I would like to bear my testimony.
It may seem unusual in that I’m not behind a podium. Rather, I am next to a stream, outstretched, beneath an overhang of granite. I fell asleep and woke to a hummingbird, a mother, bathing herself in a seep filled with yellow monkeyflowers. She flew back to her young, in view, and settled her belly on a delicate nest of spiderweb and moss. This, to me, is sacred.
The days are long gone when I would try to find God in these brittle moments, though this transition of faith — my leaving the Mormon church — does not damper them. I find more spiritual fulfillment in knowing that no being orchestrates my wonder. I am closer to the sacred in acknowledging that the world around me, of its own authority, is sacred. This knowing also teaches that my body is also irrevocably sacred.
Sometimes, though, my mind enters a dark, entangled bramble. Usually, it begins with an intimate touch from another man. “There are said to be millions of perverts who have relinquished their natural affection,” the voice says, remembering the words of Spencer Kimball. My body stiffens. Consent often comes to mind, not because I didn’t give it to my partner, but because I did not give it to the faith that entered my bedroom when I was a child and invaded my thoughts.
When I was a young boy, I learned how to manage my grief with bird song and sandstone. The desert was a place to reconcile my father, a high priest, who left me in the car, mid-summer, because he was ashamed of my queerness. I came to the badlands of rural Utah because I knew aloneness can be as full as moonlight, and true isolation is not being with oneself, but to be with another and deserted. Thus is the irony of desert. As a verb, it means “to withdraw from or leave usually without intent to return”. But I know it as a noun, a space of silent acceptance.
In the church, I was taught things that created a dissonance between mind and body: that I was wrong to love, that I was selfish to speak openly of abuse from God-fearing men, and to be ashamed, always. “Your body is not your own; it is on loan from God,” according to David Bednar during General Conference, which assumes bodily possession by the church. In the desert, I re-learned to be as I was born: creative, curious, and as motherly as a young boy could be. I’ve experienced power in black vultures, zopilote, in rock crevices, heads craned to peer over broken talus. I’ve spent nights under tall pines accompanied by the haunting calls of threatened Mexican spotted owls. From this, I can speak something of power, agency, and spirituality and know when religious institutions make a mockery of such sacred gifts.
I know I cannot persuade the church toward kindness — it has had nearly two centuries to do such — so I won’t invoke their evasive but cruel words from general conference. What I can do is remind you — yes, you — of your inherent value. You are born worthy. You are worthy. To love the world around you necessitate love, acceptance, and forgiveness for yourself. There is no need for shame in acts of being, whether LGBTQ+ or otherwise guilted for natural, human expressions. Let them remind you that you exist, and feel, and those are beautiful, miraculous things.
Jonathan Bailey
Jonathan T. Bailey is the author, most recently, of “When I Was Red Clay,” a literary memoir exploring wilderness, queerness, and ex-Mormonism. He is also a conservation photographer seeking the protection of cultural and natural resources. Born and raised in Ferron, Utah, he now lives in Tucson, Arizona.
