Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.
Isaiah 53: 4
Man of Sorrow
Why did He come This perfect Man This God from on high? Why did He come To drown in our sorrows And partake of our grief? Why did He come To wade through our guilt And sink in our sins? Why did He come To suffer the pain Of the blind The lame The leprous? He came because With His Father He made us And He loves us As a Father loves His sickly child His wayward son His rebellious daughter He came to rescue us The faithful And the undeserving He reached down to us That we might Reach up to Him He suffered with us That we might Have joy with Him He died for us That we might Live with Him Forever
Many stories about troubled lives begin with the early death of a parent. My story is no different. My father died in a plane crash two months before my ninth birthday. The prevailing wisdom of the day was that children should be spared such powerful emotions as grief, so my three siblings and I weren’t allowed to attend his funeral or burial. He simply disappeared from our lives. Pictures of him were removed from walls and dressers. We didn’t hear his name spoken in our presence. Our mother didn’t cry in front of us after she first told my older sister and me that our father was never coming home.
My father’s absence was like a toothache I dared not mention. Over the ensuing months, because it seemed to be expected, I repressed all my memories of him. They didn’t begin to surface until twenty years later when I was struggling to regain my true self through a haze of depression and disappointment several years into my failed first marriage. Those memories returned over a period of years, but they only exacerbated my unresolved grief, driving home more deeply all I had lost.
Looking back on my childhood, I can’t help but imagine how different things might have been if my family had belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We still would have grieved my father’s death, but what a difference it would have made to know that families are eternal! My mother and father would have been married in the temple, and my siblings and I would have been born in the covenant. We would have been sealed as a family for time and all eternity.
Not only that, but we would have been supported by our ward family and our bishopric as they gathered around us, lifting us up in prayer and loving fellowship. What a difference it would have made to be assured that we would see our father again, that he still lived, and that one day we might join him in the presence of our Heavenly Father and His beloved Son. What an incentive that would have given us to live righteous lives! But my siblings and I didn’t have that blessed assurance. All we had was a gaping emptiness where our father should have been, and a mother who loved us but couldn’t cope with her diminished circumstances.
After my father’s funeral, my paternal grandfather drove us to Texas to stay with my mother’s family for a few months. Many decades later, after Mom had moved back to Texas, she acknowledged that I had raised myself after Daddy died. I guess that was better than being raised by wolves, if only marginally. The loss of my beloved father and the emotional absence of my mother had made me stubbornly independent and more than a little rebellious. I didn’t like being told what to do or believe. Yes, I had a problem with authority; in fact, in my heart, I recognized none. I didn’t trust a world that had proven itself to be cruel and capricious before my ninth birthday.
Lacking even a mustard seed of faith in God or a life hereafter, I believed I was condemned to carry my burdens alone. So, following my mother’s outwardly stoic example, I buried my grief, pretending all was well. But repressed grief grows and festers. Gradually my personality changed from bright and outgoing to sullen and shy. As adolescence approached, I spent more and more time in my room, taking refuge in books and stories. My favorite fictional characters were my companions; I preferred their company to that of real people.
Looking back on my youth, I think I longed to disappear into a book with a happy ending. I never felt I belonged in the real world. It was too sad, too frightening, too lonely. The people you loved the most could disappear at any moment as if they’d never existed.
Though I didn’t know Him at the time, Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, knew me. He saw me in my bedroom, huddled on my bed with my nose in a book. He knew how sad, lonely, and scared I felt, better than I knew it myself. He knew I resented the world every time it intruded on the solitude I gathered around my shoulders like a cloak of invisibility to shield me from prying eyes. He knew the reluctant smile I showed to the world was false. He knew every moment, every detail of my grief because He suffered it with me.
Knowing that this mortal life is a time of testing and experience in God’s eternal plan of salvation, that Jesus Christ carried my grief for me, and that He understood me perfectly and loved me with a perfect love, would have made all the difference. In His infinite Atonement, He suffered with all of us. We are never alone in our sorrows, our sins, our infirmities. Even if we don’t know Him, He is with us, waiting for us to turn to Him. There’s nothing we must bear in this life that He hasn’t already born. We need only reach out to Him and He will comfort us and guide us. But I hadn’t learned any of these things.
Over time, with the resilience of children, I made friends at my new school back home and joined them in play, but the core of sadness inside me wouldn’t go away. At some point during those years, I began to see myself as a naked, squalling infant floating alone in the cold, black void of an indifferent universe. That desolate image stayed with me for decades.
Three years after my father’s death, my mother married a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was a good man, solid and true, but I can’t recall my emotions about that event. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about anything.
There’s a photograph of all of us at the wedding that tells a story. Everyone is smiling except me. The eyes of that eleven-year-old child reveal a depth of sorrow that draws tears to my eyes even today. I want to reach back through the years, gather her into my arms, and comfort her. I want to tell her that she is a precious child of a loving Heavenly Father, and He has wonderful plans for her. I want to tell her that the sorrows of this life are only for a moment, and if she endures them well, with faith and trust in Him, she will gain all that He has and live with Him in His celestial kingdom for all eternity.
I want to tell her that she will yet endure many trials and much sorrow, but it will all be for her experience, to make her stronger, to make her more like her Savior, and He will be with her through it all. I want to tell her that, yes, the night is full of trouble and pain, but joy comes in the morning, and that boundless joy will make all she has suffered seem as nothing. I want to tell her all this and more, but I can’t reach through time to that suffering child. She was, and is, in God’s hands.
After the wedding, we moved from the house my father had bought for us to my stepfather’s big adobe house in the next town. It was across the street from an LDS chapel that was still under construction. I know I was taught by the missionaries, but my memories of that time are hazy. Having learned from my mother’s example and my own experience that memories were painful, I must have made an unconscious pact with myself not to remember many things.
I was baptized just before I turned thirteen. I know it happened, but I can’t recall any details beyond the fact that my stepfather performed the baptism. I know I was confirmed a few days later, but that also is buried deep. Surely I’d remember the Holy Ghost entering my heart, but awareness of that heavenly gift didn’t come for many decades. I attended church with my family and partook of the Sacrament, but I didn’t fully realize what it meant. I don’t recall anyone explaining Christ’s Atonement to me. Maybe they did, and I couldn’t receive that knowledge into my armored heart.
My favorite things about church in those days were the firm, welcoming handshakes at the door of the new chapel, and singing hymns. I think I learned more doctrine from hymns than in any other way. The words and music lifted my soul. After I left the Church, it was singing hymns I missed most. “Shall the Youth of Zion Falter” never failed to get my heart pumping, and “I Stand All Amazed” moved me to tears. It still does.
As my teen years passed, I gained a testimony, but it wasn’t strong enough to withstand disappointments and doubts from within the Church and the looming temptations of the world. When I started high school in September of 1961, I attended Seminary early every morning. We studied the Book of Mormon, but I think I saw it more as history than as scripture. I believed it was true, and that Joseph Smith was a prophet, but that belief hadn’t penetrated deeply enough into my heart and soul to become doubt-proof.
During those years I walked a high wire between doubt and belief, between the Church and the world. In the long run, it was my grief-imposed need for the illusion of self-sufficiency that pushed me off the wire in the wrong direction. Before that final push, I was only vaguely aware of the war going on for my soul. I participated in the religious and social life of the Church, if often reluctantly, and with that core of sadness always present.
There were things about the Church that bothered me. I didn’t understand why men of African heritage couldn’t hold the priesthood. This was more than a decade before new revelation finally extended that privilege to every worthy male member. In the mid-1960s, civil rights were much in the news, and my parents had instilled in me a keen sense of justice and fairness. It rankled my soul that a certain group was excluded because of the color of their skin.
Some in the Church claimed the exclusion was because of the “curse of Cain,” assuming that the “mark” God set upon him was dark skin, but it seemed highly unfair to me that Heavenly Father would curse certain men for thousands of years because of a sin committed by a possible distant ancestor. It didn’t make sense to me, and it caused me to doubt the truth of the Church. I still don’t understand why it took so long for revelation to erase that prohibition, but I know I’ll understand someday, in Heavenly Father’s good time.
I was also disaffected by the status of women as “helpmeets” to their husbands. It seemed inferior to me. In those days, no one was talking about women sharing in priesthood power through temple ordinances and Church callings, at least not in my hearing. I don’t recall taking my doubts to God in prayer, either. In my ongoing campaign to be an island unto myself, I confided in no one.
When I was sixteen, my ward held a special youth meeting on the subject of chastity. A certain middle-aged elder in the ward had a habit of standing up on testimony Sunday and proclaiming his great humility. It always struck me as ironic that this man would brag about how humble he was. During the chastity service, this exceedingly humble elder, who was married but had no children, stood in front of the congregation and told us all, “If I had a daughter, I would rather she died than have premarital sex.”
Staring at him in shock, I thought surely a member of the bishopric would stand up and correct him. He would rather his daughter die? Had he never heard of repentance? Had he no mercy in his heart, no understanding? Would he really want his daughter to be cut off in her youth before she’d had a chance to be fully tested and proven in mortality?
Of course, I presumed that if this man had actually had a daughter, he never would have said such a foolish thing. But that wasn’t the point, not to me. The point was that no one came forward to soften that blow. I have come to know that sex outside the sacred bonds of marriage is a serious sin, one that can taint lives and distance us from God, but the sinner is not irredeemable. With sincere repentance comes forgiveness and the chance to be cleansed and start anew. To wish your daughter dead rather than have sex outside of marriage seems to me the greater sin, and for the adults in that meeting to leave the impression that unchastity is unforgivable was harmful and wrong.
If my testimony had been as strong then as it is now, I would have been able to see that elder’s statement and the lack of immediate response as human failings that shouldn’t reflect on the Church. But my testimony was weak, so that troubling episode pushed me further away. I stayed fairly active for a few more years, but my faith continued to wane until my own choices dug a chasm I couldn’t bridge for more than half a century.
At spring break during my senior year in high school, I visited my sister Lynne at Brigham Young University. Her boyfriend’s roommate was a nonmember from Shreveport, Louisiana. I’ll call him “John Smith.” My sister set up a double date. John and I were shy with each other, but the attraction between us was evident.
John and I corresponded for a while, and then he wrote that he was going to enlist in the army before he got drafted. He wanted to attend Officers’ Candidate School and serve his country in Vietnam. I was headed to BYU in the fall and had looked forward to getting to know John better, but now he wasn’t going to be there. Shortly after that announcement, his letters stopped coming and I thought that possible future had closed.
I was seventeen when I left home to attend BYU. My best friend, “Maggie,” and I would be rooming together, so I didn’t anticipate being lonely. For most of high school, being dateless wonders, Maggie and I had indulged ourselves in fantasies about the Beatles. We sketched the clothes and hairdos we would wear on dates with Paul (my love) and Ringo (hers), made up detailed scenarios of those dates, and even chose the cars they drove to pick us up. We spent hours at a time in the fantasy world we’d created, complete with a Beatles soundtrack. But by the time we arrived at BYU, we were ready to join the real world, or at least the insular world of a Church-run university. We longed to trade our fantasies for the reality of a real live romance.
Memoirs of a Prodigal Daughter 