This is an address given at the NorthStar LDS conference April 24, 2015. NorthStar supports Latter-day Saint individuals and families concerned with sexual orientation or gender identity who seek to live in joy and harmony within their covenants, values, and beliefs as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

M. Catherine Thomas is the author of a new book called The God Seed.

Click to buy.

Click to buy.

 

I know that there are many hearts here in turmoil and distress, looking to the future with fear. I love you and care about you and your distress, and this morning, I’d like to bring some comfort and perspective to the question of “What to do – with respect to myself, my family, the Church, and to God Himself? Will I be ok?” You can be better than ok.

I’d like to talk to you about taking care of yourself as a way of moving from feelings of loneliness, despair, and brokenness to a growing sense of empowerment. We’re going to work here on spiritual comfort and strengthening so as to maximize your resources for flourishing. My examples describe people experiencing SSA (same-sex attraction), but the principles I’ll present here embrace all of the LGBT community.

Some Suggestions

First, a few suggestions for getting more clear on your life:

  1. You have likely experienced the scorn of ignorant, insensitive persons who do not begin to understand your heart or what you’re going through. Lehi’s dream comes to mind with its great and spacious building and the people pointing the finger of scorn at those who were struggling and feeling their way along the path. You remember who is in that building, mocking — not just the world, the angel tells Nephi, but some of the House of Israel, that is, some members of the Church are in there too (see 1 Nephi 11:35). “But,” Lehi says, “we heeded them not” (1 Nephi 8:33).

Realize that one may experience the greatest opposition from within the Church, from within the family, from within the community. Just know that. Religion, unfortunately, does not make everybody loving. But you can view them appreciatively as your teachers and let their behavior make you even more compassionate, forgiving them, because they don’t know what they do. One day, here or there, as they get more understanding, they’ll ask your forgiveness. So, beware of self-pity, of unforgiveness, of hatred – these are mind-darkening poisons for you.

But there are other kinds of members. In fact, there are many here today who do want to understand and love and support you. And I encourage them to create a warm community for you where you can feel that you belong.

  1. Beware of the idea that this gender issue shouldn’t have happened to you. I want to remind you that in a previous life, you looked forward with clear vision and, overachiever that you were, you chose an earth-path — with some thorns. But you also chose a work you wanted to do in the midst of those thorny circumstances. Your current path is uniquely suited to what you wanted to accomplish.

So the point: both your particular thorny circumstances and the work you chose became your gifts, even your unique keys to the secrets of the Universe, to godly empowerment, and to exaltation itself.

Pres. Joseph F Smith:

Had we not known before we came the necessity of our coming, the importance of obtaining tabernacles [and all the hard stuff we would go through]… the exercis[ing] of the divine attributes, god-like powers and free agency with which we are endowed… descending below all things – we never would have come; that is, if we could have stayed away….

[Our Savior] no doubt possessed a foreknowledge of all the vicissitudes through which he would have to pass in the mortal tabernacle…. He is our example…. If Christ knew beforehand, so did we.[1]

I ask, if all that you are going through was foreseen, even chosen, how can you be to your Heavenly Father anything but His precious child, whom He has allowed to come into challenging circumstances? He is waiting for you to accept that and to come to Him. When you feel that, and you can, everything else will begin fall into place.

 

  1. Beware of teachings on the distant, exclusive, inaccessible God. You remember that the Apostle Paul said that we should seek the Lord and feel after Him, and find him, that He is not far from us: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28). In some wonderful way we see that we live and move in Him. But what we see is the tendency in religion to make God seem maybe a little hard to access; we gather that spiritual blessings as reserved only for the extraordinarily righteous; we assume that divine enabling power and loving acceptance are for someone else. And we easily pick up the image of a God sitting up on heavenly bleachers giving either a thumbs-up when we do right or a frowny face and a thumbs-down when we don’t. This is not an enlightened approach to God.

The reality is that He is working lovingly in each of us and through each of us continually – no matter what we’ve done. He is intimately connected to us, present with us, so close that we don’t experience Him except in the more subtle realms of our being. But since we’re so preoccupied with our issues, we don’t get into those subtle realms very often. The truth is that He is doing a work within each of us to help us fulfill the purposes of this mortal life and to develop godly attributes and powers in the midst of the circumstances we chose.

New Practices

Now, I hope that you can be open to some new perspectives and spiritual practices that could directly impact your particular questions and concerns.

A good beginning is: Who are you really? President John Taylor taught that you are a spark of Deity, struck from the fire of His eternal blaze, and that you were brought forth in the midst of eternal burnings.[2] There is so much more to us than we have discovered.

So, no matter what we have done, no matter what shame or distress or remorse we carry inside, each of us is eternally a part of Him, and literally something of Him continually flows in us – is alive and conscious in us.

Elder Boyd K. Packer:

There is something inside all of us…. [It] was in you before you were born (D&C 93:23, 29-30), and it will be with you every moment that you live and will not perish when the mortal part of you has turned to dust. It is ever there…. [It] is always there. It never leaves. It cannot leave…. All of this is a dimension of gospel truth that too few understand.[3]

We have simply forgotten who we are. So we tend to see ourselves as fixed entities; we say, “Oh, that’s just how I am.” But the truth is that we are wonderfully fluid, designed to pass through phases and stages, expanding in godly attributes and powers, developing a more and more expansive character.

And then after awhile of this expanding, and a lot of practice and patience, we fully unfold — into Gods. So our most effective focus while we walk this life is on this godly development – in it lie so many solutions.

Ideals: we hear much talk of achieving ideals, but keep in mind that in this life all ideals are fictitious, including about family, happiness, relationships, sex, etc. That doesn’t mean that those aren’t wonderful, but they are mixed. Every person you know is making his or her way through a tangle of light and dark; nothing is perfect in this life. No matter what you achieve, you will find opposition and stress in it – whether married or single. In this life, which is our great laboratory, we’re all living to some degree without the ideals we think we want. But this turns out to be just right for the Lord’s developing work in for us.

Each of us is an unfinished being, and just like the flowering bud, each stage and phase is necessary. So we can each say, no matter how old we are, “I can just be in this moment; I am enough as I am, a work in progress, and where I am is enough for now.”

Beware of Being Sure about Who You Are

  1. Beware of being sure about who you are

I received a letter from a friend of mine, an active LDS young woman, who came out a few years ago. Recently she became acquainted with a meditation practice called “insight” meditation, and she went to a 10-day meditation retreat. Then after she had processed that experience, she wrote me:

I remember … an interview that Ty Mansfield gave. He says that at some point in all of this, he felt a strong prompting to not identify as gay — that ultimately this would stall him. That resonates with me. I feel liberated by the idea of same-sex attracted, like it’s something that I’ve experienced, but it’s not necessarily a/the defining feature of who I am.… The feelings you might find most concrete and real (i.e. the pain of sitting for so long) can actually be relative, fleeting, reinterpreted. This feeling could be here now, but could be fleeting.

Be aware of what you “feed”: [what you] put your thoughts and energy and attention towards. [To learn] that was so powerful for me — transformative during the retreat and for long, long after.

Attraction itself could be reinterpreted. She realized she could look at an attractive woman another way, that is, as a whole person (not an object). She says, “I think I learned, or was prompted, very early on (thanks to the law of chastity) to not view attraction as a [necessarily] physical thing, but to see the attraction as a spiritual, rather than a physical, instinct. I’ve been able to trust that, and it’s brought the best people into my life. So, I don’t fear attraction; it’s feeling like a strength, not a weakness.”

Human sexuality is admittedly a complex issue; there is so much not known about it. But it seems, as they say, to exist along a continuum: and people are scattered all along that continuum with different shades and degrees of attraction and feeling. Each of us falls somewhere on that continuum. And there are many cases of people who move from one place toward another on that continuum – not saying that you will, but that it happens. So, it may be of value to stay open about where we really are on that continuum of human sexuality.

Be Willing to Give up Misery and Addiction

  1. Be willing to give up misery and addiction to disturbance and be open to the possibility of being happy in the Church, keeping the commandments. Be open to that possibility, no matter what other position various voices may try to recruit you to.

You know, you can have confidence in your most basic nature because of your inherent goodness, your divinity, which is peaceful, loving, open, even joyful. These qualities can guide you in the way to do life.

Of course, we get to earth and layer all this stuff on top of our basic nature; we layer over it these misperceptions and this faulty thinking, (alcoholics call it “stinking thinking”). And then, thinking something is wrong with us, we tend to obsess and make a big “problem” out of it. And doing that we generate more toxic emotion over “the problem” than the original situation itself needs to create. We can become addicted to disturbance and toxicity where we put ourselves in a panic, looking in many unproductive places for escape from our pain — instead of clearing our minds, waking up, and acknowledging that there is a Great Divine Intelligence at work in our life, providing us with exactly what we chose to learn. So have confidence in your goodness and know that you have options to misery and fear.

Beware of the Culture You Live in

  1. Beware of the culture you live in

We live in a sensation-obsessed culture, where we mix up true need with exaggerated appetite for sensation. As a result, some important things in us develop out of balance because we don’t know to be suspicious of what we see and hear in our darkened culture – which, as you know, widely advocates casual and recreational sex as a solution to need. Again, don’t be fooled by these voices.

Alma says to his beloved son, “Bridle all your passions that you may be filled with love” (Alma 38:12). The great insight here is that feeding the appetite outside the Lord’s bounds will conflict with the development of real love, of godliness, and with the purposes for which you came to earth.

Alma’s point about bridling passions in order to develop true love is found in the oriental wisdom known as Ayurveda, an ancient system of science and philosophy, developed over many thousands of years. Their teaching is that there are subtle energy pathways in the body called nadis. There are thousands of these nadis, but only six that conduct the energy of pure love. The purest form of love is considered as the most powerful energy, the highest spiritual energy, that man can cultivate or attain. They teach that improper use of nadis for conducting sexual energy can create patterns that are hard to break and actually take us farther away from the experience of higher consciousness and true love. Cultivating this pure love as our primary pursuit puts everything else in us into more harmonious balance.

This highest, purest love is that which the Gods themselves have cultivated in order to become gods (see Moroni 7:48). This love is the power behind creation itself, that which causes the heavens to move in their courses; it is a power to heal and to save and to rescue and to empower. Be open to a love greater than you thought possible and to the growing experience of it in your own being. Be willing to be reshaped by the power of God’s love as it flows to you and through you to others.

It seems to me that our greatest hope for resolution of distress is to become spiritually empowered; this may not change your gender feelings, but at the least it will enhance your ability to manage them in ways that can keep you in a state of grace.

Principles for Becoming Spiritually Empowered

Principle #1: Create a Spiritual Practice

Your temptation may be to avoid spiritual practices altogether because of your own feelings of spiritual inadequacy. But I tell you, you need a devotional practice everyday, no matter what — prayer, scripture, meditation, etc.. Read the Book of Mormon – even on days when it seems irrelevant: it radiates an invisible but powerful energy that clears the mind and connects you to spiritual powers.

Be disciplined with this. Your practice will be the channel through which divine enabling power and perspective will come. Otherwise you will wander in the lone and dreary wilderness of shame and despair. You are spirit first, and then flesh, and your spirit requires infusion while it is in this fallen world or it will languish, and you won’t have the strength to stay safe.

Principle #2: Learn How to Plug into the Source of Love and Divine Enabling Power in Christ 

Step #1: Be willing to set aside all the reasons you can’t come to Christ.

A story: A young gay man relates an experience he had with the Lord at a time when he was struggling with life as a gay person. He made the decision to be totally honest with the Lord. He said, “Out came my anger, my frustration, my hurt, my guilt…. I collapsed to the floor…, ‘Lord, I can’t do this anymore. Please help.’ In response… the Lord said nothing; He simply wrapped me up in His arms, lifted me off the floor, and cradled me into His lap. In my exposed honesty, the Lord saw me, understood me, and accepted me; I was loved unconditionally, redemptively.

With this empathic connection, in that moment, I [felt] healed, whole, complete. Days, weeks, and years have followed since this … exchange. Life is still brutally awesome, but I have often returned to empathic connections with God for respite, support, and growth.”

His insight: He resolved to be for others in empathy what the Lord had been to him and found that way of life as powerful as his experience with the Lord.

Step #2: In preparation for getting deeper into the subtle realms of your being and spirit and coming to Christ, get acquainted with the power of your breath. The breath is a link between body and spirit. By using our breath with our mind we can activate spiritual realities that lie generally latent in our being:

Listen to Brigham Young who says that we members live beneath our privilege; we live continually without enjoying the power of God: “I want to see men and women breathe the Holy Ghost in every breath of their lives, living constantly in the light of God’s countenance.”[4]

You can breathe in the Holy Spirit and fill your tissues with it if you wish. You’ve been given a mind with spiritual powers: powers to convert spiritual theory into spiritual experience.

Focusing quietly on our breath allows us into the more subtle realms of our being. Find a quiet time, during your devotional, to sit quietly and breathe for a bit, focusing on your breath, following it in and out, getting more and more still, remembering the Lord’s words: “Abide in me and I in you” (see John 15); and “You are in me and I am in you, otherwise you could not abound” (see D&C 88:49-50).

Then let your spirit be in Him and feel Him in you. Be there. You will begin to feel something subtle, something of His presence — because He is already there waiting for you. But He has been so close to you that you haven’t perceived Him. You can live in this sense of presence. You can become aware of His very presence in your soul. You can live feeling safe in Him. But you have to practice.

Although His presence has always been with you, it has to be awakened within our being through meditative and prayerful practice.[5] As I pursued this simple practice, He became to me more and more of a reality; and I became more centered, found greater depths in myself, and an increasing sense of quiet empowerment that began to last through the day. This is not a psychological mind game; rather, we are awakening what is already there.

Step #3 Cultivate the Power of Love and Empathy

While we are coming to Christ and trying to stabilize in Him, it’s important to add another step.

We are not only wired for connection with God but also with other people; we need connection and intimacy (which does not necessarily imply sex). But again, you have to practice because many of you come here today with a feeling of not belonging, of being isolated, of not being understood—which tempts you to withdraw and feel even worse.

We have to dare to love. Be open to being your real, vulnerable, loving, and powerful self — with both genders. The real problem, deeper than the SSA or other gender issue, is that we’re not living to love. We are seeking it rather than offering it – which doesn’t seem to work.

Yes, all the things we so desperately think we need from someone else in order to be fulfilled, we actually experience when we give love and kindness to others. You have to trust this. We must taste the vulnerability of extending true love, as a way of life, and to loving without requiring any return.

Step #4: Connect Giving Love with your awareness of the Lord

Sitting quietly and engaging your breath, imagine yourself as a compassionate person; feel that you are radiating kindness and warmth to others. This is not forced, but rather allowed to arise from the well of infinite love of the Lord in you. Imagine yourself expanding, becoming calmer, wiser, stronger, more mature, able to help, feeling the pleasure of warmth for others — most of whom are also suffering and crying inside for this love.

At the same time, inhabit your body with your feeling-awareness, and become aware of energy literally moving through your body; this dynamic energy is always there (see D&C 88:41), but you can give it the emotional or spiritual quality that you want it to have. Let it become the felt energy of the power of Christ surging in you. Feeling pure love flowing through you to others is transformative and empowering.

In addition, when you plug in, know that you begin to activate a different set of spiritual laws.[6] When you plug in deliberately to the source of love and grace in Christ and feel it flowing through you, you are immediately operating in a new dimension — under miraculous principles. Induce the feeling of these energies in your body as you give kindness, empathy, comprehension, compassion, mercy, encouragement, and you will feel increasingly stable and empowered.

Train yourself to do whatever you do during your day from an inward state of kindness. Be focused and enveloped in the present moment. Relax and trust this power.   Now, of course, you can’t enter this new dimension by acting loving while you’re thinking unlovingly. No, you have to work at being the real thing. Counterfeits of divine attributes are no good. This becomes a very purifying practice.

You may have to work at love and kindness in the beginning, but in time, these will expand and begin to arise spontaneously – and you will be glad. Then your confidence will indeed wax strong in the presence of God (see D&C 121:45-46).

One last story that illustrates a decision you could make:

Buckminster Fuller, the great inventor of many things, including the geodesic dome. When he was 32, he looked at his life of failure, no job and no money. Drinking heavily, he began reflecting on a possible solution to his family’s struggles as he took long walks down by Lake Michigan. He began to contemplate suicide so that his family could have the life insurance payment.

As he stood by the lake, looking at the water, Fuller said he had a profound experience. He felt as though he were suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to him, and declared:

“You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe…. You will fulfill your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”

He said that this experience led to a profound re-examination of his life. He chose to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”

So, I say to you: Have confidence in your basic goodness as a way to do life; get engaged in something you’re passionate about that would benefit yourself and others. Have your devotionals and your practices and — see what happens.

The great light shining on all this subject is that you came here to do a work that mattered to you before this life. Find that calling. Don’t let preoccupation with gender issues keep your focus too narrow. Rather, let your focus and awareness become GLOBAL. There are people who need you and your experience. Stay awake. Do what you came here to do. The way will open for you.

And one day you’ll testify, “I now know that what I really need is to love rather than to be loved.” This is true empowerment.

I’ll close with this little Primary song, “Shine on”:

My light is but a little one, my light of faith and prayer

But lo! It glows likes God’s great sun, For it was lighted there.

Shine on, shine on, shine on bright and clear

Shine on, shine on – Now the day is here.

 

[1] Gospel Doctrine, 13-14; italics added

[2] “Origin, Object, and Destiny of Women”

[3] “The Light of Christ,” Ensign, April, 2005.

[4] JD 9:288.

[5] See the author’s The God Seed: Probing the Mystery of Spiritual Development.

[6] For more on this idea on plugging into grace, see Alexander Loyd, Beyond Willpower.