Apr 10, 2011
Borrowed Light and the Bourne Identity
Someone recently posted an interesting comment to my four year old blog post where I outlined my reasons for not attending the Mormon church anymore. The commenter said he has been troubled by “a few things in church history”, and that if he had not experienced so many spiritual experiences, that he too might have left the church. He went on to say that, “as I’ve thought about it over the years, I concluded those who leave over the reasons you stated never acquired a testimony. I believe they lived on ‘borrowed light’”.
I’m sure that there are at least some church members who continue to attend even though they haven’t had any powerful spiritual experiences with the church and are living on “borrowed light” – in my experience they are social and cultural mormons. I also know a few members who go every Sunday even though they don’t believe any longer in the foundational stories of the LDS church – they typically attend for family reasons. More
For a while now I’ve thought that the trauma and emotion surrounding our family leaving the Mormon church was behind us. Even though I haven’t been physically healthy this past year, I’ve felt emotionally healthy for some time now. Then on Sunday a friend excitedly called to let me know about the new Stake Presidency in our area, and I felt like I was in a dentist’s chair and the drill had just hit a raw nerve.
As a Mormon missionary in Brazil, I regularly taught investigators how to repent as part of the missionary discussions. I’ve found the repentance process to be a good template for how to fix things when I’ve made mistakes in my post-Mormon life as well. That said, it is ironic that the Mormon church as an institution has not consistently used the repentance process when it has made mistakes over the years. For those who did not serve a mission or can’t remember from hazy mists of Sunday school, I’ll do a quick review of the 4 step repentance process:
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