A Fine Mess.

The opposite of faith is not doubt, 

it's certainty.

-- Anne Lamott

My mother is really clean. No, I mean really. The toilet paper in her guest bath is actually folded into a little point just as it is in a fine hotel. Her trash cans are perennially empty. The vacuum trails on the carpet remain somehow forever unspoiled. It's been that way as long as I can remember. I say this not to mock her in any way, but because having raised children myself, and seeming to lack completely the ability to stay ahead of the pile of mail on my kitchen counter, I marvel. 

I did then...I do now. So some things are obviously not genetic. Not that I live like a slob, but I do live. And I haven't yet figured out how to keep some of that living from forever showing up, all over my house.

My mother is the only person I know for whom it might be possible to call the realtor to list her home for sale in the morning, and have the agents' open house at noon. All without ever having to get up out of her chair because there wouldn't be a single thing that needed to be done in preparation. 

She could also get invited to lunch at the White House at 11:00 am and show up at 11:15, not even having needed to comb her hair. This is how she lives. This is where she is comfortable. This is the world she carries or creates, wherever she goes.

I was fortunate to attend a church meeting recently in which she bore her testimony. She said that she has never had a moment's doubt. That she was somehow born with perfect faith, and that it has never wavered. In fact, she has never even considered the fact that it could waver. She believes what she believes. She likes things how she likes them. The universe somehow complies. End of story. 

Well then.

Or maybe alas. Because I don't know how she manages that faith trick either.

The currently popular bit about "doubting your doubts" always makes me smile. Because no one needed to tell me to do that. I doubt everything. Which gives my mind the same real, "lived-in" feel that my house has. My mind and my kitchen counter look quite a bit alike most days, actually. Perhaps someone should do a scientific study to see if that's a universal truth of some kind.

I don't think the quote I used at the beginning casts aspersions on my mother's faith. I think it just means that my own less tidy brand is of equal value.

Anyway, I believe all of this is why I am drawn to Anne Lamott's writings. If you haven't read Anne, perhaps you should. She's not LDS, but is a Presbyterian who took a long time finding her way to God, and who seems to value the long slog as much as she does the destination. Her brand of faith feels very close to my own, and I've decided that's because first and foremost, I feel her acknowledgement that faith is messy. Like all the important things in life. Families, relationships, birth, death...all one big happy mess. 

With faith sitting precariously atop the pyramid like a leaking umbrella. It's not perfect and it can't stop the rain, but at least it keeps a lot of it off while you're running to the car. Even though your feet still get wet. 

I'd like to be the Mormon Anne Lamott. I think we need one, or anyway I do. I'm afraid most Mormons might not share my embrace of the idea of messy faith, however. We like things neat. We like them spelled-out. We are answerers, explainers. Solvers of mysteries. 

We like to watch the rain coming down on the world from inside the sturdy shelter we've built to keep us dry. And when we're forced to venture out, we are continually patching the umbrella.

In my patriarchal blessing, it says that I have been blessed with "a believing heart". Darn it, it's true. As hard and as messy as it gets for me sometimes, my heart wants to believe. So I guess I probably did inherit that from my mother, along with the hefty dose of gray areas from my dad. 

One of me continually pokes holes in things, one of me patches. 

Or on good days just sits still, waiting for the storm to pass. They always do. 

I came across a beautiful passage recently, written by a member whose writings on faith have also resonated for me over the years. In her essay Seeing Without Seeing, Emma Lou Thayne expresses it like this: 

"I believed it all -- the seeing without seeing, the hearing without hearing, the going by feel toward something holy, something that could make her cry and could lift my scalp right off, something as unexplainable as a vision or a mystic connection, something entering the pulse of a little girl, something that no matter what, would never go away. What it had to do with Joseph Smith or his vision or his gospel I never would really understand -- all I know to this day is that I believe. Whatever it is, I believe in it. I get impatient with people's interpretations of it, with dogma and dictum, but somewhere way inside me and way beyond impatience or indifference there is that insistent, infernal, so help me, sacred singing -- All is well, All is well. My own church, inhabited by my own people -- and probably my own doctrines, but my lamp, my song -- my church. I would be cosmically orphaned without it."

And so would I. Darned messy, leaky, imperfect, impatient Faith. Darned Believing Heart. 

But thank you for that gift, Mother. Because it's becoming increasingly clear that, in the end, it will probably be the one that made the difference.

- S.