Cabin Fever

Yesterday when Kristi and I stopped by Dad's cabin for a bit, being inside did bring back a lot of memories, including some I have probably been trying to avoid.  Some of my strongest memories are our first visit there for our family reunion in 2003.  It's funny to think about how many of our children had not yet been born at that point, and also still how crowded and hectic it was with all of us trying to fit in that cabin with few bedrooms and only 2 bathrooms.  That is also the only family reunion that we ever had with Mom.  

I remember that I wasn't in a very great mental state at that time.  Mom's cancer being so serious had really thrown off my whole perceptions and expectations for life.  Looking back, I realize that up until that time in my life, my faith was in a form of a prosperity gospel in that I truly believed that if we followed the commandments and lived righteously, that God would bless us and prevent anything really terrible from happing to us as a blessing for our faithfulness.  But Mom's diagnosis and illness shattered my understanding of reality in that respect because I felt sure that Heavenly Father would have either blessed her to not develop cancer or inspired her to go to the doctor much sooner before it became so serious.  When I saw that that had not happened, it really threw me off - I didn't feel I could trust in God anymore to protect my own health and for a while I became nearly completely crippled psychologically with hypochondria as I overreacted to the new responsibility I suddenly felt to look out more for my own health.  I became completely stuck, which I now know was due to my obsessive compulsive disorder, but at the time I did not realize that every attempt I made to prove to myself that I was not getting some sort of serious illness was only feeding my OCD and making things worse instead of better.  With the treatment I've had now, I can look back and tell myself that I should have just accepted and embraced the uncertainty of life rather that attempt to constantly find ways to reassure myself, but at the time I did not know that this was a typical OCD cycle, and the only way I was able to escape it and start trying to feel normal again was to get on the anti-depressant Luvox, which caused me to just care less about everything and enabled me to stop the bad cycle I was stuck in.  It was very helpful and I learned a lot from being on that drug.  I was taking it at the time of the family reunion, though I eventually stopped a while later because I started to feel like I could handle things better and I didn't like caring about everything less.

I remember at that reunion we had a testimony meeting where Mom expressed her faith that she would be healed from her cancer.  I also remember that I never had that faith because it seemed to me that if God had wanted her to live, He would have just prevented her from getting sick or made sure that her cancer was found sooner or even before it became cancerous.  This was the start of a struggle that lasted many years for me because I could not really bring myself to believe in a God that would promise Mom that she would live to an old age in her patriarchal blessing but then allow her to get so sick.  Of course I felt guilty for not having faith that God would still heal her and also guilty for not being able to accept and have faith in a God that would let her die so young.  For many years after Mom passed away, I continued to fervently seek for an answer from God about why He would allow that to happen and also continued to beat myself up for not being able to accept and have full faith and trust in that God anymore.  When I was in Dad's cabin this weekend in the main room, looking toward the front of the cabin, seeing that room brought back the memories of that testimony meeting and along with those, the memories of the years of this mental struggle, and in some ways, it felt overwhelming.

Losing someone you love is always hard, but looking back, the difficulty increased because instead of just focusing on and working through natural grieving,  I was stuck on questions of why a loving God would allow this to happen and struggling with guilt because of those questions.  Thinking about how much I loved and felt loved by Mom and how much I miss her feels both sad and beautiful at the same time, difficult but also healing.  On the other had, wondering if I can trust God and wondering if I'm a bad person because of those questions just feels like needless mental torture, and I feel like I still have traumatic feelings when I remember feeling so stuck on those questions.  While this was not the first time in my life that my belief system had increased the pain and difficulty of  normal life experiences, it was one of the most intense, and it brings up some big questions.

Some of these questions are "What is the utility of trusting in God if the outcome seems arbitrary?", "What distinguishes God's plans from random events?", and "Are many religious beliefs and practices motivated by our desires to somehow control or at least understand things which there is no way to actually control or understand?"  I have learned through my struggles with OCD that often the only actually useful answer to many common questions and difficulties is to simply accept uncertainty.  For example, trusting in God to prevent any of the people you love the most from dying young or being otherwise seriously damaged possibly just sets a person up for bitterness and anguish that will only server to block real healing when God's plan differs from those expectations.  What would be the downside of simply accepting the uncertainty that anyone we know can die or get seriously ill or hurt at anytime and then just working through the natural grief that we experience when such terrible things happen to us?  How does praying to God actually help at all it his will and plans are arbitrary at least relative to our best understanding?  Here is another relevant example:  given that real statistics show that health outcomes for people who receive priesthood blessing do not differ in any measurable way from those who do not receive priesthood blessings, is receiving a priesthood blessing that promises healing more helpful or harmful to a person and their loved ones?  Would it not be better to simply recognize that we are all hoping for the best but must also be willing to accept undesirable outcomes over which we have no control, rather than attempting to bring in the idea that somehow our faith in or obedience to God will have an effect on what happens?

These ideas also remind me of the circular argument Brother Brad Wilcox recently made in his now infamous youth fireside on February 6 (2022), in which he argued strongly that one would not want to walk away from the church and lose the constant gift of the Holy Ghost, and then seemingly in complete antithesis also argued strongly that it is a very good thing that we do not constantly feel the Holy Ghost as worthy church members.  If you just step back and consider this, doesn't it seem like the concept of the "gift of the Holy Ghost" has no real meaning in any practical way? 

But to me, the really dangerous thing about believing in an interventionist God who will bless you for obedience or a Holy Ghost that will guide you based on worthiness is not that these beliefs appear to be useless in the face of life's actual experiences, but rather that these beliefs are very often used by yourself and others to bring you real pain, shame, and guilt, often for things you cannot control or should reasonably expect yourself to have control over.  Unlike the blessings from God that we often use confirmation bias to recognize when they occur and mental gymnastics to explain away when they don't, this pain is real and and hurtful and serves no good purpose.  Because I have experienced so much of this pain and felt its traumatic effects and also seen many of the people that I love experience this pain, I greatly desire to help alleviate this type of suffering in the world, especially among those whom I care about most.  And these are the feelings that will sometimes not let me be silent about how dangerous and damaging I feel the faith traditions which we have been taught to follow in our our family can be, and why I am afraid that I may continue to offend many of you.  I have not yet found a way to reconcile my desire to respect faith with my desire to lessen the suffering that such faith inflicts.  Perhaps I simply need to accept that just like I could not save Mom from her cancer by the time I knew she had it, I cannot save others from experiencing the pain of psychologically harmful belief systems because everyone is on their own journey of discovery in this life.  But for whatever reason, this is really really difficult for me to accept.