A little more than a month ago I got sick, just some sort of never-ending flu that kept me in bed for more than two weeks. Among so many kindnesses, including friends who slept on my couch when Carl had to be gone on a business trip and showed up in the mornings to get my kids to school, the kindness that I want to write about is one that hits different in a post Mormon setting.
One afternoon when I was at home alone, my dad came over. We talked for a little while and then he said, “Every part of me wants to give you a blessing, would you let me?” I didn’t need to pause and wonder about the implications of a blessing. I didn’t need to parse the differences between his beliefs and mine (the distance isn’t far). I just knew that in such a vulnerable moment, for both of us, this was an opportunity to offer and accept a kind act.
My dad was not active in the church from the time he was about 15 until he was in his mid thirties. This perceived deficiency during this period of his life is actually the material that shaped me and my family. I sense that my dad has often felt guilt for these twenty years of his life, taking black and white photographs out of our hands when we’d find them. Him in a cowboy hat, a cigarette on his lips. On the beach with a group of friends. Holding a surfboard, a beer in one hand. We were always so delighted to find treasures like this as kids. My parents may as well have been movie stars. We are all made of who my parents were and became during these years. He brushed off these years for so long though, as if his life really started to be serious when he came back to church.
I know deep down, this is not how he perceives those years. Every now and then at a family dinner, he will pull out a wild story that allows us to add another thread to that period of time before we were here. My parents have always taught us empathy and non-judgmental kindness because they say they know how it feels to be on the outside—they lived as bikini-wearing, motorcycle-riding, party-throwing non-mormons in Provo for many years.
My dad has been active in the church now for as long as he was not. Age, of course comes with wisdom as ancient as a riverbed. As my siblings, my mom, and his grandchildren have left the church, I’ve watched the two worlds my dad has occupied—inside and outside of the church, meet each other in new ways. I think of that line between the ocean and river, the inevitable place where they become indiscernible, where it is no longer necessary to call one a river and one an ocean.
One of the most healing things in my post Mormon time is the fact that my dad will always choose a Sunday brunch with his kids and grandkids over going to church. I know this is a luxury that so many ex-mormons do not have. I hope for you that you will, sooner than later, know people you love choosing you over an institution.
So, the day that my dad asked if he could give me a blessing, I knew that it was an offering that was born of him. A gift of himself, and not of the church. He did mention Heavenly Father as he put his hands on my head and spoke while I sat on the edge of the bed, but all I heard was father. I heard him say things that a prayer or a blessing allow a person to say when it might be hard or awkward to say them directly.
I’m grateful that my dad’s church experience taught him that a prayer is a vessel that has the possibility of carrying unconditional love. In the blessing, he did not ask me to return to the church. He did not ask anything of me. He did not promise things. The stakes felt so low. It didn’t matter if the blessing healed me physically. It did not matter if he was “worthy” to offer it to me. The value of the blessing was not predicated on its efficacy. It was not a display of power or a way to teach me a lesson. In that particular moment I understood that it was the best gift my dad knew to offer, and I felt humbled to accept it.
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