As a teenager I went one time to the Especially For Youth program at BYU. I remember the culminating meeting in a large auditorium, surrounded by other teens in the stadium style seats while a speaker stood on the stage a ways below us. The emotions in the room were as thick as fog and the speaker was emotional as he talked about how the Atonement had saved and changed his life.
Most of the kids around me had tears streaming down their cheeks as the speaker asked us all to write what the atonement meant to us in our notebooks. I filled in a few half-hearted lines, writing what I knew I was supposed to feel, but the language I had been given to internalize the concept fell flat for me. There was nothing concrete to hold on to. No surprise turns in the text. I had been given a lot of grandiose statements that encompassed all pain, all humanity, all redemption, all salvation, but I had not been given the tools to dig through those huge ideas and find how the atonement fit in my small life. I could not figure out why Mary Oliver’s poem about a snake stirred something in my heart every time I read it, but here, in this room, where my life was supposed to be changing, I was begging my heart to feel something like everyone else around me.
I am a poet at heart. I want language that I can hold onto. I want concrete images and endings that offer more than one possibility. As a reader, I want to be trusted to bring my own experience to a piece of text and then interpret in a way that gives the text new life every time I read it. The language surrounding the atonement and concepts like eternal life, repentance, immortality, resurrection, and the Fall felt like a puzzle I could not quite get right.
It wasn’t that I was impervious to the feelings the atonement brought up. There were times when I was profoundly grateful that someone would love me enough to die for me, but often that was overshadowed by confusion in trying to understand and “apply” that act in my personal life.
The atonement wasn’t the only concept that I struggled with in the Church, on a language level. Simple words like faith, hope, repentance, godly sorrow, testimony, and salvation felt so abstract and lofty. I wanted a language like Annie Dillard gave me in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to see the smallest plants, insects, and bits of earth around me. I wanted to feel the way I did when I read Li-young Lee’s poems about eating dinner with his parents. I wanted the surrealness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I wanted to believe in the largeness of the universe in the way Tracy K. Smith’s poems made me feel. I wanted my stomach to churn with ache and love for flawed humans the way I did in Alice Walker’s novels.
No doubt there is poetry in scripture, and there are different ways to interpret the scripture (hence a thousand forms of Christianity). I knew that I was supposed to feel certain ways about the atonement. I memorized the lines, listened to the talks, could repeat scripture, Mormon philosophers, and even my own experience, but when it came down to it, I could not experience anything visceral through the language surrounding the atonement: atone is to suffer the penalty for sins’, ‘removing effects of sin’, ‘allowing to be reconciled to God’, ‘Atonement for all mankind’, ‘those who obey his gospel will receive the gift of eternal life with God’, ‘all people inherit the effects of the fall’, ‘fallen state’, ‘alienated from God’, ‘spiritual death’, ‘separated from His presence’, ‘the only way to be saved is for someone else to rescue us’, ‘satisfy the demands of justice’, ‘pay the price for our sins’, ‘[Jesus] lived a perfect, sinless life’, ‘we are redeemed unconditionally from the universal effects of the fall, but we are accountable for our own sins’.
I could not tie the concepts back into the particulars. I could not pull the metaphors out and do anything productive with them. I know that many people have had sacred and life-altering experiences with the atonement. I wanted so badly for that to be me, and it never was. I floundered in a sea of self-doubt for many years about why I could not make it so. In going back and reading the Church website’s definition of the atonement, I want to go back and offer my teenage and early adult self so much grace, to let her know that there was nothing wrong with her. The language simply was not working to help her understand the largest concept she had ever encountered.
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