What Do You Write About When There's No Longer a God?

This week I was talking with a friend who is a brilliant poet, and she mentioned that as she has recently moved away from the church, she feels as if she no longer has anything to write about. I mentioned that I’d felt the same for several years post Mormonism, and as we continued to talk about it, I said some things aloud that I realized were and are still true for me as I continue down the road beyond religion.

For a long time, my writing thrived inside of the tension the church provided. I think in many ways, this “thriving” extended beyond my creative pursuits and dictated my personhood. The stakes for everything felt so high, and so, when I wrote or spoke something inside of Mormonism, it honestly felt like it was a means of helping people be saved.

Or even better, when I wrote something that was counter to what the church might like, (which I did often on the By Common Consent Blog), it felt particularly heroic. I think we all love a good fight for justice, and the church provided excellent grounds to practice that muscle. I always had something to be fired up about, while at the same time, exercising the ability to also find the good about the gospel, and so, inside of that roiling ball of tension, I was able to produce a lot of work. It was a refiners fire that constantly felt important.

I don’t resent this fact because this scenario provided me with some valuable skills about being intentional with my thoughts and words, it helped me to know how to defend an idea, it helped me articulate with greater clarity.

The problem then, was that when, after a lot of work, I was able to step outside of that particular fire, leave that roiling ball of tension behind me, I felt a flatness to my thoughts that I had not experienced before.

If I was no longer grappling with the creator of the universe and some of the most powerful men in the world, then what could I possibly have to say of value?

What I have learned over the years though, is that the fields beyond that perceived and absolute importance will not lie fallow forever, or even very long. When you leave a field fallow, it is often a period of inactivity in order to restore fertility to the land.

I have learned, and am still very much learning, that my brain, my creativity, who I had built myself into inside of Mormonism, very much needed a period of rest. I could not write to the same topics, with the same urgency, inside of the same paradigm anymore. It wasn’t that I didn’t have things to say, or that I wasn’t thinking hard, but rather, I had expended so much energy to say so much in order to stay and then finally leave the church, that all I craved was quietude. A period of rest.

In the past six years, I have come face to face with doubt about my abilities. Like, did I only have something to say when I was writing about God and the church? The answer was and is still, no, but when you are inside of an environment that gatekeeps the world from you, it is hard to find your footing beyond it.

Portrait my 7-year old made of me. I love it so much.

I am, like all of us, still in the process of planting and sowing my first harvests without the soil of religion. I am both relieved and grateful to find that I still have so much to write about. In some ways it feels far less heroic, and more mundane, but I’ve come to appreciate the maturity required of my voice in those spaces. I cannot rely on frantic emotion or high stakes to move the work along. I find myself sitting more and more with exactly what I know, which is so little, and yet, still enough. I find a peace in the writing that is developing now, in the ways that I approach creative work in my life. It is not necessarily built to save or change or disrupt, it just is. I just am.

The church would have you believe that you lose your value when you leave it, and for a time, I grasped on to that belief. I felt as if the foundation of my creative pursuits did not belong to me, but that was never true, even when I used my creativity exclusively as the church would have wanted me to (hello, welcome to the first person to sell hand-painted prints of the temples at craft markets and made so much money).

I feel like now I am meeting a more refined version of that creator. Skeptical of so much, yes. Wary of hope, faith and anything with a whiff of saccharine, yes. Lacking a set of defining beliefs about the world and the afterlife, yes. But also, more comfortable in my skin, yes. Delighted by things like small purple flowers and snow on the mountain, yes.

The church, God, prayer, the scriptures, my mission, belief, tension, progressive Mormonism, did not have ownership over my writing, my art, my ideas, my ability to exist in the world. They offered me a training grounds to test my creativity, but here on the other side, I can see that this is just the beginning. A quiet beginning that does not require approval from anyone. A solo expedition toward all the beauty, grief and mysterious that is still out there waiting. It’s there for you too.