Deidre Nicole Green: A Thoughtful Love: Reflections on a Life of Faith as Commitment

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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“God loves your critical mind,” I reiterated to the students of my Global Women’s Studies seminar on feminist theology at the end of our semester in 2020. One of my female students had lamented that in her lifelong experience in the church, this integral part of who she was seemed unwelcome. I could relate all too well and wanted to offer affirmation and hope gleaned from an arduous journey of attaining self-acceptance and a deep sense of divine acceptance amid an upbringing in a religious culture that too often devalues and dismisses critical thinking as unfaithful or unimportant. “Critical” is often set in opposition to loving, but I know that my own critical mind and my many questions lead me to love God and others more deeply. If my mind is one of the means by which God has endowed me with the ability to love God above all else (see Matt 22:37), then it stands to reason that God loves my mind, especially when used in a way that ultimately allows me to become more fully devoted to God.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints proclaims itself to be the “only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth” (D&C 1:30), containing a fullness of truth. It also espouses the teachings of the New Testament, which claim that the first and great commandment is to love God above all else and with every part of oneself, and that the second commandment is like unto it, to love others as ourselves (Matt 22:37-40). The gospel teaches us that God’s work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of human individuals—this is the ultimate manifestation of divine love. What we ought to mean, then, when we claim that the church has a special relationship to divine truth is that this religious institution bears distinctive resources to help God’s children learn how to love as God loves.

Practicing Latter-day Saints speak comfortably about becoming like God and enjoying exaltation with those to whom they are eternally connected. Yet we rarely speak in this context of the ways we must struggle to practice the love we want to enjoy eternally. I believe that the difficulties and dissonance with which we must wrestle as both thinking and believing Latter-day Saints can prepare and strengthen us for the struggle of learning to love people vastly different from ourselves (as well as those who are altogether too much like ourselves).

I find that in my own life love breeds curiosity. I want to know the objects of my love, not in the two-dimensional way I know about facts, but in a dynamic, affected, and relational way. My reasons for being—and remaining—a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints present themselves in largely subjective ways. I trust the impressions I receive that come from God. My acute sense of divine presence in my life is more real to me than anything that is tangible in the world. Because I trust that relationship so deeply, I also trust the divine injunction that I have personally received to remain faithful to the restored gospel. This means I strive to continue to love and serve my coreligionists, however surprising and frustrating that injunction can be at times, given aspects of church culture that make it seem easier to walk away and disengage. I am inspired to stay by my own experience of God’s relentless love for creation, which enfolds every individual in a care and affection for her specificity.

During my formative years, I sensed that divine love would embrace my inquisitive mind, but I struggled in a religious culture that did not appreciate my questions. As a young teenager, I vividly recall sitting in our family minivan parked outside our chapel. My mom and I waited for my father and brother so we could make our annual road trip back to southern Idaho to visit our extended family. I lamented to my mother that I feared I would never be able to make a decision about what we in those days called Mormonism. I wanted it to be true, I told her, and that meant I would never have the requisite objective stance to accurately assess its veracity. Paraphrasing Alma 32, my mother assured me that desire could be beneficial when making decisions about religious faith and knowledge. I felt somewhat reassured at this, but continued to crave something definitive that would allow me to ascertain both the truth and what religious affiliation God willed for me. Despite this struggle, I resolved that I would serve a mission if I was “still Mormon when I turned twenty-one,” as I once proclaimed to a missionary dining with us one Sunday afternoon. This was only logical, I explained: If I believed something was universally true, and if I loved other people, I would want to share that truth with everyone.