Emma Lou Thayne: The Landing

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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[Reprinted from the 1986 collection, A Thoughtful Faith.]

It was the 24^th of July, hot and blue just as it should be in Utah. On the program for sacrament meeting in the Third Ward were a scout, a Merrie Miss, a fifteen-year-old teacher, a seventy-eight-year-old high priest, and an eighty-nine-year-old matriarch, all telling stories about their pioneer forebears. They were prepared, personal, touching. Each brought warmth, faith, information, even humor to the pulpit as the congregation radiated acceptance like hummingbirds at a feeder.

The bishop beamed; the song leader had us singing “Utah We Love Thee” and “Come, Come Ye Saints” at the top of our collectives; the sacrament had come and gone like a good dream in spite of one prayer’s having to be repeated twice because the newly ordained nerves of the priest kept mixing partake and sanctify. Sitting in that red-carpeted chapel among the twenty-five-years-familiar dear faces and constantly changing backs of heads, I belonged as surely as my pioneers belonged to their wagon circles on the prairie or conferences on folding chairs in the half-finished Tabernacle on Temple Square. My head spun with being at home, and my spirit went shimmering off like the sun on Great Salt Lake to meet my mother and father, grandmas and grandpas who I knew were singing along with me on a blue sky 24^th. It was my church, my culture, an intimate province that held and fed me among my people then and now. I absolutely loved it. And through it, the gospel.

But then the contradictions.

In the week since, a friend has been inconsiderately released from a responsible administrative position she occupied with candor and courage, not knowing of the change until her perhaps milder successor was announced. While a brother I know has escaped a coronary bypass through prayer, a young friend who talked in profound confidence to her home teacher about an indiscretion has been excommunicated. In the past several weeks I’ve seen the Church mobilize generosity and stem a flood to win the amazement of the world, and at the same time be editorially petty about what an under-researched newspaper article in a neighboring state said about a “Zion curtain.” I’ve listened to a lesson on compassionate service, but I’ve also heard of lessons on what not to read, seen the expulsion of a questing paper from the BYU campus and the investigation of writers for sister publications to the Exponent, and heard of machinations for positions that I in younger days might have expected to be filled by inspiration.

I’ve seen one missionary go out and come home under a mission president who built him, helped him master his diffidence, who gave him faith in himself and his relationship to Jesus Christ; I’ve seen another come home from another mission and another mission president, her self-worth bludgeoned by guilt and debasement for failing to find converts in a mission now closed for want of success.

Perhaps most unnerving of all, I see people afraid of the Church that I grew up regarding as refuge and sustenance, purveyor of truth and love. Who has not observed the historian afraid to write history, the young mother afraid to turn down a call, the parents panicked, expectations smashed for a son who doesn’t want a mission. And all the time believers afraid to confront unbelief even as they search for believing.

Everywhere, every week, I see the good and the far from good influences and eventualities of life in the Church, my church. There have to be ways to come to grips with the contradictions, to have enough belief in the good to counteract distress at the bad. Maybe my willingness and ableness to handle the contradictions could be seen as a lot like the fear and faith I take to the big swing at our cabin.

The swing is up a gully and then up a steep dusty mountainside. You get on the single thick rope from a platform hammered to a rough pine, grab a knot straight out from your arms, see that the seat—a shiny skinned three-inch round of mountain mahogany—is pulled tight between your legs, shove up on your toes, and take off.

No matter if it’s your first or two-hundredth time, your heart will tattoo your ribs and your mouth go dry as you drop and then swoop up over forty feet to look back—if you dare open your eyes—to the platform somewhere over there on the mountain you just left between two ancient spruces aching and swaying to hold your flight. It’s a “beaut” of a swing, one we built as kids more than forty years ago.

The swing was always central to our parties from the time we were twelve until we had our own children daring their friends to try it. And still I get up there and take off with an assurance of terror that makes even my past half-a-hundred-year-old lungs need to “wa-hoo” on that first plunge, as my legs kick me out and about for a heady landing three swings later on the bank grown steep and treacherous under the canyon boots of three generations of thrill seekers. I know I’ll make it. I’ve never failed. Oh, sometimes I’ve missed my footing as I’ve tried to land and had to hang and dangle out and back for another try, sometimes even to have somebody grab and hold till I could get off. But I’ve always made it. It’s something I can count on.

In like fashion in the Church, I’ve often gone off swinging onto new skies, examining, cheering, chafing, opposing, espousing, hoping for change, loving sometimes unequivocally a status quo. Most of all wanting urgently to continue—nay, grow—in my believing. I’ve found plenty to believe in—like the inspiration behind that program Sunday. But I go less often now up that gully and onto the swing. It seems OK simply to know it’s there, that others are whooping on it, and that anytime I want to, I can go for it and be sure of both flying and finding a landing. I’ve learned that maturity can help positively only what I have control over, and more and more I gravitate to what little I can control—mostly in private spheres.

Maybe that’s what’s happened with other enterprises that used to compel and challenge me. Like getting up on one water ski. Or thinking it was possible to rewrite lesson manuals for the Beehives, MIA Maids, and Laurels with a General Board committee who thought with me that we could make them last even through Correlation for at least a decade. Or trying either to make sense of or changes in traditions that suppose credibility in the Church only for the playing of established roles, or the signing of class rolls, or the delivery of hot rolls around the block. I just quit needing to do all of it, maybe because I already knew I could and needed to move on. Or, more likely, because the ground for landing after even the most expectant foray can so often slide and break if not my spirit, very often my heart. Too often I sense a closing down of options of where to land, a suspicion of diversity and more often than not a landing in Leviticus rules and brimstone where John might offer spirit and hope.

Sometimes I find myself with a new gnawing fear of what power or insistence on conformity can unleash—and it’s a far cry from the “wahoo” of taking off on the swing, the challenge of a new idea or way of going. So I simply choose not to swing so much anymore.

This is a good time of life. Mostly I am on solid but private ground, ground cut out and smoothed and made comfortable by my own landings or the landings of others willing to share their space with me. It is a place of believing, of letting in, and of being grounded in solid essentials. All intimately mine, all supplied by years of selecting and becoming comfortable with where I have come to flourish.

The arrival? When is there such a thing as arrival in believing? Nothing was ever more dynamic. But where I am now feels good. Full of believing—in the gospel of Jesus Christ and, if not in busyness in the Church, then in the support and camaraderie of those I love and in being about our Father’s business as well as our own.

Of course I have often over the years pleaded, “I believe. Help thou mine unbelief!” But the unbelief has given way to—or been discarded in—the gradual and not always easy comings of belief. Time and inclination finally preclude my dealing with supposition or speculation—or even caring about what I don’t know and have yet to encounter. There is little enough time for dealing with what is here and now, for trying to find out how to be human before I worry about how to be divine. But time is short. I’m about to turn the age my father was when he died—fifty-nine. It feels young, but now I’m the matriarch propounding by my life as he did for his following.

My mother and father talked little in a formal sense about what they believed. I never remember either bearing a traditional testimony. Their lives were their message: They were fair and kind and full of humor. And never condemning. More, what they chose seemed to make them happy and replete with possibilities—as they expected their children to be. They never set us up for rebellion by removing our options. Swings were there to be conceived, built, and swung on. Each of the four of us remembers going with their sanction to our own ways in the Church, attending and not attending and staying together as we came back to the same landings—non-conformists in our conformity.

I’d like very much for it to work in such a fashion for our five daughters, each of them as different as her coloring, as “active” as her convictions and sense of well-being.

Now in the Sabbath of my days, I claim more than ever the right to selective recall, endurance, ecstasy, expectation. “My” church is actually mine—a combination of “Abide With Me,” “…that His Spirit may be with you…,” and hugging in the foyer. I love teaching an institute class and learning more from my co-instructor and students than I ever teach. I watch “the word” in action up and down my block and among good people everywhere, LDS and not, all living what more and more makes ultimate sense in this passage from the Book of Mormon:

And because of your diligence and your faith and your patience with the word in nourishing it, that it may take root in you, behold by and by ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is sweet above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea, and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst. (Alma 32:42)

What has been there for me to pluck seems most precious. But my feasting and not hungering or thirsting has taken different shapes over the years. It’s been a long time since I’ve signed a roll or read a manual for the classes I attend or felt uneasy about missing Sunday School to visit my friend Margaret, 89, or to be home for house calls from my brothers, one at a time, between their comings and goings. Like one of my mentors of years ago, I’m reading less and thinking more. I’m loving my children as adults, finding from them and their husbands new ways to see. My husband and I with our different approaches have broadened each other and learned together that to praise one thing is not to condemn another. In our now almost empty nest, we’re realizing that constructive togetherness can mean sometimes prickly, often comfortable accommodation to difference.

In that accommodation I’m getting as addicted to solitude as I am to gatherings of kindred spirits, related or un-, the dozens gradually giving away to the one-to-ones.

If I like swinging over the kingdom of God in that gully and gasping at the thrill and the beauty of a green world, I also like inordinately having landed on the dark brown earth to watch the flights of others, knowing at least for now where I’ve come from, pretty much where I am, and not really a whole lot concerned about where I’m going. Only that it’s bound to be full of wonder. And that the land under me and the people around me and the tetherings inside me all seem to make a lot of sense and connect me surely to what I know with the faith of my childhood—that someone way beyond me is there to make sure that the kingdom greens or sheds in the season thereof, with predictable unpredictability.

If I have come to live more easily with some of my own frailties—and they don’t become fewer with age!—surely I can allow the same for the Church that I love and am so often dismayed at. It has given me far more than I it—and continues to. I have to play fair with it collectively as I would hope to individually. Its people, its practices, its truths have grounded and blessed me. I must grant it at least a modicum of the understanding I have come to expect from the Lord Himself for my struggles and failings. I must remind myself to be uncondemning as I pray for the patience and forbearance I hope just might be reciprocal.

With as many kinds of goodness to respond to as there are ways of looking at a sunset, I can be happy with my church only if I have neither the time nor the inclination to be unstrung by what might seem to me mismanagement, striving, discrimination, even witch hunts and paranoia. My landing and my being sure of my swinging, or of helping anyone else’s, derive from that private kingdom that is within me telling me that only I can know when to go from the platform, how many times out before I lift myself from the seat and try for another landing, how long before there will be no swinging at all. And how to look for the serenity of having held onto the landings so I can love what the 24^th of July is all about enough to counter depletions of what it isn’t.

So far, what there is to love helps make manageable any perspective on the plunge. I trust it always will.

A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century is now available to order from Bookshop.org, Amazon, or anywhere you get your books!

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