On Choosing Mormonism

'Why am I Mormon?

• I am Mormon because I willingly – and with my eyes, mind, and heart fully open – choose to be Mormon. 
• I am Mormon because I doubt. 
• I am Mormon because I hope. 
• I am Mormon because I believe. 
• I am Mormon because I know. 
• I am Mormon because I choose to wrestle with God in my “dark night of the soul”.
• I am Mormon because I choose to wrestle with the LDS church. 
• I choose to be Mormon because it is within Mormonism that I have found God. 

“It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. 

My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt” (Fyodor Dostoevsky).'

(Michael Barker in Featured, Mormonism, Why I Am Mormon - Personal Essays)

Every Riven Thing

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made

sing his being simply by being

the thing it is:

stone and tree and sky,

man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,

means a storm of peace.

Think of the atoms inside the stone.

Think of the man who sits alone

trying to will himself into the stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made

there is given one shade

shaped exactly to the thing itself:

under the tree a darker tree;

under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made

the things that bring him near,

made the mind that makes him go.

A part of what man knows,

apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.

christian wimans

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/11/poet-christian-wimans-every-riven-thing.html

rive  (rv)
v. rived, riv·en (rvn) also rived, riv·ing, rives
v.tr.
1. To rend or tear apart.
2. To break into pieces, as by a blow; cleave or split asunder.
3. To break or distress (the spirit, for example).
v.intr.
To be or become split.
[Middle English riven, from Old Norse rfa.]

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/riven

On being compelled to Love

Love is an act,
I am compelled to renew daily, 
a bittersweet choice, 
like pork seeds and chinese mustard sauce, 
   a combination of flavors,
                                   that in the end satisfies me ....
                                                       .......though more often then not, 
  very painful.

My second poem

These Poems, She Said

 These poems, these poems,

these poems, she said, are poems

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man 

who would leave his wife and child because 

they made noise in his study. These are the poems 

of a man who would murder his mother to claim 

the inheritance. These are the poems of a man 

like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not 

comprehend but which nevertheless

offended me. These are the poems of a man

who would rather sleep with himself than with women, 

she said. These are the poems of a man

with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s 

hands, woven of water and logic

and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These 

poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant  

as elm leaves, which if they love love only 

the wide blue sky and the air and the idea

of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said, 

and not a beginning. Love means love

of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing. 

These poems, she said....

                                       You are, he said,

beautiful.

                That is not love, she said rightly.

Robert Bringhurst, “These Poems, She Said” from The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982. Copyright © 1982 by Robert Bringhurst. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178483

On a Weeping god,

At the very end of the bible, John the Revelator is given a vision much like Enoch’s; in fact, he sees Enoch’s holy city, the new Jerusalem in the latter days “coming down from God out of heaven . . .And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people. 

. . .And God shall wipe away all tears from their eye” (Rev. 21:3–4). This is the great hope and consolation for all believers. For Mormons, it has the added poignancy that as he wipes away those tears, 

God himself will be weeping for the residue of his children who are not there.

(Eugene England , The Weeping God of Mormonism, Originally published: Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 63–80.)

On judging our leaders

“Though I admitted in my feelings and knew all the time that Joseph was a human being and subject to err, still it was none of my business to look after his faults.. . .

It was not my prerogative to call him in question with regard to any act of his life.
He was God’s servant, and not mine.”  

(Brigham Young, sermon delivered in Bowery, Great Salt Lake City Utah Territory March 29, 1857)