Out of Sorts is, as the subtitle suggests, all about the way a person's faith can change over their lives; it's about how tough those changes can be, how earth-shaking and scary they can feel. Sarah's family became entranced and energized by a local charismatic Christian church when she was a child, and she grew up enfolded in the safe, loving worldview that church espoused. Transitioning into her adult life brought questions, and some disillusionment, and intense loss, all of which impacted her faith.
And so this metaphor weaves through the book, a metaphor of sorting through one's possessions -- a house full of them -- and deciding what to keep, what to trash, what to linger over, what to hang onto for now even though you know you will discard it eventually (because this just isn't the right moment to say goodbye). Sarah Bessey compares this sorting process to being "out of sorts," which she defines this way: "a state of being in one's heart or mind or body. Often used to describe one's sense of self at a time when one feels like everything one once knew 'for sure' has to be figured out all over again."
Writes Sarah, "We sort on the threshold of change; it's how we gather the courage to eventually walk through the door and out into the new day's light. Of course there is grief in this process, whether it's from the death of a loved one or the death of an old way of life. Of course there is.
"Whether it's in our relationship with God or with our own families, at some point we find that it is time to sort. It's time to figure out what we need to keep, what we need to toss, and what we need to reclaim. And we need to tell our stories in order to move forward.
"Every ending is also a new beginning."
I love how she expresses this, because it rings so achingly true. And that's why faith transition takes such an awfully long time -- there are piles of boxes and beliefs to sort through, then to reorganize. You can't exactly throw out a whole box at one time (or at least, I can't), not without checking all the contents. And so when your faith isn't tidy anymore, and you have to clean it up, there's a lot of work to do. Painstaking work.
This sorting-things-out process is something I've done with my own faith, for maybe seven or eight years now. Well ... actually, I think some of those years were less sorting-things-out, more insisting-I-could-keep-all-these-items-if-I-could-just-reorganized-them-correctly. I was none too eager to downsize my collections of beliefs or get rid of things that were broken. But anyway, regardless of when I've stayed on task and when I've let my mind wander, I've been out of sorts for a while. And I've been sorting through the remains. My dilemmas have been thoroughly Mormon, which makes them different in some ways from the dilemmas Sarah Bessey describes in her book (she deals with mainstream Christianity). But at the same time, the dilemmas are not so very different, at least not as she approaches them. This book isn't about solving the specific problems or answering the specific questions; it's about lending peace to the process and giving a vote of confidence to the reader, saying, Hey, you can do this. I know it's hard. Give yourself all the time you need, but be brave -- God is with us.
There are a wide variety of resources out there for Mormons encountering some kind of faith crisis or transition; I've read and listened to many of them, and they've helped, absolutely. There's something I really love, though, about seeing this matter handled from a Christian angle that is not specifically (or even tangentially) Mormon. It means I have to stay on my toes. In Out of Sorts, Sarah Bessey is writing about familiar topics in unfamiliar (to me) language, causing me to read more carefully and think through her suggestions instead of shifting into an auto-pilot mode. Even the fact that she doesn't quote the King James Version of the Bible, preferring other translations instead, is just different enough that it keeps me paying attention.
Take this alternative version of James 1:5, a verse familiar to most Mormons as the one that prompted Joseph Smith to ask God which church he should join: "If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and He will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking."
Gives a slightly different flavor.
If I may get personal for a moment ("on your own blog, Sara? okay, fine."), I'd like to share one insight that came at me like ... well, not like a ton of bricks, but like a very forceful breeze or scent -- an insight that came as I was flipping through Out of Sorts after I'd finished reading it, checking out the things I'd underlined.
Reading on page 84-85 of Out of Sorts, I encountered a new answer to this question, one so basic that I'm stunned I haven't thought of it before.
Bessey writes, "Jesus isn't only in your tradition. You get to love Jesus without being an evangelical or a Pentecostal or a Presbyterian or whatever new label you've acquired these days or old label that just doesn't fit anymore.
"Your pet gatekeeper isn't the sole arbitrator of the Christian faith: there is more complexity and beauty and diversity of voices and experiences within followers of the Way than you know. Remember, your view of Christians, your personal experience with Christians, is a rather small sample: there are a lot more of us out here than you might think. A lot of us on the other side of that faith shift -- eschewing labels and fear tactics, boundary markers and tribalist thinking.
"The Church is sorting and casting off, renewing and reestablishing in the postmodern age, and this is a good thing. The old will remain -- it always does -- but something new is being born too. If it is being born in the Church, it is first being born in the hearts, minds, and lives of us, the Body."
"... Our particular tradition doesn't get our loyalty: that fidelity is for our Jesus."
That fidelity is for our Jesus.
It didn't quite occur to me on the first read-through, but flipping back through the book a second time, I realized something when I saw these words. And I wrote it out in soft red pencil at the bottom of pages 84 and 85.
the church was more important to me than Jesus was
Why did I need to sort out my faith? Why have I needed to walk down this path? Because the church (of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) was more important to me than Jesus was. No question about that -- my testimony was of the church and the good things it brought into my life, not of my Savior. I believed in him, yes I did, but that didn't seem to ... matter very much. It was secondary. Jesus was secondary. And I think on that fact now and how not okay it is, and how far I still have to go in coming to know and follow Jesus Christ, and how much I want to go that distance ... and I think, perhaps this is why. If church had continued to be the wonderfully comfortable place of belonging and validation it had been for me when I was younger, I probably wouldn't have been motivated to seek out Jesus more sincerely.
I'll close it out with some more words from Sarah Bessey, and I hope this excerpt and the others I've shared have conveyed some of the warmth and humility with which she writes, because that as much as anything else really makes this a special, necessary book, in my opinion.
"I wanted to follow Jesus: not a way of thinking or a doctrine, not a sermon or a list of rules, not political affiliations and church denominations or a path to a shiny-happy life or anything like that. I wanted to follow Him and love Him, right to the end, wherever He led. It occurred to me on that day that if I got to know Him -- really, truly know Him -- I could perhaps begin to spot counterfeit Jesuses. There are Jesuses out there who are co-opted for every cause and argument, and these false Jesuses bastardize the message and misrepresent a man who none of us really understands -- and we all do the co-opting, for everything from power to money to the smug feeling of being right while everyone else is wrong. We all do it, progressives and conservatives alike. Jesus isn't our mascot and he isn't the magic word.
"I found His words in Luke 6:43-44: 'You don't get wormy apples off a healthy tree, nor good apples off a diseased tree. The health of the apple tells the health of the tree. You must begin with your own life-giving lives. It's who you are, not what you say and do, that counts. Your true being brims over into true words and deeds.'
"I read those words -- 'You must begin with your own life-giving lives' -- and suddenly I understood why Mary spilled her most precious perfumes and soaked His feet with her tears, drying them with her hair. No wonder the Bible uses the word 'immediately' to describe how quickly fishermen dropped their nets and livelihoods to follow the man from Galilee. One of the biggest gifts of that season of my life was revisiting the stories I thought I knew and discovering that really, I didn't know them at all.
"The more I read the Gospels, the more I got it: no wonder we love the real Him when we meet Him."
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