Literature Review

The title “Holy Places” comes from a few places. I chose it before I had really even started working on my thesis. I was messing around with the Procreate app on my iPad, creating fake book covers and playing with colorful gradients. Something about the way the colors blurred and blended together reminded me of Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “borderlands”, the in-between spaces, the bridges, the grey areas. It felt fitting for a journey that has felt slow at times slow and lightning fast at others. Figuring out what I really believed and what I really felt (and not just what I thought I should believe or feel) left me floating in these blurred planes for a long time. Looking back on my old journal entries is strange, especially seeing the way child-me was so convinced of the truth and perfection of an entire ideology and institution based on faith alone. In reality, it was simply all I had ever known, the only solid color in which I had been allowed to reside.

A great irony in all of this is that, while I have renounced my former religious convictions which were based on the fact of my “just knowing” or “just believing”, I have come to a roundabout acceptance of this spiritual intuition as it relates to a higher power.  Though I could not have language for this at the time, I believe a lot of my convictions derived from a desire to please those around me, specifically authority figures. It was the path of least resistance. It got me love, respect, and praise, which I wanted more than anything. I’m sure there were many times, especially in my younger childhood years, where I asked questions and pushed boundaries. But these inclinations melted away the older I got. Because the reaction to even the smallest deviation from gospel principles was met with emphatic resistance, placation and acceptance became a survival instinct. The notion that I could still practice spirituality on my own terms, solely by the guidance of my own intuition and others whose ideas I could choose to accept or not, was still untapped. 

When I first left the church, I threw the baby out with the bathwater, abandoning pretty much all of my default religious beliefs, or at least casting a net of plausible deniability over them as I stowed them away. I didn’t return to or interrogate the Bible stories I’d learned in a meaningful way until my studies at Nevada State. In Dr. Decker’s course, we were assigned to read the first chapter of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. In this chapter, “Skywoman Falling”, Kimmerer juxtaposes the creation stories of Native American people and Western Christianity. 

“On one side of the world where people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.

Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.” (Kimmerer 6-7)

Naturally, learning Skywoman’s story and seeing it held up next to the story of Adam and Eve had me thinking back to learning this origin story as a child. It also prompted me to think about how foundational these kinds of stories can be, in a way I don’t think we often stop to ponder.  From the way Kimmerer analyzes the story of Eve, it is hard not to see how shame and punishment are woven into it. By all accounts, Eve made a very simple, very understandable “mistake”. Though I remember there being a sense of gratitude in the church-approved response to Eve’s story–because we would not exist to be “tested” without her misstep–there is also a warning. If you seek knowledge and truth or questions outside what you have been told is real and right, even when your gut says maybe it’s not, you will be punished. More than that, you should be punished. And if this is the message that so many children, not just LDS children, are receiving about our genesis as human beings, what does it say about what we believe about ourselves, how we deserve to be treated when we stumble, and our relationship to Earth and creation? 

“The Skywoman story, shared by the original peoples throughout the Great Lakes, is a constant star in the constellation of teachings we call the Original Instructions. These are not “instructions” like commandments, though, or rules; rather, they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map for yourself. How to follow the Original Instructions will be different for each of us and different for every era.” (Kimmerer 7)

Having been raised to believe that my choices were either: 1) Follow this doctrine to the letter or 2) Be forbidden from being with your loved ones in the afterlife, the idea of guidance and freedom in the place of rigidity feels more harmonious, more loving than anything I could have previously imagined.

In Light in the dark / Luz en lo oscuro, Gloria Anzaldúa creates a bridge–at least, in my mind–from Kimmerer’s telling of Skywoman when she writes:

According to Christianity and other spiritual traditions, the evil that lies at the root of the human condition is the desire to know–which translates into aspiring to conocimiento (reflective consciousness). Your reflective mind’s mirror throws back all your options, making you aware of your freedom to choose. (120)

In these words, I found a near-perfect description of the process of my deconstruction. When I read it, I was immediately reminded of “Skywoman Falling”. In the church, the concept of "agency" is frequently discussed. We have free agency, but we will be held accountable for our sins. When considering the wide range of severity these sins can take and taking stock of the cost of not living one's life in perfect accordance with the church's guidelines, it ended up not feeling like much of a choice at all. My natural curiosity, my "desire to know" and to obtain conocimiento, and the creation story of Skywoman all feels much more in harmony with this gift of agency. And if I employ this gift with love, I can't believe the choice to walk away from the church could be evil.

Anzaldúa also writes:

Knowing that something in you, or of you, must die before something else can be born, you throw your old self onto the ritual pyre, a passage by fire. In relinquishing your old self, you realize that some aspects of who you are–identities people have imposed on you as a woman of color and that you have internalized–are also made up. Identity becomes a cage you reinforce and double-lock yourself into. The life you thought inevitable, unalterable, and fixed in some foundational reality is smoke, a mental construction, fabrication. So, you reason, if it’s all made up, you can compose it anew and differently. (138)

I first want to highlight here that much of Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing on identity comes significantly and profoundly from her Chicana identity. When I, as a white woman, refer to my previous religion as having been part of my “identity”, I want to acknowledge that this is a kind of identity that is culturally allowable to shed in a way that Anzaldúa’s identity as Chicana and as a woman of color was not, and this identity had a material affect on her and materially affects other women of color in a way that my former religion (and current lack thereof) does not. So, while her writing on the deconstruction of identity and spirituality and orthodoxy has enormously inspired me in both this project and my own personal journey, I feel I would be remiss to not make this important distinction.

This passage was a huge part of the inspiration for my “diary” lyrics. I connected to the idea of my religious and spritiual identity being something that I had to “burn down” in order to remake it, and that this burning and remaking has been done in phases over the course of years. It also struck me that Anzaldúa speaks about identities being “imposed” upon oneself, a concept I found familiar from my time in the LDS church. From birth, I was told who I needed to grow up and become, and received the message that there was not room for much else outside of that narrow identity. A woman should be a wife, mother, devoted follower of Christ. Any individuality aside from these roles is permissible only so long as they do not conflict with those preordained–and, as Anzaldúa writes, “made up”–identities. It is disconcerting to deviate from the “life you thought inevitable”. As freeing as it was to choose to walk away from these constructed identities, it also leaves the future wide open and uncertain in a way that can be very intimidating. However, in Anzaldúa’s assertion that one must not only dispose of the old self but actively create the new self comes with the implication that this is not a simple process. For someone who is used to the idea of following a set of rules and predetermined positions, the act of deciding and enacting a new concept of self will inevitably come with hardship.

As for the modality of this project, it was only natural for me to choose a creative route, and Anzaldúa’s thoughts on artistry validated this route for me. Since I was 7 or 8, I have been making up songs, imagining melodies and writing down lyrics. It started out as silly compulsions–I heard things in my head and had to get them out. My first song was titled “Do You Want to Be a Star?” and heavily borrowed from a Faith Hill melody as well as the words to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”). It soon became a way to express myself and to process emotions. Although I enjoy and have become more comfortable with writing in the academic space, I have always found it easier to convey my thoughts lyrically. It’s also the way I can be the most concise. Anzaldúa also writes, “Through creative expression, the human experience is mythologized and collectively understood” (39). I know I am not alone in my religious deconstruction journey. It seems that a multitude of members are leaving the Mormon church recently, as well as other Christian churches. The use of art to mythologize one’s experience helps allow for a greater societal understanding of that experience, as well as an offering of connection and affirmation for others who share the experience. Anzaldúa speaks of art and creativity as almost a duty in order to help heal the world. More than anything, my hope in creating this project, this song, and in creation in general is that it can be a source of healing.

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Light in the dark / Luz en lo oscuro: rewriting identity, spirituality, reality. Duke University Press, 2015. 

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2013.