Coda: What I Can Still Sing

I do not know if I can still sing the old song of redeeming love in the way I was once asked to sing it. 0

The old song carried too many claims: priesthood authority, restored certainty, prophetic confidence, history I cannot defend, and a culture that made honest uncertainty feel like spiritual failure. I cannot sing it as if nothing has changed. But I can still sing something. 0

Those churches never wrote back. They have their own vendors and their own dialects, and I discovered I speak church the way an immigrant speaks a new country's language — fluently only in the one I left. I have played two church gigs since leaving Mormonism. One summer night, busking by a lake between sets, I played God Be With You Till We Meet Again, gospel style, on a Hammond organ, and strangers applauded a hymn they did not know they were hearing. Last year I played my children some Tabernacle Choir so they could hear what Mormon music sounds like, and Come Come Ye Saints got me sobbing — heard not as propaganda this time, but as my poor ancestors, desperate for a better life, taking an enormous risk on an uncertain story. I have a lot in common with them. I think they would be proud of me. Sometimes I play friends the old recordings, the way you show someone a photograph of a place you cannot take them, so they can hear how beautiful Mormon music can be. And I have found something else: jam sessions, full of good people, more honest than a ward in some ways and more blinded in others. My favorite one almost feels like church. Almost. That is part of a replacement, not the whole of one. The rebuilding is a life's work, and I am in the middle of the life. 0

I can still be grateful for beauty I did not invent. I can still stand in awe before a world too large for my explanations. I can still have tenderness toward the young missionary who wanted to be good and did not know how much he was overstating. I can still have affection for ordinary believers trying to make life less lonely. I can still be angry at dishonesty. I can still tell the truth about what was lost without pretending the loss itself proves anything. 0

I can still recognize the pull of family, the seriousness of children, the danger of appetite, the difficulty of freedom, the need for forgiveness, the usefulness of ritual, and the desire to make life sacred without pretending. Earlier in this book a man tied himself to a mast because the song was real. That is one thing a real song can be. This is the other. If there is a song left for me, it is not the old song of certainty and not the thin song of having outgrown everything. It is a song of reconstruction: less triumphant, more truthful, willing to leave some notes unresolved, and able to let hope and not knowing share the same breath. 0

It is mine in a way the old song never fully was, and for now that is enough. 0