Review
Title: Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace
Author: Katie Langston
Publisher: Thornbush Press
Genre: Autobiography
Year Published: 2021
Pages 237
Binding: Hardback; Paperback; E-Book
ISBN Hardback, 978-1736013670; Paperback, 98-1-7360136-6-3
Price: Hardback, 24.95; Paperback 14.95; E-Book, 9.99
Reviewed by Heather Harris Bergevin for the Association of Mormon Letters
I should mention in advance that Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace was offered to me to review specifically because of my strange and weird location in Mormonism. I suppose there are many who consider me a fence sitter, being neither “true blue, through and through,” nor “out, thank God” of the gospel. In short, I’m one of the strange ones who, despite being asked why I stay, does so for my own quite good reasons, while working to establish healthy boundaries in a place where it’s exceptionally difficult to do so. I’m not particularly good at this, but it meant that I would be interested in reading Katie’s book about leaving, while also not damaged nor shocked by, for instance, descriptions of the temple in Langston’s book. This is my caveat: Sealed is excellent reading, but my perspective is an odd one, where neither I nor anyone else is certain whether I am in the process of staying or going and where.
Langston’s florid and rather beautiful prose will encapsulate you into a bizarre world of fundamentalism, one which I hope is truly foreign to you, and which, I suspect, will not be. Just like as Tara Westover’s Educated is discombobulating because of its familiarity amongst brutality, Langston’s story is more disconcerting because it is more mainstream. Westover’s family was fringe. Langston’s family is made of regular people who have some extreme ideas.
The Mormonism of Langston’s youth, though happening in the same time frame as my own, could not be more different in many ways. While her correlated Sunday School lessons are familiar, including awful comparisons of young women to food items (a common complaint amongst evangelical women), much of Langston’s world was shaped by the Kimber Academy[1] viewpoints her family espoused, skewing their interpretation of scripture and more to a further and further right-wing standpoint. This included not only homeschooling from the Kimber directives, but also being preppers, and having various other extremist influences. This would be dangerous and frustrating for any child to grow up within religion, and, indeed, is a warning to readers now who are facing very similar standpoints in many portions of LDS culture in the United States. I escaped a ward that was following this very route, and which could not understand why I refused to fall in line. I did not because it was not the religion that I recognized. My parents weren’t raised LDS, weren’t steeped in Western LDS culture, and aren’t extremists in anything except kindness to others. Thank God.
My childhood religion, therefore, reflected agency and accountability within my folk’s already established constructs of Christ, the Atonement, and Grace. I did not realize how toxic it was possible for perfectly simple LDS doctrines to be until I left for BYU and discovered that being Mormon elsewhere meant something very different than to those of us in South Carolina. However, my mutual grounding in anxiety is so similar to that of Langston. I, too, spent decades being steeped in the concept that I myself, alone, was not good enough for God. This was despite the teaching in my home, in which my parents continually supported and cared for us and would never have accepted or supported such teachings. At home we were taught we were beloved and enough.
Yet, I remember many of the same worries and questions that Langston posits. I remember forgetting to say my prayers at nine or ten and waking in a cold sweat from a nightmare, assuming it came as a result of my forgetting and listing out all of my sins one by one to a loving God, hoping desperately to be forgiven. I can remember disliking our meddling neighbor Annabelle, who would walk into our home without warning or knocking, and worrying that because I did not like her lack of boundaries, this meant I couldn’t be perfected. When I got my patriarchal blessing, and it was slightly less than a page long, I assumed that it meant I wouldn’t live a very long life, especially with my medical issues.
I remember.
Langston’s book will make you remember, and not all of the remembrances are comfortable. As with all stories dealing with scrupulosity, and the intensity of danger, while attempting to recover from it, it is meant to be uncomfortable. You’re not meant to be soothed or enveloped in compassion and Christ’s love in Langston’s childhood gospel. There isn’t always grace available, there.
I wish I did not recognize it. I wish that I did not know what it is like to be made to feel that you are unacceptable to God. I wish that I didn’t understand how you can become prey to others if you are made to feel so. Leaving a ward where such was taught to my children, and a marriage where such was taught to me, has taken everything within my capabilities.
Scrupulosity, in my readings over the last seven or eight years, can come in many forms. It can be faced inward, such as Langston’s in regards to herself, or outward, such as my experience with one who intended me to become perfected by his own interpretation, even if it killed me. I have a tendency towards binary thinking and recognized many of the same behaviors and patterns Langston described in myself, particularly prior to my treatment for Lyme, which can also cause such predispositions to show up. These things take so much courage to discuss in our society, because those of us who have faced even a portion of what Langston has experienced, discover that we are seen as fractured humans for not experiencing the gospel the same way as many others do. My children are prone to this kind of binary thinking, and it’s one of the reasons my oldest is safest when far, far away from anyone who thinks in this way, especially as an LGBT+ individual.
I believe in God, I’ve determined after all of these experiences– a loving God who wants us to be alive, and to live the best way possible for our individual lives. When such trauma-inducing issues, whether scrupulosity, anxiety, OCD, or other complications of living within a religious lifestyle, are turned outwards towards others, or inwards towards “perfecting” yourself, it can be safer for an individual to escape from it entirely. What God would condemn His child, whether for their own mental illness or escaping that of others, as they search for safety? Yet, in our culture, we are prone to doing so, which can keep many, whether those pressing orthodoxy, fundamentalism, or perfectionism upon others or those pressing it upon themselves, from accepting the therapy, medications to stabilize brain chemicals or other treatments which can keep them safe and genuinely assist in that progression as a human. In short: it can keep us from the very progression we seek.
Experiences like Langston’s have changed my soul towards a better understanding of God, and are one of the reasons I’m seen as being very nontraditional. According to my religion, a good God wants you safe, protected, and to feel Christ’s love, first and foremost. If you can’t do that here, as it’s the most critical thing, do it elsewhere. My goal is safe, healthy, happy adults, in that order. This makes me…a complex member of the church, raising complex, thinking children.
There is too little thinking, Langston mentions, and she’s right– there is a great deal of posturing at times, and a lot of repeating what other people have told us, and something regurgitating of weird pseudo-doctrines of others who, like Kimber, have “really thought these things through,” often to a ridiculous interpretative degree. To Langston’s parent’s credit, when their best friends and major doctrinal influences show up to visit, having taken a second wife, and are headed for Mexico for sanctuary in the polygamist colonies there, her parents recognize that healthy lines have been crossed. They refuse to participate and begin to put away the extremities of their prepper behaviors and establish a bit more normalcy. But, the damage to the children had already been done. As with other notable memoirists of LDS life, Langston finds escaping ingrained memories is not so simple as putting them aside and merrily carrying on.
In a society where we have seen a significant shift to fundamentalism in the past few years under the guise of “orthodoxy,” Langston’s book is a critical text of what will indeed happen to our children if we allow this to continue. The establishment of intellectualism as an enemy not only alienates any generation with thinkers and intelligence but creates more and more orthodox viewpoints as heterodoxy is driven wholeheartedly away, as Langston has been. Without the ongoing discussion and comprehension of Christ’s Grace, which should be forever forefront in any discussion of doctrinal teachings, we, as LDS members, lose the ability to reconnect ourselves to God’s Love, not because we are shut away from it, but because we have shut ourselves off from the most beautiful and compassionate concept in the gospel of Jesus Christ– that of Christ Himself.
Those who enjoyed Educated, Joanna Brook’s Book of Mormon Girl, Lance Allred’s Longshot, and Kiera Shae’s How the Light Gets In will enjoy the fascinating world of southern Utah that Langston presents, her growth and changes as she faced her mission, and later departure from the church. (If you haven’t read those, go do so!) Members should be aware that there are descriptions of part of the temple ceremony in the second part of Sealed, though no signs or symbols are named. The writing is florid and lyrical, but not to the extent that it is difficult to read. Instead, Langston slowly forces you inside the world of her youth, so that you may see the damage and dangers she faced which masqueraded as protection and salvation. You will notice things that are painfully familiar. Just as there is no portion of life that LDS culture does not permeate, there is no hiding from the similarities you will see in Langston’s book to your own life, or to my own.
In particular, I wish that I had known anyone who felt similarly to myself, twenty-something years ago when I went through an endowment ceremony. For Langston, what many find as a benefit to their faith, the endowment filled her with more questions and confusion. This was poignant to me because the endowment has always been a stressful and fraught exercise for me. Though I likewise went and dutifully memorized, it did not become more peaceful through repetition, even before my abuser began using the word hearken in a dangerous manner. Instead, for an entire generation of women, many of us were left alone with our disconcerted feelings, and told they should be peaceful ones when they were not.
The discovery that there are others who have complications with many things in the gospel is, strangely, one of the things that keeps me within it…I function best when I know I’m not alone, and can establish healthy boundaries around such things which do not feed my soul. But, just as not everybody has concerns with the endowment, not everybody can recognize this liminal space. Some, instead, go time and again to the things that hurt them, begging themselves and their God to create solace where it is impossible to find.
This is the lesson in Langston’s book. There are places others find peace where you cannot. This does not mean you are broken, or sinful, or unredeemable. It means your brain and body work differently. There may be another place where you feel the greatest peace. This also does not make you flawed or destroyed. It makes you different, and interesting.
You must be where you are safe and feel peace.
I have found that, as in all things, moderation is a lovely thing to want and a difficult thing to find, especially within a culture in which we want to someday gain what we believe to be perfection, the word often used as a mistranslation for the completeness we actually seek. Much of my own writing and thinking goes along these lines because it is so critical to find this balance: we want to be moral individuals and to leave the world a better place than it has been. We want to be better– at being humans, at being parents and spouses and loves. But when the concept of better becomes pressed to the limits, what then is left? What can be damaged by the constant understanding that we are not good enough for God when, in reality, we are sufficient and are so adored!
If you have struggled with depression, anxiety, OCD, and scrupulosity, you are not alone. In fact, you might not even be an outlier in our culture. Your struggles, like Langston’s and my own, come from a deep desire to think and grow. While we have different reasons for staying and going, Langston’s intense desire to comprehend and go towards the intensity of Love of the Savior is what I most admire. Langston was not fully broken by her experience – indeed, she’s used her theological and theatrical background well and has repaired her breaking as she goes along. Or, rather, like the other authors mentioned above, she has chosen to use her fractures to reflect light and hopefully help others along their own paths.
I think this is all of our goals, in the end. I hope you enjoy this glorious and lyrical book, and all that lies within it.
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[1] Kimber Academy is a network of conservative private schools that was founded by Glenn Kimber. Kimber is the son-in-law of Cleon Skousen. Together they helped to found Freemen Institute. For many years Kimber presented patriotic seminars and conferences all around the US. He is also the past president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS), a conservative constitutionalist institution.