Life is complex, and that is good: A lesson from Tarzan.

There is a beautiful scene in the animated Tarzan where, accompanied by Phil Collin's music, Tarzan begins to discover the broader human world, as shown to him through slides. And he begins to show Jane his world, as shown in this scene:

 I've always loved the music and animation of Tarzan, and I relate to Tarzan's journey. These new visitors bring him both good and evil, showing him a life beyond anything he could've ever imagined in his upbringing.

Like Tarzan, the older I get, the more I discover how complex life is.

    Things that seemed simple to me even just a few years ago now appear to me a ceaseless, orbiting mass of parts and variables and variables within variables. Work, play, relationships with everyone from close family to the stranger in the store, Church and gospel and sexuality; every facet of my human life reflects this complexity now.

    Perhaps this is part of growing up. Part of becoming. Becoming someone who contributes, who makes a difference for themselves and others. That itself is, after all, not a simple task.

    We latter-day Saints are very good at trying to make things simple. Our doctrines are simple: God loves us, His children, and so has provided a plan for our happiness that involves gaining a body, learning good and evil through experience, and overcoming our challenges and sins by turning to the Savior Jesus Christ, whose perfect, loving sacrifice of His life involved undergoing all we have to undergo so that He can be perfect support, confidante and lover of our souls. Easy enough, right? Why shouldn’t living those doctrines be simple?

    But it really isn’t simple. Our bodies are very complex, laden with passions and impulses and hunger and thirst, all of it independent of what we think should happen. Learning is complex, good is complex, evil is complex, experience is complex, overcoming is complex, challenges are complex, sins are complex, the Savior Jesus Christ was complex. And, being Latter-day Saint is complex. As the meme goes, it always has been. It may be motivated by simple faith in a simple love, but that does not make it simple. “Don’t overcomplicate things,” I’ve heard Latter-day Saints say. “Stop asking difficult questions and concentrate on things that are important.” “Don’t overthink, it’s really simple.” But really, people, it isn’t. Let’s quit pretending that it is.

    For me, the changes I’ve seen in my discipleship are very similar to what I’ve seen in my musical life. As a late teenager, formed by my Latter-day Saint fears of the “worldly” and blessed with intensely positive experiences in my high school choir, I had determined to myself to work out a career as a high school choir director. It took six years of difficult, painful experiences in college music to finally realize, one rainy night driving through Salt Lake City, that this was not the path for me.

    Since then, my body has changed. And my voice with it. The same inputs no longer produced the same outputs. My efforts to sing gradually decreased in quality, and my voice ceased responding with beauty and began to produce gravelly, broken sounds and a great deal of pain. I hit a low point last year, where I felt I would never be able to sing a solo in front of an audience again. But with a choice to participate in the most recent production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, I placed myself in a position that forced me to relearn singing or else face having a vocal disaster on stage. And relearn singing I have. I will probably never be able to sing quite like I did as a teenager and a younger adult, but I can sing enough to contribute.

    Discipleship shifts in the same way. What we input and what we emphasize in the beginning of our journeys differs from what comes in later stages. If we kept living the same way we did as a teenager, where would we be? The same inputs stop producing the same outputs, because life is dynamic and so is discipleship. We learn and grow, our interests and priorities shift, and the accumulating effects of bad habits, trauma, and difficult experiences force us to reconfigure our relationship to true things. Is that not what discipleship is? A relationship to true things? If there is a God that cares about our relationship to true things, and if it is true that we are limited beings with much room for growth, then why would we expect everything to always work the same way they always have?

    Life has not been kind to me in certain respects. I have been blessed with much, and that includes many adverse experiences, some resulting from my own poor choices and others as a result of family dynamics and biological constraints not of my own choosing. As an LGBT person in a very conservative Church, I have had to juggle parallel realities within myself each claiming a large proportion of my existence, and which have often not been kind to each other.

    But hear me out just a little longer, so that I may say: I wouldn’t have it any other way.

    I LOVE BEING LGBT. It is a gift to be able to love men the way that I do. I may not always know what to do with it, and there’s no apparent place in the Church for this gift of mine, but having it has given me so many glittering facets to my personality and desires. It’s so beautiful, and I’m so grateful.

    And, I love being Latter-day Saint. There is so much that my religious practice has given me, both in terms of the complexity in my life, and in terms of being a source of strength to step into the complexity. I won’t talk in glittering terms about my faith like many latter-day Saints about my experience, because it would be dishonest. Pardon my french, but this shit HURTS. A LOT. My mission shattered my mental health, and since then my discipleship has been a series of traumatic experiences that have often left me broken. I am not an enthusiastic latter-day Saint, simply a determined one.

And again, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If life was not complex, it wouldn’t have so much room to hide its gifts.

"I just know there's something bigger out there."