A few months ago, I started to realize how just long it had been since I first began on what we now call a faith journey. I started in college, which means that I have been going for more than twenty-five years. That realization brought a bunch of questions to mind. What’s come of all that time? Was it worth everything I put into it—and everything it has taken out of me? What was the point of the journey, anyway? Have I made any progress? Or have I only been wandering?¹

And finally, should I keep going?

When I was at the beginning of my journey, doubt looked like a path that led in only one direction: out of Mormonism. But I didn’t know where it went after that. Would I find another path? Another group? Another gospel? A wilderness? A city? Would I find a place to settle again? Or would I always be a wanderer?

Mormonism was quick to offer me answers, mostly in the form of two stories. The first was the story of the Prodigal Son, reprised in the story of Thomas Marsh. In this story, the doubter leaves the Church, parties for a while, and then comes back humbled and repentant. In 1857, in the Salt Lake City bowery, Thomas Marsh—who, as we were all taught, left the Church over milk strippings—gave a speech to announce his return to Mormonism.² He said, “If there are any among this people who should ever apostatize and do as I have done, prepare your backs for a good whipping, if you are such as the Lord loves. But if you will take my advice, you will stand by the authorities; but if you go away and the Lord loves you as much as he did me, he will whip you back again.”

So there’s one story: leave and get whipped back.

The other story was simpler: it was about the person who left the community, dwindled in unbelief, and eventually died miserable and alone.

So, the doubter either returns to the Church diminished or stays outside and dies.

Both stories are what I would call anti-hero’s journeys.

You probably know the basics of the hero’s journey. It’s a story structure that Joseph Campbell synthesized from tales and legends he’d encountered in many cultures from all over the world. In the hero’s journey, the hero leaves the community—which is suffering from some kind of illness or attack—and goes on a journey to find a cure for the affliction. The hero faces many obstacles and eventually has go through what is called the “inmost cave” before finding a healing elixir and returning to the community with it.

So, in the hero’s journey, the hero leaves the community and returns as a stronger person—completely opposite to the Prodigal Son and Thomas Marsh’s story.

Interestingly, Mormonism does have a quasi-hero’s journey: the mission story. A missionary leaves the community, spends a year and a half or so preaching the gospel, and returns a stronger person. However, a mission does not have all the elements of a hero’s journey—one of the most important of which is that the community the journeyer is leaving is ill—and, being a part of the community, the hero is also ill. Rather, in the mission story, Zion is in full health and vigor when the missionary leaves, and when they return, they add their new strength to Zion. It’s only a partial hero’s journey.

Seeing this lack of a true hero’s journey story in Mormonism gave me a new perspective on the mass exodus of its members over the past twenty years. It looks like an exodus, but I wonder if it isn’t actually the beginning of a mass hero’s journey—one we can’t see because we don’t have a story to see it with.

I realize that most people who have distanced themselves from or left the Church would say that I’m wrong. The last thing they want to do is come back. But stick with me for a bit. If we really are seeing the beginning of a mass hero’s journey, then that means the LDS community really is sick (even if it doesn’t know it), that it really does need heroes to go on their journeys and find a healing elixir, and that it needs a lot of heroes.

This changes the entire story. Suddenly, the doubter is no longer the outcast, doomed to return diminished or dwindle and die. Instead, they are the beginnings of a hero—the possibility of healing a community.

If you are a doubter, this may sound like great news. You’re not a prodigal son. You’re not Thomas Marsh. But I’m sad to report that the news isn’t all good. Usually in hero’s journey stories, the hero is reluctant to depart the community—and for good reason. They know that if they leave, their journey won’t be easy.

So, departing hero, what might your journey look like? Well, first of all, it will probably be long. From my own experience, you will need to meet a lot of people along the way. They will introduce you to new knowledge, new perspectives, new ways of being in the world. These helpers may be people, institutions, causes, groups, books. Each of them will be useful in their own way, sometimes even lifesaving. And you will need time to truly learn from them.

But eventually, you’ll find their boundaries—where they stop making sense, where they stop being helpful, where they might even cause you more harm than good. Then you’ll probably go through something like what you’re going through with Mormonism right now, analyzing them and finding where they’re lacking. Every single one of these books, people, groups, or causes will eventually fail you to some degree. This brings us up against a hard reality. Even if they are helpful for a while, no one can see you all the way to the end of your journey. Because, to complete the hero’s journey, the thing you really need to analyze, the thing you really need to be honest about, the thing you really need to change, is you.

By eventually failing, all the books and people and groups and causes you’ll encounter are pointing you toward the most important part of the hero’s journey: the inmost cave—that dark, silent, solitary place where you have no choice but to dwell with yourself. Where you find out who you are. And that’s a journey in itself, because who you are has a lot of layers (like onions, parfaits, and ogres). You’ll find light layers and dark layers, layers you are proud of and layers you are ashamed of. But eventually you will realize that none of these layers, as much as they feel like they are a part of you, are actually you. You are still somewhere beneath all of them. Eventually, you’ll realize that you can get rid of these layers without getting rid of yourself. In fact, you’ll be able to see yourself more clearly.

But you don’t go into the inmost cave just once. At least, I haven’t. You’ll go in often as you find a new layer that needs analyzing. For example, probably 15 years ago, my mom wanted to come to a Sunstone symposium. Sunstone had been a huge part of my journey; in fact, I had become the editor of its magazine. It was my space. When my mom told me she wanted to come to the symposium, I realized that, in my mind, she represented the part of the Church I was trying to get away from. And if she came in, well . . . would Sunstone be my space anymore? Was Sunstone an essential part of me or was it just a layer? I sat with that question for a long time.

Eventually, I understood that my mom was not what she represented in my mind, and I was not Sunstone. I also realized that she was a human who needed to go on her own journey. She was as capable as growth as I was. And if she needed Sunstone, she should absolutely have access to it.

Over the years, I’ve had to let go of a lot of other layers of my identity. For example, I still remember the day I read a talk by Dallin Oaks and realized that I agreed with 90 percent of it. Talk about an identity crisis!

As I observed the various layers of myself, I became less and less judgmental of them, both pro and con. When I stopped trying to push them away or pull them closer—when I just let them be, just observed them—I found a particularly potent energy.

This helped me understand the plummet in energy I had felt at church during my faith journey. It used to be that I would get energy from going to church meetings, but that stopped early in my journey. After thinking about it for a long time, I finally realized that the force behind that energy was judgment. See, in church, we all got together, declared our collective judgment on various matters, and built it up. It felt good to have a judgment about what life meant and what was valuable, and to have the people around me support it. But when I started not agreeing with that value system, then that current of judgment started going against me, and I found myself constantly swimming upstream. No wonder I was always so tired.

But, of course, it also made me feel like a pioneer, like the maverick that had bravely struck out on his own. I was setting up my own judgment criteria, and I wasn’t going to let some church browbeat me out of it!

In other words, I had been in a constant state of judgment my entire life, whether I was judging with the current or against it. And this, I realized, was a problem: I was blinding myself either direction, because judgment is a way of no longer looking at something. Once you judge something, you stop observing it, you stop collecting information, you stop finding possibilities. You just create reasons to defend the rightness of your judgment.

When I taught myself to observe what was going on without judgement (this took years), I found I had much more room to understand why the people in church said the things they said—and how I could interact with them to help us all put down our judgment for a moment and start observing again.

For example, at a recent elders quorum meeting, one man promoted Dallin Oaks’s ideas about gender. As the father of a transgender child, I felt attacked. My heart started beating faster. I wanted to rebut him. But I was able to observe his statement instead of judging it. Then I looked for a way to take us out of judgment and into observation.

We had been talking about the rod of iron in Lehi’s dream when this guy made his comment. So, I used it as a launching point. “Sometimes it’s very useful to have an iron rod to hold onto,” I admitted. “However, the Book of Mormon also has a story about a family that travels into the wilderness, not sure of where they will end up, but hoping to find a better place. That was the guiding story for me when our child came out as transgender. It took Lehi and his family years to make their journey; they learned a lot along the way. It will probably be the same for me.”

So, I didn’t put any energy into countering the other guy’s judgment. Instead, I made room for other approaches to the issue he was concerned about, explicitly anchoring them in the scriptures. Interestingly, four other people spoke up after I did, all of them talking in loving ways about the transgender people in their own family and friend circles.

So, once I found this still place, this nonjudgmental place, and had enough practice inhabiting it in social situations, I found that I was able to go back to church. Because now I was not counting on church to give me energy. I had my own source.

You would be justified in wondering why I would bother going back to church at all. It seems like the reason you interact with a community is because you get something out of it, right? It’s a fair point. My reason for going back is embedded in the last part of the hero’s journey. The return.

Why does the hero return to the community? Well, the hero’s journey was largely created during a time when small, cohesive, kin-based communities were the norm, so you could say that they simply didn’t have a paradigm that would allow them to think of not returning to their community. However, the hero’s journey is still extremely popular in our day and context where such communities are no longer essential to survival.

I think the story’s continuing popularity is partially due to the fact that humans are still social animals. We really do need each other. There is no end of studies that show how much healthier, happier, and long-lived people are when they are part of cohesive communities. So, yes, I’d be willing to say that the hero’s journey is a bit of social technology that helps strengthen communities. However, the most important thing returning heroes bring back is not knowledge, experience, or leadership skills. The most important thing they bring back is themselves: a person who has dwelt in the inmost cave, observed themselves deeply, and thus found the elixir.

But how do you know if you’ve actually found the elixir? You know by what happens when you return to the community. You left because the community had an ailment that had infected you. If your journey was effective, you can return to the community without being reinfected.

This is an extraordinary idea. When we leave an ailing community, whether it is our church, our family, or something else, we leave for a good reason. We really are infected with their sickness. And, especially in family and church, that sickness is a deep and complicated one. For years after leaving such a community, it’s usually impossible to even imagine that we could heal so completely that we could return to the community without getting reinfected. Is that kind of miracle really possible? The oldest and most popular story structure in the world says it is.

But remember: it’s a slow miracle. As I said, I’ve been on it for twenty-five years, and it is only recently that I have started to find this inner energy. This is a real process that takes real work and real time. Going back to the community too early isn’t good for anyone.

But why go back when the community when it is still sick—when it doesn’t have anything to offer except a test of your healing?

It’s because an ailing community is the perfect staging ground for more hero’s journeys. A community isn’t healed by one hero going on one journey, but by many heroes going on many journeys. And you are perfectly positioned to get that started—not because you preach correct doctrine, not because you impart outside information, but simply because you come from the community but miraculously live without its ailment. Budding heroes will sense that in you. And their own journey will start to beckon.

If, after your own journey, you don’t return to your community, the elixir you found will only affect you. But if you do return, the elixir you carry is more likely to help others seek out their own. Since you know how to speak your community’s language and how to interact with its culture, you’re more likely to help people start on the path to healing.

I should point out that during my journey, I was going to church pretty regularly. So going on the hero’s journey doesn’t necessarily mean physically leaving the community, though sometimes it absolutely does. You need a lot of room—physically, psychologically, and otherwise—to do this right. You need to go to places that are very different from what you’re used to. You need to encounter unique viewpoints and people. You need to find value in places your community doesn’t connect with. You also need to encounter obstacles that you would not encounter in your community. You need to enter the inmost cave and encounter yourself without your community looking over your shoulder. In other words, yes, you need to leave somehow. You really do.

One friend I pitched this idea to thought it would be much more useful for returning heroes to start their own communities. I can see the merit in that idea. But starting a community, especially one that can integrate people from many walks of life and at many ages—and actually have a significant lifespan—is a monumental task that far exceeds most people’s abilities. Even if you do succeed, you need to know that there will inevitably be a sickness in your community that will require new heroes to take their journeys. Being a returned hero doesn’t give you any extra tools for starting or maintaining a totally healthy community. So, I’d say that for most of us, the way we can be most effective with our elixir is to return to the community we set off from.

Because, according to the wisdom of the story, that reconnection with our community is what makes us into full human beings. And, in our current situation, we need as many of those as we can possibly get. As Jonathan Haidt wrote in his book The Righteous Mind, the thing that makes a healthy country is healthy hives. In other words, having a diverse set of healthy communities is the best way to help a country thrive. Are you worried about the state of the country? Go on your journey. Descend to the inmost cave. Find the elixir. Make the return. Heal the country by healing yourself and then your community, journey by journey.