"I've done everything. I've changed everything. I changed cities. I changed countries, careers, friends, boyfriends, hobbies. But after everything I've done to make my life feel right, the one consistent is I feel like shit when I go to church."
~Nicole Hardy, Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin
It's taken me a while to begin composing this entry. I see a lot of movies and I read a lot of books, but it's rare for one to really strike my heart. Nicole Hardy's memoir of growing up in the Mormon church and eventually realizing her religion was destroying her really affected me. Not because my experience is exactly like hers--it's not--but because she writes about the push and pull of religion so perfectly and beautifully--she wants to believe, she wants to obey God, she wants so desperately to feel at home in her church, but the truth is that this church has no place for her, and the spiritual and emotional demands are slowly grinding her down.
On top of this, Hardy was a virgin into her mid-thirties. In her church, premarital sex was a grave sin, and she tried so very, very hard to honor the church's teachings. But loneliness and desire for something all of her church friends got when they married young finally came to a head. Hardy didn't want the things Mormon girls are supposed to want--namely, children. She realized this gradually, and also realized that it would effectively bar her from a Mormon marriage, since the Mormon church is extremely family focused. Hardy also realized she was a feminist, pro-gay rights, intellectual, independent--all things that added to her unmarriageability in her church.
My life mirrors Hardy's in a few small ways: I always knew I was a feminist. As of right now, I've never had a strong desire for children (never say never I guess...my ovaries could explode at 30). I was a late bloomer romantically and sexually, and I still have a nagging feeling that I am "behind"--whatever that means. And finally, I have a complicated, antagonistic relationship with faith. I'm not an atheist. I was raised in a family that went to church, but also valued reason and education. I've never been a sentimental Christian, or a good girl. If I believe in God, I want that faith to reside somewhere deep and meaningful within me, independent of my political affiliation, my sex life, how I spend my Sunday mornings. And so, I struggle with what I believe.
I feel towards religion the way a big sibling feels towards a little sibling: I feel that I should be allowed to mock, criticize, tease, and fight with my own faith...but if others mock and make fun of it, I get protective and defensive of it.
This is why reading Hardy's memoir affected me so much. I understand where she's coming from. How it's not so easy to forsake something that's been a huge part of your life. There's a reason why R.E.M's "Losing My Religion" is a sad song. As freeing as rejecting religion can be, there is a sense of profound loss as well.
After reading about her struggles with confining her sexuality and dutifully attending church as she ages out of her young singles group, I felt like a giant weight had been lifted off of me, the reader, when Hardy finally reaches an epiphany. She is back from a disastrous vacation with a semi-boyfriend. During their trip, she says something that offends him and things just get worse from there. By the end of the trip, they aren't speaking. She confines herself to her apartment for days, crying her eyes out--not just because she lost a potential boyfriend, but because of the enormous pressure weighing down on her from all sides.
She looks at herself in the mirror and thinks: "You are the one who takes care of you, I tell myself. Who will, if you don't? I say it again like a promise, into the blue-rimmed gray of my irises. You are the one who takes care of you. The words inspire a tectonic shift, a click like the spring of a lock, exposing what's been lying in front of me for days, unassuming and cataclysmic: I am finished with my church."
This passage was so fucking profound, I wanted to sob for Hardy. For myself. For everyone. You are the one who takes care of you. It doesn't have to be about church or about relationships. It's about self-respect. Self-affirmation. All the things in the world that weigh down on us--the expectations, family, work, love, sex, religion, body image, social status, money. The ties we form, the acceptance we seek, the improvements we endlessly subject ourselves to...all of it is meaningless unless we can find it in us to love and accept ourselves.
There's a lot more to Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin. At times, Hardy's writing is a bit self-absorbed (how could it not be since she is telling the story of her life?), but Hardy's self-awareness is her strength. There are moments in the memoir where she is the bad guy, or the fool. But she knows this and doesn't try to make out like a saint or a victim. Her struggles are solidly middle-class, white struggles--she knows this also. But even though she is privileged, never hungry, always loved by family and friends, her memoir captures a specific kind of struggle--the relentless demands of conservative religion, and the loneliness of feeling like you don't fit into the social group you were born and raised in.
5 out of 5 stars
***
In the same vein of Confessions, Vera Farmiga's directorial debut, Higher Ground is a beautiful take on one woman's relationship with religion over a few decades of her life.
Farmiga plays Corinne Walker, a woman who comes to Christianity after watching her child almost drown in a freak accident (the teenage Corinne is played by Taissa Farmiga, Vera's younger sister). Corinne and her husband join an evangelical, hippy-dippy church that coincides perfectly with the feel of the time period--the late 60's and early 70's. The members of the church wear homemade frocks and both genders sport long hair. There's a lot of hand-waving and singing. It's basically Woodstock minus the sex, drugs, and rock n' roll.
Corinne is presented as a woman with very strong faith. Even when she is chastised by an elder woman in the church for speaking up too often and verging on "preaching to the men", Corinne reacts with surprise and humility rather than rebelliousness.
Her faith is tested when her close friend, Annika (played by the lovely Dagmara Dominczyk, wife of actor Patrick Wilson), is diagnosed with a brain tumor. Annika undergoes surgery which saves her life but radically changes her personality--she goes from a sassy, sexy woman who can speak in tongues to a silent, scowling woman completely dependent on her husband.
Corinne's own marriage has serious ups and downs. Her husband, Ethan (played by Joshua Leonard of Blair Witch fame), is not a dominating, macho man, but he attempts to rule the roost at home in a way that is contrary to the equal partnership the two had in the early years of their marriage. This rubs Corinne the wrong way and it all comes to a head in a terrifying scene where Ethan chokes Corinne during a fight. Not long after, she decides to leave him.
Like Nicole Hardy, Corinne is a woman who naturally has faith, yet finds herself not fitting into (or rather, growing out of) her church. Higher Ground is a movie where no one is the bad guy. It's not a film that is anti-religion, but rather it attempts to realistically portray the natural changes that occur over the course of a person's life-- including changes in the relationship one has with religion.
Higher Ground ends on an ambiguous, yet positive, note. Corinne has left her husband, but still is part of her family's life. She visits her church to watch her girls perform a musical number and then speaks to the church members about waiting for Jesus to knock on her door--some days, he does, and other days she feels she lives in "a lonely place". But that faith is still there, and God has not abandoned Corinne, even though she has grown into a new person and new phase in her life. It's a fitting and beautiful end to a movie that lives solidly in the gray areas of life.
4 out of 5 stars
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