Breaking Down the Fence
On December 23rd, 2022, I bundled up and took a long, frigid evening walk to cure the incessant restlessness that always plagues me during the holidays. Because my family lives in Salt Lake, I was still in Provo. Without a particular destination in mind, I headed from my home by Memorial Park towards BYU campus. Clipping along on the icy sidewalks, I eventually neared the south end of the BYU library. This side of the building is dressed in a granite bas-relief façade dedicated to the library as a temple of knowledge. On this winter night, one carved aphorism stood out to me in particular: Truth is obeyed when it is loved.
What a curious link. When disobedience occurs, should we try to force ourselves to love the law or should we question if it can—or should—be loved at all? As a queer person raised in the Church, this question has long gnawed on me. I grew up with a barbed seed of shame lodged deep in my gut that insisted queerness was fundamentally incompatible with a godly life.
For example, in considering the impact of queer dating on my high school life, my subconscious asserted—despite my protests—that a complete detachment from the Church was inevitable. In the January of my senior year, I told my family, hot tears dripping from my chin, that I needed to stop going to Church to save myself. Later that month my mom checked me into a psychiatric hospital.
A year later, I found myself struggling to make it through my freshman year at BYU. Clawing for answers, I wrote a piece for Prodigal Press entitled "How to Be a Fence Sitter” that detailed a new solution to my problems: instead of remaining trapped in the endless pendulum swing between heresy and orthodoxy, I decided to refuse both options. I envisioned a new space sandwiched in between queerness and Mormonism, somewhere precarious yet authentic. I thought I had it finally figured out.
But by the time I was standing outside of the library, two years after proclaiming myself a staunch fencesitter, exhaling moist clouds and bracing against the chill, I had long since discovered that such a solution was wrong in its very premise: I had been trying to break down walls that I had built myself.
And so the granite wall of the BYU library stood in front of me, a reminder of self-sabotage. Unsatisfied, I pressed north through the dark ice and leafless trees dripping in Christmas lights. It was then that I saw the magnetic pole that had been pulling me along this whole time: the Carillon Bell Tower. I hurried onto the elevated walkway that leads to the tower, dragging my hand like a seismograph needle through the snowdrift that iced the handrail.
The tower is made of slabs of concrete-bound quartzite and houses fifty-two bells hanging ninety-seven feet from the ground. They ring out across BYU campus every hour. When the weather is warm, a carillonneur, perched in their aerial nest, plunks out a noontime concert. As I approached, however, the only thing I could hear was the blood crashing in my ears. Two years ago, on a similarly black and freezing night, I met someone brighter than fifty-two thrashing bells and taller than the stacks of shining conglomerate.
Two years ago, I believed a lot of things but had lived few of them. I had constructed walls and fences through myself that I subsequently raged against. I was challenging, challenged, defiant. But none of that really mattered when love hit me square in the jaw. Love is so incredibly specific. It lies in the slight twitch of the lips, in the pastry filling spilled into cupholders, in the ridiculous, glowing late-night texts, in the way someone is everything, every little grain of themselves. And that's what you love. And that's what I was missing. After all, no amount of intellectualizing can compete with the truth found in the eyes of a lover.
Love is violent when it needs to be. In my case, it obliterated the fences I had painstakingly cobbled together in the blink of an eye. It instantly disassembled the smug belief that I had constructed, ex nihilo, a world for myself. It leveled me to the frozen ground and placed me squarely before God’s impenetrable gaze. So what was left to believe in after my Babel, spiraling towards the sun, proved to be no match for the tectonic shifts of love?
A meeting at the bell tower. A winter of long walks and standing over steam exhaust grates to get warm. A falling off the fence into the depths of love. What I learned was to not build anything at all. It turns out that there is enough love floating around in the world; we just have to figure out how to catch it between our fingers.
I am beginning to seriously doubt the relative importance of things like obedience and truth when love itself has become such a brilliant lodestar in my journey through life. Who needs a wall of static, carved aphorisms when the bells peal so beautifully? So, despite the bitter, blackened cold of winter, all I wanted to do on December 23rd, 2022 was fly up into the carilloneur’s box, high in the tower, and cry with the bells for the hope that real love has placed in my trembling hands, bright, precious, violent, and everlasting. For now, I am focusing on finding love, living it, speaking it, and throwing it into the wind like a billowing seed.