As we conclude our conversation with the first member of the Sept Six, Lynne Whitesides, I asked her about her spirutality now. It’s a long way from Mormonism. We also discusses her family’s reaction to her church discipline. Check out our conversation…
Don’t miss our other conversations with Lynne! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk4ldrx61TI&list=PLLhI8GMw9sJ7fveXlF645QDhoAUGnCyYf
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Forgiving the Church
Interview
GT 00:34 Well, that’s what I want to get into a little bit, because it sounds very interesting to me. So, a few years later, it sounds like you sent a letter where you were forgiving. You’re asking for forgiveness because of your own anger. But you had no intention, really, of coming back.
Lynne 00:54 I wasn’t coming back. I never said I was coming back. That wasn’t the point of that letter.
GT 00:59 Okay.
Lynne 01:00 The point of that letter was: I see that I was asking you to hear me and you couldn’t, because it’s hard to hear someone who’s really pissed about the way things are. Not that it’s a problem to be pissed, but I was pretty pissed. I was saying things, like, I can do sound bites, and that was part of the problem. I was doing talk shows and that kind of stuff. But the other thing is, I really wanted to say, “You can’t give me what I already have. And that is my own authority, my own power as a human being, as a woman. And I was somehow asking you for that.” So, I began to realize that, because I wanted their approval, I was dancing around the patriarchy, instead of going to do something that I really wanted to do. And so when I realized that, I sent them that letter, and then I moved into the direction. I was already in the direction of going in that direction where I am now, because of things that had shown up in my life and the work that I do that has a lot to do with going to Peru, and some of the stuff that I talked about in my talk at Sunstone. But, no, I was never [coming back.] I never even had a moment of thinking of coming back when that happened.
GT 02:15 Okay, so was this was, for lack of a better word, a way to get forgiveness with the Church, where you were forgiving the Church?
Lynne 02:28 Yeah.
GT 02:28 So this is your own personal forgiveness.
Lynne 02:30 Absolutely. The only reason to do forgiveness is for yourself really. Tight? To let yourself off the hook; I really wanted to let all that go. I have come to this conclusion: The Church is doing exactly what it needs to do. Well, whatever that is, for me, was the perfect amount of patriarchal authority that I needed to find myself and to go, okay. I don’t believe that. That is not good for the world. Patriarchy, in my opinion, is what is crushing the world at this point. And so, I don’t want that. I want something else. And so that sent me on my way. And without the Church, I don’t think I would have become who I am, really.
GT 03:13 So do you regret being baptized? Or was that just part of your journey?
Lynne 03:17 Nope, I actually think every single step was exactly what I needed.
Own Spirituality
Interview
GT 03:23 Okay. And so, as you’re looking at this, you basically forgave the Church, and then said, I’m moving in this other direction. Can you talk about your spirituality now? Because it sounds like you’ve just got a different kind of spirituality.
Lynne 03:39 Yeah, Let me also say, I mean, I still work on the Church. Sometimes I hear stories, and I’m just like [ugh.] People will come and talk to me because of my background. Being part of the September Six has got a shadow and a light. You never know. My own spirituality comes out of working with the medicines I work with. I go to Peru every year. And I work with Ayahuasca down there, which if you are aware of the psychedelics that are coming into the country right now, there’s a book called How to Change Your Mind. Have you read that? Or do you know about it?
GT 03:40 [No]
Lynne 03:40 So anyway, it’s been a really interesting thing, although I don’t like the way the culture is taking in psychedelics right now. But 30 years ago, I was introduced to them right after I got kicked out of the Church, and I started doing ceremonies with people and feeling more connected to the earth and to myself and understanding what it means to be human in a different way than through Mormonism, or Christianity really. [It is] just a whole different way of feeling connected to what I call the divine and I am nuts about The Creator and what that energy is that created the universe and all it contains. And so, I’ve had a lot of experiences working out, especially in Peru, working with medicine people and medicine work, to understand what my connection is, and how my belief–not even belief, my feelings of being completely connected to a loving God that is so nuts about all of us that it just keeps loving and loving and loving. And it doesn’t matter if you’re Mormon or not Mormon, but your path is going to take you, life will take you somewhere. And it’s the most interesting, amazing ride that I could have ever imagined. Does that make sense?
GT 05:48 Could you characterize it as new age religion?
Lynne 05:52 No, no, no, no. I work with people who have been working–their lineage is thousands of years old.
GT 05:57 Is it more like Native American religion?
Lynne 05:59 South American, more South American.
GT 06:02 South American.
Lynne 06:00 There’s more than just South America. I can talk about that, because it’s out of the country. I work with a woman down there, that is phenomenal. And she does ceremonies. And so, I take groups twice a year to her place. And we stay for two weeks. And what happens when you’re there is you have this connection with stuff about yourself that you need to connect to. But also, you can see this Garden of Eden that she’s created out of a deforested place, through just the information that gets downloaded when you do this sort of stuff, and the connection she has to the Creator that we all have really. I don’t know how else to say this. But it is this beautiful experience of knowing that you’re loved and that everything, everyone is loved. And everyone’s doing the best they know how. Being human is very difficult. It’s very difficult. And we have a lot of stuff passed down to us. I talked about this in that [Sunstone] talk. But also, we have a lot of limiting beliefs that have been passed down from generation to generation: racism, homophobia, misogyny, all those things have been passed down. And so it’s not like you can get angry at the people who pass down. I’m really not. But you understand that all of those are out of fear. And that fear has kept people from really connecting. And the work that I do with medicine work connects you back into the real person, the real essence of who we really are. And that has been priceless to me.
GT 07:43 You said medicine work. And that sounds [Native American.] We always hear about the medicine man. It’s kind of a Native American [leader.]
Lynne 07:48 Yeah.
GT 07:49 Are you kind of a shaman?
Lynne 07:50 Oh, no, no, no, no, no. But I work with this woman down in Peru. She would never call herself a shaman either. She’s an Ayahuasca. But she holds this place for people to come and heal. And it’s the most healing. Not everybody should do it by the way. This is not like, oh, everyone should go out and do any of Ayahuasca or peyote or any of those things. But for people that it works for, it is a beautiful experience and helps them to heal from the generations that they come from. Does that make sense?
GT 08:28 Okay. Yeah, it sounds very Native American.
Lynne 08:31 I know it does. I am not Native American. And I’m not South American. I’ve worked with the Huichols out of Mexico. And I’ve worked with some of the Quechua tribes, a guy out of Machu Picchu, and this woman has Quechua. But it’s not Native American. I don’t even know how to explain it. Native American is one way but it’s more than that. It’s the way of connecting and caring for the earth and loving the Earth. It’s very feminine. Let me put it that way. It’s a very feminine process, as opposed to the patriarchal process. I don’t think it should all be feminine, or all masculine by the way. I think there needs to be this marriage of both, so that there’s a balance between them. But the work with medicine work is often a very feminine connecting, to watch a mama to the earth and understanding that. In fact, it’s really interesting. There’s a new documentary called Living to 100 on Netflix; The Secrets of the Blue Zone. Basically they found these places in the world where people live to 100. And they’ve done this documentary on what makes these people, where lots and lots of people live that long and they thrive. They’re not stuck. They’re not just surviving. And a lot of it is they’re connected to the earth, their land, they eat the right kinds of food. They have community. They have dance. They have song, all that stuff that we don’t have it, because we’re so separated. COVID really did a thing for us where we are just so isolated. And the isolation is a damaging thing for people, because we need community. And one of the things that has happened for me is finding community and being able to hold space for more and more community. And so, I work with communities.
Family Reactions
Interview
GT 10:24 Okay. Can you talk a little bit about your family? Because you said that, after you joined the Church, your parents did, and then your extended family did. How did they react to your disfellowshipment?
Lynne 10:36 Not so good. {both laughing} Actually, it was really difficult for me, because my parents did not have my back. They said that I probably never believed the Church in the first place and that they sided with the Church, which was very difficult for me. And then my father had a near-death experience. And when he had his near-death experience, everything changed. And from the moment that happened, we had a real connection and a real understanding of each other. And he no longer was, like all church. He was more on love. And that was an absolutely beautiful thing with my dad and I. But so yeah, it was really difficult. The extended family, I had hardly ever talked to them after that. My brother left the Church before I did. And my mom is still in. She’s 93, but she is still very Mormon, and really believes the Mormon Church.
GT 11:37 Okay. So your family has continued to attend?
Lynne 11:40 Yeah.
GT 11:42 Do they view you kind of as a black sheep?
Lynne 11:45 Probably, like my uncle, my uncle has passed, my great aunts and uncles all died, they all became Mormons. My father, people are dying off, right. So that’s part of it, but some of them are still very active. And I mean, I probably am this sort of black sheep of the family, in that area.
GT 12:06 Do they still invite you to like church events, baptisms, things like that?
Lynne 12:11 I have some that live here in Utah. And, no, I don’t get invited to those things. It’s not, I mean, I don’t even feel like they’re, like, not inviting me. They just know I’m not interested. I think that’s more than, I don’t feel ostracized.
GT 12:24 Okay.
Lynne 12:24 But I also don’t have much in common with them. You know, once you leave the Church, and then you hang out with people who are in the Church, and they’re mainly talking about their church callings and all that stuff. You’re just like, okay. But can we talk about the climate? Can we talk about something? Yeah, so I don’t feel hurt by that at all. By my family doing their thing, no. They went that direction, and I’m this direction.
GT 12:50 They still love you and you still love them.
Lynne 12:52 Yeah, I don’t feel unloved at all. I felt a little disappointed by my parents not having my back. That was painful.
GT 12:59 I’m sure that was. Can you talk about the evolution of Sunstone over, I guess it’s been 30 years?
Lynne 13:10 Over 30 years? Yeah.
GT 13:11 I mean, I guess you haven’t really checked in a lot.
Lynne 13:13 I don’t know. I go when they bring us out and say, here, it’s been 10 years. Now it’s been 30 years. So, I don’t know if we’ll ever do it again. Because we’re getting old. But I just went to that one session. And it was lovely. I was surprised that there were so many people there, actually, that people even remembered, was quite surprising to me that the September Six happened.
GT 13:35 People are still interested in it. I’m talking to you on podcast.
Lynne 13:37 I know, right? This was just really surprising to me. But, yeah, I can’t really speak to the evolution since Elbert left.
GT 13:45 Because you’ve just left it behind, basically.
Lynne 13:48 I mean, I really have gone to, I have this really amazingly wonderful, fun life. And that’s where my focus is.
GT 13:56 Okay. Can you talk, since you were the first to get disciplined, can you talk about the dominoes that fell after you and your reaction?
Lynne 14:04 Well, everybody went to all the courts. It was this very, it was like, so mine comes, this is great. I called Lavina. “Lavina, I got this letter.” This was at night, on a Sunday night. She’s like, “I’ll be over tomorrow.” She comes over the next day. She’s got homemade bread and jam, calls every newspaper and every news thing. I mean, she called everybody. So that’s how the alert went out. And so, but at that point, it was only me. But soon after, I think even before my court, I can’t remember. I think it was September 14 or something. I think she might have gotten [word.] People were beginning to get letters. So, that’s why I was like, and Lavina liked the sound of the September Six better than the September five. So, she included Avraham in that. She thought it sounded better.
GT 14:58 Well it should have been, I think it was in your session. There was another author that said it really should be the September Eight, because we should include Janice and Margaret.[1]
Lynne 15:07 But that didn’t happen for another couple of years.
GT 15:10 Right.
Lynne 15:10 Well, Janice, a year later. And that’s the other thing, I wrote a letter. Let me talk about Janice. Janice getting excommunicated was so strange to me.
GT 15:18 Oh.
Lynne 15:19 Because she was a believing Mormon. And she has nine kids. The thing is that Janice writes papers that are so intellectual that most people can’t even understand them. {Rick chuckling} And I wrote a letter to the editor about her, which was really, it was so much fun to write, because I wrote about who she was. She’s this believing Mormon. She’s got all these kids. I basically said that “Maybe the General Authorities needed to stop pretending that there was a Victorian era where women stayed home and were happy and men went to work. But embrace their true brothers in the Middle Ages, who went on a witch hunt, throwing women into pools of water to see if they were a witch. In fact, from now on, when women come into the waters of baptism add one step. See if they float. It’ll save us all a lot of time in the end.” And that went all over the Wasatch Front. It got picked up all over. So, that’s probably part of why they don’t want me back. But when Janice got [excommunicated,] I mean that was really shocking to me, because I went to both of her courts or something.
GT 16:20 Okay. She had two.
Lynne 16:22 And she had two, and it was just like, What are you? It was like a purge. This is Janice! What are you doing?
GT 16:30 Well, I wonder if that’s the difference. Janice was still going to church, whereas you just…
Lynne 16:36 I had barely stopped.
GT 16:39 Okay.
Lynne 16:40 I had just stopped, so in May I stopped going.
GT 16:44 Okay.
Lynne 16:45 Because I was just like, this isn’t right.
GT 16:49 So because you basically stepped away from the Church and quit going. That made you not a target. But because Janice was still going?
Lynne 16:57 Well, I was still a target. I mean, I was targeted. What do you mean?
GT 17:01 Well, it’s funny to me that Janice got put on probation, which she says was the same as disfellowshipment. And then a year later…
Lynne 17:13 Oh, right, then they excommunicated her. But didn’t do anything [to me.]
GT 17:15 They’ve never done that with you.
Lynne 17:16 I don’t know why. Honestly, I don’t know why. Because in the handbook, it says, if someone’s disfellowshipped, you need to do something within like a year or two, or something like that. And it’s been 30 years. I don’t hear a word from anybody, which is fine. I mean, and I haven’t taken my name off the records, partly because I keep forgetting. I might sometime. I don’t know. But yeah, I don’t know. Isn’t that weird, right?
GT 17:41 Even Margaret, because she didn’t get excommunicated until 2000. Yeah.
Lynne 17:45 So that’s why the September Eight makes sense. Except for this was years later.
GT 17:50 Yeah, well, I mean, both Janice and Margaret were in trouble. And I think, [regarding] Paul, Margaret said, “Paul waved the red flag in front of the bull.”
Lynne 18:01 Yeah, well, it’s Paul.
GT 18:03 They went after Paul instead of Margaret.
Lynne 18:05 Yeah, instead of Margaret. But you know, I mean, Margaret is the same thing. She is so lovely, and so wonderful. And the fact that they would—it’s just, like, it’s just small minded and mean, to me. That’s what Paul says, you know, that Margaret’s court was like being raped by the Care Bears.
GT 18:26 Yeah, he said that.
Lynne 18:29 Because it was the way that, she’s just, yeah. Painful, because these are believing Mormons. To go after them because of who knows why? Petty.
GT 18:40 Well, I think Margaret was still speaking in public and you’ve just disappeared off the radar. And Mormonism is in your past, and you don’t care about anymore. And so, there’s no reason to go after you. Is that it?
Lynne 18:52 Maybe, I mean, I just went, like I said, when they asked me to do something else, go find something else to do. I did. So. And it’s been really good. So, yeah. {Rick laughing}
GT 19:04 And so what do you think of these anniversaries that we keep having? Oh, it’s been 30 years. There’s a new book coming out. Actually, I think it just came out this month.
GT 19:11 Got those intellectual juices going?
Lynne 19:11 Oh, did it? I should read it. first of all, it was a really interesting experience for me to come and write a paper to give at Sunstone because it brought up all kinds of stuff that I hadn’t thought about for, really, for 30 years. Being there with people that I hadn’t seen for [a long time.] Like it was really kind of lovely, actually. I loved what it took to write it again, because it was something I needed to do. It let me know where I was, in a way that was really good.
Lynne 19:20 Yeah, well, there was I didn’t write a very intellectual [paper,] I wrote a really feeling paper because the question was, where are you spiritually after 30 years. So, I actually talked about where I was spiritually after 30 years. And so it was great. But, every once in a while, there’s an article in the paper that–they never tell me and it just shows up and I’ll get people saying, “Hey, you were in the paper again.} It’s just kind of amusing in a way, like, really because it was long time ago.
GT 20:11 For you, it’s just totally in the rearview. And so probably these anniversaries, you’re like, oh, what?
Lynne 20:16 Yeah, it was just kind of, well we’re aware. And plus, what I have loved about this time is it reconnected me with Margaret and Paul in particular. Because we have been [busy.] Margaret has been busy. I’ve been busy. And I’m seeing them more often, which makes me so happy and love seeing Janice, who I adore. I mean, it’s just those things have been really worth the let’s have this 30 year reunion and I don’t want to lose touch with them again, because they’re fantastic human beings, you know, so, yeah. {Rick chuckling}
GT 20:47 Well, Margaret and Paul, both of them have been on twice. They’re just, they’re fun people.
Lynne 20:53 They’re great. They’re really great. And Mike and Lavina. I mean, Lavina, she came with warm bread and jam to my house. And so anyway, so it was good. It was good doing that after 30 years. Yeah, but I don’t think we are going to do it in another 30 years.
GT 21:11 You won’t be here in 30 years. Well, your mother’s still here.
Lynne 21:14 My mom is still here. She’s 93. So we’ll see. {Rick chuckling} Yeah,.
GT 21:19 Well, cool. Well, I’m trying to think. Is there anything else we need to cover?
Lynne 21:26 Do you have any questions?
GT 21:31 I think that’s it then, so, Lynne Whitesides. I really appreciate you for being here on Gospel Tangents and thanks for being on the show.
Lynne 21:40 Well, thank you. It’s been really fun.
[1] See our interview with Sara Patterson: https://gospeltangents.com/people/sara-patterson/
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