Tracing Woodgrains

A parable on losing faith, and the origin of my name

I settled on this moniker several years ago, the day I decided to step away from Mormonism. I needed a username that reflected the extent to which I felt torn as I found myself turning away from the faith I’d loved and sacrificed for. While I’ve broadened the scope of my writing in the meantime, I remain attached to the name and the story that inspired it.

From time to time, I get questions about the name. Immediately after stepping away from Mormonism, I wrote about the story and its significance in my life. For ease of sharing, I reproduce that here:

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In Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, we read of a girl who traces woodgrains. Her whole life, her father and people have taught that she is chosen of the gods. They speak to her by compelling her to pause, kneel to the ground, and slowly, laboriously trace a grain of wood along the floor or wall. The urge comes after impure or impious thoughts, after any mistakes she makes. It is for her at once purification and communion with the gods. She is determined and bright, an exemplar of her own faith. Every day, she traces these woodgrains. Her life is defined by it.

Then one day, strangers come. They tell her that she has been victim of a terrible deception. Years ago, people genetically implanted these urges in her ancestors, perhaps as a means of control, perhaps as an experiment. Her faith, she is told, is every whit a construct. The strangers tell her that they have passed on a cure. Horrified at this impiety, she waits to be forced to her knees by the overwhelming urge to trace woodgrains, but nothing comes. Her people accept that they have followed a falsehood. Soon, her father, her friends, everyone she knows all step away and move on. Her religion dies.

Or rather it almost dies. What of the girl, though? She pauses, listens for the prompt that she has come to recognize as divine. Her world rests on it. Her every action and belief has hinged on the truth of this principle. There is nothing more important to her, and so this girl comes to the only decision she can: the gods are testing her. They are silent, but they are watching, waiting to see if she does what she knows she must. In a moment of pure faith and piety, she makes her choice: Free of all urges and facing a world that has moved on, she kneels down. She looks to the ground. Slowly, laboriously, she traces a grain of wood.

The story ends simply. Having made her decision, she stands true to it. Years later, she has become a symbol and a hero to her people, the last of the faithful. We find her at the end of a long life, back bent and eyes focused only on the grains of wood in her father's house, whispering a final question: "Mother, Father. Did I do it right?"

From the day I read this story, it has haunted me. What do you do if, in the depth of your passion and deepest crisis of your faith, you cry out to God and find no answer? What do you do if your world crashes around you, if all you see suggests to you that the core of your life is a falsehood? Do you bravely turn ahead, stand up from the woodgrain, and start a new life of uncertainty and discovery of new truth? Or do you bravely turn back, kneel to trace the woodgrain once more, and continue a life of humble faith? What can possibly be right when everything seems wrong?

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I don't exactly recall the first moment I envisioned this story on my Mormon mission, but I know what I was doing when it occurred: praying about the Book of Mormon. In a very real way, that question, and to an extent prayer in general, became my own form of tracing woodgrains. Every night for months at a time, I would kneel down, consider the events of the day and the offering they represented to my God, and would pray asking for a witness that the Book of Mormon was true and the Church with it. These cries in the night stretched at times for a half hour or more of pleading, listening, and silence. I performed religious fasts, I visited Mormon temples, I bore what testimony I could, I frantically read the scriptures. In the lowest points emotionally, I stopped asking for a witness and instead simply begged to feel God's love.

It came every time, unmistakably and without fail: the same deafening silence. The same piercing feeling of disappointment and isolation. The same disappointed rise to my feet. Always the same person as when I had knelt down, adding only one more hint of weariness.

At some point I started to ask myself: how long would I do this? If the answer was not yes, how would I know? I thought of the story of tracing woodgrains, and wondered if Han Qing-Jao, the girl from the story, was me. Was I the one whose faith had proven hollow and who was determined to go through the motions of it because it was the only world I could take? Or was I the one who was being tested by God, tried by silence to see if I would remain true?

When all was said and done, would I be brave enough to abandon what I knew and loved, to hold tight to my perception of truth and stand up from the woodgrains, and humbly pick up the shattered pieces of my worldview and rebuild? Or would I be brave enough to stand firm in the face of doubt, hold tight to the faith of my fathers and trace the woodgrains, and humbly serve others and wait in patience for the day God saw fit to answer my prayer?

I never dared to decide.