God Has a Very Strange Plan for Me
Darkness and darkness and a very strange redemption.
As a teenager, I realized suddenly that re-reading the romantic parts of young-adult fantasy books was, in fact, a grave sin.
That night I knelt and prayed to repent. But I must have not done it right, because I still couldn’t feel the Spirit. You see, there had been a strange buzzing wall around me for some time, that made it hard to feel the familiar tender feelings in my chest that were a sign I was receiving revelation from the Holy Ghost. This feeling of distance, my teachers at church had sometimes taught, was a sure sign that you were unclean; that you had sinned, and caused the Spirit to withdraw.
So it must be something else. Another sin, unrepented for, that kept me from hearing that still small voice. Just when I needed it most. Just when I needed guidance on what to study in college, which was of course the most consequential decision I would ever make in my life.
I must not have prayed right, that night I knelt to repent. I must not have read my scriptures enough, in the weeks preceding. Perhaps I had been dishonest? Watched a show I should not have seen? Listened to music with unclean language, or unclean spirit?
So I got down on my knees ten times a night. Each time my mind wandered meant it didn’t “count” and I had to start again. I read scriptures obsessively before sleep and took detailed notes. I considered turning myself in to the police for downloading an episode of a TV show. I stopped watching movies, and listening to music, and reading books too.
That distance from the Spirit remained, though. In fact, it seemed to grow larger and larger.
I wanted to study art education in college. Something profoundly important to me. But I didn’t receive a confirmation. No “burning in the bosom”, or clarity of mind. It was clear: God was commanding me to sacrifice my career dreams like Abraham was to sacrifice Isaac at the altar. If I did not comply, I was going to hell1.
I started my freshman year at BYU, excited to be going to a place where the people shared my standards, but was instead aghast at my fellow students: Girls wearing short shorts in the dorm; returned missionaries with trendy hipster haircuts; friends watching movies that weren’t quite rated R but certainly had enough violence to drive the Spirit away.
And then something terrible happened. On October 6th, 2012, President Thomas S. Monson announced that women could now serve proselytizing missions at the age of 19 instead of 21. A decision that had been years away was now squarely on my doorstep.
I did not want to go. I never had, and especially not now that I was so much more aware of food safety and the risk of food poisoning, which had come to my attention at the same time I had become so much more righteous over the past couple of years. Food safety took up all my mental space that was not already being taken up by thinking I was going to cause someone to kill themselves if I didn’t correctly follow the spiritual promptings to take a certain route home. How could I survive if I was sent somewhere without strict hygiene practices?
I didn’t want to go on a mission, but now I would have to, because how could the choice that required the biggest sacrifice not be the right choice, if all must be tried as Abraham?
Girls were screaming with joy in the halls. My heart inside me turned black.
I started my mission papers. I made myself be positive and excited about it. I decided to go to a school-provided therapist to see if my extreme preoccupation with food safety might warrant a note in my application stating I couldn’t be sent to a developing nation2.
The woman talked to me for about an hour and wrote me a note. I read it carefully to ensure it would save me from somewhere that lacked potable water and refrigeration. A line at the end caught my attention:
“Though Camilla shows signs of religious scrupulosity, she is very committed to spreading the Gospel and I believe she will be an excellent missionary.”
I looked up “religious scrupulosity”.
A subtype of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder characterized by extreme fixation on religious, moral, or ethical issues.
Oh.
It was OCD all along.3 I started to take my impulses with a grain of salt.
The rest of college was a journey of loosening up. By some weird miracle, I performed enough exposure therapy on myself that I could do things like listen to music and walk on grass again4. I did not serve a mission, and I was tortured a few times a year by days-long crying spells where I was caught up in the fear that I was going to hell by not sacrificing enough for the Lord.
I majored in industrial design, still too afraid that some terrible consequence would strike me if I studied art education. In my program, I became close with people who had strong testimonies of the Gospel, even if they would do “bad” things like swear. I had many strange and human and wonderful experiences. I grew up. I got better.
Then something else terrible happened.
Between my junior and senior year, I got an internship at the top design firm in the world. IDEO. They’ve somewhat fallen from grace now, but from the perspective of a design student in 2016, they were the absolute pinnacle of our industry. Their name was spoken with reverence. And I was going to work for them for the summer.
I arrived at the Munich office and fell in love. Despite the many differences between me and my multicultural coworkers, I had never felt more at home in a place. Their values, their vibe, even the office design—it all spoke to me so deeply. It felt like coming home.
It soon became clear to me that this internship was actually the secret back door into getting a full-time position at the most coveted firm in the industry. Fully aware that the only direction outside of here was down, I put myself under an immense amount of pressure to impress the top brass. But between a rocky client pipeline that left me hopping from project to project, my incredibly vague title (“Storytelling Intern”), and the fact that this was my very first internship and I was literally 21 years old5 . . . Well, let’s just say that I spent a lot of time crying in the bathroom.
During my last week in the office, I set up meetings with the three higher-ups that I had worked the most closely with, to get some feedback and to suss out whether I had a chance at coming back after I graduated.
The first two were very positive and enthusiastic and kind. The third took me out for ice cream,
sat down,
unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket where he had written some notes,
and essentially told me that everything I thought I had done well, I had actually done poorly; everything that I had been telling myself “fake it til you make it, no one else will notice,” he had caught on to; and finally, ended the conversation by implying that I should consider a different career.6
This was, of course, devastating. I returned to my senior year writing poems about Icarus and with such a dark hole in my heart that I’m told my professors whispered amongst themselves, “What happened to Camilla? Camilla’s different now.”
I spent one long dark year in hell. Rock bottom came at the end of summer, after 8 months of job searching, when I was laid off from an internship designing baby shoes (oh how the mighty had fallen), was rejected from a job opportunity in Seattle that I really thought was going to go through, and had one month left on my lease in Provo.
My options:
Move to one of my aspirational cities and hope a job worked out there,
Move back home with my parents in Colorado,
Find a new lease in Provo and see what happened next.
I chose the third option.
Things started to fall back into place. I found a new lease at a beautiful blue house. I got a job at the local used bookstore. And I started doing serious fine art again, for the first time since I started my design degree, and it was like I had never stopped.
My art seemed to strike a chord with friends & strangers on instagram, including a strange instagram account with the handle @mormcore.
The account had commented on my posts & responded to my stories a few times. I finally decided to click on their profile and see what was up.
And what I found was vaporwave . . . Mormon . . .pop art.
It was, quite literally, a revelation. My semi-dormant religious OCD had subconsciously crystalized the belief that Latter-Day Saint artwork had to be precise, photorealistic oil paintings that taught an eternal truth. The more precise and photorealistic, the more holy.
But here was something else. And it was sincere, I could just tell.
I slowly formed a friendship with “Mormcore”, who was an anonymous artist living in the middle of the desert and going by the nom de plume LAZERos.
He showed me other LDS artists on Instagram. Folks who were making strange and interesting stuff about their faith. “There’s something in the water,” he said. “I want to form a group.”
“Okay,” I said.
So we did. It’s called The ARCH-HIVE. We’ve done six large group art shows since 2019, displaying the work of over 50 artists, and attended by hundreds of visitors. We’ve done meet-ups, and zines, and retreats, and most importantly of all: We’ve changed lives, we’ve changed the culture, and we are not done.
So.
God has a very strange plan for me. The two worst things ever to happen to me are the key forces that shaped my life into a trajectory very unique, very unexpected, and something I love with my entire heart.
My experience with religious OCD, which was genuine torture, set me up for Laz’s Mormon pop art to be an earth-shaking revelation; it made it imperative that I make my own religious art to alchemize the strange & intense relationship I have with religion; and it made that experience so life-changing that I wanted all people everywhere to taste the fruit as I had.
My rejection from IDEO, which put me in such a dark place that it permanently changed my personality, also knocked my design career down a couple pegs in my heart. Previous to this, design had been my love and my life, something I wanted to spend all my nights and weekends on. With design taking a back seat, my original and true love, fine art, rose back to the top.
God has a very strange plan for me. In 2019, when the ARCH-HIVE was still new, I did a one-day-only pop-up art show for the launch of my new zine. At first I wanted it go from midnight to midnight—but then I realized that anyone who showed up at 3am was probably not someone I wanted to talk to. So I scheduled it from 9am to midnight instead.
Around 10:30pm, I started to regret my decision. I was exhausted. My voice was shot from telling fortunes. I wanted to go home.
At 11:30pm, a man with a nose ring walked in. He had been in bed, asleep. He woke up and saw an Instagram story that someone had shared of this pop-up art show. Surely it could not be still going. It was 11pm. But he still got up, and walked 20 minutes, and saw this strange artwork that put his former religion in a different light than he had ever seen. And it was sincere, he could just tell.
He was intrigued. He did not know what to think. He signed up for the mailing list.
Reader, I married him.
God has a very strange plan for me. You see, I want very badly to improve the world and to help people. But I get wrapped around the axle about doing traditional “service” due to my OCD. (“It might be nice to bring a meal to so-and-so” often spirals into “If I don’t give a meal to everyone I know, I will be damned.”)
But there is another way.
It turns out, when you make it your life’s mission to make, encourage, and promote artwork that takes a complex view on an extremely polarizing religion . . . it helps people. A lot. My co-founder Laz and I have had multiple people reach out and share with us how the ARCH-HIVE has made a profound impact on their lives. Whether showing them how they really did have a place in Mormonism, or giving them a positive way to connect with their upbringing. Or just having a fun creative outlet and feeling seen.
And . . . like I said. We are not done. In fact, we are just beginning. Because we are opening a new art gallery in the heart of downtown Provo that will specialize in the frontiers of contemporary Mormon art.
It’s called The Outer Veil, and it will open soon.
God has a very strange plan for me. It feels insane to say this out loud, and I want to make it clear that I am trying very hard to NOT make this about me . . . but between my full-time job, the art gallery, and chasing around my very small son . . . I am working on a project that might genuinely fulfill a 180-year-old prophecy.
So.
I want to build the Kingdom of God. It’s all I want. The art, the gallery—it’s not about me. “Weird Mormon art” performed miracles on my soul, and I know I’m not the only one this has happened to.
Every day I feel an intense imperative to share the Gospel in this manner. To collect the oddballs from the corners of the earth and show them they have a home. Because they do. They do, damn it. You do.
This is my consecration.
Many people with scrupulosity leave organized religion entirely. Not me. Through the grace of God, my intense spirituality has alchemized into something holy. A love for the strange & intense parts of the Gospel—tensions & paradoxes, rituals & sacrifices, the presence of God in a cloud. The exact insane energy needed to spend all my nights & weekends making and sharing contemporary LDS art. The ceaseless and ardent desire to seek the face of God, and the knowledge that the face of God is full of fire.
So.
This is The Desert Prophet’s Book of Fire.
Seek the face of God with me.
Never mind that Mormons don’t believe in hell.
Latter-day Saint missionaries do not choose where they are assigned, but rather send in an application and wait for a revelation-inspired call from the church leadership in Salt Lake.
To this day I don’t know why she didn’t bother mentioning this to me.
Yes, it was THAT BAD.
The other interns were all graduate students, often with preceding work experience to boot.
To this design director: If you’re reading this, I’m not mad at you and I don’t blame you for anything that happened to me.
It was so enjoyable to hear the whole story like that. I remember meeting you in the oddest random bits of your timeline. I'm so glad to know you, and I'm so glad you're out there creating.
“To collect the oddballs from the corners of the earth and show them they have a home. Because they do. They do, damn it. You do.”
After a particularly trying week, this hit me hard. Thank you.