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CONTENTS
Letter from the President Women’s Theology
Kirsten Campbell Inclusive Language in the Latter-
Awakenings Day Saunt Gl yiinagiee... eee... 20
Fasting as Freedom..iccccccccccececceees 4 Emily Parker Updegraff
Jana Riess
. Making a Family with Donor
Mourn with Those That Mourn..7 wt. oy
Emily Clyde Curtis POT... eeseseesseseeesneeesnneeeeneeetsen
April Young Bennett
Sabbath Pastorals
Heavenly Mother and the Sisters Speak
Proclamation on the Family............ 9 Presiding vs. Equal Partners.......25
Fara Sneddon
Marsha Kay Ault
Courtney Cooke
Lindsay Hansen Park
Steven Peck
Sandra Rembrandt
Global Zion
Muslim Mormon? ........c.cccccccceceeeee 14
Erica Eastley
Considering the Goddes............ 16
Phyllis Barber
Announcement... eee 18
Call for Chieko Okazaki Essays
Goodness Gracious
The Gospel According to Angry
DSTI S cacidnateansseneesesietucsounneutanncee 19
Linda Hoffman Kimball
Urban Camping........................ Zn
Heather Olson Beal
Book Review
The Lonely Polygamiist.............06. 29
Gwendolyn Ivie Reynolds
Exponent Generations
TOD CCl GE TH OMC siccthanussstserinesineies 30
“Homespun”
Sue Paxman
P. Anderson
Death of a Father........................ 33
Neylan McBaine
Flannel Board
How to Use Daughters in My
RTO COS ca tesesanasactendeammucaanesustonsee. a5
Exponent II Statt
Special thanks to D’Arcy Benincosa, Sharron Evans, Annie Henrie, Aimee
Evans Hickman, Abbigail Israelsen, Pat Langmade, Lindsay Hansen Park,
Sandra Rembrandt, Julie Rogers, and Erin S. Tripp
for the use of their artwork in this issue.
Cover art is She Pondered by Julie Rogers of Kanab, Utah
Submissions to Exponent II
We welcome personal essays, articles, poetry, fiction, and book reviews for
consideration. Please email submissions to editor@exponentii.org or mail them to
Exponent II, 2035 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217. Please include your name
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Please send jpegs or gifs of art submissions to our email. If you are interested in
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The purpose of Exponent II 1s to promote sisterhood by providing a forum for
Mormon women to share their life experiences in an atmosphere of trust and
acceptance. Our common bond is our connection to the Mormon Church and
our commitment to women in the Church. The courage and spirit of women
challenge and inspire us to examine and shape the direction of our lives. We
are confident that this open forum will result in positive change. We publish
this paper in celebration of the strength and diversity of women.
EDITORIAL STAFF
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Aimee Evans Hickman
Emily Clyde Curtis
Design Editor
Margaret Olsen Hemming
Copy Editor
Lisa Hadley
Exponent Generations Editor
Deborah Kris
Sisters Speak Editor
Caroline Kline
Sabbath Pastorals Editor
Amanda Olson
Global Zion Editor
Chelsea Shields Strayer
Book Review Editor
Marci Evans Anderson
Poetry Editor
Judith Curtis
Staff: Kristy Benton, Sue Booth-Forbes, Susan
Christiansen, Courtney Cooke, Bonnie Do-
nigan, Deja Earley, Lisa Hadley, Sara K.S.
Hanks, Rebecca McLaverty Head, Sariah Kell,
Kendahl Millecam, Emily Mosdell, Natalie
Prado, Gwen Reynolds, Suzette Smith, Jessica
Steed, Heather Sundahl, Brooke Williams
EXECUTIVE BOARD
President
Kirsten Campbell
Treasurer
Suzette Smith
Historian
Cheryl DiVito
Members: Andrea Alexander, Emily Clyde
Curtis, Emily Gray, Margaret Olsen Hemming,
Aimee Evans Hickman, Denise Kelly, Linda
Hoffman Kimball, Caroline Kline, Deborah
Farmer Kris, Jana Remy, Heather Sundahl,
Barbara Taylor
EMERITUS BOARD
Linda Andrews, Nancy Dredge, Judy Dushku,
Karen Haglund, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Exponent II (ISSN 1094-7760) is published quarterly by
Exponent II Incorporated, a non-profit corporation with
no official connection with The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints. Articles published represent the opinions
of authors only and not necessarily those of the editor or
staff. Letters to Exponent IT or its editors and Sisters Speak
articles are assumed intended for publication in whole or
in part and may therefore be used for such purposes. Copy-
right © 2011 by Exponent II, Inc. All rights reserved.
I am a quilter. each other support and advice. As one of the youngest
Ten years ago, Pandora Brewer, an Exponent II sister, in the guild, I have learned so much from these talented
introduced me to the art of quilting and my life changed women. Their decades of experience are enlightening and
forever. I had always had an enthusiasm for fabric—I liked inspire me to try new things. As a guild, we’ve created
to make my own clothes and Halloween costumes for my a pink breast cancer quilt to be auctioned off to support
kids. But, quilting was different. It awakened a part of my research, made a quilt for the young son of a guild member
soul that has brought me more fulfillment and harmony who tragically passed away, and created blocks to donate
than any other occupation or hobby. to an organization which raises funds to find a cure for
I love the beautiful variety of fabrics. Anything from Alzheimer’s.
homespun, to 1930’s reproduction prints, to modern geo- I also like to delve into the history of quilting. Our an-
metric designs—I love them all. It is like putting togethera cestors made many quilts out of worn out clothing—dquilts
puzzle. I choose the pattern and the fabrics and then figure — that were functional and kept small ones warm. They were
out how to create the quilt I desire. It amazes me how you not without creativity, however. Many surviving quilts
can take very different fabrics, cut them up into pieces and __ show the talent and ingenuity of those early quilters.
reassemble them into a stunning quilt block. Some blocks, Can you feel my fervor for quilting?
when put together, produce an unexpected secondary pat- I have the same passion for Exponent II. Like the vari-
tern that captivates the eye as much as the primary design. ous fabrics, we women are beautiful and come from diverse
I consider myself an emotional quilter. Most of my projects backgrounds and experiences. This diversity serves to unite
come from a source of fulfilling a need. Ihave made quilts —_us ina strong bond of sisterhood. When we get together
for a friend battling breast cancer, a friend going through a _and share our stories, the secondary pattern is remarkable.
divorce, and for another’s sweet preemie to cuddle up in. Exponent IT is, in its own way, like a guild. We pro-
Currently I’m working on two quilts for the daughters of tect each other’s interests and give support where needed.
a friend. Their father committed suicide a year and a half Through the magazine, the blog and the annual retreat
ago and these quilts are for them to have as a “fabric hug” we exchange ideas, share successes, and give each other
from Dad. As I work in my studio, cutting up fabric from advice. One of my goals as President is to have Exponent
his clothing, my heart aches for the girls. It is the most dif- | IJ move into community service mode. This idea came
ficult project I have ever worked on—but already the most — to me as I read through the Church’s new publication for
spiritual as well. the Relief Society, Daughters In My Kingdom, and was
As a quilter, I belong to a local guild. The guild meets inspired by the activities of the early sisters of the Church.
monthly to share our projects, exchange ideas and give In the book, President Monson states, “We are the Lord’s
hands here upon the earth, with the mandate to serve and to
lift His children.” I would like to generate ideas and plans
for how to motivate and mobilize our Exponent IT sisters
to work within their communities to foster positive change
and serve those who need it most.
Many of you may be new subscribers to the Exponent IT
magazine. We welcome you and hope you find a home here
with us. If you have been a long-time subscriber, thank you
for your support as we continue to be an important outlet
for women to share their life experiences. The quilt that
is Exponent IT 1s large, warm, colorful, and magnificent! I
hope you will consider adding your story--your block--to
the quilt. There 1s room for everyone to wrap herself up in
its warmth and share what means the most.
Kirsten Campbell, Winter 2011
Heather Sundahl receives a quilt made by Kirsten Camp- Have a Letter to the Editors or a submission for
bell and Pandora Brewer at this year s Exponent II retreat Exponent II? Email us at editor@exponentii.org
Fasting as Freedom
by Jana Riess
Cincinnati, Ohio
I recently undertook an ascetic fast-
ing practice for my memoir Flunking
Sainthood. For the month of February
in 2009, I fasted as if it were Ramadan
for 28 days, waking up before dawn to
eat breakfast, and counting the minutes
before sundown when I would eat ev-
erything in sight. I wouldn’t say it was
a lot of fun, and in the book I recount
some of the challenges and lessons I
learned. (Lesson 1: Eat eggs for break-
fast. Those Atkins diet folks are really
on to something about protein staving
off hunger.)
As a Mormon, it’s not like I was
a stranger to fasting. However, I was
never one of those hyper-ascetic fast
warriors who lived for the first Sunday
of the month. Before the Ramadan ex-
periment I often hated fasting. Maybe
this describes you too. I know plenty of
people who, when they are honest with
themselves, admit they do not like to
fast. One woman I knew found fasting
so difficult that she joked that she con-
tinued having one child after the other
like stairsteps so she could legitimately
avoid fasting for years on end.
That’s a pretty extreme case, but
how many of us think of the first Sun-
day of the month as a time when we
“have to fast” instead of a time when
we “get to fast’? We do it because it’s
a commandment, but we don’t usually
do it for the reason we’re promised
in Scripture: that it will bring us joy.
D&C 59:13 and 14 specifically says
about fasting “that [our] joy may be
full.” Note that in these verses fasting
is equated with joy not once but twice.
And then the following verse lays it on
even thicker that fasting should be done
in a context of thanksgiving, cheerful-
ness, happy faces, and glad hearts, and
let’s say it again, happy faces!
It’s because I’m not very good
at fasting that I wanted to learn more
about it. If you’re interested in my Ra-
madan experience, I encourage you to
check out the new book. But here I’d
like to focus on four specifically Mor-
mon ideas about fasting, and also give
some historical context for why and
how we fast in the Church.
I) Fasting ts a lifelong spiritual prac-
tice. Fasting is one of the ancient spiri-
tual practices, also called spiritual dis-
ciplines. Spiritual practices are those
things we do in order to grow in the
faith: things like keeping the Sabbath,
tithing a tenth of our income, pray-
ing, or serving others. These are called
“practices” and “disciplines” because
they’re hard. They take a lifetime of
hard work to master and understand. I
wish that in the LDS Church we spoke
more about fasting as a lifelong spiri-
tual practice. You didn’t expect to learn
the piano in a day. You don’t ask your
first-grader to learn to read overnight.
But we expect new converts to come
into the Church ready to do a full fast
right away.
I started out in 1993 as a new
convert having never fasted before. I
gamely tried this for a couple of years
and found it very difficult and taxing—
so taxing, in fact, that I quietly found
excuses not to fast for several years
thereafter. I had terrible headaches that
prevented me from fasting; I also got
mean and turned into a monster when I
fasted. (Brigham Young once memora-
bly belittled those of us who skip fast-
ing because of headaches: “If it makes
my head ache to keep the command-
ments of God, let it ache!’! Typical
Brigham. Thanks, bro.)
It wasn’t until I was called to teach
Gospel Doctrine in my old ward that I
thought I should buck up and start tak-
ing fasting more seriously. I started
with just one meal, fasting through
breakfast and then eating a decent
lunch when I came home from church.
I found I didn’t get a headache from
skipping just one meal, so I started do-
ing this twice a month and it worked
wonderfully for a time. I felt I was get-
ting at least some of the spiritual ben-
efits of fasting without having it be so
depleting.
I have worked my way toward a
full Mormon fast quite slowly — over
a period of years, even. But even the
times when I wasn’t fasting perfectly
have been rewarding and full of great
spiritual growth for me. I believe that
when we are instructed in verse 13 that
our fasting “may be perfect,” we need
to understand that we are on a lifelong
journey with fasting. It’s important to
keep in mind the end result — growing
stronger in faith and closer to God —
rather than the dead legalism of focus-
ing on a single right way to do fasting.
2) Fasting ts a way to focus our spiri-
tual energies and concentrate our
prayers. The relationship between
1 Brigham Young quoted in Alan P. Johnson,
Fasting: The Second Step to Eternal Life (Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 1963), 110.
prayer and fasting, words which so
often are linked together in the Scrip-
tures, 1S surprisingly complicated. Does
fasting merely prepare our hearts for
prayer because we humble ourselves to
God and declare our total dependence
on Him? Or is there a supernatural
effect from fasting, where the effect
of a prayer is somehow strengthened
in God’s eyes because the person has
made a sacrifice in the form of the fast?
I’m skeptical about the latter, not be-
cause I don’t believe in supernatural or
mysterious results from prayer but be-
cause I don’t particularly like the idea
of God as a vending machine. Fasting
should never be a bargaining chip in
a transaction we make with Heavenly
Father, where we imagine that we’ll
have better credit at the vending ma-
chine merely because we put in our
50 cents. I have seen people’s faith ut-
terly fall apart in hard times when they
operated under a purely transactional
concept of how God doles out rewards
for good behavior. Their child-
ish faith assumed that if they did
the right things, fasted on Sunday
and prayed the right prayers, this
would be a talisman to preserve
them from harm. Other people
would get cancer. Other people
would witness their teenage sons
clinging to life in the ICU after a
car accident.
So if we shouldn’t allow
ourselves to indulge in childish
magical thinking about what God
“owes” us because we fast, what
then is the relationship of fast-
ing and prayer? I believe fasting
prepares us for that “singleness
of heart” discussed in D&C 59.
In Mormonism we’ve developed
an interesting tradition of fast-
ing for a particular spiritual pur-
pose on fast Sunday. Sometimes
we might fast for someone’s
health, or for a child we’re anx-
ious about, or for guidance in an
important decision. In past years
I have dedicated various fast
ene
Vol. 31, No. 3
Sundays to all of those purposes. And
I have felt strengthened and inspired
from the one-two combo of fasting
and prayer. Magical thinking? I don’t
think so. I wasn’t praying for God to
take away my mom’s cancer a couple
of years ago, or for any number of
things that are out of my control. But
I prayed heartily for inspiration about
how I could cope with those issues, and
feel sure that I received it. Fasting, I’ve
learned, makes me more open to the
idea of God walking by my side even
in the hard times.
I have also found that fasting is a
wonderful way of spiritually uniting
with LDS friends who live many miles
away. Sometimes if I have an especial-
ly pressing issue, I’ll ask a couple of
close friends who live far away to fast
with me and pray about that thing, or
they might ask me to do the same. The
joint effect of our fasting is a deepen-
ing of our bond and also a growing ac-
countability to one another in prayer.
Living Water by Julie Rogers, Kanab, Utah
3) Fasting ts a way to help the poor.
Many different world religions have
practices of fasting, often around spe-
cial holy days (Yom Kippur in Judaism,
or the holy month of Ramadan in Is-
lam). Mormonism’s fasting 1s unusual
in two ways. One 1s that we fast each
month all together on roughly the same
days twelve times a year. Another is
that we explicitly tie our practice of the
fast to a special offering for the poor,
and we have since almost the begin-
ning of the Church.
Considering that fasting is some-
thing that Mormons have done con-
sistently almost every month since
the nineteenth century, there is sur-
prisingly little historical information
about it. Our theology may diverge in
important ways from American Protes-
tantism, but our worship practices and
sacramental rituals generally have not:
we take communion (which we call the
sacrament) in much the same manner
as Reformed Protestants; our Sunday
services and the order of
worship are structured in the
low church Protestant tradi-
tion; many of our hymns are
Protestant; and our prayers
sound like evangelical Prot-
estant prayers that have been
filtered through a Shake-
spearean pronoun machine.
But many Protestants rarely
or never fast. Why do Mor-
mons?
Fast days were an im-
portant part of the New Eng-
land culture that the Smith
clan grew up in. In the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, Puritan and Congrega-
tional leaders would call for
fast days for all the members
of a town to repent of some
perceived sin or to pray for
deliverance from some ca-
lamity or Indian attack. They
would also declare occa-
sional feast days to celebrate
God’s providence. The most
Page 5
memorable of these feast days,
of course, is the one we now cel-
ebrate as Thanksgiving, so some
of that legacy is still with us. As
a culture, however, America as
we know it has basically lost the
“fast” part of the feast-fast equa-
tion.
In Joseph Smith’s day, the
LDS Church observed one of
the first instances of the all-
church fast, and it was explic-
itly tied to helping the poor—in
this case, the prophet himself.
Shortly after Joseph Smith was
released’ from jail, he rejoined
the Saints at Nauvoo but found
his family in poverty. The entire
church fasted and prayed for the
Smith family, and donated their
freewill offering to Joseph and
Emma.
Brigham Young spoke about fast
Thursday in General Conference in the
early 1850s and said that fasting was
specifically to help the poor. Thursday
may seem a bizarre choice for a fast
day, but it was the traditional day for
fast and feast days in New England,
where many of the Mormons had come
from. When Mormons would come into
their testimony meeting on Thursday
evenings, they would literally bring the
food with them that they would have
given to the poor: “flour, or meat, or
butter, or fruit, or anything else, was
to be carried to the fast meeting and
put into the hands of a person selected
for the purpose of taking care of it and
distributing it among the poor.” Young
went on to encourage the Saints about
the importance of this practice:
“Tf we were to do this now faithfully,
do you think the poor would lack for
flour, or butter, or cheese, or meat, or
sugar, or anything they needed to eat?
No, there would be more than could be
used by all the poor among us.””*
2 “Released” is in air quotes here. It was
more of a warden-assiste jailbreak.
3 Quoted in Johnson, Fasting, 186.
Awakening by Julie Rogers
It’s not a coincidence that fasting is
linked so fundamentally with helping
the poor. In fasting, we make ourselves
hungry and poor. We have a taste — lit-
erally — of what being poor might feel
like, if only for a day. We can culti-
vate greater compassion. Fasting and
helping the poor go together, as Isaiah
makes clear in chapter 58, when he
says that God rejects the self-centered
fast of the outwardly pious, but accepts
the loving fast that seeks to renew the
world and help the needy.
Fasting also gives us a way to, as
King Benjamin put it in his famous ser-
mon, “retain a remission of our sins”
by helping the poor (Mosiah 4:26).
That passage in the Book of Mormon
makes it absolutely clear that helping
the poor isn’t just something to do be-
cause we’re nice or we think it’s a good
idea to share. That passage, and Mat-
thew 25 as well, make us uncomfort-
able because they remind us that if we
don’t help the poor we simply can’t be
saved, that we have no part in God’s
kingdom. Ouch. (Knowing that poverty
is intractable and overwhelming,
though, King Benjamin cautions
us that we’re not required to run
faster than we have strength. We
can’t do everything to eradicate
poverty, but we can do a great
deal, and it starts with a gener-
ous fast offering.)
4) Fasting is a reminder of
death and resurrection. | like
to think about fasting as a mini-
death. I’m not trying to be mor-
bid here, but I think we should
all get good and intimate with
the reality that we are going to
die. These bodies that we ex-
pend so much energy feeding
and bathing and clothing will
someday take one last breath.
Could it be that fasting helps us
to prepare for this truth, which
is so inevitable and yet so impossible
to accept?
Throughout Christian history peo-
ple have struggled with the place of the
body and whether it should be subjugat-
ed and controlled or celebrated. Mor-
mons have always fallen on the more
positive side of that spectrum, affirm-
ing that the body is inherently good,
that it is God’s creation, that it will be
perfected and renewed at the resurrec-
tion. We place some restrictions on the
body—eschewing sexual promiscuity,
for example, or insisting that there are
certain toxins that we won’t put into
our bodies. But in general Mormons
have always taught that the body 1s
good, even holy. We believe God has
a perfected body and are consistently
taught that our purpose in this life is to
become more like God ourselves.
But here’s the thing: If we are to be-
come like God, one thing we absolutely
must learn to do 1s to die and be reborn.
Fasting, in its small way, is that lesson
for us, month in and month out. Fast-
ing 1s, at its foundations, a reminder of
bodily death. Once a month we choose
not to sustain physical needs and the
physical body, preferring instead to af-
firm the truth that death will be real,
that the needs of this body will one day
cease, that we should not let ourselves
become overly attached to the physi-
cal. Heavenly Father created our bodies
and declared them “very” good; they
are temples of His Spirit and we are to
treat them with honor and respect. But
at the end of the day, they are not the
sum of us. And ironically enough, fast-
ing—which seems on the surface to be
so world-denying and lifeless—is pre-
cisely the kind of spiritual practice that
reminds us that human life is a gift.
I like to have people over for din-
ner on Fast Sunday, because no mat-
ter what I serve, these hungry people
are going to think it is the best meal
they’ve had in ages. (“Tripe! My favor-
ite!”) We’re so grateful for breaking
the fast and welcoming life and food
again that we have a new appreciation
for every bite. When we take the sac-
rament on Fast Sunday, it is our only
sustenance for much of that day, which
is an excellent metaphor for what the
sacrament is supposed to be for us —
unique, a witness of God, the bread
that gives us life. If you’ve ever read or
seen The Lord of the Rings, you might
remember that Frodo and Sam get a gift
from the elves called lembas bread, a
special food where just one small bite
can sustain a grown man for a day. Au-
thor J.R.R. Tolkien, a devout Catholic,
wanted a way in his fiction to represent
what the Eucharist meant to him, that if
all else were taken away, that one gift
of God would be enough to sustain life.
That 1s what we should remember on
Fast Sunday when we take the sacra-
ment: this is life, this is grace.
Dying and being reborn may not be
first and foremost on our minds next
month when we fast. But I hope we’ll
remember that over a lifetime, fast-
ing can teach us about freedom, about
death, and most importantly, about res-
urrection. Fasting reminds us that we
have been blessedly freed from sin and
death. For freedom Christ has set us
free. mf
Being a Hospital Chaplain
by Emily Clyde Curtis
Phoenix, Arizona
Editor's Note: This essay is based on
an excerpt from the keynote address
given in February 2011 for the Clare-
mont College conference, “Womens
Lives, Women’s Voices.” The video for
that address and other presentations
at the conference is available at http://
ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/collec-
tion.php?alias=/cms.
My dad always said, “If you’re the
best at what you do, you can always
find a job.” So, as a Mormon woman
who a. belonged to a church that didn’t
ordain women and b. belonged to a
church that relied on a lay clergy, I
think I put his words to the test when
I told him I wanted to get a Master’s
degree in Divinity.
Although I didn’t know what I was
going to do in terms of a profession, I
was confident that I could be true to the
Church by going to Divinity School.
While I was there, I had the option to
participate in the Field Education pro-
gram, which places students preparing
for ordination in churches, hospitals,
prisons, group homes, and other plac-
es. After a lengthy chronic illness as a
teenager, I knew I wanted to work in
a hospital, and I was thrilled to get a
placement as a chaplain at Brigham
and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mas-
sachusetts.
At my job, I had the privilege of
being with people in both the dark-
est moments of their lives and during
moments of intense joy. I have held
the hands of people as they died, and
I have cradled dying newborns. I have
sat with people waiting to hear about
the severity of their loved ones’ inju-
ries, and I have rejoiced with people
who had miraculous healings, even as
I have also learned to redefine what mi-
raculous healings are.
I remember walking into the hosp1-
tal on my first day being thrilled that
I would be embodying the scripture in
the Book of Mormon, Mosiah 18:8-9.
Now, as ye are desirous to come into
the fold of God, and to be called his
people, and are willing to bear one an-
other s burdens, that they may be light;
Yea, and are willing to mourn with
those that mourn; yea and comfort
those that stand in need of comfort.
I feel indebted to the chaplaincy staff
there. I could say that going to my of-
fice each day sounded like the begin-
ning of a joke...”So, an imam, a rabbi,
and a priest are sitting together...”’ but
these staff members taught me uni-
versal themes of spirituality, and they
showed me through their examples
how to let my differences be an asset in
my church service and how to deal with
my spiritual struggles while staying in
my church community.
I watched my Muslim friends strug-
gle to connect with patients after 9/11
when people judged them by the color
of their skin and the way they dressed. I
watched my Catholic friends deal with
the issues of women in the priesthood
that so mirrored my own experiences,
and I saw them struggle with the sex
abuse scandals in their church. I also
learned different and beneficial ways
of thinking about spirituality from my
Buddhist friends and Christians from
denominations different than my own.
Still, in some areas, I was on my own.
I didn’t know any Mormon chaplains,
much less ones who were women, and
there were times when I had to grapple
with theological issues, never being
sure 1f I was doing the right thing. One
of these situations arose when I was
asked to perform Catholic infant bap-
tisms as part of my job description.
Because BWH has one of the larg-
est Newnatal Intensive Care Units in
New England, the chaplaincy depart-
ment deals with a lot of stillborns and
babies that die soon after birth. Living
in a predominately Catholic city like
Boston, this meant that we were often
called on to baptize these babies.
While Vatican II has refuted the
belief that babies who die before being
baptized go to purgatory, many Catho-
lics still believe this. And I met with
a few parents who were desperate for
the ritual. As a Mormon woman, I was
reticent to perform this ritual because
my church taught me that these babies
would go straight to God and there was
no need for baptism. I also was uncom-
fortable because even though the Ro-
man Catholic Church does not require
a person to be ordained to perform the
rite of baptism, in my Church, baptism
is a ritual done by people who hold the
priesthood. I knew that by performing
baptisms for another church, I would
be questioned by other Mormons who
would feel that I was leading people
astray by sanctioning this form of bap-
tism.
Still, as a chaplain trying to support
grieving families, I wanted to do what-
ever I could to ease their pain. And I
knew the power religious rituals can
have to comfort and bring the presence
of God into a room full of sorrow. I also
was terrified of being in a tragic situa-
tion and having to explain my very mi-
nor issue when time was of the essence.
One of the most painful conversa-
tions I have had about my career choice
was when a male Mormon friend of
mine enthusiastically tried to convince
me that I should not baptize these ba-
bies because by doing so I was partici-
pating in “priestcrafts.” He left his liv-
ing room to grab his Book of Mormon
and proceeded to read me scriptures
defining priestcrafts and what hap-
pened to those individuals who par-
ticipated in them (Alma 1:16). I don’t
think he realized how hard it was for
me, someone who is not permitted to
have the priesthood, to be told that this
other way I had found to express my
pastoral authority was wrong and sin-
ful.
My husband was concerned, too,
and we argued for months about wheth-
er or not I would baptize babies. My
husband, Nate, you must understand,
loves nothing more than a good argu-
ment. He will often argue an opinion he
doesn’t agree with, or even believes is
defensible, just to see if he can change
your mind. It was incredibly frustrating
to hear him say, “Yes, you should be al-
lowed to baptize, but no, you shouldn’t
baptize in this way.” Fortunately, my
colleagues were patient and under-
standing while I tried to figure out what
to do.
Chaplains are only permitted to
baptize babies that will not live very
long. If there’s a chance that the child’s
parish priest can make it in time, we
wait. Better yet, if there’s a chance that
the child can be baptized in her church
with her community, we do not do this
ritual because as in the LDS church,
Catholics believe that baptism is a
chance to not only wash away sins, but
also a ritual that welcomes the child
into the church community and begins
her religious life.
After much prayer, thought, and
discussion with my supervisor and
good friend, a Catholic nun who could
identify with the issue of priesthood au-
thority that I was facing, I decided what
I would do to bring comfort to these
families and to assuage the concerns
of Mormons who felt like I should not
perform this ritual.
I realized that as a Catholic priest
had taught me the way to perform a
baptism, I could teach a baby’s parents
how to perform this ritual. What better
gift could I give a mother or father than
to give them a memory of sharing what
would most likely be the only life ritual
they would have with their child?
The first time I did this I remember
a young father looking at me dumb-
founded when I asked him if he wanted
to baptize his 28 week old son who had
not been responding to medical treat-
ments and had only hours to live. Af-
ter explaining the ritual and putting the
water in his hands, I asked him again
if he wanted to do this or if I should
find someone else. He said he did, and
as tears streamed down all of our faces,
this baby’s mother cradled her dying
son while his father softly said, “I bap-
tize you in the name of the Father and
of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”
Though I long to perform the bap-
tism ritual, I saw in that moment that
this was the right thing for me to do.
As I deliberated over whether or
not to perform baptisms, I found a way
to serve in a ministerial capacity while
staying true to the current stance of my
religious tradition, even as I struggle
with that stance. By finding another
way, I was blessed with a sacred mo-
ment with this young family as we
worked to find peace amidst the trag-
edy of losing achild. mg
Pauls epistles (often called pastorals) strengthened early Saints and uplift followers today. Sabbath Pastorals
highlights women preaching and teaching from pulpits in wards around the world.
Heavenly Mother and The Family: A Proclamation to the World
by Fara Sneddon
Carlsbad, California
I was asked to speak today about
The Family: A Proclamation to the
World. Our LDS faith teaches that the
family is central to the Plan of Salva-
tion and integral to each of our experi-
ences on this earth. The Proclamation
tells us that “All human beings—male
and female—are created in the image
of God. Each 1s a beloved spirit son or
daughter of Heavenly Parents.” Hugh
B. Brown, wrote “[t]he family concept
is one of the major and most important
of our whole theological doctrine. Our
concept of heaven itself is little more
than a projection of the home and fam-
ily life into eternity.” We are sons and
daughters of Heavenly Parents. Know-
ing our heaven 1s “family life into eter-
nity,’ we are, therefore, taught to un-
derstand our families on this earth as
types or patterns modeled on a divine
unit of parents and children: you and I,
our very real Heavenly Father, and our
just as real Heavenly Mother.
While in all things we are taught
of our Heavenly Father and His love
for us, we learn about the unit of our
Heavenly Parents in far fewer ways.
While studying French at BYU, I was
introduced to the French version of
the hymnal, and I found what would
become my favorite hymn, “Souviens-
toi, Mon Enfant.” In its first line, it tells
us to remember we are part of a divine
family. Loosely translated to English, it
reads:
Remember my child,
Your divine parents held you in their
arms not too long ago.
1 (Relief Society Magazine, Dec. 1965)
We have parents in heaven, who knew
and loved us in the pre-existence and
who now wait for our return to them.
One particular Mother’s Day in our
previous ward, the First Counselor
stood up just before the congregational
hymn, “O My Father,” and explained
to those in the chapel that this was the
only hymn he knew of that talked about
our Heavenly Mother. He said that,
though at first it might seem an odd
choice of hymn for this day, no other
hymn was more appropriate for honor-
ing our mothers on this earth and our
Mother in Heaven. Many of us know
the verse by heart to which he referred:
In the heavens are parents single? No,
the thought makes reason stare.
Truth is reason, truth eternal tells me
I’ve a Mother there.
Sister Snow’s hymn was first published
as a poem in the 7Jimes & Seasons in
1845, and its title was “Invocation, or
the Eternal Father and Mother.”
The Proclamation on the Family
teaches us that “[a]ll human beings—
male and female—are created in the
image of God. Each is a beloved spirit
son or daughter of Heavenly Parents.”
We believe and teach that, besides
Heavenly Father, there is a Heavenly
Mother, yet we forget this in our daily
interaction with spirituality. We forget
that She is someone who might be just
as concerned about us, Her children, as
the Father is; we do not consider that
She loves us with just as powerful a
love. We do not remember or do not
know that our prophets have spoken of
Her.
Joseph Smith spoke of having seen
both of our Heavenly Parents; he taught
of Heavenly Mother. The Church ar-
chives house the following account:
One day the Prophet Joseph Smith
asked [Zebedee Coltrin] and Sidney
Rigdon to accompany him into the
woods to pray. When they had reached
a secluded spot Joseph laid down on
his back and stretched out his arms. He
told the brethren to lie one on each arm
and then shut their eyes. After they had
prayed he told them to open their eyes.
They did so and they saw a brilliant
light surrounding a pedestal which
seemed to rest on the earth. They closed
their eyes and again prayed. They then
saw, on opening them, the Father seat-
ed upon a throne; they prayed again
and on looking saw the Mother also;
after praying and looking the fourth
time they saw the Savior added to the
group. *
What an amazing account of the
reality of our heavenly family, of the
divine origins of our own families. We
see here the whole of it, and the Mother
is a central component. In the Journal
of Discourses of February 1862, Heber
C. Kimball relates Joseph Smith as say-
ing “that he [Joseph] would not wor-
ship a God who had not a Father; and I
do not know that he would if he had not
a mother; the one would be as absurd
as the other.” From the records of our
Church’s history, we know our prophet
Joseph Smith saw and taught that we
have a divine Mother who is logically,
physically, and essentially a reality.
2 (Abraham H. Cannon Journal, Aug. 25,
1890, LDS Church Archives)
Other prophets and leaders have
taught similar ideas. Apostle Erastus
Snow shared his understanding of the
female deity:
“Tf I believe anything that God has
ever said about himself, and anything
pertaining to the creation and organi-
zation of man upon the earth, I must
believe that Deity consists of man and
woman [. . .] [T]here can be no God
except he is composed of the man and
woman united, and there is not in all the
eternities that exist, nor ever will be, a
God in any other way [. . .| There never
was a God, and there never will be in
all eternities, except they are made of
these two component parts; a man and
a woman; the male and the female.’”
Apostle Snow saw God as being made
up of two parts: a man and a woman,
the unity of Heavenly Father and Heav-
enly Mother.
I remember the first time I learned
that in the Hebrew, “Eloheim”’ is plural.
At first this seemed incongruous with
what I had learned through my youth,
but it simultaneously resonated through
me in such way that I knew it was truth;
it only made sense that “God” must be
plural, that “God” must be the celestial
marriage of our Heavenly Father and
Heavenly Mother, two parts of a whole,
two partners in eternal life. Bruce R.
McConkie taught this same principle:
“An exalted and glorified Man of Holi-
ness (Moses 6:57) could not be a Fa-
ther unless a Woman of like glory, per-
fection, and holiness was associated
with him as a Mother. The begetting of
children makes a man a father and a
woman a mother, whether we are deal-
ing with man in his mortal or immortal
state.””*
Finally, the prophet Joseph F. Smith
explained, “Let us make man in our
image after our likeness [. . .] Is it not
3. Journal of Discourses, Mar. 1878
4 Mormon Doctrine 1966 edition, p. 516.
Dulce Convivencia, Cuzco, Peru
feasible to believe that female spirits
were created in the image of a ‘Mother
in Heaven’? His emphasis implies a
mother deity was involved in the plan-
ning and decision making and was
part of whatever group of exalted be-
ings decided to create earthly men and
women.
We do have a Mother in Heaven.
Knowing this, when we read The
Family: A Proclamation to the World
and when we understand our fami-
lies should be patterned after this di-
vine pattern, how does that change the
way we See or understand our families
and our place in them? How does that
change what we see as the potential for
our daughters? How does that change
the things we teach our sons about
women?
In our last ward, we were sitting
behind a young family with a two year-
old son who was coloring pictures dur-
ing Sacrament Meeting. He turned to
his mother and asked for a new crayon,
and she handed him a pink one. Imme-
diately he started to cry, repeating with
what seemed like offense and indigna-
tion, “You gave me a girl crayon! Iam
not a girl! This is a pink crayon! This is
5 Answers to Gospel Questions, vol. 3 (Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 1960), p. 144.
a girl crayon!” Then he threw it back at
his mother, who reverently returned it
to the box, chose a different color, and
gave him this new crayon.
What have we taught our children,
particularly our sons, to make them
look down upon things constructed as
feminine? Our daughters and our sons
need to value the female and see them-
selves in the feminine. We have been
successful in teaching our daughters to
use blue crayons and find themselves
reflected in a Heavenly Father; we need
to grant our sons the same gift. We need
to de-stigmatize the pink crayon and
teach our sons the necessity of seeing
themselves reflected in their Heavenly
Mother, too.
Our Church leaders have long
taught the necessity of sharing respon-
sibilities in our families, regardless of
gender. Elder James E. Faust quotes the
late Elder G. Homer Durham: “Man,
as well as woman, has obligations to
learn the difficult art of fatherhood in
homemaking. This is not a task just for
the woman.’” I love the idea of “‘father-
hood in homemaking.” We should be
teaching “fatherhood in homemaking”
to our sons, and we should be teach-
ing our daughters to value and choose
to be with men who see “fatherhood in
homemaking” as integral to their role
as husband and father. Husbands and
wives are to be equal partners, because
our Heavenly Parents are equal part-
ners. I cannot imagine it being other-
wise.
It is not particularly easy to look
at ourselves and see how ideas of dif-
ference shape how we understand our
relationships with our spouses. There
are absolutely biological differences
between women and men, but how do
we view these differences in our cul-
tures and in our own families? Do our
interpretations let some of us off the
hook? Do they empower others of us?
Do they keep some of us from learning
and growth? Do they restrict us or al-
6 “A Message to My Granddaughters: Be-
coming Great Women” (Ensign 1986),
low us to shift responsibility onto our
spouse? Do they keep us from being, as
the Proclamation tells us we must be,
“equal partners’? Virginia Woolf said,
“Men and women are different. What
needs to be made equal is the value
placed on those differences.”
The default Christian explana-
tion for the subjugation of women
throughout the ages goes back to an
interpretation of Eve’s role in the Fall
from the Garden of Eden. One of the
most revolutionary and wonderful lib-
erating truths of the restored gospel is
our knowledge that the Fall of Adam
and Eve was not a bad thing brought
about by wickedness, but was instead
a central component to God’s plan.
Our modern scriptures elucidate a very
different reading of the Fall than has
been traditionally understood. In Mo-
ses 5:11, Eve refers to “our transgres-
sion” —revealing it as something that
she and Adam chose together, as part-
ners. In the Doctrine and Covenants,
section 29, we learn that Adam initiat-
ed the Fall. President Kimball explains
this more fully, stating that “Adam” 1s a
plural proper noun, and in this scripture
the term “Adam” means both Adam
and Eve. President Kimball goes on to
read these verses, inserting “Mr. And
Mrs. Adam” where the scripture just
says “Adam”’.’
Modern day revelation teaches how
Adam and Eve, together as a partner-
ship, made the critical, crucial deci-
sion to act; surely they did this through
consultation and agreement. If Adam
and Eve had an equal partnership and
an equal responsibility for their choic-
es in the garden, how much more so
must our Heavenly Parents have an
equal partnership in their roles as di-
vinities over this creation and plan?
It is now time that we must really sit
and ask ourselves, honestly and with-
out pride, if we, in our marriages, have
truly equal partnerships patterned after
these divine examples. Just as we teach
7 Kimball, “The Blessings and Responsibili-
ties of Womanhood,” (Ensign, Mar. 1976)
our children to model themselves after
Christ, we need to teach ourselves to
model our families after God, a God
who is both Father and Mother. As we
look to the Proclamation for knowl-
edge and guidance, what we discover
is not simply a cursory explanation of
roles and positions, but something far
more subtle yet far more powerful: “All
human beings—male and female—are
created in the image of God. Each is a
beloved spirit son or daughter of Heav-
enly Parents.”
The Prophet Joseph Smith empha-
sized the importance of knowing God
if we are to know ourselves: He taught
that “[i]f men do not comprehend the
character of God, they do not compre-
hend themselves,” and, in the same dis-
course, he quotes John 17:3 and para-
phrases it thus: “If any man does not
know God ... he has not eternal life;
for there can be eternal life on no other
principle.”®
Brothers and Sisters, do we know
God? Do we understand that God is
a celestial marriage, that God is our
Heavenly Father and our Heavenly
Mother? We need to ask ourselves this,
because if God is male and female, then
eternal life is connected with knowing
Her as well as knowing Him, to valuing
Her as well as valuing Him. Whether
you are a father or a mother, a son or
a daughter, I believe that knowledge
of our Heavenly Mother is crucial for
each of us, that we might know our-
selves as eternal beings.
I would like to share a poem by the
LDS author Carol Lynn Pearson. Its
title is “Position,” and it talks about the
equity and partnership that can exist in
our best marriages and families:
If “A” looks up to “B”
Then by nature of the physical universe
“B” must look down on “A”
Rather like two birds
Positioned
One on a tree
And one on the ground.
8 Teachings, 344
Or so thought Marjorie
Who had always wanted to marry
A man she could look up to
But wondered where that
Would place her
If she did.
Imagine her astonishment
When she met Michael and found
That together they stood
Physics on its head.
You could never
Draw this on paper
For it defies design
But year after year
They lived a strange
Arrangement
That by all known laws
Could not occur:
She looked up to him
And he looked up to her.’
Our wonderful gospel teaches us of
our Mother in Heaven. While we do
not know much about Her, and while
we do not pray to Her or worship Her
in overt and ritualized ways, we should
understand Her reality; Her existence
should make us more aware of how we
think of men and women, and Her mar-
riage with God the Father should teach
us how to be honest and true partners
with our spouses, a value explicitly
taught in The Family: A Proclama-
tion to the World. Our knowledge that
we are each a son or a daughter of our
Heavenly Parents should enrich our un-
derstanding of our divine natures and
encourage us to see ourselves in both
our Heavenly Father and Mother. Our
knowledge of God as a marriage be-
tween Heavenly Father and Heavenly
Mother should infuse our own families
with equality, equity, and partnership,
from which we learn to place ourselves
continually in such a way to serve one
another, preside with one another, and
in which we can both, simultaneously,
look up to one another. m
9 Pearson, “Position”, Picture Window, Gold
Leaf Press, 1996, 113.
My Sunset Journey Where is Mother?
by Sandra Rembrandt by Lindsay Hansen Park
Boulder City, Nevada Stansbury Park, Utah
I came to rest by the side of the road. from the storehouse of wisdom, Mother has living blood.
The path ahead looked familiar, weaving, re-weaving wee blue and moving,
but different lessons from past journeys into like Earth.
somehow, with challenging twists a carpet She speaks soft, |
and turns. leading to my future. as loud as shining morning.
Though the journey ahead appeared Her skin is one thousand roads
oe I saw colors—orange, yellow, red
extraordinarily long and deep, — Be driven on dust and rock and grit.
the actual and violet We suck Her sighs into our breast,
é hip across the blue vastness
crossing to the other side appeared not ian oo a a breeze, breathing this whisper
es rippling and twirling as dancers in an Fegan Fearon:
inspiring ballet She bleeds, She bleeds,
Now what? move to a dance of fire, a dance can you hear Her? =
then came the realization- of forgiveness,
I had reached the precipice of sunsets. followed by freedom, hope and love.
That moment of awareness of self
found me benumbed, without thought
or word.
With quiet anticipation and a
low chuckle
I stepped onto the lighted path,
Then as breath and air brought focus to remembering passions of early spring
the now, and with eyes twinkling in thought. Reflection
an exquisite, perfect moment occurred, Icando this. mg
an inner knowing, embraced and held by Courtney Cooke
with grateful recognition. Thank a | Boise, Idaho
You, I whispered, : iit PRETO TTT Te
feeling a smile. I am safe.
I can sleep when the wind blows. Sticks and leaves
Water and mud
In a makeshift pond
Along a tree lined path.
Branches and clouds
Blue and white sky
Clearly reflected
In an unclear puddle.
Looking down
where beauty is not,
A reminder
of what is above.
Her countenance shines
as the divine comes through
despite flaws
and distractions.
What meaning, I can sleep when
the wind blows?
Have no fear. The way 1s clear.
These words, long familiar, yet never
settled in truth until now.
Eager to learn, I walked to the edge
of the precipice.
As my eyes adjusted to the vastness of
forever tomorrows, a relenting ego
surrendered to Spirit.
Stunned, I saw my Sunset being born.
I remember how the air opened, offer- | in, @ Y
ing scents after rain, a WS irae ae ST, RRA
BOO OS ward oc NOet ite RQkEate Ls!
while myriads of vibrant color
streamed My Sunset Journey by Sandra Rembrandt
A Patchwork
by Steven Peck
Pleasant Grove, Utah
She rests on her grandmother’s quilt,
the Spring air cool, but sun warming—
healing
Winter’s darkness.
She, face turned to the sun,
is thinking back on the line of mothers
who gave her being and body...
She thinks about
an Eve, way back...
Out of some Cambrian longing
her distant grandmother emerged
hard shelled, many limbed,
singular in purpose, only a
crustacean of sorts, but a
crustacean on its way somewhere.
What a piece of work, this creature.
There would be many cuts,
restitchings, corrections, additions,
before her story appeared leaping
onto this wet fabric, around this sun,
in this
neighborhood of stars,
in this galaxy, in this cluster, in
this universe,
in this multiverse, in this embedding,
in this quilt.
She is a small thing compared to a star,
attached to eternity
by only a pineal of complexity—maybe
netting consciousness from some other
place. Is she some eternal piecework or
Stardollars by Erin S. Tripp, Salt Lake City, Utah
does she arise like her
arthropod grandmother
new and shining from lesser things?
On this day, she notices that
a far more distant
relation has shed an apple
leaf, which spirals
downward with grace.
She, saturated in connections, turning
over, leans off the quilt
and breaths in the scent of fragrant
Spring grass,
face first, she smells existence
in the loam, and feels some of
Schopenhauer’s Will
wrapping its arms around her
and whispering
sentences that that grandmother
knew and
passed on to this mammal woman,
her child’s child and so on.
Mothers running backwards, for eons.
This patchwork on which she lies
is of certain origins, and
she can wrap herself in its squares
and enjoy its warmth and the mercy of
the long chain of its history and
its intent. =
Blowing Dandelion Seeds
by Marsha Kay Ault
Nacogdoches, Texas
I saw a pregnant seed head
out on my morning walk
full of tiny parachutes
each connected to a seed
my little grandchildren love
to pull these stems, blow,
scatter feathered follicles
heavenward, and watch
the winged seeds
float through the air
to unknown fertile fields
blooming yellow flowers
I thought of a dear widow
whose husband just died.
separated from his mortal port
his spirit dispersed
to an unknown heavenly realm.
she longs to touch, to see,
to feel his presence again
her numbness and sorrow
to be washed away
with fresh falling rain
of trust and peace
blooming yellow flowers
on winged parachutes of faith. m
This poem was originally published on Wilderness Interface Zone
http://www.wilderness.motleyvision.org
Giving voice to the international and multicultural experience of women in the Mormon Church.
Muslim Mormon?
by Erica Eastley
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
My husband and I cupped our hands in
front of us as we chanted the Fatihah
in Arabic with Jyldyz and Bobir. We’ve
recited the Fatihah all over the world
and its words mirror our beliefs:
In the name of God, the infinitely
Compassionate and Merciful.
Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds.
The Compassionate, the Merciful.
Ruler on the Day of Reckoning.
You do we worship, and You do we
ask for help.
Guide us on the straight path...
“Are you Muslim?” Bobir asked my
husband when we finished, using the
informal form of “you” for the first
time since we’d met them. Praying to-
gether does that, but we didn’t know
enough Kyrgyz to explain how our re-
spect for Islam and belief in the gospel
of Jesus Christ support each other. We
could only show that respect through
our Arabic words and gestures. After
the prayer we sang together in their
tiny wagon, high in the mountains of
Kyrgyzstan where they host tourists
in a yurt and care for sheep, horses,
yaks, and cattle. The animals chorused
around the yurt that night while the
sheep-dung fire warmed us.
As Ive lived, traveled, studied,
learned the languages, and blogged in
the Middle East and Central Asia with
my husband and children over the last
15 years, I’ve had the opportunity to
learn about a variety of Muslim cul-
tures, particularly those in Central Asia
where we’ve lived for several years.
Ethnicity, culture, and religion inter-
twine in Central Asia, partly as a result
of Soviet definitions and partly for his-
torical reasons. Saying you are Muslim
in Central Asia might not mean you
strictly subscribe to Islamic doctrines
or go to the mosque to pray often, but
simply that you are a good Kazakh or
follow the Kyrgyz way.
I’ve also been able to see how the
Church works in different cultures and
countries. It can be difficult for mem-
bers from those cultures to navigate
LDS cultural expectations when those
expectations are so different from
their own. The LDS Church is often
described as an American-centered
church, but I’d like to suggest that,
more than Americentric, its roots are
firmly planted in Christian, and most
especially, Protestant belief and prac-
tice. As a result, I think there might be
more pressure to act “Christian” than to
act “American.”
Instead of insisting that we are
Christian, with all the cultural, linguis-
tic, and historical baggage that term
carries worldwide, we should focus
on following Christ and recognize that
there are many ways to do that beyond
traditional Christianity. Helping new
members find familiar ways to follow
Christ has to be more effective than
trying to fit everyone into a prescribed
mold that might be uncomfortable.
For example, there are many rev-
erent prayer postures throughout the
world. In Central Asia, people pray
with their hands cupped, finishing with
an “amin” and running their hands
/ eal 4
However, those
down their faces.
prayer rituals change sometimes when
a Central Asian joins the Church. Well-
meaning missionaries might tell new
converts they ought to pray with their
arms folded and heads bowed, or those
new converts make the switch simply
because some of the people around
them are praying that way.
There are also many cultural expec-
tations surrounding religious holidays.
One Easter I ate with some Central
Asian Mormons when Easter was cel-
ebrated on the same day by all Chris-
tians. One sister asked if Mormons cel-
ebrate Easter; she had never celebrated
Easter herself because Easter, like
Christmas, 1s a Russian Orthodox holi-
day in Central Asia. If those holidays
are celebrated by LDS Central Asians,
and they often aren’t, it might be con-
venient for them to be observed on the
Orthodox dates. But there is sometimes
pressure from American Mormons to
encourage Central Asian Mormons to
celebrate those holidays on the tradi-
tional Protestant/Catholic dates with
American traditions.
In addition, a Central Asian mem-
ber might be encouraged to stop cel-
ebrating Navruz, an ancient Spring
festival that is currently tied to Islam in
Central Asia, even though the holiday
is far older than Islam. Is it always nec-
essary for members of the Church to
celebrate Easter and Christmas if they
don’t feel comfortable doing so, or to
stop observing Navruz?
American Christian Mormons also
might have expectations about leaving
behind former religious identification.
An American missionary told about a
conversation he’d had not long after
he began serving in Central Asia. “I’m
still Muslim,” a Central Asian returned
missionary told the surprised American
at church. That might sound illogical
based on what many Mormons think
about Islam, but in Central Asia where
a Mormon Kazakh retains her Muslim
culture because she is Kazakh, it is log-
ical.
These experiences make me won-
der how the Church might be differ-
ent if it had been restored in a Catholic
or Buddhist or Muslim country. How
would we hold our hands for prayer;
what books of scripture might we turn
to besides the Book of Mormon or
Doctrine and Covenants? How would
Joseph Smith have framed the Articles
of Faith? And even more important,
what would be the same?
Of course there are aspects of
Mormonism that aren’t Protestant, es-
pecially the organizational structure
which is a lot more familiar to many
Photographs courtesy of the author
Catholic and Orthodox Christians. But
the culture of the LDS Church 1s heav-
ily influenced by Protestant culture and
practice. This isn’t surprising or nec-
essarily a bad thing, but it does affect
how the Church and its doctrines are
received by people whose background
isn’t Protestant.
Obviously former Catholics make
up, by far, the biggest group of mem-
bers of the Church whose background
isn’t Protestant, but since they come
from that traditional Christian back-
ground, the Protestant influence isn’t
so glaringly different. We are also
comfortable allowing Jewish converts
to the Church to maintain their Jew-
ish identity. Some American Mormons
with Christian roots observe Jewish re-
ligious practices themselves. We often
see strong connections and little con-
tradiction between Jewish and Mormon
religious practices. In short, we sepa-
rate Judaism from Jewish culture and
accept many Jewish religious practices
as cultural. I think we can do the same
with Muslim converts from Central
Asia where being Muslim is as much
about culture as it 1s about religion.
For the many Mormon converts
whose frame of reference is not Chris-
tianity or Judaism, many aspects of
Judeo-Christian religious history that
long-time adherents take for granted
might get lost in translation. For exam-
ple, I was reading the Articles of Faith
together with some Central Asian sis-
ters. I’d always considered the Articles
of Faith to be a basic outline of many
LDS beliefs, but I had to change my
thinking after reading them with mem-
bers who used to be Soviet Muslims.
Punished for Adam’s transgression?
Gift of tongues? The gathering of Isra-
el? The admonition of Paul? Who was
Paul? Those phrases meant nothing
to them, but articles of faith outlining
LDS belief from a Central Asian per-
spective would be confusing to most
Mormons outside Central Asia.
There is also a major gap in our
teaching when we don’t understand
what others already believe, are famil-
iar with, or are comfortable with. This
is especially noticeable with isolated
members whose gospel instruction
comes almost entirely through Church
publications instead of being taught by
people from their own culture and re-
ligious background. The Central Asian
members I know have a difficult time
understanding the basic manuals of the
Church - not because they aren’t well
educated (they are all very well educat-
ed), but because they’re trying to learn
about an entirely new topic where very
little attempt has been made to make
connections with their cultural and reli-
gious background.
Central Asians are particularly dis-
advantaged because no Church materi-
als have been published in any Central
Asian language, so everything they
read and learn comes not only with this
Protestant bias, but also through a Rus-
sian language filter since all the church
manuals are published in Russian.
Would you have much success learn-
ing about Islam from a book written
for Muslims, translated into English by
Pakistanis for Nigerian Muslims?
Jesus himself tailored his message
to his hearers, speaking in parables to
some, quoting the scriptures to oth-
ers, and using more than one language.
Each book of scripture demonstrates
that He speaks to different people at
different times in different places in dif-
ferent ways based on their understand-
ing. We miss so many opportunities to
teach when we cannot connect on that
basic level of mutual understanding.
I cannot believe God only speaks in
English or Protestant terms. He speaks
in words and ideas that are familiar to
us, whether the language is Russian or
Spanish or Uzbek, or the concepts are
from a Muslim, Catholic or Hindu point
of view. It’s easy for us to find things
that help us follow Christ and are good
and familiar in traditional Christianity;
I hope in the future we can do the same
with other religious traditions. m
* ¢
Phyllis Barber
Denver, Colorado
Editor s Note: This piece is an excerpt
from the essay, “The Goddesses in
Quintana Roo,” part of a forthcoming
collection of essays called Searching
for Spirit.
In the freewheeling decade of the
eighties, my friend Leslie, wearing
a long purple cape and the tiara of a
high priestess, called me to stand in
the middle of a circle of five people.
The season was spring, it was my 40th
birthday, and her living room had been
transformed into a ceremonial space
with jerry-rigged velvet curtains, a
sideboard converted into an_ altar
topped with candles, a bowl of floating
gardenias, two vases of purple irises,
and a statue of Isis. The two men in the
group wore loose white robes, while the
other two women and I were dressed in
long white gowns. Mine was a drapy,
Roman-looking concoction covering
only one shoulder—an item Wonder
Woman might have worn to prom. It
was also something I’d conjured from
my dreams of queens and empresses.
My youngest of four sons was eight
years old, causing me to wonder about
who and what I was in addition to moth-
er and wife. Leslie had been following
her dream of conducting ceremonies to
help women explore the goddess within
themselves. Tonight, she’d offered to
do this for me. I had nothing to lose by
committing myself in a ceremonial rit-
ual. Why not accept the goddess with-
in—the one who knew how she wanted
to express herself in the world and what
she wanted to give back? It was time
to move on from my bad habit of hesi-
tation, equivocation, and the familial
tendency toward self-effacement. Did
pre-environment have anything to say
about it? Leslie led us through a ritual
acknowledging the four directions—a
process compiled from Native Ameri-
can and Wiccan traditions and her fe-
cund imagination. She instructed me to
stand and receive a purple velvet cape,
which she tied around my shoulders.
As we began, part of me vacillated be-
tween belief and disbelief. Part of me
took this occasion seriously. Through
ritual and ceremony, one could mark
the passages and phases of one’s life,
honor the good, the highest, and the
best in one’s self. But was I indulg-
ing Leslie because she was my friend?
Because I wanted her to have what she
wanted? Maybe it was make-believe to
think I had a goddess within. A child of
God or a God in embryo, maybe, but
Goddess? The word sounded slightly
scandalous to my Mormon-trained ears
that had always heard about God as a
ates
As a young girl, I loved listening
to “Let’s Pretend” on the radio and,
afterward, playing dress-up with the
luminous pink silk trousers and frog-
fastened turquoise and yellow silk tops
my father brought home from Shang-
hai at the end of World War II. Mother
kept this extravagance of exotic fabric
in the substantial, well-used Kirby vac-
uum box in a storage closet. My older
sister, my brother, and I were forever
dragging the Chinese clothes from that
purple box with faded lettering and en-
tering into worlds where we could be
anyone: Chinese, young, old, regal,
powerful. If I listened carefully when
dressed in vibrant silk, I could hear a
nightingale. A houseboat could arrive
to take me down the Yellow River to
a palace filled with jade and princesses
with crystal chimes hanging from their
puffed-up hair. Why not be in my own
fairy tale now? A character in a myth,
possibly brushing against the tangent
of something important?
From a shadowed corner, Leslie
lifted a long, forest-green velvet bag
lined with satin and embellished with
a strip of brocade. It was tied with a
coarsely woven ribbon of cotton yarn
embedded with a ladder design. From
the depths of that bag, she drew out an
exquisitely wrought metal sword. The
hilt was knobbed with opposing heads
of Gorgons—those vicious protectors.
The design on the upper portion of
the blade had been fashioned after the
Celtic knot. This was a real sword. Not
a let’s-pretend-it’s-a-sword cardboard
fabrication. I’d only seen such things in
illustrated books of myths and legends,
and, of course, in the movies.
Except it wasn’t a real sword for
cutting or thrusting because it wasn’t
sharp enough to cut my finger when I
rubbed its blunted edge. It was a cer-
emonial weapon rather than something
to carry into battle. It hadn’t been made
for plunging into someone’s heart, but
rather to defend the honor of one’s self
within one’s self.
Leslie placed this symbol in my
hands—this reminder of knights and
honor and gallantry. I stilled in awe that
such a thing was being passed
to me. The basket-weave metal
hand grip weighed heavily in my
left hand. The tip of the sword in
my right hand felt light by com-
parison.
“Let this help you achieve
clarity,” she said.
I wanted to say, “Wow!” I felt
myself opening to receive a new
flow of possibility, even a new
story about who I could be. But
then my contrarian tendencies
infiltrated my brain again. Was
this play-acting? Suspended on
a bridge between two realities, I
didn’t know which way to point
my feet.
“Remember the Lady of the
Lake,” she said, her pale blue
eyes reminding me of picture-
book illustrations of ice prin-
cesses. “She holds the sword in
the stillness of water until it’s drawn
out for use in the world. You’re not
in alignment with your true source of
power if you see power as something
outside yourself. The sword is not about
power over another, but about power
emanating from your deepest, most
authentic source. This comes from self-
acceptance, integrity, and commitment
to your evolution. With the gift of this
sword, you are being asked to ‘knight’
yourself, to empower yourself in the
talents and gifts that you carry in this
lifetime. This is a call to take risks in
sharing your gifts with others.”
In a sudden departure from vacilla-
tion, I surrendered. I gave myself over
to the blurred edge between reality and
fantasy. I stood in front of Leslie look-
ing into her Scandinavian eyes and ac-
cepted the gift she was giving —atten-
tion being paid to the me who struggled
to find the self she thought she could
be. This ceremony was bigger than I’d
allowed myself to imagine, this experi-
ence of finding the goddess within.
“Our Father, Who art in Heaven...”
Our Mother, Who art in Earth? Hal-
lowed be thy names. Who of us can
Restful Mood, by Annie Henrie, Provo, Utah
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BPs | = = Be . ee ae Si as
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truly know God? Many have ideas
about who and what G-d, Yahweh, Al-
lah, Shiva, the Unutterable Name of
the Divine is, but does anyone really
know”? We can guess, conjecture, muse,
study sacred writings, testimonies, eye-
witness accounts, etc., but aren’t we
all hoping to know something Infinite
that may not be knowable to the small
brains cramped inside of small cra-
niums on the shoulders of our small
bodies walking down narrow streets
in large cities in big countries in a vast
number of universes?
I have my cultural impressions of
God, gleaned from the religion of my
birth. The Mormons believe there is a
God the Father with “body, parts, and
passions.” But there are rumblings
about a Mother. The pragmatic words
“In the heavens are parents single?/
No, the thought makes reason stare./
Truth is reason, truth eternal,/ tells me
I’ve a mother there,”! were penned by
Eliza Snow, a 19th-century Mormon
poet with close ties to Joseph Smith,
the founder of the religion. These were
then set to music to create “O My Fa-
ther,” a favorite hymn. In addition,
“The Origin of Man” document
issued by the First Presidency of
the LDS Church in 1909 states:
‘All men and women are in the
similitude of the universal Father
and Mother and are literally the
sons and daughters of Deity...
man, as a spirit, was begotten and
born of Heavenly Parents.”
Even with these mentions of
the Mother, the Divine Feminine
seems a rather quiet entity, mostly
ignored by the religious masses,
except, that is, for her appearance
as the Virgin Mary, whom Mor-
mons respect but don’t revere
in the way some religions do. I
sometimes feel envious of my
“lapsed Catholic” friend Mary,
and her devotion to and adora-
tion of La Virgen de Guadalupe,
1 OhMy Father, LDS Hymnal, 292.
2 Ensign, February 2002, 26-30.
and the altar on which she lights can-
dles daily. Then there are the myths in
which the Goddess of All Things is the
Earth Mother. The Peruvians call her
Pachamama or “Mother Universe.”
And the mystical matriarchal figures
such as Shakti, Eurynome, Demeter,
Gaia, Tiamat, and Corn Mother, origi-
nating from folk wisdom and celebrat-
ing the realm of the feminine—the
Earth. As for the truth of the matter, I
have no expert opinion to offer. All I
know 1s that sometimes I like to whis-
per, “Dear Mother,” to the embodiment
of human life and its continuity, the
nurturing side of Divinity.
Recently, I tried something bold-
er: addressing the Divine Mother in
my morning prayer, but the words “O
Goddess, the Eternal Mother,” or “Our
Mother in Heaven,” didn’t trip so eas-
ily off the tongue of my mind as “Our
Father Who art in Heaven.” Even the
thought of those words makes me feel
like a daredevil or a blasphemer. Heav-
enly Father is imprinted indelibly in the
language center of my particular brain.
But why has the pronoun for the inef-
fable become He, Him, or His rather
than She, Her, or Hers, or even It?
Doesn’t the ultimate God and Knower
of All Things embody all aspects of
humanity: the female and the male, the
Grace in Gold, by Annie Henrie
yin and the yang, the Creator and the
Created, the Lover and the Beloved,
and whatever can be imagined beyond
duality?
When I think about Michelangelo’s
Pieta carved into stone, I feel what it
would be like to be Mother Mary hold-
ing the humanity of Christ in her arms,
stroking his lifeless cheek, gazing down
at her beloved son. I’ve cradled four
newborn sons in my arms and luxuri-
ated in their smell, their newness, the
pulse beating in their necks. I’ve also
held a dying son and stroked his slack
skin with the backs of my fingers, even
with one knuckle. I’ve felt his human
body glazing over as life departed. The
weight of his enervated flesh on my
lap. I mourned this son. I wept for him.
I can also feel my own mother’s
arms holding me after I came home
crying after a bad fall from my bicycle.
She picked pea gravel from the scraped
skin on my thigh. She washed and ban-
daged and loved me, and scolded me,
because she wanted her daughter to
be safe. My mother could be exacting
and harsh, but still, I can relate to the
caring aspect of God better than to an
Old Testament God who 1s continually
frustrated by His children (who rarely
obey Him), a God who demands total
obedience and threatens extinction to
those children who don’t
comply.
“Turn to the Mother-
hood of God, the Moth-
er-aspect of God,” writer
Andrew Harvey says in
The Return of the Mother.
“Allow its unconditional
love to begin to penetrate
your mind, heart, and be-
ing. Whatever religion
you belong to . . . what-
ever non-religion you
don’t practice, imagine
the Motherhood of God,
turn to it in fearless inti-
macy, and allow its love
to reach you.”
On August Ist of this year, our be-
loved sister, Chieko Okazaki, passed
away. With her passing, the LDS com-
munity lost one of its most charismatic
and engaging authors, speakers and ac-
tivists. Her experience living in a soci-
ety in which she was often marginal-
ized—whether for her race, her religion
or her sex—offered her a perspective
that made her especially sensitive to
those who felt like they did not “fit 1n”
with LDS Church culture and helped
her lead as the first counselor and the
first woman of color in the General Re-
lief Society presidency in the 1990’s.
As a thetorician, Sister Okazaki
told her stories with clarity, skill, and
heart, bringing hope and courage to
those who heard her speak. She taught
true Christian discipleship, encouraged
us to study the scriptures deeply, and to
forgive each other and ourselves. She
modeled a way to do this without giv-
ing up her sense of humor or feistiness.
At Exponent IT, we considered how
to best mark Sister Okazaki’s passing
and pay tribute to her legacy. We real-
ized to do her justice, this would take
more than a column or two. So, we are
planning a special segment in our Sum-
mer 2012 issue to celebrate her life. If
you have a story or a moment when
your life was touched by Sister Oka-
zaki’s teachings or service, please send
your submissions to editor@exponen-
til.org. m
The Gospel According to Angry Birds
by Linda Hoffman Kimball
Evanston, Illinois
“In Angry Birds, players control a flock of multicolored
birds that are attempting to retrieve eggs stolen by a group
of evil green pigs. On each level, the pigs are sheltered by
structures. The objective of the game is to eliminate all the
pigs in the level. Using a slingshot, players launch the birds
with the intent of either hitting the pigs directly or damaging
the structures, which would cause them to collapse and kill
the pigs. —Wikipedia on the game play of the puzzle video
game Angry Birds
Spending obsessive hours smashing green pigs with
slung birds revealed valuable life lessons for me. (At least,
spending time and mental energy constructing an elaborate
defense for spending obsessive hours smashing green pigs
with slung birds revealed a few.)
Angry Birds teaches that perseverance pays off.
When you embrace Angry Birds, you embrace prophetic
counsel from Heber J. Grant and the wisdom of a sage, Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Grant (President of the church 1918-1945)
was known for his determination. He overcame personal
limitations and excelled despite them. His favorite saying
was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s adage: “That which we persist
in doing becomes easier, not that the nature of the thing has
changed but our ability to do it has increased.” (Some think
that the quote was President Grant’s, but no. It was Emer-
son’s.)
Learning anything — from penmanship to the laws of
physics (which is really what’s happening when Angry
Birds’ players explode pigs) — requires sticktoitiveness.
No matter how many times the slingshot’s angle isn’t quite
right, hit the reset button and persevere! This relentless ap-
petite for learning the skills and pitfalls at every level is just
a laptop version of Eternal Progression.
One person’s OCD is another person’s perseverance.
Angry Birds offers a practicum for Joshua 1:9: Have not I
commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not
afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God [is]
with thee whithersoever thou goest.
Enemies abound in Angry Birds. There are the pigs
themselves — simple green pigs, pigs fortified with helmets,
moustaches or crowns; mini-pigs in remote corners; pigs
Angry Birds Logo, Copyright Rovio Entertainment Ltd.
suspended by balloons. Then there are their myriad contrap-
tions and bulwarks.
Yet I find the worst enemy to be my pesky inner critic.
In my head it yells, “Bad aimer!” “Flubber!” “Time waster!”
This pest is bolstered in Angry Birds by the snarky graphic
that proclaims “level failed!” again and again and again.
Diffusing this negative thinking requires faith and fortitude.
Remember D&C 122:7 “...All these things give thee expe-
rience and shall be for thy good.” Take risks knowing that
each supposed “failure” teaches the skill sets of the birds
and the foibles of the pigs who threaten (in Angry Birds and
in real life ). Meanwhile, learn aerodynamics and structural
engineering in the process.
Angry Birds takes “Peace, be still!” to new levels.
Like riding the wild, tempestuous sea, Angry Birds can
make you fearful and anxious.
Some of this anxiety takes a physical form. While Angry
Birds is no aerobic Wii experience, you may find yourself
shaking your 1Pad, twitching your leg, or leaning to the right
in futile efforts to encourage longer flights, rolling boulders,
or to nudge pig heads off outcroppings. These motions will
do you no good, but — except for making you look ridiculous
if others are nearby — they will also do no harm.
The larger task is to “keep calm and carry on.” If you
can keep a hopeful, trusting attitude while pursing level
after level like a stalwart pioneer in uncharted terrain, you
will prevail. There must surely be a way to progress, or why
would Angry Birds be selling like crazy, right?
Take these lessons to heart, enjoy and flourish. May your
nests be restored to their fullness. May your bomb birds set-
tle low and your toucans ricochet in righteousness. m
Inclusive Language in the Latter-day Saint Hymnal
by Emily Parker Updegraff
Evanston, Illinois
Nephi likened the scriptures unto himself, and we are ad-
monished to do the same. This involves forming analogies.
For example, the Good Samaratin is to binding wounds with
oil and wine as I am providing rides to church. Other times
likening needs no analogy because the scriptures give direct
injunctions. King Benjamin concludes his great sermon with
a very clear one: “And now, O man, remember, and per-
ish not.” For men, this likening of scripture to oneself is a
straightforward mental process, but for women there is often
a hitch. Because the language of scripture is almost entirely
male-oriented, women must first make an analogy before
likening the scriptures to themselves: man is to humankind
as woman is to humankind.
I have made such analogies so much that they’ve be-
come almost automatic. I accept that, for its English-speak-
ing members, the Church uses the King James Version of
the Bible rather than a more modern and gender-sensitive
translation, and the Book of Mormon 1s unlikely to ever be
adapted to modern English. Still, the pronouns used in a text
influence the way that people think about its content. Hence,
the advice to replace “we” with “I”! or to use your own name
in place of the word “you” when reading the scriptures.’ So,
while I am accustomed to likening texts written in male-
oriented language to myself, nevertheless, I must perform
an extra mental step before I can apply them to my life. This
process can be distracting at times.
In recent years, the Church has shown sensitivity to the
fact that male-oriented language may sound exclusionary to
modern ears. For example, the introductions to some of the
Teachings of the Presidents of the Church manuals contain
the following disclaimer:
“President McKay [or Kimball or Woodruff] often used
terms such as men, man, or mankind to refer to all people,
both male and female. He also commonly used the pronoun
he to refer to both genders. This was common in the lan-
guage of his era. Despite the differences between these lan-
guage conventions and more current usage, readers will find
1 Marlin K. Jensen, “The Message: Making a Mighty Change,” The
New Era June 2001, 5.
2 The Presidents of the Church: Teacher s Manual. The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City, UT. 1996, 152.
Number of times
“humankind” appears
Number of times
“mankind” appears
1975-1979 [86
1980-1984 [69
“Mankind” and “humankind” usage in General Conference
since 1970 (not including quotations). These data were obtained
using the Advanced Search Options at http://www.lds.org.
that President McKays teachings are equally applicable
and valuable to both women and men.’”
This passage acknowledges two important things: one, that
male-oriented language can alienate female readers; and two,
that modern language (at least modern English) eschews
male-oriented language in favor of inclusive language.
The sensitivity to inclusive language shown in the Presi-
dents of the Church manuals is also apparent in General
Conference. As shown in the table above, usage of “man-
kind” in General Conference has decreased over the past 30
years, from an average of 8.4 times per conference between
1970-1974 to an average of 4.6 times per conference from
2005-2009. There also has been a concomitant (though nu-
merically small) increase in the usage of “humankind.” Ad-
ditionally, in the April 2010 General Conference “mankind”
was used just 5 times and male pronouns were never used to
describe a mixed group. Thus, Church leaders are increas-
ingly replacing male-oriented language with inclusive lan-
guage in their sermons. And if current sermons reflect inclu-
siveness, shouldn’t the Church’s current publications show
similar sensitivity?
Unfortunately, Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints is not a publication that demonstrates
3. Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: David O. McKay. The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City, UT. 2003,
v. The introductions to the Spencer W. Kimball and Wilford Woodruff
manuals contain the same text as the McKay manual.
great inclusivity. Of its 326 unique hymn texts, 91 contain
male-oriented language (using “man” or “mankind” to de-
note humanity, “brethren” to denote a mixed group, or “he/
him” to denote a mixed group). Given the frequency with
which hymns are sung and the general importance of hymns
in Mormon life (1.e., the First Presidency introduction to
Hymns says, “We hope the hymnbook will take a prominent
place among the scriptures and other religious books in our
homes’), it is significant that nearly one-third of the hymns
in the LDS hymnal contain male-oriented language. In a
publication as oft used as the hymnal, the Church should
consider using inclusive language.
Making the hymnal inclusive would involve revising ex-
isting hymn texts. Would removing male-oriented language
be akin to rewriting scripture? Would it ruin the poetic na-
ture of beloved hymns? While it 1s hoped that hymn texts
will have a place “among the scriptures and other religious
books” in Mormon homes, hymn texts do not have the im-
mutable nature of scripture and there is precedence for
changing them, as discussed below. Additionally, if Church
leaders saw fit to make hymn texts inclusive, much male-
oriented language could be corrected by a single word sub-
stitution that would not alter the meaning, flow, or poetic
nature of the text. For example, the phrase “that man may
rest” in “Gently Raise the Sacred Strain” could be rendered
“that all may rest” or “that we may rest.” Or, the fourth verse
of “Jehovah, Lord of Heaven and Earth” could read “One
general chorus then shall rise from those of every tongue”
rather than “from men of every tongue.”
This kind of simple word substitution is commonly and
tastefully done in other Christian hymnals. Take, for ex-
ample, three popular hymns found both in Hymns and in
hymnals from the Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Presbyterian
denominations.
“All Glory, Laud and Honor” Verse 2 *°
LDS Hymnal Hymnbook 1982
(Episopalian)
The company of angels
The company of angels
Is praising thee on high;
And we will all creation
In chorus make reply.
Are praising thee on high
And mortal men and all
things
Created make reply.
4 Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Deseret
Book Company, Salt Lake City, UT. 1985, x.
5 Hymnbook 1982 (New York, N. Y.: The Church Pension Fund,
1985), 154).
6 Evangelical Lutheran Worship renders it “Creation and all mortals/
in chorus make reply”
“Christ the Lord is Risen Today” Verse 1 ’*
LDS Hymnal
Evangelical Lutheran Wor-
ship (Evangelical Lutheran
Chruch of America)
Christ the Lord is risen
today,
All on earth with angels
say Alleluia!
Christ the Lord is risen
today, Alleluia!
Sons of men and angels say
Alleluia!
“Jesus the Very Thought of Thee” Verse 2’
LDS Hymnal Hymns, Psalms, and Spiri-
tual Songs (Presbyterian)
A sweeter sound than Thy
blest name,
O Savior of us all.
A sweeter sound than thy
blest name,
O Savior of mankind!
These examples demonstrate that revising hymn texts to
be gender-neutral and inclusive can be done in an aestheti-
cally pleasing manner, and in such a way as to not change
the meaning of the text or to alter the meter and flow of well-
known and loved hymns.
At some future date, Hymns will be revised. When it is,
modifying existing texts to be more inclusive would do a
service to both women and men, in making explicit the fact
that the teachings of the hymn apply equally and are equally
valuable to all. At the very least, any new hymn texts in-
cluded in a newly published hymnal should contain inclu-
sive language, as other Christian publishing houses currently
demand.'° Such revisions and requirements would also be in
keeping with the trend toward using inclusive language in
the sermons and writings of modern Church leaders.
Would anything be lost by modifying existing texts? Two
primary concerns might be a loss of poetic value and a pos-
sible betrayal of fidelity to the author’s original words. In
the great majority of cases, a simple solution may be found
that preserves the poetic nature of the text, as in the above
examples. Regarding fidelity to the original text, the Church
has already shown a willingness to change texts for various
reasons. Examples of modified texts in Hymns include “Joy
7 This hymn text is set to different tunes in these two hymnals, hence
the omission of “Alleluia” in the Lutheran hymnal. Hymns uses Easter
Hymn and Worship uses Orientis partibus.
8 Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis, M.N.: Augsburg For-
tress, 2006), 373.
9 Hymns, Psalms, & Spiritual Songs (Louisville, K.Y.: Westminster/
John Knox Press, 1990), 310.
10 The Augsburg Fortress guidelines for sacred music submissions
read: “All publications should show a concern for inclusive language.
While classic texts are normally honored and retained for their poetic
value, new texts for hymnody, psalmody, and liturgical rites should
include generally accepted inclusive language for humanity.” http://augs-
burgfortress.org/comopany/submitmusic (accessed 21 September, 2010)
to the World” and “Praise to the Man.”
Hymns retains changes to “Joy to the
World” made by William W. Phelps in
order to give the text a more millennial
meaning (“Saints and angels sing” rath-
er than “heaven and nature’’).'’ And the
first two lines of “Praise to the Man”
originally read, “Long may his blood,
which was shed by assassins, / Stain I]-
linois while the earth lauds his fame.”
But “when the Latter-day Saint Hymn
Book was compiled in 1927, in order to
be in harmony with the ‘good neighbor’
policy of the Church and nation, the ...
line quoted above was changed.’’””
Clearly, the Church wishes to avoid
giving offense and is willing to sacri-
fice fidelity to an author’s text when
modern sensibilities require it. Show-
ing sensitivity to more than half of the
Church’s own members is at least as
important as not offending its neigh-
bors. As a final point, the goal of in-
clusivity may be flexible enough to
allow for exemptions in certain cases,
for instance where scripture is directly
quoted (as in “Love One Another’)
or in rare cases where the meter of a
verse cannot possibly be maintained if
changes are made.
What would be gained if hymn
texts were made more inclusive? Wom-
en and men would not need caveats and
explanations to understand that a text is
meant for both sexes. And when read-
ers are not taking the step of making
analogies in a text, they can focus more
on its message. The scriptures are for
us, for our generation. And so are the
hymns. It should be explicitly clear that
their message is not just for males. m
11 Davidson, Karen Lynn, Our Latter-day
Hymns, the Stories and the Messages (Salt
Lake City, U.T.: Bookcraft, 1988), 214.
12 Ibid. 56.
April Young Bennett
South Jordan, Utah
“What man is there of you, whom if his
son ask bread, will he give him a stone?
Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a
serpent?”
Long before children start asking
for bread and fish, all biological parents
gave their children a few stones and
serpents through their DNA, like bad
eyesight or crooked teeth. Ours were
more serious than average.
My husband, Jared, has two chron-
ic diseases. He was born with neurofi-
bromatosis (NF). NF causes tumors to
grow in the nerves, causing disfigure-
ment and chronic pain. These tumors
can interfere with organs or become
cancerous. At the ripe old age of 28, he
was diagnosed with another unrelated
illness: idiopathic cardiomyopathy.
That’s medical Latin for heart disease
with no known cause. To prevent early
death, Jared’s heart requires constant
maintenance using expensive, power-
ful drugs with unfortunate side effects.
NF is a dominant trait: any child born
of a parent with NF has a 50% chance
of getting the disease. Jared’s doctors
believe his heart disease is genetic, too.
With the known 50% risk for NF plus
some unquantifiable risk for heart dis-
ease, it is more likely than not that any
child possessing my husband’s DNA
would be sick.
Jared lives a fulfilling life in spite of
chronic illness. Still, genetic disease 1s
not the legacy we wanted for our chil-
dren. “If God wants to give my children
a disease, He can, but I don’t want to
be the one to give it to them,” Jared de-
clared.
That’s why we conceived our chil-
dren by artificial insemination with do-
nor sperm.
Confronting Ethical and Religious
Concerns
As active Mormons, we wondered
if we should bring our children to the
temple for sealing ordinances, like ad-
opted children. We checked the Church
Handbook and read that children from
insemination are already considered
sealed to their parents, like naturally
conceived children.
However, the Handbook did not
provide a glowing endorsement of
the procedure. It stated, “The Church
strongly discourages artificial insemi-
nation using semen from anyone but
the husband. However, this is a person-
al matter that ultimately must be left to
the judgment of the husband and wife.
Responsibility for the decision rests
solely upon them.”
The Handbook did not explain why
the Church frowns upon donor insemi-
nation. We tried to guess. The donation
process—masturbation—might be the
problem, or perhaps there are “design-
er baby” concerns. Maybe the Church
simply prefers adoption, or is waiting
before endorsing new technology.
We eventually focused on deciding
how we felt about these issues rather
than trying to learn Church policymak-
ers’ opinions. After all, even these poli-
cymakers, who were clearly less open
to the idea of donor insemination than
we were, agreed with us that this is a
“personal matter that ultimately must
be left to the judgment of the husband
and wife.”
Of possible ethical concerns, fore-
going adoption resonated most with us.
Providing homes for children in need
would make good come from our situ-
ation; however, we felt that American
infants who were up for adoption were
not really in need, since so many infer-
tile couples were competing for them.
The cost of adopting children from
overseas was prohibitive. Insemination
was cheap—not dollar-movie cheap,
but less expensive than infant adoption,
in vitro fertilization, or raising a child
with chronic illness.
We seriously considered another
meaningful and inexpensive option:
adopting older children in foster care.
But I was afraid that I couldn’t help
or even love a child who, through no
fault of her own, may have developed
serious emotional problems during her
earlier childhood of neglect and abuse.
I was also afraid I would love her, only
to have her snatched away from me and
returned to her biological parents.
I am ashamed that I did not dare
to rescue foster children. Ironically, if
we had conceived children naturally, I
don’t think I ever would have realized
that my choice to bear my own children
was a choice to forego rescuing foster
children.
Shopping for a Daddy
Shopping for a biological daddy via
sperm bank is not at all like the tradi-
tional method of finding a father. When
I dated, I didn’t give any thought to my
suitors’ genetic codes, as evidenced by
my final choice: a kind, talented, intel-
ligent man with a lousy genetic resume.
A sperm donor’s only contribution to
a child’s life is his genetic code, so it
takes on paramount importance.
However, the jury is still out on how
character, personality, and intellect are
linked to our genes, so we weren’t tak-
ing any chances. We purchased all the
information available about the donors
we considered.
We agreed that a perfect family
health history was the most important
quality in a donor. We soon realized,
though, that all donors have perfect
health histories. That is how they get
the job. Health records were reassuring
but useless for decision-making.
Their baby photos were cute, but
whose baby photos aren’t cute? (Awk-
ward, pre-teen photos would be more
useful for the process of elimination,
we joked.) And my brain couldn’t paint
any pictures from the facial features re-
ports. What does a nose look like that
is “round in front” and “straight in pro-
file’? And why should we care? Such
trivialities were not relevant.
The recorded interviews persuaded
us most. One donor said he hated read-
ing. Is hating reading genetic? Probably
not, but lack of appreciation for litera-
ture was just as much a turn-off to me
in a donor as it was in a date. I wanted
a smart, thoughtful, well-rounded do-
nor—like my husband. Donor 3500
sounded a lot like Jared—both played
guitar and were Ph.D. candidates in a
scientific field. Mr. 3500 also seemed
kind and intelligent. Jared and I agreed
that he was our man.
Disclosing to the Grandparents
We never intended to keep our de-
cision a secret. Jared, who is naturally
reserved, might have been able to keep
quiet. For me, a more open person, a
lifetime of little white lies would be
frustrating. I didn’t want to give false
hope to Jared’s relatives with NF
(“None of Jared’s kids came out sick,
Illustration by Pat Langmade
in spite of the risk. That could happen
for us, too.”). Most importantly, I didn’t
want our children to experience unnec-
essary fear, since there was no reason
for them to worry about inheriting their
father’s sicknesses.
Still, we were nervous about how
our conservative families would re-
act to a nontraditional conception. We
tested the waters by telling my parents
first. Unlike Jared’s family, my family
was not losing its biological connection
to our children.
We prepared ourselves thoroughly,
rehearsing reasonable and tactful re-
sponses to all of the hypothetical con-
cerns my parents might bring up.
I was shocked by their reaction.
My well-rehearsed explanations were
wasted on a pair of people who were
too giddy about the prospect of a new
grandbaby to care about such details.
When pressed, they enthusiastically
congratulated us for finding a way to
avoid passing on Jared’s health prob-
lems.
I was confused. Who were these
people? I thought I remembered them
as conservative.
Encouraged by this success, Jared
spontaneously spilled the beans to his
mother on the phone a few days later.
He discovered that she was every bit as
conservative as she seemed.
I wasn’t pleased when Jared told
me he had promised his mother that we
would talk to our bishop before my in-
semination. “It’s none of the bishop’s
business,” I protested.
Jared agreed but implored me to
consider performing this little ritual to
help his mother feel better.
I empathized with my husband’s
mom. We were breaking the biological
tie between her and her grandchildren.
Moreover, our decision to save our
children from NF seemed to critique
her decision to risk passing on the dis-
ease. It didn’t seem unreasonable to put
myself through one undesired bishop
interview to save her a little angst about
the status of her son’s soul.
At the interview, Jared said some-
thing about insemination and the bish-
op cut him off, telling us that was a per-
sonal decision. Phew.
Doing the Deed
My body has an irritating tendency
to avoid ovulating until the weekend.
This would be adaptive if my husband
were impregnating me through sexual
intercourse following a romantic week-
end date. Instead, we would frantically
locate the doctor on the weekend and
persuade him to open up his office.
The insemination itself is a pain-
less—and unlike sex, pleasureless—
one-minute procedure. Although the
procedure was uneventful, we were
reeling with excitement after my first
insemination. We were starting our
family! After leaving the doctor’s of-
fice, we celebrated this milestone in
bed. Unlike most couples trying to con-
ceive, we used contraception.
But we were back at the doctor’s of-
fice again exactly four weeks later. On
our third try, the doctor invited my cu-
rious husband to insert the donor sperm
himself. That was when I became preg-
nant, so I can honestly say that my hus-
band made me pregnant with our first
child.
Our second child was conceived on
the very first try, leaving us with two
vials of #3500 for our third child. We
were anxious to conceive our last child
with the same donor’s sperm. Jared
wanted our children to be full blood
siblings, increasing the likelihood that
they could help each other if any of
them ever needed an organ donation,
such as a kidney. Less altruistically,
I wanted to save some money by not
buying any more sperm.
After an unusually long wait with
my pants off on the examination table,
we were devastated when the doctor
announced that the sperm sample was
not viable. We only had one vial left
and no idea whether it had been dam-
aged as well.
We tried all day to contact the fertil-
ity clinic to get our last vial of sperm
out of storage. As my fertile hours
evaporated and we hadn’t reached any-
one, I became desperate. I implored my
husband to inseminate me himself, the
old-fashioned way. He was flattered but
declined to take advantage of me, ob-
serving that the fertility hormones were
obviously clouding my judgment.
In the end, we did get our hands on
that last vial, and the sperm in it were
swimming. We conceived our third
child, our last—or so we thought at the
time.
As parents of three kids, we found
ourselves wondering about adding a
fourth child to our family. We could buy
more sperm, but not from Mr. 3500, we
assumed, who certainly would have
graduated from college and found a
real job years previous.
We considered those potential kid-
ney donations again. Children born
from donor sperm have half-siblings
across the country. We had, in fact,
corresponded with the parents of three
other children made from Mr. 3500’s
sperm. If a fourth child came from a
different donor, maybe the possibil-
ity of far-flung half-siblings would
increase the likelihood of finding a ge-
netic match in a medical emergency.
Still...
I felt silly asking, but I called the
sperm bank to find out if they had any
vials of #3500, just in case.
They did! They had two vials re-
served only for women who already
had a baby using Donor 3500’s sperm.
I bought them both.
Becoming a Family
I met my first child long before
she was born. She was tapping at me
from inside, as if trying to get my at-
tention. Before her birth, I was already
nurturing her by sharing nutrients and
protecting her developing body. And of
course, she carried a part of me in her
genes. She was mine.
Fathers usually meet their children
when they are born. I have seen many
fathers proudly rejoice over this new
acquaintance. “He has my eyes,” they
might say, or, “She has my nose.”
My husband couldn’t brag that our
baby was created with his genes, mani-
fested by her eyes or nose. I wondered
when he would start to feel that same
fatherly pride. I imagined it would hap-
pen over time, as he cared for the child.
“My daughter said ‘Da-Da’ today,” I
pictured Jared bragging. “I taught her
that.”
As soon as I delivered our daughter,
Jared only had eyes for her. He loved
her already and glowed with fatherly
pride, although she carried none of his
genes and he hadn’t had any time yet to
nurture and teach her.
I realized my mistake. With all my
careful consideration of the implica-
tions of genetics on my baby’s life, I
had somehow forgotten that she had a
spirit, too. Spiritually, my husband was
already her father. He had given up his
biological link to his child in order to
give her the gift of a healthy body. This
loving sacrifice only strengthened their
spiritual bond. She was his.
Sisters Speak gives our readers a forum to present their own ideas about a topic of interest to Mormon women. The
topic posted for the next issue can be found at the end of this column on page 26. We look forward to hearing and publish-
ing your own thoughtful response soon!
Our Sisters Speak question comes from Caroline Kline of Irvine, California:
“The Proclamation on the Family asserts that fathers should “preside over their families,” but two sentences later, it asserts
that fathers and mothers are to act as “equal partners.” According to Webster’s Dictionary, the term ‘preside’ means to exercise
direction, guidance or control and to occupy a place of authority. So how can Mormon couples be equal partners while the
man presides? Are the two ideas mutually exclusive, or is there a way to interpret the terms so that they are compatible?
How does presiding and equal partnership play out in your marriage or the marriages of those around you?”
Rachel Redfern from Sacramento, Cali-
fornia says this:
Personally, I still haven’t been able to
reconcile the preside/equal partners di-
chotomy. To me, preside still suggests that
one must be over the other, and I just can’t
believe that the Lord would resign me to a
place of secondary status within my home,
which is exactly what that wording says to
me.
Unfortunately, at this point, although I
would consider myself an active and (most-
ly) faithful member, I don’t think I want the
Proclamation hanging in my home. Every-
time I see it, I get frustrated; it’s a document
that doesn’t bring me any peace. oO
Emily Updegraff from Evanston, Il-
linois states:
It’s true that most organizations
need leaders (corporations need CEOs,
ships need captains, and orchestras need
conductors), but when it comes to an or-
ganization the size of a human family,
there is no reason why there can’t be co-
leadership between wife and husband.
So if your family is the size of a cor-
poration, a ship, or an orchestra, sure,
have a presider. If not, they are totally
unnecessary!
Furthermore, why would we aspire
to model our families on worldly orga-
nizations? Shouldn’t we be trying for
something more transcendent? Why
would anyone cite earthly organizations,
which are temporal and terrestrial, as
something after which to model families
working toward eternal life together? o
Cynthia Van Dam of New Orleans states:
When I was first married I worried a great deal about what it meant for my
husband to preside over me. I took that covenant very seriously. We have made
some mistakes in that vein and sometimes my husband has asked me to follow
him in ways that he shouldn’t have. For instance, we once decided to vote for the
same candidate because that was his choice. He has realized the error of his ways.
But over the years, we have definitely influenced each others’ political views. In
fact, these days, I yell at the candidates of my choice telling them what his party
says, and he yells at the candidates of his party telling them what my party says.
Then we laugh at each other. I think the kind of process we have gone through is
what we should be looking for. Yes my husband should preside. That may mean
for some cases that really I make all the decisions and he just “shows up and pre-
sides.” At other times, he makes those decisions and I follow. Those words sound
like I am somehow less than he is. But over the years, we have learned to respect
each others’ strengths, weaknesses and wisdom. We listen to each other. For us,
he does preside, but I think we have found something pretty close to equality.” o
Miri Shorten of Wylie, Texas says:
Unless we’re proposing to
change the definition of “preside”
and “equal partnership,” it is just not
possible to have both. If you are sub-
ject to someone’s authority, then you
are not equal to that person.
Families need leadership, not a
leader. There is no reason why two
adults can choose to spend their lives
together, but can’t make decisions to-
gether. If it’s ever necessary for one
person to be the final word, it should
be the one whose experience or
needs are most particular to the situ-
ation. Gender doesn’t need to be the
deciding factor. If someone gets the
final word because of their gender,
that implies pretty strongly that that
gender is better. And that’s not what
the church teaches... right? o
Carol Brown of South Jordon, Utah
writes:
The Lord’s teaching about priesthood
leadership in D&C 121 describes a servant
leader who serves with “persuasion, by
long-suffering, by gentleness and meek-
ness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness,
and pure knowledge.”
My husband has that kind of a heart
and has served as a bishop and partner with
humility and gentleness. Although I know
many LDS men who are loving and kind,
I have also observed some active LDS men
who are brutal, harsh, cruel, and unkind.
They treat their wives as servants and are
emotionally and sometimes physically abu-
sive. I am concerned that the statement in
the Proclamation about the husband’s role
as presiding in the home is misinterpreted
by many men in the Church as a reason to
demean their spouses. oO
Room I by Abbigail Israelsen, Bloomington, Indiana
Trudy Rushforth of Union City, California says:
I think the preside/equal partners ideas are mutually
exclusive. Either one person can preside or both people
can be equal. But, I think that navigating contradictions
is an essential part of our growth. Just like in the garden,
Adam and Eve were given two mutually exclusive in-
junctions (reproduce, don’t eat the fruit), and they had
to decide which one was more important to obey. We’re
given two mutually exclusive worldviews (husband pre-
sides, equal partners) and we need to choose which one
is more important. Oo
Shelley, a commenter on the “Modern Patriachy” post on the
Modern Mormon Men blog writes:
I see [the presiding injunction in the Proclamation] as defining
the responsibility a man has to his children. I do not believe that it
means husbands have any sort of dominion over their wives.
There are a couple of reasons I interpret it this way. First, it
specifically says “fathers are to preside” — not “husbands.” Men are
not fathers to their wives (hopefully), so I honestly don’t see why
people read wives into this statement.
The second reason 1s that this reading is consistent with the two
sentences that follow. To put them in context: (1) Fathers are to pre-
side over their families in love and righteousness ... (2) Mothers are
primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. (3) In these
sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one
another as equal partners. In context, the three sentences collec-
tively address (1) the father-child relationship, (2) the mother-child
relationship, and (3) the husband-wife relationship. Note that with
respect to this last relationship, they are to be equal partners.
So, to me, the [presiding sentence in the Proclamation| has little
relevance to a discussion on the relationship between a husband and
his wife, just as the second sentence has little relevance to a discus-
sion on the relationship between a wife and her husband. The only
relevance is in relation to the third sentence. (3) tells us spouses
are to be equal partners and are to help one another; (1) and (2) tell
spouses what they are supposed to be helping one another do. o
SilverRain from Salt Lake City says:
I think the two ideas ARE mutually exclusive when they are
viewed in a temporal, fallen light. Our society views leadership as
always better and stronger than following.
I believe that the Proclamation and other discourses are specifi-
cally worded the way they are to cause us to examine them more
closely and push ourselves to discover in what context they could
NOT be mutually exclusive. The seeming dichotomy between “pre-
side” and “equal” challenges us to examine our notions of leadership
and hierarchy.
I take Christ’s words literally when He says we are heirs to all that
He has, equal to Him. Yes, He will always be my Savior, but He lifts
me up to be equal to Him. And that is the kind of leadership, the way
to preside, that we must learn in our small, mortal minds. We must
learn to be the kinds of beings for whom power flows to us “without
compulsion” and for whom hierarchy has no value judgment. o
Church along this trajectory?
sisterspeak@exponentil.org m
Next Sisters Speak: The Church and LGBT Relations
I am encouraged in the last few years that Church leaders have generally backed away from asserting that homosexuality is a
choice, and that they now often acknowledge that they don’t know how or why people are homosexuals. I’m also encouraged
that Church leaders have affirmed repeatedly that having homosexual inclinations is not a sin. These are important steps.
However, I can’t help but think that there is/should be room within Mormonism to better welcome LGBT folk in our wards.
Do you foresee the Church carving out more room for LGBT’s to become practicing members of our Mormon commu-
nity, even if they are in committed relationships? Is there space within a Mormon framework to do this? Why or Why not?
What are the next steps leaders could take to do this? And what, if anything, can regular members do to help move the
The next Sisters Speak will appear in the Spring 2012 edition of Exponent II. Please send your Sisters Speak responses to
by Heather Olson Beal
Nacogdoches, Texas
Long before I became a parent,
years of Young Women lessons, Gener-
al Conference talks, Primary songs, and
New Era articles had taught me about
God’s plan for my life. God wanted
me to graduate from high school, go
to college (maybe), get married in the
temple (definitely), and have children
(definitely). I heard all those messages,
but somehow didn’t think they applied
to me. My mom split her child-raising
years between working, staying home,
and getting a Ph.D., so I never really
bought the idea that I’d have to choose
family or career. Even though I didn’t
know how it would all work out, I al-
ways suspected I’d end up creating my
own plan.
When my husband Brent and I de-
cided to start a family, I already had a
fulfilling career as a high school Span-
ish teacher that I wasn’t interested in
giving up. Because he was a graduate
student, he had more flexibility than I
did, so he took our daughter Kennedy
to the babysitter’s house every morning
at about 9:00; I picked her up at about
4:00. He also took care of her while I
worked on my master’s degree at night.
In terms of child care, our division of
labor at that point was close to 50/50,
which felt just about right to me. It
wasn’t the arrangement I’d been taught
that God preferred, but I was happy and
our daughter was thriving, so I didn’t
see any reason to change course. That
doesn’t mean I never questioned my
decision. I often wondered whether
I was doing the right thing, but since
the status quo was working for us, we
stuck with it.
Then, when Brent finished his
Ph.D. and got a “real” job, I flirted
with the notion of giving God’s plan
a shot and planned to stay home with
Kennedy (then 3) and Marin (a new-
born). But before the plot came to pass,
I applied for—and was granted—a
university teaching position, which I
accepted. Although I felt conflicted be-
cause a full-time job didn’t conform to
Mormon norms, I was excited for the
opportunity to advance my career and
forged ahead. I taught three mornings
a week and stayed home the other two
days. Brent dropped them off at pre-
school at 9:30 or 10:00 (depend-
ing on whether they stopped for
donuts on the way). Once again,
my job fed me emotionally and
intellectually, which enabled
me to sometimes appreciate our
division of labor at that point:
probably 70 percent me, 30 per-
cent him. Most days, however,
I longed for our former 50/50
arrangement. (Actually, I some-
times fantasized about a new
arrangement, maybe 90 percent
him, 10 percent me, but I’m
writing about the kind of person
I aspire to be, okay?)
When I got pregnant with our
third and decided I wanted to get
a Ph.D., I quit my job and we
moved closer to campus to short-
en our commute, leaving behind
a great church family and neigh-
bors in the process. On my first
day of school, I tried and failed to
find a semi-private place between
classes in which to pump breast milk
for my then-four-month-old son. With
only 10 free minutes left after my dis-
appointing search, I settled on a not-so-
private women’s restroom on the top
floor of the education building. As I
crouched over the public toilet seat to
pump, my feet and legs began to fall
asleep and I had to concentrate on not
falling into the toilet. I felt like I was
experiencing an all-time motherhood
ee. oe
low and resented that Brent could not
share this responsibility. I wondered—
perhaps for the first time—whether
I was doing the right thing. Maybe I
should be at home watching my infant
son sleep, making paper dolls with my
daughters, and having dinner on the
table when Brent came home. And why
did God’s divine plan for Brent not in-
clude any indignities like crouching on
public toilets pumping breast milk?
Photos by Aimee Hickman,
Baltimore, Maryland
But I’m stubborn, so I plowed for-
ward. Over two years, I managed to
carve out enough time to successfully
complete my coursework, which was
intellectually stimulating in a way that
board books and Cheerios was not. Our
division of labor was probably still 70
percent me, 30 percent him, but that’s
not including our babysitter extraor-
dinaire who also grocery shopped and
cooked dinner for us.
Then it was time for me to write my
dissertation proposal, which demanded
more of me than coursework. The con-
stant interruptions common with young
children started putting the squeeze
on my productivity. So Brent offered
to take a month off work during the
summer and take the kids away some-
where—anywhere—so I could have
a solid month alone to write my pro-
posal. No butts to wipe, no mouths to
feed, no fights to referee—just me and
my computer. A 100/0 arrangement!
He decided to spend the month do-
ing what he called “urban camping” in
Huntsville, Texas—my hometown, as
well as where my parents and my sis-
ter’s family live. Once they arrived, he
scoped out apartment complexes until
he found a manager willing to write a
one-month lease to a middle-aged pro-
fessor with three kids. Then he took
the kids to Rent-a-Center and let them
pick out whatever furniture they want-
ed. They chose a faux suede sectional
couch with an enormous matching
chaise lounge, a tacky dinette set, a big
TV (by our standards), a shiny black
entertainment center, and a queen-sized
mattress (Ew! Yes, he rented a mat-
tress). In short, they picked out things
we would never buy and were positive-
ly gleeful when the furniture got deliv-
ered to the dingy student apartment.
I’m not exactly sure how they spent
my sister’s kids fairly frequently, but
not as much as I thought they would.
They got a library card (they were resi-
dents, after all). They saw a lot of mov-
ies and spent a lot of time playing video
games, ping pong, and pool at the stu-
dent union. They ate at Golden Corral
a lot and washed clothes at the laundro-
mat.
And I wrote my dissertation propos-
al. I kept strange hours—writing until
late in the night if I was in the groove
and then sleeping in until 10:00. I even
went to a restaurant for lunch or din-
ner every day because I was desperate
to interact with other human beings! I
sometimes called Brent to whine that I
was lonely and just couldn’t work one
more minute. He must have smiled as
he listened to me, but he never said
“IT told you so,” because he’s nice like
that.
He sometimes called me, aggra-
vated by how stinking hard it was to
do simple things. He recounted how,
one morning, one kid couldn’t find her
shoes and another lost one of his shoes
and then two kids started fighting and
then he got to the gas station and re-
alized he’d left his wallet at the apart-
ment and then someone started cry-
ing, and all he wanted in the first place
was a Diet Coke, dammit! I smiled as
I listened, and I probably did tell him
“IT told you so,” because I’m petty like
that.
The girls
missed me—sort
of—but it was
harder for our
youngest, Stuart,
who was only two
years old and was
used to having me
around. He cried a
lot and refused to
touch water (and
this was July in
Texas, sO Sswim-
ming was a must).
He went crazy with
scissors—cutting
a bed sheet, his own hair, and two of
Brent’s brand-new shirts. He slept fit-
fully at night because an echo in his
apartment bedroom bothered him. I
talked to him on the phone, but he
was too little to really talk, and he was
stand-offish when I showed up to visit
one weekend. That made me feel bad,
but it’s not like I had abandoned him to
the stork for a month. He was with his
dad, right?
When the month was up, they
said good-bye to the rented furniture,
moved out of the apartment, and came
back home to the real world. Urban
camping gave Brent and me an invalu-
able peek into each other’s world. I got
to see what it was like to be holed up
in an office—nothing standing between
me and a deadline except for, well,
me. He got to see what it was like to
be holed up at home—nothing standing
between him and bedtime except, well,
16 hours of kid time. Neither of us was
happy with that division of labor. I
didn’t like working such long hours. I
missed reading to the kids at night and
snuggling with Stuart. Brent didn’t like
spending all day every day with the
kids and missed having some time to
nurture his own interests and desires.
I eventually finished the Ph.D. and
got a job in academia, so now we both
work full-time. Our kids (eight, 11,
and 14) are smart, responsible, and
independent. I think I was right to be
suspicious of the whole God’s-divine-
plan-for-me business. I’ve come to
believe that every person should focus
on creating his or her own plan rather
than trying to follow the standard Mor-
mon template. Although the “Mormon
ideal” has always been in the back of
my mind, I’ve tried to trust my own in-
ner voice and do what was best for our
family.
I suspect that’s the way God wants
it after all.
And if we start to lose our bearings,
we can always try another round of ur-
ban camping to get back on track. Lo-
cation TBA. &
The Lonely Polygamist: A Review in Reflection
by Gwendolyn Ivie Reynolds
Cambridge, Massachusetts
I unclenched my fist, and sand poured
through my fingers. The sun beat down on
my sticky eyelids as drops of sweat traced
down my bikini, which, to my horror, was
just a half size too small this year. My thin
towel wasn’t doing much to stop the sand’s
progression to unexplored places. The
sound of muted girl talk drifted through
my mind and faded into the rhythm of the
waves. My friends were talking about how
some of their husbands had lost their faith,
and how they were (or were not) dealing
with it. It wasn’t something I felt qualified
to address, since Andrew and I found our-
selves in the reverse situation.
“T just didn’t think I’d ever feel this
lonely in my relationship to God.” Becca’s
voice penetrated through my heated haze,
and I felt a terrible loneliness engulf me in response to hers.
“He didn’t know he’d ever feel that lonely either,” I re-
marked. What I meant to say was, I didn’t know how lonely
I'd feel either.
When we first moved out of Utah, my husband and I
were nervous about making friends. Within months of at-
tending our first Sunday at church, we were caught in a
whirlwind of Relief Society activities, book groups, Elders
Quorum BBQs, Institute lessons, Church basketball and on
and on. Our Bishop assured us, “These are the friends who
will make you who you are in life.” The community sur-
rounded us, and I was swallowed whole in the details of
responsibility and organization. Yet with each new activity,
I felt myself slipping further away from myself, towards
passive engagement and that most horrible of feelings—the
feeling of being alone in a room full of people. Loneliness in
chaos, something that, to me feels distinctly Mormon.
Golden Richards is Brady Udall’s “lonely polygamist,”
although at times it feels that “accidental polygamist” may
suit him better. After a strange childhood where Golden is
more prisoner than actor, he finds himself drawn into the
curious religion and practice that characterizes some small
sects of FLDS polygamy. Through the seemingly remarkable
act of not running in the other direction screaming, he even-
tually ends up with four wives and twenty-seven children in
a
See eee ee
POLYGAMIST.
ih i ee ee
ee eee eet ee one
The Lonely Polygamist
by Brady Udall
W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, 602 p.
three households. Even as he acquires one
responsibility after the next, Golden seems
to move through his life as a non-actor, as
someone who things happen to, not some-
one who does things.
The Lonely Polygamist is Udall’s
treatise on the Mormon Man, perhaps even
Mormon Masculinity. For Golden is exact-
ly what a Mormon Man, polygamist or not,
should not be. He 1s impotent. He is as _in-
capable of making decisions for his family
as he is of being able to sexually satisfy his
wives. He 1s even incapable of carrying out
a proper mid-life crisis, as he bungles his
way through an adulterous affair in several
cringe-worthy scenes. Golden rarely rises
to the occasion when he is needed most.
His attempt to reach out to his confused, pre-teen son Rusty
results in a conversation with Rusty speaking robot language
and Golden, left without a translator, berating his son for
“act[ing] so dang weird” (120). When the head of their con-
gregation approaches Golden about taking a fourth wife,
Golden’s response is to groan and ask if he’s already cleared
it with his first wife, Beverly.
Golden routinely tries to escape the chaos surrounding
his children and houses by hiding in nonsensical places of
quiet, while his wives carry on running his households. It
is the efficient way the women make sure everyone’s basic
needs are met, and the organization of the entire enterprise
that just barely walks the line between order and brilliant
anarchy, that truly reminds me of my very own Mormonism.
While The Lonely Polygamist 1s actually about—cough—
polygamists, it feels uncannily like the Mormonism I know.
It’s a Mormonism that sweeps you up in so many activities
and responsibilities that when you finally catch your breath,
you aren’t really sure how you got to where you are. It’s a
Mormonism whose dark side can sometimes reveal impotent
men and desperate women, while maintaining an appearance
of sweet innocence. You don’t have to be a polygamist to be
a lonely Mormon, but Udall’s ingenious polygamists show
us a distorted view of ourselves that can bring our particular
loneliness in chaos into stark relief. m=
In 1872, our foremothers began publishing The Woman’s Exponent (1872 to 1914). One hundred years later,
their spiritual granddaughters formed Exponent II (1970s to present), and thirty years after that, a new generation
launched The Exponent blog into the digital realm (2006 to present). By reprinting thematically linked articles from
these three different publications, we hope to pay homage to this chain of sisterhood.
What does it mean to “feel at home?” What, in the physical and emotional environment, fosters a sense of safety?
How does place influence our spiritual growth? These three generations of essays offer a broad perspective on
homemaking and the process of finding shelter in our surroundings.
The Woman’s Exponent: Aunt Polly’s Letter from Laie
by “Homespun”’
Vol. 17, No. 23 (May 1889)
Dear Aunt Polly:
It seems friendly and easy to sit
down and chat with you a while, but if
I were asked to sit down and write a
piece for our Exponent I fear I should
not feel to steal the necessary time to
think and write one. So if Aunt Em
finds enough in this semi-personal let-
ter to save it from the waste basket fate,
you can hear now a few of our pilikias
[troubles].
“Going home!” Joyful words with
a sweet mellow sound filled with the
odors of apples and plums, tinged
brightly with the blush of apple blos-
soms and after-time autumn leaves.
Echoing faintly with the voices of far
away and long-absent friends, what
words of melody they are: Going home.
Meanwhile, you, Aunt Polly, can
guess what is going on at this end of
the line. Shirts, skirts, pants and pan-
teletts of four dear little pairs of legs,
garments, socks, and palulis for the
pater families (by-the-by I have made
four white palulis for my husband this
fall), besides a dress and sundries for
Mamma and Grandma.
Grandma tends the two babies, does
the front-room work, and sews all day,
all day. Mamma and Lule divide up the
kitchen as best they may, Mamma hur-
rying to sew, sew, sew, that the work
of our four weeks may be crowded into
two. Baby’s advent this winter pre-
vented any sewing being done until the
last little while. You can imagine how a
great part of the winter has been spent:
counting the months—six, five, four,
three—then weeks, and now even the
days are numbered and measured. Can
you enter in our busy homes and hear
the half-sad, half-merry clatter about
ways and means, where we shall stop,
and when we shall arrive? And then the
last hours—the last time at the mill, at
the sea, at the meetinghouse, at Laie—
and we are gone.
Ferns are to be cared for and ob-
tained; mosses to be dried and pressed;
our few common shells cleaned and
prepared. What a tedious, weary job
this pressing, drying, and preserving
is, 1s 1t not? Only we who have tried
it know anything about it. You know,
our friends at home (we have often said
here to one another) think it 1s such a
simple matter: You walk upon the sea-
shore and gather in your apron all the
shells and mosses and coral you care
to, and come home and pack them up;
or you step out your back door and
gather from the surrounding rocks and
trees any sort of ferns or moss you may
like or desire. Shall I repeat the real
facts in this to you who know them
so well? No, unnecessary it would be.
So we will leave society the vague,
deliciously uncertain veil of romantic
fancy over the mystic scene which the
words “Sandwich Islands” call to ev-
ery eye, and only when alone together
shall we compare experiences, and ex-
change ideas about our Hawaiian Mis-
sion.
I long ardently to see my children,
friends and home again, and yet to
know that within another week I shall
have bid goodbye forever to Laie with
its cool sea breezes, its grassy slopes,
and above all, the ever restless, lovely
sea, whose brow, now calm and jewel-
crowned, anon furrowed with grey
and sullen foaming-tipped billows—it
makes me feel sad, or as the natives call
it, kaumaha.
One grows to love the place, and
feel a love for these ... people, dread-
ing to leave them forever.
Aunt Polly, I hope to see you with
many in Zion, till then, farewell.
~Homespun
P.S. We are just starting to the sea for
one of our last sea baths—oh, that we
could take the sea home with us. Don’t
you wish you were going along? Can
you swim? ~H. o
Exponent IT. In Search of a Place of Safety
Sue Paxman
Lexington, Massachusetts
Vol. 17, No. 2 (1993)
“And it shall be called the New Jerusa-
lem, a land of Peace, a city of Refuge,
a place of Safety for the Saints of the
Most High God...and it shall be called
Zion.’ Doctrine and Covenants 45:66
Most of us spend a great deal of our
life, knowingly or unknowingly, seek-
ing people and places that make us feel
safe—loved, nurtured, and protected.
For those of us who have suffered
abuse at the hands of others, the search
for safety becomes what we do most.
From Doctrine and Covenants
45:66 we understand that the Zion the
early Saints were attempting to build
would be “a place of safety.” What a
wonderful blessing and promise for our
foremothers and forefathers and one
that they needed desperately to believe
in. I would imagine that the emotional
and physical threats that they lived un-
der constantly for so many years made
them despair that they would ever feel
safe.
They thought they had found safe-
ty in Ohio, then Illinois, then Utah.
Eventually the attacks from the out-
side subsided, and they were able to
settle peacefully down in their western
homes to a pattern of multiplying and
replenishing, safe in their knowledge
that their enemies no longer pursued
them.
And that is the atmosphere in which
I grew up; I felt safe. I lived in a small
Utah town where everyone left their
front doors unlocked, even at night.
No one ever locked a car; everyone
had a role to play and seemed to play
it without complaint. The status quo
was rarely, if ever, challenged, which
contributed to the feeling of safe, rip-
ple-free sailing. In fact, everyone and
everything seemed, to my adolescent
eyes, to be “practically perfect in every
way.”
(Of course, I realize now that there
was as much going on under this “safe”
surface then as there is more openly
now. Crimes were being committed;
families were in trauma; people were
being cruel to each other. But no one
really talked about such things then,
certainly not to me; they mostly smiled
and kept going. The few troubled souls
that I did hear about were summarily
dismissed as “kooks.’’)
Red Heads by D’ Arcy Benincosa, Salt
Lake City, Utah
I felt safe when I walked alone
through the fruit orchards and fields
that surrounded my house. I felt safe
when I went out on dates. I felt safe at
school. I felt safe at church. Without re-
ally thinking about it, I assumed that I
would continue to feel as safe as I al-
ways had. I did, indeed, feel like I lived
in “a place of safety.”
As I grew older, things began to
change. I began noticing that I was
feeling less sure of being safe. People
began locking their doors. I didn’t feel
comfortable walking by myself. I no
longer assumed that everyone I met
was “nice.” The place that I called Zion
began showing the outward signs of
being physically unsafe.
But even more disturbing, I be-
gan noticing that even in those places
where I had felt spiritually safe, I
sometimes felt unsafe. It was a shock
to discover that too often the structures
that are meant to protect us and keep
us safe can also protect practices that
can make us unsafe; for example, not
all homes are safe havens for all of the
family members who live there; not all
men who hold the priesthood are safe
people to be with; not all of us are com-
fortable playing roles that others have
determined for us; not all practices la-
beled “Church” make individual souls
feel safe.
I don’t think that things are really
that much different now in either our
physical or spiritual worlds, but I do
think that because our spiritual sphere
is growing so rapidly—changing and
progressing as it grows—we are begin-
ning to notice the unsafe places. And
we want them to be made safe so that
Zion can be accomplished.
Women, who are changing the way
they view themselves and their roles
and taking more responsibility for
their own destinies and for the build-
ing of Zion, are discovering that having
these new views often makes them feel
unsafe. Some women who have raised
interesting and important theological
questions about the nature of deity and
their own places in God’s plan have
often been made to feel unsafe. Those
fearful of change can be cruel in their
fear. Some may even use the basic hu-
man need for “a place of safety” as a
weapon by threatening to take that
comfort away.
The way the business, government,
and church organizations are run 1s also
changing as these groups begin to re-
flect the new diversity of the people in
them and the changes that they repre-
sent. Those directing operations want
to remain in charge; those who are do-
ing the operating want to be recognized
and play more of a part. AS we move
through these transitions, however, we
must not permit the needs of those who
fear change to take precedence over the
entitlement of all of the Saints to find
safety in Zion, even those Saints who
are pushing the hardest for that change.
Zion is a place for all of us to dwell,
safely.
by D’Arcy Benincosa
In my view, the best we can all do
is try to see change as progression, and
progression as something that we have
consecrated ourselves to ensuring will
happen. Our reason for being here is
to improve—to perfect ourselves and
to build “‘the New Jerusalem, a land of
peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety
for the saints of the Most = God.” o
The Exponent Blog: Safe
by P. Anderson
Scottsdale, Arizona
October 16, 2009
People give us furniture. I’m not
entirely sure why, but they do. Because
of this, most of the furniture we own
is used, old, and mismatched (maybe
that’s why people give us furniture).
We’re super cheap so we don’t see
much point in buying new furniture
when what we have is fully functional.
A while ago a friend from my ward
came over to my house on
fairly short notice so we
could practice a duet to-
gether. As she was waiting
for me to finish printing out
the music she sat down in
my lime green rocker and
made herself at home. Af-
ter a few minutes she said,
“You know, I really appreci-
ate your house.”
I smiled and asked
her what she meant. She
went on to explain that she
doesn’t have super-nice
matching furniture, or art-
fully painted walls, or fam-
ily portraits in nice frames
on every wall. She sighed,
and patted the arm of the
rocker and said, “Yep, I feel
right at home here.”
I found the conversa-
tion interesting because it
was coming after the holi-
days, when there had been a
string of Relief Society ac-
tivities held in members’ homes
rather than at the church building.
Without fail, every home we went to
was tastefully and expensively decorat-
ed, with matching furniture and framed
portraits. The conversation with my
friend told me that I wasn’t the only
one who felt slightly inadequate about
the state of my house.
To a large extent, it is a problem of
size. The only houses large enough to
accommodate the whole Relief Society
are going to be big, expensive houses,
owned by affluent ward members. On
the other hand, the only ward members
willing to volunteer their homes for
such gatherings are the ones who feel
confident that their homes are fit to be
seen. In that way it becomes a self-per-
petuating problem. Since everything
we see looks like a Pottery Barn cat-
alogue, we begin to believe that any-
thing less isn’t good enough.
I want this to stop. So I’ve quit giv-
ing my house an extra special cleaning
for the visiting teachers (we vacuum
for the home teachers, but that’s be-
cause they’re allergic to cats). If my
house is clean enough for family, it’s
clean enough for everyone. I’m going
to have a weekly activity at my house
(humanitarian aid quilts) and I’m not
going to kill myself trying to fix the
ratty cat-scratched curtains before the
first meeting.
I hope women from the ward will
come and sit in my lime green rocker
(with a missing button cover) and feel
a little bit safer letting other people into
their lives, and their homes. Maybe
then we can all start feeling safer let-
ting one another into our hearts. m
DEATH OF A FATHER
by Neylan McBaine
Salt Lake City, Utah
The wide automatic doors swung open
leading from the Kennedy Airport lug-
gage claim to the taxi stand outside,
blasting me with the oppressive heat of
a New York City August and the patch-
work of international faces. My gaze
settled quickly on my tall blond hus-
band at first glance, although it did take
me a moment to realize how odd it was
he was waiting for me when we had
agreed I would simply take a cab home.
Still, after spending the past week in
San Francisco with my three children
— the last only two weeks old — tending
to my dying father, my husband’s face
was a delightful relief.
I had still been in the hospital with
my baby, hours old, when I bought my
tickets to go to San Francisco. Instead
of meditating on the fuzz on my baby’s
head or the pucker of her lips, I had
been taking hourly phone calls from my
uncle who reported my father’s failing
health from a two-year battle with mel-
anoma. As the holder of the power of
attorney and as the only non-estranged
child of a twice-divorced man, I alone
was responsible for making all medi-
cal decisions. I held newborn life in the
crook of my arm while holding death
up to my ear.
At the airport, grateful to put aside
the week of hospice, lawyers, bottles
of oxycodone, and my confident assur-
ances to my dad that I would see him
again in a few weeks, I started handing
my husband the Hello Kitty backpacks
and the baby car seat that had accom-
panied us cross country. Instead of un-
encumbering me, my husband took me
firmly by the arm, led me to an alumi-
num-wrapped pillar away from the taxi
crowd and said directly: “Neylan, your
dad died while you were on the plane.”
Looking back on the scene, I re-
member such odd things: the way the
Passage by Sharron Evans, Vista, California
Vol. 31, No. 3
cheap aluminum felt cool as I slid down
the pillar to the linoleum floor; my hus-
band hovering over my crumpled body,
protecting me from the glances of the
crowd gathered around; the individual
faces I noticed in that crowd — a woman
with dirty blonde hair, an Indian man
— even as I shrieked with abandon; the
clarity and boldness of my thoughts
even as my throat began to hurt from
the guttural cries and my body seemed
to seize: “Are my children watching
me? Are these people going to go home
and tell their families about me over
dinner? Leave it to Dad to create some
drama!” But also: “Is this what grief
feels like?”
I take comfort in knowing that, de-
spite my seemingly mundane observa-
tions during my moment of spontane-
ous release, I felt true anguish at the
news that my father had died. I often
reassure myself that my visceral re-
sponse was genuine, that the scene in
the airport, with its cinematic drama,
wasn’t a fabrication. Because by the
time I went to bed that night, my griev-
ing had ended.
Grief was defined for me when I
was twelve by an American Ballet The-
ater production of Romeo and Juliet and
I saw Lady Capulet raging and pulling
out her long, ballet-dancer hair at the
news of Tybalt’s death accompanied by
the rawness of Prokofiev’s score. At the
time, it seemed frightening yet tantaliz-
ing to know that I had the capacity as a
human to feel loss that violently. Since
my father’s death, there have undoubt-
edly been moments of wistfulness and
nostalgia — “Oh, Dad would really have
liked that” or “I wish Dad could be here
to share this with us” - but despite my
moments on the airport floor, there has
been no hair pulling for me. No sus-
tained feelings of hopelessness or de-
Page 33
bilitating depression. In the three
years since my father’s death, I
haven’t struggled with overcom-
ing my loss. I’ve struggled with
the guilt of not feeling my loss
more acutely.
Here are my excuses: I had
a complicated relationship with
my father. As the only child
of my divorced parents, I bore
both his suffocating adoration
and cold disapproval in equal
measure. Frantically possessive
about his time with me, his de-
mands to see my family strained
my marriage and left us bewil-
dered since he wore ear plugs
around my kids anyway. And
yet, his sincere pleasure in being
with me — if not my children —
and his efforts at tenderness kept
me tethered to him.
My newborn baby also dis-
tracted me from the grieving re-
sponse. I simply had to move on
with new life. In addition, I was
responsible for cleaning out storage
units full of four generations of fam-
ily belongings and selling his library
of books and paintings, which proved
to be a full-time job for at least six
months. Yet with all the distractions,
a little voice nagged, “This isn’t grief.
Why am I not grieving?”
Not having experienced a signifi-
cant loss before, the question remained
for me: What is grief? Am I feeling it?
Simply the fact that I wasn’t sure made
me uneasy. Shouldn’t grief be like be-
ing in love: you know it when you feel
it? And shouldn’t the amount of grief
you feel be directly proportional to the
amount of love you felt for the lost
person? Had I really loved my dad so
little?
I prayed to be forgiven, repenting
of my inability to feel more deeply, for
the lack of love so evident in my cool-
ness. I prayed to feel like Lady Capu-
let, for more than just my few minutes
on the airport floor, whose balletic art-
istry made my quick recovery seem
ee o*,
raat ;
a! x
Dove, detail by Sharron Evans
even more banal. I prayed not only to
my Heavenly Father but to my earthly
father, now in spirit, begging his for-
giveness for not missing him more, not
honoring his memory more profoundly.
I felt bitterly ashamed at the thought
that the dispassion I had sometimes felt
towards him privately in life was now
fully evident to him in his all-seeing
perch up above.
Ironically, it was the very picture
of my father up in heaven, hurt by my
indifference as he looked from above,
that led me to my eventual peace of
mind. As this image continued to haunt
me — my secret feelings being bared to
a man who had loved me the best way
he knew how — it dawned on me how
completely I believed in that image.
My father was, indeed, alive in spirit.
I was absolutely sure of it. I am abso-
lutely sure of it.
I began talking to my dad more
regularly, explaining what I was feel-
ing and taking time to honor him with
sincere reflection. I played his favorite
recording of Verdi’s Requiem on the
first anniversary of his death, fo-
cusing my thoughts on him and
why he loved Verdi with the kind
of passion I charged myself with
lacking. As I sorted through the
hundreds of family photos he
left me, I allowed my mind to
remember him, both fondly and
with annoyance, and laugh at
the fact that he was, eccentric as
always, buried in his McBaine
tartan, although generations re-
moved from Scotland.
And, slowly, came the realiza-
tion that my inability to grieve
stems directly from my inability
to believe that my earthly father
is extinct. This is insufficient
comfort to many who are robbed
of time here on earth with be-
loveds, but for me, this realiza-
tion explained why my airport
scene had been so fleeting: the
shock of being fatherless on this
earth was quickly replaced by
the assurance that our separation
is temporary. That death 1s a manifesta-
tion of timing: my baby’s life quietly
overlapping with her grandfather’s here
on earth when they could have just as
easily missed each other; my life inter-
secting with my father’s more briefly
than another daughter’s might intersect
with her own father’s.
My questions have not been entirely
laid to rest, but they have changed. In-
stead of asking why I am incapable of
grieving, I ask instead: Does my faith
in my Heavenly Father’s transtemporal
plan of life make me an insipid mourn-
er here on earth? Likely so, but the
very rhetoric of the question relieves
me of personal guilt by disassociating
my reaction to my father’s death from
my feelings for him. Rather than ex-
coriating my meager reaction to loss,
I choose to affirm what I have gained:
a knowledge that my father - both of
them - lives. &
FLANNEL BOARD
How to Use Daughters in My Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society
The Exponent II Staff
At Exponent IT we have eagerly await-
ed the distribution of the Church’s new
book, Daughters in My Kingdom: The
History and Work of Relief Society
(DIMK). Overall, we are pleased that
a book about women and the Relief
Society has been created for main-
stream use. The Church has not speci-
fied a plan for its use beyond a news
release, stating that “copies of Daugh-
ters in My Kingdom will be distributed
to women around the world to be used
as a resource for personal study and
for teaching in the Church and in the
home.” While we like the open-ended-
ness this offers, Exponent II is eager to
find ways for DIMK to be employed by
both women and men, on a ward level
as well as in personal study, to deep-
en our appreciation for the contribu-
tions women have made to the Church
throughout its history.
Third Hour Lessons—First Sundays
of Relief Society: Much of DIMK ap-
pears to have been written for easy con-
version into a Relief Society or Priest-
hood lesson. For instance, the chapter
“Nurturing and Teaching Investigators
and New Converts” usefully centers a
discussion of Gospel teaching and fel-
lowshipping around the example of
Sister Silvia H. Allred’s mother, who
Vol. 31, No. 3
served as a branch Relief Society presi-
dent in El Salvador (91-92).
There are also general themes
throughout the book that can be made
into lessons. Chapter 4, “A Wide and
Extensive Sphere of Action,” would
be a great starting place for a lesson
on Mormon women’s role in the pub-
lic sphere. Sharing the story of Belle S.
Spafford’s experiences with the Inter-
national Council of Women presents an
opportunity to recall the original inde-
pendence of the Relief Society and to
talk openly about what we can do today
to be strong, independent women in our
Church and global community (88-91).
Fifth Sundays—Relief Society/Priest-
hood Combined: DIMK offers a chance
during combined fifth Sunday meetings
to engage the entire ward in a discus-
sion of Relief Society and women’s
issues. It appears that many Mormon
men have had little exposure to Relief
Society history or its work. D/MK can
provide occasion to educate Mormon
men about historical events that are not
well known and highlight the actions of
powerful women, past and present.
Chapter 8, “Blessings of the Priest-
hood for All,” could initiate a frank
conversation about gender equality in
the Church. This chapter includes state-
ments like Barbara W. Winder’s here:
“T learned that when you are invited to
a meeting, you are not invited to come
' DAUGHTERS
| CPP es Mag : Aingdor é
THE HISTORY AND
WORK OF RELIEF SCRCIET%
and complain about all your problems,
but you are invited to come with solu-
tions. Then together you can talk about
ideas to see what will work. The priest-
hood brethren expect and need the per-
spective of the women of the Church.
We need to be prepared and assist
them” (141). A statement like this one
can enable a dialogue about the posi-
tive ways in which men and women
have worked together as equal partners
in the Church and can facilitate such
cooperation going forward.
Elders Quorum and High Priests
Group Lesson: Priesthood leaders
could use DIMK to teach a lesson on
Relief Society history to men in the
ward. The celebration of the Relief
Society birthday in March makes this
an obvious time of year to teach such
a lesson, though we hope all Church
members will be interested in this his-
tory more than once a year. Addition-
ally, these lessons could be taught by
a woman, perhaps a member of one of
the auxiliary presidencies. Relevant
suggestions as to the content of these
lessons are included in the preceding
sections.
Providing Supplemental Materials:
DIMK can be used as a reference dur-
ing Sunday School and other Church
meetings to interject women’s voices
and contributions into lessons that can
be androcentric.
Quotations: Several statements use-
fully highlighted in sidebars through-
out the book are gender-inclusive or
focus on women and/or Relief Society
and should make their way into Sun-
day discussion. Something as simple
as quoting Bathsheba W. Smith’s testi-
mony would be an easy way to include
women’s voices in any Sunday lesson
(34).
Teaching Examples: DIMK chronicles
the Relief Society’s charity work dur-
ing the Church’s time in Nauvoo and
includes an excerpt of the Nauvoo Re-
lief Society minutes (available online)
in which Joseph Smith offers commen-
tary on | Corinthians 13 (22-23). Such
material could enrich New Testament
Gospel Doctrine Lesson 34, “Keep
the Ordinances as I Delivered Them,”
which discusses | Corinthians 12-14.
Pictures: Typically, our ward libraries
have lots of pictures of men (famous
and not-so-famous) engaging in good
works. This book is full of pictures of
women doing the same things. Online
these pictures can easily be resized and
used for any lesson when a picture of
praying, serving, proselytizing, etc. 1s
needed.
Learning and Claiming Our History:
One of the best things about DIMK is
that it can introduce Church members
to the history of Relief Society. Many of
the stories in this book have footnotes
that guide the reader to other books and
publications that provide more infor-
mation. When reading in DIMK about
the Relief Society’s wheat mills, some
of us longed for the rich (and humor-
ous) detail in Women of Covenant. At
the end of that section, a footnote refers
readers to the pages of Women of Cov-
enant upon which those interested can
read more (188 n. 36). Other important
historical records like the Relief Soci-
ety Magazine, the Nauvoo Relief So-
ciety Minutes, and Woman’s Exponent
are also indicated in the footnotes, all
of which can be found online.
With a little study (perhaps through
a monthly, small Relief Society group
meeting, like a book club), DIMK can
be used as an outline for delving deeper
into the history of the Relief Society.
Following DIMK’s footnotes as well as
bringing books like Mormon Enigma,
Sisters in Spirit, and Mormon Sisters
into our personal study may afford a
richer sense of the history and work of
Relief Society.
Writing Our History: In addition to
having a book group to study DIMK and
other books about Mormon women’s
history, a memoir writing group could
also use this book to get motivated to
record their stories and perhaps submit
them to publications like Exponent IT.
We are encouraged and excited to
have a Church resource devoted to the
history and mission of women in the
Church for mainstream use. We hope
all members of the Church will be pro-
active in using this book as a spring-
board to enrich our understanding of
Church history and bring women’s
voices to the forefront. Please adapt
these ideas and use your own. And let
us know how it goes.
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