Exponent II's Blog, page 153

Guest Post: The Sacrifice of George Bailey

Guest Post by Anelise Leishman. Anelise is a BYU English grad and an avid writer, podcast listener, and general consumer of media. You can find more of her work at aneliseleishman.com.

Each year on Christmas Eve, my family watches Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” And each year—especially now, as I begin to settle into adulthood—it holds more and more meaning for me.

For the uninitiated, “It’s a Wonderful Life” walks us through the life of George Bailey: a man who, despite his ambitions to travel the world, spends his whole life in his hometown of Bedford Falls running the Building & Loan company his father left behind. He struggles to keep the business afloat and prevent the villainous Mr. Potter from taking over the entire town. At the end of his rope one Christmas Eve, George is given the “rare gift” of seeing what the world would be like if he had never been born. Without his influence, George sees his little world of Bedford Falls in a bizarre, fallen state, the people closest to him destitute and alone in “Pottersville.” He realizes how much his life—one that before he saw as wasted in a “shabby little office”—is really worth.

Frank Capra’s Catholic faith figures heavily into his storytelling. One of the biggest clues is the name of Mr. Potter’s housing project: Potter’s Field. This presumably takes its name from the New Testament, from the “field of blood” that the chief priests purchase with Judas’s tainted silver pieces after his suicide: “And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in” (Matt. 27:7). With this in mind, George Bailey emerges easily as the film’s savior figure. Without the Building & Loan and George’s kindness, the town is condemned to poverty and depravity in the potter’s field—death without salvation.

In George’s life, we see Christ’s humanity, His desperation—and, interestingly, a different type of sacrifice than we usually associate with the Savior. George spends his entire life yearning for a sense of purpose, wanting to do “something big, something important,” but his dreams of adventure are constantly thwarted by duty: instead, he carries out a life of service and sacrifice to continue his father’s legacy. It was never about what he wanted—“not my will, but thine, be done.” He sacrifices his youth, his desires, and his personal wealth to fight on the side of righteousness in the struggle for good and evil in Bedford Falls. He even undergoes his own temptation: “You wouldn’t mind living in the nicest house in town, buying your wife a lot of fine clothes, a couple of business trips to New York a year, maybe once in a while Europe? You wouldn’t mind that, would you George?”

Ultimately, the movie’s conflict centers around a debt that has to be paid. In the end, George is able to pay it with the help of his friends. His kind deeds and many sacrifices over the years are repaid to him tenfold, and we see that his sleepy life in Bedford Falls is bigger and more important than any lofty adventures he might have had otherwise. One by one, we see all the people who George has saved, and the impact that one man’s life—and even his death—can have in his own little universe.

Each year I watch this movie one year older, as my grasp on what “faith” is becomes more complicated, often tied up in dogma and politics. But I find that this film grounds me in what a life of service looks like. It remains to me one of the strongest and most tangible allegories of Christlike love and sacrifice, and what it means to touch as many lives as possible for the better.

The Sacrifice of George Bailey

Guest Post by Anelise Leishman. Anelise is a BYU English grad and an avid writer, podcast listener, and general consumer of media. You can find more of her work at aneliseleishman.com.

Each year on Christmas Eve, my family watches Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” And each year—especially now, as I begin to settle into adulthood—it holds more and more meaning for me.

For the uninitiated, “It’s a Wonderful Life” walks us through the life of George Bailey: a man who, despite his ambitions to travel the world, spends his whole life in his hometown of Bedford Falls running the Building & Loan company his father left behind. He struggles to keep the business afloat and prevent the villainous Mr. Potter from taking over the entire town. At the end of his rope one Christmas Eve, George is given the “rare gift” of seeing what the world would be like if he had never been born. Without his influence, George sees his little world of Bedford Falls in a bizarre, fallen state, the people closest to him destitute and alone in “Pottersville.” He realizes how much his life—one that before he saw as wasted in a “shabby little office”—is really worth.

Frank Capra’s Catholic faith figures heavily into his storytelling. One of the biggest clues is the name of Mr. Potter’s housing project: Potter’s Field. This presumably takes its name from the New Testament, from the “field of blood” that the chief priests purchase with Judas’s tainted silver pieces after his suicide: “And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in” (Matt. 27:7). With this in mind, George Bailey emerges easily as the film’s savior figure. Without the Building & Loan and George’s kindness, the town is condemned to poverty and depravity in the potter’s field—death without salvation.

In George’s life, we see Christ’s humanity, His desperation—and, interestingly, a different type of sacrifice than we usually associate with the Savior. George spends his entire life yearning for a sense of purpose, wanting to do “something big, something important,” but his dreams of adventure are constantly thwarted by duty: instead, he carries out a life of service and sacrifice to continue his father’s legacy. It was never about what he wanted—“not my will, but thine, be done.” He sacrifices his youth, his desires, and his personal wealth to fight on the side of righteousness in the struggle for good and evil in Bedford Falls. He even undergoes his own temptation: “You wouldn’t mind living in the nicest house in town, buying your wife a lot of fine clothes, a couple of business trips to New York a year, maybe once in a while Europe? You wouldn’t mind that, would you George?”

Ultimately, the movie’s conflict centers around a debt that has to be paid. In the end, George is able to pay it with the help of his friends. His kind deeds and many sacrifices over the years are repaid to him tenfold, and we see that his sleepy life in Bedford Falls is bigger and more important than any lofty adventures he might have had otherwise. One by one, we see all the people who George has saved, and the impact that one man’s life—and even his death—can have in his own little universe.

Each year I watch this movie one year older, as my grasp on what “faith” is becomes more complicated, often tied up in dogma and politics. But I find that this film grounds me in what a life of service looks like. It remains to me one of the strongest and most tangible allegories of Christlike love and sacrifice, and what it means to touch as many lives as possible for the better.

The Creation of Anna and Mary

The Virgin Mary and her mother, St. Anne.

Last Sunday I listened to a gorgeous celebration and meditation on Advent, presented by Gina Colvin and Maxine Hanks. The rare conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter was mentioned, along with apocryphal accounts about the immaculate conception of Mary in the body of her mother, Anna, as well as the conception of the Christ child in the body of his mother, Mary. They spoke of the bringing together of contraries, and the powerful energy created in that kind of space. Just as the disparate and distant heavenly planets of Jupiter and Saturn appeared to connect and create a new light in the sky, these women from long ago created a divine presence of God on earth from their lowliest of positions in their society.

Anna was shunned by her temple and church leaders. She listened to the divine call to create life in a way that was unheard of, and not in line with the established way.

Mary also heard and accepted the divine call to create the life of God in the world. She did so outside of the law. She did so, fully aware that the cost could be her life, her existence. She had to trust, to have faith, that her part of creating something that was considered illegitimate in her world, could bring about a way of being, a life of love that would transcend human law, and reveal a higher divine law.

We discussed the role Mary’s mother must have had in all this. What had she shared, and taught Mary? Was she there for the birth of her grandchild? Did Mary go to her cousin Elizabeth right away, because she had learned from her mother to recognize the divine role women played in Godlike creation, even and especially when inspired messengers declared news that was outside the established law.

So much of this story is not something to be known, or answered, or proven.

The unanswerable, mystical nature of it spoke to me, and I relished this discussion. I find the core messages of the restored gospel to be very mystical. Not so much about provable, definite answers of certainty, but rather much more about a created, divine journey of seeking greater life.

During this Advent discussion, I kept thinking of my Mary and Anna stained-glass window.

24 years ago, I was in London helping my dad with his Theater Study Abroad student group. I spent one Saturday morning at the marketplace on Portabello Road. I noticed a few very old stained-glass windows outside one of the shops. I was captivated by one of them, which was unlike what I had seen in any of the many churches and cathedrals I had visited.

It depicted a woman, whose face resembled that of my great grandmother. The face of the young girl kneeling before her looked very much like the face of my eldest daughter.

I kept looking at each detail of this small, exquisite window. The woman was teaching the girl from a script. The girl was humbly listening.

Then I noticed the title near the top of the window.

The Virgin Mary and her mother, St. Anne.

This was Mary, being taught by her mother. She was learning of her heritage. I knew the scriptural accounts of the women in Mary’s ancestry were of women in the margins, women who did not fit into the acceptable or expected traditions or laws.

I went into the shop and asked about the window. It had been made in the 19th century, by a company that was known for the unusual colors of its windows. It was made for a church that was built in 1850. The church had recently been demolished. This shop housed the salvage company which had removed anything from the building that could be saved. I looked at other items in the shop – large, exquisitely carved altar pieces, and huge windows depicting scenes of scripture stories.

I expressed wonder that a church which held such a beautiful window would be torn down. The owner patiently explained that there were not always resources to save, maintain, or repair the old churches. He said that some were demolished without any attempt to salvage any part of them. He was grateful to be a part of saving pieces that could still be appreciated, even when the building was no longer of benefit.

I thought of how vehemently some, including myself, might cling to old traditions and structures that were no longer working to expand God’s kingdom, God’s love here on earth. At what point can I let go of something that I have grasped, sometimes just because it has been around for a long time? Can I look for what it is about tradition, paradigm, stories and histories that is worth salvaging and continuing, and then let go of what should no longer be maintained?

It is a complex and difficult place to be – acknowledging a past once cherished which cannot continue as is, and embracing what can and ought to be salvaged, examined again, and created anew.

It is a place of contraries.

I thought of how Christ came to fulfill, complete, and do away with the old law. From this tradition, he became the savior that brought the new and great commandment to love one another.

I was able to purchase the window. The owner listened to me tell him about my great-grandmother, and daughter. About my love of the Nativity story, and collection of handmade nativities that expressed the individual nature of the artists. I was moved when he gave me a small section of another window, the only part they could salvage. He said the large window was of the angels appearing to the shepherds and proclaiming the good news. The small section he gave me showed just a hand, and part of a banner that had the words “Earth, peace”. I am grateful for his generous gift.

Today, I look at this unusual scene on my Mary and Anna window. A mother, teaching her daughter where she comes from, and who she is. I can almost picture Anna laying her hands on Mary, and anointing her to be the creator of divine life. There is no human-made law, or tradition that can speak more clearly, or inspire more deeply than this kind of blessing.

Would this image have been as moving to me if it were not so unusual? I don’t know.

I would love images of inspired, prophetic, divinely creative women to be displayed and encouraged everywhere, and not just in the Relief Society room, or the sister’s locker room in the temple. I would love images such as this to be used to teach boys and girls and everyone on the gender spectrum about the universal qualities of creation, and about how we can each be a part of bringing the life of God into the world, each in our own, uniquely creative way.

I find value in structure and pattern and practice. Daily prayer, and reading, and pondering, and study has helped me learn to listen, and serve, and show up, even when it is not easy or convenient, even when I don’t feel like it, or don’t want to deal with seeing God in people I don’t agree with. The practice helps me challenge what is known, to have room for what is beyond my knowing. It teaches me to be open to the divine voice. The structure and the practice are an important part of my journey, but the journey is not for the practice itself. It is meant to carry me further, without end.

Anna, and Mary, and others whose lives were shaped by strong faith practices, were not led by an angel to follow tradition, or past practices, or wait for permission from church authority before accepting the call to create a new life for themselves and others. This might seem to be something assigned only to these women, but it is very much in line with what Christ did with his life, and the example he asked us to follow.

This is a message for all of us.

I look at this scene of Anna and Mary, I am reminded of the power, the need we have to share our moments of recognition. Those moments when we see something divine within us, within each other.

I look at the small window piece that is salvaged from wreckage that once depicted angels reaching out, proclaiming the good news… “And on Earth, Peace. Good will toward men.” There on this piece is the outstretched hand, and the words “Earth, peace.”

This is the message of the good news of the gospel that brings me hope at this time of the longest, darkest nights.

And I look forward to the coming light.

Guest Post: Being Released from my Calling Because of the Pandemic

Guest Post by Piper Anderson

I was released as Young Womens president, because I found myself in a sort of catch-22 caused by Covid-19.

I have believed for decades that young women should be doing activities that are on-par in cost and time investment with activities the boys do. I’ve been lucky during my time as young women president to have bishops that agreed with me on that subject so we’ve been able to do lots of good exciting things.

The primary trouble I faced most often was my own lacking experience. Having never done high adventure activities myself as a youth, figuring out how to do those things was a barrier we had to overcome in providing those activities to the girls.

However, this year we’re in a global pandemic and my bishop and I no longer saw eye to eye. He felt that the youth needed more activities, bigger activities, and zero online activities.

He doesn’t see the pandemic as a big threat and, admittedly, lots of teens are currently starved for interaction. Zoom fatigue is real, and it is hard to generate engaging activities done at home over a video call. He felt that the ‘home-centered, church-supported’ catchphrase was missing the ‘church support’ without substantial, in-person activities. 

On the other hand, I do see the pandemic as a big threat. I thought the ‘church support’ could be provided to the youth with care packages, personalized attention, facilitating online interaction, and *maybe* a few carefully planned outdoor activities while case numbers were low. 

This diverging worldview is how I ended up being responsible for the girls playing Scattergories over Zoom while the boys went on campouts, go-karting and similar activities. If I could have changed his mind I would have.

A still shot from a video tutorial on medieval braiding I put together for the Young Women

There were a few activities where I sent my less-cautious counselors to run activities without me, but I still felt awful about it. Here I was making plans and sending out emails encouraging parents to send their daughters to activities that I personally refused to attend because I didn’t think they were safe enough.

My options were to have the big activities and expose myself and the girls I loved to unacceptable levels of risk, or to insist on low-risk activities and be the cause of the exact sort of sexist imbalance that nearly drove me out of the church as a young adult.

I dropped all this on the Bishop’s lap a few months ago. He asked if I was requesting a release. I explained that I didn’t want to be released, but wanted to make sure he understood the way I saw things and the sort of conflict I was dealing with. I left it up to him. I was close to having been in the calling for the traditional three years, and planning for next year’s activities and Girls Camp was starting soon, so I was unsurprised when he opted to release me. 

I moped for a week or so when he let me know his decision, but was surprised how much it stung when it actually happened a few weeks later.

I really loved that calling, and I hate how it ended. 

Why Does the Story of Mary Sound Like Satan’s Plan? (and Other Christmas Questions)

I’ve heard the story of Jesus’ birth many, many times, but it’s not really a story about him. He’s a newborn at his most prominent moment, and does nothing but lie in his manger. The story is really about Mary, and everyone else is a supporting character.

What happened in the Bible always seemed pretty straightforward to me, until I also became a mom. Over the years, more and more things have jumped out at me as being a little off. In the spirit of Christmas and honoring the women’s stories who so often get erased from history, I want to present my top seven questions about Mary’s story. I don’t really have great answers to any of them, and I’m not counting on a Relief Society lesson to cover it for me – but here goes. 

1. Why didn’t anyone ever ask Mary if she wanted to be Jesus’ mother? The angel Gabriel just showed up and informed her what was going to happen without ever offering her the option to say yes or no. What about her free agency? Shouldn’t she have been allowed to say no? I learned in primary to always choose the right – something that is literally impossible to do without your God-given gift and privilege of agency. 

Wasn’t it Satan’s plan to make everybody be good and do the right thing and make it back to heaven together? If Mary was just told what to do in the grand plan of salvation without being offered the chance to refuse, was she not having Satan’s plan forced on her? Why is everybody okay with this? Apostles get extended their callings. Joseph Smith was allowed the opportunity to say, “Nope, I’m good, I’ll pass on this martyrdom thing”. Even Jesus himself went to the cross willingly. Why is Mary the only person in the whole history of the gospel that was just told what to do, rather than invited? 

2. Did Mary have to be so young? Historians think Mary was about 14 years old when she had Jesus. I just so happen to have a 14 year old child right now (a boy), and I’m feeling extra certain this year that 14 year olds are not emotionally mature enough to handle something as intense as parenting the savior of the universe. In fact, they can barely handle something as intense as their science fair project. While biologically a 14 year old can produce another human being, if God needs to send His only begotten son to a mother who was prepared to mold the mind of literally the most important person ever born, wouldn’t He wait until the mom’s brain was fully developed before putting her in charge of baby Jesus? You cannot prepare a 14 year old to be mentally mature enough to handle such an enormous responsibility any more than you can make a two year old grow to be 6 feet tall before they’re an adult.

3. Why couldn’t God have waited to impregnate her with Jesus until AFTER she was married? An illegitimate pregnancy at 14 (while betrothed to another) would have made her the gossip of the town. Her unbelievable story (“I swear you guys – the Holy Ghost got me pregnant. I’m a virgin. It’s like, a miracle!”) would never be widely believed by most people she knew. I know that Joseph believed her after an angel visited him, but how mortifying would it be for everyone she grew up with to think she was not only immoral, but then a liar (with a ridiculous, absurd lie) about what happened? That seems unnecessarily cruel to her. How long was it going to be before she was married? Could God not have waited a few months to send Jesus to earth? 

I remember being fourteen. I was very embarrassed over far smaller things than an unwed pregnancy. There just *had* to have been mean/popular girls in Mary’s hometown, because they are everywhere. Mary must’ve been humiliated (at least, if she was anything like every single self conscious 14 year old girl I’ve ever met in my entire life). That just seems so mean! Why did she have to get pregnant with Jesus right BEFORE getting married instead of right AFTER getting married? (Or if it absolutely had to be a miraculous virgin birth, couldn’t it have happened closer to her wedding date so that her community wouldn’t have realized it occurred before she was wed?)

4. Why did Mary have to travel to Bethlehem at such a late stage of her pregnancy? First off, it’s weird to me that you had to travel to wherever you were born to pay your taxes. Isn’t that wildly and unnecessarily complicated? How often do you do this – is it every year? What if citizens don’t have any money left to pay taxes because they’re forced to leave their farms and jobs and income sources to travel for weeks to get to another place to pay? And were they not going to every town anyway to collect the taxes that are owed by everyone who was ever born there? Why not just have them pay their taxes in the city they currently reside in? 

But, fine. Apparently you had to travel to pay your taxes. Couldn’t Joseph have gone without her? First off, the trip would’ve been much faster (and cheaper) without a pregnant girl on a donkey. Maybe he could’ve made the trip, paid the taxes, and been back by Mary’s side before Jesus was even born.

And by taking Mary to Bethlehem with him, she lost her entire support system during childbirth. As a young new mother, I think she would’ve been much better off staying at home with her family. She would’ve had her mom, aunts, grandmas, older sisters, and female friends who already had children nearby. Joseph was her husband, but he did not know anything more about newborns than she did. 

My own husband was not there at the birth of our first child. He was deployed with the military in the Middle East. Instead of him by my side, I was taken to the hospital by two female neighbors. My visiting teacher spent the night and sat next to me while I gave birth. Female friends visited me, drove me home, and gave me lots of breastfeeding advice. Ideally I would have had them AND my husband there, but if given the choice of only one or the other – other women are significantly more useful with a newborn than a first-time dad.

Mary did not need to be with Joseph right then. She needed to be home with her female support system. It makes zero sense to me why she wasn’t at home on her due date, even if someone had to go pay their taxes. 

5. Had Joseph and Mary even been intimate yet, since she was already pregnant at their wedding? How pregnant was she when they tied the knot? Did they wait until after Jesus was born and she’d recovered from childbirth to have their honeymoon? Assuming Mary loved Joseph and looked forward to a married relationship with him, was she robbed of her first romantic encounter by experiencing them as a nursing mother who’d recently given birth? Normally a woman is at least somewhat sexually experienced by the time she has her first baby. The first time she returns to intimate relations with her husband can be challenging even in the best of circumstances, because the body parts involved in the encounter might be recovering from some tears, stitches or cuts. That’s usually not a huge deal, and the new mother can anticipate things getting back to normal, because she knows what normal felt like. But was Mary not only a new mother, but also a virgin new mother, trying for the first time to experience a sexual relationship with her husband while recovering from a traumatic childbirth in an animal stable (with no doctors or pain medication)? 

6. How did Mary handle the stress of King Herod trying to kill all the babies under the age of two in an attempt to kill her son? Not only did Mary have the stressful and often terrifying experience of an unwed (and unchosen) pregnancy as a 14 year old girl, she spent her first years of motherhood in constant fear that her child would be ripped from her arms at any moment and brutally murdered. In fact, soldiers across the land were specifically hunting for her and her baby to do exactly this. She surely would’ve heard about many other children being killed and know that if she stepped forward and gave up her own son, the slaughter would be stopped. 

It sounds like the plot to a psychological thriller/horror movie where a teenage girl is running for her life from killer assassins and must outwit them with her limited survival and defense skills. She must do this while hiding an infant and experiencing the deep moral dilemma of whether her child’s life is more valuable than all the other baby boys combined under King Herod’s reign of terror. Why do we only show a peaceful Mary in a manger scene and never acknowledge the horrors she was about to experience?

7. Did Mary know that her son would have to suffer and die at some point? Like I said earlier, I have a 14 year old son. On the days that I don’t feel like locking him in his room for a few years, I’m actually quite looking forward to the human being he will become. If I knew instead that his future was a ticking time bomb counting down to a horrific future murder, I would lose my mind. How did Mary not ever lose her mind? 

We always talk about Jesus and his unspeakable suffering for all of us – but why do we not talk about Mary and HER unspeakable suffering, too? Our Christmas hymns sing about peace and calm, but the story of Mary is also one of public humiliation, an uncomfortable and unsafe childbirth, and isolation from her loved ones in her time of greatest need. Maybe we should reflect on Christ’s suffering at Easter, and use Christmas to reflect on Mary’s.

So this week, let’s talk about Mary at least as much as we talk about baby Jesus. I think the Christmas story really belongs to her, not him. 

Hope in Lament

“Lament” by INTVGene. The original photograph has not been modified, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Back in April, my congregation talked about hope one Sunday at Zoom church. We weren’t sure what to do with hope, because it felt like hope was the equivalent of mindless optimism, and no one was feeling very optimistic. About a month into the pandemic and it was starting to become clear that COVID-19 was going to be disrupting our lives for some time. I determined that hope should be practical, because I couldn’t drum up any optimistic feelings. This would look like me exercising hope by donating to the local food bank, as an expression of my hope that everyone in my community would have enough to eat. Donations to food banks are fine expressions of hope, but I was also sure that I was missing something.

Several weeks ago, I encountered hope in an entirely new way. I was giving the peace lesson on lament for a different Zoom church. I’ve been learning about lament in my Hebrew Bible class at seminary and at the suggestion of my professor I’ve been praying Psalms of lament. This exercise had helped ease some of my pandemic-related fear and despair so it felt right to make that the subject of my lesson:

A Path to Peace through Lament

In this present moment, so many of us are grieving. We may have lost loved ones to Covid-19 and we may have been ill ourselves. We may have lost jobs and housing. Quarantine and social distancing and tension over elections and politics may be straining our relationships. Our children might be at home instead of going to school. We are worried about ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities and may feel powerless to fix things. All of this is heaped on top of systemic injustices and natural disasters.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was trying to stay on top of my grief by naming all of the things I was losing: quiet alone time in my office at work, the physical presence of colleagues and friends, sharing coffee and meals with others, getting to visit my sister and her family, and singing in person with my congregation. I have spent various chunks of the past months feeling my grief and alternatively just wanting everything to be fine. And now there is part of me that feels like I should be used to this by now. Life must go on, I tell myself. I am tired of grieving and so I feel I must be done.

I want to offer that engaging in intentional grieving and lament are practices that can help us stay connected to our empathy. When we attempt to shut off or distance ourselves from our feelings, we shut down empathy for ourselves and have less to give to others. I do wonder if the political polarization in my country is related to this process of disconnecting ourselves from our feelings and losing our empathy in the process.

The Hebrew Bible offers models for grieving. Amid the many psalms of praise are also psalms of lament, which express the psalmist’s grief at God for letting things get so hard. These days, these psalms resonate with my own prayers of desperation. I don’t believe that God intervenes directly in human affairs, but in moments when I am overwhelmed, I wish that God did.

In Psalm 74 (NRSV) verses 21-22, the psalmist addresses God with their concerns

Have regard for your covenant,
for the dark places of the land are full of the haunts of violence.
Do not let the downtrodden be put to shame;
let the poor and needy praise your name.
Rise up, O God, plead your cause;

When we express our grief and lament, we trust God with our vulnerability and make room for a full range of feelings, honoring the humanity in ourselves, which allows us to hold that for others.

Our prayer for peace-through-lament comes from Psalm 102 (NRSV) verses 1-11. Pray with me.

Hear my prayer, O Lord;
let my cry come to you.
Do not hide your face from me
in the day of my distress.
Incline your ear to me;
answer me speedily in the day when I call.

For my days pass away like smoke,
and my bones burn like a furnace.
My heart is stricken and withered like grass;
I am too wasted to eat my bread.
Because of my loud groaning
my bones cling to my skin.
I am like an owl of the wilderness,
like a little owl of the waste places.
I lie awake;
I am like a lonely bird on the housetop.
All day long my enemies taunt me;
those who deride me use my name for a curse.
For I eat ashes like bread,
and mingle tears with my drink,
because of your indignation and anger;
for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside.
My days are like an evening shadow;
I wither away like grass.

God, be with us in our grief and help us find a way to peace through our lament. Amen.

As I was reading Psalm 102 in the church service, I felt the grief of that lament, the loneliness and the feeling of being abandoned by God. I also felt something else emerge from within me: a deep longing for justice. The pandemic and our country’s inability to manage it better have been a tremendous injustice disproportionately born by Native American communities and communities of color, the elderly, and those with disabilities. This longing for justice, I realized afterward, was hope. It wasn’t a smiley feeling that everything was going to be all right but an overwhelming desire for things to be different from how they are. And so we lament in this season of Advent, hoping, through our words and actions, for a better world to come.

The peace lesson begins at timestamp 14:50.

“And they were sore afraid” – when we aren’t feeling peace, love and joy

The Angel Gabriel Appearing to the Shepherds by Alfred Morgan

On the night Christ was born, a group of humble shepherds were blessed with a visitation from a heavenly messenger announcing the glorious news. What were they feeling as they experienced this miracle? Joy? Reverence? Awe?

No. The Bible reports that they were “sore afraid.”

I once gave a gift to someone who opened the present, frowned at it and set it aside. Her reaction clearly was not personal; she repeated it with every gift and every gift-giver. But it was demoralizing nonetheless to witness a response that was so far off from the delight I had expected.

As an activist, I frequently witness similarly disappointing reactions when a policy change I have worked for finally comes to fruition. While I expect supporters to be excited, relieved or grateful, they are just as likely to express anger that the previous policy ever existed in the first place, that it took so long to change or that the change wasn’t big enough. The outpouring of negativity in the wake of good news can be more demoralizing than seeing a gift set aside by an unthankful recipient. I worry about strategy; how will we get policymakers to do what we want when we behave this way when they do? And more personally, why doesn’t anyone appreciate our efforts to make this happen?

During the Christmas season, I often feel the peace, love and joy expressed by Christmas cards. But amidst the work and expense required by the festivities, I can feel tired, worried, or grumpy. In a vicious cycle, I compound the negativity when I berate myself for having the “wrong” feelings.

There is nothing strategic about feelings, and by definition, a gift freely given demands nothing in return, not even a smile or a “Thank you.” Sometimes the greatest gift we can give is to honor others’ feelings, letting them sit with their feelings without our judgment, even if what they emote makes us uncomfortable. We can practice this kind of empathy with ourselves, allowing ourselves to be human and feel the way we feel.

May this holiday season bring peace, love and joy; and if it doesn’t, that’s okay, too.

On the 8th anniversary of Wear Pants to Church day

Image courtesy of the New York Times

Recently the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a press release congratulating the President-elect and Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris respectively, for winning the latest election. In their statement they also thanked the following administration for public service. This is something church leaders have always done.

On December 7th, Elder Dale G. Redlund also asked members to wear masks and not to politicize face coverings. He said that wearing a face covering during the pandemic is “a sign of Christlike love.”

What has been interesting to me are the responses I have seen from members of the church on social media for these two statements. The vitriol was so extensive and pervasive that the Church Newsroom shut down comments on their Facebook page. Members were accusing church leaders of being corrupt, led by the deep state, and falling into apostacy. These are the same people that I presume sustained the First Presidency as prophets, seers, and revelators at the April General Conference.

It’s interesting to me that on the 8th anniversary of Wear PANTS to Church day that the same people who threatened Steph Lauritzen’s life for organizing this event and called all of us who participated in this apostates who are disobeying and not sustaining the prophet, are now having a conniption over a gesture the church has always performed in American politics.

I was called an apostate and told to leave the church for many things:

Wearing pants to church. Advocating for women to bear witness in sacred ordinances. Advocating for the equality of women in ecclesiastical leadership positions. Supporting women who felt uncomfortable being relegated to the mother’s room during church services. For asking my ward members to stop denigrating non-Members during church lessons. Non-members like my father.Speaking out about the harmful messages and sexual objectification of teenage girls during modesty lessons. Advocating for LGBTQ rights (I actually almost got fired from LDS Family Services for that). Speaking out against the cover up of sexual abuse in the church (e.g. Joseph Bishop, Michael Jensen). For having a career and being a mother at the same time.

I wonder if the church leaders will treat these same people as being in apostacy like they treated all of my feminist friends. It will be interesting to see what happens. I want my friends who were pulled into Bishop’s offices and interrogated over things they said on the internet to know that I’m thinking of you if this event is triggering. I’m reliving a lot of of the hurt and trauma these days seeing groups like Deznat and Fair Mormon mocking and threatening those of us who stood up for what we believed was right – equality and treating people with Christ-like charity – not facing the same church consequences we faced.

All I can do this Christmas season is hold tight to the lyrics from my favorite Christmas hymn “O Holy Night” and remember that speaking out against oppression is the way of Christ.

Truly He taught us to love one another
His law is love and His gospel is peace
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His name all oppression shall cease
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name
–Placide Cappeau

The History We Keep (and what we let go)

The following essay is by Emily Gray, a managing editor for Exponent II. We invite you to submit to our upcoming issue about family history and legacy.

A few months ago, my mom gave me the family Bible. It is not the giant tome you might imagine, the kind of object that dominates a shelf and contains copious blank pages for the keeping of records of births and deaths. It is a tiny New Testament, smaller than my hand, bound in lightly embossed leather, a fragile object passed down from mother to daughter in my matrilineal line since my ancestors first carried it across an ocean and a continent from Scandinavia to Salt Lake City in the late 1800s. 

They passed down the book, but not the Swedish language necessary to read it. Anxious to assimilate their families to the English of their newly-chosen home and people, they let go of the mother tongue but kept the small volume of scripture that linked them to the place of their ancestry, long past the time that any member of the family could read it. 

Every year on December 13th, we honor our Swedish ancestry by celebrating St. Lucia day. We make gingery Pepparkakor cookies and sweet saffron Lussekater buns; my daughter puts on a white dress tied with a red sash and we light candles in a crown on her head, singing the traditional Lucia Carol with Swedish words we don’t understand while wax drips into her hair. 

The Lucia tradition is a paradox. The independent and strong-minded Swedes held on to Saint Lucia long after Martin Luther’s Reformation supposedly removed all the saints from Christian practice in Scandinavia. It is hard to say why Lucia, of all saints, had such staying power; the early Christian martyr from the Mediterranean coast of southern Italy surely had little in common with the hearty farmers of the northern climates and no understanding of their long, dark, cold winters. But the people of Sweden loved her, so over the objections of Lutheran theologians they continued to honor her, a relic of their ancestral religion brought forward into the new in the same way that my ancestors carried their small copy of the Swedish New Testament along with a new English Book of Mormon into their new life in the American Zion. 

I wonder what my daughter will take of her heritage forward into the future she is building for herself. What will she hold on to? What will she let go of? We gave her a pioneer name and told her the stories of all her heroic Mormon ancestors. It looks like she may choose to lay aside the high-demand religion they bequeathed us, but will she still connect in some way with their courage and the convictions that led them to make great sacrifices for what felt right and true? If she chooses to have a daughter, will she dress her as St. Lucia and teach her to make Pepparkakor? Or will she transform these stories and traditions, as we have, into practices that make sense to her in a life we cannot yet imagine?

The spring issue of Exponent II invites us to think about these kinds of questions as we ponder what family history and heritage means to each of us. How have you made the names on a four generation genealogy chart come alive to you? How have you dealt with difficult stories and complicated relationships in the history of your family? How have you created traditions that link past generations to the future? What kind of an ancestor are you yourself going to become? Please send essays of 700-2400 words to exponentiieditor AT gmail DOT com. Submission deadline: January 4, 2021. We look forward to hearing your stories. 

The Forgotten Women of the Nativity

The Birth of Mary

Last month, I unpacked my nativity set with my toddler son, handling the smooth olivewood figures carved in Bethlehem for purchase by eager Christian tourists. We named the figures as we put them in the tableau on top of the piano and then stood back to admire the scene. Mary was surrounded by five men, but her gaze took in only her baby. 

The overwhelming male-ness of the nativity scene felt jarring. For millennia and across many cultures, including in the days of Jesus, birth was an exclusively female event: a laboring woman was attended by midwives and female family members. Only after the groans of productive agony had ceased and the blood and afterbirth were cleaned up were men permitted to enter. There is little reason to suppose Jesus’ birth was any different.

One of the many problems with men being in charge of written and oral histories through the centuries is that not only do women and their lives and contributions get erased, but that things that are unique to the female experience don’t get recorded, whether because they are viewed as distasteful, as inconsequential, or because men are ignorant of them. Matthew and Luke mention Jesus’ birth in a sentence or less, glossing over the messy and vital work of women with a euphemistic, “and she brought forth her first born son.” 

It has been undisputedly established that women have been and continue to be written out of history, their achievements attributed to men, their contributions minimized or forgotten altogether. When women are remembered by history, they are often written as hypersexualized beings, their sexuality their most defining feature. It is as if men are unable to conceive of women as people like themselves, so their femaleness,  regardless of their other attributes, becomes the most salient thing about them in the historical record.

I’m convinced that the only reason Mary hasn’t been written out of the nativity story is because it wasn’t possible to give Jesus’ origin story without mentioning her. But like many of the women history has recorded before and after her, Mary’s sexuality became a fixation for the male historians who wrote about her. It was not enough that she gave birth to Jesus; it had to be a virgin birth. And it was not enough that she was a virgin when she conceived Jesus; she had to remain celibate for the rest of her life. In a historical tradition where women are stereotyped as either madonna or whore or crone, Mary was the original and ultimate Madonna.

I’ve always felt the almost tangible lack of women in the scriptures, in the temple, in religious and secular histories alike. I try to peel away the layers of the “official” story of the birth of Christ that have been lacquered onto our cultural consciousness for two thousand years to find the empty spaces where women must have been: the Bethlehem midwife who, with her assistants, attended to Mary even though Mary was poor and unlikely to be able to pay; the women who lived in the house whose stable housed the holy family; the women in Mary’s and Joseph’s extended families who taught Mary the art of breastfeeding and caring for her infant; the wives and daughters of the shepherds and wisemen who cared for home and hearth while their husbands pilgrimaged to see the foretold Messiah. 

If angels appeared to shepherds, and if the wise men were inspired to seek out Jesus, surely there were also women who took part in the adoration. We don’t have a record of angels appearing to women to tell them about the birth, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. More likely, though, I imagine that women were led to the Christ child through the same network that connects women in communities all over the world, that of communicated need spread quietly from woman to woman that we use to help each other to this day. Surely there were warm meals, fresh linens and blankets delivered to the new mother by women who heard of her situation. Surely these women were able to hear Mary tell her birth story, to hold and adore the baby. And, surely, their gifts were every bit as needed and appreciated as gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

My nativity set is beautiful and meaningful to me, and I recognize the power in the traditional narrative. But I wish I had another nativity set to place beside it, one with a calm and competent midwife tending to Mary, with the woman of the house making the space as hospitable as she could, with neighbors bringing gifts of bread and cloths and bedding, all paying homage to the child and his mother in the unassuming and practical way women have cared for each other through the ages.