Exponent II's Blog, page 159
October 7, 2020
Exponent Love in the Time of COVID
The following the letter from the editor for the Fall 2020 issue of Exponent II. The stunning cover art is by Rachel Thomander and you can see more of her work here. To receive this issue in all its glory, subscribe at our store by October 15, 2020.
As I reflect on my tenure as the Editor-in-Chief of Exponent II, I am proud of the work we’ve done in achieving many of the goals I set in 2015. We have continued the effort to make Exponent II more intersectional, turning toward marginalized voices of queer folk, women of color, and people with disabilities. Our art editor and layout designer have expanded the artists we showcase and our editorial team has increased the number of first-time authors. As the first Exponent II editor with no history of living in Boston, I’ve endeavored to enlarge the geographical reach of the magazine and increase the number of contributors and subscribers from all parts of the world. Over the years we’ve covered many of the topics that I hoped to tackle: environmentalism, midrash, art and creativity, and spiritual legacies.
Producing an issue entirely during a quarantine due to a pandemic was not on my list of goals. As the Spring and Summer 2020 issues were conceived earlier, this is the first issue that began and ended during the COVID-19 era.
As we wind down the year 2020, I think all of us feel unusually weighed down, exhausted by what has happened, troubled by current events, and worried about what is coming. Producing this issue felt unusually hard as writers, artists, and staff dealt with increased burdens and a lack of time and emotional resources. Because of this, I am unusually proud of this issue and grateful to the contributors and staff that made it happen, even during an extremely hard time. The resulting collection of essays and art is powerful.
In this issue, Eliana Massey writes about experiencing the anticipatory grief of a queer woman knowing she needs to leave the church that she loves. “Exercising Defiance” by Jamie Stokes and “Truth” by Lorraine Jeffrey look at how modesty and chastity are taught in the Church and alternative ways of teaching those principles. Our Women’s Work feature introduces readers to Alexandria Scott, a woman who has started Ditto Kids, an anti-racism magazine with the goal to teach love, respect, and an awareness of inequality. Emily Gilkey Palmer examines religious freedom in the time of COVID-19 and offers the example of Thecla of the New Testament to show what a determined, faithful person can do without official sanction from authorities. Along with additional articles, we also share an extra dose of poetry, extraordinary art from several new contributors, and a profile of Rachel Stallings Thomander, our cover artist for this issue.
I recently announced that the Spring 2021 issue will be my last as the Editor-in-Chief. As the board prepares for the transition, I am truly excited to see what the next editor brings and how she will develop the next iteration of this beautiful, powerful publication. 2020 has proved, once again, that this organization has unbounded resilience and potential. I believe this is because it is built on a broad and diverse community, not on any single person. It is the product of a thousand different faith journeys and a belief that every human has a story worth telling. As we face what comes, may we hold fast to that foundation and to one another. I believe in us.
October 6, 2020
Quotation and Gender in General Conference
[image error]
By Eliza Wells
Introduction
In her April 2020 General Conference address, Primary General President Joy Jones declared, “President Russell M. Nelson taught, ‘It would be impossible to measure the influence that … women have, not only on families but also on the Lord’s Church, as wives, mothers, and grandmothers; as sisters and aunts; as teachers and leaders; and especially as exemplars and devout defenders of the faith.’”
This October, President Eyring quoted those lines once again in his Women’s session address.
Though it certainly might be impossible to measure the influence of women on families, studying quotation in General Conference allows us to measure the influence that leaders believe women have on the Church. In the talks referenced above, Presidents Jones and Eyring quoted scripture and multiple current and past apostles and prophets, but neither of them quoted a single woman–despite the fact that both of their talks were about women’s roles. My research shows that, even taking into account the expected effects of the Church’s overwhelmingly male scripture and all-male priesthood hierarchy, female sources are quoted less, cited less, and acknowledged less than one might hope from a church whose president recently told women, “[W]e need your voice teaching the doctrine of Christ.”
The quotation patterns in General Conference reveal that, despite increasingly vocal commitments from church leaders to the equal but separate status of women and men, those leaders continue to treat female voices as less valuable than male ones.
Quotation as an Appeal to Authority
Why quotation? In particular, why focus on the source of a quotation?
As every student of high school English intuitively knows, quotation is about authority. We don’t just quote someone because they said something much more eloquently than we could have–we quote them because they’re authorities on whatever we’re talking about, so the fact that they agree with our point gives our argument greater legitimacy. In particular, quotation is about who would be considered authoritative to your audience: a well-known atheist might still be an authoritative source in a business setting, but citing one would decrease one’s persuasiveness in a religious setting. Throughout my research, I saw Conference speakers repeatedly using quotation in this way, carefully selecting and framing their sources to be as authoritative as possible to their audience. Indeed, a look at the data shows that what would presumably be the most authoritative sources in General Conference–the scriptures and the current prophet–have the lowest average word count of all sources. If the prophet were being quoted solely for content rather than source, we would expect quotations from him to be much longer.
Sources can be authoritative in different ways, however. Conference speakers draw upon a huge variety of sources – musicals, poetry, newspapers, anonymous proverbs, friends, other religious leaders, etc. When choosing who to cite, Conference speakers are considering the effectiveness of appeals to revered historic heroes, respected secular intellectuals, relatable rank-and-file church members, or divinely sanctioned church leaders and sacred texts. Ecclesiastical authority is not the only kind of authority in General Conference: sources are also used for their spiritual, cultural, intellectual, historical, or emotional authority. We can draw conclusions about the different sources of authority that Conference leaders believe to be influential in the Church community based on who they quote and how they quote them. The sources cited more in General Conference are likely to be considered more authoritative for members, while the sources cited less frequently are less so.
Methodology
In order to see who and how church leaders quote, I read every April session talk from members of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles from 1971-2020 and documented every quotation they used. I chose April to get a representative but granular sample of Conference talks. I also read every April general session talk by female leaders between 1988 (when women started speaking regularly in the general sessions) and 2020, along with every talk in every April session by any leader in the last five years. This totaled 12,700 quotations over 1,100 talks.
I categorized a quotation as “male” or “female” if a) the footnote attributed the quotation to an individual man or woman or b) the speaker verbally attributed the quotation to a gendered individual. If neither of these conditions were met, I categorized the quotation as “non-gendered.” For example, “Nephi said” counts as a male quotation in my sample, as would “my grandfather once said” or a footnote citing a speech by Ronald Reagan. “1 Nephi 3 reads,” “one writer,” or a footnote citing an uncredited article in the Wall Street Journal would count as non-gendered quotations. I counted church materials like The Family Proclamation, though written by men, as non-gendered because my focus was on individual gendered voices.
Prophets and Apostles Quoting Women: The Big Picture
Given church leaders’ claims about the equal but separate status of women and men in the Church, we might expect a degree of gender parity in Conference quotation. After all, leaders have encouraged women to be “contributing and full partner[s]” with men rather than “silent… or limited partners” (Spencer W. Kimball, 1978); stated that “where spiritual things are concerned… men and women stand in a position of absolute equality before the Lord” (Bruce R. McConkie, 1979); and repeatedly emphasized women’s “righteous influence” and “unique moral compass” (Russell M. Nelson, 2019). Despite this, a righteous woman’s influence is rarely the kind of authority Conference speakers are interested in drawing upon.
Looking at gendered quotations, big picture numbers are striking. In April general sessions over the last 50 years, members of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles have quoted specifically male sources 3,264 times. This does not include the male-gendered Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father, who were quoted 1,968 times. In that same period, female sources were quoted 197 times.
Overall, this means that women have made up 2.1% of prophets’ and apostles’ quotations in the general sessions of Conference in the last fifty years. By contrast, men have made up 35.5% of their quotations in those decades. (The other 60% of quotations are from sources that, though generally written by men, are not obviously gendered: the dictionary, Readers’ Digest, plays and musicals, newspapers, church publications, non-gendered scriptures, etc. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, though male, are also included in that 60%.) Women’s representation has risen slightly over time: in the last ten years, women have made up 2.7% of all quotations. For fifty years, prophets and apostles have consistently quoted men 16 times for every one time they quoted a woman.
Women In and Outside of Scripture and Church Leadership
Looking only at gendered sources, women make up 5.7% of quotations while men make up 94.3%. You might think that, while perhaps regrettable, this imbalance is understandable. After all, many quotations in General Conference come from scriptures and church leadership, which are almost entirely composed of men. Of the over 250 named individuals in the Book of Mormon, for example, only six are female, and only two women actually speak in the text. Similarly, women occupy only twelve of the more than 100 roles at the church’s highest level.
Women’s representation in quotations from scripture and church leadership are indeed low. Women make up a mere 1.3% of quotations from scripture and 1.9% of quotations from high-level church leaders. Where prophets and apostles have quoted current male church leaders (i.e. each other) more than 250 times in the last fifty years, they have not quoted a female leader of the Church a single time in an April general session. Quotations of the current prophet have quintupled since 1971, and quotations of current apostles have more than doubled. In fact, members of the First Presidency quote the current prophet nearly six times more frequently when talking about gender (14.9%) than they do on average (2.5%), without quoting female leaders at all–even when speaking at the Women’s session. This is only increasing in the Nelson era.
If we take out quotations from scriptures and church leadership, however, the gender ratio still does not look like “absolute equality before the Lord.” When quoting sources who are neither in the scriptures nor in the church hierarchy, prophets and apostles quote women 22.5% of the time and men 77.5% of the time. Who remains in this sample? Ralph Waldo Emerson, C.S. Lewis, U.S. presidents (who have been quoted more often in General Conference than female leaders of the Church), William Shakespeare, and other historical figures, as well as speakers’ relatives and friends, and ordinary church members of every walk of life. These are the sources with spiritual, intellectual, cultural, historical, or emotional authority–and almost eight out of ten of them are men.
Though it might seem that the gender imbalance in General Conference is just the result of women’s limited presence in scripture and church hierarchy, apostles and even prophets consistently draw on many other sources of authority–just think of President Monson’s love of poetry. Surely, especially given church leaders’ frequent assertions of women’s spiritual equality and superior moral sensitivity, women should be just as entitled to authority in a Conference setting as any one of these figures outside the Church. My data indicates that as of the October 2020 Conference, however, New York Times commentator David Brooks has been quoted by more speakers than any woman except for Eliza R. Snow and Emma Smith. Rather than being contributing and full partners, women are silent in General Conference, limited by prophets’ and apostles’ choice of authorities.
Acknowledging and Anonymizing Women
Even when women are quoted, Conference speakers engage in rhetorical techniques that further minimize their presence and curtail their influence. Of the non-ecclesiastical sources discussed above, prophets and apostles only name women 51% of the time. This is much less than similar male sources, who are named 62% of the time. These trends occur side-by-side, often in the same talks. In his 2015 address, for example, Quentin L. Cook quoted a woman, Carla Carlisle, and described her as “one of my favorite writers” without naming her or revealing her gender through pronouns in the talk itself–while naming and quoting several men in the same talk. Even though Elder Cook seems to personally admire Carlisle, his reluctance to reveal her name or gender compared with his willingness to name and gender male sources suggests that her gender might even decrease her legitimacy as a source.
When discussing these anonymous sources, prophets and apostles are more likely to mention men’s careers (41.7% of the time) than women’s (6.2%) when they quote them; women’s relationship or family status is more frequently discussed (36% of the time) than men’s (8%, all in their capacity as fathers). Men’s church callings are mentioned 5 times more frequently than women’s. Women are frequently described with diminutives such as “beautiful,” “sweet,” “lovely,” “dear,” and “precious,” while no comparable adjectives are regularly applied to men (who are more likely to be described with adjectives like “wise”). Women are three times more likely than men to be described as “young,” minimizing their authority by depriving them of the value of life experience. Even though prophets and apostles frequently encourage men to be good family members and women to step up as community leaders, the way they frame men’s and women’s contributions limits their value and their possibilities. Rhetorically, women remain confined to the home even as church leaders profess their importance in the broader LDS community.
Patterns and Cultural Norms
There are two important caveats about these patterns. First, these statistics are the product of hundreds of talks by almost forty different apostles over fifty years. They are not the product of any one person’s conscious decision, and certainly no speaker selects their quotations with these broad patterns in mind. The average apostle quotes eleven times in a single talk, not nearly enough to cover all the categories of sources presented here. (Some apostles quote far more often than others: Neal Maxwell averaged 24 quotations per talk, almost all scripture, while Richard G. Scott averaged 4.5.) These patterns are also the structural default, the rhetorical norm for Conference addresses, and individual speakers are unlikely to choose to deviate widely from them. However, this makes it even more necessary to examine and bring them to light. General Conference talks form the basis for much of our local meetings, so their treatment of women impacts women’s authority across the Church.
Second, the consistent overrepresentation of male quotations in General Conference can be explained in part by the overrepresentation of men in the worlds of ecclesiastical, scriptural, and cultural authority that Conference speakers inhabit. the Church’s all-male priesthood, male-focused scriptural canon, and patriarchal cultural context all play a role in muting women. The non-ecclesiastical sources cited by speakers include a greater number of well-known male writers and historical figures than female ones because many more men have historically been given the opportunity to become famous. However, this is only an explanation for these patterns, not a justification of them. The Church consistently emphasizes our responsibility to choose the right even when “the world” and those around us push in opposing directions. Leaning on excuses about cultural norms is unfair to leaders by refusing them the agency to choose differently.
Women Quoting Men
You might think that female leaders would do things differently, and they do quote women more than male leaders do: 5.7% of the time in the general session. However, female leaders actually quote men more than any of the male leaders quote men. In the last decade, female speakers quoted men 46.6% of the time in the general sessions–fully fifteen percentage points higher than the frequency with which apostles quoted men during that same time period (31.7%). Even in the women’s session, where female leaders quote women the most (13.2% of the time in the last five years), they still quote men more than twice as frequently as they quote women (30.9%). Female leaders consistently treat female voices as less authoritative than male ones. They name 68.4% of their non-ecclesiastical male sources, but only 47.8% of their non-ecclesiastical female sources, an even greater disparity than we see from male leaders; they, too, frequently describe women as “beautiful,” “sweet,” “precious,” and “young.”
If we think about quotation as an appeal to authority, female leaders make that appeal most often, spending over 20% of their already limited time at the pulpit quoting (more than any other group of leaders, including Sunday School presidents, Seventies, etc.). Just as male speakers do not treat female voices as authoritative, female speakers do not treat their own voices as authoritative. However, if Conference quotation is about drawing upon the authority of quoted sources, it might be surprising to see female leaders quoting male sources so often instead of even more authoritative sources like God or the scriptures. Indeed, female leaders tend to quote Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ less frequently (12.3% of the time) than apostles do (19.7% between 1988-2020). Women are not just quoting any male source, however: they are overwhelmingly quoting male church leaders. This is increasing over time: between 1988-2010, 19.8% of female leaders’ quotations came from male leaders, but between 2011-2020, that number went up to 37.5%–22 times more than the percent of their quotations that come from female leaders. Of these citations, women are quoting living male leaders also sitting on the stand fully two out of three times, the most of any group of leaders. In this way, at least, women’s access to authority in the Church is mediated by male priesthood holders rather than coming directly from God.
Press Forward, Saints
These quotation patterns should trouble us, especially given church leaders’ repeated commitments to the equal contributions, value, and importance of women and men in the Church. (They should trouble us on other dimensions as well: setting aside questions of race in the scriptures, people of color are quoted in Conference even less frequently than women.) In 2015, then-apostle Russell Nelson quoted Boyd K. Packer’s 1978 encouragement to women, saying, “We need women who are organized and women who can organize. We need women with executive ability who can plan and direct and administer; women who can teach, women who can speak out.” As prophet in 2019, President Nelson reaffirmed, “As a righteous, endowed Latter-day Saint woman, you speak and teach with power and authority from God. Whether by exhortation or conversation, we need your voice teaching the doctrine of Christ. We need your input in family, ward, and stake councils. Your participation is essential and never ornamental!”
President Nelson, however, quotes women only 1.2% of the time – less frequently than his predecessors, Presidents Monson and Hinckley, who both quoted women about 3% of the time. Intentionally or not, church leaders consistently engage in rhetorical practices that undermine their stated commitments to women’s importance in the Church and the world. Both male and female leaders fail to include women’s voices in the same talks that declare who women are and how much they matter. Rather than encouraging women to teach and speak out in their quotation practices, leaders exclude and anonymize women while prioritizing male voices across the board. Even when women have the rare opportunity to speak in Conference, they rely on male authority in order to be taken seriously by their audience rather than teaching the doctrine of Christ with their own voices.
General Conference quotation matters because General Conference matters: it is the most important event on the institutional church calendar, with millions of members viewing the talks live and many more engaging with them repeatedly in church magazines and Sunday curricula over several years. Short of small and large changes to the leadership structure of the Church, General Conference is one key avenue through which church leaders could demonstrate that women’s participation in the Church really is essential. Right now, their quotations might make us doubt whether it is even ornamental.
Eliza Wells has an MA in Religious Studies from Stanford University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at MIT.
October 5, 2020
A Recap of General Conference
This isn’t going to be a summary of general conference – more of a reaction.
[image error]
I saw several people in my social media feeds in the weeks leading up to conference expressing simultaneous excitement about conference and dismay that it was going to be all virtual. Since I don’t live in Utah, general conference has always been all virtual, so it didn’t really strike me as functionally different. Whether there are throngs gathered in a large auditorium or whether there are only the speakers spaced several feet apart, the experience is the same to me. I’m at home listening while folding the laundry.
I approached conference with cautious optimism. I’ve been wounded by too many past conferences where someone (or multiple someones) has given a pearl-clutching tirade about how wicked single people are for being single, as if reminding us that we forgot to get married would suddenly make us realize that it’s something we need to do, and we can just go down to the spouse store on Monday to pick one out for ourselves. Sermons preached at single people generally show clearly that the speaker has never spoken to an actual single person. They rail against straw-singles – painting men as video game playing basement-dwellers who are shirking their duty to ask out and propose to women, and women as unladylike workaholics who are turning down perfectly good marriage proposals left and right.
The pandemic has put a stop to dating, so I was hoping that nobody would take the heartless step of berating singles for something entirely outside our control. (Not that it was totally in our control before, either.) Before conference, I prayed that nobody would say anything cruel to or about single people.
Thankfully, my prayer was answered. The talks were Christ-centered and timely. The speakers addressed concrete issues of our day, not just platitudes and generalities. They referenced the pandemic by name and also addressed social problems happening right now.
Religion News Service writer Jana Reiss favorably compared this conference to a bowl of corn flakes – nourishing and bland. I agree. After the heartburn of 2020, something easy on our spiritual stomachs is just what the Great Physician ordered.
The cinnamon rolls fed my body, and the sermons fed my soul. May all general conferences be as good as this one.
October 4, 2020
Invisible
There is no such thing as universal, standard, normal, one size fits all. So writes Caroline Criada Perez in her fascinating book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Chapter by chapter, she exposes how everything from crash test dummies to iPhone design to heart attack symptoms to snow removal assumes male as the standard, leaving women to made due (and in some cases, die).
I nodded my head through the whole thing, because, as a woman, I’ve lived it. I can remember as a girl learning early on that “boy” stories were for everyone but tales with a female protagonist were just for girls. Tom Sawyer? Universal. Anne of Green Gables? Girl. And if you watched a movie like Star Wars, girls could idolize Han Solo, but I never heard a boy say his favorite character was Princess Leah. In Church, at school, on the playground, I learned to see the world through male eyes as the default gaze, in addition to experiencing things as female. In scripture study, I could identify with men like Enos and Peter (again, no boys ever quoted Sariah, Ruth, Esther), the assumption being that the reader is male. Like most women, I became bifocal, able to see most situations from the universal dude perspective as well as from a woman’s view. And I believe it has given me a richer view of life.
I’m not sure things have changed much since my childhood in the 1970s. I recently overheard a mom lament that her son’s English teacher refused to assign “normal, classic” books like The Hobbit or Holes but instead made them read Walk Two Moons. “How is he supposed to relate to a book about a Native American girl?!” I rolled my bifocal eyes and, not for the first time, felt sad about the state of things. I feel sorry for boys and men who have been raised to believe that the female perspective is foreign, other, lesser, and can only experience half the world. And it breaks my heart when women and girls suffer because their hearts, minds, and needs are often invisible.
Now let me tell you a story that happened in 1990, right after I got married. My husband Dave and I were living in Pasadena and working temp jobs for the summer. The Saudi Arabian government was doing a PR tour and had rented the Los Angeles Forum to showcase the country’s art, culture, and history. We showed up a week into the event to work in the gift shop and, as is the case with most Mormons I know, were hardworking, efficient, and had excellent people skills. So we were not surprised when the men in charge gave us extra hours, praised our work, joked with us, and kept us front and center. Some of the other temps resented our good fortune, but if they wanted to get noticed, they’d need to step up their games. Or so I told myself.
As the days went on, we became close with one of our co-workers, Jon, a local Inglewood resident and we’d sometimes hang out after a long shift. One night he said to me, “Heather, why do you think you two get the best shifts?” I hemmed and hawed because the longer I worked there, the more I saw that my co-workers were just as hardworking and competent as we were. Sometimes more so. I honestly had no idea. But as I looked into Jon’s lovely brown face, I felt a hot shame creep up the back of my neck. Did I mention that Dave and I were the only white employees?
That night I started to realize that there are not just two lenses, male and female, and that I had many blind spots. When I got back to BYU I signed up for all the non-canonical literature classes I could find, eager to expand my view: Asian Mythology, Native American Lit, African American Lit, Jewish Lit, Lit of the Developing World. For me, the easiest point of entry to understanding has always been stories.
I keep learning that there are other invisible people too. Those queer and dear to me have been patient and loving as I’ve had to reexamine a lifetime of hetero-assumptions. I still battle my binary brain as I am realizing my original duality of male and female is not that simple. And when I arranged to meet my new hilarious and brilliant friend for lunch last year, I arrived first and panicked because I had no idea which table would best accommodate her wheelchair. Totally clueless and overwhelmed by the comfort and ease of my “universal” able body. My privilege allowed me to be oblivious to her issues of access just as it made me blind to why I was promoted over Jon.
I try to explain some of this to my 88 year-old mom this spring when protests popped up all over the country, even here in Utah County. “Why would they say ‘Black lives matter,’” she wondered. “Why not say all lives matter?”
I shared with her the NPR interview with Jenna Lester, an African-American doctor, who talked about how all the available medical books only showed how dermatological issues presented on white skin. As a result, people of color are frequently misdiagnosed, sometimes with catastrophic results. Just like women with the heart attack symptoms. Their difference is ignored because the medical lens is only designed to see maleness and/or whiteness. So if the dermatologist is pushing for more diverse skin representation in medical textbooks, is she saying only Black skin matters? Of course not. She is pushing to widen the circle of who is seen, asking that these many intersections of identity are recognized. It is not either/or, it is and.
Tim Wise, co-author of the documentary “White Like Me: Race, Racism and White Privilege in America,” states that racism isn’t just a personal failing, but a systemic, institutionalized problem that hurts all of us. He wisely asks us to resist the urge to create a hierarchy of oppression, as all of us are a combination of our various identities. Instead we need to be aware that some aspects of our identity marginalize us, some privilege us. The goal is to recognize each others’ struggles and acknowledge that our unique worldview is but one of many–some that we may eventually learn to see, and others that we will just have to take on the word of the observer. All this will broaden our vision.
I want to see those around me as they would be seen. So I will continue to squint and try not to stare and add layers to my lens, one friend, one story, one mistakes at a time. Will you join me?
October 2, 2020
Take a Break
This week my daughter started a 2 week camp after school. I requested the last 2 hours of each day off as PTO for the two weeks, so when I bike her to the camp, I drop her off and then… I have nothing. I’m not expected to be at work. I’m not expected to be at home. I’m just downtown with a bike and 2 hours to myself.
There’s not a lot to do downtown; lots of storefronts are closed up because of covid. The only businesses that seem to be open are restaurants with their parklet or outdoor seating. And there are so many of them now! Everywhere I go there’s a road blocked off for outdoor dining! It looks lovely, though I’m personally not ready to take that step in the pandemic yet.
There’s also not a lot of places to just hang out even outside, unless you’re paying for food– lots of city benches are made to be hostile, or don’t exist. So I bike around. I bike leisurely: only 7 or 8 miles an hour, with frequent stops to play Ingress (Pokemon Go before Pokemon Go #hipster). Bikes are lovely machines- easy to maneuver to the sidewalk for a break.
Do you know what it’s like to be forced away from your laptop? To have no place to sit except my bicycle saddle? No one to listen to except music or a podcast? It’s downright dreamy.
And I didn’t know I needed this break. I needed it badly. I needed the sunlight and the wind and the movement of my body. I needed time when people didn’t need me. I suspect you also need that.
This weekend is General Conference and a lot of people use it to recharge. When I was a kid we only went to Sunday morning session at the stake building. I didn’t know people even watched Saturday session until I went to BYU. I assumed Saturday sessions were a courtesy to people in Australia and Japan so they could have a conference session on their Sunday! And the afternoon of Sunday was for the west coast and Alaska and Hawaii so they could have a “Sunday morning” session.
As the weekend goes it’s ok to skip Saturday sessions and Sunday afternoon, and heck even Sunday morning. It’ll be in the Ensign. They’ll have the talks up within days, maybe hours. Give yourself some time if you can. Go someplace where you can’t reach the Internet and no one needs anything from you. Move your body a little. Just for a couple of hours. You might need it.
[image error]
Courtesy, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library,
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602.
October 1, 2020
Dance With Me: 2020 WHO Year of the Nurse and the Midwife
Melody Newey Johnson /
Photo by Kim Raff
Guest Post by Melody
Melody’s thirty-plus year nursing practice includes clinical management, epidemiology, cardiology, nephrology, oncology, and behavioral medicine. She currently works part time at Huntsman Cancer Hospital and University of Utah Hospital as a Registered Nurse, certified in case management (RN, CCM). She also writes. Her first full-length poetry manuscript, An Imperfect Roundness, was published this year by BCC Press.
Nursing can be its own ministry. The LDS perspective of humanity as an actual “family” makes this idea even more beautiful. We can attend to our sisters and brothers with hope for their wellness, faith in science, and with genuine love for each person. Once scientific practice and clinical procedures are mastered, the human connection can bring remarkable depth and richness to the healing process and patient-caregiver relationship— a relationship unique in the world. As a patient, I’ve felt this with certain nurses who’ve cared for me. As a nurse, I’ve seen it too.
By its nature the relationship between patient and nurse is both personal and professional, intimate and respectful. Vulnerability brought on by illness or injury can sometimes make a patient a reluctant partner, but I see the patient-caregiver relationship as a sort of dance with our own and another’s humanity, moving around the dance floor of a health crisis, accompanied by the orchestra of medical science. We move toward and away from each other as we establish rapport and build trust in the relationship, then give and receive care. Sometimes this happens within a single encounter at a vaccine clinic or emergency room. Sometimes it spans years in a dialysis center or a home health setting. Sometimes we are left unchanged by the relationship. Other times that unique dance becomes transformative.
I remember a woman many years ago for whom I cared only when her regular home health nurse was on vacation. Part of the routine each morning at 6:00 AM involved reading to the patient from whatever text she happened to be enjoying at the time. She was bright, gracious, and occasionally demanding. I’ll call her Mary (not her real name) and she was legally blind. She never learned Braille and preferred live readings to books on tape. Her loss of vision was a result of diabetes. The home health agency I worked for provided nursing service for twice-daily insulin injections. These visits should have lasted only fifteen minutes, but Mary’s nurse always spent an additional fifteen or twenty minutes of her own time reading aloud. I was happy to do the same. We bonded over appreciation of literature and other things in those early morning readings. Mary has long since passed on, but I still think of her sometimes.
She was in her eighties and lived alone. Although she had a supportive son who helped with shopping and other tasks, he was also aging and she was obviously lonely.
[image error]One morning she asked me to read from a biography of an early-twentieth-century Mormon prophet. I don’t recall which one. The subject of death was being addressed in the text and I commented about how amazing the human body is and how people fight to live.
Mary directed me to an earlier section of the book. She had been deeply moved and wanted to share it with me. The idea was this: Our eternal spirits are entirely unfamiliar with the concept of death. Before this life we had always lived and would continue living afterwards. We came to earth, in part, to understand death: the antithesis of the immortal state. Therefore, even in our relentlessly deteriorating mortal incarnation, we try to live and live and live. It’s all we know. Our souls genuinely don’t know “how to die” nor do we desire to die. Ever.
Of course emotional distress and mental health crises can impact our perceptions and our feelings about life and death, making us feel we don’t care to live. But, the proverbial human “will to live” had never been more clearly or cogently communicated to me than on that morning. I finished the visit and spent a few minutes weeping in the car. This moment of insight has stayed with me throughout my career. It changed the way I respond to patients who appear to want to keep living beyond what I or other healthcare professionals would encourage or anticipate.
I’ve been blessed and transformed in numerous ways through witnessing and providing care in times of crisis or while providing routine care. I believe my presence has benefited patients I’ve cared for as well. If you’ve felt especially blessed by a particular care provider it would be wonderful to tell them so. Especially now, during a global pandemic, when many healthcare professionals are burdened beyond their usual giving, caring capacities.
We are all glorious, miraculous, tragic beings, we humans. I’m glad we can dance through life together.
I’d like to share two poems that arose from my life as a nurse— one composed early in my career when I realized what being a nurse meant for me. The other was written more recently.
nurse verb
/nərs/
to heal
to touch; make a word into light,
breathe it through flesh—
into the future where all
shall be well.
to love.
Music and Silence
Today I caught a glimpse of
invisible strings strung between lovers,
stretched tight, tuned to each other
through moments, years of living.
I heard sympathetic vibrations in
an old woman’s fingers woven
between her husband’s when he died.
This is why we fear Love:
the music
the silence.
September 30, 2020
On Anger
Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash
I recently read a book that was very angry.
The author’s open embrace of her anger was almost jarring to me. She was openly outraged about a whole host of issues, and even though I agreed with her on the issues, there was something about her anger that was really uncomfortable to me.
The fact that her anger made me uncomfortable, also made me uncomfortable. I kept trying to come up with reasons that her anger bothered me. Maybe it’s because her anger wasn’t “productive” – she didn’t offer solutions, only assertions about things that are broken and/or unjust. Maybe it was because she didn’t examine both sides of the issue, instead insisting that one side had the moral authority and the other didn’t. Maybe it’s because she was just so bold and harsh in her declarations. I have read so many books about female anger (I especially loved this one, and also this one), so I understand intellectually why female anger is so openly reviled, and I even think women *should* be angry. So why did her anger make me so uncomfortable?
In “Down Girl,” Kate Manne specifically points to misogyny as the reason why angry women make us so uncomfortable: “misogyny [upholds the patriarchal order] by visiting hostile or adverse social consequences on a certain (more or less circumscribed) class of girls or women to enforce or police social norms that are gendered either in theory (i.e., content) or in practice (i.e., norm enforcement mechanisms).” She adds, “misogyny’s primary manifestations may be in punishing bad women, and policing women’s behavior, as a system of punishment and reward.” Basically, angry women are breaking patriarchal social norms. Anger is gendered – it’s a traditionally masculine trait, one that men are expected to express, even as they’re asked to control it. Women aren’t allowed even controlled expressions of anger without being called unhinged, shrill, bitchy, or insert-your-favorite-sexist-epithet-here. So often the emotion of anger is conflated with the actions that are fueled by anger – violence, destruction, abuse. But those are choices that can be made out of other emotions, too – shame, grief, disgust. Men are allowed to feel the emotion of anger, even if we condemn the actions that anger sometimes fuels. But women are allowed neither to act in anger, nor feel anger. We’re taught to suppress it, to swallow the tyrannies “day by day, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence” (Audre Lorde).
In 1960, Valerie Saiving argued in “The Human Situation: A Feminine View” that “a theology based solely on masculine experience may well be irrelevant,” because it ignores the different ways men and women move throughout the world and are socialized to interact with one another. For example, the scriptures continually exhort against pride and selfishness, but Saiving argues that women are already socialized to negate and under-develop themselves, instead acting as support people to the men and children in their lives. She essentially argues that while selfishness and pride may be sins for men, selflessness and self-negation may be sins for women.
I think we can look at anger in the same way. The scriptures are full of exhortations to peace, of being “slow to anger.” A cursory search of general conference archives shows that anger is “Satan’s tool,” “will drive away the spirit,” a synonym of contention and wrath, and something “to overcome.”If selflessness and self-negation are sins for women, couldn’t a lack of anger be one, too? We live in a world where we are second-class citizens, are paid less, are respected less, are valued less. We live in a world with rampant sexual violence against women that is barely taken seriously or prosecuted in any meaningful way across the globe. In Mormonism, we’re taught to be silently supportive (how many conference talks have you heard about the saintly wife who sweetly supported her husband’s demanding work/church schedule and never once complained?). We are taught that we don’t matter as much as men matter. We are fed these lies from the moment we are born. We should be so, so, so angry.
In “Rage Becomes Her,” Soraya Chemaly writes,
When we forgo talking about anger, because it represents risk or challenge, or because it disrupts a comfortable status quo, we forgo valuable lessons about risk and challenge and the discomforts of the status quo. By naturalizing the idea that girls and women aren’t angry but are sad, by insisting that they keep their anger to themselves, we render women’s feelings and demands mute and with little social value. When we call our anger sadness instead of anger, we often fail to acknowledge what is wrong, specifically in a way that discourages us from imagining and pursuing change. Sadness, as an emotion, is paired with acceptance. Anger, on the other hand, invokes the possibility of change and of fighting back.
About halfway through the angry book, I really let myself sink in and feel the anger that the author was expressing. You know how sometimes it’s really nice to have a good cleansing cry and intensely feel how sad you are about various things in your life? Well, turns out it’s also nice to listen to this book, feel your anger validated, and have a nice cleansing rage-fest about how intensely angry you are, too. Anger does not have to be productive (it is not capitalism). Anger is one of the many emotions that human beings experience, and is just as valid to feel and express as any other emotion. And I really believe that just as selfishness and anger may be taught as sins to men in scripture, for women, those sins are an over-abundance of selflessness and a repression of our anger.
September 29, 2020
September 28, 2020
Love Stronger Than Death
Dora Rose Hartvigsen England, with George Eugene England Jr.
When I was a teenager, I didn’t like to be around my grandma.
I had not grown up in Utah. My 1960’s childhood in the Bay Area of California, and 1970’s teen years in a small college town in Minnesota had not shaped me to fit in to her image of a proper young woman. I felt she was always comparing my appearance to that of my Utah-raised cousins. She would tell me how my hair should be styled, my clothes were immodest, I needed more restrictive underwear, I should control my acne, I shouldn’t sit on the grass, I was listening to the wrong music, I needed to plan on a practical degree in Home Economics, I shouldn’t be such a tomboy, and on and on.
I was especially surprised when she saw me doing some freehand embroidery (something that I thought she would approve since it was considered more feminine at the time), but I was doing it on Sunday, and she told me any sewing I did on a Sunday I would need to undo in the next life. And that I would have to undo it with my nose. It was hard not to ridicule her for that.
I was not someone who could be easily swayed by a differing opinion, or even by criticism. But this was my grandma. Family. And I wanted to like to spend time with her. But it was painful, and getting more difficult.
Finally, after a visit where I pushed back on some of the things she told me to do differently, and she did not respond kindly, I went to my dad and told him I just didn’t want to be around her anymore.
He didn’t minimize or dismiss my hurt. He didn’t excuse her. He didn’t insist I put up with it.
He listened.
Then he went to talk with his mother. From what I heard about the conversation, he did not condemn her, or accuse her of not caring. He acknowledged that he knew she loved her grandkids, and that she felt strongly about showing her love by telling us to do things she felt would help us have a better life. Things that she was sure would help us be happier, because this is what made her happy.
And he told her that if she kept doing it, she was going to lose her grandkids. It saddened him to think that his kids were going to miss out on getting to know their grandma for the amazing, intelligent, strong woman he knew her to be, just because she could not just enjoy getting to know us for who we are, and trust us to navigate through this complex journey of growing up. He told her that he thought we would learn more from her if she would just share her life with us, her struggles and what she had learned, than if she kept telling us what we were doing wrong or what we needed to change.
He told her he would like us to see that her love for us was stronger than anything else.
She listened.
She took my older sister and me to lunch, and just asked us about our lives. She began to share her life with us, her thoughts that had nothing to do with our appearance or behavior. I began to see her sense of humor.
It was the beginning of me learning of how she was bullied as a child, how she struggled to present herself well, even though she was poor. Of how she wanted to protect her granddaughters from inequities of a system that favored men. And how she did not readily submit to a man’s differing opinion. I especially liked the account of how she stood up to Bruce R. McConkie when he was visiting the mission home in Minnesota, where she and Grandpa were serving as mission presidents.
It was the beginning of me discovering I had a grandma who was strong, feisty, smart, and who guided some of my early feminism (even though she would have called it good common sense).
It was the beginning of me knowing she loved me.
I am so grateful my dad listened to me, and she listened to him.
I got to have 20 more years to get to know her and love her.
When I spoke at her funeral, I did not have to pretend affection, or make up something nice to say. I truly mourned the loss of her, and I was able to acknowledge the bumpy road that led to learning to love her.
I especially loved the final message she gave to me. In her instructions for her funeral, in the mid 1990’s, when this was not done, she requested that her granddaughters be her pallbearers. Not honorary pallbearers, but her actual pallbearers.
She set aside tradition, and asked us to be the ones who lovingly carried her on her last mortal journey.
I wonder about learning to listen.
I wonder what my grandma and my dad would think about what is happening now. About social media becoming a place where people avoid listening. About how corporations have entire law firms that not only protect, but prevent them from listening. How families become a narrow definition, or legal battleground, or shameful dogma, rather than a relational group where we can practice and learn mercy, repentance and grace.
This physical isolation is causing us to create a new way of functioning in the world, and new way of connecting and of being related.
I lead trainings for suicide prevention online now. I try to convey, through the screen, the importance of listening, the importance of letting go of the need to fix someone, the importance of letting go of “should”-ing on people. There are few things more effective in suicide prevention than just sitting with, listening deeply, and letting go of trying to change someone. Few things are more effective than these in conveying love. (If you, or someone you know is experiencing thoughts of suicide, please call the Suicide Prevention Hotline – 800-273-8255.)
I do not want the world to go back to the way it was before the pandemic.
I want us to see this as a call to listen. Listen, even when it confronts us, challenges us to look at how we have done things up to now. Listen for how we are not being who we say we want to be.
I want families, churches, schools, businesses, political groups, advocates, activists, people in any leadership position…all of us.
I want us to listen to each other, and learn to be connected so deeply that we will dismantle the barriers that have kept us from experiencing love and mercy.
During the last 20 years of my grandma’s life, I don’t recall any need to agree with her, or conform to her ideas. I remember hearing so many fascinating stories about her life, and I remember her listening to me share mine. I felt important, and valued around her. Her influence helped me learn to handle my own finances, and to develop my independent voice. And I think she would smile to know I have become very grateful for Spanx underwear.
I hope this time of pandemic has taught us what it is like to feel alone, and non-essential. I hope we remember how hard it is to not be able to go where you want to belong, or to not feel safe in your community.
I hope, when we can physically gather again, we will welcome all who want to gather. I hope we will want to get to know each other for who we are, and not impose our “should” on each other. I hope we will appreciate the difference each unique life can make in the world, and resist trying to require agreement or conformity for its own sake. I hope we will recognize that we are all the least of these. We are all at risk of feeling rejected. We are all at risk of illness or death. We all want to know we are loved.
We all want loving hands to help carry us on our journey.
I hope we learn a love that is stronger than death.
![[image error]](https://i2.wp.com/www.the-exponent.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/invisble.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://i0.wp.com/www.the-exponent.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Gma-E-with-baby-Dad.jpg){kind=link}