Exponent II's Blog, page 171

As a missionary, I was so, so hungry.

I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, Mormon) in a country where the local culture called for a siesta: a long lunch break, possibly including a nap. Accordingly, my strict missionary schedule provided us with a two-hour lunch break—which was delightful—and balanced that by disallowing a dinner break—which was unpleasant indeed. I never had a car on my mission, and many of the towns I served in did not even have paved roads, so we rode mountain bikes. All day. Every day.

I was hungry. So much exercise! So little food!

As a “greenie” (our term for new missionaries), I was baffled about how others in our mission survived for up to two years of service without starving. Eventually, I learned that most of the male missionaries indulged in a very late dinner after they finished up proselyting at 9:30 pm, just before the mandatory 10:00 bedtime.

My female companions did not attempt such a rushed, late-night meal. I couldn’t figure out how the men were managing to squeeze a meal into their bedtime routine. For women, at least, with long hair that needed to be washed with buckets of water (most of our apartments lacked showers with running water), there was no time for food within that rigid schedule.

I doubt that any women were involved in fashioning our mandated schedule.  All women were excluded from missionary leadership positions, even more so than today. This was before 2013, when the LDS church created a new middle management position for women. Now, Sister Training Leaders do meet with the men in leadership, although they are outranked by District Leaders, Zone Leaders, Assistants to the President and the Mission President, all of whom are required to be male. During my mission, women were not invited to any leadership meetings at all.

But honestly, if any male leader had bothered to ask, I believe most of the women in my mission would have supported a schedule with a daily fast from noon to bedtime. Another missionary rule, not at all unique to my mission, is that missionaries are assigned companions of the same sex that they live with and work with all day.  Missionaries may not do anything alone, not even run over to the corner store for fifteen minutes to buy a snack. If there is one thing I learned by being forced to spend all day every day in close proximity to another twenty-something year-old woman, it’s that women are good at counting calories and radically opposed to consuming them.

“Do you know how many calories are in that?” my companion would helpfully ask me if I dared to reach for second helping at lunch.  Sometimes, I would try to talk a diet-conscious missionary companion into taking a quick break to grab a snack on the run, which would lead to an informative lecture about how fat I was going to be when I got home from the mission if I kept this up. How I yearned for 20 minutes of personal time to eat a sandwich away from the watchful eyes of a live-in dietary consultant!

My companions’ fear of food was only enhanced by the male missionaries, who felt it necessary to tell us, quite often, that they would never marry a returned missionary because “sister missionaries get fat.” My companions who did gain weight told me that the mission president would instruct them to lose weight during their quarterly one-on-one interviews. They didn’t mind; after all, they agreed with him that they were too fat, and losing weight was a top priority for them, although it was hard to see what more they could do to accomplish that beyond the current regimen of never eating dinner plus several hours of daily exercise on a bike.

At one point, even the inanimate objects in our kitchen joined the universal effort to keep us skinny.

[image error]“We just haven’t had the best of luck this week,” I wrote to my parents. “Earlier in the week, our house flooded. A couple days later, our stove, which had allegedly been repaired, started shooting flames. For now, we’re on a sandwich-only diet until the elders at the office buy us another one.”

Those were veggie sandwiches, by the way. Pre-packaged lunchmeat did not exist in my mission area. If you wanted meat, you needed a stove to cook it.

When my parents read my next letter, dated 10 days later, they panicked and called the mission president.

“I have to push myself every day to keep an optimistic attitude. It’s difficult because not only am I discouraged, emotionally, I am physically hungry! Remember how I wrote a while back about how the stove exploded and the sink flooded the house? We’ve been without a stove and sink ever since! At first we went out to eat a lot, but I am sick of spending so much money on food and my comp is flat broke. We are now eating cold sandwiches every day. On Sunday, while I was studying, I ran across the scripture 2 Nephi 9:50-51. It applies so much to us that I copied it and stuck it on the wall accompanied by a drawing of a huge sandwich.”

2 Nephi 9:50-51 reads:

“He that hath no money, come buy and eat….Feast upon that which perisheth not, neither can be corrupted, and let your soul delight in fatness.”

My concerned parents called the mission president only hours after the procrastinating office elders finally delivered a new stove to our apartment, so he was able to assure them that it had all been taken care of already.

The mission president brought up my parents’ phone call at our next one-on-one interview. Why had I tattled to my parents? What’s wrong with eating cold sandwiches? He ate sandwiches every day, he informed me.

Ashamed, I accepted the rebuke without pushing back.

It wasn’t until later, when I told another missionary about the conversation, that it even occurred to me that the scolding I received might not have been completely merited. She pointed out that even if the mission president always ate sandwiches for lunch, those were fancy sandwiches with meat on them. And for breakfast and dinner, he enjoyed hot, filling meals.

The mission president had a dinner break.

I’m just a girl?

[image error]Courtesy of Ben White Photography

I had an experience last summer that I have been pondering over for months trying to process my feelings around. My husband and I were invited to go to Las Vegas with a couple we’ve been friends with since college and one of the highlights of the trip was seeing Gwen Stefani’s residency show. If you’re not familiar with Gwen Stefani, she is the former lead singer of the ska band “No Doubt.” Their breakout hit — “I’m just a Girl” — put them on the popular music map back in the mid-90s. The song, co-written by Stefani, calls out the everyday sexism she’s sick and tired of – “I’ve had it up to here.”

When Stefani performed “I’m just a Girl” for her audience that night last summer I experienced something I have never experienced in my life. The audience was singing along with the song and Stefani stopped and had the audience repeat the chorus after her. When she sang, “I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl in the world,” we all followed. Then she asked for just the women in the audience to repeat the chorus after her and we gleefully obliged. Next she asked that just the men repeated after her singing, “I’m just a girl. I’m just a girl in the world.” During that moment I was, as my children say, shooketh.

This was the first time I had ever been in an audience anywhere where men were asked to identify as girls. Where men were able to call themselves girls without it demeaning their person or attacking their masculinity. It was only 10 seconds, but for me it was a powerful 10 seconds.

As women we are tasked on a daily basis to identify with the perspective of men. As women of the Church, all of our leaders with ecclesiastical authority are men. The scriptures we read were written by men about mostly men’s stories. Women’s roles in our scriptures are downplayed in their importance in our lesson manuals. Even on Easter the church put out a video about the experience of Christ’s resurrection from the perspective of Peter, even though it was a woman who was the first witness of the resurrected Christ. We were all told growing up that men means all people, that mankind means humankind, that brother means siblings, etc. “What I succumb to is making me numb.”

So I have to ask our male-identified readership if they have ever been asked to see themselves through the feminine lens. If they heard, “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Women,” would they think that included them because women means all people? And if not, why is mankind the default for all humans? If you only read scriptures about women or heard scriptures lessons taught about women, would you be able to apply those experiences to your life? Would you be able to stand in auditorium with thousands of others and sing that you were a girl and not be humiliated by it?

Book Review: The Tree at the Center by Kathryn Knight Sonntag

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Kathryn Knight Sonntag’s collection of poems in The Tree at the Center explore the divine feminine through themes of nature, creation, joy, birth, and the center of things. Several of the poems are inspired by scriptures, the poetry breathing color into the verses, and references are notated in tiny font in the upper corner of the page. Other mythologies are interwoven with our scripture as Sonntag draws connections between Buddha’s bodhi tree, the seven-branched trunk of the menorah, the kadamba tree of Krishna, the myrrh tree that births Adonis, the Maypole, “The holy feet descending / the rungs of Jacob’s dreams.” (World Tree, p. 12)

“We plunge deep
into mythical time, to firmaments parting,
to the first dragonfly wing etched, then
humming. Let there be, I said,
and there was.”

from The Call, p. 14

As the author states in the introduction, “Where is a divine feminine figure located in LDS theology? Where does She lodge here on Earth? And because there isn’t a prescribed answer, every [person] must find Her for herself….The Tree at the Center is an eco-theological work that delves into the meaning of female exile….This is the story of women that has only been whispered peripherally in Mormonism.” 

I do not often read books of poetry. I like poems, but I struggle with ciphers of symbolism. At the beginning of this book, even as some phrases and images shone off the page, I struggled a bit to glean meaning from the artfully wrought language. But toward the middle of the book (at the center, if you like), where the author focuses more on her own lived experience of giving birth, of postpartum depression, of new motherhood, a switch flipped for me and the layers of meaning in all of the poems came more easily.  

I never asked to be the center,
the eternal tree,
a venus belly,
etched. But as your sweet body
latches to my breast, I
am Eve, the sun of my son–
who will carry the tree through himself
when he multiplies
and replenishes the earth.

(from As a Mother, p. 38)

Consider this book the flipside to Rachel Hunt Steenblik’s Mother’s Milk: where Steenblik’s poems are spare and simple and often rooted in the everyday, Sonntag’s poems are lyrical and complexly layered with themes from nature, mythology and scripture. Both styles are elegant; both volumes beautifully evoke the divine feminine.

Sonntag’s poetry requires you to sit with the words and images, to read slowly, to pause, to read it through again. I found this daunting at first, but effort notwithstanding, most of the poems are accessible even to poetry novices like me, and at 78 pages, The Tree at the Center is a slim volume, making it possible to both savor and digest Sonntag’s poems.

The Tree at the Center

We talk often
of the Son’s surrender
His long suffering, His forever
atoning–the shards
of the universe, gathered
to reconcile all
the ways in which God
has been lost
to us.

I want to know
about the surrender
of the Mother, if it felt at all
like a body
laid flat
as creation writhed
shaking the bed
of Earth while Her mind
broke
into shards, into the wilderness
into the wolf. No word, no language
separate from the surging
womb.

I want to know
how death hit Her square
on the meatiest turn
of Her trunk, then dragged Her
from the forest–the embroidered branches
rent from Solomon’s temple–
to pierce Her stiff arms
with Her son’s.

I want to know
how a forest survives
without trees, how
we will welcome the Son
with the fires still burning.

p. 56

Asherah, God the Mother, both gentle and devouring, is the thread that binds these poems together. She is depicted as a tree, as a wolf, as an eagle-winged seraph who “circles the edges / of the square, of the wilderness where / we have left Her, / watching.” The poems explore both Her presence and Her absence, and while I have always felt the feminine wound of worshiping a masculine God, these words describing “the temple we continue to build” captured the breadth of this loss, the depth of this cavity in my spirit and in my church: “the void at its center, the scar / of Her uprooting” (all from One Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Days, p. 55).

The Tree at the Center is a worthy addition to the growing collection of works exploring the search for the divine feminine. While Mother God is still largely absent from our theology, her loss like a treeless forest with “the fires still burning,” Sonntag leaves us with hope:

And maybe we have to consider
that if we find the fluttering heat
of maternal wings missing, […]

that She, once in the midst of everything,
like the subtlest, sweetest fragrance of home,
must be restored. And who

are these temple priests
slated to return–the shadow of exile
dusting their trailing robes,
palm leaves in hand–if not you,
if not me?

from Cube of Fire, p. 62

Benevolent Patriarchy: A Photo Essay Featuring My Pets

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Introducing the three of us: my cat, who has an annoying habit of jumping on my shoulders every time I bend over; my dog, who has an annoying habit of sticking his nose up everybody’s bum; and me, who takes a lot of pictures of them. This photo encapsulates it all.

Today, I present a photo essay about Benevolent Patriarchy, featuring my cat (Penny) and my dog (Macho). (Fellow Exponent blogger Heather jokingly named this, “Benevolent Patri-Barky”.)

Benevolent sexism takes many forms within our church, and is one of the most annoying and yet difficult phenomena to explain to the men in my life. It’s basically a lighter, friendlier version of overt sexism (which says, “Women are dumb and too emotional. Men are much smarter, so they should be in charge of everything!”), which you very rarely hear in our wards and branches on Sunday. Benevolent sexism sounds much nicer (it says, “Women are so special, so spiritual, and so pure – they should be protected and presided over in love,”) and puts women up on a pedestal. The men are SAYING we are way better at everything than they are, so it honestly does sound kind of cool at first. Unfortunately though, it limits us in ways that makes many of us feel more like little children than equal partners.

My photo essay will focus on one aspect of benevolent sexism – the kind, but terribly overbearing, priesthood leader who can’t understand why we aren’t thrilled to have them helping us at every turn.

But briefly back to my pets! I adopted a kitten and puppy the same week last August, and they have grown up together since then. They were both about 7 months old when this was written, and while Macho (the puppy) had been going freely between our backyard and the house for months, Penny (the kitty) had just began her indoor/outdoor life. I waited until she was old enough to be spayed before letting her roam, and one day I took her into my backyard to play on her own for the first time. Macho, who was so excited that his friend was finally in the yard with him, followed her everywhere. His face was never more than a few inches from hers. He wanted to show her everything! Her annoyance with his constant interference grew and grew until she finally jumped onto a piece of furniture, turned around, and slapped him across the face. He looked very confused and hurt as to why she did that to him, but hey, I understood. She was sick of his benevolent patri-barky.

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Photo #1. First, Penny wanted to go outside by herself. She’s a very capable kitty. In fact, her first couple months of life was as an actual outdoor cat before she was adopted by me. She has claws and a good sense of smell and can climb trees and catch mice for dinner. But Macho couldn’t handle her going outside alone, even though we were telling him to leave her alone for a minute.

Similarly, I have gone to Girl’s Camp as both a leader and a girl. Every time, there were experienced outdoorsy women who led the group, but also every time, the men required that a priesthood holder attend with us. It’s as if they believed we might not survive a couple nights at a campground without a man there to protect us – even if he knows nothing about camping and the female leaders have backpacked to the top of Mt. Everest.

This excessive protection also shows up when a priesthood leader is required to be in the building for activities that don’t involve him. Many female eyes have rolled at the 85 year old man sent to sit in the lobby and “protect” them while Relief Society activities filled with large groups of able bodied women holding cell phones were just down the hall. 

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Photo #2. Here Penny is trying to explore, but Macho can’t just let her do it on her own. When you’re trying to get work done, but a priesthood leader is hovering over your shoulder making suggestions, it’s super annoying.

My friend was the Relief Society president in her ward, and she used to sit down with her counselors and set up visiting teaching companionships. Unfortunately, the bishop would soon undo all of their work by reassigning a few select partnerships in a way that he thought made more sense, which sent them all back to the drawing board to reconfigure the puzzle again, differently. Finally my friend learned and just invited the bishop to just come to the meeting where they created the visiting teaching routes, because it was almost pointless to do it without him because he was just going to change it anyway. For her, this was the most frustrating thing in her calling but she was too timid to speak up to his authority, and the bishop was oblivious to how unwanted and unneeded his direction on the visiting teaching program was.

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Photo #3. Years ago, when Facebook groups were a brand new thing, my ward Relief Society Presidency created one for us. For awhile (until a neighborhood group including all genders and religions was formed), it was the place for neighborhood women to chat, ask for plumber recommendations, share morning sickness tips, and even the occasional joke about boobs. It was a female-centric group of female friends, connected by all belonging to the same ward Relief Society group. It was never a church sponsored group.

Years passed, and activity in that group slowed down to mostly just announcements about Women’s Conference and what lesson we were covering on Sunday. But one day, a newly reactivated sister in the ward asked a question about the Word of Wisdom, and a conversation ensued. I wrote a lengthy response with some lesser known aspects of Word of Wisdom history and my own opinion on the topic. That night at 10 pm, I got a text from my bishop. He said, “Hey, I really liked your comment on Suzy’s (not her real name) Facebook post tonight. Thanks for sharing that!” My initial reaction was, “Cool, the bishop liked my comment.” But immediately after I thought, “Wait – what is he doing in that group?! That’s the Relief Society group!!” I went to the Facebook group and searched the membership list. Sure enough, it was all women, except three men – the bishopric had been added at some point, too. And not only were they there, they were the admins of the group! Someone put THEM in charge of OUR female group? Does the Elder’s Quorum have a group that the Relief Society president babysits silently and texts the men private congratulations on how well they are doing in it? I don’t think so. This spooky Big Brother vibe you get at Relief Society events is weird and annoying, no matter how nice the bishop that is silently spying on you might be. Knock it off, dudes. (Also Macho, stop silently stalking Penny because she does know you’re there – even if I didn’t realize my bishop was watching me.)

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Photo #4. As a newlywed at BYU I heard this teaching in a Relief Society lesson: “Let your husband be the leader in your family, and he’ll do everything he can to make you happy. In fact, in a so-called “equal relationship”, women get their way exactly half of the time. In a Latter-day Saint (except we said “Mormon” back then) marriage, a wife will get what she wants much, much more often, because he’s trying so hard to please you.”

Honestly, the idea that my husband (played by Macho the contorted dog in this photo) will be bending over backwards trying to figure out what I want and make me happy rather than just, I don’t know, talking to me like his equal and making a co-decision with me, is dumb. Let’s just be adult partners. I want to get my way through logical discussion of ideas, not master manipulation of my partner.

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Photo #5. Penny is trying to climb a tree for fun here, but Macho won’t get out of her way. He’s licking her foot, I assume in what is supposed to be an act of friendship. But actually, Macho – it’s annoying getting licked, especially when you’re in the middle of something. You are just in the way, dude. When she turned to jump down, she had nowhere to jump either, because he was blocking her landing zone, and she had to splat right onto his back and tumble to the ground.

Related, I recently read the experience of a frustrated counselor in her ward Relief Society presidency. They were planning an evening presentation with female guest speaker (presumably not LDS) who did advocacy work for domestic violence survivors and education on different types of abuse. They were hashing out the details when the president said, “…of course, only after we get the bishop’s approval.”

It’s odd because the woman presenting to them would probably have been more than a little concerned that these grown women would have to ask a man for his approval before making a move in their own organization FOR women, but no one other than her could see the irony in what they were saying. It’s really hard to run a women’s organization well when smack in the middle of your landing space is the need to run everything past a man WHO DOES NOT EVEN BELONG TO YOUR ORGANIZATION for his permission.

 

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Photo #6. I have overheard, many, many times: “Women don’t need the Priesthood. Can you imagine calling a young mom with babies to handle the entire ward? They have enough on their plate as it is. Thanks heavens only men can be called to a bishopric, right?!” (This is just plain dumb when it’s said to a wise, thoughtful, and experienced empty nester who doesn’t have a job to go to because she spent her life as a stay at home mom…while a young man running his own business with 5 kids and infant twins is called as the bishop instead.)

This picture is where Penny just punched Macho in the face, because the idea that any woman is always busier than any man, no matter what phase of life they are in, is a dumb reason for only letting men be bishops and she wants to slap some sense into him.

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Photo #7. In even the most simple of tasks, priesthood leaders can interfere and take over tasks that women could easily do on their own. For example, when a new teacher is called in Relief Society, the bishop will usually step into the women’s meeting on Sunday to announce the calling and then exit again. Is it too much to ask that the Relief Society president herself, the one who is LITERALLY THE PRESIDENT OF THIS ROOM OF LADIES, announce to them who has been called as their new teacher?

Similarly in these photos, Macho is following Penny around and checking on her every move. She can walk on her own, thank you very much. Please leave her alone to do this most simple and basic of tasks. Your meddling is tripping her and making things harder. 

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Photo #8. You can actually see my cat saying swear words in her head as Macho bumps his big wet nose into her again yet again, because he’s hovering so close.

Likewise, my friend was called as the music leader in her ward, and part of her job was to pick the hymns for church on Sunday. At first she put a lot of thought and effort into her calling, researching what the talks were going to be about, and choosing hymns that fit with the theme. Problematically, about a quarter of the time her bishop would swap out the hymns she had picked for one of his own choosing instead. Sometimes it was because he didn’t know the hymn and didn’t think the congregation would either (which is funny, because as a music lover she was specifically TRYING to introduce the ward to beautiful new hymns they might not have heard yet), and other times he gave no reason at all. He just said he felt prompted to change it. She stopped trying to care. He was hovering so closely over every aspect of her calling that there was no point in trying to do it her own way, because anytime there was a difference of opinion on what to do it was automatically going to go the way he picked anyway. And all she could do was stand there and swear in her head as he hovered incessantly over her calling.

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Photo #9. See how Macho sticks his nose EVERYWHERE, whether it’s invited (it’s never invited) or not? My friend was called as a counselor in the Relief Society presidency. She was shocked, because in the past she and the newly called president had not gotten along very well. She hoped things would change since she had picked her as her counselor, but no, it was the same as ever. Their personalities still clashed, and they had a hard time getting anything done together. Finally in exasperation she asked, “Why did you even ask me to be your counselor?” The president said, “I didn’t. I actually submitted two other names before you, but the bishop kept telling me to go back and pray more. Finally he told me to call you, so I did.”

My friend was terribly frustrated to hear this. She had accepted the calling because she thought the other woman was making a peace offering and actually wanted her input and contrary viewpoint. No, not at all! Neither of them got along, and they both knew it, but that bishop put his nose into their business and tried to make them friends. He figured he knew better than the woman he was calling whom SHE would want to work with for three years in HER organization that SHE was supposed to be in charge of. My friend resigned from the presidency not long after that. 

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Photo #10. This is my final photo (although we could go on all day). There is some scent on the air. I don’t know what it was, because I didn’t smell anything, but both of them perked up and sniffed the air with great interest at the exact same time. Macho’s next move might be to turn around and tell Penny all about it (if they spoke English), but it’s important to remember that she also has a nose and a brain, and she doesn’t necessarily need his interpretation of what is happening. 

Despite this, time after time after time after time, I have attended a meeting (a training meeting, a conference, a sacrament meeting talk) where a woman shares something profound and beautiful. But instead of just closing the meeting and ending on her words, the presiding priesthood holder stands up and explains again, in his words, what she already told us. We know stuff! We don’t need to be told again in a man’s voice. Our own personal sense of smell is just fine.

These don’t even begin to cover the limitless aspects of benevolent patriarchy, but to the men in my life – can you see how your supposed protection and care for us can be stifling? For example, have you ever stepped out of the shower and had a dog (who loves you very much) poke his cold wet nose between your bum cheeks to say good morning? Sure, his intentions are noble. Smelling bums is how he makes friends and says hello, but it is nonetheless very uncomfortable for you.

The next time you are tempted to help one of the women you preside over at church, think hard – was your presence actually requested, or are you just a wet dog nose in her bum crack? Don’t be a wet nose. Go back inside and mind your own business while she lives her own life, free and happy, in the great outdoors. When she wants to cuddle with you, she’ll come back inside and you guys can do this (because honestly men, we do love YOU – we just can’t handle your benevolent patriarchy):

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Best friends and equal cuddle partners forever.

A Primer on Blessings

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The blessings by poet and United Methodist minister Jan Richardson have been giving me a lot of comfort in recent weeks. Nearly every Zoom church service I plan includes a reading from her book The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief and probably one from Nadia Bolz-Weber’s (ELCA pastor and author) weekly newsletter. I think my current favorite of Richardson’s is Blessing for When the World is Ending, though before the pandemic I carried a small printout of And the Table Will Be Wide: A Blessing for World Communion Sunday with me wherever I went.

These blessings and prayers speak to the specific difficulty of loss and grief within a framework of faith and spirituality that resonate with me today. They provide needed comfort and messages of hope — not kind of hope where God swoops in and fixes everything, but the kind where God is with us as we sit in our grief and loss. This God calls us to create a more just and equitable world.

I first witnessed women giving blessings to other women at a Mormon feminist retreat years ago and the following year gave my first blessing. That first experience was good and awkward, and interesting, so I continued doing it. In recent years, I prefer to write out blessings and send them to the receiver. This gives me time to reflect on my message and word choice so that the blessings better reflect the needs of the receiver.

I’ve been thinking about what blessings mean to me after my faith transition. I’ve come up with a short theory of blessings that goes something like this: we are our best selves when we feel loved and valued by God (if you believe in God), our families (biological, adopted, and/or chosen), and our communities. When we give blessings, we seek to remind people of that love and connect them to feelings of being loved so that they can make decisions or act from a place of love and value.

In this way, blessings aren’t about revealing things, but they are about naming and affirming what is. This process of naming can involve naming the difficulties the person is experiencing, naming the gifts and talents of the person, and naming the love that they give to God/family/community and the love they receive from God/family/community. Don’t try to predict the future or speak beyond what you know to be true, but make the truth beautiful and relevant to that person. Even the process of naming hard truths can be meaningful if they are identified with words of empathy and compassion. We all want to be seen and loved for who we are.

Male priesthood holders have been taught to perform blessings in prescribed ways, but women’s blessings are not bound to those same rules and traditions. Do ask the person what kind of God language (or none) they would prefer. If you are giving a blessing in person, ask the person what kind of physical contact (e.g. hands on head/shoulder or none) would be best for them. Ask the person what the blessing should address or what they hope to get out of the experience. Honor those requests.

What are your thoughts or experiences with giving or receiving women’s blessings?

Guest Post: Conversations and Questions About Art at Church

[image error]“Of the Barren and the Fruitful” by Esther Candari

The following is a guest post by Esther Candari. You can see more of her work here.

Late Monday night I opened one of many recent “official update” emails from church headquarters. Most of the time these emails cover administrative details, that while important and often interesting, don’t have a strong emotional impact on me. This one though piqued my interest from the start. The emotional rollercoaster started at a high point as I read through the text detailing the increased emphasis on making the foyers of chapels a beautiful and Christ-centered space. As an art and design professional, I can’t tell you how much time I spend at church trying not to grimmace at poorly placed, poorly selected, and poorly maintained artwork and decor. While the average non-design focused individual may not be as in-tune to these details or perturbed by them as I am, research shows that aesthetic experience and spiritual experience are intrinsically linked. I continued scrolling through the letter reading through the section about a curated list of artworks approved for foyer use. I sighed a little at this portion, but I know that it is standard practice within the church and it makes sense from both a visual branding perspective and a doctrinal perspective to curate the art that is presented. What I was not prepared for was the way my stomach sank as I continued on to the next page filled with thumbnails of the artwork on this list. 

Maybe it was the fact that I have spent the last year of my life writing a master’s thesis how to use artwork in Judeo-Christian religious education to create more constructive and empathetic conversations on difficult but biblically imperative topics. Maybe it was the fact that I had just finished my last paper for my graduate degree, in which I had written about the use of militarized saints in Chartres cathedral as pro-crusade and anti-muslim/Semite propaganda; a subtle visualization of sacramentalized brutality. What ever the reasons were, the artwork displayed before me did not resonate with the deep and personal love I have for my Savior or, for the most part, with my classically trained oil painting artistic roots, most of all it did not resonate with the rich multicultural fabric that I have experienced in congregations across three continents and three times as many countries. It screamed homogeny, whiteness, and slightly-better-than-average-art. What made it worse was that the clearest, and one of only a very small handful, ethnic minority figures was a small African child, cradled in the arms of a clearly caucasian Christ. Now before anyone’s “you are an anti-white racist” prickles come out I want to clarify, I personally do not believe that depicting Christ as white is wrong, what I do believe is wrong, and so subtly powerful, is depicting him, and anyone in a position of power in conjunction with him, as PRIMARILY or ONLY caucasian. If we as a multinational and multi-ethnic church, are ok with portraying Christ and his inner circle in a historically inaccurate light, then let that light be equal opportunity. And trust me when I say, that one black baby in a strikingly colonial toned painting in a church foyer, is not going to be any help in my conversations with my southern and deeply religious African-American coworkers who in all sincerity ask me “why my church hates black folk.” 

Now as someone who has experienced a wide array of misunderstanding in my life, I strive to not do the same to others, and that in this scenario includes the committees, administrators, and clerical leaders responsible for curating this list. Bias can be both complicit and implicit and I also understand that due to a wide range of factors, some of them more honorable than others, there is not a diverse array of religious artwork available for these individuals to choose from. Especially when stylistic branding is taken into consideration. I am not going to point fingers, call names, or lay irretractable blame. My faith teaches me that judgments are reserved for God. But what I can, and believe I am called to do, is ask questions. And these are the questions that I am asking. 

1) What does the diversity of these decision making panels look like? Are there checks and balances in place to mitigate the racial biases in our church for which there are undeniable historical evidence?

2) Statistically speaking, over half of the church’s membership is female and close to half are not caucasian, but all of the artists behind these paintings (some of who I know personally and respect greatly) are caucasian, and only two of the 18 paintings are by women. While I don’t believe these facts are 100% causational of the caucasian bent and token representation that is visualized in these paintings, I think we are blind if we don’t admit they are correlational. I am a female artist of color who can hold a candle stylistically and quality-wise to more than a few of the paintings on this list. What can I be doing to make sure that voices like mine are visually at this table?

3) I understand that beaucracy works slow and the church is not a democracy, but why aren’t there more opportunities, such as the one created for the upcoming hymn book release, for the members of this church to contribute to the official collective visual language of the church?

4) The Teacher after whom we pattern our lives taught through the richness of symbols. Are we stopping to ask ourselves what we are conciously or subconciously teaching people with the symbols we create of Him? 

These are my questions. 

Diversity in LDS Art

By Michelle Franzoni Thorley

From a speech given at the Center for LDS Arts in New York City, 2019.  Shared here to publicly add to the conversation about the newly announced requirements for meetinghouse foyer art displays.

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The Author as a child

To understand my presentation, you need to understand a little about who I am. I am a woman, born to an American mother and a Mexican Father. Being part of two different worlds has given me a unique perspective. Being a Mexican American daughter of a immigrant and single white mother has taught me bravery, resiliency, and is one of the biggest reasons why I have the courage to stand in front of you all today.  My mother has taught me I am capable of anything.

I know the value the world places on someone like me.  I was not born with many privileges or opportunities. My humble circumstances might have had the power to dictate my worth or what I could become if it were not for one major influence in my life.  From a very young age I knew that God loved me, I knew that I was valuable to loving heavenly parents. Maya Angelou expressed these exact sentiments best, as she is uniquely gifted to do” “It still humbles me, that this force, which made leaves and fleas and stars and rivers and you, loves me… It’s amazing! I can do anything, and do it well, any good thing, I can do it. That’s why I am who I am,” she said.  “Yes. Because God loves me and I’m amazed at it and grateful for it.”

 

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Growing up I would look at Mormon art and feel connected to it as a follower of Jesus Christ, but I never saw myself represented there.  While this image is not LDS, it is an excellent representation of the images I am referring to.  None of the faces looked like mine. They did not tell stories that were mine. I often wondered to myself, where do I fit in here? As a Mexican American, an only child, and a daughter of a single mother I often felt I belonged nowhere positive. I did not fit into the stereotypes of a “Mormon.”  I often wondered would there ever be any art that that would represent my experiences in the church?

 

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Mother of All Living – by Michelle Franzoni Thorley

Even though I have little education, I feel called to paint because I love how diverse our Church is and I want everyone to know they fit in and have a place here.  I did not see the art I wished to see, so I decided I needed to make it.

Why it’s important that women and people of color create art?  First I want to acknowledge that the term “people of color” represents a large diverse group of people.  While our experiences differ, we are almost all minorities in our societies and especially in the church.

In a recent TEDtalk, Actress America Ferrera said, “I wanted to play people who were complex and multidimensional, people who existed in the center of their own lives. Not cardboard cutouts that stood in the background of someone else’s life….

I have witnessed the power our voices have when they can access presence in the culture…we cannot deny it — presence creates possibility…”

I share this quote because it really hits home.  Why is it important to have a diversity of skin color, gender, ethnicity, and backgrounds in LDS art? First, Let me ask you this, “what is possible for the future of our church?  What is divinely designed for the future of our church? It is diversity.  But how can we create diversity?  We can create diversity By building the possibility for it through art.  By anticipating and planning for it.  This is Christ’s church; we all need to be represented here because we all belong here.

We are starting to see more representations of people of color painted by white LDS artists. While this movement is wonderful it is only the beginning of inclusion. We have come to a place in history where people of color don’t just want their stories told, we want to tell our own stories, dreams, and perspectives using our own voices.  We do not want to be the background “color” in someone else’s painting.

Elder Ulisess Soares said “When we understand people and their circumstances, we tend to act in love, we tend to embrace them according to their needs.  This is all about ministering. You minister to people according to the circumstances they are living. And we have to understand their challenges and difficulties. I believe diversity is very important…. we should learn from the different ways people are and the different ways people think.”

We cannot empathize and minister to peoples needs, if we do not understand their circumstances and stories.  Throughout history, it has been widely researched and documented that women in general are the most marginalized and often oppressed group in history.  This marginalization is magnified even more when you add in race. All women, and especially women of color understand opposition.

We, as minorities, need to be able to process, express, pray and create art that is based and inspired by our own distinctive life experiences.  Minority women have unique experiences with oppression.  Our histories and experiences, our stories, have been pushed into the shadows through all history. I get both excited and emotional when I think about women working out and sharing difficult life stories through art for the first time.

 

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Family History & Temple Work – by Michelle Franzoni Thorley

 

A year ago, while working on my family history, I had a difficult time dealing with the atrocities my European ancestors inflicted on my indigenous ancestors.  For many people of color, family history involves oppression, racism, slavery and violence. It is really hard and depressing to confront these things. I was able to sit and paint as I worked out my feelings about this difficult subject.

 

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Family History & Temple Work – by Michelle Franzoni Thorley

 

It began with a lot of anger, then a deep sadness that I felt in my bones. I understood that all this violence, racism and oppression has lived in my family for centuries and that I still felt and saw the effects of it in my life and the lives of family members today.

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The Finding Process – by Michelle Franzoni Thorley

By doing family history and temple work, I was able to work through these difficult emotions and express my feelings of this process through painting and begin the healing process that my ancestors and I have longed for.

 

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Jesus Said Love Everyone – J. Kirk Richards

 

Having our art match the diversity of our membership also helps our community by sending a message of inclusion. This painting is “Jesus said love everyone”, by J. Kirk Richards. Imagine if you were someone who is LGBTQ+, and wondering if you will be safe and welcomed into a Latter day saint church building.  How would you feel walking into one of our Church buildings for the first time and seeing an image like this? I would hope it would be a step in the right direction to help “visitors feel welcome” without using words. In preparing for this talk I looked for a painting that would demonstrate a feeling on inclusion for women of color.  It was very difficult to find.

 

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Mourning’s Hosanna – Rose Datoc Dall

This painting “Mourning’s Hosanna” by Rose Datoc Dall, a Filipina American is very uncommon, which is saddening because this is exactly what we need to see more of. Our walls should send the message to each person who enters that they are part of the body of Christ and that they are seen and loved for who they are.

For me, beginning to paint was a daunting task. I had to first believe in myself that I could teach myself how to paint.

I had a pallet knife and two tubes of paint. I was lucky enough to be given some used paint and brushes until slowly I could buy a few of my own supplies. I taught myself how to paint portraits using tutorials on YouTube. It took months and months to understand what I needed to do and get the supplies.  I would watch painting tutorial after tutorial, and then at night after I put my kids to bed, I would try to imitate what I had seen. I had to guess on colors and values since I didn’t and still don’t quite understand all of that. I had a lot of discouraging thoughts and feelings and little guidance on how to improve.  It seemed impossible but I did not want to give up.

You may wonder why there are not more LDS women of color artists, particularly oil painters. Lack of educational opportunities and money to buy supplies are huge reasons.  The cost of the investment in resources is often too high for minority women, who often struggle on the edge of poverty in our society.  Food, bills, and medication are always going to come before painting supplies.

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I Will Find You – by Michelle Franzoni Thorley

This all becomes more daunting when you add in the confines of motherhood.  Becoming a mother has been a huge artistic inspiration as well as helping me to become a better version of myself.  The connection between mother and child is so inspiring, but I would be untruthful if I didn’t also acknowledge the difficulties it brings. I started painting when I still had 2 preschool age children at home.  There was never time to paint unless I stayed up very late at night, painting in terrible lighting. Finding a place to paint was even more difficult with the solvents and chemicals that go with oil painting. And finally, the ultimate difficulty was making the decision to focus my emotional and physical efforts to painting and not focusing 100% of my efforts on my family and all the tasks that mothers are responsible for.  It’s not just that my house was messy; it was the difficulty of forcefully making time for my dreams and then dealing with the guilt that came along with my decision.

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Resurrection Morning – By Michelle Franzoni Thorley Featured on the Spring 2020 Cover of The Dialogue Journal

 

We need to find more ways for mothers and minority women to share their voices and unique perspectives to enrich our church and to be able to empathize and minister to a variety of people.  Social media is powerful because it will be the medium in which many stories and perspective of women and people of color will be heard for the first time in history.  Social media is a great way to find mentors and seek out guidance and opportunities. It is also one of the few ways for minority women to find and apply for monetary help, even thought, I know through experience, that there are not many resources out there for people like me. Providing scholarships and grants to help with financial obstacles, will be the first phases for those wanting to help.

 

The continuing phases will be filling our chapels and church building with a diverse selection of art.  A selection diverse enough, to shine a light on the most marginalized people in our society. We need art that represents the difficult circumstances that our sisters in the church face, told by the very sisters that have overcome those circumstances.  I want children that look like me or have had experiences like me, to grow up seeing themselves in the art of the church. Media and the arts have been influencing social realities for centuries; let us make art that reflects the future inclusion we want to see.   If we make it they will come.

 

I understand that we all suffer in different ways.   I want any women or young girls listening, to know I pray for your successes. You are my sisters.  I know that God loves you, He sees you, and we see you. You and I are more than our stereotypes and you and I are strong and capable of any good thing.

 

Michelle Franzoni Thorley is an artist, a family history expert,  and a plant enthusiast. With her piece above, Resurrection Morning, Michelle is the first person of color artist to be featured on the cover of  The Dialogue Journal in the Spring 2020 issue as edited by Exponent II. You can follow her extraordinary work about family history, race, generational trauma, and art at @flora_familiar on Instagram.

Guest Post: A Good Mormon Woman

[image error]by Kristie Carlson

I’m writing about my experience, which is valid because it’s my experience. It’s okay if it’s not your experience. Scroll on; or read it and try and understand another perspective. If this is also your experience, you are not alone. It’s not you. You are not broken and you are enough! I suffered for years with depression and anxiety. It’s all gone now.

What did the church teach me about being a good Mormon woman?

To be a good Mormon woman you must always be happy and agreeable, no matter what. Don’t complain, don’t question and do whatever the male leaders say. Do not criticize the male leaders (even if the criticism is true) or the system, or you are a bad Mormon woman. Feminism is definitely evil. And recognizing inequality is also of the devil.

Having sexual feelings, initiating sex, but also saying no when your husband wants sex is bad. A Mormon woman is not a sex fiend!

A Mormon woman’s body is good, it’s a temple, but must never be shown too much because it’s bad. Wear the church undergarments to make sure that shoulders and legs do not show because they are bad. Your body is yours, but God through male leaders will tell you what you can or can’t do with your body. And what underwear to wear. But it’s your body. Do not judge others, but if they aren’t dressed according to your standards they are bad. Look away. Tell your children to never look at those bad body parts. And TV: if anyone is immodest, or is suggestive in the slightest, you must turn it off, because sex is bad- next to murder even- unless you are married, in which case it’s good, but not too much. You shouldn’t enjoy it or have sexual feelings. But always say yes to your husband. And be skinny and attractive to him, while always wearing your garments night and day. Be a good wife or he will leave you, because your worth is in being a good wife and mother.

If you aren’t enduring suffering, you aren’t doing enough. But you’ll never be “enough”. But you must always smile and be happy even if you are suffering. And you must be perfect. If you’re not a good wife, your husband will leave you. And your worth is only in being a dutiful wife and mother. If you don’t do the duties of wife and mother which includes doing the housework, always being happy and being perfectly patient with your children while always using that nauseating voice the women use in conference talks, you are not enough.

Do everything asked of you, and if you can’t, you will feel guilty and shameful and not enough. The basics are callings, mothering, housework, visiting teaching, feeding the missionaries, FHE, personal and family scripture study, prayers (morning, before meals and as a family before bed and personally before bed), making meals for others, making meals for funerals, going to all the meetings for church and your calling, visiting the temple often and doing missionary work and family history work. Do not complain when you must do all this while your husband is at work or spending all of his free time with his calling. And for sure you must clean the church building on Saturday with a smile on your face, even if you can’t keep up with your own housework, and feel like a failure because you aren’t doing enough, and you’re not being a good Mormon wife so your husband could leave you. But always smile.

Get an education! It’s not like we’re in the 1950’s! Women should get an education, but not use it except to educate their children. And even if we’re now a society that almost demands a two income home, you must stay at home, have a big family, and never get in debt. But pay your tithing first! Always pay your tithing before you pay for your food or home. If you pay for food or home and do not pay your tithing, you are bad. You will feel shame and guilt. You may not enter the temple, and you will not be a forever family.

Yes, you will suffer, but you must endure the suffering, because a Mormon will always suffer, because happiness is only for the next life. But always smile. You are an example for the world because we have the Truth and must show others that we are so happy to be the lucky ones. Be nice and helpful and serve others and coerce them to be Mormons because if you even bring just one person to God, your joy will be immense…in the next life. You are responsible for others’ eternal salvation. And being a good wife and mother means your husband and children stay faithful to the church- Not God- because the church IS God- so it must be the Church. You can’t still have God and leave the Church.

The world is a bad, wicked place. So be in the world but not of the world. If you are a working mother or an unmarried woman, you are probably of the world. And you’re bad. You must support your husband in his job and callings, because they are the most important. But praise him if he helps with the children or housework (your job!).

You must never think that women are not equal in the church. They can be primary president! But if you’re primary president, it’s actually the bishop that calls your teachers, but you may make suggestions. And if you pray and feel that Sally should be in this calling, the bishop’s opinion on the matter always trumps yours. And everything you do must be approved by the bishop. And if you ask that the activity day girls meet more than twice a month (because the Boy Scouts meet every week), because the activity day advisor is having a baby and will not meet with them next month, and your bishop says no that’s not in the handbook, you must never question his authority. And do not question The Handbook that is secret and only given to the male leaders.

If you ever question the gender inequality, other women will tell you all the things Mormon women get and why are you complaining when you’ve been given SO much. And they will ask why would you want to be burdened with the office of bishop? It’s a burden that the males bear and thank goodness we as women don’t have to bear that burden! So be grateful. If you question or are not grateful, you are prideful and Satan is getting a hold on your heart. Other women will not trust you and know that Satan is getting to you. The bishop may not give you a calling where you’ll be a bad influence.

And speaking of callings, you must never say no. If you’re overwhelmed, that means you’re doing it right. God will never give you more than you can handle. And smile. And clean the church building. And you’re special. But you’re never enough.

God is loving and loves his daughters. But he wants them to suffer in polygamy. He asks women to share a husband. Or to be a handmaiden. Women will wonder why God does not love his daughters as much as his sons, but we don’t know all the mysteries of God. When your daughters ask you why God asked Lucy Walker to marry her foster father (Joseph Smith) at age 16, right after her mother died and her father was sent away and you read of her agony in her journal, you tell them God loves his daughters, but He asks them to suffer. And Joseph Smith was suffering too- he didn’t want to marry all those women and lie to his wife. But God loves his daughters, even if it seems pretty clear that it’s not as much as his sons. God’s plan is better than yours. You read in the scriptures about men, and what they do, and you tell your daughters that God still loves his daughters just as much as his sons, but they see it in your eyes. They learn to hide the pain behind a smile; and that even though it seems unfair, do not trust your own thinking. The men speak for God, and they say God loves everyone. So your confusion must be from the devil. Your fate in heaven is to be a polygamist wife, but you’ll feel differently in heaven. You’ll be happy. Not now. But in heaven. Endure to the end. Be faithful. Doubt your doubts. Never trust your own thinking. Polygamy isn’t unfair. God is loving. He loves his daughters. They are special. They just need to endure the suffering, for God, for happiness…later. And keep working for perfection, and your worth, because God wants you to be worthy of Him.

Kristie Carlson was born and raised Mormon, but left the church last year at age 40. She is on a journey of self discovery and says that she has never been happier. She lives in PA with her husband, 4 kids and 2 dogs.

Guest Post: Does it matter who holds the priesthood?

[image error]By Ziff

In the past few years, the Church’s approach to explaining its ban on women holding the priesthood has been to play up the idea that all members have equal access to blessings of the priesthood. For example, in a 2013 Conference talk, Elder Andersen said,

We sometimes overly associate the power of the priesthood with men in the Church. The priesthood is the power and authority of God given for the salvation and blessing of all—men, women, and children.

A man may open the drapes so the warm sunlight comes into the room, but the man does not own the sun or the light or the warmth it brings. The blessings of the priesthood are infinitely greater than the one who is asked to administer the gift.

What this type of rhetoric carefully ignores, of course, is that it’s only men and boys who are actually holding and exercising the priesthood, and that there are benefits to being in the group that performs the ordinances, as well as costs for those in the group that doesn’t.

I was particularly struck by this point when reading the talks given this past Conference by two teenagers from Provo, one by a girl (Laudy Ruth Kaouk) and the other by a boy (Enzo Serge Petelo). Both talks were titled “How the Priesthood Blesses Youth,” I’m sure in an effort to emphasize the parallel nature of their experiences. But the content of the talks belies this feeble attempt to make them look similar. Kaouk’s talk was about the value of receiving priesthood ordinances, while Petelo’s talk was about the value of performing priesthood ordinances. Although of course not discussed in the talks directly, it’s not news that whereas boys (and men) are able to both perform and receive priesthood ordinances, girls (and women) are able only to receive them.

In Petelo’s talk, he also tells a story that highlights how simplistic Elder Andersen’s comparison of performing priesthood ordinances to opening the drapes is. Petelo tells how his younger sister’s baptism was delayed a month so he would have time to be ordained a priest and could be the one to perform it. Elder Andersen’s analogy tells us that it doesn’t matter who opens the drapes, only that they get opened. But Petelo’s story tells otherwise. It was important enough that he be the one to do it that they delayed the ordinance.

Another issue that that opening the drapes analogy ignores is that there’s not just an ordinance performer, but also an ordinance gatekeeper who authorizes it to take place. For example, a priesthood holder performing a baptism has to get permission from the bishop (for a child of record baptism). It’s always a man who authorizes and a man or boy who performs an ordinance (other than for women’s initiatory in the temple). This is important because for women and girls, this means that having an ordinance performed means getting authorization from a man, someone who the Church does its best to make sure has a very different church experience from you.

For example, the all-male priesthood of ordinance gatekeepers and ordinance performers can limit women’s access to priesthood ordinances in the following situations:

A young single woman who isn’t getting married or going on a mission wants to go to the temple for her endowment. She must first convince a perhaps reluctant bishop that she’s ready.
A teen girl or adult woman wants to get her patriarchal blessing. She must get permission from her bishop.
A woman who was sealed to her husband but is now legally divorced wants a sealing cancellation. She must convince her bishop and stake president to forward her request to the First Presidency. Many local leaders are reluctant to do so if she’s not immediately getting sealed to another man. (This is an issue of having an ordinance undone rather than done, but it’s still relevant.)
A woman or girl wants to take the sacrament during a global pandemic, when people are leaving their houses as little as possible. If she’s in a house with a priesthood-holding man or boy, she can get it. If not, she can’t. (Note that this also highlights that the sacrament—by far our most common ordinance—is the exception to the apologetic about male-only priesthood that says that you can’t do ordinances for yourself.)
A woman wants to serve a mission. She must convince her bishop to submit her papers. (A mission isn’t a priesthood ordinance, but the situation is similar in that women have to go through a male gatekeeper to access a valued Church experience.)

For some of these, men and boys’ experience as ordinance receivers is similar, but for others it isn’t. For example, although a sealed-but-divorced man also has to get permission to be sealed again, he’s not likely to be facing the same scrutiny because he’s not undoing a saving ordinance. A single woman who wants to go through the temple may face a bishop who has no real sense of the gender imbalance among single adults in the Church, and who may just put her off and say she can go when she’s getting married.

To fix Elder Andersen’s opening the drapes analogy, I suggest the following additions:

A woman has to go through one man, who will authorize a second man to open the drapes. This can make the process slow and unreliable.
Either the gatekeeper or the actual opener of the drapes might disagree with the woman that the drapes even need to be opened. “I have a lamp next to my desk,” they might say. “The glare from the sun will be too much. Why can’t you see well enough? Also, you are forbidden to buy a lamp for yourself.”
A woman wants the drapes to be closed, but again, the gatekeeper might disagree and leave them open. The woman has no recourse.
(Unrelated to the main topic of the post, but also, men start telling the woman that she kind of has the same power that they do because she’s able to appreciate the sun when it streams in, even though she’s still of course banned from touching the drapes.)

So to answer the question I posed in the title, of course it matters who holds the priesthood. The GAs would like us to imagine that priesthood-holding men and boys who gatekeep and perform ordinances are nothing but a conduit for God’s power to flow through, so it’s fine that women and girls are barred from it. This clearly does not align with reality, though, as priesthood-holders also have their own needs and wants, and these can easily interfere with others’ access to ordinances through them. As a result, women and girls’ access to priesthood blessings is limited not only by not being permitted to perform ordinances, but also by having to go through often unsympathetic all-male gatekeepers to receive them.

Ziff blogs regularly about Mormon topics with some of his sisters and friends at Zelophehad’s Daughters. He is also a big fan of the Exponent, and he’s happy to have the chance to guest post!

Art in Meetinghouse Foyers

Today, the LDS Church announced that all Church meetinghouses will feature only 22 approved art images for the walls. I’m deeply disappointed by the collection.

The Church is clearly trying to focus on images of Jesus Christ and moving away from images that are particular to Mormons. Only two of the images are scenes from the Book of Mormon, for example. As someone who has a deep love for LDS art, I love the idea of featuring works on our walls that center around Christ. But the figure of Christ that consistently appears in every single image in this group is comely, quiet, unemotional, and extraordinarily European. With so little variation in how Jesus appears, this collection encourages members to believe that we know exactly how Jesus looks. And, it turns out, how Jesus looks is white. Perhaps this take on the Messiah should not surprise us. Every single one of the nine artists featured is white as well.

The second problem that immediately stands out is the lack of women in these images. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us either: seven of the nine approved artists are men. Of the figures that are clearly identifiable as male or female, I counted 119 males (13 of them boys) and 22 females (10 of them girls) in this collection. Of the very few women who appear at all, most are incredibly attractive. There is no variation in body type and almost none in skin tone. The women look down, holding children and household objects. They show no emotion except for devotion.

Why do these things matter? Educators talk about the concept of “windows and mirrors.” Mirrors are stories (in art or literature) that reflect back to you your own cultural experience and help you process and build your own identity. Windows are stories that help you look out into the world, that show you others’ cultural experiences and how they are similar and different from your own. Both are critically important to help us understand who we are and how we can connect to others. These images serve only as mirrors for a small subset of the LDS population. They do not give LDS people of color an image of the divine that reflects their lives. They do not give women a sense of the potential of their relationship with Christ. They do not prompt white members to look out beyond their own narrow experiences.

In a time when art by Mormon artists is of higher quality and more available than ever before, there is simply no excuse for this narrowing up of the way we convey the human relationship to the divine. If Church leadership wants to focus on images of Christ, then our church walls should collectively house artwork that showcase the expansiveness of a Christ that is glorious and awesome enough for the entirety of the human experience. In that spirit, here is a list of six pieces of art that would more closely represent a Messiah for all the world. 

Kathleen Peterson, Parting Breads

Jorge Cocco Santángelo, Gethsemane

Rose Datoc Dall, Loaves and Fishes

J. Kirk Richards, Cristo CXXXIIA  

Caitlin Connolly, A Believing Woman

Kwani Povi Winder, They Brought Their Children

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These are images that are already available and some are already owned by the Church. I know that if the Church put out a call, many LDS artists from around the world would be honored to share their vision of Christ. A truly global church does not see Jesus in just one way. The art on our walls should offer something to inspire and comfort every single person who enters our buildings. With such abundant offerings from LDS artists, it would be truly tragic to not partake.