Exponent II's Blog, page 79

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry for Today We are Whole

Whenever anyone sets a dish on the dinner table and says, “it’s healthy,” with just that hint of virtuous suffering in the tone, it means ignore the taste and texture (or lack thereof) and force that bite down.

It’s really the only right thing to do of course, for if you are not suffering, how can you know it’s good for you? In the pursuit of the heaven that is skinniness, the ultimate moral good in the realm of diet culture, we are commanded to deny ourselves nobly and doggedly, looking forward instead to that ultimate reward.

“Healthy” in the realm of diet culture is often synonymous with denial, restriction, and suffering, because it’s the morally superior option against simple enjoyment – to “eat, drink, and be merry” as the scripture goes.

The same phrase is our spiritual parlance is also superseded by a moral imperative to avoid too much enjoyment. Like “healthy” in diet culture, “righteousness” in the church means noble and dogged denial, restriction, and sacrifice because the reward of eternal salvation comes in heaven, not on earth. We cannot be serious followers of the faith if we are eating, drinking, and being merry now. The reward comes in heaven.

President Nelson in the recent October General Conference, following the lead of 2 Nephi 28:7-8, equates enjoyment with sin and calls the eat, drink, and be merry way of living “one of the most absurd lies in the universe.” In the same conference, Elder Cook aligned the 2 Nephi scripture with nonbelievers (you can infer his opinions about “nonbelievers” in context and it’s not complimentary) who “succumb” to such a belief.

But the phrase “eat, drink, and be merry” originates in Ecclesiastes, where a different interpretation is offered. In the NIV version of Ecclesiastes 8:15, the writer recognizes that life is difficult and often contrary, so it is earthy joys that sustain us through our earthly toil. Ecclesiastes 8:15 (NIV) reads, “So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.”

If food and faith intertwine, it’s in the tension between scriptures that welcome and warn us away from the joys of sensory experiences. Do eat, drink, and be merry because that is the joy God gives us on earth as we toil. Do not dare to eat, drink, and be merry because it is thoughtless, selfish, and sinful.

As a survivor of diet culture, who has weighed out her food in points and forgone bread and gazed longingly at the “unhealthy” foods that can only lead to that ultimate sin of diet culture – fat – I am tired of all messages of shame, fear, denial, and self-abnegation. Healing my relationship with food has given me a fresh perspective on what it really means to “eat, drink, and be merry.”

Diet culture demands that food should be stripped of its properties, like fat or carbs, or that daily caloric intake should be severely limited, or that there are limited kinds of acceptable foods. We are supposed to feel ashamed if we can’t sustain a trendy fad diet and we are supposed to fear fatness like the state will destroy all our inherent value as human beings. We’re supposed to feel superior by not eating dessert.

But to enjoy something completely, earthily, to wholeness and fullness – whether that’s a hearty salad or a slice of cheesecake – is a necessary part of existence. A dinner table loaded with variety and abundance is not necessarily excessive or gluttonous. It only needs to be whole. Wholeness provides the body with all the energy and nutrients it requires plus enjoyment and satisfaction too. Recognizing that food must be both has allowed me to feel much more at home in my body and much more settled in my being, like I’m putting myself back together.

The late, great Rachel Held Evans writes about a similar spiritual fragmentation in her book Wholehearted Faith:

The Faith that I had once possessed demanded disintegration. Of course I could use my brain – as long as it led me to the correct, predetermined conclusions about science, biblical interpretation, and public policy. Of course I could use my heart – as long as it didn’t empathize with the wrong people or end up on the wrong side of complex moral dilemmas. Of course I could use my conscience – until it grew troubled by certain teachings and actions of the church. Of course I could use my body – as long as it remained heterosexual, cisgender, attractive but not too attractive, feminine but not too feminine, modest, appropriately clothes, restrained, demure, uncomplicated, and especially sexually dormant until my wedding night, at which point it would magically transform into a sex carnival for my husband.

In other words, I could be Christian as long as I loved God with half my heart, half my soul, half my mind, and half my body. (Actually, maybe just a quarter of my body).

Rachel Held Evans

The 2 Nephi interpretation of eating, drinking, and being merry smacks of living a half-life, or even a quarter life, when we could be whole by embracing the Ecclesiastes version of the scripture.

If unseasoned chicken, listless un-spiced and unbuttered veggies, and a siphoning of fat are the morally superior choices of diet culture, it seems to me the morally superior options of righteous Mormon culture also ask us to forgo wholeness.

Wholeness in Mormon spiritual matters sometimes feels impossible when we are pressured to be (happy) stay at home mothers without context, study the scriptures but only ask the right questions, attend all our meetings and never mind the time commitment, serve more without tiring, pay tithing but don’t look at that 100 billion in the vault, and endure to the end without questioning how LGBTQ folks, women, people of color, and all the interplay of variation between these identities fit in the LDS framework. If you don’t fit, just sacrifice and suffer until you do. Eat the dang carrot sticks and call it a meal. It’s what a morally upright person would do.

A spiritual theology full of contradictions and nuance (The meat and the milk, if you will) need not invoke fear and shame. When church is a place where people can approach in their wholeheartedness, we can experience the full range of grief and love, anger and exhilaration. It’s a place that can take questions and hold joy.

Wholeness means no one is scavenging for crumbs under the table or denying themselves their very favorite dessert because everyone can sit and join, serve and be served, love and be loved. It’s a place where we get everything we need, especially those irreplaceable gentle pushes to do better and be better, and enjoyment and satisfaction too. Church can do both.

The physical body cannot survive sustainably on a 1000 calorie a day diet. The spiritual self cannot survive sustainably on the religious equivalent of broccoli sans Ranch dip and fat free cottage cheese. We are meant to thrive. We are meant to be whole.

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

Mormon Feminists Riding the Edge: Thoughts on Institutional Improvements for Women in the Last Decade

Juanita Brooks’s father

 

I always liked that story from Juanita Brooks about riding the edge of the herd.* Her father once told her that it is the cowboy who rides on the edge of the herd, “who sings and calls and makes himself heard who helps direct the course.” The cowboy in the middle of the herd is helpless, he told her. The cowboy trailing behind is useless and shirking responsibility. The cowboy who rides counter to it is trampled.

Rather, her father said, “Ride the edge of the herd and be alert, but know your directions, and call out loud and clear. Chances are, you won’t make any difference, but on the other hand, you just might.”

This, of course, was his metaphor to Juanita Brooks about her place in the church. As a brilliant historian, she had things to say about Mormon history, the scriptures, and more. She acknowledges that the metaphor isn’t perfect, but she found some value in it. And as I sit back and reflect on the last decade or so of Mormon feminist activism that I’ve been involved in, I wonder, “Have our years of riding the edge and calling out made any difference? Have we Mormon feminists been able to turn the herd at all?”

I think maybe we have. Just a little. It’s hard to know if our writing and organizing made the difference, or if it’s just massive societal shifts that have swept the church along towards some improvements for women. But some things have changed, and for the better. Here are the institutional improvements that stand out in my mind:

January 2019. Women no longer covenant to hearken unto their husbands in the temple. I was devastated by the hearken covenant in the temple twenty years ago. It made me wonder if God saw women as substandard, if God thought women were less than men. I knew something was deeply wrong when I went through the temple – was it me? Was I fundamentally messed up to be so horrified by this covenant? Was it God? Was God fundamentally a sexist? Over time I came to understand that it was neither. But I can’t underscore the pain of those years as I chewed over the questions.

I’m glad that covenant is gone. Maybe women now won’t feel that same degree of pain that I felt. (They still may feel some, goodness knows, since patriarchy is still laced through the temple – it’s just more obscured now.) But the lessening of pain matters to me. I hate thinking of women doubting themselves and God the way I did as they embark on important new journeys in life. I’ll choose to hope that more changes are in store.

October 2019. Women can be witnesses at baptisms and sealings. This was such low-hanging fruit that it’s shocking it didn’t happen decades ago. But nevertheless, I’m glad it happened, even long overdue. I’ll celebrate the baby steps. Is it a little bit of slap in the face that women *and children* can do this now? Yes. I don’t like when women and children are lumped in together. But it’s still a step forward.March 2018. Policies change to explicitly allow youth and women to bring another adult in with them during bishop’s interviews.November 2014. Women with children at home can now be employed as full-time CES employees. I don’t even know what to say about this.April 2013. Enhanced leadership roles for sister missionaries; sister training leaders oversee and train sisters. This is good. Sister missionaries should certainly have access to leadership roles. Now if only sister training leaders could be leaders over both the elders and the sisters. . . .April 2013. A woman prays in General Conference for the first time. Again, mindboggling that this hadn’t happened before, but it’s a baby step.October 2012. The age for sister missionaries is lowered from 21 to 19, making it easier for women to choose to serve a mission. This was an important shift. People have the opportunity to gain a lot of skills on missions, ones that can translate to the workplace or many other aspects of life. I’m very happy that those women who are inclined toward missionary work now have more access to missions.

And there are other improvements, both women-specific and not, that are significant. (I’d love for you to add some of those in the comments.)

Are these improvements I enumerated due to Mormon feminist writing and organizing? At least in part? Again, I can’t say, but I suspect it played some kind of role. It doesn’t escape me that some of the more important changes came in the wake of the outward-facing and media-savvy efforts of Ordain Women, which launched in 2013. These changes also came in the wake of the visionary document written by Mormon feminists in 2012, “All are Alike Unto God,” which lists 22 policy changes short of ordination that would help make the church “a more equitable religious community.” Note that several of these suggestions have indeed come to pass. And all of these improvements I listed, of course, came in the wake of Mormon feminist consciousness raising and writing that began in in the 1970s.

As Margaret Toscano once told me, the outer edges of these movements for change are important. Groups like Ordain Women, the What Women Know Collective who wrote “All Are Alike Unto God,” and all the courageous Mormon feminists who have been disciplined, excommunicated, and driven out serve a crucial role. They create room for people who want moderate change to look reasonable. By staking out the revolutionary position, they shift the needle, moving the outer boundaries farther so that things in between the outer boundaries and the status quo now seem more possible and moderate.

Toscano’s vision of the edges doesn’t exactly overlap with Juanita Brooks’s vision of the edges. In Toscano’s vision, those on the edges are excised and written off, and it’s that sacrifice that creates room for some moderate change in the institution. This is different, of course, from Brooks’s more hopeful vision of those on the edges as potentially powerful change makers that stay with the herd.

I suspect both visions are true in their own ways. I’ve ridden the edges, calling out, and staying with the herd. I’ve also staked radical positions. And the church has changed in its glacial pace, which I celebrate. But above all, as I reflect on my Mormon feminist journey, I celebrate the community and connections I’ve made within the movement. I will never see the church become what I would like it to become. But how I treasure those women who have walked this path beside me, who share similar hopes and dreams, who understood the struggle as no one else ever could. That has been the real gift of Mormon feminism to me, and will always remain, no matter what the institution does.

*Davis Bitton, Maureen Ursenbach, Juanita Brooks, “Riding Herd: A Conversation with Juanita Brooks,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1974) 9 (1): 10–33.

No, I’m not signing up for Tithing Declaration this year

This is the second year in a row that I’m not signing up to attend Tithing Declaration

Before last year I NEVER missed a year of Tithing Settlement/Declaration. When I was a child my dad would make sure all my siblings and I were in the Bishop’s office when he and my mom attended Tithing Settlement. We’d each take a turn saying that we’d paid a full tithing. When I was dating my now husband I signed us both up for Tithing Settlement. Our names, written one right after the other on the paper on the clerk’s office door, announced that we were a couple. After we were married I continued the tradition of signing us up for Tithing Settlement. As children joined our family I made sure to bring them along too. 

I always liked declaring our full tithe. Our finances have often been precarious, but my husband and I were taught to put tithing first and so we have always paid it. I can point to specific blessings that I think we’ve received because of tithing. Jobs that were made available, cars that kept running, houses that fit our family and our budget. I was always proud to declare that we were full tithe payers. 

We still are full tithe payers. But I don’t want to talk to the bishop about it anymore. There are two main reasons. 

The first reason is that I don’t like how I act in the bishop’s office. 

Over the past few years I’ve been evaluating the way I act in the bishop’s office and I’ve not been happy with what I’ve noticed. I feel like I turn into a completely different version of myself as soon as I walk into through the doors.

This has been going on for years and has happened with nearly every bishop I’ve met with during my adult life. There’s something about the power dynamic between the bishop and the rest of the ward that makes me put aside my actual wants and needs and become deferential to the bishop and his feelings. 

I can be the grumpiest person in the foyer as I wait to talk to the bishop. But as soon as I walk into his office I’m all smiles. I want him to see that I’m happy, that I play by the rules, that I’m worth something. I want him to see how good I am. How on top of my life I am. I want him to feel inspired to give me a good calling. 

It’s like I forget all about my life outside of the church and turn into a childlike version of myself that wants to please my dad. I want to have an important calling so my dad will be proud of me. I want the bishop to see that I’m “worthy” of that calling. Never mind that I’m doing plenty of important work in my career and other volunteer obligations. There’s a part of me that feels I need to have leadership calling in the church to actually matter. That part of me takes over as soon as I walk into the bishop’s office.

I’m Smiley, I’m Bubbly, I’m Cheerful, I’m Happy Happy Happy. When I’m in a bishop’s office I don’t have a single complaint about the church. I’m not mad that my girls weren’t recognized when they moved up into the Young Women Program – I’m just curious as to why. I’m not annoyed that I don’t get texts about youth activities until 5:00 PM on Wednesdays – I’m content that activities are happening. I’m not upset that I don’t know where my tithing money is going – I’m just happy to be paying it. 

Last year the bishopric of my ward was rearranged a few weeks before Tithing Declaration. As I imagined meeting with the new bishop I could see myself putting on that fake, cheerful mask again. I could see myself trying to impress him. I could see myself hoping that this bishop would see that I should have an important calling. 

I realized that I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to turn into the fake, fawning version of myself when I walked into his office. I wanted to break that pattern in my life. 

The first step to breaking the pattern was to avoid the environment. So I didn’t sign up for Tithing Declaration. It felt like such a relief.

I’d like to one day get to the point where I can be my authentic self in the bishops office. But I’m not there yet. So for now I’m staying away from meeting with him in his office.

The other reason I’m not attending is that I’m not paying my tithing to the LDS church.

I love the concept of tithing. Paying tithing helps me think about others who have more needs than I do. It helps me practice being less selfish. For most of my life I thought the LDS church needed my money. I thought the money that I sacrificed to pay tithing was actually helping the church as it helped other people. That was before reports about stockpiled wealth and investment funds. Now I want to know that my donations are going to good use right away – not being added to a pile. The church is not transparent with its finances and so I no longer feel comfortable donating to that organization. 

A couple years ago I started taking 10 percent of my income and donating it to other churches and causes. It’s very fulfilling to be able to pick a different cause every time I get paid. I donate to other local churches, to national and international organizations, and sometimes I take my tithing money and put it to good use helping my friends. 

None of that shows up on my Tithing Declaration Statement. My husband and I have a joint tithing statement and he still wants the tithing from his income to go to the LDS church. It looks like both of us are still full tithe payers. But I know that my tithing is not listed. I believe in being honest. I know in my heart I’m a full tithe payer. However, I can’t look at my tithing declaration sheet and say that it represents my full tithing. 

I’ve thought about explaining that to the bishop. But frankly, I don’t think it’s any of his business. What I donate is between me and God. I don’t need to declare it to anyone.

* * *

Five years ago if you told me that there would be a time when I wasn’t interested in attending Tithing Declaration I wouldn’t believe you. I loved meeting with the bishop to show him how well I was following this specific commandment. Now I’m trying to break my fawn response and I’m not interested in discussing my financial decisions with an uninvolved third party. This has been an unexpected shift, but I think its a necessary shift.

I’m curious about your thoughts regarding Tithing Declaration. Do you attend? Why or why not? Also I’d love any tips on how to interact with the bishop in his office as an actual grown up instead of a weirdly happy version of myself.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Come Follow Me: Hebrews 1–6, “Jesus Christ, ‘the Author of Eternal Salvation’”

Attention Activity

Have class members take turns sharing a favorite movie quote (or line from a song) while the rest of the class tries to remember which movie (or song) the line comes from.

Introduce Hebrews

Note that the book of Hebrews was attributed to Paul, but scholars have questioned that attribution since ancient times and we don’t really know who wrote it. It got its name because it quotes so many Jewish scriptures.

Read Hebrews 1:1-4 together and discuss how the book was written to persuade people that Jesus is more than a prophet.

Assign class members verses to look up from the “Old Testament Scripture” list below. Tell them that their scripture corresponds to one of the verses in Hebrews chapter 1. Have them figure out which verse in Hebrews alludes to their scripture. (I found these references in the New Oxford Annotated Study Bible, NRSV.)

Old Testament ScriptureCorresponding verse in HebrewsPsalms 2:7Hebrews 1:52 Samuel 7:14Hebrews 1:5Deuteronomy 32:43, Psalm 97:6Hebrews 1:6Psalms 104:4Hebrews 1:7Psalms 45:6-7Hebrews 1:8-9Psalms 102: 25-27Hebrews 1:10-12Psalms 110:1Hebrews 1:13

Note that people in New Testament times would have recognized the references to the Old Testament, just like we recognize movie quotes and song lyrics.

Discuss what Hebrews 1:5-13 is talking about (Jesus is above the angels and is honored by God).

Ask: Why there are so many allusions to Old Testament scripture? (A new way to understand old scriptures, ties Jesus to the authority associated with those scriptures)

Say that chapter 3 talks about Jesus being more worthy of glory than Moses. It talks about how the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years and God did not let them into his rest. Hebrews 3:7-11 references Psalms 95:6-11. Have someone read those verses from the psalm. When I read that Psalm, I thought about our hymn Dear to the Heart of the Shepherd. Maybe sing it together as a class. Note that in the Psalm and in Hebrews, God is angry with the people. Talk about how that would feel if you believed God was angry with you and your people. It would make me feel despair and hopelessness. Dear to the Heart of the Shepherd is not a hopeless hymn though. Why not? (Jesus loves and watches out for each sheep. He makes the pastures a place where the sheep want to be and teaches others to care for other lost sheep.) Talk about how the idea of atonement brings peace.

Remind the class that chapter 1 talked about how Jesus was above the angels. Chapter 2 talks about how when Jesus came to earth and experienced having a mortal body he was “made a little lower than the angels” (Heb 3:9). Write on the board “Why was Jesus’ mortal experience important for the atonement?” Invite the class to silently read Hebrews 2:9-18, then share their ideas. Relate Jesus’ experience on earth to our embodied experience learning to be “under-shepherds”. Talk about what it feels like to be at one with another person: you understand their emotions and wants and needs. Sometimes you understand how to best help or support someone else, sometimes they are willing to listen to your heartache, sometimes you just enjoy experiencing something together.

“Our Heavenly Father loved us so much that He sent His Only Begotten Son to atone for our sins. The Savior not only suffered for every sin, but He also felt every pain, sorrow, discomfort, loneliness, and sadness that any of us could ever experience. Is this not great love?”

Barbara Thompson, Second Counselor, Relief Society General Presidency
“ Mind the Gap ,” October 2009 General Conference

Lavina Fielding Anderson, “On Being Happy: An Exercise in Spiritual Autobiography”

Exponent II extends its deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of Lavina Fielding Anderson, who passed away on Sunday, October 29, 2023. Lavina was excommunicated in 1993 as one of the September Six for her work documenting spiritual and ecclesiastical abuse. In an obituary for the Salt Lake Tribune, senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote, “Though Lavina Fielding Anderson can aptly be described as an intellectual giant in the field of Mormon studies, a brave activist, and a moral force for her critiques of ecclesiastical abuse in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she also was deeply devout and never relinquished her Latter-day Saint beliefs or practices.” Lavina shaped Mormon studies for the better as a mentor, writer, editor, and voice of courage and wisdom.

From its inception, Lavina was a dear friend to many at Exponent II and left an indelible mark on the organization. She was an early supporter and contributor to the paper. She was a co-organizer of the 1982 Nauvoo Pilgrimage of Mormon feminists, which launched the network of “Pilgrims” retreats and inspired in part Exponent II’s first national retreat in 1983. In 1982, Lavina was the guest of honor at the final Exponent Day Dinner, where she delivered the speech “On Being Happy: An Exercise in Spiritual Autobiography.” This speech led to a retreat tradition that continues to this day, where before the retreat’s closing Sunday morning meeting, one or more individuals present their own spiritual autobiography. Hers is shared below.

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In the center image, Exponent II founding mother Carrel Sheldon pins a boutonniere on Lavina Fielding Anderson’s dress. Images on the left and right are of Lavina at events for the 1982 Exponent Day Dinner, where she was the guest of honor and keynote speaker. Images from an Exponent II scrapbook.

On Being Happy: An Exercise in Spiritual Autobiography

I must confess that my delight at the wonderful timing that juxtaposes the East Coast Association for Mormon Letters meeting with Exponent Day is matched only by my trepidation at the responsibility of meeting the expectations of one audience with something appropriately scholarly and of the other with something appropriately personal. I’ve decided to be personal to honor all of the writers and editors of Exponent II who have taken that great step beyond anonymity and conformity to speak in their own voices. I feel it would be discourteous and cowardly not to respond in kind. I’ve chosen to talk about my spiritual autobiography, specifically about the sources of my happiness. In so doing, I am presenting a literary problem that I hope will interest the scholars in the group.

The literary problem is that most presentations of good are not as real and as interesting as those of evil. This has, I believe, been a great lack in Mormon fiction, which has traditionally set up a conflict between a simple good and an equally simple evil—either the Saints vs. the Missouri mobs or the creative Mormon individual against the repressive Mormon community. We do not have the narrative tools perfected to make a successful Sunday School class—an experience in harmony, community, and communion—sound as important and as interesting as the case of adultery between the Sunday School president and the Sunday School secretary, or the battle lost between a local congregation and the Church Building Department. I think the next challenge for Mormon writers is to find meaningful, non-clichéd ways of sharing the positive aspects of the gospel.

In nonfiction, the spiritual autobiography has existed for centuries. It is not a Mormon invention although it may be a Christian one. I became aware of it as part of my Mormon heritage by reading through hundreds of life stories and journals in the Church archives. I am aware that many people are practicing it, formally and informally, with varying degrees of success today. This is my contribution toward their effort.

I have chosen to talk on happiness because of the quite outrageous happiness of my personal life and the hope that in sharing what makes me happy, I can prompt you to pay attention as well to what makes you happy. It is my firm conviction, to paraphrase a well-known scripture, that “Happiness never was wickedness.” There are all kinds of pitfalls with this statement, of course. C. S. Lewis was one who remarked that the happiest man he knew was also the most selfish. But I’m making some assumptions: that we’re genuinely trying to be good; that our struggles are to be better, not to suppress conscience; and that one of the things that makes us unhappy is a sense of always falling short, of being imperfect and unworthy. As I think about what makes me happy, it isn’t sin and wrong-doing. It’s belting out hymn with the rest of my ward under the baton of an enthusiastic chorister. It’s having our two-year-old, Christian, reach out from Paul’s arms to put an arm around my neck, then drape the other around Paul’s, bringing our heads close together so that he can contemplate the spectacle, beaming with satisfaction. It’s seeing zucchini sprouts pop through the ground with such vigor that the leaves pick up clods on their way. It’s settling down in bed with a big bowl of popcorn and a book I’ve been longing to read for weeks. It’s reading out loud to Paul or he to me and laughing at the same passage. It’s going visiting teaching to a home where the husband stays in the living room because he also enjoys the discussion. It’s getting the countertops and the sink and the floor and the refrigerator all clean simultaneously. It’s taking the pencil to a good idea struggling in the underbrush of a bad sentence and fixing it so that the idea can dance in the garlands of its words.

Now these are just little things. I don’t know what makes you happy, but the impression I sometimes carry away from lesson manuals is that some transcendent beneficence descends during acts of service, scripture reading, or answers prayer. All of those things happen too, but the implication that the homely happinesses are somehow different—worth less, not quite as important—is something I don’t believe. I don’t think happiness comes in two-week blocks along with handing in your four-generation group sheets. I think it comes for thirty-second snatches when you see something make sense that hadn’t before. And much of it is physical—a good laugh, singing, or as Emma Lou Thayne would tell you, playing tennis.

A reason I think we need to notice and cultivate and be grateful for all of these little moments is that they are a great deterrent to sin and selfishness. My experience has been that happy people are not cruel. They are not irreverent towards God. They are not insensitive to others. They are not unwilling to devote time and energy to meeting another’s needs. Happiness brings with it a kind of gratitude that pours itself out in love to God and to other human creatures. If righteousness seems particularly difficult and unrewarding, perhaps it’s because we’re concentrating on that infamous Mormon checklist of “oughts” instead of savoring our moments of felicity and proving to ourselves in the most unmistakable way that a person capable of feeling such joy is a worthy person, a beloved person, a happiness-giving person.

The elements of spiritual autobiography that I want to share with you are events and understandings that have made me happy. This has not been happiness I’ve merited because of any outstanding service or extraordinary obedience. Much of it has been of that beautifully gratuitous kind that we call “grace” and “loving kindness.” I want to begin when I was a graduate student at the University of Washington. At that point, I had spent the first eighteen years growing up in a family of six children. My parents had both served missions. We were farmers. There was always enough time for the Church, even when there wasn’t time for much else besides the farm. My father blessed us, baptized us, confirmed us, healed us. My mother told us endless stories from the Book of Mormon, asked us to evaluate our behavior by how it matched what Heavenly Father wanted us to do, and performed miracles in exercising her faith. I remember her harrumphing in some irritation one spring when a five-week nonstop dust storm made it impossible to see across the road and systematically blew the seeds out of the ground. “There’s no need for this,” she protested. “If the stake president would just call a fast day!” He did within a few days, as I remember, and the storm ended. Both my brothers served missions. So did I. All six children married in the temple. My parents are ordinance workers in the temple now, a blessed service that they joyfully perform after a lifetime of service.

In other words, the Church has always been home for me. I don’t remember learning to pray, the first time I read the scriptures, the first talk I gave, or the first lesson I taught. Socially, emotionally, and spiritually, I belong to the Church. And it also belongs to me. I feel a fierce possessiveness about it. It is not President Kimball’s church or the bishop’s church or the church of the fourteen grandmothers who sit on the first two rows in Relief Society. It is my church. There are other ways than growing up in the Church of making that emotional bonding, but I think that it is important that it occur. As long as it is “someone else’s” church, then that someone else has the power to decide whether it can also be your church.

Part of my six-year-long BYU experience included rooming with some fine roommates—among them Karen Perkins and Dawn Hall Anderson. We talked, read, and thought a lot about the gospel. As part of that study, I wrote a paper on why I was still a Mormon. It has been interesting to me to go back to that document, now more than a decade old, and see what I thought was important then. I talked about the social satisfactions of the Church but cheerfully admitted that socially I could do just fine without it. I talked about the solid intellectual stimulation of a philosophical system that can be explained simply in six one-hour memorized discussions but that keeps unfolding “like a magician’s multiplying handkerchiefs.” At the time I said, “It’s the only system I know that contains plenty of paradoxes but no contradictions, plenty of mysteries but no confusion.” However, the ultimate reason, then and now, that I am a Mormon is spiritual. “Something happens,” I wrote twelve years ago, “when you run into truth. It’s like turning on the electromagnet under the plate and watching all the iron filings line up. All of a sudden, there’s a pattern, order, no more misaligned lines—and although you control the power, you can’t control the pattern. . . . Things like that keep me humble; I need them to happen because I enjoy being a smart aleck, and I can tell when they happen because Joseph Smith’s test works for me too: ‘This is good doctrine. It tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you. You say honey is sweet, and so do I. I can also taste the spirit of eternal life. I know it is good; and when I tell you of those things which were given me by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, you are bound to receive them as sweet; and rejoice more and more.’”[1]

I think of the last twelve years as having been very eventful. It was interesting to me to realize that spiritually, it has simply been a continuation of those first twenty-six. In Seattle, the closest thing to a gentile environment that I had ever lived in, I immersed myself in the scriptures, in aspects of Church history that were available to me, in conversations with the born-again Christians I encountered on campus and in my classes, in sorting out my own identity as different from my community identity. It was an important experience and, at some point during that first year, I realized that I did not have a testimony of the Savior. I had a testimony all around him, if I can put it that way, like constructing a giant jigsaw puzzle with a large and precisely outlined section missing in the middle. I would have been able to have deduced his presence, there in the middle, from all the rest of the evidence even if I had known nothing about him—but that was precisely the problem. I knew about him. I did not know him.

With that realization, I set the goal of gaining a testimony of the Savior and his atonement. I plumped myself into the scriptures, prayer, and ponderings, quite sure that this was the kind of knowledge that was available on demand. To my surprise, it was quite clearly made known to me that I was trying to enter spiritual graduate school without having learned some prerequisites. The first step was learning how to pray. It was helpful to me to be reading C.S. Lewis at the time, to get his personal but also Anglican perspective on prayer. Quite clearly ritual prayer had an enormous importance to him, and I found myself discovering the richness that can be added to the life of a community when ceremonial prayer becomes interwoven throughout worship rather than being signs that the meeting is either beginning or ending. I found myself, as a consequence, paying a great deal of attention to the only two ritual prayers that are part of our ceremonial communal life, the sacrament prayers. I also found myself having a literary experience with the magnificent prayers, meditations, psalms, and devotional poetry that have accumulated in our cultural heritage for the past five hundred years. They became a private wealth for me.

But even more important was the aspect of private personal prayer—not only nonritualistic but deliberately antiritualistic. I was helped in this by my experience on my mission which acquainted me with an informal French style of prayer—addressing God as you, for instance. I also enjoyed the immediacy and intimacy of the informal, conversational prayers of my born-again Christian friends, including another set experimenting with Eastern religions. During that period, I learned a lot about conversing with God, about seeking Jesus Christ as a personage, about being sensitive to the Holy Ghost.

I also moved into a house full of other women of my advanced years, and my friendship with Karen Jensen, which dates from that time, has been another of the blessing friendships of my life. She combines a profound faith in God with an almost total irreverence for most of its cultural forms, and we used to disgrace ourselves regularly by fits of giggles in sacrament meeting. Her perspective on the gospel greatly enriched my own.

I remember one family home evening lesson on the Holy Ghost, in which we discussed the different ways it reaches people. It made Karen feel sobered. It made another roommate almost giddy and exuberant. It made me feel immensely alert and intellectually stimulated. The Holy Ghost engaged my mind, my seeing and understanding, enlarged my perception, and made the wonderful shaping of a pattern. But I didn’t quite understand what people meant when they said they received promptings. I just knew it didn’t happen to me. But as I began paying attention, I noticed subtle nudges, flashes of perception, a slow gathering of sensations clustered in a certain way. I simply hadn’t known what to look for, and therefore I didn’t acknowledge promptings when they happened.

A second important lesson on prayer during this time period was the discovery of the power of gratitude. It is not listed as a spiritual gift, and I seldom hear it discussed as more than a pleasant attribute. But I had been struck by the clear scriptural warning that “in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not his hand in all things, and obey not his commandments” (D&C 59:21).

Up to that point, I had made a point of thanking the Lord for my blessings and assuming that the things I didn’t like were to be endured in as much graceful silence as possible. With considerable dubiousness, I took the scripture literally and began acknowledging the Lord in problems and adversity as well. A remarkable thing happened. Somehow—and I’m sure a psychologist would be able to explain part of it—that act of doubtful gratitude brought the unpleasant event under my emotional control so that it had less power to vex or trouble me. Furthermore, it somehow gave the Lord whatever he needed to transform the experience from adversity into actual blessing. It was not simply an exercise in looking on the bright side of things. In fact, it had nothing to do initially with attitude. I didn’t try to pretend that I liked what was happening, and I frequently expressed anger, disappointment, and a genuine lack of faith that such-and-such an event could turn into a blessing, no matter what, in the same prayer in which I acknowledged the Lord’s hand in it. But it worked in a remarkable way. I think it was related to the discovery Karen had made years earlier: the fact that Heavenly Father would answer her prayers—no matter what the answer was—made her feel loved. I found that to be true too.

In 1973, I accepted a position on the Ensign staff and moved to Salt Lake City. Making that decision was difficult for me, not only because I felt that I had finally hit my stride in my chosen field, but because I didn’t know if I wanted to work for the Church. I’d already seen some of the difficulties an official publication has when I’d worked for the Daily Universe at Brigham Young University. As I was praying about what the right thing would be to do, the answer I got was a curiously oblique one but exactly the right one. (Many of my prayers are answered by a distinctively sarcastic personage whom I’ve come to regard as a kind of guardian angel.) It assured me that my friendship with Karen would not suffer. I hadn’t realized it myself, but that question—which I had not been asking—was the only one I needed the answer to. So I went.

In Salt Lake I had some additional experiences that gave me an understanding of the process of repentance and how atonement was a healing, a removal of barriers so that love could flow freely, not only from God to me but from me to God and from me to others. I learned about forgiveness, not only by receiving it but also by extending it to others.

The Ensign years were important. I enjoyed the people I worked with and those I met, I appreciated working with a group that prayed together for assistance in performing our duties. Many times I felt inspiration in carrying out my tasks. One of the important events of those years was the discovery of Church history, thanks to my roommates Jill Mulvay (Derr) and Maureen Ursenbach (Beecher). This discovery gave me access to my past, as a Mormon and as a woman, that gave me pillars for my identity, models for my own growth, and excitement about the options and possibilities for women. It also brought me into contact with Leonard Arrington, one of the finest Christians I’ve ever met and a thorough-going professional with high standards who has always honored the power of the mind in the life of the spirit.

Jill and I and our third roommate, Brenda Bloxham (Hunt), were deeply involved in Princeton Ward, our neighborhood ward. (I was boycotting single wards at the time on the grounds that they were ghettoes.) Princeton Ward had a limited population—under 200 as I recall—and was composed largely of what someone unkindly called “the newly-weds and nearly-deads.” The bishop was younger than we were and had grown up in the ward; his parents were still there. And he had overcome the inevitable resistance of a ward toward receiving leadership from so known a quantity to transform it into one of the most closely knit and caring units I have ever participated in. The bishop got all of us involved right away, and we soon had two or three major jobs. With that bishop, I twice had the experience of disagreeing with a decision. In both cases, he listened respectfully to my reasons, and we separated, agreeing to meet again after praying about it. In the first case, he was right, and I knew it after going through that process. In the second case, I was right, and he knew it after going through that process. That ward has been a model for me ever since of the kind of community feeling that can exist in a ward—a sort of ideal.

I met and married Paul L. Anderson, a young architect from Pasadena who had first come up on a fellowship with Leonard Arrington’s office to do some research on Mormon architecture. We have not been able to reconstruct how we met, but I do remember that, at the time, he was fetchingly bearded. He had to shave it off when Florence Jacobsen hired him as manager of historic sites for the Arts and Sites Division. When I met Paul, I was thoroughly and happily single. Paul became a delightful addition to the social life that swirled through our house, and I was genuinely surprised—and even a little angry—when he proposed. He later told me he was more than a little angry to show up for a date and discover that I’d invited two or three other people to join us. Since I was asking him places about as often as he asked me out, I wasn’t defining what we were doing as dating, let alone courting. Deciding to marry was difficult; it took me six weeks.

Those six weeks were a very significant spiritual education. I have never before or since had such a concentrated lesson in another aspect of learning how to pray. I discovered that Heavenly Father’s respect for free agency is so profound that there are many times the Holy Ghost cannot give us an answer because we have not yet asked the correct question. I have a mental picture from that time of the Holy Ghost (you’ll have to pardon the irreverence) hopping frantically around on one foot while I blundered through bursts of static into a clear signal of what the right question was. Interestingly enough, it was not “Should I marry Paul?” There were a series of right questions, and they included: What would marriage be like? What would be the hard places? What would be the easy places? What will the changes be? What strengths and what inadequacies would I take to marriage? I don’t particularly want to be married; do I need to be married?

I received extremely clear information about all of those topics. I received insight into my attitudes about privacy, money, priesthood, professionalism, and ability to communicate that was somewhat shocking though not, I’ll have to admit, very surprising. But possibly the most important question that I asked was, “What kind of person is Paul?” In answer to that question, I had the closest thing to a vision I have ever experienced. A personage with a definable personality told me, almost in so many words, “Let me show you how I feel about Paul,” and then I experienced that person’s feelings for Paul: the deepest, most profound sensations of love and a respectful savoring of personality. There was not a question in my mind that I was in the presence of someone who knew Paul differently and better than I did or possibly could know him, someone who loved him totally. I acquired an awesome amount of respect for Paul quite suddenly.

There were other issues to be worked through, but one sunny day, as I knelt again in prayer, I asked again, “Should I marry Paul?” expecting to learn of a new question I should ask. Instead, I was distinctly told, “You have enough information to make that decision now.” I was stunned. I was supposed to make the decision? Yes. There was a long internal pause, a kind of mental breath-holding, then I said, still on my knees, “Yes, I will marry Paul.” The reaction could not have been more vivid, an explosion of pleasure and excitement like being in the center of a fireworks display. It surprised me, pleased me, gratified me, and humbled me simultaneously. I knew that all of those emotions were not my own, and the delight shared with other presences who cared about the decision was reassuring in ways I don’t even know how to begin to describe. One of the consequences has been that I have never had to question the initial rightness of the decision nor had to wonder if I made a mistake. (That’s been important. I may be crazy about Paul, but I’m not crazy about being married.)

I might add that another great reassurance came when Marybeth Raynes, who was not only our premarital counselor but who also sold us her wonderful house on Roberta Street, gave us the California Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and I discovered that we both rated so high on dominance that we were in the abnormal range. Paul is so nice that it was important to know he also had a healthy streak of stubbornness.

The next experience I wanted to mention came just before Christmas of 1979 when I was about six months pregnant. It had been a horrible experience from the beginning, and I loathed the feeling of being trapped in that sick, sickening body. My method of dealing with the whole experience was to turn my mind off. I learned not to think or feel or remember for months and months. In short, if you were looking for spiritual sensitivity, you’d have had more luck shopping at Safeway’s. As I drove to my six-month check-up, cultivating my usual stupor, I was listening to Handel’s Messiah on the car radio, missed the turnoff, and had to drive to the next. It prolonged the trip enough that the choir reached “for unto us a child is born.” Simultaneously with that glorious section in my ears came words into my mind: “Your baby is dead. And it’s all right.”

Well, our baby was dead, and it was all right. I cannot describe the feeling of reassurance and calm that sustained me during the next few days, days that were much more wrenching for Paul than for me. There were no explanations that came along with that knowledge, no promises for the future, and no information about what to do—just the knowledge that I was loved of my Heavenly Father. The importance of that experience lay in its pure grace. At a time when I avoided talking, thinking, writing, praying—anything that would make me pay attention to my life—at a time when I had done nothing to deserve such a gift, it was given to me. My gratitude for that experience has touched and colored the rest of my life since then.

These experiences have done something for me. I am not sure I could debate justice and mercy, ransom and compensation as related to the atonement. I do, however, have a vivid knowledge of Christ’s existence as a being of love and light from whom I never want to be separated.

In summary, these past twelve years have been a time of intense bonding on several levels. The relationships with my husband and with my son are very precious to me, not only separately but as a unit. I love Paul for himself, but I have loved him the more as I have seen him loving Christian, who is so dear to me. All of our brothers and sisters are married with families of their own, and our parents are all living, so those relationships have changed—less proximity but in some ways more common interests, particularly as we all share a deep commitment to the gospel.

As important as these relationships are, my friendships have been powerfully significant, particularly my friendships with women. Thanks to Jill Derr, Maureen Beecher, Carol Madsen, and other friends, especially Leonard Arrington and Jeff Johnson, that bonding has extended backwards in time to my Mormon foremothers. I have found strength, faith, and deep pleasure in knowing more about these women. The pilgrimage to Nauvoo of fifty-three women last month was a journey in sisterhood for me, and I felt delight in that sisterhood, renewed strength, renewed power to love, and renewed commitment to build relationships based on our shared love and faith. I also felt intense validation as a Mormon woman—that my offering is one that the Lord can and does use.

However, as my professional and family obligations have intensified, I have found myself less willing to give the Church a blank check on my time. I have not refused any callings, but I have found myself taking a long hard look at some of the other activities. There are some stake meetings I have not been back to after a year or so of trying them out. I do not make refrigerator ornaments for the women I visit teach. I am selective about social activities, and I resist mightily being recruited to make anything that will be thrown away after it is used once. I also do not subscribe to the theory that forcing a tired two-year-old to sit through sacrament meeting will mystically instill in him a desire to go on a mission.

I think there are periods in most members’ lives where they find the Church sustaining and nourishing. I think there are also times in most members’ lives where Church involvement is at least as demanding and draining as it is rewarding. These cycles are natural; to weight the down side with guilt makes it harder, in my opinion, to accept the upswings joyously and naturally.

I feel that my spiritual life is my own responsibility—that the Church, the scriptures, and the Holy Ghost offer a smorgasbord of opportunities from which I select what my spiritual diet requires right now. I find myself attracted to the idea of personal spiritual power because now, particularly in contrast with certain other periods of Church history, the contributions of women seem circumscribed to carefully defined areas, and the very thoroughness of the organization of the Church means that there are few areas not covered by some rule, policy, or the need for someone’s permission to act. Yet I feel that the Church cannot indefinitely continue to afford the sheer waste of restricting women and their talents to the spheres in which they are most commonly exercised at present.

I do not want to imply that I think the work of women in the Church is trivial or unnecessary. Quite the contrary. I do, however, want to suggest that there are some limitations built into the current roles for women in the Church that may be limiting in ways that the gospel itself is not.

And now we come to the sermon. Let me introduce it with a poem by Maryann Olsen MacMurray entitled “Calling.”

When asked what I do in the Kingdom, I

Reply that I am in the Extraction

 Program with my husband and a few friends:

Extracting principles from procedures

And realities from types, determining

Whether we’re walking on water or thin ice.

(Used by permission of the author)

If Elder Neal A. Maxwell is accurate when he says that our trials are tailored to our capabilities—and I believe he is—then I believe it is also true that our blessings are bestowed with the same distinctiveness. My experiences have, I believe, given me the right to testify to the existence of a Heavenly Father whose love is matched only by his respect for our agency. I believe that I have not only the right but the responsibility so to testify. As I have felt this divine love directed toward me, I have felt the desire to respond in a manner worthy of the gift, a desire also given direction by President Kimball’s prophetic injunction in April 1979 that “the major strides which must be made by the Church will follow upon the major strides to be made by us as individuals.”[2]

I feel a particular need to focus on personal righteousness, on thoroughly developing and refining spiritual skills. I have already mentioned one of the most important—prayer. Fasting is another. Temple attendance is a third. I won’t go into detail about either, but I’d suggest thinking about both of them as processes as well as activities, as processes whose end result is spiritual power, as processes that engage us intellectually, physically, culturally, and emotionally. Thinking about them multidimensionally has let me discover new dimensions of power in them. Another skill I’d recommend for our contemplation is that of bearing testimony—meaning that we find ways of acknowledging the reality of Christ’s power in our daily lives, in daily language, beyond jargon and beyond formulae.

There are two spiritual skills that I’d like to discuss in greater detail. The first is reading the scriptures. It is also both an activity and a process. Like most of us, I find my scripture study most meaningful when I go to the scriptures with a question, a sorrow, a joy, a need of some sort. But also, if my scripture study isn’t habitual, I find that it doesn’t help me a lot when I am in need. So I have found that regular reading is essential even if there are times when, like prayer, it only seems like going through the motions. Those motions are important training for spiritual muscles.

I’m currently reading the Doctrine and Covenants, which has never been my favorite book. I’ve spent most of my life feeling bored by the lack of narrative and unnerved by its nineteenth century strangeness. But right now it is my favorite book. I am struck by two things. The first is the sheer quantity of the words of Jesus Christ. We have more instruction, counsel, sermons, and explanations from Him in this book than we do in the rest of our scriptures put together. The second thing is the revelation of His relationship over time with a small group of individuals, particularly with Joseph Smith. I find in that relationship a great respect for Joseph Smith’s agency, clear expectations for his conduct, chastisement when those expectations are not met, an enormous willingness to answer questions—including some that Joseph hadn’t quite asked—and a genuine delight in the attempts of those early Saints to be obedient, to understand, to emulate Him. It has given me great confidence that my own efforts will be acceptable and pleasing.

It was in this context that I found great reinforcement for yet another spiritual skill—seeking spiritual gifts. These gifts, according to Section 46, include a testimony of Jesus Christ as the son of God and the redeemer of the world, faith to believe those who have that testimony, “differences of administration, as it will be pleasing unto the same Lord . . . according to the conditions of the children of men” (which I interpret to mean a sensitivity to the kind of service that is appropriate in different circumstances), knowing the “diversities of operations, whether they be of God,” a word of wisdom, knowledge, faith to heal, faith to be healed, “the working of miracles,” the gift of prophecy, the “discerning of spirits,” and tongues and their interpretation (D&C 46:12-25). I would like to add to this list the gift of charity which, as Moroni tells us, the Father bestows upon those who are “true followers of . . . Jesus Christ” who “pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart for that gift” (Moroni 7:48).

I recall listening to many lessons on spiritual gifts, most of them centered around what they are and the fact that they are to benefit the Church. I remember one daring teacher who asked us to identify what spiritual gift(s) we possessed, a request that baffled and seemed to embarrass the class. Many lessons warned against the improper use of gifts, against sign-seekers and those who were deceived in thinking their gifts came from God. Some time was also spent redefining the gifts so that “tongues” meant the ability of missionaries to learn a foreign language easily, and “prophecy” meant a gift that was given to ecclesiastical leaders for their own stewardships. But I never recall hearing anyone mention that we are commanded to ask for gifts, that God promises to give them “liberally” provided that the seeker does “all things with prayer and thanksgiving” to avoid being deceived, remembers that the purpose of spiritual gifts is to benefit those who love the Savior, “and keep all [His] commandments” or “seek . . . so to do” (D&C 46:7-9, 26).

In the by-no-means extensive research that I have done into nineteenth-century saints, I have been struck repeatedly by their hunger for spiritual gifts and manifestations and by their willingness to pray directly for them. Sarah Studevant Leavitt noted crisply in her autobiography, “I lived very watchful and prayerful, never neglecting my prayers, for I felt that I was entitled to no blessing unless I asked for them, and I think so yet.”[3] Her blessings included symbolic visions. Sanford Porter, after three days of anguished fasting and prayer, heard a voice and saw a personage dressed in brilliant white who unfolded a vision of the creation, the atonement, and his own place in the plan to him.[4] Benjamin Brown, an ancestor of Hugh B. Brown and Nathan Eldon Tanner, specifically asked “for the witness of the Nephite disciples” and was visited by “two Nephites” speaking to him in the same tongue he had heard at a Mormon meeting.[5] When Elizabeth Francis Yates decided to be baptized in England, her mother “forbade her to reenter her childhood home.” Her husband first abandoned her and her four daughters, then when this economic bludgeoning did not work, returned and took the four girls away from her. She had to be baptized at midnight in 1851 because Mormons were fair game for harassment. On the brink of the dark river she hesitated and “felt as though I could not possibly go in it. But a voice seemed to say, ‘There is no other way.'” She remarried, came to Utah, was reunited to her two living daughters through extraordinary circumstances, and had a second family. One daughter, Louise Yates Robison, became general president of the Relief Society.[6]

It has long been commonplace to admire that first generation for their endurance in suffering but assure ourselves, “We have our own trials.” I would like to suggest that instead of making facile contrasts based on widely differing circumstances that we get serious about the gospel in the same way they did. They were not seeking inappropriate signs when they prayed for the gift of prophecy, for the ministry of angels, for visions, for healing, and for revelation. We would not be either if we, like them, did so “in all holiness of heart.”

Hugh Nibley addressed the topic in an unpublished address called “Gifts,” given in 1979, excerpts of which appear in one of the most delightful books of the decade, Of All Things!. He says:

The [spiritual] gifts are not in evidence today, except for one gift, which you notice the people  ask for the —gift of healing. . . .      

As for these other gifts—how often do we ask for them? How earnestly do we seek for them? We could have them if we did ask, but we don’t. “Well, who denies them?” Anyone who doesn’t ask for them.

“But if everything is given to us, don’t we have to work?” Of course. The gifts do not excuse us from work. They leave us free to do the real work. . . . The Lord. . .[says] ‘I’ll give you the stone and the chisel. Now you show that you are a Michelangelo.’ It is much harder to be a Michelangelo than to work enough to buy a chisel and some stone.”[7]

Brother Nibley is, I feel, correct. We have not asked for the spiritual gifts, and thus we have denied them, We are all, I think, aware of the dangers of the improper seeking of and exercise of the spiritual gifts, the dangers of being deceived, the dangers of wanting to be “conspicuously” holy instead of genuinely consecrated, the risks of emotional exploitation and spiritual pornography, and of playing the “I am a spiritual giant” game, There’s also the very real question that could be asked, “But why do we need them? What would we do with them?”

I think that asking that question is a confession. How could we explain the need for literacy to a person who has never seen a book and feels no need for records that extend behind his or her memory? Most of us have, however, either experienced the gift of healing in our lives or know of those who have. Let us ask those individuals if the gift is one they would dispense with.

Furthermore, as I study the scriptures, I am struck by the way in which the roles our society finds desirable shape and define what we identify as our spiritual natures. Women in the Church today are assigned to be teachers, auxiliary executives, visiting teachers, neighbors, and even wives and mothers—but what of previous generations and dispensations when a woman could also be a prophetess and a priestess? Is it possible that these roles could still exist for women prepared to fill them?

I feel very strongly that the relationship between spiritual authority and institutional authority has become lopsided in recent generations—that we are first given callings and then we seek for the spiritual skills and gifts we need to fulfill those callings, experiencing genuine growth but frequently losing the new talents when we are released from the calling. I believe, however, that if women were spiritually quipped to serve, opportunities would be created to match capabilities and that we could offer the Lord our strengths as well as our inadequacies. People I know who have sought and received the gift of charity do not need an assignment to exercise it, for it overflows any calling they receive. But these people are also likely to receive callings.

One of the women who has become a spiritual mentor for me has been Elmina S. Taylor, a convert who, during the first four years of her marriage, never lost faith in the promise made to her through the gift of tongues that she would have a family. She bore seven children and was later called to become the first general president of the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association. When she died, Joseph F. Smith preached the main sermon. He had been associated with Elmina since 1880 when he had become first assistant to the general YMMIA superintendent.

He was now not only its general superintendent but president of the Church as well. Announcing rather tartly that “it is not my custom to speak praise of our departed loved ones,” he made an exception to his own rule and characterized Elmina as “one of the few in the world” who walked by “the light within her” instead of by “borrowed light. . . . Therefore,” he said, “she had power among her associates and her sisters. She was legitimately the head of the organization over which she was called to preside. She borrowed no influence from others. She bore her own influence upon the minds of those with whom she was associated.”[8]

A great deal has been said in recent years about women and power. I suggest that we follow Elmina’s example and seek the power of personal righteousness, power from on high, power in testimony, and power in the Lord Jesus Christ. I was impressed by the Lord’s commandment to Oliver Cowdery when he was experimenting with translation to “trifle not with these things; do not ask for that which you ought not.” This warning could be a frightening one, but the next sentence urges, “Ask that you may know the mysteries of God” (D&C 8:10-11).

The Lord promised Joseph and Oliver that they should “both have according to your desires, for ye have both joy in that which ye have desired” (D&C7:8). It is significant to me that their joy confirmed the righteousness of their desire, that their joy was the reason the Lord granted them their desire. It reinforces my idea that the seeking of happiness is a spiritually healthy thing to do and corroborates my experience that happiness characterizes righteousness.

I feel that we may have circumscribed our limits too narrowly. Our birthright is joy not weariness, courage not caution, and faith not fear. By covenant and consecration, may we claim it.

[1] Joseph Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, edited by Joseph Fielding Smith, Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1977, p. 355.

[2] “Let Us Move Forward and Upward,” Ensign, May 1979, p. 82.

[3] Kenneth W. Godfrey, Audrey M. Godfrey, Jill Mullvay Derr, Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900, Salt Lake City Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1982, p. 29.

[4] Lavina Fielding Anderson, “Challenge to Greatness: The Nineteenth-Century Saints in New York,” Ensign, September 1978, p. 28.

[5] Ibid., p. 29.

[6] Lavina Fielding Anderson, “Elizabeth Francis Yates: Trial by Heartbreak,” Ensign, July 2979, p. 62.

[7] Hugh Nibley, Of All Things! A Nibley Quote Book, edited by Gary P. Gillum, Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1981, p. 5.

[8] “Funeral Services of Elmina S. Taylor,” Improvement Era, January 8, 2905, p. 221.

All God’s Critters Got A Place In The Choir

“All God’s critters got a place in the choir. Some sing low, and some sing higher.”

Recently, I have been thinking of this Bill Staines 1979 folk song.

In one session of General Conference, there was a choir of singers from different stakes in Northern Utah. I noticed there was a woman singing with the tenors. I was very glad to see this and it reminded me of an experience I had in our Layton ward about 30 years ago. I was asked to be the Ward Choir President. It mostly involved inviting(bribing) and encouraging(badgering) people to join the ward choir and show up for practice. I made brownies or muffins for every practice to bribe those who might be hesitant. I was constantly listening for strong voices in Relief Society and Sacrament so I could find more people to invite. 

One Sunday, I heard a rich, beautiful voice singing during the opening song in Relief Society. It was a woman who had recently moved into the ward. I introduced myself after church, expressed gratitude to her for her voice, and asked her to be a part of the choir.

She hesitated a bit before answering. She said she loved singing, and would love to be in the choir, but was not sure she would be welcome. “I sing tenor,” she said. “In my last ward, they wouldn’t let me sing in the choir because they wouldn’t let a woman sing tenor.”

I couldn’t decide if I should first express the outrage I felt that anyone would prevent her from singing because of that, or first tell her there were no barriers like that here. I went with taking her hand and telling her how thrilled we would be to have her sing tenor in the choir, and how much we needed strong tenor voices like her. I can’t remember if I even considered the possibility of anyone having a problem with it, but I knew I would be willing to insist that all involved make a place for her. 

Our ward choir was so fortunate to have her with us. I often thought of how bereft we would be without her.

Seeing the woman singing with the tenors in General Conference reminded me of this particular experience. But many other things remind me of how bereft we are as a community when we do not welcome and celebrate every person as being a valuable and valued part of us.

Last Sunday I loved seeing the incredible choirs from Spelman College and Morehouse College singing with the Tabernacle Choir for the broadcast. The diversity and variety of appearance, of voices, of movement in song, of the leaders, of the instruments, of the music itself was a glorious celebration of worshipping through song. There were times in my life when that kind of performance would and could not have happened, because far too many did not have room for a God who has room for all. When there is not room for that, we can’t begin to experience the immense possibility of this deep, rich, diverse, moving performance.

I have been singing in choirs nearly all my life. When I was a child, I would go with my mom when she went to choir practice. I would sit and draw while she sang, until I began to try to make sense of the music, and sing with her. I learned from her that altos are as important to the choir as sopranos. I learned from my dad that it is okay if you sing off key, as long as you are singing enthusiastically.

I sang in choirs all through school, and whenever there was a ward or community choir to join. Good directors taught me that breathing is important. Silent breathing, controlled breathing, circular, staggered, so many ways to provide the breath of life to the song. I loved learning how to coordinate breathing as a group, and how wonderful it was to perform as one voice, with many of us learning to blend and breathe and harmonize after much practice in singing as one unit.

But, of all the different performing choirs, congregational choirs are my favorite. This is where I practice seeing that all have a place, no matter what. 

When I am singing with my congregation, I see every one is needed. It does not matter if who is singing high or low, loud or soft, with expertise or for the first time, bored or moved to tears, mechanically or with deep worship, or just hanging out, singing or not, doing whatever they are doing, being whoever they are being. I am currently the sacrament meeting chorister for my ward. I get to look at the many ways anyone who is in the chapel is a part of the choir. Even the one person who is always a full beat behind my tempo, with his strong, enthusiastic voice. Even the one who seems to stare at me with what looks like disapproval. Even the 2 year old who is happily imitating my conducting (I can’t wait until she is ready to take over for me).

And one of the best things about the congregational singing – anyone can breathe whenever they want or need to. It doesn’t matter the tempo, or what the organist or chorister are doing. It doesn’t matter how strong or weak, or whatever you are feeling at the moment, you breathe when you need to. Even if you have to take a moment, or the entire song, and breathe, this is all part of being in the congregation. I have had many times in my life where I need to work to keep breathing, moment by moment. I am overwhelmed to think of the countless ways others, often from my congregation, have helped me continue on through those times.

Some of the talks in General Conference mentioned something like this. If you are preparing a talk or lesson or message that is not all about Christ’s Gospel of love, take a breath, step back, rethink what you are doing, and focus on a message of love. If you hear anything that makes you wonder if God loves you, no matter what – take a breath, take a moment, let yourself come back to the love of God. If you are not sure if you belong, take a breath, no matter where you are, no matter what those around you might be saying or doing, please let the love from God surround you, fill your lungs, and connect you to greater life.

Congregations are one way I have practiced singing and breathing in community, and where I have practiced seeing that there is a place for all there. It is one place where I have practiced seeing how rich we are with great diversity and variety, and how bereft we are when there are exclusionary boundaries that eliminate the experience of belonging for far too many. We are bereft. 

As I said, congregations are one way I practice. It is not the only way. This is a life where I am in many different communities, each with various relationships with humans. It is a part of the human experience to wrestle with boundaries, limits, and fear of new or different information. Learning to create space, room, belonging, inspiration, greater breathing, richer harmony – this is a practice to take on wherever I am. Some of the most beautiful music has dissonance and resolution.

Not every choir is yet ready to have the space for all God’s critters. The only way I really see that happening is when enough of those in the choir insist on making space. It is a practice to take on no matter where I am. No matter where any of us take our journey. At some point, we need to overwhelm the small, limited, weapon-filled, fearful, bereft spaces in the world with full, diverse, rich, complicated, grace-ful, expansive, inspiring breaths of voices as endless as God’s love – wide as all eternity.

How do you feel God’s love?

This talk was originally given in Sacrament Meeting in Eugene, OR on October 8, 2023.

In a Sunday School lesson that took place in the last few months, ward members were asked to quickly list commandments that came to their minds. For those of you who were there that day, you remember that we had no problem rattling off things like don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t covet, don’t lie, live chaste, obey the word of wisdom. And of course at the culmination of this list was to love God (which thinking about that culmination was the purpose of the exercise).

God commands us to love him because by loving him we can more fully feel his love. When we love God, his loving arms embrace us as we go through life – the hard parts of life, the joys of life, and everything in between. Those loving arms help us to feel hope in life.

In the last month I’ve been reading a book written by Latter Day Saint authors Fiona and Terryl Givens called “All Things New: Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything In Between.” In the introduction to their book they discuss how problematic it is when we only focus on the sins and forget about God’s love. As they wrote, “A young woman wrote to us sharing her challenges as a missionary, wondering in moments of despair, ‘Why do I worship this God?…I couldn’t sleep. Night after night I would lay in bed thinking about an angry, retributive God.. We have heard these and similar sentiments expressed with great frequency. ‘I will wake up an hour or two before my alarm, only to have my mind flooded with thoughts of failings, sins, not fulfilling or magnifying a calling.’ From a grieving parent: “While waiting in the temple recently I came to [a scripture] about the damnation of those who fall from their covenants. I felt conflicted torment. What I read felt without hope. I begged God to understand.’ A man still hurting from ‘childhood wounds’ described the belief that led him out of the Church: ‘It had always been a faith in an angry old-man-in-the-sky God…The god I was raised to believe in was not kind, or loving or merciful. Instead he was judgmental.’”

If you have ever felt like the people Terryl and Fiona Givens described, this talk is for you.

If you have ever felt like listing commandments and ways to fall short is way easier than thinking about God’s love, this talk is for you.

If you have ever wondered how you can possibly “endure to the end” or even just make it past the day, this talk is for you.

I believe we can be hopeful only as we feel God’s love. So, I guess the question is, how do we feel God’s love?

And that’s where, I think, it gets personal. Everyone feels God’s love in different ways.

For example, former President Bonnie H. Cordon of the general Young Women’s organization shared how she felt God’s love one day on a church assignment. She was asked to go visit a boy at the children’s hospital, but was worried about the assignment. Her grandson had recently passed away and her emotions were still raw and fresh from that horrible experience. She worried going to the children’s hospital and seeing kids being treated for various health issues would only bring back her pain. She prayed for strength and decided to accept the assignment. She said of the experience, “as I walked in, just the sights and the sounds just opened up so much of the heartbreak for me. But I got the assignment to meet Oliver. And I walked in his little room, and on his whiteboard was a scripture that said, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not to thine own understanding.” I don’t know how it happened, but that scripture opened my vision, healed my heart in a way that I could never have done it. And I was so grateful that the Lord gave me this gift.”

I love her story because it shows that, even in times when we’re mourning, and likely feel hopeless, God can speak to us in very simple ways to let us know that he’s there, that he wants us to feel his love, and that we can have hope in him.

Sometimes the way we feel God is even more subtle than this. For example, former President Jean B. Bingham of the General Relief Society said she didn’t really know what it felt like to feel God when she was a kid. She said, “It took me a while to understand how I hear Him. I remember the first time I shared my testimony. I was 12 years old, and I was in Minnesota. It was one of those wards where you sit in the congregation and they bring you the microphone. And my heart started to pound, and I knew I had to stand up. And I was just petrified, but I couldn’t stop it. And so that was the first time I stood there and waited for that mic to come, and my knees were just shaking. And I stumbled through a very simple testimony. But I felt so warm, so good, so affirmed that Heavenly Father loved me in doing that. So that was maybe one of the first times I realized that for me, one of the ways that I feel the Spirit and I hear His voice is that warm assurance that I’m doing the right thing.”

I liked reading her story because it shows that sometimes feeling God is a simple thing. It’s just a warm assurance, but nothing miraculous.

Other times, feeling God might come from other people. For example, President Camille N. Johnson of the General Relief Society said that she hears God through the words of others. She told a story of going to the temple and wanting to feel her late father there. “while I was there at the temple, I had someone that was working there in the temple come up to me and say something to me…that sounded so very much like something … only my dad would have said to me. And I was there at the temple that day hoping for a confirmation that my dad was in here. And on that day, I heard the Spirit testify to me through the voice of a person that I didn’t know that my dad was aware of me, that he was available to me, and that he loved me. And the words that she spoke to me in the temple gave me that calm reassurance that the plan of salvation was real. I knew it, but I knew it more deeply, I knew it more profoundly, and that’s, I think, the way the Spirit uniquely speaks to us. And sometimes they’re words of another person that motivate us, comfort us, provide us with peace or joy in the moment.”

President Johnson’s story stuck out to me because it helped me realize that sometimes we need to lean on each other to help us feel that love from God. And sometimes we might be the instruments in God’s hands that help someone else to feel that love.

I remember one day when I was about 8 months pregnant with our littlest one and feeling very-8-months-pregnant. It felt like just about everything that could have gone wrong that day did go wrong, including a call from my doctor that he was reading some research that got him thinking about my baby and, long-story-short, he was worried about her growth – never something an 8 month pregnant woman wants to hear. I remember a friend from my ward texted that day and said she was bringing over dinner. It was totally out of the blue. And not really something we necessarily needed that night, but I just kind of felt like it was a little note from God that said, “Hey, I love you. I know today was hard, but I’m here.”

I’ve been recently reading US Soccer Olympic Gold Medalist Abby Wambach’s book “Wolfpack.” Her book is titled “wolfpack” because it’s about how important each of us are for each other and for the wellbeing of the world, really, even if sometimes we might be feared. She said, “In 1995, wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone after being absent for 70 years. It was a controversial decision, but rangers decided it was a risk worth taking, because the land was in trouble. During those seventy years, the number of deer skyrocketed because they were alone and unchallenged at the top of the food chain. They grazed unchecked and reduced the vegetation so severely that the riverbanks eroded. Once a small number of wolves arrived, big changes started happening almost immediately. First, they thinned out the deer through hunting. But more important, the presence of the wolves drastically changed the behavior of the remaining deer. Wisely, the deer started avoiding the places they’d be most vulnerable to the wolves – the valleys – and the vegetation in those places regenerated. The height of the trees quintupled in just six years. Birds and beavers started moving in. The beavers built river dams, which provided habitats for otters and ducks and fish. Ravens and bald eagles returned to eat the carrion left by the wolves. Bears came back because berries started growing again. But that wasn’t all. The rivers actually changed as well. The plant regeneration stabilized the riverbanks, so they stopped collapsing. The rivers flowed freely again. In short: The plant ecosystem regenerated. The animal ecosystem regenerated. The entire landscape changed. All because of the wolves’ presence.” Her book goes on to discuss how it’s up to us to come together, like a wolfpack, and work toward helping society thrive.

I wonder how often we feel like the wolf – feared by others. This idea reminds me of the quote I read by Terryl and Fiona Givens at the beginning of this talk, where they quoted so many people who had written to them discussing their challenges with feeling like they were never good enough in the church. Perhaps these people felt feared, just like the wolves were feared. Maybe they felt like they didn’t quite fit in at church or were sometimes othered by those around them. I know I sometimes (often) have those feelings. But honestly, we all play a special and important role. Abby Wambach wrote later in her book, “There is a wolf inside of every woman…Her wolf is her talent, her power, her dreams, her voice, her curiosity, her courage, her dignity, her choices – her truest identity.”

Though Abby Wambach’s book is secular, and not about God’s love, thinking about this imagery of Yellowstone and of the importance of the wolf pack can help us as we seek to feel God’s love through others and seek to help others feel God’s love through us. I believe God sees our talent, power, dreams, voice, curiosity, courage, dignity. He sees that in each of us. And he loves that in each of us. And it’s because of that love that we can have hope in Him.

I mentioned we may sometimes feel feared by others. But I also wonder how often we view others as the wolf – and fear them. How much better would it be if we took Abby Wambach’s advice and came together in unity to make the world a better place and recognize the power of even the wolves?

The gospel is a gospel of love. The gospel is a gospel of hope. The Savior’s atonement is available to us because of God’s love. Repentance is a joyful occurrence as we can more fully feel God in our lives. God loves us. We can work in unity to together feel that love and that hope.

Shifting gears just slightly:

What happens when we have mental illnesses and can’t feel God’s love? I remember after my 2nd child was born, I felt pretty empty. I had postpartum depression and kind of felt like I was being crushed by the weight of the world. If someone asked me how I was doing, I had to quickly answer and change the subject because otherwise tears would start falling from my eyes. Even though I may have believed in God and had knowledge that I should or could have hope in him, finding it was not possible. I was reading my scriptures and praying and going to church and doing all those things. But I could not feel God’s love. I wish I could say some beautiful moment, like the one I described earlier by Sister Bingham, occurred that helped me feel God. But truthfully, nothing like that happened during that time. I needed a combination of professional help and personal self-care practices that helped bring me from that emptiness. It wasn’t for a whole year after I had the baby that I could even begin to feel glimpses of God. If you are experiencing mental illness, my heart goes out to you. And it’s hard finding the right treatment to begin to feel less empty. Please do not feel guilty if you cannot feel God’s love. It’s not your fault and sometimes the answers are not easy at all.

Looking back on my experience, I’m wondering if perhaps it is times such as these where our wolfpacks can envelop us and help us through the hard times. Though I didn’t feel God’s love, I know that along with the professional help, I had so many loved ones surrounding me that helped me through that time. Though I didn’t feel it then, now I realize that even if I wasn’t feeling God and really had no hope in him, God still loved me. He put people in my path that helped me along the way.

Eventually, I was able to begin to feel him again. But it wasn’t a beautiful aha moment that I remember vividly of when things got better. Honestly, I just began feeling him a little bit here or a little bit there. But truthfully, feeling God’s love has never been the same as it was before the postpartum depression. Where I used to have bigger moments, now it’s usually more subtle. For example, I sometimes feel God’s love in the rare moments when my little one feels like cuddling with me. I sometimes offer a prayer of gratitude in my heart for my relationship with her and I sometimes feel God’s love for a tiny moment (before the two year old runs away and that moment is over). These aren’t big aha moments that I might have had in the past. But they are tiny moments that piece together to help me have hope in God. 

I believe that God is there, that he loves me, and that he wants me to feel His unconditional love. I believe that I can feel that love through many different pathways, including through those around me. I believe that I can also help others to feel God’s love. Feeling God’s love gives me hope. I have hope in God.

Photo by Ronak Valobobhai on

Inspired Public Rebuke from the Pharisees to Tim Ballard

As I mentioned in a previous post about the false doctrine of Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine, innumerable people are harmed when people in power care more about preserving one person’s ego than publicly correcting the record. So I was delighted to see the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints make a statement on Tim Ballard, notorious founder of Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), that stated, “Once it became clear Tim Ballard had betrayed their friendship, through the unauthorized use of President Ballard’s name for Tim Ballard’s personal advantage and activity regarded as morally unacceptable, President Ballard withdrew his association. President Ballard never authorized his name, or the name of the church, to be used for Tim’s personal or financial interests.”

OUR has long been condemned by actual human rights organizations and human trafficking experts, but I know many did not have ears to hear until the statement came from the Church itself. For those readers who might be unaware of OUR’s sickening practices and why they are shunned by the majority of the human rights community, there are many reasons but I’ll offer two of the ones that made me vow never to support OUR again. First, other human rights organizations have pointed out that they favor flashy, publicized rescue missions where they can swoop in and bust people out of dungeons in chains white-savior style without actually doing the hard, systemic work to prevent the root causes of victims’ oppression. Critics have long pointed out that they conduct operations in a way that tampers with evidence, that they eschew the kind of long-term, transnational investigations necessary to actually bring perpetrators to justice and prevent further trafficking, and that they don’t set vulnerable victims up for successful reintegration – putting them at risk of winding up in exactly the same type of situation again. Their operations seem to me to be more about glorifying themselves than making a real impact. Second, people have pointed out that historically they did not get proper, informed consent from victims for the way they’ve used their stories in marketing and promotional materials, generally glorifying OUR and the Tim Ballard personality cult at the expense of those they claim to save (and at the expense of the truth, as VICE News has reported).

Now at least seven women employees of OUR have accused Tim Ballard of sexual harassment, claiming he coerced them to partake in sexual acts during operations where they were ostensibly traveling to save victims of sex trafficking. Although his most ardent fans predictably reject the Church’s criticism of him (and some even claim the Church is in on the sex trafficking cabal conspiracy, as The Salt Lake Tribune reported), I hope some will be persuaded by this nudge in the right direction.

Too often in our modern culture, we care more about tone policing and protecting people in power from embarrassment than about making sure they haven’t led people astray. The welcome public rebuke of Tim Ballard reminded me of other times where public rebuke has well served the kingdom of God. Jesus publicly rebuked the money-changers, the stone-throwers, the Pharisees, and his own disciples from time to time. In Galatians 2:11-14, Paul publicly rebukes Peter, telling him he was to be “blamed” and going so far as to call him a “hypocrite” for withdrawing from the Gentiles for not living as Jews. In Doctrine & Covenants 42:91, it says, “And if any one offend openly, he or she shall be rebuked openly, that he or she may be ashamed. And if he or she confess not, he or she shall be delivered up unto the law of God.”

After I first drafted this post, I learned from a public Facebook post by Jonathan Decker that the public rebuke I appreciated so much is missing something very important: an apology. The Facebook post references an article confirming that while the Church denied any affiliation with OUR, it silently deleted a glowing article about OUR and Tim Ballard from the official Church website. This is the latest in a long history of disappointing examples of the Church’s reluctance to apologize.

I decided to publish this post anyway because I still believe that the public rebuke did more good than harm. An apology should have accompanied it, thereby modeling the repentance we all need, but that apology’s absence doesn’t make the whole statement worthless, in my opinion. In an edit to his Facebook post, Jonathan Decker noted speculation that “the original statement was shared without approval by someone on the church’s PR department. I actually think that’s probable, as the church always releases official statements through its own website, not as emails to VICE magazine.” I look forward to the day when the Church can confidently issue statements admitting wrongdoing, repenting, and committing to do better in light of new information. In the meantime, I’ll take a small public rebuke that might sway some hearts and minds away from harming the most vulnerable, instigating panic, and worshiping white saviors (which are in my view golden calves by another name).

Garments vs The Fashion Industry, Part 1

A couple months ago I wrote about how much easier it is to find garment-compatible menswear compared to women’s dresses. One of the comments asked if it is women’s garments or the fashion industry that is the problem. It is both. I want to share my experiences. In this post, I will focus on youth and young adult experiences. I will talk about later life stages in other posts.

I cross dressed for a decent percentage of the first few years of my marriage. Part of this was due to garments: I think I only ever found two marketed-to-women shirts that covered the neckline of my preferred garment tops (chemise, before the newer styles came out). Part of this was due to the fashion industry: vanity sizing, the introduction of spandex into denim, and styles that were tight through my thighs and loose on my hips made it incredibly difficult to find pants that wouldn’t fall off my skinny bum. Also, I wanted functional pockets (this was the peak of chapstick-depth front pockets), and I wanted to be able to ride my bike around campus (it took me years to figure out that I should have been shopping at $porting goods stores to find women’s pants that allowed for better range of motion.) So I often wore men’s cargo pants and a unisex* t-shirt or hand-me-up button-up shirts from my “little” brother. I was wearing what most of the men wore in my male-dominated graduate studies program. I got lectures from my female advisor about needing to present myself professionally.

Grad school aged me wearing a typical outfit (on vacation because wow! pre-smartphone we hardly ever took casual pictures.)

Before I go further I want to acknowledge that the way I move through the world is privileged by my social position as a thin, able-bodied cisgender white woman. I love my body and the amazing things it’s capable of. I have a hard time relating to other women when they talk about body image issues. However, I have a unique perspective on fashion because my body is not very curvy. The most nicely fitting pair of shorts I’ve owned was marketed to husky boys. I shop in all the departments: women’s, men’s, girl’s, and boy’s. This is a privilege because I have such a wide range of clothing choices to represent who I am, but I also feel a little bit like a perpetual tween—in between all the sizes.

The first time I wore boy’s clothing was in sixth grade. That year the style for girl’s shorts was cut for more hips than my child’s body had, and they were too short for my public school’s fingertip-length dress code. This was in the mid-90’s. This might have been the same summer flannel plaid shorts were in style. At any rate, it was well before the longer Bermuda shorts were popular. None of the Mormon women I knew ever wore shorts because they never worked with garments. I was just a kid though, and I could not fathom wearing anything other than shorts during the desert’s summer heat. My mom was not going to buy me shorts that I could not wear to school. She convinced me to buy some from the boy’s department. I didn’t want to dress like a boy, and I felt self-conscious about my shorts. Sixth grade is pretty much the peak of trying to fit in and be cool. I haven’t forgotten how I felt when the fashion industry and school dress code didn’t give me an easily accessible choice to wear girl’s shorts to school.

There is generally no physical need to have different styles of clothing for boys and girls until puberty (thank you, indoor plumbing!) The differences in clothing style is cultural and reflects what our society values in males and females. Boys’ clothing is generally more durable and utilitarian. Girls’ clothing is generally more creative and ornamental. It’s hard to be a boy who wants a shirt with flip sequins or a girl who wants a pantsuit.

My sixth grade bus driver was the first adult that I met where it was not immediately obvious what their gender was. They wore loose black t-shirts and baggy black pants. They had long hair and tattooed Celtic knots around their wrists. My world neatly divided everyone into male and female. The radio game show we listened to every morning on that bus did too: it was called “The Battle of the Sexes” and when the man won they would play Village People’s “Macho Man” and when the woman won they would play Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman”. I couldn’t easily categorize my bus driver, which was good for me to experience, but it also lead me to decide that if I ended up having small breasts when I grew up, I wanted to dress so that people could tell I was a woman. I’m grateful that non-binary people are considerably more visible today than they were when I was a kid. I can only imagine the amount of emotional labor gender-nonconforming folx go through in finding clothes to wear. For me, I still want to present as a woman, even though I don’t understand why that feels so important to me.

Men’s clothing is pretty much the same as boy’s clothing, just in bigger sizes. Women’s clothing is substantially different than girl’s clothing. I took my 5th grade daughter shopping for new snow boots. She was dismayed at how hard it was to find boots in women’s sizes that did not have high heels and were waterproof. I took my tween daughters swimsuit shopping. The girl’s section had a number of one-piece or rashguard options, but they weren’t fitting great. The only swimsuits in their size in stock in the women’s section were bikinis. My girls wear tank tops and short shorts, but they still feel self-conscious when they try on lower cut women’s shirts, even ones they know I’ve worn with garments. Both boys’ and girls’ bodies change during puberty, but our culture expects girls to show off the changes through the way they dress.

In my late teens and early twenties (I got married at the ripe old age of 20) I was still trying to figure out women’s fashion. I came to appreciate that boy’s and men’s clothes are predictable. They come in standard sizes, they cover predictable quantities of skin, pockets are always deep enough to be useful, movement is fairly unconstrained when you wear them and you don’t have to divert much mental energy to being aware of how men’s clothing moves with the wind or gravity. Women’s clothing on the other hand…One day I tried on a pair of size 0 pants that were too big and a pair of size 9 pants that were too small. It can be very difficult to determine if a shirt will cover a garment top without trying it on. It’s ridiculously exciting when you find anything with functional pockets. And I feel so seen by this line from Audre Lorde:
“who would have believed that once again our daughters are allowing their bodies to be hampered and purgatoried by girdles and high heels and hobble skirts?”**

Compared to women’s fashion, garments are amazingly predictable. If you manage to find a style that you like, you can purchase the exact same style a few years later. That isn’t possible with most items of women’s clothing. This consistency is one of the things I appreciate the most about garments, which is ironic because 1) garment sizes are notorious for being inconsistent, and 2) the slow pace of garment innovation is frustrating. Before the newer garment styles came out, I remember taking a survey from the church about them. It asked where the waistband of the old style fell on me (above my natural waist even with the petite style), and where the waistband of my normal clothing sat (I chose the lowest option on the survey, but it still looked a little high). The disconnect between garment style and clothing style was one of the most challenging things to get used to as a newly endowed, already-accustomed-to-dressing-modestly woman. I didn’t love the mental load of having to figure out which style of garment top would work with each of my women’s shirts, so I often chose to wear men’s shirts. Because they worked with everything.

I don’t think that God cares what clothes I wear. I think God cares about why I choose what I wear. God knows that I don’t love the heavily-sexualized, limited-utility brand of womanhood the fashion industry often tries to sell me. God knows that heavily-sexualized, limited-utility is also how I often feel as a woman at church. The fashion industry wants female sexuality on display, the church wants it contained in an almost impossible feminine-but-not-tempting box. I just want to be me.

*Unisex t-shirts are just men’s shirts that are marketed in a way that it is socially acceptable for women to wear them. Old Navy has a Gender-Neutral department on their website. Most of the items listed are t-shirts that use a men’s sizing chart.

** Lorde, Audre, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches 1984. Ten Speed Press, 2007, pp. 109, 113.

Morehouse and Spelman in the Tabernacle

This week the Morehouse and Spelman Glee Clubs were in Salt Lake City to perform with the Tabernacle Choir on Temple Square. You can still watch the recording of the Sunday morning broadcast of “Music and The Spoken Word” when they all sang together. I live too far away to have been able to attend in person, but I watched the broadcast and encouraged my daughter to attend, which she did. Years ago when I lived in Atlanta, I used to regularly attend the Morehouse-Spelman Christmas Concerts and always considered it the highlight of the holiday season. It is one of the events I miss most not living in Atlanta. 

Why is a collaboration between the Tabernacle Choir and the Morehouse and Spelman Glee Clubs such a big deal? It demonstrates an openness to diversity and in the “Word” part of Music and the Spoken Word, Lloyd Newell noted the “balance of variety and harmony may be one reason we are inspired by the music we have heard today.” The musical style of singing for the Tabernacle Choir is not the same as the style of singing by Morehouse and Spelman and the voices of the singers in each choir are different. 

To understand the difficulties of singing in a different style, I will use the example of Betelehemu, a Nigerian Christmas carol. I was first introduced to this song by the BYU Men’s Choir sometime late in the last century and it was received with enthusiasm and as a white person use to white people choral singing, I was impressed. Then the Tabernacle Choir sang it. You can see a video of them in 2012 here. But then I moved to Atlanta and attended a Morehouse-Spelman Christmas concert and heard the Morehouse men’s glee club sing it (see a performance of them here) and it blew me out of the water. It’s hard to describe the difference in energy in the room each time, but with Morehouse, the room simply came alive.

The singers from Morehouse and Spelman demonstrated clearly that they can sing with the Tabernacle Choir in their traditional style, but after the broadcast was over, they let loose a bit more with their personal style of singing.

Music in southern black churches has much more energy and involves a lot more audience participation. The Morehouse and Spelman choirs demonstrated this in the Tabernacle after the filming of “Music and The Spoken Word” was finished. After the broadcast, they stayed and sang additional songs, getting the audience involved clapping during each one. This music was well-received – they received a standing ovation for each piece, with some that seemed to go on forever. It was clear that those in attendance appreciated the quality of the music provided and the more alive the music was, the more it was appreciated. I hope that the organizers of the new church hymnal are taking all this into account. Music is one of the big reasons that many black converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have difficulty feeling at home in our worship services. I have heard many converts in my own ward lament that the music we sing makes it difficult for them to feel the spirit. Personally, I’m not much of a holy roller, but I can feel the Spirit listening to black gospel music. 

There are a lot of cultural things that separate people in this country and in our church. I hope that we can take the inviting of these HBCU choirs to sing with the Tabernacle Choir as a signal to embrace difference in our music and then to expand that embrace beyond music. In the south we have a saying that the most segregated time of the week is Sunday morning. I was glad to see that was not the case this past Sunday morning in Salt Lake City.