On (Not) Manifesting By The Uplifted Hand

It’s ward conference, so nondescript men in black coats and white shirts fill the stand. One of them reads aloud, name after initial after name. We’re just supposed to raise our hands. It’s run of the mill. Hardly worth thinking about.

I am sitting at the back of the stand, one of only two women (both of whom are there to do music related callings). The rote, banal list of leaders and the question that follows hardly register anymore.

But I don’t raise my hand. My body seizes. My heart races. I’ve only done this a million times, but…I can’t. I can’t. I’m…not?

My arm stays down. I neither sustain nor dissent.

My body is frozen. My brain is racing. What did I just do? Did anyone notice? Will someone say something? What is the potential social fallout of my spontaneous action? Will someone think this was premeditated? What am I doing here?

Still the man with the authority at the stand, whose name I do not know, is reading more initials, more titles, but it is not until local leadership that I can move to raise my hand. My body and brain are once again aligned.

This happened once before, at one of those early stadium tour engagements from President Nelson. It’s traditional to stand when the Prophet arrives, and I have stood for any number of General Authorities in the past, but in that moment, my body said no.

My sister, sitting next to me, stood up, noticed me sitting, and prompted me.

“The prophet has arrived.”

I stayed in my chair. I just stayed. Why couldn’t I just stand like everyone else?

I have to trust that my body knows what is harmful to me. That it would be harmful to sustain leaders whose actions I do not condone. That it would be harmful to me to pretend that I do.  

At the same time, I don’t feel a call to raise my hand in dissent. Not yet anyway, not in these perfunctory rituals of ours. Absent a meaningful process for registering and addressing dissent, it’s all symbolic anyway.

So, I neither dissent nor sustain. I cannot, with integrity, do anything but sit in this middle space that is neither all nor nothing. I do not raise my hand.

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash