The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy Quotes

“When Heaven has an earthquake you fall to your knees and feel through the rubble to find the pieces of God. When my eternal, temple-blessed marriage shattered and everything that had been meaningful lay in jumbled shards around me, I had to slowly and carefully pick up every single piece and examine it, turning it over and over, to see if it was worthy to keep and to use in building a new house of meaning. As I gathered the broken pieces of God, I used only my own authority, only my own relationship with the divine, and the good, small voice that speaks inside me, to appraise them. I threw away many, and I kept many, assembling the bright pieces into One Great Thought. I asked only, "Do I see God's fingerprints on this? Does this little piece feel godly? Does it speak of love?" That made it easy. I was forever finished with the insane attempt to love a God who hurts me. When I picked up the little pieces of God-ordained polygamy, I smiled because there was no question. I thanked the God of Love, and threw that piece away.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“Being treated with politeness, consideration, even respect is different from being treated as an equal.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“We can think a healed thought and speak a healed word, speak of and to the two who are One, our MotherGoddessFatherGod. The hopeful but misty thought that "I've a Mother there" will give way to the experience that "I've a Mother here." We will know Him, Her, Them, Us, the Divine Family unbroken, bringing part to whole and whole to part, singing the indispensable She who had been forgotten but it now found, singing the wholeness, singing the holiness.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“Heber C. Kimball had forty-three wives, with seventeen of them bearing him sixty-five children. I asked Tom Kimball, a descendant of Heber and his first wife Vilate, if he thought members of the church became more faithful because of polygamy. He responded, “No, it seemed to create fundamentalists and atheists. What I know about the Kimballs is that only two of the forty-two sons of Heber would become polygamists themselves, and my father would go around to his cousins converting them to the church because their parents were no longer Mormons. Even now, the majority of my Kimball cousins are not Mormon.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“I suggest that the representation of women deserves a much higher consideration in our religious discourse. When words are presented as if they come directly from God, they can have monumental impact on our psyches, our spirits, our hearts, and our relationships. Women are given, in story at least, first place in the lifeboats, but often in more common circumstances we are consigned to the back of the bus.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“I experience Mormondom to be a warm and beautiful and well-appointed home in which you suddenly find you're in a Patriarchy Funhouse that features crazy, rippling distortion mirrors built to magnify maleness and diminish femaleness. It's males who sit in the seats of authority, from God in his heaven on down to the leadership in Salt Lake City and out to every spot on the globe where Mormons congregate. It's males we pray to and pray through. It's males that preside at the pulpit. It's males that pray over and pass the sacrament, the tokens of the Lord's supper, and officiate in all other ordinances. It's males (nearly always) whose portriats hang on the walls of our chapels and whose faces appear on the covers of our class manuals. It's males who pronounce every doctrine and policy from church headquarters. It's males we read about in most of the Old Testament, and in ninety-nine percent of the Book of Mormon. (Thank you, Jesus of the New Testament, for being such a radical revolutionary, violating tradition, speaking of and to women, treating them as fully human.)”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“I would not have been able to articulate it at that time, but I had begun a painful journey toward an impossible goal, a journey that lasted a long time: how to love a God who hurts you.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men