Arithmetical Theologic Pedagogy

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong.  No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. -Terry Pratchett

Tonight I went to institute.  First time probably this year.  The lesson was essentially about getting your priorities sorted.  It was based on this conference talk about refocusing on the spiritual rather than the temporal.  The teacher took the idea a different direction, focusing instead on media consumption.

Overall the lesson was fine.  But I had a problem with one of her final statements.  She said she hoped that we all felt a little chastised by the lesson.  She referenced some quote about how if we aren't repenting every day then we aren't doing our best so we should all remember that and bring our A-game.  Aside from her use of the phrase "bring your A-game" pretty certainly placing her forever beyond my social circle, I was more annoyed with her stated hope that her lesson had made us all feel chastised.

Contrast that sentiment with the lesson I got on Sunday.  Relief Society was mercifully changed into a combined special meeting with our Stake President, who had been invited by our bishop to share with us a compressed version of his bishop training program.  Fun fact:  in real life our stake president works as an addiction counselor.  I really really appreciated everything he had to say, but what is relevant to this post is when he said that the best and, indeed, only way to fight darkness is not to try to remove the darkness, but to add light.  Though he is not the first person to characterize things in such a way, he still struck a chord with me.  I realized that darkness is an absence and you cannot remove an absence.  All you can do is fill it.

Which brings me back to what bothered me about our institute teacher's chastisement comment.  At first I thought I was annoyed because she was telling me I need to repent.  But that wasn't quite right, because she's right, I DO need to repent of many things. I am all too aware of that fact.  Rather, it was her blatant negative angle.  She hoped, not that her lesson had inspired me to do better, but that it had chastised me for not doing well enough.  It felt to me that she was attempting to remove the darkness rather than add light.

I have had this debate with some of my friends and I understand that some people respond well to negative motivation.  So I suppose what she said was a perfectly legitimate sentiment to express because it was effective for some members of the class.  But I have to wonder...while negative motivation works for some people, I would imagine that positive motivation works for all people.  Is that incorrect?

Telling me that I should feel bad for not "bringing my A-game" implies that my failure with whatever principle you're talking about is based on complaisance and laziness.  For every simple principle that one person writes off as a theological gimme, there is another person for whom it stands as an insurmountable obstacle.  For that person it is at best insulting and at worst actively damaging to tell them that their failures are due to laziness.  We all have our darkness, even if it isn't all in the same place for each of us.  That is, after all, the entire point of our lives.  The darkness may have got there first, but we strive to bring in the light to overcome it.  To fill it up.

So this is my friendly reminder to myself and to you and to that institute teacher who will never read this blog post.  This is me reminding us all to use positive motivation.

Let's add more light.

My story...

A few days ago I posted a link on facebook to a blog post from the website FreeBYU.org.  As the site was created by and maintained in large part by one of my best friends, I've become more involved in their movement than I likely would have otherwise.  So I came across these two profiles: Travis and Tucker.  I know both of these guys, but I had not previously heard their story in terms of the church.  Reading their stories, so similar to so many other stories I've heard, made me want to try and put my own experience into words.

When I was younger I had this reputation for being quite a scriptorian.  Whenever we'd play games in primary revolving around Book of Mormon stories my team would always turn to me when it was our turn.  And I almost never disappointed.  Clearly I had a deep love of the scriptures.  Or, something neither I nor anyone else around me considered, I might instead just have an amazing ability to recall stories.  Years and classes later, after being the go-to student to summarize the reading we were all assigned for homework last week, I've come to believe it was most likely that latter explanation.  Because one thing I don't remember growing up is ever doing a single thing to deserve that reputation I had.  I mean, I read my scripture with some regularity because my mom made me bookmarks and charts and any number of other devices to remind me to do so.  But I don't recall ever particularly loving them.

I can remember one and a half times in my life when I've ever felt what could be called The Spirit.  The first was on some teenaged birthday (perhaps my sixteenth? I don't have the journal from that time to verify).  It was late enough in my life that my grandma was already starting to show the earliest signs of dementia.  She and my grandpa had given me a card with some money, perhaps $20, and as I laid in bed that night I had one of my first ever panic attacks as I worried over whether or not they could afford to give me that money and what was going to happen to them both as they continued getting older and their lives continued getting harder.  I was so afraid for them, and I felt so helpless to do anything about either their futures or my own current anxiety.  And though I cannot now remember the actual feeling (and I am actually often tempted to discount my memory of what happened), I do know that that night I felt comforted.  I was finally able to stop worrying, trust that my grandparents would be ok, and fall asleep.

The other time, the one I call a "half" time, was when I was about 20.  I was living with my dad and my step mother and my two step brothers and I was, all things considered, not in a great place in my life.  I'd come home from my study abroad completely broke and I made the decision to leave school for a year and try to earn money.  In retrospect I can say without reservation that it was the wrong decision, though a few good things did come from it.  So I spent a year and a half living with family, working at Target, and literally doing nothing else with myself.  I would wake up between 11 and 1 every day and surf the internet till I had to go to work.  I would work from 3 to 11 and then come home and stay up till 3 or 4 or 5 watching movies or TV shows.  I avoided my family and had almost zero social interaction.  Literally the only good things in my life were my cat and my ward.  I loved that ward (and the cat, but that's not relevant to this story).  And it was eventually my ward and my bishop that helped me get back on my feet.  I started thinking about serving a mission.  I was nearing the age and I can't even count the number of times I'd heard that if I wasn't married by 21 it was my duty to serve a mission.  I talked to my bishop about it, and we discussed the preparations I would need to make for a mission to happen.  I knew I didn't feel like I was spiritually "fit" enough for a mission yet, but I was hopeful that I could become so.  But as I considered the mission I kept thinking about school.  I was thinking about all my friends and how I was already a year behind them now.  If I went on a mission I'd be another year and half on top of that.  Basically all my friends would be done by the time I got back.  So one day I was praying about whether or not I should go on a mission or I should go back to school.  Now, depending on who you talk to either I just had a moment of clarity or I received an answer to my prayers.  Either way, I realized that when making my decision it was ok for me to factor in what I wanted to do.  School and mission were both good, worthy choices; this wasn't an issue of right or wrong.  So I wasn't somehow sinning to consider what I wanted to do as I made the decision.  And what I wanted to was to go back to school and all my friends.  Which is what I ended up doing.

If you ask me right now to tell you about all the times I've felt the spirit, those are the two stories I'd come up with.  I would also tell you one more.

The actual decision to come back to Provo was somewhat abrupt and I ended up moving into the first place I could find.  I moved down in the middle of the summer of 2008 and I lived in the place I found through winter semester of 2009.  I can't tell you exactly when this event occurred besides sometime while I lived in that house.  Essentially, one night I had a...spiritual breakdown shall we call it?  It began simply with loneliness.  I've always been susceptible to the latenight lonelies.  But that night it got worse and worse.  I remembered all those New Era articles I read about how other people had felt lonely and then they prayed and they "felt the arms of [their] dear Savior surround them and His love fill them."  So I asked God to let me feel that love.  Let me feel those arms around me.  I didn't feel anything at all.  And as I waited to feel the love I'd been promised was there waiting for me I started to ask myself a question.  It was the question that I think a lot of other people my age are also asking themselves.  What if none of it is true?  What if it is all just a big lie, or manipulation, or even just a well-intentioned wish?  What then?  I think I can say that it was the worst night of my life.  Because as I asked myself that question, I also asked God.  The God who, in all my twenty-some years of life had only had anything to say to me maybe two times.  And all this time I'd been ok with that.  I knew I wasn't good enough or devout enough to warrant the sort of constant spiritual intervention that I'd heard about other people having.  I didn't blame God for thusfar leaving me be.  But that night was different.  I needed something, anything at all.  I would have been content with a brusque "get over yourself" even.  I just wanted the tiniest shred of reassurance that my entire life hadn't been built around the world's greatest self-sustaining con.  I eventually cried myself out and fell asleep exhausted.

I woke up the next day with the the question in my head "What now?"  What was I supposed to do?  I'd been let down by God.  I had asked and He had said nothing.  But on the other hand...I had survived.  I'd made it through that awful night, and, thankfully, in the light of day I didn't feel the same passionate anguish I'd felt the night before.  I was just confused.  I didn't know what was supposed to happen.

A few days later in one of my classes we were assigned to read a book of poetry called The Stream and the Sapphire by Denise Levertov.  In it I found this poem:

Suspended
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.

I have never ever cared for poetry, but that poem practically slapped me in the face when I read it.  There it was.  I had grasped at God's garment that night and my hands had slipped.  But what she said appealed to me.  "For though I claw at empty air and feel nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted."  Neither had I.  I had made it through my night of pain and abandonment and I came out the other side.

There were many more hours of thought that went into it, but this is where I ended up.  God didn't answer me.  Not even when I was desperately begging Him to do so.  I could interpret that two ways.  God couldn't or wouldn't answer me because He either doesn't exist or doesn't care, or He didn't answer me for reasons of His own that I don't know but trust to ultimately be for my own good.  I have at least one friend who, upon reading this, will quickly point out to me that those two options are actually the exact same thing, except one includes me basically making things up to make myself feel better.  And to him I say yes.  He's exactly right.  Because those two options ended up being a microcosm of my entire attitude toward religion.  Which is this:  Either God doesn't exist and everything I've been taught and believed in my entire life is a lie and I've been wasting all my time and energy on nothing more than really persistent myths.  OR.  It's all true and there are things I don't understand and probably never will and I accept them and try to figure things out as best I can.  Those may not be the options for everyone, but that's what they were to me.

So I made a decision.  I chose to believe.  I chose to tell myself what may well be a straight up lie because when I weighed my options, my life looked better through that lens.  In the church there is a lot of talk about faith.  I doubt a sacrament meeting goes by that doesn't have at least one mention of it.  Faith, we are told, is the foundation of our testimonies, and through it we progress to knowledge.  Well, knowledge is something that I have accepted to be pretty much beyond my reach.  Because I just don't think I could claim knowledge unless God or the Spirit told me something straight out.  And that doesn't appear to be something that's going to happen.  But if I'm being honest, I have to say that I wouldn't even classify what I have as faith.  What I have is hope.  Hope is the very lowest rung on the spiritual ladder in my head.  I have hope that this church I've committed myself to is true (though certainly not perfect).  I have hope that one day I'll understand the world and my place in it.  I have hope that God loves me.

That was five and a half years ago.  Things haven't been easy since then.  I've seen a lot of friends go through similar experiences to mine, but with very different endings.  They couldn't accept hope as a good enough reason to stick with the church.  I don't blame them.  In fact, I often worry that the real reason I stay with the church is simply because I don't care enough about topics that should be much more important to me.  Maybe I just lack enough conviction one way or the other.  It's actually a pretty constant issue in my mind.  But whether that is the case or not, I will say that I have thusfar stuck with my decision.  I may have doubts and questions and hurts and plenty of issues with the church...but I have decided to stick with it.  I think the hardest thing for me these days is jealousy of my time.  Lacking the devout conviction of my fellow saints I find it difficult to sacrifice my time so willingly.  I'm working on that.  But I will also say that having an...academic? reasoned?  well, either way, a far less emotional attachment to the church has had its upsides. I think I have been able to offer a supportive and understanding ear to my friends who have suffered through the disillusionment and pain that comes with a lost testimony (at least I really hope so). I am able to hear a lot more criticism of the church without getting angry or defensive (unless that criticism is idiotic and unfair ;).  And I am able to look at the church more objectively and see places it needs improvement without writing it off entirely.  And that is, I think, the biggest "blessing" that has come from my story thusfar.  Because if the ones with questions and concerns just leave, and all that is left are the devout and unquestioning, then how will anything ever change?  Each side serves it's purpose, and you need both of them.  So I am grateful, I guess, that I can be a questioner.

I told my bishop an abbreviated version of this story a few weeks ago.  It is something I've mostly kept to myself.  I've been ashamed of the fact that I can't claim to have faith or knowledge.  It is hard not to think that, if I was a better person--a better Mormon--I would have those things.  But my bishop, instead of calling me to repentance, said "I think that is a great story."  Small as it was, that little bit of acceptance was so comforting to me.  It inspired me to try and look at my story in a different light--to recast it from a failure to a success.  It's hard to even write that.  And maybe I'm not quite at success level.  But as I've gone back through it all and written it all out, I have been able to see more goodness in my story than I ever have before.  Enough that I can hope to call it a success one day...

My thoughts on the ordination of women

My former roommate Andria has been getting deeply involved in the political sphere.  Pretty much every day my pinterest is flooded with her pins about equality and feminism and all sorts of good things.  She keeps a feminist blog.  She was recently featured as a guest blogger on youngmormonfeminist.org.  She was addressing the current debate about the ordination of women to the priesthood.  Here is the link to her post.  

As I was reading her ideas I came up with some of my own and I wanted to share them.  

Andria is firmly in favor of the ordination of women.  Her post systematically addresses each of the most common arguments against it.  First she addressed the claim "if God wanted women to have the priesthood then they would already have it."  I think she makes a valid point when she says that there have been very clear moments in the history of the saints where God has waited for us to ask before he has given us greater knowledge or light.  She says that perhaps God is waiting to grant women the priesthood, but he is waiting for us to be ready and to ask for that gift.  

As I said, I think she makes a fair point.  And I would look at Elder Holland's talk in this weekend's conference to confirm the principle of asking and questioning that I think many people often forget is fundamental to the LDS faith  (tangentially, just everyone please go and watch that talk again because it was one of the greatest talks I think I have ever heard).  But I think that there is a corollary that comes with that idea that Andria doesn't quite address.  As she says, sometimes the Lord is just waiting for us to be ready.  But...what if we aren't?  What then?  I think Andria would say that that is what the Ordain Women movement is all about.  Getting us ready so it can happen already.  And I can understand that.  But I think it is important to remember the balance--that is, no matter how ready you think the world and the church and the people are, if you truly believe that the Lord is in charge and that the Presidency are abiding by His wishes and it hasn't happened...well...then it isn't time.  I understand how defeatist that might sound.  I don't mean it that way.  All I mean is that, again as Elder Holland said, you have to keep perspective and remember what you do believe.  Don't abandon something you know to be good because it is not yet perfect.  I guess that is what I'm trying to say.  Don't get frustrated if things don't happen as quickly as you want.

Andria addresses men who dismiss the Priesthood as busy work and women who dismiss it as just another responsibility to add to their already maxed out schedules.  I'm slightly bemused at how she tells men who belittle the duties of the Priesthood that they deeply misunderstand the fundamental nature and significance of the authority they wield, whilst simultaneously telling women to calm down because it's not such a big deal in terms of the commitment required.  Be that as it may, I think I can respect at least the hesitancy of women on these grounds.  When I think about the possibility of adding priesthood duties to my life I literally think "awesome...another aspect of my life to feel guilty about for failing to maximize my potential..."  Perhaps it is petty of me to feel that way, but that is, unfortunately, the way I feel.  I don't think I'm "lame" for this.

And lastly, she addresses two points which I am going to combine.  She talks about the "men and women are different but equal" argument and the "men have the priesthood and women have motherhood".  Both of these are, to me at least, essentially rephrasings of the argument that men and women have different strengths and different roles to fill.  She asserts that if women are equal then they should be equally able to care for themselves or their families (or visiting teachees) if they do not happen to have a man handy to take care of the blessing and the household running--as many women do not.  She says that motherhood is not a true compliment to priesthood.  Fatherhood would be the true compliment of motherhood, and priestesshood of priesthood.  She very interestingly points out that motherhood is more a physical ability (no matter how nurturing a man might be and how rejecting of gender stereotypes...he simply cannot bake a miniature human within his lower abdomen; there is no oven there) and priesthood is a spiritual gift and discipline (a woman is absolutely capable of humbling herself and making herself in tune with the spirit).  I think that is a really fascinating distinction that I personally haven't really heard addressed before, and is definitely worth considering further.  

But this was my thought as I read her comments on these issues.  It was actually prompted by my dad and step-mom teasing me.  My dad texted asking me if I wanted the priesthood and I texted back absolutely; eventually we'd manage to excise men from the church entirely.  And I realized that that was actually an important thought.  

I'm going to go all historical on you now and take us all back to high school.  Do you guys remember Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education?  These were two of those landmark cases you learned about in your social studies class that shaped the history of America.  Specifically, Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education dealt with the philosophy of "separate but equal" during the time of segregation (were gonna go ahead and pretend that time is past, despite this slightly gratifying (they're forcing change!) and simultaneously vomit-inducing (they even had to have this fight in 2013????) story that recently came to my attention...I just can't get side-tracked by that issue just now).  Essentially, in Plessy the courts legitimized segregation, claiming that as long as everything was equal it was totes fine to keep them dark kids separate from them light kids.  This was in 1896.  60 ish years later, Brown overturned this legal precedent, famously asserting "'Separate but equal' is inherently unequal".  Integration painfully ensued.

Those words.  "Separate but equal is inherently unequal."  I think those words have sunk deep into the American psyche since 1954.  I think they have really been at the heart of the seemingly endless struggle for equality for all the people (all of them...women, gays, blacks, immigrants, whatever).  See, we look at something like Plessy v. Ferguson and we can see exactly how awful that decision was.  There was no equal.   "Separate but equal" meant "We get the nice stuff and you get the shitty reject stuff."  During the days of "separate but equal" everything was horrible.  During the days of "separate but equal is inherently unequal" things started to get better.  And we've spent the last 60 years drilling that into our minds.  If it is separate, distinct, or apart then there is an inequality there.

At the same time, however, somehow that idea has paradoxically been fused with a sort of obsession with personal independence.  Equality has come to mean that every person is able to do every thing for themselves.  If you are dependent on another human being that means that they hold power over you and must therefore consider themselves superior to you.  Sometimes, of course, this means opportunity if not actual ability--"I could definitely learn to be a mechanic if I wanted.  I simply choose to invest my time elsewhere and pay this fellow to mechanic for me."  You get the point though.  Everyone must know they have the option to do everything for themselves if they wanted to.

So when I joked with my dad that ultimately we feminists were going to get rid of all the menz in the church and get things done ourselves it suddenly occurred to me that maybe we should think about that.  The Ordain Women movement is, as Andria said, about granting women the ability to take care of their and their families' priesthood needs themselves.  Which is good, right?  Equality is being able to take care of yourself by yourself.  You don't have to depend on anyone else; no one else has power over you.

Except I can't help but think about the idea of a community of saints.  That is the ideal toward which we are working, isn't it?  A loving, close-knit community of saints who care about and serve each other.  That is the goal.  If we are all striving to become fully independent so that no one needs anyone else, somehow that just doesn't feel like a loving community to me.  So let me ask you this.  What if the reason that women don't hold the priesthood has absolutely nothing to do with their abilities or the lack thereof?  What if it is all about teaching us to come together?  What if the whole point is that you can't do it alone?  Even that single mother.  Maybe the gift she needs isn't that she can bless her children herself; rather it is that some brother in the ward has the opportunity to come serve her and strengthen the bond between them.  

It requires a fundamental shift in perspective to look at the "gender" rolls of the church in this way.  It is a shift from viewing male and female interaction as competitive and antagonistic to complimentary and constructive.  I can understand why such a shift may well be impossible for a lot of women.  I don't think I will ever become a true feminist (a fact which I am completely ok with) because I will never see the battle in every day life like they do.  And I'm glad that they do.  Their efforts have materially improved my life.  But I think that this is an idea worth considering.  "Separate but equal is inherently unequal" may or may not be the great truth we believe it to be, but I submit this: "different but equal" is not the same evil as "separate but equal".  As some banal YA book once said: a key and a lock look completely different to the point that if you knew nothing about them you might never believe that they were companions; indeed, each serves a completely separate purpose.  Yet neither can fulfill that purpose without the other.  Sometimes differences bring us together so that we can combine our strengths and abilities and become better than either of us were apart.  Better than we ever would have suspected had we insisted on doing everything alone.

It is important to understand that I don't have any sort of fundamental problem with the idea of women being ordained to the Priesthood.  I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of lobbying the leaders of the church to affect changes we think are necessary (aren't we supposed to believe that they're inspired?) but I appreciate the importance of having the debate.  If the first presidency ever comes out with an announcement that women are to be ordained to the priesthood I will not have a problem with that, though I understand many likely will.  But I wanted to share my thoughts on this topic because they feel true and important to me.  I hope they do so to you.