Archive for September, 2007

The small shift

Published
by
Russell
on September 28, 2007
in Mormon
. 10 Comments

I was having dinner last night w/ an old friend who was in town on business.  He is a great guy. We were roommates at the B.Y. and have remained close friends for almost 20 yrs. We started talking about life, marriage, parenting, and even the church. We talked about changing values, perspectives and priorities. 

He asked me how my relationship with the church has changed over the years. I mentioned to him that for some reason, I just started looking at things differently (that includes ordinances, scriptures, callings, priesthood, traditions, culture, and even doctrine.) 

Instead of taking the perspective of looking at things as rules or commandments that I am told “I must do”, or taking the other perspective of looking at things as just BS, I just started looking at EVERYTHING as a sacred text and I ask “what can be learned from this?”  What can I learn about myself, my family, and my community? What value can I add to this experience? What connections can I make? I want to understand things better.  

I guess a better way to explain it is that I don’t really look to be handed things or “taught” things that were/are “inspired”—I look to find things and share things that are “inspiring.” The shift is simple but huge. It has made everything more open, more beautiful, more truth-ful, more honest, more flexible, more valuable, more present–yet more eternal, more human and therefore more divine.

Choosing our beliefs

Published
by
ungewiss
on September 26, 2007
in Belief
. 26 Comments

For years I assumed that people stopped going to church because they found it interfered with their social lives. It’s hard to be a partier, for example, if you awake the next morning feeling guilty for having disobeyed the brethren. And what better way to escape regret than to decide you don’t believe in the precepts that inspire guilt in the first place? It sounds a little silly to me now, but my assumption wasn’t entirely without merit—I worked with a guy who unabashedly proclaimed that he stopped believing in the restored gospel simply because he didn’t like feeling guilty for fishing on Sundays, and a few friends have said the same about drinking coffee and beer.

There are obvious holes in this kind of reasoning, not the least of which is that our disbelief has absolutely no bearing on reality. Magellan’s journey may have encouraged people to reconsider their belief that the world was flat, but it certainly didn’t change the shape of the earth. People who seek the truth must acknowledge that their own beliefs are powerless to change it—that what is true will be true even if not a single person alive believes it to be so. This may not be such a big deal for a lot of people, because I suspect that many of us aren’t seeking truth at all—we’re simply looking for a version of reality that allows us to feel happy, productive, and peaceful.

Continue reading ‘Choosing our beliefs’

Losing Your Church and Your Marriage

Published
by
Ann
on September 25, 2007
in Faith, Marriage and Mormon
. 26 Comments

A friend on another board has just told some of us that she is getting divorced. It does not seem that the divorce is her idea, but her husband’s. He isn’t willing to remain married to a post-Mormon. I reacted very strongly to the news. I cried a little. I hugged my husband a lot. I felt like we’d failed her somehow.

Losing your faith is tough. Being married to someone who has lost his/her faith is tough. Change is tough. And yet, people change. I know that when people marry in the temple they are assuming that the marriage is eternal. But that doesn’t mean that the thoughts, ideas, opinions, and yes, beliefs of the person you marry are eternally fixed at the point in time when you each say “Yes.”

I was struck recently by a comment Kevin Barney made in an “I don’t know and neither do you” tangent on By Common Consent: “We all, every one of us, walk by faith.” If you can believe that God and Jesus appeared as physically embodied beings to a semi-literate fourteen year-old in upstate New York; if you can believe that said fourteen year-old produced a work of scripture by reading the words on a stone in his hat; if you can believe that the illegitimate son of a carpenter and his teen-aged bride rose from the dead three days after being executed by the Romans ca. 30 CE; then why can’t you believe that even if your spouse doesn’t believe all those things, somehow, it can still all work out? You can believe all these implausible things, but you can’t believe in the person you married.

That’s faithless.

The Cultural Hall

Published
by
Paula
on September 20, 2007
in Culture, History and Surviving Sundays
. 19 Comments

A few days ago, the permabloggers here decided that it was time to change our look. Actually, I probably forced the issue, since I’ve never thought the old look had anything to do with our name, and I thought the old look was ugly. We uploaded some photos taken in LDS cultural halls, and the reaction in comments here, and among the perma-bloggers was varied, and interesting.
First a little history lesson about the LDS cultural hall. The first LDS cultural hall was probably the Nauvoo Cultural Hall. Its varied uses reflected the early saints’ broad interest in the world around them. It was used for church and business meetings, plays, funerals, dances, and Masonic meetings. (Yes, all that dancing that Terryl Givens speaks of probably started here.) The tradition of strong support for a public building dedicated to enjoyment of “culture” continued when the Saints moved west to Utah, first in the Social Hall in Salt Lake City, and then in cultural halls built in many, many small towns in the mountain west, such as Chesterfield, Idaho, where the cultural hall was called the amusement hall.

Continue reading ‘The Cultural Hall’

Mormons in Salon

Published
by
Ann
on September 19, 2007
in Mormon
. 21 Comments

The lead story tonight on the news/culture/leftie commentary site Salon is “The Mormons are Coming.” The article is primarily a positive review of Terryl Givens book “People of Paradox.” Reaching back to his childhood experience as a summer/Christmas visitor to a rural town full of Mormons, author Andrew O’Hehir has written an entertaining view of the church’s growth, change, challenges and victories in the last 180 years.

O’Hehir refers twice, with incredulity, to Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon by “talking into his hat.” Apparently, I’m not the only person who finds that particular translation method a little odd.

In his conclusion, O’Hehir’s states that the collapse of sacred distance Givens refers to in his book is 180 years old and retreating. This really jumped out at me. One of the most interesting things about our modern prophets is that they really don’t prophesy. They give advice. The usual excuse is that we don’t need more prophecy. This is a great contrast to the early days of the church, when the return of prophecy was evidence of the church’s truthfulness.

The article includes references to books by Mormons and non-Mormons, B.H. Roberts, an edition of the Book of Mormon that footnoted locations with their modern counterparts, Eugene England, and the BYU Ballroom Dance team. That’s a lot of territory in a very short space. The article is very positive. There is, alas, no mention of the Bloggernacle.

I’d be interested to hear what any of our readers might think of the article.

Everything Expands

Published
by
Russell
on September 14, 2007
in Mormon
. 24 Comments

I have been traveling most of the summer for work, which means a lot of time for reading and a lot of opportunity to meet interesting people from around the world. The more I find beauty and truth in other people, other places, and other faiths–the more beauty I find in our tradition—everything expands—and because of this, the Mormon experience in some ways, becomes more valuable to me and more interesting as well.I have been reading a lot of Catholic writers lately, and here are two quotes that have stuck in my head:

“Leaving the order would mean killing everything I want to liberate, not destroy” –Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Jesuit priest)

“Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable. Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious.” – Thomas Merton (Trappist monk)

Earlier this summer, John Dehlin and I had the chance to spend the day talking as we wandered our way from downtown to midtown Manhattan. The great conversation was interrupted periodically as we would step inside the beautiful churches that we passed along the way. In each case we would find peace, beauty, and people on their knees praying (during the middle of the day, during the middle of the week). Going back and forth from the kinetic New York streets to the silence of worshipers in the different chapels was a soul expanding experience. I have thought back on that day quite a bit.

Mistakes were made…

Published
by
Michael Nielsen
on September 12, 2007
in Current Events and History
. 25 Comments

Reports of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Mountain Meadows Massacre have been fascinating, haven’t they? Newspapers far beyond Utah have covered the event, as a quick search of google news will show. Some friends of mine were there, traveling from their Georgia home to join in the Lee family reunion and explore New Harmony and the surrounding area. I can hardly wait to talk with them about the trip.

Me, I have merely read from afar. I began with news articles, followed by the comments to those articles, and then visited blogs and bulletin boards to see what people had to say. Of course, you probably know what they said; comments ranged from praise for the church’s apology to questions of whether there was any apology at all. Both apologies and beauty are in the eye of the beholder, it seems.

Then today a bulletin board pointed me to this AP News story, in which the church spokesperson noted “We don’t use the word ‘apology.’ We used ‘profound regret.’” Ah, so close, and yet so far.

There’s a distinct similarity between this quasi-almost-apology and the typical political pseudo-apology. Both come at it from a perspective that “mistakes were made (but not by me…..)”. Sure, we’d all like to see a church that claims to be directed by God to display better-than-human foibles, but is that expecting too much? People are people, even when they believe they are on God’s errand.

Meanwhile, the devout and the lapsed and the inbetweeners will interpret Elder Eyring’s statement in ways that confirm their beliefs. And the world will go on spinning and orbiting, until the next powerful institution or person sees that mistakes are most easily almost apologized for in the passive voice.

Sometimes, it IS a Mormon thing

Published
by
Ann
on September 9, 2007
in Marriage and Mormon
. 16 Comments

My friend Peggy Rogers used to have a statement in her online sig: “It’s not a Mormon thing, it’s a human thing.” In many cases, I agree with her. Those of us who have ambivalent relationships with the church often slap a “Mormon” label on our challenges with the church. Usually, those challenges aren’t Mormon, but just human - people doing what people do, but the people happen to be Mormon. On a recent thread at the New Order Mormons board on the topic of getting along in a newly-mixed marriage, one of the participants called us on it. The problems and challenges of remaining in a loving respectful marriage to a believing LDS after a loss of faith were dismissed as just the problems and challenges of any mixed-faith marriage.

I’ve never been in a mixed-faith marriage between a Catholic and a Jew, or a Hindu and a Muslim, or an evangelical Protestant and a Buddhist, but I have been in two different mixed-faith marriages: once as a believing LDS to a never-Mormon husband, and later as an unbelieving LDS to a faithful LDS husband. Having experienced LDS mixed-marriage from both sides, I feel qualified to say that sometimes, it IS a Mormon thing.

The pressure of an unbelieving spouse on a faithful LDS can not be underestimated. The pinnacle of religious achievement in the LDS church is temple marriage. When I was a convert married to a non-member, the lack of a temple marriage was a giant thorn in our relationship. In the beginning I was hopeful he would see the light. As time went on, and our relationship deteriorated, the persistent lack of the magic wand - a temple marriage - magnified in my mind our already very serious problems.

Over ten years later, the shoe was on the other foot. I had the magic wand, and even a real Prince Charming, who was better in every possible way from the toad I had married the first time. But I didn’t believe in magic any more. My therapist, bless her, didn’t seem to understand that going to another church was not as simple as just going to another church! That’s a very Mormon thing - that it makes a difference which church you go to. One mainstream Protestant flavor isn’t as good as any other. In fact, they’re all wrong - it says so right in JS-H.

Garments, the Word of Wisdom, tithing, taking callings, baptizing the children, what to tell the children, what to tell the relatives, what is going to happen to my eternal marriage - these are all, to a greater or lesser extent, Mormon things. Pretending that it’s no different than what any other mixed-faith marriage has to deal with doesn’t make these Mormon things go away.

The one thing that is universal in resolving these issues, or at least learning to live with them, is communication. Judgmentalism, contempt, the cold shoulder, lines in the sand, ultimatums, tears, scripture bashing and pleas to authority usually aren’t effective. If you want it to work, keep talking. And then, listen.

Sunstone-inspired music

Published
by
ungewiss
on September 6, 2007
in Audio and Music
. 0 Comments

I wasn’t able to attend John Dehlin’s Sunstone workshop in Salt Lake this year, but when he offered to provide the audio I took the opportunity to see what I missed. They covered a lot of information that is worth hearing, and if you haven’t listened yet I think it’d be worth your time.

Since I’ve read and heard most of Dehlin’s work before, it was most helpful for me to hear people talking candidly and quite happily about the challenges facing unorthodox Mormons. I know we can read an endless stream of blog entries about just such topics, and I do, but it somehow seems less real to me out here on the internet where we can hide behind our keyboards and screen names. Maybe one day I’ll be secure enough in my confusion to attend a Sunstone workshop in person, but until then it is comforting to know that at least some of you already can.

John also played a couple of songs during his presentation, reminding me how much music has helped me understand my own meandering journey from orthodoxy. Feeling inspired by his musical interludes, I decided to share one song that I suspect a lot of us can relate to. Hope you enjoy it.

For the Best
by Straylight Run
[» You can listen to the song here.]

And it takes more time than I’ve ever had,
drains the life from me, makes me want to forget.
As young as I was, I felt older back then,
more disciplined, stronger and certain.
But I was scared to death of eternity.
I was saved by grace, but destroyed by naivety.
And I lied to myself and said it was for the best.

And now faith is replaced with a logic so cold,
I’ve disregarded what I was now that I’m older.
And I know much more than I did back then,
but the more I learn, the more I can’t understand.
And I’ve become content with this life that I lead,
where I think* too much and don’t believe in much of anything.
And I lie to myself, and say it’s for the best.

We’re moving forward but holding ourselves back,
and we’re waiting on something that will never come.
(And I lie to myself, and say it’s for the best)

* I changed the lyric from “drink too much,” which I don’t, to “think too much,” which I certainly do. If you’re drunk while reading this perhaps you’ll want to sing the original lyric…

The Church I Want to Belong to and the Church I’m a Member Of

Published
by
Ann
on September 2, 2007
in Belief, Mormon and Surviving Sundays
. 6 Comments

One of the ways I make the church work for me is by visualizing the church I want to be a part of. In the church I want to be a part of, worship is uplifting. The music is always good (because I pick the music.) The talks are Jesus-focused and if they’re not, they’re at least entertaining or I have a good book to read. In the church I want to be a part of, I spend my Sunday hours in the company of good people who love each other. Our hearts are turned in the same direction. We are accepting of the variety of experiences that inform our attitudes and beliefs. We want to build the Kingdom of God together.

In the church I actually belong to, some of this stuff matches my hopes and some of it doesn’t. The music is usually good, but not always. Sometimes, you’ve just got to give the people what they want and sing “I Believe in Christ,” though we usually do that when I’m out of town. The talks pretty much always meet my expectations, in that they’re good and I listen or they’re not and I read something. Though the good people do love each other, we sometimes don’t like each other very much. Our hearts are turned in the same direction, but we aren’t very accepting of others’ differing experiences. We want to build the Kingdom of God together, but we aren’t exactly sure how.

Today was mostly spent in the church I’m in, not the church I want. But I was the one not liking people very much. I was the one not accepting of others’ experiences. I was the one not quite sure how to build the Kingdom with my fellow Saints.