If you don’t know the story of Lorenzo Snow preaching the law of tithing in drought-ridden St. George, Utah, and the blessings that followed the Saints’ renewed commitment to the law, your best Relief Society-ready review is a Church-made 1963 movie, “The Windows of Heaven.” In fact, if you’re in a ward where many of the sisters are converts or under forty, I give you permission to start with the movie and use it as a springboard for a short discussion at the end of the lesson. It’s on the cheesy side, but it’s a tear-jerker, and it has a lot to say about faith,  blessings, and commitment. Though the original movie was 50 minutes long, the copy you’re likely to have in your ward library is a 2006 DVD that runs only 11 minutes. Lacking that (and adding in a good internet connection), you can find a version on YouTube. This one runs under 17 minutes, which will probably leave you about five minutes for discussion.

If you choose not to show the film, have someone read the following paragraph:

In his previous 50 years as an Apostle, President Snow had rarely mentioned the law of tithing in his sermons. That changed in St. George, Utah, because of the revelation he received. “I never had a more perfect revelation,” he later said, “than [the revelation] I received on this subject of tithing.” From St. George, he and his traveling companions went from town to town in southern Utah and on their way home to Salt Lake City, holding 24 meetings. President Snow delivered 26 sermons. Each time he spoke, he counseled the Saints to obey the law of tithing.

Well, goodness. What had President Snow spent all that time teaching about?

If you’ve been following Mormonism at all in the last year or so, you’ve probably seen a lot of procedural and attitudinal changes, from the new Mormons and Gays website to a surge of young sister missionaries going into the world. We’ve also begun to hear a lot of calls for change in the Church, from members seeking a standardization of temple policies and women exercising their right to wear pants, to letters asking for women to pray in General Conference and a blog calling for our leaders to ask for revelation about ordaining women.

I shared the Ordain Women meeting information with my mother, who lives a mile and a half from the University of Utah Student Union. Neither of us will be able to attend, but we had a joyful (and tearful) moment just talking about it.

And then I heard this story from Rome, which is so beautiful I simply must share it with you.

The phrase “Catholic spring” appears near the end of the article, and it resonated with me. The “spring” part hearkens back to 1848, when revolution and political compromise led to some tiny but significant changes in Europe: the end of serfdom in some places; monarchs giving up absolute rule in others. You know the more contemporary allusions: the Prague spring of 1968 and the Arab spring that started in December 2010. In those cases, and the Catholic spring mentioned in the article, the word “revolution” is clearly too militaristic. Spring connotes awakening, rejuvenation, newness, meekness. It suggests that the sun is rising, that people are seeing things with new eyes and new hopes, that people and leaders are hearing one another and working together for progress.

I hope we’re experiencing the beginning of a Mormon spring–not a revolution, certainly, but a new era of revelation that transforms the Church we love in a fundamental way, the likes of which we haven’t seen for over a century. There is so much willingness to work together to include people who haven’t felt that they belong with us. So many people talking about change, openness, inclusion, and seeing each other as God sees us.

Happy spring, everyone. May God guide us and bless us.

Something has been on my mind recently, and I can’t shake it. So I’m going to pass it along to you, dear reader, and see if you have a solution. (I’m not sure whether this counts as crowdsourcing or giving you all something else to worry about.)

A few weeks ago when my mother was in town, PBS happened to premiere “The Makers,” a documentary on the women’s movement. We sat down and watched it all in one go. In fact, we kept pausing the documentary to discuss things, so it took us considerably longer than three hours to watch it. Totally worth it.

The nagging thing that disturbed me has to do with something I’d already known, but which the documentary pointed out over and over: second-wave feminism was mostly a movement of white, well-to-do, well-educated women, to the extent that it was unrecognizable (and frequently offensive) to poor women, minorities, and women outside of the U.S.

That’s what’s getting to me. We have this amazing community of Mormon feminists — just look at the blogroll — but at some level it is a luxury afforded to a small percentage of Mormon women. I believe we’re missing a lot of Mormon women’s experiences. And we’re missing a whole lot of Mormon women. As everyone seems to be fond of pointing out now, we’re members of a worldwide church.

Obviously this is something that’s been bothering me for a longer time than just a few weeks. As a missionary in western Argentina, I was dismayed to find that only a few good LDS library mainstays had been translated into Spanish. There was a young couple my companion and I got quite close to in our ward–buena gente, we would have told you, both of them well-educated and both of them returned missionaries, struggling along in the way a lot of young families do, finding that the gospel they had taught to other people wasn’t working as well in their own lives as they had hoped it would. They were both going through a crisis of faith, right in the middle of babies and diapers and trying to get career footholds in a country that was headed pell-mell for a huge financial crisis. The mother, Alejandra, told us one day, “It’s just so hard to be everything that everyone needs me to be. Something’s got to go.”

I had a copy of Chieko Okazaki’s Lighten Up! that had a few essays she needed to read. Because that’s Mormon sisterhood in a nutshell: an elderly Japanese-American woman raised in Hawaii helping a young mother in South America. But as far as we could figure out, it wasn’t available in Spanish. And this was 1995, so it wasn’t even an issue of finding a few of the right conference talks on the LDS.org page.

So I spent my study time and lunch time for the next month trying to translate one chapter for her. Chapter 2, the one titled “Principles and Practices.” It’s about  making Relief Society work for individual sisters, and about making Church programs work for families that have different backgrounds and different needs.

You know what? Translating is hard. It’s a good kind of hard, but it’s hard.

As my Chilean mission president said, over and over: “Las cosas fáciles no valen.”

We have a wonderful Mormon feminist community here. But as it is, this is only available to the approximately fifty percent of Church members who speak English.

As Chieko wrote in that chapter I worked so hard to translate, “You can’t have harmony in music if everybody is singing in unison. . . . We need all the parts.”

Know what? There’s another large Mormon population that speaks Spanish. Another twenty-five percent, in fact–about three and a half million people. Many of them are in our communities, members of our stakes or of language-divided stakes. Many of them are beloved friends and former companions that we met as missionaries. I want my friend Mónica to be part of the conversation about being a single woman in the Church, because she’s found a way to make it work for her that could help someone else. I want my friend Patricia to be part of the conversation about leadership, and priesthood, and the role of women in the modern Church, because her marriage is one of the most equal I’ve ever seen. I want Alejandra to know that other active LDS women struggle with too many demands on their time and patience.

What would it take to extend the Mormon feminist community to a worldwide church? Is there a way to enlarge the tent?

Any historical discussion of women (and American women in particular) usually includes the idea of a woman’s sphere–the area in which it was socially acceptable for her to act and effect change.

In high school history class, this always bugged me: wait, women have an area in which we’re permitted to act, but it’s glass-enclosed? Whereas men can set their minds and hands to anything they darned well please? Totally unfair. (And especially annoying when the teacher is male, but there you go.) Forget the glass ceiling–this puts women in glass bubbles.

Despite the use of the phrase “sphere of action” in this chapter, I have to say this is one of my favorite parts of Daughters in My Kingdom–and the core of my love for Relief Society in general. The wording is grounded in another era, but the idea is forward-looking, bold, revolutionary.

Here’s why: I think the restored gospel is, at its very center, feminist. We have a lot of misguided practice and now-ingrained tradition to wade through, but remember that Joseph Smith was concerned about bringing all of the saving ordinances to men and women; that when he organized the Relief Society he switched the women’s own written constitution for “something better,” which was a presidency with the right to revelation from God; that Eliza R. Snow recorded his words at the formation of the Nauvoo Relief Society as “I now turn the key to you in the name of God”–signifying that the women in this endeavor held the keys necessary to do the work.

So as you begin this lesson with the sisters in your ward, remind them that these were women who had asked for a philanthropic society to clothe the men who were laboring on the temple, and what they got was essentially a commission to go and do good in any area they felt inspired to address, and a structure for their organization identical to that of the other priesthood quorums Joseph had instituted.

Reorganizing the Relief Society

So, who knew that the Relief Society had been disbanded? Raise of hands? I didn’t know this until DIMK came out, either, and I’m thrilled that this part of our history is available to women worldwide, who don’t always learn the same depth and richness of Church history that we do in the U.S. (Well, especially in Utah. And especially if you can trace three-quarters of your ancestry back to Nauvoo. And especially if the older members of your family absolutely live to tell crazy stories about their ancestors. But I digress.)

My husband, bless him, hates Valentine’s Day. He has good reasons for it: a history of girls breaking up with him on or around February 14th, his insistence that a dozen roses shouldn’t double in price for one week in the middle of February, his habit of surprising me with small gifts just because he found them (so why should he have to do it on one day in particular?).

But he knows it matters to me. I freely and generously admit that I’m the more high-maintenance of the two of us; I read a lot into holidays. So he always has presents for me (and for our daughters) at the breakfast table on Valentine’s Day. They’re frequently uber-geeky and thus perfect. Case in point: this morning’s solar-powered plant, which consists of a plastic “bowl” and two plastic sprouts that bob contentedly when placed in the sun.

I know my husband is a huge fan of Groundhog Day – the day, the movie, the name Phil, and the whole idea of trying to make some horrible mid-winter day more enjoyable by doing something extremely silly in the coldest place possible. So I usually have presents and a special dinner (involving – wait for it – sausage!) for him on the 2nd so that we can both celebrate sappy February holidays. The first year we were married we even made the drive from Pittsburgh to Punxsutawney in the wee early hours so we could be atop Gobbler’s Knob to sing “The Pennsylvania Polka” with 10,000 other Punxsutawney Phil disciples, a large percentage of whom seemed to be drunk Penn State frat boys. My feet froze. Phil saw his shadow. We found some super-kitschy souvenirs to take home. It was great.

Anyway, the short version of this story (I said it would be short, didn’t I?) is that I skipped Groundhog Day this year. I was burned out and overscheduled. I didn’t make cookies with our groundhog-shaped cookie cutter. I didn’t bother to even find our plush groundhog. And my husband was great about it. I gave him a scarf (which I’ve been working on since last Groundhog Day) and chocolate truffles and a Batman mask (don’t ask) today instead, and he was really sweet. I know he hates Valentine’s Day, and he let me celebrate it for him anyway.

What’s the most thoughtful thing someone has done for you recently?