“There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessing are predicated – And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.”  Doctrine & Covenants 130:20-21.

If ever a person mistook God for a vending machine, I think she could be found looking through a lens made of this scripture.

It troubles me.

It makes our relationship to God sound like a transaction, like we can cash in our obedience for blessings.  And where is grace?  When we obtain any blessing from God it is because we were obedient???  I have too many blessings I don’t deserve for that to be true.

For example, I recently took a trip to visit family, alone.  As I was leaving our hotel I dropped my wallet, but didn’t notice until we got to my Grandma’s house, two hours away.  Amazingly, someone had taken my wallet to the lost and found, nothing missing.  He also thoughtfully called my office and left a message telling me it was safe.  Without my wallet I don’t know how I would have flown home the next day, and my family really needed me home because without me there the day would have been a scheduling disaster (Uh, hello dear daycare provider, can you keep my kids till 10:30 pm?  Yeah, I know the 2 year old has been there since 8:30 this morning…)

Getting my wallet back safe was a blessing, but I did nothing to deserve it.  I didn’t pray it safe (by the time I noticed it was missing it was already locked up in the hotel safe), and I felt the light touch of the spirit telling me this wasn’t a reward for any past honesty.  It was pure grace.  Undeserved and freely given, as so many blessings are.

I think other scripture, particularly King Benjamin’s address (Mosiah 2:18-24),  establishes that blessings are not necessarily the result of obedience.  So why is this scripture saying they’re connected?

I can accept that good things come from obedience.  I think the critical issue is causality.  If blessings as a result of obedience require divine thought and action, for example God choosing and bestowing particular blessings in response to particular acts of obedience by us, then that feels transactional, and potentially capricious.  But what if there is a law (existing from before the foundations of this world) which dictates that natural consequences will flow from obedience (or disobedience) to moral principles?

For example living honestly brings the reward of having people trust you and not needing to live with anxieties created by lying.  Being faithful to a spouse means getting to enjoy intimacy and trust.  Not coveting leaves mental space that can be filled by better thoughts.  Or for a Mormon-specific kind of obedience, keeping the Word of Wisdom might mean you don’t tempt fate with your predisposition to addiction.  All of these blessings are inherent to the behavior, not an external reward layered onto it.

This to me is consistent with the logic of natural laws.  When you multiply mass and acceleration you inherently get force.  The universe doesn’t wait for God to make the force when a mass is accelerated, it simply exists.  Maybe this odd scripture in the Doctrine & Covenants is explaining a natural law.  Maybe God’s goodness and wisdom is in giving us commandments or principles that when lived lead naturally to happiness.

I’ve never liked the word obedience.  To me it connotes manipulation and control — a person more powerful than me offering a carrot if I’ll comply with his wishes and a sick if I don’t.  I can be motivated by carrots and sticks, but I’d like to think I’m more motivated by love.  I’d rather use the word allegiance.  I’d like to give my allegiance to principles (or commandments, if we must) that are part of equations that naturally yield good things.

Allegiance also leaves room for agency.  To be sure some level of agency is exercised when we comply with commandments received from authority.  This may be what God has in mind for us, at least initially, as a way of getting us started on right paths.  But surely this kind of because-I-said-so obedience is not where we are meant to stay.  We are meant to have changed hearts (Alma 5:14), loving good for goodness’ sake.  Choosing good because we love God and our neighbors.  I think allegiance is obedience with agency fully engaged.

What’s your comfort level with the word obedience?  Are you bugged by it, or of all the things to be bugged by, maybe this really doesn’t rise above the noise?

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During Sunday School this weekend I sort of zoned out.  The teacher was talking about worship and what it meant to worship and I was expecting any minute for someone to say, “The Bible dictionary defines worship as blah blah blah.” I lifted the little bag of Lindt chocolate to decide which flavor I’d eat next (my reward for being a woman!), but before I could disengage further, my friend Colleen raised her hand and said a bunch of awesome stuff. Her main point was that there are many “languages of worship,” just as there are “love languages,” like preferring service, gifts, touch, etc. as a means of expressing our affection, of course there must be various means of expressing worship.  Here are some she mentioned along with a couple of my additions:

Music: For many churchgoers, music is the language of the spirit. In the preface of our hymnbook it states: “Hymns can lift our spirits, give us courage, and move us to righteous action. They can fill our souls with heavenly thoughts and bring us a spirit of peace.”  Lots of us feel closer to God when singing than when doing anything else. I am always touched at the Exponent Retreat when many women are move beyond words as we unite in voice. I am not one of these people. However, when I hear Pandora Brewer sing “Hie to Kolob,” I am converted. At least temporarily.

Intellectual: These souls are fed through lively intellectual discourse.  These are the saints who sit on the edge of the pew when there’s a powerhouse speaker who knows their doctrine cold and uses their field of expertize to illuminate and expand our understanding. These folks love the gospel doctrine class that digs deep and isn’t afraid to leave the manual behind.  The Spirit of God is intelligence.

Symbol/ritual: Mormons love to poo poo other faiths’ reliance on ritual.  But symbol plays a large role in our church as well, and there are many saints who crave it.  The sacrament is the pinnacle and purpose of our weekly worship service and people will go to great lengths to partake of it each week. Additionally the temple is obviously rich in symbol. I remember thinking when I first took out my endowment, “So HERE  is where all the ritual has been hiding…”  Many of my friends’ parents are motivated socially by ritual as well and only visit grandkids when there’s a blessing, baptism, or priesthood advancement occurring. Substitute ordinance for ritual, and this is the thing that holds it all together for some folks.

Emotion/Empathy: For other saints certain emotions facilitate the spirit.  When talks and testimonies contain personal, moving stories, these guys FEEL the connection. Sometimes we tease these folks for being quick to tears, but that is their way of manifesting they feel the Spirit, so cut them some slack.  These passionate saints worship with all their heart, love hearing and telling tender stories, and have empathy to spare. This style makes me think of the prophet, Thomas Monson.

Service- Some saints are doers. They are forever in motion and need to be actively serving to feel they are worshiping.  These are the folks who magnify the callings that have them helping/teaching/working with others. I have one such friend who doesn’t show up on Sunday if she doesn’t have a purpose. These are the gems who show up with meals and help you pack. Not that other people won’t, but the servers among us do it not out of obligation, but because it brings them closer to the Lord. “Unto the least of these…”

Meditation: I debated whether I should label this as prayer, but meditation seemed to be a bigger umbrella for the ways in which many of us worship through quiet, mindful, often solitary practices. My father loved to sit for hours in his study and read the scriptures. He would never have used the word “meditate” but he’d emerge as peaceful and centered as a yogi. During the sacrament this week I glanced at the brother behind me and was struck by his posture. Back erect, eyes closed, hands resting palm up on his knees. His kids were bustling and for a second I thought he was asleep–but he was just so peaceful.  As I was trying to focus on renewing my own covenants it dawned on me that he was meditating, something that I do during the week when I want to connect with the divine. But it never occurred to me that I could bring that practice with me into my meetings.  Call it pondering things in your heart, communing with God, these guys are masters at internal reverence.

Obviously there are many other ways of worshipping, and most of us rely on more than one method to seek the divine. What was instructive to me about my friend’s comment was how different we all are in our spiritual quests and how important it is to allow for as many “worship languages” as possible during our services. I know I need to work on valuing the languages that are not my native tongue.

What language works best for you? What languages do you think are undervalued/underrepresented in LDS services? Which languages are privileged? How can we encourage languages that feel foreign?

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“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.  Don’t search for the answers, which would not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions now.

Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

I heard this quote at a workshop today and it knocked my socks off.  The workshop wasn’t related to anything religious, but I thought, Wow, that is what I do with my questions about the church!  It was surprising and lovely to hear it described so beautifully by Rilke, and it made my eyes well up right there in the workshop.

I feel like at church arriving at the “right” answer is valued almost to the complete exclusion of valuing questions.  It felt so wonderful to recognize questions as valuable, too.  As part of the workshop we did an exercise where we just asked questions – no answers allowed.  I learned from it.  So I’d like to know, what are your questions? No answers allowed!

Here are a few of mine:

What does life outside our solar system look like?

What if patriarchy is God’s will?

What if God isn’t real?

At what point in human evolution did our ancestors become the spirit children of God?

Why doesn’t God intervene more in our world?

At what point in history did people forget about God the Mother?

 

 

What are some of your questions?

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Many people are concerned with a very basic question right now: Why do some women feel unequal in the church? A few years ago I wrote a post for LDS WAVE about why I feel unequal. While this was not an exhaustive list, it made apparent many of the gender disparities that we often take for granted.

Another way to make inequality apparent is to talk about privilege. In academia there is a lot of literature on male privilege and white privilege—those unacknolwedged advantages that men and majority ethnicities gain from women’s and minorities’ disadvantages. An important step in lessening, mitigating and ending this discrimination is acknowledging it. It is sometimes easier to see that others have different gender roles or even that women have some disadvantages. The truly difficult thing to recognize is the concomitant truth: what aspects of being male are advantageous?

Do not despair, this is not an attack on men. Rather it is a mental exercise in trying to see those aspects of gender inequality that are normally hidden in our religious culture. Men (and women alike) are taught not to recognize our privileges or as Dr. Peggy McIntosh puts it the “invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. [Male] privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks” (McIntosh 1988). It is not the fault of the holder of these privileges that he has them. However, it is our moral and ethical duty to learn to recognize, mitigate and lessen them for greater religious gender equality.

I decided to try to identify some of the daily effects of these advantages in order to answer the question: What is it like to have Mormon male privilege? (Many of these points have corollaries in literature on white and male privilege).

As a Mormon Male:

1. My odds of receiving a leadership calling compared to females of my same age, experience and spirituality are skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the calling, the larger the odds are skewed.
2. My odds of being asked to speak at church functions compared to females of my same age, experience and spirituality are skewed in my favor. The larger the forum, the more my odds are skewed.
3. My church leaders are people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the calling, the more this is true.
4. When I ask to “see the person in charge,” odds are that I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.
5. I can go home from most leadership meetings feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.
6. I can be pretty sure that a disagreement with a woman is more likely to jeopardize her chances for advancement in leadership positions and her reputation as a good Mormon than it will jeopardize mine.
7. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my gender on trial. If I fall short as a missionary, gospel doctrine teacher, or general conference speaker I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.
8. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my gender.
9. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my gender is not the problem.
10. I am never asked to speak for or represent “the” perspective of all the people of my gender.

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I’m not a historian or sociologist, but I’ve noticed something about civilizations.  They always seem to think they are more special than other civilizations.  It’s not important to my purpose here to name names, but so many groups have had a superiority complex of one kind or another that I wonder if a need to feel more special is written into human DNA.

There may be biological explanations for why people draw distinctions and make rankings for each other, but I’m going to speculate about a psychological or spiritual one.  I wonder if this hunger for superiority stems from a lack of security about one’s value as a human being.  The first temptation of Christ started with the words “If thou be the son of God…” and if we are to believe Christ’s temptations were real it means that even Jesus must have, at least momentarily, been able to question his identity.  He was tempted to believe the lie that he was not who he knew himself to be.  We mere mortals experience that temptation not infrequently, and unlike Jesus, we sometimes succumb to it.

One strategy people have for dealing with insecurities about their identity is to artificially elevate themselves above others.  As in, if I’m not special at least I’m more special than (fill in the blank).  This has caused so much pain and injustice.  And regardless of culture, time, or place, women seem to always be on the losing side of this equation.  I remember taking a class in college from political science professors Valerie Hudson and Donna Lee Bowen in which someone asked why women in traditional societies and in poverty seem so particularly oppressed.  The reply surprised me.  It was, imagine you are a man at the lowest rung of society.  You are poor, powerless, and humiliated, but you can at least always feel superior to one person.  That person is your wife.

For whatever biological, cultural, sociological, and historical reasons, the lowest position in nearly every society is reserved for a woman.  People use race, nationality, genealogy, religion, orientation, education, wealth, and many other things to rank each other.  But after those things, there is always one more division that can be made, and that is gender.  Which is why feminism is so important to me.  I am subject to the common temptation to believe I am less than I know myself to be, and this is compounded by the fact that I am a woman in a patriarchal church.

Which is ironic because in large part the good things I believe about my identity come from my church.  The Christian teaching that all are alike unto God is a pillar of my faith, and the Mormon doctrine of eternal progression gives me an expansive view of my potential.  But my Mormonism also presents me with things that tempt me to believe the lie that I am less than what I know myself to be.  If my husband presides over me, what does that say about me?  If temple rituals contain covenants that are asymmetrical with respect to gender, what does that say about women?  Am I as fully an inheritor of divine potential as God’s male children?  Of course the answer is yes, but each time I’m faced with the Church’s patriarchy I feel I must defend myself against the implicit question “If you be equal to men…”  The question is a constant invitation to believe a lie.

There are many things I love about Mormonism.  The doctrine laid down in 2 Nephi Chapter 2 about agency and opposition is the best explanation for the theodicy problem I know of.  The Mormon idea of God being inside the universe and organizing it rather than being outside of it and creating from nothing seems very true to me – I like that Mormonism embraces the material world.  I think Mormons do well at creating caring communities for each other.  And I’ve felt small miracles take place in my heart that I think only Jesus could have worked.  But I do not love the patriarchy.  And in order for my faith to survive constant contact with it, I need feminism.

For some reason Christ’s radical notion that everyone is a person didn’t fully sink into Christianity.  And the twentieth century’s radical notion that women are people has not radically changed Mormonism (yet).  Brigham Young loved to say Mormonism embraces all truth, and in my mind it does.  But until the Church sheds the patriarchy it inherited and still embraces, I will let feminism be my guide in reminding me that in God’s creation no person is more special than another.

 

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