My page that includes the full text of LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson's 1987 talk "To the Mothers in Zion" has undergone a significant spike in traffic in the last couple of days. I can guess why. General Relief Society president Camille Johnson spoke on Friday, and she talked about balancing her education and career with raising a family, without mentioning that she was in direct defiance of the prophet at the time by having a career at all. Countless other Mormon women sacrificed their career ambitions because the prophet told them to. He didn't say, "Make your own decisions based on your individual circumstances." He didn't say, "Motherhood should be your highest priority, but you can do other things too." He said, "Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother’s calling is in the home, not in the marketplace." He was not ambiguous. He was not open to interpretation. This was only six years before I was born, and when I grew up in the 2000s, I was still being taught at church that married women shouldn't work outside the home if they had a choice. My YSA bishop was also very adamant about that as recently as 2021.
And now, as anyone familiar with its usual lack of transparency and accountability would expect, the LDS Church is quietly pretending that didn't happen and celebrating a woman who disobeyed the prophet. But of course many people are seeing through that and calling it out. And apparently some of them are using my copy of the talk as a source. Glad I could be of help. On the flip side, several Mormons are lying that the church's vendetta against working mothers was just "culture" or the "interpretation" of a few zealots in your ward, and that's also infuriating but not unexpected. I understand all too well the cognitive dissonance that comes from facing the reality that the men you've been taught to revere as mouthpieces for God were as misogynistic as they were racist. Anyway, I formally joined the Unitarian Universalist church today because it's been a good spiritual community that shares my values. It's been at the forefront of social justice movements in the United States instead of getting dragged kicking and screaming behind them like some churches I could mention. I first became aware of it over a decade ago when I had a friend who'd converted to it from the LDS Church, and then I visited it for a religious studies class. I thought the building was weird. It's literally a house. And I understood the appeal of the whole "Love everyone and believe whatever you want" shtick, but I didn't like it. That's exactly the sort of liberal claptrap that I'd been taught to dismiss. Love isn't enough, I thought. You can't just believe whatever you want, I thought. There's objective truth and it matters. At some point, a random woman stopped me on the sidewalk, and I don't remember what she said exactly, but basically she sensed a lot of stress or anxiety in me and suggested I check out Unitarian Universalism, which I didn't. In hindsight, maybe she was led by the Spirit. Or maybe she said that to everybody. Long story short, my perspective has changed. A lot of what I thought was objective truth was actually bullshit, and I have a lot more humility about how much I don't know and probably never will. I still value truth and I still intend to seek after it for the rest of my life, but I no longer think it's the most important thing. I think love is the most important thing after all. Why should God be more concerned about what we believe than how we treat each other? I've increasingly noticed that people who think that way are insufferable if not horrible people. After I lost my faith, I shopped around a little for a new one because I desperately needed the community. And I ended up sticking around with the Unitarian Univeralists, and after a year or so they asked me if I wanted to formally join, and I saw no reason not to. I don't believe it's the "one true religion," and it doesn't claim to be. It's just a community that works for me and a tool for doing good in the world. My imminent departure from Logan puts a bit of a damper on things, but I'll love this congregation while I'm here and then maybe I'll find another in Salt Lake. Things don't have to last forever to be worthwhile.
0 Comments
I found out this week that the owners of my apartment complex, who have never talked to me, don't want the property management company to renew my lease. I wasn't told why, but I have a few guesses. It doesn't matter. Though this came as an unpleasant surprise, I was trained for it five years ago, when I had to move three times before ending up at this place. I accepted it right away. I happened to read the email in Garden City during a detour from a camping trip with friends, the only interval when I had access to my cellular network. By the way, that really needs to be fixed. I'm all for leaving technological distractions behind, but anyone who has a medical emergency in most parts of Logan Canyon or the surrounding areas is screwed. The point, though, is that I was in the middle of this camping trip with friends. Most of them had actually gone home by then because they had jobs or colonoscopies or whatever.
But I love these friends. The last time I was in the wilderness with them - I don't say camping because it was cold, and we all chickened out and went home - I stared up at the Milky Way and ached with the desire for our friendship to continue after our deaths. I wasn't confident at the time that it would. Now I am. It's been all but proven by science. We know for a fact that people have died and remained conscious, despite their brains being shut down, for a couple of hours before they come back. I want to shout this fact from the rooftops. Actually, I'm working on a children's book with the working title "Everyone Dies." I've had the idea for this book for a while, but I didn't know how to go about it because I didn't have any solid reassurance to give children about what happens after death, and I'm not willing to lie to them by implying that death is always peaceful or that it only happens to old people. Now at least the first problem is solved. I feel a strong desire to write this book, and I hope it will spread a message of hope far and wide. As random as it sounds, it feels like part of my calling in life now. To reiterate: I love these friends. At this time in Garden City I remained with Steve and his wife. Not for the first or last time, here's the story of how I met Steve, which I never tire of. I used to sometimes visit this girl who lived next door to him. She texted me, I dropped everything, and we sat on her balcony and talked. Then Steve got home from work, and she said, "Steve, come join us!" I didn't like that very much, and consequently I didn't like him very much. At least once, we had three chairs on the balcony, and I put my feet on the extra chair and hoped he would take the hint, but he didn't. I feel so bad about that now. Steve is a really great guy. This whole friend group that I love so much has coalesced around him. In 2019, I jumped at the chance to become his neighbor. I used to ask him for priesthood blessings all the time. Then I didn't because he moved away and I stopped believing in the Mormon priesthood. I still think, of course, that any God who may hypothetically exist can communicate through a Mormon priesthood blessing as well as any other method, but I don't know if that actually happens or how to tell. I've been told things in priesthood blessings that the speaker shouldn't have known, and I've also been told things in priesthood blessings that were simply wrong, and I'm not interested in making excuses like "Maybe it was talking about the next life" or "Maybe it meant something else because God likes to intentionally mislead people." Anyway, since I was there with Steve I asked for a blessing to help me not spiral into depression over this email. And he mentioned something that he shouldn't have known, and something else that I may have discussed with him some time ago, but I don't remember. So that was interesting. The point I'm getting at in such a roundabout way is that because I fortuitiously happened to be with these friends at this time, it took me less than two hours to decide that I would move to the Salt Lake City area to be closer to them. Most of them live there or will be moving there soon. If I move somewhere else in Logan, I'll continue to live with twenty-year-old college students, and that gets weirder with every passing year. Logan is a college town. I love it dearly, but I came to realize that it has little to offer me anymore because I'm not in college or married. Salt Lake will be an exciting new chapter in my life. I'll spend more time with these stable adult friends, I'll be more involved in my adorable little nieces' lives, and since I'm there anyway, maybe I'll start a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah next year. USU doesn't have that program. I am, of course, heartbroken to leave behind the town that's been my home for nearly thirteen years, but life is change, and change more often than not entails some loss. Don't fight it. Don't resent it. As Matthew Stover poignantly wrote in the novelization for Revenge of the Sith, even stars die. I felt that in 2019, a higher power had orchestrated my life to lead me to where I live now. And here I met someone whom I thought was the reason. Maybe she was a reason. As much as I could do without the trauma she brought into my life, I owe her much gratitude for getting me out of the LDS Church and sending me into an existential crisis that brought me spiritual growth that I wouldn't trade for anything. But it seems weird that God would guide me to someone to turn me into an agnostic. Another reason, I see now, was getting closer to Steve and these other friends. He moved soon after I arrived, but if I hadn't lived here, they all might have faded from my life like almost everyone else I've met in this college town. He was there for me when the other person hurt me, multiple times, and he was there for me when we were stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic. I look back on those days with a strange mixture of trauma and nostalgia. After the disaster of early 2020, and I'm not talking about the pandemic, I've felt confused and abandoned and aimless as far as God's supposed guidance is concerned. This upcoming move is the first time since then that I feel once more like my life is being orchestrated by a higher power. I'm agnostic, of course, over whether it actually is. Things happen. Coincidences happen. Human brains are wired by evolution to see patterns and agency where none exist. But I feel good about it, and that's good enough. Not because my good feeling is a guide to any kind of truth, but because it means I'm excited about a new chapter. And also sad. It's complicated. If you weren't aware already, be advised that International Transgender Day of Visibility is on March 31 every year, so the right-wing Christians who claim that it was a deliberate ploy by Joe Biden to hijack Easter and destroy their "values" are full of crap. I put values in quotation marks because their values are also crap. If anything, Easter is the problem for refusing to pick a day and stick with it. But I have no problem recognizing and appreciating both holidays. I'm having a delightful time staying with my uncle and aunt and their kids. They're all at church as I write this. I talked to my uncle the other day about having left the LDS Church, and he was totally supportive and hopes I'm happy. He shared his own experience and said he has questions he can't answer, but he believes in the church because of experiences he's had and because it makes him happy. And you know what, I'm totally supportive of people believing whatever they want if it makes them happy and doesn't hurt others. That's just not what I want for myself. I want to only believe things that I have sufficient reason to believe are true, even if they make me miserable. As it happens, I have come to a place of happiness with my beliefs because science has proven that consciousness persists after death. If we didn't have that proof, it would still be possible, but I wouldn't be able to make myself believe it just because it would make me happy. I'm also big on informed consent. If people know about all the problems with the LDS Church's behavior and truth claims and still choose to believe in it, that's their business, but they should know. I was not given informed consent when I was raised and indoctrinated in the church, and I would have made different life decisions if I'd known as much then as I do now. Anyway, this being two holidays and me being on vacation, I don't feel like writing a whole lot, so here's a nice Easter song. If you only watch one documentary for the rest of your life, make it this one. I cannot recommend it emphatically enough. This documentary falls into two main parts. First, it describes how, from a physical standpoint, the advancement of medical technology has revealed and/or created an increasing gray area between life and death. It's no longer accurate to say that nobody ever comes back from the dead, though of course it only happens under very limited circumstances. This, then, leads into the even more interesting part, which is what people experience while they're dead. As I've mentioned before, I don't know why people aren't shouting from the rooftops that we now know for a fact that consciousness continues after death. This is the discovery of the century. This is why, even though my views on God are all over the place, I'm very confident in an afterlife - not because of wishful thinking or a "spiritual witness," but because of what's been reported and observed. It isn't magic. It follows laws like everything else, even if we don't know what the laws are yet.
Of course, nobody's been dead for very long before coming back, so many mysteries remain. I don't want to commit to any specific beliefs without evidence. Here's what I think right now. Our most basic and true form is consciousness, which inhabits a different plane of existence from the physical universe, a more subjective yet more real one. The physical universe is a pale imitation of it, like Plato's cave. Our brains are like radio sets that harness consciousness. Not only do they not produce it themselves, they severely limit and distort it. We'll see and understand so much more the moment we're freed from physical constraints. But in the meantime, there's some reason we're here, even if it's difficult or impossible to see, which I believe is by design. So I don't advocate for trying to cut short our time on this craptastic planet, tempting though that may be. Here's where I diverge sharply from my Mormon upbringing and hew closer to Eastern religions. I was taught that bodies are super awesome and that every disembodied spirit yearns to have one. I mostly just find them disgusting and inconvenient. Some have suggested that we all derive from one big mass of consciousness, that we're the universe coming to know itself and just pretending to be different people, that we're all one entity in the most literal sense. That's beautiful in a way, but I think it actually cheapens love in the long run. If my love for others ultimately boils down to love for myself in a literal sense, then it doesn't seem special or praiseworthy to me anymore. I also think it's great that the world is populated by people with different personalities, talents, interests, and I was going to say opinions, but that's only true to an extent because a lot of opinions make the world a worse place and don't deserve to exist. I hope that in the next world, we will become more one than we are now, but still retain our indiviidual identities and consequently our interpersonal relationships. But I don't have a belief about that, because my hoping won't make it so. I don't believe in a "traditional" heaven and hell, or in the Mormon three-tiered heaven and outer darkness, but then I wonder what's to become of the truly evil people. Because all this stuff sounds lovely, but if Hitler and I are part of the same mass of consciousness and get unified into the same eternal bliss after our deaths, that doesn't sit right with me. Maybe he'll get reincarnated until he gets it right. Someone from the Unitarian Uniersalists raised this point a while ago. She said she doesn't want anyone to burn in hell, not even Trump, and if she were a loving God, she would send him back to Earth as many times as he needed to qualify him for heaven. I like that idea. I really don't want to be reincarnated myself. Having to suffer on this planet all over again with no memory of the helpful things I already learned in my previous life sounds worse than purgatory. It's supposed to suck, which is why the point of Hihduism is to make it stop. Like the oneness thing, it also would render my concern for others a lot less selfless. I could be reincarnated as a gay black woman, so making the world a better place for those demographics would be in my own best interest. I've read some stuff, but I think this was my first time actually seeing and hearing people describe the experiences they've had while they were dead. They brought warmth to my heart and tears to my eyes. According to my Mormon upbringing, this was the Holy Ghost testifying of truth. I know it wasn't. I would have had the same emotional reaction if this documentary were a fictional movie. I had that reaction because these things are uplifting and beautiful. It's just fortuitous that they also happen to be true. Though many mysteries remain, it seems we've begun to empirically discover that despite all the inexplicable suffering and injustice in this blind, uncaring world, the universe, at least in some dimension, is ultimately uplifting and beautiful, and our existence is a happy thing, not a tragic accident. Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our house, July 10th. 1666. Copied Out of a Loose Paper.
In silent night when rest I took, For sorrow near I did not look, I wakened was with thund’ring noise And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice. That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,” Let no man know is my Desire. I, starting up, the light did spy, And to my God my heart did cry To straighten me in my Distress And not to leave me succourless. Then, coming out, behold a space The flame consume my dwelling place. And when I could no longer look, I blest His name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust. Yea, so it was, and so ‘twas just. It was his own, it was not mine, Far be it that I should repine; He might of all justly bereft But yet sufficient for us left. When by the ruins oft I past My sorrowing eyes aside did cast And here and there the places spy Where oft I sate and long did lie. Here stood that trunk, and there that chest, There lay that store I counted best. My pleasant things in ashes lie And them behold no more shall I. Under thy roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy Table eat a bit. No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told Nor things recounted done of old. No Candle e'er shall shine in Thee, Nor bridegroom‘s voice e'er heard shall be. In silence ever shalt thou lie, Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity. Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide, And did thy wealth on earth abide? Didst fix thy hope on mould'ring dust? The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? Raise up thy thoughts above the sky That dunghill mists away may fly. Thou hast a house on high erect Frameed by that mighty Architect, With glory richly furnished, Stands permanent though this be fled. It‘s purchased and paid for too By Him who hath enough to do. A price so vast as is unknown, Yet by His gift is made thine own; There‘s wealth enough, I need no more, Farewell, my pelf, farewell, my store. The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above. I was introduced to the poetry of Anne Bradstreet in a college course on early American literature. Her relatable emotions and vulnerability made an impression on me and humanized the Puritans, whom I, like most people, am otherwise inclined to regard as stuck-up, joyless bigots. The professor made us read between the lines and explain how maybe Anne Bradstreet was secretly expressing doubts when she affirmed her faith. I wondered then, as I do now, whether that was really in there or the professor just wanted it to be. Anyway, I've liked this poem even more ever since my own beloved childhood home burned down. I wanted to buy it back someday, but the new owners apparently didn't know how to use a woodstove. And thanks to the previous generations who thoughtlessly screwed mine over, I may never be able to own a home at all. At this time I can't even save up enough to cover summer rent for one of the cheapest places in town. I have family members willing to help me, but if you want to help too, consider buying my book. I've shared this poem at a gathering of friends on the theme of change last fall and at a poetry-sharing meeting of the Cache Valley Unitarian Universalists last week. It's all about priorities, and that message remains strong even though I'm now agnostic about the attached theological claims. If Anne Bradstreet's house hadn't burned down, she still wouldn't have it anymore because she's dead. I'm pretty confident that consciousness persists after death, but I won't try to guess what the afterlife looks like, and I won't assert it with certainty because I'm not dead. I think it's a safe assumption, though, that the only things we can take into this hypothetical vague afterlife are knowledge and relationships, so those should be our top priorities once our basic needs for survival are secured. And if we can't get our basic needs for survival secured, well, at least we won't have to worry about that forever. I don't mean to be flippant, but it's true. We might have healthier perspectives on our suffering if we keep in mind how short and impermanent this life is instead of trying our hardest not to think about it. I also like the part of this poem where she goes full Yoda: "And them behold no more shall I." It's so random. |
"Guys. Chris's blog is the stuff of legends. If you’re ever looking for a good read, check this out!"
- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|