Sour girl

It was a concern to me when I would read old conference talks and find that the old magic wasn't there.

I can't say that I have always paid rapt attention to conference; my note-taking has been primarily a way to stay alert, because the length of conference alone is enough to lull me to sleep. Still, even if there were things that I noticed on reading that I didn't notice while listening, or there were things I missed, my general feelings were positive and enjoyable. Since that conference when I got mad at Elder Hallstrom, it hasn't been the same, but I thought it was different. Finding those irritations in older conferences meant the difference was me.

I wasn't happy about that. I wasn't overly worried, because I am still fully engaged and committed, but it felt like it could be a hard thing if I was going to stop enjoying it. (I have been released from nursery too, so I am going to start interacting with a lot more adults now too.)

There have been little things that have helped. It was even there in the talk from Elder Haight: yes, he quoted something blatantly false and Pat Buchanan, but also the counsel he gave for staying strong was accurate and did not align with what he had previously said.

There was comfort in an Ensign article on the Proclamation, that I thought would be horrible but wasn't. (I wrote about that here: http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2018/04/comforted.html.)

But the thing that really brought everything into harmony was a talk from Bonnie D. Parkin, just after she was released as Relief Society president.

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2007/04/gratitude-a-path-to-happiness?lang=eng

The annoyance came in the first two paragraphs, with reference to women's roles in the home and family, and this question from Eliza R. Snow:

"Do you know of any place on the face of the earth, where [a] woman has more liberty, and where she enjoys such high and glorious privileges as she does here, as a Latter-day Saint?” 

We are surrounded by chauvinists, there is much of our practice the reinforces it, and that is not being against home and family but let's broaden our perspective a little!

See, that's sour. I have never not been feminist, but I didn't used to react like that.

But then in the third paragraph, there was a story of a family that had suffered a lot, but realized that they were surrounded by support, and that has been the story of my family lately. It inspired me to kneel down and say a prayer of gratitude for the support received. It was also the basis for a conversation with my sisters later that came up spontaneously, but it was relevant and I referred to the talk and we had a good talk.

That's when I realized, for all of the frustration, I am still guided and inspired and comforted by church materials. I still have that.

To have that old unruffled enjoyment, I would have had to keep turning off parts of my heart and the compassion in them. I know, some people think that it is turning off your brain, and maybe that could work, but for me it would have been my heart. I would have to ignore everything that I have taken in from anyone marginalized, and harden my heart against them. That price would be too great, and it would hamper my salvation, and I am glad that was not how it came out.

But the other alternative for many is to not be able to enjoy church anymore - which often leads to no longer going. I could not have accepted that. Doing that leaves a church full of conformists who want to convert the whole world, but not accept those people in the world as they are. We do not need that.

Or maybe I could have ended up just staying, but staying sour. That would be terrible too. This has ended up being the best possible outcome for me.

Back after I embraced hating my family (not quite that way), I remember the next Sunday seeing someone whom I could easily find annoying, but still spiritually siblings - still a good person, though flawed - and I remember getting this cycle in my head of "Love, but know" and "Know, but love". It was a cycle, because whether you start by knowing their flaws and love them anyway, or you love them and are still aware of their flaws, I don't know. Both still have to be possible.

That's not exactly cynicism, though it can resemble it. Maybe it's just a little sour.

Talk part 5 - Strength

This will be a little more random and wrapping up, but these are things that I pretty much know that I said in the talk.

In conjunction with not needing to be afraid of being afraid of the world, I focused on some of the tool that we do have.

I found it a little surprising to be talking about modern revelation, because I had just spend so much time on the four Gospels, followed by a lot of time on Matthew 25. That is true, but also my study now involves conference talks and church magazines. When I am studying the magazines in Italian, I can easily look up the English versions online. We have scriptures online, and on our phones, and with topical guides and indexes.

I started my study of the mortal ministry of Jesus with his visit to the Americas, which happened just after his mortal ministry. I studied in conjunction with the Harmony of the Gospels - that is a study aid that the church has put in the scriptures. I studied in conjunction with Jesus the Christ, written by a latter-day apostle. I have gotten my guidance on what to study at any given time, and I can get that because of the Holy Ghost, which I received through the laying on of hands because we have the priesthood. And if my study gets a little more specific now, it has been built on a foundation of many years of reading the scriptures, yes (which started with hearing someone in a church talk say that we should), but also I had seminary and institute classes and many years of Sunday school, sometimes as the student but sometimes as the teacher.

There are a lot of tools out there to help us learn and understand and apply the scriptures to us. Take that farther out, and look at the light of Christ and missionary work and the Holy Ghost in general, even without laying on of hands. Think of temples, and learning in the spirit world, and a Millennium to make sure that everyone gets every possible chance -- there are many things out there to bring us all back to our Heavenly Father, and that should be no surprise to any of us knowing that He gave His Son. We can be awed and grateful and happy -- those are all reasonable reactions -- but there is nothing in what we know that should make it surprising that God values every person, and that we should too. We know enough to know that.

I am grateful for the scriptures and temple and prayer. There are things we have gone through over the past couple of years that I would not have been able to make it through without being able to not only pray for help but also being able to receive guidance and reassurance.

It is all out there for us if we will partake.

And that's really the end of the talk, pretty much, but there has also been a realization recently, after I gave the talk, and that is something that may speak to many members. That is what I will write about next time.

I think.

Talk part 4 - not fearing the world

After mentioning my worst pet peeve about Mormons, I mentioned getting really mad at David B. Haight.

I have already blogged at length about that in Frustrated:

http://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2018/04/frustrated.html

Still, if it was treading on shaky ground admitting to have a pet peeve with Mormons, it could also be very risky to admit to getting mad at an apostle. No one has reprimanded me, and a friend told me that the stake presidency member on the stand laughed when I said it, so I guess I'll be fine.

If you don't want to go back and re-read the other post, it was for an October 1992 conference talk, where he quotes (along with Pat Buchanan) Michael Hirsley in saying that "the nation's most widely accepted prejudice is anti-Christian". It angered me for its blatant wrongness and that there would be people who still believe it. We have people who have open access for church and temple attendance, prayer, scripture study, association with other members - anything that we need to do to worship and meet our standards of righteous living - but think it is persecution that a gay couple can get married or that school prayer isn't compulsory, even though praying in school happens all the time.

So I was mad at that, but I still continued reading the talk, and there was something interesting, and that also relates to my previously mentioned pet peeve of fear of The World!

The only sure way to protect ourselves and our families from the onslaught of the teachings of the world is to commit to live the commandments of God, to attend our Church meetings where we can learn and be strengthened in our testimonies and partake of the sacrament to renew our covenants, to prepare ourselves to worthily enter the temple where we may find a refuge from the world and a place of renewal of our capacity to cope with the evils of the world. I so declare to you as I leave you my witness and testimony, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

The protection from sin is not isolation from the world; it is the active living of the gospel.

This is something that I didn't say in the talk, but as I was being frustrated with that quote, and how wrong-headed it is, I remembered something. I don't remember who it was, but someone had said that that the brethren know what is going on in the world. I believe that to a point, but more that they know what is going on with members - and that's whom they lead, so that is valuable - but that there is a lot that they miss.

During his mortal ministry Jesus - and John the Baptist before him - spent time with prostitutes, publicans, sinners, and wine-bibbers. They were judged for it, but they were not corrupted by it, and they saved people because of it. I'm sure not everyone repented, but that didn't mean that they had no value.

So going back to my Frustrated post, is the reason our church isn't heroic enough and forward enough is that we are too isolated to even get there? How much good is there that we could do, but are not even thinking about doing, because of that?

Talk part 3 - restored knowledge

I appreciated Elder Oaks' examples of lost knowledge because they related to my interests, but his examples of restored knowledge relate to one of my strongest feelings.

In common with the rest of Christianity, we believe in a Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. However, we testify that these three members of the Godhead are three separate and distinct beings. We also testify that God the Father is not just a spirit but is a glorified person with a tangible body, as is his resurrected Son, Jesus Christ.

We can point to things that demonstrate that in the Bible, but many sects have lost that knowledge.

In contrast, many Christians reject the idea of a tangible, personal God and a Godhead of three separate beings. They believe that God is a spirit and that the Godhead is only one God. In our view, these concepts are evidence of the falling away we call the Great Apostasy.

We maintain that the concepts identified by such nonscriptural terms as “the incomprehensible mystery of God” and “the mystery of the Holy Trinity” are attributable to the ideas of Greek philosophy. These philosophical concepts transformed Christianity in the first few centuries following the deaths of the Apostles. For example, philosophers then maintained that physical matter was evil and that God was a spirit without feelings or passions. Persons of this persuasion, including learned men who became influential converts to Christianity, had a hard time accepting the simple teachings of early Christianity: an Only Begotten Son who said he was in the express image of his Father in Heaven and who taught his followers to be one as he and his Father were one, and a Messiah who died on a cross and later appeared to his followers as a resurrected being with flesh and bones.

There's that arrogance again. It is easy to understand - when you have a body, as you age or get injured you see the weaknesses, and as you get ill or dehydrated or various other things, you see that mortal bodies are gross and frail, but they are also beautiful. They work together in ingenious ways to function properly and they hint of the design of immortal bodies.

Through the first vision, that knowledge is dramatically reinforced. Through the Doctrine and Covenants it is explained better, and we know and can understand and have something to look forward to.

Elder Oaks then focuses on the distinctions between the members of the Godhead, and how they correspond to the different degrees of glory to get to the next point.

The theology of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ is comprehensive, universal, merciful, and true. Following the necessary experience of mortal life, all sons and daughters of God will ultimately be resurrected and go to a kingdom of glory. The righteous—regardless of current religious denomination or belief—will ultimately go to a kingdom of glory more wonderful than any of us can comprehend. Even the wicked, or almost all of them, will ultimately go to a marvelous—though lesser—kingdom of glory. All of that will occur because of God’s love for his children and because of the atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ, “who glorifies the Father, and saves all the works of his hands” (D&C 76:43).

This feels very normal to us. I opened with an example that I likened to our Heavenly Father's love for us, and while there may have been special feelings and deeper witnesses during that, there shouldn't have been any surprise, really, because we know that. Not everyone does.

Whether that was through arrogance or fear or some other path, the much of worldly religion - despite knowing many good things - had lost enough of that understanding so that they could believe that their creator would be fine with casting millions of his children aside.

We know better than that, but do we?

One of my biggest pet peeves with Mormons is when they talk about "the world", but it is "The World" bolded, italicized, underlined in all caps, like it's Voldemort. If you do this - even if you are being really sincere and it is meaningful to you - I will roll my eyes. I will be thinking, "you mean the world that is full of our brothers and sisters that we love and that Heavenly Father loves, and whom we are supposed to be serving and caring about, whether they join the church or not? That world? That contempt for earth and flesh is part of what corrupted the early church.

I promise you that there should not be a writing off of the inhabitants of the world, and there does not need to be fear.

I will pick up there next time.

Talk part 2 - lost knowledge

This was the first paragraph from Elder Oaks' talk that I quoted:

"Last year searchers discovered a Roman fort and city in the Sinai close to the Suez Canal. Though once a major city, its location had been covered by desert sands and its existence had been forgotten for hundreds of years (see “Remains of Roman Fortress Emerge from Sinai Desert,” Deseret News, 6 Oct. 1994, p. A20). Discoveries like this contradict the common assumption that knowledge increases with the passage of time. In fact, on some matters the general knowledge of mankind regresses as some important truths are distorted or ignored and eventually forgotten. For example, the American Indians were in many respects more successful at living in harmony with nature than our modern society. Similarly, modern artists and craftsmen have been unable to recapture some of the superior techniques and materials of the past, like the varnish on a Stradivarius violin."

He could not have picked two examples that I loved more.

My Italian heritage loves the reference to Stradivarius. Though we are not from Cremona (Vicenza is more East), that has been the center of the world for violin-making, and it revolved around four families.

Guarneri and Bergonzi are less know now if you are not specifically interested in stringed instruments, and Amati may be more known for frequent use in crossword puzzles, but Stradivarius is familiar even if you are not musically inclined. Stradivarius instruments are known for their musical qualities and appearance.

The four families weren't necessarily rivals. They collaborated and apprenticed under each other. Antonio Stradivari himself apprenticed under Nicola Amati, but it seems that he did more experimenting with different designs and variations early on. As he matured his instruments became more similar to his mentor's, but he probably did all of that with a better understanding of the different components because of his early experimentation.

He probably figured out something unique that became a trade secret, and we cannot figure it out now. Modern technology can analyze the various components, and there are some interesting theories, but we don't know. That knowledge was lost because it was kept secret.

In contrast, the knowledge of the American Indians was thrown away. I loved this example because I am obsessed with permaculture now. I can tell you that when the colonizers founded Jamestown they found Powhatan's people living a pretty good life - one in which they could feed themselves and be generous with the English - but they did not recognize that it came from working in harmony with nature. So the English tore up the ecosystems that were providing the abundant food in order to use the agricultural methods that they were familiar with, putting a great deal of back-breaking labor into creating hardship for everyone.

That was arrogance. How could these "savages" know a better way of life? The lack of traditional farming could only be interpreted as them being lazy. That was knowledge thrown away, and we are still struggling to find our way back.

Again from Elder Oaks:

"We would be wiser if we could restore the knowledge of some important things that have been distorted, ignored, or forgotten. This also applies to religious knowledge. It explains the need for the gospel restoration we proclaim."

And we will focus on some of that reclaimed knowledge next time.

Talk, part 1 - growing

I started by saying my name - repeating it, because there is some confusion with four women living in the same house with the same last name - and that I serve in the nursery.

My calling is important as the reason that I mainly only know people with children under the age of four, but it also led to my first example.

Nursery has been a good calling for me because I like kids but without children, nieces, or nephews, I don't get to spend a lot of time with them. When I first started and there was one little girl who liked to sit in my lap and cuddle, that was nice. I soon noticed that she stayed with me for a shorter time each week, and figured the novelty was wearing off for her. That was fine; there was no point in taking it personally. Then one week we had extra children and it was extra loud, and that day she spent a long time with me.

I realized that the time she spent with me was a way of building up her courage and recharging, and then she could be ready to play and interact, and I was touched and honored to find that I could do that for her.

Children's love for their parents may make them sad when they are dropped off, but their trust for their parents is what allows them to dry their tears and explore and play, knowing that they will be safe. Changes in home routines will often have an effect where there is more crying or clinging, but they adjust and recover because ultimately they have a safe place in their homes and in their families' hearts, and that frees them to learn that nursery is safe and fun, and it will eventually allow them to venture to many new places and learn many new things. They need time away from their parents to mature, but their time with their parents makes it possible.

Based on that, it seems that the most important thing I can tell you is that you have a Heavenly Father who is fully invested in your growth and development, and because of that you need to spend time away from Him. To successfully navigate that, there need to be periods of re-connection.

The talk I was assigned was Apostasy and Restoration, given by Dallin H. Oaks at the April 1995 general conference.

I read it every day for the week that I was preparing for the talk, and the first time I read it, it seemed to me that it was more about personal apostasy. The second time I read it, I couldn't figure out why I had thought that, except that there are similarities in how a person and how a people can fall away, and similarities in what we need to do to make our way back.

We will pick up from there next week.

Giving a talk

I think what I want to do now is go over the different components of my talk. Not only did I say some good things, but also there was a lot I didn't say, and one of the things I have been putting off writing about could probably fit in there.

Before I get started on that, I want to go over my talk giving process to give some context.

I can't write a talk. This is weird, because I write so many other things. It's been a while, but I also can't really write stand-up comedy routines. They are both things where I need to be responsive to the moment and trying to plan it out in advance puts up all my mental blocks.

I do think about it, and I am forming words in my head all along that may go in there. I can write in my journal about things that I think I want to say, but sometimes that is just to get out the things that are related and on my mind but that will not be the right thing to say up there. That's where some of the things I don't say come from.

I have in the past taken up outlines and quotes. This time I just printed out the talk and wrote a few scripture verses on it, that I then looked up while up there. Frankly, I would rather have the scriptures printed out or at least bookmarked to limit the awkward pauses, but that's not how it went down this time.

I think it would be comforting to have everything written out in advance. Then it could be polished, and I could make sure that the closing echoed the opening and everything followed logically. I wouldn't have to worry about forgetting anything. That sounds nice.

I don't do that because it feels wrong, but I believe the reason it feels wrong is that the things that feel intellectually right might not be the same things that are spiritually necessary, and what's more important?

Also, I have been realizing now that the security we think we have is often an illusion. Like maybe I would take a well-written talk up there and find my vision getting blurry or get choked up, and not deliver it anyway.

And if the spirit is right, some people would get the message they need from the teary, choked-up person, too. As often as the safety we think we create is an illusion, there are nonetheless real safety nets and backups that are not illusory. There's room for a lot of different solutions out there.

Therefore, my way is absolutely not the only way to give a talk. So far, though, it appears to be the only way for me.