Thanks

I have been struggling with bad impulses.

President Nelson has encouraged members to post about their gratitude, using the hash tag #givethanks.

I have no good reason for reacting the way I did, but I was tempted to only give thanks for very liberal things: Biden's victory, Planned Parenthood, Governor Kate Brown's leadership, and people who wear masks (though that one should not be specifically liberal).

I have not done that because I know that even if my gratitude would be sincere, I would be doing it to annoy people. That would not be a good purpose. I have seen some very touching things posted, and I have even liked some (literally pressing the "Like" button on Facebook).

My first problem is my thinking that this is not the problem. There are definitely things that are good about noting the blessings in your life and feeling grateful. It is something I believe in and do. However...

1. I am not sure that it is the most helpful remedy for this moment.

2. The kinds of gratitude posts that are most frequently shared often have a way of making other people feel inadequate and left behind.

Mind you, social media in general has that effect on a lot of people. I don't think it should, and there are a lot of factors that go into that, but it is a real thing.

The pandemic has increased isolation, which is hard on mental and emotional health. That is increased by the toll that grief is taking on those who have lost family members, plus the physical health problems that many have experienced and continue to experience. In addition, many people are struggling financially.

Even in times of great difficulty there are things to be grateful for. It is good to remember those, but this really seems like a good time to give actual, tangible aid. I don't have a lot of money to give right now, but the Church does. That could be really great. 

I could write another letter, but they still haven't answered the first one.

I did watch the video. It was not a terrible talk or prayer. I just know there could be more. I want there to be more.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/givethanks/?lang=eng

I am not going to be posting with the hash tag. I will add requests for healing to my prayers. On a personal level, I have been working on healing anyway.

(I wish I could say that was all emotional and mental, but I have had a cold for the past four days. I am more aware than ever how much worse illness can be than the common cold, but it is still not fun.)

Otherwise, in the things that I am feeling to do, it is mostly reaching out to other people. #RememberSeptember did have a hash tag, and was something I felt led to do. Recently we sent out some holiday cards, and I know that at least two of them meant a lot to the recipients. They were not people I would have automatically thought of. 

I am being led toward something else now that I should be starting soon. It also seems worth saying that I did not just get the ideas for things to do and how automatically. For #RememberSeptember, I went over my entire Facebook friends list twice. For the cards, I went over the ward directory. There is some guidance to start, but then more is sought along the way. 

Counting your blessings can cheer you up, but so can serving other people. That may cheer them up too.

Just something to think about before they start telling us to light the world.

Eureka!

Friday I finished the last of the 1971 conference talks. Only 49 more years to go! 

(By the time I get there, another four to seven years will have passed, but that's okay. I know.)

The plan is feeling better, because of two things that have happened along the way.

One is that I am finding lots of inspiration. It may not be directly related to what I am reading, but it still works. Maybe one talk will have an anecdote or a key word that will lead to another thought, and then it connects to something else.

I should mention that right now I am getting a lot of ideas and insights in general. I have cleared room for it, and put myself in a position for it, so it could make sense that almost anything would contribute. I also don't think it is random, though, because reading old conference talks was a thing that I specifically thought I should do.

In addition, I am relieved to find that I don't hate all of the talks. Some of them are really good, which makes me more hopeful that as I get into the 90s I will not find myself hating talks that meant a lot to me the first time around.

The post title comes from a realization as I was thinking about some of those talks. I realized that the talks that inspire and comfort me have in common the sharing of personal experiences and faith. The talks that anger me are pretty consistently based on assumptions about the experiences of others. 

I thought I was bothered by how judgmental the talks were. That is part of it, but exacerbated because the judgments are ill-informed and wrong.

It is not surprising that someone born and raised in a good church family in Utah in the 70s might not have great insight into drug addiction or people who believe in God more as a presence than as a person, or a host of other things. I can also acknowledge that some of the things happening on the outside would have looked threatening and scary. If you know chastity is important, and suddenly your church is the last one that still believes in it, that could seem dire. Also, women want to work and wear pants!

When I don't know something, I believe in trying to learn about it. The problem here is when you don't know that you don't know, especially when you are sure that you do know. It is much easier to be able to hear and read about other people and their lives now, fifty years later.

I remember years and years ago, being with some really good members looking at the news about a serial killer who was targeting prostitutes. (It was almost certainly the Green River Killer.) I remember her saying that it looked like someone decided to clean up the streets.

It bothered me, but there was a level at which I believed - based on other observed behavior - that if she was actually dealing with a prostitute, she would be kind. 

It was still a twisted way to believe. It does not acknowledge the realities of sex workers or serial killers. It wasn't a mindset that would make the world a safer or kinder place.

The Bible tells us of Jesus dining with publicans and sinners. We know he taught them, but I believe he also listened to them, and understood them.

When we are looking out at the world as a scary, evil place, we are not understanding it. That severely limits the good we can do for it.

Style counsel

One of the recent 1970 General Conference talks I read had - as kind of a throwaway - an admonition to never intentionally look less than your best. I'm sure it was a reaction to more casual clothing, but it felt like a lot of pressure.

It stuck out more because I had just read this quote from Elizabeth Cady Stanton about the first time she saw a woman wearing bloomers, occurring when she visited a cousin:

To see my cousin with a lamp in one hand and a baby in the other, walk upstairs, with ease and grace while, with flowing robes, I pulled myself up with difficulty, lamp and baby out of the question, readily convinced me that there was sore need of a reform in woman's dress and I promptly donned a similar costume. 

I immediately grasped how revolutionary it must have been. It's not even automatically a skirt versus pants issue, because there are dresses that can be less encumbering than mid-nineteenth century woman's fashions. Still, choosing clothing for comfort and ease of movement would be amazing, as well as discovering how much of fashion wasted time and hampered movement.

It is also not a matter of skimpy attire; bloomers went down to the ankles. I believe bloomers were still considered immodest, possibly closer to the original meaning of the word in that it could be seen as drawing attention, and facilitated actions that might draw attention, like running. It certainly removed all mystery about whether women had legs, and how many. (That sounds like a joke, but men LOVE finding women mysterious. Then understanding them is unnecessary.)

The modesty issue does lead me to something else I saw recently, about 15th century woman Agnès Sorel, who had her gowns specially designed to expose her favorite breast. 

This immediately made me feel a little insecure; she has a favorite breast? Is that a thing? Am I missing some aspect of womanhood thinking mine are basically the same? Okay, that is partially facetious, but I spent some effort on getting in touch with my body, and now I can't help wondering what I missed.

Regardless, I mention it because the portrait was shown with a quote, "Women in the past were modest and had more respect for themselves."

Well, her style did get some criticism. It also got some imitation.

My last post was about conservatism as a way of resisting change and adhering to the past. Often that ignores real problems in the present and past. Furthermore, those perceptions are often built on lies. 

Hidden Figures (2016) shows us Black women working as "computers" at NASA, when that work was done by humans instead of machines. I have seen The Right Stuff (1983) and Apollo 13 (1995) and they showed NASA and lots of calculations, but they were all being done by white men. There was also a department full of white women. Many of the people who were there have died since then - Katherine Johnson just recently - but their accounts and the employment records still exist. They were there, and they were great at math, but then in 1983 you would have people telling you that girls just naturally had a harder time with math.

We invite people into the church telling them to keep the good they have and get more. That's fine, but are we accurately assessing what is good, inside and out?

What to keep?

I don't think I have mentioned this yet, but for a while I have been wanting to go through and read old conference talks. The church web site has them back to 1970, so that is where I started. 

Conference often lasted for three days back then. It is hard to say, but at my current rate, where I give two or three days to the Come Follow Me curriculum and then the rest of the week to conference talks, this could easily take four years (assuming that I re-read years that I read or listened to at the time). I am currently on the second day of the October 1970 conference. 

It feels important, but it is going to be a slog, what with all of the liberal bashing. Seriously, it wasn't the only instance, but in the spring session Harold B. Lee said...

One time I asked one of our Church educational leaders how he would define a liberal in the Church. He answered in one sentence: “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.” ("The Iron Rod", Sunday afternoon)

I actually had started that, got irritated and re-read the four gospels instead, and then re-started maybe six weeks ago and had to go through all of it again.

Fall 1970 started off better, where I was finding several talks that I liked in the Friday morning session. Then I decided to finish since there was only one talk left, and it was Ezra Taft Benson slagging on rock music. 

As I keep at it, there are different things that I realize. 

First of all, everyone was in a kind of defensive mode because several other churches had stopped requiring chastity, and it was alarming. I'm not sure how much it was dominating the news, but the Equal Rights Amendment was going to pass the House of Representatives on October 11th of that year. 

In addition, I can see that they were not using "liberal" to mean Democrat (because after all, we don't endorse any parties or people), but as a movement for change, and reactionary. It might have made more sense to use "progressive" for those purposes, but we don't always use political terms accurately. They definitely meant opposite of "conservative".

There was one talk that defended conservatism because God is unchanging so shouldn't we be as well? They weren't always trying to change in the City of Enoch while they were waiting for translation.

That line of reasoning would make sense if as people or as society we were perfect; we're not, certainly not in the way we follow God.

Conservatism requires a certain confidence that the current system is good. If you were a white man from Utah in the '70s, that was probably pretty easy to do, even if you had seen poverty and suffered and were a very good person. It is heartening now to know that Dallin H. Oaks can say that Black Lives Matter, but the extrajudicial killing of Black people was happening in the '70s too, and before, but with less filmed evidence.

If it is reactionary to see that there are problems and try and make things better, then I am happy to be reactionary. That word seems to apply more to seeing something new and non-conforming and immediately finding it bad and threatening. I mean, yes, lots of rockers have been depraved, but it is not a given. Classical music and hymns are great and they have their place, but so does rock and metal and especially punk. There's room for a lot of different things in this wide world.

That doesn't mean that all music is good, or that all change is good; those kinds of wide blanket statements would not even be likely to be true. I do think that if we could listen better, and trust people more, that we could do better.

I think I am going to leave that there for now, and then do a clothing-related example next week.