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iews and opinions and all around me are people waiting with sticks and a match to burn the witch how do you get over this when things get murky i really do try to get into that what would jesus do boat which is why my heart is hurting so much where is jesus in these facebook exchanges and comments sections these people wear their mormon membership like a badge but tell those searching for honest answers to go start your own church no room for you here is christ s church or immediately discount my testimony and voice because i have a few questions about policy vs doctrine my heart seems paralyzed with fear and sadness i absolutely get why people leave the church the gospel is true but the people aren t help pk dear pk the short answer to your question read pages 184 185 of the book of mormon girl a longer answer follows a web design genius friend made two word clouds last week one was composed from the profiles of the men and women on ordain women it was a nimbus of loveliness words like faith prayer revelation hope the other was composed from the comments pasted to the ordain women facebook page ostensibly by defenders of the mormon faith and it was a miasma of mean words like apostasy leave and so forth we saw similar behavior during wear pants to church last december nothing new here of course except to newbies like yourself and there are so many of you now arriving everyday in the precincts of mormon feminism welcome sister welcome and please don t feed the trolls or mind the haters what you are seeing on those flaming facebook walls and pages is this mormonism has an autoimmune disorder ridiculed by segments of the american mainstream for 150 years or more encouraged to see the world today as hostile to their faith lots of mormons move through life with their defenses up way up problem is at times mormons become so inflamed so tender we turn those defenses onto people within our own community women s issues have the power to provoke particular inflammation within our community and part of the reason aside from general human misogyny is that 160 years ago in nauvoo illinois joseph smith told the women of the early church that he d make of them a kingdom of priests he set into place elements of the endowment ceremony an initial articulation of a connection between women and priesthood and then he was martyred fragments of joseph s vision survived through the years in the women of mormonism s first and second generations in practices like washings and anointings before childbirth in the institutional independence of the relief society but many of these have disappeared almost entirely from mainstream mormon memory drummed out by correlation and 160 years later we have no idea what joseph meant ordain women is placing full faith in the doctrine of continuing revelation and asking church leaders to try and figure it out which is scary for everyone especially for people who have been raised on a sunday school curriculum that insists we already have all the answers tied up in neat correlated columns that historical perspective may be of little comfort when one is actually faced with straight up in box cruelty in the name of jesus jesus himself of course has a lot to say about these kind of situations in the new testament matthew 5 is always a favorite that s a chapter i resort to when sometimes i have to mosey out of a church meeting when an ill thought sacrament meeting talk gets off into the anti gay and anti feminist weeds and sit with my kids on the steps out back and read the scriptures everyone has limits after all know yours and gently honor them i applaud your facebook hiatus spare yourself reading the comments on most blog posts about women s issues in mormonism and fortify yourself with lots of matthew 5 dig even deeper into the new testament lots of the early church apostles knew what it was like to put up with pernicious meanness and if you re going to be in it for the long run as i hope you will you may have to supplement even further memorize the prayer of st francis lord make me an instrument of your peace where there is hatred let me sow love where there is injury pardon where there is error the truth where there is doubt the faith where there is despair hope where there is darkness light and where there is sadness joy o divine master grant that i may not so much seek to be consoled as to console to be understood as to understand to be loved as to love for it is in giving that we receive it is in pardoning that we are pardoned and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life perhaps you d like to start committing long passages from president uchtdorf s talks to memory i myself must admit i find my mind going time and time again to this opener from adrienne rich s poem integrity a wild patience has taken me this far patience yes indeed because it has been 160 years and we still have no idea what joseph smith meant when he told the women of early mormonism he was going to make of them a kingdom of priests and i ve had two very devout women i love and admire tell me that they ve had personal revelation that someday priesthood ordination will come i have not had that experience how long until women s ordination non mormon friends ask i m on the five hundred year plan i tell them i do not know that i am joking what i do know is that we have a long road to zion we mormons especially if one reads the comments on facebook as revealing something about the inner states of mormonism because yes those comments absolutely do reveal more about the innards of their authors than they do about the objective merits of the cause they purport to contest and imagine if it hurts you to read them those comments can you imagine how it feels to live with a corrosively bilious form of righteousness or abject terror and defensiveness pumping through your veins every day but here s the most important thing god is merciful god loves surprises god roots for the underdog for every caustic righteous commenter on facebook there are two more in your own ward who have the same questions you do but are afraid to speak them out loud and three more who really don t care what you think about women s ordination they re just trying to nurse a fussy baby through sacrament meeting or make it through another week of a soulkilling job they hate they re trying to get through the day by the grace of god as are we all and perhaps if we can love one another every day that passes will take us all one day closer to figuring out what joseph meant or to working our collective fearful defensiveness out of our collective system or to an even fuller version of the marvel that is mormon theology even if it takes five hundred years you are going to need courage and patience and love you re going to have to see the nastiness for what it is fear mostly but also ignorance along the way you ll find allies you ll find your heart your mind your voice and your soul courage sister you ve got mofems on your side and believe me when i tell you there are few braver women in the western world now who has words of courage for pk 74 comments filed under feminism july 22 2013 6 58 am is mormon faith crisis for men only or did the ny times miss half the story beloved readers and visitors since concluding my series on the theology of lds gender and priesthood i ve taken a summer breather but this week i m back with something to say about sunday s front page new york times article on disaffection historical controversy and faith crisis among contemporary mormons please check it out by visiting feminist mormon housewives click here 3 comments filed under social connectedness june 28 2013 9 07 pm should mormon women be ordained or are they already priesthood holders for several weeks now i have devoted my columns here to my own personal exploration of the question of women and priesthood ordination within the lds church what set me to this project was the launch of ordainwomen org a set of profiles published by mormon men and women calling for ordination of lds women to the priesthood even though i have been a committed feminist for more than twenty years i never felt the same kind of visceral connection to the priesthood ordination issue that i had so readily felt on other issues of fairness and equality seeing the faces of friends go public on line in support of ordination at ordainwomen org made me wonder why perhaps it was because i had not studied the issue carefully enough perhaps studying the lds scriptures and doctrines that structured priesthood ordination would help me arrive at a better understanding of the matter and perhaps at some stronger personal conclusions i wondered so i set out to understand mormon theology on gender and ordination on its own terms i studied scriptures historical and contemporary writings by church leaders church handbooks and ceremonial liturgies from the lds temple i also studied scholarship by historians of mormonism who have carefully and extensively tracked changes in lds doctrine and practice over time pertaining to priesthood and gender continue reading 123 comments filed under priesthood may 20 2013 7 52 am ask mormon girl are gender restricted church responsibilities based in doctrine or custom if you ve been following along these past few weeks excepting my mother s day vacation you know i ve been convening a personal study session on priesthood what it means today what it has meant and what all of this means in light of a renewed call for the ordination of women by some lds feminists and after weeks of study this is what i have gathered in summary elder boyd k packer has stated that the way mormons now conceive of priesthood authority restricted to men identical with administrative authority and opposite to motherhood is not necessarily grounded in scripture it may be just as much an outgrowth of tradition or custom priesthood keys are in fact rather haphazardly defined in scriptures and they do not map neatly onto current lds church administrative functions lds church historians date the implementation of our current concept of priesthood as identified with men only and with exclusive administrative authority and in opposition to motherhood to the middle twentieth century as introduced by leaders like john widtsoe before widtsoe there is evidence of a more expansive notion of priesthood in mormonism dating from the moment in 1843 when joseph smith made the daring and i d argue revelatory decision to interpret exodus 40 12 15 to apply to both men and women effectively vesting women with priesthood through the endowment ceremony an expansive sense of priesthood authority survives into the early twentieth century in the continuing practice of lds women giving blessings of healing and even washings and anointings preparatory to childbirth this practice contracted during the 1920s and 1930s correlation as an administrative program was introduced in the 1940s and 1950s and was used as a premise to contract the authority of women over their own auxiliaries in the 1960s and 1970s as historian laurel thatcher ulrich has remembered we have seen a very modest recent correction in renewed emphasis on the use of mixed gender councils at the level of ward decision making but if we track the institutional authority of lds women from the 1840s to today could one plausibly characterize the situation of mormon women as a restoration incomplete my goal this week is to follow the distinction elder packer has made and to understand the distinction between practices based in tradition or custom and practices that reflect a consistent and coherent lds doctrine recently we ve seen the church quietly set aside a longstanding custom of not inviting women to pray at general conference this was purely tradition it was not reflective of a consistent or coherent lds doctrine are there other customs in the way we assign authority that do not in fact have a foundation in consistent or coherent lds doctrine it appears that there is a subarticulate lds doctrine that endowed lds women do enjoy priesthood power even if they are not ordained to priesthood offices many mormons take this as a deduction from the fact that lds women conduct some temple ceremonies with authority delegated by the temple president as well as by the fact that women in lds temples participate fully in the priesthood bearing rites described in exodus 40 12 15 the distinction between a general priesthood power and specific administrative authority is often framed through the language of priesthood keys but to study the scriptural definitions of keys is to find that keys outlined in the scriptures don t neatly or consistently cohere with the shape of administrative responsibilities in the contemporary lds church in our current handbook some positions are restricted to male priesthood holders that do not in fact have particular scripturally delineated keys associated with them the question that emerges for me then is if the handbook restricts a particular administrative responsibility to a male melchizedek priesthood holder but there are no keys associated with that position is this restriction based on custom as in the case of women praying in sacrament meeting or general conference continue reading 72 comments filed under priesthood tagged as church historians endowment ceremony laurel thatcher ulrich ordination of women priesthood keys older posts ask mormon girl is the blog of author joanna brooks twitter tweets by askmormongirl top posts do mormons believe people can become gods ask mr mormon girl what s it like to be married to a mormon ask mormon girl are gender restricted church responsibilities based in doctrine or custom blogroll by common consent c jane doves serpents feminist mormon housewives mormon matters mormon stories podcast religion dispatches zelophehad s daughters archives april 2015 february 2015 june 2014 january 2014 october 2013 july 2013 june 2013 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