Hearkening

I know a number of women who are put off by the sexism in the temple ceremony. I didn't give it much thought for many years.

That was my coping mechanism for a number of years in the church--I experienced a type of spiritual paralysis due to constraints I felt were placed on my religious practice. It was a process of deciding how orthodox I would be. Would I believe that scripture study only comprised reading and annotating the scriptures, church magazines and writings of church leaders? I tried to be obedient to that but got very frustrated by the closed feedback loop. I was hearing the same thing over and over again and not gaining any new insights. After that stage, I entered a phase of becoming apathetic. I knew I was done studying repetition but I did not where to turn to study next. It felt like I was spinning my wheels. In 2009, eight years after I joined the church, that all changed when I found the alternative Mormon community. Not only did I find a wealth of study opportunities to give me new insights and perspectives into correlated gospel material, I learned the skill of listening to the heartaches of others. In some ways, their burdens became my own as I listened (or read as the case may be) how aspects of the church caused them to mourn and be burdened with concerns about the morality of certain characteristics.

Due to this willing absorption of whatever new perspectives I could take in, I began to look at aspects of church culture and practice that would have bothered me if I had given myself permission to look critically. On my blog, my readers have watched me puzzle through obedience to church leaders, the cultural silence on Heavenly Mother. Recently my attentions have turned to making sense of the temple in regards to its apparent sexism.

When it came to the hearken covenant in the temple, where Eve is commanded to covenant to listen to the counsels of her husband and all women in the temple by extension make the same covenant for themselves, I mentally reworded the implied "and Adam will hearken to the counsel of his wife."

The more I listened to the upset from those who cried that the missing implication was a glaring issue, I too realized how mentally writing it in was unsatisfactory.

It was with interest that I listened to the Mormon Matters episode on Ritual In Mormonism. I knew that Chelsea Shields Strayer would articulate the position of the injustice of making women hearken to men without reciprocity. I then learned that Chelsea Robarge Fife had given serious consideration to the issue for many months, zealously attending the temple to make sense of the hearken covenant. She came to an impression that stripped Adam and Eve of their genders and put them as mystical symbols of something else--symbols of the body and the spirit--the two essential parts of the human soul, which are both necessary for a person (regardless of gender) to enter into the presence of God as an exalted being.

I have pondered on that perspective and I get it in the context of Mormonism and its belief that the "natural man must yield to the enticing of the spirit"(Mosiah 3:19) and become subject to it. Its pretty appalling, as well as contradictory to the honor heaped upon Eve for her choice made in Eden, to see Eve equated as "an enemy to God" since by extension the temple context would then say all women were seen as enemies of God. That's just not acceptable to me.

This idea is further debunked by church leaders such as Dallin H. Oaks who is quoted as saying:

Some Christians condemn Eve for her act, concluding that she and her daughters are somehow flawed by it. Not the Latter-day Saints! Informed by revelation, we celebrate Eve’s act and honor her wisdom and courage in the great episode called the Fall.

Furthermore, the scriptures make clear that there are times in a person's life when it is not wise to give wholly over to the spirit and to ignore the needs and abilities of the body (Mosiah 4:27). Therefore, it seems that reciprocity is still lacking to state that the human family must completely subject the body to the spirit when there are needful times when the spirit must hearken to the body.

Due to these objections, I continued searching for meaning in the symbols of Adam and Eve. Reading Women Who Run With the Wolves, I stumbled across another possible interpretation.

Copied from my previous post:

In the story of Bluebeard, the older sister plays the role of Eve, awakening her naive counterpart (the wife and Adam respectively) to the danger of staying naive and unknowing of the true nature of the situation in which they find themselves. In this way, Eve portrays the Wild Woman.

"Whatever dilemma [the pysche] finds [itself] in, the voices of the older sister in [the] psyche urge [one] to consciousness and to be wise in [ones] choices. They represent those voices in the back of the mind that whisper the truths that [one] may wish to [seek]" (p.49-50) in order to escape the false Paradise Found and to find the true Paradise available to the wise and aware.

As one continues the epic journey to the celestial kingdom, the people of the world are called to "re-surface from their naivete" and as they do so, "they draw with them and to themselves something unexplored." Life, you could say. Eve through her choice made in Eden  is now a wiser woman who draws an internal masculine energy to her aid (p. 63) which Dr. Estes defines as the Jungian concept of the animus. 

In the Garden of Eden, Eve is now established as the masculine energy of the story and Adam the young maiden filled with naivete who, one could say, needs "someone older and wiser telling [him] what to do."

Which then, kind of turns on the whole Eve hearkening covenant on its head, doesn't it? If you follow, what I am saying is this: when Eve covenants to listen to the counsels of her husband Adam, it is actually the male, older, wiser part of oneself who is hearkening to the newly aware stereotypical maiden who is discovering the world, making innovative inferences to understand the world in novel and fresh ways. Thus, in the temple one can choose to believe in a scenario where the male energy hearkens to female energy just as one sees the female hearken to the male. Perhaps there is reciprocity where people have struggled to find it, after all.

As I continued pondering on that vein, the metaphor can be extended to further--after Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden to enter the lone and dreary world, Eve once again takes on her assigned gender as woman in the story. However, it must be remembered that the hearken covenant is made before Adam and Eve leave the Garden, so she is still portrayed as the masculine energy and Adam still exhibits the female energy. When Eve hearkens to listen to the masculine energy of her husband (in preparation for the ejection from the Garden), she can also, by extension, be covenanting to hearken to her internal masculine energy, the animus, the part of her psyche that led her to make the choice made in Eden. 

In this way, as we revert to viewing Eve as a woman, we can see that through that dual covenant--both to a mortal male and Elohim (and please remember every time I think of that word as the name of God that I necessarily draw on the translation which includes Mother God with Father God--Elohim is not singular) that she is actually covenanting in three ways. Listing them in order of importance, she covenants firstly to follow the Spirit of her Parents in Heaven, then to follow the counsel of her inner wise woman who manifests then stereotypical male behavior of the animus and then finally, to her life partner.

On that wise, Adam is both himself and Eve until they leave the Garden when he once again assumes the male gender. Before that point, the hearken covenant is made and he covenants to hearken to the inner newly initiated, eyes wide open maiden that he is himself, which then also extends to listening to his life partner who (as evidenced by the leadership role Eve portrayed in Garden) at times takes on the role of the older and wiser leader of the partnership.

I must say that I find this sort of study much more enriching than the study I felt compelled to do in past years and it leaves me wondering how would I have ever continued progressing spiritually without discovering a broader world of interacting with gospel truths?

Turn Up the Volume: Adjusting Sound Levels in Temple Phraseology

I sat next to my mother in the instruction room as I escorted her through the temple for the first time and listened to the assistant to the matron say, “Some women are put off by the phrasing ‘queen and priestess unto your husband’.”

That was the closest thing to validation of a major feminist objection to LDS temple rites that I had ever heard from an official source. It felt good for this feminist, I will admit.

I joined the church in 2001 as a senior in high school and spent the next 10 years with the hope of converting my widowed mother so my fairy tale could come true. I dreamed of the day when she would be sealed to my deceased father in the temple and I would be sealed to them. I was heartbroken when I stood in the undedicated sealing room of the Sacramento temple with my mother in 2006. By that time, I had given up on her joining the church in my lifetime and had become resigned to performing her temple ordinances for her after her death. At least I had her permission for that.

After my own feminist awakening during which I broke from orthodoxy, I understood better than ever before some of the reasons why she showed little interest in being affiliated with the LDS church. During what I call my crisis of culture, I turned to my mother and she consoled me when I discovered that LDS women had once enjoyed the freedom of anointing and blessing others. She heard my anger and frustration at the sense of betrayal I felt when I learned that Goddess-loving feminists had been excommunicated for writing and speaking about Mother in Heaven.

At that time, I would have been more likely to guess that I would encounter church discipline before I saw the day of her baptism.

Interestingly, it was partly my culture crisis that led her to seriously entertain thoughts of being baptized LDS. Through organizations like WAVE, Sunstone and Mormon Stories she encountered Mormons like her—feminist, liberal and non-literal believers.  Along with me, she also encountered Dialogue, The Exponent II, Daughters of Mormonism and Feminist Mormon Housewives.  She saw me flourish in a way she had never seen before. In May of last year she was baptized. In preparation for the temple she read Packer’s The Holy Temple and the temple prep manual and also Maxine Hank’s Women and Authority.

As her date of eligibility to attend the temple approached, I had no idea how I would help her prepare or how I was even supposed to feel. With my awareness of the troublesome parts of the temple, I vacillated between warning her about what she would find objectionable there and letting her discover things for herself.

And yet, we still found ourselves sitting side by side in the temple as she pondered her initiatory. The assistant to the matron gave us pause. Her statement was more than I had ever hoped to hear regarding the troublesome subordination of women under their husbands. The matron then went on to stress the supreme importance of women having a strong personal relationship with God.

As she spoke, it was like she was showing me a control panel with levers to adjust sound levels. Language does not come with scales illustrating how certain phrases are more important than others. If the words of the temple were laid down likes tracks of a song, I began to sense that “unto your husband” would be laid down much softer in volume than “hearken to the counsel of God.”

To our ears, it sounds as if the phrases are equal in importance or maybe that hearkening to one’s husband is more important because it is stated first. Maybe it follows the academic tradition of the most important being placed last and the emphasis is really on our relationship with our heavenly parents.  Perhaps the phrasing implies that hearkening to one’s spouse is just as important as hearkening to God. In any case, the statements themselves seem to indicate that it is very much open to personal interpretation when determining the relationship between the two.

I went through the rest of the session thinking of the sound volumes on each phrase and thinking that my responsibility was to remember the primacy of my personal relationship with divinity.

I still wish to someday hear men counseled in the temple to hearken to their wives. Until then, the personal nature of temple attendance allows each person in attendance to determine how loud certain tracks will be when laid down for the final cut. I cannot all together reject outright the value of being a team player and counseling with my husband, but I can choose for myself how loudly I will hear it when I play the message of the temple in my mind.

Thanks to the wise counsel of a temple matron, I choose to turn up the volume of the counsel and direction of God so that the Holy Spirit will be my guide.

The dark man

Clarissa Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves tells the story of Bluebeard and uses Jungian psychological analysis to draw a parallel between the character of Bluebeard and a common theme in women's dreams--that of the dark man preying on them.

As I read her analysis, I recalled a vivid dream that I had of a man preying on me. It occurred within the last year after my feminist awakening and I became aware of the pitfalls of patriarchy in my church culture. While the patriarchy I most often experience is of the benevolent kind, this dream was my subconscious hitting against the more threatening aspects of a patriarchal church culture.

The dream took place in an LDS church building during an evening activity. The main group of people were in the chapel listening to the speaker. There were some men milling around the foyer talking. I began to sense that I was the only female in the chapel and it was a frightening realization to find that I was not wearing a baby at that moment. I often feel that babywearing is a protection to me as I feel that no man would attempt to assault me if I have a baby attached to me.

The bishop of one of the wards in the building caught me eye and I knew in that instant the malevolent look he was giving me. He started to advance to me and I began to walk away briskly. I began aware that he was actually herding me into a unpopulated area of the church towards a room where he could get me alone. I began to panic and quickly turned down another hallway that had an exit to the outside on it. As I was about to leave the church building, I found my anger and sense of injustice. I turned to face the bishop and defended myself. I ran back toward the men in the lobby, felt the grasping hands of the bishop on my clothes and my body. I yelled that the bishop was attacking me and saw the men run googly-eyed to the scene where I kicked and hit the bishop.

After the dream, I remember waking up feeling satisfied that I had defended myself and that I had it within me to stand and fight against the patriarchal grip symbolized by a man in power.

It was very interesting to read the Jungian analysis of my dream. Based on Dr. Estes description, my dream had all the elements of a dark man dream.

She writes:

"Dreams are portales, entrances, preparations and practices for the next step in consciousness , the "next day" in the individuation process. So, a woman might have a dream of the predator when her psychic circumstances are too quiescent or complacent. We could say that this occurs in order to raise a storm in the psyche so that an energetic work can be done. But also a dream like this affirms that a woman's life needs to change, that the woman dreamer has gotten caught in some hiatus ennui as regards a difficult choice, that she is reluctant to take the next step, go the next distance, that she is shying away from wresting her own power away from the predator, that she is not used to being/acting/striving at full bore, in all-out capacity.'

'Additionally, dark man dreams are also wake-up calls. They say: Pay attention! Something has gone radically amiss in the outer world, in personal life, or in the outer collective culture."

She continues to on to say that, "...when women dream of the natural predator, it is not always or solely a message about the interior life. Sometimes it is a message about the threatening aspects of the culture one lives in....We find this destructive process exacerbated when the culture surrounding the woman touts, nourishes and protects destructive attitudes toward the deep instinctual and soulful nature. Thusly, these destructive cultural values--to which the predator avidly agrees--grow stronger within the collective psyche of all its members. When a society exhorts its people to be distrustful of and to shun the deep instinctual life, then an auto-predatory element in each individual psyche is strengthened and accelerated."

The answer, then, is for the wild woman within to be allowed to recognize these cultural forces, ask the key questions regarding what is being lost to this cultural predation so she can then "take the world into one's arms and act in a soul-filled and soul-strengthening manner."

Perhaps my favorite line in her essay on the dark man is this:

Wild Woman teaches women when not to act 'nice' about protecting their soulful lives. The wildish nature knows that being 'sweet' in these instances will only make the predator smile." 

As it has been many months since this dream occurred, I can look back and see where I have let my Wild Woman instinct guide me--and how it has preserved for me some powerful moments. It was my Wild Woman that inspired finding analogous ceremonies to honor, bless and sustain myself and my daughters as females at various life stages. While the boys and men of the church receive their many honors, the wild woman within created these ceremonies outside of church culture, draws on traditions that are meaningful to me and not tainted by patriarchal culture. I found sisters who too accept their wild woman within and see the wild woman in our church mothers.  

Even then, while I am pleased for this bastions in a time out of church culture, I know that the predator of patriarchy cannot be allowed to keep infiltrating the lives of LDS church members. There may be a time when the preying will cease and it begins with the bloggers, Sunday school attendees, Relief Society sisters, Young Women's leaders and Primary teachers who are honest and bald-faced in the face of patriarchy, who recognize and see to minimize and where possible remove the patriarchal grip from the classes they teach and the audiences they reach.

There is an online book club being hosted for Women Who Run With the Wolves, or as my friends affectionately refer to as WWRWW (sounds like a growl), by a couple of Mormon feminist women. They have opened up the club to any Mormon woman, who someone sympathetic to Mormon women, to participate.

Let's see if this works

There has been a great deal of debate recently among Mormons on the topic of women and the priesthood. I see basically three camps: people who think it is heresy to ask the prophets to receive a revelation, people who think its perfectly appropriate for members of the church for ask for the prophets to receive and revelation and people who do not care at all.

I count myself as one of those who do not think its inappropriate for members of the church to ask for the leaders to consult with God on a topic of particular interest, though if you read this conversation on my facebook page, you'll see many who disagree with me.

One of my friends linked to the page on Mormon.org that really got me thinking. In the past I had shied away from the question about women and the priesthood for my Mormon.org profile. I didn't feel I had a cohesive answer, but after learning about this conversation between President Hinckley (our former prophet who died in 2008) and an Australian interviewer, I felt like I had something I could finally say that didn't seem to conflict with this statement shared on Mormon.org.

Below is the answer I submitted to my Mormon.org profile. I don't know if it will be approved so I'll just wait and see. I hope it doesn't meet the fate of another answer that I attempted to post to my profile (it wasn't censored but it was withheld due to a glitch). If it is approved however, I at least will have a point of reference to say that "Look, my views aren't considered false doctrine! I have the official stamp of approval from Mormon.org!"

One of the reasons why women do not hold the priesthood in the Mormon Church is because, as President Hinckley said in an interview with an Australian reporter is that "there is no agitation for that." He seems to imply that if the members of the church were interested in women being ordained to the priesthood that a number of them ought to approach the leaders of the church expressing their interest. One faithful Mormon created a website where Mormons and non-Mormons can express their interest in women of the Mormon Church receiving the priesthood. The URL for that site is: www.agitatingfaithfully.org. If the leaders take the communication seriously, they have the opportunity to show the world that the Mormon church continues to receive revelation and that the church can change its practices as it better learns the mind and will of God. It would be up to the prophet and apostles of the church to counsel and pray together on the topic of women receiving the priesthood. If they can all agree that God is telling them to extend the priesthood to women, they will share that revelation with the church and the world. It may be that God does have a reason for women not to receive that priesthood and Mormons do believe that God can reveal his reasons through the prophet.

Until that time, Mormon women have many opportunities to serve within the church. The Relief Society is known as the biggest women's organization in the world and in each local congregation there is a leader or president of the Relief Society among the women of that congregation. There is a Relief Society presidency that oversees a small number of local congregation's Relief Society as well as a presidency that oversees all of the Relief Societies in local congregations throughout the world. The women of the church oversee the youth education program (Primary) of the church as well as the young women's education program. They are actively involved in family history, temple work, emergency preparedness, and humanitarian work in local congregations and throughout the world. Each woman of the church has many opportunities to serve the members of her congregation and local area and all members of the church are encouraged to be involved in volunteer organizations in their communities as well. Mormon women also serve as teachers in Sunday School and in worship services where they have the opportunity to teach all members of the church.

As you can see, there are many ways that women can be leaders in the church. They play an active role in keeping the church going and meeting the needs of all the members of the church even without the priesthood in addition to their work as very involved mothers (generally). Some argue that because of this women do not need the priesthood for these reasons.

There's a chance that the URL won't make it through which is fine. I can edit it that out, but for those who are not Mormon and care about gender issues, it may be very useful for them to see directly the effort that is being made by members of the church.I'm interested to see what will happen and how the reviewers at Mormon.org will handle it.

The D. Michael Quinn Challenge

After finishing reading the book Women and Authority, I created a challenge for myself: go to the temple and listen carefully for wording that I had heard many times before but not with this new awareness of women's history in the church.

One of the chapters from the book that was most affecting for me was D. Michael Quinn's "Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood Since 1843" where I was impressed by the sources he cited showing clearly that Joseph Smith and other early church leaders believed that women were given the priesthood through the endowment. It was unclear however where in the endowment this could be traced to. One of the clues that I took to heart was that there was a belief that women were anointed and thereby received the priesthood. Anointing only occur in the initiatory ceremony, not in the presentation of the endowment itself.

Thus, my specific challenge. Go to the temple, participate in initiatories and listen carefully to the wording of the anointing as well as the entire recitation. This morning, I had a chance to do that. We had planned to go, do an initiatory and then an endowment session so I could take in the whole thing in the context of this question in my mind. Through an unfortunate series of wrong turns and time constraints however, we only had time for a set of initiatories. That turned out to be for the best because it was only after hearing the ceremony repeated a few times did I clue in on the phrases that were applicable to my question.

The anointing offered no clue so I listened carefully for instances of the word priesthood in connection with women. The only time that appeared together was in the authorizing of the garment as a sacred article of clothing and this is referred to being clothed in the garments of the Holy Priesthood. I prayed to know if this wording (though not understanding specifically what it meant) was the indication that women were granted the priesthood through the temple ceremonies. I cannot deny the Spirit I felt confirming that to be true.

I should also say here that the time prior that I went to the temple and participated in an endowment session, I remember at one point having the distinct impression from the Spirit that because I had progressed through the stages of the endowment that somehow through that process, I possessed the priesthood in some manner. This was even before I read Quinn's chapter on women and the priesthood so before the idea was externally planted that women were given the priesthood through the temple ceremonies.

I don't understand it how it works but I have tried throughout this process to pray and ask specific and clear questions always being willing to accept any answer I was to be given. I don't understand all the implications of this and have many more questions. Was perhaps the wording changed over the last 180 years so more specific phrases referring to priesthood being removed from the women's initiatory? If yes, what did it used to say? And how does it work that women are conferred the priesthood if they are ordained after the order of Melchelizdek?

I was able to learn more about the men's initiatory process from my husband who described the point in time when names needing proxy are ordained to the priesthood and that process is obviously missing from the women's ceremony.

Its obvious that I may not ever understand more beyond the point where I currently am now, but at the same time for years, I said the same thing about where I was then. Who knows what further information or understanding may come to me as I continue this study and seeking? I will continue faithful, relying on prayer and having a much greater appreciation and desire to have the spirit of discernment which will help me to know between truth and error.

There will be many who believe I am in error and I'm scared as to what that might mean for me socially in the church. And yet, if I know if I were to deny the lessons from the Spirit that I have received in the last few months, I would also have to deny the Spirit confirmations that convinced me of the truthfulness of the gospel, that told me that my husband was the right man for me to marry, that told me it was God's will (or he was supportive) of me attending graduate school, or going to BYU, or any of the other many times the Spirit has testified to me of truth.

I do know however that I can't do much with this knowledge. If anything is meant to change in church policy, I must be patient for it and not push for anything or even recognition or corroboration that what I have been told is true. That's okay. That's the way it works on doctrine that hasn't been revealed through the proper channels. People can pray and know and its perfectly fine to believe whatever they are going to believe as long as they don't go out trying to convert people to their understanding. I'm concerned even by publicly saying this on my blog.