Sacred Grove, 6/21/14

“I am sitting in the Sacred Grove, in Palmyra, New York (where there are many mosquitos, which I am going to do my best to ignore). Somewhere in this wooded area, the story goes, a confused teenager came to pray, in the faith that God would provide an answer to his confusion. And according to the story, God did, although the answer was not one that the teenager had anticipated. Furthermore, the story continues, the teenager discovered that not everyone approved of the answer he believed he had received; some people, in fact, were very emphatic about expressing their disagreement.

“As I sit here remembering that story, I am mindful of the ongoing controversy around Kate Kelly and John Dehlin. And I’m mindful, especially, of individuals for whom that controversy may be occasioning a crisis of faith or identity—people who may be wondering if there is a place for them in the LDS Church; and if not, where do they go from here?

“For what it may be worth, I would like to reach out to people in that situation by offering my testimony of the principle taught by the story of the Sacred Grove. At the end of the story as told in the Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith draws an explicit moral from the story, which is, he says, that anyone who lacks wisdom can ask of God and receive. I would like to add my witness to that affirmation, based on my own life’s experience.

“When push comes to shove, every one of us has to decide for ourselves what to believe, or who to believe, or who to follow, or who to stand with, who to trust. We have to make that decision for ourselves; but as we make that choice, we can receive guidance from God through personal revelation. That guidance may not come on the timetable that we would like. It may not come in the ways we would have expected. The answer might not be what we had hoped for. Our understanding of the answer might evolve over time as we learn by experience and grow in further light and knowledge. Living in keeping with the answer we receive may be difficult. It may seriously disrupt our status quo. It may strain our relationships with people we love who cannot accept the answer that we believe we have received, and who may urge us not to trust our personal revelation.

“Seeking your answer, and living your answer, can feel very lonely. But the good news is that we are never actually alone. The scriptures promise us that everyone who asks will receive. Everyone who seeks will find. Everyone who knocks… will have a door opened to them, even if it wasn’t the door you had hoped for. I have faith in that promise because I believe I have seen it fulfilled in my own life.

“That is my testimony from the Sacred Grove. May God be with you—God will be with you—as you seek answers in your own Sacred Grove. In Christ’s name, amen.”

We Limit Not the Truth of God

Yesterday I was looking through Community of Christ's new hymnal, Community of Christ Sings. They have several hymns on the theme of Continuing Revelation. One of these spoke to me particularly powerfully in light of the ongoing controversy around Ordain Women.

Here are the words. The tune to which the words are matched in Community of Christ Sings doesn't appear in the 1985 LDS hymnal, Hymns; but it could be sung to the tune that accompanies "Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" (Hymns, #41).  

"We Limit Not the Truth of God" (Community of Christ Sings, #69)
Words by George Rawson (1807-1889)

We limit not the truth of God
to our poor reach of mind
by notions of our day and sect,
crude, partial, and confined.
No, let a new and better hope
within our hearts be stirred--
the Lord hath yet more light and truth
to break forth from his word.

Who dares to bind to their dull sense
the oracles of heav'n
for all the nations, tongues, and climes,
and all the ages giv'n?
That universe, how much unknown!
That ocean unexplored!
The Lord hath yet more light and truth
to break forth from his word.

O Father, Son, and Spirit, send
us increase from above;
enlarge, expand all Christian souls
to comprehend thy love,
and make us all go on to know,
with nobler pow'rs conferred,
the Lord hath yet more light and truth
to break forth from his word.

A prayer for Kate and John

The cynical, embittered pessimist in me watches the unfolding events with resignation and even, I shamefully confess, a taste of Schadenfreude. ("You see--I told you.") This video comes from a different part of me.



"Behind me is the Kirtland Temple. When this temple was dedicated in 1836, Joseph Smith prayed that the Saints would be empowered, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, to go forth and do God's work in the world. He prayed that as they did this, prejudices against them would be swept away, and that the hearts of those who opposed them would be softened. [D&C 109:56.]

"Tonight that is my prayer on behalf of Kate Kelly and John Dehlin. For Kate, and John, and all those who are in mourning because of the actions being taken against Kate and John, I pray in words adapted from words that were used at the dedication of this temple:

Holy One--
May your name be upon them.
May your glory be round about them.
May your angels have charge over them. [D&C 109:22]
Remember all your church, O Lord. [D&C 109:72]
Amen."

For Kate and John: Let the caravan move on

I just saw the news about Kate Kelly's and John Dehlin's impending disciplinary councils: Two Activists Within Mormon Church Threatened with Excommunication (New York Times). As an excommunicant myself, I'd like to offer the following to Kate and John and their supporters:

I remember how it felt to be contacted--out of the blue--by the local church leadership. Even though I'd always figured that moment was likely to come someday, it was more distressing than I had expected. I felt targeted. I suspected right away that this action was being directed from higher up; and when talking to the stake president first bolstered, then outright confirmed, those suspicions, that revelation intensified the feeling that I was being secretly monitored from afar by some shadowy presence who wanted to get me "under control." "Threatened" (as the New York Times headline puts it) is a good description of what it felt like.

Excommunication is an institution speaking in the name of an entire faith community to say, "We disown you." And even though I had mentally disowned that institution long before (my relationship was, and is, with the Mormon tradition, not with the LDS Church), it's still intimidating when the institution's representatives turn up to declare their intention to formally cut you off. (Linger on that metaphor.) Kate and John appear to feel more invested in the institution than I did at that point, which must make the experience more painful.

Excommunication serves as a kind of smear campaign. Because the institution won't go on record explaining why they disowned you--apart from deliberately vague generalities like "apostasy" or "conduct unbecoming a member of the church"--the LDS faithful are free to cast doubt on whatever you say about what happened and what you did or did not do to "deserve" this action. If your supporters try to give you the halo of martyrdom, suave apologists like Terryl Givens can say, as he said about excommunicated intellectuals for the PBS special The Mormons: Well, you know, since the church can't comment, we're only hearing one side of the story... At which point, the faithful can imagine whatever they want about why you were "really" excommunicated. Maybe it wasn't just because of your podcasts or your public questioning of church policy. Maybe church leaders knew there was something going on in your private life. Maybe that something else--some secret sin you felt a need to rationalize--is the real reason you questioned church teachings... And then they can feel that much more justified in ignoring whatever issues you were trying to raise.

It's a nasty business. I'm scoffing bitterly: Just a day or two ago, inveterate optimists like John Gustav-Wrathall and Joanna Brooks were gushing about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir having sung "Somewhere over the Rainbow" on the same Sunday that gay pride was being celebrated in Salt Lake City... grasping, as they do, for signs that the church is changing, reasons for hope. And now--the same old same-old. We don't know, of course, what's going on behind the scenes. We don't know which individuals at church headquarters may be responsible for these disciplinary councils going forward; we don't know which other individuals at headquarters may have favored a different approach. Maybe the relatively more progressive-leaning folks, or at least more image-conscious folks, will manage to work behind the scenes to get these disciplinary councils indefinitely postponed. But what's happening right now makes clear that the old guard are still on duty.

If any of you out there are surprised by this turn of events--I'm sorry, but you need to get wise. You can't assume good faith on the part of church leadership; you have to always assume that at least some of them are working to figure out how to stab you in the back. If you can't assimilate that picture of church leadership into your worldview--then it's only a matter of time before you get struck on the head by a rock you had no idea someone was getting ready to throw at you.

Okay, I hadn't intended to get that bitter. Let me try to be more... pastoral.

First, to Kate and John: Unsolicited advice from someone whose been in your shoes. Your top priority right now is figuring out how to respond to the disciplinary council in a way that will leave you feeling, at the end, that you have acted with integrity, that you have acted in a way that is spiritually healthy for you, that you have been proactive rather than simply reactive, and that you have no lingering regrets about the way in which you have brought closure to your formal church membership--and you should assume that excommunication will be the outcome. I would urge you not to let your role as public figures play any consideration in how you go about doing those things. This moment is about what you need to do for yourself--period.

Second, to Kate and John and their supporters: These excommunications--if they happen, which, again, you should assume they will--should make no difference whatsoever in how you go about doing your work. Don't let a change in Kate's or John's membership status change anything else. Just go on doing what you've been doing. To paraphrase a famous metaphor of Bruce R. McConkie's: Let the dogs snap at your heels; the caravan moves on. Mormon Stories moves on. Ordain Women moves on. In Christ's name, amen.

10/13/1993 - The end of the mission

Twenty years ago today was my last proselytizing day as an LDS missionary. On Oct. 14, I was taken to the mission home, and the day after that, I was handed over to my parents, who had come down to the Dominican Republic to pick me up.

When I started this "looking back 20 years" series of what were supposed to be monthly posts, I was hoping to reconnect with the Dominican Republic--the contemporary Dominican Republic, not my nostalgic memories of the Dominican Republic. I wanted to do that out of a sense of guilt. Guilt that I connected with all these people, I lived in this country, this culture, and the experience impacted me very deeply, at least I feel like it did--but at the end of the day, was that just a kind of extended spiritual tourism? Was it ultimately an exercise in narcissism posing as concern for people in the Third World?

Yeah. Yeah it was. I mean, it may not have been exclusively that; I trust--I have to trust--that there are redeeming or redeemable aspects to the experience. But, yeah. It was very much about me, and the connections I've continued to feel for the Dominican Republic are very much about me. That's why in the end, this series petered out. My spiritual engagement ended up flowing in other directions over these past couple of years, and the Dominican experience stopped being so meaningful.

This is not good. This is very icky. I am not proud of myself in this moment.

And that's the end of my 20th-anniversary series of mission reflections. S**t.

Other posts in this series: 
5/12/1993 - Safety in the Dominican Republic
4/7/1993 - Alma Rosa
2/3/1993 - Ensanche Espaillat
9/30/1992 - La Milagrosa
8/12/1992 - A year after the call
7/1/1992 - FEDOPO
5/6/1992 - Guaricano
4/1/1992 - First day in Guaricano
2/5/1992 - The Zona Franca
12/4/1991 - La Romana
11/6/1991 - My first day in the Dominican Republic
10/9/1991 - Entered the MTC
9/4/1991 - Waiting to serve
8/1/1991 - Mission call

Sacred Grove

My 20-year anniversary missionary posts are shot to heck. There's really only a couple months left in which to do any. My spiritual life has moved into a different channel. I would like to do one or two more posts in that series, though.

Today, though, I want to talk about a visit I made last month to the Sacred Grove. My husband and I spent the Fourth of July week in Cleveland, partly so I could make a presentation to the Community of Christ interns at the Kirtland Temple visitors center. While we were in the vicinity, we took a day trip out to Palmyra, something we've been talking about for years, even since we came back east so I could return to grad school. I haven't been to Palmyra since I was a toddler.

The weather was wretched, although in a way I guess that was a blessing because it meant I basically had the Sacred Grove to myself. No one else wanted to be out there in the pouring rain.

I appreciate how the grove is being managed: limited, low-key interpretative apparatus, a wonderfully extensive trail system so that even if there were lots of visitors, I imagine you could achieve some privacy.

I walked back for a good long ways until I found a spot that felt right for no particular reason, and then I paced for a while talking out loud to God. I had this feeling of having arrived at the place of origin, a place where the Presence is specially concentrated. I didn't have Eliade on the brain at that particular moment, but yes, we're talking hierophany here.

But I was also aware that I was standing in a mythic place of origin. This is the place where the story begins--and yet it's not. That paradox is true in a couple of different senses.

One: It's not really the place of origin because the story we tell about this place of origin probably didn't happen the way we tell it. Anyone who saw or heard the "Diagnosing the Seer" session I did at Salt Lake Sunstone last year, with Mark Thomas and Dan Vogel, on the historicity of the 1838 First Vision account knows that I voted gray or black on all the propositions we discussed. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to make my pilgrimage to this place. It doesn't stop me from experiencing the heightened Presence.

Two: It's not really the place of origin because even if the story were strictly historical, the site has changed since the 1820s. This is the insight that struck me during my trip last month, as I was pacing, looking up through the trees, getting drenched in the rain. My understanding is that site that is preserved as the "Sacred Grove" encompasses more than the original Smith property, ergo more than the original grove. Whether I'm understanding that correctly or not, the fact remains that the site I'm seeing now is not the site Joseph Smith prayed in. They're not the same trees. These trails weren't here. Who knows how else the landscape has been altered.

So it's the Sacred Grove, but the Sacred Grove has changed. It's not what it was in 1820. It has evolved into something different. But we still call it the Sacred Grove.

When that thought came to me in the grove, I also thought: That's an apt metaphor for my own Mormon identity. It has evolved into something different from what it was. But it's still Mormon.

5/12/1993 - Safety in the Dominican Republic

This post is part of an ongoing series in which I "look in" on the contemporary Dominican Republic while "looking back" at my mission there twenty years ago. Today, I feel inspired to write about safety in the DR.

Shortly after I arrived in the DR as a missionary, another missionary showed me a document which had been provided to the missionaries by the U.S. embassy around the time of the Gulf War (which preceded my mission by several months). I don't remember if the mission president had solicited this document or if the embassy had proffered it. It was a basically a guide on what to do if you're kidnapped. The advice I still remember is: Your best chance for escape is when they're first nabbing you; you need to psychologically prepare yourself for a long captivity; and you should press your captors to improve your conditions by demanding things like toilet paper and books.

The document made such an impression on me that I became paranoid when my trainer and I were approached by a young man who was very keen to have us come to his house but didn't want to be seen talking to us on the street. As it turned out, he did have nefarious intentions, but of a more mundane kind: he feigned a desire to convert in the hope of fleecing us of things like tennis shoes--at which he succeeded; I wasn't sufficiently paranoid on that count.

Once I got acclimated, I felt quite safe as a missionary in the DR. During the Gulf War, a missionary had been the victim of a drive-by shooting, apparently motivated by anti-American sentiment (he survived largely unscathed; his temple garments took the credit). But that incident was anomalous. People regularly shouted "CIA" to us on the streets, but I understood it more as a taunt than a threat. Missionaries, the North Americans especially, were natural targets of petty crime: missionaries liked to swap stories about the ingenious ways people made off with their watches in the streets, that kind of thing. I had my bike stolen several months into my mission while I was inside an investigator's house one night--the horrific aftermath of which is that the police carted off a Haitian neighbor of the investigator, who I also knew, and beat him to try to force a confession. I'm not up to reliving that memory right now; but there's a moral there about safety and vulnerability for different kinds of foreign nationals in the Dominican Republic.

The DR didn't feel unsafe to me until the very end of my mission, when my parents came down to pick me up. We were walking at night to our hotel in a touristy area, when a man began approaching us, pulling a coiled wire out from under his shirt as he did so. My petite, iron-willed mother glared at the man, grabbed my hand and my father's, and pulled us across the street. It was a very unnerving experience, and it suddenly made the DR feel less like home to me than it had. I had been moving blithely through this country, feeling like I belonged; suddenly I felt foreign and targeted.

In 1997, when I was back in the DR working with a Catholic program, I visited Guaricano, which had been my favorite proselyting area. I learned that while LDS missionaries still worked there, they no longer lived there. The area had been ruled to unsafe to live after burglars broke into the elders' home one night and assaulted them. In 2000, I returned to the DR again looking for a job teaching English. While there, I heard chilling stories about American teachers--women, in these stories--being picked up by fake taxis full of thieves posing as passengers, forced to use ATM cards to empty their bank accounts, and in one case killed. During that same trip, I got into such a taxi and had my pocket picked. A good Samaritan found my discarded wallet later that day, found inside the phone number of the house where I was staying, and called. My Dominican hosts feared that the caller was actually one of the thieves trying to lure me into . . . a further assault or a kidnapping, I guess. A stake high councilman and his wife drove me over to the caller's home, who turned out to be legit; in fact, the high councilman ended up trying to turn the encounter into a missionary referral.

I was just looking at the U.S. State Department's travel advisory page for the DR. They make it sound pretty scary, though there's reassuring perspective in their statement that "the dangers present in the Dominican Republic are similar to those of many major U.S. cities."

I can't end a reflection on safety in the DR without remembering . . . well, let's call her Guadi, a young mother living in the area where I was working on this day 20 years ago, whose musician husband was often away working a gig on the other end of the island. One night she was awakened at knifepoint by a thief who had broken into the house. Several days later, she saw the thief walking past their home; fortunately, her husband was home at the time, and he confronted the thief, which led to his arrest. I'm proud of the way ward members pulled together for her, spending the night with her when her husband had to go away again. My companion and I met with her one evening, when she was plainly under a lot of stress. We got the kids off in a corner playing with magnets, we three adults sat down to talk, she vented for a long while, my companion and I listened, the three of us sang "Abide with Me," we prayed. It's one of the spiritual highlights of my mission.

I thank God that I was safe during my time in the DR. I pray for the safety of the people I know who are living there now--Dominicans and Haitians and North Americans. Especially women.

Other posts in this series: 
4/7/1993 - Alma Rosa
2/3/1993 - Ensanche Espaillat
9/30/1992 - La Milagrosa
8/12/1992 - A year after the call
7/1/1992 - FEDOPO
5/6/1992 - Guaricano
4/1/1992 - First day in Guaricano
2/5/1992 - The Zona Franca
12/4/1991 - La Romana
11/6/1991 - My first day in the Dominican Republic
10/9/1991 - Entered the MTC
9/4/1991 - Waiting to serve
8/1/1991 - Mission call