Thanksgiving and remembrance

This week Argentina became the first Latin American country, and the second country in the Americas (O Canada!), to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. ("Viva!" to Mexico's Distrito Federal for legalizing it locally.) The LDS Church made what strikes me as a token effort to stir up opposition among its members in the vicinity of Buenos Aires. I'm not sure, actually, how to explain why they refrained from organizing a more assertive opposition, something more on the scale of Prop 8. Scared cautious by the Prop 8 backlash? Worried about a backlash from the Argentine government? A largely American leadership just not so invested in what goes on outside the United States? Who knows. Anyway, justice won, though I'd be more encouraged if it had won by a larger margin.

The morning breaks, the shadows flee;
lo, Zion's standard is unfurled!
The dawning of a brighter day,
majestic rises on the world.

The clouds of error disappear
before the rays of truth divine;
the glory bursing from afar,
wide o'er the nations soon will shine.

"Zion's standard" because one of the defining values of Zion is social equality and an end to discrimination (D&C 38:26-27).

Hope flickers on.

************

It appears—fingers tightly crossed—that the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has been successfully capped. My feeling about that actually isn't so much gratitude, to be honest, as it is: About frickin' time. I still want to see heads on stakes. Well, no, I don't believe in capital punishment as a matter of principle. So let me revise my vindictive fantasy: I want every BP executive, and anyone else in that company whose job responsibilities make them accountable for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, along with every person at the MMS ever guilty of taking gifts or allowing oil companies to bend the rules, to be compelled to work in oil cleanup for however many years it takes until the job is done.

One can only dream.

The angel brought me again to the door of the temple;
and look! water flowed out from under the threshhold toward the east. . . .

He said to me:
These waters flow down into the desert and into the sea,
and when they come into the sea, the waters will be healed.
Then every living thing that moves will live,
and there will be great schools of fish,
because of these waters.
They will be healed, and everything will live.

(from Ezekiel 47: 1, 8-9)

************

Yesterday was the three-year anniversary of my excommunication. I'm sitting here looking at the screen, with absolutely no idea what more to say about it than that. I'm not even sure what kind of scriptural passage to quote at this point. Well, no, this feels right:

I will ask my Father to send you another Advocate,
who will remain with you forever . . .
I will not leave you orphaned:
I will come to you . . .
Then you will know that I am in my Father,
and you are in me, and I in you.

(John 14: 16, 18, 20)

Taize service, July

I led the first Friday Taize service as usual two days ago. Here are the readings as I re-rendered them (working from the NRSV and the JTS translation of the Hebrew Bible). I took this set of readings from the Taize website; they weren't the readings recommended for this week but for a different week in ordinary time. When I chose them, I recognized that Psalm 103 and Isaiah 40 were being paired together, at least in part, because they both refer to being given power like an eagle's. But it didn't occur to me until we were in the middle of the service that the eagle metaphor resonated weirdly with the iconography of the Fourth of July. Since I'm not thrilled about alliances between American nationalism and Christianity, I think the resonance was unfortunate.

************

PSALM 103:1-12

Bless the Lord, my soul!
All that is in me, bless God’s holy name!
Give thanks to the Lord, my soul,
and remember all God’s kindnesses.

Who but the Lord forgives all your sins?
Who but God heals your maladies?
Who pulls you back from the precipice?
Who encircles you with tender arms?
Who fills your life with good things
and gives you power like the eagle’s?

The Lord is a righteous judge,
administering justice to all who are oppressed.
This is the God who spoke to Moses—
who liberated Israel with wondrous deeds.

The Lord is merciful and kind,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
God does not treat us according to our sins
nor repay us according to our faults.
As high as heaven is above the earth,
so deep is God’s compassion for the penitent.
As far as the east is from the west,
so far does the Lord remove from us our sins.

************

ISAIAH 40:27-31

My people,
why do you say,
“The Lord does not see me;
God ignores the injustice done to me”?

Don’t you know?
Have you not heard?
The eternal God,
who created the earth from end to end,
is endless in power
and limitless in knowledge.

In God, there is strength for the weary,
power for the powerless.
Beyond the limits at which the energy of youth is depleted—
past the point at which athletes collapse from exhaustion—
those who trust in the Lord will find their strength renewed.
They will soar upward as if with the wings of eagles.
Running, they will not become tired;
marching, they will not grow weary.

************

LUKE 6:27-32, 35

Jesus said:
Listen, all of you—

Love your enemies,
do good to those who despise you,
bless those who curse you,
pray for those who mistreat you.

If someone slaps you across one cheek,
offer the other also.
If someone takes away your coat,
turn over your shirt as well.
Give to everyone who begs from you.
If someone takes what is yours,
make no effort to get it back.

Do to others as you would have them do to you.

What is so virtuous
about showing love to those who love you?
It hardly takes a saint to do that much.

I am setting for you a higher standard.
Love your enemies;
do good, and lend expecting nothing in return.
That is how you will grow into the image of God,
who showers blessings even on the ungrateful and the wicked.

Moody

I'm feeling moody at the moment, so I'm taking a break from other tasks to do a little journaling. My moodiness is partly worry: Hugo's trapped out-of-town because of car trouble, and we don't yet know what the trouble is (or how expensive it will be).

My mood is also a carry over from last weekend. Two members of the Episcopal church Hugo and I attend here were ordained deacons as the next step in a journey which will end with their becoming priests. That was on Saturday at an old fancy church in Raleigh. On Sunday, there was an outdoor Eucharistic service at a campground where the two new deacons preached and assisted with communion, which was celebrated by a former member of the same congregation who became a priest a couple years back (the same person who created for me the Liahona icon you see on the top of this blog).

It was a homecoming, and the congregation was very happy, and I felt selfishly depressed. Watching these individuals, all of whom I know quite well, move into their vocations reminded me that I do not have a faith community that's willing to help me live out what I perceive to be my vocation. A few weeks ago, I was asked to orchestrate the reading from Acts at the Pentecost service, which in this congregation's tradition involves people reading in multiple languages. I organized something that hadn't been tried in previous years but that I hoped would enrich the spirit of the celebration, and afterwards the vicar asked me if I hadn't been gay, would I have become a Mormon priest. She was assuming that Mormons have a professional clergy, like the Christian groups she knows, so what she was saying was: You seem to have certain pastoral gifts; before you came out and had to leave the Mormon church, did you contemplate entering the ministry? It was a depressing question, and I was reminded of it again last weekend as I watched the new deacons exercise their new roles.

I don't think I've told this story on this blog before, so here goes: In 2001, I did a three-day retreat at a Trappist monastery. Doors that I'd thought had been standing open as options for my future had closed, and I was trying to figure out what God wanted me to do with my life. I had these loves and yearnings—to teach, to go back to the Dominican Republic, to do ministry, to explore new ways to tap into the spiritual resources of Mormonism. What was God trying to tell me about my vocation?

So at one point I'm walking down this snowy road, reflecting, and all of a sudden the question comes into my head: What would you ideally like to be doing, if you could do anything? And I knew immediately what the answer was: I would like to be a full-time missioner, like I'd seen in other denominations, working in the Dominican Republic, helping to build up the LDS Church, which in my imagination was more like a liberal Christian church. That, I thought, is what I yearn to do. That's my calling. And of course, it's a calling that can never be.

Whether I would actually have the skills and the stamina to do the kind of full-time missioner work I was envisioning is a whole different question—and working through that question is what discernment of vocation is all about. But the point of this story is: I realized at that moment that I yearned to do with my life something that I simply couldn't do because the possibilities just didn't exist. You might think that would be a depressing realization, but it was actually liberating. I didn't have to wonder anymore what these yearnings of mine were calling me to do. I knew—and I knew I couldn't have it. And I'm hardly the first person to live and die in this world yearning for opportunities they simply couldn't have. Think of all the women suffragists who didn't live to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Think of all the slaves who never obtained the freedom they dreamed of. Etc., etc., etc.

So the pressure's off. My task now is simply to find little ways to lay the foundation for a day when, hopefully, someone who wants the things I want will have realistic possiblities for achieving them. Maybe that day won't come. But the hope by which I live—as in "faith, hope, and charity"—is that God can somehow make the little seeds I sow grow into something else.

Which doesn't, however, stop me from indulging in a narcisstic self-pity about the fact that other people do get their wishes. Last weekend, I started a moody little prayer about my dreams deferred, but then I stopped and thought: Oh for God's sake, John-Charles, pull your nose out of your navel and pray for people whom life has really robbed.

My prayers are with Hugo, dealing with this mess with the car. One of my nephews was baptized this weekend. My mother continues to be slowly devoured alive by the tumors taking over her body. I derive an angry, dark, helpless satisfaction from the thought that when the resurrection comes, she will rise again, but the tumors will not. We may not be able to keep you from taking her down now, you s.o.b's, but someday we are going to take her back. Now is all you get.

This is what prophecy looks like

I was reminded of the street theater of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.



UPDATE: Ancient scriptures (for that matter, modern LDS scriptures) leave us the names of far too few female prophets, so I should name this one. An NPR new story identified her for me as "Diane Wilson, a 61-year-old fourth-generation fisher from Seadrift, Texas, near the Gulf Coast." God bless her for her courage.

Wo to BP...

...and to the corrupt federal officials who collaborated in their deception. Kudos to the AP's Justin Pritchard, Tamara Lush, and Holbrook Mohr for doing what journalists should be doing: digging through the bull**** shoveled out at us by the powerful to uncover truth. Their exposé of BP's bogus spill response plan and risk assessment is here.

I really am trying to cut back on this kind of ranting, but the ongoing disaster in the Gulf is too infuriating. So here goes:

Wo to those who are deceivers,
for thus says the Lord:
I will bring them to judgment.
(D&C 50:6)

Let's see heads roll already!

A spiritual fellowship in exile

Lord, you have commanded us to call upon you,
so that from you we may receive according to our desires.
(Ether 3:2)

Those who have been scattered shall be gathered.
(D&C 101:13)

I have a desire—a vision, if you will. On this Pentecost, the day that liturgical Christians commemorate the pouring out of the Spirit on the body of believers, I want to lay this desire before God publicly in the hope that there may be others out there, within the sound of my online voice, who share this desire. Despite the optimism of the verse from Ether I quoted above, I know that we don’t always receive according to our desires. So perhaps my vision will never be anything more than a pipe dream. But for what it may be worth, I offer the following.

I envision a spiritual fellowship of Mormons in exile. It’s nothing as organized as a "church" (or as preoccupied with questions of ecclesiastical authority). It’s a fellowship, or a loose network of local fellowships, composed of people from the LDS tradition who remain committed to Mormons symbols, texts, and practices as means of encountering God, but who are alienated from the conservative-dominated institutional church.

This fellowship exists to worship together. This is a spiritual fellowship. It’s not a therapeutic support group or an intellectual study group. Members come together to be nourished by the good word of God, to fast and pray, to speak with one another concerning the welfare of their souls, to partake of bread and wine in remembrance of the Lord Jesus (Moroni 6:4-6).

This fellowship offers the full range of Mormon ritual practice. This fellowship in exile believes it is empowered to perform cherished Mormon rituals for its members, independent of LDS Church authorities: baptism, the sacrament, baby blessings, health blessings, patriarchal/evangelist’s blessings, sealings, the endowment, priesthood ordination if that’s something the fellowship decides to do.

This fellowship explores the untapped possibilities of Mormon tradition. The fellowship’s primary goal is to discern what the Spirit has to teach them through Mormon texts and practices. Because Mormon tradition includes an invitation to embrace truth wherever it is to be found, the fellowship might embrace teachings, practices, symbols, music, etc., from other traditions as these seem to resonate with aspects of Mormon tradition. But the fellowship is distinctively, centrally, richly Mormon in character. It isn’t a fellowship of people who are in the process of moving into some other tradition or for whom Mormonism is just one of a number of traditions from which they mix and match. If a Jewish analogy makes sense to you, what I’m envisioning is Reconstructionist Mormonism, not Reform Mormonism.

This fellowship seeks innovative ways to understand and live Mormon tradition. In response to the invitation to conduct their meetings according to the promptings of the Spirit (Moroni 6:9), the fellowship experiments with different worship styles—liturgical, contemplative, charismatic, contemporary. They write new songs, or chants, or liturgies, based on Mormon texts. They forge new traditions for commemorating events in Mormon sacred history or for sacralizing major life events. They find imaginative ways to enact gospel principles such as service and consecration. Acting in the faith that God unfolds truth line on line, precept on precept (2 Nephi 28:30), in ways adapted to our limited understanding (D&C 1:24), the fellowship develops new ways of reading and interpreting the LDS scriptures, and they revise rituals and other traditions to reflect changes in their theology.

This fellowship operates democratically—ideally, by consensus. This fellowship is not for would-be prophets in search of a following, nor for followers in search of a new prophet. Discerning God’s will for the group is the privilege and responsibility of all members of the fellowship, equally and collectively. There is no hierarchy of authority, except to the extent that the fellowship may agree to temporarily delegate certain responsibilities to individuals as “stewardships.”

This fellowship does not insist on the historicity of Mormon claims. My personal preference would be to see the fellowship simply reject historicity, but at least they should develop ways of engaging with Mormon scripture and ritual that don’t depend on historicity—that don’t depend, in other words, on the Book of Mormon being an ancient document, or on the literal, historical reality of priesthood restoration, or the resurrection, or the Atonement, or pre-existence, etc. The fellowship is prepared to welcome those who approach these traditional teachings as symbolic rather than literal truth.

This fellowship is committed to the full, equal participation of women and of GLBT people. Among other things, this means rejecting a male-only priesthood. What to do instead is a question on which the fellowship will have to arrive at some kind of common consent. I’m prepared to adopt a radically “Protestant” position: In baptism, we take upon ourselves the name of Christ; thus all baptized people are empowered to act in the name of Christ, which is the same power that priesthood ordination is supposed to confer. Priesthood ordination is therefore entirely superfluous, although it may offer practical benefits as a way of organizing an institution. The fellowship might agree on a less radical solution than this, but somehow the fellowship needs to break down exclusions based on gender.


I want to reiterate: What I’m envisioning here is a fellowship in exile from the LDS Church. This is not a fellowship of people who are hoping to reform the LDS Church from within. This fellowship is not worried about staying within the bounds of what LDS authorities would find tolerable or about avoiding offense to orthodox sensibilities. It’s a fellowship of people who are prepared to follow the Spirit wherever they decide, collectively, that it is leading them—with the understanding that what they are asking to Spirit to teach them is how to more creatively use the resources made available to us in the Mormon tradition.

Maybe there’s no one out there interested in this vision. Maybe it’s just a quirky, idiosyncratic dream of my own. I often suspect that the majority of Mormons—conservative or liberal—aren’t as passionate about devotional practice as I am; their attachment to Mormonism has more to do with social bonds, or heritage, or intellect. (Or maybe that suspicion is just a kind of arrogance on my part.) Possibly most Mormons who have become as theologically liberal as this vision requires have also moved beyond such an exclusive interest in Mormonism as this vision requires. But I’m going to keep operating on the assumption—the faith, the hope—that someday, somewhere, a fellowship like this might come into being.

The first thing I want to do is develop a new version of the endowment, with which I have been in love since I was first endowed in 1991. I’m creating this new endowment in the faith that someday there will be a community to whom I can take it and say, “Shall we try it out?”—and they’ll read it, discuss it, revise it, perform it, discuss it again, develop yet other versions that innovate in different ways. I’ll be working on this in my Sabbath reflection time, little by little, over the next several months, I would imagine. So I may not post to the blog as regularly for a while, though I’m sure I’ll want to post in response to current events that strike my nerves, and I may post updates to the new endowment project as it comes along.

Helaman 5, edited

For today's Sabbath reflection, I'm posting an edited version of the story of Nephi and Lehi in prison, from Helaman 5. This edit follows the same priniciples as the edit of 1 Nephi 1 I posted earlier: I excerpted phrases to whittle the chapter down to a basic narrative core, then I did some light stylistic edits, mostly to make the language less archaic.

The one major license I took is that I replaced the word "repent" with the word "turn." The idea of "turning" or "re-turning" toward God is at the heart of one of the words used to convey repentance in the Hebrew Bible. I liked the way that word resonated with how the text later has Aminadab and the Lamanites turn to look at Nephi and Lehi. (Watch for it as you read.)

I've shared my reflections on this Book of Mormon story in an earlier post. Next Sunday is Pentecost, so the story strikes me as thematically appropriate for the season.

************

Nephi and his brother Lehi went out to teach the word of God.
They were taken by an army of the Lamanites and thrown into prison.
After they had been imprisoned many days,
the Lamanites came to take them to be killed.

But Nephi and Lehi were encircled as if by fire,
so that the Lamanites did not dare to lay hands on them.
When Nephi and Lehi saw that they were encircled by a pillar of fire,
and that it did not burn them,
their hearts took courage.
But the Lamanites stood dumb with amazement.

The earth shook, and the walls of the prison trembled
as if they were about to tumble, but they did not fall.
The Lamanites were overshadowed with a cloud of darkness,
and an awful fear came upon them.

There came a Voice as if from above the cloud of darkness.
It said, “Turn, turn.”
It was not a voice of thunder or tumultuous noise
but a voice of perfect mildness, like a whisper.
Yet it pierced the soul,
and the earth shook, and the walls of the prison trembled.

The Voice came again: “Turn, turn.”
Again the earth shook, and the walls trembled.

The Voice came a third time.
It spoke to them marvelous words that no human being can utter.
The earth shook, and the walls trembled.
But the Lamanites could not flee
because of the cloud of darkness that overshadowed them
and the fear that paralyzed them.

There was one among them who was a Nephite by birth,
who had once belonged to the church of God.
He turned and saw, through the cloud of darkness,
the faces of Nephi and Lehi—
they shone like the faces of angels.
They had their eyes lifted to heaven,
and they appeared to be talking to some being whom they saw.

This man cried to the crowd to turn and look.
They were given the power to turn,
and they too saw the faces of Nephi and Lehi.

They said to the man: “Who are these men talking with?”
The man’s name was Aminadab.
He said: “They are talking with the angels of God.”

The Lamanites said to him: “What should we do
so that this cloud of darkness may be removed from us?”
Aminadab said to them: “Cry to the Voice.”

So they all began to cry to the Voice—
they cried until the cloud of darkness was dispersed.
When they looked around,
they saw that they were encircled, every one, by a pillar of fire.
They were filled with unspeakable joy.
The Spirit of God came down from heaven and entered their hearts;
they were filled as if with fire,
and they could speak marvelous words.

There came a Voice—a pleasant voice, like a whisper.
It said: “Peace, peace be to you.”

They lifted their eyes to see where the Voice came from.
They saw the heavens open, and angels came down and ministered to them.

There were about three hundred souls who saw and heard these things.
They went out and ministered to the people in all the surrounding regions.