Good

I've pondered two questions for years, long before I ever questioned my faith:

1. What makes a "good person"?
2. What makes a "good Mormon"?

Pirates of the Caribbean brought up the first one, yea so many years ago.  Is he a pirate?  Is he a good man?  Wait, he's BOTH!  (...What?)

Good men wear good hats, Disney says.  

What exactly makes a person good?  What makes Jack Sparrow "good" (besides being wickedly funny and brilliant and mad and mostly loyal to those that are mostly loyal to him)?  Robbery, lying, cheating, sword fights, chases, escapes, murder, revenge, impersonation of a cleric of the Church of England...  I heart Jack Sparrow, but not necessarily because he's any version of "good".  So what is it?  At what point does a person stop being good?  After a dire mistake?  An intentional breach of integrity or contract?  Dishonesty?  Infidelity?  Money laundering for the mob?  Stealing aid money and sticking it in your own pocket?  Leading an expedition that resulted in the enslavement and genocide of thousands (pick a favorite historical example, there's plenty)?  Cheating in high school?

Likewise, when does a Mormon stop being "good"?  When he runs for President and can't seem to say the same thing twice in a row and favors policies that alienate half of humanity and/or his aspired constituents?  (I'm lookin' at you, Mittens.  I personally think you are a sucky Mormon and a sucky human being.  So there.)  After the first sip of alcohol/tea/coffee?  After the first act of pre/extramarital sex?  After not going to church for three months?  After not wearing garments for a week straight?  After stealing?  After not comforting someone in need of comfort?  After being involved in romantic relationships with multiple women at the same time who don't know about each other while you're telling the world you're going to the temple?  After questioning a policy or practice, either out of rebellion or feelings of discord with personal values?  Rebellion itself?

I don't have the answers to these questions.  I don't know where the lines are drawn in the sand, though I suspect they would be perceived differently by everyone that looks at them regardless of where they were.  People are complex.  Life is complex.  Politics are complex.  There is always a mixture of good and bad, an opposition in all things.  Given that, it seems prudent to follow the admonition of our Lord, and judge not, lest we be judged.

Waxing poetic.

Just a couple apples falling from the brain tree this evening...

Chivalry is dead--so let it lie.

And let male feminists arise.

~ ~ ~

Goddess give me the strength not to socialize my daughters to be "nice".  Strong, kind, fair-minded, responsible, compassionate, and just, yes; but never "nice".  Nice makes you a doormat, even when you're being wronged.  Nice doesn't make a fuss when a fuss needs to be made.  Nice makes you doubt your better judgment and squash your intuition because others might be inconvenienced by your truth.  Nice does not a heroine make.

Milk after meat

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,
They have their exits and entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. 
At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms
....
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
--William Shakespeare


I wanted this to be a super smart post contrasting two observations; the first being that after a long life of eating "meat", my Mom now survives on a primarily liquid diet of Ensure, jello, water, and milk, and never very much of any; the second being that many times, after a long life of living on spiritual "meat", we all still need the milk at times, that sometimes we need rest from being bogged down in the "thick of thin things" of culture and society and practice vs doctrine..

I wanted it to be, but I have to leave it at that for now and trust my readers to make their own contemplations on the matter.  Time is too short now to do much that I don't feel like doing, and I don't feel like a long post today.  The confusion has set in.  She's hardly eating.  She spends the majority of her time in bed.  She surfaces sometimes, but other times, she doesn't understand what's going on, why there's so many cards and flowers and visitors.  She wonders who's sick and what people aren't telling her.


We celebrated Mother's Day yesterday (Earth Day = Love Your Mother = We do, but she might not be here for the official Mother's Day) and she got to talk to all of her kids.  My sister was in town this weekend, and my brother and his husband came to visit yesterday, and our other brother called in and will be here next weekend.


Today, we had to tell her that she (and her brother, who was visiting when she last asked) are sick with cancer and that it's taking over her body.  She still didn't understand, and wanted to know what we were leaving out.  I had to tell her she was going to go see her mother and father soon.  She looked at me with a little surprise, but she understood.  She knew that meant the time wouldn't be long.  Then she observed, "This is totally strange."


It is.  It must be, to realize that you're quickly coming to the end of your journey, and you're having to say goodbye to everyone you love.

suckitude...

What if...: Wildly speculative and heretical

"What if..."

To my understanding, there are many gods, and possibly many levels of gods (as in "they shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there" D&C 132: 19) on the way up to becoming a God the Father or God the Mother.  Whether there's all separate universes or if it's divvied up by planets or star systems or galaxies, I don't know--I don't wanna get into those particulars--but assuming that the whole "as man is, God once was; as God is, man may become" idea that we base a lot of our beliefs on is true, there's a truckload of deities in existence somewhere out there, here or in other realms/planes/what have you.  And we're told that once you receive your immortality after judgment, you're not going to die anymore.

But what if... we've misinterpreted or misunderstood.

I have no citations to back me up here, these are just the ideas running around in my head, but... what if the reason we don't hear about or worship Mother anymore--and haven't for thousands of years--is that... She died?  Or was killed?  We assume all gods must be good, but what if they're not?  What if the greater reality is more like the drama and warfare of the ancient pantheons, where gods and goddesses are born, live, and die or are otherwise defeated with a fair amount of regularity?  The logic of "there can be no Father without a Mother" would still hold true, because She helped create us in the past.  As far as I know, all official Mormon theology regarding Her has been strictly logical; I've never heard of a Prophet--even Joseph--specifically saying, "There is a living, embodied Goddess, too."

So what if she just isn't there anymore, and we literally cannot get in touch with her or hope to bring her back into acknowledgment in our faith?

Sometimes I deeply dislike the speculative parts of my brain.

EDIT: I feel I should clarify.  This post is not a response to the lack of Mother-ly references in General Conference.  I've had these thoughts spinning around in my head for a few weeks now, perhaps a month, and I felt the need for the cathartic purge before they could fester any more.

I've been thinking a lot about gays

(Great title, right?  Right.  Hang with me.)

Granted there has been more direct reason in the past three or so years, and really one could go back to circa 1995, but for me, it has been somewhere in my mind for about 11 or 12 years.  That's when the campaign for Prop 14 started, which was the original law passed by California voters in 2000 defining marriage as between a man and a woman.  Who remembers that?  It kinda sorta hit the back burner from my POV until... what was it, 2004?  2006?  When Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco basically said to the majority of the state's voters, "Screw all y'all, I'm authorizing same-sex marriages in this city!"  (And the now-famous line "It's gonna happen, whether you like it or not!"  Thanks Mr. Mayor.  Voters FTW.  Oh wait.)  Then there was bickering and repeals and appeals and blahblahblah--Prop 8.  So for the second time in a decade, we were asked to get involved.  And I did.

And it sucked.

California is a pretty blue state, and I can be a very shy person, and the 50+% of voting residents as of 2000 and 2008 still opposed gay marriage do not live in my calling area.  There's areas of the state that are fairly red, or at least magenta.  The county I live in is maybe half a shade less blue than San Francisco itself.  I carried a lingering uncertainty for my safety having a yellow Prop 8 sticker on my bumper... right next to the other yellow one that said, "Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else."  (I got into a brief discussion once about the apparent incongruency between the two.  I'm still surprised it was only once and that it was brief, because believe me, the difficulty of holding both of those as true did not escape me.)  The night of the election, all the bumper stickers in my family came off for that reason.  I'm sure many people elsewhere in the state with blue stickers did the same thing for the same reason, and really it's just a tiny taste of the fear LGBT people live with around the world.

Anyway, I did most of the stuff I was asked to do.  I made phone calls.  (I would have rather eaten escargot.  I hate phones and I hate potential confrontation.)  I stood on street corners with signs.  I may or may not have contributed money; I can't remember.  I got a balloon at a street fair in my grandparents' hometown, and walked around with that for a while that night.  I had conversations with a few friends that I didn't especially want to have, but I did it out of a feeling of obligation and duty.  That didn't mean I was especially happy about it.

The subject was inescapable one way or another.  Every.one.was.talking.about.it.  It was on the news, on the street, in businesses, at church, in the grocery store, in my college classes.  Posters and bumper stickers and banners and mediamediamedia.  (This was also the year I got royally fed up with both major political parties--I was raised Republican--and registered as an Independent.  I was sick and overwhelmed by the political madness of that year.)  And at last, I voted the way I felt I should, while secretly envying my newly baptized friend who told me straight-up she was voting no.

While all of this was going on, my family was estranged from my gay brother and his partner.  There had been a series of incidents over the years (actually very few of them directly to do with his orientation) and things just got awkward and silent.  Occasionally gifts would go one way or the other but we just didn't really communicate.  I wanted to be his friend on Facebook but felt like that was disloyal to my Dad, who was the one particularly mad at him.  We saw them at a family wedding and maybe a reunion, but... yeah.  He was still my brother, and he was still gay, and nothing was going to change that.  I wanted to know him, and his partner.  It took two and a half years after the '08 elections for that to happen.  Now we're all friends on Facebook and Words With Friends and we comment on statuses and photos and it's a grand ol' time!  The family feels whole without this weird gap because they'e not there.

Fast forward to this summer or even the whole past year.  We got back in touch with my brother and his partner as mentioned.  I became friends with a lovely lesbian couple who are my business neighbors.  (I'd link to their store--which is fantastic--but it would destroy what anonymity I maintain.)  I attended their wedding reception last month.  And beginning to learn about Carol Lynn Pearson and her life story with her gay ex-husand.  And the Daughters of Mormonism episodes immediately after mine.  And... I don't know, it has just been on my mind.  The publicized accounts of people committing suicide because of bullying, the ongoing hullabaloo of post-Prop 8, my friends; all of these things just kept it coming back up, and honestly, I'm not sure exactly where all of my opinions and beliefs sit anymore.  However, I do know where a few sit.

No one should be bullied for being LGBT, or any other reason.  No one should end up feeling like death is the only way out of their suffering.  I've rarely seen two people more in love than my neighbors.  I don't think everyone who identifies as LGBT was born that way... but prob-ssibly a lot--maybe most!--were.  I don't know why.  I don't know how that fits into my view of the purpose of life and eternal progression.  I do believe people when they say that they love a person of the same sex, and that they belong together.  (At least as much as I'd believe a heterosexual couple.  Being one or the other certainly doesn't guarantee good relationship skills or a good match.)  I believe people when they do say they've gotten a feeling from God that they are just the way that they're supposed to be.  I have no reason or right to doubt another person's spiritual experiences, even when they don't mesh with my own.

I believe that God is love, and that love is a fruit of the Spirit and when you feel love (or peace, kindness, long-suffering, etc.) that's a sign of the Spirit's presence.  (Once I put  that idea together in that manner--thanks to a Sunday School lesson no less--it blew a gigantic hole in my ideas about homosexual relationships.)  I believe everyone deserves at least a chance at love and happiness in life, even if some of us never find it.  I believe every soul has great intrinsic value, no matter what shape it's in.  I believe everyone should be treated with fairness, kindness, and respect.  I believe we all have our sins and our struggles and things that other people don't like about us: some of them we can change in this life, some of them we can't.  I don't believe being homosexual in and of itself is a sin;  I don't know where I think it goes from there, especially in context of things I've already said about love and happiness.

I wish no one would ever feel like they could not come unto Christ, partake of the Atonement and the blessings and ordinances of the Gospel, be washed clean, and believe and worship in full fellowship with all the saints because of their sexual orientation.  I wish something--whatever it is--would come to be so that no one would ever have to leave again in order to live with integrity about who they are and whom they love.  I've personally known three people (maybe four but I lost contact with him years ago) in my life who have left the LDS church at least in part because they are gay.  They've all gone on to continue being God-loving, spiritual, religious people... just not in the Church.  I wish it wouldn't be that way.  I hope someday it won't be.

I think there must be enough room in all eternity for our LGBT brothers and sisters.  I hope someday we'll find it.

A Sunday at Heart to Heart Ministries

I can be such a lazy blogger.  I've been meaning to write this post for three weeks now.

The first Sunday for this month, I went to hear a friend sing at the Sunday service held at a local interfaith spiritual center.  All kinds were there: Christians, Jews, Pagans, Buddhists, etc.  Everyone was just there to hear something uplifting and be in a community with other spiritual people.  It was a lot like Relief Society, actually; joyful, friendly, chatty, fun, easy-going, emotional, and hilarious, with twenty-seven women to three men in attendance.  (If your Relief Society doesn't sound like that--men aside--I am so sorry and I sincerely hope things liven up soon.)

It was the first time in my life I really realized that our meetings can be extremely boring.

I've been to Pentecostal services a couple of times and have observed how very much more lively those are than your average Mormon service.  However, I find they have their own brand of boring for me.  (I find praise music really repetitive and after the fifth or sixth go-round of "Holy, holy, holy" I'm kind of done.  I'm also not a big fan of electric guitars and keyboards for accompaniment in a worship service.  It works for some people but not for me.)  That being said, I'm now going to totally contradict myself and say how much I enjoyed having homemade percussion instruments (plastic bottles of rice and such) and singing popular inspirational songs.  Maybe it's because it was having "audience" participation in the music making or that I felt that the songs contained messages for living life rather than just giving repetitious praise.  Maybe it's my personal evolution.  I don't know, but the music aspect was less repetitious than a Pentecostal service, and more make-the-every-day-sacred than an LDS one.

Not sung while I was there, but I had to take a picture.

There were four ministers, and all of them are women.  That was a somewhat new experience, though the energy and atmosphere they brought was very familiar from my Relief Society experience.  They even had and exchange of what my ward calls a "good news minute", thought they called it "one minute miracles."  The big difference there was that they took about fifteen to twenty minutes to share these, where we usually try to keep it under five.  One minister was the primary leader of the service, with interjections and contributions from the other three from time to time.  Two of them led a guided meditation, one speaking, one playing a wood flute at the back of the room.  The primary minister then gave a sermon that spanned from the chakras (especially the "sacred heart") into giving love unconditionally, relating a gut-wrenching personal story of a tragic situation in her own family.  It was one of the best expressions on the subject I've ever heard.  After the sermon, my friend sang "I Hope You Dance".  That would never fly in a Sacrament meeting, but it was really lovely and appropriate in the setting.  We finished by standing up around the room, holding hands and singing together as a group.  Afterwards, people milled around, congratulated my friend, and mingled with one another.

It was a fascinating, juicy experience, and a nice change of pace from the so-reverent-it's-dry trap that is easy to fall into in many LDS wards.  I appreciate the need for reverence, I really do, and I tend to relate better to sacred music that's dignified and dedicated to worship, but I got more out of attending that meeting that Sunday than I've gotten out of many a Sunday where I "belong".  We need to be more like that.  We need a spiritual passion and fire and real world application that's meaningful not only to other people but to ourselves.  The fire doesn't always burn high and hot--sometimes it's barely an ember--but I think a few little injections of spirit would help people feel the Spirit a little more than maybe we do.  Let's get excited and be excited about the Gospel and God and faith and charity and good works and our divine natures.  That stuff is awesome!

Musings on the need for a living Prophet

Not really after conclusions, just thinking "out loud" and maybe conclusions will find me.  And maybe they won't.  *musemuse...*

One of the biggest "selling points" that the Church has is the claim that we have a Prophet of God alive and working on the Earth today: praying for and about us and our world, receiving revelation, giving guidance to those who will listen, etc.  We sustain fifteen men in all--the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the First Presidency--as prophets, seers, and revelators, but only one is the Prophet, the one man who holds all keys of Priesthood authority and whose word is considered not just useful, but generally final.  There is the encouragement, of course, for every person to pray for personal confirmation of the Prophet's words and their application in the life of the individual, but there are a great many of us willing to forgo that step in favor of simply following the Prophet by faith.

Until or unless what the Prophet gives as a general guideline doesn't fit our personal circumstances.  Things start to get a little hairy at that point.

I don't know if I want to get into the particulars of those occurrences at this time, that's not really what I'm musing about but I may wander that way as I think.  I'm contemplating more about the intersection of mysticism and following the Prophet.  For the purpose of clarity, here's the definitions of mysticism under which I'm operating.

Mysticism:  n. "2. a doctrine of an immediate spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding, or of a direct, intimate union of the soul with god through contemplation or ecstasy." ;  "2. a system of contemplative prayer and spirituality aimed at achieving direct intuitive experience of the divine." ;
In religion, the attempt by an individual to achieve a personal union with God or with some other divine being or principle. Mystics generally practice daily meditation.

The personal relationship we are told we can have with God and that we are encouraged to pursue is  mysticism.  "God hears and answers personal prayers."  "The Holy Ghost will testify to you of truth."  "You can receive personal revelation."  Mysticism.  I think it takes a lot of the "woo-woo" connotation out of the term when you look at it this way; it starts to feel very normal.  So!  That makes Mormons a bunch of mystics.  So how do we reconcile that with the need for a Prophet?  If we can receive our own revelation, why do we need someone else to do it for us?  That's a good, fair question.

Spiritual gifts are mentioned several times in the scriptures (my links are by no means comprehensive) among them faith, prophesy, belief, understanding, etc.  What is almost always brought up in conjunction with lists of these gifts is the caveat that not everyone has the same gifts, and among those with the same gift, there are different levels of natural ability.  I would also say it follows that among the levels of natural ability, there are those who put more or less work into improving their gifts.  We're left then with a wide spectrum of ability and understanding mixed in to the flow of every day life.  Culture, language, history, family dynamics, friend dynamics, hormone balance, mental and physical health, life experience, socio-economic standing, education, natural disasters, and personal philosophy can all profoundly impact the way we think and act and what we want.  Individual circumstances are the essence of diversity, and that's wonderful, but it can also make it very hard to find Truth.  Universal, overarching Truth.  Prophets help guide us toward Truth, if we're willing to listen.

Of course, that brings up the fact that no two groups seem able to agree on what Truth is.  (Thus why they're groups rather than one unit.)  So how does one find who is a True Prophet?  As MormonsN we go right back to mysticism; we ask for Divine confirmation.  So, assuming we get confirmation, doesn't that prove we have our own Divine hotline?  So why a Prophet?  But we just had the confirmation, so shouldn't we follow that feeling and follow the Prophet?  Perhaps we didn't feel a confirmation at all, so does that mean the Prophet is false or that maybe we have more searching to do?  Are we asking the right way?  Are we receiving the answer in the way we think we should, or are we getting it in a way we don't want.


Billions of people around the world struggle with these questions and the answers will vary from person to person.  Diversity is hardwired into the system, so it must be part of the Plan, though not the very linear Plan we hear described in lessons.  There is proxy temple work to cover those who pass on without the opportunity to accept or reject the Gospel, but even then... why plan for billions of people to live by mystic connections alone, if they even maintain or acknowledge them?  It results in so many different ways of thinking and feeling and believing and being, some of which go so far aside that even with the presence of a true prophet that they no longer recognize the authority.  Still others get so stuck on prophets of the past that they can't accept prophets in the present and change with them.  This happens even among those who believe in modern prophets.


Still, change does come, because we live in a changing, diverse, multi-cultural, multi-philosophical (is that a term?  Is now!) world.  So having one steady, consistent voice, one keel directing the ship is a lot less frustrating.  Or maybe it's a flagship, and we're all just in little dinghies rowing along in the wake, trying to just end up in the same harbor.  We just happen to be equipped with our own sextant, if we know how to use it to confirm the course.  So you can follow the flag ship, use the sextant, or do both... Or neither!


I'm done musing for today.  I have to get to work, and my brain feels full.

Just late night thoughts...

I can see the waxing gibbous moon hanging in the southwest through an auric veil of fog and the branches of a beloved redwood, and painfully my heart cries for Her... "Mother!"
***
If we're invested in doing the work of God and making sure indeed that the Priesthood authority is never taken from the Earth, wouldn't it make an awful lot of sense for it to be held by the ones who, as a group, are statistically the MOST likely to be devout, the most likely to use it to better humanity?  Haven't we proved ourselves MORE than capable of blessing and laboring even without it?
***
I've held onto the thought for years that men have the Priesthood in order to make them more like women: more devout, more serving, more compassionate and merciful.  I love that idea, but I need to reexamine it.  May the men just failed. Maybe the idea is wrong.  I don't know.

That's all for right now.  Good night.