#Faith without works is dead LDS

[mindfulldsliving]

Salvation and Scripture: A Latter-day Saint Approach to Faith, Works, and Modern Revelation

Faith, grace, and works are often hotly debated topics in Christian theology, and Ephesians 2:8–9 and Galatians 1:8–9 have long been central to these conversations. As Latter-day Saints, we affirm salvation through grace but understand that faith and works together reflect true conversion. Critics often claim these verses contradict our beliefs, but with context and revelation, they align…

[warsofasoiaf]

Any progress on the Joshua Graham analysis? Any chance we could get one on Veronica Santangelo? Thanks!

Joshua Graham is an interesting figure, one that asks significant questions about redemption and fanaticism although the execution at times can be a bit stumbled. Honest Hearts as a DLC explores atonement as a central theme, and this is best seen within Graham. Graham is a man with a dual nature, some of the best and worst aspects of religion wrapped in one man as much as he is wrapped within bandages. The Burned Man, in his lifetime, committed truly atrocious acts, over and over again, as Malpais Legate of Caesar’s Legion. Was Graham always a violent fanatic willing to choose the sword over the olive branch, or did he get swept up like many others in the cult of Edward Sallow who became Caesar?

The Church of Latter-Day Saints, an American Christian revivalist sect centered around Utah, otherwise known as Mormonism, runs throughout Honest Hearts. Daniel and Joshua are from New Canaan, a prosperous trading town whose faith likens them to a distinct culture, where most in-universe actors consider them to be a distinct tribe like the other tribes in Fallout. Even the equipment of Honest Hearts pays homage. The distinct .45 Pistol is clearly an M1911A1, a famous pistol design developed by legendary firearms developer and LDS follower John Moses Browning. LDS, among other tenets, emphasizes missionary work for its members particularly for young men, and Joshua Graham was no exception. Missionary work is no stranger to the Fallout series, with tribes often promulgating their message forward from altruistic message spreading like the Followers of the Apocalypse to sinister plots like the Cathedral preaching the Unity. In theory, there is nothing wrong with this work, the Followers often help provide medical support and other useful increases of standard of living and New Canaan were famous throughout the west for charitable work and medical donations to neighboring tribes. And so, Graham from New Canaan and Sallow from the Followers, along with another Follower called Bill Calhoun. However, when the mission reached the Blackfoot tribe, something strange happened, that changed the course of Graham, Sallow, and the Wasteland itself. Captured by the Blackfoot, Sallow elected to train them in warfare, teaching tactics along with the use and maintenance of firearms. With this knowledge, Caesar turned the Blackfoot from a small tribe conducting light skirmishes and raids for pride and resources into a force practicing total war and terror tactics designed to obliterate the enemy.

“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed. Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” -Joshua Graham

In this moment we can see Graham’s start of darkness and the first hints of the violent man that lurked beneath the mien of a compassionate missionary. Graham elected to stay with Caesar, eagerly joining to become his right-hand man, leading the Blackfoot to war, translating Caesar’s orders and giving tactical decisions that would give rise to his terrifying legend. As the Legion grew, Graham became even more brutal. Brutal training regimens. Public punishments for failure. Entire villages crucified to serve as a warning. Graham continued to rack up bloody success after bloody success, pacifying the tribes with terror and awing them into submission and forcible integration into the Legion, a process that involves physical and sexual slavery along with selective extermination of undesirables and obliteration of tribal identity. Bill Calhoun forms the contrast, as he elected to leave to return to the Followers, while the rest of the mission was massacred. That Graham continued, indulging and growing his infamy suggests that on some level the work was not unwelcome. Even into Honest Hearts Graham can be chilling with his admission that he will exterminate the White Legs, and that killing is a chore much the way cleaning the gutters is. Certainly, the violent environment of the Wasteland would mean a far more violent world than our own contemporary one, but even within the Wasteland, tribes like the Twin Mothers or Graham’s own New Canaanites emphasize community, mercy, and compassion rather than a world composed entirely of raiders and sheep. Graham, however, was not a tactician but a thug enforcing control of his army primarily through fear and submission through the totalitarian cult of Caesar. His attacks were direct but clumsy, using numbers and aggression to win his battles and relying on experienced troops such as centurions and decanii to provide battlefield leadership and identify key points on the field to achieve success. At Hoover Dam, Hanlon used the weaknesses of Graham against him, picking off the veterans he depended on for his fresher conscripts and luring his aggressive demeanor into a trap at Boulder City. Despite all of Graham’s successes, failure in the Legion was not tolerated, so despite all that he had served for Caesar, the dictator had him set on fire and tossed into the Grand Canyon.

“The fire that kept me alive was love. Their love. God’s love.” -Joshua Graham

Graham, however, survived, and this is emphasized both with the themes of the DLC and in the raw mechanics. He has maximum Endurance, his DT is a whopping 50 points, almost half again as powerful as power armor, and his AI refuses to run from any engagement. When Graham pulled himself out of the Grand Canyon, he chalks it up to a ferocious will to survive, but when he returns to New Canaan, he finds that his tribe welcomed him back with open arms, forgiving all the atrocities that he had done to the Arizona tribes. Dumbstruck, Graham retroactively believed that it was not his own will, but the love that his people had for him that kept him alive, that the fire that their love filled him with inside staved off the chill of the grave and burned hotter than the fire that Caesar drenched him with. This dousing of fire and his emergence from the Colorado River was likened to a new baptism. In Christianity, baptism is a ceremonial purification ritual to signify admission into the church, usually done at a young age for children, though the Anabaptist movement postulated that baptism should be done as an adult to signify admission into the church as an act done with conscious consideration and knowledge. To Graham, this baptism in flames was to purge him of the evil he committed as the Malpais Legate, to return him to the flock of the good tribe. Even though he may have wished to be done with his past, his past was not done with him. Caesar had discovered that Graham was alive and wished to kill him, so that not might have been said to have survived the punishment of Caesar. So one of Caesar’s frumentarii, Ulysses of the Twisted Hairs, looked to destroy the powerful city, which he did through using the White Legs’s savagery guided through tactics and equipment, much the way Caesar himself transformed the Blackfoot and attacked the other six tribes to found the Legion.

Graham though, along with fellow New Canaanite missionary Daniel, escaped the sacking of their home to settle in Zion Natural Park, settling among the Dead Horses and Sorrows and resuming duties of their mission to no great success. When the White Legs came to pursue Graham, hoping to use his body as their entry fee into the Legion, Joshua felt that it was time to take back up the pistol to defend the tribes that he had bonded with and drive the shadow of Caesar out of Zion, or so he claims. The conflict begins to boil as more White Legs enter Zion, just as Courier Six enters the canyon and finds all the gasoline spread, waiting for the match to ignite.

Graham’s split desires emphasize the duality of religion. In history, religion has been both a source for comfort and a powerful tool of warfare, and has enabled individuals to acts of great charity and cruelty. With the limited medical knowledge of the tribes and the terrifying beasts that inhabit Zion Canyon from the acid-spitting green gecko to the giant cazadors, Daniel’s medical expertise is undoubtedly welcome. The threat posed by the White Legs is real, and so Joshua’s experience in battle is actually helpful for the Dead Horses (Graham is a terrible tactician against a clever enemy like Hanlon, but he performed well among the other tribes who would presumably have far less tactical training than a Ranger like Hanlon). Yet religion has also been a force for intolerance and a justification for slaughter of the other, and in the Fallout universe, the cult of Caesar justified assimilation and obliteration just as real world religions demanded conversion or death. In real life, of course, religious followers are not all saints or hypocritical sinners, like any other group their members run the gamut. 

Graham is placed within the crucible with the war between the White Legs and the Zion tribals, and what emerges becomes the true element of who he was. If the Grand Canyon was the second baptism, Zion is the third, and perhaps the final (rule of three after all) where Graham is revealed. The conflict within Joshua Graham is resolved with the Courier in the way that most quests in the game are. As always, this is a concession to the nature of the medium; a conflict that resolves without player input ignores the interactive nature of video games, arguably the entire point of developing a game as opposed to books or film is the interactivity of the medium that only games can provide. The Courier can decide to either follow Daniel’s plan, and abandon Zion to the White Legs, or follow Joshua’s plans, and strike back, destroying their leader Salt-Upon-Wounds and ending the threat that the White Legs pose both to the tribes of Zion and to the surrounding area like the ill-fated Happy Trails caravan. 

Abandoning Zion means abandoning the war effort. Joshua supports the evacuation, but he never finds the moment of clarity that he had on his way into the Colorado. He supports the decision, if only because he cannot find the White Legs on his own, but his mission work suffers. The Dead Horses do not even have the slight understanding of the Sorrows when it comes to matters of faith. The Dead Horses end up revering the cult of Joshua Graham, not the tenets of the New Canaanite faith, and become a warrior culture.

“I want to have my revenge. Against him. Against Caesar. I want to call it my own, to make my anger God’s anger. To justify the things I’ve done.” -Joshua Graham

If the Courier elects to fight, then the player turns into Graham’s crisis of conscience. If the Courier becomes the devil, and encourages Joshua to execute Salt-Upon-Wounds, then Graham goes back to depravity, desecrating corpses the way raiders decorate their lairs with dismembered limbs. In this case, Graham truly was the monster of the Malpais Legate all along, a man strong in body but weak of will, eagerly seeking out a person who would encourage his worst actions first in Caesar and then in the Courier. He becomes a lot like Ray McCall from Call of Juarez, a man who believes that he is always upon the path of righteousness because of his continued survival and success. Clearly, if God thought he was wrong, then Graham would be stopped. If Salt-Upon-Wounds is given a fighting chance, then Graham becomes a hardline militant but refrains from the acts of terror that made him such a feared man, then he is the man that he was when he spoke with the Courier; a man who sees righteous killing as a tedious chore, something to be done but not enjoyed, and he acknowledges that the difference is significant even if its only for the benefit of the Sorrows and Dead Horses. If the Courier advises Graham to spare Salt-Upon-Wounds though, then Graham realizes how easily he can slip back into old habits, that his righteous militancy intoxicated him and like any Fiend shooting up Jet and Psycho, he was doing it for the exhilarating high. He admits that the anger and rage was always a part of him, and he justified it through his religion as a means of absolving himself of responsibility and choice. This rationalization is all too common with plenty of people who have committed great cruelties, the deeds become acts of necessity in pursuit of a higher cause, from devastating wars of religion to extermination of undesirables to build a societal utopia. 

However, this moment of resolution, in my view, was a clumsy way of doing it. Why is Salt-Upon-Wounds held sacred in a way that the other White Legs are not? Arguably, Salt-Upon-Wounds is the most culpable, as the White Legs leader is nothing but a raider band predating on others. Similarly, the final boss battle is relegated to something easy; Joshua Graham makes the entire final sequence a cakewalk. Arguably, all stories have moments simplified like this, such is the nature of stories where protagonists’ roles are outsized in the pursuit of simplicity, but redemption arcs are often boiled down to singular moments which often reduces the redemption. There was no accounting to what he did to the victims of Caesar before the game, and that harms it overall.

Honest Hearts, as a DLC, explores themes of family and childhood going to adulthood as much as it explores the themes of atonement. If people want me to discuss that, please ask. And if someone wants a Veronica analysis, again ask.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[mashkaromanova]

Eugene Botkin, 1916. Below is his last ever letter, written not long before he was murdered along with the Russian Imperial Family and three other servants on the 17th July 1918. Dr Botkin started this letter on 9th July 1918 but continued writing it on 17th July, when he heard the knock on his door, which was why letter ended abruptly. It was never finished or mailed. The letter was meant for his brother Alexander

“My dear, good friend Sasha, I am making the last attempt to write a real letter, - at least from here, - although this caveat is completely redundant; I do not think that it is in the cards for me to ever write from anywhere else again, - my voluntary imprisonment here is limited to my existence on this earth. In actuality, I have died – dead to my children, my friends, my work… I have died, but have not been buried yet, or rather was buried alive, - whichever you prefer: the consequences are almost identical, i.e. both one and the other have their negative and positive sides.

If I were literally dead, that is to say, anatomically dead, then according to my faith I would know what my children are doing, would be closer to them and undoubtedly more useful than now. I rest with the dead only civilly, my children may still have hope that we will see each other sometime in this life, while I, other than thinking that I can still be useful to them somehow, do not personally indulge myself with this hope, do not humour myself with illusions, but look directly into the face of unadorned reality.

Although for now, I am as healthy and fat as always, to a point where I feel disgusted every time I look in the mirror. I only console myself with the thought that if it would be easier for me to be anatomically dead, then this means that my children are better off, because when I am separated from them, it always seems to me that the worse off I am, the better off they are. And why do I feel that I would be better off dead, - I will explain this to you with small episodes, which illustrate my emotional being.

The other day, i.e. three days ago, when I was peacefully reading Saltykov-Schedrin, which I often read with pleasure, I suddenly saw the face of my son Yura in diminutive size, as if from far away, but [it was] dead, in a horizontal position, with closed eyes… The last letter from him was on 22 March o[ld] s[tyle], and since that time postal connection from the Caucasus, which even earlier faced great difficulties, probably stopped completely, as neither here nor in Tobolsk had we received anything else from Yura.

Do not think that I am hallucinating, I have had these types of visions before, but you can easily imagine, how it was for me to experience this particular thing in the current situation, which in general is quite comfortable, but to have no chance not only to go to Yura, but not even to be able to find out anything about him. Then, only yesterday, during the same reading, I suddenly heard some word, which to me sounded like ‘Papulya’, which was uttered in Tanyusha’s [his daughter Tatiana] voice, and I almost broke down in sobs.

Again, this was not a hallucination, because this word was uttered, the voice was similar, and not even for a second did I think that this was my daughter speaking, who was supposed to be in Tobolsk: her last postcard was from 23 May – 5 June, and of course these tears would have been purely egotistical, for myself, that I cannot hear and, most likely will never again hear that dear little voice and feel that affection that is so important to me, with which my little children spoiled me so. Again, the horror and sorrow which gripped me during the vision I described were purely egotistical too, since if my son had truly died, then he is happy, but if he is alive, then it is unknown what kind of trials he is going through or is fated to live through. So you see, my dear, that my spirit is cheerful, despite the torment I live through, which I bear, just described to you, and cheerful to a point where I am prepared to do this for many more years…

I am encouraged by the conviction that ‘one who bears all until the end is saved’, and the awareness that I remain loyal to the principles of the 1889 graduates. Before we graduated, while still students, but already close friends who preached and developed the same principals with which we started life, for the most part we did not view them from a religious point of view, I do not even know if too many of us were religious. But each codex of principals is a religion already, and for some it is most likely a conscious thing, while for others subconscious, - as it basically was for me, as this was the time of, not exactly uniform atheism, but of complete indifferentism, in the full sense of the word, - it came so close to Christianity that our full attitude toward it, or at least of many of us, was a completely natural transition. In general, if ‘faith is dead without work’, then ‘work’ cannot exist without faith, and if faith joins any of our work, then this is just due to special favour from God.

I turned out to be such a lucky one, through the path of heavy trials – the loss of my firstborn, the year-and-a-half-old little son Seryozha. Since that time, my codex has been widened and solidified significantly, and I took care that each task was not only about the ‘Academic’, but about the ‘Divine’. This justifies my last decision as well, when without any hesitation I left my children completely orphaned, in order to do my physician’s duty to the end, like Abraham did not hesitate to sacrifice his only son to God on His demand.

I strongly believe that the same way God saved Isaac, He will save my children too and be a father to them. But since I do not know how He will save them, and can only find out about it in the next world, my egotistic torment which I described to you, due to my human weakness, does not lose its torturous severity. But Job did bear more, and my late Misha always reminded me about him, when he was afraid that I, bereft of my dear little children, would not be able to bear it.

No, apparently I can bear it all, whatever God wills to burden me with. In your letter, for which I ardently thank you once more (the first time I tried to convey this in a few lines on a detachable coupon, hopefully you got it in time for the holiday, and also my physiognomy – for the other?), you were interested in my activities in Tobolsk, with a trust precious to me. And so? Putting hand on heart, I can confess to you that there, I tried in every way to take care of ‘the Divine, as the Lord wills’ and, consequently, ‘not to shame the graduates of year 1889′. And God blessed my efforts, and I will have until the end of my days this bright memory of my swan song.

I worked with my last strength, which suddenly grew over there thanks to the great happiness in the life [we had] together with Tanyusha and Glebushka [his son Gleb], thanks to the nice and cheerful climate and relative mildness of winter and thanks to the touching attitude towards me from the townspeople and villagers. As a matter of fact, in its center, albeit a large one, Tobolsk presents as a city that is very picturesquely located, rich with ancient churches, religious and academic institutions, [but] at the periphery it gradually and unnoticeably transitions into a real village. This circumstance, along with noble simplicity and the feeling of self-respect of Siberians, in my opinion gives the relationships among the residents and not visitors, the specific character of directness, naiveté and benevolence, which we always valued and which creates the atmosphere necessary to our souls.

In addition, various news spreads around the city very fast, the first lucky incidents for which God helped me be of use brought out such trust towards me, that the number of those wanting to get my advice grew with each day, up to my sudden and unexpected departure. Turning to me were mostly those with chronic illnesses, those who were already treated again and again, [and] sometimes, of course, those who were completely hopeless. This gave me the opportunity to make appointments for them, and my time was filled for a week or two ahead in each hour, as I was not able to visit more than six - seven, in extreme cases eight patients per day: since all these cases needed thorough review and much and much pondering.

Who was I called to besides those ill within my specialty?! To the insane, to those asking to be treated for drunkenness; [they] brought me to a prison to see a kleptomaniac, and with sincere joy I remember that the poor wretch of a lad, who was bailed out by his parents on my advice (they are peasants), behaved decently the rest of my stay… I never denied anyone, as long as the supplicants accepted that certain illnesses were completely beyond the limits of my knowledge. I only refused to go to those recently fallen ill if, of course, they needed emergency help, since, on the one hand I did not want to get in the way of regular physicians of Tobolsk, which is very lucky to have them in the capacity and most importantly, quality of relations.

They are all very knowledgeable and experienced people, excellent comrades and so responsive that the Tobolsk public is used to sending a horse or cabby to the doctor and receive him immediately. More valuable is their patience towards me, who did not have the ability to fulfill these types of requests, but on the contrary, was forced to make them wait a long time. It’s true that soon it became commonly known that I never refuse anyone and keep my word sacredly, a patient could wait for me with peace of mind.

But if their illness did not allow them to wait, then the patients went to local physicians, which always made me happy, or to Doctor Derevenko, who also possessed their vast trust, or they headed to the hospital, and this way it would happen that when I arrived at a time of prescheduled appointment, I did not find the patient there, but that was always convenient, since most of the time my schedule was so extensive that I wasn’t able to accomplish everything, at times debts formed, which I paid off when I did not find someone there.

To see [patients] at the house where I was staying was inconvenient, and anyway there was no room, nevertheless from 3 until 4 ½ - 5, I was always home for our soldiers, whom I saw in my room, the walk-through room, but since only our own [people] passed though there, it did not discomfort them. During the same hours, my town patients came to see me too, either for a refill of a prescription or to make an appointment. I was forced to make exceptions for peasants who came to see me from villages tens or even hundreds of versts away (in Siberia they don’t pay attention to distance), and who were in a hurry to get back. I had to see them in a small room before the bathroom, which was a bit out of the way, where a large chest served as an examining table.

Their trust was especially touching to me, and their confidence, which never betrayed them, that I will treat them with the same attention and affection as any other patient, not only as an equal but as a patient who has every right to my care and services, gave me joy. Those who were able to spend the night, I would visit at the inn early the next morning. They always tried to pay, but since I followed our old codex, of course I never accepted anything from them, so, while I was busy in an izba with a patient, they hurried to pay my cabby. This surprising courtesy, to which we are not used to at all in large cities, was occasionally highly pertinent, as at times I was not in a position to visit patients due to lack of funds and fast-growing cab costs.

Therefore, for our mutual benefit, I widely took advantage of another local tradition and asked those who had a horse, to send it for me. This way, the streets of Tobolsk saw me riding in wide bishop’s sleighs, as well as behind beautiful merchant trotters, but most often drowning in hay in most ordinary burlap. My friends were equally varied, which perhaps was not to everyone’s liking, but it was no concern of mine. To Tobolsk’s credit I must add that there was no direct evidence of this at all, and only one indirect, which in addition was not unquestionable.

One evening the husband of one of my female patients came to see me with a request to visit her right away, because she had strong pains (in the stomach). Luckily, I was able to fulfill his wish, albeit at a cost to another patient, for whom I did not schedule a visit, but rode with him to his house in a cab in which he came to get me. On the way he starts to grumble at the cabby, that he is not going the right way, to which the latter reasonably respon [letter ends abruptly].”

[coghive]

[Music] Mercy - The Rock Music

“Mercy,” the emotive new worship anthem from Salt Lake City-based collective The Rock Music, is now available. Produced by Sam Hart (Aaron Shust) and co-penned by Hart along with The Rock Music’s Steele Croswhite, Thomas Scribner and Caleb Yetton, “Mercy” proclaims the love, power, forgiveness and grace of “the Savior that sin never saw coming.” Featuring vocals from The Rock Music’s veteran worship leaders Steele Croswhite, Kim Croswhite and Caleb Yetton, the song has been readily embraced by The Rock Church’s Salt Lake City-area congregation. An intimate and yearning response of worship, coupled with an unwavering confidence in the greatness of God—signature themes throughout the collective’s extensive discography of corporate worship offerings—“Mercy” stands poised to resonate with listeners everywhere.

“Over the years we have shared dozens and dozens of new songs with our congregation, and though each is special in its own way, we have come to recognize when a song uniquely connects with the church,” shares Steele Croswhite. “‘Mercy’ is definitely one of those songs. Exactly why it has spoken to our church so powerfully is only known by Jesus, but I sense that people see themselves reflected in the lyrics as receivers of God’s mercy.” “At times we have all been burdened, broken or struggling in our faith,” he adds. “Each of us has been weary, felt condemned, or filled with worry. The church singing together that Jesus’ light ‘shatters the darkness,’ that His mercy ‘binds up the broken,’ and that our sin can’t compare to our Savior Jesus Christ, has been a wonderful encouragement for our entire congregational family.” For two decades The Rock Music has been dedicated to writing, recording and performing Christ-centered music without compromise. The collective—helmed by singer/songwriter, worship leader and pastor Steele Croswhite—has released 13 full-length recordings and seven EPs. In addition, selections from The Rock Music are showcased on the DREAM Records releases God’s Not Dead: A Light In Darkness and Samson, compilations featuring songs from and inspired by the motion pictures. Mercy - The Rock Music https://youtu.be/-C-CDWwc558 The Rock Music is a ministry of The Rock Church, a suburban Salt Lake City congregation on a mission to share the Hope and grace of Christ in Utah—a state with among the fewest Bible-believing Christians in the country. Through outreach efforts in the community, including to those from Mormon/LDS backgrounds, the church seeks to work together, in unity, to reach the world for Jesus Christ. Signing his first record deal at the age of 21, Steele Croswhite began his career as the lead vocalist, songwriter and guitarist for the acclaimed rock band Silvercrush. While the group earned Billboard chart success and toured with such artists as Sheryl Crow, Foo Fighters and Maroon 5, Croswhite’s life was falling apart. He drifted from his Christian upbringing, lured by the trappings of fame and reeling from his father’s untimely death. Encouraged by his sister to visit The Rock Church, it was there Croswhite experienced the true grace of Jesus Christ and rededicated his life to the Lord. Today, he serves as a pastor and worship leader at the church. Read the full article

[blackmormonmed]

I once saw a bird fall dead from a limb without once ever feeling sorry for itself -Yeats

The above quote opens my essay in order to inform the reader that what I write should be read with the understanding that my experiences described made me who I am today at fifty years old, and not be taken as a sympathetic excuse.  

I will begin as Copperfield might, and then I was born - in Oakland California 1969, 105th and east 14th street Sobrante Park, a far cry from the beauty and kind community of Utah. My struggles were not uncommon to what one would see in a movie based on the inner-city ghettos of America.  I cannot single myself out because so many youths shared my circumstances and worse across the globe. By the grace of Heavenly Father, government aid and working after school, I was known then as a latch-key-kid.  My mother, with the help of the money I earned, was able to manage me attending high school.  My love of education was immeasurable, I wanted above all things to leave East Oakland, better known as the killing fields, and chase my dreams of becoming a Physician. The only way that I would be able to achieve this was through an athletic scholarship, as that was the only way that I knew of in the 1980s as a road to a young black youth’s exodus. I did not receive a scholarship, but that did not diminish my dreams.  Though the financial opportunity was not present, I knew that I could overcome it. I began working in a salvage yard before I finished high school receiving my General Education Diploma which was an immensely proud moment for my mother. After several years saving as much as I could here and there, I managed to save enough for my first semester of Junior college in the mid-1990s.  My dreams could now come true. I would swim for the college team and gain my scholarship via that avenue. My focus was swimming and not where it should have been, academics. I only saw the junior college as a springboard to a university where I could shine and pursue my educational dreams, I was young and foolish and flat out stupid to waste that opportunity. While attending the Junior College I fell in love with the woman that would become my wife and before I could see my dreams through to completion, my daughter Margo would be born. She was the most amazing thing that would now be my focus, perhaps my dreams could be hers as once my mother's dreams had once become mine. I would have been the first in my family to walk across the graduation stage of high school, and now Margo would be the first to have that honor but I vowed on her birthday it would not be the dream of high school graduation but the higher stage of college.

Margo grew as did my family’s need for financial stability. I sought employment elsewhere and decided that whatever job I would find I would do it with excellence as if it were my dream, as the fantasy of becoming a Physician slowly began to darken on my horizon.   I entered the Motion picture industry as a Production Assistant, worked my way up to Boom Operator and then the head of the department Sound Mixer.  

Fortune would shine on me years later after starting a conversation with a physician at the University of California Los Angeles Johnson Cancer Institute, Dr. Naismith. He was fascinated with the films I had worked on, and when I told him of my lost aspirations of medical school, he invited me to come by his lab if I ever wanted to learn a bit about science in my spare time.  I jumped at the chance. I wasn’t a student, nor had I had any formal training. I convinced him to let me clean his lab after work.  I soon was taught some basic laboratory techniques, Pipetting, western blotting, and how centrifuges were used, thus began my journey as did my love for science reborn. My adventure of learning was cut short once again by the need for family stability. The physical exhaustion of working twelve plus hour days, family and two jobs took its toll.  I had to choose the job that actually paid, but I will be forever grateful for the glimpse into the world of microbiology provided by the kindness of Dr. Naismith. Over several years of extremely hard work the team, I worked alongside achieved the film industry's highest honor of the Academy Award for best sound in a motion picture. There was money, I moved my mother from East Oakland to live out her last days with my wife and daughter. My employment kept me on the road most of the year, which I did with a heavy heart and regret not being able to spend the last days of her life with my mother and my family, and that this was nowhere near what I thought my life would be.  The strain of my mother’s debilitating illness and death, along with my absence lead over time to the end of my marriage.  This started a downward spiral in my life leading to a seventeen-year addiction to Cocaine.  

...

[exmormonmusings]

My journey out of Mormonism

    Here goes, first original post from me. I would like to start this blog off by giving you some background. When I left the LDS church, I was 13 years old and it wasn’t exactly my decision. I had been happily lds my whole life, my parents were raised lds and as far as I knew everyone in my extended family was lds except a few random cousins. My major goals in life were to do good in school and better in church so that I could have a fulfilling, well-balanced life, spiritually and physically. I wanted to go on a mission after graduating high school because I thought it would make everyone proud and I reveled in the thought that I could bring people into the truth and save their souls. I loved young womens and girls camp and I had done baptisms for the dead with my cousin. When my ward went on trek, I was only 11 and was the youngest to go as my birthday was the day before the cutoff. I paid my tithing, didn’t swear, and made sure to surround myself with good mormon friends. I was pretty much your textbook, cookie-cutter mormon teenager.

    The summer after seventh grade, I noticed a few things that should’ve tipped me off that something was wrong. First of all was that my dad would always leave church early, usually right after sacrament meeting. My mom made the excuse that he just needed to get something to eat and with my dad being a type one diabetic, I believed her. I did think it was weird that he hadn’t had this problem before but I just justified it by saying that maybe it was because we switched to a later church time. Besides, I couldn’t really complain because my dad leaving early always meant that lunch was ready right when we got home. The second thing that happened was that I overheard my parents watching a show at night that talked about joseph smith being a liar, a deceiver and a blasphemer. This really shocked me for a moment and I thought “is my dad struggling with his testimony?” But, being the solid-faithed mormon that I was, I decided that I would just have to help him out. So I started looking through the book of mormon for scriptures confirming joseph smith’s validity. Not seriously though as I figured that sacrament meeting talks and other church activities would set him straight eventually. However, a few nights later me and a couple of my siblings saw my dad wearing actual underwear to bed instead of his garments. I know it sounds really silly but it scared us. It hadn’t happened before. After asking him about it, he got kind of angry and told us not to worry about it. I tried to comfort my siblings and myself that maybe his garments had holes in them and he was in the process of getting new ones, and it worked. I tried to ignore the feeling that something was off and thus remained, for the most part, happily oblivious to the revelation that would change my life forever. 

   Finally, one Sunday in July, two weeks after my thirteenth birthday, it happened. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at first.We went to church, dad went home early. At church, my Sunday school teachers asked a question: had our parents borne their testimonies to us recently. They asked us to raise our hands if our parents had borne their testimonies to us in the last week. A couple hands. The last month. Couple more hands. The last year. Every hand except mine went up. I thought about it and I realized that they hadn’t. Everyone turned to look at me but my teachers quickly said that’s ok, that means this is a great opportunity for you to ask them to. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. I realized I hadn’t heard my parents speak positively about the church or get up in sacrament meeting talks or anything like that for quite some time. When church was over, my mom seemed really...deflated. Nervous, sad, just...not herself. She told us she had something to tell us when we got home. I got a really bad feeling but I tried to shake it off. When we got home my mom called us in for a family meeting. My sister Kayla, ten at the time, wanted to change out of her church clothes first but my mom said we needed to do this now. I thought that someone had died. And in a way, I guess they did. But we all sat down, all seven of us. My parents, me(13), Kayla(10), Alayna (8 and recently baptized), Carly(5-6) and Nicolai (3-4). My mom tried to talk first but she ended up crying. I really thought that someone had died. One of my mom’s sisters or brothers, maybe my grandparents...I didn’t know but it seemed like my mom was having a really hard time with it. But then my dad asked us if we had noticed anything weird recently. Suddenly all the things I mentioned before flooded back to me but I didn’t want to mention any of them in case they made my dad angry, especially about overhearing my dad watch that show. So I just shook my head. My siblings didn’t either. My dad’s voice broke when he said “no? none of you?”. And that’s when I knew something was seriously very wrong. I think I knew what was coming for a long time but my brain wouldn’t let me think about it. Then they said the words. “We don’t think the church is true anymore.” This all may seem very over dramatic to you reading this but I can’t even convey how much this changed my life. I never would’ve thought we’d leave, never could’ve imagined all the lies and horrors wrapped up behind my “one true church”. Those words put me in shock. I started crying without really being aware of what was going on. I tried to fight it, tried to keep convincing myself that the church was true but all the doubts and unanswered questions I had over the years all came back to me and I just broke. Most of my siblings were too young to really understand what this meant and Kayla tried to get us to stop crying by making jokes. “At least we wont have to wear these awful clothes anymore” “Hey, now we don’t have to listen to people talk and be hungry for three hours!”. My parents told us that if we wanted to keep going to church they wouldn’t stop us but they also wouldn’t come with us if we went. I considered continuing to go for a while but I was scared people would ask me why my parents didn’t come anymore or judge me because my parents left. I also decided I needed to hear what made my parents leave first. After I heard what they said, I didn’t feel the need to go to church anymore.

  The summer after was mostly filled with questions. Did this mean I could drink coffee, did this mean God didn’t exist, did this mean that we were bad people now? It turned out that a couple of my aunts and uncles on my mom’s side had been out of the church for a while and they started the chain reaction that led to my parents leaving. The rest of the summer wasn’t that bad. It was starting school again that really made things hard. 

I think I’ll end this post here though, if you want to hear more about my journey and experiences out of mormonism, follow me or comment. If not, thanks for reading and I hope I didn’t bore you. If you have any questions for me or suggestions on what you’d like to see me post, feel free to ask/leave them. Until next time,

Maryn

[pansexualpandion]

Okay first, an aside: DRASNIAN?????? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA MY PEOPLE!!!!

Onto your questions. As a little bit of groundwork, we are not a Trinitarian church, we believe that God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost/Spirit are three separate and distinct beings, and they form what we call the Godhead.

Heavenly Mother is God's wife. She helped create our spirits, and holds the "top slot" in the Godhead with her husband.

Best way to answer this one is with the 8th Article of Faith: "We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God." The reason that the Book of Mormon doesn't have the same addition is that we believe that it was translated by divine power, meaning God spoke to Joseph, essentially saying "this is what Nephi meant when he wrote this."

If I found someone dying on the street who wanted to know God, then I would tell them to find the happiest people on the other side they could, and to learn from them. I would then refer the missionaries to their family so that the person would have a higher chance of getting his temple work done, as we cannot do it for someone whose family is against it being done. This is actually how our church answers the question of "what about the people who never heard the gospel in this life?" They are taught in the next life, and we do a proxy baptism.

I never went on one due to depression and some other things, but in essence we go out and teach the gospel and serve the people in our mission zone (I think that's the right word?) We go generally in pairs, but you might see groups of 3 when a new missionary is being trained.

Christ is the Only Begotten of the Father, so... yes. He was both human and divine. Now that he has been resurrected he is all divine, with a perfect body. He had to be both human and divine to perform the Atonement (like 80% that's not an LDS only term?). Divine so that he could suffer all the pains and sins of humanity in Gethsemane, and human so he could die on the cross to complete the Atonement.

We are faith and works based. We believe you need both. As James says, "faith without works is dead." The opposite is also true, works without faith are dead. You must act in faith, as well as acting on your faith.

I hope this answered your questions!

@lds tumblr (from a christian)

- what/who is the heavenly mother?

- is the Bible (old and new testaments) 100% true or is it used partially?

- how does a non-believer of your faith become an honored Mormon in the after life? Like, if you saw someone dying on the street and asked you how they could find/know God before they die in 60 seconds, what would you say?

- what do your missions consist of?

- is Jesus man or God?

- are you works-based?

[macabreerudition]

My name is Paper Ghostie and I’m a Formon.

Ghostie Rants On: Her Experience as a Mormon.

So, as a popular blog on here, @just-shower-thoughts, has helped be realize, not all water-based introversion is brilliant. But, there is some that make you rant about things in your past. I was marveling at how often I have friends in my work group who are kind enough to offer me rides home

It led to my realization that a lot has changed in the past few years: 

the rides from my coworkers wouldn’t be allowed to be even considered

my relationship with my fiancé just wouldn’t do

my dress for my wedding would be scandalous 

even my daily language would be wrong 

Well, that was just a mere six years ago, due to the style of faith I was following at the time: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. If you are interested I have linked the English version and the language selection page of their official website. Link 1 and Link 2

Below is mostly a rant, as the secondary title indicates. I will be trying to keep the facts straight and will make corrections as needed. So, I know there are going to be people who will call me bigoted (if I get any views on this, honestly). I know that I’m going to be told I have to be more accepting of different views. I get it, I really do.I will be mostly presenting my views mixed with facts I have learned during and since I have ostracized myself from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Notes to consider before reading past the Keep reading link:

The faith will be referred to sarcastically several different forms. But, I will strictly be speaking about my experience with the LDS faith.

My experience with this sect of Christianity fell between August of 2011 and mostly ended around November or December of 2013.¹

While I would like to say that these negative points and opinions are few and far between, many other former members agree.

My living situation and mental state have both drastically improved.¹

A lot of the humor in the initial rant is sarcastic and simply “done”.

The following is the initial rant that I wrote that started this post and I wanted to not only address a lot of the errors that are in the rant but also to explain my own humor in this situation. :

I was wondering: how is it the LDS faith is an actual thing. For fuck's sake, they do proxy baptisms for the dead and the believe Jesus fucking Christ, himself, (and a buncha other dead folks, I suppose) is preaching to the dead in the spirit world to spread the "restored" word to these dead people.² So *if* these people choose to accept Christ into their... afterlives??? that they can have the baptism bit already done for them. Fucking weird, right? 

Then, we have the fucking proxy weddings that are held so deceased couples can /correctly/ be married in the Temple™. (<--- Yes, I am placing a trademark on that and I’ll go over why later.) And, this ceremony can be performed with two full-blooded siblings as the proxies for the bride and groom...³

What in the Sam Hill... how can this be a thing?! How can someone with, like, two fully functioning brain cell that rub together, can look at that and go, "that's not fucking weird at all; in fact, we consider that sacred.." 

What?! What??? 

How? How can you--- I went through that shit for two years... acting like I'm okay with all of it. Ya know? And, I still cannot, for the life of me, get how people think it's not only peachy but REVERED to do these ceremonies. I was in the fucking heated dunk tank that was on the backs of 12 oxen to represent the Mormon settlers blah blah blah. ⁴ 

 AND I CANNOT SWIM AND HAVE A FEAR OF DROWNING! But did that stop them from wanting me to do my "duty" as a Sister™(Trademark is totally needed here) of the Church™? N O p E! 

So, first, let us address the superscripts that I’m sure you all have noticed.

¹ I will be making a post if asked about addressing not only how I came into that situation but why I was willing to get into that situation.

² This was actually never fully clarified to me when I asked questions. And in the interest and pursuit of keeping my then-current home life more tolerable, I chose to act like I accepted the vague answers I received.

 ³ The family I lived with consisted of my best friend, her mother, and her maternal uncle. The uncle and mom had performed a wedding for the deceased for a pair of their ancestors. A video on baptisms for the dead and, honestly, an interesting article about a woman used as an example for an eternal marriage. Finally, another article on the same subject of Eternal Marriage. 

⁴ The twelve oxen mentioned were actually a representation of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. I still believe the oxen are a nod to the fact that oxen would have been a popular animal sought after for the Mormon settlers’ long journey.

Am I completely right? No, absolutely not. I was in the wrong to even act as though I believed in this honestly sacred belief only to abandon it as immediately as the opportunity came to me. I should have been more honest to not only the family I lived with but also my friends and family back home. Do I regret posing as a Mormon for two years in the long run? No. I do not believe that I did terrible deeds a member of the church. In fact, the church taught me a lot of things that I don’t believe I would have learned without this experience and for that I am very grateful.

That’s my rant for now. I do still dearly cherish my best friend and the people I met through the church, but I simply cannot agree with some of the fundamental values that support this institution. I may, again, if requested, go over what are my issues with the church, but for now... I think this will be good for now. I mean, I’m sure we’re about at the third page.

[mormonmonastery]

Mormons: Let’s Put Our Money Where Our Mouth Is When It Comes to Religious Freedom

The LDS Church talks some big talk when it comes to religious freedom. It’s a BIG DEAL for us, so big that we have an entire section of our church’s official website devoted to it. It’s been a recurring theme in conference ever since I was old enough to pay attention to them. Often, I let all that big talk go in one ear and out the other, especially since it was too often a dogwhistle for some evangelical dogmas I really didn’t want my church to adopt. But today? Today I truly awoke to see religious freedom in my country threatened as it never has been in my lifetime.

I don’t need to explain the Muslim Ban the temporary resident of 1600 Penn executive-ordered into existence yesterday--if you don’t believe it, go and watch the news! What I do need to ask you is to ACT in defense of religious freedoms for our Muslim brothers and sisters who worship the God of Abraham alongside us, instead of simply talking that big talk. As the apostle James wrote, faith without works is a dead and useless faith not worthy of the name. Let us not let our church’s historic commitment to the First Amendment, a legacy that stretches all the way back to Joseph Smith, be dead and useless. 

An easy way to keep that faith alive is to donate to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is doing amazing work on the ground setting up legal aid for those detained at the airports because of their religion and challenging the constitutionality of the executive order behind the Muslim Ban. Any amount that you can donate will help them fund the professionals who have taken on this great work. If you can afford to set a recurring monthly donation to help them fight on as times grow even darker, than by all means do. I would also encourage those who are able to participate in local protests  against “the great wickedness one very wicked man can cause to take place among the children of men” (Alma 46:9). 

May God bless and protect us in these troubling times by allowing us the strength to lift each other up.       

[teamshelvey-blog]

february 2017.

shout-out to shay and kris! watching your friends become parents is truly the very very coolest thing. sharing in their joys and struggles is an honor and i am inspired by them in so many ways. also shoutout to all my other friends-that-are-now-moms that i love and adore.

misha’s annual galentine’s day bash! these women are NEAT. evenings like this are such a treat, i love spending time with my girls.

family day 2017 out in canmore. a weird and wonderful bunch.

makes me laugh, rips hair out of my body, produces very cute babies, and is generally just an all-around kind and genuine and wonderful human. life is significantly brighter with you around, my dear.

evidence of said production of cute babies. i love photos of messy kids.

M: general life update: i started a new job in stroke rehab (so pumped to be back in the therapy world), my second semester at u of c is going as well as one could hope (i actually have one really amazing prof, finally), and kyler and i basically have opposite schedules and we need to be better at intentionally building into our relationship because our time together is so limited. i’m so glad he is my dude. he works so hard and makes me laugh all the time and is genuinely a fantastic friend. if you want to know any more about the general life stuff, let me know! moving on :)

last year at my church’s epiphany service (click through for more info if you aren’t sure what that is), they handed out these paper stars, and when you picked up a star, there would be a word on it, and that word would be one that you could focus on for the coming year. last year my word was “vision”. at the time i didn’t really think about it and just stuck it in the journal i was using. a couple days ago i found this old journal and when i picked it up and started flipping through the filled pages i found the star. without even realizing it, i feel like 2016 actually was a year of vision (even though i completely forgot about the star). i spent a lot of time thinking about the future and also about how to live a meaningful life right now. as 2017 began and i attended another epiphany service, my word for the year ended up being “steadfast” which i think falls really well in line after vision. when you feel inspired by an idea or you have the desire to do something new or change your life or the lives of those around you, that steadfast faithfulness and integrity is what will carry you through. it’s not enough to simply have the dream. if you want to see anything to fruition, you need to be steadfast in your dedication to making it happen. one of my biggest desires is to foster genuine relationships and create intentional community wherever i go. and this month i am so incredibly thankful for who surrounds me. god has placed me in the midst of such a ridiculously huge number of amazing human beings. i truly don’t know what a life without such a strong community is like, and i do not want to ever take that for granted. this year i want to focus on being an encouraging and faithful friend. i feel like one of the most important things we can do in life is just show up, and remind people that they’re loved. and whether a person is part of my current community or not, i want my eyes to be open and my heart to be ready to encourage them and support them wherever they’re at. i want the space i occupy to be an open space where people can let go of the armor they hold around their hearts and be honest and vulnerable, knowing they will be received with grace and compassion and love. out of this heart (and some discussions with a dear friend), rice night was born. once a month we gather as fellow humans, regardless of race/religion/ethnicity/gender/culture, to have a simple meal and to find sincere connection and inspire and challenge each other to live with intention. if you’re reading this and i haven’t invited you personally yet, but you are interested, feel free to reach out to me!

K:  I have not written in a while, as I feel like the last few months have been unbloggable. Sometimes monotony is hard to write about, and then I question how deep one ought to go on a blog like this. Anyways... this past month I had the privilege of meeting with some Mormon missionaries. I have met with several sets over the last few years and I take every chance I get to meet with them. A friend had expressed some discomfort in meeting with them, as it was a new experience for her and I offered to tag along because frankly, I enjoy it. I enjoy speaking with people about what they believe and the missionaries are so kind and open to meeting to discuss the deeper things of life. Well, most deep things. Within Mormonism you will find one of the most fascinating sub-cultures in the world. As much as I love talking with them, there is a definite downside. They present their truth so boldly, so confidently, and with such joy. But it feels so empty. For when one attempts to press upon this great truth, to poke it, to prod it, to try and find out what it is truly made of, it withers before your very eyes. Which to the un-religious may seem ridiculous. After all, this is coming from someone who claims that our world was made by an infinitely complex, infinitely perfect being in whose existence is revealed who we are, where we come from, and how we ought to live. How do you prove that this invisible, supernatural God exists? I suppose what I am trying to get at is in Christianity you can have a conversation. You can ask questions, you can disagree on some things and still pursue the same God as someone else. Christianity is defensible. Christianity can explain reality in a rational way. It is certainly still faith, but it seems far more likely to be true than any other worldview available, especially its would-be successor, Mormonism. The Mormon church thrives and survives on one very simple but powerful premise: If you read the book of Mormon, God will reveal it to be true to you. This truth is most often described as a feeling of a burning in the bosom. The problem with this is that God revealing truth to an individual is not exclusive to Mormons. Some Muslims would express the same sentiment about the Quran. I myself have felt this burning, whilst reading a C. S. Lewis book. The feeling is not exclusive to the LDS (Mormon) church. If that feeling alone is to be identified as the sole indicator of truth, then God is a liar, because he is clearly contradicting himself by affirming just about what anyone wants to be affirmed, or even things that are unrelated to him. Or you can argue that they are feeling wrong, which seems a very difficult thing to be certain of. When addressing the truth claims of a worldview, I find it helpful to think of a worldview like a house of cards. The truth claims must line up and fit together, otherwise parts of the house will collapse. Depending on how important the card, or how much apart of the foundation it is, its collapse brings the house down with it. Take Christianity for example. In order for the Christian house of cards to stand there are several things that MUST be true, otherwise it is a false worldview. One of these foundations is the fact that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Without this there is no true Christianity (or Mormonism for that matter). Another foundation would be that Jesus rose from the dead. If we found the burial site of Christ, our faith would be false and our trust misplaced (1 Cor 15:14). In order for Christianity to be true, God must exist. A supernatural world around us must exist. These are a few examples of essential parts of the foundation of Christianity. They are all quite defensible, and certainly (I think) not unreasonable things to believe. For those holding a LDS faith, all of the aforementioned pillars must be true, as well as a whole new set. For example, after Christ rose from the dead, the newly established Christian church falls into a state of apostasy after the apostles die, and lose the status and authority of the true church of God. Also, people from Israel had to sail to North America and become a bustling civilization for a time. The book of Mormon has to be an inspired work from God, Joseph Smith had to have been a legitimate prophet. All of these claims, ALL have to be true or the whole faith falls flat on its face. No feeling can contradict the nature of reality. This is where the LDS faith begins to trouble me. When any objection to any of these claims is made, most often I have found that there is no defense offered. I think the reason a lot of people view the LDS faith as a cult is this blind faith. I am not trying to say that faith is a bad thing, I myself have faith. Christian living can be seen as 3 essential things working in unison: Loving God with your heart (soul), mind and hands. Having sincere belief is an admirable thing, but at the end of the day what you put your faith in must be true. No amount of sincere belief can change the nature of reality or what is true. Through my exposure to the LDS faith I have witnessed amazing community. I have witnessed people who love God with all of there heart and hands. But it is the mind that troubles me. There is a reason that no one outside of mormon scholars consider the stories in the book of Mormon to be true. There is a reason that when the Book of Mormon talks about the Israelites living in the Americas having horses (long before the Spanish first brought them over as is universally understood), people simply do not see it as being true. There are so many damning reasons to reject Mormonism that when pushed on these topics they shut conversation down, or simply stop listening to you. When first confronted with the truth of the Mormon worldview, one thing became very obvious to me. If this was true, I need to be a Mormon. If it is not, they need to become Christians. One cannot be true while the other is as well. When talking with holders of just about every other worldview I find that there can be conversation. We can challenge each other, learn from each other, and actually dialogue. I am yet to find a Mormon that can truly hold a conversation without having to fall back on their testimony when they read the book of Mormon; it is so difficult to have these conversations. It is a funny thing to talk to a Mormon in the process of converting you, especially as a Christian. What can they offer me? I already have Jesus. Part of the reason Christians reject the LDS faith is that the idea of Christianity needing a restoration or having a loss of authoity seems ridiculous. We cannot see it. When looking back on the last 2000 years of Church, you will see some troubling things. You will find death, destruction, and sin. You will find separation and heartbreak. However if you look closely enough, you will find God. You will find men and women, lit afire by the Spirit of God, healing people, even raising people from the dead. You will find people who looked at Jesus, fell in love, and changed the world as a result. What greater authority will you grant me? What is greater than direct relationship with God? How can you beat being consumed by God himself? If you have something greater than that, you can keep it, I have no use for it. I wish the Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses would join forces, so we could have less versions of the "true" church running around. The idea that the truth has been lost is not a new one, we are just still waiting for a compelling enough of a reason to actually consider this idea viable. Whenever these discussions come up I fear how my tone or demeanor comes across. Disagreeing with people or challenging beliefs often comes across as an attack. I think that in proper delivery and context it should be understood as love. I love truth. If I am challenging what you believe I am not doing it to upset you, but rather I am showing love. Or at least that is my intention. I think one of the greatest things we can do for eachother is tell the truth. Whether you like it or not, some of us are wrong. I might be wrong. That is the way reality is. Let me be clear that I love Mormons. I hold their communities in high respect, they do community very well. I just believe their view of the world is missing some things, so I challenge them where I disagree with them.

[prosperopedia]

The Mormon Church’s Financial Responsibility Should Be Emulated, Not Criticized

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about how much money the Mormon Church has in its possession after an accusation came out from former church members and twin brothers David and Lars Nielsen. David was a former employee of church-owned investment firm Ensign Peak Advisors. The claim from the Nielsens is that the church is essentially too wealthy, and that its members don’t understand that the church is not using their charitable contributions, namely tithing and fast offerings, for the right purposes.

That accusation is dead wrong for lots of reasons. A brilliant point by point rebuttal of the allegations was published in the Deseret News shortly after they were made.

The title of the Washington Post headline is immediately condemning: Mormon Church has misled members on $100 billion tax exempt investment fund.

That sentence is bold enough to make one assume that a judge and jury had investigated, a trial was held, and the church was found guilty as charged. As I’ve read comments online of people responding to that story and other versions of it, it’s clear that too many people believe the story the Nielsens are using for their own publicity and potential financial gain.

As a lifelong member of the Mormon Church (it’s actually The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but we’ve been called Mormons for a long time, and we’re sometimes referred to as Latter-day Saints or LDS), I feel a responsibility to weigh in on this debate about whether the church has too much money and whether it’s using the money we contribute to the church through tithes and other offerings for worthy and appropriate purposes.

Let me just say that I think I represent by far the popular opinion of tithe-paying members of the LDS Church in saying that I’m confident that the church uses the funds for what they’re supposed to be used for. Let me also say that you will not find a group of men with more integrity than you will in the LDS Church’s governing body, including our prophet and president, Russell M. Nelson, along with others who serve alongside him in determining the spiritual and financial direction of the church.

Understanding the potential damage to the church and its mission from insidious and purposely deceptive misinformation spread as widely and quickly as the Washington Post is able to broadcast because of its extensive reach, those men who lead the Mormon Church promptly responded to the accusations. This is what they said.

We take seriously the responsibility to care for the tithes and donations received from members. The vast majority of these funds are used immediately to meet the needs of the growing Church including more meetinghouses, temples, education, humanitarian work and missionary efforts throughout the world. Over many years, a portion is methodically safeguarded through wise financial management and the building of a prudent reserve for the future. This is a sound doctrinal and financial principle taught by the Savior in the Parable of the Talents and lived by the Church and its members. All Church funds exist for no other reason than to support the Church’s divinely appointed mission.

Claims being currently circulated are based on a narrow perspective and limited information. The Church complies with all applicable law governing our donations, investments, taxes, and reserves. We continue to welcome the opportunity to work with officials to address questions they may have.

I absolutely believe their response to be genuine and accurate. Not necessarily because I’ve seen the church’s accounting books and had a chance to review how each dollar is used. But because I’ve had a lifetime of opportunity of being involved in the church and its efforts to spread the gospel, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, help people get on their feet and become self-reliant, and generally follow the Savior’s example and admonition to lift people. In fact, I’ve been bold enough to assert in the past to many people, and I’ll say it here now: without the efforts and influence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this world would be a much different place in a way that it would never want to experience. The positive influence of the 15 million member organization is felt in ways that few give it credit for, including David and Lars Nielsen.

My Own Experience

Over the years that I’ve been a member of the LDS Church, I have paid hundreds of thousands 0f dollars in tithing and other offerings to the church. I’ve never once felt misled about what’s being done with my contributions.

I’m satisfied in knowing that I can take my family to worship in a simple but comfortably reverent building on Sundays, that there is air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. I’m grateful that there is an organ, a piano, and hymnbooks to use for worshiping through music. I’m grateful for classrooms, chairs, and “cultural halls” (places to play basketball and socialize). I’m thanking for temples where advanced instruction and meaningful revelation is received.

With that being said, I certainly understand that not every dollar contributed is used in the most perfect of ways. In a church full of imperfect people, admittedly including those who are the highest leaders in the church, there is bound to be some waste. In fact, I worked for the church’s IT department for two and a half years, from 2009 to 2011. I saw waste among employees in my department and others we worked with, including having people fill positions that they weren’t qualified for, and many who were there to watch the clock and not contribute much, ultimately being content to just not get fired until they ultimately earned a pension. Those people are paid with tithing money, and in many cases it did seem like they weren’t producing as much as they were consuming. That situation was unfortunate, but it’s also simply an unavoidable part of human life. The overall goal and intention to use tithing money to support and bless the church was always there.

Compared to any other large organization, I haven’t encountered anything that rivals the efficiency of the LDS Church when it comes to helping people with whatever it is they need.

In the 40+ years I’ve been a member of the church, I’ve also contributed somewhere close to 10,000 hours serving in volunteer positions and on as-needed projects.

If you’ve ever been anywhere near a natural disaster, you’ve probably heard of “Mormon Helping Hands,” the people with the yellow shirts who show up as volunteers to clean up after earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and other emergencies.

I had the chance to participate in one such activity (a comparatively small-scale one) with my daughter and my brother recently. At our own expense, we traveled two hours away to Linden, Tennessee to spend the day with hundreds of other local church members clearing damage done to people’s homes (most of them not members of our church) from a storm that spawned tornadoes. The financial value of the work that we contributed to this community on a Saturday where more than 300 people came together along with chainsaws, rakes, shovels, and manual labor to clean up an entire community had to be in the range of tens of thousands of dollars. But we provided it all for free. And we were grateful to serve without payment.

But where did that value originate? What is it that creates a situation where hundreds of people are motivated to set aside their Saturday plans, spend their own money and time, and go help a community of strangers?

The deep commitment to volunteering, contributing more than you take, helping those who are less fortunate, and all of the above come from the church and its members and the divine interaction of faith consistently working to finance the development of more faith.

The evidence is clear that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are some of the most (if not the most) giving people on the planet. The latest survey from Serve.gov estimated that Utahns (where the church is headquartered and where the majority of the population observes the faith) volunteer the most out of any state in the US and have held that spot for thirteen straight years. Serve.gov’s 2018 study estimated that $3.2 billion worth of value was given by Utah volunteers in that year.

On the money side, the top 3 metro areas in the country as named in a SmartAsset.com survey are all in Utah: Provo-Orem, Ogden-Clearfield, and Salt Lake City.

Why the Nielsen Brothers Got it Wrong

One thing that is clear from watching the videos and reading the accusation David and Lars Nielsens’ attack on the church from which they’ve become disillusioned is that the Nielsens either never did understand (or they have chosen to forgotten) the purpose of tithing. Lars’ public accusations especially take a faithless approach to a principle of faith, an error that itself disqualifies his entire argument. He asked, “Would you pay tithing instead of water, electricity, or feeding your family if you knew that it would sit around by the billions until the Second Coming of Christ?” For faithful Latter-day Saints, even if that characterization (our money “sit[ing] around by the billions”) was accurate, we’d still say “absolutely”. Why, because we’ve seen how faith creates miracles in our lives. We don’t go without water, electricity, or food. God provides for us because we live by a principle that was revealed to the ancient faithful (see Malachi 3:8-11, where the Lord promises to open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing upon those who bring “tithes into the storehouse”) as well as again to those who we faithful Latter-day Saints consider to be modern-day prophets.

Emulating the LDS Church

In a society that is heavily burdened by debt, it is ironic that people would complain that the church is too wealthy, essentially that it has been too responsible, too successful in teaching its members to sacrifice and give, that it’s not wasting enough money on things that are of no worth, which is what we’ve come to expect of government and other non-profits.

According to most economists, the next financial crisis will be made much more severe (possibly worse than 2008) because of the enormous debt load being carried by individuals, households, and sovereign governments throughout the world. It’s just a matter of time before contemporary society’s addiction to spending more than it makes will create a potentially desperate situation.

For me, I’d much rather see at least $100 billion in the possession of worthy men and women who have shown that their fruits (through their membership and through their own examples) are ones of giving, carefulness, and thoughtful stewardship of resources than in the hands of the IRS to pass on to organizations that have been found guilty repeatedly of misuse.

It is not unrealistic, maybe even probable, to anticipate that a situation similar to what is recorded in Genesis to have happened in Egypt, a famine for which Joseph and the Egyptian Pharoah were prepared because of stockpiling, could happen once again, this time affecting millions of people throughout the world.

I trust that the leaders of the LDS Church to be ready for such a time as that.

The post The Mormon Church’s Financial Responsibility Should Be Emulated, Not Criticized appeared first on The Handbook for Happiness, and Success, and Prosperity Prosperopedia.

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[barbh]

— especially when the timing doesn’t make sense.

As many of you know my son, Mark is headed on a semester-long internship/mission trip.  In human terms and to many who are looking at it from the outside the timing may appear to be all wrong.  This fall he would be heading into his 5th and final year at LeTourneau Univesity (Computer Engineering) in Longview, TX.  But God had other plans and called him to spend the semester in Ephram, UT instead.

Here is an excerpt from his Facebook Group :

Mark’s Adventures in Utah

I will be spending the next semester in Utah, working as an intern with a mission organization there called Tri-Grace. Tri-Grace Ministries is a Christian Organization that witnesses to the Mormons of Utah, with a focus on the college students at Snow College in Ephraim.

The LDS people have been misled for a long time, and with the accessibility of knowledge on the internet, young members are leaving in droves. Often times they feel so disenfranchised by their faith that they abandon everything to do with God. Tri-Grace runs a coffee shop across the street from Snow College and uses that as a place to interact with students, and show them that the God of the Bible is not what they came to know, and that grace is a gift freely given, not one that you have to earn. They also run a Bible museum, with artifacts and manuscripts from Israel, to show the world that the Bible can be trusted.

I have spent my spring breaks in Utah since my freshman year at LeTourneau. I have fallen in love with the people here, and the ministry Tri-Grace provides for the community. As part of my internship, I am provided with housing, but I am expected to fund the rest of my expenses (gas, food, insurance, etc.) For transportation up there and back, and expensed while I’m there, I think I will need around $3000. I am confident that God will provide what I need.

More importantly, I need your prayer. Utah is a place filled with spiritual warfare and can be a very draining place to be. I believe this is where God wants me to be, and I trust that He will be there every step of the way.

If you do feel called to help financially, you can contribute here: https://www.paypal.me/MarkHegreberg Additionally, if you prefer contributing in some other way, you can send it to my home in Crystal Lake, or simply text/call me. Thank you for joining me in this Journey. I love you all.

Yours in Christ, Mark Hegreberg 

The Solid Rock Cafe

The Solid Rock Cafe is a special place. Not only is it a cafe with amazing coffees and teas, but it also houses a Bible museum. The LDS people are often told that they can’t trust the Bible, that it’s been so long, and has gone through so many translations, that there is no way it still says what it used to.

The Bible museum has pottery and fragments of scripture from the early days of the church, in addition to diagrams explaining the Diaspora, and the Dead Sea scrolls, and how obvious it is that there is no way that the bible could have been changed. The Cafe is also a place full of conversations. It’s a safe place for anyone of any background to come and ask questions, without condemnation or judgment. I feel privileged to be able to work here for the coming months.

From A Mother’s Heart

I can attest to Mark’s love for these people, I have heard it in his voice and seen it in his eyes since he took his first trip to Ephriam in 2015. God has a mighty work for him to do in the coming months. I ask for your prayers for the ministry, open hearts and minds, and of course for Mark.

Thank you.

Mark began his cross-country trek yesterday and will be posting updates along the way.

As a mom, I am in awe of the fact that God trusted me to be Mark’s mom.

To  learn,\ more about Mark’s Adventures  CLICK HERE

To learn more about Tri-Grace Ministries click the following links FACEBOOK or WEBSITE 

If you do feel called to help financially, you can contribute here: https://www.paypal.me/MarkHegreberg

          You Must Follow Your Calling… --- especially when the timing doesn't make sense. As many of you know my son, Mark is headed on a semester-long internship/mission trip. 

[sharionpage]

For the Love, Loathing and Laughter of the Temple Endowment

The LDS Temple Endowment is an extraordinary thing. It is central to a mature Mormon’s religious life, but if you ask one simply to explain what it is most of us will struggle to come up with a coherent response. What even is this thing?! A series of covenants? A blessing? A ritualised story? Immersive theatre in the round? Performance art? It is so many things at once, and its origins are exactly that – a buffet of individual rituals and covenants and teachings that include prayer circles, hand gestures, symbols, annointings with holy oil and water and blessings with roots in the ordination rituals of ancient Jewish Tabernacle priests, chanted prayers, new names, ceremonial robes, ‘magic underwear’, promises of deification, and creation mythology.

Claims are made about the experience promising peace and answers and clarity in a stressful and confusing world; a refuge from strife. We are encouraged to go to the temple to seek personal revelation about our most important life changing decisions. We expect going through it to solidify a person’s faith into something lasting and mature. After participating for ourselves we return to reach out to our ancestors and perform the same rituals for the dead, continuing the most ancient forms of animist religion where reverence, prayers, ceremonies and offerings are directed towards dead ancestors who are believed to still be around us and watching over us, and in need of our care and interventions to aid them on their journeys through the afterlife.

So how on earth did a new religious movement emerging from the evangelical Puritan and Protestant religious world of the rationalist, Enlightenment era early 19th century eastern United States end up doing this crazy stuff?! Heavily influenced by their experience of Freemasonry, Brigham Young and his fellow apostles constructed a total ritual experience from all the fragments and doctrines that Joseph Smith had taught to them before he was murdered to create a religious service that is a wonderful layer cake of meanings and possibilities. Some see it as a perfectly formed and profound ordinance that has hardly changed since the first biblical temples, others as a flawed mess that has rightly required several phases of reform and editing in its nearly two century history.

For some it is an oppressive shockwave still reverberating through our religion from the darkest days of polygamy and the treatment of women as property; others find it empowering and feminist. We love it. We loath it. We laugh at it. We laugh with it…..and then it tells us to promise not to laugh loudly! As a school teacher I can testify to the complete futility of telling people to stop laughing at something that is clearly a bit bonkers, however seriously one may take it oneself. So how on earth are we meant to take it seriously when we struggle to even say what it is? And when it has a name ripe for double entendres?

I have been blessed since my endowment aged 18 in 1989 to live 40 minutes’ drive away from the London Temple, and while my busy life has made it impossible to be anything close to a frequent participant, I have been a regular one. I have been well endowed!! I loathe bits of it, I have a quiet chuckle at bits of it, and mostly I love it more and more every time I go, although perhaps not for the reasons traditionally expected of me.

I have experienced the endowment before and after Gordon B Hinckley’s 1990 reforms when he removed the bloodthirsty masonic ‘penalties’ for revealing its secrets that were ritually enacted throughout the endowment service and cast a sinister and disturbing pall over the whole thing. I have not been enough of a tourist to get around much, but have participated in endowments in the London, Provo and Preston temples, and also a ‘live’ session in the Salt Lake Temple, where my British Brigham Young University student parents were married, before I went into the Missionary Training Centre in Provo.

I did not have time to go in when it was open, but one of my favourite temple experiences was nipping out of a hotel next to Central Park in New York on a school trip a couple of years ago late at night to walk around the block to the Manhatten Temple, a delightful and surreal piece of Mormonism inserted into the heart of the model modern city. A perfect plume of steam was rising up from an altar of road works in front of it like all the films of New York I had seen growing up, and also like the smoke of the burnt offerings on the open air altar of the ancient desert Tabernacle of Moses. Across the road flowing with busy yellow taxis was the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, to the left a bright red logo shone in the darkness on the CNN building, and somewhere round the corner were the Sesame Street studios. Standing on the beehive insignia on the immaculate granite sidewalk in front of the Temple I was standing on holy ground, my spiritual home, in the heart of the archetypal urban Babylon. I was part of the international community of Latter-Day Saints. As an honorary lifelong Londoner I adore the idea that our religion can flourish in the city and that a temple doesn’t have to be in a landscaped garden.  Our religion must be able to be relevant to people who don’t live physically or psychologically in Midwestern agricultural towns or middle class suburbs. Its architecture is pretty simple and functional – it really isn’t beautiful on the outside – but for all these things that it represents the Manhatten Temple may actually be my favourite now.

I have been married twice in the London Temple, the second time when given pretty much no choice but to become a polygamous Mormon sealed to two living women when it was made clear that cancelling my first sealing after divorce was not going to be an option the institution of the Church would play ball with, despite my expressed wishes. I discovered to my amazement and horror that a temple marriage sealing wasn’t a voluntary covenant after all – it was spell cast upon me that could become a curse controlled by other people who did not have my best interests in mind and that I could not shake off like something from a fairytale. The institution’s instinct to assert its authority and control over my free will was far more powerful than the instinct to bless and protect.

I have been present in the same room as those sealings when my recently baptised Granny was sealed by proxy to my recently departed Grandfather and to their 6 adult children who they raised as diligent Mormons, including one who died in her own young motherhood. So the Temple has been the setting for my family’s most frustrating, abusive and unsettling experiences with the sealing-empowered priesthood authorities and practices of the Church, and our most profound, unifying, healing and transcendent experiences.

My conclusion then, as with so many things in real life (and real life in any religion), is that there is good, bad and hilarious in everything. I can be completely honest about all these dimensions and live with their contradictions and complexities. The tensions they create are the places where I gain some of my most profound insights into Life, the Universe and Everything.

Eugene England expressed this in his book ‘Why the Church is as True as the Gospel – Grappling Constructively With the Oppositions of Existence’:

“Just before his death Joseph Smith, also with prophetic perception, wrote, “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest” (History of the Church, 6:428). By “prove” he meant not only to demonstrate logically but to test, to struggle with, and to work out in practical experience. The Church is as true — as effective — as the gospel because it involves us directly in proving contraries, working constructively with the oppositions within ourselves and especially between people, struggling with paradoxes and polarities at an experiential level that can redeem us.”

Part of the life-enhancing fun of my faith journey has been working out which of the good, bad and hilarious things is which, and sometimes changing my mind along the way. This has taught me to have some humility, some courage, a sense of humour, and always an open mind to new insights. At its best, that seems to be ultimately what the temple and its strange collage of initiations and endowments and sealings is all about. While offering a sanctuary from the complexity and worries of life on earth, it also embraces and engages with those befuddling complications and adds a few more of its own.

I am going to share some of my specific thoughts about the endowment now with the caveat that I am not going to reveal any details that I have covenanted not to, a reminder to readers that what we covenant not to reveal in the endowment is only the specific details of each sign and token, and that pretty much everything else is in the public domain in books about the temple by LDS apostles and prophets and other approved curriculum materials. The Church recently released a film about temple clothing, the Wikipedia page about the endowment is informative, and if you want to know every detail, the scripts for all the versions of every incarnation of the endowment have been easy to find on the internet for years, so I am not going to pretend they aren’t, while honouring my promises.

I love how Protestant the endowment is – like our baptism and sacrament rituals, the endowment is shorn of every scrap of unnecessary elaboration. Even where symbolic priesthood robes are required the costume only allows for the merest hint of embroidery. You listen to the Word, and what it means to you is between you and God – noone really talks about it or interprets it for you officially. There are ambiguous positions about whether it is all symbolic or literal, and a range of opinions in between. Did Adam and Eve really live in a garden without any dinosaurs and eat forbidden fruit? Is it all an archetype of how men and women are, like a sacred version of ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’? I get a lot out of viewing it from that perspective.

If people push it they usually get fobbed off with ‘pray about it’ or maybe an interview with a member of the Temple Presidency who may offer what in effect are personal opinions, or something someone told them when they asked. Or you could wade through a long esoteric book by Hugh Nibley who looked for matches in ancient Egyptian and early Christian rituals and get a couple of ideas from that. Generally though you really are on your own to interpret them as you see fit and as the Holy Spirit communicates to you.

A dear friend serving in a temple presidency said to me that offering an interpretation of the endowment’s meaning is inappropriate because it is up to each individual to receive spiritual insights about it for themselves that may not be relevant for someone else. A sceptic might say that this is a convenient way to avoid having to officially make sense of something inherently nonsensical, but he very much sees it as something to grapple with and appreciate over time by and for yourself. I love and agree with his open-minded approach and hope he doesn’t mind me going to town sharing my personal opinions and insights here – I mention what he said to indicate that I don’t claim anyone else has to share or agree with any of my opinions or experiences with the temple. It may be completely different for you, “and that’s OK!” as the immortal and wise Stuart Smalley used to say on Saturday Night Live…before the comedian who played him went on to become one of the more sensible voices in the USA’s Senate. Because real life is crazy like that.

I love how Catholic the endowment is. Normally the Mormon experience of sacred space and architecture verges on puritanical minimalism – our chapels are sparse, generic buildings, devoid of symbolism beyond vague visual motifs involving threes for the ‘Godhead’, the Mormon Trinity. There are centrally approved artworks in European style and European frames on the walls featuring European Jesus / ‘Bjorn Borg in a Blanket’, and very little of any local cultural artistic expression.

But in our luxurious and exuberant cathedral-temples with their murals, paintings and stained glass windows telling the stories of our heritage and the soul’s journey, architectural styling and detail reflecting the local cultural norms and history, prayers for the dead, and blurring the boundaries between this life and the next, we go vigorously Vatican. We have a classical golden angel in ancient Athenian attire on the spire, and these days a faux-marble Romanesque broad-shouldered Jupiter-Jesus in a toga statue in the visitors centres, the Mormon Pieta, for pilgrims to venerate. How that ever became a thing in Mormonism is beyond me, but it’s all the rage now. Give it 20 years and people will be kissing them and touching them for miracles at this rate.

Temples celebrate the close kinship and community of the living and dead members of the holy congregation, praying for and communing with our dead ancestors who suffer or thrive in the next world depending on our prayers and ceremonies for their progress and redemption from purgatory, or “spirit prison” as we call it.

The endowment tells a story loaded with veneration of the saints. Saint Eve is our Mother Mary, having prayerful visionary compassion on all of humanity and submitting to God’s will for her to be a Mother so that we can be sanctified. Saints Peter, James and John bring truth and power to mankind. Saint Michael the Archangel is a powerful member of the heavenly host. Salvation is a team effort involving all of us to create and redeem us. Our rituals and works, gilded with divine love and clerical authority and holiness, use Saint Peter’s keys to seal on earth and in heaven. Holy men from the past appear in visions to tell our leaders where to find their relics entombed in the ground, and we build some of our temples in places sacred to our foundation stories, which Mormons love to make pilgrimages to.

We embrace robes and ritual, hand gestures imbued with profound meaning; we receive stigmata and contemplate the suffering of the crucified Lord with our own bodies like St Francis. Blessings are given and received by touch and anointing with holy water and holy oil, as well as speaking and hearing.

I had an epiphany in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral on my first solo date with my wife (…I should emphasise we didn’t just lurk in crypts!) as I looked around at the usual collection boxes for coins alternating with racks of burning candles. Little prayers and pleas for loved ones written on small pieces of folded paper were tucked in among the dribbles of melting wax. In the past this had always seemed completely alien to my Mormon religious norms; pagan, superstitious and desperate. Exploiting grief for money. But this time I suddenly realised what a fool I had been – this was no different to paying tithing to enter the temple and say prayers for the dead or the very ill. The chapels above our heads were originally financially endowed for monks and nuns to pray for the souls of wealthy donors regularly throughout the day, just as our orders of temple-working monks and nuns perform daily rituals and prayers for the dearly departed dead.

I am very proud of my Great Aunty Queenie, my Roman Catholic grandad’s sister, who was a nun in the order of the Little Sisters of the Poor and dedicated her life to the service of God and suffering mankind. But there was always a distance of confusion and disdain for the alien superstitious mumbo jumbo of Catholicism with its strange pagan festivals and obsession with martyrdom and suffering, and relics of the dead.

Mormons are sometimes criticised for doing weird rituals at altars for dead people in our temples, but since the 8th century every altar in a Catholic church or cathedral has had to contain a relic of a martyr or saint in order to be consecrated (preferably large enough to be a recognisable piece of their body) and this goes for lots of Anglican altars too, so I’m pretty bullish about being criticised by them for dabbling in necromancy. At least we don’t have to have actual bits of dead bodies present to do our thing!

But I now feel a growing connection with Aunty Queenie’s religious world as I realise how we have far more in common with Catholics than the evangelical Protestants I used to think were our natural peers as proselyting Reformers, despite their deep hostility to Mormonism.

I love how in the endowment the deepest secrets are the simplest things – obedience to God, sacrifice of selfishness for something better, seeking truth, fidelity to your spouse, consecrated service to others. In some ways the endowment covenants are basically the same as the baptismal covenant, so this journey to the highest level of Mormon ritual feels like coming full circle back to the basics. This was particularly striking in the 1980’s after my teenage years had been awash with the wide ranging speculative doctrines and study of Journals of Discourses that used to be the norm in the Church. It was completely reasonable to expect to be inducted into an even more complicated and gnostic body of knowledge in the temple endowment then, and therefore completely surprising to find it does the opposite in many ways.

It is also a relief because initiates go into their endowment with basically no idea what they are about to be asked to make eternal covenants about under immense social pressure not to walk out halfway through, which is inexcusably unethical when you think about it objectively. At least when one finds out what the covenants are they mostly represent concepts and principles one is already familiar with from the scriptures.

The crescendo of the service after being promised royal kingdoms and thrones to sit on in heaven is not to actually sit on a throne. It is to gather in sometimes extremely awkward discomfort in a circle of prayer before the metaphorical throne of God, the only condition for participation being having no malice towards the other members of the circle, and a heart full of compassion. We plead with God to bless the most distressed, the most needy, whose names have literally been written on scraps of paper like the prayers in the Canterbury crypt. We pray for the shoulders that carry the heavy burdens of responsibility and leadership, the young, the missionaries tramping about out there in the difficult world. Our hearts pour out from the temple altar in unified compassion for the suffering of the world. That’s what being an enthroned God or holy monarch is all about in Mormonism – totally giving yourself to the glorification and development of others, not glorying in receiving adoration on a throne. I love that.

The chapel of Scala Sancta – “the Holy Steps” – in Rome has a 28 step marble stairway which Emperor Constantine’s devout mother brought home from her relic-hunting tour of the Holy Land. They are believed to be the steps from Pontius Pilate’s palace that Jesus ascended to his trial. Today pilgrims ascend them on their knees, stopping to pray on each step. It is incredibly painful and while I wouldn’t say my experience on them was as ‘spiritual’ as it was for my Catholic colleague as he recited rosary prayers on each step, for me it was profound to experience trying to focus on spiritual things while powerfully distracted by physical pain. It was a small insight into Christ’s suffering and how it takes grit and determination for us all to focus and persist in faith and good works when it is really difficult and painful. In Mormonism we usually avoid any kind of flagellation and intentional physical pain (although psychologically of course we can do self-harming guilt trips at an Olympian level) but in the prayer circle if you are tall like me with a tiny wife it gets very uncomfortable indeed pretty quickly, and we have a tiny taste of the vicarious and empathetic suffering that so many Catholic rituals encourage.

The prayer circle is also an act of trust that the usually old man leading the prayer will speak clearly enough to be heard and repeated, and not ramble. It is the only time in Mormonism that we repeat the words of a prayer said by someone else in a call and response format that is the norm in Catholic liturgy.

It also provides one of the moments that is most ripe for comedy. Will the old man leading the prayer mumble a really long sentence that we will struggle remember and repeat, or will he remember to chunk it up into smaller pieces? You just never know, and the collective panic when the prayer starts to veer off the road of comprehensibility can be a hoot and induce one of those ‘Why am I here, what am I wearing, and what the heck am I doing?!’ moments. It may not quite be the Twelve Tasks of Hercules, but it takes some courage to step up and volunteer to be in the prayer circle.

I love the idea of ‘sealed’ families, voluntary covenants highly conditional upon personal choice and commitment and endurance, a fragile thing that can disappear in a blink if we do not continually feed and choose it. The highest glory we can aspire to is to be a family, to love our spouse and children and devote ourselves to facilitating the wellbeing and education of the next generations. We are not wasting all the time and energy we invest in our marriage and family relationships – they are the goal of our existence and spiritual journey, not the distraction from the holy life that family is seen as in many Christian traditions. It just doesn’t make sense to me that when we go to heaven everyone reverts to being generic individuals for whom our experiences and relationships on earth have become an irrelevance, however blissed out the ecstasies of worship on offer there might be. I love the idea that ultimately all our families can be sealed to each other in a universal internet of relationships where every friend is also a relative.

I loathe how the temple sealings make ‘family’ an idol that diminishes and demoralises the huge percentage of my LDS brothers and sisters who are single, divorced, married to a non-Mormon or LGBTQ. I loathe watching the distress of Church members who are not sealed to their children, or whose children have left the Church. I loathe watching the distress of the widows who were sealed to their deceased husband and now find themselves in an impossible quandary because if they want to marry again a single Mormon man will not want them because they cannot be sealed to them, and they so often end up turning to a non-Mormon to live with or marry with all the uncomfortable compromises that often involves personally, spiritually and morally; whereas a widower can be sealed in the temple to as many new Mormon wives as he finds. Mormon widows suddenly find themselves toppled from the security and status they once had and abandoned to roam in the marital wilderness while the men can carry on as normal, although some of them also struggle and end up choosing remarriage to non-members. Jesus was very specific about how we treat widows and orphans being the litmus test of our morality as a Church. I loathe that widowers and widows who remarry each other just for this lifetime cannot fully invest in that relationship or expect it to continue into the next life. But I love how that works for some of my friends who do not want to compromise their adoration of their first spouse.

I loathe how our excitement about having the concept of sealed families has morphed into an aggressive political crusade against civil rights for people who do not practice monogamous heterosexual marriage, and all the shameless hypocrisy involved in the very same arguments that used to be used against Mormon polygamy now being deployed by Mormon leaders against other minority groups who are deemed an existential threat to the ‘traditional natural family’ like Mormons used to be. I don’t want to watch my Church die on that hill – we have so many other, better principles to institutionally martyr ourselves for, or better live for, that don’t involve such brazen double standards and whitewashing of history.

I loathe that because of the institution’s policies a remarkable, faithful woman who had prayed for a temple marriage for decades had to wait until after our civil marriage before we could even apply for a sealing clearance, even though we had done nothing wrong and the Church encourages the belief that starting a marriage with just a civil ceremony is a shameful failure or at best inferior. Many members have been catapulted out of the Church from a starting point of complete devotion by the shock of discovering how unjust, arbitrary, inconsistent, theologically confused and indefensible some of the regulations around divorce and temple sealings are.

I loathe how our crowning glory theologically – eternal families progressing towards theosis as outlined in Doctrine and Covenants 132:18-20 which provides a lot of the language and concepts for the sealings and endowments – is so thoroughly tainted by the history and vile scriptures of polygamy in this Section that demean and enslave women and mock their free will. After some pushing we finally received an ‘official’ doctrinal explanation of why still being sealed to my first wife, even though she has left me and participation in the Church but said she did not want our sealing cancelled, would be of any benefit to her. The answer from somewhere in the echelons above was that it guarantees her a place in the ‘First resurrection.’ No explanation of why, but the only place that idea can be found in the scriptures is D&C section 132. Its text was committed to paper by Joseph Smith under extreme pressure from his exasperated family, outlining the rules governing polygamy which he had already been secretly practicing and teaching for years, often behind his first wife Emma’s back, but never put into writing. (When her brother in law Hyrum presented it to her, Emma gave him what he described as the most severe talking to of his life, and a few days later seems to have thrown a copy of it into the fire, or insisted Joseph do so depending on which account is more accurate.)

Although we depend heavily for our eternal marriage theology on selected verses from this scripture, when you just read it through from beginning to end it becomes a horror story, a manifesto of sexist oppression that demeans women as property.  It states that if they object to their husbands adding more wives to their marriage they should be ignored and God will ‘destroy’ them as ‘transgressors.’

Intriguingly it also promises that anyone who enters a sealed marriage in the temple has their ‘calling and election made sure’ to use the Mormon jargon – the get out of jail free card for Mormons who will still scoff at the corruption of medieval popes selling papal bulls of forgiveness being a sign of the ‘Great Apostasy’. Couples sealed by the Holy Priesthood are promised that whatever sins they commit short of the unforgiveable sin, they will still have a place in the Celestial Kingdom and the first resurrection (hence my first wife still benefitting from a sealing she has otherwise abandoned) after doing some purgatory time to be punished by Satan for those sins:

“…if a man marry a wife according to my word, and they are sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, according to mine appointment, and he or she shall commit any sin or transgression of the new and everlasting covenant whatever, and all manner of blasphemies, and if they commit no murder wherein they shed innocent blood, yet they shall come forth in the first resurrection, and enter into their exaltation…” D&C 132:26

Section 132 takes a chain saw to several otherwise fundamental Mormon principles regarding respecting free will, and what we were always taught growing up about the existing wives’ permission being essential for polygamous marriages to proceed, which this scripture calls ‘the law of Sarah.’

It says a lot about the power of the cognitive dissonance and indoctrination we collectively normalise that we have created such a powerful firewall between what Doctrine and Covenants 132 actually says in its text in our canonised scriptures and the rest of our beliefs and practices. Still, a polygamous blast from the past reached through that barrier and the passage of time to grab me and my marriage by the throat, just as it did to thousands of Mormon marriages in the polygamous 1800’s and early 1900’s, and triggered a disempowering nightmare.

There has been some intensive spinning by Bruce R McConkie and others over the years to contradict or neutralise its worst statements, but they are all still there in our canon. The guarantees of exaltation regardless of righteousness or blasphemes which Section 132 gives to everyone who is sealed in the temple have since been translocated to the secretive and rare ‘Second Annointing’ only administered in the temple to the faithful elite, and which they are sworn to keep secret.

But that’s not what the scripture actually says. So party on people! The Church teaches us that being married in the temple is a call to the highest standards of faithfulness and righteousness, but the actual scriptural instructions for the whole concept say you can binge on blasphemies and nearly all the possible sins and still be exalted, so in fact it is quite the opposite. The pressure is off! I mean, even if you don’t want to snort cocaine in an orgy and drink champagne from your temple shoes, you can at least quit having guilt trips about not doing your home and visiting teaching. Surely the satanic buffetings for that small infraction can’t hurt too much on your way to the Celestial Kingdom.

And even then the wording of Section 132 is suspiciously wishy washy in verse 19: “Ye shall come forth in the first resurrection; and if it be after the first resurrection, in the next resurrection”, so the first resurrection ticket isn’t even guaranteed. For this we are made to suffer the indignities heaped upon so many of us instead of simply ending temple sealings at the moment of civil divorce.

But I love the way Section 132 pretty much acknowledges that Joseph Smith committed adultery and sinned against Emma with the polygamous liaisons he did not tell her about in the awkward marriage reconciliation negotiation verses…and I loathe how Joseph gets rewarded and promised exaltation out of this mess while Emma is just threatened with destruction. Let’s crawl out of this depressing rabbit hole…..

…into another one. I loathe the male chauvinism of the Endowment – Women come to the temple and see their deepest fears come true – they are subservient to men. They make covenants with God through their husbands rather than in their own right. They have to hide their faces in veiled shame to approach God in prayer. As soon as Adam is established as ruler, Eve stops talking to spiritual beings or receiving revelatory insights. We see behind the scenes into heaven where the team planning and delivering creation deliberate and Heavenly Mother is not seen or mentioned…or the Holy Ghost, who maybe is Heavenly Mother in disguise! Either way, no women.

I love how feminist the Endowment is – Eve is totally the hero of the story! As Genesis 3:6 describes, when she looks at the fruit she uses multiple intelligences to decide what to do – her practical intelligence says it is good for food, her aesthetic intelligence tells her it is beautiful (as an artist I have to endorse the idea of being willing to suffer and die for beauty) and her intellectual intelligence and curiosity tells her it is a key to greater knowledge and wisdom. She understands that to resolve the contradiction between the commandments God has given them to multiply, but not eat the fruit because it will make them mortal, they have to self-sacrifice.

She is the first and greatest Christ-like archetype, consciously choosing to suffer pain and death in order to give us all life. The men like Moses usually presented in our curriculum as ‘types’ or archetypes or living symbols of Jesus don’t come close.  She is a visionary strategist, ambitious, loving and seeking truth and knowledge above all other things, whatever the price.   She is a boundary-breaking explorer who wants to progress and grow. She is brave in the face of uncertainty, danger and physical suffering. These are all attributes traditionally attributed to strong males, particularly in the medieval Christian culture that absolutely demonised Eve, and with her all women, as weak and corrupting influences. To them, and many people still today, women are the downfall of men, ruled by their emotions and bodies rather than their minds, unable to think boldly, or most importantly strategically, and therefore unsuited to the rigours of political or commercial or spiritual leadership. So the endowment takes the philosophical foundation myth of western sexism and oppression of women and assertively kicks it into a shredder.

Women are promised they will be queens and goddesses. They wear the robes of the Aaronic and Melchezedek priesthood which they have not needed to be ordained to, participate in all the same rituals, and are inducted into the same knowledge and covenants as the ordained men. Women even administer some of the priesthood ordinances when they annoint and bless women in full priestess-representing-Jesus mode in the ‘initiatory’ rituals. Priesthood is as priesthood does! So we have a female priesthood in the Church, at least in the temple if not in the playpen of the wards and stakes where the boys and men are getting extra training to do it properly because, as D&C 121 makes clear, they have a major tendency to screw it up. Technically they need to start specifically proving that they will not abuse an endowment of power before being allowed near the temple.

I love how the Endowment continues the most ancient cultural ritual traditions of all – the tribe gathering to tell and retell the stories of its creation myths and heroes, the eternal struggle between good and evil, how the plants and animals and people came to be and why they do what they do, or have certain roles and powers in our physical and spiritual ecosystems. It guides us through the transition from Dreamtime to the time and world we live in now where the places and creatures in the stories have become avatars or symbols, shadows of the momentous events and struggles in the primordial age of creation.

I love how the endowment translates these stories into a medieval pageant, a Mummers play, a Pilgrim’s Progress of Adam the Everyman and Eve the Everywoman facing and overcoming the challenges along the way. It is performance art, kinaesthetic learning, immersive installation, theatre in the round. Its varied physical, auditory, verbal and visual ingredients fire all our mechanisms for learning and present us with different kinds of symbology that allow the Spirit and our current experiences and interests to roam and find personal meanings as we interpret it. They can yield very different but helpful insights and interpretations each time we go. Its weirdness and mysteries give us a lot of freedom to decide what it means for us, which a less eccentric experience would lack.

The accounts of the original endowment in Nauvoo Temple sound like they would blow your freaking 19th century mind! They took all day, and as you proceeded from one curtained space to the next you would encounter the characters in the stories who would perform and talk to you. A brilliant dissertation installation by one of my fellow Arts students set up in the university chapel a maze of huge white sheets where every space involved a different sensual experience of things like music, or a smell or woodchips under your bare feet. Imagine Lucifer coming at you in an enclosed space to gloat about his power and then being defeated by the heroes. It must have been a pretty intense virtual reality experience.

I adore the endowment for its laughter! How can you not laugh? Or wonder for a moment at whether ‘The Lord’s Annointed’ really knew what they were doing when they put this crazy thing together? For me the laughter began in my own endowment – a nervous 18 year old finally being let into the strange secret world my parents and their peers and the Church leaders and Authorities valued above all else…and had told me next to nothing about. I was an artist with a VERY vivid imagination fed by years of consuming and making elaborate fantasy artworks – I was expecting full-on Dungeons and Dragons, runes on paving stones on the floor, and standing naked in the light of a burning torch in a dark catacomb after the minimal preparation I had. It had mentioned lots of symbols and having parts of your body blessed and anointed, but explained very little.

My first chuckle was the realisation that after all my extravagant expectations this was going to be about as exotic or exciting as a sacrament meeting. The second came when my parents and the Stake President and adults I had looked up to all my life donned the robes of the Holy Priesthood…and suddenly I was at a guild meeting of artisan bakers! If the Swedish Chef from the Muppets had appeared at the altar proclaiming “Chicky in the basket!!” at that moment I would not have been surprised.

And then there was the film. Oh, thank You Dear God for the pure camp genius of the film. It took a few years at Art college after my mission researching postmodernist pastiche to fully appreciate and adore all its retro-chic kitsch facets, but what a smorgasbord of fun it was.

Now, I am blessed to be British, so I have grown up with our possibly unique total adoration of very camp gay national treasures like Kenneth Williams and Boy George. The one genre of theatre all Brits experience and share regardless of social class or education is Christmas pantomimes. Pantos tell the stories of traditional fairy tales like Peter Pan, Aladdin and Cinderella with loads of audience participation and filthy double entendres for the grown-ups. Boys are played by girls, and old women are played by old men in the most over the top drag humanly possible. Think LDS roadshows on steroids that break all the rules in the Handbook, on purpose, with glee and contemporary political satirical commentary, often delivered directly to the audience in moments that break the 4th wall. It has to be experienced to be believed…which some people have also said about the endowment, funnily enough…

So imagine my secret joy when discovering that our very serious American religious leaders who had filled my teenage years with every kind of sexually repressive and homophobic message and guilt trip possible from their unworldly Rocky Mountain citadel made a FABULOUS Panto, complete with a villain who threatens the audience, naïve protagonists in peril and heroes to the rescue, and instructed us to treat it as our holiest religious ritual, the apex of our spiritual lives – the way to reach out and touch the face of God! And not only was it pure panto, with terrible wooden or totally over-the-top acting by the glorious Lucifer giving it lip-curling gusto just like a Panto Dame, it was also rampantly Batting For The Other Team.   The Nearly Dead White Males who pontificate against ‘counterfeit families’ signed off on a bold contribution to gay cinema, and made us pay 10% of our income to see it. Over and over again.

Divine beings wafted about in voluminous sparkly satin robes with massive beards and long perfectly set permed white hair like aryan Barry Whites, as if they had just wandered in from Disco Heaven at Studio 54 to plan their next party in their dressing gowns…surrounded by actual giant pink pillars. In Eden immaculately quaffed and manicured naked Adam and Eve sat around stroking furry animals with unsettling sensual intensity like Bond villains, surrounded by rainbow coloured shrubbery.

The Let’s Make a Temple Film Committee have probably never heard of French portraitists Pierre et Gilles who photograph and digitally remaster celebrities surrounded by brightly coloured plastic flowers. I had already chuckled about this connection with the scenes of Adam and Eve tastefully framed by flowers and foliage to hide their naughty bits, but a few years ago the old temple films were digitally remastered by somebody who must have had their computer screen colour settings under par. What unfolded when the screen descended from the Endowment Room ceiling and the lights went down was a version of the familiar old film of such searing technicolour intensity it was like a psychedelic acid trip created by Pierre et Gilles. It was the perfect swan song for a kitsch classic. I for sure had an intense religious experience ponderising that, although perhaps not for the reasons originally intended.

I will sorely miss the old film, but to my joy the new temple films are ravishing in their gorgeous high definition footage of the natural world’s landscapes and creatures and beautifully sketched and painted plants and animals – high art meets David Attenborough and the Lord of the Rings movie credits. They also still have delightful moments of terrible soap opera acting, plus some more contemporary twists. There’s a profoundly melancholy bald Emo Lucifer who is like a hybrid of Marvin the depressed robot in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy and Varys in Game of Thrones. Adam and Eve worry and weep like snowflake metrosexuals, taking plenty of time to pause and think about the enormity of what they are doing instead of just getting on with it. We have now reached Latino Level soap opera acting. The final step will be Sri Lankan Level. If you have never seen a Sri Lankan soap you must – it has Latino Level over-emotion but adds showing each dramatic moment about 20 times over so you can relish the shocked expressions on literally everyone in the room, one at a time, and sometimes twice.

And now we also have a Made in Chelsea meets Hip Hop video Jehovah literally casually leaning back chilling with his homies on his bling golden throne in what seems to be an exclusive nightclub with loads of OTT gold leaf and expensive granite if my memory serves me right. My mind boggled at that one – what on earth were the directors thinking?! Unfortunately one cannot book in the foyer which of the 3 new films you are going to get so I’ve only seen that one once so far. I’m still looking forward to catching the legendary third one which apparently has slightly brownish people as Adam and Eve – the only Mormon race revolution we are likely to get in my generation the way things are going. It’s got to be a bit weird when your religion’s holiest ritual is like getting a ticket to see a mystery premier at the cinema and there are going to be a few people in the audience when the film begins thinking “Oh no, not this one…I was hoping it would be the other one.”

And the funniest thing of all is despite all of this they want us to make a sacred promise not to be light-minded or laugh loudly, which I hope still leaves some room for a quiet chuckle. Karl Bath said ‘Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God’ and I just love all the absurdities of the temple films. The journey to the temple is so deadly serious with years of waiting, mountains of doctrinal complexity, probing self-reflection in recommend interviews and a life dedicated to a very demanding set of standards to even get in. Yet when you finally get to it the secret / sacred crescendo of that long journey is a bunch of surrealist amateur dramatics and swishing about in hats.

I just love that – it says, to me at least, ‘Stop taking yourselves so seriously! What were you really expecting?!’ and ‘Look at all these people taking themselves and this whole thing so seriously, but be still and know that I am God…and I definitely have a sense of humour!’ It is like the best and purest virtues of laughter – laughter that releases tension, celebrates the absurdities of existence as a cause for joy rather than depression, and empowers you to stop being afraid of totalitarian systems or leaders. People got up the courage to face down or endure fascist and communist dictators by making fantastic political cartoons and jokes about them. In a Church that now concentrates arguably far too much power in the hands of its top leaders, who have not presented any of their major doctrinal or policy changes to the general membership for a ‘common consent’ vote since 1978, God seems to have made sure there is a built-in release valve from the pressure of their assumed infallibility, strategically placed at the heart of the whole edifice.

At times in the endowment I hear laughter with true humanity and soul rather than the satanic humourlessness described so beautifully in Umberto Ecco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’ and the script of the film of it.  In this story William of Baskerville struggles with a nasty medieval librarian monk called Jorge to find the last copy of a missing book by Aristotle about laughter and humour that Jorge is murdering people to hide from the world. Mormons sometimes discuss what the injunction to avoid loud laughter, which is repeated a few times in the Doctrine and Covenants, means. The conclusion is usually that it means we should not mock sacred things – some things are beyond the reach of comedy or satire and lose their holiness if we are not incredibly reverential when talking about them. This feeds into a lot of LDS cultural norms that get out of hand to suppress honest and open discussion, or people challenging the wisdom of the ‘man-made good ideas, programs or expectations’ President Uchtdorf warned us against in his October 2015 General Conference talk ‘It Works Wonderfully’. ‘The Name of the Rose’ is a perfect book to explore that whole premise in much more depth and perhaps reach different conclusions:

“Jorge: Laughter kills fear and without fear there can’t be any faith. Because without fear of the devil there is no more need of God.

William: But you will not eliminate laughter by eliminating that book.

Jorge: No, to be sure. Laughter will remain the common man’s recreation. But what would happen if, because of this book, learned men were to pronounce it permissible to laugh at everything? Can we laugh at God? The world would relapse into chaos.”

“William: “The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt….I hate you, Jorge, and if I could I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with a fowl’s feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a buffoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer…to say to all: He was announcing the truth to you and telling you that the truth has the taste of death, and you believed, not in his words, but in his grimness…..God allows you to imagine a world where the presumed interpreter of the truth is nothing but a clumsy raven, who repeats words learned long ago.”

“In that face, deformed by a hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist….the Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth….Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become the slave of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for truth.”

Perhaps one of the hidden gems in the endowment, which says truly wonderful things about embracing all truth, not just bits of it, is this insight – that in a world where we only see the truths of God ‘in a glass darkly’ we must always be prepared to have our assumptions about even the most revered doctrines about God turned on their head. We cannot make any of them our idols or fully trust them – they must all be susceptible to laughter and even mockery to remind us that no human yet knows the whole truth, and any of our most cherished beliefs could in truth be ludicrous and laughable distortions of the real truth we will one day discover.

As the Radio Free Mormon podcaster expressed so brilliantly recently in his episode 17 ‘True Believing Mormon’, Joseph Smith was very assertive that Mormonism should be literally defined by embracing all truth from any source, and should avoid the limiting written creeds of the apostate Christians which build walls around their doctrines and understanding that they cannot break through. Joseph pointed out that the scriptures only damn people for not having any faith, not for believing too many things, so he intervened to defend members on trial for apostasy because they had added beliefs to their Mormonism that made other leaders uncomfortable. He really valued freedom to think outside the box as not just a right but absolutely essential if we are ever to get to really know as much as God.

As he discusses with Benedictine Jorge, William is a Franciscan monk, his order founded by St Francis who famously did counter-intuitive, disruptive and comical things like preaching to the animals to challenge the pharisaical orthodoxies of his age that were crushing the flower of the gospel in his Church, as President Uchtdorf would put it. He and many other religious reformers like the prophet Hosea who married a prostitute and gave his poor children crazy names, Isaiah who walked around naked for 3 years (or at least in his undies according to more prudish Christians who can’t cope with Isaiah 20) and Elijah who lay in the street for over a year playing with tiles and a skillet, cooking his food with dried human poo and burning his hair, all used irreverent humour and attention-seeking public performance art to challenge their societies’ assumptions. They physically demonstrated that real religious truth is not in the things religious people make sacred and impervious to laughter.

Maybe that’s one of the things God wants me to remember and represent when I go to the temple. For some reason I often turn into a disruptive klutz when I step through the front door, accidentally upsetting the equilibrium by outrageous faux pas and slapstick physical humour. I cause a kerfuffle by making it into the temple chapel in a short sleeved shirt before being hurried out by alarmed attendants to change into a long-sleeved one. The last time I was doing sealings was for my diligent temple-worker mother in law’s ancestors and I could feel myself going into a visual tunnel as I knelt at the altar. I thought I could tough it out – it’s not the kind of thing you want to interrupt – but ended up passing out on the altar and came too, legs akimbo, slumped on the floor with my horrified wife calling my name and hoping I hadn’t died. I just don’t seem able to do dignity.

I recently went to a Christian bible seminar in London with a dear friend who I met at Christian Union at university and introduced to Mormonism. He reminded me that at his endowment on the way up to the prayer circle I tripped over and literally fell flat on my face on the floor. It says everything you need to know about what a calamity I am at the temple that I had completely forgotten that even happened. How do you forget a humiliation like that?! It’s like inviting Harold Lloyd or the Keystone Cops in an old silent movie inviting me to the House of the Lord to turn it momentarily into a house of disorder, like the Lords of Misrule that William of Baskerville appreciated.

In fact it seems I have actually been called by God to be that funny guy. My patriarchal blessing was given to me by a holy poet for whom I will always be grateful. He turned 90 this year. It says “I bless you with a joyful heart, that you shall bring balance and true relaxation into your life and the lives of others with a merry quip and a happy thought, so that all things be not solemn and dark…for the gospel is not a grey and forbidding thing when taken in the round…..your Heavenly Parents rejoice over you; sometimes they are anxious; and indeed they do chuckle on occasion.”

So what some of my concerned family members see as my worryingly reckless and irreverent responses to overbearing pompous General Authorities or other things they hold sacred doesn’t come out of nowhere. As an 18 year old I was introduced in the most solemn way my religion allowed to the idea of humour being an essential ingredient in the gospel, and one of the divine attributes, like the young novice Adso is by his older and wiser mentor William in ‘The Name of the Rose’. I was told to remind everyone, like William does, that truth does not have the taste of death. (…Death Eaters! Harry Potter reference! Tick.) And who gets told in their patriarchal blessing that Mr and Mrs God are actually for real laughing at them?!! Seriously?! Best. Blessing. Ever. My apologies to everyone with really boring ones.

As well as all this frivolous…or deeply profound…light relief, I love how the temple provides us a rare opportunity to be deadly serious – sombre, earnest, philosophical. To put aside all the clutter and trivia that overwhelm modern adult life and contemplate the nature of existence and the universe and our place within it. To make the most serious commitments possible before God and His angels.

I loathe how temple work for the dead is a massive waste of time and money and a diversion from helping the living. Surely Jesus cautioned his disciples “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:60). Some Mormons become total fanatics, neglecting family duties, missing family events and failing to be present to nurture their grandchildren to hide away in a place they cannot go, constantly repeating time-consuming rituals and “repeating words learned long ago.” I should add, since I have mentioned her, that my amazing human dynamo mother in law does both temple and family spectacularly and goes the extra mile with both. I’m not talking about you Mummy in Law! (She’s a true redhead – you can’t be too careful.)

I love how the temple teaches and reminds me, and makes me prove that I really believe, that every person matters. Vicarious temple work is the pure love of Christ in action, casting bread on the waters without necessarily expectation of reward or immediate gratification or gratitude from those you help. An extreme Zen discipline. Like the cloistered monks and nuns who never interact with the people in the world but devote themselves to making everything better, as they see it, through the service of ritual and prayer for the living and the dead.

Mormons can be the absolute best at rallying round to help people who need us, even if it is expensive, difficult, inconvenient, exhausting, or neglecting our families whose needs are greater. We don’t even need to know them or be related to them – we will turn up, step into their lives, and carry them for a while. I am convinced that at least some of that powerful and ennobling instinct which truly ministers to the living and builds Christ’s kingdom in their lives comes from what the experience of family history research and temple work for the dead teaches us – that every person matters. Their parents matter. Their children matter. Their great grandneices twice removed matter. Their time in history matters even if it was a time when God seems to have turned his face from the world. Their nation matters. Their language and culture and unpronounceable names from a place completely different to our own matter. And we don’t need to have any prior personal connection with them whatsoever for them to still matter just as much as anyone else. The ultimate attribute of deity is unconditional self-sacrificial love for ‘even the least of these my brethren.’

So, for me, the endowment with all its random ingredients and irreconcilable contradictions is a metaphor for the Church as a whole.  It is earnest, well intentioned, flawed, treated as communicating ancient unchanging truths yet reviewed and reformed with each new generation to better fit the social norms and cultural values of the current generation. It is capable of elevating your mind and soul to the heights of love and compassion and wonder at the grandness of existence in our extraordinary world, yet obsessed over small details of clothing and conformity to a long list of rigid lifestyle and ideological requirements before you are permitted or trusted to fully participate. It is expansive and small-minded at the same time. It is silly nonsense in fancy dress; it is the deepest truths. It really does have to be seen, perhaps over and over again through a lifetime, to be believed and understood.

For the Love, Loathing and Laughter of the Temple Endowment published first on http://ift.tt/2wQcX5G

[blackmormonmed]

I once saw a bird fall dead from a limb without once ever feeling sorry for itself.  Part 2

During the throws of my addiction, I lost my life twice to this debilitating disease which robbed me of my dignity, what was left of my family and my will to live. I made one more film and on the eve of what I knew would be my last night on this earth my phone rang with an offer for a new life. The missionaries I had met while I was in Utah making a television show for BYU Television called to extend the love of Heavenly Father to me. I put down the gun I had understood to be my relief from this world, I wanted to live. With what little money I had left I boarded a plane for Utah to check myself into rehab.  Through the power of faith, amazing counseling, and the LDS twelve-step program I completed the rehabilitation, but not without an understanding of why my life took such a drastic turn.  For some, when a dream is lost it goes softly into that good night, for others, it leaves a hole in their soul which they will look to fill by any means. For me, it was drugged and wallowing in self-pity for many years filling that void. I Have always known what left that vacancy in my being. My bishop asked me what will I do with the rest of my life and my answer was simple, dedicate what's left to serving Heavenly Father, knowing my testimony and knowing the cause of my aforementioned discontent with my life, he suggested that I return to school, and become my dream while serving Heavenly Father. I asked him jokingly what would I be, a fifty-year-old freshman, he simply replied, yes.  Then, I jokingly said, I would be 58 by the time I could practice medicine, once again with a kind eye he replied, yes you would, and you could serve Father as a doctor then as well too. Bishop Made a check out to Utah Valley University for the first installment payment last semester to start me on the next step in my journey. I currently work 40 hours per week at the Ramada in Salt Lake City which has been funding the rest of my education up until now while carrying 12 and now 16 credits. My payments are always late, even on the payment program. I don’t always have what I could use, but I have what I need, my peace, my life, and a thirty-two year-long hole in my soul filled,  with these things and the grace of Heavenly father I am living my best life. This past semester  I have rekindled my broken relationship with my daughter, had the pleasure of attending my ex-wife's wedding with joy in my heart,  became worthy of being called to the position of Ward Mission Leader serving on Bishop’s Council, receiving my full temple recommend, I find great peace in serving the ward by counseling others in the LDS Addiction Recovery Program also helping others along their journey and finding beds for them in rehabilitation centers across the state of Utah,  I tutor my fellow students every Saturday in Mathematics as well as Biology, I was nominated for wolverine of the week,  and lastly and at last  I am a 50-year-old freshman and cannot give thanks enough for the path that Heavenly Father has blessed me with.  

The Question for the essay was “Share an experience from your life where you’ve demonstrated perseverance and determination and discuss how that experience has influenced your academic aspirations”  I felt that you wanted what experience truly brought me to this point in my academic career. For some, the decision to succeed academically comes following their high school years and for others, it may take three decades to prepare through life experiences, so that when the opportunity to grasp at your dreams arrives you can grab it with both hands and never let go no matter the circumstance. You ask what I had to overcome, my misdirected destiny to die with a needle in my arm, my fear that my hopes and dreams were lost, and me myself.  

My life has made me who I am, and every experience has been an education. I am not asking for pity for I now understand and know who I was always meant to be; I only ask for the opportunity to put forth my very best efforts while living my dreams and that is why I would like to be awarded the STEM Scholarship witch I will grab with both hands and all might.

I once saw a bird fall dead from a limb without once ever feeling sorry for itself

[sharionpage]

For the Love, Loathing and Laughter of the Temple Endowment

The LDS Temple Endowment is an extraordinary thing. It is central to a mature Mormon’s religious life, but if you ask one simply to explain what it is most of us will struggle to come up with a coherent response. What even is this thing?! A series of covenants? A blessing? A ritualised story? Immersive theatre in the round? Performance art? It is so many things at once, and its origins are exactly that – a buffet of individual rituals and covenants and teachings that include prayer circles, hand gestures, symbols, annointings with holy oil and water and blessings with roots in the ordination rituals of ancient Jewish Tabernacle priests, chanted prayers, new names, ceremonial robes, ‘magic underwear’, promises of deification, and creation mythology.

Claims are made about the experience promising peace and answers and clarity in a stressful and confusing world; a refuge from strife. We are encouraged to go to the temple to seek personal revelation about our most important life changing decisions. We expect going through it to solidify a person’s faith into something lasting and mature. After participating for ourselves we return to reach out to our ancestors and perform the same rituals for the dead, continuing the most ancient forms of animist religion where reverence, prayers, ceremonies and offerings are directed towards dead ancestors who are believed to still be around us and watching over us, and in need of our care and interventions to aid them on their journeys through the afterlife.

So how on earth did a new religious movement emerging from the evangelical Puritan and Protestant religious world of the rationalist, Enlightenment era early 19th century eastern United States end up doing this crazy stuff?! Heavily influenced by their experience of Freemasonry, Brigham Young and his fellow apostles constructed a total ritual experience from all the fragments and doctrines that Joseph Smith had taught to them before he was murdered to create a religious service that is a wonderful layer cake of meanings and possibilities. Some see it as a perfectly formed and profound ordinance that has hardly changed since the first biblical temples, others as a flawed mess that has rightly required several phases of reform and editing in its nearly two century history.

For some it is an oppressive shockwave still reverberating through our religion from the darkest days of polygamy and the treatment of women as property; others find it empowering and feminist. We love it. We loath it. We laugh at it. We laugh with it…..and then it tells us to promise not to laugh loudly! As a school teacher I can testify to the complete futility of telling people to stop laughing at something that is clearly a bit bonkers, however seriously one may take it oneself. So how on earth are we meant to take it seriously when we struggle to even say what it is? And when it has a name ripe for double entendres?

I have been blessed since my endowment aged 18 in 1989 to live 40 minutes’ drive away from the London Temple, and while my busy life has made it impossible to be anything close to a frequent participant, I have been a regular one. I have been well endowed!! I loathe bits of it, I have a quiet chuckle at bits of it, and mostly I love it more and more every time I go, although perhaps not for the reasons traditionally expected of me.

I have experienced the endowment before and after Gordon B Hinckley’s 1990 reforms when he removed the bloodthirsty masonic ‘penalties’ for revealing its secrets that were ritually enacted throughout the endowment service and cast a sinister and disturbing pall over the whole thing. I have not been enough of a tourist to get around much, but have participated in endowments in the London, Provo and Preston temples, and also a ‘live’ session in the Salt Lake Temple, where my British Brigham Young University student parents were married, before I went into the Missionary Training Centre in Provo.

I did not have time to go in when it was open, but one of my favourite temple experiences was nipping out of a hotel next to Central Park in New York on a school trip a couple of years ago late at night to walk around the block to the Manhatten Temple, a delightful and surreal piece of Mormonism inserted into the heart of the model modern city. A perfect plume of steam was rising up from an altar of road works in front of it like all the films of New York I had seen growing up, and also like the smoke of the burnt offerings on the open air altar of the ancient desert Tabernacle of Moses. Across the road flowing with busy yellow taxis was the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, to the left a bright red logo shone in the darkness on the CNN building, and somewhere round the corner were the Sesame Street studios. Standing on the beehive insignia on the immaculate granite sidewalk in front of the Temple I was standing on holy ground, my spiritual home, in the heart of the archetypal urban Babylon. I was part of the international community of Latter-Day Saints. As an honorary lifelong Londoner I adore the idea that our religion can flourish in the city and that a temple doesn’t have to be in a landscaped garden.  Our religion must be able to be relevant to people who don’t live physically or psychologically in Midwestern agricultural towns or middle class suburbs. Its architecture is pretty simple and functional – it really isn’t beautiful on the outside – but for all these things that it represents the Manhatten Temple may actually be my favourite now.

I have been married twice in the London Temple, the second time when given pretty much no choice but to become a polygamous Mormon sealed to two living women when it was made clear that cancelling my first sealing after divorce was not going to be an option the institution of the Church would play ball with, despite my expressed wishes. I discovered to my amazement and horror that a temple marriage sealing wasn’t a voluntary covenant after all – it was spell cast upon me that could become a curse controlled by other people who did not have my best interests in mind and that I could not shake off like something from a fairytale. The institution’s instinct to assert its authority and control over my free will was far more powerful than the instinct to bless and protect.

I have been present in the same room as those sealings when my recently baptised Granny was sealed by proxy to my recently departed Grandfather and to their 6 adult children who they raised as diligent Mormons, including one who died in her own young motherhood. So the Temple has been the setting for my family’s most frustrating, abusive and unsettling experiences with the sealing-empowered priesthood authorities and practices of the Church, and our most profound, unifying, healing and transcendent experiences.

My conclusion then, as with so many things in real life (and real life in any religion), is that there is good, bad and hilarious in everything. I can be completely honest about all these dimensions and live with their contradictions and complexities. The tensions they create are the places where I gain some of my most profound insights into Life, the Universe and Everything.

Eugene England expressed this in his book ‘Why the Church is as True as the Gospel – Grappling Constructively With the Oppositions of Existence’:

“Just before his death Joseph Smith, also with prophetic perception, wrote, “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest” (History of the Church, 6:428). By “prove” he meant not only to demonstrate logically but to test, to struggle with, and to work out in practical experience. The Church is as true — as effective — as the gospel because it involves us directly in proving contraries, working constructively with the oppositions within ourselves and especially between people, struggling with paradoxes and polarities at an experiential level that can redeem us.”

Part of the life-enhancing fun of my faith journey has been working out which of the good, bad and hilarious things is which, and sometimes changing my mind along the way. This has taught me to have some humility, some courage, a sense of humour, and always an open mind to new insights. At its best, that seems to be ultimately what the temple and its strange collage of initiations and endowments and sealings is all about. While offering a sanctuary from the complexity and worries of life on earth, it also embraces and engages with those befuddling complications and adds a few more of its own.

I am going to share some of my specific thoughts about the endowment now with the caveat that I am not going to reveal any details that I have covenanted not to, a reminder to readers that what we covenant not to reveal in the endowment is only the specific details of each sign and token, and that pretty much everything else is in the public domain in books about the temple by LDS apostles and prophets and other approved curriculum materials. The Church recently released a film about temple clothing, the Wikipedia page about the endowment is informative, and if you want to know every detail, the scripts for all the versions of every incarnation of the endowment have been easy to find on the internet for years, so I am not going to pretend they aren’t, while honouring my promises.

I love how Protestant the endowment is – like our baptism and sacrament rituals, the endowment is shorn of every scrap of unnecessary elaboration. Even where symbolic priesthood robes are required the costume only allows for the merest hint of embroidery. You listen to the Word, and what it means to you is between you and God – noone really talks about it or interprets it for you officially. There are ambiguous positions about whether it is all symbolic or literal, and a range of opinions in between. Did Adam and Eve really live in a garden without any dinosaurs and eat forbidden fruit? Is it all an archetype of how men and women are, like a sacred version of ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’? I get a lot out of viewing it from that perspective.

If people push it they usually get fobbed off with ‘pray about it’ or maybe an interview with a member of the Temple Presidency who may offer what in effect are personal opinions, or something someone told them when they asked. Or you could wade through a long esoteric book by Hugh Nibley who looked for matches in ancient Egyptian and early Christian rituals and get a couple of ideas from that. Generally though you really are on your own to interpret them as you see fit and as the Holy Spirit communicates to you.

A dear friend serving in a temple presidency said to me that offering an interpretation of the endowment’s meaning is inappropriate because it is up to each individual to receive spiritual insights about it for themselves that may not be relevant for someone else. A sceptic might say that this is a convenient way to avoid having to officially make sense of something inherently nonsensical, but he very much sees it as something to grapple with and appreciate over time by and for yourself. I love and agree with his open-minded approach and hope he doesn’t mind me going to town sharing my personal opinions and insights here – I mention what he said to indicate that I don’t claim anyone else has to share or agree with any of my opinions or experiences with the temple. It may be completely different for you, “and that’s OK!” as the immortal and wise Stuart Smalley used to say on Saturday Night Live…before the comedian who played him went on to become one of the more sensible voices in the USA’s Senate. Because real life is crazy like that.

I love how Catholic the endowment is. Normally the Mormon experience of sacred space and architecture verges on puritanical minimalism – our chapels are sparse, generic buildings, devoid of symbolism beyond vague visual motifs involving threes for the ‘Godhead’, the Mormon Trinity. There are centrally approved artworks in European style and European frames on the walls featuring European Jesus / ‘Bjorn Borg in a Blanket’, and very little of any local cultural artistic expression.

But in our luxurious and exuberant cathedral-temples with their murals, paintings and stained glass windows telling the stories of our heritage and the soul’s journey, architectural styling and detail reflecting the local cultural norms and history, prayers for the dead, and blurring the boundaries between this life and the next, we go vigorously Vatican. We have a classical golden angel in ancient Athenian attire on the spire, and these days a faux-marble Romanesque broad-shouldered Jupiter-Jesus in a toga statue in the visitors centres, the Mormon Pieta, for pilgrims to venerate. How that ever became a thing in Mormonism is beyond me, but it’s all the rage now. Give it 20 years and people will be kissing them and touching them for miracles at this rate.

Temples celebrate the close kinship and community of the living and dead members of the holy congregation, praying for and communing with our dead ancestors who suffer or thrive in the next world depending on our prayers and ceremonies for their progress and redemption from purgatory, or “spirit prison” as we call it.

The endowment tells a story loaded with veneration of the saints. Saint Eve is our Mother Mary, having prayerful visionary compassion on all of humanity and submitting to God’s will for her to be a Mother so that we can be sanctified. Saints Peter, James and John bring truth and power to mankind. Saint Michael the Archangel is a powerful member of the heavenly host. Salvation is a team effort involving all of us to create and redeem us. Our rituals and works, gilded with divine love and clerical authority and holiness, use Saint Peter’s keys to seal on earth and in heaven. Holy men from the past appear in visions to tell our leaders where to find their relics entombed in the ground, and we build some of our temples in places sacred to our foundation stories, which Mormons love to make pilgrimages to.

We embrace robes and ritual, hand gestures imbued with profound meaning; we receive stigmata and contemplate the suffering of the crucified Lord with our own bodies like St Francis. Blessings are given and received by touch and anointing with holy water and holy oil, as well as speaking and hearing.

I had an epiphany in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral on my first solo date with my wife (…I should emphasise we didn’t just lurk in crypts!) as I looked around at the usual collection boxes for coins alternating with racks of burning candles. Little prayers and pleas for loved ones written on small pieces of folded paper were tucked in among the dribbles of melting wax. In the past this had always seemed completely alien to my Mormon religious norms; pagan, superstitious and desperate. Exploiting grief for money. But this time I suddenly realised what a fool I had been – this was no different to paying tithing to enter the temple and say prayers for the dead or the very ill. The chapels above our heads were originally financially endowed for monks and nuns to pray for the souls of wealthy donors regularly throughout the day, just as our orders of temple-working monks and nuns perform daily rituals and prayers for the dearly departed dead.

I am very proud of my Great Aunty Queenie, my Roman Catholic grandad’s sister, who was a nun in the order of the Little Sisters of the Poor and dedicated her life to the service of God and suffering mankind. But there was always a distance of confusion and disdain for the alien superstitious mumbo jumbo of Catholicism with its strange pagan festivals and obsession with martyrdom and suffering, and relics of the dead.

Mormons are sometimes criticised for doing weird rituals at altars for dead people in our temples, but since the 8th century every altar in a Catholic church or cathedral has had to contain a relic of a martyr or saint in order to be consecrated (preferably large enough to be a recognisable piece of their body) and this goes for lots of Anglican altars too, so I’m pretty bullish about being criticised by them for dabbling in necromancy. At least we don’t have to have actual bits of dead bodies present to do our thing!

But I now feel a growing connection with Aunty Queenie’s religious world as I realise how we have far more in common with Catholics than the evangelical Protestants I used to think were our natural peers as proselyting Reformers, despite their deep hostility to Mormonism.

I love how in the endowment the deepest secrets are the simplest things – obedience to God, sacrifice of selfishness for something better, seeking truth, fidelity to your spouse, consecrated service to others. In some ways the endowment covenants are basically the same as the baptismal covenant, so this journey to the highest level of Mormon ritual feels like coming full circle back to the basics. This was particularly striking in the 1980’s after my teenage years had been awash with the wide ranging speculative doctrines and study of Journals of Discourses that used to be the norm in the Church. It was completely reasonable to expect to be inducted into an even more complicated and gnostic body of knowledge in the temple endowment then, and therefore completely surprising to find it does the opposite in many ways.

It is also a relief because initiates go into their endowment with basically no idea what they are about to be asked to make eternal covenants about under immense social pressure not to walk out halfway through, which is inexcusably unethical when you think about it objectively. At least when one finds out what the covenants are they mostly represent concepts and principles one is already familiar with from the scriptures.

The crescendo of the service after being promised royal kingdoms and thrones to sit on in heaven is not to actually sit on a throne. It is to gather in sometimes extremely awkward discomfort in a circle of prayer before the metaphorical throne of God, the only condition for participation being having no malice towards the other members of the circle, and a heart full of compassion. We plead with God to bless the most distressed, the most needy, whose names have literally been written on scraps of paper like the prayers in the Canterbury crypt. We pray for the shoulders that carry the heavy burdens of responsibility and leadership, the young, the missionaries tramping about out there in the difficult world. Our hearts pour out from the temple altar in unified compassion for the suffering of the world. That’s what being an enthroned God or holy monarch is all about in Mormonism – totally giving yourself to the glorification and development of others, not glorying in receiving adoration on a throne. I love that.

The chapel of Scala Sancta – “the Holy Steps” – in Rome has a 28 step marble stairway which Emperor Constantine’s devout mother brought home from her relic-hunting tour of the Holy Land. They are believed to be the steps from Pontius Pilate’s palace that Jesus ascended to his trial. Today pilgrims ascend them on their knees, stopping to pray on each step. It is incredibly painful and while I wouldn’t say my experience on them was as ‘spiritual’ as it was for my Catholic colleague as he recited rosary prayers on each step, for me it was profound to experience trying to focus on spiritual things while powerfully distracted by physical pain. It was a small insight into Christ’s suffering and how it takes grit and determination for us all to focus and persist in faith and good works when it is really difficult and painful. In Mormonism we usually avoid any kind of flagellation and intentional physical pain (although psychologically of course we can do self-harming guilt trips at an Olympian level) but in the prayer circle if you are tall like me with a tiny wife it gets very uncomfortable indeed pretty quickly, and we have a tiny taste of the vicarious and empathetic suffering that so many Catholic rituals encourage.

The prayer circle is also an act of trust that the usually old man leading the prayer will speak clearly enough to be heard and repeated, and not ramble. It is the only time in Mormonism that we repeat the words of a prayer said by someone else in a call and response format that is the norm in Catholic liturgy.

It also provides one of the moments that is most ripe for comedy. Will the old man leading the prayer mumble a really long sentence that we will struggle remember and repeat, or will he remember to chunk it up into smaller pieces? You just never know, and the collective panic when the prayer starts to veer off the road of comprehensibility can be a hoot and induce one of those ‘Why am I here, what am I wearing, and what the heck am I doing?!’ moments. It may not quite be the Twelve Tasks of Hercules, but it takes some courage to step up and volunteer to be in the prayer circle.

I love the idea of ‘sealed’ families, voluntary covenants highly conditional upon personal choice and commitment and endurance, a fragile thing that can disappear in a blink if we do not continually feed and choose it. The highest glory we can aspire to is to be a family, to love our spouse and children and devote ourselves to facilitating the wellbeing and education of the next generations. We are not wasting all the time and energy we invest in our marriage and family relationships – they are the goal of our existence and spiritual journey, not the distraction from the holy life that family is seen as in many Christian traditions. It just doesn’t make sense to me that when we go to heaven everyone reverts to being generic individuals for whom our experiences and relationships on earth have become an irrelevance, however blissed out the ecstasies of worship on offer there might be. I love the idea that ultimately all our families can be sealed to each other in a universal internet of relationships where every friend is also a relative.

I loathe how the temple sealings make ‘family’ an idol that diminishes and demoralises the huge percentage of my LDS brothers and sisters who are single, divorced, married to a non-Mormon or LGBTQ. I loathe watching the distress of Church members who are not sealed to their children, or whose children have left the Church. I loathe watching the distress of the widows who were sealed to their deceased husband and now find themselves in an impossible quandary because if they want to marry again a single Mormon man will not want them because they cannot be sealed to them, and they so often end up turning to a non-Mormon to live with or marry with all the uncomfortable compromises that often involves personally, spiritually and morally; whereas a widower can be sealed in the temple to as many new Mormon wives as he finds. Mormon widows suddenly find themselves toppled from the security and status they once had and abandoned to roam in the marital wilderness while the men can carry on as normal, although some of them also struggle and end up choosing remarriage to non-members. Jesus was very specific about how we treat widows and orphans being the litmus test of our morality as a Church. I loathe that widowers and widows who remarry each other just for this lifetime cannot fully invest in that relationship or expect it to continue into the next life. But I love how that works for some of my friends who do not want to compromise their adoration of their first spouse.

I loathe how our excitement about having the concept of sealed families has morphed into an aggressive political crusade against civil rights for people who do not practice monogamous heterosexual marriage, and all the shameless hypocrisy involved in the very same arguments that used to be used against Mormon polygamy now being deployed by Mormon leaders against other minority groups who are deemed an existential threat to the ‘traditional natural family’ like Mormons used to be. I don’t want to watch my Church die on that hill – we have so many other, better principles to institutionally martyr ourselves for, or better live for, that don’t involve such brazen double standards and whitewashing of history.

I loathe that because of the institution’s policies a remarkable, faithful woman who had prayed for a temple marriage for decades had to wait until after our civil marriage before we could even apply for a sealing clearance, even though we had done nothing wrong and the Church encourages the belief that starting a marriage with just a civil ceremony is a shameful failure or at best inferior. Many members have been catapulted out of the Church from a starting point of complete devotion by the shock of discovering how unjust, arbitrary, inconsistent, theologically confused and indefensible some of the regulations around divorce and temple sealings are.

I loathe how our crowning glory theologically – eternal families progressing towards theosis as outlined in Doctrine and Covenants 132:18-20 which provides a lot of the language and concepts for the sealings and endowments – is so thoroughly tainted by the history and vile scriptures of polygamy in this Section that demean and enslave women and mock their free will. After some pushing we finally received an ‘official’ doctrinal explanation of why still being sealed to my first wife, even though she has left me and participation in the Church but said she did not want our sealing cancelled, would be of any benefit to her. The answer from somewhere in the echelons above was that it guarantees her a place in the ‘First resurrection.’ No explanation of why, but the only place that idea can be found in the scriptures is D&C section 132. Its text was committed to paper by Joseph Smith under extreme pressure from his exasperated family, outlining the rules governing polygamy which he had already been secretly practicing and teaching for years, often behind his first wife Emma’s back, but never put into writing. (When her brother in law Hyrum presented it to her, Emma gave him what he described as the most severe talking to of his life, and a few days later seems to have thrown a copy of it into the fire, or insisted Joseph do so depending on which account is more accurate.)

Although we depend heavily for our eternal marriage theology on selected verses from this scripture, when you just read it through from beginning to end it becomes a horror story, a manifesto of sexist oppression that demeans women as property.  It states that if they object to their husbands adding more wives to their marriage they should be ignored and God will ‘destroy’ them as ‘transgressors.’

Intriguingly it also promises that anyone who enters a sealed marriage in the temple has their ‘calling and election made sure’ to use the Mormon jargon – the get out of jail free card for Mormons who will still scoff at the corruption of medieval popes selling papal bulls of forgiveness being a sign of the ‘Great Apostasy’. Couples sealed by the Holy Priesthood are promised that whatever sins they commit short of the unforgiveable sin, they will still have a place in the Celestial Kingdom and the first resurrection (hence my first wife still benefitting from a sealing she has otherwise abandoned) after doing some purgatory time to be punished by Satan for those sins:

“…if a man marry a wife according to my word, and they are sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, according to mine appointment, and he or she shall commit any sin or transgression of the new and everlasting covenant whatever, and all manner of blasphemies, and if they commit no murder wherein they shed innocent blood, yet they shall come forth in the first resurrection, and enter into their exaltation…” D&C 132:26

Section 132 takes a chain saw to several otherwise fundamental Mormon principles regarding respecting free will, and what we were always taught growing up about the existing wives’ permission being essential for polygamous marriages to proceed, which this scripture calls ‘the law of Sarah.’

It says a lot about the power of the cognitive dissonance and indoctrination we collectively normalise that we have created such a powerful firewall between what Doctrine and Covenants 132 actually says in its text in our canonised scriptures and the rest of our beliefs and practices. Still, a polygamous blast from the past reached through that barrier and the passage of time to grab me and my marriage by the throat, just as it did to thousands of Mormon marriages in the polygamous 1800’s and early 1900’s, and triggered a disempowering nightmare.

There has been some intensive spinning by Bruce R McConkie and others over the years to contradict or neutralise its worst statements, but they are all still there in our canon. The guarantees of exaltation regardless of righteousness or blasphemes which Section 132 gives to everyone who is sealed in the temple have since been translocated to the secretive and rare ‘Second Annointing’ only administered in the temple to the faithful elite, and which they are sworn to keep secret.

But that’s not what the scripture actually says. So party on people! The Church teaches us that being married in the temple is a call to the highest standards of faithfulness and righteousness, but the actual scriptural instructions for the whole concept say you can binge on blasphemies and nearly all the possible sins and still be exalted, so in fact it is quite the opposite. The pressure is off! I mean, even if you don’t want to snort cocaine in an orgy and drink champagne from your temple shoes, you can at least quit having guilt trips about not doing your home and visiting teaching. Surely the satanic buffetings for that small infraction can’t hurt too much on your way to the Celestial Kingdom.

And even then the wording of Section 132 is suspiciously wishy washy in verse 19: “Ye shall come forth in the first resurrection; and if it be after the first resurrection, in the next resurrection”, so the first resurrection ticket isn’t even guaranteed. For this we are made to suffer the indignities heaped upon so many of us instead of simply ending temple sealings at the moment of civil divorce.

But I love the way Section 132 pretty much acknowledges that Joseph Smith committed adultery and sinned against Emma with the polygamous liaisons he did not tell her about in the awkward marriage reconciliation negotiation verses…and I loathe how Joseph gets rewarded and promised exaltation out of this mess while Emma is just threatened with destruction. Let’s crawl out of this depressing rabbit hole…..

…into another one. I loathe the male chauvinism of the Endowment – Women come to the temple and see their deepest fears come true – they are subservient to men. They make covenants with God through their husbands rather than in their own right. They have to hide their faces in veiled shame to approach God in prayer. As soon as Adam is established as ruler, Eve stops talking to spiritual beings or receiving revelatory insights. We see behind the scenes into heaven where the team planning and delivering creation deliberate and Heavenly Mother is not seen or mentioned…or the Holy Ghost, who maybe is Heavenly Mother in disguise! Either way, no women.

I love how feminist the Endowment is – Eve is totally the hero of the story! As Genesis 3:6 describes, when she looks at the fruit she uses multiple intelligences to decide what to do – her practical intelligence says it is good for food, her aesthetic intelligence tells her it is beautiful (as an artist I have to endorse the idea of being willing to suffer and die for beauty) and her intellectual intelligence and curiosity tells her it is a key to greater knowledge and wisdom. She understands that to resolve the contradiction between the commandments God has given them to multiply, but not eat the fruit because it will make them mortal, they have to self-sacrifice.

She is the first and greatest Christ-like archetype, consciously choosing to suffer pain and death in order to give us all life. The men like Moses usually presented in our curriculum as ‘types’ or archetypes or living symbols of Jesus don’t come close.  She is a visionary strategist, ambitious, loving and seeking truth and knowledge above all other things, whatever the price.   She is a boundary-breaking explorer who wants to progress and grow. She is brave in the face of uncertainty, danger and physical suffering. These are all attributes traditionally attributed to strong males, particularly in the medieval Christian culture that absolutely demonised Eve, and with her all women, as weak and corrupting influences. To them, and many people still today, women are the downfall of men, ruled by their emotions and bodies rather than their minds, unable to think boldly, or most importantly strategically, and therefore unsuited to the rigours of political or commercial or spiritual leadership. So the endowment takes the philosophical foundation myth of western sexism and oppression of women and assertively kicks it into a shredder.

Women are promised they will be queens and goddesses. They wear the robes of the Aaronic and Melchezedek priesthood which they have not needed to be ordained to, participate in all the same rituals, and are inducted into the same knowledge and covenants as the ordained men. Women even administer some of the priesthood ordinances when they annoint and bless women in full priestess-representing-Jesus mode in the ‘initiatory’ rituals. Priesthood is as priesthood does! So we have a female priesthood in the Church, at least in the temple if not in the playpen of the wards and stakes where the boys and men are getting extra training to do it properly because, as D&C 121 makes clear, they have a major tendency to screw it up. Technically they need to start specifically proving that they will not abuse an endowment of power before being allowed near the temple.

I love how the Endowment continues the most ancient cultural ritual traditions of all – the tribe gathering to tell and retell the stories of its creation myths and heroes, the eternal struggle between good and evil, how the plants and animals and people came to be and why they do what they do, or have certain roles and powers in our physical and spiritual ecosystems. It guides us through the transition from Dreamtime to the time and world we live in now where the places and creatures in the stories have become avatars or symbols, shadows of the momentous events and struggles in the primordial age of creation.

I love how the endowment translates these stories into a medieval pageant, a Mummers play, a Pilgrim’s Progress of Adam the Everyman and Eve the Everywoman facing and overcoming the challenges along the way. It is performance art, kinaesthetic learning, immersive installation, theatre in the round. Its varied physical, auditory, verbal and visual ingredients fire all our mechanisms for learning and present us with different kinds of symbology that allow the Spirit and our current experiences and interests to roam and find personal meanings as we interpret it. They can yield very different but helpful insights and interpretations each time we go. Its weirdness and mysteries give us a lot of freedom to decide what it means for us, which a less eccentric experience would lack.

The accounts of the original endowment in Nauvoo Temple sound like they would blow your freaking 19th century mind! They took all day, and as you proceeded from one curtained space to the next you would encounter the characters in the stories who would perform and talk to you. A brilliant dissertation installation by one of my fellow Arts students set up in the university chapel a maze of huge white sheets where every space involved a different sensual experience of things like music, or a smell or woodchips under your bare feet. Imagine Lucifer coming at you in an enclosed space to gloat about his power and then being defeated by the heroes. It must have been a pretty intense virtual reality experience.

I adore the endowment for its laughter! How can you not laugh? Or wonder for a moment at whether ‘The Lord’s Annointed’ really knew what they were doing when they put this crazy thing together? For me the laughter began in my own endowment – a nervous 18 year old finally being let into the strange secret world my parents and their peers and the Church leaders and Authorities valued above all else…and had told me next to nothing about. I was an artist with a VERY vivid imagination fed by years of consuming and making elaborate fantasy artworks – I was expecting full-on Dungeons and Dragons, runes on paving stones on the floor, and standing naked in the light of a burning torch in a dark catacomb after the minimal preparation I had. It had mentioned lots of symbols and having parts of your body blessed and anointed, but explained very little.

My first chuckle was the realisation that after all my extravagant expectations this was going to be about as exotic or exciting as a sacrament meeting. The second came when my parents and the Stake President and adults I had looked up to all my life donned the robes of the Holy Priesthood…and suddenly I was at a guild meeting of artisan bakers! If the Swedish Chef from the Muppets had appeared at the altar proclaiming “Chicky in the basket!!” at that moment I would not have been surprised.

And then there was the film. Oh, thank You Dear God for the pure camp genius of the film. It took a few years at Art college after my mission researching postmodernist pastiche to fully appreciate and adore all its retro-chic kitsch facets, but what a smorgasbord of fun it was.

Now, I am blessed to be British, so I have grown up with our possibly unique total adoration of very camp gay national treasures like Kenneth Williams and Boy George. The one genre of theatre all Brits experience and share regardless of social class or education is Christmas pantomimes. Pantos tell the stories of traditional fairy tales like Peter Pan, Aladdin and Cinderella with loads of audience participation and filthy double entendres for the grown-ups. Boys are played by girls, and old women are played by old men in the most over the top drag humanly possible. Think LDS roadshows on steroids that break all the rules in the Handbook, on purpose, with glee and contemporary political satirical commentary, often delivered directly to the audience in moments that break the 4th wall. It has to be experienced to be believed…which some people have also said about the endowment, funnily enough…

So imagine my secret joy when discovering that our very serious American religious leaders who had filled my teenage years with every kind of sexually repressive and homophobic message and guilt trip possible from their unworldly Rocky Mountain citadel made a FABULOUS Panto, complete with a villain who threatens the audience, naïve protagonists in peril and heroes to the rescue, and instructed us to treat it as our holiest religious ritual, the apex of our spiritual lives – the way to reach out and touch the face of God! And not only was it pure panto, with terrible wooden or totally over-the-top acting by the glorious Lucifer giving it lip-curling gusto just like a Panto Dame, it was also rampantly Batting For The Other Team.   The Nearly Dead White Males who pontificate against ‘counterfeit families’ signed off on a bold contribution to gay cinema, and made us pay 10% of our income to see it. Over and over again.

Divine beings wafted about in voluminous sparkly satin robes with massive beards and long perfectly set permed white hair like aryan Barry Whites, as if they had just wandered in from Disco Heaven at Studio 54 to plan their next party in their dressing gowns…surrounded by actual giant pink pillars. In Eden immaculately quaffed and manicured naked Adam and Eve sat around stroking furry animals with unsettling sensual intensity like Bond villains, surrounded by rainbow coloured shrubbery.

The Let’s Make a Temple Film Committee have probably never heard of French portraitists Pierre et Gilles who photograph and digitally remaster celebrities surrounded by brightly coloured plastic flowers. I had already chuckled about this connection with the scenes of Adam and Eve tastefully framed by flowers and foliage to hide their naughty bits, but a few years ago the old temple films were digitally remastered by somebody who must have had their computer screen colour settings under par. What unfolded when the screen descended from the Endowment Room ceiling and the lights went down was a version of the familiar old film of such searing technicolour intensity it was like a psychedelic acid trip created by Pierre et Gilles. It was the perfect swan song for a kitsch classic. I for sure had an intense religious experience ponderising that, although perhaps not for the reasons originally intended.

I will sorely miss the old film, but to my joy the new temple films are ravishing in their gorgeous high definition footage of the natural world’s landscapes and creatures and beautifully sketched and painted plants and animals – high art meets David Attenborough and the Lord of the Rings movie credits. They also still have delightful moments of terrible soap opera acting, plus some more contemporary twists. There’s a profoundly melancholy bald Emo Lucifer who is like a hybrid of Marvin the depressed robot in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy and Varys in Game of Thrones. Adam and Eve worry and weep like snowflake metrosexuals, taking plenty of time to pause and think about the enormity of what they are doing instead of just getting on with it. We have now reached Latino Level soap opera acting. The final step will be Sri Lankan Level. If you have never seen a Sri Lankan soap you must – it has Latino Level over-emotion but adds showing each dramatic moment about 20 times over so you can relish the shocked expressions on literally everyone in the room, one at a time, and sometimes twice.

And now we also have a Made in Chelsea meets Hip Hop video Jehovah literally casually leaning back chilling with his homies on his bling golden throne in what seems to be an exclusive nightclub with loads of OTT gold leaf and expensive granite if my memory serves me right. My mind boggled at that one – what on earth were the directors thinking?! Unfortunately one cannot book in the foyer which of the 3 new films you are going to get so I’ve only seen that one once so far. I’m still looking forward to catching the legendary third one which apparently has slightly brownish people as Adam and Eve – the only Mormon race revolution we are likely to get in my generation the way things are going. It’s got to be a bit weird when your religion’s holiest ritual is like getting a ticket to see a mystery premier at the cinema and there are going to be a few people in the audience when the film begins thinking “Oh no, not this one…I was hoping it would be the other one.”

And the funniest thing of all is despite all of this they want us to make a sacred promise not to be light-minded or laugh loudly, which I hope still leaves some room for a quiet chuckle. Karl Bath said ‘Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God’ and I just love all the absurdities of the temple films. The journey to the temple is so deadly serious with years of waiting, mountains of doctrinal complexity, probing self-reflection in recommend interviews and a life dedicated to a very demanding set of standards to even get in. Yet when you finally get to it the secret / sacred crescendo of that long journey is a bunch of surrealist amateur dramatics and swishing about in hats.

I just love that – it says, to me at least, ‘Stop taking yourselves so seriously! What were you really expecting?!’ and ‘Look at all these people taking themselves and this whole thing so seriously, but be still and know that I am God…and I definitely have a sense of humour!’ It is like the best and purest virtues of laughter – laughter that releases tension, celebrates the absurdities of existence as a cause for joy rather than depression, and empowers you to stop being afraid of totalitarian systems or leaders. People got up the courage to face down or endure fascist and communist dictators by making fantastic political cartoons and jokes about them. In a Church that now concentrates arguably far too much power in the hands of its top leaders, who have not presented any of their major doctrinal or policy changes to the general membership for a ‘common consent’ vote since 1978, God seems to have made sure there is a built-in release valve from the pressure of their assumed infallibility, strategically placed at the heart of the whole edifice.

At times in the endowment I hear laughter with true humanity and soul rather than the satanic humourlessness described so beautifully in Umberto Ecco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’ and the script of the film of it.  In this story William of Baskerville struggles with a nasty medieval librarian monk called Jorge to find the last copy of a missing book by Aristotle about laughter and humour that Jorge is murdering people to hide from the world. Mormons sometimes discuss what the injunction to avoid loud laughter, which is repeated a few times in the Doctrine and Covenants, means. The conclusion is usually that it means we should not mock sacred things – some things are beyond the reach of comedy or satire and lose their holiness if we are not incredibly reverential when talking about them. This feeds into a lot of LDS cultural norms that get out of hand to suppress honest and open discussion, or people challenging the wisdom of the ‘man-made good ideas, programs or expectations’ President Uchtdorf warned us against in his October 2015 General Conference talk ‘It Works Wonderfully’. ‘The Name of the Rose’ is a perfect book to explore that whole premise in much more depth and perhaps reach different conclusions:

“Jorge: Laughter kills fear and without fear there can’t be any faith. Because without fear of the devil there is no more need of God.

William: But you will not eliminate laughter by eliminating that book.

Jorge: No, to be sure. Laughter will remain the common man’s recreation. But what would happen if, because of this book, learned men were to pronounce it permissible to laugh at everything? Can we laugh at God? The world would relapse into chaos.”

“William: “The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt….I hate you, Jorge, and if I could I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with a fowl’s feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a buffoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer…to say to all: He was announcing the truth to you and telling you that the truth has the taste of death, and you believed, not in his words, but in his grimness…..God allows you to imagine a world where the presumed interpreter of the truth is nothing but a clumsy raven, who repeats words learned long ago.”

“In that face, deformed by a hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist….the Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth….Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become the slave of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for truth.”

Perhaps one of the hidden gems in the endowment, which says truly wonderful things about embracing all truth, not just bits of it, is this insight – that in a world where we only see the truths of God ‘in a glass darkly’ we must always be prepared to have our assumptions about even the most revered doctrines about God turned on their head. We cannot make any of them our idols or fully trust them – they must all be susceptible to laughter and even mockery to remind us that no human yet knows the whole truth, and any of our most cherished beliefs could in truth be ludicrous and laughable distortions of the real truth we will one day discover.

As the Radio Free Mormon podcaster expressed so brilliantly recently in his episode 17 ‘True Believing Mormon’, Joseph Smith was very assertive that Mormonism should be literally defined by embracing all truth from any source, and should avoid the limiting written creeds of the apostate Christians which build walls around their doctrines and understanding that they cannot break through. Joseph pointed out that the scriptures only damn people for not having any faith, not for believing too many things, so he intervened to defend members on trial for apostasy because they had added beliefs to their Mormonism that made other leaders uncomfortable. He really valued freedom to think outside the box as not just a right but absolutely essential if we are ever to get to really know as much as God.

As he discusses with Benedictine Jorge, William is a Franciscan monk, his order founded by St Francis who famously did counter-intuitive, disruptive and comical things like preaching to the animals to challenge the pharisaical orthodoxies of his age that were crushing the flower of the gospel in his Church, as President Uchtdorf would put it. He and many other religious reformers like the prophet Hosea who married a prostitute and gave his poor children crazy names, Isaiah who walked around naked for 3 years (or at least in his undies according to more prudish Christians who can’t cope with Isaiah 20) and Elijah who lay in the street for over a year playing with tiles and a skillet, cooking his food with dried human poo and burning his hair, all used irreverent humour and attention-seeking public performance art to challenge their societies’ assumptions. They physically demonstrated that real religious truth is not in the things religious people make sacred and impervious to laughter.

Maybe that’s one of the things God wants me to remember and represent when I go to the temple. For some reason I often turn into a disruptive klutz when I step through the front door, accidentally upsetting the equilibrium by outrageous faux pas and slapstick physical humour. I cause a kerfuffle by making it into the temple chapel in a short sleeved shirt before being hurried out by alarmed attendants to change into a long-sleeved one. The last time I was doing sealings was for my diligent temple-worker mother in law’s ancestors and I could feel myself going into a visual tunnel as I knelt at the altar. I thought I could tough it out – it’s not the kind of thing you want to interrupt – but ended up passing out on the altar and came too, legs akimbo, slumped on the floor with my horrified wife calling my name and hoping I hadn’t died. I just don’t seem able to do dignity.

I recently went to a Christian bible seminar in London with a dear friend who I met at Christian Union at university and introduced to Mormonism. He reminded me that at his endowment on the way up to the prayer circle I tripped over and literally fell flat on my face on the floor. It says everything you need to know about what a calamity I am at the temple that I had completely forgotten that even happened. How do you forget a humiliation like that?! It’s like inviting Harold Lloyd or the Keystone Cops in an old silent movie inviting me to the House of the Lord to turn it momentarily into a house of disorder, like the Lords of Misrule that William of Baskerville appreciated.

In fact it seems I have actually been called by God to be that funny guy. My patriarchal blessing was given to me by a holy poet for whom I will always be grateful. He turned 90 this year. It says “I bless you with a joyful heart, that you shall bring balance and true relaxation into your life and the lives of others with a merry quip and a happy thought, so that all things be not solemn and dark…for the gospel is not a grey and forbidding thing when taken in the round…..your Heavenly Parents rejoice over you; sometimes they are anxious; and indeed they do chuckle on occasion.”

So what some of my concerned family members see as my worryingly reckless and irreverent responses to overbearing pompous General Authorities or other things they hold sacred doesn’t come out of nowhere. As an 18 year old I was introduced in the most solemn way my religion allowed to the idea of humour being an essential ingredient in the gospel, and one of the divine attributes, like the young novice Adso is by his older and wiser mentor William in ‘The Name of the Rose’. I was told to remind everyone, like William does, that truth does not have the taste of death. (…Death Eaters! Harry Potter reference! Tick.) And who gets told in their patriarchal blessing that Mr and Mrs God are actually for real laughing at them?!! Seriously?! Best. Blessing. Ever. My apologies to everyone with really boring ones.

As well as all this frivolous…or deeply profound…light relief, I love how the temple provides us a rare opportunity to be deadly serious – sombre, earnest, philosophical. To put aside all the clutter and trivia that overwhelm modern adult life and contemplate the nature of existence and the universe and our place within it. To make the most serious commitments possible before God and His angels.

I loathe how temple work for the dead is a massive waste of time and money and a diversion from helping the living. Surely Jesus cautioned his disciples “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:60). Some Mormons become total fanatics, neglecting family duties, missing family events and failing to be present to nurture their grandchildren to hide away in a place they cannot go, constantly repeating time-consuming rituals and “repeating words learned long ago.” I should add, since I have mentioned her, that my amazing human dynamo mother in law does both temple and family spectacularly and goes the extra mile with both. I’m not talking about you Mummy in Law! (She’s a true redhead – you can’t be too careful.)

I love how the temple teaches and reminds me, and makes me prove that I really believe, that every person matters. Vicarious temple work is the pure love of Christ in action, casting bread on the waters without necessarily expectation of reward or immediate gratification or gratitude from those you help. An extreme Zen discipline. Like the cloistered monks and nuns who never interact with the people in the world but devote themselves to making everything better, as they see it, through the service of ritual and prayer for the living and the dead.

Mormons can be the absolute best at rallying round to help people who need us, even if it is expensive, difficult, inconvenient, exhausting, or neglecting our families whose needs are greater. We don’t even need to know them or be related to them – we will turn up, step into their lives, and carry them for a while. I am convinced that at least some of that powerful and ennobling instinct which truly ministers to the living and builds Christ’s kingdom in their lives comes from what the experience of family history research and temple work for the dead teaches us – that every person matters. Their parents matter. Their children matter. Their great grandneices twice removed matter. Their time in history matters even if it was a time when God seems to have turned his face from the world. Their nation matters. Their language and culture and unpronounceable names from a place completely different to our own matter. And we don’t need to have any prior personal connection with them whatsoever for them to still matter just as much as anyone else. The ultimate attribute of deity is unconditional self-sacrificial love for ‘even the least of these my brethren.’

So, for me, the endowment with all its random ingredients and irreconcilable contradictions is a metaphor for the Church as a whole.  It is earnest, well intentioned, flawed, treated as communicating ancient unchanging truths yet reviewed and reformed with each new generation to better fit the social norms and cultural values of the current generation. It is capable of elevating your mind and soul to the heights of love and compassion and wonder at the grandness of existence in our extraordinary world, yet obsessed over small details of clothing and conformity to a long list of rigid lifestyle and ideological requirements before you are permitted or trusted to fully participate. It is expansive and small-minded at the same time. It is silly nonsense in fancy dress; it is the deepest truths. It really does have to be seen, perhaps over and over again through a lifetime, to be believed and understood.

For the Love, Loathing and Laughter of the Temple Endowment published first on http://ift.tt/2wQcX5G