What remnants of needless attitudes, practices and policies, particularly with regard to gender, do we retain simply because they’ve grown familiar and, as such, unquestioned? Perhaps it’s time to do a little institutional spring cleaning.
It usually takes a disruption in our routine thoughts and experiences to open us to needed change–a tragedy or an epiphany or something as mundane as a question or a conversation.
In Ordain Women’s Conversation Three, I wrote: “As we obtain more light and knowledge, our [lives,] institutions and policies should reflect that increased wisdom. Church members … play a part in this process. We ask questions and articulate the need for revelation.”
Similarly, Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf said that “… if we stop asking questions, stop thinking, stop pondering, we can thwart the revelations of the spirit. Remember, it was the questions young Joseph asked that opened the door for the restoration of all things. … How often has the Holy Spirit tried to tell us something we needed to know, but couldn’t get past the massive, iron gate of what we thought we already knew.”
On this Easter Sunday, Elder Uchtdorf’s remarks bring to mind the image of the open tomb–the stone rolled back, no massive iron gate concealing the revelation within. That women were the principle witnesses to this disruptively central event of Christianity further encourages us as a church to clean out the patriarchal cobwebs that keep us from imagining the possibility of a religious community without obstacles to women’s ministry.
Happy Easter, from Ordain Women.
