For background: I went to my bishop and told him that I was involved with Ordain Women. They had fair warning. I was asked to speak in sacrament meeting and when I said yes, I was handed a talk by a GA and the title was, “Come Unto Me.” The rest was useless drivel. Here is what I said (I have edited for length, and since this was five years ago, I have left out some things that I don’t really think add to the gist of the what I was saying):
Come Unto Me is the invitation of the Savior to us. It is found in the New Testament, the Book of Mormon, and reiterated in our modern scriptures in Section 88:63 of the Doctrine and Covenants. “Draw near unto me, and I will draw near unto you; seek me diligently, and ye shall find me; ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
How do we draw near unto the Savior? He has shown us by His words and His example what He values and how we are to be numbered among His people. Alma, in Mosiah 18:9-11, sets out our responsibilities if we are to be called the people of God: “ye are willing to mourn with those who mourn; yea, and comfort those who that stand in need of comfort.” And in Matthew 25:40 we are counseled: “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” King Benjamin told his people and us in Mosiah 2:17: “when ye are in the service of your fellow being, ye are only in the service of your God.” Jesus spent His life among those who were marginalized, who were unacceptable to and within the mainstream culture of His day.
There are people among us today; in our congregations and our communities and even, sometimes, in our families who don’t feel welcome, who are outcast and marginalized. Who are these strangers among us?
Those who have questions often find themselves strangers among us. We too often see them as dissidents, disobedient, lacking in faith, questioning our testimonies and our leaders. Why can’t they just listen to our leaders who tell us what we need to think about and have faith that all things will be made known in the Lord’s due time?
Gays and lesbians have been made visible as strangers among us recently. Utah leads the nation in suicide among youth who identify as gay and lesbian. Almost half of the population of homeless teens in Utah are gay and lesbian children who have been expelled from their LDS homes after having told their parents about their sexual orientation. I am going to leave these disturbing statistics with the comment that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we are perceiving and treating these strangers among us, that we should think about.
The strangers with whom my heart really lies are certain women in the church today. Let me give some historical context on the way women have functioned in the church. The women of the first Relief Society were counseled by Joseph Smith: “I will make of you a Society of Priests as in Enoch’s day as in Paul’s day.” That trajectory was cut short by his martyrdom after which the Relief Society was dissolved as the Saints prepared for the exodus to the West.
The Relief Society was reorganized after the Saints had reached the Salt Lake valley. The Relief Society was a autonomous organization that was not brought under the auspices of the priesthood until much later. These women owned their own buildings, collected and managed their own funds and initiated and ran their own programs. They were suffragists, doctors, (sent to school in the East with Relief Society funds), nurses (trained by the doctors who returned from medical schools in the East), business owners, farmers, political leaders, builders and administrators of hospitals, writers, poets, publishers of their own magazines, newsletters, and instruction manuals. It goes without saying that they were wives and mothers.
Our allotted spaces for women in the church have narrowed considerably over the decades of the 20th century and a cult of femininity defined exclusively as wife/mother had developed I quote Chieko Okazaki, the First Counselor in the General Relief Society Presidency from 1990 – 1997, “the current infrastructure of the church is not allowing women to be equally represented; our voices simply aren’t an integral part of the narrative.”
The obsessive and narrow definition of a wife/stay at home mother as the only acceptable way to be a Latter Day Saint woman does not serve us well. Women too often get the message loud and clear that their job is to be supportive and just agree with the decisions of the priesthood leaders and they feel it’s inappropriate to speak up, their voices are simply unheard because priesthood leaders are not accustomed to having their counsel. This has made too many of our sisters strangers in our congregations.
It has left women who are unable to have children out of the equation. It has made women who do not want children practically pariahs. There was a recent article in the Deseret News that excoriated those who make the choice not to have children. There are many reasons to make such a choice, but there is no room in our culture to do so.
Single sisters, I have walked a few years in your shoes and have some understanding of what the culture of the church looks like from your perspective. There too often seems to be no place for you. You are thrown the bone of “well, you will have the opportunity to marry and have children in the next life.” Uh, hun. So what is this life? A waiting room? This teaching is unfortunately very dismissive of your lives and your accomplishments and your contributions to your communities and the world at large.
I am a supporter of ordaining women. I think this is a step that will have positive consequences far beyond the confines of our church communities. I join with those who are asking our leaders, those authorized to receive revelation for the church as a whole, to petition the Lord for further light and knowledge. We have full faith in continuing revelation. I believe in the promise fo the night article of faith: “we believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.” Those of us asking our leaders to seek the counsel of the Lord on this important topic are seeking a place at the table: so that women’s voices, women’s lives, women’s challenges, and women’s diversity also inform the perceptions and actions of those who are creating the programs and writing and presenting the publications and counsel that shape our religious culture.
When we begin to see women routinely acting in all capacities within our religious communities and being regarded and viewed and treated as fully and equally human, I believe that boys and girls will grow up into men and women who have very different fundamental assumptions about themselves and each other than we currently have. I think that we will find that viewing individuals of the opposite sex in a more nuanced and less restricted way will be a paradigm shift of colossal scope. I believe we will be freer to see individuals as individuals with strengths and weaknesses, gifts and goals that are unique and that will open the possibilities of tapping the potential of individuals for greatness. I also think it will revolutionize the way girls view themselves as they grow into women. I believe that the creative and intellectual energy that is now being carefully circumscribed will change the world in ways we can only imagine. I believe boys will flourish as well when they are no longer required to spend so much psychological energy patrolling and enforcing the boundaries of masculinity.
I work for a world made new when the divine feminine is allowed to come into full partnership with the divine masculine and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
There has been a great deal of very venomous rhetoric aimed at members of Ordain Women and myself personally. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been told that if I don’t like things the way they are that I should just leave. I have been dismissed, my understanding of the gospel questioned, I have been accused of trying to tear down the church and of seeking power or being power hungry.
I find this charge of seeking power an interesting one in that priesthood does not confer power in the sense that we usually understand it. Power that is perceived as hierarchical and monarchical is diluted when you share in that power. The more people who have power in this model, the less one person has of it. This is the model that sustains self-aggrandizement, and it seems that is what is really meant by the charge that we are power hungry; that we seek for self-aggrandizement.
I don’t see that priesthood power is conducive to self-aggrandizement. This is the power to bless and to serve and to teach and to discern and to prophesy and to reach the full measure of our creation and to glorify God who said in Moses 1:39, “Behold, this is my work and my glory, to bring about the immortality and eternal life of man.” Man in the generic, I am certain. If that is self-aggrandizement, we need more of it in the world.
I joined Ordain Women last October when we went as a group and requested admission to the priesthood session as prospective elders. After we were turned away, the words of President Uchtdorf came to us like sweet manna to our starved and weary souls, “Regardless of your circumstances, your personal history, or the strength of your testimony, there is room for you in the Church.”
“To those who have separated themselves from the Church, I say, my dear friends, there is yet a place for you here. Come and add your talents, gifts, and energies to ours. We will become better as a result.”
These are wise and loving words.
“Come back, there is room for you here. . .” he said, and yet. Oh, and yet, right outside the doors, within our congregations and in our family circles are those whose struggle to maintain their faith has become or is becoming unsustainable because they KNOW there is no room for them here. They know because they have lived an experience that so many REFUSE TO SEE OR HEAR because of what they think they know. They have been turned away by words and, more importantly, the actions of the body of the Church form the top down; actions and words not of the few and far between, but of the many and the constant.
I hope that we will go forth from today and make the counsel of President Uchtdorf, King Benjamin, Alma, and Jesus himself manifest in the world. To turn harsh words away with kindness, to listen with our hearts and minds open to the struggles and needs of those around us, and to offer the outstretched hand to those who are strangers among us. For this is how we truly heed the invitation extended to us from Jesus: “Come unto me.”