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This is the part of the Tribune story I liked the best: Quote:Though approaching the experience as a kind of anthropologist [taking the missionary lessons from 19 year old missionaries], Bradley said, “I experienced something my own investigators had described, that during the discussions and after, there was a light with me.”
Very interesting. I remember teaching my first discussion as a young missionary, and feeling this “light”, and also knowing that the people I was teaching sensed it also, that certain undeniable something that I’d never felt before, even though I’d grown up in the church.
turinturambar wrote:I am anti-corporate, and even anti-capitalist. I don’t want to be a volunteer for a corporation. I want to be a disciple of Christ. I want to be an acolyte for a holy mystery. I want to be a priest in a kingdom of priests. I want to be swept up in something deeply moving and spiritual. And lately, I’m not getting those things from the Church. It makes me sad.
Ditto….
I can get really excited about the scriptures, I can get excited reading church history (currently reading Teryl Givens bio of Parley P. Pratt)…but the church, the corporate church never excites me, rather it gives me a feeling of weariness. But then I remember that discipleship, or 90% of it, is weariness, and that I must keep plugging away anyway. But still I long for something different, something real, authentic, rather than the PR we get today.
I don’t think I’ve ever been called an apostate before, but I certainly have been treated like one–as I am sure many of you on this board have also. Once in priesthood meeting, when I was teaching the lesson, I had someone rise and bear testimony against me. A kind of funny experience, as I look back on it now, but at the time it wasn’t very funny. One could say the entire church has been in apostasy since 1834, Kirtland, when the saints rejected the commandment to live in the United Order–or when they simply couldn’t do it, or refused to do it. Once in Utah Brigham Young tried and failed repeatedly to revive the order, and eventually it was given up for good. But still the scripture says, “And Zion cannot be built up unless it is by the principles of the law of the celestial kingdom; otherwise I cannot receive her unto myself,” (D&C 105: 5). After reading “Approaching Zion” by Hugh Nibley, I get the feeling that on some level this is what he thought, i.e., that the church was in a state of at least partial apostasy since rejecting, time and again, the command to live after the “principles of the law of the celestial kingdom,” i.e., the United Order, and that this is what “generates those crippling contradictions that mark our present condition.” (H. Nibley)
As for individual apostasy…. I think the church today is in a growth phase, a PR phase, a phase where the wheat is allowed to grow with the tares until the time when there “will be a separation among the people” (D&C 1, I think); and so best, for the time being, to keep a big tent, lest we inadvertently cast out wheat that has been mistaken for tares. In my opinion this is what happened with the September six”…just my opinion. I think it is almost always a mistake to excommunicate members for doctrinal heterodoxy. Does anybody even remember what, exactly these “September six” were x-d for? Take Avraham Gileadi, for example. I think he said something, wrote something that offended Elder Packer…I’m not even sure what it was, and it would be hard to find someone who could say, exactly, what he did to merit getting x-d. A short time later he was re-instated…but the damage had already been done, to him personally. I do not know Bro. Gileadi, maybe someone on this board does, but I believe he lost (1) his livelihood (i.e., job at BYU, and (2) his marriage. And why? Because an overzealous SP who was a CEX employee believed that his heterodoxy merited it. Crazy–in my humble opinion.
Regarding the shame issue… I go by kjones on MormonDiscussions (I don’t post there anymore…too many haters) and I posted the following a month ago or so: Quote:A few years back I was having dinner in a quiet restaurant with five high school friends. We’d all gone on missions, gotten married, had children. So far, no divorces but me. At the time one of these friends was a high councilman, another was an EQ prez. We were then and still are all active.
Somehow the subject of “self-abuse” (we didn’t call it that, rather we used another term, the same term with which we used to refer to it in high school) came up. I think one of our number told a joke, we all laughed, and then the table went silent. It was not a subject anyone wanted to talk about. It’s one of those subjects you laugh and tell jokes about, or you don’t talk about it at all. I asked why this is so, why everybody was so embarrassed to bring it up.
“Shame-inducing,” one of our number remarked. “I’m ashamed right now, in fact I’m blushing.”
“Why? Because you have to do it occasionally?” another of our number said. “But we all do, every one of us? Right?”
Nods all around, except the friend who was a high councilman.
“I don’t,” he said. “Nope. No way.” He shook his head.
“Oh, geez!” one of my other friends said. “You are a dirty liar and you know it! Are you really going to sit there and tell us that you’re the only one of us who doesn’t
?”Another moment of uncomfortable silence. My high councilman friend dropped his head, rubbed his brow a bit and then looked up, a sheepish smile on his face.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m a liar.”
It is interesting to me, and has been for a long time now, how ashamed we all are–i.e., Mormon men. We are grown men, we have married and had children, raised families, made livings for these families, served in the church and our communities. And we are ashamed, every one of us.
My father was a good friend of SWK’s. For at least 15 years, maybe 20, he and SWK would get together once a month for a private meeting. This was during the years when SWK was Elder Kimball, not Pres. Kimball. I had a steady girlfriend in HS, and when I went on my mission she gave me as a going away present “The Miracle Of Forgiveness”–the book that came down like a mountain on even the slightest sexual transgression. The thing back then was that sexual sin was the sin next to murder in seriousness, and you were to avoid it like the plague, and even little sexual sins required confession. What this meant is that I and all of the missionaries I served with went around all of the time carrying a burden a guilt: guilt for sexual thoughts, occasional masturbation (not me, I actually never did, even one time before I was married…quite a record, I think). For my part, I felt it necessary to go into to see my mission prez and confess that I hadn’t confessed something earlier and felt the need to do so now: my girlfriend and I had engaged in passionate kissing a week or so before I left for my mission. Sounds crazy to me now, but this was all very real to me and everyone else–very, very real. Which brings me to my story….
I’d been home from my mission for 5-6 years, I’d been as chaste as it was possible for anyone to be. I occasionally battled thoughts but I never never masturbated. But it seemed like 90% of my waking thoughts revolved around girls, especially during the summers when I was out of school and worked construction, as was the case at this particular time. I’d been working all day at a construction site and I needed a ride home, and a girl who used to make deliveries for the contractor offered me a lift. I knew this girl slightly, and I admit I spent a lot of time looking at her when she was around and I knew she liked me from the way she looked at me. So I accepted a ride from her. Long story short, we ended up on the floor in my apartment, rolling around, etc.
An hour later when it was all over, I was in shock. She was LDS also and felt pretty bad. “I guess I’d better go,” she said, and she got up and left. I went into my bedroom (my roommate was not at home at the time) and sat on the bed, and began to…what?…howl, I think is the word. I really and truly believed that all was lost, that I was going to be x-d; and that if I was going to be x-d I’d rather die. My roommate kept a pistol in his room. I know, because he’d shown it to me once. I started looking for it, opening his drawers, going thru his closet…. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I felt I had to get out of the apartment and so I went outside, hopped the bus and took it to my parents’ home on the upper avenues in SLC. It took me over an hour to get there, and when I walked in the door my dad was sitting in the easy chair in the living room reading the paper.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, and out it came, I told him everything.
He’d been a sp, also a mission prez, and so he knew the routine, and in those days the routine was minute questioning, all of the details out on the table. Who undressed who? Were your genitals exposed? etc., etc. And as my father questioned me here now I noticed that he began to smile, and the reason he was smiling was that nothing, really, had happened. We’d rolled around the floor, we were making out, I tried to undo her bra but she wouldn’t let me, then I tried to get her pants off and she wouldn’t let me, then I’d gone off–and it was all over.
“But dad, I’d tried to go all the way with her,” I said. “That was my thought, it was my intention!” I really and truly thought I was damned.
“But still nothing happened,” he said; “or not much. But in future you will want to be much more careful.”
What is the moral of this story? I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me. It’s just an experience from my past. If there is a moral, this is what it is, as far as I’m concerned:
It is possible to keep the exceedingly high moral standards of Elder Packer, Mark E. Peterson and SWK if you’re living in the church bubble (i.e., you are on a mission or you are a GA or a CES employee, or something in between, like my dad was). But to people living in the real world…to expect such people, normal men and women, to expect them to adhere day in day out to an unrealistic, practically impossible standard–well, you are just setting up such people for failure, for a fall, and when they fall…well, such falls can be not only be damaging, they can be fatal. I didn’t kill myself on that day, but I know someone who did….
Yes. I should have made myself more clear. Sorry. Pres. Uchtdort is beloved of most LDS everywhere in the same way I think Hugh B. Brown was. People remember Pres. Brown fondly to this day. But we all have the ability to filter out what we don’t like or agree with in conference talks. For example…. Somebody on the Mormon Dialogue and Discussion Board (MDDB) asked if members of the board thought Pres. Uchtdorf was talking about them when he said we should be kind and charitable, even to those we disagree with. It was clear from the numerous responses to this post on the MDDB that no one on that board thought Pres. Uchtdorf was in any way referring to them, although certain posters with doubts, posters who are or were going thru crises of faith or simply with questions–to these people, on the receiving end of the sometimes snarky, sharp, occasionally insulting responses on the MDDB…well, to these people it seems as though Pres. Uchtdorft was speaking precisely to the people on the MDDB, or rather to a certain cadre of faithful on the MDDB.
This is all I meant. It’s kind of like a buffet. We take from conference talks the things we like and mostly ignore the rest. Isn’t that what Pres. Uchtdorft said in his talk? “You’re thinking this is not meant for you. It is meant for you!” (Or something like that.) Pres. Brown was a voice of moderation and civility during a time when there were a lot of immoderate, uncivil voices in the church, and lots of hardliners simply tuned him out.
But to address the primary question of wayfarer’s post…. Several years ago BYU prof Eugene England wrote a book titled “Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel”, and in it he said that through our church callings we are forced to rub shoulders with people we’d rather not rub shoulders with–like your home teaching companion; and in this way we grow and become Zion material. It is your HT companion’s burden not only to learn to love you and work with you but your burden to learn to love him and work with him. This is easier said than done. It’s something that I find extremely difficult, as I am very different from almost everybody in every ward I’ve ever been in; in fact, this is one of my primary challenges as I try to remain church active.
To my thinking Prez Uchtdorf is treated by many TBM’s in the same way Hugh B. Brown was treated by TBM’s back in the 50’s and 60’s: they tolerated him, but they did not believe him. It was even worse if these TBM’s were Republican, too (and of course almost all of them were) since Hugh B. Brown was a Democrat, and he was not shy about letting people know that he was a Democrat, although he was not in any way a political crusader like Elder Benson was. Elder Benson was not only a Republican but a John Bircher. He was not actually a member of the John Birch Society but he openly advocated the society and recommended it to church members. He once said at a BYU devotional that there was a “Judas in our midst”, or in the midst of the Twelve, and it was assumed he was referring to Pres. Brown, then a member of he 1st Prez. This was around the time when Pres. Brown was lobbying to have the priesthood extended to Blacks at a time when Elder Benson and others thought the whole Civil Rights thing was a communist conspiracy. Hi, forgotten_charity… I liked your comment, “Where the worst thing a GA was thought to have done was maybe curse once when he was younger.” I think this is a real problem in the church today, this idea that to be a leader or a witness for Christ, you must be “squeaky clean”, practically having had a halo over your head from the day you were born.
Correction…. It was not Bro. Backman’s BOM class at BYU, rather it was Reid Bankhead’s class. Does anybody on this board remember Reid Bankhead at the BYU Religion Dept? Quite an interesting personality….
Heber 13…. Thanks for your reply. Yes, I try to do the same, separate the Gospel from the church–to keep them separate in my mind. I think you have probably been more successful in this than I have been. I guess the saying is, “The church administers the Gospel, but it is not the Gospel”–even if Elders McConkie and Packer might vehemently disagree. I remember Elder Poleman’s talk, how he said basically this same thing, and then he had to go back and given an amended or watered-down address in which he basically retracted what he’d originally said. Sad.
Wayfarer…. I remember reading about the “Zelph” incident in Bushman’s “Rough Stone”. I do not “know” anything, however I do believe the BOM is an actual translation of an actual ancient record…although I’m not sure the word “translation”, or at least translation as we normally think of it, fits. I read the BOM literally every day of my life from age 17 to 30, and from 30 to today I’ve been through it several times. At BYU, in Bro. Backman’s BOM class, I memorized it from cover to cover, and could quote it with about 80% accuracy. I’ve outgrown a lot of authors in my lifetime (I read a lot), but after all of these years of reading the BOM, not only have I not outgrown it, I feel as though I’m just now beginning to understand it, at least in a way I didn’t before. I do believe it is an actual ancient record, that there really were gold plates and a man named Mormon who pulled all of the records of his people together and abridged these records, including in his abridgment Nephi’s small plates, etc., etc. When I was a missionary I used to occasionally stop whatever it was I was doing and say to myself, “This is all really true! It is really true!” On the one hand I found it frankly all unbelievable, but on the other hand I “knew” in a way I cannot describe that it was true. And it just seemed so amazing to me, and it still seems so today, the whole story of Moroni and the Gold Plates, the Urim and Thummim…frankly all unbelievable, except that I would stake my life on its being, in actual material fact, true. I don’t “know” this in the way one is used to knowing things, yet I know it better than anything that I think I know. I’m probably not making sense here. Suffice it say that, yes, I believe the BOM is an actual ancient record.
As for the PofGP…as Bro. Nibley observed, JS brought forth the Book Of Moses only a short time after the BOM–“and they are completely different books!” I remember as a young missionary reading Moses 1 over and over again, and marveling at the language, the depth and profundity of the narrative. Whoever came up with this, wrote it…well, this was not a ordinary man, even if you leave the BOM entirely out of the picture. This is why I am entirely unmoved by critics and anti-Mos who point out the flaws of JS, his teenage wives, this or that. To me it might be similar to someone pointing out that Shakespeare was a terrible husband and he beat his wife and he was stingy with money. I’d shrug and say, “So? ‘Hamlet’ still exists, and so does ‘Macbeth’, ‘As You Like It’ and all of the rest.” Whoever dumped on us, first the BOM, then the Book Of Moses, later the revelations in the D&C (some of which are as remarkable as Moses 1), and finally the Book Of Abraham and the King Follettt sermon…well, this was not a ordinary man. To me it makes more sense to view him as one of the Gods–whatever his personal failings may have been.
As for the Book Of Abraham, the papyrus, etc. This one of the things I don’t know much about. There is a story current that Hugh B. Brown did not think the Book Of Abraham ought to be part of the canon…but I don’t know. But whatever it is, it is a remarkable production, completely different in style and tone from the Book Of Moses. Is this really the voice of Abraham? I personally think that it is–whatever may actually have been on that ancient papyrus (and I do know that what was mostly likely on that papyrus was ordinary funeral writings).
Hi, wayfarer…. When I have a little more time I will answer your question about BOM and PofGP. For now I just wanted to say that I’m pretty much a socialist also. I’m a registered democrat but I’m really more of a socialist–while I am waiting for the “dream”, the return of Zion, the United Order. I think socialism is a man-made system, just as capitalism is (therefore both are corrupt in the eyes of God), but I think socialism, the kind practiced in Europe or Israel, is a better solution for the time being than capitalism–in others words socialism is less offensive to me than capitalism.
I’ve just uttered what many righteous Utah County Republicans consider blasphemy. You’d think that capitalism, free markets, etc., was enshrined in the scriptures, our church doctrine and the pronouncements of all the prophets.
More later….
