[Joni]

That makes sense, Ray. Thank you for the clarification.

[Joni]

Old-Timer wrote:

Yes, there are issues (and important ones) that I hope change, but it’s important not to overstate issues or make issues where none need exist, even if it’s unintentionally.

I don’t think I’m making issues where none exist. As an endowed female, I can tell you I am one hundred percent invested in this problem.

Quote:

Eve is not an afterthought in the endowment. The actual phrasing is, “Is man meant to be alone?” – and the answer is a resounding, “No.” The message is that man needs a “helpmeet” – and “helpmeet” means, at the most basic level, “partner; one who walks beside another“. We tend to translate it as “helper” – someone who follows directions, but that’s not what the word means. That is the actual foundation of the rest of the story – that Eve, based on the actual word used, is a partner, not a helper, and that man is hopeless without her. That’s not a knock on man; it simply says that the ideal is not an individual, but a couple.

Eve was created for Adam. If he hadn’t needed her, she wouldn’t exist. If she ever gave consent (in the premortal existence?) to be married to Adam and bear his children, nobody thought it was important enough to mention that fact in the endowment.

Was I created specifically for my husband? Or was I as a woman, generally, created for the benefit of the male species, generally? Either way, it’s not about MY personal salvation but someone else’s.

[Joni]

pdigitty wrote:

The lord does actually speak to Eve, but it could be interpreted as only in chastizement. Remember when He asks somthing like, “Eve, what is this thou hast done?” She then says, the serpant, he begiled me. I do think that the LDS view of Eve is probably the most positive in the Christian world. Not saying a whole lot though. We generally beleive that she is the first to really figure God’s plan out, and Adam was like, uuuuuuhhhhh, oh yeah, right, I knew that.

I forgot about that! Yes, she is spoken to directly but she’s not really treated as a major player. I’m deeply uncomfortable with the way Eve is treated as an accessory to the Creation. I mean, they create this glorious, amazing Earth and finally they place upon it their crowning achievement – Man! And then they kind of look around thinking, “Now, I feel like we are forgetting something…”

Quote:

I can totally see how women could intrepret the Temple ceremony as sexist. But also remember you only have to hearken unto you husband as he harkens unto the Lord. If you do not believe that what he is tell you is of the Lord, then you are under no obligation to obey. So in this way, you have a personal relationship with the Savior. You have a right to your own personal witness outside of your husband’s.

I understand that I only have to hearken to (obey) my husband if his comandments are righteous. But I don’t see why a righteous, covenant-keeping woman has to hearken to (obey) anyone but God. My husband could call me from the office right now and tell me to stop whatever I am doing and go read a chapter of the Book of Mormon. That would be righteous counsel. Would it be right? Do I have to do it? The Lord’s way (or at least the temple’s) says yes.

Taken in the context of the temple, it feels like my loss of agency & lack of a personal relationship with God is a punishment for the original sin of Eve. (Even though Eve was created to be the one to introduce sin into the world so that Adam wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty. So she was kind of doomed from the start.) The Articles of Faith only say that man will be punished for his own sins and not for Adam’s transgression.

Another point I’ve never seen mentioned before… Where on earth is Heavenly Mother in the temple?

[Joni]

Forgotten_Charity wrote:

I can’t know how you feel exactly. I know I always felt extremely uncomfortable as a man even thinking that someone should obey or hearken to someone else (husband and wife). It makes me very very uncomfortable to even think about a hierarchy of obedience (especially of man and flesh). What I can tell you is the way I feel I would prefer not to live or even prefer hell to seeing myself or others be preferred or above or below anyone else. That’s just who I am even as a man. I let my wife know it because she insists that I am the patriarch of the house. I am not. There is none. There is a side by side effort only and that’s what I talk to her about. I talk to her about disavowing any hierarchy or seeing yourself or others as above or below another. I hope in time she becomes more comfortable with it. Just my perspective as a man. I am very very uncomfortable with any notion of such too. It’s a huge clash and I see hierarchy especially in marriage as a really bad and destructive idea. (I could say evil, but I don’t think or place any thought in that.) Just good or bad ideas. This one is just very old black and white idea to preserve men in power. I don’t want or need any kind of power. Hope it helps you to know it’s not just you or even just women who have a problem with it.

I wouldn’t have a problem agreeing to “hearken to” my husband if he was also under covenant to “hearken to” me. But he’s not. The only one my husband has to “hearken to” is God. It feels like we are just paying lip service to the idea of spouses as ‘equal partners.’

“Hearken” is kind of an interesting word to use in the covenant because it’s not really well defined in its use. I think it’s somewhere between “listen to” and “obey.” (I’ve heard that pre-1990, women actually agreed to “obey” their husbands. That was before my time so I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it would confirm my suspicion that “hearken” was chosen because it’s a less offensive way of saying “obey.”) However, I don’t think that in the specific context of the temple “hearken” means “counsel with” or “have discussions with” or even “listen to respectfully” because the exact same word describes what my husband does with the Lord. And I don’t think my husband is under covenant to take advice from the Lord and then weigh it against his own opinions and then decide whether to follow that advice or not. I think my husband is under covenant to OBEY the Lord.

When I think about “hearkening” to my husband, I think about the time our oven broke. Last summer the heating element in our oven burst into flames (really) and we needed to replace the whole appliance within a matter of days since we had a family event coming up. My husband’s input into the oven-buying process was, “I’ll stay home with the kids after dinner so you can go to Lowes and pick out a new oven.” He didn’t tell me what features to get, he didn’t even tell me how much money I could spend on the oven. Since I am the one who cooks in this house (he only reheats 😆 ) DH recognized that I was the one more fully invested into our kitchen appliances so he didn’t really have any counsel to give me. Were we disobeying the Lord? Before, I would have said we did the right thing. But this was before I realized that I covenanted to “hearken” to my husband and my husband didn’t covenant to “hearken” to me – making his voice the only one that really matters in our household.

My husband is like you, F_C – he is uncomfortable with the hierarchy too, at least to the extent that he agrees with my interpretation. However – I heard an analogy once that I always apply in this situation. When you are eating a plate of bacon and eggs, who is more fully invested in your breakfast? The chicken or the pig? When it comes to “hearkening,” my husband is the chicken and I am the pig. And I don’t have any hope that the bias against women in the temple is going to go away in my lifetime because the chickens are running the show.

The other thing that really, REALLY disturbs me is that the parallel language of man -> God and woman -> man strongly implies that a woman doesn’t have a direct relationship with God. If my relationship with God is mentioned at any time in the endowment, I haven’t noticed it. (In the old endowment video, at least as I am remembering it, God never once speaks to Eve, only to Adam. That may have changed with the new videos. I’m not hopeful.) Now, I’ve been struggling with the lack of feeling loved personally by God. I’ve thought for many years that maybe I did Something to cause God to shut off His love for me. But maybe God never loved me all along because I am a woman and not a man. But it begs the question – who actually created me to be a woman? Was it MY choice? (The Family Proclamation says that my gender was part of my premortal characteristics. Was I less faithful in the premortal existence?) And why would God even go to the trouble of creating an entire gender of human beings – roughly half of all the people who have ever lived – if He is going to punish them by loving them less or not at all? That doesn’t seem like a loving, all-wise Creator to me. That seems like a petty tyrant.

[Joni]

I don’t generally read FMH, but I ended up on this post from one of the StayLDS threads linked above. The seven points they listed are nearly word-for-word what I had written down myself. So if you want to know what specific things I object to, it’s all there.

ETA: several posters mentioned that the “hearken” covenant used to say “obey,” which is something I kind of suspected.

Hawkgrrrl, you are a better woman than I, if you still attend the temple knowing what you know. Right now I can look at myself and say I don’t ever want to sit through another endowment session again – it makes me feel degraded and unhappy. If I do return to the temple, I can feel okay performing initiatory work and sealings for the dead (particularly sealings between mothers and children, vs. spouses, because the unequal language is not there) since I’ve had nothing but positive experiences doing that in the past. But at the same time… I don’t feel great helping the spirits of women who have gone on before to be prepared to be the subordinate of their husbands. And it all ends up there eventually.

My husband admits that he can’t really understand what I feel, and though he’s never really questioned any aspect of the endowment, he’s also not some kid of monster who is looking forward to ruling over me in the Celestial Kingdom. He’s even said that he will risk his own eternal salvation to make me his equal partner. Which is a beautiful sentiment but I don’t feel like we mere mortals can really stand up to God and say, “No, I want it to be THIS way.”

[Joni]

LDSThomas wrote:

SamBee wrote:

Apparently there’s a new film…

Yes, there are now 2 new films. The one that came out a few months ago (August, I believe) and a new, new one that they started showing yesterday.

LDSThomas

Are both films being used or did one replace the other? I’m curious!

[Joni]

hawkgrrrl wrote:

We all do it in talks, too, unless Merriam-Webster has been canonized.

If the dictionary is off limits, how on earth would the youth speakers prepare their talks? 😆

[Joni]

nibbler wrote:

I agree with your position of the importance of teachings coming from revelatory sources but that important distinction often gets lost. I agree that not everything that is spoken from the pulpit is revelation… but that can make for little difference when members perceive it that way. This is what the GA said… or this is what manual says and the manual has TCoJCoLDS stamped on the back so it’s FP approved, gospel truth. It’s very easy for something that falls squarely in the camp of policy to be construed as coming out of revelation if the information is communicated from a pulpit and it can be an uphill battle to convince people otherwise.

Like a lot of Mormons of my generation, I grew up in a home where ‘Mormon Doctrine’ was considered, well, doctrine. Giving up on the idea that not all writings by Church leaders are revelatory has been a big step in my journey from more-or-less TBM to… whatever I call myself now. ‘Mormon Doctrine,’ of course, wasn’t officially published by the church. But even with lesson manuals published by the church, you see a lot of stories passed off as factual, and then you look at the original source and it’s from a book called “Tales of the Pioneers” or something like that. Grain of salt.

I don’t consider FP letters read from the pulpit to be revelatory, necessarily, but I do consider them to be ‘binding,’ if that makes any sense. So the 1970 letter saying that tithing is ten percent, and ten percent of what is between me and the Lord, isn’t superseded by the Widstoe statement of eight years later. But if a FP letter was read from the pulpit next Sunday that tithing is now nine or eleven percent, that would nullify the previous letter.

[Joni]

nibbler wrote:

I’m not arguing against your position, I actually agree with it, I’m just saying that I have heard it explicitly stated… only “tithing” counts towards being a full tithe payer, everything else on the tithing slip represents something above and beyond.

I think it’s fair to ask where this statement is coming from. If we believe it’s coming via revelation, then we are entitled to have this revelation confirmed to us personally. But not everything that is spoken from the pulpit in GC is revelation. The Church leadership is deeply invested in the Church’s bottom line and can be expected to make non-revelatory statements that bolster that bottom line. I don’t think it’s about greed or being a false prophet; I think it’s human nature.

Look at the source for the Widstoe quote above: it’s coming from LDS.org but it’s not originally from a revelatory source.

I feel comfortable allocating some of that 10 percent of net (I am a small business owner so I tithe on my profits, not my sales. Where it gets hairy is when you’re trying to decide if the portion of your income that goes directly to Uncle Sam counts as ‘increase’) to the missionary fund or humanitarian aid. I haven’t prayed about it yet to receive confirmation, but unless the Lord explicitly tells me not to, I want to tithe in a way I feel comfortable with.

We tend to talk about tithing like it’s an unchangeable eternal principle but I don’t really think it is. I’ve read some sources to indicate that it wasn’t always ten percent. It used to be paid in kind and now only cash money is acceptable. And the law of tithing was instituted long before the law of the land instituted a federal income tax. Like a lot of points of doctrine (the WoW for example) the practical application has fluctuated a LOT; I think it’s unfortunate that the Church membership continues to apply a lot of orthodoxy where I don’t really think it’s called for.

[Joni]

Swivel hips! Bahahaaa.

Even as I move into a new model of faithfulness that includes turning a critical eye on Church leadership, it’s worth remembering that it’s not about the individuals, not really. I feel that there is much to be gained by seeing our ecclesiastical leaders as human beings first. I’m sure ol’ Swivel Hips there is first and foremost an imperfect man who is doing the best he can.

[Joni]

Old-Timer wrote:

My advice:

See their attendance as being that of leaders of the corporate arm of the Church that actually funded the project, not as ecclesiastical leaders. None of the non-profit, church funds were used, so see them in that situation as nothing more than citizens of the city – leading business men in that moment. See this as one of their non-religious leader moments.

This is not a simple thing, since the mere fact that the Church has a corporate arm bothers some people, but it’s a valid view, I think. Even Jesus needed a treasurer to finance his ministry, and even he had to raise / solicit money to provide a living (so to speak), so even he had a “corporate arm”, in a real way.

Jesus needing a treasurer isn’t the same as Jesus being a treasurer. The problem as I see it here is that there was no visible separation between the ecclesiastical and the corporate. Sending all three members of the FP was unwise IMHO. It implies the Lord’s stamp of approval – it shouldn’t, but it does. If they had sent, say, the presiding bishop I wouldn’t be upset about this (though the phrase “Let’s go shopping!” still really, really grates.)

I think that the City Creek opening underlines a pretty serious paradox in the thought process of the rank and file of the Church. On the one hand we say, “The leadership of the Church is inspired by God and will never lead us astray!” On the other hand we say, “The Church is perfect; the people aren’t.” But the leadership of the Church, even President Monson, are just people so they can’t possibly be perfect. We either need to pick the model where the FP is infallible and questioning them is heresy, or the model where their fundamentally imperfect decisions are open for discussion, but right now we’re straddling the fence.

[Joni]

Cadence wrote:

Personally I would be more inclined to pay some tithing if the church was just honest. Just ask for the money because they need it to keep the church running. Quit making extravagant claims about the blessings involved. Do not tell the lie that the Lords church does not need your money which is a crock.

I think I’d feel a lot better about capital-T Tithing if we could just be honest and say you are paying your share of church buildings, lesson manuals, etc. Of course it begs the question how much of our tithing is actually being used for things the membership benefits from directly and how much is being put into real estate investments. But we will never know this. Does the Lord bless us for contributing to the LDS Church’s stock portfolio?

I had an interesting talk with my husband last night. He represents a lot of the TBM thinking and reflects the attitude of what I see as the corporate Church. For example, he’s still really uncomfortable with the idea of only tithing on net vs. gross. (I never really thought about it until he started his current job. He receives a really low base salary and a decent sized commission. Problem is, the commission is taxed at a REALLY high rate – like 30 percent – and we are still tithing on the gross of that.) But I did get him to admit that the financial blessings we supposedly receive as a result of paying tithing are most likely the result of paying tithing faithfully, rather than paying tithing on gross.

(My husband is a good man and I don’t mean to pick on him here. But he represents a lot of the TBM thinking that I am questioning. He wasn’t really raised to ask a lot of questions.)

Moving on from the net vs. gross question, we also differed on what actually counts as tithing. I believe that anything that goes into the gray envelope is tithing, whether it’s actually Tithing or humanitarian aid or fast offerings or missionary fund. He believes that only the top box, marked Tithing, actually counts – so if you put ten percent of your income into Humanitarian Aid, you aren’t actually a full tithe payer. And I think that’s the prevailing attitude in the Church – but I’ve never heard it spoken from the pulpit and I certainly don’t think that’s actually The Lord’s opinion. I believe that one of the reasons we pay tithing is to help the poor and the needy – you know, like Jesus would do. Husband also contended that another purpose of tithing is to build up the Kingdom of God and grow the Church. I said it certainly is and what better way to grow the Church than to contribute to the General Missionary Fund?

The Church is a little more open about their humanitarian spending, and there is a figure floating around that they contributed $1.2 billion over a 30 year period. Now, that sounds like a lot until you consider that it’s spread out over 30 years and (at present) 15 million people. As individuals, we are actually contributing very little to humanitarian aid. I think that what happens is we put 10 percent into that Tithing box, we pay a few dollars in fast offerings, and then we ignore the other boxes on the tithing slip because we are already feeling pretty tapped out after contributing 10 percent of our gross (which is a lot more than 10 percent of our take-home pay). That’s always been my experience and I feel pretty confident in saying a LOT of other members of the Church do the same.

And, I would argue, we have got it all backwards.

It’s never been preached from the pulpit that only Tithing counts as tithing, or that the Lord is pleased when we give more money to this sort of black box fund (we don’t know how much goes in, how much goes out, or where it goes) than when we give in ways that actually directly benefit His children. I would even question, who benefits from us continuing to believe that the Lord will only bless us if we tithe in a certain way? Certainly The Church as an entity benefits more from my capital-T Tithing than from my (paltry) fast offerings or my (non-existent) humanitarian aid. But when we give tithing, do we give it for the glory of The Church, or the Lord?

My husband also brought up the extremely popular sentiment that tithing is the Lord’s money, and it’s not up to us how He spends it. But I learned something interesting last night. The Lord’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on the tithing slip. Neither does the Savior’s. But the phrase “the Church” is on there THREE TIMES.

I said that I can guarantee that there is tithing money being spent in a way that it shouldn’t. I hope I don’t sound like a crack conspiracy theorist (now get off my lawn) but you have a combination of a HUGE amount of money, a small number of people charged with oversight, and precious little transparency – it’s the perfect storm for misappropriation and even corruption. I asked my husband if he would donate to a secular charity that refused to divulge anything but the most rudimentary facts about its financial practices. (I admit I’m not consoled by the Church Accounting Office telling us in GC, “Yep. Everything’s fine.”) He admitted that he wouldn’t, or at the least, he’d be extremely skeptical. Yet our eternal salvation isn’t dependent on whether or not we contribute to the Red Cross. But we can’t even enter the temple if we don’t pay tithing.

I am one hundred percent certain that some fraction of tithing funds is being used in a manner that the Lord would not approve. I don’t know what percent it is, but I can guarantee that there are bad investments being made and possibly even fraud. I can say this with absolute certainty because it has happened before. On more than one occasion, the Church has darn near gone bankrupt because of bad investments. (It’s sad that the response to that appears to have been less transparency and more orthodoxy when it should have been the other way around.) And we can say, well, the Church is perfect, the people running it aren’t. But then on the other hand, we say well, the Church leadership won’t lead us astray. And it’s the Lord’s money, we shouldn’t question how it’s being used. But those are mutually exclusive ideas. Asking for a fair accounting of tithing – even questioning some of the investments made on our behalf – is perfectly in line with our acceptance that the Church is imperfect even up to and including President Monson.

What I told my husband is that I don’t have a testimony of tithing as I’m currently paying it, because I don’t have a testimony of The Church. Gasp! But what are we really saying when we get up in F&T meeting and proclaim, “I know the Church is true”? My husband loves to tell stories of sobbing BYU freshman declaring, “This is such a true school!” And I think it makes as much sense to declare The Church true as it does to declare BYU true. They are “true” in the sense that they deonstrably exist; but beyond that, neither BYU nor The Church are really a thing that can even be true or not. I think we can say that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is and always will be what we define as “true.” But even the restored gospel as we know it, can we even say that is such a thing as “true”? Doctrine changes all the time. Can we say the gospel is more or less true than it was in 1830 or 1890 or 1978? And if the gospel is “more true” than it was in previous years, doesn’t that mean it’s “less true” than it will be in the future?

It really makes my head swim if I think about it too much.

My husband is the primary breadwinner, though he emphasizes that the paychecks that come with his name on them are OUR money, not HIS. (Like I said, he’s a good man. He isn’t going to start asking the tough questions anytime soon but he respects that this is what I need to do.) One thing he mentioned is that it would be possible to capital-T Tithe ten percent of the net, and then ‘make up the difference’ by greatly increasing our contributions to the other boxes on the tithing slip. (The more I think about it, the more I really don’t feel good about not contributing to the missionary fund. I guarantee our children will benefit from that fund at some point.) I think that maybe The Church as an organization would disapprove of this allocation – but I feel one hundred percent certain that The Lord would approve. And as much as I don’t trust my ability to have my prayers answered, I think it’s totally fair to “experiment upon the word” and ask God for confirmation that we are doing the right thing.

Plus, I would feel better about it. Right now I pay tithing out of a sense of obligation. It’s supposed to bring us joy.

Anyway, I apologize for writing an essay here. I don’t know what’s gotten into me!

ETA: pdiggity, I have to fight back tears as I read your story. Clearly “The Church” does not approve of the way you’ve allocated your financial resources (to the extent of witholding you TR). But everything I believe tells me that The Lord heartily approves. You owe more to your wife, your eternal companion and the mother of your children, than you ever will to the Church’s financial coffers. And when The Church and the Lord are at odds, I tend to side with the higher authority.

[Joni]

The panhandlers and the people who were causing the area to be ‘run down’ are still out there. They’ve just been relocated to an area further away from Temple Square visitors and General Conference traffic. I am saying sincerely and without snark, that doesn’t feel Christlike to me.

I don’t feel that the mall was a wise use of funds or a good investment. That’s opinion. The mall was opened (I don’t know if ‘dedicated’ is the right word) by all three members of the First Presidency. That’s fact. I don’t feel good about a mall opening meriting that sort of ecclesiastical attention. I’m having a hard time preventing those feelings from interfering with my already shaky testimony. How?

[Joni]

Shawn wrote:

Bruce R. McConkie:

“Scant knowledge is available to us of Eve (the wife of Adam) and her achievements in pre-existence and in mortality. Without question she was like unto her mighty husband Adam in intelligence and in devotion to righteousness during both her first and second estates of existence. She was placed on earth in the same manner as was Adam, the Mosaic account of the Lord creating her from Adam’s rib being merely figurative.”

(Mormon Doctrine, p.242, EVE)

Stop the presses! Did I just agree with McConkie?!?! 😮

[Joni]

Shawn wrote:

My wife pointed out to me that our stake was fasting to “hasten the work.”

I asked, “What does that even mean?”

She replied, “I don’t know.”

It seems like if the work is going to ‘hasten’ it’s going to ‘hasten’ on the Lord’s timeline and not ours. His ways are not our ways, after all. So go ahead and get yourself some Cheetos.

[Author]

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