Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
SilentDawning wrote:
My wife doesn’t apologize. I can be frank about things that happen that she is completely responsible for, and how they hurt me, and she never apologizes. But she has always been like this. When I ask for her reasoning on it I don’t get an answer I can quote back here. It is a kind of non-answer.This describes my wife (now ex). In our case, it was part of a pattern of abusive manipulation – likely tied to her narcissistic personality and borderline personality disorders. She apologizes to me now. Some of that is part of a pattern of manipulating her bf. Some of it could be sincere. Losing a family that supported her for 25 years could have shook her up. Or it may not have. I can’t ever be sure with those disorders.
Family history: 5 years ago I wouldn’t have believed I’d be doing any family history. 9.2k-created-people later, I’m connected with a cousin and a sister (met on Ancestry). The free Ancestry subscription feels like the Church is paying me tithes to stick around. A sense of community: Not so much. There’s a few people I connect with but they’re as reclusive and anti-social as I am. You can guess how that’s working out. I didn’t used to be like this tho. Twenty years ago, ward leadership became dominated by cloistering isolationists (no contact with the community) and that’s been the vibe ever since. It turned out to be a good fit for my screw-everything phase.
For the family: When I entered my it-can-all-burn-to-the-ground-for-all-I-care phase, I only went so the kids would have some structure. It was fairly haphazard structure; the value of it is debatable
Remote Sundays: This feels like it could have been one of Pres Nelson’s awesome changes. New Me doesn’t like sharing a space w/ more than 20 or so people. I am looking forward to sacrament for the first time in 20 years. Also we get awesome commentary from one ward member (a high-councilmen) like “Masks for from Satan!” Actual quote, btw. Yes, he was sincere.
Support from members: I don’t ask for support often. Historically, if I wanted it, I had to form a clique. Even asking for a food order when we were literally out of food would be met with reluctance. Meanwhile me and my 5 sons attended nearly every move (0-5/month). However, in the last 2 or 3 years, it’s been better. A few guys in EQ mentioned stuff they could do which happened to be stuff we needed. Feeling supported is kind of weird and nice.
Leadership: I’ve posted about this before. Our last bishop was this awesome Tongan, who we lost in a redistricting. The guy who replaced him is a partisan ideologue (demonstrated from the pulpit). He isn’t as extreme & overt as some here but it is clear he eats/lives/breaths it. However he keeps surprising me. The tone of sacrament meeting has become mostly free of political signalling. This last Sunday, he counseled us to read Dallin Oaks talk from last conference, in prep for a 5th Sunday lesson. Yes, that talk. A talk that, while imperfect, was much, much better than i had feared. I regularly see the mantle change bishops, but never this quickly.
This is more than enough for one post, I think.
I’d keep the forum going a while longer. For what it is, it’s curious that it isn’t garnering a larger following. There’s certainly plenty of need. I recently started posting but then stopped as our household escalated from busy to busy+crisis. Otherwise I probably would be posting semi regularly.
Is covid responsible for the site slowdown? I think so. I know I’m less stressed when I’m less involved in my ward. (clarify: my issues have always been with my ward, not the Church). Less stress means less need to vent.
DarkJedi wrote:
Roy wrote:
The moral of the story is that I do not expect our church to perform better than other churches.
In this I strongly (and respectfully) disagree. I expect the Church to be better than any other because it is possible and because the alternative is to be less.Looking at this from another angle:
In my experience, status quo-ism manifests itself as a (outright or passive) refusal to be better than we are. It is a
Culture of Noand to me that feels indistinguishable from Hell. DarkJedi wrote:
We might be straying from the topic a bit with the discussion about the church’s response to abuse. Like the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, public schools, and others, the CoJCoLDS responded differently to abuse 20 years ago than they do now. Likewise, there are individuals in any organization who are more likely to dismiss accusations and/or cover them up (or at least attempt to).I wish this had been moved into it’s own thread. A thread on transexual issues is a fully uncool location for an In-depth discussion of CSA
We’re still Zoomy. Added a rotating 2nd hour (RS/EQ one week then SS/Pri). Some EQ participants are sporting hangover attire, while leaving their cam on. The 1st Pres indicated they were cool with a more general opening but our stake hasn’t made any moves there yet.
Sidebar: I’d like to revisit a bit of history. All thru the 1990s and 2000s, I watched overtly hostile, anti-Mormon bigotry grow and grow in Evangelical communities. People like Walter Martin (pre-1980s) and later Hank Hanegraaff & Bill Keller built entire industries, dedicated to demeaning, degrading & discrediting Church members, Jehovah Witnesses and even 7 Day Adventists (pre-1980 inc Catholics & post 2000 added Muslims). Theological colleges offered courses in Mormon bashing. The pressure to demonize the Church was everywhere in evangelicalism.
And then came the 2008 GOP primary races. Mitt Romney was the front-runner. Out came Evangelical bigots by the score, all super comfortable with their Klan-like bigotry – as if it wasn’t twisted and grotesque. That attracted a LOT of sunshine and what followed was tons of overdue shaming of people who’d earned it for years. They may have grumbled but they did largely crawl back into their holes.
From what I can see, Evangelical bigotry never bounced back. Well, at least not targeting us.
Bigotry toward Muslims is still a thing due to it’s much wider base – which includes plenty of Church members.
I’m in Florida and though there have been times and places I’ve been mistreated for my faith (by evangelicals, always evangelicals) it’s never cost me work. If I had to offer any feedback it would be the opposite. I have lots of history of great work relationships with Evangelical, Baptist, Pentecostal and AoG members (along with Catholics, SDA & the other easy to get on with Christian faiths). Often, these were openly Christian-centric businesses/orgs and my relationships lasted a decade or more. I never felt less than welcome.
One thing that helped me, personally, is that I was Evangelical in a previous life, so the worship and lingo are all familiar to me. Heck, if we wanted to step back one more life, I was raised Catholic (& school) and still remember all the liturgy. You can take the boy out of the church but…
nibbler wrote:
I feel god’s forgiveness when I reach the point where I can forgive myself.I feel I can forgive myself when I reach the point where I can forgive others.
I’ll rep this as well.
Has God been forgiving me? I have no confirmation one way or the other. I figure my spiritual dyslexia doesn’t allow me to recognize His personal communications.
That leaves what I can do
– forgive everyone by default
– detach shame from failure, limits and ignorance (remove impediments to self-forgiveness)
– proactively, unconditionally apologize & account for harm I cause
On Own Now wrote:Maybe this is a little like a young progressive friend of mine who recently stated that the only way to have real change was for older people to die off.
As an oldish person, I agree w/ this.Katzpur wrote:Hardly anybody in the Church would actually admit to “harboring racist views.”
I’ll admit to it and that I probably don’t understand them.
Minyan Man wrote:There has been nothing (zero) come from our stake to condemn the violence or support the equal rights movement. Has anyone heard anything from the leadership in your area?
Politics 2020 is fueled by demeaning and degrading people. We need our leaders need to leave it at the door. Some do that already. Some struggle in varying degrees. Every blue moon our Bishop will dogwhistle some RW thing from the pulpit. The latest was calling for deliverance from riots.I agree that reference was a small thing, like a little bit of porn. But it’s also effective at helping the spirit out the door. Afterward, my father-in-law met with him and the stake president about it. The following Sundays have felt better to me.
I do believe our bishop wants Sunday to be spiritually safe. However, he’s surrounded by vocal RW’rs (the ward majority) and I imagine that complicates finding a non-political space – which, btw, is never easy.
For a person who’s strongly aligned, finding non-political space means spending time in the heads of people you don’t agree with. That’s difficult on a good day. Today it’s brutal; the pressure to dismiss other points of view is just relentless.
I don’t envy our bishop or the work in front of him. However, I’ve learned to respect the ability of The Mantle to transform. I think he’s heard what needed saying and I’m content to let him find his way.
AmyJ wrote:
My best friend in our branch stopped talking to me because it’s her way of coping with stuff (has nothing to do with me). It still hurts a lot and makes it harder to consider coming back when church is in full swing.I was on the other end of that. I eventually stopped responding after a prolonged period (as in years) of increasingly awful crises. After a while, one runs out of superhuman strength.
I had a number of intertwined biz/friend relationships and I was having challenges (eg: no fuel, no food, overwhelmed) that left me no way to respond to their crises. They were genuine friends but after so many times they move you into the “not there for me” category.
I do get that they were hurt by me ghosting them. I get why. But what I think what sabotages our future relationship is their belief that if I could get there once, I could get there again. Well, they’re not wrong. My bad decade defied a lot of odds. There’s no rule that says I can’t get another one.
I mean – I don’t think it’ll happen again because bad things happen to other people. I guess to them, though, I’m other people.
For years, our ward lacked meaningful accountability. The result was that few of our youth stayed past 15. Youth would show up for an activity & were left to do whatever they came up with. We’d go years w/o a missionary. Eagle scouts became a legend from a generation ago. Once an auxiliary leader was called, that was the end of the process. They might be pointed to a handbook that mentioned their calling. Forget about getting help assigned, no matter how many names were submitted. One time, I was so frustrated that I stapled a calling sheet to the ward roster and submitted that.
I think a better question than “Should there be accountability?” is “What should accountability look like?” We need some metrics to understand how we’re doing. If those figures get used to highlight shortcomings, however, we’ve lost our way.
In my experience, helpful, beneficial accountability looks like a stake/ward leader asking what they can do to help, regularly.
Also in my experience: When a ward goes a generation w/o helpful accountability, members can become conditioned to the unproductive status quo. Anything else can seem like contention. Members can rise against an auxiliary leader who’s trying to revive nearly dead programs. That’s a terrible state to be in. To quote Pres Hinckley, “I don’t recommend it”.
Cadence wrote:
Why would we want to worship a god who hides and lets is suffer. Makes no senseI used to hide and let my kids suffer.
My first used to run off into the woods by the playground. If it was packed, he could conceivably stage a getaway that I wouldn’t see. One day I let him take off and I trailed him out of sight. Eventually he couldn’t see his way back & freaked out. I let that go on for less than a minute then staged my rescue. He and I cooperated better after that.
I really don’t want to be worshiped, however.
Two months of pandemic hindsight later, here’s my take on Elders Bednar’s comments (as well as the comments of whoever prepared the piece). Quote:a most pernicious social plague of racism
At least he addressed and framed it clearly, even if he didn’t take an inch past that.It’s out of place in this article. Perhaps that is supposed to tell us something.
Quote:Elder Bednar pointed out, jurisdictions deemed services related to alcohol, animals and marijuana as essential, while the services of religious organizations were classified as nonessential, even when those activities could be safely conducted.
Maybe it’s the hindsight speaking but this is a bit of a hairball. Marijuana seems like a dumb inclusion unless they meant places that only sold recreational. Pets is tough. I’ve been divided the whole time. I would have picked some other example.Part of the issue is that jurisdictions were reacting to news stories about churches that opted to create a congregation full of Covid spreaders.
More to the problem, however, is that there have been no clear guidelines from anywhere at all. Something as simple as
most risk is indoors, becomes confusing when combined with nonsensical beach shaming. Quote:When the pandemic hit, congregations of many faiths around the world canceled worship services and other activities to abide by government restrictions for large group gatherings to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
I think the article got part of it right by highlighting that most churches took responsible steps. But the religious freedom angle seems a tough sell when it’s up against intractable, boneheaded clergy. Clarification that religious liberty shines best when congregations aren’t defiance-fueled virus farms, would have gone a long way here.Quote:“Gathering, in short, is at the core of faith and religion. Indeed, if the faithful are not gathering, sooner or later they will begin to scatter.”
I felt this was unusually honest and insightful.Quote:“In our understandable desire to combat COVID-19, we, too, as a society may have forgotten something about who we are and what is most precious,”
Not happy this is restricted to Covid-19 but whatever.
