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Best of luck, cwald. Will the SP be sitting in on your lesson? Maybe the spirit will soften his heart, should such things be in order. 🙂 Let us know what parts of the StayLDS Bible are most useful to you? For me, the hardest things would be to try and keep any defensiveness I might feel in check and to remember that his intentions are good.
running through some old posts here… did this ever go anywhere? nice idea… sort of a “like” or “nod” “thank you” button. ((George)) I really like that song, too.
As for standing outside during the wedding, I’m so sorry that you feel separated from your family on such important days. I suspect that I’m around the same age as your grandchildren who are currently getting married. Both of my parents are converts, but my maternal grandmother briefly joined the church, about a decade ago. I’ve never been very close with mu grandmother, but she came out to visit me here at BYU a couple of years ago. Se joked about how she and her post-mo friend “didn’t make it” in Mormonism. Grandma is unaware of my own disaffection, but her being open and casual about her relationship to religion has been helpful to me. My grandmother is a beautiful, strong, woman who has been through a lot in this life and I have a lot of respect for her. (I should probably try telling her these things, sometime…) You seem to have a larger family than my own, and out of so many grandchildren, I am sure there will be some who will take strength from your openness and stance as a cultural Mormon, whether you ever know it or not.
Tangentially, I don’t know where I will end up in regards to the church and a temple marriage. If I find myself choosing to marry in the temple, I hope to have a small temple sealing with those to whom the sealing is important. However, I feel like a wedding is supposed to be an opportunity to gather your community around you. So the wedding that I suspect I would announce on invitations and the like would be a separate gathering. I want a wedding that my grandmother and friends can attend. So, rather than having a prominent sealing and a small ring ceremony, I hope to have a prominent wedding and a small sealing. Both being important (should I choose that path), but their significance being distinct and different.
Cadence wrote:Besides if it is all made up what does it matter, and if it is all true I am in trouble anyway. I am not going to let others rob me of the experience of seeing people I love getting married.
Cadence, thank you for blessing my evening with laughter!
I remember going to my friend’s Bat Mitzvah ceremony when I was about 13 years old. I felt very similarly to how I did in church and was confused. Later, probably in a bishop-youth interview or temple-baptisms interview, I asked my bishop about it because I was confused. I thought you were only supposed to feel the spirit in Mormon churches. I can’t remember his response. I know that he wasn’t condemning of other faiths. Still, the fact that I was confused by feeling at peace in a synagogue is a little sad. I’ve been trying to sort out how much of my youthful impressions of what the church taught was a) my interpretations as a child, recognizing that children tend to the black & white
b) what is predominately taught in the church, regardless of truth or doctrine(?)
c) influenced by my parents (TBM converts’) understanding of the gospel
I know that I tend towards an almost agnostic or panthesitic attitude in regards to religion these days. I really like the Jain principle of Anekāntavāda. My World Reliigions professor at BYU says Mormons can’t believe in such principles. However, I know that my current beliefs, whether they be truly Mormon or not, do at least sprout from Mormonism. I’m not sure what that says for my place in the church, or desire to raise a Mormon family.
Hey there, Scotty. Thanks for sharing your story and best of luck on your journey. I am unmarried and also 23 years old. I was in a mixed-faith relationship (and discussing marriage) for some time. I was feeling ambiguous in regards to the church and Silas was fully out of the church. So, not quite the same. Still, it creates a difficult element in the relationship around the question of religion. It was pointed out to me post-break up that the religious distance between ambivalent meand a post-mo or meand a TBM is potentially very similar, just in opposite directions. Which is to say that I personally haven’t ruled out dating TBMs, and I don’t think that you sharing your thoughts with GF is necessarily a death knell to the relationship. As to how to handle the conversation… Make sure to include the things that you appreciate about the church. Be gentle. Take a break and continue the conversation later if one of you start to get angry or feel overwhelmed. Reassure her of your love.
Wendell, you can place those phone calls. I will be praying for you as well, along with pinkpatent, on Monday. Valoel, this makes sense to me. I don’t really feel guilty for not measuring up to my ideals, let alone others’. However, for Silas, the guilt game affects him very differently. Yet, my parents have come down much harder on me for questioning the church than his own parents have. I suppose there’s a whole lot that goes into our experiences. Internal, external, how we interpret or understand the teachings, etc. In a class, one of my professors was saying how at RSR’s publishing, people expected that it would appeal to both the lay Mormon crowd and the historians as well. Unfortunately, RSR was too academic for the lay Mormons and not academic enough for the historians. One student offered that the academic world ignores RSR because it does not adequately rebut Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History. Does anyone here know if there’s any validity to that? What are the conundrums raised in Brodie’s biography that are not treated by Bushman?
oh, please, pleasedon’t throw members off the stand. teach, exemplify, but don’t remove people who are trying to speak from their hearts. anyhow, that gives the bish too much power What think I? I think that the whole idea of a priesthood is terribly confusing to me. I’ve tried to ask teachers, priesthood holders and more recently home teachers throughout my life to explain what the priesthood really
is. I thought maybe I just didn’t get it because they didn’t bother to explain it in depth to the girls or something. Nowadays I don’t think I was really taught all that differently about the priesthood than the boys were. They were taught more of the mechanics, but that’s it. Because I don’t understand what the priesthood is at all, it doesn’t really bother me so much. However, what you hit on in your rewording is actually where I find more frustration. I don’t get why the men should be acting alone as overseers.
If women fulfill roles that are distinctly different from—but of equal import to—that of men; then, they must also offer knowledge and perspective that is distinctly different from—but of equal import to—that of men. Thus, we need both men and women acting as overseers.
The question of whether women do or should bear the priesthood is outside the question of what the priesthood is. Or, at least, of what it should be. So, I guess what I am trying to say is that I don’t understand what the priesthood is, but the way it is currently practiced troubles me.
I would like to understand what the priesthood is. If anyone feels they are particularly adept at explaining this concept, I will be an eager listener. If anyone has read any literature or had any experiences that helped clarify to them what the priesthood is, I will be an eager listener.
