Recently, Russell M. Nelson, the prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, gave a talk about the change in what he wanted people to say in reference to the Church itself. This is not a new topic for him; in April Conference of 1990, he gave a separate address that touches on the same themes. All of them are concerned with how the Church is named and how people refer to it. What is different is who is saying it and the more distinct prohibitions that have come down as a result.
I feel that I should say that I wrote about my own feelings about how the Church is discussed a couple of years ago, and much of what I wrote there remains my opinion. As much as possible, I feel like people talking about the Church ought to designate it using its full name, per the request of the institution. There is, however, more to be said about this topic. The problem with talking about it is some assumptions that I want to unpack. If you're unfamiliar with the Church, you may not recognize the way the president--often called the prophet (as opposed to the Prophet, who was Joseph Smith) of the Church--is considered. Particularly in official decrees over the pulpit during General Conference (which is what that first link is connected to), the pronouncements of Church leaders is considered sacrosanct and of divine origin. This is part of the reason why, back in October 2010, there was a kerfuffle about Boyd K. Packer's modified version of his talk on same-sex attraction: If the speakers at General Conference are inspired of the Lord, how can they say anything astray? This type of thinking is fundamental to Mormonism (yes, I used the M-word; I'll explain why in a minute) because the entire concept of coming into the Church, of conversion, is a belief in continued revelation--both organizationally and personally--that allows anyone to come to know the truth of the gospel as contained within the doctrines of the Church (see Moroni 10: 3-5). Without revelation about what is and is not orthodoxy (and, quite often, orthopraxy), the Church's entire conceit is lost. So when a Church leader says something in April or October General Conference, it's considered a soft-kind of scripture. (Most talks recycle ideas and themes from the canonical texts, though they will quote each other frequently, and very rarely would anything come across as being "new" doctrine--hence the stir Elder Packer's comments created, as well as their omission.) This is why it's such a big deal that the president of the Church made the kinds of nomenclature changes* as he did back in October. As a member of the Church, I'm not supposed to criticize or argue against what has been done. As a Mormon, I'm really uncomfortable with the declaration. And the two conflicting emotions have given me a bit of an identity crisis. Part of this is because I still stand by the idea that Mormonism isn't Christianity. While I love my Christian friends and my atheist friends and my Muslim friends and my all-of-the-other-things friends, there is enough difference between Mormonism and Christianity that I do not want to be considered a Christian. That is a term for the branch of religion from which Joseph Smith broke back in 1830. Christians believe in the Bible; Mormons believe in the Book of Mormon and the Bible and the Pearl of Great Price and the Doctrine and Covenants. Much like Jews believe in the Tanakh and Christians in the New Testament and the Tanakh, I feel that my religion is an outgrowth of a previous one, built upon its foundations and using its texts, while at the same time expanding. And a term that works very well for indicating that unique and powerful doctrine is Mormon. Now, President Nelson pointed out that using the term Mormon omits the name of the Savior from how we're viewed. I don't disagree: It's one of the things that makes it hard for other Christians to understand that we believe in Christ. I don't think that someone who doesn't know who we are, however, is going to have more positive feelings toward us simply because our two-syllable name is eschewed in favor of the eleven-syllable one. And I simply don't feel that my belief in Jesus Christ, His sacrifice, and His Atonement are lost when I use the word Mormon to describe my beliefs. And that, right there, is part of what makes this particular topic so fraught. How can I say I disagree with the prophet? A man whom I said I sustained as prophet, seer, and revelator? It's…tricky. Believing in President Nelson's guidance as the leader of the Church doesn't mean I have to turn off my brain. I flatly disagree with my Sunday School teacher, who said that the leaders of the Church are "perfect". I resist the hero-worship that many Saints practice (as one bishop said, "If it's good enough for President Monson, it's good enough for me") and would rather not defer my feelings to another. But why would I be enamored of a nickname to the point of opposing the president? (And I don't think I'm opposing him; I'm stating why I feel differently than others.) President Nelson alluded to Romeo and Juliet (how could you not? Shakespeare is everywhere) in his talk, saying, "What's in a name, or in this case, a nickname?" A rose really does smell as sweet, regardless of the language naming it. Without going into Derridean postmodern deconstruction on the purpose and power of words--which absolutely do matter and, so far as our society operates, really do mean things--I assert that Mormon is a word that easily and clearly describes the types of beliefs that I hold. Mormonism is an excellent way of describing the religious philosophies that I espouse. In his talk, President Nelson reminds us of how the term Mormon was used as an epithet and a way of speaking derogatorily about members of the Church. That much is true. But the thing about derogatory terms used against a particular group is that the group can also appropriate that term. Because words matter and mean things, that means that words are power. To usurp a persecutor's power, one can usurp that persecutor's term. This is why the Black community can use the N-word (and those outside of it really can't), as it defangs the pain the word can cause. Queer members of the LGBTQ+ community (and I know there's arguments about what to do with that argument which I'm not up to speed on, so I'm using this term for the nonce) also took what was supposed to be the verbal rock of the word queer and used it to build their own fortress to protect themselves from the scorn of those who hated them. In other words, it's only an epithet to me if I'm willing to let it be. And, as a member of the community, I feel I'm justified in choosing to feel that Mormon describes me in a non-persecutorial way. Additionally, it's important to note that our early history shows an acceptance of the term. Brigham Young was fond of saying "Mormonism" (as he always put it into quotes), going so far as to asssert that "Mormonism" was true. Even Joseph Smith omitted Christ's name in an early version of the Doctrine and Covenants**, and I don't think that Smith's actions were "victories for Satan". Of course, that's the tension inside the Church, isn't it? We believe in continuing revelation, but we always cleave to our canonized past. I don't know how to square that circle, save to say that, for me and myself, I don't have any problems with the M-word. It fits who I am and what I believe; it's convenient and it creates a solidarity for the persecuted past through which my ancestors suffered; and even if it is a bit of a shibboleth to others, I see it as pushing me into a deeper exploration of whom I believe in. --- * Clearly, it's not a "change" in that the Church didn't get a new name. It's the same as before. In fact, it's not even a request to others that they stop using the term Mormon, as the Church has been asking that for years. It's a change in how we, as members, think of ourselves. ** "Joseph Smith oversaw the editing of the text of some revelations to prepare them for publication in 1835 as the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints" (Introduction). ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! Tonight, my family and I went to the kids' elementary school's "family skating night". It's an annual tradition with the school, plus my boys really enjoy the time. I, personally, would be happier watching a movie at home or otherwise relaxing. Parenting, however, is very often a matter of skipping over one's personal feelings in order to accommodate the whims of the youth.
I rented some rollerblades, which I used when I was a kid. I used to skate down the short porch on my parents' house, then leap off the steps, landing on the driveway one stair down. The driveway is slanted, and the rest of the sidewalk is downhill. Timid Steven never really garnered enough chutzpa to pick up that much speed, but I did learn how to rollerblade with sufficient confidence that, some twenty-five years later, I can help my two older boys on the endless circling of a skate night. (My youngest rode his scooter the whole time, which required less help and supervision.) One primary difference between skating as a kid and skating now is the addition of PVC pipe-constructed walkers. They have rollerblade wheels on the three joints and they assist neophyte skaters with keeping balance. Obviously, the kids still topple into painful piles every once in a while, but it meant that one parent could be with Demetrius, another with Puck, while Oberon kept himself upright with the walker. Then things would shift. In short, the walker acted as a third parent for the purposes of keeping our kids from crashing to the ground. The 'blades I rented, sadly, were not the best. They didn't rub wrong or anything; instead, the arch of the 'blades and the arch of my foot met in a Venn diagram of discomfort. I could never get my feet in a position that wasn't uncomfortable. I didn't want to squelch my kids' enthusiasm, so I put up with it for as long as I could. And, to be honest, it's an enjoyable experience to zip around the circle, navigating among the teenagers who are way too talented at skating and the kids who are there just to have fun. As I worked to pass on my knowledge--all stored in my muscles' memories rather than my mind's--to Oberon, my second child, I held his little hand in mine. I wondered at that: Was I squeezing too tightly? He was slipping and sliding and tumbling and wobbling. Were my interventions helping? Did he need to be free to fall in order to pick himself back up again? Where was the line between "letting him learn his lesson" and "being negligent"? Our connection was physical, but--in my mind, at least--tender. He would flop and sprawl onto the ground, then grin up at me with the kind of gap-toothed smile that most eight year olds sport. He maybe got some bumps but it was never too much, never tear-inducing. By the end of the evening, he didn't use the walker and he wasn't interested in using me. He wanted to be making his laps on his own, sink or swim. He fell a lot. A lot. But he always got up again. Maybe I could trust him more, let him learn his limits on his own. But that means letting go. And of all the things I've practiced in my life, I've never been good at letting go. One of the lies that I tell my kids is that they can't cross the parking lot or street without me. It's less because they can't do it (though the five year old still needs help and protection) and more because I want to be able to hold my children's hands for as long as possible. They're so well trained about the hand-holding that they don't think twice. I, on the other hand, always think about their hands in mine and how fleeting the time is. Once my agèd bones could no longer handle the agony of my footwear, I sat myself on a bench and watched the stream of humanity flow before me. Little kids no more than, maybe, three years old would zoom between wobbly pre-teens. Teenagers would stand around and talk or dance to the tinny music (loud, but not particularly good speakers are a hallmark of places like this). Adults would bend over awkwardly, glimpses of their underwear or skin peeking over their waistlines, trying to help their kids along without toppling themselves. Some held hands. I watched them go about. There was a straight couple, a diamond glinting on her finger, whose whispered conversation and entire air was one of recently conjoined. There were girls who held each other's hands, fingers barely laced together, their attitude one of best friends--maybe even pack behavior because it is a frightening thing to be a woman in this world and there is safety in numbers. There was one lesbian couple--I'm guessing on this one--whose hand-holding had an intimacy that I saw as young love, the kind of teenage reliance of two who looked like they lived on the margins finding solace in that shared deterritorialization. One boy held his boyfriend--good friend? Impossible to tell--as the boyfriend shuddered and shook on his wheels. The boy held one hand, the other on the boyfriend's back, steadying him as he looked on with concern and compassion. I don't know if they really were dating or were simply two people who cared about each other, but it was one of the most beautiful moments of the night. I didn't expect to see such depths of compassion at the skating rink. Puck turned around and used his walker and his body--albeit inadvertently--to dam the flow so that the young stranger, no older than Demetrius if I had to guess, who had fallen hard on his face could shed his tears until his dad made it around to comfort and console. In its own unexpected way, seeing so many people holding hands in so many ways--some literal, some metaphorical, and some (let's be honest: It's a skating rink, after all) because it was "Snowball" and so it was an excuse--did a lot to help shore up my faith in humanity. I'm reminded of the lines from one of my favorite Dave Matthews Band songs, "Cry, Freedom": "Hands and feet are all alike/But walls between divide us." Would that I could remember that better. Would that we all could. Being Jazz 2 May 2018
I listened to Being Jazz by Jazz Jennings this past week. It's given me a lot to think about, and most of it was really positive. I selected the book because I really don't know what it's like to be a transgender person, and I thought it would be interesting to learn some more about a part of life that I haven't experienced. Since I'm not a reality-TV watcher--not much of a TV watcher of any sort, as I prefer my stories to be interactive--I didn't know that Jazz Jennings and her family were part of a reality-TV series, nor did I know just how much Jazz has done as an advocate and activist for the LGBTQ community. On that front, there was a lot to learn here. What I thought would be a big portion of the book, however, was the difficulty of being transgender in America today. Of parents disbelieving or disowning. Of frustrations about such a fundamental part of one's life being so often ignored or dismissed. Of the trials and hardships that a kid would have to navigate in a society that's rife with prejudices, assumptions, and ossified ideas about gender and identity. This book doesn't really have much of that, though. Instead, it's a documentation of all of the things that Jazz went through in her fifteen years of life, as best as she can recall. She figured out that she was a girl very early on, and her parents didn't give her much flack for it. They were unsure at first, but pretty quickly they got with the program. As far as I can tell, her parents not only were her number one supporters, but also constantly fighting for her rights--a fight which she joined them in as she grew up. This isn't a critique, necessarily: I'm really glad that Jazz has had such a fulfilling life where she can pursue so many of her goals, only one of which was furthering transgender awareness and LGBTQ rights. It's not what I expected, that's all. I thought it might be a sadder tale, and was preparing myself to deal with the hardships she related. But, no. She's happy, her childhood was happy, and though her difficulties were different than a lot of teens, she passed through them because of the great support of her parents, friends, family, and schools. In other words, I expected a tragedy, but I got a comedy (in the classical sense of the genre). It was a pleasant surprise. On the content side, the book was fantastic. I could tell that Jazz is still a teenager, though. Not only does she have a relative paucity of lived experiences outside of advocacy, she writes in the familiar, clipped tones of a teenager. This is by no means a bad thing--I wish I could have written so well at age fifteen--but it does mean that there's a focus that's beyond my current interests. For example, she reflects often on her different camp experiences, which obviously meant a lot to her and her journey, but--having never done a summer camp like she describes--it didn't make a large difference for me. Not only that, but her chapter titles were atrocious. Hard pass on those. I also noticed that she would take some time to relate a particular story and, when I would expect some sort of reflection, analysis, or lesson learned at the end of them, she instead would jump to the next topic. All of this is familiar to me--I teach the age that she was when she wrote this--so I'm probably overly sensitive to these issues. On the whole, she delivered the story well, usually kept her narrative focused, and brought out a lot of the emotional experiences that such a memoir demands. That's pretty impressive, regardless of the author's age. But that's all surface-level stuff, and one of her big theses was that surface level stuff only matters so far. She may have been born with boy parts, but she still liked and relied on the external signifiers of femininity to indicate her internal grounding. That is, she wore pink sparkly shirts and feminine cut shorts--she even had a princess phase--because those were surface-level things that spoke about what she cared about. It doesn't take long, however, before it's clear that, while the surface has some bearing and meaning, it isn't the whole story. And Jazz's whole story is intriguing. Again, it's such a different experience than what I have gone through, both as a person and a parent. That's the area, in fact, that made me think the hardest: What would I do if I were Jazz's parents? A big part of me says, "Why would it matter? I would do what I could to make my kids happy." Another, quieter but still present voice says, "How would you be able to go through something like that?" The thing is, it isn't me that I would be worried about, necessarily: It's how I would handle someone judging, ostracizing, and even hating my children. My kids are a quirky bunch, with Puck, at eleven years old, being the most overbearingly quirky. (Part of it is that he still thinks he's a little kid, which is kind of like when a Great Dane thinks he's still a puppy--there's an incongruity there.) For many reasons, Puck has a hard time getting along with kids his age. It's hard to watch him throw defenses up to keep kids from teasing him, which end up repulsing those who might want to be his friend. But Puck is, heart problems aside, a "normal" part of society. What if he were much more radically, much more visibly different? How would I be able to help him through the sharper barbs of a socially stigmatized subsection of humanity? That's the part that I don't know about. One thing that's pretty clear in my mind already, though: I wouldn't consider disowning my kids. I've heard plenty of horror stories of parents (usually of the conservative persuasion) who ban their children because the kids don't want to go to church anymore, come out as LGBTQ, or have other differences that the parents didn't anticipate. I have to keep reminding myself of how hard we fought to keep Puck around on planet Earth in the first place, and how that bond of love that helped us through heart surgeries has to be extended to all of my children in all that they do. Do I have lines that they might cross? Yeah, probably. But gender or sexual orientation isn't one. Reading Jazz's book helped me to reassert that decision I made when I became a father. I don't want unimportant* issues to interfere with my relationship with my kids. That isn't something I always live up to, but reading Being Jazz has reminded me to do better. I'd recommend it**. --- * I'm not trying to imply that gender isn't important. I think it is; otherwise, why would we get so tied up in knots trying to understand what's going on with agender and nonconforming orientations? I recognize that, as a cis-het White male, I have a great deal of privilege in how I pass through the world. What I mean by unimportant in this case is this: I love my sons because of who they are, not the gender they have. I would love them if they were daughters, or if they became my daughters, or if they were daughters who became my sons. The point is, I'm supposed to love my kids, not their gender signifiers, their orientation, or their faithfulness to the Church. And I have to say, I don't understand parents who can't do that. ** This probably comes as no surprise, but there's a lot of talk about body parts, sexuality, and gender identity in this book. I wouldn't say that it's inappropriate, but there are parts where a teenager talks about how she's approaching the mindset of courtship, attraction, dating, and kissing. She's pretty straightforward most of the time, so if you read this, don't be surprised when she, for example, talks about wanting boobs. So, content warning…I guess? I mean, if you read almost any mainstream fiction, you'll come across much more explicit discussions of body parts and sexuality. Then again, that's fiction, rather than a teenager, but, hey, teens are people, too--as much as they try to dissuade you of that fact, sometimes. LTUE 2018 Day Two
Today's sessions went better for me because my wife came along with me. The conference is only a few miles from where I teach, so I also had a field trip with my creative writing class. That meant that I have spoken aloud today--as opposed to yesterday, where I said a combined total of, I would guess, 500 words. However, the conference drain--and a nagging sore throat--means that I'm going to include some notes from one of the panels I attended. This one was about LGBTQ representation in science-fiction and fantasy. Two of the panelists are part of that community while the other two had children in the community, but there were still a lot of worthwhile ideas thrown around. Not all of it makes sense--that's the danger of posting notes that aren't proofread--and I don't even agree with some of the assertions (I don't think we've gone far enough in representation, for example). Still, I think it's worth looking at. LGBTQ in SFF
ii.And when it was there, it was coded
ii.Which is a Orson Scott Card book, apparently
ii.One example from the panelist is about his son
iii.Writing about a character from different communities, but that doesn't mean that you can write the character's stories
ii.This goes along with the #ownvoices ideas
ii.Know that a member of the LGBTQ community doesn't know everything about all of those letters iii.Talk to those who are going through their transitions or opening
|
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
July 2022
Categories
All
|