I too sincerely hope that female subordination is confined to this life, and not a reflection of how things are eternally; my own belief is that it’s one of the many difficulties which confront us in mortality. Yet I have a hard time accepting the idea that all women are in some way being punished for Eve’s choice. I’m not sure how well that notion fits with the Second Article of Faith–though I suppose it could be argued that it’s similar to children suffering from the sins of their parents, even if they’re not held accountable for them. But my biggest dilemma is trying to reconcile the idea that female subordination is something temporary with Church teachings that patriarchy is eternal. (If Adam had taken the fruit first, I wonder, would we now be explaining that matriarchy is eternal?)

To all,
I know that we see things differently, but I just want to say again that I appreciate that we can discuss things in spite of those differences. I hope that my involvement in this discussion has been consistent with the overall positive feelings I have about the interactions. I feel like you genuinely care, and I hope that you know that is the case here as well. Thank you to all for your patience and willingness to engage and to continue to help me understand more where you are coming from.

Now, I for one, believe in a fair and equitable God, and that somehow things will be righted in the eternities, but this is something where I am using my own convictions to come to conclusions

I think this is the key. Frankly, we have very little “knowledge” about what the eternities will look like, so I am saddened when women will put that much energy into something that is really so unknown to us still. We really don’t know enough to really be able to understand how it will all shake out. What we do know is what you said…that God is fair and equitable. I also think we need to remember that our understanding will be perfected as well, so that will surely come into play in how “happy” we can be with whatever the order will look like.

Anyway, this is why I said that trusting in God’s love and desire for us to be happy, even in the eternities, can help, which it sounds like is what helps you. But I appreciate you helping me understand a little differently why you think illness vs. feminism might be a little different.

Still, I disagree with your following statement: I don’t think it matters if God “causes” or “allows” or even “commands” whatever causes us pain. While you’re right to point out that it doesn’t matter in the sense that they are all painful (and we have to figure out some way to find peace), I find that it’s easier for me to make sense of pain that I think God “allows” vs. pain that I think he might “command.”

For example, as I’ve shared elsewhere, I have bipolar disorder, and for awhile I was made at God for the ways in which this has adversely affected my life. I wanted to know why God didn’t just remove this trial from me. But I’ve been able to come to a certain amount of peace about this issue because I know it’s a trial I only have to face in mortality, and I know that it’s something I’m facing because it’s helping me to grow as a person. This hasn’t made the experience not painful (and I think it’s important to acknowledge this kind of pain in my and others’ lives), but I’ve gained a certain amount of perspective on it that’s helped me to come to a certain amount of peace.

I think what’s hard for a lot of women when it comes to issues of gender is that things are painful and they see things as being potentially painful for eternity. While the plan of salvation teaches us that things like bipolar disorder are things that accompany our mortal lives (and won’t be around when we have perfected bodies), we are given no such assurances about things like gender roles and the importance of women in God’s plan. Many women are told that things that cause them immense amount of pain will exist not only in this life but in the life to come. In a sense, God is not just “allowing” these things to happen but he’s “commanding” them, which means these things could continue indefinitely. And the thought of indefinite and eternal pain is something that is scary.

Now, I for one, believe in a fair and equitable God, and that somehow things will be righted in the eternities, but this is something where I am using my own convictions to come to conclusions (rather than knowledge I’ve gained from church because it is the church that makes me doubt my worth as a woman).

I suppose this conversation gives me a chance to develop some empathy. Perhaps you couldn’t really read how much of my heart I opened up by sharing what has caused me to sometimes feel a lack of God’s love in my life. How easy it has felt for my pain to be rationalized away because “well, that’s just mortality.” But just as I can’t rationalize your pain away re: feminism and all of that, this has at times been my reality, and I don’t think it’s fair to diminish that anymore than you like your pain dismissed. We all need to have our needs heard, ya know?

At the times when I have struggled, it hasn’t mattered if God “caused” or if He “allowed” it, and I have not found peace in the logic that, “well, that’s just mortality.” When I’ve been in my doubtful, frustrated modes, all I have felt is that He hasn’t helped me in the way I have wanted Him to, so maybe He doesn’t love me. When I’ve not trusted God, I have been mad and unhappy and alone. I’ve cried and prayed and wondered “why” and “where’s the joy now?”. I’ve felt He didn’t care what I was going through. I felt my prayers didn’t matter. (This involves trials I haven’t even shared here as well, some of which leave me also wondering about how the next life will all shake out – will I really be happy?) I cannot believe these frustrations and concerns are any less confusing and disheartening for me than feminism issues are for some of you. We are not so different.

I don’t think it matters if God “causes” or “allows” or even “commands” whatever causes us pain. I think the underlying problems are the same, and the possible answers and healing will come in the same way for all of us. THIS is what the gospel is about — answers for all, regardless of what the specifics of our pain and struggles are. But it requires faith and trust that is sometimes soooo hard to really exercise. We each have to find how to let go of that pain, to give it to Christ and to God.

The fact that we can each choose something different to define what God’s love means to us (or we can each say to the other that we don’t share the same pain) sorta illustrates the point I have been trying to make all along. In a way, when we are unhappy with God or what is going on in life or commandments or whatever, I think we have set God up. We have defined for Him what love from Him should look like. And I think we set ourselves up for disappointment when we set Him up like that.

And so I am trying to remind myself that a different approach is probably called for. Why not figure out how God chooses to show His love to me — how He defines it? Where is it written that I have any right to put parameters on His love or anything else I want from Him? He’s the Parent, I’m the child. He gets to decide what is “expedient” for me, for all of us.

The gospel teaches us that His love is shown by the facts that 1) He created this earth, 2) He gave us the plan of happiness by which we can grow to become like Him, and 3) He “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” Aren’t we a bit cavalier (ungrateful?) to demand anything more of Him, as though He is supposed to do more to “prove” His love? What more can He really give us if He has promised us everything He has and sacrificed His Son??? He has given all that we need to be able to eternally live in happiness with Him someday. He provided a way to have our sins and our guilt swept away, and to have illness and broken dreams and pain and unanswered questions all fixed and made whole. We don’t know what that all will look like, but what is faith for if not trusting in all that He has promised? What is submission if we don’t accept the way He chooses to show His love? If we don’t ultimately trust in that, I think none of us will truly be able to taste God’s love in this life, at least not to its fullest extent.

When I really trust in that (like I said, it’s hard for me to do — I’ve been struggling with this lately, which is part of why I’m writing this – for ME), then my demands fade and the peace comes back and I can find happiness in spite of whatever trials I may be experiencing now.

So, in essence, I think we are all wrong to determine what equals God’s love and what doesn’t. The scriptures say that God doesn’t give stones when we ask for bread. He is a perfect giver of good gifts, but He is the only one who can determine what the good gifts that we need are. If we trust in Him, then we open up the way to be happy. I’m learning that is not easy to really do. But I think that is what we are here to learn how to do.

1 Cor. 15:19: “If in this life only we have hope…we are of all [wo]men most miserable.” We have to look to what lies beyond and hope in that through Christ in order to not be miserable now. I just don’t see any other way. At least my experience has been just that.

Incidentally, I think in general people leave when they get fixated on whatever is happening here and now (in the Church, in their lives, in social movements, etc.) and forget the eternal perspective, and don’t trust that God really will give us the best that He has to give if we will but trust in Him now.

Sorry for the long comment. I know I’ve probably gone over the top. Thanks in advance for your patience in letting me sort out some of my own thoughts on this topic. I hope maybe something I have said might be relevant, but if not, please go easy on me. Life isn’t easy for me right now.

I’m sure it’s true that people construe (and thus receive and give) “love” in different ways, and this would be very interesting to explore. At the same time the term can’t be infinitely open and still be meaningful. My impression is that in our culture, by emphasizing the importance of saying “I love you,” we’ve unfortunately sometimes developed a habit of using this phrase as an excuse for doing it–for loving someone. In extreme forms, individuals justify inappropriate behavior by labeling it as love (I punched you/ignored you/etc. because I love you).

Love is a confusing topic in itself which I haven’t fully worked out. But I think it’s fair to make a qualitative distinction between love of objects and love of subjects. Since in certain environments in Church discourse God is said to curtail or deny women’s personal spheres in which they are subjective, accountable actors, then it seems to me that, at best, God is loving them as objects. This is why the insistence that women and men are equally valued by God because they are equally necessary to his plan is so weak.

I recognize that multiple interpretations of any text are possible, but not all interpretations are equally valid. Again, language has limits, and this is an especially important aspect of legal language. The specific language under discussion is that of what are essentially eternal laws which we explicitly consent to obey. If the plain meaning of God’s words belies God’s intent, God has effectively lied, and is responsible for those who “misunderstand” by taking his commandments at face value. This is where everything gets tricky, to my mind.

In addressing the problem of evil, I think it’s helpful to distinguish between events which produce unhappiness whose causes can be located in the mortal world or others’ agency (which, if God is omnipotent, is ultimately under his control–another topic in itself), and instances in which God commands us to behave in a way that, as we read the situation, propogates evil in the world, but for which we have choice. I think a more apt analogy than chronic illness would be God commanding someone to drink poison and somehow make themselves chronically ill, for no apparent reason (no evident greater good). In the latter example, God is not directly creating evil; God is commanding that we ourselves create evil, but we can choose whether or not to obey. One of the insidious things about certain commandments is that rather than hurting us outright in a straightforward manner, God is asking us to hurt ourselves, to willingly become the instruments of our own demoralization in our relationships. (But I realize this all hinges on whether certain commandments result in feelings of demoralization for different people, and why.)

Vada, thanks for your wonderful and supportive comment–it really resonates with me. There’s a lot I love about the temple as well, especially the idea of sacred space, ritual, and the use of beauty as an element of worship (something generally lacking in our other services).

Rilkerunning, I’m glad to see you here–I always enjoy your comments. I, too, feel there are reasons to think God is loving, and in a way that indicates certain aspects of our tradition are absolutely wrong (both false and immoral). I don’t see any valid way to reconcile God’s alleged love with certain things the Church teaches. I genuinely hope God’s love is real, and God actually loves us in a way that feels like love to us. But while I can hope, I just don’t see sufficient reason to believe.

I’ve read that the most difficult personal relationships are those in which we are ambivalent, and the other party sometimes seems supportive and sometimes hostile.

I’m interested in the data that the Church is hemorrhaging men at rates that far outpace the attrition of women. (If true, this would be especially interesting since one oft-cited reason not to ordain women is that men are supposedly only attracted to churches in which they have power of a sort women do not–our God evidently being a moral pragmatist rather than an idealist.) Of course, the Church is a social community, it’s a set a theological propositions, it’s a commitment to a certain lifestyle, etc., and obviously people choose to leave or stay for all sorts of complex reasons, which is one reason it would be interesting to explore specifically what makes happy members happy. (“One of Mormonism’s appealing aspects to me is the possibility of practicing polygamy in the next life,” vs. “I’m happy in the Church because I doubt polygamy is practiced in the next life,” for example.) For practical purposes, a critical mass of people voicing dissatisfaction is probably necessary for an institution to examine complaints, but for theoretical reasons I don’t see why it should be.