I am an infectious disease epidemiologist for a global diagnostic company that makes the leading test for respiratory pathogens, including a family of viruses known as Coronaviruses. You may have heard of them. It has certainly been an extremely stressful few months at work. But also just a stressful time, in general, for us all. There is a lot of uncertainty. We’re all anxious.
Around the world, individuals, families, cities, states and nations are taking action to stop the spread of the disease. People are staying home with hopes that the virus will be stopped at the door.
I am an active member of the church. My spouse and I both have callings and temple recommends. However, for many years our activity in the church has been dependent on our ability to stop the harmful aspects of the church at the door of our home. We are vocal feminists. We have different last names (gasp!). We will never hang the Proclamation to the Family in our home. My husband does not preside over me. We take turns picking who prays (anyone else think the tradition where the man picks the prayer giver is just the silliest thing?). We sing of and pray to both of our Heavenly Parents.(Among many other beliefs that would be eyebrow raising at best, membership-council-inducing at worst, to 99% of our ward.)
This dichotomy of active at church but untraditional at home, I understand, is not for everyone. It might not even be for us forever. But it is what is working for us now.
However, with the shift to at-home worship looming, I have felt an attack on the careful anti-sexism “quarantine” we have built in our home. It is starkly obvious now, when we are discussing the logistics of home centered church, how truly periphery women are to the official ordinances of Sunday worship. Women can literally do nothing for themselves. If we don’t already have a priesthood holding male in our home, we must wait for one to get around to coming to us. If we do have a priesthood holding male in our home, we must sit silently and watch them do everything of institutional value.
Consider, there are 4 single women with whom I am very close in my ward that live in my very row of townhomes in the suburbs on Salt Lake. I checked in on them yesterday to make sure they had all they needed in the face of social distancing. They were well stocked and in good spirits. But all said they didn’t know what exactly they were going to do about the sacrament. Would my husband be willing, they asked. Would I ask him for them? He is a person they hardly know. He has not developed friendships with them over years of chats, shared callings, ministering, relief society activities, neighborhood walks, etc. I have been the one to develop relationships with these women. What a painful feeling it was then, to be standing there in front of my friends offering to help and yet the only thing they really needed I was systematically barred from providing. Go home and ask your husband, they said. I felt sad and empty walking back to my front door. I can’t recall many other times in my marriage where I’ve felt so subservient, dependent, and useless.
My spouse, who is a member of our Ward’s Council and has therefore been helping plan the logistics of sacrament administration over the next few weeks asked me for my input as a public health professional with particular expertise in this pandemic. “The best thing to do would be to give women the priesthood,” I said. Not likely to happen, of course. Sigh. “Just tell the men to wash their hands very thoroughly.” I guess that’s the best we can do.
I like the sacrament. It is an ordinance that brings me peace and helps me reflect on how to be a better person. While I understand that even at church, of the two of us, my Spouse is the only one that could prepare or pass the sacrament–in our entire decade of marriage I can’t recall more than a few times he wasn’t just sitting by me receiving it in the pews, on seemingly equal footing. Plus, it was comfortably compartmentalized in the at-church-painful-stuff that did not cross the threshold of our home.
I can’t bear to partake of the sacrament at home, under the current rules. To feel completely dependent on my spouse for a religious ordinance that I am completely barred from assisting with, in our safe space would be too painful. It would feel like an insult to our little egalitarian oasis. It hurts my soul to even think of it. It hurts his soul to even think of it.
So that leaves me the following options: 1. Just don’t take the sacrament until church starts up again or 2. Prepare and bless the sacrament with my spouse in my home, and very much without the support of the Church. The first option is definitely the easiest–just kick that can down the road. The second feels the most right, although I’m aware that women have been excommunicated for much less. And I wonder, after experiencing preparing and blessing the sacrament myself, will I ever be able to compartmentalize the experience again? Will I ever be satisfied with leaving the male only priesthood ordinances at church and ignoring the injustice of it all when I am at home in my egalitarian safe space? I have a feeling that my right to be a full and equal participant in the ordinances essential to my own religion will be a conviction that will spread like a pathogen, no respecter of mental boundaries or handbooks.
Very much agree with you about the problems and risks of sexism in this situation. I am *very* concerned about how much networks of ongoing sacrament deliveries will do to undermine shelter in place orders. Especially since I bet a lot of the recipients will be elderly women! If anybody reading is not concerned yet, you next need to read the Imperial College’s modeling study for disease proliferation and mortality rates with and without severe social distancing measures. One interesting idea, which some ward or stake evidently is allowing, was mentioned in the comments over on wheat and tares. This protocol was to let the recipient do all the prep work, then the visiting guy just says the prayer through a cracked open front door, without ever any contact. Obviously much less dangerous! Also a small step from there to having bread blessed over the phone? It implies letting women prepare the sacrament, which could be framed as a small gain. I certainly agree, though, that the real correct answer is accepting that women have equal liturgical authority. But in the meantime, I’ll push anything that doesn’t help the virus.
Tough situation. And yes, my wife and I, at my insistence, alternate weeks determining who will offer prayers. There is really a very weak argument for not giving women the priesthood and many strong arguments for it.
My husband received an email from the EQP that administering blessings via phone is ok. Not addressing the sacrament issue directly but, yea, why not let women prepare and have the men with the priesthood bless remotely? First choice is definitely to have women do it all by their own adult self.
Thank you for sharing! There’s so much that I wish was different, more egalitarian with the ordinances. In my ward, leadership decided to allow a person to prepare their own sacrament if there is no priesthood holder in their home. That way, when the priesthood holder does an in-person visit, he doesn’t need to touch anything or even come into the residence. However, if there is a priesthood holder is in the home, then he must be the one to prepare the sacrament. It’s like, but why? It makes no sense. And it’s hurtful.