As part of the Church’s “Light the World” campaign this year, they released a set of images for people to share. One of them was a modified version of a painting of Mary and baby Jesus that had a number of edits made. See below to see the original and the modified versions. (I’m not sure who to credit for noticing this or making the comparison image. I’ve seen it mentioned in a bunch of Facebook groups and I think on the Mormon Reddit, but I’m not sure who made the original observation.) In honor of the covering up of any hint of Mary’s cleavage in the edited version, I’ve rewritten the song “Mary, Did You Know?”
Mary, did you know that your wicked breasts
Would cause good men to stumble?
Mary, did you know that your sinful chest
Made men’s composure crumble?
Did you know that your cover up
Would save men’s souls from sin?
These parts of you were secretly, morality’s linchpin
The Church announced back in November that as Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, church will be a sacrament meeting-only affair. (The wording of the announcement actually makes me chuckle—it says “the only meeting Church members need to attend that day is sacrament meeting”—which kind of sounds to me like a suggestion that wards should still hold the second hour, it’s just that nobody should feel obligated to attend it.) Although my memory isn’t great, it appears from this Church Tech Forum discussion that they made similar announcements in 2011 and 2016 when Christmas fell on a Sunday, as well as in 2017, when Christmas Eve did. But church wasn’t consistently shortened for Christmas on a Sunday in previous years. I definitely remember attending all three hours of church as a kid in the 1980s when Christmas fell on a Sunday in 1983 and 1988, and I recall being desperate to get the boring church stuff out of the way so I could get home and enjoy my presents! I’m not sure what I was up to in 1994, but in 2005, again I remember attending all three hours of church, as my wife and I were visiting her parents. In 2010, I even blogged about the question, suggesting that maybe church should be shortened around the holidays. Maybe I should take credit for the Church deciding to listen and start doing so!
I saw Peggy Fletcher Stack share this New York Times article (This is a gifted link to the article, so you can read it even if you don’t subscribe.) about different ways Christian churches are handling Christmas on a Sunday this year. According to results of one church’s survey, the percentage canceling church entirely is up five percentage points (from 11% to 16%) since this was last an issue in 2016. I really liked this summary point from Timothy Beal, a religious studies professor who was quoted in the article:
Christmas morning and Sunday morning are sort of in tension with each other. Most people who are churchgoers think of Christmas morning not as a religious time but as a family time: stockings and brunches and staying in your pajamas until midday or later.
Anyway, considering the question again, I had a few thoughts. They don’t really hang together, so I’m just going to make a bulleted list.
Christmas church isn’t a big deal for us because we Mormons don’t follow a liturgical calendar. We don’t have particular different services for any holiday. Not Christmas, not even Easter, the centerpiece of Christian celebration. (Well, maybe Mother’s Day.) Sure, individual wards and branches can decide on their own to have a more music-and-scripture focused sacrament meeting on or around Christmas, and in my experience, many do, but that’s up to them. There’s nothing stopping a bishop from assigning speakers to talk on the City of Enoch or the Word of Wisdom this Sunday.
As you know if you read ZD at all regularly, I’m mostly a complainer when it comes to Church-related issues. Today I wanted to break from my routine and talk about parts of the Church’s new edition of For the Strength of Youth that I appreciate. It still doesn’t fully match what I’d ideally hope for (for example, in maybe mentioning Heavenly Mother and not telling gay teens they need to live a celibate life), but it’s just so much better than the previous version (which, in my more usual vein, I wrote a post complaining about several years ago). If you want a more comprehensive look at the changes from the previous version, you might want to check out Elisa’s excellent post from October over at W&T.
I’ve put the quotes in the order they appear in the booklet. I’ve linked to each chapter before the quote or quotes I’m taking from it, in case you want to read them in context.
There may be times when you don’t feel strong or capable. That’s normal.
One of my biggest complaints about the previous version is that it pathologized some things that are perfectly normal for teens, like any sexual feelings at all. I am therefore very happy to see lines like this that tell teens in a straightforward way that they’re not alone when they have difficulties or struggles.
It has been such a hard fall. The weather is getting to me; it is so gray, and it feels like the gray seeps everywhere and dims everything, dulls all the colors. The solstice is approaching, and the darkness feels relentless. But the worst part, of course, is that my brain is broken. I keep running into the same wall, I crash in the same way over and over, and I can’t put the pieces back together again; every attempt to do so somehow leaves me even more jagged and misshapen. I try new meds and go back off them because at the very least they don’t seem to do anything helpful, and sometimes it feels like they are making things worse. I can’t really tell, though, what it is exactly that’s making everything so horrible. As usual, I conclude that the world actually is that awful, and also I am a moral failure, and that explains everything.Read More
