I was sitting in church a few weeks ago and noticing how several of the scriptural texts were about God calling people: Samuel hearing a voice and wondering what it was, Psalm 139 (“Lord, you have searched me out and known me”), and the encounter of Jesus with Nathanael. As I was listening to the sermon, which also touched on these themes, and emphasized God’s call to each one of us, and the need for our community to make space for everyone to become what God is calling her or him to be, a question came to mind which I’ve often pondered: how do you discern between a call or a challenge that pushes you in healthy ways, make you grow, and brings you closer to God—and one that simply beats you down and leaves you broken? Read More
It’s my church too
I was lucky enough to grow up with unorthodox Mormon parents, who patiently listened to and sympathized with my teenage and college-age complaints about going to church: how boring it was, how my YW leaders could never answer my questions, how I often felt like I just didn’t fit in. And every conversation, at least in my memory, ended with a gentle reminder: “Remember,” they’d say, “it’s your church too.”
Getting Baptized
I didn’t actually have to get baptized as part of my conversion. The Episcopal church doesn’t have a clear policy on what do with Mormons—while Catholics and some Protestants have ruled that Mormon baptism is invalid and converts from Mormonism must be baptized, Episcopalians have been rather less definitive. There are certainly LDS converts to Anglicanism who’ve made the religious transition without being baptized (perhaps most notably a former Episcopal bishop of Utah). When I first started playing with the idea of converting, I figured I’d do it via confirmation only; I liked the idea of holding on to my Mormon baptism as a way of maintaining continuity in my religious journey. Read More
Waiting for Visiting Hours: Memories of the Psych Ward
It’s been almost two years since I was last hospitalized (yay!), but I’ve been reading through some of the journals I kept while I was there, and it put me in the mood to reflect yet again on some of my experiences.
In every psych ward I’ve been in, visiting hours were restricted to an hour or two a day. After lots of experiences with this, I’d actually forgotten that for people in regular hospitals, they usually let people come throughout the day and only send them away at night; I remember asking a friend of mine who was in the hospital for medical reasons a few years ago when I could visit, and being surprised when she said, anytime. In the mental hospital, they seem to think it’s a distraction that needs to be limited. Though at least everywhere I stayed, they had visiting hours every day; I’ve heard of places that only allowed them a few times a week, if even that, I think on the theory that you needed to focus on their program and on getting better, and less contact with the outside world would help you do that. I would have really hated that.
Where ZD is Going
A particular combination of life circumstances last year lured me back into being a more active blogger than I’d been in a while. However, as the year went on and I started to suspect that my religious dabbling elsewhere might be turning into a serious thing, I found myself grappling more and more with questions about what it meant for me to be blogging on a Mormon blog. When I finally made the decision in November to convert away from Mormonism, I realized I was going to have to address the issue at some point. Should I keep writing about my religious journey and explorations of faith here, I wondered, or would it make more sense to go elsewhere? I don’t feel done with blogging, certainly; there’s still so much that interests me about religion (inside as well as outside of Mormonism), and there are other topics that I’d like to write about as well. But given where I am, I’ve worried about whether it really makes sense to continue to share my thoughts here.
An Agenda for President Nelson’s First 40 Days in Office
Day 1: Demote Dieter F. Uchtdorf to regular old member of the Quorum of the Twelve.
Day 2: Talk to the staff at the Ensign and lds.org, and tell them to get the women out of the centerfold in the Conference issues and off the General Authorities page.
Day 3: Get to work editing hymns. In verse 2 of “In Humility, Our Savior,” change the beginning of the second verse from “Fill our hearts with sweet forgiving; Teach us tolerance and love” to “Make our hearts obedient to thee; Teach us who we must not love.”
Day 4: Schedule a tour to promote Sister Nelson’s book The Not Even Once Club.
Day 5: Compose a letter to be read in all sacrament meetings that exhorts members to leave some positive reviews of The Not Even Once Club on Amazon.com.
Day 6: Work with Sister Nelson on her manuscript tentatively titled The Don’t Even Think About It Club.
Day 7: Announce a new, improved exclusion policy that bans the children of parents in a gay marriage from entering meetinghouses.
Day 8: Demote Dieter F. Uchtdorf to Seventy.
Day 9: Talk to the facilities management staff about getting those pesky “Visitors Welcome” signs taken down from meetinghouses.
Day 10: Send out a decree that all sacrament meetings must include a reading of the Proclamation on the Family.
Whither Mormonism?
Two Mormon-related events in the past week have shaken me up a little. On one level, neither of them were particularly surprising—but on another, I found them both unsettling and at least a little unexpected. The first was the release of the Gallup poll which found that the Mormon approval of Trump was, at 61 percent, the highest of any religious group surveyed. The second was the decision of incoming church president Russell M. Nelson to move Dieter F. Uchtdorf out of the First Presidency and replace him with Dallin H. Oaks. I also found the comments made at the press conference about the leadership transition, especially the ones about women, to be quite jarring. And I’ve found myself asking: whatever has happened to my church? (Yes, I know that it’s not technically mine anymore, since I’ve found a new religious home. But it’s still the church I grew up in, the church that shaped me. I don’t feel all the way disconnected from it.) Read More
Bringing the Good I Have, and Moving Forward
President Hinckley once encouraged those not of the LDS faith, “ . . . we say in a spirit of love, bring with you all that you have of good and truth which you have received from whatever source, and come and let us see if we may add to it.” It might seem odd, but I’ve actually thought a lot about that quote this year, because it speaks to something about my current religious journey, as I take a significant step in a new direction. This coming Sunday, the day after Epiphany, I’m going to be baptized in the Episcopal church. Read More
Yearly Church President Probabilities for Current Q15 Members
As a supplement to yesterday’s post, I’ve made the graph below that shows the year-to-year probabilities of each Q15 member being President.
The values come from the same mortality table that I used to run the simulation to find the likelihood of each Q15 member ever becoming Church President. This graph doesn’t require any simulation, though. For each Q15 member, I just used his yearly probabilities of survival to come up with yearly cumulative probabilities of survival (i.e., how likely is he to live through this age). Then for each Q15 member, his yearly probability of becoming President is the probability that he survives the year and that all the members senior to him do not. This is found by multiplying probabilities, so for example for Elder Ballard, who is junior only to President Nelson and Elder Oaks, his probability of being President in a particular year is this:
(Ballard cumulative probability of living)*(1 – Nelson probability of living)*(1 – Oaks probability of living)
The results look similar to what we’ve seen in the past with graphs like this, in that there are big probabilities across periods of years for Elders Oaks, Holland, and Bednar. The one big difference is that, as el oso noted yesterday, President Nelson jumped from a pretty low probability for most of his time in the quorum to 100% when President Monson died. I guess this just illustrates that applying a mortality table that gives general trends to a small group of people as I have here is bound to be wrong in big ways at times.
Church President Probability Changes with President Monson’s Death
As you are no doubt aware, President Monson passed away Tuesday evening. As I have before when a member of the Q15 passes away, in this post I’ll show how the probabilities of becoming Church President change for the other members as a result.
All the probabilities come from a simulation I did for a post back in 2015. It’s a straightforward simulation: it uses an actuarial table and each Q15 member’s age and seniority in the quorum as inputs, and it draws a series of random numbers to simulate different possible life expectancies for each member. The life expectancies are then compared to find in what fraction of the simulations each member outlives all other members senior to him to become President. I did 100,000 replications for each run. That is, 100,000 times I drew random numbers for each Q15 member and compared them to his survival probability each year, and then worked out whether each member would become President or not in that scenario, and how many years he would serve if he did. For a more detailed description of the process, see my earlier post.
I realized when writing this post up that I had never done a post to show changes in the probabilities after Elder Hales passed away last October. I’ll start with that. This table shows the changes in probabilities and average number of years serving as President for the other Q15 members after Elder Hales died. Note that all the numbers, including ages, are as of October, 2017.
Nacle Notebook 2017: Funny Comments
This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments I’ve read on the Bloggernacle in the past year. In case you’ve missed them, here are links to previous years’ posts: 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008. I’m very good with numbers, so I can tell that the fact that there are nine old ones and one new one means that this is my tenth annual post! It seems like this calls for a celebration of some kind, but I’m not sure what form that should take.
Anyway, back to the comments. Most that I’m quoting are excerpts from longer comments or posts. I’ve made each commenter’s name a link back to the original comment or post. The comments are roughly in chronological order.
fbisti, commenting on LDS_Aussie’s post “Lies, Damn lies and Statistics?: Growth and Decline in the LDS Church Membership Numbers” at W&T:
God is fickle (depending on who is the stake president).
Ring Out, Mild Bells!
The Curriculum Department has received a number of complaints that Hymn #215 was promoting wildness among Church members, particularly some of the youth. There have even been reports of unwholesome recreational activities linked to singing of this hymn. We are plea
sed to offer this newly revised version, which will replace the existing version when the hymnbook is next revised in 2045.
Ring out, mild bells, but be restrained,
Keep decibels low, keep echoes brief.
The year is leaving like a thief;
Ring out mild bells, but keep noise contained.
The year is leaving like a thief;
Ring out mild bells, but keep noise contained.
The Reckless Love of God
I suspect that a message that most human beings absorb growing up is that we should exercise some caution in our love. That love is always a risk, that it opens you up to being vulnerable, that you can get deeply wounded if you get too drawn in by love’s currents and run into troubled waters. That the people whom you love the most are also the ones who can hurt you the most. So we learn to hesitate, to look before we leap, to take care, to think in advance about what might go wrong. Sometimes we may let ourselves get swept up in it despite all this, an experience which can be both giddy and terrifying. But we also often build walls, sometimes as thick as we can make them, in hopes of protecting ourselves from getting too invested, from caring too much.
A Faith Less Angsty
For most of my life, my religious beliefs have been both deeply meaningful to me, and a source of intense turbulence. I agonized over my relationship to Mormonism for decades, over what it meant to stick with a tradition that did things I so deeply disagreed with but which was such a profound part of my identity, and had played such a foundational role in shaping my spirituality. I don’t know how many hours I spent writing about those questions, talking endlessly to friends and family about them, even bringing them up in therapy. And because of all that, I think I developed the idea that genuine faith was meant to be difficult, and by “difficult” I meant, something that regularly drove you crazy.
Leaked Memo on the Effects of Non-Priesthood Cooties (NPC)
In the wake of the Church’s recent announcement that young women will be allowed to hand out towels in the temple (and that priest-aged young men will be able to perform and witness baptisms for the dead), the following memo to the First Presidency that preceded the change has been leaked by an unnamed source in the Church hierarchy.
Executive summary
Recent research and revelation indicates that infection with Non-Priesthood Cooties (NPC) would not prohibit young women from handing out towels in the temple, and it is recommended that the current restriction on them doing so be lifted. No other changes in women’s or young women’s participation in priesthood ordinances are recommended, as NPC infection continues to be a serious concern in all other such situations.
Background
As the adornment of humanity, women and girls are, from birth, infected with Non-Priesthood Cooties (NPC) that prevent them from participating in priesthood ordinances in any way. (Note that NPC infection also makes it possible for women to become pornography.) Women’s NPC may even threaten the efficacy and validity of the ordinances themselves if women and girls get too close to them. The threat of NPC extends even to serving as a witness, a fact which has been known to prophets ancient and modern. For example, it is recorded in the New Testament that when the Savior was resurrected, and well-meaning female disciples attempted to convey this information to authorized priesthood leaders, Peter rightly doubted their testimony and believed it only when he had verified the event for himself. Although the women testified truthfully in this case, Peter was doubtless responding to previous situations in which the women’s NPC infection had prevented them from witnessing correctly.
Pay Attention. Keep Watch. A Post for Advent.
This is my first year observing Advent. To be honest, in the past I only had a rather vague idea of what it was all about. I associated it with the Advent calendars we had in my family growing up (only one each year, which meant that if you had six siblings, you only got a chocolate every seventh evening and had to suffer the indignity of watching a sibling eat the chocolate on the other six). And I’d been to Lessons and Carols on multiple occasions. But my general impression was that Advent was just the time of excitement and fun leading up to Christmas. Read More
Christmas Classics, Mormonized
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Ostracized by his family and friends because of his freakish red nose, Rudolph the reindeer runs away to the Island of Misfit Toys. While there, he learns about the Unwritten Order of Things and realizes that even though Santa’s secret Reindeer Handbook explicitly says that nose color doesn’t matter when reindeer are chosen to pull his sleigh on Christmas Eve, what this actually means is that nose color conformity is absolutely essential. Armed with this knowledge, Rudolph decides to undergo a painful operation to permanently change the color of his nose. He is welcomed with open hooves when he returns to his family and friends, and he secures a coveted spot on Santa’s reindeer team.
Toward a Less Micromanaging God
I grew up with two related beliefs about making decisions. The first was that in most cases, there was a right decision, a choice that you were supposed to make. “There’s the right and the wrong to ev’ry question,” asserts the hymn. The other was that with enough asking, God would reveal to you what that correct choice was. I heard again and again what a wonderful blessing this was, that God had a clear plan for your life and would guide you along that path, that you wouldn’t ever be left on your own to figure out what you were supposed to do. In fact, figuring out and then following God’s will for you was the entire point of this life. “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them,” explains the book of Abraham. Read More
The Cost of Making Women Ecclesiastically Superfluous
It first dawned on me that women weren’t necessary in church when I went to BYU Education Week as a teenager and heard what were meant to be faith-promoting stories about believing LDS women behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, who were unable to have an ecclesiastical organization because there wasn’t anyone with the priesthood to run it and who therefore didn’t get to take the sacrament for decades, but who nonetheless personally kept the faith. Rather than being inspired, I was somewhat taken aback when it occurred to me that for all the importance Latter-day Saints place on having an organized church, it is secondary to the importance of maintaining strict gender divisions. I realize that in the particular situation of the Cold War, there were added complications affecting what was possible. But a principle nonetheless became clear to me: if the choice was to ordain women, or to not have a church at all, Mormons would opt for the latter. (This led me to wonder: what if the only way to restore the church had been to work through a woman? Would the Mormon God simply decided to not have a Restoration rather than to allow a woman to act in his name and with his authority?) Read More
How to Get Those Darn Gay People to Stop Being So Obsessed With Their Gay Identities
One of the complaints I’ve heard numerous times from Latter-day Saints is that we gay people are way too obsessed with our gayness, that we get caught up in some outlandish homosexual identity (which might eventually lead to the dreaded “gay lifestyle”), and that we need to just stop thinking about sexual orientation as being that big of a part of who we are. We’re discouraged from even using the word “gay,” because it might swallow up our identities and make us think that there’s nothing else to us. Mormons who claim to be especially enlightened have informed me that they just don’t think about people in those terms, that they’ve transcended even being aware of such details about a person, and then complained about gay people who “force” their orientation on others by talking excessively about it, and thereby making everyone feel unnecessarily awkward and uncomfortable. Others have objected to an idea put forth by some church members that gay Mormons have a particularly challenging trial, pointing out that everyone has difficulties in life, and asking, when did we decide that gay people should get all this special attention? Read More