Unpunished Rapture

My First Mormon.org Video Profile

 

Yvette Yamagata's video, now featured on Mormon.org, is the first interview I helped to produce. Several of my others are forthcoming, but it's quite a thrill for me to see Yvette's confident personality and healthy perspectives featured in this way. It was a pleasure getting to know her, seeing her with her students, and learning of her passion for teaching, sports, structure, her family and the gospel.

Mary Flint Foulger, 1922 - 2010

On November 12, 2010, Mary Foulger passed away after almost five years of bedridden illness. Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to perform at her funeral service in Washington D.C., along with my mother, my childhood piano teacher Yoshie Akimoto, and Yoshie's daughter cellist Alison Eldredge. Although none of us was directly related to Mary, we still felt like part of her family, an amazing feat considering she had six children, 48 grandchildren and 64 great grandchildren!

Mary -- "Grandmother" -- and Grandfather made much of my being their "49th grandchild," a place I always treasured, but as with so many large families I've admired and loved in my life, the truth is I'm always on the outside looking in. Still, I consider her influence on me to be one of the greatest blessings of my spiritual life, a blessing that isn't diminshed by the fact that so many others got to enjoy her light much more than I did. I'm republishing here a short essay I wrote last December to Grandmother's daughter to be read to her in her bed.

Your mother sat in as my own grandmother at my sealing in the Salt Lake Temple. Growing up as I did, with no siblings and geographically distant from any extended family, our "family" often consisted of ward members or neighbors who my mother frequently and generously invited into our home. We were always reaching out, trying to make connections with those in proximity to us, offering our home as a sanctuary to so many who came and went through New York. With your parents, it was different. Their home was our sanctuary, a place where my mom and I could revert to being loved and pampered instead of always doing the loving and pampering of others. Your mother's home was, for me, the proverbial grandmother's house where something warm is always cooking in the oven, where cousins abound and where children can learn on the knees of older generations. Your mother even had an attic that your granddaugter A. and I rummaged through on occasion. I remember finding antiqued floral stationary in there on which A. and I wrote pledges to each other as "best friends forever". I remember the thrill I felt the day I saw myself on the grandchild bulletin board. There was my picture, included with the other beloveds! I didn't care if there were 25 or 50 or a hundred other grandkids up there with me. I felt like I belonged and it was marvelous.

Even though I am not part of her blood lineage, I figured I could make myself part of her spiritual lineage by emulating her and learning from her personality and habits. Optimism and effusiveness became my target characteristics, and I tried for a while to copy her trademark expression: "Oh! Oh! Isn't it wonderful!" while clapping her hands in delight. Such gushing sounded weird coming from a teenager and so I eventually adapted the execution, but the sentiment remained sincere. Her love of the scriptures was also something I figured I could emulate. I told my future husband I wanted a little wooden table by a window where we could permanently leave out our scriptures and our gospel study books. Apartment living hasn't accommodated that yet, but her legacy of scripture study certainly burns bright even without the little table. Her love of beautiful things and her world view were also important elements of crafting my idea of what a Mormon woman should be. She is curious, adventurous, luxuriant in her way and a promoter of the world's best offerings. She never shrinks from the world. She has a sense of humor. I'll never forget the good laugh we all had one morning in Israel when her sister J. described her adventure from the night before: She had washed her garments, hung them by the window of her hotel room to dry and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, J. woke up to what she thought were angels fluttering in her window. "I'm ready!" J. cried. "You can take me now! I'm ready to meet my maker!" We laughed at J.'s surprise when she didn't go anywhere and the angels turned out to be her laundry blowing in the breeze.

In Russia, a few years earlier, we ran into your parents in the Rembrandt Room of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where they were touring with the Tabernacle Choir and my family was on vacation. "There is no such thing as a coincidence!" your mother gushed, and your parents whisked me and my mother away to one of the best restaurants in the city and gave me my first taste of caviar. Then they hired a street artist to sketch my portrait. I'm convinced Grandfather paid the artist to make me look like a Kirov ballerina. Generosity was another defining characteristic I am determined to make my own. The degree to which Grandmother and Grandfather share their home, their money and their time is astonishing. From her devotion to the local Chinese branch to her endearing American accent when referring to her Latino house guest "Angel" to the gifts and mementos she would slip into my hand at each visit, your mother gives everything she has. This generosity literally saved me and my mother when my parents were going through their divorce and I was starting college. I too try to give all I have because of her.

Somehow after I went away to college and moved to California, I stopped seeing your mother as often as I had. I went off and got married, worked, started having children, moved around and I was not as good at keeping in touch as I should have been. I'm sorry for that. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that, except for my mom, Grandmother had the greatest impact on my character and my spiritual personality than any other woman. I love her. It's hard for me to think of her suffering now and I hope that knowing of her profound influence will bring her some comfort.

I know she has a legion of descendants who honor her everyday by living righteous lives, but please tell her she has one more in me.

Reflections on Sahar at BCC

I've been invited to post a sort of "director's journal" at By Common Consent, chronicling my experience publishing interviews with the MWP. My first instalment, "Reflections on Sahar," was published today. I'm thrilled more people are becoming familiar with this heroic woman's story.

There Is A Photo In This Post. In Fact, There Are Four.

Last night, I met Brandon Flowers.

Here's the proof:

A terrible iPhone photo, but that's him and this is me.

I am a huge fan of the Killers and of Brandon Flowers independently. There is so much that is intriguing and unique about him and his music to me, which I don't say lightly because I usually think stuff found on My 99.5 to be whiney drivel. It takes a lot for me to actually like anything of the pop/rock/alternative genres, and so for me to memorize words, buy videos of concerts and play them so much even my kids know the words is quite remarkable.

Flowers' talents are a perfect mix of great showmanship without being over the top, an understanding of drama and taste, a gift for creative and diverse melodies that actually get developed over the course of a song, and a profound poetic ability in his lyrics. This last point, even though I am usually totally deaf to lyrics in popular songs, is particularly striking to me because he rarely writes about the common tropes: being in love, sex, losing a love, being angry, etc. His songs are about family and reflection and redemption, very Mormon themes put in a setting of real conflict and tension. Like in his songs, I wonder about his personal life --wife and two kids (one named Ammon!), currently active at church although not always -- "Will he make it? Can he keep it up?" That tension makes him endlessly fascinating to me.

So how did I get to meet him? Before I started at Bonneville, our team filmed him for one of our Mormon.org profiles. (I've seen an early cut. Jared Hess of Napolean Dynamite fame was the director.) He gave our team passes to the afterparty at last night's show at The Depot.  I thought it was funny at on the bar at the Depot, after the audience had all cleared out and only those of us with these nifty green passes were left, there was a copy of the Primary Songbook on the bar with a ticket on it! This photo was not staged, and I thought it was hilarious. I have no idea why it was there.

 
 

The last song of the show was a cover of "When You Were Young" from Sam's Town and even though the concert featured Flowers' solo album, Flamingo, Ronnie Vannuci (the drummer from The Killers band) cameoed on guitar. So I snuck a photo with him too:

I only look a little excited.

Terryl Givens in CJane's Green Room

The delightful CJane invited me and my husband to join her Saturday evening in her Green Room, the quirky used-to-be-garage that she has magically transformed into a cultural center of Provo. She hosted a fireside (literally! complete with hot chocolate!) at which Terryl Givens, one of today's leaders in Mormon intellectual thought, answered audience questions for two hours and beyond about everything from what it is that makes Mormons so reviled to why faith is a choice and not exclusively a spiritual gift. Prof. Givens was in town giving the keynote address at the Mormon Media Studies Symposium entitled "Fraud, Philanderers, and Football: Negotiating the Mormon Image" which was a fascinating summary of the development of our cultural involvement as a people since our inception in 1830.

"What the Mormons do seems to be excellent," said Charles Dickens. "But what they say is nonsense." This phrase from 150 years ago still accurately describes the general public's perception of us as a people. Whether it's in football, on American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance or even in rock music, our people excel in the cultral front. However, get into what those people actually believe to be truth, and our influence and thought is completely discounted. Terryl Givens' primary message is to answer the question Why? What is it about our theology that stirs such passionate responses from our detractors?

In the course of answering this question, through his keynote address and through the questions on Saturday night, Givens essnetially revisited the entirety of human religious though since the life of Christ in the spirit of a true doctor of philosophy. The simple answer is that we add to doctrine -- a whole book of scripture, a wild supposition for where we came from and where we are going, literally what we as eternal beings will be doing in a million years -- rather than simplify and take away, which has been the traditional trajectory of Western religious philosophy. We tell a story, with a passionate, vulnerable god, denying the mysticism and untouchability of religion through the ages.

Across the course of this two-day exegesis, Givens gave me a complete reboot of my simplest faith as well as my most aggressive intellectual pursuit to understand the whole eternal round. The uniqueness of Joseph Smith's restored theologies, the way the Book of Mormon fits perfectly into the course of history as laid out in the Old Testament, and the resonating truth of the Plan of Salvation make all of our institutional church's quirks and quibbles seem so small and trite. The gospel isn't about "me me me" and it's ultimate purpose is not necessarily to make sure that every person is perfectly happy in this life. It is so much more, so much greater than ourselves, so tied up to the purposes of eternity and the beauty of creation. Thoughts like these make my head feel like it's going to explode, in the same way muscles feel tired but exhilarated after a workout.

Thank you Professor Givens and CJane for restoring the intellectual rigor I applied to the gospel in high school and college but haven't had much chance to apply more recently. I am reinvigorated, rededicated to ferreting out the beauties of our gospel and of religious thought from the world's best thinkers while concurrently renewing my relationship with the Savior.

***

Incidentally, CJane and I realized that we had lunch together at Planet Hollywood in New York when we were both seniors in high school! I'm so delighted to have reconnected with someone so full of life and committed to truth herself.

Mormon Times' Coverage of the Symposium

Emily Jensen from the Deseret News' Mormon Times covers the "I Am A Mormon Woman: Female Latter-day Saint Identity on the Internet" symposium panel here. I particularly enjoyed getting to know Emily better at the symposium last week. She is funny, smart and came extremely well prepared to moderate a different panel earlier in the day. She also came with a 2-month-old baby in tow; I naively asked her if it was her first, forgetting I am in Mormon country. Although younger than I, this one is Emily's fifth. That's what we Mormon women can do!

I Am A Mormon Women: Female LDS Identity on the Internet

It was wonderful to see so many familiar faces at the Mormon Media Studies Symposium yesterday at BYU, and meet so many people I've only known online. I had an enriching discussion with Kathryn Soper, founder of Segullah, and Lisa Butterworth, founder of FeministMormonHousewives, moderated by Catherine Matthews Pavia, PhD. I'm including my introductory remarks here.

 

What does Mormon womanhood look like? Can we describe a Mormon woman’s hair? Her dress? Can we detail her daily activities, how she spends her time? Can we know what kind of food she buys for her family? What kind of decorations she has in her house? Who makes the money that pays for the clothes she wears?

 

For too long, our cultural image of a Mormon woman has presumed answers to each of these questions, too narrowly defining what good Mormon womanhood looks like: she drives her children to activities, she cooks casseroles for her neighbors, she relies on her husband for her welfare.

 

When I launched the Mormon Women Project in January of this year, my goal was to explore not what Mormon womanhood looks like, but what it feels like.  I wanted to explore the righteous use of our most precious divine gift – our agency – to craft lives that may not include canning and quilting and may not even include children or a domestic life, but that still exude a feeling of faith and dedication to the principles of the Gospel.

 

The Mormon Women Project accomplishes this goal by producing one extended text interview with a Latter-day Saint woman each week, exploring her life story but paying particular attention to the intersection of her faith and her personal agency. We are most interested in the woman’s process of self-discovery: How did she figure out who she is? What she loves? What her talents are? And how did she reconcile the answers to those questions with the demands of the Gospel’s doctrine? To date, my 25 volunteers and I have produced 62 interviews, many of which are accompanied by professional portrait photography of the interview subjects. The Project’s tagline – “Celebrating the Many Ways To Choose the Right” – reflects our desire to examine women who have deliberately crafted rich lives through courage, confidence, a clear understanding of our doctrine and a reliance on the Holy Ghost.

 

By taking this grassroots approach to celebrating the deliberate and diverse lives of women in the Church, the Mormon Women Project does not seek to change policies in the institutional Church regarding women or shame women into renouncing their domestic expertise. The MWP seeks instead to stimulate a groundswell of pride and understanding in our strength as a broad-ranging sisterhood. The MWP is trying to offer something of the highest professional quality that fosters pride in our culture, instead of having it be the punch line of a joke. If Mormon women have examples of other authentic and confident Mormon women they can admire and relate to, we are more inclined to see the Gospel as a positive force in our definition of ourselves as women. More importantly, our young women will more readily see a future for themselves in the Church if they understand that the intersection of faith and agency is not a dark, back alley they should be ashamed to visit but the main crossing on a boulevard of dreams.

 

The Mormon Women Project is not a community in the same way Segullah and FeministMormonHousewives are. At mormonwomen.com, readers have the opportunity to post comments and responses to the interviews, but there is an understood respect and reverence for the woman who has opened her heart and deepest motivations to the reader, which results in very little debate. It is up to the individual reader to figure out what the interview means to her, not for the community to weigh in. This format demands introspection and a private, rather than public, discourse. To facilitate this introspection among our readers, the MWP takes the strategy of “deliberate disorientation,” meaning that we try to offer profiles that represent every possible choice or life challenge so that our readers can never come away saying to themselves, “Oh I guess a good Mormon women is this,” or “A good Mormon woman is that.” There is no one right answer to what is a good Mormon women, and the MWP does not endorse one choice over another as long as the women making those choices are staying close to the Spirit and prioritizing our doctrine.  We hope that this inability to spot the perfect prototype or role model forces women to turn instead to the Lord and say, “Okay Lord, who do you want me to be?”

 

Thanks to the Internet, the geographic boundaries of our ward Relief Societies no longer dictate our social communions with other sisters. The Mormon Women Project is only possible because Skype, email and the Internet have made it possible for us to interview women in Korea, Russia, England, Ireland, South Africa, Ghana, Venezuela and France, as well as across the United States. The power of this collection of stories comes from the irony that at once, we feel the commonness and also the uniqueness of our own personal circumstance. Our faith in a common doctrine brings us together as a people, despite our varying locales or ages or ethnicities, satiating a need to belong and cementing a bond with others who share our peculiar status in the world. On the other hand, each of our stories is so individual, so guided by personal revelation in a way that is meant just for us, that we cannot doubt the power of our personal missions, our individual relationships with the Savior, and the solitary responsibility we each have to make something of ourselves. We gain confidence from knowing that we are known by the Lord, power from knowing we alone have the experiences and relationships that make us who we are.

 

 

 

 

My Response to Patheos Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I published an article on Patheos.com entitled, "Here's A Secret: Nobody's Normal." In it, I discuss how intrigued I've been to discover how many women consider themselves to be "out of synch" with what the Church expects women to be, which has led me to the conclusion that there is in fact no ideal, perfect Mormon woman. I used the term "Molly Mormon" to describe that impossible being, simply because I have long understood that to be an apt term to describe a woman who looks and acts perfect on the outside and is thus assumed to be perfect on the inside. To me, the term embodies every judgment, every unrealistic expectation, every silly comparision and every skim-the-surface sort of thought that our women have too long been subject to.

 

In my article, I did not state this definition clearly enough. Some of the commentors apply the term to themselves and women they admire, which suggests to me that I did not emphasize enough the impossibility of the term's literal application and my view of it as an excuse for shallow judgment.

 

In addition, commentors wonder whether the Mormon.org campaign with which I am now involved is merely a public relations effort and that it fails to represent the real speak and expectations of our leaders. These are extremely valid concerns and I will address them in the coming weeks here through a series of personal observations about the campaign.

 

I love comments! I think it's so fascinating to see your insights into these discussions that oftentimes I am too close to. I felt bad that "Jenni" didn't feel more comfortable stating her own opinions on the Patheos.com comments, but please always feel free to let me know what you think! What is a Molly Mormon to you? Is it a positive or negative term?

 

 

Mormon Media Studies Symposium, November 11 and 12

On November 11 and 12, BYU is hosting its first–ever interdisciplinary Mormon Media Studies Symposium. The Symposium will focus on the academic study of all aspects of Mormons and the media (film, online, books, television, interactive, etc.) historically and in the present.

 

I have the honor of being a panelist in the discussion "I Am A Mormon Woman: LDS Female Identity on the Internet." My fellow panelists are Kathryn Soper (founder of Segullah) and Lisa Butterworth (founder of FeministMormonHousewives.com). If you're interested, please consider attending our panel discussion on Thursday November 11th at 1:00pm in room 2258 of the BYU Conference Center. You can come to hear Terryl Givens give the keynote address at 11:00am, stay for lunch and then slip into our discussion!

You can find the complete schedule here.

 

 

 

Go Giants: 2002

It's not unusual for San Francisco to be balmy in October, despite the 55 degrees and overcast consistency the rest of the year. The October in 2002 was just such a balmy time. And it wasn't just the skies that were clear: We were still newly-married, only three years into our life together and preparing to move to a hipper, upgraded apartment out of the Financial District and into tony Pacific Heights. It was a time in our lives when we hit opening nights of the blockbusters on Fridays (Lord of the Rings! The Talented Mr. Ripley!) and if we didn't feel like making dinner after work we hit Fuzio or maybe even Kokkari, the upscale Greek restaurant across the street, if visiting parents were treating.

 

I don't remember specifically how we scored two standing-room tickets to Game 3 of the World Series that year, when the Giants played the Anaheim Angels. I think there was some connection with our work at Walmart.com, although of course taking any sort of gift from a third-party or supplier would have meant our quick dismissal from Mr. Sam's bastian of honesty so I assume we paid someone for them. Despite the fuzzy memories of our procurement, I destinctly remember being there, on that gorgeous October night when we cheered for our home team.

 

Because our tickets were for standing room, Elliot and I simply walked the perimeter of what was then PacBell Park while the game was in process. Occasionally we ran into work colleagues and even one or two people from church. We would stop, talk for half an inning, and then continue on with our peripatetic patrol. The stadium was quite new at that point and so the series that year was, for San Franciscans, a celebration of our swanky new home as well as our skilled team. Never one for obsessive baseball watching, I focused on the energy of the stadium instead. Nearly jetting into the Bay, with McCovey Cove inviting local boaters to draw near to the action, PacBell Park was raucous, gorgeous and happy that night. The bright lights shone the brighter against the backdrop of the black water and as we ate our garlic fries and strained to get a glimpse of the plays from the walkway along the outfield, there was an unforgettable festivity in the atmosphere. It was a happy, happy night.

A year later, almost to the day, we had our first child and for the most part that era of carefree life-absorbing times came to an end for us. Now, eight years later, San Francisco again feels that happiness and some other young couple is enjoying that city's magical powers.