Last fall two seemingly innocuous events occurred in my life.

The first was having my own DNA tested. The second was reading Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality by Matthew Harris. The entire priesthood and temple ban on those with African ancestry is a horrific part of Mormonism. To read in such detail about the racist teachings and policies crafted by LDS church leaders was enlightening and saddening, such as Brigham Young saying that any man who mingles with the ‘seed of Cain’ is “to come forward & have his head cut off & spill his Blood upon the ground”.1 Yikes!

One of those shocking bits of history talked about at great length in the book is the “one-drop rule.” The “one-drop rule” stipulated that any person with even a ‘drop’ of African blood was considered ‘negro’ and thus ineligible for priesthood ordination (if male) and temple rites (if female). I had known about the ‘one-drop rule’ before reading the book, but reading all the awful details about it broke my heart in ways I hadn’t expected.

While knee-deep in Second-Class Saints, I was thrilled to get my DNA results. I texted my kids the above graphic and said, “Look at me, I am a product of humanity!” I was so proud to learn that I am 20% Indigenous Mexican. (Thanks Mom!) I was equally proud to learn I was 26% Celtic/Gaelic (Thanks Dad!) Smaller parts of my DNA showed me to also be Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, and African—4% African to be exact. Love it…thanks Mom!

Knowing that I had ‘four drops’ of African blood, I realized that my own parents’ temple marriage was against Church policy as my parents were married in 1971, seven years before the priesthood and temple ban ended.

Harris writes:

“But there was another fundamental flaw with the one-drop rule…you couldn’t tell whether someone had African ancestry simply by looking at them. In the nineteenth century, when Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders defined a “negro” as anyone having one drop of African lineage, there were no reliable ways to identify bloodlines. DNA tracing through the Human Genome Project was decades in the future, which made determining lineage imprecise and often wrong. All of this is to say that the one-drop rule underscored a brutal reality that neither Mormon leaders nor Americans in general could grasp. The racial boundaries they sought to enforce were built on fiction.”2

I had ‘four drops’ because my mother had ‘eight drops.’ Obviously my parents were married before DNA tests, but it left me wondering, would The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have scrapped the ‘one-drop rule’ had DNA tests been a possibility? Or would they have leaned harder into the rule had science made it easier to discriminate? So many questions!

At the time, some people (mainly in South Africa and Brazil) were required by the Church to trace their genealogy to prove they had no African ancestry. Or worse, some potential converts were assessed by a white missionary or other white church leader just by looking at them to see how dark they were. I have curly brown hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. But one of my sisters—sharing all the same DNA as my parents—has blonde hair, blue eyes, and light skin. I truly can’t imagine the humiliation of some white man staring at any of us to decide if we ‘pass’ as white.

Harris documents loads of stories about LDS members discovering they had African ancestry, but who ‘passed’ as white. Some looked like me, some like my sister. Sometimes church leaders looked the other way when they knew someone had African ancestry and sometimes they didn’t. Harris writes–

Over the years, [Church leaders] fielded numerous queries from Latter-day Saints who looked White but were classified as Black by the church….These sensitive cases always frustrated the Brethren because the individuals in question wanted to serve missions, marry in the temple, and hold the priesthood, but the church’s restrictive racial boundary made this difficult. The simplest answer was to get rid of the one-drop rule and cut through the bureaucratic gauze that prohibited full church participation. But the Brethren couldn’t see themselves changing decades of tradition. On at least three occasions in their council meetings the apostles discussed—and reaffirmed—that they would keep the one-drop rule.3

My mother and her family experienced plenty of racism as Mexican Latter-day Saints even though they were not required to prove their lineage upon baptism. In Mexico my family was specifically told by the missionaries that they were ‘Lamanite’, a group of people written about in the Book of Mormon, but also a cursed people according to scripture.

One of my mother’s sisters, Herlinda Briones Bowen, served a mission shortly after her baptism in the 1960s in western Mexico. She writes in her memoir about numerous racist experiences, things she overheard while working in the mission home in Hermosillo, Sonora. The mission president’s wife was having a conversation with a young male missionary who had finished his service and was going to be heading home to Arizona—

“While I was sorting some papers, the missionary casually stands by the Mission President’s wife seated at her desk, engaging her in lighthearted conversation. This being the last day of his mission, all smiles and cheerful demeanor, she turns towards him inquiring about his plans after completing such an important milestone in his life. Without preamble, the missionary launches on his number one goal…he intends to marry Sister T., a recently released Mexican lady missionary!...My emotional radar in full alert by now, I managed to keep my eyes on my work; the discussion was none of my concern and the conversation being in English, further removed me from any involvement. [Not everyone in the mission home knew Herlinda understood English]. Her smiling face and cheerful demeanor gone; the Mission President’s wife’s tone of voice changes accordingly in a mean-spirited lecture about the “disadvantages” of marrying a Mexican!” 4

The above encounter doesn’t even surprise me. I’ve heard and seen plenty of racism from Latter-day Saints towards Mexicans (and other Latinos) my entire life. In fact, I probably have witnessed more than my fair share because as a ‘white presenting’ woman (with an English last name, first Harrington, now Winward) other white Latter-day Saints feel safe in expressing their racist thoughts to me. Never having been one to stay silent, I always call them out on their racist comments and then witness a lot of back-peddling.

One last story from my family. In the late 1970s my dad was a deputy sheriff for San Bernardino county in California. He had an opportunity to work for the sheriff’s office in Springville, Utah. Before uprooting our family, my dad had the wherewithal to ask his future employer what the racism was like towards Latinos in a small town. The man was honest with my father and told him the racism would be significant in Utah. My dad, not wanting to subject his wife, my mother, to much more racism than she already had to bear, turned down the job and raised our family in southern California.

I grew up in the safety of that choice, ‘passing’ as white while the Church’s complicated racial past hummed quietly in my DNA. The history of racism—official and cultural—is a dark stain on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is a history that once relied on the fiction of racial purity to determine eternal blessings. Today, as I look at my DNA results and my family photos, I am struck by the irony that the very thing the prophets and apostles once feared—the ‘mingling of races’—is exactly what makes me, well, me.

The ‘bureaucratic gauze’ may be gone, but the social scars for so many still remain. Whether on this side of 1978 or the other, my ‘four drops’ of African blood never made me or my family second-class saints, but a beautiful product of humanity and a child of God.

Cynthia Winward

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We all know change can be hard, but what about changing our own thinking? Can the discomfort associated with conflicting ideas keep us from fully engaging with them, or prevent us from objectively weighing data? Why does ‘putting it on the shelf’ sometimes feel like our only option? The human tendency to seek validation for existing beliefs is called Confirmation Bias. Religions and politics both depend on it; by naturally pursuing evidence that supports our current position, people maintain the conviction that “My team is the best.” In Episode 262, Cynthia and Susan discuss confirmation bias, and some of the ways it may function among church members. As Brian McLaren explains, “People only change their minds when the pain of not changing surpasses the pain of changing.”

Notes & Quotes:

Recognizing Our Biases: The Power of Confirmation Bias, Center for Action and Contemplation, 11/19/2025
What Is Confirmation Bias? | Psychological Explanation & Examples, MindfulThinks
Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, by Brené Brown
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr
Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer, by Richard Rohr
A Mirrored Funhouse of Confirmation Bias: a sermon on Palm 27, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, The Corners, 3/17/2025
Why I Spent 90 Minutes Steaming an American Flag, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, The Corners, 4/13/2026
Coming Closer to Jesus Christ, by Dallin H. Oaks, BYU Speeches, 2/10/2026
Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith, by Sarah Bessey
Why Can’t We See?, Learning How to See with Brian McLaren podcast, Center for Action and Contemplation, 10/5/2020
Sermon on Seeing More Than Just What We Look For, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, Patheos, 1/16/2017

“You may have heard the old saying that people only change their minds when the pain of not changing surpasses the pain of changing. That old saying is all about confirmation bias.” —Brian McLaren

"We are willing to receive all truth, from whatever source it may come.” —Joseph F. Smith

“My brain has a lot going on, so it interprets hard work like this as pain….Wanting to save me from that extra reframing work, my brain presses a “reject” or “delete” button when a new idea presents itself. ‘I’ll stick with my current frame, thank you very much,’ it says. And it gives me a little jolt of pleasure to reward me for my efficiency.” —Brian McLaren

Confirmation bias is “a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other.” —Brené Brown, (p. 81)

“When we’re faced with information that challenges what we believe, our first instinct is to make the discomfort, irritation, and vulnerability go away by resolving the dissonance. We might do this by rejecting the new information, decreasing its importance, or avoiding it altogether. The greater the magnitude of the dissonance, the greater is the pressure to reduce dissonance.” —Brené Brown

“There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand.” ―Richard Rohr

“Before the truth 'sets you free', it tends to make you miserable.” ―Richard Rohr

“What you decide to look at determines what you do not see.” —Richard Rohr, (Dancing Standing Still, p. 70)

”Not to put too fine a point on it, but it feels like the machinery of late stage capitalism coughed up the internet for us with its empty promises of connecting us all through social media – only to leave us in a mirrored fun house of confirmation bias.
“I feel so surrounded by it that it’s suffocating and I’m left wondering what is real….and what is true when there are such starkly different narratives out there about the world that are then custom delivered to our devices to assure us that we are right about everything.” —Nadia Bolz-Weber

“The biblical text, when treated as a Living Word and not simply a dead policy manual, allows meaning, comfort, and wisdom to unfold in both old and new ways for each community that studies it. It allows the Bible to surprise us, live in us, even interpret us.” —Nadia Bolz-Weber

“Remember, “to survive spiritually,” you will need the “constant influence of the Holy Ghost.” An abundance of speculation and false information in podcasts and on social media surrounds us. Some may protest or question the truth of Church doctrine without knowing or even understanding the fullness of that doctrine. Don’t be persuaded by false or inaccurate information. Discuss your concerns with faithful, well-informed friends and always take those concerns to the Lord.” —Pres. Dallin Oaks

“Sometimes one of the greatest gifts God gives to us is losing our religion. We have to be committed to unlearning the unhelpful, broken, false, or incomplete things if we want to have space to relearn the goodness, joy, and embrace of God. But it sure doesn’t feel like it at the time.” —Sarah Bessey, (p. 31)

“The third thing [the third choice] is our contemplative mind [which] helps us to step outside of that thought and embrace another. But because the God thing, right, the God thing, you and me and Richard as people of faith, we can project those stories, those biases onto God. God has ordained men to lead, women to be quiet. God has ordained white is right, white is powerful. God has ordained straight people....All of that stuff gets stuck in the religion story. So how do we push ourselves to a third space where there’s something else besides squeezing someone in the box.” She goes on to say, “When we quit squeezing people into boxes, we let God out of the box.” —Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis

“Part of what we are invited to learn out here in the wilderness is how to metabolize that loss into compassion rather than bitterness, into welcome rather than caution.” —Sarah Bessey, (p. 78)

“God of desert prophets and unlikely messiahs,
”Help us set aside our pride enough to see how little we really know. Humble us. And then raise us up as agents of your peace. Show us that there is more to see than what we look for. More possibility. More love. More forgiveness. When we look upon those we consider enemies, help us see them as your children loved madly by you. Help others who view us as their enemies to also see us as your beloved children. Heal this nation. Heal the people in this room, Lord. Restore our sight so that we may see you in each other.
”We’re not going to bother asking politely because we are basically out of other options. Show yourself, Lord. And if you are already doing that and we are too blind to see, then grant us even bad vision, since even that would be a vast improvement.
”We ask all of this and that for which we have no words in the name of Jesus Christ, friend of sinners of every variety, Amen.” —Nadia Bolz-Weber

Some things in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seem to be changing more regularly than they have in the past. Many members have lived through decades where it felt like almost nothing changed in our meetings, curriculum, and official messaging, so this evolution comes with a diversity of feelings. How might Church leadership help members move forward more easily? Could adjusting the way these inevitable shifts are introduced increase clarity, unity, hope, and even anticipation for what the future may bring? Episode 261 addresses this and other topics—including listener voicemails—in a conversation about a little of everything.

Notes & Quotes:

Church Facebook post about a husband supporting his wife’s career
BYU-I Instagram reel about a woman choosing a career
LDS Church President Dallin Oaks hopes lower missionary ages will lead to lower marriage ages, by Peggy Fletcher Stack & David Noyce, The Salt Lake Tribune, 1/12/2026
The Family-Centered Gospel of Jesus Christ, by Dallin H. Oaks, 10/2025
Parents and Children, Dallin H. Oaks, 10/2018
Unselfish Service, Dallin H. Oaks, 4/2009
Why Invoking Jesus in War Turns Christianity Into a Dangerous Weapon, Jane Clayson Johnson with Father James Martin, Deseret Voices podcast, Deseret News, 4/10/2026
Deseret News Facebook post
Why Social Change is Contagious, by Gregg Sparkman and Greg Walton, 6/3/2019

“Marriage is central to the purpose of mortal life and what follows,” Oaks said... “We are children of a loving Heavenly Father who created us with the capacity to follow his commandment to multiply and replenish the Earth.” —Pres. Dallin Oaks

“In the United States we are suffering from a deterioration in marriage and childbearing. For nearly a hundred years the proportion of households headed by married couples has declined, and so has the birthrate. The marriages and birthrates of our Church members are much more positive, but they have also declined significantly. It is vital that Latter-day Saints do not lose their understanding of the purpose of marriage and the value of children. That is the future for which we strive.”—Pres. Dallin Oaks

“The gap between those who are [parenting] and those who are not willing to do this is widening in today’s world. One of our family members recently overheard a young couple on an airline flight explaining that they chose to have a dog instead of children. ‘Dogs are less trouble,’ they declared. ‘Dogs don’t talk back, and we never have to ground them.’” —Dallin H. Oaks

“Children are our most precious gift from God—our eternal increase. Yet we live in a time when many women wish to have no part in the bearing and nurturing of children. Many young adults delay marriage until temporal needs are satisfied.” —Dallin H. Oaks

“Research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, suggests that social change can self-propagate: simply witnessing other people change their behavior leads people to question fundamental beliefs that hold them back from changing themselves. Specifically, seeing change in others makes people think that change is possible for themselves, that it is important, and that it is compatible with who they are.” —Gregg Sparkman & Greg Walton

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Many thanks to listener Gretchen Blackburn for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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SH: And I feel like you’re describing this kind of diversity of thought. I find it very hopeful that that’s even being allowed on Latter Day Saint platforms. This is hopeful that we can have James Martin on and he can say these things, it really is. But I feel like he still says them as an outsider. We’re thrilled that the diversity of thought is coming into the room. It’s fresh air coming into the room. But until the leaders or mainstream members, until it starts to come out of those mouths, then members who would express the same thoughts will continue to be ostracized. Exhibit A: Cynthia and Susan.

CW: Hello, I’m Cynthia Winward.

SH: And I’m Susan Hinckley.

CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today’s episode is Susan and Cynthia’s Mailbag Mayhem. How’s that?

SH: Hello Cynthia.

CW: Okay, Susan. Mayhem? Really? Is that where we’re going today?

SH: I mean, people seem to like the Rage Cast, so let’s take it up a notch. Let’s go to full mayhem. Really it’s just that we have a smattering of different things that we wanna talk about.

CW: This episode did start out – I’m giving a teaser right here ‘cause we’re gonna talk about this halfway through – but this episode did start out with a specific topic with specific notes. And then it just kind of evolved into other stuff. So we’re front loading. We’re putting the mayhem at the beginning, and then we will get to some more structured stuff towards the end. Teaser.

SH: A little teaser. That sounds good. Well, I think it was in our Rage Cast episode where we had a little conversation about a church identity crisis. We were talking about, do I wanna cut my bangs? Right? About the church as an eighth grader. And ever since we had that conversation, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. And the church has helped me along by continuing to do stuff that makes me say, “Seriously, what are we even doing right now?” And so, I just want to talk about a couple of those things right upfront, if that’s okay.

CW: Yes.

SH: You and I have talked several times over the years about this thing going on where the church is calling women to leadership positions who have had careers.

CW: Big careers.

SH: Big careers in some cases, yes. Career women in leadership positions in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which has spent literal decades telling women not to do this, right?

It’s interesting. So a couple of things happened on social media a week or so ago. One was a post that popped up about a man supporting his wife who was in medical school, maybe?

CW: Yes, that’s right.

SH: This came from the church. Of course, we’ll link to it. And it’s a lovely story. He’s decided to stay home with the kids and support her while she’s going to medical school. And this is a decision that they have made together as a couple, which is, let’s be clear right up front, the way obviously marriage should work, right? Isn’t this the way that these decisions should be being made?

CW: Imagine that.

SH: But the thing about the exchange that took place on social media with the church posting this—and then what happened after—is not that people took any issue with what the church posted necessarily; it’s what’s behind all of it.

CW: And that’s why we’re talking about this.

SH: And there is a lot of emotion. The comment section was pretty crazy with that post, right? And we’ve seen this happen before. I mean, Annette Dennis’s famous “Post turned ‘round the world” comes to mind immediately where someone says something that maybe shouldn’t be that big a deal, but then the members explode in the comments.

CW: The “What’s behind that?” exploded

SH: Exactly. And that’s what happened with this one. So I want to just give you a couple of comments from the comment section.

One that I feel like captures what a lot of people were thinking, including myself, which is why I chose it, says this: “This does feel like mixed messaging. The proclamation outlines fairly specific gender roles and has long been treated as doctrine. If the current emphasis is shifting toward personal revelation and individual family decisions, that’s a meaningful change. But it should be clearly acknowledged as such. When teachings carry [00:05:00] doctrinal weight, they shape real life decisions for decades. So it’s reasonable for members to ask whether the underlying stance is consistent or evolving. Clarity here would go a long way.”

And then someone else jumps on immediately and smacks back saying, “On the other hand, personal revelation isn’t a new doctrine.”

CW: Someone had to say it. They just couldn’t let that comment stand alone. They had to smack it down.

SH: Yeah. So we had that going on. Late the same week, or maybe the next week, we had a video that came out from BYU Idaho. This was a woman talking about how she examined her personal gift, her strengths, her needs, and her desires; and decided to pursue a career. They also have children, but she’s working and her husband’s also working, and she is finding enormous fulfillment through that choice.

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Hello!

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s ahead as we roll toward the home stretch of Season 11. It’s going so fast! Thanks for all the ways you’ve been contributing to the conversation. It feels like our social media has been in full bloom the past few weeks, and we just love it. The more voices and ideas, the better!

Poor Ellen!

Don’t miss out—make a note of upcoming attractions now! Remember that for our Friday Live Chat events, the Zoom link gets dropped in our regular Substack chat the morning of the meeting. No need to register. These discussions will be recorded so you can listen later if you’re unable to participate.**

ALSSI Calendar

4/24 Friday Live Chat | Letting Go, 10:00 am Mtn

4/28 Ep. 261: Susan & Cynthia’s Mailbag Mayhem

5/5 Ep. 262: Confirmation Bias

5/7 Say More | Cynthia Winward

5/12 Ep. 263: What Do You Say? | Listener Edition 3

5/14 Worthy Stuff | Cynthia Edition

5/15 Friday Live Chat | Confirmation Bias, 10:00 am Mtn

5/19 Ep. 264: Big Ideas | Myth

5/21 Say More: At Last She Writes It 2

5/22 Friday Live Chat | Myth**

5/26 Ep. 265 | Chaplaincy w/ Jenny Richards

5/28 ALSSI News

**What’s our Substack chat? It’s a dedicated conversation space for paid subscribers—full of amazing ALSSIers—where we talk about All. Of. It. all the time. (It’s also a great way to support the podcast.) We’d love you to join the convo! You can find info about subscribing here.

If you’d like to participate in one of our Friday Live Chat events to get a taste of what you’re missing, we’ll open our meeting on Friday, May 22 to everyone. No need to register, just click on this link at 10:00 am Mtn to join us!

Questions?
Want the community, but can’t afford to subscribe?
Send us an email at atlastshesaidit@gmail.com and Katie will help!

drumroll, please. . .

While you have your calendar out, save the date—here are a few preliminary details about our upcoming summer ALSSI Live Event!

Tuesday, July 21
Time: TBA (eve)
3301 E Louise Ave, Salt Lake City, UT

We’re planning an evening of fun with plenty of time for you to catch up with old friends and/or make new ones (hint: you’ll get a chance to answer some of this season’s What Do You Say questions!) Watch this space for registration info.

Of course there will be cake.

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Meanwhile …

It’s the First Anniversary of our book! 🎉🎉

Bunches of thanks to everyone who has supported us by purchasing a copy for yourself or to share.

If you’re feeling the pull to start a conversation with someone but haven’t known how to begin, we’ve heard from readers that this book can help open the door. (Looking at you, Mother’s Day!) In fact, if you have an online book group and want to discuss our book, we’d love to “attend” and take part in the discussion! We’re also willing to come in person if it’s super local to where we live. Just send us an email.

paperback $24.95 | ebook $9.99 | audiobook $19.95

Buy on Bookshop.org
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Speaking of books,

The next At Last She Read It book club is scheduled! The readers have spoken, and Lilith, by Nikki Marmery, was selected at the last meeting.

From Goodreads: “Lilith is the story of the first woman, who was expelled from Paradise for disobedience. In this retelling of the Hebrew myth that justified and explained woman's subjection to man, Lilith will have her revenge—however long it takes. In the Garden of Eden, at the beginning of time, an outrageous lie is born: that women are inferior.”

Please start reading now, and plan to join us!

ALSRI Book Club
Thursday, July 16
7:00 pm Mtn
register here to receive Zoom link via email

Thanks for reading/listening/being.

Our best,
Susan, Cynthia,
& the ALSSI Team

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“The spiritualities of all great world religions teach us letting go, or how to step aside,” writes Richard Rohr. Letting go is an intentional process. We may let go of our emotional attachments, limiting beliefs, or past events. We may give up control, the need to be successful, or the need to be right. It’s an ongoing process of surrendering to what is, and adjusting accordingly. In Episode 260, Susan and Cynthia take on this big idea, a central theme in spiritual practice.

Notes & Quotes:

ALSSI News, 5/11/2023
Crisis Contemplation, by Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Holmes
The Importance of Letting Go—But Not Right Away, by TyaCamellia Allred, LMFT, Roots Relational Therapy
Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go, by Richard Rohr
Apatheia, Wikipedia
An Early Resurrection: Life in Christ before You Die, by Adam S. Miller
Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, by Richard Rohr
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott
At Last She Said It: Honest Conversations about Faith, Church, and Everything In Between, by Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward
Walking Away, by Dana Vanderlugt, Reformed Journal, 1/23/2025
Ch ch Changes, by Nadia Bolz-Weber, The Corners, 3/16/2026
Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount, by Richard Rohr
Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, by Gregory Boyle
Words of Good Hope: A Conversation with Nadia Bolz-Weber, Part II, by Jane Ratcliffe, 6/26/2024
Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, by Mirabai Starr
Letting Go, by Jack Kornfield, 7/1/2022

“Life is such that everyone's life, sometimes, is almost more than you can bear.” —Jim Finley

“True liberation is letting go of our small self, letting go of our cultural biases, letting go of our fear of loss and death. Freedom is letting go of wanting more and better things, and it's letting go of our need to control and manipulate God and others. It's even letting go of our need to know and our need to be right, which we only discover with our maturity. We become free as we let go of our three primary energy centers…as described by Thomas Keating: a need for power, control; a need for safety, security; and our need for affection and esteem.” —Dr. Barbara Holmes

“Letting go and giving up are not the same thing. When we let go, we recognize our arrogance, our myths of control, and we realize that the only constants are God's love and God's promise that we will never be left alone.” —Dr. Barbara Holmes

“What can be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is?” —Eckhart Tolle

“Letting go is profoundly honest. It is grounded firmly in the truth of what is. That’s why it’s such a release.” —Sharon Salzberg

“Be with that shit
Deal with that shit
Heal from that shit
And then, when you’re ready—Let that shit go.” —TyaCamellia Allred

“Unless we learn to let go of our feelings, we don’t have the feelings, the feelings have us. [...] Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying that you should suppress and deny your feelings. I’m challenging you to name them, identify them, and observe them. But don’t fight them and don’t identify with them. [...] —Richard Rohr, Simplicity, (p. 44 Kindle)

“Love is hard because it’s a kind of death. To love, I have to be willing to die. I have to be willing to let go of my life and give myself to caring for the lives of others. And, then, to continually live in love, I have to be willing to die every day, every hour, in ways that are big and small, again and again. I yield on the freeway. I bite my tongue when I want to criticize. I put down what I’m doing and read to my kids. I stay up late and finish the dishes. I get up early and drive my daughter to seminary. I grade the next paper. I put on my running shoes. I exhale. I surrender my life. Crucified with Christ, I practice surrendering all day long until my days are filled with the rest of the Lord. I practice dying as a way of life. And I keep practicing until I find the kind of rest that comes only from living my life in the form of a thousand daily deaths.” —Adam Miller, Early Resurrection, (p. 44)

“If suffering is ‘whenever we are not in control’ (which is my definition), then you see why some form of suffering is absolutely necessary to teach us how to live beyond the illusion of control and to give that control back to God.” —Richard Rohr, Eager to Love

“We come to God not by addition, but by subtraction, letting go.” —Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

“Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.” —Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually)

“In my opinion, there are 3 primary things that we have to let go of. First is the compulsion to be successful. Second is the compulsion to be right—even, and especially, to be theologically right. [...] Finally there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control.” —Richard Rohr, Simplicity, (p. 42 Kindle)

“There’s always a lot of anxiety and insecurity in letting go of your current images of yourselves and your images of God. Only God can lead you, and all you can do is let go. The spiritualities of all great world religions teach us letting go, or how to step aside.” —Richard Rohr, Simplicity, (p. 25 Kindle)

“I’ve heard it said that we can only know God through an open mind, just like we can only see the sky through a clear window. We won’t see the sky if we’ve covered the glass with blue paint. The idea of painting the sky on a window before we look out so it appears exactly the way we want it to, or think it should, or hope it will, sounds silly. Yet sometimes, when I’m sitting in church surrounded by what feels and sounds like certainty about ideas that for me only point to larger questions, I have the vague feeling I’m looking at a painted sky. It’s pretty, sunny, warm and reliable, but if I could somehow just scrape away the blue paint, I might get a glimpse of what the sky really looks like. And if I were to open the window and lean out, I might see even further.” —Susan Hinckley, At Last She Said It, (pg 52)

“The path of descent…is not necessarily a one-time event, but for some of us, it's a cyclical experience.” —Mike Petrow

“What if fear [...] was replaced with faith that God could be offering something better—even if it’s different from what I initially believed? So maybe I’ve not completely learned how to love the sound of my feet walking away, but I am finding grace in slowing down, grounding the humility of my limitations, and better listening to my footsteps whichever way they’re pointed. [...] Let me hear the beauty of walking away from not only that which is not meant for me but the joy of walking toward that which has been created for all of us.” —Dana VanderLugt

“In the early 90s when I got sober I very much needed to get clean but the idea of becoming someone else terrified me, so I tried desperately to live the exact same life, in the same places and with the same people just without the drugs and alcohol. Because when change feels scary, familiarity can feel like safety, even when it’s not. But trying to just impersonate a previous version of myself ends up being more painful than just accepting that I’ve changed.” —Nadia Bolz-Weber

“Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If we are anxious, if we are trying to control everything, if we are worried about many things, we don’t have faith, according to Jesus. We do not trust that God is good and on our side. We are trying to do it all ourselves, lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
The giveaway is control. That’s a good litmus test of the quality of our faith. People of faith don’t have to control everything, nor do they have to change people. We have the wisdom to know the difference, as the Twelve Step people say, We cannot ‘fix’ the soul. Matt 6:34 says: ’So do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself.” —Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan, (p. 27)

“Now you might ask: ‘What does this have to do with God? I thought prayer was supposed to be talking to God or searching for God. You seem to be saying that prayer is first of all about me and getting myself out of the way?’ That is exactly what I am saying. God is already present. God’s Spirit is dwelling within you. You cannot search for what you already have. You cannot talk God into ‘coming’ into you by longer and more urgent prayers. All you can do is become quieter, smaller, and less filled with your own self and its flurry of ideas and feelings. Then God will be obvious in the very now of things.” —Richard Rohr, Simplicity, (p. 44 Kindle)

“The discovery that awaits us is that paradise is contained in the here and now. We let go of the desire to expect anything beyond it. The awareness of this keeps us from the suffering generated by resisting life as it is.” —Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir, (p. 74)

“There have been times where I have fought, fought, fought because I was sure the story I was telling myself was right about myself and the world and other people. When everything collapses or something happens that was unexpected, I start thinking differently about it, I’ve got to let all of that stuff drop. And I can't even see the relief of it, because I'm so scared to let it go, because it's all I have.” —Nadia Bolz-Weber

“When religious ideologies and their associated spiritual practices begin to take us away from our lives instead of connecting us with the center of ourselves, we need to be willing to let them go. To not be in a hurry to replace them. Instead, we can shift our focus back to the ordinary and bless it with the gift of our full attention. Then watch in awe as it brims with holy light.” —Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy

“Letting go is a central theme in spiritual practice, as we see the preciousness and brevity of life. When letting go is called for, if we have not learned to do so, we suffer greatly, and when we get to the end of our life, we may have what is called a crash course. Sooner or later we have to learn to let go and allow the changing mystery of life to move through us without our fearing it, without holding and grasping.” —Jack Kornfield

“Perhaps the single most courageous act of contemplation is to feel the grief of letting go—grief that is a fruit of loving—and to continue to have an open heart. Somehow, mystically, doing so opens a door.” —Center for Action and Contemplation

“Letting go and moving through life from one change to another brings the maturing of our spiritual being. In the end we discover that to love and let go can be the same thing. Both ways do not seek to possess. Both allow us to touch each moment of this changing life and allow us to be there fully for whatever arises next.” —Jack Kornfield

“Letting go is an inside job, something we can only do for ourselves.” —Sharon Salzberg

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Many thanks to listener Ginger Hyde for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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CW: Who the heckity heck would ever use success in a religious context except prosperity gospel type American Christians? I don’t know.

SH: Right.

CW: I just think that more and more lately I’ve been asking myself how a religion of a God who is crucified, like a God who loses, how we morphed into a gospel of success and winning?

SH: Right. That’s the question I was asking early. What happened between the gospel of apatheia and where we are today? I’m not totally sure when or how that happened. It was probably a series of a thousand small adaptations and changes

CW: Over a thousand years.

SH: Over a thousand years. Exactly.

CW: Hello, I’m Cynthia Winward.

SH: And I’m Susan Hinkley.

CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today’s episode is Big Ideas: Letting Go.

SH: The biggest of all my big ideas!

CW: That’s why I’m laughing!

SH: Right before you hit start on this recording, you said to me, “We’re talking about all the things that we’re interested in. Is anyone else going to be interested in any of this?” And I said, “I don’t care.”

CW: No.

SH: So this is another Big Ideas episode, and here’s the thing I want to say about it. These episodes are, I mean, we have 10 pages of notes, so I’m going to try to talk really fast. These episodes are full to the brim with quotes from big thinkers.

And the vision that I had for this really was that we can do some of the legwork for people on this. Like if we take a deep dive on letting go, then our listeners can get the flavor of that big idea. And if they’re interested, we’ve given them a good starting place to maybe go into our show notes and follow some of those links and do a deep dive of their own. But even if they’re not that interested, they’ve gotten a lot of wise words from really smart people on a big topic. And so I feel like we’re doing a public service, Cynthia. That’s what we’re doing.

CW: It’s so funny because for listeners who don’t know—Susan, every Monday, loads everything into the syndicator for the podcast. She gets all the show notes ready. She does the writeup and she will often text me and say, “We are doing a public service right here!” Because it’s true, dear listeners. We put every quote on our website. We hyperlink everything. Susan, I should say Susan, not me. Susan does all of that and it takes her hours and hours.

So yes, this is quite, I think, a public service that not only do they get to hear all the quotes from the big thinkers, but then they can go back and either read the full transcript, or if they just want all the quotes, go there.

SH: Right.

CW: Yay us.

SH: Yay us. So we’re going to hear what smart people have said about letting go today. That’s a better title, and more honest title, of the episode.

CW: More honest.

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Last week, ALSSI released a “Ragecast Potpourri” episode covering a few recent headlines and explored some questions raised by recent changes. For fun, we challenged you all to share your best rage haiku with us. As always, we were BLOWN AWAY with the responses and just had to compile all the amazing poems in one place. This issue includes some of the haiku that were submitted on Facebook, Instagram and Substack. They have been grouped based on a loose theme to help fully absorb the impact of communal voices coming together to speak on one topic.

Haiku on The Nature of God

“The Lord loves effort!”
I’m confused because I thought
The Lord would love me.
Candice Clark Stevens

God was never small
only what you built around
I found Them outside
Kim G Bohne Landeen

The church claims Jesus.
Jesus claims no church on earth.
Who do they follow?
Valerie Atkinson

Is God asking us
To reach higher than a church
To really know Him?
Erin O’Dell Garrard

Please hear my prayers
I want answers to suff’ring
Not to find car keys
_louise_e

Do not blame Jesus,
Grasping tightly to dead things
And never growing
kjkj6363

Haiku on The Divine Feminine

I’ve needed so long
to know Her I can’t just stop
reaching for Her now
Mara Haslam

Dear Heav’nly Mother,
The boys are gaslighting us.
They need a time out.
Carol Colvin

I know no Goddess
Who claims my autonomy.
This reveals their lies.
Hannah H

“We need our Mother”
Jingle jangle go the keys
“You have a FATHER”
Shelli.Elle

Behind these shut doors,
I speak to Her as I please,
You can’t stop my prayers.
times.of.faith

Haiku on Purity Culture

“Modesty?” -humbug
avert your eyes if my thighs
offend your male gaze
Kajsa Kaufusi

Holy cloth clings tight
Texas sun turns faith to fire
I choose bare skin now
Julia Baldwin

Purity Culture
The seed of shame incarnate
Don’t yoke us with it.
Pat Catherall

They see us simply
Jezebels and Gilgolos
Unworthy of trust
Lisa Fluckiger

Storms rage in our hearts
One garment wedgie away
Mormon laundry sucks
Heidi C.

“Women are equal”
But men give us approval
On our worthiness
Laynie.markisich

You’d approach our girls
If a Prophet said to prey.
Blind trust is your God.
Annika Evelyn

Trans friends chaperoned
Sexual predators not
I’m out of here, Bye!
Sarah Porter Otter

Temple wedding day
Sorry you can’t come in
You did not comply
Kyra Dunshee

Purity, shame, guilt.
We cast our pearls before swine.
Not for God: for men.
Hannah H

Haiku on The Patriarchy

You win a crouton!
Oh, and YOU win a crouton!
Why aren’t you grateful?
Rebecca Bigelow

“Trust us, don’t murmur.”
Say, “All is well in Zion.”
Just bow and say, “Yes.”
Jessica Mitchell

For Eve’s transgression:
All women shall be punished
Ruled over by men
Nicole Slater

“Defend the BRETHREN.”
“What about the SISTREN, Jim?!”
Eyes flash. Heresy.
Kajsa Kaufusi

I am told to not
Get ahead of the brethren
But they do not move
Amy Sego Shumway

Leaders LOVE women
But we must scream to be heard
Silenced is not loved
Elizabeth Ludwig

A sister speaks up
Shhhh! Stop. The men are speaking.
We love the sisters!
Madwoman_c

“You don’t understand”
They tell me when I speak up.
They don’t understand
Elisabethbingham1

Trapped in spirit pris’n
Stunted in a male domain.
No progression here.
Mama_gale

By their fruits ye shall
Know them. Why are so many
Fruits then so rotten?
Eleanor Clark

“Stay off the damn stand”
“Not on the front row, either”
“Go make me donuts!”
Carol Colvin

Dear Patriarchy,
We have a Heavenly Mother
and no women leaders?
Nicci Cameron Lovell

Truth should not fear light
Questions were never the sin
Silence was the cost
Erica N.

Old men lead the way.
What will we do without them?
Shout hallelujah!
Pat Cathall

Waiting and hoping
Maybe things are improving?
Then disappointment
Whitney Webster Pack

Teach what men preach.
Personal revelation?
Keep it to yourself
Allison.deibel

I am not enough
To pass bread to the people
But twelve year olds can
Aerynnec

I am the witness!
But then a man from the back
Does my job for me
Ajsjonm4

Haiku on Feminism

“Feminist” was taught
To me as a bad word. Oops.
I’m one, anyway.
Kaylee.a.skinner

Perimenopause
Meets ongoing faith crisis
No wonder they’re scared
Jilleneladle

I am not enough?
I throw away the men’s words.
I find I am strong.
cristallharper

They buried our names—
wild seeds under heavy stone.
Still we rose up green.
Melanee Green Evans

I bent till I broke
now I rise without your name
whole, and not afraid
Kim G Bohne Landeen

Please, tell me again
what I can and cannot do.
I know my power.
Annisija Wallin Hunter

You shudder at my
“wokeness”, yet holy words call:
Awake and arise
Sarah Hale

Women, we breathe life
Heart listeners-who lead
With healing and hope.
Ananda Isaken

Coercive marriage
Taught to absorb all the harm
Rage feels like freedom
Unschmuck

Please less “explaining”
Just don’t care much anymore
Your view from up here
Christiehp

Notice me I said
I did everything right here
I want to be seen
Heathermimib

Haiku on Spiritual Autonomy

Words are powerful.
Screaming out in defiance.
No, no, no, no, NO!
Jessica Mitchell

Lie to me today
To gaslight me tomorrow
Watch me walk away
Stephanie G.

I don’t like meetings.
“Where will you go?” they ask
I go home and nap.
Su_lott

Not Naive, not blind.
Eyes clear, arms weak, willing heart.
I plant my feet here.
The.vision.beautiful

Smile, serve, and be still.
Questions bloom like contraband.
I walked out in bloom.
Becky Sanchez

Foundation anew,
I choose my own bricks this time:
Spiritual freedom!
Andrea Meecham Neahusan

I must leave to love
The tender heart who receives
Careless musket fire
Jenny Garrard

I bent till I broke
now I rise without your name
whole, and not afraid
Kim G Bohne Landeen

Don’t rush connection
Covenant path instruction
Can not satisfy
Brooke

I asked honest things
They called it a slippery slope
Yep. Slid on out
Erica N.

We take our lives back
Joyful, adventurous, and
Our own to direct
Lisa Fluckiger

I see the forest
And the trees. I know
I am not alone
Kcampbella

When Faith Loses Focus: For every woman whose questions were treated as a spiritual problem

by Brittney Walker

The night my brother came out to me, I got off the phone

and went straight to my knees.

I had questions and I knew where I’d been taught to take them.

I prayed for a long time. And what I felt was peace. Clearly, unmistakably, the way I had been taught to recognize revelation. Not the complicated kind. The simple kind. My brother was right just as he was. He didn’t need fixing.

I stood up from that prayer believing something true.

And then my brain, the one that has never once in its life left a loose thread alone, started pulling.

The thread you cannot stop pulling

If my brother was right, and the feeling was real, then the disconnect was somewhere else.

So I went looking for it.

I didn’t choose to go looking. I want to be clear about that. The search wasn’t an act of rebellion or spiritual carelessness. It was compulsion. My brain identified a problem it could not resolve and it went to work on it the way it always had—relentlessly, around the clock, whether I invited it to or not.

In the middle of sacrament meeting. At 2 a.m. On the drive to pick up kids from school. The questions kept arriving.

If the feeling was right, was the teaching wrong? If the teaching was wrong, who taught it? If he taught it, was he—the prophet—wrong? And if he could be wrong about this, what else? And if that, then what about …

The dominoes fell all the way down.

To the prophet. Then further. Then to God.

And then there was nothing left to land on.

What they called it

There is a word the Church uses for what I was experiencing: doubt. Sometimes faithlessness. The cure prescribed is almost always the same: pray more, study more, serve more, trust more. Do not let your intellect get ahead of your faith. So I did.

What no one told me was that I have a brain with a specific, documented, neurological inability to leave a question unresolved.

I have ADHD. I also have scrupulosity, an anxiety pattern that hijacks the religious framework and turns it into an engine of obsessive moral accounting. My brain doesn’t just notice inconsistency. It cannot rest until inconsistency is resolved. It needs certainty the way other people need sleep.

Put that brain inside a faith system that asks you to hold unanswered questions peacefully, to sit with not-knowing, to “doubt your doubts,” and you don’t get a crisis of faith.

You get a machine that cannot stop running.

I wasn’t falling away from God. My brain was doing exactly what it was built to do. It was following the evidence. It was refusing to look away. It was doing, in the language of faith, what it had always done in every other area of my life: working the problem until it either resolved or broke open entirely.

That’s not weakness. That’s not wickedness.

That is an ADHD brain, functioning precisely as designed, inside a system that had no category for it.

The year of falling

What followed was a solid year of grief.

The only image I have ever found that fits is this: falling through space. A bottomless black hole. Nothing to grab onto. Nowhere to land.

I had built my identity inside this structure. My calendar, my community, my sense of what I was for—all of it organized around something that was coming apart faster than I could process. And the falling felt endless because there was no floor. Every answer I found opened into another question. Every certainty I tested failed.

I want to say something to the women who are in that falling right now, or who have been, or who are watching someone they love go through it:

The falling was not a punishment. It was not evidence that I had been faithless or careless or spiritually reckless.

It was what happens when a brain built for pattern recognition finally finds a pattern it cannot reconcile.

The grief was real. The loss was real. I am not going to tell you it wasn’t.

But the falling was not my fault.

What the Church called sin

Here is what I have come to understand, years out from that night:

Every trait that made my deconstruction feel so total, so unstoppable, so consuming—the relentless question-following, the inability to unknow something once I knew it, the need for coherence, the refusal to hold contradiction in peaceful suspension—those are not spiritual defects.

They are ADHD.

The same brain that got sent into the hall for asking too many questions in Primary. The same brain that couldn’t stop mentally arguing with myself over what was said in sacrament meeting. The same brain that needed the pieces to fit, always, desperately, at the cost of everything.

That brain didn’t destroy my faith.

It followed my faith all the way to the edges and kept going when the edges ran out.

There is a version of my story the Church would tell where I was deceived, or weak, or led astray, or just didn’t try hard enough. In that version, the problem was always me.

But here is the version I know to be true:

I went to my knees the night my brother came out to me. I sought God in the way I had been taught. I received an answer that felt true and real and certain. And then my brain—my beautiful, relentless, impossible, truth-seeking brain—refused to stop at the edge of what that answer meant.

That is not a failure of faith.

That is faith, taken seriously by a mind that could not do it any other way.

What I wish someone had said

Your questions were not a spiritual problem.

Your inability to sit with uncertainty was not a character flaw.

Your brain’s relentless need for coherence was not the enemy of your faith.

It was just a mind doing what minds like ours do: following every thread, refusing to look away, insisting that the truth, whatever it turned out to be, was worth finding.

The Church didn’t have a category for that kind of mind.

But that doesn’t mean the mind was wrong.

Contributor

Brittney Walker

I am an ADHD coach and writer living in Arizona with my husband and a lively household including six sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson. I spent many years trying to be reverent, organized, and less distracting, and now I write about executive function, faith, deconstruction, and rebuilding identity with a different kind of brain. My work explores neurodivergence, belonging, and the slow process of learning to trust yourself. You can find more of my writing at exmoadhdcoach.substack.com

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In Episode 259, Susan and Cynthia ask Mer, Zinah, and Carol, What Do You Say? It's the second installment of ALSSI's wide-ranging conversations with wise Latter-day Saint women. Each guest answers randomly selected questions about their memories, insights, and beliefs through stories of their personal lives and experiences.

Notes & Quotes:
To hear more from Mer Monson, check out ALSSI Ep. 157
Motherhood is a Choice: Not Inevitable or an Obligation, by Fatimah Mohammed
Original Goodness: Made in the Divine Image, Center for Action and Contemplation, 10/27/2021
What Do We Do With Sin?: Collective Sin and Evil, Center for Action and Contemplation, 3/13/2026
Motto, by Bertolt Brecht
Into the Gray, Substack, Rev. Benjamin R. Cremer

“We were raised to see motherhood not just as an inevitability that would come at the right time—when we were married to an acceptable man—but also as a duty. A price we paid for being women. The thing we owed the world. [...] We were born girls, so they told us our very existence revolved around what our bodies could offer the world. To think otherwise wasn’t an option. Who are you to be born with a womb only to choose not to use it? Who do you think you are? How dare you? The very idea of it was inconceivable.” —Fatima Mohammed

“My deepest me is god.” —Catherine of Genoa

“In fact, evil is often culturally agreed-upon, admired, and deemed necessary, as is normally the case when a country goes to war, spends most of its budget on armaments, admires luxuries over necessities, entertains itself to death, or pollutes its own common water and air. Evil seems to be corporate, admired, and deemed necessary before it becomes personal and shameable.
Sin and evil must be more than personal or private matters. Convicting people of individual faults does not change the world. I believe the apostle Paul taught that both sin and salvation are, first of all, corporate realities. Yet, we largely missed that essential point, and thus found ourselves in the tight grip of monstrous evils in Christian nations, all the way down to the modern era.” —Richard Rohr

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
—Bertholt Brecht

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Many thanks to listener Rebecca Bigelow for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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CC: I hadn’t based my foundation on the teachings of Christ, my foundation was on the words of the prophets, right? And the organization of the church. So if I hadn’t set it up that way, I wouldn’t have had such a hard fall.

CW: Hi, I am Cynthia Winward.

SH: And I’m Susan Hinckley.

CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today’s episode is, What Do You Say: Three Conversations about Mysticism, Music, and Living in the Now. Hello, Susan.

SH: Hello. I love these conversations. Let’s roll ‘em and then we’ll come back later and share some deep thoughts.

CW: Let’s do it,

SH: or maybe not so deep.

CW: Well, deepish.

Hello Mer Monson. Welcome back to At Last She Said It.

SH: Hi Mer.

MM: So good to be here.

CW: So good to have you. Okay, Mer, we can’t wait for your wisdom. And our first category is Memories. Would you like question one, two or three?

MM: I want three.

CW: What was a moment in your life when you could have chosen a different path?

MM: Shoot. Oh, how many answers do I get?

CW: Oh, I wanna hear ‘em all, but just one for now.

MM: So what comes to mind is my first pregnancy was horrific, like lost 25 pounds, couldn’t drink water without throwing up, totally incapacitated in bed. And I survived it, had my kid, had my beautiful son, and I could have chosen to like not do that ever again.

In fact, I did choose that for about four years. And then I didn’t, then I changed my mind and decided to go back into the depths of hell again. So, wow. Yeah. That’s what comes to mind.

CW: And was it because after four years you were like, oh, it wasn’t that bad, or,

MM: Nope, that wasn’t it. Who knows what preyed upon my- how old was I? 31-year-old mind?

CW: Yeah. Yeah.

MM: I wanted him to have a brother.

SH: Yeah.

MM: I thought I was supposed to. I thought I should.

CW: Yeah. Yeah.

MM: It was the right thing to do. You know, that’s your status, that’s your value in the Mormon world.

I thought, in fact, can I just, can I share one thing?

SH: Yes!

MM: I remember I was… So, I was pregnant with my third, uber sick playing the piano in primary, and the chorister leans over to me and she starts asking me about my kids and how many I have and blah, blah, blah. I was telling her I get really sick, and she’s like, oh, is that why you only had three kids?

SH: Wait, what?

MM: Yeah, that, wait, what? Like I don’t get any credit unless I can fill a minivan.

CW: Uhhuh.

SH: Wow.

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The other day Cynthia and I were texting about whatever the freshest-current-events-h*ll of the day was, and she said something like, “Make it stop! I really just need someone to hit pause right now!”

It’s always a pleasure when one of my old comics drops so seamlessly into a conversation without me needing to set it up myself.

Speaking of dropping in, I’m just here today with a short Worthy Stuff—a handful of ways I’ve been surviving lately.

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ALSSI doesn’t usually focus on church announcements or events, but our conversations about Big Ideas do exist within the current context of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Episode 258, Susan and Cynthia take a beat to discuss a few recent headlines and explore some questions raised by these changes.

Notes & Quotes:

Find the Church Newsroom announcements here and here and here
Jaxon Washburn’s Fb post
Are you sure you know what ‘gaslighting’ is?, by Emma Bowman, All Things Considered, NPR, 3/25/2026
Lifted Up upon the Cross, by Jeffrey R. Holland, 10/2022
The Symbol of our Faith, by Pres. Gordon B. Hinckley, 04/2005
Banishing the Cross: The Emergence of a Mormon Taboo, by Michael G. Reed

“The First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles have determined that, effective immediately, the bishop may call a man or a woman to serve as ward Sunday School president. If a man is called as Sunday School president, he must hold the Melchizedek Priesthood, and his counselors and secretary must be male members of the ward. If a woman is called as Sunday School president, her counselors and secretary must be female members of the ward.” —First Presidency Letter

“There are many capable women and men who can help strengthen gospel instruction and foster spiritual growth.” —Paul V. Johnson, General Sunday School President

”Historically, Latter-day Saint women have prophesied and received revelation. They’ve witnessed angels and administered blessings by the laying on of hands. They have offered the Lord’s Supper as military chaplains. They act as priestesses in the temple. All of these are already performed through God’s power, which is priesthood power.
Ordination + comparably equal ecclesiastical, ceremonial, and social standings and opportunities as men are all fully theologically possible within a Restored Gospel framework.
The destiny of the Daughters of our Heavenly Parents is that of unmatched transcendent power, glory, and perfect unity with God while inheriting all of God’s same qualities, attributes, and creative abilities. I want the ecclesiastical, ceremonial, and social experience of Latter-day Saint women to better reflect that.” —Jaxon Washburn

"When you begin, over time, to accommodate to somebody else's reality and you're giving up pieces of yourself along the way, it can be what many people say is soul-destroying." —Robin Stern, author of The Gaslight Effect

”Lastly, we remind ourselves that President Gordon B. Hinckley once taught, ‘The lives of our people must [be] … the symbol of our [faith].’ These considerations—especially the latter—bring me to what may be the most important of all scriptural references to the cross. It has nothing to do with pendants or jewelry, with steeples or signposts. It has to do, rather, with the rock-ribbed integrity and stiff moral backbone that Christians should bring to the call Jesus has given to every one of His disciples. In every land and age, He has said to us all, ‘If any man [or woman] will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.’” —Jeffrey R. Holland

“I do not wish to give offense to any of my Christian colleagues who use the cross on the steeples of their cathedrals and at the altars of their chapels, who wear it on their vestments, and imprint it on their books and other literature. But for us, the cross is the symbol of the dying Christ, while our message is a declaration of the Living Christ.” —Pres. Gordon B. Hinckley

“Bruce R. McConkie was less tactful and more sensational than Hinckley in his influential book Mormon Doctrine. McConkie not only asserted that the cross was a pagan symbol introduced to Christianity via the Roman Emperor Constantine, but he also declared its sign to be the ‘mark of the beast.’ Under the entry ‘Catholicism’ McConkie’s book said ‘See Church of the Devil’.” —Michael G. Reed

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Many thanks to listener Lindsay Riggs for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

Listen Here

SH: Like, if we’re gonna move into mainstream Christianity, I feel like a fellow Christian would need to be able to walk into any sacrament meeting and recognize Jesus Christ as the centerpiece of that worship service.

But instead, I feel like they are at least as likely, if not more likely, to get temples or something like tithing or word of wisdom.

Or I mean, like sometimes your pioneer stories, right? Or the importance of sustaining our leaders. Like the talks could be about anything that gets assigned that week, but it’s not, I’m not even sure that it’s most likely to be about Jesus Christ.

CW: Hello, I’m Cynthia Winward.

SH: And I’m Susan Hinkley.

CW: And this is At last she Said It. We are women of faith discussing ragey things.

SH: It’s complicated, Cynthia.

CW: -complicated ragey things. And the title of today’s episode is Cynthia and Susan’s Rage Cast Potpourri.

SH: Yep. That’s the title. All right. Okay.

CW: That’s the title.

SH: To be fair, there were other possible subtitles in the running. Some of those- Including but not limited to-

It’s not gaslighting if God does it.

CW: That’s yours, Susan.

SH: Also, that’s how sacred women are.

CW: Oh gosh. More on that, Uhhuh

SH: more on that. Or also just pass the popcorn because Cynthia, this conversation is just gonna be about a whole bunch of stuff and in preparing for it, well, it came about because we were messaging each other back and forth all week about some ridiculous things and just wanting to grab a mic and talk about them. And in a season of big ideas, like I feel like, ah, we’ve done deep dives on big topics. We’re planning deep dives on future big topics, and it’s been a lot of work and it’s been awesome, but it’s also a lot to chew on. And so every now and then, it’s good to just grab the microphone and blow off steam, so,

If you’re a listener who, you know, loves the deep dives and exploring big ideas, don’t give up on us. Those are coming back. And if you’re a listener who doesn’t mind kicking around the church football every now and then then stick with us today ‘cause that’s exactly what we’re gonna do.

CW: Exactly. Everyone gets your favorite dirty soda and that popcorn. And join us, Susan. I’m wearing my womankind t-shirt even, you know?

SH: Perfect.

CW: We’re not talking about mankind today. We’re talking about womankind. So,

SH: I love it, Cynthia.

CW: Join me. Join me in my feminist rage right now.

SH: Okay. Well, where to start?

CW: Just the tone. Where to start? Exactly.

SH: We’re gonna start with women can now be Sunday school presidents.

CW: Yeah. Yeah

SH: I mean, as a Mormon feminist podcast, I think it’s only fair that we spend a minute talking about this, even though we’re not usually the, you know, respond to church headlines podcast. That’s not really what we are.

But I mean, this one, well, it feels big, or does it?

CW: Or does it?

SH: Is it the biggest crumb we’ve ever had? Or is it the crummiest crumb that we’ve ever had? I’m not,

CW: I keep hearing women talking about crumbs saying we don’t even have enough crumbs for a crouton. Well, well, they’re not wrong.

SH: That’s, yeah, I think that’s true.

A few things occurred to me when this announcement came out, so I guess I’m just gonna start there and we can talk about those.

CW: Okay.

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Eager to Hope

by Susan Hinckley

Last weekend I participated in our local protest,

because I think protests are public hope and I needed to both give and receive. Despite this being the reddest of small towns, there were hundreds of us—5x as many people as I expected. The crowd was anchored by a few full-size US flags, confidently riding the morning wind. Those flags understood the assignment; something in me quickened as I parked. A small marching band trumpeted hope up and down the sidewalk.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben was once asked, "What's the best thing I can do as an individual?" He said, "Stop being an individual.”1 I showed up needing to feel less alone, and got all the right medicine. Most of the passing drivers honked, waved, and gave us a thumbs-up.

Of course there were a few whose sneers and gestures made clear their contempt. As I stood fighting to keep my poster upright in the wind, a red car approached and slowed to a stop in front of me. The window slid down. A woman leaned out, looked right at me and said, “You know, he is YOUR president. He is the president of every single one of you.” She drove away.

As if that should end the protest. As if anyone could so smugly close the lid on hope.

I haven’t stopped thinking about the woman in the red car, and about all the things I didn’t say in response.

There are a few lessons I’ve always thought God made particularly obvious. Diversity is one—look around—and creativity is another. A third I see writ large in the natural world is hope. Morning was the first advertisement for this concept, but because it comes every day we tend to stop noticing. Maybe God knew we’d have a hard time paying attention to a thing that happened so often. Maybe that’s why they also came up with spring.

Of course God put winter first to really get our attention—to bring us right to the edge of giving up—before adding spring to the calendar. In ink. Not often enough that we’d quit noticing either, surprised by joy every time a weeping cherry drapes itself sky-to-ground in pink ribbons.

The thing about spring is, it always comes. It doesn’t matter how hard the winter is, or how evil the king. It doesn’t matter if there’s a huge snowstorm in April that pushes us to the brink of really not being okay. Spring prevails every time.

American theologian Walter Brueggemann said, “Hope arises from memory.”

Rebecca Solnit explains, “You can turn that inside out to say that despair arises from forgetting. If you forget that every good thing we have came about as the result of a heroic struggle, of course you will despair.” She says that optimism and pessimism “assume we know the future, and therefore nothing is required from us. I think the future is radically uncertain, and therefore much is required of us.”2

But is hope too much to expect in the face of radical uncertainty?

Well, what else is there? Gripping everything tighter isn’t going to give us any guarantees, but engaging with hope means we’re showing up for the future no matter what heroic struggle it brings, because there is no way to get where we want to go next except through whatever is happening now.

I remember exactly where I was sitting in an AP English classroom about 100 years ago when the teacher ridiculed a student for using the word anxious when they actually meant eager, and I realized for the first time with a spark that those words aren’t interchangeable. No matter how often they get swapped in casual speech, eager is about positive anticipation and anxious is about worry. As that came into focus for me, the very next second I thought, “Pretty sure Joseph Smith made a mistake.” In D&C 58, being “anxiously engaged in a good cause” was surely meant to be about eagerness to do good. I don’t think he meant to suggest we should feel nervous about the uncertainty of our actions or outcomes while we engage in that goodness.

But I’ve been anxiously engaged my whole life as a Latter-day Saint. I took the words to heart just the way Joseph wrote them.

I’m not sure exactly how this worked, but all that anxious engagement over many decades seems to have resulted in some serious hope muscle. As I enter my later years, I find my core is all made of hope. Maybe it came from so many years showing up and doing all the church things while thinking, “I’m really not very good at this. I’m not sure I’m doing it right. I have no idea whether it will be enough.” Maybe when you feel a little doomed from the start, but you press on anyway, you get in the habit of grasping anything you can find that might make up the difference. You hope.

And I don’t mean feeling hopeful. I don’t mean a grin that comes back no matter how often reality turns its power-washer on you. I mean hope as a verb. As a thing you decide to do. As a perspective you have, because you bring it. Hope is not something that arises spontaneously and promises to work everything out. Anxious or eager, the work is the same. But I’ve come to prefer eager: Hope is a way I can choose to engage.

I wish I’d known I didn’t need to feel so worried all those years. I wish I could go back and tell my young self, “See those flowers? They probably aren’t worried at all—yes, winter knocks ‘em out, in fact, it straight-up kills some. But there’s always spring, and flowers don’t have to earn it—all they have to do is wait for it.”

“Consider the lilies,” Jesus said. “They seem to remember something you don’t.”

Flipping from anxious to eager in my spiritual life has mostly been a function of embracing my own hope. “God is always present in reality as it is. Not as it should be,” says Richard Rohr.3 I think this is one of the reasons Jesus showed up on earth, getting everyone’s hopes up, but then surprised even the people closest to him by becoming victorious only after an unimaginable defeat. It was a lesson so bewildering, even people who desperately wanted the miracle had a hard time accepting the truth of what they were seeing in real time. How could something so awful be the doorway to lasting hope?

Thomas had his doubts; unfortunately he’s remembered for them. But do you know what he did next? He took Christianity to India and beyond, converting many to the very idea he had such a hard time getting his head around. He may have needed to touch for himself, but that experience powered a lifetime of ministry. It’s fair to say reality transmuted the moment of doubt into something truly sustaining.

But God’s love was in the world before Jesus ever got here. “It is good, in fact, it is very good,” God says, the punchline of the whole opening monologue. A few minutes later, we find out “good” may be more complicated than we thought—no one was going to be allowed to stick around, basking in the very-good-ness of a garden. I think everything God says and does after that is trying to teach us about hope—even in the face of the bleakest reality—and I can see why the best object lesson to do that would probably be our own screw ups.

“We’ve met the enemy, and he is us,” says the famous Walt Kelly comic strip.4 The practice of hope must be a principle through which God thought humans could remind ourselves of divine love no matter what else is going on.

I’ve decided another idea articulated by Richard Rohr could be repurposed into a good definition of hope: “the ability to flourish inside of paradox.” We know what has happened, and we know what’s happening now, but I don’t think we can be at all certain what it means in real time, and we never know what’s going to happen next, even when we think we do. We can be sure it will be bad and good and then bad again and then sometimes better, but there’s no guarantee. A yes for every no, and a no for each yes. Life will be loss and abundance, joy and sorrow tossed together. “Reality’s conjunction is always and,” writes Christian Wiman.5

That’s where I think hope lives. Hope is in the and.

So what do we do when we’re really not feeling it? Hope, faith, and love show up together in the Bible. Sharon Salzberg teaches6 that the word translated there as faith is actually a verb—it’s not a thing we have so much as a thing we do. Hope and love already operate as verbs in modern English; moving faith into the verb column makes sense, if these foundational principles walk hand in hand. A quote from Rabbi Abraham Heschel says, “Faith is mostly faithfulness to the times when we had faith.”7 I understand this as, “Faith is a thing we keep doing because we once felt it.”

Anyone who’s been in a long term relationship knows love operates the same way. We fall in love with someone, then we keep loving them on the days it’s hard to do so, because love is no longer a feeling so much as an action.

The emotion of hope is also less useful than the action. When hope-the-noun becomes hope-the-verb, we go to the protest whether or not we think it will change anything. We’re eagerly engaged, smack in the middle of not knowing. We follow hope instinctively because it’s all there is to do in the face of such radical uncertainty. It’s the thing we can control.

The woman in the red car—and everyone else who flipped us off that day—thought she could impact my hope by insisting the situation was hopeless. She (and all the efforts I’ve seen since to minimize that hopeful act or dismiss it outright) is missing the point of hope. The only thing hope insists is that, eventually, things will change. That’s based in reality—a measure of calm certainty can reside in the uneasiness of it. Hope-seeds arrive buried in the same dirt we’re standing in. It’s because reality is often objectionable that I choose to orient myself this way. I engage eagerly because of what it does for me today, not because I think it will ensure any future outcome. Hope—and faith and love—don’t operate in the future. They’re how we survive the now.

Trying to stomp out a protest by throwing reality on it is a bit like telling me it’s winter, and I may as well accept that as final. But I spent many years living in the upper Midwest. I know a thing or two about winter. And I know a lot about hope.

Susan Hinckley

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Is there a richer text for Christians than the Beatitudes? Yet we don’t all think or teach about them the same way. Many Latter-day Saints talk and teach about them as a list of saint-like attributes to which we should aspire, traits that will bring us closer to God and eventual exaltation. But Nadia Bolz-Weber suggests, “What if the Beatitudes aren’t about a list of conditions we should try to meet to be blessed? What if they are not virtues we should aspire to? What if Jesus saying ‘blessed are the meek’ is not instructive but performative—that the pronouncement of blessing is actually what confers the blessing itself?’” In Episode 257, Cynthia and Susan ‘dance with the scriptures’ in an attempt to discover new ways of seeing and engaging with these familiar verses.

Notes & Quotes:

Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount, by Richard Rohr
ALSSI Ep. 60, Ep. 106, Ep. 193: What About Blessings? Parts 1, 2, & 3
At Last She Said It: Honest Conversations About Faith, Church, and Everything In Between, by Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward
Blessed Are the Poor In Spirit, by Rob Bell
Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People, by Nadia Bolz-Weber
Always a Guest: Speaking of Faith Far From Home, by Barbara Brown Taylor
How Do We Interpret the Beatitudes?, by Julius-Kei Kato, The Bart Ehrman Blog, 6/04/2020
Gospel Medicine, by Barbara Brown Taylor
Q & R: Can You Explain the Beatitudes, by Brian McLaren, 11/25/2025
Feeling called to an LDS stronghold, Utah couple deliver grub and the gospel to the hungry, by Mark Eddington, The Salt Lake Tribune, 2/06/2026
Living the Sermon on the Mount: What Does It Mean to be Blessed?, Center for Action and Contemplation, 11/04/2025
On the Beatitudes—Sermon, Contemplative Pastor, 2/01/2011
Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go, by Richard Rohr
The Beatitudes and Our Perfection, by Elder Royden G. Derrick, 04/1977
Matthew 5: The Beatitudes, Church website video

“But if to be ‘blessed’ means to be ‘made holy,’ that’s entirely different from popular usage talking about things like good fortune, a desired outcome, or comfort. That simple little definition opened a crack of light for me into this whole complicated conversation. I could suddenly see that a blessing is not an event, nor something we receive in exchange for what we do. It’s independent of external circumstance, because blessing is an internal state.” —Susan Hinckley, p. 102

“The gospel is the announcement that in your pathetic, bedraggled, confused, morally ambiguous state in which there’s nothing good within you, God announces, ‘I’m on your side.’” —Rob Bell

“It can be easy to view the Beatitudes — the “blessed ares”... as Jesus’s command for us to try real hard to be meeker, poorer, and mourn-ier in order that we might be blessed in the eyes of  God….Plus, it can be easy to look at, say, Mother Teresa and think, Well, she is a saint because she was meek. So if  I, too, want to be blessed, I should try to be meek like her. (Don’t get me wrong, we could use a few more people trying to be like Mother Teresa. I just don’t think that her virtue of meekness is what made her considered blessed by Jesus.) But what if the Beatitudes aren’t about a list of conditions we should try to meet to be blessed? What if they are not virtues we should aspire to? What if  Jesus saying “blessed are the meek” is not instructive but performative — that the pronouncement of  blessing is actually what confers the blessing itself ?” —Nadia Bolz-Weber, pp. 183-4

“Stopping to remember just how many people are beloved of God: those we suspected and those we did not; those we can name and those we cannot; those who left their marks on this world and those who vanished without a trace…
“They don’t ask for much: spiritual poverty, mournfulness, meekness, mercy-mindedness, single-heartedness, unwillingness to fight, willingness to get beat up. [...] If you were to take a tour of the places where such blessed people have traditionally been found, you would visit a lot of jails, funeral homes, courthouses, cheap restaurants, and emergency rooms, as well as some nice homes in the suburbs and a palace or two. It’s a mixed crowd we belong to—” —Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest, p. 234 (Kindle)

“The historical Jesus as well as the original audience to whom the Beatitudes were directed, were hoping for an imminent world-changing intervention of God (also known as ‘the coming of God’s reign’) into their historical world. That would then create a new world order where, the (really) poor, the (literally) hungry, the weeping ones would be the beneficiaries of this reversal of fortunes brought about by divine action and will be truly (and not only spiritually) ‘blessed,’ thus, truly worthy of being ‘congratulated.’” —Julius-Kei Kato

“If the only way to get to the 2nd half of the sentence is to go through the first, then who in their right mind wants to go? [...] Jesus is not telling anyone what to do. He is telling us how things really are. [...] Everything that follows is going to be based on the tipsy worldview of the Beatitudes. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” —Barbara Brown Taylor

“The moment we look down on somebody because they aren’t disciplined, hardworking, upright, smart, responsible, moral, good looking, Bible believing, Jesus trusting, or as God fearing as we are because they’ve made idiotic, stupid, immoral choices again and again and again, at that moment we are rich in spirit and Jesus isn’t announcing anything to us.” —Rob Bell

“What was so shocking about Jesus’ list was not the form but the content. Blessed are the meek? The mournful? The poor in spirit? Who was he kidding? …. What was so happy about hungering and thirsting for righteousness, or about being reviled and persecuted?....No one with a lick of sense was going to vote for any of those definitions of the Good Life, but Jesus did not ask for anyone’s approval. He just redefined the Good Life in nine short sentences and held them out for everyone to see: nine portraits of kingdom people, previously known as victims, dreamers, pushovers, and fools.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine, p. 160

“Here, I think, is the key to the beatitudes. Rather than interpreting them as ‘God blesses these people’ – Think: this is performative, like performing a wedding and saying, ‘I now pronounce you legally married,’ or ‘We pledge allegiance …’ The saying of the words performs the action. To bless is to speak highly of, to praise the goodness and value of. The point is … WE bless these people, here and now. We say they have worth and value. We say their lives matter. We say they count. We say they are important.” —Brian McLaren

“In the wake of the original apocalyptic context of the Beatitudes being unrealized, they should now be theologically interpreted through the lens of a realized, collaborative, incarnational eschatology by which the promised rewards of the Beatitudes no longer depend on an apocalyptic intervention of God but on the followers of Jesus (or practically anyone else [even agnostics/atheists] who think that Jesus was a great teacher) taking on a liberative praxis to create in some way and realize a new social order where the really poor, the truly hungry, the weeping and marginalized ones really come to experience now (not later in some heaven) some measure of the blessedness that God’s reign should bring with it.” —Julius-Kei Kato

“The first words out of Jesus’ mouth are not “Blessed shall be” but “Blessed are.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—not because of something that will happen to them later but because of what their poverty opens up in them right now. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”—not because God is going to fill them up later but because their appetites are so fine-tuned right now….” —Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest, p. 202

“Notice how [Jesus] also uses present tense: ... the Reign of God isn’t later. It’s present tense: We are the free ones now, if we remain without anything to protect or anything we need to prove or defend. I know people who have left Christianity to become Buddhists precisely because of the doctrines of emptiness, simplicity, and nonviolence that they discovered in Buddhist teaching. If only they had been taught these same foundations in Jesus’ Beatitudes!” —Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan, p. 160

“It has been two thousands years and the poor are still with us. Those who hunger for justice are still hungry. The mournful are still blowing their noses, and the excluded are still waiting at the border. The Beatitudes may work for people who can wait until they die for their reward, but meanwhile there are other people who have lost faith in Jesus’ promises. They aren’t feeling the joy. They need heaven now.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest, p. 200

“Whatever you believe about [Jesus], believe this about you: the things that seem to be going most wrong for you may in fact be the things that are going most right. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fix them. It just means they may need blessing as much as they need fixing, since the blessing is already right there.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest, p. 203

“Middle-class people can hear Matthew more quickly than they can hear Luke. Luke is talking to the poor in a way that will make them feel invited and accepted by God. Mark is doing the same thing for people with a little more security, it seems. This is a good example of how we should speak in a way that enables us to be heard.” —Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan, p. 104

“Much of the power of the Beatitudes depends on where you are sitting when you hear them. They sound different from on top than they do from underneath. They sound different up front than they do in the back. Up front with the religiously satisfied and self-assured, they sound pretty confrontational. Where is your hunger and thirst, you well-fed Christians? Where is your spiritual poverty? Where are the bones of your soul showing through your clothes, and why aren’t your handkerchiefs soaked with tears? But way in the back, with the victims, the dreamers, the pushovers, and the fools, the Beatitudes sound completely different. Shhh, they say, dry your tears, little ones. The whole earth belongs to you, though someone else still holds the keys. It won’t be long now. Heaven’s gates are opening wide for you, and the first face you shall see shall be the face of God.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine, p. 162

“And so just as surely as Jesus was offering a word of hope to those downtrodden and hungry, he also, in a not too subtle way, was making a political statement about how different the nature of God’s kingdom is. In God’s reign the hungry will be fed, the last will be first, the poor will be wealthy, those picked last for the dodgeball team will be the captains. It is radically different from the realm in which those with power rule with an iron hand and …sneer at those whose voices cry out for justice.” —Blogger, The Contemplative Pastor

“Ever since the Sermon on the Mount, the Gospel and Western Civilization have been on a collision course. And the winner wasn’t Jesus, the winner was Western civilization. We’ve taken Jesus over and placed a crown on his head, not a crown of thorns but a royal crown, which he expressly rejected.” —Richard Rohr, Simplicity, p. 26, (Kindle)

“Each of the Beatitudes represents a specific step in our orderly progression towards perfection, and teaches us how to qualify ourselves for exaltation…. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” —Elder Royden G. Derrick

“But something happens to us as we grow older. Some are in their thirties or forties when the truth starts sinking in: Dying is a part of life. By fifty or sixty, we must learn that dying is not opposed to life; it’s a part of a greater mystery—and we are a part of that mystery. The older psyche is ready to hear such sober truth.” —Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan, p. 158

“When the heart is right, seeing will be right, Jesus says. He ties together heart and sight. Consider the saying, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ So is God. All we need to do is keep the lens clean.” —Richard Rohr, Jesus' Alternative Plan

“Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’s lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside, blessing all the accidental saints in this world, especially those who that world — like ours — didn’t seem to have much time for: people in pain, people who work for peace instead of profit, people who exercise mercy instead of vengeance. Maybe Jesus was simply blessing the ones around him that day who didn’t otherwise receive blessing, who had come to believe that, for them, blessings would never be in the cards. I mean, come on, doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do? Extravagantly throwing around blessings as though they grew on trees?” —Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints, p. 184

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Many thanks to listener Amanda Gunderson for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

Listen Here

CW: And about that Barbara Brown Taylor, she said “It has been 2000 years and the poor are still with us. Those who hunger for justice are still hungry. The mournful are still blowing their noses and the excluded are still waiting at the border. The Beatitudes may work for people who can wait until they die for their reward, but meanwhile, there are other people who have lost faith in Jesus’ promises, they aren’t feeling the joy they need Heaven now.”

SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.

CW: And I am Cynthia Winward.

SH: And this is At Last she Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things and the title of today’s episode is Big Ideas, the Beatitudes. Hello, Cynthia.

CW: Hello, Susan. Are you ready to have a big, big idea and maybe a big, big convo about it too.

SH: I mean, I gotta be honest, like, I am. Okay. I love this conversation and it’s because I’m hanging on by my fingernails in this one. This is, this just feels to me like slightly, like just enough, slightly above, my head that I have to run to keep up with this big idea.

CW: And oh, same.

SH: I love being in that situation. Yeah. So I’m excited to have it.

We have tons of stuff. Should we just dive in?

CW: Let’s just dive in. So, I’ve been wanting to have this episode for a year. I feel like I’ve mentioned it to you here and there probably ever since I read Richard Rohr’s book, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount, and he just had so many good ideas, that I was like, let’s do this episode. But, you know, because we have so many other ideas, not every episode gets to happen when we actually think about it, right? So, so I’ve had an extra long time to think about this, and after I read Richard Rohr’s book, I couldn’t help but remember, that the very first time I did a deep dive into the Beatitudes was when I was taking New Testament at BYU and some people who are my age might remember, there was like this really big orange manual, and I remember in that manual, under the Beatitudes, it talked about how the beatitudes are basically the list of an exalted person.

SH: Okay.

CW: I’m sorry, I’m already laughing because I know, huh? I know what you’re thinking, Susan. Like really exaltation, perfection.

I mean that is not what I would think of now when I think about the Beatitudes, but in the moment I was like, okay, this is what I’m being told we…

SH: I always thought of them as aspirational, like, I mean, I thought that was what I was supposed to be aiming for.

CW: Okay. Well, even aspirational, is better than exaltation and perfection. I don’t know. We just dial it up to 11.

SH: Always.

CW: In our church. Always. Right, right, right. Now also, I know we just had an episode on piety and in that episode we talked so much about focusing on our own holiness, spotlessness, cleanliness, all of the above. And then, you know, we had an episode earlier this season on purity culture. So just taking those two episodes, kind of bundling them with this one, I can’t help but think of, like a more insular take on the Beatitudes than to make it about perfection and exaltation. So that’s why we’re filing this under big ideas, because I wanna take a bigger take, Susan, and I want you to go on that journey with me. So let’s do this because after working on the notes for this episode, for days. I basically said to myself, why can’t we take the Sermon on the Mount, which is where the beatitudes are found. Why can’t we make that a more serious topic for us in the church? I mean, you know, every few years, in Come Follow Me, we study it for probably one lesson or something.

SH: Right. Right.

CW: But in preparing this episode, I, you know, I’m out on the worldwide web reading this, reading that, reading books from our favorite thinkers, and I read an article about a church that studied the Sermon on the Mount, so the entire sermon, not just the Beatitudes, for 18 weeks, Susan.

SH: Wow.

CW: 18, four months, over four months. And then Rob Bell, he did 22 sermons on them when he was at his church, Mars Hill in Michigan. 22 sermons straight on the Sermon on the Mount.

SH: They don’t have as many books of scripture to get through as we do, Cynthia.

CW: In our defense, that is true.

And also, come on.

SH: Yeah.

CW: I want to spend that kind of time on the Beatitudes. Today, we don’t have that kind of time. We’ll give it an hour and some change, but

SH: We did come up with 15 pages of notes though, so I feel like we’re taking a run at it.

CW: We are. [00:05:00] But I’m just glad that you and I get to sit down and kind of chew on this together because after all, speaking of other books of scripture, Susan, they are, the beatitudes are found, pretty much word for word in the Book of Mormon in 3rd Nephi. So come on, doctrinally important speaking. I know, doctrinally speaking we should, I feel like we should be taking them more seriously. If they’re found in more than one place. So let’s do that together. Why don’t we start out by actually reading the beatitudes and you’re gonna do that?

SH: Okay. I’m gonna read from Matthew chapter five verses one through 12, The NRSV,

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Hello!

Welcome to the official season of hope! We don’t know whether there are blossoms where you are in the world, but it’s spring in ours and it feels like good news arriving just in the nick of time. Saved by the sun again! Whew, that was close.

Before we begin the slide toward summer, here’s a quick heads-up about ALSSI coming attractions. Mark your calendars for anything you don’t want to miss!

Calendar—

03/31 Ep. 257: Big Ideas | The Beatitudes

04/02 Say More 1 | Susan Hinckley

04/07 Ep. 258: C&S’s Rage-cast Potpourri

04/09 April Worthy Stuff | Susan Edition

04/10 Friday Live Chat | 10:00 am Mtn

04/14 Ep. 259: What Do You Say | Listener Edition 2

04/16 Say More: At Last She Writes It 2

04/16 ALSRI Book Club | 7:00 pm Mtn

04/21 Ep. 260: Big Ideas | Letting Go

04/23 ALSSI News

04/24 Friday Live Chat | 10:00 am Mtn

04/28 Ep. 261 Ask Us Anything | Q & R w/ C & S

05/05 Ep. 262 Big Ideas | Confirmation Bias

A few calendar notes:

We hope you’re enjoying the ALSSI Season 11 episodes as much as we’re enjoying making them! Fyi, our current season will run through mid-July. (Pssssst! We’re talking about ending this season with a live event in SLC, so file that info in the back of your mind and stay tuned for details…🤞🤞🤞)

Watch for links for our Friday Live Chats in the regular Substack chat a few minutes before starting time. No need to pre-register! We’ll record the meeting so you can listen later if you’re unable to join us in real time.

Lastly, hard to believe, but it’s almost time for our 2nd ALSRI Book Club meeting of the year! If you haven’t started reading yet, don’t panic—these discussions are great whether you’ve read the book or not. At the end of the meeting, we’ll all vote on the selection for next time. We really hope you’ll join us!

Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground, by Mirabai Starr
April 16, 2026
7:00 pm Mountain
Register to receive Zoom link by clicking here

And now…we’re pleased to introduce the newest member of our team!

Sarah Morse

Sarah’s stepped into the role of creating our social media, and we couldn’t be happier. We’re loving her whole vibe! (We can’t thank anyone enough for stepping up when we ask for help, but today we’re feeling especially thankful for you, Sarah—it’s a big job, and we were thiiiis close to dropping every ball there is! At last we can breathe again.)

Here’s Sarah in her own words:

I'm a long time ALSSI listener, thrilled to work for one of my favorite podcasts. Even though I’ve lived in Austin for the last 22 years, I’m a Midwesterner at heart, since I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and still visit often. I’m turning 50 in a couple weeks, and I’m pretty excited about it. (I’m one step away from pulling on some high waisted pants and doing my best Sally O’Malley kicks.) I have a degree in political science, and I will happily talk about news and politics with anyone. My favorite thing to do is wander a thrift store and hunt for vintage housewares, some of which I keep, and some I re-sell. I’ve been married to Matt for 28 years, and we have three boys, ages 20, 18, and 12. At church, for the past several years I’ve been both a Relief Society teacher and the stake communication director, and I love both roles. You can find me on IG at @craftandopinion.

Call for Voicemails—Ask Us Anything!

It’s been a long time since we had an episode where we responded to your questions. Is there something you’d like to hear us talk about? Anything you want us to take a stab at? We can’t guarantee “answers,” but we’d love to respond to your thoughts with some of ours! Leave us a voicemail here or send us an email at atlastshesaidit@gmail.com and we’ll tell you what we think. You have 90 seconds of recording time.

Thanks!

We continue to be grateful for all the support that comes our way, and also the many words of encouragement we see exchanged between members of this community. It’s the space it is because together we make it that way. Thanks for your contributions—the ones we know about, and the ones we don’t.

Thanks for your hope.

Warmly,

Susan, Cynthia
& the ALSSI Team 🌺

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Shadow Work is a phrase that gets a lot of airplay, but it can be hard to get your head around exactly what it means or how it can apply in your life. The “shadow” consists of unconscious, repressed, or hidden parts of our personality. So what might it mean to uncover, understand, and integrate our shadow self? How might this work affect our responses and relationships? “The human soul wants belonging, but the ego really doesn’t know how to give it to us. It just...helps us fit in. It helps us show up and be acceptable—and it thinks that hiding the shadow is the thing that’s going to do it,” explains Jana Spangler. In Episode 256, Susan and Cynthia are joined by Jana for a conversation about the potential benefits of bringing the shadow to light through this specific inner work.

Notes & Quotes:

Hear more from Jana on these ALSSI episodes:
Ep. 69: But She’s Got a Great Personality!
Ep. 135: What About Religious Trauma
Ep. 184: Am I Allowed to Change?
Find Jana on Instagram here and on Facebook here and professionally here
Shadow Work: An Idiot’s Guide, Rainn Wilson with Keila Shaheen, Soul Boom podcast Ep. 36
Find Byron Katie’s work here
Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening, by Connie Zweig
Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, by Connie Zweig

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Many thanks to listener Kim Kershaw for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

Listen Here

JS: And befriending our inner critic because we’ve built up such a shadow that every way that we naturally are is not okay. We’re supposed to fit this mold. And so it’s reclaiming parts of - That we’ve had to repress and push down for acceptability. So it’s bringing those up and looking at them and having a lot of that self-forgiveness you know, that Maya Angelou talks about. That when we know better, we do better and have lots of grace for yourself for doing what you did when you did it.

SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.

CW: And I am Cynthia Winward.

SH: And this is At Last she Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things and the title of today’s episode is Shadow Work, A conversation with Jana Spangler. Hello Jana.

JS: Hello ladies.

CW: Welcome!

SH: We are thrilled to have you back on the podcast. Our listeners might remember that we’ve had you on before. I’m gonna give a quick rundown of those episodes right now so that people can go back and find them when they hear this amazing conversation and want so much more from you, which is sure to happen. So we had you on Episode 184: Am I Allowed to Change. On episode 135 we talked about religious trauma and then the original on episode 69, we introduced the Enneagram in an episode called “But She’s Got A Great Personality” and I will link to all of those in the show notes.

JS: Awesome. Well, thank you for having me back. I love conversation with you two.

CW: Ahh. Same.

SH: Is there anything that you’d like to give the listeners by way of introduction of yourself? Maybe just something you haven’t said before or maybe just the same things you’ve always said before?

JS: Well, sure. Well, I’ll just start with people who don’t know me. I am an integral professional coach who specializes in faith transition and relationship, and I’ve been working in that field for over nine years now. I work with Symmetry Counseling and I just am passionate about wellness and helping people through things. I’m the epitome of the wounded healer. I’m, if you know that archetype I fall into it well. These days I’m just really passionate about healthy dialogue. I’m passionate about ways that we can understand each other better without perpetuating all of the yucky stuff we see going on in the public sphere around religion and politics and everything else. I just think the world’s really in need of it, so.

CW: You’re really good at that.

JS: Thank you. I try. But other than that, I’m a mom of three emerging adults. Can’t believe it. My baby’s about to graduate from high school.

SH: Oh.

JS: Like, I don’t know how I got here. But that’s me.

SH: I think Cynthia and I can both relate to that feeling. We’ve been there.

JS: Yeah.

CW: Sometimes I feel like an emerging adult. What’s going on there? That’s another conversation.

SH: You need to schedule a conversation with Jana about that Cynthia.

SH: Laughter

CW: Laughter

JS: Laughter

CW: Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh goodness.

SH: Well, that gives our listeners a great intro as to why we’re having this conversation with you. And today, Cynthia’s gonna lead us through the discussion. So I’m just gonna turn it over to Cynthia.

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Something I see differently today than I did 10 years ago is the idea that a savior needed to die…and the whole concept of the atonement.

Ever since I became a parent, my perspective has gradually shifted. The idea of “I sent my son to die for you” feels very different to me now. It doesn’t align with what I would expect from a loving, all-knowing, supreme being.

As an imperfect human, I would never require one of my children to die for anyone else. And if I had created all of this, I wouldn’t make the people I love inherently unworthy in the first place.

Feels so strange to me now.
—Jamee Andelin

I have shifted the way I view trials. I no longer believe that “everything happens for a reason” and God had some master plan that involves giving me my trials. I currently view the hard times as just part of the condition of being mortal. Sometimes good can come from them. They’re not pointless. But God didn’t handpick them to prove me.
—Jessica Mitchell

How about in the last 6 months? I think about God differently. Instead of a God who is a gatekeeper, demanding, and to be feared and obeyed or else, I know believe He is ALL loving and no matter my choices or how I get things wrong I will always be loved and welcomed to live with Him and my loved ones.
—Kathy C.

That putting my family over policy is extremely important. To Think that I was trying to keep a family eternal with rules that strained relationships is now laughable. People come first now, and if that send me to hell, so be it.
—Jillian Tueller

Personal revelation over obedience to church leadership. Wow what a difference! I am using the gift of agency instead of blindly following man’s interpretation of God’s laws and it feels so good.
—Dee Adams

A couple of my favorites are that I am God and God is in me. There was never, and could never be, a separation. And, closely related, that we and all of God’s creations are connected. When one is harmed, we are all harmed. Conversely, when one is healed, we are all healed.
—Marley Orton

My connection to God has no gatekeepers.
—Leslie Boyce

I don’t believe in God anymore. But I am happy to see women reclaiming their power and autonomy when it comes to their religion.
—Erin Pfleger

I have claimed my spiritual authority, I don’t need a man of anybody else’s authority to have a relationship with God. I also believe in a God who is not legalistic, but is love.
—Gaynor-Marie Glass

Many things, but mostly how we have been saved by grace, and that we will all return to our Father in Heaven. I think our temple visits place us on perhaps a higher plane of righteousness when making promises to the Lord and showing our respect and submissiveness in following the gospel and doing His will, but I don’t know in my heart that some things performed in the temple will need to be done when we pass by the sentinels in Heaven.
—Holly Christensen

Mainly, my vision of eternity has transformed. I believe God is more than a body of flesh and blood. God is more that 3 degrees of glory and God is more than gender. My beliefs are so radically different they seem unrecognizable to some, but I think they fit seamlessly into what my heart and head have always felt. We are still an eternal family, each of us still aspires to become like God once was. Love is forever the foundation and being like Jesus means focusing on that love and helping people to grow. What’s really changed is I have lost fear. I follow myself and my inner soul. I can’t believe the relief I feel and I think my “fruits” speak for themselves. Less judgment and service that is heartfelt, not forced. I’m happier and more self confident. Losing myself really has led to finding myself. I found this podcast at the beginning of my journey and I feel like I have walked this path with many of your listeners. Thank you for allowing what I believe to be the echoes of eternity brought forth into light.
—Pamela Kennedy

My own personhood and autonomy. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but here goes: I was relieved when my husband chose me when I was 20 because it took the pressure off me having to make risky choices like trying to get into law school. This was the mid-80s, and my Mormon bubble didn’t have many examples of career women. Being someone’s wife was safe, known, preached from the pulpit. So I made the sacrifice, squelching any desire to develop myself and following the known quantity of temple marriage, stay-at-home motherhood, all with relief that “at least someone chose you!” I willingly, albeit blindly, chose not to develop a ME.
—Becca T.

I have 2: paying tithing on gross, off the top, for 30 years when I should have been putting that money in retirement. And also starting having babies at 20 and not finishing my education because I hadn’t self-actualized. I had so many interests but didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I tripped into SAHMhood.
—Brooke

Wearing garments for over 35 years. Being out of touch with my body. Disliking my body. Living with the fear that if I didn’t have them on, something bad would surely happen to me.
—Nancy

I sacrificed my dreams. LDS culture said “if you are a woman, your dream is motherhood, and that’s it.”

And I love being a mom, but I didn’t realize until much later that I hadn’t even allowed myself to have any other dreams.

Another one I regret less is that in high school I gave up a trip to Europe for Girls Camp. I had signed up to travel to Europe for two weeks with a group of high school musicians from all over the state. Since I had turned 12, Girls Camp had ALWAYS been the second week of July. I was scheduled to return from Europe at the end of the first week of July. We had already put down over $1000 towards the trip when the dates for Girls Camp that year were announced. It would be the first week of July. I was devastated. I loved camp and this was going to be my last year. After a few weeks of agonizing I decided to pull out of the Europe trip. We lost the $1000. Most expensive year of Camp ever. I’ve still never been to Europe.
—Zinah B.

Putting LITERALLY everyone else’s needs ahead of my own. Trying so hard to be that selfless woman that’s spouted about in church.

Thinking that the natural woman is an enemy to Godde. ( yes I changed it on purpose ).

Those beliefs led me down so many roads that led to intense personal decisions that impact me to this day.
—Genna

I can completely relate to the sacrifice of my true self, getting an education, having my own career, and the tithing.

Which brings me to the answer that came to my mind when I read the question. The biggest sacrifice I’ve made in my life was going to work (two jobs!) at age 45 when my youngest was six-years-old so we could avoid bankruptcy (mostly medical bills) because it was WRONG to go bankrupt if we could avoid it, and of course paying such a generous tithe guaranteed God would give me strength to work 50-60 hours a week (half of those just to pay the generous tithe). At a low-wage jobs because I had no education. But can I call it MY sacrifice if it was my children who suffered the most? Yes, it was rough on my brain and body for those eleven years and yes, it battered my marriage beyond repair, but my kids are the ones who paid the price of having an absent or cranky/exhausted mother. I can’t begin to express my anger and grief. How can we claim the family to be the most important unit when our teachings so often cause harm to families?
—Katy O’Barr Smith

Giving up on becoming a medical doctor because I thought having a family took priority. I did have the satisfaction of working in the medical field for 25 years after the youngest was in school, where I was able to make a difference for good. But I often wonder if there were greater opportunities to make a difference had I chosen differently. I don’t regret having 8 children. Not at all. They are wonderful people and each of them and theirs are making a difference for good in the world.
—Pat Catherall

I alienated my entire family because they were not members of the church and could not enter the temple for my wedding to my husband.

That was emotionally and spiritually devastating - but demanded [by a] religion that prizes obedience and worthiness above all else.

Putting the church’s demands over what my own conscience told me was wrong will be part of my deconstruction for the rest of my life. The harm from that one event has echoed through our relationships for years - and still does in the distance it caused in the lives of my children relative to their grandparents.
—Jessica Mertz

A mission, while the mission itself was a great experience, I felt very alone when I returned. As a person on a visa, I had to enroll in school full time a month after. I had no family close, very little money, ate little, it was winter and it was one of the hardest times in my life. I was very poor.
—Carolina Bell

One thing is serving a mission to Idaho. It was probably at least twenty years or a little more before I admit, it’s anyone publicly that I have been disappointed in that mission call. Even now, I did learn to love the people of Idaho, and I had tears when I left, i had wanted to go to either a Spanish- speaking mission or a welfare mission. I feel it is something that I do or rather did to show love for Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father.

Another one is perhaps not really a sacrifice, by just being single and not having children. I’m at a point in life for reviewing my life, and knowing those dreams and hopes will never ever happen. It is a devastating kind of feeling. And there’s a part of me that wonders what my life would have been like, perhaps without the influence of the church on dating and what type of people to look for.. For instance, I’m sure church culture and church teachings probably influence some guys to not like me.

Another one is unfortunately due to my job. I have a job that basically requires homework in terms of paperwork and such. So I have sacrificed personally due to the kind of job that can impact one’s life balance. I feel like i’ve given a lot to my job. Trying to help patients yet in hindsight, even though I did what needed to be done, I wish I had been better with boundaries than life balance in some aspects of my work.
—Nita

My personal autonomy. It was 2003 when I got married at age 20. I knew plenty of women that had an education/career, but no one, not even my parents, ever actually talked to me about having hobbies or interests, going to college, or any sort of personal development (except Personal Progress, of course. My mom once told me Satan had his hands on me because I didn’t want to do it.) So I never had any plans for life except get married. So now I’m an empty-nester at 43 and trying to figure out who I want to be and what I want to do.
—Kayla

No one “chose me” until it was too late for the motherhood part so I was left with education choices that put me near poverty because they were good degrees for a mom.
—Heather G.

Men’s opinions on women’s issues.
—Haley Mann

ANYTHING a man says. I’m serious. I was taught that anything and everything a man said was literally smarter and wiser than any woman, especially myself. No more. Done with that. That is not true in the slightest.
—Mary Cox

Every damn thing! Swearing, what I wear, what anyone says I’m supposed to believe or do, counsel from ward, stake, and SLC leaders, the Word of Wisdom, the importance of meetings, shopping on Sunday, the temple, the afterlife, and, again, SWEARING!
—Carol Colvin

My children’s salvation looking like church activity and a “covenant path” lifestyle. Now that I don’t take that seriously, I’m so happy, relaxed and can and enjoy my adult kids 100%!

Boy, do I ever love them.
—Nancy

The afterlife. I now choose to focus on finding joy in this life.
—Jodi Gale

As I recover and heal from scrupulosity, I've taken a break from attending my rather prescriptive LDS Ward. In so doing, I felt like Alice in Wonderland for a while last year. I didn't know which way was up, what was real or false, or right or wrong. Instead of enjoying the adventurous ride, I stressed and cried almost every day for months as my spiritual foundation crumbled.

After a few months, finding a bit of stability and soft landing in a local, progressive Methodist community, I found myself crying and stressing less. I still relapsed at times with tsunamis of guilt or shame. During one of these relapses, I distinctly heard in a loving, almost joking tone, "You've got to stop taking Me so seriously!"

I've been enjoying this spiritual adventure so much more since that moment.

So, long story short: GOD.

I’ve learned to take God less seriously, in all the good, wholesome, healing, playful ways that God wants for our relationship.
—Andrea Neahusan

The opinion of anyone regarding my “worthiness”.
—Laura Balmaceda

What we are “supposed to” do and feel and be.
—Joy Wil

Everything that is not about secure attachment. If it doesn’t affect secure attachment relationships, it’s not serious.
—Paula White

That 15 old white men were the mouthpieces for God and that their words were what should guide all my actions.
—Meadow Petersen

Sadly, the belief that I could bring about any kind of change in my ward.
—Rebecca Bigelow

A transactional God. I actually think that God CANT intervene in our lives. They are God in that they love and care for us and the ultimate form of worship is to have a relationship with them. That thought makes them seem more loving to me. Otherwise, it means that they pick and choose when and who and how to help...or not help. And that just doesn’t make sense to me.
—Tara Northcutt

That there were good reasons for all the things the church encourged or discouraged. Now I know that many of those reasons are just inherited cultural baggage.
—Laura Glasglow

I think patriarchy/hierarchy has been a hard but freeing belief to let go of. I still believe that some version of the gospel according to the LDS church is true. There are a lot of things where I’m like “yeah, maybe something kind of like that is true, but probably not in the way we’ve learned it.” But the whole idea of patriarchy, even though it’s so central to the way the church is run and supposedly continues into the eternities.... No. I can’t keep trying to believe that an oppressive system comes from God.
—Kristine Napper

I have let go of so many things but the biggest is that my religion (Jehovah’s Witness) is THE TRUTH.
—Melinda Kopilow

I’ve let go of believing the church has all the answers. And that what the church did was “God’s Will” and there must be a reason for the things that didn’t seem quite “right.” Like denying priesthood to groups of people. Or polygamy.
—Maria Krieser

The belief the Church has all the answers. They don’t and wanting them to was hurting me.
—M. Alva

Learning to let go of the Mormon “I have the answers to everything and I am right and you are wrong and ‘playing church’” (cough, cough Brad Wilcox) has been SO FREEING!! For a long time after deconstruction, I felt like my beliefs might be wrong or right, but it didn’t matter because I was learning, thinking, and growing! Now I realize I was close, but just barely missing the point = there IS NO RIGHT/WRONG in spiritual growth and learning!
—Sage

As an enneagram 8 - being wrong is one of my LEAST favorite things -- BUT - allowing the vulnerability of being wrong is also the gift of a healthy enneagram 8 (I’m not quite there yet, don’t fret) -- it’s where I learn about myself -- and that’s when the growth happens. I also think that the more I’m wrong about some of the little things, I trust myself to be RIGHT about the bigger things.
—Mary

I’m never comfortable with being wrong. But I’m also learning to lean into the discomfort for “productive discomfort”.

That said, there’s still plenty of times I don’t wanna lean in, but instead get unproductive discomfort and just be sassy or lean away/walk away from it to not be so uncomfortable.
—Nikki Nelson

I didn’t even know feeling comfort was a thing. Been feeling uncomfortable since birth. Adventures ahead.
—Evelyn Galbraith

I’m not comfortable with being wrong (mostly because I am a recovering perfectionist, considered the smart one in my family and was usually right) but I’m much more comfortable with not knowing all the answers. I’m okay with saying “I don’t know, but I’m sure everything will be fine.”
—Carol

What was a woman’s role at church and in heaven, other than supporting other people’s dreams and lives? Luckily I had faith that once I went to the temple, god’s true plan for women would be revealed. And…we all know how that turned out.
—Jodi Gale

I was taught “No necking and petting,” and no one could/would answer what that meant! I’m still not sure.
I think most of what I learned was ambiguously taught, hence still so much is ambiguous to me.
And - all those handshakes to determine evil spirits and resurrected spirits, etc. How on earth was I supposed to remember all of this? Still confounds me; I see no relevance.
—Ronda Weaver

How will we get to heaven? Like will it be on a rocket ship to Kolob? Or will we dematerializing into energy and transported like on Star Trek. I spent way too much time thinking about this. Not one Sunday school teacher had a satisfactory answer.
—Ginger Hanson

If EVERYONE gets a body, when does the Holy Ghost get a body? I assume he would be the last spirit to be born, so there is an end. Also, after he gets his body, does that mean we no longer have “The Gift of the Holy Ghost” here on Earth? How does that work? I did ask the question once. The poor Bishop had no idea how to answer. Or that it was even a possible question to have. I got some version of “God will work it out in the end” The greatest non-answer answer the church has.
—Christina Beal

Are women only there to raise boys who will go and do cool things and girls to raise more boys and so on down the line ...
—Amanda Funai

I remember the day I learned about Polygamy. 14 years old in Seminary, Church History year. I asked my mom about it after school that day and she confirmed what I’d heard. I sobbed in my room in utter disbelief and despair. The first jar on my shelf. I tucked it away because it physically hurt to think about. Honestly, it still does.
—Farrah Nordquist

The 3 degrees of glory: where is the “cutoff” line?

If God know what decisions we will make, why bother with a thousand years of peace and judgement day, etc.

Why cant I play with non-morons? When I moved to Utah this was the first thing they TRIED to instill in me. Segregation of Mormons from non.
—Ricci Giles

Two big questions for me in my teens:
1. Why would God disallow black men from receiving the priesthood (6th grade when that started)
2. Why was Emma not worshipped for all she did!! Members didn’t even want to talk about her when I was a youth.
—Janene Goubert


My mother joined the LDS church when I was 5, my father was already a member. She was raised as a devout Catholic, parochial school too. My maternal grandparents were my favorite people! They were kind, loving, loved Christ, served in their church and so much nicer than my paternal, LDS, grandparents. I am old enough to remember when the “Great and Abominable Church” was directly identified as the Catholic Church. That didn’t sir well with me. I always wondered if they got that wrong, what else did they get wrong??
—Theresa Nowling

When I got a little older I read the scriptures a lot. I was focused on the idea of univocality in the scriptures and thought that if I could just study hard enough I would be able to find the true answers to all my questions.
—Mara Haslam

I obviously didn’t get the repentance message prior to baptism and soon after got into a physical fight with a friend at school and thought I would go to hell. That worried me for a long time.
—Diana Kell

Sacred Space, Loud Mind: Creating Room for Neurodivergence in the Church

by Brittney Walker

In church, stillness is a virtue.

Fold your arms.

Close your eyes.

Sit quietly.

Reverence. It’s how we show respect and love for God in His house.

For many people, those instructions are simple. For some of us, they are an impossible puzzle.

We weren’t trying to be irreverent or disobedient. But our brains don’t experience stillness the same way.

ADHD doesn’t turn off when sacrament meeting begins. Thoughts still move quickly. Bodies still carry energy. Attention still searches for stimulation the way other people breathe.

And when a faith tradition teaches that spiritual sincerity looks like stillness, children who cannot sit quietly will start to assume something is wrong with them.

The girl trying to listen

Every few minutes I would snap back into focus.

Wait. What are they talking about?

I would sit up straighter and resolve to listen this time. Sometimes it worked for a few minutes. But then my mind would jump ahead to a scripture reference the speaker mentioned, or a question I wanted to ask, or the sudden realization that the woman in front of me had the exact same purse my mom owned in 1992.

Eventually I developed strategies.

I drew pictures in the margins of the sacrament program. I counted the ceiling lights. I peeled the foil off gum wrappers and pressed them onto the program. I split the ends of my hair and lined them up along the edge of the bench.

Sometimes my mom and I played the dot game on the program. We would draw a grid of dots and take turns connecting them, trying to capture squares and write our initials inside before the other person could block us.

Other weeks we played the “I love you” hand squeeze game during the talks.

It looked like fidgeting. But it was actually concentration. Keeping my hands busy was the only way to keep my mind in the room.

Eventually I learned an even better trick: taking notes. If my hand was moving, my brain stayed anchored.

The effort no one could see

From the outside, ADHD rarely looks dramatic. Especially in girls.

We are not usually the ones climbing the chapel furniture. We are the ones whispering.

A question about something the speaker said. A connection to a church magazine story. A thought that arrived so quickly it came out of our mouths before we had time to decide whether it should stay there.

Participation felt natural to me. Stillness did not.

The early lessons

Sometimes my parents had to take me out of the chapel. I remember sitting on a parent’s lap in the foyer, trying very hard to hold my body still long enough to prove I could go back inside.

As I got older, my job became escorting younger siblings out for water or bathroom breaks. Everyone knew that those trips often turned into a few minutes of running around the church building before returning reverently to the pew.

The sacrament itself was one of those moments. The moment the bread and water reached our row. The small sensory shift of participating.

Afterward, we unfolded the accordion-folded paper cups and formed them into flowers.

It wasn’t irreverence. It was stimulation in a room that offered very little.

When difference becomes shame

Many women with ADHD grow up believing their brain is a spiritual problem. Nobody says those words directly. But the traits that come with ADHD are easily and often interpreted through a moral lens.

For girls especially, the message often becomes: be quieter, calmer, smaller.

What belonging could look like

The hopeful part of this story is that inclusion doesn’t require sweeping changes to doctrine or worship. Often it simply requires widening our understanding of what spiritual engagement can look like.

A Primary teacher who welcomes questions instead of shutting them down. Even if the lesson veers around a bit.

A youth leader who understands that a girl whispering excitedly about a thought from the lesson is not being disrespectful. She is processing out loud. And when someone finally receives her that way, when a leader leans in instead of shushing her, something shifts. The story she tells herself changes. Not overnight, but it changes.

A calling where someone who struggles with administrative details receives structure and support instead of quiet frustration.

Small moments like these can change the story a child tells herself. Instead of I am bad at reverence, the story becomes my brain works differently. And that difference can belong.

A wider kind of reverence

Looking back now, I see that my ADHD didn’t separate me from spiritual life. If anything, it drew me toward it.

Curiosity made me ask questions.

Energy made me volunteer.

Intensity made me care deeply.

Some people experience God in stillness. Others encounter the sacred through curiosity, conversation, movement, and connection. Both can be forms of devotion.

The child whispering questions may be deeply engaged. The teenager who cannot sit still may be thinking harder than anyone in the room. The woman whose mind moves quickly may be offering gifts the community doesn’t yet know how to recognize.

Sacred space doesn’t always have to be silent. Sometimes it just has to be large enough for every kind of mind.

Brittney Walker

I am an ADHD coach and writer living in Arizona with my husband and a lively household including six sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson. I spent many years trying to be reverent, organized, and less distracting, and now I write about executive function, faith, deconstruction, and rebuilding identity with a different kind of brain. My work explores neurodivergence, belonging, and the slow process of learning to trust yourself. You can find more of my writing at exmoadhdcoach.substack.com

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