ALSSI Newsletter

July 2024

Hello!

As we enter the home stretch of both summer and Season 8, this month’s newsletter has editorial calendar notes and info about upcoming events, so you’ll know what to keep your eye out for in the next few weeks. But first, a message from Cynthia:

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Six years ago my ward had a special musical number.

Our bishop wanted a group of adults to sing the very unofficial Primary song “I Will Be What I Believe.” When some of us got word of this upcoming event, we tried to point out how this song is crazy similiar to the satirical song, “I Believe,” from The Book of Mormon musical. I don’t think orthodox Latter-day saints had any idea just how huge that musical was a decade ago. I never saw it, but I also don’t live under a rock, so I was at least familiar with some of the songs. 

Can you tell which is the satire and which is the children’s song?

“I believe- That the Lord God created the universe. / I believe- That he sent his only son to die for my sins. / And I believe- That ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America. / I am a Mormon. / And a Mormon just believes.”

Compared to:

“I’ll have faith like brother Joseph and the strength of the pioneers. I’ll be brave as a stripling warrior and like Nephi persevere. I will spread God’s love to all I know and serve. I will plead with my Father on my knees: I will be what I believe.”

Kind of hard right? Okay, maybe not that hard, but also, they’re not that different. :)

One dear friend of mine was asked to sing in the group and she said she wouldn’t because that’s a children’s song, with a children’s theme. What adult wants to sing about “having faith like brother Joseph” and “I’ll be brave as a stripling warrior?”  She and I joked that honestly, you could remove maybe two lines from The Book of Mormon musical, “I Believe”, (ahem, the f-word) and it too could be sung in church! Funny, but not.

It didn’t matter that my friend pushed back against that song. They just found some other adult who would happily sing a child’s song. On the day of the musical number, maybe only a small handful were sweating in their armpits with pure embarrassment like I was, but I think that’s part of the problem. Collectively I think we prefer naïveté. We dig our heels into our solid ground of the good-vibes-only acreage we surround ourselves with. We plant ourselves so firmly there that we don’t even see that spiritual anemia has crept in sooooo slowly that we hardly recognize that we prefer to act (and sing!) like children, rather than face the complexities of a changing society with complicated adulty needs. 

How this happened and why it happened is too long to explore here, but I do think, like the larger Christian world, we saw the allure of the cult of innocence. The need to stay pure, juvenile, and ignore the larger problems in our worship services. Just believe!

Patrick Mason has said:

“I will admit that I have two fears for the church that I love and am totally committed to. First, I fear for what I call the “juvenilization” of Mormonism, or the “EFY-ification” of the church….When it’s adults in the room, let’s respect one another enough to talk like adults. Most people can handle complexity and nuance. We can stretch beyond what we learned in seminary, though we are so rarely invited to. I have a really smart colleague who once invited the missionaries into his home so he could learn more about Mormonism. When they finished their discussion, with frequent references to their accompanying flipchart, he thought to himself, “That’s it?” Indeed, I fear that in too many contexts we’re feeding our members and investigators a low-nutrition religious diet that leaves them not only with the unsatisfied feeling of “That’s it?” but also leaves them poorly fortified against challenges to their faith. 

Around the same time as the musical number, a stake priesthood leader even said in our stake conference that many of our problems are due to being “too intellectual.” I thought to myself, no one with a curious heart and mind would poo-poo learning as being “too intellectual.” Since when is “seek[ing] out of the best books words of wisdom” for faith challenges, familial challenges, mental health challenges, and societal challenges, seen as “too” anything? And can our worship services incorporate those words of wisdom into our Sunday sermons, and songs? I don’t expect my leaders to be experts on anything. But treating adults as if primary answers are as deep as we ever need to go is insulting to my very complicated life.

I love to donate blood. It’s a favorite form of service I love to give, but it seems like every time in the last few years that I have gone to donate, I am turned away due to low iron. They tell me to eat more red meat, more dark leafy greens, and of course, to take an iron supplement. I can’t help but compare the tools of physical anemia to the anemia I feel in our church services. Not all the time, but many times, when I leave my church building on Sunday afternoons, like Mason’s friend, I say to myself, “That’s it?” I imagine someone poking the side of my finger, just like the Red Cross does, to see if spiritual anemia is present. Thankfully, I’ve learned what to do to manage my physical and spiritual anemia, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish for better days in the pews with the community that I love.

—Cynthia

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Okay, let’s talk about the elephant …

Yes, what was going to be our Live Fall Gathering in SLC has become an Online Fall Gathering you can attend no matter where you are! Same date, same content! We know this was welcome news for some but undoubtedly received a thumbs-down from others—our own feelings about it are complicated. Life throws curveballs and it did, so we’re grateful the show can go on! We’ll miss connecting in person, but we’re also excited to offer more women the opportunity to hear the speakers we’ve lined up. There’s a learning curve, of course—we don’t really know a thing about putting on online events, but we’re eager to find out! (Fwiw, we didn’t know anything about starting a podcast either…)

If any of you have some expertise and/or want to volunteer to help, please drop us a line at atlastshesaidit@gmail.com. And watch for registration info coming next month!

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Also coming up—

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• Our new RS Chats on Substack are a second weekly conversation for paid subscribers—a place to talk that’s a teensy bit more intimate. Share your Sunday thoughts with an amazing group of supportive women!

• We have 5 remaining episodes this season. On August 27 we’ll wrap Season 8 and take a break for a few months to catch our breath, host our online event, and prepare for Season 9.

• We’ll take Thursday, Aug 1 off our usual Substack editorial schedule, so look for Say More to resume August 8.

• Our next Book Club meeting is August 15 at 7:00 pm Mountain. You can register here or on our website at Events.

• Our 3 Friday Live Chats next month will be August 9, 23, and 30 on Substack. Susan and Cynthia host, and we usually try to get our guest for the week to check in too! All Live Chats are from 10:00 am—Noon Mountain, but after that you can drop in on the conversation and leave your 2 cents whenever it’s convenient!

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Don’t forget!

Our Book Club selection for the August meeting is Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It, by Brian McLaren. It’s a quick read so no worries if you haven’t started yet … there’s still plenty of time!

Note: I typed the title and Brian’s name into my podcast app just for fun and it came up with a seemingly endless list of shows he’s been on talking about this book, so if you’re not a reader but you like podcasts, check one out and you’ll feel prepared to join our discussion! Hope to see you there! —S.

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Website update:

atlastshesaidit.substack.com

Our website migration is well underway—we’re grateful to our friend Kim Friedmann who’s so capably taken the reins of the project! When finished, we hope it’s a more easily-searchable home for all-things-ALSSI. For one thing, we want to make it simpler to find episodes you need by topic. Once the change is complete, our current address will redirect to our Substack page, the website’s new home. You’ll be able to find everything you’re used to in the menu bar at the top of the page. If you haven’t looked at our Substack recently, take a peek and you’ll find it’s filling in nicely. Chat is there, and if you click it you’ll find all the conversations going on every day—it’s an active space! Pull down the episode menu and you’ll see it’s populated with about half our content already, with new episodes being added daily. You can also find transcripts under their own tab, and we’re catching up on those too, thanks to many of you who volunteered to adopt-an-episode. The new site menu will soon include all the event, merch, Say More contributor and donation info you need. Thanks for your patience with any glitches while we make this switch!

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Lastly, a late-summer dish that’s as good as dessert—

I spend my summers in the midwest, and that means our ward has a Summer Corn Feed … because by August, it’s corn everywhere you look! But if you invite me to a potluck any time of year, this is what you’ll probably get, because this super-secret recipe is my food super-power. Sweet, but with that green chile kick I love. —S.

Susan’s Green Chile Creamed Corn

24 oz. corn kernels (about 6-8 ears, depending on size, or 2 pkg. frozen—it’s worth getting fresh if you can!)
1 pint half-n-half
1 tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1 large can (7 oz.) chopped green chiles, drained
2 Tbsp. butter
2 Tbsp. flour
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese

Trim uncooked corn from cobs (no need to defrost if using frozen). In a skillet, combine corn, 1 cup half-n-half, salt, sugar, pepper, green chiles, and butter.  Cook until butter is melted. Whisk together remaining half-n-half and flour and stir into corn. Cook over medium heat until thickened, and corn is cooked through. Remove from heat and stir in Parmesan until melted.  Serve hot. 

(I usually make it, dump it in a casserole and put it in a warm oven until we're ready to serve.) 

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That’s it for this month—

Thanks for supporting the amazing community that continues to grow around this project!

Cynthia, Susan,
and the ALSSI Team ❤️