ALSSI Newsletter

May 2024

Hello!

Look up quick, or you’ll miss it! We’re thiiiis close to May disappearing into June. Hard to believe we’re sliding into summer already! This year, our podcast season will keep running right on through … no summer vacation for us! We hope you’re enjoying Season 8 so far—we have so many good conversations scheduled over the next few months, we can hardly believe it. So we hope you’ll take ALSSI with you, wherever your summer road takes you!

Today’s message is from Susan:

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“Hooray! There’s the alarm!” said no one ever.

I'm pretty sure most of us are here because an alarm clock of some kind has gone off. Either in our heads, our hearts, or our lives. Something called us out of wherever we were before, and we're here now: blinking and looking around, wishing we were still there or maybe panicking over what we're supposed to do next.

Alarms are useful, but I hate them. Any day I have to set an alarm is automatically a worse day than one where I'm left to wake up whenever it happens. But alarms are how grownups get life done.

I was reading someone's account of their exit from the Church, and they mentioned the phrase "woke up" multiple times. The first time, it chafed a little. By the third time, I felt angry about it. Any time a phrase lands that way, I like to stop and look it in the eye to figure out why it feels like fighting words to me.

In this case, it was the implication that having woken up was synonymous with having left the Church.

Just the other day a woman responded to our post on Instagram saying she wondered how anyone could see things clearly and still make the choice to stay. She said she’d weighed it all, and there was no choice. She walked away. Her shrug emoji implied that once any serious thinking was done, the conclusion would be inevitable.

I didn’t reply. How to explain 180+ podcast conversations in one social media comment? They’re there, if she wants to listen to understand my own careful weighing, my personal conclusions that are anything but foregone.

As if I were committed to hitting snooze forever. As if I moved through my life ignoring the alarms. As if I couldn't stay if I had half a brain. Or as if leaving somehow holds a moral superiority over not leaving—or vice versa.

As if I weren't fully awake in my decision to be here now, having spent my lifetime actively choosing a thing that has always been hard, and continuing to choose it despite a full, grownup awareness that I have the power to leave whenever I like. Nothing binds me but my own choice, even if there are a thousand deep, tangled reasons and complications that I weigh in making it. (There are.) They're my reasons, my complications.

The person whose waking took them out of the Church weighed their life and experience, and found that membership no longer serves them. That’s beautiful—it’s the second half of life, manifesting in a change of course. I weigh my own life and have made a different determination. Neither of us holds any intellectual or moral superiority over the other. Neither of us is sleeping through our spiritual life, because we're actively choosing a path that we hope will lead us to our best selves. Which is, of course, what being awake is really about.

I guess my point in writing this is just to pinch myself, so to speak, to make sure I'm still up. Ouch. I definitely am. I'm awake and still in my same seat near the back—those soft folding chairs in the overflow—most Sundays.

Admittedly I drop in on my favorite Episcopal church every now and then too, having accidentally learned that 60-year-old-Susan actually had a deep hunger for what those in other Christian traditions call High Church. Who knew? I love the smells, the vestments, the beautiful building, the soaring professional-quality music, the ritual, the poetry-as-prayer, the emphasis on scripture readings, the peace-passing, the call and response. I’ve expanded my worship, vocabulary and practice. No one is more surprised than I am at this turn of events in my religious life; thank goodness I can still surprise myself.

But when I’m in those slightly different (looking at you, kneelers) pews, I’m there as a Latter-day Saint, choosing that label and lifestyle daily with my brain, my heart, and my feet. Because I also love the tradition to which I’ve given so much of my life.

We each get to do that for ourselves, make the choice—whether or not we’ve been awake to our own ability to do so before now. It’s the doctrine that supposedly sits right at the center of this whole thing. There was always a “no” available, even during all the years I didn’t know how to reach for it. Now I keep it where I can always see it, right next to “yes,” and I reach for the one I want when I want it. How to live is a choice that must be made every day, and requires full presence.

I don't intend to sleep through any of it, and I'm committed to never assuming that you are asleep either, no matter what we each choose.

—Susan

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“I learned that sometimes our most holy mountain-moving faith looks more like spending our whole lives making that mountain move, rock by rock, pebble by pebble, unsexy day after daily day, casting the mountain to the sea stone by stone rather than watching a mountain suddenly rise up and cast itself. [ … ] But as the people of God, we have a choice: we either make excuses or we make the mountains move, one stone at a time, one after another after another. Radical faith looks a lot like faithfulness, and look at what God can do with that.”

— Sarah Bessey
Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women

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For your calendar:

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Looking further ahead:

We’ve found a new venue, which means we’ll be able to accommodate more of you this year! Yay! 🥳 We’re also kicking around some exciting new ideas, so we really hope you’ll put us on your calendar and plan to attend. Registration details will be available soon! Watch social media, your inbox, and our website for more info.

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At Last She Read It:

Our next book club meeting will be Thursday, August 15. It’s still too soon to register, but it’s not too soon to start reading! If you haven’t read Brian McLaren’s book Faith After Doubt, it’s one of the best in the evolving-faith space and we can’t wait to discuss it with all of you. If you’ve yet to attend one of our meetings, we promise you won’t be disappointed! Lindsie and Shaless are A+ discussion leaders, and their insightful questions shape a truly meaningful conversation. You’re bound to be thinking about it for weeks after. We hope you’ll join us!

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In other news—

Guess what? Some people don’t listen to podcasts…at all…ever! That’s why we’ve signed an agreement with Signature Books to try to capture our conversations between two covers…at last! One of our goals is to create a way for listeners to share ideas and hopefully start discussions—with those who aren’t listeners—about the women’s issues we’ve been breaking down for 4 years on ALSSI. We’re not doing this because we weren’t busy enough … whew! But we feel like it’s an important next step in our project, and a way to get more people talking about things we believe are important to women in the Church. So stay tuned! Thanks to Signature Books for believing we have something to say, and providing us support to say it.

Speaking of writing, we continue to seek submissions for Say More: At Last She Writes It. We want to publish your essays, short reflections, reactions, poetry, other forms of creative writing—anything you want to write, our editorial team wants to read! We also accept submissions of art. You can find submission guidelines (including where to send your work) by clicking here. There’s also a link on our website.

Also, several of you have graciously volunteered to help us produce transcripts of our podcast conversations. Thank you for your willingness to adopt an episode and make our podcast accessible to more women. We’re excited to be able to expand our transcript offerings, so stay tuned!

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“On the page, I undergo a change of heart, I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away.”

— Melissa Febos
Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

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Summer time is snacky time!

Okay, it's a savory recipe this month, but come on! Buttery hot pretzel bites? I'm almost always Team Salty over Team Sweet, so these easy treats hit all the salty notes for me. However, there is a cinnamon sugar option in the recipe as well. —Cynthia

Dough:

• 2 1/2 cups (300g) all purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon (6g) salt

• 1 teaspoon granulated sugar

• 2 1/4 teaspoons (7g) instant yeast

• 7/8 to 1 cup (198g to 227g) water, warm*

*Use the greater amount in the winter, the lesser amount in the summer, and somewhere in between in the spring and fall. Your goal is a soft dough.

Topping:

• 1 cup (227g) water, boiling

• 2 tablespoons (28g) baking soda

• coarse, kosher or pretzel salt (or coarse sugar, optional)

• 6 tablespoons (85g) unsalted butter, melted

cinnamon sugar, optional

Instructions:

Place all of the dough ingredients into a bowl, and beat until well-combined. Knead the dough, by hand or machine, for about 5 minutes, until it's soft, smooth, and quite slack. Flour the dough and place it in a bag, and allow it to rest for 30 minutes.

• While the dough is resting, prepare the topping: Combine the boiling water and baking soda, stirring until the soda is totally (or almost totally) dissolved. Set the mixture aside to cool to lukewarm (or cooler).

• Preheat your oven to 400°F. Prepare a baking sheet by spraying it with vegetable oil spray, or lining it with parchment paper. Grease the parchment with vegetable oil spray to make double-sure the bites won't stick.

Transfer the dough to a lightly greased work surface, and divide it into six equal pieces.

Roll the six pieces of dough into 12" to 15" ropes. Cut each rope crosswise into about 12 pieces.

Pour the cooled baking soda solution into a pan large enough to hold the bites. Place the bites into the solution, gently swish them around, and leave them there for a couple of minutes. Transfer them to a greased or parchment-lined baking sheet, and top with pretzel salt or sea salt; or with pearl sugar, for sweet pretzel bites.

Bake the bites for 12 to 15 minutes, until golden brown. Remove them from the oven, and roll them in the melted butter.

For cinnamon-sugar pretzels, toss with cinnamon sugar once you've rolled the bites in the butter.

Place on a rack. In you're not going to enjoy them immediately, store the bites, well-wrapped, at room temperature. Reheat briefly before serving.

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That’s it for now. Thanks bunches for your support!

Love,
Susan, Cynthia,
and the ALSSI Team