Episode 263 (Transcript): What Do You Say? | 3 Conversations About Agency, Motherhood, Faith Crisis, Premonitions, and Creating God
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Sarah Thomas for her work in transcribing this episode!
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TT: I didn’t wanna live that way anymore. So I got some help, and through a lot of therapy, we worked through that, and I have a totally different relationship with God now.
I would say I don’t fear Him anymore. I don’t fear the afterlife. It’s a whole different relationship. I kind of feel like it’s a whole different God that I believe in than the God I was raised to believe in.
SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.
CW: And I’m 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: What Do You Say? Three Conversations About Agency, Motherhood, Faith Crisis, Premonitions, and Creating God.
CW: Good grief. Bingo blackout right here.
SH: Bingo blackout on the title. Well, look, these are complicated conversations, Cynthia. They’re about lots of things.
CW: Well, we have three more amazing conversations today, so let’s listen to what our amazing guests had to say, and then we’ll come back for “Contemplation Corner.”
How’s that?
SH: Fantastic.
Segment 1: Conversation with Stephenie Glismyer
Okay, we are here with Stephenie Glismyer today. Hi, Stephanie.
SG: Hi.
SH: Our listeners might recognize your name because you sometimes write for Say More for us. We’ve had a few pieces of yours, I think.
SG: Yeah.
SH: Well, we’re excited to play with you today, and we’re gonna start with the memories category.
I have three questions for you to choose from. Would you like question one, two, or three?
SG: Three.
SH: What is one thing about your life that childhood you never would have imagined?
SG: Childhood me. I grew up with so many messages about being a mother and having that fully satisfy me, that as I got into the teenage years and wanted to have a career, that childhood song, “When I grow up, I want to be a mother and have a family. One little, two little, three little,” you know, up to six little babies—that was ingrained in me.
And so when I got married, I gave all thoughts of a career up and just focused on motherhood. And I think I had this nostalgia that motherhood was the only thing I could be.
I don’t think that little girl, Stephenie—singing with my yellow balloons in a sacrament meeting over and over again (I feel like we sang it every year on Mother’s Day)—would have ever imagined that I’d be in a position with as much education, authority, and leadership. I just can’t imagine that little girl me would have thought that I could be more than just a mother.
Even though I had thoughts—fleeting thoughts here and there through my teenage years—that I wanna be a doctor, I wanna be all these things that school and education taught me, I always reverted back to my religious upbringing, which was that none of those things mattered more than just having babies.
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I had six babies. I feel like that was just running in the back of my mind constantly.
CW: I’m not even sure which Primary song that is. I don’t remember singing that one. Do either of you know the title of that?
SG: I don’t remember, but it’s a Janice Kapp Perry song, I think.
But it goes, “When I grow up, I wanna be a mother and have a family. One little, two little, three little babies of my own.” And it just has like, “And I will love them all day long and feed them cookies and milk and yellow balloons.”
SH: Oh wow, I don’t know that one either.
SG: You can look it up and listen to it on YouTube.
SH: You can bet that I’m going to.
SG: Like, literally, it was the song that we sang every Mother’s Day. And we sang it up in the stands, and sometimes they gave us little yellow balloons as a prop.
CW: Okay. Where did you grow up?
SG: I grew up in California. I grew up in Venice.
CW: Okay. I grew up in Southern California, too. So I thought, well, maybe this was a regional thing. But nope. Fascinating. Well, someone in your ward obviously loved that song, and that’s why you were indoctrinated.
And probably had the six children like the song said.
SH: Was there one specific point in your life at which that really changed for you? Like, where you thought, “Hey, wait a minute, I want something different or something more or something in addition, or...”
SG: I think it’s [00:05:00] my first three kids kinda left the nest. My fourth was getting ready about seven or eight years ago, and I was like, “What am I gonna do with my life?” I didn’t find joy in a lot of the things that I had learned to find joy in being a stay-at-home mom.
I really felt like I had more to give the world, to give myself, and I just didn’t wanna be home cleaning the house and cooking and taking care of other people. And I also felt weirdly stuck by not having my own income.
Which sounds weird, ‘cause my husband is providing just fine.
SH: It doesn’t sound weird at all.
SG: And he’s never been controlling about that. I handle all the finances because he’s been in finance and he hates it. He’s just like, “I teach this all day. I don’t like to deal with it.” So it wasn’t about that. It was just, I felt like I had all this potential that wasn’t getting used.
And I was watching marriages of family members falling apart. I was watching how unhappy my mom was as a 75-year-old. And I just realized that I don’t wanna be that way.
I wanna be happy and satisfied and healthy and I felt like I have more talents than just being a mom. And I don’t even know if being a mom was a talent for me, honestly. My kids would probably argue.
CW: I don’t think that is crazy at all because Susan and I—you have no idea how much we text each other and talk about the whole money thing and how risky of a decision that was to stay home. And for those who are listening who are not in the United States, you can claim Social Security and Medicare through your spouse. But I mean, how risky is that? If something happens, I just feel like I have to lean on him for everything, including being taken care of when we’re older. It’s a mental thing, even if it’s not a financial thing.
SH: Or if he died.
SG: The fear of him dying was always in the back of my mind. Like, what will I do?
CW: Yeah.
SH: I wish we talked so much more in the church about women’s whole lives, you know? Because I feel like no one prepared me for the idea that you have these children, and that’s great. And you can go all in on that, but you’re gonna have a whole lot of years after that, if you’re lucky, right?
You’re not going to be busy with that anymore. And I mean, we talk about senior missions. What other things have you ever talked about for older LDS women than that at church? There’s nothing.
SG: that’s what my husband and I were aiming for. We’ll go on this senior mission. I’ll develop all these talents so that I can be a senior missionary.
And I was like, “Wait. And then leave my family?”
CW: Such a good point. We could talk about that one all day because we have so many opinions. But we will move on to insights.
Stephenie, would you like one, two, or three?
SG: Let’s do two.
CW: When’s the last time you forgave yourself for something?
SG: That’s hard.
And I don’t know why I’m becoming emotional.
But I think—I think, especially this last year, when I drive to work every morning, I reflect a lot on my life. And I’ve started to shift from thinking about all the things I messed up in either my children’s lives or my own life, or the bad decisions I made.
I’m starting to shift and think about what I’m doing right because it’s so heavy to think about all those things that I can’t change at this point.
But I think I’ve finally come to that realization just recently. I forgave myself for really all of it. And I feel so much healthier and happier—even though I’ve got tears— just because I think it’s so emotional to let all of that go, and to not keep digging it up.
I feel like I used to have these running thoughts in my head like, “Okay, I did this good thing, so maybe this good thing when I get to heaven will counteract this bad thing I did.” And I was always trying to focus on the positive, but there was always a negative that I felt that this positive had to weigh.
SH: Equalize.
SG: Right. Exactly. And now I’m starting to feel like I can let that go and focus on the things that I’m doing to grow and to be a good person. I’m just seeing more that I’m a good person doing good things, rather than having to be a perfect person or being a person that doesn’t make any mistakes. So, now I don’t feel the need to forgive myself anymore. Even like with mistakes I’ve [00:10:00] made with my kids, my kids have come to terms. I’m like, it is what it is; I was stuck in a system. I just didn’t have the tools. And now that I have the tools, I’m gonna do better with the tools I have, ‘cause they’re more fitting for me.
And I’m grateful that I have a family that’s so forgiving. And so like, yeah, let’s just start with a clean slate and move forward, and not worry about always forgiving—let’s just grow and learn from those things. Like you talked about in that sin episode—they’re not sins that I need to be forgiven for. They’re just my human frailty that is what it is.
CW: Your humanness.
SH: Do you feel like that process has happened for you just as a result of maybe aging, ages and stages in your life, and so you moved into a different one? Or is there something that triggered that?
SG: I think aging has a big part to do with it, just because you become your mother and your grandmother as you age. And I feel like you start to have a lot of compassion for those women before you.
And I think forgiving myself also included forgiving my mom. And understanding and seeing that she was also a victim of certain circumstances, and she did the best that she could with what she had.
Because I think sometimes the world wants to blame women for everything, and I think I blamed my mom and the women in my life for circumstances. I think I spent a lot of time blaming her for being a single mom and for going through husbands and putting me in the situations. I now realize that it really wasn’t her; it was the situations, and they were unfortunate. And I had been trained in a system that said, “Hey, these problems were brought upon by herself.” And then I became a victim of them. But they weren’t all her problems.
She didn’t bring them upon herself. A lot of them were thrust upon her, right? And she did the best she could, muddling through it, and unfortunately, she had three children to take through that process with her, right?
SH: Right. Yeah. As we do.
CW: So many feelings. Thank you.
SH: Alright, let’s shift and talk about beliefs for a second.
Stephanie, would you like question one, two, or three?
SG: I’ll take one.
SH: I mean, this is hardly a big question at all. Are you ready?
It’s a ridiculously broad question. What belief helps you make sense of the world?
SG: I think the biggest belief—and this has been a shift for me—is that there’s a Heavenly Mother or a female god up there.
It’s been really hard for me to make sense of the world with just men creating. Especially after having six children and being a mother. And I’ve sometimes likened it to the patriarchy building me this motherless nest. And a motherless nest is a dangerous place to be, you know? Just all by yourself.
And then you don’t have a mother to nurture you, to teach you how to fly, right? You’re just stuck in this spot. And I think changing my beliefs to acknowledge and to be able to speak about the fact that there’s gotta be female deity has just really helped me connect better with the world and make my beliefs feel whole. My beliefs never felt whole. I was always trying to figure out what was missing, and I realized it was me that was missing, right? I was missing in my beliefs, as a woman, as a mother.
And so I think that’s a belief shift that’s changed, and it’s really helped my daughters too. And my sons, actually.
And maybe we always believed it. I feel like we have remnants of that belief in our background, but we never were able to really talk about it.
CW: We never plumbed the depths of that like you just did for the last couple of minutes. Never!
SG: Yeah, and it felt like we believed it, but we didn’t. We were never encouraged to believe it. We were just like, “This is here. You can believe it if you want to. But if you believe in it too much or you focus on it too much, then you’re way out there.”
It’s just hypothetical or theoretical, then.
SH: Yeah. Believing in it too much seems way more frowned upon than not believing in it in our church.
CW. Truth bomb. [00:15:00]
SG: I feel like we are actively encouraged not to believe in it, in some ways.
SH: Yes, in some ways we are. I’ve never thought of that.
CW: Well, Susan, is this a line from our book you wrote— or did you just say it in one of our episodes—that Heavenly Mother is simultaneously given to us and taken away at the same time?
SH: Yeah, it is in our book
CW: Something like that. Yeah. So, nailed it, Stephenie.
SH: Love that answer to that question. It’s not what I expected, Stephanie. I love it. Thank you.
CW: Thank you, Stephenie. This has been wonderful.
Segment 2: Conversation with Blakelee Ellis
SH: We’ve got Blakelee in the house. Hello, Blakelee.
BE: Hello, y’all. What’s up?
CW: So glad you’re here.
BE: I just tried to sound really young with the what’s up, but that just makes me sound old, doesn’t it? Nobody says what’s up anymore.
SH: What? Okay.
SH: You’re talking to the wrong person. I always make myself sound older without knowing.
All right. We are starting with the Memories category. Would you like question one, two, or three?
BE: I’m a middle child, so I’m gonna go with two.
SH: As an LDS woman, can you think of an experience from growing up when you realized your parents didn’t have all the answers?
BE: Oh, this is tough for me because... Not tough, tough’s not the right word. It was pretty standard for me not to know answers. My dad has never been active, and so we were nuanced. If I went to my dad with a question, he never hesitated to say, “I don’t know.”
My mom—because she grew up in a little bit more traditional household and raised us a little bit more traditionally (we were active because of her)—would have the answers. But it was very standard for me to hear, “I don’t know,” from my dad.
So I don’t have a particular moment, I think. Well, maybe I do have a particular moment with my mom, and it was when my brother came out as gay, and her world just imploded. It set a faith crisis off for her, and she just didn’t know how to reconcile anything—like a lot of us don’t in that first moment.
And so that’s when I really looked at my mom and went, “Oh, she really doesn’t know how to put anything together right now—her faith, her spirituality, her love for her son with what doctrine is—she just didn’t know how to put any of it together.”
CW: How old were you, Blakely, when your brother came out?
BE: I was 13.
CW: Oh, so pretty young.
BE: Yeah, I was 13. He was 15.
SH: So how did that impact you in the church context?
Did you have an easier time assimilating that information when your brother came out than your mom did? Was it already pretty easy for you? Did her confusion make it harder for you?
BE: It only made it hard from the standpoint that she was just doing whatever she could to survive, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. And so we had a couple of really rough years—bless my mom’s heart, I don’t blame her at all—where my mom just kind of disappeared for a little while.
We were all just really in survival mode. As far as church, she wouldn’t come to church because she couldn’t handle all the doctrine and the rhetoric and all the culture and everything that gets said. You know, some of us have to take sabbaticals sometimes ‘cause our hearts just can’t do it.
But she would drop me and my younger sister off. She wasn’t making my brother go at that point because things in the ward were really bad for my brother. So my mom would drop me and my younger sister off to go to church, and then would come pick us back up.
CW: Okay, that’s really interesting to me, Blakelee, because I feel like Susan and I have heard on the podcast and through women in our Substack, in the chat or whatever—for years they have said, “I don’t wanna go, but I go for my children.”
And so I find it so fascinating that your mama, your sweet mama, was like, “I cannot go right now, but I’m dropping you off.”
Susan, we only ever hear stories where the children attend with their dad while the mom is on sabbatical.
Or the whole family isn’t, but I’ve never heard where the mom drops off the kids. I kinda love that she just knew what she needed, but she was respecting what you needed.
BE: Yeah, she just couldn’t do it. She would just cry the whole time. She had some really bad interactions with stake presidents and bishops, and she just was like, “That is not a safe place for me- but I want you to go and be spiritually fed, so I’m dropping you two off.”
But, I mean, don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of Sundays, too, where I would be like, “I’m not going,” and she was like, “Great, I’m not making you [00:20:00] go.”
SH: That was my next question, actually.
BE: So, I mean, there were plenty of Sundays where none of us went either.
CW: All right, Blakele, from Insights, do you want one, two, or three?
BE: I’m gonna say three.
CW: How comfortable are you with silence?
BE: Oh, very. Very comfortable with silence. Every time I come talk to you or write something for the Substack, I understand more and more about how much my dad has impressed me in my life.
So much comes from my dad, because my dad is not a talker, and neither was my grandma. Like, before my grandma passed away over the summer, my dad and my grandma would have phone conversations where literally nothing happened. Like, they were just breathing with each other.
And finally, he would be like, “Okay, I guess I’ll call you tomorrow,”—‘cause he was calling her every night at that point near the end of her life, where they would not say anything.
And so, silence does not bother me because I grew up with a dad who would ask questions, but then would just listen; he never forced anything.
SH: Has that carried into your other relationships? Like, does that make you really comfortable with silence in your marriage or as a parent?
BE: Yeah. It’s funny what you don’t know you have to learn when you go into a marriage, but my husband’s not a great talker either—he’s more of a talker than I am, and especially the first few years we were married, he was like, “Can you just please say something? I’m always the one talking.”
And I had to be like, “Oh yeah, okay. Well, I mean, I don’t feel the deep need to talk. But all right, sure.” So that has been a major learning curve for me, funnily enough, to be like, “You have to say something now.”
CW: Okay, never in a thousand years would my husband ever say to me, “Can you just say something?” Like, never, ever as long as I live. So Blakelee, in some ways, are you and your hubs are the reverse of what typical gender…
BE: In some ways I think my husband and I are really “opposites attract” people. Not on everything, but a lot of things in our lives, we are on opposite polar sides.
And he does a good job of balancing me out in a lot of ways, and I do the same for him. And then there are a lot of things that just absolutely drive us crazy, which I think is a standard marriage.
SH: That, I’d say it is. If you’re alone, do you engineer that to be a silent space that you’re in, or do you like to have music or TV or something, kind of background?
BE: I like to have something with me, but if it were silent, it wouldn’t bother me.
I’m not uncomfortable, but I think that, more than my dislike of silence, it probably comes from my love of music. I’m a dancer, I’m a creative, I love music. Music just fills me. So I think, more than my dislike of silence, it comes from how much I love music.
SH: Yeah. I can totally see that with you. I have to tell you, though, I perceived you as a talker. How’s that for interesting? And it’s not like we’ve never spent time together or anything, so that’s just funny that I had that wrong.
BE: I mean, I can talk. I’m an extroverted person. Like, I can talk, but it’s just, I don’t know. I can talk, but…next time we’re in a group situation together…
CW: Okay, I’m gonna notice.
BE: Let’s look at who does the majority of the talking with me, you, and Katie. Let’s see who talks the most. I bet I’m the one that talks the least, and I’m totally fine with that, totally comfortable with it.
SH: Interesting. I love it. I love being surprised. Alright, let’s do Beliefs. Are you ready?
BE: Sure.
SH: Would you like one, two, or three?
BE: I haven’t chosen a one yet, so...
SH: I love this question, actually, and it’s ‘cause I have good answers to it, so I’m dying to know everybody else’s answer to this question.
Have you ever had a premonition about something that came true?
BE: See, this is where, well, I guess I’m in a safe space. Yes, I have. I absolutely have. I have had some mystical moments, for lack of a better term. I can’t say that it was God divined that I knew that this was gonna happen, but for some reason, deep in my soul I was just like, “No, I know this is how it’s gonna turn out.”
I have no explanation [00:25:00] for how the premonition got there. It’s not like I had a vision. It’s not like anything happened, but I’ve had a couple moments in my life where I’ve been like, “Oh, no, I know how this is gonna turn out,” even though the data necessarily wouldn’t tell you that’s how it was gonna turn out.
The first time my husband applied for medical school, I don’t know, I just knew we weren’t gonna get in the first time. He sent his letters, and we were waiting for responses, and something just deep down inside of me was like, “Get ready to help him emotionally because you’re not gonna get in. This is not the round.”
And so it wasn’t a surprise to me when he didn’t get in the first time. So there have been a couple little things like that through my life. And I don’t know... Like I said, I don’t know the origin of that. I don’t know where that comes from.
CW: Okay, but I have a follow-up question to that.
At the time, though, did you think this was a prompting from the Holy Spirit or whatever, like letting you know?
BE: Absolutely.
CW: Okay. So you frame it differently now?
BE: Yes. I totally frame it differently now. But at the time, it was very much, yes, the Holy Ghost, God connecting with me, telling me, “This is not gonna happen, so get ready.”
Interesting. Absolutely.
SH: Interesting. I would feel guilty that I had those negative feelings about it. Like maybe I jinxed the situation. Or like, “Why can’t I believe that he’s gonna get in?” I would hate myself for that premonition. I would feel really bad about that.
BE: And now see, I don’t know, maybe because it didn’t have anything to do with me, not believing, or his lack of qualifications, or anything like that. It’s just hard to get into medical school. I can’t explain it necessarily, but it didn’t have anything to do with me being like, “I don’t think he can do it,” or, “He doesn’t have good enough qualifications.” It was just all of a sudden, “This is just not gonna happen this time.”
SH: But did you have to pretend for his sake that you were very hopeful and,
BE: Oh, yeah. I did not say anything to him out loud at the time. Definitely not.
CW: And then I have another follow-up question to that.
If that happened to me, I would be like, “Wow, I am so righteous and so worthy that God is giving me a little mini crystal ball.” I know we shouldn’t call it that, but did that in any way affect how you saw your own worthiness, righteousness, spirituality, Ms. Blakelee?
BE: Oh, sure. Absolutely.
CW: Okay, good.
BE: Absolutely. I don’t know that I was... No, I can’t even say that. The—what do I say—the evolved me now wants to be like, “I didn’t think I was better than anybody else,” but, like, let’s freaking get real. Of course I did! I mean, I was like, “We got married in the temple. We go and do temple ceremonies. We go to church every Sunday. I connect with God. Like, oh my gosh, God loves me so much and spoke to me.”
I mean, as much as I wanna be like, “No, I didn’t feel that way,” like, let’s get real.
SH: Did it impact how you went into it the next time?
Like, the next round of applications, did you feel differently about it? Or, like, were you worried that, “Oh, I don’t wanna feel that way again”?
BE: No, I can’t say that I was. Nope. That’s an interesting question. I never thought about that before, but I don’t think so.
I think probably because I had deep inside of me that ‘everything happens for a reason’ thought, right?
And so it was more like, we didn’t get in the first time for whatever reason, which at some point will be revealed to us. And so I think I probably just thought, “Well, now’s the time. Now it’s gonna happen this time because it was meant to happen or whatever.”
CW: Dang it, Blakelee, now I wanna have a whole conversation about that phrase. ‘Cause Kate Bowler, right, her book—Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.
There’s that, and then there’s also—maybe the more evolved us would use Richard Rohr’s line from Everything Belongs.
BE: Absolutely.
SH: Oh, now I wanna have a whole conversation about the interplay between those two ideas because it’s sort of a subtle shift, actually, when I think about it, but I hate the idea that everything happens for a reason. But I love the idea that everything belongs, so I gotta think more about that.
BE: I don’t know. You say it’s a subtle shift, Susan. I don’t know. I mean, it probably is, but also something that can just blow everything else out of the water. Like, it’s a subtle shift, but it can change everything.
CW: Ooh, say more. What do you mean?
BE: Like- Well, I don’t know. I guess it comes back to me and [00:30:00] what I understand now about God and how God really only creates and facilitates goodness.
So the trials that we talk about and the bad things that we talk about, how they’re, oh, God giving them to us—I don’t believe that anymore. So, when I don’t believe that we deserve suffering, that suffering comes from God, how do I shift my mind to say, “Well, I don’t think this is from God, but how do I make it belong in my life? How do I make it turn me more towards God or more towards my higher evolved self, even though it didn’t come from God?”
It’s just the nature of the world. It’s just the nature of human life. So I think that could just blow up everything—for me personally—versus being, “Yeah, you know, I just changed my understanding of God so much,” just deciding not to believe in a God anymore that orchestrates sadness and suffering, even if it would be for a learning tool, you know? Even if it would be for some good reason, I just don’t believe in a God that does that anymore.
CW: So good, Blakelee.
SH: Agreed. To me, the power of Everything Belongs is that it doesn’t really matter where it came from. I don’t need to solve the question of does God orchestrate it or not.
CW: So good. Well, Blakelee, thank you for having this quick chat with us.
Segment 3: A Conversation with Tedi Thompson
SH: Hey, Cynthia, we’ve got Tedi Thompson here. Hi, Tedi.
TT: Hi.
SH: We’re so glad you’re here. Let’s play What Do You Say? I’m going to ask you a question from our Memories category. Would you like to answer question one, two, or three?
TT: Let’s go one.
SH: Is there a childhood fear that you still carry?
TT: As it pertains to the church, I used to have a lot of fears. A lot of fears. Because in the culture I grew up in, we were taught that. That’s kind of what we were taught.
But I have worked through most of those fears. I would say I used to fear God. I mean really fear God.
CW: Really?
TT: And I reached a point in my life that I just didn’t wanna live that way anymore.
So I got some help, and through a lot of therapy, we worked through that. And I have a totally different relationship with God now. I would say I don’t fear him anymore.
I don’t fear him. I don’t fear the afterlife. It’s a whole different relationship. It’s kind of, I feel like it’s a whole different God now than I was raised to believe in.
And I’ve created that myself, and I have a lot of peace with that. So I would say that was one of my biggest fears, and I’ve worked through that.
When I think about my relationship with God now, I don’t have fear associated with it. I believe in a God that is full of grace, that he’s not looking, he or she or whoever it is, is not looking for me to do something wrong that they can chastise me for or anything else.
But yet all they want me to do is succeed and be happy, find joy, things like that. So that’s a fear that I have worked through.
As far as do I still have fears?
Well, I do have fear. I don’t actively attend church anymore. And I do fear rejection. Only by family, and I have not been rejected yet. But I do fear that a little bit. It’s just in me, I don’t wanna let anyone down.
But at the same time, I have to be authentic to myself, and I have to have peace. And at this time in my life, I feel more peace by not attending the traditional church.
CW: So, a minute ago, you said in talking about how you see God now, you said something like, “That’s how I’ve created God.” And I was wondering—because that’s kind of a buzzword in our LDS tradition, creating God in your own image—what do you say to people if they would say that to you?
Or just, you know, process that a little bit out loud. I’d love to hear you say anything about that.
TT: I mean, I feel that none of us really know who God is, right? But, we’re taught, and so then we create that in our minds of this is who God is, and I had to recreate.
I had to undo what I was taught, because I didn’t like the fear. And so I had to then rethink, “Who is God to me?” I have to come up with that myself. I can’t be taught that. I don’t want anybody to [00:35:00] tell me who is God. I’m going to find that for myself.
So I’m not creating God in my own image. I’m just creating a God that I can have peace with.
CW: I love that distinction.
SH: Can I ask you a quick follow-up question? I’m just curious to know—you said it took a lot of counseling for you to work through this specific thing—and I’m just wondering if your counselor was a Latter-day Saint or was from another religious tradition or what?
I would like to know how that counseling relationship informed where you’ve landed now.
TT: Well, that is a great question, because when I hit my breaking point and I thought, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this on my own. I’ve gotta get some help,”
I swore that day I would not go see an LDS counselor because I didn’t want them to try to sway me back to- you know, whatever their beliefs were or anything else. But I kept getting recommendations for a specific therapist. And I looked into her, and she is LDS and I thought, “Well, it’s just who I felt good about.” You know?
I kinda had a gut feeling, so I went to her. And funny enough, she is LDS, but she’s from a whole different part of the country than, like, Utah or Idaho, where traditional Mormons are. It’s a different culture where she grew up. And I have to say that it was the best decision I could have made because she is LDS, and I believe she’s pretty active.
But she’s experienced a lot of the same things I have as well, in that people didn’t always—in the church—necessarily like her because she’s educated, she has a career, she kind of broke the mold. And that is me too. I’ve always had a career, even when I was raising my kids and things like that.
And so I wasn’t always treated really well, so she does get that. And not one time has she ever tried to push her beliefs on me. Not one time has she told me that I should go to church. She’s been excellent. I think she follows all the rules.
CW: Yeah, best practices.
TT: Yeah, I’m so glad I saw her, and I wouldn’t think about going to see anyone else.
CW: Oh, gosh, that’s great. So glad that was a good experience.
Well, I’m going to ask you a question from Insights, even though I wanna have a whole conversation now about having a career as an LDS woman. But maybe another day. Maybe another day. I’ll stick to the rules here. Okay, would you like one, two, or three?
TT: Let’s go two this time.
CW: All right. This is a big one.
How do you make sense of suffering?
TT: Well, again, I feel that’s evolved for me too, because of how I was raised in the church. And I have to say, a lot of these things I was taught not so much by my parents, but by my leaders.
My mom really didn’t believe this either, but I mean, it was so ingrained in so many of the classes I attended and everything else. But I felt like people who suffer—they suffered for a reason. It was because they had done something wrong and that people deserve to suffer.
And as I’ve aged, I think I’ve learned to have more grace for people, just as I’ve learned to have more grace for myself. Because I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I have suffered, and I don’t think I deserve to suffer. I don’t necessarily think anyone deserves to suffer.
I think it just happens, and it is part of life. We all have to suffer. But I don’t necessarily think somebody who lives a life of—let’s just say crime—they’ve committed crimes and they’re suffering because of that—I don’t think necessarily they deserve to suffer any more than I deserve to suffer.
But sometimes our decisions will dictate that and it’s just part of life. I truly don’t think God wants anyone to have to suffer. But again, God knows that we all will suffer in some form or another. Does that answer your question?
CW: It does. I’m the one who made up that question, and I just thought that whoever we asked could take it in a myriad of directions. I really like the direction you took it—as far as deserving suffering—just because I think that’s such a big conversation. We talk so much about consequences in our church, you know, breaking commandments and the consequences that follow.
And so I think it makes a lot of sense to me, your angle on that. I think there are other angles to take, like how do you make sense of starving children in Africa, you know?
I think there are so many ways, so I’m really glad I asked you that one. I really like where you took it.
TT: Well, I kind of relate it to shame a little bit, suffering to shame a little bit.
I really hate the phrase, “Shame on you.” And then usually follow it up by, “Well, if they would’ve been living their life right that probably wouldn’t have happened.” And I just do not agree with that.
And I try really hard not to shame anyone, ever. But I can’t say I always did that. I’ve shamed people and then watched people suffer and thought, “Maybe they deserve that,” and I no longer believe that.
CW: Grace for all, right?
TT: Yes
SH: Exactly. We’re gonna move into the Beliefs category, and I’m going to ask you question one, two, or three.
TT: Well, let’s just do all of them. I’ll do three this time.
SH: Is there something you think you’re probably supposed to care about that you just don’t?
TT: In way of beliefs? Eternal families would be one. Because at this time I don’t attend church, so I don’t attend the temple—which to be quite honest, I never really did attend the temple because I wasn’t comfortable there—but I think: Should I believe in the temple ceremonies of eternal families?
Because I really don’t. I don’t think that God is going to require that of me to be able to have my family with me in the afterlife.
But sometimes I do wonder: Should I care more about that? And I don’t know. I always reserve the right to change my mind, because I change my mind a lot on different things as I learn and as I grow in my experiences.
So I do reserve the right to always change my mind on that. But at this time, I do wonder: should I care more about those types of ceremonies, and should I believe in them more? But at this time, I just don’t.
SH: Okay. Can I ask you a follow-up?
TT: Yes.
SH: Is that something that has changed for you? Did you use to believe in them and care about them, but you don’t anymore? Or have you just kinda never really cared much about it?
TT: I was taught to care, and I know that was one thing that was really important to my mom, the eternal family thing.
And I think that’s because my mother’s father—so my grandfather—he died. He was killed in World War II three weeks before she was born, so she never had the opportunity to meet him. You know, when somebody dies, they become kind of perfect oftentimes. You know, oh, they’ve done no wrong, and we put them up on a pedestal. And that’s how she was taught about her father the whole time she was growing up and as an adult. And so she thought, “This is my only way. This is the only way I’m ever going to get to meet my dad.”
And as some of my beliefs have shifted, it kind of makes me feel a little bit sad for her that she thought that she had to jump through all of those hoops in order to be able to meet her dad.
But yes, so at one time I did believe, even if I don’t wanna do this, I have to do this. I guess for that reason, it was important to me. But even though I never did enjoy the temple. I mean, the first time I went through I was having an anxiety attack and I nearly ran for my life…
SH: I hear you.
TT: But I did feel like it’s important. I have to do this because I was taught that.
CW: What year did you go through the temple, Tedi?
TT: 1994.
CW: Okay, same as me.
TT: Yes, I’ve heard you say that, and I thought, “Oh, we probably had a similar experience.”
CW: Yeah. My experience was more, “Is that all?” Because my whole life, the temple was built up as “You will know the things of eternity,” and I was like, “I didn’t learn anything there that I hadn’t learned in church my whole life.” So I just, that was my overwhelming feeling, was, is that all? Just, you know, disappointment. I went in there expecting the world, but anyway.
TT: Well, they don’t prepare you for anything that happens in there. And so it was just almost too much for me. I’m so commonsensical, logical thinker, that it was just way too much for me. I just didn’t get it.
CW: I feel that deeply as a commonsensy, logical person as well.
SH: I’m pretty sure you’re not the only ones.
SH: Oh, thank you, Tedi.
TT: Hey, thank you, ladies.[00:45:00]
Segment 4: Contemplation Corner
CW: All right, Susan. Stephanie, what a wise woman she is. I really enjoyed everything we discussed with her. What stood out to you?
SH: Well, the first thing I wanna say is how relieved I am that I never had to sing the I Want to Be a Mother song- that she talked about.
CW: I just wanna say, that song, I looked it up afterwards and watched the YouTube video that goes along with it, which is very interesting, and it’s by a woman named Janine Jacobs Brady.
So I, just in case it gets back to Janice Kapp Perry, and she’s like, “I did not write that song.”
SH: Yep, Janine Jacobs Brady is another buzz name of primar song music.
If it wasn’t Janice, you knew it was gonna be Janine based on the time period that we’re talking about. So I wasn’t surprised by that. Actually, the whole video, you know what? I’ll post a link to the video in our show notes because it’s such a time capsule to me. It was fun.
But anyway, I really loved that Stephanie talked about motherhood from a lot of different angles. She talked about her own. She talked about her mother’s. She talked about kind of the interplay and relationship between those things. And when she was talking about her mom, I really loved this description that she used.
She talked about her mom having three children that you’re taking through it with you.
And I feel like that’s such an expansive way to think about it because it’s like allowing the woman to have her own journey outside of her role of mother. I think with our mothers, it’s really hard for us to separate them away from that role and from all of the impacts that their motherhood has had on us, right?
But I mean, the mother is a woman in her own right who is having her own journey. And so I, I just love the idea that you’re just taking your children through it with you while you’re navigating actively, in real time ... with no instructions, in real time, right? I mean that, man, that’s a whole thing.
That is just a whole thing. It’s a whole thing.
And you know, I think it takes some work to get to that perspective. I think that there comes a time in your life where you get to the age of being able to think of your mother as a woman and not just as your mother, but I’m guessing that happens for people at different times.
CW: For sure. Definitely later in life.
SH: Right, and I did tons of therapy trying to process that complicated relationship in my 20s. But the fact that I went through my whole 20s still needing to do all of that therapy, like, I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t able to peel my mother—her individual life and her selfhood—I wasn’t able to pry my grippy hands off of that in my 20s. That came a lot later.
One of my favorite books—I have a book of essays, and I ... dang it, I couldn’t find it—of women writing about their relationships with their mothers. Anyway, one of the lines from that book that I love so much is, “The past is a country my mother never visits.”
And that rang so true to my own personal complex relationship with my mother because, for a long time, I felt so stuck in that past. It’s like I was living in that past. She’d moved on with her life. And so, for me, allowing both myself and my mother to be in the present, like, actively in the present together, I think that might be the biggest personal growth that I have ever navigated.
It wasn’t easy.
So I loved hearing Stephanie’s perspective on her own relationship with her mother and how she’s come to think about some of what sounds like maybe difficult experiences that they had together.
CW: I was really touched when she was talking about her mom and she used the phrase, I think she said, like, her mom’s problems were thrust upon her. And she did the best she could. And I thought, “What a grace-filled way to describe a complicated relationship,” right?
When our parents were also raised by messy humans, and so they have their own problems that were thrust upon them. And it’s interesting, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about free will and agency, and I think, Susan, you and I have even talked before about having an episode, like, do we really have agency?
And I don’t think we’ve had it yet because it’s such a complicated topic. But I was watching a Soul Boom interview with Rainn Wilson. He was interviewing Nadia Bolz-Weber a year ago, and as you and I both know, she does volunteer work in a women’s prison.
And she was [00:50:00] saying, “Did those women really have a choice in life about- how they ended up where they ended up?” You know, she went through a whole list. Not proper medical care, not proper dental care, abuse, neglect, poverty, all of these things that were thrust upon them, like Stephanie mentioned about her mom, and I kinda got a little bit closer to understanding free will.
Do we have free will? And in that interview, Nadia Bolz-Weber said, “People blame these women for their choices, but what about society’s choices for these women?”
And that just really hit me because I thought oh, yes, we like to just look at a person as if they lived in a bubble and they made the choices they did, but what about the way society treated them?
And gave them or didn’t give them what they needed, whether that’s parents, government leaders, or school leaders. Anyway, I’m not sure I’m ready to have an episode yet on free will, Susan, but I wanna keep thinking about it.
SH: I think Big Ideas—Agency is a strong contender for season opener for our next season, Cynthia.
We’ve talked about that for a long time. But I love that you bring it up here. I love that you bring that idea of agency into this conversation because it was so interesting to me—listening to Stephanie talk about her own motherhood—how she started out by framing it as there was this programming running in the background, right?
And that goes back to the song that she was talking about, saying there was this programming running in the background. And then she grows up to have six children, right? Which is like, even the number specified in the song.
CW: Oh my gosh. It’s almost eerie.
SH: It is a little eerie, and I think she kind of pointed to that in the way that she described it. And then she comes to this point in her life where she really took hold of her agency for herself and decided, “I have all these other things that I want. I have gifts that are going unused,” you know?
Anyway, I just loved her description of that. All of it was really resonant for me as a woman who grew up in the church and made choices. Or didn’t.
CW: Right. Consent. We’ve come back to consent already, Susan. Yep. Put the bean on your bingo card there.
SH: Also, from our conversation with Stephanie, let’s talk about Heavenly Mother for a minute because I was so struck by her line where she said, “I realized it was me that was missing” when she was thinking about the whole God story in her life, about God as creator, you know?
And I think it was interesting what question got her to this, because wasn’t the question that we asked her something about a belief that helps you make sense of the world or something?
And she went straight to God, but that there was a critical component missing as she tried to sort out and make sense of the world, because she saw no place for herself in her image of God.
CW: It felt like that was the most perfect, concise sentence of the problem of not having a feminine divine all summed up in, like, six words, seven words.
SH: 100%, yeah. It was just one of the best lines that I’ve ever heard come out of a guest’s mouth on our show.
CW: Right.
SH: It just said everything.
CW: I realized it was me that was missing. And I’ve been thinking about that since we had this episode with her, and I thought, okay, men see male deity, and maybe that’s their aspiration.
I mean, we are told we have kingdoms, thrones, principalities. So whether or not we’re still teaching you can become a god, we’re teaching you at least get to be like God.
But what about for women? We’re missing from that narrative. We’re not there in the temple endowment, which is where the whole creation story happens.
It’s all men doing the creation.
Stephanie realized she was missing, and I’m missing, and you’re missing. It’s tragic.
SH: It’s tragic. It was also a total gut punch to me when she said we’re actually encouraged not to believe in Heavenly Mother too much.
And it occurred to me, I’ve said before that one of the tricky things about polygamy is the thing that we have to sort of accept it. We’d be in big trouble if we made too much noise about not accepting it, but we’d also be in big trouble if we accepted it too readily, right?
I mean, there’s actually a temple recommend interview question that guards against that. Well, I feel like Heavenly Mother is the same way. It’s like she’s in the doctrine. We have to sort of assent to it, but if we believed too much, if we wanna do anything like treat her like deity—pray to her, you know, talk about her, any of those kinds of things—we’re in big trouble. We’re probably in more trouble doing that. [00:55:00]
There’s nothing that can give a subject too much power, like not being able to talk about it, and I think Heavenly Mother definitely belongs in that category.
We can’t move her to a normal place where we can see ourselves and make sense of the whole thing because it’s too fraught. We’ve created this dynamic where it’s just totally fraught.
CW: And it’s not even like what you and I are talking about is, like, way in the past, right?
I mean, Elder Renlund’s talk was just a couple of years ago. So then I just feel like this is just something that keeps surfacing every few years. It’s our church leaders who bring it up with a little bit of a finger wag. In other words, it’s not fading into the background.
Like, this isn’t one of the topics where we can be like, “Huh, we don’t really mention this anymore.” Like, it’s pretty explicit. It’s pretty explicit, “Don’t go there.”
SH: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a topic that’s gonna go away, and I don’t think it should go away until we resolve something about it.
All right, let’s talk about Blakelee.
CW: Let’s do. For those who don’t know, Blakelee works with us and helps us with so many things behind the scenes, so I was really glad we got to speak with her for a few minutes.
SH: Yeah. One of the main things she does, where our listeners can see her creative work on display all the time is that she is the curator and the editor of Say More for us.
So that’s all Blakelee. If you ever wonder how did she think of that amazing image?” It’s because it’s Blakelee, and Blakelee’s brain is like that. Blakelee’s a force, a creative force in the world. So we’re so grateful to have her on our team.
CW: I was really touched hearing her mom’s story. Well, it’s Blakelee’s story, their whole family’s story—when her brother came out as gay. And how that kind of immediately sent her mom into a faith crisis of some sort. I mean, I don’t know how her mom would describe it, but something changed.
I don’t know, for the millionth time, like, Susan, how many people went looking for “trouble”?
I’m putting trouble in air quotes there. Like, how many people went looking for “trouble” reading anti-Mormon literature. Like, how often does a person just have lifey things happen to them—like a child coming out—and that kind of sends them into a tailspin?
And what does that even say about our church that having a child come out makes your church life harder? When hard things hit our lives, shouldn’t church be our refuge? I mourn that. That shouldn’t be the case.
SH: No. That shouldn’t be the case. I mean, ideally, you have religion in your life because it can help you navigate the difficulties and complexities of your mortal experience, right? But this is a case where it just heaps a whole bunch of new difficulties and complexities on something that already is going to be very emotional, I think—having a child come out—you’re already gonna be dealing with just the emotion of that experience, and of moving through that with your child. You’re trying to help them process that experience as well.
CW: Exactly. Have you ever heard an LGBTQ parent say, “When my kid came out, my church experience got instantly better”?
SH: No, I’ve never heard one say, “When my kid came out, thank goodness we had the church.”
Okay, the other thing that I really wanted to talk about from our conversation with Blakelee is the idea of everything happens for a reason versus everything belongs. Because as soon as those two things came out in tandem in the conversation, I was like, “Ooh, there’s a whole conversation to be had there.”
It’s so compelling to me to think about how those work together and how they don’t. So I’ve done some thinking about it, and I feel like everything happens for a reason suggests that God is controlling it all, and it’s up to us to accept it.
Like, if you got cancer and a church member says to you, “Everything happens for a reason, so this is gonna be for your good in the end,” or whatever, they’re pretty much just saying, “Get on board with whatever awful thing God is doing in your life. It’s your job to accept this and assign God to it somehow.”
Whereas, to me, everything belongs suggests that God is with us in it. It’s the God who doesn’t spare you from anything, but sustains you in all things- right?
And I said in the conversation with Blakelee that it was a subtle shift, and she said, “I don’t think it’s subtle at all. It changes everything.” And I understand. I mean, I agree. It’s not a subtle life shift. It’s a huge perspective shift, but it’s sort of a subtle shift from a philosophical [01:00:00] standpoint—or the way you would express those ideas is it’s pretty subtle.
So I had to really think through that like, “What’s the difference here?” And I grabbed a couple of quotes from Richard Rohr’s book. As you know, my favorite Richard Rohr book is Everything Belongs. So I grabbed a couple of quotes from that I just wanna share.
The first is he says, “If the veil parts once and you know life is radically okay, then you are—to use the normal Christian language—a child of God. You are in union. There is nothing to prove. Nothing to attain. Everything is already there. It is simply a matter of recognizing and honoring and trusting.”
Which is very different from accept what God is doing and get on board with it, right? In my opinion, recognizing and honoring and trusting are better words for approaching my life experience in a way that actually feels sustaining and helpful.
Everything happens for a reason feels dismissive to me of my experience.
CW: Totally agree.
SH: And then the other quote from Richard Rohr is he says, “I look for meaning, but as someone said, ‘If you understand it, things are just as they are. If you don’t understand it, things are just as they are.’ The mystery is to be ready to receive things just as they are and be ready to let them teach us.”
So it’s not a difference where you’re not willing to learn from your own life and your experiences. I think those two phrases both can have that in common, that eventually this is gonna make you who you are, and that may end up being a good thing.
You can’t know at the outset what the consequences personally for you are gonna be from those experiences. But the idea that we can be ready to receive things just as they are readies us. It prepares us. It puts us in an orientation to our experiences where we’re more ready to learn from them.
CW: Yes, I was just gonna say that. It’s a subtle shift in our orientation. And I really love your distinction between those two phrases. You know, everything happens is God is controlling, whereas everything belongs is God with us, right?
Like if you’re sitting in a hospital bed and you’re ill, you know, everything belongs is, to me, God sitting by your bedside holding your hand.
God didn’t put you in the hospital. They’re not curating this for your own good, but they’re going to be with you through that.
And I agree with Blakelee. That changes everything. It’s not subtle at all.
SH: No, it’s not subtle at all. She was absolutely right.
CW: Well, speaking of God, we have to talk about Tedi Thompson. Oh my gosh. I just love that Tedi, she was so energetic in the way she was like, “I don’t fear God anymore. I’m good. We’re good now.”
And I was like, yes! This is the magic pill that I want to give to every woman who kind of lands in an ouchy space and finds the At Last She Said It space. Do you know what I mean? I want to give them that pill of like, “You’re good with God. Nothing to fear anymore.”
SH: Well, I also loved that she framed her whole experience with God starting with fear, because she really readily acknowledged that her ideas about God were fearful. That God was a God of fear for her. And I don’t know that there are that many Latter-day Saints who would feel that they could be honest in that way about the God that they had been given through their religion?
CW: That’s why I want it to be a pill, Susan. I wanna shove it down people’s throat! Because I don’t even think we see how fear-based our thoughts were until it’s years down the road. And that seemed to be Tedi’s journey as well, so I felt less alone just hearing her talk about that.
SH: Totally agree. That’s why I loved it when she talked about creating God. She framed it as creating a God that she can have peace with.
I mean, I’m not sure I’ve talked or written about anything more as an LDS woman than my inability to find peace. And so I resonated so deeply when she said it that way.
Like, this has been the work of my own spiritual life— creating a God that I can have peace with. And I make no apology for creating that God.
CW: What I think the church warns us about—creating God in your own image—you and I would just call it relationship, and that’s an inside job.
SH: Right. I don’t feel like God is something that someone else has a responsibility to define for me or teach me. That’s something that I have to find, that I believe [01:05:00] we all have to find.
CW: That’s what I got from Tedi, that she was very much like, “I’ve done the work. This was my job to do. It was an inside job.”
And I was like “I’ve heard Susan talk about this,” so we’re in good company with Tedi.
SH: Yes, I thought it was beautiful.
Pema Chödrön says, “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
And I think that statement operates in interesting ways in this conversation about God and creation, actually, because I think we feel intense fear. Tedi started out by framing her ideas about God as fearful to begin with, and I think we feel intense fear about maintaining those kinds of boundaries around our ideas of God. We don’t really allow anything to violate that wall, right? The wall around God’s identity and what God’s expectations are for us.
Those things are also closely guarded out of fear. So that fear, about our God of fear, is an extra layer of fear.
CW: It’s fear on fear.
SH: Yeah, our God fear is wrapped in another layer of fear that we’ve imposed on it. So, there is so much fear around all of it. But the only way to get rid of God fear, if you’re to believe what Pema Chödrön says—and I think she’s extremely wise on most things—the only way to get rid of that God fear would be to keep going through it to the other side, right?
CW: But that’s not our reaction.
SH: It’s not our reaction, but I think eventually, maybe you come to a place where the fear is so painful, so not serving you in your life, so not what you need, that you’re willing to keep walking toward that fear. So I guess I would just say, if you’re deconstructing your God, then when the fear gets really intense—keep going. It means that you’re moving in the right direction. It means that you’re moving towards something more true for you—something that can sustain you.
CW: I’m so glad we’re bringing up the fear angle here because we’re already planning in our brains Season 12, and I know we’re gonna have another conversation about fear. So I have plenty to say and…
SH: Yep.
CW: Hold that thought, Susan. Hold that thought until this fall.
SH: Tedi also talked about reserving the right to change your mind. Oh, my goodness—THIS. Because one of my pet peeves as a Latter-day Saint has been that I don’t think Mormons’ views are expected to evolve. I really don’t, on basically anything.
CW: No, we’re expected to endure to the end. That’s it.
SH: Correct.
CW: Wash, rinse, repeat.
SH: Yeah, and that’s your brain, that’s your body, that’s every part of you—your ideas, your convictions. It’s all supposed to endure to the end. We talk about seeking further light and knowledge or learning line upon line, but I have not experienced my church life as a place where I was encouraged to change the way I think about anything, really.
In fact, fear of having our minds changed keeps us from thinking about a lot of things at all, which is—hello, looking at you—confirmation bias. We just had that episode. So we specifically try not to have our minds changed.
CW: Okay, Susan, but if you’re gonna use that phrase—our very LDS phrase of seeking further light and knowledge—the problem is embedded right there because that just means more of what you already have.
More of what you have. More
SH: More of what you have. Yes! More on top of…
Same with line upon line, though. It’s like take what you already have and then dial it up a notch.
CW: Exactly. So I think that’s not the kind of change Tedi was talking about, right? And the kind of change that you and I have experienced is completely revolutionary. Literally, the word revolution— to turn around, to just make this complete revolution and end up in a different place. To me, that has a way different feeling than further light and knowledge. Just say it!
SH: You’re absolutely right, and I had not even thought of that. But, erase that chalkboard, knock down the block tower, whatever.
I don’t think you’re ever gonna hear someone encourage you to do that at church, but I testify that these things are true.
CW: I testify as well.
SH: Okay, last thing I wanna talk about. Cynthia, let’s talk about being LDS and not necessarily caring, I’m using air quotes there, about “eternal families”.
CW: Oh, go for it, Susan, ‘cause I don’t even know what to say. When I saw you put this in the notes, I was like, what?
SH: I just wanted that sentence to be in the room.
CW: Okay. Pass the popcorn.
SH: Asking for a friend. I’m not even sure those are the right words to use, like, not caring about eternal families.
Like, it’s way more nuanced than that, right? But it’s this idea that that’s not the thing, that idea is not the compelling thing that is [01:10:00] driving all the choices you make and everything you do.
Which is kind of the place I came to with it, because my kids all left the church. So, as we talk about it, my table is already full of empty chairs. I can see that from here, based on the way we talk about it now.
CW: Yeah. Right? And maybe, let’s change the phrase. Instead of saying we don’t have to care about eternal families, what about caring about the doctrine of eternal
families?
SH: I think that’s true.
CW: I mean, I think what you’re saying is it no longer-
SH: That can’t be the animating thing about religion for me.
CW: Right. Well, and I’m thinking of our other favorite Adam Miller phrase we always use, a weight-bearing question.
Like, the doctrine of eternal families no longer for you was a weight-bearing question. Nothing was hinging on that anymore.
SH: Right. It can’t, because I learned that the doctrine— as I understood it—is not true. I know this.
As soon as you start talking about empty chairs or anything resembling sad heaven, I just have to know that’s not true. It doesn’t make sense with anything I’ve come to know or understand about my children, about love, about my capacity to love, and therefore, about God and God’s capacity to love. It doesn’t make sense.
So I had to throw it out.
But the other part of that sentence I wanted to put in the room is being LDS and making that shift. ‘Cause once you’ve made it—it’s a thing to be LDS and no longer think about it that way. It kind of calls the temple into question. It calls a lot of what we talk about an ascent to a church. A lot of the messages you’re gonna hear are just no longer gonna resonate. It’s sort of a real thing.
CW: Again, this is an inside job—how you’re gonna reframe the whole eternal families thing because the party line stopped working. Then what are you gonna do? And then it becomes an inside job. I mean, all of this stuff should be an inside job, but some things can only be an inside job because the organization is never going to give you permission to set something aside—something as big as eternal families.
SH: Right. And the thing about an inside job is, it spills out, man. It spills, it gets on other things. It gets on everything. So I tried to keep it an inside job, but let’s just say, as a member who sits in church in the pews on Sunday, this is something I’m very actively chewing on and working through.
CW: Well, Susan, we went way over. We are so ridiculous. We have talked and talked, so we’ll see how much we chop chop and what ends up in the episode, but dang it that just goes to show how much we loved these three women we talked with. They were wise and amazing, and how did we get so lucky to get to have these convos?
SH: Cannot thank them enough for sharing with all of us, so thanks, Cynthia.
CW: Thank you.
Voicemail 1:
Hi, Cynthia and Susan. I just finished listening to your most recent podcast episode, and you guys mentioned one thing about how women are given the pedestal of piety, and it made me think of one quote that I heard years ago. I don’t know who to attribute the quote to, but it essentially says that a pedestal is just as confining as any other small space.
And I think that it’s so true, especially in the church. As a woman, I’ve been told my whole life pretty much that I should be so grateful for my place as a woman, that I’m just treated so well and I’m respected so much, and that I don’t need the priesthood because of how much God loves me and how much the church loves me.
And it just feels so confining to be put on that pedestal, kind of exactly what you guys were talking about with this pedestal of piety. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to be on a pedestal because at the end of the day, it’s just a prison. No matter how pretty the pedestal looks, it’s just a prison that confines you and prevents you from becoming who you really want to become.
Voicemail 2:
Hi, this is Emily. I wanted to comment on the quote by Debbie Thomas in your episode on piety. She talked about the modern tendency to read scripture with an individualistic lens by thinking me or inserting your name whenever the scripture says you. And then she says that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is actually talking about building a community of followers rather than focusing on the individual, which we tend to do.
And there’s been discussion lately about the new approved Bible translations and how important it is to have options that are more readable than King James. And I totally agree with that. But I also think that one benefit of King James is that individual versus collective is actually clearer than in the new translations.[01:15:00]
I’m sure that a lot of listeners know that in languages like French, German, Spanish, others, there’s a distinction between singular versus plural you. So, meaning that you literally use a different word depending on whether you’re talking to one person or more than one. Now, what a lot of people don’t know is that English also used to have this distinction.
Thee and thou were the singular forms, and you and ye were the plurals. So this can definitely impact our reading of scripture if we know what we’re looking for. For example, in Matthew 5, 14, ye are the light of the world, talking about the larger group.
And then in verse 41, whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. So that’s talking about an action that an individual person could take. There are so many ways, obviously, to read and interpret a text. And I don’t think that one way is always the right way. But I think this little fact about the history of English can be another tool in the toolbox.
SH: Don’t forget our website.
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