I watched the PBS documentary (as did over 250 million others) The Mormons and I was both impressed and disconcerted. I was impressed with the accurate portrayal of the past, including the good and the bad; I was impressed with Dallin Oaks’s admission of the complicity of the Mormons in…
Category: Testimony
Symbolic beliefs can counter cognitive dissonance, but at a cost
There Is Work Enough To Do
It was May of 1993. I was 7 months pregnant with my second daughter, and it was my most dreaded of days: Mother’s Day. I scrambled to get my three year old daughter ready for church, and my then husband, Jeff, gave me his usual Mother’s Day gift: nothing. He…
Blogger Land
Here in blogger land, people say the darndest things. And that’s just the comments. Recently I was lambasted for a post about a church meeting I had attended. The experience got under my skin, so I blogged about it. I was called, by several people, “shrill, unhealthy and bitter.”
Stinker
My mother is 77 (let’s say it all together..) “bless her heart”. She has severe senile dementia, congestive heart failure and is a breast cancer survivor. She is, in a nutshell, A Survivor. She has also reverted back to that state of a child where she’s lost certain social proprieties…
Authority, Power and Seeing Red
I went to an LDS ward meeting yesterday. Sacrament meeting. I went to support a friend who was singing; she is inactive, but they keep asking her to come sing. I don’t blame them, she’s got a killer voice. Before I left home, I asked my daughter “Do I look…
Abide with Me
I can’t sleep again. I got home late (10:30 LOL) and I was so exhausted I thought I was going to pass out. Well, I did, relishing the thoughts of sleeping in until…6 or 7 or something. But no. Four am on the dot. I keep thinking of the eulogy…
Marriage to Marriage
We are married to marriage. Our whole culture, across all socio-economic, religious, gender and political boards is overwhelmingly married to the idea of marriage. When someone divorces, they call it a “failed marriage”. But the implication is not that the actual pairing failed; rather, the implication is that something tragic…
Nuts n' Bolts
Here we are, getting down to the nuts n’ bolts of death. Cleaning out possessions from dad’s room, meeting with the mortician, going over the funeral plans, choosing flowers. I heard recently that from an LDS perspective, LDS funerals should have the three following components: Remembrances of the deceased’s life,…
All Is Not Well
I like knowing. I think we all like knowing. When someone asks me something and I know, I feel so useful, so helpful. ‘Oh I know!’
Perfection
I am a former Mormon. Many of you know this. I wondered today how much of the Mo I still have in me. I like to think that I am completely over being Mo. No more anger, no more hallucinations…that sort of thing. But I don’t think I am.