Preparation for the Temple

Last week, a close family friend went to the temple to receive her endowment. In preparation for that event, I wrote her a letter with temple preparation advice. The first half of the letter was practical advice about garment styles, and the second half was about the theology of the temple, with the specific purpose of mitigating some of the gendered language of the ceremony. I've reproduced the second half of the letter below, edited to remove any personal information.

I will be moderating comments on this post due to the sensitive nature of the topic. Comments that violate the comment policy or that quote lengthy excerpts from the temple ordinances will not be posted.

Flunking out of YSA

I often hear people in the church refer to those who marry in their 20's as "graduating" from the YSA program. Well, if that's the case, I just flunked out. I'm no longer a young single adult in the church. I'm now a single adult.

I kind of have mixed feelings about this, and honestly I didn't expect to be weirded out by it. For all the joking about flunking out of YSA, I honestly dropped out a few years ago. I've never been a part of a singles ward. (I'm opposed to the whole idea because it creates a division in the body of Christ. There isn't a separate church for single people, so the congregations should be integrated.) I stopped going to the activities a while back because the things that appealed to me when I was 19, going to college, and living with my parents weren't really relevant when I was in my mid to late 20's, working, and living on my own. Even the mid-singles activities don't really appeal to me. They tend to be the same as the YSA activities, only with a further skewed ratio of women to men. (At the YSA activities, I found it was about 2:1. In mid-singles, it's more like 4:1 or 5:1.)

It's hard being a single person in a married church. When the primary president announces to all of the teachers that there will be an inservice and to "please ask your husband to substitute teach your class so you can attend" or when the relief society president says "we have an assignment to perform proxy sealings at the temple next week and we need five couples to attend", it can feel like I'm invisible. Those same situations could have been handled like this: "Please find a substitute teacher so that you can attend next week's inservice." and "We need five men and five women to attend a temple trip next week." Just changing a few words can make a world of difference.

My life is great. I'm pretty happy, and I'm making progress in establishing myself in a rewarding career. I have friends, family, and a wonderful cat. But there's a part of me that feels I'm missing something. I want to share this awesome life with someone. I want someone to help share my joys and my burdens and I want to share his joys and burdens. But if that never happens, I think I'll be fine. (Even though church culture says that I shouldn't be fine. The constant battle continues...)

Living Water

In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.
John 7:38

After yesterday's downer, I promised a more upbeat post on the fantastic Saturday session of the mid-singles conference. So, here it is.

I arrived and mingled for a while. I met a guy who is in his last semester of law school, so we talked about law school for a bit. (There's something about the legal profession that creates an instant kinship when two people meet. I don't know why, but there it is.) I gave him a pep talk about the bar exam because he's a bit worried about it. Then we exchanged business cards. Then I ran into one of my friends who I hadn't seen in a while, and we took a seat in preparation for the keynote address.

One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism

[There is] one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.
Ephesians 4:5-6

I attended a mid-singles conference this weekend in the Bay Area. It spanned three days, with social activities on Friday night, spiritual/educational lectures on Saturday, and a church service on Sunday. Saturday was fantastic, and my report on that can be found here. Today's church service, however, wounded my soul deeply.

The keynote speaker for today's service was Julie Beck, the general president of the Relief Society. When President Beck got up to speak, I was hoping that what had been a wonderful Christ centered conference would be concluded with yet another message focusing on the Savior. Sadly, this was not the case.

Matching Dishes

When I moved out of my parents' house and into my own apartment several years ago, I bought all of my dishes, pots, pans, etc. from the thrift store. They were serviceable items, though they weren't that nice and they didn't match. My mom tried to comfort me by saying that when I get married, I can register for matching dishes. I didn't really care that my dishes didn't match because I was just so excited to be a real grown up with a real apartment.

Well, the coating on my thrift store pans has flaked off, my plates are chipping, my set of 5 pairs of chopsticks is down to 1 1/2, and my last bowl split in half. So, I decided it was time to replace them.

I headed to the thrift store to see if I could find new stuff. The stuff that was there wasn't in good condition, so I passed on it. Then I ordered some cookware off the internet. But I still didn't have plates and bowls. I had to run to the drugstore for some other stuff, and while I was there, I saw a sale on dishes. I bought a beautiful service for four consisting of dinner plates, salad plates, and bowls.

So, now I have brand new cookware and matching dishes. It's my graduation/remission present to myself. But in a way, it's also my non-wedding present to myself. While I certainly would like to find someone to share my life with, I'm ok if I don't. I have a happy and full life; I'm not stuck in some pseudo-adult limbo. And I don't need to wait for a man in order to have matching dishes.

Around the Bloggernacle - Volume 10

Marriage sure has been a big topic around the Bloggernacle this week.

By Common Consent has a post about the judgment that divorced members feel among ward members.

Wheat and Tares has two posts - One about ways to improve the mid-singles program, and one decrying the trend of people marrying later.

I've blogged a bit on the subject, and I don't really feel like rehashing everything I've said before. I do, however, want to bring up the point that a lot of the marriage rhetoric in the church seems to be along the lines of encouraging people to just get married to anyone with a pulse and a temple recommend. But people forget that marriage requires two people with compatible life paths to be in love with each other at the same time. Sometimes that takes a while. For those of you who found the right person at age 21, I'm happy for you. But I didn't. And I'm not some slacker just because the stars haven't aligned properly for me yet.

As we learn in song:
You can't hurry love. No, you just have to wait.

Around the Bloggernacle - Volume 9

I wanted to highlight two great posts around the Bloggernacle this week. The first one is by Seraphine at Zelophehad's Daughters. It's part of her series on 30-something single members in the church. This post is about dating advice, and she shares a list of bad advice people have given her.

The second post is by Ardis Parshall at Keepapitchinin. It's a response to Seraphine's post, and Ardis talks about what it's like being a 50-something single member in the church.

Both posts highlight the point that often the church doesn't know what to do with single members. I think the first step would be for the membership to recognize that this isn't the "church of eternal families". It's the church of Jesus Christ!

One of my favorite scriptures is in Ephesians 2:19, where Paul preached to the newly converted Christians.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.

Too often, single members of the church are treated as "strangers and foreigners" instead of "fellowcitizens with the saints". We can do better.

The Eternal Implications of the Male/Female Imbalance in the Church

I've been thinking about the male/female imbalance in the church and what that means for the hereafter. People have pointed to the fact that there are more active women in the church than active men, and they extrapolate that to the Celestial Kingdom, and then posit that there will be widespread polygyny as a result. There's a great post at BCC breaking down population statistics over time. The conclusion is that based on historical infant mortality rates, there will be considerably more men than women in the celestial kingdom.

Given those numbers, there are a few possibilities:

More on Dating/Marriage

SilverRain has an excellent post on her blog. It's entitled Singles of a Certain Age, or What I Wish Church Leadership Would Understand. She discusses the challenges that singles in the church face and the issues involved in singles' activities. She makes the excellent point that we want to be viewed as whole people and not as fundamentally broken due to our marital state. I want to give the whole post a hearty amen!

Other great singles-related blog posts:
I wrote a post about retention of YSAs in the church and a post on the ethics of dating.
Seraphine at Zelophehad's Daughters has a series of posts about being a 30-something single in the church.

A Follow-up On My Most Recent Post

I wrote a post on LDS dating, and I received a comment from Kress that deserves its own post. He said

What was wrong with so-and-so that "nice" just wasn't enough to keep your interest? What would change your perspective from "oh gosh why would I ever spend more time with so-and-so" to "well, he's a nice chap; why don't we do something different next time and see if I find him more interesting in a different setting?"

First off, I left out several key details of why the particular men I was set up with were bad matches. I left out these details in the interest of protecting their privacy. I'm certainly not one to write somebody off just because there were no sparks flying with violins in the background on the first date. In fact, some of my most successful relationships have been with men who didn't sweep me off my feet instantly.

What makes the dates with these "nice" guys awkward is the expectation (culturally) that there's only one purpose to the encounter - a marriage interview, and that it has to happen on the accelerated LDS schedule. (You know, the stories about people meeting and then marrying within a few months.) When I express a sincere desire to be friends with these men, they assume that means that I never want to see them again. Really, what it means is that I want to be their friend. Maybe something more will happen, but maybe not. Either way, when I tell a man that I want to be friends, it's not a brush off. It means I really want to be friends.

Stephen M at Ethesis addresses much better what I was trying to get at with my fungibility comment in his post On Finding a Match.

Ethics and Dating in the LDS Context

I minored in philosophy in college, and I was captivated by the study of ethics. Bioethics, legal ethics, business ethics, it didn't matter. I found it all fascinating. In fact, while I was on hiatus from law school, I almost decided to abandon a legal career altogether to become a bioethicist.

I recently read a blog post by Hugo Schwyzer discussing whether or not the "pick-up artist" phenomenon is compatible with feminism. This led me to thinking about dating ethics in general and within the LDS context specifically.

In the church, there are some specific issues surrounding dating that are different from the community as a whole. The biggest one is the doctrine of eternal marriage. The fact that we believe that families can be together forever isn't what sets us apart. The big difference is the belief that (heterosexual) marriage is necessary for exaltation.

This belief imbues relations between men and women with a certain degree of sexual tension. Instead of seeing members of the opposite sex as colleagues, friends, or acquaintances, there is a temptation only to see them as potential mates - potential tickets to the highest degree of Celestial glory.

How I Receive Personal Revelation

An anonymous commenter on my post Stake Conference and Personal Revelation said:

I was struck by the clear and very specific nature of the personal revelation you received last september regarding marriage. If it is not too personal, or difficult to describe, could you please relate the process of this revelation? Was it a voice, a warm feeling after a specific question or just what? I would sincerely appreciate your input...I don't think I have ever been able to distinguish between emotions, hopes, fears and the spirit.

I promised a follow-up post to respond to this question, and I'm only just getting around to it. I'm so sorry it took me so long. I hope you see this, Anonymous.

Abraham, Isaac, and Me

It's often said in the church that we will all have to endure a test of our faith like Abraham's. I'm going to set aside for a moment the discussion on whether or not that is hyperbole. It got me thinking. I've always had concerns with the story of Abraham and Isaac. What kind of God would ask someone to sacrifice his child?

Then I realized that in a very real way, God has asked that of me as well. I'm unmarried and I have no children. This is not because I desire a single and childless life. It is because, despite my pleadings, God wants me to be single right now. He asked me to sacrifice family life when He called me on a mission. He asked me to postpone childbearing for a few more years when he called me into academia. I'm itinerant right now because of the nature of my vocation, and that rootlessness is not conducive to family life. There's a common saying among female professors that the time between tenure and menopause is the only time the system allows for pregnancy.

I've never desired to be a stay at home parent, but I do want to have children. God has promised me children, but He has guided my life in such a manner that children cannot be a part of the plan right now. With each passing year that that is the case, the number of children I can bear drops. I'm old enough now that absent medical intervention, I likely will not have as many kids as I want.

God stopped Abraham from completing the sacrifice. In the end, he did not have to give up his child. That made me realize that God will do the same for me. I don't know if that means I'll get tenure expeditiously, if I'll have a longer period of fertility, or if I'll have the opportunity to adopt. All I know is that if I stay faithful, God will allow me the academic career He has called me to, and that I won't have to give up my children.

----
Note: This post is not the place for the "mommy wars". Any comments vilifying stay at home parents, working parents, or non-parents for the paths God has called them to and the life choices those callings necessitate will be deleted. Keep it civil.

Stake Conference and Personal Revelation

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I made it through finals, more or less. (I’m still waiting for several grades. I’ll never figure out why it takes the professors so long to grade exams. It’s been over a month.) I had a week off from classes, and for the past two weeks I’ve been juggling work with an internship for credit. However, that’s not the topic of this post. (That’s the topic of tomorrow’s post.)

The topic of this post is stake conference, personal revelation, and how it’s my lot in life to be misunderstood. Today was stake conference. Elder Trythall of the Seventy was the presiding authority. This morning, before the general session, he held a meeting for all the YSAs. The meeting was a question and answer session. Nobody seemed interested in asking a question, so I opened up a can of worms by asking a question that seems to crop up frequently in the Bloggernacle, most recently at Zelophehad's Daughters in Seraphine’s excellent series about being a 30-something single in the church.

For background, I’m 28, so while I’m technically still a YSA, I’m on the way older end. As regular readers of the blog know, I’m in law school and feel strongly called to use my God-given talents in the legal profession, most likely in legal academia. This tends to make me unattractive to the typical LDS man who wants someone who is 19, blonde, and with little ambition. (I've been told that the reason I'm single is that I'm too ambitious and too smart. Don't even get me started there.) Anyway, here’s the question I asked:

Inviting the Single Saint to Stay in the Church

This is in response to a post on Keepapitchinin, where some commenters asked what to do about the widespread inactivity of single church members ages 18-30. I decided that it merited a response, but I didn't want to threadjack a lovely post by Ardis.

I'm 27 and single, and I've been active ever since I joined the church as a teenager. Prior to my mission, I held several YSA and institute callings where I saw up close and personal the issues faced with rampant inactivity among the YSA age range. (In my stake, we had about 1000 YSAs on the rolls, and there were between 3 and 10 who were active.)

There are a few issues at play here:

First: The late teens and early twenties are a naturally itinerant time in the life of an individual. He or she is embarking on adulthood and has to find out what he or she believes and wants to do in life. This is often accompanied by going off to college or otherwise moving away from parents. Sometimes people slip through the cracks. If someone isn't converted to the gospel, it's easy to stop going when you move.

Second: The church often doesn't know what to do with single people. We're a church of eternal families. This is a central doctrine. It's a beautiful and all-encompassing doctrine, and sometimes in our excitement to proclaim and discuss it, we leave out people who aren't married. When every Relief Society lesson consists of "and here's how we can teach this gospel principle to our children" or "and here's how we can support our husband as he does xyz", it makes things less relevant to unmarried, childless members. Although I haven't attended singles wards, my friends who do have remarked that the lessons seem to be geared toward "all marriage all the time".

Third: In many areas, there is a critical mass problem. There often aren't enough single people, so those who are there feel alienated. Some of this is solved by singles wards, but when the singles wards suck away some of the faithful (usually across stake boundaries), it makes it that much harder for those few of us who stay in the geographic wards. The singles wards contribute to the married members not knowing what to do about single people because they so rarely interact with single people, as they're conveniently quarantined in a social leper colony.

Now that I've laid out what I see to be the problem, I'll propose my solution. Of course, your mileage may vary.

First: Eliminate singles wards. This will powerfully show the single members that we are all a part of Christ's church. There isn't a separate church for married people and single people. Granted, there will be some wards where there still isn't critical mass. If that's the case, designate one ward in the stake as some sort of singles magnet ward. Basically, it's a regular geographic ward (I hate the term "family ward"; it sounds so exclusive) where all single members are invited to attend along with the members within the ward boundaries. There is a ward like that in my area for the 25-45 age group and it seems to work well. (I don't attend as it's not in my stake, but many of my friends are happy about it.)

Second: Give single members meaningful opportunities for service. I can't stress this enough. I've felt most engaged in the church when I have felt that I had something to contribute. I find it tragic that so many singles go without a calling. We can help. Use us! We can teach, we can provide compassionate service, we can be in presidencies, we can help with the music. My favorite calling was nursery leader, which is usually the calling that a single, childless career woman would never be offered, but it was great to be asked to serve.

Third: Ensure that the youth (i.e. YM/YW) are given ample assistance and training in the gospel so that they can develop a personal testimony before they reach the critical YSA years. Personal conversion to the gospel is essential. Someone is much less likely to fall away if he or she has a relationship with God and a burning witness that this is His church.

Fourth: Get to know the singles as people, not as projects. We're not broken. We're fellow saints walking the same path as you. Sure, our life experiences are different, but that's part of the fun. We know things that you don't, and you know things that we don't. We can learn and grow together. Don't pity or patronize us. Sure, I want to get married, but I'm quite happy in my single state. I feel blessed for all of the opportunities God has given me, and if I sat around wallowing in pity and sorrow, I would be guilty of the sin of ingratitude. Please don't make it any harder than it already is.

What I Got Out of the Relief Society Broadcast

This post is a few days late. The General Relief Society Broadcast has been discussed in numerous places on the Bloggernacle over the past few days. I got something totally different out of the conference. In fact, it was something I wasn't even actively seeking.

Here's a little bit of background to make things make more sense. I'm single, I'm a grad student, and I'm old enough that if I were a guy, I would be a menace to society, but since I'm a woman, I'm merely the cat lady. Every so often, I wonder why guys are totally interested in being my friend, but totally uninterested in dating me. I got some insight from watching the broadcast.

You'll see above a picture of my right hand. The lighting is bad, but the inscription reads "True Love Waits". It's a chastity ring, a reminder of the promise I've made to abstain from premarital sex. I have worn this ring ever since I got home from my mission. Only a few people have asked me about it, and I'm always happy to explain.

Well, fast-forward to Saturday's broadcast. All of the talks were excellent. My big epiphany came not from any spoken word, however. As President Uchtdorf was giving his talk, he was gesturing animatedly with his hands. I noticed that he was wearing his wedding ring on his right hand instead of his left. I filed this away in my brain to research later.

After the broadcast, I looked on Wikipedia. It turns out that wearing a wedding ring on the right hand is traditional in many European countries. I live in an area that is culturally diverse, with people from all over the world living and working side by side. It occured to me that perhaps I haven't been getting attention from guys because they think I'm already married.

I put the ring on a chain to wear as a necklace yesterday. Maybe my un-ringed fingers will make a difference.

Anyway, the point of this story isn't about my ring at all. The point of the story is that inspiration can come at any time, even when the subject of the inspiration is totally distinct from the subject of the circumstances, and even when we aren't actively seeking answers on a particular subject. I love the Spirit.

I'm looking forward to General Conference next weekend to see what other inspiration I can receive.