You just moved into this branch 3 months ago and last Sunday they made you the branch president. During the week  sister X(*), a woman in the branch whom you barely know, made an appointment with you and shared some sad, shocking news: her husband has been unfaithful to her and broken his marriage vows. She offers as evidence the fact that she observed him entering a “house of ill repute” (her words) twice during the past week. She even has the dates and times written down.

You are righteously indignant that a priesthood holder would do this and contact brother X immediately.  You make an appointment for the following evening where you expect to lower the boom and explore the various options for church discipline, which you anticipate will be dispensed with a liberal hand. 

Br. X appears promptly for his appointment but he delivers another shocker.  When you ask him if he went to the brothel at the dates and times his wife wrote down, he answers affirmatively and forthrightly.  He goes on to explain that the reason he went to the brothel on those occasions was to speak to his wife, sister X, who works there.  Sister X denies this charge.

What do you do?  Is this marriage worth saving, or do you conclude that a marriage is pretty well shot when people start accusing each other publicly of participating in prostitution?  How do you get to the truth of the matter?  You can’t interrogate people in the style of detective Andy Sipowicz or even Jethro Gibbs.  You can’t enter the establishment in question to determine whether sister X really is employed there as a vendor of goods and/or services.  And there is still the big question about church discipline.  How would you approach that?  Of course we would expect a branch president to try to seek answers through prayer, but what kind of preparatory work do you think should be done in order ensure that prayers are effectual?

* This incident is a true story. It is recorded in a copy I have of the handwritten notes of branch presidency meetings from the New Orleans branch in 1844. X is a stand-in for a very common Mormon name of Scandinavian origin. BCC is just like Dragnet; we change names to protect the innocent, and maybe the guilty, too. There is a good chance that a reader of this blog would recognize the names of somebody in the family genealogy. I’m assuming that we really don’t want to know how great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother made her living.

I think we also need to recognize that even though this is an unusual situation, it illustrates the nature of intractable, difficult problems our bishops are called to handle. It shouldn’t be surprising if your bishop were over at the church right now, dealing with something just as off-the-wall and unsolvable. Next time you see him, thank him. And this incident also serves as a good illustration of the quirky combination of mixed motives, weakness, depravity, and nobility of which our fellow beings are composed, and whom we are obligated to love and help.

One of the really appealing things about the Mormon worldview is the way that it handles wrongdoing so adeptly.  Our ideas about agency, transgression, redemption, and eternal progress combine to help us see things we do wrong as learning opportunities.  We don’t think about cardinal sins or venial sins; we think about improving, and form Mutual Improvement Associations.  We see bad choices and failure as necessary parts of mortality.  Our restoration scriptures make it clear that the Fall was not an impediment to our salvation, but an important part of it.  We must taste the bitter so that we may learn to prize the good.  We are presented with a challenge and when we master it, all previous failures are forgotten.  Christ’s grace is sufficient, and a loss becomes irrecoverable only when we make a fully conscious, fully informed, deliberate turning away from that grace.  We believe we will be judged according to the true desires of our hearts, so it’s hard for Mormons to blunder their way into hell.

Those are some of the deep thoughts I have had while I’ve watched the replays (again and again) of Eric Bruntlett’s unassisted triple play. Two weeks ago in the Phillies/Mets game, history was made. For only the second time in over a hundred years, a player made an unassisted triple play to end a major league baseball game. With no outs in the ninth inning, and with runners on first and second, the batter hit a screaming line drive up the middle. Bruntlett made a good play by catching the ball (out # 1), then stepping on the base to throw out the runner who had failed to tag for out # 2. He then ran down the runner coming from first base and applied the tag for out # 3. All this happened, as you can see, in a matter of 2 or 3 seconds. This is an outstanding display of some great defensive baseball.

But here’s the thing. The only reason there were runners on base in the first place was because Bruntlett had misplayed the ball on both previous plays. His mistakes earlier in the inning had allowed runners to reach base safely. The odds say that when a team has runners on first and second with no outs, it is about 70% likely that at least one runner will come home safely, and in a sport where batting averages figured out to the third decimal are meaningful, the odds are what you go with. Bruntlett’s errors had him set up to be the scapegoat for a loss, but they also made his triple play heroics possible. He was very likely discouraged, but he persisted and put himself in a position to succeed. His play is a perfect illustration of the plan of salvation.

Sometimes I like to read 2nd Nephi chapter 2. But when I want a visual representation of the ideas in that chapter, I like to crack open a cold one and watch Eric Bruntlett go from goat to hero in the twinkling of an eye. May we all prepare ourselves to do the same.

I recently read through the Book of Mormon again.  I was interested in how the experience this time was different from other times, and also how it was the same.  Perhaps you have also noticed some of these points in your own reading.

A personal reaction to scripture

Scriptures, as well as other books, have an interesting way of revealing different things to different people, or to the same person at a different time.  Consider the story of Nephi and the brass plates.  What are we to learn from this story?   Ask 20 different Mormons and you’ll get 20 different answers, including probably the importance of faith, obedience,  perserverence, following the Spirit, family unity, geneaology, prayer, and so on.  And all the answers will be valid.  When I look at my missionary Book of Mormon, I am sometimes embarrassed at the things I underlined in red which I thought were enlightening or inspiring, but those were apparently the things I needed to learn at the time.  I also find it especially ironic that many of the passages which I thought were the most faith-promoting were precisely the passages which the Lutherans among whom I lived and served would have found to be the most faith-destroying.

Likening the Scriptures

I think the best way to get personal benefit from the scriptures is to apply lessons from them to ourselves, but this time through, I think I started to see some danger in the ways I have done it in the past.  Specifically, I think it is possible to go overboard and to start seeing answers where there aren’t any.  The Book of Mormon contains many distinctive phrases, and here are two of them:  Looking beyond the mark, and wresting the scriptures.  When we apply the scriptures to ourselves too aggressively we are doing both. So the insight I gained this time was to be a bit more cautious and to let the scriptures speak for themselves rather than assuming that I am always the star of the show. 

Authoritative interpretation

It occurred to me that the admonition in the Book of Mormon to liken the scriptures to ourselves runs into direct conflict with 2 Peter 1:20, which states that no prophecy in the scriptures is of private interpretation.  If we accept the Book of Mormon’s advice, it is all of private interpretation, or most of it.   There are limits, of course — I’m not free to interpret section 132 any way I feel like, at least if I want to remain in good standing in the church – but there is an entire cafeteria’s worth of smorgasbord to be found in our canon.  That’s why it’s called feasting upon the word.

Authoritative interpretation is often seen as a safeguard against the more wacky understandings which inevitably crop up.  But I realized that most of the really weird things I haved heard over the years — the current location of the 10 tribes and their methods of transportation, the notion that one’s race changes as one repents, the location of Kolob and the entire body of speculation which fits under the title of Seminary Science, the sexual practices of resurrected beings, absolutely bizarre interpretations of the Book of Revelation – I heard about all these things from authoritative sources, either in the priesthood hierarchy or the BYU religion department.  So ironically, authoritative interpretation often creates more misunderstanding than it clears up.  But I have found that scriptural exhortations to charity are helpful in these situations.  If a fellow member of my priesthood quorum thinks that Kolob is really one of the moons of Endor, I am more able to take a relaxed view.  It is really no skin off my nose, and I wonder if 2 Peter 1:20 isn’t one of those passages from the Bible that Joseph Smith planned to revise, but he just didn’t get around to it.

Scripture as a personal Urim and Thummim

Both Dallin H. Oaks and Bruce R. McConkie have advocated the idea that the scriptures are the key to personal revelation.  At a recent stake conference, the general authority visitor also stressed this theme, and recommended that we occasionally stop in our reading to pay attention to those “sudden strokes of intelligence” which might come.  If I understand correctly, the simple fact of opening the scriptures invites the Holy Spirit, which puts us in a frame of mind to receive personal revelation.  It is possible that God wants me to know something which is completely unrelated to the text on the page in front of me.  I tried that approach this time and I received no revelation, at least none that I will share here.  But I did find the experience to be worthwhile, and plan to continue this practice.   

The Book of Mormon and me

This book has become like a quirky old friend.  The repetitions have become endearing, and the klunkiness of the language is part of its appeal to me.  The book apologizes for itself, many times, and begs us to overlook the faults it readily acknowledges.  I had noticed this before, but not the frequency.  Sometimes my reading stops within the first 50 pages, so Nephi’s self-assurance had unduly influenced my reading and caused me to overlook how truly humble the book is. 

The title page announces that the purpose of the book is to convince its readers to believe in Jesus Christ.  It seems to me that this obvious point nevertheless gets overlooked, even by believing latter-day saints.  The book can be understood in many ways, yes, but the more time we spend looking for modern day parallels to the Kingmen, for instance, the more we will miss the message of Christ’s grace and the hope and redemption that he offers.  That is the central message and it is so huge that everything else must be seen as something of a sideshow.  Sideshows can be interesting and instructive, but they can also be distracting.  The book consistently seeks to persuade us to believe and repent, and we just as consistently want to talk about something else.  We cannot blame other Christians for missing the point of the Book of Mormon when we Mormons often seem intent on missing the point, too. 

I love the last few chapters of Moroni.  The teachings about faith, hope, and charity come through for me there so much more clearly than they do in Corinthians.  It interests me that the book’s final admonitions are to be filled with hope and love, and to believe in Jesus.  There are also passages in 2 Nephi, Mosiah, and Alma which elucidate our Savior and his willingness to bear with us and forgive us very clearly.  I’m thankful for them because they have helped me understand and believe.  My life is richer and more meaningful because of my encounters with the Book of Mormon.

Brother Lars Glenson is a good, though misguided and simple-minded soul who shows up hereabouts from time to time. He holds the study of Mormon history in special disdain and refers to it as Mormon Minutiae. Our Christian duty requires us to bear with Lars in his difficulties and to shed as much light as possible on his darkened path. It is in this spirit that BCC announces it will provide from time to time a new feature as a public service called Especially For Glenson. This service will be carried out in the form of short, inspirational posts, much like the format of Especially For Mormons. However, the BCC iteration will be better because the stories will actually be true. Please enjoy our first feature, which we will call Covered Wagon Feminism.

On June 6, 1846, the group of saints which Brigham Young called the camp of Israel had abandoned Nauvoo and were about one hundred miles west of the Mississippi.  The journal of Louisa Barnes Pratt records that the following incident took place:

Last evening the ladies met to organize.  Mrs. Isaac Chase was called to the chair.  She was also appointed President by unanimous vote.  Mrs. L. B. Pratt counsellor and scribe.  Several resolutions were adopted:….If the men wish to hold control over the women, let them be on the alert.  We believe in equal rights.  Meeting adjourned.  

I am very curious to know what incident or series of incidents caused the women of the camp to meet and adopt this resolution. On the other hand, we don’t need to read between the lines very much to be able to imagine a presider who enjoyed presiding a little too much and who is about to have his head handed to him.

The lesson for us is to realize that the uneasy tension between male priesthood and female empowerment has been with us since the very beginning. We speak of feminism as though it were invented by the scary ERA ladies in the 1970s, but we can see that as early as 1846 Louisa Pratt, faithful saint and wife of Addison Pratt, was ready to go apostate, abandon her family, stop shaving her legs and wearing a bra, join the paid workforce, and get a tattoo on her right gluteus maximus that said To Hell With Housework.

Perspective, Lars.  That’s what we need.  Those who do not understand Mormon Minutiae are condemned to repeat it.  Some of the issues we see before us have already been dealt with, albeit in a slightly different form.  An awareness of that fact allows us to approach our current challenges without hyperventilating.

I once had a co-worker who was an alcoholic, although he claimed to be just a social drinker.  It was only after two disastrous life events that he decided to face the truth, admit that he had a problem, and get help.  As I worked in the office next to his for over a year, I often reflected on the the lesson I learned in Primary about the four R’s of repentance.  The first step we need to take in order to reform ourselves and become better is to recognize that we have a problem.  The second step is to feel sincere remorse for our actions.

In the LDS church, we need to find a way to explain our past and present racial attitudes.   After recent screenings of Nobody Knows, I’ve had conversations with faithful and active LDS members who have advanced three different explanations for our actions leading up to June 8, 1978.  This post will address those explanations and explain why I continue to find them inadequate.

Church leaders at the time were simply part of their surrounding culture.

This is a reason which explains but doesn’t excuse.  When we make this argument we are making a general observation which we also want to use as a means of exoneration.  I think it goes without saying that the society which surrounded the American church and its leaders over the past 150 years was racist, and it should not surprise us to see some of that influence seeping into the church, even at the highest levels.  But the argument ultimately fails because being LDS means that we should separate ourselves from the evil around us and reject that part of the worldly culture which conflicts with the gospel culture.  We simply cannot use culture as an excuse.  For example, consider a hypothetical serial adulterer who takes his cues from popular entertainment.  When he is finally asked to explain his behavior to his bishop, do you think he will get a sympathetic hearing if he claims that his sinful actions were the result of society’s influence and that he should therefore be excused? If you were his bishop, what would you do when he asked why people are making such a big deal of something that is in the past, and can’t we all just put it behind us and move on?

The ban was necessary in order to prevent schism in the church.

This sounds like a reasonable argument.  We need to be unified, consequently we must sometimes be willing to compromise in order to get along.  It would not have done the church any good to break up over this issue, and many people might have left the church.  But then we need to remember that many people did leave the church.  As Tamu Smith points out in Nobody Knows, the cost to black families has been incredibly high, and tragic.  We lost the descendants of Jane James and Elijah Able and other faithful saints.  Do we really want to be known as people who shift the burden for our racism onto others who are innocent?  If we sincerely believe this argument, we are not taking responsibility for our sins.  If this argument is true, we have reinforced our worst tendencies at the expense of our better selves.  If black people had been fully integrated into Mormonism from the beginning, I believe the church today would be less xenophobic, less racist, and more accepting of differences of all kinds.  Win/win/win.

The gospel welcomes black people, but their culture hinders their progress in the church.

I have little patience with this line of thinking, but because this attitude is widespread among us it must be dealt with.  It plays into the hands of culture warriors and people often agree with it without even defining what black culture is.  When we start to get down to details, though, things get ugly fast.  When I asked follow-up questions, I found that the people who make this argument mean that black culture doesn’t fit in with the hard-working beehive model of Deseret.  That is an insulting idea, and one that should not be made by a person who lives in a ward which struggles to get into double digits on hometeaching percentage.  I have also heard objections to the energetic style of worship in black churches, and emphatic insistence that we must maintain our sense of reverence as we currently practice it.

As I think about these three reasons, I don’t know quite what to make of our current situation.  On one hand, we still hear plenty of excuses, and that makes me wonder if we are like my drunk co-worker.  Have we really even figured out that we have a problem?  Do we even notice the damage we have caused, or care about it?  Are we still, even now, trying to blame our behavior on others and make excuses?  In the special features portion of Nobody Knows, we can hear Tamu Smith explain how she was asked to bring her family and be photographed for church magazines.  When the family arrived, her white husband was excluded from the pictures and she was paired with a black man who was a complete stranger.  Even now, decades after the ban was lifted, the Smith’s married-in-the-temple family apparently isn’t quite good enough for us.  If this incident reveals the underlying attitude of the white American church now, shame on us.  We might as well start right now making installment payments on that hovel in the telestial kingdom, because that is certainly where we are headed.

On the other hand, I am very optimistic.  It is possible to envision a time in another few decades where we truly will not notice race.  I love it when a woman who is the great-great-great granddaughter of slaves stands to bear her testimony in our ward.  Instead of addressing the congregation as brothers and sisters, she says simply:  “Good morning, family.”

“Here are photographs from our ward’s service in southeastern Louisiana.  We collected canned goods for several months and donated them to three local charities.  On April 25, ward members volunteered at the feeding ministry of the local AME Church.  The photographs show some of the volunteers wearing their yellow Mormon Helping Hands vests and shirts while preparing and serving food, and stocking pantries.  The Primary children sang several songs at the event.”

What a good-looking bunch of people!

Young saints do their part.

There is enough and to spare.

Feeding the multitude.

Thanks, Left Field!

_____________________________________________ This is how it went down in the 225.

We were supposed to report for duty at 0700, but some people didn’t show up until 0800 or 0900, thus proving the truthfulness of the parable about the laborers in the vineyard who come at the third hour still being worthy of reward. There were several hundred people from our stake, and I can assure you it is impressive to watch a crowd that size get down to work. We were assigned to clean up a cemetery which dates to 1850, and which has fallen into disrepair in recent years. It was interesting to think that this is another way that latter-day saints can serve the dead. We also were given the task to scrape the old paint off a house and give it a new coat. The pictures below speak for themselves.

The only casualties sustained were sunburn, blisters, and poison ivy, along with the shenanigans we might expect when Laurels, Priests, and paint brushes share close quarters.

This was a wonderful event, one that I will remember fondly.

What the cemetery looked like when we started working.

After lots of shoveling, raking, cutting...

...mowing and hauling tons of trash and debris...

...the cemetery looked like this when we finished.

This is the "before" picture of the house, when we're just starting.

This is how we left it when we finished. Good job, friends!

Somebody go tell the bishop that the high priests are goofing off. Oh wait, that is the bishop.

__________________________________________

TSteven sends in pictures from their cleanup project in Minnesota. Thank you!

“After all the snow and ice melts in our little town the city sponsers a City Clean-up day as all the hidden trash is uncovered. Our primary asked the ward to particpate, but only the Presidents’s family and the 2nd Counselor’s (my wife) did. The 11 of us were assigned the local lake and we spent 3 hours cleaning the shore line of all the trash accumulated by the ice fishermen all winter. We found a lot of floats and beer cans (even one full one, but not our brand), plus we got a traffic cone! As you can tell the weather was wet and cold, but the day before had been 90 – that is what we call “the summer” here – blink and you miss it.”

Taking out the trash in Minnesota.

Residents of the lake give their approval.

According to the LDS Newsroom website, tomorrow is a day of service in eleven Southern states, but I have noticed that stakes in other areas are participating too. All in all, the church is mobilizing hundreds of thousands of volunteers to join with volunteers of other organizations for the purpose of community betterment. This thread is an invitation for you to share what is happening where you live. Please give as many details as you can and if you can take pictures, that’s even better. You can email them to bccservicephotos@gmail.com. Ronan, who serves as BCC photo editor, will gladly upload them to the thread.

It is a good thing the church doesn’t publish instructions on how to perform this ordinance, because I would have probably done it about a hundred times by now to the church’s computer system.

Let me explain.  One of my callings is clerk, so I’m one of the guys who stay after church on Sunday and account for the donations.  We enter all the information into the computer, make sure it all balances, and then transmit it all to the church’s main computer in Salt Lake City.  Simple enough, right?  Well, it is, unless the computer you are using is ten years old and you have to transmit over DIAL UP.

There are several frustrating things about it all.  The old computer is slow enough already, but then the church adds all kinds of monitoring and filtering software which imposes even more overhead.  The network’s name is Moroni, and my guess is the reason that name was chosen is because nobody wants to get caught looking at teh porn on the toobz by Captain Moroni.  But Moroni is old and slow, and when you combine that with a computer that is old and slow, and then you combine that with a dial-up modem, you have the perfect recipe for clerkly frustration.

This is how it went for me on a recent Fast Sunday.

2:30  Church is over.

2:45  Go to the clerk’s office with bishopric counselor.  Begin opening envelopes and counting donations.  Enter it all into the computer.

3:30  Begin the balancing process. Make sure that the money counted matches the total on the donation slips. Double check everything.

3:45  Begin preparing the bank deposit and transmission to SLC.

4:00  Begin transmission.  Listen to the modems squawk at each other as they synch up.  Watch the progress bar telling you that the process is now 5% complete.

4:10  Rearrange the drawer which holds post-it notes and paper clips.  The progress bar says 23% complete.

4:15  Go get a drink (of water).  Stop in the foyer and listen to the speaker in the other ward for a minute.  Back in the office, the progress bar now says 48% complete.

4:25  After reading scriptures for a few minutes, you see that the progress bar is at 62%.

4:30  Think of all the ward members now at home who are digging in to their second helping of dessert.  Wonder if any of them appreciate you.  Conclusion:  No.  Progress bar says 71%.

4:31  The modem drops the line and the transmission is aborted.  [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted].

4:32  Begin the transmission again.  This time you can’t hear the modem squawk because your growling stomach is making too much noise.

4:40  You only get to 15% this time before somebody calls the bishop’s office.  Since the bishop’s phone is on the same line as the modem, the transmission fails again.

Such is my life on a Sunday afternoon.  I have sometimes had to try nine (9) different times before a successful transmission was achieved.  At a time when I should be home enjoying pot roast and a nap, I’m stuck in a windowless cell of a clerk’s office, growing an ulcer and wondering why the universe hates me.  Sometimes we clerks commiserate and we have concluded that the reason the office doesn’t have a window is because we would be tempted to throw the computer out of it and then yell “We’re mad as heck and we’re not gonna take it anymore!”

I realize the church has many demands on its resources.  I realize that on  Sunday afternoon there are probably thousands of wards strung out all the way from downtown Salt Lake City to Fleabite, Louisiana all trying to transmit at the same time.  But let’s get serious, this is the twenty-first century.  Let’s join it, and install high speed Internet access in the clerk’s offices.  I will be grateful, my growling stomach will be grateful, and most of all, my bishop will be grateful, because then I won’t need to make an appointment every week to repent of my language and close calls with the Word of Wisdom.

We can do this.  Yes, we can.

Even though conference was two weekends ago, I find that I am still thinking about it.  There is something about this semi-annual gathering that is very meaningful to me.

 What I have in mind isn’t the sermons, testimonies, or advice, although I find those things valuable as well.  But I have come to value most of all, I think, the common participation in a meeting that happens in all parts of the world.  So much of what we Mormons do finds meaning only in the context of community.  We can’t be saved without our dead, we are sealed as families, we participate each week in a communal remembrance of the blood and body of Christ.  No matter which way you look at it, Mormonism is all about relationships, from top to bottom.

Latter-day saints don’t just listen to conference; they experience it, and that experience is a shared experience.  The open threads on conference weekends at this blog are consistently our most popular threads, and I believe the reason is because so many of us want to experience conference with others.  We seek active participation rather than passive listening.  When we hear someone say “Lift where you stand”, that phrase has meaning beyond just the words, because we remember how we felt when we first heard it.  Even a sermon about pickle making has now become part of our shared heritage.

I have friends in remote places who have told me about their experiences with conference.  One of them told me that his son likes to say an audible “amen” (or, in the case of Elder Uchtdorf, “ahmen)” as the family sits around the computer to watch the internet feed.   Another friend told me that she watches conference alone in her apartment on another continent, but that when the people in the conference center raise their hands to sustain our leaders, she is watching the proceedings on her laptop, and she also raises her hand to cast a sustaining vote.  I find that image tremendously moving.  Her participation is just as real and just as important as if she had been sitting on the front row in Salt Lake City.

This communal celebration of our unity and beliefs is something to be treasured.

On my way to looking up other things, I found the current version of the BYU Honor Code online.  Under the heading “Live a chaste and virtuous life” are seven items.  This is what caught my eye:

The following are examples of inappropriate gender-based behavior or sexual harassment.

Repeated stereotypical gender-based remarks, and 

Derogatory or demeaning comments concerning gender

Here are my questions to all you smart people. 

1.  How is it even possible to talk about gender the way we do in the church without repeatedly using stereotypical gender-based remarks?

2.  To what extent is our discourse demeaning? 

3.  If a person gives a talk in a campus ward about the roles of Mars and Venus  on Sunday, does that person need to be on the carpet in the Standards Office on Monday?  

4.  Is it time to retire the word gender from our discourse altogether?