By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

During a recent priesthood lesson, the teacher asked this question:

What do you think is the greatest threat to your family?

I think he misread the question, or misinterpreted the question: I think he meant to say, what is the biggest threat to the family, as in the institution, and then we could all produce our various social bogeymen and parade them around. But by posing the question the way he did, my answer was so quick in my mind and so strong that it felt like some sort of inspiration.

The biggest threat to my family is me. Read the rest of this entry »

When I posted about putting together a collection of groovy Sabbath music, I mentioned that I had made a cd of interesting covers of the Christmas songs in the English LDS hymnal. Here I offer a slightly modified version of that cd. These may not be to everyone’s taste, so feel free to post alternatives in the comments.

Enjoy.
Read the rest of this entry »

I posted last night about the controversy surrounding Orson Scott Card’s novella Hamlet’s Father. My sources for information about the book were here, here and here. Card has posted a response to the reviews of the book, challenging some of the assertions of the reviews on which I was commenting. I had not located his response in my research. I pulled the post of the blog until I had a chance to look at his response and consider what an appropriate post would look like.

My original post took for granted what was independently reported by several sources: that Card’s re-write of Hamlet makes a link between homosexuality and pedophilia. I do not have the book, and so, given Card’s protest, it is unfair of me to make that assumption. It will be interesting to see what other reviewers say about the issue.

However, I would still like to respond to Card’s decision to rewrite Hamlet and the thematic issues involved in this project which he has undertaken. Read the rest of this entry »

Ten years ago this month, I left the United States. I didn’t abscond with the church funds, run off with a senator’s wife, or kill a man. I explained my decision to move abroad in my first post at BCC:

I left the United States in August 2001 because of a serious case of restlessness. I was 31 and single; I had just finished my MA and thrived as a high school English and Media Studies teacher … but the restlessness haunted me. I considered several options, all of which left me with a stupor of thought. Then I heard about international schools and off I went to Finland, never having been here before. After two happy years I married a Finnish Mormon and we moved to London, planning to globe hop until our feet itched no more. The birth of twins and the ensuing chaos cured us, and when I was offered a job back here, it smelled like a blessing. And, dear reader, so it has been.

Four years and two more kids later, it’s still all good. As I’ve considered this moment and what it’s meant for me over the last ten years, I have no regrets. That’s not to say that life would have been miserable had I stayed in the US, but I like the life of an expat. I’ve found a balance between going native and remaining obstinately American, being connected to the various communities around me and yet apart from them at the same time. The interplay between culture and behavior, both in individuals and groups, still fascinates me as much as it did when I first went abroad as a missionary some 20 years ago, and as I’ve gained language skills and some cultural friction here, it becomes more intriguing and rewarding.

This is as true for my Mormon experience as it is generally. The casual visitor to a Helsinki ward would recognize the church as they know it most places in North America. The wards are large and stable with core families, many second and third generation members and return missionaries, unlike so many of the branches I’ve visited in other parts of Europe. Visiting on any given Sunday, one would be forgiven for repeating the familiar mantra, ‘The church is the same wherever you go!’

Except it’s not. Read the rest of this entry »

Some years ago, when I had just started in the bishopric, I was conducting sacrament meeting on a hot summer day. We meet in a storefront chapel with no air conditioning, and it was warm in the chapel. I think I was the only bishopric member there, and we had a visitor from Frankfurt who was sitting on the stand. As I stood to announce the speakers after the sacrament, he leaned over and handed me a note. It said that I should announce that brothers could take off their suit coats if they wished. I just stared at the note for a minute for two reasons: first, my Finnish was terrible at the time and spontaneous announcements were a bit of a trick. Second, I was not wearing a suit coat myself.  Read the rest of this entry »

“We know there are parents among us today who have, in their efforts to get their children to church, cajoled, begged, threatened and physically wrestled to get them into church clothes and/or outdoor clothing, violating most of the principles of good parenting and basic human morality in order to bring small children to a meeting that is not intended for them but through which they must behave unnaturally; these parents who have rushed to church but still come late to face the disapproving glances of others who will say coming on time is a matter of planning (but how do you plan for a child throwing his shoes out the third-floor window into the street below, taking a crap on the kitchen floor as we are walking out, or slipping on the ice and having a geyser of a bloody nose?), and with their own behavior fresh in their minds, to have to sit through all of the verses of ‘Love at Stinking Home;’ parents who will spend the sacrament meeting monitoring sacrament tray etiquette, breaking up fights, doing toilet trip escorts, looking for stray crayons, whisper-reading books and trying to stop someone from singing ‘Shake Your Money Maker’ while everyone else sings ‘I Believe in Christ’;

Bless these parents, that against all odds, they might feel something of the Holy Spirit today.’

I: September

One Saturday, I went hiking with a friend in the forest just beyond the city. We walked for about ten kilometers, up and down hills and through swamps and along lakes, all of the time in forests of birches, the white trunks rising high above us and the leaves shimmering in the wind. It was that moment between late summer and early autumn, when the coolness and dampness have settled in but before the leaves have changed. Any man’s thoughts are apt to turn to higher things in such a place, and given that my friend is a Lutheran priest, I was not surprised that he wanted to talk about religion when we stopped for lunch. But I was surprised by how he started.

‘Of course, nature is very important to you Mormons.’

‘Is it?’ I asked, more out of curiosity than denial.

He had toured the temple during the open house and had been struck by the mural in one of the endowment rooms covering three walls, clearly representing the beauty of the natural world just outside of the temple: birch forests, rock outcroppings and the occasional native fauna. (I believe murals representing the local landscape are common in the small temple designs.) He said, ‘It must be wonderful to worship in such a room.’ I agreed that it was, although I was unsure about the actual role of the room in the temple worship. I assume it is meant to represent the tellestial world, or the world in which we now live — but it is green and lush, full of life and beautiful, with nary a thistle or thorn. If you add to that the nearly religious devotion of Finns to their forests and the products thereof, I imagine that for most people in that room, the mural represents more of an Eden than a vale of tears. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently read Preach My Gospel because I was asked to give a talk based on something in one chapter. What I found was what everyone had said about it: it is a concise, easy to follow guide to teaching people the teachings of the Church. Anyone with the desire to do so could carefully and prayerfully read the book and be prepared to tell a non-member what they need to know what the Church says they need to know in order to be baptized.

Which leads to this scenario:

Let’s say I have a friend who has seen my interaction with the church, and who I have talked to about my feelings about the gospel, and he says he would like to know more. Why would I call the missionaries? Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s how this started: a Mormon friend of mine had never heard living people referred to as Lamanties, as in ‘our Lamanite brothers and sisters in Mexico.’ He’s Finnish and has never lived in the States, but still: I thought using the term ‘Lamanite’ to refer to indigenous peoples of North America, South America and/or Polynesia was fairly basic in Mormon culture. (I’m no social scientist, so forgive my clumsiness in dealing with these terms.) I grew up with the word ‘Lamanite,’  hearing it from people my parents’ age. I’ve tried to recall whether I heard it used by BYU students or missionaries other than ironically, but I can’t remember much from those years other than ironically , so who knows? Certainly, the leadership of the church referred to those populations as Lamanites throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. I assumed that if they stopped it was probably because of the DNA controversy of the last few years.

With a hypothesis and a song in my heart, I went to lds.org, and I did a search for the term ‘Lamanite’ in General Conferences. The church magazines are online starting from 1971, so that was my beginning point. I got 120 hits, and then read through them to see if the talk referred to Lamanites in The Book of Mormon or Lamanites being alive and well, so to speak. (I ignored the ‘News of the Church’ entries.)  I found 26 references to contemporary Lamanites [1]: Read the rest of this entry »

I recently went to a sauna night at a church member’s house, and another member, very active, shows up with a can of beer. Really.

It turns out it is 2.8% beer, and he says drinking this isn’t forbidden by the Word of Wisdom because a grown man cannot get drunk off of it. He claims lots of Mormons do it. The host amiably disagrees, but he drinks no-alcohol beer. I’m skeptical as well, but I drink home beer and sima (which translates as mead), both of which have extremely low alcohol levels. I believe most Mormons here do, and in fact sima was served at our wedding reception in the stake center with no raised eyebrows. Another brother present drinks none of the above, citing the ‘appearance of evil’ concept.  Later, I ask a very orthodox friend, and he says he doesn’t drink 2.8%, but he doesn’t think it is forbidden, and he mentions that his father and brother imbibe.

Is it possible for five Mormons to have different ideas about what the Word of Wisdom means, and yet they all believe they are keeping the Word of Wisdom? Is it significant that all five are very active life-long members? How about the fact that all five conduct temple recommend interviews? Read the rest of this entry »

I like the idea of Teachings for Our Times. In an education system that encourages correlation, the program allows local leaders to make decisions based on the needs of students. This year, I was delighted to find that our stake did not choose the talks for these monthly lessons and passed that responsibility to the wards. I was asked by the bishop to come up with the TFOT lessons for the fist six months of the year, and I went through a process to make that happen. Based on my experience, here are some ideas related to the administration of Teaching for Our Times: Read the rest of this entry »

1. A young, newly married woman was called to our ward’s nursery. A week later, she called and asked if she could come over to our home and get to know our nursery age child. She spent an hour on the floor with our two year-old, reading and rolling balls, laughing and singing. Thank you, A, and all of those who serve with love.

2. At one point in the last year, I was feeling low. I was overwhelmed by my faults and the impossibility of overcoming them. One Sunday, Brother J got up and bore his testimony about how hard it was to be good, and how he prayed for strength and, even though he felt like he fell short, he knew that he was acceptable in the sight of the Lord because of his desires, and that all he could do what continue to strive. Thank you, Brother J, and all of those in my ward and on the internet who are willing to open their lives and share their struggles. It has made a huge difference in my life.

3. Several of my home teaching charges have really needed me these last few months. I have received phone calls in the middle of the night, had involvement with law enforcement at several levels and grieved with a family over the death of a father and husband.  It has not been easy, and I have been required to make some tricky decisions. I alos recognize that I have thrived spiritually and socially. I am grateful for a community which requires me to take my commitment to the Gospel out on the mean streets, to take the question of what Christ would do above the level of cliché or rhetoric.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Feel free to share your Mormon thanks.

True or False:

Based on what I have read and understood, the hill in New York is the actual, physical location where Moroni buried the plates.

I recently listened to a podcast featuring Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize winning economist and philosopher. (If you want to hear it, here it is.) He has a new book about justice, in which he argues that a universal or idealized concept of justice should not be our goal: rather, we should focus on the obvious injustices and eliminate them.

The interviewer mentioned a parable Sen uses in his book that I found intriguing. I will paraphrase:

Imagine a flute. Three children each have a claim on the flute.

The first child should have the flute because she can play it well, and the others cannot.

The second child should have the flute because he has no other toys with which to play, and the others do have toys.

The third child should have the flute because she made it.

Of course, the purpose of the parable is to show the competing definitions of justice. But I wonder: according to contemporary Mormon Christianity, who should get the flute? Extra points for textual support. Read the rest of this entry »

We travel to California every two years, mostly to see family. However, when we had been there a few days, I realized that my parents were not doing as well as I had thought. They had kept elements of their health problems secret from me and my siblings, and it was only because I was living under their roof that I sorted a few things out. Read the rest of this entry »

Like I did in part 1, I have changed the names and extracted some embarrassing details.

When we arrive at Norms and I open the car door for Paige, the others having gone ahead to get a table, she gets out and gives me that same serious look she gave me at the dance, the eye contact we avoided there, and I feel close to her, closer even than when I kiss her a moment after. We go into the diner — the others are seated, menus out. Baz and I exchange a nod and smile before I sit down. Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, I posted about our ward’s experiments with music here, here and here. Since two members of the music committee are leaving the ward, it seemed like a good time to report.

First, our successes: the music has been good. Since the end of the summer holidays, we have had one or more special musical items (dare I call them performances?) in nearly every meeting (excepting most fast and testimony meetings). While there is a core of  musicians who perform regularly and an a capella quintet who perform every month as a mini-choir, there has been quite a variety of music. We’ve had violins, kanteles, four-handed piano, an upright bass, guitars, muted horns, an accordion, and the list goes on. While pieces from the current and past LDS hymnbooks have been prominent, classical and traditional Finnish religious music has gotten a lot of play as well. The quality has sometimes varied, but not the sincerity. Here are a few other things we’ve done that have gone especially well: Read the rest of this entry »

Recently heard in a ward council meeting:

‘I know more about ward members from their Facebook pages than I do from home teachers or visiting teachers.’

Is that a bad thing?
Read the rest of this entry »

I think this really happened, but one can never be sure.

We went to the church building on a Sunday evening, and the foyer was decorated vaguely like an airport terminal. The buffer zone was set up like an airplane, and we pretended to be going somewhere. Then the plane crashed, and we were taken from room to room, reenacting the post mortal world or the judgment — I don’t remember that part so well. The grand finale was going into the chapel to see all of our parents dressed in all white clothes, hugging us as we came in, congratulating us on our valiance. Read the rest of this entry »