Stumbling to Zion

When I was younger my favorite book was The Mists of Avalon .  The characters, many of them strong, independent women who don’t need no man in Dark Age Britain, worshipped the Mother Goddess—a powerful, mysterious deity that embodied every facet of womanhood from virgin to crone.  Even now I get the appeal.  As much as I believe and trust in my Father in Heaven, it is occasionally hard to believe that He knows me and understands me on a deeply personal, female level.  I want to see myself reflected in the divine—or the Divine reflected in me—just as easily as my brothers can. This brings us to one of the beautiful, sacred parts of the gospel: the idea that we have a Mother in Heaven.   Usually the closest that Christianity comes to having a Sacred Feminine is the Virgin Mary, who is largely relegated to the side as a benevolent and compassionate onlooker, an adoring mother to Christ, and the occasional intercessor for us sinners.   The concept of a Goddes...

 Confession: I didn't write last week.  I got overwhelmed trying to decide what to talk about so I just kept putting it off and hoping for inspiration to strike.  Then I started feeling like a failure because I had a self-imposed deadline that I was probably going to miss, and I thought about how some of you might notice and be like "Wow, she only made it two weeks before she started screwing up." And that sounded like inspiration to me.  So here I sit, the morning after my self-imposed deadline, hiding from the kids that I just decided yesterday I wanted to reprioritize, drinking a Pepsi which I decided to give up two weeks ago. Let's talk about perfection. Sometimes the church is accused of having a culture of perfection that is too hard to bear.  That’s true.  Some people place a premium on being perfect—the perfect hair, boobs, kids, house, job, calling, and mommy blog.  Perfection is measured by whether you attend all of your church meetings or ha...

Years ago, a friend mentioned she hadn't heard my conversion story.  This is a common enough question when members of the Church find out you weren't born into it, but the idea has always bothered me.  Often conversion is spoken of as a one-time act, a singular choice; some members of the Church talk about conversion as if it is only something that happens to those who weren't raised in our religion.  This simply isn't true.  Ideally, conversion is a lifelong goal, a process of spiritual refinement.  It certainly isn't limited to those raised outside the church; all of us are meant to be converted. Dallin H. Oaks, an apostle of the Church, once taught that "In contrast to the institutions of the world, which teach us to know something, the gospel of Jesus Christ challenges us to become something." He continues with the story of the last supper, when Christ told Peter,    "'I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art conver...