Pipes

A couple of things:
1. The drinking water in Armenia is unreliable for a couple of reasons probably, but one reason I know of for sure: so pipes are designed to leak, right? They're going to leak anyway and so they're designed to leak to let pressure out as needed and to avoid needing being fixed incessantly because who has time for that? The idea, of course, is that the water pressure is high enough to keep bad stuff out--if water is always pushing out, nothing is ever seeping its way in. Except if, as is the case in Armenia, you end up turning off the water once or twice or whatever a day. Then, as the water pressure slows to a trickle and then to nothing, the icky, wet, muddy, rotting stuff hanging out near the pipes and enjoying a constant water supply makes its way into the pipes and so into your house. (Except if you have an industrial-strength, Salt Lake-issue water filter.)
2. When we talked about Revelation in Sunday School we talked about how precisely we're supposed to battle evil. It's evil, right? And there's a whole lot of it and we're commanded to love, so how do we love if we're simultaneously trying to find and snipe down evil? Luckily, I talked to Amandadam the night before this lesson was given and we came up with some very lovely tasting conclusions. Mostly one: out job isn't to smother out evil. Our job is to create as much good as we can because dark cannot exist where there is light.
3. I've been in a real funk lately. A funk because I don't have enough going to keep me in crisis mode and, as some of you have pointed out, I have no hobby to keep me busy. So I'm kind of just being. I feel better when I hang out with friends or take some initiative to accomplish things on my to-do list or when I keep myself occupied otherwise. I feel like I get in a funk when I go into passive mode: when I'm not putting enough good out there to keep bad stuff from getting into me. On a (yet) more abstract level, I think that this might be the key to being in the world but not of it...emitting enough light that no darkness can get into you, but as I'm not sure how that would work I'll leave it at this, the level applicable to me right now. I've got to be up and doing, or will be wrestled down and beaten by the world or my life or whatever.

The Wisdom of the Nineties

So I remember a couple of things being drilled into my head as a child. Basic and fundamental things that defined the way I acted and viewed the world. Like the time in high school when some sixth graders were trying to convince me that the best course of action when lost in sub-zero temperatures was to sit still. Because you might lose a limb, but better than lowering your entire body temperature? I still think their teacher was wrong and leading these poor kids to their deaths.

Example 1: Stranger Danger

Do you remember these lessons? Occasionally set to music. Don't take candy from strangers. Don't get into a stranger's car. Set up a secret password with your family so if your mom has to send someone from work or whatever you can verify that s/he actually knows your mom. (Ours was "pickles" I think.) Don't wear t-shirts with your name on them. (I remember being crushed when I learned about this one. I didn't have a t-shirt with my name on it, but my fondest dream was born and smashed in the same moment.)

So how can people justify this:

Not only do strangers have your names and placement in your family, but they know if you like soccer or have a pet. A whole generation of parents is putting their kids in grave danger! How is this allowed?

Example #2: Hole in the ozone layer

Remember when, pre-global warming, the hole in the ozone layer was environmental concern #1? Remember how that hole was caused almost entirely by aerosol hairspray? And the 90's, so fraught with aerosol hairspray abuse.

So imagine my horror when, in the search for product this weekend, I could find nothing BUT aerosol hairspray? Even brands whose non-aerosol products I've used had nothing to offer in the pump-variety. What happened? Where did all the environmentally conscious hairspray go?

When I was living in Armenia I spent the autumn in constant panic: leaf disposal there is largely a matter of unsupervised burning. My "No Burn" desert social conscience suffered an aneurysm daily.

I Heart Sister Beck

I got to go to the general RS meeting with my mom and sister yesterday and it was lovely. a) my mom brought Mini Brie, b) I got to chat with Anne, and Scout afterward, c) President Uchtdorf is dreamy and there was a kind of hilarious general swoon when he got up to speak. But mostly I really like Sister Beck.
She talked about understanding the role and responsibility of Relief Society, its duties and its potential. Her talk was the same kind of hardliner that we've come to expect and which I'm so glad for. Not only because I'm a pleaser/masochist, but because I really believe that the [women in the] church have so much and so widereaching a potential for good. We forget this. We hide behind insecurities and mundane responsibility. I tend to think of Relief Society as something to keep us busy or something else to check off a list, but it was put in place by the Lord, by revelation to contribute in a major way to building the kingdom. When we minimalize its place in the church we minimalize the sacrafices and contributions of the women who work to make it great, as well as our role in the church.
I've felt agitiation here as well: that RS is all centerpieces and fluffy nothingness...but there's more there and, as I thought Sister Beck reasserted, can be even more.
It comes back to this theory I hold, one I've developed in response to feeling out of place or underappreciated or pigeonholed or ignored in the hierarchy: if leaders are really earnest about the "motherhood is the most important thing you can do" deal, if they mean what they say and if we can believe that, than their pushing women toward the home isn't marginalization or subjugation (or reverse sexism or whatever) but really is honor and trust and responsibility. Do we believe them? Do we think they're trying to pull the wool over our eyes?

Sister Beck visited Armenia while I was serving there. She talked about pioneers, about how all those who go before are pioneers. We were stuffed in a too-warm (and lovely) meeting house in Yerevan and I was worried about a couple of my investigators (and the fact that I'd ended up sitting right next to an elder--my companion had wandered off somewhere). I was impressed then, when she was on the YW presidency with her straight-forward articulation and tenacity. She appealed to me as down to earth and real.

After her address at conference last year, I got caught up in the controversy. My great friends had much to say about "that Beck woman" and I know there was a big to-do generally. But to me it seems like the same people who argued against Sister Beck's hard-line approach are the ones who dislike two-facedness in the church, who resist the programs that seem to them extra-curricular, that they also argue for a more earnest, personally challenging approach to gospel living. It seems to me like this is what Sister Beck is proposing: she reminds us what the leaders of the church have said and challenges us to live it fully.


Lately I've been a little frustrated in my spiritual circles (I haven't jumped into my ward and have just begun institute). I want to pep-talk. I want to shake them and say: wake up! This is the most important/crazy/interesting stuff we know about or will ever know about!! Why are we speaking in cliches? Why are we so bored? Why aren't we sharing? I know I tend toward extremes and I think that's why I like Sister Beck. Don't beat, don't soften, encourage certainly, but let's wake up everyone and do this thing. There's much to be done.

Kitsch

So I have a thing for kitsch. Religious kitsch mostly (ask me about altares), but I enjoyed a discussion about culinary kitsch (frog-eye salad, anyone?) with my sister, and can take all the dubbed-over sassy 50's housewives you can dish out.
Something else I've been thinking about: graveyard kitsch. I do see the irreverence in discussing this--these are monuments to loved ones that people put a lot of time and thought into. And I do love kitsch in a very self aware and self righteous sort of way. These things notwithstanding.

I first became interested in graveyard kitsch in Armenia. (It's a lot easier to call objects from another culture or time kitsch I think. And it isn't necessarily a pejorative term.) The tragedy, of course, is that the graveyard are huge. The Spitak earthquake took a really staggering toll on the population of Gyumri, where I served, and there are just miles of cemetery outside the city. Also, there are territorial conflicts still festering with Azerbaijan, etc. which particularly earlier in the decade also took many lives. I think that the Armenian interest in photography, as well as a demand in this area lead to gravestones like this:
I had enough taste as a missionary to not take pictures. (If you're reading this and are offended I'm so sorry.)

From closer to home, though, some from my trip to Parowan:(Cute, sort of, right? but still...)
And my favorite:There were a bunch of headstones with childrens' names carved into the back (which I'd never seen before), but I thought this was something else entirely. I think it's particularly interesting considering which superson was in charge, most likely, of commisioning the piece. Glorious.


Conclusion? And help me out here: deep feelings are often an impetus for kitsch. Why is that? (Something about kitsch being shorthand...hmm.)



(Um, this post left me feeling a little guilty/dirty/insensitive. Any validation you can provide that would help me feel otherwise would be greatly appreciated. Great stuff, right? Right?)

What I Read This Morning:

"Mormonism is truth; and every man who embraces it feels himself at liberty to embrace every truth: consequently the shackles so superstition, bigotry, ignorance, and priestcraft, fall at once from his neck; and his eyes are opened to see the truth, and truth greatly prevails over priestcraft...
"Mormonism is truth, in other words, the doctrine of the Latter-day Saints, is truth...The first and fundamental priciple of our holy religion is that we believe that we have a right to embrace all and every item of truth without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds..."

I read this from the Joseph Smith manual (I missed the Relief Society lesson) and I was struck by a couple of things:

a) I used to know this. Like know know. I remember teaching in Armenia and being able to see the shakles that people were laboring under and I understood that a knowledge of the gospel would break them free. Would help them find purpose in their lives and structure in their families. This was a huge testimony builder for me.

b) I've been trying to teach my kids a love of learning. I hope they get it by example, but I want them to really get it. The more I learn the more I realize that everything connects eventually and that no knowledge is useless. The more you understand the world, the more you can find patterns and connections and meaning. I love the doctrine of the church emphasizes so much on learning and its role in salvation and exaltation. ("It will be a great work to learn our salvation and exaltation even beyond the grave" idea. Learning to weild to power-knowledge of Godhood? Chills. Love it. Sign me up.)

c) I wonder why this seems not to happen in practice. I had an oddly atheism-themed weekend over Thanksgiving (I blew through His Dark Materials in 36 hours [not necessarily atheistic, but I was reading it through the spin of course--have you read this? You must] then caught an article on NPR on atheism [they talked about how the saying "there are no atheist in foxholes" is really offensive to atheists"] the next day. Interesting) and one of the things that I was thinking about is how certain it is. When I start talking about religion to people who believe differently than I do, I get really insecure. There are so many things that I believe without being able to explain, and things that make sense to me but only because they're the context of a lifetime of learning/understanding. I get all defensive, and it keeps me from being able to share the really fantastic truths that I know.
And on reflection, the things I'm claiming to know seem kind of ridiculous--an all-powerful being, both loving and vengeful, who insists on exacting justice, but is willing to take his/his son's death in exchange for our sins? What? If I didn't have innumerable experiences that have convinced and reconvinced me that there's something else out there, if I didn't have a framework through which to make sense of these experiences, if I didn't just happen to flip to this lesson even though I slept through Relief Society and it was just precisely what I needed to read, how could I believe something like this?
The point being that there have been many times when my beliefs haven't been liberating, but have felt confining. They've felt like superstitions.
And it seems like culturally we're (members of the church) kind of closed-minded and bigoted at times. That is, many of the people I know don't seem like great acceptors of truth-in-every-form. Myself included of course.
So what happened? (Visions of Brigham are dancing in my head, though that's probably not fair.)

d) I've troubled some over the dearth of great LDS thinkers/writers. We have some of course, but...(maybe I'm judging unfairly)...at the dearth of LDS theology? But I think the reason why is because the tenets of the church/gospel/whatever are a jumping off point. Our job is to take what's taught us and run with it, find the paths of truth that it leads us down, and build up our salvation with God. That is collect the knowledge that will ensure our salvation through prayer and personal study...on our own. And as we learn this stuff we, individually, grow closer to God.


Anyway. Made my day. ke