I live on the fourth floor of an apartment block with my beautiful cat Zilly. A few weeks ago, in the morning – late enough that I was mostly dressed but early enough that I wasn’t yet fully functioning, all the alarms and sirens in the building, both in my apartment and in the halls, blared in one deafening scream. I didn’t know what was happening, but obviously it was a warning to leave, now. It was, frankly, terrifying.

I stuffed Zilly into her cat carrier. I thought momentarily about reaching for the little emergency cash in the apartment, but that was 12 steps in the wrong direction so I immediately dismissed it. I didn’t even think about my laptop, or my phone, or literally anything but Zilly. So with cat carrier in one hand and cane in the other, I staggered as quickly as I could down the hall toward the stairway, with my neighbors mostly shouting uselessly “What’s happening?” “What should I do?” “Leave! Now!” I shouted without stopping.

Continue reading Take Care of Each Other →

Kathleen.

I don’t remember her last name, but sometimes — like when a Christofascist is installed as Speaker of the House — I remember her and wonder where she is and how she remembers her early school years.

She was the only one in my elementary years whom I knew wasn’t LDS. She was Catholic.

The Supreme Court declared mandatory public school prayer to be unconstitutional in 1962. I started school in 1967. Despite that ruling, we had prayer in our first grade classroom in Sandy, Utah, every day, offered by one or another LDS kid — the same kids I walked to Primary with one afternoon every week.

Early in the year we took a vote in our class about whether or not to say a prayer in the morning. I suppose now that was to overcome the “mandatory” part of the Supreme Court ruling.

I don’t have any memory of how Kathleen voted, or whether she ever said the prayer in our room. But I understand now that a specifically LDS prayer, and never a prayer that would have been familiar in her tradition, was a mandatory part of every school day for her.

Anyway, I think about Kathleen sometimes.

As I clear out my home for an unexpected move, I am running across so many, many things there will be no room to keep, except in memory. The memories are overwhelming, in part because I never allowed myself to mourn what should have been mourned when the losses were fresh. That’s especially true as I come across, and hold one last time, and discard, the tangible links to my parents and a happy childhood and the feeling that once upon a time I was secure in someone’s love.

My mother wanted to surprise me with a quilt when I came home from my mission. Instead, sometime later, she produced a small box holding so many colorful pieces of fabric. Some I recognized from years past when she had done so much sewing, others unfamiliar that I realized she had picked out at the fabric store .

Continue reading But the Spirit Was Willing →

When I was 19, I wanted to take a vacation.

That isn’t so unusual, I suppose, but it was new to me. My family had not taken vacations while I was growing up. We moved every year or two following Dad’s job, and after you’ve packed up everything you own and driven hundreds of miles to start over every summer or two, the idea of packing and traveling for a vacation didn’t seem very attractive to any of us.

But in 1978, I had been working full time for more than two years after high school, I had no plans for the future and couldn’t see anything ahead but more years of the same kind of work, and I wanted to do something new for a while. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I chose Nauvoo, Illinois, as my destination, and I set off with vague plans to spend three whole weeks there, living in a motel, seeing the sights.

This was long before Nauvoo had become Disneyland-on-the-Mississippi, decades before the replica Temple had been built, or little signs by the roadside leading to the river told you every few yards why you should be weeping for the sorrows of the early Saints. But many of the homes and businesses had been rebuilt by then, the women’s monument sculpture garden had just been opened, and the nightly pageant would be in full swing while I was there for much of August.

Continue reading Lifeline →

I have not been to the temple in about 30 years.

That will probably surprise many readers who know I am a believing Latter-day Saint, and one for whom genealogy and salvation for the dead are such important features of life and the gospel. But I want to give my perspective on some of the temple-related topics that have been so prominent in recent weeks because I haven’t seen anything that comes close to my perspective, and I don’t think I can write about it without being candid: I do not go to the temple.

This does not mean that I do not value the temple and all it stands for. The desire to go to the temple was one of the reasons I went on a mission – I can remember the moment it occurred to me that the one would lead to the other; I was walking across a parking lot near the Smith Field House on BYU campus. It was a wet day, but the finding of a solution to “how can I go to the temple?” when I wasn’t getting married in the foreseeable future (to that point, I had been on exactly one date, ever) made the day feel sunny and warm.

My mission was not what it could or should have been, but access to the temple went a long way toward making it worthwhile. I’m glad I went to the temple. My covenants were and are important to me. I believe in what is taught in the temple. I submit many, many well documented records of the deceased every year so that their ordinances can be done and so that you who do go to the temple regularly have that opportunity: although we’re encouraged to go to the temple frequently by appeals to how important it is to us individually, there is really no cause for returning to the temple if you aren’t performing ordinances for someone who needs your proxy assistance. I support the temple in every way of which I am capable.

Continue reading Beyond the Veil: Temple Thoughts →

The Presbyterian Outlook has shared a brand new hymn by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, the first lines of which are:

When Jesus went to Egypt,
Safe on his mother’s arm,
His parents stayed beside him
To keep him safe from harm.
And when they crossed the border,
They were allowed to be
Together – seeking refuge –
A Holy Family.

Please visit the link for the full hymn, and this YouTube link for a church choir’s unrehearsed recording of the hymn to a familiar hymn tune.

To my mind, the hymn is fully in accord with the Proclamation on the Family, and with LDS Church statements on the essential need to protect immigrant families.

Our hope is that, in whatever solution emerges, there is provision for strengthening families and keeping them together.” (26 January 2018)

“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints supports a balanced and civil approach to a challenging problem, fully consistent with its tradition of compassion, its reverence for family, and its commitment to law.” (10 June 2011)

Someone has left a long, long, and inappropriate comment on a posted poem called “Resurrection.” I sent it to spam. Still, I can’t resist commenting on it publicly.

The gentleman has proved to his own satisfaction that the Gospels, including the accounts of the Resurrection, were not written by eyewitnesses. His self-congratulatory conclusion:

“This is the most profound discovery of modern biblical scholarship; a discovery which will eventually doom traditional, conservative Christianity. It is the issue we non-supernaturalists must point out to conservative Christians over and over again, every time we discuss the truth claims of Christianity with them. Without the ability to pull out the Gospels as primary source eyewitness accounts, the strength of the evidence for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus drastically plummets. And without the historicity of the Resurrection, the entire Christian belief system collapses.”

I won’t argue with this “non-supernaturalist” that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses. I say it’s irrelevant.

Continue reading Eyewitness Testimony: Jesus Lives →

I can’t remember ever believing in Santa Claus.

Apparently – according to my mother; this happened before I have any memory of it – I was very young when I decided entirely on my own that the Santa story couldn’t be true. Something about his coming down the chimney? or maybe about his pack or sleigh not being big enough to carry everything? I don’t think it was the awareness that there were too many children in the world to visit in one night. (It had to be something I could understand as a very tiny tot, and numbers wouldn’t have been that, I don’t think.)

In any case, I decided on my own, against my parents’ desires, that Santa Claus wasn’t real, and I announced that realization to my family. It happened when I was so small that my brother, two and a half years my senior, still believed in Santa, and I ruined it for him. My parents were not happy about that. At least my little brother, 11 months my junior, was still too little to understand.

Continue reading Belief in Santa, and Faith in the Gospel →

This is an unhappy story with an unsatisfactory ending. I apologize for that, especially since I have been so lax over the past few weeks in posting what you expect to find at Keepa.

I remember the first story I ever heard in the miraculous-faith-promoting genre. I can date it to sometime before 1967, when I was 8 years, because I had it in my mind when my family was sealed in the Salt Lake Temple that year. I could have heard it as much as 3 or 4 years earlier when so many adults I didn’t know (missionaries and local members) were coming to our house to talk to my Dad about the Church; he was baptized in 1964. I suspect that, due to the smallness of the memory, this probably happened at the earlier end of that period. I don’t know, though. During the entire possible window for this story, we lived in the Salt Lake Valley.

It was told in our living room, by an adult I didn’t know. I don’t remember the context at all, but I certainly remembered the story, and do, some 50 years later. Don’t underestimate little pitchers with big ears, ever.

Continue reading My First “Faith Promoting” Story … That Wasn’t →