Nancy's Musings

Only a few days home from the hospital. A few nights? There was no knowing in mid-June, in Alaska. The Mother and Baby unit, and her room in it, had had a wall full of windows and never achieved complete darkness even with the blinds fully down. After a labor achieved under a magnesium drip, her stay in the hospital was an obscenely long weekend of bleeding, feeding, sweating, nurses manhandling her breasts and pelvis, exhaustion, frustration, irregular meds, and less-than-mediocre food. She had begged for discharge. To be discharged from the hospital, that is. Discharges were aplenty for her and the little mewling fireweed jelly that was now hers forever. The bedroom in their overcrowded apartment had blackout curtains nailed over the windows, parted only perfunctorily for a narrow fan. This achieved, in contrast to the hospital, a perpetual near-nighttime. The air moved angrily, oscillated from the outside where temperatures “varied” from the sixties to the eighties. The little one...

I moved to Idaho in 2017, and immediately loved it. I loved the nerds in Rexburg, the Snake River, and living with my best friend. I loved making new friends. I lived in Rexburg for just over five years, meeting wonderful and intelligent people who have, I hope, since forgiven me for any number of social mistakes I've made. Idaho government was generous to me by giving me thorough healthcare when I did not have a job. I tried to return the kindness when I could. I participated in local politics and encouraged others in civic participation. I paid taxes with enthusiasm. While I lived in Idaho, I got married for the first time in 41 years. My husband is a Californian who was living in Arizona with his father and brother, whom he relocated to Idaho Falls when he moved up to marry me. After my wedding, many things began falling apart in rapid succession: my mental health, my car, my employment, my health, his car, his health, our living situation, etc. We suddenly found ourselves unemp...

 Today I sat on a panel of colleagues at a "Meet the Professor" activity hosted by the English student committee. It was awesome! Such bright and interested English majors. Meanwhile, I was sitting there, a middle-aged woman, on a panel of people who had "arrived." They had reached their destination. Each of them took a moment and explained how they had succeeded, how they had found acceptance. Even those who had detoured through other paths before they got what they wanted described those detours as some kind of success: some successfully raised families, some had other jobs, etc. Some were convinced that it was because of a particular habit or capability. For several minutes, I just sat there feeling horrible, right in the middle of this impressive panel. I should have stayed silent. Blerg. I can't stay silent. I'm not that wise. So I added my two cents: I explained that I would tell them something the others would not: that sometimes you don't arrive,...

 Today was our congregation's Christmas celebration in Sacrament Meeting. It was a rough day for me, as the ward organist. We switched songs at the last minute, and the second verse of "Joy to the World" went completely off the rails, and I laughed so hard! I laugh when I'm embarrassed. I laugh a lot. Anyway, as I tried to herd my cat-like thoughts during the Sacrament ordinance, I saw such worry in the congregation. I know there are a lot of heavy things in the world these days. One brother's mother had just been admitted into the hospital for a serious reason. There were widows and those who had suffered divorce. I saw single women, and parents who still dead-name and misgender trans children, and screaming babies. So. Many. Screaming. Babies. The words "let your heart be light" came into my thoughts and I prayed for everyone, that the music that we made would ease their burdens. I very carefully distinguished between "let" your heart be ligh...

 LDS news is abuzz with Elder Holland's address to BYU faculty last week. His comments about gay students was particularly concerning, especially when he lamented how few people were willing to wield a "musket" in defense of eternal marriage doctrine (which doctrine is exclusively heterosexual when it is not a polygynous variation thereof). Perhaps a blunderbuss might have been a more apt weapon. War imagery has always been problematic in religious discussion specifically because humans are the WORST at correctly identifying an enemy. We can't do it. A religious person wielding any kind of projectile weaponry is guaranteed to injure someone they should be protecting. If I may generalize dangerously for a moment, I think that our problem is that in defense of "doctrine" we end up fighting people, and people are never the enemy, no matter what ideas they espouse, and no matter how militant we feel they are.  Some "people are enemies" confusion even c...

 Last week I wrote about the space that faith fills in the epistemology of the gospel: specifically that it extends beyond the known, but can be felt and experienced as a sensation as if something is growing inside us. I reiterated and complicated Alma's description of how to tell when a seed is good, and when we should keep watering it. As a metaphor, planting "the word" as a seed is extremely helpful for those who are new to the idea of faith, and those of us who have begun taking it for granted. And yet I find that there is more to say. What exactly is this thing whose tentacles/branches/nerve cells want to invade every part of me? Must I let it grow before I know? What is the nature of the growth? Is it a cancer? A parasite? A symbiote? How much of it is me, and how much of it is not me? Will I birth it like a child, or absorb it into my cells like a protein nutrient? Maybe. . . Maybe a better metaphor is gut biome - it's a thing that biologists haven't quite ...

 In my previous post, I outlined a way of knowing when my beliefs are wrong or need correction/amendment. I talked a little about the tautology of "it's faith if the thing you believe is true" but as I've thought about how I came to my beliefs, I realize that there's more to be written about the role of faith in epistemology. In 2010, Dallin H. Oaks addressed Harvard Law School, and that address was then excerpted for the January 2011 Ensign (a monthly church publication). Because he was addressing the academy, his language was careful, and he states, "My first fundamental premise of our faith is that God is real and so are eternal truths and values not provable by current scientific methods " (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2011/01/fundamental-to-our-faith?lang=eng Emphasis mine ). Because these truths are not currently provable or unprovable, people do not arrive at their conclusions about them by proof. Later in the same address, the...