Um, no, he didn't get a sheep--our habitat is a little too suburban. No dog, either, though there's a little girl in his class with a gorgeous malamute-coat hat, so I can visualize the possibilities there. The helix pattern looks cool--next year's Christmas present for my bio. major little sister?!
My six-year-old son is learning to knit at school--he goes to a Waldorf school where everyone learns to knit beginning in first grade. One of the reasons he's there is that I knew if I sent him to public school I'd be having endless conversations about Ritalin with his teachers. Knitting for a while is magically calming for him--he used to just explode out of the car after driving home from school and it took a good hour to peel him off the ceiling. Now he knits on the way home and acts remarkably like a human being on arrival. He asked for a sheep for Christmas so he wouldn't ever run out of yarn!
My devout Mormon physicist father gave me a seriously condensed version of Teresa's comment above the first time I ran into a literalist Sunday School teacher (when I was 9 or so, I think). He said "The Bible is about why the world is full of glory. It's not meant to be a history or geology textbook. It's best to use the Bible for what it's for." Worked when I was 9; works pretty well still.
I'm in Swampscott, Mass., north of Boston near Marblehead, so we got 30 inches of snow and tidal flooding. I bundled up my 6-year-old last night and walked down to the beach to watch the last of the storm swells. There aren't that many things in life that are more fun to do with a 6-year-old than with slightly more advanced life forms, but this was way better with him. All the cliche9s about wonder, etc.
Later, as we were drinking our cocoa (well, OK, as I was drinking my cocoa and he was spooning up marshmallows held together with a shot of cocoa), he said "Mama, I'm starting to feel my right size again."
Indeed.
Kate asks:
Does one ever get de facto clergy? People whose turn seems to come up more often on the rota? Alternatively, does absenteeism rise when someone known to be longwinded is up?
No, not for the main meeting, but there are often semi-permanent Sunday School teachers (invariably awful ones, in my experience), even though that job is also supposed to be regularly rotated. As for skipping the most boring talks, most Mormons are thoroughly conditioned to believe that if they are bored by a speaker, the fault is their own, rather than the speaker's--they believe that boredom is the result of "not being in tune with the spirit." Quite neatly solves the potential problem of selective attendance.
Like Teresa, I grew up Mormon, and I think that may actually confer some small advantage in the appreciation of the sermon as an artistic form. Mormons have no professional clergy, which means that members of the congregation take turns delivering more or less (mostly less) coherent "talks." There's little exposition of theology, appealing or otherwise, and almost no appreciation of rhetorical forms or of metaphor. It's all personal testimonials and repeated bits of doggerel and sentimental stories. So for me, at least, running into a sermon that deploys effective and well-chosen metaphors and demonstrates some literary skill seems so breathtakingly wonderful that it takes a while to even register the underlying theology through my sense of aesthetic relief. (Not saying that's a responsible position, necessarily, just explaining why it's easy for me to disconnect sermons from their sometimes distasteful religious underpinnings to appreciate them as cultural artifacts)
I think I'm with Yonmei in preferring George Fox, but just by a bit, and probably only out of snobbishly not wanting to love the one sermon of Edwards that everyone knows. But for sheer rhetorical gorgeousness (and excess), there's no preacher like John Donne. When I was in college, a friend of mine borrowed my choir robe to deliver Donne's sermon from Christmas day, 1624, FROM MEMORY. It was astonishing.
Graydon--despite wanting to post a few of your sentences on my wall just to admire their sheer elegance of phrasing, I think I disagree with you. Awe may be where you find it, but I think sometimes you have to go looking. Particularly in this post-everything age, it seems to me that it's too easy to adopt an ironic pose that leaves one too coolly detached and clever to be capable of noticing any but the least subtle knock-you-down kinds of awe-fulness. While I've been disappointed too many times to go searching for transcendence in a Mormon temple, I know people who look for and find it there, and I want to be careful about encroaching on that space where they find sacredness. Of course, it's easy for such "respect" to turn into relativistic twaddle--the logical extension of such carefulness is that one is forced into saying "well, if Precious Moments figurines fill you with a sense of the holy, far be it from me..." I'm wanting to argue for some position between the two poles (which, I realize, is a rather dull position to argue, especially in a forum where passionate rhetoric in defense of strong positions is properly valued!).
Teresa,
That makes sense to me; I draw the line a little before you do, but not really so very much before. In ten years, I'll probably be closer to where you, PiscusFiche, nerdycellist and others are. For now I'm in the exceedingly awkward place where I'm still a little oversensitive about underwear jokes and yet feel like I need to take Jo a casserole to make up for the offensive missionaries. How do Mormons spell oy vey?
Graydon, I was trying (too?) hard not to do the "I'm offended; be nicer to me" thing. If there's one thing I know from growing up Mormon and Southern [my brothers' joke: what's great about being Mormon AND from Tennessee? You can marry ALL your cousins] it's the difference between nice and kind. I wasn't so much wanting to preserve niceness as to make it clear that I didn't mind strong opinions being voiced. I was apologizing because it seemed everyone else was being too careful, and I hadn't wanted to make a fun thread so heavy (7 generations of Scandinavian Mormons can really breed the capacity for humor right out of a body!!)
As has been pointed out, there are boatloads of things to make fun of about Mormonism. And I hope I didn't imply that devoutness of belief ought to be the standard by which anything is off-limits for ridicule. Some people are passionately devout about the principle of food storage (just to mention one form of quotidian wackiness among Mormons that hasn't come up yet), and that is both ridiculous and funny.
But doesn't there have to be some line that one doesn't cross, some space that is allowed to be sacred, precisely to preserve the possibility of awe?
Emma, I wouldn't advise asking a practicing Mormon questions unless you have a long time to listen and/or aren't afraid of two ill-informed 19-year-olds showing up on your doorstep, but any Mormon worth her salt would be thrilled to have you ask questions. Hardly any of Mormonism is secret, actually, only some of what happens in the temples (which are different from the regular churches where Saturday basketball games and Sunday meetings are held). And if your father was a freemason (I peeked at your website), you could find out much of what happens in the temples from him.
I think the fact that Mormons view Britain as "benighted" is one of few almost-redeeming features of their proselyting project--it would be far more offensive if they only went to Africa or other parts of the global South, wouldn't it?
And it isn't so much not respecting other people's religion as just earnestly believing everyone else is mistaken and will be happier if they are made to understand the truth--that's plenty offensive, but I still think it differs from intruding into sacred rituals in order to mock them. Knocking on the door of your house is grossly rude, but it's not the same as barging into your Sunday worship service to rip the crucifix off the wall and laugh at its grotesquerie.
That said, let me be clear that I think knocking on people's doors to try to convert them is boorish and stupid, and I wholeheartedly agree that it shouldn't be done.
And, in full backpedal mode, let me say that I didn't intend to end up being a Mormon apologist, or to hijack a perfectly pleasant and amusing discussion--sorry everybody.
MKK: wholehearted agreement with the "very funny and irreverent"--I'd add smart, thoughtful, and probably another very to very funny. But I thought it was "smartasshood."
CHip: I'm not sure I understand your point about heritage.
Clark: Intellectual Reserve, Inc. hasn't been terribly successful at obscuring matters of governance. Despite their silly lawsuit, it's still pretty easy to get a copy of the Church Handbook of Instructions (if the Book of Ether didn't already put you to sleep--sheesh!) However, I agree with you and others who make the point about the secrecy of the hierarchy. I think it is, at best, one of many marks of an immature religion, or, at worst, a sign that members of the hierarchy are entirely motivated by fear of losing their power. (My personal inclination is to believe that the truth lies somewhere between, but...)
nerdycellist: I love the reupholstery image--picturing myself and various friends as couches with upholstery in various stages of disrepair, patching, and slipcovering! I'm the same age as you, with most of the same issues, though I'd add sexism and homophobia to the list of huge cultural and possibly doctrinal problems with Mormonism.
Thanks for the thoughtful responses and the link to Teresa's essay. I think, despite the ridiculous length of my previous comment that I didn't get at what's really bugging me. Here it is: it's one thing to make fun of religious culture, knick-knacks (I loved those threads), and even outlandish doctrine, but it seems to me that it's entirely different to actually desecrate objects people regard as sacred--the difference between Monty Python songs about transsubstantiation and actually taking the host and crushing it into the mud. For believing Mormons, selling temple clothing on eBay has to come close to that level of sacrilege, and it's hard for me to laugh at that, even though I'm pretty sure I could laugh myself sick at the southpark episode.
And I promise not to go on so long ever again!!
This thread is stuck in my head, too, and a little bit in my craw, and I've been trying to figure out why. The obvious reason is that I'm Mormon, and though it has been a long time since my personal beliefs would pass muster with the orthodoxy police and I'm long past believing that my underwear is magic, I still love a lot of people who believe exactly that. So it's partly just taking (mild) offense at an affront to my tribe. But also I'm wondering why Mormonism is ok to make fun of; after all, I imagine we'd be having a very different discussion if people were auctioning off ritual garb that was held to be a sacred part of some Native American ceremony. It's not just here, of course--"This American Life" and other medium-highbrow entertainments have pretty frequent appearances of Mormon characters who are completely ridiculous and (therefore, I suppose) thoroughly ridiculed. On declining alcohol at a college professor's house, I was once asked "What are you, Mormon or something?" as though it were a hilarious impossibility that a reasonably bright college student could exist in the same body as a believing Mormon. Even people who are terribly respectful of some religious beliefs or who, at least, would be embarrassed to admit their real views of many religions, feel pretty comfortable mocking Mormons. I've come up with a list of possible reasons, in no particular order:
1) Mormonism is like the goofy version of Americanism--persecuted religious minority flees oppressive government, founds thriving society in the wilderness, then becomes a caricature of middle America in all its nicey-nice, Jello-eating, Republican-voting, scrapbooking glory. What's funny about Mormonism is what's funny about America.
2)Mormonism is, under its veneer of Americanness, actually nothing like America. It retains elements of very very old European religions that it no longer understands, and it's that old religion (or the peculiar Mormon misunderstanding of it) that seems funny to hip modern folk.
3) Mormonism upsets our class prejudices about religion--although we are accepting of people who are not well-educated or affluent and are devoutly religious, we can explain that religion away as ignorance, assuming that if those people had a chance to go to graduate school, they would become nice Episcopalians or Unitarians. Many Mormons are highly educated and still very devout. Mormons are funny because they ought to know better than to cling to such weird beliefs. As Anne Lamott says "Mormons are weirder than they have to be."
4) In this forum in particular, there are many "recovering" Mormons for whom this is an exercise in the form of making fun of crazy old Uncle Harold--who can believe I'm related (or used to be) to these wackos?
5) Believing in magic underwear, peepstones (whether in spectacles or in hats), angels with disappearing gold books, et flipping cetera, is just plain funny.
After parsing it out, I'm inclined to accept #5 as the most likely explanation, but I'd still be interested in the comments of this august group.
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