Sabbath Devotional :: Getting Acquainted

Photo of Chicago by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash

One of the things I love best about MWEG is our hope for a thoroughly integrated organization. We are intentionally not hierarchical. Whether as founders or occasional post readers, we each contribute to the sap that runs the system. In an effort to let you know a little about me, here is a quick sketch of my early years as a Mormon.

My son Chase once described me as a “committed misfit” in the Church. I think he nailed it. I don’t fit the mold, but I’m here to stay. I was brand new to Mormondom in the early 1970’s. As a student at Wellesley College, I waited for two years to be baptized so my parents could get comfortable with the idea that their Midwestern daughter was on the one hand getting “radicalized” in the liberal East while simultaneously embracing a conservative religious group they thought of as backward and slightly scandalous.

My mother rolled her eyes and confessed that “if you had to pick an adolescent rebellion, at least you didn’t pick the Hari Krishnas.” Despite my mother’s assumptions, I had always been a deeply committed Christian (Protestant) and hadn’t gone into this Mormon move without considerable study, questions, doubts, wrestling and a hope that God knew what He/They were doing with me.

When my circle of friendships grew beyond the many sets of missionaries who nurtured me in the basics of the faith for those years, I heard about and witnessed a group of “older” women who, with their own get-up-and-gumption, were studying the history of 19th century Mormon women, publishing a book called “Mormon Sisters” and in July, 1974, beginning a newspaper which they announced as being “poised on the dual platforms of Mormonism and Feminism” with its purpose “to strengthen the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and to encourage and develop the talents of Mormon women.”

I didn’t realize that Mormons everywhere were not enjoying Institute sponsored “sensitivity training sessions” and studying the 19th century Mormon foremothers and their vast contributions. Also, during the two years I waited to be baptized, I was fully active at church with callings, settings apart, blessings and full engagement in events and activities. I just thought that’s how all “investigators” were treated.

In 1980, after college, graduate school, marriage and our first baby, my husband Chris and I left Cambridge for him to attend the University of Chicago Law School. Our ward was in Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago. The South Side is primarily African American, middle-class and not the crime-ridden ghetto that people often imagine. Hyde Park itself is a small and somewhat isolated lake front community and is well-integrated with the university as its primary hub.

We arrived in Hyde Park just two years after the revelation on the priesthood and the ward membership was already starting to swell with African American members. We met in an old condominium building altered somewhat to suit our purposes. Classes and offices filled every room, the kitchen and even some closets. The clerk’s office was in the kitchen’s pantry. One year, while launching a “Home Teaching Blitz”, the Elders’ Quorum Leader found a membership record of a woman who had literally “slipped through the cracks” between the file cabinets in that pantry. To share an Ensign-style ending, that woman responded to the blitz connection and has been a vital, articulate participant in the Church ever since.

I loved the energy and activism of the Hyde Park Ward. There were so many new situations arising with joys and challenges. Innovation was always in the air. We had many graduate students from the West, some of whom never got over their fear of the city, and some of whom were shocked and disturbed at how we ran things. I’ll admit I thought they should expand their view beyond the mountains and into the “real world.”

When a new building was finally constructed in Hyde Park — just about the time we left in 1992 — Dallin Oaks presided at the dedication. At that event we sang both Come, Come Ye Saints and the song Lift Every Voice and Sing. Elder Oaks told the Hyde Park leaders that the top church leaders were watching what we were doing in Hyde Park, trying to get ideas that could work in underdeveloped areas of the Church. I had matured enough in my understanding of Mormonism to know this was unusual. Typically, the membership looks to the leaders and follows them; in this case — the leaders were watching us locally and adopting our innovations for application elsewhere.

Decades have passed since those early years of my Church membership. I have lived in several other wards since, each with their own unique cultures — some more nourishing to me than others. I am determined to bring all of me to this place of fellowship — all of my cravings for truth; my Midwestern and/or my Boston accent (depending on who I’m talking to); my love, respect for and informed familiarity with the larger Christian community; my commitment to justice, equity and ethics. And even my quirky sense of humor. Thank you, my MWEG community, for being constant examples to me of goodness, faith and commitment.