The blessing of alone...

Image from here.

I stayed up until 3:30 this morning cleaning, just so I could enjoy the peace. Because it's when I'm up that late, alone, that I finally have time to write notes to tuck into my kid's lunches and make sure that they have matching socks to wear. You know. Like a good mother would.

Walking around in your own home--putting things away, making things right, and knowing that it isn't being undone at the same time by little hands--being alone and content in your own mind? That, my friends, is happiness.

One of the hardest parts, for me, of being a Latter-day Saint feminist is how lonely it can feel. Sometimes I go to church and feel alone in a crowd. In countless Sunday School and Relief Society lessons, I have stared down at my lap and said nothing because I didn't want to say the wrong thing--the thing that might make someone uncomfortable. Even if I believed passionately that my thoughts were more true than what was being said. I keep my mouth shut most of the time. Well. Some of the time.

But keeping my thoughts to myself tends to make me feel very disconnected from my sisters in the gospel.
It makes me feel very, very alone.

Tonight I read the transcript of this video with the general presidents (or former presidents, for Sister Dalton) of the Relief Society, Young Women, and Primary organizations as they discussed women, the priesthood, and women's role in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And I laid my head on the table and cried because their words--their kindly offered and sincere words--left me feeling ever more isolated, misunderstood and alone.

Where is the serenity and peace for that kind of loneliness?
The kind of loneliness that I worry, deep down, might last forever?

As I grapple, trying to hold on to peace even in my seeking, I remembered the Savior's words in John 14:18 when he said "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you."

So I went and looked up that scripture and found this too--earlier in the chapter:
"Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
In my Father's house there are many mansions...I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."

The truth is: sometimes I am alone. Sometimes in the gospel I not only feel misunderstood and isolated--I am misunderstood and isolated.
But I have been promised comfort and reassurance in knowing that even when I feel most alone, there is a place, just for me. That there are many mansions, and it will be okay because mine will be personal and individualized. It will be perfect, for me.

So. For as much as I don't know or understand, and despite knowing that my struggles will surface again tomorrow, tonight I can know that I can walk around my quiet, dark, house or sit quietly in my loneliness and know that, in the end, I am never alone.

April 2013 General Conference

The F Word.

Artist unknown.

Feminist.

The F word.

It conjures up images of sad, angry, bitter women.

Aging hippies with no bras.

Intellectuals who have ne'er seen the inside of a dentist's office.

A fearsome thing to behold.

I remember sneering to a professor once that I would never become a feminist.

He cocked his eyebrow at me and asked if I believed in the right for a girl to drive, to vote, to get an education, to get a job, and to decide who she wanted to marry.

My response was somewhere along the lines of "Well, duh."

"You are not only a feminist, then, but--in most of the world--a radical one at that."

Ooof.

So what does it mean, to me, to be a Latter-day Saint and a feminist?

It means that I have a deep and abiding faith in God and in His son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.

It means that I have a deep love for Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon.

It means that I married in the temple (a marriage that makes me blissfully happy) and that I have a testimony of the temple. 

It also means that I struggle with my role as a mother and a woman.

It means that I believe women in the gospel are capable of so much more than their currently assigned roles in our faith.

It means that I am deeply torn about the fact that I can't talk about these struggles in church. I yearn to be heard and seen. I fear for my membership. I feel very alone.

This blog is my somewhat anonymous attempt to explore the roots and branches of my own faith. To understand the path that I've taken, to this point, and to see where it might lead.

I am seeking.