Adventures in home teaching, part 2

Another home teaching story, from the same ward as the last one:

So we’d gone a few months without home teachers, but that didn’t really stress us out, so we didn’t think about it much.

We were about to start to think about it a bit more.

So our ward had the schedule where sacrament meeting came last, which has advantages and disadvantages, but one of the biggest advantages accrues to the ward choir director: you can corral people into choir practice a lot easier when everyone is in the same place at the end of the meeting block, rather than scattered around a bunch of different classrooms.

Therefore, as you might expect, sacrament meeting was followed immediately by choir practice. Well, neither of us were in the ward choir, so at the end of sacrament meeting the choir members headed to the front of the chapel, and we headed toward the back.

As we were about to leave the chapel, a man who we’d seen before but hadn’t ever properly met stopped us and asked, “Are you the B—s?” We said we were, and he said, “I’m your new home teacher—i’m Brother—” and at that moment there was a loud burst from the organ, drowning out his name.

Now, looking back on things, we realized that we should have asked him to repeat it—but we didn’t, instead just setting up an appointment for him to come by later that week.

Well, he came by, but at that point we couldn’t very well ask what his name was—i mean, he’d told us and we were even letting him in our house—so we listened carefully to see if he told us his name.

Nope.

So next Sunday we listened carefully to see if he or anyone else would say his name.

Nope.

Or rather, lots of people said his name, but he was well-known enough in the ward that everyone who talked to him used his first name, and it was a very, very common name.

Which means that for several months, we had monthly visits from a very good home teacher…whose name we didn’t know.

Adventures in home teaching, part 1

True story: Back when Jeanne and i were first married, we had a very good home teacher. He (and his companion, when his companion chose to come along) came every single month, taught good lessons, and provided excellent emotional and spiritual support.

No, that’s not the surprising/amusing part, believe it or not. <rimshot />

So anyway, at one point early one month, we had someone come up to us and introduce himself as our new home teacher, and he set up a time to come over. We weren’t necessarily thrilled to switch home teachers, but we weren’t really sad about it, either—that’s the way it goes, and we figured that our previous home teacher was needed somewhere more pressing than visiting our active selves. No worries.

So our new home teacher came over, and it was a good visit—the first of several good visits, as he (and his companion, when his companion chose to come along) ended up coming every single month, teaching good lessons, and providing excellent emotional and spiritual support.

And then later that month our previous home teacher called to set up a time to come visit, and we were cool with that—one last visit from a good home teacher isn’t something to be avoided, after all.

So our old home teacher came over, we had a good visit, and we got to the next month.

And, once again, our new home teacher set up an appointment with us—and so did our old home teacher.

Now, we might should have told our old home teacher he didn’t really need to come any more, but he actually seemed to enjoy his visits with us, and it’s kind of awkward to tell someone they don’t need to hang out with you any more, at least when there’s no reason for it other than what you think the elders quorum president has done, but forgotten to tell anyone.

So for six months, until our old home teacher moved away, we had two home teachers (along with their companions, when their companions chose to come along) visiting us every month, teaching good lessons, and providing excellent emotional and spiritual support.

And most people i know have trouble getting just one home teaching companionship to come by even once in a while. Go figure.

Marriage, or not?

Here’s a puzzler for everyone out there: The church insists that sexual expression is only acceptable within the bounds of marriage. However, there are a number of jurisdictions in the United States (among other countries) that offer not just marriages, but also civil unions—a legally binding parallel to marriage that is, effectively, the same thing. It’s primarily set up as a marriage-like institution for same-sex couples, but it’s also available as an option for mixed-gender couples.

Therefore, i wonder: Does the church accept civil unions for, say, a couple desiring to be baptized? I can’t easily find anything definitive on that, but i may just be looking in the wrong places. Anyone out there know?

Please stay tuned…

…we are experiencing technical difficulties.

Basically, moving to a new place, a failed logic board, and the local internet service taking a few unexpected extra days to get set up have created a break in posting. I should be back into it properly in a couple or three days, but until then, thanks for your patience.

What do you want from life?

The following is an excerpt from a conversation last evening between Jeanne and our 11-year-old daughter. They’d made a social visit to a woman who Jeanne’s assigned to as a visiting teacher, and she (the woman they visited) shared some cookies she’d just baked with them. On the way home, the conversation apparently turned to goals, and what our child wants to be like when she grows up:

	11-year-old:	Those cookies were really good.
	Jeanne:	Yeah, she bakes really well.
	11-year-old:	One day i want to be just like that.
	Jeanne:	You want to learn how to bake?
	11-year-old:	No. I want to visit teach someone who makes good cookies.

Teaching our children priorities and goal-setting: We’re doing it right.

Advantages of not fitting in

True story from our exile in Utah: Our then-4- and -2-year-old children would often play with groups of similarly-aged children outside, but we’d never have to worry about knowing whether our children had wandered away and gotten lost or not—we’d simply look at the gaggle of children, count to make sure that there were two heads of brown hair amidst all the blondes, and happily continue on.

Seriously, the number of people there who were stunned to find out that children are sometimes born with hair colors other than blond and eye colors other than blue…

Differences

Something i have learned: The most important difference between a ward’s executive secretary and its clerk.

When the ward clerk roams the halls during church, he’s generally trying to get statistical information, and so the leaders of the various organizations run away from him and hide. When the executive secretary roams the halls during church, he’s generally trying to set up interviews with the bishop, and so it’s everyone else that runs away from him and hides.

Falling in love with Uncle Sam

So the recently concluded Fourth of July celebrations led me to wonder why in the world Mormons* have become such a hyperpatriotic people. I mean, this is the country that tried to litigate us out of existence less than a century and a half ago, and that we had to leave to survive less than two centuries ago.

Anybody got any explanations?

* In the United States, at least. I don’t know what the situation is like in other countries.

Triumphant harmonies

I do have to say that i absolutely love the fact that even though the hymnal says to sing the chorus of “Called to Serve” in unison, congregations everywhere i’ve ever heard it sung still sing the line “as a triumph song we sing” in harmony—it sounds way cooler that way.

Practical clothing

I wish to submit that whoever it was that came up with the idea that female people should always dress in one-piece swimsuits* was never involved in toilet-training a girl.

That is all.

* It has long amused me that every time requirements for church activities involving swimming say that all of the girls and women must wear one-piece swimsuits, any of them could, technically, fulfill said requirement by wearing a monokini.

Scary sex!

A discussion on the wonderful Keepapitchinin blog has brought to mind what, to my mind, is one of the most troubling aspects of Mormon culture: the degree to which sex, and particularly the fear of sex, consumes us.

Consider the following:

• Full-time missionaries aren’t allowed into the homes of single women* (which means that, say, a 70-year-old woman can’t serve lunch to the missionaries in her own home unless she goes through the trouble of getting a chaperone).
• Mixed-gender couples who are married but not to each other, as well as mixed-gender couples where one is married and the other is single, aren’t allowed to ride in the same car to and from church events or meetings. (And this one’s even enshrined into church policy in the Handbook!)
• A home teacher isn’t supposed to go into the home of a single sister he home teaches until the other home teacher is there, leading to the absurdity of guys waiting in their cars in the cold or stifling heat instead of going inside and being able to fellowship with the saints (and, in fact, the particular saint they’re assigned to fellowship as a priesthood responsibility).
• There is a strong social pressure on romantically involved couples to get engaged quickly, and to have a very short engagement, rather than taking time to get to know each other a bit better.
• Relatedly, there is pretty strong pressure brought onto young Mormons to get married pretty young (for the men, very soon after their return from a full-time mission), even to the point of being taught in general conferences.
• There is a strong social stigma attached to the sight of perfectly sexually innocent patches of skin, such as bare shoulders on women. (Or even prepubescent girls!)
• …And so on.

Basically, many (maybe most, but even i'm not that cynical most days) faithful Mormons seem to believe that nonmarital sex is something that human beings have no ability to resist, and therefore we have to build fences around the law—really, really horrible fences, in some cases.

I don't really get it, myself, but it's there—and i find it remarkably unhealthy. Not sure what to do about it, though. Thoughts?

* This rule wasn’t enforced in my mission when i was a full-time missionary twenty or so years ago, or at least all or most of us full-time missionaries in that mission weren’t aware of the rule. I’ve met others who served around the same time who report that it was an incredibly firm rule for them, though, and it’s been a pretty intensely-taught rule for the full-time missionaries in every mission i’ve lived in since then, too.

What does it mean to be baptized?

As seen recently on Facebook, as posted there by a reader of this blog (and reposted here, anonymized, with permission):

The situation: a parent talking to her child just before he turns four years old, saying that then he’ll be halfway to his eighth birthday.

Parent: What happens when you are eight?
Child: I get baptized.
Parent: What does it mean to be baptized?
Child: I drown.

I’m thinking that maybe they’re going to do a bit more teaching on that subject—but if they don’t, i totally want to be at the baptism to see his reaction.

Reducing the impact on…something

So when the new church handbooks* came out a while back, there was a bit about how multiple members of individual families shouldn’t generally be given “significant” callings, so as to reduce the impact of those callings on families.

In my observations of the past few weeks, i’m thinking that the real reason for this policy suggestion is so that a ward doesn’t have to, all at once, come up with replacements for (to pick three callings utterly at random) the executive secretary, young women president, and beehive class president.

* Now titled Handbook, to contrast with the previous Church Handbook of Instructions, which replaced the earlier General Handbook of Instructions. I actually heard someone say at the time that the change of title to Handbook is evidence that the church is led by actual prophets. You know, there may well be evidences that this church is led by prophets, but i’m going to go out on a limb here and say that i’m pretty sure that that ain’t one of them.

On going to the temple

So i got tripped up by an interesting bit of Mormon terminology yesterday afternoon. Consider this:

I’m going to the temple means that you’re going to perform ordinances of one kind or another (with a default of an endowment session, i think) inside a temple.

I’m going to the temple means that you’re going to the grounds of a temple, perhaps as part of a sightseeing event when you’re on holiday.

This isn’t the first time that this particular ambiguity has caught me. I’m not sure what to do about it (my personally preferred solution, replacing to with through in the ordinance-performing reading, isn’t likely to ever be widely adopted, i don’t think), but one would think we’d be a bit more precise about one of the distinguishing practices of our religion, you know?

Let’s argue about this

Question: When did Mormons redefine the word contentious to mean “involving even the vaguest hint of disagreement”? I’d like to know.

Offensive!

So, just as some of you may have, i heard the news yesterday that Idaho’s liquor stores won’t be stocking Five Wives Vodka, made by Ogden’s Own Distillery, because it is (quoting from the newspaper article about it here) “offensive to Mormons who make up over a quarter of Idaho’s population”. And this isn’t just the reporter editorializing—the letter sent from Idaho’s regulatory commission actually used the word “offensive”.

And you know, i think they’re entirely right! You can’t have state-controlled liquor stores carrying products that are offensive to segments of the population that…aren’t remotely likely…to walk into…any of those stores…

Oh, wait.

Daughter effects?

So the “daughter effect” has been well-documented in the business world—if a company’s chief executive officer (or similar) has any daughters, and particularly a daughter as an oldest child, that company is more likely to have policies and practices of the type that are generally seen as being friendly to women.

So this has gotten me wondering—is there a similar sort of effect among Mormon leaders (bishops, stake presidents, mission presidents, general authorities)? If one of them has daughters, especially an oldest child who’s a daughter, is he more likely to, say, listen to women in stake or ward or whatever councils, or focus on young women equally as much as the young men, or promote visiting teaching as vigorously as home teaching, or whatever else one might come up with? Also, how would one measure this?

Utah Valley University has a decent and growing Mormon Studies program, and Brigham Young University has a lot of folks interested in the social scientific study of religion, and the University of Illinois has a history of research into Mormonism, so there’s got to be somebody out there who has the desire and training to look into this.

Tired of the cold

Resolved: That the women of the church be the ones to set the temperatures in Mormon sacrament meetings, and if the men of the church want to be so deucéd cold, they can just take off their suit coats!

If you’re running late, just admit it

Fair warning: I’m gonna go totally postal on the next person who excuses their lateness by claiming that it’s no big deal, they’re just working on “Mormon Standard Time”.

Turn this mutha out

So can somebody tell me when Mormon celebrations of Mothers Day stopped being about Mothers Day and started being about Every-Female-Person-Over-Eighteen Day?