Fun with platitudes!

So yesterday was Mothers Day, and we got to hear all the usual Mothers Day sacrament meeting platitudes, along with a number of actual insights.

And it just so happens that one of my least favorite Mother Day illustrations got vectored. It goes as follows (you may recognize it):

A good mother is someone who, upon discovering that there are five people at the table and only four pieces of pie, suddenly declares that she never cared much for pie anyway.

Even leaving aside the glorification of such self-abnegation as a uniquely and positively maternal quality (which is simply wrong on many, many levels), i’ve long thought that there is one good thing about this false statement about what it means to be a mother: It lends itself well to parody.

Consider:

A real mother is someone who, upon discovering that there are five people at the table and only four pieces of pie, suddenly points out that it is time for everyone to go to bed. Fortunately, when the morning comes she has disposed of the pie so that there can be no arguments about it.

Alternately, we could go all mathematical about it:

A smart mother is someone who, upon discovering that there are five people at the table and only four pieces of pie, recognizes that if four people each get 80% of a piece of pie, what remains gives the fifth person an equal share.

In a perhaps more serious vein, Jeanne (my wife) jotted down her version, which emphasizes foresight in avoiding arguments:

A good mother is is someone who, upon discovering that there are five people at the table, cuts the pie into five pieces.

Any of y’all have any other ways to spin this?

I’m not really good at this

So what’s up with Mormons and this compulsive need we have to apologize for our speaking abilities when we get up and deliver a sacrament meeting address?

This suddenly became quite a bit more real (and not just annoying) to me since my oldest was asked to speak in sacrament meeting tomorrow. She practiced her speech in front of Jeanne and me this evening, and it was good and we told her so, except that we asked her to eliminate the sentence she opened with where she said she was nervous and downplayed expectations for the whole thing.

She objected to our request, saying—seriously!—that one has to start a sacrament meeting address that way.

I mean, kudos to her for such astute cultural observation skills, but is it really a good thing to tell people at the outset that you’re no good at what you’re doing? After all, such a claim is either wasted time since we’re all about to become painfully aware of it whether you say it or not, or it’s false modesty. Either way, not good.

(And it’s not just girls, or even just girls and women—men and boys do it too. Do similar things happen in other faith traditions where congregants regularly speak in services?)

p.s. She finally conceded our point after a couple minutes of back and forth on the issue. Score one for basic rhetorical competence.

Trying to have it both ways on children

So with general conference coming up, i’ve been thinking about the last general conference—and what with birth control having been in the news here in the US during the past few months, it’s gotten me to think about Neil L. Anderson’s latest general conference address.

I’ve thought a lot about that address, and the comments i made during my semi-liveblog of that conference session still hold true, i think—basically, i think his message was rather muddled, and that he wasn’t successful at explaining whatever it is he wanted to say. This may be why i’ve heard and read his address used by Mormons to support claims that the leadership of the church wants its members to have as many children as physically possible (and perhaps not even stop there), and also that the leadership is cool with its members having however few children they want.

Consider the following lines (not next to each other, as it appears here) from the address:

When to have a child and how many children to have are private decisions to be made between a husband and wife and the Lord. These are sacred decisions—decisions that should be made with sincere prayer and acted on with great faith.

Many voices in the world today marginalize the importance of having children or suggest delaying or limiting children in a family…[Quotes from others went here, including a statement that “a biblical perspective on motherhood” requires having children]…As the world increasingly asks, “Are these all yours?” we thank you for creating within the Church a sanctuary for families, where we honor and help mothers with children.

(That last one was followed by stories of folks having children despite, e.g., still being in school—and this is all presented as a Good Thing.)

Sorry, but this just seems a bit of trying to have one’s rhetorical cake and eating it, too—everybody gets to make a private decision, but in the context that decision is always going to be to have lots of kids starting pretty much right away.

Y’all’s thoughts?

A rambling man

I’ve had friends tell me that they miss LeGrand Richards (who was in the quorum of apostles until his death in the early 1980s), because late in life he lost his sight, and so he wouldn’t read from his prepared text, but would just kind of ramble about whatever he wanted to. (Some people have said the same thing about David B. Haight, more recently.)

Well, having listened to recordings of LeGrand Richards from the 1940s and 1950s, i have to say it had nothing to do with his sight—he was like that when he was much younger. Really, it was probably more that he came from an older preaching tradition, where you pray that the Spirit moves you to say something, and then just kind of go with it. I’m still trying to decide whether or not i wish we had folks in general conference who speak in such a stream of consciousness mode, rather than the hyper-prepared sound we generally get these days..

There’s Marmons on the carner

So i just spent a little bit of time listening to L. Tom Perry, and i’m just wondering: Does anyone else want to work up a petition to get the Utah legislature to declare him a state linguistic treasure? I mean, i know we’ve got a pretty good case to make on his behalf…

What happens when the world isn’t as bad as we say?

One thing that y’all may have missed in the excitement of Thanksgiving weekend and Xmas shopping was the news that the teen pregnancy rate in the United States declined last year. And when i say it declined, i mean it declined—it dropped to a record low rate for the entire time records have been kept (70 years!), and this isn’t just a little blip downwards, but a continuation of a long-term trend.*

And yes, some of this is due to an increased use of contraception, but the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s analysis (which is only available in PDF format, and i don’t like linking to PDFs, so no link here, but it’s googlable) finds that a lot of it is also due to teens simply choosing not to have sex.** Kind of runs counter to the common Mormon meme that the world is busily going to hell in a handbasket, and that we need to aggressively shelter our kids from whatever the rest of the world is doing, since everybody else is getting more and more evil.***

So i’ll just say that what i became very thankful for this past Thanksgiving weekend was that my children are growing up in a world that seems to be getting more and more moral in some very important ways, whether we care to notice that or not.

* I recognize that the unwed teen pregnancy rate is a more interesting statistic for this entry than simply the teen pregnancy rate, but those statistics turn out to be really hard to come by—or, at least, reliable ones are hard to find. Part of the problem is that the best numbers for my purposes would be teen pregnancies in which conception (not just birth) occurred outside of marriage, and that doesn’t seem to be well-tracked by anybody.

**And before anybody decides to pull out the abortion card, i’ll simply note that the teen abortion rate has been steadily falling over the past several decades, and that the stats i’m talking about are pregnancy rates, anyway, not birth rates.

*** As does the fact that the peak year for the teen pregnancy rate (in the United States) was 1957. You mean teen pregnancies have been lower than that for more than 50 years, and we still haven’t realized that maybe the world isn’t all that more evil a place for our kids to grow up than it was when we were kids?

The evils of not having money

I was going through some old notes from church meetings, and i discovered a reference to a speaker saying that the early (as in late 1830s) Mormons were “evicted from Missouri”.

Evicted? Wow. I’d never known that the early Mormons had been that far behind on their rent, but Jeanne and i have been reading through the Documentary History of the Church, and the church and its leaders certainly had their share of cashflow problems, so i guess that makes sense as the reason all the unpleasantness of the time happened. Right?

Sometimes it’s just so easy

You know, i have to admit that i actually like the occasional fire-and-brimstone, one-moral-slip-and-you-lose sacrament (and conference) address—’cause it logically follows that since i’ve already slipped, i’ve already lost, and so i don’t need to try any more.

Thanks for the free pass, folks who think you’re trying to get me to be righteous!

It depends on what the proximate, not ultimate, goal is

I once heard an interminable story in a sacrament meeting speech about how this one kid was just learning to drive and she hadn’t listened to her father telling her there was a hidden stop sign as she came around a particular curve, and so she ended up in an accident, hitting the stop sign and then a tree. Her father was pretty angry at her for not listening to his advice, which i can certainly understand, but i also have to think: Well, she did stop, didn’t she?

One of these things is not like the other

Why do Mormon sacrament services tend to have oddly random choral exhibitions? Like, a service in which all the speakers talk about the covenants of the sacrament, but then we get a bunch of youth singing some modern fluff song with random scriptural quotes about bringing one soul to God? I mean, really.

Things to teach your children

A recent sacrament meeting speaker i heard talked about how his grandmother was the ultimate example of motherhood, and one of his evidences for this was that she’d had seventeen(!) children.

He went on to talk about her “righteous posterity”, made up of sixty-two grandchildren, and now several (i forget the number) great-grandchildren.

Now i’ll quite vociferously argue against the meme of holding up one’s fecundity as a valid measure of how good of a parent one might or might not be. However, if you look at the numbers, we see something interesting:

62÷17<4

Or, in other words, each of her seventeen children produced, on average, less than four children themselves.

It appears that she taught them at least one important parenting lesson, eh?

Couldn’t get an extension

So i heard a sacrament meeting speaker recently say that the Mormons were “evicted” from Missouri in the 1840s. Wow, thought i—i hadn’t realized that they hadn’t paid their rent on time. Well, such are the evils of cashflow problems.

Being weepy

So this past Sunday was my ward’s testimony meeting. At one point a woman went up front to the podium, offered her testimony for a couple minutes, and then sat down. As she left the podium, my youngest* leaned over to me and said, softly but with clear surprise in her voice,

Oh! She didn’t need any kleenexes!

I’m glad to know that my child is learning all of the requisite cultural markers she’s going to need to survive the Mormon world as an adult.

* Three years old, which i think adds something to the story.

Wherein David B falls back into his natural habitat, the pun

A speaker in a church meeting i was in recently was talking about food storage, and pointed out that you need to rotate through food and water in your storage so that you don’t end up throwing stuff out as waste after you keep it past its shelf life. To aid in this, the speaker suggested dating your food and water supplies.

Date ’em? I hardly even know ’em!

Comparative love

So i heard a speaker in church recently say that if we commit sin, that means that we love that sin more than we love Jesus Christ.

Is that claim actually true? I have some serious doubts about it, but i’m not absolutely certain one way or the other. Others’ thoughts?

Deciding who speaks when

Is there actually a church policy that someone who holds the Melchizedek priesthood (or at least a man) must be the closing speaker for sacrament meeting? (Or maybe that a woman can’t be the closing speaker?) There actually is, as far as i can find, no direction on this, which presumably would mean that it doesn’t matter—so why have most of the wards i’ve lived in treated things (sometimes explicitly, even!) like that was the rule?

I have a dream (that sacrament meetings will sound interesting)

So yesterday was a holiday here in the United States in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. As a result, i heard a bunch of archival recordings of Dr. King on the radio, especially of his most famous speech.

Listening to that, i wondered why our church speechifying is so, well, boring. I mean, not necessarily in terms of content, but in style—even when the speaker is saying something stirring, there’s almost never any prosodic shifting going on, there’s no serious attempt to bring the congregation into the flow of the words.

And it’s not like this flat delivery is something inherent to Mormonism—if you listen to old general conference addresses, the old-school speakers (those who came of age in the nineteenth century) got into it. So apparently it used to be part of Mormon preaching—but now it’s not. So what happened? Why did we move away from interesting-sounding sermons to monotonous-sounding ones?

Looking at the calendar

Can we stop it already with the repeated claim (over the pulpit sometimes, even!) that we’re special because Doctrine & Covenants 20:1 tells us that Jesus was born on 6 April, 1 bc?

I mean, especially since it appears to be simply not true, what with the reference to the year most likely being just a hyper-flowery way of saying ad 1830? (Not to mention the issues of mapping a solar calendar to a lunar one, and the fact that each solar year isn’t always the same length anyway, and…) Also, it seems especially impolite to make such unsupported-by-scriptural-text statements right around Xmas itself.

Yeah, i know, we won’t (stop, that is). A boy can dream, though, can’t he?

Glurge

Why do so many speakers feel the urge to pepper their speeches in church with glurge? Particularly when a quick trip to Snopes could demonstrate the falsity of much of what’s out there—scroll through the list on the glurge page, and you’re bound to see a lot of thing you’ve heard before in sacrament meetings, i’d wager.)

It’s a serious question—especially since i have to wonder whether the Holy Spirit is going to testify to the truth of something that quite definitely isn’t.

On fear

Just an interesting point a sacrament meeting speaker made recently: The word fear is problematic in religious contexts, because it’s ambiguous. Therefore, it becomes necessary to contrast what i as a linguist might call fear_reverence and fear_shame (with reverence and shame being the words the speaker used).