Whither the (sorta-)unbelievers?

Participating in temple worship is a necessary thing if one wishes to be a full participant in the Mormon religion. However, receiving a recommend requires not just adhering to accepted Mormon practice, but also believing in it.

This poses a problem for those amongst us who are affiliated with Mormonism, and self-identify as Mormons, but for whatever reason have not received a spiritual witness of some part of the faith—some, in fact, of as basic a thing as whether God actually exists.

So those who don’t have a testimony (as generally defined within Mormonism) of such things are stuck with something approaching a Morton’s choice: either participating fully as a result of lying by saying they believe when they don’t, or telling the truth and not participating fully. It seems to me that this is a problematic position to place those people in, and the sort of thing that might well drive them away rather than bringing them closer to the faith. I don’t know how to resolve this problem, but that doesn’t stop me from perceiving it as a problem, you know?

Telling on myself

One time a list of blessings you get from attending the temple was included in the printed program for sacrament meeting, and one of them said “You will be thin.” I was rather surprised, since i figured that was a promise only God could make, and then only individually, until i realized that i had misread it. What it really said? “The veil will be thin.”

Self-evident truths

You know, i can’t be the only one who gets amused by people bearing testimonies that include lines like “And i know that Thomas S. Monson is the president of this church.”

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.

Acquiring culture

So i’m sitting in testimony meeting and three straight semi-little kids (all from different families) stand up and start out with these exact words:

I’d like to bear my testimony, i know the church is true, i’m thankful for my family…”

I mean, even the stress pattern was the same for all of them!

What i want to know: Where do they learn it?

* Not the most recent one i was at. That one, we actually had the conceptual opposite, where lots of kids stood up and they all said different things. That was a Good Thing, i’d say.

Mormonism meets Buddhism

A zen testimony: My belief is.

Or, if you prefer, a fast meeting koan: What is the sound of one testimony being sobbed?

Naming practices

Jeanne and i only had female children, but if we’d had a male child i might have pushed for naming him Thyson (i could make a case that it was a variant of Tison, i suppose) so that everyone could bear testimony in his name along with Jesus’s.

Anybody wanna parse this for me?

Heard in sacrament meeting, from a teenager who’d just participated in one of those horrible, horrible “Trek”* things:

And i really gained a testimony of my ancestors.

That was it—it didn’t tie in to anything that went before (despite the “and”), it was a complete sentence, and there was no further explanation. It just makes me wonder what in the world “testimony” means to Mormons nowadays, anyway.

* And i promise a really good rant about the idiocy of those one day.

Things to be thankful for

A not-uncommon item heard in testimony meetings: “I’m thankful for my wonderful husband…”

I just always want to mentally finish it with “…but not for my no-good, two-timing, non-wonderful husband!”

Continuing to think about virgins

Another thought on the parable of the ten wise and ten foolish virgins: If the parable says that you can’t borrow a testimony from those that have one, isn’t it also kind of saying that you can buy one, as long as you leave yourself enough time?

Who knew? You really can buy anything in this world with money!

An anniversary, and the return of the testimony glove

So this blog is officially one year old today.

Looking back through all the posts, i find it interesting that the one that got the most comments, including some from people who just popped in to disagree with me on that topic and then disappeared completely, was on the rather bizarre phenomenon of the “testimony glove”. (The link should pop up a new window with my post on it. You may want to read it to provide context.)

I just think it’s interesting that such a cutesy item can be the source of such vehemence, both against it (that’d be me!) and for it (i’ve found a “testimony of the testimony glove” written by the person who claims to have invented them).

I still maintain that the whole “testimony glove” is harmless enough, except that it gets taken way too far when we start recommending that people use things like that as a cheat sheet for testimonies. Testimonies are supposed to come from the heart—any claim that there are “five essential elements of a pure testimony” (yes, that’s a quote) and that testimonies should stick to those misses the point, really—outside of a couple of rather technical uses, a testimony is a statement of what the utterer avers to be fact. In Mormon contexts, this is something you aver to be fact because the Holy Spirit has given you a witness of it. Full stop.

And creating a crib sheet for things that are claimed to be essential is dangerous, i’d argue. If the speaker knows the five things on the testimony glove to be fact (God lives, Jesus is God’s son, Joseph Smith is a prophet who translated the Book of Mormon through divine inspiration, we’re in the true church, and the church is led by a living prophet),* then that person should call that their testimony. However, if the person knows other things that aren’t on the testimony glove to be true (say, that priesthood keys have been restored, or that angels minister to humans, or that the book of Doctrine and Covenants contains revelations from God,** or that having love for each other is a good thing in God’s eyes), that’s still a “pure testimony”, no matter what the testimony glove may say.

The really interesting thing about the comments i got from my earlier post on the testimony glove is how (politely) vehement some of the responses were that the testimony glove is a good thing. (Sidebar in response to a comment i got off-blog: Just ’cause an idea appears in the Friend doesn’t mean it’s divinely inspired, you know?) One of the memes seemed to be that we have poor models of testimony-bearing in testimony meetings, so kids need a cheat sheet of sorts. Though i disagree that children need a cheat sheet for testimonies (a testimony in testimony meeting is supposed to be at least semi-unscripted, after all, since it’s supposed to be delivered when the Spirit moves you to deliver it, not when you’ve planned out what you’re gonna say)—and particularly that full-time missionaries don’t need one, or at least shouldn’t—i can understand the urge. However, the testimony glove does two things wrong in relation to this: It misdefines what a testimony is, and it wrongly limits the sorts of things that ought to appear in testimonies.

And yeah, as a couple commenters noted, travelogues and thankimonies can be annoying, but when they’re very short and used to illustrate a deeper point, they actually work. The people in your ward don’t do that? Fine. Start modeling better behavior, don’t hand out scripts. Is that so hard?

Well, for some people, apparently it is.

* I’d argue that some of these are wrong, in minor though not unimportant ways—for example, the church is not led by a living prophet, it’s led by Jesus Christ.
**I suppose some could argue that this one is subsumed within the Joseph Smith one—but if so, why would the testimony glove be needed to remind people that the Book of Mormon was translated via prophetic means?

Burnings in the bosom remixed

Why is it that any time i hear people going on about feeling a burning in the bosom, i halfway expect it to be followed by “And i know that the plate of sausage and peppers i had last night is true”?

The testimony glove

So my oldest comes home this past week from achievement days, wearing a single white glove. After the inevitable Michael Jackson flashback moment, i saw that each of the five fingers [insert pointless argument over whether the thumb counts as a finger here] had a small picture pasted onto it: Jesus (the Del Parson version), the Salt Lake temple, a rendition of the first vision, Thomas S. Monson, and Joseph Smith.

This seemed odd to me, so i asked what it was. The answer? It’s a “testimony glove”.

Yes, folks, we’re now coming up with cheat sheets for things that are supposed to come from the heart. Go figure.

To be honest, it wouldn’t bother me except for the reasoning behind it: that these five things are

The Essential Parts of a Testimony

Some go even further—for example, saying that

teach[ing] children to express thanks for parents, brothers and sisters, for teachers and for home, is commendable, but it is not a testimony unless it is expressed within the five essential elements.

In fact, while poking around i even found what looks suspiciously to me like a testimony glove-driven script:

A Pure Testimony Is…

1. I know that God is our Father in Heaven and He loves us.
2. I know that Jesus Christ is His Son, our Savior and Redeemer.
3. I know Joseph Smith is a prophet of God, and he was the instrument through which the gospel of Jesus Christ was restored to the earth. He translated the Book of Mormon by the gift and power of God.
4. I know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the Lord’s church on the earth today.
5. I know this Church is led by a living prophet who receives revelation.

Yeah, that’s just what we need—make testimony meetings even less interesting, with everybody getting up and saying the exact same stuff.

Funny, but here i always thought the angel was pretty straightforward in telling John that

the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

Apparently, though, that’s just all nineteen hundred years ago—we’ve moved beyond that point now.

Makes me want to pray for us to be saved from cutesiness, you know?