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I wanted to start a new thread to further discuss some things that were brought up in another thread. (I don’t know if this is something that has already been discussed at length in the past because the search feature says
womenand priesthoodwere too common words to search for) cwald wrote:SilentDawning wrote:It actually begs the question — as far as priesthood blessings is concerned, is it even important to have the priesthood to give effective blessings? Do we sometimes overrate the “men holding the priesthood” as a form of priesthood envy that is unjustified given the power of an individual to invoke the power of God through faith?
I had this exact discussion in priesthood meeting two weeks ago. I made the argument that a man of faith without the priesthood could heal and do just as many miracles as a man of faith exercising his priesthood. It did not go over well. I was “corrected” by a member of the branch presidency.
So I guess it depends. In “mormondom” the priesthood is some magical power that trumps faith. In reality — I don’t know.
These exact thoughts have been weighing heavily on me over the past few months. I am a big believer that blessings, healings and miracles big and small can be found among every faith. I believe they are solely achieved according to ones faith and belief that God will and has granted what they desire. All women have this power as well… only in our faith men are brought up believing that it is through the priesthood they have this power. This belief is exactly what they need to have enough faith to manifest these miracles. As a woman, I feel very hurt. Not because I don’t believe that I have that power within me, but because I am sad that few women will ever realize their true potential… we have been left out of the equation. Few woman will ever have the necessary faith to call upon this power, because they have been brought up to believe that they do not have it and they are dependent on a priesthood holding man.
This is not something I can bring up with my husband without upsetting him and seeming disrespectful and hurtful to the priesthood power he proudly holds. I do appreciate his faith. I feel like I am disappointing him with my “feminist views” Any thoughts or advice on how I can look at the situation differently and have a deeper appreciation as to what the priesthood should mean to me? …and how to have a better attitude.
Whoa… I just noticed I have hit 100 posts! I now feel like I am an official staylds-er… Woohoo!
I posted this on a different thread, but I think it applies here. Just wanted to let you know I get it, in case you didn’t read the other thread. Quote:I have to admit that I have never really understood the angst and pain that many LDS woman talk about — it’s just never been an issue for me, though I like to think myself to be progressive and sympathetic…unfortunately, or fortunately, depends on how one sees the whole picture, that has changed a bit in the last 24 hours. I’ve evolved – maybe I can understand the issue better…
This may seem like the silliest, most obvious thing in the world, but I lost some sleep last night. Here is what happened. Deep down I do appreciate and love the church, and yesterday as I was talking to my wife about church and some options/callings we might do to keep our branch functional in order to keep it going to so our kids will have that resource to help get them through their teenage years – I made the comment to her that I was bitter and frustrated because I WANT to serve and I’m WILLING to help out the Branch in my calling, yet, according to the CHI, my days are numbered. I squeaked through the TR interview just to get the calling to begin with, and there is just no way I can do so again at this time.
Anyway, so I tell my wife how frustrated I am that because of church policy/politics my calling options are limited and I’m not going to be able to contribute to the LDS church like I want to and need to.
Her response, “Well, now you know how I’ve been feeling the last 20 years.”
OMG. I am an idiot.
Powerful story, cwald. Thanks Cwald, your post applied well here. Anyone who understands a woman knows that she is not necessarily looking for a solution as much as she is just in need of someone to acknowledge her feelings. You have done just that. 
Quote:she is just in need of someone to acknowledge her feelings
Wow! That’s all it takes? My life just got MUCH easier!
😯 😆 (Sorry, that’s my terrible sense of humor rearing its ugly head. I have only a wife and four daughters at home right now, so anything that makes my life easier on the estrogen front . . .)
🙄 As far as what you can do to see the Priesthood differently, before I address that question, I hope you don’t mind one of my own – and I apologize for not being able to remember without prompting (a condition of age, I’m sure):
Have you been through the temple? (I typed, “Are you endowed?” – but that wording just didn’t seem appropriate.
😈 )Old-Timer wrote:Have you been through the temple? (I typed, “Are you endowed?” – but that wording just didn’t seem appropriate.
😈 )Yes, I have been through the temple. (I am endowed, although not well-endowed
😆 )flowerdrops wrote:Any thoughts or advice on how I can look at the situation differently and have a deeper appreciation as to what the priesthood should mean to me? …and how to have a better attitude.
It seems in some ways, perhaps, like your sadness is related to others validating or giving you priestess power and authority. While that would be nice, it doesn’t seem like it is happening.
Power is exercised on behalf of God by those who will put their soul in motion to affect it. Building the Kingdom of God (the metaphor) and bringing to pass the exaltation and eternal life of people around us is a blessing that can be given in service to people who recognize it consciously or not. The results are more important than the credit.
Be the priestess of God regardless of being validated. That is even more powerful a lesson and a service to others. Do the good, and shape the world in virtue, and you are in the service of God. That is what a priestess/priest is — a servant of the divine plan, and an active participant in it.
Someday, it will change. The most powerful changes happen when we put thing into action, and are willing to work for the future dream, even knowing that we may not get to taste the fruits. It is a gift to the future, to our children, and to God.
I don’t mean this to say that women should never express openly their roles as priestesses. Choosing to do so or not, that is a decision to be made at appropriate times you are inspired to decide.
Brian Johnston wrote:Be the priestess of God regardless of being validated.
Sometimes it takes an utter mystical heteric to say the most jaw-droppingly beautiful things. Wow.
What Brian said. You have been endowed with divine power (whether literal or figurative), and you took from the temple the symbols of that endowment. One of the reasons I love the concept and principle of the garment is that it allows each person who wears it to have a physical reminder that they carry the Priesthood with them – man OR woman. Just because the outward ordinances and certain callings currently are restricted doesn’t mean the power and authority of the endowment is lessened in the person who has been endowed. It might be latent in SOME manifestations, but it’s NOT latent in others. So . . .
Bless others and live as someone who has been endowed with divine power – again, whether you see the endowment itself as literal or figurative. What you make of it determines how literal the power and influence you exercise actually is.
Was doing some Eugene England reading tonight – and thought I might just post this thought here. This article is dealing with women and the priesthood, and how women might use the perceived injustice to attain something “better.” I attached a link if anyone is interested in reading the entire book/article. DIALOGUES WITH MYSELF
Personal Essays on Mormon Experience
Chapter 14 We need to liberate Mormon Men
Eugene England
http://www.signaturebookslibrary.org/dialogues/chapter14.htm#feminist ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.signaturebookslibrary.org/dialogues/chapter14.htm#feminist This moving image of human response to opposition suddenly makes clear one subtle message of the whole novel: That the “zeks,” the political prisoners who staff the technical institutes of Moscow, slave labor suppressed under Stalin’s patriarchy, forced to work long hours without reward or power or the usual freedoms,
these men and women are much more intellectually alive, inventive, interesting, moral, free in important ways, even happy, than their oppressors.This is, of course, one of Solzhenitsyn’s great testimonies about the “gulag,” that for all its evil, it contained in remarkable spiritual freedom the true soul of Russia, stimulated the best creativity, produced some of the highest Sainthood in the modern world. This is not a new idea. The literature of Western Civilization is full of powerful images of men reaching heights of spiritual power or literary creativity when made powerless in prison or exile or by some other suppression: Socrates, Christ, Boethius, Thomas More, John Bunyan, Henry David Thoreau, Joseph Smith, Gandhi, Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King. In Civil Disobedience Thoreau described the principle in ringing and influential words:
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. … It is there that the fugitive slave and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her but against her—the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor. But Thoreau taught the more general principle as well—the danger of being conscripted into the power structures, seduced into the quest for wealth and stature, of any oppressive system, the value of being instead among the oppressed, the outcast, even the imprisoned, for the perspective it gives. He quotes Confucius: “Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it.” Thus, Martin Luther King saw and wrote better about America from Birmingham Jail. Gandhi, as we can see again in the current film, when in prison was the freest man in South Africa; later, when he was near death with fasting against oppression, he was the most alive person in India.
In The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne gives a powerful example of the possibility that oppressive limitations can also be strangely liberating in a woman. Of his heroine, Hester Prynne, he writes:
[p.157]
She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter.In her lonesome cottage by the seashore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England. … Had [her child] never come to her from the spiritual world, she might have come down to us in history as the foundress of a religious sect. She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. Is it a similar patriarchal oppression, like that of the Puritans, and loneliness, like Hester’s, that have produced the free and creative, maturely speculative and spiritual, even prophetic, voices of Mormon women? Partly, but much more is involved…. The rights of the priesthood are inseparably connected with the powers of heaven, and … the powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only with the principles of righteousness.
… when we undertake to … exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness, behold the heavens withdraw themselves.
[p.168] We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.
No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned.
… let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from heaven.
The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever.
That passage is the clearest warning anywhere about the destructiveness of seeing priesthood as
powerrather than duty to serve—a warning both to men who think they have such power and to women who want to get it. And it shows how clearly the role of oppressor is more destructive to the oppressor than to the oppressed, whether in a patriarchy or a matriarchy. Wow everyone! A lot of very insightful and powerful thoughts in response to this thread. I was very hesitant to even bring up the issue, but now I am glad I did. Seriously… you guys are awesome! Wording is so very important. I pointed out to my husband that often when performing ordinances men use the term “power” of the priesthood when they are supposed to use “authority.” He assured me that he did not. Ha! He had to do 4 confirmations on Sunday and I caught him each time correcting himself. (Dang! I hate it when I’m always right.) Now if I could just remember where I recently read it… I believe that women have the power of the priesthood–we can and do actions on behalf of the Father–but we don’t have the authority or maybe keys would be the right word. (Exception being in the temple, of course.)
BKP: “The authority of the priesthood is with us. After all that we have correlated and organized, it is now our responsibility to activate the power of the priesthood in the Church. Authority in the priesthood comes by way of ordination;
power in the priesthood comes through faithful and obedient living in honoring covenants. It is increased by exercising and using the priesthood in righteousness.” Personally, I am thankful that that burden is not mine. If it was, my husband would be glad to relinquish all of those duties to me. Baby blessings, father’s blessings, baptisms and all of the ordinations. At least this way he can’t delegate it to me.
observant wrote:Wording is so very important. I pointed out to my husband that often when performing ordinances men use the term “power” of the priesthood when they are supposed to use “authority.” …
I believe that women have the power of the priesthood–we can and do actions on behalf of the Father–but we don’t have the authority or maybe keys would be the right word. (Exception being in the temple, of course.)
BKP: “The authority of the priesthood is with us. After all that we have correlated and organized, it is now our responsibility to activate the power of the priesthood in the Church. Authority in the priesthood comes by way of ordination;
power in the priesthood comes through faithful and obedient living in honoring covenants. It is increased by exercising and using the priesthood in righteousness.” Wow, I guess I never really considered it like that – and I am surprised to hear BKP say it so eloquently. Do you know the source for his comment? I will need it if I ever quote him in priesthood meeting. The “brethern” in my branch are pretty well convinced that priesthood trumps faith everyday as far as healing and miracles are concerned.
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