Times & Seasons » Susan Staker

Waiting for the End

Susan Staker — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 17:36:38 +0000

I heard Dallin Oaks’s conference talk last Saturday while waiting to take my husband’s parents to breakfast. I was interested in the way he talked about the second coming—what would you do if you knew Christ was returning tomorrow? I’ve been wondering since then how people in the church typically talk about the End now that we have lived beyond the end of the twentieth century. I still have a very vivid memory of a talk I heard in church when I was probably about ten (I grew up in a very small farming village in southeastern Idaho in the fifties). I remember the talk because it frightened me. This person was talking about the second coming and making it very clear that the End would come by the year 2000. And the events before the End wouldn’t be pleasant. Certainly it is because this apocalyptic talk was atypical that it stands out against the blur of countless mundane hours spent in church as a child. And I remember at the time that some adults thought the talk a bit extreme and inappropriate. But it did leave me with a sense that I could well live through the end of time—and before I was very old.

In the ninth grade, I had a remarkable seminary teacher, who spoke in this same kind of heightened language about the dramatic possibilities of religion. I was mesmerized by him. The end was near. Terrible things would happen. But even now, you can come close to Christ. If you are righteous and believe, he can actually appear to you, speak to you, bring you precious, even secret, knowledge. By my tenth grade, this teacher had been moved on to another town because of complaints and concerns voiced by concerned parents. (Eventually this teacher took one of my BYU roommates as his second wife, and therein lies another tale.) But he had built on this sense I had that religion really was about intense, important things. And that I was living at the end of time.

Of course, there is a time-honored tradition of waiting for the end that goes back in Christianity to the early church. And Mormonism has its own intense nineteenth-century version of the end stories. I have recently been thinking about the texts that Joseph Smith dictated in 1830. As bookends of sorts to the texts of 1830, you have Joseph’s meditations on the beginning in June (Moses being called to write the Bible, the revisions to the creation and garden stories in Genesis) and his meditation on the end in September (now D & C 29) given at the second conference of the new church. Compare Joseph’s language (quoting God) to that of Dallin Oaks’s at this year’s conference: “Wherefore, I the Lord God will send forth flies upon the face of the earth, which shall take hold of the inhabitants thereof, and shall eat their flesh, and shall cause maggots to com in upon them; And their tongues shall be stayed that they shall not utter against me; and their flesh shall fall from off their bones, and their eyes from their sockets . . . . . .” Joseph himself made predictions about the end that left believers in the new church waiting patiently for the end to come in the nineteenth century.

Wilford Woodruff was one whose patient wait for the end for engendered by Joseph’s words. I called the selections of Wilford’s journal that I edited, “Waiting for World’s End” because of the extent this wait was a sustaining theme in his life. In the intro to those selections I quoted from a talk he gave in 1868 to primary children about how the world would look in 1898: “That visit was before the destruction of the City of New York By the Sea Heaving itself beyond its bounds & washing the inhabitants into the Sea & they were drowned. It was Before Albany was utterly Destroyed by fire. It was before Boston was sunk with an Earthquake. It was before Chicago was struck with lightning & burned with fire & Brimstone for their Abominations. It was before the many Millions of the People of the United States & other Nations of the Earth were destroyed with their Cities By the Great Judgments of God Because of their great sins & wickedness in the sight of Heaven & Earth.” (I guess I was not the first child to be frightened by my elders in church!) Wilford did live to 1898, but, of course, saw none of these dramatic events happen. Thirty years to the day after he gave this talk he was in San Francisco, where he died a few days later.

Wilford had to make his peace with the end that didn’t come as he predicted. It’s interesting to read the various explanations and accommodations as the various dates suggested by Joseph and others came and went. And now the date that frightened me so as a young child has come and gone. Was there discussion about the year 2000 in church communities as it approached? We obviously still live in a very extreme and dangerous world. A world where extreme, heightened versions of the various religions still have a great deal of power. Where does the church stand these days on the End?

Making Peace with Mother

Susan Staker — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 04:00:57 +0000

Being identified as the mother of Nate for the past two weeks has set me thinking about mothers—having one, being one. My own mother died several years ago. I still work at making my peace with her. It’s not been easy to admit my likeness to her. Her circle for life seemed so tiny as I was growing up in a very small village in southeastern Idaho. Nate knew my Mom. She probably had better luck teaching him to do needle work than she did me. Recently I’ve been typing my Mom’s autobiography and her journals onto the computer, so I can make them available to her extended family. And I can honestly say at this point: I do hope I’m my mother’s daughter. (And my aunt’s niece.) How unique is my experience?

I’ve been struck by how much of my mom’s life story–and her sister’s–was structured in response to their mother’s story. My mother’s mother married a dashing young farmer in the Salt Lake Temple. His story became a familiar one in the area where I grew up—the Jack Mormon. My mother’s father took up smoking which kept him away from church. My mother’s mother was so dependent on him that his life story constrained her own, in the church and elsewhere. She never learned to drive and so depended on him to take her everywhere. Mostly she stayed at home, on the farm.

My mom learned to drive horses and the car when little more than a girl so she could drive her mother. My mom and her sister were always very close to each other, and they were very close to their mother. But both sisters became fiercely independent in their own ways—very much because of the mother they loved.

They didn’t want to be like her. Both went away to two years of college (unheard of for most men, let alone women in that time and place), both became school teachers , both taught full time when their own children were still little and in school. As I look back now, I see with increasing pride the independence they won in response to their mom’s helplessness. I can also see that it was this same independence led them down two divergent paths when it came to the church. My mom was sad that her mother’s dependence kept her so many times on the periphery of things in the church. So my mom was always absolutely faithful, in the center, no matter where her family was. Her sister was the converse version of independence– the thrice-married, loving, earthy, outrageous Jack Mormon.

Nate offered one version of how he’s made peace with me in a blog he still links to in his Times and Seasons bio: “My mother is a fine and gentle Mormon apostate. As near as I can tell, she long ago lost the faith of her childhood, but the marks of Mormonism are still heavy upon her. Any bitterness she may have once harbored about the Church long ago disappeared, and now she is merely interested. Much of post-Mormon intellectualdom seems to be engaged in a perpetual apologetic for their apostasy. I can understand why they do it, but I find it a bit boring. However, I think that there are a lot of ex-Mormons who fall into my mother’s category. They are informed (if I can use such a loaded word on this blog…), often interesting, and ultimately harmless.”

For the most part, I can make my peace with this (though as I’ve discussed in my blogs here on Times and Seasons, I do feel a continuity with my Mormonism that isn’t captured in terms such as “post-Mormon” or “ex-Mormon”). I kind of like “apostate”–it’s both extreme and affectionate.

I do, however, pause over these phrases: “merely interested” and “ultimately harmless.” I definitely wouldn’t want these on my tombstone. Happily, Nathan and I can continue our conversations—which as you imagine can be exciting (and excited) ones. But I do think that discussions about the church that happen across that perceived divide of within/without too often are conceived in terms of danger and harm–I’ve blogged about this on Times and Seasons as well. (Perhaps I should just take it as a complement that I do no harm.)

My daughter Sarah always insists that Nate and I are much more alike than she and I are. Could that possibly be true? And how much of these autobiographical ramblings (both mine and Nate’s) are about something you recognize?

Lessons in Representation

Susan Staker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Today I was talking with an editor in my group about why she wouldn’t be in the office this afternoon. She was taking her two children to see the Wiggles. Now I admit that even though I’ve watched a bit of television in the past couple of years with my grandchildren, I’ve missed the Wiggles. Robin had been telling her daughter (I think her daughter is about four) that they were going to see the Wiggles. The little girl was excited and wanted to know whether the Wiggles would be on a big screen. Robin had to explain that they would see the Wiggles in person—and perhaps the little girl would actually get to touch a real Wiggle. At this point in the conversation, I told Robin a story about my daughter Bevin and books. It’s surprising how often I find myself telling stories about Bevin to explain the meaning of life. Bevin, now in her twenties, is developmentally disabled. When asked about her mental age I often say that Bevin is like a very, very, very, very, very experienced (but, even as I mother I must admit, not particularly accomplished) one to two year old. But charming. Oh so charming.

Children’s books were lost on Bevin, the toddler. She would have nothing to do with them—which means she tore them up, threw them away, hid them away in the back of closets, threw them down the stairs to the basement. From her I learned just how complicated the representational routines are that most kids master by the age of one or two. Viewed through Bevin’s eyes, I was astounded of what we were asking of a kid when we handed them a Richard Scarry book. Dozens of funny-looking little animals dressed in clothes and acting like people—driving vehicles, cooking food, working in hospitals, building buildings, flying airplanes. I finally taught Bevin ta bit about he meaning of books by filling one with photos of her family. That struck her as vaguely interesting, almost funny. Nathan standing before her (though she always called him Heea, go figure), Nathan in the book. Sarah here, Sarah in the book. Her dad here, her dad in the book. Something here, something very like it (but not quite real) there. That’s representation.

We all know how tricky it is to teach little children about reality. (Now here I could, but won’t, tell you a story about Nate causing mayhem on the pre-school playground, beating up kids because he thought he was Spiderman. At this point in his life, by the way, he also insisted on wearing Spiderman Underoos at all times.) Perhaps Richard Scarry, Winnie the Pooh, Peter Rabbit, Maisey, Franklin—they just aren’t helping in the basic lesson of life. The basic lesson of life: representation. This stands for that but isn’t that. This is real, that’s an image, a meditation on the real. Mastering the lesson of representation makes it possible for us to learn. That’s what allows us as humans to write novels, history. Paint masterpieces. You get the idea. . . . . (And Bevin really never quite got the idea. She taught me mostly how amazing it is that most of us do.)

This morning as I was talking to Robin about the Wiggles, her daughter, and Bevin’s encounter with books, I recalled a study I heard about on the radio a couple of mornings ago. About small children watching television. Lots of details I can’t remember about why the researchers concluded it’s bad (attention deficit, obesity. . . .). But the final statement in the report stuck with me: children under the age of two shouldn’t be allowed to watch television. This stuck because, of course, I’m guilty. Personally guilty with all of my grandchildren. . . . . But this morning, as I listened to Robin, I began wondering if the problems being caused were previewed in my experience with Bevin. Perhaps children, who unlike Bevin should be able to, aren’t learning the basic lesson of representation. Robin’s daughter didn’t understand that the Wiggles she sees on the television are pictures of real people playing the Wiggles. Children need to learn the rules of narrative, of drama, of representation. That’s where the world begins to go wrong. . . . . .

Moses as a Key to Theology

Susan Staker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

We tend to think of theology in discursive terms—as a collection of ideas or propositions. When we talk about the development of theology we are apt to trace the history of abstractions such as faith, hope, love, priesthood. With Joseph Smith, I’ve come to believe it is much more enlightening to attend first to characters and to the plots, language, discussions that collect around them. Again and again these characters inhabit stories that preview and explore situations very like those facing Joseph and the community of faith gathering around him. Following key characters thus becomes a tool for tracing developments in early Mormon history. Viewed within this context. Moses becomes a key to Mormon theology (or at least a prime exemplar of what I’m talking about).

Moses is a particularly interesting character because he is a relative constant in the texts dictated by Joseph—present in the Book of Mormon in 1829 and still an inhabitant of key discussions in Nauvoo over a decade later. (Unlike Enoch, for example, who has a spectacular but relatively self-contained presence in Joseph’s dictations.) The Book of Mormon sets Joseph up as “a Moses” (2 Nephi 3). Tracking the continuities and transformations associated with this Moses/Joseph doubling provides a distinctive angle of view onto the development of early Mormon theology and practice.

In the Book of Mormon passage dictated in 1829 that sets up the parallel between Moses and Joseph, Moses is evoked as the seer with a rod (as Mosiah and other Book of Mormon seers use and pass down the seer stones and other sacred artifacts). In 1829 Joseph similarly uses a seer stone to dictate the Book of Mormon and its environing revelations. In 1830, Joseph, no longer using the seer stone, dictates the story of Moses’s vision of God and his call to write the Bible (Moses 1). This prologue to the New Translation again explicitly points to the parallel between Moses and Joseph. And in the September 1830 conference, Joseph is singled out as the only one to “receive commandments and revelations in this church . . . for he receiveth them even as Moses” (D&C 28). In 1831, the parallel to Moses is used in evoking Joseph as president of the church. In 1832, the story of Moses within the New Translation and in its environing revelations is used as the basis for explorations of the high priesthood. In Kirtland, Moses is among the visitors during the dedication of the temple. His story continues its importance in Nauvoo, where it enables Joseph to explore further the rituals to be associated with the temple there.

Certainly there are explicitly discursive elaborations of doctrines in Joseph’s texts. I am not trying to minimize his contributions on this front . But my continuing studies of Joseph’s work convince me that distinctive Mormon doctrines almost always arise out of innovations and transformations that appear first in narrative contexts associated with the sacred characters of Joseph’s revelations and translations. Doctrines that do not seem continuous or related when tracked on the basis of logic or argument reveal themselves as much more so when traced along the thread of character and narrative.

To What End Blogging?

Susan Staker — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 16:59:43 +0000

I’m curious about the function that blogging serves for you. The blog is such an interesting, borderland genre. (And I will candidly admit here that the bulk of my personal experience with blogs and blogging has turned on a certain motherly voyeurism of my very verbal, bright, and prolific son.) A really great blog can read, it seems, like a well-honed, mini essay. A continuing interchange can take on the shape and the heat of a spirited conversation, or an argument. I’m often impressed with the quality of the writing and thinking I see. (And sometimes, of course, blogging is far less than this.) Also there’s a continuing quality to a blog that is closer to a journal or diary, or soap opera, as it charts the ins and outs of personal and communal experiences.

The energy I see Nate expending on his blogging comes closest, I suspect, to energy that I expended in my twenties and thirties on journal writing. I know the value of journal writing to history. I also understand what I think of sometimes as the underside of journaling. Wondering what the parallels might be with the blog.

The earliest journal I have dates back to the fifth grade. I became a serious journal keeper when I went away to college. I have boxes full of notebooks and endless files on my computer filled with personal ruminations. The longer I keep a journal, the more it bores and annoys me. I’ve tried multiple times in my life to kill it off. I’m in one of those phases of the moon now. I know how a wonderful diary reads. And mine is no wonderful diary. For me journal writing has always been a coping tool. I write when I’m sad or angry or frustrated. A sad, angry, frustrated person is a repetitious, boring person—these emotions send me, at least, round and round in circles. I work my way forward inch by inch through an endless round of repeitition. Since I’m basically a rather optimistic, bouyant person, it’s painful to encounter myself in these pages. The disclosures in these pages mask, obliterate much of what matters to me looking back.

And I sometimes wonder what I could have done if that writing energy had been channeled in a different direction. Maybe my son trods a better way. . . .

The David and Jonathan of the Primary

Susan Staker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kristine’s description of her lunch with Esther Peterson got me to thinking about other women I wish I could have met. I was somewhat surprised that Louie Felt and May Anderson popped into my mind. These two women were the first two presidents of the Primary. Between them they presided over the Primary from 1880 (at its beginning) to 1940. Louie Felt was a plural wife; May Anderson never married. (May was quite a few years Louie’s junior.) Neither had children. I take my title from the title of an article about the two that appeared in the Children’s Friend, the magazine they edited together for decades.

I loved the story about these two women from the Friend. It described in some detail the close friendship that developed between the two, the American plural wife and the British convert. The two shared a house together from soon after their meeting until Louie’s death. Louie didn’t like traveling alone for the Primary from settlement to settlement. She insisted that May give up her tea (so the story in the Friend goes) so that Louie could call her to be secretary of the Primary. That way Louie would have a traveling companion. The article described the two women sitting in their bed in the house they shared together correcting proofs for the children’s magazine. The two also founded the Primary Children’s Hospital. The article emphasized the importance of their devoted friendship in leading the Primary.

The nineteenth-century language of friendship and love always delights me. So much to learn. Others I’d take to lunch in a minute: Emma Smith, Sarah Pratt, Emmeline B. Wells, Amy Brown Lyman. . . . . .I could make a very long list.

Intimate Enemies, The Passion, and Joseph Smith

Susan Staker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been interested in one line of recurring discussion in all the talk about Mel Gibson’s movie. (Keep in mind I’m focusing on “talk” about the movie; I haven’t yet seen the movie.) On the one hand, the charge that the movie is anti-Jewish. On the other, the counter that it’s not; that it’s telling the gospel story of crucifixion, the atonement. My point would be that these two views may not be exactly contradictory. I recently reread The Origins of Satan (1993) by Elaine Pagels. Her argument has framed my own response to discussions about Gibson’s movie—and to my thinking recently about Joseph Smith’s “prologue” to his New Translation of the Bible (contemporary Mormons know this prologue as Moses 1).

Here are some quotations from Pagels’s book that give you the gist of her argument:
•“While angels often appear in the Hebrew Bible, Satan, along with other fallen angels or demonic beings, is virtually absent.”
•“What interests me are specifically social implications of the figure of Satan: how he is invoked to express human conflict and to characterize human enemies within our own religious traditions.”
•“Thus the problem of evil begins in sibling rivalry. . . . Satan is not the distant enemy but the intimate enemy—one’s trusted colleague, close associate, brother.”
•“The gospel of John, like the other gospels, associates the mythological figure of Satan with specific human opposition, first implicating Judas Iscariot, then the Jewish authorities, and finally ‘the Jews’ collectively.”
•“By presenting Jesus’ life and message in these polemical terms, the evangelists no doubt intended to strengthen group solidarity. In the process, they shaped, in ways that were to become incalculably consequential, the self-understanding of Christians in relations to Jews for two millennia.”

If Gibson has faithfully captured this gospel story of intimate enemies, he may well have captured the strong and highly polarized story Pagels describes. Christians must make their peace with this part of the Christian story as surely as they do with the gospel of love and forgiveness.

It is this same New Testament story of Satan, a ground for the story of intimate enemies, that Joseph Smith wraps around the King James Bible in his prologue to the New Translation, dictated to Oliver Cowdery in June 1830. This text comes at a crucial borderland—the Book of Mormon is recently off the press, the church is only just beginning, the community of faith not yet gathered into one place. This prologue brings a strikingly New Testament frame to the Old Testament’s beginning. Satan tempts Moses in the wilderness just as he tempts Jesus in the gospels. He loudly proclaims that he is the Father’s only begotten, evoking his own story as a family story, insisting on his place in the family of heaven. And in the early pages of Genesis, Satan’s fall from heaven (similar to his fall in Revelations) is inserted as the context for his behavior with Adam and Eve in the garden and his relationship with Cain.

This figure of Satan, the prospect of intimate enemies following in his wake, is used in the early Mormon context very much as it is in the New Testament context, to strengthen the group and to deal with opposition. In the first years of the church, cursing enemies is a parallel ceremony to sealing friends to eternal life. And very early in our history, these were “intimate” enemies—members of the family, former friends and church leaders. Ultimately the parallel ceremonies for enemies and friends are enshrined in the early temples—with lists of both left on the altars of nineteenth-century temples (one of the images that still lingers with me from Wilford Woodruff’s journals).

I understand the power of this story, it’s protective utility in our history. But it’s effect can be—and has been–disabling as well. In contemporary terms, we might admit to a rather dysfunctional family dynamic. As a model for brothers and sisters, families, intimates struggling to disagree, it has its limits.

Keeping the Faith

Susan Staker — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:31:47 +0000

I’ve been thinking recently of people I met in my twenties. Where we are now—that memory thing. A post a few weeks back by your own Jim Faulconer sent me on this most recent tour down memory lane. Jim was a person I met in my twenties—in the honors program reading room at BYU. At BYU I also met Mike Quinn, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Janice and David Allred. . . . . We were all idealistic, faithful, bookish Mormons, beginning our adult lives. From what I know, I believe that we’ve all “kept” the faith.

By that I mean, it’s still with us all, held very close. Mormonism matters to us in a way that has structured the plot of our lives. We’ve all expended a prolifigate cache of psychic energy on Joseph Smith and Mormonism, on The Church. We’ve all striven to keep our intellectual lives (remember we’re all bookish) in synch with our moral lives, with our religious inclinations. We love our familiest (etc. etc.) And I suspect we’d all say we’ve won a certain congruence in our lives that keeps us striving after truth, good, life—God?

And of course we’ve ended up (variously) on either side of what is easily imagined as a gaping divide. In the fold. Without. Faithful, lapsed. Members, excommunicants. Increasingly, I find that relying on this self-evident gap to tell me anything very important about people—and faith–is quite simply lazy, obtuse.

Jim talked in his blog about how he used to struggle more. How he now finds peace at where he’s landed. It feels congruent, peaceful. I can identify with that feeling. You take it a day at a time. Confront what you see. Check deep inside. And go where your heart, your integrity, your life, your past, leads you. You keep the faith. There is something so very mysterious about this to me. . . . .

Greying. . . .

Susan Staker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

So why do I always resist the rather obvious point. The Sunstone crowd is greying, the Mormon history crowd is greying. . . . There is an easy answer, I suppose. I’m from the old Sunstone crowd. I’m greying. Maybe I don’t like facing the obvious. But I really don’t think that’s it exactly.

I just don’t agree that the problem is the greying. Or if it is, then “greying” can afflict the young as easily as it does the old, the blog crowd as easily as the typewriter one. I see the problem as something more like getting stuck, going round and round and round.

You’ve surely had this experience. You walk into a room, and the people there are in the middle of the same conversation they were having when you left the room minutes, days, months, years, even decades before. Some people get stuck on this round and round in their twenties, some are still eluding it in their nineties.

This getting stuck, this round and round, can afflict institutions as easily as it does individuals. An institution, like an individual, can circle round and round a formative experience, a painful moment, a triumph. And never move on.

I do understand there’s a down side to this reflexive concern of mine about getting stuck. Some things that were good 30 years ago are still good today. I too care about back bone, commitment, truth. . . . But when that moment of recognition comes—I’ve been here before, I’ll come around again, nothing will change—a warning bell goes off for me. I’ve come to trust that finding oneself on the round and round is a pretty reliable sign of danger.