In my weaker moments, when I miss the comforting embrace of religion, I have a devotion to Mary, as do many Catholic women (I think we’re kinda supposed to), but not that Mary. No, the cool Mary. This is the most beautiful prayer to her I have ever heard.

The part that makes me cry:

I remember nights we spent
whispering our creed.
Our rituals, our sacrament,
the stars our canopy.
And there beneath an olive tree
we’d offer up our plea.
In God’s creation innocent,
his arms surrounding me.

I long for a religion that makes me feel like that.

P.S. I feel like I’ve posted this already, but couldn’t find it, so sorry if it’s duplicative.

I may be late to the party on some of these, but I thought they were worth sharing around:

Over at the Wild Hunt, Jason has compiled a number of startling links about the “Third Wave of the Holy Spirit”. You know, the really scary xians. He comes at it from a small-religion perspective, but in this, we atheists must also be aware of the actions and intents of the Third Wave—and stand with the religions that stand to lose the most from them.

Many people have already posted about the greening of our twitter icons (which shows visible solidarity, but has no other effect), but here is something you can do that will make a difference. Change your Twitter location to a city in Iran and change your time zone to GMT +3:30, making “it harder for the Iranian government to block real Iranian Twitter accounts”. It still may be a small gesture, but worth the extra time it takes us.

see the full size version for detail of the top

One of the things that really bothered me about my father’s funeral was the body. It was in no way his body—he was long gone from it—and yet it was made to look “alive”. He had make up on, combed hair, a suit & tie, the whole deal. Even his favorite little aborted fetus feet pin. I really don’t understand the desire to make dead people look like they’re still alive. Like at any moment he might sit up and be all, “What’s up, guys?”

I was wandering through the cathedral here in Augsburg (oh, hey, I’m in Augsburg, now, guys! I’ll be here until mid-August) and there are dead people in the walls, dead people under the stone slabs, a crypt (with its own chapel directly above, dedicated to death), and everywhere acknowledgement of the impermanence of this life.

Now I will be one of the first to say that the Catholic faith is way too obsessed with Jesus’ death (and suffering and blood and the fluid that “flowed out of his wounds” along side the blood…and his blood some more), but I think that a healthy acknowledgement of our own deaths is…well, healthy. A lot of my pics didn’t turn out, so this is the best I could do to illustrate: this is a bishop’s grave set into the wall. At the top, covered in gold leaf, is a skull with a bishop’s hat, a cross, wings, and an hourglass. Not morbid when in the context of actual death. And this was by no means the only such grave. Most of them had skulls set into them as decoration. Almost as a reminder: we’re not just remembering this dude, we’re remembering that he had a body, a body that is right here behind this stone, rotting away, just like yours will, and if you can’t deal with that, have a seat where you can see it and think about it for a while; pray about it, if you will.

Our society could use a bit more of that, if you ask me. Maybe that’s why I find such affinity with the goth movement: we really do need to do a better job of acknowledging the darkness. Embracing it, without losing ourselves in it. Death happens. Night falls. Flowers, people, and buildings wither and decay. But life happens, too; the sun rises again, and new life springs from death. Hiding either behind the other is a crime against both.

Here’s #004 in the wild (explanation in post):

A few months ago, after getting a feel for Twitter, I wanted to see what I could do with it as a writer. I began tweeting a story. I am still in the middle of what I’ve tentatively named, “The Bean, the Brew and the Buzz.” Here are the informal rules I follow:

• I try not to compose each tweet until I’m sitting in front of the computer or wielding my phone. (though I may entertain ideas and do some fuzzy plotting beforehand)
• I compose my tweets in a twitter client (laptop or phone) or web page, and not in a word processor or text editor.
• I try to avoid studying my earlier tweets, though I do refresh my memory by reading quickly through them on occasion.
• I include the numbering system and the #JCafe hashtag as ways to identify story tweets and to help readers to tie them together.

It would be easy to write an entire story first, and then send it out daily in discreet twitter-sized chunks. I want to avoid this, and to explore how the medium can impact the process of telling the story. My main challenge (other than being consistent) iss to infuse each tweet with enough meaning or value to stand alone while still tying them all together in a narrative.

Some of the limits are technological. Intuitively, you should be able to search on a hashtag and pull up every incidence of a term, but twitter’s search tool retrieves no more than the last several weeks worth (even though the company stores every tweet we’ve ever tweeted).

For this reason, I’m going to start posting an occasional archive of my #JCafe tweets. They’re not intended to be read back to back this way (the inconsistencies become immediately apparent!), but I have to provide some means for people to who start following in the middle to catch up and for others to refresh and reread.

Enough of my rambling–here are the story tweets:

001: So, there’s this barista who looks totally like Jesus: olive skin, big nose, long hair & beard. And His brews are always divine. #JCafe 10:38 AM Apr 4th from web

002: Turns out his name really is Jesus. Heysoos. Means the same thing in Spanish. Why do anglophones have a problem with the divine? #JCafe 10:40 AM Apr 4th from web

003: I heard he spent years learning the way of the bean in Ethiopia, Indonesia and Guatemala, picking red cherries with the locals. #JCafe 8:58 AM Apr 8th from web

004: The first time, he tried to preach love. 2000 years later, he just wanted to make coffee. He was doomed by his perfectionism. #jcafe 7:02 PM Apr 21st from TwitterFon

005: GalacticWiki, year 4031: The origin of the benediction, “In the name of the Bean, the Brew & the Buzz” is lost in Web antiquity. #jcafe 7:31 PM Apr 22nd from TwitterFon

006: Jesus’ brother JC was also into coffee. He made a killing w/his Kingdom Koffee chain, building cafes in megachurch lobbies. #jcafe 7:10 PM Apr 23rd from TwitterFon

007: Kingdom Koffee: a sermon on every sack, a scripture on every cup, the Spirit in every hot sip–at least according to Marketing. #jcafe 7:35 PM Apr 24th from Tweetree

008: It was the multi-level scheme that turned JC’s chain into empire: pastors preached Koffee & Christ, missionaries hawked coupons. #jcafe 7:03 PM Apr 27th from web

009: While JC spread his franchise throughout the land, his brother, Jesus Sanchez, quietly opened up a cafe next to a pawn shop. #jcafe 7:47 PM Apr 28th from Tweetree

010: The first time JC stopped by, he laughed out loud. The second time, he offered to buy the place but left, swearing. #jcafe 8:31 PM Apr 30th from web

011: Jesus would be the first to admit that he wasn’t good at ‘this capitalism thing.’ I mean, that’s why he signed me on, after all. #jcafe 9:04 PM May 1st from web

012: I got the business loan for him (we were ‘revitalizing the urban center’) but almost left when he refused to charge our clients. #jcafe 7:10 PM May 4th from TwitterFon

013: He asked folks to pay only what they thought their cup was worth, or what they could afford. Some did dishes for their AM brew. #jcafe 8:34 PM May 5th from Tweetree

014: After a week of stuffed donation boxes and an organic baker offering to swap pastries for coffee, I decided to stick around. #jcafe 7:22 PM May 6th from web

015: It got so busy that Jesus chose to train some homeless clients & bring them on. He was generous, but I liked the cheap labor. #jcafe 6:50 PM May 7th from TweetDeck

016: GalacticWiki, Year 4031: Scholars speculate that the origins of the Barista class go back to the Brahmin of old India on Earth. #jcafe 8:19 PM May 11th from Tweetree

017: GWiki, Year 4031: The Schism of 2480 began over the priority of arabica v. robusto beans but lead to heretical genetic variants. #jcafe 7:57 PM May 20th from TweetDeck

018: As crazy as it sounds, we were making bank. Jesus had tapped into some kind of coffee-loving, charity niche demographic. #jcafe about 5 hours ago from web

To be continued…stay tuned via my twitter feed!

For life is quite absurd
And death’s the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow.
Forget about your sin – give the audience a grin
Enjoy it – it’s your last chance anyhow.

I have mixed feelings about the discussion that’s taking place at my maybe I’m being ex’d post, and I wanted to work out my unease out loud.

Though I’m capable of it, I don’t like rational argument when discussing my personal religious experience. I’m not competitive. I don’t really have anything to prove. I prefer personal narratives, sharing of experiences, touchy-feely stuff. I want to understand and be understood, not argue that one point is better than another. It’s why, for you Bloggernacle types out there, I’ve always felt more at home at feminist Mormon housewives than at Times and Seasons. I made a space for myself at Sunstone by writing and telling stories of my faith struggles.

I think what’s bugging me about the thread is the discussion about oath-breaking. I really really really appreciate people (esp. Kaimi) springing to my defense, or even taking the time to carefully parse out the issues, but I see it as a huge distraction. I resent the institution and its defenders holding me to an oath it roped me into unfairly. It’s not a legal matter. It doesn’t matter what church members think about it.

Listen, everyone: I felt coerced. My experience of the Church is an emotional analog to my own abusive childhood. You cannot argue this. If you want to debate how I experienced this, I will ask you to kindly fuck off. This may seem crude, but I am confident that many of our readers, the ones I typically write for, can relate to how I feel about this.

I write, first and foremost, for the Mind on Fire community. This community is defined by the connections that we make through our posts (on all of our blogs) and comments and conversations and these deepen over time. I’m an exmo. xJane is a former Catholic. Most of my active commenters have left their religions, or been made unwelcome, or been kicked out, or remain but feel marginalized in their doubts and questioning, or are closet unbelievers who continue to attend for family reasons. This blog is part of our church. This is our parish, our testimony meeting, our coffee hour, our therapy couch, our pub. It extends across a network of blogs and facebook friends and twitter followers and (gasp) real life friendships.

So, here’s where I think my rambling is taking me: I’m affirming to myself who my community is, why I write, who I write for, and how I write for you.

I think this is one reason why I’m flabbergasted that anyone would even take offense at the content of this blog. I’m like, DUH. If you don’t like Satan, don’t walk into the Church of Satan. You’re guaranteed to be offended. Why do members of my old ward/stake keep coming back here?

I think I’ve calmed down again. Thanks for listening.

Several of you have directed my attention to what I believe may be the post that offended LDS muckety-mucks enough to invite me to a disciplinary council.

It’s a video blog entry in which I show and comment on a brief excerpt of HBO’s Big Love depiction of the temple veil ceremony, I read from a paper I wrote for a class on religion and violence, “stringing together with some academic glue…[the Mountain Meadows Massacre] and secret vengeance oaths and bloody sacrificial atonement by firing squad”, and I demonstrate how, as part of my oath-taking, I symbolically slit my throat to show what could/should happen to me if I revealed these things to the world. (please tell me how this is not sick and coercive–no, on second thought, don’t.)

Overall, it’s actually quite an embarrassing video–not because of its content, but because of its amateurish presentation. The production values are in the gutter–no, they’ve poured down the storm drain and are headed for the sea, I look strange, I speak awkwardly, and the scene transitions are abrupt and almost non-existent in places. It’s ironic but shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that its small number of views have at least doubled since the local Church authority’s visit.

Finally, part of the reason I posted the video was to find a fair use way of posting a showing at least a portion of the Big Love ceremony. I studied the legal recommendations of fair use advocacy groups and discovered that it is defensible to show a short video clip of copyrighted material as part of a personal or academic work. My commentary was meant to coincide with the momentary increase in public interest in Mormon temple rites.

Towards the end of the video I describe my motivation for discussing the temple ceremony and its impact on some Mormons:

It’s…because of the power of these techniques and the questionable morality, the force behind these techniques of teaching that I feel like these things have to be put out in the open, they have to be discussed, they have to be open to criticism. At this point the only people who are in a position to reveal these things and to talk about them, hopefully in an intelligent and maybe even in a somewhat respectful manner–I am not trying to make fun of these ceremonies, I’m not trying to belittle them in any way. I want to point out the problems I know had a definite impact on me, on my psyche and my emotional and mental health. After talking with so many people who have had such problems and difficulties with the temple ceremony, today, by suppressing any kind of discussion of these things, it only serves to reinforce the power of the Church in many of these peoples’ lives in destructive ways, emotionally and socially destructive ways.

In this light, after all of the things that I’ve said about the Church, I’m not at all surprised that it may have chosen to finally take action against me because I spoke openly and critically about such problematic portions of the temple ceremony.

As I said before, the temple is where the Church is most cult-like. This is where the social pressure reaches its peak, the topic on which opposing voices are most effectively silenced or marginalized, and the rhetorical space in which members are most likely to exhibit uncritical, programmed behavior. I realize that this last accusation is a powerful one, so I don’t make it lightly. I’ll leave it to you all to judge based on how you see members talk, react, comment about the temple and its detractors.

“Sacred, not secret” is the standard Mormon mantra about the temple. When I was a missionary, I was taught that the most sacred event in the history was the suffering of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. My mission president and visiting general authorities lamented that the church in Japan did not speak enough of it, that entire meetings would pass without a mention of Jesus and his redemptive sacrifice, his sacred gift to us. Hearing this, I made it my heartfelt priority to testify of his suffering for me, and for others–members and non-members alike–every opportunity I had. I was lauded for this behavior. I’m not sure how to reconcile these two views of speaking of sacred things in Mormonism, but they seem to be at odds with each other.

One final thought: while I have been ratcheting down my engagement with Mormonism outside of the political arena (I’d like to be a bulldog against the Church on gay marriage issues), I don’t feel blindsided that the Church may be on the verge of excommunicating me. I didn’t consciously invite this attention, but I’d like to think that for once, the Church is reacting to me, rather than the other way around. And I don’t have any problem with their desire to boot me. Maybe I’d want to do the same, if I were in their shoes.

One of the reasons I didn’t rush to remove my name from the records was because I was conscious that I have more power to criticize the Church while I’m an official member. Once I’m off, I’m easily dismissed as a critic of any value. Some of you might want to think about this, as you debate whether or not to remove your name from Church records. I prefer to use my exit to draw at least a little attention to the negative aspects of the Church, rather than leaving quietly. I only get one chance at this, after all.

When the local Mormon Stake President came to the door, I was half-hoping it was Carolyn, wanting to share a glass of Layer Cake Shiraz (that she had recommended) while our wives were at paddling practice. The kids were wrapping up dinner and Isaac and I were sitting on the couches enjoying warm conversation and cold beers.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Dr. Clayton. He delivered GameBoy over a decade and a half ago. He told a group of us LDS college students of his struggle with doubt during his med school days. He had always been kindly and soft-spoken.

He was standing outside in his jeans and Stanford sweatshirt. I invited him in, and CatGirl immediately left the room. We spent half an hour in pleasant conversation, catching up, making small talk with Isaac and GameBoy.

Finally, he got ready to leave, and asked if I could step outside for a moment. I don’t remember the exact words and sequence, but I’ll try to get this down the best I can. He told me of his long friendship with me. I told him, sincerely, of the fondness I had for him, but reminded him as long as he was still the official local representative of the church, that that impacted our relationship.

He then informed me that I had written something on my blog about the temple (this was as specific as he got) that was offensive to the sanctity of the temple and that I would be receiving an invitation to a council because my mishandling of these sacred things was not in keeping with the oaths I made and my position as a member of the LDS Church. (Yes, I’m still on the books.)

At this point, I said two things:

1. That the things he found sacred I saw as manipulative, coercive, and destructive to many people. I told him that I respected his experience, but that I would resist any attempt to censor the expression of those of us who found that it was a painful, problematic experience. (We own our temple experiences as much as any current or former Mormon, and the Church has no right to silence us.)

2. That I make it my policy to blog any interaction I have with Church officials. I told them that I had overcome much of my anger, and had recently wound down much of my criticism of the Church (with the exception of its Prop 8 involvement), but that if they wanted to pursue this, I would document the whole process publicly. My motivation here is primarily one of openness. I’m laying all of my cards on the table (Dr. Clayton is perhaps extending the same courtesy to me, with his visit).

This pretty much ended our conversation. He wished me and my family the best, and I saw him off.

I came inside and told Isaac, “I think I’m getting ex’d.” CatGirl, who was standing in the hallway, broke into a big smile and said, “Isn’t that what you wanted anyway?” We then went off to get ice cream (our original plan for the evening, not in celebration).

So, many of you may wonder how I feel about this.

• This is the first time I’ve stood toe-to-toe with a Mormon leader and felt like his complete equal in every way. It’s liberating to not feel beholden to Church authority and priesthood power.
• It was nice to have Isaac, of all my friends, to process this afterwards. He’s been close enough to the Church to see both the good and the damage it does, but distant enough to provide objective support.
• I asked Isaac to help me make sure my motives are pure. At this point, I don’t feel angry or vindictive. I do feel a responsibility to fight censorship, and to speak out for all of us who have suffered under the Church. I explained to Isaac, “I started Mind on Fire as a cry out to others, when I felt isolated, and then it grew into a community that could embrace others who experienced similar anguish and marginalization.” I still feel that. I’m amazed at the response I got withing minutes of posting my first tweet. I am definitely not alone. Thank you. And I don’t want to abandon any of you.
• That said, I do feel bad for everyone who is struggling and angry on my behalf, especially Jana. The Church may intend to cut me off, but they may lose Jana in the bargain.
• Finally, I’m proud of my kids. GameBoy is bemused by the turn of events, and CatGirl is positively delighted.

Anyhow, the ball’s in the Church’s court, so to speak. I’m not sure what to expect at this point–I guess a letter in the mail later this week, if the Stake Presidency and the Stake High Council have already made up their minds. Maybe they’ll decide it’s not worth the hassle and will let me (relatively) quietly move on.

I’m ready for whatever. Bring it on.