Lavender

Dissent is a vital aspect of progress but it is not just the voices of those who suffer that create moral and social improvements, it is the powerholders' ability to listen and the united ability of the majority to re-imagine reality together. We are a nation that greatly benefits from dissenters.

“I am a witness by being absent,” Wendy declares, giving vivid despair to the realization of my role as a woman in this patriarchal church. What brings her peace brings me grief.

This is just one small glimpse of the power of an unpaid woman. Tragically, so much of women's magic is lost along the straight-and-narrow path of patriarchy. Gerda Lerner, the champion of "Women's History Day," laments that "what women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected, and ignored," and this has distorted history and religion and governments and families, but this does not mean that women have been doing nothing while they have been ignored by historians, political leaders, and religions. They have always been and continue to be the makers of worlds.

Who did Jesus always heal, touch, greet, meet, eat with, bless, teach, and commune with? Always. Every time? It’s not the righteous. It’s not the rule followers. It’s the sinners. The sick. It’s everyone who knows they are sick, those too weak to pretend or hide behind righteous appearances, those who tell their histories and shady stories, the ones who recognize the extent of their wounds, and those who allow others to be sinners, too. 

This is the best story/lesson/sharing time I have found that teaches kindness, acceptance of differences, and self-love. It is entertaining and silly enough to keep children's attention and tender enough to teach a lesson.

This is the "Welcome to Primary" teacher packet I give to each teacher called into my ward's Primary. Feel free to edit it and make it your own or just use it as a launching board for the culture you want to create in your primary.

Because of this small pocket of freedom in a patriarchal church, primary has become a sanctuary for me, a sacred, loud, bubbling place where age and biological sex are just pieces of who we are and not yet used as incriminating evidence to divide us from each other. 

She declares that “In pursuit of liberation, we do not need to pine after the power of our oppressor, we have to long for our own power to be fully realized. We don’t want to steal and dominate someone else’s land, we want agency in reclaiming and establishing our own spaces . . . We don’t want to silence . . . we want to be believed.”