Guest Post: Dormant

by Tracy

I agree with Brené Brown: anger is a secondary emotion. (1)

Reflecting on my angriest times, it is deep hurt (betrayal, grief), sadness at injustice, and feelings of powerlessness that have most often fueled my anger. When I have allowed my anger to act as the necessary catalyst for change that is the inherent gift of this dark emotion, it has lit the torch of my empowerment and propelled my growth in stunningly beautiful ways.

It is said that, as difficult and scary as anger can seem in the context of a relationship, it is better than apathy. According to Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Joel Walton, “Simply put, apathy is when you just stop caring. Your head tells you there’s a problem, but your heart doesn’t care anymore to fix it. You feel no motivation and no interest. You are unwilling to put forth any energy or effort toward something because, well, you just don’t care.” (2)

As a “born in the covenant” fifth generation Mormon of “pioneer stock” through both my matriarchal and patriarchal lines, I was birthed into relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have inherited and personally sustained deep gender wounds as a faithful Latter-day Saint girl and woman. Patriarchal pangs were my shadow for the better part of four decades until, in my mid-thirties, the bright flame of trauma vanquished the lie. My feminist awakening was brilliant in its beauty and its pain. As the apt saying goes: The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. The grief was intense, and yes, anger was one manifestation of that grief.

As I expanded into my true, balanced self, I was inspired, as many Mormon feminist women before me, to apply my spiritual gifts to the collective effort of coaxing our beloved church to likewise grow. I was encouraged and excited by prophetic calls to the women of the Church to lean into our unique gendered experiences and to courageously lead with the Spirit. I heard statements such as these as beautiful invitations to unashamedly speak with my divine feminine authority truths I was learning through study and through faith:

“Women see things differently than men do, and oh, how we need your perspective!” (3)
-Russel M. Nelson

“…it was Eve who received the knowledge that Adam needed to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge for them to keep all of God’s commandments and to form a family. I do not know why it came to Eve first, but Adam and Eve were perfectly united when the knowledge was poured out on Adam.” (4)
-Henry B. Eyring

I felt empowered to come out of my safe spaces and speak more openly from a place of my own profound spiritual experiences.

Experiences with Love, informed by pain and by healing and by my increasing oneness with God and others…

Following Jesus’ feminist example into further light and knowledge, He who told a woman first and relied on women to witness to doubting male apostles…

THWACK!

Dale G. Renlund’s profoundly patronizing and supremely ironic “Your Divine Nature and Eternal Destiny” talk, delivered in the Women’s Session of General Conference (presided over by a man and opened and closed by the speeches of men) in which he lectured and maligned women for following the examples of both our Glorious Mother Eve and Jesus Christ as we sought a more balanced spirituality in the image of Them. (5)

Our revelations recast as merely “reason”. As if revelation cannot be informed by reason! Our righteous enthusiasm for learning about our divine nature and eternal destiny as women from Her, Them, the Source dismissed as “arrogant and unproductive”. For there is only one source of truth according to the men in the matching suits in their privileged seats in front of and above the girls and women: Always He and Him. Never She or Them.

As if our “demanding revelation from God” is somehow so different from the example set by the very founder of our religion.

His talk worked. Not in the way I think the brethren intended, but it indeed worked to shut me down. Not to Her, Them, God. To the Church. While there are many members of the Church who embody Christlike love and a holy openness to new perspectives and who demonstrate a willingness to listen to and learn from the marginalized, this institution that claims Christ’s name is cold, hard, and uncaring. I’ve lost interest in waiting on Adam to take Eve’s lead. The Eve the brethren prop up is merely an image of her, a puppet who speaks the lines they give her. Who sits where they tell her to sit and leaves the room when they tell her to leave. The brethren have turned away from countless opportunities to learn from the unique perspectives of women and bravely follow their lead. They value the voices of women only to the extent that they echo the voices of the men in charge. They desire the pretty stamp of female approval to seal the words they have already spoken.

I have spent so much time and energy speaking up because I have felt called to do so, but I am exhausted and find myself falling into cynicism as my personal revelation and that of my sisters has repeatedly been doubted and disregarded and our cries—whether of pain and desperation or of hope and inspiration—have continually fallen on deaf ears. It’s getting to the point where I wonder if I even want to raise my daughter in this church, and yet I am running out of energy to set a better example for her, whether in staying or in leaving. Apathy has set in. My existence as an awakened woman in the Church feels as hollow as the prophetic calls to share our female perspectives, to lead as Eve led. Yet I continue to go through the motions because I don’t at present have the energy for anything else.

The institution wants to control my relationship with God, teaching of an all-male father god who cherishes his exalted wife by locking her away in the attic (6) and modeling a disturbing family dynamic. (7) An all-male creator god who enlists other men, but has no need of woman, to create life itself. But I have come to know God and, borrowing the words of Jane Eyre:

“I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic, and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence; with what I delight in,—with an original, a vigorous, and expanded mind.

“[Does the Church] think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? And can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? [Does the Church] think, because I am [a woman], I am soulless and heartless?—[The brethren] think wrong!—I have as much soul as [men],—and full as much heart!

“…it is my spirit that addresses [their] spirit[s]; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,—as we are!” (8)

I have learned from Them that growth and progression follow the pattern of seasons. I am currently in winter, dormant but not dead. Will my spring come in the Church or must I, as countless brave women before me, leave to bloom again? I rest now in the place where I was planted, with icy layers of hardened snow weighing heavy upon me and the bitter winds of prevailing thought howling triumphantly about. But spring will come, and I will rise. She always does.

Tracy writes to heal her soul and discover her truest self. She will write for as long as she lives, because healing and discovery are never done.

1. Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart (New York: Random House, 2021), 218-226.
2.  Joel D. Walton, “The Big Threat to Your Relationship: Apathy”, mended LIFE (blog), October 20, 2019.
3.  Russel M. Nelson, “Sisters’ Participation in the Gathering of Israel”, General Women’s Session, General Conference, October 2018.
4.  Henry B. Eyring, “Women and Gospel Learning in the Home”, General Women’s Session, General Conference, October 2018.
5.  Dale G. Renlund, “Your Divine Nature and Eternal Destiny”, Women’s Session, General Conference, April 2022.
6.  Guest Post, “Madwoman in the Attic”, Exponent II (blog), April 26, 2022.
7.  ElleK, “I Don’t Want to Be Like Heavenly Mother”, Exponent II (blog), April 19, 2022.
8.  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), Volume the Second, 17-18.