Guest post by Maria Mortensen-Davis. Maria Mortensen-Davis is a poet, amateur naturalist, and currently an at-home parent in her family. She lives in Utah County with her husband and four children, where she spends as much time outside as possible. 

I’ve spent many hours this week preparing my garden beds for the season. I don’t enjoy gardening during most of the year, a fact that I manage to forget every spring for a few weeks in a feverish obsession with new growth and sunshine. Easter was last week, spring is on my mind, and it’s time to work in the dirt. It’s been a long winter and all I can think about is late-summer raspberries.

This year we had an unseasonably warm week in mid-March, followed by the usual return of Second Utah Winter, so my kids have been confused ever since the vernal equinox. “I thought it was spring!” they whine to me as I bundle them into winter coats and send them to school in the sleet and hail. I don’t blame them: spring has always been the hardest season for me, too. By the time the weather starts to warm in April I have waited so long and my hopes are so high that I am inevitably disappointed. After months of alpine winter, one warm afternoon isn’t enough to thaw my core; fifty-degree days might as well be twenty, for all the good they do me. Maybe I’m just impatient, but it’s never until summer that I’m really comfortable. Spring is a fickle friend.

I felt that familiar spring delight when President Nelson became prophet and things in the Church started changing at lightning speed. Two hours instead of three. No more Scouting. Ministering instead of Visiting Teaching. Women witnessing ordinances. Now, I thought, it’s happening. Springtime in the church. I’d heard someone describe it that way and it seemed to fit. I felt the same about the concurrent explosion of art, books, and social media content featuring Heavenly Mother. So much new growth, so quickly, after what felt like an interminable period of dormancy. For once, the Church felt not only true but also living. Everything was new and exciting, and more change seemed inevitable.

So when I attended my first endowment session of the new year in January 2019, I was full of that feverish springtime hope. I had been wrestling privately with various parts of the temple ceremony for years—Why did I need to be veiled? Where was Heavenly Mother? Why was Eve so silent? Why was I making covenants to my husband instead of to God?—and when I heard that changes had been made, I was thrilled. I felt seen. Was my crop of faith finally bearing fruit? I spoke with trusted sisters about their experiences with the new wording. I heard rumors that things were “so much better!” I read the Tribune article that informed me I would “see revisions and additions as a leap forward.” I hurried to the temple. Perhaps I should have seen this for what it was–my usual pie-in-the-sky expectations of early spring. But I didn’t. Instead, I found myself weeping hot angry tears in the Celestial room afterward, trying to explain my fountain of disappointment to my husband (and myself). It was painful. I have not often been back. It was that evening, as I sat with my shattered hopes in the endowment room of the Mount Timpanogos temple, that I realized quite clearly that regardless of wording changes, I was still no more than a guest in a man’s church. What was there to celebrate in these changes? Such a tiny gesture, such a bare minimum of respect that only by stark contrast could it be considered equality? A little lip-service could not suddenly make me forget that the hearts of Church leaders were “far from me.”

The Women’s Session of General Conference this April was another late-season blizzard. I had been hoping for more autonomy for the Relief Society; Elder Oaks’ words seemed to grab power back. I had been hoping for more light and knowledge and (dare I say?) worship of Heavenly Mother; Elder Renlund’s talk squelched it. Just when I had allowed myself to believe in growth and change again, Second Utah Winter slammed down and threatened to kill all the blossoms. I’m hurt and confused and hungry. It takes only a cursory study of our church’s history to discover that there have been many such late frosts, storms of change that have removed previous growth. Look back a few decades and you’ll find the resulting dead blooms: financial autonomy of the Relief Society, institutional encouragement of women’s development and careers outside the home, even women’s laying-on of hands to give blessings.

I think I struggle with spring because I don’t trust it: it feels warm and inviting, but underneath it the ground is still frozen. Because even when I believe that summer is inevitable, I also know that Second Utah Winter will have its day, and that makes planning difficult and disappointment likely. It will be weeks, months maybe, before every day is warm. My ancestors must have known this well. They could have told stories about “starving spring”—a time between late winter and spring when food stored from the last harvest was gone, animals were scarce, and a reliable harvest could not be expected for three more months. Unlike the Easter candy my children have been eating this week, spring in this hemisphere has historically held only the promise of nourishment, not its fulfillment. A time for planting crops, but not for harvesting, not even for eating much at all. The flowers on the apricot tree are not popcorn, and they can’t satisfy. A person can still starve in the spring.

It seems like my church participation, lately, consists almost entirely of hollowing out a place in the snow where my divine self can blossom. Of making space for the truth that is witnessed to me. Of reconciling personal revelation with dogma. As Joseph Smith put it, “I want the liberty of believing as I please. It feels so good not to be trammeled.” I was well into adulthood before I discovered that I was allowed to have my own beliefs, that I didn’t have to take everything offered me by authority figures. I’ve now planted some beliefs of my own. I’m experimenting, like Alma encouraged. My new little beliefs aren’t very different from what I was taught in primary, but the small changes make them mine. They feel so true in my body. They’re just sprouting, and I’m tending them carefully and they’re growing beautifully and the fruit looks like it’s going to be very sweet. So why do these spring hailstorms keep coming to trammel them?

I was thrilled a few years ago with what felt like springtime in the church. But I forgot that this is Utah, and in Utah we always have Second Winter. It’s never a gradual warming: always a struggle between darkness and light, yesterday and tomorrow, old and new, cold and warm. We’re in it now. Before you say it, I know: it’s irrational of me to expect an institution as large as the Church to change overnight. And human nature being what it is, the Church is almost as root-bound with old traditions as my front garden beds are from years of weeds. But if you think that’s stopping me, you clearly aren’t familiar with my unrealistic expectations of spring. I’m cold and hungry and eager for summer.

We may be in the fullness of times, but I think we’re early in the spring of it. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that the First Vision, early in the spring of 1820, was followed by decades of tremendous hardship. The continuing restoration, but not the harvest. The fullness of hopes, not the fullness of bellies. Because even now, all is not well in Zion: we have siblings that are starving. Women are hurting. Our LGBTQ+ loved ones are dying. If I, a white, cis-het woman, have begun to feel hungry, how much more malnourished are our Church members who are LGBTQ+ or people of color? We have a past full of racism that is waiting to be reckoned with. There are millions more sorrows “that the eye can’t see.” We are hungry for clarity, truth, and understanding, and even those of us that have faithfully laid by our years’ supply are beginning to run out. We are venturing out of the field not because we are too picky or too ungrateful or too lazy to reap, but because there is nothing left here to sustain us. We are out in the wilderness hunting and gathering whatever nourishment the rest of the world has to offer. Not out of rebellion: out of desperation. Starvation. I think my pioneer ancestors, surviving on the roots of sego lilies, would understand.

I’m trying to find hope in the spring. I have faith in the restoration of all things. I have hope for truth that is clear and resonant, for paradoxes reconciled by Jesus Christ. But a woman cannot live on hope and promises alone. What good is my faith if I starve before any of them are fulfilled? Like my mother Eve, I’m longing for fruit. I want August raspberries, and when it comes to raspberries, a field that is white is not ready to harvest—it’s only in blossom. Many of us are so, so hungry. We need something to live on now.

So as I clear the roots from my garden beds both literal and spiritual, I find myself praying the hungry prayer of my ancestors: Please bless us with good weather for growth. Send a bountiful harvest to nourish and strengthen us. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.