[Love And Loathing
Abdul Soumphonphakdy
So how on earth did a new religious movement emerging from the evangelical Puritan and Protestant religious world of the rationalist, Enlightenment era early 19th century eastern United States end up doing this crazy stuff?! Heavily influenced by their experience of Freemasonry, Brigham Young and his fellow apostles constructed a total ritual experience from all the fragments and doctrines that Joseph Smith had taught to them before he was murdered to create a religious service that is a wonderful layer cake of meanings and possibilities. Some see it as a perfectly formed and profound ordinance that has hardly changed since the first biblical temples, others as a flawed mess that has rightly required several phases of reform and editing in its nearly two century history.
My conclusion then, as with so many things in real life (and real life in any religion), is that there is good, bad and hilarious in everything. I can be completely honest about all these dimensions and live with their contradictions and complexities. The tensions they create are the places where I gain some of my most profound insights into Life, the Universe and Everything.
Part of the life-enhancing fun of my faith journey has been working out which of the good, bad and hilarious things is which, and sometimes changing my mind along the way. This has taught me to have some humility, some courage, a sense of humour, and always an open mind to new insights. At its best, that seems to be ultimately what the temple and its strange collage of initiations and endowments and sealings is all about. While offering a sanctuary from the complexity and worries of life on earth, it also embraces and engages with those befuddling complications and adds a few more of its own.
We embrace robes and ritual, hand gestures imbued with profound meaning; we receive stigmata and contemplate the suffering of the crucified Lord with our own bodies like St Francis. Blessings are given and received by touch and anointing with holy water and holy oil, as well as speaking and hearing.
It is also a relief because initiates go into their endowment with basically no idea what they are about to be asked to make eternal covenants about under immense social pressure not to walk out halfway through, which is inexcusably unethical when you think about it objectively. At least when one finds out what the covenants are they mostly represent concepts and principles one is already familiar with from the scriptures.
The prayer circle is also an act of trust that the usually old man leading the prayer will speak clearly enough to be heard and repeated, and not ramble. It is the only time in Mormonism that we repeat the words of a prayer said by someone else in a call and response format that is the norm in Catholic liturgy.
The accounts of the original endowment in Nauvoo Temple sound like they would blow your freaking 19th century mind! They took all day, and as you proceeded from one curtained space to the next you would encounter the characters in the stories who would perform and talk to you. A brilliant dissertation installation by one of my fellow Arts students set up in the university chapel a maze of huge white sheets where every space involved a different sensual experience of things like music, or a smell or woodchips under your bare feet. Imagine Lucifer coming at you in an enclosed space to gloat about his power and then being defeated by the heroes. It must have been a pretty intense virtual reality experience.
And then there was the film. Oh, thank You Dear God for the pure camp genius of the film. It took a few years at Art college after my mission researching postmodernist pastiche to fully appreciate and adore all its retro-chic kitsch facets, but what a smorgasbord of fun it was.
I love how the temple teaches and reminds me, and makes me prove that I really believe, that every person matters. Vicarious temple work is the pure love of Christ in action, casting bread on the waters without necessarily expectation of reward or immediate gratification or gratitude from those you help. An extreme Zen discipline. Like the cloistered monks and nuns who never interact with the people in the world but devote themselves to making everything better, as they see it, through the service of ritual and prayer for the living and the dead.
So, for me, the endowment with all its random ingredients and irreconcilable contradictions is a metaphor for the Church as a whole. It is earnest, well intentioned, flawed, treated as communicating ancient unchanging truths yet reviewed and reformed with each new generation to better fit the social norms and cultural values of the current generation. It is capable of elevating your mind and soul to the heights of love and compassion and wonder at the grandness of existence in our extraordinary world, yet obsessed over small details of clothing and conformity to a long list of rigid lifestyle and ideological requirements before you are permitted or trusted to fully participate. It is expansive and small-minded at the same time. It is silly nonsense in fancy dress; it is the deepest truths. It really does have to be seen, perhaps over and over again through a lifetime, to be believed and understood.
Nice. A wonderful read. Refreshing and insighful and honest.
I might be a bit jealous of your patriarchal blessing comments, Peter but they actually spike my testimony with reassurance to reread and trust my own.
I agree with all you say on the whole.
Your final comments about helping others unknown to us do not often ring true in wards. It actually feels like pulling teeth to inspire some Mormons to look outside their own idyllic patriarchally protected cloisters to care about outsiders. I wonder at times if prayer and reminded blessings for living righteously encourages a self centred people but yes, there are enough who are learning to serve for the sake of love.
We all do, slowly, often via religion.
I love love love the references to Isaiah and Elijah etc. I knew nothing of these scriptures. Delightful!
These videos were created for Latter-day Saint parents and allies to voice their love for their LGBT brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. They want to give a message of comfort and support to other parents who are navigating the difficult conflicts that can arise in families around this issue.
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Sometimes a photograph is art and the importance of that photograph can transcend the time and place in which it was taken. A photograph can outlive both the photographer and the subject. A photograph can outlive the very reason it was created.
I was first inspired by Yusuf Karsh in my teens; a visionary, a fellow Canadian, a true artist. He is famous for his portraits of the famous: Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemmingway and others. His work lives on well past the end of his life and career.
And sometimes my work remains private; for viewing exclusively on living room walls and mantles. It is shared with immediate family only or tucked away in a shoebox but saved for generations. These photographs are no less important.
My love of photography comes from having precious few photos of my own childhood. I envy those who can relive their early years through photo and video. In my own small way, I like to think Iris Booth is providing a service that goes beyond a simple headshot for LinkedIn or a small business website. I like to think that these portraits, so candid and honest because the subject and artist are one in the same, will become cherished family treasures one day. Hopefully end up tucked away in a digital shoebox (hard drive) for future generations.
Someone thought it would be funny to give my English husband a DVD box set of the 2005 Ashes series as a Christmas present that year - the joke being on Australian me. I scowled whenever I stumbled upon it during house moves across two continents, incredulous that it survived a charity shop box or bin bag on countless occasions. It now sits on our bookshelf.
Who would have thought I would be the first one in the house to watch it, 15 years later, in an attempt to refuel a hate that had been shoved away at the bottom of a drawer long ago, like those bloody DVDs should have been? The only explanation I have for not throwing them out is that they weren't mine to dispose of, and it was, after all, the greatest series of them all.
As I gaze at the cover, past the main image of a grinning Michael Vaughan, I see the subject of my wrath: a maniacally roaring, champagne-spraying, devastatingly good Andrew Flintoff. I am reminded that there is something to love, in spite of myself, about Freddie.
I can't escape his feats from that summer. Memories flood back every time it is mentioned, and it is, often. My work laptop has a preset home screen showing the delighted faces of England supporters at Old Trafford as a figure in the foreground raises his arms in triumph. The crowd is in focus and the player is a blur but it is unmistakably Flintoff. He is celebrating the wicket of Simon Katich, for the second time in that third Test of '05, halfway to his haul of four wickets in the innings, before Brett Lee and Glenn McGrath held out to deny England victory. The result was good for Australia, but that image irks me nearly every day.
After starting to write this piece, I was half-watching a late-night rerun of a British crime drama I'd never bothered with before. One of the characters, explaining how a cold case got no press, told another: "We'd just won the Ashes, remember? It was all Flintoff and humiliated Aussies." I told you, I can't escape him.
So what is it about Flintoff that gets under my skin? Let's start off the field. Freddie is a blokey bloke, a man of the people, but I'm just not suckered into his class-clown routine. He sometimes does this thing where he leaves his mouth hanging open after he's said something, like he's waiting for his audience to break into laughter. Infuriatingly, they usually do because much of what says is entertaining - gah!
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