:Naiahdot

For months now, I have wrestled with varying degrees of resistance to writing here, ranging from my own reticence for fear of pride to outright stupor of thought those times when I’d made up my little mortal mind to just roll my sleeves up and have at it. I’ve called up screens and stared at them until the words “Write Post” were burned into my retinas. A few times I’ve managed to tap out a bit, but never anything inspired, in any way worth sharing, or, occasionally, even coherent.

As the subtitle of this site states, I write here to make sense of it all, to process all the various theses, antitheses, and yes, even my own varying syntheses as they flow through my life and mind. Sometimes I write to process. Sometimes I write to proselytize. Sometimes I write to persuade. Even then, though, when I think I have scrap of understanding that I wish to share, in the process of writing, that God-given ephemeral abstract pursuit of condensing the myriad sensations of existence into linear text, even then I am further cementing the order of my thoughts as I experience their verbalization.

I could not begin to make sense of the last several months of my life if I had two research assistants, a team of experts, and the Oracle of Delphi to help me.

I live in a small town. I like living in my small town. I don’t like leaving my small town. In fact, as a rule, I just don’t unless I have to. Well, last summer, I packed up and left town for quite a while and had what was safely one of the richest life experiences of my 30-odd years. I was blessed, together with my children, to get to spend a month of our summer living with some of the displaced FLDS mothers and children down in Texas. Yes, I went all the way to Texas. Yes, I went to stay with the FLDS in Texas. What a priceless cross-cultural experience!

You see, I had been very moved by both what I had seen of their plight in regard to the YFZ Raid of 2008, as well as what I had managed to learn of their lifestyle previous to it. I wished publicly that I could live among them and learn from them, and that wish was granted. I learned more there than I could even begin to quantify.

That one month is still being processed some six months later. (Has it really been that long?!?! I hadn’t counted until now.) Sure, I said above that sometimes I write to process, but there’s a fair level of pre-writing processing that has to take place before I can even begin to piece together a sentence, and, being a busy mother, I really don’t have anything close to the time to relax and peacefully ponder a body of experience of such depth and breadth and height. I have, at times, impatiently begged for understanding, but I was met with nothing but a quiet admonition to patience. And so, I wait. If He meant for me to have it, I would have it by now, but I don’t, and I’m ok with that.

I, myself, wait rather patiently on the Lord these days. He has kept me plenty busy with volumes more life experience in arenas much closer to home, and so, like a lovingly distracted and redirected toddler, I find myself not even thinking much about the lack of recent posts on my blog. All my concerns about yesterday, and all my fears about tomorrow are remedied by living today as best I can (a spectacular truth that I picked up from my FLDS friends), and so I find myself staying in the moment. So much so that, apparently, six months have gone by before I could even stop to reckon them up on my fingers. All through this time, though, I have been receiving such kind and sweet encouragement to begin writing again, from such different quarters of my life, that I felt I needed to offer some explanation for my silence.

So, there you have it. I’ve been blessed with one of the most priceless experiences of my mortal sojourn, but without the corresponding capstone of understanding. If anything, I’ve learned how little I know, especially when I think I know something (and really that train of thought can get me chasing my tail so long I’ll never write another public word again if I don’t break it off). Perhaps I will need to just set that all aside, and accept that, contrary to what seems like the obvious thing to do with such an exceptional life experience, I may need to just set it on the shelf, and go on writing without having actually made sense of it all.

I do like writing. I love words. Next to flowers, they’re one of my favorite aspects of this world the Lord has given us. Mostly, though, I like the thinking and the moments of clarity and understanding that come along as connections are made and truths are realized, but really, in the end, like flowers, such things are gifts, and it’s not up to me whether I am to be a receiver or not, and so I just wait and cheerfully tend to my work elsewhere.

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This is a project that I have been personally involved with and, if you value your rights, I am hoping that you will feel to check it out and speak out. You can do so at Voices for the Children.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, at the request of Senator Harry Reid, is going to convene this week for a hearing entitled “Crimes Associated with Polygamy: The Need for a Coordinated State and Federal Response”, coming up July 24, 2008. This is an entirely speculative hearing, and the only people called to testify are outspoken critics of the FLDS people. It does not matter how you feel about polygamy or the FLDS; what matters is that you oppose government targeting like this.

Just because they are a little different from mainstream culture doesn’t mean that they are not protected by the Constitution.

Aren’t we all a little different in our own ways?

If we allow this for some of us; it’s only a matter of time before it’s any of us.

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In his open letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry and 51st District Court Judge Barbara Walther, Samuel W. Roundy illustrates the fundamentally flawed nature in which the state has gone about ‘learning about’ the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints with an intriguing metaphor. Brother Roundy writes:

These people, according to their own admission, have been schooled for a year or more by lying apostates from our society. This is akin to taking the testimony of an ex-wife who has left her husband and had a bitter divorce to find out what his character is like without using any other source of information.

I would like to take this metaphor a step further.

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A house divided against itself cannot stand, and a mind divided against itself cannot write. Having taken a stance in behalf of the FLDS at a time when the church into which I was baptized 13 years ago has taken a bafflingly aggresive public stance against them has placed me in a very awkward situation. I can’t help but wonder if the leaders of my church are as misinformed about these people as it seems most everyone but their few-and-far-between allies is these days, for the Spirit has whispered to me gently but intently that I was to seek out understanding, that I was to learn about them and their ways. As I followed that personal prompting, a most amazing thing happened. I found that as one allegation after another began to fall away, the people I thought I was learning about bore little to no resemblance to who they actually are. I have been blessed to learn about them, and even to get to know some of them. I have come to love these people.

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The level of misinformation about the FLDS and their ways is astounding. I, myself, began with the same picture of these people as is commonly held–an extremist cult who practices a perverted form of the restorationist doctrine of celestial plural marriage wherein young girls are forced into early marriage and pregnancy, kept in poor conditions, mistreated–all to serve the lusts of the ruling body of old men, who oust young boys to keep them from stealing their would-be brides. Sensationally salcious to say the least, and those who spread such an image, such as Carolyn and Flora Jessop or Elissa Wall, undoubtedly sell many more books painting the FLDS that way than they would if the picture were a little truer to life.

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“Truth is truth, wherever you find it.” That’s one of my stock phrases. The lesser-used second half of it is “whether it’s from the mouth of a sage or the mouth of a babe.” While the wording is not the same, the idea comes from Joseph Smith, himself, and one usually thinks you can’t go too far wrong in following the prophet, but it has recently caused me to receive a little well-intentioned-yet-negative feedback from a couple of friends after I made known my feelings about the recent treatment of the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints living at YFZ Ranch and my outrage at the utterly unconstitutional way in which their community was invaded by the Texas authorities.

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Those closest to me have known that my mind has been consumed to a great degree concerning ways of living, particularly the paradoxical requirements of living life as a saint in modern society. Much of my thinking has touched on or been inspired by the lifestyle lived by the members of the FLDS who reside at the YFZ ranch in Texas, brought to public view by their recent, heart-wrenching, constitution-crunching persecution and the veritable mass-kidnapping of their children. Since learning of their plight, I have followed the developments of their case closely. I have haunted their new church-sponsored websites, FLDS Truth: the truth about the FLDS faith, Captive FLDS Chilren, and the blog-like Truth Will Prevail waiting for the next development. Three times now, a name has caught my eye, “Maggie Jessop.”

Maggie is absolutely brilliant.

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Note: I originally published this for just a few minutes right after I wrote it, but then I took it down and sent it in email to select group of my closest friends and confidants. I have decided to go ahead and make it public now.

I can’t speak as to how legally defensible it is, and judging by the recent treatment of the members of the FLDS church, it isn’t, but I would like to claim for myself, and for others who choose it, the right to opt out.

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