"The Lesson":

Yes, my fretting,
Frowning child,
I could cross
The room to you
More easily.

But I’ve already
Learned to walk,
So I make you
Come to me.

Let go now—
There!
You see?

Oh, remember
This simple lesson,
Child,
And when
In later years
You cry out
With tight fists
And tears—
“Oh, help me,
God—please.”—
Just listen
And you’ll hear
A silent voice:

I would, child,
I would.
But it’s you,
Not I,
Who needs to try
Godhood.

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

I suggest that the representation of women deserves a much higher consideration in our religious discourse. When words are presented as if they come directly from God, they can have monumental impact on our psyches, our spirits, our hearts, and our relationships. Women are given, in story at least, first place in the lifeboats, but often in more common circumstances we are consigned to the back of the bus.

I experience Mormondom to be a warm and beautiful and well-appointed home in which you suddenly find you're in a Patriarchy Funhouse that features crazy, rippling distortion mirrors built to magnify maleness and diminish femaleness. It's males who sit in the seats of authority, from God in his heaven on down to the leadership in Salt Lake City and out to every spot on the globe where Mormons congregate. It's males we pray to and pray through. It's males that preside at the pulpit. It's males that pray over and pass the sacrament, the tokens of the Lord's supper, and officiate in all other ordinances. It's males (nearly always) whose portriats hang on the walls of our chapels and whose faces appear on the covers of our class manuals. It's males who pronounce every doctrine and policy from church headquarters. It's males we read about in most of the Old Testament, and in ninety-nine percent of the Book of Mormon. (Thank you, Jesus of the New Testament, for being such a radical revolutionary, violating tradition, speaking of and to women, treating them as fully human.)

We can think a healed thought and speak a healed word, speak of and to the two who are One, our MotherGoddessFatherGod. The hopeful but misty thought that "I've a Mother there" will give way to the experience that "I've a Mother here." We will know Him, Her, Them, Us, the Divine Family unbroken, bringing part to whole and whole to part, singing the indispensable She who had been forgotten but it now found, singing the wholeness, singing the holiness.

Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves.