Today’s guest post comes to us from Andrew.
I’ve spent the past several weeks euphemizing, dodging, and altering the narrative of the long out-of-print Book of Mormon Reader as I read to my two young daughters. While the artwork is as vivid and interesting as I remember it from my own childhood readings (especially in comparison to the more recent Book of Mormon Stories; the art in which looks like it could have been lifted from the Watchtower Society or McNaughton Studios), the Reader’s emphasis on narrative rather than theological exposition tends to be a bit heavier on decapitations and dismemberments than seems fit for a two-year old and a four-year old.
So, my wife and I decided to pick up the church-published (revised in 2008) New Testament Stories. With the exception of the whole nailing-a-man-to-some-wooden-beams episode, surely the New Testament would shield my two daughters from some realities, concerns, and ideas that I’m not so sure they’re ready for yet. Right?
Maybe not.
One recent evening, we picked it up and read the first several chapters. So far, so good. Some gruesome foreshadowing, sure, but no images or stories that my girls haven’t already heard or seen in nursery and Sunbeams.
We read of Jesus’ birth, and of his presentation at the temple, summarizing the events narrated in the middle section of Luke’s second chapter. The final panel of the two-page chapter states, “A widow named Anna also saw Jesus and knew who he was. She gave thanks and told many people about Him.”
If I hadn’t been looking directly at the page, I would have done a double-take.
The actual text of Luke 2:36-38 describes Anna thus:
And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of the Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity;
And she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.
And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem.
Anna’s widowhood isn’t even the fourth thing the text tells us about her, let alone the first. Anna seems to meet John the Revelator’s criterion for being called a prophet.
But let’s give the church the benefit of the doubt. Even if the Correlation Department or whatever bureau of the shadow church is responsible for this mess, cannot write that Anna was a prophetess, surely there are better ways Anna could be described.
By my count, there are at least three things, not counting her prophethood, that are more descriptive of her character and who she was than her widowhood.
I know this is just one word choice. In and of herself, Anna probably isn’t worth getting too worked up over.
And I’m not worried about Anna (though I think we’ve done her a grave injustice here). I’m worried about the accretion of such messages over a lifetime — hell, over a girlhood.
Just last year, I experienced my first real moment of LDS-father-of-girls heartsickness. Our oldest, then three, leaned over to me during Sacrament Meeting and said, “Just boys pass the Sacrament, right dad? The mommies and girls stay in their chairs.”
There’s a widening gulf between what I want my girls to see and value in themselves and that which the church (if occasional statements by leaders and the tone and content of church curricula are representative of the institution) wants.
Admittedly, I’m probably the one responsible for that growing rift. I haven’t moved much, but given the church’s glacial pace on progress, I think we can guess on whose side the more active tectonic plates are shifting.
At what point does that gulf become unbridgeable?
Before I was baptized, I thought that the boys got the priesthood when they were baptized, and I remember wondering why girls were baptized since we didn’t seem to have anything change. That’s been a long time, and I still don’t see that much changes for women, ever, in the church.
Do you know if the pre-2008 version calls her a prophetess? I remember telling this story in sunday school last year and calling her a prophetess. I’m sad that in the book geared to young children she is reduced in importance a great deal.
Paula – isn’t it tragic?
Carole – not sure how the pre-2008 version describes Anna. But I am certain that the discussion of Anna (and other women in the New Testament) has been a topic of debate among Christians long preceding our church’s apparent difficulty with it.
Within the LDS church, I’ve noticed a sense of dis-ease and discomfort enter the Gospel Doctrine classroom, when discussing Anna, Junia (Romans 16:7) or Philip’s four prophesying daughters (Acts 21:9).
To us in the modern church, of course, apostle and prophet are offices of the priesthood, and prophesying is tied to those offices. We impute to the text this modern understanding. But it seems, based on my decidedly non-scholarly reading of the NT, that prophecy was a much broader phenomenon in the early church (both the first century and in the early days of the Restoration) than it is today, and that the terms apostle and prophet are more descriptive of an individual’s faith and testimony than they are descriptive of an office.
I could be wrong, though; that could be my heresy speaking.
Just a “girl comment.” When my girls, Christina being the oldest, were being brought up in the church, it always galled me that they were required to wear a dress in the actual sanctuary part of the chapel. And not only them! I can’t tell you how many times other women, and even I, went way out of our ways to avoid actually going through the sanctuary of the chapel (not even on a day other than Sunday and not even if no one else was in the building!) when we were wearing pants. But when my little girls went to Primary and had to put on a dress before we left the house, (whereas my sons only had to make sure they had long pants on (not shorts)) it made me mad! I wondered if they required the cleaning ladies to wear dresses?
I am studying the church from an academic perspective and wondering after watching the entire GC what the nature of the difference is between the prophetic powers of the leaders of the church and more “lowly” promptings or messages of the laity. Also what percentage of Mormons believe in the historical facticity of the BOM as opposed to it having spiritual truth? How many see it as parables, myth or symbol? I guess it depends on age but also location?
Regarding my above post on BOM. If anyone has stories of their changed views of BOM it would be greatly appreciated.