Two sets of keys, turned jointly and unitedly in mutual purpose, is what we should be envisioning when we think of our Heavenly Parents and Their work together.
General Conference April 2022 confirmed Heavenly Mother is our doctrine. Further, it was stated that the specifics of the Church’s doctrine on Heavenly Mother could be found in the Gospel Topics Essay. This was exciting!
Dreams are highly valued as a source of revelation in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but do we have a clear doctrine on dreams?
As a teen convert to the Church, I was taught that we have a Heavenly Mother, but She was being protected by Heavenly Father from the fallen-ness of our world and so we did not pray or speak about Her. The idea, as I understood it, was that if no one thought or spoke about Her, somehow She would be protected. How an immortal, all-powerful goddess could stand in need of protection was never explained to me. Even my teenaged convert self knew that was hooey.
Embodiment is one of the two great doctrines restored by the First Vision. When Joseph Smith entered the Sacred Grove in 1820, he learned two great truths contrary to Trinitarian Christianity. First, he learned that Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father are separate beings. Hence, we do not believe in the Trinity but in the Godhead.
A strange dynamic sometimes animates conversations on the subject when certain members of the Church take part. For example, someone mentions a recent increase in violent crimes in their city. The hypothetical Church member involved in the discussion, upon hearing this, might shake his head and say something like, “Christ is coming back soon.” Others in the conversation usually will mumble some sort of agreement and drop the point.
Apostasy from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has become increasingly common in recent years. I wish to say a few words about how the apostasy of a close family member has impacted my life.
In the temple we are taught that we must enter into a specific order to claim our divine inheritance: the Holy Order of Matrimony. Might this be the holiest Order of God, the one which Priest- and Priestesshood are patterned after? Heaven would then be governed by an order which consists of Priestesshood and Priesthood unified; an order in which complementary physical and spiritual ordinances of birth, awakening, attachment, and oneness are the means by which progression occurs.
Throughout mankind’s existence, and especially during times of crisis, conflict, and confusion such as we see now with COVID and the war in Ukraine, one universal question seems to echo the loudest across time and space: “If there is a loving God, why is there so much suffering?!”
One of the most glorious truths that has been restored in this fullness of times is the knowledge that men and women are meant to be equal partners, uniting with Christ in our complementary differences to fulfill the measure of our creation.
When I teach my graduate course where we examine the ways that the lives and choices of women affect international relations, my students always have a moment of clarity near the end. They reach a point where they passionately wonder how it is that women, having obtained civil rights and property rights more or less worldwide, still cannot bring about equal standing with men and a cessation of male violence against them.
As far as we know, only two religious societies have successfully built Zion: the City of Enoch and the people in the Americas after Christ’s visit. There are good reasons for this paucity of perfect societies: building a Zionistic society of “one heart and one mind” requires sacrifice and a proactive attitude from every individual towards living the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not for the faint hearted.
The symbolism of the blood of the womb echoes in the ordinances of salvation, temples ancient and modern, and the Atonement of Jesus Christ. As we rediscover sacred feminine truths that have been neglected through the ages, we develop a clearer understanding of women and their distinctive purpose in the exaltation of mankind.
The male gaze, I assert, has hovered over the world of women like the giant eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.
For some time I have been curious about ideas of what a woman is, and where those ideas have come from. I have also been fascinated by the images of ancient goddesses, and wondered how their images have influenced thoughts about women through the ages and whether goddess images have any influence on how women are seen today by others and themselves.
I ask that question especially of the orthodox CoJC members, of which there are many, in that legislature. What were they thinking when they voted for this disastrous bill? Were they dreaming of their polygamous mansions above? Or somehow vindicating their polygamous ancestors? Did they think of themselves as heroic ark-steadiers preparing for the Second Coming?
What would happen . . . if we thought that matter is more like the fields of energy that animate the whole cosmos rather than incredibly small particles held together by external forces? What would happen if we thought of matter as the stuff that makes relationships possible, including our relationship to God?
As a child with limited exposure to blatant evil, in my perspective, a harlot was the pinnacle of wickedness. I'm not sure if I was ever explicitly taught this in church, but this term was used to describe women who preyed on men with their insatiable lust. This fits well with another false concept I learned that when a woman falls from grace, she falls farther than any man ever can, because she is inherently purer.
That women served as deaconesses in the early church is not really in dispute. Paul writes about women deaconesses as early as the sixth decade, about 30 years after the death of Christ. The presumed earliest mention of women deaconesses is in Romans 16:1, where Paul specifically refers to Phoebe as a deacon, though in English the word is changed to read “servant.”
Heavenly Mother is prominently present in scripture. She plays all the roles we would expect a divine mother to play. While her presence has been obscured by the loss of plain and precious parts of original texts, her extensive involvement in the lives of her children is nevertheless still apparent if the scriptures are closely read with attention to symbols and surrogates. As the modern Zeitgeist impels us to look for the feminine divine in the scriptural canon, voices speaking from the dust—especially the Book of Mormon—providentially give us background information necessary to find our divine Mother hidden in plain view.