Various church things

[cahn]

1. So after all the drama (mostly inside my own head, no one else cared) of last week, choir director moved back the date choir was performing at church. Without telling me! Fortunately, she mentioned it in her weekly choir email on Saturday night, which was enough time that I was able to contact the program people and have them change the program.

2. This was apparently directly related to no pianists, including me, being at choir practice last week. My in-laws were in town! No one told me there would be no pianist if I didn't come to practice! (I suspect what happened is that regular choir pianist forgot to mention he was going to be absent.)

3. For the last couple of weeks I've been substitute-teaching the 8-year-olds at church. It's... kind of fun, actually! The second week I was more confident than the first, and I think it made a huge difference both in the quality of my teaching and the way I felt about it, although I spent somewhat less time preparing the second week.

It does make me... I don't know... side-eye putting together kids of wildly unequal maturity, just because their chronological age is similar. Because although I think I did a relatively good job at engaging everyone and interesting everyone (and the thing I love about teaching that age is that I can slip in my own heretical way of looking at things -- emphasizing, for instance, that people don't have to be Mormon to listen to God, or that sometimes God can speak to us through other people, or defining the word priest, which they all knew was in the scriptural story we were discussing but not one of them actually knew what a priest was) -- I also spent a large amount of time telling people to sit down and shut up (not in those words, obviously, this is church!), and the one kid, let's call him Maxwell, that no, he could not leave and make copies of his pirate drawing, now that he had discovered the copier. No, he still could not leave and make copies. Yes, he could go to the bathroom, but he had to leave his drawings behind. (*) And so on. Clique of three girl cousins in the corner: no, you cannot play with a kindle during class. Please stop talking while Max is speaking. Hey, you might like to pay attention because I'm about to say something interesting. Let's see who's being reverent (Mormon kid code for "I'm going to bribe you with a fun activity to sit down and shut up").

Meanwhile, there's this girl, whom I'll call Caroline, whose family was visiting. She was fantastic -- very attentive, thoughtful, when I asked questions actually answered the question (instead of waving her hand around wildly because she wanted the attention, and then responding with a non sequitur, which some of the kids were doing). You could see she was really thinking about some of the points I was bringing up. (**)

I mean. I can see how a teacher who was really good could engage all those kids at the same time, especially if she had them every day instead of for four hours out of their entire lives. Occasionally even I would rise to the heights where they were all paying attention. But.. but.

(*) I should append here that Max has mild ASD; two years ago he legitimately did not understand boundaries. At this point I've seen (with other people) that he does understand, if maybe not to the extent of a typical 8-year-old, but he does do a lot of pushing to see if you'll let him have his way.

(**) This kid was sort of unbelievable, actually. She told me she liked my singing. At the end I told her that I really enjoyed teaching her. "I really enjoyed having you as my teacher!" she responded. What 8-year-old says those kinds of things?? Is it bad that I totally wondered if she was homeschooled?

4. Yesterday I was subbing in the nursery. (Ah, June, and everyone going on vacation. Someday I will be able to attend regular church, but not until July, probably.) It's the first time I've been in the nursery for months. And it turns out that the composition has totally changed since my job (calling) was there: looking after a bunch of more-or-less civilized 2.5-3.5-age girls is way, way easier than my previous task of looking after a bunch of 1.5-2.5-age savages plus two uncivilized 3.5-year-old girls and one civilized 3.5-year-old girl. (I should not say that they were uncivilized, exactly, but one was always doing things like tripping or pushing the younger toddlers and then looking all innocent, and it was really irritating. The other would just brawl with the other girl because they were both seriously high-energy, and I would spend a great deal of time trying to keep the savages' Brownian motion from taking them into the path of the brawls.) I was actually not wiped out after two hours with the kids, which is a first.

Also, they're all at the same level, except for the one 2-year-old boy who is happy as long as he's clutching his little panda bear (so cute!), so I actually found it way easier pedagogically than the 8-year-olds :) (We worked on not grabbing and asking other people nicely for things instead...)

Comments

[cahn]

Heh. I wondered whether you'd catch that :) So here's the thing: because of the typical Mormon emphasis on Book of Mormon study over Bible study, these kids all knew the BoM story, which was about Wicked King Noah and his wicked priests (one of whom listens to the righteous prophet who comes to call them to repentance, indeed repents, and becomes a prophet himself) — and yet had no idea what a priest was. So my bar here was very low: make sure they don't come out of the lesson thinking priests are typically evil characters…

Not feeling overly burdened with completeness or complete accuracy, I defined it something like "person whose job it is to think about God and talk to other people about God." I know, I know, one could pick all sorts of holes in both that statement, and worse, what it omits, but hey. I also pointed out the connection to the Mormon concept of "priesthood" (which is markedly different from either the Catholic or Jewish concept, but which has some commonality, and which they would be familiar with) and that sometimes they might run across members of other religions who call themselves priests.

[seekingferret]

I defined it something like "person whose job it is to think about God and talk to other people about God."

Huh... yeah, I have lots of problems with that definition, but like I said, I have no idea how I would define priest.

Obviously, ancient Israelite priesthood (kohen/k'huna) was by analogy to its local neighbors, and mostly the job description was to perform religious rituals. On the other hand, Exodus describes a call for the entire nation of Israel to be a nation of priests, and I don't think we can easily construe that to mean that everyone would be responsible for the performance of rituals. So there's something else to the title besides the mere ritual, but on the other hand it's not communication with God, that's reserved for prophets (navi/n'vuah).

The whole sentence is "You shall be a nation of priests, a holy nation." And it's tempting to interpret the second phrase as a definition of the first, and that's a feasible translation of the Hebrew, but I don't think that's how traditional Jewish exegesis would understand it, because that would mean the phrases are redundant and we don't allow for redundancies in the Torah. I think traditional exegesis would begin by rendering it "You shall be a nation of priests AND a holy nation," and then try to ask what the difference in these two calls is.

And I'm mostly spitballing here, but holy nation usually implies distinction and connection to God via separation from that which is mundane. And the fact that the actual Israelite priest's role is to perform rituals on behalf of other Israelites is suggestive, that perhaps a contrastive meaning is being brought here, that the call is for Israel to distinguish itself from the other nations, to be holy, but also to serve others and bring them closer to God.

And of course, Catholic priesthood grows out of this idea, but moves in different directions because of the political tides of the time. The Israelite priesthood of the late Temple and early post-Temple era was highly politicized and probably in some ways corrupt. Early Christianity abolished the hereditary priesthood, abolished most connection to the sacrificial cult, but retained a lot of Jewish ideas about the prist as the person whose job it is to perform rituals on behalf of others, to help bring them closer to God.

[cahn]

Hee. Well, yeah. I can also see that I will have to explain more about the Mormon idea of priesthood, which I realize I'd been subconsciously fighting because I always feel, in the midst of explaining these things to you, that they're horribly and terribly culturally/religiously appropriative and even kind of offensive. But, you know, as usual, apologies for any way I may inadvertently offend, and I know you are good at separating it out, so. (Also another unrelated caveat: I am not married to a Mormon, and my dad is terrible at explaining things, so think of this very much as from the point of view of someone who's looking at it from the inside of the religion but outside of an intimate experience with the actual possession of the priesthood.)

Mormons take the scripture about "a nation of priests" very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that all "worthy" (which usually means church-attending, tithe-paying, Word-of-Wisdom-keeping, non-sexually-immoral) males over the age of... 12, I think?... are (should be) ordained with the priesthood. (There are two types, a lower and higher, and the age-12 one is the lower.)

Men with the priesthood have access to the power of God for the serving of others (I think this is even something like the Sunday-school definition). This manifests in a couple of ways. One must have the priesthood to participate in the sacred ritual of the sacrament by blessing or distributing the sacrament (like a Catholic priest), and to perform other sacred ordinances such as baptism, temple marriage, etc. Priesthood holders can anoint with oil to give special blessings. There are other ritualistic priesthood blessings (baby blessing, confirmation by laying on of hands to receive the Holy Ghost). They serve in positions of authority in the Church (any "calling" that involves a position of authority that is defined to include other men must have a priesthood holder filling it -- for example, as music leader, I have authority over other music people, some of whom are men, but there's nothing that says the music people must be men. A ward (congregation) by definition must have men in it (because it must have priesthood holders to bless the sacrament, if nothing else) so the bishop (leader of the ward) must have the priesthood).

However, although "the priesthood" is a huge thing (perhaps one of the biggest, actually; one of the big things about Mormonism is that it claims that the "true priesthood" was lost from the earth a couple hundred years after Jesus), Mormons are not called priests (well -- it's one of the names of the classes the Young Men (12-18-year-olds) go through, along with Deacon, Teacher, etc. I think these are all taken from a scripture in Paul). So I'm not sure the kids had ever put together that the "priests" in this story are connected with the thing we call "the priesthood."

But, because all these kids have been marinated in this culture, I felt I could elide all of that (ritual, authority, calling, sacred nature) a little by just making that connection, plus which you can see the differences are fundamental enough that I didn't really want to get into it. Which is part of my frustration -- if it had just been Caroline, we might have been able to get into all of this a little more, but as it was I kind felt like I had to do a sound bite and get on with it. (Though they will have lessons about the Mormon priesthood every year of their lives, probably.)

(...hmm. On consulting with the Book of Mormon, it indeed seems to be true that although the performance of various rituals (er, baptism, sacrament) is cited as a duty of the priests, there are many, many more references to the priests teaching the people (with that explicit wording). Interesting, and interesting that apparently my subconscious mind registered this, and registered it more prominently than, oh, you know, actually seeing Catholic priests these days.)

[seekingferret]

Hmm... Actually, Judaism also has an idea that "true Priesthood" has been lost, inasmuch as the traumatic movements of the Jewish people have destroyed the genealogical records confirming the authenticity of our hereditary priesthood. We have people who have a family tradition that they are priests, and we generally respect that when it comes to the minor honors that the modern service accords to priests, but we don't have certainty that their traditions are correct. (And this is important because it's more than just being born to a priest that makes one a priest... the priest must also not have entered into a forbidden marriage, such as to a widow or divorcee.)

All the stuff about the Mormon priesthood is fascinating, and yes, kind of offensively appropriative in the way Mormon tradition usually is, but... well, my friends got into this huge and fascinating argument a few years back on a private message board about the idea of religious appropriation, and I wish I could share it with you, but basically our only reasonable conclusion was that all religions steal from other religions and it's kind of a waste of time getting worked up about it once it's syncreted to a sufficient point of distinguishment, and possibly even before that point.

I do like the idea that everyone (er.... every man. :( ) has a calling to serve others through the priesthood.

[cahn]

...Yeah, that's an awfully mature conclusion. It's a bit asymmetric, in the sense that Judaism has been around long enough that all kinds of religions have had the opportunity to steal from it, whereas Mormonism has been around for such a short period of time that we haven't really had that kind of experience. Though along those lines, have you watched/listened to The Book of Mormon (the musical, that is)?

And yeah: there is a vibrant underground Mormon feminist movement that is really annoyed about the male priesthood thing. (I am not really one of them, but I might well be if I had a Mormon husband and/or sons and got to see the inequality firsthand. And there is inequality in the way men and women are regarded -- in, as was pointed out to me the other day, the very way that the leadership (all men) take pains to point out frequently how women are just as good as men. No one ever feels the need to tell men that they're just as good as women.)

[seekingferret]

It's a bit asymmetric, in the sense that Judaism has been around long enough that all kinds of religions have had the opportunity to steal from it,

Judaism has also been around long enough that it has had opportunity to steal from all kinds of religions. A facebook friend posted an article a few weeks ago about some really bog-standard Jewish practice that apparently unquestionably originated in medieval Arabic ritual, borrowed by the medieval Cabbalists in Tzfat and then spread through the Jewish world.


(Also, ha: http://seekingferret.livejournal.com/92576.html. Not to mention, http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/80711.html?thread=221767#cmt221767 )