Contemplative Dexterity

For nine months, I haven't attended church. It's been quite lovely having my Sunday's completely free and not having to worry about what activities I should or should not be doing. But leaving a religion is a lot more than just not attending regular church meetings. Having been raised since infancy in the LDS church, my identity for 25 years of my life has been linked inexorably to that belief. As humans, we have an inherent desire to identify ourselves, whether it be through groups and beliefs, or jobs, or sports, or talents and hobbies. We invest much of who we think we are into these identities to the extent that when something negative happens, such as we lose that job or can no longer participate in a talent/hobby, we feel an immense sense of loss and confusion. Depending on ones level of immersion, religious identities can be particularly hard to lose. It has been quite liberating to experience the freedom of researching my religious beliefs and expanding my lear...

(This is another very long post, so sorry.) Okay, so again, I fully admit that I've never gone through the temple and taken out my endowment, but I have read it and what I felt as I read it was very real. While I can only imagine what it's like to go through for other people, I do know how I would react, or at least what I would be thinking had I gone through the ceremony. The comments that follow are some of my thoughts and responses to the endowment ceremony, the transcript of which I found online. It is a   1990 transcript of the endowment ceremony. I also respond to a webpage created by a current member of the LDS church for the initiatory (washing and anointing). Up until the 20th Century, the washing and anointing ceremony required the initiate to be nude. A member of the opposite sex would then bathe them and then anoint them with perfume on specific areas of their bodies and then anoint their heads with consecrated oil. Gradually, the LDS church wo...

Last summer I moved to Provo. I had just taken a job in Springville and felt the need to be within a closer proximity than my Salt Lake home offered. I didn't want to move to Provo because it is the center of Happy Valley and having already graduated from college, from the U of U no less, I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of taking up residence in BYU sanctioned housing with young college students. But the housing was cheap, so I moved. The unfortunate thing about BYU housing, minus the BYU, is that if you're not a student (who is already required to take a certain number of religion courses), you have to be enrolled in an institute class and attend at least 75% of the time, otherwise they kick you out. Initially, I wasn't thrilled at the idea of having to take another institute class, but I tried to look at it positively and figured that it would be a good place to at least meet people and make friends. My mother suggested that I take the Temple Prep course. Thi...

With my quest for more information regarding celestial marriage and sealings, I realized how little I knew about the actual temple ceremonies, and more specifically, the endowment ceremony. I was told that you can actually find videos on YouTube of the ceremony. I was completely floored by this! Some soul was brave enough to take a hidden camera into the temple and record the entire ceremony?! Sacrilege! At least that's what I would have thought if I was still an active member of the LDS church. Watching one of those videos sounded like a much better plan than me pretending to repent of my "sins" so I could go through the temple and experience it myself, which has crossed my mind once or twice. However, since I do the majority of my research on my downtime at work, I haven't had the opportunity to watch more than about 30 minutes of the ceremony. I did find a transcript online though, so I have read the ceremony in its entirety. The actual ceremony isn't going ...