O My Mother

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One of the talks in General Conference was about the importance of understanding the aspects of our Heavenly Father, so that we can become like him. I must admit that for me, having listened to most of General Conference without a female speaker (even the Women's Session was more male voices than female voices), I couldn't help but think that this man was speaking to other men. That men ultimately matter more because men are going to be the leaders of the church, and of course, we want to pay special attention to them. So, listen up men, this is what God is like. You need to be like him.

And I wonder who I'm supposed to be like. There are throwaway references to Heavenly Parents, but rarely any reference to Heavenly Mother and very, very little doctrinally known about her, except for the stereotypical traits of binary womanhood: submissive, shy, feminine, obedient, and so on. I try to explain to the men in my life why it is that it's important to me that women speak in General Conference when they say, but if the message is from God, why does it matter who gives it? It matters because men don't give the same messages as women, and because I feel like men are only speaking to other men and forget that I (and other women) are in the room. When they try to tell us what it's like to be a woman, it's all from looking at women on the outside, not on the inside.

In the end, I end up deciding that all of Mormonism crumbles on this one question of who God is and whether God is male or female. If I accept that Joseph Smith saw God as an embodied man, an exalted being that "we" (meaning men) can become like, then what about women? Where are women in heaven? The fact that when women ask this question, they are told to be quiet, says everything to me. There's no answer. No one wants to think about this because they are talking to men and want to keep talking to men (the important ones, the future leaders).

If God is, in fact, a pair of heterosexually married beings, male and female, then why does no one talk about what it means to be a female God? Ultimately, this is a huge flaw of Mormonism and its talk about the eternal gender binary. And so I end up falling back on what seems to me a far more Catholic idea of God, of a being that doesn't have a form or a gender, isn't defined by humanity or former humanity, and is simply a being of goodness that we cannot truly understand as mortals as flawed as we are. 

Or there is no God. That's also possible, though I've spend considerable effort in the last few years trying to find God again and feeling a real connection of some kind, perhaps only in myself, to something that is divine and "beyond." 

Let me just go back to these questions:
1. If God is male, then what is the place of women in heaven?
2. If God is male and female, why do we never hear from Heavenly Mother or even about her?
3. If God is not male or female, then what is the point of Mormonism as a distinct religion, in which we mortals can become like god?

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