AT the Pulpit

I am lucky enough to own a copy of the book “At The Pulpit” This is what an article said about it: “At the Pulpit” is a book of Latter-day Saint women’s discourses over the past 185 years which has made waves in the world of Mormon scholarship.  Bearing the Church Historian’s Press’s prestigious [and orthodox] stamp of approval. It is a monumental work both in terms of the intriguing content (a range of diverse Latter-day Saint women’s voices delivering powerful, spiritually moving witness and exhortation) and impeccable editing (detailed, carefully referenced introductions providing context and insight into the author’s personal perspective).

This is a review of At the Pulpit from a non-scholarly point of view. I appreciate the book as an impressive work of history, but also find it inspiring for my personal religious life. Here I will highlight just three reasons why At the Pulpit should be on the shelf of every LDS home.

1. Stories You Never Heard Before About People You Know

Sometimes I feel as if our “cool stories about early Mormons” run a little ragged because we have only a few and so are telling them over and over again. Well, here are more stories about all the people you know and love! Joseph Smith! Emma Smith! Eliza R. Snow! The book begins with a memorable account of Lucy Mack Smith exhorting a group of Saints in 1831 as they huddle at the edge of a frozen Lake Erie, wanting to travel south from New York to Ohio, but hindered by the solid ice.

Lucy charged the Saints to have “confidence in God.” She said: “And now, brethren and sisters, if you will, all of you, raise your desire to heaven that the ice may give way before us and we be set at liberty to go on our way, as sure as the Lord lives it shall be done” (5). According to her account, just as she finished speaking, “a noise was heard like bursting thunder, and the captain cried out, ‘Every man to his post!’ and the ice parted, leaving barely a pathway for the boat” (4).

Other accounts of early church history, such as the account of the first Relief Society meeting in Nauvoo (“We Are Going to Do Something Extraordinary,” Emma Hale Smith, Nauvoo 1842-1844, pages 11-14), put the reader “in the room where it happens.”

2. Women’s Wisdom has a Long Shelf Life

Reading At the Pulpit is like sitting down in a room full of incredible women and absorbing their good advice. The historical distance (sometimes over a century) does not prevent me from being inspired by their ideas and experiences. Many of these women endured serious difficulties and challenges both physical and spiritual. Their perspective gives strength. For instance, in 1906 General Relief Society President Bathsheba W. Smith (1922-1910), who had endured mobs in Missouri, been a founding member of the Nauvoo Relief Society, and presided in the temple as the Salt Lake temple matron, gave a rundown of the Plan of Salvation in a nutshell. She said,

Briefly the constructive parts of the plan of salvation are these: What man is, God once was; what God is now, man may be; the glory of God is intelligence. Nothing can be annihilated and no act lost. It is impossible to be saved in ignorance. The Spirit of God, which is the Holy Ghost and the Comforter, surrounds us and pervades the universe, and is the medium by which we may receive the inspiration of God toward intelligence and through which it is our right to receive comfort; and finally that faith, hope, and charity are necessary for divine grace, but that the greatest of these is charity! (100)

As a frequently frazzled mother of four kids, it is nice to hear a deeply experienced woman teach about what she had found was most important.

Lucrecia Suarez de Juarez (1896-1998), speaking in 1972 in Mexico, offered a beautiful parable about a young mother who “set her foot on the road of life” (179-180). It is so lovely that I cannot reduce it to a summary, but what struck me about it was the way in which, as things became more difficult and as challenges arose, the mother’s joy and satisfaction increased as she taught her children to face these difficulties:

Dawn came and in front of them there was a hill; the children climbed and became tired, but she kept saying to them, “Be patient and in a little while we will reach the top.” When the children arrived, they said, “We would never have made it here without you, Mother”; and while the mother rested happily that night, looking at the starry skies, she said, “This day has been better than yesterday, because my children have learned to have strength in the face of difficulties. Yesterday I gave them courage, and today strength.” The next day there came strange clouds which darkened the heart—clouds of war, hate, and wickedness—and the children groped and stumbled, and the mother said, “Look up raise your eyes to the light.” The children raised their eyes, and saw above the clouds an everlasting glory which guided them and carried them beyond the darkness. That night the mother said, “I am happier than the other days, because I have taught my children about God.” (180)

This is just an excerpt from this beautiful parable which everyone in the Church ought to read and cherish, but it spoke to me in the midst of a dark time in my own life, when I felt that I might not live long enough to teach my children all I wanted them to understand. As I reflected on Sister Suarez de Juarez’s teaching, I felt reassured in her observation that children do learn from difficulties and challenges. I felt her conviction that the hard work of parenting will indeed make a difference, day by day.

3. Perspective on Generational Change Within the Church

Finally, At the Pulpit gives us some much-needed historical perspective on religious truth and generational change. I currently have many LDS friends who say that they—or a son or daughter, or spouse—are in the middle of a faith crisis. As technological developments quicken the pace of social and cultural change worldwide, particularly among the younger generations, will the Church be able to adapt? Is adaptation a good idea? At the Pulpit suggests that the current “crisis” of shifting cultural assumptions is not unprecedented, but par for the course. A 1934 discourse by Elsie Talmage Brandley (1896-1935), geologist and apostle James E. Talmage’s daughter, gives insight into how members of the Church dealt with a similar crisis nearly a century ago.

Brandley’s talk, “The Religious Crisis of Today,” wrestles with contemporary (1930s) debates over religion in American society between fundamentalists and modernists. Fundamentalists supported a worldview in which literal interpretation of the Biblical text was the authoritative source for all truth, including truth about the physical world. Modernists supported a worldview that integrated recent scientific frameworks, including scientific explanations for the age of the earth, the formation of the physical world, and so on. These two views clashed. Was the earth around 6,000 years old, as the Bible said, or billions of years older, as suggested by the best scientific evidence at the time?

The increasing authority of a scientific framework in popular culture was earthshaking for many Christians, including Latter-day Saints, because it seemed to challenge the authority of Scripture and longstanding religious teachings. Elsie Talmage Brandley’s talk tackled these issues fearlessly. She argued that Mromonism was a revelatory religion, uniquely suited to keep pace. To a gathering of young men, young women, and their leaders in Salt Lake City’s Assembly Hall, she declared:

To deny the fact that we are facing a new day is to close our eyes to the world about us; to prove ourselves blind and deaf to sights and sounds so significant that an intelligent mind not only must admit them but must integrate them into the shifting, colorful pattern which is life just ahead. With the passing of every generation emphases shift, certain problems give way to others, answers change with the changing times. In view of the amazing progress and drastic change of the past century it is easy to see something of the reasons why problems have become more acute and less easily soluble by old methods of discipline and pronouncement.

These observations are absolutely relevant to the early twenty-first century, which has seen just as much “amazing progress and drastic change” as the early twentieth. There have been dramatic breakthroughs in physics, microbiology, information technology, women’s rights, and so on.

Brandley’s optimism as she called on Latter-day Saints to be open to new insights and new ways of seeing the world is eye-opening, especially when you consider that people of her vintage are now very senior citizens. Born in 1896, Brandley was my age when she addressed the youth of the Church in 1934. Among the youth of the Church whose future she hoped to expand was a 10-year-old Russell M. Nelson (born in 1924). Brandley’s open view helped to shape a Church in which both modern science and the Scriptures were valued. This Church culture of embracing new understandings about the universe and human biology was certainly a favorable environment for a smart, curious boy and eventual pioneering heart surgeon who is now the new prophet.

Younger members of the Church sometimes view older leaders as having always been “old” and unable to relate to their concerns. But in truth, older leaders have participated in many generational shifts and cultural changes. The talks from At the Pulpit help us to see how church leaders in every generation, including wise and inspired women, have wrestled intelligently to maintain Mormonism’s distinctiveness, founding revelations, and prophetic identity in a turbulent and shifting world.

This collection of women’s discourses is particularly relevant because Mormon women have always been at the heart of Mormon culture. Through their eyes we see the Church as they loved it, created it, and hoped that it would be.

I can’t wait to read this book. 

Con amor,

Vero