Weekend Revelation!

I really thought I was through with writing about women in the Bible, not because I know everything there is to know about them but because I had the feeling it was time to move on. I still have that feeling, and yet a couple of conversations that I had over the weekend have got me thinking about the power of these historical women to reach across time and culture to affect our lives.

Anyone who’s read this blog knows that I’ve often claimed that the combination of psychology and religion have come to my rescue many times. Seriously, in some ways the Bible can be looked on as the original self-help book. Granted, it’s not as easy to pick out the parallels and lessons as it is when you’re reading something like The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie. I love this book and find myself dipping into it on a regular basis. The author spells things out for the reader in such a clear and engaging way that you can’t help but see the validity of her ideas.

In the Bible, however, you might have to do a little digging. Not only that, but after some pondering, you might see that one story could have several layers and numerous applications. That’s what happened to me last night as I reviewed the weekend’s events and interactions. At least two of the many women I talked to indicated that there had been some sadness, some real “soul sickness” in their lives. Hey, I can understand that, can’t you? Is there a woman alive who hasn’t had the blues at some time or another?

People have several options from which to choose in combating their dark days. They can think happy thoughts, something psychologists call cognitive restructuring. They can turn their focus outward and think of what they can do for others instead of having a pity party. They can get little treats for themselves, even if it’s just an ice cream cone from Mickey Dee’s or a half hour of solitude to read a magazine. An increasingly popular option is to use medication. I might add that this last strategy is a quick one too, something that fits right into our fast-paced lives.

I’m fortunate in that I rarely feel down, and when I do, I can just about always pinpoint the reason. In other words, it’s situational and subject to change. When I can’t figure out the problem, I console myself by remembering that with garden variety depression, it always ends and when it does, there’s a rebound effect in that the next day or the next (or whenever you’re back to normal), things are going to be especially sunny. You’ll shake it off and wake up wondering how in the world you could have had such a case of the doldrums when you live in such a wonderful world. 

That brings me to self help of the spiritual kind. I was thinking of the woman written about in the 8^th chapter of Luke in the New Testament who had an “issue of blood.” She’d had this problem for years and had visited many doctors in search of a cure. When she learned that Christ was going to be in town, she went to where He was, not to gawk and stare but to be cured. She KNEW that He was the one who could heal her, and when she touched His garment, the woman was immediately healed.  I might also mention that she was probably living in poverty, and because of her condition, she was considered “unclean.”

And yet she was healed! What’s the message behind that? Today I’m seeing her physical challenges as symbolic of any and every type of problem that a person can have, even depression and “soul sickness.” Not only that, but I can also see that it doesn’t make any difference to Him whether you’re loaded, have tons of friends, live in a big house on the hill, or have beaucoup degrees. No one is better or more esteemed in His sight than anyone else.

I doubt if the women I talked to over the weekend will ever read this post, but I’m hoping that someone will and will pass my revelation on to someone just like these women.  I’m not saying that books and therapists and meds aren’t helpful; they are.  I’m just saying that I had a brainstorm this weekend!

Dissing Rebekah

I’m having second thoughts about Rebekah. I think I might have been dissing her unjustly. Remember the story of how she duped Isaac, her husband, into giving the blessing to Jacob, her favorite son, instead of to Esau? Esau was the older of the two brothers and the one to whom the blessing rightfully belonged.

The story of Rebekah and Jacob’s duplicity found in Genesis 27 used to disturb me. Was she supposed to be a good role model for what a loving wife should be? And was Jacob so much of a “Mama’s boy” that he couldn’t say no to her? Or was he fueled by his own ambition? We don’t know. We just know that their scheme worked and that after Jacob received the blessing, the brothers became estranged. In fact, Jacob had to flee the area or risk being killed by his angry brother Esau. And Isaac? The scriptures tell us that he “trembled exceedingly” (Genesis 27: 30) when he realized what had happened.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Isaac and Rebekah and wondering how a couple who was once so much in love could have come to this state. She had gladly left her father’s home and traveled 500 miles to marry him, and Isaac apparently loved her very much. They were childless for years, and after Isaac prayed on Rebekah's behalf, God sent them twins. The babies must have been unusually active within her womb because Rebekah asked God about it, and He told her that two nations were in her womb and that one would be stronger than the other. And here’s the kicker. She was told that the that the older son would serve the younger one.

Did Rebekah ever share this news with Isaac? I’ve reread the 25th chapter of Genesis several times and can find nothing to indicate that she ever mentioned this ultra important information with her husband. Why not? Had they stopped communicating? Did she think he could laugh at her? Did she think it was just “too weird” to even consider?

According to the scriptures, Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebekah, and although her age isn’t given, I feel like she was a young woman, maybe even a teenager (by today’s standards). Although some people estimate that they had been married for 20 years before the boys were born, I don't know. I do know that the twins were fast becoming young adults, and I wonder if Rebekah was getting impatient.

Rebekah knew what God had promised, and yet she had overheard Isaac telling Esau, his favorite son, that he was old and that he wanted Esau to bring him some venison to eat before he died. Isaac added, “…and bring it to me that I may eat; that my soul may bless thee before I die.” (verse 4) Isaac was both old AND blind, so Rebekah hatched the plan to make Jacob appear hairy like Esau, knowing that the subterfuge would trick Isaac.

I’m not saying Rebekah was right to trick her husband or to play favorites with her children. I’m just saying that she knew what God had told her, and she was probably wondering how this promise was to come to pass after hearing the conversation between Jacob and Esau. In other words, maybe she was “impressed” to take matters into her own hands in order to bring the prophecy to pass.

What do you think? Is it possible for mothers to have intuitions about situations involving their children?

Lucy's Advice

I don’t have much time for a long discourse about the virtues, personalities, or trials of the women in the Bible this evening. However, I just can’t stop thinking about Sunday and some of the things that Donna shared with us, and I feel inspired to share them tonight. Always creative in her approach, she gave everyone a stocking containing a quote, a candy cane, and an edible treat. Towards the end of her lesson, she asked me to read my quote aloud, and I gladly complied. It’s one of my favorites, and I’m going to share and expound on it just a little.

“We must cherish one another, watch over one another, comfort one another and gain instruction, that we may all sit down in heaven together.” Lucy Mack Smith

Donna then looked around the room and asked us to tell what each of those phrases meant to us. Although I’ve read and heard that quote literally dozens of times, it still touches my heart. I wish women everywhere could feel a closeness within a sisterhood like Relief Society. I glanced around the room that day and knew for a fact that every single woman present tried in her own way to follow Lucy Smith’s advice. As various class members began describing what the phrases meant to them, I was even more grateful to be part of such a worldwide sisterhood.

Cherish one another. We hold one another in high esteem, knowing that regardless of our life circumstances, propensities, or little quirks, we’re all daughters of a Heavenly Father who loves us. Here’s an example. A couple of years ago, I went to the library one Sunday afternoon, and I saw Shawna, one of my Relief Society sisters, and one of her daughters. We chatted a few moments and parted company but not before sharing a spontaneous hug. I think it was the first time I’ve ever hugged anyone in a library before!

Watch over one another. If someone is absent, we are prompted to give her a call or send her a card. The visiting teaching program is a divinely inspired program that's designed so that every single sister will have some sort of contact each month. Whether it’s a phone call, a visit, or a card, the contact is supposed to happen on a monthly basis. We’re not perfect, so sometimes life and general busyness get in the way of our contacts. Still, we’re working on it. Me included.

Comfort one another. Comforting involves more than watching from afar. To comfort, one needs to move in a little closer. It involves putting your arms around someone and encircling her with love and care and casseroles.

Gain instruction. Instruction can come in the form of classes such as the one Donna taught Sunday, or it can be by example. In addition to learning gospel principles, I’ve learned about cake decorating, freezing vegetables, knitting, smocking, make up application, jewelry making, journaling, and hair braiding. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

That we may all sit down in heaven together. It’s going to be great!

These women are modern day Eves. Like Naomi, some have lost their husbands and/or children, and like Hannah, some are praying for a child. Like Rachel, some are beautiful and much loved by their husbands while others, like Leah, struggle to win the affection of their partners. I looked around the room Sunday and spied a couple of Dorcases who always (and I mean always) go about doing kind deeds for others. Like Hagar, some have been mistreated, and there are at least a couple who, like Lot’s wife, struggle with leaving the past behind. As I write this tonight, it occurs to me that every single woman who was present on Sunday has a good portion of Esther’s courage.

Regardless of age, bank balance, race, ethnicity, education, marital status, talents, or any other variable, we all see the need to cherish, watch over, and comfort one another. I wonder how Kitty is adjusting to her new ward. Maybe I'll give her a call tomorrow. And if I have time, maybe I'll bake some cookies for Stacy's children. There's a sympathy card I need to send too...or maybe I'll visit instead.

Backwards and in High Heels

It’s time for another post on this blog. I’ve been working like a busy bee putting together a book composed of most of these posts. They’ve been edited and polished and elaborated on to the umpteenth degree, and now I’m working on a cover. Not that you asked. Just thought I’d throw that in.

These tasks, all done as a labor of love, have kept me too involved to write much of anything on any of my blogs. Yet this week at least three things have “conspired” to make me say, “Okay, that’s it. I just have to write a post on Eve’s Sisters."

1. A teacher at church mentioned that women in the Bible often made her think of Ginger Rogers, dancing partner of Fred Astaire. A talented dancer, sometimes she seemed overshadowed by Fred. As our teacher reminded us, she did everything that Fred Astaire did, and she did it backwards and in high heels.

2. At lunch yesterday, one of my friends began defending some of the women in the Bible, especially Mary the mother of Christ, and I again thought of how women are sometimes/often outshined by the men in their lives. Yes, in this case, Mary was the mother of the Savior, not the Redeemer himself, and in some religions she’s highly, maybe even equally, revered. In the scene we were discussing, however, she was seemingly being dismissed by Christ. A religious professor who just happened to be dining with us shed some light on this story and made us feel better about the situation.

3. Today I saw this headline on MSN: “Politicians are always in the spotlight, but rarely does that light shine on the women in their lives.” Hmmm. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

These three incidents reinforced my idea about women in the Bible being ultra important in the grand scheme of things, albeit behind the scenes. Who cleaned up after the 45,000 animals on Noah’s ark? Who gave birth to ten of Job’s children and then had to grieve alone while her husband was out talking with his “friends?” Who twice lived in a harem while her husband Abraham went about doing things that would eventually secure their future and his place in history? Who loved her child so much that she had her daughter Miriam hide him in the bulrushes hoping that he’d be discovered by the pharaoh’s daughter? Who nurtured Jacob’s twelve sons and daughter Miriam?

I love the stories of the Bible and believe that we can find the answers to life’s mysteries and dilemmas within its pages. At the same time, I sometimes wish Hagar, Leah, and Hannah didn’t have to dance backwards in high heels to be noticed.

Don't Look Back

Good-bye 2011!

On the last evening of 2011, I find myself remembering some of the high and not-so-high moments of the past twelve months. Mostly, it was a very good year. However, it's now history, and while reminiscing about it can be a grand thing, I need to move on. Below is an excerpt from a book I've been working on about the women of the Bible and what their lives can teach us from both a spiritual and a psychological perspective. This brief excerpt is what I needed to reread to get motivated for tomorrow. Enjoy!

"Most mornings, I like to get up before dawn. That way, I can read and write to my heart’s content while the day is still fresh and uncluttered with the crazy busyness of life. Sometimes I’ll read a magazine or a novel that I’m working on for book club, but most of the time I’ll read something inspirational or informative…or both.



This morning I was leafing through a book entitled Gifts of the Spirit that I discovered at a local thrift boutique. By Philip Zaleski and Paul Kaufman (1997), the book is subtitled Living the Wisdom of the Great Religious Traditions and has an overall theme of the importance of contemplation and stillness in daily life. Here’s one of my favorite sentences from the section I read this morning. “When you wake up tomorrow morning, let this be among your first thoughts: now is the time to begin….with the rest of my life before me, a path of unpredictable length and inconceivable wonder (23).”

Whether good, bad, or neutral, yesterday’s gone. While past events can continue to influence a person, she doesn’t have to remain trapped in the past with its demons. Nor will it do her any good to look longingly at a door that has closed. Now is the time to begin. Interestingly, going forward in the pursuit of your goals and dreams is also a theme in humanistic psychology. While the past can continue to affect and influence us, it doesn’t have to determine who we are. We have choices, lots of them. Move on or stay stuck? Go for it or cower in a corner?

In Relief Society today, our teacher mentioned the story of Lot’s wife, and having heard and/or read about the misfortune that befell her when she looked back, I knew the moral of the story before Lisa told us: Don’t look back. Then one of the younger women gave me something to think about that I’d never considered before. She said she could be looking out of her kitchen window washing dishes and have a thought or memory about her past and some of the poor choices she had made and begin to feel anxious and unhappy. Don’t look back has a different but equally important meaning for her. She went on to say that she could choose to stay mired in guilt and shame or she could turn her thoughts to today. She always chooses the latter.

Is it a coincidence that I read the passage from Gifts of the Spirit just a few hours before again hearing of Lot’s wife decision? Maybe. What I most took from these two events is that no matter how many times you read a story, you can always come away with a fresh meaning, a heightened awareness of what was really going on. I’d always assumed that Lot’s wife was looking back with a bittersweet longing, and perhaps that was the case. The lesson is clear, however. Don’t look back."

Now is the time to begin the next chapter in your life, and you can’t do it if you’re a pillar of salt. What are you waiting for??

Go Leah!

Yesterday my daughter Elizabeth asked me about some of the similarities between her sister and her. This query was prompted by something I’d done, something that made her laugh and say, “Mom, you and Aunt Ann are so much alike sometimes that it’s not even funny." And then after a moment, she asked, "How are Carrie and I alike?”

“Well,” I said. “You both have dark hair and the same basic facial structure. And anyone who’s looking at the two of you would know have the same parents.”

Not content with my answer, she persisted, “But we’re so different in other ways.”

And she’s right. Elizabeth is as quiet and reserved as Carrie is extraverted and talkative. Their basic temperaments, what psychologists look at as the raw material from which the personality is fashioned, have been different from their first days in the world. At the same time, they’re both conscientious, hard working, and diligent. They can be counted on to do what needs to be done and to give it their best effort.

Our brief conversation reminded me of two sisters I’ve mentioned often, Leah and Rachel. Like my daughters, they had the same parents, and yet their looks and personalities differed greatly. Leah was not as attractive as her beautiful sister Rachel. At the same time, I see Leah as being steady, dependable, and non-complaining. Rachel appears more temperamental and perhaps even petulant. She wanted a child so much that she said to Jacob, “Give me children, or else I die.” (Genesis 30:1). As we know, she later gives birth to Joseph and Benjamin.

Back to Leah, I’ve often found myself feeling sorry for her. She gave birth to six of Jacob’s sons and a daughter, and yet she appears to remain second in his affections. It’s not as though she asked to be married to him. The marriage was brainchild of her scheming father. Could she have refused her father’s instructions? Was she resentful? And later, was she heartbroken to remain in the beautiful Rachel’s shadow? Was she jealous of Rachel? I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking of some of Leah’s sterling qualities, and her conscientiousness tops the list. Costa and McCrae, developers of the five-factor model of personality, list this attribute as one of the Big Five. The traits are easy to remember if you can just remember one of my favorite words, OCEAN, as a mnemonic acronym: Openness, Conscientious, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Today and in Leah and Rachel’s era, there is plenty of evidence to indicate the value of conscientious, and to me this quality was one of Leah’s most salient traits. I have no doubt that she was dependable, industrious,and organized. Because of the time and place in which she lived, she was probably busy from dawn to dusk just taking care of business, business like making sure all the members of her household had what they needed to survive. If I’m out of bread, I jump in the car and go to Wal-Mart. I don’t think Leah ever let that happen, do you?

After rereading the Genesis account of the two sisters, I now feel both compassion and admiration for Leah. The compassion lingers because she still felt that Jacob loved Rachel more, and she knew that Rachel was more beautiful. At the same time, I can’t find a shred of evidence that she was spiteful, backbiting, or mean spirited towards Rachel or anyone else. What a gal! She was too busy doing what she needed to do to be overly concerned with the emotional undertones of the large household. She did what she had to do to take care of her seven children, and as Wife Number One, she undoubtedly had the responsibility and prestige that came with the title.

As a friend of mine recently reminded me, Jacob asked to buried next to Leah, not Rachel. And lest we forget, she gave birth to six of the twelve sons of Israel. She doesn’t need our sympathy; she deserves our applause. Go Leah!

Museum Moment

Jeanita is one of my oldest and dearest friends, the kind you might not see for months and yet when you meet again, you can pick up exactly where you left off. Lately we’ve been trying to come up with a free weekend that we could get together with another couple of friends, and it seems impossible to come up with a date that will work for all the people involved. I’m not talking about a week or even an entire weekend. We’ve given up on that idea. Now we’re just trying to find a free spot for dinner! Incidentally, we live about 140 miles apart so it’s not as if she’s right around the corner. And then when you add more people into the mix, then a meeting really gets complicated!

At some point during last night’s conversation, Jeanita said something I’ve heard her say many times. It’s a thought I’ve heard expressed by many women.

“I thought things were supposed to get easier as we got older,” she said. “It seems like they’re getting more and more complicated.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “I’m busy all the time, and I often wonder how I managed to get anything done when I was a younger mother.”

As I’ve mentioned before, the key is balance. Jeanita and I like to have fun and have taken some trips to NYC together. On one of them, we left Judy, Joan Ella, and Patty at the hotel so that we could visit the MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, where there was a Van Gogh exhibit. I was having a conniption fit to see The Starry Night, and despite the fact that we’d miss having dinner with the rest of our party before the theatre, Jeanita was up for the experience.

We rode in a bicycle drawn rickshaw to get there, and even though we only had thirty minutes to savor the exhibit once we arrived, it was well worth the time and the money. On the way, we laughed and chatted and absorbed the energy of the city. Then when we got into the museum and on the floor of the exhibit, I said something like, “Let’s just walk in calmly and amble along until we see it.” She grinned, nodding in agreement.

And that’s what we did. After looking at paintings of wheat fields and potato eaters, we rounded a corner and there it was, The Starry Night. Awed by the painting’s intense colors, swirling celestial orbs, and the cypress tree reaching toward heaven, neither of us spoke for a few moments. Standing there, we talked about the tiny town nestled beneath the sky and how the church steeple reached heavenward, just like the tree. In the sky, there was action and energy and light; below there was quiet and darkness. We talked about how puffed up and important we humans think we are, and yet when compared to the cosmos, we’re “small potatoes.”

I’d have to say that viewing the painting was pretty close to a spiritual experience. While studying scriptures, praying, meditating, attending church, reading inspirational books and magazines are all beneficial for our spiritual growth, so is visiting an art museum and appreciating the work of the great painters. So are visiting a beach, a mountain, or your own backyard. Mother Nature can be a good nurturer, and often a walk around my neighborhood turns into a moving meditation.

Jeanita and saw the rest of the exhibit and then circled back for one last look at Starry Night. I bought a poster of it in the museum gift shop, and whenever I look at it, I remember that day in Manhattan when I was both Mary and Martha. Balance is the key.