Passing Through Darkness

A Wrinkle in Time is a weird book. It’s theological children’s science fiction. It’s about good and evil, angels that look like old women but are also something like pegasuses or stars, different planets, and giant brains. I love it. Like all really good science fiction, it’s much more about the power of love than it is about aliens.

There’s this moment in A Wrinkle in Time that I think about a lot. Meg passes through the Black Thing. The Black Thing is evil—literally, it is the physical form of evil, and by touching it, she is hurt. The wise people of a new planet treat her and help her regain her physical strength, but she is still wounded. When she lashes out at her most important people, her alien caretaker says, “Don’t judge her harshly, She was almost taken by the Black Thing. Sometimes we can’t know what spiritual damage it leaves.”

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To Elle, On Marriage, Because She's Getting Married, and That's a Big Deal

Dear Elle-girl,

Dad says to always ask for marriage advice, because the advice is inevitably about the advice giver’s marriage, and in our family we’re too into ethnography to not take advantage of that. Austin says no one should offer marriage advice, because even if you have a good marriage, doing something well once is not evidence of expertise.

In addition to all of these warnings, I shouldn’t give you marriage advice because I’ve been married for hardly any time at all, and I’m your big sister, and sometimes being a big sister can get in the way of just being a good sister. So I’ll try to limit the advice and stick to theology. I’ll end up giving advice anyway, because I’m bad at not giving advice, but here’s my theology: marriage is practice building Zion.

It’s amazing for a lot of the same reasons. It’s hard for a lot of the same reasons. It’s important for the same reason: God tells us, “For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect” (D&C 128:18), and He’s talking about ancestors and progeny, but He’s also just singing the song that resonates across scripture. We can’t be saved without other people.

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Conflict Isn't Contention, A Love Letter to Elle

When I was seventeen, I took a mediation class, and I had to write a paper about a conflict I was in and analyze it using the theories we’d been learning. This professor was a family friend. I’d known him for years. We went to the same potlucks. We ran into him at Costco. He knew my family. So when I told him I wanted to write about my sister for the paper, he laughed and said, “How could anyone be in conflict with Elle?”

I pointed at him. “Exactly.”

If you don’t have the benefit of knowing Elle, I’m sorry. She has freckles and blue eyes that I absolutely covet. She is magic with little kids and pets. She likes puns and indie pop and clothes and immigration studies. Her first words were “no thank you,” as in we’d say, “Elle, time to go to bed” and she’d say, “No thank you.” I’ve known her her entire life, and she’s never been anything but delightful.

At the time, Elle was twelve. She was known for being happy and sweet, neither of which were very good reflections of the complexity of her personhood. (To this day, one of the fastest ways to make Elle upset is to call her sweet.) Professor Ford couldn’t imagine anyone getting on her bad side, because he couldn’t imagine her having a bad side. He couldn’t imagine us being in conflict, and that was the “exactly,” because we weren’t in conflict. We were almost never in conflict. That was the problem.

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I Can Fix That, And Other Lies I've Loved

The first time I got my heartbroken, I was an absolute mess. It was almost comical. It would have been, in a chickflick. It would have been like that part in Legally Blonde where she’s eating ice cream and yelling at the TV. My version involved a lot of crying in stairwells, only eating Clif bars, writing pages and pages of burn letters, and getting very little sleep. After two months of this, a guy in an elevator said to me, “You should probably take a nap.”

As always, my approach to this new problem was research. I listened to podcasts and read blogs and scientific articles. (Did you know that heartbreak is a physical phenomena wherein, deprived of the dopamine and oxytocin the relationship provided you, your body freaks out? Tylenol helps.) In addition to online resources, I pursued more traditional modes of research: people. I asked advice from everyone, all the time. Someone would say, “Hey, how are you?” And I’d say, “Not great. How do you deal with heartbreak?” My favorite response was Bentley’s. He said, “Reread Harry Potter. You’ll feel better by the end.”

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If You Can't Say Something Nice

When I was twenty-one one of my friends told me, “Risa, people don’t know you like them. They can’t tell. You don’t show them.”

Nate was my roommate Shelley’s boyfriend (hi Nate! Hi Shelley!) who had decided to adopt me as a little sister. (“But I’m older than you,” I told him when he informed me of his decision. “That’s OK,” he said, “I’m taller.”) He read my essays, forced me to watch bad actions movies, and coached me in my complete lack of a social life. He was one of my best friends, and he was sitting at my kitchen table, calmly informing me that most people kind of thought I didn’t like them.

I was a little devastated by the thought. I’m a Hufflepuff, meaning (as I explained to my therapist during one of our first visits, all the while saying, “You should really read Harry Potter”) that I am driven forward by relationships, by contact and closeness. By twenty-one I’d shut down the sun-shiny friendliness my mom insists I was born with, but I’d maintained the bounding enthusiasm in the existence of almost everyone around me. I figured that, being as great as they were, they were working off the assumption that I liked them. I didn’t need to go out of my way to communicate it.

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Wilderness and Becoming

You may remember that in my last post I wrote about wordlessness. It was timely, because I’ve felt myself without words again over these last few weeks. I’ve found thinking, much less writing hard. Instead I’ve been reading—reading lots of things by people I respect about how to think through and name what is going on in our world right now. Here is a sermon from one of my professors, Stephanie Paulsell, on things unseen, including viruses but also conviction. Here is an article on the importance of the ordinary during these times. And below is a talk my mom gave a few months ago on wilderness, which I’ve been thinking about ever since. Thanks for letting me steal it, Mom.

In the beginning, Lehi received a vision from God telling him to leave Jerusalem and go into the wilderness. In the account of this story by Lehi’s son, Nephi, the wilderness looms large. It looms not only as a place but also as a metaphor for affliction. It existed as a wilderness not only because of its location but also because of what it lacked—the familiar as well as dreams once held dear.

It is not difficult to imagine that when Nephi traveled through the wilderness in the plains, wadis, and mountains of the Middle East; across the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean; and even the new-to-him uncharted Promised Land he missed the briny taste of olives and goat cheese. Did he also miss the colorful cacophony of Jerusalem’s marketplace? Did he miss the wet/dry smell of rain on the dusty streets of Jerusalem?

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You Have Your Mom's Cells (Hope That's Cool)

Austin says that he gets all the main benefits of div school because I come home and tell him all the best stuff—but I submit as evidence that time we were sitting on his couch and he kept not doing his homework so he could read mine (it was about gender among the ancient Greeks, and it was fascinating). So you should all go to div school, but here are the ideas that are lighting me up this week:

Mothers and Grandmothers

I’m in this class called “Encountering Motherhood: Sacred Histories,” and my professor is intensely motherly. She’s also quite hippy, which I associate that with motherliness, because my mom is also kind of a hippy. My professor wears long green velvet dresses, and the first day of class she assured us it was OK not to come because of family emergencies, and “family includes pets, I want to be clear. If your goldfish dies, and you’re very upset about that, I will absolutely understand.”

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