On Friday I went to a conference at Utah Valley University co-hosted by BYU's Wheatley Institution and UVU's Center for the Study of Ethics. I found out about it about a week and half ago and, as I told my mother, "I saw “PEACEBUILDING” with a picture of a butterfly and knew I would freaking walk there if I had to." I didn't have to. I asked the magical world of Facebook for a ride and successfully obtained a good one. Maybe "obtained" isn't the word. Anyway. The remainder of this post will be adapted from my letter home this week. (So, Mom, Dad, Marian... don't read this yet. Your version is better anyway.) So, the conference! It was so good. We were there for a total of five speakers, and a discussion/Q&A session for two of them. Each speaker was better than the last. I took notes (in pink ink, of course). I managed to streamline (most) everything into a few key points: The church is struggling at being international.This is actually a direct quote from one of the speakers, Christian Euvard, during the Q&A session. He, and the lady right before him, were part of a section called “Peacebuilding in a Global Church.” The lady, Melissa Inouye, talked about when they first opened the Hong Kong mission. Hong Kong was then full of refugees due to the recent civil war, and the mission president took great strides in a really intricate and incredible welfare system. The mission was more about relief than proselytizing, in part because of that, and in part because none of the materials the church already had were effective, because they assumed prior Christian knowledge. This is sort of what Euvard meant. Having an international, global church means more than just having members all over the world. It means not imposing your Western, North American culture over the culture of another nation. We talk about this a lot in my Book of Mormon class; we can’t look at the events of the Book of Mormon through our “Twenty-First Century Lens.” We have to recognize the differences in culture. For instance, women regularly wear pants to church in Nepal and asking them to all wear skirts would not be good for church attendance. Essentially, it’s difficult to distinguish between culture and gospel. There’s a quote from Bruce R. McConkie (that was actually used in Sunday School this week, which made me squirm) that says, “The place of gathering for the Mexican Saints is in Mexico; the place of gathering for the Guatemalan Saints is in Guatemala; the place of gathering for the Brazilian Saints is in Brazil; and so it goes throughout the length and breadth of the whole earth. ...every nation is the gathering place for its own people.” This was said with good intentions, of course, and is basically saying that we don’t have to gather physically to Zion (a.k.a. Utah) anymore, but it’s actually kind of harmful. It keeps those countries separate and doesn’t help to integrate us all together, such as in the case of refugees. Euvard also reminded us that Patrick Kearon’s talk from the April 2016 General Conference was absolutely perfect. Zion is of our construction.Other great things I wrote down about this: “Zion became more spiritual than geographical,” “as Zion is being built, the LDS will be constantly moving,” “Zion is a community of one heart and one mind,” “Zion is a place where there will be no more poor among them,” “Zion is everywhere,” and that Zion is a refuge, a harbor, and the ultimate social ideal. Every time we talk about Zion I am reminded of my mother’s letter to me on trek: “All of that is the lesson of the pioneers — work on, help each other. ...which is Zion more than it is SLC or the vans waiting to drive you home.” And as I wrote in my journal (a pen-to-paper preparation for testimony meeting later that day), I put down the thought, “That is my testimony that I want to bear, of Zion, of “work on, help each other,” of friends and family and a special kind of service: holding the metaphorical hand of those who need.” One of the presenters, Patrick Mason (whose presentation was entitled “Just Ward Theory,” a fantastic play on words that I enjoyed long before I even really knew what it meant) said that Zion is the single most motivating concept to Mormons, at least when it comes to addressing violence in your community, or just to service in general. The presenter before him, Chad Ford, talked about the story in the book of Moses of Enoch. The key point in there is that God wept when he saw the terrible things that happened to his people, but he also talked about the beginning of Enoch’s story and the end (which, we all know, is the original Zion). So, Zion. It’s a good life pursuit. Peacebuilding should be our vocation.“Vocation” does not mean the same as “profession.” Your vocation is less of what you do and more of who you are, and Mormons are pretty good at separating these two things (calling vs. career). I didn’t take a lot of notes on this specific lecture because it was presented by two people, a professor and an undergrad from BYU Hawaii, and I was too much in awe of the girl to actually write down anything she was saying. She was AWESOME. She’s basically majoring in Peacebuilding (which I was informed is a BYU-H emphasis in the International Studies major) and I wholeheartedly appreciate her work and existence. Patrick Mason (the Just Ward Theory guy) said that our wards should promote peace, and that Jesus gave us a call to be peacebuilders. We need to address low-level and structural violence in our own communities, realistically, because although a ward in Springville can’t end the problems in Syria, they can do great things at home; think global, act local. We can be the critical yeast: fully kneaded. (WHICH IS A REALLY GREAT PUN, IF YOU ASK ME.) He also told us about a BYU stake which, several years ago, made “pure religion committees” in each ward that were tasked with doing really impactful service, service that helped the community more than -- and was about more of a change of heart than -- just raking some lady’s leaves. Our wards should be, as a Community of Christ apostle once said, “signal communities.” Allow me to quote the first scripture mastery I ever learned, Matthew 5:15: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” Instead of this “city on a hill” thing being about the truth of the gospel, let it be about our service as a community. Let us be “enviable,” so to speak, not because we are just so great, but because we do great things. Let’s make Zion. And then, of course, violence.I wanted to go to this conference primarily because of my pacifism thing, obviously. The presentations I was able to attend ended up being more about service and building Zion, which was great. But the middle lecture was about how we as a church spend more time pressing the importance of chastity than we do pressing the importance of not killing people, and how the two are irreversibly linked. He said that although violence “tears at the fabric of creation,” we must accept that it is inevitable and unavoidable. He gave two big examples. The first is eating, and how even if we are a vegan we still have to consume something that was at one point living to survive. He said that it is not about whether we will destroy, but rather about how we will be responsible about it. His other example was that we “cannot escape the fact that ... The Great Creator sometimes takes life ... in order to create life more abundantly.” David Pulsipher’s statements did little to ease my discomfort about that fact, but he’s right: we can’t escape the God-sanctioned violence in the scriptures. Very, very often in the scriptures (in the Old Testament and Book of Mormon especially), violence is “facilitated” by God, done either at his hand or at the hand of man. We can’t erase that from the scriptures just to make ourselves more comfortable. In the end, Pulsipher gave us two sets of principles, per se. Choosing Violence
Engaging Violence
Suffice it to say that I was really happy I went to the conference. And now, A ConclusionBecause this already seems like a missionary email, I figure I might as well tell y’all about the lesson in my Book of Mormon class this past Thursday. We talked about Captain Moroni. If you read his letters, he’s harsh and sassy and hot-headed. But if you read Mormon’s commentary on him, he’s this super great and righteous person. This leads to some cognitive dissonance, perhaps. This can be solved in two ways: one, stop imposing our twenty-first century culture onto theirs, or two, remember that he was twenty-five. Twenty-five-year-olds are hot-headed and sassy and sometimes mean. He wasn’t some wise and learned prophet, he was just some dude who was passionate and determined and trying his best. He didn’t care what people thought of him, he just wanted to do right. Maybe he was a little wrong about that right sometimes, but he tried. I think that’s important.
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I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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