This archive Sunday post originally appeared on October 5, 2006. To read the original post and comments, go here.
Our home teachers popped by last Sunday to talk to us about honoring the priesthood. Now, I like the priesthood quite a bit—as a chronically ill woman who also suffers from chronic impatience, I’ve had my share of priesthood blessings which have been followed by immediate pain relief. But obviously the priesthood isn’t just a fancy supernatural form of Excedrin. Nor do I think it is solely what my HTs implied with their quotations about men being the head of the household, a topic which bloats the bloggernacle on a regular basis. (And rightly so.)
Now, I adore my HTs. They are smart and kind men who do not believe the presence of a Y chromosome serves as an automatic qualifier of either righteousness or power. In fact, they verbally agreed with me that priesthood holders shouldn’t view their calling as hierarchical or themselves as the embodiment of God’s power. But when I asked them what it means for their wives to “honor the priesthood” in their homes, their answers belied their protestations. This resulted, I believe, not from surreptitious megalomania but rather from an honest to goodness vacuum of discussion about how women honor the priesthood differently from how they honor the priesthood holders in their lives. So I wonder, absent the conflation of priesthood with an actual corporeal person, what does it mean for a woman to honor the “priesthood in her home”? Do men and women differently percieve the act(s) of honor? And of course, the inevitable question: how do we talk about this in the context of an equitable marriage?
Please note: I am not asking why men currently hold the priesthood and women do not, but rather how women should righteously negotiate the status quo in such a way that appropriately bifurcates men from the power for which they serve as conduit. On a day-to-day basis, does the notion have any meaning? My HTs started to visibly squirm and my DH started to audibly snicker, so I let the nice young men in my living room offer a lovely prayer and go home. But I’m still curious. Maybe it’s simple and my honest-to-goodness painkillers have clouded my judgement, in which case I know I can rely upon the wisdom of you brilliant people to set things right in my befuddled little brain.
Turns out that I prefer posing question to offering answers. I can be a pest that way.
