Are your relationships transactional or communal? How do you know?
“Every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Isaiah 55:1
In a communal relationship, individuals focus on the well-being and care of the other person without expecting immediate or direct reciprocity. Acts of kindness or support are given from a place of love, concern, or a sense of duty. The relationships itself holds value rather than the value of the act performed. In these types of relationships, give and take feels natural. These relationships constitute your support network. Examples of these types of relationships are friendships, family members, or marriage partners. But it’s not restricted to that. Larger groups can be communal in relationship as well. Communal relationships rely on trust and a valuing of the common good. Early humans used communal parenting, for example, to increase the likelihood that young humans would thrive. In our modern society, our communal parenting usually involves payment, which makes it the other type of relationship: transactional.
In a transactional relationship, there is an exchange that must be roughly equal in value to the participants. The primary motivation in these relationships is self-interest and fairness. Direct reciprocity is expected and should be either immediate or soon enough to be tracked. These types of relationships are less emotionally invested and are conditional on equivalent value from both sides. Examples of transactional relationships are business partnerships, professional networks, customer to business relationships (even in care-based transactions like daycare, teaching, or health care), and politics.
Certain relationships naturally tend to be communal, whereas others tend to be transactional. For example, even if you are a regular at a specific restaurant, you aren’t going to eat your meal, then wave to the owner on the way out and say “Hey, next time you can just come over to my place for dinner! We good?” Likewise, you aren’t going to tip your child proportional to the level of service when they make you breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day, or if you do, you just might end up the subject of a future therapy session. When your boss says “We’re all one big family here at Big Corporation!” well, that just means she wants everyone to get along, but the reality is that it’s not a family, even if everyone goes to Happy Hour together once a week. It’s a job, and jobs are transactional. The limits of that communal relationship will be tested if you find out that someone took too much credit for your work or that they are doing less for more pay. You could, I suppose, have a collective of artists creating a project, and the lines might get a little blurred between communal and transactional. Or you might as a family have extremely “fair-minded” parents who send everyone a monthly bill of who owes what to your parents for various financial help they’ve given their kids.[1] Or you could, perhaps, enter a marriage contract with Tom Cruise detailing exactly what you will give (a child, a certain amount of sex and companionship) and what you will get (career boost, a set number of vacations, plastic surgery) for a specific amount of time.
When we think of a relationship as communal but the other person treats it as transactional, it gets weird. When someone treats a transactional relationship like a communal one, it doesn’t usually raise our hackles as much. It can increase our trust and lower our defenses. Most people prefer communal relationships. They feel better, more human, more enjoyable, more supportive.
But there are some types of people who are prone to default to transactional relationships rather than communal, even when a communal relationship is more appropriate.
Narcissists. People who are hyper-focused on their own self-interests have a hard time understanding communal relationships.
Machiavellian types. Manipulative and strategic thinkers view relationships in terms of power dynamics and personal advantage. A former colleague of mine who was Indian said that he would never want to work in India again because in India, every relationship was master and slave. You were either the master or the slave. He found relationships in business in America to be much more collegial and less power-driven.
Low empathy. People who struggle to empathize with others may not see the value in communal relationships. They may view relationships in terms of benefits rather than emotional connection.
Emotionally neglected. People who grew up with emotionally distant families may not have learned how to form emotional bonds, so they may default to scorekeeping in relationships.
Transactional parents. People whose parents modeled self-reliance, competition among family members, or who were over-focused on material success may have taught their children to treat relationships as transactional rather than communal. If people see relationships as a means to an end rather than of intrinsic value, they may default to transactional relationships.
Insecure attachment. People with avoidant or insecure attachment styles often struggle with vulnerability and intimacy, preferring to keep relationships on a surface level to avoid emotional complexity. This is also true of those who have been hurt or betrayed in past relationships and no longer feel able to trust.
Economically insecure upbringing. Those who were raised in a scarce environment such as poverty or instability may have a difficult time building relationships that are not transactional.
Controlling individuals. People who fear losing control or being dependent on others may resort to transactional relationships where it is easier to feel in control of outcomes.
Many years ago, I had a conversation with a high-ranking executive at American Express who was from India. When he discovered I was Mormon he said how wonderful the Mormon communities were, comparing it to Indian communities in the United States. He said that any time you moved, you immediately had a new family waiting to embrace you, to help you move, help you with child-care, give you local advice, and befriend you. While I think that is certainly less true now than it was then, due to various factors, it’s still the reason many dislike the institutional church but like their local wards.
And yet, there are certain facets to the Church that are deliberately transactional, which undermines the communal aspect of belonging to a church. A few that readily come to mind: tithing settlement, disciplinary councils / policing each others’ social media or behaviors, hierarchical callings, how assignments are extended, being “voluntold” to do something. When this balance is off, people feel taken advantage of or that the relationship is not really reciprocal. The problem with scorekeeping is that the other person can scorekeep you right back, and you probably both end up feeling like you got ripped off.
While those things I just listed are kind of unique to the LDS church, what I found interesting a few weeks ago when I was writing the post about Google reviews of other churches is that they all suffer from this same tension between communal and transactional approaches to the members. Negative reviews for those non-LDS churches were also complaining about feeling like an ATM, or like the church had dialed down on what they (the members) valued while ratcheting up the requests (and guilt-trips) for donations. They disliked the congregant to pastor ratio and that pastors were pre-filming their sermons for a larger audience and not “performing” in person. Less value for the same money. Spiritual shrinkflation of sorts.
- Have you been in a relationship that felt too transactional when you thought it should be communal?
- Do you struggle with pushing relationships to be transactional, due to personal traits or life experience? What have you done to overcome this and be more trusting?
- Was your family transactional or communal? Were there exceptions?
- In your experience, is the church more transactional or communal? What is the right balance? What could be done to improve it?
Discuss.
[1] Using clip art of hands holding bags of money. Very creative.
Wheat & Tares 
I’ll speak to my experience as someone who doesn’t drive, due to visual processing abnormalities, and has, at various points in my life needed occasional assistance in the form of lifts when public transport was an insufficient alternative, and my spouse unavailable.
Issues to consider:
a) providing lifts is a cost, both in fuel, time and vehicle wear and tear, some people can afford this better than others
b) different people have very different attitudes to recompense
c) some wards suggest to their members a sliding scale of recompense, eg. £1 – £2 for lifts to ward, £5 for lifts to stake, £10 for lifts to the temple
d) talking about money is taboo
As someone who finds socialising hard work, and reading cues confusing, it’s difficult to know what to do. Generally, I will put the ward recommended amount in an envelope with a thank you card. And had very different responses, wholly unrelated generally, to the financial position of the person providing the lift. Some people react somewhat offhanded (presumably that a financial contribution wasn’t apparently forthcoming) until they open the envelope and are then all smiles. Others guess what it contains, and refuse to take it, reacting very offended, and still others having discovered it, return it to me the next time they see me, and proceed to lecture me about it. I find the whole thing to be extremely stressful, and upsetting to the point that if I can’t get myself there I would simply prefer not to attend. Some of you might say why not just ask about payment, but I’ve tried that before too. It’s a veritable minefield, and people just seem to get offended, which I hate.
Background that might affect how I feel about this. I’m the eldest of seven children. Most of my childhood there were financial struggles. For the first part of my childhood we did not own a car, and walked miles to and from church. Weekday primary held in the evenings a member would meet my sister and I at the bus stop and take us there. And members would give us lifts back home afterwards. But there would always be arguments between the adults about who was volunteering to take us (to be clear lots of volunteers, it wasn’t that they didn’t want to), stressful to listen to as a child. And then to top it all when we got home, we’d sometimes be in trouble because the wrong person brought us home. Presumably my parents had made arrangements, which the adults altered. In fact this is pretty much the only thing I remember about weekday primary. The stress of requiring lifts.
Sometimes I feel like there is a cultural expectation to provide a communal experience on a transactional budget – and that calling it out like that is crass, deflective, and ruins social currency.
This might be mostly starting at my house, where the objective is “clean house” and everyone in the household gets mad at me as I “preside” in starting conversations about “what people are going to donate in terms of time, attention, and energy” to get a cleaner house. And it is usually cheaper to me personally to handle it myself in a communal way rather then deal with all that weirdness (and I get called out by my husband because if I do it all, that isn’t teaching our children hard work… and I get called out by my children who think that I am letting their father free-load while they slave away).
The most functionally effective resource for me personally in the situation wasn’t “The Proclamation to the Family” or the hymn “Love at Home”, but it was a book called “How to Keep House While Drowning”.
My actice-believing mindset thought the benefits outweighed any negatives by a large margin – even if you only considered material blessings and ignore eternal salvation. Cheap BYU tuition, health benefits from WofW, blessings from Tithing, help moving or finding jobs, etc.
As someone who resigned recently my point of view about church relationship falls short of even a transactional relationship. To have a true and fair transaction there needs to be exchange of information, otherwise it’s coercive. My opinion is that the LDS church hides so much information from members that they are unable to participate in a fair transaction. It’s heavily tilted in favor of the church.
The Sermon on the Mount is the manifesto of communal Christianity. Christian teaching is demonstrably non-hierarchal, especially when the servant is emphasized as the greatest of all. Conservative politics and the corporate business world favor transactional relationships with a heaping dose of individualism. Inside that worldview communal relationships as weak and demeaning. The problem I see is that the Church morphs from communal relationships to transactional relationships depending on the status of the member. For example, the average church member covenants to the law of sacrifice and the law of consecration in the endowment. They take the sacrament and view themselves as having internalized the mission of Christ. Members are supposed to be all in on every church effort or project. But leaders get “perks” that clearly demonstrate that sacrifice and consecration don’t apply to some “special” people. Mission Presidents are reimbursed for living expenses. Most missionaries are not. Children of mission presidents and area seventies get reduced/free tuition at BYU. Children of GAs get reserved seating at General Conference. I can think of many more examples, but I can confidently claim that corporate business practices (which are transactional at best) pretty much dominate the practices in the Church office building. I’m not so sure we’ve seen anyone significantly challenge that transactional mindset since Spencer W. Kimball. But if a member participates under the rules of the communal relationship at church, she is bound to be disappointed and even hurt repeatedly throughout life.
Whether it’s prosperity offered via tithing, forever families offered by temple covenants, or many other countless examples, LDS folks are constantly negotiating with themselves in a very transactional relationship with the Lord. We phrase it as receiving blessings for righteousness. But sometimes it gets absurd: If you serve a mission you’ll be rewarded with a hot spouse. If you go to the temple, you’ll be armed with the Spirit. If you obey the word of wisdom you’ll be faster and stronger.
You know the saying that the definition of integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is looking? I think of that when I see religious people doing what they consider to be “right”. Are they doing X because they think God is watching and that he will give them a reward (a.k.a. transactional) or just because they want to be good?
While I do believe it’s important to have more communal relationships with spouses, children, close friends, etc. – it can cause real problems to be too transactional in those relationships, as mentioned in the OP. But I see lots of problems when it goes the other direction as well – when we try to treat transactional relationships as communal.
The most obvious example I can think of is at work. People talk about their “work family” or bosses saying, “at our company, we’re all family.” In reality, we’re trading our time and expertise to our employer for money – this is the very definition of a transactional relationship. Calling a company a family can distort the relationship and allows employers to extract the loyalty and attention that should normally be reserved for our closest personal relationships. (The better model is to frame a company more like a sports team working together to accomplish a common goal.)
This extends into the church too. I think the gold standard is to have a communal church – I grew up in a ward & stake like this, it overall had a very positive impact on my upbringing. The trouble is that it’s the communal ideals are very hard to scale, and we’re seeing the impact of this on the LDS church.
The church wants members to walk into an LDS church anywhere in the world and instantly feel like they’re in a familiar community. This is a great idea in many ways, but the only way to do this efficiently at a large scale is to turn it into a franchise model. It can be convenient and even reassuring to know that you can get the same Big Mac from any McDonald’s in the world, but McDonalds will never be able to match the spirit of a local diner that’s been run by the same family for three generations.
It’s the human traditions, quirks, idiosyncrasies that provide much of the communal glue.
Over the course of my career, I have worked as a professional in several corporations that were much, much larger than the little group that I worked with on a day-to-day basis. The groups I worked in were often fairly small, often just 5 to 15 people. These groups were often quite tight-knit. Some of the closest friends in my life came from these groups, and I still frequently do things with these people even though we haven’t been coworkers for many years. In other words, the feeling within the group was very communal. People were genuinely friends with each other.
When I was young college graduate, I made the mistake of thinking that the communal friendships within my little group at my first job was all there was to my working relationship. However, it only took a few years for me to understand that while my relationships within my work group were truly communal, my relationship with the corporation was purely, purely, purely transactional. I made the mistake of putting in a significant amount of overtime and unwarranted loyalty to something–the corporation–that only cared about money (and sometimes the egos of corporate overlords). I quickly adjusted my relationship with any corporation I worked for to purely transactional after watching good people who made significant contributions to the corporation being laid off to save a little money while upper management raked in millions in bonuses. Other times, I saw good people fired for giving honest feedback to upper management on ways to improve the corporation.
After those early experiences, I learned to partition my communal relationships with my close coworkers from my transactional relationship with the corporation as a whole. I still make true friendships with my close workers, but I have zero loyalty to my corporate entity. If I choose to put in overtime at a corporation, I do it because I am personally interested in my work, and/or I want to get a big raise or increase my status, but I never do it out of loyalty to my “corporate family”. When travelling for the corporation, I would tend to spend close to my daily allowances on lodging, food, etc., even though these amounts were more than I would have spent on my own personal travel, and more than I would have spent if I felt I had a communal relationship with the corporation. There were times when I observed things that I could do to improve the corporation, but that I knew would almost certainly never be acknowledged or rewarded by the corporation. I would have done these things if I had a communal relationship with the corporation, but I correctly understood that the relationship was transactional, so I didn’t do them. These corporations often had internal marketing and activities trying to promote the idea of our “corporate family”, but those things were very superficial when compared with the actual actions of the corporations. The corporations that I’m speaking of were generally considered good corporations to work for–I wasn’t working for notoriously bad corporations, by any means. However, corporations at their core are only concerned with making a profit–the bigger the profit, the better–and pretty much anything can and will be sacrificed in the pursuit of that profit if the corporation can get away with it. At least, that’s been my personal experience working for corporations.
Despite what many people say, including ex-members of the Church, I don’t think that the Church’s primary goal is profit (although they do care about that). Perhaps Dallin Oaks summed up what may be the Church’s primary goal:
It’s very telling that Oaks listed maintaining the authority of the priesthood as the first thing that he is willing to “sacrifice anything” for. At the end of the list is protecting the “fact” of the “divine mission of the Savior”. It’s nice that he acknowledges the Savior, even if Christ has lowest priority. However, note that Oaks doesn’t seem willing to sacrifice anything to spread the Savior’s love throughout the world. Nope. He is willing to sacrifice anything to protect the Church organization’s current view of Christ (which continually changes over time, depending on who is currently in charge or the organization).
In short, the Church, and its leaders, tend to care first and foremost about protecting the Church organization. It’s very transactional in that way. Corporations care about profit, and the Church cares about preserving and expanding the Church organization (which, if you think about it, is what profit accomplishes for a corporation). If you are helping the Church organization, there is no problem and you’ll likely get promoted (if you’re male). On the other hand, if you are viewed as harming the Church organization, the Church will not hesitate to chew you up and spit you back out again.
Oh, the Church tells a good story about how the Church’s goal is to help the members become disciples of Christ, but the reality is that its primary concern is preservation and expansion of the organization. In the quote above, Dallin Oaks was defending how the Church was treating the authors of the book Mormon Enigma, a book that just presented an accurate historical account of the life of Emma Smith, which sometimes put Joseph Smith in a not such a flattering light. I believe in a God that loves truth, and I believe that Church members benefit from knowing the truth of Church history. Dallin Oaks–and the Church organization as a whole–prefers to suppress truth to protect the organization.
It’s not just Mormon Enigma, though. The Church was slow to change the policy on blacks because they didn’t want to throw previous Church leaders under the bus. It chose to prioritize protecting the integrity of the organization, which puts great importance on the correctness of its “prophets” (and who had taught many horrifically racist things over the years), over following their stated mission of “perfecting the Saints”. The same thing is almost certainly happening with LGBTQ (and many other) policies/doctrines right now. Oaks’ Proclamation on the Family is now likely known to be terribly flawed by some Q15 members, yet the Q15 continues to refuse to follow its mission to “perfect the Saints” by extending fellowship to LGBTQ individuals because they feel that doing so would harm the organization–members would question future Church leader statements, and, even more damaging to the organization, many orthodox members might even leave the Church.
Just as I found true friends in my little work groups at large transactional corporations, many members are still able to find communal relationships within their local congregations. The Church has greatly reduced the opportunities for forming these communal relationships by removing ward activities, organized sports, etc., but some members are still able to form these bonds.
I think the hardest part for me about organized religion is how they take a transaction between an individual and the divine and and tie it to other people like objects.
If Israel is righteous, God will allow them to kill their enemies.
If missionaries follow all the rules, other people will join the church.
If some people choose to displease God, He will curse them and their posterity for generations.
If parents follow all the rules and their kids choose a different path, the parents righteousness will overcome the kids choices.
It’s no wonder that modern Christianity, with a transactional theology, has no issue legislating their views on everyone.
I also agree that the employer/employee is entirely transactional, notwithstanding the many friendships I have with coworkers and clients.
I think it’s a matter of ward roulette. I’ve been in ward’s where I felt more like “an employee of the church” rather than a “member of the church” and my acceptance and value was linked to how much I was contributing and serving. I’ve been in other wards (particularly a Spanish branch in Alaska), where everyone just showed up and they were loved and accepted as they were. It was great.
Growing up, I was taught that our relationship with God was transactional (and I believe this is still strongly taught at General Conference and at church). However, my spiritual life was completely changed and transformed for the better when I changed from having a transactional relationship with God to a communal relationship. I don’t really ask for anything or expect anything from God, but I do find a lot of comfort from just connecting with and being with God. It’s actually really great.
I think when we understand God’s grace, we realize that our relationship with God is not transactional. He gives us forgiveness for our sin, just because we ask for it sincerely. He love us, just because we are his. No matter what we do, he will continue to love us. He might grieve the direction we are going and what we are becoming, but that does not mean that he doesn’t love us. He may not like us, but will still love us.
When Nelson gets up in conference and tells us that God’s love is conditional on our behavior, what it means is that Nelson doesn’t understand how much God loves us. Because what Nelson is describing is a transactional relationship. “You be good and do as I ask, and I will love you and give you eternal life in my presence.” That is how Nelson sees God and that is transactional, same as “you work for my company and I’ll pay your salary. But that isn’t what the Bible says about God. Makes me wonder about his children and if he ever actually loved them, or just had a transactional contract that he told them was love.
Sure, lots of people act like God’s love is transactional, but he says flat out that he makes it rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. He just sort of set this earth up and turned us loose on it. He doesn’t really bless the righteous and punish the unrighteous and He didn’t save Trump from any bullet in spite of what my ministering brother said. He leaves all that stuff to chance, but there are built in rewards for most human righteousness. When we treat others kindly, they are more likely to treat us kindly in return, and when we lie, cheat, and steal, they don’t like us and don’t want to be around us. And neither will God.
And when we are nasty unkind, lying, cheating, stealing, kind of people, we don’t like ourselves and we would not want to be around those who see us for who we are, so we most certainly don’t want to be around God. We punish ourselves by who we become, and God really doesn’t have to do anything mean to us.
funny, but none of that is stuff I was ever taught in church.
The LDS church is all about a transactional relationship with god. After all, a covenant with god states that if we perform certain actions and obey certain commandments god will deliver certain blessings.
The D&C states that god is bound if we uphold our end of the deal. If we don’t, we have no promise. It doesn’t get more transactional than that.
In a 2012 talk given by Elder Holland from a missionary satellite broadcast said the following: ““A covenant is a binding spiritual contract, a solemn promise to God our Father that we will live and think and act in a certain way — the way of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. In return, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost promise us the full splendor of eternal life”.
This is in fact the direct words from a top LDS authority figure, referring to a covenant as a “contract”. Here we go again with the endless legalistic metaphors, which may serve a purpose on occasion, but have become our primary way of describing our relationship with God. I hate to inform him, but a “contract” is the lowest form of relationship possible, it’s not merely transactional, it’s adversarial. Contracts are used to protect individual parties from being harmed should the opposing party fail to uphold their end of the deal. Contracts put an official stamp of transaction on this relationship. They immediately imply a lack of trust, which in our mortal business world probably makes sense, but not as the way we define our relationship with “the highest possible good”.
Transactional relationships are by definition not about the relationship itself, it’s only about what I can get from it. It’s a married for money concept, one bound together by codependence instead of free choice. Transactional relationships are temporary and only useful as long as they are delivering the thing I want from it. It’s built for divorce, hence the mass exodus from organized religion. They are marriages designed for divorce, not eternity. When we make our relationship with God transactional, we make God into an idol, which is just another way to tell a story about my own goodness. God becomes disposable in this sense.
Covenants are NOT contracts, they are mutual partnerships, chosen freely, not because of what it will provide me, but because of what it can create. Like hydrogen and oxygen, both independently are useful elements, but when combined they become lifegiving water. Yes, scripture repeatedly asks us to trust God, but we fail to see that trust goes both ways. God is also trusting us to bear his image, to keep his spirit alive in his physical absence, to unite with him as a cocreative partnership to multiply and replenish the earth. God to Abraham said, I will bless the world “Through” you, meaning Abraham would be a conduit through which God’s grace would continue to flow. But instead, religion and our LDS tradition in particular has made God’s grace something we must deserve, therefore making a transactional relationship the point where Grace has reached its point of “damnation”. If we stray from Jesus’ own explanation of Grace as causing the rain to shine on the just and the unjust, we will inevitably act out a belief that grace was earned, which means everyone else must earn it from me as well. That is the definition of “damnation” (stopping the flow of grace by transaction).
toddsmithson,
Thank you for explaining Covenants as mutual partnerships entered in freely to create something else.
And when believers understand covenants to be contracts (transactional by nature), it seeps into and can poison family relationships as well. Many LDS parents model their relationships with their children through the transactional framework they understand to be the high and holy way God Himself operates. Their regard for their children becomes contingent on the extent to which their children “live the gospel” or “follow the covenant path.” The “love” they extend to “wayward” children is a toxic mix of guilting and shaming. Only after becoming a parent myself did I realize the extent to which I reject this concept of God (and parenting).
Margie, that understanding of what a parent’s love is for their child is also what made me understand God’s love for us. Once I was trying to explain why adoptive parents don’t love their child the *same way* as birth mothers do. My first baby was born before the concept of “rooming in” started. And because of the kind of pain killer the doctor used, and the hospital’s stupid schedule, and the fact she was born just before midnight, they didn’t let me hold her until she was 36 hours old. I felt like a physical piece of me was taken away. I was desperate to get to my baby. It was physical. A physical need for my child. She was part of me and should not be cut off any more than an arm or leg. Part of me was missing and I needed it. After the hormones wear off, (when a nursing mother quits nursing) you are left mostly with the kind of love adoptive parents will feel. But some of the feeling of the child being part of you, not just emotionally part of you, but physically part of you stays and adoptive parents cannot know what they are missing. The love you learn to feel just isn’t quite the same. It cannot have that same physical feel because that is hormonal. It is why the Bible uses the love of a nursing mother for her infant as the strongest kind of love. Sure, it can go wrong and we have postpartum depression or failure to bond. With premature babies, the mother’s body isn’t ready and the hormones are not there yet, and there is sometimes a failure to bond, and THAT would be my second child. Oh, sure, I learned to love her, and now she is probably the one I have the strongest bond to, but it was never the same. Luckily I knew how I had loved my oldest and so tried harder to learn to love her.
Now father’s, if they are around the pregnant mother enough, their body puts out hormones to match the mothers. Not as strong perhaps, but they are there, if the father spends enough time with the mother. And scientists have found that doctors are the worst for not spending enough time with their pregnant wives because of the high time demands of med school, residency, and speciality training. So, what does that tell you about our current prophet and his insistence that God’s love is conditional? Perhaps he has never really experienced the full force of parental love and doesn’t even comprehend that his conditional love for his children and his concept of God are lacking that sense of physical connection, of being one, because you are literally flesh of my flesh.
The Bible over and over uses a mother’s love (not even a father’s love, even though He is supposedly our father and not our mother) for her child as how God cares for us. He Loves us because we are His. Not *if* we are good.
And I just don’t know where our church started getting things so jacka** backwards, but it does.
Margie: I completely agree with you here. Before being a mom, I probably had a more transactional view of (even family) relationships. But it just doesn’t work that way with my kids. As the poet Philip Larkin put it “Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you.” My kids will always have a place to go, especially if they don’t deserve it, and even if they don’t want it. That’s just how this works.
But by contrast, you have Oaks saying (I realize this was in the 90s) that parents should tell their gay adult children they can’t come home. They can have a meal, but they have to leave after, or somesuch nonsense. There probably is a distinction between parenting styles, and I’m sure some of that is generational, but I can’t imagine a loving parent of either sex saying anything like that to their own child. There was a mother on Reddit who texted her trans (adult) child that she *almost* wished they were dead, then hastened to say “note that I said almost” as if her highest priority was to justify her own parenting failure, not to reassure her child that they are loved. It’s honestly disgusting. I hope and believe this horrid woman is in the minority, even among the most unquestioning church members, but that might not hold true for much longer as draconian policies like the recent anti-trans one take hold.
I nursed all my kiddos, the first 14 months pumping and working, then my 2nd was autistic and couldn’t sleep except when nursing and then only for 45 minutes at a stretch. I nursed 3 of my kids for 4 and a 1/2 years each which is pretty close to average weaning age worldwide (5 years per La Leche League). My last had a heart condition and couldn’t suck. I pumped 14 months for him.
I know moms that adopted or couldn’t nurse. They definitely love their children. Rather it’s the same or not I cannot say.
I can only say that I do not find any lack of integrity in David Archuleta’s mom. I would go to hell and defy God and the church for my children. However, I do not believe God rejects LGBTQ people at all.
God made transgender people with a brain and body that doesn’t match gender wise to begin with, just like my autistic kid’s brain is different and my kiddo with defects has only one testicle. Why would God consider being born differently and finding ways to feel comfortable in your unique body, sinful?
Our bishop spoke in sacrament meeting today. He affirmed that men have the priesthood and that women can bear children (and be the mother of all living), and that women need not desire the priesthood just like men need not desire to bear children–that God had divided the labor. I had thought that we were beyond such discourse. He then reminded us that those who had been to the temple had agreed to consecration, to give everything, that that this year the ward has received only two-thirds of what it had received last year, but that fast offering needs had doubled, and that we ward members need to do better about caring for the poor in our midst by stepping up our fast offerings. I don’t know where this came from. I am aware of no requirement for an individual ward to be in the black on fast offering funds. Maybe the stake president is unhappy seeing our one ward soak up all of the fast offerings in the stake, but I don’t see that in him. Our ward is the only inner city ward in the stake, and the other wards are in more affluent and rural. Still, I have never heard a bishop tell us what our donations were compared to this time last year, nor what fast offering expenditures have doubled over last year. Anyway, I call this leading by guilt. I don’t understand why some people feel we need to do this from our pulpits.
Fast offerings are not based on locality. Your bishop sends your fast offerings to SLC. When your Bishop needs money’s for fast offerings they send them from SLC based on the needs of the ward and stake. So it is irrelevant to the bishop and members of your area what you pay in fast offerings.
I expect that in spite of this reality they pressure bishops and stake presidents to meet certain stats and goals for the area. So this talk is kind of like the yearly tithing talk or the zone meeting pressing missionaries to increase their golden questions or door knocking so the mission president looks good when he goes to meetings, as he competes with other mission presidents. I agree, guilt is the wrong way to approach this, plus I get suspicious about the leader’s motivation.
I would encourage you to pay whatever fast offerings that make you personally feel good, particularly if you have confidence in general in the church’s programs to support the poor. If you are not confident, pay for a grocery order for a friend when things are tight. Or pay for a night in a hotel when they are homeless and it’s cold out.
This post has been rolling around in my mind. Yesterday it dawned on me that once I changed from having a transactional relationship with God to a communal relationship with God, that’s when my aversion to the temple really amplified.
The temple is set up to be super transactional- keep these covenants, and receive these blessings in the next life. A lot of people love that, and they thrive in that transactional relationship with God. And I say good for them.
What my experience has led to is: I’m not trying to get blessings from God. I’m not trying to earn or qualify for anything. I just love God. I want to be more like God. I want to be united with God. I trust God, and I trust God’s plan, not just his plan for Mormons, but his plan for everyone.
I don’t view God as someone that I have a business deal with. I feel like the temple presents my relationship to God like a business deal. Inasmuch as ye shall keep these covenants… ye shall be made a king and priest in his presence. But if you don’t keep your covenants, you’ll be in Satan’s power. You know what? Don’t sign me up for that.
What I’m signing up for is: I’ll live true to myself and the divinity that is within me. As I recognize my soul and the divinity within me, I will connect that to God and live in alignment with God and be one with God. I will also see the divinity in others, love them, and have compassion for them.
And what is the reward or the promise that I get for doing this? No reward or promise needed. I just want to do these things because of my relationship with God, because God is Good I want to be in alignment with him. And whatever happens happens, but I trust that it will be good.
But that is very different than what I hear at church and all the talk about covenants, covenants, covenants. That type of language doesn’t appeal to me at all.