This Is My Blood

By Linda L. Crowe

I gave blood for the first time at age fifty-four. I’d wanted to give before then, but at less than one-hundred-ten pounds—the minimum weight required to donate blood—I was too scrawny.

I came from a blood-donating family; both my parents were periodic blood donors. They went about it faithfully, though without fanfare. They felt the same way about giving blood as they did about voting. It was a privilege—as well as a duty—of citizenship. When he hit his fifties, my father had to give it up. He’d faint, or come close to it, after his appointment with the needle because of his low blood pressure. My mother gave blood well into her later years. My sister and her husband both donate when the bloodmobile rolls around.

Over the years, I’d attempted to slip past Checkpoint Charlie, always to no avail. Once, in South Carolina, I even wore my steel-toed boots at the weigh-in, but the nurse—she must have worked in a prison at one time— was on to my tricks. She slapped a consolation sticker (I Tried to Give Blood Today!) on my chest and marched me back outside.

As middle age crept up on me, so did my weight. One fine day, I stood on the scale and looked down. One hundred ten. Opportunity presented itself in the form of a sign at my former church: Blood Drive Here This Thursday. 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The Methodists: “Open hearts, open minds, open doors.” Open veins, too, it would seem.

When separated into its components (red blood cells, plasma, platelets, and cryoprecipitate), one pint of blood can save three lives. The goal for this church on this day was thirty pints. Or, potentially, ninety souls.

•••

How appropriate that my first blood donation would happen at a Methodist Church. My father came from a long line of Methodists. His grandparents were Methodists in Sweden before they immigrated to Massachusetts in the late 1800s. Daddy attended a Methodist Church Camp as a boy during the Great Depression. Even his middle name was Wesley, after John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church.

My parents met at the Methodist Church in Hopewell where my mother sang soprano in the choir. I was christened there as a baby, attended before my earliest memories. I was married there when I was thirty-seven. But by the time I turned eight or ten, Mom no longer sang in the choir. She and Daddy attended only sporadically, making special appearances on Boy Scout Sunday, when Dad’s scout troop marched the flag in, or if I played my flute for a special hymn. Sometimes, not even then. By the time of their divorce when I was nineteen, my father was an absentee on the membership roles, and my mother was a self-declared atheist.

Except for a brief time in college, and despite my parents’ religious apathy, I’d gone to a Methodist church all my life, even attending as a girl when my parents had stopped. I was a pious little thing back then, though I’m not sure where it came from. I loved the hymns, the advent wreaths, the Easter cantatas. But after all those years, did I still buy the whole bit about the magic baby, forgiveness, resurrection, life after death? For that matter, did I ever?

When I lived in South Carolina in the early 1990s, I attended a tiny rural Methodist church. One Sunday in May, a young college-aged woman stood up to testify. “If a man came in this church right this minute with a gun and threatened to kill anyone who was a Christian, I would stand up and say, Jesus Christ is my risen Lord and Savior.” She continued in her heavy southern accent. “And I wouldn’t be afraid because I believe in life after death.”

Wow, I thought. I wanted to have that kind of faith. It would make things so much simpler. Maybe I just needed to try harder. Pray more. Just keep showing up. Which is how I arrived at Nelson UMC in 1996, after I married and moved to Nelson County. I liked this small church immediately. The choir seemed overjoyed to have another alto. The congregation took on meaningful projects. The men worked on Habitat houses. The women knitted prayer shawls for cancer patients. The members of the church collected school supplies, coats, mosquito nets for communities in need both near and far. Most of the congregation seemed heavily biased in favor the Virginia Tech Hokies (always a good thing in my book). I had found a new church home.

When my mother died in 2008, I took what I intended to be a temporary leave of absence from church. She’d lived two hours away in Hopewell and during her six-month illness, I traveled down there a couple of times a week. Combined with my more-than-full-time job, I was away from home a lot. Sunday had become the only day I had to relax at home with my husband, do laundry, help him with projects, maybe cook supper.

During this time, I missed seeing people in church, and I missed singing in the choir. But Nelson is a small county. I ran into folks in the grocery store, the library, the farmer’s market. “When are you coming back to church?” they’d ask. “When things settle down,” I told them. I would return to Sunday morning worship when things got less hectic.

Worship. Who was I kidding? When you sing in the choir, you don’t have time to actually worship. Right off the bat, you’re looking at the bulletin to see what hymns you’ll be singing that morning, then marking them in your hymnal. Even during the pastoral prayer, you can’t really concentrate because you don’t know exactly when it’s going to end and when it does, you’ve got to chime in with the Choral Response. Will it be the three-fold or the seven-fold Amen? You lean over to whisper to your fellow alto, trying not to make a spectacle of yourself, but because you’re sitting right up front near the altar, you’re doing just that.

There were other problems for me as well. In my mind, a lot of what came after Christ’s life, and always in the name of Christ, didn’t seem consistent with Christ’s message of acceptance, tolerance, and non-violence. In the Methodist church for example, homosexuals are welcome in the congregation, but not in the pulpit. With all the starving and homeless people in the world, why the focus on homosexuality? The Bible makes some references to it for sure, but it is even more clear on topics like adultery and killing, as in Thou Shalt Not. Methodists’ open minds, it seemed, opened only so far.

When we sang “Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War. With the Cross of Jesus, Going on Before,” I used to wonder, “Why not Marching as to Peace?” After September 11 and the wars that followed, I couldn’t sing that hymn anymore. I would stand with my hymnal in hand and not even mouth the words. I could barely stomach it when the minister read Psalm 137, ending with “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” Jesus must get himself stinky drunk when he sees the twisted ways we’ve interpreted the Bible. Thou Shalt Not Kill. Were there some exception clauses that I missed along the way?

My Sunday school teachers taught me that Jesus is love. The ministers all along the way explained that when Jesus died, he became part of the Holy Trinity— the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. God is omniscient, they said, and omnipotent to boot. I thought about the on-going world condition that included genocide, poverty, and violence. If God was all-knowing and all-powerful, I reasoned, then he wasn’t all good.

I did not return to church immediately following Mom’s death in June of 2008. Dad’s Alzheimer’s had worsened, my sister and I had moved him into an assisted living facility, and I was on the road more than ever. Yet the following Christmas Eve, I attempted a re-entry.

I’d always loved the quiet excitement of the midnight service. Candles lit, poinsettias on the altar, the evergreen scent of the Advent tree. But now a large projection screen hung from behind the altar. Suddenly something like a comet swirled across the screen as though from another planet, and at the end of the tail lay a baby in a manger, as a large deep voice boomed, “And Unto You is Born This Night, in the City of David, A Savior, Who is Christ the Lord.”

“Christ in a bucket!” my mother used to swear when exasperated. Christ on a comet, I thought now. It was too much. I slipped out the back door before the end of the service and drove back through the night toward home.

Life is full of inconsistencies, but here was the real question for me. Could I worship someone or something I wasn’t sure I believed in to begin with? Christian faith. After a lifetime of looking for it, practicing it, even faking it, I had to admit it. I just didn’t have it. What I did have finally was the required poundage, and now another cross beckoned. The Red Cross.

•••

It was raining when I arrived at the fellowship hall to donate blood. The workers were still setting up, and three or four donors were ahead of me as I filed past the greeting table manned by church volunteers. “Given before?” asked a friendly-faced man I didn’t know.

“This is my first time,” I said.

“Good!” said Dawn, a woman from the church I’d always liked. “You’re mine!” She peeled off a sticker and wrote the number 1 on it. She handed me some reading material, and I took my place in a row of seats to wait.

I looked around. This fellowship hall had been built since I’d last worshipped here. Gleaming acrylic floors replaced dull tiles. Brass chandeliers brightened the room, providing cheerful contrast to the gloom outdoors. Though they’d been stashed away for today, I could picture the folding tables and chairs that usually filled this space; could almost smell the fried chicken, garden vegetable side dishes, and vanilla-wafered banana pudding that adorned the counter during the many covered dish dinners I’d enjoyed here over the years. Now this busy place prepared to give sustenance of another kind.

Sanford Shepard, a rising senior at Nelson County High School was seated in a chair beside me, tapping away on his iPhone. He was a babe in arms when I’d first come to this church, seventeen years ago.

“How did your soccer season turn out?” I asked. His picture had been in the paper more than once that spring.

“We lost 2 to 1 in the regional semi-finals,” he said. “Lost to a Northern Virginia school though, so that’s not too bad.”

“Not bad at all,” I agreed. Little Nelson County High School had just graduated one hundred seventy seniors. The Northern Virginia school would probably graduate ten times that number. Then I asked something else that was on my mind. “Have you given blood before?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said politely, then returned to his phone.

I was impressed. You can start donating blood when you’re sixteen years old, with a parents’ permission. Here he was, maybe seventeen, with multiple pints under his belt.

The Dalai Lama says that kindness is his religion. I’ve been giving that a try, but constant kindness is harder than it sounds. The Bible, the Buddhists, even the Boy Scouts entreat us to be pure in thought, word, and deed. As difficult as it is to constantly do good deeds, that’s the easiest one of the three. Followed by words. I curse and sometimes take the Lord’s name in vain. Even when I try not to, I slip up. If someone swerves into my lane, the first thing out of my mouth is “shit,” which may well be the last thing out of my mouth someday.

But thoughts? How is it possible to maintain integrity in thought? I’m working on it, but it seems an insurmountable task. Mostly I’m thankful that people aren’t mind readers. I remind myself that each day offers a new opportunity to make a new start. To work harder. To try to be better. Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight.

For me, it was one step at a time. One thought at a time, one word at a time. And in that fellowship hall, I’d joined others who were doing their good deed for the day.

After a bit, a uniformed woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties, and who sounded exactly like Whitney Houston when she spoke, led me behind a small curtained enclosure for a “mini-physical.” If I passed it, I could advance to a questionnaire. If that went well, I’d “get the chair.”

I passed the physical—great temp, super blood pressure—but nearly balked at the finger prick. I hated those things worse than I hated needles. It’s practically impossible to sit calmly while someone jabs something sharp into your oh-so-sensitive fingertip. You never know exactly when they’re going to do it, so you try not to anticipate it and pull back, but you do anyway. It’s just dreadful.

I thought of my son, who needed surgery on his arm when he fell off a ladder. And of my other son, who climbs tall trees with chain saws. I thought of my nephew who recently joined the Marines at a time when the nation is at war. And of his brother, who joined the police force at a time when Virginians have never been more armed and dangerous. It is better to give than to receive.

I survived the finger prick.

I breezed through the questionnaire, which contained everything from where I’ve lived over the years (might I have been exposed to Mad Cow disease in England?) to questions about my sex life. I was escorted to a comfortable lounge chair. Whitney Houston swabbed my left arm with brown liquid, waited thirty seconds, then did it again. This time she made Van Gogh swirls until the crook of my elbow looked like an abstract painting, suitable for framing. “My artwork,” she said with a Mona Lisa smile.

I dreaded what came next, that horror of a needle. I made myself look elsewhere.

Elsewhere happened to be where young Sanford reclined, blood flowing from his athletic arm to a bag, nearly full. A boy’s blood.

All the ways young men can and do lose their blood— often in great quantities— flooded my mind. Car crashes, athletic injuries, plain old foolishness. I saw chainsaws, mortar rounds, bullets. Blood everywhere.

“We got it,” Whitney said, and I watched my own blood fill the clear tubing like tomato juice through a crazy straw.

There is no substitute for human blood, and in the U.S. and Canada, we need a lot of it; one person or another needs blood every three seconds. Patients use 43,000 donated pints each and every day. Shortages of all blood types occur during the summer, and winter holidays.

•••

A few years ago, I dreamed about Jesus. He was the Caucasian Jesus presented to me in childhood, fair-skinned with long reddish-blond hair and beard. He was seated under a tree, beckoning small children to come unto him. I don’t remember what else happened except that when I awoke, there was no doubt in my mind—none—that Jesus Christ was the risen Lord and Savior. I had the feeling that I’d found what I’d searched for all my life. The whole deal, it was all true. I retained this assurance, and with it a feeling of joy, throughout the morning.

Then the doubts began to set in. Jesus wasn’t a white man bedecked in spotless flowing robes. He was a roaming Middle-Eastern man who bore more resemblance to Osama bin Laden than the Jesus of my girlhood. My dream must have been more of an aspiration than a visitation. Had Jesus really taken time out of his busy schedule to appeal to my skepticism? My certainty faded. Did I not have the strength to believe, or was it all in my mind? I prayed for the vision to come again, but it never did. Was it a visitation, or was it just a dream? I didn’t know. But over time, I’ve gained clarity on what it is I do believe.

I believe that there are more people who claim to have spoken directly to God than who actually have. I believe that Jesus is among those who actually have. I believe that his practice of embracing the poor, the sick, those disenfranchised by society, showed us a way to be good in the world. I believe what we do here and now is more important what comes after this life.

And what I was doing here, was giving blood. While my bag filled, I recalled so much time spent in so many hospitals. My mother’s cancer surgery, my father’s heart valve replacement, my husband’s adrenalectomy. Our sons, our friends, our families. All those operations. All that blood lost and replaced. It was always there and I rarely gave it a thought.

But I saw it now. My mother and father in a blood mobile in Hopewell. Big city people in line at collection centers. Rural people in country churches. This is my blood, shed for you.

Twenty minutes after I started, I joined other freshly bled people in the recovery area, drinking juice and chatting. Sanford was back with his phone.

I should have asked him how many pints he’s donated in his life thus far. All I knew was that I had some catching up to do. That day, I made a start.

•••

LINDA L. CROWE lives in Nelson County, Virginia, with her husband Kevin, big-hearted dog Tem, and mean-spirited cat Mildred. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Virginia Forests Magazine, Slaughterhouse, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Full Grown People, NPR’s Open Mic, and Studio Potter.

Killing the Magic

By Kate Haas

When a grown woman and her seventy-something mother engage in yearly debates about the existence of Santa, I think we can agree: there’s a problem. Of course, my mother believes the problem is mine, while I tag her as the source of the annual angst. But who’s telling this story?

My mother, a bookish only child, grew up yearning for a house full of kids and a big, old-fashioned Christmas, like the ones Louisa May Alcott wrote about. My father, who had ditched his nominal Judaism by the time he married my mom, was willing to comply with her yuletide agenda.

And so began my mother’s strictly secular, Euro-inspired holiday extravaganza. It started early in December each year, with the cookie baking. Buttery Swedish stars; Viennese crescents, rolled warm in vanilla-scented powdered sugar; gingerbread men; Swiss chocolate crisps; linzer cookies, each with its shiny pocket of raspberry jam. Over a three-week period, with her three children as floury assistants, my mother rolled out as many as fifteen different varieties at our Formica kitchen table, carefully packing the finished batches between layers of waxed paper in tins to be stowed in the basement freezer. By my mother’s decree, the cookies would emerge for the first time on Christmas Eve; sampling them before that date was verboten.

Later in the month, we adorned the house with simple pine cone decorations (no tacky plastic Santas in my mother’s home), and we kids fashioned homemade gifts to stash in secret hiding places. The holiday rituals continued with the tree selection (December 20, not a day earlier) and, on the evening of the 23^rd, the decoration: while classical music played softly on WQXR, we took out the ornaments while my mother related the story behind every wooden Waldorf gnome, vintage glass ball, or lumpy, pre-school-made button string. The next night, we ate fondue in front of the fireplace, dunking warm pieces of baguette into the melted Gruyere, before hanging our stockings. Finally, there was the ceremonial, dramatic reading of A Visit From St. Nicholas (that’s The Night Before Christmas for you non-literary sticklers).

Permeating the entirety of the festive season was my mother’s Santa Doctrine, enforced with the rigidity of a decree from the Vatican:

1. Santa Claus exists.

2. Doubters: button those lips. If you can’t believe, pretend.

3. Santa alone fills the stockings.

4. Never thank someone in the room for a stocking present. It came from Santa!

5. Befuddled by an item in your stocking? (A not uncommon occurrence in our house.) Mom will interpret. (“I’m pretty sure Santa would say that’s a do-hicky to put your tea bag on.”)

6. Questioning the existence of Santa is tantamount to Killing the Magic.

I don’t know when, exactly, my mother formulated her Santa Doctrine, but my siblings and I absorbed it early, along with the rest of the holiday rituals, each yearly repetition enshrining our customs deeper into the family bedrock. And it worked. Just as my mom had planned, Christmas was indeed a time of festivity and magic for us kids (who, thanks to my mother, believed in Santa longer than was really quite seemly).

But marriages crumble, and children turn into sullen, cynical teenagers, no longer wonderstruck at the sight of the Christmas tree, glowing in the pre-dawn darkness. My mother figured that our holiday traditions were one element of family life that she could keep the same for us. But everything else had changed, and Santa couldn’t make up for that, not really.

Mom remarried eventually, to a tolerant man who knows better than to suggest alien rituals of his own at Christmastime. We kids got on with our lives. But no matter how much we’ve changed over the years, it’s made clear to us each December that, if we come home, there will be no deviation from the holiday of our childhoods, not now, not ever. When it comes to Christmas, my mother adheres to Tradition! with the fervor of Tevye the Milkman.

Which is ironic, considering that these days, when December comes around, I’m on Tevye’s side of the fence.

•••

Like my mother, I was a solitary, bookish child. Like her, I loved books set in “the olden days.” But while Mom was eager to shed the Episcopalian shackles of her stuffy WASP upbringing, I had a secret hankering for religion, a topic so resolutely avoided in our home that I felt a subversive thrill whenever I encountered it in my reading.

I trace the birth of my Jewish identity directly to fourth grade and the copy of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family that I found on the school library shelf. Here were my two fascinations, the olden days and religious ritual, united in the delectable story of five turn-of-the-century sisters growing up on New York’s Lower East Side. Enfolded in that middle-grade novel was a year’s worth of vibrant Jewish life: Mama, praying over the Sabbath candles in their gleaming brass candlesticks, Papa blessing his daughters; congregants chanting Torah at the synagogue; the Passover Seder (unusually somber when scarlet fever strikes the family); and Purim, with its costumed revelry.

Why, I wondered, was this entrancing world closed to me? My father was Jewish, after all. Why didn’t he do anything about it? His silence made the idea of Judaism all the more tantalizing. My friends all belonged to one faith or another. “What are you?” they used to ask. “Catholic, Jewish, Presbyterian?” I could only answer: “Nothing.”

My own kids, I vowed, would be something.

•••

By the time those theoretical kids arrived, I had been a member of the Society of Friends for years. I loved the deep, living silence of Quaker Meeting, the concern for peace and justice, the gentle fun we poked at our rivals, the Unitarians. And I still felt Jewish enough to appreciate that the “inner light” of Quakerism doesn’t mean the light of Jesus, if you don’t want it to.

“So we’ll raise the kids Quaker, right?” I said to my husband.

“Sure, sure,” he replied absently, distracted by graduate school and the fog of sleep deprivation that had descended with the birth of our first child. My husband had grown up in a Conservative, kosher home. He no longer practiced, but he had a strong cultural affiliation with Judaism, the kind acquired automatically when your entire extended family hails from Brooklyn. Still, the Quakers were okay by him.

The Quakers were okay by him right up until our first child was four and I was set to enroll him in First Day School, where every Sunday he would learn about George Fox walking in the glory of the inner light.

“The Quakers are great, with the anti-war and the social justice and all,” my husband told me then. “But they don’t have—well, enough tradition.”

The product of Quaker summer camps, Quaker high school, and Quaker college, I knew that the Society of Friends has plenty of traditions. Much like Quakers themselves, these traditions are plain, not easy to spot. But I wasn’t about to argue the point.

“You want tradition?” I said. “Dude, you come from five thousand years of tradition.” (I married a surfer, a move that results in sentences like this.)

My husband gave me a look. “You’re saying you want to raise them Jewish now?”

“I’m saying I want to raise them something. Jewish works for me.”

“You do realize that we would have to join a synagogue. And actually go. And celebrate Shabbat and all the rest of it.”

“Yup.”

We visited the progressive, Reconstructionist shul, where the rabbi assured my husband, who balked at the concept of a deity, that he himself thought of God as the cosmic force of the universe, rather than, you know, God. That my own Judaism came from my father, not my mother, troubled the rabbi not a bit. Did I consider myself Jewish? Did I plan to raise my kids that way? Fine.

And just like that, we were all Jews.

Except for yearly visits at the High Holidays, my husband hadn’t spent much time in a synagogue since leaving home. But when we started attending services, I watched it all come back to him. He knew the melodies, the prayers, and, impressively, he could read Hebrew, a skill I knew he possessed but had never seen in action.

Yet despite my own lifelong pull toward the faith of my forbears—well, half of them—I couldn’t help an initial sense of detachment. I rose with the congregation when the rabbi took the Torah out of the ark, but inside my head a tiny anthropologist was busily taking notes. Observe the tribe ceremonially processing with its totemic object! The language was unfamiliar, the alphabet was different, and while the customs here were intriguing, they felt decidedly foreign.

In other words, I soon realized, it was a situation made for a former Peace Corps volunteer.

With the zest I’d once brought in Morocco to learning Arabic and the proper way to prepare couscous with pumpkin, I now dedicated myself to learning the ways of my people. I signed up for a class in beginning Hebrew (for the record, much easier than Arabic). My toddler in a backpack, I experimented with challah recipes, ultimately achieving a golden, braided loaf that is reliably more photogenic than I am. Self-consciously at first, I lit the Shabbat candles on Friday nights before dinner, experiencing a quiet satisfaction that for my young children, listening to me sing the blessing was simply routine.

I was surprised at first, and a little chagrined, by how easily I’d abandoned the Friends and taken up with the Jews. Just how committed a Quaker had I really been all those years? On the other hand—and I elected to view it this way—my speedy switcheroo was certainly a testimony to the “many candles, one light” theory of religion.

That was over ten years ago. The tiny anthropologist tossed out her notebook long ago and moved in with the tribe, embracing its rituals and community, its scholarly dedication to seeking contemporary meaning in ancient texts and traditions. The holidays that entranced me in All-of-a-Kind Family back in fourth grade have become my family’s, the rhythms of the Jewish calendar, my own: Rosh Hashanah with its apples and honey; the solemn introspection of Yom Kippur; Passover’s festive seder, when we welcome the stranger among us. And in December, the arrival of Hanukkah, with its latkes and candles to warm the winter nights.

Of course, we all know who else arrives in December.

•••

When my boys were little, I gave them the lowdown on Santa, that jolly imaginary fellow, who even grown-ups like to pretend about. Never tell another kid that Santa doesn’t exist, I instructed. Believing in Santa is very important in lots of families, and it’s not your place to say otherwise. This, I thought, was the respectful approach. Unfortunately, I neglected to include my mother in the category of people whose belief in St. Nick must be preserved. And when one of the boys innocently mentioned the words “Santa” and “pretend” in the presence of Grandma—well, the reindeer poop hit the fan.

It was useless to protest that my little band of Jews shows up at her house every December 25th. To remind her that my husband orders the Christmas morning breakfast croissants from her favorite bakery, that I make my share of the cookies, help decorate the tree, stuff stockings. My mother is painfully aware that, really, I’d rather avoid the entire holiday, and my siblings aren’t crazy about it, either. She knows that my family participates only because we love her and she lives seven blocks away. (What are we going to do, stage a boycott?) Nothing could have illustrated this more sharply than my flagrant violation of the Santa Doctrine.

“You actually told them there’s no Santa Claus?” my mother said, her voice rising in disbelief.

“Mom, the kids love celebrating Christmas at your house,” I said. “The presents, the stockings, all that. But I’m not going to tell them Santa is real, or pretend to believe in him myself, anymore. I’m just not.”

“What’s wrong with letting them use their imaginations?” she demanded, adding darkly, “I suppose you tell them there’s no Tooth Fairy, either?”

“Mom, the Tooth Fairy is not associated with the birth of Jesus.”

“Neither is Santa Claus!”

I gave her a pointed look.

“Well, not in our family, as you know perfectly well.”

“Yes, but that’s beside the point,” I said. “Jewish kids don’t believe in Santa. It kind of goes with the territory, don’t you think?”

My mother fixed me with a bitter eye. “You’re just hellbent on killing the magic for those boys, aren’t you,” she said.

•••

A framed passage from Khalil Gibran hung on the wall in my mother’s house when I was growing up. “Your children are not your children,” it read in elegant calligraphy. “You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.” I doubt my mother was pondering this sentiment as she orchestrated her Christmases back then; as she carefully cut out those cookies, grated cheese for fondue, told the stories behind the ornaments. She was establishing a beloved tradition for us. That her children would grow up to reject it must have been far from her mind.

Last year I watched my oldest son stand on the bima at his bar mitzvah. In confident Hebrew, he led the morning service, singing the psalms of praise and blessing. Then he chanted from the Torah, his voice rising and falling in the ancient rhythms. Watching him ritually take his place in the community, I knew that I had given my children what I always wanted for them, even before I knew their names. Not faith, which isn’t the point in Judaism—a good thing, for my little atheists—but identity. Whether they practice its traditions or not, they’ll always have a place, a people, a sense of belonging.

That’s what the Santa Doctrine signifies to my mother, I know. Her Christmas rituals are bound up in family and belonging, too. Now that I’ve strayed from the script, she can’t help realizing that it’s all going to end. Years from now, when she’s gone, there won’t be Christmas Eve fondue, or stockings, or a tree, not in my family. I’ll always make the Viennese crescents in December, but we’ll go out for Chinese and a movie, like the rest of our tribe. I wish that my mother could accept that, instead of fighting it every year, using Santa as a proxy for what really saddens her. I wish she could recognize that she’s given me things I consider far more valuable than Christmas: a love of books and literature, the shrewdness to hunt for a bargain, her piecrust recipe. And if, one day, my kids convert to Catholicism, or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and I’m able to greet the news with equanimity—well, in a roundabout way, I’ll have my mother to thank for that, too.

•••

KATE HAAS is an editor at Literary Mama. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe Magazine, Salon, Brain, Child, and other publications. She’s a regular contributor to Full Grown People and lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family. Read more of her writing at www.katehaas.com.

Persuasion

god encounter — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Nicole Walker

Max, three and a quarter years old, wakes up in the morning, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, asking, “Do I have to go to school tomorrow?”

“You have to go to school tomorrow and today.”

“Today?”

He is crushed. Tears. “But I want to stay with Mama.”

Who doesn’t? I’m lots of fun, staring at my computer all day and complaining about the news.

I’m making his sister, Zoe’s, lunch. He comes out wearing shorts, a long-sleeved shirt, red cowboy boots, gloves, and a helmet. It’s thirty-three degrees outside. “Too cold for shorts, bubba.”

“But I want shorts.” If this kid wins any records, one of them will be able to sustain the word want for forty-five seconds.

“Fine. Freeze.” This is not a good thing to say to a three-year-old and yet, it’s a good thing to say to Max because you will not win. You will not offer him candy to change. You will not threaten him with punishment. You will not carry him and forcibly change him. Even if you manage to physically restrain him, he’ll run into his sister’s room to put his shorts back on.

“Grandpa’s wearing shorts.”

“Grandpa is not even here.”

And then he sees his dad, who is wearing flip-flops. Off go the boots.

I tuck his regular shoes and a pair of pants into his backpack. It seems cruel to make the preschool ladies fight the battle, but trying to convince Max to do something he doesn’t want to do is like trying to convince a pig to understand about the greatness of bacon.

Max’s teachers probably won’t take up the battle. He will be cold, but he won’t die of cold. It will warm up by noon, I tell myself. It’s perfectly normal to wear shorts in February, I think. He’s really quite warm-blooded, I say to myself.

I can go to great lengths to change my own mind.

•••

Farm-to-table has become tail-to-snout kind of dining. This works best when you’re talking about a fish. I love the whole trout. Hamachi cheek is my favorite food group. I can make good progress with a chicken. All the meat. The guts and bones for broth. I have eaten chicken feet before. The whole cow? Tongue. Sweetbreads, the thymus gland. Oxtail soup. I have made a lot of progress on the cow.

The idea behind the eating of the offal is to let nothing go to waste. It stems from a kind of environmentalism—if you’re going to do the evil of eating meat, you should at least have the sense to make use of all. It’s tied to a respect for indigenous cultures—Native Americans used the whole animal. It’s tied to the DIY food movement—butchering, cooking, smoking, and curing your own meat is a sign of self-sufficiency. It’s a sign of respect. You have to believe that eating the whole animal is for the greater good. The greater good becomes a kind of religion. This religion, like all religions, comes through the stomach and convinces through intestinal satisfaction. You have done the good work. You have ingested the good thing. Transubstantiation. Voila, animal is God in the belly. Voila, you are at once person, cow, and God. To make it all the way to heaven, you have to be a stubborn convert, eat the ears of a cow in the form of the ears of cow, not in the easy form hotdog. One is not born into the church of nose-to-tail gastronomy. Becoming a lover of all food requires conversion.

•••

When I pick Zoe up from second grade on Wednesdays, I bring her a smoothie so she has some energy before gymnastics. I make one for Max, too, and pick him up after I finish my grading during Zoe’s class. One Wednesday, I had a late meeting. I couldn’t get home to make smoothies. I picked up some Pirate’s Booty and Strawberry Monster Odwallas at the grocery store. This was good for Zoe. She loves Pirate’s Booty. This was not good for Max.

“But I want my yellow cup.”

“Look Max, this is better. It’s got more sugar!”

“But it’s not in my yellow cup.”

“Pirate’s Booty! Full of salt AND sugar,” I try to convince him. “It’s delicious.”

“It tastes like Styrofoam.”

Lesson to take from this: do not teach your kid to eat the edible packing peanuts shipped with Apple products. Do not teach your stubborn kid the word “Styrofoam.” Only stubborn kids will learn the word to use against you. Do not indulge your kid with a yellow cup every day. Maybe just every other day. Kids love rituals, but they should love sugar more.

•••

A farm-to-table restaurant in Boston called Estragon serves a whole pig head. A server brings the head to your table. The pig’s head has been roasted. Or, rather, a chef stuck a pig’s head in an oven. It looks like Luau pig. The skin is crispy brown. The head is small. It’s a baby pig. “Look at that.” (Many syllables on the that). “Hello, baby,” someone says. A table of four cannot be expected to eat an adult pig’s head elegantly.

A table of four cannot even be expected to eat a baby pig’s head elegantly. Fingers will be involved, but not at first. At first, feign utensils. The cheeks come off easy enough. Slice them like chicken breasts off the bone, then slice them crosswise. Serve a slice to the diner to your right. The other cheek, let your friends on the other side of the table carve for fear too much reaching will soak your fancy sleeve with grease. What is it like? Carnitas. The most carnal carnitas you’ve ever head. Shredded pork has nothing on pork cheek. This cheek is not just on-the-bone but this cheek is braised not only near bone but in pig fat. There is a lot of pig fat. Do not bother to wipe your hands between head parts. There is nothing better than pig fat. There is more. You go on. Tongue first. Can’t be worse than the tacos de lengua you order quietly when they order carne asada. The skin? You’ve heard of cracklins. You suspect this is what they taste like although admittedly, you’ve never had cracklins. The snout? Iconographic pig is the cutest part of the pig.

You take a tiny bite for the collective cause. The brain? You know you’re not supposed to eat cow brain, for fear the bovine spongiform encephalopathy. You pride yourself on knowing what’s new in medical news as much as what’s new in foodie news. There is no porcine encephalopathy that you have heard of. You take a bite. The fattiest pork fat. The closest thing to foie gras. But the eyeball. You just close your own eyes and put the pig’s in your mouth, gnash it quickly. Most religions rely on a cross between knowing and not-knowing which is sin and which is not and you don’t want to know too much about the chewing and swallowing of eye. The sin is in the popping.

•••

“I want to wear my cowboy boots.”

“You are wearing your cowboy boots.” Max is indeed wearing his red cowboy boots.

“I want my cowboy boots.”

“Come here.” Max walks over to me. I pick him up. He puts his head on my shoulder and pats me on the back. He’s sorry that his mama is so confused. So is she.

The boots fall off one by one. He points to them on the floor. “See. I am not wearing my cowboy boots.”

Reality conforms to those who want it most. He wants it so much he makes it happen. I am proud of his rhetorical skills in an exhausted kind of way.

•••

Do you have to talk yourself into eating pig’s head? Do you have to talk others into joining you? What words do you use? When you ask the diners what they thought about the experience, they say, “It is a lot of work.” If you ask them, “Would you do it again?” They say, “No. Lobster’s a lot of work but I know where the cache of meat is. With the pig, it was too much work to get to the stores of meat. Same with crab. It’s too much work.”

You cannot eat a pig’s head alone. The first rule of a religion is that, if you do it alone, it’s not a religion, it’s a psychosis. You are going to have to find a way to bring the pig to the people. If you can eat bacon, which is the fat and muscled layers of a pig’s belly, then you can eat a snout! But we must make the word sound more beautiful than snout. To sell it to the less adventurous food-lovers, you’re going to have to rely on some words that convey a happier reality. Try “liebe.” The Germans won’t mind. Martin Buber, a major Austrian-born philosopher, promoted immanence. Austria is practically Germany. Love, love, love is everywhere.

•••

“Hey Max,” I call from the other room. “Zoe wants to go to sushi. You want to go?”

“No. I do not want to go to sushi. I want to stay home.”

“Why do you want to stay home? We’ve been home all day.”

“Stay home. Stay home. Stay home.”

He wins this one because for sure we don’t want to go to our favorite sushi place and have him scream, “Home. Home. Home. I want to go home.”

I turn on the oven. Put some potatoes in to bake. I quick-brine some chicken thighs. Seven minutes before we sit down to eat, Max looks at me and says, “I thought we were going to sushi.”

I would like to stick my hands into his head and turn his brain around. I would like, at that moment, to massage some consistency into his head. But then, if consistent, he would not be Max.

•••

How do you talk people into doing things? How do you convince three-year-olds? Is the process the same? Think of the poor vegetarian. He wants to convince you that eating animals is disgusting. It’s bad for your health, for the planet, and for the animal. You’d think the best way for him to start was to serve you a pig’s head, make you confront your demons, your evil, your sin. But something happens to the human mind. It resists conversion, at least when it comes to fat and meat. The stomach that a moment ago churned against the idea of popping an eyeball now somehow sends signals to the salivary glands to make them water. The vegetarian is aghast that you are chewing on an ear right in front of him. You offer him the other ear. He does not take a bite. You are at an impasse. No converts this night.

•••

I spend my life trying to convince Max to do what I want him to do. To put on shoes. To eat some broccoli. To go to sleep my god please go to sleep. But the point of having kids in the first place is to be converted unto them.

“Yesterday, there was a bird on my bed who told me I should be Spiderman and he gave me webs. I should take my webs outside and fight the bad guys.”

“Who are the bad guys?”

“There are no bad guys, mama. Come outside and see.” And Max takes me outside to show me where he would shoot his webs if there were bad guys but now there are only hummingbirds.

“See? No bad guys. No webs. Hummingbirds.”

“You like hummingbirds, Max?”

“I love hummingbirds.”

And thus, the religion of Max.

•••

If you name the pig snout “liebe,” you have a naming strategy akin to religion’s. Eucharist for cracker. Wine for blood. If you make eating pig head something you do every six weeks when Bob and Sue come to town, you have the routine of Sunday church-going, Easter, Christmas. If you repeat it in the right order. If you anoint the pig’s head with olive oil, if you say Grace in the form of, oh my god, I can’t eat that, and then do, you will have your Christ. Your farm-to-table religion. You are leading by example. While everyone else eats bacon, you are sacrificing by crunching an eyeball between your teeth. Transubstantiation. The idea of transforming yourself is what religion is really good at. Conversion is as satisfying as eating pig’s fat. It’s even better that you had once been so confirmed in your original morality: no eyeballs for me! And yet now, you wake up some nights craving the jelly pop of eye.

•••

Max convinces me every day, not by the power of persuasion but by the power of naming and ritual. Those are not cowboy boots. I want juice—not in a cup but in a cup. My face is not dirty. This is not even face. It is dirt. And dirt should be dirty. “Mama, you should sleep by me.”

“But this is not my bed,” he says, trying to convince me I should sleep there. He points to his bed. “It is your bed.” He pats the pillow. “Sleep by me.” I lie down. I can sleep in my bed tomorrow, I tell myself. Perhaps conversion is a daily thing.

I used to think I was a bad mother for Max. I had been, to my mind, a good, patient, not-argumentative mother with Zoe. But lately I’ve been thinking that Zoe converted me first to her own religion. She wanted to keep the tent up in the front room for six weeks on end. We let her. She made me and Erik lie down on the floor so she could cover my face with washcloths and say “go to sleep.” We did. She only ate food cut into the shape of squares. Max has a whole different list of jobs for me. How do I become the better mother?

•••

Max asks for hot juice.

“You mean cold juice.”

“Hot. Juice.”

“I do not think you would like hot juice.”

“I want hot juice. Please.”

The “please” convinces me. Maybe hot juice is the new thing. I get out the orange juice from the fridge. I take out a pan. I pour some juice. I turn the heat on low. At what temperature should one heat juice?

I drain the warmish juice into a sippy cup. He takes a sip. Hands me back the cup. “I don’t like it.”

Ha! I’ve won, I think. But then who is the person getting out, pouring out the hot juice, replacing it with cold? Converted again.

The pig, too, with its hot, juicy fat wins the argument. Pig is persuasive.

•••

I read something the other day about a woman getting her family’s priorities in order. Love god first, then love husband, then love children, she wrote. If you take it to the next level, what you love keeps spiraling. Love eyeballs. Love pigs. Become a vegetarian. The vegetarians lack pig fat, ritual, and the renaming of products for other products. Even mock chicken they call “mock” chicken. The chef work involved to make vegetarian food is mostly chopping, not digging in or butchering or rendering. I love the hard work of finding crab meat even in the tiny tendrils of legs reminiscent of insects’. Maybe, though, work isn’t the way to get to God. Maybe, the easiness of tofu is.

Convert means to turn and look the other way. Max says, “Look here,” so I look. It’s easy. The doing is as easy as the saying. What do I see? I see the lilacs he calls birds and the squirrels he calls punch guys and the hummingbirds with spiderlike webs and I am born again. I call my pig cheek, pork. That is easier too.

•••

My friend Jesse called me the other day. Jesse’s a former tow truck company owner, former bouncer, former meth head, present adventurer. No one really grins anymore, but Jesse grins.

“I found one.”

“One what?”

“A pig’s head.”

“From where.”

“My friend. He raises pigs down in Camp Verde. He’ll give us a baby head.”

I had mentioned to Jesse that I wanted to cook a pig’s head but now I’m having second thoughts. Jesse knows everyone. Even pig farmers, apparently. I should have told someone who had no friends in Camp Verde who grew pigs. I should have told someone who had no friends.

But if that Jesse and I were going to do this thing, we had to convince others to join us. We couldn’t eat one pig’s head between the two of us. It would be wasteful. We wanted to start a movement. We needed to persuade some people this was a good idea. Not just flavor-wise. Not just adventure. But that it’s a good thing to do. Head-to-tail. Hard to do. Confront what you’re eating. Literally face-to-face. If we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it. Let’s make the big bigger. Come on. Come with us. One of us isn’t enough to achieve critical mass. But two is enough for missionary work.

•••

When Erik brings Zoe home from school, he and she find Max and me in our cowboy boots with gloves on. We are drinking hot juice. This time, apple. Out of a yellow cup. We are eating packing peanuts from Microsoft—the kind that are made out of corn starch. We offer some to Zoe. She tries, one. Says it needs salt. Max and I nod and shake salt onto the Styrofoam. We sing Styrofoam, Peanut, Styrofoam, Peanut until we convince Erik to try one.

“Tastes like Pirate’s Booty,” he says. We’ll see if we can convince Erik’s mom to try some next. She’s a vegetarian so I don’t have hope she’ll join the pig-head-eating sect but the Styrofoam-peanut sect—a good back up choice, if all other bacon-y persuasions fail.

•••

NICOLE WALKER’s Quench Your Thirst with Salt won the Zone 3 Award for Creative Nonfiction and was released in June 2013. She is the author of a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street 2010) and edited, with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, (Bloomsbury, 2013) and with Rebecca Campbell—7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment from the Arts, she’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Proxy Sister

prayinghands — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Karrie Higgins

As a gentile living in Salt Lake City, the holy beating heart of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I probably have no right to meddle in Mormon religious matters, even though the Church meddles in secular ones every day: a prohibition on Powerball tickets, a ban on adoptions by cohabitating couples, arcane liquor laws that turn restaurants and taverns into temperance-era time machines, Proposition 8. I certainly had no right to attempt to claim a place in the standby line for the Priesthood Session of the LDS October 2013 General Conference. Besides being a gentile, I am also a woman: strike two. In the Mormon faith, men get the priesthood and women get motherhood. Men bestow blessings and women birth babies.

Strike three: I am childless.

Strike four: childless by choice.

After four years in Utah, during which I had learned to soften my loudmouth and dodge conversations about family and children, it astonished me when Mormon feminist organization Ordain Women called out the Church on its separate-but-equal lie: Motherhood is not equal to the priesthood. Motherhood is equal to fatherhood. Only priesthood is equal to priesthood.

Until Ordain Women made headlines, I was only dimly aware of Mormon feminism. I had heard of excommunicated feminist scholars and a “wear pants to church” protest, but Ordain Women felt more direct and radical, more relevant.

Ordain Women believes the priesthood should transcend gender and parenthood, just as Joseph Smith intended in 1842 when he envisioned the Nauvoo Female Relief Society as a “Kingdom of Priests.” Without the priesthood, women cannot take the reins of clerical or ritual authority. Men oversee everything they do, even in the all-female Relief Society. When the Church limits women’s roles because of motherhood, it echoes patriarchal justifications for locking women out of everything from the voting booth to education.

Maybe if women held the priesthood keys, I thought, they would spring open doors for me, too. Maybe I could finally claim a place for myself here, a childless gentile in Zion. Do not get me wrong. Everywhere I have lived, I have endured relentless uninvited commentary about my choice not to bear children. I am selfish. I am depriving my parents of grandchildren. I will never know real love. I will never be a true adult. But here in Zion, the commentary cuts deeper: Here, I am denying spirit babies their bodies. Here, I am defying God’s commandment to “be fruitful, multiply”—and risking the salvation of my soul. I am going against God’s plan. The patriarchy of the church trickles down into my life, too. What happens to Mormon women happens to me.

So on October 5, 2013, when Ordain Women attempted to claim places in line for standby tickets to the priesthood session, I joined them although I did not join them as myself. I joined them as a woman I’ll call Sarah, who could not attend and whose name I drew from a stack of proxy cards, similar to the LDS ritual of getting baptized by proxy for a deceased ancestor. I was her proxy sister, and it was my sacred duty to carry her to the door of the Tabernacle.

At least, that was my justification on that day. Now I know I had it backwards: she was the one who carried me.

•••

Hours before walking to City Creek Park where Ordain Women gathered for a prayer and hymn, I realized I did not own a stitch of appropriate attire. Every member of Ordain Women, I was certain, would show up in raiment befitting potential priesthood holders. All I had was a closet full of hippie patchwork dresses, boyfriend jeans, and Chuck Taylor All Stars. On the one hand, patchwork dresses are at least dresses; on the other, you can see the silhouette of my thighs when sunlight hits the diaphanous cotton gauze—not exactly modest attire for Temple Square. Gentile that I am, I still respect the sacred space beyond those fifteen-foot walls. Plus, it was chilly, the first true autumn day. As for the boyfriend jeans: modest but sloppy. Tomboyish.

Too broke to justify new clothes, I was trapped in a double bind: dress like a boy or stay home.

Would my baggy jeans insult these women who yearned for the priesthood so badly they were willing to risk apostasy—or worse, excommunication? Would I attract hecklers? Then I realized that my dilemma represented the secular vs. spiritual tug-of-war I face every day living in Salt Lake City: How do I navigate Zion’s spiritual and cultural expectations of femininity and modesty while staying true to who I am?

I had to go.

On my way to City Creek Park, I stopped in Temple Square and listened to Elder D. Todd Christofferson’s voice booming almost God-like over loudspeakers.

A woman’s moral influence is no more or nowhere more powerfully felt, or more beneficially employed, than in the home.

I found myself transported to the first time I heard words thundering over a loudspeaker. It was a union picket, probably 1979 or 1980. I was four or five. A man chanted, “Solidarity Forever,” and picketers sang back, a call-and-response. I never forgot it, the visceral feeling of words at that volume, how they vibrated in my heart and bones. As Elder Christofferson spoke, I watched a pair of little girls, maybe six years old, spinning in frilly white flower-girl dresses by the edge of the reflecting pool, as if rehearsing their future wedding dance. Most sacred is a woman’s role in the creation of life. Were these their first loudspeaker words, the first ones to vibrate inside their hearts?

The world has enough women who are tough; we need women who are tender. There are enough women who are coarse; we need women who are kind. There are enough women who are rude; we need women who are refined. We have enough women of fame and fortune; we need more women of faith. We have enough greed; we need more goodness. We have enough vanity; we need more virtue. We have enough popularity; we need more purity.

Families picnicked on the lawn east of the looming temple spires: men with their suit jackets strewn on the grass, sleeves rolled up, backs of their hands shielding eyes from the afternoon sun; women tossing napkins and sushi trays into Harmon’s grocery store bags, wiping their toddlers’ mouths.

Nobody reacted.

If this were Portland, Oregon, where I lived for nine years before moving here, somebody would have raised a fist and shouted. We have enough patriarchy! We need less theocracy!

I was an ex-pat in my own country. And yet, part of me must have assimilated. Why wasn’t I raising my fist? Why wasn’t I shouting?

As I stood up—

Take particular care that your dress reflects modesty, not vanity, and that your conduct manifests purity, not promiscuity.

—I thought again of the hippie patchwork in my closet and felt good for choosing my comparatively modest jeans.

Then, as if to put me in my place, a young elder walked by, looked me up and down, and scowled. I could almost hear what he was thinking: Tomboy. Dress like a woman.

•••

By the time it was almost my turn to approach the Tabernacle door, I already knew it would not turn out the way that Matthew: 7 booming over the loudspeakers in Temple Square a few hours earlier had promised: knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Not this door, not this time. The guard standing sentry at the bottom of the steps had turned away Ordain Women founder Kate Kelly, and the news trickled down within minutes to the rest of us, along with a message to stay in line: each of us would knock at that metaphorical door, even knowing the answer. We would force the Church to cast us out one by one, not just our gender, but us.

Up until the moment she was turned away, Kate Kelly had believed—really believed—the door would open for her. What for her had been an act of pure hope and faith had for the rest of us transformed into a ritual drama.

Earlier, as we walked two-by-two from City Creek Park to Temple Square, we passed elders holding up signs, the best-dressed beggars I have ever seen in their starched white shirts and black wool suits.

“Need Tickets,” their signs read.

Nobody around me seemed to notice this reversal of the normal order in Zion: men beseeching women. I thought the elders meant it tongue-in-cheek, a jab at Ordain Women for attempting to “steal” their tickets.

Then, after we arrived at Temple Square and stood shivering in the early autumn chill, I noticed an elder clutching a sign to his heart:

“Be an answer to prayer. Need tickets.”

I knew then that the elders on the sidewalk had been sincere, and in fact, their signs were not directed at us at all. Walking past the conference center, we simply happened into their path.

By contrast, Ordain Women rules forbade begging tickets off sympathetic male friends or relatives. This protest was not about getting in. It was about being let in. Still, I wondered why we did not thrust signs into the air and chant. Did the elders milling about on the square know why we were there? Did the frilly princess girls? How could they know our purpose if we did not assert ourselves in some way?

A sister missionary wearing a star-print dress in Wonder Woman blue-and-white and a red corduroy coat passed by, arm hooked in her companion’s. Her nametag bore a United States flag. Her outfit, I realized, made her the embodiment of that flag: a living, breathing Lady Liberty. If this were a protest in Portland, I could safely interpret that dress as a “statement.” Here, though, I am still learning how to read. But my questions cut deeper, too. As a man had asked me just before the group left City Creek Park, “How do you do a religious protest?”

Until Ordain Women, all my protests had been secular.

I once dressed in all black for a theatrical funeral procession through downtown Portland to protest the Carabinieri shooting Carlo Giuliani at the Genoa G8 Summit in 2001. At the front of the march, several “pallbearers” carried a black cardboard coffin aloft, which we planned to lay at the door of the World Trade Center. On our way there, we staged a die-in in front of the Oregonian newspaper offices.

Another time I locked arms with a line of strangers to prevent donors from exiting a parking garage to attend a fundraising dinner for President George W. Bush.

In Seattle, I chanted, “This is what Democracy looks like!” and “Whose streets? Our streets!”

In Washington, D.C., I plopped down in resignation on the lawn in front of the World Bank as riot police circled our demonstration.

Locked arms, blocked intersections, costumes, signs, chants, dances, drummers, direct actions, handkerchiefs shielding nose and mouth in case of pepper spray: these signify protest to me. But how do you mount a religious protest, where your target is a higher authority?

And in Zion, is there ever really a difference? In March 2011, I attended a protest in the Capitol Rotunda against a bill that threatened to strike at the heart of Utah’s model public records access law, the Government Records Access and Management Act. Conservatives and liberals joined forces, and for the first time since moving here in 2009, I felt like I could claim a place in this community. As I ascended Capitol Hill on foot that day despite an aching knee and a fever, I realized how hungry I had been to get involved in civic activism again, to carve out a space for myself as a Utah citizen. I moved to Utah kicking and screaming when my husband landed a promotion he could not refuse, and for the first few years, I barricaded local politics out of my life, refusing to learn representative names or follow the issues. As a liberal gentile, I felt like I had no voice, anyway—no hope of being represented. Even most Democrats in this state sound like Republicans to me.

Inside the capitol, I was shocked at the politeness of the protest. Protestors held signs—

Talk About a Freight Train

Sunshine Not Secrecy

GRAMA may be old, but she has a voice

Only Cockroaches are Afraid of the Light

—but they did not, as Portland anarchists would have, lock arms and shut down the capitol. They spoke their minds for the appointed time and dispersed on cue.

What made the protest culture here so polite? Was it just the conservatism of the state in general or something about the Mormon culture? Then, someone said, “You know the Church is behind this bill. If you’re fighting government secrecy, you’re fighting the Church.”

In other words, there is no such thing as a purely secular protest in Zion.

But is there such thing as a purely religious one?

Now, standing in line at the Tabernacle, I clutched my proxy card, worried if I loosened my grip it would float away on a breeze. Back at City Creek Park, when organizers had invited attendees to carry proxy cards, I knew I wanted to do it. I felt the desire viscerally, a physical ache in my lungs. It was so intense I almost reached for my inhaler until I realized this ache was not asthma: it was a testimony, Mormon-speak for burning in the bosom, the fire of truth.

I wondered what it meant to volunteer to get cast out for somebody else—and for somebody else to request it. It was the opposite of a proxy baptism, when living Mormons stand in for the dead, getting dunked in the baptismal font on their behalf, a magical telegraph bouncing from star to star: you are wanted in our fold. My proxy was alive, inhabiting a body, and she had telegraphed me through her Mormon sisters.

What if these women knew about the afternoons I spent circumnavigating their temple during my early days in Salt Lake City, longing to tap into that magical telegraph machine and zap a signal to my dead brothers in the phantom zone? Or the time I wrote my brothers’ names on a slip of paper and carried it to the temple doors, where for just a moment, I considered sticking it into the lock like a pathetic skeleton key?

Was I so desperate to tap into the temple telegraph machine that I was using Sarah to do it?

On the loudspeaker, Elder Christofferson had derided feminists for scorning the “mommy track,” but he was wrong. Back at City Creek Park, I had witnessed an Ordain Women member fielding urgent texts from her daughter about an eleventh-hour homecoming dress catastrophe. All around me in line, women fussed with strollers and tended to toddlers. And just as I had predicted when I scorned my baggy jeans in my bathroom mirror, the Ordain Women members came dressed worthy of the priesthood: most of all Kate Kelly in a mustard yellow, waffle-knit blazer and purple pencil skirt. These women radiated color, a stark contrast to the elders’ black-and-white suits. Even here, I did not fit in, except for this: All my life, people like Elder Christofferson have assumed I thumbed my nose at motherhood, but they never ask why I do not want children, just like they do not ask these women why they want the priesthood.

Ask, and you shall receive.

Suddenly, it felt right for me to carry Sarah to the door of the Tabernacle. Who better than the gentile, the childless-by-choice tomboy in boyfriend jeans, to be cast out on her behalf? For that is what I am, always, as long as I live in Salt Lake City: an outcast. Marked, set apart.

One by one, women ahead of me approached the Tabernacle steps.

One by one, they sought entrance.

One by one, they were told, “Entrance to this event is for men only. Please go to LDS.org.”

The guard meant they could log onto LDS.org to watch the priesthood session live for the first time in history, the perfect Orwellian maneuver: nobody could accuse the Church of sexism if women could live stream the priesthood session at home—at home, there was that phrase again. At home: where I had almost stayed because of a stupid outfit.

When it was my turn to break from the line and approach the Tabernacle alone, I glanced from the crowd of people to the men snapping camera shutters at the front of the line and thought, “Nobody knows I am doing this as a proxy.” Should I announce it? Was it dishonest to let them think I was Mormon? Or could they already tell?

I looked up at the temple. How did I not notice before? Our ritual was playing out in the shadow of the west central tower, the one with the Big Dipper carved into it: the constellation for lost souls. In the basement below lies the baptismal font, where proxies stand in for the dead. If the temple really were a telegraph machine, the tip of that Big Dipper handle would be the wire connecting to the sky, to Polaris, the North Star. From there, any soul can be found, maybe even living ones. Maybe my proxy sister’s. Maybe by standing here, I was transmitting a message to her.

I swallowed hard: dry tonsils, pill-stuck-in-my-throat feeling. “I am seeking entrance for me and”—I thrust out the card instead of speaking her name, as if exorcising her from my body. I needed the guard to see her as separate from me.

To my surprise, he leaned forward and read her name. He did not hurry. As a Mormon, he understood what it meant to be a proxy for someone. He understood I was carrying a burden. In this small act, I had transferred my burden to him.

But I had given myself away all the same: No Mormon in the baptismal font would exorcise her proxy. I was a phony.

The guard looked me in the eye. “Welcome to Temple Square,” he said. “Entrance to this event is for men only.”

For the first time, I felt the full weight and power of the Church bearing down on me, as if for that moment, the temple had been tilted from its foundations just a crack to let me peer inside at the baptismal font, then dropped, Wizard-of-Oz like, crushing me. It did not matter if I thrust out the card. What mattered was my heart. I had become her. I had become a Mormon woman.

I maintained eye contact as I nodded.

I did not cry because I did not know if Sarah would cry.

Finally, I understood: This protest was not a protest at all, but a prayer. We did not need signs because Heavenly Father could read our hearts. We did not need chants or locked arms or sit-ins because in the very submission the Church demanded from us as women, we held the trump card: We had made them tell each and every one of us no. We had made them witness our submission. We had made our burden theirs. It was not a ritual drama; it was real.

As I rejoined the crowd, a brilliant green dump truck loaded with trash bags barricaded us from the door: picnic detritus of the day—paper cups, sticky silverware, empty sushi trays, greasy napkins—the very things the Church’s strict gender divisions define as “women’s work,” were now a literal barrier to entering the Priesthood Session.

The women, however, did not decry their fate. Instead, they broke into a hymn: “I Am a Child of God.”

I was the only one not singing, the only one who did not know the words.

•••

In an intersection on our way back to City Creek Park, a man dressed in a devil costume with a University of Utah Utes hat pointed a pitchfork at us and growled, “It’s just like Hair Club for Men. You can’t have it because it’s for men!”

Was he mounting a secular protest or a religious one? After all, in the Mormon faith, there is such a thing as false testimony, a burning in the bosom inspired by the devil instead of Heavenly Father. And yet, that Utes hat: a cheeky reference to the annual “Holy War” between the BYU and Utah Utes football teams. I got the sense the Dark Lord of the Hair Club for Men was more riled about women’s social roles than any doctrinal dispute.

But then, isn’t that what we had just protested: social roles as doctrine?

Behind me, a man shouted, “Satan is a Utes fan? Oh, come on!”

•••

Later, when we returned our cards so our proxy sisters could keep a tangible memento, I asked if I could contact the woman on my card. I wanted to tell her how it felt and what it meant to me to do that for her. The organizers suggested I write my name and email address on the back of the card, so I did. Even if she never contacts me, we are eternally connected as proxy sisters now, our relationship sealed by that artifact, an unofficial temple ordinance record.

On my way out of the park, I asked one of the women if it might offend my proxy sister to have a gentile carry her name to the Tabernacle.

“Non-LDS men can attend the priesthood session,” she said, shrugging. “Why not you?”

I knew right away what she meant: If non-LDS males who possess no other credentials for the priesthood than their gender can attend the priesthood session, certainly non-LDS women who live under this patriarchy can, too.

But for me, it also meant something more fundamental, something less and something more at the same time: Why not me?

•••

KARRIE HIGGINS lives in Salt Lake City. Her writing has appeared in Black Clock, DIAGRAM, Quarter After Eight, the Los Angeles Review, and the Los Angeles Times. Her essay “The Bottle City of God” won the 2013 Schiff Prize for Prose from the Cincinnati Review and will appear in the 2014 issue. She is at work on a book by the same title.