3
" When Heaven has an earthquake you fall to your knees and feel through the rubble to find the pieces of God. When my eternal, temple-blessed marriage shattered and everything that had been meaningful lay in jumbled shards around me, I had to slowly and carefully pick up every single piece and examine it, turning it over and over, to see if it was worthy to keep and to use in building a new house of meaning. As I gathered the broken pieces of God, I used only my own authority, only my own relationship with the divine, and the good, small voice that speaks inside me, to appraise them. I threw away many, and I kept many, assembling the bright pieces into One Great Thought. I asked only, "Do I see God's fingerprints on this? Does this little piece feel godly? Does it speak of love?" That made it easy. I was forever finished with the insane attempt to love a God who hurts me. When I picked up the little pieces of God-ordained polygamy, I smiled because there was no question. I thanked the God of Love, and threw that piece away. "
― Carol Lynn Pearson , The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men
4
" I experience Mormondom to be a warm and beautiful and well-appointed home in which you suddenly find you're in a Patriarchy Funhouse that features crazy, rippling distortion mirrors built to magnify maleness and diminish femaleness. It's males who sit in the seats of authority, from God in his heaven on down to the leadership in Salt Lake City and out to every spot on the globe where Mormons congregate. It's males we pray to and pray through. It's males that preside at the pulpit. It's males that pray over and pass the sacrament, the tokens of the Lord's supper, and officiate in all other ordinances. It's males (nearly always) whose portriats hang on the walls of our chapels and whose faces appear on the covers of our class manuals. It's males who pronounce every doctrine and policy from church headquarters. It's males we read about in most of the Old Testament, and in ninety-nine percent of the Book of Mormon. (Thank you, Jesus of the New Testament, for being such a radical revolutionary, violating tradition, speaking of and to women, treating them as fully human.) "
― Carol Lynn Pearson , The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men
15
" I said, "Mary, tell me something. Why do you have that picture from The Wizard of Oz on your wall?" Mary chuckled at my question. "Oh, that's my favorite move. I saw it the first time when I was five. But it's more than that. The story is so relevant to my life. That big, wise Wizard, you know. He's nothing. You pull back the curtain, it's just a man. I went through my whole life looking at the men at church as the Wizard, practically as God. I believed every word they said, every way they interpreted the bible, every condemning judgment on my gay son. After Bobby died, I started to study on my own, and I see the Bible through my own eyes now, not through theirs. I pulled back the curtain, and it was not God, just men. The tin man, he had a heart all along. The lion had courage all along. I knew the truth about Bobby all along, but I didn't listen inside, I listened outside. Most of us go on dancing down that yellow brick road to find the izard and be told the secret. But the secret is, the kingdom of God is within, inside every one of us. That picture, I keep it there to remind me." (49) "
― Carol Lynn Pearson , No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons Around Our Gay Loved Ones
17
" I sat down and read out loud a statement on the box, a message from the Celestial realm.
If I had my child to raise all over again, I'd finger paint more, and point the finger less. I'd do less correcting, and more connecting. I'd take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes. I would care to know less, and know to care more. I'd take more hikes and fly more kites. I'd stop playing serious, and seriously play. I would run through more fields and gaze at more stars. I'd do more hugging, and less tugging. I would be firm less often, and affirm much more. I'd build self-esteem first, and the house later. I'd teach less about the love of power, And more about the power of love.
-Diane Loomans, Full Esteem Ahead "
― Carol Lynn Pearson , Embracing Coincidence: Transforming Your Life through Synchronicity
18
" We can think a healed thought and speak a healed word, speak of and to the two who are One, our MotherGoddessFatherGod. The hopeful but misty thought that "I've a Mother there" will give way to the experience that "I've a Mother here." We will know Him, Her, Them, Us, the Divine Family unbroken, bringing part to whole and whole to part, singing the indispensable She who had been forgotten but it now found, singing the wholeness, singing the holiness. "
― Carol Lynn Pearson , The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men
