LDS Church-owned FamilySearch now lists same-sex couples in its geneaological records

Here is my latest freelancing effort, running today in The Salt Lake Tribune: 

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   FamilySearch, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ genealogical website, says its nearly 2-year-old move to list same-sex parents and couples in its massive databank has proved to be a popular one.

   How popular? Well, FamilySearch, by policy, does not publicly release such specific statistics. Still, Chief Genealogical Officer David Rencher says those unpublished numbers do show that including “same-sex couples and same-sex parents has been well-received by the community of enthusiasts engaged in family history.”

   “Every person’s life is important to reflect in the fabric of the human family,” explains Rencher, who also serves as director of the church’s Family History Library in downtown Salt Lake City, “and adding these features to the [the site’s] family tree [feature] enables everyone to experience and see where they fit into the big picture.”

   The Dec. 10, 2019, official announcement, however, has not changed the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage nor its recognition of only traditional, male-female unions for solemnization and “sealing for eternity” within the faith’s temples.

   Thus, the FamilySearch initiative remains just another step for those hoping for wider same-sex acceptance by the church, says Nathan Kitchen, president of Affirmation, an advocacy and support group for LGBTQ Latter-day Saints and their families and friends.

   “When the announcement was first made,” Kitchen says, there was a “sense of relief within Affirmation and LGBTQ communities that the church would finally open its family records listings and pedigree format for all family configurations, not just opposite-sex monogamous and polygamous family configurations.”

   But it wasn’t necessarily seen as “an inclusive gesture,” he adds, “rather a necessary evolution for FamilySearch to survive and thrive in the family history marketplace.”

   Though a nonprofit operation, FamilySearch — linked to the church’s 5,400 family history centers worldwide and boasting nearly 1.4 billion individual names in its family tree archives — is a big player in a digital arena that includes for-profit companies like Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and FindMyPast.com.

   Kitchen notes the latter three genealogical sites were ‘listing and including same-sex couples and their children long before FamilySearch.org made its announcement and subsequent changes.”

   Of course, those family history services are not owned and operated by a religious institution committed to what it sees as divinely defined marriage on one hand and changing mores and cultural norms on the other.

   Rencher puts it this way: “Issues surrounding gender cross all segments of the population; so these new features accommodated [church members] whose families need to be reflected accurately in the FamilySearch family tree, as well as any of the other millions of [our] users throughout the world.”

   Kitchen says his own mother was among the many who welcomed FamilySearch’s same-sex pedigree expansion.

   “Yes, [she] was very excited to add me and my husband to the family tree in FamilySearch after my marriage,” he says. “[And] over the past couple years, I have heard of many parents who are happily adding their same-sex married children [and] grandchildren into their proud family heritage.”

   Even so, Kitchen asserts that “as fast as parents can add their same-sex married children to their family records in FamilySearch, the church removes them” from the faith by withdrawing their memberships.

   “It is a huge disconnect . . . to have the church remove them from their ‘forever family,’” he says. “For Latter-day Saint parents, this eternal family tree, not the FamilySearch family tree, is the only one that really matters in the end.”

   Kitchen and others in the LGBTQ community hold out hope the church’s proclaimed prophetic leadership will have a “revelation” that includes same-sex spouses and their families in the next world.

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To read the entire story, with photos, click on this link:  LDS Church embraces inclusion of same-sex couples and parents in its FamilySearch genealogy database (sltrib.com)

Adidas-wearing pastor has a goal for Salt Lake City Unitarians: Get a kick out of life

  So, had a Tribune assignment to profile a new pastor at Salt Lake 1st Unitarian Church. 

  When he politely, and eloquently, declined to offer the usual background  -- age, marital status, family background -- I thought how will this possibly work? But it did, going to show even a 60+(+) semiretired journalist can learn a new trick now and then. 

  I thought it turned out rather well, and as always, Francisco Kjolseth found the less-traveled photos path to make the page pop. Kudos, again, to Editor Dave Noyce, another one-of-a-kind character blessing my universe, and a talented wordsmith to boot. 

________

     After 34 years with outspoken social and political activist Tom Goldsmith at its helm, Salt Lake City’s First Unitarian Church is turning to a contemplative Harvard Divinity School-educated minister and educator to help chart its future.

    But as interim pastor, the Rev. Ian White Maher will not be replacing the Rev. Goldsmith, who retired from the pulpit in May. Instead, the Portsmouth, N.H., native has a two-year contract to help the nearly century-old, 300-member church at 569 S. 1300 East contemplate both its congregational and civic missions before selecting a permanent senior pastor.

    “I’m not just here as some sort of consultant to make sure the church is healthy, though that is part of my job,” Maher explains. “But truly why I am here is to help people believe that they can fall in love with this life. . . to truly fall in love again despite all the grief and heartache we see.”

    Indeed, Maher — whose own activist credentials are hardly lacking, including advocacy for immigrant, LGBTQ and racial rights as well as what he characterizes as “multiple civil disobedience arrests” — sees the inward, contemplative journey as going hand in hand with First Unitarian’s long history of pushing for social justice, income equality and environmental protections.

    “There are so many people today who feel completely disconnected from their spiritual lives, and from organized religion,” Maher says, citing a 2014 Pew Research study showing 23% of Americans identify as “nones” when asked their religion — up from 16% in 2007. (During the same time period, self-identified Christians dipped to 71% from 78%).

    That’s [more than] a fifth of the American population. You have all these people that are ‘unchurched.’ And that doesn’t mean they are [all] atheists; it just means that what had been working is no longer working,” Maher contends. “I honestly, truly believe that the problems that we are facing — war, refugee problems, income inequality problems — are not actually our [real] problems. Our problems are greed, alienation and loneliness, and these are actually spiritual problems.”

. . . .

     To read the rest of this story, and view photos that illustrate it, click on this link: https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2021/09/22/new-adidas-wearing-pastor/

Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur: Times for deep reflection, repentance and resolve

(Excerpts from my story in Sunday's Salt Lake Tribune on the beginning of Judaism's High Holy Days)

   Listen carefully during the daylight hours of Tuesday and Wednesday, and you may hear the blasts of the shofar rising from synagogues along the Wasatch Front.

  From a twisted ram’s horn come tones both alarming and plaintive, at the same time triumphant and hauntingly like the sobs of a lost child for its mother: This is Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, which begins Monday evening — a two-day observance as rich in millennia-old traditions as it is in how 21st-century Jews in Utah and across the planet understand and experience the holiday.

  “Rosh Hashana has so many different meanings to it,” Rabbi Samuel Spector of Salt Lake City’s Congregation Kol Ami acknowledges. “In Judaism, we say that this was the day that God created humankind. There is a big focus during Rosh Hashana on togetherness, on seeing the holiness and humanity and one another, and in coming together as a community.

  “It’s a time for us to really reset. Ten days later is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement,” Spector says. “We learn that, leading up to Yom Kippur, we are supposed to do an accounting of our souls and think about how we can be better, how we can both make our world better and be better ourselves, and make our world better in the new year.”

 To read the rest of my story, and see more photos, click on this link: https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2021/09/05/utah-jews-enter-high-holy/

St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral celebrating sesquicentennial in the heart of Salt Lake City

    Having an occasional freelance assignment now, in semi-retirement, from The Salt Lake Tribune has been a nice change. What is old is new again, kinda sorta. :)

This is my latest assignment for Religion Editor Dave Noyce (friend and former boss).

    "In the mid-19th-century Mormon theocracy ruled by pioneer-prophet Brigham Young, plans by smatterings of Episcopalians to carve out their own religious niche in the Utah Territory seemed audacious.

    But, in July 1867, two decades after Young had led Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley, newly consecrated Episcopal Bishop Daniel Tuttle — having first paid a courtesy call to the leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — presided over his church’s first services in Salt Lake City’s Independence Hall.

    These pioneering Episcopalians went on to establish one of the earliest organized, permanent Protestant presences in Utah.

    “You could characterize it as both a gamble and a miracle, but it’s also what love does — it spreads out and drenches every nook and cranny [of a community],” says the Rev. Tyler Doherty, dean and rector of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah’s Cathedral of St. Mark, which is celebrating its sesquicentennial in September. . . . 

Read rest of my story, with photos by clicking this web link: https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2021/07/10/after-years-utahs-second/

A bright spring morning, an old dog, a wagon, and honoring the Walk of Life

 Part of my daily routine is a contemplative morning walk along riverside trails or in parks. I put on my earphones and log on to a podcast, or play portions of an audio prayer book, psalter, or if I'm in a more secular mood, an NPR, Axios or BBC newscast.

 Today, it was the prayer book on play as I did several circuits around a soccer fields complex above the Murray City Park. The air was invigorating, cool and crisp ahead of a warm spring day, a slight breeze in the trees where sunlight dappled a swaying canopy of leaves, while nesting birds chirped and fluttered through the branches.

 Then, as I got into stride and sipped my Starbucks French roast, I saw him -- an athletic man in his late 30s or early 40s towing his mixed-breed, gray-muzzled dog behind him. The canine lay nearly motionless on a small mattress and blanket aboard a wagon.

 Perhaps, in days and years passed, the man's four-legged friend had taken his human for long walks. Like so many other dog owners do with the wide open greenspace there, human and dog had played on the acres of green, tossing and chasing balls or frisbees. But now the years had taken their toll, replacing a puppy's boundless, energetic youth with the ragged, slow breaths and half-closed eyes of an ancient dog.

 Stamina had faded, aches in hips and shoulders grown, the runs becoming walks, the walks becoming shorter until this routine of quiet, simple companionship became what I saw today.

This day may have been the dog's last, or at least one of them. Yet, his human friend was honoring a life that had been -- and remained, even in its twilight -- precious and beloved.

 I remembered the many dogs I have had the privilege of knowing and sharing all-to-brief moments in time and unconditional love with over my life.

 I did not intrude on this moment of bonding and honor between the man and dog he dutifully towed behind him. Instead, I just stood still, quietly witnessed the pair as they went down a hill and disappeared.

 And, with a smile and wet eyes, I said a prayer for two souls on the Walk of Life.

 

Soul Searching: On Confusing the Duties of Faith with the Lure of Political Power

    Hopefully, this will truly be a time of soul searching for Evangelical Christians (as for us all) over confusing faith with political power, and thus a bitter harvest -- often borne of willful ignorance of moral compromise in leadership.

    And of course it is not just Evangelicals who detoured into this dead end path; still this uniquely American Protestant community seemed to fall hardest for a false secular gospel that clothed itself in fear -- and ultimately looked little different than the violence and hate that likewise betrayed and usurped other, initially peaceful protests over legitimate racial and justice concerns this past year.

   My friend, and a mentor in my Eastern Orthodox Christian faith, Fr. Steven Clark, put it this way in a comment:

"The evil one showed the world and said: 'This I will give you, if you bow down and worship me.'

And. . . well.. . . . you know."

Please read, and consider: 89.3 KPCC | 'How Did We Get Here?' A Call For An Evangelical Reckoning On Trump (scpr.org)

Grace in the Time of Covid: On a cold winter's morning, a lesson from Michael

 It was a bone-chilling cold, pre-dawn Tuesday morning. The 5 a.m. alarm on my phone sounded, and for several minutes -- nestled in my warm bed -- and debated with just turning it off and drifting back to sleep.

But I got up, with a moan. It was the day for early-morning liturgy and communion at Sts. Peter & Paul Orthodox Church in downtown Salt Lake City. I knew I needed it, and needed to be there. 

After the service, the guys would meet for coffee and scriptural study with Fr. Paul downstairs -- a time that has become especially precious to me during this season of prolonged Covid-19 related isolation.

Showered and dressed, I donned a heavy coat, scarf and gloves and bundled myself into the car, first scraping a sheet of ice from the windshield. My decades-old Honda Civic coughed to life, I turned on the heater full blast, and drove down the road.

It's a 15-minute trip to the church, and to my usual morning prayers and added not a few laments about life as we have come to know it in the age of pandemic. Finally, as I drove on near-empty, slippery streets, I passed the homeless camps of shopping carts draped with makeshift tents that regularly pop up along the curbs of the Salt Lake County-City Government Complex.

Deseret News photo

But I was so self-absorbed, irritated that the old Honda's heater was just beginning to warm the car's interior, that I hardly noticed the desperation and poverty of wrecked lives that have become part of the urban landscape.

Pulling into a dark side street and then the small parking lot behind my parish church, I sat for a time behind the wheel, relishing a belated moment of warmth. Then with a grunt I got out, put on my mask, shivered, and began walking down the alley to the entrance of Sts. Peter & Paul.

The homeless, I'm ashamed to say, have too often become the faceless, nameless backdrops of our lives today. If not ignored, then they only elicit a brief thought or an occasional a few bucks quickly handed over to appease the inconvenience of guilt.

But there is one denizen of the street many in the parish have come to know, and some befriend.

"Michael," also the name of his patron saint, adorns the sleeves of his arms and coat with iconic images of saints and angels, secured with transparent plastic and duct tape. Slight and gaunt, his beard and graying hair often seeming as wild and surreal as his thoughts, Michael has good days and bad.

Some days, he holds forth on the warfare of angels and demons in the skies above, where clouds may swirl, punctuated by thunder and lightning. "See? There they are, fighting over the souls of the dead? Right there," he once told me on a summer day, pointing and nodding.

On other days, he seems to have the simple clarity of a saint. That is the case on this particular frigid December morning, as he steps out from behind a plastic tarp draped over his nest of blankets and sleeping bags near a building's steam vent.

He won't do the shelters. He has horror stories of sickness, bed bug-infested cots, drug use and violence inside them. He's often been robbed of his few possessions. Over the years, our priest and parish have tried to arrange other housing and psychiatric care, without success.

So, one does what one can, meeting this brother where he is, and with what he needs -- warm clothing, food, a few dollars for coffee or a snack, and friendship, to the extent this gentle and enigmatic man allows that.

So, on this morning, I just want to get inside to the warmth, comfort and spiritual refuge of the church. Michael recognizes my voice, this time, and hurries to my side. I'm grumpy; he is ebullient, and our pace toward the open iron gates of the entrance slows.

"It's a good day," he rasped. "It's a cold day," I grumbled back.

He either didn't hear me, or ignored my reply. "God is so great! He provides what you need. Even a hot shower!" Michael pointed to the steam coming out of a head-high pipe. "They shut down the showers where I was going," he explained, vaguely waving toward an undefined downtown Salt Lake City location, "But then God provided this!"

He went on to list a few other things he attributed to Providence. A place to fill his water jug. People cared enough to check on him, feed him, take him to the free clinic, even just talk for a few moments.

Then, Michael grinned, pointed at the church where he, like me, received baptism a few years back, and said, "And we get to go inside His house and have communion! Hey, it's the Breakfast of Champions!"

And we did that. We climbed the steps inside to the candle-lit darkness, venerate the icons of the saints and stood for the ancient prayers of the liturgy, culminating with the Eucharist.

I watched Michael approach the chalice, a look of awe on his smudged face as he received the mystical Body and Blood of Christ.

As he made his cross and silently walked away, I sighed, ashamed at first, then humbled, and then grateful for the lesson.

For Michael.

Lord have mercy, indeed.

Remembering Mom: an end to mourning, a bitter-sweet celebration of mercy

Hard to believe it has been a year since my mother, Katherine, passed away.

June 17, after having called aloud in delight for her own mother, she "reposed," as we Orthodox Christians say. And, a year later, I see that moment of her leaving us as a blessing -- ending the confusion and haze of final-stage Alzheimer's disease, the physical pain of one unable to speak or understand speech, walk, or care for herself in the most basic manner.

But she knew love and knew how to give love to the end of her 91 and a half years. She could still smile, and raucously laugh, and cry tears sometimes of pain, other times of joy she could not otherwise express.

As dawn turned the sky silver over the Jordan River this morning -- candles lit, a ribbon of burning incense drifting up toward a small photo of her nestled amid icons of Christ, His Mother, and an assortment of saints in my home prayer corner -- I recited the ancient Akathist to Jesus for Those Who Have Fallen Asleep.

I had offered this same prayer for 40 days following her death last year, as I had for my father when he had passed away six months before. And as I had done for my father, Robert Sr., on the one year anniversary of his repose, I prayed for Katherine.

There were, again, some tears for me. There also was peace and hope.

Our broken hearts: Where hope flees, riots and madness fill the vacuum

Violence, looting and arson engulfed Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and other cities this week, played out in endlessly recycled video clips of mob madness on our screens.

And we wonder, "Why?"

The myopic, yet narrowly accurate answer is that -- in scenes echoing such civil breakdowns in past years and decades -- a handful of criminal opportunists can quickly turn peaceful protests into riots, steering the desperate masses into acts they will later individually regret . . . while the thugs sparking it all could not care less.

But history teaches us that wherever trust, justice, hope, and mutual respect are absent, anger and madness waits to fill the vacuum. And this has been true for all ethnicities, racial strife, political rage, religious hatred sadly being universally human (https://www.brainz.org/riots/). 

Now, we see black faces, twisted in rage over the death of another African-American man fatally injured during an arrest exhibiting excessive force. But look beyond the sensational, incendiary in themselves clips on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, et al, and you also will see faces of our brothers and sisters sobbing amid those truly mean streets; others scream in impotent angst; some pray, and most deplore their legitimate grievances being hijacked by violence and destruction  . . . mayhem that undercuts the message we should hear.

This is not a new pattern in America. In the late 1960s, riots scourged Chicago, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Kansas City. Louisville and many other cities. At their roots were racial oppression, segregation, and economic hopelessness in the slums, ignited by grief and anger after Martin Luther King Jr. -- the prophet of non-violent protest -- was gunned down. 

Mixed into this cauldron, too, were anti-Vietnam War protests. And again, given human nature, non-violent protests morphed into darkness as mobs picked up rocks, sticks, Molotov cocktails, and firearms to battle police, and to "burn baby, burn," as the cry went at the time.

And here we are, half a century later. Trillions of dollars spent on education, jobs, urban development, welfare, anti-gang programs, wars on drugs, etc., etc. Technological advances and social engineering unheralded in modern history. So much has changed.

And yet, so much has not changed at all. For this truth remains, as it has from the beginning of humanity: our hearts are broken. That "image of God" we bear is tainted too often by our choices of pride over humility, materialism over charity, offense over forgiveness, hatred over understanding.

When no one listens, the desperate scream louder. Unaddressed pain and injustice eventually will bring anarchy and the Abyss, that dark chasm Nietzsche warned stares back at those who gaze into it for too long.

True for individuals. True for communities, for nations, and for civilizations.

Lord have mercy, we repeatedly pray in services at my Orthodox Christian parish church.

We all need that mercy. And we all must somehow learn to give it to our fellow flawed humans, as well.

Senior Hour Treasure Hunt at CostCo, or the Quest for Toilet Paper (for your) Booty

Well, some things are just impossible lately to get shopping online for pickup or delivery.

So, I tied on the homemade polyester-blend T-shirt mask Barbara crafted for me (and, Lysoling the sucker inside and out beforehand) -- and donning some plastic janitorial gloves -- drove to CostCo at the b**tcrack of dawn for "senior shopping hour."

I got there at 7:20 a.m., well before the official 8-9 a.m. Golden Years hour . . . and still was eighth in line. Tape marked off 6-foot intervals stretching from the entrance down the side of the building, and into the distance horizons, out of sight.

By 8 a.m., all those social-distancing berths were filled; the queue stretched around the warehouse, behind it, and was nearing a full circumnavigation of CostCo.

There were surgical masks, dust masks, dish towel masks, knee socks masks, and not a few underwear and T-shirt masks; gloves like mind, white dinner/butler gloves, driving gloves, work gloves, and a few folks who had wrapped their hands in sanitizing wipes.

A few people smiled -- I think they smiled, from the crinkled eyes -- but most were silent, and tense. I felt especially sad for some frail, octogenarian women and shuffling elderly (well, more elder than myself) couples who wore near-dispair like a quivering, dark aura.

Fear. This is what we have come to, as Covid-19 and its seemingly increasing isolation, restrictions, shortages -- and uncertain future for our social institutions, civil rights, and economy -- weighs more heavily. The 15-day plan became the 30-day plan and now, some warn, could stretch through summer.

Once inside, the first thing this serpentine procession of seniors saw as a smiling employee parceling out the allowed "one only" 30-roll megapack of Scott toilet paper. Plop, roll the cart 6 feet. Plop. Roll the cart 6 more feet. Plop . . . .

I added a 12-pack of off-brand paper towels next. Then some hand soap. A few grocery items. Oddly enough, couldn't find orange juice -- frozen or liquid -- anywhere.

The pace inside was glacial as it was surreal. The 6-foot rule was a challenge to observe, with people suddenly stopping to gaze at their cellphones, or just standing with confused, tired looks.

Not an experience I would want to repeat anytime soon, but it was nice to be able to find something to . . . well, you know.

Oh, did I mention the on-site security? Two large Pacific Islander guards, each easily 300-pounds and 6-foot-3, 4, watched the crowd outside.

Nary a graybeard in queue challenged them, though they did turn away a few younger types trying to enter the store during the Hour.

I know this experience was traumatic emotionally for some people in line (I passed the period listening to Eikona chant the daily Orthodox Prayers on my iPhone) . . . but compared to the chaotic conditions in other countries due to Covid-19 right now, we have things easy.

We need to remember that, right? And this will end.

As for the aftermath, the impact on future pandemic preparations -- and how much this all has further weakened our freedoms of movement, association, privacy, even, some say, religion -- remains to be seen.