I had barely stepped out of the church when I felt the first drop on my head. I looked up to see the clouds conspiring against what had been a bright day, moving together in a dark and menacing way. Church ought to be the place in which we feel lifted and inspired, as my mother had always said, “An opportunity to choose those good and uplifting places.”
But, this morning, my heart will stop when the Jewish-convert Sunday-school teacher, who was very well versed in historical accounts and scriptures, speaks to the group about being moved in difficult places by our own holy ghost promptings—ponder, research, pray to come to revelation and a move towards your own enlightenment.
The Bishop's wife had quickly stood, knowingly smiling at the rest of us and launched into a story of the Equal Rights Amendment issue coming through, while she was attending BYU. She explained, she’d been rushing around to get ready for her tennis date and was tripping over books strewn throughout the living and kitchen areas and when she’d inquired of her roommate, the other had said she was trying to make an informed choice when it came to the women’s amendment. The Bishop’s wife told us bravely, proudly, that she’d brushed her hand through the air, told her she didn’t need to waste her time on a sunny afternoon when the prophet had already spoken.
Some people can eat beans with abandon and never suffer side effects, but I was not one of these. Protein rich and a cheap staple, I do eat my share of them, making Boston baked Beans, cooking them until super soft and mashing with a bit of olive oil to smear across tortillas, or even occasionally I make a bean casserole if there are leftover tortilla chips to get rid of—all from pinto, unless split peas with ham.
Even so, even though I was eating them and enjoyed them there were those times that my guts rumbled, doubled over if I wasn’t able to let some of the gas escape and the worst of these times often enough happened at a public event or while with others in whom I didn’t want to expose to noxious fumes. That’s how this morning had felt too, the Bishop’s wife offering her holier-than-thou story, the one that stopped even the super smart Sunday-School teacher, who religiously wore her Star of David round her neck notwithstanding the bland Mormon chapel.
She hadn’t even started out talking about the long ago equal right amendment, but in that moment she was suffering some kind of junior-high-school seeming, head-cheerleader rebuttal, we’re cooler than you slapping. I sat holding in my gas—not born of bean, but fire of spirit over what had just transpired. It was my throat chakra that choked and I toyed with the blue stone of my necklace that rested there as I took in what I could no longer hold.
Remember that not all is sweet—though I’d certainly been raised to be so. It is nice to be liked and held in a fold, to know you are one of a group, marching together on behalf of the righteous side, but when your guts start to buckle and rumble, you might find yourself politely stepping aside to rest, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to just sit down here a second, better myself before continuing on.”
I turned to my husband, my voice shaking and my eyes wide in disbelief at what had just transpired, and whispered, “I don’t think I can do this anymore. I’m done.” I looked at the other women in the room and most seemed entirely unaffected, one searching her purse for more mints, one staring at the clock, another reading her lesson manual, and yet, my head was spinning, my guts knotting and my heart pounding.
Enrolled in an online gender-studies class, we’d been studying in detail the Equal Rights Amendment and why it hadn’t been ratified despite such simple and inoffensive language. Woefully, I’d been finding enough carefully saved and catalogued evidence from the church website to make me ill. For the beans had come to boiling, water all to steam, and black-burning to pan bottoms and now my prayers answered, because that lesson, which had nothing to do with the Equal Rights Amendment, spoke directly to me in such a precise language I couldn’t stay.
I walked out of the church and the watery drops fell on my head.
