Last night I read to my son from an illustrated book called New Testament Stories. The book fell open to the story of Jesus cleansing the temple, and my impulse was to skip over it to avoid having to explain the image of Jesus using a whip. But my son wanted to hear the story, so I relented. I told him the basic outline of the story and conveyed the message that temples and the churches are houses of God, places where the Holy Ghost can be. That makes them special, and we don’t do everyday things in them like buy stuff. I hope it was a good enough explanation for a 4 year old.

However, I didn’t talk to him about another facet of the story, which is the morality of making money in the context of worshiping God. In the story of Jesus cleansing the temple, sellers were exploiting the fact that temple worshipers needed an animal to sacrifice, setting up shop right there in the temple and probably overcharging people the same way movie theaters and airports have rip-off concessions. Jesus called it a den of thieves. [Read more...]

I spent some time today watching live feed of a pair of eagles caring for their hatchlings in a large cottonwood tree in Iowa. One egg hatched on April 2, a second on April 3, and the third will hatch within a couple of days. You can catch the 24 hour feed here. It was remarkable to watch them – especially around 5 pm central time when one was feeding the hatchlings a fish. The female and male take turns sitting in the nest while the other hunts for food – and the nest is fit for a noble bird. It’s 5-6 feet in diameter and weighs a ton and a half! Watching them feed was interesting, but mostly all they do is groom the nest, occastionally shift their weight, adjust their feathers, and patiently sit, warming their young.

One thing that struck me is how powerful they look – large birds of prey with sharp eyes, a beak for tearing flesh, and large talons. Yet they’re nurturing, carefully and patiently providing their precious offspring – the only three they’ll have this year – with everything they need to get started in life. It made me think of the metaphors Christ uses in the scriptures to liken his care for us to a nurturing mother:

“How oft have I gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and have nourished you.” (3 Nephi 10:4)

“Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” (Isaiah 49:15)

These are tender, even intimate images Jesus chooses to represent the care he has for us. But I very seldom feel that his care is so available and eagerly offered. I wonder why? What can I do to let Christ nurture me? How can he nurture me? These are questions I’ll try to ponder as we approach Easter and see the earth shake off winter and her creatures nurture their little ones.

I like making stock. It makes me feel resourceful. Industrious. Virtuous. Rather than throwing away a chicken carcass, I wring a little more value out of it by boiling it with a few vegetables. Some cookbook authors declare homemade stock to be incomparably better than canned stock, but I honestly can’t taste the difference. I like making stock for the virtue of it, not the aesthetics. It’s one of the few things I do in my homemaking that feels conservative and productive.

A recent post at The Exponent asserted that consumption has replaced production in modern homemaking. The economic value of women’s work was very tangible for past households because women produced so many things the family used every day. But the homemakers of today don’t churn butter or make soap – they spend money. And buying and consuming aren’t satisfying the way production is. Creatively producing things is good for our sense of self worth. Just like Thomas the Tank Engine, who prides himself on being “a very useful engine,” people like to feel useful and needed.

You probably saw the article on Salon.com a couple of weeks ago about the feminist who can’t stop reading Mormon housewife blogs. The author marvels at the creativity displayed on these blogs – beautiful homes, beautiful baked goods, beautiful photography. A lot of Mormon homemakers are extremely creative and productive. But rather than take the Salon article as a complement, some stay at home moms I know were less than thrilled with it. They were offended when the author quoted her friend as saying she wanted to be like Mormon moms and arrange flowers all day. The author acknowledged that being a SAHM is about more than just crafts and cupcakes, but for some SAHMs the flower arranging comment was the take-away message of the article, and they didn’t like it. I understand their annoyance – there’s nothing worse than being asked “So, what is it you do all day?” when you’re working your tail off taking care of kids. But still, I marveled at their ability to be offended by what I saw as a largely complementary piece. The author said their lives look joyful and give her hope that marriage and motherhood can be something other than a “miserable, soul-destroying trap.” And she seemed to quite genuinely mean that.

Perhaps what created such a tender spot for SAHMs is the productivity question. Child rearing is productive, but only in a fairly invisible, abstract way. By contrast, paid employment is productive in the concrete sense that one is bringing home money. SAHMs do not want to be thought of as unproductive, and art, crafts, baking, photography, and blogs are all visible evidence of productivity. And they want these kinds of productivity to be recognized – not dismissed as flower arranging.

Or perhaps they are tender about the implied question of why Mormon homemakers are so creative, an implied answer to which is that motherhood is not enough for women, and that the women who’ve chosen it are doomed to boredom and frustration for which blogs and crafts are an antidote. The implied other side of that coin being that paid employment is so wonderfully fulfilling that people engaged in it have no need for other forms of creativity.

But I think earning money is a poor proxy for creativity. I have paid employment, but I still really like making stock. Earning money is a necessity for me, but it doesn’t completely fill my need to be useful and needed. It’s not enough to make me feel like “a very useful person.” I’d venture to guess the same is true for working men, many of whom have creative outlets apart from their paid employment. So I think the answer to the question of why Mormon homemakers are so creative is that they are creative because they are human. Everyone want to be useful, needed, and creative. As Dieter Uchtdorf said, “The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before”

Blogging, baking, photography, and handicrafts are all things that can be done from home and can be self-taught, so perhaps that is why Mormon SAHMs specialize in them. But regardless of the form their creativity takes, they doing as President Uchtdorf said, and “[taking] the normal opportunities of … daily life and [creating] something of beauty and helpfulness.” That’s a wonderful thing.