Spirituality in the city

After several weeks of being out of town, I am back again. In fact, my own friends visited me last week from North Carolina. At dinner, we began discussing the differences between how, unlike in Elders Quorum, assertive and controversial comments are widely discouraged by the culture of Relief Society.

Normally, I am inclined to attribute these facts to my feeling that the reigning prescriptive cultural norm of Mormon womanhood has little place for the assertive manners of speaking that women who are, for example, CEO's or other professionsals use to speak with authority in the work place. When these professional, educated women transfer the style of speaking that they use in their daily lives to Relief Society, I feel that they often meet resistance from a setting that values the "emotional" well-being of its members far more than their intellectual health.

However, my friends from North Carolina made me wonder if perhaps there are not other factors that contribute to the fact that in Relief Society we find people speaking in a confessional, nurturing manner rather than in patterns of speech guided more by inquiry. Namely, I was struck by the fact that my wonderful friends from North Carolina lived life at a much, much slower pace than it is possible to in the heart of New York City where I reside. As I was speaking effeciently and watching the clock so that I could make it to my work on time, they chatted with everyone, took in the world around them, and disclosed large aspects of their personal histories to those they met.

Perhaps these qualities were peculiar to my friends, but I began to think about how the models that we have for spiritual conversations and sacred places generally derive from people who lived in the countryside. One would look in vain for a Sacred Grove in the middle of Manhattan, not to mention neighbors that would welcome a long chat. And, I began to wonder whether people in the country and the city experience their spirituality in different terms as a consequence of the environment they live within. Surely, many of the ways that we are expected to speak in church settings reflect gender norms, but I would be interested in hearing from readers about whether they have found that where they live influences the type of conversations that they consider spiritual.