Carol Lynn Pearson > Quotes

“There's an old Jewish saying: An enemy is someone whose story you do not know. (22)”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons around Our Gay Loved Ones

“When you have a child, you start to dream of how this kid will grow up and make you proud. The only thing you can predict with 100% certainty is that the reality will diverge somehow from that dream. Some of our children will disappoint us by not being the scholars we hoped they would be. Some children will disappoint us by not being the athletes we hoped they would be. Some will disappoint us by coming out and telling us they are gay and they won't give us grandchildren...the real question is not, what book can I read, what technique can I use to raise a perfect child? The real question is how will you handle that gap between the child you dreamt of having and the real child growing up in your home...What I have learned is that any religion, if you do it wrong, will leave people feeling condemned and dismissed and unworthy and any religion, if you do it right, will leave people feeling cleansed and firmed. (118) Rabbi Harold Kushner”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons around Our Gay Loved Ones

“Thank you, Carol Lynn Pearson, for reminding us that the task of any religion is to teach us whom we're required to love, not whom we're entitled to hate. - Rabbi Harold Kushner”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons around Our Gay Loved Ones

“Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term "we" or "us" and at the same time decreases those labeled "you" or "them" until that category has no one left in it. - Howard Winters (115)”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons around Our Gay Loved Ones

“Today's science should also relieve us of the fear that our children are at great risk to be recruited into homosexuality. I believe that if the gay community sent missionaries door to door like we Mormons do, spreading the good news of homosexuality, they would get pitifully few converts, probably only a small sliver of the terminally confused. "Join us and very possibly break your parents' hearts, throw the family into chaos, run the risk of intense self-loathing, especially if you are religious, invite the disgust of much of society, give up the warmth and benefits of marriage and probably of parenthood." (16)”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons around Our Gay Loved Ones

“And Whoever is in charge of all this will walk with us, and will help us to sort out the mysteries and help us to complete the healing. Walls will fall and we will see each other more clearly - all of us, the Mormons and the Catholics and the Jews and the Moslems and the straights and the gays and the women and the men. Confusions will lift like fog lifts from the Golden Gate Bridge on a good summer day, and we will each see our next step and will take it.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson

“In April of 2006, the Church-owned Desert Morning News, in a remarkable week-long series on suicide in Utah, reported: "A former surgeon general who recently spoke in Utah about suicide prevention said he was impressed with the state's warm and friendly people...But, he added, 'In New York, we kill each other. In Utah, you kill yourselves.'" The newspaper gave the shocking statistic that Utah leads the entire nation in suicides among men aged 15 to 24. Utah also has the 11th highest suicide rate over all age groups. (36)”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons around Our Gay Loved Ones

“I wonder-Did I peek through the veil impatiently, while you slowly forged the bonds that brought me to mortality? And do you now stand where I stodd yesterday, your cheeks against Heaven's curtain, and pray-Pray fervently for me to forge the bonds that bring us to eternity?”
― Carol Lynn Pearson

“Practice Makes Perfect

I'll know better next time
Than to even begin;
Everything's easier on the second try--
Especially sin.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson

“Optical Illusion"

Time is a stage magician
Pulling sleight-of-hand tricks
To make you think things go.

There
Eclipsed by the quick scarf
A lifetime of loves.

Zip—
The child is man.
Zip—
The friend in your arms
Is earth.
Zip—
The green tree is gold, is white,
Is smoking ash, is gone.

Zip—
Time's trick goes on.
All things loved—
Now you see them, now you don't.

Oh, this world has more
Of coming and of going
Than I can bear.
I guess it's eternity I want,
Where all things are
And always will be,
Where I can hold my loves
A little looser,
Where finally we realize
Time
Is the only thing that really dies.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, Beginnings and Beyond

“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

“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

“Ah, the ocean. The movement of eternity right in front of us." (61)”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons around Our Gay Loved Ones

“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

“Being treated with politeness, consideration, even respect is different from being treated as an equal.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“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

“Every time I have seen families embrace and accept their homosexual family members, nothing bad had happened! The association has always been positive and loving, caring "family" experience has only grown and flourished. They are available to each other for that family support that is so valued in our culture. Families are strengthened not weakened. When families have rejected their homosexual family members it has not turned out well, even when that rejection was done 'lovingly.' You know, love the sinner...hate the sin? I've known homosexuals rejected by their families who looked for acceptance in all the wrong places. Bright, promising lives lost to drugs, disease, and death. I've seen families who reject those they should love, depriving themselves of that valuable relationship. (120)”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons around Our Gay Loved Ones

“I would not have been able to articulate it at that time, but I had begun a painful journey toward an impossible goal, a journey that lasted a long time: how to love a God who hurts you.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“I suggest that the representation of women deserves a much higher consideration in our religious discourse. When words are presented as if they come directly from God, they can have monumental impact on our psyches, our spirits, our hearts, and our relationships. Women are given, in story at least, first place in the lifeboats, but often in more common circumstances we are consigned to the back of the bus.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“Heber C. Kimball had forty-three wives, with seventeen of them bearing him sixty-five children. I asked Tom Kimball, a descendant of Heber and his first wife Vilate, if he thought members of the church became more faithful because of polygamy. He responded, “No, it seemed to create fundamentalists and atheists. What I know about the Kimballs is that only two of the forty-two sons of Heber would become polygamists themselves, and my father would go around to his cousins converting them to the church because their parents were no longer Mormons. Even now, the majority of my Kimball cousins are not Mormon.”
― Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men

“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