Ardis, I agree with you 100%. I believe the Savior thoroughly understands the female experience, not just as theory, but as substance. He’s “been there” in a way no woman ever has. He understands bleeding. He understands pain. He knows what it’s like to be misunderstood, isolated, abused, dehumanized. He knows what it’s like to put your own life on the line in order to give life to someone else. And He learned all this “according to the flesh,” the same way we learn. Our (male) Savior volunteered to undergo all this. That, to me, is evidence that gender presents no barrier to His understanding and power.

Anyway, thank you for all the stuff you post. I am heartened and instructed every time I come here.

But, to my mind the big gap is not between male and female, but between mortal and divine. The “condescension of God” in coming here and living with us is the real thing to consider. It gives one pause to think what we are and the excuses we make for ourselves.

Nor have I or anyone else claimed you were “faithless or apostate,” especially for asking questions. In fact, there are comments specifically endorsing the asking of questions — any questions.

When the scriptures give such a plain answer to a question, though, as they do to the one about whether a male Christ understands women’s bodies, then I do think we’re bound to accept that answer, or at least try to accept it, rather than continuing to ask the question as if God hadn’t already bothered to answer. At the very least, I have the right to bear my testimony to my own acceptance of that answer.

I could offer answers to your questions in your #27, but unlike the question posed by this post, theose answers would be only short-sighted human ones, and I suspect that you may be more interested in asking the questions than in hearing possible answers.

Please — don’t accuse me of accusing you of something I haven’t said, am not thinking, don’t believe, and would not tolerate being said here by anyone else. Of course asking questions doesn’t make you faithless or apostate — but answering questions doesn’t make me cruel or judgmental or unwomanly or anti-feminist, either.

How are we expected to become celestial, unless God tries us? Is it unfair that women can’t hold the priesthood? No more unfair than men cannot bear children. Is it unfair that at 50 years of age, I have no biological children of my own? It is all a matter of two things: perception and pride. Do we seek to perceive things from God’s point of view, or from another? And are we going to spit into the wind, or seek to have a contrite spirit and broken heart?

Life was thus designed to see what we make of it. Yes, it is a matter of faith. But it is also a matter of humility versus pride. It is a sad commentary to call God impotent when it comes to PPD or women’s needs. It is also a sad thought when we consider any trial that is placed before us as something that overbearing men (mortal or divine) have placed upon us.

You can hide your eyes and say the problem doesn’t exist but that won’t make it go away. You can claim I’m faithless or apostate to ask the question but that won’t make it go unasked. Why are girls’ programs given so much less in the way of resources than the boys’? Why does all the institutional power in our church reside with males? Why?

I loved Bekah and Left Field’s comments. I had not read that passage from Sister Okazaki, what a fabulous quote.

Thanks for sharing your message, Ardis. I am just wondering,how do we get this message out? How do we reach women who might feel like this? Can we?

I think sometimes we get stuck on the cleverness of a question and think the answer has to be harder than it really is. Jesus has said he takes upon us our pains and afflictions and sicknesses — we ought to believe him.

We know that on some level Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It’s our faith that he experienced everything–absolutely everything. Sometimes we don’t think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don’t experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means Jesus knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer–how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the studentbody election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked, and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism.

There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands about pregnancy and giving birth. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion.

His last recorded words to his disciples were, “And, low, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew 28:20) What does that mean? It means he understands your mother-pain when your five-year old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down’s syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children who ever come are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He’s been there. He’s been lower than all that.

In the temple, women approach God personally and directly, even being introduced to the Lord by another woman. No mortal man intervenes in that personal conversation. That direct interaction between mortal woman and God is in fact the pinnacle of the ritual, the event that was promised and foreseen from the beginning of the ceremony.