Posted by:
Cathy
(
)
Date: January 24, 2013 08:08PM
Sure.
I was an older teenager well known for my musical abilities in Southern California - I performed with a singing & dancing group (I'm a pianist) very much like the Young Ambassadors, as well as being involved in literally thousands of other groups and such. In addition, my family was stunningly dysfunctional - my parents couldn't stand each other, my mother feared my father (rightly so), and us kids were used as pawns against her. He was, and remains, a truly evil, repulsive, manipulative person - I have NO contact with him whatsoever. My mother passed away a few years ago.
The big thing in our family was to always put across a good front. Nobody was to EVER know anything was wrong - it was stunning, how much effort we had to put in to try and act as though everything was wonderful at all times. My father worked over every bishop, counselor, stake president, regional director, anyone he possibly could, to make sure everyone knew he was a spiritual giant, that he was a brilliant, amazing, unfulfilled man whose life was being ruined by my supposedly cold, nasty, wicked, ailing mother, none of which was true. We moved often, due to his job, and he always a reason to precede us, ostensibly to find a home and scope out his new work environment. What he was also doing was hitting up every church authority within 100 miles, demonizing my mother and us kids so that, by the time we got there, we were doomed. We were ungrateful wretches who didn't understand the incredible opportunity we had to be J.W.'s children. Most people just heard parts of this - it was mostly aimed at the higher authorities so my father felt super bada**.
I naively thought my "blessing" would be at least somewhat inspired, but failed to realize (at that time) the depth of my father's depravity and determination to portray himself and our family as spiritually blessed to have him around. The patriarch gave the standard blessing - yada, yada, yada, you have great musical talent, you'll be blessed to work in many church callings in music (whoa, no one saw THAT one coming), blah, blah. But, one sentence, early on, stuck out instantly - he said I was fortunate in having been blessed to come to an "earthly family in which there is great love - the father for the mother, the mother for the father, the children for their parents, and the parents for their children". I didn't really notice it until I read it later, but "shelved" it, figuring there must be more to it.
Many years later, after being troubled by it for a long time, I asked a church "authority" about it. He said, as two subsequent "authorities" did, that it must have meant that my heavenly family was loving. It was my heavenly family the patriarch had been referring to. Right. My heavenly family. It clearly stated my family "here", but, again, I shelved it.
A few years later I was SO troubled by it, though it might seem a small thing to other people, I met with my bishop (I know, but I thought it was what I was supposed to do), told him about the "blessing" and my concerns about it (and the circumstances surrounding it), and asked if I could have another one. He was a kind bishop - we were friends and he was a generous and decent guy. His answer, as dictated by the higher-up's, I'm sure - "No." Nothing else - just a flat "No". I was crushed and, in hindsight, I started wobbling about the church more than ever, at that point.
My father had influenced the patriarch, doing the gladhanding and backslapping whenever possible so he felt important and popular. The patriarch had, of course, come up with absolutely nothing inspired or even imaginative. Worse, we were told (I assume it's the same now) to not share our "blessing" with anyone because it was too sacred, too special, too personal. Obviously that was to keep the blessing under wraps so it wasn't so easily busted and shown to be a fraud. That was one of many shelf items, but, over time, it became a fairly weighty item up there - it really showed the total lack of inspiration and ability for members to manipulate church authorities improperly.
Kinda long, but it's something important to me to share. I hope lurkers read info like this, look at their own "blessings", and realize they're bogus - just mass produced statements and material that don't mean anything. I mean, the patriarch interviewed me for half an hour before the blessing - he had everything he needed just from me to personalize the "blessing", not to mention the undue influence of my father, who was evil. So evil, BTW, that at our oldest son's baptism a close friend of mine who had never met him walked into the stake building for the baptism meeting and saw a man walking down the hall toward her. He was friendly and said hi, as you'd expect, but his aura was SO dark, frightening, and evil that she instinctively shrank against the wall trying to put even more difference between her and him. She couldn't get out of that hall fast enough - she felt she was choking on the hateful, black cloud around this man, who, of course, was my father. The fact that he could, and did, influence any church "authorities" in any positive way shows how uninspired and malleable they really were.