So Elder Renlund recently gave the long-rumored talk on Heavenly Mother–and though overall his tone was perhaps softer and humbler than many feared it would be (certainly he didn’t repudiate the doctrine at least), he still firmly came down on the side of not praying to Her, as expected.

It was a baffling rhetorical maneuver for a number of reasons, as already well-detailed elsewhere—not least of all because those already praying to Heavenly Mother are more likely to double down now, while those who hadn’t been now have the idea on their radar.

Admonishing everyone not to pray to nor seek revelation on this Divine Feminine does not make this yearning disappear; in fact, as the famed French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray might argue, this literal “feminine lack” becomes all the more present in its absence. As Irigaray has explained elsewhere, the more one emphasizes a phallocentric epistemology, the more one is forced to confront how much the phallus needs the void to be complete.

At least, so Irigaray argued in a famed tongue-in-cheek parody of Sigmund Freud entitled “This Sex Which Is Not One” (1979), wherein she flips the father of modern psychology’s own obvious phallocentrism (Freud famously believed all women suffer penis-envy). She does this by instead making the feminine void of the vagina itself the pre-eminent object of desire, rather than the phallus–since of course the empty womb is what the phallus desires and is, again, incomplete without. But Irigaray’s goal is not to merely supplant a phallocentrism with vaginocentrism, but rather to highlight by satire (granted, her humor is very dry) how this entire dichotomous model of gender-supremacism is inherently flawed to begin with.

By extension, every attempt to displace the Heavenly Mother with the primacy of the Heavenly Father is to transform the feminine into an empty void–with the unintentional collateral effect that the feminine now becomes the central object of focus. In fact, that is exactly what we have seen happen in our LDS context: every attempt to hide Heavenly Mother behind some ill-defined “respectful silence” only makes her loom the larger. Ironically, if Elder Renlund and the brethren hadn’t mentioned Her at all, she would have remained sidelined and marginalized; but with this silencing talk, they have single-handedly made her the central topic of discussion again. The margins have become the center, because the center can only be defined by the margins (this is Poststructuralism 101! See kids? This is why we need more French High Theory in the Gospel!)

Because these are not mere theoretical considerations at all: back during my long YSA years, I knew a significant number of LDS young women who were, by any metric you could devise, conservative, orthodox, faithful, believing, Church-attending, Relief Society-participating, Priesthood-sustaining, Temple-recommend holding, modestly-dressed, returned missionaries, aspiring moms, wives, and home-makers, etc, etc.  You know the type.  They were as far from being sympathetic to, say, Ordain Women or Exponent II or the Sunstone Symposium or whatever, as one could reasonably expect. 

Yet even amidst these most conservative of LDS young women, I’d regularly hear: “You Elders have something I wish I had: the Priesthood” (I heard that from a Sister missionary);  or, “when I get to the other side, Heavenly Father and I are going to have a long talk about why women get the short end of the stick so often” (I heard that from an RM and Relief Society Instructor);  or, “I wonder what Heavenly Mother is like?  The Prophets and Apostles and God the Father and Jesus Christ are all men, I want so badly a feminine model I can look up to and emulate, to know what it looks like to be a divine woman” (I heard that one from about the most conservative, modest Midwest girl I’ve ever met).  Again, these were hardly the target audience for Ordain Women or FeministMormonHousewives or what not, they were not liberal agitators out on the margins, no, these were the conservative ones, the faithful, believing ones!  It they still feel this yearning, what of the rest of us?

But we will have to engage with Heavenly Father sooner or later–and frankly, if that involves seeking after a revelation, well, that’s how Joseph Smith started this Church in the first place.

Speaking of which: I once attended a conference wherein a panelist noted that in every extant version of the First Vision, Joseph Smith not once mentions the gender of the “two personages” that appeared to him; only that one says, pointing to the other, “This is my Beloved Son, hear him.”  That is, this panelist proffered the wild theory that Heavenly Mother is maybe who introduced Christ Jesus to Joseph Smith.  And indeed, the Old Testament, New Testament, and Doctrine and Covenants all state that husband and wife become “one” in marriage–and what exactly does that even mean?  That is, perhaps that panelist wasn’t as far off as might first appear in trying to locate Her in the First Vision.

Now, I’m not saying I buy that theory; I feel like Joseph Smith would have brought it up at some point–he introduced so many other radical, mob-enraging religious ideas in his short life that I suspect he would’ve just gone for broke on that one, too.  Nevertheless, I recall this panel now because I found it significant how someone was trying to locate the Heavenly Mother within that foundational moment of the LDS faith–it shows a very real maternal need in our faith that is not currently being met, and that need isn’t disappearing anytime soon.