UNAPOLOGETIC AUTHENTICY

The prophet released his stranglehold on the podium and leaned back, raising his voice, “The Lord in his infinite wisdom has determined that the time is right for all worthy females in the church, ages twelve and above, to be ordained to the holy priesthood.”

There were gasps, followed by a long hush—shocked silence was more like it.

“Brethren, the Lord giveth and he taketh away. From this day forward, all males will be released from their priesthood responsibilities, including all rights, privileges, and authority. We would like to thank those of you who have faithfully served in your callings and who have honored your priesthood over the years. Those who would like to give a vote of thanks to these individuals may do so by raising the right hand. … To be perfectly clear,” the prophet said, “brethren, you have all just been un-ordained.”

As Latter-day Saints, from birth we are taught to think, to believe, and even to feel a certain way about certain things. For instance, if someone loses a son in the mission field, we assume that his ticket has been punched to the celestial kingdom—he’s not only in a better place, he’s in the best place–so turn that frown upside down and rejoice! But what happens if you can’t flip the switch? What happens when anger, grief, and guilt gnaw so deeply and insidiously that you have to take action: someone’s going to pay.

I wrote the title story “The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood” first draft 40 years ago when my wife, Rebecca, and I were living on the Navajo Reservation. We had three daughters ages six, four, and one, and I had a full head of hair (now long gone). Initially, it was a nice little comic romp in which the priesthood was given to the women of the church and taken away from the men. There were some amusing (but predictable) moments–the bumbling dad burning the pancakes while his wife trots off to bishopric meeting–but the story never took off. So, I tossed it into a box I call “The Elephant’s Graveyard”—a stockpile of rough drafts and creative hunches–and forgot about it.

Forty years later, I needed one more story to round out the collection I was submitting to Signature Books. I ferreted through “The Elephant’s Graveyard” and the moment I read the title—“The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood”—I smiled. Yes. Now. The time was right, and I was ready—finally.

I say “finally” because in 1982 I wasn’t prepared to do justice to that story. However, over the next four decades, as my three little girls grew into young womanhood and then full adulthood, I would witness firsthand the double-standards, the condescending remarks, the dismissive behavior, and the sometimes subtle and other times shameless bias against my daughters and their female compatriots at school, at church, and in the workplace. To quote my oldest daughter, I had been “sufficiently schooled.”

I remember her sharing what she called her “most memorable lesson” during her tenure in the Young Women’s program. Her well-intentioned teacher told a story about a young woman who was studying to be a concert pianist. She was at a crossroads, weighing the level of time, commitment, and “single-mindedness” required to succeed in an extremely competitive profession against the obligations of marriage and family. She decided to set aside her artistic ambitions to get married in the temple and have children. The teacher lauded her for “making the right choice.” 

Meanwhile, my fourteen-year-old daughter (who would go on to earn a master’s degree in piano performance and a doctorate in Musicology) trudged out of the classroom as if she’d just been handed a death sentence. “Marriage?” she said to me. “Children? Can I at least graduate from high school before you totally crush my dreams?” Her use of the word you as if I were complicit in this aspiration-killing plot still troubles me, almost as much as what she said next: “Why does a woman have to make this choice but not a man?”

Throughout their adolescence, my three girls had always kept me on my toes, peppering me with questions: “Why do the Scouts get to go kayaking while we have to babysit for Relief Society homemaking meeting?”  “Why can’t a woman give the closing prayer in sacrament meeting?” And, of course: “Why can’t we hold the Priesthood?” This one really bothered them. Some of their male peers got their jollies by torturing frogs over a campfire, yet they were deemed worthy of holding the holy priesthood. “Why them and not us?” In their eyes, priesthood eligibility had little to do with merit, as long as you were a male and you weren’t a practicing felon.

The concept of priesthood privilege—who can and who cannot officially wield the authority of God on earth—continues to baffle me. While I have known many exemplary men who faithfully honor and magnify their priesthood callings, I have known just as many (myself included) who take this extraordinary honor for granted; we become casual and apathetic. We groan about the many meetings and roll our eyes at the constant reminders to do our ministering, go to the temple, be a missionary, and cheerfully load another moving van. Too often we regard priesthood as a burden rather than a sacred responsibility (which is easy to do when you get that 3:00 AM phone call from Sister Henderson requesting a blessing to alleviate her bunion pain.).

With these and other thoughts in my head, I re-read the original draft and began scribbling anew. The first 20 pages flowed along smoothly and predictably, with echoes from Elouise Bell’s outstanding story “The Meeting” (Dialogue, 1981) humming in the background. But then something quite unexpected happened. Frank O’Connor once said that a writer’s greatest delight is when a character stands up mid-story and proclaims, “I’m not going to do that! I’m going to do this!” In this instance, it wasn’t a particular character that rebelled but the story itself: “Nope! Not going there! We’re going here!” When I protested—“No, no—let’s stay the course! That wasn’t the plan!”—the story fired back: “No!  We haven’t come this far just for that! We’re going for the jugular here!” Or, in today’s vernacular, “Go big or go home!” The result was a substantially longer, more thought-provoking, and more blushingly candid reimagining of the original. The humor is still there, but the knife cuts deeper. It’s a story that will linger for many days after the initial reading.

I never begin a story intending to make some lofty moral or political statement.  My primary objective is always to tell a good story, and to me that means a journey of discovery. After the fact, if I root around a little, I can usually find some redeeming social or theological value in my work. In this story, my modest hope is that it will help drive a stake into the heart of the last vestiges of Mormon male chauvinism in the Twenty-first century. And if it lights a fire under some priesthood slackers, that would be good too.

In The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood and Other Stories, Michael Fillerup afflicts his characters with a startling variety of sins and troubles: a man trapped in a tank in Kuwait meditates on his life as he waits for death from heat exhaustion; a man commits adultery in the mistaken belief that his polyandrous wife loves her other husband more; a father seeks revenge for his son who was murdered while on his mission; a peeping Tom watches his high school sweetheart having sex with her husband. Fillerup uses all these troubles to explore redemption or the lack of it. The stories are not didactic, not cautionary tales but variations on a theme, a distant cousin to Kierkegard’s Fear and Trembling, which retells the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac from a variety of perspectives.

Kierkegaard and Fillerup both reach toward comprehending that which is beyond comprehension—the condescension of God as manifested through the Atonement. Again and again Fillerup’s flawed, complex characters approach the limit of their suffering and stumble forward. The result is a vision of life that is full of difficulty and blessing. One dying man recounts his prayer: “I thank him for those priceless moments on the mound throwing sidearm strikes to Andrew, and for fifty-one years on this beautiful planet, eleven years with beautiful Frieda. I thank him for the pioneer men and women of steel plodding across the wind-swept plains, wearing rags on their feet, pulling strips of rawhide from the handcart wheels and chewing them for dinner.”

The stories take on a variety of forms—a novella, the transcript of a confession, sudden fiction that reads like a prose poem, a letter. His sentences are exquisite: “They squeezed between two giant boulders constricted so tightly that, for Mark at least, coming out the other end felt like a birthing” and “A pregnant mutt, her swollen teats dragging along the snow, plodded towards the rock schoolhouse where Tom earned his daily bread.” While his endings are like the twist of a knife, flowing though the stories is Fillerup’s love for people, the earth, and God. In one of the most moving stories, a man drives into a blizzard with a bad truck, bad clothing, and the feeling he has wasted his life. What he discovers on his journey will knock readers back on their heels.

— The Association of Mormon Letters,
Citation for Best Short Fiction Collection, 2022

READER REVIEWS

A Masterfully Told Short Story

 I just read Michael’s short story, “The Year They Gave Women the Priesthood.” It’s unusual for a short story to captivate my imagination the way his did. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I laid awake at night thinking about it. What a deft hand Michael has applied in revealing a knotty problem in our LDS culture; a divinely ordained and presumed masculine superiority over the feminine. Men like me, who believe they have welcomed a new openness to feminine authority in the Church, may discover an unconscious knot of presumed masculine superiority hidden in their psyche after reading this story.

— Vaughn, February 6th, 2023

A Paradigm Shift -- For Both Men and Women

The author's main story is engaging, ironic, and thought-provoking as he upends a lifestyle lived by men and women in a given cultural and religious context. As you read, you will"feel" the emotions of both the male and female characters who are required to make a difficult shift in their family and social paradigm based on a change in religious practices. His other short stories are diverse in setting, characters, and messaging. His experience living and teaching within the Native American culture gives him a unique perspective that he insightfully shares in both subtle and direct ways. In one of his short stories, you will feel the terror of hiking with him and his family through treacherous terrain. Through all of his stories, the author takes the reader through a kalidiascope of emotions and paints stunning verbal descriptions. You won't want to put this book down! Book Club participants -- you will have fruitful short stories as a catalyst for meaningful discussions of all dimensions of life.

— Judith L. Lyon, October 30th, 2022