My friend Marissa is going to Harvard Divinity School, studying the stories of holy women. She recently posted a meditation on female anointings, and in it, described her encounter with a prayer that LDS women used to say as they anointed and blessed their pregnant sisters. Here is the prayer she found:
I love this prayer. In her post, Marissa adds the following:
I love the parts of my religion it [the prayer] reminds me of. I love that, in our early church when things were so theologically creative, women laid their hands on each other and pronounced blessings, the way we still do in the temple. This prayer sounds a lot like those temple blessings. It uses some of the same words, it has the same tendency to dart back and forth between the spiritual and the physical, nearly scientific, with its talk of marrow and ligaments, its attention to the details of the body. I love that about my religion too—the insistent mixing of the mundane with the divine, the assurance that the body is permanent, is part of our soul, is a necessary part of salvation, and therefore worthy of our theological attention and love.
Terryl Givens has said that “One of the hallmarks of Mormonism, and of Joseph Smith in particular, is the collapse of sacred distance–the sense that there is an earthly and a heavenly, a bodily and a spiritual.” This prayer, with “its talk of marrow and ligament, its attention to the details of the body,” is a prime example of that. It’s also a testament to the enduring faith of Latter-day Saint women. I hope my children–should God grant me children–know about prayers like these.