Contemplating Carol Lynn, by Maxine Hanks

[Maxine Hanks’ guest post about Carol Lynn Pearson, on her passing.]

The sunlight in this snapshot of Carol Lynn and me at Sunstone, makes her head look part quantum, which it was. Carol Lynn radiated light, she lived from her own divinity. Her work witnessed a spiritual truth about ourserves, and our relationship to God, especially the Mother.

I knew her demise was coming but I didn’t think it would be so soon. How can Carol Lynn Pearson be gone? She seemed ageless. She was my first feminist role model in Mormon culture, as the empowered alternative to Helen Adelin’s Fascinating Womanhood. In 1973, I drove to Seattle to hear her speak at an LDS Laurel conference, which she mentioned in her journal. There she encountered an LDS man whose work she had criticized:

“April 28, 1973 — I spoke at a Stake Laurel Conference . . . a member of [that] stake presidency . . . wrote the ‘Elect Lady’ Institute lesson . . . when he read the letter from me responding to the “Elect Lady” he was astonished . . . he very humbly asked me just to consider the possibility that I am wrong…He asked if I would pray with him…I did, praying…on the subject of women we may receive all the light that is possible for us to receive…that the church authorities and membership at large would be given good understanding on this subject and the wisdom to act on it.” 1

Carol Lynn was advocating for women from Beginnings in 1967 and the “Elect Lady” in 1973, using aikido moves aligned with Church discourse. She confirmed my inner sense of feminism with her books, Daughters of Light in 1974 and the Flight and the Nest in 1975. I followed her at Ricks College in 1976-77, and at BYU in 1981-82 where she read her poem, “A Motherless House” to a group on campus. It was the first time I’d heard anyone discuss the Mother in public. I asked her if we could publish her poem in the Seventh East Press, but she wasn’t ready to make it public.

“July 15, 1977 — Finished a poem about Mother in Heaven; don’t know what will come of it.  A Motherless House… 
[Diary footnote: Actually quite a bit came of that poem, now in my book Finding Mother God. My friend Maxine Hanks, Mormon scholar who was excommunicated for her feminism and later rejoined the Church, told me that hearing me read that at a BYU event in 1981 was a life-changing moment for her, the first powerful thing she’d heard that spoke the truth on this subject.”]

In 1981, Carol Lynn wrote a whole manuscript about the Mother, titled “Letters from a Motherless House.” It was so far ahead of its time, and beyond Mormon theology including other religious traditions, it went unpublished. I still have the copy she sent me for editing help with publishing, along with her note: “Maxine, Here it is, Guard it well! CLP.”

“January 27, 1982 — My speech in Ogden went well. I used a certain amount of material from my ‘Motherless House’ book. Tried to inspire them not just to reach for the things that men have been reaching for, but to reinforce a respect for things female.”

In 1989, I asked Carol Lynn if she was ready to publish her poem, “A Motherless House.” I wanted to include it in my book about Mormon feminist theology. This time, she said, “OK Maxine!  Let’s do it.”  I asked her to write an essay to go with the poem, and she agreed, so we used her talks, “A Walk in the Pink Moccasins” and her panel comments on “God the Mother” along with additional ideas and insights.

“May 28, 1992 — While I was in Utah, Maxine Hanks gave me a copy of the material she’s putting together for her book, Women and Authority. Something of mine will be in it. The book is going to cause a major stir.”

In Dec. 1992, we published her poem “A Motherless House” for the first time, in Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism, along with her essay about the absence of the divine feminine in the Church and the world. We titled the essay, “Healing the Motherless House,” to convey our intent to heal Mormon culture. Her essay was the only one in the book that my own mother liked. Carol Lynn crossed all audiences with a message that rang true regardless of orthodoxy.

“January 19, 1993 –Have been reading chapters in Signature’s new book that Maxine Hanks edited, in which I have an essay. Women and Authority: Reemerging Mormon Feminism. My essay [is] “Healing the Motherless House.” There is a lot of strong stuff in the book.”

The book was a collective effort to recover the divine feminine and women’s priesthood in LDS history and theology. Unfortunately, Mike Quinn and I were excommunicated for the book in Sept. 1993. I was very concerned about the repercussions on my authors. Yet Carol Lynn was protected by her bishop and stake president, and by her own divine powers.   

“September 9, 1993  I learned that Maxine Hanks is scheduled for a court on September 19th…I called Maxine and we spoke for some time. She wants to remain a member of the Church for a number of reasons besides the usual…and she doesn’t want to damage the acceptability of the book she edited.”

While we were working on Women and Authority in 1990, Carol Lynn also premiered her play Mother Wove the Morning in Salt Lake. Some of us feminists in the Mormon Women’s Forum helped sponsor her play in Utah. I still have the blue Nazar eye necklace from Delphi that she brought to each of us after she performed the play in Greece.

“January 9, 1990– The Salt Lake Tribune did a good article with a picture…[the] women of the Mormon Women’s Forum have been very helpful . . . Friday was opening night. We were sold out . . . The play couldn’t have gone better.”

Carol Lynn and I continued our collaborations over the years, working on projects and speaking on panels. In 2001, I visited Carol Lynn in Walnut Creek, during one of many trips to the Bay Area, from 1995 to 2009. I loved spending time with Carol Lynn at her home.

“January 5, 2001 — Spent much of the day with my good friend Maxine Hanks, who was here visiting, [she was] one of the “September Six” that was excommunicated a few years ago. We went for a walk to the top of the hills. On the top we had a great synchronicity.”

Her sacred hill was magical like a faerie forest. At the summit was a stunning vista in all directions, east to the mountains and west to the bridges and water. It felt like the top of the world. We said a prayer of blessing, with her arms raised to heaven as we turned in a circle and prayed for God’s grace upon all. We blessed our loved ones and friends, then we blessed the Church, its members, especially “scholars, feminists and LGBTs,” and its  leaders “both women and men” and “even Boyd K. Packer,” then we blessed the whole world.

It was a spectacular experience, yet one she had every day as a personal ritual. She took many visitors on that sacred climb. She led us upward like a prophetess or high priestess communing with God and petitioning for her people, from “a high place.”

After we descended she said, “Now, I’m going to make the best salad you’ve ever had.” She combined greens, tomatoes, avocado, broccoli, cucumbers, covered with sunflower seeds, and topped with tofu marinated in Paul Newman’s dressing. She tossed it all together, and it was delicious. We sat in her writing den and read her manuscript, Consider the Butterfly: Transforming Your Life Through Meaningful Coincidence. She wanted my input so we talked about Jung’s concept and our personal experiences with it over the years.  I told her she made synchronicity far more understandable and accessible via her examples and stories. She hoped it would awaken readers to  synchronicities in their lives.

Carol Lynn often came to Salt Lake to speak and encourage, reassure and inspire Mormon feminists, liberals, scholars and LGBTs in the wake of the 1993 purge and its ongoing aftermath over the years.

“November 5, 2001 — Lavina pronounced Mormon feminism dead…but I cling to the bigger picture. Lavina said we…were anachronisms, survivors of a shipwreck. I don’t know how all this will look historically, but I am at peace. I have done my part. At dinner afterwards, Maxine Hanks said, as she has said before, that I amaze her. “You have done cutting edge feminism all along, and you have done it successfully and managed to alienate so few people! I don’t know how you have done it.” … [Others] had said that it is not possible for Mormon feminists to join in the general discourse. Maxine said that my play, Mother Wove the Morning, with its 300 performances had accomplished that.”

In 2012, I returned to LDS Church membership, which brought a backlash from some who saw my return as a betrayal of dissent and feminism. This misreading was understandable given the timing of my return during the “Mormon Moment” — when a critical mass of dissenters and feminists were finding a vital stage of differentiation with the Church. I was in a vital stage of integration with myself and the Church, doing healing work. Carol Lynn wanted to know all the details of my return for her journal, and she recorded everything I shared with her.

“August 6, 2012 —  Interesting things are happening on the fringes of Mormondom just now. Maxine Hanks, one of the excommunicated “September Six,” [was] rebaptized. She is now a member again. Some cynicism around this by various folks. I visited personally with Maxine while I was in Utah and can report that she is very sincere in her desire to be a member.”

Carol Lynn approached Mike Quinn to see if she might help facilitate a return for him as well, but he declined. Mike and I had explored that together, as he aided my return, and even contemplated returning as well, but he opted not to try, given the Church’s policy on LGBTs.

August 9, 2012 — I’m very happy at Maxine’s rebaptism, and I want to suggest that this would be a perfect time for someone to reach out to Michael Quinn . . . I believe that a small outreach of love might grow into a significant miracle . . . Maxine never had to disavow the book that was her biggest sin: Women and Authority.”

Carol Lynn sent a letter to LDS President Thomas Monson, making an appeal for Mike Quinn, but she received no answer. I made appeals for Mike as well, including to Elder Packer, but I received no response from him about Mike.   

In 2021, when Mike died, Carol Lynn and I grieved, and wondered how things might have gone differently for him and for others expelled, and for the Church itself, if leaders had been more responsive and accepting to members’ diversity and dissent.

In 2023, Carol Lynn began sharing her diary project with me, hoping to publish her journal entries as a book. She sent me endless excerpts to read and discuss. Her draft was 1600+ pages, all of which she wanted to publish with a national publisher. I told her that a national press would only take 300-400 pages, but Signature Books would take all of it, given their biographical works on Mike Quinn, Leonard Arrington and Duff Hanks. I felt her memoir belonged with theirs, given her personal relationship with all three. And, she felt an urgency to publish her diaries as soon as possible.

“July 2, 2023 — Getting lots of good comments from the readers so far on Diary of a Mormon Feminist…Maxine Hanks emailed me this: Dear Carol Lynn — What a stunning report of events private and public and the truth behind the scenes for 70 years! I was spellbound by so many revelations. I lived through those times, so I’m deeply aware of what was happening and how it was shaping and affecting women, and all that was wrong…WOW!–the access you had to so many major people and events and discourses that shaped us and your own direct involvement in all of that! … Reading it brought it all back…I was drawn into every line. I could not put it down yesterday and read until 2 a.m. then finished this morning.”   

Carol Lynn called Barbara Jones Brown and the results are four amazing volumes of primary source texts chronicling feminist life inside Mormonism from the 1960s to the 2020s. Her diaries stand along side Signature’s biographies of Leonard Arrington, Marion D. Hanks, and Michael Quinn, as a collective witness of the vital role of devoted dissent within the church — to inform, challenge, and heal it from inside, no matter how slowly progress comes.

Reading her diaries from the 1960s to the 2020s was like having a life review, before death, not after. Signature turned her draft into books quickly, given Carol Lynn’s declining health. She exerted to complete this project before she died. I’m thrilled that she got to see it happen.

In Oct. 2023, our mutual friend Jan Tyler died, who was Carol Lynn’s best friend for decades. Jan helped sponsor Mother Wove the Morning and traveled to Greece with Carol Lynn for its performance at the International Partnership Conference sponsored by Riane Eisler in 1992. Jan and Carol Lynn were very close, to the end of Jan’s life. Carol Lynn gave a brief eulogy for Jan’s memorial, which reads like a eulogy for Carol Lynn herself.

“7 Oct 2023–Hey, dear Maxine. And now a short bit you might appreciate from today’s diary, about our dear friend Jan Tyler who passed away last week. Today I wrote: ‘October 6, 2023  Oh, I just did something brave, something good. And I want to write it while my eyes are still wet. Jan Tyler’s family held an intimate “Celebration of Life” this afternoon… I joined by Zoom. A number of the family members spoke, sharing appreciative, fun, generous things about Jan, who truly was a remarkable woman…I had written and sent a paragraph, which was:

‘It feels impossible to put my dear friend Jan Tyler in the past tense. She is/ she was/ she will be. Jan and I were close friends for many decades. Her huge heart was wholly devoted to making the world and our church a more welcoming place for women. As Latter-day Saint feminists, we went through the wars together, giving each other strength and tending each other’s wounds and laughing in spite of it all. Her generosity was boundless; if she had it to give and she saw a need, she gave it—to causes, to individuals, to animals. I marveled at the energy she found to contribute, despite a body that brought new challenges year after year… Jan’s gifts were monumental and will continue to bless the people she touched and the causes her passion fed. Fly well, dear Jan. Thanks for coming.’

As the service went on I noticed several references to Jan being welcomed by her Heavenly Father and conversing with Him. As they were preparing to close, I thought … of course I thought … I can’t let Jan’s service end like this… I raised my hand… “I am so appreciative of everything that has been said here about Jan today… There is just one thing I need to add. I want to leave with each of you a very important visual. It has been noted several times that Jan is now with her Heavenly Father. Surely she is. I must add on behalf of Jan, that she is now also in the arms of her Heavenly Mother, to whom Jan was devoted all her life—and now, even more, for all eternity. Thank you.”  …The woman giving the closing prayer came to the stand. ‘Our dear Heavenly Father—and Heavenly Mother. . . ‘ I was amazed and thrilled… several of Jan’s family members crowded to the stand and spoke to me, thanking me for what I had said. I went directly into my bedroom and had a wonderful prayer—blessing Jan, blessing our Mother and Father who bless us—overwhelmed by the blessing I had just facilitated for my dear Jan and her family.” 2

Carol Lynn never hesitated to speak up or bless others when any need arose. There were many times over the years when Carol Lynn blessed me with her healing words and energy, including for my ever-challenging health issues. In 2024, she began blessing me over the phone, which worked surprisingly well.

“January 2, 2024– Spoke on the phone to Maxine Hanks. She remembered the energy healing I had done on her hands a few years ago… I said “I’m going to put on my timer for just seven minutes and see what we can do.” So I said to myself, this hand is now Maxine’s hand, and I vicariously sent healing energy into it with my right hand. Felt good warmth, brought energy in from my feet and my head, channeled it through my left arm into the thumb and little finger—and through my right palm over the whole left-hand area.   When the timer rang, we spoke. “Did you feel anything?” “Wow. Lots of warmth, lots of loosening. The pain and the tightness are 50 percent gone—no, I would say 60 percent gone.”  Of course we were both thrilled.” 

The pain in my hand faded completely that day, and has not returned.

In May 2026, I published a review of her book, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy in honor of its 10th anniversary (published in 2016). We talked about whether that book had the impact she’d hoped.  We planned a podcast for June discussing the book, and how it had returned full circle to the topic that first ignited her feminism as a teen — polygamy.

My review ended with these thoughts: “Carol Lynn Pearson is a female prophetic figure herself, with white hair, translucent skin, and a powerful female voice that is still vital in her mid-eighties . . . she testifies that dispelling polygamy’s ghosts truly works because she has done it herself.  She says, ‘The Ghost, I knew, was a formidable figure, well established and well protected. But I had faced him down in my own life, had evicted him from my personal house of faith . . . It is my belief that when we . . . are able truly to expel the Ghost of Eternal Polygamy, we will . . . [know] the two who are One, our MotherGod-dess/FatherGod.  We will know Him, Her, Them, Us, the Divine Family unbroken.'” 3

Carol Lynn’s energy faded quickly in June-July, so we were unable to do the podcast. I grieve that I didn’t seize the moment in May, before the window closed. Seizing the moment and living it to the fullest was how she lived, every day, and why she was able to do all that she did. Conversely, I always wait, hesitate, delay, but Carol Lynn acted immediately on everything.

As we worked through her diaries, I noticed an evolving arc of her relationship with the Mother, which began in the 1960s when she visited Greece as a teen, and reached its apex when she returned to Greece in the 1990s with her play.  When I pointed this out, she was quite surprised, it had never occurred to her. She said she never felt the presence of the Mother, she felt her absence, thus a need to address that.  She was keen to the absence of the Mother, rather than her presence. She felt her task was to fill that absence with her voice, her own presence.

I had noticed the presence of the Mother, rather than her absence. It made sense given my introversion, and Carol Lynn’s extroversion. I gathered Carol Lynn’s journal excerpts about her relationship to the Mother, into an essay for a collection I’m editing, and had Carol Lynn review it. She said I could publish it, after her journals were published.

And suddenly, she’s gone. I can’t imagine life without Carol Lynn and our conversations. We discussed every controversial issue from 1989 to 2026. She always wanted to hear my views and I needed to hear her wisdom. I could write a book about the conversations we had during that 37 years.

Carol Lynn mothered us all. I was just one of thousands of needy children in a motherless Church.  This essay is just an excerpt from 50+ years of knowing her, to show how much she impacted just one life.  Multiply my interactions with her by thousands, and you get the universal scope of her soul and work, her ability to mother countless individuals. She reached out to every soul on a spiritual level, beyond the limitations of body, location, time, culture, class, and gender. I’ve never known anyone whose soul was so incredibly huge and aware of so many people and their needs, while at the same time so fully present in each moment. She was not an ordinary human being.

I believe Carol Lynn will keep mothering us from the other side. Her spiritual connection to souls regardless of their position in society or their orthodoxy was a divine grace, an authority beyond any earthly one.  I believe Carol Lynn is home in the highest realm of heaven, embraced by God, and by Gerald and Katie and “Elohi-mama” (as she called Her). She carried God’s love in this world.  She never waited for the next life, she brought heaven into this one every day. She was like Eliza R. Snow, but a monogamous modern version whose ministry served the Church but went far beyond the hierarchy and halls of church headquarters.

Our love and gratitude go with you Carol Lynn, to the realms of light from which you came.  Thank you for making our house a lot less motherless, while you were here.

NOTES:

1. Excerpts in quote and italics are from her draft manuscript, The Diary of a Mormon Feminist, Carol Lynn Pearson, 2025.   

2. Email, from Carol Lynn to Maxine Hanks, Oct. 2023.

3.  Hanks, Maxine, review, “The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy,” Journal of Mormon Polygamy, https://journalofmormonpolygamy.org/jmp/article/view/52/66

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Maxine Hanks is a feminist theologian, historian, writer, and lecturer on women’s studies in religion. She was a visiting fellow at Harvard Divinity School and a research fellow with Utah Humanities Council. She has lectured in women’s studies at the University of Utah, and guest lectured at many other schools.

Her books include Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism, Mormon Faith in America, Getting Together with Yesterday, and A History of Sanpete County. She has authored many articles on women’s topics in Mormonism and in religion, including an essay in Secrets of Mary Magdalene.

In 1993 she was one of the “September Six” due to her work on Mormon feminist theology. Since 1999, she has served as an interfaith minister and chaplain in Salt Lake, while chairing Utah Women in Ministry and Interfaith Week in Utah. She also served on the Olympics Interfaith Council and Salt Lake Interfaith Roundtable, as well as on Senator Orrin Hatch’s Women’s Council, and the Utah Attorney General’s Safety Net Committee. Since 2012, she has returned to LDS Church membership and served as a Young Women’s leader and a teacher in her ward, while continuing her interfaith and chaplain work and pastoral care.

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You can read more tributes to Carol Lynn Pearson here:

Tributes to Carol Lynn Pearson, the Blessing-giver