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In my long life of church activity, I’ve only heard two testimonies that left the congregation stunned. But in neither case did the bishop say anything. One was by a sister who felt she had had it with the church, and stood up to say “This is goodbye!” Then she went on to elaborate her disillusionment with the church. She of course didn’t close with an “amen” or anything, and her tirade (which best describes it) was followed by a long, embarrassed silence after she strode out of the chapel. Finally someone got up and broke the ice. The other one was by a non-member visitor obviously of a very evangelistic persuasion. He gave a very rousing “Halleluia, praise the Lord!” type of talk. Heartfelt, to be sure, but not at all like a Mormon testimony. I wasn’t at all bothered by it, and in fact found it a bit of a refreshing change. But the bishop was getting red in the face, obviously wondering whether he should stand up and say something. He saved his comment for the next testimony meeting, where he emphasized that testimonies should only be borne by church members. (Is that really true? I don’t think so. I don’t understand why he and several others in the ward were so annoyed by it.) I must confess that I haven’t paid much attention lately to what kind of pressure is being put on YM or YW to serve missions or to marry those who have, since that’s a cohort I have dealt with much in recent years. But I have been increasingly aware of pressure put on older/retired couples to serve missions (or work in temples, or take on various other assignments, none of which I am keen to do). Our stake occasionally holds meetings to encourage senior members to consider various possibilities (“Have we got plans for YOU!!”). My wife is much more orthodox than I am (and I’m a fairly low bar), but thankfully she’s not interested in any of that. We retired a year ago, but have been keeping it a secret at church simply because we don’t want to be put on the spot with all that stuff. Over my lifetime I’ve given way more to the church than it’s worth to me, and I’d like to have my “golden years” (a misnomer if there ever was one) to myself–or maybe do non-church volunteer work (my wife is already involved in that). She tells me of a ward she lived in before our marriage where the bishop chided people who did non-church volunteer work, saying that if they had time for stuff like that, they should be dedicating it to the church. (Whatever happened to “men should be engaged in a good cause of their own free will …”?) I’m glad it went well for you. That would have been a difficult topic for me. I was asked to speak a few months ago, and of course was given a GA talk to base it on. It was a topic I could handle okay without compromising myself. After a passing reference to the GA talk, I just went in my own direction. If it’s a topic on which I can draw from the gospels or from personal experience, I’m okay with it, but if they asked me to talk about temples or a host of other topics, there’s no way I could do it. I served a brief stint on the high council many years ago, and spoke regularly in that connection. I don’t think I could do that now. I share Nibbler’s skepticism, not only about this survey, but about surveys in general. These kinds of changes–if indeed they are changes at all–are difficult to map, partly because whether an LDS environment is supportive or not depends to such a large extent on the specific unit, the people in it, and its leaders. When I was growing up, most people assumed that excommunication would be pretty much automatic for any sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage. But there was a kid in my ward who was mostly out of the closet, and was accepted (his father was stake patriarch, and was very protective of him). Now that would not necessarily be the same everywhere. I’ve also been in wards with “hanging bishops,” who would have ex-ed that guy in a heartbeat. Unlike the Catholic church, we don’t have anything like canon law, and local authorities have considerable latitude in dealing with such cases. BTW, the kid in question is now grown up, has moved away, and from what I hear, is no longer associated with the church. The Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonnhoeffer, who sacrificed his life resisting the Nazi’s, made oft-quoted comments about grace, differentiating “cheap grace” from “costly grace.” “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. […] Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. […] Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son […]”
Discipleship, pp. 47-48 There are many who have, I think, misinterpreted Bonnhoeffer’s “costly grace” as advocating works as a way to “earn” salvation. I don’t see it that way. I take his “cheap grace” to refer to those who seek to be excused rather than forgiven, and there is a huge difference between being excused and being forgiven. If faith is not in some way transformative, then it is not genuine. Recognizing that there is nothing we can do to “earn” salvation, the recognition that we are under grace should make a difference in our lives. Of course, we are at all times indebted to grace whether we realize it or not. Our very lives are a gift. But the gratitude that comes of recognizing that should make a difference.
One of my favorites among the new hymns is “It Is Well with My Soul,” which also appears in many Protestant hymnals. The third verse “My sin–Oh, the bliss of this glorious thought–My sin, not in part but the whole, Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more …” also marks a shift that others here have mentioned in connection with “Amazing Grace.” I’m sure that church committees a generation ago would not have approved. I see this kind of musical ecumenism as a welcome change. Minyan Man, I’m not sure that what I could say would provide any answers to the questions you pose, but I too sometimes miss the innocence of past life. I recall my days in Primary (which met on weekdays back then) and Junior Sunday School (back when there was such a thing). I was a bit of a loner as a child, inept at sports, often bullied, and for me church was a sort of refuge from all that. I recall a painting in the Junior Sunday School room, probably by a local artist, of Jesus reaching down over a cliff to rescue a lamb that was trapped on a ledge, and I somehow imagined myself to be like that lamb. Though I am still glad that I grew up in the church and had that refuge at a time when I sorely needed it, as I moved from my teens into young adulthood, many aspects of church activity became problematic, and that has continued to the present. I have been unwilling to jettison it in spite of persistent doubts because it has come to be a sort of metaphysical glue that holds so many parts of my life (including most importantly my family life) together. I try to focus on those aspect of it that I really do believe, and do my best to ignore those I don’t. You mentioned prayer as something that no longer works for you. Prayer is if anything more important to me than ever, but my prayers now are nothing like those of my childhood and youth. They are much more a matter of meditation. If you could plug into my mind when I am praying (always silently), you’d find more silence than words. Prayer calms me, forces me to be honest with myself, to admit my shortcomings (which are legion). And aside from God, there is no one to whom I could say absolutely anything. Even in communicating with my wife, there are things that are best left unsaid, and that goes for anyone I know. I have friends with whom I can talk politics but not religion, and those with whom I can talk religion but not politics, those with whom I can joke but not say anything serious, etc. etc. But I don’t have to–indeed could not possibly–hide any of my thoughts from God, and when I lay out before Him what is on my mind, I’m forced to reassess all of it. Again, with lots of silent intervals. Sometimes I feel as if I’m only talking to myself (which at least has the value of introspection), but there are times, too, when I genuinely feel that I am addressing a Presence, in spite of my uncertainty of just what kind of Being God actually is (I’ve long since moved on from the idea of God as an old bearded white guy somewhere up in the sky). Of course, I can’t–and don’t really want to–recover the sense of magic of my childhood, but I have found prayer/meditation to provide refuge when I need it. There seems to be a good deal of diversity (inconsistency?) among local church leaders when it comes to blessing infants. When I blessed our daughter decades ago, I invited the participation of a brother of mine who, though an elder, had not darkened a church door in many years and who professed a definite dislike for the church. Then when my second granddaughter was born, my daughter called to inform me before we drove to Iowa for the blessing that I would need to bring eighter a current temple recommend or a letter from my bishop declaring my “worthiness.” The bishop of my daughter’s ward met with me prior to the meeting and carefully inspected my recommend (giving it greater scrutiny than airport security officials before boarding a flight). When I mentioned this to a priesthood leader in my own ward, he was amazed, saying that blessing an infant is not an ordinance after all, and that the bishop’s role is only to arrange meeting time for what is essentially a family affair. He said that it’s much like a “father’s blessing,” which a child can request anytime and which needs no approval from higher up. Quote:I might be more cynical these days, but it seems to me that men are at their most “Chutzpah” when they embrace polygamy. When they legalize the emotional or physical infidelity they want to perpetuate rather then remain faithful to their original spouse or be honest that they are ready to move on. The power to choose which wives to take on without thinking through what will happen to the wives, or the men connected to those women (the men who want to date and marry those now-taken women for example) – that is impressive.
Yes indeed, the practice of polygamy represents the ultimate “Chutzpah” of men, to the disadvantage of women of course, but also to the disadvantage of many men. It is a system in which a few alpha males hog all the women, to the disadvantage of beta males as well as the women. In some of the polygamist colonies, when “surplus” males reach a certain age (18 or so), they are sent away from the community to fend for themselves, having little practical education. All so that the few remaining males can have more mates. Polygamy benefits no one but the alphas. I see it–along with the priesthood ban–as among the most egregious skeletons in the church closet.Hi Minyan Man, The question you raise about JS and chutzpah is one I’ve wrestled with for a long time, and still continue to wrestle with. Because of its numerous anachronisms, I cannot take the Book of Mormon seriously as a historical account of things that actually happened. At the same time, I have a definite admiration for the book: its teachings are consonant with Christianity and I find parts of it inspiring. Moreover, its length and narrative unity are impressive. Not just any farm boy could have produced it, so I think that JS was a genius of sorts. So I can’t dismiss it as chutzpah. I also don’t think that it was a deliberate hoax; I believe that Joseph Smith really believed it. At least that’s my tentative conclusion. I don’t want to go into all of its many anachronisms in this post. Most readers in this forum are probably familiar with them anyway, so there’s no point in belaboring them.
Like you, for me the NT also ranks highest. Some of my favorite scriptures are from the OT, however. When I’m feeling down, Ecclesiastes always speaks to my soul, as do many of the Psalms. And Isaiah represents the theological high point of the OT, and a sort of ecumenism that is lacking in many of the other books.
I appreciate everyone’s thought on this topic. By saying that the Bible engages me much more than LDS scripture is certainly not to say that I think every jot and tittle was revealed, as some fundamentalists into Bibliolatry seem to think. (Do they suppose that God dictated the whole thing, word for word? “Paul, take a letter!”) I believe it was Karl Barth who said “I take the Bible too seriously to take it literally.” Its complex textual history makes it intriguing to me, anyway. The facticity of, say, the details of the invasion of Canaan has been seriously questioned (so much for the book of Joshua) and, as has been mentioned, the canonicity of such things as love poetry like the Song of Solomon has been rejected by many denominations. Though Jesus preached in Aramaic, the gospels were not recorded until decades later, and in Greek, not the Aramaic that Jesus spoke, so even the Greek is “translated.” And one cannot deny the possibility that during the intervening decades between the events themselves and their being set down in writing, some embellishment likely occurred. The fascination the Bible holds for me is NOT some kind of fundamentalist literalism. I read it as a sort of meta-narrative that, taken as a whole, points in a truthful direction. But of course, all sources of truth are potentially also sources of error, and there will never be a final word on interpretation. Even what I consider to be the pinnacle of biblical scholarship, the Anchor Bible, is not and never could be the final word. Hi Nibbler. You certainly did not take any “wind out of my sails.” I didn’t comment on the nobility appearing in my pedigree our of some sense of self-importance. As you say, lines of descent appearing in pedigrees are often suspect anyway. The point I was trying to make is that the farther one goes back in one’s pedigree, the more it records only the privileged classes; the common folk generally lived and lived and died leaving no record of themselves, so genealogies leave them out. Besides, logically everyone has royal blood somewhere in their pedigrees, even if they haven’t discovered the links. No wind, no sails. For every “noble” person in anyone’s genealogy, there are no doubt as many (or more) profligates. I’ve largely lost interest in genealogy work. Thanks for your thoughts, Amy and Nibbler. It’s been well over a decade since I last went, and I haven’t missed it at all. Last time I did go, I was roped into doing some initiatories, and I panicked, recalling previous negative experiences with that. But it’s all completely different now; you keep your clothes on and the officiator “symbolically” anoints you. My arguments with the temple go beyond the rituals. I suppose it can be a charitable gesture toward the deceased to make sure that their “work gets done,” but of all the billions of people who have lived on the planet, only a small fraction died leaving any record of themselves, and most of those were the nobility (my own pedigree goes way back, but only because I was able to plug into Anglo-Norman nobility, which then extends to nobility all over Europe and beyond, but I know nothing of the plebes who logically constitute most of my ancestry and who died leaving no record, so “work for the dead” ends up being “work for the privileged classes”). But unless their “work is done” for them, they have no chance at exaltation. I would rather not bother with a recommend, but having one appears to be essential to receiving callings, and besides if I bucked that, then it would make for tensions with my wife. As for the questions relating to lifestyle, I can answer all those honestly in the affirmative. If I use some Clinton-esque fiddling with semantics, I can also answer the belief questions affirmatively. After all, I my faith is firm, even if my beliefs are not all orthodox. The question that really bothers me, though, is “are you worthy to attend the temple?” I’m not sure what that even means. Is it an invitation to congratulate myself? Am I being asked to put myself in a special category of human beings, better and more righteous than others? I don’t think I’m better than anyone else. As I get older, I only become more acutely aware of faults that had previously escaped my notice, and I don’t want to make pretentions to being more righteous than others. I’m always tempted to respond, “Well, you just asked me a battery of probing questions. What do YOU think?” Not that I have any vices that I’m hiding, but I always hate that question, and wonder how anyone could cheerfully answer “Oh yes, I’m very worthy!”
Nibbler is no doubt correct: we’ll end up settling on a few hymns for repeated use. I work with the music in my ward, and have found that when I try using hymns that are less familiar, the congregation’s singing is very anemic. I’ve tried using several of the new hymns, and the only ones that have gotten a good response were “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and “Amazing Grace.” Thanks for your thoughts, Amy. I like your metaphor of faith as a banner with beliefs floating beneath it. One of my favorite writers on religious thought, David Bentley Hart, wrote that “Faith … is a trust in the reality of some living truth that transcends the forms it animates.” He could as easily have said that about hope, since faith and hope have an umbilical connection with each other.
