[Riceandbeans]

I promise I’ll get to positive suggestions in this post.

Bullying is commonly defined as having two essential traits:

*an imbalance of power and

*repetition.

The way the compulsory state schools were set up for the industrial revolution depends entirely on maintaining an imbalance of power between teachers and students. Certainly a lot of teachers believe they’re doing the right thing, and further have a lot of dedication: they believe that the children depend on them to learn, that the repeated imbalance of power they maintain over the children is for the children’s own good, and that this love that they give to the children will pay off when the children grow up and see how well-prepared they are for the world. These beliefs are misguided delusions, but no, they’re not malicious. That’s the saddest part. Even the crudest behaviorist manipulations I see carried out with the most solicitous concern. The false premises lay deeply buried.

I’m a product of public schools, and I work for a school district now. I see small-minded adults (who have been teachers) smile at each other with knives behind their backs on a daily basis. Those who rise to the administrative levels are more likely the ones who like power more than they like children, and even the most idealistic teacher on the ground has more strings attached now than ever.

But the main unspoken rule that I see permeating into most teachers’ minds is: never trust anyone under 18. This usually comes out in words like “I really care about these kids, I really want them to succeed” – so much of it is the masochism of a martyr, like a middle-class nuclear mother shutting herself in her suburban home with her six children because it’s God’s will and nobody else can take her place in raising them. Some of my most dedicated teachers wielded the subtlest knives that did the most lasting damage. The best ones I had were the ones who simply showed me the example of a mind turned on, and who treated us with respect, like the one who took criticism from one of the students and, instead of marching out of the room in a huff, stayed, argued, and came to a resolution.

Forced schools try so hard to stop bullying, but they never will as long as their structure teaches this by example: the sustained imbalance of power. There are far better ways to help young people get educated. The Sudbury Valley School (http://www.sudval.com/” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.sudval.com/) has been bringing children and youth up in knowledge and civic responsibility for 45 years. It is a school where the students and staff make and enforce the rules, where there is no curriculum or grades, and everyone is free to pursue their own calling. There is no formal reading instruction, but everyone learns to read – in that environment they can’t help it. Ages mingle freely between four and 19 years old, so there’s no segregated pressure cooker to produce bullies like conventional schools invariably do. Many other schools have been founded around the world according to that model (http://www.sudval.com/07_othe_01.html” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.sudval.com/07_othe_01.html), and the world desperately needs a hundred times more.

There’s also unschooling, which is growing in popularity. People have set up resource centers for unschoolers: Liberated Learners is one network of such: http://www.liberatedlearnersinc.org/the-story-of-liberated-learners/” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.liberatedlearnersinc.org/the-story-of-liberated-learners/, and there’s also Not Back to School Camp: http://nbtsc.org/” class=”bbcode_url”>http://nbtsc.org/ If you can get a copy of Grace Llewellyn’s Teenage Liberation Handbook I highly recommend it.

A couple more good links: http://alternativestoschool.com/” class=”bbcode_url”>http://alternativestoschool.com/, http://www.educationrevolution.org/store/about/” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.educationrevolution.org/store/about/

There’s loads more too. All this has been going on for decades now, but people still suffer in ignorance about it or fear of it.

I leave with another quote from John Holt. Here’s the immediate practical advice:

“Three words I try to keep up in front of my mind now when I deal with children—and I mean two-year-old children, I mean one year old.

“Dignity. Courtesy. Respect.

“I think it’s terribly important that we try to be polite. I think it’s important and very difficult for us to talk to children in the same tone of voice that we use talking to somebody else. Here I suggest something that any adult that wants to can do beginning right now. If something would be painful, or shameful, or humiliating to us, then we ought to try, as far as we can, not say or do that to children. If we could do that much I think a lot of other stuff would begin to flow from it. And that little bit of dignity, courtesy, and respect is something that anybody can begin to work on.”

[Riceandbeans]

No, I don’t see it as unique to or worse. I see it as disappointing that it’s not better in an organization that prides itself so much on having so much additional truth.

I have to qualify and clarify: I do see this phenomenon as intensified in religious culture. I mentioned Puritan attitudes: the Church still has a bad Puritan hangover. I do also see a particular danger of sentimentality in a culture like ours that teaches optimism. But I do also recognize that we’re not the only religion with that problem either.

[Riceandbeans]

I’m sorry I don’t get on here as often as I used to.

John Holt pretty much sums up what I tried to express here: http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_holt4.html. I’d also recommend reading Alice Miller and Maria Montessori for more light on this subject. I don’t agree with everything the Natural Child Project posts, and I have a few questions about some of Holt’s assertions in the article referenced, but for the most part he says what I tried to. If “contempt” is too strong a word for some stomachs, I stand by “condescenscion,” which I see all the time in the Church.

I love substituting in Primary, because of the time I get to spend with a small group of children in a classroom, trying to deal with them respectfully and not as an authority who deserves their deference just because of my age. Sitting through the chirpy and syrupy manipulations in Sharing and Singing Time is paying dues, and often leads me to wonder if the Primary program as we have it is irredeemably toxic, too corrupted by school models to be worth the time. I consider it abominable and wrong to require children to sit still in rows by age, just as I consider it generally a waste of time to insist that adults sit quietly for as long as we do listening to recycled banalities in our grown-up meetings.

This past week, they were teaching pre-baptizeds “I Stand All Amazed.” The chorister linked “That He should extend His great love unto such as I” to Jesus’ special love for children. No! The hymn is from an adult point of view. Teaching children under the age of accountability to identify themselves as “rebellious and proud” souls is apostate Puritanism. There followed a lesson about sin and repentance. Nobody mentioned Christ’s revelation to Mormon that “little children cannot repent.” When the teacher asked “how do we repent?” I raised my hand and said “first you need to be eight years old.”

“Now behave,” she replied.

Yes, there is something in children’s vitality that looks like rebelliousness from our hide-bound adherence to our rules – most of which would be revealed as power plays if we had the courage to face our own unconscious. That “rebellion” is of God. It is not the same as the rebellion of a soul whose mortal life has progressed to the point of accountability for her knowledge of good and evil.

Sometimes it sucks to go through the work of dealing respectfully with a child. Roy made a good point: it helps to be freer and quicker expressing your frustration. But I, who grew up under the kind of bad authoritarianism that I suspect is all too common among respectable members of the Church, can’t allow myself much license in saying “just do this because I said so.” Recognizing the upbringing I had, I have to constantly bring into question how I present myself to my child. Of course this is hard, and it’s much easier to hide behind rules and authority in “bringing up children in righteousness.”

Every child is a fresh indictment of our failure to make an acceptable world.

[Riceandbeans]

“Baptized members” – heh. That’s a good one.

convert1992 wrote:

I do have one question: since he’s only four, don’t you think he could very well forget this incident? I’d be much more worried if it happened to him at 13.

He may well bury any clear recollection of this single incident later in life, but it’s a symptom of something much bigger and more pervasive. By the time young men get to be deacons they generally have a lot more exposure to the “harmless” and “good-natured” banter and “just giving you a hard time” and all that kind of stuff that some of us never quite get around to understanding or feeling comfortable with. Quite likely this boy will go through life without any apparent self-esteem problems, since he’s got the kind of parents that like to say “awesome!” and “good job!” and are wealthy besides. But there’s so much more to people than what meets the eye, and there’s so much more to our motives than our conscious will. Even if nobody ever gets laughed at in Primary, it’s still a training ground for turning yourself off, stifling your real thoughts and feelings and learning to abase yourself, for learning whether you’re good (quiet and docile) or bad (energetic and impatient with the absurdities adults try to force on you). When I was in the MTC I heard a talk about charity wherein the speaker said that as we learn to love ourselves, we can then love others. That shocked me because it flew in the face of all the messages I’d been soaking in since childhood: put others first, be selfless, etc. Even after I came to accept intellectually that you have to love yourself in order to love your neighbor as yourself, I’ve had a lot of work over the 18 years since in trying to accept this, and it has cost me dearly in money, time and opportunities.

I don’t think anyone who laughed in the entire congregation was acting out of any conscious malice at all – on the contrary, they felt that they were showing him how cute they thought he was. But when you deal with other people, especially children, that is simply not good enough: you can really hurt them if you’re not careful. I knew this intuitively from looking at my own earliest memories, but it’s really been drawn out as I’ve read The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller (the title is somewhat misleading: it’s not just about the children that get put into GT programs). There are things from our earliest years that we might not remember consciously, but we keep in our unconscious and in our bodies.

[Riceandbeans]

convert1992 wrote:

My parents were from the Far East, and Eastern religions are by nature non-dogmatic (that is, if A is true it does not preclude the opposite of A). So when I found out that the evidence against the BOM is damning, I didn’t take that to mean that the Church is necessarily a complete fraud (or a fraud at all) and therefore I have to leave. On the flip side of that, missionaries who serve in the Far East know how frustrating it is to have an investigator conclude the Church is true but not agree that they have to be baptized.

When I talk to atheists I often see this same Western Christian dogmatism in their language, and I am put off by it. Freethinkers and skeptics should search themselves for ingrained habits of dogmatic thinking. It helps so much to throw out the “it’s all true or it’s not true at all” dichotomy. And that is how I stayed LDS.

This is good. I’ve been reading a lot of depth psychology and being reminded of the importance of myth, symbol and ritual for the human psyche, the fragility of the ego in relation to the unconscious . . . I might have already written on here a few years ago that Carl Jung has helped me keep my testimony.

A big thing for me has been learning to think mythically: letting go of an insistence on the literal factuality of scripture stories like the creation, flood, tower of Babel etc. has helped me to view them with a lot more respect and appreciation for what they really teach. Myths can be true and nourishing in a way that has nothing to do with fact. In a recent SS lesson the instructor did mention that the story of Adam and Eve could be seen as symbolic to our own lives, and I wanted to call out: of course! Heck, in the Temple we’re told that flat out. Their story is presented plainly as a myth there, and I often wonder how fully people let themselves face up to that. I didn’t make any comment in that lesson – I’ve taken a sort of vow of silence in SS and EQ, though sometimes I’ll let a comment slip in EQ. Keeping my mouth shut helps me too, as does substitute teaching in Primary. Sitting through Sharing Time isn’t my favorite thing, but when I can get in a room with a bunch of children I have a great time.

If I had the gumption I’d look up the Jung passage I read about the necessity for religious dogmas to be scientifically ridiculous but I’m feeling lazy right now. But that was its main gist: doctrines like the creation – or the resurrection – aren’t supposed to make scientific sense; they have a different purpose. I dare say that making the transition to a fuller way of thinking in terms of myth would help a lot of members of the Church feel more comfortable living in this world, and make them less scared to death of bringing their intellect to church.

[Riceandbeans]

There are things about how the church has treated the thorny problem of sexuality that I’ve had to just drop, saying “people have got it wrong.” Like saying it’s such a terrible sin to wank sometimes – that’s about as clear a strategy of emotional manipulation as I’ve ever encountered. Sometimes a well-meaning commentator will say that sex should never be used as a weapon between couples. But society has always used it as a weapon. The church is no different.

It’s ironic that we hear so much glamorization and glorification of sex within marriage. I’ve come to the (provisional) conclusion that leaders of the church don’t understand sex any better than the rest of the world. “Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood,” wrote the sex-positive pagan lesbian Camille Paglia, and she’s right – about that anyway. It’s a messy thing whose daemonic character vindicates its four-letter referent of choice as brilliantly appropriate, and it’s stupid how Mormons think that getting married is going to not only make it into a holy sacrament but to give them the right to look down their noses at anyone who has to suffer under the tyranny of sexual urges in a way that doesn’t offer them the same sanctioned release.

I should shut up, but I hope your meeting had a good result. My prayers are with you.

[Riceandbeans]

Hang around the HFAC. Get to know all the artists and pseudo-bohemians. I did, my junior year, and it saved me.

Good luck. But, although I am glad to have been at BYU and learned what I did, some of the best parts of my education came from extracurricular activities, like cleaning the Wilk at night and playing in a rock band. Sometimes I wish I had either dropped out or taken a year off until I had made up my mind more clearly just what I wanted to do.

There are growing movements to help people realize how much they could do with their lives even if they don’t get a college degree. A guy named Blake Boles wrote a book called Better Than College (http://www.better-than-college.com/” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.better-than-college.com/), and has started the Zero Tuition College (http://www.ztcollege.com/” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.ztcollege.com/) as a service to match self-directed learners and mentors. That has a long way to go, but it’s an idea that deserves support and participation. Ivan Illich called for something like this 40 years ago in his book Deschooling Society, which some kind soul has put online in PDF form: http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf.

I definitely think I got a better deal at BYU than at one of the stuffed-shirt ivy league rackets, but a peaceful future is to be found in lower-cost sharing of knowledge among people of all ages, not just 20-somethings with their lives on hold; and wider training in the trades.

[Riceandbeans]

Furthermore, this opens up a big can of worms about the nature of spirits, intelligences and consciousness. The idea of billions of sinister anthropomorphic ghosties with highly developed psychic identities lurking here and there and tempting us shows the common assumption that premortal spirits have form (just because Jehovah could show himself to the Brother of Jared in human form) and consciousness as we experience it in our material bodies and brains. This is more an assumption than anything explicitly revealed.

In another post I mentioned a book by the psychoanalyst James Hillman, The Soul’s Code. He talks about the ancient idea of a daimon, which he casts as “the acorn theory.” It’s a fascinating idea, thousands of years old (he cites a myth presented by Plato): each of us has a calling, a destiny, an image of a life to be led. It’s a sort of intuitive wholeness that is distinct from our ego and even from our talents. The idea of forgetting one’s fate or calling at birth is part of the old myth too.

Even a cursory bit of research into theories of the unconscious will be very rewarding in consideration of the bare doctrines we have, stripped of parascriptural assumptions. It gives scientific evidence (yes!) to the doctrine while at the same time showing how little we really understand. Obviously we can’t equate ego entirely with spirit, since the things we have forgotten are by definition unconscious. I’ve been reflecting on the idea of a daimon: is that the spirit? Is it part of it? Are individual spirits more like Atman than autonomous atoms? I like that idea, in light of what psychology tells us about the Collective Unconscious.

In any case, I think it’s assuming maybe too much to say that Satan and his angels are or have developed egos or consciousness.

[Riceandbeans]

dash1730 wrote:

I’m scratching my head over this story, as it is related to some other stories I remember learning, but for the life of me don’t know their source. As I recall, Lucifer and his 1/3 is banished to earth, and his influence is limited to inhabitants on this planets. He cannot tempt people on other planets, even though Christ’s atonement covers them, too. But as a result earth is the most wicked of all among God’s creation. If this story is true then other inhabitants on planets are able to live out their mortality in rather challenging conditions. I am forced to wonder why we then got stuck with a raw deal.

Does this story ring a bell with anyone?

I think this is one of those “pretzels” that Wayfarer wrote about: a more-or-less folk doctrine that grew out of interpolation and now enjoys official status because people don’t look closely. Someone correct me if needed:

The 1/3 of the hosts of heaven thing is from the Revelation of John, right? From a vision so thoroughly symbolic, the only reason we would take that as a literal thing is because our capacity for thinking in symbolic and mythic terms is so undeveloped as a church still. The revelation in Section 29 quotes on it and builds on it, but I don’t see that as requiring an insistence on its literal factuality; Joseph’s revelations came according to his understanding and that of the early converts, from whom I think we inherited our symbological handicaps.

The idea of this world being the most wicked comes from Enoch’s vision in Moses 7, and applies specifically to Enoch’s time; it could be taken to apply to ours as well, but I don’t see that as necessary.

Characteristic of a literalist-oriented, mythically-impaired, cocksure and downright lazy mindset, Mormon “thought” has strung the “doctrine” you just described together from these sources, as so many of our other doctrines are strung, cobbled and nailed together from hopping around the scriptures. Not only are we bad at thinking symbologically and mythically, we’re bad at asking deeper questions of what we’re told, and we’re bad at rigorously analyzing scriptural sources.

[Riceandbeans]

From reading the things I’ve read, especially about depth psychology, I’ve thought similar things. I just finished reading The Soul’s Code by James Hillman (which I highly recommend to everyone here) and it deals with the idea of “bad seeds”: how some notable evil people in history have seemed to have personal callings towards evil. This has me trying to refine the idea that I was developing before: kind of like the tribal story about two wolves within every soul. I have become comfortable with the belief that the potential for evil and depravity exist within each of our spirits, and along with that have developed a hypothesis that maybe Satan is something like an artificial intelligence: a spiritual being, yes, one that encourages us to follow the worst within ourselves, but after all maybe not a conscious entity in the way we believe our spirits to be.

[Riceandbeans]

This reminded me of the scripture in Isaiah 1:18 too: the one about scarlet sins becoming white as snow. The original context refers to a people repenting of their sins as a people: specifically their social mistreatment of the weak and disadvantaged. I often wish that were re-emphasized, because it’s easy for an individual to be clean of sexual infractions, for example, and still be complicit in widespread oppression. In fact it will have to take concentrated effort by groups of people to throw off the oppressive structures that individual docility (promoted as such a virtue) keeps us locked into.

[Riceandbeans]

I have noticed a really widespread and strong aversion in my church experience to any current mysticism or modern miracles that are either too recent or seem somehow dangerous . . . in my perception, visions, dreams and similar experiences often have to go through a period of curing (bleaching) to be safe for sharing in meetings. They happened in pioneer times for example. It’s all very well for the saints in Kirtland to speak in tongues, but can you picture the pants-pissing panic that would ensue if such an irreverent thing were to show itself in one of our meetings today? We have enough trouble actually SHOUTing “hosanna.” It was bad enough when the old black lady in my Pittsburgh congregation started singing a spiritual during her testimony. You should have seen some of the faces – and this wasn’t even in Utah.

As a teenager I sat in a room while Dee Jay Bawden told a fireside group about the revelations that would pour into his mind while he worked on his sculptures, and I couldn’t believe my ears. Was this allowed? Was he going to go apostate any minute?

In my first area of my mission I met a recent convert who was a visionary man. My companion didn’t like visiting him, because he had had visions, and he talked about them. The whole island of Puerto Rico was full of people seeing visions, and it was a thorn in the side of straight-laced missionaries who only were willing to consider such visions as having divine providence if they led someone into the church. In this man’s case that had been the case, and his visions still weirded my comp out. That’s not even mentioning the lady who saw an angel who gave her some winning lotto numbers so she could build a chapel. Obviously, such things had to be of Satan, right? Anything that wasn’t with us, had to be against us, hm?

Through my life I’ve seen a lot of attempts to make our faith rational, and I’ve grown sick and tired of it, especially since it has led to some really embarrassing pseudoscience – if not the same thing as Creation Science then similar: attempts to have our cake and eat it too. We back away from anything that offends the “sola scriptura” Protestants, we give our scriptures all sorts of calm scholarly treatments, but then still insist on a factual Flood? Gimme a break. We still have a lot to learn about thinking mythically, which is sad, because if the Temple really is a school of any kind, it is a school in mythical thinking. Accepting something as mythical can be tremendously liberating, because now you can access all its beautiful, colorful truth without having your fun spoiled by worrying if it can be factually proven. Myths function outside fact, outside time. You don’t have to try to prove that they “really happened.”

Maybe I should change my profile name to something like “JungianMormon” because C.G. Jung has meant so much to me. Reading his works over the past few years is what has helped me regain an appreciation for and a longing for mystic and spiritual experiences in all their . . . color. Color is the metaphor I keep coming up with, to try to capture this quality of vision, reveltation etc. that makes life meaningful, much more than doctrines. That gnosis has so much more color than white shirts, ties and Celestial rooms, even than the Gospel Art Kit. And it has an unruly aspect to it, which is why I see it feared by mainstream Mormons and intellectual Mormons alike.

Joseph’s seer stone has become one of the things that is breathing new life into my love for the Book of Mormon. I live by a river and have collected several special stones from its banks. I haven’t seen visions from any, nor do I really expect to, but holding them and feeling them, meditating on them, I feel a greater appreciation for the myth and magic that have given human lives meaning on this earth, and I see part of Joseph’s unfinished work as helping Christians reclaim that color that the Protestant revolution had sapped.

So, to try to wrap this up in the interest of brevity tonight (but I really did want to comment on this, forgive me), yay for mysticism, for visions, for even weird and wacky things. Yay for the folk magic that fertilized the Restoration; here’s hoping that it may too be restored one day in an improved form. I hope to continue to lead my life away from the fear of such things, whether or not I ever come to have experiences like the OP reported (what a blessing!). I have been privy to such in my own family, and I have had at least one dream that I hold as a vision from God. I want to widen my receptivity to the spiritual nourishment that comes from this earth, from living things (but also from stones), whether that comes in the form of dreams or visions or whatever. I wonder if the wish to “consume it upon your lusts” is really just the flip side of fear of the unknown.

It’s true there are deceivers and charlatans, and people who do things like read auras are especially prone to ridicule because there are such caricatures, looking into crystals and cards. But as I plant my feet in the belief that some of the gifts they parody are truly real, I feel faith, hope and joy grow in me. Charity too? I think so.

[Riceandbeans]

I’ll be glad to give updates. This really came at a good time, since I have been feeling like the meetings I attend are pointless and there’s not much for me to offer this ward. Now I have a way to share one of my gifts in a way that I won’t need to self-censor, at least not very much!

And I definitely plan on putting “All Creatures” in. That’s a regular bedtime selection in our house.

Thanks all, and good night!

[Riceandbeans]

10 years ago I worked in the Family History Library. It was a lowly, dead-end job, re-shelving books and cleaning microfilm readers, so I didn’t have the same kind of experience you have, but I do remember before I began, hearing from an older sibling who had worked in the same position “the Church is true. The Corporation of the President is not.” And it was something I held onto all through the time I worked there. It bugged me greatly when people talked about me working for the Church, especially when they said it was nice that I worked for the Church, because I knew that I worked for the Corporation of the President of the Church etc. Keeping my perception of the wide gap between those two entities was hard sometimes, because so many others acted as if it wasn’t there. It became a personal iron rod, especially since I had some very frustrating times in that job. I don’t know if I want to go into that right now.

But I have come to a realization of the way that the Church itself acts too – should I capitalize it here? A while ago, talking with another older sibling, who has been happily inactive for my whole adult life, I mentioned something about how as soon as any large institution is established, its main goal becomes self-preservation, and any express purpose that it is supposed to serve takes a firmly secondary priority. “You know,” said sibling replied, “churches are like that too.”

“I know,” I answered. How much of a big deal this is to this person I don’t know. To me it hasn’t been so much a big dissilusion to admit that the church acts like any other impersonal institution. It does cause me to regret the continued repetition of the phrase “the church is true,” which begs many questions and needs a lot of qualification in order to be really clear in its meaning. But maybe there’s some use to its vagueness: you can assign whatever meaning to it you want. It’s like saying the Book of Mormon is true: I don’t feel bound to accept a strict factuality of everything that has been officially claimed regarding its geography and chronology. The truth of it lies in what it teaches, as the truth of myths does. It’s very regrettable that so many people set up truth and myth as opposites, because myths can give us some of the most valuable truths, often better than bare fact. Reading William James and Carl Jung have helped strengthen my conviction of this.

I digress. In my life within the church I have heard several admissions that the church is not what saves us. I like to think that many of the leaders recognize this, even if they find it dangerous to emphasize too much in a world that they see as a spiritual war zone. It is clear to my view that many, many members still live according to the assumption that salvation is found only in and through the church, and keep their minds firmly closed against any sorts of questions that would lead to a better understanding of how human beings, and our institutions operate. They also close their minds against considering that even if the church was organized by diving intervention, it is still an earthbound institution and that fallen human psychology and sociology make up its heart and soul. We don’t have Jesus Himself sitting in an office in Salt Lake City making the decisions, and until that happens, even the most earnest, humble and enlightened vicar will still have imperfect reception. Even if Christ Himself were directing things personally, plenty would still go wrong getting passed down the chain of command, as long as we live according to the myth of a chain of command. When more of us do grow a more mature and fruitful tree of life in our own souls, there will be less need for commands, and reliance on institutions to pass orders down from superiors will deteriorate. I am satisfied that that is one of the most important – and so far, least realized – parts of Christ’s mission.

It may be true to say “the Church is perfect” if we’re talking about a spiritual ideal of the Church, but that has to go along with a recognition that that ideal has yet to be really incarnated here on the earth. And in the meantime it is a drag, isn’t it, to have to sit through hearing about the Church being true and about loving it – especially hearing that sing-songy “I know the Church is true” from children at the pulpit. Thank God my daughter is still too shy to get up and share her testimony. If she ever does I’ll do my damnedest to induce her to say something outside of that norm.

[Riceandbeans]

Kipper wrote:

I tried to take notes during conference this weekend but most of what I wrote down were things that stuck out and bothered me. I get very little out of conference any more. I mean, am I supposed to be so moved by all personal the miracles of the GA’s that I cry and go out to find my own? I guess I could if I accepted them all without wondering. I can’t get over it when I hear from 4 out of five speakers who warn us not to let “_______” (fill in the blank with “ambitions,” “goals,” “activities,” “hobbies” etc) be distractions to your activity in the church. The message I get is that we should be spending 90% of our time reading, preaching, being missionaries, doing genealogy, attending to the sick and poor, doing temple work, magnifying our callings and basically being at church every day. Life on earth has much to offer and my life has changed so much that I don’t recognize myself. Be soft, pale, slightly overweight and I’ll fit in. Evidence that I don’t take time to go to the gym (last conference that was actually mentioned as a distraction) or participate in any activity that would take commitment outside the church.

I’m there with you: I see a lot of repetition of concepts like church activity, faithfulness, obedience, even service, that seem stripped of real meaning to me. Obedience has become one of my least favorites, because it can easily become a way for people to get on power trips, policing their fellows for any perceived infraction of rules at the expense of the weightier matters. From what the Holy Ghost has showed me, I would expect that if the membership of the Church were really to start taking their covenants seriously it would lead to a radical change in the fundamental structures of society, but nobody has the nerve to go against the really powerful norms of the world: the way things are just done. So what we get is this that you’re describing: attention on the busy-ness of the church trappings as they grow out of an unexamined complacent conformity to worldly norms. As long as we’re not drinking, smoking, looking at porn etc. we can just keep pushing the engine of the world along its self-destructive course, provided that we do enough individual little kindnesses to make us feel good about ourselves, like throwing snowballs into a furnace.

I guess even a 50% increase of actually attending to the sick and poor instead of talking about it would greatly mitigate a lot of the suffering that we don’t want to face, because it would require us to let go of our self-righteousness in looking like the right kind of respectable people.

I wanted to enjoy Priesthood Session, but mostly I just let my thoughts wander. There were some good thoughts about being compassionate, seeing people for who they might become etc. . . . but then the closing hymn with its belligerent imagery completely went against that for me, and I thought: this is going to lead how many to go home feeling they should go out and enact some warrior fantasy, watching for foes to put down instead of fellow children of God to lift up?

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