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Old-Timer wrote:
Most of the prayers I “hear” are public ones, and those tend to be spoken with the intent of the meeting in mind. Therefore, they tend to be similar. Nearly all of the personal prayers I’ve heard in my life have been very different than the public ones – much more meaningfu, thoughtfull and heartfelt.
Public and family prayers as well: I’ve had to endure countless family prayers filled with as much rote repetition and marked by as little careful thought as public ones. But I guess the family is another kind of audience.
I myself have had to disengage a lot of my emotions, so as to avoid getting angry. I have a very idealistic temperament and have felt great pain having most of what I believe and care about denied, trodden down and mistreated in countless ways by the world and the small minds that fill it. There was a time when I would let this get to me and I would express anger and frustration. As time has gone by I’ve had to sever, untie, let go – pick your metaphor – a lot of my emotional attachment to my ideals: the world is cruel. People in the Church think and do incredibly stupid things. What does that have to do with me? Or I could say: what does it have to do with my consciousness/ego? I’ve made a lot of emotional attachments: made these links, laid trip wires to my feelings all over the world. When someone violated one of my ideals or a truth that I understood, it rippled back to my nerves and caused pain. I have tried to undo these tripwires. Is this making sense? Hawkgrrrl’s suggestion of cultural anthropology is a very good one. I thank God for leading me to read what I have about Buddhism too, because I think that gave me a lot of my ideas about letting go. If not for that, going to meetings on Sundays and sitting through epic, empty, delusional prayers would have filled me with intolerable rage by now. As it is, they are plenty annoying and onerous to slog through, but it’s like there’s some kind of storm drain in my soul that carries excess frustration and anger away, so that at noon on Sunday I can say “Ite missa est. Deo gratias!”, go home and enjoy my Sabbath.
I have to give God credit for putting that storm drain in my soul. I think it was dug in the course of a lot of silent prayers: “dear God, can You believe this rubbish? This is such an insult to the intelligence You gave us that I’m gonna be sick unless You help me get through it. I’m only here because of You, you know. And I guess I have some compassion for these half-asleep souls going through these motions that they themselves don’t understand . . .”
Try it. Next time you see something to be negative about, take it up with God, silently in your mind. Keep a running play-by-play commentary with the Almighty, and if you keep in mind that it is the Almighty you’re addressing this to, I think God might help you truly disengage in compassionate, constructive ways.
A lot of prayer that I hear is the sort that is immediately answered, because it is: “bless that we may/can/might/might be able to” . . . do whatever. If you’re praying that you can or may do something . . . well, in most cases you already can or may or might be able to, say be kind, be safe, be faithful, strive to do what’s right, etc. etc. The question is: will you? And do you 1. have the nerve to put forth your part and change your life and 2. think of asking for help while you do it? I don’t know about all of your prayers, but most of the prayers I hear from Mormons’ mouths are so formulaic, so poorly thought out that they’re meaningless or nearly so.
Meditation is good. So is laying out the contents of your mind, however dirty, for the viewing of a higher intelligence. It helps you be honest with yourself. It helps you to see yourself as the despicable, low-life, lovable nothing you really are, and that given you humility, calmness and courage.
As much as I can get online I think I will need to watch this thread. My family nucleus is currently stuck in the in-laws’ house and it has turned out to be a toxic environment: the place is choked with junk and the spirit of contention is a constant companion, even though these are outwardly respectable and faithful (or maybe fanatical?) members of the church. So I don’t have much to offer in the way of advice, but I too would like to read what others may offer. Coming in from a spell of inactivity on this board, I found this thread and it is something I’ve thought about a lot. So for better or worse here are some of my thoughts. One of the things that saved me was hearing dear old Steve Robinson at BYU say something like: “after you get married you’re still going to meet people who turn you on. You have to remember your covenant is to cleave to your spouse.” I don’t know where I got the idea that I had to find the most ideally attractive woman to marry because after getting married I would be in danger of hellfire if I noticed other beautiful women. I’ve seen the idealized portrayals of faithful husbands who never even looked at another woman, I’ve had that advice given to me: never even look at another woman.
Not possible.
Did I choose my wife based on appearance? Damn right I did, but I didn’t line up some kind of police line and choose her due to the best measurements or hair color etc. I find her the most beautiful woman because: I genuinely am attracted to her, I choose to see her as the most beautiful, and I cultivate a faithful cleaving to her as my one and only. But it would be a lie to say that other women don’t turn my head.
They turn my head, draw my eye, but I have learned to recognize the limits of that: there are sights that I may be glad to see, but they do not equal love, or even infatuation. They do not come close to the all-five-senses experience of lovemaking with a chosen spouse. The enjoyment of a pleasant scene has its limits, and with that understood, you can stay within those limits and avoid a disturbance of your peace.
It took me a while to learn that; for a while in school I still thought I was falling in love with every round pelvis that passed my peepers. Ridiculous, it was. Partly raging hormones, I own.
Soon after I got engaged, a member of my ward’s bishopric said to me that he wished he could just tell some of the folks in the ward to just choose someone and get married, without waiting for the ideal combination of everything. When I was a teenager I had a list of qualifications for my future wife. One of them was that she be a Rush fan (the band, not the radio pundit). I revised it after my mission but thank God I had thrown it out by the time I met my wife, who for one thing can’t stand Geddy Lee’s falsetto. I love her anyway. I didn’t conjure her up as my Soul Mate, Practical Magic or Savage Garden style – none of that bullsh*t. I had felt a spiritual tap on the shoulder that said I was ready to get married, it had scared the hell out of me, I met this interesting woman, we spent time together, knew we liked each other, I decided to love her, and then knew that we could make a good marriage. So we have spent 10 years doing just that.
About a month before we got married I was on a hike with some other folks (my wife doesn’t really do hikes. I love her anyway), and a woman a bit older than me was talking about a young man with whom she got along just fine, but didn’t want to marry because there wasn’t that romantic spark. WTF.
For some time I have lamented the stigma in the western world against arranged marriages. It’s almost as vilified as polygamy: dragging young girls from their homes to live with ugly old drunkards or whatever else, the Matchmaker song from
Fiddler on the Roofand all that. Maybe it would take too much work to establish a matchmaking function among single adults in the Church that would really work. For one thing, first there would have to be a mass abandonment of a lot of silly romantic ideals. Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out how silly they are 200+ years ago and they’re still weighing us down. Physical attraction could still be accommodated to a large degree, if people let go of the chimera of finding the one paragon of their ideal, and if young men were free to develop different preferences of appearance . . . even if Rubens and Titian paintings were once again held up as standards of beauty instead of scarecrows, that would go a long way.
There was an Ensign article about a couple in India who decided to marry each other even though they hardly knew each other, It was enough that they were both members of the Church. It worked for them because of the Indian norm of arranged marriage. It was a wonderful story and it’s sad that in the world’s richest nation uncounted young people are kept away from achieving something similar by distorted fairy tales.
That’s all I have time to type for now.
SilentDawning wrote:I’m having a bit of trouble with the idea that sexual relations is for others and a complete expression of love as M&G says, however. Ideally, this would be phenomenal, and I fully expect to get beaten up for this, of course, but I see it a little bit like hunger and eating on one level, and an expression of love on yet another, different level. Both co-exist and are valid.
[snip]
Women in particular, i have found to be incredibly indifferent to men’s sexual needs.
Boy did you ever get that right.
Quote:There are different kinds of intimacy — some that is more utilitarian and serves a biological purpose, and the most fulfilling kind which is an expression of love. It’s too idealistic to believe that all men will be completely satisfied with the “pure expression of love” variety, particularly if it only happens once or twice every 20 years due to the preferences of their partner.
One more reason why I think it’s tragically misguided to teach anyone to expect or feel entitled to sexual satisfaction. But since we want to keep youth from sinning, we “tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie: Dulcis et decorum est” . . .
Quote:Also, I think we mistakenly tend to view chastity in terms of restraint. It also means actually engaging in sexual activity that is healthy within marriage. Personally, I think my wife violated the Law of Chastity for a decade when she refused to do what was necessary to fix the sexual problems she brought to our relationship from day one. Yet she felt she could answer “yes” to the chastity question because she simply was not engaging in extramarital affairs.
I have managed to survive in a largely sexless marriage, but if simply abstinence from extra-marital sex this is considered the Law of Chastity, then I think it needs a serious redefinition. And someone who never engages in sexual activity in their marriage is violating that law.
Attractive sentiment. Thing is, “chastity” is etymologically related to “chasten” and they hark back to a Proto-Indo-European word meaning “to cut” (cognate with “caste” also). The
word itselfis rooted in concepts of restraint. So I would suggest if you want to posit a divine mandate for married couples to get it on regularly, try to build another frame: the Law of Marriage, maybe. I would like to track down the quote from a GA back in the 80s maybe that says in effect: we don’t find any scriptural justification for sex even in marriage used purely for gratification. Very unpopular now, but as far as I know, factual. Of course there’s Abraham sporting with his wife and the whole Song of Songs, but of course the Song of Songs has been singled out as “not inspired.”
Your points on mutual meeting of needs ring true. Sex is a problem, a complex of needs and motives ranging from charitable to utterly base, and it needs work by both spouses to reach a tolerable equilibrium. Not some beautiful gift to make our joy full: I think that’s evolutionary physiology talking.
When my wife and I were first married we took instruction on a natural family planning method which is quite popular with Catholics, as a result of their belief that sex is primarily for procreation. Part of the program was to explore alternate forms of physical intimacy during the fertile times if we didn’t want to conceive. We gave it up after a while for various reasons, but I have to admire those Catholics who so value continence and self-control and stick to an unpopular doctrine even when technology has made it seemingly irrelevant.
I have known families who have had children young while the parents were still in school, or have unsteady employment at low pay and eight children or something like that. These families have gotten a lot of welfare assistance from the ward. Of course, my small family, with only one child born after I started my “career,” has also had to rely on welfare assistance from the ward. So there are no guarantees. You can try to make sure you’ll be self-reliant and still need help, and that can actually be a blessing, to help you humble yourself and not look down on the big families that always seem to need help and whose children always seem to have discipline problems to boot. It is not for me to judge them, but it is easy to: what’s wrong with them — can’t they see how irresponsible it is to bring so many children into a household that doesn’t produce the resources to take care of them?
On the other hand: what inspiring faith they have, to live according to the dictates of their conscience, even if they fail to take care of their children all on their own.
Self-reliance is a tricky concept. In the total analysis nobody can ever be truly self-reliant. But American opinions do tend to look on even Church welfare recipients as ne’er-do-wells and drains, at least such was my perception before I had to get it myself. It is true there are moochers and abusers even in “the Lord’s way.” But that’s another story. It is not for me to judge a family for being crazy enough to have too many children or have them too young. Better for me to cultivate respect for their courage, all the more so since we never felt that we could do that. We acted by what we felt was right and prudent. If the Church were living closer to the intent of the Law of Consecration I would have felt ourselves with less reason to wait.
It is also true that the men who I have heard or read saying “just let the children come” raised (or “reared” – how come they always use that word? Every time I hear or read about rearing children I think of diapers and spankings, maybe they do too and that’s why they use it?) — I say, it’s true they raised their children in a different time. And these are also the
menwe’re talking about here, and during the child-raising years of most GA’s, the culture still held women subservient and demanded their self-sacrifice. Not to mention that the men who are called as GAs do tend to be wealthier men who have been able to bring home enough money for their wives to raise their children comfortably. It is a beautiful concept: a young family, husband and wife both sacrificing to raise children with the proper care, confident that their needs can be met through cooperation should their individual efforts fall short, able to draw on support from extended family and community for all their tasks of tending children and managing households. The atomistic private domesticity cult that the Victorian age saddled us with has, in my opinion, more responsibility for shrinking families than women awakening to develop their talents outside the nursery.
Even so, women have been the ones who have promoted birth control, and it started not from selfishness but to save women’s lives.
I’m rambling. Good night.
Replying after two months — hope that doesn’t get me too many boos. Old-Timer wrote:I don’t believe that he [Jesus] was celibate, and I believe he probably was married. Count the days of his life of which we have a record of any kind. It’s interesting and instructive. We know next to nothing of his life outside of his ministry – and very, very little of it even within the three years of that ministry.
I also think there is a very good argument to be made that Paul was a celibate homosexual – that being attracted to other men was the “thorn of his flesh” to which he referred. Yes, that’s blatant speculation and absolutely heterodox, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable guess. I certainly wouldn’t preach it or try to get others to believe it, but it’s hard to say it’s an impossibility – and it makes as much sense as just about any other option.
I have at times believed very strongly that Jesus was married, and I know it’s a pretty popular (what to call it? folk tenet?) within the Church, at least from where I see. There’s that famous Gnostic gospel which I’m too lazy to look up about Him kissing Mary M. I’m ok with the idea, but I’m also ok with the notion that His superhuman mission could have kept Him celibate.
And I still give a lot of credit to the idea about Paul; it makes sense to me.
I know other threads have touched on celibacy in the context of SSA and been locked, and I don’t know if it would be useful to start a thread focusing purely on celibacy. It seems to me that Mormons have been pretty smug about not believing in celibacy, looking down our noses at those Catholics who don’t respect sex. But might it not be more supportive of those with SSA who do choose to live celibate lives to recognize a virtue in celibacy and praise it?
(I suddenly recall visiting a celibate couple: a Carmelite monk and a Sister of Mercy who lived together in Mexico helping political refugees. They were old, but had lived together for a long time. Their neighbor thought they were married!)
I’ve come to the conviction that the attitude that everyone has the God-given inalienable right — maybe even duty — to find someone to swive is a product of an affluent and spoiled generation that feels entitled to more than its rightful share of Lehi’s famous joy. I browsed a book about celibacy and one of the authors reported how people who honestly choose celibate lives often get a lot of flak for it — and I don’t remember it saying anything about SSA Mormons. I wish I could remember more clearly a quote from someone who gave support to people who wanted to live celibately: “you don’t ever have to ****. Don’t ever let anyone tell you differently.”
The FAQ at asexuality.org is an interesting read with this in mind.
Now, if there were more sincere and open admiration and praise in the Church for celibacy as a choice that anyone can make — if there were open praise for those who take it up by preference, then those who feel they must take it up as a cross could also feel better supported in that.
This is nice to read about the Catholics. I remember reading a similar proposition by old Hugh. I think what he wrote was that man becomes man when he starts keeping a record. I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve read by Jung about the collective unconscious and how it has developed, in relation to the concept of forming humans from the earth and then putting their spirits into them. It’s fascinating to me that we have the Adam and Eve story told so blatantly mythologically in the Temple – the ritual doesn’t scan as factual history at all. The Adam and Eve story is a very useful story, maybe even more powerful when considered as a guiding myth/metaphor, discarding any insistence that it has to be held as fact. I wonder if it’s only the Book of Moses that has kept such a strong commitment to the idea of a literal single pair of progenitors for all of humanity.
Not even really the Book of Moses, but a literalist interpretation of it, ignoring the Lord’s very interesting words “true even as I will.”
Thanks for this post. I had a really good relationship with a brother-in-law until about six years ago when we got into a political argument, and although we said sorry and stopped arguing I still don’t think it’s fully healed. There are many in my family who express opinions I disagree with, some of them I think are dangerous and abhorrent (the opinions). I’ve come to a similar conclusion to yours: look to the things I admire about and can learn from them. I’ve recently moved, and in our new ward there are a lot of those attitudes that I think are misguided and in some cases harmful when voted on. I have resolved not to get drawn into political discussions in this ward, because I’d rather gain people’s trust so that I can work with them on positive things.
Roy wrote:I see your point R&B, but to outlaw certain forms of marriage because we believe that the participants might otherwise be denied certain benefits from not living the “ideal” form of marriage – is quite a stretch.
I guess I’d better state clearly that I don’t see much if any point of trying to outlaw gay marriage where human laws are concerned; I think the horse has kind of left the barn on that one. I’m dealing with the matter strictly in terms of what the Church would recognize and seal in the Temple.
Quote:If we were to protest cohabitation, or children born out of wedlock, or people that marry too young or without getting to adequately know each other or without taking a required compatibility test, with the same fervor as Gay marriage – we would be marginalized to the fringe. Whereas, when we protest Gay marriage we are merely being conservative.
It would be nice if the Church leadership made the volume equal on their protests against each of these. I have seen plenty of protest against cohabitation and unwed parenting, but I grant it might not be as strong as the protest against gay marriage lately. And it would be quite refreshing to hear more against marrying too young etc. Personally, I wish we had the collective nerve to marginalize ourselves to the fringe. The way we always hear about “the world’s standards change but we won’t budge” then all the PR stuff to try to get everyone to like us really looks to me like wanting to have it both ways.
Quote:for individuals that find themselves in these situations/personal realities – what are we to do with them? or rather – how are we to treat these, our Brothers and Sisters?
I repeat: if Jesus could live a life of freakishness where the sexual norm is concerned, then we should be able to find places for others who also must for different reasons. Is it our lingering anti-Catholicism that creates the feeling that asking people to live celibate lives is subjecting them to evil persecution? Or is it our Mormon fondness for crying “persecution!” whenever someone gives us a hard time? Maybe if Buddhism continues to be so popular in American society then celibacy will lose its reputation as such a horrible thing . . . no, that would take Buddhism being adopted more seriously rather than as a hipster affectation.
Old-Timer wrote:Are you under the impression that garments are to be worn during sex?
Heck no. But they’re so utilitarian, and even when one is able to act on your proposed strategy there’s always that instruction lurking: put them back on as soon as possible. You can’t ever reach the free expression or ease that you may wish for.
Not that I’m even saying that’s wrong: just because I don’t like something or find it disappointing doesn’t make it wrong. Maybe the Law of Chastity is just a more merciful way of making clear the impossibility of sexual satisfaction and keeping us from getting too addicted to something that can be a lot like a drug.
Assuming the worst — that sexual satisfaction is impossible, and that frustration is a continuum where everyone occupies a spot — is something of a defense mechanism. To truly believe that it was possible to reach fulfillment of these desires in this life would make keeping covenants intolerable. It would require accepting the notion that Alma’s “wickedness never was happiness” was 180 degrees off, and I have trouble enough putting faith in that maxim already.
