On Sunday night I attended a fireside production of Woman at the Well that a group of girls in my ward has been working on putting together for several months now. I'm not really a Kenneth Cope fan, but I had friends who were singing and I attended to support them.
The first thing I noticed when I opened the program was the Young Women theme printed on the left side of the paper. Immediately I moaned to my roommate, "Oh, I hope they don't make us stand up and recite this!" But sure enough, halfway through, just before all the cast members came together to sing "Daughters," the sister in charge of the evening stood at the front and announced: "And now, sisters, let us unite our voices in reaffirming our committment," or something along those lines. I dutifully stood with all the other girls in the room and recited the theme and stumbled over the "strengthen home and family" line just like nearly everyone else in the room, and resented every minute of it.
Which made me wonder why I felt resentful in the first place.
It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with the Young Women theme. There's some great stuff in it, if you actually think about what you're saying. I certainly didn't think anything of standing and reciting it every week when I was a teenager. But I sort of feel like I'm past that now. Not in an "I'm too old for this" sort of way, but in the fact that my committment runs deeper than a memorized list, my friendship and unity with the other women in the room lies deeper than the shared experience of reciting a few words. With all that I've learned in the x number of years since I "graduated" from the Young Women program, the recitation now seems like a superficial reflection of values that should not be superficial.
When I first joined my current BYU ward some eighteen months ago, the stake Relief Society was encouraging the ward Relief Societies to learn the Relief Society theme and to recite it at the beginning of every meeting. I think my own ward RS leadership quiety overlooked this borderline mandatory suggestion. What this means is that at stake meetings, instead of making the girls stand up to recite the Young Women theme, they make us stand and recite the Relief Society theme, and since this theme is about five times as long as the Young Women theme it just feels ridiculously drawn out. Of course, no one in my ward knows it (at least not by heart) and so we just all stand patiently and listen and think happy thoughts about our ward Relief Society presidency who thankfully never made us waste five minutes of our already-too-short Sunday meeting time exercising the rote memorization part of our brain (we get enough of that during the school week!).
But there are women who find these things meaningful, who are filled with joy just listening to young adult women stand and recite together what they learned in their youth, or who take pleasure standing and uniting their voices with everyone else. Quite honestly, sometimes I wish I could be like that. I so often hold myself aloof from many LDS cultural practices, and sometimes I just want to feel things more deeply. I want to feel elation when we all stand up and speak these words together. I want to be brought to tears by Kenneth Cope and Michael McLean, to read mainstream LDS fiction and feel uplifted and enlightened, to fall in love with Greg Olson paintings. I want to bear testimony that nature is so beautiful that there could not possibly be any other explanation than the work of a Supreme Being, and really mean it.
But although sometimes I am bothered by the fact that I hold myself aloof from LDS culture, doing so has also helped me to recognize that my faith is deep. I read a statement of testimony from my freshman year journal the other day, about why I knew the gospel was true, and I thought with a pang of regret that the statement was no longer applicable. That particular statement no longer held up for me and I was sort of disturbed to realize this, and wondered what had happened to my faith in the intervening years. And then I realized that if the foundations of my earlier faith had been shaken, it had only revealed that there is something much stronger underneath. Because I still believe, and I believe deeply, and I know better today than I knew x years ago how God works in my life and how He guides and supports my understanding.
And I have every reason to believe that this kind of progress will continue.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I for one feel very estranged from LDS pop culture, but I have no regrets. It's fine with me if Church-related merchandise helps other people feel more connected to the gospel, but it doesn't add anything for me. In fact, I loathe some of the inferior music/fiction/artwork just because some of it is such bunk but sells simply because is it designated LDS. Some of the artists are quite talented, but none of them really strike me except earlier ones like Minerva Teichert and Avard Fairbanks. And I don't recognize any of the names. I'm always like, "Greg who?" Good thing none of it is really part of the church. When we sustain our leaders in conference, we don't say, "I sustain the Work and the Glory as the best series ever." I hope nobody's testimony is entirely based on these extra-doctrinal items, though. I always think it would be better for me to spend more time on the scriptures or the Ensign than to read what some non-apostle thinks about the scriptures. But that's just me. The great thing about the gospel is that it's personal, and perhaps others really are touched by the Spirit though these avenues. I'm just glad that the Church is complete in and of itself.
Part of me has this sort of aversion to popular LDS culture, as though it's a "fake" version of the Spirit. But this attitude makes me feel like I'm somehow inherently better than other people because I don't succumb to the emotional/cultural influences and base my testimony upon that which is not really essential to the gospel. I hate this feeling of superiority, I really do, because I don't think I am superior to other people. And so I have given this matter a lot of thought, and I have realized that, on the one hand, just like you said, we need to make sure our testimony is founded on what is essential, not on what is cultural. But on the other hand, the cultural objects and practices certainly can bring true spiritual principles to remembrance. Kenneth Cope may not "do it" for me, but that doesn't mean that other people cannot be spiritually uplifted. Their associations are just different from my associations, and people can learn and grow and find affirmation to their testimonies through these routes as well. The important thing is that our foundations are the same, even if the manifestations are not, if that makes sense...Sorry I keep rambling about this - I'm not sure all these thoughts are coherent, but it's something that's been on my mind a lot.
I am glad that I'm not the only one who feels that way. A lot of your comments really hit the nail on the head for me.
I had that problem when they asked us to do the mission of the Aaronic Priesthood back home. We started referring to it as our "brainwashing," and after a while the leaders didn't make us do it anymore.
Post a Comment