Tomorrow I’ll spend all morning and afternoon listening to a bunch of men and women, no one younger than 60, talking about spirituality. Then I’ll do it again on Sunday.
And I’m really looking forward to it.
I consider myself a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I go to church nearly every Sunday, I read my scriptures and pray daily, I devote my time to working with teenage girls. But I think I’m an exception among my peers because I’m in no way shape or form sheltered.
Mormons are notoriously square. Whenever South Park makes a Mormon joke, I have to laugh because they’re usually right. (Except that it costs money to get married in the temple. It doesn’t. And that’s really a blaspheme of the highest order and if you ever meet these guys in public you should watch out for stray bolts of lightening.) Same when I read Dooce. She doesn’t want the church in her life so she’s a little more dismissive than I am, but she’s usually pretty dead on about the eccentricities of the culture.
A lot of members try to remain pure by completely shutting themselves off from the world. I suppose it works in some ways. If you outlaw drinking in your county then you probably won’t be able to indulge in that temptation. But it also causes many many other problems. Like pride. And self-righteousness. And unfair judgment. And this makes me CRAZY.
As an educated woman, a feminist, and a democrat, I still have no problems practicing my faith. There is no cognitive dissonance for me, no gap between my two sets of beliefs that I go around ignoring. There are however, major problems within the culture of these wacky people. I’ve been around the block enough to know that we’re all just trying to get through this crazy old world and whatever helps you sleep at night is OK for now. I figure there are so many hateful and indignant people out there explaining what is a sin, that I’ll just be the person who loves. I don’t think there’s a gay person alive who isn’t aware that they are committing a sin in the eyes of many, so can’t we back off of that just a skosh? I think we’ve got the hate the sin part down, shouldn’t we work on loving the sinner? There’s a reason why so many people dismiss that as self-righteous, because most people don’t do it. I believe in Christ and I want to be His disciple. So I’ll let God do the judging and I’ll just be kind to people. It’s a radical concept, I know.