I realized today I have come to a point in my life where I take all of my notes in the same notebook. Spiritual thoughts, class notes, story ideas, personal musings--they all go in the same notebook, because I see them as being all part of the same thing. I see this as a sign that my life is approaching what I want it to be. I see it as a sign that I am becoming a person of greater integrity, wholeness. But who knows?
A couple of weeks ago I started bringing this notebook to church, which I realize is a popular thing to do but I haven't actually done it much. But in my notebook, unfortunately, I am not waiting to record inspiring quotes I hear at church. My plan was to draw a chart of three columns: in one I listed things I liked, in one I listed things I disliked, and in one I listed things I am just wondering about.
I felt the need to do this because I feel that attending church has become an increasingly stressful experience for me. In order to fully address this, I guess I need to backtrack a little bit. Part of the reason I am writing this post is to update you on the Church problem that I brought up many months ago. It's something I've wanted to bring up with you when we chat, but it's always the most awkward thing to address for some reason, and on top of that my thoughts on the subject are always so jumbled that I feel like I would either talk for five hours about it or I wouldn't be able to come up with anything to say at all. So this post is my attempt to update you on where I'm at, I suppose.
So, since this began with Derek, I'll start with him. He has developed something of an obsession with post-Mormon (that's the best word I can use to categorize all of these) podcasts, blogs, etc. And that used to bother me. But I'm becoming okay with it. (But even that kind of worries me? Ha ha). We still go to church every week, we still say our prayers together every night, nothing really externally has changed at all. I don't think he plans to leave the Church, but who really knows what will happen. I have no intention of leaving the Church either! But basically, I've come to a place where I feel like I can't possibly know if it is true. I hope it is, and I want it to be true (most of it). I honestly feel like I have had spiritual experiences that confirm this stuff to me, but on the other hand I realize that many people in many traditions have had similar confirming experiences and that my upbringing has been such that I'm primed to interpret my feelings as spiritual experiences. Nevertheless, I feel like if God is real, and He is going to talk to me, it's probably going to be through spiritual experiences, so it's not very fair of me to discount the ones I've already had. Basically, I'm okay with the idea that this Church stuff might mostly be made up--that alone would not be reason for me to leave it behind. I feel like it's given me enough good in my life that it definitely isn't worth it to leave it behind. Also, I figure that even if all religions are equally true/false, this is the one that's "mine" and it would be good for me to "bloom where I am planted" and try to give to/get from this tradition as much good as I can, and I can feel fine with that.
But there are scary things that come with this. Mainly, children. I would be okay with raising my children in exactly the way that I was raised and then letting them come to the point in their adulthood that I have come to now. What I am afraid of doing is raising them in this relativistic wishy-washy way that teaches them it doesn't really matter whether you believe in God and what you choose because it's allllll good. Because more than anything, I just want them to know that it does MATTER a LOT. And they can choose their own path or whatever as long as they've put a ton of thought and effort into it. But how are you supposed to do that??
Also, death. In the past, I have pondered for a brief instant the concept of eternity and then backed off, as if I were coming around the edge of a doorway and, seeing that that doorway leads to another doorway which leads to another and another and an infinite sequence of doorways, get frightened and recede back past the edge of the first doorway (does that make sense?), because it's frightening. Because to think about a life without an ending is mind-boggling. Now, the opposite is a very real possibility for me: what if this really is ALL there is? What if when I die I really just don't exist anymore? And I'll never see anyone I knew ever again and I'll never even think about them because I just won't BE? This is, like, the most cliche existential worry. And yet I have honestly never considered it until now. Also, it is crazy to think that so many people just expect this. Why do they even attempt anything in their lives? What is the point? (How can I express this without cliches???)
Anyway... back to the notebook. My very first Sunday with the notebook, I came to a conclusion of sorts that isn't actually helpful at all. But it makes these two things fit together for me: 1) God is real and wants us to learn from our life experiences, and 2) the Church is wrong in many regards, or at least unhelpful, and other churches could be just as true. I mentioned earlier that church has become a stressful experience for me recently; I expected therefore that my "dislike" column would get fuller than my "like" column. Nevertheless, I found myself putting things in my "like" column that I wouldn't have expected--things besides the obvious "service" or something. I wrote down things like "repentance/continual improvement" and "the idea of trusting in something (God) outside of yourself." And yet at the same time I realized that these very things could be negatives--for example, a focus on repentance could quickly lead to overwhelming guilt or feelings of inadequacy. And it connected with an epiphany of sorts I'd had months ago, the last time I went to the temple. Okay, first, who knows if Adam and Eve were real. Who cares. It's a great story. And if it's real and/or the story was inspired by God, how interesting that the lesson of the very first story in Judeo-Christian scripture is "Sometimes you have to break a commandment." So here's what I was thinking. If the purpose of life was to learn to do what's right and not to do what's wrong, God could have presented us all with a two-column chart, with one column labeled "Right" and one column labeled "Wrong," and all the actions would be in one of the columns, and then we would know. But instead, we have to live life, right? And in the process, we learn that things that are sometimes right are at other times wrong, and things that are sometimes right are at other times wrong, and the only way to learn this is by experience, and maybe actually you'll never learn which is which but at least you'll learn that it's hard to tell which is which. And therefore, maybe the Church not only isn't perfect but it CAN'T be perfect and never will be, and sometimes it's not even good, because its purpose is just to provide us with a lot of dilemmas where we have to choose between "principles" and people and how to strike a balance between everything, and that's also the purpose of every church and every other organization and every thing in the world.
Anyway, I like this idea, even though, like I said, it really doesn't help anything.
Thanks for reading; you're the best.
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