This is a pseudo-psychologico-religious post, so if you don’t like thinking about stuff like that, you can hang up now.
For those not of the LDS faith, I should tell you that there is a relatively common phenomenon in our church, and that is guilt. I expect that is not unique to us as a people, that most Christian religions have that in common, but as I am and have always been a Mormon, I can only tell you about the view from in here, which, let me say, is often somewhat odd.
But I had a thought today that I wanted to share.
Much of the guilt centers around the idea that we have too many laws and rules and that nobody could possibly be expected to live up to all of them. This is silly on several levels, but let’s just set that over there for a second. Mothers – and this particular kind of guilt is heavily female – see that they are up all night with the baby, then up all day with the other children trying to keep the house clean, then they cook most of the meals, wash dishes, battle with the kids to get them to bed, grab a couple hours of sleep and off they go again. They’re tired, and frustrated, and then they go to church and someone – this kind of insensitivity is almost exclusively male – tells them they should be going to the temple, grinding their own wheat, spending an hour a day in contemplation of the scriptures, baking bread for widows and orphans, volunteering in the community, and they should do all this with a cheerful heart and a smile.
See? Feeling good? No?
Well, there are a couple of things here that could make the problem more manageable. First, for many of the women I know that get into this guilt trap, at least a significant part of the guilt relates to what other women are perceived as doing, i.e. that they are doing better at all this stuff than we are. Two things here: 1. They aren’t. 2. Who cares? So let’s just dispose of that first one right now. God doesn’t care about how they’re doing relative to you. There is no Top 25 for human performance. There’s nobody to impress. Just stop it.
Second, let me use an analogy: suppose you have a child going into high school. He’s been a good student, done pretty well, you know, a B here and there, maybe a C, but nothing terrible. For the most part, coming along, handling the work and learning things. Then he gets to high school. All of a sudden those cute two-paragraph papers don’t work any more. The wonderful theorems he learned in math are great, but they’re not all that applicable to pre-calculus. New rules of behavior. New ideas. More homework. It’s hard.
News flash: it IS hard. But which of us would expect that child to feel GUILTY for not understanding how to calculate arctangents? Frustrated, sometimes, yes (although that is also silly), but guilty?
And since that is exactly what we are going through here, why should we feel guilty? Truth is, you should be doing whatever you can to improve, to learn new things, to get better. You’re not ever going to arrive, you know, not in this life. There isn’t ever going to be a time when you’re going to look back and say “yep, I did it all.” The more you can do, the more there is to do. That’s the way of things.
And thank a gracious God it is so.
You probably should be baking cookies for the neighbors and you probably should be reading the scriptures more and you probably should be kinder and more loving to your family. The math you’re doing now, the papers you’re writing for this class, they’re harder than the ones you were writing before. You might not be very good at writing them just yet. So what? The idea is not to acheive, as if you were going to perform some act of galactic significance, but to become, because the person you are growing into through this process is worth all the matter in the universe. If you were the only one here, it would still have been worth the act of creation just to produce you.
Is it any wonder, then, that we are constantly urged to greater heights? And why should we feel guilty that we have not yet attained them?
Tags: religion
Posted on Tuesday, 21st April 2009 by chrisjones
Posted in General | Comments (5)
April 21st, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Very true and very touching. Thanks for the great post! It brightened my day.
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:39 am
You’re right, of course you’re right, we all know you’re right. But we feel guilty anyway. And now I feel guilty for feeling guilty. Thanks a lot.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I feel so guilty for having read this on work time
December 26th, 2011 at 11:56 pm
At last some rtaionliaty in our little debate.
December 29th, 2011 at 3:55 am
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