Graham and I are having a conversation under the "Greetings" blog that I'd like to bring into focus, because it's a topic that has for a long time been very important to me. Check Graham's last post about training. Here is my response:
Logically speaking (and in reality, I think), a product (training) orientation can never lead to wholeness, which is what "perfection" is. I'm happy that the "new" annotated LDS scriptures (the ones you all grew up with) contain in the footnote to Matthew 5:48 an explanation of "perfect" as it would have been understood in a 1611 translation of teleios into English: "complete, finished, fully developed." (Think teleology, that which something is fundamentally, in and of itself. Think whole number; the Latin equivalent is integer; think integrity.) And think about this in the context of D&C 67:13: "Ye are not able to abide the presence of God now, neither the ministering of angels; wherefore, continue in patience until ye are perfected." Made whole, made what you fundamentally are, without that which holds you from perfection, constrains, tempts, pollutes you, holds you back, draws you away. Made complete, increased in capacity and then filled with the knowledge, power, and will to goodness that makes you (like) God.
The problem with a checklist/training/product orientation is that you CANNOT be perfected (made whole) that way. It's an impatient, self-directed, finite, never-ending process looking outside itself, toward an end, a goal, a product. If you proceed in increments (think Zeno's arrow), there will always be another increment. Perfection can't be linear. Infinity isn't linear. That's Greek thinking, with the head. The Hebrew thinking, with the heart, is circular. All truth is circumscribed into one great whole. As a man thinketh in his heart, so IS he. It can happen in a moment for the person prepared, as that person completely submits to the will of God and becomes a new creature in Christ, whole. And it can be lost in an instant, as we turn from the center (Christ) and veer off on a tangent. This is a process, to be sure, but involving yielding not striving, one with which we must have patience, working out our salvation with fear (awe) and trembling, before the Lord. While we are in mortality, we'll never finish, it will never "hold" (unless we have our callings and elections "made sure" by the presence of the Lord Himself). But if we are experienced in the process, we are ready at the end of mortality to enter into the Rest of the Lord, to come into His presence and know His Glory.
This is why charity (love, an emotion/will/capacity, not a series of actions) is the greatest of all the spiritual gifts, and the one without which, in the end, we are "nothing," all our actions being (in) vain. Wholeness implies a condition/state of being. God is (has become) LOVE. He is no-thing other. He acts only out of wholeness, and having no disposition to do evil, he can only do good. That is perfection.
Here's something: We don't learn "things" in the temple. We learn a way of being. Think of how your (one's, my) problem with your temper utterly vanishes in certain contexts. Instantly. God doesn't get up in the morning and say, Wow, Lucifer really makes me angry, so I'd better get that under better control. God is what he does. (Does what he is.) Because he is love. I don't think this is like hitting the perfect tennis ball without thought because I have trained myself over and over again to do it. It's that my whole body is filled with light, and there is no darkness in me. Missing the ball is not an option. Nor is missing anything else, regardless of whether I have ever tried it before.
I can't stress enough how important this is. Is has taken me most of my adult life to shake off the shackles of accomplishment, striving, the training/product mentality that got me where I am today (and I'm glad of it) and in the meantime plunged me into a depression I couldn't pray myself out of. When there was no one else to measure myself against, I would measure myself against myself. It was never enough. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I didn't.
I have been studying this matter since I was a 19-year-old freshman. That's more than 40 years now. When my big crash came (just under 25 years ago, just after my adorable Mikey was born), I had already been pondering love and accomplishment for many years. In the old days before these new editions of scriptures were produced, without a reliable concordance, I had to go through the Standard Works line-by-line to find all the references to love. So I understood the thing intellectually pretty well before the stresses of striving for perfection (6 kids in 9 years and no report card to tell me how I was doing) got me. I pondered taking drugs for the depression, as the doctor ordered. But instead, through a combination of hard work that I called "scrupulous mental hygiene" and a re-ordering of my understanding of God, I came out of it. After about 15 years.
Sounds like training, doesn't it? I re-trained my brain. So this is the sense in which you are surely right, Graham. I have treated this issue at some length elsewhere, as some of you already know. In a nutshell, it's a mortal paradox. We live in a time-bound sphere in which scarcity makes competition necessary. And we are aiming for eternity, where abundance makes competition pure evil.
I'll leave you with that for now. I have to go mow the back lawn before it rains. AGAIN!
Love to all on a Monday morning!
P.S. Could it be that Graham and I are merely exhibiting the typical masculine/feminine, Greek/Hebraic, spear/vessel, linear/circular, mechanical/organic polar modes of thinking about the same thing, both of which modes are necessary to the comprehending of Reality? (The kind of "opposition" in all things ... note not rival but necessary ... that "must needs be"?) The "proving" of which contraries will yield ... eventually, finally ... Truth? (Which is ultimately experiential, contextual, not factual?) Hey, hey!
It's all in the process. The means doesn't justify the end, it IS the end! Or is this just another example of my mode at work? Can I no longer even think outside of it? Wait, but I AM thinking, and striving. Hm.
The problem is that I'm back inside blogging because I couldn't get the lawn mower started, so I have to wait until my husband comes home and figures it out. I lack both experience with and information about this mower. It's not that I'm a girl; it's that I'm lawn-mower challenged. Actually, it IS that I'm a girl and am mowing the lawn only for exercise. I certainly did mow as many lawns in my youth as my brother did, but since I've had husband and sons ....
Never mind.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, my way of thinking isn't a method. It isn't a better way to do anything. It's a description of reality (as I see it). I'd start answering your question by asking this, Why do you yell at your kids? Do you know why? Do you want to yell at them? Are you sure? I'd work on changing desire (heart), and the yelling will take care of itself.
ReplyDeleteI happen to have particular experience with this very thing, and my yelling stopped precisely at the moment I learned all the other stuff. (See the result in an essay I wrote at the time, "Respite for a Heretic, Jesus Christ and the Language of Desire.")
Trying to stop yelling at my kids by improving myself in the yelling department never worked. But one day Lynn Scorseby (I mention him by name because I remember that you liked him as a teacher) said to me, "It's time to give up your anger at your children." I was mightily affronted, very very angry at his suggestion that my anger was a choice, something I could just "give up." I told him that my children understood my anger, which was provoked and therefore not my fault. My husband's anger, on the other hand .... Lynn just looked at me like I was the idiot I actually was.
As I pondered this outrageous suggestion during the course of a week in which I had several, I can only call them revelations, about other matters that were on my mind, I suddenly, I mean SUDDENLY, knew Lynn was right. And IMMEDIATELY, something in me changed. (An example of being compelled to be humble?) And from that moment until this I have never felt the kind of anger with my children that once caused me to "yell" at them. (I'm hoping that most of them don't even remember the old yelling mama.) Well, okay, except for a couple of arguments with my brilliant, adorable youngest child when he was a teenager, but anyone who has been following this blog can understand THAT! And that was actually more vigorous expression than actual yelling.
All I can say is that the quality of my parenting changed instantly, and permanently, when my understanding shifted. Had I somehow made way for the Spirit to work in me? Maybe that's another way to say it. Because I'm still working on my personality, my tendency to criticize, my perfectionism that leads to irritability, all those things that I'll probably struggle with till I die. I struggle with characteristics. But when I saw in a blinding, Scoresby-induced, and God-given flash that my children are not my adversaries and that I must never raise my voice to them in anger, it simply became impossible for me to do it anymore. I suddenly received the patience, as if tapping into a well in myself, to regard them tenderly at all times. Yes, yes, I have been upset, impatient, frustrated, tired. But I stopped yelling. Period. For good.
The post isn't over your head, Graham. I know your head. It's just a lost of condensed thought representing a long trail ... This is a bad metaphor I'm not going to try to fix. Here's another way into it, paraphrased from a paper I wrote a while back:
On 15 November 1851 John Taylor, who would become the third president of the Church, published an account of an exchange reported to have occurred some years before in Nauvoo between Joseph Smith and a member of the Illinois legislature, identified by one witness to the event as Judge Stephen A. Douglas. The gentleman “asked Joseph Smith how it was that he was enabled to govern so many people, and to preserve such perfect order; remarking at the same time that it was impossible for them to do it anywhere else. Mr. Smith remarked that it was very easy to do that. ‘How?’ responded to the gentleman; ‘to us it is very difficult.’ Mr. Smith replied, ‘I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.’”
Here's something else. In my view, "learning" to stop yelling at your kids is not the same kind of activity as learning to do well on the LSAT or on the tennis court. It has no "end" or purpose. It is merely a manifestation of a condition or quality.
Honestly, one of the reasons I have come to think as I do about this is because of persistent failure to change myself by training. But ... this is actually a rather complex subject, and I don't mean to be more categorical than need be. Some things need the attention of training, and some us need more of it than others.
But for now I'm going to go try to start that mower again. Clouds loom.
Mower still won't start.
ReplyDeleteOf course, we're not saying here that you, Graham, yell at your children. Sorry if that got fuzzy. You were speaking hypothetically, and I responded with a concrete personal example. Something contextual. And I realize that a psychologist looking at my accoun might say that I am self-deceived, that actually I was shamed into my new and better behavior. Shame, of course, can be a powerful motivator. And pride in accomplishment can maintain shame-induced change. All I can say is that it wasn't like that.