A Five Hour Affair

It occurred to me yesterday why some Mormons (me in particular) might always feel so harried during the weekend. It is the way we interpret Sabbath observance. We try and cram every task that needs to be finished into Friday night and Saturday and because Sunday is so wrapped up in going to church, we don’t really get a sense of rest during the weekend.

When I get back to my house after a week of work, I just want to camp out in my house and not leave for a day to gather my thoughts and relax. My wife, on the other hand, wants to GET OUT at any cost, she having been housebound most of the week with the kids. We are forced to try and reconcile both of our needs on Saturday because of the way the Mormon Sabbath is run.

Both of us know that nothing can be done on a day we go to church, no purchases, no going out to eat, NOTHING. This is particularly true this year when we are on an early afternoon schedule. We spend half the morning just waiting to get ready for church, then most of the afternoon inside a building in church meetings. This means a whole day is squandered because of our church attendance, for what reason!?!

Sacrament Meeting is an utter waste, as we spend a majority of it entertaining the kids and keeping them from disrupting the meeting. My wife and I never bother attending Sunday School, although I don’t suspect she thinks I am intentionally skipping because the content is worthless to me. The last hour is wasted in Elders’ Quorum, which I only value to be with the other men. Lately, however, I have been somewhat intentionally isolating myself from everyone, knowing that there is no way I can tactfully participate in the conversation because alternate viewpoints are not really wanted, and I have no real original points anyway.

WHY do we go through this drudgery? Getting to church is a FIVE HOUR affair, what with preparation time. FIVE FREAKING HOURS I could spend actually enjoying my weekend or accomplishing something! This is just one more reason I will find reasons to be away every Sunday. I can’t WAIT to get out camping!

Searching For Scandal

As part of a joint stake Young Men and Young Women’s council, one of the women leaders brought up what she obviously felt was a breach of the Word of Wisdom by some of the youth.

Currently, there is a fad involving certain carbonated drinks that have been marketed as “energy” drinks. These drinks are anything but healthy, containing inordinate amounts of caffeine, sugar and God only knows what else. I can’t defend them on a health note, but no definitive ruling has ever been made against them by LDS authorities and they easily fall into the gray area surrounding all caffeinated soda drinks. One of my Young Men colleagues brought this up, and I followed up with a comment stating that these types of things are best left up to the personal Word of Wisdom interpretation in any given household, not imposed by us as leaders.

I could tell this woman was surprised by our reactions. She is a sweet lady, but probably really naïve to the many different ways that standards are believed and implemented by different Mormon households.

Later in a side conversation, another of my Young Men compatriots mentioned that he was appalled that many kids were showing up to classes in high school with lattes, and what bad parents they must have to allow such outrageous behavior in their teenagers. As if lattes were such a harmful abusive substance that teenagers should have restricted access to them! I then found I was in the odd situation of having to defend coffee drinkers.

I found it strange to be out of sync with some of the judgments that were being passed on people. I wonder if my friend found it weird that I refused to condemn such actions. As I have been among those who drink coffee for six months now, I now find the propensity among Mormons to find scandal in beverage choices to be highly amusing. I felt like a disconnected outsider looking in and observing strange behavior in this species of human called Mormons.

Why do the LDS continue to look for ways to be scandalized by behavior most adults find absolutely normal?

Making Mormon Meetings Worth Something

I find myself wanting to see how many weeks out of the year I can stay away from Sunday church meetings. It’s not for any sort of enmity I feel towards those who I see when I do attend; it has more to do with the sheer boredom I feel with what is taught there. It seems that no one questions official policy and or the official sanitized version of the history. I wonder, am I the only one with this dry of a personality that would actually WANT to learn about what made this church the way it is?

As it is, I only attend Sacrament Meeting and Elders’ Quorum. In Sacrament, I spend a majority of the time trying to keep the kids quiet and satisfied and I hardly bother to pay attention to whichever person is reading the dull General Authority quotes over the pulpit that day. My wife and I haven’t been to Sunday School in years, and I don’t know if I could even stomach it now with my new perspectives on the authorship and historicity of the Book of Mormon. For the last little while, we have been able to use the excuse of a nursing baby (and an uninteresting teacher).

In Elders’ Quorum, I mostly keep quiet. I am this way about most meetings in life anyway, but Elders’ Quorum in particular. I can’t offer anything to the discussion. I feel like most people are there to hear their own feelings reflected back at them, not to discuss anything new. I can’t grow with anything I learn there, and most of what is discussed is just covering ground that I have covered over and over in my own study, though I have done it with much more depth and breadth. This year, with the subject being Joseph Smith, you’d think there would be something that a person like me could say, but I am reminded that no one would want to hear it.

My intent this year is to try and attend church as few weeks as possible and to bend as many of the cultural Mormon customs as I can. This will mean finding more opportunities to be gone from home on the weekend. It will mean finding fun things to do on Sunday that do not involve putting on a shirt and tie and sitting for three hours in dreary meetings. Or it may mean that if I am there in the meetings, I will make an effort to nourish existing friendships rather than bother with actually being in a meeting.

Sometimes, I feel like a hypocrite just for even attending. I present the acceptable, unified front with the members of my ward on the outside, yet inside I am miles away from them. Chances are, there are many more people like me, but the format of Sunday meetings is such that I don’t get the opportunity to know and understand people on anything more than a general level. It almost feels like a cold, corporate environment where we only interact in a superficial professional way. Lame.

I really want more out of my interaction with people at church, a real connection to them, like I had with my friends when I was a kid. I don’t want the sanitized politically correct version they present to the Mormon community. Having a real connection would make my participation at church worth something to me.