Letting Be

One of the issues that originally brought me to StayLDS was my struggles with the cultural aspects of the Church (the doctrinal and historical stuff not so much). It has puzzled me for years that some of my most painful or frustrating experiences would have been church-related. This board has been helped me process a great deal of this. It’s good to know that others have similar frustrations and (in some cases) even worse experiences to report. I came across the following which is a bit long but I found it tremendously helpful in explaining what happens as we gather in our families, wards and communities. The quote comes from Don Cupitt’s book Above Us Only Sky:

Nevertheless, because we are so sociable we do tend to assume that human beings must be happiest in their most intimate relationships. We want to idealize small face-to-face communities–the family, the village, the congregation, the residential community, the religious society…Often we seek personal happiness through membership of some such ideal community.

…And often we are disappointed, as we discover that the society we have joined is riven by feuding factions, by power struggles, by backbiting and bullying. Perhaps this is particularly true of academic and of religious societies, which have a strong image of themselves as conflict-free, ‘cloistered’, calm and supportive. It seems that Sartre was right: –Hell is other people, and the closer people get to each other, the more they are in danger of getting locked into attitudes of frigid mutual detestation. Religious bodies are especially Hellish in this way.

Why? It seems that in the face of life’s uncertainty, death’s uncertainty, and the instability of all valuations, we feel desperately insecure and threatened. Everyone else feels the same. To alleviate our distress and anxiety, we all try to gain some relative advantage vis-a-vis other human beings. We want power and authority over others, but if that is not readily available, we’ll settle for recognition by them; and if that is not available either, we will settle for respect, the absolute minimum. Unfortunately, all the others seem determined to overvalue themselves and undervalue me. So society becomes…a war by each against everyone else for social dominance and recognition. Everyone is bitterly resentful, eveyone sees himself as a victim of injustice. We join some religious or ethnic liberation group in the hope of finding sweeter and more harmonious relations there, but unfortunately the same conflicts recur.