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The Tipping Point is a sociological theory that believes, Quote:“the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point”
affect life.
I believe Tipping Points are extremely common in Faith Crisis/Transition. I believe we are often unaware we are near a Tipping Point, until after the tip. From there it is hard to nigh impossible to go back.
Each of us here has a particular Tipping Point. A place where balance gets thrown off, where our worst fears win out, and personal angst takes over. For me my Tipping Points come from marginalization. I take seriously religions call to be inclusive. No religion succeeds at it, but in my heart the LDS church should be a leader in that. I can point to dozens of scriptures, parables, and Christ examples to prove my reasoning. Unfortunately no one from Salt Lake calls to get my sublime read on life, so I fight through, waiting and hoping that some one will get the message and start moving us that direction.
Because this is my TP – other things like historicity of something don’t get me that much. I try to comprehend why it’s hard for others, but it just isn’t a concern. But let mine get bumped and Woo-Hee I am riled, incensed, and vent for hours.
What is or are your Tipping Points? How do work through them? What makes them your Tipping Point?
Personal hurt spawned by unmet expectations. Each crisis I’ve had, has had those elements in them. Not faith crisis, not doctrinal problems – but behavior or leaders and members who leave me deeply hurt and disappointed. Those are my tipping points. How to work through them? In the beginning, I don’t think my strategies were healthy. I talked to anyone who would listen, lessened my involvement and stopped serving. I grew bitter and angry inside. I think that marked me further as unsuitable. My wife was very forebearing, which was great, but I really hurt myself in the process. Especially since at that time, I still had a decent testimony.
Now, I think I’ve lowered my expectations for what I can accomplish in the church, and what I expect of other people in any context. I have lessened my involvement and filled my life with other things that I feel much more excited about. I have made preserving my inner peace my objective, not meeting LDS expectations, not necessarily having an eternal family where everyone is “saved” eventually. I don’t live certain commandments and it makes me happier to do so than by living them. I feel tolerant and kind to others in the church, and encourage gospel living in my wife and daughter.
And most of all — time — learning to let time heal wounds. And also, recognizing situations where there is potential to hurt myself. I stay away from those situations. Next time there is a conflict with a certain personality type I have grown to recognize as defiant and vindictive, I will step aside, quit the situations, or give way to their desires, and leave it at that. I avoid the people who have hurt me in the past — this is NOT to hurt them, but to protect my inner peace. I know what my tipping points are, and I do everything I can to prevent them from occurring. And I’ve replaced church service with a lot of other fulfilling things. Both help. Kind of like when you break up with someone — you avoid the hurtful person and situation, and try to fill the void with new experiences — both a defensive move, and a proactive move, simultaneously.
Leader worship. This is a big one for me. Modesty enforcement and body shaming are another one. There are others, but those are ones that popped into my head first. RiverSong14 wrote:Leader worship. This is a big one for me. Modesty enforcement and body shaming are another one. There are others, but those are ones that popped into my head first.
Leadership worship for me is secondary to leaders overstepping and creating the environment where leadership worship will flourish. Just in the last conference we heard, “We CAN NOT lead you astray”. I had to scream when I heard that (I was alone at home).Stupid arguments to justify discrimination Seriously, I can handle different views about almost anything, but stupid justifications tip me.
For me it’s straying for the core truths of the gospel and instead engaging in Pharisaical behaviors and teachings. mom3 wrote:I believe we are often unaware we are near a Tipping Point, until after the tip. From there it is hard to nigh impossible to go back.
Agree. Even though I was tumbling to all kinds of unsavory stuff, I was unprepared for the final….tip. It was in the first part of the bycommonconsent series about Section 132. It talked about the bulk of the “revelation,” and then added this:
Quote:The July 12 revelation was not the end of marriage revelation from Joseph. For instance, he tells Clayton the following on September 15, 1843:
Prest.J. told me he had lately had a new item of law[6] revealed to him in relation to myself. He said the Lord had revealed to him that a man could only take 2 of a family except by express revelation and as I had said I intended to take Lydia he made this known for my benefit. to have more than two in a family was apt to cause wrangles and trouble. He finally asked if I would not give L[ydia] to him I said I would so far as I had any thing to do in it. He requested me to talk to her.[7]
Clayton was married to two Moon sisters and planning to marry a third when Joseph “lately had a new item of law revealed to him,” no third sisters allowed, and, oh, by the way, give Lydia to me? I thought, Are they serious??? The church wants to go to the mat calling this godly? (She didn’t marry him.)
Quote:Each of us here has a particular Tipping Point. A place where balance gets thrown off, where our worst fears win out, and personal angst takes over.
Maybe I’m not in synch with Tipping Point theory, but I define it as the place where I finally got uprighted. The personal angst was gone. With the Moon sisters I realized I could walk away from this with a clear conscience. That’s not a judgment about all the good people who lived polygamy and were born because of polygamy. Just my firm belief that God didn’t command it.
Thanks, mom3.
I think my tipping point is closed minded absolute certainty. When I hear comments putting down other religions with their flaws that are obviously lost truth or broken truth from apostasy or their ignorance to the truth we have in the church as if the church has all truth…I shudder. I have to make comments about our own issues, and that things are not black and white. I can’t help myself. I understand others have testimonies and are certain in their minds they know truth…but I don’t like the way it is verbalized to put others down.
Ann said Quote:
Maybe I’m not in synch with Tipping Point theory, but I define it as the place where I finally got uprighted.As I understand it the Tipping happens when you or your ideology gets pushed off/over. For you polygamy was the Tipping Point and your equilibrium or up righting came from ByCommonConsents piece. As I understand, re-righting or finding a righting is part of the Tipping Theory. Just like after a natural disaster, everything is upheaveled – tipped – finding or creating a balance becomes the next step.
If I have misunderstood you, let me know, I would love to learn from your experience. Most of all I am glad you found hope. There is tremendous power in hope.
Black and white thinking, all or nothing mentality. I have a lot of little ones, dealing with power hungry people, self righteousness, those that demand. Not *my* tipping point but worth mentioning. I walked out of another ward a couple of years ago when a speaker said all callings are divinely inspired.
Now many ARE, but what about when someone selects friends, relatives etc? Or someone who abuses or embezzles?
I simply don’t buy it.
My tipping point was dishonesty and betrayal from the institution I had come to fully trust. I had trouble with historicity and polygamy, but more in the context of the church trying so hard to hide the truth from me for so long. I really feel duped sometimes and it still stings. It has made me know that they don’t have all the answers and that i need to follow my own heart, so there was one blessing that came out of it. My tipping point was the sexual abuse of my daughter & trying to find spiritual answers & comfort. Throughout the process all I seemed to get was numb. (Mentally, emotionally, spiritually)
I couldn’t go through the motions & had to stay away from church for awhile (many years).
Overtime, it has gotten better & my daughter came through the other side.
She is well adjusted, graduated college, teaches, got married & has a son.
Answers to our prayers don’t always come quickly.
I don’t think we are (or can be) completely ready for the trials life will throw at us.
I like to think that I can take whatever life hands me personally.
What I have problems dealing with is the abuse of the innocent (women & children).
It seems that my first reaction is always anger.
When anger comes, spirituality completely disappears.
For me, it was the recent church statements on polygamy, buried and unauthored on lds.org and the church’s excommunicating those who point out the reality of church history. Before that, somehow I hoped that maybe all this stuff I had discovered about church history really was somehow “anti-mormon” propaganda, even though I knew it probably wasn’t. Part of me also hoped that maybe the leaders of the church had never strayed from looking at the sources that they recommended to missionaries and members. That way, the reason they didn’t come out and clear the air it was out of sheer lack of knowledge. But, when they came out and admitted Joseph Smith’s polyandry and polygamy, still claimed that it was divinely inspired, yet hid this deep in the website to protect it from the naive general membership of the church…. And John Dehlin and others who are willing to put the unpolished version out there are threatened with losing their membership… something inside of me changed. I now know that what I know is reality, and what I believed before isn’t. Even more so, the church isn’t going to admit this difference even exists, and will even go as far as disciplining those who don’t follow their version of the truth. I’ve gone from an every Sunday goer to a once in a while Sacrament Meeting attendee. I no longer worry as much about how this will impact my kids or my parents. What matters is that I am true to myself and now that I know what that truth is to me, let the chips fall where they may. For me the “tipping point” was the stillbirth of my daughter. I had been raised to assume that because I was honoring my priesthood, my covenants, and generally doing my LDS duty that God would bless me.
Losing my daughter put me into a tailspin where my world fell apart. I stumbled across the concept of an “assumptive world collapse” that helped me to understand from an outsider perspective what I was going through (as opposed to losing my mind or succumbing to the “buffetings of Satan”). We all live with assumptions that are easy shortcuts or rules of thumb to live by. Especially if one had a positive and happy childhood – these assumptions will probably be filled with positivity about the world and a sense of safety and overall justice (i.e. good things happen to good people who work hard). People can generally ignore, justify, or shelve points of evidence that do not fit with their assumptive world until something big comes along that cannot be assimilated. It changes the game and shatters the old world of assumptions. You might call this thing a “tipping point.” I feel that religious belief is built upon the foundation of the assumptive world. One could possibly experience a faith crisis and even change religions or from faith to secularism without changing the underpinnings of the assumptive world. However, there are similarities between the assumptive world collapse and a faith crisis and at times they do seem to intertwine.
The assumptive world collapse and Fowler’s stages of faith are both models. Models are very helpful but are also always limited. I believe it would be a mistake to assume that everything that can be experienced fits within our own personal framework, model, or assumptive world. Perhaps that is another assumption. To assume that my personal reality is not complete – not all encompassing and should be open to growth from outside sources.
One of the things that I found most interesting is that the goal of the healing process is to build a new “assumptive reality”. “Why do I need assumptions? Why can’t I just live in reality?” I thought. I have come up with 2 reasons:
1) The human brain is not built to process all information indescriminantly. It works by building a framework to interpret, categorize, and prioratize the data. This framework is a major building block of the assumptive world.
2) Reality can be nihilisticly depressing. I believe in hope. I believe in purpose. I believe in meaning. I believe in goodness. I believe that the best things from our human existence should go forward and continue in some form. These things make my life more fulfilling and so I hold onto them – even though they are assumptions that may or may not correlate to “reality”.
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