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DarkJedi wrote:
Quote:“Sometimes young women — especially those who are just learning to respond to the Spirit — might think, ‘everybody else is crying, why am I not crying? I must not be feeling the Spirit,’” Sister Oscarson said. “People can feel the Spirit working in their lives and everybody reacts differently to it. Stick with the scriptures, the basic doctrines of Christ and of the gospel, and choose appropriate activities that invite the Spirit, but which don’t try to manipulate emotions.”
I think the appeal to emotion is way overplayed in the church, not just among YW. Post FC I have come to recognize that “good feelings” have nothing to do with the Spirit.
This post will be a bit of a tangent but…
This sort of thing is really embedded into the culture… in much more ways than simply crying in public. Nearly every single Sunday I hear something similar to the following from the person conducting a meeting or saying the prayer:
“We thank the for the spirit that we have felt in the meeting today.”
“Wasn’t the spirit really strong during our sacrament meeting today?”
Language like this is the filler we insert into empty places in our conversations and I wonder what effect it has on people that feel like they haven’t felt the spirit. Do they wonder whether something is wrong with them because everyone around them is claiming how powerful or strong the spirit has been during a meeting but they just felt “normal.”
Where I’m going with this is that when we put people on the spot by asking things like, “Wasn’t the spirit powerful?” it can be a passive aggressive way of saying, “You should have felt the spirit.” and I think it leaves a lot of adults wondering why they never felt the spirit all their lives. All because someone was saying the equivalent of, “I really liked this meeting.” but in a way that placed great expectations onto others.
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