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I read a quote recently that said “The only path to true and lasting joy is through repentance and service”. This came from a member of the Church at large….I’m curious — do you think this is true? Why or why not? SilentDawning wrote:I read a quote recently that said
“The only path to true and lasting joy is through repentance and service”. This came from a member of the Church at large….I’m curious — do you think this is true? Why or why not? No, I don’t believe that assertion at all. Someone on NOM modified the quote, “Wickedness never was happiness” to say, “Worthiness never was happiness” which is a much more accurate description of the reality of the situation in my experience. Doing the main things the Church asked for did not make me happy at all, it mostly felt like a big hassle especially after my mission when I had school and work to worry about and then the Church piled on all these extra requirements on top of this that basically stressed me out and ruined much of the free time I had left.
Actually, I don’t believe there is one set answer for everyone as far as what will make them happy or not. People have different interests and personalities so to prescribe a one-size-fits-all “plan of happiness” for everyone is a good recipe for dissatisfaction for many if not most of them in my opinion. Another thing to consider is that some of these things like service vs. self interest are more of a sliding scale where the better (more realistic) goal would be to find some balance you can feel comfortable with rather than a yes/no either you did your home-teaching, got your temple recommend, etc. or not. For example, maybe people typically don’t mind some voluntary service but when taken to extremes it will burn them out and they will start to resent it especially if they feel pressured into it as if it is something they are supposed to do even though they don’t really want to.
But for some people, they get peace from believing that serving in the Church is going to lead to some kind of eternal reward. I asked a devout man in our Ward on exchanges with the missionaries one night how he sustained his enthusiasm after all these years. He said “I believe the Lord will bless me for doing these visits and everthing I do”. So, a certain amount of the happiness is generated by FAITH what you are doing will eventually bring happiness. For me, repentence does bring happiness – but only when it involves habits that are personally damaging.
Regardnig service in the Church as a source of happiness? Sometimes it brought GREAT joy, but ony when I was in a TBM mindset. And even then, at times being worthy actually made me miserable…
Now, service to other people independent of any Church interests — THAT makes me happy right now.
I think a lot of happiness comes through the following: * Treating other people well.
* Living a simple life.
* Realising that you don’t have all the answers and never will.
* Not worrying about things you can’t change, or when you don’t have to worry about them.
* Not competing continually, getting involved with large financial transactions/debts etc.
* Forgiving, and cutting people slack.
Perhaps the AA’s Serenity Prayer sums it up well:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
SilentDawning wrote:But for some people,
they get peace from believing that serving in the Church is going to lead to some kind of eternal reward.I asked a devout man in our Ward on exchanges with the missionaries one night how he sustained his enthusiasm after all these years. He said “I believe the Lord will bless me for doing these visits and everthing I do”. So, a certain amount of the happiness is generated by FAITH what you are doing will eventually bring happiness… For me, repentence does bring happiness– but only when it involves habits that are personally damaging…Regardnig service in the Church as a source of happiness? Sometimes it brought GREAT joy, but ony when I was in a TBM mindset.And even then, at times being worthy actually made me miserable… It makes sense that it can easily be a very different feeling doing something if you believe it’s what God wants you to and that you will be blessed for it in this life and the next versus believing it is just some men telling you what to do. To me this shows that the real source of happiness in many cases is people’s own minds and that happiness is to some extent a product of the way they interpret their experiences. For example, if I sit here telling myself that I should have advanced more than I have in my career by now and some of my neighbors have a nicer house, car, etc. than I do then that will definitely make me feel worse than if I don’t dwell on ideas like this. There are plenty of excuses most people can find to feel sorry for themsevles if they let their mind wander out of control in a negative and unhealthy way.
Believing all this effort would pay off helped motivate me to some extent on my mission but it was nearly impossible for me to feel very good about it after I became completely inactive for several years and then tried to return to full activity even when I still believed in the Church’s overall story. I guess in the back of my mind it was hard for me to really believe some of these expectations were half as important as the Church was acting like they were because I saw first hand that it didn’t really hurt anything as far as I could tell when I didn’t live up to these Church standards for all these years.
Now I think the Church’s formula for success (strict obedience and sacrifice) will really start to cost it in terms of increasingly losing members and generating negative feelings about it. Basically, it looks to me like the Church found they could get people to go along with what they were asked to without much resistance in many cases so they just kept asking for more and more without ever considering whether this was too much to realistically expect out of the average person and I think many active members are not really satisfied with with their overall Church experience even if they can’t explain why and continue to put up with it.
I suppose that each person must answer that question for themselves. In my case, using the LDS interpretation of repentance and service, it is absolutely false. In fact, those concepts as interpreted by the traditional,orthodox, active membership, made me quite miserable. I think it is worth saying that happiness comes more naturally to some people than it does for others. Various times I have heard Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search For Meaning (about his experience seeking fulfillment Nazi concentration camp) being used by church leaders to support the theory that anyone can be happy in any set of circumstances as long as they put their mind to it. That some people were able to keep reasonably good spirits in horrific circumstances does not mean that this feat is attainable by all. The follow up concept to this fallacy, is that persons who are not happy simply choose to be unhappy.
Excellent point, Roy – and extremely easy for the vast majority of people not to understand. OK, here goes the resident parser:
🙄 IF, and I mean IF, “repentance” simply means “growth through change” (which is how I define it and which, imo, is consistent with our scriptures) and IF, and I mean IF, “service” simply means “being unselfish and helping others” – THEN I can accept the quote as being true. Those two things, defined in that manner, are so expansive as to pretty much encompass everything else – just like, “On these two things hang all the law and the prophets.”
Otherwise, not really. There’s more to it than any other definitions allow.
For me the source of true happiness was summed up by Spinal Tap’s drummer, “Have a good time, all the time”. Says it all.
SilentDawning wrote:I read a quote recently that said “The only path to true and lasting joy is through repentance and service”. This came from a member of the Church at large….I’m curious — do you think this is true? Why or why not?
Buddha recognized that the source of all suffering is desire. Conversely, happiness can be said the removal of suffering, although I suspect it isn’t that easy. If ‘repentance’ is therefore the removal of [lustful] desire or something, perhaps this can lead to happiness.Chuang tzu has a chapter on ‘Complete Happiness”. to him happiness comes from tranquilly going with the flow, in harmony with Tao (the Way). So, this involves not only ‘no desire’ but also wuwei – non-impositional action.
So it gets down to the motivation for repentance and service. if I have desire, even the desire for exaltation, or for any specific outcome in service, then it will not lead to happiness unless the desire is fully fulfilled, and too often it is not. Teachings in the book of mormon and doctrine and covenants lead to a naive formula for happiness: if ye keep my commandments, ye shall prosper… Life is a machine — put obedience [to what?] into the machine, and presto, out comes happiness. My sense is that there is no law from the foundation of the world that guarantees happiness as a result of obedience alone — it just doesn’t work that way.
I remember a very motivated missionary companion who was like the eveready bunny, always going, going, going. He would get up extra early and yell at me saying, “Get up elder wayfarer, we’ve got to go earn BLESSINGS today.” One day I had a serious talk with him about all this, and he really felt that everything we did was because we would earn blessings. Everything in his life was wonderful. Had this really gooey girlfriend that sent him all sorts of tapes with music and gooey romantic crap — he was charmed.
After his mission he married the girl. Soon, she ran off with another woman — I have no issues with that, only it was the beginning of a very uncharmed life. He remarried after a quick divorce, and although he remained super faithful, he had one disaster after another; died as a young father of four of some inexplicable disease, and shortly after that, his second wife died as well, leaving all the children orphans to be raised by an extended family. He had a tragic, horrible life, but did by any measure obey every possible aspect of the gospel he could.
Maybe he’s “up there” enjoying all of his blessings now, but I rather doubt the whole ‘up there’ concept. Fact is, obedience to arbitrary church laws does not engender happiness or magical positive consequence. Where a law or rule has a natural justification, then obedience thereto results in natural positive consequence. For example, if you don’t drink alcohol, you’ll never get drunk. Whether never being drunk is happiness, I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure that alcoholic addiction isn’t happiness from first hand experience.
rambling instead of doing my real work for right now…
SilentDawning wrote:I read a quote recently that said “The only path to true and lasting joy is through repentance and service”. This came from a member of the Church at large….I’m curious — do you think this is true? Why or why not?
When I hear someone boil down anything as complex as Joy to a single path with two or three actions, I am can be pretty sure they are wrong.
😆 To be more kind though, I think I view this as more of a rhetorical speech device. It’s a way of placing emphasis on ideas that we want to communicate. People often do this unconsciously. If you really pinned them down though, they would probably admit that it’s actually more complicated than what they said out loud.
I had some lasting joy this weekend, holding my (6) week old grandson. He’s named after me. It doesn’t get more joyful than that.
I will be playing with my (2) grand-daughters this afternoon. More lasting Joy.
Mike from Milton.
Mike wrote:I had some lasting joy this weekend, holding my (6) week old grandson. He’s named after me.
It doesn’t get more joyful than that.
I will be playing with my (2) grand-daughters this afternoon. More lasting Joy.
Mike from Milton.
hey there you go. I was on skype with my granddaughter yesterday, and today the two grandsons are coming over. woo-hoo!divine payback:
part 1: whatever trouble you give your parents, your kids will give you double
part 2: spoiling your grandkids is also divine payback — for all the trouble your kids gave you.
see? there is a god!
This posting really has me thinking alot. I woke early this morning & the first thought that comes to mind is this:
Quote:“The only path to true and lasting joy is through repentance and service”
Is it possible that this is wrong? Instead of “service” maybe for me it’s “Simply acts of kindness”.
The reason this comes up is: yesterday was my wife’s birthday. All day, relatives & members of the ward called to wish her a happy birthday. Our Home Teach came over with (2) of his daughters to sing happy birthday to her & gave her flowers. That moment will last for a long time in my mind.
I don’t have alot of happy memories of doing Home Teaching. The ones I do remember are those I did a service for. Such as unplugging a drain pipe or changing locks on a door. I can still remember how I felt when someone said, months later, “thanks again for fixing my drain pipe”. No one said, “Thanks for that lesson on tithing”.
Sometimes words have a negative meaning for us. Service doesn’t have to be a formal calling, office or special lesson taught.
That’s my two cents for today,
Mike from Milton.
Mike wrote:Is it possible that this is wrong? Instead of “service” maybe for me it’s “Simply acts of kindness”.The reason this comes up is: yesterday was my wife’s birthday. All day, relatives & members of the ward called to wish her a happy birthday. Our Home Teach came over with (2) of his daughters to sing happy birthday to her & gave her flowers. That moment will last for a long time in my mind.
I don’t have alot of happy memories of doing Home Teaching. The ones I do remember are those I did a service for. Such as unplugging a drain pipe or changing locks on a door. I can still remember how I felt when someone said, months later, “thanks again for fixing my drain pipe”.
No one said, “Thanks for that lesson on tithing”.Sometimes words have a negative meaning for us. Service doesn’t have to be a formal calling, office or special lesson taught.
That’s my two cents for today,
Mike from Milton.
That is a good two cents.
Maybe we need to change the “expectations” of HT to more fit the mission of happiness and peace rather than….
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