Grace Available

It seems that at every turn I am finding things wrong with the church. The first thing that is troubling is the proliferation of churches that claim to be Christ's church, I have noted in the past that there appears to be nothing more Christian than a good schism. I have started to wonder what kind of reconciliation is going to be required before the saying "If ye are not one ye are not mine" (D&C 38:27) doesn't sound like something we should be worried about.

Today I'm not prepared to describe all of what I think is wrong with the church, but I think that the wickedness in the church that hindered it in its progress as described in Alma 4 could be an interesting model for some investigations into what is going wrong today. As I try to develop a working model of what is going wrong, I find I can't blame anyone who decides to leave.

A scandalous history

The more history you find the more you see that there are some unanswerable questions that hint at a history as scandalous as what we see in the bible, and it makes sense that people decide to leave when they realize the squeaky-clean version that was taught in primary and not significantly expanded on in adult classes was missing a lot of detail. A collection historians make up an unfortunate (and metaphorical) trail of bodies who have been ejected for touching history deemed too sacred to question because if they are right and there were shenanigans it is expected that people's faith can't withstand the questions it would raise.

In all fairness we are in a bit of a pickle because we've had some unfortunate lessons that indicate that either it's all true or none of it is. This is dangerous all or nothing thinking, the ego's favorite kind of thinking. It also means that you have to get your entire logical system right the first time or you have to throw it all away and have nothing. And what do we have now? We have people throwing the whole thing away and believing none of it.

An intractable problem

So, what is a guy to do? I know I can't fix the church. I'm well aware that agitating too much will get me quickly excommunicated for trying to "steady the ark". If I go back to sources in the doctrine and covenants and point out that the structure of the church today doesn't quite match what is described there, I will also be accused of not following the continuing revelation. It is indeed a difficult problem. One of the biggest problems I see is that in the interest of reconciling everything through the process of correlation we have unintentionally killed the sense of mystery and discovery in God's words. We have turned them into a deterministically describable and arguable ego possession and in process of trying to distill from them their essence we accidentally boiled the life out of them. We have deluded ourselves into believing that we have God all figured out, but that is simply a lie we tell ourselves in our pride.

I don't think I can take any of this head on, but as I have been thinking I was pondering about how the body of Christ, which is sick, can be healed. I have identified some things that I think are problematic and so far, the most I can do is try to share the things that bring life back into the words of the gospel that have been lost through a generation of lesson materials that didn't get any deeper than what the correlation committee was able to prove to themselves was correct in the source material.

A cell

Is it my place to "fix" the church? No. But it is definitely my place to try to connect with God and share what I can to hopefully help others find him. Today I realized I am a cell in a body. When any of us gets a cut how is it healed? Do we with our minds and sheer force of will instruct it to grow back together? Would that even be possible? Could we use that same force of will in order to prevent healing from happening? If we are in the process of healing sometimes it is the act of trying to fix the wound that results in making it worse and we in fact need to just let each individual cell involved do its job to heal the wound.

It would appear that some cells today are failing to express their inherent behaviors that would tend toward healing because they don't know what to do or they have a series of facts about what it means to be in a body without any practical experience of what it is to participate in the living tissue. Part of that participation is nourishment through the blood stream. Just as a cell will starve, die, and fall out of the body if the blood is not carrying the oxygen and other nutrients that are needed, we as members can starve if the words that we share with each other are flat and devoid of life.

In our generation we have accepted a Church built on authority and have given up too much to professionals who preach at general conference and correlate our manuals. We attempt to feast on the words that are frequently no more than a secondhand experience of God rather than going on the adventure with Him ourselves and experiencing Him directly. We need to come alive and look for God ourselves because I'm not sure that he will ever be conveniently or reliably presented to us at church. In fact, it is possible that Richard Rohr is right, the church might be the safest place for the ego to hide from God because it is there that we can convince ourselves that we have got it all figured out and that we're right with God because we have finished every item on the checklist but in reality we have no connection with him.