the game of who loves more than whom
We had a really good Elder's Quorum lesson the other week. Our quorum president had compiled some quotes from the Brigham Young manual's "Parental Responsibility" lesson. It's excellent counsel; I highly recommend it.1 One particularly interesting part, I thought, was "Anger should never be permitted to rise in our bosoms, and words suggested by angry feelings should never be permitted to pass our lips." Rather surprising from the Lion of the Lord. We spent much of our time discussing the value in taking a time-out before discipline when angry. While I have no experience to speak of, having never even babysat, really, such a philosophy is my own natural inclination, and I was delighted to hear it recommended.
I've been ruminating on it since, and one interesting idea has occurred to me: I think that the only emotion that Mormons2 are really comfortable with is sorrow.
It does seem doctrinally reasonable, after all--who was our exemplar but a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief
? Do we not read of godly sorrow
? One in the quorum even pointed out that Mormons are much less comfortable attributing the driving of the money-changers to "righteous wrath" than most other Christians. Excepting lust, I think most sins of commission are tied to anger, and most sins of omission are tied to thoughtless happiness3--if you're happy, you're not serving hard enough.
I do not think, I must add, that this tendency is limited to Latter-day Saints; I believe there is plenty of precedent in early Christianity for a Gospel intended for the poor, the brokenhearted, the captives, the blind, the bruised
, whose primary hope is a reward in heaven
.
The crucial difference, however, is this: the canonical4 Christian heaven is a place of rest and joy, while the Celestial Kingdom is primarily a magnification of the life of an earthly saint. Consider what are perhaps the most beloved stories of modern canon: we are touched not only that our Prophet suffered wrongs and unlawful oppressions
, but that our very God looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept
.
It is disingenuous, I argue, to suggest that we are happier in any realistic sense for living a Godly life: to make this something that is more than only fair
, to be the first to love, to, if any man will . . . take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also
, exposes us ceaselessly to betrayal and stoniness of heart, to ending up compelled to go with him three miles and left with no shoes. Indeed, can any Latter-day Saint parent imagine a heaven more heart-rending than an eternity of wandering children, without affection
toward parent or sibling? Is it any wonder that the righteous are so often promised peace and so rarely promised happiness?
I'm not suggesting any easy answers; I don't know, myself, what path leads to a satisfying life.5 It's just another sobering reminder to me of what a Big Deal true Christianity is. Speaking secularly, though, I must earnestly recommend both Stumbling on Happiness and What's it All About: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, respectively a psychological and a philosophical investigation of the problem. I even have both on my bookshelf, unborrowed. For now.
Do you think my analysis is reasonable from a sociological standpoint? From a doctrinal standpoint? Is it ethical or even realistic to seek a life of mostly happiness? Is it wiser to follow Card's6 assertion
grief and joy [are] not weighed in the same scale, one making the other seem less substantial?
1) And, of course, it's full of gems like "I do not believe in making my authority as a husband or a father known by brute force; but by a superior intelligence . . . "
2) Somehow I doubt this <abbr> usage will ever enter the Church style guide.
3) Trianglers, I'm essentially arguing that the LDS triangle of emotion is yellow=happiness, red=anger, and blue=sorrow.
4) Programmer's canonical, not theologian's.
5) St. John's Wort seems pretty close sometimes, though.
6) I don't think 'Brozy mentioned what is, to me, the most amazing thing about OSC: apparently his writing process consists of a synopsis on a three-by-five card, followed by a few pages of notes, followed by a book, with virtually no editing aside from typos and referring only occasionally to the notes. Absolute genius.
4 comments:
"Anger should never be permitted to rise in our bosoms"
I don't agree with this. I don't think that anger is an inherently unhealthy. In fact, I think it's useful.* Not as a staying place (dwelling on my anger only makes me angrier and more unhappy) or a place from which one should usually act (reacting angrily also makes me angrier), but as a notice that something may be wrong. When I'm angry, I know it's time to stop and evaluate why. Am I angry because I'm behaving incorrectly? (Am I jealous? Am I being intolerant? Do I need to get more sleep?) Or am I angry because someone else is behaving incorrectly? (Did they kick my puppy? Betray trust? Steal my lunch?) Once I've figured out *why* I'm angry, I can determine an appropriate action to take.
"And words suggested by angry feelings should never be permitted to pass our lips."
I mostly agree with this. I think most of us, when reacting angrily, do inappropriate things, refuse to listen, and refuse to honestly acknowledge the situation (we may be right about X, but the person we're mad at may be right about Y).
"I think that the only emotion that Mormons2 are really comfortable with is sorrow."
Generally, yes. (Although a large number are more than comfortable with feelings of pride and self-congratulations, it's certainly not a doctrinally supported viewpoint, nor is it one that those same people enjoy in others.)
"It is disingenuous, I argue, to suggest that we are happier in any realistic sense for living a Godly life. . . ."
While you know that I agree with you on this, I do still wonder sometimes if it isn't just another matter of finding a happy medium**--it seems to me that most people who run around indulging in excesses of what we consider actively evil behaviors (killing, stealing, doing drugs, defaming, etc.) aren't actually happy on the balance, either. (Because even if their behavior makes them happy, they may only be happy when engaging in that behavior, and life that is sustainable is more than just a glut of pleasurable activity.)
*In keeping with Survival of the Sickest, I'd argue that anger must at least have once been beneficial to some people, or it would've been bred out.
**Not finding a happy medium between murder and sainthood. But of not indulging in excesses such as murder or extreme self-deprivation for the purposes of service--I think that from your standpoint, there is no happiness in either. So while Mother Teresa is clearly a good woman, just as Hitler is clearly evil, neither can be considered normal and certainly not happy by the average human standard. Thus, I suppose, the differentiation between "worldly" happiness (pleasure) and eternal happiness (peace).
I like this post a lot. Thanks.
Hesse in Steppenwolf (italics added):
"We are in my Magic Theater," he said with a smile, "and if you wish at any time to learn the Tango or to be a general or to have a talk with Alexander the Great, it is always at your service. But I'm bound to say, Harry, you have disappointed me a little. You forgot yourself badly. You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality. That was not pretty of you. I hope, at least, you did it from jealousy when you saw Hermine and me lying there. Unfortunately, you did not know what to do with this figure. I thought you had learned the game better. Well, you will do better next time."
Annoyingly, I can't find quotes from Le Guin, but I believe she makes a similar statement in either "Left Hand of Darkness" or "The Dispossessed" to the effect that murder in anger is much less evil than the death penalty.
I personally have been injured on many occasions by people so restrained that they act out of anger under the guise (even to themselves) of reason. They are no less injurious (and in fact, often more, since they let it accumulate), but the truly evil part is that they hide their reasons so well that it's very hard to convince them or anyone else why they did what they did.
Note that I'm commenting tangentially to your post -- timeouts are very important sometimes, especially for people with a history of impulsively acting on anger.
For brainy engineer types in particular I think it's wise to reduce the number of layers of abstraction (or lenses, or processing steps) between sense, emotion and action. I've known people who have so many layers that they literally take minutes to respond to even simple questions -- they're wrapped up in the guts of their code at some layer that's not operating correctly. Very tricky to debug such systems.
(An anecdote I heard in school regarding how Unix took a minimalist approach in contrast to the baroqueness of Multics went that when the first Multics system powered up and a key was pressed, it took fully 45 seconds before the letter appeared on the display.)
.
I hope you don't mind, but what I mostly took from this is that sweet abbr code. I'm totally using that.
Didn't 'ole Brig just mean it regarding kids?
I think once a person hits age 18, they should be on the "it's okay if someone gets angry at you" list.
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