Contemplative Dexterity

My mom called me Thursday evening with the news that my brother would be coming home from his mission. A typical LDS mission lasts 2 years. My brother has been out for 4 months. I was relieved on some level, for the sake of my parents, that he wasn't coming home from "sinning". Turns out, he might just have depression. I say might, because it was his mission president, who has no formal training in psychiatry, that determined he had depression. My brother and I are similar as far as internalizing emotions and being too hard on ourselves, so to suddenly discover that he is depressed wasn't a huge shock. What worries me is that after the missionary persona wears off of him, how hard will the realization of being sent home be for him to reconcile? The worst thing, for him, would be to feel as if he'd failed. The Church is both good and bad at dealing with early return missionaries. My brother is lucky in many respects, to have been honorably discharged fro...

One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.                 -Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell Growing up, I always considered myself to be an intelligent individual. Perhaps this was because I was one of the few in my family who understood my grandfather’s jokes and comments, or because I consistently had good grades or because I could read above my grade level. Perhaps it was because people just assumed that since I was shy, quiet, read a lot and had a drier sense of humor that I was smart, and I took those assumptions to heart. Within the last year, however, I’ve come to realize that I’m not as smart as I once thought. It’s been said before that religion doesn’t teach you how to think, it only teaches you what to think. In tandem with that, and this could very well have been my own isolated experience, but the public school system o...

According to Mormon mythology, the war in heaven occurred before we were sent to earth. This war was incited by Satan, who presented a plan that was contrary to god’s plan. These plans were what would decide how we would live our lives on earth. God’s plan was to send us to earth to have physical bodies and to be tested. This test would be gods way to see if we would follow everything he said: And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them;                                                                 Abraham 3:25 [Please note that Abraham is in the Pearl of Great Price , a book that was “translated” ...

At Sunday dinner this last week, I had the obligatory conversation about the new job I just procured. This current job is fairly similar to the last one I had, just on a much larger scale and with a lot of added tasks. Anyway, my dear younger sister, being the wonderful Mormon girl that she is, became really excited after I explained that my new job was similar to the last one, and she says something along the lines of, 'There was a reason you had that last job," implying that god allowed me to have the last job so that he could allow me to have this current job. For some reason I became really frustrated with her comment, but all I could spit out was, "Not really." Smooth and witty, no? But she persisted and reiterated her declaration. After that, I shut down the conversation as quickly as I could, not really wanting to start a debate about "god's plan" and all that crap at the dinner table surrounded by my family. I'm just not that kind of person...

          Every decision I made was by design. Some great overlord was watching my every move, ensuring that I stayed the course He had predetermined for me. This was how I grew up. Convinced that I was being watched, that every choice that was ever presented to me was to test how well I understood the plan that I was never actually privy to know. I had a hard time understanding how it worked, Free Agency. How was it that I had free agency, the ability to choose my own life’s course, when an unseen Power living above and around and inside me had already drawn up my life’s map and it was just a matter of time before I reached my “true potential”? If he was purposefully presenting me with different choices, didn’t that already undermine the basic tenants of Free Agency?                    I’ve twice read a book called “Clockwork Angels” by Kevin J. Anderson. It’s a wonderfu...