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 from the mission field, and he will still be treated as a hero. But like any other close knit community, every ward is full of busy-bodies and loud mouths; people that have to make everybody's business their own; people that take it upon themselves to fix the "broken spirits". This sense of someone's business being everyone's is quite common, and in almost every scenario it impedes any potential progress that could have been made by that individual. Church is one of the worst things for my brother right now, but being a return missionary and having TBM parents, he'll believe that it is the best thing for him.
Quite often the Church will just bury an individual with responsibilities so that the individual becomes so busy they kind of set aside and forget for awhile that they have issues. The mentality is more or less, "if you serve others, god will serve you". My brother is going to be expected to find a job, reapply for school, be encouraged to date more seriously and he'll be given one or two church callings. This might not sound like a lot of responsibilities, but keep in mind, this is a 21 year old kid who is potentially suffering from depression. When an individual is undergoing some kind of mental and emotional stress, giving them more responsibility ultimately leads to a crushing feeling of inadequacy as soon as they start to fall short in one area.
I have my suspicions as to why my brother became depressed. I believe it stemmed mostly from deciding to go on a mission. I don't know if he was depressed before leaving, but in my honest opinion, this depression stems from his association with the Church. I described some of the issues my parents experienced with my brother in a previous post, and I believe that because of incidents like these, once Daniel decided to commit himself to the Church, his somewhat reckless and apathetic nature towards the Church morphed into guilt, inadequacy and shortcomings. He carried these things with him when he left for his mission, where they were enhanced tenfold because everyday a missionary is surrounded by living in the gospel.
The most visible struggle my brother had was in learning the Spanish language. Growing up in the Church, you come to believe that you can do anything through the spirit, and this sense is magnified in missionaries. So many return missionaries love to tell stories of how they initially struggled with learning a new language, but through fasting and prayer, it just clicked one day. This didn't happen for my brother. Granted, he was only out in the mission field for 4 months, but he had been promised that if he was worthy, he would receive blessings beyond measure. Herein lies the root of the issue. Religions lead you to believe that if you don't come to the same conclusions, if you have doubts, or experience any level of hardship, it's because of YOU. By this line of thinking, my brother couldn't master the Spanish language in 4 months because he wasn't spiritually worthy enough. In reality, he'd only been learning the language for 4 months! The MTC (Missionary Training Center) used to be a great place to learn the basics of any language. The typical missionary used to spend between 6 and 12 weeks in the MTC to learn how to be a missionary and how to speak a language. They've since cut down this time to 3-9 weeks. My brother was expected to have the basics of a language down in 4 weeks time and then to go out and proselytise to native speakers. It's ludicrous. Anyway, I've veered a bit off topic.
I just want to make it clear that I am not privy to my brother's thought on why he came home or why he might be depressed. This is pure conjecture, but I will say that as an outsider who was once very much on the inside, I have a better eye for recognising potential causes and to not be afraid to address them. I've been there. I know what it's like to feel as though you're not good enough to receive blessings from the lord. That everything that's wrong in my life is due to my own lack of faith and ineptitude to interpret divine messages. I still struggle with this to some degree.
Now that my brother is home, I want to save him. I want to show him all the amazing things I've learned and open his eyes to the hypocrisies of the Church and of religion in general. I want to be able to show him that a potential lack of faith does not mean you're an incomplete person.
When I was involved with the Church, I had no desire to convert people to my religion. I felt as though I should have had a burning desire to convert my friends and classmates, but I shied away from engaging in anything that might lead to conversation because I knew that I had no way to defend myself against counter arguments, or even how to adequately answer a sincere question. How could I convince someone else that this was the true church if I couldn't convince myself?
It's just ironic how this desire manifests itself now. Now that I know where the real truth lies.
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