It often feels in church settings as if The Family is more important–more emphasized, more loved, more fussed over, more worshiped–than God or Jesus Christ. This emphasis on The Family is going to do us more harm than good. And it is starting to feel like idolatry to me. And they–by which I mean “we”–are not only not looking so hot these days, but we are going to lose our races. I feel like the church I am in now is one where the swimmers are obsessively trying to look good in skinny jeans. But that was the result of a rhetoric of indirection it wasn’t the result of a direct focus on The Family.
Yes, families were huge–literally and figuratively–in the church I joined. The by-product of that was nice-looking bodies, by which I mean thriving families. I feel that the church I joined was one where the swimmers ate carefully and exercised hard in order to win their races. Further, I think the family has an eternal role (which I struggle to understand because there is virtually no revelation about the place of the female half of those family members, but that is a topic for a different post), so I think it matters how we form and treat our families here.
#Definitin of indirection quotation how to#
So it obviously makes sense that we think about how to live according to Christian virtues in families. And then there is a more personal level: most people will spend a good chunk of their lives in a family setting and if they are going to break a heart, wound a soul, or exercise any manner of cruelty, it will probably be to someone in that family–not the guy who delivers the water jugs each week. I have three levels of deep concern about the family: one is a societal-level concern, where I see individuals making choices that do not serve the best interests of children or the larger culture or, ultimately, themselves. Period, exclamation point, end of sentence, that’s it.” When I joined the church, the “basic purpose” was described as a three-fold mission of proclaiming the gospel, redeeming the dead, and perfecting the saints. In a training on sabbath observance, Elder Bednar said, “The basic purpose of all we teach and all that we do in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is to make available the Priesthood authority and gospel ordinances and covenants that enable a man and a woman and their children to be sealed together and be happy at home. Now when I hear those things, they are usually couched in or around The Family. There was a focus on individual righteousness–personal scripture study, prayer, personal worthiness, temple attendance, etc.
#Definitin of indirection quotation manuals#
We hear about these things a bit now, but a comparison of church manuals will show much more attention is now paid to The Family. When I joined the church, there was a focus on commandments that created certain habits: reading the scriptures, keeping a journal, maintaining food storage, obeying the Word of Wisdom, that sort of thing. But when is the last time that you heard someone say that the Book of Mormon was written for our time? In fact, the new curriculum for college-age students omits half the time spent on the study of the Book of Mormon and replaces it with a class on The Family. It was all about the Book of Mormon then. I’ve been thinking about those swimmers recently as I try to grapple with the church’s emphasis on The Family. The physical appeal of those bodies that I was ogling on the medal stand was the accidental by-product of an entirely different goal. They swam countless laps–not to drop pounds, but to perfect technique and enhance speed. They lifted weights–not to sculpt their abs, but to enhance their speed.
They watched their diets not because spare calories might adhere to their hips but because they needed enough calories–and the right kind–to swim as fast as they could. But even I knew that Olympic level swimmers were paying virtually no attention to the appearance of their bodies.
I grew up swimming on summer neighborhood teams and for my high school. Not scarily gaunt like the runners, not comically and grotesquely bulging like the weight lifters, not the stunted look of the gymnasts. I remember watching the Olympics when I was in high school and concluding that the swimmers had the best-looking bodies of all of the athletes.
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