I taught another disconcerting and somewhat disheartening lesson in RS this week. The jumping off place was L. Tom Perry's talk "Bring Souls unto Me." That may have been the first problem--that I think of my assigned subject matter as a jumping off place rather than a lesson to stick to. I read the text, usually think, "oh my gosh what am I going to do with this that hasn't been done a thousand times before," and then something will snag my attention and off I go on my own tangent. This will not change, as I am unable (unwilling, I suppose) to teach by having people read little excerpts from the talk aloud during class and then ask for rote answers to predictable questions. Sometimes my method works and everyone feels comfortable, enlightened, and edified--other times RS ends as it did this Sunday, with hurt feelings, harsh words, and me in confusion.
This time what caught my eye was the injunction to proclaim the gospel to the lost sheep among us. I immediately thought--there is quite a lot of relationship that has to happen before anybody is willing to hear someone proclaim the gospel to them--what about relationship-building? What in Utah County, in our ward, gets most in the way of relationship-building--is it how we tend to form our dear comfortable groups (at church) and others are left on the outside looking in?
"No!" was the fairly resounding answer (not unanimous, of course), "if people feel excluded around us it is
their fault." And many personal experiences to illustrate this point ("
I am the one who is always excluded, not them," "They don't really
want to be a part of our group," "We Mormons are too critical of ourselves--we should give ourselves credit for being more inclusive than other groups," "
I've never had a problem like this [so obviously other people don't]," "We feel this way because of how the pioneers were driven out of Nauvoo," and even "Black people have an attitude," which statement completely baffles me). Poor Julie, our new RS president, felt it necessary to stop me and state at length that inclusiveness is not really what the lesson is about, it's about proclaiming the gospel to people who need to hear it. Um, OK.
I told a story on myself--about walking into a stake RS conference soon after we moved here and saying nervously to Sergene, "There must be a hundred thousand dollars worth of hair care in this room." When I told Tena at lunch today that I said that, she said I likely offended people with the story, even though my point was that I was being judgmental and making assumptions based on appearance, because I was nervous and insecure. So maybe that was it. I didn't say what else I thought at the time, which is--there must be even
more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of boob jobs, body sculpting, plastic surgery, and anorexia in this [stake RS conference] room--which I suppose would have been really offensive. If self-evident.
I don't know. I tried to link it back to the example of Jesus, who would talk to
anybody, but we couldn't get past the point of feeling insulted, hurt, and defensive about not being inclusive enough. People came up to me after church and called on the phone yesterday afternoon about it, pro and con. I felt/feel like I got caught in the crossfire of an ongoing battle of which I was unaware. People usually don't react so defensively to exhortations from the pulpit to be more Christlike. You don't hear them arguing back to the teacher about daily prayers, or Word of Wisdom, or temple attendance.
I didn't tell the stories of hurtful exclusion I've heard from within our ward, within the past few months. I thought that those hurts are too near and tender, and I respect the confidentiality of those who have confided in me.
John says he thinks it has something to do with the political battles going on right now. He is in the loop of the right-wing emails that fly around the ward and the valley, exhorting people to "take back the nation" and "stop the Obama administration from destroying the Constitution." Maybe that explains the odd comments about black people. People in the class were wounded. They were full of rage.
I don't know. I don't get it. I don't know how to predict when something else I say or topic I think is timely but innocuous will set people off. Has something happened that takes such a challenge off the table, makes it invalid as a critique of ourselves and our culture? What is it?
