Janey’s recent post “Should We Make Life Easier or Harder? at W&T got me to thinking about a little story bordering on aphorism that I recall hearing a number of times as a kid and a teen in the 1980s. General Sunday School President Mark L. Pace recently told a version of it:
President Pace particularly emphasized the importance of every member learning the gospel for themselves. He shared what he’s learned from watching baby chicks hatch during the years he’s spent raising chickens.
Hatching isn’t a simple process, he said. It sometimes takes 12 to 18 hours, with the baby chick resting between bouts of pecking the eggshell. And on a few occasions, out of concern for the bird’s life, he’s peeled away the eggshell for the baby chick.
“All I can tell you is that every time I have endeavored to do it for them, instead of them doing it for themselves, they die,” President Pace said. “They make it out, they may live for several hours. But there is something about the physical process of them coming out of the egg on their own that gives them the strength to stand up and walk and adjust to life outside the egg.”
Similarly, people must spiritually “hatch” for themselves, he said.
Even aside from his explicit analogy to spiritual development, I think the story gives a clear message that we need to worry more about being too soft than too hard. It’s better to err on the side of letting people suffer too much than on the side of coddling them too much. (Along similar lines, I remember a Seventy including the idea “Hard Is Good” in his Conference talk title a few years ago.)
What I find most striking about the story is that I hadn’t thought about it in decades probably before Janey’s post brought it back to mind, but it’s an idea that seemed so utterly logical when it was presented to me at the time that I just accepted it uncritically.
Now I’ve very much flipped, and I wonder if it might not be better to err on the side of being too soft. I even came up with an animal-based analogy to replace the hatching bird. Consider that humans are ridiculously complex creatures who mature unbelievably slowly compared with the rest of the animal kingdom. We typically don’t walk for the first year, take years and years to master language, aren’t ready to reproduce for over a decade, and aren’t fully mature for over two decades. We take a massive amount of parental and community investment to raise. Shouldn’t parents and communities who are invested in a kind, intelligent, socially responsible next generation do everything they can to help and support developing children and young adults rather than neglecting them in the name of “tough love”?
Anyway, setting all that aside, what I was thinking about more broadly is that there are ideas and framings of the world that I learned as a kid that I never questioned and that I now do. This is utterly unremarkable, I know. It’s not specific to Mormonism or even to churches. It’s just a thing about life that parents and others raising children teach them the way they think the world is, or the way they hope it will be, or the way they think children will be best served by thinking of it as, and then the children grow up and decide that lots of what they were taught is baloney. But also it’s interesting and not too surprising when many of those ways of thinking about the world survive unquestioned to adulthood. Because it takes effort to question and pull apart everything you’ve been taught, and at some point, even the most stubbornly reactive young (or older) adult likely finds themselves needing to get on with the business of everyday life rather than spending their time in endless reevaluation of everything they’ve ever been taught.
But the topic did get me to plumbing my memory a bit for other bits of ideas that might have lodged there a long time ago and that I haven’t re-examined since. Here are two more I’ve come up with.
One is the story LeGrand Richards told in A Marvelous Work and a Wonder of the Catholic theologian who visited Salt Lake and told Orson F. Whitney that Mormons didn’t appreciate the strength of their position as a restorationist church. Either the Catholics were right, he said, or the Mormons were. I remember the story especially for his use, at least in the retelling, of the term ignoramuses. Anyway, what strikes me now, but didn’t at the time I first heard and read the story, is that the theologian set up the ground rules by deciding that authority passed from generation to generation, from man to man, is the core important characteristic of The One True Church. Now, I’d question whether that’s actually true, and more importantly, I can see that that’s an assumption he made, not a necessary truth. Again, this isn’t an issue I had really thought about in decades. (If you’re interested in the story, Elder Richards also told it in Conference in 1972. Kevin Barney at BCC wrote a post about it back in 2008 when he tracked the Catholic theologian’s name down, and commenters on the post also had interesting additions.)
The other idea that came to mind is the one expressed in Hugh B. Brown’s story of when he explained to a British politician about the need for prophets in our day. I heard this a number of times as a child and teen. Elder Brown asked the man why God didn’t speak today if he had in the past. Does he not love us anymore? Are we so smart now that we don’t need him? You’re probably familiar with the conclusion of the story:
“Mr. Brown, there never was a time in the history of the world when the voice of God was needed as it is needed now. Perhaps you can tell me why He doesn’t speak.”
My answer was: “He does speak, He has spoken; but men need faith to hear Him.”
It’s not the main message, but the metamessage of this line of argument seems to me to be that if you need a thing to be true badly enough, that’s an argument for it being true. Now I would say that’s nonsense. Using this reasoning is a basis for rejecting any kind of uncomfortable or distressing reality. Was COVID real? Did the Holocaust happen? How about polygamy? The existence of these things make me sad and angry, but the fact that I have that response doesn’t make them false.
I’d love to hear about any ideas you learned in the Church that maybe you hadn’t thought about for a long time but that resurfaced later. I’d especially be interested to hear if anyone else was struck by the don’t-help-a-hatching-bird idea.
Does helping birds hatch actually kill them? How did he know that the chicks who struggled to hatch wouldn’t have died anyway? It isn’t clear that Pace used a proper control group to account for survivorship bias.
Also, if the chicks do die, how? Is it because they don’t develop the right muscles? But they died within hours, so is it normal for essential bird muscles to develop this fast?
Great questions, Kamron. I feel like it’s kind of like the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water story, where it seems like there are a lot of unanswered questions, but this doesn’t keep the story from being repeated.
This link answers Kamron’s question. It is worth reading all the way through.
https://www.mypetchicken.com/blogs/faqs/is-it-ever-okay-to-help-a-chick-out-of-the-shell?srsltid=AfmBOorWoXDgNFiUXyH49nMbYhrrjSX3ky1FiWr_yAg9ynl_m4b9z6H9
You made me think of butterflies we “hatched” in our family one year. First the caterpillars created their chrysalises. The last caterpillar to do so started nibbling on a chrysalis that had already formed, which was somewhat shocking. Anyway, the first butterfly to hatch was super healthy, clearly, super fast, and shot off and away as soon as it was released, never looking back. The next two hatched at more or less the same time, a couple of days later. They seemed less confident, flew around the garden a little, coming back a few times before finally leaving. Lastly the poor nibbled chrysalis butterfly hatched, it wasn’t very healthy, appeared slightly damaged, and couldn’t fly well. It fell victim to a spider.
Metaphors like this drive me nuts. A metaphor can be a nice way to help someone remember a concept, but it is never a justification for something being correct. You can agree or disagree that people need to spiritually hatch for themselves, but the fact that helping a chick out of its shell us almost always a bad idea has nothing to do with that. Usually, these messages in church seem to convey the message that the individual needs to do all the work themselves, while at the same time, insisting that they do the work in exactly the ways, and with exactly the outcomes, that others proscribe for them.
My own Church idea that lived as an axiom of life in my head for many years was the Mormonism has all the important answers. Mormonism (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saintsism?) likes to say it has answers to all the important questions (where did we come from? why are we here? where are we going? etc.) but really I think the Church just sorts questions into important/unimportant based on whether they have answers for them.
Where was Jesus while he was dead? Important question! He was in the Spirit World!
What’s with women who end up sealed to more than one man? Unimportant question! Quit worrying about it!
What are these 2 degrees of glory in 1 Corinthians 15? Important question! Actually there are 3, and only we know about them!
How do LGBTQ people fit into God’s kingdom? Unimportant question! They need to be good, but just kinda sit on the sidelines of church and society for the entirety of their lives and trust that everything will be fixed in the next life, but fixed in a way that neither offends the Proclamation on the Family, or the LGBTQ person, which probably means that they’ll have to be magically changed into a cis/het person, but don’t worry, we promise you’ll be totally ok with it then, even though you’re absolutely not ok with that idea now! Just have faith! See, we have all the answers!
There was a point in my life that I believed that The Church would work for everyone. It felt like if the church were True, that ought to be the case. I no longer believe being an active member of the church is the best outcome for all people.
I have always known that the Israelites were God’s chosen people.
It was only recently that I realized I don’t have any idea why God wants or needs chosen people. Why specifically them? Why only them? Can God not speak to everyone? I honestly haven’t figured out anything that really makes sense.
I do think that as a human family across the planet, there has been an invitation to awaken since the beginnings of the pandemic. Maybe even earlier, like with the Arab Spring and the #MeToo movement. When BLM and George Floyd happened, along with all the nonsense about not listening to public health during the pandemic, I really felt it was a major turning point: you could choose to give yourself graciously to the collective for a greater good or be a staunch individualist.
We have been staunch individualists in the U.S. forever, since the beginning. In fact, research says we are the most individual-focused country in the whole world. This has given birth to ongoing colonialism in the form of war, caste, slavery, imprisonment, the patriarchy (colonialism of our own families and communities), as well as a multitude of hate promotion and misinformation/disinformation.
To love our neighbor and to be a peacemaker doesn’t mean to give up your individual needs but rather you are more in service to the group. And some people on the planet get that, especially Gen Z. But, some people are hanging onto their fears of change and not moving forward with this collective viewpoint.
Bringing this back to the Church, there are many old traditions and even policies that need to be let go in order to more fully love our neighbor and be a peacemaker. One of those traditions is that we hold all truth (which was debunked several years ago in a Church press release); Church members are not superior — the truth is far from it. We need to be more inclusive of our fellowmen and women, regardless of if they are members. Sometimes we are so focused on statistics, rules, and “growth” that we forget the Church’s purpose and Christ’s way.
I too am inclined to be more soft. Let’s all be more soft. We need less judging and less busy work, and more loving clergy and unconditional service to bring solace to wounded souls. We need more no-catch community involvement, that is simple service and about making friends. We need to learn better how to make friends with all people. We need anti-racism lessons, media literacy lessons, and encouragement to read good literature so that we’re not trapped in the social media vortex. Our Church universities need to be more loving and tolerant. The Church needs to openly talk about climate change and that it is imperative that the members educate themselves on it and how to reverse it — after all, that’s supposed to be a major Millennium effort (why cause more suffering?). There is much we can do.
This post reminded me of a book I read recently called Misreading Scripture Through Western Eyes. It’s written by a couple of Christian evangelists who use their experience living abroad (Indonesia, iirc) to highlight cultural assumptions we have as westerners that impact our interpretation of the Bible. A couple of sections that I distinctly remember are our emphases on punctuality and self-reliance – the former a cultural, not a moral value, and the latter arguably in direct opposition to the call to be parts of the body of Christ.