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.