Blame the absent

I left church early last week and this week.

In general, I find it annoying that 6 of our 8 church hours (in the average month) are spent rehashing Conference talks.  To me, it’s profoundly clear that the wisdom, archetypal messages, prophecies, and histories of scripture are infinitely richer than your average Conference talk.  It’s more potent, more beautiful, more pristine than Conference.  And when people give lessons on scriptures, we at least get commentaries, questions, perspectives… when we rehash Conference, we often just hear the talk paraphrased.  My brain dies a little.  Sometimes my heart dies even more.

Last week they were discussing Rasband’s talk.  Rasband is not exactly my hero anyway, but that last one is a doozy.  I was trying to keep it all together until they got to the paragraph where he talks about people who choose to worship in nature and implies they do it because they’re lazy and bored.  I left.  I tried to leave quietly and quickly, but I did get some people checking in with me later, so apparently my exit wasn’t as graceful as I’d liked to have thought.

Well, I am bored.  Shallow, bland, inoffensive, beige church chatter IS boring, and being satiated by it means that we’re spiritually anorexic.  Also: mountains are God’s original temple.  And it seems pretty hard to really worship in a mountain and NOT get more out of it than church.  Maybe instead of shaming and blaming people who connect with God differently than we do, we could try to make church more fulfilling.  Or even just be less judgy.  There’s a thought.  (So weird that we can have talks on “don’t judge” and then turn around and have a talk like this.  I have no words.)

But why change?  Can’t we just blame the absent?

Anyway, today was Sunday school, so it’s a different crowd, plus we actually discuss scripture.  So I should have been there.  But I still hadn’t healed from last week, and being there felt so burdensome.  So I left.  And nobody died.  And it’s all okay.