Mar 11, 2011
Object Lessons and Other Horror Stories
My last calling in church was in Young Women’s. There is no organization in the church, perhaps in the world, I believe, so fond of object lessons — most of them having to do with “virtue” or, more to the point, the loss thereof.
You know what I am talking about: The teacher gets up one Sunday with a bouquet of beautiful white roses. During her lesson she sends one of these flowers around the room with an invitation to all to take a minute and feel the rose, maybe take a petal, to enjoy it for a moment and pass it on. We all do this and by the end of class the rose is back in the teacher’s possession looking much worse for the wear. We are then invited to pick a flower to take home and no-one picks the one we passed around. No-one wants “damaged goods.” Or, in a similar lesson, the teacher offers us a choice of gum, the wad from her mouth or a fresh stick from the pack. A Young Men’s leader brings in a board into which he invites the young men to hammer a number of nails. During the lesson the young men are allowed to remove the nails from the board, but it is pointed out that the holes still remain.
I admit to a fondness for a good analogy or parable, but these stories about chewed bubblegum and nailed boards and wounded roses, meant to convince the young and innocent youth to protect themselves from the evils of the world, have long rubbed me the wrong way.
Chiefly, my discomfort with these stories comes from my understanding of Christianity. If there is an atonement (and I am a want-to-believe-er) the beauty and miracle of that event is that Christ’s death is meant to make the unclean, clean — the scarlet sins as white as snow. It troubles me that people who claim to believe in the atonement put so much emphasis on the permanent scars left by youthful sins.
The part of me that doesn’t believe in the atonement also questions the notion of sin. I think of my young daughter. The time will come when she will begin to explore her sexuality. I shutter to think that she may grow up to believe that the touch of love is denigrating, that, should she choose to be sexually active before marriage that this would turn her into something foul and undesirable. My son, too, will be faced with many choices in his life some of which will be wrong. But I would rather have him make mistakes than live a fearful life. While it is important that he understand consequences and the reality that life will leave him scarred, I don’t want him to think that every bad choice he makes will stay with him forever.
My son and my daughter will, of course, not hear these examples in common. My son is unlikely to ever be told that he is used chewing gum or a bruised rose. His sins, which may still leave spots in his life, are, apparently, not so damaging.
These object lessons make the right choice and the consequences of the wrong choices too narrow. I think of the analogy that President Hinkley used who telling the youth not to tattoo their bodies: We wouldn’t defile the temple with graffiti so how could we defile our bodies with body-art. But the temple is not unadorned. It is painted and swathed in fabric. What if our body art is an adornment — beautiful and thoughtful? What if my children have sexual encounters that are powerful and beautiful and that bring them and their partners joy and satisfaction? What if they make choices that are outside the expected?
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