Annually, our church has what they call “Standards Night”. The leadership in the region, encompassing multiple congregations, invites the youth in the area together to have a discussion on navigating life’s difficulties while maintaining high standards of Christian living. The discussion mostly focuses on avoiding sexual related temptations, avoiding drugs and alcohol, and staying away from bad language and inappropriate material through the various media channels coming at us these days. Last Sunday, part of the discussion centered on a phrase that put me in a wrestle – “keeping ourselves unspotted from the world”.
Before I dive into that, let me say I have no idea how to teach teenagers spiritual lessons. I’m not doing a great job of it with my own children. I’m on my own individual spiritual journey, gaining insights, learning lessons, but I’ve had decades now of wrestle, starting at a young age. My life resides in a completely different context than them – born as I was into childhood poverty, raised by an autistic mother in a crumbling house without air conditioning in the Yuma desert. They have no idea what I went through, why I am where I am, why I’m concerned with what I’m concerned with, how I came to the insights I have. It’s really difficult communicating any of this to them. They are on their own journey and need to learn their own lessons on their own mostly from scratch.
Their context is just different. They are overwhelmed with a school system that is far more demanding than mine, with parents desperate they receive opportunities that alluded me. They have advantages I didn’t have, but disadvantages as well. I leaned hard on God in my difficulties. A difficult childhood deepened my faith, loyalty and devotion to the church who nurtured it.
My children’s paths are different. Difficult in many ways, but not obvious in ways that will lead them into the same type of spiritual conviction mine did. I’m not sure they will continue down the religious path they were born into. Will they find another path? Will they do what so many of their peers will likely do and opt out of religion altogether? This choice will be theirs. I want them to have a spiritual life. I have no idea how all of this will turn out.
Given all of that, I understand the point of Standards Night and I understand the need for the church to distill the gospel down in ways that young minds can hold onto as they navigate a complex world. And I desperately depend on the church to provide a structure of spirituality fine-tuned for young minds. There’s institutional wisdom in the church far better than my own. I depend on it.
This post is not meant to criticize or push against the messages contained at standards night, just an opportunity to dig into one idea that came up. Just what does it mean to be “unspotted from the world”. Doing a search of the scriptures I found just two references to this phrase:
Pure areligion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To bvisit the cfatherless and dwidows in their eaffliction, and to keep himself funspotted from gthe hworld.
And that thou mayest more fully keep thyself aunspotted from the world, thou shalt go to the house of bprayer and offer up thy csacraments upon my dholy day;
There’s not a lot of specificity in either verse, but I do like the context. First in James, pure religion requires us to take on the burdens of the most vulnerable – the fatherless, the widows, those in affliction, the poor, the sick, the dying, those in prison, really all of us because we are all vulnerable and in affliction. Is there some connection between orienting our lives in service for others and remaining unspotted from the world?
There must be.
We need to avoid habits and behaviors that puts us in an inward, selfish orientation. In my church, we often conflate being spotted with sexual sin. In this view, we become spotted if we look at pornography, or engage in heavy make-out sessions with someone we just met, etc. We clean ourselves from these spots as we confess and forsake our sexual mistakes. There’s something to this. Sexual desire can be handled selfishly but it can also be an essential expression of deep intimate love with a committed partner.
But I’m wondering if an over-emphasis on avoiding sexual sin (or drug use or alcohol or whatever) can be counterproductive as well, in all the same ways an over-emphasis on following God’s laws led the New Testament Jews astray. Being too devoted to our own personal righteousness feels like spots to me. It makes us self-obsessed and inward focused, keeping us from the pure religion James describes.
Doctrine Covenants 59:9 adds another wrinkle. To remain unspotted we need to “go to the house of prayer and offer up sacraments”. There’s something sanctifying in regular ritual. Attending our church meetings with an open heart and a willing mind, united in humble prayer with others nearby, committing ourselves to each other in holy, sacred sacrament.
We need to come to prayer each Sunday and then to commit ourselves to take on the afflictions of others through the week, avoiding distractions and addictions that keep us in our heads.
Perhaps we find cleanliness in pure, selfless connection. We become spotted in isolation or as we use others for our own self interests.
I think this is a message I can communicate to my children. Spirituality comes through pure religion, selfless service, sacred communion in rituals, regular meditative prayer. None of this is easy. It’s a journey. Perhaps, we are born spotted and we spend a lifetime learning how to free ourselves of these selfish impulses so that we can finally live within the pure religion James describes.
scottintempe 