Let's Just Stop Saying "Worthy" and "Worthiness"
Think about the heartfelt nature of this question. It doesn't help that you don't know my mother. But for her to even ask this was not vindictive. It came from a personal place of profound pain.
Imagine someone trusted you enough to invite you to sit in their pain with them for a moment, to speak to it. Coming from my mother, that's what this was. She knew I couldn't do it because then she'd have to sit with mine. So she went to someone else.
And this person, completely unprepared for this moment, looked at her and said the only people who are allowed in the temple are the ones who are worthy to be there. My mother came to an average Mormon with an honest question. And thanks to the obsolete, insensitive language we use so casually in the Church, she told my mother she wasn't worthy of God or his presence. Whether she intended to or not, that was the message she sent with the language she used.
I cannot adequately express to anyone the pain in my mother's face when she told me this. You'd have to know her to fully appreciate it. My mother and I have a complicated history, and the church has been at the center of that for more than a decade. But I cannot describe to you how angry I was when she finally told me this. It seemed impossible to me that anyone could be that insensitive or careless.
I come to my point. The "let's be as Mormon as possible so the non-members will think we're good people and want to join the church" mentality. The habit of leaning into our own exactness, our obtuse insistence in doing things our way, even when it hurts people, and calling that a virtue. This refusal to demonstrate any kind of humanity didn't entice my mother to join the Church. I don't know where people born into the Church got the impression that this is what makes people gets baptized, but that's not how this works. That's not how anything works.
My mother is not a person whose favor is easily won, but it is very easily lost. She has no patience for posturing or pretense. And I realized, after hearing this story, that the church would have to be a very different place before she would ever feel at home in it.
That day, I excised the words "worthy" and "worthiness" from my vocabulary. They have no place in what it means to be a Latter-day Saint to me anymore. There are few words that cause me more emotional and spiritual discomfort. I understand that there is a layer of judgment to them that is inappropriate for me to use because I'm not God. If what I mean to say is prepared, ready, observant, dedicated, devout, or any other words that would be more precise, then I should just say that.
Who are we, as Christians or as Saints, to attempt to measure the faith and devotion to God in another person's heart? And to use such feeble measurements, like the length of a hemline or cups of coffee, to quantify that relationship? Our rulers and measuring sticks will mean very little to God when he sees the ways we used them to punish each other for the universal imperfections that affect us all.
God is good. The thing I can't wait for each and every person to discover about him is how much he cares about us individually. The way all labels and judgments disappear in his eyes and we are finally seen for who we truly are.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.1 Cor. 13:12
We are all deeply flawed beings, struggling to understand and cope with what it means to be human. Let's all remember that a little more often.
