The Sacredness of Informality

Went to the sacrament meeting service at my mother-in-law's nursing home. Our services in general already exist at a weird intersection between the formal and the informal. The service at the nursing home is homemade and fully embraces the informal in a way typical church services do not, but perhaps they should.

Image courtesy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

 

I was thinking about this as I was watching a father who was trying to run the meeting with his young daughter in tow. She, having been through one set of meetings today, was unprepared to be still any longer and was hanging on his leg. The pianist was out of town, so they were using the pre-recorded hymns. The tempo is faster on those than most people sing, and the effect is compounded when people are elderly. 

Some people might say it was cudgeled together. A mess. Not fitting for the sacred nature of the ordinance. And on and on.

I personally like it better this way. No ornamentation. No pretenses. No illusion that the meeting is anything other than what it is.

As I took the sacrament today, I thought about which I thought was more important to God: the attempt to do something good, or actually accomplishing it.

There are times when getting things exactly right is worth the continued effort. Things like figuring out how to lift people out of poverty, conquering prejudice, and making amends for deep wrongs. They're worth sticking with until we get them right.

But for most other things, especially the things in religion that are purely stylistic, these things can easily distract from worship and become the Church experience. 

What clothes someone wears, the way they pray, the mechanics of how someone traverses their presence in the shared space of Church. All of that is fundamentally inessential. It may be a reflection of worship, but it is not in and of itself worship.

There is value in honoring the attempt, rather than what is accomplished. People may never fully accomplish what they intended to do. But the effort has value. 

I'm realizing that's what I liked about Mormonism. It wasn't accomplishment. It was the aspiration of becoming holy.