From the book ‘The Power of Stillness,’ under the heading:
“Not Feeling It” at Church
Those stepping away from faith communities often report coming to feel that their experience has become rigid, narrow, overpaced, and so forth. Though the larger stated reasons for leaving often go beyond this, the joyless, day to day grind can become an ever-present reminder that fuels the ultimate decision to walk away.
Even so, many will admit that there used to be a richness to the life they are now leaving. Somehow, though, that sweetness is now gone. What more is there to say?
Maybe a lot!
Compared to a once-soulful experience of prayer and scripture study, many of us know what it’s like to find these spiritual practices becoming impoverished, superficial, and thin. Although it’s easy to conclude that prayer or scriptures themselves are somehow limited, it would be shortsighted not to consider ways in which all of these larger tendencies toward distractedness, stressful busyness, and accelerating pace of life might be playing a role.
Interestingly, the roots of the Chinese character for busy point to some of the deeper effects of an over hectic way of life: namely, the death or loss of the heart. Could we be “losing the heart” of our spiritual practices in large part through the exhaustion and frenetic pace of our modern lives? If so, what kinds of changes does this call for?
Stopping as a Radical Act
To start, we might ironically first need to stop. But, immersed in nonstop news and entertainment, many find it a lost art to be able to pause and deeply rest. Have you noticed how getting in even fifteen minutes of reading can seem almost impossible these days? Rather than blaming a “boring book,” maybe this says more about us.
If that’s true, what would it mean to experiment with fresh, creative ways of approaching our lives?
Reaching a better place may not be as impossible as we imagine. One thirty-something couple wrote about remembering a time “when things did not move quite so fast. When it wasn’t expected that everyone was reachable at all times.”
Finding a better balance doesn’t mean “sitting in a rocking chair on a farm for twelve hours a day,” they added, but rather finding a healthy pace of life filled with good accomplishments, without simultaneously feeling like “we’re constantly drowning. Shouldn’t that be a reasonable thing to want?”10
We think so. (Continued. . .)
Jacob Z. Hess, Carrie L Skarda, Kyle D. Anderson, Ty R. Mansfield, The Power of Stillness (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 2019), 5-7
10. Tanja Hester, “The World id Speeding Up. We’re Eager to Slow Down,” Our Next Life, September 5, 2016, https://ournextlife/2016/09/05/speedup-slowdown/.
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience, and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
