The Problematic Ideal

As a practicing Mormon, I sometimes found myself weighed down with heaviness, a symptom of a self-burdening syndrome. Sometimes the syndrome manifests as a form of guilt and self-recrimination. But more often, it's just a feeling of heaviness. A burden we carry by maintaining a set of unrealizable objectives. As an example, I have sometimes tried to add up all the time it would take to do everything that Mormon church leaders tell us we are supposed to be doing. There simply isn't time in the day to do it all.

As I've recently looked at the church from a more neutral perspective, I've come to see the self-burdening syndrome as a natural outgrowth of some of the church's teachings. I'm not trying to slam the LDS Church. I respect it as an organization for what it does for its members and others. But as its teachings hold up an ideal of perfection, we're going to have a lot of people embracing guilt and judgment on some level.

On the other hand, there are many teachings in the church that tend to reduce the effects of the self-burdening syndrome. There are several scriptures I collected years ago that I called the "chill out Gospel". One of my favorites is Matthew 11:30, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” I have seen some church leaders who recognized that there is a time and a season for everything (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8) and have preached a lighter gospel that sounds something like, “do what you can and enjoy the ride.” Unfortunately, there is also a core set of teachings, and plenty of talks by current church leaders, that feed right into the guilt and judgment.

This syndrome isn't limited to the LDS church. I only talked about that church because it's part of my background; it's what I know best. I think the syndrome is a natural outgrowth of any religion or school of thought that teaches an ideal of perfection, a concept of evil, and a conflict between those two things. In western religion and philosophy, these ideas are deeply entrenched. So deep, I never saw them clearly until I began to step out of them. In the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islaam), there is an ideal good (God/Allah) and an opposing evil (Satan/Shaitan) except, I believe, in Judaism, which doesn't necessarily believe in a devil/tempter. There are numerous scriptures in these religions that speak of a conflict that began before, or at the time of, creation and will last until some promised time of peace. In Mormon/Christian theology, this is the promised millennium of peace following Armageddon.

In western philosophy, I see idealism first cropping up with Plato's forms, a concept of an abstract ideal of which all manifestations are imperfect reflections. Early Christian writers found they had a lot in common with Plato's teachings, and C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors, had quite a bit to say about them. As a beautiful example, take a look at Lewis' culmination of the Narnia series, "The Last Battle". The ideal is the spiritual, the unmanifested, the perfect. The manifested will never achieve the ideal, but is only a crude reflection of it. One day, after we die, we will see the ideal in all its glory. This is a Christian idea, not a philosophic one, but, when framed that way, you can probably see why Plato’s philosophy of forms has had great appeal in some Christian circles.

I think the concept of Plato's ideal forms is beautiful in a way, but also problematic. By imagining that the ideal is beyond our reach, those who strive for perfection in this life will never achieve their goals. Perfection and ultimate happiness must be saved for later. An echo of this is the end-time prophecies, which say we must wait for the ideal form of government and human society (the coming millennium I referred to earlier). Our current forms are corrupt and less than ideal. But the ideal will come.

What I find unfortunate about this line of thinking is that we're always waiting for something to be perfect. Perfection is always just outside our reach. Being forced to wait makes some of us give up on the life we're living right now. We begin to see our life on this earth as dirty, unhealthy, suboptimal.

But I don't see life that way. At least, not anymore. I look at the "imperfection" all around me and I think it's perfect. I've never seen a perfect triangle according to the rules of geometry (one example of Plato's forms), but the triangles I do see are each unique ... and beautiful in their own way.

I live in a pretty nice house, but it’s a typical family home. It's often a mess. The "ideal" home would have everything in its proper place. But the "ideal," could it ever be achieved, would be sterile and death-like. Life is messy. And messy can be beautiful.

In my living room, I have some cracks in the walls. They weren't there when we bought the house, but the foundation has shifted a little, and they appeared a few years ago. That kind of thing used to bother me (OCD personality that I am), and I would want to fix it. But now I look at it as a beautiful reflection of a home that has been lived in and loved. Every mark on the walls is a reflection and reminder of memories, many of them chaotic, loud, hyper, sometimes even combative, but always beautiful. We're planning to paint the walls soon because it's nice to have things clean and sparkly (and that will be beautiful too), but while we have the cracks and the marks, I'll enjoy them.

These realities, these messy things that never measure up to anyone's version of "ideal" are, in my mind, perfect. It is the ideal forms, which have never existed in the real world, that are unhealthy. 

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
  -- Anthem by Leonard Cohen

The idealistic mode of thinking manifests itself in some form, to some degree, in the conscious or subconscious thoughts of many of us. It causes people to compare themselves, their lives, their habits, their thoughts, or whatever to a perfect ideal that simply does not exist. Perfection is right here, in this life, right now. And happiness is best found when life is embraced and loved, not in spite of its imperfections, but because of them.