Various Stages of Mormondom

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Our topics are always so coincidental.

One of my associates quit this week because her depression was interfering with her work. She just left one day last week and has not come back. I finally had to make the awkward phone call telling her that basically she no longer had a job. She has struggled with this problem for a while, and she explained to me that she doesn’t think she was a very good employee and that it wasn’t fair to put that burden upon me and the company. I feel for her. Sadly, she was correct. She wasn’t doing very well and was on the way to being let go anyway. She said that she has a doctor (a psychiatrist I think) whom she is working with. I hope everything turns out OK. She’s getting married in a few weeks.

Do we all suffer from depression? While I myself have very real episodes, I still think of depression as a dirty word. While I am as empathetic as they come, I still roll my eyes at the condition.

I spent the greater part of my teenaged years depressed. Really depressed. I had a lot of anxieties and hang-ups, but didn’t know how to deal with them. I didn’t know you COULD deal with them. Generalized anxiety disorder wasn’t popular then, and neither was Paxil, Zoloft, or Prozac.

My depression is cyclical. While the anxiety comes like clockwork (it is connected to monthly hormones), the depression cycle takes much longer. About 3 times a year I will stay in bed for two to three days because “I don’t feel well.” I will have a bad week with the in-bed time sandwiched in, and then I will slowly come out of the funk and not even remember what it feels like to be depressed. Isn’t that strange, that I can’t really remember what it’s like unless it’s happening?

Just yesterday, I was listening to the radio on the way to work and the guest had written a book about depression. He described his inability to get out of bed for weeks. I turned my head and only listened out of the corner of my eye because I have a hard time accepting how close that reality is for me sometimes.

Any resolutions? Perhaps. Depression is an awful, awful thing. You can’t suck it up or pray your way out of it. A lot of times medication is a good solution, sometimes the only solution for someone to lead a “normal” life.

But I have a fantastic life. I have a husband I LOVE, a nice house, a job I enjoy, family and friends, and a naturally sunny disposition. I have a hard time admitting that I have a little black rain cloud waiting in the wings.

Carrie Ann

At one point on my mission, 4 missionaries lived in an apartment which was roughly 2/3 the size of my living room. I was one of those missionaries. Elder Miles, our district leader, lived there, too. Okay, the whole district was in there.

One day, Elder Miles was on splits with the local Zone leader (whose name I cannot recall). While they were out, they stopped in a local shop. I should tell you that we were in Russia (post-Soviet) and that our missionary funds were excessive for the area in which we lived. Instead of packing up and shipping out excess funds each month, as I am sure we would have done if we were more socially conscious, we bought a lot of frozen pizza. The funny thing about the frozen pizza, was that it was often Scandanavian in origin. So, we were unable to read the boxes. Nonetheless, we had a good idea about what was on individual frozen pizzas because the good people in Scandanavia shipped their pizzas in brightly colored boxes that featured pictures on the pizzas inside. Cheese, pepperoni, and supreme pizzas were easy to spot and eaten often.

On this particular day, Elder Miles and the Zone leader were flipping through the pizzas in the freezer in much the same manner that one would flip through LPs in a record store. Suddenly, they stopped. They marvelled at what their eyes beheld. It was a Hawaiian pizza. There was the pineapple. There was the ham. Perhaps they thought it odd that this distinctly American pizza had made it into Russia, via Scandanavia, but they didn't care. It was a taste of home. It was bought and it was to be quickly consumed, before the other elders in the tiny apartment (including me) got home.

I should say that Russia, at this point, was on the cusp of its current craziness. Yeltsin was still in power, drinking himself into irrelevance. The area in which we worked was dominated by Mafioso (hence the upscales stores with frozen pizzas). So, while it wasn't impossible to get American foodstuffs, it was rare and expensive. Missionaries went ga-ga over the stuff. I knew missionaries who bought out kiosks of cases of root beer (near 100 cans of the stuff). I personally combined funds with a companion to a buy store out completely of its accidentally acquired stock of canned chili (50 cans consumed in about 2 and 1/2 weeks). So, I did not begrudge them their find, as I likely would have done the same and I know that it would have been shared if there had been more than one pizza.

In any case, when I came home, I saw two of the most disconsolate missionaries I had ever seen. The pizza had been a mistake. You see, the pineapple, pictured on the box, had turned out to be pale celery. The juicy pink ham was actually salmon. Much more suited to the Scandanavian palatte, don't you think?

They were heartbroken. They could not bring themselves to eat it, or even look at it. My companion and I, however, were unburdened by false expections and, hey, free pizza is free pizza. It wasn't bad if you knew what it was.

I am sure that there is a lesson about religion somewhere in that. Our expectations often prevent us from enjoying blessings that come at us sideways. It is helpful to really understand what you are getting before you dig in. Though the pizza may not be to your taste, it doesn't mean that it is valueless as food. Finally, God loves a good joke. May he smile upon you, too.

Posted by HP

In case you've missed it, the topic this week on Various Stages of Mormondom is "Pizza." Don't look at me, it wasn't my suggestion. It is particularly cruel for me to have to write on the topic of pizza because I am lactose intolerant. I wasn't born lactose intolerant; it's something that developed in my early twenties. I've loved pizza since I was a kid, especially the Godfather's Combination pizza. When my parents picked me up from the airport after two years in Argentina, I made them stop on the way home at Godfather's.

And though you may already hear the creaking of an over-extended metaphor, I think Mormonism and religion in general are a lot like pizza for me. Sure, it's not an exact analogy, but I think it has some good points.

Just because I can't eat pizza, it doesn't mean that I don't want anyone else to eat it. My wife and I order pizza all the time; she eats the pizza, and I have a meatball sub (sans frommage). I am happy that she is happy eating the pizza. What the pizza does to my digestive system has no relevance to her enjoyment of it.

Just because I can't eat pizza doesn't mean that I don't occasionally enjoy the smell of it. That doesn't mean that I want to live in a pizzeria (or next door to one), or have pizza rubbed in my face every single day. But I have no problem with a normal amount of pizza.

If I eat a slice of pizza, I will get sick. But I can pick off the pepperoni and eat them without consequences. There is no reason not to eat the pepperoni if it is the cheese that makes you sick. Of course, you shouldn't cherry pick all the pepperoni off a slice and leave it inedible.

Finally, please believe me when I tell you I can't eat pizza. Some people have told me that there is no lactose in pizza, and that I should feel free to eat it. I have eaten it and I know that there is something in pizza makes me very sick, very quickly. Perhaps I'm misidentifying lactose as the root of my problem, but there definitely is a problem.

Do I envy the pizza-eaters? Sure, though not as much as I used to. I miss the strings of cheese that stretch from your mouth to the slice. I miss eating the cold leftovers in the morning for breakfast. But it's been a few years since I've eaten pizza, and I'm okay with that.

It does help that I've found a substitute: my wife discovered a pizzeria that offers pies made with brown rice cheese. The restaurant is a pain to get to, and the pizza isn't quite like the Godfather's that I remember, but it is worth it to me to eat pizza and not get sick.

After all, isn't that the point? Everyone needs to eat, but they don't all need to eat the same thing.

Posted by Ned Flanders.

To talk about the Sabbath Day is to talk about commandments in general. After all, the strictures that we generally find imposed on ourselves during the Sabbath are just the sort of things that people go to day spas to enjoy. A day without media? Isn't that why people go camping? Isn't that what people are after with yoga classes and morning Tai Chi in the park? Meditation and a connection to the divine? What else would you like?

Well, for starters, it seems like we would like our meditation to come in shorter doses (not as long as daylight). We would like to set aside our quiet day in the event that there is something noisy and interesting coinciding with a Sabbath. We wanna be in charge, darn it! Any day that is our own is satisfying, but it cannot be a Sabbath and that is irksome.

There is some ambiguity about the title of the Sabbath. There are two possible Hebrew sources: one meaning seven (as the Sabbath was (and remains for Jews) the seventh day of the week); the other referring to ideas of covenant and oaths. Both make sense, explaining the ambiguity I suppose. There is no moral imperative for Sundays in the Church (the Sabbath day migrates in the Middle East). So we are stuck with the covenantal idea for our justification.

So, what isn't to like about the covenant? At any given time in the church, we are the bearers of several covenants with God. Some of them involve outward displays, others are solely inward motions. Believers find them all effective and important. Indeed, believers would argue that inner belief is what makes them effective; solely outward participation may reap social rewards, but it has no eternal value.

We make a big deal in the Church of Jews, of the joys that the orthodox take in fulfilling commandments. Why just be envious? Why can't the fulfilling of commandments be a delight because it is an expression of one's love of God? I don't know, but we don't seem to be there yet.

Perhaps it is because we are still too concerned with outward appearances. I, for one, would find the Sabbath more enjoyable if it didn't involved wrestling my five-year-old into church clothes weekly. However, I keep doing it, because something about it strikes me as important. Something Ossie Davis said in Joe vs. the Volcano. Though the Sabbath and some other commandments are outward, they are meant to be expressions of inward convictions. Perhaps someday I'll get to that point. In the meantime, I'll keep on struggling with my necktie and looking forward to the goldfish in Nursery.

ps. the name has changed but the song remains the same. For more info (vague as can be), see here.

Posted by HP

So, Blogger didn't like our blog, I guess, and turned it into a blank screen for a while. After emailing them regarding the issue and waiting eons for them to get back to us, I finally took matters into my own hands and discovered that I was able to fix it myself.

Let that be a lesson the next time the technical forces of the internet combine to obliterate your blog. That's what I learned.

Posted by Kaycee.