Tales from the Mission Journal, Part 2

(Yeah, a number of mission stories have been on the mind recently.  So sue me...)

One morning, my companion and I knocked on the door of a "New Age Woman".  (We knew this because this was one of the first things she said...in English.  "I'm a New Age Woman!")

I'm not sure what that meant exactly, but the second thing she said was much more useful: "I want to know everything there is to know about your Church..."  Well, okay then...

We taught her that morning and a couple of other times over the next week.  The key to being 'New Age' (again, according to her) is open-mindedness, and she was very willing to learn about our Church, and every other church and philosophy out there.  Things went fine for a little while, until we got into the parts of the discussions that started requiring commitments.  Then, the problems started...

Commitments, you see, make you at least theorize about our view of things being somehow 'better' or 'more correct' than others.  How can you be so 'judgmental', she said...  All religions and philosophies are equally good, and you can't just say one is any better than the others.

To demonstrate her point, she drew for us a small dot in the middle of a page, and a number of arrows moving into the center from all directions.  The dot represented 'heaven', or 'nirvana', or any other religious concept representing the ultimate goal of the human spirit.  The arrows represent the different religions and philosophies of the world.  "See?" she said, "you can get to the middle through any number of directions.  No one religion is better than the others..."

That was the end of our encounters with the "New Age Woman", although I think the experience is worthy of mention on a number of levels.  Openmindedness is great...unless you take it so far that you refuse to pass judgment on anything.  I'm on record as saying the differences between our Church and other world religions aren't as great as people might think, but even given the universalness of various truths, eventually you'll still reach a point where you have to make critical decisions.  Everything can't be 'true', simultaneously...

The flaw in Ms."New Age"'s example (which we didn't get into at the time) is simple:  It's true you can get to any one point from any number of directions, but a 'path' cannot be defined only by the destination.  It also depends on where you start--where you are now.  Are we here (top of the page)? Here (left side)?  Here (lower right corner)?  Draw a dot somewhere where you are now, and then look...to get from where you are to where you're going, there is one path and one path only.

That's why certain truths are essential to understanding where we are and where we're going.  Who is God?  Who are we?  Why are we here? What do we have to do to get there from here?

It's one thing for a Buddhist to say "We don't need a Savior in our religion like Christians do..."  But we don't need a Savior because we believe we do, we need one because that's the way things are.  We're here (draw a point on the page) and there's an insurmountable gulf between here and our goal on the other side of the page. Having a different belief about the universe doesn't automatically make the belief reality...

Joseph Smith said, "It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character of God", and to have "a correct idea of his...perfections and attributes".  Knowing God helps us understand ourselves, since we were created in His image.  And knowing ourselves helps us know why we're here, what laws and principles govern the universe we live in, and how we can get to where we want to go next...