What?
What was that?
I remember something from my Greek/philosophy studies where an allusion was made to the 'Sun eating ifs own children', meaning that the sun, although it is really big and really powerful/hot, it was so giant that it consumed it's own offspring... I'm not sure where the story came from nor am I sure that I'm alluding to it correctly; I just know that when I went to a LDS singles activity, the idea of 'the sun eating it's own children' came to mind...
Let me explain:
We need to start with the status quo--Hundreds and thousands and even millions of singles in the LDS church. As of right now, almost 1/3 of the church membership are single adults. Now, if you also take into consideration the percentage that are children/minor youth, and you mathematically are left knowing that the single adult percentage of the church is equal to that of the married adults (and 1/3 is left for the children...). That is HUGE!
Next, we also know that the singles are going to be looking to marry and compute their progression charts and because every (maybe not every, but I can only speak from my own perspective!) person wants to make every logical progression through this mortal life--not to mention fulfill their patriarchal blessings (which all of them speak of being eternally married [if not in this lifetime, then in the world to come]...)!!!
We also know that the church shares in this knowledge of the eternal progression of the individual, and that this progression ends at a certain point and an 'eternal spouse' is needed in order to reach the highest degrees of that celestial order!
Finally, we are left with the church feeling the need to help the singles match-up and move on. Only, they have 2 things going against them:
1) The actual single population is made up of somewhat backwards (at least socially speaking...) and recently wounded adults. None of the recently divorced adults feel like they can simply just jump-right-into the "feeding-frendzies" called the single-adult-life and survive on their own;
and 2) the church has no experience playing "match-maker" or at least helping the singles warm into the dating scene and potential marrying-scene...
What we are left-with is mass dating--we all congregate together and do something wholesome and potentially uplifting! Mind-you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but the church is left with an ever-growing 'single adult population' and no end in sight!!!
We, meaning all of the single-adult-LDS-community (the author excluded) need to either learn how to have that drive (isn't it a God-given-drive anyway?) and act on it effectively, or, we need to have the church gain some matchmaking wisdom and teach itself how to help the growing single-acult community learn how to find it's own "marriable" singles (the girls find the boys that they will marry and visa-versa...). Now we have to look at the 2 types of singles: the-never-been-married and the-married-but-now-divorced and see if we can find a single answer for both types of singles...
If not, we are going to only see this population grow and grow (and thank goodness that children are not born into this mindset, but they grow up and naturally find spouses!!!) until we see if end in arranged marriages!?! (would that be that terrible?)
JPS
Interesting post. I am glad you put a little responsibility onto those in the single scene. Despair not, singles! I have an over 40 single friend and she has quite the victim mentality. Somehow she feels the growing numbers are the rest of the church members fault, and we should somehow fix their problem. How is it possible? We try our best to include her in this family-focused church, but somehow we always fall short. I can appreciate that it must be very hard. Anyway, it was nice to hear your perspective. I suppose any of us "marrieds" could become singles at any time.
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