Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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[RST] Charity and Hebe

I don’t know what it is about the plant Hebe, but I’ve never liked it. Its flowers are pretty, and the leaves have a lovely symmetry to their arrangement, but for some reason it will never get onto my list of favourite plants. It is, in my books at least, botanically unlikeable.

IF

I enjoyed today’s Relief Society lesson on charity, but it got me thinking afterwards, and there was something that bothered me a little.

We’re all familiar with the story of the good Samaritan, but there’s an abstractness to that story, in some respects, because the injured traveller is helpless and his personality is not revealed to us. The Samaritan performs a generous act of charity, but it is to someone whose needs are obvious and who hasn’t yet had a chance to reveal any irritating character flaws. We don’t find out if the Samaritan ever gets to deal with the injured man as a conscious person with whom he might be obliged to have ongoing interactions. Maybe the injured man is an ungrateful, self-centred ego-maniac. Perhaps he’s ever-so-slightly patronising or a fan of the very worst kind of reality television. Would the good Samaritan roll his eyes and beat a hasty retreat as soon as politely possible, or what? What does his charity look like now?

I think I understood the story about President Joseph Fielding Smith’s reliable but mischievous horse, Junie, who could escape her barn and turn on the tap no matter what was tried to prevent her. President Smith highlighted that he had learned to “love and appreciate her for herself”, with her good features and her “couple of bad habits”, but I have to admit I just found the horse endearing, and so the question of loving her was not an issue to me. But what if the horse had been just a little more annoying or quirky?

We all have our distinctive character traits and habits, some of them appealing, some of them perhaps off-putting. We may have the gospel in common, but we are all different. Every so often — and maybe it is just me who thinks this (in which case this little homily has a very limited audience!) — I can’t help wondering which of us would be in each other’s circle of friends outside of the Church. And yet, here we are, with the Lord’s commandment to love one another.

So how do we obey that commandment, not just because it IS a commandment, but because we want to feel and act with genuine love towards each other? How do I show charity when not only do you and I march to the beat of different drummers, but your drummer is doing a classical waltz and mine is into heavy metal techno country? (As far as I can tell mine isn’t … but let’s say so for the sake of the argument!) How do you and I reach out to each other in love, when we are so different, have so little in common, and may, conceivably, irritate each other immensely from time to time (or even frequently!)?

I think it requires a degree of faith: to plant the seed of a relationship and then to nurture it, with patience, with forgiveness, with tolerance, and with a vision of the grand potential that each of us holds within as children of God. For that is who we are. Our occasionally unlikeable or prickly or awkward outsides are just facades for something deeper, purer and more beautifully powerful. We may not even be fully aware that it is there. In fact, I think we are best helped to discover it by those who reach out to us in charity and love, who help us find our better selves, who don’t judge our quirks and shortcomings, and who look beyond the differences.

I look again at the photo. The flowers really are pretty. Maybe it is possible to learn to love even Hebe.

 

Note: The Relief Society Thoughts posts are reprints of little mini-sermon/parable/homily-thingies that I’ve been writing for the women in my Relief Society group at Church. I write them when inspiration strikes and email them out as well as posting them to our facebook page. I thought I’d add them to my blog as well. You can find others by clicking on the “Relief Society Thoughts” category label, in the grey box at the end of this post, and the most recent of the thoughts should have a list of all the posts by title at the end. Previous posts are:

Getting our priorities straight: Mary, Martha and us (Sep 2014)
The stinging nettles in my garden
(Aug 2014)
The black Sunday shoes
(Jul 2014)
An unspectacular sunset
(Jul 2014)
On not doing ALL the things
(Jun 2014)
Gulp! I didn’t see that coming (Mar 2014, which sort of explains the job of “Relief Society President”)

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