On Personality

In my reading of Wuthering Heights for my study abroad class, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of personality: what is it exactly, how much are you born into, and how much can you change? Quite a few of the characters in WH (Heathcliff and Catherine, in particular) seem to have decided that they would not fit in in heaven because their nature is inherently contrary to it. They've seen their society's vision of heaven (the Lintons), and they don't like it, so they aren't going to even try for it.

I see people in the Church sometimes making this mistake, apologizing for the fact that they don't fit the Molly Mormon/Peter Priesthood cast that they assume will be those going to heaven. Whether by virtue of their past experiences, their political party, or their hobbies, they set themselves up as outside those who can expect exaltation. Even worse is when we place others into these categories. We assume that in order to become like Christ, we must lose our individual nature, our personality.

A couple reasons why this is bad: First, it places a limitation on the Atonement which doesn't actually exist. Second, it denies the individual worth of each soul. God created us to be unique from each other. What would be the purpose of doing so if life was supposed to smash that uniqueness out of us? But more concerning than either of these, it implies that the gospel creates a bunch of cookie-cutter people, that you have to be a certain type of person to participate fully in the gospel. Of course, this is true to an extent. We have to do a lot of the same things--you must be keeping the commandments and doing your best to grow closer to God--but I personally believe there's a lot of room in the gospel for personality.

My conclusion about personality is an echo of Plato's allegory of the soul. Personality traits are neither good nor bad. They just are. Or rather, they are both, having both a good and evil aspect plus a will to direct or choose between them. The gospel is not about choosing between being yourself and being Christ. It's about choosing which version of yourself to be. This, to me, is the meaning of "making weak things become strong." Our weaknesses, our personality flaws, are not to be removed by the atonement, but transformed into what they were always intended to be. As CS Lewis says in The Great Divorce, in seeking for heaven, we find fully realized the spark that we thought was worth clinging to in hell. And again, in Matthew 16:25: if we are willing to let go of what we think of as ourselves, we find that we become more unique, more infinitely personal. But in clinging on to the shreds of our self, we lose virtue and uniqueness until at last we are dully all alike in the gray coating of vice.

Weak Things

Sorry about the lack of recent posts. I've been working on getting back in the habit of writing in my journal, and it seems to absorbed all my blogging time. After the journal guilt trip lesson in the Wilford Woodruff manual, I've recently rediscovered some of my old journals.

As I was reading through them, I realized something: I keep making the same mistakes and discoveries over and over again. Seriously, I was reading my journal entries from last summer, and I could almost just change the dates and call them good for this summer. The same rants about a lack of time, dropping good habits in favor of stress, feeling lonely and worried, new resolve to do better, etc. etc. in endless cycles of the same realizations, the same problems.

It seems to me that maybe these are the things that the scriptures are referring to when they talk about taking our weaknesses to the Lord. For some reason, I had always thought of "weak things becoming strong" in terms of talents, or areas of knowledge. For example, I know I could never have made it through my Physics series without the Lord's help--it's simply not something I could have understood on my own.

Perhaps the scripture is true in that way, but I wonder if the Lord wasn't more specifically referring to weaknesses of character, those flaws in our own personality and thought process that we can't seem to see past. Because as I read my journal entries, I notice that when I am not keeping up on my scripture reading and those daily things, my weaknesses are magnified. When I become overwhelmed with my weakness and sink into the depths of despair, it is then that I am inspired to pick up again, to come close to God, and as I do, I see my weaknesses fading away.

It's almost like my own personal pride cycle. I'm not sure that I could ever fully be rid of it, but maybe someday I'll be able to shorten those downward periods and prolong the periods of light.