There is something wrong with mission stories. At least, that is what you might be led to believe by the way we avoid them and the way we apologize for sharing them. For instance, look at how Ben Huff introduced a mission story that he was posting. He started off with “Can y’all stomach a mission story right now?”
I’ve known Ben for a long time and I always enjoy his posts and comments. I hope he doesn’t mind my using his post as an example. Why did Ben feel obligated to preface his mission experience in this way? Is there some kind of unwritten law of Mormondom that says that, for the most part, mission experiences are undesirable?
This is an interesting phenomenon. One possibility is that as a culture we suffer from some kind of mission story fatigue. There are a whole lot of returned missionaries and all of them have stories. In conversation, one mission story tends to beget another and after a few they can get to be tedious and uninteresting, especially when the stories move from uplifting to bizarre tales of deviance and general weirdness. Perhaps we are suffering from this same type of effect on a macroscopic level.
Some people seem to look upon mission stories as evidence that the teller has not progressed beyond his or her mission. This attitude can take one of two forms. For some people, mission stories seem to represent a naive, simplistic, black and white world view that should have been grown out of and those that tell them are therefore viewed as simplistic and intellectually weak. In its other manifestation, telling mission stories might be looked down upon because we expect people to continue to have spiritual experiences after their missions are over and if they continue to tell mission stories we wonder why they don’t have any spiritual experiences to share from after their mission.
Of course there is also the tainting influence of missionary folklore. Once we’ve heard the same story about the missionary who flicked an investigator’s cat between the eyes and accidentally killed it from missionaries who served simultaneously on four different continents, we may start to doubt the veracity of mission stories in general. This of course dilutes the spiritual value of mission stories.
Even though I enjoyed God’s Army, I wonder, too, if seeing missionary stories formalized into film form by Richard Dutcher might have influenced this trend too.
Another consideration might be that people feel that those who share mission stories are being insensitive toward others who may not have served missions and that sharing a missionary experience communicates a kind of spiritual elitism.
Of course, I am speculating. I don’t really know why mission stories are becoming increasingly taboo. Whatever the cause, I do think that it is a shame.
Mission stories can be powerful and while I have had many powerful experiences with the spirit, the priesthood, and the power of the atonement since my mission, these experiences are often too close to home to share without embarrassing members of my family or myself. I wonder if this is true for others as well? After a mission, spiritual experiences tend to center around family. I would think that propriety would discourage telling experiences involving the prescription pill addiction of one’s spouse or child, the apostasy of a family member, or the specifics of your own struggle to overcome sin, even though they may be spiritual and illustrative.
If post-mission stories are often too close to home to comfortably share, and mission stories become culturally unacceptable, we face the danger of filling in a well of spiritual inspiration and cultural intertextuality. Despite this trend I think that mission stories are relevant to our lives. They are an important source of inspiration that we do not want to stifle.
How can we find a balance and unapologetically share uplifting and instructional narratives from our missionary lives while avoiding the pitfalls of mission story fatigue, apparent spiritual elitism, and the effects of tall-missionary-tales?