When you sit on the stand in church, your brain tends to work differently. And I've been sitting on the stand quite a bit lately.
Last week, I looked out over the congregation and saw a box of crayons — not one of those puny boxes, but a big, robust box filled with a hundred different hues.
Each person in the congregation was unique, one of a kind. The shade they brought to the ward and the world was all their own. And yet, the people were also all the same. They held the same beliefs, followed the same rules, performed the same rituals. In church, they were like crayons in a crayon box.
They were one — not unlike the people Jesus speaks about in his "intercessory prayer" (John 17).
When those in the world saw the similarities in LDS people, however, they saw only "uniformity," not "unity." The world saw sheep blindly following, lemmings en route to the sea.
They didn't see the unity.
Unity is a spiritual quality. It's the sweet feelings of peace and purpose that come from belonging to a family, to a dedicated team, to a squadron. It's wanting the best for others as much as you want it for yourself. Unity is honesty. It's knowing that no one is out to harm you, so you can speak from the heart. To borrow a line from Kurt Vonnegut, it means being "lonely no more."
Years ago, I was part of the hoard of journalists that descended on Denver when Pope John Paul II appeared there for World Youth Day. The journalists covering the event wrote about everything, except what was really happening. They couldn't grasp the bonding and spiritual blending that was going on. The true meaning of the moment eluded them.
"That has to be frustrating for you," I told Bishop William Weigand, who was shepherding the Utah contingent. "They're missing what's really happening."
"I know," he said. Then after a pause he said, "That's why we have to teach them."
So, as I sat on the stand in that LDS service, I thought how all the people in the chapel before me were unique. They had their individual strengths and weaknesses, personal longings, private dreams. But together they blended into a color wheel of spiritual unity.
I knew many people in the world couldn't see that. After all, the world was just a coloring book, filled with black and white lines and empty spaces. It was up to those who'd found the rainbow to fill in the color.
And those "crayons" in the chapel that day were charged with taking the sweetness and beauty they'd found in "being as one" and coloring the world with it.