Voltaire’s
Candide raises a lot of good
thought-provoking questions. The famous line in Candide is that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” On
the surface, this is meant to be an optimistic statement, but if you look
deeper into the meaning, you see that this is kind of a passive sigh that means
“I give up.” When you view the world as not having the ability to improve, it
provides no incentive to improve ourselves. We just accept sadness of our
existence. We view God as a puppeteer of all things on earth, and we feel that
there is an absence of agency. Of course, as Latter-Day Saints, only few of us
have this kind of thinking. However, we can apply it in a different way to our
personal lives. Is this thought of us living in “the best of all possible
worlds” something that applies to the way we think of our spiritual lives? Are
we being spiritually passive? This is one of the biggest dangers as members of
this church. We go through the motions of going to church, reading our
scriptures, and saying our prayers, but there is always more we can do. We must
work every minute of our lives to improve our spiritual life. As Brigham Young
said, “after suitable rest and relaxation there is not a day, hour or minute
that we should spend in idleness, but every minute of every day of our lives we
should strive to improve our minds and to increase our faith in the holy gospel.”
Often, we think that our lives are fine as they are and that we have no reason
to want to change that. This mentality is what stunts our spiritual growth. Our
life is a process of continually trying to improve. If we stop, what is the
point of life? If we stop trying, life starts to lose its meaning. If we stop
trying, we stop living. We must not allow ourselves to be spiritually passive.
We must not let ourselves say that the spiritual world we live in is “the best
of all possible worlds.” As soon as we say this we become passive and
dismissive. We stop questioning the morality of the world around us and if we
are not progressing, then we are moving backwards. Our spiritual growth is like
a steep ramp. If we are not working to move forward, then we start slipping
backwards.
