The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life

by Terryl L. Givens

“Christ never was, nor can be, in any creature but purely as a spirit of love.”

Guilt is how we know we are free to choose.

Our lives are more like a canvas on which we paint, than a script we need to learn—though the illusion of the latter appeals to us by its lower risk. It is easier to learn a part than create a work of art.

He realized that authentic freedom required self-creation. We must be free to make our own choices, if we are to create a genuine identity of authenticity and dignity. And that freedom is simply incompatible with our existence as products, beings whose origin, constitution, and will, are created by Another.

If the spark of human consciousness is eternal and undetermined, then God did not predispose us in any direction, set our course toward the evil or the good. Our original choice, or one of them, judging by our present state and possibilities, must have been a response to a set of options given us by a superior Being, which led to our presence in the world (since we quite clearly didn’t get here on our own, and if we were simply cast adrift on the shore of this strange world, where is the freedom in that?).

Life is pain but it is not punishment, and it begins in a season of hope—for all of us, not just our mythic parents.

It means that deep in the primeval past, before the earth was formed or the first man or woman created, grace irrupted into the universe. Before Adam tilled the earth or Eve bore her first child, God had already set His heart upon the race of men, and designed to bring them into His own heavenly sphere.

the most tragic predicaments in which we find ourselves are those that require a choice between competing Goods, not Good and Evil.

Her decision is more worthy of admiration for its courage and initiative, than reproach for its rebellion.

She is depicted as a woman in pursuit of the Good, the True, the Beautiful.

The knowledge of good and evil which they lacked is experiential knowledge.

Mortality, therefore, immersion in bodily, earthly experience, is vital to becoming like God.

In the first Christian centuries, commentators found Adam and Eve’s departure from the Garden and God’s act of clothing them with skins to be a clear metaphor for their descent into a world, where God clothed their souls in earthly bodies. The

suffering can be sanctifying, that pain is not punishment, and that the path to virtue is fraught with opposition.

“without contraries, is no progression.”

“Life, from beginning to end, [is] a constant system of education for eternity.”

“the world is charged with the glory of God;

Our task, it would seem, is to retain or recapture the innocence with which we began this life, while passing through the crucible we call mortality.

not our righteousness, but His mercy and grace give us a place at the table.

God has the desire and the power to unite and exalt the entire human family in a kingdom of heaven, and except for the most stubbornly unwilling, that will be our destiny.

God is personally invested in shepherding His children through the process of mortality and beyond; His desires are set upon the whole human family, not upon a select few. He is not predisposed to just the fast learners, the naturally inclined, or the morally gifted. The project of human advancement that God designed offers a hope to the entire human race. It is universal in its appeal and reach alike. This, however, has not been the traditional view.

Even if we admit that we are responsible for our own poor choices, why would God punish us for mistakes made along our path to moral growth and betterment?

Why do our actions, for good or ill, matter to God, in other words, and why would He choose to punish or reward accordingly?

In the language of scripture, this is God’s response to human sin, an underlying sorrow, not anger.

The pain associated with sin is the natural consequence of our choices; it is not God’s retribution upon the wicked.

The gift and power of agency mean we are free to create the conditions of our own existence—which can be a blessing or a curse.

What is always at stake in any decision we make is what that choice turns us into. We may suffer the unfortunate consequences of

other peoples’ choices. People may honor or abuse us, harm or nourish us. But for the most part, it is our own choices that shape our identity.

Through examples poignant and playful, Dante drives home the truth that hell is a prison we build for ourselves one brick and one choice at a time.

The unhappiness of sin is nothing more than our spirit rebelling against a condition alien to its true nature. We have fallen out of alignment with ourselves, and with that God whose love we crave and whose nature we share.

Or, we can treat guilt as a healthy prod to action, as a pain that signifies a deeper injury in need of remedy—an actual injury signifying real spiritual harm. Guilt is what we feel when we have positioned ourselves in opposition to laws and principles that exist eternally and independently of the mind.

Commandments are the expression of those eternal laws that will lead us to a condition of optimal joyfulness. They are the beacon lights of greater realities that define the cosmic streams in which we swim.

The human freedom to sin thus collides with God’s desire to exalt and bless. The problem of how to reconcile this tragic collision is the problem of atonement, by which we mean, full and harmonious reconciliation.

“We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. . . . What we are worshipping we are becoming.” Every moment of every day our choices enact our loves, our desires, and our aspirations. And we are molding ourselves into the God or gods we thereby worship.

How much more meaningful is a life designed for spiritual formation, rather than spiritual evaluation. All tests evaluate, and life is no exception. But the most meaningful and productive tests are those that assess with an eye to improvement, that measure in order to remedy, and that improve and prepare us for the next stage in an upward process of advancement. For these reasons, all talk of heaven that operates in terms of earning rather than becoming is misguided. Such ideas misconstrue the nature of God, His grace, and the salvation He offers.

“incapable of thinking otherwise of God than as the one . . . who

can will nothing else to all eternity, but to communicate good, and blessing, and happiness, and perfection to every life, according to its capacity to receive it. Had I a hundred lives, I could with more ease part with them all by suffering a hundred deaths than give up this lovely idea of God..

Heaven is not a club we enter. Heaven is a state we attain, in accordance with our “capacity to receive” a blessed and

sanctified nature.

In other words, we acquire Heaven in accordance with a growing capacity to receive it.

What we conclude at this point is this: God cannot arbitrarily dispense a blanket “salvation” on the human race for two reasons. First, because heaven depends on our attaining a particular mode of being, a character and mind and will that are the product of lifelong choosing. Conforming to celestial laws, we become celestial persons.

Heaven is a condition and a sanctified nature toward which all godly striving tends; it is not a place to be found by walking through the right door with a heavenly hall pass.

Even if it were possible, imposing a heavenly reward on those who do not choose heaven would be just that: an imposition on the “unwilling” and an abrogation of the moral agency on which all human life and earthly existence is predicated.

We cannot expect heaven if we do not choose heaven, in simplest terms.

The atonement of Jesus Christ, His agony in Gethsemane and His death on the cross, is the only action by which the wounds of sin and hurt that rend the world can be repaired.

design is not to extend our life indefinitely, but to enhance it permanently.

Christ’s atonement provides a way to break the cycle of sin, and begin a new life-course (in ways large or small) with a newly forged disposition.

If God takes as much care with the destinies of human souls as with the planets they inhabit, surely they too gain in splendor and glory through the cycles of eternity.

For redemption to be permanently beyond reach, however, one would have to choose to put oneself beyond reach.

Hardly ever, then, is a choice made with perfect, uncompromised freedom of the will. That, we saw, is why repentance is possible in the first place. We repent when upon reflection, with a stronger will, clearer insight, or deeper desire, we wish to choose differently. To be outside the reach of forgiveness and change, one would have to choose evil, to reject the love of a vulnerable God and His suffering son, in the most absolute and perfect light of understanding, with no impediments to the exercise of full freedom.