The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith

by Terryl L. Givens

perhaps providing conclusive answers to all our questions is not the point of true religion. Jesus, on assorted occasions, chided His listeners for just such misconceptions. The gospel Christ taught was spectacularly designed to unsettle and disturb,

Jeffrey Holland said, the Savior did not preach “comfortable doctrine, easy on the ear.” Rather, he upset the expectations of “those who thought he spoke only soothing platitudes.”7 In the perfect peace of Eden, God planted a certain tree, the purpose of which was clearly provocation, not restful shade from the sun.

“Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?” And “From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.” Then, a Jesus wearied by the defections of fair-weather disciples asks His closest friends, “Will ye also go away?”

“To whom shall we go?” they ask. There is pathos in the unspoken. They do not say, “of course not, we have found all the answers right here,” because Christ’s words do not elicit peace but perplexity; they leave His apostles unsettled as well. The apostles do not say, “Why would we leave?” They do not reply by affirming their testimony of the difficult doctrines that have caused the fainthearted to flee. They are just as shaken as the others by what they have heard. They affirm their faith in Jesus in spite of, not because of, the hardness of the way, the disequilibrium His indecipherable teachings have stirred in their souls. The apostles choose to cling to the belief they have that Jesus is the Christ. But that doesn’t make His teachings easier to bear.

peace comes as strains of harmony heard amid the cacophony of life, like the quiet voice heard amidst the maelstrom of wind. It does not come as escape from the whirlwind.

In the Mormon narrative, therefore, the circumstances that define the reality of the human predicament are not a

blatant choice between Good and Evil but a wrenching decision to be made between competing sets of Good. The philosopher Hegel believed that this scenario, replicated in myriad artistic narratives, expressed the inescapably tragic nature of the universe. There are very few simple choices. No blueprint gives us easy answers. Life’s most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong but between competing demands on our time, our resources, our love and loyalty.

Savage said, “Seeing you are to go forward, I will go with you, will help you all I can, will work with you, and if necessary, will die with you; but you are going too late.”10 Savage chose loyalty, and he found horrific suffering. That is the tragic consequence. Eve founded the project of human mortality—and lost Eden.

John Ciardi wrote, that “clean white paper, waiting under a pen, is a gift beyond history and hurt and heaven.”

so many critics attribute to religion a kind of facile wish fulfillment, imaginative fairy-tale scenarios that reduce complexity and mystery to easy answers and glib forms of consolation. As any disciple knows who has lived a life of faith thoughtfully, attuned to the rhythms of humanity’s travails, to the demands of mercy and unconditional love, and to the call to patient waiting, religion is

not the coward’s way out of life’s difficulties. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it’s a cross.”

Elder Holland has said, “Sadly enough . . . it is a characteristic of our age, that if people want any gods at all, they want them to be gods who do not demand much: comfortable, smooth gods.”

To be an agent unto oneself may very well require that we operate in the valley of incertitude. It is here that we act most authentically, calling upon intuition, spiritual intimations, or simple yearning.

“It doth not yet appear what we shall be.”

Even with Christ as our exemplar, we strive to achieve emulation, not replication. Brigham Young said it most provocatively: “‘I put into you intelligence,’ saith the Lord, ‘that you may know how to

govern and control yourselves.’”20 If spiritual maturity and not a rote performance is the goal, then life is not a multiple-choice test. There can’t be ready answers to the most soul-stretching dilemmas. Like Eve’s courageous choice in the garden, the test has to probe deeper than True/False or Right/Wrong. Self-revelation and self-formation take place only in the presence of the seemingly insoluble,

gospel . . . causes men and women to reveal that which would have slept in their dispositions until they dropped into their graves. The plan by which the Lord leads this people makes them reveal their thoughts and intents,

It may be the most potent form of the question most worth posing: What will you do now?

There is no escaping our fragmentary grasp on the deepest truths of our predicament, on either side of faith. In the memorable words attributed to the arch-skeptic Voltaire, “To believe in God is impossible; but not to believe is absurd.” To the would-be believer, not everything makes sense. Not all loose ends are tied up; not every question finds its answer.

Staying the course takes a great effort of will. Relinquishing faith would solve some problems—but would multiply others. For how does one even begin to address the manifold experiences and tender feelings we have known, the powerful ideas and explanations our theology provides, and the visitations of peace and serenity that are balm to broken hearts like our own? Abandoning our faith because it doesn’t answer all the questions would be like closing the shutters because we can’t see the entire mountain. We know in part, Paul said, looking for the flickering flame to give us a glimpse of the

way ahead in the gloom. With Nephi, we readily confess: “I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.”30 We know more than we think, even if we know less than we would like.

Chapter 3 Of Sadducees and Sacraments: The Role and Function of the Church

Saints are nothing without a community of memory. . . . To be a communion of saints makes saints possible.

It has been said that Jesus invented true religion, and man invented churches. That’s not exactly right, but it does reflect a crucial principle: true religion is a way of life; a church is an institution designed to strengthen people in the exercise of that life.

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.”5 It is worth considering what he meant by this, in light of Carlyle’s insight. He could have meant that the best religious practice is to serve others. But perhaps more accurately, one could take his words to mean this: a life devoted to serving others reflects the best conceivable set of values. Regardless of what we say we believe, such a life shows what we believe: that our hearts are attuned to others, that we feel the pain of the vulnerable and seek to relieve it, that we aspire to emulate Christ and His life of selfless service.

act of putting ourselves in the place of the other and seeking his or her best interest—is the lodestar of our life, then that is true religion.

The Church was not designed like a Swiss Army Knife, with a tool to meet every need, a program to serve every function.6 We often impose on the Church organization similar expectations, wanting it to fulfill purposes it was never intended to serve. At the same time, we often bridle against the programs, manuals, cultural accretions, and institutional practices that can seem like distractions at best and spiritual impediments at worst.

In moments of frustration it is easy to imagine a religious life unencumbered by fallible human agents, institutional forms, rules and prohibitions, cultural group-think

and expected conformity to norms. As if our natural, default, primal mode were blissful freedom and natural, spontaneous joy—and it is the artificial strictures of institutional religion that get in the way! But religious forms are necessary—just not in the ways we might have conceived.

Problems enter into our understanding of the Church when we divorce the first part of Christ’s model of true religion, the Lord’s Supper, from the second part, the effects it should generate.

the purposes for which we go to church should be to reenact, in microcosm, the motivations and objectives that Jesus had in laying down His life for us. By coming together in community, serving and ministering to each other, sacrificing selflessly and loving unfailingly, we grow united, sanctified, and perfected in the family of Christ.

We know that the main purpose of Sabbath observance is to partake of the Lord’s Supper. But we sometimes grow frustrated with all the peripherals. Lessons and talks are to

some Mormons what cafeteria food is to teenagers—not just in the way they can be bland and boring, but in the way that they sometimes bring us together in mutual griping rather than mutual edification. But what if we saw lessons and talks as connections to the sacrament rather than as unrelated secondary activities? What if we saw them as opportunities to bear with one another in all our infirmities and ineptitude? What if we saw the mediocre talk, the overbearing counselor, the lesson read straight from the manual, as a lay member’s equivalent of the widow’s mite? A humble offering, perhaps, but one to be measured in terms of the capacity of the giver rather than in the value received. And if the effort itself is negligible—well, then the gift is the opportunity given us to exercise patience and mercy.

insist on imposing a higher standard on our co-worshippers, if we insist on measuring our worship service in terms of what we “get out of” the meeting, then perhaps ...

The first time the word worship appears in the King James Version of the Old Testament, it appears with appalling import. “Abide ye here,” Abraham tells his servant, while “I and the lad will go yonder and worship.”9 The terrible offering of his son’s life is what the Bible’s first instance of “worship” portends. In the New Testament, the word worship first appears again in conjunction with a costly offering. It is used in reference to the wise men, who “worshipped” the Christ child by “open[ing] their treasur...

When, in the Old Testament, King David sins against God, the prophet Gad tells him to offer a sacrifice by way of reconciliation. Hearing of this, a well-intentioned King Araunah offers to ease David’s burden by providing both the site for the altar and the sacrificial oxen. David reproves him, asking, how can “I offer burnt offerings unto the Lord my God of that which doth cost me nothing”?11 Abraham, the wise men, and King David under...

The shopping around for more satisfying spiritual nourishment has long been a heritage of the Protestant Reformation—so much so that in 1559, the Act of Uniformity required all English people to attend their own parish churches. Today that requirement is little more than a quaint memory of a time before religious association and attendance became products of market forces. Mormon practice has achieved what the English parliament could not. With the rarest of exceptions, Mormons attend the ward where they find themselves

Congregations and their bishops do not audition for new adherents’ willful association. They are instantaneously designated a new move-in’s adoptive family, without the member’s right of dissent or appeal.

We love our families because of how much we have invested in them, how many times we fought, argued, simmered, and stewed but were forced back to the negotiating table by an unavoidable proximity and by a connection that transcended personal choice. We love that irritating brother and that infuriating sister because we couldn’t simply walk away in a moment of frustration. We had to submit to the hard schooling of love because we couldn’t transfer to another class with siblings more to our taste.

any resources they need to employ for the building of Zion must be found within themselves or their immediate environs, not among more congenial fellow Saints or under the tutelage of more inspiring leaders the next block over. These wards and stakes thus function as laboratories and practicums where we discover that we love God by learning to love each other.

the moment most conducive to the memory of that gift—the most perfect portal to its meaning and effect—is when we see His body symbolically broken anew, see His blood ritually offered again, and bow in remembrance. That is the moment, in the presence of that offering, that we make our own sacrifice. There, in true worship, we complete the ritual by offering our most costly gifts—our debilitating predilections and habits. “I will give away all my sins to know thee,”

The sacrament is the setting and occasion to complete that transaction, the supreme moment of worship—and it cannot be replicated in any personal religion we fashion on our own.

Heaven is not a location to which good people are assigned, and salvation is not a simple condition of perfect righteousness. The goal of human striving, according to the New Testament, is the acquisition of eternal life—which may be read to mean, the attainment of the kind of life that God Himself leads and enjoys. And that is not simply an existence defined by His perfect attributes. God is God by virtue of the perfection of the relationships He has founded and preserved. He has “set his heart” upon us, “doeth not anything save it be for [our] benefit,” weeps over our suffering in sin, and makes it His personal work and glory to bring about our exaltation.16 Clearly, heaven is a complete immersion—a full engagement and participation in a web of eternal, familial bonds of love and affection.

Being a good person doesn’t of itself put us into meaningful relationship with anyone. That is why, according to Joseph Smith’s magnificent vision of the heavenly kingdoms, the honorable men and women of the earth are saved in a kingdom of glory but are not in the Father’s presence: not because they do not “deserve” it or qualify for it but because, given the opportunity, they did not create that relationship.

“Where can you taste the joy of obeying,” he asks, “unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?”

God not only revealed all the ordinances of salvation to Adam, Joseph taught, but intended them “to be the same forever, and set Adam to watch over them [and] to reveal them from heaven to man or to send Angels to reveal them” in the event of their loss.

Chapter 4 Of Canons and Cannons: The Use and Abuse of Scripture

“Some will say, the scriptures say so & so,” he told a large congregation with some impatience. But “I have the oldest Book in the world [the Bible] & the Holy Ghost I thank God for the old Book but more for the Holy Ghost. . . . If ye are not led by revelation how can ye escape the damnation of Hell.”16 One lesson Latter-day Saints should take from all this is the greater responsibility to model Joseph’s practice of combining spiritual guidance with intellectual effort to discern the Divine voice.

Contradictions in the text are not contradictions in the nature of God Himself, and readers must spiritually discern for themselves the reason for the inconsistencies. As Joseph Smith said, “many things in the scriptures . . . do not, as they now stand, accord with the revelation of the Holy Ghost to me.”17 Specifically, that revelation included a clearer picture of the true nature of God, which early Church leaders called absolutely “necessary in order that any rational and intelligent being may exercise faith in God unto life and salvation.”

We need to search the scriptures in the company of the Holy Ghost. Reading them merely is insufficient to reveal the portions that most truly testify of Christ and His Father.