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The Atonement is not a backup plan in case we happen to fall short in the process; it is the ordained means whereby we gradually become complete and whole, in a sin-strewn process of sanctification through which our Father patiently guides us.
To be open to truth, we must invest in the effort to free ourselves from our own conditioning and expectations.
Love reveals reality.
If my temporary taste of gratitude becomes a disciplined habit, an ongoing attitude and state of mind, I am “smarter,” more aware, than if this were not so. To the extent that I become a habitually grateful person, I engage a different and richer reality than the “me” who is less grateful.
it may be worth considering that freedom and its opposite take many forms. Freedom to choose belief and a life of faith, freedom to choose one’s principles and abide by them, freedom to cherish one set of values over another, those kinds of freedom might best unfold when we are not commanded in all things, by God or by the facts. 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. In this regard, William James observed that “our passional
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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,
This perspective represents a fundamental reorientation in attitude toward life’s incompleteness. The patterns of meaning only dimly perceived, the inspiration only partially (or negligibly) felt, may not be God’s indifference after all—or our spiritual failing. It may be the most potent form of the question most worth posing: What will you do now?
Wordsworth realizes it is the tension itself, the irresolution, the ambiguity and perplexity of our lives, the very feelings of alienation, estrangement, and dislocation, that are our rescue from the complacency and stasis of an eternal Eden. Like the sand in the oyster shell, the torment of uncertainty is at the same time the spur to our spiritual vitality and growth.
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.
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
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Worship, then, is about what we are prepared to relinquish—what we give up at personal cost.
“Some will say, the scriptures say so & so,” he told a large congregation with some
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. In searching the scriptures, we should expect to find pearls amidst the detritus of the centuries.
“The things of God are of deep import, and time, and experience, and careful, and solemn, and ponderous thoughts can only find them out,” Joseph said.
When dissonance and distress set in, we should trust in the Spirit to find the hidden God of scripture, the One who knows us by name, who weeps with us in our pain, and who has graven us on the palms of His hands.
Lorenzo Snow wisely noted, “I thanked God that He would put upon a man who had those imperfections the power and authority He placed upon him for I knew that I myself had weakness[es], and I thought there was a chance for me.” That is why “I thanked God that I saw these imperfections.”25
And if delegation is a real principle—if God really does endow mortals with the authority to act in His place and with His authority, even while He knows they will not act with infallible judgment—then it becomes clearer why God is asking us to receive the words of the prophet “as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith.”8
God’s power and promise is in His capacity to transmute our suffering—and our faithful response to painful predicaments—into something beautiful. God said He would have a tried people. But He doesn’t have to do the trying. We do most of it to each other—through the very weakness designed to bring us all, fallible leaders and struggling disciples, to Christ the Healer.
“In recent years we might be compared to a team of doctors issuing prescriptions to cure or to immunize our members against spiritual diseases. Each time some moral or spiritual ailment was diagnosed, we have rushed to the pharmacy to concoct another remedy, encapsulate it as a program and send it out with pages of directions for use. . . . Over medication, over-programming is a critically serious problem.”5
The challenge, then, and the enticing opportunity, is to find a pattern of devotion and nourishment that extends beyond the confines of a Sunday curriculum, one that constitutes our private life of discipleship. (“Ah Lord! Be thou in all our being; as not in the Sundays of our time alone,” prayed MacDonald.)15 For while the established Church provides a framework of service, an occasion for community, and a vehicle for saving ordinances, it is in the secret chambers of our private temples that we must have ultimate recourse to the inspiration and revelation that guide our discipleship. In
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Brigham Young set a standard still too little appreciated when he declared that “Our religion takes within its wide embrace not only things of heaven, but also things of earth. It circumscribes all art, science, and literature.”20
Surely we can feel at home, not just in our Mormon community of aspiring saints, but in the larger church without walls, peopled by the devout, the holy, and the exemplary from myriad times and traditions.
In the end I have come to one simple truth: we choose. We choose what we will believe in and live by. We choose how we will behave and what we will hope for. I then bore testimony that I know that when I follow Christ’s teachings I have a better marriage. I know that when I serve and love others I am a happier person. I know that when I focus on love I form lasting deep relationships with others. I know that when I read scriptures in the morning with my daughter, she and I are happier together and more peaceful in our relationship. I do not know that the Church is true. I do not know that
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Instead of explaining our suffering, God shares it.2
Mormons typically cast the war in heaven as a contest between freedom and coercion, risk and salvational assurance. Beecher’s view is no different. He simply recognizes that freedom is the freedom to err, which is inseparably connected to risk: the risk of pain and loss.
The mythic memory of those events and projected costs might serve to endow Paul’s words with new meaning: “Be not overcome of evil.”6 Paul’s fear may have been, not that we as disciples would fall prey to the allure of evil, but that as compassionate spectators we would fall prey to the weight of evil, and turn to despair, hopelessness, or bitterness. This is why Julian of Norwich so compassionately counseled, “For it is [Satan’s] meaning to make us so heavy and so sorry in this that we should forget the blessed beholding of our everlasting friend.”7
Reb Dovid Din was sought out in Jerusalem by a man who was suffering a crisis of belief. . . . He listened and listened to the man, who ranted and raved for hours. At last he said to him: “Why are you so angry with God?” . . . Then Reb Dovid stood up and told the man to follow him. He led him to the Wailing Wall, away from the place where people pray to the site of the ruins of the Temple. When they reached that place, Reb Dovid told him that it was time to express all the anger he felt toward God. Then, for more than an hour, the man struck the wall of the Kotel with his hands and screamed
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Surely God is not so fragile, so lacking in empathy, that He would take offense at our incredulity or our anger in the face of the world’s wounds. For our pain is already His. As a theologian who lost his own son wrote, “Through our tears, we see the tears of God.”
Patience does not mean to wait apathetically and dejectedly, but to anticipate actively on the basis of what we hope to be true and what we know to be true; and what we know, we must remember.
Remembering can be the highest form of devotion. To remember is to rescue the sacred from the vacuum of oblivion. To remember Christ’s sacrifice every Sunday at the sacrament table is to say “no” to the ravages of time—to refuse to allow his supernal sacrifice to be just another datum in the catalogue of what is past. To remember past blessings is to give continuing recognition of the gift and to reconfirm the relationship to the Giver as one that persists in the here and now. Few—very few—are entirely bereft of at least one solace-giving memory: a childhood prayer answered, a testimony borne
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It is useful at such moments of doubt, if we can’t exercise faith in God, to exercise faith in ourselves. We can trust that it was a good and trustworthy self that once knew certain things to be true—and may one day again.
It may be for this reason that the heavens close from time to time, to give us room for self-direction. “This is the place where every man commences to acquire the germ of the independence that is enjoyed in the heavens,” Young said.
“sooner or later [God] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs. . . . It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.” This is because “He wants servants who can finally become sons [and daughters].”22 That may simply be, unavoidably, a wrenching process of spiritual abandonment such as Eve and Adam felt in their expulsion from God’s presence, or we all must have felt upon leaving of our
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“Enough of this nonsense. This is pure foolishness. Stop this at once. Stop praying with your knees, start praying with your feet.”
“To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”24
Just as some have entertained “angels unawares,” so might we well be exercising faith unbeknown. Faith is lived, not thought.
