With a Sincere Heart, with Real Intent

In the early 1990s I was involved in an increasingly heated discussion within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America about homosexuality. I participated in a couple of dialog events where information and perspectives on homosexuality were presented that were participated in by liberals and conservatives -- across the theological spectrum within Lutheranism.

At one point I remember having a conversation with a conservative evangelical Lutheran pastor. What he told me, I felt, was very revealing. He believed that the "biblical" position on homosexuality was that it was a sin. If that position were shown to be wrong, then he would lose faith in his ability to get any truth from the Bible. He said, "If we can't count on the Bible, what do we have left?"

My gut reaction came from the spiritual wellsprings of my upbringing as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I said to him, "We have God, of course!" I thought, "Where do you think the Bible came from?"

Thanks to my Mormonism, my faith as a Christian didn't depend on a view of scripture as 100% inerrant. I believed in a God who could reveal (and had revealed) himself to me personally, and who could give (and had given) me direct answers to the most perplexing questions in my life, even (or especially) when the words in a book didn't seem to do that very well. As Joseph Smith put it, "for the teachers of religion... understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible."

Of course I've run into the same problem among Mormons. A lot of Mormons want to do the same thing for "living prophets" that a lot of Protestants have done for the Bible. "Living prophets" are not "inerrant" for the same reasons that the Bible is not inerrant. This gets us to the root or the heart of the problem -- whether you are a Mormon or a conservative Evangelical.

If what you want is some "never wrong" external source of authority, you will be disappointed (traumatically disappointed even!) time and time and time again. The search for Truth with a capital T requires more personal engagement than just believing that some interpretation of scripture or some doctrinal pronouncement is infallible. It requires us to engage in a personal quest that requires risk.

"What if I'm wrong?" is one of the most painful questions to emerge from this messy human experience we are all having. And lots of us try to avoid that question by believing (wishing?) that some external authority can take away from us all risk of being wrong. If THEY'RE right 100% of the time, then I can always be right by just following them 100%.

I actually have become profoundly convinced that that's not God's plan for us (another insight that comes from deep within the spiritual wellsprings of my faith as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). I absolutely believe that God intended for this experience to be challenging and messy and to demand of us the utmost personal risk in learning how to become like Him.

In other words, there's no way for us to avoid being wrong once in a while.

*****

From this I also learned something important about the painful conflicts many of us are experiencing around LGBTQ experience and the church.

It was painful for me to feel that my experience as a gay man was invalidated or not believed by other Christians. But when I had this conversation with this conservative evangelical pastor, I realized that for him this was not about me personally at all. It wasn't about LGBTQ people in general at all. It was about him trying to hold on to a particular type of moral and spiritual compass. It was about this big question of how do we know truth and how do we make our way through the world.

In other words, it was not that he was a bad person. Quite the opposite. He was a very, very good, admirable person, wrestling with big questions about truth and how to find it and how to live by it. And for that, I was able to forgive him for not "getting" it, for not seeing things exactly the way I see them, as I hope others will forgive me for not seeing things their way, and even for being wrong on important matters that affect them.

What I believe is that we all have a better chance of getting to that place of perfection and truth we're all striving for if we have patience, if we go about it with a lot of love and forgiveness, and if we seek truth "having faith" that we can find it, "with a sincere heart, with real intent," and with more humility than we've had in the past.

On Being an Ex-Ex-Mormon

Recently I participated in a Facebook discussion that was started on the Affirmation Facebook group when a young gay Mormon posed a simple question: where could he "come back to church" now that he was married to a man?

The ensuing discussion reminded me a little bit of the Joseph Smith story, "some crying, 'Lo, here!' and others, 'Lo, there!' Some ... contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptist." Well, not literally for Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists... But the general thrust of the discussion seemed to be creeping toward a debate over whether to stay in the LDS Church or go over to some other more "gay-affirming" non-LDS Church.

I still find it a tad weird that in a group for LGBT Mormons there are folks actively making the case for leaving the Mormon Church entirely and joining some other Church. I wonder how the good folks at Reconciling Works: Lutherans for Full Participation would take it if I hung out on some of their on-line support groups and started encouraging folks to leave Lutheranism! Or if I did the same in one of the many other spaces that have designed to provide support for LGBT Catholics, Jews, Episcopalians, UCC'ers, or even Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists.

I was a member of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) from 1986 until 1994, and during that time I was an active member of Lutherans Concerned and worked for some time with Lutheran Churches in Minnesota to help them become more LGBT affirming in my capacity as the director of the "Reconciled in Christ" program. As long as I was a member of Lutherans Concerned I worked for and within the Lutheran Church to make space for faithful LGBT Lutherans. I am no longer involved with Reconciling Works, because I am no longer a Lutheran.

I think LGBT Mormons are smart enough that, if they decide they no longer want to be Mormon, they can (through a quick, easy Internet search) find other groups that will support them in whatever spiritual path they do choose. But, for some reason, individuals who no longer affiliate with the LDS Church feel obligated to evangelize on the Affirmation Facebook group.

I actually sort of get it. I get that the LDS Church doesn't operate like other mainline denominations. I get that because of the LDS belief that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has unique authority from God (which is a belief I embrace), and because of the  tendency among Mormons to believe that true happiness is only possible safe within the fold of the LDS Church (which is demonstrably false), certain dynamics exist among ex-Mormons that you don't find among former members of other churches. I think it's quite possible that ex-Mormons evangelize because as Mormons they were taught to evangelize. As Mormons they tended to view the world in terms of absolutes, in terms of black and white, good and evil. Individuals tend to join the LDS Church because they believe it is the true Church, so it stands to reason that when they leave it, it is because they believe it is a false Church.

There's no question that I experienced trauma during my last years in the LDS Church. It was painful enough that I almost committed suicide. Mormon culture (just like every culture) has a dark side. Authoritarian attitudes and mores in any culture create unhealthy dependencies, and dangerously weaken the individual confidence and self-esteem that  people need in order to be healthy and happy and to make good choices. So wherever we find ourselves, it behooves us to reinforce the positive aspects of the culture around us and to work at ameliorating what is negative.

I left the LDS Church for a time because that was what I needed to do. I didn't find it possible to function in that setting in a healthy way. But what I gradually discovered over time was that even when I was a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and, later, when I was a member of a United Churches of Christ congregation, I was still basically a Mormon. My worldview was Mormon. My way of thinking about morality was a very Mormon way of thinking about morality. My way of relating to God was a very Mormon way of relating to God. I once had a Lutheran pastor who counseled me for a time, and tried to point this out to me. He wanted to help me see how I had never really stopped being a Mormon. This was not necessarily bad from his point of view, it was just a reality. But I was in denial about it, and my denial was making it difficult for me to function healthily in other religious settings.

Gradually I realized that in running away from Mormonism, I was avoiding doing the real work that I needed to do. I couldn't work through the dark side of Mormon culture by being a Lutheran or a UCC'er. I could only work through the dark side of Mormon culture within the framework of Mormon culture. And I realized that in doing so, I might not only be helping myself -- becoming a healthier, happier, more truly Mormon me -- but that I might also be able to help other Mormons as well.

Religion is a complex phenomenon. And at some level, I think many of the distinctions we make by affixing labels to ourselves (like "Mormon" or "Presbyterian" or "Methodist" or "Baptist") are false distinctions. One way of looking at it that I find helpful is to think of a religion as a discipline or practice that we use in order to explore the world and grow. A religious community is a place where we commit to work together using a similar vocabulary and set of practices. Ultimately it is the growth and the exploration that matters, not necessarily the techniques we use to achieve it. That's one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at religion is to see it as providing us a set of hypotheses about how the world works. We test those hypotheses by practicing the religion. We know that a hypothesis is only a model. But as long as that model gives us an effective way of interacting with the world, we'll keep working with it. We can revise the model, add layers of complexity to it. We might, at some point, find that it no longer functions well for us as a model, and then we might be obliged to find a different hypothesis or model.

"Mormonism" hasn't stopped being useful to me as a working hypothesis of the world.

Earl Wunderli's Imperfect Book

Ten years ago, I wouldn't have bothered to read Earl Wunderli's Imperfect Book, if only because I would have taken for granted his argument that the Book of Mormon is not what it purports to be (a book of ancient American scripture), but rather the nineteenth-century product of a single author (Joseph Smith).

In reading the book it has become clear to me that this is not so much Wunderli's argument as his premise. Occasionally he manages to cover his biases in the language of objectivity. His critique of the Book of Mormon will certainly be pleasing to rationalist materialists who -- denying the  objective existence of God, angels or miracles -- insist that of course the Book of Mormon can be nothing else than what Wunderli says it is, and who are annoyed that so many people stubbornly continue to believe in it and turn to it as a source of personal inspiration and as a vehicle for communion with the divine.

Ten years ago, as I said, I would have numbered myself among them. But nine years ago I started to "doubt my doubt," as President Dieter F. Uchtdorf so pithily put it in an October 2013 General Conference address. Being well aware of the various archaeological, anthropological, historical, and even biological (DNA-based) critiques of the Book of Mormon, I nevertheless read the Book of Mormon to see what, if anything, it had to say to me as a gay man. And I did so primarily because I felt prompted by the Spirit to do so. I put the Book of Mormon to the test, reading it, as Earl Wunderli himself purports to, on its own merits. I was surprised by what I discovered. The experience was powerful, life changing. I discovered I still had a testimony of the Book of Mormon after all, a welter of intellectual doubts notwithstanding.

Like others who have read Wunderli's book, I've found it entertaining and engaging. As someone who loves the Book of Mormon (I've read it cover to cover three times in the last nine years, and am currently reading it a fourth time as part of Affirmation's Book of Mormon Challenge), I appreciate Wunderli's careful textual, word for word analysis of the Book. Wunderli's critique can best be appreciated, I think, by someone who is extremely familiar with the text cover-to-cover, by someone who has, for instance, bothered to read the Isaiah quotations in the Book of Mormon side-by-side with Isaiah as found in the King James Bible, and who has bothered to read other, more modern (and more linguistically sophisticated) translations of Isaiah.

There was a certain mythology of the Book of Mormon I was raised with that was naive and, for lack of a better word, fundamentalist. There's a kind of Mormon romantic mythology about Joseph Smith and how he functioned as a prophet that not only doesn't square with the facts of history but that amounts to a kind of denial of core principles of the Restored Gospel such as our belief in the primacy of agency in God's plan and the fact that "all have fallen short of the glory of God." The sooner we dispense with those mythologies, the better off we are. So Wunderli does a service to Mormonism by showing how some of those mythologies are simply untenable.

Wunderli acknowledges at the outset of his textual analysis that, for those who believe in the Book of Mormon, there are two theories of how the Book of Mormon was translated. One theory -- bolstered by certain eye-witness accounts of the translation process -- is that Joseph literally received every single word by divine revelation directly from God through the "Urim and Thummim." The other theory -- bolstered by D&C section 9 -- is that Joseph got a certain sense of the meaning of a text, and then had to do the hard work of converting that meaning into his native idiom (early nineteenth-century frontier U.S. English). According to the latter theory, there would have been a cultural filtration process by which Joseph Smith adapted ancient meanings to a modern context, and would have borrowed heavily from the language and ideas of the King James Bible and of American religious culture of his time and place to express parallel ideas from the Book of Mormon text.

Wunderli's textual analysis makes the case for a literal, word-for-word translation process virtually impossible to sustain. Wunderli persuasively argues that the language of the Book of Mormon is the work of a single author with -- for that matter -- a fairly limited English vocabulary that is heavily dependent upon the King James Bible. That would be fairly descriptive of Joseph Smith's English. Wunderli, of course, is inclined to see this as proof that Joseph Smith is the sole creator and author of the Book of Mormon, not its translator. Though, his textual analysis is still consistent with the second believing theory of the Book of Mormon that would see the mind of Joseph Smith as a filter through which the original Book of Mormon text was "translated" into modern idioms.

Wunderli makes a lot of the supposedly "anachronistic" borrowings from texts that could not possibly have been known to Book of Mormon authors. A few years ago, my husband bought a book by Marcus Borg and Jack Kornfield called Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings. The book places side by side teachings of Jesus and teachings of Buddha that are often so similar, they beg the question of whether Jesus was familiar with Buddist literature and/or teachings, since Buddha preceded Jesus by about five centuries. In my own wide readings of the sacred corpuses of different world religions -- ancient Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Mesoamerican, Gnostic, Muslim -- I am struck by the fact that in comparing any given sacred text to almost any other, it is possible to find striking similarities. Is this because one is copying off another, or is it because there are in fact, as James Frazer argues in The Golden Bough, universal elements in all religion? If Jesus at times sounds like he's quoting Gautama Buddha, why wouldn't it be possible for ancient American authors to express ideas that on occasion sound so similar to Middle Eastern Christian writers that Joseph Smith could borrow turns of phrase from the New Testament in order to translate them?

What I (and other believers in the Book of Mormon) find so compelling about the Book of Mormon, however, is not the borrowings, not the parallels, but those aspects of the Book of Mormon that are unique, that shed new light on ancient theologies from a perspective that is often quite surprising and liberating. I'm familiar with the religious culture of nineteenth century America. I am a scholar and a teacher of it. And yet, I find the Book of Mormon to contain ideas that are unique and powerful, that set it apart from its time and place, that have caused it to transcend everything else that was written either contemporaneously or since then. I believe in the Book of Mormon largely because, when all is said and done, after all the textual and historical analysis has been waded through, I am still left with the book's undeniable power; because it has opened doors in my soul that couldn't have been opened by any other book.

In light of that, I can't help but smile a bit at the overreaching in a number of Wunderli's arguments. For example, in a section where Wunderli discusses Book of Mormon prophecies that have supposedly demonstrably failed, he cites 2 Nephi 3:14, a prophecy ostensibly about Joseph Smith that states "They that seek to destroy him shall be confounded." Since Joseph Smith's enemies did in fact "destroy" him when he died at the hands of assassins at Carthage Jail on June 27, 1844, says Wunderli, this prophecy has demonstrably failed. To bolster his point, he cites a David Whitmer statement that the prophecy could not have been about Joseph Smith since "those who sought to destroy Brother Joseph were not confounded, but they destroyed him." He also cites Parley P. Pratt's argument (prior to Joseph Smith's martyrdom) that all efforts to destroy Joseph Smith legally had come to naught, thus falsely confirming the prophecy (since ultimately Joseph was killed/"destroyed").

Of course, the goal of Joseph Smith's assassins was not merely to "destroy" Joseph Smith, but to snuff out Mormonism itself. They believed that once Joseph was dead, his disillusioned followers would abandon the religion he had founded. In that goal, they were in fact notoriously "confounded." From a believer's perspective, Joseph Smith could not possibly be "destroyed" with an assassin's bullet. As Jesus taught, "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul" (Matthew 10:28). Joseph's assassins neither destroyed Joseph nor put an end to Mormonism. Rather, like the blood of the martyrs of early Christianity, the blood of Joseph and Hyrum became "the seed of the [Latter-day] Church." Still, Wunderli is satisfied to put that in the column of "failed" prophecies.

Still, a worthwhile read, perhaps  more for believers than for skeptics (who don't need to be convinced that the Book of Mormon is a fraud). Believers will appreciate the opportunity Wunderli presents to reflect deeply on the text, and what it means (and doesn't mean). Being gay and excommunicated, I should probably be an easy sell on the notion that the Book of Mormon isn't what it purports to be. But here I am, having doubted my doubts, still a stronger believer than ever.

Disillusionment and Inconclusive Data

This past weekend at the Affirmation Conference in Salt Lake City, there was a consistent, golden thread connecting all of the keynote addresses, both Friday night and Saturday night. That thread was personal story and personal revelation.

Darius Gray, an African-American Mormon filmmaker, broadcast journalist, and leader of the Genesis group, shared a very personal account of a personal revelation that transformed his understanding of the history of Mormon attitudes toward race. Jazz singer Spencer Day used song to describe and document his journey out of Mormonism. Jeff Benedict's interview with Clark Johnson, a gay Mormon who was part of the original cast of the Broadway production of The Book of Mormon: the Musical, explored Clark's 15-year-long struggle to reconcile his LDS faith with his sexuality, ending in his decision to break with the Church. Spencer Stout and Dustin Reeser ("The Home Depot Boys") described the process that led them to accept a same-sex relationship as right for them (also ending in a break with the Church). Eri Hayward discussed her transition from male to female, and her father Ed discussed his, and his wife's, journey from disbelief to acceptance of their transgender daughter.

Examined superficially, some of these stories seem to run at odds with each other. Darius Gray and Ed Hayward, for instance, described personal processes that ultimately kept them rooted in the LDS Church, while Spencer Day, Clark Johnson, Spencer Stout, Dustin Reeser and Eri Hayward described personal processes that ended in cutting ties with the LDS Church  (even as they continued to identify with some aspects of Mormonism and as they continue to treasure ties to family and friends who are still a part of the LDS community).

I and other conference organizers in fact observed very bifurcated responses to the different keynote talks.

In the immediate aftermath of Darius Gray's talk that evening and the following morning, I heard from about 40 conference participants who described his talk as "powerful" and "inspiring." A number of individuals I spoke to described having spiritual experiences as they listened to the talk. Some described these spiritual experiences during the "Testimony Meeting/Spiritual Story Sharing" meeting on Saturday afternoon. I myself had an experience of feeling filled with light and warmth during his talk, and found his words triggering rich and comforting reflections on my own situation as an excommunicated gay man with a testimony of the Gospel.

On the other hand, in the debriefing session held by conference organizers after the conference, there were reports of individuals who complained that Bro. Gray's talk was "too religious," or "too churchy," and who even found his words "offensive." Some refused to attend the event or walked out of it. A number of those individuals, however, felt reassured after Saturday evening's event, which mostly featured stories of individuals who had left the  LDS Church. They expressed relief that the stories of leaving Mormonism had restored "balance," and left them feeling better about the conference as a whole.

On the other hand, at least one individual who had been deeply appreciative of Bro. Gray's talk, felt dissatisfied and let down by the Saturday evening event. The spiritual high experienced during Bro. Gray's talk and during the Testimony Meeting of Saturday afternoon had been dissipated and deflated by the Saturday night presentations.

During our debriefing discussion, one conference organizer suggested that the positive and negative responses were indicative that we were "doing things right"! Affirmation's stated values include providing a nonjudgmental space where individuals can find healing and can work out answers to difficult spiritual questions and challenges on their own. Affirmation does not prescribe any one path for anyone, but rather makes space for individuals to find their own path. We make space for faith, and for connection to LDS teaching and to the LDS Church, but we also honor individuals' decisions to make other choices that they find more spiritually nurturing. The fact that we had presented different stories at the conference that provoked dramatically different responses was a sign that we were accomplishing what we had set out to accomplish.

Well, that's one (perhaps reassuring) way of looking at it, though I think still a rather superficial way. Reflecting on the different stories I heard, it occurred to me that the stories look very different if we focus on process rather than outcome.

Focusing on the "end" of the story is extremely problematic if you think about it, because any story ever being told by a person about him or herself always only reflects where that person is as of the telling of the story. For example, as I listened to Clark Johnson's story, it occurred to me that 15 years ago, my story would have sounded very similar. In fact, you can link here to a version of my story, published in 1997, which ends with the statement: "God has freed me in two ways in the last decade of my life: God freed me of the Mormon Church, and God freed me to come out of the closet and accept myself as a gay man. Thanks be to God, I can breathe again." At that point in my life, I would have been shocked and appalled if someone had told me that less than I decade later I would find myself returning to the Church and yearning for full membership in it. But here we are.

That is not to suggest that there is something truer or righter about my journey back to the Church than Clark Johnson's journey out of the Church. Again, keep in mind that my journey is not over yet.

I just turned fifty, and I'm planning to live another fifty years or so. But imagine I were to die shortly after completing this essay. Say I die tomorrow. My epitaph would be, "He died having a testimony of the Church." But is my death the end of the story? I would argue it cannot be, neither from the LDS perspective of life after death, nor from an atheist perspective of my death as the final end of me. Because even an atheist would acknowledge that had I lived longer, my views might have evolved or changed. Whatever my endpoint might have been at the time of my death, it could only be viewed as historically contingent. Historians and biographers speculate all the time -- sometimes very contentiously -- about how individuals throughout history might have evolved had they lived longer. This is not just an academic, historical problem, it's a political problem. For instance, in debating constitutional law, we frequently debate the "intent of the founding fathers." What would the founding fathers say about the second amendment if they lived to see the proliferation of weapons far deadlier than they ever imagined in our society? In reflecting on Church history, we often speculate how the Church might have been different if Joseph Smith had not been assassinated in 1844. We could not have such debates if we didn't acknowledge that new information and new experiences can change people, and that where those individuals were at death does not tell us the totality of who and what they were.

So, what if we disregard the "end" of any individual's story (living or dead) as "inconclusive data"? The end of a story is only a hiatus, not a moral. We of course frequently act as if these incomplete stories of ours have a moral. And maybe they do have morals, but, as Darius Gray suggested in his talk, maybe "not what we think."

If we exclude the end of the story from our evaluation of what the story has to teach us, we are forced to focus instead on the process described in the story. And I would argue that if we focus on the process rather than the end, all of these stories -- the "Church-positive" as well as the "Church-negative" stories -- actually are more similar than they are different.

All of these stories had a common element of disillusionment. What I mean by disillusionment is that individuals telling these stories described how a series of experiences or encounters or exposure to new information led them to question and reevaluate and abandon old beliefs or old patterns of thought. What was once accepted as normal might now be viewed as oppressive and unjust. What was once viewed as impossible might now be viewed as necessary.

All of these stories also had a common element of self-empowerment. What I mean by self-empowerment is that individuals telling these stories describe how they came to trust their own ability to discern and make sense of facts. They claimed not only the right but the responsibility to act for themselves as free agents, to make decisions that might disappoint family or friends or the larger society, but that felt truer to the new understandings that emerged in the wake of disillusionment.

All of these stories also had a common element of faith. What I mean by faith is changing one's behavior in a way that feels more life-affirming. It means taking steps into the darkness, without necessarily knowing that one's new course of action will end well. It means being willing to make mistakes or to make sacrifices in order to make way for the possibility of something new and better to emerge.

I would argue that until we experience disillusionment, until we empower ourselves, and until we begin to exercise faith and act as free agents, we are not fully mature beings. When we fail to act out of fear, out of a need to conform, we become stunted. I would also argue that a major cause of depression and suicide stems from the perception that we have no choice, that an intolerable situation is inescapable because we must be wrong, or there is nothing we can do, or anything we do differently from what we're currently doing will only lead to disaster.

So, for instance, a common observation of individuals who had left the Church was that prior to leaving the Church they believed that happiness outside of the Church was impossible. I could relate to this. I experienced a very similar kind of fear. These individuals discovered (and I discovered) that in fact one could be quite happy outside of the Church; that in fact we became happier after leaving the Church than we had been as members of the Church. People who believe that true happiness is only possible within the Church may inevitably be disillusioned.

But I would argue that these necessary steps of disillusionment, self-empowerment and faith don't guarantee us happiness. They make us free agents. But they don't guarantee that all our choices will make us happy. We often feel a rush once we become free agents. It's a heady experience to realize that you can now do things you once thought impossible; to see spread out before you the virtually infinite range of choices that are now available to you. But the rush doesn't last forever, and eventually the choices we make (we can never not make choices) create new obligations and expectations and restraints, that lead us to new cycles of disillusionment, self-empowerment and faith. (Or... if we choose... stasis.)

What I found in my return to the Church is that I had a different kind of testimony based on a depth of experience I hadn't had before. I found that my decisions to practice my faith (by, for instance, living the Word of Wisdom) were decisions I made because I wanted to learn from them, not because I felt obligated to make those decisions. Not because I felt I had no choice. That kind of faith is powerful.

But by definition, it requires that I not begrudge others the right to perceive and to choose differently.

God Would Never... (Fill in the Blank)

I  hear this phrase a lot, and interestingly enough, I hear it from liberals and conservatives, from Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Atheists. It doesn't matter.

One  variation of this phrase goes something like this: "We should not believe in a God who would be capable of doing _____." (Commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; commanding war, conquest and genocide in the Old Testament; requiring that a Savior die on the cross to forgive our sins; commanding the practice of polygamy, etc. Fill in the blank.)

Everyone (including folks who don't actually believe in God at all) has some idea about what God is about, what God has done, does, and will do, what God is capable of and what God is incapable of. I have been/am/will be guilty of this as much as anybody else.

Like all opinions, some of these opinions are better informed than others. Some are based on a better awareness of scriptural testimony regarding what God has done in the past than others. Some are based on personal experience with a living God. But those who know God best (and I'm specifically thinking of numerous scriptural witnesses of God) insist that none of us, no matter how acquainted we may feel with the ways of God, knows God well enough to predict exactly what he will and will not do. Even those prophets with the most intimate personal knowledge of God have repeatedly been surprised, amazed, and humbled by revelations of God's will that they never expected.

Those who are wise content themselves to wait patiently for God to manifest his will rather than make predictions about it.

Losing faith in God because he doesn't manifest his will on our timetable or in the way we would like is literally one of the oldest forms of impatience in the book. Cain offers God a sacrifice thinking, God will like this! God doesn't like it. Cain was wrong about what would be acceptable to God. God offers Cain a second chance. He simply says to Cain: "If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him" (Genesis 4:7). In other words, if we let go of our expectations of what God asks of us, if we listen and follow, we will "do well." If not, we will fall under the "rule" of unrighteous desires.

It's such a simple, fundamental principle. And it all boils down to waiting and listening and letting go.  It also boils down to trust.

A key moment in my own journey with God was when I let go of my assumptions and misunderstandings of God's dealings with others. Just because God has asked "X" of somebody else, and just because I imagine that to be unpleasant, or painful, or distasteful, or unfair, doesn't mean that I fully understand the context, and it doesn't mean that that is what God is asking of me. Maybe God will ask it of me, but maybe not. I need to be patient. What I know of God's dealings with me is that God has never let me down. Whenever I've trusted in what he's asked me to do, I've prospered and found joy and peace and done well -- even in difficult circumstances, even in illness or loss or poverty or times of loneliness. So if those have been God's dealings with me in the past, I can trust that whatever his dealings with me are in the future, they will work out for the best.

What I see of God's dealings with others is only half (maybe less) of the story. To understand those dealings, I have to understand them from the inside out, and I have to see them through from beginning to end.

In a sense, I don't even fully understand all of God's dealings with me, because I haven't seen the end yet. I'm still in the realm of mortality, not in eternity.

What I do know is along the lines of what is described in Alma 32. I can see the good that has come so far. I  can exist in my understanding of God's dealings with me on a spectrum between total ignorance and perfect knowledge, and faith is the vehicle that allows me to move toward the knowledge end of the spectrum. Way points on that spectrum include perfect knowledge of limited principles, but the end point of perfect, ultimate knowledge exists beyond the span of our mortal existence ("for now we see through a glass darkly," 1 Corinthians 13:12).

If faith is the moving principle, patience, hope and love are principle methods for exercising faith.

We can choose (like that old American political party founded on hatred of Catholics) to "Know Nothing." We can choose not to know God. But the invitation to know God, to let go of our prejudices and our assumptions and to let God reveal himself to us, is always there, like it was to Cain.

Horror and Great Darkness

I'm currently reading the Old Testament from cover to cover for the third time in my life. I seriously debated whether that was necessary. Most people who read the Old Testament from cover to cover feel that one time is enough. But the reason people don't like reading the Old Testament is because it's challenging material. And on the third go, I'm discovering that my greater familiarity with the material is making the reading much more profitable and enjoyable.

Most Christians, I think, pass through life with a mental Cliff's Notes version of the Old Testament that is heavily filtered through the writings of the apostle Paul and through the Gospels. Mormons take the Old Testament a little bit more seriously, partly because our "restoration" encompassed significant parts of the Old Testament. In any event, there's nothing like delving into the nuance and intricacies of the text itself. I've recently invested in a new Jewish translation of the Old Testament, English side-by-side with the original Tanakh.

One of the ways in which the original text is foreshortened in the New Testament is in Paul's characterization of Abraham as a pre-figuration of Christian faith. Paul describes him as "the father of faith."I don't deny that Abraham is a model of faith, for Jews and Christians, not to mention Muslims. But if Abraham is a model of faith, the Book of Genesis provides a much more complicated, darker image of what it means to have faith.

A key element of the Abrahamic story involves God telling Abraham that he is to be a father of many nations, with seed as numerous as the grains of sand in the ocean and as numerous as the stars in the heavens. Abraham, the paragon of faith, apparently has a difficult time believing this, because the Lord tells him the same thing three times, recorded in Genesis 12:7; 13:14 – 18; and 15:3 – 7.

After the third reiteration of this promise the text records that Abraham (then still Abram) asks God, perhaps with impatience, "Whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?"Despite the frequent promises, as of yet there is no evidence that this prophecy will be fulfilled, as Abraham has no children.

In response, God asks Abraham for sacrifice, which he offers. Carrion fowl arrive, attempting to feed on the meat, forcing Abraham to stand watch over his sacrifice to drive them away. After the sun sets, Abraham falls asleep, "and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him" (Genesis 15:12).

I don't know how many of you have experienced horror by darkness at night. I have. Promises, hopes, and dreams for a better future seem to evaporate in fear of seemingly inevitable evil and misfortune. I can really relate to this piece of Abraham's story.

It is comforting to me, because it reminds me that God's promises to us stand, in spite of our inability to imagine them coming to fruition. Abraham wrestled with doubt. If he did, then none of us should regard it as abnormal to wrestle with doubt in our own lives of faith. I'm speaking not just about doubt over the truth claims in our belief systems, though I think this applies to those kinds of doubt as well. I'm speaking about our doubt of the good that God intends us to experience as his children. Doubts of the former kind contribute to doubts of the latter kind. But it is doubts of the latter kind that are much more serious to our well-being and our ability to fulfill the measure of our creation.

Real faith is not doubt-free. I doubt faith that claims to be.

What I can say empirically is that I have had a special class of experiences that are extremely vivid, that have made a lasting impression on my life, through which I've caught glimpses of a larger realm in which our souls exist and find meaning. And there have been times and there are contexts in which I'm tempted to doubt those things, for any number of reasons. But as I've kept faith with those experiences, I've found joy and I've prospered, and I see my life unfolding into something completely unexpected and amazing.

The Book of Genesis describes this "horror of great darkness."  St. John of the Cross wrote of "the dark night of the soul."  Joseph Smith described "thick darkness gathered around [him]," that caused it to seem "for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction" (Joseph Smith History verse 15).  I've experienced that.

It is interesting to me that in this moment of darkness described in Genesis 15, the Lord does unveil to Abraham a darker aspect of the thrice-granted prophecy of his descendents: "Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years" (Genesis 15:13).  In this moment when Abraham himself was struggling, the Lord made it clear that the future was not all going to be easy, either for him or his descendents.

It's in the next chapter (Genesis 16) that Sarai despairing of having any descendents of her own, hatches a scheme for her Egyptian handmaid to bear children for Abram.  Sarai is not pleased with the results of her own scheme (and ultimately, we see the full fruits of her jealousy and cruelty in chapter 21), though the Lord begins to fulfill his promises to Abram through the castaways, Hagar and her son Ishmael. Sarai faces tests of faith of her own, in chapter 12 (where she becomes the object of Pharaoh's lust) and in chapter 18 (when she learns that the prophecies of Abraham's descendents are to be fulfilled through her as well).

With hindsight, the journey of faith looks like a golden road to Heaven. But from within the journey, it looks mostly like darkness and roadblocks.

Spooky Mormon Hell Dream

Nothing new in terms of the basic picture of Mormonism presented in "The Book of Mormon: The Musical." We already saw it in the "Mormon episode" of South Park. Those Mormons, they believe in some wacky, crazy shit! But they sure are nice. Really amazingly nice!

Spoiler alert! If you haven't seen "The Book of Mormon: The Musical" yet, and you don't want any major plot revelations before seeing it yourself, don't read any further!

In the play, Elder Price and Elder Cunningham arrive in Uganda with high hopes of bringing souls to Christ. Elder Price is a superstar missionary whom everyone expects to change the world, while his companion, Elder Cunningham, is a flunky who has a tendency to tell tall tales, and who's never even read the Book of Mormon. Confronted with the poverty, disease and violence of life in Uganda, however, it is superstar missionary Elder Price who gets discouraged and abandons his post. Elder Cunningham stays behind, only to discover that the missionaries' enthusiasm and faith has rubbed off on one young Ugandan woman in the village named Nabulungi.  Nabulungi persuades the other villagers that perhaps Mormonism does have some unique power that can help them solve their problems and find a new promised land in "Salt Lake City."

Abandoned by his more doctrinally adept companion Elder Price, Elder Cunningham, who knows little to nothing about the Book of Mormon or about LDS Church history, improvises and preaches a gospel to the Ugandans that bears little to no resemblance to the official Mormon gospel.  The Ugandans nevertheless find his message inspiring, and convert en masse to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When the local warlord shows up, threatening to destroy the entire village, their new found faith gives them the courage to stand up and drive the villains away.  Unfortunately, when the mission president learns of the fabrications that Elder Cunningham has used to convert the Ugandan Saints, he orders all the missionaries home in shame.  But Elder Price, who had returned feeling guilty about his earlier abandonment of his mission post (after having a "spooky Mormon hell dream"), decides that doctrinal orthodoxy doesn't matter any more.  What matters is that the faith and enthusiasm of the missionaries made a difference in the lives of the Ugandans.  Elder Price persuades the missionaries to stay behind and continue to work to improve the lives of their converts.  The musical ends with the missionaries and the converted Ugandans joining together to preach a new gospel based on the fabrications of Elder Cunningham that had so inspired them.

I have to say there is much about this musical I loved.  There were silly -- almost ridiculous -- inaccuracies slipped in, perhaps, to deliberately signal that this was a work of fiction.  Mormon missionaries get their mission assignments long before arriving in the Missionary Training Center, and they don't spend their entire two years with one companion.  Oh, and, for the record, though Mormons are often driven by terrifying guilt, they really don't believe in the classical Christian hell, filled with sulfur and brimstone and ruled by a red Devil with horns and bat wings and a pitchfork.  And I'm yet ever to hear a single Mormon utter the phrase "Praise Christ!"  Yeesh.

But much of the texture of missionary life felt realistic to me.  The emotional and spiritual bond between missionary companions is powerful and life-changing -- at least my relationships with my companions were.  There are missionaries obsessed with personal glory, as well as missionaries whose humility and desire to do what's right outweigh their desire for adulation.  The mission field is rife with missionaries who get burned out and discouraged and who give up, as well as missionaries whose faith spurs them to remarkable acts of sacrifice and courage.  And Mormon missionaries do enter the mission field notoriously naive about the culture of the people they are sent there to convert, but they also usually learn to deeply love the people, and are often both challenged and transformed by that love.  Oh, and, for what it's worth, the play taps realistically into the "gay Mormon moment" by including a Mormon missionary character who is gay, and who deals with it by just "turning it off."

An implicit message in the musical is that belief is almost always ridiculous, but the power of belief can still make the world a better place, if we remain humble and are willing to put ourselves on the line for the welfare of others.  This is not a bad message.  It actually resonates with the very scriptural notion that "faith without works is dead."  I like the way the play presents the real-life faith struggle of what happens when prayers aren't answered the way we like them to be.  I couldn't help but be moved by the scene where Mormon elders and converted villagers gather together dressed in white at the waters of baptism.  Mormons are portrayed as hopelessly naive, but Mormons will like the fact that the play generally gives them the benefit of a doubt at least as to their motives, which are portrayed as unfailingly well meaning.  The message in the musical that is least likely to sit well with most Mormons, however, is the idea that it doesn't matter what we believe, so long as our belief is fervent and well-intentioned.  

I'm pretty sure I don't actually believe that at all; what we believe really does matter.  And Mormons have rational reasons for believing that God is real, and that Joseph Smith did speak to him, and that the books of scripture that inspire us are true.  There are aspects of our faith that we all wrestle with (including the racist elements in the Book of Mormon), and Mormons are concerned about objective validation of their beliefs.  I think Matt Stone and Trey Parker do Mormons injustice by acting as if the only ways to believe in that wacky Joseph Smith, and that weird Book of Mormon is either to take everything at face value and never to question anything -- to "just turn [doubt] off" -- or to take it all as mere metaphor.  In my mind, doctrinaire scientific rationalism fails because it doesn't take religious experience seriously, and Mormonism is powerful as a faith because it does.  The universe is more complex than South Park makes it out to be.

All the same, I liked the musical.  Mormons who watch it may have to bring ear-stoppers for all the profanity (though I have to admit, the musical's portrayal of Mormon phobias about profanity is pretty dang funny).  The play is not anti-Mormon, though it presents a view of Mormonism that is colored by the unbelief of its creators.  Ultimately, if Matt Stone and Trey Parker are willing to grant Mormons the benefit of a doubt as to their motives, I'm willing to return the favor.  

And so, apparently, is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which took out three full-page ads in the playbill of the Minneapolis show, encouraging play attendees to "read the book" now that they'd "seen the play," proving the play's point that if Mormons really do one thing very well, it is to "believe."

Religious Experience, Memory and Reason

If I had to distill all of "Mormonism" down into one word, it would be "revelation."

Why that word?  Why not, say, "love"?  "Love" is actually the word that I would use if someone asked me to distill all religion down into a single word.  In elaborating how "revelation" is the core concept explaining Mormonism, (i.e., what precisely is revealed through Mormonism) I would hasten to add that "love" is the "what" that is revealed when we speak of what "revelation" reveals in Mormonism.

But if I were to draw a line to distinguish what Mormonism is/believes/practices from all the rest of religion, the line that I would draw is "revelation."  I would say that almost all other religion points to love as what "has been revealed."  Most Christians, for instance, would say, "Everything that God needs to reveal was revealed in the person of Christ (who revealed God As Love), a record of which we have in the Gospels.  There's no need for more revelation than that, and anything more or less than that is blasphemy."  A Mormon might say (or this Mormon says!): "What God has revealed is only part of the story, and the less important part of the story at that.  God reveals (present tense!) himself to us today in a living and resurrected Christ through living prophets and Saints.  That's why, for us, the blasphemy is to insist that the last and only time Christ could ever have revealed himself to living humans was recorded in the Book of Revelation in the ancient Near East.  We have a record of him revealing himself in the Americas, and of him announcing he would reveal himself elsewhere.  He revealed himself to a 14-year-old boy in a grove of trees in upstate New York, and in the Kirtland Temple in Ohio in 1836, and on countless other occasions to living prophets and living Saints of which we may or may not have a written, public record.  The moment we convert the present tense of the statement 'God reveals himself' into the past tense, revealed, we no longer have a living religion.  We have a remembered religion or even a dead religion.  Our definition of 'apostasy' is when we stop receiving God's current and always living revelation to us."

We understand this principle most clearly, when we pose the question, "What does it mean for a faithful Latter-day Saint to actually live her or his religion?"  And I think the best answer to that question would be: "To live our lives in such a way that we will always be in harmony with the Spirit, and to seek and to be able to receive God's guidance in our day-to-day lives."  A Latter-day Saint lives her or his faith by seeking to practice a kind of constant communion with God.  Mormons who live their faith know how to seek and receive revelation from God, and strive to live their lives in accordance with the revelation they have received.

Now there are other religions where you get some sense of this.  All religious people who have some belief in the divine seek some sort of communion with that divine.  You get a more vivid sense of this (closer to the vividness of the sense found in Mormonism) in most traditional Native American religions.  When Lakota people go on a vision quest, or prepare for and perform the Sun Dance for the purpose of seeking divine guidance for an important decision they need to make, most devout Mormons would understand exactly what they're doing and why -- though we ourselves go on similar quests through simple fasting and prayer.  When Pentecostals insist that we recognize true religion through the presence of modern day miracles and signs, they are making an observation that Mormons would universally assent to.  Though there's a line that Pentecostals are unwilling to cross: new scripture.  The fact that that's not a line Mormons are worried about gives some sense of how important a concept modern-day revelation is in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

To the extent one takes issue with Mormonism as a religious system, one inevitably deals in some way with the personal or collective manifestations of revelation.  Thus, one of the most common accusations against Mormons is that they are led by "false prophets." Personal revelation is dismissed as a form of delusion -- either satanically or self- induced.  Mormons are accused of mistaking "mere" feelings for the promptings of God, etc.  The possibility of actually receiving revelation from God is denied, either categorically (as atheists would deny it), or contingently (as Evangelicals or Pentecostals would deny it in the case of Mormonism but affirm it in the Bible or in manifestations of the Spirit they consider acceptable).

For me the question is always how do I personally recognize when a revelation is true or false?  What if I receive a revelation I once recognized as true, but later conclude that it was not?  Does that call into question the whole premise of revelation as the foundation of true religion?

My dad taught me how to recognize the Spirit by putting me in situations where he felt I was guaranteed to feel the Spirit, and then asking me to be attentive, and to observe what I felt.  I could then use that as a base-line for recognizing the work of the Spirit in my life in other situations where it might be less obvious. I've come to realize this is the closest anyone can come to "teaching" us how to recognize and follow the Spirit.  Because the Spirit speaks to us internally -- in our minds and hearts -- as opposed to externally -- i.e., in an objectively audible voice -- learning to recognize and follow the promptings of the Spirit is literally something we do on our own.

The baseline my dad gave me is what I've used throughout my life to recognize and judge spiritual experiences.  Over time, those have included numerous "gifts" and different manifestations of the Spirit.  I have experienced the literal "burning in the bosom" that scripture speaks of.  I've experienced the Spirit giving me literal words or phrases that came to me as if someone were speaking them.  I have had visions, I have seen divine light, and I have had even more powerful experiences.  What I have discovered is that the intensity of the experience may vary, but the nature of the experience does not.  The most subtle "still small voice" can be just as powerful -- sometimes more powerful -- than something more tangible.

I had had many rich, powerful spiritual experiences prior to leaving the Church.  Even after leaving the Church, I could not deny the experiences themselves.  The experiences were real.  I had had them.

But there was a time in my life (which was not co-synchronous with my time outside of the Church) when I questioned the nature or the validity of these experiences.  Were the visions I'd had hallucinations?  Was the "burning in the bosom" some kind of physical or hormonal manifestation?  Were spiritual promptings I'd experienced "just feelings" or a kind of "self talk"?  Were they the result of wish fulfillment?  Did I, for example, want a testimony of the Church because, as a young child, I knew that obtaining a testimony would please my parents?  So I then proceeded to manufacture an experience for myself that could serve as a testimony?

I have found it to be true that the more I distance myself from those experiences, the less real they seem.  I could never completely deny them, but I could downplay them.  And if we can do that, isn't that as much as saying, we make anything of them we wish?  Maybe we did just manufacture them.

Questioning my spiritual experiences did lead to doubt about the spiritual experiences I'd had.  But eventually, during a time in my life that I would characterize as the most doubtful, angry period of my life, I was spiritually awakened by a manifestation of the Spirit that was so powerful and so distinct, I found it difficult if not impossible to deny or explain away.  At that point I actively fought the revelation, I tried to deny it.  But it returned again and again, persistently, I would even say lovingly, until I surrendered to it.

I feel fairly certain that had I refused to surrender for long enough, it would eventually have departed and I might at this point in my life be a confirmed atheist.  In fact, I remember that the turning point for me in my struggle with this revelation was the moment when the Spirit said to me simply, "I won't stay with you always, unless you act on what I am telling you."  At that point, I had to decide.  And I ultimately chose to surrender.

After some time of wrestling with questions of this nature, and of learning what it means to listen to and follow the Spirit, I acquired an important insight.  I can remember the very moment when I acquired this insight, because I acquired it on the verge of another, subsequent act of spiritual surrender, and the insight is related to the concept of surrender, which, I believe, is closely related to the concept of faith. It relates to a concept of faith that is illuminated by an analogy Mormons often like to use of faith being like the act of a child who leaps into a dark pit, subsequently to be caught in the loving arms of the father who had called to her from the darkness, whom she had not been able to see, but whom she trusted enough to leap into the darkness.

For me it boiled down to how I answered the question: What is the fundamental nature of our relationship with the Universe?  Is the Universe hostile to us?  Does it seek to destroy us? Is the Universe indifferent to us? Do we exist by chance? Do we thrive merely by a combination of luck and perseverance? Or does the Universe love us? Does it yearn for our happiness and reach out eagerly toward us, like the finger of God painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel?

How I answered this question determined how I might answer a (to me) very urgent corollary question: If some voice is speaking to me, some voice which speaks to me deep in my heart, piercing through to my "inmost parts," but seems to be not of me, seems to be coming to me from somewhere "out there," out from beyond, should I trust it?  Should I listen to it?  Because if there is some Great I Am who is capable of reaching me, of speaking to me, it could be all powerful but I should not trust it if it is not beneficent, if it wills to harm me.  And if it were indifferent to me, then I cannot imagine why it would speak to me; so I should interpret this voice as my own imagination.  But if it is all powerful and Love Incarnate, then I should surrender.  I should throw myself into the dark pit, trusting the voice of a father promising to catch me, and I would be caught.

I did have experience to rely on.  The Spirit had told me that the Church was true, and so I had trusted the words of scripture and teachers and begun to learn love and service and patience.  And all these things had been good.  And, yes, I had learned homophobia in the Church too, and the homophobia hurt me.  It almost destroyed me!  But before it could destroy me, I had received another prompting through the Spirit reassuring me that my gayness was a good part of me, which gave me the courage to begin to work that out over the course of the years.  And this was a very, very good thing!  So even where the Church had failed me, the Spirit had not.  In other words, the Church is not perfect, but God is.  Every Sunday School child knows that truth.  The Spirit prompted me to leave the Church for a time, which I did, and learned many important things in doing so.  The Spirit prompted me to seek out and find my husband, the man I have loved for over 20 years now, and who has helped me to grow and become wiser and stronger than I was before I met him.  And that is also good.  So the Spirit did not lead me astray there either.  And the Spirit has so often comforted me in grief and given me courage in fear, and the more I reflected on it, the more I realized that the Spirit had always been a light to me in the darkness.  I could look back over the arc of my life and see the Spirit leading me from good to greater good to greatest good.

So now that the Spirit was prompting me to believe in God again, and to trust in God's goodness, and to come back to the Church and be faithful, what was most reasonable for me to do?

And even the very most rational, most skeptical part of me could look at that and think: Maybe there is no God.  But even if this voice which is speaking to me is nothing but my own subconscious, somehow it has never significantly led me astray.  Maybe even if this voice is just me talking to myself, it seems to be the best part of myself, the part of me that I should trust and follow.  Faith could be what we choose to believe.  Maybe it is all just inside of me.  Maybe God is like the God of Alcoholics Anonymous: whatever we make him.  Maybe, maybe.  But even then it still seemed wise to just trust, and see what happens.  And I have, and incredible good has happened.  The greater the trust, the greater the good.

And I could just continue in trust, suspending belief in God.  I could just say, I don't know what this is, but I'll continue to follow it as long as it leads me good places.  But there comes a point where you realize that what you are learning is principles like faith (trust), love, compassion, patience, hope, strength, and you are learning that there is a power greater than you that gives you strength greater than you imagined yourself capable of, and you begin to realize that what you have is something like a copy of the Sacred Word, an internal guidebook of life like the Standard Works, written and guarded in your heart, and that points you toward the same thing that those external paper and ink Standard Works point you to, namely God.  So why not just give it up and call it God?

Because ultimately what you also learn is that the longer you tread in that path of goodness, the one feeling that comes to overwhelm all the other feelings is simple gratitude.  Which makes no sense if the Universe is just emptiness and indifference and non-entity.  We can only be meaningfully grateful to Some One.  So God must exist if only to be the One To Whom We Give Thanks.

There are moments of darkness and anguish in life, when the view is obstructed, when faith seems naive and stupid.  Sometimes those moments seem to stretch out into something like a life time.  I'll grant that.  And we can always choose to curse God and die.  I choose the alternative.

In relation to remembered spiritual experiences, what I have found is that we can dismiss or downplay spiritual experiences from our past much in the way that our memories of someone we once knew many years ago can become distorted caricatures of the real person.  When we remember a person, we focus on certain traits of that individual that we remember to the exclusion of other traits we actually experienced but choose not to remember.  The longer time separates memory from the actual experience, the more distorted the caricature.  But when we know and interact with a living person on a day to day basis, our memory -- our internal image of that person -- is constantly challenged by the reality of that person.  Our memories never surprise us.  But a real person often surprises us, as we learn more about that person we didn't know before.  So it is with God.

And this is why, for me, a True Gospel is always about revelation in the present tense.  Yes, God is the God who was with me yesterday, and last year, and ten years ago, and who was with my ancestors a hundred and a thousand and ten thousand years ago.  The God of our memories is God, which is one reason God commands us to remember.  The scriptures are the collective expression of our obedience to that commandment: "Remember me."  But the God I know best is the God who is here with me in the now.  The God I turn to every day, whom I know through obedience to the commandment, "Pray always without ceasing."

It is through the understanding granted by that present God, the God who never ceases to surprise me, that I am able to make sense of memory and enter the future with hope.

A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, and a Mormon Christian Reflects on "Brother Joseph"

My fairy god daughter Daphne had to write a report based, at least in part, on her reading of this wonderful little book by Rabbi Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus (Doubleday, 1993).  After reading her thoughtful paper, she allowed me to borrow the book. It's a quick read. I was able to finish it in about three sittings of about an hour per sitting (about as long as it takes me to read one of Original Mohomie's blog entries).

Rabbi Neusner, in a way that is perhaps a model of respectfulness, carries on a conversation with the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew. He argues with Jesus, specifically about the Sermon on the Mount. For the rabbi, argument is a high form of respect, a form of honor. Rabbi Neusner honors Jesus by arguing with him. He takes Jesus seriously enough to think deeply about what he has to say, and to reflect on the implications of what Jesus has to say for him and his family and his nation. And ultimately the rabbi disagrees with Jesus. He explains to Jesus why, after all, he will not follow him, why he chooses instead to let Jesus go his way, while he returns home to his wife, children, dog, and garden, and goes on with his life as he had lived it before.  Rabbi Neusner hopes that at least one effect of this encounter is that it will encourage Jews to be better Jews and Christians to be better Christians.  He hopes for greater respect between Christians and Jews.  But he does not expect ever to become a Christian.

I encourage folks to read this book.  It seems timely, especially for Mormons, given that high profile Christian leaders are accusing us of belonging to a "cult."  I suppose we're long used to the slur that we are not "Christian," or rather, the denial that we are "Christian" being used as a slur.  (It's one thing to acknowledge that Mormons are not Christians in the same way as Protestants and Catholics, and another thing to defame us by denying us the Christian label we apply to ourselves.)  I think Rabbi Neusner's book is a model for how people of differing beliefs and values can talk to one another about their differences.

The rabbi's argument hinges on Jesus' statement, in the Sermon on the Mount, that he came "not to abolish [the Law and the Prophets] but to fulfill them."  Rabbi Neusner thinks that Jesus does in fact abolish some fairly important aspects of the Law and the Prophets (the Torah).  Jesus' teaching, he argues, has no place in it for the "we" encompassed in the revelation of the Law on Mount Sinai.  Jesus' morality, he argues, is a too-individualistic morality of the heart.  It includes teachings that are potentially profoundly anti-social ("do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth...").  His abolition of the holiness code, the rabbi argues, makes irrecoverable any sort of sacred "now" in a Kingdom of God on earth.  Yes, he accuses Jesus of other-worldliness, of looking too much forward to a Kingdom of Heaven after death, rather than a this-worldly Kingdom of holiness.  ("Holiness" for the rabbi means emulation of God in the here and now.)

For me, however, the most electrifying part of Rabbi Neusner's argument came when he insisted that it is ultimately impossible to separate any evaluation of Jesus' theological positions from Jesus' claim to divinity.  More shocking, the rabbi came to this conclusion through a close reading of the Sermon on the Mount.  There has been a tendency, the rabbi acknowledged, to want to separate "the historical Jesus" from the dogma of the Church.  Many people -- Jewish and liberal Christian alike -- hold the view that Jesus must obviously have been a "great moral teacher," but that he could never have actually made any claim to divinity.  The apostle Paul is accused, in this account of Christian history, of inventing the expiatory atonement theology that required making Jesus into a God.  Jesus himself would never have made such claims.

But Rabbi Neusner argues that if you look very closely at what Jesus is saying in the Sermon on the Mount you cannot conclude anything different than that Jesus is putting himself above the Torah.  The rabbi makes some very close comparisons of what Jesus says to some of the great commentary on the Torah from the Mishnah and the Talmud, and he acknowledges that much of what Jesus says sounds very much like what you would expect from a classical teacher of the Torah.  But there are points where Jesus makes critical departures from the Torah, departures that, he argues, undermine its integrity as a divine commandment.  And it is at those very junctures where Jesus places himself at the center of any Christian moral system.  Without a divine Jesus, there is no sense in which Jesus could possibly have come to "fulfill" the Law and the Prophets.  Without a divine Jesus, the rabbi essentially argues, Christian morality comes apart at the seams; and it certainly can make no claim on the loyalty of Jews, who must reject Jesus in favor of the Torah.

This is simultaneously the boldest and most humble part of Rabbi Neusner's argument.  He never anywhere impugns Christians' belief in the divinity of Christ.  To the contrary, he says in essence, if this is what you believe, you have no choice but to follow Jesus' teaching, even -- or especially -- where it contradicts the Torah.  But, he simultaneously points out, it is impossible to gloss over the significant differences that separate Jewish and Christian moral teaching and theology.  At some point, Jew or Christian, in evaluating the claims of Christianity you must decide what you think about the person of Jesus Christ, and that will make the difference between whether you "follow Jesus" or go some other way.

I found these arguments particularly relevant to the debate over whether Mormons are Christians.  A lot of that debate hinges on Mormons' particular beliefs about the nature of man and the nature of God, and whether Mormons believe in Christ's divinity in the same way as Nicene (Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox) Christians.  By Rabbi Neusner's criteria, I think it is impossible to conclude anything but that Mormons are indeed Christians, and very solid Christians at that.  That's a conclusion I find myself startled to accept.  I've always been happy to concede that Mormons, if they were Christians, were not Christians in the same way as other Christians.  (I've never particularly worried if other Christians thought we should be excommunicated from the family of "Christian" communions.)  But from the point of view of Judaism, from the point of view of the question, "Do you see Jesus as greater than the Torah, and do you subordinate all other moral considerations to the imperative of following Jesus?" Mormons most definitely are Christians in no fundamentally different sense from anyone else who claims that label.

At the same time, just as the person of Jesus forms a kind of crossroads dividing devout Jews from devout Christians, the person of Joseph Smith, Jr. becomes a similar kind of crossroads dividing Mormon Christians from every other kind of Christian.  Either Christ was divine, along with all that implies, or he was not, and there's no meaningful Christian "system" if he wasn't.  Either Joseph Smith was a prophet, or he was not.  And just as many students of Christian history, embarrassed by claims of Jesus' divinity have tried to make Christ a "great moral teacher," so many students of Mormon history, embarrassed by Joseph Smith's claim to be a prophet, have tried to make the prophet Joseph into a great "theological innovator," or a "moral reformer" who sought to reframe Christian theology for American modernity.  But, I would argue, there's no meaningful Mormon "system" if the prophet Joseph did not literally speak with and receive authority from God.  "Mormonism" comes apart at the seams if Joseph Smith was just a theological innovator or reformer.

When I attended the Affirmation Convention in Kirtland, Ohio, I was particularly intrigued by a lecture I heard there on Mormon history delivered by Community of Christ historian John Hamer.  His lecture boiled down, I think, to the notion that different branches of the "Mormon movement" could be accounted for in relation to their acceptance of successive revelations of the Prophet Joseph.  At the very core of Mormon belief, you have "Restorationism," the idea of the need to "restore" the "primitive," ancient Church of Jesus Christ, as established by Christ himself in the meridian of time.  At this level, Mormons look very similar in their belief to other radical "restorationist" Christians (like the Campbellites or certain kinds of Baptists).  Acceptance of the Book of Mormon and of the divine calling of Joseph Smith is what separates "Mormons" from other restorationists.  On the other hand, the "Nauvoo theology" -- polygamy, theocracy, temple sealing, and the King Follett theology regarding the divinity inherent in human nature -- is what separates Latter-day Saints from the Community of Christ.  The Community of Christ was ultimately constituted of those Mormon communities that rejected Brigham Young's leadership; and the main bone of contention in relation to Young's leadership was the Nauvoo theology.  (It's why Emma Smith ultimately aligned herself with the "Reorganization"...  She never could reconcile herself to her husband's polygamous teaching.)

This is why, ultimately, as much respect as I have for the Community of Christ, as grateful to them as I am for their compassionate moves toward greater inclusion of GLBT folks, as much as I love individual members of the Community of Christ, and as much as I honor their testimonies and their profoundly Christian commitments, I can't see myself joining the Community of Christ.  For me, there's no making sense of Joseph Smith's calling as a prophet without coming to full terms with the Nauvoo theology he revealed.  And at that crossroads that divides me from other Christians -- at that all-important question regarding the divine calling of Joseph Smith the prophet -- I am firmly decided on the point that Joseph Smith was indeed a prophet of God, with all that that implies.  For all my human frailty and sin, and for whatever judgment I may come under to acknowledge it, I cannot retreat from the conviction at the core of my being that Joseph Smith was a revealer of divine truth and a restorer of divine priesthood.  I must come to terms with that in all its fullness, let the chips fall where they may, even if to do so ultimately condemns me.

Whatever conflicting emotions I may have about this, oddly, the one emotion that comes to the fore is gratitude.  I am thankful to know what I know, to know it with every fiber of my being.

I cannot possibly judge or condemn others for what they believe or do not believe.  I cannot speak for what they know or the ways in which their consciences may hold them responsible to that knowledge.  It is too awesome a responsibility for me simply to be obedient to my own conscience to try to account for anyone else's.  And my conscience commands me to love others completely and unconditionally, to seek their happiness and welfare as I would my own.  So I am grateful to people of conscience everywhere.  Rabbi Neusner, thank you.  My Christian friends who think I'm slightly crazy for being Mormon but love me anyway, thank you.  My friends in the Community of Christ who extend a loving welcome to me as a gay man and as a "Mormon," thank you.  My LDS brothers and sisters who don't know what to make of me as a gay man, but who love me and are willing to wrestle with me and on my behalf, thank you.

Faith/Doubt, Part II

I guess I'd say that I've always relied mostly on my relationship with the Spirit as the foundation of my faith. Since I've been old enough to think rationally about belief -- and for me, I think that was about when I reached the 7th grade -- I've always more or less understood that there were certain intellectual challenges related to religious belief. (The 7th grade is when one of my best friends in High School who happened to be an atheist started to debate the existence of God with me during our lunch breaks.) I've always understood that there were contradictions within the scriptures, or between certain cherished religious beliefs and what we can learn through science or history or other disciplines. And I've always been interested in exploring those contradictions or challenges, and reconciling them where possible. But my faith has never reposed on the need to resolve all contradictions or challenges or ambiguities. Rather, my faith has been strong when I've had a good relationship with God, and when I've lived in a way so that I can feel the Spirit in my life. As far as the intellectual challenges go, I'm willing to defer resolution; I'm willing to wait and see how things go; and not lose my salvation just because I don't happen to have intellectually pleasing answers to all my questions at any given moment.

Again, it's not that I don't value intellectual exploration of issues related to belief. For instance, when I was in Utah last week, I bought a book entitled Mesoamerica and the Book of Mormon: Is This the Place?, by John L. Lund. Will I buy all his arguments? Probably not. I'm curious to see if I do. Right now I'm reading The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 by John L. Brooke. Some of the information in this book I find challenging (he's certainly writing from a perspective of non-faith), but I'm also finding things in it that are strangely confirming of my belief in the Church. This is basically the only kind of stuff I read, and I read it all the time. Someone once asked me when was the last time I read anything but non-fiction, and I honestly can't remember. My devotion to the Spirit does not correspond to a devaluing of science or history or anthropology or other similar disciplines that may on occasion seem to compete with or contradict religious belief.

I've read broadly enough on LDS history and theology and textual criticism of the Book of Mormon and so on that I can safely say there's no skeleton in Mormonism's closet that I'm not fully cognizant of. Oddly enough (in some people's minds, maybe) I credit Fawn Brodie with my renewed testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Even though it was more or less her intention to destroy his reputation as a prophet, it was while reading No Man Knows My History that I felt the Spirit testifying to me about him, as I pondered the question: Why would he give himself up and go to Carthage? So I'm sort of a believer in letting folks learn whatever they want about the Church from whatever source (even South Park or The Book of Mormon, the Musical!), and letting them make up their own minds.

I'll say that a lot of things people might learn about the Church that could throw them for a loop don't bother me for two reasons. First, I'm not bothered because I know Church leaders and members aren't perfect. God works perfectly well through flawed vessels, or even through vessels that -- to our eyes -- seem broken. (This is what it means in the Book of Daniel when we compare the Church to the "stone that was cut out of the mountain without hands.") Second, I'm not bothered because the unconventional does not frighten me. (I say this both as a believing Mormon and as a proud, openly gay man.) So polygamy or magical beliefs or whatever other rabbits you want to pull out of the hat of Mormonism don't worry or embarrass me.

I consider reason more or less a friend to orthodox belief because in my increasingly old age I've learned to be humble enough (some would say "credulous" enough) to keep an open mind and accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my (or anyone's) philosophy. I am an orthodox believer because I have the Spirit in my life, and because it works. Living by the Spirit and accepting the testimony of Jesus has made my life better and has made me a better and happier human soul.

OK. Anybody who regularly reads my blog knows this about me already. But recently I had an experience that shook me somewhat. I was having a conversation with a faithful LDS friend about Church history. This friend well knows my orthodox (if unconventional) commitment to the LDS Church. And somehow in the course of the conversation there was discussion of the fact that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy (news to my friend) and the (to my mind fairly well settled) fact that Joseph initially practiced polygamy without Emma's knowledge or consent (shocking, very upsetting news to my friend). Now I've lived with these "facts" and more or less made peace with them long enough ago in my faith journey to have forgotten that they ever upset me. But upset me they did, deeply and profoundly, when I first learned them.

Now the friend in question is someone I love deeply. He is also someone whom I would describe as having experienced profound, positive life changes as a result of his association with the Church. His testimony of the Church has been the rock, the foundation, that has enabled him to face some pretty terrifying demons in his life and come through victorious. I would go so far as to say that the Church has been the primary social force for good in his life. And this conversation that I had with him has shaken his faith in the Church profoundly, to its very core.

Now I remember I went through three stages in terms of dealing with Joseph Smith's polygamy. Stage 1 was, "He can't possibly have done what he did to Emma and be a true prophet of God. I cannot possibly believe in anything Joseph Smith did or said any more." I continued to read Church history and struggle with this issue, and eventually I got to Stage 2, which was, "Maybe he was a prophet of God, but what he did to Emma was wrong without any question. If he was a prophet, he was a flawed prophet whom God was able to use to establish the true Church in spite of his flaws." Sometimes, to be honest, I think I'm still in Stage 2 with this. Though, as I've continued to read and ponder, I've come to feel more comfortable with Stage 3, which goes something like this: "Maybe God did command Joseph to take plural wives. Maybe God was trying to stretch the Church and push it to a new conception of marriage and relationships that went far beyond our conventional wisdom on this subject. And maybe in an ideal world, Joseph would have been up front with Emma and with everyone about this from the beginning. But he knew how people would react. How he feared they would react was, in fact, the way they did react. Emma freaked out. Outrage about polygamy was a contributing factor in the events leading to the prophet's assassination. So maybe Joseph had good reason for revealing what the Lord had commanded him only slowly and carefully, even to his wife." With Stage 3 I've even been able to consider that Celestial relationships will likely require extraordinary selflessness of us, a kind of selflessness that the practice of polygamy did in fact require of the Saints who practiced it. Whether I find myself in Stage 2 or Stage 3, some sort of faith is possible. Faith (in an LDS context, anyway) was not possible as long as I was in Stage 1. Which is definitely where my friend seems to be with this right now.

So at some level I feel very bad. Did I do something terribly wrong, by casually revealing to this person some information that has really shattered his faith? My faith eventually recovered from this information, which is part of why I hold to an ethic of believing that it is ultimately not healthy to withhold information from people. But what if my friend's faith doesn't recover? What if he loses his testimony? And what if all the good things that have come into his life as a result of his faith are lost? What if, for instance, he lapses into addiction again without the rock of his testimony to help him resist temptation? Am I responsible for that? So I've really wrestled with this a lot. It's been very painful for me. It's always been my desire to strengthen faith, never, ever to undermine it for anyone.

What I did do was make my friend promise not to make any snap decisions about his Church membership or activity as a result of having learned this. I bore my testimony to him. I told him that there is no question in my mind that Joseph was a true prophet, and the Church he restored is true. I encouraged him to keep reading and learning. I gave him a few titles of books... Donna Hill's Joseph Smith: The First Mormon, Richard Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling. And, yes, Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History. Remember, I got my testimony reading that book, even though I would say I presently disagree with many of her conclusions. I had to let her arguments sit with me for a while, think about them, and weigh them against information that others had to present. And I weighed them as well -- ultimately -- against my own testimony. Against my experience with the Spirit, and my experience with the Restored Church.

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." But ultimately, as my friend and I have spent much time discussing recently, I want to believe and I must believe that "the glory of God is intelligence."

Faith/Doubt

Last night, a group of people I'd mostly never met face-to-face humored me by showing up at my parents' home here in Springville, UT, to participate in what I had haphazardly called a "Gay Mormon Family Home Evening." Up until about an hour or so before people started showing up, I really wasn't quite sure what exactly we were going to do, or even if anybody would show up to eat the chips and veggies my dad and I had bought for the occasion.

I say people humored me, because I'm sure a number of folks showed up mainly to socialize (and not even necessarily with me!), and I insisted on starting and ending with a hymn and a prayer even though I knew some folks who showed up are not into that. And in between the socializing (which started around 7:30 p.m. and didn't end till 1:00 a.m.) we sat in a circle and took turns telling a little bit about ourselves, whatever we wanted to tell. And so the things people shared ranged from the mundane to the sublime, and there were stories of faith and doubt (and neither faith nor doubt), all intermingled. That, to me, was actually quite amazing.

The big happy surprise of the evening, for me, was the arrival of Kiley. I think she was actually the first one to RSVP on Facebook, so that was a big happy surprise from the moment she messaged me a few weeks ago to say she was really looking forward to it. I told her (only partly tongue-in-cheek) that I was amazed she was coming because I thought she was pissed off at me. And she said something to the effect that if she occasionally gave me that impression, it was only that the messages of faith on my blog hit too close to home for her. Which, if I had to summarize how I feel about her blog, would be very close to what I'd say about her. I understand the doubt thing, not just because I've been there, but because when I'm honest, I have to confess that the doubt is always sitting there, just at the threshold. Which is why it felt so good to actually see the real flesh and blood Kiley, and give her a great big hug, and to smile and see the smile on her face, and recognize that whatever we express of doubt or faith on our respective blogs, in the flesh we're something like a brother and a sister and much, much closer to each other than our words might make us out.

I recently received a confession of doubt from a close friend. He was weeping, because he felt like his faith and his life in the Church had been a great, big lie. He had confronted some uncomfortable truths about Church history that literally rocked his world, and he didn't see how faith was possible for him any more. I've never seen someone so utterly bereft and heartbroken. He wept and hugged me and trembled like a child.

And it occurred to me, as I was reading this recent post by Andrew, that people have this tendency to act as if the line between doubt and faith is this static boundary, which we are either on one side or the other of. When someone expresses doubt, if we've ever felt doubt, we act as if that person is where we once were. If someone expresses faith, and we no longer have faith, we act as if we were once "there," as if we've "been there, done that."

But there is no static boundary, there is no static realm or dominion of faith or doubt. Our lives are like a mountain road with a lot of twists and turns, valleys and vistas. And our faith is like that bend in the road just beyond an outcropping of rocks that lets us see miles all around us in the valley. We can sit for a while and enjoy the view. But when we move beyond that point (and move on we must, because our lives are a road we must keep walking), of course we lose the view we once had. Now we're on a stretch of trail where we can see nothing but steep walls hemming in our view, and a path that disappears after a few dozen meters. No vista any more. But it doesn't mean we didn't see what we saw earlier in the journey. It doesn't mean that previous vista was false. And if we stay on the journey, eventually we'll catch another vista again. And when we do -- when, once again, we can see the valley stretching out below us for miles away -- it's no longer the same vista we had before, but a completely new and different vista, one likely with a larger perspective than the earlier one. Even that perspective will eventually have to be abandoned if we want to keep growing.

So a normal, healthy, growing soul passes through faith and doubt, which are not so much opposed to one another as interconnected phases of the same journey; a journey which could not exist without both. When a person of faith wrestles with doubt, he's not "returning" to doubt, he's moving forward. We may wrestle with doubt at many phases of our lives, but doubt is never the same. It's always a different twist in the road. And faith reaffirmed and re-embraced is never the same faith. It's always a maturer faith, more refined by the doubts that preceded it.

Yes, Andrew, faith is relevant. But only so long as we don't define faith as the things we supposedly know -- the static, unchanging facts -- that make us moral beings (which is sort of how you've defined it in your essay). For me faith, in some profounder way is the journey, even when I'm passing through darkness and doubt. Because in those moments when my view is cut off, I've learned to keep walking, knowing that as long as I don't stop moving, I'll eventually see more clearly again.

Doubt represents the hard-won acquisition of indispensable truths. We should never jettison those truths, and so in a real sense, we never jettison those doubts. They just get incorporated into the larger understandings we acquire further up the path. That is why I ultimately can't bring myself to argue with someone who doubts, to try to convince them that they are wrong. At some profound level, I do not believe they are wrong, and to persuade them they were wrong would be to send them in the wrong direction, backwards instead of forwards.

That's why I was so happy last night. I loved that feeling in the room last night, as I sat there conversing till early this morning, that sense that wherever we are, we're all in this together.