Meet the Early-Day Saints: A Wayfare Limited Series

When I was seven years old, my grandma offered me twenty dollars to read the Book of Mormon ahead of my baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

The task started well, as I’d already heard the opening stories many times. But roughly 80 pages in, thick into the Isaiah chapters, I was overwhelmed. My eyes dutifully looked at each word, but I understood nothing. It was beyond my abilities. Eventually, for a stretch of at least 50 pages, I just read the tiny summaries at the start of each chapter and called it good. That’s how I finished the book before my baptism.

My grandma gave me the prized twenty-dollar bill at the Salt Lake City airport, minutes before she left on an LDS mission. I held that bill in my hands, dreaming of my purchasing prospects (a discount game for my Nintendo Entertainment System, I’m sure). 

But on my way out of the airport, I lost the bill. Did I drop it on the escalator? Did it fall out of my pocket where I’d been sitting? My parents helped me look for it, but it was gone. I didn’t have the heart to tell my grandma, and part of me decided that my loss was simply God’s retribution for skimming chapters. I deserved to lose the money.

I read the Book of Mormon (really read it) many times in the years that followed, such that by the time I left on my mission I felt like I knew it deeply and was ready to convert the world. During a particularly naive moment of zeal, I even told my high school girlfriend just before I left that everyone would convert to Mormonism if they could only hear our message explained clearly enough. That’s what I was going to do.

An Expanding World

Imagine my surprise and disappointment when reality proved far more complicated than my teenage self assumed. Despite my best attempts to explain the message, almost no one I spoke to during my mission converted.

My mission experience expanded my world, which only continued to expand when I returned home, started college, and did two stints abroad, visiting cathedrals and museums full of biblical art across Europe. 

That’s when I realized that I’d still never read the Bible cover to cover. The task had always felt daunting. How could I make sense of Leviticus, Ezekiel, or Chronicles? My reading comprehension had thankfully improved over the years, but I knew I would need guidance. So, for more than a year, I read scholarly books about the Bible alongside different translations of the text. 

I soon realized how little I knew about anything beyond the scope of the curated Sunday School lessons I was raised with. Once again, I felt overwhelmed — like I was at the limits of my abilities. Even if I could grasp what a handful of scholars thought about the book, how would I ever understand the thousands of interpretations from every Christian and Jewish sect throughout history, much less the original languages the book was written in? It would take a lifetime, I knew, to comprehend it all.

And that was just Christianity. Around the same time, as I’ve recounted elsewhere, I was also reading wisdom texts from eastern religions—the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, and so on. The more I read, the more I realized that if it would take a lifetime for me to understand all the nuances of Christianity, it would take many lifetimes to understand all the nuances of each tradition around the world. It was simply too much. If I thought about the sheer expanse of everything I didn’t know, I felt overwhelmed—like I was going crazy.

The View From Nowhere

Some people deal with this overwhelm by taking what the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls a “view from nowhere.” They believe that the only way forward is to try to become impartial spectators, scrutinizing each tradition like a medical student bent over a dissecting table. 

But living traditions can’t pass the view-from-nowhere test (consisting, as they do, of flawed human beings rather than lifeless objects), so those who embrace this view often reject traditional religion altogether, becoming either secular atheists or spiritual but not religious. 

I sympathize. There’s something freeing, after all, about sloughing off a tradition’s unpleasant cultural baggage, and there’s an allure to picking and choosing each tradition’s best aspects and leaving the worst behind. I’d even go so far as to say that periodically taking the view from nowhere is essential for seeing the flaws of one’s own tradition. (We can’t be self aware without some distance.)

And yet, taken too far, the view from nowhere is a dead end. Those who hold it too tightly develop an evasive, detached approach to life, cutting themselves off from institutional, civic, and sometimes even familial responsibilities. Compared to an unrealized ideal, every community is a disappointment, a total let down. So those who tightly grip the view from nowhere tend to favor whatever impulse speaks to them in the moment. It’s the “follow your heart” model of life, shorn of any sense of the fact that all of us are forever and unmistakably connected to each other and therefore have a responsibility for each other.

The View From Somewhere

The view from somewhere, by contrast, is grounded in responsibility for others, particularly those where we live.

It’s a lesson that surfaces in traditions around the world—a lesson I didn’t initially see when I first started digging into wisdom texts. During that first pass, I mostly just saw the passages of universal love I was hoping to see. “Within yourself let grow a boundless love for all creatures,” from the Buddha or “universal love is the way of the wise,” from the Chinese sage Mozi—that sort of thing. But the more I sat with these traditions, the more I saw just how much they also call for people to commit to and sacrifice for a (flawed) local community in time and place. 

In Buddhism, this community is known as the sangha. “We need to stick to the sangha, build the sangha, and not be separated from the sangha,” says the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. (He adds, “If we are living with a sangha that has many weaknesses and shortcomings, one which does not operate according to our wishes, then we should know what to do in order to help improve the quality of our sangha.”) 

In Confucianism, this community is the family, among other things. “When you serve your mother and father it is okay to try to correct them once in a while,” said Confucius. “But if you see that they are not going to listen to you, keep your respect for them and don't distance yourself from them.” 

And Hinduism speaks of the dharma, or your duty to your community. “It is better to strive in one’s own dharma than to succeed in the dharma of another,” reads the Bhagavad Gita. “Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind.”

In short, I found that if you sit with the wisdom traditions long enough—if you expand widely enough—you see that they encourage people to go local, to sacrifice for an embodied community. They all take a view from somewhere. 

I worry I might be misunderstood here, as though I’m saying that no one should ever reject anything from their lineage or their community. That’s not it. Taken too far, the view from somewhere can be just as pathological as the view from nowhere. It’s the story of a spouse who stays in an abusive marriage out of fear of the unknown. It’s the story of a mother whose dreams are erased in her sacrifice for her family and her church. It’s the story of a father who becomes a “yes man,” willing to silence his inner voice to climb the corporate ladder. 

Those who get too wrapped up in the view from somewhere cling to their commitments even when those commitments make them miserable. That’s not a good life. 

The good life blends the gifts of the view from nowhere with the gifts of the view from somewhere, adapting based on where we live, who we live with, and who we are. It’s context aware.

What does this look like in practice? 

I don’t know. We each live in different contexts and have a uniquely personal path and relationship with other people and the divine. Unlike my teenage self, I don’t presume to know what God has in store for anyone else. I’m still trying to discern what all of this means for me. 

I only know that whenever I feel overwhelmed in this expansive universe, it helps to remember that I grew up somewhere and live somewhere. This fact grounds me in time and place and (helpfully) limits my options. I don’t have to understand everything or solve every problem in the world. I can instead commit to and sacrifice for my communities (the view from somewhere)—all while keeping one eye open to the flaws and shortcomings of my culture (the view from nowhere).

In the end, I have empathy for my seven-year-old self who strained to understand the antiquated language of the Book of Mormon and the layers of meaning in Isaiah. He deserved that twenty dollars. In so many ways, I’m still him—straining to make sense of a complicated world and knowing, as the wisdom traditions ultimately tell us, that we don’t exist in theory.

We only exist in place.

Jon Ogden is a Wayfare Senior Editor and co-Founder at UpliftKids.org, a lesson library and curriculum for families to explore wisdom and timeless values together.

Art by Edvard Munch.

KEEP READING

COME TO RESTORE!

Restore is an unforgettable three-day gathering by Faith Matters that brings together speakers, poets, musicians, and artists to inspire, enlighten, and nourish faith. This year's gathering on September 5th-7th will be our best yet. A few exciting features: 

* An Evensong choral performance by Sound of Ages Choir Thursday Sep 5th.

* A special event for young adults on Friday Sep 6 evening featuring Mallory Everton and McKenna Breinholt.

* A beautifully designed contemplation room featuring a meditation by Thomas McConkie.

* An incredible art exhibit curated by Esther Candari.

* A huge books area for snagging your next read.

* Lots of chances to connect with new people.

* A parents area so those with young children can still see and hear everything.

* A preview of Wayfare Issue 4

Register today and invite your friends and family to join you!

* Student tickets: $25

* Under 30 tickets: $50

* Young Adult Evening tickets: $10

Use the code WAYFARE to save 20%

“It is of little consequence in respect to the question of originality, which of them holds the pen; the one who contributes least to the composition may contribute most to the thought; the writings which result are the joint product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other.”

So wrote John Stuart Mill in reference to the role of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, in his own published works. (I gratefully acknowledge the truth of the principle from personal experience!). History is replete with other examples than Mill of women who exercised unheralded influence on a writer who—often because of women’s more obscure place in patriarchal society—ventriloquized a wife or—in two famous cases—sisters. 

William Wordsworth revolutionized English poetry, and is celebrated as the Father of British Romanticism. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, in an age of fervent optimism and revolution, Wordsworth gave powerful expression to the innocence of children and the fundamental goodness of human nature. His constant companion—more so than wife or friends—was his sister Dorothy. She was “a flash of light, Or an unseen companionship, a breath . . . independent of the wind.” He was the most celebrated English poet of his day. However, one can track in her journals the embryos out of which William fashioned some of his most famous poems. If journals and diaries had persisted as credited forms of literary expression, she might herself have achieved celebrity status. His poem best known to school children begins with the famous lines,

I wandered lonely as a cloud

It is not clear that his words improved upon the unadorned account Dorothy recorded privately, earlier:

We saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.

More consequential for the history of early Christianity was the remarkable woman Macrina the Younger—known to few besides specialists today, and largely overshadowed by her brother Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory became the most eloquent proponent in the fourth century of the theology of ascent—that view which sees humankind as a work in continual progress, participating in gradual sanctification and union with the divine. Gregory read the Song of Solomon as a beautiful allegory of human response to the “arrows of love” with which God relentlessly pursues his creation. Gregory developed the theme most lyrically in his Life of Moses, wherein he recast the prophet’s entire life as a universal model: “The great Moses, as he was becoming ever greater, at no time stopped in his ascent, nor did he set a limit for himself in his upward course. Once having set foot on the ladder which God set up (as Jacob says), he continually climbed to the step above and never ceased to rise higher, because he always found a step higher than the one he had attained.”  

Yet Gregory left no doubt that his spiritual teacher and master was Macrina, “the common glory of our family.” Macrina had actually brought several of her brothers to Christ, and served throughout her life as their spiritual director. In 379, as Macrina lay dying, Gregory paid his last visit. Like Socrates the night before his execution, Macrina wanted to discuss the soul’s origin, God’s purpose in its creation, and what awaited us after death. Her last words were a testimony to the creation itself as an outflowing of God’s love—and reaffirmed those very teachings which her brother would make more famous. Gregory’s tribute, published as “On the Soul and Resurrection,” was his way of proclaiming to Christians the true author of  the most beautiful teachings that lighted the way for fourth-century Christians: his sister Macrina.

Rational nature was brought into generation for this purpose, that the riches of the divine goodness should not be idle.” We were fashioned as souls “with free wills . . . for this very purpose: that there would be some capacities able to receive his blessings, capacities that are enlarged by the addition of that which is poured into them.” God “has but one goal: the whole plenitude of our nature is brought to completion from the first human being to the last.” He will offer “to all a participation in the beautiful which is in him.

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Artwork by Anna Ancher.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and perhaps the greatest of the Victorian poets. He suffered terribly from recurrent bouts of religious doubt and profound depression. In one of his “sonnets of desolation" we read a startling metaphor for spiritual struggle:

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

It took a harrowing image—carrion serving as comfort food—to shock Hopkins out of his diet of disappointment. 

In 1913, the Irishman Sir Hugh Lane proposed establishing a permanent modern art gallery in Dublin. He had secured pledges of funding to house and enlarge his own collection featuring such contemporary greats as Corot, Manet, Monet, Degas, and Renoir. The location was to be a middle-class Irish neighborhood—who could object to such an aspiration? Well, lots of people, actually. The country was on the brink of civil war; a citizen labor army of 20,000 had just armed themselves against violent police crackdowns; Dublin slums were pervasive and death rates high; the trauma of the Great Hunger was still a vivid memory among the aged; and the Great War loomed ahead, only months away. Dispensing even private funds—let alone public monies—for fine art in desperate times struck some as a tone-deaf indulgence. To others (like William Butler Yeats), affirming the enduring and the beautiful amidst hunger and squalor was an act of defiance against human fragility and contingency. (Aren’t the poor always with us?)  In spite of Yeats’ impassioned support, Lane’s proposal failed to obtain public approval, and Yeats wrote a poem of bitter consolation to his ally in the effort, Lady Gregory. Hopkins’ wrestle was spiritual and cosmic; Yeats’ was political and moral. But in both cases, grievance threatened to canker their soul, and both rebuffed the temptation.

Yeats’ magnificent poem, “To a friend whose work has come to nothing,” ends with a call that challenges the human spirit to one of the hardest tasks it can ever face:

. . . Bred to a harder thing

According to Paul Ricoeur, love means “unconditioned solidarity with and affirmation of the other.” For Dietrich von Hildebrand, love is “the affirmation of the being” of the other. For Martin Luther King, “love affirms the other unconditionally.” We could add endlessly to the list. In love we affirm the other—that is, we recognize the claims of the other person, that she is an end and not an object, she is the “Thou” in the I-Thou relationship, the “I”-view of the other into which one must enter imaginatively and feelingly. 

The quiet heroism of Yeats’ poem is in its recognition that in so many of life’s transactions, we will not be affirmed. What then? Unrequited romantic love is the great fabric upon which poets embroider their tragedies. The desiccated desert of a loveless childhood, Romanian orphanages taught us, creates real-life shrunken souls that our most effusive compensations can seldom repair. Life in a close community wreaks its own wounds of neglect and disregard and slight. Our cultural moment has sensitized us to a plurality of individuals who feel insufficiently affirmed in their diverse identities. All the marginalized were the focus of Christ’s ministry and should be of ours.

There is, however, another deficit of affirmation that Yeats is addressing in his poem. Less morally urgent perhaps, less dramatic, but a hurt that spares no one and can nonetheless corrode the soul like a spiritual rust. It is the experience of disappointment—of seeing our projects or our plans, or our vision of a larger good, frustrated.

Human nature being what it is, in the absence of affirmation we just seek another kind of affirmation. Assurance that we are right in feeling aggrieved. Solidarity in our disappointment, frustration, sense of being wronged. We cultivate our own microbubbles of discontent. 

“Be secret,” urges Yeats. “Be secret.” There is a time to make our protests long and loud. But there are also times to bear one’s grievance in private. When Job declared, “my heart shall not reproach me as long as I live” (27:6), he was making a pledge about a life in the absence of affirmation. 

“And exult,” added Yeats. Exulting is usually a counterpart of success. Yeats makes it a companion of failure, of disappointment. How so? He gives us no drawn-out ballad about the heroism of tragic failure, or the pride of having done the right thing in a world gone wrong. Yet this capacity for which no name exists—the capacity to “be secret and exult”—seems necessary in the disciple’s spiritual repertoire.

Sometimes true discipleship is the courage to say hard things, to speak truth to power, and to put one’s reputation and life on the line. Sometimes, as we are implored in scripture ancient and modern, discipleship is the discipline to “stand still,”(Ps. 46:10), to “be still” (D&C 123:17). That may be a call to cease frenetic motion of mind and body and listen. And sometimes, it is a simple call to silence. 

Hopkins silenced the interior demons of despair. As a Jesuit, he understood that nourishing despair is a failure of belief in Christ, not in ourselves. Silence in those circumstances is the allowing of space for Christ to enter into our interior dialogue, bringing hope. 

Yeats silenced the inclination to spread disappointment like a canker. The “most difficult” thing is to know when to be quietly glad that some failures cause us grief—while we wait for renewed opportunities.

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Art by Gerard Dillon.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

When they were teenagers, my fourth great-grandmother and her sister sailed to the United States to walk across the plains with the Latter-day Saints migrating to Utah. Before they set off with handcarts, though, their parents changed their minds. Mary Jane and Eliza hid from them until they had boarded the ship back to England. Setting their faces toward the Salt Lake Valley, the two young women left behind their native home and family forever. They had new shoes for their journey, but they decided to save them so they would have pristine footwear to put on as they walked into Zion. They walked the entire journey barefoot. By the time they arrived, their feet were too swollen and calloused to fit into their shoes. In remembrance of the feet that have carried us here—bruised and blistered, scarred and swollen, both steadfast and faltering—we present a collection of essays to honor Pioneer Day, featuring four writers who share a connection with an ancestor that has touched them. We hope this series reflects the wisdom, solace, and strength we glean as our hearts turn to the generations before us. A kindling of recognition, a story that imparts courage, a shared grief—these are some of the gifts we receive as we commune with our family across time. May we find renewed faith as we remember the feet that carried us here and the footprints we leave for those who follow.

—Grace Carter

JULY 24TH: A PHOTO EXHIBITION

by Alexander Laurent

The Feminine Divine has a storied history in religious texts and literature alike. Often, however, the face of the feminine divine shines through an earthly personage. In Goethe’s masterpiece Faust, the hero loses his duel with the devil. His contract with Mephistopheles requires the forfeiture of his soul, and in the drama’s closing scene, raucous devils arrive to ferry him to hell. The ending is poised to be yet another version of the morality play’s tragic conclusion as it had long played out in hundreds of versions performed in fiction and fairs across a vast cultural landscape over past centuries. But in Goethe’s Romantic version, a shocking reversal occurs: Angels intrude and pronounce Faust redeemed through the successful intercession of the soul of a young girl he had wronged—the maiden Gretchen. One of the greatest works of Western literature ends with the mantic pronouncement: 

Das Ewig-Weibliche

The most enduring version of this cosmic trope—and certainly one that Goethe had in mind—was from the masterpiece of the Middle Ages: Dante’s Divine Comedy. This trilogy, one of the first great works of literature written in the vernacular (Tuscan), depicted in an accessible and memorable way the theology of the Medieval church. Through the character of the narrator, we follow the paradigmatic journey of the pilgrim making his way through earthly travail, purgation, and into heaven. 

Spurring him along the entirety of his journey is his Platonic love for the idealized Beatrice, an Italian girl Dante had met briefly, but who captured Dante’s heart and served as his spiritual inspiration and poetic muse. In the epic poem, she sends Virgil the poet to guide Dante the pilgrim through Purgatory, at the summit of which she conducts him personally through ever higher and more radiant celestial spheres.

A most famous scene takes place in the final moments of his ascent. As the journey ends in the divine presence, Dante anticipates a beatific eternity in the company of Beatrice, “through [whose] power and excellence alone” he has “recognized the goodness and grace” that is the object and prompt of all his striving. In a moment, she is gone. He panics and sees Beatrice in the distance. He prays desperately to her who has “healed his soul,” seeking assurance of her abiding grace. In response, 

she—far up the mountain,

The church of Dante’s era was rooted in the theology of St Augustine (in process of being overtaken in influence by Aquinas). A central feature of Augustine’s theology of love was that it is always one of two kinds: love is use or love is enjoyment; it is either instrumental or it is the deserving end of all our striving. Augustine is very explicit on this point: “humankind’s proper attitude to the world is not enjoyment (frui) but use (uti).” And the same holds true for other persons. Only God is to be loved for himself and himself alone.

That was Beatrice’s message to Dante.

C. S. Lewis admired Dante’s work and Augustine’s thought that had inspired much of it. A great struggle came into his life when death intruded upon his so-long-delayed marriage to Joy Gersham. After only three years together, she died of cancer and he agonized over her loss. He feared that in his hopes for future reunion he was just engaging in a sentimental projection. More painfully, he considered that Augustine and Dante were right, that we err in letting our longing for family obscure our only legitimate end: God himself. He journaled about his inner conflicts of human impulse against theological commitments.

That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a byproduct of the true End. Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet Joy again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not?

In the end, he concluded Augustine and Dante were right. In working through his grief, Lewis had at last an experience of “assurance,” of Joy’s continuing presence, precise yet “incredibly unemotional,” imbued with neither “joy nor sorrow.” The ultimate significance of the encounter was to interpret for him an experience he had had at Joy’s deathbed. On that occasion, Joy had said to the chaplain, “I am at peace with God.” Only now, it seems, in the aftermath of his visionary experience, does the import of that scene become clear to Lewis. After assuring the chaplain of her peace, he recorded, poignantly but I think tragically, “She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.”  Lewis takes those final words of Dante, verbatim, with which to conclude his own pilgrimage of love. He is now ready to relinquish Joy, as Dante did Beatrice.

We come at last to a third farewell, a third scene where a lover observes the pole star of his universe fade into the beyond. The moment is depicted in Wendell Berry’s masterpiece, Jayber Crow.

Jayber (who in the novel compares himself to Dante’s pilgrim) is now an old man, and he has had one love in his life: Mattie Chatham. Like Dante’s, it was a Platonic love, an admiration so rich and pure and sanctifying that it gave coherence and beauty to everything in Jayber’s uneventful life. Mattie had perhaps sensed his devotion, in the scattered moments of conversation and comfortable silence that they innocently shared over the years in a grove of trees where they occasionally encountered one another. Now Mattie lies dying in a hospital bed, her husband has sold for logging that small paradise of trees that had become their sanctified site of friendship and love, and Jayber has come to say his goodbyes.

“Jayber. Oh, he’s cutting the woods.” And so she knew.

After a millennium of poetic error and theological misfires, Wendell Berry gets the ending right. God intends for all of us to be ends, and not merely means. In God’s universe, love does not compete with love. His project is only its multiplication.

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Last winter, walking through our snow-laden neighborhood, I passed an elderly man shoveling his driveway. I faintly recognized him from the local congregation. I offered my help, which he cheerfully accepted. The snow was deep and we labored together a little while, scoop and throw, scoop and throw.

After a few minutes of shoveling in silence, I paused with my arm on my shovel. “I hear you once played professional football?”

“Yes, I did,” he replied. “A few seasons with the Chicago Bears.” He reminisced briefly but fondly over his successful career. He was large, still trim and powerful in his build, and clearly relished his memories.

“I know this will come as a surprise to you,” I said as I stood erect with all my 130 pounds, hands poised thoughtfully on the handle of the shovel still idle before me, “but I never played professional football.”

He didn’t so much as pause in the rhythm of pitching his snow. “That’s ok. We all have different gifts,” he said.

I’ve thought about that interaction many times since. Because even though he missed my irony, there was a genuine grace in his words. 

“The task is to recognize the creature’s otherness,” writes John Durham Peters, “not to make it over in one’s own likeness and image. The ideal of communication, as Adorno said, would be a condition in which the only thing that survives the . . . fact of our mutual difference is the delight that difference makes possible.”

This “delight that difference makes possible” may be the essential feature of that love into which Christ is trying to initiate us.  

Love can only operate in the presence of difference, though difference has many deceptive surrogates. Social media is not the only shaper of “affinity bubbles,” as Noreen Herzfeld calls them. Ego and fear alike lead us to surround ourselves with mirrored walls we think are windows of communion. 

God’s fullness of joy exists in the face of infinite human variability. That stunning fact warrants pondering. Our particularity is the field in which God’s delight is operative. Helen Oppenheimer sees human value as “a particular sort of living claim” that God recognizes. 

As a religious imperative, therefore, “what the belief in a heavenly father requires is the exercise of imagination to see each other's irreplaceability.” We must be schooled to see difference, variability, particularity, as God does: not as obstacles to surmount but the precondition for fullness of celestial joy. Oppenheimer sees parental love as a pale but valid analog: “the alternative to making favorites among our children is not to love them ‘all alike’: it is to love them all differently.”

In one of the most provocative of his theological insights, Stephen Webb suggested that, in one crucial regard, we may miss the point of our incarnation. Out of his nurturing love, “the Father creates bodies that can share the Son’s sorrows and joys and, in that process, become more like him.” In other words, Christ’s primal place within a relational mosaic, joyfully and sorrowfully responsive to the entire array of our fractiousness and frailties, is the condition for which mortality prepares us. His Incarnation expresses his solidarity with us; but our incarnation prepares us for solidarity with him. His Incarnation heals and redeems us, while our incarnation puts our potential in play. Our potential, that is, to love as he loves, with the same vulnerability and delight in difference.

Oppenheimer emphasizes what this love has to move beyond within a field of radically differing personhoods. "It is an impoverished human being whose highest hope is to be at the receiving end of a merely accepting love. Tolerance, after all, is not the top virtue.”

Perhaps this point is what’s behind Peter’s admonition in his first epistle to “love one another with a pure heart fervently” (1:22 and again in 4:8). He needed the adverb, twice, to emphasize the active embrace of, rather than tolerant acquiescence to, the difference that constitutes one’s neighbor—or one’s child or spouse. 

Our best ethical philosophers have seen this “delight that difference makes possible” as reframing human interaction in powerful ways. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “Christ was not concerned about whether ‘the maxim of an action’ could become ‘a principle of universal law, but whether my action now helps my neighbor to be a human being before God. God did not become an idea, a principle, a program, a universally valid belief or a law. God became human.” 

Herbert McCabe restates that idea more simply: 

“The morally good act is not the act prescribed antecedently by some moral law, it is whatever love demands in a particular situation.” 

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Art by Eileen Cooper.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Once upon a timeless time, 13.7 billion years ago, a quantum energy fluctuation arising from a spacetime vacuum energy state produced an eruption into the universe of hydrogen atoms. An almost inconceivably large number of hydrogen atoms: 10 followed by about 85 zeros. No suns or planets or heaps of dirt or drops of water or dust or bacteria or any sort of thing larger than a hydrogen atom existed. 1085 hydrogen atoms. 

Just a hair short of 13.7 billion years later, little human hands began to differentiate from a bean shaped embryo in the womb of a young Italian woman named Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. Twenty-odd years later, those fully grown hands, pulsing with blood and connected by neural pathways to one of the most magnificent brains in the history of human creativity—Michelangelo—chipped millions of flakes from a block of Carrara marble and produced the Pietá. 

Just what God’s role in Creation was is hard to say. Many early Christians believe that God shaped primordial matter into the cosmos that we know and live in. Later Christians—and many today—believe that God summoned that cosmos into existence by the power of his Word. I think the more interesting question is how we got from those hydrogen atoms to the Pietá.

The great physicist J. S. D. Haldane opined that “If our planet was created a few thousand years ago to end a few years or a few thousand years hence, it is conceivable that the main purpose to be worked out on it is the salvation and perfection of individual human beings.” Curiously, he believed the age of the earth was an argument against any divine involvement. “On a planet more than a thousand million years old, however, it is hard to believe—as do Christians . . . that the most important event has occurred within the last few thousand years.”

Apparently, a God of instantaneous creation is easier for some people (and many Christians) to believe in than a God of infinite patience. The God I believe in is an artist. And Makoto Fujimura reminds us, “There is no art if we are unwilling to wait for paint to dry.” Whatever the mechanism or meaning of creation—it took a lot of time to get from hydrogen atoms to Michelangelo. Whatever the precise role of God in designing and guiding the growing beauty, complexity, and intelligence in the cosmos, something is going on that is garnering new attention and new explanations.  

For many years, the idea was dominant in evolutionary biology that humans and every living thing are the product of countless random variations generated by mutation. Re-wind the tape to the beginning of earth’s history and start again, in Stephen Jay Gould’s metaphor, and the story line would change completely, along with the result. Randomness, chance, accidents, molecular mishaps and genetic aberrations constitute a wild free-for-all of the unpredictable, the unforeseen and the unexpected. Life finds a way, negotiates its tortuous paths, and we end up with the delightful but utterly contingent world we see—but it could all have been otherwise.

Except that story of utter randomness is no longer persuasive. Life is a perpetual, unremitting, infinitely creative struggle to solve problems—and time and time again those solutions converge. Life takes different paths, but the results are the same. “It matters little what our starting points may have been: the different routes will not prevent a convergence to similar ends.” Life manifests a “recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same 'solution' to a particular ‘need.’” Life explores all possibilities, but freedom always operates within parameters of the possible.

The irrepressible drive of all that lives to engage the world, to see, to taste, to hear, to feel, extends beyond human examples and imagination. The nose of the star-nosed mole is a centimeter in width. It contains 25,000 sensory receptors and five times as many nerves as the human hand. It does not smell its environment; it “sees” it with a level of mapping detail more accurate than our eye. In some fish (mormyrids), their bodies respond so sensitively to electrical currents that they have an effectual picture of their environment. Mammals and mosquitos independently evolved hearing systems based on similar mechanics. The asymmetrical ears that give owls such exquisite targeting ability evolved independently five to seven times in evolutionary history. The impulse to be aware, to interact, to multiply the means of moral and physical agency, will not be thwarted. Evolution isn’t linear or unidirectional—except in the long run. Life is relentlessly surging toward an end. “What we call language,” writes Morris, “is an evolutionary inevitability.” More to the point: “our sentience was effectively inevitable.” His mapping of convergence upon convergence points him to one conclusion with enormous theological implications (though he is a paleobiologist): “Something like ourselves is an evolutionary inevitability.”

More is implied in these patterns of adaptation and development of sensory mechanisms, communication, and social organization. Darwin insisted only survivability was the principle of change. For Morris, “larger and more complex brains, sophisticated vocalizations, echolocation, electrical perception, advanced social systems including eusociality, viviparity, warm-bloodedness, agriculture—all of which are convergent—. . . to me that sounds like progress.” In fact, he hypothesizes, if we ever discover alien life, the chances are overwhelming that we will encounter a species that solved the challenges of olfaction, vision, dexterity, respiration and oxygenation the same way we did. We will, effectively, be "looking at ourselves."

How did we get from hydrogen atoms to the Pietá? To Mozart and Mother Teresa and your best friend’s love and laughter? Maybe there are yet to be discovered, universal laws of self-organization that pertain to the material. Even secular philosophers are beginning to consider that “there may be powerful principles of self-organization at work . . ., principles that Darwin knew nothing about and might well have delighted in.” Atheist thinker Thomas Nagel is also persuaded of a deeply rooted “teleology” driven by apparent “principles of self-organization or of the development of complexity over time that are not explained by [the known] elemental laws.” 

Some theologians believe that God is this "living process of interaction," an "impersonal infinity.” I don’t. I think only a person who is a center of consciousness and personality can love us as God does. But I do think matter is majestic and marvelous—and that whatever animates it moves beautifully and relentlessly in the direction of abundance and creativity. 

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel and The God Who Weeps and All Things New.

The evening of August 19, 1662, one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers of the age died, perhaps of a brain aneurysm. Blaise Pascal was only thirty-nine. A few days following his death, his servant was putting his clothes in order when he noticed a curious bulge in the deceased man’s doublet. Sewn into the lining was a small, folded parchment written in Pascal’s own hand. It recorded an ecstatic vision Pascal had experienced eight years previously. He appears to have made the record immediately in the aftermath of the event, and the stark, staccato language reads like the sudden irruption from beyond the veil that it was:

The year of grace 1654,

Pascal never referred back to those luminous two hours, and it is impossible to say what transpired. Wordless communion? Angelic ministering? Visionary worlds? Language never before uttered but heard by him? Two lessons, at least, we can reasonably infer.

First, we can venture what the “certitude” referred to might be—and it was more than a simple statement about the reality of God. For Pascal, as for most Christians then as now, questions about the existence of God were seldom in play. The first great age of skepticism was still a century away. The words of the poet Robinson Jeffers applied to seventeenth-century Europeans like Pascal as well as to ancient Greeks: “O happy Homer, taking the stars and the gods for granted.”

What was in doubt was the only thing about God that really matters: in what does his nature principally consist? The paramount revelation to Pascal in the dark of that November night was by way of a correction. God was not the God sought and proclaimed by the philosophers and the learned—of whom Pascal himself was exhibit A. He later expounded the identity of that God of the patriarchs he had come to know:  “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the heart and soul of those whom he possesses.” 

Institutional Christianity struggled to reconcile the suffering, incarnate Christ with the demands of classical philosophical influences. In part because the church soon acquired the very trappings of power and sovereignty that Jesus had repudiated. In the background, the human desire for a zero-sum universe of equity and fairness and retributive justice competed with a challenging new ethic of asymmetrical love and forgiveness. Under these pressures, increasingly, the God of the philosophers (the timeless, transcendent God without body, parts, or passions) supplanted the God of the disciples—in many cases with surprising self-awareness. One prominent Christian theologian of our own day writes with startling condescension that hoping to find a correct understanding of God from the earliest Christians is “expecting far too much.” Another similarly holds that “we should not be surprised” that “people so close to the apostles . . . understood the central mystery of the faith so badly.”

Pascal’s certainty about God’s nature paralleled the apostles’ understanding, no matter how unsophisticated philosophically or theologically. The first disciples knew God to be love in the only way anyone experiences absolute love. Love is interpersonal, relational, costly, and inexhaustible. Rather than see them as first-century theological unsophisticates, the gospels affirm that these disciples knew firsthand who the early Christian convert Mathetes called the “Nourisher, Father, Teacher, Counsellor, Healer,” the God revealed in Jesus Christ. John Burnaby was correct in this regard: “It was as a person, living, speaking, acting, and suffering, that Jesus was known to his friends; and when the fourth gospel was written, the church was assured that to know Jesus in this way was to know his father also.” That seems to have been the certitude Pascal experienced. God is the God of love and comfort who fills the soul as we come to know him. 

The second lesson that may be drawn from Pascal’s memorial is the lesson of sacred silence. Pascal kept the parchment that commemorated his holy encounter concealed for two reasons: to maintain throughout his life the sacred privacy of his experience; and to wear it near his breast as a private, tangible, ever-present memorial of an encounter that shaped his subsequent life. Our access to the holy of holies may depend in part on our kindred capacity to cherish and nourish and safeguard those glimpses of the divine with which we are gifted.

The question all this leaves unaddressed, of course, is how can I experience the certitude—the conviction beyond any possibility of doubt—that I am loved as Pascal knew himself to be loved? Even in a community of faith, even sharing a common canon, common foundational teachings, and a shared revelatory heritage—it is unlikely that any two mental constructs of God held by any two modern disciples follow identical outlines. 

Matthew 7:23 anticipates a day when Jesus will say to many professed disciples, “ye never knew me.” In discussing this scripture with a small group, we referenced the prayer of C. S. Lewis (who was paraphrasing Augustine): “May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.” That petition has always struck me as the most fruitful consideration when aspiring to a prayer-centered life. The perpetual pursuit of self-honesty, and an openness to a revelatory process of learning to know God, go hand in hand. In this discussion, I was surprised by a young woman’s comment. “I fully expect,” she said, “when I meet the Lord he will be different than I imagined.”

What moved me was the tone behind her comment. Not fear that she had God wrong. Not disregard for the stakes or blithe acceptance of our limited light. She seemed, rather, to be expressing with hopeful optimism what one of the greatest early Christian teachers wrote: “For whatever it is that we are able to sense or know of God, it is necessarily to be believed that he is by many degrees far better than what we perceive him to be.”

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

As ancient Christians followed Jesus’s instruction to spread the gospel, the word spread across the globe to Africa, Asia, and Europe. Far-flung believers developed local traditions using their own cultural resources, developing Jesus’s message in fascinating ways. As a specialist in medieval thought, Dr. Miranda Wilcox says the light of Jesus’s gospel was kept burning through the ages by people who Latter-day Saints can understand as our spiritual forebearers. Wilcox wrote “Medieval Christians,” the Afterword to the book Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints.

About the Guest

Miranda Wilcox is an associate professor of English and earned her PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on early medieval religious culture in Western Europe. 

About the Host

Blair Hodges earned a bachelor’s degree in communications (journalism) at the University of Utah and a master’s degree in religious studies at Georgetown University. He hosts Fireside with Blair Hodges and previously hosted the Maxwell Institute Podcast at Brigham Young University.

Cover art by Charlotte Condie

Early Christians believed the return of Christ was imminent. When his return seemed delayed, Paul reassured them that Jesus would return soon, that the righteous would be lifted up, and that the dead would be raised to meet him. As the years continued to pass, Christians developed different interpretations about when Jesus would return and what that return would look like. Here we discuss Frederick’s chapter, “Facing the End: The Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the Millennium” in Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints.

About the Guest

Nicholas J. Frederick is an Associate Professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. He earned his PhD in the History of Christianity with an emphasis in Mormon Studies from Claremont Graduate University. 

About the Host

Blair Hodges earned a bachelor’s degree in communications (journalism) at the University of Utah and a master’s degree in religious studies at Georgetown University. He hosts Fireside with Blair Hodges and previously hosted the Maxwell Institute Podcast at Brigham Young University.

Cover art by Charlotte Condie