Narrating the Sacred
An interview with Matt Wickman, a professor at BYU and a scholar of spirituality in literature
Matt Wickman is an associate professor of English at Brigham Young University. His specialties are Irish and Scottish literature and, more recently, Christian spirituality. He is the founding director of the BYU Humanities Center and hosts the center’s Faith and Imagination podcast. This interview includes bits about myth, poetry, and spirituality, as well as Wickman’s profound mediation on revelatory versus transaction-based love. My time with Professor Wickman was truly a conversation, weaving from topic to topic organically and honestly.
What would you say is myth’s relationship to faith?
The way I understand myth is that these are large stories that try to explain otherwise almost unthinkable things. They take complex stories of civilization or the natural world. They explain how to explain our place, our origins, our purpose. And you know, we have a place. Obviously, we’re here. We have a purpose. But the story of how we come to be here, [when] just told as a history, is enormously and outrageously complex, with so many details and so many chapters. What myth does is it takes a lot of this and distills it down into some very clean, neat, but powerful metaphors that function as points of discernment amidst all the detail.
Stories of faith, you know, I don’t believe are fictions, but they can be myths in that they can explain the hand of God in one’s life, the presence of the Spirit in one’s life, in ways that one could discern, even amid a mass of complexity, or complicated life circumstances, or long and slow developing stories about how one got from one place in life to another place in life. A story about the hand of God in one’s life is usually a story distilling down a presence one discerns amidst all that complexity, and it’s bringing that presence to the fore and putting a lot of the complexity in the background. In that respect, these are stories that explain the simplicity and the beauty of God’s meaning, God’s presence amid a maze of complicated circumstances.
In a lot of your interviews, at least recently for Faith and Imagination, there have been a lot of poets, and this idea of poetry being a distillation feels very potent. What is the difference in their roles, myth and poetry?
Do you mean between poets and prophets, poetry and mythology?
What I mean, I guess, is that we have a lot of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon and we’re more comfortable with the idea of talking about poetry in our sacred texts, but if you bring up mythology in a Sunday school, then people start to get a little bit nervous.
Well, I mean, the scriptures have mythic stories in them, right? The Book of Job tells a mythic story about a person who may be historical, but the story itself, the way it’s told, you know, isn’t trying to capture the exact dialogue of Job and three friends. It’s kind of capturing dynamics more than it is capturing an actual set of conversations. The book of Jonah and [story of] the whale, right? The story of Jonah and the whale is a classic sort of myth. Even if something like this happened, the story is very self-consciously telling you as a story. Poetry is to myth what photography is to narrative. The poems that I’m drawn to at least capture these impressions in these situations or moments. They basically say, “do you detect what’s important right here, right now?” “Do you feel this thing right here, right now, do you perceive it? Do you discern it?” Religious poems often ask the question, “can you detect the Spirit of God in this place? Right here? Right now?” Myths are often about how something came to be. Here’s how we came to recognize something, here’s how we came to experience something. Here’s how we were brought across the water from an old land to a new one. So poems, for me, are more about discernment amid the circumstances, discernment in the moment, whereas myth is more of a story about how we came to acquire the capacity to recognize or discern something.
I’ve been really obsessed with the Adam and Eve story of late, and specifically how it’s told in the temple. And I was talking to my parents, and I was like, “It’s so amazing. We have this beautiful creation myth.” And they’re like, “No, it’s so important to us that those two people were there, and that really happened.” And I would just be curious to know how you would respond to that idea.
In a talk from many years ago, President Holland evoked the idea of Adam and Eve as real beings in a real garden, but he qualified it by saying he’s not sure where this was, you know, or I forget the exact wording, but he basically was saying, if you try to sort of trace it back to this location, or this year, or whatever, that may be a bit of a projection on our part. And he was trying to sort of, I think, suggest that two things that can be true at the same time, there can be actual histories of things that are also couched in story for the purpose of simplifying otherwise tremendous complexity, story helps us see clearly things that otherwise get lost in the massive detail. In that respect, to call creation a myth probably wouldn’t be the right term, as the creation happened; if you believe that God is a creator, then creation happened as a historical fact over a long period of time.
But are there creation myths? Sure, the way we tell that story, there were seven days. Day one, this happened. Day two, that happened, clearly, Latter-day Saints don’t claim it happened in seven days, right. That version of the story would be an example of myth and simplification. The first day, he separated light from darkness, you know, a few days later, maybe all these birds and all these fish. Then the next day, it was people. Well, you know, no one believes that actually occurred, like the Thursday he did this and the Friday he did that. That’s myth in operation.
What have you learned from the people you’ve interviewed on your podcast about this relationship between faith and imagination?
What I learned is that these are people whose imaginations are energized by their faith. It’s not that their imaginations enable them to conceive of God. It’s the reverse, really. It’s that their experience of God animates their imaginations. It enlivens their intelligence. It makes possible the things that they do, the books they write, the paintings they draw, the poems they create. So that’s what faith really is. It’s a conduit to an experience of divine things, and one manifestation of that experience is our capacity to draw on our creative natures to make things in the world: that can be you writing an article, or it can be me building a friendship with somebody I know, or strengthening relationship I have with one of my daughters. These are all manifestations of our creative natures as children of God. And so what I learn from my guests is the ways in which they embrace their faith as part of that broad creative process.
The Latter-day Saint tradition has a very expansive view of creation and our creativity as children of God, but never in a formal church setting are we explicitly or even implicitly encouraged to use our imagination when reading. Why? Where’s the disconnect?
I think there’s a broad cultural association between imagination and falsehood, right? We’ll say things like, “Oh, that didn't really happen. Someone just imagined it.” That’s true across cultures, very, very broadly. In our religious culture, we want to make a case for the historical factuality of certain things. We believe that Christ was born and was resurrected. We believe that the First Vision actually happened, you know, even the restoration of the priesthood, you know, by Peter, James, and John to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, that these things really happened. We believe that as recorded in section 110 of Doctrine and Covenants, Christ appeared, as did prophets from the past. And so to say that we’re using our imaginations to get our head around this kind of thing is for some people another way of saying that we’re introducing falsehood where there should be just truth. That’s a narrow vision of what imagination does. Imagination is primarily just a way to employ the mind to grasp more vividly the things that we perceive. That’s what imagination is. It means the power to create images. Imagination is to fact what parable is to doctrine. It’s an illustrative mechanism.
As you’ve interviewed these poets and thinkers, what have you learned from them? How have you approached your faith differently, or your sacred texts differently, or maybe your own writing differently?
Yeah, I’ve just thought to myself, if they can employ their faith to such great events, maybe I can do a bit better myself. A lot of my work has evolved over the last decade. My faith is now much more front and center in the work that I do. I would have told you a decade ago, or two decades ago, that I specialize in eighteenth-century British and Scottish literature, which I still love today. Today, I see myself as first and foremost a scholar of Christian spirituality. And I approach literary texts of various kinds, looking to understand them in light of spiritual experience and hoping to draw upon literature’s sophistication to help me better understand the nature of spiritual experience. Help me understand better the nature of my relationship with God. And this has been incredibly impactful on me, teaching that kind of thing at BYU. It’s the best place on the planet to do it, because the students themselves have these very rich spiritual lives with great powers of discernment, and together, we edify each other in ways that are both intellectual and spiritual, and in ways that are deeply meaningful.
So in the realm of spiritual experiences, thinkers like Marilynne Robinson come to mind, who just captures the spiritual experience with language in such a way that, you know, before you read her, you don’t know that your whole life is leading up to reading her. But then in relation to my own spiritual experiences it feels like they lie outside of language. And in fact, it would be a disservice to that thing, like Cordelia in King Lear says, “I can’t heave my heart into my mouth.” So how do you navigate that?
Yeah, good. One of the things that I find that studying spirituality as a scholar can do, and actually looking at the broad Christian tradition of scholarship on the subject, is it expands my vocabulary for spiritual things, and expanding my vocabulary helps me name things more precisely, and it also gives me a richer basis for the metaphors that can evoke something of the nature of spiritual experience. There are ways all across literature, especially in poetry, where people give really vibrant expression to their experience with spiritual things, so that I think we can resort almost too easily to the claim of ineffability, when actually sometimes all we need is a slightly larger vocabulary and a slightly more enriched imagination.
Do you think that is the case for all things that we say are ineffable?
I mean, my guess is, if I were to say I felt impressed to share a spiritual experience, and I felt that the Lord wanted me to share it, if I went to the Lord and I said, “I don’t know how to describe it,” my guess is the Lord would not say “that’s true.” He’d say, “try harder,” right? There are things that we don’t share. I do believe there are experiences that are just too sacred to share, but for those that we can and do share, I think the Lord has given us a variety of tools, from basic language, to the kinds of religious traditions that allow us to understand each other better inside these traditions, to literary texts that do brilliant jobs of explaining very difficult things in vibrant language that brings them vividly into view, to our capacity as humans to empathize with each other and to feel things from each other we might not feel if we were left to our own devices. All these things are tools of communication that the Spirit amplifies and then helps to bring to our understanding.
Kierkegaard has this idea that we can’t love people for reasons because it has to be this ineffable thing that magnetized us to this person, and this idea has gotten me in some trouble. What do you think about that?
Yeah, that’s great. I think when you love people, you can love some people for particular reasons. I love certain restaurants because the food is really good, right? And you love the chef, yeah, right. That’s kind of a transactional love, right? You give me good food and I give you the money for the entree. That kind of thing exists, and sometimes it can also exist in our friendships, like “I love talking to so and so because so and so is such a good listener. I love talking to so and so because so and so says such beautiful things about other people or about their closest friends.” But ultimately, yeah, love in the grandest sense is not only to love people for who they are, but to love them as image bearers of God. And in that respect, what you love in people is the divinity they do not yet know how fully to express. In that regard, the edict to love without qualification is also a demand that one become more responsive to revelation, the revelation of the divine in other people, and I don’t think we love God because God promises salvation or blessings. We love God because the experience of God is just so amazing. It just inspires love of its own. It’s like, wow, right?
Our God is a great and beautiful and deeply good and truthful God. Ultimately, I think that to love other people is to catch some trace of that in them. To love them because they themselves are—in their way—beautiful and truthful and good beings. So there is a transactional love, but it’s just not the same thing as the revelatory love that allows us to love without qualification. I like that formulation because then a follow-up question would be, well, then “How can someone love someone in this revelatory way?” If they don't know God at all well, they find it through loving this person. Find him through loving this person.
You’re married, and I’ve never been married, so I don’t know, but I’ve been warned a lot that often times, you’re going to love your spouse precisely when they’re not bearing the image of God. And I’m curious how you describe that, just because I want to hear your language in describing that kind of moment when you're like, oh, clearly that’s not, that’s not them living up to their divinity.
For me, the way it works, I've been married to my wife, Carrie, for twenty-eight-and-a-half years, and there’s much more that Carrie has to forgive in me than I have to forgive in her. But I do see her in her humanity, and I love it. I love her humanity, for her quirks and for her epigenetic inheritance from her family, even though it drives me crazy sometimes because it’s different from my inheritance from my family, I love her in her distinctness and uniqueness as a product of her human experience. But amidst all that, there’s something that I also perceive, that God deeply loves about the humanness and the distinctness and the particularity of Carrie in her human experience, and there’s something divine about her very nature as a human person, and it’s true of her when she is angry with me, which happens on occasion, deservedly so on my part, it happens when she is not at her best. There’s something in her particularity which reveals the tension between what is divine in there and what is weighed down by circumstance.
And I guess it’s in those kinds of moments that one gets a feeling for what Christ's ttonement means and Christ's capacity to be with us in our infirmities, as it says in Alma 7. You know, our infirmities really finally mean our deep and inexorable humanness. Whenever I pray about Carrie, I just get a sense that God loves her in and as the person she is, not just as the person she can become one day. There’s something about the humanness that is loved by God for its quirkiness and particularity and mortality and hope and grief and every day, adorable fallenness.
Such a great interview - full of so many wonderful insights.
I do not know Professor Wickman personally though we probably work in the same building. What I do know is that he is a most beloved and respected religious person, and the exact opposite of me. I don't say that negatively, but only to point out that people of faith can be as different as green tea is from orchata. That, of course, has to do with life experiences, and how we've had to navigate different challenges and obstacles. He cannot be me and I cannot be him, but we both can be scholars of faith, both of us believing in the Restoration and the Resurrection. How we negotiate those and how we speak of them is also quite different. While he may see light in poetry and myth, and probably sees his place in the temple (this is all conjecture, of course), I see light in the on-the-ground struggle of marginalized people of faith, and in the humble homes of those I worship with. I'm assuming he sees the beauty of BYU in its traditions, its past, and its prophetic direction, while I see it in the crevices inhabited by those who do not yet feel they belong. I love BYU but do so because in spite of its sometimes administrative blindness to the real issues in society, it too can be sacred ground to people who yearn for a belonging place and a church that sees their pain and their alienation. Place is often what we make of it, but that making comes in many forms, and created by very different individuals. I find it an honor to call Professor Wichman a colleague.