On Evoking (and Cherishing) the Forms
Some thoughts on ritual, humility and the art of finding God through others
I am at a point in my religious life where I perform the sacred and leave the rest to God. I pray every morning and every night, and after praying I sit wide-eyed on the edge of a couch and listen for answers that do not come. And I refuse to be worried. Most afternoons, I spend fifteen minutes reading scripture, and most afternoons my worn green ‘revelation journal’ is inscribed with nothing more than the day’s date and a preface recounting the injuries and injustices that need to be rectified by that day’s study. And the answers do not come but the silence does not chasten. Every Sunday, I ease into a folding chair and watch as the Lord’s Supper takes shape on a table situated at the front of a cavernous lecture hall. Every Sunday, I join in the communal feast by passing trays, eating bread, swallowing water and closing my eyes, and nearly every Sunday I leave the table without having really tasted that which was set before me. Yet still my stomach is full. Finally, with some regularity I travel to one of the two temples in Provo to participate in the ordinances practiced therein, and with equal regularity I exit the temple with feelings of peace whose immediate provenance is unclear, the sort of peace that the poet Christian Wiman describes as being “too remote to know, but peace nonetheless.” And I don’t feel to ask God for more startling instantiations of grace.
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I haven’t always felt this comfortable with the silence of God. When I left on my mission to France and Switzerland in the summer of 2019, I turned my departing remarks into a consideration of the ways in which heaven’s apparent non-responsiveness could be reimagined as evidence of God’s confidence in us. I agree with most if not all of what I said that day, but this doesn’t change the fact that my talk was offered in response to my own fears that heavenly silence was indicative of heavenly disfavor. Later, at the Missionary Training Center, one of my instructors asked us how we would respond to an investigator who was having a hard time receiving answers to their prayers. I raised my hand and, instead of offering reassurances, said that I would commence a discourse on the silence of God. And I meant it. I was sick of an institution that pretended that God was always just around the corner, when it was quite clear to me and many others that His was a voice that was vexingly difficult to access.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious to me that I was exaggerating the extent to which the Church—both its leaders and its members—stigmatizes what we might charitably term unconventional ways of experiencing the sacred. Yes, the “ask and ye shall receive” principle is repeated with such frequency at the MTC that some missionaries likely fail to grasp the fundamental facts that God cannot be corralled and that the Spirit bloweth where it listeth, but it’s not as though anyone ever told me that an unanswered prayer was a contradiction in terms (though they might have gently pushed me to look just a little bit harder for the response that was, like the dollar from the tooth fairy that had merely slipped under the bed, undoubtedly there). I guess what I’m trying to say here is that the sense of alienation I had was not entirely attributable to the fact that God spoke clearly to others while hardly whispering to me. This was part of it, but the alienation grew disproportionately large when coupled with the faulty and prideful assumption that no one else had a hard time hearing God’s voice. Hogwash.
Terryl and Fiona Givens made a similar observation as they toured Latter-day Saint congregations around the world: they found that scores of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were subjecting themselves to feelings of guilt, stress and alarm because they incorrectly believed that no one else had a hard time believing. The great redemptive truth is that religiosity is hard—for everyone. I don’t deny that some people have an easier time believing than others, but my point is that we sometimes get so caught up in the uniqueness of our wrestle before God that we forget to remember that, regardless of how things might look to us, practicing a vigorous discipleship is a fraught endeavor no matter who you are.
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Once, a friend told me that she sometimes feels distant from God, and that this doesn’t always bother her. At the time, I found this to be a profoundly significant stance, and I tried to explain to her why I thought this was the case. I can’t remember all that I said, but it seems to me now that I was right but for the wrong reasons. I talked of the sacred burden of agency and of the rhythms and cycles that exist in all relationships, even those between Heavenly Parents and one of their children—and maybe these do have a certain amount of explanatory power, but my mistake was to analyze rather than to bear witness. Now all that I dare to do is gesture toward the radical beauty of being so assured of the fixedness of heavenly concern that one can temporarily set aside the dictum that if we’re not moving towards God then we are of necessity backsliding. Because what if we’ve just taken a little break to note the inarticulable pleasures of consciousness, the paradoxical liberation of embodiment or the rich and ever-shifting textures of our relationships with others?
Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts—the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation. And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you. And still the box is not full.
John Steinbeck to his editor Pascal Covici
Wonderfully written, full of helpful insight. This reminds me of Jesus' command: "be still, and know that I am God" - the emphasis on the "be still."