The Advocate
In the latest offering from the Maxwell Institute's Living Faith series, attorney Heather Chesnut recounts her life as a Latter-day Saint lawyer.
Counsel, Please Rise is the latest addition to the Maxwell Institute’s Living Faith series, which includes such titles as Letters to a Young Mormon (Adam Miller), 100 Birds Taught Me to Fly (Ashley Mae Hoiland), and Both Things Are True (Kate Holbrook).
In it, Chesnut narrates her experiences as both a criminal defense attorney and single mother according to the rubric of 2 Peter 1:4–7, which teaches of a cumulative program whereby we receive divine attributes, one upon the other. Thus the first chapter is devoted to faith, and from there moves to the endowments of virtue, knowledge, temperance, and patience, each of which receives its own chapter. (Those hoping for a full enumeration of the attributes under consideration are invited to turn to 2 Peter.)
First, a word about structure. Chesnut’s decision to build her story around a particular conception of discipleship—one which holds that we gradually become like Christ by developing a series of interdependent characteristics—serves her well. It tracks with my understanding of how discipleship works, is easy to follow, and allows for a rich exploration of ideas that we tend to understand as more or less identical (e.g., brotherly kindness and charity or temperance and patience).
Chesnut’s discussion of faith, which anchors the book, is particularly compelling. “Despite its worldly reputation as fanciful,” Chesnut writes, “faith . . . is highly practical.” After her divorce, Chesnut had to find a job to provide for her three young sons. She was extremely busy and had no time for superfluities. Faith, she found, is hardly superfluous. Rather, it is, as Paul taught, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Her faith helps her be a better parent and calls forth inspired solutions to thorny issues she faces in the courtroom.
Chesnut’s chapter on diligence, which is an account of a typical day in court, is also strong. She effectively illustrates how demanding and unglamorous criminal defense work is as she describes herself running back and forth between her clients, prosecutors, the bailiff, and probation officers, trying to secure the best possible outcome for the individuals she represents. Her job, it becomes clear, requires hard work, patience, composure, intelligence, and a human touch.
One concern I had as I made my way through the book was that Chestnut’s account was insufficiently personal. The first 160 or so pages dealt almost exclusively with her work as a criminal defense attorney, and around page one hundred, I was craving some glimpses into her life outside of the courtroom. What were her relationships with her family members like? How were her sons doing? Fortunately, Chesnut seemed to anticipate the response of this reader, and populated the last seventy pages of her memoir with stories of her sons, second husband, sister, and female forebears.
The chapter on Chesnut’s female family members, which is also the chapter on charity, is moving, but also raises some troubling questions. Chesnut’s sister, Heidi, had hoped to become a doctor, but ultimately gave up her dream to raise a family. In this, she follows in the footsteps of her grandmother, who, Chesnut writes, “had sacrificed her dreams to support her husband in working the family farm and to support her children in developing their talents and attending college.” Of course, Chesnut herself does not give up a potential career like her grandmother and sister—indeed, she is forced by circumstance to have a career—and it is this divergence that comes up in a phone conversation that closes the chapter on charity. Heidi tells her sister that she is somewhat jealous of her legal career, and Chesnut responds by pointing out the wonderful things that Heidi has done as a mother. Chesnut brightly concludes that “we’ve had different journeys, but both brought us to learn charity.”
My qualm is that the “different journey” that Heidi took doesn’t seem like the only path that she could have taken, nor does it appear to be the one that would have made her happiest. At one point, she discusses with her husband the possibility of moving back to Salt Lake City to finish her undergraduate degree at the University of Utah, but “her husband kept advancing in his employment, bringing home more money and more stock benefits, and Boise was a lovely city.”
Later, Heidi sobs as she throws away her MCAT study guide: “She hugged her knees to her chest and rocked, letting the sorrow take its course. She bowed her head to her knees. Her heart felt like it had been stabbed. Her stomach churned.”
If (and this is a big if) the primary reason that Heidi and her husband did not prioritize her education was because of her husband’s large salary, that seems like a miscalculation. Why couldn’t her husband have sacrificed his large salary and generous stock benefits for a job in Salt Lake City? And if Heidi’s medical career meant that she was going to be able to spend less time with her children, why couldn’t her husband have reduced his hours so as to shoulder more of the child-caring load?
Chesnut is absolutely right to reassure her sister that being a full-time caregiver can be just as important and meaningful as any other career. Both my mother and my mother-in-law made that decision and found the work deeply satisfying. The rub is that in Heidi’s case, the decision seemed to have been made for her. From this reader’s vantage point, which is admittedly incomplete, there existed other paths to fulfillment—both familial and professional—that were foreclosed because Heidi rose to maturity in a world that did not give equal weight to women’s career aspirations.
As I draw to a close, two thoughts about sacrifice. First, it is sacred. Second, our expectations of sacrifice are not infrequently gendered, such that, for example, a wife is responsible for sacrificing her extra-domestic ambitions in order to raise children, while her husband is utterly free to pursue his professional dreams. Raising a family is, of necessity, a rigorous and redemptive sacrifice, but too often the husband leaves little at the altar while his wife takes up the invisible labor of childcare and household management. Thus the problem does have a name: reflexive, uncreative gender norms that rob women of the self-actualization that is at the heart of Christ’s gospel.
In sum, Counsel Please Rise is a worthy addition to the Living Faith series, and an important primer on how a person’s discipleship might inform their professional life.