"There is no turning away": On Cultivating the Willingness to Recognize the Real
A faith journey
If C.S. Lewis is correct in positing that “life has always been lived on the edge of precipice,” then it wasn’t until a too-bright Monday afternoon in Marseille, France that I discovered that I was teetering on the edge of something vast and significant. I’d buried myself in a hammock and closed the sliding door so as to construct a set of walls (one of thread and the other of glass) between myself and my companion, and now I found myself weeping as I detailed for my sister the ways in which I’d been wronged by my new companion during our first week together. The apparent reason for our conflict was our diverging perspectives on the question of the utility of walks. I was of the opinion that, given that the global pandemic kept us from street contacting, the next best option was to spend hours every day treading the streets of this rough-and-tumble port city in the hopes that curious onlookers would stop us. Elder Bronson, on the other hand, preferred to remain inside the apartment and scour Facebook for potential investigators.
I say that this was the apparent source of the disagreement between us because I saw it as shorthand for two radically different approaches to the task of sanctifying the Mediterranean coast via the promulgation of the fundamental truths that God loves us perfectly, Christ represents every good thing and their shared salvific work would ultimately encompass and redeem the totality of human experience. To be clear, my analysis of the situation was flawed in a number of ways, but it seemed to me that whereas I was motivated by a pure desire to value France and its inhabitants in whatever way they might permit, my companion was interested solely in finding, teaching and baptizing. And as I unspooled all of this for my sister, stopping every few sentences to wipe away tears and take a ragged breath, I began telling her of Eugene England’s “Enduring,” and what it had taught me about the shape and texture of durable discipleship. Namely, it had reinforced the growing sense I had that my mission was to function as a sort of winnowing process that would result in the removal from my worldview of all of those things that had no ultimate significance, encapsulated in England’s description of him and his wife being “directed from place to place across the country—toward unforeseeable service and learning and away from ambition for luxury and prestige.”
Recounting one’s life in accordance with the conventions of narrative—plot points, themes, climaxes etc.—is a risky enterprise because, well, life tends to be more than a single story, but for the sake of continuity I’ll assume that risk and will narrate my faith journey as a series of episodes tied together by the fact that they all caused me to have a better understanding of what truly matters. In other words, mine is a story of the experiences that have conditioned me to recognize and cherish that which is real, and to sidestep that which fades, rots and corrupts. As Adam Miller puts it, “The substance of my conviction about Mormonism amounts to a running account of the ways in which, because of Mormonism, I have been and increasingly am awake” (Rube Goldberg Machines 126). Now this might seem like an obvious point to make, and in many ways it is, but I’m convinced of its radical relevance because so many people seem to be caught up in ways of living that are predicated on faulty assumptions, which is just another way of saying that they’re living in imagined realities and slaying fictitious demons.
A particularly poignant instance of this is drawn out by Adam Miller’s reading of Jacob 7, which locates Jacob’s misunderstanding of Sherem’s provocations in the fact that the former insists on interacting with the latter as though he were Laman and Lemuel. That is, Jacob is unable to fully engage with the real fact pattern before him because he approaches Sherem not as a human being to be understood on his own terms, but rather as a type who was made after the manner of his older brothers. Importantly, this initial slippage in Jacob’s situation in reality results in a flawed piece of prophecy. Jacob tells Sherem that even if he were to be given a sign from the Holy Ghost, he would deny it (Jacob 7:14), but the chapter goes on to reveal that a sign did come and Sherem did not deny it (7:17-18). But Sherem dies before Jacob can renegotiate their relationship in light of Sherem’s repentance, which is to say that, as Miller puts it, “Jacob and Sherem meet but they never connect” (Future Mormon 25). I bring this up here because I think it helps to underscore the significance of the theme that will run throughout the entirety of this narrative—if Jacob, a sensitive and sorrowful prophet who denounced Nephite materialism and misogyny, can fall prey to the temptation to privilege the imagined over the real, then we’re obligated to assume that this is a vice to which we’re all susceptible.
I have one final item of business to address before launching into my narrative proper: though these stories and reflections will conform to the conventions of the genre in that they’ll be thematically linked, there is still a sense in which things will be fragmentary and digressive. Far from being an attempt to justify laziness, the decision to refrain from making this essay too tidy is rooted in a desire to let form follow life. Life, maybe especially one’s spiritual life, is divergent and unexpected and its meaning various, and I would have this piece reflect that. My hope is that this method of organization will underscore the reality of God’s grace in the way that Reverend John Ames suggests it might in the following passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Lila:
Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy. (223)
The Capaciousness of Reality
Though this is not the language I would have used then, I once had a powerful spiritual experience during a seminary devotional that allowed me to recognize the limits of Positivism. It was probably around 7:15 am, and I was sitting on a plush chair in the Relief Society room. It was Jesse Hill’s turn to teach and testify of a gospel principle, and what he said about the reality of the Atonement of Jesus Christ moved me in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. And that’s the extent of it: someone spoke sincerely about how they’d been made whole by Christ’s matchless gift, the Spirit allowed to to recognize the veracity of their words and here I am writing about it some five years down the road. Though I wish I remembered more details, I’m somewhat taken with the simplicity of my recollection for the reason that it is imitative of the form of the conversion that it represents. By that I mean that this moment figured prominently in the process whereby I came to understand that the world far exceeds the scope of my senses, and came to realize that Hamlet is correct when he tells Horatio that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
And that process, to clarify the claim I made about the shared simplicity of the memory and its effect, was quiet and gradual and more or less devoid of spiritual wrestling. Without really being aware of what was going on, I became convinced that the Positivist notion that the real is restricted to that which is empirically verifiable is far too reductive a way of reckoning with lived experience. Even though the Positivist position is incorrect, the real tragedy is not just that they’re wrong, but that their mistake cuts them off from a universe that has so much to offer in terms of mystery, meaning and enduring adventure. This is precisely the charge that Gregory of Nyssa laid against Epicurus: “To him the visible was the limit of existence; he made our senses the only means of our apprehension of things; he completely closed the eyes of his soul, and was incapable of seeing anything in the intelligible and immaterial world, just as a man, who is imprisoned in a cabin whose walls and roof obstruct the view outside, remains without a glimpse of all the wonders of the sky.”
William James makes a distinct but related point when, in his essay “The Will to Believe,” he distinguishes between the “empiricist way and…the absolutist way of believing in truth” (12). The difference between the two comes down to the fact that though both believe that actual knowledge is possible, the latter group goes a step further and claims the capacity to know that the knowledge they have acquired is complete and unimpeachable. James acknowledges that we are all “absolutists by instinct,” but he insists that this knee-jerk certainty is “a weakness of our nature from which we must free ourselves” (14). And for James, that freedom is to be found in a stance of humble openness vis-à-vis our life experiences: “I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold to any one of them—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude” (14). When applied to religious life, James’ advice can cut both ways. On the one hand, by calling for the recognition of the provisionality of all beliefs (James is adamant about this: “I absolutely do not care which”), his advice establishes the conditions under which someone who is skeptical of God’s existence might be persuaded to consider otherwise. On the other hand, however, religious communities frequently enthrone certainty as the epistemological ideal, and James’s whole point is that certainty is chimerical and hobbling.
In his magnificent essay “On Criticism, Compassion and Charity,” George Handley makes an observation that is germane to the task of determining whether William James’s valorization of uncertainty is more damaging than freeing. Handley writes that “doubt is best resolved, not with knowledge per se, but in loving relationships and with experiences of God's pure love. Nothing is more important to experience than this. What I want to suggest is that aesthetic and spiritual experiences teach that understanding matters and it comes, but it doesn't matter most and it doesn't come first” (120). Handley stakes out a nuanced position that is only partially consistent with James’s. Like James, he believes that in most cases, being entirely convinced of the soundness and durability of what you believe to be true is not the ultimate good. However, he diverges from James in positing that there exists one particular truth of which we should strive to be completely and irrevocably convinced: the fact that God loves us more than we can imagine.
Unintentionally perhaps, we’ve worked our way back to the idea animating this entire paper: the reduction of one’s faith to its fundamentals is a redemptive and generative process. If we cut through all of the peripheral truth claims and attach ourselves to the most basic of all Christian fact patterns—God so loved us that he sent his Son, and because of that supernal gift all will be made right—then we will be able to abide in the kind of spiritual and psychological moods that conduce to the creation of a beautiful life. This assumption informs my interpretation of the following line from Lowell Bennion: “Faith, repentance, love, God, atonement, are but words in a book, symbols of attitudes and realities that we comprehend only in part” (50). That is, I see this as another way of articulating the basic Christian fact pattern, and by underscoring the unexplored depths that lie beneath that fact pattern, Bennion seems to be making the point that there is more than enough material there from which we might fashion a life of consecrated devotion.
Wondrous Love
Though I touched on this in preceding paragraphs, this next section of my essay constitutes a more complete analysis of the role that divine love has played in my faith journey. In March of 2019, a roommate asked me to give his girlfriend, who was suffering from insomnia and depression, a blessing. I had held the Melchizedek Priesthood for less than a year at that point, and I felt no small amount of trepidation as another roommate and I placed our hands on this girl’s head and prepared (oh the audacity of it) to tell her what her Heavenly Parents would have her know. I needn’t have worried. I was overwhelmed by the fullness and tenderness of the love that this girl’s Heavenly Parents felt for her, and neither before nor since have I had an experience as sacred as this one. All the metaphors are applicable. Beauty for ashes. Bread upon the waters. Oil of joy for mourning. Loaves and fishes fulfilled by a feast. Rocks turned to light. And, my personal favorite, it was like throwing a plum and having an orchard come back at me—the asymmetry between what I’d offered and what had been rendered in return was that striking (Flanagan).
The experience I had blessing my roommate’s girlfriend meant many things, but what I want to focus on here is the way in which encounters with God’s pure love clarify and refine our conceptions of the future. Put slightly differently, if we could live in the reality intimated by these experiences, it seems to me that there would be a whole host of things that would simply cease to weigh upon our minds. A key point here is the constancy that is suggested by these experiences. Yes, we’re convinced of God’s perfect love at a specific point in time, but even more important is the fact that this love is part and parcel of the fundamental fabric of reality, that it is, to borrow a metaphor from David Foster Wallace, the very water we swim in. Julian of Norwich speaks to this when she asserts that “He that made all things for love, by the same love keepeth them, and shall keep them without end” (13). For Julian, it is the “keeping” that is most assuring. To quote Julian again, “God willeth that we know that He keepeth us even alike secure in woe and in weal” (22).
I might seem to be belaboring the point, but I’m arrested, both intellectually and spiritually, by the notion that being convinced of God’s love is closely correlated with a sort of baseline steadiness that can then undergird the psychological and emotional fluctuations to which we’re all subject. An important clarification is in order here, because what I’m saying might seem to run counter to the belief that Christianity ought to be demanding, disruptive and disorienting in all the right ways. The way I would reconcile these two things is to say that each phenomenon is operating on a distinct level of observation. Inspected granularly, Christianity in the Restoration tradition is exigent, which is to say that it regularly requires that we do things that are difficult. Seen from afar, however, the most striking characteristic is not its rigor but rather the sense of substantive security it offers to those who take its dictates seriously. President Nelson is getting at something similar in stating that “the joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives” (Nelson). He is making the important point that the feeling of durable well-being is one that is achieved independent of how difficult—or, alternately, undemanding—one’s life is.
The Sustaining Power of Orthopraxy
In a moving scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the narrator notes the ritualistic aspects of the way in which the father prepares his son for bed: “He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (74). Though I didn’t come across this passage until a few months ago, it is a particularly eloquent articulation of something I’ve long sensed about the significance of ordinances, and that is the thought that the enactment of one’s beliefs contains a power that is independent of the content of those beliefs. Adam Miller makes this point in a video for “LDS Living” on the subject of belief and doubt. In the video, Miller tells of having lunch with a friend at an academic conference and listening as this friend told him all of the reasons why he was going to distance himself from the Church. Realizing that he shared many of his friend’s concerns, Miller was forced to determine why he stayed while his friend left. After a long night of prayer, Miller came to the following realization:
And what on my end is required is instead something much more modest, something much more practical. That what would be required on my end would not be to guarantee that all of those things were true, but that what would be required on my end would be to keep the promises that I’d made, regardless. To show up on Sunday. To do my home teaching. To have family home evening. To go to the temple. To be faithful to my wife. That’s my responsibility, that’s what I’ve promised, and my intention is to keep that promise.
What freed Miller was the realization that his primary obligations were behavioral rather than cognitive. He’d covenanted to do certain things, which meant that success in his religious life was going to be determined primarily by what he did rather than what he believed. Of course, beliefs are essential because they are generative of certain kinds of behavior, but Miller’s insight is that we’re capable of acting in belief-oriented ways even when those beliefs are not as motivating as they once were. Indeed, one of the central functions of covenants is to extend our commitments into the future so that our behavior is not solely contingent upon how we feel at any given moment. Miguel de Unamuno’s “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr” is a short story that has important things to say about the relative importance of beliefs and behaviors because two of its central characters, Don Manuel and Lazaro, live robust Christian lives without being convinced of the veracity of certain Christian truth claims. I think that the correct way to read this story is to understand it to be prioritizing some beliefs above others rather than classifying all beliefs as inferior to actions. The important thing to realize here is that though Don Manuel might have a difficult time imagining the afterlife, he is at the same time deeply convinced of other Christian truth claims. For example, he clearly believes Jesus’s teaching that “the greater among you shall be your servant” because he “rejects several offers of a brilliant ecclesiastical career because he only wanted to serve his village” (Mattew 23:11; Unamuno 2). Additionally, he was apparently taken with the Christian notion that a worthwhile life is one that is oriented towards the realization of wholeness in one’s own life and in the lives of others, because “he wanted to fix broken marriages, reunite stubborn children with their father, or the fathers with their children and, above all, to comfort those who were discouraged and weary, and console those who were about to die” (2). Which is to say, Don Manuel believed the right things, which led him to behave correctly. And isn’t that sufficient? Isn’t that the whole point? My answer to that question is a qualified yes. Yes, I think that the importance of a belief is almost exclusively a function of the sorts of behaviors that it motivates, but I’m not convinced that Don Manuel’s stirring humanism is sustainable without a belief in Jesus Christ. Now those two statements aren’t necessarily in tension, but the point is that there exist beliefs that are worth holding even though they’re not directly productive of moral behavior. For example, in Don Manuel’s case we might posit that it would have been better that he have a surer faith in the veracity of the sacred stories he told because it would have contributed to his overall well-being. This sense of well-being, in turn, would have conceivably permitted Don Manuel to be an even more devoted disciple than he was already.
When I took this paper to the Research and Writing Center at BYU-Provo, my tutor indicated that she was skeptical of the claim that action without belief was a sustainable mode of Christianity, and though I more or less agree with her, I was unsatisfied with her explanation as to why this was the case. She argued that though this might make our Christianity efficacious in the lives of others, it would never satisfy our own spiritual needs; I didn’t say this, but isn’t the measure of Christainity’s potency the extent to which it entangles us in the lives of those around us? Which would mean that if one’s faith blesses the lives of others, then that faith has, in some ways, achieved its telos, and there is no need for caveats. My tutor believed that Unamuno’s short story was a tragedy because it features a religious leader who was never able to secure the kind of solace that he so effectively provided for his flock, but I would argue that that is precisely the point. Mother Teresa, another religious figure who felt distanced from God, put it this way: “We must become holy, not because we want to feel holy, but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us.” Personal holiness is, in at least some ways, an instrumental rather than an ultimate good. This is not to say that God does not value the relationship that he has with each one of us, but only that his desire is that that relationship prods us to then relate to others more generously. This idea—that feeling particularly attuned to the divine presence is valuable because it can draw us into relation with others—is the subtext for the High Priestly Prayer found in John 17, which is encapsulated in Christ’s request that “the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them” (17:26).
Heaven is Other People
In his 1944 play No Exit, the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously posited that “hell is other people.” Though this line is often understood to be saying that sociality is inevitably hellish, Sartre was actually saying something much more nuanced, namely that “when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves…we use the knowledge of us which other people already have” (Ambrosino). That is, the mere presence of the other as a witnessing agent forces us to see as we are seen, and the self-judgment that this insight renders possible can become a sort of hell. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought, then, the specter of hell is always before us because it is impossible for us to disentangle ourselves from the web of relationality. LDS theology has a similar interest in the centrality of relationships to human experience—e.g. ontological plenitude in the highest degree of glory is only possible when one is in a covenant relationship with another person—but the key difference between it and Sartre’s existentialism is that it moves from description to prescription by saying that beyond being inescapable, relationships are in fact constitutive of sanctified life. Rather than seeking to escape them, we should forge, nurture and even formalize them via ritual because “that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:2). Joseph Smith himself was so invested in the relationships he forged during his life that, as Sam Brown has written, “[he] famously commented on multiple occasions that he would be happy in hell if only he could be there with his friends” (9). For members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, then, heaven is other people, which is to say that, to paraphrase an idea that Dr. Givens and his wife have popularized in LDS discourse, it is not so much a place as it is a set of mutually reinforcing relationships.
Though I’m not sure when I was first exposed to it, I’ve long been moved by this component of LDS theology, and as I’ve matured, it’s become one of the markers by which I evaluate the robustness of my discipleship. Indeed, currently affixed to my wall is a note card (written on my mission) whose title is “Principles of Zachary Stevenson’s Discipleship,” and one of these principles is to “measure the depth of my discipleship by the level of my investment in lives other than my own.” For me, the most eloquent articulation of this principle comes in the following line from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables: “To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask for nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. To love is consummation” (1354). My dad included this line in a letter he wrote to me during the final months of my mission, when I was stationed in Geneva, Switzerland, a city that achieved international recognition when it became a refuge for Protestants during the bloody European wars of religion. I was deeply struck by these lines because they helped to crystallize the meaning of the two years I’d spent in France and Switzerland. More specifically, the sacred asceticism implicit in the passage— “that is enough,” “ask for nothing further,” “there is no other pearl to be found”—mirrored the suite of stances that I’d tried to develop on my mission, which all more or less boiled down to the task of recognizing and cherishing those things that really mattered (read: other people) and then setting aside the rest. This has become one of the things that I return to again and again when asked about my mission—I say that it was a training in proper priority placement that, to quote a passage I’ve cited previously, caused me to orient myself “toward unforeseeable service and learning and away from ambition for luxury and prestige.”
This idea—that the only things that really matter are other people—is one that is explored at length in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Indeed, the novel is an extended letter from Reverend John Ames to his young son Robby, and he spends large portions of the book detailing the rich and complicated relationships he has with his grandfather, his father, his brother, his friend Robert Boughton, Boughton’s son Jack and his (Ames’) wife Lila. To put it a little differently, the book is an extended exploration of Ames’ comment that “I read somewhere that a thing that does not exist in relation to anything else cannot itself be said to exist” (47). In Ames’ case, we might even adjust that assertion to say that “a thing that does not exist in harmonious relation to everything else cannot itself be said to exist fully.” The reason for this amendment, of course, is Jack Boughton. John Ames exists in relation to many other things—his congregation, Boughton, Lila etc.—but his relationship with Jack is rocky, and Ames’ existence is impoverished until he is able to repair that particular relationship. This repair is memorably achieved at the very end of the novel, when Reverend Ames blesses Jack as the latter prepares to (once again) leave Gilead. The moment is so charged with grace and meaning that Ames remarks that “I’d have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment” (242). Later, Ames will tell his son that “wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration,” but he’s only able to say this with conviction because, at long last, even Jack has been transfigured in his sight—the price was time, offense and periods of mutual incomprehension, but Ames finally acquired “a little willingness to see” (245).
Conclusion
In the front matter of his novel East of Eden, John Steinbeck includes an enigmatic note to his editor, Pascal Covici, wherein he talks of a box that “contains nearly everything I have,” including evil thoughts and good thoughts, despair and “the indescribable joy of creation.” Steinbeck then ends the note by saying that “still the box is not full.” With these words, Steinbeck was apparently describing the novel he’d just written, but I find that the metaphor of the unfilled box is an apt one for my purposes as well. This account of my faith journey is a box, and I’ve loaded it down with anecdotes, quotes, assertions and themes, but still my faith journey remains untold. The rejection of Positivism is in there, as is an abiding belief in the power of praxis, and these two conceptual threads are joined by a deep appreciation for the “embracing, incomprehensible reality” of heavenly love, which is in turn linked with a conviction about the importance of mobilizing that love in our relationships with others. But, and this is a truism, there exist large swaths of my religious experience that await excavation and articulation.
And the box metaphor is helpful in another sense, too, because a box—especially one that is wrapped and fitted with a bright bow, sort of like a cumberbund but significantly more appealing—is the Platonic form associated with the notion of the gift. This is appropriate given that giftedness is everywhere present in the story of my religious life. My mission was a gift, my love of reading is a gift, the formative spiritual experiences I’ve had were gifts and the many people who populate my life are gifts. Reverend Ames tells his son to “put himself in the way of the gift,” but it’s been my experience that gifts pile up even if we haven’t positioned ourselves in such a way as to facilitate their arrival (114). Gratuitousness and asymmetry are operative, regardless. I stand with William James, then, in asserting that the “turtles all the way down” position is an untenable one, and that there is indeed a bedrock principle from which one can create a stable and accurate model of reality. That bedrock principle is that, to quote George Handley, “none of this is earned,” and if that is the lens through which we experience life, then all else will come into focus (132).
Thank you for sharing the things of your soul in a very public forum. They add to the tapestry of faith that must be preserved, in a world that is in many ways turning away from such beautiful, and life-giving things.