During my senior year of high school, snow days acquired an existential heaviness that made me quite miserable. On one of these days, I began crying during a snowball fight with my mom and siblings. It was midafternoon, I think, and the snow was substantial, but already it bore the marks of incipient melting. There already was one source of grief. We were playing in a hollow situated between my house and the hill that sloped down to the library, but the game had hardly begun before I turned to go back inside. I sought relief in productivity, but Michael Gerson’s cover article in The Atlantic did nothing but provide me with an abbreviated history of evangelicals in America that I knew I would soon forget1. I could hardly bear the weight of wading through dates and names that I had no hope of retaining.
And then, at the very end of the piece, came this line, which constitutes the genesis of an idea that would sustain me at the MTC and in the mission field: “At its best, faith is the overflow of gratitude, the attempt to live as if we are loved.” In other words, what would it look like if we were to consistently inhabit the reality that is intimated by the experiences we have with our Heavenly Parents’ love? What sorts of fears would fade, and which anxieties would wink out? How does a person’s life change when that life is founded upon Julian of Norwhich’s famous conviction that “all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well?”2
Encountering that line only offered a temporary reprieve from the blues of boredom and empty days, but it did provide me with language to describe the task that fascinated my mind and pulled at my heart: living as though I truly believed that everything would work out. And that might seem like a crass or cheap way of putting it, but such an assertion seems entirely fitting given the scriptural promise that “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,” and the Lord’s prophecy that “then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other” (Revelation 21:4; Moses 7:63). The feelings evoked by these verses make no sense if they mean anything other than that all will be made right in the end, and that the same love that was operative at the beginning will abide until the moment when all lost things have been recovered.
And yet the world fails to achieve its angle of repose3. Instead, anger abounds, sorrows multiply and trauma metastasizes. I tell myself things I feel to be true—that this too shall pass, that the stress I feel currently is no different from the stress I’ve felt in the past, and it will be resolved just as its predecessor was—but my wandering mind remains unconvinced. I call to mind startling experiences with the prodigality of divine regard and the sharp asymmetry of grace (“it’s like throwing a plum and having an orchard come back at you”), but I find that though I’m able to remember the blaze, the attendant warmth has long since dispersed (second law of thermodynamics etc.)4.
The root of the problem lies in the fact that discipleship is not an intellectual endeavor, at least not exclusively. Which is to say, a person can know a thing without being animated by it. We’ve both answered our question and streamlined our task, then: if we are to consistently experience life as the incongruous gift that it is, if we are to follow Gerson’s counsel and “live as if we are loved,” then we are going to need to put ourselves in a position to witness and receive instantiations of that love on a regular basis. It’s not enough to have seen the light, we need to strive to live within it. We are, to quote Reverend Ames from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, going to need to “put ourselves in the way of the gift.”5
When I was on my mission in southern France, I sought after the gift by drafting, sealing and sending letters to my friends and to members of my family. It would have been more simple to state that “I wrote letters to my friends and to members of my family,” but I broke the description into three parts because such a structure is reflective of the way I experienced letter-writing. For one thing, there was the intentional physicality of it. I didn’t have access to a computer or printer, so all of my letters were of necessity hand-written, which allowed me to embody and enact the love I hoped to communicate in my missives. And then that physicality was ratified and extended by the folding of the paper, the licking of the envelope, the application of the stamp and the short walk to la poste. Of course, typing a letter is an act of love whose price is measured in time and in the clickety-clack of a keyboard, but there’s something even more poignant about inscribing that love on paper via pen and pencil. Far be it from me to establish a hierarchy of charitable acts, but the point I’m trying to make is that I was deeply moved by the process of concretizing the abstract affections that were circulating in my head.
There was something, too, about the primitiveness of the tools at hand which endowed the writing process with greater sacredness. The gesture seemed to be one of genuflexion and humility—take this folded piece of lined paper filled with tight script in black ink, it may not be much but it is all that I have to give. O Lord, look upon me in pity, and turn away thine anger from this thy people, and suffer not that they shall go forth across this raging deep in darkness; but behold these things which I have molten out of the rock. Or, perhaps more provocatively, consider this as a companion text: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. Insignificant things, whether they be letters, stones or pieces of bread, display the quality of transfiguration when they’re offered in great love. And this might in fact be the point—as the poet Christian Wiman has written, “at some point, you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them.”6
About a month ago, I wrote the following in a birthday letter to my friend: “I hope that you enjoyed your time in the Philippines, and that the final few weeks of your penultimate semester (I think) will be fractious but in an endearing way, which is to say that I hope that you’re beset by the kind of busyness that presents itself as grace, and as a reminder of the plethora of good, beautiful and true things with which your life is populated.” This idea can be misconstrued and busyness can easily become a false God, but I nonetheless feel to say that cultivating abundance is another way in which we might put ourselves in the way of the gift.
The Labor Day before my first week of college classes, my five roommates all went boating with a friend they’d met a few days before. They were of course thrilled to be out on the lake, and the fact that the whole thing was made possible by a girl they had just barely met made the prospect even more epochal, because, well, this was what college was all about. Heady times. Halcyon days. For [adulthood] offers her lures, has her consolations7. But I didn’t go because I couldn’t afford to play on a day that ought to be used for pre-semester prep. And the funny thing is that I was imperious in my opinion, which is to say that I saw their behavior as unambiguously irrational and immature. It wasn’t until my second semester of college that I learned to say yes to invitations to play tennis or go on a road trip, and to strike a stance of openhandedness vis-à-vis the stream of potential experiences that Provo was constantly offering me. So, by all means budget your time, do your readings and complete all of your assignments, but also remember that iconic object lesson from seminary, the one with the Mason jar, rocks and a pile of sand—in other words, let your scholastic obligations fill in the spaces between the times you spend eating and laughing and shooting the breeze on friends’ couches. I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.
When I was in third grade, I took a test to determine whether I’d be admitted to the gifted and talented program. One of the questions asked about things that I liked to collect, and I (in)famously responded that I collected “memories of hope,” which, depending on how generous you want to be, was somewhere between greatly exaggerated and categorically false. Perhaps my answer was anticipatory, however, as I’ve since acquired the habit of compiling long lists of quotes, a fact that is of some relevance here because these lists represent a third way in which I seek the gift on a daily basis. For me, Mormonism tells a story about irresistible repair made possible by Christ, and when I come across related ideas in things that I’m reading, I feel compelled to collect them. Take, for example, this magisterial and earthy description of resurrection, a particularly gorgeous iteration of the extended metaphors that appear regularly in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:
Even now I always imagine her leaning from the low side of some small boat, dropping her net through the spumy billows of the upper air. Her net would sweep the tumbling world unremarked as a wind in the grass, and when she began to pull it in, perhaps in a pel-mell ascension of formal gentlemen and thin pigs and old women and odd socks that would astonish this lower world, she would gather the net, so easily, until the very burden itself lay all in a heap just under the surface… There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole8.
Prior to reading this book, I was of course familiar with the notion that we are called to be fishers of men, but my understanding of that directive was indisputably impoverished until it was refracted through the mind and language of Ruth Stone, the character responsible for this description. Without Ruth, my understanding of Christ’s famous words to Simon and Andrew would have remained restricted to the arena of missionary work; with her wandering and theologically-oriented mind as a guide, though, they suddenly became harbingers of the great work of restoration and redemption that is always already being effected by Christ.
To return once more to the question that began this essay, how, really, can we experience the substantive security that the Christian life is intended to offer? What must we need to do to ensure our behavior matches our convictions? Though I’ve just outlined three practices or stances that might contribute to that sort of continuity and coherence, I hasten to add that I don’t presume to have any easy fixes to one of the great struggles of discipleship, a struggle that Paul defined as living as though persuaded by promises that were still afar off. With that being said, I do have one concluding thought, a general principle that might allow us to be more cognizant of the ways in which God and Christ are already keeping their promises. Here’s that principle: let’s get clear about what those promises do and do not entail. This is not about wish fulfillment. Faith means that everything will work out, yes, but it does not mean that everything will work out as expected. To truly trust God is to know that merely what happens is not what determines whether or not things have turned out all right. Rather, what matters is the relationship with God that both precedes and follows whatever happens. So long as that relationship remains intact, we can always feel to exclaim that all is well, regardless of the circumstances within which we find ourselves.
Gerson, Michael. “The Last Temptation.” The Atlantic, Apr. 2018.
Norwich, Julian of. Showings of Divine Love. Wilder Publications, 2018.
Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose. Doubleday, 1971.
Flanagan, Richard. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Penguin Books, 2018.
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. Picador, 2004.
Wiman, Christian. Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Copper Canyon Press, 2007.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford Paperbacks.
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. Picador, 2020.
Thank you for writing this; it lifted and blessed me.
Thank you for writing this; it lifted and blessed me.