The Crucible of Doubt

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• We all inhabit geographical, linguistic, and social worlds that shape our vision and our impressions of what is normal, what is real. Our worldview is a collective set of assumptions we carry with us that condition every question we ask. These “paradigms” make it possible to guide inquiry, but they can also limit and impede our inquiry. They can get us off on the wrong foot, obscure our line of sight, or simply misdirect our focus. This is because, all too often, we don’t realize the limiting assumptions with which we are working.
  • #Heuristics
• Only when we have left a misguided assumption behind are we able to see it clearly.
• is only with hindsight that we can see the paradigms of the past for the intellectual straitjackets they were.
• Great Christian thinkers of the past have operated with assumptions—some of them deeply ingrained, sanctioned by long tradition, by ecclesiastical authority, and by scripture—that made answers difficult or impossible to obtain. At the least, such assumptions can delay prayerful responses to earnest questions, even by decades.
• Julian of Norwich was a model of piety. Living in England’s second-largest city in a time of rampant plagues, she fell gravely ill in her thirtieth year. As her sickness reached a crisis in 1373, she experienced a series of heavenly visions. She recovered her health and retreated into solitude in order to meditate upon the sixteen revelations, or “showings,” she had received.
• Hell was not a fixed place of retribution, but the experience of our own alienation from God. In other words, hell is the condition of suffering that results from sin.
• The Atonement is not a backup plan in case we happen to fall short in the process; it is the ordained means whereby we gradually become complete and whole, in a sin-strewn process of sanctification through which our Father patiently guides us.
• Sin, along with the pain it entails, is the great educator. Mortality is the school in which we learn to eschew evil and to inculcate the attributes of the Divine.
• From his first experience debating a Campbellite minister on the Book of Mormon in 1881, Roberts was devoted to defending the Mormon scripture. While in England as a Church mission president in 1887 and 1888, he studied in the Picton Library, collecting notes on American archaeology that could serve as external evidence in support of the Book of Mormon. The three volumes of the work that resulted, New Witnesses for God, appeared in 1895, 1909, and 1911.
• Daniel Dennett wrote, “Philosophy … is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.”
• Disciples too must persevere until we get the questions right. If a devout visionary and an ordained Seventy can ask the wrong questions, it is likely that many of us do as well.
• In those circumstances, as Joseph Smith learned, some people “will fly to pieces like glass as soon as anything comes that is contrary to their traditions.”
  • Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Orem, Utah: Grandin, 1994), 319.
• To be open to truth, we must invest in the effort to free ourselves from our own conditioning and expectations. This means we have to pursue any earnest investigation by asking what the philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer calls the “genuine question.” And that is a question that involves openness and risk. As he explains, “our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk.”
• On the contrary, the best art penetrates the hard shell of habit to reimmerse us in the depths of experience, “refining the sense of beauty to agony,” “ making the stone more stony,” creating “anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.”
• William Wordsworth spent the greater portion of his life wrestling with one question in particular: how do blood and bones, friends and family, childhood terrors and early loves, a favorite toy and the ghosts of past melodies, all come together and blend into a coherent self, an “I”? Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society. How strange, that all The terrors, pains, and early miseries, Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part, And that a needful part, in making up The calm existence that is mine when I Am worthy of myself!
• Reason, unfettered from human feeling, has led to as many horrors as any crusader’s zeal. What use is pity in a world devoted to maximizing efficiency and productivity?
• Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that strict obedience to “hard reason” rather than sympathy for fellow humans would represent a sacrifice of “the noblest part of our nature.”
• But whom to marry, when to discipline a child, when to let go of a dream, what sacrifices to make and promises to keep—these are decisions best made when emotion is moderated but not obliterated by reason, by logic, by “scientific” thinking.
• Common sense reveals that farther down the road, I myself become one such simple, soulless interruption to some other weary traveler. But my mind revolts at the notion that to other drivers, as to the earth’s teeming billions, I am a thing, a nuisance, a paltry digit in an almost infinite sequence of numbers, an “it” rather than an “I.”
• The Mormon scholar Philip Barlow writes: My grateful mental state lets in a different view of reality than is otherwise possible… . And when I am thus conscious of my life and the world as a gift, I am less preoccupied with self. My attention focuses elsewhere. I am more alert to other people’s needs and virtues.
• The healthy stance is not “to question the validity of physical laws or the veracity of mathematical equations, but rather … to break the dictatorship and absolutism of scientific thought over all other forms of human thinking.”
• As Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most esteemed theoretical physicists, explains, “Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental spiritual universe that transcends the material universe.”
• If we find we are unable to express that truth in the language of science, or to find logical support for our moral position, that should not blind us to the reality, the truth, that child abuse is wrong. In such a case as this, our failure to find support in science, or logic, or rationality, or whatever name we want to give it, should not cause us to doubt our intuitive moral faculty. On the contrary, it should cause us to place greater trust in and value upon it. Conscience has preserved us in our humanity, even if other ways of knowing have not.
• The Astronomer Royal of Great Britain has recently written about one of astronomy’s most puzzling and astonishing mysteries: dark matter. Apparently, the majority of the physical universe consists of material that science has not yet been able to detect. The large majority. As Martin Rees admits, “it’s embarrassing that more than ninety per cent of the universe remains unaccounted for.
• We can hardly speculate as amateurs on where current astrophysical investigations might lead. But we hear the ring of truth and relevant wisdom in Rees’s conclusion: what we can “see, as it were, [is] just the white foam on the wave-crests, not the massive waves themselves.”
• People have a horror of loose ends. We crave closure and certainty, wholeness and equilibrium.
• Like children, we adults also want our most pressing questions answered, not multiplied. So it is not surprising that we look to religion, the great comforter, to “resolve [us] of all ambiguities,” in the words of Dr. Faustus.5 But perhaps providing conclusive answers to all our questions is not the point of true religion.
• In the Mormon narrative, therefore, the circumstances that define the reality of the human predicament are not a blatant choice between Good and Evil but a wrenching decision to be made between competing sets of Good. The philosopher Hegel believed that this scenario, replicated in myriad artistic narratives, expressed the inescapably tragic nature of the universe. There are very few simple choices. No blueprint gives us easy answers. Life’s most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong but between competing demands on our time, our resources, our love and loyalty.
• That is why true religion is inseparable from suffering. It tells us the truth about our condition without flinching, offers no cheap solutions, and conceals none of the costly price. And the price that exacts the most from us is not the final, definitive resolution of the arena or the operating room. It is the fretsome anxiety of the waiting room. “There is no pain so awful as the pain of suspense,” said Joseph Smith.
• That is why we will do almost anything to escape this suspense. We feel unmoored if our religion fails to answer all our questions, if it does not resolve our anxious fears, if it does not tie up all loose ends. We want a script, and we find we stand before a blank canvas. We expect a road map, and we find we have only a compass.
• As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it’s a cross.”
• As the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak has suggested, we might consider, in the face of our unsettling reality, that “He desired a world of indetermination, with all its crisscrossing confusion, so that within it freedom could spread out its wings, experiment, and find its own way.”
• Even with Christ as our exemplar, we strive to achieve emulation, not replication. Brigham Young said it most provocatively: “‘I put into you intelligence,’ saith the Lord, ‘that you may know how to govern and control yourselves.’”
• “It will take a long time after the grave to understand the whole,” said Joseph Smith.
• Even cutting-edge quantum theory, according to one of its most famous proponents, “describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.”28 There is no escaping our fragmentary grasp on the deepest truths of our predicament, on either side of faith. In the memorable words attributed to the arch-skeptic Voltaire, “To believe in God is impossible; but not to believe is absurd.”
  • Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 10.
• Also connect to the paradox where, to believe in God, is logically the best option
• Abandoning our faith because it doesn’t answer all the questions would be like closing the shutters because we can’t see the entire mountain. We know in part, Paul said, looking for the flickering flame to give us a glimpse of the way ahead in the gloom. With Nephi, we readily confess: “I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.”30 We know more than we think, even if we know less than we would like.
• true religion is a way of life; a church is an institution designed to strengthen people in the exercise of that life.
• The Church was not designed like a Swiss Army Knife, with a tool to meet every need, a program to serve every function.6 We often impose on the Church organization similar expectations, wanting it to fulfill purposes it was never intended to serve. At the same time, we often bridle against the programs, manuals, cultural accretions, and institutional practices that can seem like distractions at best and spiritual impediments at worst.
• In moments of frustration it is easy to imagine a religious life unencumbered by fallible human agents, institutional forms, rules and prohibitions, cultural group-think and expected conformity to norms. As if our natural, default, primal mode were blissful freedom and natural, spontaneous joy—and it is the artificial strictures of institutional religion that get in the way! But religious forms are necessary—just not in the ways we might have conceived.
• But what if we saw lessons and talks as connections to the sacrament rather than as unrelated secondary activities? What if we saw them as opportunities to bear with one another in all our infirmities and ineptitude? What if we saw the mediocre talk, the overbearing counselor, the lesson read straight from the manual, as a lay member’s equivalent of the widow’s mite? A humble offering, perhaps, but one to be measured in terms of the capacity of the giver rather than in the value received. And if the effort itself is negligible—well, then the gift is the opportunity given us to exercise patience and mercy. If that sounds too idealistic, if we insist on imposing a higher standard on our co-worshippers, if we insist on measuring our worship service in terms of what we “get out of” the meeting, then perhaps we have erred in our understanding of worship.
• Worship, then, is about what we are prepared to relinquish—what we give up at personal cost. When, in the Old Testament, King David sins against God, the prophet Gad tells him to offer a sacrifice by way of reconciliation. Hearing of this, a well-intentioned King Araunah offers to ease David’s burden by providing both the site for the altar and the sacrificial oxen. David reproves him, asking, how can “I offer burnt offerings unto the Lord my God of that which doth cost me nothing”?11 Abraham, the wise men, and King David understood that in true worship, we approach the Divine with the desire to offer treasures and gifts, not to seek them.
• Mormon practice has achieved what the English parliament could not. With the rarest of exceptions, Mormons attend the ward where they find themselves geographically situated. They are perhaps the last Christian church to do so with consistency.
• Like the family into which one is born, wards become the inescapable condition of a Mormon’s social and spiritual life. Just as, ironically, siblings forge fiercer bonds of loyalty and love to those with whom they never freely chose to associate, so does the arbitrariness of ward boundaries create a virtual inevitability about the ward’s cohesion.
• Love is a product of what we put into a relationship. We love our families because of how much we have invested in them, how many times we fought, argued, simmered, and stewed but were forced back to the negotiating table by an unavoidable proximity and by a connection that transcended personal choice.
• As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer realized, “cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church,” and one version of cheap grace is “baptism without the discipline of community.”
  • “No church that does not demand the sacrifice of its members…” Joseph Smith
• The goal of human striving, according to the New Testament, is the acquisition of eternal life—which may be read to mean, the attainment of the kind of life that God Himself leads and enjoys. And that is not simply an existence defined by His perfect attributes. God is God by virtue of the perfection of the relationships He has founded and preserved.
• Ordinances make possible our response to God’s invitation. We are enabled to formalize and constitute a living, dynamic relationship through a set of ritual performances. We willfully and bodily participate in the forging of that relationship as a response to a personal beckoning rather than an impersonal moral imperative.
• In discipleship, the canon is what we measure ourselves by. The scriptures, said Paul to Timothy, are given for “correction” and “instruction in righteousness.”
• The etymology of cannon refers to a large barrel or tube through which objects are propelled to deadly effect. It can be used offensively or defensively, but it is a weapon, meant to bludgeon into submission. Some people use the scriptural canon with the first meaning in mind. And some with the second.
• As individuals, we also are apt to use the canon as a cannon. We invoke the stripling warriors of Helaman and the iron rod of Lehi’s vision to ground our own version of unflinching obedience. Or we invoke the lessons of the Liahona to support our more spontaneous and flexible approach to gospel living. In America, some Mormons find Jesus’ ministry to the downtrodden and King Benjamin’s words about withholding judgment but not relief from the beggar to be apt endorsement of their preferred political policies. At the other end of the spectrum, some invoke the war in heaven fought over agency and consider the Mormon ethic of self-reliance to be adequate support for a different political outlook. Or, sometimes individuals even employ the cannon against the canon, citing inconsistencies and imperfections in the record as grounds for nonbelief in the principle of inspiration, one’s faith tradition, or even God. This is lamentable, but fully understandable. Some are dismayed that a supposedly loving God is sometimes portrayed in scripture as wrathful, vindictive, and unfair.
• The question is, what do we do with these internal scriptural contradictions? Joseph Smith was speaking in relative terms when he said the Book of Mormon was the “most correct book.” Even in that scriptural record, Nephi reminded readers that if he erred as author, so “did they err of old.”
• “Some will say, the scriptures say so & so,” he told a large congregation with some impatience. But “I have the oldest Book in the world [the Bible] & the Holy Ghost I thank God for the old Book but more for the Holy Ghost… . If ye are not led by revelation how can ye escape the damnation of Hell.”
  • “You will not be able to survive spiritually…” [[Russell M. Nelson]]
• some portions of scripture portray a kinder, gentler God, while others depict a God who orders wholesale slaughter of non-Israelites. Contradictions in the text are not contradictions in the nature of God Himself, and readers must spiritually discern for themselves the reason for the inconsistencies. As Joseph Smith said, “many things in the scriptures … do not, as they now stand, accord with the revelation of the Holy Ghost to me.”
• Rather than surrendering to the varying moments of tension and disagreement in the scriptural record, it might be well to remember Jesus’s reproof of His contemporaries. We need to search the scriptures in the company of the Holy Ghost. Reading them merely is insufficient to reveal the portions that most truly testify of Christ and His Father.
• Parley Pratt made this point himself in The Fountain of Knowledge, a small pamphlet he wrote in 1844. With elegant metaphor, he noted that scripture resulted from revelatory process and was thus the product of revealed truth, not the other way around. We do well to look to a stream for nourishing water, but we do better to secure the fountain. That fountain, Pratt noted, is “the gift of revelation,” which “the restoration of all things” heralds.
• Biblical inconsistencies, common sense, the Book of Mormon’s own words, and Joseph Smith’s remarks on the subject make it difficult for Mormons to be strict scriptural literalists.
• Dostoevsky believed that “man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than to find as quickly as possible someone to worship.”
  • “I want no man to follow me…”
• Great leaders do not just shape the course of history, they awaken and unleash tremendous forces that generally lie dormant in the individual human soul. For if the spark of divinity animates every man and woman, it is too often obscured by the monotonous daily grind of economic and emotional survival, buried beneath fear and doubts and life’s teeming distractions or simple inertia.
• Dostoevsky agreed with Carlyle about the human propensity to admire heroes—even to worship them. As he recognized, “for the humble soul … , worn out by toil and grief and, above all, by everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, both his own and the world’s, there was no greater need and comfort than to find some holy shrine or person, to fall down before him and worship him.”
  • Everyone has a God-shaped hole in their heart that they’re trying to fill with anything BUT God.
• If Heavenly Father has a god through eternities then it is in our nature to seek out something to worship
• But, too often, we confuse the call to discipleship with the desire to unload responsibility for our spiritual direction onto another.
• Brigham Young protested the perils of slavish obedience and submission: “I do not wish any Latter-day Saint in this world, nor in heaven, to be satisfied with anything I do, unless the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, the spirit of revelation, makes them satisfied. I wish them to know for themselves and understand for themselves.”
• J. Golden Kimball, reminded his audience that “There are not enough Apostles in the Church to prevent us from thinking, and they are not disposed to do so; but some people fancy that because we have the Presidency and Apostles of the Church that they will do the thinking for us. There are men and women so mentally lazy that they hardly think for themselves. To think calls for effort, which makes some men tired and wearies their souls. No man or woman can remain in this Church on borrowed light.”
  • It will be impossible to survive spiritually
• However, in 1945, a Church magazine urged upon its readers the exact opposite, that “When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done.” Many are familiar with that expression; fewer are aware that when President George Albert Smith learned of it, he immediately and indignantly repudiated the statement. “Even to imply that members of the Church are not to do their own thinking,” he wrote, “is grossly to misrepresent the true ideal of the Church.”
• Even the best, and best-intentioned, men and women called by God are, in the end, human vessels.
• There is a reason why every man and woman may hold leadership positions: a lay church drives home the point that all are equally members of the body of Christ, that all should have equal access to spiritual gifts and heavenly powers.
• Parley Pratt responded to the criticisms with his own pamphlet. He believed that rather than fawning choirs of angels, God wanted us all to be joint-heirs with Christ, a doctrine he considered Mormonism’s most magnificent. He celebrated what he called “this doctrine of equality.”
  • What you think heaven will be like should dictate how you act on earth. A puffy cloud of harp playing dress wearers fawning over God for eternity is anti-Christ
• Elder J. Reuben Clark Jr. recounted a story told to him by his father about President Young. He said that at the time of the Utah War, Young “preached to the people in a morning meeting a sermon vibrant with defiance to the approaching army, and declaring an intention to oppose and drive them back. In the afternoon meeting he arose and said that Brigham Young had been talking in the morning, but the Lord was going to talk now. He then delivered an address, the tempo of which was the opposite from the morning talk.”40 This also explains why the apostle George Q. Cannon could say of Brigham Young, for example, that in certain instances, “Some of my brethren … feel that in the promulgation of doctrine he took liberties beyond those to which he was legitimately entitled.”
• The remark was in President Uchtdorf’s address in general conference, 5 October 2013. The two articles were Laurie Goodstein, “A Top Mormon Leader Acknowledges the Church ‘Made Mistakes,’” New York Times, 5 October 2013; Laurie Goodstein, “A Leader’s Admission of ‘Mistakes’ Heartens Some Doubting Mormons,” New York Times, 8 October 2013. Goodstein reported being “deluged” with letters from Mormons angry at her reportage of that statement. Personal interview, 8 October 2013.
• Mormons frequently describe priesthood as the authority to act in God’s name. But they often fail to plumb the potentially vexing implications of that principle. Authority is the source of delegation, delegation involves humans, humans entail error, and error in the context of authority creates conflict and tension.
  • 3 Neohi - “I know that you will ask nothing that is contrary to my will.”
• Austin Farrer, the great Anglican churchman beloved of C. S. Lewis and often quoted by Elder Neal Maxwell, wrote an essay on “Infallibility and the Historical Tradition.” Farrer’s effort to balance God’s divine purposes with the imperfection of His human instruments suggests one way Mormons might think about faith-wrenching practices (polygamy), missteps and errors (Adam-God), and teachings that the Church has abandoned but not fully explained (the priesthood ban). Practices, in other words, that challenge and try one’s faith; teachings whose status as eternal truth is either disconcerting, questionable, or now denied. Here is what Farrer said: “Facts are not determined by authority. Authority can make law to be law; authority cannot make facts to be facts.”5 (Or, as Henry Eyring once quoted his father as saying, “in this church you don’t have to believe anything that isn’t true.”6)
• The Church moved to make its members’ expectations in this regard more realistic when it published the sobering opinion of B. H. Roberts: “I think it is a reasonable conclusion to say that constant, never-varying inspiration is not a factor in the administration of the affairs even of the Church; not even good men, no, not though they be prophets or other high officials of the Church, are at all times and in all things inspired of God.”
• If God can transform cosmic entropy and malice alike into fire that purifies rather than destroys, how much more can He do this with the actions of well-intentioned but less-than-perfect leaders. In other words, it is reasonable to believe that in His infinite wisdom, God anticipates not only the devices and strategies of the wicked but also the foreseeable range of His leaders’ errors—and appoints them with those limitations already considered.
• When Lehi blessed his son Jacob, he promised him that “God … shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain.”20 A brilliant truth emerges from that scripture because it lets us know that God does not send afflictions to us. Cancer, tsunamis, bad parenting, and mistakes by priesthood leaders—are all part of the mortal condition, the natural world, and the institutional Church. God’s power and promise is in His capacity to transmute our suffering—and our faithful response to painful predicaments—into something beautiful. God said He would have a tried people. But He doesn’t have to do the trying. We do most of it to each other—through the very weakness designed to bring us all, fallible leaders and struggling disciples, to Christ the Healer.
• “Imperfect people are all God has ever had to work with,” reminds Elder Jeffrey Holland. “That must be terribly frustrating to Him, but He deals with it. So should we.”
• While Smith’s language was typical of the era, the “abominations” he alluded to were not, contrary to general assumption, in reference to the Catholic creeds. Indeed, Smith felt it was the Protestant creeds that were the root of Christianity’s most lamentable errors.
  • The branch jumps from the tree and says “I am the true tree.”
• The creedal formulation most attacked by early Mormon writers, and defended by their antagonists, had nothing to do with the Athanasian or Nicene controversies. It was the Protestant wording of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles (1563), largely incorporated into the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), that Mormons criticized consistently. “There is but one only living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions [incorporeus, impartibilis, impassibilis],” held the document that was the theological basis for subsequent formulations of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists.
  • “He who you ignorantly worship declare I unto you.”
• The colorful language of condemnation in Smith’s account has contributed to a particularly pernicious myth that has had tragic influence on Mormon thinking. This is the notion that Mormonism has a monopoly on the truth, that other churches and traditions have nothing of value to contribute, and that the centuries between the death of the apostles and the events of 1820 were utterly blighted and devoid of truth.
• Even though priesthood authority and ordinances had been lost, truth had not departed the earth entirely, and God had not abandoned His people to spiritual famine.
• How did God nourish His people and keep the fires of truth burning when the gospel ordinances were no longer available in their fullness? It appears that when God lacked prophets, He spoke through poets and musicians, sages and simple men and women of faith and goodness.
• A problem related to perceptions of Mormonism’s monopoly on truth is the impression that Mormons claim a monopoly on salvation. It grows increasingly difficult to imagine that a body of a few million, in a world of seven billion, can really be God’s only chosen people and heirs of salvation.
• Joseph’s teachings suggest that the Church is best understood as a portal for the saved, not the reservoir of the righteous.
• Young preached, “Every faithful Methodist that has lived up to and faithfully fulfilled the requirements of his religion, … will have as great a heaven as he ever anticipated in the flesh, and far greater. Every Presbyterian, and every Quaker, and every Baptist, and every Roman Catholic member … that lives according to the best light they have, … will have and enjoy all they live for… . This is the situation of Christendom after death. You may go among the Pagans, or among all the nations there are … and if they have lived according to what they did possess, so they will receive hereafter. And will it be glory? you may inquire. Yes. Glory, glory, glory.”
• One cause is suggested by a comment of Thomas Merton, the great Trappist mystic. When asked to diagnose the “leading spiritual disease of our time,” he responded unexpectedly, “efficiency.”
• “In recent years we might be compared to a team of doctors issuing prescriptions to cure or to immunize our members against spiritual diseases. Each time some moral or spiritual ailment was diagnosed, we have rushed to the pharmacy to concoct another remedy, encapsulate it as a program and send it out with pages of directions for use… . Over medication, over-programming is a critically serious problem.”
  • Boyd K. Packer
• A nineteenth-century historian of Christianity advocated the need “to search out the real Church from age to age, … indeed a work of much labour and difficulty… . The ore is precious, but it must be extracted from incredible heaps of Ecclesiastical rubbish.”
• As George MacDonald wrote, “to the man who would live throughout the whole divine form of his being, not confining himself to one broken corner of the kingdom, … a thousand questions will arise to which the Bible does not even allude… . Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be, if the Bible told us everything God meant us to believe.”
• For while the established Church provides a framework of service, an occasion for community, and a vehicle for saving ordinances, it is in the secret chambers of our private temples that we must have ultimate recourse to the inspiration and revelation that guide our discipleship.
• Joseph Smith owned books by Calvinist preachers, lectures on Universalism, a Catholic prayer book, meditations by the Reverend James Hervey, and five volumes of Walter Scott’s poetry.17 David O. McKay could reportedly quote 1,000 poems from memory, and he referred to literary masters as “minor prophets.”18 Spencer W. Kimball loved literature and quoted liberally from great authors, as well as penning his own poetry (“Young love is beautiful to contemplate/ But old love is the finished tapestry/Stretched out from oaken floors to heaven’s gate …”).19 Brigham Young set a standard still too little appreciated when he declared that “Our religion takes within its wide embrace not only things of heaven, but also things of earth. It circumscribes all art, science, and literature.”20
• Trials of faith seldom arise from core Mormon beliefs; few struggle with commitment because their God is too benevolent, His plan too generous, the heaven we anticipate too rich in relationships and love. Doctrines, however, no matter how pure, do not exist in a vacuum. We encounter them through teachings, programs, manuals, personal interactions, and institutional forms and practices. And in the process, we occasionally find the pure gospel entangled with unfortunate ideas, pharisaical behavior, legalistic thinking, judgmentalism, and rules based more on tradition than inspiration. Those, of course, are the fruits of culture—a primarily western American Mormon culture almost two centuries in the making. They are not the gospel itself. But the complaint that culture, not the gospel, is the problem, is not entirely satisfactory. Our experience of the gospel is inescapably mediated by, conditioned by, culture.
• In Salt Lake’s old Thirteenth Ward, Bishop Edwin D. Woolley frequently found himself at odds with President Brigham Young. On a certain occasion, as they ended one such fractious encounter, Young had a final parting remark: “Now, Bishop Woolley, I guess you will go off and apostatize.” To which the bishop rejoined, “If this were your church, President Young, I would be tempted to do so. But this is just as much my church as it is yours, and why should I apostatize from my own church?”
• We have all bemoaned the traffic congestion at rush hour, or the heavily populated mountain path where we had hoped to find solitude. We forget that from the perspective of the other travelers—and from any objective point of view—we are the problem we bewail.
• Just as we are a part of the Mormon culture we lament. If we allow ourselves to be co-opted by practices or attitudes we deplore, we share in the collective guilt.
• So I began to ask all the questions in my mind and study and search them out. For ten years I have slowly waded through the doubts and questions of my intellect… . In the end I have come to one simple truth: we choose. We choose what we will believe in and live by. We choose how we will behave and what we will hope for. I then bore testimony that I know that when I follow Christ’s teachings I have a better marriage. I know that when I serve and love others I am a happier person. I know that when I focus on love I form lasting deep relationships with others. I know that when I read scriptures in the morning with my daughter, she and I are happier together and more peaceful in our relationship. I do not know that the Church is true. I do not know that there is a God but I hope there is. I hope that the feelings of love and comfort and inspiration that would indicate that there is a loving God are not just brain chemicals and biology and psychology, but that they are evidences of Him. I hope that when we die we go home to loving Heavenly Parents.
• “It does not mean that a man is not good because he errs in doctrine,” Joseph said of a Mormon rebuked by others for his preaching. “It feels so good not to be trammeled.”31 This is the spirit in which one Church leader recently noted that not only unique backgrounds but “unique talents and perspectives” and “diversity of persons and peoples” are “a strength of this Church.”32
• Norman Mailer, that the specter of colossal human pain requires no God, a perverse God, or a God self-limited by human freedom. “If God is good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever in the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for thirty-five years or so, I have been believing that He is doing the best He can.”
• Depriving the human family of agency and accountability could only have been tempting to sons and daughters of God if the alternative were unthinkably terrible. The most reasonable explanation of heavenly division was not over some vague risk of failure that we bravely accepted while others cravenly retreated. More likely, as Beecher argued, was the very real, vivid, inevitable pageant of warfare, genocide, infant mortality, an almost universal anguish for sin and personal bereavement that, once unfolded to our eyes in celestial councils, threatened to derail the entire plan, drawing away a third of the heavenly hosts.
• “Tell me frankly, I appeal to you—answer me,” Ivan cruelly prods his brother, “imagine that it is you yourself who are erecting the edifice of human destiny with the aim of making men happy in the end, of giving them peace and contentment at last, but that it is absolutely necessary, and indeed quite inevitable, to torture to death only one tiny creature… . Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me and do not lie!” And Alyosha responds with a barely audible whisper, “No, I wouldn’t.”
• Impotence in the face of another’s pain is the greatest of all suffering, as anyone knows whose love for another—the daughter in depression, the innocent children read about in the school shooting—has exacted sleepless nights, broken hearts, and rage against the universe. But perhaps raging against the universe—even against God—is not the sin some people think it to be.
• Surely God is not so fragile, so lacking in empathy, that He would take offense at our incredulity or our anger in the face of the world’s wounds. For our pain is already His.
• As the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff has written, “We all suffer. For we all prize and love; and in this present existence of ours, prizing and loving yield suffering. Love in our world is suffering
  • Empathy leads to suffering
• Some do not suffer much, though, for they do not love much. Suffering is for the loving.”14
• Brigham Young thought God’s intention was to make us as independent in our sphere as He is in His. Such independence may require that we learn to act on the basis of what drives us from within, rather than what acts upon us from without. It may be for this reason that the heavens close from time to time, to give us room for self-direction. “This is the place where every man commences to acquire the germ of the independence that is enjoyed in the heavens,” Young said.20 Which may explain why the Saints rejoiced in a Pentecostal day in Kirtland’s temple, but were met with silence in Nauvoo. Silence—and their memories of Kirtland. One can see the Lord gently tutoring us to replace immediacy with memory in section 6 of the Doctrine and Covenants, when He says to Oliver, “If you desire a further witness, cast your mind upon the night that you cried unto me in your heart, that you might know concerning the truth of these things. Did I not speak peace to your mind concerning the matter? What greater witness can you have than from God?”
• Might, in other words, the greater challenge we face in prayer be recognizing what Wordsworth called “intimations” of the divine, learning the language of God? The poet R. S. Thomas prompted such a consideration, suggesting God may be speaking “in ways we have yet to recognize as speech.”
• Another friend recalls years of praying into the void, through adolescence and into his mission. Finally, in spiritual agony, he wrote home, complaining of his own feeling of fraudulence. An unexpected rebuke came back from his mother. “Enough of this nonsense. This is pure foolishness. Stop this at once. Stop praying with your knees, start praying with your feet.” And that was a sweet relief for me. It was complete and total liberation. I took her advice and decided “I’m going to stop doing this thing. I’m going to stop holding a gun to the Lord’s head and insisting on a sign. I’m just going to live my life as if the gospel is true.” So you must understand: what I did upon reading that letter, was that I made a wager. I decided to bet my entire life that the gospel was true. I decided I would wager my life that the Church is everything it claims it is and live out my life accordingly.
• Prayer is more than an attempt to wrest from heaven intellectual clarification or propositional responses to informational questions
• The prayer that seeks to be the “icepick to break up the frozen sea within us,” in Kafka’s words,19 is a miraculous passage across difference. If prayer is to succeed, it must bridge the divide between earth and heaven, a mortal heart and the divine mind.
• Even nontheist cosmologists concede the astronomically remote odds of myriad cosmological constants appearing in concert to enable the emergence of a life-sustaining universe. Its precision and collective appearance seems to be “astonishingly improbable,” a “mysterious collection of pure numbers,” “unlikely coincidences” that are nonetheless “essential to the existence of carbon-based” life forms like ourselves, according to the classic treatment of what is called “the anthropic principle.”
• Dawkins allowed himself to speculate, “God indeed can’t have just happened, if there are Gods in the universe, they must be the end product of slow incremental processes. If there are beings in the universe that we would treat as Gods, if we met them, … they very likely may be so much more advanced than us that we would worship them.”
• Joseph Smith taught, “We have imagined that God was God from the beginning of all eternity,” when in fact, all intelligences progress, “going from a small capacity to a great capacity, from a small degree to another, from grace to grace.”
• If, as Mormon scripture asserts, to some is given to know of Christ’s divinity and kindred doctrines, while others are given to believe,15 then it would appear God is suggesting that the grounds for a reasoned devotion to the gospel are available to those who doubt.
• We understand, and embrace, the opinion of George MacDonald: Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not. And if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste. Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. I will go further, and say I would rather die forevermore believing as Jesus believed, than live forevermore believing as those that deny Him.
• William James responded with words that hinted at a human foible behind the lofty-sounding position: He who says “Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe… . This fear he slavishly obeys… . For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world… . It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
• The question is, do we love what is true, what is good, what is beautiful, more than we fear the possible error our embrace of those things risks? No human relationship can carry any guarantees of success, but the vulnerability to which we expose ourselves in love is to a large degree the measure of that love.
• We agree with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who believed that “our Creator would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.”