The twentieth-century Latter-day Saint teacher and humanitarian, Lowell Bennion, believed that we live in two worlds: the objective world of external reality and the inner, subjective world of values and meaning. My expansion of an implication he observed goes something like this: In the external world, I am small, of scant consequence, and subject to great forces beyond my control, including my own genetic and cultural inheritance. In the inner world of values, however, I play a significant role. I have a measure of choice in what I value and become. I help to fashion the lens through which I interpret the world.

In this spirit, what follows is a personal meditation on one element of Latter-day Saint belief. This serves as a way of expressing my faith because the meditation illustrates how the gospel helps me make sense of life.

We might characterize my words as “an act of theology.” By this I do not mean a pronouncement of official church doctrine, for which I am neither equipped nor licensed. Instead, by “an act of theology” I mean the art and discipline of meaning-making at the junction of three primary influences: the religion I embrace; my personal experience and judgment; and the observable world. By the “observable world” I mean “reality,” to the modest extent that I apprehend it by attention to the persuasive findings of science, scholarship, direct surveillance, and the reports of thoughtful fellow travelers. My immediate theme is what we Latter-day Saints call “the veil,” along with the questions we pose and receive through it.

Before turning to the veil, I offer comment on the first of the influences on my theological formation: my religion and its institutional expression, the church, which introduced me to the concept of the veil. Because the church sustains criticisms in our era as in earlier ones, it is worth noting, in passing, why it continues to nourish me. I have given fuller explanation of this in other forums.

The Church

It is not lost on me that the church makes extravagant claims that seem unlikely from certain angles of vision. Yet the phenomenon persists. Despite its strangeness, in part because of its strangeness to modern sensibilities, the religion thrives, nourishes adherents, serves the world, challenges and is challenged by the wider culture, and perplexes its most thoughtful observers. It remains vital to me, for I see in the overall thrust of Joseph Smith’s vision something grand, inspiring, and worth living toward. I find strength and productivity in the lay-oriented devotion of the organized Saints, their culture of saying “yes” to service and to looking after one another in the context of devotion to the divine. The church reinforces for me lovely, sacred commitments in the form of the sacrament, especially, and related ordinances. It fosters love of God and neighbor.

Because of our distinctive ways and beliefs, we can seem odd to outsiders. If one wishes to understand this curious religious movement, however, it helps to remember that all claims that grapple with the contours of reality may seem bizarre when extracted from their context, when superficially understood, or when viewed through the presumptions of another paradigm. This is so of a Buddhist’s sense of recurrent birth, her highest aspiration to “cease to be”; or a Catholic’s commitment to a mysterious Trinity and to a God enfleshed who walked on water, died, and came back to life; or an atheist’s faith in a universe explained as fabulous accident (or, to the contrary, as cosmic inevitability). Unlike the early Christian apologist Tertullian (if we are to construe him literally), I am not a believer because the object of my faith is “impossible,” but because the high claims of the gospel have not dissuaded me from rewarding participation and ongoing probing. In this respect the church parallels the universe itself. As geneticist J.B.S. Haldane observed, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Despite this strangeness, I find myself a grateful participant in this implausible universe. This paradox holds promise, invites inquiry, and requires imagination if we are to navigate our world fruitfully. In the words of Annie Dillard, “our faithlessness is a cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination.” Nature itself abounds in radicalism, extremism, and selective anarchy. Were we to judge nature strictly by our common sense, we could scarcely believe the world exists. “No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.”

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In the midst of the odd, unfathomable, tragic, and wondrous reality in which human beings find themselves, we Saints are “a peculiar people” in both modern and biblical ways. We are, first, people, which means it is not hard to discover among us, individually and corporately, wisdom and nobility as well as errors and foibles. As to foibles, we may all be honorary members of the fictional Chelm First Ward. More gravely, like Job’s friends, Christ’s Pharisees, or Mosiah’s Zoramites, we may sometimes grow too sure of ourselves, our religious paradigms, and our righteousness, thereby displeasing God. Despite our imperfections, however, we are a people trying together to respond to the divine, which we believe calls to us. We are a people composed of persons, and so we are diverse. In any given Sabbath meeting at which I find myself, I am surrounded by those I love and with whom I share much, but who also believe or reject things that I judge differently. So far, though, room has been made for me in the church’s tent. In short, I am—quite happily—an eccentric member of a peculiar people on a strange planet.

The Veil: a Problem and a Tool

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My path of commitment to and belief in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints developed around four basic religious questions I encountered as I grew up. First, is there a living God? Second, was Jesus a teacher worthy to be worshipped? Third, was Joseph Smith a prophet deserving of allegiance? And fourth, is our Latter-day Saint culture meritorious—worth defending and working for?

As these questions may reveal, I believed the intellect to be enormously important—more important than the heart, more important than tradition. If my mind could not confirm the truth of my religion, I felt I would be unsettled and apprehensive. Nevertheless, I felt very comfortable with poetry, music, art, drama, testimony, ritual, ceremony, and other expressions of religious feeling and thought. I was also comfortable with people who contended that religion was a matter of spirit, not mind, and that testimonies could come only through the assurance of the Holy Ghost.

My struggle with the first question began when I was a freshman at the University of Idaho and continued until the third year of graduate school. I acted as a believer, willing to assume there was a loving and powerful Creator. But I was not satisfied until I had studied the matter through and came to a conviction that my intellect could defend. My first satisfying experience was with Lowell Bennion’s What about Religion? This manual, used in the MIA, taught a crucial truth, namely that the restored gospel represents truth and enlightenment, not superstition and ignorance. Scholarship and education are part of the gospel; Mormonism undertakes to foster the discovery and spread of truth; God has commanded that we study and learn and become acquainted with all good books; the glory of God is intelligence; and it is impossible for a man or woman to be saved in ignorance (D&C 90:15, 93:36, 88:118, 131:6). The manual also quoted with approval Brigham Young’s statement in the Journal of Discourses that we accept truth no matter where it comes from, that Mormonism comprises all truth, and that there is an indissoluble relationship between religion and learning (JD 1:334, 11:375, 15:160). These became articles of my religious faith and continue to remain so.

When I went to the University, my roommate, anxious to test my mettle, provoked me into reading Why We Behave Like Human Beings by George A. Dorsey. This widely read treatise by a noted anthropologist and behavioral scientist gave a mechanistic interpretation of the ultimate questions–not intended to inculcate faith in religion. Man was viewed as little more than a complete biophysical machine. I vividly remember one phrase from it, suggesting that thinking was no more than “laryngeal itch.” That stimulated me to read several books on evolution, including On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin.

Dissatisfied with the superficial and uninformed views that were being conveyed in certain publications to which I was referred, I concentrated on the works of philosophers. First, I read The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, which introduced to me the names of the most prominent persons who had pondered the great issues. I then systematically read some of the great thinkers—Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Josiah Royce, and William James. I read some philosophical novels: Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and George Santayana’s The Last Puritan and Reason in Religion. I read the autobiographies of St. Augustine, John Henry Newman, and John Stuart Mill. I read several books that reviewed what the great thinkers had said about God, man, and the universe, and had personal experiences that confirmed their views in an intimate way. By the time I began my third year of graduate work, I had satisfied myself about the existence of God. And my religious experiences in my more mature years have merely served to corroborate what I had then come to believe. While philosophers have not always argued that the existence of God is demonstrable, they have presented arguments that have been persuasive to me. My experience suggests that Francis Bacon was correct when he contended that “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

My conceptions of Jesus emerged when I was still in high school. I must confess that I read the Bible through when I was thirteen but, country boy that I was, I was turned off by the King James Version, which was to me a strange and unfamiliar idiom. When I went to the University, George Tanner, my LDS Institute instructor, gave direction to my search for Jesus as a person, as a leader. He introduced me to new translations of the Bible. These were helpful and I still often use them. At his suggestion I also read Shirley Jackson Case, Jesus: A New Biography; Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus; Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus; and James E. Talmage, Jesus the Christ. I came away persuaded that Jesus was, indeed, a historical figure (some historians had expressed doubt on this point), that the values He taught were superior to anything mankind had ever devised, that Jesus was indeed a divine person, and that His life provided a model worth imitating in meeting today’s difficult problems.

As to Joseph Smith, I hear many assessments that clash with the impressions I have acquired and confirmed in my years of research in the Church Historian’s Office. Unquestionably Joseph had a marvelous intellect and also acute spiritual sensitivity. He honestly sought to resolve the many intellectual, spiritual, social, and personal problems that arose in his lifetime. He was an imaginative thinker and leader. He accepted truth from many sources. And he had good values: people were more important than money, and the law of eternal progression pointed us all in the right direction.

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What about the Prophet’s accounts of his own experiences: the First Vision? the visit of the Angel Moroni to tell him about the golden plates? the return of John the Baptist to confer the Aaronic Priesthood and of Peter, James, and John to confer the Melchizedek? Can one accept all of the miraculous events that surrounded the restoration of the gospel? I was fortunate to have read George Santayana’s Reason in Religion before confronting these historical problems. I do not say that I fully understood it or that I agreed with his basic premise, but the book gave me a concept that has been helpful ever since—that truth may be expressed not only through science and abstract reason, but also through stories, testimonies, and narratives of personal experience; not only through erudite scholarship, but also through poetry, drama, and historical novels. Santayana used the term “myth”—a term well understood in recent religious literature—to refer to the expression of religious and moral truths in symbolic language.

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When I was a young mother living in the San Francisco Bay area, I was asked to teach a sharing time lesson for a stake primary activity. I don't remember the topic, but I vividly remember the inept way I tried to make the point that Jesus loves everyone equally. Looking out at the children, who included both light-skinned descendants of Europeans and darker-skinned descendants of Pacific Islanders, I asked, "Does Jesus love people with brown skin as much as he loves people with white skin?" Perhaps some of the children raised their hands to answer, I don't remember. But I will never forget the slumped shoulders and defeated look of a Pacific Islander boy near the front of the room who bowed his head and said, "No."

I had assumed the only possible answer to that question was "yes." Frantic to do damage control, I spluttered that Jesus did love brown people as much as white, he loved all people equally, skin color didn't matter. I don't know if any of my protestations were enough to reduce the shame I had inflicted on him by asking the question. My heart still breaks every time I remember that day.

That child's lived experience made it possible for him to believe that he was inferior to the white children he worshiped with. The striking difference between his home community—a place blighted by a violent drug trade—and the exclusive surroundings of the ward he attended sent the message that his community was lesser. Unfortunately, he probably got that message at church too, from well-meaning but stumbling people like me, and from primary lessons and songs that characterized all the Indigenous people of the Americas and Pacific Islands as "Lamanites" whose ancestors were wicked and cursed with dark skin. Focusing on and connecting skin color with wickedness is both hurtful to Latter-day Saints of color and, as I will argue below, mistaken.

Discomfort with how differences in skin color were interpreted in the Church has been a life-long concern for me, stemming from my own lived experience. My family participated in the Church's Indian Placement Program from the time I was seven years old. I was anxious for my Diné (Navajo) brothers to feel fully part of our family, ward, and community. I also identified strongly with my own Native American ancestors, Shoshones Sally Exervier Ward and her daughter Adelaide Exervier Brown, who were among the earliest Native converts to the Church. These connections sensitized me to problematic interpretations of skin color and made me feel discomfort on behalf of my brothers and my ancestors whenever I heard skin color or ethnic difference described as a sign of cursing or unrighteousness.

For the same reasons, I pay close attention to how skin color figures in the Book of Mormon. I love the Book of Mormon and have a spiritual witness that it is true. That witness dates from the first time I read it and prayed about it at the age of twelve, and it has been renewed through prayer and study during the dozens of times I have read it since then. While I approach the Book of Mormon as a sacred text, I also approach it through my training as a historian. This involves close reading, considering each writer's perspective and cultural context. My own context also matters. I, as a reader, am influenced by my own time and culture, which affect the assumptions I bring to my reading, what I see, and what I fail to see.

During my years of studying the Book of Mormon, I have come to believe that interpreting dark skin as a curse on wicked Lamanites is tragically mistaken. It confuses the prejudicial attitudes of some people in the Book of Mormon with God's will, and it ignores the revelations from God within the book itself that condemn such prejudice. Because of persistent assumptions and teachings that link dark skin with cursing and wickedness, many people within and outside the Church have felt shame, anger, or confusion surrounding the identity of "Lamanite.” To lessen that pain moving forward and take up President Russell M. Nelson's challenge to "lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice," we need to learn to read the Book of Mormon differently, paying attention to the divergences between the attitudes of the Nephite writers and God's direction to them. The Book of Mormon reveals God's will for how people of different appearances and cultures should treat each other, but it also introduces us to a culture and people that, like our own culture, needed such teaching. Despite and because of the fallible people who appear in the pages of the Book of Mormon, it clearly speaks to the challenge of modern-day racism.

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This essay represents how I have come to reconcile my conviction that the Book of Mormon is sacred scripture providing guidance on today's challenges with my recognition that interpretations of the book commonly used in the Church by lay members, policy makers, writers of manuals, and general leaders have fueled the fire of racial prejudice. I acknowledge the pain many have suffered because of discourses and practices surrounding skin color, even in the church that I love. I deeply regret times when I contribute to that pain. I hope that offering new ways to interpret the Book of Mormon will contribute to our shared effort to heal wounds and "root out racism."

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[Reprinted from the 1986 collection, A Thoughtful Faith.]

At one point in my life, I thought I had become indifferent to matters of the intellect—academic or religious. I had seen too much collecting, collating, cataloguing, and cross-referencing by persons eager to reveal and defend a “new” insight, which as often as not had already been expressed in one form or another hundreds or thousands of years ago. I had seen long years, lives even, spent in “proving” the internal consistency and logic of systems based ultimately on unexamined assumptions. I had seen too much effort spent creating human ideas and cultures, including our own, which became the only reality experienced. I decided it would be better to start baking good chocolate cakes. Knowing the reality and goodness of God would be enough, and for some purposes it was.

But I found that though I can turn off academic game-playing, I cannot turn off lively seeing, analyzing, and questioning, or constructing sense, and making new (for me) metaphors. I cannot divorce thinking from religion, or from human relationships, or, for that matter, from taking a shower or doing the dishes. It is all very well to say that what matters is love, kindness, humility, and knowing God, but the fact is that none of these can be separated from what I think.

Those of us who have profound spiritual experiences continue to live, make decisions, and structure our worlds in part because of what we think about such experiences, not just because of our feelings or faith about them. Moses, Jacob, Isaiah, Nephi, Laman and Lemuel, Peter, Joan of Arc, Gerrard Winstanley, William Blake, Joseph Smith—all these and others who said they talked with God or angels make clear that a divine experience does not transform prophets or other persons into puppets with strings controlled by God: a human being thinks.

When a person with me shows tears, anguish, or confusion, or when I experience these things myself, or when I go out for the morning paper and see Mount Timpanogos all aglow, or for the evening paper and see richness of light on Dry Mountain, how can I pretend indifference to matters of the intellect, as though thinking is irrelevant?

Faith in God’s ways, and commitment to them and to the people of my Church, are in my bones, at the core of who I am. So is knowledge that God is real, and good, and powerful. To abandon this faith, commitment, and knowledge would be to become a different person. To abandon them would be as difficult for me as to abandon thinking. However, the faith, commitment, and knowledge have not been matters of unconscious habit, or absence of seeing, hearing, and change.

As a child in Western Canada in the ‘thirties and ‘forties, I was among friends, neighbors, and schoolmates of diverse origins and religions. I heard from one friend that the Pope was infallible, and from others that God created us and the world out of nothing, that God was three in one and one in three, and when you prayed, He heard without ears and listened to everyone at once but wasn’t a person. None of it seemed reasonable to me (a man who couldn’t make a mistake? three and one at the same time? somebody who was nobody?), but they seemed satisfied. They prayed for help when they needed it, and tried to be good. Some of my schoolmates went to church when it wasn’t Sunday, and some didn’t go at all that I ever heard of, and others sang in Mrs. Cull’s United Church choir all year and went to Bible school in summer but not to church in July because there wasn’t any: it was vacation for everybody. There was more than one way to do things, and it seemed to me that while some choices mattered greatly, others mattered not at all.

Though vulnerable to many other personal hurts, I found no need to be defensive about my religion among friends in the United (Methodist-Presbyterian) Church, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, the Baptist Church, and the synagogue. Many of the people I knew were first generation immigrants, and few had grandparents born in Canada. A flood of displaced persons came from all over Europe after World War II, along with Australians and even an occasional American. I thought hardly anyone was particularly peculiar—or rather, everyone was, including me. I was aware of persons, not groups. Once when I cut through the back alley coming home from a piano lesson, a boy pointed his finger at me and stroked it with a finger of his other hand, calling, “Stinky little Mormon, stinky little Mormon,” his voice rising and falling in singsong melody. I was hardly surprised—after all, it was Denny Burton.

Joseph Smith and Church history were not as important or as real for me then as Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. Till I was grown up, I had little awareness of my own pioneer ancestors: Pioneers and early Church leaders were another kind of creature, not like me. Stories I heard about their unqualified virtue didn’t seem as real as stories about the Council in Heaven, or walking on water, or a little bread and fish fed to five thousand, or Christ’s letting the children come to Him, or the decision of Eve and the struggles of Moses, Abraham, David and Jonathan, and Esther. My faith was in Heavenly Father; Church was where I learned and sang about Him and Jesus, and later the Holy Ghost, and where, as I grew, I saw my parents and other men and women building and worshipping together in His own church because they loved Him, and would give skin, muscle, life savings, and faith to Him. Because of Him they also gave much to each other, teaching rowdy classes, mashing big pots of potatoes, and standing in long lines at receptions.

General authorities, who drove the long road from Salt Lake to Lethbridge Stake Conference several times a year, even in -40 degree blizzards, often ate in our home, and when they stayed with us we’d double-up on bedrooms so they could have one. I stood silently watching a presiding bishop play with my blond, dimpled little sister on his knee, and noticed that he seemed as delighted with her as my parents and everyone else did. When one apostle eating supper with us spilled crumbs on his tie, my sister observed, “You’re as sloppy as I am,” and when he took some berry jam from a crystal dish, my brother politely said, “When I take that much, I have to go without for a week.” My mother blushed; Christ’s apostle smiled. These authorities were fallible men, not infallible popes; not God Himself, but His dedicated servants. With no patina of perfection, they sacrificed, taught, and testified, at times lifting young and old alike in packed meetings, giving us awareness and courage. Whatever the topic, for me the cumulative song of their sermons was a state of being: Eternity, intelligence (the glory of God), joy, love, and height of soul.

Perhaps my physical landscape was important to my context for stake conference sermons. The sky was clear and the stars countless at night. Even now, when I visit that country and the wind blows so I must stand against it to keep my balance, the expanse in all directions invites to the ends of the earth beyond the prairie rim except to the West, where mountains loom a hundred miles away—not a barrier but a more visible invitation to explore and know.

Though our family at times had “home evening,” or whatever it was called in the ‘forties or ‘fifties, I remember little about explicit instruction there or at regular Church classes, and there was no seminary. Far more important than lectures was the implicit framework my parents and teachers had for what they did. My parents didn’t need to tell me about prayer or God, or tell me to give to the Church, or to set goals. These were self-evident parts of a whole. They didn’t need to explain sacrifice and consecration. I saw theirs, and was involved in them. There were of course occasional lectures at home, but I don’t remember systematic “religious” ones. I do remember my father sitting at the opposite end of the table in our small breakfast nook telling me—week after week, year after year—to sit up straight, put my shoulders back, and quit slouching. The fact that he had to keep telling me suggests something about the relative effectiveness of that kind of instruction.

Most important by far to my religious convictions was the quality of a few experiences that were not matters of teaching, authority, social habit, or abstract belief. They were not matters of so-called “faith” or “reason.” They were matters of immediate, absolute reality. I knew about the fabrication of fairy tales and night or day dreams—I could create them all, and make them go as I wanted them to go. I knew that when my cousin, Tom, and I acted out stories, or the novel we were going to write, we were making up what we wanted to think and feel. But I knew my own imagination could not fabricate the astonishing transcendence I experienced when I was alone in the temple for a few minutes before baptism, or sitting on a folding chair far back in the recreation hall at a stake conference in my early teens, or receiving a blessing from David O. McKay, or in my middle teens knowing a few hours of absolute faith and almost immediate healing after long weeks of uncontrollable infection when I discovered the first part of D&C 88 one night while alone in a hospital far from home. I told no one of these experiences, because it seemed to do so would profane them, and because they are beyond the thousands of words I knew then and have learned since, and because there was no need: Anyone who had experienced such things didn’t need to hear about them, and anyone who hadn’t probably couldn’t hear. Besides, I was a private person. I didn’t talk about things most important to me.

Running through all my world, earlier than I can remember, were questions, and the lively searching they provoked—the most exciting kind of learning. The first “religious” (I made no such distinction then) question which I can remember came with a great shock a few weeks after I turned six. For the Dominion Day celebration in July, my parents and some friends arranged to meet in the afternoon for a picnic at Park Lake. My family and two others arrived first. Camp kitchens were filling fast, and we needed a stove for hamburgers and hotdogs. The men stayed at the entrance of the park to meet our other friends, and under a darkening sky the mothers and children walked some distance round the lake to a three-walled rectangular shelter complete with roof, two wooden tables, and a metal-covered cement stove for wood fires. A violent thunderstorm came up, splits and rumbles shaking the universe and us with light, sound, and finally a deluge. Under the sheltering roof we huddled in wonder, till an astonishing clap of brilliance, tingle, shaking, and smell came all together: Lightning down the chimney exploded our stove. Pieces of cement flew into bare arms, children were thrown against walls, purple-brown lines streaked down necks to ankles, and I ran out into rain and tall wet weeds screaming my question: “I thought Heavenly Father would take care of us?” No one was dead or permanently damaged, and my mother came into the rain answering me, “What do you think He did?”

What did I think indeed? Amidst crying children and frightened adults, I thought to myself about the meaning of “take care of us” and I later thought about it again. My fifth-year-thinking about God, myself, and the world hadn’t taken into account complexities I met at six.

I’ve not had a chance since to assume I knew everything or could, though I kept trying. Years later, riding the train one hundred and forty miles home from a visit to the only orthodontist in the province, I saw a line of telephone poles getting smaller till they disappeared across the distant prairie, and that night in bed I thought about following such a line beyond the horizon, then around the earth till I came back to the beginning; or better still, taking such a line out past the stars to the end of space. But in space could there be an end? If there were, how could it be an end unless there were something “outside” it? And if there were nothing outside, nothing would then be something, wouldn’t it? There couldn’t be an end of space as I’d assumed, or, by the same reasoning, of time either. I glimpsed infinity then, without bounds, and in sudden terror looked to my own windowsill for familiar definition of glittering stars and black space beyond me.

Hearing in Church another day that the purpose of earth life is to get a body so we can be parents forever, I thought as I undressed that night that if I had come to get a body so I could have children, so they could get bodies so they could have children, so theirs could and theirs could—on and on in a chain through boundless eternity like paper dolls—then the whole business had no meaning. What was it for? Something was being left out. Then I heard in Church that we are here so God could test us, which suggested contradictions and more questions than it answered no matter how I interpreted it. Something was still being left out. How could my Catholic friend be satisfied with a catechism which supposedly gave her all the questions as well as all the answers?

From the time I started giving two-and-a-half-minute talks in Sunday School, scriptures were like a dictionary—a good reference book when there was a particular word I wanted to use. I’d look up baptism or faith in the index, find a verse, and make a talk around it without ever knowing or wondering who said it to whom, or when, or why. Verses of scripture, or even parts of verses, stood on their own.

The importance of context for a given scripture finally dawned on me one cold winter day when I was home alone practicing the piano and was interrupted by a knock on the door from a Jehovah’s Witness whom I invited in. It was hardly a visit, but rather a matter of two persons thinking in mutually exclusive closed circles. The Witness did most of the talking, among other things proving to me from the Bible that we had no existence before birth. After two non-stop hours, as I finally ushered the earnest Witness out into arctic air, I thought, “One can probably prove almost anything with scripture if one is narrow, closed, and sure enough of being right.” Then I thought, “A verse of scripture is in frameworks—several frameworks, the writer’s and the reader’s,” and with new awareness I went back to the piano and my versions of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Prokofiev, and Pinto—each uniquely, himself, writing music both like and unlike the others.

That probably contributed to my decision to read the Book of Mormon right through instead of just picking verses from it. I’d begun several times, and knew “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents” by heart, but I’d never got past the first few chapters except to get a verse when I needed it. When my older sister came home for a few months and I saw her steadfastly studying the whole book, I decided to do it too. This time I was captured by the reading, which went quickly till I got to the chapters from Isaiah. They seemed to me the ravings of a madman. Why would scripture be so crazy? I put the book down. Later I hurried on to more straightforward chapters, got lost in the wars for a while, and finally finished the book quite unchanged. The good parts confirmed what I already thought, and I ignored Isaiah. You could say I consciously put it on the shelf, but the truth is I simply forgot about it for a while.

I can’t ignore the Book of Isaiah now. None of it seems madness. Much of it exhilarates me, and after many readings, I still discover sudden illumination in an image here and there. But Isaiah also disturbs me. In more than one chapter, the writer(s) of Isaiah affirm human agency and divine justice and love, but in the same chapter give assurance that God manipulates human beings and then punishes or rewards them for the results of His own manipulation. Isaiah makes God a respecter of persons, who will not let His sun shine on both the good and the evil, i.e., Israelites and non-Israelites. Such a God is consistent neither with the Father of whom Christ tells nor with what some other scriptures seem to say. Like some other Old Testament scriptures, the Book of Isaiah seems to affirm some teachings of Christ and contradict others, and the mix causes confusion in some persons’ relationships with God. I have not put the mix on the shelf, because the confusion has mattered much to persons I care about, and also because in context the mix and confusion make sense.

I am fifty now, and know both more and less than I did as a child. Tonight, coming up the stairs, I saw one of my scientific sons getting Snelgrove Canadian Vanilla ice cream out of the freezer. “I saw that,” I teased. “How did you see it?” he answered, calmly putting cinnamon and applesauce on the ice cream. “With my eyes.” “How did they do it?” Thinking of something else, I lost the connection for an instant, wondered who “they” were, and absently replied, “Why don’t you ask them?” “They can’t talk. You tell me.” Remembering what our lighthearted exchange was about, and aware of research studies, quantum mechanics, and some ideas which have been around for hundreds and thousands of years, I said, “Well, that depends. Either some particles or some waves struck either some so-called matter or some so-called energy and…” “Don’t get technical. Just tell me what happened.” “I can’t,” I said.

Sometimes increased information and alternative theoretical approaches make simple accuracy hard to achieve, at least temporarily. But information, experience, and theories that are used as such can also make simplicity and accuracy easier to achieve. It is ignorance and inexperience, not a little knowledge, that make confusion.

A couple of years ago, I answered the phone. After some conversation, the voice at the other end shook and finally broke: “Does God love me? Can God love me?” “Why don’t you try asking Him for yourself?” “I’ve tried. I try and I try, but I don’t get any answer: I wonder if He’s even there, or if He pays attention to me. Can He love me?”

It was not the time to talk about what prayer is, or why there might be no apparent answer. It was not the time to talk about important differences between feeling guilty and being evil. It was not time to say, “Well, let’s just put this on the shelf a while. You don’t have to get all heated up about it.” It was certainly no time to refer to scripture.

Once, it had been profoundly comforting to this person to read

But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. (Isaiah 49:14-16)

But now, after reading in the Doctrine and Covenants about the wrath of God, and then going to Isaiah for comfort but instead chancing on verses about unforgiving divine vengeance, this person found scripture to be the problem, not the solution. Discussion of context would not erase deep despair at that moment, and any ignorant call to repentance for uncommitted sins would make it worse. What was needed was knowledge that God’s love for a struggling human being is real—not just likely, logical, promised, or assumed, but real.

The voice on the phone came again: “Do you know He is real? Do you know He can love me?”

It is one of the few things I absolutely do know. Several years ago, while on a Church writing committee, I was asked to do a lesson on love for all persons. I wasn’t qualified for the task. I myself didn’t love everybody, didn’t know what it felt like—not the all-encompassing, continuous state of being we wanted to teach. For several weeks I focused on learning. I cut out newspaper articles about loving persons and nasty persons and indifferent persons; I skimmed and reread assorted essays, discourses, biographies, autobiographies, short stories, poems, and sections of novels. I watched and listened; I consulted concordances for everything I could find in scripture (in context) on love, charity, other relevant words, and characters I remembered as loving or unloving. The scripture I found most powerful, Moroni 7:48, impelled me to pray with all energy of heart for the love I wanted to teach, and I did so at night and at assorted odd moments during the days. I was full of the search, and knew quite a bit.

One morning I took some clean clothes into my son’s room. It smelled terrible. A search finally revealed the odiferous source: Several of Brett’s dirty socks were in a heap with his cross-country running shoes. That night I reminded him to use the dirty socks basket outside his door by the washer. A few days later, the room stunk again, I found a pile again, I reminded him again, and a few days later again, and then again. Finally frustrated one evening, again, by the powerful air emanating to the hall from his room, I exploded (not my usual style).

In the middle of hot angry generalizations about his intractable laziness, I suddenly saw the great crack between how I’d been studying about love all afternoon and how I was feeling about my son now. What kind of person was I? In the middle of a word, in shame and despair of doing anything right that mattered, I went to my room, shut the door, and went to bed though it was hardly 9:00 P.M.—no toothbrushing, no prayer, no looking or analyzing. I slept deeply and blankly until just before morning, when I learned, to my astonishment, things I had thought I already knew about God, love, and human relationships.

When I was young, I dreaded becoming middle-aged and believing all to be just as I thought it was. When I was older, I had a period of wishing I might believe that anything was just as I thought it to be. One of many tensions in mortality is that between knowing and not knowing. We are likely to forget some things and remember others, to notice some things and ignore others, to assume some things and search for others. In all this mix, it is easy for most of us to trust ourselves too much or too little.

I know a little. I believe much and assume much—as most persons must do about anything. I know God now in ways enhanced by my questions and my experience. Though such knowledge does not solve all questions or smooth all hills and valleys, at the core of my context for current experience is the certainty I have about God and His relationship with us.

From the earliest years I remember, I have wanted a large and reasonable context—logical and internally consistent. I do not want it based only on human assumptions or secondhand reports, important though they be. I do not want my only realities to be those which I and others have created, important though they be. Though it is useful to know that someone says a thing is true, I want to learn whether it is true. I want to know reality beyond my own window sill. I want at least some acquaintance with ultimate, eternal truth—though I see it through a glass darkly till I die.

I need a reasonable context for diversity, suffering, confusion, sacrifice, and love; a context for delight and discovery, questions, and the lively exchanges repeated over and over for thousands of years without universally complete conclusions on everything, except those supposed by persons unwilling or unable to go beyond their own thinking. I need not only a good context of time, place, and circumstance for a given event or idea, but a large and reasonable context for looking at what scripture is, what humans are, who God is, what life is for, and how we do and don’t make sense of things. Such a context is important for understanding not only answers, but also the questions.

From LDS scriptures I draw the basis for such a context. It certainly is not the only view which can be drawn from them, but is a framework which for me is logical, useful, and consistent with my experience with God and my fellow human beings—a framework different in important ways from traditional Christianity and many other religions and philosophies. My understanding is that God and His Son have given and continue to give the help we need to preserve our individual diverse wills and our capacity for both confusion and understanding, costly though that preservation be for us all. Otherwise, how could we continue to exist as individuals, capable of choice and change, capable of learning to deal with realities of personal relationships and natural “law” as He does, capable of rightness and truth without cracks or shadows if that is what we want, capable of knowing Him and ourselves, capable of joy and love, of choosing from all other possibilities to be as He is?

Last month our Sunday School class discussed D&C 132. One man was disturbed by language suggesting that women are property to be given to men, to be owned by them. Another man said that, personally, he puts his wife on a pedestal; in fact, he puts most women on a pedestal. A woman objected to that. A wonderful assortment of heads and faces responded to each comment, and a forest of lively but not hostile hands arose. Men and women talked about God, scripture, and men and women.

After the closing prayer, one man—who didn’t get to speak before the teacher closed the discussion in time for sacrament meeting—said to another: “I don’t know why anyone gets upset about men’s higher position, their power over women. It’s the way things were in the pre-existence, and it’s the way God wants it. Women had just better obey and be happy about it.” He was serious, and so was his neighbor, whose assumptions were different.

The two are friends. Both are committed to the Church and God, and both read scripture. Both have seen how men treat women, and each thinks differently about that and about other things. Each thinks his choices matter.

Who can say that faith and reason are separate categories? Those who have faith think about it. Those who reason, even (or especially) scientists, must begin with ultimate assumptions they cannot incontrovertibly prove, assumptions which they must rely upon with a degree of faith. It is not easy to define such complexities, or to be simple and accurate in expressing all the things important to us. Alive, we move in darkness and light, expressive and inarticulate, inventing and discovering. That makes sense to me, in context.

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A Healthy Aid to Honesty

For a scholar, writing a personal essay can be an act of self-honesty. The whole apparatus associated with scholarly writing—disciplinary jargon, citations and footnotes, stylized hesitance—too often becomes something to hide behind. The fact is that it is easier to pile up mere indications of authority than to actually risk attempting to speak authoritatively. It is in this way that the personal essay can be a healthy aid to honesty for the scholar. At the same time, however, asking scholars to write personal essays might wrongly convince them that their hard-earned knowledge amounts to a kind of wisdom. I am young, but I have certainly already learned that knowledge and wisdom are not the same. Study does not alone produce wisdom—and even knowledge, as Hugh Nibley used to say, is not bought as cheaply as we tend to think.

I am also mindful of the generational distance between me and the authors of essays in the original volume of A Thoughtful Faith, and I feel that distance with more humility than pride. I do not wish to have lived at another time than my own, but I do worry that I hail from a generation far too convinced of its own moral superiority. Young Latter-day Saint scholars can be tempted to believe themselves uniquely prepared to do things never imagined by their intellectual forebears. They (we!) often forget that they (we!) can only do what scholars before them (us!) have made possible. For me, then, this essay is partially an exercise in remembering—in remembering that I have only just started.

In light of all the above, to give structure to my reflections here I have decided to write in dialogue with an essay from the original volume of A Thoughtful Faith. And because I call home the same institution and even the same department that Richard Lloyd Anderson did before me, I have chosen to write in response to him. I present the following pages under a few headings, each a phrase drawn from Professor Anderson’s essay. I mean to amplify moments in his wise words where I hear an echo of my own thoughts. Like he did before me, I find myself with a double commitment due to the academic position I occupy: a need to speak to average Latter-day Saints uninterested in specialized scholarship, and a need to do serious academic work on my faith tradition. I am convinced that such a double address needs to be heard more often—and more loudly.

A Generation without Moral Courage

I am a philosopher, so I will ask a philosopher’s question here. What does it mean to be thoughtful? Or better, What does it mean to think? This question does not come from nowhere but responds directly to the title of this book: A Thoughtful Faith. If we hope to articulate a faith we might call thoughtful, we ought to reflect carefully on what it means to think. We can eliminate cheap interpretations right away. Of course, we use the words “thought” and “thinking” unreflectively most of the time, as if they just named what Louis Althusser called our “spontaneous ideology”—whatever we “happen to think” about things. But I cannot believe that a thoughtful faith is that of someone just interested in expressing a point of view. We are all (symptomatically) interested in talking about our perspectives. There is nothing surprising or special about that. It is therefore wrong to associate thinking solely with the narcissistic pleasure of appreciating and expressing oneself.

So what does it mean to think? I will not lay out a long philosophical argument here, but, simply put, I would insist that thinking concerns itself with questions more than answers—with problems more than solutions.

What I have in mind here is this. It is far more difficult to discover and satisfactorily articulate a genuine question or a real problem than it is to provide possible or likely answers or solutions. Actually, that is probably too weak. It is far more difficult even just to understand a genuine question or a real problem than it is to provide possible or likely answers or solutions. A serious thinker does not read Plato or Aristotle to learn and then to assess their proposed solutions to obvious problems. Rather, a serious thinker reads Plato and Aristotle to riddle out the obscure problems they came to see with astonishing clarity. Similarly, it is an unserious or at least still maturing thinker who reads René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding just to decide which of the two was right about the nature of knowledge. The philosophically mature thinker takes up Descartes and Locke primarily in the hopes of seeing the essential problem of knowledge that the Meditations and the Essay help identify.

A more recent historical example may be more illustrative. I have a soft spot for the work of Sigmund Freud, but I have learned how impolite it can be to bring up Freud or his disciples. It is not that people are offended by the sometimes-lurid nature of Freudian work, nor that people think Freudians have too depraved a view of human beings. Sadly, Freud is too unpopular today even to elicit these kinds of worries. Instead, the objection I hear is usually that psychology and the brain sciences have both basically proved Freud wrong. That is probably fair (though I am neither a psychologist nor a brain scientist). For my part, however, I am uninterested in Freud’s solutions. “Fine,” I want to say, “but what’s most interesting about Freud isn’t his theories; it’s rather the set of problems he identified and articulated. We’re still grappling with those problems, and I’ve found that we often do so with less clarity about those problems than Freud and his associates.”

Perhaps I am wrong about Freud. He may be less interesting than I think he is. And anyway, I might have made the same point with someone else—anyone whose answers and solutions are dated and who is therefore supposedly irrelevant today. For example, these days I hear people talk about Hugh Nibley this way, although I am convinced he is often closer to the real problems than are those who criticize his solutions. At any rate, I hope my point is clear. Thoughtfulness is an attentiveness to things that mutes the urgency of answering and solving because it is satisfied to sit with questions and problems themselves. Let the practical-minded produce answers and solutions (and let us thank them), but thinkers insist on attending to questions and problems. Do we even know what the problems are? Are we even sure we are asking the right questions correctly?

This is what I hear in the phrase “a thoughtful faith.” In my view, a thoughtful faith is not necessarily informed or sophisticated, as we often assume. It is not a faith that is simply critical or hard-won or open-minded. It is, rather, a faith attuned to the fundamental problems that come along with faith—problems that are probably invisible without faith and perhaps invisible even to those with faith. A thoughtful faith is unafraid to postpone the practical work of solving problems so as first to probe the problems themselves.

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The kind of patience required to be thoughtful in this way takes moral courage. I am convinced that this particular form of moral courage has become rare, that it is largely foreign to today’s younger generations in so-called “developed countries” (that is, to my generation and others like it). Perhaps the internet is to blame, or maybe widespread prosperity in certain contexts. Whatever lies behind it, we are too impatient about problems and questions, too eager for solutions and answers. We lack the moral courage needed to be patient. Indeed, as often as not, what we call “questions” today (“I’ve just got a few questions about Church history”) are not actually questions but demands for instant answers. In short, I hail from a generation too often lacking the moral courage to think.

Structural Intricacies

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My conversion to the restored gospel turned on a sacred encounter that has never left me. This same revelation, however, also led me into a church and a canon that has on occasion perplexed me. Sometimes we Saints talk as though we have a monopoly on truth or are uniquely virtuous. In different quarters, God has been portrayed in contradictory ways and God’s church and love cast alternately as constricted or expansive. In working through these thickets over the years, I have grown to view heaven’s love as unbounded. I see my earlier Catholic faith as preparatory and complimentary and intrinsic, rather than as rival, to the restoration. I see God as welcoming all that is good, true, and edifying, no matter its source—just as our founding prophet taught. What follows are key strands along my path to this way of understanding the gospel.

Background

Anne Mary Martin was born in Tipperary in Southern Ireland, to a generationally strong Catholic family. Walter William Bulbeck was born into an Anglican family, whose forebears had resided for generations in Oxford. It is unlikely my father’s family attended church except as a formality at Easter and Christmas. By the time Walter and Anne were married, he was no longer a believer. Their public union occurred at a time when the non-Catholic spouse was required to assure that the children would receive a Catholic education before the nuptials took place. Consequently, my brothers and I were educated in Catholic schools.

My high school years were spent at New Hall, a Catholic boarding school in Essex. Education was rigorous, and I loved my English and language classes in particular. Initially, however, it was not the education that endeared New Hall to me. It was the stables where I could ride every week. Most of my teachers were lay staff, but the school was home to the Community of Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre. Tradition has it that this order has existed since the 4th century, when Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, accompanied Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, in her search for the True Cross. The order eventually settled at New Hall in 1799. The Elizabethan manor was placed conveniently between London and Harwich and was home to a number of royals, including Henry VIII, who had procured the manor in 1517. The wall of the convent chapel still bore his coat of arms, HENRICUS REX OCTAVUS featuring among the inscriptions.

As pupils, the only services we were obliged to attend were Sunday mass and compline, after which the entire school retired to our separate houses. While the canonesses were not renowned for their singing, I was always moved to a peaceful stillness by the repetitive antiphons and responses. No matter how difficult the day had been, I returned to Campion House soul rested. While I frequently attended mass during the week, I particularly loved the Sunday service, perhaps because it was not followed by classes. The hymns and readings nourished my soul and mind and our parish priest, as I recall, always centered his homilies on the themes of a loving, kind, gentle and compassionate God and the beauty of the universe in which he resides.

The great gift of my convent school education was immersion in the sacred and the beautiful: the 16^th century manor house, the creak and smell of ancient wooden floorboards, the evensong of the nuns, the equally ancient library and a curriculum saturated in the works of the most renowned literary minds. Summers I swam in the Indian ocean (my parents lived on Mahé, the largest of the Seychelles Islands). The other eight months I swam in the currents of Western art and literature.

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Conversion and perplexities

During my gap year in Germany I became friends with a young woman with whom I felt comfortable talking about things divine even though she was not Catholic. Intrigued by the similarity of our views on God, I accompanied her to church one Sunday morning at her invitation. As I stepped over an ordinary threshold into an unimpressive room, I experienced something beautiful and powerful. I had not experienced the Spirit in this way before and only on a few occasions since. I paid closer attention to what followed. What I remember from this ineffable conversion experience is fire and light. A few weeks later I rang my parents to share with them that I had decided to change my religious affiliation: I was going to join what we then called “the Mormons.” I anticipated some hesitation, but not the devastation I saw in their response. My father wondered if I had joined the Baader-Meinhof terrorist organization, otherwise known as “die Rote Armee Fraktion.” My mother stuttered, “What about Brigham Young and all those wives?!” I knew of the former, as the Baader-Meinhof group was still active. As for polygamy, even though I was later taught that this practice was the order of heaven, I was surprised that it was not part of the missionary discussions.

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Church has not always been easy for me. As a woman, an indigenous person, and an academic, my mind and my church experience sometimes clash. I worry that things are moving too slowly or in directions that are different than I think they need to move. But I have been buoyed by undeniable experiences of priesthood power, the atonement, the temple and kindness that solidify my testimony.

My great grandparents were Rina Puhipuhi Meihana, daughter of Meihana the paramount chief of Ngāti Kuia, and George Te Oti MacDonald, a descendent of Rangitane ki Wairau.

One of Rina Puhipuhi Meihana and George Te Oti MacDonald’s eleven children was my grandfather George MacDonald, who married Kate Mahinaarangi Dawson. Together they had 16 children. My father Dennis was the youngest and his parents died when he was very young.

My parents married in 1962, and had four daughters; we lived in Blenheim. I am the youngest in my family. My married name is Riwai-Couch, but my maiden name was MacDonald.

When I was four years old my parents separated, and then my sisters left for Church College of New Zealand, attending a Church boarding school in Hamilton. I was left at home to be raised by my dad.

When I was young the missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would call over to our house and my dad would mostly turn them away. On a good day, they might get fed lunch, but dad would not go out of his way to make them feel welcome.

We could not afford to buy new things, but my father was very clever and figured out ways of fixing old stuff, and through his bartering or inventing we had what we needed to get by. Between poverty, negative stereotyping of Māori people and struggling to get by, there were many challenges, including some abuse by an acquaintance. The Church became a safe place for me.

What I didn’t know at the time was that my great grandfather George Te Oti MacDonald had been baptized a member of the LDS Church in 1894 when he was 41. His conversion trickled down through the generations and some of our family lines stayed close to the Church, but most of our family left.

When my dad was a boy, the missionaries used to come to our marae (tribal meeting house) at Wairau Pā and baptize the eight-year-olds in the Wairau River. In 1947 when my dad turned eight years of age, he hid up in a tree when the missionaries came—and he didn’t join the Church until much later when he was an adult. What prompted him at the time was that my mother had left him and he thought maybe being baptized might win her back. My mother had already joined the Church several years earlier after having been taught by the missionaries.

My dad was an exceptionally good man—after all he raised four daughters alone, but at times it felt a little like we were left to fend for ourselves. He would never come into church for Sunday meetings—I would be dropped off in the car park and if I couldn’t find a ride home I would either walk or phone dad to pick me up. I wasn’t baptized until I was 10, simply because no one knew that I hadn’t been baptized already and I had no family with me. I never had family home evenings, scripture reading or seminary. My church experience consisted only of what I chose to do that I could get to unassisted.

At church I attended the children’s primary classes and later youth classes. There I was taught that I was “a daughter of God.” As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we believe in eternal families. We believe that before birth we lived with a loving Father in Heaven and that we chose to come to earth to gain a body and live our mortal lives. We choose to be baptized and to receive the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost. We have the opportunity to be obedient to the commandments of God. We can be kept together in eternal family units by making sacred covenants in Holy Temples. This means that marriage and families do not end at death, families are forever.

This doctrine, as true as it is, felt as far away from my reality as it could be. Despite this, I knew that when I was at Church I felt whole. Deep inside I started to understand that God wanted me to be okay, even though my situation then was not good.

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The scriptures say that with God nothing is impossible, and as a teenager I decided that if anyone needed a miracle it was me.

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God calls us to adventure. I believe that Earth life is not a test to separate the wheat from the tares. It is not a proof in the way that medieval villagers threw a witch into the pond to see if she would float. Not a simple assessment for placement in some grand hierarchy of prisons or resorts. It is an exam, rather, in the sense that we are learning the skills necessary for existence. Faith, hope, charity are attributes necessary to travel into the eternities. We are graced with a chance to set sail with God. We are learning to be shipmates on an adventure that requires certain tackle, knots, and such accoutrements that have been found useful for an eternal voyage into the unknown. I find using the Greek word, techne, useful for framing the characteristic equipment we will need to manage our work travelling through an eternal existence. Existence is motion, nomadic. Nothing is ever set in stone, not even things really set in stone—even protons decay. This techne includes the idea of arête, skill, including some I would like to focus on: curiosity, generating novelty, and creativity. I cannot seem to bring myself to separate faith from these traits, which are necessary to equip us for an adventure that will never end. For example, can we really imagine that love and charity and hope and faith are being so ardently worked on here if it is not to continue their refinement as we journey on with God in the eternities?

One of my earliest memories is of capturing bees foraging on dandelions in a grassy field behind our student housing complex at the University of Utah where my dad was going to school in Social Work. The trace impressions from those days are indistinct, and it is hard to form them into a visual picture that comes readily to mind. But one event stands out as if it were lived yesterday, and I can recapture the delightful attractiveness of the day quite clearly.

The sun is bright and the colors it discloses are not just instances of their usual hues. Rather they carry into my heart and mind an affective mood—a feeling that seems to define the long summers of childhood, when to play and explore was what it meant to exist. I must have been about four or five and my mom and I were in a grassy field behind a long building with blue wood siding. The greenness of the lawn, the light blue of the unsullied sky, and the billowy clouds are more distinct than anything I can recall of those early years. We were capturing bees in mayonnaise jars. I remember how excited I was to actually have one of these little creatures in the jar who moments ago had been visiting bright yellow dandelions. I was holding it in my hands! I put my ear up to its side and could hear the loud buzzing of the tiny prisoner proclaiming its confusion and displeasure. I knew bees could sting, but I had no fear or apprehension about these—just a sense of triumph, delight, and elation.

I suppose that is why, after a lifetime, the event remains so clearly etched in my mind's eye, though the images have become a bit disjointed. I remember the bees in the jar. That I was not alone and that my mother was there guiding and helping me. The colors seem so clear. I'll never forget the grass and the dandelions and their contrasting treasure of emeralds and golds. There seemed to be so much freedom and gladness in watching a bee soar from the jar, its dangling legs laden with pollen under its heavy body, as it made a small slow circle before flying home. Since that time, these images have likely been reconstructed with bits and pieces of other memories, because the ways that memories are laid down and pulled up again are fraught and messy. Still, I’m convinced there is something of the visual essence of the recollection that remains true to the original event. But the mood! The feelings of delight and magic are so clear, so deep, that when I look back on that afternoon, I cannot help but long for such unassuming clarity of purpose and such untainted joy. I hope I get to be an untamed child again. Perhaps, it was in that jar of bees that a scientist was born. Curiosity was midwifed into the world. There were things to discover. The universe was infused with novelty and wonder.

I embrace a theology in which faith is a curiosity-based exploration of existence. A trust that God has graced us with equipment that will enable safe passage across fathomless seas. Ours is not a static existence that follows well-worn deterministic paths of Einstein’s or Augustine’s block universe in which the whole course of existence is laid out—played in a cosmic film reel with fixed action sequences that cannot be changed or influenced by the projectionist from its deterministic order of scenes. I see the universe as one in which novelty emerges into new structures and forms—there is no set film that guides the sequences of adventure. Evolution’s creative flourishing is part of my theology. As is astronomy, literature, geology, and all the ways humans have learned to engage with the manifest universe.

Given that the world demonstrably engenders new forms as it evolves, what does God mean when He says His course is “one eternal round?” Such a course seems to invoke a sense of repetition, as if existence circles back around and repeats endlessly. That doesn’t feel right given what we know about eternal progression. What then could the Lord mean with this statement? The image occurs at many points in scripture: “For he that diligently seeketh shall find; and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them, by the power of the Holy Ghost, as well in these times as in times of old, and as well in times of old as in times to come; wherefore, the course of the Lord is one eternal round” (Nephi 10:19).

Another example:

And it may suffice if I only say they are preserved for a wise purpose, which purpose is known unto God; for he doth counsel in wisdom over all his works, and his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round. (Alma 37:12)

Several things strike me in these passages. The first is that God's course is “one,” and that course is an “eternal round.” In addition his paths are straight. Both “straight” and “round?” Three other verses in the scriptural canon contain the phrase “eternal round”:

For God doth not walk in crooked paths, neither doth he turn to the right hand nor to the left, neither doth he vary from that which he hath said, therefore his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round. (D&C 3:2)

I perceive that it has been made known unto you, by the testimony of his word, that he cannot walk in crooked paths; neither doth he vary from that which he hath said; neither hath he a shadow of turning from the right to the left, or from that which is right to that which is wrong; therefore, his course is one eternal round. (Alma 7:20)

Listen to the voice of the Lord your God, even Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, whose course is one eternal round, the same today as yesterday, and forever. (D&C: 35:1)

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In all of these, it appears that there is something God cannot get out of. Whatever this eternal round is, there are things He cannot escape. The path is set: no left turns, no right turns. The banks are too high to climb out, and He is stuck with the things He has embraced, as in the phrase “I the Lord am bound, when ye do what I say….” (D&C 82: 10). Trapped in existence like a bee in a jar. But that makes no sense—God is creative. Inventive. A being that takes delight in novelty. Right?

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“God loves your critical mind,” I reiterated to the students of my Global Women’s Studies seminar on feminist theology at the end of our semester in 2020. One of my female students had lamented that in her lifelong experience in the church, this integral part of who she was seemed unwelcome. I could relate all too well and wanted to offer affirmation and hope gleaned from an arduous journey of attaining self-acceptance and a deep sense of divine acceptance amid an upbringing in a religious culture that too often devalues and dismisses critical thinking as unfaithful or unimportant. “Critical” is often set in opposition to loving, but I know that my own critical mind and my many questions lead me to love God and others more deeply. If my mind is one of the means by which God has endowed me with the ability to love God above all else (see Matt 22:37), then it stands to reason that God loves my mind, especially when used in a way that ultimately allows me to become more fully devoted to God.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints proclaims itself to be the “only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth” (D&C 1:30), containing a fullness of truth. It also espouses the teachings of the New Testament, which claim that the first and great commandment is to love God above all else and with every part of oneself, and that the second commandment is like unto it, to love others as ourselves (Matt 22:37-40). The gospel teaches us that God’s work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of human individuals—this is the ultimate manifestation of divine love. What we ought to mean, then, when we claim that the church has a special relationship to divine truth is that this religious institution bears distinctive resources to help God’s children learn how to love as God loves.

Practicing Latter-day Saints speak comfortably about becoming like God and enjoying exaltation with those to whom they are eternally connected. Yet we rarely speak in this context of the ways we must struggle to practice the love we want to enjoy eternally. I believe that the difficulties and dissonance with which we must wrestle as both thinking and believing Latter-day Saints can prepare and strengthen us for the struggle of learning to love people vastly different from ourselves (as well as those who are altogether too much like ourselves).

I find that in my own life love breeds curiosity. I want to know the objects of my love, not in the two-dimensional way I know about facts, but in a dynamic, affected, and relational way. My reasons for being—and remaining—a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints present themselves in largely subjective ways. I trust the impressions I receive that come from God. My acute sense of divine presence in my life is more real to me than anything that is tangible in the world. Because I trust that relationship so deeply, I also trust the divine injunction that I have personally received to remain faithful to the restored gospel. This means I strive to continue to love and serve my coreligionists, however surprising and frustrating that injunction can be at times, given aspects of church culture that make it seem easier to walk away and disengage. I am inspired to stay by my own experience of God’s relentless love for creation, which enfolds every individual in a care and affection for her specificity.

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During my formative years, I sensed that divine love would embrace my inquisitive mind, but I struggled in a religious culture that did not appreciate my questions. As a young teenager, I vividly recall sitting in our family minivan parked outside our chapel. My mom and I waited for my father and brother so we could make our annual road trip back to southern Idaho to visit our extended family. I lamented to my mother that I feared I would never be able to make a decision about what we in those days called Mormonism. I wanted it to be true, I told her, and that meant I would never have the requisite objective stance to accurately assess its veracity. Paraphrasing Alma 32, my mother assured me that desire could be beneficial when making decisions about religious faith and knowledge. I felt somewhat reassured at this, but continued to crave something definitive that would allow me to ascertain both the truth and what religious affiliation God willed for me. Despite this struggle, I resolved that I would serve a mission if I was “still Mormon when I turned twenty-one,” as I once proclaimed to a missionary dining with us one Sunday afternoon. This was only logical, I explained: If I believed something was universally true, and if I loved other people, I would want to share that truth with everyone.

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[Reprinted from the 1986 collection, A Thoughtful Faith. The essay has been edited lightly for space considerations.]

A student once came to me for counsel. I had taught him at the Institute of Religion and had served as a member of his bishopric while I was doing graduate work at Stanford. He told me that he had tried on his mission—and with particular intensity during the year since he had returned—to get a spiritual witness of the Book of Mormon. He had read and reread the promise of Moroni and had tried to fulfill the conditions—reading the book, pondering, praying, yearning. But, he told me in tears, he simply had not experienced any response—any knowledge or even spiritual comfort. How, he begged, could I explain this “failure”—or better, how could I help him find success?

I don’t think I was very helpful. I didn’t know then—and don’t now—how to “explain” and thus control the gift of grace or the meanderings of the Spirit, which “bloweth where it listeth.” The operative word in Moroni 10:5 is “may”: “And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.” And that is the word used by Alma in his great chapter (Alma 32) on epistemology, on the process of finding (creating) truth in this lone and dreary world: “Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed…, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold it will begin to swell within your breasts” (Alma 32:28). The processes of knowing and the role of our individual agency are so subtle and intertwined yet so important that neither pride nor despair behooves any of us engaged in this pilgrimage. And I can only be thankful that I did not further burden my young friend with allegations that he had not really fulfilled Moroni’s conditions—or that he must be sinful or at least delinquent in obedience to the gospel if the promise wasn’t being fulfilled. But the years since then have brought experience and perhaps a little wisdom.

My essay’s title contains both my subject and my conclusions: I am convinced, both in theory and from experience, that it is possible to find a truth that matters and a God who is personal, ravishing, and an accessible guide and model. I believe the quest must start in hope—an active desire that this universe is a meaningful and potent one. Such hope includes a yearning for meaningful, individual life after death—and also some willingness to accept the responsibilities that such potential life implies, such as eternal marriage, continual repentance, and preparation to meet God. I’ve learned that knowledge comes in abundance from such questing. However, if the quest is honest, skepticism also comes. All the faith that is possible in this vale of tears lies on the other side of skepticism and is made possible in part by our being energetic and persistent in that skepticism. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man reminds us that “[a] little learning is a dangerous thing”—but so also is a little skepticism. Finally, I believe that there is precious little faith possible for many “intellectuals”—that is, for those who are blessed (and cursed) with the “gift of knowledge.” But faith is precious—above all that is sweet and precious—and it is sufficient for our needs.

It may seem strange that an essay on faith and hope should depend so much on such seemingly weak reeds as skepticism and what I later on shall call“the null hypothesis.” But we shall see that such weak things of human experience can be more reliable and important in certain ways and instances than objectivity and reason—the mighty and strong in the world’s eyes.

Indeed, the increase in skepticism since the Enlightenment and the Renaissance has become dramatic since the Restoration and seems to have undermined religious faith irreversibly, which some see as evidence of Satan’s battle against the Restoration. But, on balance, I believe that this skepticism has been positive. There are of course a great many things toward which we should remain skeptical. Skepticism has undermined false religion and bad faith—all to the good. In fact, it can be read as a necessary part of the Restoration and preparation for the Eschaton, the final great drama. Though skepticism has sometimes destroyed true religion and good faith, when properly understood and used it reinforces the need for both religion and faith. It has, in the hands of faithful thinkers like Pascal, Coleridge, Kierkegaard, Karl Popper, and F. A. Hayek, undermined the excessive faith of many modern thinkers in such previously intimidating giants as Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, and Marx. It also has countered the modern tendency toward naïve faith in science as our savior. Skepticism has successfully refuted reductionism—the pervasive modern idea that all reality is matter and all theory of matter is reducible to physics. Skepticism has helped us rediscover the law of unanticipated consequences—that social experiments often fail, even when launched by moral truth and good intentions, because human nature is more complex than we have assumed. It is therefore dangerous to give great power to anyone on the basis of their claim to special truth or ways of knowing truth. In the perspective I am seeking here, skepticism leads directly back toward the balance of humility and fearlessness of true faith—that very thing that Latter-day Saints understand is among our chief purposes in life to develop.

Let me first establish my perspective from two basic Mormon texts, both from the Book of Mormon. The first gives the most challenging and yet satisfying basis I have been able to find for ontology: a concept of what the universe basically is. The second gives what I have found to be the most convincing and workable epistemology: a concept of how we know anything. In 2 Nephi, chapter 2, Lehi teaches his son that “it must needs be that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11) and goes on to explain that this is not merely a descriptive statement about the divisions and conflicts of human personality and social interaction in history, but a proscriptive assertion about what the universe must be like, not only in order for righteousness and good to be brought to pass but in order for life, sense and sensibility, the earth, God, and even the universe itself to exist. The crucial thing this opposition at the heart of things makes possible is the creative activity and freedom of intelligences, initiated (at least in our sphere of present understanding) by God: “For if [opposition is] not there is no God. And if there is no God, we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away” (2 Nephi 2:13).

This crucial ontological point is reinforced in a revelation that was given to Joseph Smith three years after the Book of Mormon was published: “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence” (D&C 93:30). This scripture bridges ontology and epistemology because it not only suggests that the very existence of the universe depends on the dynamism of opposition and the perplexing, joy-bringing—but also pain- and sin-bringing—creative play of intelligences, including God. The passage also states that “truth,” which we have been tempted to regard as static and permanently fixed, however elusive, is also inseparably connected to the creative activity of intelligences and relative to the sphere of existence where it is pursued. As the Lord told Joseph Smith in that same revelation, “Truth is knowledge of things as they are, as they were, and as they are to come.” And knowledge, as we have learned so well since the Romantic revolution, changes as the knower changes. I believe that the second text I will use, Alma 32, gives us the best help both in understanding how the knower knows and what the process of change is. It also helps move us to engage in the process. Alma puts his finger on the essential dilemma of any epistemology. He points out that in his time, just as in ours, many start with a self-defeating condition before they will risk the search for truth and God: they say, “[i]f thou wilt show unto us a sign from heaven, then we shall know of a surety; then we shall believe” (Alma 32:17). Human beings claim they are perfectly willing to believe, if only someone will provide perfect knowledge—clear, rational argument and evidence—in advance. But Alma knows from experience that such a condition, such prior “knowledge,” is a snare and a delusion, because “if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe”—that is, he will be satisfied with those static, unprogressive, essentially trivial aspects of existence which are available for perfect knowledge, and he will not be moved to change his life to conform to the active knowledge of self and God that comes only through faith. As Alma warns, “How much more cursed is he that knoweth the will of God and doeth it not” (Alma 32:19).

Alma is interested in something much more important than the knowledge available empirically and rationally. He is interested in faith, which he says is “not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen which are true.” In other words, we live in a universe (not of our making, nor ultimately of God’s, but just irrevocably there) in which the most important spiritual realities and meanings are not empirically available to mortals. Some of those realities in fact seem to be merely potentials, yet to be built by beings willing to hope and to proceed without perfect knowledge. Truth is to be found in the process of creating the true realities possible in our universe. God is to be discovered as the being who guides and nurtures that process, but only as we create the beings we may become in that process.

How then are we to proceed in such a strange universe, so unresponsive to our desire for a sign, for perfect clarity and assurance? Alma is extremely fair; he asks the bare minimum required for the process to begin: “Awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith” (Alma 32:27). This is hope being described, a motivating wish that certain things could be true, because he goes on to ask of us, “Even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.”

At this point alarm bells go off for skeptics, especially those aware of “cognitive dissonance” and the numerous ways mortals delude themselves. Such are convinced that any tilt in the experiment, any emotional hang-up, any desire for social approval, even any desire to believe, destroys complete, disinterested neutrality—and thus the reliability of the experiment. They are right about the destruction of neutrality—but not about the value of the experiment: because all experiments unavoidably have at least those limitations, even the ones upon which apparent evidence is based. No human endeavor at all, including science, would be possible without some desire, some chance-taking, some hope and vision, some assumptions—if no more than faith in the reliability of our senses as they perceive and measure things. And there are some good safeguards against these minimal tilts, ones well-proven in science and ones that Alma not only accepts but firmly insists upon. He is perfectly aware that the process he is describing, central to the life of the universe, is a fragile one, much like the growth of a plant—the very metaphor he chooses. The process can be aborted by tilts in either direction: On the one hand the seed, even a “true seed,” a “good seed,” can be cast out by unbelief, by resisting the Spirit of the Lord. On the other hand the seed can be bad, and “if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away” (Alma 32:32). That is, it should be cast away. But clearly Alma understands that some of us, because of cognitive dissonance, or pride, or fear, or some other weakness, may go on harboring bad seeds (whether false doctrine, Mormon mythology, or simply incomplete notions that need to be improved before they are planted and nurtured). And by sometimes not being skeptical enough at this point, we delude ourselves that these bad seeds are growing. Thus we invalidate the experiment and do real damage to ourselves and others.

But Alma realistically views even a successful experiment as only a beginning, though a crucial and rewarding step:

Ye know that the word hath swelled your souls, and ye also know that it hath sprouted up, that your understanding doth begin to be enlightened, and your mind doth begin to expand. O then, is not this real? I say unto you, Yea, because it is light; and whatsoever is light, is good, because it is discernible, therefore ye must know that it is good; and now behold, after ye have tasted this light is your knowledge perfect? Behold I say unto you, Nay; neither must ye lay aside your faith, for ye have only exercised your faith to plant the seed that ye might try the experiment to know if the seed was good… And now behold, if you nourish it with much care it will get root, and grow up, and bring forth fruit. (Alma 32:34-37)

This all strikes me as eminently reasonable and fair and modest, yet it does not shrink from suggesting how difficult and risky the business of learning to know through faith really is.

Though we may be blind and gullible pilgrims in a strange and deadly universe, assaulted on all sides by claims and counter-claims, there is an orderly way to begin to sort things out. We need only have the courage to hope, to desire a living and responsive universe no matter how responsible that makes us—and whatever increasing demands that places on us. If we refuse to begin or to continue the process, the judgment lies not on the universe—despite Albert Camus’ pained and painful arguments—but upon ourselves:

If ye neglect the tree, and take no thought for its nourishment, behold it will not get any root; and when the heat of the sun cometh and scorcheth it, because it hath no root it withers away, and ye pluck it up and cast it out. Now, this is not because the seed was not good, neither is it because the fruit thereof would not be desirable; but it is because your ground is barren, …and thus, if ye will not nourish the word, looking forward with an eye of faith to the fruit thereof, ye can never pluck of the fruit of the tree of life. (Alma 32:39-40)

On the other hand, Alma’s promise, which I have tested many times and found as true as anything I know about, is that

because of your diligence and your faith and your patience with the word in nourishing it, that it may take root in you, behold, by and by ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is most precious, which is sweet above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst. (Alma 32:42)

No wonder that fruit was so desirable to Adam and Eve. I mean that seriously, because I believe that was precisely the fruit they learned to partake of in the Garden, through great effort and moral anguish and courage. Their brave choice to partake of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil began for us all the opportunity to engage in a similar process of growth through faith. It is a process not available in any other way and one that therefore our heavenly Father and Mother, in great sorrow but in great hope, had to send us forth to do—on our own, though with Christ’s necessary and sufficient help.

I know I have not pinned down precisely the only true way for finding God and truth. But it is one way that I, your fellow pilgrim in this lone and dreary world, can bear fervent witness about. It may help to relate some contemporary ideas and experiences to encourage understanding and a willingness to try this approach to the fruit of knowledge. For instance, many modern scientists and philosophers have carefully removed any basis for undue pride or overconfidence in the once touted powers of critical intelligence and the certainties of science. In his essay “On the Uncertainty of Science,” Lewis Thomas argues powerfully for humble attention to our still mysterious but essential human gifts for ambiguity and for language: “The culmination of a liberal-arts education ought to include, among other matters, the news that we do not understand a flea, much less the making of a thought.” Another example is Alston Chase, who presents a striking description of what we have lost since the Renaissance by exalting knowledge over virtue and faith, not only in public and private evil committed by perfectly intelligent beings like the Nazis (who increased through science their power to do evil but not their will to avoid it), but also in educational disarray and general anxiety:

The academic community, by putting scholarly ideals above spiritual and moral ones, has forgotten how to make value judgments, and therefore does not know how to say what ought to be taught… Nuclear bombs, genetic experimentation, industrial pollution, carcinogens in processed foods are all products of our own ingenuity and unlimited desire. In the end our fears remain because we have chosen neither to limit knowledge nor to rein in the human will.... Only in my lifetime have educators abandoned all pretense to limit reason by faith.

But, you may be saying, didn’t you earlier praise desire and knowledge as parts of the process of finding truth? Yes, certainly, but only in the context of Alma’s thorough and balanced treatment of the process of gaining faith. The process begins in a “hope for things which are not seen, which are true.” But where do we get any idea about what Paul called “the substance of things hoped for” so that we can go on to develop (through Alma’s process) some evidence for “things not seen”? Joseph Smith, in his Lectures on Faith, taught that three things are necessary for viable faith—that is, faith unto salvation: the idea that God exists, a correct knowledge of His attributes, and confidence that we are living in harmony with those attributes of integrity, charity, etc. The first two conditions are provided in history and revelation: God has assured us that He will not “leave us comfortless,” and throughout the scriptures He both gives us the evidence and reminds us how important that evidence is to assure us of what Moroni calls, in the preface to the Book of Mormon, “what great things God has done for our fathers.” But though God, through His loving watchfulness over human history, makes available to us all the essential knowledge on which hope and proper desire can be based, we must finally reach out to Christ for the power to repent and put our lives sufficiently in harmony with the divine nature that our hope can be properly directed and our knowledge sufficiently humble. Then, if our skepticism is adequately persistent, we can begin to develop a growing and saving faith.

I remember with continuing pain a conversation I once had with a fine young poet and thoughtful, sensitive husband and father. He and his wife had decided to no longer be involved with the restored gospel, not because it wasn’t true but because they were afraid it was. He had considered the prevailing Mormon rhetoric about the celestial kingdom—apparently a place of organizational charts, high-powered administration, constant progress measured by graphs, assignments, and evaluations and constant cheer of the kind best imagined as a perennial missionary zone conference or an Amway sales force meeting. He had accepted the image as accurate and decided that he wanted no part of such a heaven, because there would obviously be no place for poets. Like Huckleberry Finn, he said, “All right, I’ll go to hell,” because his sound heart would not accept racist values—though he uncritically accepted them as true—of the imperfect society that had conditioned him. But my friend, right as he was to resist a false image of heaven, was wrong; his desire was not Christ-centered enough and his skepticism not persistent enough to help him beyond a community-taught “knowledge” that was flawed and limited, to help him move on to a growing and life-giving faith in the living God of the scriptures and of his own best imaginings—a God who, I believe, is a poet.

Besides the skepticism my friend needed in order to find faith, I mentioned another “weak reed.” The first is “the null hypothesis,” which refers to a process, familiar from algebra and used effectively by Hugh Nibley, by which the corrosive power of skeptical logic can be turned to the service of affirming propositions rather than constantly attacking them. For example, rather than merely pointing to logical and evidential weaknesses or problems in the claim that the Book of Mormon is of divine origin (a very easy thing to do) or trying to prove the claim directly (an impossible thing to do), we can make the “null” or negative hypothesis that the book is not divine, was written by Joseph Smith or some other early nineteenth-century person, and then apply all our skeptical, logical tools scrupulously to that proposition. The result, I believe, is a powerful argument that the null hypothesis is not true and by logical implication the opposite is true—the Book of Mormon is divine. In general, if we would be as rigorously honest and thorough in questioning our negative conclusions as we are our positive ones, we would find God and truth more easily. Skepticism should keep us from accepting inadequate answers and merely wishful hope—but also from accepting inadequate refutations and self-indulgent or cowardly despair. As Pascal taught, the possibility that God exists, the mere chance that he guarantees human immortality and joyful eternal purposes, is so stupendous a possibility that we ought to risk all for it, gamble everything, certainly time and intellectual persistence and “working out our salvation in fear and trembling,” rather than getting lost in some absurdly fair or “objective” game of letting all the negative evidence overbalance the little, but sufficient, positive evidence. If I am marooned on a desert island, absolutely dependent on finding another human being to comfort and perhaps save me, the one little swale where I find a single footprint is more important, more true, than the other hundreds of square miles where I find nothing.

I believe that the struggle to find truth is only really successful when united with the struggle to find God—and that the struggle is worth the pain and setbacks, worth enduring to the end. I believe the evidences God has provided in history and in the scriptures are adequate to show what great things he has done for our ancestors and can do for us if we will persist in the hope that such evidence provides. I believe His grace is sufficient, that He will visit us with assurance and spiritual confirmation from time to time—not as we demand it but as He knows we need it. And I believe the Church of Jesus Christ is the best context on earth in which to carry on the struggle—because it provides ways to know and serve Christ that can direct and discipline our desires and thus help us to hope genuinely in things that are real but not seen. And through the sacrificial service it requires and unconditional love it thus helps us learn, the Church can teach us to persist in humility—not to be consumers of truth but rather servants of truth and to affirm the struggle, becoming as little children; willing, as Joseph Smith the boy was, to ask and let it be given, to knock and let the door open.

Sterling McMurrin, one of the brightest people I’ve known and truly a post-Enlightenment rationalist, once bore his testimony as follows: “I came to the conclusion at a very early age, earlier than I can remember, that you don’t get books from angels and translate them by miracles.” I find that a remarkably unskeptical assertion, one that manifests much greater faith than I am capable of—a faith, that is, in a dogmatic and quite limited view of the world. I am inclined to believe what Shakespeare’s Hamlet reminds us—that there are stranger things than are dreamed of in any of our philosophies. Joseph Smith was in one sense more skeptical than Sterling McMurrin, more willing to question the most basic assumptions and thus to make contact with the most basic, divine realities and learn basic truths about the universe. As we learn more about young Joseph as a practitioner of folk magic, one still in tune with forces and perceptions that had not yet been destroyed by Enlightenment rationalism and thus able later to look back to what he called “the ancient pattern of things,” I hope we will not let our own rationalist limitations shock and disappoint us too much. We may even open up a bit ourselves. After all, it seems to me that the living God of the scriptures (the one whom I desire to love and serve and know) could make Himself known to a boy still capable of seeking treasures in the earth more easily than to someone who is certain you “just don’t get books from angels.”

Finally, let me say something about the role of the Church in our quest for truth. Not too long after that conversation with my young friend at Stanford who was struggling to get some divine confirmation, I heard President David O. McKay give one of his last addresses, one that was a little disturbing to those who thought the process of getting divine manifestations an easy one, especially for potential prophets. He told how he struggled in vain all through his teenage years to get God “to declare to me the truth of his revelation to Joseph Smith.” He prayed, “fervently and sincerely,” in the hills and at home but had to admit constantly, “No spiritual manifestation has come to me.” But he continued to seek truth and to serve others including going on a mission to Britain, mainly because of trust in his parents and the goodness of his own experience in the Church. And finally, during that mission in England, while witnessing some remarkable spiritual outpourings at a conference, including the presence of angels, he realized that “the spiritual manifestation for which I had prayed as a boy in my teens came as a natural sequence to the performance of duty.” I have had many personal confirmations of that prophetic witness. Most of my profound spiritual manifestations that have confirmed and strengthened me in the struggle to discover and create truth and to find God—as well as my most soul-stretching moral challenges and my most precious though painful opportunities to learn how to love—have come “as a natural sequence to the performance of duty” in the Church.

I believe that, together with the scriptures which it plays a major role in preserving and teaching, the Church is one of the major gifts of grace God provides in His promise not to leave us comfortless in a difficult world. It is the most tangible, day-to-day reminder of “what great things the Lord hath done for [our] fathers,” the chief way we “may know the covenants of the Lord, that [we] are not cast off forever.” And according to Moroni, this is precisely the evidence of “how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men” and what we must “ponder” in our hearts in order to be prepared to know the truth of all things through the power of the Holy Ghost (see Moroni 10:3-5).

I know from experience that there are many ways to improve our receptivity to divine confirmation of truth. Pride and despair, seemingly opposite, are similar in their preoccupation with self, their inclination to put immediate success or failure in the quest for truth ahead of sacrificial love or even patience: “He that would save his life shall lose it.” And a persistent inclination to extreme skepticism—or cynicism, whether intrinsic or adopted as a modern fad—can be a problem: “If ye do not cast [the seed] out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord” is one of Alma’s conditions for tasting the fruit of faith. But the essence of my wisdom is simply that one must keep trying, patiently and humbly, and that by far the best place to do that is within the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood created by a covenant community; for all of us who have it available to them, the Church of Jesus Christ is that community. I just don’t buy the objection that church participation is too stressful, too boring or painful or degrading or whatever. I have encountered most of those stresses quite directly and I’m not persuaded the price is too high, especially as I have found that the very problems and stresses that a demanding, authoritarian, but lay church places on us are a good part of its blessing to us in teaching us to love so that we can more ably create truth and find God.

Finally, I just can’t accept the claim of some people (though I certainly feel the pain they reveal) that we must get on with our lives—that if there is no sure answer, fairly soon, to the question of Joseph’s divine calling or the truth of the Book of Mormon claims, then we can’t wait around but must try something quite different. This takes us back to Alma’s condition of desire: What do we want to be true? The claims of the restored gospel, beginning with Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, are simply on the face of it the most intellectually and morally and spiritually exciting available on the earth. If it is true that we are eternal intelligences, gods in embryo who can fulfill our infinite potential only in an ever-ongoing process of perfecting the very best of what we know and find joy in—love, marriage, friendship, service, integrity, learning, pursuing beauty, creating—then it is worth every effort, every sacrifice, to engage in the process sufficiently to find out. Certainly, short of convincing evidence that such a possibility does not exist, we would be foolish to turn our energies to lesser options, especially those, however brave-sounding, that are content to limit our vision and responsibilities to this mortal—that is to say, material and doomed—life. So I encourage us to keep trying, however long and difficult the way.

It seems that all of us must go through some kind of Gethsemane, some version of Abraham’s test when he was asked to give up his beloved son and his most cherished moral beliefs in order to know God. This may be the only way in the universe to be prepared to understand and accept for ourselves what Christ learned in the Atonement—and thus learn to forgive ourselves and others and develop faith unto repentance so we can be redeemed. For some of us that test may come in our challenge to keep trying, to keep planting seeds and nurturing them, without feeling any clearly recognizable swelling motions or spiritual confirmation, but simply enduring in desire and hope until, after long and patient service in love, the joyful taste of the fruit comes “as a natural sequence to the performance of duty.” If my young friend from Stanford were here, this is what I would bear my own witness to—and hope for him.

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Of all the moral virtues, courage holds pride of place in my own pantheon of revered qualities. Having read the historical accounts of Christianity’s first martyrs, I am most moved by the words of the aged Polycarp. Led to execution by immolation, he had merely to renounce his faith in Christ to escape the flames. Eyewitnesses recorded his response: “Eighty-six years have I served him, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?” And so he perished, as did hundreds of others of his era who did not merely profess belief, but enacted their faith at horrific cost. The key to understanding such courage may be reflected in the words of the scholar of early Christianity Marcellino D’Ambrosio: these martyrs, he wrote, “died for a person, not an ideology.”

The young Polycarp had known the aged John the Apostle, but he was born almost four decades after the death of Jesus. It is the more remarkable, therefore—assuming as I do that D’Ambrosio is correct—that one’s connection to Christ, one’s feeling of love and loyalty, could attain to such a pitch of personal intensity, catalyzing such absolute courage and sacrifice. The same may be true of many martyrs through history, and of many among our own community of Saints. I would hope the same is true of myself, but I have not been called upon for such acts of raw bravery and cannot know.

However, in our religious lives as Latter-day Saints, the presence of that institution through which we learn of Christ, and through which we worship Christ, continually threatens to loom larger than Christ himself in our hierarchy of loyalties. Far larger, in any case, than was true in the small, tightly knit associations of Christians of Polycarp’s era, who met in house churches and were presided over only by local pastors within their own orbit. Our relationship to Christ, in other words, is much more profoundly mediated, conditioned, shaped, formed, and contextualized than was the case for Christians of the first few generations. And we need—or at least I need—to constantly consider that institutional presence, and what it means for my discipleship.

I take it as a given that the church is “true and living.” More importantly, it is, ideally, steeped in truth and “life-giving,” in the words of the second-century church father Irenaeus. Yet, it is beyond dispute that its leaders are not infallible, and its members can individually and collectively, in the words of a Book of Mormon prophet, be “a great stumbling block” (Alma 4:10). Still, this particular incarnation of the body of Christ was formed under divine guidance. Through its inspired prophet, the “great story” of humankind’s eternal saga was restored; as were the true (plural and passible) nature of God, the origin and destiny of the human soul, and the durability of what we most cherish: human love, relationships, “sociability.”

In what precise sense, then, is the church living or life-giving, and how to proceed when those epithets no longer ring true in our personal life? My devotion, like Polycarp’s, is to the Christ, “the light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things” (D&C 88:13). My personal faith is in the felt actuality, the literal truth behind those words. And my fidelity to the church resides in my trust that the institution has most fully revealed him, provided me the practical resources to learn to emulate him, and stewards the holy powers that empower me to be eternally “at one” with him—and with those I love. If those three propositions are true, then the negative dimensions of the institution, as of any institution filled by human servants, are in the end beside the point. That does not entirely ameliorate the frustrations, the pain, and the personal costs those temporal realities bring in their turbulent wake.

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Orson Pratt was, to my mind, the most heroic instance of a disciple who could experience the crushing disappointment of watching good men building a stumbling block, and still remain unmoved in his commitment to Christ and to truth. In the more contemporary era, and much more abundantly documented, we have the case of Eugene England as a Saint who wrestled with the conflicts he felt between personal conviction and institutional loyalty. I offer his story not for its moral exemplariness or for the solutions it offers, but for what it might teach us about the perseverance in our church culture of the original dilemma of Eden: how do we face with fortitude and resolution those conflicts we inevitably encounter between competing Goods? And as we Saints continue to work through our own “late to the party” version of a modernist crisis, his prescience about the insistent demands of a historical consciousness in treating our own historical past and institutional formation are especially timely.

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A Foundation

God and ghosts inhabited my childhood. The ghosts came first, running rampant across my parents’ villages in the Philippines. I was born in my father’s village of Tigbauan, where spirits seen and unseen inhabited our fields and homes. Three men dressed in white once followed my father as he walked across rice paddies in the middle of the night. Then the shadow of a big mango tree tracked his steps as he walked home after a temporary shift as a policeman in town. My oldest sister, atop a serisa tree in our cousin’s yard, picking tiny, sweet berries, suddenly felt an ice-cold hand wrap itself around her wrist. We took for granted the reality of things we didn’t understand—hairy growling creatures coming down from the hills and sticking coconut frond spines up the slats of my aunt’s bamboo floor, my uncle running away from a witch disguised as a cat that incessantly bounced up through his grass roof and down through his bamboo floor and back up again, and an angry wild boar jumping on my Chinese uncle-in-law’s breakfast table (after he had killed some animals while hunting), staring him down with a curse, and causing him to die the next day.

When I was two my family left the rice fields for the city, where my life took a decidedly different turn. We built a hut on stilts in the slums on a beach that looked across to my mother’s hulking home island called Guimaras. Along the beach a short distance from our hut stood the walls of a beautiful Catholic school founded in the late 1800s and run by the Daughters of Charity. Every year, young nuns visited the slums, bringing clothes, canned goods, and catechism to poor families like mine. That’s how Sister Elvira Correa, a cherubic-faced nun with a heart to match, came to knock on my hut. After speaking with my mother and older sisters, she determined that we were smart enough to be invited to attend school for free. The nuns ran one of the most exclusive and expensive schools in the city, but had started a “free department” for poor girls, whose studies would be subsidized by the tuition-paying children in the main building across the street. I was five years old.

On the first day of Catholic school, I asked my aunt to accompany me to the registrar’s office. The officer behind the glass window asked me to write my name on a form. My aunt and I looked at each other, realizing we didn’t know how to spell my name. “Astrid” was a Scandinavian name, picked by my mom from a stray magazine that featured Queen Marie-Astrid of Belgium, and gifted to me. We wrote down “A-S-T-R-E-D.”

I soon learned to spell my name correctly. The school—Colegio del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus (College of the Sacred Heart of Jesus)—was my equivalent of the wardrobe that led C.S. Lewis’s kids into Narnia. I entered a magical—if daunting—new world of numbers and letters, classrooms with electric lighting, nail inspections on Monday mornings, uniforms, book-borrowing privileges, and weekly mass and confession. I also learned more about God (less about ghosts) in one of the strictest settings for that kind of learning.

We called our school Sagrado for short. Religion (later renamed as “Christian Living”) was permanently part of the curriculum. A senior nun, known as Mother Superior, ran the institution. Other nuns served alongside lay employees as teachers and administrators. I looked to the nuns as authorized and authoritative servants of God. They floated ethereally along the Spanish-tiled corridors in their perfectly pressed white habits, blue wimples, and black rosary beads dangling on the front of their floor-length skirts. In class, they showed glossy colored pictures that made me stare in endless awe: heaven and hell, the devil with his pitchfork, angels behind a fair-skinned lady listening in rapt attention to a church sermon, a suffering Jesus (with a crown of thorns wrapped around his flaming heart), and an all-powerful, stern God sitting on a throne in heaven. This early religion made me fear God and think of him as a punisher. But the narrative had a mitigating figure: the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was everywhere—in the chapel, in books, on medallions, in calendars, and in all the churches and cathedrals of the city. We prayed to her more than to God the Father. In the rosary, we recited “Our Father” only once for every ten “Hail Marys.” Mary interceded with love and mercy between me and the Father, and between me and Christ. She was understanding and kind. We sang the beautiful “Magnificat,” which told of the angel Gabriel’s appearance to Mary, the revelation that she would become the mother of God, and, because I loved her, that she was my mother, too. My own mother had left my family at that point, her relationship with my father having become too hard to endure. As a result, the phrase in the song that “Mary is my mother, too” meant the world to me.

As a child, I wanted to know good from evil. I wanted to please God and repent of my sins. Every week at mass and in the confessional box, I acknowledged my stumbling and failures, and humbly accepted penance. I prayed many times a day. I obeyed. I wanted to do well on the checklist of faith that the nuns taught me.

One day, I had a brief but life-changing conversation with Sister Susana Palces, the bright, young nun who taught my Christian Living class. We were doing a reflection—just a small group of girls who were 9 or 10 years old—and she looked at me and said, “You know, Astrid, to follow Christ means you need to see God in every person.” That phrase struck my very soul. Up to that point, I had thought of religion as a points system with rewards and punishment. I did things for points, in return for which the punitive God wouldn’t punish me and I would not have to burn in hell. I had also judged others as hapless souls who were doing more poorly than I in the points system. Sister Susana’s counsel made me pause and reflect. Perhaps religion was something else. Perhaps it was less about points for going to mass or confession or saying novenas (long, special prayers) or rosaries or engaging in self-flagellation (which many Filipinos literally enacted each year on Good Friday). Perhaps it was more about whether, in my thoughts, words, and actions, I could truly see God in others and treat them with kindness, respect, and reverence. It seemed like slow, hard, lifetime work.

Sister Susana’s counsel led me to begin trying to see others truly as divine beings. I continued to believe fervently in God. Prayer buoyed and comforted me. When I was remorseful, I felt forgiven. In my poor, perilous, and sometimes frightening neighborhood, I felt angels nearby, witnessing the efforts and suffering of many souls. I turned for solace and kindness to Mary as my mother. My childhood belief in the world of spirits made it easy for me to have faith, the “evidence of things not seen.” But I had evidence, too.

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I was walking to school one day and about to cross an intersection when I distinctly heard a voice, “Unbuckle your shoe.” Sagrado required black shoes and white socks as part of our uniform. I bent down to unbuckle my shoe. At the precise moment I crossed the street—perhaps due to my or the driver’s inattention—a jeepney (one of those elongated jeep contraptions that ferry people everywhere in the Philippines) ran over half my right foot. Because the shoe was unbuckled, I managed to yank my foot out just in time. I arrived in second grade class that day with my heart pounding but my mind calm, knowing that God somehow saw me and wanted me to know it.

Absolute Certainty

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Working late one evening as a doctoral student at the University of Pavia in Italy, I was in the middle of preparing several plates containing DNA samples from individuals carrying maternally-inherited genetic profiles specific to Native American ancestry. During that time, I was well aware that no one had at their disposal as much data and DNA samples as I had to address questions pertaining to the origins, dispersal, and expansion routes of indigenous groups of America’s double continent. These samples resulted from several collaborative efforts with institutions and universities in diverse parts of Central and South America, and from volunteer submissions from the general population of the United States and Canada. As often happened in those days, I was the only one in the lab at that late hour, alone with my thoughts. Although my research objectives as part of Professor Antonio Torroni’s scientific team had nothing to do with religious matters, I could not help but reflect about the genetic origins of these people and the controversy surrounding the narrative found in the Book of Mormon. Because of the nature of my doctoral work, my employment with the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, and my membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I had been approached several times with questions and high expectations that such research could shed some light on whether “Lamanite DNA” could be detected, settling once and for all the question of an Israelite origin of the people of the Book of Mormon. For some reason, although I was interested in providing some science-based answers to such queries, I was not troubled by them. My understanding of the principles governing population studies based on genetic evidence had deepened and expanded, and it was clear in my mind that the answers to Book of Mormon people's origin questions were not to be found in the DNA samples in my hands.

That experience was one of many that helped me sort through a number of issues pertaining to the apparent conflict between faith and science-based matters. Things that I have learned, studied, and researched, and things that I do not have an answer for, including occasional personal struggles, doubts, or confusion, have gradually and steadily faded into the background in the face of my relationship with the Divine. Yes, I, like many others, have experienced faith challenges and times of loneliness and loss. During those moments, I learned to stop what I was doing, sit back, and ponder whether my heart and mind were set on what really mattered, and whether my faith was rooted where it was supposed to be. Years later, I found great similarity between how I occasionally felt and the words of Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge given at a 2019 BYU devotional. Elder Corbridge taught the importance of focusing on a set of “fundamental questions” rather than running in circles over the “marginal questions.” From personal experience, I can attest that this pattern has worked for me. Elder Corbridge summarizes the primary questions as follows:

1. Is there a God and is He our Father in Heaven?

2. Is Jesus Christ the Son of God and the Savior of the world?

3. Was Joseph Smith a prophet?

4. Is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the kingdom of God on the earth?

Working on the most important questions first requires diligence, humility, faith, and patience. In a recent conversation with a friend from another faith, I felt impressed to share my sense that sometimes a lack of knowledge on a specific matter, including the nature of the Godhead, is an act of mercy from a loving Father in Heaven so that we can be accountable for our actions based on our knowledge. “To want more from Him means to do more for Him and in doing more for Him, we become more like Him,” were my words to my good friend. I am therefore persuaded that an open and willing heart and mind will eventually be filled with God’s light. I also believe that what we currently acquire as knowledge in this mortal journey is very, very little when compared to the wealth of divine knowledge He is waiting to share with us. Coming to an understanding that everything in life has a purpose and that our Heavenly Parents really care about us and want the very best for us is the most important element to a peaceful and meaningful experience on this earth.

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In my adult life, as I have continually worked on becoming a better scientist and a more committed disciple of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I have had a number of experiences that required a recentering on the fundamental questions, as outlined by Elder Corbridge. One of them happened in 2002, when I was a young and inexperienced researcher at the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Salt Lake City, Utah. Under the mentorship of molecular biologist Scott R. Woodward, I began working on the reconstruction of Joseph Smith Jr.'s genetic profile. That project was an early experiment, or template, for what was quickly becoming a worldwide interest in combining family history with DNA information. During that process, I was contacted by a descendant of early apostle Parley P. Pratt, asking if I could use the knowledge on the Smith family’s DNA to address questions related to Joseph Smith’s polygamy and alleged children born to women other than Joseph’s first wife, Emma. I was somewhat familiar with the practice of plural marriage in early church history, but I had never spent much time learning about it. The man who reached out to me explained that there were records in his family history supporting the possibility that one of Parley’s sons, Moroni Pratt, was actually the biological son of Joseph Smith.

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Introduction: Kate Rebukes Me

We were driving home from Pilates in a frigid April rain, too late in the spring to be so cold. My fingertips ached a little as they curved over the steering wheel toward the windshield. The heater in my car wasn’t working because thieves (“meth heads” in the bitter story I told myself) had tried to steal my car stereo, and the local garage didn’t replace the instrument panel correctly. I hadn’t joined my wife, Kate, at Pilates this week because I’d just lost a cracked second molar to an oral surgeon. I was biting down, a little too hard, on salt-wet gauze, trying to persuade the socket where the molar once stood to stop oozing blood. It wasn’t my finest moment as Kate’s companion and occasional chauffeur.

I’d been listening to the 2016 Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology during the prior week’s commute. The lecturer was an atheist cosmologist, Sean Carroll, a politer alternative to the more famous Richard Dawkins. After a lively introduction to particle physics and quantum field theory, Carroll was making his way through the philosophical problems that come after the theories of physics. He’s a confident and polished speaker. He was entertaining if a bit smug, and his early lectures flowed well. Then came the hard problems that have always been the Achilles heel for atheism: how do we explain consciousness, morality, and meaning? After much fanfare, foreshadowing, and throat clearing, Carroll’s solution to the big issues was to sidestep them. “Meh,” he seemed to say. They’re illusions. Get over it. Go be true to yourselves, whatever that might mean in a giant ball of quantum fields, and enjoy what time you have left with your illusions of love and consciousness.

I’d been hoping he would have something to say about the big problems of existence. I like to learn and was looking forward to new arguments. I found myself disappointed, even irritated. I meant him no harm, but I wanted to yell at my smartphone that there was nothing new in his pontifications. He had no more defended atheist naturalism as an overarching philosophy than he had bent a spoon with his mind. His account of empirical observations about particle physics seemed valid, but his defenses of his life’s moral compass were sophomoric.

As my wife and I chatted our way home, I complained about how stupid Carroll had been and how frustrated I was with the quality of his intellectual engagement with God and religion. Maybe, I suggested to her, I should write something about how dumb modern atheism is, using these obtuse lectures as the outline. The piss and vinegar in my brain leaked into my words.

“Maybe you should pray to love him,” Kate said.

My tooth socket buzzed with its loss and my embarrassment. I closed my mouth and drove into the rain, cursing under my breath. Sometimes I hate it when she’s right.

The Call of Atheism

I stare, sympathetically, at atheism from time to time. Maybe it’s because atheism is cool right now. That’s as may be. But I also remember its charms for me as a boy. I recall some of the emotional pleasure it brought, especially the sense of power that comes with incredulity. I enjoyed defying tradition. I liked how tidy atheism felt, like a bedtime story in a board book of bright reds and deep blues. Goodnight, Moon. God is dead. Don’t be naïve.

Atheism has been on my mind again of late. I suspect I’m thinking about it more these days because some people I love tell me that they are, more or less, atheists now. Whereas I’m religious and have been for thirty years. Why are they doing the same thing that I got so wrong as a child? I tell myself that the main thing that irritates me about atheism is that it is so obviously wrong. But I’m being simplistic. There’s more to it than that.

I wonder sometimes whether modern atheism affects me the way it does because I’m not naturally good at a life of faith. Belief is not my equilibrium—unbelief is where entropy pushes me. For a long time, I cherished being an unbeliever. Atheism is in my nature. Like many another feral impulse or appetite, this one happens to be misplaced, but that doesn’t change the basic reality. I know that for me life in God takes work, commitment, and resistance.

My affection for atheism is an emotional attachment. I know intuitively that what’s marketed as atheism isn’t rational in any non-circular sense. I get that it requires a kind of willful blindness. But I know how tempting it is anyway. So sometimes I suspect that when I hold atheism in my hands again, I’m like a sober alcoholic remembering the touch of single malt whisky on my throat as I pass by a liquor store. Or the adulterous man who can’t stop ogling a distant celebrity. I know the beauty and power of life in God but can never shake entirely the giddy stupor of my teenaged atheism.

There’s also an aspect of not wanting to feel embarrassed. I worry that religion makes us seem stupid or antiquated. I watch the responses to modernism from within fundamentalist Christianity and often cringe. I’m arrogant. I don’t want to look like a hillbilly. There’s enough of that in my socioeconomic background. I’ve spent adulthood fleeing from the painful humility of being too poor to fit in. I’m weary of a nagging sense of shame about religious belief.

Maybe that’s why I’m spoiling for a fight. I feel like the atheist entertainers like Dawkins and Carroll are peddling delusions in the hopes of persuading people to abandon the communities and modes of being that matter most—those grounded in the love of God. In place of God they sell a smug and stuporous modernism. And I know how persuasive those false stories can sound to people like me. I know how easy it is to become embarrassed by religious belief. It’s this beautiful thing, and people are throwing rocks at it because they pretend it is ugly. So maybe I also feel like I’m witnessing an injustice—to borrow the convoluted metaphor of postmodern argument, the atheist entertainers are “gaslighting” people, some of them my close friends.

The rhetorical problem: I love to fight

So why do I keep fighting in my head with the atheist entertainers? Why is there hatred rather than love in my heart? I like to argue. The fight has been in my heart since the beginning. The main thing I did in high school besides skipping classes and antagonizing authority figures was debate, the flavor we called “policy” or “cross-ex.” By the end of my senior year, half of my classes were directly supervised by our ever-indulgent debate coach. (I’d persuaded other teachers that it was in their best interest to not require me to stay physically in their classes.) I loved debate, and I was good at it. We spoke fast, twisted our words, and bush-whacked through logical arguments. At one point in my debating career, I wondered whether I should be a trial lawyer.

When I was an adolescent atheist, my love of argument aimed its sights on religious folk. I knew and loved the anti-Mormon and anti-Christian arguments. I felt strong and wise.

I still cherish a good argument. That much will never change. I think I feel about arguments the way culinary sophisticates feel about wine. I love them viscerally, delight in their strange terroir and the pleasant buzz that comes after.

But there’s something else going on. It doesn’t feel like a fair fight right now because the format of current debates about theism creates a handicap for people of faith. The atheist entertainers get to use the crass caricatures, the breezy dismissals, the crude jokes, and the curse words. Their polemical writings are often exuberantly fun. This bombast is part of their charm. And we religious folk are supposed to be quietly respectful, to avoid vulgarity and cruel indifference. We’re supposed to model true piety, to turn our cheeks to the mugger.

But I’m not good at being polite and respectful. I want to fight fire with fire. I’ve been planning a diatribe against modern atheism for years. I’d fill it with curse words, rude jokes, and caricatures. I’d make atheism laughable. I would, in a word, turn the invective back on religion’s critics. It would be awesome.

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Until Kate rebuked me in the car, I think I’d believed that we religious intellectuals have given too much ground to our critics through polite restraint. We’re too prim for the real contests. There are exceptions—some religious thinkers do love to shout. But by and large we have been uncomfortable descending into the Colosseum in all its naked gore. Why shouldn’t a religious scholar use words that rhyme with spit and duck in a full-throated counter-assault in the war of words? Seriously. Why not? For years it seemed to me that such restraint was mere Victorian prudery.

But it has come to me after Kate’s correction that what we religious have to offer is not a simplistic argument or petulant turn of phrase. The reason the life of faith matters is not some high school debate trophy. God is about life, presence, and experience. Divine love is what’s at stake. And that love is inaccessible by way of rage or hatred. I’ve had to come to terms with that fact: however addicted I am to debate, the life of God does not come through animosity. It’s like trying to grow tomatoes in a beaker of sulfuric acid instead of a pot of soil.

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When you are in the wide world

Hans Christian Andersen is a famous Danish writer of beloved fairy tales, such as the ugly duckling and the princess and the pea. As a native of Denmark, I grew up with his fairy tales and poetry as a staple of my cultural and literary diet. It was while I was in Italy studying toward my PhD that I came across one of his poems that resonated deeply with me, titled “Er du I Verden vide” (“When you are in the wide World”). Andersen wrote this poem when walking alone in the mountains near Setubal in Portugal in 1866. The first stanza reads,

“Er du I Verden vide”

Er Du I Verden vide,

Du er dog Hjemmet nær,

Gud aander ved din Side

I Luft og Blomst og Træer;

Du høre kan hans Stemme

I Dig og rundtenom,

Og føle du er hjemme

Hvor Du i Verden kom!

”When You Are in the Wide World”

When you are in the wide world,

You are yet close to home,

God breathes by your side

In Air and Flower and Tree;

You can hear his voice

In you and all around,

And feel that you are home

Where in the world you’ve come!

In many ways this poem encapsulates some of the key tenets of my belief in God. Regardless of where in the world I might find myself and the state-lines that humankind has drawn on its maps, this beautiful world was created for us as our home during this mortal journey. And wherever I may be both physically and spiritually on this journey, God breathes by my side and I hear his voice.

I grew up feeling that I was indeed in the wide world. From the age of one I was an immigrant, moving from Denmark to England to Ireland, back to Denmark and then back to England again. While living in Denmark as a teenager, I had the dubious honour of attending a school that Hans Christian Andersen himself had attended, which he apparently hated. I was often not fond of it myself, as it was here I was made to feel that because I had lived elsewhere, suddenly I wasn’t Danish enough. I found myself constantly having to justify my own heritage. It pained me to feel that something so core to most people’s identity as their nationality was in some sense taken from me.

Something my father said eventually changed the way I viewed my cultural identity. Perhaps because his own mother was a German emigrant and he too had grown up juggling his Danish and German heritage, he concluded over time that, while he thought of himself as a Dane and more broadly as a European, the most important identity to him was that he was a Latter-day Saint. This made me reflect on how I myself rooted my identity in my relationship to my religion and my God. It would also lead to my studying history, in particular where migration, religion, and gender overlap.

As I started university in England, I grew interested in how migrants historically constructed, enacted, and negotiated their cultural identity. I began to be more aware of the role that culture plays in our daily lives. I discerned that many truths or norms we hold as essential are instead rooted in our cultural upbringing. For example, as a child in Denmark I had a teacher tell me that eating rye bread was the only way I’d grow up healthy and strong. Not until much later did I see that, while there may be health benefits to rye bread, this commitment was rooted not in some eternal, universal principle, but in a Scandinavian dietary habit. Few of the children I grew up with in England ever ate rye bread; despite that, I’m confident most of them grew up quite healthy. Similarly, in Denmark the norm is to cycle to work, to school, to the beach, to most everywhere. My mother still tells me it gives her a sense of satisfaction every time she sends us off somewhere on a bicycle. However, in England when my brother cycled to school as a child, complete strangers called the school to complain about it, as a child cycling to school on his own was construed as parental negligence. In England walking is the cultural staple. People love to walk, and ancient footpaths that people have trod for centuries are protected so one may walk across them freely, even if they happen to cut straight across a farmer’s field. The more I saw these contrasts in different places I lived, the more I began to question most practices and beliefs, curious to know which were a universal part of the human experience and which were embedded in mere cultural norms.

Naturally, I later began to apply this orientation to my religion. Some things seemed obvious. In Europe, drinking root beer is the Mormon thing to do. (Here I use the term “Mormon” purposefully in a cultural sense separate from the teachings and religious life of the Church of Jesus Christ). However, root beer isn’t commonly sold in Europe. We could get imported root beer only at one of the few Latter-day Saint bookstores that existed in Europe. Even today one only finds root beer in specialty international food stores. Not until I was an adult did I realize that, to Americans, root beer was just another kind of soda. It wasn’t anything especially ‘Mormon.’ But to me growing up in Europe it had been a special treat, the “Mormon Beer.” It is part of a European Mormon culture, influenced by its American roots.

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But there are other things in our religion that are less obviously cultural rather than universal eternal truths. Just as root beer became associated with Mormon culture, many other practices and ideas also cling to the faith because the history of the gospel's restoration took place in North America, and church headquarters is in Utah. This affects, for example, what we deem appropriate clothes to wear to church on the Sabbath. I have known Bishops who insisted only those wearing a white shirt and tie could bless the sacrament, thereby excluding African immigrant members who came in their own beautiful ethnic costumes. While I believe in keeping the Sabbath day holy, and in reverence for the Sacrament, this exclusion is rooted in Western culture of what“Sunday best” looks like. Another example is the way in which the United States Constitution is held in reverence in the church. I understand that this is rooted in a passage in the Doctrine and Covenants and diverse comments by General Authorities of the Church, and I won’t dispute that the writers of the Constitution were at times inspired by God. However, I will assert that this is not equally true of many of the constitutions of other nations. For example, the Danish Constitution in June 1849 granted Danes religious freedom, only months before Latter-day Saint missionaries arrived in Denmark in 1850. One of these early missionaries, Erastus Snow, wrote in his journal, “Thus we saw that the Lord had been preparing the way before us in a manner that we knew not of.” I believe that the Danish Constitution was inspired by God, but it was only ever the inspired U.S. constitution of which I was taught in seminary and Sunday school lessons growing up. These often unintentional “Americanisms” can leave those of us who reside outside the United States feeling alienated. That can present a bigger problem for some than for others, but given that an increasing majority of members live outside the U.S., it is a problem for the church as a whole.

Gender is another area in which we often confuse culture and doctrine.

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[Reprinted from the 1986 collection, A Thoughtful Faith.]

It was the 24^th of July, hot and blue just as it should be in Utah. On the program for sacrament meeting in the Third Ward were a scout, a Merrie Miss, a fifteen-year-old teacher, a seventy-eight-year-old high priest, and an eighty-nine-year-old matriarch, all telling stories about their pioneer forebears. They were prepared, personal, touching. Each brought warmth, faith, information, even humor to the pulpit as the congregation radiated acceptance like hummingbirds at a feeder.

The bishop beamed; the song leader had us singing “Utah We Love Thee” and “Come, Come Ye Saints” at the top of our collectives; the sacrament had come and gone like a good dream in spite of one prayer’s having to be repeated twice because the newly ordained nerves of the priest kept mixing partake and sanctify. Sitting in that red-carpeted chapel among the twenty-five-years-familiar dear faces and constantly changing backs of heads, I belonged as surely as my pioneers belonged to their wagon circles on the prairie or conferences on folding chairs in the half-finished Tabernacle on Temple Square. My head spun with being at home, and my spirit went shimmering off like the sun on Great Salt Lake to meet my mother and father, grandmas and grandpas who I knew were singing along with me on a blue sky 24^th. It was my church, my culture, an intimate province that held and fed me among my people then and now. I absolutely loved it. And through it, the gospel.

But then the contradictions.

In the week since, a friend has been inconsiderately released from a responsible administrative position she occupied with candor and courage, not knowing of the change until her perhaps milder successor was announced. While a brother I know has escaped a coronary bypass through prayer, a young friend who talked in profound confidence to her home teacher about an indiscretion has been excommunicated. In the past several weeks I’ve seen the Church mobilize generosity and stem a flood to win the amazement of the world, and at the same time be editorially petty about what an under-researched newspaper article in a neighboring state said about a “Zion curtain.” I’ve listened to a lesson on compassionate service, but I’ve also heard of lessons on what not to read, seen the expulsion of a questing paper from the BYU campus and the investigation of writers for sister publications to the Exponent, and heard of machinations for positions that I in younger days might have expected to be filled by inspiration.

I’ve seen one missionary go out and come home under a mission president who built him, helped him master his diffidence, who gave him faith in himself and his relationship to Jesus Christ; I’ve seen another come home from another mission and another mission president, her self-worth bludgeoned by guilt and debasement for failing to find converts in a mission now closed for want of success.

Perhaps most unnerving of all, I see people afraid of the Church that I grew up regarding as refuge and sustenance, purveyor of truth and love. Who has not observed the historian afraid to write history, the young mother afraid to turn down a call, the parents panicked, expectations smashed for a son who doesn’t want a mission. And all the time believers afraid to confront unbelief even as they search for believing.

Everywhere, every week, I see the good and the far from good influences and eventualities of life in the Church, my church. There have to be ways to come to grips with the contradictions, to have enough belief in the good to counteract distress at the bad. Maybe my willingness and ableness to handle the contradictions could be seen as a lot like the fear and faith I take to the big swing at our cabin.

The swing is up a gully and then up a steep dusty mountainside. You get on the single thick rope from a platform hammered to a rough pine, grab a knot straight out from your arms, see that the seat—a shiny skinned three-inch round of mountain mahogany—is pulled tight between your legs, shove up on your toes, and take off.

No matter if it’s your first or two-hundredth time, your heart will tattoo your ribs and your mouth go dry as you drop and then swoop up over forty feet to look back—if you dare open your eyes—to the platform somewhere over there on the mountain you just left between two ancient spruces aching and swaying to hold your flight. It’s a “beaut” of a swing, one we built as kids more than forty years ago.

The swing was always central to our parties from the time we were twelve until we had our own children daring their friends to try it. And still I get up there and take off with an assurance of terror that makes even my past half-a-hundred-year-old lungs need to “wa-hoo” on that first plunge, as my legs kick me out and about for a heady landing three swings later on the bank grown steep and treacherous under the canyon boots of three generations of thrill seekers. I know I’ll make it. I’ve never failed. Oh, sometimes I’ve missed my footing as I’ve tried to land and had to hang and dangle out and back for another try, sometimes even to have somebody grab and hold till I could get off. But I’ve always made it. It’s something I can count on.

In like fashion in the Church, I’ve often gone off swinging onto new skies, examining, cheering, chafing, opposing, espousing, hoping for change, loving sometimes unequivocally a status quo. Most of all wanting urgently to continue—nay, grow—in my believing. I’ve found plenty to believe in—like the inspiration behind that program Sunday. But I go less often now up that gully and onto the swing. It seems OK simply to know it’s there, that others are whooping on it, and that anytime I want to, I can go for it and be sure of both flying and finding a landing. I’ve learned that maturity can help positively only what I have control over, and more and more I gravitate to what little I can control—mostly in private spheres.

Maybe that’s what’s happened with other enterprises that used to compel and challenge me. Like getting up on one water ski. Or thinking it was possible to rewrite lesson manuals for the Beehives, MIA Maids, and Laurels with a General Board committee who thought with me that we could make them last even through Correlation for at least a decade. Or trying either to make sense of or changes in traditions that suppose credibility in the Church only for the playing of established roles, or the signing of class rolls, or the delivery of hot rolls around the block. I just quit needing to do all of it, maybe because I already knew I could and needed to move on. Or, more likely, because the ground for landing after even the most expectant foray can so often slide and break if not my spirit, very often my heart. Too often I sense a closing down of options of where to land, a suspicion of diversity and more often than not a landing in Leviticus rules and brimstone where John might offer spirit and hope.

Sometimes I find myself with a new gnawing fear of what power or insistence on conformity can unleash—and it’s a far cry from the “wahoo” of taking off on the swing, the challenge of a new idea or way of going. So I simply choose not to swing so much anymore.

This is a good time of life. Mostly I am on solid but private ground, ground cut out and smoothed and made comfortable by my own landings or the landings of others willing to share their space with me. It is a place of believing, of letting in, and of being grounded in solid essentials. All intimately mine, all supplied by years of selecting and becoming comfortable with where I have come to flourish.

The arrival? When is there such a thing as arrival in believing? Nothing was ever more dynamic. But where I am now feels good. Full of believing—in the gospel of Jesus Christ and, if not in busyness in the Church, then in the support and camaraderie of those I love and in being about our Father’s business as well as our own.

Of course I have often over the years pleaded, “I believe. Help thou mine unbelief!” But the unbelief has given way to—or been discarded in—the gradual and not always easy comings of belief. Time and inclination finally preclude my dealing with supposition or speculation—or even caring about what I don’t know and have yet to encounter. There is little enough time for dealing with what is here and now, for trying to find out how to be human before I worry about how to be divine. But time is short. I’m about to turn the age my father was when he died—fifty-nine. It feels young, but now I’m the matriarch propounding by my life as he did for his following.

My mother and father talked little in a formal sense about what they believed. I never remember either bearing a traditional testimony. Their lives were their message: They were fair and kind and full of humor. And never condemning. More, what they chose seemed to make them happy and replete with possibilities—as they expected their children to be. They never set us up for rebellion by removing our options. Swings were there to be conceived, built, and swung on. Each of the four of us remembers going with their sanction to our own ways in the Church, attending and not attending and staying together as we came back to the same landings—non-conformists in our conformity.

I’d like very much for it to work in such a fashion for our five daughters, each of them as different as her coloring, as “active” as her convictions and sense of well-being.

Now in the Sabbath of my days, I claim more than ever the right to selective recall, endurance, ecstasy, expectation. “My” church is actually mine—a combination of “Abide With Me,” “…that His Spirit may be with you…,” and hugging in the foyer. I love teaching an institute class and learning more from my co-instructor and students than I ever teach. I watch “the word” in action up and down my block and among good people everywhere, LDS and not, all living what more and more makes ultimate sense in this passage from the Book of Mormon:

And because of your diligence and your faith and your patience with the word in nourishing it, that it may take root in you, behold by and by ye shall pluck the fruit thereof, which is sweet above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea, and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst. (Alma 32:42)

What has been there for me to pluck seems most precious. But my feasting and not hungering or thirsting has taken different shapes over the years. It’s been a long time since I’ve signed a roll or read a manual for the classes I attend or felt uneasy about missing Sunday School to visit my friend Margaret, 89, or to be home for house calls from my brothers, one at a time, between their comings and goings. Like one of my mentors of years ago, I’m reading less and thinking more. I’m loving my children as adults, finding from them and their husbands new ways to see. My husband and I with our different approaches have broadened each other and learned together that to praise one thing is not to condemn another. In our now almost empty nest, we’re realizing that constructive togetherness can mean sometimes prickly, often comfortable accommodation to difference.

In that accommodation I’m getting as addicted to solitude as I am to gatherings of kindred spirits, related or un-, the dozens gradually giving away to the one-to-ones.

If I like swinging over the kingdom of God in that gully and gasping at the thrill and the beauty of a green world, I also like inordinately having landed on the dark brown earth to watch the flights of others, knowing at least for now where I’ve come from, pretty much where I am, and not really a whole lot concerned about where I’m going. Only that it’s bound to be full of wonder. And that the land under me and the people around me and the tetherings inside me all seem to make a lot of sense and connect me surely to what I know with the faith of my childhood—that someone way beyond me is there to make sure that the kingdom greens or sheds in the season thereof, with predictable unpredictability.

If I have come to live more easily with some of my own frailties—and they don’t become fewer with age!—surely I can allow the same for the Church that I love and am so often dismayed at. It has given me far more than I it—and continues to. I have to play fair with it collectively as I would hope to individually. Its people, its practices, its truths have grounded and blessed me. I must grant it at least a modicum of the understanding I have come to expect from the Lord Himself for my struggles and failings. I must remind myself to be uncondemning as I pray for the patience and forbearance I hope just might be reciprocal.

With as many kinds of goodness to respond to as there are ways of looking at a sunset, I can be happy with my church only if I have neither the time nor the inclination to be unstrung by what might seem to me mismanagement, striving, discrimination, even witch hunts and paranoia. My landing and my being sure of my swinging, or of helping anyone else’s, derive from that private kingdom that is within me telling me that only I can know when to go from the platform, how many times out before I lift myself from the seat and try for another landing, how long before there will be no swinging at all. And how to look for the serenity of having held onto the landings so I can love what the 24^th of July is all about enough to counter depletions of what it isn’t.

So far, what there is to love helps make manageable any perspective on the plunge. I trust it always will.

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It has not been easy to continually choose to move forward as an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In many ways a path outside of the Church would seem logical given my life circumstances, which include being an openly gay, active, striving church member. And yet the few times I have considered stepping away, I have felt a divine pull to stay. My faith isn’t about ease, logic, or reason—it’s about fruits. My faith is grounded in the experiences that I have had. Pondering the scriptures and feeling my mind and heart expand. Attending the temple and walking out of those sacred buildings feeling spiritual strength and power. Praying for a miracle and feeling God’s love. Seeing my life improve as I follow inspired prophetic counsel. Connecting with fellow saints who enrich my life. But the fruit that most grounds my faith comes from my experiences with the Atonement of Jesus Christ, experiences that have often been facilitated through the Church. The restored gospel has taught me how to access God’s redeeming love, and I stay not only because I yearn for more of those experiences, but because I’m confident I still have so much to learn.

My belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ requires that I do some pretty tough things. Chief among those is forgiving those who reject me, misunderstand me, and cause me pain. I have had lots of practice with this aspect of the gospel. As a gay man, I embody a paradox that is sometimes beyond people’s ability to comprehend. Consequently, I have spent much of my adult life explaining my existence to individuals on all sides of the spiritual, political, and cultural spectrum. I often find myself asking, why am I always required to be the bigger person? Why is it my responsibility to demonstrate to those who reject me that I actually belong? Why do I have to respond to hostility with kindness?

In May 2021 I received a message from a woman named Jen. She explained that her husband Brent was planning their stake youth trek and they wondered if I’d be willing to be one of five speakers to address the youth. I don't love camping and the thought of using vacation days to spend a weekend in the woods with a bunch of strangers wasn’t terribly appealing. I also thought that the stake would never approve having a gay man talk to the youth about being gay. However, a few weeks later Brent called to confirm the invitation. Two months later I was on a plane to California.

I was surprised that local leaders had approved my visit. I’m regularly asked to give firesides and a fair portion of them get cancelled. If they don’t get cancelled, there is almost always some kind of hefty pushback. It is not uncommon for parents and leaders to complain, and sometimes General Authorities are called in an attempt to shut down such events. It doesn’t matter that I’m a BYU administrator. It doesn’t matter that I have a current temple recommend. It doesn’t matter that I am a high priest, serving faithfully in the church. It doesn’t matter that I have a book published through Deseret Book on the topic of same-sex attraction. None of that matters because I am going to talk about my experiences as a gay man in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That’s a reality that many church members do not feel comfortable talking about.

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When I arrived in California I learned that while the stake presidency was excited to host me, some parents were upset. Several families said that they would no longer be sending their kids on the trek if I was going. One youth cried, saying she didn’t want to go on a “gay trek.” One adult expressed concerns that I would encourage the youth to be gay. They were afraid of me and how I would negatively impact the kids.

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At eight years old I looked for angels in vain. I might have seen one, but my mother’s response hardly hid her skepticism. Even back then I realized that I had probably been looking too hard. Truth is, I was bitterly disappointed and worried that my failure to glimpse beyond the veil revealed something lacking in me.

My angel search took place during the 9:00 a.m. session of the Jordan River Temple dedication on November 16, 1981. It was a big deal that I was there and I knew it. I had turned eight less than a month before, the minimum age for attendance, and realized that compared to my younger sister and most of my friends, I was lucky to be so old. It is no overstatement to say that my anticipation for the event had been building for years.

One of my earliest memories came three and a half years earlier. On April 16, 1978, not yet five years old, I had been brought to a Bountiful, Utah, pulpit by our Latter-day Saint stake president and presented with a dollar. He asked what I would buy with it and I reportedly responded, “eggs.” He asked for the dollar back and announced that I had just made the stake’s first donation to the construction of the Jordan River Temple. I vaguely remember the loss of the dollar but, more, my pride at being the first to help build the sacred place. Three years later, I attended the temple’s cornerstone ceremony in late summer. Two months after that I toured the new temple at the open house preceding its dedication on my eighth birthday.

In the weeks and months before the dedication itself, my family had talked of temples and dedications and I was ushered into a sacred narrative stretching back from me to the 1830s Ohio Saints. I could not forget the angels said to have attended the temple dedication there. And I was determined to see one. The first cautions came from Mom. Appearances of angels are rare. Something so sacred doesn’t happen every day. Even with the stakes thus raised, I readied myself for visions, undeterred. When I wondered afterwards if the guy who seemed momentarily out of place at the beginning of the service had been an angel, Mom lovingly professed agnosticism. (The stories, the cautions, and the tender skepticism all came from Mom. I didn’t remember my father having been at the dedicatory session at all until I checked his journal. Always, scripture and doctrine came from Dad, narrative and charismata from Mom.)

In a way, this was my own childhood version of the “Great Disappointment,” the shock that forerunners to the early Adventists experienced when Jesus did not return as predicted in 1844. Still, I pushed the letdown from my mind and instead remembered the experience as a treasured time with Mom that provided a profound sense of belonging—a placeholder in the space where angels might have been. I eventually brushed off later absences, too. Where was God when this terrible thing happened or when that critical question remained unanswered? If God knows sparrows and numbers hairs, where was he during holocausts or genocides? Like my fruitless childhood angel quest, I suspected for many years that the absences in experience or gaps in explanation were my fault. For a few years in adolescence, I wondered if they pointed to a more shattering lacuna—perhaps there were neither angels nor a God to encounter at all. Even after finding faith again in my late teens, the questions remained, in modified forms, but eventually I acclimated to the apparent gaps.

In other words, that childhood experience has played out time and again throughout a Latter-day Saint lifetime. God and angels have remained stubbornly absent, especially at times when I think I need them most, but skepticism, adulthood, and modernity have not fully stamped out my primal Latter-day Saint yearnings, either. I still long to keep company with angels and touch the face of God. I’m told that, as a young child, I got a neighbor friend to help me reenact the scene of Moses before God’s fiery presence from Cecil B. DeMille’s film, The Ten Commandments. Mom found us kneeling in the yard, shoeless, and I explained we were on holy ground. I think I will always crave the burning bush. More than four decades later, I find myself still magically drawn beyond the immanent, secular framing of reality even as I have acclimated to its rhythms, priorities, and habits of mind.

My story is embedded in a much more extended set of stories.The entire history of modern Christianity can be seen to pivot on the axis between notions and experiences of divine presence and absence, between the “religious” and the (secular) “modern.” I recognize that the terms “modern” and “religious” were themselves constituted in a single, complicated historical process, and acknowledge that they combine to form the water I swim in. Many scholars maintain that the “secular” and the “religious” are more like sides of the same coin than definitional opposites. From this perspective, we’re all swimming together, culturally, at least in the modern West. But understanding the complicated processes that made our modern world does not spare me from their effects in my own life or in my own thinking. So, even as “modernity” insists that the gods survive primarily as “symbols, signs, metaphors, functions, and abstractions,” they have refused to remain so safely contained. The founding narrative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems to mightily strain against that cultural stream in its insistence on rather spectacular divine interruptions into the ordinary. That fact excited my earliest imagination and fueled my yearning for the holy, and it does so still. That said, I was left with a sobering problem: those dramatic divine obtrusions seemed to elude me. It turns out that both my religion’s vibrant rejection of the world’s “disenchantment” and my thoughtful distance from its extraordinary founding convulsions are both in their own ways emblematic of the American sojourn over the past century.

That being said, I have always belonged among the Latter-day Saints. Life in a ward, time as a missionary, and my undergraduate years at Brigham Young University provided the warm, embodied, and communal contexts for my earliest religious experiences, comparatively undramatic though they were. Those environments cultivated a keen sense of at least proximity to the holy, which has long felt mostly good enough in lieu of direct heavenly presence.

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Yet while I experienced foundational, formative spiritual sparks in those nurturing spaces, none of them made much sense of divine absence for me. Why didn’t divine realms make themselves more obvious to us? Nor did these spiritual beginnings meaningfully address the vast challenges we encounter in life, including paradox, complexity, irony, failure, and change. My youthful religious sensibilities primarily had been occupied with certainty, absolutes, and “eternalities.” Back then, religion was the agent that smoothed rough edges and made stories simple, linear, and triumphant. But those reassuring traits also made religion brittle for a stretch during those teenage years, when it seemed ill-equipped to handle the big existential questions (Whence evil? What is universal truth? What is enduring amid the changes of history?). As a missionary, though, those same sensibilities proved to be powerful glue for diverse people striving together in fledgling wards and deep motivation in the face of rejection or drudgery. Emerging from that missionary experience, I had grown accustomed to pretending that the absences or complexities did not exist or did not matter.

This changed, permanently, when in 1998 I arrived at the University of Wisconsin to begin a doctoral program in American history.

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[Reprinted from the 1986 collection, A Thoughtful Faith.]

When I was growing up in Portland, Oregon, in the 1930s and 1940s I always thought of myself as a believing Latter-day Saint. My parents were believers; even when they were not attending church regularly, they still believed. All of my relatives were Latter-day Saints, and so far as I could tell they accepted the gospel as a given of life, like food and drink. In Sunday School I tried to be good. I answered the teachers’ questions and gave talks that brought compliments from the congregation. From the outside my behavior probably looked like the conventional compliance of a good boy. But it went deeper than mere appearance. I prayed faithfully every night, and whenever there was a crisis I immediately thought of God. I relied on my religion to redeem me. I often felt silly or weak, and it was through praying and religious meditation that I mustered my forces to keep on trying. In high school I was a thoroughgoing wallflower, at least as I remember it now, with no close friends. At lunchtime I often ate all by myself because no one noticed me, and I had no idea how to insinuate myself into a circle of people. At the end of my junior year, a Mormon friend in the class above me said it was my obligation, for the honor of the Church, to run for student body president. One thing I had learned in Church was to speak, and a good speech could win an election. I prayed that for the sake of the Church, God would help me get my speech together, and was elected. That made redemption very real.

Partly because of the responsibilities student government gave me I was admitted to Harvard, and left my family and Portland for Cambridge in the fall of 1949. I loved everything about Harvard—the people, the studies, the atmosphere. I was more myself there than I had ever been in my whole life. Harvard helped redeem me too, but it also eroded my faith in God. I went to Church regularly and made good friends with Latter-day Saint graduate students, a faculty member or two, and the small circle of Mormon undergraduates. The undergraduates met Sunday afternoons to discuss the scriptures. We debated everything about religion, but we were all believers. I do not know why it was that by the end of my sophomore year my faith had drained away. Logical positivism was at high tide in those days, trying to persuade us that sensory evidence was the only trustworthy foundation for belief. At the end of my freshman year I wrote a paper comparing Freud and Nietzsche and confronted the assertion that Christian morality was the ideology of servile personalities who feared to express their own deepest urges. Until then I had prided myself on being a servant of God; was I also servile? These ideas, and perhaps the constant strain of being on the defensive for believing at all, must have eaten away at my belief. The issues in my mind never had anything to do with Latter-day Saint doctrine specifically. I was not bothered by the arguments against the institutional Church which so trouble people today, or by the problems of Mormon history, another current sore spot. I was not debating Mormonism versus some other religion; the only question for me was God. Did He exist in any form or not? I was not worried about evil in the world, as some agnostics are. I suppose Mormon theology had made the existence of evil perfectly plausible. I simply wondered if there was any reason to believe. Was all of religion a fantasy? Were we all fooling ourselves?

These doubts came on strongest in the spring of my sophomore year. During the preceding Christmas holiday I had been interviewed for a mission and received a call to New England, to serve under the mission president who attended the same Sacrament meeting as the students in Cambridge. Did I have enough faith to go on a mission? I debated the question through the spring, wondering if I were a hypocrite and if fear of displeasing my parents was all that carried me along. And yet I never really considered not going. As I look back, I think that my agnosticism was perhaps a little bit of a pose, a touch of stylish undergraduate angst. It was true enough that my bosom did not burn with faith; on the other hand, I was quite willing to pledge two years to a mission. So I went.

The mission president was J. Howard Maughan, an agricultural professor from Utah State and a former stake president. In our opening interview in the mission home in Cambridge, he asked if I had a testimony of the gospel. I said I did not. He was not at all rattled. He asked if I would read a book, and said that if I found a better explanation for it than the book itself gave, he wanted me to report it to him. He handed me the Book of Mormon. The next day I left North Station in Boston for Halifax, Nova Scotia. For the next three months as I tried to learn the lessons and the usual missionary discipline, I wrestled with the book and wrote long entries in my journal. I thought a lot about the three witnesses: were they liars, had they been hypnotized, were they pressured? I believe it was at that time I read Hugh Nibley’s Lehi in the Desert. I also read the Book of Mormon and prayed, sometimes in agnostic form: “if you are God….” After three months the mission president came up to Nova Scotia for a conference, and when it was my turn to speak I said with conviction that I knew the Book of Mormon was right. The reasons for belief that I had concocted were not what made the difference—though Nibley made a great impression; it was more the simple feeling that the book was right.

The mission left me with another impression. At Harvard in those days we talked a lot about the masses, envisioning a sea of workers’ faces marching into a factory. In Halifax we missionaries met the masses every day as we tracted, and they did not exist. Instead there were a great number of individual persons, quite idiosyncratic, perverse, and interesting. They were no more a mass than the Harvard faculty or the United States Congress.

That realization planted a seed of doubt about formal conceptions. Did they conform to the reality of actual experience? After the mission, I never again felt that the issues debated in the academy were necessarily the issues of real life. This skepticism grew, especially after I entered graduate school in history and learned how formulations of the past had continually altered, as each generation of historians overturned the conceptions of its predecessors and made new ones for itself. Rational discourse came more and more to seem like a kind of play, always a little capricious and unreal, and in the end, compared to the experience of life itself, not serious. To confuse intellectual constructions with reality, or to govern one’s life by philosophy or an abstract system, came to seem more and more foolhardy. My attitude as it developed was not precisely anti-intellectual. Ideas did not strike me as dangerous; they were too weak to be dangerous. I was depreciating intellectual activity rather than decrying it. But whatever the proper label for this attitude, it put distance between me and the intellectuals whom I so admired and whom, as it later turned out, I would aspire to emulate.

Paradoxically, in my own intellectual endeavors I have benefited from this skepticism engendered in the mission field, for it has led me to trust my own perceptions and experience over the convictions of my fellow historians, considered individually or en masse. I have always thought it possible that virtually anything taught and believed in the academy could be wrong. Repudiation of God by every intellectual in creation did not mean He was nonexistent. By the same token, any of the certainties of historical interpretation could be perfect errors. However fallible I might be myself, however much I was subject to influences and illusions, I had to trust my own perceptions above everything else.

After I returned from the mission field I no longer had doubts, but I did have questions. They were not specific questions about the meaning or validity of specific doctrines, wholesome questions that enlarge understanding. They were the questions of some unknown interlocutor who asked me to justify my faith. “Why do you believe?” the masked stranger asked. This was the old question of my sophomore year, asked now, however, of one who did believe, who had faith, and was being called upon to justify it. I suppose there was nothing complicated about the questioning. At Harvard I studied in the midst of people who made a business of defending their convictions. It was an unwritten rule that you must explain why you took a position or supported a proposition. “Why do you believe in God?” was a question that the trees in Harvard Yard whispered in one’s ears without prompting from any skeptical inquisitors. In fact, when I returned to Harvard in 1953 the religious atmosphere was much more favorable to believers. The president, Nathan Pusey, was himself a believing person, and he had hired Paul Tillich as a University Professor and seen to the rejuvenation of the Divinity School. Even the agnostics listened respectfully to Tillich, and undergraduates talked more freely of their religious convictions. In my senior year I headed a committee sponsored by the student council on “Religion at Harvard,” and our poll of undergraduates turned up a majority who said they had a religious orientation toward life. Even so, the mood did not quiet my faceless questioner. I still wanted to justify my convictions.

How those questionings came to an end is beyond my powers of explanation. For an undergraduate reader today, still fired by fierce doubts and desperate need to know for sure, one word may seem to explain all—complacency. But I myself do not feel that way. My questions have not simply grown dim over the years, nor have I answered them; instead I have come to understand questions and answers differently. Although I cannot say what truly made the difference, a series of specific experiences, small insights, revelations, new ideas, all addressing the same issue and coming over a period of thirty years, have caused me to change my views. I now have a new sense of what constitutes belief.

For a long time, twenty-five years or more, I kept trying to answer the questioner. I received little help from religious philosophers. The traditional proofs for God never made an impression on me. I did not find flaws in them; they simply seemed irrelevant. My empirical temperament and suspicion of grand systems worked against any enthusiasm for arguments about a prime mover. I never studied those arguments or made the slightest effort to make them my own. My chief line of reasoning was based on the Book of Mormon. It was concrete and real and seemed like a foundation for belief, not merely belief in Joseph Smith but in Christ and God. Joseph Smith and Mormonism, as I said before, were never the issues; it was primarily God. Although it was a lengthy chain from the historicity of the Book of Mormon, to Joseph’s revelations, to the existence of God, it was a chain that held for me. I felt satisfied that if that book were true, my position was sound. Without it, I do not know where I would be. I have imagined I could be a religious agnostic were it not for the Book of Mormon. That is why Hugh Nibley’s writings played a large part in my thinking. Although I recognized the eccentricities of his style and was never completely confident of his scholarship, there seemed to me to be enough there to make a case. First Nephi could not be dismissed as fraudulent; and, so far as I know, no one has refuted the argument he made in Lehi in the Desert. Nibley offered just the kind of evidence I was looking for in my pursuit of answers: evidence that was specific, empirical, historical.

Nibley’s style was important enough that I made one attempt myself to prove the Book of Mormon in the Nibley-esque manner, and this effort came about in such a way as to confirm my belief. When I was asked to give some talks in Utah during the Bicentennial of the American Revolution, I decided to examine the political principles embodied in the Book of Mormon and make some applications to our nation’s Revolution and Constitution. I thought this would be simple enough because of the switch from a monarchy to a republic during the reign of Mosiah. I was sure that somewhere in Mosiah’s statements I would find ideas relevant to the modern world. With that in mind, I accepted the invitation to talk, but I did not get down to work until a few months before I was to appear. To my dismay, I could not find what I was looking for. Everything seemed just off the point, confused and baffling. I could not find the directions for a sound republic that I had expected. Gradually it dawned on me that the very absence of republican statements might in itself be interesting. Long ago I learned that it is better to flow with the evidence rather than to compel compliance with one’s preformed ideas. So instead, I asked: What does the Book of Mormon say about politics? To my surprise I discovered it was quite an unrepublican book. Not only was Nephi a king, and monarchy presented as the ideal government in an ideal world, but the supposedly republican government instituted under Mosiah did not function that way at all. There was no elected legislature, and the chief judges usually inherited their office rather than being chosen to it. Eventually I came to see that here was my chance to emulate Nibley. If Joseph Smith was suffused with republican ideas, as I was confident he was, then the absence of such sentiments in Nephite society was peculiar, another evidence that he did not write the Book of Mormon. Eventually all of this came together in an article, “The Book of Mormon and the American Revolution,” published in BYU Studies in 1976.

While circumstances and my predilection to justify belief influenced me up to that point and beyond, my commitment to this kind of endeavor gradually weakened. Perhaps most influential was a gradual merger of personality and belief. By 1976 I had been a branch president and bishop, and was then president of the Boston Stake. Those offices required me to give blessings in the name of God and to seek solutions to difficult problems nearly every day. I usually felt entirely inadequate to the demands placed upon me and could not function at all without some measure of inspiration. What I did, the way I acted, my inner thoughts, were all intermingled with this effort to speak and act righteously for God. I could no longer entertain the possibility that God did not exist because I felt His power working through me. Sometimes I toyed with the notion that there could be other ways of describing what happened when I felt inspired, but the only language that actually worked, the only ideas that brought inspiration and did justice to the experience when it came, were the words in the scripture. Only when I thought of God as a person interested in me and asked for help as a member of Christ’s kingdom did idea and reality fit properly. Only that language properly honored the experiences I had day after day in my callings.

More than anything else, church work probably quieted my old questions; but there were certain moments when these cumulative experiences precipitated new ideas. Once in the early sixties, while I held a post-doctoral fellowship at Brown University and was visiting Cambridge, I happened into a young adult discussion led by Terry Warner (I believe). He had the group read the Grand Inquisitor passage in The Brothers Karamazov. The sentences that stuck with me that time through were the ones having to do with looking for reasons to believe that would convince the whole world and compel everyone to believe. That was the wish of the Inquisitor, a wish implicitly repudiated by Christ. The obvious fact that there is no convincing everyone that a religious idea is true came home strongly at that moment. It is impossible and arrogant, and yet that was exactly what I was attempting. When I sought to justify my belief, I was looking for answers that would persuade all reasonable people. That was why I liked Nibley: because he put his readers over a barrel. I wanted something that no one could deny. In that moment in Cambridge, I realized the futility of the quest.

I was moved still further in this direction by a lecture which Neal Maxwell invited me to give at Brigham Young University in 1974 as part of the Commissioner’s Lecture Series. I cannot for the life of me recall why I turned to the topic of “Joseph Smith and Skepticism,” but that was the subject. In that lecture I sketched in the massive effort to demonstrate reasonably the authenticity of the Christian revelation. The effort began in the early eighteenth century, when Deism first took hold in earnest, and continued through the nineteenth century. The Christian rationalists assembled all the evidence they could muster to prove that biblical miracles, such as the parting of the Red Sea, were authentic and therefore evidence of God’s endorsement of Israel. In the course of the nineteenth century, as agnosticism waxed strong among intellectuals, the volumes on Christian evidences proliferated. I can still remember sitting on the floor in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School library, flipping through these books, each one almost exactly like the others. I realized then that the tradition of seeking proof was very strong in the nineteenth century, and that Mormons had been influenced by it. More than any other Latter-day Saint, B. H. Roberts, a man troubled by questions as I had been, borrowed these methods. His New Witness for God was a replica of the books in the Harvard Divinity School basement, except with Mormon examples and conclusions. Hugh Nibley dropped the nineteenth-century format for works of Christian evidences, but his mode of reasoning was basically the same.

Awareness of the affinity of Nibley with these Protestant works did not dilute my own interest in evidences. The study of Book of Mormon republicanism, my own contribution to the genre, came along two years later. But the contradictions were taking shape in my mind and readied me, I suppose, for a personal paradigm shift. It occurred in the early 1980s at the University of Indiana. Stephen Stein of the religion department had some Lilly Endowment money to assemble scholars and religious leaders from various denominations to discuss their beliefs. With Jan Shipps’ help he brought together a handful of Mormon historians, some historians of American religion, a local stake president and regional representative, and a seminary teacher. The topic was Joseph Smith. The historians among us made some opening comments about the Prophet, and then over a day and a half we discussed the issues that emerged. It was a revelatory assemblage from my point of view because it brought together in one room representatives of the various groups involved in my religious life—Church leaders, non-Mormon scholars, and Mormon scholars. Although all of these people had been represented in my mind symbolically before, they had never been together in person before my face, talking about Joseph Smith.

Their presence brought together notions that previously had been floating about separately in my head. Sometime in the middle of the conversations it came to me in a flash that I did not want to prove the authenticity of Joseph Smith’s calling to anyone. I did not want to wrestle Stephen Stein to the mat and make him cry “uncle.” It was a false position, at least for me, and one that I doubted would have any long-range good results. I recognized then that the pursuit of Christian evidences was not a Mormon tradition; it was a borrowing from Protestantism—and not at a moment when Protestantism was at one of its high points. At any rate, it was not my tradition and I did not want to participate in it. There was no proving religion to anyone; belief came by other means, by hearing testimonies or by individual pursuit or by the grace of God, but not by hammering.

By the time of the conference I had completed the manuscript of Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism. The Book of Mormon chapter in that book hammered at readers. My urge was to show that the common secular explanations of the Book of Mormon were in error and to imply, if not to insist, that only a divine explanation would do. In the revision, I tried to moderate the tone without complete success. I did not wish to dissipate the basic argument, which is that the counter-explanations did not adequately explain the complexity of the book, but I sincerely did not want to push readers into a corner and force them to come out fighting. The desire to compel belief, the wish of the Grand Inquisitor, was exactly what I had abandoned.

At the present moment, the question of why I believe no longer has meaning for me. I do not ask it of myself or attempt to give my reasons to others. The fact is that I do believe. That is a given of my nature, and whatever reasons I might give would be insufficient and inaccurate. More relevant to my current condition is a related question: how do others come to believe? I would like to know if there is anything I can do that will draw people to faith in Christ and in the priesthood. My answer to this question is, of course, related to my personal experiences. I no longer think that people can be compelled to believe by any form of reasoning, whether from the scripture or from historical evidence. They will believe if it is in their natures to believe. All I can do is to attempt to bring forward the believing nature, smothered as it is in most people by the other natures that culture forms in us. The first responsibility is to tell the story, to say very simply what happened, so that knowledge of those events can do its work. But that is the easy part, the part that could be done by books or television. The hard part is to create an atmosphere where the spiritual nature, the deep-down goodness in the person, can react to the story honestly and directly. Some people can create that atmosphere quite easily by the very strength of their own spiritual personalities. It is hard for me. There are too many other natures in me: the vain aspirer formed in childhood, the intellectual fostered at Harvard, the would-be dominant male created by who knows what. But I do believe that when I am none of these, and instead am a humble follower of Christ who without pretense tells the story to a friend whom I love and respect, then they will believe if they want to, and conversion is possible. Questions may be answered and reasons given, but these are peripheral and essentially irrelevant. What is essential is for a person to listen carefully and openly in an attitude of trust. If belief is to be formed in the human mind, it will, I think, be formed that way.

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This is the story of how my perfection almost damned me. That is, how my relentless quest for flawlessness undermined my happiness, my health, my orientation to the world, and my faith. It is a story, too, of a girl becoming a woman and in the process making room for grace.

I was barely twelve the first time I worked up the courage to see my bishop and confess. I’d learned that bishop-confessions were what you did when you committed particularly serious sins, but I never imagined that I would be the one in the bishop’s office. I was so overcome by guilt immediately following my mistake that I confessed to my parents, but their reassurances weren’t enough to quench the fire of condemnation that I felt so tortured by. (I’ll elaborate, but for now, just understand that I feel guilt in an unusual way.) When I asked them if I needed to confess to the bishop, they were a bit surprised and told me that I could confess if it would help me feel better. Now I understand that they didn’t think it was necessary for me to go, but they also must have felt discomfort at seeing their daughter in so much torment. I wanted to show God that I wanted to be good, and I desperately needed to know that he still accepted me. I needed someone who could tell me, with authority, that God forgave me and still loved me. I don’t remember how the conversation went, other than that I wept and was met with overwhelming love and compassion from my dear bishop. When I walked out of his office, an immense weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I felt so free.

I remember similar feelings of distress-then-relief when I was baptized. I suspect most children don’t worry much about their worthiness before being baptized, but I felt burdened by my childhood mistakes (what to my seven year-old brain felt like mortal sins), and I craved a fresh start. But at the same time, I worried that my wrongs made me unworthy to be baptized. If I didn’t tell the bishop every detail of every mistake, would my baptism count? Adding to the question of my prepubescent worthiness, there were other uncomfortable moments on my baptismal day – my mother made me wear a floral dress with shoulder pads that I really did not want to wear, I worried about my underpants showing through my white baptismal jumpsuit (my activity day leader told me that she had accidentally worn pink ones on her baptismal day), and I felt embarrassed that all of the messages during the service were directed at me. But the relief that I felt as I emerged from the water – that I was all the way clean and totally forgiven – was powerful enough that if I meditate today on that moment, I can feel it again. It felt delicious to have a divinely-sanctioned fresh start.

As I rode home from the service, my wet hair dampening the despised shoulder pads of my dress, I lay horizontally across the back seat of our Dodge Grand Caravan with my hands behind my head and gazed out the window into the night sky. With the same innocent logic that led me to believe that if I tried hard enough I could dig to China from my backyard, I thought to myself, “I am totally clean, and if I try hard enough I can probably stay that way.” I didn’t want to feel the dread I’d felt before my baptism again, and I was naively but sincerely committed to putting in the work necessary to avoid needing repentance.

I took my spiritual journey, including the decision to be baptized and to remain clean, very seriously. I took a lot of things seriously as a child. Many of my day-to-day activities were touched – and often interrupted – by my carefulness and worries. Neither I nor my family understood how to make sense of my anxieties. I have some names and a couple of diagnoses for it now (one of which is “scrupulosity,” a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder that is characterized by excessive fear of sin and reassurance-seeking rituals), but I remember it being called “a very sensitive spirit.” My scrupulosity expressed itself in many ways – sometimes through repeated safety rituals or asking my mother for reassurance, but most often in the form of confession. I confessed everything, even if I was unsure if I had actually made a mistake. For example, if I had set an open pen on someone’s floor, I confessed that I might have made a mark. I had an unusually low tolerance for dishonesty, uncertainty, and risk, and I felt guilt in a way that most of my peers and family couldn't relate to. I was much more careful than anyone else I knew and was much harder on myself than anyone ever was with me. The love and peace that the gospel could offer me were often replaced with guilt and fear about my standing before God.

Like most youngsters, my understanding of God as a child and adolescent was based on a transactional model of divine reward or retribution: I obey, he blesses. I disobey, he punishes. Although I held hope that God and Jesus loved me, my anxiety and developmental abilities made it difficult to emerge from my fear of doing something wrong and disappointing them. My perception of God’s nature and my relationship with him was also complicated by contradicting teachings about him. My parents taught me that he was gentle and loved me always, but the Bible talked about a jealous and rageful God. How could I make sense of a God who was a hen gathering chicks in some verses and a wielder of a terrible and swift sword in others? I was unsure of who was listening to my prayers. I feared how he felt about me, especially when I made mistakes, and was desperate to know I was enough in his eyes.

There were glimpses of transcendent love and light that burst through this transactional and fear-based God-view from time to time. My baptism, attending the temple, reading the scriptures, singing hymns, hearing the testimonies of my dear parents and trusted leaders – these were moments when I genuinely felt the Spirit and tasted God’s mercy. When I wasn’t worrying about my mistakes or experiencing disturbing intrusive thoughts, I felt happy when I attended church. My tight-knit ward family loved and supported me. But scrupulosity often lurked just beneath the surface, preying on my good desires and fanning the flames of uncertainty about my worthiness. The resulting unease propelled me to cling to the safety I was promised if I was exactly obedient.

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My natural inclinations toward perfectionism found fertile soil to thrive within the programs and standards of the church.The need for reassurance that I was “enough” fueled my enthusiastic participation in my various classes. In many ways, my life held evidence that a simple transactional model of the divine order worked. I was following the rules, my home life was peaceful and stable, I attracted good friends with similar standards and goals, and together we avoided the consequences of mistakes that some of our peers struggled with. I attributed these successes – my happy, good life – to living the standards of the gospel with exactness. I could ignore the few times when the transactional model didn’t work because there were so many times when it did (“work” meaning I saw myself blessed in obvious, outward ways). But there came a time when I couldn’t ignore how poorly this model actually worked for me.

Anxiety and scrupulosity had been my regular companions during childhood and adolescence, but I had little awareness of them until they showed up in a way that made life hard to live. Before age 21, I could engage in my compulsions (confessing, reassurance-seeking, repeated checking) somewhat freely. And while these compulsions didn’t get rid of my anxiety, I could get by with the temporary relief they offered. Then I went on a mission to Chile, and things got really hard. In the missionary training center and in my first Chilean area, I experienced a deep darkness that surprised as much as it devastated me. It would be hard to imagine a young woman more excited about and dedicated to serving a mission than I was, and I certainly didn’t expect my mission to feel like this. I had known sadness before, but this was different. I had been discouraged, confused, lonely, and even hopeless. This was different. Never before had I gone to bed at night wishing that I didn’t have to wake up in the morning. Never before had I felt such dread and soul-crushing pain. Wasn’t my obedience and sacrifice supposed to bring me joy? It did not make sense that I was being punished for disobedience – I literally didn’t have any time to be disobedient, and I also didn’t want to believe in a God who would “teach me a lesson” in this way. As questions about God’s character began to surface, the transactional model of God that had sustained me during my earlier life began to crumble.

With time, the heaviest darkness lifted and I was able to experience manifestations of God’s light. Yet striking moments of confusion continued for the remainder of my mission and after. Despite my sincere commitment to obedience, I sometimes felt emptiness and doubt as I prayed. I felt ashamed of this and kept these experiences to myself; it wasn’t where I thought I would be spiritually at that stage of my life. I was obedient. I kept my covenants, I studied, I prayed, I served, I attended the temple, and I loved freely. Why did I feel so much uncertainty and despair when I was doing everything that I could to follow Christ? The added complexities of post-mission life, including my career and relationships, added more weight to my load of emotional and spiritual distress. I felt persistent fear that I would never be enough, and my response of “doing more” did little to help me find refuge and peace. Two years after my mission, I felt prompted to break off an engagement with a young man after previously feeling God’s encouragement to marry him. This dealt another harrowing blow to my understanding of and relationship with the dependable, transactional God I had imagined. My view of God and my role in his plan weren't holding up.

During this time, I also began diving deeper into questions about him that had pricked my heart as a youth, especially surrounding how God felt about women. I asked these questions because I yearned to know how he felt about me – just me – a woman without a husband or children. Even from an early age, I noticed how the church treated men and women differently. I think I could ignore the dissonance the differences caused because I had many opportunities that felt equal, or nearly equal, to those that my male counterparts had: I held important roles in ward and stake leadership as a youth, I served a mission, and I was even called to be an “asistenta” – a female assistant to the mission president for a stint. God was using me and my talents in meaningful ways to bless his children, and I felt that my voice and contributions were equal to the boys and men surrounding me. Then something changed.

Perhaps it was the effect of nearing a temple marriage and imagining myself in the role of wife and mother. In any case, the differences between women and men in the church began to pain me. I squirmed in discomfort as I attended the temple; I fumed inside as I listened to counsel given to wives and mothers over the pulpit; and I felt disoriented, even numb, as I discovered details about the church’s polygamous past and present. I wondered if I was as important as men in God’s plan. Would a man forever have authority over me? Even worse, would I be one of many women bound to one man eternally, unable to experience true reciprocated belonging and equality? I couldn’t imagine a loving God who would command his daughters – his precious daughters – to live polygamously. It felt sad and scary to imagine that God might not care about my feminine fears and anxieties. I searched and searched for a more comprehensive understanding of God’s character and how he felt about me.

In my sorrow and frustration, I promised him that I would stay near him and keep trying. I knew that I needed to be fed spiritually – I needed light and mercy and divine power to guide me. I also knew that focusing exclusively on the frustrations of my questions would not give me the nourishment I needed to feel connected to my true self and to heaven. I didn’t need to have the answers to all of my questions before I could connect with heaven. Yet as I struggled, I began to realize that trying to stay near to God as I had thus far – motivated by a to-do list and the promise of a reward when I did something right (a transaction) – wasn’t helping me feel closer to him.

A wise client once taught me that striving and desire are good, if built upon a foundation of acceptance and love, but can be counterproductive when built upon a foundation of fear, self-rejection, and shame. With time, I began to wake up to the emotional realities that most often motivated me, and I saw how much guilt drove – and spoiled – each potentially helpful thing I did. Ironically, my desire to do so many good things (and to do them perfectly) was actually taking me further from God. With these realizations, I felt that God was giving me permission to slow down and to be a little easier on myself.

As I practiced slowing down and extending myself grace, I began to notice how different it felt to have effort produced by love instead of by the fear of disappointing God. I experienced a shift – from thinking that God would love and bless me once I had proven myself to him through my own perfection, to knowing that he already loved and blessed me in all of my imperfection. I came to see that the pain of my experiences wasn’t a manifestation of his displeasure towards me, but was actually the result of the realities of mortality that helped me carve out space in my heart for him. I used to see instances of darkness and doubt as interrupting my faith journey. I see now that they propelled it, deepened it, and helped it be more personal and relevant.

In the process of untangling my scrupulosity from God’s character and relationship with me, I let go of a lot of what I had believed – and feared – about him before. This process was and continues to be deeply personal and difficult to describe. But in short, I’ve come to believe that God is a lot more like a hen than a wielder of deadly weapons – he’s much more nice, gentle, and merciful than I had previously assumed. Coming to believe that God is a divine pair – a Heavenly Father and Mother – has been central to this transformation; integrating the feminine divine into my personal theology has brought balance to my view of God. I can more easily believe that I am not just acceptable but adored and totally loved. I can imagine how she feels about me as I hold my own daughter, put bandaids on her knees, and encourage her to keep practicing.

As I grew to better understand the character of my heavenly parents, as well as the purpose of being mortal, I began to realize that the guilt and fear that I felt so frequently were not what they wanted me to feel. They were not godly feelings deriving from some “super morality.” They were pathological. This was revolutionary for me. I felt free, free to follow what was virtuous and lovely, and to use my agency in a way I hadn’t before. My heavenly parents wanted me to use it! There was no way for me to become like them without using it and falling short sometimes. They provided a savior for me as I became wounded along the way. Their enveloping love provided a secure base that gave me the courage to explore my world and my questions even further. Tethered to their love, I felt confident that my exploration would help me to become like them.

Thankfully, as I dove into searching for answers to my questions, my life overflowed with nurturing spaces to explore them. As I eased up on my self-judgment, I found a community with devout question-askers. My professors and mentors wept with me. My ecclesiastical leaders lovingly modeled that it was okay to not have all the answers. My friends didn’t judge me. My family listened with compassion. My understanding boyfriend – who became my husband — was open to and respectful of my thoughts and feelings. There are many who haven’t understood my questions and yearnings, and that’s okay. As my mom says, “the church needs all kinds.”

For many years I longed to find the answers to my questions in a book–in an archive, an essay, a lecture. I wanted the fiery pain in my heart to be quenched by some amazing insight or historical finding – something deeply wise that would satisfy my questions and ease my pain. And while I’ve found many amazing insights as I’ve studied, I’ve felt that the only thing that can go deep enough to reach the pain in my heart is God’s unending compassion and love. I remain planted in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ not because I know anything for certain or because I’ve received all the answers that I’ve yearned for, but because I have experienced light and love here. Although it may at times go dim, I believe that that light will grow brighter until the perfect day. Like Moses, I affirm that “I will not cease to call upon God, [for] I have other things to inquire of him: for his glory has been upon me.”

My heart has made more room for Jesus. It feels good to have him there. And from this calming place of grace, I find I can be clearer with myself about my faith and why I remain attached to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Here are a dozen reasons why:

I stay because I believe in the plan of salvation, and in heavenly parents who want to give everything they have to their children.

I stay because the Book of Mormon has taught me about Jesus and has spoken to my soul.

I stay because I believe that I am good, inherently good, and not a result of a mistake or of an original sin.

I stay because I’ve been nurtured in my questions.

I stay because there is space in the body of Christ for all of God’s children, and together I believe we can receive an ongoing restoration and build an expanding Zion.

I stay because in the gospel I find balance, tensions of equal and opposing forces. I can feel at peace while not agreeing with every interpretation or policy I encounter as our lives as a people unfold.

I stay because of the faith of my foremothers and forefathers, by which I have been nourished.

I stay because of the peace I have felt in the temple, in addition to the wrestle that the temple has been for me. There is beauty in the covenants I have made.

I stay because following Christ and contributing to a community like the Church makes my life better; in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ I find light.

I stay because I like the feeling of mystery, of being reminded that I don’t know everything and I don’t need to.

I stay because I love how faith feels, and "I will declare what he hath done for my soul."

I stay because of the promise of redemption. I need a Savior. I hunger for the growth and transformation he has promised–and I can’t do it alone.

I’m lying now under a tree gazing at the golden sky. My hands are behind my head, my ankles crossed, and my cup is running over. I’m not there yet; I still have scrupulous thoughts and occasional panic attacks. Sometimes I squirm and fume and wonder. But I’m also filled with the love of my heavenly parents and a savior. They comfort me and I feel safe in their care. I now understand that the process of growing into whomever I need to be will necessarily involve a lot more mistakes and imperfections than I used to imagine. They know that I cannot be perfect in this world and it’s guaranteed that I will need repentance many, many times. This is not a train wreck; it is organic spiritual growth within God’s tender embrace.

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