Francine Bennion: A Large and Reasonable Context
from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century
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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.