Philip Barlow: Questions at the Veil

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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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.”

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