Storytelling & Returning

Read excerpts from the next two chapters of Gracing, and join us for a group discussion on Friday July 25

Jul 18, 2025

There’s a story many of us have heard: Once upon a time, we were born broken—sinful and degenerate. There was a chasm separating us from perfection. From our first breath, we fell from grace. Adam’s sin was stamped on us from the beginning. Our only hope was Jesus, who would impute His righteousness to us, snatching us from the inevitable trajectory of our own corrupt natures.

It’s the story of Original Sin. Though officially we Latter-day Saints reject the story, in practice we keep returning to it. We retell it with a twist. We agree it’s not Adam’s fault, but we affirm that it is ours: We’re still not good enough, and God will keep punishing us and letting us suffer until we are. He sends trials to purify and perfect us. Jesus will eventually wrangle us into starched shirts and straight pews, but it will require a lot of work on our part. We must put our back into it, and maybe—just maybe we’ll reach the heavenly destination.

The story needs a revision. A truer telling. Something like this: Once upon a time, we were born whole—magnificent and holy. As literal children of God, we were fashioned with the spark of divinity. Perfect and pure. As we grew, at times we forgot that we were “trailing clouds of glory,” as William Wordsworth wrote, and we rejected the gift of grace because we were convinced that we could do it on our own. In our suffering, we forgot both who we were and whose we were. We built up walls to separate us from God and each other. But Jesus intervened, sitting with us until we remembered—and sharing His life with us once we did.

The philosopher Adam Miller tells a version of this story that he calls Original Grace, and he juxtaposes it against the story of Original Sin. This version begins with grace, not sin. Miller writes, “My goal in life is not to prove that I will eventually deserve some future grace or salvation that God is currently withholding. Rather, my single Christian obligation is to stop rejecting the grace and redemption that God is already and continually willing into being.” Wherever we are right now, at our core, we are bathed in grace. Once we discover this, we discover ourselves and simultaneously discover God. You could call this process healing, repentance, or gracing. It’s all the same story.

Indulge me for a moment in a fish tale. Once upon a time, long before duck-billed platypuses or dinosaurs, a funny-looking fish was born. His pectoral fins were not sleek and aerodynamic like those of his brothers and sisters. They were stout and awkward, like beefy stumps jutting from his sides. Though he tried to keep up with his friends, he was often picked last for games and was the butt of all the jokes.

Mama told him he was special—that the stars and moon shone extra bright the night he was born. She called him her little slice of heaven; she’d take his face in her fins, her penetrating gaze reaching deep into his soul, and tell him he was magnificent. But he didn’t understand what she meant, and he retreated to the shadows.

The venerated church elders took Mama aside to speculate as to why God would give her dear child this trial. Perhaps Mama had forgotten to say her prayers. Maybe she harbored an unholy pride and this was her penance.

Or maybe the boy was to blame. Maybe he had sinned before he came to the ocean—he was a fence-sitter or a half-hearted, less-than-valiant milquetoast soldier, and this was the penalty. Maybe repentance was the antidote. Or perhaps, the elders speculated, there was no cure and the boy had been sent to teach everyone patience and compassion.

Mama listened, but she quietly rejected the idea of a God who would punish her beautiful boy. Deep down, she knew God was love. Both her heart and head told her that God was not vindictive or punitive. And she knew her boy was more than an object lesson; her little slice of heaven was magnificent.

The fish physician, weighed down by age, wisdom, and spectacles, took Mama aside. Perhaps, he suggested, he could design some prosthetics to facilitate easier movement through the water—amputate the aberrant fins and design some artificial ones that could attach to and be controlled by her son’s nervous system. (Technology was shockingly quite advanced.)

Before Mama had a chance to respond, an up-and-coming fish genetic engineer who had overheard the conversation broke in. Perhaps, the engineer suggested, she could sequence the boy’s DNA and locate the anomalous pattern. She could repair the mutant DNA in some of the boy’s select stem cells, allowing the mended cells the opportunity to grow new fish-appropriate fins. (Indeed, medical technology was tremendously cutting edge.)

At this point, the church elders, physician, and genetic engineer all began to quarrel about the best way to put the boy into their fish-shaped mold—to build the template and cookie cutter to get this boy to rights. They pulled out their graphs and scriptures, their white boards, arguments, and data.

Meanwhile, from the corner of her eye, Mama saw her boy venturing toward the edge of the world where the water, sky, and land all converged. It was dusk, and the quarreling faded into the background.

Mama swam to her son and then stopped, catching her breath. In awe, she watched as her boy dug his strong fins into the sand, propelling himself forward. She surfaced just in time to see him pull himself onto the land. His unique-looking fins, the object of ridicule and speculation, were now a superpower. All along, he had been a fish with legs. A whole new world awaited, ready for exploration. The stars and moon shone extra bright. He looked back at Mama and smiled.

They knew. He was magnificent.

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REFLECT:

How does the story that you are a child of God, with a spark of divinity, impact you?

How does it either complement or contrast with the other stories you tell yourself?

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Chapter 12: Returning

I think we can learn something from a Christmas cactus that sits above my kitchen sink. The plant was given to me by my husband’s mother. She has a gift with plants and can coax beauty out of even the most persnickety varieties. The Christmas cactus, thankfully, is quite forgiving—convenient because my not-so-green thumb is often in need of forgiveness.

Around Christmas each year, the plant explodes in a spray of flowers that roughly resemble hummingbirds—some red, some pink, as if the plant can’t quite pin down its favorite color. The leaves are thick, no doubt designed for water conservation, with spiked edges, and are linked in chains like a toddler’s pop- together beads.

These leaves, like other plants, exhibit phototropism wherein they turn their faces toward the light. The cells in the stems that are farthest from the light elongate in response to hormones, thus propelling those nearest to the light to move even closer. The cells also strategically rearrange their chloroplasts—the suncatchers of the cell. Like little domesticates, the chloroplasts harvest and bottle sunshine for future energy use. I can sympathize with their need for sun, especially during the cold of Christmas.

Every now and then, I turn my plant 180 degrees and watch over the next couple days as the leaves, slightly disoriented, gradually reorient themselves toward the light. Unlike radical butterfly transformations, this one is soft. Like a newborn rooting for her mother’s breast, it’s a subtle yearning, the slowest of stretching, the most understated movement.

This movement reminds me of repentance, which comes from the Greek metanoia, meaning a change of heart and mind—a conversion, a healing, a turning, a spiritual overhaul. The word repentance unfortunately carries with it a lot of baggage such as penance, shame, and the idea that heaven must be earned, so the word is a mixed bag. But the reality it points to is worth noticing.

Gracing, I believe, is this reality. Repentance is the journey of turning to God again and again. We forget to join with God, and then we remember. We think we are right, and then we realize we are wrong. We stop living a lie. We stop telling ourselves stories that keep us stuck. We live with ego-driven, narrow vision, and then, as with a camera lens, we zoom out and see that God was present all along. Our experience and story changes. God offers alternate views, relationships, healings, and ways of being and seeing—over and over.

But through a softer lens, we also heal from our accumulated wounds. With Jesus, people who are blind see. People who are deaf hear. People who are lost are found. The lines between sin and suffering blur, but the solutions continually return us to grace. With Jesus, we wake to a new story and to the reality of a world embedded in grace. Of recognizing,

Oh, this person is my brother.

Oh, God was always here.

Oh, this hope is bigger than my pain.

Oh, there are colors and light and beauty I didn’t see while living a solitary, detached life.

Every time we return and are transformed, we are saved. Every time we forget, we are damned—literally stuck, because there is no salvation without God.

We are saved by grace. Full stop. This is no cheap grace—a mere saving proclamation that we need Jesus regardless of any work we do. Rather, we are saved by grace because the freely given gift envelops us like air and does what it was designed to do.

Grace saves; work doesn’t. Work does other things. Knives cut and soap cleans. Work gets things done and displays God’s love. And grace saves.

Living without God, on the other hand, is the state of what the Book of Mormon calls “the natural man.” I don’t mean natural as in earthy and without makeup or artificial dyes, but as in “without God,” as Alma teaches (Alma 41:11). This supposedly “natural” condition is a false front that we put on, wherein we are an enemy to God simply because we have placed ourselves apart from God, in opposition, and not on the same team. This way of being is faulty, guarded with plates of armor. It’s not how we were designed to function, and it’s contrary to the nature of God and the nature of who we are. We weren’t created to flourish as a branch dismembered from its root.

In life, we tend to toggle between these different ways of being—with God and without. Far from God, we become stuck in suffering and sin. Returning home, we re-enter God’s embrace.

Reminiscent of my Christmas cactus, a similarly subtle movement once happened between me and my brother. Prior to this, dysfunction had plagued me and my siblings for various reasons—contention and hurt between various members that had occasionally turned into painfully ugly confrontations. People had been flat-out rotten to each other.

My family of six siblings and parents all live within an hour of me, so we have traditionally held family dinners to connect. Because of all the tension, though, I’d been hesitant to host.

One brother’s personal life had been brutal, including a painful divorce and ongoing court battles. He understandably felt like much of his life was out of his control and was therefore extremely sensitive to others exerting control over him. His strong political views were also highly alert to any element of control. We’d had disagreements on that topic. And his fuse seemed short.

In finally making the leap to host dinner, I wanted to minimize the potential for conflict. So, I added structure to the event. Rather than our typical pattern of eating followed by unstructured play and conversation, I planned a show-and-tell where all the cousins and adults could participate. I planned to show my Johnny Apple peeler that cores, peels, and cuts apples into long, curly, slices. I emailed the invitation to my family. My brother responded with his intention to share “what’s really going on in the world”—not-so-subtle code for his contentious politics.

Oh boy. So, then I sent a clarifying email about the structure of show-and-tell—a limited amount of time so everyone could have a turn, with the event structured more as a presentation than a discussion. I also requested that if anyone wanted to have a confrontational or argumentative conversation with anyone else in the family, that they please take it away from the group.

My brother responded that he wouldn’t be coming—that I was censoring and controlling. He essentially argued that my approach would deepen divides. In suppressing free speech, I would be putting up barriers to future resolutions. I was allowing underlying issues to fester, ignoring deeply rooted problems, and putting on a façade of fake niceness. In retrospect, I see that his concern was like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s concept of negative peace in which there was an absence of tension in place of positive peace in which there was the presence of understanding.

At this point, I buckled down with renewed intensity, engaging in one hundred-plus back-and-forth emails with my brother and other family members. I was blown away, but not entirely surprised, that my request to take confrontation elsewhere was deemed so objectionable. At one point, I used an analogy that I hoped would connect with my music-composing brother.

Music, I said, needs both structure and flexibility. The structure includes a certain key signature, time signature, and other conventions. But if the music becomes too structured, it lacks room to breathe, becoming flat and boring. There needs to be balance. In creating an event, I said, too much flexibility leads to mayhem while too much structure stifles spontaneous expression. For the family dinner, I was leaning toward more structure; he wanted more flexibility.

Finally, we compromised and agreed that debates or disagreements with civility, respect, and good faith were okay, but contentious arguments that indulged hostility or contempt would have to be moved elsewhere. No topics would be off-limits, and my brother reasserted that he’d share his controversial topic for show-and-tell.

Sunday evening came. I was apprehensive. But when my brother came over, something in the air had changed. We hugged, and I noticed a black paperback about the composer Johann Sebastian Bach in his hand. My brother might be Bach’s biggest fan, and in my family, no one disputes Bach’s greatness. I don’t know what happened between our email exchange and the event, but for show-and-tell my brother completely dropped his plan and instead shared a story about Bach once taking a random melody given to him by the King of Prussia and turning it into an interesting piece of music with various opposing yet complementary lines of harmony. My brother demonstrated on the piano.

At the end of a pleasant evening, right before my brother left, I explained how because I had been a violinist, I was used to playing the melody. I didn’t have a good sense of how chords worked together in the interplay of melody and harmony, but I had great respect for composers who did.

“Would you like me to show you some basics?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He sat on the piano bench, and I sat with him. He showed me the structure for the easiest key: the tonic chord, up a fifth to the dominant chord, and down a fifth to the subdominant chord.

“These are your basic chords,” he explained, and with that structure in place he demonstrated moving up and down the keyboard, introducing novelties and flexibility, and always remembering and returning to the tonic chord—your home.

So, there we were. Two middle-aged adults, old enough that we were both going gray, sitting on a piano bench. Just me and my big brother.

He taught me how to combine structure and flexibility to create harmony. Mostly I saw flying fingers in a lot of different places, and I couldn’t quite keep track. But there was a pinprick of clarity in the chaos. I was figuring it out. Maybe there’s hope for us both.

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REFLECT

What is one of your relationships that feels stuck?

How is grace inviting you to return to your true self, to this person, or to God?