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I recently read of a man who grew up in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and faithfully served in various callings until his mid-forties. Then one day, he said, he realized that the Church was a human organization, not a divine one, and on the basis of that perception became inactive. What he meant, it seems, is that the Church is wholly human rather than wholly divine. Neither characterization, however, lines up with scripture or ecclesiastical pronouncement. Often we hear that the Church is not a museum of saints but rather a hospital for sinners: it is a place where we can heal and grow, notwithstanding the imperfection of the people we serve with. Another image is that of Noah’s ark: there is a storm without and a smell within.[1]

I believe the Church is an ark of salvation precisely because it is an intimate mix of human and divine. It is a place where we can learn and grow amid opportunities to empathize, repent, and forgive. Not that such opportunities do not exist elsewhere, but in the Church we are stretched heavenward by ordinances of salvation while our own weaknesses and those of others pull us back down to earth. It is this juxtaposition of opposites that makes the ordinances real and lifts us heavenward. Without the gravity of human weakness, there would be no redemptive struggle and therefore no real liftoff. The catch, of course, is that we must become kind, patient, meek, forgiving, and charitable. We must walk the low road of salvation, the one populated by spiritual weaklings. Providentially, Christ walks this road as well.

As far as I can tell, nothing in the scriptures holds the Lord’s Church up as a problem-free refuge from the storm. When peace and goodwill do prevail, it is always under threat, and much of scriptural history is marked by difficulty and strife within the Church. That is, among fellow believers following the same prophet and worshipping, ostensibly at least, the same God. Think of the children of Israel waywardly following Moses while journeying back to the land of their inheritance. Or the so-called Nephite cycle of righteousness and prosperity followed by pride-fueled wickedness and misery. Or Paul’s epistles, many of which address contentions and misunderstandings among fellow converts. Or sections of the Doctrine and Covenants wherein the Lord admonishes and reproves individual members of the Church, Joseph Smith included. Or the twenty-first century Church, some of whose members fall into inactivity or withdraw their membership after having decided that the Church is on the wrong side of some political or social issue.

But to affirm what should be obvious from even a cursory study of the scriptures, the Church as an organization—a group of relatively like-minded persons—is neither wholly divine nor wholly human. It is a mix of both, and with good reason: it is a place where the life-awakening, salvation-giving opposition-in-all-things that Lehi spoke of is often felt most acutely. In the middle of this opposition there may be a vast difference between what is and what one yearns for (and perhaps even deserves). In the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants, incongruities of this sort are described as “contradictions,” the prototypical instance of which was Christ’s suffering.[2] Pure, innocent, and fully undeserving of punishment and pain, he suffered on our behalf. By this ordeal he descended below all things but then ascended above them (see Doctrine and Covenants 122:8; Ephesians 4:6–10). His exaltation was born of abject humiliation, something that would not have happened had he opted out of the contradictions that awaited him.

In lesser measure, humans may experience contradictions that entail excruciating pain, or pain that has the capacity to nail its bearer to a cross after the manner of Christ’s crucifixion.[3] In his vision of the spirit world, Joseph F. Smith saw those “who had offered sacrifice in the similitude of the great sacrifice of the Son of God, and had suffered tribulation in their Redeemer’s name” (Doctrine and Covenants 138:13). Joseph Smith taught that we must be tested as Abraham was, who was promised endless posterity but whose aged wife Sarah was childless.[4] And then, some years after Sarah miraculously delivered Isaac, Abraham was commanded to sacrifice him. The contradiction between the promise and its seeming nonfulfillment, and then the fulfilled promise and the commandment to sacrifice, must have been excruciating.

Seen this way, as an institution that may “require the sacrifice of all things,”[5] the Church supplies the contradictory circumstances that enable our exaltation. Its saving ordinances promise us every good thing, but the promise appears contradictory in the light, or darkness, of the human imperfection in which it is embedded. This contradiction may then morph into the agony of divine abandonment—God’s apparent indifference to our pleas.[6] The result is a contradiction or small-scale crucifixion that may, if we let it, break us open to larger understanding.

I believe that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a divine coincidence of opposites and therefore a very good place to be stretched heavenward while wrestling with human imperfection and God’s silence. To go to church is to put oneself in an environment of lofty ideals and flawed, often-less-than-lofty people—people who embody the opposition-in-all-things tensions that structure existence. C. S. Lewis noted that religious believers simultaneously shape up as bad and good: bad because every one of us needs to repent, good because only good people can repent.[7] Hence, it is not as if some members are untouched by evil while others constitute the problem of evil. We are all part of the problem and potentially part of the solution—unless, by refusing to repent, we opt out of the growth-generating contradictions that await us.

If things were simply a matter of separating good people from bad people, the contradiction would not be nearly so acute. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed, however, the line dividing good and evil runs through the heart of every individual.[8] That line is not just “out there” in the world; it is who we are. “All human beings, as we meet them,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “are commingled out of good and evil.”[9] And that commingling goes back to the beginning. When Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the fruit became part of their flesh and awoke within them new sensibilities and inclinations, some of which pointed toward sin. Thankfully, however, the Lord gave them principles whereby their struggle against sin could redound to their exaltation. No strain, no gain—and evil, our own and that of others, is what we strain against. As we strive to love those we presently hate or dislike, we become confident, lovely, loving persons and thereby fit ourselves for a better world. The sin that was once our stumbling block becomes our stepping stone. This is the seed-like good that is hidden up in evil. It is also the celestial genius of the plan of salvation, a plan that finds ready realization in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

An Ark of Salvation

When I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, my favorite religion professor was Rodney Turner. Unlike some others, Turner was not all sweetness and light. He clearly loved the gospel but often opined that Latter-day Saints, a people blessed with immense spiritual wealth, were not remarkably different from others outside of the Church. When we get ill, he stated, we generally first put our faith in modern medicine and then, failing an effective remedy, ask for a priesthood blessing. He felt also that some students were always pushing the envelope of the BYU Honor Code and from time to time the code was modified to accommodate the pressure. These negative assessments were not always well received by class members, and perhaps for that reason, Turner was not (as I recall) an extremely popular professor. I, however, enjoyed both his incisive explanations of gospel principles and his slightly negative commentary on Latter-day Saint culture. To me it was all very inspiring.

One day in class Turner made the following blockbuster claim: “Most of the members of this church will not get within telescopic sight of the celestial kingdom.” Again, I found this statement inspiring, and it has stuck with me for over half a century. It speaks to the magnificent difficulty of the quest we’ve undertaken. But I don’t believe it’s true, at least not in the long run. If God’s highest aim is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39), who among us is in a position to question God’s ability to do just that? Of course we must do our part, and that means remaining teachable and softhearted. Then God can continue to work with us, as a potter works with clay, for however long it takes. He is supremely patient. As Isaiah wrote, “And therefore will the Lord wait, that he may be gracious unto you” (Isaiah 30:18).

It may take a long time because, to borrow a line from one of Oscar Wilde’s plays, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”[10] There is nothing wrong with being in the gutter; it is the lowly circumstance of mortality. But except for astronomers, who makes it a practice to regularly peer into the starry heavens? Once the night sky was regarded as divine.[11] The stars were higher worlds prefiguring our own radiant destiny after mortality’s sunset. For many people now, however, belief in life after death seems quaint, a throwback to a now-discarded worldview. The real business of life, they insist, has nothing to do with the stars and everything to do with the opportunities, crises, and calamities that sweep the earth. Stars are no more relevant to one’s eternal destiny than saving ordinances, another relic of a bygone age.

What gets lost in this tendency to write stars and saving ordinances out of the story of humankind is Lehi’s teaching that light and darkness exist in opposition to one another. Each throws the other into relief. But for darkness we would never see points of light in the night sky and never contemplate their nature and meaning. Nor would we marvel at the bright, color-saturated world that comes into being at sunrise. With no alternation between day and night (with just day or night), life as we presently know it would lose much of its spiritual tension.

To some degree, in my opinion, this has already happened: by reason of their supposed irrelevance to our earthly concerns, stars for most people no longer suggest deliverance from the gutter. And certainly, something similar has happened following the widespread dismissal of saving ordinances. The worldview we live in is flatter, having lost significant tension in its light-dark, good-evil polarity. As a culture, we are no longer stretched heavenward.

We are as big or as small as our worldviews. If we believe that life emerged from random processes and that it ends at physical death, we live within a pretty small story. Some will say, Yes, a pretty small story—but a realistic one, given that no scientific evidence exists for life after death, nor for a universe purposefully designed to bring forth life. There are problems with this response, however. One is that science is not an impartial arbiter of truth. It has its own metaphysical commitments, one of which is to explain nature without bringing God, or any whiff of God, into the explanation. This is not a knock against science, just an acknowledgment of its methodology and discourse. Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate physicist, wrote that “the only way that any sort of science can proceed is to assume that there is no divine intervention and to see how far one can get with this assumption.”[12] Some years ago, Sidney Harris published a cartoon portraying a physicist writing equations on a blackboard, in the middle of which he had written “then a miracle occurs” at a particularly difficult step.[13] Here, the cartoon physicist violated the rules of science. While miracles, or miraculous beings, can be invoked as explanatory factors in religion, they are barred from performing such service in science.

Scientific findings, in brief, come with human fingerprints, one of which is a commitment to leave supernatural agencies out of the explanatory picture. This exclusion, however, leaves a void, which in modern science is filled by random events. Something must have propelled the universe across eons of evolutionary history—all the way from the big bang singularity to our present state of wheeling galaxies and life on earth—and random events are the engine of choice. Their mindlessness, after all, coincides with the supposed mindlessness of the evolutionary process, and so they affirm the basic premise of blind chance.

I have nothing against randomness. In fact, I find it fascinating. Scratch the surface of randomness, though, and you’ll probably find that you know less about it than you thought. What at first appears random may in time prove nonrandom and goal-oriented, and in the meanwhile, it may be impossible to discriminate between the two.[14] Like a couplet that doesn’t rhyme or register until the last word, or a melody that remains up for grabs for the first few tones, the universe may be on its way to something other than random or entropic dissolution. It may not be, of course, but in the meantime we are here as purposive, goal-oriented beings. Something in the blind evolutionary process (so assumed) seems to have rhymed and lifted the process above random apathy.

I believe Lehi would say this is another instance of opposition in all things. Randomness and order, blind meandering and purposeful action, exist in complementary interface. Mary Midgley observed that a great deal of orderly thought informs events that people trust as random: slot machines are engineered and some mathematical formulas for creating random outcomes are believed to be better than others.[15] In these cases, randomness is the product of human intelligence, not the other way around. Midgley also points out that chance and order each makes sense (acquires meaning) in light of one another, so it is not as if everything can be reduced to chance happenings. If we persisted in thinking that blind chance lies at the bottom of everything, it seems to me, nothing would make any sense whatsoever. For example, if fossils left by dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures were explained as random confluences of forces and elements, there would be no science of paleontology. As we understand them, fossils are signs or evidence of dead organisms. They mean something. When Robinson Crusoe discovered a footprint that was not his own on the beach of the island on which he was shipwrecked, he did not suppose it to be a meaningless configuration of sand that just happened to resemble a human footprint. He knew immediately that another person lived on the island. If we were to explain away everything as a random happening, we would have no foundation from which to build an understanding of the world.

More to the religious point at hand, though, without an opportunity to reach upward despite our lowly circumstance, how much spiritual tension can there be in our lives? Our highest desire may be to visit Hawaii or own a yacht, goals hardly lofty enough to put us on a life-stretching, soul-transforming, Abrahamic rack of sacrifice. This rack, however, is what we need if, during extremity, we are to experience God’s rescuing love at a time of his choosing.

We find everything we need—the good, the bad, and the heavenly—in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Church is an ark of salvation because it proffers saving ordinances in an imperfect, earthbound setting that puts us far away from heaven—so far away, in fact, that we might suppose that we will never get within telescopic sight of the celestial kingdom.

Consider, however, the night that Jacob spent while journeying back to Caanan after several years’ absence. Apprehensive about his return—afraid that his brother Esau was still angry with him and wished him harm—Jacob took a stone for a pillow and fell asleep, whereupon he saw in a dream a ladder stretched down from heaven, with “angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12). The Lord then stood above the ladder and renewed the covenant made with Abraham, Jacob’s grandfather. If faithful, Jacob’s seed would possess the land promised to Abraham and be as “the dust of the earth,” immensely numerous and widely scattered for good among “the families of the earth” (Genesis 28:14). When Jacob awoke, he built an altar to God using the stone that had been his pillow. After consecrating the altar with oil, he changed the name of his campsite to Bethel, meaning “house of God.”

While the heaven-earth ladder is the central feature of the story, the stone pillow bespeaks the hard ground of Jacob’s life—but then becomes a consecrated altar. And the dust of the earth signifying the innumerability of Jacob’s seed is a mundane variation on the stars of the sky that Abraham saw when receiving his promise of endless progeny (see Genesis 15:5). Thanks to heaven-earth traffic (angels ascending and descending the ladder) and God’s delight in exalting the humble in surprising ways, we stand a better chance of being lifted up than we might suppose—if we remain faithful and humble. Granted, we climb the ladder of salvation weighed down by our imperfections, but that struggle refines and strengthens us. Further, we come to know the amazing contradiction at the heart of reality—that a perfect God who created the universe suffers for imperfect sinners—whereupon our hearts, like Enoch’s, swell “wide as eternity” (Moses 7:41).

This is what we miss if we opt for a life exclusively keyed to the here and now, the latest news cycle and the fads, fashions, and politics that leave God out of the big picture. Or, said more correctly, if we fail even to suspect a big picture in which God’s strength and “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). God not only rescues us in our weakness and helplessness, but he often does so by weak means.

Weak Means

What is the difference between the people who followed and mingled with Jesus and the Pharisees who opposed him? This question was once posed in my ward Sunday School class. The short answer, in my mind, is that those who gathered around Jesus knew they were sinners, while some Pharisees didn’t. The New Testament gospels throw this point into high relief by portraying those on the margins of society as the people most likely to win Christ’s commendation and forgiveness. The poor, the outcast, those fully conscious of their failings, were more likely to acknowledge their weakness and seek God’s help than those whose wealth and social status engendered a false sense of God’s approbation.

Modern society is no different: the opposition or difference between good and bad is not always clearly seen. If we have money, we tend to avoid the poor—their neighborhoods and hangouts—and those with addictions that blight their lives and consign them to the fringes of mainstream society. Perhaps we do not identify them as sinners as certain Pharisees did, but we may feel they have little to offer, given their socially failed circumstance. But I sometimes wonder if the spirit of God is not thriving in their midst just as it was in Jesus’s day. What holds them back are addictions and inclinations they can’t quite throw off.

My wife Janet and I have known people like this, good people whom God loves but who struggle mightily with bad habits and a keen sense of inadequacy before other people and God. To our surprise, they may be welcomed first into the kingdom of heaven, in striking illustration of the gospel maxim that the first shall be last and the last first (Matthew 20:16). God, I believe, is a God of miracles, and it is well known that he loves and suffers with the poor, the hungry, the sick, the incarcerated, and the dispossessed, “the least of these my brethren [and sisters]” (Matthew 25:40).

When Janet and I lived in Salt Lake City about a year after we married, I struggled to find a good job. Because we had a tiny baby and Janet was expecting another, I eventually started picking up work at the state temporary employment center. These were short-term jobs that paid minimum wage for physical labor. The good thing was that the work was pretty steady; if you weren’t picky, you could nearly always get a job that would last for a day or two, and sometimes for a week. Early on I met a fellow worker who introduced himself as Jack, and then added, “I’m just an old hobo from Louisiana.” He really wasn’t very old, maybe 35, and I didn’t ask why he called himself a hobo. He certainly didn’t fit my image of one. As I got to know him, I admired him for his many positive qualities. He worked hard and he easily had the brightest, most friendly personality of any of the workers. Everyone liked him. Further, when on one occasion an employee in the temporary job center lied to an applicant about a job, among those of us who heard the lie, he alone stood up and called out the employee. He had a strong sense of right and wrong and wasn’t afraid to act on it.

One Saturday in October 1975, several of us were working in a big furniture store rearranging the layout. We quit for lunch and found ourselves in a room where a television was broadcasting general conference. As we watched, Spencer W. Kimball was sustained as the prophet of the Church. Jack spoke up, saying that his favorite prophet was David O. McKay. He wasn’t a member of the Church, but he had passed through Salt Lake City often enough that he knew the Church had prophets, and I marveled at the ease with which he brought up the topic and expressed at some length his affection for David O. McKay. In a surprising reversal of what perhaps should have happened, he offered a simple testimony of President McKay while I, an active member of the Church, said nothing.

A couple of weeks later Jack failed to show up on Monday morning for a job we were working on together. When he failed to show up again on Tuesday, I assumed he had left town or found other work. But Wednesday morning he was there, and I asked him if he had been ill. No, he said, he had simply gone to the liquor store over the weekend and hadn’t recovered from his hangover till Wednesday. Then I remembered his introduction: “I’m just an old hobo from Louisiana.” Notwithstanding all his stellar qualities, his life had been blighted by alcoholism, though in many ways he was still doing the work of the Lord below the radar of public recognition.

Fast forward nine years. My job search had led me into the US Army, and we were living in Nuremberg, Germany. We had five kids and were very busy with work and family. One three-day weekend Janet and I drove to the Bern Switzerland Temple, leaving our four older children with friends but taking Melissa, our two-year-old daughter, to be babysat while we were in the temple. On the way home, our car broke down in Stuttgart, Germany, and by the time we were able to get it towed to Patch Barracks, the closest US Army installation, it was nearly midnight. Because we had no place to spend the night, I asked the military policeman at the front gate to ask the officer on call to see if there were a spare room on post where an active-duty soldier and his two dependents could catch a few hours of sleep. After time away on the phone, the policeman explained that there was no room on post but that he had called a German Gasthaus (hotel) and arranged for us to rent a room for the night. The Gasthaus was just a couple blocks away, and the night manager would be awaiting our arrival, he said.

By the time we got to the Gasthaus, it was midnight, and to our chagrin, our knock at the door went unanswered. We realized that either the military policeman had lied to us or the Gasthaus manager had lied to him, and given my experience with military red tape, I knew it would be fruitless to return to the post. The US Army is a multibillion-dollar organization, but it wasn’t able to help a small family in need, in part I think because I was an enlisted man (staff sergeant), not a high-ranking commissioned officer. The month was October and there was a chill in the air. We weren’t dressed to spend the night out of doors, and we were particularly worried about Melissa. We couldn’t even spend the night in our car—it was locked in a garage on post. I remember thinking, “Something’s got to happen,” and at that moment a man came walking down a nearby sidewalk. He called out to us in German, and we explained our situation. He told us to get in his car, and as he started driving, we realized that this man was drunk. Nevertheless, feeling we had no other option, we let him take us to a high-rise apartment building, where we took the elevator up to his apartment. He awoke his wife and explained our predicament, whereupon they vacated their bedroom, moved into a smaller bedroom, and gave us their bed. Given that we were perfect strangers, their hospitality was extraordinary.

In the morning we became better acquainted with Bernard and Annika as they shared their breakfast with us. I thought it unusual that Bernard drank beer for breakfast, but he, perhaps noticing my surprise, explained that beer was nonaddictive and harmless owing to its relatively low alcohol content. After breakfast he drove us to the train station, where Janet and Melissa caught a train home to Nuremberg, about 120 miles away. I stayed on to see to the car repairs on Monday, hoping to drive the car home that day.

For two days, Saturday and Sunday, Bernard and I got to know each other. He treated me as if I were his best friend and I did my best to reciprocate. He introduced me to his mother and his daughter, Sabine, who was about the same age as our oldest children. But we never went far from his apartment because he had to visit a nearby bar every few hours. He and his drinking buddies had a dedicated table (Stammtisch) where they talked and laughed while slaking their thirst for beer. All the same, we became good friends, and after I went back to Nuremberg, our families got together on at least two occasions for fun and food.

After we rotated back to the states, we rarely heard from Bernard and Annika. But then we got a letter detailing his untimely death. After he and Annika divorced, he took a separate apartment and evidently drank himself into a stupor from which he could not recover. The postman noticed his mail piling up and, not getting an answer when he knocked at the door, contacted the police, who found him dead. It wasn’t a happy ending to a good life, albeit one blighted by alcohol. What I always sensed about Bernard was his need for friendship, and it seemed to me that his beer drinking mitigated some deep loneliness and insecurity. He was always on the lookout for new friends, and when he saw Janet, Melissa, and me standing in the dark that cold October night, he called out to us. I’m not sure someone less needy would have bothered. In his weakness he came to our rescue.

A Drop of Pity

Some years ago I assisted the full-time missionaries in presenting a lesson to a woman they were teaching. Before we could get very far into the lesson, the woman remarked that she knew many Latter-day Saints who led lives contrary to the teachings of the Church. Her point was that some Latter-day Saints are hypocrites, and one ought to think twice about joining a church whose ranks are filled with hypocrites. My response was that I was probably the biggest hypocrite I know. I fall short of gospel perfection in many ways. All the same, I hope and believe that God can rescue even me.

This book is about kindness to self and others—even those whose responsibility it is to instruct and lead us. When I was a young missionary, my companion and I rented a basement apartment from a middle-aged couple who lived upstairs. Although she was an active member of the Church, he had decided not to affiliate with the Church. What I found interesting was his reason for declining the invitation to be baptized after taking the missionary discussions several years earlier. He said that when he attended sacrament meeting, the bishop and his counselors were clearly ill suited for the responsibility they bore. Not that they were bad men—they were obviously good men trying their best—but they sometimes hemmed and hawed or otherwise misspoke while conducting the meeting. One even wore white socks. Our landlord, a highly regarded businessman in the community, couldn’t get past his initial poor impression of the bishopric. Said another way, he couldn’t empathize with three men who were doing something not because they were paid but simply because they had been asked to serve.

A few years later as newlyweds my wife and I lived for a summer in Chicago. We attended the local ward, but for me Sunday School class was a trial. I felt the teacher was uninspiring and way too jokey. I was sure I could do better and even considered talking to the bishop about the teacher’s poor performance. Fortunately, I never did so and shortly thereafter we returned to Utah. In the course of time, I was called as a Sunday School teacher. I don’t remember what I taught, but one thing I learned is that it is very hard to be a good teacher. More importantly, I learned empathy for the Sunday School teacher in Chicago. Although I have no personal association with him and I’m sure he doesn’t remember me, he is to this day my friend and fellow traveler in the Church.

A little empathy, born of similar or shared responsibility, goes a long way toward defusing the anger we may feel toward a Church leader or teacher. It is always easy to sit in the bleachers and take potshots. In fact, it seems to me it is almost human nature. When I taught at BYU, I overheard many locker room conversations analyzing football and basketball game losses. If only the coach had adopted this strategy or made that substitution at a decisive moment, BYU would have won the game. But, of course, hindsight is 20/20, and critics often speak after the fact.

What is more, critics are often removed from the action, which makes it easy for them to imagine that they could outperform athletes on the playing field. Many sports fans are armchair enthusiasts reliving and perhaps amplifying their glory days in high school, an indulgence that seems to give them license to criticize far superior athletes who are, in the heat of the moment, exhausted and pained. Sports fans can be merciless, simply because while they are deeply invested in the game, they are not actually in the game but merely on the sidelines. They are spectators, not participants, and real life and real-life understanding presuppose participation.

Recall Teddy Roosevelt’s rebuke of the nonparticipating critic: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds.”[16]

Which brings us back to the Church and criticism of those in the Church-service arena. Owing to the human element, there is always plenty to criticize, for it is human nature to err. God’s intent, I believe, is to give us opportunities for growth through trial-and-error service. He does not cancel our choices by telling us what to do every minute of the day, and when he does prompt us, it is generally just that—a gentle nudge or whisper that we may choose to ignore. Spiritual promptings are part of the growth process; they do not override our agency and they are not permanent proof against error. We may slip from grace and then regain it. That is called repentance, and as Church leaders have taught, repentance is the engine of spiritual growth.

We should fully expect all members of the Church to make mistakes and practice repentance, for every one of us is (or should be) on a path of growth.[17] This is the very purpose and meaning of earth life: we are here to grow and learn, which implies opposition and familiarity with evil—and evil, as we work hard to overcome it, brings about the growth we seek. To taste goodness, we must also taste evil and then embrace goodness as our way of life. This is how potential goodness, untested and unrealized, becomes real and living.

There is more, however. Along with good and evil, there is the heavenly, which distills upon our souls as we persevere in goodness at all costs. Empathy for others—that is, charity—is the vital virtue in this process. It performs its perfect work as we forgive others for being just like us—imperfect. Moroni defines charity as “the pure love of Christ” and adds that “whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall well with him” (Moroni 7:47).

If there is a shortcut to heaven, a rip in the fabric of perfunctory obedience to God’s commands, it is charity. Is the “pure love of Christ” love for Christ or the love that Christ has for all creation, his Father included? I submit that it is both. It is the synergistic blending of the two great commandments (love of God and love of others) that unlocks the powers of heaven no less than nuclear fusion unlocks the power of the atom. Little wonder Moroni closes his sermon on charity by admonishing us to pray to our Heavenly Father “with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love,” for the blessing of charity gives us deep identity with Jesus Christ, the one fully deserving of exaltation. “When he [Christ] shall appear we shall be like him,” writes Moroni, having purified ourselves “even as he is pure” (Moroni 7:48).

We live in a world shot through with the possibility of error and misjudgment. This, I believe, is exactly the kind of world where we can, to our eternal profit, learn the pure love of Christ. This is not a world in which there is a right answer to every ideological or intellectual question, but rather a living laboratory for the development of kindness, forgiveness, empathy, and charity. Generally when two people argue, each is partly right and partly wrong. Each is shaped differently by their own experiences and therefore each sees the issue from a different angle. The Lord does not hold us accountable for our differences of opinion, but he does condemn those who dogmatically refuse to understand others. Such refusal cripples the imagination and short-circuits the childlike impulse to grow and learn.

Moreover, the world’s intrinsic uncertainty puts us all in the same category. We are all alike in that no one can prove, to the satisfaction of everyone else, much of anything. Who, for example, is the best basketball player of all time—Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, or somebody else? The question is fun to debate but impossible to get consensus on. But at least those who do debate it generally do so with the understanding that my opinion is just one of several, none of which ultimately decide the question, because there are too many subjective factors. When we move to social and political issues, however, this appreciation of the human element, the part of us that accounts for our irreducible differences and keeps you from being just like me, often gets forgotten. More and more in recent years, it seems to me, we want others to be just like us, or to have no say whatsoever in the deliberative process.

Even when we are right or mostly right in our ideological or intellectual opinions, we err when we express them dogmatically and contentiously. Evil is often good distorted to a bad purpose, and only the devil wins when we use our superior understanding to humiliate an opponent. Given its light-and-dark composition, this world is not fitted to the unequivocal determination of ideological or intellectual truth: it is a shadowland marked by uncertainty and ambiguity. This intrinsic uncertainty is, however, the world’s primordial intrigue and saving grace, for lacking a firm foundation of intellectual truth to stand on, we must learn to lean on and help one another. A singular paradox of mortality is that the supposedly firm ground of secular truth collapses under the weight of human argument while seemingly insubstantial religious principles like charity buoy us up amid life’s difficulties. We sink when we are full of ourselves and stay afloat by thinking kindly of others.

Growing up I heard that bumblebees can’t fly—their wings are too tiny to get their big, heavy bodies off the ground. But I knew this wasn’t true because I saw bumblebees flying all the time. The response to this contradiction was that since bumblebees don’t know they can’t fly, they just fly. This makes no sense scientifically, but it contains an element of moral truth. Sometimes miracles of mutual understanding occur when we subtract ourselves from the equation, when we drop our determination to win the argument and just let things happen, notwithstanding our knowledge of what supposedly can or can’t happen.

Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian well acquainted with scholarly argument, wrote that “one drop of pity is enough to lift our doing beyond intellectual distinctions.”[18] I see this book as a drop of pity (or a gesture toward such) and hope it will echo gospel truths that melt away sharp intellectual, political, and cultural distinctions. Diversity, of course, can cut both ways, toward enmity and alienation based on difference or toward celebration of differences and the realization that despite our differences, we are all alike and traveling the same path, susceptible to the same hurts and healings. Hence the golden rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—a maxim that seems almost forgotten these days. For many, the fashionable new doctrine of self-compassion is more appealing than the age-old doctrine of compassion for others. I suggest, however, that the two doctrines are a single package. If we wish to be kind to ourselves, we must first learn to be kind to others who may not share our views, both in and out of the Church.

Notes

[1] Jeremy L. Sabella, An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2017), 136.

[2] Doctrine and Covenants, 1835, p. 53, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/.

[3] John Taylor stated: “I heard the Prophet Joseph say, in speaking to the Twelve on one occasion: ‘You will have all kinds of trial to pass through. And it is quite as necessary for you to be tried as it was for Abraham and other men of God, and (said he) God will feel after you, and He will take hold of you and wrench your very heart strings, and if you cannot stand it you will not be fit for an inheritance in the Celestial Kingdom of God.’” Journal of Discourses (London: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1884), 24:197.

[4] See Larry E. Dahl, “The Abrahamic Test,” The Old Testament, Sperry Symposium Classics (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 83–99.

[5] Lectures on Faith states, “Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things, never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.” Doctrine and Covenants, 1835, p. 60, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/.

[6] See, for example, Joseph Smith’s plea in the opening verses of Doctrine and Covenants 121.

[7] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 38–39.

[8] Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, trans. Thomas P. Whitney, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, n.d.), 168.

[9] Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 112, https://www.google.com/books/.

[10] Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan (Boston and London: John W. Luce & Co., 1906), 56, https://books.google.com/books/.

[11] Plato characterized the starry circuitry as “a moving image of eternity.” Timaeus, 37d. He meant that study of the stars unlocks the rational faculties and propels the mind beyond the physical cosmos into an unseen, unchanging world of eternal truth. Put differently, human intelligence drafts on the circuits of intelligence in the heavens: by the time we began to investigate the starry sky—to reduce it to rule and pattern—the honest regularity of its motion had already patterned our thinking. Other examples of the night sky’s impact on premodern thought could be given, but I leave with Claudius Ptolemy’s tribute: “I know that I am a mortal living but a day. / But when I search for the numerous spiral turnings of the stars / I no longer have my feet on the Earth, but am beside Zeus himself, / filling myself with god-nurturing ambrosia.” Quoted as an introductory epigraph in Liba Chaia Taub’s Ptolemy’s Universe: The Natural and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy’s Astronomy (Chicago: Open Court, 1993).

[12] Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 247.

[13] “Then a Miracle Occurs,” Science Cartoons Plus; reprinted in Michael J. Wade, “From Ockham’s Razor to Rube Goldberg: Don’t Rely on Forensic Age-Dating Miracles,” Environmental Forensics 17, no. 2 (April 2016):131–135, https://www.researchgate.net/.

[14] A case in point is the quest to determine whether the decimal expansion of pi is random. Is it a meaningless (random) string of unending digits, or does it express a yet undiscovered pattern? The “sequence of digits . . . looks like gibberish,” remarks Gregory Chudnovsky, a Russian-American mathematician who, along with his brother David, has spent years exploring pi. But looks may be deceiving, he adds, for pi is a “good fake of a random number. I just wish it were not as good a fake.” He speculates that it may be “a powerful random-number generator,” an algorithm for keeping the quest for pattern and meaning alive. Richard Preston, “The Mountains of Pi,” New Yorker, March 2, 1992, 36–67. So it may be, as Friedrich von Schiller wrote, that there “is no such thing as chance and what we regard as blind circumstance actually stems from the deepest source of all.” Wallensteins Tod [The Death of Wallenstein] (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell), 186, quoted in Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J. Dunne, Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (Princeton, NJ: ICRL Press, 1987), 86.

[15] Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 43–50.

[16] Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” American Presidency Project, April 23, 1910, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-sorbonne-paris-france-citizenship-republic.

[17] “We are not infallible in our judgment,” stated J. Reuben Clark, speaking of Church leaders. “And we err, but our constant prayer is that the Lord will guide us in our decisions, and we are trying so to live that our minds will be open to His inspiration.” J. Reuben Clark Jr., Church News, July 1954, 8, quoted in “Are Prophets Infallible? Statements by Church Leaders,” https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/.

[18] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 212.