Justice and Inclusion: From Isaiah’s Pen to our Eyes and Ears

[Cross-posted to Religious Socialism. A version of this post originally appeared on By Common Consent]

Back in 2014, I embarked on a read of the complete Old Testament, with a close focus on the text. It took me two-and-a-half years to finish, and my insights along the way were hugely important to the way I have come to think about scripture and what it has to say about my life. Last year, I decided to repeat that read, because Robert Alter, whose translations of various books were central to my first journey through the text, had finally finished his edition of the entire Hebrew Bible, and wanted his poetic sensibility and commentary to guide me through what I’d missed before. Of those missing parts, none were more important than Isaiah (the image here is Marc Chagall’s surrealist interpretation of Isaiah 6:6, when one of God’s seraphim descends from heaven and touches the prophet’s lips with a burning coal taken from God’s altar, thereby cleansing his lips and calling him to reveal God’s will).

The Book of Isaiah has, of course, been heavily proof-texted and read selectively by Christians for centuries. No other set of Hebrew poetic and prophetic texts that made their way into the canonical Old Testament have had as massive an impact on how Christians, from ancient to modern times, articulated the faith which the recorded statements of Jesus and the accounts and letters of his early followers inspired. It’s not just that Jesus himself is shown in the Christian Gospels to be quoting from or referencing Isaiah more than any other older text besides the Psalms; it’s that Christianity’s entire cultural and theological approach to and interpretation of Jesus’ message and meaning comes through a heavily Isaian lens–the language of Handel’s Messiah being just the most obvious example. (And with the commemoration of the Messiah’s birth just a couple of days away, this seems like a good time to revisit the text.)

Separating myself as a reader from that inheritance was no easy feat, and I can’t say I was entirely successful. Thanks to Alter’s translation, however, a couple of key ideas were made profoundly clear to me. First, that from its beginning, the book of Isaiah–far more than those associated with any of the other Hebrew prophets–is a text that presents calls to social justice on the same level as its condemnations of the cultic failures and ritual sins of Israel. Isaiah 1:14-17 sets the theme for the entire text, with its explicit condemnation of those who hypocritically attend outwardly to religious duties but ignore the needs of those who are part of that same religious community. As Alter renders it:

Your new moons and your appointed times I utterly despise. / They have become a burden to me, I cannot bear them. / And when you spread your palms, I avert My eyes from you. / Though you abundantly pray, I do not listen. Your hands are full of blood. / Wash, become pure. Remove your evil acts from My eyes. Cease doing evil. / Learn to do good, seek justice. / Make the oppressed happy, defend the orphan, argue the widow’s case.

The text of Isaiah regularly connects the evil that must end if the orphan is to be defended with the accumulation of wealth itself, entirely aside from whatever charitable purposes to which such wealth might be set. Growth itself, in a society where land had been–at least insofar as the legends of the Israeli conquest of Palestine suggested to those living in the 7th century BCE, the like era of the author(s) of Isaiah–distributed to every family as an inheritance, risks great evil:

Woe, who add house to house, who put field together with field till there is no space left, and you alone are settled, in the heart of the land. / In the hearing of the Lord of Armies: I swear, many houses shall turn to ruin, great and good ones with none living in them (Isaiah 5:8-9).

Of course, in today’s globalized and financialized economy, far more shaped as it is by speculative, debt-financed, corporate-dominated exchanges of information and images than by productive, non-alienated, land-based labor, such warnings about growth might be easy to dismiss as limited to the agrarian world of ancient Israel. Still, perhaps the pastoral and anti-urban context from which such beautiful visions and invocations of God’s justice were articulated ought to be recognized as potentially inseparable from the repentance that these prophet-authors called for as well, which in turn might suggest hard questions for leftists like myself to struggle with as we contemplate our responses to capitalist accumulation and industrial growth. Consider Isaiah 32: 13-20:

On My people’s soil thorn and thistle shall spring up / for on all the houses of revelry, the merrymaking town, / the villa is abandoned, the town’s hubbub left behind. / The citadel and the tower become bare places for all time, / wild asses’ revelry, pasture for the flocks. / Till a spirit is poured on us from above, and the desert turns to farmland and farmland is reckoned as forest / And justice abides in the desert, and righteousness dwells in the farmland. / And the doing of righteousness shall be peace, and the work of righteousness, safe and quiet forever. / And My people shall swell in abodes of peace, in safe dwellings and tranquil places of rest. / And it shall come down as the forest comes down, and in the lowland the town shall come low. / Happy, you who sow near all waters, who let loose the ox and the donkey.

Pastoral visions like this naturally generate all the usual individualistic reactions–start associating God’s promises with some kind of communitarian ideal, and the next thing you know everyone’s on the hunt to drive out the dissidents, the foreigners, and anyone else who is seen as not fitting in with the community. To be sure, there’s no way to discern honestly in the Isaian voice any kind of validation of liberal concerns; it just isn’t there. Isaiah is concerned with God’s covenant with the descendants of Israel; that is undeniable. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, another concern is there–a concern I’d never noticed until I read Alter’s translation. It is the degree to which the prophecies in the book of Isaiah reflect the Mosaic insistence upon respect for, and even the inclusion of, the stranger–including strangers whose lives (including, at least on the basis of one reading, their sexual lives) might seem to exist in opposition to the mandates of Israel’s faith:

And let not the foreigner say, who joins the Lord, saying / ‘The Lord has kept me apart from his people,’ nor let the eunuch say, ‘Why, I am a withered tree.’ / For thus said the Lord: Of the eunuchs who keep My sabbath, / and choose what I desire and hold fast to My covenant, / I will give them in My house and within My walls a marker and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name will I give them that shall not be cut off…./ For My house a house of prayer shall be called for all the peoples (Isaiah 56:3-5, 7).

Note those final three words. At a time of year when most of us are surrounded with presentations of these prophetic calls in entirely predictive, Christological contexts, it is good to remember that this kind of almost-if-not-quite-entirely universalist sentiment can be found frequently throughout text of Isaiah--especially in the later, so-called Second Isaiah sections--entirely apart from the Christian gloss generally (however sincerely, or even, perhaps, arguably legitimately) placed upon it. That leftists like me can learn from the Hebrew prophets is hardly a new insight, but this year, thanks to Alter’s help, I appreciated the reminder.

Thoughts on Reading (and Being Surprised by) Isaiah

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Back in 2014, I embarked on a read of the complete Old Testament, with a close focus on the text. It took me two-and-a-half years to finish, and my insights along the way were hugely important to the way I have come to think about scripture and what it has to say about my life. Last year I decided to repeat that read, since Robert Alter, whose translations of various books were central to my first journey through the Old Testament, had finally finished his edition of the entire Hebrew Bible, and wanted his poetic sensibility and commentary to guide me through what I'd missed before. Of those missing parts, none were more important than Isaiah (the image here is Marc Chagall's surrealist interpretation of Isaiah 6:6, when one of God's seraphim descends from heaven, touches the prophet's lips with a burning coal taken from God's altar, cleansing his lips and calling him to reveal God's will).

The centralized Sunday school schedule followed by the Mormon church around the world has only recently finished reading Isaiah; it is a heavily proof-texted and selective approach--but then, Isaiah itself has been heavily proof-texted and read selectively by Christians for centuries. No other set of poetic and prophetic texts which made their way into the canonical Old Testament have had a similarly massive impact on how Christians, over all the course of ancient and medieval and even modern Christendom, articulated the faith which the recorded statements of Jesus and the accounts and letters of His early followers inspired. It's not just that Jesus Himself is shown in the New Testament gospels to be quoting from or referencing Isaiah more than any other Old Testament book besides the Psalms; it's that our entire cultural and theological appropriation to and interpretation of Jesus's message and meaning comes to us via a heavily Isaian lens--language of Handel's Messiah being just the most obvious example. And Mormons like me have our own particular doubling-down on this; you can't get a more unambiguous association than the resurrected Jesus explicitly stating in 3 Nephi 23:1 in our Book of Mormon, "great are the words of Isaiah."

That the words of the prophet--or possibly two or even more prophets, spread out over a century, all writing under the name of Isaiah--are great is something I fully agree with. (When I summed up my Old Testament journey before with personal ranking of its books, I put Isaiah in my top ten but near the bottom; now that I've read Alter's translation, I think I need to push him up a few slots.) The poetry of the book is stunning, and frequently arresting, especially for a life-long Christian whose background assumptions include a Christianizing of the language of the Isaian text at such a basic, routine level as to often not even be aware of it. It soars to immense heights, but also digs deep within; it's lovely. For whatever it's worth, I want to share some of what Alter's translated words captured for me--and also push back against Alter is one crucial way, where is deeply informed secular perspective struggles to make sense of something which all us clumsy, pious proof-texters over the millennia might have gotten right after all.

From the beginning, the book of Isaiah is--far more than those associated with any of the other Old Testament prophets--is a text which presents calls to social justice on the same level as its condemnations of the cultic failures and ritual sins of Israel. Isaiah 1:14-17 sets the theme with its explicit comparison of those who hypocritically attend outwardly to religious duties, but ignore the needs of those who are part of that same religious community:

Your new moons and your appointed times I utterly despise. / They have become a burden to me, I cannot bear them. / And when you spread your palms, I avert My eyes from you. / Though you abundantly pray, I do not listen. Your hands are full of blood. / Wash, become pure. Remove your evil acts from My eyes. Cease doing evil. / Learn to do good, seek justice. / Make the oppressed happy, defend the orphan, argue the widow's case.

Importantly, the text of Isaiah regularly connects the evil that must be ceased if the orphan is to be defended with the accumulation of wealth itself, entirely aside form what charitable purposes such wealth might be set to. Growth itself, in a society where land had been--at least insofar as the legends of the Israeli conquest of Palestine suggested to those living in the 7th century BCE--distributed as an inheritance to every family, risks great evil: "Woe, who add house to house, who put field together with field till there is no space left, and you alone are settled, in the heart of the land. / In the hearing of the Lord of Armies: I swear, many houses shall turn to ruin, great and good ones with none living in them" (Isaiah 5:8-9). Of course in today's economy, far more shaped as it is by speculative, debt-financed exchanges of information and images than by productive, land-based work, such warnings about growth might be easy to dismiss as limited to the agrarian world of ancient Israel. That the author(s) of Isaiah were primarily reflective of an agrarian sensibility is undeniable--but perhaps recognizing the pastoral and anti-urban context from which such beautiful visions and invocations of God's justice were articulated ought to be recognized as potentially inseparable from the repentance which this prophet-author called for as well. Consider Isaiah 32: 13-20:

On My people's soil thorn and thistle shall spring up / for on all the houses of revelry, the merrymaking town, / the villa is abandoned, the town's hubbub left behind. / The citadel and the tower become bare places for all time, / wild asses' revelry, pasture for the flocks. / Till a spirit is poured on us from above, and the desert turns to farmland and farmland is reckoned as forest / And justice abides in the desert, and righteousness dwells in the farmland. / And the doing of righteousness shall be peace, and the work of righteousness, safe and quiet forever. / And My people shall swell in abodes of peace, in safe dwellings and tranquil places of rest. / And it shall come down as the forest comes down, and in the lowland the town shall come low. / Happy, you who sow near all waters, who let loose the ox and the donkey.

Pastoral visions like this naturally generate all the usual individualistic reactions--start associating God's promises some kind of communitarian ideal, and the next thing you know everyone's on the hunt to drive out the dissidents, the foreigners, and anyone else who is seen as not fitting in with the community, right? To be sure, there's really no way to honestly discern in the Isaian voice any kind of validation of liberal concerns; it just ain't there. But, perhaps surprisingly, what is there--and which I'd never noticed, until I read Alter's translation--is the degree to which the prophecies in the book of Isaiah reflect the Mosaic insistence upon respect for, even the inclusion of, the stranger--even strangers that live in ways contrary to the community's shared faith. "And let not the foreigner say, who joins the Lord, saying / 'The Lord has kept me apart from his people,' nor let the eunuch say, 'Why, I am a withered tree.' / For thus said the Lord: Of the eunuchs who keep My sabbath, / and choose what I desire and hold fast to My covenant, / I will give them in My house and within My walls a marker and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name will I give them that shall not be cut off..../ For My house a house of prayer shall be called for all the peoples" (Isaiah 56:3-5, 7). These kind of almost-if-not-quite universalist moves appear frequently throughout text (especially in the later, so-called Second Isaiah sections). Of course, that move away from understanding God's revelation solely in terms of a tribal covenant and towards recognizing in it the seeds of a kind of universal love, is, culturally at least, inseparable from Jesus's message in the Sermon of the Mount and elsewhere that God calls us to higher law. And while Alter's presentation of the book of Isaiah is rigorously committed to a secular literary interpretive lens, there comes a point when even he struggles to separate the voice coming through these ancient prophecies from the Christian promise.

It's not the usual suspects; passages like Isaiah 9:5 ("For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us, and leadership is on his shoulders") are pretty obviously--at least in Alter's capable linguistic hands--presented as belonging to 7th-century BCE concerns particular to an Israel longing for an escape from the threats posed by Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. But then you come to Isaiah 53, starting with a powerful question--"Who could believe what we heard, and to whom was the Lord's arm revealed?"--and going from there into a long, unprecedented vision of a Servant, first mentioned in the previous chapter, who redeems Israel through his suffering. Alter, while dismissing the Christian interpretation, to his credit admits that the verses perplex him, suggesting as they do a posthumous restoration of a Servant whose identity--as least insofar as "virtually all serious scholars" are concerned--remains unclear:

Yet he was wounded for our crimes, crushed for our transgressions. / The chastisement that restored our well-being he bore, and through his bruising we were healed. / All of us strayed like sheep, each turned to his own way, / and the Lord brought down on him the crimes of all of us. / Afflicted and tormented, he opened not his mouth. / Like a lamb led to the slaughter and like an ewe mute before her shearers he opened not his mouth. / By oppressive judgment he was taken off, and who can speak of where he lives? / For he was cut off from the land of the living for My people's crime, bearing their blight. / And his grave was put with the wicked, and with evildoers his death, / for no outrage he had done and no deceit in his mouth..../ My servant shall put the righteous in the right for many, and their crimes he shall bear. / Therefore I will give him shares among the many, and with the mighty he shall share out spoils, / for he laid himself bare to death and was counted among the wrongdoers, / and it is he who bore the offense of many and interceded for the wrongdoers (Isaiah 53:5-9, 11-12) 

My reading of the Old Testament over the years has, more than anything else, taught me to think in terms of God's patient, always evolving, always emergent work: the divine power manifest through the inconsistency and inconstancy of we fallen human beings. Such haphazardness, revealing almost against its own grain the loving attendance of the Creator, has come to me to be essential to understanding the whole complicated structure of this ancient, fascinating, maddening collection of texts. What I have come to not expect, by and large, is exactly the sort of thing so many Christians like myself were raised to focus solely upon: proof of the truthfulness of some doctrine or practice or miracle, delivered to us whole, across centuries of time and thousands of editorial interventions (both intentional and unintentional), in the plain words of the text. I'm pretty confident at this point that I'm really not missing much actual spiritual nourishment by discounting pious claims of such. But when a text more than 2500 years old lays out the possibility of resurrection and restoration, one that has barely any connection to what we know about Hebrew thought of the time, and which matches both future texts and the spiritual experiences of hundreds of millions so well? In this case, bring on "All We Like Sheep," says I. I mean, Christmas is on its way, isn't it?

Messages of Gratitude from the Desert (and for it, Sort Of)

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

For years, our family has had a "Thanksgiving Tree" tradition. We write on cut-out leaves something we are thankful for, then hang them on a "tree" of dead branches, and on Thanksgiving Day, we share them all. Since we've saved these leaves over the years, I can look back at mine, and there are several constants. Among other things, it seems that at this time of year I regularly feel gratitude for changing seasons, for frost on the grass, for fall foliage, for the smell of the earth after a November rain. It wouldn't be wrong to sum up one of the main themes of these leaves simply as: I am thankful I don't live in a desert.

Despite the faith community I am a lifelong member of having achieved its first full development on the edge of America's Great Basin Desert, that attitude is, I think, probably somewhat woven into modern Mormonism as well. I lived in Utah for five years, as an undergraduate and graduate student at Brigham Young University, and was happy to leave it for many reasons, not the least being the six months out of every year where the dominant natural color everywhere I looked was a dull brown. While its proximity to the Wasatch Range and its canyons, alpine meadows, and ski slopes may make it easy for the Mormon faithful gathered in the heavily urbanized corridor from Ogden to Provo to forget that they live in a desert, the order of ordinary life there also serves to push that awareness ever further away from everyday awareness. Maybe that just means that living in Salt Lake City is similar to living in Last Vegas or Phoenix or any other urban agglomeration located in an arid place--but I suspect there's more to it than that. 

Rather, I think the lived experience of American Mormonism itself has become thoroughly suburban, or even urban, perhaps as profoundly shaped in its assumptions about spiritual life by post-WWII suburban developments as American evangelical Protestantism has been. This shift towards stereotypical "urban" spiritual characteristics--pragmatism, individualism, flexibility, diversity--has arguably threatened something essential about the Christian faith, but such an argument is rarely heard among American Mormons, who, for the most part, see the practices and opportunities of urban modernity as simply a new challenge to integrate into their faith life. The idea that my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, needs to maintain the old tradition of separate farming communities--much less flee to the desert in order to preserve its collective relationship with God--is an idea that has long since been forgotten in pursuit of creating perversely well-watered suburban gardens and golf courses in Utah. That is, assuming it was ever believed by more than just a handful of cranks in the first place.

Still, those cranks may have a point, and they put my thankfulness for having avoided what I see as the harshness and empty openness of the desert (so different, to my mind at least, from the openness of the Kansas horizon, which is always distant but never empty) into question. That the desert speaks to some people--or, perhaps more accurately, opens some people up to a still and small voice they perhaps need to hear--is not news to me. A thoroughly urban and cosmopolitan friend of mine has written about the starkness of the Utah desert, and how he experiences something "profoundly stirring and deeply right" when he stands "awed by beauty and unspeakable vastness," "feeling impossibly small," during his visits there. I can't say I've ever had such an experience--but among my faith tradition more than a few others have. Gene England saw the desert as a place of covenant, calling the Mormon faithful to live up to the hard standard of peace. Nathan Nielson reminded us that the enchantment of the stark desert escapes our every attempt to package it, whether for visiting tourists or just ourselves. Perhaps most famously, Terry Tempest Williams saw the whole 20th-century history of Utah Mormonism as a tale of violation and rebirth in the desert wilderness, and in so doing gave voice to a Mormon environmentalism which was only ever implicit in decades past.

As wise as some of those writings are, though, none of them reproach me in my perhaps misbegotten anti-desert gratitude as do the Desert Mothers and Fathers. For these ancient mystics and hermits--whom I've been reading a fair amount of lately, as part of an effort to become more familiar with the early Christian church--the idea of the desert as a hard, demanding gift, a necessary and subjecting and purifying gift, is absolutely central. That language alone--a language of subjection and purification--isn't at all typical to the very modern rhetoric of the LDS Church, so it's not surprising that these early Christians saw things very differently from the way desert-dwelling Utah Mormons do. (And, to be clear, it is radically different from the faith language of the overwhelming majority of practicing Christians of all stripes in America today as well.) But that different perspective has been haunting me over the past months, and among other things, making me rethink the whole project of gratitude I see among my fellow Mormons.

Primarily, there is the fact that our language of counting one's blessings is almost always an enumeration of the positive: I am blessed with this or that or this other good thing, and for them I am duly grateful. That is definitely not the approach reflected in all that has been recorded of these desert monks long ago. Instead, their approach is that of the tax collector in Luke 18:13; for them, gratitude was primarily a negative expression of abasement and unworthiness. In the words of Abba Or, "In my own opinion, I put myself below all men"; in the words of of Abba Matoes, "Now that I am old, I see that there is nothing good about me"; in the words of Abba Anoub, when asked "What is integrity?" answered "To always accuse oneself." Consistently, across hundreds of sayings, these mystics suggested that they had pursued a life of solitude and suffering in the desert because they understood the best route to recognizing the love of--and their dependence upon--God to be that which separated themselves from the temptations posed by material accumulation, accomplishment, and security. To truly not judge others as Jesus commanded, to be one of the "pure in heart," meant to remove from one's life any basis for judging oneself or anyone else as deserving of any reward, whether it be good health, a remunerative occupation, supportive family and friends, or even sufficient goods, to say nothing of luxuries. The praising of God's goodness through the listing of blessings is replaced by the pleading for God's mercy in the context of sinful deprivation, which the humbling reality of desert existence hammered home daily. Abba John the Dwarf summed it up well: "Do not pay attention to the faults of others, and do not try to compare yourself with others, knowing that you are less than every created thing."

It is easy for modern-day Christians, particular those of a restorationist tradition like Mormonism, to dismiss all these folks as kooks at best, apostates who have gotten Christianity entirely wrong at worst. And I happily agree that there are ways in which I see their extreme asceticism becoming an idol in itself, particular in the way their insistence upon solitude--Abba Poeman: "Have the mentality of an exile in the place where you live"--runs against the very community-building hope which Jesus said His grace would always attend to. But some of these desert truths seem powerfully true to me, all the same. In particular, my own intellectual gifts and educational blessings come in for probably much needed disparagement, with these monks reminding me that a humble person is always willing to confess ignorance before the ways of God (Abba Anthony: "Abba Joseph has found the way, for when asked to explain the Scriptures he has said: 'I do not know'"). And some of the stories of genuine pastoral consideration and care which these sayings include are both beautiful and, I think, perhaps more reflective of the ways of the human heart than is often the case in stories whose context is a suburban cul-de-sac or citified congregation. But sure, just as the desert is a place of extremes, so are most of these sayings.

Perhaps it isn't surprising that the few signs of moderation found among these determined souls generally come from the women monks, the Desert Mothers. Amma Theodora warned that "neither asceticism, nor vigils, nor any kind of suffering are able to save," since demons, which neither eat nor drink, are not impressed by fasting, nor by separation from the world, since they live in the desert too. Amma Sarah observed that one should not condemn those who give alms for the praise of others, like the Pharisee mentioned in the same scripture above, because even if such acts are "only done to please men, through them one can begin to seek to please God." Perhaps the most well-known Desert Mother, Amma Syncletica, strikes this tone often. Not that she was at all ambivalent about her choice to pursue a life of solitude and suffering; she was actually rather contemptuous of the "many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and thus are wasting their time," and noted that being "a solitary in one's mind" was a matter of personal discipline, not circumstance. But she did not deny that people in urban circumstances, far away from the desert and "living in a crowd"--whom she called "seculars"--could also achieve the sort of balanced commitment which recluses like herself sought. She thought it was unlikely, since "immoderation cohabits with...the freedom of the city," but it wasn't impossible. Ultimately, one just has to be sensitive to just what kind of vocation God is calling one to; as she is recorded as saying:

Not all courses are suitable for all people. Each person should have confidence in their own disposition, because for many it is profitable to live in a community, and for others it is helpful to withdraw on their own. For just as some plants become more flourishing when they are in humid locations, while others are more stable in drier conditions, so also among humans: some flourish in the high places, while others achieve salvation in the lower places.

As someone who, as our collected Thanksgiving leaves from years past testify, has pretty much always, ever since escaping Utah, been appreciative of a course that hasn't involved living in high and dry places, and has been grateful to witness the changing of seasons from fertile and flat places all through the rest of my adult life instead, I need to keep this reminder of the variety of God's creation, and the variety of humankind's relationship to God's creation, in mind. It's not the most important lesson I take from the Desert Fathers and Mothers, but it's a valuable one all the same. Particularly during a time of thanksgiving, it's probably a good idea to think less about whatever bounty we think God may given any of us, and more about how God's love is always there, calling out to us, demanding a response from us--even, or perhaps especially, in the stark, sometimes psychologically immense and emotionally gaping absence of any particular bounty whatsoever, which too many face, every single day. 

Personally, I'm not sure I've ever heard that call, nor do I think I've ever felt any desire to listen for such a call, across the desolate, demanding, desert spaces which my church fled to and made blossom like a rose (partly and at some environmental cost). But I'm thankful to those, both anciently and today, who have turned away from living in the crowd (sometimes only briefly, sometimes for a lifetime), gone into the mountains and deserts, and shared with me what they heard. It's not a warm and light message of gratitude that I've learned from them; more often a harsh and intimidatingly direct one. But among the great fecundity of God's creation and the diversity of those who hear and respond to and seek to live in accordance with His word, it's a word of thanks, I think, all the same. As Job supposedly said, whether the Lord gives (like in the wide, rolling fields of Kansas I've come to love) or the Lord takes away (like in the haunting, sterile vistas of the Utah desert which some weirdly adore), "blessed be the name of the Lord."

What I Learned from the Old Testament

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Recently a friend of mine shared a story with several of us about how he, while on vacation and with some spare time on his hands, decided to re-read some parts of the Old Testament. His strongest impression of what he read, he said, was that these were the records of a people struggling to understand what it means to no longer be God's chosen people--or, if they were still chosen, why being chosen did not protect them from being defeated, occupied, and driven into exile, their temple desecrated and their community destroyed. He commended a reading of the Old Testament to us all, saying that it would remind us of the importance of humility, and endurance, and maintaining faith and hope even while our assumptions about the world all around us are being shattered.

(Please, no 2016 elections jokes. I've heard enough already. Besides, my friend is a Republican.)

It took me two and a half years, but about a month ago I finally completed my long trek through the entire Old Testament (the Revised English version, with an assist from a lot of commentaries by Robert Alter along the way), one chapter at a time. My thoughts on it all? Overall, I would say my friend's recommendation was correct, casual though it may have been. I would add, though, that the best way to draw out that homily--in my pedantic opinion anyway--isn't to take it from the apparent authorial intentions of the narrative itself (as if there was only one authorial intent or narrative line in the OT!), but rather to recognize that, to a very great extent, the marvelous, meticulous, convoluted, confusing, millennia-long literary product which is the Old Testament is itself an important source for our concepts of "humility," "endurance," "faith," and "hope" in the first place.

Not that other ancient literary sources didn't also help lay a deep foundation for the gradual emergence of a real moral subjectivity, whereby we human beings are simultaneously conscious of both our own pleadings outward and upward and of the condition of our own heart as the source of those pleadings. Truth is, this remarkable psychological and ethical evolution had many ancient parents. (Which is, itself, part of the reason why reading the Old Testament in light of critical scholarship on the myths of other ancient Mesopotamian and Near Eastern peoples is so valuable). But because the historical Jesus, and thus Christianity, came from Palestine and out of the Hebrew religious tradition, the Old Testament's liturgical and prophetic literary legacy was carried forward through all of Christian and Western and modern European civilization. So that means the legends of Adam, the pains of Abraham, the dilemmas of Moses, the boldness of Miriam, the mourning of Aaron, the triumphs of Deborah, the sins of David, the perversions of Ahab, the warnings of Isaiah, the strategies of Esther, the crankiness of the Preacher, the madness of Ezekiel, the machinations of Zerubbabel, the haplessness of Jonah, the cursings of Jeremiah--and more importantly, the belabored, overlapping, inconsistent, sometimes simply fragmentary but often nonetheless powerful translations which relate all of the above to us, in all their messy, haunted, one-step-forward-two-steps-back repetitiveness--have shaped the way Christians like myself morally conceive of the world. The very facticity of these records obliges us to reconsider our beliefs, and then reconsider again. Or as the finest scriptorian I have ever known, Jim Faulconer, often reminded his students: as believers, we ought to "read, read, read, work, pray, and reread." Doing that stretches our acts of faith out--and given the canon of the Old Testament, that stretching will be lengthy and humbling indeed.

In other words, it seems to me, having read the whole blessed, boring, remarkable, ridiculous thing, that having the Christian story of salvation and judgment be connected to the OT's monumental and contradictory literary burden--a burden which most Christians either proof-text to death or ignore entirely, as I did for so many years--can give those who believe in that redemptive story an awareness of carrying a great historical weight. The salvation of Jesus is presented in the New Testament terms of a sacrificial lamb, a priestly office, a purifying fire; centuries of literary echoes and arguments inform each of those theological imaginings, and when we strive (or are forced by the hardness of life) to see something beyond the simplistic, we find that our hopes in Him cannot be disentangled from those forms either. And that, I think, means we cannot help but turn in upon ourselves and ask just where we have placed this story of Jesus's grace in our hearts, and more importantly why. We are the sorts of modern Christian believers we are--or, at least, many of us are led to being the sort of humble, enduring, faithful, hopeful, believers we ought to be--in part because the Old Testament, the bare fact of the whole strange and awesome thing, with all its commandments and condemnations and curiosities, its insistently distancing and yet drawing presence, won't let us be otherwise.

Well, anyway, that's that. I'm not a scholar of the Old Testament as history or literature; I'm just a reader. I already accepted the basic assumptions of historical criticism in approaching the text, so realizing the ambiguity and unreliability of many of these tales didn't bother me any. Mine is a faith more based on community and continuity that history and authority, and the OT gave me plenty of the former, even while complicating even further the later, so as a reading of scripture it served me well. Your mileage may vary. Still, would I recommend it? Of course! I mean, the election is over, at least insofar as the Anglo-American blogosphere is concerned, so what better thing could you do with 2017 (and possibly 2018, and perhaps longer), than sit down and read, from beginning to end, hundreds of interwoven accounts of the world's creation, its promise being vouchsafed to a particular people, and their constant interrogation of, enjoyment of, abuse of, abandonment of, and attempted reclamation of, that gift? (There's a lesson in that, surely.)

Oh, and all right, you want a ranking? Top Ten list? Fine, here it is. I mean, if Mormon apostle Bruce R. "Job is for people who like the book of Job" McConkie can do this, so can I.

The Top Ten Books of the Old Testament:

1. Genesis
2. Job
3. Ecclesiastes
4. Exodus
5. 1 & 2 Samuel
6. Micah
7. Ezra-Nehemiah
8. Isaiah
9. Esther
10. The Psalms

Feel free to disagree with my listing in the comments (though you'll be wrong).

Invisible Church, Immanent Community

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

In the liturgical calendar of the Christian tradition, today is Whitsunday, the Day of Pentecost, a day to commemorate a marvelous, mostly invisible miracle. As the story goes, the resurrected Lord had left His disciples 10 days earlier; as Ronan Head put it in a fine post just a week and a half ago, "Jesus was, in some profound way, with God and not, in bodily form at least, any longer on the earth." But the disciples continued to meet has they had been commanded, and on Shavuot, as thousands of Jews from parts both far and near gathered at Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks, the miracle occurred. As the King James Version puts it (Acts 2:2-4):

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.

And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

I've written about Whitsunday before, and why this particular holy day means a good deal to me. It is, in its most fundamental form, a promise: that the Holy Ghost--the ruach Elohim, the Spirit of God, the still small voice, call it what you will--will fill and surround and sustain us all, with such gifts of faith and action as will enable us to both know of God's hand in our lives, and serve as His hands in blessing the lives of others. Not all spiritual gifts are invisible, of course--in the story from Acts, there tongues of fire which descended upon the disciples, and then they went forth and spoke in a dozen different languages to all of those in the city. But most of the time, for most of us, what gifts we may have are unseen. We may hear them, we may feel them, we may know they are there, but they come (and go) invisible to the human eye. (As Jesus was, after His ascension, of course.)

Craig Harline, a professor of European history and a Mormon like me, recently wrote a long, kind of strange, but I think beautiful reflection on Pentecost, placing that marvelous event in the context of a later revelation and development in Christian history: Peter's vision of eating unclean beasts, and Paul's realization that following through on the implications of that vision would mean (as Craig put it in a delightfully stream-of-consciousness way) "sitting down and figuring out how you could tweak your ways a little here and even make a wholesale change there and okay even rethink even certain apparently non-negotiable unmissable ways in order to help accommodate people you’d thought were strangers, because you were sure that your mutual hope and love in Jesus rose above all that, or better yet underlay it, like some big pillow, softening everything." In other words, once blessed by the breath of God, you want everyone to similarly feel that wind, that touch, that grace, that gift, and you may well feel inspired to reconsider some of the most fundamental givens (or things you thought were givens) in your life, just so they, too, however strange or alien or disobedient they may appear to be, might hear that whispering. Such reconsiderations aren't invisible, necessarily, but neither are they usually formal pronouncements; as Craig observes, they "happen mostly in the doing rather than the preaching." To accept such fruits of the Spirit, things which emerge organically, unannounced, usually unseen until already accomplished, is a hard thing. In fact, Jesus let everyone know how hard--yet also how obvious--it would be, long before Pentecost, or His Ascension, or almost anything else in His ministry. While Craig looked forward in the story, I look back to John 3: 1-8, near the beginning of His mortal story.

There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews:

The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.

Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

In the Revised English Bible, those final, key verses read slightly differently: "You ought not to be astonished when I say, 'You must all be born again.' The wind blows where it wills; you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born from the Spirit." 

You do not know where it comes from or where it is going. There are many hard and profound teachings from the New Testament that have echoed in my head over the decades, but this is one of the hardest. God's will--His breath, His gifts, His comforting and confirming and sustaining grace--comes and goes as, presumably, He wills it. Nicodemus wanted to understand Jesus's power and authority in terms of tangible, trackable, see-able things; the Lord's talk of being "born again" struck this learned (though, lest we forget, ultimately Jesus-believing!) man as nonsensical--because, after all, no one actually can be born again. Well, no, obviously not: not physically, literally, visibly, anyway. But through the Spirit? In a way that cannot be seen, that cannot be predicted, than can only be felt and heard through the fruits it makes manifest in the lives of those so touched afterwards? That's the basis of the radicalness of the whole Christian message, a radicalness which Pentecost, and Peter's vision, and Paul's vision too, and hundreds of millions of other moments of grace and giftedness and inclusion and reconsideration besides, all underline. The invisible work of the Spirit, made visible, made immanent, through the actions of those who, unseeing and often even unknowing, received and were thus reborn through His breath.

Such radical freedom does not mean "anything goes"--it can't, because Jesus clearly intended to bring His disciples together, and such togetherness is going to require some particularity, some notion of what is true or good: this community, not that one. So the winds which have historically tossed the faithful to and fro are not the same as the Holy Spirit. Being able to tell apart these two very different winds is one reason Paul talks about the need for apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. But note that Paul does not say in Ephesians that these individuals exist to identify the work of the Holy Spirit for the rest of us; rather, they are called so as to enable the members of the community to be equipped to minister to one another--and it is not difficult to suppose that it is in and through such mutual ministering, such edifying and perfecting (such "doing" as Craig put it), where we work out exactly what radical (or mundane, or both) thing God's invisible breath is gifting us to be able to conceive.

To speak of things invisible points in the direction of Protestant mysticism, of course (though not only that; the "mystici corporis Christi" is orthodox Catholicism), and I would assume a majority of believing Mormons would say that part of the whole point of having "apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and so forth" is to keep such mystical ideas away from our religion. Through our peculiar doctrine of the Light of Christ, most Mormons would be, I think, accepting of the idea that God's will probably really is manifest everywhere, doing all sorts of things outside the purview of the visible church. But can the communion of Saints be guided by such invisible operations? I would suspect that the common Mormon answer is "no." But Craig is right to point to the story of Peter's vision, and Paul's operationalization of it, as a model which all of us, in our own ways, in our own lives and families and congregations, are nonetheless always involved in. As he put it in a response to a comment on his post, asking how the "serious accommodating of serious differences" might undermine the togetherness which Jesus called His disciples to: "Does binding have to come through following basically the same practices and rituals and even detailed beliefs? Or does binding happen through something that transcends those, ethereal as it sounds?"

Put me down on the side of mysticism and ethereality, though I'm not sure speaking of such in terms of that which "transcends" is particularly helpful. In the 17th and 18th centuries, there were a large number of Protestant thinkers (beginning in Germany, but soon spreading through all of western Christianity) who thought seriously about what it would mean to make devotion to Jesus--as experienced invisibly through one's own personal associations and actions--the center of one's faith life, as opposed centering it upon a confession of a detailed theological belief, as made visible through the creedal church. Their conclusion, which came through both study and practice, was that such devotion would be anything but a source of separation; rather, it gave rise to intense feelings of Christian solidarity and intimacy. Through these informal, often invisible associations, through the ecclesiolae in ecclesia ("little churches within the church")--or as the philosopher J.G. Herder later put it, through attending to that shared religious language which constitutes one's volk, the peoplehood one has by sharing a history and a place and a way of speaking and hearing and doing, as opposed to sharing some distinct denominational confession--community is realized, strengthened, made visible. A binding community, then, perhaps can be found immanently, through all the invisible associations which the reception of God's gifts enable us to create through sharing and speaking and ministering with and to one another, in the most ordinary and non-transcendent of ways.

Mormons like myself actually already know this, though perhaps we don't fully know that we know it. Once a month in our church meetings, we have what is called "testimony meeting." In it, we invite one another to publicly stand up and speak and share and inspire, as God's unseen breath may happen to move us. There are--of this I have no doubt--more than a few problems with how we go about that testifying. But whatever the failures or complications of the particular rhetorical practices of American Mormons, the plain fact that we do it so regularly, and so devotedly, is, I think, itself an immanentization of God's binding love for us all. We listen, sometimes attentively and sometimes not, but simply by listening we show respect for one another, learn about each other, and gain an appreciation of what God is doing with each of us and, thus also, with all of us altogether. Through this, we learn to love one another, and learn to see how God is planting His love for us all in all our hearts. Remember that, according to the story, before Peter taught Jesus Christ and Him crucified to the people of Jerusalem, they were amazed and marveled and were brought together--Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Egyptians, Libyans, Romans, Cretans, Arabians, and Jews--because they heard. God's breath, His unseen, unbidden, undirected, unknowable, yet nonetheless binding breath, did that.

Now, the pragmatist will ask: did it last, and did it resolve all of the concerns all those different individuals had? The scriptural record makes it clear it did not. And neither could any of us say that that one testimony or sermon which really spoke to us one Sunday remade us entirely. But perhaps that just means God wants us to keep at it, keep ministering, keep reconsidering, keep including, keep sharing. If we keep at it, then who knows just which foreigners and strangers and pilgrims God may be able, through us, to see feel His wind, and be born again? After all, it's not as though His gifts, both visible and invisible, will ever run out.

A Year of Hard Love

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

I've joked for years about being a closet Lutheran--joked about it for so long, in fact, I can't remember when I first started doing it. I know it wasn't because one day I read and found myself converted to the Lutheran Book of Concord or any such thing (though over the decades I have read and found myself agreeing with its contents a whole lot more than I disagree). It may go way back t my childhood, back to reading scriptures like Matthew 18:7, in the King James Version: "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" (A nearly identical passage can be found in Luke 17:1.) There was a terrible, yet comforting, logic to those passages as I understood them, so long ago: first, that this will be world of offenses, of horrors, of hardness, and there's nothing anyone can do about it--and second, that God will still hold by whom those offenses, those horrors, that hardness comes accountable. This was a God, I thought, with whom you can know where you stand.

The KJV reading of those scriptures isn't the best, I know that now. Those passages actually show Jesus speaking specifically about those who create temptations or stumbling blocks to faith in the hearts of others; He wasn't speaking of the brokenness of the world in general, much less morally situating all of us in regards to it. But learning a better reading of those scriptures never altered, I think, my sense that the KJV version really captured so much of what Paul supposedly wrote--and which, much later, Augustine and then Martin Luther would teach about as well. What is that teaching? It is about sin, about its omnipresence, about the way it infects and twists our every perception and action, and the fact that we are called to somehow love one another in the midst of it. We will fail, of course, and stand condemned for that failure--but God by His grace will also save us in that failure and condemnation. The experience of that grace in such a context isn't an experience of lightness; it is, rather, hard. It is something that, all things considered, we would rather have not needed in the first place. But need it, I think, we actually, most assuredly, do.

Here, on the last day of 2015, I look back on a year and see a lot of this kind of difficult grace, this kind of hard love. Maybe you've seen a lot of it as well--hard decisions about the saving or ending of weak and desperate lives, about the rescuing or fleeing of marriages, about opening oneself up to and learning to love a stranger in need or shutting out and accepting the hurt done to a loved one who has become a stranger to you. Whatever your experiences have been, I suspect you feel divided about them, just as I do. I'd be lying if I talked about how "grateful" I am for them, because I'm not: rather, as Frodo confessed to Gandalf, I wish these things "need not have happened in my time." But I'd also be lying if I pretended not to recognize the wisdom of Gandalf's reply: "So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." I look around, and I see offenses of every sort--intentional and unintentional, against loved ones and strangers, against adults and children. I would rather I was free of all of it, just as everyone does. And yet, sometimes I really am kind of happy for that hardness--because, if nothing else, it helps me (and others, all of whom need it just as much as me) see the difficult grace around us better than we could in a world wherein offenses and evils and complications did not come.

Martin Luther, speaking as a Christian prophet should, put it well: "This life is not godliness, but growth in godliness; not health, but healing; not being, but becoming; not rest, but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way; the process is not yet finished, but it has begun; this is not the goal, but it is the road; at present all does not gleam and glitter, but everything is being purified" (Luther, A Defense and Explanation of All Articles). That purity, as so many have put it, will hurt. Chosen or not, we stand here as God's children, committed to it. So here's to God's long and difficult love, a love which comes slowly and inevitably through and I think necessarily as a part of the brokenness and condemnation and failures of these lives we live. And let's wake up tomorrow, with the new year, and keep on keeping on.

Ten Psalms to Remember

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Last week, continuing my slow journey through the Old Testament, I finished the Book of Psalms, aided as always by the work of Robert Alter. It was a strange, often difficult and boring, but sometimes surprising and even inspiring. If reading poetry isn't something you normally do--and I don't--then I suspect going straight through the entire Book of Psalms and confronting its mish-mash collection of 150 ancient works of temple liturgy, private devotion, celebratory hymns, and meditative practice isn't an ideal beginning spot.

And yet, there is value to that strangeness, and rewards as well. As I went through, I couldn't get out of my head the disconcerting image of an ancient gathering of people, speaking (or chanting, or singing) in a language I do not know, in a time and place I can barely imagine, conveying, to an audience either huge and public or intensely private and personal (or both), sentiments that, occasionally, were pretty much exactly my own. I suppose that's a tribute to the power of poetry. Jews of twenty-five hundred (or perhaps even as much as three thousand) years ago wrote down the pleadings, the hopes, the fears, the longings, the demands, and the celebrations of their heart, and the spiritual language they lit upon, while often rote and repetitive, sometimes managed to express something that struck me to the very core. I can't say I learned as much from this book of the Old Testament as I have from the others I've read up to this point, but this was the first time I really felt as though the words on the page were, sometimes, through some alchemy of history and memory and providential wisdom, actually speaking to me.

As the end of 2015 approaches, here are a selection of ten psalms that conveyed that speaking most particularly; perhaps they will for you as well. They haunted me throughout the day as I read them in my trusty Revised English Bible, and which stay with me still as I look forward to the next step in my Biblical journey. Let's hope it's a good one.

Psalm 13:1-2--"How long, Lord, will you leave me forgotten, / how long hide your face from me? / How long must I suffer anguish in my soul, / grief in my heart day after day? / How long will my enemy lord it over me?" Again and again, through the Psalms, you have this kind of existential language, conveying a sense of inwardness in one's pleading to God that deepens what might otherwise been simply an expression of bitterness over ill fortune or the actions of one's opponents. We all know that what's worst about defeat isn't the loss, but the feeling of failure and helplessness which so often accompanies it. Thousands of years ago in Palestine, someone knew that as well.

Psalm 23:5-6--"You spread a table for me in the presence of my enemies; / you have richly anointed my head with oil, / and my cups brims over. / Goodness and love unfailing will follow me / all the days of my life, / and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord / throughout all the years to come." Without doubt, the most beautiful and treasured of all the Psalms, an endlessly beautiful evocation of faith and gratitude. There's no need to say anything more about it, not when we can listen to so many inspired translations and adaptations of it. Here's a great one.



Psalm 34:18-19--"The Lord is close to those whose courage is broken; / he saves those whose spirit is crushed. / Through the misfortune of the one who is righteous be many, / the Lord delivers him out of them all." Through the Old Testament so far, I've encountered a great range of human emotions--but it was with the Psalms, such as in this one, that I read for the first time real expressions of metaphysical and moral hope: for succor, for relief, and for salvation. The heart of a people capable of conceiving of a godly sacrifice on behalf of personal redemption rather than military victory finds its roots here.

Psalm 38:4--"For my iniquities tower above my head; / they are a heavier load than I can bear." Many of the Psalms have a tortured textual history, and as a result their translations are open to significant reconstructions. In the REB, this is a powerful psalm which communicates a recognition of our sinfulness, and our need for God's aid to endure our own weaknesses. But for Alter, it is ultimately about the psalmist struggling with illness, and pleading for healing. I prefer the first reading, but perhaps the two aren't incompatible.

Psalm 51:10-13--"God, create a pure heart for me, / and give me a new and steadfast spirit. / Do not drive me from your presence / or take your holy spirit from me. / Restore me to the joy of your deliverance / and grant me a willing spirit to uphold me. / I shall teach transgressors your ways, / and sinners will return to you." Again, here the attempt to get right with God goes beyond temple sacrifice, and God's presence is more than just one's proximity to the altar. It is the plea of an ancient believer, wanting to be enlisted in a purifying work that may begin with ritual, but extends far beyond it.

Psalm 69:30-33--"I shall praise God's name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving; / that will please the Lord more than the offering of a bull / a young bull with horns and cloven hooves. / When the humble see this let them rejoice. / Take heart, you seekers after God, / for the Lord listens to the poor / and does not despise his captive people." The Mosaic law provided ways that even the poorest Jews could ritually affirm their place in God's covenant; here, we read evidence that throughout this ancient population, there were those who realized that the experience of God's love and promises is more a matter of seeking Him than fulfilling every jot and tittle of his law--a realization that perhaps the Babylonian captivity was essential to the learning of.

Psalm 90:13-15--"Lord, how long? / Turn and show compassion to your servants. / Satisfy us at daybreak with your love, / that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. / Grant us days of gladness for the days you have humbled us, / for the years we have known misfortune." As another birthday (my 47th) arrives in just a couple of days, this plea, expressed in the context of a recognition of one's mortality ("Seventy years is the span of our life, eighty if our strength holds; / at their best they are but toil and sorrow, / for they pass quickly and we vanish"--v. 10), is particularly poignant.

Psalm 99:4-5--"The King in his might loves justice. / You have established equity; / you have dealt justly and righteously in Jacob. / Exalt the Lord our God / and bow down at his footstool. / Holy is he." A short, succinct expression of wonder, faith, and humility in a God who, in His wisdom and omnipotence, will see, in ways that we cannot, that all will be exactly as it should be. This sentiment is, I think, of a piece with Psalm 19:9, the one Lincoln's quoted, using the King James Version: "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Psalm 137:4--"How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? / If I forget you, Jerusalem, / may my right hand wither away; / let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth / if I do not remember you, / if I do not set Jerusalem above my chief joy." A psalm that is both plaintive and harsh, evocative of the general feeling homeless and vicious in its view of those who would deprive another of their home, as well as of those who dare to adapt to the new reality. A frightening as well as aching reminder of the desperate power tied to one's particular place.

Psalm 139: 7-12, 23-24--"Where can I escape from your spirit, where flee from your presence? / If I climb up to heaven, you are there; / if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. / If I travel to limits of the east, / or dwell at the bounds of the western sea, / even there your hand will be guiding me, / your right hand holding me fast. / If I say 'Surely darkness will steal over me, / and the day around me turn to night,' / darkness is not too dark for you and night is as light as day; / to you both dark and light are one....Examine me, God, and know my mind; / test me, and understand my anxious thoughts. / Watch lest I follow any path that grieves you; / lead me in the everlasting way." My favorite psalm, because of its deep introspection, and its grasp of the idea that God is more than Israel's YHWH, but is rather universal, before us and behind us, always already and also always waiting. We cannot find the path that is our own...but He can, and will if we let Him. And that, I think, is the kind of hope that saves.

Broken Soil, Broken Hearts

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

This week, I prepared our small garden space, as I do every year, for the tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, and more than we'll plant in the coming days. It starts with layering on top of the ground wheelbarrows full of freshly composted soil (filled this year, thankfully, with earthworms and grubs), then working it into the dirt, breaking apart the soil and mixing it in with a rototiller. It's a violent process, but with the heavy clay content of our native dirt, it almost always needs to be done.

I always feel a sense of satisfaction and peace when I can look back upon this labor after it's done, even though it's a small and not particularly impressive bit of work. Still, in its little way, it makes me think about the necessary disruptions in any productive life. Sometimes the good that is natural to a thing is best revealed by attending upon its own rhythms and time--but other times, it has to be drawn out, with work. And sometimes, of course, that work is thrust upon us, without our choosing.

I thought about my rototilling in church today. All our regular meetings were cancelled, so we could instead attend a special stake meeting to hear from Elder Jeffrey R. Holland (a leader whom faithful Mormons consider to be one of God's chosen apostles), who ended up--in the midst of mission conferences and other responsibilities--here in Wichita, KS, this Sunday. Holland asked several people to bear their testimony of Christ before him, and then he spoke for a half-hour, picking up on what he felt was an unspoken theme in the others' comments. Launching into a litany of the thousand ways in which we can all feel burdened and broken up by life--haunted by the deaths of loved ones, handicapped by disease, struggling with finances, in despair over the challenges our children face, and so much more--Elder Holland plaintively insisted, again and again: "God loves broken things."

Speaking both theologically and agriculturally, Holland riffed on the great Baptist preacher Vance Havner, and talked about how brokenness was both tragic and essential to our mortal life. How can God not love broken things?, he asked. So much of His creation is broken. It is only from broken clouds that we are able to receive rain for our soil. It is only from broken soil that grain may be grown. It is only from broken grain that bread may be milled. And that bread, once broken, becomes the essential symbol through which we may partake of the Savior's own brokenness upon the cross, reminding ourselves of the broken heart and contrite spirit which we are commanded to seek. That heart, and that spirit, was exemplified by Jesus's own brokenness--what Holland called the Savior's own "contrition," the sorrow He felt, the hurt that God Himself feels, at the inevitable and terrible and fundamental pain and disappointment and disruption of this fallen world.

Opening his scriptures, Holland turned to an old and beloved story, one that fits in well with stories of fallen natures and elemental struggles:

And the same day, when the even was come, he saith unto them, Let us pass over unto the other side.

And when they had sent away the multitude, they took him even as he was in the ship. And there were also with him other little ships.

And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full.

And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish?

And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.

And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?

And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him? (Mark 4: 35-41)

Storms are frightening, for certain, as are traffic accidents, sudden deaths, tragic realizations, disappointing news, economic downturns, unintended catastrophes, unlooked-for diagnoses, and so many other daily instances of brokenness. It would be easy to fall into a simplistic providentialism here, and wait on the healing which God promises to us all--and Elder Holland didn't entirely escape that tendency. But more important was his insistence, as I understood him, that it is not experiencing doubt or anguish or pain which shows a failure to do that work which our own brokenness and the brokenness which we confront in all our friends and families and congregations calls us to perform. It is fear, above all else, that we must seek the faith to overcome. Yes, there is an ultimate healing which awaits those who endure...but more important, I think, is the fact that there is that peace of mind, that solace of feeling--"the peace of God, which passeth all understanding"--which attends those who trust that there is an empathetic, loving God, weeping for and with us through and in the midst of all our storms.

Recently, a young person has come into our family from a background that is commonly referred to--fairly or not--as "broken." She needed a home, we provided one, and now we all find ourselves engaged, without have known what exactly any of us were choosing, in a good deal of sometimes painful and difficult and disruptive work. Perhaps something good and nourishing will grow from this breaking up of our family soil; perhaps we'll find our selves refreshed by the rain which the broken clouds are bringing into our home. Or maybe we'll all just end up muddy and wet. Either way, I took inspiration from Elder Holland's words: to not be fearful, and go about the work we cannot avoid doing, and look for the grace of peace along the way. It is a grace that will be there, in the tilled soil, and in the clearing which follows after every storm. I'm grateful to have been able to learn such things for myself, as I've broken up clods of dirt by hand...but, like everyone else, I need every reminder I can get.

Should Mormons (or Anyone) Hope to Change the World?

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

For many decades at least--and maybe, depending on whose history you most trust, maybe ever since our beginning--the dominant American Mormon mode for thinking about this thing which the scriptures and those who claim to be able to authoritatively comment upon them tend to call "the world" has been to, if not completely flee it, then at least stand at a remove from it: to be "in the world, but not of the world." There's a deep scriptural truth to this formulation, reflecting as it does one of the final statements attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John. But just as many Christians--and, of late, more and more Mormons--have been equally inspired by the tradition of the Great Commission: that we are called to go about into the world, and change it for the better. This means evangelization and missionary work, of course, something which the Mormon church has embraced from the start. But it also means many other kinds of service and charitable works as well--something which, to our credit, we've done our best to get caught up on in recent years.

Jesus taught the eternal value of changing lives through loving service, and that is more than enough for most Christians. Mormons, though, might imagine that there is an additional endpoint to all that going out into and changing of the world, one which which distinguishes us from many (not all, for certain, but nonetheless many) other Christian groups: the ultimate aim of building up the kingdom of God upon the earth and establishing Zion--which for Mormons like me means a community and/or state of being where all are of one heart and one mind, dwell in righteousness, and no one is poor.

There is much which can be said about the theological, ecclesiastical, political, and cultural aspects of this argument--or is it a dialectic?--between Christian resistance to "the world" and the (utopian?) Mormon hope for a real, actual Zion of unity, equality, and love, and no Latter-day Saint in the past century has written about the topic more provocatively and powerfully--if not always persuasively--than Hugh Nibley. (I've written and spoken some about Nibley's ideas here, here, and here.) Last year, though, another voice was added to this ongoing argument: Joseph Spencer's For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope. In his smart and short book, Spencer explores a very specific philosophical matter which pertains to how worldly Mormons like myself think about Zion: how can we hope for something which is, by all apparently and historical experience, impossible to achieve? That is actually a truly vital question, and Spencer's wrestling with it is genuinely challenging, something I didn't notice at first. My belated realization of how good a book it is should be of no surprise to those who read Mormon blogs--just see here or here if you've missed out, somehow--but I'm happy to say it here: if you've ever thought about the why of the Christian call to change the world, or of the Mormon call to consecrate one's time and talents on behalf of such an ideal goal, Spencer's book is one to be read.

Note I said why, though: not how. Spencer's book is directed towards shifting our philosophical appreciation of what it means to hope for something that lies utterly outside our experience, relying heavily upon a reading of the apostle Paul's letter to the Romans, and the entwined concepts of faith, love, and God's gifts. "[H]ope gives up on the world in joyful affirmation that it can--and will--be otherwise," writes Spencer; we must understand, he argues, that Jesus's life and death ushers in the possibility of a hope that "refus[es] to trust in the supposedly self-sufficient, in the supposedly inert and fixed, and in the supposedly total and unchangeable [character of the world]" (pgs. 22, 51). Moreover, Spencer argues that such a "hope against hope" is essential to understand Joseph Smith's fullest teachings about Zion. A "genuinely Christian hope" is that which frees us from (Spencer quotes the philosopher Gabriel Marcel here) "the 'radical insecurity of Having,' from the self-liquidation of every economy of property," and since Smith's law of consecration--which Spencer insists is still fully in force for every member of the Mormon church--obliges us to own our property "as though" we don't, we need to be able to grasp such an unworldly hope if the motivation to act as other-directed, charitable stewards, rather than accumulators and profit-maximizers, is going to have any kind of chance (pgs. 63, 128, 141). I'll say it again: that's a vital shift, and writing a thoughtful book about it is thus a worthy and important thing.

But it is also, I think, a limited thing. It is an argument which insists that we ought to look at ourselves in the mirror and recognize "not only that things can change despite the fact that they present me with an objective impossibility, but also that...I can be an agent of such change" (pg. 27)--a great message! It repeatedly underlines Adam Miller's insistence (including at the very beginning and the very end of the book) that the responsibility faithful Mormons have to work out the means by which they will put that economic, communitarian, charitable hope into practice is finally and ultimately a personal one: "[i]f you do not work things out for yourself, they will never get done" (pgs. ix, 153)--again, a great message! But they both sound to me like individualistic ones, inward ones--which is why I've suggested (both in the review I linked to above and in a too-long, rambling philosophical post here) that Spencer's book strikes a quietist tone to me.

Jim Faulconer--an old teacher of mine, my respect for whom is pretty immense--takes issue with this judgment. "I’ve seen Joe accused of a kind of quietism of thought, but this book proves that charge untrue," he writes. "For he shows that the law of consecration has remained, from beginning to now, a matter of providing an inheritance for the poor of the Church, and he argues quite firmly that the law has not been rescinded, not even temporarily." He quotes Spencer's summary of the law (as he presents it as presently existing) in its all hopeful fullness:

To obey the law is to remain the technical or legal owner of one’s property while (1) deeding away all excess (everything more than is “sufficient” for an appropriate stewardship) in order to outfit the poor Saints, (2) maintaining what remains in one’s possession as a stewardship for which one is responsible to God and for God’s stated purposes, and (3) giving whatever excess accrues subsequently through wise use of one’s stewardship either (a) to benefit the poor directly or (b) to ensure that the institutional Church has the resources to do other work necessary for furthering God’s purposes (pg. 142).

Once again, this is a great--a challenging, sobering, inspiring--message. I do not--not when I truly think seriously about my and my family's needs and wants, and the needs and wants of those I see all around me in my ward and city and world--consecrate all that I could. I don't act like the steward I probably ought to be; we don't have many excesses in our family, but we have a few, and we treasure them, and the prospect of giving them all away to the poor or donating them all to the church to use as it sees best rests hard upon my heart. To the degree to which Spencer's arguments must be understood as a plea for ordinary (and comparatively speaking, quite wealthy) American Mormons like him and me and everyone who reads his book or this blog to gird up their loins, be hopeful, and work towards that demanding--though perhaps also liberating--personal end, then surely Jim's response is correct: this isn't a retreat from action, but rather a charge directly to the heart.

But that doesn't resolve every concern I have, because "quietism" doesn't simply mean "inaction." Rather, quietism suggests a non-antagonist, non-confrontational, accepting attitude towards the world; it suggests a posture of acceptance, rather than engagement. Spencer's book, insofar as we think of one's personal understanding of what it means and what it involves to hope for and work towards a better, more equal, more loving world, is hardly lacking in hows. On the contrary, it is filled with them. But those hows never extend beyond his heart, or my heart, or yours. It is the how of Mother Teresa entering the slums of Calcutta, of Zacchaeus coming down from the sycamore tree and giving half his wealth to the poor, of Ebeneezer Scrooge's reformation. It is a call for everyone, on their own, to figure out how better to love and serve their neighbor. For the fourth time--that's a powerful and needed call! But not a comprehensive one--in fact, it's the opposite of comprehensive: it's piecemeal, it's particular. I like the particular; I think it's vitally important to involve oneself and to prioritize over other allegiances the local. But note what's happening there: involvement and allegiance. Which means other people, all of whom are organized one way or another in reference to the world they (and we) are part of. To engage with any of those organizations, however hopefully, may well obligate us to make choices and experience alignments and disagreements with others--in other words, to say something to or about or sometimes even against the world.

I would never label Spencer's book a call to some kind of spiritual individualism or atomism; that completely misunderstands his many, strong arguments pointing out our absolute dependency upon God's gifts. Yet I fear his analysis at least allows for such a conclusion. He carefully and forcefully argues against the Mormon tendency to put the utopian demands of consecration in our distant 19th-century Utah past or our unknowable, millennial future, and I couldn't agree with him more. But he does this in part by attacking the idea of any kind of "systemization" of consecration, insisting instead that seeking Zion is simply something that each of us, on our own, need to be doing right now, since, after all, there's no "divinely orchestrated communism on the horizon" (pg. 145).

Of course, that's not entirely true, as we still have the model of Joseph Smith's communism, not to mention the model of dozens of experiments with communal economics under Brigham Young, to say nothing of hundreds of other Christian examples of Zion-type arrangements the whole world over. But Spencer's arguments give me the impression, at least, that he feels that if, in our hopeful workings, we decided to critically engage in a changing the worldly systems and organizations we and our loved ones are part of, in the hopes of moving them in the direction of something more Zion-like, we'll actually be getting hope wrong. Invoking the--one more time!--powerful and thought-provoking idea that conditions in Zion ought to be understood as similar to those economic and social relations which obtained among medieval monasteries, he deepens his commitment to an abiding, waiting, "as though not" framing of hope, suggesting that the truest and wisest realization of Smith's efforts to build a Zion community was that "the law of God and the laws of the land" should be "neither directly opposed to each other nor regarded as potentially working in perfect concert" with each other (pg. 140). In other words, the hope for Zion should involve that which does not challenge worldly laws, nor that which makes use of worldly laws. Truly, monastic models of community have much to teach us...but as regards the whole debate over Christians not being "of this world" as opposed to Christians "changing the world" I mentioned earlier, and what a better grasp of hope may tell us about that matter--well, this sort of presentation does seem to stack the deck in favor of the former, don't you think?

Thinking through these issues puts me in mind of another excellent book, James Davison Hunter's To Change the World, which is a fascinating survey of--and a thorough criticism of--the many ways in which Christians throughout history (though mostly American history) have articulated their challenges to the world. There is--just like is the case with Spencer's book!--a great deal to learn from Davison; his unsparing analysis of the presumptions he sees operating in favor progressive change on the part of the "Christian Left," and in favor of cultural preservation on the part of "Christian Right," and even in favor of the "neo-Anabaptist" rejection of both of the above, is both trenchant and mostly persuasive. But only mostly...because, after all, if the power of God's call is to be experienced in this world as not one which makes peace with the world, but also not one which seeks to change the world this way or that, that how can it be anything except, well, a private, personal mystical experience? Hunter's call for Christians to exercise "faithful presence" is wise one (and one whose parallels to the patient world of Christian monasteries supplements Spencer's arguments), and I certain wouldn't say that I've fully internalized all the good things I can learn from it. But I also can't help but agree with Andy Crouch in this review of Hunter's book, which observes that one cannot build a "presence" alone: "movement[s]...require partners."

Partnership, friendship, community, collective sacrifice, building and eating and reaping and sharing in ways that tied and supported and protected the saints all together: all of that was central to Smith's original social, economic, and ecclesiastical vision. Spencer's book takes nothing away from any of that. But it also constructs a notion of hope that I think may, however insightful it is, lead some of us to believe we have good theological reasons to hesitate to orient our hope towards the collective possibilities and gifts always around us, and that it would be truer to God's revelations to focus on the--admittedly!--great and needed and loving work we can do, on our own, in our own way, as we hope to get our hearts right. I would never judge another's vocation. But I have to end my simply saying that my preference (without concurring every postmodern claim he makes) is to see we faithful, we hopeful saints, as Scott Abbot did: "we will own up to our stewardship as creators, and not just stewards." A proper hope for Zion may begin with my shifting my heart to a willingness to embrace those gifts from God which enliven the objectively impossible, but it doesn't end with a refining of that self-embrace; it looks for tools and partners and, yes, even systems and programs and suggestions and criticisms by which the whole community, perhaps even the whole world, can be embraced as well. If not that, well, then, what was the Commission for?