Six months after I gave birth to my second child, in 1983, I had a frightening episode. I had driven to our small town’s airport to pick up my husband, Jim, who was returning from a business trip. I love watching planes take off and land, so I parked outside the airport near the runway and waited for his plane to arrive. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the belief that his plane would crash and explode in a ball of fire. I drove away from the airport in panic. When I finally summoned the courage to return to the airport, I found that his plane had landed safely.

Over the next few days, I became more agitated. I began to talk rapidly and nonstop. I thought I was being poisoned and that enemy bombers would destroy our town. As I became more upset, Jim and I finally went to our bishop, who referred us to an LDS therapist. The therapist assigned me exercises to understand my distorted thinking patterns and extreme emotional reactions, using vivid imagery to illustrate his points.

But I had been badly shaken spiritually. I have always believed the Holy Ghost gives inspiration to the heart and mind, but what if my brain was broken? During the episode, I believed I was seeing the future: Jim’s plane crashing and enemy bombers attacking our town. Only afterward did I recognize the thoughts as completely delusional. For years I struggled with the fear that my mind and spirit were severely defective, but my life moved on; I was a busy wife and mother and active in my ward and community. But the question remained: How could I receive inspiration with a broken brain?

Twelve years after that episode, I started waking up spontaneously at five o’clock in the morning. Jim and our six children were still asleep, so I would go quietly to my desk and read scriptures. I was excited at this new energy. Before long I was waking up at 4:30 a.m., then 4:00, then 3:30. Even if I had only been asleep for four hours, I woke feeling refreshed and energized. This seemed like a great blessing: I was able to be consistent in reading my scriptures and praying; I could “cease to sleep longer than is needful [and] arise early, that [my body] and [my mind] [might] be invigorated” (D&C 88:124). I was finally reaching these spiritual goals that I had had for years.

But after several days, Jim noticed that my behavior was becoming erratic again. I was talking rapidly and nonstop and couldn’t focus. I was paranoid and terrified, convinced that evil men were trying to kidnap my daughter. My behavior became so troubling that Jim didn’t trust me around the children. He called our bishop who asked some ward members to drive me to the emergency department of a nearby hospital. On the highway, I felt my friends weren’t comprehending the grave danger to my daughter, so I unbuckled my seatbelt and tried to jump out of the car to get their attention. My friend calmly buckled my seatbelt and assured me I didn’t need to leave the car. Fortunately, I acquiesced.

In the emergency department, I noticed a policeman leaning against the nurses’ station counter. I now realize he was there in case I became violent. At the time I was convinced that everyone in my exam room was going to be translated to heaven and actually see Heavenly Father face to face. There was a privacy curtain around my exam table. Occasionally someone would pull the curtain closed and I couldn’t see the policeman outside the room. “Oh, that’s too bad, that nice policeman won’t see God tonight,” I thought. Then someone would open the curtain. “Great. The policeman will get to go with us to heaven.”

I thought I had never been more lucid; I felt strongly that I was spiritually in tune in a way I had never been before. I completely expected to go to heaven that evening, but again, I was delusional.

Later, I was transferred to a locked psychiatric unit, put in leather restraints, and given an injection of a powerful anti-psychotic. Then I slept for about eighteen hours. I awoke emotionally and spiritually shattered. Once again, what I thought was inspiration had been delusion.

A psychiatrist diagnosed me with manic depression, also known as bipolar disorder. He prescribed lithium to stabilize my mood, and I began working with a therapist to learn how to recognize distorted thoughts and sort through my emotions. Later, I became depressed, as typically happens after a manic episode, and I was prescribed an antidepressant.

It would take me years to understand what this diagnosis really meant. My bipolar disorder strikes at my very core as a person. Integrity, reliability, compassion, and dignity disappear during an acute episode of either mania or depression.

When I’m depressed, I often don’t have the energy or hope to get out of bed and push forward into the new day. My thought processes are slowed down; I have great difficulty concentrating, remembering simple things, and making decisions. Normally enjoyable activities lose all appeal, and feelings of emptiness take over. The emotional pain is as debilitating as physical pain, and I blame myself, which increases my self-doubt and self-loathing and worsens the depression.

In mania, my overconfidence and grandiosity prevail. Along with the rapid, uncontrollable speech and much less need for sleep, I start multiple, overly ambitious projects. My relationship with my husband is strained by my impulsive actions. Only after the episode do I recognize that my thoughts were wildly distorted, and that I have taken great risks, committed to impossible projects, and damaged treasured relationships, engendering mistrust and doubt.

Immediately after my hospital stay in 1995, I was released as Primary president in our ward. This was very painful because Church service had been an important part of my identity, ever since I joined the Church at age nineteen. I knew it was a wise decision by my bishop, but I felt spiritually defective. Slowly, with continued counseling, medication, and hard work, I regained enough emotional and spiritual strength to press forward.

I never considered abandoning my faith. I might not be able to recognize true spiritual feelings, but I trusted that others could. I did all in my power to serve God, be worthy and faithful. I placed a high priority on living the gospel daily and on attending sacrament meeting every Sunday, even when travelling. I kept a fairly strict Sabbath, avoiding shopping and recreation and even novel-reading and videos. I fasted once a month even though my psychiatrist warned against the practice while taking lithium. I faithfully accepted every calling I was given. I diligently attended all sessions of general conference every six months.

Despite these efforts, I still worried about future relapses and their potential effect on both my spirituality and everyday life. I was dismayed, for example, when a friend from my bipolar support group called me. He was in a locked unit of a psychiatric hospital and wanted my help to escape. If he could lose his sanity, perhaps I might lose mine again. That was frightening.

It took a long time to recover my self-confidence. Even now, years after my episodes, I am perplexed by the delusions I experienced. It is painful to know that I was a danger to my children and confusing to realize that my disordered thoughts can masquerade as spiritual feelings. For many years, I fasted and prayed monthly, desperate for better spiritual discernment and a stronger witness to my soul of the truth of the gospel. Looking back, I now realize that what I wanted was an indisputable sign. I never received one. But subconsciously, I was afraid of anything so dramatic. After all, what I thought was a spiritual epiphany in the emergency department, when I was certain I was about to be translated to heaven, was actually a delusion.

Over many years, I have come to realize that as long as I take my prescribed medication and get enough sleep, I can be confident that I am of sound mind and can receive real inspiration. My inspirations are small and everyday. When I have a decision to make, I say a quick prayer and follow my feelings. If it’s a big decision, I ponder it over time and discuss it with family members and friends. It’s usually not dramatic.

One Tuesday evening, as I was about to get ready for bed, a fellow temple worker texted me that she needed a substitute to work in the baptistry next morning. My initial reaction was that I was too busy to help. I had just spent six hours in the temple that day substituting for another friend. But that initial reaction made me uneasy. I felt a pull that I should help this friend. So, I prayed about my situation while I brushed my teeth. I looked at my calendar and realized I could easily rearrange my schedule. My prayer, “Heavenly Father, should I take this shift?” was answered by a calm feeling. Nothing grand, nothing expansive, but simply calm. Taking this as an answer, I texted her back that I would go to the temple to help out. The next morning the temple was busier than usual, and I felt deep gratitude to have served my friend as well as the baptistry patrons. This is one illustration of how, with time, I have become content with quiet intimations and inspiration.

One Monday morning, I began my weekly laundry and the kitchen clean-up after a supper party the night before. As is my wont, I reached for my phone to listen to something while I puttered and cleaned. Stephen Fry’s excellent audiobook, Mythos, was on my mind. However, I’d been neglecting my daily practice of listening to general conference talks. I turned to Russell M. Nelson’s October 2015 talk, “A Plea to My Sisters,” and let the app run through talks from that session of conference until I came to Henry B. Eyring’s “The Holy Ghost as Your Companion.” I met President Eyring briefly at Clayton Christensen’s funeral viewing in January 2020. I’ve never interacted with a more Christlike person. He radiated love and made me feel like there was nothing in the world more important to him than talking with me. He grew up in New Jersey, as did I, so I feel a kinship with him on that count. That personal connection helps me feel the Spirit through his talks. In this talk, he maintains that we can have the constant influence of the Holy Ghost in our daily lives.

Simple as that insight is, I was struck by its truth that Monday morning. My spiritual understanding was reinvigorated. I realized anew that for over forty years I have been wracked with self-doubt about my ability to discern revelation, and I have been discounting little divine encounters. In my desire for dramatic spiritual experiences and the ability to know which were true and which were delusions, I overlooked the countless daily instances of the divine all around me. The choice I made that very morning, to choose general conference over Stephen Fry, was directed by the Spirit. I received a prompting, no less true for its simplicity, and was strengthened spiritually because of it. Merely recalling this instance fills me with a calm and peaceful feeling that is my frequent experience with the Holy Ghost. It’s not dramatic; it’s easily missed. But after forty-nine years, it is familiar and unmistakable when I’m paying attention.

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Mary Hazen Johnston is a writer, reader, and mother of six millennial children. She is currently finishing a memoir on her experience with bipolar disorder.

Art by Laura Knight (1877–1970).

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“How lonely sits the city
    that once was full of people!” (Lamentations 1:1; NRSVUE used throughout)

A ruined cityscape is a desolating sight. Its razed buildings and its vacant, mangled thoroughfares summon the ghosts of a vanished human commerce. How wasted and barren, how bereft the streets.

Our collective memory holds grim pictures of ruined cities: London and Dresden in black-and-white rubble, Hiroshima silent and leveled, Chernobyl abandoned to a poisoned forest. NYC on 9/11, littered with the paper remains of Wall Street. Gaza, buried in concrete and twisted rebar.

Lamentations belongs to this fearsome company as the Bible’s primary literature of destruction and grief. It speaks from the point of view of Jerusalem itself in the wake of the Babylonian conquest, a wrecked city mourning for its kidnapped and murdered inhabitants. Over five highly structured poems, Lamentations memorializes the catastrophe of the temple’s desecration in shocking scenes of violence and violation. Where the faithful once moved in procession toward the temple with festive psalms, the implacable nations now march with fierce clamor (Lamentations 2:7). With caustic irony, the poem imagines an anti-worship that un-dedicates the temple.

By the time a reader of the Christian Bible reaches the famous opening line of Lamentations (“How lonely sits the city”), they have encountered the destruction of Jerusalem in three historical narratives (2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Jeremiah 52), two major prophets (Isaiah and Jeremiah), at least three psalms of lament (Psalms 74, 79, and 137), and the overarching framework of covenantal blessings and curses that warns of Judah’s punishment from Deuteronomy onward (Deuteronomy 28 and 31). When we arrive at Lamentations, the destruction of 587 BC is hardly breaking news. But reading the grief and outrage that throbs in these ancient poems is like looking into an open wound that still weeps blood.

In spite of its despair, the poetry of Lamentations is so arresting that it has become a universal vehicle for the sorrows of the world. Ironically, its bitter parody of worship has been reincorporated into genuine worship. In Judaism, Lamentations is read from the floor of a darkened synagogue on Tisha B’Av, the saddest day of the year, to commemorate the destruction of both temples. After the Holocaust, and again after October 7, 2023, its words took on a terrible new poignancy:

The Lord has rejected
    all my warriors in the midst of me;
he proclaimed a time against me
    to crush my young men;
the Lord has trodden as in a winepress
    the virgin daughter Judah.

For these things I weep;
    my eyes flow with tears;
for a comforter is far from me,
    one to revive my courage;
my children are desolate,
    for the enemy has prevailed. (Lamentations 1:15–16)

Christians, for their part, have found in Lamentations a text equal to the grief of Golgotha. In traditional tenebrae services of Holy Week, selections from Lamentations are recited to evoke the suffering of Christ and the grief of the Church. Lamentations 1:12 is read as the words of Jesus on the cross:

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
    Look and see
if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,
    which was brought upon me,
which the Lord inflicted
    on the day of his fierce anger.

Our own faith community recently marked one year since four of our own were killed on a Sunday morning in Grand Blanc, Michigan. Latter-day Saint leaders no longer commonly offer public lament; they wisely focus on resilience and consolation in Christ. But I can imagine a private gathering in which the bereaved ward family might read together Jerusalem’s words of baffled devastation:

The elders of daughter Zion
    sit on the ground in silence;
they have thrown dust on their heads;
    they put on sackcloth;
the young women of Jerusalem
    have bowed their heads to the ground. . . .

You invited my enemies from all around
    as if for a day of festival;
and on the day of the anger of the Lord,
    no one escaped or survived;
those whom I bore and reared,
    my enemy has destroyed. (Lamentations 2: 10, 22)

Communal lament helps survivors come to terms with the catastrophes of history and the tragedies of their individual lives. Weeping together helps a community purge and process the despair of loss. The raw grief of Lamentations, which over the course of its five chapters stubbornly refuses to countenance any settled comfort, can nevertheless be a source of healing for wounded readers. Among the several ironies of Lamentations, this at last is a gracious one.

One way literature gentles grief is by submitting overwhelming emotion to the discipline of literary form. Its five poems are Hebrew acrostics, each line beginning with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet, as if to express the comprehensiveness of the people’s grief from beginning to end, aleph to tav. Beyond this formal device, the poet of Lamentations creates three unforgettable characters who speak for Israel. In chapter 1, Daughter Zion appears as an abandoned mother whose children were killed and kidnapped before her eyes; she herself was sexually violated and left exposed and discarded in the street. Despite her shame, she does not hide or crawl away to die alone. On the contrary, she stridently importunes the Lord to witness her suffering and to respond with aid. In the floods of horror that surround her, she wants to live, and she will not cease to seek life from God. Daughter Zion’s desperate thirst for life moves me deeply.

Lamentations 3 introduces a second character, a shattered Man whose once-powerful body was broken by enemies. He expresses Israel’s pain in a masculine voice, offering a song of lament in the shape we recognize from Psalms and Jeremiah. He begins with vivid description of his body’s ruin, bones crushed and teeth ground into gravel, and then turns from lament to praise in the famous lines:

Yet this I call to mind
    and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
    for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:21–23)

The Man is resolute and firm of mind. His patience and self-discipline, his submission and silence in the face of God’s chastisement—so different from the importunate Daughter Zion—also move me deeply:

Let him sit alone in silence,
    for the Lord has laid it on him.
Let him bury his face in the dust—
    there may yet be hope.
Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him,
    and let him be filled with disgrace. (Lamentations 3:28–30)

But there is a third character who moves me most of all, the Child. The children of Zion appear throughout the five poems as figures of absolute innocence, emaciated and defenseless. Lamentations 2 is the most harrowing treatment, showing starving children collapsing in the street and perishing in their mothers’ arms:

My eyes are spent with weeping;
    my stomach churns;
my bile is poured out on the ground
    because of the destruction of my people,
because infants and babes faint
    in the streets of the city.
They cry to their mothers,
    “Where is bread and wine?”
as they faint like the wounded
    in the streets of the city,
as their life is poured out
    on their mothers’ bosoms. (Lamentations 2:11–12)

Though it is almost too painful to read, the image itself is carefully constructed. The Child cries out weakly for nourishment and collapses into her mother’s lap. But her mother cannot provide. Instead, where milk should pour from the mother’s breast, the child pours out the last of her sole and precious life. The Child does not deserve chastisement and cannot be culpable for covenant betrayal. Unlike Daughter Zion and the stoic Man, the child does not know how to importune or submit to God. She has no part in the clash of empires that piles wreckage on the shores of history.

I think it is natural for collective memory to personify a devastated city. I see London after the Blitz, and New York City on 9/11, as heroic wounded rescuers pushing through smoking debris, risking their own lives to recover the wounded and dead. I see Hiroshima as a young woman cruelly scarred and desperately shielding her unborn child from radiation. I see Gaza as a child pulled from the rubble of a hospital, wrapped in a torn sheet.

I turn away from these thoughts. But Lamentations is beyond denial and beyond avoidance. Its poet is stronger than I am, forced by their people’s suffering to confront the universal suffering of Woman, Man, and Child. They ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We tremble to know that they knew it.

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Rosalynde F. Welch is associate director and a research fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of California, San Diego, she is a scholar of Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature and the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction.

Art by Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945).

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The Old Testament Reflections series is published in collaboration with the Maxwell Institute.

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Numbers tell stories, but only through human interpreters.

Currently, numbers showing the steep decline of global birth rates have sparked fierce debates in governments, magazines, and online forums.

The numbers certainly are striking. In 1950, the global total fertility rate (or the average number of children a woman had during her childbearing years) stood at about 5 births per woman. In 2025, that number was 2.24, and is expected to drop below 2.1 (the standard number for population replacement levels) by 2050.1

Many factors affect total fertility rates, including economic development, migration from rural to urban areas, birth control, access to education, and economic outlooks. In general, however, countries that once saw high or moderate birth rates in the middle and end of the twentieth century now report birth rates far below replacement levels.2

Numbers relating to birth rates are sometimes presented as neutral facts, but they rarely remain neutral for long. Once interpreted, they become weighted with anxiety, blame, and moral agency. In the United States, for example, pronatalists view falling birth rates as signs of economic decline or “moral decay.”3 Conversely, antinatalists welcome failing birth rates as relief from environmental or social strain.4

Debates, ideologies, and policies regarding natalism are not new. Governments have vested interests in birth rates since they shape the future of work, resource distribution, militaries, and taxes. In the twentieth century alone, governments tried various ways to raise (or depress) birth levels: from Sweden’s parental leave policies to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s decrees outlawing abortion and contraception in Romania; from China’s erstwhile “one-child policy” to France’s French Family Medals, pronatalist and antinatalist policies take many directions. There are even pronatalist and antinatalist stories in the Bible. In one of the Bible’s most infamous stories, Pharaoh murderously throws all male Israelite infants into the Nile, as he fears the Israelites will become “mightier than [the Egyptians]” (Exodus 1:9). While an extreme example, this story illustrates how discussing birth rates in terms of fear, contempt, or outright xenophobia and racism can lead to tragic outcomes.

I find both frameworks—pronatalism and antinatalism—deeply unsatisfying. While their desired outcomes are opposed to each other, they share similar fixations on control, prediction, and fear to achieve those goals. They frame birth as a problem to be managed rather than a mystery to be received, and they rarely succeed in convincing people to care more deeply for children or for life itself. I do not want to frame the holiness of life in terms of panic or preservation. I want to learn how to embrace life, with its interlocking, intertwining oppositions of mess and order, holiness and misery, and joy and sorrow (see 2 Nephi 2:11).

Our vision for the future is shaped by how we regard the world. The framing of the contemporary natalism debate has missed the mark about celebrating and nurturing the gifts of life, and instead has focused on numbers, the “right” kinds of births, and civilizational or ecological apocalypse. This framing does not lend itself to valuing life.

I propose looking at questions of cherishing birth and life through a different framework: that of beginnings, and specifically, through the philosophy of natality. Natality does not focus on demography or birth rates; rather, it crafts relationships and environments that welcome new beginnings for all.

What Is Natality?

Natality is a philosophical and political category created by the twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt argues that the concept of natality is essential to human dignity, freedom, and action. “Man is free because he is a beginning,” she writes in her essay “What Is Freedom.” “Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same.”5 Each birth, each new beginning, she argues, allows for a “new world” to come into existence.6

Ironically, Arendt’s views of natality were forged during chaos and destruction—while worlds she knew ended. Arendt, a Jewish woman who saw the rise and violence of antisemitism in Nazi Germany, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo, who escaped from an internment camp in Vichy France, and who lost loved ones in the Holocaust, certainly knew loss and death. Even after escaping from Vichy France and immigrating to the United States in 1941, she witnessed and wrote about the horrors of the Holocaust, nuclear proliferation, and human rights abuses across the globe.

Arendt saw how governments and individuals inflicted violence, and yet she chose to frame life—and political thought—in terms of the human capacity for beginnings. Birth makes all people “newcomers and beginners,” she writes, with the agential power to “take initiative,” regardless of circumstances.7 Agency and action create new possibilities, new political systems, and new worlds where people with different backgrounds can coexist.8 Instead of determinism or fatalism driving the human condition, Arendt argues for natality’s centrality in the human experience.9 To be mortal is to die, yes, but to be mortal also means finding ways to begin again. Natality is “the miracle that saves the world.”10

Arendt did not develop natality as a meditation on motherhood or childrearing, yet natality offers a more expansive and enlivening framework for discussing the political implications of birth and children than current pro or antinatalist positions. Indeed, the reality and needs of children offer a clear way to witness and respond to the urgency of beginnings, risk, and action. Birth transforms bodies, lives, and communities. According to Arendt, the words of the scriptural herald, “a child is born unto us,” are the most “glorious” for any society to receive.11

Children—all children—are born unto us, unto the families and communities which bear the responsibility of cultivating the good, beautiful, and true in their (and our) lives. Focusing on the ways children teach some of the principles of natality—including accepting risk, building community, and choosing courage—can provide “hope for a better world” by valuing children in our communities (see Ether 12:4).

Natality and Risk

Hannah Arendt ties the meaning of natality to freedom and human flourishing—having the freedom to create new possibilities in one’s life, society, or nation. Bringing children into this world—and raising children—embodies both the hope and the risk of new beginnings.

Natality embraces life, which includes the limits and power of human agency. And, whether to our dismay or wonder, life is charged with risk. As a mother to two young children, I witness how risk augments my children’s lived experience. Every day they amaze me with the strength of their bodies and minds. Yet every day I am also made aware of their vulnerability. At times, their little bodies shiver with fever; sometimes other kids push them away.

It seems both my heart and my amygdala grew after having children; my fear wants me to protect them from everything, whereas my heart realizes my capacity for fear threatens their capacity for growth and my capacity to love. While it is easy to let fear paralyze the future, I cannot live like that. I cannot love like that. To give into that fear would suffocate both my children’s and my ability to grow. Embracing life means facing fear, even while knowing there are no guarantees in human love. It takes courage to love life and to love those in our lives, never knowing when our endings and beginnings will coincide. But natality asks us to act—to love—anyway.

I remember sitting in Oxford’s Vault and Garden Café with a friend months after I had given birth to my firstborn. My husband and I had traveled to England together with our son so I could conduct archival research for my PhD dissertation while still breastfeeding. While in the UK, I met up with my friend. She was also a mother with young children, and she was also pursuing a PhD.

While my husband played with our baby, my friend and I exchanged confidences amongst the honey-yellow stones of Oxford. We talked about the haze and urgency of new motherhood, of endings and beginnings of various life stories, of shifts in hormones and priorities. We talked about risk, about death, and specifically about the “valley of death” in childbirth.

This friend, a mother of three sons, is intimately acquainted with that “valley of death.” She lost one of her sons at birth in circumstances that set off a medical emergency for her and another child. I asked her in a roundabout way how she ever walked through that grief. With tears in her eyes, she looked right at me and said, “You have more strength than you realize. Even in that.”

This is a natality mentality. This is hope in the face of new horizons, whether dark or bright. This is facing new beginnings, whether wanted or unwanted. This is centering life around birth rather than death. Not in a naïve, trivial way—neither birth nor death is easy. They both bring pain and uncertainty. But natality provides a useful corrective to fatalism, and a hopeful framework to work, build, and believe in the future. In our lives, we will experience death and rebirth in countless ways. If in each person are new beginnings with the potential to “begin the world over again,” then it follows that worlds can also end. But the framework of natality can give us strength to face dark nights and new horizons with faith.

Natality and Community

My friend faced death and new life, and the work of envisioning a revised world for herself and her family with the support of a community willing to enter an uncertain future with her.

Natality cannot thrive in isolation; while natality champions individual actions of freedom, it cannot stand alone. Natality means choosing each other. As one Arendtian scholar puts it, natality is our entrance into “the world we inhabit” and share in common with others.12

We enter worlds we did not create, yet we bear responsibility in how we shape those worlds and how we care for other newcomers. Our task, according to Arendt, is to “provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers.”13 Natality means making space for each other in public, creating environments which welcome the newcomers we encounter, and practicing patience when life is noisy and uncomfortable.

Children are obvious “newcomers.” A society’s treatment of children indicates societal health. Authors of dystopian novels frequently use themes of controlling children, sex, or sexuality to explore questions of human flourishing.

I still remember reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time as a child, and having a gut reaction as I read about the protagonists confronting evil on the planet of Camazotz. When Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin arrive in Camazotz, they notice a perfectly orderly neighborhood. But something is wrong. All of the children dribble balls in eerie synchronization. Later, all of the children’s “mother figures” (as L’Engle calls them) open their front doors and call them inside at precisely the same time. I felt like I was reading about hell. There was no “community,” only control. And it certainly wasn’t a place for children.

Perhaps it is from reading such novels that I continue to have visceral reactions when I read of no-children policies in museums, cafes, or even playgrounds. Whether adults want to recognize them or not, children are a part of society—including in grocery stores, restaurants, public transport, or airplanes. Childfree spaces are made in the name of control, order, and quiet, but making public spaces unfriendly for children hurts society at large. This practice prioritizes the value of convenience over human dignity, and entrenches a belief that money can buy freedom from others.

This doesn’t mean adults—whether parents, neighbors, or teachers—should neglect teaching children how to behave in public spaces. But when adult desires for control or ease are prioritized over children’s needs to learn to engage with and wonder about their world, societies suffer.

Even though our social natures are inherently risk-laden, we unfairly target children for exploring the world. Children often experience the brunt of society’s impatience with the vulnerable.

Going out with children is an exercise in faith, hope, and charity. When I get my children ready for sacrament meeting, or prepare them for a transcontinental airplane flight, I cannot guarantee my children’s good behavior. I often fear judgment from impatient strangers, and have experienced some unpleasant interactions. Still, I prepare, I hope, and I pray for kindness from others. And I am grateful to have received grace from strangers who have shown me how to respond to children in public.

When my family lived in Washington, D.C., I took my children on an outing downtown. I did not love driving in the city, so I opted to take the Metro. My toddler son rode in the stroller, while I strapped my infant daughter to my chest in a baby carrier. The ride downtown was uneventful, and we enjoyed our outing. But when it was time to go home, my son protested. With all the strength of his two-year-old limbs, he thrashed around while I struggled to get him back in the stroller.

Once he was firmly buckled in the stroller, we still had too many Metro stops (including a line transfer) until the safety of home. My son was still engaged in a classic “terrible two” power struggle, determined to show me that the stroller was not the place for him, and how dare I suggest he needed a nap.

We were sitting in the back of the Metro car, and I tried to keep his temper tantrum contained. I felt the looks—both looks towards me and away from me—from fellow passengers as my son’s treble voice crescendoed. He then proceeded to take off his shoes. I grabbed them before he could throw them across the train. We reached our transfer stop and I somehow managed to maneuver the stroller off the train. I looked for a place to hide on that all-too-public platform, wanting to put my son’s shoes back on and calm him down, when I heard an “Excuse me.”

I tensed up, afraid that someone was about to chastise me for having loud, misbehaving children.

I turned around to see a woman in her sixties. She opened her mouth again: “Can I help you?” she asked.

I burst into tears. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, please.”

She helped me get to the elevator, kindly talking to me, my son, and my daughter.

That woman saw us through the framework of natality. She saw chaos, but she also saw the potential to rearrange that chaos into something new. And she acted. She had the courage to come up to me and ask if I needed help. She didn’t know if I would reject her help. But she asked anyway. She saw a stranger, she saw my need, and she created a new beginning for myself and my children that day. She will never know how much her kindness meant, but it changed my world, not only that day, but every time I remember it.

Natality and Courage

Natality means choosing courage—to take heart in this world and find room in our lives for the newcomers and strangers among us. In choosing and protecting those newcomers, natality means exercising courage and choosing children. I do not mean this strictly as choosing to have children. Certainly, choosing to raise and respect our own children takes sacred moral courage and fortitude. But choosing to raise and respect children not our own (including strangers and newcomers among us) takes another type of sacred moral courage (see Matthew 25:35).

There are many ways to choose children, regardless of marital status, desires for or the ability to have children, or less-than-ideal family circumstances. If the most glorious words are, “a child is born unto us,” then choosing children and all they embody—love, risk, new beginnings, communal bonds, and interdependence—glorifies and empowers all of us.

​Choosing children requires leaving a contemporary individualist mindset and looking outward. It means choosing life, and all of its accompanying joys, sorrows, rejections, pains, and wonder. We choose children when we take care of the children in our families and communities by ensuring they are fed, housed, and safe. We choose children when we support children’s parents or other caregivers—whether by volunteering to sit alongside parents with rowdy kids during sacrament meeting, babysitting for a single parent, or offering to hold a diaper bag while a parent tends to an upset child. We choose children when we seek ways to improve maternal health. We choose children when we advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves. We choose children when we seek to build peace. We choose children when we find ways to repair relationships and help others to begin again.

These are the moments which change the world. Spiritually, these are moments of repentance, and of refusing to give into despair. These actions require choosing to begin again, to believe again, to, indeed, be “born again,” and create the societies we want for ourselves, our neighbors, and our neighbor’s grandchildren. Beholding the world and the future with a framework of natality is not repackaged naivety. Rather, it takes courage to begin anew. It takes faith to acknowledge our “bleared, smeared” world and still find solutions to problems. Natality rewards agency in our relationships. Whether in the yin or yang of marriage, the mirror-like reflection of a new baby, the suddenly-strange otherness of a teenaged or adult child, or in faces of those we consider strangers (or even enemies), natality begins the world anew by providing new beginnings for those relationships. Whether or not we are graced with the relationships we desire, the choice to welcome newcomers in our lives enlivens the soul and the communities we live in. There are risks to wanting, there are risks to loving. There are risks to being alive. But these risks hold the potential to “create the world anew” through the miracle of beginnings.

When I think about the moment of birth—of a child’s first breath and that raw, lusty cry of life, I sense the power of natality. When I see neighbors rally together for parents who have lost a child (whether to illness, injury, or violence), I witness the bonds of natality. When I hear strangers speaking up for those who cannot defend themselves (especially those experiencing violence and injustice), I behold the dignity of natality. And I want to be part of this ongoing story.

These worlds and these stories I want to help create will not be completely my own. Natality does not guarantee control; rather, it celebrates human agency as it seeks to create conditions for human flourishing. As we seek to make private and public life more amenable for children, we will, in turn, make life better for us all.

Geopolitically, managing and controlling birth rates results in unexpected outcomes. Nations that seek to suppress birth rates later want higher birth rates; countries seeking higher birth rates have never found a proven policy. Pharaoh was so focused on numbers that he discounted the power of action, and the creative paths of a mother’s love. He did not count on his own daughter’s intuitive insights into natality, that she would take a newcomer, hidden in the bulrushes, and raise a stranger in royal robes. He could not have expected that that baby would challenge his empire and legacy.

Babies save the world. Like baby Moses, John the Baptist, or Jesus Christ, the new face of a child compels us to let the other—the baby, the immigrant, the stranger—change our old conceptions of ourselves.14 They make us all new creatures in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). “Respect[ing] the infant’s faith,” as William Blake writes, allows us to “[triumph] over Hell and Death,” and to see possibilities of renewal, redemption, and reconciliation. How we respond to and prepare for newcomers—especially for children—increases our capacity for working miracles in our own homes, communities, and nations.

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Megan Armknecht is an associate editor for Wayfare. She is a writer and historian currently based out of Bangkok, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Art by Robert Henri (1865–1929).

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In July of 2024, I was sitting in a cafe in Fes, Morocco, chatting with a Muslim acquaintance named Younes. As we discussed my ongoing research as an anthropologist of religion, Younes asked me why, after studying Islam and spending time with Muslims for so long, I had not yet converted.

I took a few moments to consider his question. It would be easy to simply say that I was a practicing Latter-day Saint, that I was deeply committed to my own faith tradition. That was true. But at the same time, through the months and years I had spent with my Muslim friends in their homes and mosques, I was developing an increasingly deep appreciation for Islam. I had come to love the embodied discipline of salat, ritual prayer. I had learned much from my friends’ discussions of akhlaq, the Islamic obligation to cultivating an ethical, virtuous character. And I had come to appreciate my friends’ deep commitments to surrendering themselves to the will of God, to saying alhamdulillah [praise be to God] no matter how difficult the circumstances. Most significantly for me, in living and worshiping alongside my Muslim friends, I had experienced moments of transcendent connection to the Divine.

With all this in my mind, I told Younes that despite my commitments to my own faith tradition, I had developed a deep appreciation for Islam’s ability to connect people, including me, to God. But I then added that I didn’t think I could know Islam was true in a way that would sincerely allow me to profess a belief in the unity of God and the prophethood of Muhammad. I told him that if I said the words of the shahadah, the Islamic profession of faith by which one enters Islam, I feared I would lack niyyah, the proper intentions that validate ritual acts, as the words wouldn’t feel true to me the way they are supposed to. I told him I was skeptical of my ability, as a mere human, to know anything was true in any kind of sure or absolute sense.

I had long considered doubts about my ability to know a major challenge in my Latter-day Saint experience. So much of what I heard in church seemed to insist that what mattered most was coming to know the truth of particular claims. I had certainly experienced what Latter-day Saints call “feeling the Spirit.” I had felt my bosom burn within me as I read scripture, as I listened to talks and testimonies, and as I sought divine comfort in moments of turmoil. But when I heard other people testify of similar experiences leading them to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, of a surety, that a fairly robust list of claims was true, I often felt discouraged, deficient, and frustrated. How could anyone know that surely? My lack of commitment to knowing seemed to bother many of the Latter-day Saints with whom I had discussed it. So I figured it would bother Younes too.

But Younes’s response surprised me. He said that my incapacity to obtain a sure knowledge was not a problem because, according to his understanding, normal people do not necessarily have unbiased insight into the objective nature of reality. However, he insisted, the prophets that God had selected throughout human history could perceive and reveal God’s truth to mankind. For Younes, encountering the perfection of prophetic revelation was the means by which limited humans could come to know absolute truth.

At first, the way Younes seemed to brush off my concerns left me frustrated—yet another instance of someone insisting that objective knowledge was possible, despite my contradictory experience. But after reflection, Younes’s response led me to a realization: Many Muslims, and perhaps many Latter-day Saints too, might not have a problem accepting that most humans can’t perceive truth and reality objectively, that for most people, perception of truth is filtered through subjective human experience. But many of these same people are invested in the idea that throughout time there have been special people who have some kind of unfiltered access into the objective nature of reality, who can see and tell us what is really real and what is really true and what is really right. Thanks to Younes, I came to realize that my Muslim and Latter-day Saint friends who seemed so confident in their knowledge of the truth might not be doing so based on confidence in their own ability to know. Rather, they were likely acting based on their faith and confidence in the possibilities of revelation.

On the nature of prophetic knowledge, the fourteenth-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun stated that “The knowledge that God gave [prophets], and the wonders he manifested through their statements, indicated that there exist things beyond the reach of man that can be learned only from God through the mediation of such individuals.”1 According to this line of thinking, prophets have the capacity to be the mediums through which divine communication is passed from God to humanity. For most of my Muslim friends, this prophetic mediation is perfect and pure. By the grace and mercy of God, it is unencumbered by the humanity of the prophet.

In contrast, Latter-day Saint teachings hold that even prophets are susceptible to the imperfections of a fallen world. Paul the Apostle troubles the surety of prophetic knowledge in this way: “Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. . . . For now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:8–9, 12 KJV). Through an allegory of gazing into a cloudy mirror, Paul tells us that, even in the case of prophecy, mortal perceptions of reality are always imperfect.

Despite Paul’s teaching, throughout my Latter-day Saint experience I have often heard people voice a similar view of prophetic knowledge to the one put forward by Younes and Ibn Khaldun—that prophets provide a more or less direct, perfect reflection of the mind and will of God. In Latter-day Saint circles, I’ve sometimes heard a saying which captures the essence of the friction between Latter-day Saint teachings and practices related to prophets: “Catholics teach that the pope is infallible, but nobody believes it. Mormons teach that the prophet is fallible, but nobody believes it.”2

Regardless of how closely this comes to capturing the reality of Catholic or Latter-day Saint experiences, the circulation of this story in Latter-day Saint circles points to a tension many feel between teachings that claim prophets are fallible and a religious context where openly acknowledging that prophets are sometimes wrong will, at best, turn a few heads in Sunday school. At worst, it can lead to disciplinary action. Whatever the doctrine may say, in practice, many Latter-day Saints have the habit of treating the words of the living prophets as unquestionably true.

In this vein, throughout much of my Latter-day Saint experience, as I’ve struggled through feelings of inadequacy over the things I can’t seem to bring myself to know, I’ve found myself asking: what keeps so many Latter-day Saints from taking seriously their own doctrine about the fallibility of prophets? I don’t think I have all the answers to this question, but as I’ve spoken with many friends in my religious tradition and on its peripheries, I’ve begun to see how many Latter-day Saints feel caught in a way of knowing where things are either absolutely true or absolutely false. This binary allows many to find deep meaning in the confidence that they belong to a group that possesses objective knowledge of all the answers that count. But this binary also lays the groundwork for any perceived flaw in their faith tradition to cause their personal faith to crumble. This means that people who experience doubts about one aspect of their tradition might find themselves unable to find positive meaning in any aspect of it.

As someone with a deep appreciation of the ways the Latter-day Saint tradition has allowed me to make meaning in the world, I am saddened at the idea that if anything is wrong with my religion, everything is wrong. I’m deeply sympathetic to those who feel the need to step away, but I also wish that more people could find meaning in their faith tradition even when they can’t accept every claim as objective truth. I think it’s important for Latter-day Saints to consider what opportunities such a widening of the tent might afford. What possibilities might emerge from making space for people who take prophetic fallibility seriously? What prospects for radical love and empathy might emerge from a Latter-day tradition with more diverse ways of knowing?

Reconsidering our ways of knowing is an important step in opening up space to explore these possibilities. In my experience as a practicing Latter-day Saint, I’ve been taught a fairly straightforward method for coming to know the truth. As the Book of Mormon prophet Alma writes, one should accept certain premises on faith and then experiment on the word, by which one can arrive at “a perfect knowledge” (Alma 32). The image of experimentation in the Book of Mormon and elsewhere in Latter-day Saint tradition is interesting to me because it points to ways of knowing that are remarkably similar to the ones put forward by modernist science: Both Latter-day Saints and scientific moderns are taught to come to objective knowledge through a rational process of hypothesis, experimentation, and verifiability.

But like Paul writing to the Corinthians about the fallibility of religious knowledge, the objectivity of modern scientific knowledge has also been called into question. Much of philosophy over the last century has been intimately concerned with examining the ways scientific knowledge is made, created, constructed, and otherwise subjectively produced. For example, the twentieth-century American historian Thomas Kuhn framed science as a series of shifts between different paradigms or sets of assumptions rather than a unilinear march closer and closer to ultimate truth.3 Similarly, twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed to the ways that the various power structures of a given society influence what is considered true and false such that scientific knowledge reflects social worlds as much as it reflects the natural world.4

This kind of theorizing opened scholarly discussion to the ways modern societies can sometimes fetishize scientific knowledge to the point that science becomes scientism, what the late French philosopher Bruno Latour called “the modern cult of the factish gods.”5 Latour questioned a common assumption that, while the fetishes (that is, material objects invested with mystical powers) used in religious rituals around the world are fabricated by humans, facts are not fabricated—they just “are” out there in the world. In other words, he suggested that facts are made by human hands just like ritual objects. But while most who use material items in their religious rituals openly recognize their human origins, modernist science too often ignores the mortal provenance of its similarly manufactured knowledge. Thus, Latour pointed to the ways in which a misguided, scientistic devotion to the knowability of absolute truth can actually become a problematic form of idolatry.6

The essence of both Paul and Bruno Latour’s assertions is that an over-commitment to knowledge can be problematic. The hymn “Lead, Kindly Light” makes a similar argument, namely that when we pretend to see our path laid out clearly before us, our will is ruled by pride rather than by God. This is not to say that the pursuit of truth ought to be abandoned. Rather, it is a warning against becoming so sure of what we know that we miss opportunities to experience the Divine. In Robert Harris’s novel Conclave, Cardinal Lomeli (Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, in the 2024 film adaptation) puts it this way: “Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”7 There is certainly a place for making meaning as we come to know truth, but there can also be a place for making meaning as we embrace the unknown.

Returning to Paul’s cloudy mirror metaphor, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:12–13). Here, Paul shares the promise of pure, unfiltered knowledge in the world to come. But he couples that promise with an injunction for love to be our mortal-world solution to our temporary lack of objective knowledge. In the Book of Mormon’s variation on 1 Corinthians 13, the prophet Mormon stated: “Cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail—But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever” (Moroni 7:46–47). In the face of mortal limitations keeping us from pure knowledge, scripture calls on us to seek charity, the pure love of Christ. In the certainty of uncertainty, scripture calls on us to love, for “in the gift of his Son hath God prepared a more excellent way” (Ether 12:11).

But what is this more excellent way? How can we develop charity in the face of the ambiguity explored above? What might it look like to better practice the pure love of Christ? As I stated at the outset, I’m an anthropologist, and in what follows, I will discuss one aspect of anthropology called “cultural relativism” that has helped me, as a seeker of the pure love of Christ, to try to love the way Christ loves. I was initially attracted to anthropology because of the possibilities I found it afforded for living my faith, and my religious commitments have continued to inform my experience in the discipline. My hope is that my particularly Latter-day Saint approach to anthropology can be helpful to others who are similarly striving for more Christlike ways of living and loving.

Anthropologists often say they aim to understand others by “making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.” In other words, they seek to understand people on their own terms, according to their own logics and experiences. Anthropologists call this effort to understand people from their own point of view “cultural relativism.” Put simply, a cultural relativist approach tries to empathize with others across differences.

The cultural relativist approach is based on the premise that people experience the world in different ways and that their particular perceptions of reality are filtered through varied assumptions and experiences. From this premise, cultural relativists hold that judging a person or group without first working to understand them is an ineffective and unethical way of encountering difference. This approach has allowed anthropologists to spend time all over the world trying to understand people’s experiences as they experience them, which in turn has allowed them to relate to others across cultural differences, including differences that some might find morally repugnant, in a more empathetic way.

Significantly, cultural relativism is very different from a much maligned “moral relativism” where nothing is real and anything goes. In recent decades, many scholars have criticized cultural relativism on the grounds that it offers too little space for critique or judgement of others’ lifeways, traditions, beliefs, and practices. Many in the academy have sought a framework that allows them to pursue a more explicit politics in which they can assert particular (often liberal secular) moral-ethical claims as broadly applicable across differences. With concerns that are remarkably similar to those of the scholars just discussed, some in the Latter-day Saint tradition have tended to interpret frameworks questioning the absolute authority and universality of their particular knowledge as a claim that there is no right or wrong.

I believe this critique is well intentioned but misguided. Cultural relativism is not moral relativism. The unilateral dismissal of all value judgements would indeed be deeply problematic for anyone working towards collective human flourishing. But in my view, cultural relativism need not prevent people from making value judgements. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine someone leading a meaningful life without operating on some sort of assumptions about what is real and what is right. Rather, I would argue that cultural relativism simply demands that before anyone asserts that their values apply to someone else, they first commit to questioning their own assumptions and to understanding the perspectives of those they might critique. This approach to cultural relativism, far from dismissing morality, becomes a moral project in its own right, a check on the human tendency to center one’s own values and assumptions to the detriment of others. Such a call for humility is part of what I understand in Jesus’s injunction to “judge not” (Matthew 7:1–5).

With this conception of cultural relativism in mind, I suggest that the subjective nature of knowledge described by Paul and Bruno Latour opens up space for us to step outside our own assumptions about what is real and what is right in order to step into the assumptions of others, to see the world from their perspective, to evaluate it based on their rationales, and by so doing, to understand, empathize, and love them. My suggestion is basically that instead of saying, “I know what is real and right and everyone else’s assumptions are wrong, or at least less true than mine,” we might consider saying, “I can suspend judgement at least long enough to empathize with a different person’s perspective.”

As I’ve studied anthropology alongside the gospel, I’ve come to realize that Jesus is the perfect example of relating to others in the empathetic way made possible by a cultural relativist approach. In Latter-day Saint teachings about atonement, Jesus Christ takes on the experiences of everyone who has ever lived, and that is why he is able to understand, comfort, and love us in a unique and perfect way. The Book of Mormon prophet Alma said that “he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind . . . that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:11–12, emphasis added). In analyzing this passage of scripture, contemporary Latter-day Saint thinker Blaire Ostler suggested that “by sharing a consciousness of every gender, race, orientation, and ability, Jesus became exceptionally aware” of the full diversity of the human experience.8

If this is the Latter-day Saint understanding of atonement and if our tradition is invested in taking upon us the name of Christ and trying to be like Jesus, trying to love as he loves, then we must follow Christ in stepping outside of our own assumptions and experiences and into the assumptions and experiences of others. In this way, I am proposing that however imperfectly we may be able to understand and empathize with others, the pure love of Christ is the solution to relating to others across differences in a mortal realm mediated by subjective knowledge. For Latter-day Saints, such an approach has the potential to fundamentally shift our discourse and practice from an emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge to an emphasis on the pursuit of charity. It is an approach in which seekers of the Divine, instead of spending their time praying to know the truth, spend time praying for the pure love of Christ. To follow this approach, we need not let go of our unique beliefs and teachings. We just need to loosen our grip on the universality of those truths enough to shift our focus toward radical forms of love and empathy.

These radical ways of knowing, being, and relating to others are not easy for me. I often get fixated on truth and right, on dividing the world up into reality and unreality, good and bad. And that very frequently gets in the way of me loving people the way Jesus loves them. Sometimes, when members of my congregation speak about all the many truths they claim to know, I find myself feeling frustrated and angry. Similarly, when Younes dismissed my concerns about the possibility of absolute knowledge on that summer day in Fes, my initial reaction was something like indignation. But as I opened myself up to curiosity and surprise, as I tried to take seriously what Younes was telling me, I ended up coming to a better understanding of his religious experience as well as my own. I was able to appreciate the meaning he found in the perfection of prophetic revelation, even if it differed from my perspective. And that in turn has helped me in church. Now, when I find myself feeling frustrated by the talks and testimonies of my spiritual siblings, I try to step outside of my own ways of knowing and appreciate the beauty and meaning they find in objective truth, especially when their perspectives don’t reflect my own. In my life as an anthropologist and as a Latter-day Saint, as I have tried to practice cultural relativism, to enact the pure love of Christ, to step out of my own assumptions about truth and right and into the assumptions of others, I have found intense spiritual meaning in the diversity of spiritual meanings. I have experienced, by the grace and mercy of God, moments of transcendent love that have connected me to the people around me, to the earth, and to the Divine in powerful, indescribable ways.

Truly, charity never faileth.

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Clayton Van Woerkom is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Michigan. His scholarship focuses on the intersections of language, religion, and migration.

Art by Henri Matisse (1869–1954).

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On August 27, 2025, Fania Fainer passed away in Toronto at the age of 100. Fania was a Holocaust survivor, a woman of quiet strength, warmth, and resourcefulness, who transformed the shadows of her unimaginable past into a radiant life of love and enduring legacy.

Fania was born in Bialystok, Poland in 1924, a middle child between an older brother and a younger sister. At sixteen, while walking down the street, she was identified as a Jew and imprisoned. She never saw her parents, her two siblings, or any relative from her extended family of about ninety people again. She was first deported to the Stutthof forced labor camp and then, in 1943, she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she toiled in the Union Werke munitions factory.

At a table with nineteen other women, she sat in enforced silence, manufacturing bullets for the German army. In an act of subtle resistance, instead of packing the bullets with powder, she and the other prisoners would surreptitiously gather dirt from the floor and insert it, rendering the ammunition useless. As one of the women later reflected, the Nazis could strip them of everything, but they could not take away their ability to think.

At that table, Fania met Zlatka Pitluk and they became friends. When Fania turned twenty, Zlatka was determined they would celebrate. Remarkably, Zlatka persuaded the women to surrender tiny portions of their daily bread rations so she could fashion a small, round birthday “cake,” iced with butter and marmalade. Zlatka also wanted Fania to have a lasting souvenir. She had always loved handicrafts and managed to scavenge bits and pieces with the goal of creating a heart-shaped origami birthday card with the other women at the table.

This incredible feat was accomplished without talking or moving, as the kapos were constantly vigilant. The women risked their lives with every element required to craft the card: the paper, scissors, pencils, glue, and the needlepoint F stitched on the cover. They even cut fabric from their own clothing to form the book’s cover. The defiance was worth the peril. “Life and death were the same,” Zlatka said in her testimony. “No one knew if they would survive to see the next day, but we were alive in that moment and resolved to celebrate our friend.”

On the day of her twentieth birthday, Fania sat down at her narrow bench to work. There, waiting for her, was the gift. “I looked at the book,” she recalled, “and it had my name on it—Fania Landau. It was for me. Someone remembered my birthday. In hell.”

She opened up the card which unfolded into a beautiful origami flower. Inside were messages inscribed by all the women in Polish, German, Yiddish and Hebrew:

“Happy Birthday, dear Fania.”

“Those who live through this—win.”

“Don’t cry when you suffer.”

“May your life be long and sweet.”

“When you are old, put on your glasses and remember what we went through.”

And finally: “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom!”

The messages were signed with their names: Hanka, Mania, Mazal, Hanka W, Berta, Fela, Mala, Ruth, Helene (Lena), Rachela, Eva Pany, Bronia, Cesia, Irena, Mina, Tonia, Gusia (Guta) [and] Giza.

Fania cried softly reading the messages, remembering her parents, her brother and her sister. The Nazis had taken everything away from her. She had no reason to live. But this card reminded her that there was still love and beauty left in the world. It gave her strength to survive another day. So she held onto it. She kept it hidden while she was in the camp, slipping it under a rip in the bunk bed above or in the straw on the floor below. Somehow, she even preserved it during the death march, tucking it beneath her armpit as she walked.

The heart survived.

Today, that heart-shaped card is one of the central artifacts of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is the subject of a documentary film, The Heart of Auschwitz, and the inspiration for the award-winning children’s book Fania’s Heart. It anchors school curricula and educational programs across continents.

When we think of heroism and nobility, it is not just Fania who comes to mind. It is the nineteen young women, many of them teenagers, who risked their lives to create a secret birthday card in the depths of Auschwitz. Their courage was not forged on a battlefield or proclaimed in speeches. It took the form of a quiet, perilous act of kindness: a refusal to let friendship die.

Their story holds a mirror to our own lives. We may never be tested as they were, but their example asks us: Are we capable of choosing selflessness over survival, compassion over indifference, sacrifice over fear? Would love, courage, and friendship endure within us if the world around us collapsed into darkness?

In a magnificent general conference talk given in October 2000, President Dallin H. Oaks sought to answer this question. In his talk “The Challenge to Become,” he emphasized that faith isn’t simply about acquiring knowledge or holding testimony. It is a call to become; to have our nature, desires, thoughts, and actions changed, rather than simply add information.

“It is not enough for anyone just to go through the motions. The commandments, ordinances, and covenants of the gospel are not a list of deposits required to be made in some heavenly account. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a plan that shows us how to become what our Heavenly Father desires us to become.”

This transformative vision is also found at the heart of Judaism. The third-century Babylonian sage Rav taught: “The commandments were given only to refine people through them. After all, why should the Holy One, Blessed Be He, care whether one slaughters an animal from the throat or from the nape? Thus, we learn that the commandments were given only to refine people through them.”

This teaching addresses a question I hear often as a rabbi: Why is Judaism so exacting? Why does God specify the precise method of slaughter or prohibit certain foods while permitting others? Rav’s response is profound and liberating. God doesn’t micromanage these details out of capricious preference. Instead, the commandments are designed to refine us. By adhering to these laws, we cultivate discipline, mindfulness, and empathy. We learn to pause before acting, to consider the impact of our choices, and to align our will with a higher purpose.

This sobering truth challenges the notion that we can simply “go through the motions” of religious life, reciting prayers without feeling, giving charity without empathy, or observing the Sabbath day without inner rest. We reject such superficiality; ours are not religions of heavenly bookkeeping, where commandments are deposits in a cosmic account. Instead, the commandments form a divine roadmap, guiding us toward our highest potential. They are the blueprint for refining our essence, polishing away impurities like selfishness, anger, or indifference, until we shine with the light of holiness.

The Vilna Gaon, one of Judaism’s greatest minds, explained as follows: “The prime purpose of man’s life is to constantly strive to break his bad traits.” It echoes Deuteronomy’s call: “Now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only that you should fear the Lord your God, to walk in all of His ways, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul” (Deut. 10:12).

To walk in God’s ways is an invitation to emulation. The Talmud illustrates this vividly: “Just as He clothes the naked, so too should you clothe the naked. Just as He visits the sick, so too should you visit the sick. Just as He comforts the mourner, so too should you comfort the mourner.”

Emulation unfolds in the quiet, everyday moments. It’s comforting a tearful child, forgiving a minor slight, extending a kind word amidst the chaos of busyness, or simply acknowledging a friend’s birthday with genuine warmth, as those brave women did in Auschwitz amid unimaginable peril. Each good deed serves as a sacred training ground: the dietary laws instill discipline and mindfulness; observing the Sabbath imparts the art of rest and mindful presence; giving charity nurtures a spirit of generosity and empathy. Through these practices, we forge ourselves into beings who embody truth even when it demands great sacrifice, compassion even toward the undeserving, honesty even in the shadows of solitude, and nobility even when it imperils our very lives.

For years, Fania kept her prized birthday card tucked away in a drawer in her bedroom. “I played with it as a kid,” her daughter Sandy recalled. “She would yell at me and tell me I wasn’t to touch it, it was not a toy, and it was very precious. And it is the only thing that she survived with. There was no family, no history, nothing.”

But that changed in 1988 when Krisha Starker, a good friend of the family, was hired to be the second director of the Montreal Holocaust Centre. Krisha had spent a brief period in Auschwitz herself. She came to Toronto to visit and at dinner mentioned that she had kept her striped Auschwitz uniform and was going to donate it to the Centre. Fania was suddenly, profoundly inspired.

She excused herself from the table. She walked quietly into her bedroom. And when she returned, she was holding the heart.

Krisha looked down at the fragile paper, at the needlepoint F stitched onto the cover, and immediately understood what she was seeing. She was holding a piece of the impossible: a documented act of grace carried out in the deepest hell. Her response came not as analysis, but as revelation.

“Fania,” she whispered, “this does not belong to you. It belongs to the world.”

Against the impassioned pleas of her husband and daughter, who could see only a mother giving away the family’s single surviving treasure, Fania made a decision of staggering selflessness. She understood that the heart was not just hers; it was a testimony. It was a light in the darkness that could save others.

Her hand trembling, her eyes filled with the memory of the nineteen women, she surrendered her most precious possession, transforming a private sorrow into a universal sanctuary. Fania Fainer, the survivor who had once been the recipient of that heroic, secret kindness, became in that moment its ultimate vessel. She did not merely relinquish a family treasure or a relic of her past; she offered the very symbol of her life’s meaning to the world, laying it bare before a public that might treat it with reverence or with callousness. It was a staggering act of vulnerability, an acknowledgment that while not everyone is called to expose their soul in such a way, she would bear the burden of this exposure. She gave away the one physical thing that anchored her to her past, trusting us, the strangers who now look upon it, with the heavy responsibility of giving her life, and the lives of her friends, continued meaning.

With three short words, the Talmud may capture the essence of our faiths: Rachmana Liba Ba’ei—God desires the heart. That eternal truth radiates from Fania’s heart—handcrafted in defiance of death, a repository of love, compassion, and hope. It serves as irrefutable proof that when people rise above their basest instincts and reach for what is right, true, and noble, the result is nothing less than spiritual majesty, a light that pierces even the darkest abyss.

And so the heart does not merely remember the past; it summons the future. It calls us beyond repentance alone, beyond ritual compliance or moral bookkeeping, toward the lifelong work of becoming. With the fierce determination of those nineteen women in Auschwitz, we are summoned to refine our souls, to emulate the Divine through unyielding kindness and unwavering truth. We are asked to shape lives defined not by what we possess, nor by what we know, nor even by what we do, but by the enduring, transformative question that confronts every faithful human being: who we dare to become.

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Jarrod R. Grover, Senior Rabbi of Beth Tikvah Synagogue in Toronto, is a spiritual leader known for his passionate teaching and interfaith outreach, particularly with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Art by Merrilee Liddiard.

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“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound . . . ”1

For most of my life, I have been someone else. Actually, I was myself trying to be someone else, on a journey through several languages and cultures. The personas I created, though, were so convincing that I forgot who I truly was—until, not long ago, I came to myself. How that came about follows. Recently, after retiring from a career as an historian, I turned my analytical skills toward my own life. I had been crushed by the worst catastrophe: the death of my wife of thirty years. Only Annette came to know me as I am, and in spite of my self-evasion, she still loved me. In the midst of unquenchable grief, grace found me. With it, I came to see that my journey has been one of love, recognition, and return—with grace being the ever-present, though mostly invisible, engine of its unfolding. I came to see that my journey was not unlike that of Frodo and Sam to destroy the Ring and return home. This comparison is particularly meaningful to me, since my family emigrated from the very place that Tolkien used to model the Shire: Penkridge, Staffordshire.

Like Frodo, I, too, carried a “Ring” of shame, fear, and memories of childhood trauma. I fingered my Ring constantly to make sure my secret was safe. Like Frodo, my Ring preyed upon my mind. I was hypervigilant and felt unsafe around most people. My Ring remained undestroyed while I was distracted by my quest to achieve significance. The tale of how it was finally destroyed reveals how grace has redeemed my soul from a living hell.

My story began not in the Shire, but in an obscure Midwest town—a place too small for my ambitions. Ancestors and close relatives had accomplished extraordinary things—inventors, pioneers, statesmen, scientists, decipherers of ancient scripts, and explorers. Thus, I sought adventure on wider stages, leaving the Midwest for more exciting places. I was driven to achieve because I didn’t want to waste my God-given talents. But there was another reason, as we’ll see.

When I left home, I also tried to leave behind the person I had been. I modified my speech and mannerisms to conceal my rural Midwestern origins. I sought correct English grammar and precise usage (not available where I grew up) and a less cacophonous vowel harmony. Wherever I lived—and I have lived among several varieties of English—I adopted elements of local speech and mannerisms that pleased me. I especially loved the bits I picked up from my time at Oxford. The result was a broadly and deeply educated persona that I hoped obscured my humdrum origins—effectively concealing the Ring—and projected, through elevated idiolect and erudition, the kind of cultured person I wanted to be. Curiously, none of these carefully cultivated voices mattered to Annette. She always heard my original one and always spoke directly to the authentic me. She was aware of and intrigued by my tapestry of identities, and I was at ease being vulnerable with her. She is the only one to whom I showed my Ring.

Reflecting on the course of my career, I could see how I was a beneficiary of grace, which helped me become a respected scholar of many languages. Once I stood before an audience of Iranian medical students in Tehran, where I’d been invited to present on Arabic medicine. I was greeted by, “Dr. Cooper, I read your article on medical crises,” or “How is the current edition of Galen coming?” So, when I rose to speak and introduced my talk in Farsi, I received a standing ovation. On another occasion, I shared a taxi with Sir Roger Penrose on the way to our papal audience, during a physics conference sponsored by the Vatican. Another memorable event was being a guest of President Erdoǧan of Türkiye while attending a conference on Islamic science. Moving among such luminaries validated my craving for significance and kept my Ring well-hidden.

I saw the divine at work in my life most clearly in my relationship with Annette. She came to know me better than anyone as we journeyed together. Before we began dating, we journeyed to Norway to visit her family. Unexpectedly, however, after Annette and I had spent much time together, I began to feel like I had come home—and not simply because I also have roots in the country. That our life journey together should begin there is more than coincidence. With my guard down, I fell in love with her as she spoke her ancestral language with her cousins in her beloved Norway. That moment of coming home, as it turns out, was my first acquaintance with a feeling that grew as we created an actual home and family, and that will be consummated in our eternal home. My soul grew entwined in joy with hers, and when her soul sailed into the West, mine was bereft. However, grace found me, filling some of this void and opening my broken heart to an even greater capacity for love.

A year after she passed, my Ring was finally destroyed. While reading Adam Miller’s Original Grace, I was moved by his shift away from viewing divine justice as a balance sheet of punishments and toward grace and forgiveness—away from praying for vengeance and toward praying for what I and my adversaries need. For many years, I had harbored hatred toward my former employer. I was more than qualified to be granted tenure, with more than sufficient published pages, and more skills and experience, but they misrepresented my record, their message being, “You’re not one of us, you don’t belong here.” Unable to provide adequately for my family, my self-worth as a husband and father was damaged. Annette held us together. She knew that my talents—my pearls—were unappreciated.

Then, like the Prodigal Son in a land far from home, I came to myself. While undergoing therapy for recent post-surgery trauma, my therapist taught me healing techniques involving body and soul together. This healing process finally freed me from the Ring’s power, which was the burden of silence and shame that I had carried for fifty years. So, quite by accident, the abusive emotional, sexual, and especially physical trauma I suffered as a child came forward. I both owned my experiences and let them go, so they no longer captivated me, and the Ring vanished.

My negative self-talk vanished: “You’ll never amount to anything. No one will want you, you’re damaged. People would shun you if they knew your secret.” The joy I feel with this freedom is indescribable. The colors of nature become clearer and more intense. The piano music I play sounds more beautiful; the tones are purer and richer.

A weight was removed: The Ring was gone. None of what had brought resentment seemed to matter anymore. I found myself more patient, smiling more, chatting with strangers. Finally at home in my own skin, I could attend authentically to others in conversation unmediated by inner questions like “Is this a safe person? How much of myself can I share?” My life was an extended effort to prove the negative voices wrong, to show the tormentors behind those voices how wrong they were by leading a life of significance, changing some corner of the world for good. In short, I have become more like the person that Annette perceived through the smokescreen.

Like the Hobbits’ journey in The Lord of the Rings, I left home for adventures in the East to serve great kings, encounter strange peoples and creatures, and battle orcs and dragons. I entered a larger world with important people, august institutions in distant lands, and intellectual pursuits beyond anything imagined by those where I grew up. Eventually, I returned to where I began, profoundly changed in ways I could not have foreknown.

The story of David and Goliath is used to teach that, like David, we’ll prevail against our Goliaths through obedience. But what about the Davids who follow God’s counsel, do everything they are supposed to do, but their Goliath remains undefeated? How do they handle their disappointment and despair? We would all benefit by more practical discussions at church about how to cope with failure.

My Goliath-antagonists were university administrators, smugly dressed bureaucrats in ties who sanctimoniously impose metrics on everything, as if everything could be quantified. As Oscar Wilde noted, such men know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Scholars are treated as human resources. Neither I nor any other scholar worthy of that name is a “human resource”: that puts us on the same existential level as office equipment. My employer deprived us of my livelihood in retaliation for whistleblowing—in spite of their knowing that I was grieving my deceased companion.

So, I returned home wounded, with my Goliath undefeated, despite all that I could do and despite all that could be done. Moreover, my life’s companion had gone on before me. It seemed that all was lost. However, in the alchemy of the Atonement, my resentment and rage transmuted to goodness and gratitude.

Returning home, I was surprised by the celebrations that awaited me from the very people I had sought to leave behind. None of my defeats or Ring that wounded my heart lowered my esteem among my own people. There, I am not judged by academic accomplishments, titles, or prestige. I am simply received as I am, enveloped in love and acceptance, the fatted calf, new clothes, shoes, a ring—a good ring. I felt this love especially on two recent occasions: my wife’s funeral and my son’s wedding. I had come home, and experienced it as if for the first time.2

I had hoped to accomplish great things with my life. Will my story be remembered? When measured against saving the world from the power of Sauron and the Ring, my deeds may seem minor, but they made a difference to a few people. My discoveries are fascinating, but they haven’t changed the world as I hoped—although they’ve changed me and a handful of students. Being open to grace has helped me to see that. Whereas my career seems to have failed, I did not fail in life. The most significant thing I ever did was marry Annette, and all the good that happened flowed from that decision. What if my greatest deeds have little to do with fame, prestige, or even an academic career? What if they consist instead of surviving childhood trauma—destroying my Ring, choosing to follow Jesus, serving my community, thriving in spite of losing a career, building a strong marriage, and creating the best family we could?

At the end of the journey, I remain a boy from a small Illinois town, who chased adventure in the East, and was the guest of kings, popes, ambassadors, prime ministers, and universities. He battled dragons and ringwraiths and Goliaths, seemingly failing in his quest, and has come home like Frodo, with wisdom, wounds, and a memory replete with stories to regale admiring young hobbits. There, he won the greatest victory of all: he became free of his Ring’s poison. There is now time for reflection, writing, healing, forgiveness, and being who I am at last with those who love me. At the end of my journey, after all the languages I learned, all the voices I borrowed, and all the identities I tried to inhabit, the only voice that mattered was the one Annette had recognized from the beginning. When I join her in the West, that is who she’ll embrace.

“I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.”3

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Recently retired from BYU, where he enjoyed teaching, Glen continues writing on the history of medicine and Arabic science. He loves his children, foreign travel, discussing philosophy, and music, both listening and composing. A former resident of Plato’s Cave, he plans to craft a memoir about his healing experiences in therapy.

Art by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973).

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Chalk this one up to something like a scriptural version of the frequency illusion.

Here’s what happened. I was recently reading a book that quoted Matthew 16:13–16, and I’m sure because Jeremiah was on my mind for the purposes of this blog post, something in that Matthew passage caught my attention like never before.

“Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” Jesus asked his disciples.

“Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some Elijah; and others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”1

I realized that, as far as I could remember, I had never asked myself, Why would the people who were hearing Jesus—and hearing of Jesus—associate him with Jeremiah? Think he might even be Jeremiah returned? I could remember in the past thinking, Why John the Baptist? Or why Elijah? But not that I could recall, Why Jeremiah?

It didn’t take long to discover that I had read books that had treated that very question,2 but nothing about those previous encounters had stuck with me until now. It dawned on me that the very fact that Jeremiah had been on my mind made me notice something that had always been there. It was the scriptural equivalent of learning a new word and suddenly hearing it everywhere or buying a new car and suddenly noticing that every fourth driver on the freeway seemed to own the same car.

That’s the frequency illusion, and it has given me some things to think about this week.

For one thing, it was yet another reminder in general of the value of a close reading of scripture. I need constantly to be asking myself, What other details and rich avenues for exploration are right here, right now—and have always been there?

But for these past few days specifically, it has been an interesting exercise to think about this connection between Jesus and Jeremiah. What was it about Jesus’ ministry that reminded his hearers and associates of Jeremiah? What can this tell us about early reactions to Jesus’ work and words?

It doesn’t take long to see that the thematic parallels in their ministries seem everywhere.

Here are just a few very initial thoughts:

• The gospels’ chronology of this is not easy to pin down with any definitiveness, but the Gospel of John suggests (differently than the synoptic gospels) that Jesus also drove out the moneychangers and merchants from the temple early in his ministry (see John 2). If that timing were the case, what Jewish witness of Jesus’ actions and words would not have heard echoes of Jeremiah’s indictment of what was happening in the temple in his day? The synoptic gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple even have Jesus paraphrasing Jeremiah: “Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?” (Jeremiah 7:11) As word spread of Jesus’ actions at the temple, would the connection with Jeremiah’s indignation have seemed almost unavoidable?

• The connections to the temple go even further. One of the most sobering of Jeremiah’s prophecies asked Judah to look at what had happened to Israel just a century before, and to Shiloh specifically: “But go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. . . . Therefore will I do unto this house [in Jerusalem], which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh” (Jeremiah 7:12, 14). And we remember that one of the chief accusations brought against Jesus was that he had predicted, or even called for, the destruction of the temple (see Matthew 26:61). Even though his accusers had missed the deeper meaning of Jesus’ words, it would make sense that his listeners might have thought, “This sounds a lot like Jeremiah.”

• Jeremiah 2:13: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” At a tense season in Jesus’ ministry—at the very time when “there was much murmuring among the people concerning him: for some said, He is a good man: others said, Nay; but he deceiveth the people”—Jesus spoke these words in the temple: “Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law? Why go ye about to kill me?”; and “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:12, 19, 38).

• Jeremiah’s strong rebuke of the religious leaders of his day made him unpopular on all sides. Pashur, the “chief governor in the house of the Lord,” even “smote Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the high gate of Benjamin” (Jeremiah 20:1–2). But that painful humiliation didn’t cow Jeremiah. He came out of the stocks with a “thus saith the Lord” message for Pashur: Judah would be conquered by Babylon, “and thou, Pashur, and all that dwell in thine house shall go into captivity: and thou shalt come to Babylon, and there thou shalt die, and shalt be buried there, thou, and all thy friends, to whom thou hast prophesied lies” (Jeremiah 20:6). And then we remember moments when “all they in the synagogue, when they heard” what Jesus said, “were filled with wrath” and tried to “[lead] him unto the brow of the hill whereon the city was built, that they might cast him down headlong” (Luke 4:28–29). Or moments when they “took . . . up stones to cast at [Jesus]” (John 8:59).

There is a lot more to say here, but maybe this is enough of a start, because what strikes me overall in this exercise is something more impressionistic than anything. Matthew 16’s reference to Jeremiah could reveal something about a general attitude toward (and appreciation of) the fearlessness that observers associated with Jeremiah—and likewise saw in Jesus. It’s the spirit of Matthew 15:12–14: “Then came [Jesus’] disciples, and said unto him, Knowest thou that the Pharisees were offended, after they heard this saying?” Jesus seemed undisturbed. “But he answered and said, Every plant that my Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” When Jeremiah was first confronting the implications of his prophetic calling (and confronting his own self-doubt), he accounted for his subsequent and unflinching resolve this way: “Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:9–10).

All of this was not without a cost, for Jeremiah or for Jesus. In Jeremiah 20, Jeremiah lamented the day he was born: “Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?” (Jeremiah 20:18). It was a heavy burden to speak the word of the Lord. Jesus, too, was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

It’s easy to imagine the way society’s underdogs might have cheered for Jesus as they saw him doing what they understood Jeremiah to have also done so many centuries earlier: dishing out a plate of comeuppance to the powerful. It would have been easy to admire that kind of courage to call out the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of those who tithed mint and cumin but ignored the weightier matters of the law. But what Jesus was about was much more than that—and so, too, was Jeremiah.

No, of course Jesus was not Jeremiah returned, but they were motivated by very similar concerns.

The Bible Dictionary entry for Jeremiah has this beautiful line: “After Josiah’s death he tried to stem . . . the tide of idolatry and immorality, of self-deception founded on superficial reforms . . . , and of fanatical confidence in the Lord’s protection, in which all classes were carried away” (emphasis added). I’m struck by the notion that Jeremiah was worried about self-deception and superficial reforms that seemed so universally problematic. It was more than just boldness for boldness’s sake, more than being a disrupter for disruption’s sake. It was about getting past the surface.

“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time,” Jesus told everyone who would listen, as he reviewed points of the law. “But I say unto you,” what about anger, lust, contention, revenge, integrity, humility? Superficial reforms were not good enough, could never be good enough. “Hypocrites! For ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. . . . cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, then the outside of them may be clean also” (Matthew 23:25–26).

Knowing that truth, it’s no wonder that Jeremiah felt the “word . . . in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, . . . and I could not stay” (Jeremiah 20:9).

That was true for Jeremiah, and it was true for Jesus—and all the better for us. That kind of boldness might be just the thing we all need to prompt us to confront our own tendencies toward self-deception.

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J. B. Haws is the Executive Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and a professor of Church History and Doctrine at BYU. He is the author of The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (Oxford, 2013) and holds a PhD in American History from the University of Utah. His research centers on the place of Mormonism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, including public perceptions of Latter-day Saints, trends in contemporary Mormon historical scholarship, and interfaith engagement.

Art by Barthélemy d’Eyck (c. 1420–1470).

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“The trick to life is to just keep breathing.” — John Landry

The first time I forgot how to breathe was at the end of sixth grade. I had been laid up in bed for a week with the measles, barely able to rouse myself to stumble to the bathroom or choke down some mild food. At eleven years old, I was old enough to care that I hadn’t showered or washed my hair for over a week, so when I could finally sit upright without the world spinning around me, I dragged my body into our tiny bathroom and pulled myself into the tile-lined shower. I started feeling weak while I was washing my hair, and my hands started tingling like they were falling asleep, but I pushed through until I had rinsed out all the soap and turned off the water. I struggled to wrap myself in a towel as pinpricks of pain filled my hands. I crawled to my bed just before my fingers started to seize up. I watched in horrified fascination as my fingers turned into rigid claws, frozen in place as if they belonged to some other creature and weren’t part of my body at all. My breath was coming in short, shallow bursts, which seemed like a natural consequence of my hands’ transformation rather than its cause.

I don’t remember how that incident ended, whether I called out to my mom for help or just crawled back under the covers until I was asleep again. I chalked the experience up to another weird part of the measles, along with the way it had defied my vaccinated state, made me miss my sixth grade graduation program, and brought the public health workers out to draw my blood for research. But the memory has stayed vivid in my body.

Hyperventilating is a strange problem, almost like too much of a good thing. The body needs oxygen to survive, and usually we take in as much as we need without even thinking about it. But when we hyperventilate, we breathe too deeply and quickly, upsetting the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The lack of carbon dioxide affects the flow of blood and leads to tingling hands, muscle spasms, or fainting. In an attempt to get the breath we crave, we cause the body to shut down.

Why would anyone try to get more air when they normally do just fine with the breaths they take? What problem is hyperventilation trying to solve? It seems like an inability on some level to accept that there is already plenty of air, that breathing can happen just fine without extra effort and stress.

Oliver Cowdery, working as scribe to Joseph Smith, seems to be suffering from a sort of spiritual hyperventilation in section 6 of the LDS Doctrine and Covenants: Instead of accepting and breathing in the peace and guidance he has already received about the truthfulness of the book he is working on, he wants a “further witness” (D&C 6:22). The answer he has already received has somehow been forgotten or seems insufficient, but here the Lord reminds him that what he got was enough: “What greater witness can you have than from God?” (D&C 6:23). Already surrounded by the “air” of divine revelation, Oliver seems to be struggling to breathe. God reminds him that he can relax and accept the abundance he has already been given. And the reminder seems to work. Like my younger self, Oliver is eventually able to find peace with what he has and keep moving forward with the project.

But like Oliver, I wasn’t able to hold onto that peace forever. My second encounter with serious hyperventilation was in college, when I was about to get my wisdom teeth out. I didn’t feel nervous at all. I had always had positive experiences at the dentist; in fact, I enjoyed going to get my teeth cleaned, probably because I had no cavities and always got praise for my excellent oral hygiene. I knew that getting wisdom teeth removed was normal and nothing to worry about. But somehow my body understood better than my conscious mind that I was afraid. The fear I didn’t know I was feeling started to show itself in my hands, as the tingling started in my fingers and then began to intensify. I mentioned to the doctor that I was starting to lose feeling in my hands, and people around me sprang into action. “It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious before surgery,” I was told. But I didn’t feel anxious. I felt just fine, except for my tingling hands. Within seconds, someone was holding a brown paper lunch bag in front of me and instructing me to breathe into it. Instead of the deep gulps of air I had been taking, my body needed to breathe its own breath back again. Within a few minutes, my hands felt back to normal, and I was ready for the surgery, which went as smoothly as I had expected.

The treatment for my “overbreathing” at this moment was in some ways similar to what God told Oliver in his moment of crisis. I didn’t need more oxygen or deeper breaths; I needed what I already had: the carbon dioxide I was breathing out too quickly. I needed to hold onto what I had already received a little longer instead of desperately seeking new and different air.

Why is it so hard to find contentment in what we already have? In chapter 30 of the book of Alma in the Book of Mormon, the prophet Alma speaks to a challenger named Korihor, who insistently demands a sign of God’s existence. Alma’s first response is not to give Korihor some new evidence of divine power, like a miracle or unexpected event. Instead, he points the man back to the evidence all around him: the scriptures, the abundant earth, the movement of the planets: “Thou hast had signs enough; will ye tempt your God? . . . The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator” (Alma 30:44). The proof had been there all along, but Korihor didn’t see it. He was so focused on judging God’s existence on his own terms that he was unable—or refused—to see the abundance around him. What got in his way? Wanting evidence of God seems like a good thing, but in Korihor’s case, that desire seemed to blind him to the evidence that was already there. Only later was he able to admit that he really had “signs enough”—the evidence was there all along.

Although Korihor’s inability to “breathe” seems to be at least partly his own choice, his example is still a helpful reminder of the dangers of “looking beyond the mark” and trying to force God to play by our rules. One of the central tenets of many ancient religions is meant: learning to let go of our white-knuckled clutch on what it is we think we need out of life. In the Bhagavad-Gita, the god-turned-man Krishna counsels his friend Arjuna to “act without attachment in whatever situation, for by the practice of detached action, one attains the highest” (Chapter 3 verse 19).1 The Daodejing advises readers to “always rid yourself of desires” (section I) and to “have little thought of self and as few desires as possible” (section XIX).2 In the Lotus Sutra, Buddha states that his teachings are meant “to free the sentient beings from their various human attachments” (section 6a).3 Nonattachment means relinquishing control—or, more accurately, the illusion of control—over the world around us and even our own lives. It means acting without focusing on the results of that action and letting go of your own hopes for what might happen. It means breathing in the air around us and letting it go without trying to out-think our bodies. It means choosing not to judge my own body for hyperventilating and instead viewing it with compassion and curiosity. In an American LDS culture that can sometimes seem intolerant of anything less than perfection, nonattachment offers the alternative of accepting any and all outcomes without labeling them as desirable or undesirable. It suggests that, in the words of Alexander Pope, “Whatever is, is right.”4

It seems appropriate that breathing is so central to religious practices like yoga and meditation. What happens with the body is inextricably bound to what happens with the mind. In principle, all this sounds easy. According to contemporary music, all it takes is making a decision: Just breathe! Faith Hill sings it in a country song about having “nothing left to prove,” when all she and her lover need is “just to be.” Jonny Diaz sings a similar message in a Christian song, in which Jesus calls his followers to “Come and rest at My feet and be, just be. Chaos calls but all you really need is to just breathe.” Just breathe! It sounds so simple, like a trivial choice that anyone can make just by wanting to. But I suppose the existence of the songs suggests that it isn’t always as easy as it seems. This most essential of human actions can apparently be enough of a challenge that pop singers need to remind us to stop getting in its way.

Through the years since those early hyperventilation scares, I have only felt little reminders of that propensity in me: tingly fingers when I get up to sing a solo, an impulse to breathe too quickly or deeply in a stressful situation, a heightened consciousness of the unconscious process of respiration when my mind searches for something to worry about. But recently, on a bus in Peru, my body decided I needed a stronger reminder. In retrospect, there were lots of causes for the episode: I was alone with a group of strangers on a tour bus that I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be on. I had awoken really early, which tends to make me feel a little dizzy and lightheaded. I was starting to feel a bit nauseated—often an early sign of motion sickness for me—and I worried about what would happen if I got really sick. I was heading into an unfamiliar situation after several days of other unfamiliar situations.

My mind was so focused on the fear of getting carsick that it took me a few minutes to notice the tingling in my fingers and the shallow, rapid breaths I was taking. I seemed unable to stop my hands from freezing up and turning rigid. I felt separate from my body, powerless to stop my fingers from clenching together like hard plastic oven mitts. After a few minutes of silent panic, not wanting to draw attention to myself, I remembered the paper bag full of snacks the tour guide had given me at the beginning of the early-morning ride. I scooped it up with my almost-useless hands, dumped it out on the seat, put the bag up to my mouth, and started to breathe in my own breath. The seats around me were empty enough that no one was there to witness my mini-crisis, so I could focus on what I needed to do: just breathe. The comforting effect of receiving my own air back again was quick and powerful. My hands and body relaxed, and eventually my mind did as well. As I bounced along that chilly Peruvian highway, I slowly let go of whatever desire for control over the situation I had wanted and accepted my fear, my discomfort, and my anxious hope for an exciting trip. I gave myself up to the abundance of air, of divine love, and of complicated life around me. For that moment, I let what I had been given be enough and just breathed.

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Jennifer Black teaches English Literature and composition at Boise State University and travels the world in any spare time she can find.

Art by Kaihō Yūsetsu (1598–1677), Kano Tan’yū (1602–1674), Musō Soseki (1275–1351), Sakai Hōitsu (1761–1829).

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The Cleveland Clinic—as reputable a medical source as any—defines “interstitium” as “a contiguous network of fluid-filled spaces situated between cells, tissues, and organs throughout the body.” More informally among doctors, however, the term simply refers to all the “stuff” that is not an organ or other major, named, recognizable constituent of human anatomy. It’s the stuff you hardly remember exists, the stuff you’re likely to overlook. But my contention in this essay is this: in the human body—and, critically, in the body of the church—that very “stuff,” the people and things we might easily overlook, constitute the critical context and infrastructure without which those bodies would inevitably fail.

*****

It is late in 2005 and I stand, a young medical student, slightly crouched over a gurney, with three classmates at the rectangular table’s other corners. In the center of our little group lies a corpse, gone grey, with mottled skin stretched—here taut, here loose—over the skeleton inside. This person died many months ago and was preserved “for science,” which, in this case, meant becoming a “cadaver” bound for dissection by nascent doctors.

We will spend three hours a day, three days a week, over the next three months dissecting this body. This I will do to teach my fingers, heart, and mind how human anatomy flows. I will do this with my small group: a hulking man with dark hair, glasses, and a voice pitched much higher than I expect; a Jewish woman who grew up in Connecticut, who graduated from Yale, and who will strike me as someone out of The Great Gatsby; and a woman who already knows she wants to be a gynecologist and who never stops telling off-color jokes that land with an odd frisson given the strange business we’re all about. I will spend these months using a scalpel and forceps to prise apart the minutest branches of a nerve and the divisions of an artery so whisper-thin that I will wonder how blood cells fit inside of it at all.

In all of this—perhaps unavoidably given it was my first year of the eleven I would need after college to become a physician—my focus will linger on the body’s most obvious major constituents. During those months, and in the year or so of physiology lectures that follow, I would come to see the body as a symphony of organs: the heart and the lungs working together to transport oxygen, the liver and the kidneys both filtering the blood in their respective ways, and the brain sending electric impulses through the nerves to create coordinated muscular contractions. My newbie doctor brain wanted to imagine that those large, visible, dominating organs were nearly all there was to the human form. And that early belief was hardly surprising: after all, I hefted a human heart in my hand, became familiar with the hulking contour and spongy texture of the liver, and even cradled a long-silent human brain—all ridges and sulci—in my gloved fingers.

The organs were my initial landmarks—they allowed a green student to find his way through the maze of that dead body. But, of course, new doctors do not stay new forever. And over the next decades, across thousands of hours caring for living humans, my understanding began to deepen and my vision became both more expansive and more penetrating. Eventually, I came to appreciate that the organs mattered, but were, in fact, just one part of a larger and much more complicated story.

In fact, some of the most important components of that physiologic symphony are like instruments whose sound is so soft and subtle that their effect most often becomes apparent only in their absence. When we attend a live orchestra performance, it is easy to recognize the importance of the violins or the horns, but it may take more training and closer attention to recognize the part played by the second cellist or the viola. But if you begin removing the “less important” parts from the orchestra, the music thins and loses its vibrancy and coherence until, finally, you are left with a few visible and audible soloists whose musical work has lost its harmony, rhapsody, and meaning.

A similar dynamic exists within the working of the human body.

After many years of taking care of patients with cancer in the hospital, for example, I began to recognize that an entire host of complicated, seemingly disparate cancer-related health problems trace their origin back to the lack of a single molecule I’d barely heard of when I finished medical school: albumin. To say this compound doesn’t get much attention in the course of medical training is an understatement; to my memory, it showed up for about five minutes as part of a lecture on liver physiology in the second year of medical school and then disappeared. Yes, it’s one of the labs doctors routinely check as part of a “comprehensive metabolic panel,” but it’s one we often don’t pay much attention to. It is just sort of there, to the side, present but largely silent, doing its job with no applause or even notice—nowhere near as sexy or noticeable as the heart or the lung.

What took me many years of practice to recognize, though, is that a lack of albumin causes untold problems in patients with advanced cancer. You may remember from high school biology that if you place two quantities of liquid on either side of a semipermeable membrane, and if they have different concentrations of particles in them (that is, different osmolarities), the liquid will flow through the membrane to equalize those concentrations. This same principle operates continuously within the body—which is lined everywhere with semipermeable membranes. It turns out that albumin—that little molecule about which I knew nearly nothing—is the principal protein that contributes to osmolarity in blood and in the human body. So when a patient is missing albumin, the disequilibrium created by that change in the osmolarity of the blood makes almost every barrier within the body unusually leaky. This means that whereas the body normally can carefully sequester fluid within the blood vessels—where it is needed, in patients with advanced cancer, the body’s fluid tends to go everywhere you don’t want it while never staying where it’s needed. Cancer patients often experience fluid building up in the sack around the heart, the sack around the lungs, and the empty cavity inside of the belly. What’s more, if a patient with low albumin develops dangerously low blood pressure, the normally simple task of delivering intravenous fluids becomes nearly impossible. A doctor can pour fluid into the veins and it will simply leak out into all the wrong places.

The purpose in relating this is to provide a single concrete example of how a deficiency in a microscopic molecule—that most people have never heard of and that doctors often think very little about—can cause enormous problems within the body. The roundabout consequences of the lack of albumin in patients with advanced cancer can even become life-threatening. If patients do not die, the lack of this molecule can still easily lead to continually shuttling into and out of the hospital, unable to live life with the freedom and vigor that had defined their lives just months before.

*****

All of this brings me to a surpassingly strange moment from church just a few weeks ago.

Just as our sacrament meeting’s benediction ended, I gazed up at the crowd as the parishioners began to get to their feet. In that moment, I had come to me very distinctly this peculiar thought (just go with it, I’m a doctor, ok?): Behold the interstitium. Initially, I wanted to pass this off as the bizarre misfiring of a tired brain, stewed for too long in its medical juices. But then, I thought better of my initial dismissal and slowed myself, finally sitting down again in a pew to watch as the meeting ended and people began to stir from their seats. I sat silently and watched as these many friends and acquaintances began to rise, greet each other, embrace, and chat, and then finally as they made their way to Sunday school.

As I’ve written before, I believe the church would be a stronger place if our leaders at all levels reflected the full diversity of the members of the body of Christ. Indeed, I do not believe hoping for this requires revelation or reception of new doctrine; there appears to me to be plenty of “stretch” left in current doctrinal and policy realities which, if taken advantage of, would make the church a more robust, healthier, kinder, and better place.

But the point that was brought home to me on that Sunday was a very different one: a truth that does not negate but, rather, complements and expands the discussions around more fully celebrating and utilizing the full range of gifts available among all church members. The point I was given to more deeply understand on that Sunday is that most of what matters deeply in the church happens by virtue not of the church body’s most visible “organs,” but, rather, in the interstitium.

In other words, while I will always hold the utmost respect for the impact of a bishop or a Relief Society president, the vast majority of what actually happens within a congregation every Sunday is carried out not by those who are visible on the stand or even at the head of a classroom, but, rather, within the nearly invisible interstitium of a ward—the part of the ward that functions largely without note or acclaim but that nonetheless comprises the lifeblood of most congregations. In this regard, my moment there in the pews, looking at my friends mill about the chapel, reminded me of the classic scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, where a young George Bailey is railing against the invidious greed and moral myopia of Mr. Potter. Speaking to Mr. Potter and standing up for the memory of his recently departed father, George shouts, “Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working, and paying, and living and dying in this community.”

When we focus too much on who holds what position in the church—again, as much as I recognize that that matters—we run the risk of missing the true miracle of an LDS congregation. As I watched that morning, I saw the man in the back of the chapel who always helps to pick up and push into the chapel the woman who is nearly blind and confined to a wheelchair; I saw the middle-aged mother who is universally beloved by the young women she works with and who brings kindness and a smile to every interaction with them; I saw the physician who gets up early every weekday morning to teach seminary; the businessman who chimes in to every lesson with a thoughtful comment; the spindly woman who sews hats for every newborn baby; the elderly couple who has spent more than sixty years married and attending this very ward; and the list went on and on and on.

As I watched this complex and restless milieu—as they careened around the room like so many atoms in Brownian motion—I was deeply moved to think of the good they all do generally, and of the unique blessings so many of them have brought to me specifically. I don’t know how to choose which one would be the closest analogue to “albumin,” but the point as I watched was to relearn in a more visceral and personalized way the importance and truth of Paul’s reminder that we are all members of the body of Christ, and that while it may be easiest and most apparent to notice the head, the hands, and the heart, it is the full synchrony and symphony of all the nearly invisible members of the body’s interstitium that allows the body to fully do its divine work.

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare. To receive each new post to Tyler’s column by email, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select On the Road to Jericho.

Art by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty (1711–1786).

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Wayfare is pleased to announce our Fall 2026 issue—Celebrate Advent: A Christmas Companion. Building on our longstanding tradition of sharing essays, poetry, artwork and more exploring the traditional Advent themes of hope, peace, joy, and love, this special issue invites you to slow down and experience a more meaningful holiday season by embracing this ancient liturgical tradition, whatever that looks like for you in this season of life. Paid subscribers will receive a copy of this issue in the mail—and we are offering a 20% Advent discount from now until October 30th. Subscribe today!

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Advent is the Christian liturgical season that begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas (in 2026, that is November 29.) During each week leading up to Christmas, you’ll be able to open up your issue and explore a traditional Advent theme—hope, peace, joy, and love—through essays, poetry, an original children’s story, artwork, scripture, and more. This issue also includes essays, poems, and other offerings to deepen and extend your Christmastide observance. And as always, this issue is stunningly designed, with beautiful full-color art throughout. Explore the full table of contents here!

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…Each Sunday during Advent, in the darkest part of the year, people gather to light Advent candles. Each week a new candle is thoughtfully added, until by Christmas Eve the wreath is a circle of light, pushing back against the darkness and insisting that yes, darkness is real—but so is light. 

Advent teaches me that I don’t celebrate the birth of a Savior by closing myself off to difficult realities and uncomfortable emotions; I celebrate by allowing myself to feel it all and letting that depth of feeling inspire me to bring just a little more hope, peace, joy, and love into the world. It invites me to join in the work of “hasten[ing] the time” of peace on earth, goodwill to men. It reminds me that this is precisely the world to which “the dear Christ enters in”—and that, miraculously, I can be a part of that entering.

Through music, essays, poetry, artwork, stories and more, we hope you will be inspired to join with us, in your own way, to bring more hope, peace, joy and love to the world this season, each of us lighting our own small candles against the darkness.

—from the editor’s introduction to the Advent issue

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Adapted from Seven Songs: Signs of Christ in the Old Testament (Deseret Book, 2025). Shared by permission from the publisher.

Isaiah 60 is a song of homecoming. After the catastrophe of the scattering, which saw Israel’s children and household flung in disarray among the nations, this poem, one of the finest in the Hebrew Bible, depicts Israel’s restoration as a great flow of creation—camels and ships, gold and silver, rams and doves, juniper and fir and cypress, and wave after wave of human peoples stretching as far as the eye can see—streaming “in triumphal procession” back to the holy city of Zion (Isaiah 60:11, NIV).

For all its epic sweep, this poem is rooted in the story of a family reunion. Strip out the extravagant imagery, and its core is surprisingly intimate. After years wandering in faraway lands, a family of lost children is finally brought home. They arrive at dawn. Their steps quicken as they near the city gates, and they begin to run at the sight of their mother just beyond. Lady Zion has not forgotten her children. She rises, straining to make out their faces, dark against the rising sun. They come to her now, their arms heavy with gifts. Her years of poverty are over, and their years of wandering, too. They are reunited and home: “Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee” (Isaiah 60:4, KJV and hereafter).

Homecoming is an all-purpose archetype for the (re)turning points in every life shared with Christ. Repentance is homecoming: The prodigal son who “was lost, and is found” returns from a distant country to the arms of his loving father (Luke 15:32). Conversion is homecoming: As Paul put it, “Now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. . . . Now therefore ye are . . . of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:13, 19). Death is homecoming: Alma taught his own prodigal son, Corianton, that “the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body . . . are taken home to that God who gave them life” (Alma 40:11). Salvation is homecoming: King Benjamin turns the mind of the people to the happiness of those who “are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness” (Mosiah 2:41).

The lost are found. The far are brought near. The estranged are taken home. The pilgrims are received. Again and again, prophets turn to the biblical promise of the gathering of Israel to express the hopes of those who follow Christ. And no Hebrew prophet wrote more powerfully of the gathering than Isaiah. Isaiah managed to create, not just here but across the entire collection of poems contained in the book named for him, an incredibly compelling religious template for love, loss, and reunion. Who can fail to be moved by the story of a mother who loses and then finds her children? Who can resist the promise that “thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side” (Isaiah 60:4)? The gathering of Israel is, for both Jews and Christians, the central emotional and theological framework for understanding the Messiah’s redemptive work in drawing all people to himself.

But who is going home? In the book of Exodus, we see that God’s aim is not only to bring us home to him but also to build a home for himself among us: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel . . . . And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:1, 8). God’s purpose for creation is to make it possible for us to return, wiser and better, to our true home in the presence of God, yes. But God also desires to, himself, come home to us.

And so the homecoming in Isaiah 60, we can now see, is a two-way homecoming: God receives creation to himself, and creation receives God to itself. The children of Israel stream to Zion, trailing in their wake the abundance of creation to lay at the altar of the temple. And when they arrive there, they find that the Lord, too, has come home to meet them in the sanctuary: “All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee: they shall come up with acceptance on mine altar, and I will glorify the house of my glory” (Isaiah 60:7). The presence of the Lord in his house is signaled by glory, the brilliant light that radiates from his habitation. We see the relationship between light, glory, and divine presence laid out in the parallel structure of verse 19: “The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory” (Isaiah 60:19). Where glory is, there God is also—and glory is everywhere in Isaiah 60. The poem begins with the light of the Lord dawning over Zion: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee” (Isaiah 60:1). By the end of the poem, the light of the Lord has taken up its place in the sanctuary of the temple and Zion is illuminated from within by a light so brilliant that it eclipses the sun and the moon: “Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light” (Isaiah 60:20). In Zion, God is no absentee landlord, but the on-site, on-call, hands-on resident Lord of creation.

Isaiah paints a masterful word picture of the future homecoming of Christ and humanity, when they will at last receive one another fully in the temple of renewed creation. As Latter-day Saints, we look forward to the Savior’s second coming—his homecoming, as Isaiah has taught us to see it—in the fulness of his glory. But when we focus exclusively on the comings of Christ that still remain in the future, we risk missing his many homecomings in the past and present. Indeed, we may miss the reality that the entire history of Christ’s dealings with humanity is one long series of homecomings.

Consider these seven snapshots from scripture. Each is a homecoming of God.

“And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8): God visited Adam and Eve in the garden at the beginning of time.

“And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord” (Ether 3:6): God came to a Jaredite prophet when the world of men was new.

“And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8): God traveled in a tent through an ancient wilderness.

“The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14): God indwelt a tabernacle of flesh as a first-century Judean artisan.

“And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering” (Luke 9:29): God uncovered his glory on a mountaintop at the meridian of time.

“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16): God came again into the world at the birth of his church.

“We saw the Lord standing upon the breastwork of the pulpit, before us” (Doctrine and Covenants 110:2): God moved into the home lovingly erected as a modern witness to his presence in the world.

String together these snapshots of seven homecomings into a moving picture. Now splice this film montage-style into Isaiah’s poem: Picture, in quick succession, the Lord coming home in glory to his garden, his mountain, his tent, his body, his Church, his temple, his city. Picture all of creation, all of history, every dispensation and every visitation, as the occasion of God’s homecoming celebrated in Isaiah 60: “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” Now dissolve these flashing scenes slowly into a single image of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The world is God’s home, and Christ is God’s homecoming.

To my mind, there is no greater modern witness of divine homecoming than the Restoration. The revelations of our founding prophet, the sacred cosmos and loving Father that become visible in them, the beauty of our temple practices, and the consecrated efforts of our community straining toward Zion—all of these testify to me that what John the Baptist announced has come to pass: The kingdom of heaven has come near (see Matthew 3:2). The realized hope of Israel’s prophets is underway; God’s home of justice, peace, and joy is coming into being; and the New Jerusalem as the temple-world of God is rising in our midst.

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Rosalynde F. Welch is associate director and a research fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of California, San Diego, she is a scholar of Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature and the author of Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction.

Art by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).

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Courageous Hope: Kierkegaard’s Vision of Spiritual Joy

Join us for a conversation with Deidre Green about her new book Kierkegaard’s Visions for Christian Life. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s religious reflections on the lily and the bird, his maternal metaphors for God and Christ, and his generative readings of three women from the Bible, Green develops a theology that attends to the centrality of joy and flourishing, openness to the divine and others, and communion with specific beloved individuals for Christian life.

​This book reconfigures the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, as well as the joy that it produces, in ways uniquely conceived by Kierkegaard that enable us to navigate our current world of suffering and uncertainty more productively and powerfully.

WHEN: Nov 4th, 7:30pm

WHERE: The Compass Gallery, 250 W Center St, Provo

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THE COMPASS GALLERY: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 7 PM

It’s not too early to think about Christmas! Join us at The Compass Gallery for an evening of music, mingling, and stories to celebrate Wayfare’s new print issue, Celebrate Advent. Children most welcome!

Come for the delicious refreshments and magical ambiance, stay for the fun and good cheer, stay longer for the bonds of affection strengthened. Join us on Friday, November 20, at 7 PM.

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In my office, I have a print of a Brian Kershisnik painting entitled “Divine Intervention.” Pictured is a man struggling to write something on a piece of paper. What the man is writing is not depicted—it could be an essay, a letter, or perhaps even a math problem. Above him, several angels are rushing to his aid, but a single angel holds back the heavenly throng. Perhaps the man will be left to struggle on his own for a while. Perhaps an angel will break through just long enough to convey an inspired thought that will nudge the man just a bit further along.

Seeing this painting for the first time reminded me of an experience I had as an undergraduate mathematics student. My graduate student advisor in the research group I had recently joined gave me a small problem to tackle. We had been studying a certain class of symmetry groups defined algebraically over polynomials. My task was to investigate a proposed geometric description of these symmetry groups, which perhaps would help the research team better understand the more difficult mathematics that relied on them. I was to see if the geometric group description was isomorphic to our algebraic one—not equal, but essentially the same in all mathematical respects.

As I worked with my problem for several months, I came up with many ideas and a few partial results. My advisor suggested some possible approaches, and I spent time reading up on background theory that had some potential to help with my research. But time and time again, I had no luck.

Then one day, as I had my notes spread out on the table in front of me in the university library, I fixed on the mathematical definition of the polynomial symmetry group. I had spent many hours staring at this equation previously, but this time as I stared at my notebook a very distinct idea flashed through my mind: “Erase the A and write S instead!”

These letters represented two different matrices of numbers that I had defined previously. Substituting one for the other in my equation created a brand-new mathematical object, and at first I had no clue what to do with it. But as I continued to work on my problem in the subsequent weeks, I soon realized that this was the missing link to my puzzle—a mathematical object that bridged the gap between the algebraic and geometric symmetry group descriptions that I was trying to reconcile.

As soon as it happened, I knew that my mathematical inspiration did not originate with me. I attributed this idea to God, who took pity on my meager efforts and, perhaps through an angelic messenger, provided me with just enough information to push my project along.

Now imagine that instead of laboring intensely over my problem and praying for guidance, I had focused my efforts on crafting a carefully-worded prompt about my research question which I then fed into a large language model (LLM) AI system. Then imagine that, after a few minutes of “reasoning,” the AI system responded with the same mathematical object mentioned previously and offered me step-by-step instructions on how to use it to resolve my question. In this hypothetical scenario, I glance through the AI output, look up a few definitions, and do a few calculations. I have a solution to my problem, and though it was not one that I had come up with myself, I still bring it back to my advisor at our next meeting and we discuss next steps for our project. The mathematical progress is the same as what had actually transpired—with the benefit of being much more time-efficient. But what did I miss out on? The chance to struggle with a difficult math problem and the chance to experience God through the process.

Until very recently, this reimagining of my experience would have seemed absurd. Research-level mathematics has been out of reach of even the most powerful AI models for quite some time. In August 2025, for example, OpenAI released GPT-5 with the claims that it had “PhD level“ intelligence. OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck quickly made several claims that GPT-5 was capable of generating new mathematics, but had to walk back the comments after being shown that the “new” AI results were actually plagiarized from previously published papers (see examples here and here).

However, researchers continued to develop more powerful AI models. In May 2026, OpenAI announced a startling improvement in mathematical ability in one of its latest models, and this time it had the receipts. In response to a single prompt about whether or not an open conjecture in discrete geometry was true, an AI system independently “reasoned” through the problem and found a counterexample to disprove the original statement (many mathematicians had thought the conjecture to be true). No additional guidance was given beyond the original prompt. No additional work needed to be done to complete the AI proof, though mathematicians later reviewed and refined the result.

Though this is only the first instance of an AI independently generating a novel proof, and one that primarily synthesizes ideas from disparate areas of mathematics rather than developing entirely new mathematical machinery, it raises many questions about what the future of research mathematics will look like and the role humans will play in it.1 Math focuses on discovering true statements that can be derived from sets of commonly accepted axioms using logically rigorous proofs. In many cases, math is useful for developing new technology and helping us better understand our world. However, unlike other creative fields such as art, music, and literature, there is not likely to be a strong demand for human-made mathematics as AI systems improve.

There are compelling arguments for keeping mathematics human-centered, with humans deciding which research questions to pursue, and humans having the final say on the validity of mathematical proofs. Especially with the potential growth in AI’s mathematical ability in the coming years to both generate and validate mathematical proofs, we must continue to champion human efforts to work through difficult problems so that we may better appreciate our accomplishments, wonder at the beauty of creation, and even encounter the divine along the way.

I am not alone in claiming spiritual aid to establish a mathematical result. Georg Cantor, a Russian and German mathematician famous for being the first to show that infinite sets could have varying sizes—that some infinities are “larger” than others—saw himself as a messenger sent from God to communicate new mathematical ideas and even claimed to receive divine assurances of the truth of his work.2

Similarly, in the early twentieth century, Indian-born Srinivasa Ramanujan filled his notebooks with dense equations that were sometimes difficult even for fellow mathematicians to unravel. According to some sources, Ramanujan claimed to occasionally have dreams where he would be shown new formulas; upon waking he would write them down. “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God,” he said.3 More recently even the agnostic Andrew Wiles, famous for proving Fermat’s 300-year-old “last theorem,” described the moment that he discovered the final piece that connected his proof puzzle together as a “revelation.”

But for each of these mathematicians, simply laying claim to inspiration was not sufficient to establish their results. Their work could only be accepted after being scrutinized and vetted by the broader mathematical community, which often required additional effort beyond their epiphanies.

Though Wiles might not describe his breakthrough moment as spiritual in nature, it is clear that it was only possible due to his persistence, and meaningful because of the vast amount of effort he put in to get there. Andrew Wiles spent seven years working alone on Fermat’s last theorem. After he finally presented his proof, reviewers found an irreconcilable gap in his logic. Wiles spent another year on the problem, worked with some collaborators, and finally had his moment of revelation that tied his proof back together. Initial ideas that Wiles had toyed with but set aside previously now came back to fill the gap.4

Due to his unconventional training, many of Ramanujan’s formulas were missing the accompanying proofs needed for full mathematical rigor. Proving these equations kept him and his collaborators busy during his lifetime, as well as many others long after Ramanujan had died. Some of Ramanujan’s equations, along with later work building on his results, eventually enabled Andrew Wiles to finish his own proof of Fermat’s last theorem. The divine inspiration that Ramanujan claimed only opened the door to further research, instead of settling problems once and for all.5

Cantor’s case is more complicated. For a paper early in his mathematics career, Cantor worked to determine the number of elements in two different sets: the set of algebraic numbers, and an interval on a real number line. He tried to show that the algebraic numbers were countable (able to be completely labeled by positive integers), and that the amount of numbers inside an interval on the number line was uncountable (that any labeling by positive integers would necessarily leave some numbers out). Cantor ran into some small issues though: His proof for the algebraic numbers was flawed, and his proof for the real interval was overly complicated. His collaborator, Richard Dedekind, provided a correct proof for the algebraic numbers and a simplified proof for the real interval. But instead of acknowledging Dedekind’s assistance, Cantor decided to publish these proofs under his own name and remove all traces in the proofs that would point back to Dedekind. Despite having felt called by God to champion this mathematical work, Cantor’s proofs were incomplete. Instead of continuing to work to resolve these problems, Cantor took the easy way out and claimed credit for something he did not produce.6

Interestingly, Cantor’s plagiarism did not tarnish his mathematical career. Dedekind kept silent about the slight, though he ceased corresponding with Cantor for a few years afterward. And due to pressure from Leopold Kronecker, Cantor eventually revised his uncountability proof, creating his famous diagonalization argument that is a staple in undergraduate mathematics and computer science curricula.

But for many budding scholars, taking easy-to-get answers to hard problems without putting in the effort to resolve them could stunt both academic and spiritual growth. This is especially tempting in a time of readily available AI results, which can diminish creativity and critical thinking skills.7 As Melissa Inouye puts it, “Our Heavenly Parents have given us the opportunity to struggle mightily with life’s puzzles, thereby exercising our divine capacity. We reason and rage. We stumble, and correct course. We learn to be unshaken. We learn to bend.” It is through the struggle to solve difficult problems that we learn, grow, and encounter the divine.

I firmly believe that the study of mathematics affords ample opportunity for this type of growth. I resonate with Henry Eyring, who once reminisced about his own efforts to study mathematics as an undergraduate. He candidly admitted that as a student, “I felt overwhelmed. I began to feel that I was trying to learn something that was beyond me. The more I felt overwhelmed, the less I felt the strength to keep trying.” Because of how much he struggled, he turned to God for help. He recalled that, “As I prayed, I felt the quiet assurance of the Lord. I felt Him say to my mind, ‘I am proving you, but I am also with you.’” Henry Eyring’s divine assurance came precisely because his subject was difficult to master, and because he was putting in the effort to master it.

Does working with AI necessarily mean that we are not communing with God? Must we reject technological advancement that makes research too easy, shouting with Captain Kirk, “I need my pain”? I do not think that these paths to knowledge are mutually exclusive. Latter-day Saints have had a long tradition of embracing truth from whatever source it comes.8 Mathematician Thomas Bloom also positively notes that “AI is helping us to more fully explore the cathedral of mathematics we have built over the centuries.” But as we work together with machines to develop new knowledge, we should remember to keep God in the loop not only to guide us to important insights but also to help us appreciate what it is we are accomplishing.

Ultimately, in the age of AI, the quest to develop new mathematics should be celebrated as well as the final results. In Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, a character named Mr. Ramsey takes a moment to reflect on his academic achievements. Laying out his accomplishments along the alphabet as a spectrum, he notes that he had “reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.” But he agonizes over the fact that “he [was] stuck at Q. . . . He would never reach R.” Mr. Ramsey tries to comfort himself by saying that only one person in a generation would ever reach the letter Z. “Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? Provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no more left to give?”

While cold comfort for Mr. Ramsey, I believe that we must embrace our human struggle to solve problems and create new knowledge. For it is often through that very struggle that we arrive at sacred solutions and thereby encounter God.

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Nathan Cordner is an assistant professor of computer science at Utah Valley University.

Art by Brian Kershisnik (@briankershisnik).

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During the nights of the full moon, look up at the sky and you’ll see the same pattern of light and dark on its surface month after month. I see a mother curved over a child. Perhaps you see a face, or a frog, or a rabbit. But each month the moon shows the same face.

Long ago, the moon showed a changing face to the world. But the relationship between Earth and Moon is a dance of change and stasis. Slowly, over time, the gravity at work between the two inexorably pulled the moon’s cold dry bulk into a precisely synchronized rotation relative to Earth’s rotation in a phenomenon known as tidal locking. The moon also stabilized Earth’s tilted axis so that we can enjoy lovely seasons without burning or freezing to death. Earth responds to the moon’s steady presence by offering a splashy libation, the rising tide that follows the moon’s course.

My children and I were recently at the beach at high tide. The strength of the rising ocean surprised me. One of my children lost her footing in the strong pull of a receding wave. The sucking water dragged her quickly toward the crest of the next rising swell. She screamed, I ran, and just before the wave broke, she regained her balance and scampered up the shore into my arms.

A changing tide exposes our vulnerabilities, not only because its changeability produces waves of surprising strength, but because it forces upon us an environment for which we are very ill-suited. Dolphins get stranded on sandy shores. Shoes and sandals and maybe children disappear into watery shadows. When the tide turns, features that once were clever adaptations, such as lungs that breathe air, become a vulnerability.

Our time is one of shifting tides. This is true at the scale of geopolitical events, but ask yourself if it isn’t also true at the scale of an individual human life. It’s a time of change, and therefore a time of vulnerability.

What does a human do when the tide turns? Some might respond to rising waves as my adolescent son does—joyfully running into the water, ready to test his strength against the sea. He loves life, my son, but he doesn’t yet know how precious it is. Another familiar response is to exert our formidable powers to control our material and psychological lives. We follow schedules and build algorithms; we set boundaries and curate our media diet; we ask our institutions to play an ever-expanding role in creating homogenizing environments of protection and pre-fabricated meaning. This calculated response is a losing proposition from the start. Despite all the protective measures we take, bodies change, people change. Life, at least as we know it, will end. Any attempt to avoid that fact is just a fig leaf.

Eve in the garden knew something about fig leaves, and her story shows us a better way. Eve taught us how to meet our time not with calculation but with trust.

At first glance, Eve’s story might seem a cautionary tale of misplaced trust, much like the stories of Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel. The Latter-day Saint understanding of Eve’s story hints at much more. In the garden, Eve showed us that to trust is to love life more than to fear death.

In the garden, Eve occupies an elusive space vis-a-vis God’s word. At times she is nearly invisible, like the new moon in the daytime sky. In the scriptural account, only Adam directly receives God’s command not to eat the fruit. And if Eve was present, was she firmly within the ambit of God’s directive, or did she occupy some other space? What did she make of God’s trailing clause of “nevertheless thou mayest choose . . . ” (Moses 3:17). Did Eve’s response to the vibrations of those words set the world in motion, each choice adding energy and direction like the resonance of a swing, until creation was full of the movement of choice? Like the moon, her position is changeable, strangely patterned to those of us who don’t know her ways, though clearly centered on God. This gives Eve a unique kind of freedom in her moral choice. When Satan irrupted into Eve’s predictable life in the garden, Eve could wonder.

Kierkegaard, that Christian philosopher who delights in ambiguity, paradox, and complexity, calls this kind of choice, one that defies logical argument and inevitability, an act of passion. For Kierkegaard, such passion is the essence of life, faith, and self. Passion stands in stark contrast to the kind of prediction-making, comfort-seeking posture that so many of us occupy in our uncertain time. But to passionately act within this uncertainty is the practice of living.

So there was Eve, serpent at her side, not so much listening to his slippery words as gazing at the possibilities inherent in a choice like so many seeds inside a fruit. Deciding whether or not to live. It’s strange to think of Eve’s choice in those terms. After all, wasn’t she choosing whether or not to die? But here is a critical truth from Eve’s story: One cannot choose life without also choosing death.

Philosopher Annette Baier recognizes that to trust is to willingly make oneself vulnerable. In other words, vulnerability offers us an invitation to enter into trusting relationships. What implications does this have for Eve? Maybe Eve’s story is not one of innocence, fall, and redemption, but of ever-expanding boundaries of trust. Eve knows that God loves her inside the garden—but will God love her outside of it? Yes, Eve says, I trust that God’s love will attend me even there.

Does that mean that we should put ourselves into risky situations so that we may act with trust? Or worse, pretend that risk doesn’t exist? I have made such mistakes, and it doesn’t feel like courage or faith; it feels like foolishness.

The philosopher Sissela Bok wrote, “Whatever matters to a human being, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.” Baier playfully responds to this assertion by pointing out that a great number of things that humans would like to avoid—like exploitation, deceit, and treachery—also thrive in relationships of trust. Trust does not call us to foolishness or self-deception. Indeed it requires that we know what is at stake. Because risk is exactly the point: To trust is to willingly remove our protection and reveal what lies beneath, whether that be our desires, our otherness, or our insufficiencies. One might receive the love and care of others, but the possibility—no, the inevitability—remains that instead of love, one might receive injury, rejection, cruelty, or death.

We have made much of Eve’s choice to eat the fruit herself. But let us linger for a moment at the next scene in the story. Eve turned to Adam. What was Eve risking when she offered the fruit to him? Adam might have said no. Eve would have left the garden alone, knowing that Adam’s fear of death was greater than his love for her. Many have turned away from Eve for just this reason. Did Eve know that in choosing to live, others would blame her for death? Did she know that by inviting Adam’s trust, she would also become an object of distrust, an emblem of suspicion? Ah, poor Eve! But Adam did eat. I like to imagine he did so without resentment, in that moment growing into the man he was meant to be. With Eve at his side ready to leave the garden, and knowing that God wanted them to be together, Adam himself could act with Kierkegaardian passion and take upon himself the burden and blessing of his own life.1 Perhaps Adam saw clearly in that moment something that the rest of us forget too easily. Without trust, you are certainly alone. With it, you may live with others, and all the riches of a life woven together with other lives accrue to your soul.

The early Christians would recognize the holiness of trusting relationships. For these first saints, the trust we have in God and our resulting relationship was the essence of faith. Anglican theologian Teresa Morgan, whose words appear later in this issue, points out that trust is two-way. Holy trust means being both trusting and trustworthy. As we trust God, God trusts us to receive our “atypical Messiah.” As Morgan points out, holy trust leads us to act. Jesus’s acts of trust include absolute truth-telling, participating in the rites of hospitality with good faith, and nourishing deep friendships. Jesus’s final sacrifice defines both complete trust and complete trustworthiness. He did not shrink! Our holy trust looks like heartfelt attention to the habits of devotion. Our small taste of bread and water can be as significant for us as Eve’s taste of the fruit. Trust certainly looks like our care for the lives that God has entrusted to our community. And for those of us on a church pew the first Sunday of the month, it means we receive another’s witness of God without looking away, and we offer our witness in turn. We trust in God’s goodness when our own fails. We trust in God’s goodness even when the heaving waves of our changing tides rise up with unpredictable force.

So do not fear the tides, and do not fear the moon. The inscrutable moon, while she pulls our oceans this way and that, simultaneously steadies us so that we may flourish under a mild sun and gentle rain. To choose life is also to choose death. But do not fear, only trust. Do not fear, but live. Faithfulness, ours and God’s, is stronger than the cords of death.

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Rachel Jardine is Deputy Editor at Wayfare. When she is not looking after her family, she loves to read, write, and hike.

Art by Rose Datoc Dall.

This essay appeared in Wayfare issue 7.

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FEATURED ESSAYS

THEOLOGY

ORATORY

ON THE ROAD TO JERICHO

Who told thee that thou wast naked? (Genesis 3:11; see also Moses 4:17)

Have you ever wondered why Adam and Eve hid when they realized that God was about to see them naked? I have. Because this wasn’t a new situation. To that point, Adam and Eve had only ever been naked before God. God knew their nakedness—he created their nakedness! Whether speaking to them face to face or just aware of them as their all-knowing Creator, God surely was not bothered by their nakedness. What changed when Eve, then Adam, chose to partake of the forbidden fruit?

The difference was that they became aware of their nakedness. I imagine that this was not the first time they had shared a walk with God in the cool evening breeze. But this time, for the first time, when they heard that familiar voice in the garden, they “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8; see also Moses 4:14).

In Isaiah 50, God wonders where we have gone. “When I came, was there no man? When I called, was there none to answer?” (Isaiah 50:2). What causes us to hide when we hear God’s voice? What causes us to believe that we have been “put away” by God; that we have no option but to sell ourselves “for [our] iniquities?” (Isaiah 50:1).

[W]e hid as it were our faces from him . . . (Isaiah 53:3)

As I read Isaiah 50–55 this week, I was struck that these chapters can function as an answer to the experience of shame—an experience that too often causes us to “[hide] as it were our faces from” our God (Isaiah 53:3).

Like in the Garden of Eden, our “nakedness”—the things which cause us to feel shame—do not actually require us to withdraw from God. God has always stood aware of our shortcomings and our needs. He knew them long before we came to recognize them. But that experience of recognizing our nakedness can be one of intense vulnerability and shame. Many of us respond by separating ourselves from God. We “sell ourselves” to cover the debts we take ourselves to have accrued (Isaiah 50:1). We feel darkness surrounding us, and instead of asking God for light, we burn from the inside, trying to light our way on our own, until we inevitably burn ourselves out and “lie down in sorrow” (Isaiah 50:11).

God watches us withdraw from him in sorrow of his own. Isaiah presents his anguished call to us, asking why we don’t believe he can help us: “Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? or have I no power to deliver? behold, at my rebuke I dry up the sea, I make the rivers a wilderness . . .” (Isaiah 50:2). He begs us to “[l]ook unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you” (Isaiah 51:2). We belong to the human family that he seeks to tie together through covenant; without us his family is incomplete and there is a gaping hole in “the rock whence [we] are hewn” (Isaiah 51:1).

Nevertheless, we often are utterly convinced that our shortcomings mean we are condemned to “divorcement” from God (Isaiah 50:1). But God wonders, who do we take to be calling for this condemnation (Isaiah 50:9)? God calls to us not to condemn us, but to offer deliverance. And as for those who would condemn us, he promises that when we heed his voice, “[n]o weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn” (Isaiah 54:17). The Lord seeks to give us relief from the voices that would keep us feeling the need to hide our faces. I can’t help but hear in this verse the Savior’s exchange with the woman taken in adultery:

“Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?”

“No man, Lord.”

“Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (John 8:10–11).

God does not want us to cower in condemnation. He wants to redeem us.

But what about the moments when I don’t hear God’s call? Or when I feel his disappointment?

In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee. (Isaiah 54:8)

Why does the Lord sometimes hide his face from us, even for “a small moment”? (Isaiah 54:7). As a parent, I know that how I react to my children matters a lot. Even when they are actively resisting what I am asking of them, I know they are tracking how I respond. My reactions to them shape their world—their sense of self, of worth, of belonging. With such high stakes, I sometimes worry about doing anything that risks alienating them from my approval.

But I don’t only want my children to feel loved. I also want them to learn how to be active participants in loving relationships, where the care flows both ways. And that means sometimes letting them see that I am hurt. I respect their growing agency when I allow them to see that their actions impact me—for a moment, letting them understand that they have the power to put distance between us.

But the moment I see that my child has understood this, I usually have an overwhelming need to reassure them. To connect more deeply, to close any space that they feel between us. When I read Isaiah 54, I see our God feels that way too. He promises that his “everlasting kindness” will never “depart from [me],” ensuring an overflowing of mercy and a perfect commitment to “the covenant of peace” he offers me (Isaiah 54:8, 10).

I think of the way my little girl will fall into my arms when she knows she did something wrong but sees my outstretched hands and knows that I want to hold her in that hurt, not condemn her for it.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him . . . (Isaiah 53:3)

What allows us to accept such an expression of care when we feel ourselves drowning in shame? There is incredible power in knowing who Christ is. The sacred heart of this sequence of scripture is surely the description of Christ in Isaiah 53.

Abinadi quoted this chapter in its entirety when he stood bound before King Noah and his priests. Among those priests is Alma, who “knew concerning the iniquity which Abinadi had testified against them” (Mosiah 17:2). I imagine that in that moment, Alma had cause to feel great shame. Abinadi had spoken plainly and publicly of the priests’ failure to teach the people what they knew was in the scriptures, instead indulging in destructive vices that then spread through their people (Mosiah 12:29). When Alma recognized the truth of Abinadi’s words, he surely felt his own “nakedness.” How did he stop from hiding his face, instead finding the strength to stand up to King Noah, and ultimately record and teach Abinadi’s words?

I suspect that the time Abinadi took to quote all of Isaiah 53 had something to do with it. Alma was reminded that his God understands the experience of shame: to be despised and rejected, to have others turn their faces from you in disgust and judgment, to be oppressed and afflicted (Isaiah 53:3, 7). He also was reminded of the willingness of the Savior to undergo such suffering out of a love for us, because “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground . . . (Isaiah 53:2)

Having recently spent time with my family trying to make things grow during the scorching Utah summer, the image of Christ as a tender plant with a root in dry ground caught my attention. We removed the lawn in the yard beside our house to plant things we could harvest, but we quickly realized that only a few inches down the dirt turned into rocky, nutrient-poor ground fill. If our garden dreams were going to come true, we needed to learn how to help tender plants grow in dry ground.

My husband suggested planting comfrey to enrich the soil. Comfrey has a long tap root that reaches deep into the earth as it grows. This makes the mature plant drought-tolerant. Comfrey is able to seek out the water and nutrients that plants with shallow roots cannot access. It then grows robust, abundant green leaves that can be cut down and left on the ground, providing a nutrient-rich mulch. Over time, the quality of the dry soil improves, and more plants are able to grow.

Perhaps Christ, the tender plant in dry ground, is able to work something like the comfrey. Seeking out the hidden goods around him that others struggle to access. Willing to give of the richness he produces to feed the ground in which we strive to grow. He knows what it is like to feel the sorrow of dry ground, but promises that if we stay near him, we will receive relief and nourishment.

[P]ut on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem . . . (Isaiah 52:1)

The experience of shame is so well captured in the sudden realization of nakedness; is it any surprise that Isaiah presents God’s ability to soothe this vulnerability as the offer to clothe us in beautiful garments? Or to build us of “stones with fair colours,” foundations laid with sapphires, “windows of agates,” and “gates of carbuncles” (Isaiah 54:11–12)? We are offered beautiful comfort, homes of safety from which we are encouraged to “[e]nlarge the place of thy tent . . . spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes” (Isaiah 54:2). Isaiah’s message of comfort to the ashamed is that if we answer the call of our Savior, not only will we “forget the shame of [our] youth” (Isaiah 54:4), but we will find ourselves able to open up our homes and hearts to other members of God’s family.

Isaiah teaches that the isolation of shame and loss can be replaced with the security of knowing a God who works tirelessly to “[gather] the outcasts of Israel” (Isaiah 56:8). He begs us to “[take] hold of my covenant” (Isaiah 56:6), so that he may “revive the heart of the contrite ones” (Isaiah 57:15). The language and emotion that runs through these sections of Isaiah’s poetry is rich—it’s no wonder that so much of this material is quoted in other books of scripture.

He is near that justifieth me . . . (Isaiah 50:8)

If God wants us to know anything, it is that we don’t need to hide from his voice. He has provided a way for us to be reconciled to him: a Savior, who knows how we feel and how to succor us in our pain. I love the image of confidence Isaiah provides: I will “set my face like flint, and know that I shall not be ashamed” (Isaiah 50:7).

That is the confidence that can come when we know that “[h]e is near that justifieth me” (Isaiah 50:8). There is no distance he cannot overcome, no debt we accrue that he cannot resolve for us. He wants nothing more than for us to reach out in our moments of nakedness, so that his outstretched arm can offer comfort and safety. And once we know his care, he asks that we join him in reaching out to those who still feel the need to hide.

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Katie Paxman is an associate professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University and a Visiting Campus Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. A Canadian philosopher specializing in early modern philosophy, she focuses particularly on David Hume’s theory of the passions, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of emotion. She is a founding member of the Latter-day Saint Philosophy Project and has published in Hume Studies, The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, Res Philosophica, and several anthologies of Hume scholarship.

Art by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).

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Fireside Talk Notes

Tulsa, Oklahoma Stake
September 2025
Benjamin Peters1

I stand over a sink at the end of a long day. The water rushes down, pouring through my hands into the sink below circling the drain. The water falls where gravity pulls it. In receiving the water through gravity, I am allowing a force greater than myself to do its work. Perhaps this image connects to my assigned topic tonight: The priesthood as we understand it today in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a channel as much as it is a source—both the proverbial sink and gravity—for better getting to work in the world.

My central claim is modest but consequential. The priesthood may be experienced more broadly—more deeply—if we understand it as more of a channel than as a source for relating with others. Its nature as a means, not an end, functions in at least three ways: a cosmological constant, a vertical covenant, and a horizontal relationship for receiving and bearing community with one another. (How many talks in a Christian church have implied a conceptual cross? Well, note this cross comes with a third, a background constant too.) In this view, every member (including priesthood bearers) receives priesthood channels and flows. Understanding our common role as receivers helps us better grasp what the priesthood is now and why it matters eternally.

I understand the priesthood to be, in John Taylor’s formulation, “the power of God delegated to intelligences in the heavens and to [people] on earth.” The power of God to act on earth is no small matter. Let us examine our understanding of the priesthood in three ways: as an eternal power that organizes the Church, as a personal covenant between us and God that invites each of us to virtue, and as a form of collective action and relational service.

But first I carry a question mark about the proverbial elephant in the room. After years of study, prayer, and reflection, I can personally affirm that the best response, for me, to the question of why women do not receive priesthood offices in the Church currently is, following Sister Melissa Inouye, “I do not know.” Every other answer sits less well with me. Sensitive to imbalances as well as to the wealth of what sisters possess, I stand with dignity in the fact that I simply do not know why we draw this difference between earth and heaven, temple and world. With President Nelson, to “think celestial” may also sometimes mean to think until the difference between here and heaven is zero; thus I rejoice in the celestial thought that, surely, the current arrangement cannot be for the eternities, even as we all are called to strive for the eternities here and now. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised, we must learn to “live the questions.” Years ago, my family decided our motto would begin with this triplet: ask hard questions, solve problems, delight in dilemmas. I hope to live for all three today.

Three Ways to Understand the Priesthood

First: Priesthood as a Power That Organizes the Church

The eternal reality of the priesthood is this: it existed before us and will remain after us. Thus it must work with us—changeable and imperfect creatures that we are.

The priesthood comes before the Church. Consider the sequence. On May 15, 1829, before the Church was organized, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were ordained by John the Baptist to the Aaronic priesthood. Later, Peter, James, and John conferred the Melchizedek priesthood upon them. They had all necessary priesthood power before the Church was established. When the Church was later organized, both had to be baptized into it and ordained elders.

Note the order: Eternal priesthood precedes the Church, and the Church precedes offices. Although today we experience the priesthood primarily through Church offices, it clearly precedes the Church itself. Church offices are clearly transient; priesthood precedes it.

Consider my sink analogy. Perhaps priesthood is like gravity, a cosmological force. Perhaps the Church is like a home or building. Perhaps a priesthood office is like a drain in a sink. (Bear with me for a moment!) When we see the swirl of water pulled down a drain, we might think—cool, gravity. Fair enough. But gravity also comes before a home, and a home comes before a drain. The drain is how we experience gravity’s public workings, its visible choreography. Yet its force surrounds us everywhere.

If the priesthood has eternal reality, it must be the kind that changes and seeks restoration and evolution. The priesthood is both eternal and timely, both fixed and dynamic, both a cosmological “constant” (in fact, gravity is one of the less understood of the four fundamental forces in the cosmos) and a swirling drain. As our heavenly parents’ creative power, it predates creation itself; but once administered through the Church, it becomes subject to ongoing revelation. Our past, present, and future are uneasily dialectical: As Terryl Givens has observed, Latter-day Saint theology courts an environment of, in the language of Arthur Peacock, “infinite restlessness.”

Perhaps eternal things learn to stir, and thus awaken to our living world around us, by receiving and bearing uneven costs when they come to earth—the lesson we accept in mortality. The priesthood predates us. It is delegated to us as we’re ready to grow with it. Because it will predate and postdate all of us, it must be administered by imperfect mortals and institutions. Despite the resulting difficulties, this is not a failure but a feature of the design.

The Church hierarchy is clear, but differences between offices are never meant to be personal. At ward and stake levels, folks rotate in and out constantly. The Church should not respect persons. There are, of course, social hierarchies in our communities too—school, companies, governments. Learning to operate in self-checking hierarchies with grace is valuable. Good hierarchies include precious unequal relationships: mentor-mentee, teacher-student, parent-child. We operate well when we sustain leaders while never idolizing them. Local Church hierarchy, precisely because it rotates, ensures that ego-driven people do not merit leadership positions. A lesson I’ve learned at the university as well: all positions—teaching, talks, organizing, etc.—are best subsumed under the ego-diminishing, all-encompassing category of community service.

Second: Priesthood as a Personal Covenant

The priesthood is a personal covenant between God and person, inviting each of us to virtue. Priesthood covenants await us all in the temple. In 1832, before the first temple was built, Joseph Smith asked about missionary authority. The result was Doctrine & Covenants 84: “All they who receive this priesthood receive me, saith the Lord; . . . and he that receiveth me receiveth my Father . . . therefore all that my Father hath shall be given unto him” (vv. 35, 37–38).

The key word here is receive, not hold. The priesthood covenant offers internally nested relationships of receiving: God to Jesus, Jesus to receivers, receivers to holders, and back again. The value and power of the priesthood lies not only in worthily holding it (for men), but in receiving its power by covenant in baptism, sacrament, and temple—which every person can do.

The oath and covenant frames the priesthood as a relationship. First between God and person, then between sister and brother. The Lord promises blessings if priesthood bearers magnify what they receive, and blessings to all who receive priesthood covenants well, especially in the temple. Again, why only worthy men bear it remains my dignified question mark. But that each of us receives the priesthood, promising to magnify our relationship to it, is a potential beautiful universal.

Third: Priesthood as Relational Action

Priesthood is relational action—less noun, more verb: It orients toward others as an antidote to selfishness, a step away from the man behind every natural man. Consider obvious priesthood expressions. Blessings? Never does a bearer bless themselves. Ordinations? Never self-ordination (except Alma at the waters of Mormon). Passing sacrament? Deacons, and everyone on the pew, pass to others, not themselves. No event proceeds without a second witness. No action happens alone. Every decision made as a quorum or committee.

Even in structured contexts, priesthood manifests in relationships that open us to others: Sometimes we receive, sometimes we bear one another’s burdens. As C.S. Lewis says in The Weight of Glory, “The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.” Thus are all of us humbled, if unevenly. Every member, bearing covenants, receives the priesthood. We all bear together (again, unevenly!) the very unevenness of who holds specific priesthood offices.

To understand priesthood’s eternal reality, we must go beyond the vertical—God reaching us through Church, covenant binding us to God. We should see priesthood as horizontal action between us that prompts us to see the fullest, most eternal reality of all of us. When we see each other as God sees us and serve one another accordingly, we are covenantally enacting priesthood together. When we minister to one another, when we call one another to imperfect callings, this is priesthood action illuminating our hands, hearts, and heads together. Zion is fashioned from humanity’s bent timber—that is precisely what makes it Zion. As Kant observed, “From such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built.” Zion may lie in straits, but it is not straight.

Doctrine & Covenants 107:30 requires decisions “in all righteousness, in holiness, and lowliness of heart, meekness and long-suffering, and in faith, and virtue, and knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, . . . kindness and charity.” Amen to any priesthood that elevates self above others, seeking wealth, glory, or power. The priesthood is a covenantal antidote to the natural man through collective action and relational service. As Martin Buber taught, “All real living is meeting.”

In my analogy, gravity works not just in kitchen sinks (Church offices), though there the swirl is obvious. It works all around us, in matter’s fabric. The question is whether we can learn to see and receive it everywhere in our lives’ covenantal fabric. Like gravity, priesthood is experienced in action drawing bodies together. Like gravity, it conditions our co-creation—we are never enough when alone—we all need each other, and Jesus needs us to need one another.

Conclusion

Seven summary points follow on understanding the priesthood as a nesting of cosmic power organizing the Church, a personal covenant, and a relational action for receiving and bearing community with one another.

First, the priesthood invites us to think celestial beyond office to relationship. Every ordinance, blessing, and service reminds us that God’s power flows primarily through eternal connection, secondarily through temporary offices.

Second, our “not knowing” can be faithful discipleship. Sustaining prophets while acknowledging understanding’s limits demonstrates, I think, mature faith trusting continuing revelation. Uncertainty is not the enemy of faith but its companion. (Indeed, if anything, certainty is the opposite of a live faith.)

Third, the priesthood calls us to magnify our capacity to receive. Spiritual growth comes through learning to receive God’s power more fully.

Fourth, covenant relationships create the fabric where priesthood power operates. Through marriage, baptism, and temple ordinances, we access power beyond our own through bonds with God and each other.

Fifth, the priesthood teaches us that eternal things work through mortal means. This tension between fleeting drains and enduring forces is a feature, not a bug, of earthly experience.

Sixth, real priesthood authority manifests in service, not status. The most powerful expressions happen when we lift others, not when one elevates themself above others.

Seventh, everyone participates in the priesthood’s relational nature. We are all receivers, all benefit from ordinances, and all help create a community where God’s power flows; even if all we sometimes see is water pouring into a sink, do we not also stand as witnesses to the fact that the force behind that flow must also be everywhere else at once? That thought gives me comfort. Let us receive the priesthood as the source for everything, a cosmological constant like gravity, and its offices as a channel for a few temporal things, maybe even the kitchen sink.

Testimony here.

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Benjamin Peters is an editor-at-large for Wayfare.

Art by John Randall Bratby (1928–1992).

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In Tyler’s parable, a desert city has forgotten that its existence depends on a well and its life-giving waters. The well’s guardian instructs his daughters in how to tend the well and keep its waters pure; he teaches them about the oracle with second sight who found the well, around which a cathedral and eventually their city was built.

Despite their family’s charge to look after the well, each daughter chooses her own path. The first daughter finds her place in life among the city’s merchants and material splendors. The second daughter, weary with the city’s pride and opulence, leaves the city and finds a new well of water. The third daughter attempts the same feat but is not led to water and finds only heat, sand, and scorching sun. The fourth daughter remains in the city and carries on the work of her father.

The land was plagued by drought. In the height of summer, the winds would blow fires across the brushy desert. The lakes and rivers turned to dry, cracked earth.

The most direct way to have enough to drink, was to live in one of the few cities. In these cities, water bubbled up from the earth in the center of town, and residents could fill their cups, pitchers, and bottles multiple times each day. Each of these cities was built around an artesian well at the center, and the culture was shaped by the well’s presence.

For example, each city had a list of habits and rules surrounding the well, and in order to live in the city, residents had to promise to follow the rules, which specified the rituals required to approach the well and fill a water container, how to treat the earth of the city, what to grow in the gardens of the city, and what fertilizers to use. In some cities there were even rules about what to eat and drink and how to properly dispose of trash.

Because of these traditions, and other cultural differences between the well-cities and the drier cities of the wider-world, the citizens of the well-cities were seen as strange. They acted peculiar. They wore peculiar clothing, made peculiar music. They were a bit isolationist and—to some—off putting.

And the well-cities did have problems. Some of their citizens struggled to make it to the well and didn’t have anyone to go for them. They found themselves often thirsty even when they lived only a short distance from fresh water. While some people saw beauty in the rituals, there were others who saw them only as a burden. Some chafed under the culture of the well-cities and found themselves visiting the well less and less often.

Those who stopped visiting the well usually decided to leave the well-cities for other cities, cities with different water-based economies.

And there really were so many ways to get water. Scientists had built great machines that pulled water from the air. These atmospheric water generators were loud, and the water they collected was distilled, void of the healing minerals of the artesian wells, but it had the advantage of being available in bottles at markets. No rituals were required to obtain it, only money.

Instead of the central well, these cities—which were built on trade routes or in the hills of mountains—were often organized around vast and sprawling markets, all competing for the attention, and money, of their thirsty populace.

Those who didn’t like the hustle and noise of the markets sometimes bought their own, smaller machines that captured dew in the mornings or desalinated water from the oceans. Others wore suits that recycled the water released from their breath or sweat or urine for use later.

And yet others invested their efforts into gaining so much wealth that they could send for water without going to the markets at all. They would take honest-to-goodness baths in their houses, and go to water retreats where they would swim in great pools of crystal clear distilled water until their fingers and toes were wrinkled in ways they had never thought possible. They spread tales of the wonders of such extravagant weekends and their healing benefits.

And then there were those who skipped water altogether. They drank milk, juice, hard cider or rare wines. They sometimes relied on vinegar or coconut milk, choosing to forgo the waters of the generators for something more exciting, more full of flavor.

In cities far from the well-cities, stories would be told of a magical place where water came out of the ground—water rich with healing minerals and more refreshing than the coolest, purest water available in the marketplace. Some thought it was just a fairy story. Others thought it was true but only in history, not in the present. When people would meet someone from a well-city and have the truth confirmed, there were a variety of responses. They may seek out the rituals to apply them to their own water or wine. They may ask to hear the stories again and again, to find hope in them.

Or, rarely, after hearing about the artesian wells in far cities, they would travel through familiar and unfamiliar cities, through fire and storm and over parched earth, until they finally approached one of the cities themselves. Then, at the gate, they would take off their shoes and promise to follow the rules and rituals before being led to the well, to taste the water for themselves.

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Chanel Earl is a writer—mostly of fiction—who currently teaches writing at Brigham Young University.

Art by Odoardo Borrani (1833–1905).

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A while back we were on a family outing when the topic of men and women came up. Nothing says Cool Dad more than quoting ’90s rock songs, so I found myself saying, “It’s like the U2 lyric, ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’” Melissa stared at me in exasperation and exclaimed, “U2? It was Gloria Steinem who said that!” I sheepishly had to admit (at least to myself) I was that many years old before I learned that.

As a fifteen-year-old boy growing up in the very Mormon suburbs of Salt Lake City, I wasn’t reading much (any) Gloria Steinem, but I was listening to a lot of U2. So this 1970s feminist slogan—which, it turns out, originated with an Australian university student named Irina Dunn and then was popularized by Steinem—was transmitted to me through an all-male rock band. Does that matter?

I couldn’t control how or where I heard the idea; we all have limited inputs. But because there’s a long history of men getting credit for women’s ideas, it’s important to acknowledge—however belatedly I learned it—that this phrase about women’s self-authorship was first spoken and then popularized by women.

More than a chain-of-transmission question, this brings to the fore a truth that has only grown more weighty for me over time. Simply stated, women’s autonomy matters (and has always mattered) regardless of what I think or do about it. At the same time, what I think and do about it as a man does matter—quite a bit, in fact.

Even if the truth of women’s self-authorship and autonomy needs my testimonial about as much as a fish needs a bicycle, it’s still helpful—for me, if no one else—to excavate and articulate how and why I believe what I believe. There are lots of reasons why I believe in women’s inherent dignity and worth, but I’ll narrow it down to two.

The first reason is because I came of age in 1980s and 1990s America. By the time I was a semi-thinking human being, second-wave feminism had washed across our collective consciousness, even if the ground wasn’t fully saturated. The smartest kids at school were pretty equally divided between girls and boys. Shows on TV like Friends depicted men and women in more or less equal terms.

I shouldn’t exaggerate this as some kind of golden age. The fact is, my mom worked a full-time job and did all the housework while my brothers and I watched sports on TV with my dad. Yes, middle-class women could self-author by working outside the home more than had often been the case in previous generations. But for many, like my mom, it simply meant doing even more work.

It is hardly a novel insight to say that the main place in my life where it appeared that women didn’t have or express full sovereignty was at church. To claim that I spent a lot of time thinking about that or that I was really bothered by it would be giving my younger self too much credit. But it was impossible not to notice. “The priesthood” was in charge, and only men had the priesthood (I thought). The Relief Society did lots of nice things—I knew this, because it seemed my mom was always doing something to help other people in the ward. But men did “The Important Things,” like go to lots of Very Important Meetings and always be Importantly in Charge of those meetings.

Our twice-yearly ritual of gathering around TV sets to watch general conference reinforced the idea that women were good but men were Important. One of the seminal moments in my own consciousness-raising came when I was a student at BYU, living in an apartment with a bunch of friends. One of my roommates regularly spoke with a kind of soft misogyny, all part of a performative macho act. When he talked that way the rest of us would cringe and laugh nervously. We might even gently chide him, but none of us ever really challenged him on it. Once we were all watching general conference on our living room TV when a female speaker came to the pulpit. Suddenly my friend grabbed the remote control and changed the channel. He then picked up the phone to call an apartment of girls who lived across the courtyard from us and said, “Call us back and let us know when someone inspired is speaking.”

This was one of those ripping-off-the-bandaid moments for me. It felt so blatant, so crass, so wrong. It forced me to confront whether I also thought women’s voices were somehow secondary to men’s. Nervous laughter and gentle chiding weren’t good enough. We seized the remote control and flipped back to general conference while my friend walked out of the room.

The remote control incident came at the same time that I was first starting to read the work of Mormon thinkers and experience my own adult intellectual and spiritual development. In addition to reading lots of Mormon history, I also dove into the writings of Maxine Hanks, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Claudia Bushman, Margaret Toscano, Janice Allred, and other Mormon feminists.

This period of reading and thinking helped crystallize in me the second reason why I am committed to women’s self-authorship and autonomy: because I am a Mormon.

Because I am a Mormon, I believe that the spirits or intelligences of women and men are co-eternal and co-equal. I believe that women and men are children of Heavenly Parents. I believe that God consists of a Heavenly Father and Mother. I believe that Eve’s partaking of the fruit in the Garden of Eden was a courageous, necessary act that advanced rather than set back God’s plan of redemption for humanity. I believe that women have equal access to God, to Jesus, to the Holy Spirit, to personal revelation, to exaltation. I believe that all are alike unto God, female and male. I believe that all women and men have distinctive spiritual gifts that they are intended to cultivate and share with everyone.

Because I am a Mormon, I believe the power of God—which we call priesthood—is generously bestowed on and exercised by women and men. I believe that in the temple women and men receive and exercise the same priesthood power, and in the Church, women form orders of priestesses in parallel to male quorums of priests. I believe that Melissa and I are fully equal partners in marriage and parenthood.

Because I am a Mormon, I believe in an ongoing restoration in which God is still revealing great and important truths about the divine relationship between women and men. I believe that Jesus will redeem all things, including a church that is still young and learning and hasn’t yet fully learned to recognize let alone empower women’s sovereignty.

Women don’t need men to grant them their sovereignty. Women don’t need men to validate their intrinsic self-worth or inherent dignity. Women don’t need men in order to be infinitely, unconditionally, and eternally beloved and empowered by God.

In a very real sense, then, an essay like this achieves nothing. No words that I offer can either enhance or diminish the fact of women’s sovereignty. It would be like writing an essay affirming the power of gravity. Fundamental realities don’t depend on my acknowledgment. Gravity doesn’t need my solidarity any more than a fish needs a bicycle.

But recognition matters, both for the recognized and the recognizer. Once we name a thing and dedicate our best efforts to understand it more deeply, we can put those fundamental realities to work in ways that had been previously latent. Humans always had the capability to fly, but we had to comprehend gravity and other laws of physics before we could actualize our potential. To name and publicly acknowledge women’s self-authorship and autonomy are the most basic steps to getting us off the ground. That’s when transformation can start happening.

Like fish, we’re largely blind to our environments simply because we’re immersed in them. We don’t fully choose our inputs, especially when we are young. In the end, while it’s good I came to an initial awareness of some of these ideas through Bono, it also matters that I now know who really first gave them voice.

What matters most is how I apply the knowledge I gain, by whatever means. What will I do with my remote control when women’s self-authoring voices and experiences come across my screen? Will I change the channel, or turn up the volume? That choice doesn’t alter the fundamental reality of women’s sovereignty, but it does change my ability to see and hear all the truth the universe is trying to broadcast to me.

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This essay appeared in Wayfare issue 7.

Patrick Mason is a professor of religious studies and history at Utah State University who spends most of his professional life thinking and writing about Latter-day Saint history, culture, and theology.

Art by David Habben (@habbenink).

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FEATURED ESSAYS

THEOLOGY

FICTION

POETRY

While fir trees persist like victors
           in stony ground,

                      I slow my flight
over fallen cones, stepping into scripture
           as if it were a river,

      waving wings
like white flags, hollow bones, supple
           as undiscovered worlds.

                      Oh, how willing
is this featherweight, light as linen paper,
           quill.

           Beneath those trees
                           that sing, I will
my weight to stone—pining for constancy

                           in the current
           of ancient pages.

Britney Wells is a mother of four and a returning BYU student majoring in English.

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There is a lot going on in these middle chapters of the book of Isaiah. Prior to them, the first 39 chapters deal with the immediate crisis of the Assyrian menace and the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel. Now, this section addresses the kingdom of Judah as they cope with their own exile in Babylon, seeking to comfort them and fortify their hope of return. In the very first lines, God commands an unnamed plurality of agents to comfort the people and let them know that their sentence is fulfilled and their return from exile is being prepared through the instrumentality of an unlikely helper—Cyrus, King of Persia, who will defeat Babylon and make the return of the exiles possible.

In all of the movement and thematic weavings of these chapters, it can be easy to miss one of the most evocative subtexts with which the prophet-poet is playing. Before giving it away outright, let me line up a few of its traits.

The first is one I have already noted: God addresses a plural assembly of some kind, giving them commands to act on behalf of God’s people. “Comfort, ye” says the Lord, and “prepare ye the way” (Isaiah 40:1, 3).1 Since the text doesn’t tell us directly who is being given these commands, we have to infer, and one candidate scholars have favored relies on the similarity between this section and other places in the Hebrew Bible where God addresses a heavenly assembly. A notable example of this occurs earlier in the book of Isaiah as God, enthroned, addresses an assemblage of Seraphim, and asks, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (Isaiah 6:1–8, and see a further example in 1 Kings 22:19–23 and 2 Chronicles 18:18–22). There are references to heavenly pluralities in the Psalms and Job, as well (for example, Psalm 29:1; 82:1; 89:5–8; 103:20–21; 148:1–2; and Job 38:7); but it is in Genesis, most particularly, where the divine voice sometimes speaks from within a heavenly plurality of some kind, creating and ordering the world: “Let us make the human in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26); “The human is become as one of us” (3:22); “Let us go down” (11:7). Here, God speaks from within a heavenly council at the dawn of creation.

Another trait of the subtext is the notion of emptiness, vanity, or insignificance—all glosses of the pregnant Hebrew term tohu. The nations are “counted as nothing . . . and vanity” (Isaiah 40:17), princes are brought “to nothing” (40:23), idol-worshippers “are all vanity, their works are nothing” (41:29), idol-makers are “all of them vanity” (44:9). In Isaiah, the positive sense of countering this emptiness is also expressed when the prophet writes that God “created it not in vain [tohu]” and “said not . . . Seek ye me in vain [tohu]” (45:18–19). Significantly, this is the same term that is translated as “without form” to describe the world “in the beginning,” before God begins to create, in Genesis 1:2.

In another refrain from these chapters of Isaiah, God “stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain” (Isaiah 40:22), “created the heavens, and stretched them out . . . spread forth the earth” (42:5), “stretcheth forth the heavens . . . spreadeth abroad the earth” (44:24), and “stretched out the heavens” (45:12). This is the same language as we find in Psalm 104:2, 5, which famously invokes images of a God who “stretchest out the heavens as a curtain” and “laid the foundations of the earth,” much like the image of pitching a tent and setting down carpets for its floor.

Yet another motif, related to that of insignificance here, is that God “comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure” (Isaiah 40:12), the nations are as “small dust of the balance” (40:15), and Cyrus is given nations “as the dust to his sword” (41:2). These dusty images recall the formation of the human from the moistened dust of the ground in Genesis 2:6–7.

As I hope is becoming obvious, the subtextual theme that Isaiah is sounding throughout these chapters is that of creation—specifically, the sovereign and gracious power of God, who presides over a heavenly council, spreading out the heavens and the earth after finding the world empty and void, and then forming humans from the dust of the ground. And lest we suppose this is all coincidence, the language of creation continues to multiply in these chapters. The same words for creating or forming that occur in Genesis (bara/yatsar) recur in such Isaiah passages as “The Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel” (Isaiah 43:1); “I have created him for my glory, I have formed him” (43:7); “formed thee from the womb” (44:2, 24); “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (45:7); and “Thus said the LORD, Israel’s Holy One and its Fashioner . . . I made the earth and the humans upon it I created. It is I, My hands stretched out the heavens, and all their array I commanded” (45:11–12, Alter).2

These references to creation in Isaiah have a clear purpose: to highlight the ironic contrast between the true creation undertaken by the living God and the false creation undertaken by idol makers and idol worshipers. The ironsmith forges and hammers and works over his images (Isaiah 44:12), and the woodworker measures and marks, cuts and planes to fashion idols from material that is utterly subject to human craftsmanship. From the same tree that he takes firewood for dinner, notes Isaiah with obvious disgust, the carpenter makes an artificial deity. In these chapters of Isaiah, then, the contrasts between true and false creation are multiplied.

Where idols must be fashioned by humans, the true God is the fashioner of humans themselves. Where dumb idols must be “loaded as burdens on weary animals,” the creator God says the remnant of Israel “have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, even when you turn grey I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save” (46:1b–5). Where humans conserve and carry around the idols of their making to no purpose, God bears and saves humans with salvific purpose. Where idols afford no life or habitat to humans, God has made all from the dust of the earth and spread the heavens and the earth as a habitation for them. And where vain idols are crudely shaped in the fashioner’s likeness, humans are actually created in the supernal image of the divine.

The use of these echoes and reminders of the divine creation in these chapters of Isaiah, then, serves to heighten our awareness of the perversity of laboring to supplant the living God—who ordered and still upholds all things—with empty, vain, and impotent mirages of our own devising. To fashion idols is to turn the act of creation against itself, thwarting the sacred purpose for which humans were formed by God from the dust of the earth in the first place.

Often, in our considerations of the persistent struggle with idolatry that is chronicled in the Old Testament, we note that while Israel was enamored of false deities, we today have different temptations to idolatry. Rather than images of supposed gods, we are tempted by status, wealth, and leisure. It is good to reflect in this way, for it is all too true of us that such temptations abound. But more than just passively falling into vain and profitless cultural patterns, are there ways that we actively participate in their creation?

This has been a challenging question for me to ponder. The act of creation in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, we are encouraged to become more like our heavenly parents by learning to create as they create. But might there be a dark side to creation, as well? There are probably as many answers to this question as there are readers willing to ponder it. As I have done so, I’ve reflected on the stories and metaphors that I have adopted, and sometimes, indeed, created, to make sense of myself to myself and to others. If I am very honest, I have to admit that some of these stories serve less to deepen understanding and more to cover my sins and to gratify my pride, and my vain ambition (see Doctrine and Covenants 121:37). In today’s degraded cultural, political, and spiritual moment, abundant with those who “loveth and maketh a lie” (Revelation 22:15), it can be painful and sobering to examine the ways that we, too, participate in that lie-telling and idol-making. We curate an image of ourselves on social media or at church that we know in our hearts is a facade. We ascribe noble intentions to our support of flawed candidates while condemning the moral defects of those who vote differently. Someone who loves us asks how we’re doing, and we give a shallow “fine” or “great” instead of something closer to reality that might invite a courageous conversation. We naturally want to be the heroes of our own stories, so it takes a determined kind of love of truth to allow the deep introspection that reveals ourselves as we truly are before divine reality. But in the depths of such humbling visions, Isaiah goes on to surprise and assure Zion—and by extension, us—that if we are willing to have our vain and fruitless self-deceptions uncovered to him, the Lord says, “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions” (Isaiah 43:25); “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions” (44:22). And then comes the most potent promise of all:

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. (Isaiah 49:15–16)

As the vanity of the graven images we have made of and for ourselves is exposed, we find that our Creator has been making inscriptions of his own, indelible reminders of us within his own fashioning hands. We realize that he bears us not as a load that can be externalized to a beast of burden, but as a plan traced upon his own body. We are the marks in the palms of his hands of which he seeks no erasure. We are the confines—the “walls”—of relation from which he desires no escape. He is with us and for us always, unforgetting and unrelenting, until we tire of all our illusions and self-justifications, throw them down at last like so many idols, and step again into his living, loving embrace.

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D. Morgan Davis is a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He holds a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University.

Art by Rico Lebrun (1900–1964).

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