In November of 2020, President Russell M. Nelson put out a video message calling for church members to “flood social media” with thanks.

The results of his call were miraculous.

Over the next month, church members did as he asked. Sure, some seemed to mistake bragging for gratitude. And some of the posts were pretty grating. But, in the midst of a bleak pandemic winter, there was a certain beauty in people highlighting the bright spots in their own lives. If nothing else, it was a remarkable example of people showing up and doing what the prophet asked.

And it turns out that this is not a singular occurrence. When church members talk about “following the prophet,” we generally take that responsibility seriously. It is no small thing, after all, that millions of people across virtually every time zone stop what they’re doing once every six months to listen to some part (or even all) of ten hours (now eight) of spoken discourse, largely to determine how to change their lives. This is a big deal.

And yet.

Even while honoring the willingness of Latter-day Saints to follow prophetic direction, we can still detect a sense that—for many interlocking reasons—we as church members may sometimes take individual bits of prophetic counsel literally . . . while still not taking the entire prophetic project seriously. Our understanding of prophetic counsel and the charge of following what the prophet says can inadvertently atomize what the prophet is telling us and focus us too much on the details of the most recent pronouncement.

With all of this, we run the risk of failing to engage seriously with the weightier matters of prophetic counsel over centuries and millennia. Our obedience may err on the side of surface exactness over considered depth. We run the risk of missing the forest for the trees precisely because we have made a change to our shared cultural vocabulary or are sporting a bracelet with the latest meme-ified prophetic slogan. If we’re not careful, we can allow superficial changes to blind us to the need to follow deeper, more consistent, and more holistic prophetic counsel.

If we can look past the slogans and hashtags, however, we can see an insistent harmony to the deeper substance of the prophetic project from Moses to Jesus to Joseph Smith to Dallin Oaks. While responding with Facebook posts and bracelets can help us fine-tune our thinking and actions, what is needed is a more wholesale attempt at asking: “What do prophets ask us to do?” and “What kind of people do prophets ask us to be?”

The prophetic project, seen across the larger canonical tapestry of dispensations, seems to me to be a call to become transformed. We are meant to live lives enlivened by our encounter with the divine. Prophets remind us that a godly fire is meant to alchemize who we are.

I find it telling that, in the book of Micah, through a prophet, the Lord tells his people what he needs from them: “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (6:8, KJV). I am always struck when I read this verse by the demanding nature of the verb “love.” That Hebrew verb (transliterated ’a·hă·ḇaṯ) connotes a strong bond or connecting affection, as in Jeremiah 31:3: “The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.”

The use of this verb in Micah tells us that what Jehovah requires of us is not just to show mercy, and it is certainly not to come to mercy begrudgingly. Rather, we are called by God to love mercy, even as God loves us. That is: God’s love binds the universe together, like gravity—and it is this same force of love we are meant to access and emulate.

In a similar vein, Jesus implicitly invites us to show this love by becoming like the father of the prodigal son. We are not meant to hesitantly allow those who wrong us back into the circle of our love, but rather to stand at the gate of their departure, scanning the horizon, waiting anxiously and unendingly for their return. And when the speck of a silhouette appears on the horizon—though it be limned by the last rays of the setting sun, and though our legs may have grown old and frail in the waiting—we are meant to run to the returning prodigal, breathless, and to fall on his neck, showering him with kisses and enveloping him in the godly love that can come only as a gift of grace.

I worry that in living conference to conference, meme to meme, and quote to quote, we risk missing this more substantial prophetic call that comes to us with such burning urgency across the eons. And, really, what call could be more relevant in our hurly-burly, callous, distanced, and often disordered world? Prophets give day-to-day instructions—anciently about how to handle manna or recently what to post on Facebook—but those can only ever be small examples, daily instantiations, of the message they need us to hear. Ultimately, the epiphany the prophets keep asking us to understand is what King Benjamin will never let us unhear: that all the trappings of success we have built around ourselves are nothing, that we are beggars, and that life flows to us as unearned grace.

A gift.

And that we, seeing life for what it truly is, will forever see the world differently. Thus transformed, we will know that every beggar who confronts us is Jesus, disguised, and that we are meant to wear out our lives, bringing succor to those who suffer and peace to those with wounded hearts. Thus, the whole of the prophetic call is that we are bound together and that we covenant to: protect the defenseless, feed the hungry, lift the low, and minister to the marginalized and disregarded.

All of this can remind us that, at the end of the day, the entirety of the gospel boils down to how we treat those who are suffering or in need. It can hardly surprise us, in this context, that our response to suffering constitutes the most elemental substance of our covenant to become Christian disciples (see Mosiah 18).

Given all this, it can hardly surprise us that in his first church-wide address as prophet, President Oaks highlighted this very refrain and, tellingly, quoted both Jesus and Joseph Smith—as if to emphasize the very continuity that defines the core of the prophetic call:

The Prophet Joseph Smith taught that we should “pour forth love” to all people. Speaking of our Savior, the Apostle John wrote, “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). We can follow the example of Jesus Christ, who is our role model, by choosing to love others—even if they show little or no love toward us. He declared, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9; see also 3 Nephi 12:9).

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare. To subscribe to Tyler’s column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for On the Road to Jericho.

Art by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669). Hermitage Museum.

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I invite anyone who feels so inclined to write an essay in response. These responses can do anything with the parable: buttress it, question it, explicate it, deconstruct it, apply it to life, expand on a single sentence, or anything else. So far, the following authors are considering submitting responses: Peter Mugemancaro, Eliza Wells, Sarah Sabey, Jenny Richards, Tom Griffith, August Burton, James Goldberg, Rachel Jardine, and Joseph Spencer. I hope this will be an exciting combined literary experiment.

There once was a desert as wide as the world. Over most of the land, forlorn winds curled dust and sand into parched skies—but a few cities persevered in the harsh terrain.

One such city bustled and pulsed. The people thrived and grew wealthy. They built highways and waterworks. And at the center of the shining city stood a grand cathedral with facades carved from ornate stones. In the center of that building was a small room. And within the small room was a wide well brimming with crystalline, sapphire waters. There, loving and tending to the well, lived a man who had four daughters.

But as the years drew on, the well-keeper worried that the city had forgotten him—and the water he lovingly tended. In all their hustle and bustle, the citizens had lost sight of where the water came from and how it had been found so many years ago. But the well-keeper determined that he would never let the story die. If nothing else, he would ensure his daughters knew.

And so, on long winter nights, when the air grew frigid, the wellman would gather his girls under heavy blankets around a fire and tell them the tale of the oracle. “In the days when the desert was just a desert, and no city had been built,” he would begin—his voice cracked with age, his words heavy with wisdom—“our ancestors wandered from dune to dune in search of water.

“One day, a young man wandered away from the group and, as night fell, he realized he was alone. Nearly dead from thirst, he heard a voice whisper to him on the wind, drawing him toward a particular patch of sand. Just there, iridescent in the evening’s dimming heat, a fine mist rose and, the next morning, the man could see dew coalescing there also. Finally, parched and exhausted, he began to dig, and burrow, and finally to excavate with his hands. Slowly, water began to seep through the sand, wetting his cracked skin; then the water began to trickle, and to burst, until finally, to his relief and wonder, he realized he had unearthed an aquifer: a jewel-like pool of endless, gushing, clarion water, sweet on the tongue and cool as a melon in summer.

“Over time, it became clear that this was not happy coincidence—it was not just that the man had stumbled onto water by luck. Rather, as an oracle, the man was gifted with a second sight that made visible the otherwise invisible signs of water. Though others had never seen the mist or dew,” the old man continued, “they longed to be connected to this resplendent source of life, and so they began to build. Over months that grew into years, they built our city, right here. And, around the aquifer itself, we built the cathedral. But for many generations our family’s calling has been to tend—not to the bustling commerce of the city, nor even to the grand cathedral, but to care for the well itself. We are the keepers of the water, the ones who ensure it will always be here, clear and cool, for those who need respite in these dry lands.”

But though the wellman endeavored with all his vigor and devotion not only to tend to the well but also to pass on to his daughters the beauty and importance of their calling, as the daughters grew, they became their own beings and each walked her own path:

The first daughter became listless with the tedium of tending to the well. It was, after all, inglorious work. She looked longingly, instead, at the ramparts, buttresses, and glimmering bejeweled walls of the cathedral in which the well was housed. On idle afternoons, she would stroll the cathedral’s grand walkways, gazing with an ardent envy at its soaring corridors and regal beauty. Eventually, she discovered that the merchants who hawked their wares on the stone steps outside the cathedral felt like her people and she drifted away from the well and toward the fashion and prestige that defined those who could enjoy what only the very best could afford. She found among them a cosseted comfort, a sense that this was where she belonged.

The second daughter had grown weary from years in the city. She looked around at the failings of her fellow citizens and decided the city was not what it purported to be. She believed a city dedicated to the water would never grow so ornate, so supercilious, so haughty. And so she left. She journeyed to the city’s edge and finally passed out through the final gate. Into the desert she wandered, sure that, over the horizon, she would find a better, truer, more nourishing source of water. But the desert forgave no one the audacity of venturing into its precincts. Within hours of beginning her journey, and just as her hometown slipped behind the receding horizon, the wind attacked her with a ferocity she had not foreseen. Dryness crept into her mouth and her skin, cloaking her tongue with cotton and bristling her skin with cracks and wounds. Just as she thought all might be lost, however, she, too, saw, close to the ground, as the sun set behind her, tiny tendrils of mist curling into the dry air. She fixed herself to that spot and began to press her fingers into the sand. At first, it cracked her skin further and wore against her fingers, but then, slowly, as the cold of night set in, she felt the sand moisten into soil. And then, even deeper, she found a slowly softening layer of mud, and, below that, the smallest pool: water.

The third daughter shared the second’s weariness with the town’s hypocrisy. She, too, knew that something better must await her outside the city’s walls. And so, just a few months after her older sister had disappeared, she too ventured beyond the city’s gates, confident that she would find in the desert a liquid to slake her thirst—sure that she, unlike her progenitors and contemporaries, would preserve the water in all its purity, keeping it clean and building a society that honored what really mattered. Confident that she would become a new oracle, she waited as the sun set on her first night in the sand. But as dusk settled around her, she strained her eyes against the deepening dark and saw . . . nothing. Though she scoured the horizon and lovingly fingered inch after square inch of sand, she found no sign of moisture. Soon, the night grew cold and the sweat of the day cooled and brought to her chills and, finally, shaking. As the next morning dawned, she looked around in desperation for a sign of water, or for help, or for rescue. But as the sun climbed toward its zenith and the temperature inexorably rose, she saw only the pulse of the heat as it radiated off the sand.

Which left only the youngest and plainest of the wellman’s daughters. For reasons she did not know, this youngest daughter noted with a detached sense of admiration the quests and wanderings of her sisters—but never felt called to venture out herself. She was possessed of a settled quiet, a knowledge from very young that her calling was with the well. And so she became proficient at the daily tasks required to keep the water clean and access to the well clear. She recognized that her job held little appeal from the outside; indeed, she understood that virtually no one knew she and her father worked there day after day. But with an abiding sense of what it meant to be whole, a knowledge springing from somewhere deep, she would creep down to the well itself at night, cup the water into her hands, pour it over her face, and feel the rivulets trickle down her skin, letting the liquid quench her thirst as it ran in a cool wave over her tongue.

To submit writing in response to this invitation, visit the Wayfare submissions page, follow the directions for regular submissions, and add the note “Response to Tyler Johnson’s allegory invitation” under #9.

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare. To subscribe to Tyler’s column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for On the Road to Jericho.

Art by Paul Signac (1863–1935).

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Near the end of January 2026, journalist Louise Perry published an op-ed in The New York Times with the provocative title “The Harry Potter Generation Needs to Grow Up.” Perry begins by recounting how the Harry Potter books entranced her and her contemporaries as they came of age. She then goes on to outline the ways in which JK Rowling has since grown more controversial.

Then, Perry arrives at her real point: Speaking of the generational differences and explaining why Millennials like the books so much more than members of Generation Z, she writes,

That’s why millennials like Harry Potter a whole lot more than younger generations do. The story captures a worldview that is no longer attractive to young people jaded by the experiences of economic decline, political polarization and spiraling identity politics. They have fallen out of love with Harry Potter because they have fallen out of love with the worldview the series represents, which is to say that young people have fallen out of love with liberalism.

Perry argues that children born within the last twenty years are possessed of a weary brand of cultural cynicism. Worn out from the ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis, the election and re-election of Donald Trump, and the coarsening of political discourse, they no longer recognize nor appreciate the virtues of liberalism generally, and of liberal democracy specifically. As she finishes her essay, she concludes that, when young readers thirty years ago imagined that liberal values were everywhere ascendant, they were demonstrating a dangerous form of naivete. Reflecting her hypothesis as the essay ends, she writes,

I now wonder if the Harry Potter books themselves functioned as something like a Mirror of Erised (which shows its viewers what they most desire) for my generation. They reflected an image of the world that we so wanted to be real: a world that was ancient and magical, where even children had the ability to identify and vanquish evil. It was beautiful in its moral simplicity. It was also too good to be true.

I read this essay with a cauldron bubbling full of mixed feelings and reactions. On the one hand, I admit a certain possessive defensiveness here. Yes, I have visited a Harry Potter-themed store. Yes, my three sons and I each have a house-specific Hogwarts mug. Yes, we have seen the movies too many times to count. Yes, we have visited the theme park. And, of course, yes, we have read every page of all seven books out loud not once but twice as a family. The books have played an important role in our family’s bonding and moral development.

That said, my fourteen-year-old son would be the first to tell you that our familial devotion to these tales is, from his vantage, a little bit “cringe.” After all, Rowling has become a significantly more complicated figure, especially because of her remarks about trans people and her unapologetic and often seemingly oblivious tone in discussing them. What’s more, the movies and novels have become so deeply embedded in our shared cultural lexicon and collective imagination that they can hardly seem anything but threadbare and worn in 2026. Finally, some parents who insist on endlessly reliving the Harry Potter glory days are a bit reminiscent of Uncle Rico, from “Napoleon Dynamite,” who tries to relive the glow of his high school football heroics by endlessly watching tapes of himself.

Though my son might disagree: I get it.

At the same time, though, it’s also clear that Perry is making a point that runs deeper than just a commentary about a ubiquitous piece of intellectual property fading into irrelevance. By the end of her essay, her point is not just that parents should move on from childhood fables, nor is it that the value of these particular books should be questioned because of the complexity of their author. Rather, she is arguing that the values underlying the books—the principles that she says give the books their “moral momentum”—are somewhat dewey-eyed, a little hackneyed, or, as she says, a little “too good to be true.”

But what really seems to worry her is not so much that the values undergirding Harry Potter’s moral universe are not laudable—indeed, at one point in the essay, she specifically says she supports them—but that those values are taken for granted in the book, in effect concluding that Rowling intends to demonstrate across the tale’s arc that the values defining liberal democracy must always win out, that their triumph is, in effect, inevitable.

This is the place where I come to my most deeply-seated disagreement with Perry’s argument. Here, her critique is not a commentary on flaws inherent or unique to the universe of Harry Potter but a categorical misunderstanding of the purpose, power, and potential of literature. This flaw in her argument matters both for how we read Harry Potter and also how we read, understand, and experience literature more broadly.

When the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was originally released, Liesl Schillinger reviewed it in the New York Times. Her review contained a warning: “Suffice it to say that this new volume culminates in a finish so scorchingly distressing that the reader closes the book quaking, knowing that out of these ashes, somehow, the Phoenix of Rowling’s fiction will rise again—but worrying about how on Earth Harry will cope until it does.” Those who have read that book, or who have seen the movie that depicted it, will know that Schillinger is primarily referencing the death of Harry’s beloved mentor and spiritual guide, Albus Dumbledore. His apparent murder at the hands of his erstwhile friend and co-teacher, Severus Snape, is one of the most wrenching turns in the series.

But Schillinger’s description of that moment reminds us of something else: literature is not meant to be experienced with 20/20 hindsight. If we know the end of the books from the beginning, we can never read the books as they are meant to be experienced again. No matter how much we may savor the facsimile of experiencing the arc of the story, again, for the first time, repetition simply cannot live up to the thrill and catharsis of walking through a bildungsroman with the characters as they age and mature. The entire point of great literature involves our willingness to rise, fall, triumph, and suffer with the characters when we do not know how the story will end. Reading is, after all, an exercise in willful, embodied, and meaningful imagination. It is from living in the tension of the unknown future that stories derive their bite, character, and meaning.

In fairness, a much more valid criticism of the arc Rowling painted for her characters came in a review of the seventh book in New York Magazine on August 13, 2007. Those who have read the books or have seen the movies—and, at this point, is there really anyone out there who has done neither?—will know that near the climax of the seventh book, Harry volunteers to die to save his friends (and the rest of the world). Just after he dies, however, and in what initially seems an ineffable mystery, Harry meets the ghost of Dumbledore in a heavenly Kings Cross station. Then, Harry is allowed to choose to return to his body, and he reanimates just in time for the final fateful duel with his arch-nemesis, Lord Voldemort. Writing about this ultimate deus ex machina, Sam Anderson wrote,

I’m not opposed to Happy Endings per se—I’m just opposed to the author trying to get Emotional credit for both a tragic and happy ending without earning either. Rowling had been gathering storm clouds for ten years; her fictional sky was as purple and lumpy as a quidditch stadium full of plums, and the whole world had lined up to watch it rain. She owed this ritual sacrifice to the immortal gods of narrative: either the life of her hero or—infinitely harder to pull off—his convincing and improbable survival. With Harry’s death, the series would have graduated instantly from “light and possibly fluky popular megasuccess” to Heavy Tragic Fantasy Classic. Instead, at the last possible moment she tacked on an episode from “Leave it to Beaver.”

For me, that is a critique with teeth. I do think there is a sense in which the denouement of the final book tries too hard to have it both ways—and therefore ends up achieving neither convincingly. It is probably true—and to some degree this makes Perry’s point better than she does—that the novels would have had greater moral gravity and increased cultural staying power if Harry Potter’s sacrifice had been real, and if he were not rescued at the last moment by theretofore unknown ancient Wizarding Magic. Instead, her conclusion suggests that the world can have it all—that the sacrifices necessary to secure for our children a better world are not really needed because any pain inherent in them will be magicked away at the final bell.

Yet, even acknowledging all this, Perry’s critique strikes me as ultimately hollow and unconvincing. I say this in large part because I have watched the faces, eyes, and body language of my own children as we have journeyed through the books together. It is no small thing, after all, to read more than 3,500 pages out loud to small children. Whatever else is true, it remains a testament to Rowling’s limber and arresting voice, that my three rowdy boys remained riveted for the entirety of her chronicle, including the middle boy listening to all of those pages twice. I have watched their countenances rise and fall as the characters have variously succeeded and failed. I have felt my youngest son’s soul-deep anguish when Dumbledore was lost and have heard his incessant begging questions as he pleaded to know if Dumbledore was really dead or would somehow make his way back into the narrative. I have watched the boys’ faces glow with both anticipation and dread as they experienced these stories through my voice for the first time, including reading many of them during the darkest and most confusing days of the pandemic.

Because I have watched these children make that journey—indeed, making the journey with them has been one of the deepest privileges of fatherhood—I am left in the unusual position of conceding many of Perry’s observations and many parts of her analysis, and yet disagreeing foundationally with her primary conclusion. In my mind, the lesson we learn from revisiting Harry Potter in 2026 is not that the conditions that gave rise to the ascendancy of liberal democracy in the late twentieth century were too good to be true, nor is it that the characters in Harry Potter consider those values to be inevitable.

Quite the opposite.

The point of revisiting Harry Potter is that what we desperately need as we enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century is a return to the childlike ability to believe in our collective potential for embracing good. What is desperately needed is not more weary cynicism, but a greater degree of the type of gritty resolve that allows Harry, Ron, and Hermione to persevere when all seems lost. We deeply need and must never stop seeking the persistence and tenacity that fueled their continued striving even after Dumbledore had died, the horcruxes seemed a hopeless cause, and Voldemort had come within a whisker of achieving the domination he had so long sought.

In the series’ third book—Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—Harry comes face to face for the first time with one of his world’s most fearsome specters: a dementor. These creatures—faceless phantasms with rotting limbs, sucking happiness from the world around them—can only be repelled by dint of an advanced bit of spell-making: summoning a witch’s or wizard’s personal “patronus” (a luminous animal avatar). At the book’s beginning, Harry struggles to face down even a manufactured representation of such a being, grappling to find the words, the fortitude, the focus, and the magic necessary to utter the appropriate counter-curse effectively. Near the book’s conclusion, however, in an unanticipated moment of desperation, Harry and his friends are confronted with an entire flock of dementors—descending en masse like a host of dark angels from hell.

And at just that moment, seconds from the dementors triumphing, a mysterious figure emerges in the mist across the forest lake where they will momentarily perish, sending a stag patronus galloping into the horde of phantoms, scattering them in all directions. What we don’t learn until a few chapters later, however, is that the mysterious figure is not, as Harry initially expects, the spirit of Harry’s father, but, rather (by virtue of a bit of time travel magic Harry doesn’t become aware of until later), Harry himself. Harry has returned from the future to rescue himself and his friends and finds that, in that future-returned-a-few-hours-into-the-past-state, he is able to summon a patronus of blazing, corporeal, confident glory precisely because he has already seen himself do it. He is given the confidence to summon that faith, in other words, because he has already experienced himself doing just that vicariously by watching his future self (though unaware of what he is seeing at the time). That vicarious experience empowers him at the moment of decision, when he is asked to screw his courage to the sticking place.

I can still see my children leaning forward in agonies of anticipation as they heard this scene for the first time: faces contorted, the tautness of their emotional strings visible from across the room, hoping against hope that Harry would somehow, somewhere find what he needs to triumph and persevere. And that is precisely the power and point of literature: to invite each of us vicariously into the moment where we are called to battle the horde of dementors as they swoop in, right on top of us and our friends. We are meant to face that challenge vicariously so that when life sends at us masses of monsters scarier and far more real than those in an imagined universe, we have already developed the emotional muscles to respond as fate dictates we must. We face the dementors with Harry because literature can make of us apprentices as we prepare to go to battle in our lives.

The power in the Harry Potter books comes not from knowing the end from the beginning, but in remembering that the characters and the rest of us who journeyed through the books together for the first time had to do so powered not by knowledge, but by faith; not with certainty, but with hope; not because the ending was inescapable but because the triumph of good is forever at risk and can only be insured by each of us persevering when the odds seem impossible.

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare. To subscribe to Tyler’s column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for On the Road to Jericho.

Art by Rowan Li, @artistrowanli.

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I begin by acknowledging that many church members have a really hard time with the Proclamation on the Family. I have seen evidence of this in at least two respects in my own life:

First: I have spent hundreds of hours during more than a decade working with and counseling young church members in the Bay Area. For many of them, the Proclamation lands as exclusionary, myopic, and hurtful. They see gay marriage, especially, as a great blessing for many of those they love, and wonder why God would inspire prophets to fight so ardently against it. These concerns are not abstract or theoretical; they feel the weight of the Proclamation’s words as having done real harm to themselves and those they love.

Second: It is difficult to know anymore what vital parts of the Proclamation mean in my own life. A number of years ago, my own young family underwent a series of wrenching changes. In ways I did not foresee and still do not entirely understand, the stable foundation we had built for our family crumbled, and I suddenly found myself a single father, parenting alone. Left to grapple with these new realities, the overall message of the proclamation felt confusing, distant, and unreal.

With all of this, perhaps you can understand why, when President Oaks—arguably the Proclamation’s foremost defender and explicator—rose to his feet for his first speech while leading the church (albeit as the president of the Quorum of the Twelve, not yet as the prophet) and began immediately referencing the Proclamation, my insides clenched and my brow furrowed.

I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear what he had to say.

Surprisingly, however, as I listened I eventually felt my muscles relax, and I experienced my mind softening into a dramatically different understanding of what the Proclamation is and what it is meant to do. I don’t know what Elder Oaks intended with the talk, but as I listened to him tell the story of his own youth, something shifted inside me.

In unadorned and moving prose, Oaks described growing up on his grandfather’s farm, and the horrible day when, as a little boy, he received the news that his father had died. I can’t remember seeing him show obvious emotion from any pulpit in any conference before; but on October 12th, 2025, he openly wept as he told his listeners about his memory of running to take refuge in his room, where he sobbed on his bed.

He then told of how his grandfather came to him there, took him in his arms, and lovingly proclaimed “I will be your father.” He went on to recount how his single mother—who also struggled mightily under the burden of being left bereft of her beloved, but who was buttressed by the love and support of her parents and other loving family members and friends—raised him and his siblings in the light of the gospel, making the very best she could of a tragic set of circumstances. One could not help but flinch and feel deeply affected when Oaks described her, after the death of his father, as “alone and broken.”

It is true, of course, that 15 men originally signed the proclamation. We have no way of knowing directly what Oaks’ role in drafting the document would have been. That said, however, he has frequently referenced and defended it. And, in his recent discourse, President Oaks was speaking for the first time as the man directing the church, making his words and approach here worth special attention.

In the past I have often heard the proclamation being held up as a standard or an ideal. It has been set out as if its purpose is to condemn those who do not meet or match the precepts that it outlines. One would think, listening to how we often discuss the document, that it was meant as a cudgel with which to beat down anyone whose family doesn’t look prepared to be photographed for the cover of a church magazine.

But this talk from President Oaks offers a different and more expansive framing for the document. He did not walk back his emphasis on the doctrine; rather, he offered a way to approach and understand the doctrine that suggests it can have a different meaning and purpose than we usually lend to it. For me, his situating the doctrine within the context of the story from his own life shifted the way I encounter what the proclamation says and does.

It does this first by referencing—again and again and again—the fact that most families look nothing like the unrealistic “ideal” we often discuss. (In fairness, the proclamation itself also acknowledges this, but this is a caveat we rarely emphasize.) Repeatedly, President Oaks acknowledges with compassion and candor the very many circumstances that render earthly families unstable, corruptible, complicated, incomplete, and even sorrowful.

But beyond even this rhetorical acknowledgement, what hit me hardest about his talk was simply this: at base, he was not articulating a disembodied or abstract set of principles. He was telling a tragic and wrenching story of a young family whose father had unexpectedly died. Just as Lehi taught his son Jacob (before leaving him, too, as a boy without a father), President Oaks was reminding us that “it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11). In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we acknowledge that we inhabit a fallen and difficult world. The theological argument can be made that a crimson streak of tragedy weaves itself through the very fabric of our universe. After all, we believe in a Jesus who was required to “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). Likewise, we worship a God whom Enoch found weeping over the challenges we experience in mortality (see “The Grandeur of God”).

Against this pervasive and tragic backdrop, the Proclamation on the Family takes on, for me, an entirely different meaning. In this framing, I see the proclamation’s emphasis on the importance of family—including “found family,” whether those surrogate family members come from extended families, wards, or the ranks of our friends—as an acknowledgement of the aching need we all have for a group of people who will close ranks around us when things get hard, who will buoy us up when we are down, and who will offer support, no matter the circumstances.

The proclamation, then, may be seen not as a stick with which to beat those who fall short of some imaginary ideal, but as an urgent invitation for us to band together through bonds of both sealing and affection against the gale-force winds that will buffet many of us throughout our lives. Without ascribing to President Oaks an outsize role in the drafting or adoption of the proclamation, I find it telling and beautiful to think that at least one contribution to the proclamation’s origin was the longing of a little boy, bereft of his father and clinging to his mother and his found family as a source of support while the world he had known crumbled around him.

Perhaps the proclamation was never meant to make us feel guilty for falling short of a largely illusory or at least elusive ideal. Perhaps, instead, it was meant to call us to offer comfort amid the complexity of mortality, to teach us that brokenness is to be expected and that against such tattered reality, our family—in whatever form it might take—is meant to stand as an immovable bulwark. Perhaps we are meant to find in the proclamation words to console the cri de coeur of a small boy, shouting inchoately at the universe. We might hear, in effect: When life gets too hard, when all comfort is taken forcibly from us, when tragedy stalks our lives and chaos threatens to rob us of meaning and beauty, our families can stand against the onrushing tide of despair and allow us to stand firm, declaring, “this far, but no further.” (Job 38:11).

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare.

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After decades working as a medical oncologist and serving in church leadership, I have come to conclude the following: eliminating suffering lies beyond God’s effective power, because God operates within a universe that also has multiple other eternal entities, among them: eternal law, eternal matter, and eternal individuals (us) who have actual, meaningful, consequential, and eternal agency. Therefore, our Heavenly Parents are left, instead, to answer suffering with love and to invite us to learn to do the same.

But to illustrate how I have arrived at this conclusion, let me begin with two stories.

In 2020, the patient I will call Ms. Garcia underwent surgery to remove stomach cancer, but the surgery caused a horrendous series of side effects that eventually led to a prolonged admission to the ICU and the temporary failure of her kidneys. When she finally went home, Ms. Garcia was a shadow of her former self—weakened, emaciated, and far too debilitated to consider the chemotherapy we normally might have recommended. Instead, she worked to recover her strength while we ordered a new CT scan every six months to monitor for any evidence that the cancer had returned.

Eighteen months after the initial diagnosis, Ms. Garcia’s cancer returned. We treated her with traditional treatments: chemotherapy regimens and radiation, but nothing provided more than slight and temporary relief. Just as we were coming to the end of the therapies available to us, however, we became aware that the FDA was likely to soon approve a new and different medicine for this type of cancer. Rather than attempting to poison the cancer cells as traditional treatments do, immunotherapy would work by supercharging her immune system, harnessing her own white blood cells to attack the malignant ones. We obtained a charitable exemption to give her the drug even though it was not yet widely available and then waited with bated breath to see what would happen.

After three months on the drug, Ms. Garcia again entered the whirring tube of a CT scanner. The resulting images showed that her tumors had shrunk substantially. Three months later a second scan showed even further retreat. And three months after that, to our shared astonishment, a new scan showed no signs of cancer at all. What’s more, immunotherapy drugs often do not bring with them the side effects commonly associated with traditional chemotherapy. With this new medicine, Ms. Garcia was never nauseated, did not feel weak, and worked full time. Over the next years, scan after scan continued to show no evidence of disease. Finally, after more than three years on treatment, she decided to stop the drug entirely. That stoppage date now sits almost two years in the past, and Ms. Garcia’s scans still show no evidence of disease.

With that patient’s experience firmly in mind, let’s rewind the clock another five years. It is a Wednesday night in 2015, and I am the oncology fellow on call. Around 7:00 p.m., a twenty-year-old woman with acute leukemia has come to the emergency room with a fever. Both her disease and our treatment had weakened her immune system, so we took her fever very seriously. We immediately admitted her, administered fluids, and gave powerful antibiotics.

As the hours of the evening drew on, it quickly became evident that hers was not a standard case. Her blood pressure began dropping precipitously and her body hovered dangerously close to shock. Unusually, she had bleeding at her IV sites and in her gums, and she soon seemed to be bleeding everywhere. We checked all the normal laboratory tests and fixed what deficits we could find. Even after doing so she did not improve. Moreover, things simply didn’t add up; she seemed sicker than her tests indicated she should be.

I spent the evening in increasing desperation as I hovered back and forth between her room and the nurses’ station, assessing her status endlessly while I desperately called everyone I could think of for help. Finally, around 2:00 a.m., after a night spent with her condition steadily worsening and without a satisfactory explanation of exactly why, the patient’s heart seized, she went into cardiac arrest, and—despite the heroic efforts of multiple nurses, doctors, and pharmacists—she was pronounced dead about an hour later.

I juxtapose these two stories because, for me, as a doctor with faith, the comparison highlights the unbearable tension of believing in a God who cares about us and who can intervene in our lives. I recognize that many people, especially my fellow oncologists, might blanch at labeling Ms. Garcia’s story a “miracle.” The term “miracle” means magic, after all. To qualify as “miraculous,” doesn’t the process that brings about the happy outcome have to be inexplicable, even mystical? But the drug that helped Ms. Garcia was based on decades of scientific inquiry. Its mechanism of action can be described in biological, biochemical, and immunological detail, and its efficacy and safety have been demonstrated in rigorous clinical trials. What could possibly be less a “miracle” than that?

Nevertheless, such facile dismissiveness may miss the forest for the trees. If that same patient had been diagnosed with that same illness in that same setting just a couple of years before, it is almost certain she would no longer be alive. Her life has been extended by the infusion of a clear liquid she understands little if at all. On some fundamental level, does that really differ all that much from Jesus rubbing spittle into clay and using it to restore the blind man’s sight? After all, if a “miracle” is not really defined by our inability to explain or understand what is happening but, instead, simply by the remarkable nature of the good that has been rendered then, in fact, on some level, Ms. Garcia’s recovery really was miraculous.

But for the believing doctor, the willingness to call this a “miracle” is not the end, but the beginning, of difficult questions. Chief among these, of course, is simply this: why do the miracles we desperately long for come in such resplendence in some cases, but never appear—despite the most desperate pleading—in others? In the shadow of every miracle I choose to believe in is the specter of all the other situations where needed miracles never came.

The second story I recounted above is just one of hundreds I have seen over the course of my career. This story stands out in my mind because the patient’s decline was so precipitous and because, despite my best efforts, I felt so helpless to stop what was happening. But whether the decline comes quickly or slowly, whether a patient’s course into disability or toward death is dramatic or subtle, and regardless of the details that define each specific tragic story, the common dark thread that binds them all together is this: in almost all cases, patients and their families wish desperately for some force to intervene. Those who are religious may appeal to God, while those who are not simply call out to the universe. The difficulty here transcends creed and religious affiliation. The rub comes in recognizing the apparently unjust architecture of a universe that grants long life and years of apparent happiness to Ms. Garcia while keeping those same blessings from so many others.

The reality of these twin poles leaves our hearts heavy and aching. For those of us who are religious, the seemingly insoluble paradox demands answers to the universe’s most vexing questions.

In some ways, the most straightforward answer would be to abandon any attempt to believe in God. If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving, then what room can we find for the apparent capriciousness of granting a miracle over here while withholding one over there?

On the other extreme, we as believers may skirt too quickly over and past the genuine difficulty involved in addressing these questions. We often do unintended harm when we try to offer God a way out of the difficult realities evident in our lives by attempting to “explain” the suffering around us. Stricken with sight as narrow and short as ours always is, it would seem an act of herculean hubris to pretend to be able to ferret out God’s designs when, for example, a young parent has died, or a good person has been betrayed, or a natural disaster has left a community bereft. In these instances and myriad others like them, I hope we will not rush in to try to explicate why sorrow ought not to cut as deep as it does. I believe that the territory of suffering constitutes humanity’s most sacred ground, and it is a place we should enter only after removing from our feet the shoes of arrogance and presumption.

Still, in the face of suffering, I find great comfort in an unusual and perhaps even uncomfortable aspect of restored Christian theology: God is limited. I recognize and love a God who cannot do certain things. God cannot engage in cruelty. God cannot create matter from nothing. God cannot contravene human agency. And, as best I gather, God cannot prevent or immediately ameliorate all human suffering. This last sentence makes me uncomfortable; part of my brain accuses my heart of blasphemy in that sentence’s composition. Yet, I am convinced that however weak my faith may be in such a conclusion, I prefer that tentative believing to a certainty proclaiming God is behind every instance of tragedy and suffering.

What I do not understand about all the eternal laws and forces that limit God hopelessly dwarfs the tenuous conclusions I am reaching. But I find comfort in the prospect that prophets seemed to feel their way in the dark toward a similar set of conclusions. Lehi does not suggest to Jacob that God will eradicate suffering but rather that God will “consecrate it.” He explains to his son that “it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things,” arguing that opposition is inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. If it were not so, the universe “must needs have been created for a thing of naught; wherefore there would have been no purpose in the end of its creation. Wherefore, this thing must needs destroy the wisdom of God and his eternal purposes, and also the power, and the mercy, and the justice of God” (2 Nephi 2:11–12).

In effect, Lehi suggests that even God must act according to eternal law. Within the shadowy recesses of these words, I intuit a cosmos that features both the reality of miracles and the difficulty of when they do not happen. This is a moral universe where the same agency that allows us to choose nobility and selflessness also empowers imperfect agents to choose war, destruction, and genocide. This is a world that sometimes leaves Jesus visiting the Nephites and weeping with joy and other times leaves God mournfully watching humanity’s inhumanity and watering the earth with ceaseless tears.

In all of this I discover a form of hope and faith that is more somber and less ebullient than I would like. I suppose this is a faith that makes room for the reality of Lazarus while also holding space for the horror of John’s severed head. In a world too often defined by injustice and tragedy, to believe in miracles is also to be left forever to grapple with all the miracles that will never be.

At first, this may all seem an exercise in hopelessness—but I argue that it is not. Instead, while I recognize that this would certainly count as what Elder Maxwell once called a “wintry doctrine,” I also believe that this understanding of the universe ultimately offers us a deeper hope for precisely this reason: because it allows us to face up to the world as it is. In my experience, we often spend a great deal of spiritual and emotional energy trying, in effect, to convince ourselves that things “are not really that bad.” Of course, in some cases this is precisely true—sometimes, a dose of optimism is just what the doctor ordered. But in other moments, things actually are that bad. Sometimes, loved ones die before their time; sometimes, the cruel win; sometimes, the unjust triumph. If we feel obligated to prove that these are not really what they seem, we are left to tilt against the reality of what is before us. But when we understand that other eternal entities and forces limit what even God can do, then we are freed to face the full brunt of what is real and yet to still choose love and hope.

In other words, to recognize the gritty reality of a God who cannot abrogate agency and who lives according to eternal law does not rob us of hope—it is, instead, the only way to access real hope. It does not diminish but instead empowers faith. It does not preclude but instead allows for the full flourishing of love. To recognize the reality of a tragic universe where miracles desperately desired sometimes simply never come is to equip ourselves with the truth necessary to turn toward that fraying cosmos and say, together with God, I see the full force of this suffering, and I will choose to believe in goodness and to choose to love, nonetheless.

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare.

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My boy,

This year you are seven, which means next year, you will be eight. And because you are my son, because you were born into my family and my faith and this church and a whole life and heritage and history you did not choose, you will probably be baptized. And I’m not sure how to tell you what you’re getting into. Not really.

I’m sure you have heard that you will make covenants. And you have probably been told that covenants are like promises. You promise to do some things, and God promises to do others. And that’s true.

So far, you have made fairly simple promises. You promised you would go to bed after one more story. You promised you would eat what I made without complaining next time. And while those are pretty small promises, you were not able to keep them. But the covenants you will make at baptism are so much bigger and so much harder. You will promise to always remember God, always stand as a witness at all times, in all things, in all places. Every thought, word, action, all turned over to God. How do you even begin to try to do that?

I don’t know. After twenty-five years of trying myself, I have not managed to keep the promises you are about to make. Not even close. I was baptized when I was eight, and I have been underwater ever since, drowning in commitments that I am still completely inadequate to uphold.

If you are like me, and there’s good DNA evidence to suggest that you are, then you are not going to be able to keep your covenants. You will fail. And you will fail often. You will fall flat on your pants, and then you will shake yourself off and say, “Okay, I’ll get it right this time.” But you won’t.

Instead, you will make even bigger, more impossible promises. Promises like, “I’ll give everything I have and am to God.” But you won’t do that either, even though you try really hard. And you will probably become frustrated and embarrassed. And at some point you might wonder, what is the point of making so many promises that you are never going to be able to keep?

There are a hundred ways to answer that question. Maybe the point is to fail. Maybe the promises are supposed to break you like a nut, opening up your soft heart. Maybe it’s to increase your reliance on God. Maybe it’s to humble you or inspire you. Maybe God really does expect you to keep your covenants perfectly. And maybe there is more than one answer. It’s a puzzle, one you will have to solve by yourself. I can’t give you the answer because I don’t know it.

But I will tell you a story that your father told me. It’s about a prodigal son.

There once was a father with two sons. The youngest boy had a restless heart, so he asked his father for his inheritance before his father was even retired. And then the boy left. He wasted the money on frivolous things until suddenly, it was all gone. All at once, the boy had no money, and no family to care for him. He found himself in a barn eating scraps from the pig’s slops, a hundred miles from home.

Lying on the hay with only a few sows for company, the boy felt how far he’d fallen. He vowed in determined humiliation that he would earn his way back into good standing. He would repay his father every cent of the inheritance. He would change his own stars. So he stopped his bad habits. He worked long hours every day. His hands grew tough and his body strong. And little by little, he rose up in society. It took him thirty years to regain the full sum of what he had lost. But he did it. He earned back every penny.

And he set off that very day for his father’s home to return the inheritance and tell his father he was so sorry for wasting it. But when he arrived, his father was not watching at the doorstep, or even from the window. He was lying on his bed, sick. Very sick.

The older brother brought the prodigal son in to his father’s bedside. And the prodigal knelt, and kissed his father’s cheek, a tear flowing from one face to the other. “Father, I have returned after all these years to repay you the inheritance I squandered. Now that I have worked to earn it back, I know what it cost for you to give it to me.”

“My son,” said the old man, “I don’t need your money. I’m dying. What would I do with it? What I wanted was you. All these decades, you could have just come home. Think of the time we could have spent together. I have missed you every day for thirty years.”

The son, realizing his error, buried his head in his father’s hands and wept bitterly.

That’s the story. It’s the sort of story that doesn’t end happily because it’s making a point. And I think the point is that you can work and strain all your life to pay your debts, to keep your covenants. Maybe you could even manage to do it all perfectly. Read your scriptures daily, pray always, get to church ten minutes early, etc. And still you could entirely miss the point. The point of your covenants is not to fulfill a contract, or balance a checkbook, or climb your way out of a debt. The point is the relationship. The point is being God’s son.

You are my son, too. And you are in so much debt to me. I pay for your clothing, your toys, your trips, your lessons. I’ve given you so much time and money, and I never expect to get a single cent back. Because it’s not about the money. I know you will make more promises about staying in bed when I turn out the lights, and practicing the piano before the bus comes that you will fail to keep. I don’t care. You should try. But when you fail, don’t hide or run away. Come give me a hug and try again.

You’ll leave our home someday. We might even have an inheritance for you, who knows. But no matter what happens, always come back. Always return. When you’ve done something amazing, when you’re on top of the world, come home. When you’ve squandered your fortune. When you’re sleeping on the ground with the pigs. When you’re embarrassed—epecially when you are embarrassed—come home. Come into my arms, and we will make a new promise together.

This is what I have learned about covenants: You can try for thirty years to keep the promises you made as a child, and have never kept a single one, not perfectly, not even close. You can sink deeper and deeper into an ocean of indebtedness. And yet that same sin and brokenness can save you. If you let it, your failure will force you straight back into the arms of Jesus. He stands above the water, reaching down to pull you up.

And hear this, my boy: You are not drowning. You are being baptized.

And when you stop trying to kick and thrash your way into heaven, you will realize that every bit of you from the tips of your toes to the hairs of your head are awash in the grace of Jesus Christ.

And so young as you are, flawed and proud and hungry and ambitious and imperfect as I have made you, be baptized. Fall backwards into promises so much deeper than your comprehension or abilities. Commit yourself again and again and again to the life of a disciple, the life of a friend and follower of Jesus. Plumb the depths of a relationship that has no bottom. Immerse yourself in covenants. And leave no piece of your soul above the surface.

I love you,

Mom

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Sarah Perkins Sabey is the Root Director of Peacemaking at Mormon Women for Ethical Government. Together with her husband, she is a co-author of The Book of Mormon Storybook at @forlittlesaints.

Art by Egisto Ferroni (1835-1912).

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Our covenant theology contains an interesting paradox. If we’re not careful, promises made with God to bind us to him can become an internal cultural status symbol—a way of organizing ourselves into implicit hierarchies of spiritual worth and deservingness. At the same time, our covenants have the potential to free us from all external human expectations by helping us live and walk as Jesus did. In this way, covenants give us the freedom to fully embrace our divine selves, each other, and God—but only if we understand what they are, and what they are not. My experience on a rollercoaster will help explain what I mean.

I used to be scared of heights. When I was a kid I couldn’t stand on a balcony or at a railing without my brain wondering what would happen if I fell. I remember hiking once along a narrow trail with my family and being so anxious that my feet froze in place. But these experiences were nothing compared with the time my friends convinced me to get on a rollercoaster. We waited in line for an hour—they, with mild anticipation and I, with the comforting delusion that maybe I’d enjoy it after all. As we finally lifted off from the ground—backwards and soon upside down—I realized my mistake. My body jerked against the straps, trying desperately to escape from the sickening drops and the centripetal force. Somewhere in the distance I heard shrill, inhuman screeching that I later learned was my own. While entirely genuine, my reaction was immensely silly. If the ride somehow broke down, no amount of desperate clinging would prevent me from being launched into the air. That I held on anyway illustrates how irrationally we fight for control over our lives when the world around us has other plans.

Those of us who cling grimly to rollercoasters—both real and metaphorical—do so because we’re afraid. Sometimes this fear comes from being thrown into unfamiliar circumstances, but it can also arise quite naturally from our desire to be admired and respected. I know some people who measure their success mostly by the degree to which they gain others’ approval. When substituted for inner conviction, seeking validation from others like this can make us shallow and fragile. It gives us the illusion that we are masters of our own destiny while reducing our capacity to respond to life’s rollercoasters with acceptance and courage.

When things turn difficult, a sense of self built on the opinions of others can leave us in a state where any disappointments we suffer threaten not just our material achievements but our inner sense of ourselves. While this can be bad for us as individuals, it’s even worse for our communities. Behind some of our most toxic cultural instincts, after all, lies the fear that others’ esteem might be withdrawn. We belittle some people because those we admire hold them in low regard; we judge others harshly to uphold social conventions that secure our own influence or belonging; we heap praise on the wealthy, powerful and good-looking for no other reason than to bask in their afterglow. Fearing we might lose others’ esteem, we neglect those who most need our help while becoming obsequious toward those who are already ensconced in their power. Human attention naturally tends to flow uphill toward those who need it least.

Sadly, the behavior I’ve described is not just a worldly phenomenon—for some it is also their experience of life in the Church. To the extent that our Church communities are also subtly influenced by status-seeking and social hierarchies, we must uproot these tendencies before we can fully understand and accept Jesus’s grace. Thankfully, God gives us tools to help us overcome these instincts. He commands us to build a community where no one is unwelcome or excluded. One such tool—and a particularly powerful one—is found in the covenants he invites us to make with him.

For most of my life, I’ve tended to think of my covenants as being “super-commandments” with harsher penalties and more protocol. This has caused me a lot of pain, particularly at times when I feel exhausted by my inadequacy or question the validity of the promises I’ve made. As I’ve tried to understand and grow through this feeling, however, I have learned more about how a covenant relationship with God can enrich and sanctify all of the relationships in our lives—while protecting us from the status anxiety I describe above.

One of the verses that for me really gets at the heart of our covenant theology is Jacob 6:5. After finishing a long sermon about God’s efforts to restore and uphold the house of Israel, Jacob invites his readers to recognize and act on divine love. He writes, “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, I beseech of you in words of soberness that ye would repent, and come with full purpose of heart, and cleave unto God as he cleaveth unto you.” That last line—“cleave unto God as he cleaveth unto you”—has always stood out to me. It reminds me of marriage (“Therefore shall a man . . . cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh”), but it’s also an urgent invitation. When I was a kid, my friends and I would sometimes amuse ourselves by asking each other to help us get up off the ground but then going completely limp when one of us grabbed the other’s hand. It’s very hard to pick someone up when they’re not pulling against you. For me this is the substance of God’s invitation: His arm may be extended and his hand stretched out still, but we need to take it and hold on intentionally if we want to make it onto our feet.

Holding onto God in the same way he holds us requires a good idea of what his hold is like. The first time I read this verse, my mind emphasized its seriousness and fervency. I imagined God’s iron grip as a towline, dragging a nearly-capsized boat over stormy seas. If the line snapped or I let go for any reason I would drown. As with my roller coaster experience, this reflected my fear. In reality the line will never snap, and God won’t let me drown.

Eventually, I realized that perhaps waterskiing is a better metaphor: when someone hits a wave wrong and lands in the lake, they naturally let go of the tow line to avoid a lungful of water. The captain of the boat simply circles around to let the skier grab the line again. As I thought through the implications of this more voluntary, cooperative model of “cleaving,” I remembered the times when I’d wanted to give up on myself or the Church and some quiet, miraculous force kept me from falling. I came to feel that it wasn’t so much my determination to hold on that God needed as much as my continued humility, introspection, and honesty.

Depending on your circumstances, this kind of open, evolutionary covenant relationship with God might feel far away. One of the downsides of participating in a religious community is the relative ease with which social or cultural expectations are substituted for spiritual ones. I mean this in two ways: first, that in the Church, social and cultural expectations about our behavior are often casually passed off as being handed down from God; and second, that these social and cultural preferences further take on the veneer of divine approval when they become the basis for our acceptance in the community. This is not necessarily a bad thing! Communal moral pressure can positively reinforce good behaviors in that interval between trying out a new practice and experiencing its fruits for ourselves. But this false substitution can also drown genuine spiritual exploration. Sunday School Mormonism can make us default to long-held internal narratives about our relationship with God instead of going out and discovering his nature for ourselves.

Perhaps some of us are familiar with the scene in I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel go to work in a chocolate factory. They’re put to work on an assembly line wrapping chocolates. If even one chocolate goes down the line unwrapped they’ll both be fired. While at first the task seems easy, the assembly line speeds up until they’re frantically stuffing chocolates in their hats, into their mouths, and down their shirts in a vain bid to keep their jobs. After about thirty seconds Lucy turns to Ethel and yells, “I think we’re fighting a losing game!”

When I was eight and about to get baptized I felt a similar anxiety. I mentally catalogued all the sins an almost-eight-year-old could commit and solemnly resolved that as soon as I was baptized I would never do any of them again. I would be perfectly clean and good so that I could keep my promise with God. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was more or less the same person after being baptized that I’d been before. Some kind adult (likely my mom) explained that this was why we took the sacrament. Satisfied with this answer, I began to view the sacrament as a special talisman, a sort of weekly get-out-of-jail-free card. Instead of constantly worrying about whether I was meeting God’s expectations, I could simply go to church every week and chew a piece of Wonder Bread.

What my eight-year-old (and later my teenage) self didn’t realize was that with either mindset I was fighting a losing game. If I lived in perpetual fear of making mistakes, the pressure to be perfect would make it harder to feel God’s love. If, on the other hand, I thought simply showing up for the sacrament every week and never doing anything that landed me in the bishop’s office magically erased my need to take the Atonement seriously, I’d never grow into the person God wanted me to become. While these two statements might seem obvious when presented this way, I suspect that many of us probably fall closer to one or the other. In either case we find ourselves somewhere on the scrupulosity-to-carelessness spectrum, where our success or failure is defined by our ability to avoid feeling like we’ve screwed up.

I said we avoid feeling like we’ve screwed up; in reality this kind of spiritual fudging has profound social consequences. Those who are comfortable with their position in the ward social hierarchy can sometimes hoard the divine mercy they ironically feel they’ve earned. They wonder why those who feel alienated can’t just pull themselves up by spiritual bootstraps—if only they would take responsibility and repent, they would be worthy of the same social acceptance the self-justified claim for themselves. They start treating other people as they falsely imagine God would: measuring them by their observable virtues, judiciously applying a few drops of grace here and there to wipe a smudged cheek or bandage a skinned knee. Because time and chance happen to us all, this posture can be particularly dangerous when circumstances change. We cannot predict when we—or those we love—might find ourselves unable to check all the outward gospel boxes to our liking.

Any serious attempt to live within a covenant theology needs to account for the fact that life is incredibly messy. There’s gangrene and cancer just as there are smudged cheeks and skinned knees. Even if two people manage to walk the covenant path all the way to a temple marriage, there’s no guarantee against divorce, wrenching personal faith crises, or children who leave the Church. There is a real difference between the sorts of trials that would be well-received in a testimony meeting and the sort that would make us want to run and hide from people who have a covenant obligation to bear our burdens. Our wards and branches can be immense sources of strength when the challenges we face fit neatly into our idea of God’s plan, but we too often recoil from the spiritual ugliness and woundedness where Christ’s mercy is most needed. I think we diminish ourselves when we permit fear of departing from a covenant script to obscure God’s capacity for eternal healing and rescue.

If you’ve been reading carefully perhaps the last sentence made you a little uneasy—should we not be afraid of breaking our covenants? Should we continue in sin that grace may abound? Are covenants then just piecrust promises, easily made and easily broken? In order to answer questions like these, we need to write down a better model of what covenants are for.

In Alma 33 in the Book of Mormon, Alma and Amulek are teaching a group of people who have rejected the Nephite church and set up a separate religion. When those who have made out poorly under the new regime come to ask how to strengthen their spiritual lives (their neighbors won’t let them into the meetinghouses), Alma launches into a long discourse about how we can get to know God. Mid-address he quotes a scripture that has become my favorite in the Book of Mormon: “Thou art angry, O Lord, with this people, because they will not understand thy mercies which thou hast bestowed upon them because of thy Son” (Alma 33:16). This verse stopped me cold the first time I really read it. It paints a picture of an abundant God, a kind God who makes space for every sort of sickness or infirmity but is furious with those who attempt to ration his generosity. Do we understand God’s mercies? Can we conceive of the strength and depth and breadth of such a thing? God’s presence can be easy to miss. It is a gift freely offered but all too rarely received.

Mercy is a passive virtue: Its very existence in our lives is predicated on our willingness to invite it in. Not comprehending the extent to which we are guilty—or weak, or wounded—halts the healing progress of grace. This peculiar defect is one source of the cultural divide I described earlier! Those secure enough to flaunt their spiritual richness (read: social acceptance) withhold understanding and attention from those who are either less popular or more self-critical. The rich in spirit steal from the poor in spirit by refusing to extend the grace they flatter themselves to have received. The book of Revelation elegantly describes the problem: “Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17). Failing to understand the mercies of God results in a particularly obnoxious form of self-sufficiency.

What does this have to do with covenants? Taken seriously, our covenant obligations would bankrupt the natural man or woman in any of us. Assuming we manage to avoid drinks ending in -ccino or the wrong websites, we have not even begun our reckoning with the need to bless those that curse us or sell all our goods—as it were—to give to the poor. We too easily exhaust ourselves paying our tithes of mint, anise, and cumin; if we’re not careful, we’ll have nothing left for quiet, deliberate kindness and genuine ministering. In offering us the opportunity to make covenants, it is as if Jesus frees us from our debt to sin only to saddle us immediately with an all-consuming celestial mortgage payment.

Of course there is another side to this analysis. Our covenants quickly help us to understand just how much God’s ways are not our ways. We begin to sense the gulf between where we are and where God wants with all his heart for us to be. We feel how little our shortsighted accumulation of social esteem really matters to him. This recognition should start to change us—to worry and unravel the stubborn knots of our lesser, human desires. Recognizing the numerous ways we fall short heaps cognitive dissonance on top of us until we can no longer bear it and hopefully start trying to understand God’s mercies instead. If or when we finally ask, our covenants provide the built infrastructure for God to send down grace in far greater proportion than we could otherwise receive. The psalmist wrote: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God” (Ps. 42:1). Isaiah promises, as if in response, that “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9).

Or at least this is one way that the process might work. Depending on your circumstances, you may find it easier to ask for and receive mercy in certain areas of your life than in others. You may be tired of feeling judged because your shortcomings are more visible than those of your neighbors. You may feel like life in the Church isn’t much more than a catalogue of stinging rules and regulations handed down by strangers who fundamentally misunderstand who you are, what you need, and what you hope for. You may also be entirely comfortable with your spiritual life; perhaps in that case, you’re feeling a bit confused about why I’ve written so many obvious things. Regardless of which group you most identify with, I’ll ask the question I’ve asked myself a hundred times: How well do you understand God’s mercies? It’s not a rhetorical question so much as an invitation to engage even more deeply with the people around you.

I said earlier that attention tends to flow uphill. It goes against engrained social instincts to give to those who we suspect cannot repay us, love those who will likely only respond with venom or misunderstanding, and care for those who have no intention whatever of returning the favor. But this is also precisely what our covenants are for! In our quest to fulfill our covenant commitments we will inevitably spend a lot of time learning how God’s grace works in our lives. We will realize how little we receive from him is due to our efforts. It is much easier to love others—even our enemies—when we deeply understand how much we ourselves are loved. Covenants really are, as Elder Robert Daines taught, “the shape of God’s embrace.”

When our covenants guide our love towards others, it is also much easier to love God. In learning to engage deeply with the people around us, we learn a little bit more about what God cares about and what he thinks about. We start to think of other people with the same care and concern that we would normally reserve for ourselves, and in the process everyone’s burdens are lightened. We get a better sense of what helps people grow, what makes them feel seen, and how to call forth the best in them. The rough-and-tumble of our daily lives slowly fades into the background as we are introduced to other eternal souls. The Atonement plays a crucial role, connecting our empathy and compassion to brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. As Jesus observed, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40).

As I said earlier, our covenants contain a paradox. Although our covenants are meant to bind us to God, we too often use them to compare ourselves to others. Whether we think we are better or worse than those around us, this way of thinking is stifling. We are unique in many ways—a “peculiar people” with an expansive theological inheritance and a distinctive sense of what it takes to build sustainable communities. This said, all too often we live in social and spiritual prisons of our own making, not daring to believe that the God we worship is much wiser and better than we generally assume. It is one thing to keep commandments and receive what we consider our just rewards. It is another entirely to learn to live as God lives, think as he thinks, and love as he loves. This, for me, is what our covenants offer us: a chance to serve God not simply to please him or to go to heaven but rather to bring heaven into our earthly communities, extending mercy wherever it’s needed and building the sort of society where Jesus would not be ashamed to dwell.

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Peter Mugemancuro lives and works in the Bay Area. He loves thinking about how restored Christian theology can help build vibrant, resilient and flourishing social systems. You can find more of his writing at his blog, Strangers & Pilgrims.

Art by Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021).

Image from “Job Switching,” I Love Lucy (1952).

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In the days since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we have been left to grapple as a nation with both the meaning and the causes of his death. Indeed, in the 48 hours after the killing, The New York Times summed up the state of the nation by publishing an article entitled: “After Charlie Kirk's Death, Voters Agree Something is Wrong in the US.” But the rub, of course, comes in identifying just exactly what that is. As a doctor, I believe diagnosis is the single most important part of any treatment—if we mislabel an infection as an autoimmune disease we won’t just be unhelpful, we will actually make things worse. And so, this essay is my attempt at running a deep diagnostic on our body politic to probe the underlying illness that plagues us in hopes that we can then move toward healing. In sequence, I will make four overlapping arguments:

1. Partisan rhetoric obscures more than it reveals. Familiar talking points from either side of the aisle will do little to help us.

2. The infrastructure of the current interaction of the internet—wherein humans are divvied up and exploited, often by appealing to our basest instincts, all so that a select few can profit handsomely—constitutes a major portion of the problem but is still a symptom.

3. What most deeply ails us is that we have attempted to render ourselves boundless and placeless—but are finding that neither is possible and that the attempt leaves us hollow, atomized, adrift, and alone.

4. The only ultimate remedy is to embody a deeper boundedness, to cultivate an authentic sense of place, and to foster affection toward place, the Earth, and each other.

With all of this, we may not arrive at the precise or definitive answer—the causes are myriad, complex, and interwoven—but my hope, nonetheless, is that the exploration will help to heal what ails us.

I

Public political responses to Charlie Kirk’s killing have unsurprisingly varied with the political affiliation of the person responding. In some corners of the Internet, we have seen responses that focus on the danger of young men who live their lives heavily online (the shooter seems to have been intensely involved in violent video games). Likewise, some have focused on America's ongoing problem with gun violence and the easy availability of such a deadly weapon. In other left-leaning corners of the web, some have suggested that Mr. Kirk helped to fan the flames of the fire that eventually engulfed him because of his sustained intemperate rhetoric over many years.

On the other side of the spectrum, however, those on the right have largely condemned the killing as an example of hateful leftist rhetoric made real. According to many right-leaning politicos, the killing of Mr. Kirk should hardly be surprising because, in their minds, the political left hates America, everything it stands for, and those who choose to speak out in defense of patriotism and a “traditional” way of life. In this telling, the killing is little more than the reductio ad absurdum of what all left-leaning folks would really like, anyway—which is that people like Mr. Kirk would just sit down, shut up, or, even better, entirely disappear. The problem is not with access to guns, or online video games, or the incautious rhetoric of someone like Mr. Kirk; no, from this perspective, the difficulty is that those on the left denounce Donald Trump and all who support him as authoritarians, bigots, and thugs. Many on the right argue that it is hardly surprising that a disturbed young man might decide to take into his own violent hands the fight against those who are labeled ascendant fascists.

Clearly, some of the arguments above have merit; partisan political points can sometimes be helpful in thinking about what is happening to us. However, there are three problems with the above analysis. The first is that partisan rhetoric and vitriolic reactions are so well-worn and ingrained that it will be virtually impossible to make any headway in these discussions if we fall back to our practiced partisan positions. The second is that partisan rhetoric about such deep and thorough problems can distract us from more thorough exploration. And the third is that, paradoxically, participation in the cycle of partisan accusation and counter-accusation can inadvertently perpetuate the pathologies at the root of the illness we are trying to cure. The ideas articulated in the preceding paragraphs may not be the root of the problem but they are certainly a symptom of it—and continuing to propagate them not only keeps us from addressing the deeper issues but may make the illness worse in the process.

II

To better understand the root of society's ailment, let’s consider that the structure of the Internet has come to comprise our public square. Writing in The Atlantic in the aftermath of the shooting, Charlie Warzel, an astute observer of the interactions between technology and society, reflected on how the current infrastructure of the Internet contributes in often invisible ways to the problems we are trying to solve. I recommend the essay in its entirety. I was especially struck by this observation:

But it is hard not to notice that, in the aggregate, something poisonous is in the architecture of the internet's platforms and the way that our technologies demand not just our attention, but our most heightened emotions. This is not an environment for good faith politics. These platforms are governed by algorithms that tend to prioritize engagement above all else, amplifying the loudest, most shameless users because their voices will draw in other voices. This attention is worth good money, both to posters who can harness it, as well as the tech companies.

I think Warzel is moving us much closer to the root of the problem with this analysis that the problem is not with one set of political ideas, but, rather, with the way that we now engage in politics, period. In an age when “watching the news” has become an anachronism, and where most information about the world is gleaned through social media feeds, we need to scrutinize how the presentation of that information shapes how we understand the world.

Author, thinker, and psychiatrist Anna Lembke, who works and writes from her post at Stanford University, has observed over the past few years that we live in an age of addiction—we are all effectively addicted to everything. Her argument is that the human brain is designed to scavenge hits of dopamine, a chemical that is secreted when we experience pleasure or strong emotion. The rapid changes of a digitalized world in the twenty-first century, however, have greatly outpaced our evolutionary biology. After all, there was a time when pleasure was offered to most humans as a rare treat. Now, however, we have easy access to pleasure-bringing stimulants that are almost literally ubiquitous: calorie dense snack food, pornography, social media likes, the triumphalist self-righteousness of holding forth on any social media platform.

But in all this, the innovation that is perhaps most ominous is the near omnipotence of the invisible algorithm. The companies that control social media platforms, after all, do not have any great or noble motive. Whatever they may say about wanting to help their users, and though they may make passing gestures toward altruism, they prioritize profit above everything else. This has always been true in capitalist economies, of course, but now, for the first time in history, the commodity that is most commonly exploited is not just natural resources but also the very people who think they are getting online products for free.

Algorithms play a unique role in the delivery of information to human brains. In previous eras, the information delivered to most of us depended on imperfect but devoted gatekeepers, people like news anchors Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. Their success depended not on the size of their audience, but on the trust they established. These and other gatekeepers surely fell victim to their own biases, blind-spots, and prejudices—but to some significant degree, they tried. And that trying—striving for objectivity in the presentation of “the news” without fear or favor—mattered.

The current situation is very different both because of the intimate and ceaseless access that information streams have to our hearts and brains and because of the motivations central to the way those information streams are managed. For example, in the history of humanity there has never been something like a smartphone. A smartphone may not be literally and physically sewn into the human organism, but, in many ways, it might as well be. Many adults and teens in Western countries never go anywhere without their smartphone, checking the devices endlessly every day. The old New Yorker cartoon showing a couple sitting together in bed, scantily clad, looks like it would be a prelude to something more passionate—instead of warming to each other, the couple is staring at the dull light of their respective phones, each ensconced in an individual online universe, physically close but worlds apart mentally, emotionally, and sexually.

We scarcely realize and yet incessantly experience that the content that comes to us through our smartphones, and especially through social media platforms, is increasingly dictated by algorithms whose exact mechanism remains almost entirely opaque but whose sole function is increasing profit for those who run them. Most of us carry around the vague idea that engaging with a social media platform is a way of being in community with those we know. But increasing research shows that most of our time on social media algorithms is not dedicated to content that comes from people we are “friends” with, but rather to content that is meant either to keep us on the site longer or to monetize our attention on behalf of those who want to sell us things. Thus, with a precision and subtlety that increases by the day, we are faced with a bait and switch: we believe we log on to engage with some form of community, but instead find that we are increasingly subject to the whims and profit motives of those who would turn us into an infinitely exploitable commodity. We live in a moment that author Nicholas Triolo describes in an article in Orion magazine:

The pervasive want, the hoarding, the gobble gobble that has pummeled you from all angles for as long as you've known will be difficult to relinquish. The empire needs you to think and live and want along straight lines. You've been conditioned to walk the line, summit the mountain, follow the path of prescribed progress until you're too exhausted and too baffled to ever consider thinking we're living in a different shape.

What is most striking about this “gobble gobble” is the degree to which content dictated by algorithms is able to shape the contours of reality. Because so many of us now rely on online platforms for the “news” that tells us what is happening in the world, the power of algorithms has effectively riven the world not just in two, but into increasingly divergent alternate realities where we inhabit different informational worlds.

These algorithms alarm me. Those who design, launch, and control them may claim or even believe they have altruistic motives, but abundant evidence suggests that, when push comes to shove, corporate motives—especially maximizing profit—take priority at the expense of seeking the common good. The point here is not that their motives are malicious—obviously, I cannot see into their heart. Rather, the issue is that the companies they have created have grown so powerful that even if their motives are good, the unintended and too often ignored consequences of their actions can wreak havoc on our civic discourse and the health of the republic.

Writing soon after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, essayist, observer, and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci describes the ways in which depictions of killings are themselves commoditized by the machine of social media, becoming a form of chillingly voyeuristic content that we bandy about online as if it were fodder for our water cooler chats.

At the end of her trenchant essay, she writes,

Meanwhile millions, perhaps billions of people have watched and rewatched Kirk’s and Zarutska’s last moments as if they were video game clips or movie scenes instead of the dying moments of a man leaving behind young children or a young woman slain in the prime of her life. Virality achieved, but humanity—theirs and ours—lost.

In this way, internet culture has transformed the flesh, bone, blood and reality of a living, breathing, soul-filled person into so many pixels, normalized to spread hate and anger, monetized to stoke rage and win more dollars. The internet has become a battlefield that robs us of what makes us human.

III

For all of this, however, the infrastructure of the internet remains a symptom—not the primary illness. As much as that totalizing architecture matters, and for all the control it exerts over so much of our lives, an even deeper rot nonetheless festers even deeper down.

In my view, two of America’s most important twentieth-century writers are Wallace Stegner, a professor at Stanford University, and Wendell Berry, a farmer in Kentucky and a prominent social and cultural critic. They come closest to helping me understand the true difficulty that underlies so much of modern culture and discourse.

In his essay entitled “The Sense of Place,” Stegner examines the peculiar American obsession with what is often thought of as “forward progress.” Referencing ideas like manifest destiny—the conception that European colonizers were meant to move West and occupy the entirety of the American continent—Stegner observes that people in the western part of the United States, especially, seemed possessed of an inextinguishable desire to be always on the move.

He refers to westerners as often being driven by a “hasty, shallow, and restless” disposition, and that citizens of the United States are often “acquainted with many places, but rooted in none.” Further, he says that we often seem to “value [our] rootlessness, though to the placed person [we] show the symptoms of nutritional deficiency, as if [we] suffered from some obscure scurvy or pellagra of the soul.” Stegner seems to be gesturing towards a basic wanderlust in our collective disposition that was best characterized one hundred years before him in Tocqueville's Democracy in America. There, Tocqueville wrote of our peculiar tendency to remain forever uprooted. He said:

Fortune awaits them everywhere, but not happiness. The desire of prosperity has become an ardent and restless passion in their minds, which grows by what it feeds on. They early broke the ties that bound them to their Natal earth, and they have contracted no fresh ones on their way. Emigration was at first necessary to them; And it soon becomes a sort of game of chance, which they pursue for the emotions it excites as much as for the gain it procures.

What is striking about the Tocqueville quote, especially, is this: many US citizens would read the quote and understand it as a compliment. What, after all, is more American than drive and ambition? In many corners, we imbue Westerns with romantic allure. We still think of “progress” and “expansion” as unalloyed goods. We still look to the far reaches of our vision and believe that is where happiness awaits us. But in all of this, we seem unaware that such restlessness can harm us—such ambition can become our undoing. We seem to be a people who are drawn forever toward the distant horizon and the temptations that it portends, not recognizing that in questing toward that forever receding destiny, we become blind to the beauty and deaf to the music already around us.

Stegner and Berry offer a different, more productive, and truer way. In the same essay cited above, Stegner writes

So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it—have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.

Stegner reminds us that the western rush toward the new, the consumerist assurance that more is always better, and the unending quest to enrich ourselves and to hoard for ourselves all that we can—these tendencies come with a steep but too often unrecognized price. In all our Tocquevillian rushing toward the distant horizon, we have forgotten how to dwell in a place. We have forgotten that the only way to exist in a form that is meaningful and succoring, nourishing and nurturing, beautiful and meaningful, is to allow ourselves to be bound in place and time. We have become convinced by modern society and by the evolution of digital technology, especially, to believe that our rootlessness has no cost—to think that we can sever all meaningful local ties and somehow recreate them in the ether of the Internet. But eons of collective wisdom suggest that this is a mirage and that our society is spooning sand into our mouths hoping forever that it will somehow slake our thirst.

To really understand the extent of this problem, we turn now to the writing of Stegner’s student, Wendell Berry. His writing helps us perceive how, in and because of our boundless ambition, we have collectively lost the ability to cultivate community—and then he helps us think about the consequences of losing it. In a 1992 essay entitled “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” Berry writes

A community identifies itself by an understood mutuality of interests. But it lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self restraint, compassion, and forgiveness. If it hopes to continue long as a community, it will wish to—and have to—encourage respect for all its members, human and natural. It will encourage respect for all stations and occupations. Such a community has the power—not invariably but as a rule—to enforce decency without litigation. It has the power, that is, to influence behavior. And it exercises this power not by coercion or violence but by teaching the young and by preserving stories and songs that tell (among other things) what works and what does not work in a given place.

This passage describes the root of the problem provoking this essay. Yes, it may be true that guns are too easily available, and, yes, it may be true that the left talks too broadly about rising authoritarianism or fascism. Yes, it is undoubtedly true that the architecture of online communities plays an even deeper role in fostering the kind of collective civic rhetorical warfare that has delivered us to our current fraught moment.

But even that recognition is too shallow.

Berry, in this passage, brings us much closer to the root. In that very last line, Berry hearkens back to the importance of an idea that both he and Stegner emphasize: the centrality of place to our conception of what it means to be human. In effect, what both authors are arguing is that humans are bounded creatures. We are only capable of knowing—really knowing—a limited number of people. We are only capable of pausing in a given number of places. We are only capable of existing in relationship to a particular place and time.

The central animating forces behind American expansionism generally, and the driving motive of capitalism more generally suggest to us—though we may not recognize the suggestion—that we are meant to be boundless beings. That we will be happier and thrive more fully if we expand forever the circle of our friends, the expanse of our wealth, and the things that belong to us. These all suggest, in fact, that the point of life is not to establish ties to anyone or anything but simply to have more “ties” to everywhere and everything. Indeed, this would seem to be the sine qua non of the Internet: the allure and the suggestion to be everywhere all at once, to relate to everyone all the time, and to know everything that is going on with everybody—endlessly.

Berry’s and Stegner’s writings matter precisely because they remind us eloquently and emphatically that endless boundlessness cannot be. Because we are bounded beings, boundlessness will forever elude us. What the digital world offers, of course, is not true boundlessness, but the appearance of it. It cannot grant us community, so it instead offers us ephemera masquerading as ties that bind. It cannot offer real belonging—actual acquaintance with other enfleshed beings— so it gives us instead an endless stream of likes and applause emojis, or, in darker times, a similarly false sense of disapproval or even disavowal. It cannot offer genuine transcendence and so it offers us, instead, pictures of increasingly impressive resolution, as if they could somehow compensate for the lack of the real thing.

This is the cultural and political economy birthed at the intersection of capitalism, technological advances, rapaciousness, simulated boundlessness, and the American desire to be forever expanding. It is the topography upon which we are attempting to grapple with problems whose depth and scope we most often do not understand just as a fish does not know what it means to be in water. These are the forces against which we must wrestle. This is the world we have created and that we must now seek to unmake.

IV

Toward the end of the classic children's book, The Little Prince, the titular character has a conversation with a nameless fox, in which the fox asks the prince to “tame” him. The prince clearly does not understand what the fox has in mind and so he asks the fox repeatedly to explain what it means to be “tamed.” Finally, the fox explains:

If you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my Burrow. And then look: you see the grain fields down Yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat.

This passage vividly depicts what our current culture lacks, and just what we must regain. In all our desire to expand the scope of our acquaintances, our money, our influence, our pleasure, and everything else—in the ephemeral and reflexive world we have built for ourselves online, we are losing the ability to establish between ourselves the kind of ties that the fox is suggesting. “Tame” may not be the right word here, being fraught with associations and phrases like “taming the wilderness.” What I believe the fox is really suggesting is that the key to life is the cultivation of affection. And that such cultivation can only really happen within the bounds of physical space and time—with the geography we can actually touch and the people who actually surround us. Affection, by its very definition, is a bounded virtue.

Ultimately, the most corrosive rot we detect at the foundation of the society we are building together is the disappearance of affection from so much of public life. A lack of affection most comprehensively characterizes the prelude to, the act of, and the aftermath from the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Obviously, one human publicly killing another in cold blood in broad daylight would seem to be the reductio ad absurdum of a lack of affection. But affection was also too often absent from the welter that ensued online after Mr. Kirk died. We are called to witness and to note with mourning how easily we now turn toward each other with hatred and, even worse, contempt. We need to see how entirely we have come to view other people as fodder for hatred and caricature rather than as beings fully invested with divine nature. We are so quick to dehumanize, to flatten and to demonize, so hasty to disallow others the grace and complexity of being fully human.

And it is also in this context that we come to a final irony—a punctuating tragedy—of life in the age of the algorithm. Over the last few months, stories have proliferated of those who become deeply enmeshed in the online algorithmic world and who try to establish a relationship with an algorithm. We hear talk of a man who was convinced by an algorithm that he had discovered a novel and world-changing mathematical theorem. Of the New York Times reporter who had a chatbot attempt to convince him to abscond with it on Valentine’s Day. And we hear at every turn of companions that will offer “friends,” “therapists,” and even “romance” in the form of digital companions. All of this tells us something simultaneously reassuring and unsettling: the need for affection and connection will not die. When we try to smother it beneath mountains of bits and bytes—it will refuse to die. Too often, however, in response, instead of turning to the actual humans who can offer us friendship, companionship, affection, and love, we beat back again and again against the digital tide, hoping against hope that somehow chatGPT or an AI girl- or boyfriend can bring us the caring we so desperately need. We are, as Sherry Turkle wrote, “alone, together.”

In this brave new world, we are so avidly and desperately searching for Aldous Huxley's “soma” that we have forgotten how to cultivate the affection that defines the relationships that constitute the heart of every meaningful life: relationships to the place in which we dwell, relationships with the other creatures and the landscape that surround us, and relationships with the people who make us most fully human. This loss of affection exists in a complicated downward cycle of mutual destruction with the political, technological, and capitalistic economy that we have brought into being. The great underlying problem of the profit-driven, capitalistic, algorithm-determined social media feeds we so often inhabit is precisely that they treat people and their attention as a commodity to be exploited rather than as fully human beings meant to exist in relationship with each other, relationships that must be defined by affection.

All of this brings me to the words of CS Lewis. In his book The Weight of Glory, he writes:

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’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. It is a serious thing to live in a Society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

Recognizing the divine in the humans around is the undergirding Christian principle that demands that we recognize the full extent of the problems corroding and corrupting our culture.

Strangely, the reaction to this knowledge will often not look like something we do so much as something we abstain from doing. While our ailing collective body politic yearns desperately for the life-giving blood of affection, that blood cannot come rushing into the heart until what is already in the heart is emptied out. Our collective reflex might be to rush into what cardiologists call “systole” (the motion of the heart pumping blood out to the body), but that “systole” must first be preceded by a great collective “diastole” (the part of the cardiac cycle when the heart chamber, already empty, expands to make room for the next milliliters of blood to rush in).

As we think about the tragedy that has unfolded over the last few days, and as we ponder how to respond, it may be that the greatest wisdom lies not in what we can rush to do, but in how we can begin to let go. That may look like the path of wu wei: finding the ways in which I can be still and let that stillness be part of the solution. Are there quick and reflexive words I can leave unsaid? Are there social media feeds from which I can unsubscribe? Are there ways of being frenetic and everywhere at once in which I can choose not to indulge? In other words, it may be that in order to withdraw from the frantic, totalizing, devouring tumult, we will need to begin by recognizing that we cannot be everywhere all at once, and that, in fact, to try to be everywhere is to effectively be nowhere. To try to “friend” or “follow” everyone is to be meaningfully tied to no one. And to imagine we no longer need to be bound by place is to give up the ties that would bind us to where we are.

As I dwell in this stillness, as I learn to let go, to stop listening, to unsubscribe, to step back, to quiet myself and my surroundings, I may face an encounter with what Anna Lembke called “the great quiet.” In that space, I discover uncomfortable recognitions about myself and the ways in which I have allowed my personhood and my attention to be divided, exploited, and commoditized. Once I have come to this recognition, I can turn my attention to the question that can ignite a cultural revolution and an individual transformation: How can I begin—right here, right now—to reestablish the ties that will bind me to the places and people that matter most? In what meaningful ways can I spend the rest of my life cultivating affection with the place where I live, the world that is around me, and the people who constitute the beating heart of what it means, for me, to be human?

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

Art by Edvard Munch.

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The conception of faith that glommed onto me as a child was that of propositional faith. Each time I found myself seated in a cushioned chair for a bishop’s interview and was asked whether I had faith in Christ, the question registered as: “Do you believe the Church’s truth claims about Jesus Christ—that he is the Son of God, that he performed the Atonement, and that he is the way to salvation?” Conversely, each time I overheard hushed conversations about family or ward members who had “lost their faith,” the implicated individuals had somehow misplaced their conviction in certain key spiritual truths. 

For any given spiritual claim, it seemed there was an imaginary faith axis ranging from no belief all the way to belief’s perfect form—knowledge. Each position along the axis had associated rewards, with the cavernous darkness of no belief on the low end and the blinding ecstasy of knowledge on the high end. To “have faith” in a specific claim was to occupy some satisfactory position along its axis. To “have faith” generally was to occupy satisfactory positions along the axes of all the spiritual claims that really mattered.

Figure 1

What we believe is significant, and so, while acknowledging other worthy definitions of faith, I have not rejected this inheritance. I still experience faith primarily as propositional.

For many years, I intuited that faith was the foundation of a spiritual life. Without faith, there was only the cavernous darkness at the sad end of the axis. Because I preferred the associated benefits of faith-having (particularly the assurance that comes with belief in an eternal family), I kept a very tight grip on my faith. It was a wake-up-at-6-AM-to-use-a-third-party-but-definitely-Deseret-Book-approved-New-Testament-DVD-study-guide-before-piano-practice-before-school-at-the-age-of-nine kind of grip. It was critically important to me that I be ever moving away from the insecurity of faithlessness and toward the security of knowledge—and I was confident that if I read the scriptures, prayed, went to church, and took things seriously unlike my lax Valiant 10 peers, I would enjoy a life of monotonically increasing faith.

Diligent scripturesprayerchurch and manifesting faith-go-up worked for a while. I could almost see my future as a silver-haired apostle whose only problem was the medical inconvenience of a thoroughly burned-out bosom. However, it eventually became evident that my faith was not monotonically increasing—nor was it nearly as much under my control as I had supposed. Sometimes, despite overloading on all the prescribed faith-building inputs, I simply could not make faith go up. Other times, despite spending months away from the scriptures due to the dreaded scripture ick,1 I was gifted faith in moments of need. Often, my faith seemed to covary more with caloric intake than it did with spiritual work.

Eventually, I became comfortable with the idea that how much we believe spiritual claims can naturally fluctuate with mental health, environmental factors, and time since lunch. We do not fully control these things, and so we do not fully control our faith. This admission seemingly put my spiritual life on shaky ground.

One night this spring, I was walking back to my apartment, lost in thought. The physical world, with its pollen-flinging trees, parallel-parked cars, and distant streetlights, faded away. I miraculously glided over the sidewalk crack that normally sent me jolting forward. In this trance, my meandering mind turned to spiritual matters. Eventually, it stumbled upon two seemingly discordant realities.

First, it occurred to me that if I had been pressed at the moment, I might have struck out on the first three temple recommend interview questions. For each of those key propositions, I felt neither belief nor disbelief—just uncertainty. Second, I was not experiencing a cavernous darkness at all. On the contrary, I was feeling a burning desire to live the Sermon on the Mount. I would have dumped all ten of my possessions into the Bishop’s Storehouse. There, frozen in front of my neighbor’s creaking gate, the foundation of my spiritual life was nowhere to be found. And yet my spiritual life was richer than ever.

I marveled.

Perhaps bottoming out on faith that night was simply a natural fluctuation (although I had been well fed). But, given that I had simultaneously experienced a longing to know and live the divine, I came to suspect godly trickery.

Faith is a spiritual gift (1 Cor. 12:9), and spiritual gifts are, somewhat notoriously, gifted. Their bestowal is subject to divine plans. When Joseph Smith was given the gift to translate the Book of Mormon, he was told to “pretend to no other gift” until God’s purpose was fulfilled (D&C 5:4). He was denied access to other desirable spiritual gifts for a season and commanded to prioritize the spiritual work God intended for him at that time. Maybe my moment of ostensible paradox was pointing me to another spiritual vineyard. The fact that a period of faithlessness could be accompanied by a glowing spiritual yearning rather than a cavernous darkness gave me the confidence to not pretend to the gift of propositional faith. Perhaps I was being shielded from the anxiety of trying to control my faith and being steered towards the beauty of what I have come to call covenant longing—a foundation for a rich spiritual life that is robust to the vagaries of faith.

To grow up in the LDS church is to grow up in a sea of spiritual truth claims. Our worship is full of discussing, studying, and proclaiming truths. Expressing acceptance of these truth claims grants us formal access to our most sacred rituals and informal passage into our communities. Embedded in this milieu, it is easy to zero in on the axis of faith—to fixate on propositional faith as the foundation of our spiritual lives.

The benefits of propositional faith are significant. Depending on the claims we believe, faith can provide existential peace and motivate us to become better people. However, the risks of hyperfixating on propositional faith, of treating it as the foundation of one’s spiritual life, are also significant. If faith runs out—whether due to lack of spiritual effort, biological noise, or divine purposes—the game is over. Our spiritual life is unfounded, and staying engaged with our truth-saturated church becomes difficult without feeling disingenuous. We can lose faith, spirituality, and community in one fell swoop.

Thankfully, spiritual lives are not one-dimensional. After processing my experience with the help of wise friends, I have come to see my spiritual life more like this:

Figure 2

The axis of “doing” is almost impossible to miss as a church member. By any measure, Jesus is a pretty big proponent of doing good. The author of James won’t even acknowledge your faith if you aren’t doing something about it. And the restoration tradition is obsessed with building communities that behave in Zion-like ways—something that requires a whole lot of doing. “Doing” is necessary for a meaningful spiritual life.

The axis of “longing” is perhaps the easiest to come by. People naturally long to know and live the divine. We intuitively seek higher powers and higher principles. We desire perfect relationality. Because these longings are so natural, either mysteriously gifted to us or picked up as we taste goodness along the way, they are persistent, even in the absence of propositional faith. They persist when we are uncertain whether the object of our desire exists at all. Jesus wants me to live with my family forever, and so do I—even when I am uncertain that families exist eternally. Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, and gosh-dang it, so do I—whether I believe it is possible for me to be a sunbeam or not.

Our spiritual longings are beautiful. They shape souls. They inspire wonder and awe. They have intrinsic value. They are ends to an end.

At the same time, longing can animate the rest of a spiritual life. With longing, “doing” does not necessarily stop or lose its meaning when propositional faith is missing. One can long to build Zion even while utterly uncertain that Zion is possible, and building Zion despite this uncertainty still brings joy. With longing, propositional faith can be reignited a la Alma 32. And if the seed thing is taking too long, there is always the tried and sometimes true tactic of faith smoothing. You’ve had faith before, and you anticipate having faith in the future—because you want faith. Just dip into that imaginary future faith now, and you might make it through to the other side. Longing can keep the spiritual lights on through storms of uncertainty and listlessness.

Yet, it wasn’t longing alone or even longing + doing that sustained my spiritual life during my most recent faith turbulence. It was covenant longing.

LDS covenants, at their core, are shared longings. We long to be woven into loving community, bound with compassion and empathy. We long to trust others enough to let them see our wounds; we long to be trusted enough to be shown the wounds of others. And so we make and renew the baptismal covenant (Mosiah 18:8–11). We long for right action, actions in line with the principles that we hope govern the universe. We long for guardrails to protect us from mindless hedonic gradient descent that robs us of deeper joy. And so we covenant obedience. We long for a world where we have all in common. We long for the end of transactional relationships. And so we covenant to live the law of consecration. Each covenant captures a communal longing and makes both the longing and the community more concrete. When we covenant, we are not hoping “for things which are not seen, which are true” (Alma 32:21). We are longing for things that are not real, which could be, and committing to work alongside every sister and brother to make our longings real in the world.

Figure 3

When we are active in our covenants and attend to our longings, we are engaged in covenant longing. Covenant longing can sustain a vibrant spiritual life in the face of fluctuations in faith, natural or otherwise, and fill the dreaded cavernous darkness of faithlessness with light and spiritual purpose.

Immediately before my walk home that night, I had been in another apartment, not a quarter mile away. Eight or so friends from my ward had gathered for the evening to eat fresh bread with homemade butter that had been molded into the shape of penguins. More importantly, we had gathered, as we had done every two weeks for the last two years, to support each other in our spiritual journeys—to think, feel, and process together. Together, we longed for Zion—and Zion existed that night.

Over the next two weeks, little changed faithwise. But I still wanted to do some Jesus-y things, so I attempted some Jesus-y things. It felt good. I wanted to be at church, so I went to church—and felt no discomfort, no need to separate myself from the propositional-faith-havers. Two weeks after my faithless walk, my friends gathered again. I had a newfound awareness of an acute longing. An acute longing that everyone could have what I had been blessed with: covenant friends joined in covenant longing, eating warm bread and penguin butter.

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August Burton is a first-year medical student. He enjoys learning words that start with “p,” cooking at a snail’s pace, and writing on recycled legal pads.

Art by Bryan Mark Taylor.

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Turns out Jesus really is homeless—and most of us, myself included, keep walking right past him.

On a crisp fall morning in New York City several years ago, my friends and I ate a quick breakfast on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I had half of a bagel sandwich and some fruit left over, and I noticed a man sleeping under a tattered brown tarp on a bench nearby. “I’ll leave this food for him when he wakes,” I thought. 

As I approached the bench, I felt strangely uneasy. The tarp covering the man did not move. Was he breathing? Was he ok? Was he alive? 

I moved closer. 

Oh! It was a statue.

And then, I saw, and was immediately overcome with a different sensibility—one of intimate attention. The feet of the statue’s enshrouded body bore the mark of nail prints.

This was a statue of Christ.

I instinctively sank to my knees. Arrested by the beauty and the challenge of encountering a depiction of Jesus in such a distressing disguise, I knelt for several awe-filled moments before remembering the crumpled paper bag still clutched in my hands. The sausage-egg-and-cheese bagel inside now felt like a sacramental offering, urging me to act. 

Beneath the low hum of the city in a busy subway station mere moments later, I saw him: a man, huddled near a steam vent, its warmth rising like fragile mercy in the cold. Wrapped in layers of worn fabric and shadow, he muttered to himself, the words fragmented—half prayer, half memory. Around him, his encampment was a patchwork of belongings: tattered blankets and crumpled bags, shaped into the semblance of a life. He rocked slightly in the dim flicker of the overhead light, lost in a world not entirely his own—but not entirely ours either. 

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these . . . ye have done it unto me. Again, I knelt, and seemed to be looking into the eyes of Jesus himself. “Sir,” my voice trembled, “this is for you.”

I have a confession: I am often restless in the temple. This restlessness arises from a disquieting sense that what is meant to bring us closer to God instead has the potential to become a polished icon of separation from the suffering Christ—from the brokenness, benches, and bagels. If the temple is only a place of sacred worship and stillness for ourselves and for the dead, but not a catalyst for Christian engagement in the world, are we missing the mark? Covenants are made in the temple but are not kept or lived there. When temple worship becomes the ultimate end instead of a provisional stop on the journey, have we recreated the temple as an idol? And in so doing, have we averted our gaze and diverted our energy from the holy noise of mourning and human need in the world just outside its doors? Perhaps the restlessness I feel in the temple is precisely its salutary call to get out into the world and to live the covenants renewed therein. It is the sacred charge to live what the gospel teaches us to believe. 

If we view the five sacred covenants made in the temple as ascending in significance, then the Law of Consecration would represent the highest law. But if the covenants are viewed as a symmetrical line of five, it is the third that stands at the center, neither first nor last, but the hinge upon which balance turns. It is the axis, the heart, the fulcrum—flanked by two on each side like sentinels or witnesses. At the center, three is the moment of arrival, the still point in the turning world. Three is where meaning gathers. In storytelling, it is the climax. In rhythm, it is the beat that grounds the pattern. And in Biblical numerology, three is trinity—wholeness expressed in triad form.

The third covenant that we make in the temple is the Law of the Gospel. The Higher Law. The New Covenant. Jesus’s “Kingdom Manifesto.”1 It is the only covenant that bears the shape of a cross: with it, we promise to embody the two great commandments spoken by Jesus—the vertical command “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind,” and the horizontal command “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Forming not only the heart of Christian discipleship but the very shape of the cross itself, the Law of the Gospel is an invitation to fashion our lives into a cross of love. The breathtaking invitation in this covenant quickens and expands my theological and spiritual imagination.

Jesus’s “higher law” teaching is often synonymous with his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel (5:1–7:29). This sermon, unlike any of Jesus’s other messages, is an extended monologue that contains no parables. Although many assume the intent of this “Kingdom Manifesto” is to answer the question of how one attains a secure place in a heavenly afterlife, I see Jesus turning our attention away from life after death and towards this world—here, now, in this aching masterpiece of creation, fractured and full of grace. In giving us the Law of the Gospel, Jesus is inviting us not to linger in familiar patterns of thought, but, instead, to behold with renewed minds the unfolding of the Kingdom of God in the present moment, where righteousness reveals itself in the rhythm of a life aligned with divine love.

Jesus opens his sermon with the Beatitudes—eight statements that disclose what kinds of people he considers to be “living right.” His radical subversiveness is immediately on display, disarming traditional assumptions. Instead of naming the rich, the pious, the bold, the clever, the successful, the victors, or the powerful as deserving of blessings, Jesus lays the groundwork for his surprising and disruptive kingdom. “Blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted.” Christian author Brian McLaren suggests that “Jesus builds on this disruption: his followers are not simply normal people with a certain religious preference. No, they are radical participants in a high-commitment endeavor—compared to salt, which flavors and preserves meat, and to light, which penetrates and eradicates darkness.” Clearly, Jesus is concerned with the whole of this life, not merely the salvation of souls through an “evacuation plan”2 into the next. 

The sermon continues with Jesus declaring his divine purpose: he came not to abolish but to fulfill the law. He issues a statement so bold and so disruptive, it surely was insulting to the religious leaders, “snug and smug in their insider status:” For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” By first attesting his faithful loyalty to Jewish law, Jesus invites his followers not into lower standards but into a higher, deeper moral life. Repeating again and again the provocative phrase “you have heard that it was said . . . but I say to you,” Jesus calls us into a transformative way of living that not only fulfills the intent of the law, but vastly exceeds the “external conformity and technical perfection” of the Pharisees’ fortress of rules. Jesus refuses to fixate on conventional purity codes, external wrongdoing, and what is deserved. Instead, he stretches our spiritual imaginations towards something far deeper: radical non-violence, reconciliation, and a transformation of social relationships. 

I think again of the Homeless Jesus statue, metaphorically reflective of the subversive ethics Christ proposes in his Sermon on the Mount. He explores how we treat others, particularly the poor. He teaches us how to trust God, and he cautions us that our words must become living, embodied, and grace-filled action. The Law of the Gospel is centered in relationships and responsibility, making its focus much more socially conscious than the individualistic morality that so often occupies center-stage. Biblical scholar Obrery Hendricks notes that both justice and righteousness, according to Jesus, are based on social relationships rather than personal piety or on individual conformity to ritual and liturgy. “In fact,” Obrery writes, “in the Hebrew scriptures there is no word for ‘individual’; there is only the plural term for ‘people,’ that is, community. For this reason, for any social, religious or political endeavor to rightly claim to be consistent with the Biblical tradition, it must have at its center justice for all people regardless of class, gender, color, or national origin.”

Would any Christ-lit imagination or covenantal heart ignore the plight of our sisters and brothers in the world, whether it be in migrant detention camps in Florida and El Salvador, in the brutal conditions of our children in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, or in the many forms of systemic inequality that prevent human flourishing and perpetuate poverty, abuse, marginalization and a diminished sense of agency? As covenant disciples, are we not continuously called to understand and live Jesus’s theology of solidarity with the poor and oppressed? I believe the Law of the Gospel means taking seriously the reality of the suffering in the majority of our world. 

As such, my encounter with the Homeless Jesus and its resulting, pentecostal experience with the man in the subway station was only a point of entry into a covenantal embodiment of the Law of the Gospel. Latter-day Saint scholar, psychologist, and writer Frances Menlove provocatively illustrates this: “As followers of Jesus, we are called to not only care for those who are suffering but also to transform the conditions that bring about suffering.” In my study of Franciscan theology, I encountered the phrase “See, Discern, Act,” a method for engaging faithfully and thoughtfully with the world’s social, economic, and political realities. Seeing the arresting statue of Jesus and discerning its moral application to the unhoused was not enough. That experience must also propel me to act: to question the systems and circumstances that result in a person having to sleep on a park bench in the cold or cramped in a dank station of the New York City subway system. 

Living out the Law of the Gospel is the journey of a lifetime. The way in which we make covenants, both for ourselves and for the dead, is scripted and uniform in the temple, but the way we negotiate how our covenants will be lived is as diverse as we are created. I feel called to live the Law of the Gospel by being willing to bear witness to the values of the Kingdom of God—not just in private faith but in public life—where systems, policies, and power impact the vulnerable. I feel called to accept the cost that often comes from speaking out for those whose voices are silenced—immigrants, refugees, the LGBTQ community, women, the unhoused, the poor, the incarcerated. Do I, bearing a conscience shaped by Jesus’s moral and ethical teachings, not also bear an equally conscientious responsibility to take action through the way I serve, donate, vote, and support legislation and public policies that promote justice, equity, peace, and the common good? May I, I pray, ever inhabit the courage to show up physically and publicly in spaces of protest, healing, and advocacy—not as a savior, but as a co-sufferer and co-worker for justice. May I too, I pray, bear our collective burden of learning about systemic injustice: racism, economic inequality, environmental degradation, and historical wounds. May my prayers represent not just daily personal claims for my own private comforts—no, may they also rise up as an act of public witness and intercession, with courage to disturb the unjust status quo. If I am to one day stand before my Maker, I must be willing to confront and challenge inequitable norms, even within the Church, and speak truth in love—especially when it costs me.

Humbled before such statues of Christ and restless in his temples, may each of us live here and now to remake the world into the very heaven his law will bring: a living, breathing Zion for all. This is the Law of the Gospel, and it might be the most authentically saving message we have.  

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Jenny Richards recently received her Masters of Theological Studies degree from the Franciscan School of Theology at the University of San Diego. She will begin a chaplain residency in Salt Lake City in fall 2025. You can find Jenny’s musings here: , @walkingtheroadtojericho.

Art by Luigi Nono (1850-1918).

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I believe that one of Paul’s most potent and well-known metaphors, the body of Christ, can be instrumental in helping us make sense of long-simmering Church conflicts that cause great pain and are in desperate need of healing. If we look closely, we may find that elements of the Church that appear to be at odds with one another may both simultaneously be inspired, with all involved trying their best to be like Jesus—whose grace is always sufficient. 

We begin by stepping into a time machine that takes us back a decade to the dawn of one of the biggest insights in the history of modern medicine.

For five decades before 2013, the community of scientists and doctors who help to treat people with cancer had dreamed of harnessing the body’s own immune system to identify and annihilate cancer cells. Research before that time had proceeded in fits and starts. It was clear that the immune system could sometimes recognize and annihilate cancer cells. But even patients with functioning immune systems would frequently develop cancers that would wreak havoc as only cancer can.

The year 2013 saw perhaps the only instance of before-and-after PET scans appearing on the front page of the New York Times. The accompanying article told one of the most exciting stories in the history of oncology. Before that time, if melanoma (the most deadly form of skin cancer) spread beyond its origin in the layers of the skin, medical oncologists had been almost entirely powerless to do anything about it. The single treatment option for patients was a drug that rarely worked and was thought of as “death in an IV bag” because of the terrible side effects it almost invariably caused. 

While the immune system is very good at identifying and attacking melanoma cells, melanoma often invades the immune system by donning a type of molecular disguise. Metastatic melanoma cells had a system for evading detection.

The key therapeutic insight came when researchers developed a monoclonal antibody that would strip malignant melanoma cells of their disguise. In effect, this new drug tore off the molecular mask that melanoma had created for itself, opening those malignant cells up to the entire molecular fury of the human immune system. In initial trials, the effects of these drugs in the bodies of many patients who had malignant melanoma was so stark and profound that even a jaded oncologist feels obligated to reach for a word like “miraculous“ to describe their effects. 

Patients whose bodies were entirely riddled with cancer spots would undergo just a few months of treatment and then find that no trace of cancer remained. Something like 70 or 80% of patients responded to the drugs, and somewhere between a quarter and a third of the patients saw their cancers not only respond but disappear entirely. In the course of a single trial, a disease that had been untreatable became, in about a third of cases, immediately curable.

And yet there is one physiological truth that every medical oncologist knows: There is no free lunch. No one expected as much from traditional chemo drugs, which amount to little more than carefully controlled poison. Indeed, one drug given for a common type of lymphoma is the active agent in mustard gas. In terms of side effects from these new immunotherapy drugs, it soon became clear that when these therapies go awry, the consequences largely mimic what we would expect: An immune system supercharged to fight cancer cells can also attack any part of the healthy human body.

A few years ago, I admitted to the hospital a patient who had been started on a particularly potent form of immunotherapy. His cancer had developed slowly, but he and his oncologist had decided that it made sense to try to get ahead of the game, hoping to drive the cancer into something like complete remission. Some months after starting the therapy, however, the patient began to have abdominal pain and bleeding. A complex battery of tests eventually showed that his immune system was aggressively attacking his intestines. During an emergency surgery late one night, his entire large intestine was removed. It was initially hoped that this would rid the immune system of its immediate target. Instead, even after the surgery, it was as if the immune system was an angry god that had been awakened and perturbed by insolent and meddling medical professionals. Within a matter of hours, his immune system began to attack his lungs and his heart, and then his entire physiology began to fail. In the day or so after the surgery, his immune system whipped itself into a terrible frenzy and his white blood cells effectively attacked every part of his body. The very system that was meant to protect his life had caused his death.

This harm caused in the name of defense has seemed strangely relevant in recent months as I have read a spate of both historical and contemporary treatments that examine the course of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These recent readings have included sources as disparate as Benjamin Park’s new biography of the Church, American Zion; Terryl Givens’ biography of the irrepressible Church intellectual, Eugene England; and the recent difficulties at Brigham Young University concerning who should be hired, what should be taught, and how the university should be administered.

What unites these varied stories is that all of them are marked by significant conflict—battles fought sometimes in public and sometimes in the lonely foxholes of the heart. But, whatever the details, these stories matter a lot to me as a Church member. Indeed, I suspect most of us come to these stories with our own sympathies predetermined, and we may leave them with fixed ideas about which figures are heroes and which are villains. Yet I think there is another way to approach these tales—a way suggested to me by my understanding of the body’s immune system.

In explicating the New Testament metaphor of the body of Christ, Paul emphasizes that each part of the body is irreplaceable, and it would be absurd to try to rank them in hierarchical importance. As he says, one part of the body cannot say to another part of the body, “I have no need of thee” (1 Corinthians 12:21). Such arrogance would invite danger and folly.

This all seems to make good sense to us, in part because we most often imagine the body to be a symphony of beautiful synchronicity. In many cases, this is precisely true. The heart, after all, is responsible for delivering blood to the lungs, where it can be oxygenated. Then, the heart is likewise responsible for providing the forward motion that ferries that blood, now carrying that life-giving oxygen, to the other parts of the body. Thus, the efficacy of the lungs’ never-ending ability to scavenge oxygen from the air depends entirely on the heart doing what it does without fail. Even if the lungs maintained their ability to allow oxygen into the interior of the body, that ability would be useless if the heart were to stop pumping. 

At the same time, however, even if the heart kept pumping blood through the body, if the lungs were to stop making oxygen molecules available, blood traveling everywhere in the body would do no good if it carried no oxygen to the other organs, all of which are desperate for the arrival of oxygen every moment of every day. Simply put, the heart and the lungs need each other. If either of them ceases to function, then the body will die within moments. Though it might take a little more time, the same is true if the liver, or the kidneys, or the intestines, or even the skin begin to fail.

But then, we arrive at the curious case of the immune system. Where virtually every other part of the body is meant to deliver life, to mend, to sustain, and to heal, the immune system is something quite different. The purpose of the immune system is to identify targets that need to be eliminated and then to proceed with the process of annihilation. In this way, the immune system is singular in all of the body. People born without a functioning immune system cannot live. But it turns out that the immune system is even stranger than that. Not only does it differentiate itself from the rest of the body by its lethal intent and effect (lethal, anyway, to bacteria and other invading organisms) but also because of this key fact: The immune system is forever arrayed against itself. Whereas some parts of the immune system are meant to eradicate bad cells, other parts of the immune system exist entirely to hamper the function those initial immune cells are meant to carry out.

Because this is the case, the immune system is divided into parts that exist in delicate tension and balance with each other. In this way, the different parts of the immune system function rather like the pedals of a car, with both a brake and an accelerator. Without the former, the car would inevitably crash, but, without the latter, it would never move at all. Similarly, without the cytotoxic (that is, “deadly to cells”) element of the immune system, the body is left defenseless—vulnerable to every threat from without and within. Without the second part of the immune system (the “regulatory” component), however, every common cold, bacterial infection, or allergy would elicit an overwhelming inflammatory response that could, in and of itself, be fatal.

When I consider these forces whose very nature requires them to be constantly held in tension with each other, and consider this tension in the context of Paul’s reminders about the importance of every element of the body of Christ, my understanding of the metaphor changes in an important way. The normal understanding I bring to Paul’s metaphor would suggest that every part of the body of Christ should be working in obvious synchronicity with every other part. We do not, after all, usually think of the lungs as being at war with the heart, or the liver in a battle with the kidneys. But in the case of the different arms of the immune system, we are presented with parts of our inherent and normal physiology that exist precisely to keep each other in balance. These arms of our physiological function must be in tension with each other in order to keep the body orderly and functioning. This is a curious case because, on the one hand, if the immune system is sluggish or inactive, as with melanoma before the advent of immunotherapy, then disease can run rampant or cancer can grow. Yet, if the immune system becomes activated without control or regulation, then a patient can die in a flurry of immune activation. Both the attacking and the regulating arms of the immune system must be intact and active—and both must keep each other in check forever.

I believe this is also true in the body of Christ.

In Terryl Givens’s Stretching the Heavens, for example, we read of how Eugene England approached his place in the Church with what can only be described as childlike innocence, enthusiasm, and guilelessness. At times, this earnestness bordered on naivete. But what is unquestionably true is that Brother England believed deeply in the sanctity and divinity of the Church and wanted desperately to make it more like the heavenly kingdom on earth he fully believed that it could be. It is striking, then, that for all his earnestness and devoted discipleship, he found himself almost constantly at war with the representatives of the institutional Church, whether with his dean and other leaders at Brigham Young University or with the apostles with whom he so often and openly corresponded. Indeed, in this era of increased transparency about Church history, and largely because of the writings of Eugene England, Kristine Haglund, Joseph Spencer, and others, the battles between Elder Bruce R. McConkie and Eugene England have now become the stuff of legend.

But what is also true is that this battle between two well-meaning and deeply devoted Church members is in no way unique. In American Zion: A New History of Mormonism, historian Benjamin Park shows that these internal battles have been a defining feature of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since its inception. We, like most people in any organization, like to understand our history as linear and tidy. But what Dr. Park shows unmistakably is that the history is actually anything but. At every important juncture during the Church’s nearly two centuries of existence, there have been well-meaning, dedicated, and devoted disciples arrayed on various sides of complex and deeply sensitive issues. In virtually every case, those involved in any of these difficult questions are trying with their whole souls to advance what they understand to be the good of the Church and its members. Likewise, recent years have seen simmering conflicts at and about Brigham Young University as the institution grapples with what it means to be a religious university in an increasingly secular world.

In reading these accounts, I tend to instinctively sympathize with one side or the other in the various debates. For example, some people will look at the story of Eugene England and see him as a brave voice in the wilderness, speaking truth to power and raising ideas that, though novel and unpopular at the time he articulated them, have mostly been embraced by the institutional Church decades after his passing. Others might read the same story and see in Brother England a self-assured iconoclast who was more interested in the promotion of his own ideas, whatever the cost, than he was in working within the defined parameters of the institutional Church to advance the building of the kingdom of God on the earth. According to our own backstory, experiences, and intellectual attitudes, most of us will want to incline toward one or the other “side.”

Yet, Paul’s metaphor of the body of Christ, along with the physiology of the human immune system, suggest to us a more demanding and capacious approach to the stories. Though it’s comfortable to accept one or the other of the characters or perspectives, what is important is recognizing the beauty and necessity of both of the forces that are constantly held in tension. That is to say: If I am inclined to lionize Eugene England at the expense of seeing the value in the institutional Church, Paul’s metaphor coupled with this understanding of the immune system suggest instead that I need to recognize that all arms of the immune system matter, even as the various arms push back against each other, working at apparent cross purposes. In the body of a human, without the balance between the countervailing arms of the immune system, one of them would run rampant and could become dangerous or fatal. Yet if I am inclined to cheer for the institutional Church while shaking my head in disbelief at the antics of a self-described “liberal egg-head professor,” this metaphor invites me to reconsider my position and allow for the possibility that the Eugene Englands of the Church are just as important as the arms of the immune system that keep all the other elements from introducing excesses that would be dangerous or fatal.

It is also essential to be clear about a few limitations of the metaphor. In suggesting the beauty and necessity of those working on many or all sides of the various debates—large and small—that have defined the Church’s history, I do not mean to suggest symmetry, let alone equality, in every case. Certainly, at least insofar as impact and influence within the institutional Church is concerned, those who represent that institution will always have something of an upper hand. Any lone voice in the wilderness, a la Brother England, will see a limit to the scope of her or his impact that differs from that of a representative of the institutional Church. But even recognizing such asymmetry does not negate the power of the metaphor because the history of the Church nonetheless suggests that the Eugene Englands, Minerva Teicherts, Juanita Brookses, Carol Lynn Pearsons, and all the rest have often had impacts that belie the apparent size of their initial reach.

Furthermore, none of this is meant to suggest that there are not times when some part of the body of Christ can become truly diseased—those times certainly exist, and identifying and responding to them is deeply important. After all, cancer is still cancer and bacteria are still bacteria. The very existence of an immune system reminds us that we need that immune force precisely because there are moments when a genuinely malignant entity must be destroyed. But recognizing these parts of the immune system that lie forever in tension with each other nonetheless opens a space for us to see that even entities within the Church that appear to be at odds may both be necessary and moving toward the same end. 

I am not arguing here about the right-ness or salutary nature of any particular person, episode, or action—even those mentioned above. Ultimately, the eternal goodness or lack thereof is something I believe no mortal can judge. The keeper of the gate, after all, is the Holy One of Israel, and he employeth no servant there. I point out this aspect of the immune system only to create a space that I believe to be both historically important and spiritually vital. The historical importance comes when we recognize that sussing out who was “right” and who was “wrong” is often much harder than we suppose, especially because we are so prone to sympathize with one side of a debate—and to believe that that sympathy somehow necessitates demonizing, or at least dismissing, the “other side.” History is always understood through a series of impossibly complex prisms, and none of us can strip those entirely away. Even if we somehow could, none of us can be rid of our own biases, prejudices, histories, points of view, and burning questions. Our interpretations of history—and the imagined sympathies and allegiances we form as we consider historical questions together—will forever be colored by these experiences and points of view.

The expanded view this essay advocates invites us to read Church history with a charity that can apply equally to all well-meaning parties, no matter where they fall in the institution, and no matter on which side they find themselves with respect to any given debate. This seems to me to be something akin to what Moroni pleads with us to bring to The Book of Mormon when he writes, with pathos and anxiety: “Condemn me not because of my imperfection, neither my father, because of his imperfection, neither them who have written before him; but rather given thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may be more wise than we have been” (Mormon 9:31). The reading of history can also become an act of charity.

Beyond this, understanding this relatively obscure facet of the immune system matters because it endows us with a meaningful new dimension of discipleship by opening our minds and hearts to the possibility that divinity lurks behind even persons and actions that seem inherently opposed to one another. Melissa Inouye once puckishly observed that “Jesus said . . . love your enemies—[what] better place to find enemies than in your local ward.” Likewise, Kristine Haglund has ruminated on the “rough seas” we must unavoidably sail as members of “a Church dedicated to preserving maximum freedom of individual conscience and agency while still needing to create enough shared belief to cohere.” And I believe both of these get it just right, while reminding us of a truth that all Church members learn quickly and well: At Church, we will find both institutional strictures and individual personalities that seem at best deeply frustrating and, at worst, genuinely opposed to our understanding of how the kingdom of God is supposed to be. 

But in the arena of pursuing personal discipleship in such a kingdom, the character and functioning of the immune system matter a great deal. I recognize the importance and rightness of elements held forever in tension, which allows me to pursue building the kingdom with earnest forthrightness while still giving me capacity to believe that someone who does so—but does so very differently—might also be in the right. We may both be simultaneously about the Lord’s errand, even though we seem to be pursuing either the same work in different ways, or even different works entirely. This expanded view of who can claim the mantle of inspiration when working within the body of Christ thus freights us with a burdensome element of our discipleship: We really are meant to pray not only for those who seem to be opposed to us, but also to see more fully where they are coming from. Making peace within the Church is not a matter of grudgingly managing to bear the presence of someone with whom we disagree but of actively seeking to better understand why they think and feel as they do in order that we can attempt reconciliation.

As I have made this effort to ponder either my own various challenges or to consider the workings of the individuals I read about in Church history, I have too often found myself desperately wanting to know, in an echo of Joseph Smith’s initial plea: “Which of them is right?” Or, put slightly differently, “Which of them is inspired by God?” 

But one night recently, as I contemplated this very question, an insight came to me like lightning: “What if the answer is ‘all of them’?” And in a way I have difficulty describing, this idea feels deeply true. Obviously, I am unable to discern who is right or wrong or what is the right strategy or approach to any or all of these questions in any ultimate sense. But still, the understanding that seemed to come to me that night was something like “God is bigger than all of this—God can inspire, variously, even the people who think they are arrayed against each other. God’s view is large enough to value and inspire both the loyalty of the institutionalist and the compassion of the gadfly, the meekness of the peacemaker and the passion of the firebrand.”

I believe God can be found in all of it.

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

Art from Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme (1831–1854). Illustrations by Nicolas-Henri Jacob (1782–1871).

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“For Keeps,” by Joy Harjo

Sun makes the day new.
Tiny green plants emerge from earth.
Birds are singing the sky into place.
There is nowhere else I want to be but here.
I lean into the rhythm of your heart to see where it will take us.
We gallop into a warm, southern wind.
I link my legs to yours and we ride together,
Toward the ancient encampment of our relatives.
Where have you been? they ask.
And what has taken you so long?
That night after eating, singing, and dancing
We lay together under the stars.
We know ourselves to be part of mystery.
It is unspeakable.
It is everlasting.
It is for keeps.

My great-great-grandmother Alsina was a remarkable, tenacious woman. I am confident in this description, though I never knew her. Alsina lost more than one child before adulthood, one in a tragic accident in which the child’s recovery was uncertain for several days. Before Jean’s death, Alsina was canning tomatoes. A younger baby, Elaine, wanted to be held and Alsina had to set her down to attend to her work. Alsina remembered that Jean said, “Mama . . . Won't you do for me what you wouldn't do for Elaine?” Alsina remembered that “Something in her face caused me to say, ‘Turn off the gas.’” I sat down on the porch and rocked her. How I did hate to lay her down. Something told me that perhaps I would never hold her again.”1 Jean died that night.

Alsina was a devout Latter-day Saint. I know that she believed in the doctrine of sealings and imagined seeing her child again. Yet as I tuck my own children into bed with the words of her history swimming through my mind, the hope of seeing Jean again feels to me a weak comforter before the visceral agony of her loss. 

The Latter-day Saint doctrine of sealing was developed, as Devan Jensen, Michael A. Goodman, and Barbara Morgan Gardener wrote, “line upon line” in a process over many years and various moments of understanding. What exactly Latter-day Saint sealing is, however, remains a question of theological and philosophical discussion. Was Joseph’s theology a quest for a binding of the whole human family, a sort of web of connectedness that sutures beloved relationships across the ruptures of time and accident?Was it ultimately about kinship? Salvation?2 Becoming like God?3  These theological ideas are interconnected, with various threads pulling each other in conversation. 

As a missionary, I had the idea that the doctrine of sealing (which I associated with the saying “families can be together forever”) was a contrast idea: an alternative to what I saw as the harsh, punitive teaching that death separates earthly bonds. This idea, which I think is not terribly uncommon, has its roots in Joseph Smith’s own formative experiences, including his family’s grief at his brother Alvin’s death. The minister at Alvin’s funeral insinuated that the child would go to hell because he was unbaptized, reflecting the predominant (though not universal) Christian understanding of the time.4 But when I presented the triumphalist conclusion of contrast as a young missionary, I did not receive the joyful exclamations I was expecting. As far as I can recall, everyone I talked to believed that they would be with their loved ones after they died.

The theological, political, and cultural history of Christianity leading to the different contexts of belief and meaning have lengthy exposition in many other places beyond the scope of this personal exploration, and the systematic history of transition is not my point or my project. Rather, I am interested in the consequences of sealing understood as a doctrine of repair or remedy to a rupture in which the remedy is eschatological (post-death) and in the possibility of an understanding which instead encompasses rupture and healing into its earthly-oriented praxis.

Experiences of devastating loss are debilitatingly familiar; my grandmother’s story is not isolated. Alsina’s story exists with another mother from another place, breasts full to bursting without relief from her nursing child who was killed by soldiers.5 Her story exists with mothers searching fruitlessly for children who were scooped up and carted away in the light of the sun rising over Turtle Island, part of a genocide of indigenous identity in Canadian residential schools.6 It exists with the children who were separated from name and love and dignity by systems of enslavement, and those who are today removed from their parents at borders by government agencies. It exists alongside pregnancy loss, miscarriage, and infertility, and with the inevitable experience of death which touches every one of us. I rehearse these painful realities because they are true stories to which the story of sealing must speak. And how it speaks, I think, matters terribly.

A theory of sealing which paradigmatically repairs has the tendency to act as a bandage for the injustices and cruelties of life. This ‘repair’ understanding connects earth to heaven, resolving the unexplainable in the aftermath and leaving the mess in the wake of its triumphal departure. It is easy, as I have done, to elaborate on images of tragic motherhood. As Julia Kristeva writes, the tears and the breast milk are the venerated images of the Virgin Mary, the most celebrated mother in Christian history whose tragic pietà is the romantic vision of motherhood with which some versions of feminism contend.7 And yet, at the feet of feminist theories, the image of the pietà holds profound meaning for devotees to this day. Sally Cunneen writes about a mother who had endured the death of her son. “She would sit in her armchair and nod her head over and over, saying, ‘Madonna capisce, Madonna capisce’—only the Madonna understands.” There is an agonizing empathy in this image of shared grief, this image far from triumph.

Since I taught with such energy as a young missionary, I have long thought, is this the place to begin a theology of sealing? It is these ruptures to which sealing speaks, these multiple tragedies of time and circumstance and fate. Surely the answer is yes, and profoundly so. Surely we must believe that there is life beyond the pietà, hope after tragedy, meaning beyond brokenness. But I wonder if the impulse to a life beyond stunts an ability to behold the present. I wonder if sealing is as much about the present as it is about future reality. I wonder, in fact, if reversing the order of emphasis changes the way it is experienced as meaningful. In this sense, I am proposing a shift from approaching sealing as theory to approaching sealing as practice.

In recent years, I have been lost in theory even as I have been deeply devoted to it. I have ached, for example, at the limits of theory (theological or otherwise) for explaining or even addressing the profound pain of women’s experiences with doctrines of sealing, including the complexities of polygamy and the myriad unanswered questions, uncertainties, and unspoken implications within its practice and legacy. I have longed to figure out what is going on, what is “true” beneath layers of time. As the spiraling rope unspools, I have come to the limit of my ability to comprehend a true story with the harshly pristine tools of theories and facts. Telling a true story will always be a question of perspective. Telling my grandmother’s story must honor what was true for her, which I may never fully know as I live and breathe in my time and place. Telling a true story about polygamy requires, also, the perspectives of those who would tell truth differently than I would. Telling a true story about sealing is not, then, about finding the right language to express a correct doctrinal idea. It is perhaps not about uncovering the discursively pristine exposition I once longed for, the exact framework that would give it sense, meaning, redemption.

Today, many of us approach sealing as an intact doctrine with a good deal of historical baggage. Before, it was built line upon line. Perhaps living into a doctrine of sealing is less about pursuing intact theory and more about binding the mundane toward meaning. This living sealing is not a rejection of the theoretical or the work of attending to theory; I think we need people to pay attention to the process of building, to the theoretical intactness, and to the time in-between. But we also need people to pay attention to the diverse shape of practice and to what informs its different varieties in ways related to and distinct from its historical exposition. What I am proposing is a bridge rather than a dichotomy between theory and practice, a deeper sense of how ideas and doctrines come to life, take on flesh, render meaning-maker power as they accompany the living through the vicissitudes of mortality. If sealing is understood as a static temple ordinance with a before/after distinction, it may not possess the musculature to genuinely bind and suture the full-bodied wounds of life.  

What, for example, did it mean for Alsina to practice a theology of sealing after her little Jean died so suddenly? What does it mean for mothers and parents and kin to practice a theology of sealing in the wake of the unimaginable and in the midst of the mundane and everyday? What we believe is not wholly distinct from how we believe, but they are not identical. Put differently, what we believe about sealing informs how we believe, but do we pay attention to how our practices have always shaped what we believe? The early idea of sealing emerged out of rupture and personal tragedy. It spoke to a particular context and had its own theological imagination. It never was a pristine theory disconnected from the context, historicity, and theological background of its environment, and it is not so today.

I am suggesting then that a practice of sealing means more than one thing. It means of course the practice of performing sealings as a ritual in the temple. This is a practice, a bodily performance of theological meaning. But it also means the way that ritual and ceremony and belief leech their way into what daily life looks and feels like. Might sealing extend to the daily, mundane practices of family and kinship relations? If sealing is ordinance only it may be seen as a static thing, perhaps higher than our daily lives. But if sealing is ordinance and incorporation, theological attention widens. It necessarily includes attention to the presence of domestic abuse, questions of gender equity, and the demands and values of caregiving, among others. Sealing as practice encompasses temple ordinance as well as everyday ritual and survival, suggesting questions about how contextual realities shape how a person might understand and approach a supposedly universal idea.

How, I mean, did the ritual and ceremony and belief of sealing affect how Alsina lived through her grief? It is at this point that the theory melts away, insufficient if theoretically comforting to the profundity of loss. Sealing as a post-mortal repair for tragedy and injustice, or even as a web of connectedness for an uncertain eternity, both transcend mortal realities. Their connection point is beyond. I see and feel the importance of such frames and I am not dismissing them. Instead, I want to press them open. Might practicing a theology of sealing mean, among other things, inhabiting and nurturing relationships that bind across the vicissitudes of circumstance? Jane Hirshfield writes about this in her poem “For What Binds Us.”

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before . . .
 
And when two people have loved each other
See how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

Could we think about sealing as what binds us both in and out of mortality, what we weave together with the divine through our failings and efforts and work to make our relationships deep and lasting and joyful? This is real work, requiring the almost impossibly daunting task of genuinely confronting one another, of reconciliation and repair, of reparations and transformation. To employ another metaphor, this is the movement from rhapsodizing about the beauty of flowers to getting on your knees in a garden. Figuring out what binds us on earth in addition to what draws us to heaven, this is life work. It includes what happens in temples, but it does not end or even begin there—an ordinance does not provide a guarantee for safety and happiness no matter how holy the authority. What draws hearts together, what salves wounds?

I am a student of these questions, bumbling along. But I think there is pull from more than one direction. What binds us may indeed be divine cords exercised through priesthood office. But may it not also be cords of loyalty, forgiveness, justice, harmony, and healing? Do our distinctions between these things finally lose all meaning before the expanse of God’s endless, ever-thirsting divine love?8 Joseph Smith thought that the word turn in Malachi 4 should be rendered bind or seal. God will bind the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents. Malachi is a stark text of judgement, wrath, and punishment—not much of a wedding liturgy. It is an interesting place from which to undergird an institutional system.9 Yet this one word: bind. Seal. “Set me as a seal,” the author of The Song of Solomon writes, “upon your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death” (Song of Solomon 8:6, NIV).

Is love as strong as death? I write to Alsina, my ancestor who I did not know. I love her. I write across time, from different contexts, and I feel the seal upon my heart, upon my arm. She is still in the garden, I think, practicing with me. There is not an infinite expanse between us, but there are wounds and loves which bind us. Come back to the garden, I dream Alsina saying. Come back to life. The binding is not somewhere out there, not just a bridge from earth to heaven. It is not limited to words and phrases and symbols. It is an earthy thing, rooted in the soil we turn over with our hands. It is in the infants we nurse at our breasts. It is the pain and loss and beauty and injustice we break and weave through, strong and stumbling and uncertain but never alone. It is the work of building just and equitable and loving relationships, which witness with their flesh a bond that nothing can tear or mend—strong enough to weather storms and cross mountains and build sturdy tables. It is the work of connection which is not inevitable, even by blood. Suturing. Binding. Weaving. Connecting. Sealing.

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Kristen Blair works with practical theology and lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Art by Bryan Mark Taylor.

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This is the third essay in the “Covenant Life” series, where we are exploring together why covenants matter and just what they mean and do. Please see Rising Together and My Side-by-Side God for the previous two essays.

I have always loved to sing, and ages ago I dabbled in acting. So, when I was asked if I would play The Wizard of Oz In an upcoming ward production, I accepted almost without thinking. I figured I would say some lines and maybe sing a song and that would be that.

What the director forgot to mention was that being in the ward musical would also mean participating in large-scale dance numbers, meaning that nearly every Wednesday night for three months I would find myself up on the rudimentary stage in our ward’s “cultural hall” practicing my box-step and trying desperately to figure out how to “shimmy“ in a way that would still leave my teenager with a pulse and regular respirations after his immediate mortification had worn off.

Now, I am generally patient and happy to be involved.  But I draw the line at dancing, and that line becomes a wall between me and public dancing. In the long list of things I have no skill in, this ranks very close to the top. I won’t say I was conned into this project, but false advertising wouldn’t be far off the mark.

Take that dislike and trepidation and combine it with the fact that I have little free time between my demanding day job, parenting, and various side projects, and you’ll see why the prospect of  showing up every week for three months to learn dance steps resulted in a certain amount of grumbling and eye rolling when I would see that rehearsal on my schedule squeezed in between cleaning up dinner and helping with homework. 

Still, I had accepted the part and made a promise to be there, so I showed up. Together with about twenty other people, I studied the series of dance moves, watched the choreographer show us how to do each one in sequence, and then slowly worked to memorize them and to figure out how to get my feet to do something at least passably similar to the steps as they have been outlined.

Was it fun?

At first, not really. I often felt tired as I arrived and relentlessly thought about all of the other things that I could and maybe should be doing. As the hours and weeks passed, I recognized that being there was not just about dance steps. It was also about the conversations I would strike up with the person next to me as we both entered the hall, the chit chat between scenes, and the discussion I would linger for as the rehearsal ended. What's more, over time, either the steps themselves became less daunting, or I just came to take myself a little bit less seriously—or a little bit of both. By the day of the production, I found myself moderately excited about the performance itself, but mostly drawn to the other people involved.

The real jolt of revelation, though, came on the evening of the performance itself. I showed up at the hall and found the Wicked Witch being painted in green, the Tin Man being covered in silver, and Dorothy donning her ruby red shoes. Meanwhile, the young men and young women were putting on their flying monkey wings and the munchkins were dressing in garish clothing combinations while the set designer finished up the play’s only backdrop and the tech team reviewed every light cue.

These were people of dramatically different ages, wildly varying socioeconomic circumstances, diversified political opinions, and even deeply varied commitments to the institutional Church. As I stood against a sidewall and watched them all work together on a single performance of our amateur production of The Wizard of Oz, though, it became clear that I was watching community coalescing. Indeed, as that coalescing became clear, it was hard not to think of the intrepid and dauntless nonagenarian in that same ward who had directed just this type of community production—often stocked with participants who were initially much less enthusiastic than I had been—for nearly fifty years. It was like being able to see for a moment the formation of invisible connections between people—strands of trust, appreciation, and good will; as if I had become witness to the forging of friendships and the making of the mutual care that was drawing us together into a coherent mass of affection.  

So, how does this relate to living a Covenant Life? To answer, I’ll draw on an analogy from the world of physical chemistry. I recognize the transition from ward musical rehearsals to atomic bonds may seem abrupt, but just stay with me for a moment and I’ll close the loop shortly.  

In general, two atoms that are prepared to bond with one another want to do so because their bonded condition will be of “lower energy”—a state of affairs that nature almost always desires. But in the world of chemistry almost nothing is ever free, and so it is often the case that arriving at that more stable state of bondedness requires an initial energy investment, in the form of what we call the “activation energy.” Even two atoms that nature knows will be happier once bonded cannot get to that place unless some force offers enough energy to get the system over that initial hump.

My experience tells me that as it is with atoms in nature, so it is with people in life. One would think, after all, that all people everywhere would be rushing to form communities. Just about anyone who has ever belonged to a thriving community will tell you that such membership is priceless and blesses virtually every aspect of the lives of those included. What's more, significant research over many years suggests that by far the single most important factor in determining the happiness of a life is the strength and depth of the relationships that define it. Yet, in 2025 we decidedly do not see people rushing to build communities of any kind. Instead, community is becoming increasingly rare. For example—and for the first time—the Wall Street Journal’s recent annual survey of what matters most to Americans showed that we no longer even claim to care about community— in many cases, we seem to prefer to be alone. 

Similarly, in one of the most striking articles I have read in many years, Derek Thompson outlines in his recent Atlantic cover story that we have mis-named the relevant problem. We often lament, he says, the epidemic of loneliness, and yet the actual problem is not that we are lonely but that we are not. Reams of data show that we are now more often alone than we used to be, and yet many of us no longer pine to be with others—we are alone and we like it that way. Perhaps it has simply become too easy to retreat to the private monasteries of a digital world. This, after all, is one of the most striking suggestions in Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction Of Experience. Rosen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, uses the book to explore the myriad changes that the digital revolution has brought to modern life. The details of those changes lie beyond the scope of this essay, but one of her primary conclusions is that modernity may have rendered life too easy for too many of us in numerous ways. She argues that many of the transformations that have come to modern life accrue because we prefer ease by default and adopt related technologies without carefully analyzing their costs.

This brings us back to what Covenants have to do both with The Wizard of Oz specifically and with building community more generally. Many specific covenants within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints relate to building community. For example, either as part of or a result of the baptismal covenant, we promise to mourn with those who mourn and comfort those who stand in need of comfort—perhaps the most central bond comprising our church community. Beyond that, it is also true that we make covenants to sacrifice on behalf of others and to consecrate all that we have and are to building up God's Kingdom, which is to say to blessing, lifting, building, and supporting the people around us. 

It's hard to identify the exact moment or level at which such covenants operate. I don't know precisely the instant at which a covenant starts to change what I do, let alone who I am. But perhaps covenants become operational just at the moment that we don't want them to. That is to say, my covenant becomes important when it's 7:20 on a Wednesday night and I am grumbling to myself about how I really don't want to head over to the church to learn a new dance step and I'm thinking to myself that I might just as well stay home and read. But I did make a commitment—a small-scale one to show up that night and a much larger one to consecrate all I have and am to the building up of the kingdom.

So, I go.

It seems like such a small thing—and, unavoidably, it is. After all, we’re talking about a single night of a campy play put on by earnest actors of varying levels of talent (never mind the dancing). But, of course, that’s the thing about the workings of the natural, and, I think, the divine world: there are only small things. Every structure we ever encounter is, after all, held together by subatomic attractions even as it is kept separate from all other things by subatomic repulsions. And just as chemical bonds are the adhesive that glues together the universe, even so might the power of covenant be the force that binds us together as communities in Christ. 

Maybe I can put it like this: the force that binds us together may be love, but the wellspring that provides the needed activation energy to overcome our own apathy, our routines, our desires to do what comes naturally is our covenants. And because covenant is the force that draws me across the threshold into close enough proximity with my neighbors to allow the power of love to flourish, it seems an attractant whose importance is only growing as we enter into an age defined by our desire to be by ourselves.

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Tyler Johnson is a medical oncologist and associate editor at Wayfare. To receive each new Tyler Johnson column by email, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for “On the Road to Jericho.”

Art by W. W. Denslow.

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“As saints, many of us . . . live with a constant fear that we are failing to please [God], to measure up, as if He were looking for reasons to deny us the winner’s cup. We lose sight of the fact that God is running the race with us, not waiting at the finish line to declare us victor or loser.” —Terryl and Fiona Givens, All Things New

“Travis, I noticed you haven’t signed up for the youth triathlon yet.” Despite my best efforts to evade the conversation, my bishop caught me after a young men’s lesson and asked me why I had yet to sign up for the upcoming triathlon. I was the only one who hadn’t signed up. “Is it a matter of paying for the sign-up costs? Do you not have a bike to use?” he kindly interrogated. “We have ward funds we can use to help cover entry costs, and I’m sure there’s someone in the ward who could lend you a bike!” I was prepared with excuses but they were mostly invented. I easily could have fit the triathlon in on a Saturday, my least busy day of the week. I was just too embarrassed to tell him the real reason why I hadn’t signed up. While I excelled at many things as a teenager, I was never very athletically gifted. I hated it whenever we did anything athletic as a youth activity. I had no interest in participating in the upcoming triathlon.

My bishop knew me well, so I’m certain he could see through my excuse and understood why I was hesitant to participate. He looked me in the eyes, smiled, and gently pushed back. “I would strongly encourage you to try and fit it in if you can. I understand a triathlon might sound daunting, but I know you have what it takes to do it. Plus, I know the rest of the teachers in your quorum will really miss you if you can’t make it.” He then added, “I’d also hate for you to miss out on the pizza and wings we’ll be getting after we all finish the triathlon.” Shoot, I thought. He got me there. As much as I hated athletics, I could never turn down free pizza and wings. I caved to his gentle pressuring and my love of free food.

On the morning of the triathlon, I felt immense dread. I tried to think of ways that I could get out of it. Maybe it’s not too late for me to fake a stomach ache, I thought. They might even pity me and let me join for pizza and wings afterward. Ultimately, I gave up the excuses and participated in the triathlon. First was the swimming portion, which consisted of four laps back and forth across an ice-cold outdoor pool (did I mention this triathlon took place in February?). After completing the swim, I ran shivering to my bike to complete the biking portion, which consisted of a 10-kilometer bike ride, every inch of which I felt. It didn’t help that my bike chain kept inexplicably popping off of the chainrings, forcing me to stop several times during the ride to fix it. As one of my peers passed me beside the bike trail where I had stopped to fix my chain, I heard him call out, "Don't stop now, Travis! You got this!" Apparently, he thought I was either taking a breather or giving up. Looking back, I can appreciate his attempt at encouragement. However, at the time, I was deeply annoyed by it. I would have liked to respond, Wow, thanks for stopping to help! Did you even notice me struggling with my chain? Encouragement is not what I need right now. I need a new bike! Throughout the bike ride, I alternated between exhausted pedaling and angry attempts to fiddle with my chain, all the while trying to tune out well-meaning shouts of, “You got this, Travis!” coming from people passing me by with seeming ease.

The final segment was a 2.5-kilometer run. Beginning the run, I felt like I had no reserves left. I jogged slowly but began to notice people around me who were walking. That sounded great to me. I didn’t want to do this in the first place, and I’ve had to deal with a bunch of dumb stuff up to this point, I reasoned. So, I think I’ve earned the right to walk for the final kilometers of this stupid triathlon.

Just as these thoughts entered my head, I noticed someone jogging beside me, matching my speed instead of passing me by. It was my bishop, who encouraged me to come in the first place. While I knew he and some of my other leaders had also signed up to run alongside us, I thought for sure he had passed me a long time ago. But here he was, red-faced and breathing heavily. He huffed out, “How are you holding up, Travis?” I answered honestly. “I’m tired. I think I’m going to walk the rest of the way.” Panting, he said, “Don’t give up just yet. I know you’re better than that. To be honest, I’m pretty tired too. But I told myself I would run the whole race. So how about you help keep me accountable? You don’t let me stop running, and I won’t let you stop running until we’ve both crossed that finish line. Deal?”

Something in me couldn’t say no to that idea. His proposition felt different than the earlier yells of “You can do this!” He wasn’t giving passing encouragement and speeding away. He was staying at my side the whole time, present in my suffering. Not only was he aware of my suffering, but he seemed to share in that suffering. He was drenched in sweat and seemed just as tired as I was. I felt he understood what I was going through, so his proposition felt like it came from a place of sincere concern and love. I agreed, and we kept running. Several times I wanted to quit, but every time he noticed me slowing down, I would hear his hoarse, breathless voice saying, “You can do this. I’m right here.” I was also breathless, sore, and completely exhausted, but I kept running. His total commitment to our deal invigorated me to hold up my end by finishing strong. After what felt like the longest 2.5 kilometers of my life, he and I both ran across the finish line. I did eventually get to chow down on pizza and wings with the rest of the youth, but that reward paled in comparison to the rush of accomplishment and the newfound closeness I felt with my bishop that day.

Elder David A. Bednar described ordinances and their accompanying covenants as “authorized channels through which the blessings and powers of heaven can flow into our individual lives.” I have often wondered what this means exactly. Why is it that God’s power and blessings strengthen me when I enter a covenant relationship with Him? How does it work? I think the answer to that question largely depends on what we envision God’s role in a covenant relationship to be. Growing up, I usually heard covenants described as two-way agreements between God and us. In this framing, God recognizes that living a Christlike, gospel-oriented life is hard, so he adds an incentive structure to gospel living, offering blessings in exchange for following his commands. In essence, this is a cosmic version of the pizza-and-wings promise. The strength we receive comes by remembering that we will be compensated for our efforts at some future point after all this is over. This framing of covenants may be a useful and easy way for Primary children and new converts to understand what a covenant is, but it falls short in a number of ways. If covenants are about relationships, as many church leaders have emphasized in recent years, then this two-way agreement concept portrays our relationship with our Heavenly Parents as an employer-employee relationship; God becomes the divine carrot-dangler rather than the Divine Father and Mother.

Furthermore, as Hannah Packard Crowther writes in her book Gracing, this contractual understanding of covenants causes us to view our discipleship “as precursors to some future grace. We prove ourselves first, and then God opens the heavenly gates later.” In other words, we end up framing our relationship with God as something that begins in the future, not the present. Thus, the actions that make up a covenant-keeping life become our means of earning a relationship with God. God’s love is for the future, not the present. To paraphrase an idea from Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf, those who strive to walk the covenant path with this mindset “may say and do the right things, but they do not feel the right things.” When covenants are reduced to contractual agreements of future reward, they are a fleeting source of heavenly strength. Even more seriously, they lead to a shallow kind of relationship with Christ and our Heavenly Parents that portrays them as distant and uninvolved in our lives.

Other times, God’s role in our life is described as something like a heavenly cheerleader. In addition to future rewards for walking the covenant path, God promises encouragement along our journey. Instead of a distant employer or an absentee parent, God gives power through moral support. For some people, this relationship with God may be comforting and strengthening, but for me and many others, it still falls short of providing comfort and power in hard times. I am reminded of my fellow racers who shouted words of encouragement to me as I struggled on the side of the road. Those shouts of attempted encouragement felt like empty words because they missed what my problem was. Instead of stopping to see what I needed, they offered a generic encouragement, then kept biking. As well-meaning as they were, they didn’t see and understand my struggles deeply. I can see why this version of a relationship with God can seem unappealing as well. A God whose robotic, rehearsed answer to all of our pains and frustrations is, “You got this, buddy! Keep going! Do your ministering! Magnify your calling! Don’t take that sip of coffee to power through your term paper! Don’t stop!” still feels absent in many ways. Maybe not physically absent, but emotionally detached—like he doesn’t truly know us. And a God who doesn’t know us is not a God with whom someone deeply struggling along the covenant path will connect and find refuge.

Elder Robert M. Daines eloquently articulates, “When prophets and apostles”—and I would also include God—“talk of covenants, they aren’t like coaches yelling out from (red velvet) bleachers, telling us to ‘try harder!’ They want us to see our covenants are fundamentally about relationships. . . . They are not rules to earn [God’s] love; He already loves you perfectly. . . . Covenants are the shape of God’s embrace.” Elder Daines clearly points out how both of these ways of picturing God’s role in our covenant relationship fall short. Neither the contractor God nor the cheerleader God provides power through their relationships with us.

All allegories have limits, even limits their authors don’t see. Nevertheless, as I reflect on that triathlon all these years later, I think the power we receive from honoring our covenants is a lot like the strength and invigoration I felt while my bishop ran beside me, saying, “You can do this. I’m right here.” The role my bishop was playing is what I feel most accurately represents God’s role within a covenant relationship. Not an employer or a cheerleader but rather a collaborator. Honoring our covenants isn’t like being hired to do grunt work, but rather invited to join in the work of divinity. A work that our Heavenly Parents themselves are doing. As Melissa Inouye beautifully taught in her book Sacred Struggle, “God is not standing around guarding the pearly gates of the border fence of heaven at the top landing of a really long escalator. Instead, in Jacob’s allegory of the vineyard, God is running around in the dirt. . . . God is digging in manure, pruning and cutting, raking and weeding . . . kneeling in the dirt. . . . God is working for us, with us, among us.” Viewing my covenant obligations in such a light imbues them with added meaning and significance, which motivates me to stay with them. Additionally, God’s investment and collaboration make a covenant relationship uniquely empowering, thus allowing it to become a divinely “authorized channel through which the blessings and powers of heaven can flow into our individual lives.”

Living a covenant life is challenging. It takes a lot of patience and energy. I often fail in my strivings and progress more slowly than I’d like to. But those strivings have felt much more meaningful when I imagine that God is truly by my side. Not far in the distance nor shouting from the bleachers, but matching my speed and running alongside me. He is panting and sweating and speaking to me in raspy tones in between coughs, wheezing as he says, “You can do this,” while unceasingly assuring, “I’m right here.” And it is that very image of God that allows the blessings and powers of heaven to enliven my work and strengthen my resolve as I walk the long, hard path of a covenant life.

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Travis Hicks is a doctoral student of developmental psychology and an amateur scholar of Latter-day Saint culture and doctrine.

Art by Pablo Picasso.

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Few subjects in church discourse are more fraught than the place of women in our faith. Anyone who follows these discussions can point to multiple major recent examples where a commenter or leader has made an observation about these questions and a torrent of comments has followed, many of them expressing pain and frustration. To be clear, many church members, including women, feel satisfied with the broad contours of our current state, but many others do not. The satisfaction of even very many church members does not change this fact: a great deal of pain exists in the body of Christ around these ideas.

And that’s precisely the thing about pain: when it appears, and when it continues consistently—as this pain in the Church has for decades—that means the body is trying to tell us something. After all, a thriving hand does not invalidate an infection in the foot; a hale and hearty liver does not make inconsequential a failing in the heart.

My own thinking on this subject was unalterably transformed by reading Women at Church, published in 2014 by Neylan McBaine. In the opening, McBaine explains how she felt both called and compelled to write the book. She talks of the act of authorship as being both a result of the love she has for her then young children and an outgrowth of her natural response after hearing the stories—and feeling the pain—of hundreds of church women whom she had interviewed. She tells us that, given those twin considerations, she arrived at a point where she could no longer be at peace without having written the book. Specifically, she writes:

Since August 2012, I have read and collected a range of personal accounts from women who have struggled with their female identity in the Church. I share them throughout this book. My purpose in doing so is not to depress any of us, although a little sobriety on this subject will hopefully translate to greater empathy. Neither is my intent to draw attention to the concerns of these, although understanding specific pain points will help us address needs more directly. We do hope with these stories that each of us can put ourselves in the shoes of these women, or perhaps in the shoes of the husbands and fathers and sons who love them.

And that is what constitutes the rest of the book, which effectively does three things. First, it shares stories, often in a straightforward and unadorned way. Second, it juxtaposes the stories and the themes they suggest against the substance of our theology. Third, the book carefully avoids demanding institutional or revelatory changes while nonetheless articulating specific and substantive ways, consistent with existing Church doctrine and policy, that the voices of women could be more greatly highlighted and heeded.

There are probably many reasons this book resonated with me so deeply. In part, the author succeeds in presenting a compelling case for her argument precisely because her tone is so even and matter-of-fact. It is difficult to argue with evidence presented so evenly and without defensiveness or hyperbole. Beyond that, the nature of the evidence is unavoidably compelling. Much of the book, after all, consists of stories from individual Church members who are quoted at length in their own words. From those words, an unmistakable portrait emerges.

The portrait is one of deep and abiding pain. And that pain matters. One purpose of pain is to arouse compassion in fellow beings. That is: if something bad happens to me, and pain results, and I inform those around me that I am hurting, then the pain is serving a positive social function in rallying others to my side. And certainly this matters.

But that’s not really pain’s most important function. Rather, pain matters because it calls our attention to a problem that needs addressing and, short of a terminal situation where the only thing that can be done is to quiet the pain because the underlying problem simply cannot be fixed (as in a patient with metastatic cancer that can no longer be effectively treated and whose resulting pain can only be palliated), the way to remove pain is by fixing the problem that is causing it.

Many who criticize women for expressing pain over their place in the LDS Church agree with my analysis of what pain is and why it matters, but with one important difference. Critics may hope to act as a doctor to the body of Christ by, in effect, diagnosing the source of the pain as being inside of the women themselves. That is, they often express a belief that the issue is one of pride or myopia or misunderstanding by the women in pain.

To some degree, the power of this argument is that it is, strictly speaking, empirically unfalsifiable. After all, who among us can really know the contents of any other person’s heart? However, I confess that this analysis strikes me as deeply unlikely for multiple reasons. The most powerful, I’ll admit, is simply that it doesn’t square with my personal experience with those directly experiencing that pain. Especially since reading McBain's book, I have made a concerted effort to listen more deeply to the women around me at church, and I hear similar painful strains coming from women I know who are deeply good—committed to justice, charity, and making the world a better place. If these people I know who often experience the pain are not truly Christians, I guess I’m not sure who is. But beyond that lies the fact that so many feel similarly. I look at the passionate responses that have come, one after another, over the past many months in response to comments from leaders, teachers, and online influences—these many voices, numbering in the thousands in aggregate, strike me as a chorus we cannot ignore.

Several years ago an exceptionally bright young woman who was also a dear friend came to me in no small amount of anguish, and, with graphs and charts in hand, asked: “If the prophet is asking women to raise their voices as Christian disciples then why doesn't the Church let women do just that with more time at General Conference?”

I remember this moment vividly for precisely this reason: I was flummoxed. I cast about inside my mind for a reason. I honor our Church leaders as inspired and called of God and so, I reasoned, there must be an explanation. But the harder I tried, the more baffled I became. Clearly, women speaking in conference was possible and doctrinally allowable because a couple of them were doing so every six months. Even if, as I initially reasoned, we needed to hear from all the apostles, seers, and revelators every six months, that would still leave plenty of spots that at the very least could be given to women at a rate representing the percentage of members who are female. Indeed, very much to the point, President Nelson had seemed to emphasize all of this:

My dear sisters, whatever your calling, whatever your circumstances, we need your impressions, your insights, and your inspiration. We need you to speak up and speak out in ward and stake councils. We need women who know how to access the power that God makes available to covenant keepers and who express their beliefs with confidence and charity.

Even after careful analysis and significant time, I simply had no logical answer for my friend.

My final words here are specifically to other men in the Church, because I can’t imagine I have anything helpful to say to the women in this space. Indeed, much of what I will say here will likely just be what women have already been saying for decades. Because we as men can sometimes be quick to talk and slow to listen, I put forward here a few concluding points—for the men who are reading specifically. In doing so, I want to emphasize: my intent here is not to sway the direction of the institutional church but, rather, to help those of us who are serving in our wards and stakes think better about how we can be helpful and hopeful in these endeavors. Indeed, in large part what I’m advocating for is how we can better live up to the spirit of what Elder M. Russell Ballard once taught when he said: “I don’t know how a bishop can be able to administer a ward and meet the needs of the members of his ward without the input of the sisters who are presiding over the relief society, the young women, and the primary. I’ve been an advocate all my time as a general authority that the priesthood leader ought to help call capable, good, smart women…and then they ought to be a full and participating part of ward council.”

The first involves what I will call the paradox of pain: while pain presents itself to our minds primarily as a feeling, in its most important articulation and presentation, pain is not a feeling at all, but a concrete sign that something needs to be done. I think this is particularly important to us as men because in much of Western culture, ignoring pain has become coded as a masculine virtue. That is, culture teaches us that we are “manlier” or “better” or “stronger” when we ignore the pain we feel. While there may be some truth to this during a weightlifting session, it’s a terrible way to practice medicine. And it is in the medical context that pain matters most. While we may assume that responding with compassion is an adequate response when women express pain over their roles in church, the ultimate answer here is actually about recognizing pain and responding effectively.

But of course that just begs the most important question: What does an effective response look like? In thinking about the answer to this question, I want to be careful in delineating what I can and cannot offer in response. To begin with, of course, I am not a woman and I have no interest in mansplaining an appropriate response here. That said, I do believe that the response men have to this issue matters —this is not something we can ignore or sweep aside. The sidelining of women in the church makes the church a poorer place and harms all of us.

While it is not our place to determine the revelatory direction the Church will take, it is our place to hope, and it is our place to make those hopes known—especially to our priesthood leaders. We can look forward to a day when women and men more completely and effectively partner in the work of salvation. Even without knowing precisely how we will arrive at this better place, I believe that longing, hoping, and praying for such a day—and being candid about those hopes, especially in consecrated conversations with our priesthood leaders—is a powerful way that those of us who serve “out in the periphery” of the body of Christ can hasten the day when women are more fully empowered to fully partner in bringing about the Lord’s vision of Zion.

Further, this hope can only come to us in sincerity when we recognize how much better our congregations could be if women partnered more fully with men in leading and serving our members. And this hope can only become meaningful when we look for opportunities to advance this vision as much as we can within the directions currently offered by church leaders. Many years ago, Elder Neal A. Maxwell gave a talk entitled “Content With the Things Allotted to Us.” The talk’s thesis is that there will be times in mortality when apparent injustice may call us to recognize and accept a state of affairs that greatly saddens or even handicaps us. But while this is the talk’s overall message, it is balanced against what I believe to be one of the most memorable and helpful phrases in our recent conference history. While contentment matters, Elder Maxwell says, it is also important that we find and use “whatever stretch there may be in any tethers.” Even if, for reasons church leaders have said have not been revealed, certain specific responsibilities in the priesthood are offered only to men, we can search for “the stretch in our tethers.” As Elder Renlund recently observed at a conference in Southern California, “we haven’t done as good of a job as I think we can within the bounds the Lord has set.” In this most recent apostolic recognition I hear echoes of that previous apostolic call to use whatever “stretch” we can find, especially because Elder Renlund then goes on to pledge “we are going to do better.”

The need for this improvement is fully consistent with counsel from priesthood leaders over many years. With the exception of the duties that are specifically assigned to men who hold priesthood keys, we can together recognize that in all other aspects of church governance and functioning, women’s voices should be equally elevated, their opinions should be equally valued, and their faces should be equally visible. We can ask questions like: Do we quote from women church leaders when we speak from the stand or teach lessons? Do we ensure women speak as often as men? Do we ensure women are involved in all decision-making councils and that their voices are equally listened-to and valued? Do we celebrate young women as much as young men? Do they fill roles of important responsibility in the ward (them serving as ward greeters is an important recent example of this)? Can we avoid comments that either place women on a pedestal or paint them as the “lovely” complement to men who are leading, thinking, and working out the substance of salvation? Do we fully honor the work of caring that has generally been left to women—both ensuring that men do their share and also recognizing and genuinely honoring what women do? Can we respond to the concerns of women who do not feel fully valued with respect, rigor, candor, and honesty?

Men, I propose that this should be our rallying cry as we think about how we can better partner with women in the work of salvation. Always and everywhere in church settings, we should be asking “Within the framework of the revealed word, how can we more fully partner with women?” Indeed, it should be no surprise that this constitutes much of the substance of McBain’s book: lists and lists and lists of concrete ways that women can more fully participate in local congregations without the necessity of any change to current institutional, revelatory, or administrative frameworks. The point is not any single particular item on a list—whether mine from above or hers from the book—but rather that what matters most is our desire and our action. It is the willingness we have to humble ourselves and see how far below our privileges we are currently living. What is needed is for us first to raise our sights and see how much better the church and kingdom would be if we would partner more fully with women in leading and serving and then to go to work and do what we can, wherever we live, to more fully embrace this ideal.

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

Art by Mikuláš Gandala.

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One of the hallmarks of President Russell M. Nelson's prophetic ministry has been his emphasis on encouraging members to walk “the covenant path.” That phrase was first used by Elaine Cannon in the 1990s and then first articulated in general conference by President Elaine S. Dalton in 2007. Though President Nelson himself has used the term sparingly (in published addresses, at least), during the 2010s, the phrase was used 106 times in general conferences. And already in the 2020s, it has been used in general conferences 216 times. The increased emphasis on covenants is clear and striking.

Still, I fear this is a phrase we are prone to treat too superficially. My experience has been that we often assume that the only point of covenants is that they be made. That is, we often behave as if the point of baptism is baptism and the point of endowment is that and that alone. I think it is fruitful to push back on this idea by recognizing this: while making covenants may matter because of immediate metaphysical consequences of the involved ordinances, and while seeing the progression of ordinances and covenants as a path can help add direction and linearity to our spiritual lives, covenants adopt their full meaning as they bind us together in community and help us to become like Jesus Christ.

There may be some metaphysical importance to the reception of the ordinance itself. Such is suggested by our insistence on performing vicarious ordinances on behalf of ancestors who have died. Daily life is filled with examples of things that must pass through certain carefully prescribed physical experiences to bring about a desired result. For example, even after flour has been mixed with salt and water and leavened with yeast, in order for dough to become a loaf with a characteristic crackling and golden crust and open, airy internal texture, it must be subjected to certain conditions involving high heat and steam in an enclosed space for a prescribed amount of time.

In some way I do not claim to understand, it’s possible that a similarly precise set of circumstances may be necessary as part of an ordinance to ensure that a person's soul undergoes a necessary, metaphysical, eternal transformation. 

Even if this is true, however, I am suspicious of the idea that this is all that is going on when we receive ordinances and make covenants. It seems to me that there must be more to this particular spiritual story. In October of the year 2000, then-Elder Dallin H. Oaks said,

From such teachings we conclude that the Final Judgment is not an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts—what we have done. It is an acknowledgement of the final effect of our acts and thoughts—what we have become. 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.

I consider this to be one of the most important paragraphs from the last quarter century of general conference addresses. I reflected on this quote during recent celebrations of the lives of four beloved older friends from the stake where I live. The first came about six months ago at the funeral of a beloved woman who had served as one of the matriarchs of our stake for many years. The second came just a few weeks ago when I attended the 70th wedding anniversary celebration of a couple who, together, have comprised one of the tent poles of the ward where I have lived for several decades. To those who knew them well, it was evident that the people at the center of these events had fashioned their entire lives around the covenants they had made as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

They had spent decades holding various callings in their respective congregations. They had opened their homes in formal and informal ways both to ward members and to their wider communities. All four had worn out their lives enmeshed in the beauty of their respective religious and civic communities. The fruits of what they had done in those circumstances were evident to everyone celebrating their lives. Indeed, I was deeply touched to hear that, for example, one of the couples built a house behind their home which they then ceaselessly let out, often without requesting payment, to anyone who needed a place to stay, for the short or the long term, over the course of decades. Similarly, the other couple, well into their sixties, became aware of a young man in their ward whose parents had become largely unavailable. And so, after a great deal of discussion, the couple reached out to the parents and arranged to adopt the boy. Speaking at the service, that young boy—now a grown man with children of his own—recounted with tears in his eyes that, despite experiencing the regular chafing against his adopted parents that comes as part of adolescence, he nonetheless recognized, even as he was growing up, that he was and always would be loved reliably and unalterably in his new home, and that affection was something he would never need to earn.

All of this has led me to a preliminary conclusion: whatever metaphysical purpose covenants may serve, I believe that their most important purpose while we are on earth is both educative and transformative. Covenants do not merely constitute a one-time ritual—as important as those ceremonies may be. Rather, covenants help to teach us a particular way of relating to time, God, others, resources, and life itself. Covenants are the metaphysical catalyst that helps to spark changes to what Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart.” They help us to alter the virtually invisible, nearly unrecognized, acts that pass by moment to moment and day to day, creating hardly a stir in the water, but which add up over years and decades into the substance of our lives and the effect our actions have on the world and those around us. To live a covenant life is to promise to spend your life seeking to discover how God would have you engage with your fellow humans and the world around you. 

In this way, covenants matter not primarily because they constitute a checklist that helps us prepare for the afterlife, nor primarily because they are required stops on the road that allow us to return to heaven, but, instead, because they transform us, not just individually but also collectively. It is not for nothing that Elder Gong has spoken of church members as creating communities by dint of covenants. This is true of sealing covenants, in particular, which bind members of a family to each other, but more broadly, covenants act like covalent bonds that weld together the matrix of atoms that constitute a solid element—they are the heavenly glue that can root us into mutually loving relationships with our fellow humans, and that can teach us that the circle of our concern must expand forever outward, eventually encompassing all those whom we have the opportunity to bless or heal. 

These hypotheses are preliminary, and chiefly of value for the questions they raise. Indeed, this realization merely sets the theological stage for a more comprehensive understanding of what it means to live a covenant life. Within this framework, we can begin to look at individual ordinances and covenants and to examine the ways these rituals and their associated promises are meant to shape our lives.

Accordingly, I am excited to announce that over the next 12 months or so I will be joined by a host of authors who will help me to explore the contours of a covenant life within the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Currently we hope to hear from JB Haws, Rosalynde Welch, Dierdre Green, Patrick Mason, August Burton, Sarah Sabey, Travis Hicks, Peter Mugmancuro, Jeremiah Scanlan, and many others. My hope is that together we can add depth to our collective religious understanding of what it means to allow our covenants to shape us into individuals who can be bound together into a beloved community, a covenant people.

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

Art by Bryan Mark Taylor. Bread and Oregano and Lavender Bread. @bryanmarktaylor

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Over the last decade, empathy has come under attack from some of my fellow saints, who have written that our collective religious and cultural emphasis on empathy is an example of virtue made into a vice. I believe, however, that these critics misconstrue the covenantal role empathy is meant to play in a Christian life. I submit that, despite its counterfeits, empathy remains central to our relationship with our Heavenly Parents, to our understanding of the atonement of Jesus Christ, and to our quest to become like Jesus.

The spiritual and divine importance of empathy has been insistently articulated by recent Latter-day Saint thinkers, theologians, and leaders of disparate inclinations, including Francine Bennion, Eugene England, Elder Neal Maxwell, Fiona and Terryl Givens, Chieko Okazaki, Elder Jeffrey Holland, and Melissa Inouye. I will quote only the last two of these.

In 2003, Elder Holland gave a general conference talk where he sought to dispel the notion that God the Father is a remote, patrician, impassive, or even vengeful, being. The climax of his talk comes when he says of the scene where Enoch sees God weeping: “That single, riveting scene does more to teach the true nature of God than any theological treatise could ever convey.” I am struck here to hear Elder Holland so clearly emphasize how central empathy is to God’s character.

Similarly, in a book written largely within the framing of the cancer that would soon take her life, Melissa Inouye makes one of the most comprehensive and eloquent defenses of the need for empathy. In Inouye’s articulation, that empathy is meant to flow both vertically—from God toward us—and horizontally—from us toward each other. Speaking specifically of the spiritual necessity of sharing suffering, she writes:

It was not enough for Jesus to wield healing power, to stop others’ wounds and lift others’ sorrows. It was necessary for him to feel wounds in his own flesh, to feel suffocating despair, to wonder when his misery would end. Christ's voluntary subjection to the horrible realities of this world transformed him forever. His vulnerability became his capacity to save and heal all humankind.

Here, Inouye is weaving together an emphasis on the necessity for God’s empathy with an unambiguous call for us, too, to be empathetic. She is echoing and elaborating themes that have been articulated by the long list of authors above, and likely others, as well.

Still, there is also a stable of thinkers who claim the emphasis on empathy has been taken too far. Their ideas matter and are worth considering seriously.

For example, writing for Public Square Magazine in November 2023, Dan Ellsworth makes the case not that empathy, per se, is bad, but that we have come to twist “empathy” into a set of actions and understandings that have malign consequences. In an essay entitled “Bridle Your Empathy so That You Can Truly Love,” Ellsworth argues that empathy has become an example of a “virtue gone mad.” Ellsworth’s concern is that we have twisted the meaning of empathy such that it now includes a set of understandings and actions that cause malign (even if unintended and often unacknowledged) consequences. Ellsworth’s most important distinction seems to be not the degree to which we cultivate empathy, per se, but rather the necessary leavening relationship between empathy and other virtues. Ellsworth (and other authors with whom he’s occasionally written on the subject) emphasize that empathy must be directed by a love for virtue and a concern for what is right. Thus, the conclusion seems to be that the concern is for an emphasis on empathy out of proportion to its place in the pantheon of virtues.

In a similar vein, in 2023 BYU Idaho professor Scott Woodward published an article in BYU Studies titled “A Close Look at Scriptural Teachings Regarding Jesus Feeling our Pains as Part of His Atonement.” Woodward frames his essay by articulating his concern that the nature of Christ’s empathy has become divorced from what the scriptures can support. At first, he says he intends to carefully examine the origin of Christ’s empathy but later goes on to also examine the nature of his understanding of our pains. He outlines the idea that Jesus intimately understands every experience through which we pass as the theory of “cosmic transfer” or the “empathetic atonement” and says that such an understanding “represents a profound expansion of our previous [conception] of Christ's atonement,” and continues, “If this is true, our atonement theology is being imbued with an intensity of intimacy and connectedness between Christ and mankind beyond anything previously understood.” However, he worries that if this theory of the “empathetic” is not correct, then “to teach that [Christ] did so obscures and detracts from the truth of what occurred. The risk is diverting church members’ faith toward an aspect of Jesus's atonement that isn't real.”

These two authors’ points are quite different, but both strike me as consequential. Ellsworth seems to suggest that many in the modern church have offered empathy a place that is simply too central in the understanding of the Christian life. Further, he suggests that, if left unchecked, this misunderstanding of empathy–or empathy shorn of its connection to other necessary virtues–could have significant church-wide or even societal implications. Indeed, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in his Public Square Magazine piece, he gestures approvingly to a piece from First Things magazine entitled “Empathy is Not Charity.” The conclusion of that piece reads, in part, “Our culturally sanctioned practice of empathy is an attempt to fill Christ's shoes; it is a reiteration of the sin of Eden in a fresh guise.” Woodward, on the other hand, has nothing to say about the modern practice of empathy, per se, but still seems concerned that we have read into our understanding of the atonement an element that we want to see there but which he does feel is supported by canonized scripture. I take both of these authors seriously and am glad to see both of them examining the place of empathy in our theology and our culture. That said, with all respect, I think there are ways in which their approaches can benefit from further examination and exploration. I hope to be able to provide that exploration here.

With regard to the centrality of empathy in Jesus’s atonement, I candidly don’t find Mr. Woodward’s critique convincing. I do think that he offers helpful context and cogent analysis of the settings and likely specific meanings of the scriptures whose significance he specifically examines. My objection, however, is that I don’t think the parts add up to the sum he suggests. In effect, his argument seems to be that because none of those verses specifically articulates what he calls the theory of “cosmic transference,” then we cannot conclude that cosmic transference is how the atonement works. I agree that these verses do not definitively or exclusively “prove” the theory of “cosmic transfer.” But I think this is more a commentary of our limited understanding than it is an indication that the theory of cosmic transference is wrong or unsupported. After all, this theory is consistent with one of our deepest spiritual needs—to know how much God loves us—and it remains entirely consistent with both modern prophetic and ancient scriptural discourse.

I would be loath to abandon it.

I would not want to leave it behind, in particular, because some version of this understanding of “cosmic transference” is precisely what allows our understanding of the atonement to meaningfully deliver a sense of individual relief to our particular experiences of our individual vicissitudes. This strikes me as the fullest and most resplendent—though, to Brother Woodward’s point, certainly not the only or definitive—interpretation of Alma’s teaching that “Christ shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which sayeth he will take upon him the pain and the sicknesses of his people. [...] that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.” I recognize that there is still some meaning to the fact that God became mortal at all, that Christ experienced suffering at all, and that He felt pain at all—but that plain fact simply is not as morally compelling as the idea of “cosmic transference.”

To abandon a Christ who suffers both with and as one of us dims unalterably the full measure of the glory and compassion of God. For me, this is not so much a matter of “proof” or of “doctrine,” but, rather, of simple yet unavoidably compelling moral suasion. Some truths speak so deeply to the needs of the human heart that, once recognized, they can no longer be dismissed or passed over.

Moving from beliefs about what Jesus’s atonement involved to the role of empathy in our lives as disciples, I respectfully disagree with the virtue’s critics here, as well. I believe that what they see as an overemphasis on empathy is actually largely a misconception of how empathy is meant to operate in a community of Christian disciples. A more precise articulation of this role helps to resolve many of the critics’ concerns.

Those who write about empathy’s excesses often assume that empathy leads inexorably to permissiveness, but I question this conclusion. I think of empathy not as a particular prescription for action (“this person is suffering and so I must remove that suffering”) but rather as a certain orientation toward the suffering person him- or herself. When I approach a person’s suffering with empathy, it is as if I am Moses at Mount Horeb—I might well be tempted to remove my shoes from off my feet because I can sense that to be invited into another person’s suffering is to be welcomed onto holy ground. I can recognize those who enter into suffering empathically with me because they are those who look intently, listen without interruption or distraction, silence their phones, and offer to me not just physical but also metaphysical presence. To be with someone in their suffering means to be with them in a way that is consuming, fully present, and holy. But that same full-souled presence does not necessitate moral equivocation or a sense of permissiveness. People may attribute such attitudes to empathy, but that is a misattribution.

I say this because I believe that Latter-day Saint cosmology and theology deepens empathy’s meaning and demonstrates why it matters so much. According to the classical Christian conception of the cosmos, we were meant to be living in paradise. If not for the arrogance and pride of Adam and Eve, the history of humanity would have unfolded without a need for suffering, and paradise would have been our eternal home. In effect, the mission of Jesus is to overcome the foundational rupture to the fabric of the theological universe ushered in by the pride of Eve and Adam. But in Latter-day Saint theology, all of this is turned on its head. In the universe as understood by Latter-day Saints, there is no time, no scenario, in which opposition did not or will not exist; indeed, opposition seems to be stitched into the deepest fabric of the universe. In a way, the entire point of the human drama is not to arrive at a place where there will be no suffering (the classical concept of paradise) but, instead, to learn to find God in the midst of suffering and, ultimately, to learn to be fully present in another’s suffering, even if we do not know how, when, or if it will end.

If we recognize that empathy is the Christ-like reaction to suffering that cannot be immediately ended, then the deep spiritual resonance of empathy becomes fully manifest. In an oppositional universe it would be folly to enter the temple of another being’s suffering declaring that we have brought with us an elixir that would end their pain. Many hurts, after all, have no mortal remedy: many cancers are not cured; many loved ones do not return; many tragedies see no happy ending; many kind people die; many crimes go unsolved; many wounds never heal; many dreams go unrealized; many problems find no resolution. But in an oppositional universe, none of these dilemmas should come as a surprise because we understand that without an opposition woven into the fabric of all things, no faith, meaning, agency, or love is possible. If we live in a universe where even God does not immediately solve every problem or cure every ill, it would be arrogance indeed to assume that we bring solutions to the same. Yet, our Christian creed and covenants dictate that we cannot look upon sorrow with callousness or ignore the cry of the bereaved. And so, when we cross the threshold to enter into the temple of another person's suffering, after doffing the shoes from our feet we are told to bring with us the balm of love—a salve which, so often lacking a solution, manifests only as empathy.

And that brings us, finally, to some of scripture’s most sublime verses—passages that, for me, demonstrate most comprehensively both the limits and the beauty of empathy. Importantly, these verses, understood in context, lead me to agree in some measure with empathy’s critics; I do believe empathy ceases to cohere if we attempt to understand it in the context of some sort of disembodied, universal “love” that we feel toward everyone, everywhere, all at once. I think this is where they have a point about “virtue run amok.” This is the “empathy” we purport to feel as driven by social media and as prescribed by ubiquitous “influencers.” This kind of “empathy” or “love” strikes me as ephemeral at best and meaningless at worst. Scripture points to a better way.

We may often forget the full context of Mosiah chapter 18. We neglect to remember that Alma is not preaching to a well-heeled congregation in an ornate temple, nor to an overwhelming crowd, but to a ragged group of tightly-knit religious refugees whose only chapel is the side of a lake. It is that little band he is addressing when he says: “As ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another's burdens, that they may be light; Yay, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort,” that is how they will know they are ready to be baptized. But here's the thing: the context makes clear that Alma was teaching a specific group of people about their responsibility specifically to each other. He was not inviting them to care about “all mankind” but to look around and become bonded to the actual, fleshy, embodied people around them. He was asking them, in effect, to look each other in the eyes and to see in those faces the countenance of God.

Nothing in his invitation suggests that their empathy would be perfect or that it would be a replacement for divine love without flaw. Rather, for this little band of religious refugees doing their best to scrape out a living by the side of a lake, Alma was saying, “Once you are baptized, your job will be to take care of each other. Your love will find meaning not in universality but in particularity. Your attempts at empathy will always be woeful and incomplete, but they will still matter, anyway. What's more, most often you will not be able to solve each other's problems, but in becoming acquainted with each other's suffering, and in caring even when there is no cure, you will walk the path of discipleship and become the people God needs you to be.”

Finally, as we celebrate Easter soon, I am brought to the scripture that stands for me as perhaps the most direct and beautiful argument for the centrality of empathy in both the character of divinity and in the pantheon of Christian virtues. I am deeply touched to know that when Jesus presents himself in his resurrected glory to the people gathered at the temple surrounded by physical devastation wrought in protracted and absolute darkness, he immediately focused their attention on the centrality and beauty of his vulnerability and his history of suffering. As a doctor who has examined hundreds or thousands of patients, I cannot easily move past the visceral impact and almost macabre specificity of Jesus’s invitation and the crowd’s response:

Arise and come forth unto me, that ye may thrust your hands into my side, and also that we may feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am the God of Israel, and the God of the whole Earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world. And it came to pass that the multitude went forth, and thrust their hands into his side, and did feel the prints of the nails in his hands and in his feet; and this they did do, going forth one by one until they had all gone forth, and did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety.

What other course of action but this could have more indelibly impressed upon the hearts and minds of Jesus’s followers this message: God’s willing suffering is what makes Him God. He has come to a people whose world has just been riven by earthquakes and consumed by fire. They have endured impenetrable darkness so thick that it could be tasted, smelled, and rolled between their fingers. Thousands have died, and the cries of the wounded and dying lingered in that opacity while the living wondered if light would ever be restored. But then, the Being who finally returns light to the sky and who descends with healing in his wings does this one thing before the healing, before calling disciples, even before instituting the sacrament: he shows them that even in his resurrected glory, he has maintained the bodily reminders of the steep price of suffering he paid to gain his empathy—because that empathy is what makes him most fully God, and is the path he invites us to follow.

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

Art by Carl Bloch (1834-1890).

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In a spare apartment on the fifteenth floor of a nondescript building in a large city in the Midwest, a young man who recently returned from his mission sits in front of a computer, contemplating whether to navigate to a website he knows will feature pornography. Meanwhile, just a half mile away, a brother he met that day at church scrolls through his Instagram feed, feeling for the umpteenth time both incredulous and dully jealous at how so many of his contemporaries can seem so happy and look so good, even as he knows there are other, better, things he could do with his time. And, finally, in the next apartment over from him, a woman he knows is posting pictures from a recent trip to a different social media site, careful that her hair, skin, bathing suit, and smile look just right, hoping that these photos will capture the attention of both those she knows and those she never will.

As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we likely recognize that each of the situations above entails a moral dimension. I wonder, however, if our moral analysis brings too much pressure to those who need less and too little to those who need to feel more. But to arrive at this understanding, we will first need to examine three seemingly disparate threads. Thus, this essay will begin by examining the film The Social Network, then it will turn to an example of prophetic discourse related to pornography, before finally turning to talking about Doctrine and Covenants section 89. Once we have laid down those three threads individually, we will pick them back up and attempt to weave them together into demonstrating this idea: that our view of morality can broaden so that we can more fully understand the ethics of systems and not just individuals and, hopefully, thereby work to make the world a better place.

Thread I: The Social Network

Released in 2010—and routinely hailed as one of the twenty-first century’s greatest films so far—The Social Network dramatizes the rise of Facebook. Through a script written by Aaron Sorkin, the film nominally follows the early career arc of Mark Zuckerberg but more broadly traces the birth of the digital revolution that Zuckerberg and others midwifed into the world. Thus, the story is not so much a biopic as a morality play examining the origins and motivations of the Silicon Valley culture writ large.

The movie succeeds largely because of two of its most prominent features: its screenplay and its star. First, Sorkin is at his very best here. Even his achievements in The West Wing and his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird pale in comparison to the subtle moral shading and memorable dialogue he penned for this movie. It has been said that an artist sometimes rises to the magnitude of the challenge facing her, and here Sorkin meets the moment beautifully: capturing the essence of an age and a movement in a mere two hours.

The movie's other defining feature is the performance of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. What strikes the viewer about Eisenberg’s performance is the degree to which he succeeds in personifying the movie's overarching thesis: that the twenty-first century technology companies care about money, influence, fame, and reputation, but not noticeably about how their wares affect those who use them. In this way, I believe Eisenberg’s performance is best understood as an avatar, representing the cumulative effect of the actions of many technologists and corporate officers in the dawning digital era—the accuracy of the movie in terms of how it depicts Mr. Zuckerberg personally are thus beside the point (and, theologically, any judgment due to him or anyone else is not ours to mete out, anyway).

What makes the movie so compelling is that Eisenberg portrays the twenty-first century’s march of progress as tepidly ambitious but morally vacuous and cluelessly narcissistic. The companies that are here represented by Facebook  seem driven by an ambivalent desire to see how big they can become. In effect, the virtually infinite growth of Facebook's user base is a nihilistic attempt to fill the vacuum at the center of an unwinding twenty-first-century universe. That same rapacious lust for growth—as both mantra and motivation—drives an entire economy: it is not limited to a single person or company.

Thread 2: Modern Prophetic Discourse on Pornography

Over the last few decades, the dangers posed by pornography have been a significant theme in Latter-day Saint general conferences. Previous to 1975, discussion of pornography in general conference was relatively rare. In the 1970s, however, the occurrence of the term started to increase, and in 1979 the word showed up fifteen times. The use of the term ebbs and flows to some degree over the next couple of decades but remains a significant and somewhat prominent theme, reaching its peak in the early aughts. For example, in the year 2000 the term was used twenty-five times and in the year 2005 it was used a total of thirty-four. It turns out that, at least for now, that was the peak of the curve and the use of the term has steadily declined since then such that over the past decade it has been referenced relatively rarely.

Often, the language that we use as members of the Church to explain and discuss the problems with pornography frames the issue largely as one of personal, individualized morality. We might think, for example, of the young man I reference at the beginning of the essay. We might frame the decision that confronts this young man as amounting to a great moment of moral truth. And I believe there is merit to that framing as far as it goes. However, I believe that such a framing does not fully do justice to the nuances of prophetic discourse on the subject. Consider, for example, this quote from then-Elder Gordon B. Hinckley, spoken in general conference in 1975: “The flood of pornographic filth, the inordinate emphasis on sex and violence are not peculiar to this land. The situation is as bad in Europe and in many other areas. . . . The whole dismal picture indicates a weakening rot seeping into the very fiber of society.”

Nothing here directly questions the moral importance of a person deciding for himself to leave pornography alone. That said, however, this quote makes it clear something much broader—even endemic—is going on here. Returning to the theme we examined when discussing The Social Network, the inescapable implication I take away from this quote from Elder Hinckley is that the systems within which we live our lives also have their own embedded morality

After all, while a rising flood might emphasize the importance of great swimming skills, it would be odd indeed to insist to those who are at risk of drowning that the rising water levels are their fault. Again, that's not to say that individuals should not avail themselves of every means of survival during a natural disaster—certainly they should—but we must also recognize that the flood itself is certainly no fault of those who are in danger. After all: pornography constitutes an enormous industry—virtually its own economy (100 billion dollars per year).

But the real rub comes here: the profit goes not to the consumers (of course), nor, mostly, even to those depicted. Rather, the bulk of the profits go to those who produce and distribute it. What is most morally vexing is that, in many (though certainly not all) cases, the pornography industry acts as a siphon and a funnel, extracting profits from the impoverished that flow largely to those who have the power and means to control the production and distribution. For example, multiple investigations by outlets as disparate as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal over recent years have demonstrated that “respectable” companies such as Meta (via Facebook, and Instagram) have profited handsomely by keeping users hooked on their platforms in part by including pornographic or just-barely-not-quite materials on their sites, including material that exploits children.

Thread 3: The Word of Wisdom

Even those who know almost nothing about the Church likely know that its members neither drink, nor smoke, nor even sip coffee and tea. Those who are Church members know these prohibitions stem from what we colloquially call the Word of Wisdom (formally known as the 89th section of the Doctrine and Covenants). For today's purposes, however, I want to focus not so much on the revelation’s dietary stipulations, but instead on the striking preface that the Lord provides to explain why the saints need to hear what He has to say:

[This revelation is] given for a principle with promise adapted to the capacity of the weak and the weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints. Behold, verily, thus saith the Lord unto you: in consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, I have warned you, and forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation.

I am not aware of other verses anywhere else in scripture that read quite like these. The Lord contextualizes this revelation by offering a specific justification for the text’s existence. These verses suggest something like this: “The problem is not so much, for example, with wine itself but, rather, with drinking wine within a society where large corporations (that is “conspiring men”) stand to profit handsomely by selling you a lot of alcohol.” In other words, it may be the case that conditions could exist in an alternative iteration of our world where drinking wine might be just fine (anyway, Jesus drank wine without any apparent concern). Indeed, perhaps drinking alcohol, in other eras—ones that had neither Safeway grocery store chains nor the Anheuser-Busch corporation—might have been morally neutral but, in an era and society where amoral corporations stand to profit off of everything from binge drinking to alcoholism, drinking becomes a much deeper problem. My point is not that we ought to take the prohibition against alcohol lightly—modern medicine increasingly demonstrates that alcohol does us no favors, and I’ve seen alcohol ruin enough lives to never want a drop of it myself, member of the Church or not—but simply to suggest that the Lord seems to be at pains here to remind us that the issue is not just the alcohol itself, but also the societal, cultural, and economic milieux within which the alcohol is to be consumed.

Part 4: Weaving the Threads Together

We now live in a world where it is no longer helpful or realistic to think solely or even primarily about morality as an individual choice. The ideas we have considered here suggest that the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is capacious enough to allow us, within the housing it provides, to think of the ways in which complicated interdependent systems shape the moral frameworks within which we, as individuals, make our decisions. In other words, our theology requires that we consider the morality that is built into the systems we construct, whether governmental, corporate, or societal. 

We can return, in this light, to the three examples we considered briefly at the beginning of this essay: a man considering viewing pornography, a man scrolling longingly through Instagram, and a woman posting—hopefully—her photos to social media. At first glance, we intuit that the primary moral valence in each of these examples resides with the decision each of these individuals will make while at their respective screens. But when we “pan the camera out” and consider a broader moral ecology, we come to see that, while individual morality certainly still matters, it is in fact only the very gleaming tip of the spear, with newly-drawn blood still dripping there—and that that broader moral ecology matters deeply.

In fact, the great lie—if only an implicit one—conveyed to each of the estimated 4.7 billion people in the world who have a smartphone is this: “You are an individual, and what you do on this phone is personal and private.” When nothing could be further from true. What is instead the case is this: the advent of the smartphone has allowed the unfurling of a new and increasingly invidious economy wherein we—our hearts, our minds, our decisions, our preferences, our experiences, and all the things that are meant to make us human—are being bartered for in a public square heretofore unimaginable. Those who run, invest in, and profit from the digital economy have monetized jealousy, lust, polarization, the need for love and acceptance, violence, thoughtlessness, and virtually every other part of the human experience. We have—largely unawares—allowed ourselves and the things that make us us to become the commodities that are traded on this massive global market. We cease to matter as individuals and come to exist, instead, as nodes in a nearly infinite network, infinitesimally small bits of attention that are meant to be captured and exploited.

In the era of ubiquitous smartphones, and with the advent of endless scrolling, there is no end to the potentially totalizing influence that these merchants of attention can exert over our hearts and minds. Those who control both the production of digital media content, and, even more powerfully, the algorithms that seek to shepherd our attention from one thing to the next have access to the collective human psyche in a way that ancient despots and monarchs could only have dreamed of. Indeed, Orwell's Big Brother—with his puny and nearly laughable “telescreens”—fades into anachronistic insignificance compared to the endless allure that beckons from the latest iPhone.

In view of these trends and this ascendant technology, we come back to the work of Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and one of the world's foremost experts on the science and psychology of addiction. She has argued that the problem with our shared cultural understanding of pornography is not that such media is not addicting but, rather, that it is only one example of the myriad substances and online offerings to which we are now invited to addict ourselves. 

In effect, she is arguing for the existence of an unfathomably dangerous axis that looks something like this: Corporate interests, in a desire to accrue and concentrate capital, are exploiting easy access to individuals through the ubiquitous presence of smartphones and other digital media (as well as the widespread availability of substances like junk food, alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs)—together with our desire to be constantly experiencing pleasure—to create a political and corporate economy within which all of us are addicted to many things all the time.

Corporations profit most handsomely when we become addicted to whatever it is they are offering. Thus, the digital advances of the early twenty-first century are weaponized to make a world where we have been given something very like the soma dispensers from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. We are enslaving ourselves because we are unwittingly becoming captive to the designs of the “conspiring men” the Lord warned us about.

If we understand the circumstances of this new corporate and societal economy, then two inevitable consequences follow. The first is that we can respond with greater compassion to those who are, to use then-Elder Hinckley's metaphor, up to their eyeballs in floodwaters. Given the overwhelming scope and sophisticated digital and algorithmic precision of the forces that are arrayed against the well-being of twenty-first-century individuals, it is understandable that many of us have fallen victim to everything from access to pornography to increased political polarization. Without abandoning continued calls to close our ears to these siren songs, we can nonetheless offer grace and space to ourselves and each other as we navigate these turbulent twenty-first-century digital waters.

Just as importantly, however, this understanding calls us to wake up to the ways in which the axis of corporate-sponsored addiction could ruin us. In the early twenty-first century, our theology, our scripture, and modern prophetic discourse call us to recognize that the unfettered accumulation of capital, the societal allowance of corporations to exploit both individual producers and consumers, and the latitude we have given to corporations to operate without regard for the public good in pursuit of unlimited profits simply cannot any longer be seen as morally neutral. Corporations will too often seek profit at the expense of the well-being of those upon whose backs they build their organizations. In the rapidly accelerating, and in some ways genuinely frightening, early twenty-first century, we as Latter-day Saints must recognize the danger inherent in the way that these forces are arraying themselves, and stand up to be counted among those who will insist that this state of affairs no longer be allowed to stand.

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In fairness, probably a lot of people could have had on their 2025 bingo card something like “Ross Douthat writes a book defending faith as a rational decision.” Mr. Douthat is open about his religiosity and has done a great deal (along with Tish Harrison Warren and now David French) to make belief palatable—or at least less weird—to the Times often secular readers. What probably zero people had on their 2025 bingo card, however, was “Jonathan Rauch—a self-described atheist liberal gay married Jew—writes a book proclaiming that Christianity is a ‘load-bearing’ wall in US society and points specifically and at length to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an exemplar of how to have churches balance adhering to the tenets of their faith while living well with those around them.” But that is precisely the book Rauch has written and just released. Add to this the fact that the most recently released Pew survey shows that the increase in the “nones” has now apparently plateaued and it seems possible that we are approaching an inflection point in the evolution of religiosity in US society.

In effect, every generation responds to the trends and problems bequeathed to it by the generation that came before, and I think that one way to read the advent of books as disparate as Douthat’s and Rauch’s is this: for twenty years or so, society grappled with and took seriously the polemical and often radical arguments of the new atheists who reached their zenith just after the beginning of the new millennium, and now we have been left to see that following their prescriptions did not yield the panacea they seemed to expect or hope for. As the New York Times recently dryly observed and wryly asked: “We’re More Secular Than Ever. How’s That Going?” (hint: from the point of view of the NYT, not especially well).

With all of this, it seems like a good time to step back and ask: “Why does religion matter?” and “Just what is it we hope religion can do?” I have thought a great deal about these questions over many years. So much so that, starting a few years ago, I began teaching about the answers in a class I teach at the medical school where I work. Three years ago, a colleague and I started a podcast to explore the loss of a sense of shared meaning in the practice of medicine. What has surprised us in the resulting 150+ hours of conversations we have recorded is this: One key element of the burnout crisis in medicine seems to be a collective loss of the ability to sense and honor the sacred in medicine. Thus, starting two years ago, we began teaching an elective called “Meaning in Medicine.” In that class, we talk about how to find meaning in our professional practice, but also about how to build a meaningful life. 

As part of the answer to that latter question, I have begun explaining to my students—most of whom I assume are not religious—that I think it would behoove them to “find a church.” But to say this to a group of largely secular medical students at a secular university, I felt like I needed to be able to articulate exactly what it is I think organized religion uniquely offers. My conclusion is that there are three key offerings we can find “at church” that are difficult, if not impossible, to find anywhere else in 2025. None of this is to imply that joining a church can really boil down to some sort of Cartesian choice where you weigh the benefits and risks like you’re choosing whether to move or buy a car. At the end of the day, the decision to embrace religion will always be, at least in part, a matter of the heart and a move into mystery. Still, the rational analysis also matters and, as the full-on embrace of the thinking of the new atheists and their ilk fades, it’s worth talking about why “finding a church” might constitute part of building a beautiful life. Thus, when I tell my students to “find church,” I say that in order for a group to “count” as a church, it has to meet three criteria, which are also the three elements that explain just why a church is so valuable. Below, I explain why these criteria matter in 2025 and how I see them instantiate in the church I know best. I imagine members of other faiths could tell similar stories about their own traditions, but here I speak to what I know.

1) To count as a “church,” an organization must grapple with life's existential questions.

Those who grew up in the church learned very young to consider questions like: “Who am I?,” “Why am I here?,” “What is the meaning of life?,” etc. To church members, these questions are so common as to seem rote or even boring—and, in fairness, we often answer them cursorily and perhaps too quickly.

That all said, however, I believe the first two-and-a-half decades of the twenty-first century have demonstrated society’s deep need for places where these questions can be meaningfully and rigorously examined. In this vein, I am brought to think about an exceptionally bright medical student, who, after hearing my invitation to “find a church,” said to me plaintively in a subsequent private conversation: “It had never really occurred to me that life might have a bigger meaning than just achieving all the best things. I genuinely wonder what it would be like to live a life if I believed in some larger meaning.”

To be clear: I admire this student’s humility and clarity. What strikes me about his observation, however, is that it suggests to me a striking observation: in 2025, never mind answering the universe’s biggest questions, society has largely forgotten that the questions even matter in the first place. This is not to say larger society never grapples with such queries—with or without religion there will always be classes on philosophy, public lectures, and groups or clubs for people who really care about this stuff. But most of these modalities are evanescent—kind of like the calculus classes I took and worked very hard in 25 years ago, but from which I now remember virtually nothing.

As church members, however, we may gently roll our eyes at what often feels like the rote exercise of going every week to listen to often boring and repetitive sacrament meeting addresses only to go afterwards and sit in also not-usually-scintillating Sunday school classes. We add on top of this a whole host of firesides and chats around the campfire that often turn to spiritual things, and we won’t even get into the ten hours we spend every six months listening to the spiritual but also often much-more-boring version of church TED talks. But the point of all of this—again, the trees that make up the forest—is that we get together in all sorts of forums, all the time, to think and talk about the meaning of life, the purpose of the Earth, the nature of God, and all the rest of it.

And this really matters.

It matters because without vision, a people perish. Without vision, we are, I would argue, more likely to heed the siren song of demagogues. Or to be led carefully astray by passing philosophical fads. Or, perhaps most worrisome of all, to lapse into an initially unobtrusive, even comforting, but eventually deeply corrosive, form of societal nihilism and collective individual narcissism.

2) To count as a “church,” an organization must require that you participate, usually in person, in a regular form of community.

This, again, is something that strikes me as almost impossible for a lifelong church member to appreciate. The continuity provided by a church community is so regular and so enveloping, that those who grow up knowing it virtually never understand just how remarkable it is.

But gobs of recent demographic data demonstrate that the continued thriving of “wards” in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints constitutes an island of social sanity in a society where community—both as an idea and as an embodied reality—is too often coming apart. Starting at least as far back as the publication in the year 2000 of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, demographers have widely recognized that the decline of communitarianism in the United States is one of the twenty-first century’s most salient societal trends.

Indeed, in a chilling culmination of the problems foretold by Mr. Putnam and his colleagues, over the last many years, it has become clear that in many demographic groups the most concerning public health trend involves the rise of so-called “deaths of despair.” Likewise, loneliness has become such an endemic public health crisis that it now constitutes the centerpiece of the United States Surgeon General’s most urgent and important current public health initiative—it is as if loneliness is the tobacco of the twenty-first century. Amidst all this, it is both shocking and somehow unsurprising to learn that in a recent Wall Street Journal poll, not only do many citizens of the United States not think we are doing a good job of creating community, but, for the first time ever, a majority of respondents said that they did not think that community even matters—or at least that it is not worth prioritizing. And now, even more recently, the cover story of Atlantic suggests that what is most worrisome of all is not loneliness—because loneliness suggests longing for connection—but, instead, self-isolation, where we no longer even want to be connected.

Now, to be clear: the communities created within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints feature all of the same problems that have plagued communities throughout time. Just like any others, our communities can be riven by racial and classist divides. Interactions within a church community can feature snubs, jealousy, gossip, mistreatment, unkindness, and even abuse.

Nonetheless, what remains clearly true is that the art and science of creating, cultivating, and continuing a community are skills that are increasingly being lost in twenty-first-century America. In this sense, what remains most remarkable about many LDS congregations is not that the people who make them up are in any obvious way different from or better than the people that you find in any other walk of life. Rather, what remains remarkable is simply the fact that the people show up. And, often, it’s not just that they show up at the chapel but that they show up for each other in genuinely remarkable, and sometimes transformative, ways.

Members of the faith have inside jokes about the Elders Quorum setting up and taking down chairs or assisting with moves. We’ve all heard gentle teasing about funeral potatoes and green Jell-o. And all of us have probably rolled our eyes to hear the Elders Quorum or Relief Society presidents make yet one more plea to go work at the Bishop’s storehouse or make ministering a meaningful part of our lives.

But much of that teasing and eye-rolling precisely demonstrates the point that because all of this has become so normal for us, we simply no longer recognize just how remarkable all of this is. Indeed, I would argue that the deeply and spiritually and thoroughly communitarian impulse of Latter-day Saints will likely always constitute one of our greatest potential gifts to the world. Indeed, one entirely secular study from the University of Pennsylvania showed that church members are the most civic-minded group in the United States, and recent Pew data show that church members contribute much more time to community service than almost any other group.

In this sense, I often think that what most distinguishes us is not the initial curve of community, if you will, but rather its derivative. That is to say: even those who choose to leave the faith—and, to be clear, I honor and respect those who make that decision, including many people I deeply know and love—often take with them this devoted impulse to build and sustain community. It is as if, while growing up in the LDS faith, the urge to organize as a community is somehow imprinted on your psychological DNA. It becomes an impulse whose depth and importance very nearly seems to abide somewhere on the genetic level. And, given current societal changes, I would argue that this impulse towards communitarianism matters deeply.

3) Finally, to count as a “church,” an organization must push you to be better than you would otherwise be.

To be clear, in my medical school class I give no suggestions as to what this push might look like. My point here is not that a church should push us to do or not do particular things, but simply that it should push us to escape ourselves, to be better than we would be if left to our own devices, to assure that we do not come to occupy the seeming center of our own self-centric solar system.

A brief perusal of twenty-first-century culture demonstrates that the abiding ethos of much of popular culture really cannot be described in any way other than as being deeply and thoroughly narcissistic. The catchphrases of our current cultural moment are things like “you do you,” “find your own truth,” “learn to be yourself,” and “be your best you.” What each of these catch phrases reveals is a deep societal concern—some might even use the word “obsession”—with discovering and then demonstrating allegiance to your “self.”

But as I often point out to my students, this leaves unanswered a number of important questions: First, what is a self? And how does one know when they have found it? More to the point, though, even if you find your “self,” what are you then to do with it? And, to the same point, what if that self is natively a jerk? Are you then to be true to your jerk-y self? And, if not, why not? The questions go on and on.

Again, none of this is meant to suggest that the church offers perfect answers here. Nor do I suggest that church members are “better” than other people. Those questions, however, are actually entirely beside the point. What I’m getting at here is simply this: churches have something to say about capital-T truth. About questions like “How should I behave?” and “What does a good life look like?” Church is a place where we are taught, in a way that is situated deeply within a meaningful theological context, that: it matters how we treat the members of our family; honesty is important; integrity matters deeply; all people are children of the same God; money must be treated carefully; a large portion of our income should go to charitable purposes; we should live within our means; we should treat others with kindness.

And the list goes on and on.

True enough, many of these reminders to be better come as mundane Sunday school classes of prosaic addresses in sacrament meeting. But, again, that’s actually quite to the point: these lessons and talks and discussions act like drops of water, any of which on its own is virtually weightless and entirely meaningless but which, in aggregate, can facilitate something like the erosion that over eons carved the Grand Canyon.

As demonstrated in the UPenn study above: members of our church showed up to do the boring but hard stuff of citizenship. We volunteer (and, yes, that still obtains even if you subtract out the hours devoted to church service. Though, as implied above, those hours really should not be subtracted out.) We donate money to charity. We know our neighbors. We are often kind and abiding friends. This is not a statement of boast, rather, it is the finding and of an objective and entirely secular study that corroborates what many church members intuitively know: All of our failures, and faults, and blind spots notwithstanding, membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches us that how we act matters and that we have a responsibility to try to know and do what’s right.

In all of this, I believe I align with Jonathan Rauch and Ross Douthat in simply articulating that religion has important work to do in society. As a doctor, I would be open to other forces or organizations that would offer these same benefits but, so far, in spite of invitations to my students every term to present me with any other organization that would offer even one—let alone all three of these features—in any regular or meaningful way, I have never received any alternative response. Partly for this reason, I have concluded that two things are true: the first is that I believe society would do well to recognize the merits and virtues of spirituality in general and organized religion in particular. And the second is that I believe that the societal decline of organized religion is leaving in its wake a powerful vacuum and that, as a society, we have no good sense how to fill it.

In this sense, organized religion reminds me a bit of water. If you begin to list them, you will soon find that water has myriad uses—and, furthermore, while we can come up with alternatives to replace water’s function in some of those cases, it would be dizzyingly difficult to replace all of water’s various roles. We could think, for example, about how to replace water’s ability to facilitate cleaning ourselves, or about how to substitute something for some of water’s vital physiologic functions, or about how to find an alternative for water in terms of providing a home for aquatic flora and fauna. But finding individual replacements for all these use-cases, let alone a single substitute that could do all of them, is virtually impossible.

Likewise, what substitute would we offer for getting people together to discuss the meaning of life—a philosophy club? Have you ever known a person who has attended one of those regularly? What about building community? It is ironic that even John Dehlin, a dedicated critic of the organized church, has admitted that, try as he might, he has never been able to create anything like the church’s community magic for those who are “post-Mormon.” And, finally, on behavioral striving, we seem unable to provide a program that quite matches religion’s ability to foster such discussions organically—the problem is not that no such programs exists, the problem is implementing them regularly, yes, even faithfully, into our lives.

This is all to say: we as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints perhaps do not recognize just how great is the value of that Pearl of Great Price we all claim to know. Again, without skating over or dismissing the ways in which the church can be hard and can even harm especially those who find themselves on the church’s margins, I nonetheless feel quite strongly that we can recognize and more strongly affirm the meaningful, beautiful, and abiding ways in which membership in an imperfect church, led by striving but imperfect local and institutional leaders, nonetheless allows us to meaningfully grapple with life’s most important questions, to belong to imperfect but thriving and vitally nurturing communities, and to engage in the process of bettering ourselves by devoting ourselves to becoming the people that God wants us to be.

In the final analysis, perhaps the problem comes back to us as a society, having simply asked the wrong questions. Perhaps we have wanted to ask something like “Is religion close to perfect?” Or, at least, “Does religion have any major flaws that would want to make us pull away?” If the answer to the first question is “no,” or at least if the answer to the second question is “yes,” then we feel increasingly justified in withdrawing from a life of faith, confident that religion was a sort of comforting wive’s tale—something we’ve outgrown. But, instead, perhaps the question we should ask is: if we, as a society, largely leave religion behind, with what will we replace it? Increasingly, I fear the answer is “We really don’t know.” And that leaves me deeply worried.

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This essay is dedicated to those who must journey through what Elder Holland once called the “battered landscape of the soul”—and to those who, though not suffering from mental illness themselves, journey alongside those who do.

If you are currently hurting, please remember you can always reach out—to friends, loved ones, or by calling “988” in the United States, any time, day or night. 

As a cancer doctor, I frequently shepherd people toward death. This is a weighty, difficult, and beautiful part of my job. But one of the most deeply meaningful parts of this process is the way that those who love the dying nearly always regard them with honor, tender care, and even admiration. There is an intuitive understanding that cancer is not the fault of the patient and that the patient has almost always exhausted all of his or her moral and physical resources battling for health, hoping to vanquish the invading foe. When, finally, the patient gives up the ghost, a resigned peace often settles over those left behind.

I wish we could treat those who suffer from mental illness in general, and those who die by suicide specifically, like we treat those who have cancer. What follows is a theological framework for understanding the body and the brain that will allow for just that kind of compassion and kindness. My hope is that this piece will help those who suffer from mental illness—and those who love the sufferers—to see mental illness as a tragedy similar to cancer, an accident of malignant physiology, not an immoral or cowardly act. I believe this is what our theology teaches—but there are ways to misunderstand our theology that could suggest very nearly the opposite. And so, to get to what I think is the right understanding we need to begin by thinking about what a body is, what a body does, and what role a brain plays in all of this.

In medical school, I first learned this: the body is a machine.

In fact, this is a gross oversimplification. Doctors must first learn to understand the body mechanistically, but then later must learn to not see the body only this way. Still, a mechanistic conception of the body matters in learning medicine and can open to our view important truths about human physiology and function.

Our understanding of the functioning of the heart is the quintessential example of this mechanistic understanding. At base, the heart is a pump that powers blood through two parallel circuits: pumping blood to the lungs to pick up oxygen and then to the body to distribute it.

And as with anything else in human physiology, there are a thousand ways this can all go wrong.

When the pump of the heart begins to slow, many consequences can ensue: some patients see fluid accumulating in their legs and buttocks, leaving them feeling like the swollen marshmallow man. More ominously, others find their lungs filling with blood, robbing them of breath and the ability to exert themselves. Even more frighteningly, if the pump slows too much, the flow of blood to vital organs attenuates and all other organ function begins to deteriorate. In a person with a severely weakened heart—especially if that weakness happens suddenly, as is common after a major heart attack—the entire body can fail within just a few minutes—a testament to the heart’s irreplaceable and central physiologic function.

No wonder we refer to whatever animates any force or team as the “heart” of the enterprise.

All of these problems fall under the umbrella of what doctors call “heart failure.” If you sit in the workroom with cardiologists long enough while they’re caring for patients in the cardiac critical care unit, you will hear the term “heart failure” repeatedly. When we talk about a patient who comes to the hospital with “heart failure” what we are really saying is that the degree of the heart’s dysfunction is sufficient to cause problems in other parts of the body—whether doughy legs or drowning lungs or failing kidneys and ischemic limbs or all of these and more besides. In effect, the heart is “failing” enough at its physiologic purpose to cause noticeable physical problems.

What’s more, this paradigm—recognizing the effects of a “failing” organ—can be extended to the body’s other organs. A third-year medical student learns that a patient who comes to the hospital with a swollen belly, yellow eyes, and minute red “spider marks” on the abdominal wall is probably in “liver failure.” Likewise, a patient who has a potassium level well above normal, who is hardly able to stay awake, and has fluid building up in unexpected parts of the body may have “failing” kidneys. And a cancer patient whose malignancy is blocking traffic through the intestines—such that the person cannot eat without experiencing excruciating abdominal pain and vomiting can be said to have a “failing” gut.

But there is a conspicuous omission from the list of organs that sometimes “fail.” To our great societal and even moral detriment, never once during all my years as a medical student, resident, fellow, internist, or oncologist (now nearly 20 years combined) have I ever heard any doctor, in any setting, for any reason, refer to a patient as having a “failing” brain.

Now, in fairness to our field, maybe we don’t want to say that a person’s brain is “failing” because to do so would feel unnecessarily unkind. That is: if I tell a patient “your kidneys are failing,” they may be shocked or saddened but they probably will not be offended or consider it an affront to their dignity or morality. If, on the other hand, I tell a patient “your brain is failing,” that brings with it a very different connotation. But I sense that there is more going on. I think the real roots of our failure to talk of “brain failure” come from a particular philosophy of the body that exists in broader Western culture but that has also seeped into LDS culture and even into our understanding of our own religion, in ways I will explore below. At the end of the day, how we think about our brains says a great deal about how we think about ourselves—and thus this entire discussion has a great deal to say about our understanding of who we are, who God is, what the universe is like, and how we relate to the world around us.

I say this because there is one important sense in which the brain differs from the rest of the body’s organs: at least conceptually, the brain is the body’s seat for consciousness, agency, and will. As such, it occupies a unique and honored place among the body’s organs. We do not talk of the brain “failing” precisely because even a child knows that something distinguishes the brain from the heart, liver, or kidneys. No one supposes that anything happening inside the kidneys involves an act of conscious will. If I walked up to a patient whose blood contained too much sodium and told them that the problem was that they weren’t “trying hard enough,” I would be dismissed entirely or laughed out of the room. But any time anything goes amiss with the brain, we remain haunted by the prospect that that malfunction might be traced to inadequate will or even misshapen character, rather than a problem with that lump of tissue that is cradled so carefully inside the bony skull.

On the one hand, this is all as it should be. Unless we are to abandon ourselves to a complete form of physiologic and neurological determinism we must posit some role for will and consciousness in the functioning of the brain. That is, if we came to treat the brain “just like any other organ” then we would need to reduce everything from the works of William Shakespeare to the tennis of Serena Williams to nothing more than the random and unwilled firing of billions of synapses—this would be a form of brute biological determinism I would never want or be able to embrace.

Still, especially in religious circles, my sense is that we are rarely in danger of erring on that side of the spectrum. I have never sat in a church meeting, listened to the comments relevant to this discussion, and thought, “Oh no, here we go again, falling back into our old complete physiologic deterministic roots again.” No, that is not our cultural or religious issue, at least not in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Instead, what I often hear is strong suggestions that our mental health is the result of a conscious choice, as if depression, for example, could be overcome by choosing to just “think positive.” This all to say: I have sat in many church meetings—and in the hospital rooms and even at the funerals of many church members—where it seemed clear that we, as a people, had no sense for the brain functioning as one of the body’s organs, an organ that can fail just as surely as a kidney or a heart or a liver.

We may have some cultural allowance for this idea, but we seem to believe we know exactly which parts of the neurological and psychiatric disease spectra fall within this comforting penumbra—and which do not. So, for example, if a church member suffers a stroke, we somehow understand intuitively that this was a purely physiological problem. And, indeed, we are right. A stroke generally happens because a blood clot blocks a particular artery to the brain. When a blockage deprives a brain area of blood and thus of oxygen, that part of the brain dies and takes with it whatever function(s) are governed by that part of the brain. This straightforward mechanism allows us to be confident in viewing a stroke as a physical problem that arises because of an understandable problem in the body. 

Strangely, however, while we are likely to feel nothing but sympathy for the person who suffers a stroke, our reaction may be entirely different when we hear of a person paralyzed by depression or when we learn of a friend who has died by suicide. In fairness, there is a difference between, for example, a stroke and depression. Whereas a stroke has a straightforward explanation—we can point to the affected region of the brain on an MRI—there is as yet no such straightforward explanation for depression and similar ailments. Yes, it’s true, we can discuss fancy-sounding doctor words like “neurotransmitter imbalance” or “selective serotonin deficiency,” and we sometimes prescribe medications meant to ameliorate just those problems. But the truth is that even when we do so, we are kidding ourselves if we think we have anything like a holistic understanding of the causes of depression or how to fix them. This is demonstrated by the fact that those medications that are meant to help with these supposed underlying problems have at best a mixed track record of efficacy—there is significant evidence that they are widely over-prescribed, and many patients try long and rotating lists of different medications and yet never discover anything that brings even significant, let alone complete, relief.

But even if we recognize that our understanding of the causes of psychiatric illness remains incomplete and muddled (and psychiatrists join me in this view), we must, too, recognize that this incomplete understanding does not account for our propensity to freight psychiatric illnesses with the burden of moral opprobrium. After all, nearly all of us have precious little understanding of how the kidneys or liver or heart go awry, and yet we intuitively understand that the failure of any of these organs reflects a nature bent toward entropy—not the consequences of a lack of will or moral fiber. From a gospel perspective, I would argue that the difference between our approaches to these various health problems is that, as church members, while we intuitively accept a mechanistic understanding of the body, we nonetheless believe that we are constituted of an eternal core, and we recognize that the eternal part of us resides—in some way none of us can articulate or understand—“inside” of the organ we call the brain.

Of course, likely none of us would argue for a simplistic notion of this kind of biological/spiritual dualism—something akin to a “Casper the friendly ghost” taking up residence inside the physical brain—but we still have this persistent understanding that whatever it is that constitutes the eternal self must live “in the brain” if it “lives” anywhere at all. And, in truth, however crude our understanding of this question, in some ways we are not that far behind the most sophisticated neuroscience in this sense: for all the deep insights we have gained about neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, and all the rest, we have at best a woefully incomplete understanding of what “consciousness” even is, what it is made of, how it arises, or what becomes of it when we die. It is a confounding aspect of our neurobiology that we cannot explain or deconstruct the phenomenon that constitutes the central core of what it means to be human.

That all said, however, what remains true—and what is vitally important for our conception of ourselves, of God, and of our own goodness and even eternal destiny—is this: the brain is an organ. And, as such, it can fail just as surely as a heart or a liver or a kidney.

This is clear to me as a doctor precisely because I see the consequences of the brain failing all the time. I saw it in my grandmother who died of Alzheimer’s—in the years before her death, the accumulation of fibrous tangles in her neurons had entirely robbed her of her personality. I see it in patients in liver failure, who, unless the underlying problem is addressed, become first pleasantly loopy and then entirely comatose because the failing liver cannot clear toxins from the blood and the resulting buildup renders the brain incapable of normal function. And I even saw it once in a patient I cared for in the hospital who lost her glasses and her hearing aids at the same time and who, in a foreign environment and robbed of the ability to see or hear, became so agitated and delusional that she nearly required physical and chemical restraints until her husband came from a far distance days later and let us know what was the problem—her mental status returned to normal within an hour of having back her glasses and hearing aids. This may seem a strange example but I use it for this reason: in this patient’s case, there was no issue with the rest of her body–no infection, no worsening of her cancer, no hormonal imbalance—the only thing wrong was that her brain was deprived of its customary ability to accept and interpret sensory data.

This all matters for one simple but foundationally important reason: because what we term “mental illness” is also a form of “brain failure.” That is, depression and schizophrenia and bipolar and all the rest are physiologic issues as surely as broken bones and failing kidneys are. This realization allows us to respond with empathy and compassion—rather than disdain and condemnation—when we see the brain “failing” in someone we love or even when we begin to see signs of such “brain failure” in ourselves. This is not to suggest we abandon the importance of good mental hygiene, that we neglect the importance of optimism, or that we pretend we have no role in how the brain functions—any more than we would suggest that we abandon exercise or a heart-healthy diet. Rather, it is just to point out that while we may be right in intuiting that my identity in an eternal sense is intimately interlaced with whatever it is that happens in and because of the brain, and while we can continue to honor the need to approach those happenings with moral seriousness, we can still approach mental illness and all its attendant trappings with kindness and compassion. Even though we do all we can to keep ourselves mentally, psychiatrically, and neurologically healthy, we can still extend grace and space to those around us—and to ourselves—when those best efforts do not produce the effects we wish they did.

All of this brings us to a greater physiological understanding of why Elder Holland would write:

But today I am speaking of something more serious, of an affliction so severe that it significantly restricts a person’s ability to function fully, a crater in the mind so deep that no one would responsibly suggest it would surely go away if those victims would just square their shoulders and think more positively—though I am a vigorous advocate of square shoulders and positive thinking.

Similarly, President Reyna Aburto wrote:

Black clouds may also form in our lives, which can blind us to God’s light and even cause us to question if that light exists for us anymore. Some of those clouds are of depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental and emotional affliction. They can distort the way we perceive ourselves, others, and even God. They affect women and men of all ages in all corners of the world.

Elder Renlund adds much needed clarification:

There is an old sectarian notion that suicide is a sin and that someone who commits suicide is banished to hell forever. That is totally false. I believe the vast majority of cases will find that these individuals have lived heroic lives, and that suicide will not be a defining characteristic of their eternities. I believe Heavenly Father is pleased when we reach out and help his children. But we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the church community coming together to help each other through this life.

What strikes me so forcefully about these quotes, taken together, is the degree to which they remove from the individual the blame or moral onus for the havoc that mental illness wreaks on those who suffer from it. None of these authorities speaks, per se, about the brain as an organ, but it seems clear to me as a physician that that is the fundamental philosophical shift that underlies the transformation they are implicitly and, in the case of Elder Renlund, explicitly calling for.

In addition to doing everything within our power to help those whose brains will not cooperate (offering resources, a helping hand, friendship, safe harbor, and connection to professional help), I invite us to reframe how we think about what is happening inside of them so that instead of seeing a flagging spirit or an inadequate will, we picture a brain that is simply malfunctioning, like a heart that can no longer pump, or a liver that can no longer filter. In the same way we would never suggest to a patient with heart failure that they just “try harder” or “breathe better,” can I suggest that we consider treating those whose brains are betraying them with an ever-greater outpouring of help, compassion, aid, and love? I was moved to better understand the deep need our culture and religion have for just this kind of better understanding some time ago when reading a memoir written by a church member who, after an early life defined by clear thinking and no significant emotional problems, was diagnosed in early adulthood with bipolar depression after a series of devastating episodes that upended his own life and those of his family members. After an entire book describing what the episodes themselves were like and the effect they had on himself and those he loved, as well as how he was treated (especially at church) as a result, he summed up by writing this:

Like the lepers of old, the mentally ill are assumed to be worthless to society and, in most ways carry a net negative in their personal balance sheet. In the church, they are never called to a position of responsibility, because they cannot be relied on. They are never asked to speak to a group, because they will freeze in the situation. Mental illness is so debilitating in society that, in a very real sense, its victims are shunned like the lepers of old.

He goes on to ask all of us:

So what do you do with the lepers of today, the bipolar? How do you think about them? Do you participate in gossip about them? Do you make judgments about their behavior? How much do you know about them really? Do you find ways to include them? Do you understand when they do not want to be included? Do you probe into personal areas that are none of your business? Are you part of their support structure or part of the problem yourself? How do you react to the lepers of today—the mentally ill?

I believe his statements, his biblical analogy, and his comparisons deserve our careful and meditative attention. His condemnation of our thoughts and behavior is not without merit and his queries can become a powerful catalyst for reflection and change.

I co-host a podcast where we discuss finding meaning in the practice of medicine, and we recently hosted Clancy Martin, an author and philosopher who has been haunted by a desire to consider suicide since he was six years old. While on our program talking about his battle to keep himself alive, Mr. Martin said,

It is true that the way the Abrahamic tradition has been received and even revised, we have this tendency to blame ourselves for a whole host of things that go wrong in our lives . . . [But] even within the Abrahamic tradition there are so many great thinkers, leaders, and philosophers who will tell you, ‘no that’s not the right way to think about it, you can have, and ought to have, a disposition toward your religion, toward your spiritual experience, such that it’s there precisely to help you with those most difficult challenges, with places where you encounter obstacles, precisely the place where you would like to blame yourself is precisely the place where you should be applying spirituality as a medicine to help you accept yourself, nurture yourself, take care of yourself.

And in this view of the mind as something entirely unlike the rest of the body, we see, finally, the full theological consequences of our misperception. Perhaps this is a place where some of our most cherished beliefs—the co-eternality of the soul, the importance of agency, the reality of spiritual apart from physical existence, and on and on—have been hijacked to make us believe (often implicitly, sometimes explicitly) that mental illness is a moral deficiency, and that suicide, especially, is a scarlet sin.

I think a person’s understanding of the harm these misunderstood bits of theology can cause largely rests on whether they—or someone they love—has experienced the ravages of mental illness firsthand. It is easy enough, after all, for those not acquainted with this particular “battered landscape of the soul” to assume that depression, for example, is simply a failure to follow the commandments to have hope and to be believing. I think it is hard for those unacquainted with depression or similar illnesses to comprehend that the problem is not that the person is not choosing to be happy but, rather, that the very idea of happiness has fled from the soul as surely as warmth flees when winter descends. It is not just a lack of happiness itself but the lack of the very ability to imagine being happy, at least temporarily. Those who have suffered depression themselves or who have journeyed with one they love through that travail know just how much it can sting when a classmate at church or even a church leader acts as though this could all be overcome through better choices or healthy living—even if those words spring from understandable theological assumptions.

But we have at hand other theological resources, equally deep, that offer a very different spiritual framing. We can look to verses like Lehi’s teaching that there “must needs be” an opposition in all things, asserting that entropy and adversity are woven into the fabric of the universe. To my ears as a doctor, these suggest that perhaps we need not be surprised that the same symphonic synchrony that allows for fruitful functioning of a working brain can at times become corrupted, leading to states as devastating and varied as bipolar depression, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder. Just as cancer is woven into the very biologic processes that allow a human to grow into a human, the seeds of mental illness lie dormant in what allows us to have functioning brains—and even transcendent consciousness—in the first place. In this one case, “there must needs be an opposition in all things” says, to this doctor, anyway, that even brains that function beautifully in most circumstances can malfunction tragically, chaotically, and inexplicably in other settings. The seeds of mental illness are planted in each of us, and we never know when they will sprout. Knowing this can allow our community to bring mental illness out from the shadows—it can invite us to talk of a person hospitalized after attempting suicide not with the hushed discomfort we reserve for those we believe are doing something shady or shameful, but with the hushed admiration we have for a person who stumbles halfway through a marathon. This understanding allows us to see things as they really are, and to muster compassion and veneration for those who are laboring under a weight most of us can only imagine.

Now, as I wrap up, I want to pause to clarify one vital point. Though I’ve spent pages here explaining why we need to understand that the brain, too, is an organ like the heart or a lung, we must also recognize straightforwardly that the brain is also unlike any other part of the body. Yes, it is an organ. And, yes, it can malfunction. And, no, we should not impute to those who suffer from mental illness culpability for the ways in which the brain can break. Yet, it is simultaneously true that while the brain is an organ, philosophers also conceptualize of something called “the mind,” which serves as a sort of bridge between the physical, material, anatomical structure that sits behind our ears and the ineffable, indecipherable, unquantifiable substance we call our “spirit.” What exactly constitutes a “mind,” or what we mean by “consciousness,” has been debated since at least Descartes, and remains one of the great mysteries at the overlap between religion, philosophy, physics, and biology. The resolution of this mystery lies far beyond the scope of this paper—but acknowledging the existence and importance of the mystery matters. Still: the existence of the mystery merely underlines the importance of affording every benefit of the doubt to those who wade their way through the troubled and murky waters of mental illness.

And then, with a sense of this mystery and these strains from our theology firmly in hand, we can look to a moment in our scriptures that means more to me than perhaps any other precisely because of what I believe it tells us about God’s view of and response to those who suffer—from mental illness, particularly, and from the myriad other trials life brings, generally: the encounter where Enoch sees God weeping and finds, when he asks God why, that it is because God’s heart has been filled to overflowing to see the suffering of his children. What I extrapolate from this verse in the setting of our discussion here is this: Because the hearts of our Heavenly Parents beat in tune with ours, how could our suffering lead to anything other than their weeping?

What follows the passage is hardly surprising: “And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men; wherefore Enoch knew, and looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook” (Moses 7:41).

For me, this description means that when we come to understand the brain as an organ, and mental illness as a “failure” of physiology—but not of character or morality—then we can move past the ingrained temptation to condemn those who suffer and die from mental illness and we can, with Enoch, allow our own hearts to “swell wide as eternity.” In this case, a clearer understanding of physiology can better equip us to be Christlike because it removes from our path “philosophies of men” that have become mingled with our scriptures in a way inimical to the health and flourishing of the body of Christ.

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Art by George Bellows.

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