In “The Four Horsemen of New Theism” Wayfare Editor Zachary Davis makes the case that the cultural vibe in the West has shifted away from the stridently anti-religious sentiments of New Atheism toward a re-enchanted and spiritually curious “New Theism.”

Specifically, Davis looks at four books: All Things Are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart, Believe by Ross Douthat, Living in Wonder by Rod Dreher, and Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth. He writes, “Although these books vary widely in tone and emphasis, they share a core belief: our crisis is spiritual, rooted in an aggressive, reductive materialism that looks upon the wonder of creation and sees only lifeless matter to analyze, control and exploit. They also converge on a shared hope that amid the ruins of Christendom, genuine religious life can be reborn in the West.”

This shift toward New Theism is welcome, Davis asserts, because it’s an answer to the widespread loneliness, sorrow, and loss of meaning we’re collectively facing. The more we embrace this shift, the argument goes, the more we’ll discover “a deeper, richer form of freedom found in dedication to community, contemplation, and faith.”

For my part, I strongly agree that our crisis is spiritual and that both reductive materialism and the Machine (replete with its enticements toward mindless scrolling) are a poison to the soul. And yet there’s a thread running through these books that troubles me—a thread that, to me, is a sign these New Theists don’t embrace enough mystery.

Before I unpack this, I’ll say that I view David Bentley Hart as an exception. Indeed, he wrote as much in a comment to Davis’s piece, declaring, “For the record, I don’t have much in common with the other three figures mentioned here,” and his book All Things Are Full of Gods tends toward the fuller embrace of mystery I’m advocating for—a mystery that transcends the traditional categories we human beings have invented to make sense of our world.

With that in mind, let’s turn to the stories of the other three New Theists.

The Many Conversions of the New Theists

Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher, and Paul Kingsnorth each write of their conversions to particular strains of Christianity. Douthat was baptized Episcopalian, later converted to “charismatic Christianity,” and then settled into Catholicism. Dreher was raised Methodist, later converted to Catholicism, and then settled into Eastern Orthodoxy. Kingsnorth grew up a cultural Christian, later practiced Zen Buddhism, joined his “local Wiccan coven,” and then settled into the Romanian Orthodox Church.

In each case, these writers assert that they settled into their current faith because they came to believe certain truth claims.

Douthat suggests that Catholicism is the truest religion—not just “true enough”—because, among many reasons, it has had such staying power and is “the part of Christianity known for systematizing everything.” He writes, “When I say the Nicene Creed, I mean it.”

Dreher, on the other hand, says that after researching the Catholic sex-abuse scandal for years, he “just couldn’t believe in the truth claims of the Catholic Church anymore” so he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, believing that it “had valid sacraments and a valid hierarchy” without the scandal. He also recounts that he has since had the truth of his choice confirmed when he visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during Orthodox Holy Week and put his hand in the Holy Fire for several minutes without getting burned.

Kingsnorth writes that after joining his local Wiccan coven, he had an unexpected and vivid dream where Jesus visited him. Months later, he had an experience at a concert where he “could see how everyone in the room was connected to everyone else.” He recounts, “I was overcome with a huge and inexplicable love, a great wave of empathy.” In that moment, he writes, “I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true.”

In short, all three of these writers have gone through a series of conversions and now assert that their current faith is true because of a combination of intellectual reasoning and personal spiritual experiences.

While I don’t dismiss their stories outright (more on that in a moment), I personally long for even more mystery than they’re allowing for here.

For instance, we might ask: What if God’s ways truly are beyond our comprehension? What if God calls people—ourselves and others—toward surprising paths even when those paths differ from our own and even after we feel settled?

What if the goal of religious life is less about pinning which of 10,000 possible views is the truest and more about developing the courage to take a step into the dark together?

Mystery Is Bigger Than Our Perception of Truth

Which view is the truest?

In most cases, we’d all agree that answering such a question requires thoroughly understanding each current possible view. Any good scientist, for example, would start an inquiry by gathering all available data, understanding the theories behind that data, and analyzing that data as impartially as possible.

I have yet to see anyone do this with religion—likely because it would be an impossible task in a single lifetime. Not only would one have to fully contrast Christianity with Islam and Islam with Hinduism and Hinduism with Judaism, etc., but one would also have to contrast each strain of each religion, because the differences between, say, Pure Land Buddhism and Zen Buddhism matter to practitioners of those strains. (In other words, there are many “Buddhisms,” just as there are many “Christianities.”)

On top of this, one would also have to thoroughly practice each religion, for knowing the truth of a religion often lies in the practice of it. (For instance, one who has read about Zen but has never meditated does not understand Zen!)

We simply don’t have time in a single life to complete this inquiry, at least not well.

And yet this doesn’t stop some people in each tradition from declaring that their position is the truest position. It doesn’t matter, they seem to say, that they haven’t read the Upanishads or the Dhammapada or the Zhuangzi—it doesn’t matter that they haven’t practiced the Noble Eightfold Path or experienced the aural magic of the Qur’an or delved into the self-inquiry practices of Advaita Vedanta. They already know all of those things pale in comparison with their own views. They already have a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible.

Admittedly, the New Theists aren’t ignorant of my critique here. As I mentioned, Kingsnorth has some years of experience with Zen and Wicca. And Douthat’s thesis in Believe is that people should choose the religious path that most calls to them, even while he declares that Roman Catholicism is objectively the truest path. This ecumenism signals a greater generosity of spirit than religious fundamentalists tend to exhibit. (Though I will say that Douthat does tremendous handwaving when it comes to addressing what biblical scholars have discovered about the thorniest issues in the Gospels, seriously downplaying the strongest arguments against his views.)

And anyway, the argument goes, the point of faith isn’t entirely rational. People don’t know their religion is true because of reason alone. They know their religion is true because of their personal spiritual experiences.

Mystery Is Bigger Than Our Interpretations of Spiritual Experience

Spiritual experiences are among life’s greatest gifts. They bring us a sense of love and unity. They break us open to new possibilities. They give us a reason to live. They are real.

They’re also frequently leveraged as proof that a particular strain of faith is true. As I mentioned, Kingsnorth experienced love and empathy at a concert and then declared that Christianity is the true religion. One could find hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of similar interpretations of spiritual experiences from believers around the world.

And yet it’s worth noting that believers do not have a monopoly on such experiences. In The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, for instance, the French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville tells of a moment in a forest when he felt “a seemingly eternal sense of peace” so strongly that he felt he “contained only the dazzling presence of the All.” The self-proclaimed atheist Marius Favre writes about a similar experience, saying, “The border between my body and the world had vanished.” And the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich writes that when she was a young woman, she was on “a pre-dawn walk” when “the world flamed into life” and “nothing could contain it.” Many other nonbelievers, including Buddhist practitioners, have reported similar transcendent experiences.

Even the New Atheists have expressed openness to this territory. Richard Dawkins writes of being “moved to tears by a beautiful piece of music,” loving “hymns and Christmas carols,” and feeling “breathless with joy” while gazing “at the stars on a dark night with no moon and no city lights.” Christopher Hitchens wrote about being drawn to “the lure of wonder and mystery and awe.” And Sam Harris frequently promotes the work of mystics from a variety of traditions as well as the work of his wife, Annaka, whose writings on wonder and consciousness are a hair’s breadth from David Bentley Hart’s views in All Things Are Full of Gods, as Annaka likewise posits that consciousness—not materialism—is the fundamental foundation of reality.

Now, one might respond by saying that true spiritual experiences are about more than personal feelings of awe, mystery, and wonder—that true spiritual experiences require a belief in the supernatural as well.

But even supernatural experiences do not uniformly converge toward a single religious tradition. Yes, people like Paul Kingsnorth have had profound dreams of Jesus leading them toward Christianity. But many Muslims have likewise reported having dreams of Muhammad so profound they changed their life, to name just one counter example.

Similarly, near-death experiences—as profound as they are—tend to be all over the religious map. As one researcher of these experiences writes,

Typically, near-death experiencers experience symbols drawn from the religions closest to home. A Jew may find himself being judged by rabbinic authorities, a Hindu might be saved by Krishna, a Catholic might find herself in the presence of the Virgin Mary or Christ, and a person of indigenous origin may receive knowledge at the hands of his own ancestors.

In mentioning this, I don’t intend at all to invalidate any of these experiences. To the contrary, the sheer number of people from different cultures who have spiritual experience strongly suggests that something real is happening here.

I only mean to say that mystery itself is bigger than our interpretation of these experiences—that it’s misguided to leap from having a spiritual experience to declaring that our experience means our tradition is the true strain of faith for all people everywhere.

Again, I’m opening the possibility that God is bigger—more mysterious—than we can comprehend.

Mystery Demands More of Us

So, where does all of this leave us?

Near the end of Believe Ross Douthat draws a binary between his view (wherein he asserts that Roman Catholicism is the truest religion) and perennialism (which says that all religions point to the same basic truth and that our task is to piece together a worldview that works for us). Douthat opposes perennialism because he sees it as easy and undemanding, a tepid form of anything-goes relativism that results in isolation rather than community and commitment.

For my part, I believe that Douthat’s binary is false.

I believe there is another option—one that demands more of us. It’s the option to fully commit to mystery, to be willing to be called into the dark by a God we cannot completely comprehend.

In this view, God is bigger than any single tradition even while God sometimes calls us into a tradition. This doesn’t mean that we know with certainty that the particular tradition we’re called into is the truest tradition for all people everywhere. It just means that, barring a fresh calling elsewhere, we commit anyway, in faith.

As we commit, we will see other people declare that they feel called in other directions, including toward disbelief in traditional views of God. When this happens, we might be tempted to think of their views as morally inferior. But what if we were to instead remain curious? What if we were to instead hold the possibility that God is calling them in one direction and calling us in another? And what if we were to hold the possibility that the friction inherent between these different journeys yields the fruit that’s actually best for us all?

In response to such questions, a religious fundamentalist might express skepticism. “That’s impossible,” they might say. “My God points everyone toward the same path!”

But that assertion boxes God in. It confidently declares—without evidence—that God’s thoughts are their thoughts, that God’s ways are their ways. As it does this, it is ultimately faithless. It doesn’t trust that God is quietly and almost imperceptibly orchestrating life better than we could possibly realize.

What if faith, by contrast, is about believing that God is bigger than our perceptions and bigger than our interpretations? What if faith is about actually believing that God “will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom”?

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Jon Ogden is the cofounder of Uplift Kids, which helps families explore wisdom and timeless values together. To subscribe to his column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for “One Step Enough.”

Art by J.M.W. Turner.

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In the early 1920s, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faced a stark and uncomfortable decision. Looking to counter and put to rest scholarly criticism about the Book of Mormon, they tasked one of their own—LDS historian and general authority B. H. Roberts—with researching the book’s origins. Roberts spent years digging into every angle he could and came away with a conclusion neither he nor other church leaders wanted. His findings went unpublished until 1985, long after his death.1

In the wake of these findings, Church leaders sat at a crossroads. Would they embrace a messy, contested, and scholarly approach to learning, or would they embrace an approach that cleanly prioritized defending the faith? It was a pressing question for some leaders, as a 1935 survey of BYU students found that 62% didn’t believe in a literal devil, 64% believed in evolution, and 62% believed personal authority mattered more than institutional authority. How would the Church respond?

By the late 1930s, the decision had been made. J. Reuben Clark, a member of the Church’s first presidency, instructed a group of BYU professors at a yearly training that they were to defend the faith above all else. “These students crave the faith their fathers and mothers have,” he said. “They want it in its simplicity and purity.”

This approach quickly dominated LDS culture, with new apostles repeatedly referring back to Clark’s speech to show the way forward. By the 1960s the Church education system implemented a correlated learning program, where every LDS congregation across the world was given the exact same standard lesson to follow together each week. This and other initiatives had a substantial influence on the culture, and by 1973 only 5% of BYU students didn’t believe in a literal devil, 19% believed in evolution, and 12% believed personal authority mattered more than institutional authority.

And yet some Latter-day Saints expressed concern with this direction. Lowell Bennion, who wrote church manuals prior to the correlated program, warned that without great care this simple and pure approach could lead church members to value obedience over agency (authoritarianism), institutions over people (institutionalism), creeds over revelation (dogmatism), and “chosenness” over humility (self-righteousness). Around the same time, Richard Poll, a professor of history at BYU, published an essay that referenced two physical symbols from the Book of Mormon, asserting that while some Latter-day Saints focus on holding to the “iron rod” (privileging simplicity, sameness, answers, obedience, and hierarchy), other Latter-day Saints focus on following the “liahona” (privileging complexity, differences, questions, agency, and personal revelation).

We could use any number of names for these two approaches—form and formlessness, structure and flexibility, answers and questions, etc. The anglican priest William Ralph Inge spoke of the need for both the “institutional element” and the “mystical element” of religion. Other thinkers have written of the need for both tradition and faith. In each case, the point is that two “poles” (or complementary opposites) depend on and need each other.2 Without some form of shared language and tradition, we can’t fully nurture spiritual health. (We’re a social species and need shared language to worship together, after all.) Similarly, without the formlessness of spirituality—which, like the wind, “bloweth where it listeth”—we close ourselves off from the ongoing inspiration of the still small voice.

My sense is that all Latter-day Saints understand this in theory. We might think of Jesus, who participated in his Jewish religious tradition while also urging people to question strict views of the Sabbath, ritual cleanliness, boundary-keeping, and more. In this way Jesus wove together form and formlessness, tradition and faith, structure and flexibility. He used his gifts as a teacher and storyteller to call for a “both-and” community—a living tradition.

What might it look like to do the same today?

From my perspective, nurturing a living tradition requires us to follow what I might call the syntax of wisdom, which says, “Yes, we need both X and Y, and in this particular instance we need more Y.”

Put simply, what’s needed in any particular instance depends on context—the time and the place in which we live, as well as our unique spiritual gifts and the unique spiritual gifts of others in our community.

Personally, when I look at the contemporary Latter-day Saint context in Utah where I live, I see a community that has greatly benefitted from the gifts of form, religion, structure, and answers. I see the well-manicured landscaping of BYU campus and temple square, the stability that comes with a smooth transition of power after a Church president passes away, the vast amounts of wealth the Church has accumulated after careful investing, and so on. All of these things are the result of the work of the Church’s highest leaders, who bring their experience in fields like law, business, auditing, and organizational structure to make the Church run smoothly. This operational excellence gives Latter-day Saints a sense of stability, security, and safety. All of that is, in so many ways, a blessing.

And yet I wonder about the opposite pole—the open and expansive formlessness that comes with raw spiritual questioning. Is there space in the contemporary Latter-day Saint community for “not knowing” (truly not knowing) to balance the “knowing” of testimony meetings? Is there space for artists, storytellers, scholars, and philosophers when what they explore doesn’t fit the mold? Is there space for personal revelation even when it moves someone toward non-traditional beliefs and practices?

I realize that in posing these questions, I’m already hinting at my own position on the matter. And yet in doing so, I don’t mean to imply that everyone should agree with me or share my particular beliefs. I don’t even want everyone to share my beliefs, as that would lead to communal lopsidedness. The Body of Christ, to use the Apostle Paul’s metaphor, has many members.

I only wonder if it’s possible to more fully embrace both form and formlessness in community—and whether, to return to the syntax of wisdom, Latter-day Saints in the twenty-first century need more of the formless, as precarious as that might sound.

What if God is bigger than form, stability, structure, and safety? What if God also includes formlessness, creativity, flexibility, and risk?

What if a living tradition is always “both-and,” like the in-breath and the out-breath?

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Jon Ogden is the cofounder of Uplift Kids, which helps families explore wisdom and timeless values together. To subscribe to his column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for “One Step Enough.”

Art by Ben Crowder (@bencrowder)

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Before the gospel of Jesus there was the gospel of Caesar Augustus. 

“The most divine Caesar,” proclaims an official 9 BCE Roman inscription, “who being sent to us and our descendants as Savior, has put an end to war and has set all things in order . . . the birthday of the God Augustus has been for the whole world the beginning of good news.” 

It was in the wake of this proclamation of good news—the gospel of Augustus—that John the Baptist emerged from the wilderness, wearing camel’s hair, eating grasshoppers, and speaking of one who would baptize the people “in the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus came to John to be baptized by him and, for a time, to live as he lived. For forty days and nights after his baptism, Jesus prayed and fasted in the wilderness “with the wild beasts,” overcoming temptation. Then he emerged, transformed and on fire with good news. 

“Jesus came to Galilee,” reads Mark 1:14–15 (ESV), “preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.’” These are the first words out of Jesus’s mouth in the earliest gospel account we have access to today. Straight out of the wilderness, before anything else, Jesus preaches the good news of the kingdom of God — a kingdom that, contrasted with the kingdom of Augustus,1 blesses the meek, the merciful, the hungry, the poor, and the powerless.

How do we experience the good news of the kingdom of God? 

As Jesus says, we must repent.

And yet repent is a word with a contested history. Around five hundred years ago, a Catholic priest named Desiderius Erasmus claimed that the common Latin translation of the word had incorrectly been confined to mean “performing external acts of penance.” Instead, Erasmus argued, the Greek verb “to repent” (metanoeó) is more about “a change of mind.”

Contemporary dictionaries tend to agree with Erasmus and add that the verb can also mean “to turn around” or “to adopt another view.”2 Taken this way, metanoeó is not primarily about external acts. Instead, it’s primarily about changing your mind as a result of how you see.3 

To enter the kingdom of God, in other words, we must at the very least see beyond the surface. How else can we see that the poor and the meek are blessed? On the surface (in the kingdom of men) the poor and the meek have failed, and small things like sparrows, lilies, a pinch of yeast, and mustard seeds are essentially worthless. But in the kingdom of God, beyond the surface, these small things have tremendous worth and potential.

To change your mind—to repent—is to see this worth and potential. It is to see that everyone is a child of God. It’s to see a world where each person is deserving of forgiveness, a world where even our enemies are worthy of love, a world where we have the capacity to extend grace to all people just as God lovingly sends rain and sun on all people. This is the good news of the kingdom, a kingdom where, unlike the gospel of Augustus, everyone is a brother and a sister, independent of worldly status. 

Of course, entering this kingdom is easier said than done. If I’m honest, part of me resists the idea of inherent worth—mine and yours. This part of me believes that my worth is based entirely on what I do and what other people think of me. As embarrassing as it is to admit, this part of me craves praise. It even believes that without praise, I’m worthless. This part of me, to put it starkly, lives firmly in the kingdom of men, the kingdom of status. It believes the gospel of Augustus.

The problem with this part of me is that no amount of praise can possibly satiate the craving it feels. I could receive dozens of kind comments from strangers and loved ones, and I would momentarily feel some pleasure and safety. But within a day (or two or three) that feeling would fade, and I would be left craving more. “Please, like me!” this part of me says. “Please admire me! I don’t want to die unknown!” 

This part of me fixates on surface credentials—money, looks, degrees, and so on. It plays the comparison game, feeling good when I perceive I’m “better than” and feeling bad when I perceive I’m not. No wonder Jesus urged his followers to not judge each other: It’s only by avoiding judgment that we can experience the good news and enter the kingdom.

Crucially, this message extends not only outwardly but inwardly as well. As Jesus says in the Gospel According to Thomas, “If those who lead you say to you: See, the kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of the heaven will go before you; if they say to you: It is in the sea, then the fish will go before you. But the kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you.”

On both fronts—the inner and the outer—this is good news. Internally, it’s good news because, by seeing differently, we acknowledge and transform the “enemy” parts of ourselves, the parts that we can’t hate out of existence, the parts we can only integrate through honesty, forgiveness, and love. Externally, it’s good news because we join a community of sisters and brothers who work in harmony to love all people, even those we initially perceive as enemies. In the kingdom of God, no one is alone.

It’s not difficult to imagine that Jesus experienced this way of seeing during his time in the wilderness. Something about fasting and praying in solitude sparked a fire in him that never went out, even as his own family told him he was “out of his mind” (Mark 3:21) for what he preached.

Viewed this way, to restore the gospel of Jesus is, perhaps at a baseline, to likewise live on fire. It’s to see an ever-flowing abundance of love, inside and out. This insight is a pearl of great price, a treasure in a field. It is worth living for, in sacred communion with others who are also on fire, fully alive.

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Jon Ogden is the cofounder of Uplift Kids, which helps families explore wisdom and timeless values together. To subscribe to his column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for “One Step Enough.”

Art by David Park (1911-1960).

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KEEP READING

FICTION

POETRY

EVENT

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A Zen parable tells of a professor who travels to Japan to learn about Zen. As soon as he arrives at the nearest monastery, however, he sits in front of the Zen master and waxes on and on about all he’d already learned of Zen through books. 

After hearing this professor pontificate at length, the Zen master sets a full cup of tea in front of him. Then he begins to pour tea into it. He keeps pouring, as tea flows across the table and splashes onto the floor. 

“Stop pouring!” the professor says. “You’re spilling tea everywhere.”

With that, the Zen master stops. He looks in the professor’s eyes and says, “Like this cup of tea, you are already full. How can I show you what Zen is unless you first empty your cup?”

It’s a story with a universal message, which is that when we’re too certain that we already know everything, we cannot learn. We cannot grow.

A similar message is embedded in my own Latter-day Saint heritage. The Book of Mormon warns against “the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men,” saying that “when they are learned they think they are wise, and hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves” (2 Ne. 9:28). In a similar vein, other voices in the book declare, “I do not know the meaning of all things” (1 Ne. 11:17) and “I do not know all things” (Words of Mormon 1:7) and “as to this thing I do not know” (Alma 7:8). 

It could even be said that the entire Latter-day Saint tradition grew from a place of not knowing. As a teenager, Joseph Smith was so confused about religious questions that he later wrote, “How to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know” (JS–H 1:12). From that not-knowing, the story goes, he was open to receive wisdom.

And yet, in my experience, a phrase like “I do not know” often seems out of place in the tradition today, like it no longer has value in Latter-day Saint life. This is perhaps most clear when members gather once a month for fast and testimony meeting to name what they do know—“I know this Church is true,” “I know we’re led by a prophet of God,” “I know Christ lives,” and so on.

These “I know” statements produce wonderful fruits—including a strong sense of unity, belonging, purpose, and identity.

They do all of these things, that is, until they don’t. 

As I’ve written about elsewhere, around fifteen years ago I experienced a faith crisis brought on by discovering that the version of Latter-day Saint and biblical history my culture had handed to me as a child didn’t match with what was conveyed in many scholarly sources on the topics. 

This discovery wasn’t a matter of acquiring benign but fascinating tidbits about my tradition. Rather, I experienced a dramatic shift with real-world effects on my sense of belonging in my Latter-day Saint community. I suddenly felt like a foreigner in my homeland, especially during testimony meetings. If all I had to offer was “I do not know,” how could I belong in an organization that seemed so saturated in knowing?

It was a terribly isolating stretch of time. I kept up my Mormon habits out of a love for the tradition—the way it tied me to my ancestry, the weekly conversations about timeless values, the hymns I’d sung since childhood, etc.—but my actions soon felt zombie-like, disconnected from head and heart. Occasionally, I spoke up about my doubts at church in an effort to be heard and to even “correct” other members. But that never felt right. So I mostly stayed silent.

To see if I could rekindle a sense of camaraderie and belonging, I started attending post-Mormon gatherings. I met many wonderful people there, as I had in the LDS Church, but the recurring topics of conversation—focused, as they were, against something rather than for something—never really lit anything in me. I didn’t feel like I could fully come alive in those spaces, as much as I appreciated being seen in my unorthodox views.

Then, more than a decade ago, I stumbled into a six-week mindfulness course facilitated by Thomas McConkie at the Lower Lights School of Wisdom. Here was an in-person community that brought together a range of participants—those who were active in Mormonism, those who had left the tradition, and those who had never been part of it. Belief wasn’t at the forefront, wasn’t a point of contention one way or the other. Rather, Lower Lights was a place to attune to something deeper together, to explore a way of living centered less in claims and propositions and more in a sense of divine trust. Week after week, I noticed something lighting in me. I felt a spark of life, enough to return for the next Lower Lights event, and the next and the next. 

I’ve felt this same spark of life—this experience with the divine—several times since finding Lower Lights, including at the launch party for the first physical issue of this magazine, Wayfare. I had been following the rise of Wayfare closely, but I’d hesitated to get involved because I had (and admittedly still have) such complicated feelings about my Latter-day Saint heritage. And yet I felt something undeniably alive at that launch party, which was full of earnest, cheerful, and thoughtful people. It was more than “good party vibes.” I felt a resonance deep in my core, a sense of direction in the dark, an alignment with God, a desire to contribute and build.

I hesitate to limit any of these and other similar experiences I’ve had in the last decade by confining them to a single label, but if I had to, I might say that they all had a hint of the mystical. These experiences softened my heart and opened my mind toward all people and communities that are trying—however clumsily, as we all are—to draw nearer to truth. As meditation teacher Shinzen Young writes, “Once you begin to have mystical experiences, you can feel right at home in anybody’s church.” Given this, these experiences at Lower Lights and Wayfare have led me into fuller participation in my local congregation, where I currently teach the men once a month in elders quorum. I no longer harbor my prior inclinations of trying to “correct” other Latter-day Saints like I once did. I’m just trying to keep the space alive, staying soft and open to the possibility of being surprised by a God I do not fully understand. 

Above all, I’ve slowly been able to attune to a sense of deep trust in life itself, intuiting that even while I don’t have the same convictions about certain claims and propositions that I once did, I can trust that which sparks a sense of life in me. I don’t know what that ultimately means, or where it will take me. And I certainly wouldn’t presume to say that I’ve found the true communities for all people everywhere. I just have a felt sense that these communities have offered me belonging and aliveness in connection to my heritage. 

In the words of the hymn “Lead Kindly Light:” 

I do not ask to see the distant scene; 
one step enough for me.

To return to the Zen story I started with, I’m beginning to see that growth happens when we “drink in” our current understanding of life’s mysteries and then hold our empty cup out, open for more. It’s less a matter of belief and more a matter of trust—of faith. We must trust that even though it’s unsettling to hold out an empty cup that cannot be filled on our own timetable, this is how we grow. 

Faith willingly drinks in and holds out the empty cup. 

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Jon Ogden is the cofounder of Uplift Kids, which helps families explore wisdom and timeless values together. To subscribe to his column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for “One Step Enough.”

Art by Henri Matisse (1869–1954).

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MORE FROM JON OGDEN

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In his book Dispatches from Mormon Zion, Ryan Davis tells personal stories from a decade living in Utah Valley. For him, this has meant fishing up the canyon, connecting with fellow Taylor Swift fans, interacting with students at Brigham Young University (where he’s a professor of political science), and chatting about practical philosophy with his friends in the area. 

The book’s opening stories are a delight, including a comical interaction with a random kid who tries to get Davis to take her to 7-Eleven to buy her snacks, a pie-making contest that Davis mistakenly wins for a moment, and a sighting of minivan near BYU with a license plate MIL-FLCN (Millenium Falcon), and so many more. Provo is weird, and Davis captures the weirdness perfectly.

But it’s the final chapters that most deeply moved me. There, among other things, Davis explores some of the most vexing questions I’ve wrestled with as an adult, namely: How can I make sense of the fact that my childhood beliefs about God were largely the result of the culture I was raised in? Wouldn’t I have had very different beliefs (and felt just as certain about those beliefs) if I had been raised elsewhere? Perhaps more importantly, how can we ever hope to find true peace—to build Zion—when the world is full of quirky differences and contradictory views about God? 

As he does throughout the book, Davis explores these questions with a spirit of humor and curiosity. He says that what might initially appear to be irreconcilably different views of God might only seem that way because we’re each embedded in different cultural contexts. To illustrate this point, Davis suggests that we imagine what it would be like to meet an alien who experiences colors as sound. Whereas you see the color green, this alien would hear it as a particular kind of buzzing. “You are responding to the same thing,” Davis writes, “but with different experiences and concepts.” 

A similar thing is happening, Davis suggests, with the varieties of religious experiences around the world. We’re each responding to the same thing, but we experience that same thing through the concepts that are familiar to us because of our unique cultural context. “Our spiritual experiences might really be traceable to God, but this phenomenal appearance (the God we perceive) is a kind of intermediate figure between us and God. Call it an angel, or a vision, or a heavenly Buddha. But whatever you want to call it, God must enter our mind through our own sensory experience, as shaped with our own concepts.” (148)

This is a wonderful, hopeful, and loving worldview. It means that we must learn to hold each “phenomenal appearance” lightly, knowing that any phenomenal appearance cannot fully capture the infinite capacity of God. It means that God is at work throughout the entire world in a variety of cultural contexts. It also means that each tradition has a unique purpose to play in building Zion, and that Zion is bigger than any single tradition. As LDS apostle Orson Whitney once wrote, “God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of his great and marvelous work. The Latter-day Saints cannot do it all. It is too vast, too arduous, for any one people.” 

Of course, all of this is quite abstract. In practice, I’m not trying to figure out how to get along with every person in the entire world. I’m just trying to figure out how to get along with the people I interact with on a daily basis—my family and friends, quirks and all. 

Davis understands this and writes about how to translate these ideas into our lived experience. Citing the work of historian Don Bradley, he points out that Joseph Smith claimed that the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism is to “embrace all truth, let it come from where it may” but that Smith later also proclaimed that friendship is the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism. 

Proclaiming that two distinct things are the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism might seem contradictory, but Davis sees another way to think about it. “My own preferred reading,” Davis writes, “is that embracing the truths one finds in another is just what friendship is about.” (153) It’s a lovely interpretation of Smith’s words, suggesting that a) Mormonism is fundamentally about friendship and that b) friendship is fundamentally about embracing the truth in each other. 

Put another way, the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism is the portal into Zion. It’s a way into peacemaking, which Davis also explores in these chapters. He notes that there are two ways of finding peace: either through conquering another person via argument or through finding “peace through friendship.” For Davis, finding peace through friendship happens when we stop “trying to win an argument” and instead take on a posture of curiosity, allowing ourselves to be open to their differences—their views, their flaws, and their quirks.

This is the practice of Zion—flawed people learning to understand other flawed people and create something completely new together in the process. 

Where will this practice lead us? It’s impossible to know. When we practice this way we can’t help but transform into a new way of being. As the scholar Wayne Booth puts it, when we open ourselves up to love, we are “committed to the possibility of conversion” away from our current position. Love, in this way, always retains a sense of openness and malleability, without ever completely letting go of one’s inner integrity.

“In a deeply divided world,” reads the back of the Dispatches from Mormon Zion, “how can people find common ground?” On every page, Davis shows how it’s possible—through a determined spirit of curiosity and humor that not only tolerates but also delights in our quirks.

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Jon Ogden is the cofounder of Uplift Kids, which helps families explore wisdom and timeless values together. To subscribe to his column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for One Step Enough.

Art from the ‘Marrow’ series by Daniel George.

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Wayfare is pleased to introduce a new column by Jon Ogden, Senior Editor at the magazine and a beautiful thinker. To subscribe to his column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for One Step Enough.

In his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, the poet Christian Wiman tells the story of his evolving faith. He grew up evangelical Christian and had a powerful spiritual experience at church as a twelve-year-old, only to later reject his tradition and become an “ambivalent atheist” in college.

Then, when he was nearly forty, he fell in love and got married. The experience renewed a sense of divine love in him. “I don’t think the human love preceded the divine love, exactly,” he writes. “But it was human love that reawakened divine love.” Out of this love, he and his spouse started praying together—“spontaneously,” Wiman writes, “though we’d been away from any sort of organized religion for years.” He felt what he called an “assent to a faith that had long been latent within me.”

Tragically, less than a year after he got married, he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable form of cancer. That’s when he was drawn to belong to a church community again. As he tells it, “My wife and I found ourselves—and that’s just what it felt like, that suggestion of passivity and chance—walking through the doors of the little church at the end of our block. I’d passed right by the church every day for three years on my way to the train and work downtown, but I couldn’t even have told you what denomination it was. I wasn’t tuned in to churches. Or to Christianity. I was, however, tuned in to something.”

It took time and genuine wrestling—often in the form of frank debates with the church’s preacher—for Wiman to settle into church life again, but he did. “I needed a form for the faith,” he says, “the inchoate faith that I was already feeling.”

A form for the faith.

Christian Wiman’s story of returning to a religious form isn’t an isolated event. As a report from the Wheatley Institute reveals, roughly 1 in 5 people who have stepped away from religion eventually return to it.

The report explores why these “reconversions” happen and finds that—just as in Christian Wiman’s story—the experience is often tied both to love (human and divine) and to life circumstances (e.g., a marriage, a diagnosis, or a new child). One study cited in the report says that those who returned were those who had experienced “love, respect, and patience” instead of judgment for having taken “a different path.” Another study found that “in almost every narrative, the reconversion process focuses on a new or rekindled relationship with God.” And another study revealed that this “reconnection with God came through intimate, individualized, and spiritual experiences.” This intimacy and individuality is key, since, according to that same study, “none of our participants mentioned specific resources produced by religious organizations as foundational to the resolution of their faith crisis.”

In short, these reconversions didn’t happen through calculated means—through apologetic efforts from a sanctioned church source. They didn’t happen because someone encountered a logical argument or an official church talk that brought them back. They happened because love worked its way.

What does this mean for those who long for someone to return to religion?

The answer is both simple and complicated.

In its simple form, the answer is the same for everyone, regardless of religious affiliation or disaffiliation: The answer is love. As the Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila wrote, the spiritual path consists of two parts: loving God and loving each other. And how do we know we are on this path? “The most reliable sign that we are following both of these teachings,” writes Teresa, “is that we are loving each other.” That’s the path. No one’s above it.

But the path is complicated because the outcome of our love cannot be predetermined. Sometimes we love and the other person never returns to the fold. Sometimes we love and we are changed. And sometimes we love and the person returns to religion, but not in the way we may have envisioned.

“[Love] does not insist on its own way,” writes the apostle Paul.

Similarly, Joseph Smith says, “If I esteem mankind to be in error shall I bear them down? No! I will lift them up, and in his own way if I cannot persuade him my way is better! I will ask no man to believe as I do.”

This is wise advice both for those who stay in religion and for those who leave. In either case, love is eclipsed when there’s an inflexible demand to adhere only to our pre-scripted outcome—a demand that results in misery. As the Bhagavad Gita says, “Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of their action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.”

Love, by contrast, “casts out fear” and replaces it with trust. It holds faith that whatever the fruits of love will be, they will be better than what we demand must happen.

Of course, none of this means that we must erase ourselves, deny our individual desires, or accept cruelty from anyone. Love requires self-respect, which entails not only hearing what the other person wants but also stating what we want in a relationship. Without self-respect, it’s not love.

Nor does any of this mean that differences of beliefs don’t come with an immense price tag or an almost unbearable grief. Anyone whose family has been disrupted by differences of belief knows the potential aftermath—traditions upended, future plans unraveled, certain values up for grabs. In my Latter-day Saint tradition, this rupture can lead to deep worries about whether kids and grandkids will fall to substance abuse, whether a spouse will break marriage vows, whether traditions like prayer or going to church together are now off the table, and much more. A shift in belief can carry effects that disrupt daily life and ripple for decades.

In times of grief, it can help to realize just how universal this story is—and how many times it’s happened throughout history. None of us are alone in the pain that stems from disagreements about belief, whether we stay in or leave a religion.

To give just one example: One of my ancestors named Charles Layton was born in Bedfordshire, England in 1832 to Bathsheba Layton and an unknown father. When he was a teenager, Charles and two of his friends decided one night that they were going to disrupt a sermon by some Latter-day Saint missionaries, but were instead so moved by the missionaries’ sermon that they converted and got baptized. Two years later, at the age of eighteen, Charles left his family and took the seven-week voyage from England to New Orleans before making his way to join the Latter-day Saints in Utah.

Bathsheba never saw Charles again. “My dear son,” she wrote in an 1864 letter, “you do not say anything about coming home to see us. We should all like to see you very much.” She continued, “You say you wanted to know whether your sisters remember you.” (She doesn’t say whether they do, implying that no, they don’t.) “Now you wanted to know whether they would join the Mormons. They said they think they never shall.”

In the letter, I sense pain that stemmed from a disagreement about belief, perhaps compounded by the fact that Charles had already taken a second wife by that point. It makes me think of what life was like even earlier in my family history when the Romans forced my Celtic ancestors to convert to Christianity, which almost certainly disrupted familial ties as well.

In each case, my ancestors likely felt a sense of searing pain and an inevitable acceptance of the powerlessness we all feel because we cannot control the beliefs or actions of those who are close to us.

What can we do in light of this pain and powerlessness?

We can choose to stay soft, open, and humble to the possibility that we might have something to gain from people whose beliefs differ from our own. That’s love. It’s what Jesus pointed to in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, which he directed to those “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” In the parable, a Pharisee thanks God that he is “not like other people” while the tax collector bows his head to God and pleads for mercy. The Pharisee is closed off and full of contempt. The tax collector is open and, presumably, full of love.

Love shifts us away from an insistence that we alone are righteous (and therefore always deserve to get our way) toward a realization that there are new paths that can only be discovered through our encounters with each other. In this sense, love integrates each of our gifts into a new way of being together.

On this note, I think again of Christian Wiman, whose return to religion wasn’t a flat retreading of his fundamentalist evangelical upbringing (likely to the disappointment of some of his friends and family). Neither did his return to religion stem from a complete buy-in of the propositional truth claims taught in the church that sat a block away from his house. Rather, Wiman integrated the hard-earned intellectual gifts from his years as an atheist alongside a surprising discovery that in order to grow in community, faith has to take some form.

And yet even here Wiman is open to many possibilities. While he sympathizes with the view that your native religion might have “such a bone-deep hold on you that, as with a native language, it’s your only hope for true religious fluency,” he doesn’t insist that this view is an incontrovertible truth—that it’s the one true form that faith can take. “I have friends whose patchwork religious lives have a hard-earned authenticity to them,” he writes. In other words, for Wiman, there’s always an underlying sense of trust, not so much in the specific outcome, but instead in the transformative discipline of love itself.

It’s terribly difficult to have faith in all of this—to stay soft and open and strong at an individual and cultural level. But it is the best hope for all people, including those of us in the broader Latter-day Saint context. As Joseph Smith said, “In reality and essence we do not differ so far in our religious views but that we could all drink into one principle of love.”

Do we have the faith to drink into this one principle of love? Can we develop the capacity to trust—whether we consider ourselves “in” or “out” of religion—that whatever emerges through love will be fruit worth tasting?

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Jon Ogden is Co-Founder at UpliftKids.org, which helps families explore wisdom and timeless values together. He envisions a future that transcends the worst of the past and includes the best. Subscribe to his column by clicking here to manage notifications and select One Step Enough.

Art by Amanda Yim.

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It’s terrible to admit, but for a long time I used lines from Jesus to sneer at the rich. It was only logical, I told myself, to say along with him that “you can’t serve God and wealth” or “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word,” or “do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,” or half a dozen other lines. With these verses I felt justified — superior — as a money-strapped college student. I believed I was simply trying to be like Jesus, who reserved his harshest language for the rich and the powerful and who lived a life of few possessions.

And yet, as happens every time I try to logic my way into using scripture as a bludgeon, my heart hurt. Part of me knew that my sneering was an ego game. 

I started to soften only after I got a basic salaried job and had enough money that I could spend more than fifty dollars at a time without spiraling into a panic. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was happier, and I was happier largely because I had a bit of money. 

Then one day as I taught a Sunday school lesson on the parable of the rich fool, something shifted in me. We read about how the fool decides to tear down his barns and build bigger ones to store his surplus grain. “You have ample goods laid up for many years,” the fool tells himself. “Relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But God replies, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” Then Jesus spells out the takeaway: “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” 

As we unpacked the story, I leaned into the angle that the fool’s error was that he stored his wealth for himself, and that we should be cautious of doing the same thing. But the class didn’t like that. They said that the problem had more to do with the fact that the fool wanted to relax, eat, drink, and be merry. How could that be, I asked, since Jesus’s first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding and since he described himself as someone who eats and drinks? Jesus wasn’t opposed to merriment. He was opposed to storing wealth. After all, in the only two scenes we see him interact with rich men, he tells one to sell everything he has and give the money to the poor, and he praises the other only after learning that he gives away half of what he owns.

“But what’s so wrong with storing wealth?” someone asked. 

I responded with a canned line about how storing wealth is selfish. And that’s when something shifted in me. I realized as I spoke the words that I didn’t believe them. Or rather I admitted to myself that I, too, would genuinely feel better if my spouse and I could store up some wealth for our kids and not be so stressed about running out of savings — even though it meant we would technically be saving money and even though we were technically rich, at least on an international scale, with our basic income. 

I didn’t know what to make of this realization. Were Jesus’s views of wealth misguided? Was storing up wealth not the big deal he made it out to be? Or maybe Jesus was right for his particular perspective as a first-century unmarried Jew, but my context as someone who was trying to build up a modest retirement account for my family in the 21st century was different? 

What I didn’t see at the time but what should have been obvious is that Jesus exaggerates. 

He exaggerates in the parable of the rich fool, and he exaggerates (often humorously) elsewhere. “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away,” he says. And, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” And, “How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?”

We can only assume that Jesus didn’t mean such things literally. (Otherwise, the world would be full of one-eyed Christians!) 

So why the hyperbole? After all, Jesus could have said, “Rich people risk becoming disconnected from their fellow human beings such that they can no longer access true spiritual peace.” That’s literally true. But it’s limp. It lacks the visceral verve and pop carried in dramatic statements about eyes, needles, and planks.

Hyperbole is memorable. It lodges in the mind. It gets in the guts. And getting in the guts wakes people up. It moves them to act. So when Jesus tells a story about a rich fool deciding to tear down his barns and build new ones only to croak that very night, the takeaway isn’t a simple “don’t store wealth,” as I had assumed years ago as a fumbling Sunday school teacher. 

The takeaway is directional, suggesting that we must turn away from the natural tendency to endlessly ask, “How can I get more?” and instead more frequently ask, “How can I give more?” It’s about developing a generous disposition—one where we don’t cling to our possessions.

This is a universal lesson. The Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo tells a story of a king who lived in a palace full of endless riches while his guru lived simply with only a loincloth and a clay bowl. One day the king was in the garden listening to his guru teach mindfulness when a servant came rushing up, shouting, “Master! Come quickly! There’s a fire in the palace, and we must put it out!” In response, the king, fully embodying the teachings, only said, “Do not disturb me. I am learning mindfulness and am not concerned with what I own.” But the guru, surprisingly still caught in desire, stood up in a panic, saying, “I must go. My bowl is in the palace!”

Such exaggerated and humorous stories wake us up and call for introspection. How are we like the panicking guru? How are we like the rich fool? Such stories, again, are not meant literally. They’re meant directionally. They help us stretch beyond our natural tendencies, whoever we are, toward something more divine.

Do you need to give away all your wealth and possessions? Should you become so unattached to what you own that you would let a fire consume it all? Personally, none of that strikes me as wise.

But in a world of excess wealth and dire poverty, couldn’t most of us do far more to head in that direction?

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Jon Ogden is a Wayfare Senior Editor and co-Founder at Uplift Kids, a lesson library and curriculum for families to explore wisdom and timeless values together.

Art by J. Kirk Richards, @jkirkrichards

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On May 9th, 1969, in the midst of ongoing tensions about segregated swimming pools, Fred Rogers did something simple yet moving on an episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. He invited a Black police officer played by François Clemmons to dip his feet in a pool with him.

It’s easy to forget how severe tensions were at the time. Steeped in racism, some people threw nails into pools and beat up Black people who tried to swim with them. In one instance a hotel manager in Florida got so angry he dumped acid in the hotel pool when he saw a Black family swimming in it.

Like so much of what Mr. Rogers did on his TV program, the moment with François Clemmons subtly referenced his Christian faith without giving any sense of superiority. It called attention to the importance of the second great commandment, to love your neighbor. 

It also alluded to a verse from the Sermon on the Mount: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”

At first glance, this connection might seem like a stretch. How is dipping your feet in a pool connected to being perfect? 

Back in high school, I memorized “be ye perfect” as part of the scripture mastery program for my Latter-day Saint seminary class. At the time, I assumed it was a command to never have a sexy thought. (Not great for someone with scrupulous tendencies!) I didn’t realize it back then, but I had overlooked a crucial word in the verse: Therefore. 

“Be ye therefore perfect.”

Therefore points to the verses that precede it, verses that talk about how God’s love is perfect, universal, for all people—just like the rain and the rays of the sun.

Given this, a paraphrase of the passage might read:

You have heard that it has been said that you should love provincially—that you should only love people who are part of your tribe. But I say that you should love all people, just as God sends rain and sunshine to all people. You should therefore love universally like God does.

This is the subtle message behind Mr. Rogers putting his feet in the pool: Our love should be for everyone.1

Of course, if you sit with these verses long enough, you realize that the message is even more troubling, challenging, and uncomfortable than I’ve portrayed it above. This is perhaps most immediately clear in the Contemporary English Version of the Bible, which reads:

“You have heard people say, ‘Love your neighbors and hate your enemies.’ But I tell you to love your enemies and pray for anyone who mistreats you. Then you will be acting like your Father in heaven. He makes the sun rise on both good and bad people. And he sends rain for the ones who do right and for the ones who do wrong. 

If you love only those people who love you, will God reward you for this? Even tax collectors love their friends. If you greet only your friends, what's so great about this? Don't even unbelievers do that? But you must always act like your Father in heaven.”

Again, there is the call to love everyone just as God sends rain on everyone. But there is also a call to specifically love “bad people” and “the ones who do wrong” (or the evil and the unjust, as it says in the King James Version). 

So the passage isn’t only saying to do what Fred Rogers did by putting his feet in a pool with a friendly neighbor. It’s also saying—as difficult and uncomfortable and perhaps nearly impossible as it may be—to love those who do wrong.

It’s saying to love the hotel manager who dumped acid in the pool. 

Loving an oppressor like that might feel like a step beyond the pale. How can we love someone who did something so horrific?

Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of this universal love during his fight for civil rights. “What do you mean,” he asked rhetorically, “when you say love those who are oppressing you and love those who are exploiting you and those who are violently seeking to destroy you? Certainly when I talk about love at this point I am not talking about emotional bosh. I am not talking about some sentimental or even some affectionate emotion. I am talking about something much deeper.” 

For Martin Luther King, Jr., this love entailed seeing the fullness of every human being. He says that the oppressor (the type of person who would dump acid in a pool) is acting from the fear instilled in him from his cultural upbringing. “At times his school taught him that way,” King says. “At times his church taught him that way. At times his family taught him that way. And the thing to do is to change the structure and the evil system, so that he can grow and develop as a mature individual devoid of prejudice. And this is the kind of understanding and goodwill that the nonviolent resister can follow if he is true to the love ethic.”

We must each face the uncomfortable reality that if we had been raised the same way as an oppressor, chances would be higher that we too would behave like an oppressor, despite our agency to choose otherwise. And if we did, we would also likely be convinced that our actions were justified. 

If this were the case, how would we ever change? Only by being seen fully for who we were, who we are, and who we might become—past, present, and future. Only then might we feel soft enough to change. 

Seeing someone fully like this is not a weak position. It takes strength to see a person’s past. It takes strength to imagine redemptive futures. It takes strength to fight a corrupt system while loving the people ensnared in it, oppressed and oppressor alike. 

It also takes strength to love universally and still demand accountability. I mean, we can understand the hotel manager’s life circumstances and also put him in jail. After all, in its full expression universal love encompasses the actions of justice. (This might have been another subtle reference from Fred Rogers, who sat next to Officer Clemmons, dressed in full uniform—suggesting the need for restorative justice.) 

Today our conflicts and divisions are wide and varied. Religious vs. secular, believers vs doubters, right vs. left, old vs. young, etc. There’s a strong pull to choose your team and create purity tests—to claim that those who don’t agree with you are a “them” and that only those who are on your team are pure. 

But when you see yourself and others fully, you realize that there ultimately are no teams. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either,” writes Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” There is only endless complexity unfolding inside and between each of us, an ever-shifting blend of good and bad—a hope for a brighter future together.

And still the rain keeps falling and the sun keeps shining on us all.

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Jon Ogden is a Wayfare Senior Editor and co-Founder at UpliftKids.org, a lesson library and curriculum for families to explore wisdom and timeless values together.

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When I was seven years old, my grandma offered me twenty dollars to read the Book of Mormon ahead of my baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

The task started well, as I’d already heard the opening stories many times. But roughly 80 pages in, thick into the Isaiah chapters, I was overwhelmed. My eyes dutifully looked at each word, but I understood nothing. It was beyond my abilities. Eventually, for a stretch of at least 50 pages, I just read the tiny summaries at the start of each chapter and called it good. That’s how I finished the book before my baptism.

My grandma gave me the prized twenty-dollar bill at the Salt Lake City airport, minutes before she left on an LDS mission. I held that bill in my hands, dreaming of my purchasing prospects (a discount game for my Nintendo Entertainment System, I’m sure). 

But on my way out of the airport, I lost the bill. Did I drop it on the escalator? Did it fall out of my pocket where I’d been sitting? My parents helped me look for it, but it was gone. I didn’t have the heart to tell my grandma, and part of me decided that my loss was simply God’s retribution for skimming chapters. I deserved to lose the money.

I read the Book of Mormon (really read it) many times in the years that followed, such that by the time I left on my mission I felt like I knew it deeply and was ready to convert the world. During a particularly naive moment of zeal, I even told my high school girlfriend just before I left that everyone would convert to Mormonism if they could only hear our message explained clearly enough. That’s what I was going to do.

An Expanding World

Imagine my surprise and disappointment when reality proved far more complicated than my teenage self assumed. Despite my best attempts to explain the message, almost no one I spoke to during my mission converted.

My mission experience expanded my world, which only continued to expand when I returned home, started college, and did two stints abroad, visiting cathedrals and museums full of biblical art across Europe. 

That’s when I realized that I’d still never read the Bible cover to cover. The task had always felt daunting. How could I make sense of Leviticus, Ezekiel, or Chronicles? My reading comprehension had thankfully improved over the years, but I knew I would need guidance. So, for more than a year, I read scholarly books about the Bible alongside different translations of the text. 

I soon realized how little I knew about anything beyond the scope of the curated Sunday School lessons I was raised with. Once again, I felt overwhelmed — like I was at the limits of my abilities. Even if I could grasp what a handful of scholars thought about the book, how would I ever understand the thousands of interpretations from every Christian and Jewish sect throughout history, much less the original languages the book was written in? It would take a lifetime, I knew, to comprehend it all.

And that was just Christianity. Around the same time, as I’ve recounted elsewhere, I was also reading wisdom texts from eastern religions—the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, and so on. The more I read, the more I realized that if it would take a lifetime for me to understand all the nuances of Christianity, it would take many lifetimes to understand all the nuances of each tradition around the world. It was simply too much. If I thought about the sheer expanse of everything I didn’t know, I felt overwhelmed—like I was going crazy.

The View From Nowhere

Some people deal with this overwhelm by taking what the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls a “view from nowhere.” They believe that the only way forward is to try to become impartial spectators, scrutinizing each tradition like a medical student bent over a dissecting table. 

But living traditions can’t pass the view-from-nowhere test (consisting, as they do, of flawed human beings rather than lifeless objects), so those who embrace this view often reject traditional religion altogether, becoming either secular atheists or spiritual but not religious. 

I sympathize. There’s something freeing, after all, about sloughing off a tradition’s unpleasant cultural baggage, and there’s an allure to picking and choosing each tradition’s best aspects and leaving the worst behind. I’d even go so far as to say that periodically taking the view from nowhere is essential for seeing the flaws of one’s own tradition. (We can’t be self aware without some distance.)

And yet, taken too far, the view from nowhere is a dead end. Those who hold it too tightly develop an evasive, detached approach to life, cutting themselves off from institutional, civic, and sometimes even familial responsibilities. Compared to an unrealized ideal, every community is a disappointment, a total let down. So those who tightly grip the view from nowhere tend to favor whatever impulse speaks to them in the moment. It’s the “follow your heart” model of life, shorn of any sense of the fact that all of us are forever and unmistakably connected to each other and therefore have a responsibility for each other.

The View From Somewhere

The view from somewhere, by contrast, is grounded in responsibility for others, particularly those where we live.

It’s a lesson that surfaces in traditions around the world—a lesson I didn’t initially see when I first started digging into wisdom texts. During that first pass, I mostly just saw the passages of universal love I was hoping to see. “Within yourself let grow a boundless love for all creatures,” from the Buddha or “universal love is the way of the wise,” from the Chinese sage Mozi—that sort of thing. But the more I sat with these traditions, the more I saw just how much they also call for people to commit to and sacrifice for a (flawed) local community in time and place. 

In Buddhism, this community is known as the sangha. “We need to stick to the sangha, build the sangha, and not be separated from the sangha,” says the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. (He adds, “If we are living with a sangha that has many weaknesses and shortcomings, one which does not operate according to our wishes, then we should know what to do in order to help improve the quality of our sangha.”) 

In Confucianism, this community is the family, among other things. “When you serve your mother and father it is okay to try to correct them once in a while,” said Confucius. “But if you see that they are not going to listen to you, keep your respect for them and don't distance yourself from them.” 

And Hinduism speaks of the dharma, or your duty to your community. “It is better to strive in one’s own dharma than to succeed in the dharma of another,” reads the Bhagavad Gita. “Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind.”

In short, I found that if you sit with the wisdom traditions long enough—if you expand widely enough—you see that they encourage people to go local, to sacrifice for an embodied community. They all take a view from somewhere. 

I worry I might be misunderstood here, as though I’m saying that no one should ever reject anything from their lineage or their community. That’s not it. Taken too far, the view from somewhere can be just as pathological as the view from nowhere. It’s the story of a spouse who stays in an abusive marriage out of fear of the unknown. It’s the story of a mother whose dreams are erased in her sacrifice for her family and her church. It’s the story of a father who becomes a “yes man,” willing to silence his inner voice to climb the corporate ladder. 

Those who get too wrapped up in the view from somewhere cling to their commitments even when those commitments make them miserable. That’s not a good life. 

The good life blends the gifts of the view from nowhere with the gifts of the view from somewhere, adapting based on where we live, who we live with, and who we are. It’s context aware.

What does this look like in practice? 

I don’t know. We each live in different contexts and have a uniquely personal path and relationship with other people and the divine. Unlike my teenage self, I don’t presume to know what God has in store for anyone else. I’m still trying to discern what all of this means for me. 

I only know that whenever I feel overwhelmed in this expansive universe, it helps to remember that I grew up somewhere and live somewhere. This fact grounds me in time and place and (helpfully) limits my options. I don’t have to understand everything or solve every problem in the world. I can instead commit to and sacrifice for my communities (the view from somewhere)—all while keeping one eye open to the flaws and shortcomings of my culture (the view from nowhere).

In the end, I have empathy for my seven-year-old self who strained to understand the antiquated language of the Book of Mormon and the layers of meaning in Isaiah. He deserved that twenty dollars. In so many ways, I’m still him—straining to make sense of a complicated world and knowing, as the wisdom traditions ultimately tell us, that we don’t exist in theory.

We only exist in place.

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Jon Ogden is a Wayfare Senior Editor and co-Founder at UpliftKids.org, a lesson library and curriculum for families to explore wisdom and timeless values together.

Art by Edvard Munch.

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One Sunday morning when I was a teenager, a member of the stake high council rattled my world when he told our congregation that his favorite book was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. 

He didn’t hedge. He just said it, with conviction. 

I didn’t know you could do that. 

After the meeting I tracked him down and asked if he’d let me borrow his copy of the book, which he happily agreed to do.

When I returned home and started reading Meditations, I didn’t comprehend most of what I read. But I sensed the book’s quiet power. Here was an emperor of Rome—possibly the most powerful human alive at the time—writing notes to himself full of humility, grace, and wisdom.

“Very little is needed to make a happy life,” Aurelius wrote. 

“Remember that neither the future nor the past pains thee, but only the present.”

“Nothing is required of us than to accomplish well the task at hand.”

The more I read, the more I simultaneously felt exhilarated and confused. Here were words that stirred the same spiritual feelings within me that I felt while reading LDS scripture. And yet Meditations lacked the gold-leafed edges and thin, near-transparent paper I’d come to associate with sacred texts.

What did that mean?

I wasn’t sure, but I wanted more of the feelings that Meditations stirred in me.

Not long after, I discovered a book of conversations between a Christian reverend and a Hindu devotee that helped me confidently cross a threshold toward expansive spirituality. In the book, the Hindu devotee claimed that the New Testament phrase “all scripture is given by inspiration of God” indicates that Christians should be open to a spiritually expansive worldview—one that includes the scripture of Hinduism among other traditions.

The reverend said that he initially disagreed with such a view but that he had recently discovered a passage from a book that made him think twice.

Which book?

The Book of Mormon.

“​​I went through my reference library and found a wonderful statement in The Book of Mormon,” the reverend said, “which, mind you, is a book that I generally have no connection with and rarely ever read.”

Then he showed the Hindu devotee a passage in 2 Nephi 29: 

“Know ye not that there are more nations than one? Know ye not that I, the Lord your God . . . bring forth my word unto the children of men, yea, even upon all the nations of the earth? Wherefore murmur ye, because that ye shall receive more of my word? . . . Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written.”

“This is wonderful,” the Hindu responded. 

“I really like it quite a bit,” the reverend said, “although it definitely substantiates your point of view.”

There I was, reading LDS scripture through the lens of someone who wasn’t LDS and realizing that yes, this was my tradition. 

The Latter-day Saint call for an expansive approach to spirituality goes well beyond the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith claimed that “one of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may.” The Doctrine and Covenants urges the saints to “seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom.” The thirteenth article of faith says to seek “anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy.” Brigham Young said that whether the truth surfaces “with the Universalists, or the Church of Rome, or the Methodists, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Shakers, or any other of the various and numerous different sects,” we should gather it. And Orson Whitney said, “God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of his great and marvelous work. The Latter-day Saints cannot do it all. It is too vast, too arduous, for any one people.”

In some sense, this expansive approach to spirituality is the work of ongoing restoration. After all, the restoration isn’t a lifeless process, like bringing a classic car back to its original condition. That kind of project might be a fine hobby, but, as Patrick Mason wrote in his book Restoration, “We weren’t put on earth to watch reruns, no matter how good those old episodes were.” 

Restoration is the work of digging deep to tap into the living source that’s always already here and then living from that place: here. It’s the work of planting seeds in soil, allowing the nutrients inside and outside ourselves to do the rest. “The farmer sleeps at night and is up and around during the day,” Jesus said, “Yet the seeds keep sprouting and growing, and he doesn't understand how. It is the ground that makes the seeds sprout and grow into plants that produce grain.” This ground of being—the living source itself—breaks us open for growth. In time, it also brings death to our old selves, which pass away like seeds newly sprouted. As Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.” Death gives way to life in an ever-present restoration.

And so I continue to dig and plant, searching for words and practices that sprout something in me. I’m struck to stillness reading Taoist questions such as, “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?” and “Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?” I’m called to care for life when I read the Buddha say, “The wise live without injuring nature, as the bee drinks nectar without harming the flower.” And I feel hope when I hear the repetitive conviction of Julian of Norwich, who wrote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Mystics and meditators from all traditions offer these fruits and so much more—brothers and sisters who’ve experienced the same eternal living source I yearn to live aligned with.

Some Latter-day Saints might worry about what will happen if members embrace this expansive approach to spirituality. “If we embrace wisdom from anywhere,” the thinking might go, “won’t some people leave the fold?” The answer is that they might. Anything is possible. But consider the spiritual hunger of Joseph Smith—a hunger that led him to explore the Apocrypha, Hebrew and Latin languages, myriad translations of scripture, and more. The founder of the LDS faith had a deep hunger for expansive spirituality, and it was from this hunger that revelation poured through him, the way it does through us all. Hunger feeds revelation.

So I ask: What if we don’t embrace wisdom wherever it’s found? What if we aren't expansive in our spirituality and instead are content to simply maintain it? What’s the risk?

One risk is that we won’t be ready for the inevitable exposure that upcoming generations will have to these texts. Two hundred years ago, these texts were available to only a subset of scholars. Today, by contrast, the words of wise women and men around the world (past and present) are instantly accessible to read or listen to via our phones. What happens when the next generation encounters these words, as many inevitably will? Will they be troubled by the fact that such texts are full of wisdom, as I was when I first encountered the words of Marcus Aurelius? Or will they celebrate, knowing such wisdom is part of one great whole? 

We also risk getting stuck in the zero-sum debate that rises from a paradigm of either/or, in/out, and pure/impure. Chances are that we all know what it feels like for someone to engage us in such a way—to not see the nuance in our position and instead flatten us to being “the bad guy.” People of one sect do it to people of another, believers do it to nonbelievers, and nonbelievers do it to believers. Embracing an expansive spirituality allows us to be more resilient to such attacks because we play by a different set of rules. We sidestep the premise that we are 100 percent right and another group is 100 percent wrong. We realize that we can find wisdom even from those we disagree with and in doing so turn “enemies” to friends, as Jesus urged people to do. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we risk stunting our individual and collective growth —like trees stuck in planters too small for their roots. Such trees never reach their full height, and when we limit our sources of growth, we risk the same result. We need firm soil, true, especially early in life when we’re sensing into identity and community, and in this way, a planter is a solid place to start. But if our spiritual life grows stale, we suffer. And, as part of the body of Christ, when we suffer, the whole community suffers. And so we must faithfully follow that which nurtures genuine life in us, for the kingdom of God contains people who are alive.

In one of the most famous passages of an ancient Hindu text, a boy is sent to school for twenty years to study the scriptures of his tradition. He returns full of knowledge but also full of unfounded confidence, certain he’s discovered all the insight that the world could possibly offer him. 

The boy’s father, sensing his son's confidence and knowing it to be misplaced, decides to teach him a lesson. 

“Go and get the seed of a banyan tree,” he tells his son. 

So the son does.

“Now break it open and tell me what you see,” the father says.

“I see nothing,” the son says. 

“Exactly,” the father responds. “And yet from this invisible essence, a tiny seed grows into an enormous banyan tree.”

Then the father tells his son that he, too, is this invisible essence. “You are that,” he says. 

Eventually, as the father continues to present his son with a series of similar analogies, the son returns to a state of humility, realizing that even though he had studied the scriptures of his own tradition for twenty years, he still didn’t know all the mysteries of life and should instead remain open for new growth. 

It’s a story rich with insights, one of which is that we should never convince ourselves that we’ve “made it.” The confidence we gain from studying the wisdom of our own tradition (or the wisdom of any tradition, for that matter) lies not in our possession of knowledge, but in the source of that knowledge.

“My work is not yet finished,” reads 2 Nephi 29:9,11, “For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them.”

As we remain open to this divine reality—this invisible essence spoken of in the Hindu story of a father and son—we can’t help but grow. What will such growth look like? How does it work? Like the sower in the parable of Jesus, we can’t know. And yet the more we remain open, allowing the divine to work through us all, the more we’ll grow toward a Zion more beautiful than we can imagine.

“Enlarge the place of your tent,” Isaiah writes, “And let them stretch out the curtains of your dwellings; Do not spare.”

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Jon Ogden is co-Founder at UpliftKids.org, a lesson library and curriculum for families to explore wisdom and timeless values together.

Artwork by Paige Crosland Anderson

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