On Tuesday, August 22, 1978, Truman G. Madsen (1926–2009) was working to get a family cabin enclosed before winter arrived in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. He looked at his watch, said “Whoa—gotta go!,” and climbed into the passenger side of the family truck. He traded his overalls for a shirt, tie, and jacket as his son Barney drove him down the canyon to the curb outside the massive new Marriott Center on the campus of Brigham Young University.1 The basketball arena had been adapted for Education Week, the university’s late-summer continuing education program held since 1922. Thousands of Latter-day Saints had gathered inside, hungry for a series of lectures about their founding prophet, Joseph Smith, by one of the university’s most popular professors and its Richard L. Evans Chair of Christian Understanding. The first of Madsen’s two speeches that day (and eight that week) is “The First Vision and Its Aftermath.”2

These speeches culminate a decade of Madsen-led efforts to solidify Latter-day Saint faith in the founding prophet’s first theophany, which had become the Saints’ origin story. “The first vision has come under severe historical attack,” Madsen wrote to the Church’s First Presidency in 1968, referring to the work of Reverend Wesley Walters, a Presbyterian minister in Marissa, Illinois, whose recent article had impeached Smith’s canonized vision narrative as anachronistic.3 When Madsen eyed Walters’s nametag at a Southern Illinois University symposium later that year, he erupted pleasantly, “Wesley Walters! So you’re the one who dropped the bomb on BYU.” Madsen then said, speaking of BYU and its sponsoring church, “They’re giving us all the money we want to try and find answers to you.”4

Madsen’s speech delivers answers to thousands of self-selecting Saints who had come “to give eight hours of undivided—or even divided attention.”5 The audience was well known to Madsen, and he to them. Now in his early fifties, he had long been a popular speaker and a student favorite. Years earlier, BYU student Jeffrey R. Holland (who would become the president of BYU two years after Madsen’s 1978 speech) had sat “spellbound like all the rest” of his peers at one of Madsen’s fireside talks.6 So Madsen knew, as he reflected later, that “I could begin with presumptions and assurances which to others would have appeared startling.”7

When he stepped to the podium, Madsen spoke to the thousands he could see but also to those he later called his “invisible” audience, composed of concerned Saints, whose “penetrating queries about Joseph Smith” were directed to him for answers. “At certain points it is apparent that I was addressing them,” Madsen recalled, “in a kind of underground conversation, more than those present.” In “The First Vision and Its Aftermath,” Madsen performs a strategic counter maneuver against the attack on the Saints’ origin story. Years in the making and tactically skillful, the speech does what a BYU colleague would later describe as arming the children.8

A decade after the speech, Madsen noted: “More than all else I have written or recorded, these cassettes have engendered a return wave, international in scope, of responsive letters and comments.” I first heard this speech while serving as a missionary in Saskatchewan soon after Madsen observed how far it had reached. Some missionary apartments were stocked with the cassettes, and I was one of many missionaries who could not listen to them often or long enough. Madsen’s resonant voice has a distinctive cadence and varied pacing that is entirely lost in transcription. The text reads: “In the earliest account, Joseph speaks of his days in Vermont. There and later in New York Joseph would look up at night and marvel at the symmetry and the beauty and the order of the heavens.” But orally, Madsen actually says,

Let me then dwell for a few moments on the background. In the earliest account Joseph says that even in the days that he was in Vermont—Vermont, where even today there is little pollution and where the sky, at night, is clear. And the Milky Way [pause] is [emphatic] milky. He would look up, at night, and marvel [pause] at the symmetry, and the beauty, and the order [pause] of the heavens.

Here was the inverse of monotone.

It helps that Madsen picked a perfect story. Whatever literary wisdom Joseph Smith lacked, he had instinctively cast himself as a likeable protagonist embattled against the forces of evil, including an actual if unseen devil and his corrupt clergy. Madsen taps that arc to give his listeners a Joseph Smith who raises the stakes on his young self to eternal life and death, reads a Bible verse that launches his quest by going to the woods to ask God for knowledge, and escalates the tension until he is overcome by “thick darkness” and “doomed to sudden destruction.” Just then, as Madsen shows, Smith exerts all his power to call on God, “and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction,” a pillar of light fills the woods where he was praying, vanquishes the evil, and reveals God and Christ, who deliver the knowledge Joseph had desperately lacked.9

Madsen embellishes this story in the positive sense of the word. He further characterizes Joseph and his antagonist, whom he gives a name, Reverend George Lane, and a voice, creating a scene that beats back and forth. It features young Joseph, full of glory and excitement, being robbed of joy by Lane’s rejection, then ending the scene as a martyr. “Shucks, boy, it’s all of the devil” was Madsen’s paraphrase of Lane’s dismissal. “The boy’s smile slowly disappeared.” Joseph “learned early that to testify of divine manifestations was to stir up darkness and to call down wrath. That wrath finally evolved into bullets.” Madsen laces the story with other delights, too, including data points that I had never heard before, delivered so matter-of-factly that they integrated seamlessly into my prior knowledge of Smith’s First Vision. I had known nothing about the four accounts of the First Vision. After hearing the speech, I felt as if I had known them all along, that the Wentworth letter was indeed “well known” to informed people like me. Madsen takes for granted the existence and positive value of multiple vision narratives. Sprinkled throughout are lines like, “In an earlier account he adds that for a time he could not speak, as if his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth.”

The selection of data is a purposeful and powerful act of reshaping Latterday Saint memory, which is constructed of consolidated and unconsolidated components. When people choose how to attend to these components, however subtle or unconscious, they select and relate data components to one another. Relating apparently happens in the brain’s hippocampus. By analogy, groups consolidate collective memories via a social hippocampus, with a person or group selecting, relating, and repeating the memory until it is common knowledge. Madsen selects and relates information strategically, leading to new knowledge in me and many others and forming a novel and improved past that would prove especially usable and resilient.

Even so, I changed my mind about Madsen’s speech. It happened gradually and perhaps ironically. Inspired in part by Madsen’s work, I pursued Joseph Smith’s revelations academically. In that process, I became a different kind of hearer of Madsen’s interpretation. As I gained the will and skill to be source critical, I dissected the text of Madsen’s speeches and found that they had lost much of the power they once offered me. As I learned the academic jargon, the speeches seemed reductive and lacking nuance. They were historically sloppy. Then, in 2003, I heard Madsen speak in person for the first time. It was at the symposium God, Humanity, and Revelation: Perspectives from Mormon Philosophy and History, hosted by Yale Divinity School.

He told about his conversation with some Jesuits. They were trying to understand each other’s theism with mutual respect and rigor. The Jesuits, he said, explained that they could not imagine theism other than classical and could not fathom a God whose purpose could be to raise children quite literally to be equals in his exalted image. Madsen said he explained to his learned Catholic friends that Latter-day Saints could not imagine God’s work to be other than that. Listening to Madsen and then reflecting restored my initial judgment. His lecture on Joseph Smith’s First Vision deserves a place in the pantheon of landmark Latter-day Saint speeches. Truman Madsen is a philosopher. In August 1978, he was doing theology, not history. As he acknowledges from the outset and in his notes, he had relied on the best informed historians but did not presume to be one of them. I had become frustrated at what I perceived to be his historical shortcomings, but all the while he was not trying to do historical work. Rather, he was on a mission to do theological work for the masses, telling historical stories as a means to rhetorical and epistemological ends. Madsen could—as he elsewhere did—speak the language of his Harvard education and engage in erudite exchanges. But if he had done that in the Marriott Center, he would not have reached the masses with the message that God knew the (extra)ordinary boy Joseph Smith, and that that boy came to know God, and that I could know the same thing in the same way. Though Madsen opened my eyes, I had been blind to the work he did. Others saw clearly. Hundreds of people in Madsen’s “invisible” audience wrote to him “expressing what the Joseph Smith tapes had meant to them.” One letter he loved came from an Australian man in his early thirties, saying that he had first heard the talks when he was fifteen. “I spent the next three months listening to them every day,” he said, and credited Madsen with solidifying his faith in Joseph Smith as God’s prophet.

The First Vision and Its Aftermath (1978)

Truman G. Madsen10

Years ago I prepared a paper that went as a kind of tract in New England. We used it at the Joseph Smith Memorial—titled “Joseph Smith Among the Prophets.” It was written, I thought, to a non-Mormon. It attempted to present ten characterizations of prophets that are typical in Judeo-Christian literature. For instance, a prophet is a foreteller; he has prophetic access to the future. Also, prophets have been called “forth-tellers,” meaning that they speak forth boldly in judgment and in recommendation as to their own time. A prophet too is categorized as a man who has authority, who speaks with more than human sanction. He is a recoverer or discoverer of truth. He is an advocate of social righteousness. He is a charismatic, one whose personality manifests something that attracts in a spiritual sense. He is one who endures suffering, and does so radiantly. He is an embodiment of love. He is a seer, meaning that he has the capacity to clearly understand and reveal truth. Finally, among the great prophets of the past, many have been martyrs. In that presentation I simply showed that, under each of those heads, Joseph Smith qualifies as a prophet. If we can use any one of them to characterize a prophet, what can we say of a man who radiates them all?

Today, more intimately than in the Judeo-Christian captions above, we come to a subjective approach to Joseph’s glorious first vision. (I would prefer to call it, for reasons that will soon appear, his first visitation.) Let me begin with a little book work. Nearly nine years ago, in 1969, BYU Studies11 published a collection of the four known written accounts of the First Vision. One was first recorded in 1832; another in 1835, after a visit Joseph had with a Jewish visitor named Joshua;12 there is the 1838 statement, which has been published to the world in the Pearl of Great Price; and finally, the well-known Wentworth letter written in 1842 to the Chicago Democrat,13 in which the Prophet briefly recapitulated his first vision. What was intended by the BYU Studies14 publication was not only to give, as was done, the actual holographs—the handwritten accounts from his different scribes—as he dictated them, but also to provide articles on the context by some of the best LDS scholars.

Let me now dwell for a few moments on the background. In the earliest account, Joseph speaks of his days in Vermont. Vermont where even today the sky is clear, the pollution is little, and the Milky Way is milky. There, and later in New York, Joseph would look up at night and marvel at the symmetry and the beauty and the order of the heavens. Something in him said, as has happened to sensitive souls from the beginning, “Behind that there must be a majestic creator of the heavens.” The contrast between his boyhood awareness and the confusion he saw on this planet was not just difficult; it seared his soul. The divisions he laments in Palmyra were not just among and between others, neighbors and friends; they were in his own family. He had at least one relative in every church in Palmyra, so that his family was utterly spread. Order in heaven, disorder on earth. How could God be responsible for both?

The record makes it transparently obvious15 that before the sacred experience in the Grove it had never occurred to Joseph that all the then influential churches were in error. Notice, the question he put to Jesus Christ when he recovered himself was not, “Is there a true church in the world?” The question was, “Which church is true?” He assumed that at least one had to be true. The answer therefore was all the more striking and startling: “Join none of them.”

Another interesting point about the background is that by reading in the Bible, Joseph had been “struck”—in fact, he says, “Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine.” We think we know that Reverend George Lane may have been the man who first recommended in Joseph Smith’s hearing, “Let him ask of God.” That specific passage in James 1:5 was mentioned in some of the minister’s sermons. A Methodist, he was associated with revivals in western New York. We can’t prove that he was this person, but Joseph later talks of a Methodist preacher he was with soon after the vision, a person who was, he says, “active in the before mentioned religious excitement.” Imagine (and this to me is poignant) Joseph at age fourteen—full as he was of the glory, the remarkable experience, and the excitement of it—recounting his experience to this man (he does not say George Lane, he says he went to this man). And the man’s response was, “Oh no, that could not be of God. Those things don’t happen anymore.”

So to recommend that one lacking wisdom ought to go and pray about it, by all means let him ask of God. But to this man the answer seemed . . . well, too much. Heaven had come too close. We can almost visualize the boy—pureminded, spontaneous, even a little unrestrained, as teenagers are—being struck by the wonder of this marvelous answer to prayer. “Wow! It worked! You told me to do it. I did it.” And the response was, “Shucks, boy, it’s all of the devil.” The boy’s smile slowly disappeared. And he learned early that to testify even to hints of divine manifestations was to stir up darkness and to call down wrath. That wrath finally evolved into bullets.

I have not done justice to the family and their support for him. We have a document from a woman who herself was a Presbyterian, who speaks of Joseph’s early life, when she as a girl, much younger apparently, came and watched him with others of the boys working at her father’s farm. The enemies of Joseph Smith have made out over and over that he was shiftless, lazy, indolent, that he never did a day’s work in his life. The truth, exactly the contrary. The stories radically contradict each other. On the one hand, we hear of this shiftless person, who’s always telling stories aimlessly and never doing a hard day’s work, and in the next breath the anti-Mormons point out that every night at midnight he’s out with his crew digging for silver or buried treasure or something and never finding it, which is hardly indolent; it’s overactive.16 The truth is that, according to this account, a non-Mormon account, her father hired Joseph because he was such a good worker.

Not only that, but because he was able to get the other boys to work. The suspicion is that he did that by the fairly deft use of his fists. I noted that as a suspicion, I don’t say that that is the truth. It is my belief that one of the feelings he had of unworthiness, one of the things for which he asked forgiveness (and his account shows that he did pray for forgiveness prior to the visitations of Moroni), was this physical propensity. He was so strong, so muscular, so physically able, that that was one way he had of solving problems. This troubled him. He did not feel it was consonant with the divine commission he had received.

Mrs. Palmer’s account speaks of “the excitement stirred up among some of the people over [Joseph’s] first vision.” A churchman, she recalls, came to her father “to remonstrate against his allowing such close friendship between his family” and the boy Joseph. But the father, pleased with Joseph’s work on his farm, was determined to keep him on. Of the vision, he said that it was “the sweet dream of a pure-minded boy.” That is before. But then, the daughter reports, Joseph claimed to have had another vision; and this time it led to the production of a book. The churchman came again, and at this point the girl’s father turned against Joseph. But, she adds significantly, by then it was too late. Joseph Smith had a following.

The first members of that following were his family, who supported and loved him with great constancy. In fact, there is no greater example of total familial endurance in history than that of the Smith family. It is true that they had their ups and downs and that William Smith was almost as insecure and unsteady as Hyrum Smith was loyal and unyielding in his faith. But from an overall perspective, one of the strengths of the history of the Church is that the first family held true to each other. Even in the early days of Joseph’s revelations, the father would say to his son, “Do not be disobedient to this heavenly vision.”17

Notice that all four of the accounts of the First Vision describe the struggle Joseph had with the adversary.18 At crucial turning points in the Restoration, Beelzebub, the enemy of righteousness, the prince of darkness, has made his power felt. The First Vision was a natural point of attack. The devil has not, like the rest of us, lost his memory of premortal life. He has not been placed in a physical body and had the veil drawn. He therefore knew Joseph Smith. Later in his life Joseph would say, “Every man [and that would include himself] who has a calling to minister to the inhabitants of the world was ordained to that very purpose in the Grand Council of heaven before this world was.”19 It is no surprise, then, that the adversary would wish to thwart the earnest supplications of the boy Joseph in the Sacred Grove. I believe it is important to observe that it was not the first time someone had prayed for the Lord to answer the hard question, “Where is the truth?” In effect, the response that came to Joseph, this mere boy, was the answer, I believe, to millions of prayers offered down through the centuries on both sides of the veil.

[. . .]

It is significant, I take it, that when the Lord speaks, coming in His glory is he who shall abide the day that the very same reality, namely, His glory should be a blessing, a creative, enhancing, sanctifying thing. And for the wicked, anything but. Corruption cannot endure the presence of God. The same fire that will confirm the worthiness of the faithful will condemn the wickedness of the rest. They, in effect, will lose by purging, and in some cases by death, the very elements of their system that have been corrupted.

The Prophet was not harmed by the experience; he was hallowed by it. Having seen the light, he now saw in it two personages, one of whom said to him, indicating the other, “This is my Beloved Son.” In the Wentworth letter the Prophet adds, speaking of the two, that they “exactly resembled each other in features, and likeness.”20 Notice they not just resembled—they exactly21 resembled each other in features and likeness. My own guess as to his meaning is what we speak of on earth as a family resemblance: “Like father, like son.” The Master looked like his Father.22 Hancock records a discourse in which Joseph Smith said that the Holy Ghost, only the gift of the Holy Ghost, in its special province of revelation, can really enable you to know the Father from the Son in so much that they are alike. Philip asked, “Show us the Father.” The Master replied, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”23 This is not because they are identical but because they are, in appearance as well as in nature, exactly similar.

[. . .]

Next I turn to the emerging point that I have hinted at. Though we do not know how long the Prophet Joseph was in the Grove that day receiving instructions, it probably was longer than is suggested by the outline we have. We know, for example, that he wrote, “Many other things did he say unto me, which I cannot write at this time.”24 So far as I know, he never did commit them to paper. Some critics have pointed out that the Prophet spoke of the visit of angels in connection with his first vision. Some have theorized that he began by asserting that he saw an angel and ended by embellishing it with the claim that he saw the Father and the Son. The truth is that, having described all that we are familiar with about the visitation of the Father and the Son, he says in the closing words of the 1835 account, “I saw many angels in this vision.”25 It is an enforced either-or to say that he either saw the Father and the Son or saw angels. What he saw was both.

It is a fascinating and unanswerable question: Who would have been permitted to be with him in that theophany—what angels were present? We have Joseph Smith’s teaching that angels are either (1) resurrected personages who have lived upon this earth, or (2) the spirits of the just who have lived here and will yet be resurrected, or (3) as in the rare cases in the Old Testament, not-yet-embodied persons who come in anticipation. “There are no angels who minister to this earth but those who do belong or have belonged to it.”26 That narrows it down to this earth, but we do not know much more than that.

Joseph was wearied with his experience in the Grove. The encounter, however long or short, demanded much from him. He says, “I came to myself.”27 I think it inappropriate to say that he had been in a trance or a mystic state. The clearest parallels come from the ancient records of Moses and Abraham and Enoch. Like those prophets of old, Joseph was filled with a spirit which enabled him to endure the presence of God. Is that spirit enervating or is it energizing? My considered answer is, “Yes.” It is both. It demands from us a concentration and a surrender comparable to nothing else possible in this life. But it also confers great capacities that transcend our finite mental, spiritual, and physical powers. In 1832, emerging from the vision on the three degrees of glory28 with his companion in the vision, Sidney Rigdon, the Prophet looked strong, while Sidney looked like he had been through the war.29 To this the Prophet, with a certain humility as also perhaps with a little condescension, said, “Sidney is not as used to it as I am.” But after the First Vision, he was feeble. It was difficult for him to go home. Similarly, in his 1823 encounter with Moroni, the repetitive encounter, he was left weak, and his father sent him home. He couldn’t even climb the fence, though he was usually a strong and vigorous boy. Neibaur reports him saying of his condition immediately following the First Vision, “I . . . felt uncommon feeble.”30

We now turn to some of the theological extensions of this initial insight of the First Vision as the Prophet later taught them. “It is the first principle of the gospel,” he said, “to know for a certainty the character of God.” That is more than saying it is the first principle to know that31 God exists. He doesn’t use the word existence32 at all in this context. You can’t find one argument in Joseph Smith for the existence of God. Why not? I’ll give you the most unkind answer.33 Because one does not begin to argue about a thing’s existence until serious doubts have arisen. The arguments for God are a kind of whistling in the dark. In the absence of experience with God, men have invented arguments to justify the experience of the absence of God. They have built a rational Tower of Babel, from which they comfort themselves with, “We haven’t heard from God, but he must still be there.”

But Joseph wasn’t speculating. He was reporting his firsthand experience. Prophets always have. On the other hand, the philosophers have expended some of the greatest ingenuity of the western world in inventing what turn out to be specious and invalid arguments for the existence of God. No. “It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character [the personality, the attributes] of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another.”34 That is the testimony of Joseph Smith from beginning to end. He is talking about all of us, now. A man, a woman—it is the first principle for any of us. That is where you begin.

[. . .]

That leads to my final point. So often, so often, we are haunted not only with the question of whether we have gone far enough in our own religious experience but also whether we can rely on some things we have previously trusted. Acids eat away at us. Sometimes it is the taunting of other voices; but sometimes it is nothing more profound than our own sins and weaknesses, and the betrayals of the best in ourselves. Doubt naturally follows.

The Master made a strange statement to Thomas. Thomas is categorized as a doubter because he said what the others had said earlier: “I will believe when, and only when, I see.”35 According to Luke, the others virtually rubbed their eyes in disbelief when they did see. It is a beautiful phrase: “They yet believed not for joy.”36 Meaning what? Meaning it was too good to be true. Within days they had seen their Lord crucified, and now he stood before them! They rubbed their eyes. So they too had impending doubts, as did Thomas. The strange words of Jesus are reported by John: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”37

I call that strange because on the surface this statement seems to put a premium on secondhand or distant awareness, almost as if unsupportable faith is more commendable than faith resting on the knowledge of sight. That, I think, is a mistake. What is involved in the statement is the recognition by the Lord and by his prophets that the most penetrating of assurances—the one power, even beyond sight, that can burn doubt out of us and make it, as it were, impossible for us to disbelieve—is the Holy Ghost.

[. . .]

In closing may I offer a word of testimony. Often we are confronted in the world by those who want to believe in God without believing in God. They are willing to affirm that there is something—and that’s about the strongest word they are willing to use—that there is something out there that accounts for things: a principle, a harmonic force, or an ultimate cosmic mystery. How rarely is the testimony welcomed that the Father is in the likeness of the Christ! One reason—and Latter-day Saints can testify of this—is that such personal beings can get involved in your life, changing it, giving specific commandments and counsels, rebuking, approving, or disapproving. A God who is utterly distant stays out of your hair.

Whether or not the Prophet fully anticipated the consequences of his prayer in the Grove, and I’m sure he did not, but he nevertheless fully measured up to those consequences. He never wavered. On one occasion he said, “If I had not actually got into this work and been called of God, I would back out.” But he added—and this shows his integrity—“I cannot back out: I have no doubt of the truth.”38 (Some men having no doubt of the truth have nevertheless backed out, but he did not.) From the Grove experience on throughout his life he knew and welcomed into his life the Father and the Son, “even,” as he was commanded in 1829, “if [he] should be slain.”39 He was true unto life and unto death. To use the word that he re-revealed in our generation, that seals the power of his first and subsequent visitations. Anyone who has enough of the Spirit of God to know that God lives and that Jesus is the Christ, by that same spirit will be brought to recognize that one of the prophets called by the Father and the Son was the prophet Joseph Smith.

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Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, to be published June 2, 2026, by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

To pre-order the full anthology from University of Illinois Press, click here. (Use code S26UIP for a 30% discount!)

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Steven Harper is a professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University and was previously editor in chief of BYU Studies, managing historian, and a general editor of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, and a volume editor of The Joseph Smith Papers. His books include First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (2019).

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand gestures hold well-known meanings.

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Hello. My name’s Eric. I’m a member of the Berkeley Ward but I was invited to speak to you because I have a stake calling where I’m supposed to be useful to the wards’ Sunday Schools. Which isn’t an easy thing to figure out how to do. But I love Sunday School and I’m excited that this year’s course of study is the Old Testament because I love the Old Testament. It has a lot of classic stories and it has a lot of . . . really weird stories. I think both are great.

I’m guessing you had a recent Sunday School lesson about Genesis chapter two, which includes this formula for the soul:

The Lord God formed a person from the dust of the ground,
and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils;
and that person
became:
a living soul.

This ties into one of the funny little ideas we got from Joseph Smith that make us unique among churches even though Genesis literally just said it. Here’s D&C 88:15:

The spirit and the body are the soul of man.

Sometimes we’re a little down on our bodies. I mean, they’re always getting us into trouble or catching the flu or bleeding or something and the idea that our soul is both our spirit and our body sometimes isn’t as easy to believe as imagining our sweet innocent spirit someday floating away on its own, untouchable, safe, harmless—our true soul.

But that’s not what scripture says.

In fact, Joseph Smith even taught that “The devil has no body, [that’s] his punishment.”

So shake your neighbor’s hand and celebrate because that handshake proves you have power over the devil.

But why are bodies so important? We know our Heavenly Parents have bodies and we know that Jesus’s resurrection is one of his key accomplishments—not just because he resurrected himself but because he also made it so we will all be resurrected someday.

Because we need these bodies—both dust and breath.

But why?

Here’s one reason:

We need our bodies in order to discern truth.

Because our bodies do tell us the truth. Not always, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

First, imagine that, right now, a 12-foot-tall Kodiak grizzly bear walks through those doors in the back of the chapel—right now!—then chomps down on the shoulder of someone right there on the back row. What are we all going to feel? Fear, maybe? And we’ll feel it alllll through our bodies, won’t we?

And won’t that fear be the truth?

You bet it will.

Our bodies will definitely have an opinion on a bear in the chapel, just as our bodies totally give us important information all the time—they tell us when it’s time for a sandwich or when it’s too dark out. Because our body knows.

But, also, sometimes our body is wrong. Sometimes we crave a sandwich when we’ve already eaten—and we could stand to lose twenty pounds. Sometimes we’re afraid of the dark but we’re not in a forest listening to wolves—we’re lying in our own bed, safe and sound.

So we have to learn how to discern.

Recently in Sunday School, we heard the story of Satan coming to visit Moses. Happily, Moses was able to discern that Satan was a) not God and b) bad news, but that’s not always easy to do.

Yet Moses was prepared. He’d just been talking to God himself—actual God, not Satan’s poor replica. Moses had studied God and heard his words and intended to live them, so when Satan showed up, Moses could not be fooled. He knew who God was. And this was not God. Moses was ready to roll. But not with this guy.

Practicing goodness is how we become good. We get better at being good the more we try to be good. We also get better at recognizing the Lord’s voice as we practice. And we practice by acting—by using our bodies and acting on the word of God.

During the last few weeks of my mission, the Spirit told me to do something very strange.

My companion and I were teaching one of the lessons to a beautiful girl our age, 수윤. That detail is relevant. I promise. It was us and her with her older sister and a guy friend of theirs, who had both been baptized in the last year or so.

I was wearing one of those CTR rings. Do you know these? Just rings with the letters CTR on them, a reminder to always Choose the Right.

Now this is where the Spirit got weird. Because it told me to take off the ring, explain its meaning to 수윤, then give it to her and tell her to keep it as a reminder—until God answers her prayers and tells her to get baptized.

Let me restate this spiritual prompting for you:

The Spirit was saying to me, a twenty-one-year-old missionary, Give your ring to a pretty, twenty-year-old girl.

This is not proper missionary behavior. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, missionaries should not give pretty girls rings. Not even that often. And so I spent most of the lesson saying, Haha, can’t fool me! to the Spirit of God.

But, finally, I did listen.

I don’t know that I could have received such a peculiar prompting twenty months earlier; and if I had been given that prompting, I don’t know that I could have recognized that such a weird, weird prompting actually came from God.

But I had had a lot of practice by that point in my mission in acting, and finally I did what I was told and I gave her the ring.

About three months after I came home, I received an envelope from Korea. 수윤 wrote me all about her spiritual journey to baptism and returned my ring, bringing a conclusion to this particular (peculiar) prompting.

The Lord—let me tell you, friends—the Lord moves in mysterious ways.

Because it’s not hard to imagine a story where that feeling I felt about giving my ring to a girl was about something other than baptism. I think you can imagine that other story too, am I right?

Romantic love is an interesting test-case for what we’re talking about here. Our body tells us some of the most important truths of this life, truths that are felt deep, deep in our bodies, through this thing we call “romantic love.” But how many of us know someone whose life was thrown off a cliff by their body telling them a lie about love?

We have to learn how to discern between the soul—body and spirit—and just the body.

There was a wonderful woman who was born way back in 1098. She dedicated her entire life to God. She also saw visions her entire life. She described them like this:

I observe them in accord with the shifting of clouds . . . . I do not hear them with my outward ears, nor do I perceive them by the thoughts of my own heart or by any combination of my five senses . . . but I see them wide awake, day and night. And I am constantly fettered by sickness, and often in the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me, but God has sustained me until now. The light which I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it “the reflection of the living Light.”

One modern scientist read this and said, yeah, looks like Mother Hildegard suffered from a lot of migraines.

I read the description and, yeah, maybe.

But even if they were migraines, she lived a holy life and did a whole lot of good in the world and her words and her music have brought many people to Christ over the centuries.

Who says God can’t send you a holy migraine?

Understanding how spirit and body interact—and how the Holy Spirit interacts with our body-and-spirit soul—is the work of a lifetime. I’m still working on it. You’re still working on it. We’ll all keep working on it. Maybe, even after we’ve been resurrected, we’ll still work on it. I don’t know.

But how do we grow? How do we learn how to understand what our body—as part of our soul—is telling us?

When Joseph Smith was translating the Book of Mormon, his assistant, Oliver Cowdery, wanted to try translating as well.

It was a righteous desire. The work was holy and Oliver just wanted to help. Well, he was helping—he wrote down every word Joseph said—but Oliver wanted to translate too. And why not? As the translation went on, Joseph and Oliver would receive the Aaronic Priesthood; Joseph and Oliver would perform baptisms; Joseph and Oliver would receive the Melchizedek Priesthood. They were working together to perform this great work.

So Oliver got permission to try and . . . nothing happened. Nothing at all.

Well, the Lord does explain that Joseph was called to translate while Oliver was just called to write stuff down, but then why did Oliver even get to try?

Maybe so we could have the revelation that came as explanation. Here’s one part of it:

Behold, [Oliver,] you have not understood;

you have supposed that I would [just] give it unto you,
when you [yourself] took no thought save . . . to ask me.

But, behold,
I say unto you,
. . . you must study it out in your mind;
[and] then you must ask me if it be right,

and if it is right
I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you;
therefore, you shall feel that it is right.

But
if it be not right
you shall have no such feelings,
but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong;
therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred
save it be given you
from me.

This is a very popular description of how the Spirit works with the body among Latter-day Saints, but I wonder if we’re misunderstanding it a little.

Jesus is talking to Oliver Cowdery here. He’s not talking to me or you or our bishop here. He’s talking to Oliver Cowdery. And how does Oliver Cowdery’s body tell him when something is true? His bosom burns within him.

But elsewhere in the Doctrine & Covenants, we learn about other ways people feel the Spirit. Joseph Smith feels his mind enlightened. That doesn’t sound the same to me as a burning bosom. Joseph also experiences peace. Of course, you can feel peace and feel a burning bosom at the same time, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. Sweet and sour chicken is sweet and sour because it is sweet and it is sour.

Joseph also talks about something strongly pressing against his feelings. That sounds like stress to me. Not a feeling we often think of as one of our favorites. But that feeling led to the revelation about baptism for the dead, so I say hallelujah for Brother Joseph’s stress.

And then, two thousand years ago, just before the resurrected Jesus visited the Nephites, they heard

a small voice [that] did pierce them that did hear to the center

That feels quite different from a burning bosom to me. What does it feel like to be pierced to the center? I bet if you know, you know.

So, they heard

a small voice [that] did pierce them . . . to the center, insomuch that there was no part of their frame that it did not cause to quake; yea, it did pierce them to the very soul, and did

Oh, look at this!

did cause their hearts to burn.

I’ve always thought of that moment like this:

There was a small voice and they, all of them, every individual person at the temple that day, were pierced and quaked and burned.

But it doesn’t quite say that.

That might be how it was.

But it might also be that when that voice spoke to them, some of them were pierced and some of them quaked while others of them felt their hearts burn.

And that’s okay.

No matter how their body expressed it, that was the Spirit of God. And they all, then,

saw a Man descending out of heaven;
and he was clothed in a white robe;
and he came down and stood in the midst of them;
and the eyes of the whole multitude were turned upon him,
and they durst not open their mouths, even one to another,
and wist not what it meant,
for they thought it was an angel that had appeared unto them.

And it came to pass that he stretched forth his hand and spake unto the people, saying:

Behold, I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world.

Even with all that piercing and quaking and burning—even then, they mistook Jesus for an angel.

It takes a lifetime and more to learn how to commune with God.

But I want you to know, right now, today, in this room, the Spirit is here speaking to you. Listen to your body. What is it saying? How does it understand the Spirit?

Maybe it’s a burning or a quaking or a piercing or a pressing or an enlightening—or maybe it is something else altogether. But God loves you. He talks to you. Jesus came to this earth to live and die and resurrect so he could take you home with him to our Heavenly Parents.

Believe that.

Feel that.

Feel it with your body.

Listen to your body.

What is it telling you right now?

How is it telling you?

Your body and your spirit make your soul. And they both, together, are vital, vital parts of your eternal soul.

Love them and listen to them both.

Learn how to discern.

We’re all in this together.

And we’re in it together with our Saviour, Jesus Christ, the God of this world.

In his holy name we hope and pray,

Amen.

Influences this talk accepted:

https://www.wayfaremagazine.org/p/translating-the-flesh

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/doctrines-of-the-gospel-student-manual/10-purpose-of-earth-life?lang=eng

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2019/04/27homer?lang=eng

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Eric W. Jepson is, under another nom, author of the novels Byuck and Just Julie’s Fine.

Figure studies by Franz Kline (1910–1962), courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Francine Russell Bennion (1935–2024) delivered “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering” at the 1986 Brigham Young University Women’s Conference in Provo, Utah. Bennion spoke from both an academic and religious background: In addition to teaching university courses for thirty years, she had served on the general boards of both the Young Women and Relief Society programs. Bennion consistently united faith and intellect in her contributions to Church curriculum committees, Relief Society workshops on depression, and the foundation of the Women’s Research Institute at BYU.1 Her “Theology of Suffering” is another fusion of these commitments. It is unapologetically cerebral, with detailed discussions of both scripture and science. It is also a deeply faithful testimony of the power and possibility of Latter-day Saint doctrine.

This fusion is particularly notable in its social and intellectual context. In 1986, women were not yet included as regular speakers in main sessions of the Church’s general conference, and the BYU Women’s Conference was only a decade old. It had been a tumultuous decade. Church leaders’ opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the subsequent backlash had raged throughout the Church, prompting a resurgence of Latter-day Saint feminism and a retrenchment against it.2 (BYU Women’s Conference in fact began during the contentious ERA heyday of International Women’s Year.) Forums like BYU Women’s Conference, which featured “inspirational and practical sessions” for thousands of women, were important spaces for navigating what it meant to be a Latter-day Saint woman in changing times.3

At the same time, Church leaders were emphasizing doctrinal uniformity while putting heavy pressure on intellectuals who seemed to criticize the Church.4 The first half of the 1980s saw Apostles remind people to defer to Church leaders in activities ranging from academic research5 to forming personal relationships with Christ.6 Rarely had the Latter-day Saint ethos of preferring “prophetic over intellectual authority, obedience over questioning, faith over doubt, humility over intellectual pride, communal loyalty over independent thought, and intuition and spiritual promptings over unaided reason” been stressed as strongly.7

Bennion had seen this tumult up close: She had taught at BYU since 1961 and served on the Relief Society board with Barbara Smith, who frequently acted as the Church’s spokesperson against the ERA. Against this backdrop, Bennion’s speech can be read as a distinctive and potentially radical statement about the capacities and responsibilities of Latter-day Saint women. In an era when theology was rarely discussed, and the word itself was sometimes even used pejoratively,8 “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering” stands out.

Her central theme is agency. In Latter-day Saint doctrine, learning to exercise agency is a fundamental aim of mortal life. Bennion argues that this explains the existence of suffering alongside a loving God. It also generates an imperative for each person to take responsibility for their beliefs and do theology for themselves. Bennion criticizes Latter-day Saints for their tendency to, as she memorably puts it, “shroud [themselves] helplessly in a crazy quilt stitched haphazardly from Old Testament theology . . . and LDS doctrine embroidered on top.” Exercising agency instead requires confronting the tensions in religious tradition and lived experience.

Bennion offers a two-pronged argument about theological substance and method that is in itself a rich contribution to Latter-day Saint thought. But her speech is also remarkable for its deft integration of content and form. Bennion uses eloquent language to practice precisely what she preaches. In her use of imagery, narrative, and quotation, she breaks from familiar rhetorical traditions and takes responsibility for her own conclusions. Finally, she invites her audience to do the same.

An immediately striking feature of Bennion’s rhetoric is her vivid language. Compare her presentation of the problem of suffering to twentieth-century philosopher J. L. Mackie’s. Mackie writes: “God is omnipotent. God is wholly good; and yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions, so that if any two of them were true the third would be false.”9 Bennion’s reality, however, is not the sanitized, distant world of propositions. In addition to citing statistics about global poverty, Bennion uses examples that center suffering in the individuals who experience it: “the child lying in a gutter in India, the woman crawling across the Ethiopian desert to find a weed to eat, . . . the child sexually abused or scarred for life, or the astronaut who is blown up and leaves a family motherless or fatherless.” Bennion asks her listeners to sit with sufferers, reading at length from the Bible or Dorothy Bramhall’s grief- and joy-filled diary. She does not flinch from the problem, even as she offers her solution. She writes, “Christ’s atonement makes it possible for us to go through the meeting of reality, the falling, the hungering, the screaming, the crawling on the floor, the being disfigured and scarred for life psychologically or physically, and still survive and transcend it.” The litany of striking images makes the reality of suffering overwhelming, even as it carries listeners toward the hopeful possibility of redemption.

While the rhetorical function of examples is often simply to illustrate an argument, Bennion goes further. Her imagery is her argument: The lived force of the problem of suffering requires a comprehensive theological response. Good theology must satisfy both the mind and the heart.10 She does not use vivid language for shock value but to present her audience with the problem in a way that provides resources for them to evaluate her proposal. She positions them to make theological choices for themselves.

Throughout her speech, Bennion is sensitive to her female audience, though she does not discuss womanhood directly (a notable omission in its own right). Speaking to women with enough leisure time to attend a conference, Bennion knows she is not addressing those experiencing starvation or medical deprivation. She takes care to make this distant suffering present to them, but she also uses examples that sit closer to her hearers’ hearts. She speaks of domestic violence, loss of children, and cancer. In her metaphors, theological work is women’s work: She describes agency using Isaiah’s metaphor of weaning from breastfeeding and theology itself as the traditionally feminine activity of quilting.11 Her central scriptural example of suffering is Jephthah sacrificing his daughter, to which she asks, “What of Jephthah’s wife, who isn’t even mentioned?” Bennion reminds her audience that the problems theology grapples with are also women’s problems. Latter-day Saint doctrine needs to have answers for women.

Just as Bennion’s imagery makes vivid the problem of suffering, her engagement with other sources makes vivid the problem of building a comprehensive theology. Bennion refuses to allow her audience to look away from the difficulties within their own religious tradition: She selects a series of scriptures that seem to contradict one another and reads the devastating story of Jephthah’s daughter in full. This is a departure from the familiar use of scripture in Latter-day Saint contexts, which is generally to provide argumentative support or to elucidate divine promises.12 Bennion also obstructs unquestioning acceptance of tradition in her choice of which sources to omit. There are no references to the current prophet or other male Church leaders. As I have written elsewhere, quoting religious authorities is a rhetorical staple of Latter-day Saint oratory in general conference.13 In her unusual citation practices, Bennion neither hides behind male authority nor defers to it. She takes full responsibility for her own ideas.

Bennion’s rhetoric displays nothing less than the agency she believes can confront both the problem of suffering and the problem of theology. She is unflinchingly intellectual, confident, direct, descriptive, and argumentative. She engages in the kind of doctrinal inquiry traditionally the domain of male authorities. But she does not allow her audience to defer to her authority, either. She acknowledges her limitations with phrases like “I think” and “as I read this passage.” She presents her own perspective but asks her audience to figure things out for themselves—to be “not listeners but thinkers.”14

“A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering” is a powerful call to women in the Church and to all Latter-day Saints. Through her rhetorical choices, Bennion consistently treats herself and each listener as an agent. Instead of helplessly accepting the patchwork quilt, she eloquently demonstrates how to weave one’s own tighter, stronger theology. Her closing plea for women to “choose well” and “trust ourselves” is particularly significant given its delivery in an environment where what to choose and who to trust were disputed. But her speech is a promise that each individual is qualified and entitled to search for a theology that accounts for their reality. This search is the path to becoming like God.

A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering (1986)

Francine R. Bennion1516

[. . .]

We are accustomed to talking of fragments of theology—a topic here, an assumption or tradition there, often out of context with the whole. We are a people accustomed also to fragments of scripture out of context—a phrase here, a verse there, words that say something appropriate to the matter at hand, and ring with clarity and conviction. We have to do it; we haven’t time or ability to say everything at once. Sometimes, however, the clarity becomes blurred and the conviction open to question when a person puts some fragments with others. For example, what do you make of the following?

2 Nephi 2:25: “Men are, that they might have joy.”

Job 5:7: “Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

Deuteronomy 4:29–31: “But if from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him; . . . he will not forsake thee.”

Psalm 22:1–2: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? . . .”

Matthew 27:46: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Abraham 3:18: “Spirits . . . have no beginning; they existed before, they shall have no end, they shall exist after, for they are gnolaum, or eternal.”

2 Nephi 2:14: “God . . . hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.”

Proverbs 3:13: “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.”

Ecclesiastes 1:18: “In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

One function of theology is to provide a comprehensive framework that gives meaning to the fragments and the seeming contradictions or paradoxes which they suggest. Theology provides a framework that binds diversity and complexity into a more simple net with which we can make some sense even of things we don’t fully understand.

If we live long enough, we find diverse views and contrasting fragments not only in scripture but also in life. For example, Dorothy Bramhall went to Hawaii in February for the birth of a grandchild. She went also for a visit with a longtime friend, not LDS, who had lost two sons in a traffic accident and then struggled with her own cancer and amputations for many years. Dorothy wrote:

It’s been a week of varied emotions. My friend, Jean Kerr, died the morning after I arrived. It seems I’m destined to spend part of my beach time in Hawaii contemplating the death of a good friend. . . . Suffering without a sense of purpose seems bitter indeed. Her mother said her husband prayed all night for her to die. Does one who doesn’t believe pray to anyone or anything? Or is it merely another way of saying—he yearned for or hoped that she would die? Do you think such a prayer will be heard when all those given for her healing have not been?

Enough! My grandson was born at 5 a.m. Sat. . . . This is a miracle baby. When he was born the doctor showed them that the cord was knotted. The reason the baby survived is that his cord was unusually long, and the knot was never pulled tight. They are feeling very blessed. It’s always such a humbling feeling to look at a newborn—such utter perfection! I can hardly wait to hold him.17

The same week, the daughter of another of my friends gave birth to a premature Down’s syndrome child who has already had two of the six operations needed for survival. On March 2, a report released by the World Bank estimated that 730 million people in poor countries, not including China, lacked the income in 1980 to buy enough food to give them the energy for an active working life.

One function of any religion is to explain such a world as this, to provide a theology that makes sense of love and joy and miracles but also of suffering and struggle and lack of miracles. Good theology makes sense of what is possible but also of what is presently real and probable. In this twentieth century, it is not enough that a theology of suffering explain my experience; it must also explain the child lying in a gutter in India, the woman crawling across the Ethiopian desert to find a weed to eat, and the fighting and misery of many humans because of pride, greed, or fear in a powerful few. Satisfying theology must explain the child sexually abused or scarred for life, or the astronaut who is blown up and leaves a family motherless or fatherless. Good theology of suffering explains all human suffering, not just the suffering of those who feel they know God’s word and are his chosen people.

It is not enough that theology be either rational or faith promoting. It must be both. It is not enough that satisfying theology be mastered by a few expert scholars, teachers, and leaders. It must be comfortably carried by ordinary people. It is not enough that theology help me to understand God. It must also help me to understand myself and my world.

Theology does not prevent all hurt and anguish. No knowledge of theology can remove all pain, weakness, or nausea from all terminal cancer. Nor can it fill an empty stomach. What sound theology can do is to help those who believe it to make some sense of the suffering, of themselves, and of God, such sense that they can proceed with a measure of hope, courage, compassion, and understanding of themselves even in anguish.

There is no single theology of suffering in our Church, one framework uniform in all respects in the minds of all leaders and all other members. Though we may share the same scripture, the same revelation, prophets, and belief that God and Christ are real, we have various frameworks for putting them together and for seeing suffering, either our own or someone else’s. One person thinks God sends suffering to teach us or to test us. Another thinks God or Satan can affect only our response to the suffering, and some think it is Satan who is causing the suffering. Others think there should be no suffering at all if we are righteous and certainly no misunderstanding at all about why it is happening. These are only a few of the varieties of LDS belief about the origins of suffering, and however contradictory they be, each can be supported by fragments of scripture.18

We do not use identical principles or patterns to bind together fragments of scripture and life. In this twentieth century, with the history of the world before us, each of us has taken ideas and patterns from various sources to form our personal theologies of suffering. The complexity and power of those sources are evident in the story of Jephthah.

According to the book of Judges, chapter 11, Jephthah was asked to lead Israel against invading Ammonites.

[. . .]

“And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands,

Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering. . . .

And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter.

And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back.”19

As the story is told, Jephthah makes the sacrifice because he believes it to be right. At the core of his and his daughter’s theology are these principles: God controls human events and determines either victory or defeat in battle. God can be bargained with. God gives Israel victory because of Jephthah’s all-encompassing vow, his willingness to give God anything he has. God’s law requires that the vow be kept. According to our record in the book of Numbers, “If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth.”20

A human being’s function is to obey the law. If God had wanted the obedient daughter saved, he could have prevented her from dancing out at so inopportune a moment.

We do not all read the same things into Jephthah’s story, or into sacrifice.21 Even in so short a story, the context for suffering is complex and today provokes questions such as these: Who is really responsible for the suffering in this story? Jephthah? God? The religious leaders who taught the theology that contributed to the making and keeping of the vow? Persons who developed a social system in which a daughter is her father’s property? What of Jephthah’s wife, who isn’t even mentioned? What about Jephthah’s father and harlot mother, and the halfbrothers who threw Jephthah out of the house earlier in his life and perhaps contributed to his great desire for the power that victory would bring?22 What about Jacob, who set a precedent by bargaining with God?23 Or Moses, who, without regard to circumstances, seemed to teach that keeping a vow was more important than “selfish” compassion?

This list does not, of course, exhaust the questions, which go beyond reasons for Jephthah’s vow; for example, is obedience always a virtue? Is the major difference between God and Satan just a matter of who’s in charge, demanding obedience?

[. . .]

Today, many who do think Jephthah rash nevertheless have “simply” made his version of God their own: a God who controls all human events; a God who can and must be bargained with; a God who considers unquestioning obedience to be the highest good—not just the means to goodness, but goodness itself; a God who causes suffering in the innocent and also authorizes theology that fosters it. Many who believe in such a God either ignore or are confused by inconsistency with other scriptures that seem to speak of God’s valuing agency above obedience,24 love above tradition,25 and the human heart above ritual sacrifice.26

What do you think about Jephthah, his vow, and his God? Your answer will depend in part upon your own version of theology.

Does it really matter what we think? Can’t we just be kind and patient, without worrying about various points of theology?

It matters. For one thing, our assumptions affect how kind and patient we are likely to become. What Jephthah believed was central to what he did about suffering, and what we believe is central to what we do about it. For example, if we believe that inflicting suffering will further God’s work or glory, we may inflict it, as Irish and Lebanese and Iranians are currently doing, or as a father did by punishing his young son by putting his hands under scalding water, which nearly destroyed them, or as a husband is doing by telling his wife she can do nothing unless he tells her she can.

If we believe God wants suffering, we may not take responsible action to relieve or prevent it. Thirty-five years ago, one of my schoolteachers would not take medical help for a lump in her thigh because “God had given it to her.” In Relief Society one Sunday last year, a class member told us we shouldn’t concern ourselves with events in the newspaper because God is planning destruction before the Millennium anyway, and all we should concern ourselves with is our own righteousness and that of our children, and then we’ll be all right. A few years ago, one young woman’s confusion about God and suffering was central to her anguish and paralysis in the face of repeated violence: “I don’t know what it is God’s trying to teach me with my husband’s temper.”

Many who believe God is causing the suffering will not, or feel they cannot, ask him for help or comfort at the very time they need it most.

Another of the reasons our theology of suffering matters is that we may live comfortably with a framework which has inherent holes and contradictions as long as the suffering is someone else’s or as long as our own suffering isn’t very great. But holes and contradictions have a way of becoming very important when anguish is our own or when we feel the pain of persons we care about. Job’s friends said to him:

Behold, thou hast instructed many, and thou hast strengthened the weak hands.

Thy words have upholden him that was falling, and thou hast strengthened the feeble knees.

But now it is come upon thee, and thou faintest; it toucheth thee, and thou art troubled.27

If, like Job, we find that the comforts we’ve offered others aren’t sufficient for our own experience, then the suffering itself, however great, is not the only problem. The problem is also that the universe and our ability to make sense of it have fallen apart, and we are without hope or trust in ourselves or in God.

[. . .]

We have not the mind of God. We see through a glass darkly now and will till we meet him and ourselves face to face and “know as we are known.”28 There are times we must say, “I don’t know.” If we think we know everything, it is a sure sign we do not. But we are capable of learning much about this world and of considering what difference LDS doctrines can make to how we put together our experience, our diverse scriptures, our traditions, and well-supported but contradictory theological explanations. The better we understand what is at the core of LDS doctrine, the better we can distinguish what is not. We need not shroud ourselves helplessly in a crazy quilt stitched haphazardly from Old Testament theology, such as that of Jephthah, with a few patches of utopian thought and LDS doctrine embroidered on top. We can extend our understanding of LDS principles and use them as the core for a framework with which to make some sense of contradictory fragments.

Of course it may seem simpler to stay on well-worn traditional ground, but God—and this is one of the most important things we believe about him—has invited us to go further, to make suffering worth the trouble and to meet it as well as we can. We can be in the process of learning to do that whatever our current limitations or circumstances. Though our search for understanding be long or incomplete, it can lead us to courage, peace, and an increasingly truer sense of ourselves and God.

The traditional views are that we are alive because God put us here, or because Eve and Adam fell from innocence and trouble-free paradise through disobedience. These views are expressed in scripture. The Latter-day Saints believe, however, that these traditional views are fragmentary because they leave out several important things—for example, that we have existed without beginning and that we are here because we chose to come.29 [. . .]

[. . .]

We wanted life, however high the cost. We suffer because we were willing to pay the cost of being and of being here with others in their ignorance and inexperience as well as our own. We suffer because we are willing to pay the costs of living with laws of nature, which operate quite consistently whether or not we understand them or can manage them. We suffer because, like Christ in the desert, we apparently did not say we would come only if God would change all our stones to bread in time of hunger. We were willing to know hunger. Like Christ in the desert, we did not ask God to let us try falling or being bruised only on condition that he catch us before we touch ground and save us from real hurt. We were willing to know hurt. Like Christ, we did not agree to come only if God would make everyone bow to us and respect us, or admire us and understand us. Like Christ, we came to be ourselves, addressing and creating reality. We are finding out who we are and who we can become regardless of immediate environment or circumstances.

What is the point of that? What is the point of knowing reality and being ourselves, of suffering as Dorothy’s friend Jean Kerr suffered and as many other people suffer daily? Why did this matter so much?

One reason we were willing to pay the high costs of continuing to address reality and become ourselves is that God told us we can become more like himself. We can become more abundantly alive, with ultimate fulness of truth, joy, and love—fulness impossible for souls unable to take real part in creating it, souls ignorant of good or evil, pleasure or pain, souls afraid of the unknown.

According to my understanding of scripture, we are not preparing now to begin in the next life to become more like God. We are not simply waiting to get started with the process. We are in it here and now. [. . .]

[. . .]

Beyond the specifics of suffering, we too are being “weaned from the milk and drawn from the breasts” and are agents learning comprehensive matters, however brief, painful, or severely restricted earth experience might be. Even an infant born yesterday and dead of starvation or abuse within a week will experience physical reality, the quantum leaps, elements, motions, or processes which constitute physical existence. Even such an infant experiences something of how agents can affect each other and be affected by each other. [. . .]

[. . .]

I know the love of God. It is one of the very few things I do know with absolute certainty. I think suffering on this earth is an indication of God’s trust, God’s love. I think it is an indication that God does not want us to be simply obedient children playing forever under his hand, but wants us able to become more like himself. In order to do that we have to know reality. We have to be real ourselves and not dependent on externals. If we are to be like God, we cannot live forever in fear that we may meet something that will scare us or that will hurt us. We have to be able, as he is able, to meet what comes of others’ agency, and of living in a lawful universe that allows creation of a habitable planet only when it allows also the difficulties that come in natural operations of such a planet.

We exist now as adolescents between ignorance and full truth, with real interactions among ourselves and the universe more numerous and complex than we yet observe or comprehend. It is within this context that I trust God and his commandments. I do not believe I could do it within the traditional framework where his love and power are supposed to keep us from pain or struggle if we are good. Neither could I find it easy to trust him if I believed him to make a habit of manipulating natural law and other persons to give me just what I need to test or teach me—in other words, to make me the center of the world without regard to other persons’ agency or experience, and without regard to consistent, knowable law. In LDS theology, I believe, it is the large context for all humans that gives meaning to suffering. Within the context of LDS theology, I find hope for understanding and changing what I can, but also hope for transcending what I cannot. [. . .]

[. . .]

[. . .] Christ’s atonement makes it possible for us to go through the meeting of reality, the falling, the hungering, the screaming, the crawling on the floor, the being disfigured and scarred for life psychologically or physically, and still survive and transcend it. If that were not true, then our whole universe would have no meaning, and we had just as well be what Lucifer suggested, simply obedient robots.

Let us choose well the theology with which we frame our experience. Let us trust ourselves and God, asking continually for the help which is good. Let us love each other, mourn with each other, and sacrifice fear for courage. Let us seek reality and truth, forgiving ourselves and each other, learning to help ourselves and each other as we can. Let us become more like our God, who is good.

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Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, to be published June 2, 2026, by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

To pre-order the full anthology from University of Illinois Press, click here. (Use code S26UIP for a 30% discount!)

To receive each new post in the Oratory series, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select “Oratory.”

Eliza Wells is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba. Her research focuses on the normative dimensions of social roles, including gender, citizenship, and professions. She completed her PhD in philosophy at MIT and postdoctoral work at Harvard. She also works on feminism in the Mormon tradition and has an MA in religious studies from Stanford. Her analysis of gender in LDS general conference rhetoric appeared in Dialogue.

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand gestures hold well-known meanings.

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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (b. 1931) is a beloved figure in history circles. Born in Sugar City, Idaho, she moved to Salt Lake City to attend college at the University of Utah and then settled permanently on the East Coast. While raising five children with her husband, Ulrich was active both in her ward in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in the burgeoning Latter-day Saint feminist movement. Beginning in the early 1970s, she and several friends organized home gatherings, retreats, and a newspaper called Exponent II that explored women’s place in society, history, and religion. The activities sparked Ulrich’s interest in women’s history, and when her husband took an academic post at the University of New Hampshire, she began graduate studies in history. Balancing family, church, activism, and education was demanding, but she persevered. In 1982, two years after she received her doctorate, she published her first book, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750.

It took five years after her graduation to move into a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at UNH. In the meantime, she had received two prestigious grants to start a new project on the diary of an unknown Maine midwife, Martha Moore Ballard. It was Ulrich’s meticulous unpacking of this diary that resulted in A Midwife’s Tale, the dazzling portrait of an early American woman. As soon as it was published in 1990, a cascade of prizes from professional historical societies applauded her book. Reprinted here is the acceptance speech Ulrich gave after winning the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.

Acceptance speeches are typically celebratory and ceremonial, but the Bancroft organizational committee specifically asked that the address be personal. So, while the last paragraph does express gratitude, the bulk of the address links Ulrich’s own life to that of Martha Ballard’s. The Bancroft address duplicates what historian Mary Maples Dunn saw in A Midwife’s Tale: the life of a “professional woman whose professional responsibilities did not relieve her of the ordinary work of women.”1 Because Bancroft Prize acceptance speeches are not normally published, Ulrich addressed only a small coterie of attending scholars and her own family. A Midwife’s Tale won the Pulitzer Prize a few months later.

In addition, a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship supported Ulrich’s research on the social history of New England textiles. And, in 1992, Ulrich received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. Then, in 1995, the Department of History at Harvard University invited her to join its august ranks. The early nineties were heady years for the professor from New Hampshire. After PBS funded a documentary based on A Midwife’s Tale, a website was created that included the Bancroft acceptance speech. At that point, the audience expanded so that many came to appreciate the humanity, humor, and acumen of one of America’s preeminent historians. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich retired from teaching in 2018, but her multiple publications remain standards in American history.

“Martha’s Diary and Mine” is a lyrical testimony to the pleasures of history making. The address articulates the almost mystical way historical characters are brought to life through writing. Ulrich accomplishes this project by placing her own diary—kept sporadically—next to Martha Ballard’s diary. The eighteenth century and the twentieth are thus knit together. In their writing, historians ordinarily do not conflate their own lives with those they study, but since the Bancroft committee had requested a more personal approach, Ulrich took advantage of the opportunity to enliven social history by connecting the diaries of two women.

To bring the audience into her stories and reveal the magic of the professional historian, Ulrich uses several rhetorical devices. First, she compares herself with Martha Ballard. Not only does Ulrich tell us she keeps a diary (somewhat) like Ballard, but she narrates the multiple places where her life and Ballard’s intersect. For instance, Martha Ballard began her diary when she was fifty, and when Laurel Ulrich turned fifty, she wanted “a beginning, too.” Ballard’s children get diphtheria, Ulrich’s “upset tummies.” While both diary writers are tired at the end of the day, it is Gael, the modern husband, who “holds things together at home.” Comparisons create a through line in “Martha’s Diary and Mine” and solidify the intimate relationship between the historian and the person of the past.

To enliven the speech, Ulrich also employs the rhetorical technique of including quotes from her own diary. With her characteristic self-deprecating wit, Ulrich recalls her enthusiasm when her first book came out in 1982. In her 357 diary, she jokes that her mother, husband, and neighbor all found Good Wives worth reading, but she craves “gushing reviews [and] a Bancroft Prize would be nice, too.” Ulrich had long ago forgotten that cheeky admission in her diary, but there it was. With this stylistic move she brings together her diary making with the event at hand, directly addressing the small Bancroft audience.

Ulrich’s diary quotations are in support of another rhetorical practice, that of storytelling or narrative construction. Throughout the address are personal anecdotes and family facts. Details—like the names and ages of her children—are included. She uses such facts to create a narrative context. Ulrich places stories of Ballard’s efforts to reach her patients next to the author’s own challenges. She describes the pressures of family life to illustrate the triumph of carving out time for history writing. With all five of her children in the audience, Ulrich tells of the events in their lives that provided a backdrop to writing A Midwife’s Tale. As a part of her overall strategy to integrate the personal with the historical, she knits both streams together through stories.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich always hoped to be a writer and to avoid the dull prose of the historian. Consequently, she uses pithy insights as a rhetorical choice to keep her listeners attention. “Diary keeping,” Ulrich admits, “is a dangerous activity.” Later in the speech, she concludes, “One should never trust a diary.” Ulrich captures the thrill of historical discovery and the disciplined effort needed to make sense of that finding. She does this through the recitation of vivid details from both diaries.

Reaching an audience far beyond Latter-day Saint circles, A Midwife’s Tale exemplifies the turn in scholarship in early American history toward the lives of ordinary folks. That the Bancroft committee asked for an address that was personal and that family members made up the audience allow Ulrich to explore how historians are privileged to have an intimate relationship with the past. What she eloquently shares is not a formulaic acknowledgment. Rather, she recounts her pleasurable relationship with Ballard through silly coincidences, gentle admonishments, and sustaining uplift. Eventually, the address was available on the internet, and Ulrich’s own personal history became a part of the wider history-making process.

When Ulrich received the Bancroft Prize, her scholarship and university teaching had little to do with Latter-day Saint concerns. This was an intentional act, as Ulrich knew the limits of focusing on one religious community in one’s scholarship. Except for an oblique reference to “community service” in her list of “competing demands,” we get no hint of her church activities. So what is Mormon about this acceptance speech?

Keeping in mind the pitfalls of speculating about unspoken religiosity, I venture that “Martha’s Diary and Mine” (and by extension much of Ulrich’s scholarship) echoes Latter-day Saint values in four ways. First, the focus on diaries resonates with a stress on recordkeeping within the Church. Latter-day Saints keep and have kept personal journals. Leaders insist that even the most mundane details of living have meaning, especially to future generations. Second, ritual activities within the Church presume a fluidity between the living and the dead. The living have both the ability and the responsibility to ensure that the dead can progress spiritually. Mormon folklore contains visions, dreams, and uncanny premonitions, all illustrating an enchanted world where the past, present, and future merge. Third, while at times exasperating, families are the foundation for deep happiness and a spiritual necessity. An opposite-sexed spouse and multiple children are a blessing. While A Midwife’s Tale depicts the strange family life of early America, Ulrich portrays her own family as utterly conventional. Finally, the life of the professor and the life of the midwife are both notable for the sheer number of things they do. Plural wife Annie Clark Tanner in her autobiography, A Mormon Mother, suggests, “If Mormon philosophy can be summed up in two words, it is ‘Keep Busy,’ and that applies to every member of the church.”2 The two women are constantly on the go. Their ability to manage all this productive activity (and in Ulrich’s case, to win prizes and honors) sets a high bar for the merely mortal. For most of us, reaching that bar will prove elusive, but it is in exerting the effort where the pleasure occurs.

Martha’s Diary and Mine (1991)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich3

I spent eight years studying the diary of Martha Moore Ballard, an eighteenth-century Maine midwife. As I was thinking about how I could explain that to you, I remembered my own diary. It is a pretty miserable affair compared to Martha’s—four ruled notebooks with intermittent entries scattered over fifteen years, but when I went back to read what I had written I was surprised to discover how much it told me about my life with Martha.

My diary entry for April 18, 1982 seems particularly fitting for a Bancroft Acceptance Speech. “The summer should be interesting,” I began, adding that, my husband, Gael, was going to be a full-time parent and househusband in July and August because I had “an NEH summer fellowship to work on Martha Ballard’s diary.” Then I went on to comment on the recent publication of my first book. “Good Wives is out. Except for a short review in the NY Times, silence. Sort of an eery feeling . . . I like Good Wives a lot. Mother likes it. Gael likes it. And [our neighbor] Parker Ayer finds it worth reading. . . . I suppose I am a ways from celestial values. I crave the validation of gushing reviews. A Bancroft Prize would be nice, too.” I honestly have no recollection of ever thinking such a thing, let alone writing it down. Diary keeping is a dangerous activity.

People often ask me how I found Martha Ballard’s diary. The answer is “by accident.” I had gone to the Maine State Archives pursuing an early court case that interested me. I ran out of documents by mid-afternoon, and since Augusta, Maine, is a long way from Durham, New Hampshire, and I didn’t want to waste my trip, I decided to stop in at the adjoining state library to look at two diaries I had seen in a bibliography of women’s history. One turned out to be a ten-page typescript. The other was Martha’s—two fat volumes bound in homemade linen covers. Because I had found so few women’s documents in my research for Good Wives, I was awed by the sheer bulk of it. The faded ink was difficult to read, but in the hour or so before closing I transcribed several pages, enough to form the base for the grant application that gave me the summer fellowship.

Reading my own journals, I was surprised at how soon into the summer research the idea for the book began to form. After a few weeks in Augusta I had arranged to have the diary microfilmed so I could continue the work in Durham. On July 17, 1982, I wrote:

As I was walking home from the UNH library yesterday I suddenly felt I should do a book on the diary. . . . The trick would be to write something more accessible than the diary itself. Is this midwifery or bastardy—to borrow a metaphor from Mrs. Ballard’s world? Am I giving her life to the world or substituting an “illegitimate” book for a real book—hers[?].

The key sentence is probably the next one: “This project appeals to me as a writer.” Fortunately I recognized early on that I was a better storyteller than editor, that I didn’t have the patience or the humility to spend years transcribing a document as massive as this one. I also recognized, I think, that my experience in writing Good Wives allowed me to see things in the diary that other people might not recognize. I had no idea how difficult it would be to actually write the book. “I don’t suppose the historical issues are terribly complex,” I wrote, adding blithely, “This should be about [a] 150 page book—with maps and photographs.”

By August, while Gael was holding things together at home, I was working full-time at the library—reading negative microfilm—white on black. No wonder I sometimes forgot where I was. My diary entry for August 5 begins:

I almost wrote 1782. I am at least ankle deep in Mrs. Ballard’s Book. I have spent a full week now reading microfilm and filling out data sheets. When I came out of the library the other day, it was raining. I knew it would be because I had just been reading about it—the freshet was rising in Mrs. Ballard’s world which had somehow become my own.

In September Gael and I both went back to teaching—and to sharing responsibility for our rambunctious house. Karl, Mindy, and Nathan were away at school, though they liked to show up on weekends and holidays with several friends and occasionally a big black dog. Thatcher was thirteen in 1982; Amy was seven. On February 26, 1983, I wrote:

It gets more & more difficult to write in this journal. The semester is five weeks gone. What a wild month it has been—snow days, flu, and trying to be at school by 9 to lecture to 200 students.

I then follow with a long discussion about Nancy Chodorow’s book The Reproduction of Mothering, which our women’s studies faculty had been discussing.

Must we assume male dominance of the culture because we admit male dominance of those aspects of the culture controlled by men? Suppose we admitted for the sake of argument that motherhood was powerful. Could we find men speaking through women’s language (even in imagination)? What would male culture look like if it were the muted text?

Much of my own diary is in fact about mothering, though at a practical rather than theoretical level. I was surprised, remembering those times, at how upbeat most of the entries really are; a tipoff, of course, that one should never trust a diary. Despite my good humor it is obvious that, like most working parents, Gael and I were stretched in many directions:

June 7, 1983

Saturday I was frantically finishing a review essay for Trends in History. Monday was Memorial Day. Amy marched in the parade in the rain. Gael & I ran a game at the school fair . . . chasing yellow & green tennis balls in a downpour, kids lined up ten deep to take their chances winning a squirt gun. Tuesday & Wednesday I wrote an NEH Grant, got it in the mail just in time to drive to Sanbornton to speak to their historical society.

That NEH Grant, written in a frenzy and dropped at the Durham Post Office thirty seconds before closing, eventually gave me a full year to continue my work on Martha’s diary.

Unfortunately, the grant did not provide a housekeeper and nanny. On December 22, 1984, I wrote in triumph, “I managed to write 30 pages in 10-days,” then added, “I have been writing notes to myself all morning, puttering around among quiet kids with upset tummies. (Please not another virus—though I feel ungrateful after writing about diphtheria all week.)”

I made enough progress during my year’s leave to feel quite confident that I could finish the book before my fiftieth birthday, which then seemed comfortably distant. The goal seemed appropriate, since Martha Ballard began her diary at the age of fifty. I do not need to elaborate the rest of the story. It is familiar to every scholar who attempts to complete a major project in the midst of the competing demands of teaching, family life, and community service. On July 22, 1985, just as my year’s leave was coming to an end, I wrote: “I had nightmares all night that I was in Durham when I was supposed to be in Augusta, in Augusta when supposed to be in Durham!”

At some point in all this a 250-year-old lady took up residence in the loft above my bedroom, alternately cheering me on and chastising me for my lax habits and flagging spirits. She crossed the Kennebec River at the crest of the spring freshet, waded through waist-deep snow, and climbed mountains of ice to reach her patients, and at the age of seventy-seven bent her swollen knees onto the bare back of a pesky horse to reach a woman in travail. How could I complain of my burdens? I’m not sure when I began to call this paragon “Martha” rather than “Mrs. Ballard.” Perhaps I grew less deferent as I began to discover the woman beneath the heroine. Yes, she too occasionally quarreled with her husband, offended her children, and indulged in self-pity.

It was also instructive to discover that even in the eighteenth century a woman could struggle with the double burden of caring for a house and family while doing productive work in her community. Responsible scholarship made me wary of identifying too closely with my subject, but when Martha wrote “some fatigud” (she probably pronounced it “fatagooed”), I knew what she meant. As my stack of notecards and computer files grew, I said less and less about her in my diary, but she is certainly there in my continuing entries about the joys and trials of family life.

Amy had just lost her first tooth when I began my project; now she is taller than I am. During the years we all lived with Martha, our family celebrated high school and college graduations, two weddings, the completion of four PhDs, and the birth of a grandchild. Gael started a new business, took up singing, and went gray. When my eighty-year-old mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, Martha sat with me at the hospital alternately marveling and despairing at the miracles of modern medicine. I survived my own cancer scare and a broken foot, but when I was called to six weeks’ jury duty during a precious summer break, I concluded that Augusta’s eighteenth-century magistrate, Judge North, was pulling strings somewhere in the Great Beyond, trying to prevent me from printing Martha’s description of his trial for raping the minister’s wife.

On July 12, 1988, one day after my fiftieth birthday, I wrote:

50 years old. I’m proud to have survived a half-century. . . . I suppose this is supposed to be a traumatic moment, but in the past five years I’ve reconstructed it into a beginning. Martha’s diary—and therefore her historical life—began at fifty. I’d like to think this can be a beginning, too. . . . Now for Jubilee resolutions. What would I like to begin on this day? Another chapter of Martha’s Book.

Fortunately Martha Ballard’s spirit rather than Joseph North’s prevailed. The book was completed and published just before my fifty-second birthday.

I would like to thank Gael for thirty-three years of loving support and for not insisting that I retrace Martha’s canoe trips on the Kennebec River; my children for computer services and household labor, and for making this project so much more difficult than it might have been and so much more meaningful; my editor, Jane Garrett, for her wisdom and friendship, and for knowing when it was time to get Martha out of my loft and into print; and all those others at Alfred A. Knopf (Mel Rosenthal, Ann Kraybill, Dorothy Baker, and many more) who treated my book so kindly and endured my endless revisions. This evening I owe a special thanks to Columbia University, the Bancroft Prize committee, and all of you for honoring Martha Ballard’s story by listening to mine.

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Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, to be published June 2, 2026, by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

To pre-order the full anthology from University of Illinois Press, click here. (Use code S26UIP for a 30% discount!)

To receive each new post in the Oratory series, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select “Oratory.”

Colleen McDannell is Professor of History and Sterling M. McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. A recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a specialist in American religious history. Her most recent book is Catholic Utah. In 2019, Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy (Oxford University Press) received the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand gestures hold well-known meanings.

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In the biographical sketch for “Making Zion,” Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye (1979–2024) is introduced as “a self-described bald Asian American Latter-day Saint woman scholar.”1 With a BA and PhD from Harvard University, Inouye was a senior lecturer in Chinese history at the University of Auckland, with a focus on modern China and global Christianity at the time of this speech. She also contributed to Latter-day Saint intellectual conversations through her position as a historian at the Church History Library and as a leader in the Global Mormon Studies Research Network, with numerous published essays, interviews, and talks, two books for general audiences, and a coedited volume with Kate Holbrook of essays by Latter-day Saint woman scholars, Every Needful Thing.

“Making Zion” was given at Brigham Young University in conjunction with the publication of Inouye’s book Crossings, part of the Living Faith Book Series produced by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Living Faith books are meant to provide “Latter-day Saint young adults and their mentors nourishing traveling companions on their journeys of faith.”2 In the series, scholars integrate their academic, personal, and spiritual perspectives, showcasing how being an intellectual Latter-day Saint “is a vocation worthy of serious reflection and joyful effort.”3 In this way, the Living Faith Series is part of a larger tradition of Latter-day Saint “personal apologetics” that includes anthologies such as A Thoughtful Faith4 as well as single-author books like Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel5 and The Faith of a Scientist.6 Rather than using rational or theological arguments to justify a faith tradition (i.e., why this should work for everyone), this type of apologetics focuses instead on personal experiences of faith (i.e., why this works for me).

Personal apologetics is one response to the growing number of young Latter-day Saints leaving the faith. Data from 2016, three years prior to Inouye’s address, show that close to 50 percent of millennial (born after 1981) American Latter-day Saints were no longer affiliated with the Church,7 a trend consistent with young Americans’ general disaffection from organized religion. Inouye frames her talk as a response to a young Latter-day Saint woman who is unsure whether she wants to continue attending a church that she sees as giving unequal treatment across gender and sexual identities. This concern reflects a larger cultural movement toward equity for women and LGBTQ+ people, including the legalization of gay marriage in the United States in 2015 and the #MeToo movement of 2018. Inouye chooses to address this young woman’s concern in a speech at BYU, a place where many young Latter-day Saints and their mentors likely share this and similar questions. “Making Zion” was also given at a turbulent personal moment. As Inouye shares, she had learned in the week just prior to her talk that her colon cancer—the reason she wrote Crossings as a memoir of faith for her young children—was no longer in remission. Throughout “Making Zion,” Inouye interweaves the global with the personal, using fresh and animating analogies to excavate underlying assumptions and give her audience new perspectives on the life of faith.

Instead of using the typical logic of conversations about the Church’s flaws, Inouye names and undermines this logic, changing the terms of the conversation. Inouye responds to the young woman’s assertion that “the gender and sexuality issues are deal breakers,” without excuses or critiques. Instead, she questions the logic of deal breaking itself. To Inouye, deal breaking is also the logic of those who dismiss the young woman as overly critical, believing that “pointing out ways in which we [as a Church] fall short breaks the deal.” Undermining the logic of deal breaking begs additional questions that Inouye does not address, such as if there should be any deal breakers in religious practice or where to draw personal boundaries. Instead, Inouye comments “that life is full of messy contradictions and that sometimes embracing them is the most productive way forward,” asserting that noticing inequality in the Church does not exclude engaged participation.

Inouye also flips the logic of typical Church conversations by directly addressing patriarchy. This word can cause consternation in many Latter-day Saint spaces, with some leaders historically affirming patriarchy as God’s way of governing8 and others explaining that the use of patriarchy in a church context is distinct from usage elsewhere,9 distancing the Church from feminist critiques. In contrast, Inouye uses the term in its mainstream, feminist form, but asserts that the Church is wholly unexceptional in its patriarchal structure, which it shares with the majority of religions, governments, cultures, and even gourmet cooking. As she says, “Though some spots are better than others, I would not escape patriarchy by quitting my job, moving countries, or leaving the Church.”10 This assertion echoes a conclusion from Verlyne Nzojibwami’s qualitative study of thirteen Latter-day Saint feminists that “there is no haven on either side of the fence. Instead, a private space is created in between the two opposing sides.”11 For Inouye, this “private space” can be made within the Church, questioning the tacit assumption that leaving the Church would free her (and her audience) from gender inequality.

In each section of her talk, Inouye uses her own lived experiences alongside global history to contextualize the challenges of life and faith. She points out the universality of death and patriarchy across history but also discusses her own cancer, her mother’s death, and losing her hair at age twenty-nine. By continuously zooming in on individual experience and out to “most of humanity for thousands of years,” Inouye encourages her audience to see personal things with a global, transhistorical perspective. She reminds her listeners that Latter-day Saints “are a tiny 0.02% minority of God’s children,” a fact that is easy to forget at BYU. To Inouye, this global perspective reveals a hidden strength: “We are weird and small enough to really try to be sister and brother to each other.” Once again, Inouye has changed the terms of the conversation, suggesting that personal efforts can address global issues, just as global perspectives can shed new light on personal problems.

Inouye also uses fresh and humorous analogies to change her audience’s perspective. In a humorous story about her farmer grandfather, Inouye invites her audience to consider that life is, in part, about choosing which ditches you want to dig. Inouye says, “Since I see no feasible way to opt out [of patriarchy], I have decided instead to dig in—to sharpen my shovel and get to work.” This analogy gives Inouye a tool that brings the Latter-day Saint work ethic to a novel application, expanding listeners’ thinking.12 Near the end of the talk, she speaks “to my young fellow Latter-day Saints, . . . please consider your tremendous power to lead us where we need to go,” inviting them to join her in the ditches of the Church. This invitation may be unconvincing to young people who worry these ditches will not make much headway. But by giving her audience the analogy of ditchdigging, Inouye shifts the conversation about faith and church membership from the existential to the everyday work of improvement.

In the most irreverent analogy of her speech, Inouye quotes her uncle, Charles Shirō Inouye, who said, “Mormons are like manure. If you heap them all up in a pile together, they just stink. But if you spread them around, they can do a lot of good.” In the same vein, Inouye comments that Jesus called his disciples to be salt and yeast, “things that are horrible in concentration, indispensable in dissolution.” Inouye’s use of humorous analogies allows her to build empathy and trust with her audience, making them more likely to listen to her perspective.13 In her creative analogies, Inouye echoes not only Jesus but also other Latter-day Saint leaders like Dieter F. Uchtdorf and Chieko N. Okazaki, who use fresh analogies with lived experience in a global church.14 “Making Zion” provides a personal apologetics for remaining a part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rooted in the faith’s tradition of broad visions and pioneer spirit. Inouye’s title is a telling insight into her uniquely Latter-day Saint approach to this topic—Zion will not happen by an act of God; it must be made by us. Inouye contends, “The worst thing is to live life in a way that requires no transformative struggle from ourselves, and that makes no difference for good in the lives of others.” This work involves “living with contradictions,” an attitude that echoes the claim of the faith’s founder, Joseph Smith: “By proving contrarieties truth is made manifest.”15 The Latter-day Saint project is full to the brim with contraries:16 manure and theodicies, earth and sky. Following her pioneer ancestors, Inouye digs ditches into thorny issues, like patriarchy and disaffection, suggesting that we, the modern Church, not only make Zion, but we can make it anew.

Making Zion (2019)

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye17

[. . .]

About a year ago I had a chat with a young woman who was deciding where to go to college. She had been accepted by a number of outstanding universities and academic programs around the country. She had a bright future ahead of her, but she wasn’t sure whether that future included ongoing practice in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She laid out all of her pressing questions.

I took notes. I’m going to share an excerpt from what she said with regard to women’s issues and LGBTQ issues within the Church. Whatever your own position on these sensitive topics, can I ask you to listen gently, with an open mind, accepting that these are her sincere, heartfelt questions? Don’t worry about responding. Just see if you can hear her.

How can I be a member of a church that doesn’t treat women equally compared to men, and that asks LGBTQ people to never date, seek loving companionship, or marry and have children? Didn’t Christ command us to treat others the way we would want to be treated?

I’ve studied history. I understand how structural inequality works, and what it looks like. Currently, the church looks like just another of the many conservative religious institutions that are part of the long human history of patriarchy and discrimination. Sure, I like the idea of “eternal families.” But when the promise of “eternal families” comes with treating men and women differently, and denying LGBTQ people love and the opportunity to start their own families, people like many of my friends and me, are inclined to say: No thanks. The gender and sexuality issues are deal breakers.

She expressed these concerns with eloquence and passion. In addition to concerns about women’s and LGBTQ issues, she also cited well-documented instances of racism and abuse within a Church context. As I listened, I could feel that these questions came from a place of integrity, a belief in the worth of each individual soul, and a desire to follow the Savior’s fearless example. She wasn’t looking for excuses to be a slacker or lead a dissipated life. She wanted to love others as Jesus loved, to stand for truth and righteousness, to bring as many people as possible into the gospel fold. If you or someone you love and respect has ever expressed any of these concerns she raised, can you please raise your hand?

I’ve been thinking about her questions for some time. Many of them have long dwelt in my heart. But I was struck by the way she asked them—as a seventeen-year-old, with fire in her eyes, with a clear understanding of the tensions that they generated in her life and worldview and personal relationships. These concerns are pressing to many within the rising generations of Latter-day Saints—if not you yourself, then perhaps your loved one or your friend.

What is also pressing is a desire for action. Today it is common for people to boycott restaurants or corporations because of political views or social policies associated with them, or to hold a “walkout” as a form of protest. In such an environment, it can seem inexcusable to many to remain within an organization that excludes women from the chain of organizational leadership, or compels LGBTQ people to make excruciating choices to remain in full fellowship, or that has a history that includes racist teachings and policies, or that has a track record of cases of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

So now some of you are looking at me and wondering, “Is she going to excuse this and say, ‘Just focus on the positive, read your scriptures, and pray?’ If she sees the contradictions I see, how can she stay?” Or, others are looking at me and wondering, “Why is she so critical? If she sees contradictions in the Church’s structure or policies or history, why doesn’t she just go somewhere else?”

I want you to notice that both of these positions are closely related. They’re based on the same premise that some things are deal breakers. Either the Church is supposed to be true and good, and falling short of truth or goodness breaks this deal, or faithful church members are supposed to believe that the Church is true and good, and pointing out ways in which we fall short breaks this deal. I have many friends and family members who have left the Church because they felt they couldn’t reconcile their moral values with our policies and culture. I have many friends and family members who will never leave the Church because their past experiences have given them a sense of certainty that wherever the Church and its leaders are at any given time is where they want to be (and where others should be).

How we come to our worldviews depends heavily on our own personal experiences and the environments in which we live. My own position—the basic set of assumptions that shape my faith and worldview—is different from the two “deal-breaking” positions I just described. My position is that life is full of messy contradictions and that sometimes embracing them is the most productive way forward. This worldview is based on my experience as a scholar, returned missionary, athlete, mother, and cancer patient. It is based on my family background, and my relationships with people in places like Orange County, California; Taiwan; Auckland; and Gunnison, Utah.

If you don’t mind, in the remainder of the talk I’ll share this position with you, with an understanding that even within the body of committed Latter-day Saints there are diverse experiences, values, and concerns. In today’s audience, there are also a number of people who are not Latter-day Saints, but who are people of strong faith, intellect, and heart.18 All of us live in a world of bewildering contradictions. Even if our worldviews don’t completely align, I hope that one or two of my perspectives may be useful to you in some way.

I first drafted this talk on an early morning train from Bordeaux to Paris in March, on my way back home from a scholarly conference. As I watched the sun come up over the barren fields and warm the cold earth, three sentences popped into my head that seemed to usefully triangulate my life philosophy at this point in time. Here they are:

Death is not the worst thing.

Patriarchy is not the worst thing.

Baldness is not the worst thing.

By “baldness,” I don’t mean just having no hair, but I mean imperfections, loss, scars, damage, and other conditions that we acquire as life takes its toll. I don’t just mean things that are easily visible, like wrinkles, but things that come to us in life that make us feel less secure, less confident, less buoyant or hopeful.

Death, patriarchy, baldness—these three are symbols of the suffering, imbalance, and indignity of the fallen world in which, Latter-day Saints believe, we chose to dwell. They are features of human experience in every place and time. Our Heavenly Parents do not rejoice in untimely death, or revel in unfairness, or gleefully inflict damage on their beloved children. But they have prepared for us a world in which the laws of nature take their course, in which imperfect individuals make assumptions and exercise agency, in which accidents happen. The whole point of life is to encounter opposition, to learn to discern good and evil, and to exercise the divine nature within us by following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.

Therefore, from this perspective, what is the worst thing?

The worst thing is to live life in a way that requires no transformative struggle from ourselves and that makes no difference for good in the lives of others.

Let’s talk about death. All of us are dying. Some of us will finish dying sooner. Others will finish dying later. I was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017, did a round of treatments, went into remission, and last week was told by my doctors that the cancer was likely recurring. Therefore, I will be thrilled if I live to see my credit card expire in March 2023. The reason I’m here on the BYU campus today is because I wrote a book about my life, titled Crossings (with a very long subtitle). I began to write Crossings shortly after my diagnosis, because I was not sure whether I would live long enough to talk to my young children about my faith. At the time they were eleven, nine, seven, and five. This is not exactly the age for complex, nuanced discussions about the meaning of life. The weeks between my diagnosis and my surgery were the darkest period of my life, as I contemplated the possibility that my time for influencing my children and being with my husband was coming to an end.

During this time, the thought of death accompanied my every action. As I dropped a batch of library books on robots into the return slot, or watched as my stir-fried green beans and onions with lemon and soy sauce disappeared at the dinner table, I thought about the fleetingness of the many acts that constitute parenthood. In themselves, they are so completely unmonumental. Sure, you create the kid’s body out of a single cell, so that’s something that proves you were there, but so many things—the new diapers, the milk from the breast, the words of stories, the trips to the museum—simply go in and out, in and out, delivered and erased on the daily tide. And then they are gone, leaving no visible marker that says: Your mother was here. She loved you.

I wondered whether I would live long enough for my youngest child, nicknamed the Shoot and sometimes the Hamburger, to have one or two strong memories of me. Would he know “what Mama would say” or “what Mama would do”?

In addition to worrying about my kids, I also worried about myself. I knew what cancer could do because of my mother’s experience. My mother was a gracious, lively woman whose small stature concealed fierce determination. In 2008, she passed away due to a rare cancer of the bile duct. She had been in terrible pain for several months, pain so terrible that the strongest opioids could only take off the edge but never take it away. The pain had made her unable to eat and unable to sleep. Her frame became skeletal and her face acquired a permanent pinched, grim expression. I wondered: Will I suffer like that too? Will I have to be brave, like that? Morbid thoughts flickered in and out of my daily conversations. A couple of colleagues asked me if I could advise a doctoral student coming next year. I responded, cc’ing everyone, “No problem, as long as I’m still alive then!” Radio silence. I now realize that was an awkward and unprofessional thing to say. Cancer: There’s a learning curve!

Let’s talk about patriarchy, by which I mean a system of men officially in charge, men at the forefront, men as the primary subjects, symbols, actors, and authorities. Patriarchy has been the dominant modus operandi for most of humanity for thousands of years. It is everywhere—in government, in scholarship, in art, in gourmet cooking, in the great cathedral of Notre Dame. It is in the Buddhist Vimalakirti Sutra, the Hebrew Pentateuch, the Koran, the Hindu Ramayana, the Pauline epistles, the Book of Mormon. It’s a feature of religious organization at the top levels of the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, Tibetan Buddhism, East Asian Buddhism, our Church. It’s an element of my family history on both my mother’s and my father’s side—my beloved family that I love, that bands together with such fierce loyalty, that is, in my eyes, the awesomest family in the world.

We have a famous story in the Inouye family. My grandparents, Charles and Bessie Inouye, were farmers in Gunnison, Utah, and their children spent all their time working on the farm. One day Grandpa and his high-school-aged sons were out digging in a ditch. My father remembers standing up to his knees in thick, oozy mud. Clouds of mosquitoes were swarming around, biting every exposed surface. Grandpa’s timing was perfect. He said, “Boys, if you don’t get an education, you can look forward to this for the rest of your lives.” It made a deep impression. All of Grandma and Grandpa’s children went on to college, most of them here at BYU, and on to graduate or professional school. Two decided to go to school indefinitely, that is, become university professors. One, Charles Shirō Inouye, is a professor of Japanese literature at Tufts University in Boston. Another, Dillon Kazuyuki Inouye, was a professor of instructional learning technology here at BYU until he passed away in 2008.

That day in the ditch, Grandpa, himself a graduate of Stanford University, wasn’t saying that if you get an education, you’ll never have to work, or get dirty, or that one should always avoid digging ditches. I think he was saying that education gives people more power to choose which ditches they want to dig.

Today, in my work as a professional scholar, I dig particular sorts of ditches. In my research on Chinese history and global religious movements, I plow through texts, line by line. I delve into historical sources like newspapers, organizational records, and religious teachings, seeking to uncover the lives of ordinary people in another place and time. I also step back to look for the big picture.

When one looks at the big picture of all human experience, everywhere, one finds that just as most people’s eyes are brown, and most people’s hair is black, most people’s experience within familial and other social structures is shaped by patriarchy.

I know that there are some spaces in the world, such as Indigenous cultures that are traditionally matriarchal, or perhaps some corners of the internet, that are “patriarchy-free,” by which I mean that in these spaces, patriarchal assumptions, actions, or organization are entirely absent. However, the spaces where I live my life, such as all the universities I’ve ever taught at, New Zealand society, American society, Chinese society, Christian religious traditions, social media networks, my beloved Church, and my beloved family’s history, are not patriarchy-free. Though some spots are better than others, I would not escape patriarchy by quitting my job, moving countries, or leaving the Church.

To clarify, by using the term “patriarchy-free” I am not seeking to trivialize the negative experiences of women and men who have been harmed by patriarchal practices and assumptions—women who have been ignored, abused, or dominated, men whose assumptions that they were inherently more important led them to ignore, abuse, or dominate women, have harmed their families and stunted their spiritual growth.

I am saying that patriarchal systems are rooted throughout the worlds in which I want to live, and since I see no feasible way to opt out, I have decided instead to dig in—to sharpen my shovel and get to work. The challenge of bringing to pass, in my worlds, the Book of Mormon teaching that “all are alike unto God” is one of the ditches I have chosen to dig.19

Regarding baldness: You’re probably wondering why I don’t have hair. No, it’s not because of the chemo. The major effect of chemo for me was that I felt the overwhelming urge to watch all of the British history–related shows on Netflix, from all seasons of Downton Abbey to documentaries on Henry the VIII’s residence, including his velvet-covered toilet seat (which sounds so inadvisable). Anyway, until the age of twenty-nine, I had long, thick black hair—until, inexplicably, it just fell out. At first it was really hard. I felt like everybody was looking at me. Employees in stores, flight attendants on airplanes, frequently called me “sir.” It was very humbling. I began to realize that I had no right to be prideful or to judge people based on their appearance. I was, after all, the bald woman in the room.

I would definitely love to have hair again, but losing it taught me a lesson. I learned that loss makes us both vulnerable and strong. We lose things that are dear to us, that make us beautiful or happy or whole. Sometimes this loss is readily apparent, but sometimes it isn’t. Losing my hair was the first time in my adult life I really remember feeling dependent on the kindness and graciousness of others. I had always been a competitive person—a Harvard graduate, a marathoner—but now, I felt vulnerable, dependent on others to be kind to me. This vulnerability helped me better understand and accept the vulnerability in others. In this way, as it says near the end of the Book of Mormon in the Book of Ether, 12:27, our weakness becomes a strength.

So I’ve come to a sort of understanding with death, patriarchy, and baldness, which is to say that I’ve come to accept and even appreciate the imperfection of human existence. [. . .]

[. . .]

Similarly, the more I learn about our Church history and our governing structures, the more clearly I see that the Church as it’s currently constituted has never been the best of all possible worlds. As Elder Uchtdorf has said, the Restoration is ongoing. At the same time, the more I think about the Church today, the more clearly I see that it has something to offer me and that the Latter-day Saints have something to offer the world.

What I see the Church offering me is the opportunity to learn to follow Christ and participate in the redeeming processes of error, repentance, and growth by engaging with my sisters and brothers in the gospel. It is the opportunity to think globally and act locally, to think locally and act globally. These networks of human bonds and collective action are as close at hand as my own home and neighborhood, and as far flung as the entire world. That is cool. We, the Latter-day Saints, are weird and small enough to really try to be sister and brother to each other, in our diverse and often contradictory circumstances around the world.

[. . .]

If we surround ourselves with only those who agree with us and admire us, creating an insular Latter-day-Saint-land, and forget that we are a tiny 0.02% minority of God’s children, we risk creating an artificial environment in which contradiction, tension, and discomfort are seen as foreign. This is like digging in a sandbox, where there are just uniform grains of sand. It’s easy and it’s clean, and children like to do it. But it is not fertile soil, and it does not hold water. By contrast, the native ecosystem that our Heavenly Mother and Father created for their children was meant to be muddy, full of diverse elements and microorganisms, and frequently a bit wretched.

This reminds me of something Uncle Charles said to me in college. Uncle Charles (Gunnison farm boy, professor, poet, and Latter-day Saint) told me, “Mormons are like manure. If you heap them all up in a pile together, they just stink. But if you spread them around, they can do a lot of good.”

In the scriptures, Jesus didn’t exactly say his disciples were manure, but he similarly used metaphors that described things that are horrible in concentration, indispensable in dissolution. He said in Matthew 5:13: “You are the salt of the earth.” He said in Matthew 13:33: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.”

As General Relief Society Counselor Sharon Eubank taught in April general conference, Jesus made great efforts to reach out to people outside the circle of social privilege and religious orthodoxy: “lepers, tax collectors, children, Galileans, harlots, women, Pharisees, sinners, Samaritans, widows, Roman soldiers, adulterers, the ritually unclean.”20 These associations made him vulnerable to criticism from the community of those who considered themselves righteous, proper, and mainstream, and eventually contributed to his death.

[. . .]

Therefore:

Death

Patriarchy

Baldness

These are not the worst things. They are features of where I live, but they do not define me or my work as I dig the ditches of life.

In a similar manner, my faith as a Latter-day Saint is not defined entirely by our mistakes, our imbalance, and our weakness. These surely exist, because we are a living community of people seeking God together. My faith as a Latter-day Saint encompasses both the deep flaws and the deep beauty of such a collective endeavor.

[. . .]

And, to my young fellow Latter-day Saints, who are troubled by the ways in which our Church institutions or culture sometimes fall short of our highest ideals, I say: Please consider your tremendous power to lead us where we need to go. You are the future of our Church. You are who we may become. You may find that God will consecrate these struggles for your good, and for ours. As a people, where would we be without fearless questions and a fierce will to press on toward Zion over bogs and rivers and mountains? There are real hazards to undertaking a messy spiritual journey in the company of so many others, as Latter-day Saints do. But for me it is a rich life, a consequential life, a life worth living.

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Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, to be published June 2, 2026, by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

To pre-order the full anthology from University of Illinois Press, click here. (Use code S26UIP for a 30% discount!)

To receive each new post in the Oratory series, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select “Oratory.”

Catie Nielson is a cognitive psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is also active in Mormon Studies, where her primary interest is in materialism and its relationship to the broader philosophical tradition.

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand gestures hold well-known meanings.

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This post is part of a collaborative series between Wayfare and Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory, which is available for pre-order here. (Use code S26UIP for a 30% discount!)

Across its two-hundred-year history, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and Mormon culture writ large) has developed an impressive tradition of public address, much of which has been recorded and collected, but relatively little of which has been studied academically, and none of which has attempted to capture the full range of the Latter-day Saint speaking voice. Our volume and this series attempt to fill that gap by providing a vital sampling of sermons and speeches that offer primary works for students and scholars of Mormonism, of American culture, and of religious rhetoric, as well as for anyone interested in the faith’s rich and surprisingly diverse tradition of eloquent oratory.

Since the Church maintains no professionally trained or paid clergy at the local level, no schools of theology, and no separate priestly class, it has no concept of what other religions call homiletics, or the art and theory of preaching. So one might presume there is not a strong culture of preaching or public oratory in the Church, but we find precisely the opposite. The Church’s radically democratic structure, lay ministry, geographically bounded wards, and volunteer callings make it an entire universe of constant speechmaking by all kinds of orators, skilled and otherwise. Members are frequently required to give talks or sermons in front of entire congregations, including prepared messages at assigned meetings, open-mic testimony meetings once a month, and frequent devotionals, firesides, conferences, camps, and other events—to say nothing of public prayers, ordinances, rituals, priesthood blessings, and other speech acts that play a central role in the maintenance of Latter-day Saint life.

Almost as soon as they can walk and talk, young members of the Church enter Primary, where they are invited to prepare short talks for large groups of fellow children. They typically deliver these addresses into microphones while standing behind lecterns. At age eleven or twelve, they enter the youth program, where they are invited to prepare whole lessons and give more talks, sometimes to the adult congregation. Beginning as early as age eighteen, active Latter-day Saints are encouraged to join a robust missionary force, leaving home to travel the world, two by two, to preach in homes, parks, and streets. Frequently called to leadership positions, these missionaries organize and conduct meetings, administer rituals, pray publicly, and give several lessons and talks each week in addition to their extemporaneous preaching.

By the time they arrive home from their missionary service, typical Latter-day Saints have become seasoned—if not always well-trained—orators and leaders, poised to continue contributing to their local congregations as part of the Church’s vast lay ministry. In these roles, Church members are expected to conduct meetings and trainings, teach and offer counsel, and speak frequently to audiences ranging from a few individuals to a few hundred or even a few thousand people.

All told, Latter-day Saints are expected to speak and preach frequently and publicly on topics of significance, often with little notice, from a young age and throughout their lives. It is not an overstatement to claim that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are likely to have spent far more time than the average person behind a lectern or pulpit delivering speeches, lessons, sermons, and prayers before large audiences.

As scholars of rhetoric—or the art, theory, and practice of communication—we find this phenomenon fascinating. Surely this abundance of public-speaking opportunities accounts for part of the success of Latter-day Saints in the worlds of business, government, and education. We also understand that no number of fine examples of Mormon oratory have prevented an equal amount of boring, uninspiring, or cliche sacrament meeting talks.

Either way, however, Latter-day Saints exhibit a reverence for the spoken word and its centrality to their lived experience. They demonstrate a great love of eloquent orators, like the late Jeffrey R. Holland and the charismatic Dieter F. Uchtdorf. They also show a profound respect for more austere speaking styles, like that of Bruce R. McConckie or Spencer W. Kimball.

Then there’s the famous statement of Brigham Young, who declared: “When I saw a man without eloquence, or talents for public speaking, who could only say, ‘I know, by the power of the Holy Ghost, that the Book of Mormon is true, that Joseph Smith is a Prophet of the Lord,’ the Holy Ghost proceeding from that individual illuminate[d] my understanding, and light, glory, and immortality [were] before me.”

Finally, there is the prodigious spectrum of non-institutional Latter-day Saint voices that have contributed to this tradition. From women and minorities to intellectuals and non-conformists, Mormons are anything but monovocal, as our anthology seeks to demonstrate. Believers and critics alike seem to understand the importance of this Book of Mormon truth, that: “the preaching of the word . . . had [a] more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword or anything else” (Alma 31:5).

In this Wayfare series and in the anthology, you’ll encounter Joseph Smith’s legendary King Follett Sermon, one of Melissa Inouye’s Maxwell Institute lectures, and a Bancroft Prize acceptance speech by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. You’ll also encounter or re-encounter Truman G. Madsen’s audio-recorded education week addresses on Joseph Smith, Francine Bennion’s “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering,” and Orson F. Whitney’s “Home Literature” address, with its famous call for “Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.” You will also find that, despite their richness and diversity, these speeches and others in the series and anthology all openly confess or deeply imply a central commitment to the Savior, or at least to the importance of the restored gospel as an influence on the speakers’ lives. May you enjoy reflecting on the significance of public speaking in Latter-day Saint life through this series, as well as its endless yearning for divine eloquence.

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To receive each new post in the Oratory series, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select “Oratory.”

Richard Benjamin Crosby is a professor in the English department at Brigham Young University, where he specializes in the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric. His essays have appeared in his field’s top journals, and he is the author of American Kairos: Washington National Cathedral and the New Civil Religion.

Isaac James Richards is an award-winning poet, essayist, and scholar of rhetoric. He has also taught classes in the BYU English Department, Honors Program, and School of Communications.

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer. Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand meanings hold well-known meanings.

Subscribe now

This post is part of a collaborative series between Wayfare and Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory, which is available for pre-order here. (Use code S26UIP for a 30% discount!)

On March 9, 1844, fifty-five-year-old King Follett perished from injuries suffered in a well-digging accident. Joseph Smith delivered an address on Sunday, March 10, 1844, the day Follett was buried. That sermon is sometimes labeled as a funeral sermon for Follett. In spite of that, Louisa Tanner Follett—King’s wife of twenty-eight years—requested that Smith preach another sermon on Follett’s behalf. That sermon, delivered on April 7, 1844, later became known as the “King Follett sermon” and is widely recognized as the single most famous, controversial, and important of all Smith’s orations, and perhaps as the most important Mormon speech of all time. Famed literary critic Harold Bloom refers to it as “one of the truly remarkable sermons ever preached in America.”1

The immediate context of the April 7 King Follett sermon was a conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The conference promised to be a dramatic one, as dissenters planned to bring public charges against Smith over various issues, including polygamy.2 But Smith short-circuited that plan by declaring in the opening moments on April 5 that the conference would hear no such cases. Smith then complained of illness during the first two days of meetings and did not preach until the afternoon of the third day—April 7, 1844—when he finally fulfilled the wish of widow Louisa. According to eyewitness accounts, Smith preached at full voice in windswept open air for around two and a half hours starting around three fifteen in the afternoon on an outdoor, wooden platform pulpit to a crowd estimated at between ten thousand and twenty thousand people.3

Smith’s preaching was directed at Louisa Follett and others in the audience who mourned the loss of family and friends, yet Smith’s extemporaneous remarks were not a eulogy, and they cannot be said to be unrehearsed. He had stated all his rhetorical points before in various settings.4 Instead of a eulogy, he offered a kind of cosmological overview of the purpose of life, summarizing some of his often-repeated preaching from the period of 1839 to 1844.

In the early 1830s, Mormon sermons were considered ephemeral oral events not meant to be recorded. In a rhetorical sense, the resulting sparse reporting may have contributed to preventing Smith’s opponents from easily validating claims about what he might have said. But the need for order and consistency in the growing Church required an increasingly careful documentary record of Joseph Smith’s teachings.5 These records consisted largely of content audits (reports of a sermon through paraphrase) and, later, aural audits (attempts to capture the preacher’s words verbatim).6

For the Follett sermon specifically, two official clerks, Thomas Bullock and William Clayton, had been appointed to keep longhand notes of the conference. Both were experienced notetakers. Smith’s private secretary and historian, Willard Richards, kept brief notes. Wilford Woodruff kept notes from the audience and then later elaborated upon and enlarged them from memory. Others kept notes as well. Bullock later combined his own conference minutes with those of Clayton for the version that appears in the Times and Seasons in September 1844. As a result, there is no one text to identify as the “base text” for the sermon. Instead, there is a “pivot text,” a fusion of several sources formed by clerks in 1856 as a kind of intertextual palimpsest. Smith even generated some intertextuality unconsciously, foregrounding texts of other speeches he had given and texts he had read or heard within the extemporaneous milieu, particularly his Book of Abraham, published in 1842.7 Additionally, the sermon was reported to have been over two hours in length, but even a dictation-speed reading of the longest aural audit does not approach two hours. A careful comparison of the reports shows that neither clerk could keep up—all of which illustrates one of the difficulties with the phrase Joseph Smith said. Yet, for the Follett sermon in particular, surviving texts show that the main points were captured with remarkable fidelity. For the next two centuries, the sermon continued to be redacted, edited, interpreted, annotated, reprinted, rejected, and reborn through at least twenty-five different manuscript versions influenced by several human actors and historical impulses. Thus, the legacy of the King Follett sermon and its reception deserve attention as part of its rhetorical biography.

The Follett sermon reverberated throughout history largely due to its radical theological claims. The sermon basically approaches five main points: the nature of man, the nature of God, the resurrection, the nature of hell, and baptism as a pivotal rite (necessitating proxy baptism for the unevangelized dead). All these points have largely disappeared from sponsored Latter-day Saint discourse in their original forms. Still, three claims of the sermon had important (and evolving) rhetorical effects: (1) Smith’s argument that God was once, in effect, a human being on some world and had saved that world as Jesus did this one;8 (2) Smith’s assertion that the human soul has no beginning and no end but exists eternally and coequally with God; and (3) Smith’s claim that children who die will be resurrected exactly as they were when they died and “will never grow” but reign “on thrones of glory” without “one cubit added to their stature.”

The first two claims played a critical role during Middle Mormonism (1845–1890), when Brigham Young and others revised Follett theology to form a kind of metaphysics for polygamy, while the third created camps of supporters and rejectors.9 A step toward that remodeled teaching of claim 2 was published in Mormon poetess Eliza R. Snow’s 1845 poem, “My Father in Heaven,” which hinted that the Gods propagated/made spirits/souls by copulation in heaven: Divine women birthed spirits instead of adopting already existing souls. In 1855, the Deseret News noted that Snow’s retitled poem as the hymn “O My Father” was a Brigham Young favorite.10 The logic of sexuality in heaven had little relationship to Smith’s teaching in Nauvoo, Illinois. Still, the revision of that teaching seemed inevitable, as Snow, Young, William Phelps, Orson Pratt, and others would sketch a very material afterlife, with sex as a metaphysical justification of polygamy.11 Thus, Middle Mormonism exchanged Follett’s self-existent human souls for a logic of procreated/gestated spirits to help root the theology of polygamy and provide reasons for communal coherence in the fraught pioneer isolation of early Utah. The final 1856 redactions of the sermon obliquely reflected this picture of heaven.12

The contradiction between the notion of souls born in heaven and souls with no beginning was not lost on internal critics of the Follett sermon, and even late nineteenth-century non-Mormon sources noted the issue.13 Despite B. H. Roberts’s best efforts at reconciliation (he published his annotated version of the 1856 text in 1909 in the main church periodical),14 Church President Joseph F. Smith, a nephew of Joseph Smith, and his First Presidency largely succeeded in expunging any reference to the sermon from continuing church publications. Joseph F., in particular, led a crusade against claim 3 while one of his counselors denounced claim 2. Joseph F.’s opinion perhaps grew partly out of his own personal loss; by the end of his life, thirteen children had preceded him in death. Smith and his counselors in the First Presidency essentially anathematized the sermon. In 1911, they halted the distribution of the King Follett sermon via Church periodicals and excised it entirely from the landmark six-volume History of the Church. The result was the near complete absence of the sermon in official works for nearly three decades.15

The sermon was revived when Joseph F. Smith’s son and namesake, Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, overruled his father’s 1912 ban on Follett by republishing Roberts’s 1909 version in the 1938 Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Meanwhile, the contrary parent-derived soul theology (Roberts’s contemporary Apostle James Talmage’s term) was just as serviceable after the end of polygamy, this time partly due to the rise of biological studies from Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin. Church leaders again needed the Middle Mormonism teaching that human souls inherited the potential to become gods through divine sexual transmission of spiritual genes, as it were.16

In short, Joseph Smith’s King Follett sermon turned extant nineteenth-century teachings on their collective heads, wrecked Christian anthropology as a bulwark of divine separatism, befuddled his own most loyal followers, erected—by broad Christian standards—a truly heretical theogony (God has a genealogy), and largely failed to be completely owned by any of the churches that emerged from his prophetic legacy. Almost all other branches of Smith’s original founding church eventually rejected the sermon as inauthentic or in error even though textual sources demonstrate that neither of these claims are viable. Follett survived, in part, because the notion of a progressive God who came to be God in some distant past helped to rationalize a heaven built around polygamy (the Saints were treading the paths of the gods). The paradox of God as the adoptive Father of uncreated, necessarily forever-existing, indivisible minds/souls/spirits versus souls/spirits born to Mothers in Heaven persists in Latter-day Saint thought.17 Thus, at least in part, Follett continues to be an important anchor of belief in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an oration whose legacy affirms its eloquence.

A New Critical Text of the King Follett Sermon

The apparatus below18 is as follows. Text in italics is found in only one source text. Text in [brackets] shows alternate text from two or more aural audits. Text in {braces} and bold headings are the author’s additions and are not found in any source text.

The History of God

I now call the attention of the congregation while I address you on the subject contemplated in the fore part of the conference. As the wind blows very hard, it will be [hardly possible/impossible] to make you all hear unless {there is} profound attention.

It is of the greatest importance and the most solemn of any that could occupy our attention, and that is the subject of the dead on the decease of our brother Follett, who was crushed to death in a well. I have been requested to speak by his friends and relatives, and inasmuch as there are a great many in this congregation who live in this city as well as elsewhere who have lost friends, I shall speak on this subject in general and offer my ideas as far as I have ability and as far as I shall be inspired by the Holy [Spirit/Ghost] to dwell on this subject. I want your prayers and faith, the [inspiration/instruction] of Almighty God, the gift of the Holy Ghost, [that I may set forth truth/to say] things that [are true/can easily be comprehended] and [will/shall] carry the testimony to your hearts; pray that [he/the L{ord}] may strengthen my lungs, [stay/control] the wind, and let the pray of the saints to heaven appear that it may enter into the ear of the L{or}d of Sabaoth for the fervent effectual prayer of the righteous man avail much—and I verily believe that your prayers shall be heard. I will speak in order to hold out.

Before I enter fully into [this/the] investigation of [this/the] subject that is lying before us, I wish to pave the way—make a few preliminaries—bring up the subject from the beginning in order that you may understand the subject when I come to it. I do not calculate to please your ears with superfluity of words, oratory with much learning, but I calculate to edify you by [the/with] simple truths of heaven.

First place, I wish to go back to the beginning of creation, then {there?} the starting point, in order to {be} fully acquainted with purposes/it is necessary to know the mind purposes decrees and ordination of the great Elohim that sits in the h{eavens}. For us to take up beginning at the creation, it is necessary for us to have an understanding of God himself in the beginning. If we start right, it is very easy for us to go right all the time, but if we start wrong it is hard matter to get right. There are very few beings in the world who understand rightly the character of God and do not comprehend their own character. They [do not/cannot] comprehend [the beginning nor the end/any thing that is past or that which is to come], neither their own relation to God, and com{prehend} but little more than the brute beast. [It does/comp{rehends?}] the same thing—eat, drink, sleep, arise, and not any more—and what the designs of Jehovah what better than the beast it does the same thing—eat drink—sleep and comprehends present and knows [nothing more and how are we to do it/as much as we unless we are able to com{prehend}] by no other way than the inspiration of Almighty God. I want to go back to the beginning and so [lift/get] your minds into a more [lofty sphere/a more exalted standing] than the human [being/mind] generally understands. I want to ask this congregation, every man, woman, and child to answer the question in their own heart: What kind of being is God? Ask yourselves.

I ag{ain}repeat the question, What kind of a being is God? Does any man or woman know? Have any of you seen him? Heard him? Communed with him? Here is the question that will peradventure [from this time henceforth/while you live] occupy your attention.

The apostle says this is eternal life to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. If any man enquire what kind of a being is God [if he will search diligently his own heart/cast his mind to know if the declaration of the apostle be true he will realize] that unless he knows God, he has not eternal life. There can be eternal life on no other principle. My first object {is} to comprehend and explain God, and I comprehend them to your hearts so that the spirit seal it upon you hearts. Let every man and woman henceforth [put his hand on his/shut their] mouth, sit in silence, and never say anything against the man of God, [and/again but] if I [do not do it/fail], [it becomes my duty to renounce all my/I have no right to] pretensions to revelation, inspiration, if [all are/I should do so] pretensions to God [they will all/should I not] be as bad [off as I am/as all] the rest of the world. They will all say I ought to be damned. There is not a man or woman would not breath out an anathema on my head if they knew I was a false prophet, and some would feel authorized to take away my life.

If any man is authorized to take away my life [who say{s}/because] I am a false teacher [so I should have the same right to all/then upon the same principle am I authorized to take the life of every] false teacher, and where would be the end of blood and who would not be the sufferer? And there is no law in the heart of God that would allow anyone to interfere with the rights of man. Every man has the right to be a false prophet as well as a true prophet, but no man is authorized to take away life in consequence of their religion. All laws and government ought to tolerate {religion?} whether right or wrong. If I show verily that I have the truth of God and show that ninety-nine of one hundred are false [prophets/teachers] while they pretend to hold the keys of God and go to killing them because &c, it would deluge the whole world [with/in] blood.

I want you all to know God to be familiar with him, and if I can get you to know {him}, I can bring you to him. All persecution against me will cease and let you know that I am his servant, for I speak [as one having/in] authority and not as a s{cribe?}. What kind of a being was God in the beginning? Open your ears and eyes, all ye ends of the earth and hear, and I am going to prove it to you [with/by] the Bible, and I am going [to tell you the designs of God to the human race/and the relation the human family sustains with God] and why he interferes with the affairs of man.

1st, God himself who sits enthroned in yonder heavens is a man like unto one of yourselves. This is the great secret. If the veil was rent today and [that/the great god] who holds this world in its orbit, its sphere, or the planets and upholds all things by his power—if you were to see him to day you would see him in all the person image, very form of a man, for Adam was [created in the very fashion of God/formed in fashion and image like unto him]. Adam received instruction, walked, talked and conversed as one man talks and communes with another. In order to [speak for/understand the subject of the de{a}d], the consolation of those who mourn for the loss of their friend, it is necessary [they should/to] understand the character and being of God, for I am going to tell you what sort of a being of God {and} how God came to be God.

We [suppose/have imagined] that God was God from all eternity. I will refute [the/that] idea. Truth is the touchstone. These are incomprehensible {things?}. To some they are the simple and first principles of [the gospel/truth] to know for a certainty the character of God that we may converse with him {the} same as [a/one] man with another, and God himself, the father of us all, was once [as one of/like] us [was/dwelt] on an [earth/planet] [as Jesus was in the flesh/same as Jesus Christ himself].

I wish [I had the trump of an Archangel/I was in a suitable place to tell it/If I have the privilege], I could tell the story in such a manner [as/that pers{ecution} should] cease forever. Said Jesus mark it Br. Rigdon. What did Jesus [say/said] as the Father hath power in himself to do even so hath the Son power to do what{?} why what the Father did, that answer is obvious in a manner to lay down his body and take it up again. Jesus, what are you going to do—to lay down my life as my father did that I might take it up again? If you don’t believe it, you don’t believe the Bible. The scripture says, and I defy all hell [all learning and wisdom and records of hell together/all the records and wisdom and all the combined powers of earth and hell] to refute it. Here then is Eternal life to know the only wise and true God. You have got to learn how to be a God yourself in order to save yourself [and/to] be a K{ing} and God [Priest to God/priests and kings] as all Gods have done by going from a small [capacity/degree] to another from [grace to grace/ exaltation to ex{altation}] until the resurrection of] of the dead, till they are able to dwell in everlasting burnings in everlasting power, till they are able to sit in glory as doth those who sit enthroned as they who have gone before, [and/I want you to know] while in the last days while certain individuals are proclaim{ing} his name, that he is not trifling with [us/you or me].

I want you to know the first principles [of this law/of consolation] how consoling to the mourner—when they are called to part with a wife, father, mother, father, dear relative husband, child, friend—to know that although earthly tabernacles shall be dissolved, their very being will rise [to/and] dwell in everlasting burnings in immortal glory to sorrow die nor suffer any more, and not only that, to contemplate the saying they shall be heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. What is it{?} to inherit the same glory powers and exaltation as those who are gone before? What did Jesus do{?} Why I do the things I saw the Father do [before/when] worlds came rolling into existence.

{Quotes John 5} I saw the Father work out his kingdom with fear and trembling, and I must/can do the same, and when I get my kingdom, I will [give/ present] my kingdom to the Father, and it will exalt his glory so that he obtains Kingdom rolling upon Kingdom so that Jesus [treads/steps] in his tracks [as he had gone/to inherit what God did] before. It is plain beyond comprehension, and you thus learn this is some of of the first principles of the gospel about which so much hath been {said?}. [You have got to find the beginning of this history and go on till you have learned the last/when you climb a ladder you must begin at the bottom run{g} until you learn the last principle of the gospel] [will be a great while before you learn the last/for it is a great thing to learn salvation] [after/ beyond] the grave. It is not all to be comprehended in this world.

I suppose that I am not allowed to go into an investigation [but what is contained/of any thing that is not] in the Bible, and I think is so many learned and wise men who would put me to death for treason I shall turn commentator today.

I will go to the first Hebrew word in the Bible, make a comment on the very first sentence of the history of creation: In the beginning Barosheit. Want to analyze the word—Be—in, by through, and everything else. Rosh—the head. When the inspired man wrote it, he did not put the Ba there but the first part to it a man, a Jew without any authority thought it too bad to begin to talk about the head of any man. It read in the first—The head on of the Gods brought forth the Gods is the true meaning of the word—rosheet signifies to bring forth the Elohim. If you do not believe it, you do not believe the learned man of God—no man can tell you any more than I do, thus the Hed God brought forth the Gods in the grand council [will simplify it in/I want to bring it to] the English language. Oh ye lawyers ye Doctors [who/that] have persecuted me, I want you know that the Holy Ghost knows something as well as you do—the Head God called together the Gods and set in Grand Council. The Grand Counsellors set in yonder heavens and contemplated the creation of the world’s that was created at that time.

[. . .]

Now I ask all the learned doctors who hear me whether the learned men who are preaching salvation say that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. They account it blasphemy to contradict the idea. They [will call/ think] you a fool—You ask them why they say “Don’t the Bible say he created the world?,” and they infer that it must be out of nothing. And the reason is that they are unlearned, and I know more than the world, and if the Holy Ghost in me comprehends more than all the world, I will associate myself with it. The word create came from the word Barau—it means to organize, same as [you/ man] would [organize/use to build] a ship—hence we infer that God himself had materials to organize the world out of chaos—chaotic matter which is element and in which dwells all the glory—element had an existence from the time he had. The pure pure principles of element are principles that [nothing can destroy. They never have an ending; they coexist eternally/never can be destroyed—they may be organized—and reorganized—but not destroyed.]

I have another subject to dwell on and it is impossible for me to say much but to touch upon them—for time will not permit me to say all [so I must come to/It is associated with the subject in question.] The resurrection of the dead. The soul—the mind of man, the immortal spirit [Doctors of Divinity/all men] say God created it in the beginning. The very idea lessens man in my [idea/estimation.] I don’t believe the doctrine, hear it all ye ends of the world for I know better God has told me, so I am going to tell of things more noble [If you don’t believe it, it won’t make the truth without effect/Make a man appear a fool before he gets through,] if he don’t believe it. We say that God himself was a self-existent God, who told you so? It’s correct enough but how did it get into your heads—who told you that man did not exist [in like manner/upon the same principle] (refers to the bible) [how doest it read in the/Don’t say so in the old] Hebrew—God made man out of the earth and put into [it Adam’s/him his] spirit and so became a living [spirit/body]?

The mind of man—the mind of man, the intelligent part is as immortal, as coequal, with God himself. I know that my testimony is true hence [while/when] I talk to these mourners what have they lost—They are only separated from their bodies for a short [period/season], but their spirits existed coequal with God, and they now exist in a place where they converse [as much/same] as we do on the earth. Does not this give you satisfaction? I want to reason more on the Spirit of Man, for I am dwelling [on the body of man on the subject of the dead/on the immutability of the spirit of man.]

Is it logic to say that a spirit is immortal and yet have a beginning{?} because if a spirit have a beginning it will have an end—good logic—illustrated by his ring, if man had a beginning he must have an end. It does not have a beginning or end,

I take my ring from my finger and liken it unto the mind of man, the immortal spirit, because it has no beginning or end. Suppose you cut it in two, but as the Lord lives there would be an end. All the fools learned and wise men from the beginning of creation [who say/that comes and tells] that man had a beginning proves that he must have an end, and if that doctrine is true, then the doctrine of annihilation [would be/is] true.

But if I am right, I might with boldness proclaim from the house top that God never had power to create the spirit of man at all. God himself could not create himself. Intelligence exists upon a self-existent principle. It is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it—the first principles of man are self exist{ent} with God—All minds and spirits God ever sent into [the/this] world are susceptible of enlargement.

That God himself finds himself in the midst of spirit{s} and [glory] because he was greater saw proper to institute laws [for those who were in less intelligence/to instruct the weaker intelligences] [that they might have one glory upon another in all that knowledge power and glory and so took in hand to save the world of spirits/whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself]. You say honey is sweet, and so do I. I can also taste the [principle/spirit] of eternal life. [I know it is good and/This is good doctrine, it tastes good] when I tell you these words of eternal life that were given to me by [inspiration of the Holy Spirit/the revelations of Jesus Christ], and I know you believe it. You are bound to receive it as sweet, and I rejoice more and more.

[. . .]

There has also been remarks made concerning all men being redeemed from Hell but those who [Sin against the Holy Ghost cannot be forgiven in this world or in the world to come but they shall die the 2nd death—/commit the unpardonable sin are doomed to Gnaolom {Eternity} with out end], but as they concoct scenes of bloodshed in this world so they shall rise to that resurrection which is as the lake of fire and brimstone—some shall rise to the [everlasting burning of God/God dwells in everlasting burnings], and some shall rise to the damnation of their own filthiness—same as the lake of fire and brimstone—I have intended my remarks to all—to all rich and poor, bond and free, great and small. I have no enmity against any man. I love you all—I am their best friend, and if persons miss their mark it is their own fault—if I reprove a man and he hate me, he is a fool—for I love all men, especially these my brethren and sisters—I rejoice in hearing the test{imony} of my aged friend—[You never knew my heart. No man knows my history—I can not do it. I shall never undertake—/You don’t know me—you never will. I don’t blame you for not believing my history.] [If I had not experienced what I have, I should not have known it myself—/Had I not experienced it, I could not believe it myself] I never did harm any man since I have been born in the world—my voice is always for peace—I cannot lie down until my work is finished—I never think evil nor think any thing to the harm of my fellow man—and when I am called at the trump and weighed in the balance, you will know me then—I add no more. God bless you. {A}men—The choir sung an hymn at ½ p 5.

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Excerpted from Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory edited by Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, to be published June 2, 2026, by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2026 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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William V. Smith is an emeritus professor at Brigham Young University. He has authored several books and book chapters on Mormon history and preaching, including The King Follett Sermon: A Biography (BCC Press, 2023). His current interest is in antebellum American sermons.

Illustrations from Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) by John Bulwer.

Hand gestures have long been used to great effect by public speakers to convey or emphasize meaning. In certain cultures, specific hand meanings hold well-known meanings.

Who is Jesus Christ? It sounds like a question you should be able to answer in primary, but it also gnaws at me constantly. Barely a week ago, I told Heavenly Father, “I desire to follow Him more than ever, but feel as though I know Him less than ever.”

While that might seem like an odd prayer for a lifelong member of the Church, it highlights the difference between knowing about Jesus—and knowing Him.

As the Son of God, He set the example for all of us to follow. He taught things that radically challenged the traditional ways we approach life. Consider just a few of His teachings.

In his story about the workers in the vineyard, people start working at different times of the day, but everyone gets paid the same in the end. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the brother who leaves home, spends his birthright, and pursues a destructive life ends up back with his father—and his inheritance. When the woman caught in adultery is brought before Jesus, He tells her to go and sin no more.

These teachings fly in the face of how we normally deal with each other. Think about it. How are any of those things fair?

If I start work at 5 a.m., I should get paid more than those who start at 5 p.m. If I spend my inheritance, it should be spent and irretrievable (banks certainly won’t let me cash the same check twice). If I commit adultery, my life should be shattered. I should be stigmatized by my neighbors and face a long road before I can ever again feel the love of Jesus.

But we’re the ones who are obsessed with paying prices. Jesus wants us to do away with those natural man reflexes. He wants us to stop thinking about what’s fair or how to get to heaven—and start building heaven by loving each other.

The more I study and apply His teachings, the less I seem to know. Perhaps that’s one reason why President Nelson has asked us to devote time each week to studying about the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

ATONEMENT

We often talk about this as something that happened in the Garden of Gethsemane. If we’re feeling a little crazy, we might also say that Christ’s pains returned a second time when hanging from the cross. And yet, as President Nelson implies, there’s much more to learn.

“Atonement” is an English word for becoming “at one” with Christ. As you start to study, you’ll learn that “Atonement” refers not only to an experience in Gethsemane or on the cross but to the sum total of all Christ did for us. For example, a primary element of “Atonement” as it appears in the Book of Mormon is, interestingly, resurrection. The earliest Christians often viewed it as representing how Christ heals us from our sins (or the self-inflicted wounds we incur as a result of our brokenness). And pioneer Latter-day Saints sought ways to use ordinances like the sacrament to become one not just with Jesus but also with each other.

The Prophet Joseph Smith had an interesting approach to the Savior’s Atonement. On one hand, he almost never talked about it, likely reflecting an understanding that punishment-focused theology diverges from the Savior’s true purpose.

On the other hand, Joseph taught some things so radical that they remind you of Someone Else who challenged us through His teachings and parables.

Consider this quote. It sounds so simple, and yet it had—and has—dramatic consequences:

“If you do not accuse each other, God will not accuse you. If you have no accuser, you will enter heaven.”

Some pioneer Latter-day Saints twisted the Prophet’s words. At this time in our history, polygamy was practiced, but it was also highly secretive. That caused more than a few problems, one of which included some male followers of the Prophet telling women it was okay to commit adultery as long as they didn’t tell others. The thinking was that if no one knew, then no one could accuse them. And if no one accused them, salvation was assured.

But that was a horrific twisting of Joseph’s teachings. The Prophet wasn’t advising on how to get away with harmful actions by keeping them secret. Rather, he challenged the saints to turn their understandings about heaven inside out.

He’d already done this by revealing Section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants. Replacing a heaven–hell dichotomy with a more generous view of the afterlife was too challenging for some pioneers, and many Kirtland saints left the Church as a result.

With this teaching about accusers, Joseph Smith is going a step further. Forget about heaven and hell. Forget about degrees of glory. What’s it all about? Each other.

Each of us has hurt someone else. We can’t take that pain away. We can try. We can make restitution. We can change. “We” can do so much. But the other person is the only one who can accept us after harming them. Sometimes, we’re the person who was harmed.

Joseph was teaching something radical, something that echoes the Lord Himself: whether your neighbor gets into heaven depends on you. Divine forgiveness be damned, that person can’t come in until you give the green light. Conversely, you’re at the eternal mercy of whomever you’ve wronged.

Think of what that means. It’s simultaneously terrifying—and empowering.

Terryl Givens, a Latter-day Saint religious scholar at BYU, quotes a twentieth-century Russian theologian who said the same thing in different words.

“Moral history,” said Nikolai Berdyaev, “began when God asked Cain, Where is your brother Abel? But it will reach its culmination when God asks Abel, Where is your brother Cain?”

Did you catch that? Cain killed Abel. Murdered him. That’s about as serious as it gets. And yet Christ’s Atonement offers healing even for him—but it comes in a unique way. Ultimately, Abel will forgive Cain. They will heal each other by living up to the seemingly impossible teachings of Christ.

Can you imagine them when that happens, Cain and Abel walking arm in arm, building Zion on the other side of the veil? First, brothers, then a murderer and his victim, then two members of the body of Christ choosing not to accuse each other but to be each other’s keeper.

That is the message of Christ. That is, in part, Atonement. It is both our impossible challenge—and our inevitable destiny. It is the vision we share with others as Latter-day Saints.

MY MISSION IN ITALY

I want to share a brief experience that is both embarrassing and enlightening. I served my mission in Rome, Italy. Suffice it to say we didn’t have much success when it came to baptisms.

One day, I went with my companion to read scriptures with a ward member. I don’t recall all the details, but when we finished, the member cried and said that because of our conversation, he would fast for the first time in his life.

It should have been a joyous experience. But I was tormented. Six months I’ve been here. I’ve rarely gotten past the first discussion. Almost no one has. Missionaries who baptize are like unicorns.

And now, I’m not even doing “missionary” work. All I did was get a current member to fast. Am I a failure? Was it worth it? I left behind school, girls—many girls—and plans. I’d do it again in a heartbeat if only I could make a difference. But what does it say about me if I can’t baptize anyone, if the very best I’ve done is help a member feel God’s love and decide to fast?

Some of you will relate to that mindset. It’s what I knew at the time. You can recognize the sincerity of my motives, yet also the deep flaws that accompany them.

What would Christ have said if we had a conversation about that? I know now: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

This truth casts baptism in a new light. The symbol of that ritual is powerful and can help people take the first step in a new journey, one that is focused on following Christ and building Zion, or heaven, with each other.

BAPTISM

But baptism isn’t an end goal. While it’s a solid statistic to indicate membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it falls short of indicating conversion to Christ’s teachings. Jesus doesn’t teach us how to get to heaven. Rather, He teaches of our responsibility to build it with each other.

Even the best of people can misunderstand that, though. Richie Steadman, my ministering companion, recently interviewed Richard Hanks—the son of Elder Marion D. Hanks. It’s a fascinating episode of The Cultural Hall podcast worth listening to. Elder Hanks believed that Matthew 25 and 28 went hand in hand, that we both serve and preach. And he exemplified how the best preaching is often done without words.

While overseeing some of the Church’s efforts in Asia, Elder Hanks devoted one of the missions to nothing but humanitarian service. When he approached the Church for the needed funds, one of the brethren was concerned about how that might negatively impact statistics and asked, “How many baptisms will it cost us?”

Elder Hanks replied, “All of them.”

The goal was to preach like Christ, not to baptize. Later, a visiting leader walked through a refugee camp the missionaries had set up. “Are there any Mormon refugees here,” he asked?

“Not yet,” said Elder Hanks. “But there will be.”

And there were.

Over and over, whenever the Church has experimented with preaching that takes the form of friendship and service, baptisms are a natural result—often in greater numbers than the traditional approach.

WARD MISSION

It’s one reason why President Gardner has asked us to start calling the Ward Mission Leader—that’s me—the “Ward Doing Good Leader.” He warned us against making friends to increase the chances they’ll be baptized, saying that those motives are “fake.”

The idea is to make friends, to be in each other’s life, and to lift each other’s burdens. We’re not trying to create converts but rather to build community—what it’s all about. In a very real sense, you and I are the good news of the gospel Jesus preached. By following His example, we give each other the healing He promises.

Our ward mission plan will have four components to start:

1. Zero baptism goal. We are setting a baptism goal of zero, and the stake presidency has expressed interest in following our lead. We’re not anti-baptism, but we want that ritual to stem from friendship. We don’t care if you join our church, the mosque up the street, or no church at all. We just want you in our lives.

2. Teach with the missionaries. If you ask us how to learn more about the Church, we’ll teach you alongside them. And we’ll help the missionaries teach anyone in the current pipeline.

3. Focus on service. We’re going to bring the missionaries with us to serve people. We’ll help folks move, facilitate the self-reliance process, go to sporting events, sponsor fundraisers, visit the lonely, and anything else we can think of. But the missionaries won’t teach. They’ll never even invite people to listen to the discussions. They’ll serve, create friendships, and build Zion with name tags front and center. No preaching. But the minute someone asks a question, they—and we—will be ready to help them make covenants.

4. Focus on belonging. Even within the Church, the feeling of community that will be in Zion can feel lacking. We want to help create that, probably by identifying folks who feel lost after wards were combined last year. We don’t care if you come to church or stay home. But we want you to know you’ve got friends. And someone to sit with if you do come. And we’ll love it if you can enrich us by being part of our lives.

My testimony today is that Jesus Christ lives and this embodiment of Atonement is what He’s anointed and appointed us to do. We can build heaven with each other, dry tears, prevent homelessness, create friends, bear burdens, and live so that when Christ returns, we’ll know Him because we’ve become like him.

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Kurt Manwaring is the Editor-in-Chief of FromtheDesk.org, a Latter-day Saint history and religion blog.

Art by Vincent Van Gogh.

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William James writes at the conclusion of his Varieties of Religious Experience, “By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard.” For James’s philosophy of religion, the individual is the irreducible subject of consideration. Compared to texts, dogmas, creeds, institutions, and other “general messages to mankind,” the idiosyncrasies of our individual experience prove for James far more compelling. “Generalized objects,” James continues—things that exist beyond the individual––are “without solidity of life.” For this reason, James is also critical of abstract philosophical idealism in favor of naturalistic pragmatism. In his 1908 Hibbert Lectures, James explains further what animates his scholarship: “I am finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such, and with things that have a history.” 

James’s confession of love for the ‘finite world as such’ resonates deeply with my reading of Christ’s visit to the Nephites in the Book of Mormon. I believe that God created the world out of love for us and a desire foremost to enter into relationship with us. Tracing back to the Cappadocian fathers and resonant with my faith as a Latter-day Saint, this explanation for why God created the world seems to suggest that the only way God could fully consummate his desire was incarnation. Emerging out of a faint, hard-to-decipher voice “as if it came out of heaven,” and materializing as an embodied, resurrected being who “stood in the midst of them” and then dwelling among us in the flesh are all essential to fully realize God’s love. It is in God’s divine economy of becoming “finite once for all,” to borrow James’s words, and “knit up…with things that have a history” that God’s self is fully realized and we can fully reconciled to God.

In 3 Nephi 11, the risen Christ invites the multitude to “arise and come forth” unto him and thrust their hands into his side, and feel the prints of the nails in his hands and his feet, so that they might know who he really is. The believing people whom the risen Christ visits anticipate in advance and thus witness prophecy fulfilled in his coming. It is for this reason that touching the imprints of Christ’s crucifixion one by one is followed with the promise that the people may know whom Christ claims to be, that, as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58).

In the Book of Mormon’s language, Christ’s preexistence is suggested in his promise that his audience “may know that [he is] the God of Israel, and the God of the whole earth, and [has] been slain for the sins of the world.” Upon Christ’s invitation, each individual is invited to come forth and encounter the divine hand-in-hand, flesh-to-flesh, and they “did see with their eyes and did feel with their hands, and did know of a surety and did bear record, that it was he, of whom it was written by the prophets, that should come.” This feeling and seeing is what I’ve decided to call the fleshiest moment. 

Why is it important to me that Christ doesn’t merely appear but rather comes in the flesh to these people, that this scene be understood literally rather than symbolically, that they touch Jesus and did see with their eyes and feel with their hands? It has less to do with the event’s historical factuality, but its facticity: that Christ came to these people in a particular historical moment, who were themselves attached to a particular set of contingencies traced in the Book of Mormon’s narrative that these people had little control over, including an horrific account of catastrophic violence that befalls the Nephites in the chapters preceding Christ’s coming. 

My contention is that Christ also comes to us today through our own fleshy experience in the world as such, in things which have a history. We encounter the divine in our poieses (plural) of the flesh. That each of our fleshiest moments—the things that render us utterly irreducible at times to our historical facticity and its material contexts—are precisely where God meets us in the here and now. It is within the fleshy and historical that God desires to enter into a relationship with us. Religion is one of these fleshy and historical poieses. As a Latter-day Saint, my faith’s highly controversial history of gold plates and angels and seer stones is one obvious dimension of the messiness of the flesh, but I’d like to speak to two bodily dimensions of my faith practice that help me find communion with God and through which I believe I see and touch Jesus. 

Latter-day Saint Sunday worship services center around partaking of the flesh and blood of Christ through an ordinance (our technical term for formalistic ritual) we call ‘the Sacrament.’ By sanctifying bread torn into individual pieces and water served in individual cups, I believe I have the opportunity to come unto Christ each Sunday for a ‘fleshy moment’ of communion and atonement (at-one-ment), to thrust my hands into his wounds and experience an intimate encounter with the divine. 

Another highly fleshly, if controversial, dimension of Mormon liturgical life is the practice of wearing what we call temple garments . In addition to our low-church Sunday worship meetings, we also practice temple rites, in which we make covenants with God and with each other that help us to enact holiness in our lives. By wearing temple garments I am encircled in the arms of God’s love at all times by virtue of my covenants. 

The practice of wearing temple garments enacts on earth quite literally what is promised to the believer in the Book of Revelation: “He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment” (Rev. 3:5). Paul also speaks to this promise in his second letter to the Corinthians: “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this do we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: If it so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked” (2 Cor 5:1-3). 

Wearing temple garments is a fleshly poiesis of these divine promises from Paul and John the Revelator, a token that audaciously suggests God will not forge a new creation in me in the distant future, but is at work here and now both in my body and in spite of my body and its weaknesses and shortcomings. This is why wearing temple garments is another way I come to see and touch Christ and why this more esoteric practice has deep spiritual resonance with me. In my encounters with Christ, as he draws me to higher and holier ground through the formation of sacred community with others, I find new resonance within the reality that’s mine to guard, to allude to the James quote I began with, with all its idiosyncrasies and historical contingencies.

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This talk was originally delivered at Harvard Divinity School on September 25, 2024 as part of a Noon Service organized by HDS Mormonisms.

Kyle Belanger is a student at Harvard Divinity School and a recent BYU graduate in Classics and History from Anaheim, CA, with interests in history, politics, theology, and interfaith work.

Art by Gary Kapp.

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The God we worship and emulate is an artist. The first thing we learn about our heavenly parents is that they make beautiful things: stars, suns, planets, oceans, sky, sunsets, mountains, cherry trees, blue whales, herons, leopards and the crowning creation: the bodies our spirits were given to dwell in. The rapturous splendor of our world and our bodies are works of art that reveal the love God has for us. A love so great they sent us to a home of overwhelming beauty. 

This is why art is much more than decoration or ornament. Art is revelation, an uncovering of the fundamental nature of reality: that we were painted on the same canvas as all of creation; that light overcomes darkness, that we were born into love and shall return to love. 

These deep truths are why we respond so powerfully to beauty. Beauty is the promise of happiness—the horizon of our longings that points us towards our true home. A home that isn’t elsewhere in the clouds, but here, on this earth, but transformed through our faith and love, in partnership with our God. God didn’t want us to stay in eden, but to go forth and build Zion. We are called to beautify the world with our hands and imagination and to live in righteous communion. We are apprentices of our artist God, invited to develop beautiful souls and reflect that beauty into physical and symbolic forms—landscape design, architecture, sculpture, fashion, poetry, painting and all the creative arts. Art is the project of making a home where joy can take root and flourish. 

But art isn’t only about happiness. It is also an answer to loss and suffering. We cannot prevent pain and tragedy from occurring in our lives—but we can transform it. Vincent Van Gogh, Beethoven and JRR Tolkien each took the raw material of their earthly suffering and alchemized it into art that bore witness to eternal truth, goodness and hope. A hope that heals. A hope that ultimately connects us to our savior who is the author and source of our greatest hope. That in Jesus, all that is lost shall be restored, all that is dead shall be made alive. 

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This address was given at the opening of The Compass Gallery, on August 15, 2024.

Zachary Davis is the Executive Director of Faith Matters and the Editor of Wayfare.

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Last year, just after I turned fifty, I went back home to Chicago to visit my sister Erin, who is a health and wellness coach. During the visit, she told me I needed to add yoga to my workout rotation because "women at your age should prioritize flexibility training to increase strength, agility, stability, and balance."

"Ew, no, I hate yoga."

"Too late," she said. "I already signed us up for a class tomorrow. You’re going."

The next morning, I found myself in a yoga studio with Erin and 20 strangers, staring at a very bendy-looking instructor who couldn’t have been a day over 30.

Hell, I thought, this is hell.

But I looked around and convinced myself that if these people could get through it, so could I. I did get through it, but just barely. My body resisted the poses, positions, twists, and stretches. The instructor, seeing my struggle, came over and whispered in my ear, "May I make hands-on adjustments?" I grunted some sort of consent, and she gently placed her hand on one of my shoulders, applying pressure to adjust and angle my body differently. Throughout the class, she paid careful attention to me, often coming over to place a firm but gentle hand, sometimes guiding limbs into safer positions, other times applying pressure to direct me into deeper stretches. Her soft, quiet guidance and assistance were enough to not only get me through that first class but also to convince me to continue a yoga practice when I returned to California.

Many years ago, before I learned phrases like faith crisis, faith expansion, or evolving faith, I had the rug pulled out from under me, and everything I believed about my faith and my church was put into question. The faith that I thought was agile and strong turned out to be weak and rigid, and I found myself in need of what I called a faith stretching. Stretching makes room and gives space. Stretching is difficult, uncomfortable, and even painful, but it’s intentional, and no one can do it for me. I knew from my many years participating in sports that a consistent habit of stretching before and after games, matches, practices, and workouts prevents injury, relieves soreness, and makes you more flexible. Flexibility makes you stronger, more agile, more stable, and more balanced.

Chieko Okazaki said, "We know that flexibility is one of the characteristics of living things. If you watch a young tree in the wind, you can see how it bends and sways with the wind. If the wind is very strong, it bends almost to the ground, but it doesn't break. We need to be flexible in our lives . . . we can learn from the tree that bending and swaying are part of life, and that they help us to survive and thrive even in difficult conditions." Inflexible things break against the force of a strong wind. If we are to weather the spiritual storms of life, our faith must be like Chieko’s tree: bendy, balanced, and flexible enough to move with the wind while keeping our roots firmly planted in rich soil. Just like flexible bodies, a flexible and sturdy faith is achieved by stretching.

In my faith stretching, just like in my yoga class, I have felt gentle hands guiding me, making small adjustments to keep me safe from harm and to deepen my stretching.

Ten years ago, my husband Andy and I came to hear the Givens speak. At the time, the Heavenly Hush of Mother in Heaven was weighing heavily on me. This was before the gospel topics essay, before Carol Lynn Pearson’s beautiful book of poetry, before any BYU survey of historical teachings. I asked Fiona, “Where can I find Her?” Her advice was to look for the feminine divine in other faith traditions. Fiona’s words were a gentle hand on my shoulder, inviting me into a deeper stretch, which led me not only to books, study, and conversations with friends of other faiths about Sofia, Mary, Fatima, and even Wonder Woman, but also gave me permission to follow the admonition found in the Doctrine and Covenants to “seek out the best books and words of wisdom; to seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

That evening, Fiona sent me on a treasure hunt that would not just be instrumental in building a relationship with my Heavenly Mother but also integral in sustaining me through the many years of faith stretching that followed after the Church broke my heart. I already knew what to do. I leaned into the study of the words of other Christian thinkers and theologians, joined an interfaith women's circle, and continued my seeking. It allowed me to maintain full activity in Mormonism while seeking faith-building outside of it.

For years I stayed clear of any podcast, book, or article that had anything to do with the mother tongue of my faith. Any exploration of Latter-day Saint theology beyond Sacrament or Sunday School felt like a bridge too far. Then I felt another gentle hand guiding me to a safe position for better and deeper stretching. I learned about the Faith Matters podcast. At first, I dismissed it, probably saying something like, “That sounds really Mormony.” Then my bishop gave me Brian McLaren’s book, Faith After Doubt, for my birthday. I read it, loved it, and asked him how he had come to read the book. “Oh, he was on Faith Matters.”

I went home that day and listened to Aubrey and Tim talk about faith after doubt through the lens of Mormonism with Brian McLaren, and all of a sudden, the expansive beauty of Latter-day Saint doctrine, theology, and thought once again felt safe and available to me. And maybe even more importantly, I looked up and saw how many of my fellow Saints were taking yoga class with me, stretching faith in their own ways. I am not alone; I never was. 

This fact has come into relief for me over the past several months when so many of us experienced the collective disappointment and, for some of us, the heartbreak of women in our area being asked to step down from the stand. Our stretchiness and flexible faith allowed for the practice to not only be prayerfully put in place to meet the needs of members for the last eight years, but also allowed us to ask questions, come together, support each other, and build each other up. We have not only practiced individual faith stretching, but have also encouraged stretching in the greater Church.

Our spiritual yoga practice has allowed us to be like Chieko’s trees. Harsh wind blows and although the bending and twisting required of us is painful and difficult, our roots remain firmly planted in the rich soil of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Our stretching has been healthy for us; it has made us more flexible, stronger, and more able to weather the inevitable storms of the human experience that bring strong winds of heartbreak and doubt. I am looking around my spiritual yoga class saying, “Hey, if you can get through this, so can I.” What’s more, I now understand that you and I, in our different degrees of stretchiness, must be the hands of our Heavenly Parents for each other. We can take turns being the gentle hand that guides, protects, and pushes us into a stronger, more agile, and more flexible faith.

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Amy Watkins Jensen teaches humanities in Oakland, CA and can be found on instagram @womenonthestand, encouraging respectful and open dialogue about women in the Church.

This speech was originally delivered in the home of Jeff and Katherine Wise on June 8, 2024.

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Our first reading tonight captures the sense of spiritual possibility Christianity has inspired across the centuries: new creatures, new life, new epochs of love and light.

In Christ, all things are new. As our Dominican Brother John Church noted in his sermon two weeks ago, the repeated biblical accounts of new beginnings can inspire our hope that divine creation is not past, but present. It is ongoing in me and in you and all around us if we can but see it. Here is the originating language again, but in Robert Alter’s poignant recent translation:

“When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”1

I treasure that ancient image of God “hovering” over waste and deep, setting off creative abundance by speaking light into darkness. The American naturalist and wilderness prophet John Muir could not help but agree. He had been brought up in the Wisconsin prairies and polished in the rocky cathedrals of California’s mountains. After a remarkable life reading God’s signatures on the landscapes of the American West, he wrote:

“We live in ‘creation’s dawn.’ The morning stars still sing together, and the world, though made, is still being made and becoming more beautiful every day.”2

Our second reading reinforces the truth with language from my tradition that divine creation recurs in every human life. Christ’s light illuminates all space and each human story, no matter how painful. Successive generations—mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers—reverberate with divine potential and promise. Though seemingly obscured through pain or loss, those with eyes to see learn to trace God’s autograph on every human face.

Returning to our first reading, Paul gave direction to his “new creation” language in 2 Corinthians by describing Christ’s mission as one of reconciliation. In the logic of this ancient letter, God reconciles humanity to himself in and through the gift of his son Jesus. But part of what makes Christian life new rests in Paul’s conviction that we are ourselves called to the “ministry of reconciliation.” We are both to adore the divine gift and participate in it. In Paul’s choreography of redemption, as we move towards God we simultaneously move towards the people around us. If the world suffers from alienation and from ruptures of relation all around—and who can deny this has ever been the case?—then Jesus and, by extension, his followers, are to interrupt and overturn that reality for a new one.

The great scandal, of course, is that Christians have not only often failed to heal the wounds, we have sometimes inflicted them or have made bad things worse. The ministry of reconciliation has proven to be hard work indeed. In a caricature rooted in some very hard truths, Jesus’s modern followers are widely considered obstacles to reconciliation, not practitioners.

But the call still stands.

Thirty years ago, I was a teenaged Latter-day Saint missionary, far from home and just starting to experience the newness of life promised in the New Testament. Like the West End’s theatrical parody of missionary life, I was eager, I smiled a lot, and I was more than a little naive. The West End play, however, captures neither the fear endemic to missionary life, nor its loneliness. And, sadly, I quickly learned that those who professed Jesus loudest would often treat us harshest.

One day early on, we waved hello to a well-dressed middle-aged man looking at us through the front window of his tidy, middle-class home. We saw him again moments later when we turned the corner, only this time he was holding a rifle, pointed directly at my chest. We moved quickly up the street but he silently kept us in his sights until we were safely out of range. We learned later that he was a committed Christian and active in his congregation. That was by far the most egregious encounter, but it numbered among many others where I learned how deeply I was despised by some who professed Christ. This was not anything like what others have suffered for their faith, I know, but for my purposes here it is significant that, somewhat imperceptibly to me, my heart hardened along my detractors’. I probably said disparaging things about “those people.” I certainly thought them. I had been treated like an enemy and that sense of alienation stayed with me for a very long time.

Then, in 2004, I was shown a better way. That fall, a Calvinist theologian and evangelical seminary president named Richard Mouw stood before a large group of my church members and said, “We ... have sinned against you.... We have even on occasion demonized you.” He apologized for the pain his community had inflicted. He expressed repentance for any false witness born against us.

This pious man, at a far end of the theological spectrum from myself, in an instant made things new for me. The “enemy” became a friend. We’ve spent two decades in conversation since. We pray for each other. We listen to each other. We love each other. I was shown what a ministry of reconciliation looks like.

In the early sixteenth century, William Tyndale invoked a new English word in an attempt to capture the work of Paul’s reconciling Christ. He translated that 2 Corinthians passage this way:

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away, behold all things are become new. Nevertheless all things are of God, which hath reconciled us unto himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given unto us the office to preach the atonement. For God was in Christ, and made agreement between the world and himself ... and hath committed to us the preaching of the atonement. Now then are we messengers in the room of Christ ... So pray we you in Christ’s stead, that ye be at one with God.”3

Again, atonement or “at-one-ment” here is multidirectional. An alienated and broken humanity becomes one with God through Christ. Then, Christians themselves rush to the brokenness around them in love as “messengers in the room of Christ.” Not only recipients of God’s reparative work, we become the agents of it.

A world riven by violence and hatred and hypocrisy on every side can sap motivation to even start, I know. With the shattering images from Gaza or Ukraine or any number of other calamities in view, a kind of helplessness can set in. It is easier to retreat into whatever entertainment and comfort one can get, I suppose. The way to begin is clear enough, though. There is work enough at hand. “But I say unto you, love your enemies.”4 Who is the enemy? From whom are we estranged? Who stands apart? There God hovers, and there we begin, again, in Christ’s name, Amen.

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This sermon was given at the Pembroke College Evensong service in Oxford, England, on February 18, 2024.

J. Spencer Fluhman is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University and former executive director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He is currently at work on a biography of LDS apostle James E. Talmage.

Art by John August Swanson.

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I’d like us to have a vision together. Please picture this in your mind as vividly as you can while I describe it. Imagine a tall and barren hill rising out of a desolate plain. Maybe it was once green and alive, but it has been wasted. Scorched by the sun, blasted by the wind, every living thing now avoids it. Walking to the top of the hill, you can see the lifeless sun-baked land stretching in every direction. Standing at the top you find the stump of a tree, already ancient when it was cut down many years ago. On the flat top of the weathered stump you see thousands of tightly packed rings. 

Something draws your eye down to the roots: you see a tiny sprout beginning to shoot out, growing upward, unfolding its first deep green leaves in the sun. The stem continues climbing, knee high, waist high, now overhead. It doesn’t pause as it begins to set branches that stretch out in broad tracery—budding, blossoming, and finally bursting with leaves. As the branches rise overhead it casts a pleasant dappled shade, cooler and more comfortable on your shoulders than the full sun. 

You feel the ground tremble under your feet and look down. You see that as the shoot has grown into a new tree, its roots have bored deeply down into the ground; where they cracked the stone under the hill you see water rise and overflow, pouring out from under the thick roots. You touch the water. It is cool and crystal clear, alive in the play of sunlight. You bring a cupped hand to your mouth and drink. It is sweet, and your thirst is gone. As you watch, the water continues to bubble up, flowing away from the tree in four streams to the north, east, south, and west. At first each stream disappears quickly into the empty soil, but as more water flows, the stream extends further and further down the hill.

Now looking at the edge of the stream, you see tiny delicate blades of grass spring up. A carpet of green spreads across the hill as the water fills the soil, and amidst the growing grass you see bursts of color as goldenrod, yarrow, poppy, penstemon, paintbrush, and monkshood explode with an array of other wildflowers. As the water pools here and there on its winding course, you hear the first croak of frogs, the splash of jumping fish, and the songs of birds. 

When the water reaches the plain below you see that it carries with it this explosion of life, the grass and flowers dancing in the breeze. Here and there in the new grasslands the seeds of ancient trees awaken and take root, bringing stands of forest out of the prairie. Between the trunks you catch a glimpse of a doe with her fawn jumping lightly on mossy soil. All around you is a symphony of life. 

You turn back to the tree in wonder at its power of resurrection and see that while the blossoms fall in snowy spirals there are radiant fruits growing. Each one seems to catch the white sunlight and glows as the branches grow heavy and bow. You reach up as a branch seems to reach down to you; you pick the fruit and eat, and you are filled, and you are alive.

Holiness, Wholeness, and Healing

That is a vision of healing, and of things becoming whole again. And there is an interesting secret buried in those words. The words “heal” and “whole” come from the same ancient root, heilig. That same root gives us our word “holy.” That which is healed and made whole is also made holy. To make something holy is to set it in its proper order, devoted to its highest purpose, to make it most enduringly and intensely real and alive.

Spirit

Changing topics for a moment, have you wondered what your spirit is made of? The scriptures teach that a spirit is made of words, light, life, intelligence, and mind. Those things aren’t poured into a mold and mixed up at random. A spirit has a pattern, and IS a pattern. Your spirit is the pattern of being that makes you you, the pattern that you act out as you live in your body. (John 6;63, D&C 84:44-46, Lectures on Faith 5). Like Jesus, whose spirit fills the immensity of space, you will learn that your spirit can extend beyond your own skin and imprint itself on the world around you for better or for worse. When we talk to each other, when we work together, when we tell stories, when we sing and paint and build and dance, we are sharing our spirit patterns with one another. 

In Romans chapter 1, Paul says that the invisible things, the hidden patterns, of God are revealed by the things that he has made. In the same way, the hidden spirits within you are revealed by the things that you make in the world of matter. 

You could view your spirit as sheet music and your body as an orchestra performing the music of your spirit. The orchestra reveals and makes alive the music as it performs. And we need to be careful not to mistake the clumsiness or lack of skill of the orchestra as a deficiency in the music. But broadly speaking, how you live and what you make is a revelation of your spirit. 

There are patterns of being, or spirits, that cause life to flourish, to grow vibrant and varied, to grow strong and resilient, to grow more and more beautiful. There are patterns that orchestrate life into a harmony so beautiful that it could go on forever and you would continue choosing to live it, and so beautiful that people would choose to live it with you. 

There are also spirits that cause life to diminish and wither; that cause relationships to strain, to crack, to break. There are patterns of being that cause people to come apart, to disintegrate; and then cause families to disintegrate, and then cause cities and nations to disintegrate. 

So when we read the scriptures and learn about holiness and unholiness, about being poor in spirit, about hungering and thirsting after righteousness, about making peace and giving others grace, about eternal life, about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, these phrases aren’t just meaningless religious jargon. These are deeply practical and very real things that lead to life or death. To say that Christ’s spirit is holy, and that you can receive that spirit, is to say that you can learn the sacred art of binding up all broken things, to set things within you and around you on the path toward their highest and most beautiful purpose. This is real. 

Out of Your Belly Shall Flow Living Water

Jesus once met a woman by a well and asked her for a drink. She is all of us, with her life in disarray, with her relationships fractured and broken, and her spirit asleep in the dust. At the well Jesus says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that says to you “give me to drink”; you would have asked the same of him and he would have given you living water….whoever drinks of the water from this well will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give her shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give her shall be in her a well of water springing up into everlasting life”  (John 4). 

That living water is the spirit of Christ (John 7:38). It is his words, his light, his intelligence, and his mind. It is his way of being. If you drink it, it will change you. First it will heal you. It will take the fractured mess that is your spirit and begin to gather it into something coherent, something harmonious, one piece at a time. Though you were at war with yourself, you will find the little spirits inside of yourself make peace with one another as they enlist together in the service of something higher. You will experience this as a release of tension, a quieting of dissonance in your mind, and a sense of newness about yourself and the world. This living water will gather even the parts of yourself that seem like fatal flaws and it will resurrect them into your greatest strengths (Ether 8:27). And it won’t stop with you. It will flow out from your roots and begin to create a new world around you. Where you go, things will become cleaner, broken things will be repaired, and the world will grow more beautiful. Where you go there will be more laughter, more love, and more joy. Other people will find rest, and life, and the peace of God, in you. Flowers and fruit will spring up at your feet.

The world around you will become holy, because you have healed it, because you are holy, because you have been healed. 

Sacrifice

Now we need to talk about sacrifice. Joseph Smith taught that a religion can only have the power necessary to bring us to salvation and eternal life if it requires the sacrifice of all things (Lectures on Faith 6). I don’t know if that sentence is more terrifying for the old, who have many things, or for the young, who haven’t even gotten a chance to start gathering things yet. 

The word “sacrifice” means literally to make something sacred, to take something mundane and ordinary and to put it to the service of a transcendent and sacred purpose. To give it up, or upward. Those moments when life feels meaningless, purposeless, or arbitrary, or when we feel at war with ourselves, those are moments when the pieces of life are not gathered properly in our own judgment in service of what we believe to be most high. 

You have to sacrifice everything you have and everything you are. You have to sacrifice yourself. Jesus commands you to take up your cross and follow him, meaning follow him to the place of your own execution by crucifixion. If you were inventing a religion to trick people into following you with pleasant tall tales, then that is not what you would tell them. But that is Jesus’s message. You have to submit all the parts of your being to the cross. 

I can imagine each of us in a quiet moment kneeling and offering ourselves to God. And I can imagine God’s response: “Good. I can work with that.”  But I can also hear him say “That’s only the beginning. You don’t even know all the parts of yourself, let alone how to sacrifice them.”  I’m sorry to say that you will discover these pieces of yourself as they break down, and fail, and when you confront problems you don’t know how to solve. When that happens you have to let things die which have grown old and insufficient; ideas, desires, ways of thinking and understanding, habits, and paradigms, and more. 

But the miracle of the cross of Christ is that those things that are given willingly to death upon it will be resurrected. When you choose to give your life as a body for Christ's spirit, you will find that pieces of yourself will die along the way. But you will also see those pieces resurrected, now filled with God’s spirit and put to their proper use. The perfection that God has in mind for you isn’t a neutered, amputated, lobotomized sterility, where pieces of your spirit and body have been turned off. Christ wants all of you. This will not be a movement toward a uniform cookie-cutter image of pious, bland, sameness. Instead it makes each of us more fully and uniquely and eternally ourselves. 

Death Into Glory

Sometimes people think that seeking and receiving God’s spirit means only allowing yourself to think about pleasant things, and that God’s spirit only tells you things that make you feel good. That is false. The roots of the tree of life reach all the way into hell. Joseph Smith said that if you wanted to lead a soul to salvation, even your own soul, then your mind and your vision must stretch as high as heaven, but also “search into and contemplate the lowest considerations of the darkest abyss,” and the “broad…expanse” of eternity. God’s spirit doesn’t just paint over the tomb and leave the bones. It opens the tomb and calls forth all dead things into new life: dead ideas, dead relationships, everything preventing life from flourishing eternally. If you receive that spirit, then you will have to learn how to wrestle with the ugliness and pain of life, to identify and overcome spirits that are evil, and let God work through you to transform death into glory, to make beauty where now there is only ashes.

If you offer your whole self to the path of Christ, to making creation whole, holy, and healed, then you are prepared to be baptized by fire and by the Holy Ghost. Then you will finally have taken the advice you were given after baptism to “receive the Holy Ghost,” and if you “receive the Holy Ghost it will show unto you all things what you should do” (2 Nephi 32). That vision we began with is many things, but one of those things is a vision of what you are called to become through the grace of Christ. If you receive God’s baptism of fire you will then have a well of living water flowing out from your belly, making your life holy, a living sacrifice, a sacred garden in a world of stone.

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Bob Sonntag is an architect and artist, seeking understanding through drawing and writing.

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I was twenty-two years old when I first held a dead body. He was freshly gone. One moment talking pleasant nonsense with his family and friends over beers on the Moscow–St. Petersburg express train, the next moment fibrillating between the bench and the table. They’d come for a holiday from their home in Spain to see the once-Soviet land of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, of Peter the Great and Stalin the Terrible. If memory serves, the tourist’s name was Alejandro. He called Madrid home.

I was majoring in linguistics then. I’d secured funding to study Russian syntax between my sophomore and junior years of college and had quickly realized that, in freshly post-Soviet Moscow, I may as well enjoy the country as try to get anything meaningful done in the empty offices of a Russian summer. So I headed to Petersburg with a newfound friend, the warm and gracious Zhenya. 

I’d felt called to be a physician during my freshman year of college. I thought I should be a classics professor, but God had other plans—and I was trying to be obedient. This odd feature of my early adulthood meant that even though I was primarily studying the subsurface structures of language, I was also a “pre-med” student. I’d learned the rudiments of CPR as part of volunteering at a rehabilitation hospital beside the Italian quarter in Boston’s “north end.” 

I’d seen enough of the weeds Soviet Communism had sown in Russian society to be skeptical of the quality of their medicine (an assumption that proved, alas, quite true when I returned years later to do public health research). So when a train official ran through our second-class car yelling “kto-nibud’ vrach?” I figured that I was as much a “doctor in the house” as anyone else they’d find that night. So I called out, “Da,” and ran after him, lurching from coach to coach through the weary clackety-clack of the ramshackle train.

When we arrived in the first-class compartment, all was chaos. People shouting and crying in Russian and Spanish, and Alejandro’s friends pushing on his chest without a discernible rhythm to their efforts. If Harvard life had taught me anything, it was to project competence even where I had none. So I took control, modeling what I thought was effective CPR and helping them count their chest compressions—“uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco”—over and over. We kept this up for an hour, until the train stopped beside a godforsaken town covered in long grass and blank darkness. Two medical professionals placed a breathing tube into Alejandro’s windpipe, splashed some lidocaine through that same tube, and pronounced him dead in one languorous shudder of their shoulders.

At first, maybe, Alejandro looked like he was in a deep, chemical sleep. I wondered whether we could still consider him alive if our efforts were circulating his blood. Maybe so. But as the minutes stretched to an hour, his skin grew pale and ashen, almost woody. He only moved when we pushed his chest or grabbed his chin. His body was an object, to borrow the language of scripture, that could only be acted upon. He slumped further from life with every additional minute his heart failed to beat on its own.

Once I’d got the rhythm of chest compressions and breathing settled, I turned to Alejandro’s wife and young son. While I had learned Russian in college, I’d made it through two years of high-school Spanish and decided in that moment that I was an honest-to-goodness polyglot. I began to explain to the worried Spaniards what was going on and how important our CPR was. I complimented their friends for their great work at chest compressions. The incipient widow stared at me, mystified. The boy watched his mother’s knee.

The tour guide interrupted me in Russian. “They only speak Spanish.” 

“I know,” I said, “that’s why I’m speaking Spanish.” 

The officials began to laugh like a Greek chorus. “You’ve been speaking Russian the whole time,” the interpreter explained. My cheeks flashed pink. In the intense emotion of the moment, my brain had dived into the “foreign language” pond, and at that time in my life, that body of water could only hold Russian. I tried for a painful moment, as Alejandro’s friends continued to count and push, to get some actual Spanish out. “Lo siento” was all I could manage, I’m sorry. Indeed.

I had witnessed sorrow before. My own father died when I was eighteen, also with a sudden cardiac arrest, also with CPR, but in a hospital in the Wasatch Mountains rather than a train in the Russian countryside. I was thousands of miles away and didn’t even make it home for the funeral. I never saw his dead body. Death wasn’t the only sadness there: I’d had run-ins with vaguely suicidal depression as a teen, and I had struggled under the awful weight of poverty and my parents’ mental illness. But I’d never seen grief like that of the widow and her son. 

After we arrived in St. Petersburg, the railway officials mocked my worry that leaving Alejandro’s corpse at room temperature would accelerate his decay. “His first body,” they laughed as they drank vodka and ate dried fish around a long table, their gaze not making it all the way to me or the Spaniards. The interpreter explained that the Spanish consulate would assure that Alejandro’s body would be repatriated. But there the two Spaniards sat in a foreign country, surrounded by people who could not understand their words, beside the slowly decaying body of their beloved Alejandro. A widow and an orphan, strangers in a strange land. They yearned for the language of their homeland, for its familiar smells and sights and sounds. Above all, they longed for Alejandro to speak again, for any human sound to escape his throat.

There’s a lot happening in that memory from my first trip to Russia: life and death, bodies and spirits, homeland and exile, empathy and incomprehension. These themes have been with me for my entire life. If anything, I see them more clearly and consistently as I make my way through life’s middle ages with their various mournings and muddles and dislocations. We are never quite where we mean to be; we can never quite say what we mean to say. We are never quite who we mean to be. I feel these existential problems deeply as a Latter-day Saint, and I often wonder what the Restoration has to say and do with them.

That train ride told a related story about the troubled history of language. The specific details of Spanish and Russian kept the participants from understanding each other, both the bare words and their deep meanings. I knew from classes in historical linguistics that those two languages flowed from a single spring. This language, Proto-Indo-European, is what our ancestors spoke in the vastly open spaces between Europe and Asia five thousand years ago. Only two hundred generations have passed since then, but how far we have come from that place, that language, that time!

We see occasional fossils of that lost unity in the modern Indo-European languages. We mortals will one day be as dead as Alejandro—as the Spaniards would have it, muerto, or as the Russians say, myortvy. I’m not surprised that the word for death has changed so little over the millennia. I wonder sometimes when humans first started talking about death and the possibilities that lie beyond it. 

I’m guessing that awful conversation came within a few hours of when they spoke their first words. That’s certainly how the Old Testament account of Eve and Adam in Eden has it. “Welcome to life, which is full of fruit and trees,” God says. “Here is knowledge, and here is death.” Our first parents chose both. In doing so, they became gods in exile, called to spend their lives stitching heaven and earth back together. That work, the work of gods in earth, is a project of translation.

This is not, I suspect, the typical preface to an academic talk on translation, even in the metaphysically charged spaces of the Restoration. Translation generally worries, as I do, about our Book of Mormon, our Bible, the scripture that I call the Egyptian Bible and others call the books of Abraham and Moses. I am not discussing Hebrew syntax, Arabic cognates, or apparent precedents in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century English texts. There will be nothing in this talk of Solomon Spaulding or Ethan Smith or Adam Clarke, and there will be nothing of proto-Isaiah, deutero-Isaiah, or Hugh Nibley. I find those topics interesting, and I will happily read the relevant scholarship as it is published. But they seem to me to stand beside the point of Restoration translation. 

In Restoration thought, that single word, translation, effortlessly refers to the conversion of one text from a particular language community to another text for a distinct language community as well as the conversion of a human being such that she is able to tolerate the divine presence directly. There is both movement—the traditional etymology of trans-latio, or as the Greeks would have it meta-phorein—and transformation. Bodies and texts both undergo translation. In a sense, my work on translation in the Restoration is an attempt to understand the relationship between those two senses of translation. Are they in fact two separate words that look or sound the same? Could this, in other words, be a case of homophony or homonymy? Or are these two clusters of meaning in the intriguingly broad semantic scope of one fundamental word? To my eye, the last option is the closest to the truth: translation in these multiple senses is a single concept with deep unity. The fact that translation encompasses linguistic and human transformation is not, in my view, a vagary of historical etymology. Even when we aim to speak strictly of scripture, translation is bigger, and I believe better, than the movement of words from one group to another.

I’ve spent almost two decades thinking about translation in the early Restoration, pondering from the perspective of intellectual history and also, more quietly, from the standpoint of a human believer. My strange and stretching encounter as a college student with a dead Spaniard on a Russian train brings those possibilities into sharp focus. 

I see in that story and in the Restoration legacy of translation the complementarity of body and spirit, the human posture between heaven and earth, and the failings of human communication. Navigating these channels is the work of translation. Working with those three basic ingredients—complementarity, exile, and fallen language—I believe we can bake a true and soulful understanding of scripture and translation. Understood this way, translation is a bulwark of the Restoration and the special light it sheds in the world. I will argue that these themes not only explore existential questions but also return to the traditional starting point of scripture in the world. If I may borrow rather predictably from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

With that preface, we will leave traditional ideas about scriptural translation to explore complementarity, exile, and the failures of language. And then we will return to scripture to see it for the first time.

COMPLEMENTARITY

I’m well aware of, and have even participated in, ongoing debates about whether Latter-day Saints are materialist-monists or dualists. A traditional story says that we Mormons are monists. The available data suggest to me that Joseph Smith would have been mystified by the distinction. We are the merged complement of body and spirit, and that duality is embedded within a unity that embraces two worlds. One could, I suppose, fault Smith for not being more systematic about this. That would be a category error: Smith was not a systematic theologian and was not pretending to be. But diagnosing category errors is by now a too-common form of intellectual laziness. So, I’d like to wonder this objection through a bit, even if it is a category error. Whatever his lack of bona fides as a systematic theologian, Smith was the human vessel of a rich Restoration theology. That theology deserves to be considered carefully.

So, what did Smith actually say? In canonized aphorisms, he said that “all spirit is matter” but is of a “more fine or pure” type. He said much the same in a contemporaneous editorial in the church newspaper. From these two key documents, we see Smith proposing that what others call matter is actually coarse matter, and what others call spirit is fine matter. In other words, the duality of spirit and body is in fact a duality of coarse and fine matter. 

There’s more than just the aphorisms, though, in this question of philosophical monism. There are also the mysterious instructions about shaking hands with humanoid apparitions canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants (section 129). The duality of coarse and fine matter extends into the taxonomy of non-ordinary beings—true angels can be touched, whereas honest pre-angels will demur from attempts to shake hands. Smith thought of the God (or Gods) called Elohim as enmeshed in the world with all of us, physical like us, coeternal with us. This theology of an embodied God entails the possibility that the lack of physicality splits the world of consciousness in two. And Smith follows that line precisely in his teaching that what separates Satan and his demonic hordes from angels and humans is the fact that they never materialize as physical beings. They never get bodies, never become coarsely physical. This is stark evidence, to my eye, of a deep duality of body and spirit. The Sons of Perdition (the only truly lost children of Restoration scripture) lose their embodiment precisely by aligning definitively with the souls that have lost the option of embodiment.

It should be abundantly clear that there is no credible path from Smith to the Gnostics, who radically prioritized spirit over matter. The essence of Gnosticism, expressed so clearly in its Docetist heresy, is Smith’s very definition of hell. Note that fact: the physical is a mandatory component of the celestial. To be a soul alone is to be lost forever. 

I want to notice here that in this central complementarity, spirit is not superior to matter or mind better than body. Spirit is wonderful, true, and primary in the grand history of the cosmos, but spirit lacks the substance required of a divine being. And the physical is the prize of the Plan of Salvation. As many twentieth-century Saints would say, we come to earth to partake of a body (just as we partake of the Eucharistic body). Without that partaking, originary spirit is damned. So this persisting duality, what I prefer to call a complementarity, is not hierarchical in any familiar sense.

This complementarity of spirit and body mirrors a complementarity of divine and human. Recall that Elohim had to be mortal to become divine. We tend to focus on the sequential nature of the mortal-becoming-divine pathway, but we can also acknowledge that the pathway is causal. The human is the cause of the divine, just as the divine is the cause of the human. Once again, and this is one of our strangest heresies, these deep complementarities are not intrinsically hierarchical.

There are other complementarities we encounter—many more—and some can be perilous waters to navigate. The female and the male are perhaps the most perilous of duals in our current cultural moment. Gender complementarity has recently been seen as a mealy-mouthed euphemism for sexism because historically one gender is subordinate to the other. I acknowledge how hard these conversations are and how much pain has been suffered by so many. With that acknowledgment in play, I believe that Restoration theology includes an importantly different way. It’s a big task, and it’s one that will require consensus within the body of Christ, including authorized ecclesiastical leaders. But there are Restoration theological resources that could support a nonhierarchical complementarity for women and men. We can see key features of that capacity in the ideology of power within the Egyptian Bible and the Nauvoo temple endowment, as two points of entry. 

In the Egyptian Bible, as I detail at length in Joseph Smith’s Translation, Smith and his lieutenants were obsessed with images of female priestly power. It’s too easy in my view to be distracted by the intricacies of Abraham and Egypt and hieroglyphs and hieratic and thereby to miss the broader point. Egyptus and Katoumin and their daughters exercised intense priestly power, and they and their foremothers played key roles in the propagation of priesthood. This Egyptian Bible was a high point in Smith’s ongoing translation of the Bible. The Egyptian Bible was also the moment when he pivoted from visibly textual projects to the ritual work of the Nauvoo temple that followed. In that temple endowment, the image and substance of female priestly power intensified and expanded into a physical, ritual realm. In eternal complementarity, male and female priests would rule and reign as heavenly royals. While there are other complicated and controversial moments in the history of women and men, my point here is that the complementarity of the earliest Restoration does not require specific hierarchies for its instantiation.

I’m optimistic that the fact of complementarity is secure. There are spirit and body, heaven and earth, human and divine, male and female, among many others. I have chosen complementarity over polarity or binarity or dichotomy intentionally. I want to emphasize the promise of harmony among the partners. Even with that promise, though, the complementarities are not fully realized as such in our current phase of existence. The distance between promise and reality points to the vital and painful fact of exile.

EXILE

As my now-late Kate was wont to say, echoing the poet Geoffrey Hill, “we live in a fallen world.” I think about that phrase constantly. No matter how we sacralize the world, and we should, it is fallen and imperfect, not how we wish it to be. We are not living in the unmediated presence of God. We just aren’t. We live in exile. That is true, and it is painful.

This exile isn’t just a general sense of a world marked by death and decay, although that is true and frightening. Even if we had an indefinite lifespan, we do not currently live in heaven. It’s not just a question of our cosmic address; it’s also an awareness that we are limited in our ability to know, to communicate, to love. I, along with so many others, have experienced the heartache of absence, alienation, and miscommunication.

The experience of exile is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to emphasize at the expense of all else. It’s easy to imagine that the complementarities are permanently ruptured. There is no true meeting of people across the chasm of Otherness. There is no direct access to heaven from earth. There is an insuperable chasm between men and women. Alienation is human nature. It’s an irreducible fact. Substantial theories and disciplines have been built up around these ideas, and they gain traction from the ubiquity of the human experience of alienation.

One key touchstone of our alienation is language in all its glorious limitations. I am little surprised by the linguistic turn of the twentieth century. Those philosophers were not the first to puzzle over the nature of language, communication, and representation, and they won’t be the last. They joined, and changed, long philosophical histories in which Joseph Smith also participated with great enthusiasm and intelligence.

FAILINGS OF HUMAN LANGUAGE

I won’t spend too long reciting this history. Joseph Smith famously described human language as a “little, narrow prison” from which he struggled to break free. But he also loved to use language, to study it, to play with it, to create with it. He clearly believed, through a pure Edenic language that mediated between divine and human speech capacities, that there was suprahuman power in certain forms of language. The use of Edenic words in temple rituals and scripture, the Sample of Pure Language, the sacred word Ahman and the special valley where Adam and Ahman would come back to unity—these are all marks of the importance of a sacredly primordial language to Smith and his earliest followers.

I think that for most of us, especially scholars in the humanities, Smith’s anxieties about the limitations of language will resonate. How long have we stared at pages of crude words, how many times have we second-guessed our talks and turns of phrase, how often have we muddled through contentious faculty meetings? Language fails us, constantly. This sense of linguistic limitation is almost certainly a ubiquitous human experience.

I suspect that we will also appreciate Smith’s yearning for a better-than-human language even if we aren’t quite sure what such a language actually is. I won’t be the only one in this room who has felt the temptation of apophasis, truth that cannot be spoken, when it comes to theology. Acknowledgment of the limitations that drive us to apophasis is itself a form of yearning. Smith hoped that one day the yearning would find fruition in perfect communication. But for now we stand at least partly unspeeched in the presence of the Divine and the world with which the Divine lives in sacred intimacy. Just as the limitation of language evokes exile, so does it point toward the semantically vast notion of translation that Joseph Smith believed held the key to the return from exile. Bodies that must be prepared urgently for the presence of God require translation. The resolution of the rifts in other complementarities also require translation. Translation is what our heart calls out for.

I’m aware that I’ve been theoretical, even often abstract, to this point. And I’m sometimes in a hurry to say what’s on my mind. So I’d like to pause before doing our next bit of work together. I’ve argued that in Restoration theology, translation encompasses a variety of foundational themes. Translation mines the deep stuff that concerns us all—questions of life and death, of bemusement and bewilderment, the questions that speak to the core of us. Complementarities—what others might term dualities, binaries, polarities, or dichotomies—are a Restoration mode of thinking about the deep stuff. These complementarities are, in current human experience, marked by separation rather than unity. There are rifts in the hybrid unity of cosmos. These rifts and this separation are exile. And, crucially for the multivalent sense of the term “translation,” the specific limitations of language are a clear path into thinking about exile and alienation. But the Restoration is not just defining problems, it is also offering possible solutions. There is in the Restoration a relentless yearning for complementarities to be made whole. And this recovery of hybrid unity occurs through translation. That, in a nutshell, is what I’m wanting to say.

This account has the advantage that I believe it to be true. But I think it’s fair to ask whether I’m doing something other than just restating familiar concepts in new terms. What, in other words, do we do with this theology of translation? At a practical level, I believe that the theology of Restoration translation transforms our understanding of scripture. 

THE LIFE OF SCRIPTURE

What matters on my account of translation is the extent to which scriptures translate us and we translate them in turn. Joseph Smith led the way with his never-ending translation of the Bible. On my reading, all Restoration scriptures are, among other things, translations of the King James Bible. While Bible translation is the fundamental form of Restoration scriptures, the use to which that form is put is to support human translation with linguistic translation.

Let’s start with the Book of Mormon or the Egyptian Bible. There is in them a complementarity of the living and the dead, brought into hybrid unity. The voices of the dead whisper from the dust through the pages of the Book of Mormon. Through a prismatic wormhole, Moroni sees modern readers, and we modern readers see him back. Why does the Book of Mormon obsess so much about the living and the dead being not just intelligible to each other but visible to each other? It’s because the Book of Mormon is a translation in the Restoration sense. Not just capturing words and sentences or even paragraphs, but overcoming the rift in the complementarity of the living and the dead.

Why is there so much King James Bible in the Book of Mormon? Because the textual remnants of the dead must join with the living. I’ve argued elsewhere that the Book of Mormon saves the Bible by killing it. It’s the jolt that was needed to steal the live scripture away from the Protestants who had held it for several centuries. The same, in a slightly modulated key, is true of the Book of Abraham, the Book of Moses, and even the Doctrine and Covenants. 

These translation realities have something to say about certain traditional methods of reading scripture. Squabbling over proof texts as if we were fundamentalists—whether secular or religious doesn’t seem to make much difference from what I can see—isn’t true to scripture. Because scripture needs to be translating us as much as we are translating it. Scripture is not inert words or pithy summaries or evidences within a mathematical proof. Scripture understood within a Restoration theology of translation is an encounter, a melding of exiled complementarities. I recall here our own George Handley’s keen warning of the risks of reading scripture. Those risks are the possibility that we will be translated in the encounter. And we need to bear that risk. Our souls need it, our bodies need it.

Those of you of the right age may sense that I draw some inspiration from the Romanian scholar-mystic, Mircea Eliade’s, ideas about homo religiosus, illud tempus, and the irruption of the sacred into the profane. My first essay in Mormon Studies, back in 2006, was deeply indebted to that framework, and while I’ve appreciated J.Z. Smith’s and others’ criticisms of Eliade over the ensuing years, I continue to believe that Eliade captured, without intending to, the primordialist dream of the Restoration. We exiled believers yearn for the time and place where and when time and place no longer imprison us. Translation is the work of breaking out of that prison.

As one practical example, my proposed framework of translation provides context among believers for Jared Hickman’s rendition of the Book of Mormon as an Amerindian Apocalypse. Hickman’s magisterial essay suggests, among other things, that the racism in the Book of Mormon is real and illuminating as we consider Nephi as an unreliable narrator. By treating Nephi as a human character with flaws and blind spots, we readers of the Book of Mormon can see more of the plight of the modern American Native and the suffering of the peoples of Laman and Lemuel. Hickman is writing within the discipline of literary criticism, but he is squarely in the center of a Restoration theology of translation. As long as the person we call Nephi actually lived, flawed ancient prophets are in the warp and woof of Restoration scripture. We are called into communion with Nephi. As he shares with us, we learn and hopefully we share back with him. As we work better at the universal principles of love and belonging, we are being true to the ancients, lifting them as they lift us. They will see through our blind spots and we will see through theirs, and we will bring each other to life in the presence of Eternity.

The Restoration theology of translation also speaks to other modern philosophical questions. It doesn’t take long in reading contemporary philosophy of mind to learn that Cartesian dualism is dead, while embedded, embodied cognition is the new way of talking about how minds work. This can be taken to silly extremes, like Richard Dawkins’s memes or breathless recitations of behavioral psychology studies of heuristics and irrationality at cocktail parties. But in its essence, the statement is that what we call thinking is something that we do with minds and bodies. There’s a fine point here that some call out nervously. Since brains are the core and necessary substrate of minds as we know them, it’s easy to endorse embodied cognition without believing that we think with anything other than our brains. But of course, we think with other parts of our bodies. Pain, hunger, arousal, warmth, bodily position, and dozens of other stimuli and states also help to shape our thinking. What a Restoration theology of translation requires, though, is that we acknowledge not just the embodiment of cognition but also its embedment. Not just embedment in circulating cognitive constraints (what Dawkins is almost pointing toward in his clumsy analogy to genes), but embedment in community, love, and relation. We think, and we worship, in community. And scripture is a core locus of that communal cognition. There are trivial senses in which this is true, both secular and religious in common contemporary terminology. But there are deep senses in which our ability to think, feel, and worship together as a body of Saints living and dead is crucial to what we call salvation and exaltation.

The classic line from Nephi’s translation of Isaiah in 1 Nephi 19 takes on a new tenor in the setting of a Restoration theology of translation—he “did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning.” Likening the scriptures is not just thinking about their relevance in the modern setting or constructing object lessons from stray verses. It is about entering into relation with the people whose lives are contained and retold within their pages. This broader and deeper sense of likening is another view on translation.

Some of you may wonder—and some of those who have read my scholarship on these questions have already wondered—whether I am proposing an elaborate dodge. In other words, now that the Interwebs have decided that Smith’s scriptural translations do not appear to have been scholarly translations in any traditional sense, I have begun to work some legerdemain, pretending that the old questions are just category errors. In other words, we faithful few have lost the game and so changed the rules because we can’t bear to lose. Or, if we prefer a more scholarly-sounding framing of the same criticism, we Mormons are hard at work to reduce our cognitive dissonance. We are the Millerites after the Great Disappointment, looking for new predictions of the Millennium or new ways to interpret William Miller’s obviously incorrect timetables for the return of Christ.

I don’t believe this criticism. I happen to think it’s puffy nonsense. But we should engage it anyway. Honest and earnest engagement is a path to greater understanding. Not least because many Latter-day Saints have held to a strictly linguistic view of scripture and translation. Because of that history, what I am proposing may in fact represent a change in thinking for at least some Latter-day Saints. And for a particular strain of Latter-day Saint thinking, a move beyond literalism may well feel like a Great Disappointment. 

I want to include a disclaimer here: I affirm the literal veracity of Restoration scripture. I am not offended or embarrassed by efforts to find Hebrew or Egyptian parallels or to map the Arabian Peninsula. I love the curiosity and engagement and seriousness manifested in these activities. I just don’t think modernist literality makes the list of the top five attributes of scripture in the Restoration. I worry too at times that we risk adopting a scriptural fundamentalism that is in its essence idolatrous. Scripture is alive, yes, but it’s alive with God and the dead and with us as readers benefiting from and engaging with translation. Scripture must not become an idol. We are truest to the Restoration legacy, I believe, when we encounter God and the ancients within Scripture, and when they encounter us. Scripture as text is the scaffolding for the translating dance of complementarity. 

I’m aware that this can be taken too far into the spirit side of the complementarity between spirit and letter—even to frank mysticism—and I want to defend against that. I’m suggesting a modulation, a course correction. To polarize and then occupy one pole is to miss the point of Restoration complementarity. So we want the enfleshed bones of scripture as well as its breathing soul. That is what I’m hoping we can achieve with a deeper theology of translation.

I’m mindful that I’ve said a lot and that words are time-bound tokens of grander aspirations. I want to wrap up this entry into the endless conversation about existence with a summary of sorts. I remember again Alejandro, the Spanish tourist who died on that Russian train. I remember the feel of his dead body under my hands, the massive grief of his wife and son, the Babel of languages colliding in my head as I tried to be of use to them. I remember my own intermittent loneliness and bewilderment in that strange land, so small compared to theirs. 

And I think of the vast splendor of the Restoration. There is so much wonderful work to do in making sense of the world and with the world as we are buoyed up by the revelatory grandeur of this Restoration that enlivens us. And with that grand rhetoric comes the core argument. Translation is much more than words, it is the healing of fractured complementarities, the return from exile. Translation, understood from the perspective of the early Restoration, liberates us from the idolatry of fundamentalist literalism. In so doing, it draws us into the frightening transformation that will exalt us.

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This essay was originally delivered at the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities 2023 Annual Conference at Utah State University on 26 May 2023.

Samuel Brown is a physician scientist working on sepsis and ARDS. Outside medicine, he writes books on intellectual history and theology.

Artwork by Mizuki Heitaro.

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Some of you may have four or five beautiful daughters, who all won their young women of excellence awards, were all married in the temple, and are raising perfect young families. You have several sons, handsome and strong as stripling warriors, who all reached eagle scout and served honorable missions. This Mother’s Day talk is not for you. This talk is to honor real mothers of real families.

The Bible is a family narrative. After we get through the story of creation, Genesis settles into its real focus: families. The striking fact to any reader is that all these families are dysfunctional. The very first son we are introduced to, Abel, is slain by his angry, jealous brother. Isaac has an elder brother, Ishmael, who is harshly treated and ejected from the family home. Jacob and Esau fight with each other while still in the womb, and with his mother’s help, Jacob steals the birthright from his elder brother. Then he is so afraid of retaliation, that he runs away and hides with his uncle for over twenty years. Jacob’s favorite son is Joseph. He appears in the story as the favored, pampered child, who creates so much resentment in his eleven brothers that they plot to kill him, but let him off relatively easily by instead selling him into years of slavery.

About now, some of you are probably thinking this doesn’t sound very much like a mother’s day talk. But that’s because I want to say something different today about being a mother, or a parent. Why are these stories given to us? Why show us the struggles, and disappointments of great matriarchs and patriarchs, good women and men of the past? Where are the perfect, happy families? I believe these scriptural accounts are preserved for us to give us perspective and comfort, to let us know that we are not alone in our imperfections, in our failures and in our sin. 

During the filming of “The Mormons,” my wife Fiona was asked by Helen Whitney on camera: “So tell me about the perfect Mormon mother.” Fiona answered, in her typically meek and understated way, “The perfect Mormon mother is an invention of Satan. She should be hunted down, found, and shot on sight.”

Much harm is done by measuring ourselves against imagined ideals. In the year 1840, the Englishman Thomas Carlyle published an important book called, “On Heroes and Hero Worship.” We all want heroes to worship. It is a convenient and almost irresistible form of idolatry. It’s easy enough to see how Americans do this with celebrities and sports stars. But we in the church do it as well. The very same year that Carlyle wrote his book, Joseph Smith was in Washington DC, giving a public sermon. Among other things, he said this: “I have been represented as pretending to be a Savior, a worker of miracles, etc. All this is false. I make no such pretensions. I am but a man. A plain, untutored man, seeking what I should do to be saved.” 

I think the Lord keeps trying to tell us this through scripture stories, but we refuse to listen. We refuse to see that salvation comes not to the perfect, but to the sinners who repent. Greatness is not the absence of weakness, it is victory over the weakness. Joy is not the absence of sorrow. It is triumph over the sorrow. If we learn anything from the scriptures, it is that pain is part of the process. 

Latter-day Saints are often accused of believing in a different God than other Christians. In some cases this may be correct. We believe in the Christ of Gethsemane, and in the God of Enoch. The one of whom Enoch recorded:

And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept. And Enoch said unto the Lord: How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity? The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency; And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood;… and among all the workmanship of mine hands there has not been so great wickedness as among thy brethren….misery shall be their doom; and the whole heavens shall weep over them, even all the workmanship of mine hands; wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?... and until that day [that my Chosen shall return unto me] they shall be in torment; Wherefore, for this shall the heavens weep (Moses 7:33-40).

Yet that was not the first time we have record of God weeping. In Joseph Smith’s greatest vision, he saw what has come to be called the War in Heaven (Doctrine and Covenants 76:26). “This we saw also, and bear record, that an angel of God who was in authority in the presence of God, who rebelled against the Only Begotten Son whom the Father loved and who was in the bosom of the Father, was thrust down from the presence of God and the Son, And was called Perdition, for the heavens wept over him.” Perdition, of course, does not mean damnation. It means lost. Sons of perdition are the ones the Father has lost.

We do not know why one third of the hosts of heaven rejected the Father’s plan, opting instead for an alternative proffered by Lucifer,  “the one who bears light.” Indications are that the opportunities offered by the plan of salvation were as tremendous as the costs required. And so the scriptures record two responses: 

“The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” we read in Job 38. But “his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth,” we read in Revelation 12.

It seems likely that it was the suffering, the tragedy, the heartache and the inevitable wounds, that frightened one out of every three souls to the point they turned away from the Father. The scriptures, perhaps surprisingly, attest to the fact that Lucifer and his followers had good reason to be afraid. The cost of agency can be excruciating. That is why the story of the first family in the Bible is a story of pain and loss. In losing Abel, Eve and Adam were only experiencing what the Father himself had known—the pain of children who turn away from the light.

From the Father’s heavenly offspring to the present, no generation is exempt, none seems to escape the family pain and sorrow. There are no perfect families in the Bible. No fathers, and no mothers, with flawless records. What we do see are parents who persevere. Let’s look at a few examples:

In Genesis, we read that Esau married outside the covenant, “a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah” (26:35). She was also concerned for the future of her son Jacob, and the influences being exerted by neighboring tribespeople. So despondent did she become, that she said to her husband, “I am weary of my life because of the daughters of Heth” (27:46). Yet she persevered. And in the most patriarchal society ever recorded, she found a distinction unequaled by any man or woman of her time. With troubling forebodings about the two children she carried in her womb, she approached the Lord in prayer. “She went to enquire of the Lord,” the scripture records, and then it notes that the word of the Lord came unto her….” You may search the Old Testament in vain. That is the only biblical example we have record of, where the Lord deigns to speak by revelation to an individual, outside of prophetic channels. And it was to a troubled mother who persevered in faith.

Eve, the mother of the race, saw paradise transformed into exile, family feuds, death and apostasy. And yet, even after the loss of Eden, she found reason to rejoice. 

“And Eve, his wife, heard all these things and was glad, saying: Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient” (Moses 5:11). Not the absence of sorrow. Joy triumphing over the sorrow.

Book of Mormon

The first sentence of the Book of Mormon proper is the header, written by Nephi, in which he characterizes what is to follow as “an account of Lehi and his wife Sariah and his four sons.” The Book of Mormon, in other words, in fact and in the eyes of its first author, is the story of a family. In the text’s introductory sentence, Nephi’s first thought is to cast himself as a son of “goodly parents,” “taught in all the learning of my father,” tempered nonetheless by “many afflictions.”

Nevertheless, this starring family of the Book of Mormon does not have four perfect sons who all go on missions and marry in the temple. Sariah is a study in the rocky road of motherhood: “Sariah…truly had mourned because of us” (1 Ne. 5), Nephi records, in words that strike close to home for all of us.

The most spectacular vision described in the Book of Mormon is the vision of the Tree of Life, one that spans continents and history. It describes the birth and ministry of Christ, the discovery of America, the populating of the western hemisphere, the destruction of the Nephites. But to Lehi, it is about one thing, and one thing only. For Lehi, in his first retelling of the story, seems unable to move beyond what it meant in terms of his own family. Nephi records, “These are the words of my father: . . . And Laman and Lemuel partook not of the fruit.” And even though Lehi at this time discusses other matters pertaining to his vision (“all the words of his dream . . . were many”), Nephi only notes that “because of these things which he saw in vision, he exceedingly feared for Laman and Lemuel, yea he feared lest they should be cast off from the presence of the Lord. And he did exhort them then with all the feeling of a tender parent, that they would hearken to his words” (8:34-37).

Like the Old Testament, then, family stories dominate the subject matter of the early sections of the Book of Mormon. They pervade and eventually conclude the narrative as well. The poignant concern of Lehi for his sons is mirrored later in the paternal worry of King Mosiah for his missionary sons about to proselytize a violent and hostile people in Lamanite territory. His fears are allayed when he obtains a revelation expressly telling him, “Let them go up, for many shall believe on their words, and they shall have eternal life; and I will deliver thy sons out of the hands of the Lamanites” (Mosiah 28:7). The righteous Alma the Elder has a particularly recalcitrant son, who goes about seeking to destroy the Church his father founded. When an angel appears to Alma the Younger in an episode reminiscent of Paul on the road to Damascus, the miraculous conversion that ensues is traceable to a father’s love. “The Lord hath heard the prayers of his people,” the angel tells the stunned youth, “and also the prayers of his servant, Alma, who is thy father; for he has prayed with much faith concerning thee that thou mightest be brought to the knowledge of the truth; therefore, for this purpose have I come to convince thee of the power and authority of God, that the prayers of his servants might be answered according to their faith” (Mosiah 27:14). 

Even without angelic intervention, the power of loving parents proves potent. Nephi implicitly attributes all that is good in his life to “his goodly parents,” and having been taught “in all the learning of my father” (1 Ne. 1:1). The first conversion recorded in the Book of Mormon occurs when Enos goes to the forest to hunt, and, as he writes, “the words which I had often heard my father speak concerning eternal life, and the joy of the saints, sunk deep into my heart” (Enos 1:4). The miraculous preservation of the warrior youths of Helaman is expressly attributed by them to their having “been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them” (Alma 56:47). And the last two characters given voice in the Book of Mormon, silhouetted against a battlefield of appalling carnage, are the warrior prophets Mormon and his son Moroni, who vainly battled to save their people, by preaching and by force of arms, from a spiral into irredeemable depravity and death.

When the final scene wraps up, as when the drama began one thousand years earlier, fragile hope resides in the son who occupies a darkening stage. The family tragedy that escalated into a civilization’s utter destruction is in the end reduced, once again, to loss that is profoundly personal and relational. The abstractions of historic catastrophe collapse into a family circle. The seeds of destruction, the hope of spiritual survival, and the consequences of evil, never really move outside the local and the personal.

With his last words, Mormon laments the scene before him: 

My soul was rent with anguish, because of the slain of my people, and I cried: O ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord! O ye fair ones, how could ye have rejected that Jesus, who stood with open arms to receive you! Behold, if ye had not done this, ye would not have fallen. But behold, ye are fallen, and I mourn your loss. O ye fair sons and daughters, ye fathers and mothers, ye husbands and wives, ye fair ones, how is it that ye could have fallen! (Mormon 6:16-19).

How fitting, that the same scripture that began with a family patriarch struggling to preserve his family, ends with a similar scene of grief for a family torn asunder by poor choices.

But it is to the Bible that I wish to return in my closing thoughts, and on a happier note. I wish to conclude with the story of Joseph in Egypt. There are really two stories here. The story of Joseph, and the allegory of Joseph. The first, recounting the actual events in the life of Joseph, is merely beautiful and moving. The second, relating the greater realities the story points us to, is spiritually healing and wondrously sublime.

The story goes like this. Young Joseph, beloved son of Rachel and Jacob, is aware from his youth that he has been foreordained to a leadership role, one that is bound up with the temporal salvation of his family. The Lord has told him so in dreams. In one dream, the sun, the moon, and even the stars, bowed down and worshiped him. Not the kind of dream to endear a young boy to his older brothers. His brethren seethe with a resentment that grows deeper by the day. At last they conspire to kill him, but at the last moment are persuaded by Reuben to sell him instead to a group of Ishmaelite slavers. After time as a slave and a bout in prison, he rises to high position in Pharaoh’s court, and eventually is in a position to help his family.

But this story is also an allegory. For Joseph, we know, is a type. He is a shadow and forerunner of someone else. Another individual, who was aware from his youth that he had a foreordained mission, and went intently about his father’s business. This youth also elicited hostility, opposition, and eventually the threat of death. He, too, was part of a transaction in which several pieces of silver traded hands. And he too emerges at the end as a viceroy, that is, the one who stands on the right hand of the king. Joseph was, of course, a type of Christ. So what is the allegory of Joseph’s life?

Joseph comes at the end of a long line of family heartache. The discord of pre-mortal heaven has seeped through the veil, and corrupted the earth and its inhabitants. Brother slays brother, or steals from the brother, or conspires against the brother, or sells the brother into bondage. A murdered Abel, an exiled Ishmael, a robbed Esau, guilty and remorseful brethren of Joseph, worried Rebekah, disconsolate Adam and Eve, a grieving Jacob. Then famine, encroaching disaster—the whole society is threatened with destruction, and at last, in their desperation, they turn to the viceroy, the intercessor with the king, for salvation. And this is what happens:

And the famine was over all the face of the earth…. and when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt, Jacob said unto his sons, Why do ye look one upon another? And he said, Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt: get you down thither, and buy for us from thence; that we may live, and not die. And Joseph's ten brethren went down to buy corn in Egypt. And Joseph saw his brethren, and he knew them, … but they knew not him.

And perhaps you remember what happens next. Joseph plants the silver cup in Benjamin’s sack of grain. When it is found, he threatens to keep this youngest of the brothers as a slave in Egypt. At this point, dependent, humbled, and desperate, Judah offers his own life in exchange for Benjamin’s. In other words, he has gone from a wicked brother having murderous intent, to a kind and compassionate one, willing to offer the ultimate sacrifice for his brother. He has been healed. And this is what happens next:

Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me. And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known unto his brethren.

And he wept aloud: [so loud, we read, that] the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard. And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life (Genesis 45:1-5).

The point, my point anyway, is this. The scriptures are not about perfect families, or perfect mothers. They are about perfect love. And that love is found in Christ. In the allegory of Joseph, this perfect love of a Savior is the love that heals all wounds, and allows our hearts to be knit together, with our families and with our God. Across, and in spite of, the ravages of sin, of selfishness, and of our own inadequacies. The scriptures tell us that good mothers, like good fathers, are not perfect. And they will not be spared pain. But they endure, with faith in Christ and in his promises. And at the last day, our shock and surprise may be as great as that of Joseph’s brethren, who could not possibly have anticipated how wisely, and providentially, and fully, the reach of the Lord’s saving arm extended. And perhaps at that day, as in Joseph’s own, the reunion will be filled with so much weeping that it will be heard in adjacent mansions.

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Editor’s note: Samuel Benson addressed the Brigham Young University Class of 2023 as the student commencement speaker on April 27. This essay is based loosely on his remarks. Watch his speech here.

A few weeks ago, I went to the library to pick up a book I’d reserved. They brought me a stack of five or six books which definitely weren’t mine, but the little reservation slip had my name on them. I was confused. The library employee was confused, too. We looked at each other, and near-simultaneously, we had a realization: there must be another “Samuel Benson” on campus. We laughed, I took my books, and promptly forgot about it.

This happened again, and then again, and on that third time, I thought, ‘Okay, this has got to end.’ This poor other Samuel Benson is probably dealing with the same inconvenience. (Although he’s reading Dostoevsky this time, so at least he has good taste.) So I did the only logical thing, which was to grab a post-it note from the counter and scribble, “Dear Samuel Benson: If you’re reading this, I want to meet you. Signed, Samuel Benson.” I added my phone number to the bottom and put it in his book. He never called.

Why do I share this? Because the memory of it came flooding back as President Worthen read the program schedule at the commencement ceremony: Alumni association president Hillary Nielsen … Reverend Dr. Andrew Teal … student speaker Samuel Benson. Wait, Samuel Benson? What if I’m the wrong Samuel Benson?

I joke about this, and I acknowledge most people don’t have a mysterious doppelganger frequenting the same library, though in my community, I’m far from the only person to carry the crème de la crème of generic Utah titles: Biblical first name, Mormon last name. (To all the David Kimballs and Jacob McKays out there, I see you.)

But I’m sure most of us, if not all of us, have felt something similar. It’s common for prospective graduates, putting on our gowns and hats and looking in the mirror for the first time, to think, “There’s no way I am really a college graduate.” Behavioral scientists call this the “imposter syndrome”—this fear of being exposed as a fraud; of doubting whether we are enough, whether we are ready for this next chapter of our lives.

The impulse stems from a natural human tendency to seek belonging. We want to feel welcomed; we want to feel like we have a place in whichever space we occupy. We want to feel like our unique nature is not just acknowledged, but celebrated. One benefit of a university program is that upon graduation, belonging is prescribed to us. There is a specific list of necessary requirements, and once they’re all checked off, we’ve earned a place as graduates. We get instant membership in the alumni association. We get the university magazine mailed quarterly. We’ve done everything necessary to earn belonging, and it is given to us freely.

But the goal of a BYU education is a higher form of belonging. We seek for membership in Zion— the “beloved community.” This form of membership is indifferent to our GPA, our major or minor, or any of the other things on which we tend to hyperfixate during our college years. The list of requirements starts and ends with being “pure in heart”—to love and to share, to welcome and empower. A BYU education, at its best, teaches all the intricacies of our academic disciplines along with the necessities of a Zion community. A Zion community, at its base, embraces all.

I remember the first sociology course I took at BYU, before I’d declared it as my major. I knew nothing about sociology, aside from a course I’d taken years earlier in high school. (We went to basketball games for extra credit.) I knew college-level courses would be different, but how different could it possibly be? The subject material seemed mildly interesting, and as an aspiring lawyer, I figured it would only help.

It was a course on race and ethnicity. The professor, Dr. Jacob Rugh, was a white guy, raised on Chicago’s south side, who specialized in studying housing segregation. Near the beginning of the semester, he split us up into groups—all of them intentionally multiethnic—and gave us assignments. As a class, we’d be working on the first-ever “racial equity inventory” at BYU: a huge, campuswide project with the goal of analyzing BYU’s status as a place of belonging for all of its students, faculty and staff.

My group included two white students and two students of color. Our task was to analyze all the syllabi for courses across campus, and identify which ones talked about race or ethnicity. From there, we dug deeper: What ethnic groups are discussed, and how? Does the professor use the Church’s “Race and the Priesthood” gospel topics essay? Are white supremacy or white privilege discussed (and what about the Church’s statements on those issues)?

Other groups interviewed students of color, pored over demographics, or even took notes of racial representation in artwork hanging around campus. Our job was not to diagnose or to criticize; it was simply to study. 

I came away from the project with two major impressions: one, BYU is full of remarkable individuals whose experiences and stories should be heard; and two, if we are serious about this whole idea of building Zion, we need to make room for everyone, because Zion isn’t Zion without all of us. 

We submitted our findings to the college dean. But before the results were ever published, I felt them. I was sitting in a Black History Month panel, where several of my brave classmates (including Tee Tellas, one of my partners on the group project) were sharing their experiences as Black people in the U.S. Participants could submit questions anonymously. Before long, the queue was filled with racists tropes—criticizing the panelists, criticizing Black Americans, blasting racial fallacies while feigning faux ignorance. The Washington Post caught wind of the incident; when a reporter called, Tee said she was “very heartbroken.”

“The stories we as panelists were telling were very personal and very dear to our hearts,” Tee continued. 

Within weeks, the pandemic canceled classes and sent us home. As the Black Lives Matter movement resurfaced questions of race and belonging, BYU again became ground-zero. Don Izekor, another classmate in my sociology group, helped draft a letter on behalf of the Black Student Union on campus, petitioning to remove all names from BYU buildings. Calls to jettison Abraham Smoot’s name from the administration building had circled for years. (Smoot, an early benefactor to the university and a prominent church and civic leader, was a slaveholder.) Don, who graduates from Cornell Law School this month, crafted a careful, nuanced argument: it’s been years since BYU named a building on campus, he reasoned (they now get generic names like “Life Sciences Building” or “West View Building”). To prevent future generations from singling-out or “defaming” future church leaders, why not apply the current practice retroactively and give generic names to all buildings on campus?

The letter made me uncomfortable. Two buildings on campus bear the names of my ancestors. My knee-jerk reaction to Don’s argument was that it would devalue their contributions and tarnish their legacies. I called Don. He listened to my concerns with empathy. He didn’t try to convince me of anything. He explained that we should of course honor the contributions of the women and men whose names are carved into facades and posted above door frames. But we also must honor the humanity—the dignity, the vibrancy, the lived experience—of every person who walks through those doors.

The idea of “Zion” is not unique to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the Book of Mormon and modern revelation sharpen our image of what it can, and should, be. Zion is not just the millennial community that greets the Savior upon His return and lives with him in peace for a millennium. Zion should come now. Zion is a physical place and a figurative community. Zion is a place of diversity and peace. In Zion, we have everlasting joy.

The final prophet of the Book of Mormon, Moroni, pleads with future generations to build Zion: “Put on thy beautiful garments, O daughter of Zion; and strengthen thy stakes and enlarge thy borders(.)” Similar exhortations are made by Isaiah of the Old Testament, as well as in the Doctrine and Covenants. The pairing is uniform in all three instances: strengthen your stakes, and enlarge your borders. Strengthening Zion can’t come without enlarging Zion. Prosperity isn’t possible without inclusion. 

My final three years posed a difficult challenge for our campus. How do we build Zion, when some feel that the walls of Zion are closed to them? How do we create a “beloved community,” when many feel little love? We saw progress—the creation of an Office on Belonging, a groundbreaking report on racial equity across campus, a forum series dedicated to building the “beloved community.” Three of the best speeches I’ve ever heard—delivered by the Rev. Dr. William Barber, Martin Luther King III, and the Rev. Dr. Andrew Teal—were given in that series. Each pointed to BYU’s new Statement on Belonging, which calls for a community “whose hearts are knit together in love.”

As I looked around, I saw students everywhere—everywhere—who were actively engaged in Zion-building. Some never felt unwelcome on campus, and yet they saw beyond themselves and lifted where they stood. Others never felt like they belonged, and so they started working to build a place for themselves. I saw Quincy Taylor, the founder of BYU’s Cybersecurity Student Association, who spent her time on campus empowering women to enter a field where nine in ten workers are male. I saw Gideon George, who came to BYU to play basketball, but left both with a diploma and with over 14,000 pairs of shoes to donate to people in his home country of Nigeria. I saw Noridianys Gomez de Bybee, who, upon arriving at BYU, found there were few on-campus resources for undocumented students like herself, so she worked with International Student & Scholar Services to create them. None of them asked for credit or for recognition. 

I’d be surprised if they saw themselves, in the moment, as engaged in the act of Zion-building. To them, it was natural. Of course Zion would include Nigerian youth and Dreamers and women cybersecurity students. Of course they have a place. Everyone does.

And not only do they have a place, but they are loved. As the Reverend Dr. Teal said in a campus forum last year: “We need to show that whoever somebody is—whatever their color, creed, background, gender, sexual orientation, you name it—the Lord loves them.”

Toward the end of his career as a professor at BYU, Hugh Nibley compiled his essays, speeches, and other writings on Zion into a single volume. The result, a 631-page tour-de-force titled Approaching Zion, is blunt. Too often, Nibley surmises, our discussions of Zion deal with the hereafter; when building Zion, we need to focus on the here-and-now.

In one essay, he writes, “In the Zion of God, […] where there is no … sickness, there will be no more doctors; … where there is no litigation, there will be no lawyers; where there is no buying and selling, there will be no merchants,” and he continues to list about every field in which BYU offers degrees. (I note that he doesn’t mention sociologists like myself, likely implying that many of us are already unemployed.) But what do we make of this? How do we reconcile the claim that in Zion, we won’t need doctors or lawyers or businesspeople or whatever else, and yet as recent graduates we have spent four years and however many to come, training to be exactly those things? 

Nibley never answered the question. In his stead, I humbly offer one possible interpretation: At BYU, we enter to learn, and we then go forth to serve. The laborer in Zion labors for Zion, not for money. In Zion, we don’t call each other doctors or lawyers or bussinesspeople; we call each other “sister” and “brother.”

Sisterhood and brotherhood is more than association. The relationships in Zion require more than tolerating another or acting “civilly.” They demand solidarity and empathy; they demand Christlike love. The Lord told Joseph Smith that the latter-day Zion will be both the most peaceful place on earth (“the only people that shall not be at war one with another”) and the most diverse place on earth (“there shall be gathered unto it out of every nation under heaven”). Those two qualities are uttered in the same breath. 

Zion demands that we, in the same motion, both embrace one another and eschew worldly allures. The lone example of a true Zion community in the Book of Mormon, in 4 Nephi, highlights “the love of God” in the heart of each person. It caused them to abolish murders, lying, stealing, and most other forms of interpersonal transgression. It also caused them to have all things in common. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young experimented with the economics of Zion with varying results. By 1892, when British naturalist Phil Robinson entered the Salt Lake Valley, many of the vestiges of these experiments had faded. He found a once-isolated community that was now welcoming commerce and peoples by way of the Transcontinental Railroad and pining for U.S. statehood. Nonetheless, Robinson saw something peculiar among his hosts. 

“The people [of Utah],” he wrote, “though ‘Americans,’ refuse to make haste to get rich; to dig out the gold and silver which they know abounds in their mountains; to enter the world’s markets as competitors in the race of commerce—a people content with solid comfort; that will not tolerate either a beggar or a millionaire within their borders, but insist on a uniform standard of substantial well-being, and devote all the surplus to ‘building up of Zion’[.]”

Zion is a paradigm shift, a changing of priority. Money is not the goal, but ministering. The mission of Zion is exactly this—to not get caught up in the allures of the world, but to use our surplus of skills and talents and abilities we’re given to build Zion. That is what makes institutions like BYU unique, and essential: its mission, in turn, is to prepare individuals to build Zion. It provides education not geared toward lucrative careers or financial comfort, though many of its graduates do achieve this. Instead, the mission is to serve and bless the world. The mission is to build Zion.

I was given experiences at BYU to combine scholarship and faith that I would have received nowhere else. My senior honors thesis explored the first British Latter-day Saint emigrants in the 1800s. I read their journals, autobiographies and letters. I wanted to know why they migrated—was it all economic, as many historians claim, or was it all spiritual, as our Sunday School teachers suggest? I found that it was both and neither. (The complex beauty of the social sciences.) In their writings, it is near-impossible to distinguish between temporal and spiritual motives. Economic depravity in England? It’s because England is Babylon. Family in Nauvoo? It’s because Nauvoo is Zion. The common theme through nearly every account was the call to gather to Zion. It was Zion that pulled them across the sea.

The same motive pushes people to Zion today. Unlike many of the world’s other highly selective universities, which define their prestige in part by how many students they exclude each year, Zion defines itself in terms of inclusion, a mission to allow all to find belonging “without money and without price.”

A tragic paradox: Those people who enter BYU, this Zion-building laboratory, and feel like Zion is not extended to them. They deserve our praise, and our aid. They are the ones, in many cases, who by necessity undertake the backbreaking labor as bricklayers and builders of Zion, while the rest of us stand passively as surveyors or scaffolders. We honor them not by statements or words. We honor them by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them, trowels in hand.

When I reflect on my time at BYU, I remember classes and professors and projects, sure. I also remember the heroic students around me who quietly, almost unnoticeably, worked every day to build a Zion for everyone. I think of the visible moments, too—the woman I saw almost daily as she sat at a library help desk, to whom I never spoke. But then I saw her standing on a platform by the duck pond, a group of hundreds of my fellow students surrounding her, who’d walked out of class in support of our LGTBQ+ brothers and sisters. She poured out her soul to them, crying into a megaphone, begging for someone to make a place for her.

The pioneers who poured the foundations and laid the bricks on the old Brigham Young Academy building sang about finding the place which God prepared for them. There are pioneers today, too, not searching for the place, but for a place—a place where they can thrive, where they can belong, where they can love and be loved. 

The assignment to represent my graduating class as the commencement speaker made me reflect, over and over, on two questions: First, what message encapsulates my experience at BYU? Second, what message adequately represents our class as a whole?

The answer to the first question is one word: Zion. BYU taught me how to build Zion and why to build Zion, and it forced me to behold the many, many people on Zion’s outskirts who deserve a place inside. My BYU education offered certainty on few things. I don’t know what Zion looks like, other than it being diverse and peaceful. I don’t know the best way to honor an institution’s history while also reckoning with its thorny parts. I haven’t experienced BYU from the perspective of a non-Latter-day Saint Nigerian or a Dreamer or a woman in cybersecurity. Aristotle said, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” (Though the learned know Aristotle probably didn’t say that.)

To me, the second question—what message represents my class—is still unanswered, simply because a body of 7,000 individuals is far too complex and diverse to boil down to one message. My classmates will spend the rest of our lives answering that question. I instead left them with two questions: How has attending BYU shaped us in a way that other universities would have not? And how can we, in turn, shape the world in ways that other university graduates cannot? 

My graduating class, and the BYU community, is overflowing with distinct skills and experiences and identities—some that we brought with us to campus, and others that were refined or developed there. We need all of them to build Zion. In Zion, there are no imposters and no frauds. We all belong. 

The charge we’ve taken upon ourselves is to ensure that is true. We must serve the world, love our neighbor, be peacemakers, labor for Zion—until the walls we build around Zion have no other purpose but to embrace us all, to ring with our praise.

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Samuel Benson is a Deseret News staff writer, BYU grad and aspiring peacemaker.

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If you enjoyed this essay, you might also enjoy the following piece:

I’ll tell you a story from an old Russian novel:

Once upon a time there was a peasant woman, and a very wicked woman she was. When she died she did not leave a single good deed behind, so the devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. Her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God. “She once pulled up an onion in her garden,” said he, “and gave it to a beggar woman.” And God answered, “You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.” The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. “Come,'” said he, “catch hold and I'll pull you out.” He began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. “I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours.” As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake, and she is burning there to this day. So the angel wept and went away.

It’s a marvelous parable with a nice Russian ending. Islamic folklore gives us a similar story with a different ending, about a man who likewise had never done anything good. He had even killed 100 people. At the end of his life he felt remorse, and went to seek a faraway temple where he might find forgiveness, but he died only a few steps outside his town. The devils and angels came clamoring for his soul, the angels saying that he was on his way to repentance, and the devils saying he had lived an evil life here in this city. And so God told them to measure the distance and see if the wicked man was closer to the city or to the temple. If he was closer to the temple, the angels could have him. If he had fallen closer to the city, the devils would get him. And as they began to measure, God began stretching the world, making the few steps out of the city worth a thousand miles, placing the wicked man at the foot of the temple. And so the man was let into heaven. 

These two fables have very different endings, but share a surprisingly similar portrayal of God and the angels. In both stories, the angels are not sentinels, guarding the gate, securing the castle with a key and passwords. Instead they are out in the world, meeting people as they die, fending off devils. Trying to get all people into heaven. And in both stories, the angels’ strategy is the same: It is to find goodness, and to use that goodness to pull us into heaven. 

Though my life has not been as hyperbolically evil as the Russian woman or the Muslim man in these stories, I can look on a period of my life as a catalog of failures. I was called as ward clerk by a departing bishop whom I loved. Under his direction, I was a clerk in name only and instead was tasked with making sacrament meetings more fulfilling. I called speakers, assigned talks, and proposed topics. This experience was short lived, however; when a new bishop was called, I began doing more secretarial tasks. The new work was uninspiring, but beyond that, something about how this new bishop orchestrated the ward felt heartless, bureaucratic, wrong-spirited. Even so, the first and second councilors were people I enjoyed well enough. Yet I would have enjoyed them more if it hadn’t been for my general gloominess about the state of affairs. 

At one point, the second counselor sent me a story he had written. He never responded to the feedback I gave him, and I thought he must suspect my antipathy. I wondered if I should have been more effusive in my compliments and kinder in my critiques. But it was neither here nor there. He was not a person of low confidence. He was a jokester and fun to be around. If I hadn’t always been in a hurry to leave church after another long, rambling, pointless bishopric meeting, we might have become close friends, but we did not. 

And then, at a youth activity at the chapel, this man had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital, where doctors found a brain tumor. This was a man in his late thirties, with five children. He missed a lot of bishopric meetings after that, lucky him. But he came when he could. Over the following year, I watched him shrivel. He lost his balance easily and almost fell most Sundays as he tried to climb up to the stand. And every testimony meeting where he was present, he would get up and make some jokes, and testify. 

A couple months before he died, I remember noticing that his once plump and jovial body had become entirely desiccated. He had a scar across his head, from an ineffectual surgery. And he tottered as he stood bearing testimony. He talked about mistakes he made as a kid, and how he must have caused his mother a lot of grief. And he went on to testify that God’s grace, like a mother's love, sees through our mistakes and childishness. 

During his whole testimony, my son Clarence was making a racket in the aisle. And I thought, my son, you are missing this. There is nothing so commanding, so profound, so glorious as a man in his humiliation. A man who jokes with death. A man who believes as purely as Job. 

And I thought about my failures and childishness. I had had plenty of time to befriend him. The man even sent me a story he had written. By the time he got his diagnosis, we could have been great friends. We could have had inside jokes. Mine could have been the family he called for a blessing or a babysitter. But we weren’t. I wasn’t. And why? Because I was upset about how the bishop orchestrated the ward. But that’s the thing. The body is not a bureaucracy. The ward is not the bishop. As Paul says, a body is not a head. All parts are a part of the rest. And the church is the body of Christ. We are the body of Christ. It’s us, it’s between us. We animate it, or let it atrophy. 

And I had done the latter. After his death, his family decided not to hold a funeral. I was upset—I thought he would have liked a funeral. He was a man who bore testimony every chance he could. He was a people person, a storyteller. But his death had been long and drawn-out, and the family was probably exhausted from the attention and ready to move on. But still, it would have been nice to have a funeral. They did eventually decide to invite friends to a graveside service. And I thought, well that will be nice. 

But by that point, my family was processing some trauma of our own, and my mind was so preoccupied with planning an upcoming move that I totally spaced the service. I didn’t show up. I had failed him again, in life, and now in death. And I had had the gall to be upset that they hadn’t planned a funeral. 

I remembered that short story he had sent me, and that he had never responded after my feedback. And I thought, darn it. Darn it. So many failures. But I read through the story again. It was about him as a boy having to shoot the family dog because it had eaten coyote poison. And it was a pretty good story. Reading my own comments, I saw that I had said some really nice things. 

I was so grateful—I had not failed entirely. I had read his story. I had made thoughtful remarks. I was kind and generous. Who knows why he never responded to my feedback. But I saw our interaction as an onion. 

Another great failure of mine at the time was when I failed to secure a new bed for a man named Bobby before he passed away. I was tasked with getting him a new mattress on Sunday at another uninspiring bishopric meeting, and I planned to do it the following Saturday, but by that time Bobby was already dead. When I learned that Bobby passed away, my first thought was, oh I wish he could have spent his last night on a new mattress. That was an onion. My second thought was much less holy: I thought, well at least the church saved some money.  

That week a lot of the ward leaders were away on Trek, but we were home, and I was able to go and prepare Bobby’s body. I was able to dress him in my temple clothing. There is a man in a cemetery in Waltham, Massachusetts, buried next to his mother, in my temple clothes. That is an onion. 

I believe that God is waging a very different kind of war than we often imagine. There are no scales he cannot unbalance, no distance he cannot change. The moment we turn to repent, we are a thousand miles from sin and a foot from the temple. The logic of God’s grace is unlogical. 

This is a truth that hit me again just before Christmas as I read one of my favorite Christmas poems. Here is an excerpt that will shed light on God’s tactics.  

This little Babe so few days old
Is come to rifle Satan's fold;

With tears He fights and wins the field,
His tiny breast stands for a shield;
His martial ensigns cold and need,
And feeble flesh His warrior's steed.

My soul with Christ join thou in fight;
Stick to His tents, that he hath pight.
Within His crib is surest ward;
This little Babe will be thy Guard.

If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heav'nly Boy!

This poem draws attention to what was perhaps most surprising about God's condescension to the earth. People had imagined the coming of God to be powerful, forceful, undeniably grand—this is God we're talking about. But instead, he comes just as weakly, unremarkably, and miraculously as any other new born baby. Except, perhaps a little more humbly than most. In a stable. And he's almost immediately put on the defensive, as the family flees into Egypt to escape Herod's genocide.

And all this speaks to the kind of war God has come to wage. Not a battle with swords, not a battle for popularity, not even a battle of ideas. But a battle to end battles. A battle that undoes the logic of war. The final line uncovers the depth of his subversive tactics. God defeats his enemy not by plunging a sword through their heart, or besting them with strategy or technology. He overcomes them with joy. Joy is the weapon of God. 

And he brings us to heaven not by force, but by our own goodness. Here is need, he says. Here is want. Here is a naked chest. Here are babies crying. Help. And sometimes, remarkably, we do. Not every time. Far from every time. But sometimes we provide. Sometimes we cover nakedness. Sometimes, we share an onion. Sometimes we comfort the crying baby. And the baby calms, and beams back at us, and we are foiled by joy. God has lassoed our hearts. And he is pulling us to heaven.

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Joshua Sabey is an award-winning writer and director. His recent book, Ali the Iraqi, was published by BCC press. His latest documentary, American Tragedy, won best documentary at the Boston Film Festival where it screened alongside Taika Waititi’s Jo Jo Rabbit.

Artwork by Vincent Van Gogh.

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