A Restless Faith
In the summer of 2020, I spent copious amounts of time walking around French cities. I began the season in Lyon, a former Roman settlement situated at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers, and ended it in Marseille, a gritty Mediterranean port city founded as a Greek colony in 600 BC. The COVID-19 virus had rendered traditional forms of missionary work obsolete, so when my companion and I were not spreading the word via Facebook, we could often be found pacing our way along the cobblestone streets of Old Lyon or the wide avenue of the Canebière, Marseille’s answer to the Champs-Élysées. We could not approach people directly, so we reasoned that the next best option was to stride by them with our white shirts and black name tags. That was the reason we offered, at least. In truth, we were hot, restless, and bored, so we went walking.
As was the case for most people, the global pandemic upended my life and, given that I was not an essential worker, left me with little to do but fret over the heaviness of it all. During the first nationwide lockdown in the spring of 2020, I tried to stay busy with phone calls and French practice and an hour of desultory exercise in the nearby pocket park, but my list of things to do was never long enough to take me past the early afternoon. Even after the French president lifted the lockdown, the continued restrictions meant that emptiness remained the defining feature of my days. I’m hesitant to say that I felt anything akin to despair because the apparent trigger was simply a lack of things to do. But even with the benefit of hindsight, those days are marked with a pathos that makes me want to shed a tear for my former self. I was not clinically depressed, but the long, warm, unspent afternoons grew so burdensome that it became clear to me why Andrew Solomon had titled his book on the subject The Noonday Demon. Like most of the rest of the world, I felt imprisoned, incapacitated, and sad.
That summer, while on a regional train between Lyon and the small town where a member lived, I read Kylie Turley’s article on Ammonihah in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. Turley argues that the atrocities that Alma witnessed in that city, specifically the murderous blaze that claims the lives of the wives and children of those men who’d believed his preaching, deeply affected him, and that the rest of the book of Alma bears witness to that tragic transformation. Turley reports that after his harrowing experiences at Ammonihah, “Alma’s interest in the doctrine of rest seems to fade as he becomes more and more restless.” Prior to Ammonihah, Alma’s teachings consistently include a consideration of how Christian believers can leverage their faith to enter into a state of rest. After Ammonihah, Alma jettisons talk of rest in favor of the themes of tribulation, endurance, and sorrow. This thematic shift is particularly evident in Alma’s words to his son Shiblon. He praises Shiblon for his “steadiness and faithfulness,” and writes that his diligence, patience, and “long-suffering among the people of the Zoramites” have given his father much satisfaction (Alma 38:2–3). A few weeks after that train ride, my companion flew home to Tahiti, and I moved across town to an eighth-floor flat that received and stored heat like asphalt in August. It was there and then that I began to treat low-level despair with constant movement. Once, my companion and I traveled to the train station on foot. The trip took us over both the Saône and the Rhône rivers and lasted ninety minutes. We could have taken the metro but we didn’t.
A few weeks later I arrived in Marseille, where I took Alma’s endorsement of restless discipleship and attempted to use it as a model for redefining my boredom as something akin to courage. As I walked down to the Old Port or requested to follow yet another complete stranger on Facebook, I would remind myself that by attending to my mundane responsibilities day after day, I was, like Alma, refusing to rest. The potential sanctity of submitting to the mundane was an idea with which I was already familiar, but the stance embodied by Alma was distinct from the ideas underlying Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, there is no beyond, no transcendent significance to be discovered on the far side of tedium; instead, tedium is all there is, and something like secular salvation is to be found in submission to it. Thus, Camus concludes The Myth of Sisyphus with the injunction that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” even as Sisyphus is fated to be a stone-pusher until the end of days. Sisyphus is, allegedly, happy because he has discovered that there is no respite. For Alma, on the other hand, hardship is a crucible that prepares us to more fully receive the divine. We might find joy in pushing rocks up hills—not because we inhabit a “universe without a master” but because, as Melissa Inouye puts it, “to the extent that it catalyzes learning and development that nudge us closer to the character of our heavenly parents, all experience . . . is sacred.”
While still in Lyon, sprawled on a couch in our uncooled living room, I read Eugene England’s essay, “Enduring.” In the meandering and non-explicit manner of its genre, the essay makes the case that in many instances, faithful living looks like both doing what we can to alleviate the suffering presented to us and also acknowledging that those efforts are woefully inadequate. The piece begins with a stirring description of the “safe valley” where England spent his boyhood, and the rest of the piece, with its consideration of debilitating illness, attempted assassination, and the terrors of ex materia existence, reads as a troubling of that initial tableau. England’s muted paean to pain reinforced Turley’s insight that we can look for and locate meaning in emotions such as grief, frustration, and incomprehension. Far from endorsing a grim existentialism, the essay pairs the inviolability of the individual (“But there finally is no answer to the question of why and how I exist in my essential being. I just always have.”) with the compensatory reality of divine regard and attention. Life requires nearly everything of us, but we, like God, can “endure in love.”
In an appearance at the end of 2023 on NPR’s Fresh Air, the poet and memoirist Christian Wiman said something that places him squarely in the camp of Alma and Eugene England. Noting the tendency of some Christians to only understand God as a source of relief and rest, Wiman told Terry Gross, “I don’t feel that at all. I don’t understand when people present God as an answer to the predicament of existence. I don’t feel the sense of mystery or terror alleviated by faith.” Similarly, England closes “Enduring” on a note of haunting ambivalence: “I lie awake sometimes now, as the nights begin to shorten, my mind besieged by woe and wonder.”
If God is simply someone to tell us that everything is already alright, then what is Christianity but a form of escapism and denial? I want a God who returns me to the darkling world with the charge, and the capacity, to nevertheless act well. A God who reaffirms rather than negates the predicament of existence. Maybe that is why it was Turley, Alma, and England who offered a theological solution to my COVID-19 discouragement. In articulating a gospel of salvation through, rather than in spite of, struggle, sorrow and interdependence, they refused to minimize the global scale of the suffering. Instead, they centered that suffering and made its acknowledgement the heart of the matter. Further, they each spoke to the essential limitedness of the God uncovered by Joseph Smith’s revelations. There is monumental suffering and there is God, but the latter is not a solution to the former. Instead, we are apprentices to God in the effort to mend a fractured reality. This conception of God is perhaps less comforting than one in which His omnipotence is centered and emphasized, but as multiple commentators have argued, it is certainly one worth preserving. Because while it is true that, as Sterling McMurrin wryly pointed out, “religionists . . . do not propose to take their problems to a God who has problems of his own,” it is equally true that believing in a God whose plan of reconciliation and reunion requires human participation is expansive and affirming.
If, as Christian Wiman has it, God does not alleviate the mystery or terror of existence, then what does God do? Perhaps he navigates those emotions alongside us. Although His relationship with the unsanded edges of the universe is qualitatively different than our own, He too is subject to forces and agencies beyond His control, and so models the persuasive but always non-coercive love that might, ultimately, offer some measure of relief to a howling world.
As a missionary immobilized by a worldwide pandemic, I wasn’t craving pat answers—and such answers would have been insufficient in any case. I didn’t need assurances that all would be made well in the end by a maker whose powers and proficiencies were boundless. Instead, I needed a God who sanctified struggle by admitting its intractability, a heavenly instructor who was not responsible for my boredom and frustration but was nevertheless without peer in His capacity to coach me on the potential utility of those emotions. And that, I think, is precisely the God we have.
Zach Stevenson has a BA in American Studies & French Studies. He is an aspiring author and scholar interested in twentieth-century American history.
Art by Aubrie Mema, also known as AMEMA.
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