Tentacles of Divine Providence

The Sticky Grace of God

The Prophet Joseph Smith “never taught a more comforting doctrine” than this, recalled Elder Orson F. Whitney:

. . . that the eternal sealings of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant service in the Cause of Truth, would save not only themselves, but likewise their posterity. Though some of the sheep may wander, the eye of the Shepherd is upon them, and sooner or later they will feel the tentacles of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to the fold. Either in this life or the life to come, they will return. They will have to pay their debt to justice; they will suffer for their sins; and may tread a thorny path; but if it leads them at last, like the penitent Prodigal, to a loving and forgiving father’s heart and home, the painful experience will not have been in vain. 

Whitney’s statement is straightforward: the faithfulness of sealed parents carries salvific power for their children. The idea is similar to what Calvinists call “irresistible grace”—the doctrine that God’s will to save His elect can overcome any human resistance or recalcitrance. In Whitney’s revision of the Calvinist idea, however, election is secured for children through the temple sealing of their faithful parents. For Whitney, the fate of these children is not in doubt: “Either in this life or the life to come, they will return.” For them, God’s grace cannot be thwarted.

The metaphor Whitney employs—“tentacles of Divine Providence”—underscores the awesome power of God’s grace. Evoking an image of God as cephalopod—as octopus or squid or Kraken—the metaphor emphasizes God’s strength and power, his alien other-ness, and, most of all, his prehensility or grabbiness. The many-limbed creature serves as an apt metaphor for God’s omnipotence and omnipresence. But tentacles are not limbs of any ordinary sort. Tentacles are not only strong and dexterous but sticky, clinging and gripping with a grasp that is almost impossible to escape. The sticky tentacles therefore emphasize the adhesive quality of God’s grace: it doesn’t just reach for us; it latches on and doesn't let go. Whitney’s metaphor evokes a God whose power is inescapable, whose “sticky” grace can seize even the most rebellious souls. 

Officially, Latter-day Saints do not believe in irresistible grace, instead choosing to elevate agency over the “Sovereignty” of God emphasized by Calvinists. And so it is somewhat surprising that Whitney’s statement has been cited more than a half dozen times in General Conference or official Church publications since 1990, including in talks or articles by Elder Eyring and Elder Bednar. Although the doctrine is mightily comforting, it could also be construed as dangerous and heretical. This is because there is an obvious tension between Whitney’s quasi-Calvinism and the paramount Latter-day Saint doctrines of individual agency and accountability. 

Can the remarkable promise Whitney recounts be harmonized with the indispensable doctrine of agency? Can God honor individual accountability while also honoring the promise made through his prophets that “Either in this life or the life to come, [the wayward children of sealed parents] will [absolutely] return”? (Is this just another form of that old Christian koan, “Can God make a mountain so large even he cannot move it?”) Can this tension, this paradox, be resolved? 

Perhaps not. But sometimes art can shed light where propositional theological reasoning cannot. 

Although the doctrine of eternal sealing is unique to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Orson Whitney’s statement is strangely and powerfully dramatized in the novels of Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene. In O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952) and in Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951), Whitney’s curious idea of the “tentacles of divine providence” is powerfully depicted. In these novels, a parental figure’s faith is an efficacious power that draws a wayward child mysteriously and irresistibly back to God. The God of O’Connor and Greene is a God who coils his sticky tentacles around unwitting atheists in an embrace that can feel like strangulation. Theirs is a God who is not above strong-arming, ensnaring, or entangling his wayward children. Theirs is a God who visits the faith of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation. 

The novels do not in any way neatly resolve the paradoxes I’ve outlined above. But they do give the theological conundrum texture and vitality, and so go some way towards illuminating this most interesting Latter-day Saint puzzle. These works are fiction, but they are fiction by some of the most astute literary-theological thinkers of the twentieth century, and I believe they provide a valid kind of “data” that might make our reasoning about these mysteries both more imaginative and more grounded.

Wise Blood

Hazel Motes, the protagonist of O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood, grew up in a revival tent listening to the sonorous voice of his preacher grandfather, Jerusha, who preached a Jesus so “soul-hungry,” he would die “ten million deaths” for the “meanest” singular soul. Using his grandson as an object lesson, he would point to Hazel from the pulpit and promise (threaten?) that “Jesus would have him in the end!”

Jesus would have him in the end. The entire novel bears witness to Jesus’ dogged persistence to have Hazel; Hazel, who lost his faith fighting as a soldier in World War II, does everything he can to distance himself from his grandfather’s influence and his grandfather’s God. Leaving for the city, he visits a prostitute. He gets into public altercations with a “blind” street preacher, Asa Hawks, and his daughter, Sabbath Lily. Hawks infuriates Motes because he doesn’t believe Motes’ professions of faithlessness. Because Motes doesn’t fully believe his own professions of faithlessness, the accusation rankles.

His preacher grandfather has in some curious sense “marked” him for Jesus (you might say “sealed” him) and it’s a source of continuous annoyance to Hazel that everyone around him perceives the “mark” he so persistently denies. “Some preacher has left his mark on you,” Asa Hawks says. “Did you follow for me to take it off or to give you another one?” 

Motes eventually decides to found a new parodic “church”: the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified, or The Church of Christ Without Christ. The core doctrine of his “church” is that there is no sin, and hence no need for a cleansing from sin. He begins preaching his sermons in front of movie theaters from the top of his junk-heap car.

But then in a dizzying succession of direct encounters with sin, his own and others—wanton cruelty, violence, hypocrisy, opportunism, charlatanism, carnality, blasphemy—Hazel is convinced of its reality. His faith in faithlessness shattered, he resigns himself to his destiny of faith. In a shocking act of morbid penance and self-mortification, he blinds himself, presumably to give total attention to the interior matters of the soul he had been so fervently suppressing. He wraps barbed wire around his chest and fills his shoes with glass and sharp objects. “I’m not clean,” he explains to his landlord, who finds bloody spots on his white bedsheets.

Wise Blood is about a man unable to shake off his inheritance of belief. No matter what Hazel Motes does, the “tentacles of divine providence” draw him powerfully back to his grandfather’s exacting God.

The End of the Affair

Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair is a twist on that old trope, the love triangle. Maurice Bendrix, the narrator of the story, is engaged in a passionate affair with Sarah, wife of the unimpressive civil servant Henry Miles. One night, Bendrix and Sarah are in bed together when an air raid siren sounds to alert the presence of V1 bombs over London. A bomb strikes Bendrix’s building and he is knocked unconscious, his ragdolled body splayed face down under a door blown off its hinges. To Sarah, Bendrix appears dead, and the shock of his death spurs her to take a leap of faith. For perhaps the first time in her life, she utters a prayer to God. Her prayer is a promise: if Bendrix lives, she will end her affair and return to her husband. Almost immediately after amen, Bendrix walks back in the door like Lazarus returned. A woman of integrity, Sarah promptly leaves the flat, returns to her husband, and does not speak to Bendrix for several years. 

But her decision to choose God over Bendrix is a painful one, and she continues to wrestle with faith and doubt. Because she still loves Bendrix, she is eager to explain away the miracle she witnessed so that she might renege on her promise to God and return to her lover.  “I’m not at peace anymore,” Sarah writes in her diary. “I just want him like I used to in the old days . . . I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love.”

In a desperate attempt to find a loophole in her promise to God, she begins making regular visits to Richard Smythe, an atheist who has committed his life to spreading his gospel of unbelief. But Sarah finds Richard’s proselytization completely ineffectual. “I had gone to him to rid me of a superstition, but every time I went, his fanaticism fixed the superstition deeper,” she laments. Without any conscious effort to cultivate her faith, she finds it growing despite her best efforts to root it out: “I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love,” she confides in her journal.

After jointly hiring a private investigator to track Sarah, both Bendrix and Henry incorrectly suspect that Sarah has begun an affair with Richard after ending her affair with Bendrix. The truth is, though, that she has begun a relationship with God. As the novel begins, the love triangle is Henry-Sarah-Bendrix, but the real love triangle at the center of the novel is God-Sarah-Bendrix. God has cuckolded Bendrix, who had cuckolded Henry.

When Bendrix confronts Sarah with a final plea to run away with him, Sarah runs away from him into the rain. Already seriously ill, the exposure to wet and cold worsens her health and hastens her demise. Henry soon receives a visit from a Catholic priest, who encourages Henry to give Sarah a Catholic funeral. She was meeting with the priest and was in the process of conversion, the priest asserts.

After the funeral service, Bendrix meets Mrs. Bertram, Sarah’s mother, who tells Bendrix something totally unexpected: she had had Sarah secretly baptized as a toddler. The mother confides, “I always had a wish that it would take. Like a vaccination.” Could it really be that this long-ago baptism planted some mustard seed of faith that would germinate for years and finally break the topsoil only decades later at the deafening sound of a V1 bomb blast? Unless there is real, efficacious power in the ordinance, how could the baptism have had this effect if Sarah had herself not known of it? Befuddled, Bendrix can only weakly mutter something about how it all must be an extraordinary “coincidence.”

This is not the only such “coincidence” in the novel. In The End of the Affair, Graham’s God works through elaborate constellations of “tender mercies” (to use Latter-day Saint parlance) that, try as one might, cannot be explained away as mere coincidences. Coincidences can only be multiplied so many times before skepticism is made absurd and faith becomes the more sensible explanation.

The novel ends with intimations that the tentacles of divine providence, having already reclaimed Sarah, are coiling around Henry, Bendrix, and Richard, too. Sarah’s conversion to God creates a powerful undertow, so that all the men who loved her in life are inexorably drawn to love God by her death. Henry, Bendrix, and Richard are drawn to God by the riptide of redemption from the safe shallows of atheism into the deep dark waters of faith.

It is a tired atheist critique that belief in God can be entirely explained away as mere wishful thinking. The argument was succinctly summarized by C.S. Lewis in his 1955 essay “On Obstinacy of Belief”: 

There are of course people in our own day to whom the whole situation seems altered by the doctrine of the concealed wish. They will admit that men, otherwise apparently rational, have been deceived by the arguments for religion. But they will say that they have been deceived first by their own desires and produced the arguments afterwards as a rationalization: that these arguments have never been intrinsically even plausible, but have seemed so because they were secretly weighted by our wishes.

But, as Lewis argues in the same essay, although some may choose to believe in God because it fulfills some secret psychic wish, others may choose to disbelieve in God for the same reason. It is not at all obvious that all wish-fulfillment finds its only terminus in Christian faith. Lewis writes, “A man may be a Christian because he wants Christianity to be true. He may be an atheist because he wants atheism to be true. He may be an atheist because he wants Christianity to be true. He may be a Christian because he wants atheism to be true. Surely these possibilities cancel one another out?”

So it is that there are many reasons one might wish for God’s existence, but there are equally many reasons that one might wish for his non-existence. And one person’s wishes need not be entirely consistent. Indeed, one may will to believe in God at one moment and will to disbelieve in him at another moment. It is even possible that in the very same moment, one may will to believe in God with one part of one’s self, and will to disbelieve in God with another. Experience confirms that belief and disbelief are messy like this; desire and will are messy like this. 

O’Connor’s and Graham’s characters have powerful reasons for wishing God weren’t, but find themselves believing in him in spite of themselves. O’Connor and Graham portray a gruff God who has a habit of grabbing people by the scruffs of their necks, and drawing them, sometimes against their will, towards him. This portrayal of God is, I think, aptly captured by Orson F. Whitney’s curious phrase “tentacles of divine providence.”

Against their will. This phrase gets to the heart of the seemingly irresolvable paradox I outlined at the start of this essay. But perhaps the paradox is really only irresolvable if one assumes that a person’s “will” is singular, consistent, coherent, monolithic, and harmonious. In her author’s note to the second edition of Wise Blood, O’Connor suggests one potential way through the difficulty. She writes:

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for some readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them, Hazel Motes’s integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure [Jesus] who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author, Hazel’s integrity lies in his not being able to do so. Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.

Perhaps Whitney’s statement can be reconciled with the doctrine of agency (free will) by complicating our notions of what constitutes “will.” As O’Connor suggests, we do not have one “will” but many “wills.” Our “will” is plural, gestalt, inconsistent, and contradictory. So, it seems true that God will never override our agency (will), not even to save us. But it may also be true that the only true will, out of all the contradictory and multitudinous wills conflicting and colliding within us—the only will that God truly cannot contravene—is our will to be saved and exalted. 

David Bentley Hart makes a similar point in his remarkable book That All Shall Be Saved. Some have argued that hell is a necessary precondition to true freedom. These “infernalists” have alleged that God made us free, cannot compel us to love him, and must therefore provide an alternative to himself in order to preserve conditions of freedom. Hart refutes this line of thinking by arguing that true freedom means sanely seeking what is in one’s own best interest. One cannot freely choose against what is in one’s own best interest; that is insanity and un-freedom. Freedom always consists in choosing God. This is what is meant by that famous maxim of Jesus: “The truth will make you free”—which is to say, you can only be truly free when you have knowledge of the Truth, or knowledge of God. And you cannot know God as The Source of Fulfillment—as the only end toward which you were created and the only end in which you can find peace, rest, fulfillment—and choose against him.

If we take O’Connor at her word, then, Wise Blood is not about God’s coercive overriding of Hazel’s will, but instead a winnowing of wills within Hazel: a sifting of higher wills from lower, or a synthesis or coordination of disparate and contradictory wills into one coherent will uniformly directed towards God. Or, to use Hart’s language, it might be said that O’Connor’s novel depicts a coming to sanity after a period of insanity. Perhaps this is the most accurate description of how grace operates on the free human agent. 

Not everyone will find this line of thinking convincing. Some might object to the assertion that true freedom inevitably leads to the same decision. They might contend that such a claim makes agency a sham and the Plan of Salvation absurd, because robust agency requires that people make real choices with real consequences. I concede the force of this argument. In truth, it may be impossible to reconcile Joseph Smith’s “comforting doctrine” to the invaluable doctrine of individual agency without compromising the force of the former or the integrity of the latter.

Still, I confess I find the idea championed by O’Connor, Greene, and Whitney—that God aggressively and relentlessly pursues his own—undeniably attractive. This God, whose grace sticks and grips like tentacles, offers a vision of hope for the wayward and wandering. I wonder if Orson F. Whitney cheered when junior apostle Elder Patrick Kearon recently taught, “God is in relentless pursuit of you . . . and he employs every possible measure to bring you back.” This statement resonates deeply with me, as someone who loves wanderers and as a wanderer myself. I believe in a God whose reach is long and grasp is strong, whose ‘tentacles of divine providence’ seize the floundering, dragging them homeward, even as they thrash against the grace that saves them.

Corey Landon Wozniak is lives with his wife and four sons in Las Vegas, NV. He teaches English and Comparative Religions.

Art by Kitagawa Utamaro.