What Is To Be Done?

Ivanka Demchuk, Pilate Condemns Jesus

As always, we are living in a world of a million complexities. As we witness the roiling political and ideological waters—this latest frantic recruitment into teams—and as our different ideologies narrow us and break us into "all manner of -ites," and as the world prepares for its foretold and inevitable spiralling conclusion, we might feel like Joseph Smith did facing such divisions when he wrote, "What is to be done?" (JSH 1:10)

What can we preach in such a climate? Where do we start after so many earthquakes of social and political change? How do we renovate the temple that is ourselves? "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland) How can we preach our old cherished latter-day saint ideals and shore up "these fragments" of belief against the ruins of a culture that is shifting, and old ways of knowing that are rapidly crumbling away? 

How do we move forward in such a time?

At some point, now or later, all of us will be faced with the great and terrible questions and forced to look into the eyes of the beast of the world's impossible binaries, the winnowing down of our lives into one choice or another, in which neither solution truly captures who we are. How do we choose between church and our loved one who is hurt by it? How do we choose between conformity and identity? Between family and sexuality? Between obedience and our mental health? Between politics and prophetic counsel? Between history and our traditional faith narratives? In my mind, these are just some of a million derivatives of the same basic and timeless question: How can we preach the heavenly ideal while respecting and acknowledging the pain, complexity and disappointment of a mortal life spent dabbling in a cave full of shadows?

And just to belabor a point, how do we teach eternal families and celestial marriage when so many find ourselves in family arrangements and personal situations that bring so much disillusionment and pain? How do we choose between teaching a gospel of joy and peace and blessings, while also preaching a gospel of suffering, growth, and sacrifice? How do we navigate so many competing narratives on history, psychology, theology, and science? Do we bury our heads in the sand and persist in our old narratives of celestial idealism? Or do we focus instead on teaching a narrative of how best to endure a lifetime of pain, abuse, and disappointment, and somehow manage to make this all sound very sane and desirable to ourselves and to our children?

The way forward in these impossible spiritual predicaments, these crises of faith, to me it is not to frame it as a choice between one or the other, between good and evil, ideology vs reality, since there are innumerable devilish decoys in both, and our own biases and human limitation can only ever lead us to eventually choose between one evil over some other lesser one. As Joseph Smith learned, "it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong." (JSH 1:18) Neither can the answer be found by an appeal to intellectual authority or tradition alone, however well they may have served us in the past.

Rather, we are faced, again and again, with a choice between Christ, and everything else in the world that is not Christ.

By preaching Him, instead of choosing between either idealistic or humanistic narratives, we rightfully end up preaching both the malady and the cure. This is how healing begins. We teach and preach the divine validation for every mortal struggle, the everlasting embodiment of every mortal pain and complexity. No matter what you are going through, Jesus Christ is the resolution for the tension we all face in this mortal experience. He is the narrative that includes us all, the Alpha and the Omega, the whole alphabet that we might use to speak or write what we think and feel. He is infinite, as He has borne every human suffering which anyone can experience. He is our way out of every possible human paradox, the Rock of Ages who clefts wide open for us to fit our sorrow in, the answer to every life chock full of tangled questions. 

Christ knows how to appear to each of us in our own unique sacred groves, but as Joseph Smith learned, this comes only after the unique crucible of our question has been formulated and articulated, sometimes after hours and even years wrestling in the dark over it. In that moment we exercise our faith to call out to Him, He is the light that breaks through. He can overcome every demonic fight for our souls in a world hell-bent on recruiting us to a side. Christ alone asks us to join "none of them." He is the Light, the Life, and the Way. He invites us to take His name upon us, to become a member of His body, because no other name we could call ourselves can quite cover the gamut of diversity and difficulty of human experiences.

I have watched friends and loved ones walk many paths that are not Christ (and I am not talking just about those who stop attending church. There are a million and one ways to sidestep Christ at church.) I have walked those paths, too. I imagine I am still walking some of them. At times, we all might follow our more cherished ideological pathways to their inevitable conclusion in order to learn that they don't achieve a resolution to the question within ourselves. Nothing this world offers can fully resolve what it means to be a child of God in a lone and dreary world. Sometimes we must experience this knowledge for ourselves, by trial and error. 

When faced with a difficult path in our discipleship, we might ask, "Isn't there some another road besides this one?" Even Christ shrunk from the bitter cup and asked if it were possible that it be removed. Eve asked, as we all do, "Is there no other way?"  Especially in our greatest suffering, anything may feel more comfortably suited to our tired feet than this burning road through the wilderness to the promised land, and so we might temporarily seek for something more comfortable, whether it be gospel of conformity and platitudes, or a gospel of rebellion and disillusionment. Both are easier than personal growth with Christ. Both are easier than walking His lonely path that passes by Gethsemane.

But every path that is not Christ eventually becomes a brick wall. Every ideological breakthrough, even when it may feel new to us, degrades over time to yet another version of the same old, well played human drama wrapped up in new packaging. It leads to the same, because only Christ can walk with us though our life beyond this one. Only He can keep walking with us beyond our own mortality and to a new life and resurrection.

Once we have chosen Christ and have yoked ourselves to Him by covenant, we will still have our work cut out for us. It is not a once and done experience. We will continually find ourselves required to choose Him again and again, as each and every alternative is placed before us. Some alternatives may hold greater appeal to one than to others. There is always something else at church that may temporarily hold our appeal. But when the loaves and the fishes inevitably dry up, will we follow the Savior all the way? Will we take up our cross and follow Him to Calvary?

One of the hardest tasks and greatest responsibilities as disciples of Him is to stand as a witness of Christ "at all times and in all places." For those of us who spend a lot of time standing around with other latter-day saints, we may be surprised and even disheartened to find how frequently our witness of Christ is needed. There are sometimes more members of the body of Christ converted to the cultural, political, or social aspects of our church than there are converted to Him whose church this is. Truth be told, at different times this is all of us.

In the end and after so many words, my commitment to Christ means more to me now than it did one year ago, or five years ago, or ten years ago, or twenty. I imagine the crucible of doubt comes more than once to all of us. At least, it has for me. While I would never go so far as to say I am grateful for my trials, I also know that my time spent underwater has made my faith in Christ all the more meaningful, because after acknowledging better the depths and the waves, now I see better the miracle: that with Christ, I can walk on water. 

When I stay focused on Him and not on the boisterous waves around me, and though I will inevitably sink at times, His hand is always there.