Tower of Babel

The (Great) Tower of Babel, Bruegel the Elder, 1563

What is the difference between building Zion and building the Tower of Babel, when both stories are about trying to build our way to heaven? How do we know which work we are engaged in? We can know by whether or not we are listening to each other.

The people in the Old Testament were trying to get closer to God. I doubt we are supposed to take the story literally, that these people were actually dumb enough to think they could build a tower high enough to reach heaven, but there is good symbolism there.

"'Go to,' the people said, 'let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.' And the Lord said, 'Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.'" (Genesis 11:4)

In today's polarization, we are likewise confounded in our language. Sometimes, we legitimately do not understand one another's speech. When I talk with someone about certain political issues, I sometimes wonder if we are speaking in foreign tongues. So many things break down in translation. "Freedom." "Common good." "Rights." "Responsibility." We have lost the ability to communicate different perspectives with much degree of comprehension or common ground, and I appreciate that it is as much my fault as anyone else's.

Why would God confound us, members of Christ's church trying to build His kingdom on the earth? Sometimes, I think, it is because we have forgotten that we are building Zion where there are "no poor among [us,]" and have instead been building a tower of Babel in its place.

For a long time, and emerging out of a complicated cultural framework in the early 1900s, we had at last developed a solid core name to be known by, an unofficial "Mormon" identity that involved a certain culture, politics, language, and which abided by grammatical rules of what it meant to speak properly about being a latter-day saint. Those who didn't speak that language were, to our detriment, often pushed out. Our identity eventually became less and less about our belief in Christ and his gospel, and more to mean a certain political orientation and certain set of social expectations. At the time, it was easy to work together this way, all of us predominantly located in the intermountain West and superficially united in the same cultural language. But the polarization of our world has changed all that. It has pointed us to the fracture lines in our foundation. Like the Salt Lake City Temple, we need a renovation. 

As we internationalized and faced more complex social issues at home, our makeshift language that we constructed as a defense against the world "lest we be scattered," lacked the vocabulary to move forward. We  became mired in an identity that tends toward exclusivity rather than inclusivity. From here on out, if we are going to move forward we are going to have to adapt and focus on our common faith in Christ regardless of our social or political views. We need to value our differences, instead of marginalize them. In short, we are going to need to learn to speak one another's languages.

In the day of Pentecost, there was an outpouring of the sign of the gift of tongues. I believe we need this gift now more than ever. Not necessarily literal languages, but we need ways to interpret each other's differences with edification and rejoicing. Every day I lack this gift! But with each of us and our thick pioneer accents that hail from a multitude of different motherlands, we must learn to understand one another. Our ways of gesturing and communicating will vary depending on our life's experiences and a variety of political and social backgrounds, but taking time to listen to someone who speaks differently is going to be necessary work. It will enrich our church with diversity. It is the gift of interpretation of tongues. Without it, there will be no Zion, only the Babel of the 6:00 news.

The common language, the one we shall never throw away because it is the everlasting alphabet of our Savior, is the gospel of Christ. It is the language of Zion, the means to make a society consist of the "pure in heart" and where there are truly no poor among us. Christ's gospel language demands a rhetoric of bold defense for the most vulnerable among us, rather than focusing on ourselves. Christ's gospel is the language of service, inclusion, and love. Without learning to listen with love, our work will look less and less like Zion and more and more like the Tower of Babel, or perhaps even like Lehi's vision of the great and spacious building.

On Convoys and Caring

We talk a lot about a health care system because that's what it is. It's a system. Like any other, it is based on efficiencies and statistics and bottom line dollars. We analyze bed capacity and staffing and projections of possible admissions, equipment needs, budgets, vaccination rates, and skill sets. Like any system, it has hierarchies and values, and choices must be made every day about which values have priority.

So it is not surprising that some people feel lost, unheard, and invalidated in this system. It is a real problem. More than anything, I am concerned that many people are losing their trust in this system altogether, especially their trust in health care providers, as legitimate questions about a rapidly changing pandemic come about as quickly as the tidal waves of information and misinformation that try to answer them.

When we have a question about the wiring in our houses, we go to an electrician. When we have a question about migration patterns of dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, we ask a marine biologist. But for some reason, when it comes to our own bodies, more and more we are turning to the people on the internet, many whose credentials are inflated or entirely misrepresented, and then turning around to call the ones who have spent their entire lives studying the human body and epidemiology untrustworthy. What is going on here? Are some people just idiots? Or could there be some problem with us in healthcare?

Now, I am hardly some veteran, experienced nurse over here by any means, but I have done some thinking and tried really listening to a lot of people with different perspectives than mine, and while I still think many are totally quackers, I have come to the conclusion that not everything is their fault. I think part of the blame is with us. It is my opinion that much of the pandemic fallout shows us that our healthcare system could use some tweaking.

I hear many people who feel like their concerns about vaccines and side effects often go unanswered as we rush them through the system like a production line in a factory. The drive to vaccinate has always been about numbers, statistics, and a race against time, and to some degree rightly so. But we all know that one of the biggest problems in this pandemic has been that people are not feeling heard or seen. Some people feel talked down to or ignored by their health care providers in the rush to protect the public and stop the spread, or just because we don't have time or energy to explain the same thing one more time. Some people feel like they are even treated like the enemy because of their health beliefs. Some honest questions are met with derision or a brush of the hand instead of an attempt to give thoughtful answers. This has to be, in part at least, our own fault. The metaphorical call bells are going off somewhere else in the ward and so we triage, we prioritize, and sometimes we just don't have time to explain why we are doing what we are doing, Mr. Jones, so please just sit down and take your dang medicine because we don't have time for your shenanigans.

Right now a trucking convoy for freedom, with a lot of my friends hollering their support, is a symptom to this problem of not feeling seen or heard. The pressure has been building for a long time. It is hard to listen to and see the answers from someone when you don't feel listened to or seen by them first. It speaks to a demographic who hasn't had their concerns acknowledged for two years. In my church we teach that 

"No power or influence can or ought to be maintained...only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile—reproving betimes with sharpness...and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy." 

As I see many who now esteem scientists, government officials, and even healthcare providers as their enemies, I wonder if we need to re-evaluate how we do things.

Any system like ours naturally thrives on administration and bureaucracy. We all know this. Rules and policies and rollouts and shareholders are what steer Alberta Health Services, not the benevolent nurse who holds hands and validates feelings. This does not mean administrators do not have their place. We need administrators and science informed policies and quality control and someone to balance a budget. But it isn't enough. It is not a balanced system if we don't carve out and protect a space for caring and compassion and listening and nurturing and a whole lot of patience. And I think this is what is missing today.

In any system there is a Yin and Yang of feminine and masculine qualities to make things run smoothly, but more often than not, the masculine qualities of efficiency and quantifiable production will beat out the feminine qualities of the compassionate, caring nurse every time. Because newsflash! We are living in a patriarchal system. We value masculinized characteristics over feminized ones. It's the very air we breathe, and healthcare is a pretty good case study for it. The administrative qualities will rise to the top and the nurturing qualities of caring will remain unpromoted at the bottom.

After the physician strolls in and gives the diagnosis and writes the prescription, he will have to move onto the next one, because this is an assembly line model with a waiting room out there full of other patients, and with specific billing procedures to follow. Most policies are formulated with the business model in mind. Almost all physicians I know are furious with recent changes in our province that make it even more like an assembly line, with artificial quotas and red tape that put unnecessary restraints on a physician's ability to take time and care. Meanwhile, on the other side of the team, nurses are facing the cutting block in virtually every budget meeting, and it is a constant fight to even keep our place in the system at all! Some suggest that humans in healthcare could be replaced with an App. Obviously, this is an imbalanced system. This is not news to anyone who works in health care, and we generally work out that balance between efficiency and caring in our practice as best we can.

Every nurse I know starts out caring deeply about people. They are naturally drawn to a profession that values listening, taking care of people, talking with them, alleviating suffering, and teaching. But more often than not, the system doesn't allow much time for that. When you are short staffed on the floor and the bells are ringing, the expectation is that you get the job done, even if it means treating people like pieces of meat in a factory as if everyone just needs a pill and a wipe and then you can send them out the door as fast as you can because the hospital is in overcapacity again. A nurse can quickly become jaded in such a system. There is a good reason you might get greeted by a tired, crusty, burnt out nurse who doesn't have time for your questions. It isn't that she or he doesn't care. They probably cared too much. But when you are treated like a cog in a factory, it will get to you eventually, and it isn't necessarily our fault.

Mind you, there are so many heroic caregivers that go above and beyond every day to take time to see the people instead of the numbers. But it is largely unsustainable in our current model. Anyone who cares deeply about people in this system all the time will burn himself or herself out. So you learn to ration your feelings and your caring, because compassion is not an inexhaustible resource. The time taken to explain treatments and answer questions and provide education about medications including vaccines to a blustering Mr. Jones is about maintaining an attitude of caring, sometimes superhuman acts of caring, and more often than not, this is the part that gives out well before the physical exhaustion sets in. 

This side of health care, good nursing care, cannot be valued properly when the entire system is based on a masculinized business model where the bottom line is efficiency and people's health become the commodity. The pandemic has put even more pressure on us, and the gaps are glaring at us even more than they were before.

There is so much about our health care system to love. Socialized health care for all is something I am fiercely enthusiastic about. But I know not everything we are doing is working great right now. For one thing, voting for policies and governments that continue to gut the healthcare and education system in the name of freedom and a dollar will not work for me anymore. For another thing, I despair to see more and more people I know turning to the wild west of the internet for their scientific and health information, wading through garbage because they don't know the difference between politics and peer review. But I can't blame them. There is a reason they don't feel comfortable to turn to their own health care providers for clarification. How would they even get an appointment? To me that is the most alarming thing.

As I watched this past week's freedom convoy, battling between feelings of charity and disillusionment, I began to wonder what freedom and caring even means anymore. What it means to me. What is freedom without caring? Without truth? Without responsibility? As caregivers drown in the impossible task of single handedly educating a nation, of listening to people mired in conspiracy fears and trying desperately to earn back the trust of a demographic that has become more and more disillusioned, and all this while we face the unrelenting workload of saving lives in a short staffed and burnt out fifth wave, it becomes obvious there will be no convoy on their way to Ottawa demanding support for nurses and healthcare providers anytime soon.

"It Shall Be Well With Him"

 "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." (1 Cor. 13:13) It has been helpful this week (for me anyway) to look at these three Christian virtues as they are situated in time. 

1. Faith

In a lot of ways, faith looks into the past. It is the evidence of things not seen, the substance of God's works as they have unfolded to us previously in human experience, either anciently as recorded in the scriptures, or in our own more recent family and personal experiences. Faith is a power of action. We build on past faith by "experimenting on the word," (as Alma puts it) which comes to us "like a voice from the dust" from the past to propel us forward into the unknown. Faith is not blind believing, but acting on past evidence. In some ways, faith is always dependent on the past. It is the "faith of our fathers [and mothers,]" the foundation upon which we, their children, must build. It is our first step in the gospel that connects us to God, but every step of faith we make, as soon as it is taken, becomes another part of the past upon which our discipleship is built.

2. Hope

If faith arrives to us from the past, hope always points us to the future. In Spanish, "to hope" is the same verb as "to wait." It is future tense, waiting with conviction for better things. It is the power that helps us see beyond the mortal muddle we are in, whatever feeling or emotion that drags us down in our lives. We hope for a future time where negative emotions or experiences can be resolved. We hope that some day we can sit down together in heaven through Christ, in a state of peace and total acceptance and with a perfect restoration of lost loved ones and lost blessings. Hope is the "anchor to our souls." (Hebrews 6:19) It is what helps us to make sense of less than ideal circumstances. Hope looks forward towards the ideal of what we and our fallen world can become in Christ.

3. Charity

But, of course, a life cannot be lived in either the past or the future, because it must be lived in the present. The most important time frame is now. We cannot focus our living on the experiences of the past, nor to the hope and idealism of the future at the expense of today. However much we would like to escape the discomfort of the present, to the suffering of the human experience around us on any given day, focusing solely on the past or future does not allow space for the crowning Christian virtue, which is charity, the pure love of Christ. Without His love today, our faith and hope in Christ is "sounding brass and tinkling cymbal," for without charity, we are "nothing." (1 Cor. 13) And so our lives must be spent trying to ground ourselves in the present, connecting with the beauty, humanity, and suffering of ourselves and the people around us by practicing love.

Charity is given to us only as we seek for it, pleading "with all energy of heart" that we might be filled with this love. (Moroni 7) Unlike faith and hope, which can be cultivated in solitude, love is relational. It forces us to connect to each other so that we can knit our hearts together in love. (Mosiah 18) It is what we are commanded to practice with each other now. Right now. Today.

Love is now. Love is not based on a person's past, or our past interactions with any person, because Christ's love does not allow itself to be clouded by how people once were. Neither does pure love look forward to the future, to some future state of a loved one, hoping that someday this person will be something other than what they are right now in order to love them. Just as Christ is present with us in each moment through His atonement (that perfect manifestation of His love) the pure love of Christ helps us to love and accept one another how they are now. Love does not demand that another person be different than they are in order for us to resolve our own feelings of tension or discomfort about a person's behavior. Love embraces that tension. Love hurts because it comes at a cost, which is the cost of our own growth, to expand ourselves more in order to include another person more completely in the orbit of our love. In other words, love is our work and willingness to grow so that we can better love another person.

Too often what I call love is not actually love, but another version of hope and faith. I think this is common. In other words, we love people because we hope they will change into something they are not, into what we think they should be. Hence we withhold love in the present tense by projecting our love for them onto the future, some time when they are more worthy of our love. Other times we love someone for what they once were, drawing on our love in the past tense, because of memories and experiences we shared together in better times, and so we have faith that things will work out for our relationship like they have done in other situations. Make no mistake, faith and hope can be good things, important and extremely vital things. With Christ, faith and hope are often the building blocks of love.

But every crisis of love comes to us in the present. It is charity that "never fails," not our hope or our faith. Love sees people without their baggage and without any expectation or ulterior motive from us for their change. We see each other for who they are. We listen to each other for what they are feeling in this moment. Love validates them in the present. It is what we are all so hungry for, because to be human is to hunger for this kind of love.

Christ loves us while we are yet sinners, that even if we should never cease to be sinners, His love would not falter at all. It is a constant the way the sun is, for it shines for us every day in the present. He suffered for us not based on our potential, but because of who we are right now, in this moment. We do not work to be worthy of His love someday, gaining love by degrees until we have cleaned up and shaped up and attained the fullness of His love. His love is already full. Christ loves us perfectly, infinitely, exactly how we are now.

How can I learn to love another person with this kind of charity? I believe it is the greatest task one can attempt to undertake, to learn to love someone exactly how they are without trying to manipulate or love them into submission. Learning to love another goes beyond my feelings for them. It is renovative. It is radical. It changes the world precisely because it changes myself, starting with my own heart. Love disrupts my natural tendencies, fundamentally making me a new creature. It makes me put away my "natural man"—all my insecurities, my fears, my ulterior motives, my comfort, my pride—so that I can be filled instead with Christ's love.

What I have learned about myself, for all my lengthy words and deep thoughts and circular arguments and righteous desires, however noble they may be, is this: I need this love in my life. I lack it. Every time I am called to put it into practice, I come up short. I feel the weight of my discipleship so much more when I try to act on it, than when I try to explain it or talk about it in the abstract. One can only know how impossibly heavy this task is by picking it up and trying to heft it for themselves. Charity is my biggest yearning and greatest potential for strength, but it is also my greatest weakness. Reading about the love of God in the scriptures points me to my need for repentance, to change my heart, clear away the overgrown brambles of my own fear and pride, so that Christ's love can take root.

Before I did this study exercise about charity, I believed that my love could change people. Perhaps, to my shame, that was what attracted me to it. It still can, I suppose, but now I am learning that it is not at all in the way I thought. I admit that I sometimes thought of charity as a kind of weapon. I wanted to obtain it mostly so I could use it to my advantage. I imagined, "If only I could love someone enough to change them." Studying about charity has taught me that the pure love of Christ isn't used to change other people. It is used to change me! Every opportunity to love someone is an opportunity for me to be changed, not the other way around. When I allow Christ's love into my heart, it makes me new. That is where the renovation occurs, not in some other person whose behavior or way of being happens to make me uncomfortable. Charity changes the world because it changes the heart of the person reaching for it.

In reality, being the self centered animals we are, I also have come to realize that charity is truly impossible. There is always some lingering animal fear that pops out of me, some selfish thought which interrupts it. Charity is the unattainable ideal of dreamers. As long as I am housed in mortal flesh, I am unable to generate this kind of selfless love on my own. But this is exactly why it is a miracle wherever it is found! And truly, I have seen it. I have felt it. Because my love is always tied up in my base and animal desires, Christ gives me His love, instead. When I pray for it, I am given opportunities to feel it, to see someone the way He sees them. Even if it only flashes into my heart for a moment, it leaves marks that permanently change me. Mine are simple moments that become recorded in my spiritual memory: an unexpected ice cream cake, a tupperware bowl of macaroni, a late night knock at a wooden door, the touch of a hand. These were times I was on the road to Emmaus and felt my heart burning.

"And whoso is found possessed of [charity] at the last day, it shall be well with him." (Moroni 7) I want to experience Christ's love not just once, but over and over again. I want that gift, to see someone with His love so that it changes me into something I am not, something more than I am. I already know I am a stubborn, insecure, anxious, prideful person with a fragile and easily deflated ego, and I know I become defensive and uncomfortable in the face of human vulnerability, especially my own. This has been a difficult but much needed discovery.

But I know His love changes me. It situates me not in the past, which is fraught with the evidence of my weakness, nor in the future, which is already looking like it will involve more of my failures. Choosing charity focuses me on the present, on the opportunities that are around me right now, because it is in the present where His grace is found, both to give it and receive it. Charity is the yoke we take upon ourselves when we take His name upon us. It includes the yoke of His grace that is both easy and light, but also impossibly difficult. But for now, it is sufficient for me to know that there is an unlimited supply of Christ's love to accompany me in what I will have to face today.

David's Hallelujah

King David Playing the Harp. Honthurst, 1622

One of the titles Christ uses in the scriptures is “Son of David.” 

This Christmas I was pondering that title. Why would Jesus, the one perfect man, choose a title that ties him to a man as imperfect, complicated, and flawed as David?

True, David started out as the boy who once faced Goliath and won. But he still ended up the man who looked when he shouldn’t have looked, and then went on to hide his mistakes. His actions even led to what amounted to murder. Why would Christ choose to be born in Bethlehem, in the city of David of all places? David seemed like an immensely inappropriate candidate for this title, despite his many beautiful, desperate psalms pleading for forgiveness. What was it about David that Christ thought worthy of making a key part of His title?

From the union of David and Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite that David committed adultery with, and she whose rightful husband David sent to the front lines to die, came Solomon and the line of kings. Ultimately, from THIS complicated marriage came the line that brought us Jesus Christ.

Surely Christ should have come through the line of someone more worthy. Someone like Nathan, the prophet sent to call David to repentance for his sin. He seemed a decent fellow. I am sure there were plenty of other guys who didn’t whore around quite so much, men who didn't kill their lovers’ husbands quite so much.

But He didn’t.

David was indeed a paradox. He did both amazing and awful things.

Not unlike each one of us.

All of us have a little bit of David in us, I think. We all have, once upon a time, fought our own personal goliaths and won. Some, like me, have made covenants with God in spite of the considerable goliath of same-sex attraction. Many still strive to keep it together, often against great opposition amidst immense trials of faith.

And yet we are also weak. Painfully so. Some of us struggle with temptations and sins not unlike David. Many of us have found ourselves more than once on the rooftop. Like David, I think we all could write psalm after psalm pleading for a Savior who would one day redeem us from our sins.

And then it finally happened.

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:11)

All of us have a Bethlehem. A miraculous birth. A silent night. Metaphorically, in our spiritual lineage and from the very unholy union of our divine spiritual selves to our natural man, a Savior is born. Despite whatever impassioned choices we might have, despite whatever addictions, sins, and mess-ups we might fall into, we each individually have a Savior “born unto us.”

This Christmas and always, Christ chooses to be born again through you. Imperfect and complicated you.

Christ does not condemn us of our mortal shortcomings. He knows all about your “natural man.” He knows exactly what it is like to fight against the weaknesses of the flesh, and He has the power to forgive. What can we do to obtain this gift?

It is simply to not give up on Him as our God. We keep trying even if, like David, we spend a lifetime trying to get it right. All he asks is that we turn away from the false gods of the world, whatever they might be for you, anything that would lead you away from the priesthood covenants that bind you to Christ.

Jesus Christ asks each of us to keep looking to Bethlehem, to the city of all your mistakes, where “the hopes and fears of all the years are met” in the birth of Jesus Christ. The Son of David. The Son of Christopher. The Son of You.

The little stone we need to pick up and sling at our personal Goliaths this year is always the same one. It is the little stone of Jesus Christ, the one that made its arc through generations of messes and landed in Bethlehem, in the "House of Bread." Jesus can turn your little stones into bread for you.

What was David’s “secret chord that pleased the Lord?” It was that he simply didn’t give up on Christ. That is the music we feel running through us. Even though the Savior David yearned for wouldn’t arrive in His city for many centuries, he didn’t give up.

And He was born to die for Him. And for you.

In the words of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Hallelujah.”

Converting to The Church of Jesus Christ of Present-Day Saints

 "...And we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God." (Article of Faith 1:9)

This week I am pondering what it means to have a testimony of a church that is always changing. When we say, "I know the church is true," to which church are we referring to? The church as it existed yesterday? The church how it was in 1983? The church of a pre-pandemic 2019? If we mean the church today, what does that mean if the church is different tomorrow?

When I taught the gospel as a missionary, I remember well the enthusiasm of the new convert. Many newly baptized members were willing to take their old beliefs and throw them out the window. They walked away from their old church, old teachings, old books, old friends, and old socio-political alliances to eagerly embrace a new worldview. As the church continues to change through revelation, I wonder if we are doing the same?

I have on my bookshelf a lot of old church manuals. Many of them mean a lot to me. I learned the gospel from those old curriculums, and I gained a testimony for myself from many of those mid-century quotes. I trusted them. And yet, going through them now, I have read things and thought about old interpretations that don't resonate with me anymore. Some make me very uncomfortable. And why shouldn't they? If I am still living in the church of 1992, how can I embrace an ongoing restoration? Old interpretations have given way to new ones, and thank heavens for that. And in the future, our understanding will change again. That's what having a testimony of revelation means, as long as each step is a step closer to Christ.

Does this mean we can't trust the church's correlation department? Should I throw all those manuals away? Well, maybe. Probably. But I don't find it helpful if we just categorize previous teachings as "wrong" and current ones as "right," because I see how our light grows by degrees and our understanding has grown not from wrong to right, but rather from a darker shadow to a lighter one, and today we still "see through a glass darkly." 

But I do think we can abandon some things. For example, we can stop trying to make sense of the "patriarchal order" when it hasn't been mentioned in a single conference talk for over twenty years. We can divorce ourselves from other spiritual millstones, too, like young earth creationism, and some of our anti-evolution, anti-science rhetoric. Digging around in old manuals can bring unnecessary hurt, and preaching them in Sunday can bring unnecessary doubt, especially to our youth. We can throw out our old interpretations of polygamy and the priesthood ban. And when we know more, I can't wait to throw away our current understanding of both gender and race, too, so we can embrace something even better. 

I believe our testimony should be based less on church as much as on the revelation that powers it. I think we can take seriously the mandate to seek revelation on everything that is being taught, and we can have confidence in this process when we do it with a spirit of unity and love. We are taught that it is very good to ask questions and seek for answers in faith. Accepting hook, line, and sinker every sentence that comes from the correlation department as if it were written by the finger of the Lord on Sinai just doesn't give us the same opportunities to exercise faith. 

For context, before there was Israel, there was just Jacob wrestling with the angel. Every problematic lesson plan can be our own personal invitation to wrestle with the angel. Some questions can take years. Others may even take a lifetime.

I used to think, back when the phrase "hastening the work" became popular that it meant God would change the world, but somehow leave me and my church intact. I felt pretty good where I was back then. I had all the answers I needed, or so I thought. Now I realize the Lord meant hastening His work in me. In my community. In the mainstream church itself. And now I believe changing me, and changing us, is prerequisite for God to change the world, because how can He gather Israel if the gathering place doesn't have the capacity to hold them all?

The official declarations in D&C regarding polygamy and the priesthood ban in this week's Come Follow Me lesson remind me that the restoration is ongoing. I also believe that not every degree of light and knowledge gets an official declaration and is canonized, either. As things become more clear by degrees rather than by official declaration regarding complicated issues, such as race and gender, we can still believe in the church, that it is not a static structure, but a developing one. We can have spiritual maturity enough to see that the church can be right on one thing and out to lunch on another, and yet still be the Church of Jesus Christ. This is because it is simultaneously the church of the latter-day saints, and we continue to live in problematic gender and racial contexts, and while still in them we work with Christ who gets us where we need to be.

I know this can be hard pill to swallow, especially for those hurt most by sexist, racist, or homophobic policies that existed (and likely continue to exist) in the church. For me, I take some degree of comfort knowing that God can work with imperfect people, because that means He can work with me. When I choose to "let God prevail" in flawed church leaders and members, I am better able to let God prevail in myself and my own imperfect life. 

Sometimes, this has less to do with staying in the church in order to change it from the inside (which to me is just a setup for disappointment and resentment) and more to do with staying in the church to change me, because I need the growth that comes from forgiveness and patience. I need to let my gospel experience change me before I can expect it to change everyone else. Even more importantly, I have enough experience being wrong about a multitude of things to think twice about relying on myself to interpret complicated issues. I believe following a prophet and staying connected to the body of the church keeps us emotionally, temporally, and spiritually stable.

We have been reminded several times in recent General Conference talks that the Restoration is ongoing. Meaning the church ten years ago was less restored than it is today, and in ten years it will be even more restored. One might fairly ask, what's left to restore?

That's the million dollar question, not just for prophets, but for all of us. We tend to interpret restoration to mean restoring things that existed anciently in the original church structure. But I think that has mostly already been done. Some things, like polygamy, have already been removed, making us less like ancient Israel, not more. Increasingly, I think restoration means restoring things that weren't there before. Maybe things that have never existed among God's people, not ever. As demonstrated in Official Declarations 1 and 2, that may mean things like gender and racial equality.

As human beings, we tend to cling to what we know. We who grew up on 1970s and 1980s CES and Sunday School manuals—ones that taught us that a woman's place is in the home, or that evolution and the gospel are not compatible, or that God was behind the racist priesthood ban—we have a lot of catching up to do. This can feel scary. It was perhaps more comfortable for us to let the manual do all the work, to guide us only to those questions we already knew the answers to. But if we can't trust the manual, what can we trust?

We can trust the Holy Ghost.

The new Come Follow Me curriculum invites us to examine our doctrinal baggage and make adjustments, however painful they might be, by using the Holy Ghost to keep us in line with revealed truths from our current prophet. The new curriculum peels back almost two centuries of scriptural narratives and invites us to study, work, and seek for answers using our most current interpretations of scripture. It is an invitation to be an active part of the Restoration, an agent in its unfolding instead of a passive recipient of it. It is a bottom up approach to revelation, rather than a top-down one.

I am excited to be a part of this as it happens in the Old Testament, which for me is the most exciting book of scripture, mostly because it is also the messiest one. I know not everyone loves the Old Testament, but I like it because when I see the mess of Israel, it helps me put my own mess into proper context. Reading about the hot mess that was God's people, and even seeing that hot mess reflected in the church today, reminds me that I truly belong in this very ancient, very dysfunctional family. If Israel were to read like a pious "museum of saints" I may think I could never belong in heaven with them. Reading the mess of Israel reminds me of all the reasons why I need a Savior.

This year, I look forward to converting once again to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at least as it exists in the year 2022. I will need the enthusiasm of a new convert to do this, and channel their willingness to let go of my preconceived ideas and beliefs. I pray for the humility to allow the Holy Ghost to penetrate the decades of lesson manuals that have been build up around my heart and mind, sometimes working like a much needed protection, but other times like a barricade to further revelation. I will try to let the Spirit sort out what parts of that fence to keep, and what parts should be thrown away.

On Pandemics and Prophets

Listening to the prophet is as important in a pandemic as any other time, if not more so. But what does that mean, exactly? Can a prophet, whose job is to keep as safe spiritually, also act as a medical authority? Can he speak with authority about politics? Can we listen to him about spiritual matters, but ignore him when it comes to temporal ones?

Prophets often talk about laws and temporal affairs, especially when they see how certain political issues will have spiritual consequences. After all, they are "seers." They see things. This includes prophetic knowledge that is both spiritual and temporal. In a time when divides in our church over masks and vaccines are causing spiritual damage to our congregations at least as much as the ongoing physical loss, their voice is vital to maintain unity, navigate truth, and show us correct principles that can heal our wards and stakes. Their teachings point us to Christ.

And yet, I don't believe that when the prophet speaks "the thinking is done." I know what it feels like when you struggle to agree with something and someone comes in and instead of listening to what you have to say they fly at you with a bludgeon telling you to "follow the prophet!"

I know the hurt. I have felt it at certain times in my life when some of my political and social views did not line up with the church, like when I was a student at BYU during the church's campaign with Proposition 8. I can validate that feeling of confusion and hurt, especially when members marginalize you because you have a different perspective.

This is a learning experience for all of us. For me, it is a reminder to balance seeking truth with compassion. I am still trying, and I am truly sorry when I fail at this, because I still remember that feeling of rejection when you find yourself outside of the status quo of prophetic authority.

For context, here is the quotation that I heard a lot and had to wrestle with at a difficult time for me during Proposition 8, especially when it was hurled at me like some kind of spiritual weapon:

“You may not like what comes from the authority of the church. It may conflict with your political views. It may contradict your social views. It may interfere with some of your social life…[but] your safety and ours depends upon whether or not we follow.” (President Harold B Lee)

This quotation means something different to me now than it did then. I still believe it is true, but now I believe getting to that place of truth and safety is less about blind obedience and more about experiencing a "wrestle in the spirit" as we learn to truly listen and work through our differences with each other and with God, and learning to do this with integrity and faith.

I know that for many years and for many members, following conservative radio and websites and following the prophet looked a lot like the same thing. For years, members felt it was always "those liberals" who struggled to follow the prophet. And maybe so. But in the end, that wrestle was good medicine. At least, it was for me. It deepened my faith and taught me compassion. It stretched me in soulful ways and kept me in a place of tension that brought me closer to the Savior. Following the prophet became less about changing my opinion and more about changing ME. Wrestling with difficult questions in the gospel helped me grow, and holding liberal views in a conservative church was a catalyst for much of that growth.

Now, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. For complicated reasons I don't fully understand, a vaccine has become a political lightening rod. After a discouraging political saga including Trumpism and an increasingly polarized newsfeed, the shoe is on the other foot. The prophet is now, in the strongest and most consistent messaging possible, urging us to comply with public health measures and government mandates, and this has been a hard pill to swallow for many conservatives friends.

No longer does the voice of the prophet align with the conservative news pundits and talk show radio hosts that were our closest allies during the cultural wars for religious freedom and traditional family values. But perhaps they weren't the horse we wanted to hitch our Zion wagons to, after all? At any rate, we know we can't keep one foot in Zion and the other one in Babylon any longer.

I am generally a positive person, and I want to first say that most church members I know have fallen in line, heeding the counsel of the prophet. Recognizing their quiet faith and obedience should not be lost to a vocal minority. Besides, I don't believe at all this is a "goats and sheep" type scenario, anyway. There is so much good in every single one of my friendly neighborhood anti-vaxxers to avoid categorizing any of them as apostate or unfaithful. They are good, decent disciples of Christ, every last one of them. Whoever is without fault here, cast the first stone.

But let's just say, I don’t hear the phrase “follow the prophet” taught quite as vigorously as I did in 2008. For some, that's because it's hard to say with an unmasked straight face.

Again, I know the difficulty in following a prophet when it conflicts with your political views. I know the pain, and I can validate that difficulty and intellectual stretching. But here is the thing: I learned for myself that it is not faith if everything you are asked to do is what you would do anyway. Where is the growth in that?

Today, my testimony is that marriage is ordained of God. My faith came because I kept listening to and wrestling with prophetic authority. I want to share my testimony of prophetic authority with the same people who lent their testimony to me when I needed it, because following the prophet has richly blessed my life. It has given me protection at a vulnerable time.

I admit that I feel hurt and little surprised as I watch the same people who taught me to follow the prophet even “when it contradicts your political and social views” apparently unable to do the same for me, a registered nurse, when it is their turn. My feelings are sometimes raw as I witness a letdown of my community that chooses not to do what they once demanded me to do so persuasively. 

For many members, especially LGBT members, following the prophet meant to turn away from a fundamental part of their identity, to exercise considerable faith to accept a teaching that contradicted feelings that ran so much deeper than politics. And then for us to not even put a piece of fabric on our faces? And what a disappointing attitude about the miracle that is a vaccine! Seeing us balk at something so simple when others gave up so much is difficult for me.

Actions speak louder than words. Today, the message from some (though not all) is less about obedience and more about convenience. From some (though not most) church members, the message is this: “Follow the prophet, but only when it doesn’t interfere with your political views.” When the message comes from a respected member in a position of authority, for the spiritually immature youth it can undo a decade of primary lessons to “follow the prophet” in no time flat.

We can’t be surprised if, when all this is over, our youth do exactly that—ignore prophetic counsel in favor of their own feelings or political orientation, especially when it comes to issues far more complicated than saving people’s lives by getting vaccinated.

So please, if you still don't agree with vaccines or masks, keep wrestling. Do what the prophet asks by going to the right sources. Seek good information. Just as you told me once that spiritual questions need spiritual answers from God, scientific and medical questions will need scientific and medical answers from peer reviewed sources.

Now, as much as ever, "your safety and ours depends upon [it.]"

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.