I recently read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. It is worth reading, but it was a very mixed emotional experience for me. Politically, it was interesting, insightful, and personally affirming, while philosophically it was interesting, insightful, and personally aggravating. Continue reading
I recall sitting in church on the lap of my Grandpa Sabey. I cannot recall the time of year, but it was presumably cold outside that morning, because I recall how warm and comfortable I felt in the chapel, despite wearing a tie. Grandpa whispered “sweet nothings” in my ear during sacrament meeting–his own phrase, not mine, though “sweet nothings” is an apt descriptor, because the particular words are nothing while the sweetness of kind attention is all. Except that the particular words did matter in my case, because it was the whispered “s” sound that made a delicious tickling in my ear, and that was my secret reason for asking for more sweet nothings. I enjoyed singing the familiar songs and seeing the familiar faces. I don’t remember anything particular from that meeting beyond these details–but I do remember being touched by particular teachings and songs and testimonies in other meetings, even as a very young child.
Some of the stories I then found moving I now find problematic. For example, the heartbreaking parable of the older boy who takes the younger boy’s whipping for him after the younger boy steals the older boy’s dinner. As flash fiction, it is effective, and it nicely captures the competing demands of law and order on the one hand and pity for hungry bread thieves on the other. As an analogy for the Atonement, however, it is, I now believe, extremely dubious.
But overall, my initiation into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was sound in every way–a happy embrace by the tradition of my ancestors since the mid-nineteenth century, conveying God’s hope-giving truth and his loving expectations.
Touching stories and music and grandpas who whisper sweet nothings in the warmth of the meeting place is, of course, far from unique to my religious tradition. Perhaps every religious tradition is capable of providing legitimate spiritual experiences as well as aesthetic and social enjoyment. This presents a double problem—how to distinguish legitimate encounters with God/Truth within one’s religion from mere aesthetic or social enjoyment, and how to justify, beyond family loyalty or mere familiarity, a belief in the truth of one’s religion relative to other religions. This essay does not purport to have any definitive answers. It simply presents some of my own personal struggles and resolutions and reasons for belief. Continue reading
In my reading, I’ve several times now run into the idea of a gentle sense of humor as being a godly power, linked closely to love and faith. It is an intriguing concept. Please consider the following three quotations, ordered both by length (the first is a fairly lengthy account) and by the chronology of my reading. I’ll provide some brief commentary between quotes.
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From F. Enzio Bushe’s Yearning For the Living God
The following experience is probably one of the most sacred in my whole life. It happened in the very beginning of my service as a General Authority, after I moved to the United States. I was still very new and inexperienced and I had to rely completely on the Spirit to be able to do the many things I had to do.
On one trip, on assignment as an executive administrator, I gave a talk on welfare to a lovely group of people. I taught them in a special meeting and spoke about faith and the dimensions of faith and the importance of developing it. I quoted Matthew 17 to explain how the Lord expected his disciples to have faith and how frustrated He was when they did not have enough faith to cast out an evil spirit. I quoted that scripture in order to show our need not only to view faith as thought or feeling, but also as a power with which we can control or even change the circumstance of this world.
That evening, I began a tour of a neighboring mission and stayed in the basement of the mission home that night. I was very tired when I finally went to bed at around 11:00. I fell sound asleep as soon as I was in bed. I woke with a start when, at about 1:00 A.M., the mission president came into my room. The light was on and he was speaking to me, but I was still half asleep and did not understand what he was saying. I asked him if what he had to say could not wait until tomorrow. I could see that he was disappointed, but he nodded his head and began to leave the room.
By then, I was more awake and called him back and asked him to repeat the problem. I focused on listening to him and was surprised by what he said. He said that in the evening, a missionary had been possessed by an evil spirit. Continue reading
The Evils
Contemporary life in America, while full of material blessings, is plagued by emotional and spiritual poverty, mental health issues, and loss of felt community. Among the chief contributing factors to these plagues is a loss of several kinds of meaningful connection.
Contemporary work is marked by a shallowness of purpose: we work for employers whose goal is to make money and in return they give us money. That’s it. Very often, it is not even imagined by either party to this transaction that a higher state of things is possible. Furthermore, the extreme division of labor that has taken place since industrialization means that our work is often so specialized and narrow as to be almost entirely disconnected from the rest of our lives and our larger ideals. Thus, not only the purpose of our work but also its content lacks the ability to connect us to meanings worthy of a life’s devotion: the purpose is money; the content is a super-specialized function so narrow and obscure as to be spiritually impoverished. Our careers–for those who are fortunate enough to have a career rather than a mere job or unemployment–most often lack any sense of vocation.
The complexity of contemporary economics and social life also obscures certain realities and involves us in moral compromise. Continue reading
How’s this for a lighthearted proof of the devil’s existence: there is no reason that a person cannot at one and the same time have a robust moral code and charity towards those who fail to satisfy its rigors. That is in fact what Christianity has always demanded. Likewise, there is no reason one cannot have both a commitment to systematic foundational doctrines and openness to other perspectives and even to revising one’s own most basic beliefs in response to new evidence or insights. Yet for some mysterious reason, despite numerous individuals and even small sub-cultures demonstrating that these ideals can be achieved, they have never been realized by any society in recent recorded history, nor have any of the ancient societies that have claimed to have achieved some utopic vision at some point in their history been able to maintain the achievement.
Western society before the Enlightenment had a comparatively exacting moral code and a strong commitment to certain doctrines, including but not limited to those of Christianity, yet it was decidedly unchristian in its responses to moral infractions and religious dissent. There is no reason it could not have progressed towards tolerance and openness while keeping its faith. That is exactly what Christianity’s law of love required, and I think it was desire for power far more than for truth or for God that caused intolerance and dogmatism to be so dominant for so long. Martin Luther King Junior’s message, though not all aspects of his life, perfectly demonstrated the possibility of remaining fully Christian while moving away from dogmatism and intolerance, and he is only one prominent figure within a multitude of whom the same could be said. Their stories are the leaven within the story of civilization. “I have seen the promised land,” he claimed–and for my part, I believe him.
But we have not followed Martin Luther King’s message of brotherhood. Continue reading
PART 5: SUMMARIZING AND TYING IT ALL TOGETHER
In summary, sexuality is ambiguous. The gap between sexual desire and nature’s procreative goal is the space in which imagination has immense interpretive play. The ambiguity of the words and symbols we use to represent sexual things to each other and to ourselves and differing philosophies and world views interact with each other and with the interpretive play afforded by the vagueness of sexual experience to enable radically different interpretations of sexuality.
Of the infinite number of possible responses, two poles emerge. The World responds to the ambiguity by letting each individual interpret their own sexuality without guidance and with only such ever-diminishing restraint as the law imposes–and it claims for each person the “right” to do so. With increasingly limited exceptions, the World denies that there is anything wrong with doing whatever feels good in the moment and defies any purportedly moral authority that would constrain sexual desires. And yet everybody knows in their heart of hearts–and the popularity of miserable break up songs attests–that sex without care, commitment, or lasting emotional meaning, is inherently violent and ugly–a zombie that tears its pleasures with singleminded inanity, ungoverned and ungovernable. It is not difficult to see how porn, adultery, and casual sex participate in this violence and ugliness. In contrast, moral and healthy sex is a coherent part of a whole life, relationship, and belief system that does not set desire against wisdom or rectitude but harmonizes them, and that means a marriage-like state of mutual commitment, respect, and care.
The Church responds to the ambiguity by learning from religious tradition what God says about it and trying to conform to those teachings, including by imaginatively reconnecting sex to marriage and procreation. This is the correct approach, but the teachings are often transmitted as a list of ultra-strict “thou shalt nots” without the contextualizing that would reveal the “everlasting yes” to which these “everlasting nos” give rise and without recognizing that chastity is a thing to be learned by hard experience and long struggle and repeated repentance rather than a pristine sheet to be kept unsullied at all costs.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can do much to enable healthy sexuality and avoid the excessive guilt that in its own way can become as damning as the World’s drunken sexuality, though much less enjoyable. While I defer to those whose callings entitle them to receive revelation for the church, it seems to me that the following steps would be salutary:
The Brothers Sabey 