Letter to a Jesuit

Below is part of a letter I wrote recently. As an attempt to capture my spiritual path over the last 10 years or so, it seemed worth saving. I have removed anything that might identify the recipient.

I was born into a very devoutly religious family. My parents are both converts to Mormonism (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with headquarters in Salt Lake City), which they found in early adulthood and have adhered to faithfully since before I was born (the eldest of six living children). I grew up Mormon, far away from Utah, in a small and close-knit congregation of Saints (as they like to call themselves, perhaps a bit pretentiously from your point of view). I went through the entire cursus honorum that contemporary Mormonism offers young men—attending weekly meetings faithfully, receiving and carrying out the duties of the priesthood (first Aaronic then eventually Melchizedek), graduating from seminary, receiving my endowment in the temple, serving a two-year proselytizing mission in northern Spain (I spent many months working in Galicia), graduating from Brigham Young University (the LDS church's university in Provo, Utah), and eventually marrying in the Salt Lake temple (which you may have seen: it is rather pretty, especially when compared to more modern Mormon architecture). Experience has taught me to beware of judging the quality of one's faith in terms of external career. In my case, almost everything I did from the age of about twelve came from a motivation informed somehow by my Mormonism—a Mormonism that was very sincere and earnest, perhaps too much so as it happens.

As part of my Mormon formation, I was taught church history and doctrine (I hesitate to call it theology, but the term is not utterly inapt) formally and informally. My formal schooling took place in church, in seminary, in special retreats held for missionaries, at BYU (my alma mater), and in the temple (where Mormons take part in complex rituals that dramatize the creation, fall, and redemption of the world). Informally, I did a lot of reading on my own. I was drawn very early to scripture, and over the course of my youth became very familiar with the King James Bible, in addition to other books the LDS church regards as holy scripture (including the Book of Mormon, which I have read many times). I was naturally interested in the history of the books I read—the context out of which they arose and took their first meaning before being handed down to me. Before I went out as a missionary, I had already begun studying religious history and had even decided that I would need to study biblical languages (Latin, Hebrew, and Greek) in college. As a youth, I did not notice any great imbalance between my personal religion and the religion preached and practiced at church. The more contact I had with the institutional church, however, the more this changed. My two-year mission in Spain was revelatory in this regard: I saw the church doing things that made no sense to me, things that seemed to me to cheapen the gospel in the interest of gaining converts to it (superficial converts, with no great understanding of what it was they were committing themselves to). At BYU, I began studying church history in great detail, on my own and in company with others, and I slowly came to realize that the church history I had been taught throughout my youth was by and large a complete fairytale—a transparent hagiography of the early Mormon movement that transformed men like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young from nineteenth-century mobsters (with good and bad traits) into modern Saints (with no evil qualities worth noticing).

By the time I was married and about halfway through graduate school (far from BYU), I realized that I could not participate actively in LDS Mormonism any more. Under the influence of my ongoing studies into church history (early Christian history as well as Mormon history), I could not see the LDS church's version of Christian history as anything but an increasingly transparent fable (as literal history: as a symbolic narrative, it has some merit). To make things worse, the church demands that the individual conform his private thought and (at the very least) public utterance to its versions of events. It does this by controlling access to temples (etc.) through a process of ecclesiastical confession that involves meeting regularly with local church authorities (the bishop or one of his counselors, and then the stake president or one of his—perhaps a bit like talking to your local parish priest and then the bishop). These gentlemen inquire into your orthodoxy (“Do you believe in the divinity of God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost? Do you believe Joseph Smith to be a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator?” and so on). If you cannot answer questions to their satisfaction, then your status as an active Mormon is revoked until you repent. I cannot answer questions as they would like, and I cannot repent (for when I look into the historical record, I do not see what they want me to see—viz. that I must subject my opinion on doctrinal matters to theirs, whatever it may be, without critical judgement).

When I was no longer able to practice Mormonism actively, I did not cease to have a spiritual vocation. I needed to feel myself part of something larger than myself, but I also needed the freedom to express myself openly and honestly, even when others might possibly construe my expression as a threat to faith (not the way I construe it, but I can certainly appreciate that I am not the only person with a point of view that matters: we all see things, and we all matter; I am certainly as open to taking criticism as I am to dishing it out). Fortunately, my wife was not a dogmatic Mormon: she was one of the few external things that remained constant in my hour of confusion; I am very grateful for her unflagging moral support. Initially, I felt something of a gulf between myself and institutional Christianity. (To be completely candid, I still sense that gulf today, but experience has prepared me to confront it with curious interest rather than defensive hostility.) As a result, my first spiritual home outside Mormonism was a small Buddhist sangha in the Kagyu tradition (Tibetan). I found (and contine to find) Buddhist rhetoric very liberating (it is nice to be told that the self is impermanent when your own has just been brutally shattered), and I continue to enjoy the Kagyu liturgy (which involves meditation and chanting prayers, with or without the aid of tools such as a rosary or icons). But there is something important missing in my Buddhist experience, something that I cannot help but call Christianity.

It is hard to put into words, but let me try. Buddhism satisfies my intellectual hunger entirely, offering an outlook on the world that appears appropriately wise and skeptical (important to me, given my past history of being gulled into what the Buddhists would call “wrong views”). While it is very beautiful, Buddhism does not satisfy my aesthetic hunger: I find the bodhisattva distant and aloof, rather like the gods of Epicurus. Mormonism such as I grew up with was not a religion of passive acceptance. Mobster that he was, Brigham Young was also determined to build heaven on earth, and while I shrink back from some of the evil consequences of his efforts (e.g. the Mountain Meadows Massacre or the suffering of people involved in polygamy against their will), I still admire the aim. I want to make the world a better place, actively—or at least to see the examples of others engaging with sin or crime or other natural hardships in authentic ways that I might possibly emulate. I love retiring from the world, but I need to build something in retirement (“the kingdom of God”)—and I have years of exposure to Christianity that predisposes me to find meaning of some kind in Christian scripture, discourse, and ritual.

While serving as a Mormon missionary in Spain, I attended a public mass in the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago and conceived a desire that I carry to this day of completing a pilgrimage there on foot. If I ever have money and time, I will certainly carry this desire out, whether or not I become Catholic. I feel a great internal need to do it, to see the places where I came bearing Mormonism and give thanks for the many unexpected gifts I received in return. One of those gifts was a chance encounter with the Jesuit Andres Torres Queiruga, who invited me into his apartment to discuss religion and left a very profound impression on me (as being utterly sincere and good, even if his belief in the resurrection is metaphorical rather than literal—as mine now is, too). Regardless of how I feel toward what are sometimes called “religious truth-claims” (i.e. whether God is personal in some particular way or the Bible a literal history composed in the manner of Thucydides), I feel drawn toward Christian tradition, especially older versions of it that have a sense of their history—a memory of the good and the evil done in God's name over time. I don't know what to do with this attraction, whether I should abandon it to continue on as a Buddhist atheist (see below) or pursue it (as I am trying to do in reaching out to you).

My reading of the historical Buddha is very like my reading of the historical Jesus. What draws me to both is not the idea that they are more real or powerful than ordinary human beings, but the aspiration that they have come to represent to so many of my fellow creatures, an aspiration to make life beautiful where it can be ugly. I share that aspiration, no matter what I may happen to think right now about the ultimate order or disorder of the cosmos. “The kingdom of God is within you” is a statement that I continue to find incredibly edifying (and frustrating, as I seek some means of relating my window on that interior kingdom effectively to others—in ways that edify them and me, recognizing and respecting the reality that we need each other, that we are all part of a vast ecosystem of overt and hidden relationships that have the power to become incredibly beautiful even if they are occasionally also ugly).

Many people whose circumstances appear externally very similar to mine—people whose history has brought them into significant conflict with some fundamentalist, literalistic religious tradition (such as modern Mormonism has increasingly sought to be)—become atheists. Some of them find all the socialization, all the service, all the spirituality they need outside established paths. I have examined their ways of life thoughtfully, and I find much to admire in many of them. But at the same time, I cannot believe that “the old ways” are defunct, dying, or useless. To me it seems that history shows humanity existing with certain constant strengths and weaknesses. Occasionally, these express themselves in ways that are incredibly destructive (and we get something like the Holy Inquisition in Catholicism or the Danites in Mormonism), but that does not deny that they can also be very good—and dropping a particular ideology does not insure us against their destructive recurrence (as the last century has proved to me: atheism or secularism carries the same capacity for evil that religion does, more in an age where science exists to supply leaders of any ideological stripe with WMDs). I see that religion is occasionally poisonous (like all medicines), but that does not mean that I can abandon it (any more than I can abandon eating, though its eventual consequence is death). I value tradition, I am trying to say—even when I disagree with it, even when it challenges me, even when my response to its challenge is more negative than positive. A good man needs good enemies, friends who know how to wear their friendship in disagreement and disappointment as well as concord. I did not find that in Mormonism. I wonder whether I might find it somewhere in the universe of Catholicism.

Is there some way a person like me might become Catholic, or at least engage Catholicism in a meaningful way (mutually useful in terms of building the kingdom of God)?  No matter what happens, I will always be grateful for the faith of men like Thomas Merton, whose books have been a real blessing to me over the past few years as I have sought to rebuild myself in the image of God.

Intelligent Design Gets Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.  New York: Random House, 2004.  ISBN 0812975219.

Every moment of my life, I make bets with the universe.  If it is cold, I bet it will stay that way for a certain amount of time, and I wear warm clothes.  If I need to get somewhere, I bet my car will work (or take the bus or the train).  If I enter a relationship with another person voluntarily, I bet its overall effect on my existence will be more positive than negative.  If I feel hungry, I eat something (or don't), betting that eating (or fasting) will make me feel better.  Sometimes, my bets pay off: I get more upside than downside from exposure to the reality I don't really understand.  Eating (or fasting) makes me feel good.  Other times, my bets do not pay off: I get more downside than upside from exposure to the reality I don't understand.  Eating (or fasting) makes me sick.

Some time near the dawn of my adolescence, I picked up the idea that there exists out there in the universe a betting strategy that would provide only upside--no downside at all (or at least, no downside worth considering: the upside would be so good that it would always pay gamblers like me more than it cost).  This idea was intuitive--it was a story I was inclined to tell myself by nature--and it was reinforced by my education, especially my religious education (which told me that my perfect betting strategy existed and was the restored gospel of Jesus Christ preached by the Latter-day Saints).

The LDS church (that I was brought up in) offered me a fixed strategy for making bets with the universe.  If you reduce this LDS strategy down to its essence, it looks something like this: (i) never do anything you feel bad about (bad feelings are a sign from God that a bet is evil); (ii) follow the prophets, no matter what (the prophets will never lead the faithful astray: their bets will always yield more upside than downside).  I placed many bets with this strategy over the course of my adolescence and young adulthood.  Some of them paid off (more upside than downside).  Others did not.  I was told that the downside from these bad bets would even out eventually, that losses did not matter, that they were Satan trying to mislead me (away from the one true strategy for making bets with the universe).  I should just take my losses, no matter what they were, and have faith that the upside would appear, eventually, and erase the debts that were starting to destroy my life's accumulation of moral capital.  For a while, this rhetorical placebo worked ("eat your losses, and God will make them up to you"), but there came a moment in my life when it didn't--a moment when my losses were too catastrophic to be ignored, a moment when it was painfully clear to me that I needed to change some of my bets with the universe or go morally bankrupt.  I had a moral crisis, what some call a crisis of faith.

Nassim Taleb tells my same story, in a different environment: Wall Street.  In brief, some Wall Street traders are kind of like religious fanatics (of the species I represent).  They make bets with the universe, as we all do, and when their bets are bad, they double down.  "My betting strategy is perfect.  I have constructed it painstakingly, rationally, conscientiously--and any losses I take will ultimately be offset by even larger profits!"  Blah, blah.  The worst of these traders were those who traded with others' money (e.g. investment bankers attempting to game the market with the life's savings of ignorant bank customers).  These guys could lose all their clients' money several times over (as some of them did), still believe in the truth of their bad betting strategy (which after all remains as logical, precise, and mathematical after losing money as it was before), and (worst) walk away with their own fortunes intact (even if they could never get employment as traders after their catastrophic losses).  These smug SOBs screwed their clients over, big time, and felt absolutely no compunction about doing it--because they believed uncritically in the absolute truth of their betting strategies.  Every time I read this story I am struck with how relevant it is--not just to my religious life, but to life in general.

As a result of my personal experiences, including my encounter with Nassim Taleb's work, I have realized something important about myself.  I don't trust any fixed betting strategy to deliver more upside than downside.  I don't care who tells me a story: I do not ever want to bet on a single story being so true that I can accept it without criticism (without taking out insurance somewhere, for when it turns out to be false).  When I was young, I believed in a universe of order--a just world that makes sense, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked (eventually).  I no longer believe in that universe.  I have seen too many good people go under, and too many successful morons (including evil morons).  And I have learned that people all have different betting strategies (even individual LDS take the generic Mormon model and use it differently) and that these are all more similar than different.  Mormonism is more like Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam or Buddhism or even atheism than it is unlike them.  All -isms originate as ideas in the human mind, which leaves recognizable generic traces (no matter what particular story it tells in any given instance).  When you look honestly into history, it is patently obvious that the human mind is not a key to clear understanding of absolute reality.  Ideas are cheap.  Logical, linear ideas creating logical, linear maps of reality are cheap: they appear all over the place (in Mormonism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, atheism, and any other -ism anyone can think of ever).  Results are what matter.  Change your ideas to match the results, not the other way round.  Ideas are like quicksand, inherently unstable and dangerous (no matter what they are or who has them or what methods he claims to use to get at them).

There is a fundamental insight here, something deeper than the silly ideological wars between competing -isms.  The fundamental insight is that reality is an open, chaotic system, not a closed, orderly one.  No matter how nice some story sounds in the classroom (or the chapel or the lab or the boardroom), it is guaranteed to be false in some way.  Logic is nice, and we should use it, but we should also use our eyes.  You can lie with logic (and math and science as these exist among human beings) as easily as with any other language (logic is a language, like math and Spanish and Latin).  Some lies are more harmful than others.  The worst lies are those that people don't question, those that escape recognition and get accepted as some kind of absolute, fundamental truth.  The worst lie is the one that says you can make bets with the universe that have no downside, no unexpected results, no risk for doing real damage.  Historically, there is no such thing as a bet with the universe that life wins unconditionally: all species go extinct, like all companies, churches, nations, and -isms.  But the successful people never see this.  The gamblers who staked it all and won don't realize that they win because they are lucky: they preach about how to succeed ("just make bets like I did! playing Russian roulette worked great for me, and if you have the right moral fiber, it will work for you, too!").  The losers know to question their strategies.  They see that their smarts don't work, that their logic is flawed, that reality remains opaque to the human mind (whether that mind approaches it through Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, atheism, or any other -ism: it doesn't matter which ideological horse you ride, you are never guaranteed to find happiness, at all).  But the winners don't get it. 

The winners talk about "intelligent design" as something real, and verifiable by recourse to simple observation.  "See this awesome company I have built," Dick Fuld says of Lehman Brothers.  "My partners and I had this great vision, and the brilliant piece of work you see before you is a result of our intelligent design" (the same kind of intelligent design that produces Paley's watch or Behe's cell or any other complex product of any process anyone wants to imagine).  Then the thing unexpectedly goes bankrupt.  What happened?  Where is the intelligent design?  Here apologists for the really just world I used to believe in typically come up with some kind of rational, logical deus ex machina to save their Intelligent Designer (whom we may as well call God) from being dumb the way all intelligent designers we see in history appear dumb.  "My CEO is not fooled by randomness the way Dick Fuld was.  Fuld was a loser, but my CEO is a winner.  Read his latest book!  It will show you how his design is really intelligent, fundamentally different from the flawed logic used by idiots like Fuld."  You can ride this train as many times as you like, picking a new guru (a new Intelligent Designer) every time your old one blows up.  If you're lucky, yours may never blow up (in your lifetime, anyway): you might be able to use his strategy to place bets that turn out well for you, randomly, because sometimes bets turn out well.  Success happens (I almost added "unfortunately").  You can play Russian roulette and win--even win big: that doesn't make it a good strategy to recommend to others who want to enjoy your kind of success.

At the end of the day, I really like paganism--the extinct Greek and Roman variety, especially--as an -ism for modeling the way I see the world.  The Greek god of just order is Zeus.  He makes sure that good guys win and bad guys lose.  But he is not omnipotent.  The rest of his family have will too (and often oppose him directly), and there are always Titans looking to rebel and destroy his fragile, temporal order.  In addition to all that, there lurks behind his throne the prophecy (preserved by Prometheus) that one day a son will overthrow him (the way he overthrew his father back in the day).  He is a realistic kind of intelligent designer--a gambler who places bets (attempting to effect order) that will not always pay off.  If there is a god ruling over the mess that is real life, this is what he looks like: he is not someone you can rely on for perfect stability.  From my perspective, there is nobody you can rely on uncritically for perfect stability--no person, no ideology, and no god (whether gods are real or not: it doesn't matter).  Real life is not about picking one strategy for placing bets and then insisting on that strategy dogmatically until you die (particularly if said strategy leads you to blow up: it would be sheer madness to continue killing yourself merely for an idea--no matter how pretty or logical it might appear).

I don't see myself as an opponent of religion or science, per se.  I don't have a problem with people placing bets that they like with the universe.  But I am a resolute opponent of people who think they have discovered "the secret" to winning Nature's game.  I mistrust priests and scientists.  I think it a virtue to doubt them, not embrace them and their (dangerous) ideas uncritically.  The best among them share my fear (and take measures to prevent their inevitable mistakes from hurting other people unnecessarily); the worst demand respect that they never earn (trying to bully me into making the bets they would on the grounds that they are "smarter" than I am because of some stupid ideology they like, an ideology which might be religious or scientific, Mormon or non-Mormon, skeptical or not: it doesn't matter, and I don't care).  In short, my moral crisis did not lead me to change allegiance from one god to another (who might be the devil).  What changed for me was the way in which I look at all gods, especially when they come to me strongly recommended by people looking to influence my moral behavior.  I mistrust people (including myself).  I think people are fools--lovable fools when they get their own lives wrong, dangerous fools when they try to make me make the same mistakes they are making because some god (or non-god) wills it.  Authoritarian bastards are authoritarian bastards, no matter what rhetoric they use to make themselves (and their followers) feel good about it.  I don't follow any of them (until I have to, because they will kill or ostracize me otherwise, and I want to live).  I don't love them.  I don't agonize over whether we should pick one over another (voting for the lesser of two evils).  They are all bastards.  They are all dangerous.  I am always against them, no matter what nifty rhetorical guise they use to cover up their bullshit.  They can be as religious or scientific as they please.  They can plead priesthood or democracy or logic or whatever the hell they want, and I will still refuse to bend the knee.  They can nail me to a rock and have the eagle tear my liver (as Zeus did to Prometheus), and I will die despising them for it.      

Truth and Lies, Reality and Myth

Peter Kingsley. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness: Golden Sufi, 1999. ISBN: 189035001X.

Peter Kingsley. Reality. Inverness: Golden Sufi, 2003. ISBN: 1890350095.

Peter Kingsley. A Story Waiting to Pierce You. Point Reyes: Golden Sufi, 2010. 1890350214.

Robert Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Morrow, 1974. ISBN: 0688002307.

These books were all important in my discovery that reality exists apart from myth (without excluding it).  I encountered Kingsley's work while investigating the early Greek philosopher Parmenides, about whom he has written extensively.  (He also has many interesting things to say about Empedocles.)  I was impressed with Kingsley's scholarly depth (more than one of my dissertation advisors, who finds some of his historical ideas "fanciful"), but what really drew me to his work was its elegant simplicity.  Reading his work shows you (1) how ancient people found meaning in the pre-Socratics, and (2) how the pre-Socratics remain relevant today.

The central thesis of Kingsley's work is that Parmenides was concerned with reality as people actually experience it.  He wanted to talk meaningfully about all the experiences that all of us have every moment of our lives--no matter who we are, where we live, or when.  In other words, he was what some people call a mystic.  Like other mystics ancient and modern, he used the language and ideas of his time to talk about the human experience (conceived as something universal, i.e. bigger and larger than any single person's understanding).  He told myths.  He composed poetry.  He saw changes happening all over the place, all the time, and he saw continuity underlying change.  He recognized that people are at once alike and different (when compared with one another), and that they all see the same world (even when they see it very differently).  In short, he was an ancient analogue to Robert Pirsig -- the mad modern genius whose idea of Quality is very like Parmenidean Being.  I will try to summarize my understanding of this Quality/Being below.

Reality is not a narrative.  It does not develop predictably from known principles, and its end is equally mysterious.  When storytellers say in the beginning, they are venturing into the unknown--a place none of us has ever been--just as they are when they say the end.  (How do we really know that a story has ended?  What is the end, really, of anything?  If there is no known beginning, then there is no known end.)  Most of us experience reality as a series of impressions--thoughts, feelings, impressions, ideas, reactions, intuitions, experiences.  But these only ever exist in the present moment, where we organize them and reorganize them, over and over again.  In this process of organization, something is always lost.  No story can ever do justice to the full extent of the experience it seeks to describe.  From this perspective, all stories are lies: they omit potentially important information.  Living well is learning to live with lies, learning to hold them when they help you and to let them go when their usefulness is gone.  Lies are not inherently evil, but they become so when  we insist that they must be true.  Lies are not inherently good, but they become so when we know how to use them well (i.e. when to stop believing them).  The wise man is aware of lies, is happy with them, because he sees the reality behind them.  He is in the moment, discarding the lies that hurt and embracing the lies that help (which he will let go in turn when they prove false).  Consciousness is not a matter of learning the absolute truth (finding the rock upon which to build a permanent house), but of learning the impossibility of absolute truth (riding the wave of contextual truth, which moves constantly as moments pass and the nature of life's game changes).  Truth (reality, quality, being) is in the experience, which no myth, however great it may be, can really capture.  Myth is useful.  It can help you benefit from someone else's experience, but it is no substitute for actively engaging your own experience (which is the most important thing for you, the bricks and mortar out of which your very own life is made).

When it finally broke through to me what Kingsley, Pirsig, and Parmenides were talking about, I knew that something had changed fundamentally in the way I think consciously about the world.  Part of me assented unconditionally to the way they conceive consciousness: waxing psychological, I think that my conscious mind finally realized how it really works (and has always worked, as near as I can tell).  As I experience life, following the truth is much more like surfing than building a house on a rock.  I tried building that house on the rock, and the rock kept washing away.  Now, I am riding the wave.  I don't have to stop every few moments and convince myself that the rock is not water.  I do not have to pretend to hold onto solid matter where all I can find is fluid.

Kingsley warned me that reading his books would change the way I looked at things.  As a faithful LDS, I was not convinced (with good reason: maybe if I had read them 10 years earlier, they wouldn't have changed anything: every individual walks a unique path to Reality).  In the end, however, he was right.  I must credit him with providing one of the most interesting interludes in my faith journey as an adult.

Making Peace with Stupid

Here is something I wrote in response to an informal discussion of this article. 

Superstition is a natural state. We all behave superstitiously at some point every day (when we pick a shirt that reminds us of something pleasant; when we repeat words uttered before some successful venture; when we invest in some complex activity that we don't fully understand that has turned out well in the past). Some kinds of ignorance can be overcome with newer, better information (which falsifies or clarifies the earlier stuff). But it nevertheless remains true that lack of superstition is not natural: we have to work hard to achieve moments of clarity, and even then we only get moments (and only in certain contexts: many of us who are very astute when it comes to dealing with claims about physical or religious realities devolve into primitive morons when we grapple with politics or economics). 

A body-mind analogy may be helpful here. The human body is an enormous colony of cells, some of which work at cross purposes with one another. If something goes terribly wrong, these cells can go crazy and start killing one another (cancer, metabolic disorders). Sometimes, killing off large numbers of some cells can mitigate the damage (and save the body). But in the long run, the body that is going to survive has to have some viable means for integrating "rogue" cells: we need an immune system, and we need foreign bacteria to invade and colonize various parts of us (especially our intestinal tract).

In the same way, the human mind is an enormous collection of ideas/memes, some of which are always going to be idiotic.  Healthy living means learning to accommodate the right amount of stupid ideas, learning how to avoid letting our stupid ideas destroy us.  We would like to eradicate stupidity, but this is impossible.  We have to live with dumb, because that is what we are (at least in part).  Religion has a lot of experience dealing with stupid, and not all of that experience is bad.  Learning from history is not a bad idea.

Why Mormons are Christians, Part 2

This podcast validates my own position that Mormons are Christians.  Historically speaking, Abrahamic religion lives in a milieu defined by pseudepigrapha ("false writings" whose historical authors assign their work to some mythical hero, e.g. Moses or Paul or some other legendary Christian apostle or associate of the prophet Muhammad).  Like other religious leaders before him (e.g. the Deuteronomists, the Christian writers who gave us the Gospels or some of the dubious Epistles, and Muslim authors of hadith), Joseph Smith (and/or his collaborators) made up stories, sacred stories that he credited to mythical heroes (Moses, Abraham, Mormon, Moroni, Nephi).  

Mormonism is just one outgrowth of the giant body of folklore that is Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with all their different sects).  Folklore can be profound.  Folklore can be moving.  Folklore can teach you useful things.  But it is not history.  It cannot teach the lessons of history.  Its lessons are about human nature, not what really happened at some point in historical time, since most of it never did (certainly not as advertised): no historical Exodus, no Resurrection, no appearance of the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad, no First Vision for Joseph Smith.  These events are myths that explore human nature outside of history--myths like the Lord of the Rings, the Kalevala, the Nibelungenlied, the Volsungasaga, the Homeric epics, the Mahabarata, and the Ramayana.

There is definitely a useful place for myth in the world.  I can learn from Tolkien's work without believing in a historical place known as Middle Earth.  The character of Bilbo Baggins offers insight into modern human nature, not the nature of a nonexistent tribe of midgets living in a culture that has disappeared from the face of the earth (leaving no physical trace, just like the Lamanites and the Nephites!).  All these years I thought I was trying to be a "faithful" historian, I was really just doing my utmost to turn ancient science fiction into factual history.  I attended seminars in ancient history that were functionally equivalent to courses in "hobbitology" (complete with the latest research tracing the real history of Homo floresiensis: the Liang Bua cave is all that remains of the Shire)!  It would be funnier if people didn't take it all so seriously.

Bob Price is my kind of Southern Baptist, and I am his kind of Mormon.

Myth as Language

Someone recently wrote to me about my discussion of C. S. Lewis.  In responding to this person's insights, I came up with something I would like to share more generally.

The problem with the claim for Christ (as the one and only way to God, or the Good) is that it is not really stronger than a claim for Balder (or Osiris, or any other dying and rising god).  Today we know a bit more about the gospels than we did in Lewis' day, and they are very clearly myth (just like Egyptian myth or Norse myth or any other myth).  They aren't history (any more than the changing story of Joseph Smith's First Vision is).  This does not mean that they do not express important human truths, but those truths are not historical (i.e. accounts of what really happened at some moment in the past) or particular (i.e. stories of a particular person doing particular things).  Myths are about universal truths like love, loss, and moving on into the great unknown.  They are about what happens all of the time to all of us (and each one of us). 

Just like you can speak of these universal things in any language without losing important meaning (since Spanish is no truer than English or Russian or Chinese as an expression of human reality), so you can put them in any myth: they are the timeless truth; the myth is just an accidental vessel that holds them.  Lewis' mistake was presuming that Christianity was somehow categorically different from other religions.  It isn't.  This doesn't diminish its importance: English is still important, even if it is not categorically superior to (say) Spanish (which is also important, right? why should we pretend that Spanish is inferior to English? why pretend that Christianity is categorically superior to Buddhism, Judaism, or Islam?).  This doesn't mean that the real truths it teaches are not important or universal.  But it does allow us to check them against other versions of themselves (as it were), and to compare our myth-makers with other storytellers out there (who may pick up on some important things that we leave out of our stories, for one reason or another).

From my perspective, Lewis just made the choice at some point to speak English (Christian), i.e. to make English (Christianity) the language through which he expressed himself.  That is perfectly fine, and English (Christianity) happens to be my native language as well.  But I like other languages.  I don't see them as categorically inferior to mine (though there are speakers of each who claim it as the one and only true language, and treat those ignorant of it as babbling idiots, no matter how well they speak their own language; I think this is wrong).

I can make an emotionally charged argument that anyone who chooses to dismiss the Buddha or Muhammad (or Osiris or Balder) is willfully rejecting the one true prophet or the one true God.  I can make an emotionally charged argument that English is the one true language, that there is no such thing as a cultured human being who has never read Shakespeare in the original.  Both arguments have a gigantic flaw.  They ignore the humanity of other people, a humanity evident in the facts (1) that there are many prophets and many gods (including many as good as ours), and (2) that there are many great human cultures entirely ignorant of Shakespeare (who did not live early enough to bestow his genius on the Upanishads, the writer of Ecclesiastes, the Homeric poets, or countless others widely and rightly acknowledged as having achieved high levels of culture).

What is good in my culture (English, Christianity) does not have to be qualitatively superior to what is good in other cultures.  People do not have to speak my language (English, Christianity) to me before I acknowledge them as true human beings.  I think even C. S. Lewis is willing to concede this on some level (with the story of the saved Calormene in the Last Battle).  The only difference between us is that I see the saved Christian as being more like that Calormene: God is a mystery that all human cultures (including every form of Christianity) seek in vain to capture and own for themselves (and their little languages), but he is not ours.  We can be his, but he cannot be ours.  He can speak for us, but we do not speak for him.  When we try to do this (speak for him), what we say has a disturbing tendency to become fascist nonsense.

Does that make my position a little clearer?  I don't think I am calling Lewis (or any Christian) stupid.  I think Christians are by and large good people, with good stories in a good language.  But I see in us (and other human beings of all faiths) tendencies towards a kind of cultural absolutism which others use and prey upon to bad effect (in the history of the world, which it has become my job to read).  For what it is worth, I have the same tendencies.  So if we are fools, then we are all fools together.  I have not become someone who sees other cultures as magically superior to his own: we all have human flaws that can be dangerous.  But I do think that acknowledging the flaws in ourselves (as we cannot help seeing them in others) is an important first step towards getting along better with everyone (including our very selves).  Moral improvement cannot really begin until we are entirely honest (at least with ourselves).  For me, that means admitting that Christians (and English-speakers) are neither better nor worse than other human beings.  Our story is one of many.  It is not the only story in any way.  It can be special because we love it, and that is enough.  It does not have to be true history, or the source of imaginary superiority that we enjoy over those who have different stories.  As I read Jesus (including some of the words attributed to him outside the New Testament, e.g. in the Gospel of Thomas), he was not necessarily interested in declaring himself the one true God (though some disciples were eager to claim him as such) or in founding a missionary church (though some disciples were eager for that as well).  The core of Christianity, as I understand it, is cultivating love for the world (God and one's fellow human beings, which are not artificially restricted to those who speak the same language or tell the same stories).  To me, this message is more important than the messenger (who may or may not have been a god on earth: why does this matter? is his message somehow false if he didn't rise from the dead or turn water into wine, etc.? I don't think so.  If Lewis does, then we disagree there.)

First Love

Flogging Molly. "Laura." Whiskey on a Sunday.  Borstal Beat Records, 2006.


The last few posts have shared a little of the hurt I feel as a result of my unique experiences with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).  This hurt is understandably strange to people who have not felt it, especially those LDS close to me whose experiences have been very different from mine.  Contrary to what some might think, I do not deny (or even begrudge) others' positive experiences with the LDS church and culture.  I know that not every LDS suffers the way I do.  I do not want every Saint to experience for him- or herself the betrayal and the pain that I experienced.  But I don't want to pretend like my suffering never happened, either.  I need the freedom to express that suffering, if I am ever to turn it into a positive stepping-stone instead of a negative stumbling-block.  I need to be able to share my real self (and the real pain that I feel) with the people I am close to and care about.  But I need to do this without hurting them too much, too.  With that in mind, I have come up with a gentle metaphor for my experience with the church.  (There is no profanity in this post: it is not necessary.)

My metaphor begins with a personal story.  I was about fourteen years old.  I remember being at my local church building before or after a meeting (I think it was a Sunday afternoon, though it might have been Wednesday night).  The lights were dim in the building, and there were not many people around.  I was on my own for the moment, but was heading toward the genealogical library (I think) to look for my dad, so that we could go home together.  Like many LDS meetinghouses, ours was built with three central rooms (chapel, overflow, and gym) circumnavigated by a long, horseshoe-shaped hallway.  I was on one side of the horseshoe (by a water-fountain in the foyer), and the genealogical library was on the other.  Without thinking much about it, I decided to cross over toward the library via the overflow.  As I opened the door to the overflow and began to step through, my life changed suddenly.  There was a girl approaching the door I had just opened.  I had seen her somewhere before.  Her family were recent converts, and she was a little younger than I was.  Up until this moment, she was nobody special (as far as I was concerned), but something happened when I opened the door and she was just right there, coming the other way and looking me straight in the eye.  Before either of us could swerve or apologize, our eyes met and something happened.  I fell in love.

In the wake of this disaster, we (the girl and I) managed to avoid collision, mumbled incoherent apologies at one another, and hurried on our respective ways (toward opposite ends of the building).  But it was not over.  In the weeks, months, and even years that followed, she was always somewhere in the background of my thoughts, torturing and enchanting me with her impossible (and utterly unexpected) beauty.  She attended church meetings, Sunday School, and youth activities.  I was never safe.  Of course I was desperate to talk to her, but (being who I was) I couldn't.  Lacking any real idea of her character, I imagined her as a kind of angel (morally and aesthetically), a perfect being who by some miracle managed to coexist with mere clod-hopping churls such I was.  I spontaneously reinvented the medieval game of courtly love, with this girl playing an exalted Guinevere to my lowly Lancelot, only the complete lack of any real relationship between us meant that we were more like the Grail and Perceval.  I longed always for a glimpse of the sacred Beloved, but would never presume to speak to her, let alone have any carnal knowledge of her (such as touching her hand or, heaven forbid, kissing it).  Too incorrigibly wicked to be a Galahad or Bors de Ganys (as I was beginning to realize from my inability to keep from waking up during wet dreams), I had to take Perceval's route of penance and tears, of hair-shirts, self-flagellation, and perpetual exile in the service of the Holy Beloved.  I spent many hours weeping on my knees, begging God to forgive me and remove my sexuality from the picture, so that it might not taint the impossibly pure affection I felt for this perfect being.

Oddly enough, despite all my fervent prayers (which were as much on her behalf as mine), the object of my affection was rather perplexed by me (and perhaps a little put out).  Looking back, I think she might have liked it if I actually dared to say more than two words to her.  I think she might have appreciated it if I had had the guts to get to know her (maybe even dance with her at one of those creepy church dances, which for some reason were always done in the dark to really awful music: was it to make us think that dancing really is devilish?).  But I was oblivious (and psychotic).  There were times when she made valiant efforts to break down the barrier between us, inviting me to youth activities in person and once even volunteering to read the scripture "Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you" (D&C 88:63) right after I had read in class.  But these attempts only made me feel vaguely uneasy.  Though I was naive, I was fortunate to have wiser people around me.  I remember one older lady in our ward in particular, who happened to be my Sunday School teacher when all this was going on.  One day in class she casually remarked that many of us thought we were in love now, even though we weren't really: "You think you're really in love, but it's just puppy love.  In a few years, it will blow over and you'll laugh at it!"  I snorted inwardly and recoiled in horror at the blasphemy to my Lady (who as a perfect being could only be loved perfectly, i.e. eternally, chastely, and without any rival: one does not "get over" a goddess).  But, as often happens, time eventually vindicated my teacher's pragmatic realism over my youthful idealism.  After several years, I realized that my initial love, my first true love, was not really that girl.  It was Love itself (or herself, if you want to personify it).  I was in love with Love.  The girl (poor thing) was just an object onto which I projected my naive ideas about Love.  I did not love her (how could I when I didn't even know her!), but my idea of her (Love).  Her real attentions disturbed me because they revealed that she had a personal identity outside the angelic mold I had created for her, i.e. that I was not in love with her (the real her), but with a phantasm of my own creation.  There were some funny moments of cognitive dissonance which also pointed this fact up to me, like the time when I realized that she liked rock music.  (How could my pure Lady like rock music!  Inconceivable!  She might even have normal bodily functions, too.  Gross!  Is she only human after all?  I'll have to start praying that I can help her overcome these flaws.  These thoughts are utterly ludicrous now, but when I had them they were serious business.)

As things turned out, I survived my first love without hurting anyone too badly.  I annoyed the girl, yes, but at least I never managed to make her expect too much (since all I gave out were long looks, sighs, and prayers that she could not receive).  I caused myself some grief, but I also learned important lessons about human relationships, the most important being that I need to deal with other people on their terms (trying to see them as they are as much as possible, not as I imagine them).  Now, let's do a thought experiment. Imagine that my Sunday School teacher was not wise.  Imagine her telling the class that first love is the only true love, that we have to maintain it no matter what, that it is wicked to get over it.  Assuming I took this advice, where would I be today?  If the girl was as naive as I was (as I have no reason to suppose she would not have been), I would be unhappily married to a person unknown to me, a person whose real character I would always be trying to overlay and stifle with impossible adolescent illusions of perfection.  Our relationship would be completely dysfunctional, with one or both of us failing to engage the other meaningfully.  It would also be a perfect metaphor for my relationship with the LDS church.

My love affair with the church is much like my first crush.  It began relatively suddenly and even unexpectedly, when I was eleven years old.  My mother was put on bed-rest early in her last pregnancy (which ultimately resulted in my youngest siblings), and my father had to work, so I was detailed (as the oldest child) to look after making everyone breakfast and overseeing most of the daily housework.  I would get up early in the morning while everyone except my father slept and go to work making oatmeal in the kitchen.  Waiting for the stuff to cook gave me an extended period of free time, which I spontaneously decided to fill with scripture study.  I had no real reason, no motive for this decision, and what followed from it was largely unexpected (just like my accidental encounter with the girl and everything that resulted from that).  I became a scripture junkie.  I was hooked.  Reading from the Book of Mormon every morning gave me this incredible emotional high.  It was so powerful, that when I finished I went on to read the King James Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price (all of which I eventually read through several times).  I prayed fervently to God about the scriptures, just as I did about my Beloved, and I had a firm testimony that they and the organization that produced them were true (just as I knew my Lady was true and pure and everything else wonderful).  I believed that God wrote these books (whatever imperfect human tools he might have used to pen the actual words and then typeset them for me), just as I believed that he created me to worship my Lady (an unworthy servant to a perfect angel).  When the scriptures mentioned God and his servants (prophets, seers, revelators, apostles, and so on) as active figures in real history, I took them at their word.  I believed in the magical powers I found in the scriptures: I thought that servants of God really could heal diseases with their staves (Numbers 17) or their saliva (John 9:1-7), that they brought people back from the dead (2 Kings 4:32-35; Luke 8:49-56), that they could call fire down from heaven and burn up God's enemies (2 Kings 1:5-15; Luke 9:51-56).   And when the church added that such divine servants exist today and preside in perfect righteousness over the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I took them at their word.  In other words, I projected my own, naive ideas about Divinity onto the church and its leaders (the way I projected my naive ideas about Love onto the girl).

Unfortunately, there was no one to keep me from "marrying" the church, no one to warn me that my devotion was unbalanced, ill-informed, and generally ridiculous (expecting more of humanity than humanity has to offer).  Instead of deflating my naive adolescent enthusiasm, people around me mostly treated it as a kind of virtue, as though it were a good thing to expect impossible things from church leaders, as though they could live up to the excessive esteem and deference I held for them as healers, saviors, and mouthpieces for God.  I might be Perceval (a mere worm struggling to live worthy of the lowest kind of holiness), but here at last was Galahad (my church leaders: the closest thing to human perfection in the world), and the Grail Quest would be won.  We were going to build Zion together, a utopian society in which there would be nothing bad at all.  With God and Christ on our side, who could stop us?  Well, apparently we could.  Unfortunately for my absolute faith in the church, I thought she had no dark side, no serious skeletons in the closet.  When she demanded everything I had (my time, talents, love, and devotion), I gave it to her willingly, because she alone was worthy (as the body of Christ, led by his hand-picked leaders: Romans 12:5; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31).  I wanted to know everything I could about the church (naturally: learning about her in the scriptures made me very happy, and what evil could be known of something as perfect as the very kingdom of God on earth?  Did not the Lord himself command us, "Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith" [D&C 88:118]?).  I was ready to give the church the benefit of every doubt, as I had already done when I gave my entire life to her, first at baptism and later when I entered the temple.  Unfortunately, she had not been entirely forthcoming with me.  I gave her everything of mine, but she held back (a lot, as it turns out).

Here my story becomes very personal.  Different people need different things to be happy in a relationship.  Some people don't need transparency, brutal truth, or the freedom to ask difficult questions.  As it turns out, I am not one of those people.  If you really like rock music, I don't want you to pretend that you don't just to make me happy.  (I might never have realized this if I had been unfortunate enough to marry my first crush: in a worst-case scenario, I would have resented her constantly for failing to live up to my fantasy in which she was the perfect Lady, the Holy Grail of womanhood.  I might have thought that it was her duty at least to seem as "perfect" as I thought she should be.)  If you really have a rather sordid past, I don't want you to pretend that you don't just so that I'll feel good about dedicating a huge portion of my life to you.  I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  I am at once an idealist and a realist, which means I want to see things as they really are (warts and all) before I start trying to change them for the better (in a way that actually improves them).  Because nobody warned me about idolizing the church and its leaders early on, I had impossible expectations going into my career as an adult Saint.  I wanted my adolescent fantasy of Divinity to correspond to reality, the way I used to want my adolescent fantasy of Love to correspond to a certain young girl.  After years of experience and research, I discovered that my adolescent religious fantasy is not real.  (No working magic props.  No heavenly fire.  No Galahad.)  I'll be honest: this broke my heart.  It turned my world upside down, and I am still struggling to recover.

My feelings are not unlike those of a bereaved lover who wakes up one morning to discover that his beloved has perished utterly (and irrevocably) overnight.  Songs like the one that heads this essay still make me cry:

Feel the words from my lips
To your heart's fingertips
Then you know where I come from
'Cause I know, yes I know
Everything there is to know
'Cause I lost everything I had
See, I could have danced on the sun
But my world came undone,
                                    Laura!


There's no need for tears
There's no need to cry
The love that you leave
Will never be denied
This pain in my head
Escaped from my heart
No woman alive can touch
Who you were


So bye-bye, Laura!
Nobody can take your place
Bye-bye, Laura!
Your beauty will never fade
Fade!


My world came undone.  I lost everything (including my dreams of hieing to Kolob, i.e. dancing on the sun).  My head hurts, but my heart hurts more.  It is surprisingly like growing up and feeling nostalgia for the way things used to be (when you were five years old, ten, nineteen).  But I know that my youth is irrevocably gone, and with it my naivete.  I can never trust the LDS church naively again (or any other group of people claiming to speak for God), just as I can never again fall head over heels in love with someone I have never met (a circumstance for which I am sure my wife is grateful).  Growing up and leaving our youthful fantasies behind is a necessary and healthy part of life, I now think, but that does not mean that it is easy or painless, especially when you are not well prepared (e.g. when you think that it is a virtue to hang doggedly onto those fantasies, as I used to).  For all those who think that they have separated reality from fiction and discovered the universal meaning of life at age eleven, I repeat the observation of my Sunday School teacher (with a slight twist): "You think you know, but it's just youthful hormones.  In a few years, it will blow over and you'll laugh at it, unless you make it the defining cornerstone of your character.  Then, you will cry."  The price for taking our naive fantasies too seriously is deep grief.