"Write Them Down": Writing to Transform Life

Crossposted from Blogger of Jared--my first real post there.

One of the funny things about being a writer is that you have to be somewhat narcissistic. You have to think your words are important enough to share. To quote Orson Scott Card:

Let's face it. You don't start writing fiction if you didn't have a healthy dose of vanity and ambition. What could be more arrogant than to believe that stuff you make up out of your head will be so pleasurable to others that they ought to pay you to be able to read it?

Although the quote applies specifically to fiction, the point applies to writers of the personal essay, and even journal writing. If you’re not, say, Winston Churchill or Ghandi, why is your life important enough for me to spend any time on, not even taking money into consideration? I've talked to many people who've pushed off journal writing with just this attitude. I’ve even felt it myself--the guilt of writing something of no importance. It seems wasteful. As I’ve been working on personal essays for my honors thesis, I’ve rediscovered how plain my life is: no physical disabilities, no abusive family, no major obstacles, no major accomplishments, no strange events, no extraordinary revelations, no doubts. It's just life, all PB&J sandwiches and afternoon TV programs, bland and continuous. Perhaps the only thing unusual about my life is how ordinary it is. I suffer, as I’m sure many do, from a form of angst envy, wishing that my life was just slightly more interesting. But not too interesting, of course--I'm not asking for major trials, just something worth talking about.

Strangely, being Mormon solves this problem: our religion is one with a strong belief in the importance of every individual. We’re one of the few branches of Christianity who believes God isn’t some omniscient blob, but a person with a body and a personality. We believe that simply by your membership and your humanity, you are qualified to instruct others in sacrament meetings and gospel doctrine classes. In our temples, we do work for individual people, one at a time, slowly slowly. The insane scope of our temple work project has only recently hit me: do we realize it will take more than a million years of cumulative two-hour endowment sessions to cover the earth’s current population, not to even begin to think about those who are dead?

Most importantly, we believe fervently that each individual has direct access and right to revelation from God. To us, or at least, to me, God is not only someone who enacts our salvation, but someone who cares about our mundane lives, who inserts the little "tender mercies." That intense divine interest and compassion qualifies every life as important reading material. President Eyring’s talk in the Sunday morning conference session, "O Remember, Remember," makes this same point:

I came home late from a Church assignment. It was after dark. My father-in-law, who lived near us, surprised me as I walked toward the front door of my house. He was carrying a load of pipes over his shoulder, walking very fast and dressed in his work clothes. I knew that he had been building a system to pump water from a stream below us up to our property.

He smiled, spoke softly, and then rushed past me into the darkness to go on with his work. I took a few steps toward the house, thinking of what he was doing for us, and just as I got to the door, I heard in my mind—not in my own voice—these words: “I’m not giving you these experiences for yourself. Write them down.”

I went inside. I didn’t go to bed. Although I was tired, I took out some paper and began to write. And as I did, I understood the message I had heard in my mind. I was supposed to record for my children to read, someday in the future, how I had seen the hand of God blessing our family. Grandpa didn’t have to do what he was doing for us. He could have had someone else do it or not have done it at all. But he was serving us, his family, in the way covenant disciples of Jesus Christ always do. I knew that was true. And so I wrote it down, so that my children could have the memory someday when they would need it.

As President Erying says, “forgetting God has been such a persistent problem among His children since the world began.” Therefore one of the first commandments of God to his people has always been for them to keep a record of their interactions with him (Moses 6:5,46). These records not only record our lives, but transform them:

I wrote down a few lines every day for years. I never missed a day no matter how tired I was or how early I would have to start the next day. Before I would write, I would ponder this question: “Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?” As I kept at it, something began to happen. As I would cast my mind over the day, I would see evidence of what God had done for one of us that I had not recognized in the busy moments of the day. As that happened, and it happened often, I realized that trying to remember had allowed God to show me what He had done.

I used to be bothered by this idea that reflection inserts revelation into our past. It seemed like creating something out of nothing. It was a stretch, like wresting the scriptures, wasn't it? But over the past year of developing my own writing I've seen ordinary parts of my own life--going to school, visiting a museum--transformed into some of my most meaningful memories because I wrote about them. This process of living and then realizing is simply part of being human. We don't have the mental capacity to realize the implications of what's happening at the moment we're in it. I think there's a reason that pondering is in the primary song along with searching the scriptures and praying. If we don't think, we miss much of what the Lord has to say to us. We must study out our lives in our minds to find the things of eternity.

But finding these revelations in your life is not the last step. That whispering voice told President Erying, “I’m not giving you these experiences for yourself. Write them down.” Where would the Church be if Nephi had ignored the command to make a second set of plates? As spirit children of God, our experiences count for something. Again, there's a reason this Church has no paid ministry and I believe it is because we each have something to teach and something to learn. How you saw God's hand in your life might help someone else, either by testifying of God's love or by helping them to see things in their own lives. It doesn't matter your background, your education, your doubts: write them down and share them as inspired by the Spirit.

Gender Unity: A Nibleyesque Musing

So, I'll get around to an obligatory conference post eventually today, but I'm restraining myself from writing anything fun until I do the Nibleyesque Musing that was due last week. Unfortunately, the only way I can motivate myself to do it is by posting it on the blog, so you'll just have to bear with me. Hey, it's on gender roles instead of obscure doctrine, so that should be fun.

“Patriarchy and Matriarchy” was an interesting approach to the question of gender equality in the gospel. I’m not sure I agreed exactly with Nibley’s characterization of Adam and Eve. He seems to switch back and forth on who he “blames” for the Fall (assuming it’s something to blame for). He attempts to make Eve a conscientious actor (“It is she who perceives and points out to Adam that they have done the right thing after all.”), a deceptive trickster (“But Eve, who in ancient lore is the one who outwits the serpent and trips him up with his own smartness, defeated this trick by a clever argument.”), and finally an innocent victim (“The first daring step had to be taken, and if in her enthusiasm she let herself be tricked by the persuasive talk of a kindly "brother," it was no fault of hers.”). It seems that Nibley wants to have it all ways at once, to blame Satan, Adam, and Eve each for the fall in successive turns. After all, I suppose all are to “blame,” but I don’t think Nibley does a good job of pulling all three problems together into a coherent vision. Instead, his description of the Fall seems to remain fragmented and confused.

However, I do like Nibley’s final conclusion about apparent gender issues in the gospel. The problem with the Fall, he says, is not that it was a wrong choice. It was that the choice was made by Eve alone, rather than in conjunction with Adam and especially without consultation with God. He goes on to conjecture that the real problem with the matriarchy/patriarchy issue is that it shouldn’t be an issue. We shouldn’t be choosing one or the other, but both and neither. The problem is that we set it up as an issue at all, that our society is so concerned about who should be first. As Nibley explains, “the suffix archy means always to be first in order, whether in time or eminence; the point is that there can only be one first.” The problem is that we insist on trying to find out which gender is superior or better, or trying to find the exact nature of either gender, under the false assumption that one can really exist without the other.

Nibley’s explication of the loss of gender identities in Macbeth clicked an image in my mind of gender identity and struggle as a sort-of circle. At the bottom of the circle, we have those societies who, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, have lost their gender identity in a quest for power and authority. Here is the raw power sought by either pure patriarchy or matriarchy, complete chaos and domination by one set of principles or the other. Moving up to the middle of the circle, we have a society of opposites: extremely different and polarized gender roles, where we have given up some of our desire for power in order to achieve a more balanced society. Some would think this is the society the Church advocates, with men in the workplace and women in the home, each minding their separate spheres. But what the gospel really calls for is at the top of the circle, where gender becomes both extremely essential and also totally unimportant. As we move to the top of the circle, we move from a society desiring power to a society desiring progress—eternal progression. We give up our desire for absolute agency (being able to make all the choices ourselves) for the greater gift of unified action. Gender at this level becomes infinitely important, because society must be run by a man and woman working and deciding together, but also irrelevant, because of the perfect unity achieved. The two have become so one that both can do everything, and yet nothing, without the other.

(Long time readers may catch the definite allusion to one of my favorite posts on this blog, The Circle: A Theory of Knowledge. Like I say, everything relates to it!)

On Personality

In my reading of Wuthering Heights for my study abroad class, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of personality: what is it exactly, how much are you born into, and how much can you change? Quite a few of the characters in WH (Heathcliff and Catherine, in particular) seem to have decided that they would not fit in in heaven because their nature is inherently contrary to it. They've seen their society's vision of heaven (the Lintons), and they don't like it, so they aren't going to even try for it.

I see people in the Church sometimes making this mistake, apologizing for the fact that they don't fit the Molly Mormon/Peter Priesthood cast that they assume will be those going to heaven. Whether by virtue of their past experiences, their political party, or their hobbies, they set themselves up as outside those who can expect exaltation. Even worse is when we place others into these categories. We assume that in order to become like Christ, we must lose our individual nature, our personality.

A couple reasons why this is bad: First, it places a limitation on the Atonement which doesn't actually exist. Second, it denies the individual worth of each soul. God created us to be unique from each other. What would be the purpose of doing so if life was supposed to smash that uniqueness out of us? But more concerning than either of these, it implies that the gospel creates a bunch of cookie-cutter people, that you have to be a certain type of person to participate fully in the gospel. Of course, this is true to an extent. We have to do a lot of the same things--you must be keeping the commandments and doing your best to grow closer to God--but I personally believe there's a lot of room in the gospel for personality.

My conclusion about personality is an echo of Plato's allegory of the soul. Personality traits are neither good nor bad. They just are. Or rather, they are both, having both a good and evil aspect plus a will to direct or choose between them. The gospel is not about choosing between being yourself and being Christ. It's about choosing which version of yourself to be. This, to me, is the meaning of "making weak things become strong." Our weaknesses, our personality flaws, are not to be removed by the atonement, but transformed into what they were always intended to be. As CS Lewis says in The Great Divorce, in seeking for heaven, we find fully realized the spark that we thought was worth clinging to in hell. And again, in Matthew 16:25: if we are willing to let go of what we think of as ourselves, we find that we become more unique, more infinitely personal. But in clinging on to the shreds of our self, we lose virtue and uniqueness until at last we are dully all alike in the gray coating of vice.