"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.

Temples, Sacraments, Mysteries

"That is one of the reasons that I believe in Christianity. It is not a religion you could have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe that we have always expected, I should expect that we were making it up. But in fact it is not the sort of thing that anyone could have made up. It just has that queer twist about it that real things have."
- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

In my current Hugh Nibley research, I've been reading (all right, skimming) books like A. D. Nock's Early Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Background and Kirsopp Lake's The Religion of Yesterday and Tomorrow. This morning, in these and other sources, I ran across an interesting bit of religious wordplay. Apparently, the Latin-based word sacrament in ecclesiastical Greek becomes mysterion from which we get our "mysteries" (Lake 23). And from Nock:

A mysterion is a secret rite, in which the individual participates of his own free choice, and by which he is put into a closer relation with the deity honoured; normally he must undergo ceremonies of initiation (not usually capable of repetition) conferring a new and indelible spiritual condition and commonly giving an assurance of happiness hereafter. Those being initiated, says Aristotle, need not to learn something, but to receive an experience, and to be put into a frame of mind. The experience of the initiate may consist of acts done to him or by him, or again of the watching of a sacred drama. (Nock 5)

Reading that quote in context of the temple catches my intellectual breath in a way that hasn't happened since I found out covenant and testament are rendered from the same word. I confess that since my early Sunday school days, I've longed to find out what is meant when the scriptures refer to the mysteries of God. As a child, I was an avid learner, and this sounded like the best knowledge of all: "And if thou wilt inquire, thou shalt know mysteries which are great and marvelous; therefore thou shalt exercise thy gift, that thou mayest find out mysteries, that thou mayest bring many to the knowledge of the truth, yea, convince them of the error of their ways" (D&C 6:11). It seemed as though that knowledge was the apex of life, which of course, it is.

But as I prepare to go through the temple, I'm conceiving of the mysteries of God in another way: as sacraments, as ordinances, not necessarily something that we learn so much as something that we do. In the past, the importance of physical action in ordinances seemed to me out of step with religion which I saw as primarily intellectual and spiritual. Yes, I could see the symbolism in the action of baptism by immersion--the going down and coming up out of the water representing death and resurrection, the water acting as the physical sign of the cleansing of the soul--but in spite of all its beauty, my brain couldn't grasp why it was necessary to salvation: why should being covered in water at a certain point in your life actually affect the state of your eternal soul?

And I'm still not sure I can answer that question in an intellectually satisfying way. But what I have discovered is that religion isn't all about intellect. So much of it is about things you can't understand, predict, or explain, things that simply are as they are: "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be". If you limit religion to intellect, you make it what it should not be. One of the essential qualities of religion, says Lake, is mysticism. It is not logic. "It is not an emotion: it is a different form of consciousness" (Lake 178-9). It's the ordinances that we recognize as correct and satisfying without knowing why.

As I listening to a temple preparation lesson yesterday, I realized that the plan of salvation reminds me of nothing so much as the hero cycle, both in its steps and in its ubiquitousness. The hero's journey appears everywhere. There's no particular logical reason why it needs the steps Campbell assigns to it, yet they feel right. The plan of salvation just feels right, though I suppose you can't logically explain why it ought not to be some other way. This feeling of rightness is one of the things which can't adequately be explained by science: string theory, for instance, can explain the laws and constants of the universe, but can't explain why the universe would choose this particular set of constants from among all the other predicted possibilities. To science, to reason, they all seem equally likely. It is something beyond logic that says, "This one."

Learning and the Spirit: A Nibleyesque Musing

“Zeal without Knowledge” is without a doubt one of my favorite essays ever. The replacement of true knowledge with blind trust in the Spirit is one of my main concerns for the modern Church. Too many times I have heard people deride the importance of preparing for teaching in the Church because they want to let the Spirit guide the lesson. I think this is not only foolish and lazy, but strictly against the way God and the Spirit work. Undoubtedly, listening to the whisperings of the Holy Ghost is an important part of our belief. We know that man cannot know everything, and that God has many designs for us which we may not anticipate. Thus we must rely on the guidance of the Spirit to lead us in the right paths. However, this does not mean we should rely on the Spirit for things we could and should do ourselves. Just as the Lord says “it is not meet that I should command in all things” (D&C 58:26), it is not meet that we should wait for him to teach us all things. In gathering and synthesizing knowledge, the Lord commands us to actively seek learning, not just to let it passively wash over us.

And though we are to “seek learning . . . also by faith” (D&C 109:7), I believe it will do us little good unless we have the learning sought by study to go along with it. In the process of learning, the Spirit is more of a director than a worker—we must put ourselves fully into the work of gathering and making knowledge, and only then can the Spirit direct us to the insights he would give us. As someone once said, the Lord won't move a parked car. The Lord waits for us to knock, but the process of knocking is not, as Oliver Cowdery found out in D&C 9, merely asking for wisdom and waiting for God to tell us what to do. It is throwing ourselves into the work, constantly listening for the promptings of the Spirit, but at the same time being “anxiously engaged in a good cause, [doing] many things of [our] own free will” (D&C 58:27).

Back to the idea of preparing for Church talks, would not the Spirit be better able to enlighten our minds to new truths if we sat down and put an intensive amount of effort into studying out a doctrine we think we already understand? I think that much of inspiration is lost because we assume we have already sufficiently “treasured up in [our] minds continually the words of life” (D&C 84:85), when in fact it is a process we can never finish. There is an infinite amount of knowledge to be learned out there, and we should not be complacent with the small portion we have obtained. Nibley’s own scholarship is testament to this principle: though he was extremely widely read, he never felt as though he knew sufficient to simply coast along by the Spirit. He continued to seek out more books to read, new ideas and new ways to say them. And throughout all of his study, he maintains the inspiration of the Spirit in his ideas. Just because he was synthesizing his own ideas did not mean he had shut out the ideas of the Spirit, as seems to be the common misconception.

Nibley has some interesting perspectives on man’s relationship to nature in “Subduing the Earth.” I’ve often wondered exactly what was meant by the command to “subdue the earth and have dominion over it.” I like Nibley’s picture of man as a gracious lord or host over the earth, responsible for ensuring the comfort and improvement of everything in it. I’m still not certain how I feel about his idea that respect for life means we shouldn’t eat meat. Since we believe all things were created spiritually before they were created physically, it seems an arbitrary distinction to draw the line between using plants but not animals. If animals can be said to be equally valuable with man, why not plants with animals? And then again, why use rocks and minerals, which also have a spiritual creation of a sort? I’m not sure that valuing and respecting life means ignoring its usefulness. It’s an issue I have still to work out in my own thoughts, and Nibley has certainly caused me to think about it more.