Archive for June, 2008

Sunstone Symposium!

Published at June 29, 2008 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

Here is a link to the preliminary Sunstone program. It looks excellent. I organized five of the sessions. One is a mediation between young people, their parents and Church leaders; another features Jeff Nielsen talking about how we can change Church pedagogy so we can have a voice and confront difficult topics honestly; another is about five moral issues that youth think the Church does not sufficiently address, another is on the Honor Code at BYU; and the last is three practical reforms that the Church could make to green the ward, create a sustainable stake economy, and improve the anthropological strenght of its missionary program.

Here is the link:

https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/images/stories/preliminary2008.pdf

 PLEASE COME! Bring all your friends and family members and introduce them to Sunstone.

Compromising The Kingdom: An Interpretive History of Mormon Politics

Published at June 25, 2008 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments

Some of you may already know this, but I wrote an article for Sunstone’s latest issue, which contains several articles about the relationship between Mormonism and politics. My article is the feature piece, a framing essay that explains Mormon political history as a series of unresolvable dilemmas. The article is long, but I am including it here if you want to read it. Also, there is a longer version of it if you happen to be a masochyst. I only say that because I had to cut out a lot of history stuff that a buff might know but that, according to Chris Foster (who does not read my blog), most people don’t and should. So, if you want a copy of that, just let me know.

For now, here is the shorter but still very long piece. The other articles in the issue are also excellent, especially the one about Hinckley’s ritualization of Mormonism. If you want to order a copy, you can call Sunstone at 801-355-5926 or order one online at www.sunstonemagazine.com. I also have a few extra copies kicking around…

 Last item of business: This year’s Sunstone Symposium will be August 6-9th. Pre-registration has already begun, and a preliminary program will be out tomorrow. The theme of the symposium will be Spirituality of the Rising Generation, with about twenty sessions devoted to topics that affect the twenty-somethings in the Church. I have organized several sessions (I will post descriptions soon), and hope that lots of people will attend! The symposium is free for students (but you still have to register), $60 for a first-timer full pass, $80 for a non-first-timer pass, $20 for a day and $6 a session. Please tell your friends and register by calling the Sunstone office or going on the website.

Compromising the Kingdom 

The Reading Religion

Published at June 17, 2008 in Uncategorized. 10 Comments

I just finished an English class, and am for some reason weeping. We were talking about The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s re-writing of Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway. We talked about the suicide, the scene where Richard–an ardent, searing human who has finished an important book that no one will read and who is dying of AIDS anyway–flings himself from the window of his apartment. He says: “What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.” And then he jumps, his robe billowing out behind him, smashes into the sidewalk. Clarissa, his love and a woman who has tried to create a party for him that will mean something, that could stand beside all the war and poverty and distraction of the world and matter anyway, runs down to where he lands and stops beside him. The next part is surprising. There is none of the screaming and the swelling and hysteria we expect; there is something more like a scene I saw once in a European movie, where death was a long narrow hallway and a person in grey dropping her head–a shot of her hands–a presentation more stunning than screams and hysteria, a mute beauty of sorrow, a great and noble drop of the head. Clarissa sits by Richard and smoothes his robe. She realizes no one knows he is dead; no one saw him fall. And then she sits in the in-between and places her head on the small of Richard’s back, sits simply with her head in the small of a back and lets it rest. That is her mourning, her scream, her widow’s black.

I read this scene at 2 am last night. It felt like cloth in my throat, or an unbearable shining beauty that should not be but is only ever borne alone: death on the ground, a hand on the back–mortality and beauty skin to skin. I felt the ache that I have always felt in the inside of every beauty, a terrible desire that is no different from death, no different at all. For beauty was, at 2 am last night, nothing more or less than the realization that I will die, and the ache of a gorgeous meanwhile. This is what I have felt, inarticulate in my belly, since I was little and watched the gold clock tick by my bed, when I said, “Eternity has already begun,” and then hoped double: that I would never die and also that I would die and that would be it. I never had confidence, even then, in my ability to bear a beauty that was always passing, a pile of memories growing thicker, things that would one day have to be forgotten because there was not room. Or worse, things that would stay, with the heavy presence of the undeniably gone, and demand to be thought. To remember without the option of reliving is poetry, death, beauty all at once. It is the most excruciating feeling I have known, the source of raging against and then hoping for more.

And I wanted to know why Richard died, and if anything could have kept him from it. It was strange to feel ardor and compassion for an invention–a pile of words–and even stranger to want to resurrect a person who had never existed.

So we talked about it, in class, and it became a conversation about Modernism and authenticity, art and editing. We talked about the desire to create a beautiful party–was it superficial? Or a book–selfish? Was there a place for beauty and its preservation amidst war, poverty, and as I said before, distraction? Because the Modernists wanted that, even when the bombs dropped–through World War I and World War II, through radio and the television. They were maybe trying to say: Beauty doesn’t solve war, is not useful, can be snobbish and exlcusive and can maybe never even be explained, ever, or captured or worded or loved enough. Ever. But it needs to be preserved, has value, is above and below and beyond all war, is the clue to the agony of death and the longing for immortality. It is simply the attempt to create meaning inside of time that will surely undo it in front of an audience who may never care to notice.

Writing and religion and music–all the things of beauty, I suppose–have the same job: to recapture and amplify immediacy, to decide what to remember and what to forget. So their writers write and their prophets prophesy and their composers compose and, when it is all done, face Richard’s grave fear: that what they have produced cannot stand by even the simplest morning. So the writers and the prophets and the composers go back to immediacy, to their incomparable mornings, to live unmediated in what they could not capture. And then they encounter the second great loneliness: that immediacy is ravishing, is there, in the bones, but that immediacy is not complete, either–cries out for a loving someone to say all the words it is embarrassed to say, to give shape to the streaming, to order and provide, to remind it where it is going and what for. And so beauty is nothing more than to be tossed willingly about between meaning and immediacy, experience and articulation, losing something every moment–howling, turning, going the other way. Beauty is a rueful secret about how much artifice the real needs to be meaningful, to be real, to recognize itself in the window or on the street. Beauty is the remembrance of how close we are to forgetting, specifically, but also to a great Forgetting, a death that will erase us. And beauty is the brave girl who will give herself to the desire to both remember and to utterly forget, who will bear the knowledge that almost everything will be forgotten, but who will, like a good modernist, make a naive and keening case for remembrance–who will jump out of windows because there are not enough readers who care to remember at all.   

And that is what, by the way, might have saved Richard from the window. At least, conceivably.  He wanted to make a book that could stand beside a morning, and he had failed. He sensed that no artifice was good enough for reality, nevermind how much reality might need it. But he also felt forgotten, agonized by the knowledge that only a few people would ever care to read his creation.

That is what we talked about for the last ten minutes of class. And were the moderns so absurd, anyway? To want to save beauty from violence, utility, nonchalance? To create parties and books and stories where beauty could exist without having to defend itself? To fight death with beauty–to fight the death of a constantly moving immediacy by saving its beautiful moments in bundles of words? And then, when they were done, to realize that beauty is death, that it is always saving itself from what it will become? And why, then, should it be so silly that they wanted the same things for themselves–that in their secret and not-so-secret hearts they wanted readers who would care enough to remember them? Who, after reading the world with such closeness and such phenomenal effort, would want someone who would read them well, too?

I think, strangely, I have just articulated why I believe in God. Above all reason, beyond proof. I believe in God because I believe in honor to great narrators, to people who read the world so well that they create new worlds from old materials. Religion, then, is just good reading: it is recognizing the ritual, the work, the great artifice that it takes to create a meaning that is already there, an authenticity that outshines itself. And revelation?: immediacy that cannot be spoken but that will suffer a thousand attempts to be spoken anyway, an intuition that beauty and meaning and death are the same because they all recognize a great passing and long to outlast it.

I believe in God because I feel for him what Clarissa feels for Richard:

She wonders if tomorrow morning will mark not only the end of Richard’s earthly life but the beginning of the end of his poetry, too. There are, after all, so many books. Some of them, a handful, are good, and of that handful, only a few survive. It’s possible that the good citizens of the future, people not yet born, will want to read Richard’s elegies, his beautifully cadenced laments, his rigorously unsentimental offerings of love and fury, but it’s far more likely that his books will vanish along with almost everything else.

Even if God does not exist, I can never risk it, because I want to love him the same way I want to love Richard. To say: thank you for writing the book. Thank you for a loving reading. Thank you, beyond all war and all injustice (which somehow have nothing, in some way, to do with you) for the pinon tree and last Thursday’s cake, but mostly for the story that gave everyone a role. I will try to be a good reader, to return the narrator’s gift, immortality for immortality. Come down from the window; I will read your book.  

Mrs. John Stuart Dalloway, Part I

Published at June 15, 2008 in Uncategorized. 7 Comments

I haven’t written a post in a long time. That happened for many reasons, but partly it happened for the same reason as always: I feel so many changes in mood, conviction, and temperament in even one hour that I am embarrassed to lay out my thoughts like a contradiction feast–also, that I feel things that are so intense but so out of vogue with the time that I live in that I am ashamed or afraid of being misunderstood. But I have been reading Mrs. Dalloway and have gained courage that this kind of schizophrenia is not only acceptable, but a respected Modernist craft (nevermind all the deeply troubled characters and the shell shock). So thanks, Mrs. D, and off I go…

I have two things to write about–well, two events that are mere containers for a thousand thoughts: one, being in Santa Fe for six weeks for a creative writing grad school course, and second, going to church. I’ll get to that latter much later, if I know myself at all.

When I was at BYU, lots of people would nudge me and joke knowingly about how excited I must be to leave and attend some progressive school. But the truth was I dreaded leaving BYU. I dreaded it because, whatever real frustrations I have with religion, there is nothing quite as remote to my soul as a happy, flat progressivism, the snarly-smiling certitude of the second-generation secularist who believes he has sidestepped all the pitfalls of religion.

From some experience I knew that the move would be excruciating and lonely for me: to go into a world where the rejection of ideas that still sweat me has been so complete that it’s guache to even perspire for them. Here, for example, the question of immortality is not just a fairy tale; to the second-generation secularist, it is moot, pointless, laughable. The question of its replacement, too–the harrowing dread of the nihilists, the grave-brave counter-offerings of the existentialists–has been swallowed and absorbed, evacuated, the remains merely sitting now, assimilated, in the cells of the obvious. The consternation and the fight have gone out of things. There is no life after death and possibly no point to this one, but it doesn’t bother people, as they tell me themselves: they have never been religious or caught up in any of that stuff (headtoss). They say it like being non-religious is a mark of extemely good taste, of having anticipated before any of their neighbors next trend of rationalism, sanity’s new spring line. They say it as if they have escaped all the silliness and embarrassment and above all the dogmatism (oh yes, the have escaped that!) that plagued their religious forebears and now plagues (heaven forbid) their contemporaries.

I sit, in my comparatively drab cassock of mind, and eat cafeteria macaroni. 

It’s not that they are atheists. I would know, for I’ve been longing for one: a shining, crimson atheist in the froth of the fight, an atheist for whom the question is still alive, for whom one of the answers must still be killed. An athiest who would say “God?” and really get offended, who would sit in the macaroni-strewn cafeteria and lay it out for five, six hours, until the cooks would turn off the lights demonstratively and the whole thing would move to the lawn outside. But here there is no offense because now there is nothing to get offended about. (It was a careful dance, at first–this non-offense–but now we are simply spotting it, tired of the dance anyway and seeing no point. We have signed contracts: we will preempt offense by never caring to get into it.) Around here, there are mostly second-generation secularists, people for whom the question and the answer were both matters of course that happened to course through their ancestors and, thankfully, went their way. And the result in thinking, the quality of it, is remarkably the same for all second-generationists, religious or secular (really, it is alarming how similar two unimaginative enemies can be): a self-satisfied superiority, the confidence of the public opinioned, the bovine contentedness of a mind masticating the detritus of its decade, and, above all, no offense but a certain brand of middle-class indignation: offense at the mere suggestion that anything is being done or thought or intentioned at all, that there is even the slightest snag in the otherwise invisible fabric of the cocoon, of the self-evidence of the way things are.

I almost didn’t bring John Stuart Mill, but now I am glad I have, and I turn often to a page that has read me many more times than I have read it. Bear with him. Read it all:

It is illustrated in the experience of almost all ethical doctrines and religious creeds. They are full of meaning and vitality to those who originate them, and to the direct disciples of the originators. Their meaning continues to be felt in undiminished strength, and is perhaps brought out into even fuller consciousness, so long as the struggle lasts to give the doctrine or creed an ascendancy over other creeds. At last it either prevails, and becomes the general opinion, or its progress stops; it keeps possession of the ground it has gained, but ceases to spread further. When either of these results has become apparent, controversy on the subject flags, and gradually dies away. The doctrine has taken its place, if not as a received opinion, as one of the admitted sects or divisions of opinion: those who hold it have generally inherited, not adopted it; and conversion from one of these doctrines to another, being now an exceptional fact, occupies little place in the thoughts of their professors. Instead of being, as at first, constantly on the alert either to defend themselves against the world, or to bring the world over to them, they have subsided into acquiescence, and niether listen, when they can help it, to arguments against their creed, nor trouble dissentients (if there be such) with arguments in its favor. From this time may usually be dated the decline in the living power of the doctrine. We often hear the teachers of all creeds lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in the minds of their believers a lively apprehension of the truth which they nominally recognize, so that it may penetrate the feelings, and acquire a real mastery over the conduct. No such difficulty is complained of while the creed is still fighting for its existence: even the weaker combatants then know and feel what they are fighting for, and the differences between it and other doctrines; and in that period of every creed’s existence, not a few persons may be found, who have realized its fundamental principles in all the forms of thought, have weighed and considered them in all their important bearings, and have experienced the full effect on the character which belief in that creed ought to produce in a mind thoroughly imbued with it. But when it has come to be an hereditary creed, and to be recieved passively, not actively–when the mind is no longer compelled, in the same degree as at first, to exercise its vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a dull or torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realizing it in consciousness, or testing it be personal experience, until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being…the creed remains, as it were, almost outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power not by suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant. 

It is this quality of inherited thought (and the smugness that sustains it) that repulses me more than any other vice. And to suggest that its perpetrators are quarantined only to the practice of religion admits a thoughtlessness that makes me suspect the speaker of the smallness he is busy criticizing. Inherited formulas dog the religious and the secular alike. However frightening and insidious this kind of thinking is to true religion (and it is odious and inimical to it), I am more likely to forgive it there, since it is at least sometimes attached to some ardor that might rescue it, some fidelity beyond all vicissitudes that will tutor it against itself.

But the more dangerous–particularly, the more insidious–is the same kind of inherited thought in secular or enlightened circles. It is dangerous in that form precisely because so many secularists believe they have overcome inheritance and dogmatism, believe that some old fight fought hard enough to cover them and alleviated them of all attention ot subtlety, contradiction, and hypocrisy. This imagined triumph is bested by its temperamental consequence: a manicured irony that resists attachment altogether, that can swerve all hope, all sincerity, all candor to posture behind a grimace or a smirk. The new ethics is arm’s length, formulaic, unimpeachably now–with no present or past to harangue it and no law of love to complicate its even distribution.

A religious person, with his great crimes and foibles, will at least avoid the fate of arm’s length; while his urgency and attachment can turn maudlin or myopic, he is, at least attached to something that will shift his allegiances at all times: to the neighbor who sits beyond all systems and codifications. He will judge, yes, and he will malign and misunderstand and sit superior and all that, but at least he will do these things with all his heart and has some hope of being saved in his intensity. The alternative horrifies me and, incidentally, Kierkegaard, who had dark words for Hegelian ethics and its penchant for systems and cielings. Kierkegaard (whose ideas, by the way, frighten me too (I am part Hegelian, part ceiling secularist)) saw the relationship to God as the highest allegiance, an allegiance that blasted systems to straws and impossibilized ceilings.

Speaking of systems: I was sitting in the cafeteria the other day when a conversation started about someone’s Bible as Lit class. A girl with a strong mouth and disdainful face began to inveigh against the conservatives in her class who had, in a supposedly safe around-the-circle moment, admitted that the Bible meant anything to them at all. Several people snorted and rolled their eyes, and the girl, gaining courage, continued: “I mean, it should just go without saying that we are in college and that juvenile reading philosophy should have been left at home! To have to remind someone that we are reading the Bible as literature is an insult to all English majors.” I didn’t say anything at first. I understood the girl’s exasperation. I have spent a good deal of my own time arguing for the metaphorical status of many parts of the Bible, and have felt frustrated at obstinate literalism. But the disdain for the idea of attachment–that someone could care enough to risk their lives on a pile of lovely words, that the questions would matter to anybody beyond issues of metonymy and alliteration–was flat and unbearable.

…to be continued