A Day in the Mind of A Mormon

New home for M. E. Pickett

2011-02-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

Hi loyal readers, all 13 of you, there is a new home for my blogposts and those of some of my most creative and intelligent colleagues. It is called Mormon Perspectives. Please go and read my posts there (I may post here occasionally, too, I'm not sure yet), comment on what you read, and join the conversation.

Thanks,

M. E. Pickett

Conference Talk of the Week

2011-01-27T15:16:00.000-08:00

We are taught in the church to seek out the guidance of the Holy Ghost. If we have received the Gift of the Holy Ghost and are living worthy of it, then we have a right to be guided by it. This is called personal revelation. Yet, in his talk, "Gospel Learning and Teaching," Brother David M. McConkie says this:

"Brothers and sisters, it is contrary to the economy of heaven for the Lord to repeat to each of us individually what He has already revealed to us collectively. The scriptures contain the words of Christ. They are the voice of the Lord. Studying the scriptures trains us to hear the Lord’s voice."

What is the relationship, then, between scripture study and personal revelation?

Should Mormon Parents Emulate Chinese Parents?

2011-01-25T04:01:00.000-08:00

An article recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” As you can imagine, it caused quite a lot of stir. A lot of people had negative reactions to it. They accused the author, Amy Chua, of being heartless, too demanding, obsessive, and cruel. After reading the article, I can see why people would react this way, but at the same time, I noticed a lot of things in Chua's article that Western parents should emulate. I'll take this space to comment on some of the passages from the article that I think demonstrate how Western parents, and Mormon parents, for that matter, should be more like Chinese parents. Passages from Chua's article are within quotation marks.

"What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up."

How many children see how easy something looks while watching it on TV, beg to be allowed to do it, and then give up trying when they find that it is actually very hard. I know I did that at least once as a child. Is it okay to do it once? Sure. Is it okay to make it a habit? Absolutely not. Where I differ from Chua is that I think that children, whenever possible, should choose what they are spending this kind of effort doing. For example, I will do everything in my power to make my children want to play baseball, but if they ultimately decide that they like basketball more, I will let them focus on that sport (after I drop them off on the doorstep of some basketball-loving family that they can join).

"Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me 'garbage' in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage."

Some of the greatest instigators for me to change have been moments when I felt like garbage. Neither of my parents have ever called me that or anything comparable, but I think that the principle that Chua is talking about here still applies. This principle is to hold children to a high standard and to let them know when they are not meeting it. I don't mean a standard such as a shooting percentage in basketball or performance on a test (we'll return to that topic later), but a simple standard of behavior. Let them know that you know that they have dissapointed in a specific instance (not that they are disappointments in general; we don't need our kids to be as messed up as the guy in Inception). I remember the moments when I disappointed someone I wanted to impress, and I have improved because of them.

"First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital."

I do believe that we place far too much emphasis on self-esteem in our culture. I believe that when self-esteem becomes the main focus of raising children, the experiences that will actually build self-esteem don't ever happen. What are those experiences? Succeeding at something that was hard, developing self-discipline, working to accomplish a goal, and many other things. Getting praised for little effort does not build self-esteem. It builds a big (unjustifiably big, I might say) ego. This is a hard line to walk because parents have to determine if their child's performance was the best he or she could have done or if he or she could have reasonably done better.

"Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough."

I believe that a child's grades in school are a better reflection of that child's work ethic than intelligence. It is possible that a child isn't capable of grasping Calculus, but I was raised with the notion that anyone can do anything that they put their mind to. Parents should be more willing to push their children to work hard rather than shrugging their shoulders because that's just what their child is capable of.

"Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children."

Too often we see Western parents who, if they don't believe the opposite of this, behave as if they do. They will bend over backwards to satisfy the most trivial of their child's wants. This gives a child the sense that he or she is somehow more important that anyone else around them, an attitude that can do nothing but harm the child.

"Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences."

Somehow, we got the notion in the West that children are capable of making important decisions for themselves. While it is important for children to learn decision-making skills, this does not include every possibility for every decision. If children were given that power, they would eat nothing but cake, do nothing but play video games, and help in nothing but their own gratification. “The natural man is an enemy to God,” (Mosiah 3:19) and while children can be wonderful and sweet and angelic, they also have moments in which it is clear that they have not yet overcome their natural tendencies. One of a parent's jobs is to teach them to do this: to think of others when they would naturally only think of themselves, to keep doing something that's hard or unpleasant because of the reward that will come only after hard work, to look to God on guidance about how they should pattern their lives.

Basically, parents should try to pattern their parenting after the ideal parent: God, our Heavenly Father. God demands that we live by high standards of behavior. He pushes us to do more than we think we can do. He helps us recognize our weaknesses so that we can turn them into strengths (see Ether 12:27). Yet, none of our shortcomings, mistakes, or even sins make him love us less. That is the kind of parenting that Mormons, or every parent for that matter, should emulate. I see some of these qualities in Chua's description of a Chinese mother, qualities that aren't very apparent in Western parents. That is not to say that I think that we should do everything that Chua describes, but we should be able to take advice from other cultures as long as it is bringing us closer to being like God.

Why I Believe

2011-01-24T03:51:00.001-08:00

Would I be a Mormon if my parents hadn't raised me as a Mormon? Without my parents to take me to church every week as a child, would I go to church today? If my parents hadn't set an example by living God's commandments while they were raising me, would I be living them today?

I've asked myself these questions. I don't think that anyone person of faith who was raised by faithful parents can avoid them if they want to seriously examine their faith and understand what it means to them.

But ultimately, the answer is a resounding, “I don't know.” I can't know unless someone finds a way to spy on some sort of parallel universe. But I think that the answer to all of those questions is, “Yes.” I would be Mormon, I would go to church, I would live God's commandments. I think this—you could say that I know it as much as anyone can know anything that is unknowable, which is part of faith—because my faith doesn't come from my parents. They were instrumental in directing me toward where I would find it, probably ensuring that I would find it a lot sooner than I would have otherwise, but they are not it's source.

My faith comes from God. It comes from experiences I've had while seeking Him through prayer. I have felt the power of His spirit answer questions like “Is the Book of Mormon true?” “Was Joseph Smith a true prophet?” and most importantly “Did Jesus Christ atone for my sins?” God has answered all of those questions for me.

Without my parents to teach me and provide a good example for me, I may not have asked those questions so early in life. They might have had to wait until two young guys in white shirts and ties, wearing black name tags knocked on my door, but I would have asked them. And I know that the answers would have been the same.

Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel

2010-12-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

Of all the great Christmas songs—the fun ones, the rollicking ones, the cheerful ones, the reverent ones, the worshipful ones—“Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel”—I guess you could describe it as a somber one—is my favorite. I especially like this version by Mannheim Steamroller that uses deep, almost Gregorian chant-like vocals, a cathedral echo, and is sung in Latin. Say what you will about Holly and the Ivy, or Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, or any other Christmas song, this one feels most like Christmas to me. I want to spend the rest of this post explaining why.

First, this song has a distinctly old feeling, which appeals to me. Not only was it written a long time ago (either in the eighth or twelfth centuries) but it’s use of the title “Emmanuel” harkens back to the Old Testament. The title literally means “God With Us,” and Isaiah uses it in speaking about the Messiah. When used with the plea, “Oh Come, Oh Come,” it reminds me of the time immediately preceding Christ’s birth.

While Joseph and Mary were on their way to Bethlehem, the Kingdom of Judah, what remained of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, was suffering under the tyrannical rule of the Romans. The second line of the song refers to “captive Israel,” and I think of this situation when I hear those words. These people were desperate for freedom and many believed that the Messiah would come and deliver them from this political bondage. Which would have made it all the more difficult to recognize, in the poor carpenter’s son from Nazareth, the awaited deliverer.

I want to go back, briefly, to that word “Emmanuel.” As we know, it means, “God With Us,” referring to Jesus’ premortal identity of Jehovah. Jehovah was the God of the Old Testament and he was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem, literally making him God in the flesh, or God walking among us. I can’t imagine the kind of mental leap that the people around Jesus, the neighbors, the friends, the family, the strangers, must have made to look at someone they could see to be flesh and blood, just like they were, and say, “Yep, that there is God.”

True, he performed miracles among them, healing the sick and causing the lame to walk and the blind to see, but prophets did that stuff in the Old Testament too. Elijah even brought someone back from the dead. And it is also true that not everyone who followed him recognized him as the Messiah, but the mere fact that anyone did is mind boggling. That knowledge, that assurance, that the man standing in front of you, the man who breathes and eats and does everything else that you do, is God in the flesh can only come, as Jesus told Peter that it came to him, through the Holy Ghost.

When I hear this song, I wonder if I would recognize Christ for what he was. I wonder if I would have heeded that subtle voice of the spirit that was telling something that my brain would surely react against as impossible, or at least very unlikely.

Second, I like that this song is so old. As noted above, no one is exactly sure when it was written, but we know that it was sometime in the dark ages when Christianity consisted wholly of Catholicism. As a Mormon, I understand that the original church, the church that Christ established during his mortal lifetime, was lost soon after his death and ascension. The people of the eighth or twelfth centuries didn’t have the priesthood organization to facilitate revelation or to make their sacraments valid.

However, this song reminds me that many of them were still wholly devoted to Christ. They believed in him and relied upon his grace and mercy. This song is one of the most beautiful pleas for supplication that I have ever heard. It is far greater than most hymns that Mormons have come up with. Which is why it helps remind me of the bond that I share with my other Christian fellows, which is one of things that we should remember at Christmas, but also of the glorious truth of the restored gospel that these people can receive sacraments under the proper authority, even though they didn’t live in a time when that authority was active.

There has been a lot of great Christmas music written and I hope that more will be written in the future. I feel the reverence of songs like “Silent Night,” and “What Child is This?” as much as anyone. And I like to go riding in a one-horse sleigh and to make my Christmases holly and jolly as much as anyone. But this sacred song, “Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel,” has a special place in my season’s celebrations. And I hope that whatever your favorite Christmas song is (and please tell me about your favorite in the comments) that this season helps remind you that Emmanuel did come, and that he did ransom us, and that he will come again.

Conference Talk of the Week

2010-12-23T19:07:00.000-08:00

This week's talk is Elder Jeffery R. Holland's talk, "Because of Your Faith." In it, he says these words:

"I am grateful for all the women of the Church who in my life have been as strong as Mount Sinai and as compassionate as the Mount of Beatitudes. We smile sometimes about our sisters’ stories—you know, green Jell-O, quilts, and funeral potatoes. But my family has been the grateful recipient of each of those items at one time or another—and in one case, the quilt and the funeral potatoes on the same day. It was just a small quilt—tiny, really—to make my deceased baby brother’s journey back to his heavenly home as warm and comfortable as our Relief Society sisters wanted him to be. The food provided for our family after the service, voluntarily given without a single word from us, was gratefully received. Smile, if you will, about our traditions, but somehow the too-often unheralded women in this church are always there when hands hang down and knees are feeble."

There are a lot of cliches in Mormon culture, but they take on meaning when they come at a time of need. My family was the recipient of Elders' Quroum ditch digging when floodwaters threatened our house. When have you or your family been blessed by a Mormon cliche?

Did You Know...

2010-12-21T19:01:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the First Counselor in the church's First Presidency is the son of a world renowned theoretical chemist? In fact, he developed the absolute rate theory of chemical reactions, which has been the basis for the work of many other chemists who have won the Nobel Prize. Why didn't he win the Noble himself? It seems that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences didn't really understand the theory until it was too late to award him the prize. They tried to make up for it, though, by awarding him the Berzelius Medal in 1977. He explained the relationship between science and religion this way: "Is there any conflict between science and religion? There is no conflict in the mind of God, but often there is conflict in the minds of men."

Flagella and Faith

2010-12-19T18:55:00.000-08:00

Have you heard the big news? Scientists have found microbes that use arsenic in their genetic makeup instead of phosphorous! If that doesn't mean anything to you, don't fret. It didn't mean anything to me either until I learned a little more about it. Basically, all of life as we knew it uses six elements as its building blocks: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. This bacteria uses arsenic, a poisonous substance to most organisms, instead of phosphorous. It's kind of a big deal.

Well, it's a big deal for scientists and people interested in that sort of thing. So why am I writing about it here?

One of the greatest questions that people have pondered since the beginning of pondering is where we came from in the first place. I came from my parents who came from their parents who came from their parents and on and on. But, we can't follow that pattern back forever. There had to be a beginning. One of religion's jobs is to tell us where that beginning is. The Judeo-Christian tradition finds the answer in the book of Genesis: There were first parents and their names were Adam and Eve.

Okay, so where did Adam come from? Genesis answers that as well. God created them. Great. That settles that.

At lest it did settle that until Darwin had to come along with his little book on The Origin of Species. You probably know the rest of the story. These new ideas about evolution seemed to show, at least to some, that man was not created by God, but sprung from lesser beings through the mechanism of natural selection. And this mechanism does not need God (again, at least to some). Since then, religious people and scientific people have been engaged in a war over the minds of the people.

I see this new discovery as another battlefield in that war.

I read a book once called The Language of God by Francis S. Collins. Collins is an expert geneticist. In fact, he oversaw the Human Genome Project. He's also a Christian. And in his book, he wrote about being a believer while being surrounded by skepticism, and also some of the traps that believers can fall into when confronted with scientific evidence.

The one that is pertinent to my discussion here is what he calls the “God of the Gaps.” This is when people of faith see gaps, usually in the evolutionary record, that science can't explain and ascribe this gap's existence to God. For example, there is a bacteria that has a flagella (a tentacle like thing that it whips around to propel itself through water) and scientists can't find the evolutionary steps that would have had to occur in order to develop the flagella. “See,” believers will say, “there is God's fingerprint. It couldn't have developed through evolutionary means, therefore, it was created directly by God.”

Here is the problem with this tendency: scientists have this annoying knack for discovering things. To my knowledge, this flagella thing hasn't been figured out yet, but a lot of other gaps in the evolutionary time line have been filled in. So, if you find God only in these gaps, what do you have to stand on when there is no more gap?

DNA could have been one of these gap situations. As far as we could tell for a long time, life could only be based on six elements out of over a hundred. That makes life orderly in a chaotic universe. And order comes from intelligence. So, in the basic structure of life, we find evidence for God's existence.

But this discovery puts a kink in that argument. If life could develop to use arsenic in an environment that is heavily saturated with the poisonous element, what else could it use? Are there any limitations? Is it really chaos?

If someone's faith in God is based on this limited observation of the natural universe (life on Earth only uses six elements), then that person may not be able to answer those questions. Faith has to be based on something internal, not external. It has to be based on spiritual experiences, not physical ones.

After all, science and religion tell us fundamentally different things about the universe. Religion tells us that God created the world. Christians don't all agree about the defenition of creation used here, but we Mormons see it more as organizing existing chaotic matter into the organization that we see today. Religion also tells us that God created humans in his own image, which we Mormons understand to mean that we were made to look like God physically, or that God has the basic appearance of a man, albeit a glorified and perfected one. Religion also tells us why God created all of this stuff. In Moses 1:39, which is found in the Pearl of Great Price, on of the books of scripture that is unique to Mormonism, that God created the world “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”

Religion does not tell us how God created the world. It doesn't concern itself with that because it doesn't matter for the ultimate purpose of creation. Knowing how God created the world will not make us better able to live his commandments and become like him. So, religion leaves that question to science. Which is exactly why people of faith shouldn't let any scientific discoveries affect their faith. After all, it's only studying God's creation.

The Two Dollar Rule

2010-12-05T16:25:00.001-08:00

My mother likes to tell a story about when I was young. According to her, she once took me with her to the store and told me that I could choose one thing for myself that cost two dollars. I was excited to get a new toy and when I saw a Voltron robot, I knew that it was the toy that I had to have. The only problem (which you know if you have clicked on the link) is that the Voltron robot costs much more that two dollars.

When I pleaded that my mother get me that toy, she refused, citing the two dollar rule that I had agreed to before entering the store. I had already set my heart on that Voltron toy, so rules no longer had any meaning for me. When I realized that I couldn't convince her by an rational means, at least any rational means at the disposal of a child (“You should get it for me because I want it”), I resorted to every child's last resort. I started to cry.

I cried as my mom dragged me through the aisles to get the rest of the things she went to the store for. I cried in the checkout line. I cried all the way to the car. Finally, after everything was packed away and we were sitting in the car, my mom waited until I calmed down a bit, then turned to me and said, “Was that fun?”

“No,” I responded.

“Did you get anything?”

“No.”

And just like that, my mother turned the car on and backed out of her parking space, having taught me one of the most important lessons of my life. I learned that just wanting something is not enough justification to get it. We have to follow the rules as well.

It's important to note that my mother hadn't imposed the two dollar rule simply because she wanted me to learn to appreciate cheap things. At that point, my parents really couldn't afford anything more expensive for me. It is harder for parents to teach their children this lesson when they don't have that restriction. When you have the means to by a Voltron robot, it is hard to say no, especially when you have to suffer through the embarrassment of dragging a crying child around in public. But it is important for children to learn that wanting something is not reason enough to get it.

But why isn't wanting something enough reason to get it? If I want something good, why can't I have it right now?

If we instantly have our wants satisfied, we start to think that the world revolves around us, that we are somehow important simply because we exist. We get more selfish, more egotistical, and more lazy. We start to see people as mere means to our own satisfaction.

God did not intend for us to live that way.

When God curses the ground in Genesis, he doesn't say that it is to punish Adam. He says that it is “for [Adam's] sake” (3:17). Adam had to work in order to survive. That helped him to appreciate his life all the more. He was being productive. He was learning and growing. His life had much more meaning outside of the Garden of Eden, where he had to work, than inside the Garden of Eden, where all he had to do was pick his food from the nearest tree.

The world has evolved since the days of Adam though, and survival is not a pressing concern for most of us. But the same principles still apply. If I want to stand on top of Mount Everest, I can't just stroll up there. I have to buy the gear, train for an extended time, make some preparatory climbs, and then travel to Nepal and start the grueling trek up the mountain.

Similarly, if I want a million dollars, I better be willing to put in a lot of work over a long period of time. That is the way God intends for us to get what we want. Through work. However, there is another way. If I really want a million dollars, I can steal it. Getting up to the top of Mount Everest without the work would be a little more tricky—it would require getting someone to drag you up or something—but if it could be done, it would be worth far less than the effort that those who climb it put forth.

God has given us many commandments that work much like my mother's two dollar rule. He gave them to us for many reasons, but they have the added benefit of teaching us that we can't always get what we want (who knew that you could find pearls of truth in Rolling Stones songs?).

Take chastity, for one example. Our society says that if you want to have sex, you should be able to. Nothing should stop you. In fact, we are even working extra hard to disconnect sex from it's natural consequences, some of which are good, like pregnancy, and some of which are bad, like sexually transmitted diseases. A person used to have to confront these consequences if they wanted to have sex, which might make them think twice about having it. Today, though, those consequences are almost completely avoidable (the operative word there is “almost”). So why not allow people have sex when they want?

That's because sex is a sacred thing. It's the way we give life to more of God's children—or at least that's how God intended it to be. And it forms a strong, intimate bond between a man and a woman. God intended that as well. The relationship between a husband and wife is one of the most sacred unions that anyone can hope to enter into. It should have the utmost importance and provide the most meaning to a person's life.

When we compare that meaning to standing on top of Mount Everest or earning a million dollars, it becomes clear that skirting the divinely ordained way to get it, through marriage, cheapens it and makes it less satisfying.

As my mom drove me home from the store that day, I could have decided that I was going to work and save until I could by the Voltron robot for myself. If I really wanted it, that is exactly what I would have done. But I didn't. I got home and turned on the TV or started playing with some of my other toys. I wasn't willing to pay the price to get it, so it was clear that I didn't want it enough. God's commandments serve that purpose. They help us determine what we really want, and help us get them in a way that helps us get the most out of them.

Conference Talk of the Week

2010-12-02T06:22:00.000-08:00

The leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encourage us to read and study the talks from the previous General Conference. If you are not aware, the church holds a General Conference every six months in which the leaders of the church--the First Presidency, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and other general authorities speak to the church as a whole.

In order to more fully study and incorporate their teachings into everyday living, I will take on talk every week, post an excerpt from it, and pose a question or two for us to discuss in the comments.

The talk this week is "The Transforming Power of Faith and Character" by Elder Richard G. Scott, a member of the quorum of the Twelve Apostles. In it, he said this:

"Faith and character are intimately related. Faith in the power of obedience to the commandments of God will forge strength of character available to you in times of urgent need. Such character is not developed in moments of great challenge or temptation. That is when it is intended to be used. Your exercise of faith in true principles builds character; fortified character expands your capacity to exercise more faith. As a result, your capacity and confidence to conquer the trials of life is enhanced. The more your character is fortified, the more enabled you are to benefit from exercising the power of faith. You will discover how faith and character interact to strengthen one another. Character is woven patiently from threads of applied principle, doctrine, and obedience."

And now for the discussion questions:

Elder Scott says that "character is not developed in moments of great challenge or temptation. That is when it is intended to be used." How do we develop our character so that we are prepared for those moments of challenge and temptation?

Mormons tend to think of character as a principle of action, while character seems more like a way of being. How are faith and character related?

The Bible and Modern Prophets

2010-11-29T03:59:00.000-08:00

In a recent column for CNN.com Michael Coogan, a Harvard Divinity School Bible scholar, argued that “the essence of the Bible -- its ultimate authority -- is not in its individual pronouncements, but in its underlying message: equal, even loving, treatment of all persons, regardless of their age, gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.”

Coogan comes to this conclusion after showing that much of what the Bible commands is rejected today. The examples he uses are slavery, which was practiced under certain circumstances by the ancient Israelites; the treatment of women as property, which Exodus 20:17 seems to approve of by putting women in the same category as a house, servants, livestock, etc.; and commanding to abstain from pork, which the Law of Moses considers an abomination. While some of these examples are more valid than others, a Bible scholar should be smart enough to recognize that they all come from the Old Testament and the Law of Moses, which Christians believe was fulfilled and replaced by the gospel of Jesus Christ. So finding inconsistencies in the behavior of ancient Isrealites and modern Christians is expected. After all, there are 613 commandments in the Law of Moses and Christians ignore almost all of them because Christ taught a higher law.

However, there are even some directives in the New Testament that modern Christians, including Mormons, don't follow, that Coogan would have been better served in citing. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 34-35: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.” I don't know of anyone who would actually enforce this command.

If I were to follow Coogan's line of reasoning, I would figure that this is an evidence that the Bible was written by mere mortals under the influence of the “views and values they shared with their contemporaries.” Since these views and values are human and not divine, the Bible has little, if anything, to tell us about how to conduct our personal behavior. In the end, according to Coogan, the only important thing is to love others equally.

While I accept that, as Jesus said, doing unto others as we would have them to to us is “the law and the prophets,” (Matt. 7:12) I can't accept that the Bible has nothing to say on other issues that Coogan cites, such as abortion and same sex marriage. Yes, the various books of the Bible were written by many different people over the course of over a thousand years, but those writers were not just ordinary men. They were prophets, writing under the influence of God's Spirit.

In Numbers 12:6, the Lord says, “If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream.” Prophets are God's mouthpieces to the world. They receive divine communication from him and relay that message to the rest of the world. With all of the voices clamoring for our attention, if we know who God's prophet is, we know who's voice is the most important to listen to. This is one of God's ways of providing order to an otherwise chaotic world.

In addition to this, though, prophets have another important function. “No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation,” says the Apostle Peter. “For prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:20-21). If prophecy—or scripture, which is prophecy written down—is of no private interpretation, then who is to interpret it? Since it came by holy men of God speaking as they were moved by the Holy Ghost—prophets—then holy men of God speaking as they are moved by the Holy Ghost should interpret it. That would present a big problem if there were no prophets around.

Fortunately, there are prophets around. God appeared in a vision to the boy Joseph Smith, who was subsequently directed to restore God's church. Since then, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who is Thomas S. Monson today, has served as God's mouthpiece, or prophet, to the world.

This solves the problem that Coogan has with ancient scripture. With a “holy man of God” to interpret scripture as he is “moved by the Holy Ghost,” we can know what God's will for his people is today. We don't have to make our own judgment calls on what was ancient tradition and what was divine command. The current prophet will make that clear. This is a great blessing to all those who strive to live according to God's will and not according to their own, with a dash of spirituality thrown in for good measure.

Gratitude Proficiency

2010-11-21T19:38:00.000-08:00

Much of this post will come from a book by Gregg Easterbrook entitled The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. In it, he explores how people aren’t any happier than they have been in the past -- in fact, in many cases they are less happy -- even though the quality of life we enjoy is far and away better than it has ever been in the history of the world. Mr. Easterbrook is not a member of the church, but his findings on happiness are pertinent to my topic. At one point in the book, he says this:

It might be said that the human condition is characterized by “complaint proficiency.” Whether through natural selection, God’s touch, or simply practice, human beings as a group are really good at complaining. We complain to our parents for bringing us into the world; complain to our teachers for educating us; complain to our bosses for employing us; complain to the merchants who feed and clothe us; complain to the lovers and spouses who embrace us; complain to the children we summon to join us; complain to the Maker for starting the world in which all this happens. About many things, especially injustice, we should complain. But we practice complaining so much, and on such minor issues, that we become too proficient: And then complain more, if only because we are confident we are good at it. Expressing gratitude or appreciation does not come easily to us because we practice it so little (118).

When we stop to think about it, it seems silly that we complain about waiting for half an hour in an airport for a security check in order to take a flight that will transport us hundreds of miles in a matter of hours when many of our ancestors walked thousands of miles over many months across the country, going maybe fifteen miles on a good day. Or that we complain about the incompetence of doctors when advances in medicine have allowed us to live longer and with greater health than ever before. Or when we complain about the price of gas when most of the people to ever live on this planet never had the means to travel from the town in which they were born. I even heard a friend complain about the hassle of registering for classes, saying that things might have been better back when you had to take a registration card to the school auditorium and navigate the crowd in hopes that you might get the classes you wanted, all because her internet connection was a little slow. We, the citizens of the 21st Century, are spoiled.

Paul prophesied to Timothy that in the last days people would be unthankful, and it doesn’t take much searching to see this prophecy fulfilled. Paul, by the way, mentions the unthankful in the same sentence in which he mentions the covetous, the boasters, the proud, the blasphemers, the disobedient to parents, the unholy, the trucebreakers, the false accusers, the incontinent, the fierce, the despisers of those that are good, the traitors, the heady, the highminded, those without natural affection, and those that are lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. So, the unthankful are not in very savory company.

Yet, it is still so much easier to see what we have to complain about than what we have to be thankful for. As President Henry B. Eyring said in the October 2007 General Conference:

the challenge to remember has always been the hardest for those who are blessed abundantly. Those who are faithful to God are protected and prospered. That comes as the result of serving God and keeping His commandments. But with those blessings comes the temptation to forget their source. It is easy to begin to feel the blessings were granted not by a loving God on whom we depend but by our own powers (“O Remember, Remember,” Ensign Nov. 2007, 67-68).

Elder Jeffery R. Holland said the following in his talk, “The Tongue of Angels”:
In all of this, I suppose it goes without saying that negative speaking so often flows from negative thinking, including negative thinking about ourselves. We see our own faults, we speak—or at least think—critically of ourselves, and before long that is how we see everyone and everything. No sunshine, no roses, no promise of hope or happiness. Before long we and everybody around us are miserable…As someone once said, "Even in the golden age of civilization someone undoubtedly grumbled that everything looked too yellow" (Ensign May 2007, 17-18).
Mr. Easterbrook says it this way:

Americans and Europeans live in an age in which most aspects of life are improving for most people, yet many feel progressively worse; in parallel, Americans and Europeans live in an age in which the collecting of grievances and holding of grudges is elaborately encouraged, while forgiveness and gratitude are looked down upon as quaint traits of Kansas farm wives from previous centuries.

Trends in the educational, legal, political, and media systems all urge contemporary men and women to view themselves as wronged by various forces real or imagined; to get angry and fight back; to fixate on any harms of which they may have been the target; to search out wrongs about which to become outraged. Americans and Europeans are further encouraged to even the score with those who may or may not have wronged them, using litigation or bad publicity or other means. The recent fads of children filing lawsuits against parents, or parents filing accusations against other parents regarding events between their children on the sports field or at school, are just two examples of this.

Another example that I have seen is in a recent film adaptation of the classic novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas. In the novel, Dumas’s protagonist, Edmond Dantès, learns that “lacking God's omniscience and omnipotence, human beings are simply not capable of—or justified in—carrying out the work of Providence. Dumas's final message…is that human beings must simply resign themselves to allowing God to reward and punish—when and how God sees fit” (http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/montecristo/themes.html). The modern film, on the other hand, simply glorified vengeance.

Easterbrook is clear in saying that grateful people are not merely naïve about the injustices in the world. In fact,

in studies, people who score highly on various indicators of gratefulness also report strong awareness of the bad in their own lives and society. In fact, some research finds that grateful people are slightly more likely to be cynical than the population as a whole. But the grateful person may achieve the ability to be aware of life’s drawbacks and yet thankful to be alive, an attractive combination of views (240).

President Gordon B. Hinckley, said the following in his book, Standing For Something:

The absence of gratitude bespeaks a lack of appreciation and an ignorance that comes of an attitude of self-sufficiency. It expresses itself in ugly egotism and, frequently, in malicious conduct. Many selfish, arrogant, and usually miserable people in this world walk without gratitude. Perhaps they do so because they do not fully realize all they have to be thankful for (90-91).

President Hinckley’s strong words bring up an important question. What do we have to be grateful for? I won’t attempt here to come up with an exhaustive list, but I’ll mention a few things that may seem small, but shouldn’t be overlooked. The shelter over our heads, not matter how shabby it may be when compared to other more opulent homes and apartments, the clothes that keep us warm, regardless of whether they are in style or not, the food we have to maintain our strength every day, even if it is no more than Top Raman. And that's not even mentioning living in a time when the fulness of the gospel is on the earth, our knowledge and faith in God, the manifestations and guidance of the Holy Ghost, and most importantly, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

It is not difficult to cultivate gratitude in our hearts. Elder David A. Bednar recommended that we periodically offer a prayer in which we only give thanks and express gratitude. He invited us to, “ask for nothing; simply let our souls rejoice and strive to communicate appreciation with all the energy of our hearts” (Ensign Nov 2008, 43). I wonder how many of us heard this council, intended to do it, but still haven’t got around to it. Until recently, I found myself in that category. Then, I decided to make my gratitude prayers a more regular thing. I am a systematic guy, and I need a schedule for myself in order to do anything with any sort of regularity. So, I decided that on Sundays, I would do as Elder Bednar instructs in my morning and evening prayers. In just a few weeks, I have seen a difference in the spirituality of my Sabbath worship.

Now I would like to present some of the findings of “gratitude research” as described in Mr. Easterbrook’s book. He quotes Robert Emmons, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis as saying, “Gratitude research is beginning to suggest that feelings of thankfulness have tremendous positive value in helping people cope with daily problems, especially stress, and to achieve a positive sense of the self” (238). Recent studies on the topic have also shown that:

People who describe themselves as feeling grateful to others, and either to God or to creation in general, tend to have higher vitality and more optimism, suffer less stress, and experience fewer episodes of clinical depression than the population as a whole. This result holds even when researchers factor out such things as age, health, and income--equalizing for the fact that the young, the well-to-do, or the hale and hearty might have more to be grateful for.
Grateful people tend to suffer less anxiety about status or the accumulation of material possessions. Partly because of this, they are more likely to describe themselves as happy or satisfied in life.
In an experiment with college students, those who kept a “gratitude journal,” a weekly record of things they feel grateful for, achieved better physical health, were more optimistic, exercised more regularly, and described themselves as happier than a control group of students who kept no journals but had the same overall measures of health, optimism, and exercise when the experiment began. (If the idea of a gratitude journal sounds familiar to you, it should. President Henry B. Eyring spoke of keeping his own “gratitude journal” in General Conference only a few years ago. I have adopted this practice into my regular schedule as well, documenting all the things that I have to be thankful for from the previous week in my journal on Sunday.)

I see this gratitude research as another example of how God knows what is best for us before we learn why it is good for us, much like recent scientific findings that support living the Word of Wisdom.

God has always commanded his people to express gratitude. Paul wrote to the Philippians, “with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God” (Phil. 4:6). And the Lord said to the Latter-day Saints through Joseph Smith, “But ye are commanded in all things to ask of God, who giveth liberally…doing all things with prayer and thanksgiving” (D&C 46:7). In the April 2007 General Conference, Sister Bonnie D. Parkin said that, “[God] has commanded us to be grateful because He knows being grateful will make us happy. This is another evidence of His love” (Ensign May 2007, 35).

Yet, despite all of this evidence that gratitude is in our best interest, a voice still whines at the back of our heads. “It’s easy for people to be grateful when they have money, and a house, and cars, and are married. I’ll be grateful sometime in the future, when life will be good and I’ll have something to be grateful for.” I hope you see the danger in this “grass-is-always-greener” reasoning, but if you don’t, here is what Mr. Easterbrook has to say on the people who are most grateful:

Grateful people are not necessarily ones whom the world has showered with gifts. People of modest means, or who have suffered personal tragedies, nevertheless may report themselves as grateful, while the well-to-do, the good-looking, or the celebrated may exhibit little gratitude. “To say we should feel grateful is not the say that everything in our lives is necessarily good,” [the psychologist Robert] Emmons says. “It just means that if you only think about your disappointments and unsatisfied wants, you may be prone to unhappiness. If you’re fully aware of your disappointments but at the same time thankful for the good that has happened and for your chance to live, you may show higher indices of well-being” (240).

I would like to close with a story from the book Our Heritage that beautifully illustrates this very thing. If ever a group of people had something to complain about it was the members of the Martin Handcart Company, which in 1856 walked to the Salt Lake Valley. As you probably know, they were caught in an early winter. At least 145 people died, and many of the survivors lost fingers, toes and limbs. They suffered through starvation, fatigue, frostbite, and many other afflictions. Our Heritage tells this story of one of the survivors:

A man who crossed the plains in the Martin handcart company lived in Utah for many years. One day he was in a group of people who began sharply criticizing the Church leaders for ever allowing the Saints to cross the plains with no more supplies or protection than a handcart company provided. The old man listened until he could stand no more; then he arose and said with great emotion:

“I was in that company and my wife was in it…. We suffered beyond anything you can imagine and many died of exposure and starvation, but did you ever hear a survivor of that company utter a word of criticism?...[We] came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives for we became acquainted with him in our extremities.

“I have pulled my handcart when I was so weak and weary from illness and lack of food that I could hardly put one foot ahead of the other. I have looked ahead and seen a patch of sand or a hill slope and I have said, I can go only that far and there I must give up, for I cannot pull the load through it…. I have gone on to that sand and when I reached it, the cart began pushing me. I have looked back many times to see who was pushing my cart, but my eyes saw no one. I knew then that the angels of God were there.

“Was I sorry that I chose to come by handcart? No. Neither then nor any minute of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay, and I am thankful that I was privileged to come in the Martin Handcart Company” (78).

This Thursday is Thanksgiving, and our minds will be turned to the many things that we should be grateful for. This is a good thing, and I hope we can all enjoy the hearty turkey dinners that will be prepared. My challenge, though, is that we not forget this gratitude once the turkey is gone and we’ve loosened our belts. Let us spend the rest of the year practicing “gratitude proficiency” instead of our customary “complaint proficiency.”

Talents and Gifts of the Spirit

2010-11-14T20:11:00.000-08:00

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lists what we have come to call the Gifts of the Spirit. These gifts, along with even more, are listed in the Book of Mormon and in the Doctrine and Covenants as well. We know that anyone who receives the Gift of the Holy Ghost is entitled to at least one Gift of the Spirit, but that members of the church don't have a monopoly on spiritual gifts. Many people who are not Mormons have gifts from God that they use to bless the lives of others. One example that comes readily to mind is Mother Theresa, who seems to have been blessed with the gift of charity.

But how can we tell the difference between a Gift of the Spirit and just a innate talent? For example, a friend of mine was baptized into the church when he was nineteen. After his baptism, people would compliment him on something that he was doing and say that it must be a spiritual gift. Only, he had been pretty good at doing that given thing before his baptism too. So is it a spiritual gift or just a talent?

I'm not sure I can give a definitive answer to this question, but I have come to some insights after thinking about it for a while. First, we know that all good things come from God. That's a given. Second, it is my opinion that the more good you are capable of doing in the world, the more evil you are capable of doing too. Or in other words, the more talents you have, the more influence you can have on the world. You determine whether that influence is for good or evil.

A classic example of this is Adolf Hitler. From what I gather, he was a great public speaker. People who heard him talk were captivated not only by what he had to say, but how he said it. He chose to use that talent to achieve horrific ends, but what if he had decided to do something good with that talent?

I'm sure that I can say that Hitler's public speaking abilities came from God, but I do give credit to God for my talents. I consider the things I am good at as spiritual gifts, even if I would have had these talents if I had never heard of the church. So, I find it very difficult to distinguish between an innate ability, or a talent, and a spiritual gift. I'm starting to think that they are one and the same. The real difference is in how we use them.

The Censorship We Should Fear

2010-10-03T21:29:00.001-07:00

If you weren’t aware—and there is no real reason why you should be aware unless you are involved in some way with books—this past week was Banned Books Week. This week always annoys me. It is when every elitist Manhattenite in the book industry laughs at the quaint, religious, backwater yokels who are afraid that their children will become witches after reading Harry Potter.

Now, I don’t agree with most of the challenges that are raised against many books—I don’t think that reading Harry Potter will make anyone a witch—but I do think that we should be very careful about what we expose children to. I am not a parent, but I hope to be one someday, and I will be sure to keep explicit sex, violence, drug use, profanity and the like away from them. I plan on making careful and informed decisions about what I allow them to read, watch, listen to, etc.

One of the big stories in Banned Book Week was about someone calling the book Speak “soft porn,” obviously implying that it isn’t appropriate for the audience it was written for: teenagers. Recently, some people have even called for a book rating system. This makes people in the book industry scream about their First Amendment rights. They argue that a rating system will affect what an author writes because he or she will be writing for a specific rating. They see it as a form or censorship.

I see it as a matter of trust. Parents don’t trust authors and publishers to produce literature that is appropriate for the age that it’s targeting. They go to great lengths to encourage their children to read only to find that they don’t approve of what passes for children’s literature these days. Because that trust has been shattered, they feel like they need some way to control what their child reads short of prereading everything. If publishers and authors were trustworthy, we wouldn’t have this problem. If a rating system for books was enacted, I would prefer it to be more like this website’s movie ratings.

But I also think that this distracts us from the censorship that we should be looking out for. The First Amendment wasn’t written to stop some soccer mom from keeping Twilight off the shelves of the local elementary school library. It was written to prevent the government from silencing dissent. Everyone has the freedom to say or write or publish whatever they want. That’s an inalienable right. That doesn’t mean, though, that anyone has to listen to them. Choosing not to listen is not censorship. Preventing from speaking is. The soccer mom doesn’t have that power on a large enough scale to matter. The government does.

Rationalized Obedience

2010-09-05T19:09:00.000-07:00

We are all aware of the dangers of rationalizing sin. Someone will say that they can get as much out of a Sunday afternoon in a park as they could get out of church services, or that one drink of wine isn’t a big deal, or that premarital sex is acceptable as long as the two people love each other. We recognize these pathetic excuses for what they are—excuses to engage in sin—and try to avoid them. However, I get the sense that we Mormons sometimes rationalize the obedience that we render to the unique commandments that we observe.

We Mormons are a peculiar people mostly because of the strict moral code that we adhere to, and which the rest of the world doesn’t. We don’t shop on Sunday in observation of the Sabbath. We don’t use tobacco or alcohol. And, as referenced above, we don’t engage in extramarital sexual relations. To the rest of the world, we are weird for doing all of these things.

These things distinguish us as a people, but why do we do them? That is what many people want to know when they first meet a Mormon. You don’t do this? Can you do that? Why? Why not? When confronted with these questions, we have to justify our behavior. We have to help these people understand. So we explain that having a day in which we don’t worry about getting work or chores done makes the rest of the week more productive, and science has shown that tobacco and alcohol are damaging to the body, and that abstinence is the only sure guard against sexually transmitted diseases and prevents the emotional stress that uncommitted sex can cause, both to the partners and to the child born out of wedlock.

All of these benefits that we cite are true benefits of living these commandments, but are they the real reasons for which we obey them? Did the leaders of our church read studies about the damaging effects of tobacco and react by prohibiting it universally for all church members? Did they command us to be abstinent in a response to the growing number of children born without fathers in the home? And how to we reconcile our obedience when the science goes against it, like when doctors say that one glass of wine a night is healthy?

These commandments that we follow are God’s immutable laws. They are not based on research, but revelation. We abstain from all of these things that the rest of the world engages in because God, through his prophet, commanded us to. We get blessings of health, both physical and mental, and strong family relationships as a result, but we would still be obliged to obey God’s commandments even without these blessings.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t explain to people the blessings that we get from obedience, but that that is where we should finish, not where we should start. We should start with something more fundamental, like the faith that is expressed in the phrase, “Because God commanded me to.”

The Definition of Morality

2010-08-22T17:59:00.001-07:00

This week, I had the pleasure to read Freakonimics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. While I give the book my highest recommendation to the curious reader, I want to take this opportunity to pick a bone with the definition of morality that the authors use repeatedly in the book. This is how they state their definition of morality, “Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work” (p. 11).

This definition of morality makes the people who care about living moral lives seem like naïve do-gooders who go around wearing rose colored glasses and are oblivious as to what the world is actually like. Considering myself a moral person, I take offense at that characterization.

The authors define economics elsewhere in the book as the study of how people get what they want. They argue that people respond to incentives and that sometimes incentives are set up that encourage immoral behavior. These incentives motivate teachers to change their students’ standardized test scores, sumo wrestlers to throw matches, and real estate agents to accept a lower offer than could be found for a given house. I don’t disagree with the authors’ assessment of these situations. The incentives are set up to encourage cheating. I am a moral person and I understand how the world actually does work.

Morality, at least in its truest sense, is doing the right thing even though it is economically advantageous to you to do the wrong thing. I will most likely be taking the LSAT next summer. If I get a high score on that test I will be able to get into better schools, which will translate into a better chance of getting a job upon completing law school, and a strong likelihood of getting a better paying job at that. It also gives me a better chance to get financial aid. So, I have a lot of financial incentives to get the highest score possible on this test.

Since I’m fairly confident that the Law School Admissions Council has thought of most of the possible ways to cheat on the test and has put into place ways to catch potential cheaters, it isn’t in my best interest to cheat, because if I get caught cheating, I’m losing out on every economic incentive that is available to me using my own intellect. It is in my best interest to study and learn all I can before showing up on the test day. My decision to not cheat could be a manifestation of my own moral strength, or it could just be a manifestation of my desire to not get caught.

But let’s imagine that I have a group of friends who are also going to take the LSAT and one of them has devised a method to game the system. He has detailed knowledge of all of the cheater finding strategies and is absolutely certain that this cheating will not be detected.

Here I am faced with a choice. I can take the test with my own abilities and risk getting a low score, or I can use this cheating method, and have a reasonable expectation that I will not get caught and can guarantee the greatest possible economic payout. I hope that the moral decision is obvious to you, the reader, and that you aren’t so naïve as to wonder why these hopeful law students would consider cheating.

Now I want to address the most controversial topic covered in Freakonomics. In Chapter 4, the authors argue that the single greatest factor causing the severe drop in crime over the past two decades is Roe v. Wade. They argue that the women who are getting the most abortions—low income, single, poorly educated—are the women who would be the worst mothers, giving their unwanted child a higher probability to live a life of crime. Since these children aren’t being born, there are fewer criminals around.

Some people have been outraged by this argument. They see abortion as morally reprehensible and can’t accept that anything good can come out of its practice. I also see abortion as morally reprehensible but can’t see any flaw with the authors’ reasoning. It makes perfect sense. But if abortion is bad but causes less crime, which is good, does that make abortion good?

Of course not. A moral person does not live under the delusion that there will be no negative consequences of moral behavior or no positive consequences of immoral behavior. Sure, because of abortion, many future potential criminals aren’t being born, but if we really wanted to lower crime, we could impose the death penalty for anyone convicted of any crime—murder, assault, drug trafficking, vandalism, shoplifting, speeding, etc. I am absolutely certain that this would cause the crime rate to plummet to next to nil. However, it doesn’t take a moral giant to see that it would be a very immoral thing to do.

Missionary Heroes

2010-08-15T17:40:00.001-07:00

Everyone is the hero (or heroine, as the case may be) of their own story. Fiction writers need to understand this so that their secondary characters feel like real people. They have their own values and their own motivations. Their raison d'être is not to provide support the story’s hero, but to live their own life. Likewise, I am not a supporting character in the story of my life. I am the hero.

We Mormons have lots of missionary heroes from the Book of Mormon, Ammon being the most famous. Ammon is everything that a future missionary wants to be. He’s zealous, charismatic, dynamic, brave, humble, faithful, knowledgeable, and any number of other positive attributes. On top of all that, he goes on one of the greatest missions in history. He cuts off a bunch of bad guys’ arms, converts a king, and ultimately an entire kingdom. He is a hero worth emulating and missionaries would do well to strive to be like him.

However, it is important to remember that Ammon is a hero of the Book of Mormon, and he’s the hero of his own story, but he isn’t the hero of King Lamoni’s story, the man he teaches. King Lamoni is the hero of his own story, Ammon is merely a secondary character. That is not to say that Ammon is unimportant, or that his efforts weren’t vital in bringing King Lamoni to the truth, but that without King Lamoni’s own efforts to understand and accept what Ammon was teaching, those efforts would have been to no effect.

Too often I see missionaries that see themselves as the hero of every story they are in. They are rightly the hero of their own story, but they are egotistical to think that they are the hero of every person they teach and baptize. Using my missionary experience as an example, I don’t see myself as a necessary component in the stories of any of the people I taught and baptized. I strived to be the best missionary I could be, to teach as diligently and as clearly and as powerfully as I could, but I refuse to believe that those people wouldn’t have been baptized if I chose not to serve a mission. They are the heroes of their own stories. I didn’t convert them, they converted themselves. My blessing for serving a mission was just being a character, in any capacity in their stories. The great blessing of serving a mission is accepting that role, changing your raison d'être, and witnessing the miracle of conversion firsthand.

Priorities

2010-07-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

So, this is my first blog post in a little over three months. I’m pretty sure that I don’t have scores of adoring fans out there in cyberspace waiting with baited breath for my next brilliant utterance, but I started this blog with the intention of posting every week for my own exercise, for the habit of forcing myself to write every week, with the hopes that someone would read it, enjoy it, and maybe even glean something from it.

The first few weeks I missed because I got a full-time job and was still in the middle of a heavy semester of grad school. After the semester ended, I needed a break on Sundays, when I normally write these posts. After I had rested, I was too busy with friends inviting me to do things. Long story short: I always had excuses. Which got me thinking about priorities.

When we really value something, we make it a priority. I like sports, so I make sure to plan TV watching time around the sporting events that I want to watch. I value literature, so I make time to read whenever I can. I also value money--which may not be obvious by my chosen profession--so I make sure to check my accounts every day (to be sure no one is taking my money) and I monitor my credit regularly (I don’t think that my valuing of money is excessive, just safe). So, if I really value my blog and my writing and the thought that goes into it, I need to make it a priority and write every week. So, all of you readers out there in cyberspace have my word that I will make this blog a priority from now on.

Now, I want to talk about making God a priority. Jesus taught that the greatest commandment was to love God with all of our heart, might, mind, and strength (Matthew 22:35-38). In my mind if you love someone, you make that person a priority. For example, if I love someone, I won’t tell them that I’ll see if I have time to spend with them after I get all my errands done, and after I play videogames for a while, and after I watch this movie, and after I read some from this really great book that I just picked up. I will make the time with the person I love first, and if I have time for anything else, I’ll squeeze in time for those other things too (assuming that I could do important errands with the person I love).

So, time for God shouldn’t just be when we have some extra time some odd Sunday to get to church. We should put Him first. That doesn’t mean that we have to be monks and nuns to make God happy with the time we are giving Him, just like the person you love should understand that you have to go to work and that you have other interests and hobbies that you want to pursue. We just need to make sure that He is not an afterthought.

After all, His work and glory is to bring to pass our immortality and eternal life (Moses 1:39). Of all the things He could be doing with His time, we are His priority. This is how He shows His love for us, His children. It is only fitting that we should reciprocate that love.

Why Seek Ye the Living Among the Dead?

2010-04-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

With my limited time this weekend, I just wanted to send out a brief note about the significance of what we celebrate on Easter. In a time when it is deemed unreasonable to think that Jesus was anything more than an ordinary man, anything more than an extraordinary teacher, or that his death was anything more than an ordinary death, it is all the more important to vigorously proclaim what is unreasonable.

Jesus was more than an ordinary man. He lived as the Son of God. He lived a perfect life, taught with the authority of a God, took upon himself our sins as part of his agonizing death on the cross, and rose from the dead three days later. All of that didn’t happen figuratively. He was dead. His spirit left his body. Three days later, it entered that body again and he was resurrected and perfected. He still lives today.

Of course these things are unreasonable. If they weren’t they wouldn’t mean anything. They wouldn’t be extraordinary. They wouldn’t be worth declaring.

God Laughs

2010-03-28T13:33:00.002-07:00

My favorite movie of all time is It’s a Wonderful Life, and one of my favorite scenes from the movie is when George Bailey is sitting in a bar, distressed over the five thousand dollars that has gone missing from his business, and prays for some help. Immediately after he finishes praying, a man punches him in the mouth. When his guardian angel asks about his fat lip, he says, “This is what I get for praying.” I have felt like George Bailey many times in my life.

One of the concerns that has weighed most heavily on my mind since moving out to Boston has been finding employment. I have been living off of school loans, and while I’m grateful that I have that means to support myself right now, I can’t help but think with every dollar that I spend that I’ll have to pay for it again, with interest. I’m not used to not working, and it made me very uncomfortable.

I had been applying for jobs, but with the job market the way it is, I wasn’t getting many responses. I was qualified for these jobs, but people who were far more qualified were getting them. I was starting to think that I’d have to take anything, even waiter jobs--which I swore I would never do again--in order to survive.

I made my job search the focus of my prayers when I went to the temple about a month ago. With the reverence and comfort I feel in the temple, it is far easier to focus my payers and really communicate with God, and when I left, I felt like I had made my case sufficiently clear. I had had a phone interview for a job earlier that week, and as I drove home, I wasn’t expecting to get a call that very day saying I’d gotten the job, but I also wasn’t expecting to have an email telling me I hadn’t got the job waiting for me either. As you can probably guess, the latter is exactly what happened. I looked up into the heavens and sighed, “So, this is what I get for praying.”

I think that God likes to laugh at our shortsightedness, much like a parent may laugh when their child bites off more than he can chew. But since God is a perfect parent, He doesn’t just laugh for His own amusement, He laughs to help us see with a wider vision. The punch to the mouth wasn’t the answer to George Bailey’s prayer (I know I’m using a fictionalized story to illustrate my point, but I think it works). Everything that comes after that is the answer to his prayer, and even then, not all of it is pleasant--if you don’t know what happens, I suggest you see the movie at your earliest convenience. Likewise, that email wasn’t the answer to my prayer, that wouldn’t come until later.

That very afternoon, I got another email in my inbox. This one was from a fellow ward member and she was letting the members of the ward know about a job opening where she works. The job was advertised as a “great way to get into publishing.” Since that is exactly what I want to get into, I jumped at the possibility. Even at this point I didn’t want to assume that this was the answer to my prayer because there was no guarantee that I would get the job. I calmed myself and took it all one step at a time, trying not to assume that I knew what God’s purpose was until He decided to make it known.

To make a long story short, I know work at Boston Common Press, publisher of Cook’s Illustrated, Cook’s Country, and various cookbooks, as the office manager. I’ll be making enough money to cover my expenses, and I have the possibility of moving into the editorial side of things. Now God is probably laughing that I even wanted a job right now. My schedule is as full as it has ever been and I will be running myself ragged until the end of this semester, but I’ll laugh along with Him. I know that the business won’t laugh forever, that it’s a means to an end. And I know that with His help, I’ll reach the end I’m working toward.

God Laughs

2010-03-28T13:33:00.001-07:00

Mormon Art and Babies

2010-03-07T14:11:00.001-08:00

I have a love/hate relationship with Mormon art, which includes painting, sculpture, music, fiction, movies, etc. (I will focus in this post more on fiction and film, because that’s where I have more experience, but I think that what I write below applies to painting and sculpture as well. I won’t even touch music because I don’t know enough about it to write about it.) I want to like it. After all, it is from and for the demographic that I belong to. It addresses concerns that I share and speaks the language that I speak. From all objective indicators, the indicators that marketing people would use to determine the audience for a given work of art, I should like it. But, most of the time I don’t. I don’t think that it is worth my time when there are great works of art to be enjoyed by people outside the Church. Yet, I feel like if I don’t support these fledgling artistic endeavors to create something wholesome and good, I’m betraying my beliefs.

I should make it clear that I don’t think that any Mormon has any obligation to financially support anything that they don’t want to support. It doesn’t matter if it is made by a Mormon, sold by a Mormon, or packaged to appeal to a Mormon, business and faith should never be combined and anyone who says differently shouldn’t be trusted. However, one thing that Mormons tend to complain a lot about is decadence in the mass media. Movies are too violent, there’s too much sex on television, and most magazines are borderline pornographic. We complain, yet we still fork out or money for that super-violent, ultra-crude summer blockbuster (cough…Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen) or tune in every week to see television bring out the worst in people (cough…reality tv).

And when a good wholesome movie made my people who share our faith comes around, we intend to put it on our Netflix queue someday, but never seem to get around to it (I’m talking about myself, here). The literary part of me wants to say that if Mormons bothered to make good movies or write good fiction, I’d be more willing to lay down my hard earned dollars for it. The moral part of me argues that if I support these artists, their art will get better--after all, Mormon art is young and is still developing.

I think we kind of have to treat Mormon art as if we were a parent and it were a baby. In a global perspective, taking a step is no big deal. Billions of people do it thousands of times a day. But for a baby, it is a big deal. It shows that the child is developing into a healthy child. So you congratulate that child much more than you would congratulate your uncle if he were to do the same thing. However, if that baby chose not to take any more steps for the rest of his life, but decided that the one was enough, you would do something to motivate him to walk because you don’t want him to be stuck as a baby. As much as you like baby’s, a human being cannot be a baby for its whole life.

Mormon art is currently in the baby phase. It’s taking a few steps and I think that we should reward those steps by buying tickets to those movies or copies of those books. But if we ever get the feeling that it won’t progress beyond those few steps, if we get the sense that it has decided to not progress, then we should indicate that we are not pleased. It’s a hard balance to maintain, just as it is hard for parents to maintain the balance between rewarding success and demanding further achievement, but I think that Mormons with discerning tastes, and I know that there are a lot of us out there, can start to make that happen.

What is Love?

2010-02-14T15:08:00.000-08:00

I was flipping through the channels a while ago when I fell upon an interview with a starlet who had just gone through a divorce. I normally would have blown right by the program on my way to ESPN, but something she said caught my attention. The interviewer asked her how she was coping with being alone again, to which she responded, “Nothing lasts forever, much less love.”

I wanted to protest, to clarify her grievous misunderstanding of what love is and what it can do, but the television is, unfortunately, a one-way communication device. She could not hear me.

But then I started thinking about what I’ve learned about love from popular culture about love. I’ve learned that I can’t buy me love, that love can drive you crazy, that love is a long, long road, that you can be love sick, love drunk and a soldier of love, that love stinks, that all is love, and that all you need is love. Sometimes, though, you don’t get any real answer in popular culture about love. Instead, you get a question: What is Love? (Baby don’t hurt me, baby don’t hurt me, no more.)

That’s not a very deep understanding of what love is. So, I decided that I would look to God’s revealed word to find out what He has to say about love. Even there, though, I didn’t get a definitive answer. The scriptures use the word love in so many different contexts, such as the following:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting live” (John 3:16).

“Jesus saith unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord they God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matt. 22:37-39).

“And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell the of” (Gen. 22:2).

“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Eph. 5:25).

“That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children” (Titus 2:4).

“And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her” (Gen. 29:20).

The word love cannot mean exactly the same thing in all of these passages. The love God has for us is not exactly the same as the love we should have for Him. The love someone has for a neighbor is not exactly the same the love shared between a husband and wife, while the love the husband and wife have for their children is different still. And the love that Jacob had for Rachel is the kind of love that all of us single people are looking for. Is it any wonder that someone might be confused about love, when it can be used in so many different contexts?

I found a quote from Gordon B. Hinckley in his book Standing For Something. He says, “If the world is to be improved, the process of love must make a change in the hearts of humans. It can do so when we look beyond self to give our love to God and others, and do so with all our hearts, with all our souls, and all our minds.

“As we look with love and gratitude to God, and as we serve others with no apparent recompense for ourselves, there will come a greater sense of service toward our fellow human beings, less thinking of self and more reaching out to others. This principle of love is the basic essence of goodness” (p. 9).

That definition of love sounded a lot like the definition of charity, which is the pure love of Christ. It is a selflessness that can enhance every kind of relationship. God sacrificed His Son as a selfless act for us, His children. We obey His commandments out of love, not only because we want the promised blessings if we do. Husbands and wives should serve one another and they should both sacrifice to satisfy their children’s temporal and spiritual needs. And any service rendered for a loved one should seem like a small price, just as Jacob’s seven years of service seemed to him but a few days.

This kind of love doesn’t seem like the kind of love that pop culture talks about. It seems like so much more. And as Mormon wrote to his son, Moroni, it is far more enduring that whatever that starlet felt for her ex-husband. “I am filled with charity,” he writes, “which is an everlasting love” (Moroni 8:17).

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

Simon Peter: The Unauthorized Biography

2010-02-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve always been bothered by the way Peter, the Apostle, is talked about in religious discussions. Some scorn him for his lack of courage and others praise him for overcoming his moments of weakness and becoming a powerful instrument in the Lord’s hands. Both characterizations ring false to me. They don’t adequately explain the entire New Testament record that we have of him.

We know that Peter did deny Christ three times, but we also know that he “smote high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear” (John 18:10) when Judas came to betray Jesus with “a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees…with lanterns and torches and weapons” (John 18:3). The other gospels describe this group as “a great multitude with swords and staves” (Matt. 26:47, Mark 14:43). I would imagine that this multitude outnumbered the people with Christ, and that they were better armed. Many of them were probably soldiers. Yet Peter attacked them first. I can’t understand how he could be so zealous in the garden, yet so craven only a few hours later. With the rest of this post, I will present an alternative narrative to explain Peter’s actions here. I don’t present this as doctrine or the absolute truth, but as another way of understanding the scriptures and the people they teach us about, based on what they tell us.

The narrative starts at the Last Supper. This is where Christ, according to the popular understanding of these events, prophesies that Peter will deny Him. But the language Christ uses here is very important. He says, “Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice” (Mark 14:30). God frequently uses the future tense in commands, not necessarily prophecies. Just look at the Ten Commandments and all of the “thou shalts” that it uses (Exodus 20). But why would Jesus command anyone, let alone His chief Apostle, to deny Him? Right before this, Peter declared, “I am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death” (Luke 22:33).

Peter was perfectly willing to die for the man he knew to be the Christ. In fact, I get the feeling that he wanted to die for Him. Nothing would have been more glorious than giving his life for the man he worshipped. But that is not what Christ had in mind for him. Christ needed him to lead the church, no to die in some futile attempt to stave off the inevitable.

With this understanding, we see Peter’s reckless attack on the high priest’s servant as brave, but stupid, disobedience. Peter hasn’t yet got the message, so Christ tells him to put his sword away. Jesus has to help his overzealous disciple understand that this is supposed to happen. This isn’t a battle for Peter to fight.

Even still, while all of his other disciples “forsook him, and fled” (Mark 14:50), Peter followed. Being anywhere near Christ at that point was the most dangerous place for a disciple to be. The people wanted to kill the master, I can’t imagine that they would have treated the disciple any better. Despite the danger, Peter was there, as close as he could get to his Lord. When he was exposed as one of the Christ’s followers, he knew he had a choice to make, declare his allegiance to a condemned man and suffer the same fate, or deny it and escape with his life, as Christ commanded him. He chose obedience, even though the pain of it made him weep.

As the culmination of this narrative, the resurrected Christ asks Peter three times if he loves him not as a backhanded way of saying, “See, I told you so,” but as a reward. Peter suffered through helplessly watching the Messiah die, but it was not without a purpose. Peter was meant to “feed [the Lord’s] sheep” (John 21:17).

What is Man?

2010-01-31T17:15:00.000-08:00

A week ago, one of my professors posed a question to my class. What makes a man a man? What would have to happen to a man to make him no longer a man? If he lost a leg would he still be a man? If he lost an arm? What if he lost all four of his limbs? We all seemed to be of the consensus that he would still be a man, albeit an armless, legless one.

At this point one girl remarked that if he lost his head he would be a dead man, to which we all laughed.

Okay, my professor said, what if he was barking like a dog, living like a dog? Or some other animal? Well, physically he would still be a man. Only his behavior would be different from most other men, and I couldn’t say that that would change the essence of what he is.

I started thinking about metaphysical attributes that humans possess and mere animals do not to try and determine if a man could lose one these attributes and be no more than a man. Humans are self-aware, whereas animals are not. We can contemplate our own existence, and ask questions about it. Animals cannot, as far as we can tell. Maybe being self-aware is what makes human life meaningful. But, then I thought of babies, which, to all intents and purposes are little more than human shaped slugs. They aren’t self-aware. They aren’t asking questions about their existence. They just cry when they’re hungry or tired or cold or when they’ve messed themselves and are uncomfortable. I can’t make a philosophical distinction between a baby and a man since all of the potential for manhood his there in a baby boy. Even without self-awareness, a man is still a man.

My professor then asked if a man without a conscience would still be a man. The ability to know right from wrong is another key difference between humans and animals. Many people in the class conceded that the lack of a conscience would turn a man into something else. I almost agreed with them, thinking of the horrors perpetrated by serial killers and rapists and the like. Surely they are something less than human. But then I thought of grown men with mental deficiencies that make them unable to distinguish right from wrong. Are these people something different from men because they happen to have this mental deficiency? I had to answer that they are men, even though they have such a deficiency.

I kept thinking about one of the scriptures that I used over and over again to teach people about our relationship to God: Romans 8:16-17. It reads, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” That doesn’t just apply to people we like or people who behave in ways that we approve of, but every person on the earth.

I had to say that nothing could make a man less than a man, nor could anything make a woman less than a woman. Or in other words, nothing could happen to a human being to make him or her something less. There is something divine and sacred in human life, and nothing can take that away. If he demote someone to less than human when they do something horrific, as our favorite villains of the twentieth century, the Nazis, did, what we are really saying is that we don’t want to go through the effort of understanding them. (I won’t reiterate here what I recently wrote on the Nazis, but if you’d like to read it you can here) Animals don’t do the things they do for any rational reason, they just do things, and we want to think that no rational being would do anything horrific, so we say that they are less than human. Yet, man is capable of committing horrors. And, if guilty, man is worthy of the just punishment, which may be death.

At the same time, innocent human life is precious and should be preserved for its own sake. The devaluing of human life for any reason is the first step on the road to euthanasia, abortion, and even eugenics. All of these destroy the greatest of God’s creations: human life and the free agency it is endowed with. That is why I could not draw any line of when a man would become something else. Once a man, always a man. Once a woman, always a woman. Forgetting that gets us into dangerous philosophical ground. Forgetting that, I believe, makes it so much easier for us to commit horrors on our brothers and sisters.

Faith’s Proof

2010-01-17T19:13:00.000-08:00

The Book of Mormon recounts an experience that the prophet Alma had with a man named Korihor. This Korihor was going around saying that the prophecies of God’s prophets, many of which concerned the coming of Jesus Christ, (this was before Christ’s birth in Bethlehem) were not true because “no man can know of anything which is to come” (Alma 30:13). He taught that no one can know of things that they cannot see, and that faith in the coming Messiah was the “effect of a frenzied mind” (16). “And many more such things did he say unto them, telling them that there could be no atonement made for the sins of men, but every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime” (17).

This passage in the Book of Mormon is so fascinating. Korihor, a man from the first century B. C., is making the same arguments that the wise and the learned are making in the 21st century. These arguments are not modern or new. People have been saying the same things for millennium, so the faithful should not fear them. We’ve dealt with them before.

Getting back to the story, Korihor ends up resorting to murder to win an argument and is subsequently brought before Alma to be judged. They get into an interesting theological debate and when Korihor asks Alma to show him proof of God’s existence in a sign, Alma responds with these words: “Thou hast had signs enough; will ye tempt your God? Will ye say, Show unto me a sign, when ye have the testimony of all these thy brethren, and also all the holy prophets? The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator” (44).

Alma’s answer doesn’t satisfy the rational and scientific modern mind. Nature obeys basic laws of physics like gravitation and thermodynamics. The motions of the planets and all of the things are not evidence of God’s existence because they can be explained scientifically. The scientific mind sees no place for God there.

In some respects, I have to agree with science on this one. Alma is taking one of his own assumptions, that the order of the universe denotes the existence of a Creator of that order, and demanding that Korihor accept it. Korihor doesn’t.

Yet, even though Alma doesn’t prove God’s existence with his rebuttal, he illuminates an important principle of faith. Alma can’t prove God’s existence to Korihor. He knows that he can’t. So, he does the next best thing: he declares his faith in God. To Alma, nature and the motion of the planets and everything else, witness that there is a Supreme Creator because he has chosen to believe in that Supreme Creator. He has had personal experiences with God that have confirmed that faith and as a result, he sees proof of God’s existence everywhere he looks. Korihor can look at the same scene and see only dirt, rocks, a few trees and the sky. He doesn’t see what Alma sees because he chooses not to.

Philosophers and scholars have been trying to prove and disprove God’s existence for ages. I find some arguments more compelling than others, but when you come down to it, none of them actually does what it seeks out to do. Those trying to prove God’s existence always run into the wall of only having secondary evidence to make their case and those trying to disprove it always run into the wall of trying to prove a negative and end up sounding like people trying to disprove the existence of bears because they never saw one at the zoo. In the end, I can only prove God’s existence to one person: myself. The evidence cannot be used outside the courtroom of my own conscience.

I think that God wants it this way. God wants us to rely on faith. After all, it is the first principle of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If He wanted to prove His own existence, He surly could. He chooses not to because He wants us to rely on faith, when things are going well for us and when things are not going well. He wants our faith to be tried and tested, not coddled and obvious.

Korihor chose not to have that faith. He continued to demand a sign, so Alma gave him one. He was struck dumb. Later on, he was trampled and killed. It’s funny. Being struck dumb didn’t cause Korihor to change his life and serve God. I guess he figured that there was a perfectly rational and scientific explanation for why his vocal chords gave out right when Alma said they would. There’s always a perfectly rational and scientific explanation for those kinds of things.

So This is the New Year…And I Don’t Feel Any Different

2010-01-04T14:31:00.000-08:00

I’ve never really liked New Year’s Eve, and this past one was the second worst I’ve ever had. I flew from California to Boston on the 31st and landed with a splitting headache and some real stomach discomfort. I got to my apartment at about 10:30, crawled into my bed and didn’t move until about 12:30, when I turned off the light and fell asleep. Only one of the twenty-six New Year’s Eves that I’ve celebrated has been quite as bad as that, but I still don’t like it. Usually on New Year’s Eve, people get all excited and talk about new beginnings and blank slates and stay up until midnight and watch the ball drop and sing “Old Lang Syne” if they can remember all of the words.

Well, every year, I stay up and watch the ball drop and go to bed and wake up the next day and…well, life hasn’t changed much. I have to remember to write the date as ’10 now instead of ’09, which I will consistently forget to do until about June, but other than that, I’m in pretty much the same situation I was in on December 31st: my student debt hasn’t gone away, I still don’t have a job, and this coming semester of graduate school is looking to be even worse than the last one.

So what’s with all the talk about new beginnings and blank slates?

I was thinking about that in church yesterday and had an interesting thought. The New Year doesn’t give anyone a blank slate. Yes, it’s fun to go to a party and to watch a ball drop as everyone else in the world is watching that same ball drop (unless they happen to live in a different time zone as you do, then you’re watching it one or more hours before or after them) but you have to admit that New Year’s is pretty meaningless. It’s an excuse to party and (if you’re not Mormon) drink till you pass out. That’s it.

What really provides a blank slate is Jesus Christ. We all make mistakes. We say something we don’t mean, or mean but don’t intend to say that hurts someone else. We neglect to go out of our way to offer help that someone could probably use, but we’re not sure and we wouldn’t want to offend them by offering our help. We take our loved ones for granted, we take what isn’t ours, we take offense where none is intended. All of us do things we wish we hadn’t. All of us sin, and that sin weighs us down. I know that it’s not popular in our modern world to talk about sin, but it’s real and ignoring it won’t make it go away. A New Year won’t make it go away either.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ provides lots of new beginnings. One almost every week, in fact. When we are baptized, we are washed clean of all our past sins. We come out of the water completely clean. After that, we got to church each week and partake of the Sacrament (the name we Mormons use for what other churches call the Eucharist or Holy Supper). If we are repentant as we eat of the bread and water, we renew our baptism and are clean again. We have a blank slate. And we can resolve then and there that we’ll be a little better in the coming week.

A real blank slate is not something that comes with the changing of a calendar. It’s not something you celebrate with late night parties, confetti and a giant ball. Don’t get me wrong. Next December 31st, I don’t want to be lying in bed. I want to be among good company and eating good food. Even more, I want to have a lovely lady that I can kiss to start 2011. But that’s just the day that I’ll have to start writing the date twice every time I sign something. My new beginning I celebrate quietly every Sunday.

Some Thoughts on Christmas

2009-12-25T15:45:00.000-08:00

Black Friday is the worst way possible to start the Christmas season. It is the single most shameful manifestation of American consumerist society. It starts the month during which we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ with our collective sights firmly set on what most of our culture seems to worship: stuff.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against giving gifts on Christmas, or even getting gifts, for that matter. Gifts, in fact, are a way to commemorate the first Christmas. In case you forgot in your mad dash to get your hands on the latest electronics for deep discounts, our gifts at Christmas are meant to echo the gifts that the wise men left the newborn babe in Bethlehem, and I don’t think the wise men were paying their credit cards off until the second Christmas.

Of course, everyone knows all of this. No one will honestly say that they love Christmas for the mad shopping sprees and expensive booty that they rake in. But I even have a problem with what people claim as the “Reason for the Season” when they’re being honest.

“It’s about serving others,” they say. Or, “It’s about spending time with family.”

Okay. Those things are nice, and are some of the things that I enjoy about Christmas. But, whereas getting gifts is a tertiary benefit of the season, those other reasons are secondary. The primary reason we celebrate Christmas is to commemorate the birth of the Son of God, who was born to “save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). Because of that birth over two thousand years ago, and the Atonement that that baby would ultimately perform, all of our service and all of our family relationships would be meaningless.

I like to imagine myself in the fields with the shepherds who were watching over their fields by night. I wonder what it would have been like to suddenly see an angel and hear him make the pronouncement, “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). Would I have known that I was witnessing the second most important moment in the history of the world? Would I have reached out to touch the newborn Christ? Would I have recognized in Him the King of Kings and Lord of Lords?

It is because of Him, his birth, life, and Atoning sacrifice (which is the most important moment in the history of the world) that makes all our service and our cherished relationships meaningful. Without Him, no matter much service we did in this life, we, with those whom we serve, would all be condemned to die and stay that way forever. Without Him, we would have no hope of seeing our family again after this life. Because He now lives, we will all live again. Because He took upon Himself our sins, we can overcome them, and one day live the life that our Heavenly Father lives with our families with us. He is not only the “Reason for the Season,” He is the reason for everything. He is the only thing that makes life worth living.

Of course, all of you know that, and I thank any of you who have read this far for humoring me as I put some of my thoughts into words. So, I will reward all of you faithful readers out there. Do yourselves a favor and get a copy of the film The Nativity Story. It’s a magnificent film that tells the story of Christ’s birth with great reverence. If it’s too late to enjoy it this year, get it in time for next Christas. It’ll be a great addition to your Christmas movie collection, alongside It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf, and A Christmas Story.

The Right Question

2009-12-13T18:08:00.000-08:00

While we were in Europe, my family traveled north from Italy to Munich, Germany. Near to Munich, is Dachau Concentration Camp. I think that it was only fitting that we were there in November, when the trees were bare and the air was chill. It made the grounds harsh and uninviting. That’s the only way that place should feel.

Nazi Germany is an enigma to most modern people. It’s something were still grappling with as a society. That’s why books and movies about the Second World War are so popular. We still have questions that haven’t been answered. The main question is how could it have happened? How could they have done such horrible things?

Maybe they all suffered from mass hysteria. But that answer is really a non-answer. It doesn’t help us understand what happened. Reason and motive does not enter the brain of the hysterical. We have nothing to learn from them.

Maybe the Germans are a hateful people. But that just gives us an excuse to dismiss them. Hateful people are wrong, therefore I don’t need to understand them. We aren’t going to get any answers that way. And can we really believe that they are or were more hateful than any other people?

Maybe they were easily manipulated by their leaders. The Germans? They are one of the best educated nations on the planet. The notion that all of them were just used for the personal vendetta of their leaders is silly. Also, that argument just delays the question. Eventually we are going to want to know why their leaders would want to kill millions of people.

I think that these answers are hard to come by because we aren’t asking the right questions. Instead of asking, “How could they have done that?” we should ask, “What would I have done in their place?” That changes the way we think about the problem and gives us a better chance of solving it.

Between the world wars, Germany suffered one of the worst financial collapses ever experienced. To pay for its debt from the first war, the government just printed money until the German Mark was worth next to nothing. People would burn heaps of them for warmth. Milton Bradley collected them to put in the Monopoly game because that cost less than printing his own fake money. When the currency was hyperinflated, people’s savings became worthless. Businesses went under and unemployment was rampant.

Enter the young, charismatic leader of a new political party. The leader: Adolf Hitler. The party: the National Socialists. Hitler promised to put the country back on track. He promised to solve these economic problems. He promised to give people jobs again.

And in his first months in office, Hitler was true to his word. He solved the unemployment problem. He did so by going into so much debt that they had to invade and plunder their neighboring countries and seize the property of minorities to pay for this, but the average German didn’t know that. All he knew was that before he had no job, now he had one. All she knew was that before she had no bread, now she had that and more.

Now they hear rumors that people are being gassed in what are supposed to be worker retraining camps. Who are they going to believe? The people who gave them their life back, or unsubstantiated rumors? But what about the soldiers? Are they going to disobey orders and defy the people who made their country great again? When anyone else would flip the switch in his place?

If he was moral he would, we say. I think that is the answer. A moral person would do what is right. He would not be an executioner of innocent people even if it meant that he would have to lose his own life. Moral strength was lacking in Nazi Germany, which is why such atrocities were allowed to happen.

But I don’t think that Nazi Germany was especially lacking in moral strength. I think that most people, most nations are lacking in moral strength. An American teacher reproduced the Third Reich in his classroom, and his students started behaving like Nazis without even realizing it. We do what everyone around us does. We go with the flow. We look out for number one.

It takes great moral strength not to.

It takes great moral strength to stand up for what it right, even when everyone around you says that it is wrong. It takes great moral strength to defy your leaders, especially when they have complete power over you. It takes great moral strength to see the truth, even when it means that what you have been given is ill gotten.

When we stop asking, “How could they?” and start asking, “Would I?” maybe we’ll develop the moral strength necessary to prevent what happened in Nazi Germany from happening again.

Sacred Ground

2009-12-07T08:49:00.000-08:00

I recently returned from a trip to Europe and my posts for the next few weeks will be discussing some of the experiences I had out there. My brother was already in Rome with a friend when I arrived, and the rest of my family wasn’t going to land until the evening, so my brother and his friend, Mike, showed me around the city for the day. We went to the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, and St. Peter’s Basilica. While we walked through basilica, I was overwhelmed by the size and the beauty of the place.

Mike had been to Rome many times before, and he freely shared his knowledge about what we were seeing. He informed us that the basilica was built over Peter’s tomb, he explained what all of the saints who are immortalized in marble there did to become saints, and he pointed out different relics in the basilica, such as the spear that pierced Jesus’ side. It slowly dawned on me that Mike was a Catholic and that he really believed the things he was telling me. When that dawned on me, it changed my experience inside the basilica.

I didn’t come away from that impressive structure a Catholic, or believing in many of the things Catholics believe. For example, I seriously doubt that the spear kept in St. Peter’s Basilica is the actual spear that pierced Jesus’ side. And even if it was, it would have more historical value than spiritual value as far as I’m concerned. But seeing this place through the eyes of someone who considers it sacred, just as so many people in the world do, was a gratifying experience. After all, if someone was going to tour one of the sites that I consider sacred, such as the grove of trees in upstate New York where God and Jesus Christ appeared to the boy prophet, Joseph Smith, or Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah, I would want them to see it the way I do. I would want them to know why I consider it sacred.

That is not necessarily so they will believe what I believe, although if they did believe it that would be all the better. I would just want them to understand where I’m coming from. We Mormons have borne the brunt of our fair share of disrespect. In the eighteen hundreds, Mormons were persecuted, killed, raped, pillage, and driven from their homes and the Temple they had worked so hard to build. This happened not once, but twice, in Kirtland, Ohio and Nauvoo, Illinois. It almost happened again in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the present, Mormons have been accused of being racist, chauvinists, hate-mongers, and worse. I think that this persecution comes mostly because we don’t compromise our beliefs when they conflict with the demands of the world. Many of the things that we consider most sacred are degraded, ridiculed, and worse yet, exposed to the world’s misinformed scorn.

It hurts when people I meet let their pastors or their ill-informed friends speak for my beliefs. It’s frustrating when I cannot convince them that the falsehoods that they’ve heard are incorrect. Since I’ve had those experiences, I am very careful about not doing the same thing myself. If I am going to learn about a different religion, the least I can do is show those who believe in it the respect of learning about it from one of them, hear what they believe and why they believe it. I unexpectedly got that chance as Mike guided me and my brother through St. Peter’s Basilica, and because of that, I was better able to understand where he and the millions of other Catholics are coming from. Someday, if we’re ever in Salt Lake City at the same time, I would like to be able to return the favor.

Our Work

2009-11-15T18:45:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, I dedicated my post to the answer that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers for the question, “Why did God create the world in the first place.” This week, I’d like to discuss what we need to do in order to accomplish that purpose.

Just as God’s purpose is found in the scriptures (“For behold, this is my work and my glory--to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” Moses 1:39), our purpose is also found in the scriptures unique to the Latter-day Saints: “Behold, this is your work, to keep my commandments, yea, with all your might, mind and strength” (D&C 11:20). In order to accomplish the purposes that God sent us here for, we must do what He tells us to do.

Many people ask why God would go to all the trouble to create us just to tell us a bunch of things that we can’t do. I would ask the same question of the mother who scolds her small child for reaching up toward a boiling pot of water. That mother went through nine months of pregnancy, a long and painful labor, late nights feeding and soothing the baby, countless diaper changes and a list of other inconveniences, and then has the gall to go around saying to that child, “Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” Did this woman go through all of that just so she could have someone to boss around?

To the child it might seem that way, especially as he grows older. Those of us with a greater understanding, though, know that the mother is motivated by love. Her scoldings may be hard for the child to take, but it is in order to spare the child from painful burns that would result from pulling boiling water all over himself. It would be an unloving parent indeed who allowed a child to seriously harm himself for fear of damaging his ego with a scolding.

God is much the same way. Compared to His perfect understanding, even the wisest of men is a child. We don’t know what is good for us. We don’t know that much of what we naturally want--like the child’s curiosity for the boiling pot of water--is in reality very harmful for us. God does. So, he gives us commandments like, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” because He knows that infidelity will lead to our unhappiness. Even commandments that could be viewed as selfish when we look at them from an imperfect perspective, like, “Thou shalt have no other God’s before me,” are actually for our own good when we realize that no other God but the true God can offer us salvation.

Jesus taught, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). So, if we want to accomplish the purpose God sent us here to accomplish--and if we believe that God loves us, then we should also believe that God’s purposes are the only way to achieve the greatest possible happiness--then we better follow the way that Jesus laid out for us. That means being obedient to God’s commands.

Christ laid out this path when He visited and taught the people on the American continent, as recorded in the Book of Mormon. “Now this is the commandment:” he said. “Repent, all ye ends of the earth, and come unto me and be baptized in my name, that ye may be sanctified by the reception of the Holy Ghost, that ye may stand spotless before me at the last day” (Third Nephi 27:20). If we do those basic things, we will accomplish our purpose here, we will receive eternal life in the hereafter, which is life like God’s, life with God, and life with our families.

New Features

2009-11-01T20:19:00.000-08:00

We just had an Young Single Adult Education Conference here in Boston, which Elder M. Russell Ballard, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles attended. We got some wonderful instruction about how to share our beliefs with other people, both face to face and on the internet. One of those ways is through a blog, which I was proud to say that I've already had for a few months, now (though that is only because I was obeying the council that Elder Ballard himself gave in a talk about a year ago) but I realized that my blog wasn't connected in any meaningful way with other resources on the web. I guess I should just accept that I am not the ultimate source of infomation on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I've put some usefl links in the bar to left to resolve that problem.

Since the purpose of this blog is the share my thoughts on my religion, mostly with a non-Mormon audiance in mind, I figured that I would also expand on my profile info. I want readers of this blog (that means you) to see Mormons as normal people. Yes, I do listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir but I also listen to cool bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Coldplay.

So, for all of you non-Mormons, feel free to check out the links and find out more about the church. And if you want to know what Mormons read and watch, feel free to check out my profile (although, I'm not sure I am indicactive of what all Mormons read and watch, because Mormons read and watch all sorts of different things). For all of you Mormons, find out how you can be a presence on the web to share your beliefs as well.

The Big Question

2009-10-25T19:03:00.001-07:00

I volunteered at the Boston Book Festival, yesterday. As a volunteer, I had to wear a bright orange t-shirt with a huge question mark printed on the front, implying that festival goers could come to me with their questions and that I would have the answers. That may have been a little misleading since all of my knowledge about anything outside the room I was assigned to was printed on the programs that everyone got.

At one point, the event in my room was filled to capacity, so many people were being turned away. A couple of girls were among that crowd and since they had a while to kill, now that they couldn’t do what they had been planning on doing, they thought they’d kill a few minutes chatting with me. They commented on the funny question mark and what it implied and we laughed as I joked that, indeed, I did have an answer to every question. The first question they asked, though, caught me off guard.

“What is the meaning of life?” they said.

“To…” I started. I didn’t have an answer ready for that question, which surprised me because I knew the answer. There is a scripture in the Pearl of Great Price that gives that answer very clearly. “For behold,” it reads, “this is my work and my glory--to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). This is the only scripture that I have found that states why God created the world and us, His children, in the first place. He created us to teach us how to live the life He lives: eternal life.

I could have answered this question, but it would have required a full missionary-type lesson, which was out of the question. I gave them a true, but ultimately meaningless answer, and was left to contemplate the question for the rest of that day, and for a big chunk of this day.

I honestly haven’t heard anyone ask what the meaning of life is for a long time. It’s not a question that ever crosses my mind. I think that is because the question is answered, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t have to go around wondering what the bigger picture is because I already know what that is.

I don’t know how serious this inquiry was from these girls, but it made me appreciate all the more my membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints along with my knowledge and testimony of its doctrines. So many people have not found a reliable answer to that most basic and fundamental question: “What is the meaning of life?” So many people go about their daily lives wondering if anything they do has any lasting meaning. I don’t know if I would be willing to struggle to find a good job, or strive to find someone I can marry, or even brush my teeth for that matter, if I didn’t believe that my life had greater meaning than what can be found in the present.

Fortunately, because of my faith, I do know that life has a greater meaning. So, I do struggle to find a job in which I can have an influence. I do strive to find that woman with whom I can start a family. I do brush my teeth. Because all of that has meaning. All of that doesn’t just disappear when I die. All of the memories and relationships and habits that I have gained throughout my life will rise with me. All of it, even the minutest detail, has meaning, because God created it that way.

The Voice of the Spirit

2009-10-11T13:57:00.000-07:00

I gave a talk in Sacrament Meeting today, so I thought that posting that would cover my blog post for the week. Enjoy!

When I was sixteen, around Christmas, some friends from church and I decided to go around looking at Christmas lights. Since Megan Young was the queen bee of the Laurels, we were all to meet at her house at seven. I parked my truck across the street and knocked on her door precisely as the clock was turning from 6:59 to 7:00. I don’t know why I was surprised that I was the first one there and that Megan was still getting ready. In order to get out faster, Sister Young suggested that I go pick up the people that Megan was supposed to pick up and bring them back there. The only problem was that I only had a pickup truck. Not enough room for a carload of people. Sister Young had a solution for that, too. I could take their family van.

As I took their keys in my hand and walked out their front door, I mulled over in my head the route I should take to pick everyone up, how I could best avoid stop signs and traffic lights. I figured out a way that would take me in a loop that would end up right back at the Young’s house. But, as I turned the key in the ignition, I got a strong feeling that I should go the opposite way. “That’s dumb,” I thought. “If I go that way, I’ll have to turn left onto Fair Oaks Boulevard and that always takes forever.” I started backing up. Again, I got that strong feeling that I should go the opposite way. “But that makes no sense,” I thought again, shouting down that annoying feeling. I continued backing up. I was just about to put on the breaks and pull forward when I heard a crunch. I froze. I was almost too afraid to look. Finally, though, I did. I got out of the van to check the damage. I had backed into my own truck.

If I had listened to the voice of the Spirit that night, I could have avoided paying the twelve hundred dollars to repair the Young’s van. But as it was, it was an important lesson for me. I had a greater understanding for what the voice of the Spirit sounds like. Because even though I hadn’t heeded its warning, I had heard it. And I had a greater resolve to heed the next time.

Even so, I’m still learning how to recognize and heed the voice of the Spirit. It was a little easier when I was a missionary since all my thoughts were focused on spiritual things, but there were still moments during my mission that I wish I could do over, that I wish I could do exactly as the Spirit directed me. Since the mission, it’s been a real challenge. There are so many distractions and other concerns I have to worry about. As a missionary, all I wanted was to do God’s work in God’s way, and many times I got the specific guidance that I needed to do just that. Now, though, I’ve had to worry about so many other things. What should I major in? Where should I live? Which jobs should I apply for? Should I go to graduate school? My own wants and desires are so mashed up into all these questions that I wonder if a prompting is really divine guidance, or just my own stupid ideas. Sometimes, the hardest part about doing the will of the Lord is knowing what His will is. If He would just tell me, there’d be no problem.

When Moses was at the shores of the Red Sea, with Pharaoh and his armies behind him and the eyes of all the children of Israel fixed on him, “the Lord said unto Moses…lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea” (Exodus 14:15-16). Sometimes I read passages like these about the prophets hearing the voice of God and think that they had it easy. God tells them to part the Red Sea or build an arc or take their family to the Promised Land and they do it. Can’t He tell me what I should do with my own little life?

But then I read something in the Doctrine and Covenants that changed my perspective on these questions. In Section 8, the Lord tells this to Oliver Cowdery: “you shall receive a knowledge of whatsoever things you shall ask in faith, with an honest heart, believing that you shall receive…Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart. Now, behold, this is the spirit of revelation; behold, this is the spirit by which Moses brought the children of Israel through the Red Sea on dry ground” (D&C 8:1-3). So, Moses was prompted by the Spirit to part the Red Sea? It was just a feeling in his mind and heart? That’s what it seems to be saying. So maybe these other prophets--Noah, Lehi, and all the others--were not acting on direct audible commands from God, but on the whisperings of the Spirit. Of course, there have been a few times when God has spoken directly to His prophets--Moses talked to God face to face at times, the brother of Jared saw Jesus’ spiritual body long before He was born in Bethlehem, and Joseph Smith saw and talked with the Father and the Son in the Sacred Grove--but I think that these moments are rare, even for prophets. I think that when God speaks, he normally does so through the voice of the Spirit, because the voice of the Spirit is His voice.

We have a few descriptions in the scriptures of what that voice “sounds” like. Right before Christ arrived in the Americas, we read that the Nephites who were gathered around the temple in Bountiful “heard a voice as if it came out of heaven; and they cast their eyes round about, for they understood not the voice which they heard; and it was not a harsh voice, neither was it a loud voice; nevertheless, and notwithstanding it being a small voice it did pierce them that did hear to the center, insomuch that there was no part of their frame that it did not cause to quake; yea, it did pierce them to the very soul, and did cause their hearts to burn” (3 Nephi 11:3). And in the Book of Helaman we read that the voice of the Spirit “was not a voice of thunder, neither was it a voice of a great tumultuous noise, but behold, it was a still voice of perfect mildness, as if it had been a whisper, and it did pierce even to the very soul” (Helaman 5:30). And we all know how the voice of the Lord came to Elijah not in the strong wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, but in “a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). From all these descriptions, it seems clear that the voice of the Spirit connects more to our soul than it does to our ears. God doesn’t communicate with us through sound waves carried by the vibration of air molecules. He communicates with us through His Spirit.

In this past General Conference, Elder Richard G. Scott said, “I am convinced that there is no simple formula or technique that would immediately allow you to master the ability to be guided by the voice of the Spirit. Our Father expects you to learn how to obtain that divine help by exercising faith in Him and His Holy Son, Jesus Christ. Were you to receive inspired guidance just for the asking, you would become weak and ever more dependent on Them. They know that essential personal growth will come as you struggle to learn how to be led by the Spirit.” I have personally wondered if learning to hear and heed the voice of the Spirit is not one of the most important things we are meant to do during our lives.

Now, when I read stories in the scriptures about the great deeds of past prophets, I’m not only impressed with their obedience and dedication to the Lord, I am also impressed with their trust in the voice of the Spirit and their ability to hear it. When Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his only son, the son that God promised he would have and through whom God promised that Abraham’s posterity would number more than the sands of the sea, did he receive that command through an audible voice, or through the voice of the Spirit? I think that it was through the voice of the Spirit, the same voice that told me to go left when I wanted to go right. But unlike me, Abraham obeyed. He walked all the way to Mount Moriah, built an alter, tied his son’s hands, and raised the knife. He was ready to obey God’s command with exactness. He didn’t know as he held the knife that God would send an angel to stop him. He only knew what God commanded, and he trusted that command. As President Eyring has said, when we hear the voice of the Spirit, we are usually “given no assurance of the outcome, just a clear direction—go forward.”

One of the great differences that I have found between the prophets and myself is that trust. Trust in the still small whisperings of the Spirit. When the prophets hear them, they obey, when I hear them, I rationalize my own decision and back into my own car. But I’m learning to trust the Spirit. I have had some successes since that Christmas nine years ago. But sometimes those whisperings are crazy, like telling me to talk to a stranger about religion or something like that. I’m sure that being told to kill his son sounded crazy to Abraham to. One thing to remember is that we “receive no witness until after the trial of [our] faith” (Ether 12:6). I want to use the Apostle Peter as an example of someone who passed a trial of his faith.

“When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?” If Jesus had been going around telling everyone that He was the Messiah they’d all been waiting for, these would have been pretty foolish questions. If they listened to Him at all, they would know who He was. But Jesus didn’t go around saying that. In fact, He frequently told his disciples to keep His identity, His true identity as the Son of God, a secret, at least until He ascended into Heaven. At this point, though, no one, not even his Apostles, had made any indication that they knew His true identity. “And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 16:13-17). Peter hadn’t heard that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah through sound waves carried by the vibrations of air molecules to his ears. He had heard it through the voice of the Spirit.

Peter trusted that divine communication enough to be the first to say it out loud. And he trusted it enough to step out of his boat onto the water when Jesus told him to. And he trusted it enough take a sword and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant to defend Jesus, even when that high priest’s servant was backed by “a great multitude with swords and staves” (Matthew 26:47). Even though Peter trusted the voice of the Spirit that told him that Jesus was the Messiah, it seems from the record that he and the other Apostles didn’t quite understand what exactly the Messiah’s mission would be. They knew that He was meant to free them from bondage, but they thought that would be from the bondage of the Roman’s who had conquered them. They knew that He was meant to be a king, but they didn’t know that His kingdom “is not of this world” (John 18:36).

What must have been going through Peter’s mind as he watched his Messiah bleed and die on the cross? The man he had trusted in had not freed the children of Israel from Roman bondage. He hadn’t been crowned a king. Did any doubts creep into Peter’s thoughts during those three long days when Jesus lay in the tomb? Did he ever wonder if what he’d thought had come from God was really just some crazy idea of his own? We don’t know for sure, but I think that might have happened. Those were a dark three days. They were the trial of Peter’s faith.

And then Sunday morning came. Mary Magdalene came with news that the tomb was empty. Peter went running to see it for himself. Then Jesus of Nazareth, the man Peter believed in as the Son of God, the Messiah, stood before Peter alive, resurrected. Peter felt the wounds in His hands and in His feet. He was able to confess his love for Him three times. And he went on to lead Christ’s church and preach the good news of Christ’s Atonement to the world. He received his witness, but it was only after he had trusted in the voice of the Spirit.

Most of us have heard that same voice. We’ve asked God to know that the Book of Mormon is true, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that Jesus is the Christ. And most of us, if not all of us, have received an answer. Yet, if we were going to write about that experience, would we write that we had a good feeling about these things, or that we heard the voice of the Lord and He said, “These things are true”? That’s how Moses wrote about his experience on the shores of the Red Sea. As he looked at the armies of pharaoh, and the multitudinous children of the Israel, and the vast sea that stretch out to the horizon, he could have thought, , “I’m going to look really foolish if I raise my staff and command the sea and nothing happens.” But he didn’t. He raised his staff. He commanded the sea. And the waters parted.

My prayer is that we can all develop that trust in the voice of the Spirit. That when we hear it we will heed it. I know that as we do we will be doing the Lord’s will, and even if that seems crazy right now, it will always work out for the best in the end.

To and Fro

2009-10-05T20:27:00.001-07:00

This past weekend we enjoyed another Church General Conference. General Conference happens twice a year, the first weekend in April and the first weekend in October, and consists of the leaders of the church, the First Presidency, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and other church leaders, speak to the church worldwide. The conference takes place in the Conference Center in Salt Lake City and is broadcast over television, radio, and other communication methods. This year, I watched most of it in my room over the internet. The conference is translated into about ninety languages.

To give you an idea of what General Conference means to me, let me tell you a story. I was a Spanish speaking missionary in the New Jersey Cherry Hill Mission. During one Conference weekend, I was serving in Long Branch. On Saturday morning (conference consists of five two-hour sessions, three on Saturday and two on Sunday) my companion and I arrived at the church to make sure that everything was set up properly for the Spanish speaking members in the area. Everything was working properly. The video was being projected onto a large screen and the audio was hooked up perfectly. All we had to do was wait. So we waited. And waited. And waited. As the hour for conference to begin neared, we started to realize that no one else was coming. We would be watching General Conference alone in a room that could fit over one hundred people.

I don’t want you to get the impression that the Spanish members in the area were neglecting their duty. Many of them were able to watch the session in their homes and almost all of them came to at least one session. The Sunday sessions were especially crowded in that room.

But sitting there, with just my companion in a sea of seats, while the prophets of God were addressing the entire world, I couldn’t help but think about the throngs of people outside. I saw them in my mind’s eye milling about, going about their normal Saturday business--getting the car fixed, going to the mall, having lunch with friends. At that point, I thought of the explanation that Paul gave to the Ephesians as to why Christ called Apostles and Prophets. “That we henceforth be no more children,” he wrote, “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the slight of men and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive” (Eph. 4:14).

With so many voices screaming for our attention, it’s hard to know who to trust. Who is right and who is wrong? Should I do this or should I do that? We can feel like ships tossed to a fro on a stormy sea. The guidance of God’s called Prophets and Apostles is like an anchor for me. It gives me stability in a volatile world. I have faith, tempered by study, prayer and many experiences, that these men are God’s mouthpieces on the Earth. That they are sources of truth in our day, just as Moses, Isaiah, Peter and Paul were in theirs. After I listen to the ten hours of conference, and yes, it does sometimes take some effort to stay attentive the whole time, I have a better sense of what course my life should take, of how I can do what God would have me do and become what He would have me become. It’s a feeling of stability. Of not being tossed to and fro.

The Great Outdoors

2009-09-22T06:33:00.001-07:00

My ward had a campout in New Hampshire this weekend, so I spent the last three days roughing it in the great outdoors. We slept in sleeping bags, gathered around campfires, canoed on the nearby lake, and participated in group competitions. We ended the weekend with a sacrament meeting in an amphitheater on the side of the lake. When I first stepped into the amphitheater, I was struck with the beauty of our surroundings. The sky was clear, the lake was wreathed in lush, green foliage, and the morning sun was just hitting the water and reflecting off the endlessly shifting ripples. It was a rare opportunity to worship God while surrounded by His raw, glorious creations.

Every time I’m out in nature, I think of the words of the prophet Alma to Korihor, as recorded in The Book of Mormon. When Korhior asked for a sign of God’s existence, Alma responded, “The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator” (Alma 30:44). Being out in the great outdoors increased my faith in God.

At the same time, I understand that there are intelligent people, many of whom have dedicated their lives to the study of the natural world, who don’t see the majesty of the wild as evidence of God’s existence. They can see the same natural phenomena and interpret them to be evidence that there is no God. I’m a well educated person, and I am well aware of their expertise and their arguments. So, why don’t I believe them? Why don’t I accept the opinion of the experts?

To answer that question, I have to talk a little about authority. The world is filled with authority figures, and we submit ourselves to them throughout our entire lives. When we are children, we submit ourselves to the authority of our parents. Then comes the authority of our teachers. As we grow up and start exercising more our own authority over our lives, we are still subject to the authority of others. We let doctors guide many of our health decisions because they are the authority. They know best. We can’t be experts on every aspect of life, so we listen to those who are. But what happens when you have two doctors giving different diagnoses? What do you do when two authorities on the same subject don’t agree?

In these cases, I have decided to look into the subject as best I can, and then make my own decision based on what I know. This is the only option available to me because I am ultimately responsible for my actions and I have complete authority over my life.

In the debate over the existence of God, countless authority figures support both sides of the argument. I’m caught in the middle. Alma also teaches how we can decide for ourselves which side we will join. He explains a spiritual experiment that we can perform this way: “Now, we will compare the word [of God] unto a seed. Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me” (Alma 32:28).

That’s the experiment I have personally done to find out which side of the debate I will join. I have experimented with prayer, I have experimented with scripture study, I have experimented with fasting, and all the other commandments. The seed has grown. I now know which authority figures are right and which are wrong. I can’t prove that to anyone else. It is evidence for me only. But I can encourage others to perform the same experiment. By the laws of nature, if the same experiment is repeated in the same way, in any other place, or inside any other person, it should end with the same result. So go ahead, do the experiment. And you will be able to see what I see when you go out into the great outdoors.

No More Strangers

2009-09-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

In the past week I moved across this entire great land of ours. I drove myself and all of my possessions from Sacramento, California to Boston, Massachusetts--that’s about three thousand miles--so that I could start graduate school at Emerson College this week. The distance didn’t really bother me. Driving long distance never has. Sometimes I think that my true calling is to be a truck driver; I can drive forever. But then I woke up in South Bend, Indiana with a sore throat. I had already planned out my trip so that this would be the last leg of my journey, and I wasn’t going to let a little sore throat change that. The day progressed just as any other on my trip, but I gradually felt the soreness in my throat invade my nose. Soon enough, I was sneezing uncontrollably and my nose felt like a faucet that was left just a tad open. The drive was miserable, but I finally made it to my new apartment.

My new roommates were ready to meet me when I arrived. We had communicated through emails and phone calls, but this was the first time we were meeting face to face. They introduced themselves, and extended their hands, which I told them I couldn’t shake because I didn’t want to infect them. (Despite all my efforts, I did end up infecting one of them, which I feel very bad about.) They showed me around the apartment and the neighborhood, and have been great about welcoming me into their apartment.

Today was my first time attending church out here in Boston. Many people assume that for a Christian, such as I am, any Christian denomination will do, that one is as good as the other. In fact, one of my new friends told me about how her new landlord mentioned that she and her roommates could go to any of the four churches that she could see from her apartment. They’re all Christian churches, so what’s the problem? I’ve heard the gospel compared to a mountain with many pathways up it, or a cloud with many ropes hanging down. The point of these comparisons is that any road, or rope, is as good as another and will bring you to the same destination. That’s not how Christ described it. He said, “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matt. 7:14). Christ also prayed that His disciples “may be one,” as He and His father are one (John 17:11). All of the denominations, all of the pastors, all of the doctrines that characterize all of the different Christian denominations could hardly be described as “one.” Many times, you can go to a different church of the same denomination, and because of the interests, biases, and opinions of the pastor, feel like you’re in a completely different church.

That is not the case for the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The teachers in my new ward use the exact same teaching manuals as the teachers I learned from in California and Utah. All church members, all over the world, go to the same three meetings, Sacrament Meeting, Sunday School, and Priesthood Meeting/Relief Society. Not only do all of the individuals in a single ward make up the body of Christ, as Paul talks about in his epistle to the Ephesians (see Eph. 4), but all of the wards in the world comprise that body. This is truly a worldwide church.

The only way such unity can be maintained is with a common foundation. That foundation was also described in the epistle to the Ephesians. Paul says that the household of God is “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone” (Eph. 2:20). We all look to same source for direction, the president of the church, whom we sustain as a prophet, seer, and revelator. And the Lord has said, “though the heavens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:38). Knowing where to look for direction, which comes to us in our local wards through the organization of the priesthood is the unifying force for the church. And it was that kind of unity made me unafraid to move across the country, even though I knew absolutely no one out here. Even though I didn’t know what to expect with my new school and my new city, I knew what to expect with my new ward, because I knew not to expect a new church, but the same church I am familiar with. The same church that I know is true.

Paul wrote that the Saints in Ephesus were “no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints” (Eph. 2:20). In my first week at my new ward, I didn’t once feel like a stranger or foreigner. I felt like a fellowcitizen. And like a new friend.

The Law of the Land

2009-08-30T23:37:00.000-07:00

At the passing of Edward Kennedy, part of the praise he is garnering includes the “dozens of laws that bear [his] name or imprint.” I found it curious that writing so many laws was something to be praised. Of course, I know that law is an essential part of a functioning society. Law, as idea, is good. However, that does not mean that all laws are necessarily good, or that more laws are necessarily good. Just as a man can drown in water, heaping more and more laws on a society can smother it. To use another example, the mother and father who make the most rules for their children aren’t necessarily the best parents.

Latter-day Saints have a unique attitude toward the laws of the land. One of the thirteen Articles of Faith, or basic tenets of our belief is this: “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law” (A of F 1:12). This makes obeying the laws of the nations in which we live a spiritual matter. The Lord has also stated though modern prophets that “he that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land” (D&C 58:21). Does that mean that exceeding the speed limit is a sin? That has to be answered by each individual’s conscience. If it does, I’ll have to put that on the list of the things I need to repent of.

Yet, the Book of Mormon tells the history of many societies in which the laws of the land became corrupt. When that happened, those societies were poised to fall. Thanks again to modern prophets, we know how to discern between good law and corrupt law. The Lord has revealed through his mouthpiece that “that law of the land which is constitutional, supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges, belongs to all mankind, and is justifiable before me. Therefore, I, the Lord, justify you, and your brethren of my church, in befriending that law which is the constitutional law of the land; and as pertaining to law of man, whatsoever is more or less than this, cometh of evil” (D&C 98:5-7).

When the legislature creates laws that are outside its constitutional parameters, it is an evil, or corrupt law. That doesn’t give us permission to disobey that law, but it does give us a mandate to ensure that those who enact such laws are not reelected, and that those we elect will work to repeal such laws.

Some might argue that such laws are necessary. The members of our society cannot be trusted to treat each other justly, or make choices that are in their own best interest. To that I would argue that unconstitutional law is evil, as God has said, and is not meant for society’s betterment, but its control. However, I want to follow this reasoning to its conclusion to make a point.

Let’s suppose that men cannot be trusted to treat each other justly. Is creating more laws the answer? I don’t believe it is. Man will only behave with injustice toward his neighbor if he is immoral. He doesn’t obey the highest moral law, Christ’s Golden Rule, “all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets” (Matt. 7:12). Creating more laws in an attempt to make someone moral is like taking a painkiller for a broken bone. The pain might be relieved for a while, but the break remains untreated.

Morality comes from within, not without. It cannot be legislated, regardless of what politicians might think. Making it illegal to hate will not make someone love his neighbor. That love comes through understanding of God’s plan and our place in it. As Boyd K. Packer, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, has said, “True doctrine, understood, changes attitudes and behavior. The study of the doctrines of the gospel will improve behavior quicker than a study of behavior will improve behavior.”

If that sounds naïve, let me give you an example of when it has worked. John Taylor, third President of the Church, recounted the following experience:

“Some years ago, in Nauvoo, a gentleman in my hearing, a member of the Legislature, asked Joseph Smith how it was that he was enabled to govern so many people, and to preserve such perfect order; remarking at the same time that it was impossible for them to do it anywhere else. Mr. Smith remarked that it was very easy to do that. ‘How?’ responded the gentleman; ‘to us it is very difficult.’ Mr. Smith replied, ‘I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves’” (quoted in Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith).

Government can’t be depended upon to make society better, because it simply cannot do it. The only society that can function for any length of time is a moral one and that morality comes from within, not without. No number of laws can change that.

Baseball’s Steroid Era

2009-08-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

I must admit that I am a diehard baseball fan. It has been my favorite sport since I was a little kid playing Tee-ball. But before any of you non-baseball fans click away in disinterest, I think that what is happening in baseball today has larger cultural implications. I would like to take this space to discuss those implications.

Over the past century, some of the greatest cultural icons have come from the diamond. Babe Ruth has an almost godlike position in popular culture, with his herculean abilities and the historic moment when he “called his shot.” Lou Gehrig was such a hero, which is final speech on Yankee field solidified even more strongly, that the disease he was diagnosed with was named after him. Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier wasn’t just a monumental baseball moment, but a monumental American one.

Baseball has a special place in America. Even though the numbers say that the NFL and the NBA have more fans, baseball has an almost sacred status in the hearts and minds of its fans. An NBA player is caught using steroids and he’s suspended for ten games, about twelve percent of the season, and no one bats an eye. Even though players are caught using steroids in the NFL, it gets almost no publicity and incites no public outcry. Baseball, though, is different. That is possibly because baseball has so many sacred numbers that we have seen dropping like flies: Roger Maris’s single season home run record of 61, Hank Aaron’s career home run mark of 755. We hate to see those records fall to people who are “juiced.”

Yet, some people are saying that these people should be inducted into the Hall of Fame. What good is a Hall of Fame if it doesn’t house the player with the most hits ever, or the most home runs? they ask. But I have a question for them: What does that say about us if we honor cheaters?

This is not a cut and dry situation. We will never know the names of all the players who ever used steroids. During the steroid era, which I hope is over, it is probable that even the lowest players on the roster were using, just so they could stay in the league. But the only way we can get cheating to stop is by showing that we will not tolerate it. If someone is caught cheating, yet we honor them for the records they set while cheating, what message are we sending young players? We are obviously not saying that cheaters never prosper. In my opinion, this steroid era, and how we handle it, is indicative of the moral health of our society.

Gordon B. Hinckley, former President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, wrote this in his book Standing For Something: “Without honesty, our lives disintegrate into ugliness, chaos, and a lack of any kind of security and confidence. Imagine a society in which it would be unwise or unsafe to trust anyone--from elected officials to financial advisers to insurance adjusters to your child’s babysitter or kindergarten teacher. Imagine having surgery performed by someone who had cheated in medical school or found a way to short-circuit the requirements of medical residency. Imagine the terror of a society that condones or at least turns a collective blind eye to dishonesty. The prospects are horrifying!” (p. 16)

Some may argue that the honesty of a baseball player means little. I would argue that baseball players have such an iconic position in our society that dishonesty in them won’t end between the foul lines. Those who grow up idolizing cheaters will emulate cheaters. We have already seen scandals in which students are cheating on college exams. Many even have the audacity to say that what they did wasn’t wrong. A culture of cheating doesn’t just fall upon you overnight. It creeps up on you a little at a time. One person finds that he can get away with it, so he tells his friends, who spread it to others, like the disease it is. Pretty soon, you’re living in the world President Hinckley described and wondering how you got there.

Our culture needs to send a message not only to cheating baseball players, but to the young people who look up to them. That is the only way to ensure that young people will not idolize cheaters, but those deserving of emulation.

The Purpose for the Fall of Adam

2009-08-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

Many religions consider the fall of Adam a disaster. They blame him for eating the fruit of Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and expelling himself and his wife, Eve, from the Garden of Eden. With this reasoning, if it hadn't been for Adam and Eve's disobedience, all mankind would now be living in peace and prosperity in the Garden. There would be no pain, no disease, and no need to work for sustenance. The food would just be there for the taking. Life would be an easy, idyllic experience.

It's a nice fantasy, and that's all it could have ever been. God did not create man to put him in a natural, open-air cocktail lounge.

First, we learn from the Book of Mormon that Adam and Eve could not have had children in the Garden of Eden. The prophet Lehi taught, "And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end. And they would have had no children; wherefore they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin" (2 Nephi 2:22-23).

Second, God never intended this life to be Heaven. That is to come after, if we live worthy of it. This life is a testing ground. We are here to prove that we can walk by faith. That we will obey despite obstacles, setbacks and doubts. Those purposes would have been frustrated if we were all living in the Garden of Eden in luxury and bliss, and life would be meaningless.

Now, let's consider what it would say about God if He being expelled from the Garden was an avoidable disaster. It would mean that God condemned billions of His own children to live in a harsh, painful, miserable world when they could have been living in the lap of luxury because of the foolish actions of one man and one woman who lived thousands of years ago. That sounds pretty harsh. That's not the God that I want to worship. The God that I worship has plans that cannot be frustrated by the mistakes of men or the designs of Satan. The God that I worship does not punish the innocent because of the actions of the guilty. The God that I worship has a plan for his children, and Lehi makes that plan clear in his discourse: "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:25).

The Work of Faith

2009-08-08T11:41:00.000-07:00

The "faith vs. works" argument gets brought up a lot when your talking about religion. Somehow, someone got the idea that Mormons believe that you can work your way to heaven on your own, as if the Atonement of Jesus Christ meant nothing. This is false. We can only be saved by the grace of our Lord. But our Lord has given us commandments to govern our behavior, and if we truley accept Him as our Lord and Savior, we will be obedient to his will.

The Apostle James described it this way, "For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also" (James 2:26). The spirit and the body are inseperable. The one without the other is lifeless. Even so, our faith and works are dead if they are not joined together. A Book of Mormon prophet named Alma explained the connection between faith and works this way:

As he was teaching a group of people, he compared the word of God to a seed, so let's talk about planting a seed for a second. When you plant a seed, you have to dig a hole for it in a good spot of soil, where it will get enough sunlight. Next, you plant the seed in the hole and bury it. You have to give it water and make sure that no weeds choke off the seend and kill it. All of this is work, and if you don't do it, the seed won't grow. "Now, this is not because the seed was not good, neither is it because the fruit thereof would not be desirable; but it is because your ground is barren, and ye will not nourish the tree, therefore ye cannot have the fruit thereof" (BoM, Alma 32:39).

Continuing with the analogy, all of that work that goes into nurturing the word of God is faith. The work of faith. That work is praying, reading scripture, fasting, attending church services. All of these things nuture the word of God in our hearts and they are all "works." If we don't do them, the word will die in us, and it won't be the word's fault. It will be ours. So, we must excersise faith in order to partake of the fruit of the tree, which Alma describes as, "most precious, which is sweet above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea, and pure above all that is pure; and ye shall feast upon this fruit even until ye are filled, that ye hunger not, neither shall ye thirst" (BoM, Alma 32:42).

That sounds like some fruit I would like to have.

The BYU Honor Code

2009-07-31T21:30:00.000-07:00

If you don't know, Brigham Young University, the university owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has an honor code that all students must sign. The honor code says that the students can't smoke, drink, do drugs and have premarital sex. It's what makes BYU different from every other university out there. And most of us who are going to BYU, or, like me, who have gone to BYU, are proud of our designation as the number one, "Stone Cold Sober" school in the country.

I heard something about the honor code the other day, though, that makes my blood boil. I was listening to the Dan Patrick Show when they read an email from a BYU student saying that he had to go up to Salt Lake City to get booze. I'm going to rant about that now.

Why are you going to BYU if you want to drink? No one is making you go to school there. Unless, of course, mommy and daddy want you to go there, or are paying for you to go there, and you aren't man enough to live your own life. That's right, you aren't man enough. Contrary to what you might think, boozing up on the weekend doesn't make you a man. If you want to drink, that's fine. Just don't sign a document that promises that you won't. Instead of going up to SLC to booze on the weekend, you can just pack your stuff, transfer to the U of U and booze all you want as a Ute. And that would make more room at BYU for the kind of student that we alums can be proud of, the kind with integrity and honor.