“What the eye sees more deeply the heart tends to love more tenderly.”
― Robert Kegan, Harvard psychologist
I’m slowly working my way through Grant Hardy’s Annotated Book of Mormon through the Oxford Press. As has been the case for decades, I often have bursts of odd questions come at odd times and places. So I write to explore the conversation that I believe God is trying to have with me through my probing. The following is one example from a few days ago.
I read:
And the Lamb of God went forth and was baptized of him; and after he was baptized, I beheld the heavens open, and the Holy Ghost come down out of heaven and abide upon him in the form of a dove.
I wrote:
“I don’t understand this—this Holy Ghost. And I don’t understand the devil, or Satan. Are these ideas or actual entities?”
I wrote that brief note in the morning. Later in the day, while fixing lunch, a thought came to me accompanied by a feeling that the thought was true and so I wrote some more in trying to understand it. What follows is what I wrote and then edited for this post:
These positive and negative impulses are within us—what we call good and evil. I think they are within God. Or at least were at some point to some degree. They would have had to be according to a careful and full reading of my faith’s Restoration theology. I’m guessing any evil impulses are all bled out of God by now.
Maybe these “forces” or impulses have been ascribed the personas of the Holy Ghost and Satan. Ascribing good and evil personas outside ourselves helps us see that they are not us and we not them. That we have an essence, spirit, or intelligence that stands apart from these impulses and that we can choose to be influenced and even become captive by them.
But when we ascribe our or another’s essence—or even the essence of another species—as good or evil we walk on a false and destructive premise. By making such a serious mistake of judgment—judging the “soul” of a being” rather than their actions—we are not able to discern what is truly good and evil. We mistake a creation of God—pronounced by its creator as beautiful, useful, and commanded to have joy—as an enemy who must be destroyed or vanquished.
Latter-day Saints and Christianity as a whole have more theological information about Satan than the Holy Ghost. We have a backstory for him as a remarkable and beloved son of God—“a son of the morning.” The Holy Ghost we don’t. I wonder why? Maybe good is more mysterious than evil? That could be useful since it makes pursuing good more tantalizing. Most of us like a good mystery.
And with these two extremes—this opposition in all things—we have a gradation of mixed motives and actions in between. For all of us. This is why we need to separate the actions we see from the essence of the actor.
David Brooks in his recent book, How to Know a Person, literally begs atheists and secularists to at least believe we have a soul. To believe there is some essence apart from our meat bodies and brain that has inestimable worth and whose needs and desires deserve our respect. We don’t have to agree with their stories but we should seek to understand and respect them as we hope others will do for us.
Brooks also talks about how vital it is for human flourishing to live out a story. A story where our lives and others lives have purpose. Each culture has such stories. Even secularists have stories they live into. None are perfect or pure. Some are more useful than others. Some are just plain harmful. I believe this oft-repeated story has some utility:
“An old missionary returned to the home of a convert among the Mo Indians. When the missionary asked him how he was doing, old Joe said, ‘Well, it seems that I have a black dog and a white dog inside of me and they are always fighting.’ The missionary asked him, ‘Which one wins?’ and Joe said, ‘The one I feed the most.’”
At least as important as the stories we feed ourselves are the stories we feed each other. Social media, news feeds, and politics often feed us the worst possible stories about each other. Recently I was able to hear Father Gregory Boyle in person again. He is a hero of mine who truly gets JesUS. In his decades working with thousands of hardened gang members and their families in L.A. he does not see himself as a savior but being saved. Even though thousands consider themselves saved and rescued by his love for them—by seeing God’s love for them. He has helped them see beyond their actions of evil to their essence of good. That night he repeated a Spanish word that I am now repeating to myself every day: acatamiento—affectionate awe. He said this is how God sees even the worst of us and how we need to see each other.
The story that I’ve been blessed to live into is not perfect or perfectly true—but on the whole it has been enormously helpful to me and many others. This Book of Mormon is a critical part of that story. While its origins and even some events in it greatly stretch the imagination, I believe they are possible. And I hold that belief in faith, not knowing how much is factually true but living as if much of it is. I say this having some friends and family members who, on balance, have said that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its story has been more harmful than helpful to them. I believe this can happen. My reading of God’s love through Jesus indicates that my role is to continue to walk with them and learn from them in compassion and friendship. In acatamiento.
If science indicates that the space beyond us appears to be infinitely expansive with countless universes likely containing worlds with life; if archeologists continue to discover through Lidar and other means the unknown complexity and intelligence of past civilizations; if innovators continue to create and extend artificial intelligence; if the vast ocean continues to reveal what we couldn’t see before our capacity to see it—then to me, some of the claims and stories that religions tell seem just as viable.
Living this way asks me to ask these stories what they meant to the people of the past and what they mean for me now. This “now” of not understanding the factuality of the Holy Ghost and Satan yet probing the depths of what they may point me to.
Acatamiento!
