It’s a bit of a cliche, learning about God from parenting. God isn’t mad at us when it takes us time to learn, just as we’re not mad at babies when they fall down learning to walk. We don’t always understand why pain is necessary, just as babies don’t understand why we’re giving them shots.
It’s a cliche, but it’s what I find myself thinking about it a lot these days.
Read MoreOne day in Jerusalem the disciples forgot to wash their hands before they ate, and the Pharisees took this personally. (Always interesting, isn’t it, what thingswe decide to take personally?) They said to Jesus, “If you’re a prophet, why don’t your disciples follow our elders’ traditions?”
And Jesus said, “Mind your own business.”
Read MoreIn the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man. “Who sinned,” his followers ask, “him or his parents? Why is he blind?”
“Neither,” Jesus said. “He’s blind so that you and everyone else could know that he could be healed.”
Read MoreThings that happened over the last year that you might not know if I haven’t talked to you recently:
We moved! Like a block. We graduated from our one-bedroom apartment where you couldn’t stand in the kitchen and open the fridge door at the same time to a two bedroom apartment where several people can stand in the kitchen at once. The walls are also white and there’s a lot of light, and every day Austin and I look at each other at some point or another and say, “I love our apartment.”
A Wrinkle in Time is a weird book. It’s theological children’s science fiction. It’s about good and evil, angels that look like old women but are also something like pegasuses or stars, different planets, and giant brains. I love it. Like all really good science fiction, it’s much more about the power of love than it is about aliens.
There’s this moment in A Wrinkle in Time that I think about a lot. Meg passes through the Black Thing. The Black Thing is evil—literally, it is the physical form of evil, and by touching it, she is hurt. The wise people of a new planet treat her and help her regain her physical strength, but she is still wounded. When she lashes out at her most important people, her alien caretaker says, “Don’t judge her harshly, She was almost taken by the Black Thing. Sometimes we can’t know what spiritual damage it leaves.”
Read MoreI gave a talk on hope five years ago, and near the end of it I said, “If you’re not overwhelmed by the need of the world, then you’re just not paying attention,” which is much more true now that it was then. We’ve all lived through a pandemic, financial crisis, and turbulent and dividing politics. And those of us who have those terrible but general things at the top of our list are the lucky ones. We’re the ones that haven’t lived through displacement and violence, crippling illness, death of loved ones, loss of faith. I haven’t been alive to the world and its pain for very long, but the last five years seem particularly rough going.
Which is why, I imagine, my friend (hi Kaia!) texted me recently and asked, “How do we let joy coexist with pain?”
Read MoreAfter all the plagues—the locusts and the lice, the flies and the boils, the death of livestock and the death of the children—the Israelites were camped out at the edge of a sea when the Egyptians came after them.
You have to wonder what possessed the Egyptians to come at all. Trying to keep the Israelites in Egypt had gone very badly (see the above plagues), until even Pharaoh’s priests and courtiers begged him to just let them go already, and Pharaoh—king and god of Egypt—agreed. So it’s odd that so soon after their departure he changed his mind and charged after them
Read MoreOnce, on a bad day, in a bad month, in a bad year, Tal got a flat tire out at the Payson temple. For a variety of health reasons, he couldn’t take care of it himself. He called Sarah (who didn’t know how to change a tire) who called me (who didn’t know how to change a tire) who called our roommate Kaylie (who did know how to change a tire, but did not feel entirely confident that she’d be able to do so on her own). We wandered over to an apartment of boys, where one of them was sick and one of them was already dressed to do an endowment in the temple. But both felt bad telling us no, so all of us went.
As I mentioned, it had been a bad day in a bad month in a bad year, and I didn’t know how to change a tire. I was along for the drive and the people with no personal feeling of responsibility towards either Tal or the tire. So when it turned out that that, out of all five us, none of us knew how to change Tal’s specific tire, it was a welcome relief to sit down on a curb and laugh for a while.
Read MoreIn the story of Babel that I was taught as a kid, the Babelites were not sure they were going to earn their way to heaven and were uncertain of God’s grace, so they figured they’d just climb. They built a tower that punctured the clouds, hoping to find where God lived.
I love this image. It’s so literal and graphic. It’s also wrong. Robert Alter, my favorite Biblical commentator, says no one was trying to build a tower to get to heaven. The text says that the tower’s top was “in the heavens,” but that “is a hyperbole found in Mesopotamian inscriptions for celebrating high towers” (Alter 39). The Babel built tower is the linguistic and literal equivalent of our “skyscrapers.”
Read MoreThe day Jesus learned that his cousin John the Baptist died, he went away into the desert, as he often did when He wanted to talk to God. And, as they often did when they wanted to talk to God, everyone followed him. He was tired and sad, and maybe he was thinking fondly of the days when no one knew who he was, but he didn’t tell them to go, not even when his disciples came up and said, “They should head back. It’s late, and they’ll want to buy food somewhere” (Matthew 14:15).
“No,” Jesus said. “They can stay. We’ll feed them” (Matthew 14:16).
“We only have five loaves of bread and two fish,” the disciples say (Matthew 14:17).
I wonder if they said and did not record or just thought what they really meant: that amount of food is not only not sufficient to feed this crowd, it’s not even enough for us.
Read MoreThings that happened over the last year that you might not know if I haven’t talked to you recently:
Austin graduated from law school, graduated from business school, passed the bar, and became an attorney at law at a law firm in downtown Boston, and we are Very Proud. (I am Very Proud. Austin is weirded out by having an assistant.)
I got a job at Harvard Divinity School as a faculty coordinator, which means I run schedules and process financials, do some occasional editing and research. It’s not glamorous or important, and I like that. I’ve liked having a job that I don’t care about very much, because it means that it doesn’t figure into my identity very much, which feels both healthy and unlike anything I’ve ever done before.
If you’ve never been to IFS therapy (interfamily systems), then a session sounds nuts. It sounded crazy the first time I went. “I feel like I’m making it up,” I told my therapist.
“So?” she said.
In IFS, we try to identify feelings or urges as “parts” (or “peeps,” as my mom says) with names, personalities, ages, purposes, and desires that may conflict with each other. (Think Inside Out.) As a rule, no matter what a part’s job is or how destructive their work is becoming, they’re there to help. My anger is there to protect me. My sadness lets me know what I value. My tired tells me to rest. But they’re all a part, and it’s my job as the Self to be the whole. I’m the grownup, and I have to help them realize when their job is done or redirect their energy when they’re being hurtful.
Read MoreI’ve been wondering, recently, why no one recognized Jesus when He came back from the dead. Why did no one, upon simply seeing Jesus, shout or faint or otherwise realize that he was flesh and bone among them again.
We can give Mary some room. Mary went to finish Jesus’s burial only to find his body missing, two angels chilling exactly where it should have been. Mary turned and saw Jesus but, through her tears and confusion, didn’t recognize him until he said her name. But she was crying, she’d just encountered angels, she’d though He was dead, and it had been a really, really rough week. We can give Mary some room.
Read MoreIn Ether 2, the Brother of Jared approaches God after building boats according to the Lord’s exacting instructions, but he has noticed two problems: Problem 1: These boats are fully enclosed, and the people in them are going to have a hard time breathing. Problem 2: These boats are fully enclosed, and the people in them are going to have a hard time seeing.
God meets him at the top of the mountain tells him to go ahead and cut holes in the top and bottom of the boat that can be very tightly stoppered when the sea is calm, and that way they can get fresh air. (This solution terrifies me, but the Brother of Jared seems to have been chill with it.) Jesus didn’t tell him what to do about the light, though, so after making the tightly stoppered holes, the Brother of Jared hikes back up the mountain to say, “And about the light?”
“What do you think?” God says.
I think, had I been the Brother of Jared, I may have been annoyed by this. I might have thought, “I don’t want to have to keep climbing this mountain when you can just tell me the answer already.”
Read MoreWhen I was twenty-two, I ran into a professor in the elevator who said, “Hey, I need someone to do research for me in London. Want to go?”
Going to London is one of those turning points in my life. I spent six weeks there, and it had undue effect on the person I became. Like, I’d always ascribed to second wave feminism enough that I’d refused to care about clothes or makeup or anything appearance related, and then I went and was like, “There are exactly zero guys here I’m trying to impress, and I still want to know what I look like with eyeliner, so I’m gonna do it.” I’d always thought I didn’t like being outside, and one day, on the top of White Horse hill with the wind whipping around me, I found out that I loved being outside. Not being around people I knew meant that I could become who I wanted without fighting their expectations.
Read MoreThe Brother of Jared (known only by this epithet in scripture, because apparently his name was Mahonri Moriancumer, and that’s not a fun name to carve into metal plates) was on his way to the promised land. He’d built boats that were “tight like unto a dish” so that its residents could live entirely below deck for those times that water will cover them, but it occurred to him that it was going to be very dark in there, which, in addition to creating what must have been a horrendous vitamin D deficiency, would make it hard to steer.
The Brother of Jared went to God and posed this problem, to which the Lord answered, “What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels?” (Ether 2:23). No windows, he specified, and no fire. But other than that—what can I do for you? (This always reminds me of my dad, whose favorite mantra while I was growing up was, “You’re smart, you can figure it out.”)
The Brother of Jared reflected on this for a while and then went to work making sixteen shiny stones of glass. He took them to God, saying, “Look, I know this might be a stupid idea, and don’t be mad at me, but here’s my pitch: what if you touch them, and fill them with your light, and we’ll use that to cross the sea” (Ether 3:4). The Lord, invisible behind a cloud during this whole conversation, reached out and touched the stones, and they were filled with light.
Read MoreIt may be that we’re not supposed to have favorite prophets, but I do. Isaiah speaks to me, Moses is my dude, but Alma the younger is probably the one I want to talk to most.
After a youth of moral experimentation and rebellion, Alma had one of those (literally) earth-shaking encounters with divinity. God moves in mysterious ways, like, in Alma’s case, a temporary coma in which he came to know mercy. Afterward, he became a missionary. In one particularly wicked city, he encountered Amulek, a lapsed man of God, who fed him and began preaching with him.
If you’re familiar with scripture (this one or others), then it won’t surprise you that this didn’t go over well. All the people who came to know God through Alma and Amulek’s teachings were eventually cast out or burned alive. It was horrendous in ways that the sparse details of the scripture allow us to skip over—the screams and the smell of burning flesh of people you know and love, the flames lit by your neighbors. This is the kind of thing that leaves soul scars, the the kind of thing that wakes you up years later, sweating and shaking.
Read MoreOften, when one of my friends is off to do something exciting or unknown, I’ll ask them, “On a scale from Bilbo to Gandalf, how do you feel?
Bilbo, of course, is the main hobbit in The Hobbit. He likes the comfortable life—good food served promptly at meal times in warm, dry, comfortable spaces, preferably home. Gandalf, of course, is the wizard who tramps around inciting adventure and danger and general excitement everywhere he goes, convincing others to tramp along with him. This, of course, is how Bilbo ends up hungry on the other side of the world, in lots of cold, wet, uncomfortable spaces and has a lovely adventure.
Sometimes I am the wizard, sometimes I am the hobbit. Sometimes I spend days on AirBnB or hop last on a last minute flight, go on sporadic six hour hikes or wander around unknown cities looking for speakeasies. Other times, like a few weeks ago when I was on a plane to Aruba, my inner hobbit kicks in.
Read MoreIn one of the shortest books of the Book of Mormon, Enos is out hunting when he develops a sudden need to speak to God. He kneels down and pleads for forgiveness of his sins.
We don’t know very much about Enos other than he is the son of Jacob, son of Lehi, and that he was raised in the faith, so it’s unclear what kind of life he’s led up to this point. Did he sow wild oats, like Alma the Younger, or was he more of a Joseph Smith type, not guilty of anything grate, but nonetheless committing “many foolish errors, and display[ing] the weakness of youth”? Either way, Enos characterizes his conversation as a “wrestle” before the Lord. He pleads for himself, then for his people, and then for the enemies of his people.
There’s a lot of things that we could say about Enos. In the Maxwell Institute’s new series, Enos, Jarom, Omni: A Brief Theological Introduction focuses on how the book explores themes of covenants and inheritance. In my scripture study group last year, we spent some time discussing Enos’s characterization of the Lamanites as "a “wild, and ferocious, and a blood-thirsty people,” a generalization that we were uncomfortable with (and really differed from Jacob’s account of the Lamanites only a generation before), especially given the racial overtones of the passage.
This week, though, I’ve been thinking about t the bit early on in the chapter when Enos repented of his rebellions and hears a voice saying, “Enos, thy sins are forgiven thee, and I shalt be blessed,” and Enos’s immediate reaction is, “I . . . knew that God could not lie; wherefore my guilt was swept away” (Enos 1:4-5).
Read MoreIn ancient Greece there was an ongoing argument about what humans were made of. Hippocrates begins the famous Nature of Man (which was actually probably written by Polybus, but details) refusing to participate in the debate of which of the four elements people were made of: fire, air, water, or earth? None of these things, he points out, are “an obvious constituent of a man.” In other words, this is a stupid question.
Hippocrates/Polybus is more interested in the more scientific proposals, specifically “some . . . say that a man is blood, others that he is bile, a few that he is phlegm.”
I read this in a class on the conception of Christian bodies (which, naturally, has to start with non-Christian Greeks, because Western bias), and I couldn’t stop laughing. Someone who walked this earth seriously contemplated that people were formed “in unity” of phlegm.
I imagined a time traveler coming up to me and saying, “Excuse me, are people made of blood, phlegm, or bile?” and I, the humanities major with a high school and nonfiction essay informed idea of the human body, would have to say some version of, “Your assumptions are so wrong, I don’t even know how to answer your question.”
Read More