On Hobbits and Happiness

Often, 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.

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It's Not a Trick Question

In 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).

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Blood, Phlegm, Bile, and How I'm Not Smarter than the Ancient Greeks

In 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.”

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Theological French and Metaphorical Wildernesses

A few summers ago I studied French. I did not want to study French. It was not on the top of my Languages to Learn list. But my program required French or German, so French it was.

There were a few things that were very unfortunate about this class, besides, of course, the fact that I did not want to be in it at all. The first was that we were not learning how to speak French. Written French, as you probably know, bares little to no resemblance to spoken French, and my professors were not at all interested in my ability to order a croissant in a little bakery in Marseille and much more interested in me being able to power through Foucault, a writer that I find deeply confusing even in English. After eight weeks, thousands of flashcards, and a lot of crying, I was no closer to being able to ask for a bathroom in French but could make my way through complicated philosophical texts.

The worst part of the class though, for sure, was that I was really bad at it. Everyone else in the class had some background in French, even if that background was just “I took Latin for four years in high school.” Those people at least knew what conjugation was. I studied Mandarin in high school. Mandarin doesn’t do conjugation. Mandarin is about as related to French as lobsters are to seagulls.

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Slice of Sky God

During my last year at BYU, I went to study and work in UK. My cohort of classmates was an odd one—a ton of freshmen English and drama major girls and six business bros recently back from their missions who just felt like going to London. “I’m so glad you’re going,” my professor said when I accepted the job. “I feel like you’ll be a stabilizing influence.”

A few weeks into the program, we were all crowding into a tiny town’s tiny church, the floor stone, the ceiling creaking wood. I was in love with it. There’s something about old churches, for me.

The boy next to me took a deep breath and said, “Ah! The smell of apostasy in the morning!” and rarely have I been so close to slapping someone. It seemed to me a mockery of the hundreds of years of people who had worn out their life in the pursuit of God, who had done their best in that little church. It seemed to dismiss their faith as less than his for the simple reason that it wasn’t his.

There’s a thing that can happen in my church—can happen in most churches—where we get to thinking we’re the chosen ones. We have all the answers, and everyone else is just wandering around in the dark, the poor misguided souls. At its worst, this attitude reminds me a little of the story about Rameumptom in the Book of Mormon, where a group of people gather weekly to thank God for loving them and saving them—just them. Because they were the best. This is an extreme example of course, but sometimes I hear echoes of it. Sometimes, unfortunately, I feel it.

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I Am Bad at Museums and Depression

A few weeks ago I went with my in-laws to the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit. We sat in a room as 600,000 cubic feet of projections and Van Gogh’s artwork flooded around us. “There’s two ways to watch this,” the ticket handler at the door told us, “You can watch it like a movie or you can experience it.”

I’m not very good at experiencing art. I feel bad about this, but so it is. Usually I walk around a museum for about twenty minutes, and then I think, That was cool. Is there a cafe or a gift shop? I don’t really know enough about art for it to touch me most of the time—but every once in a while, every once in a while it barrels past my ignorance and tags me anyway.

In the exhibit, they sometimes animated the paintings, and one in particular caught my eye. It was on every wall, this rocking man, gnarled and bent over, rocking back and forth and I thought, I recognize that. I know that feeling.

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Kill Your Darlings

I’ve noticed the people often talk about God as the master of whatever it is they do. My parents say God is the master teacher. As teachers, they stand in awe of his pedagogy. But I’ve heard him called the master gardener, artist, and scientist—whatever we are, whenever we really come to love something, we see how good God is at it. It’s probably unsurprising, then, that I think of God as the master storyteller. And by master, I do mean master of His craft, but I also mean master in terms of a master and apprentice. God isn’t just a brilliant storyteller—He teaches us how to write our stories.

I’ve had a lot of writing teachers, and they’ve taught me a lot of things, like how to write topic sentences and where the commas go. The thing they teach most consistently though, is what to cut. Over and over again, I’ve sat in offices while my professors read through my work, drawing lines through paragraphs or scribbling in the margins. I’ve read the titles of their books until they look up and give the diagnosis. Once, Steve pointed to an underlined bit and said, “I think this sentence would be better not existing.” When Peter gave back the first draft of my thesis, he said, “I liked some of this, I just didn’t mark those things.” “Unnecessarily flippant” is what one of my favorite professors said about several of my favorite bits of one paper, probably because I was getting a bit impatient with historians being so sexist.

Sometimes my writing masters have been more gentle, but they all say things like that. What every writer really needs is a good editor to read through their stuff and say, “Nope. Not that.”

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To Elle, On Marriage, Because She's Getting Married, and That's a Big Deal

Dear Elle-girl,

Dad says to always ask for marriage advice, because the advice is inevitably about the advice giver’s marriage, and in our family we’re too into ethnography to not take advantage of that. Austin says no one should offer marriage advice, because even if you have a good marriage, doing something well once is not evidence of expertise.

In addition to all of these warnings, I shouldn’t give you marriage advice because I’ve been married for hardly any time at all, and I’m your big sister, and sometimes being a big sister can get in the way of just being a good sister. So I’ll try to limit the advice and stick to theology. I’ll end up giving advice anyway, because I’m bad at not giving advice, but here’s my theology: marriage is practice building Zion.

It’s amazing for a lot of the same reasons. It’s hard for a lot of the same reasons. It’s important for the same reason: God tells us, “For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect” (D&C 128:18), and He’s talking about ancestors and progeny, but He’s also just singing the song that resonates across scripture. We can’t be saved without other people.

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Hungry Ghosts and Forgiveness

I have many gifts. I am a good writer. I have a completely adequate choir voice. I am very good at comforting people. I’m a natural at milking goats. I can get bathrooms very clean.

I am not very good at forgiving. I forgive small slights easily and I anger slowly, but what my grandma calls “soul bruising,” the hurts my mom talks about passing through the heart—those take me a while.

My patriarchal blessing, the personal prophesy each member of my church receives, says something along the lines of, “Improve your capacity for forgiveness. It will make you more useful.” Every time I read it I grimace a little bit at this part. Oops, I think.

Sometimes I try and try and try to forgive and still come up wanting after years of effort. Sometimes, instead, I refuse to look at the pain. I sweep whatever calls for forgiveness under the rug so that I don’t have to go through the emotional labor of working it through. “Nothing to see here,” I insist, my back to the horse-sized lump in the rug. “Everything is A-OK.”

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Sparrow Prayers and Thunderstorms

Chieko Okazaki was in Church leadership when I was born and will be a patron saint in my family forever. In her 2002 book Being Enough, she preached about sparrow prayers. Sparrow prayers are one of Okazaki’s answer to the same question I pondered a few months ago: why does the same Lord who promises that if we ask He will give us not always give us what we ask for, even when we’re asking for good things?

Sparrow prayers are smaller prayers that God can answer when He and She can’t answer the big asks at that moment. Because our Heavenly Parents delight in blessing us, when they can’t do the big stuff (for a variety of reasons that Okazki explores here), They shower us with the small. Rain is one of my sparrow prayers.

Growing up in Hawaii, rain was the rhythm I fell asleep to most nights. Hawaii rain is dense. It falls thickly and steadily and warmly, and after I moved to the desert for school, I missed its consistency. When it did rain, especially as I was falling asleep, especially when I was having a hard time, it always felt like love. Every time it rained it felt like God had seen me and said, “Time to send Marissa a little love. Let’s get a rain storm in there.” God may not have been in Elijah’s wind or earthquakes of fire (1 Kings 19), but He was in my rain. So whenever things got really bad, whenever I really needed to know that God was there and had my back, I prayed for rain.

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Mastering the Elements: Avatar Conflict Analysis

Last year my family was rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender. (I know it’s a kid’s show, but it also has some of the best character development on TV and a surprisingly developed stance on colonialism and intergenerational trauma, and one day I will write a post about repentance primarily by talking about Zuko and it will bring you to tears.)

If you haven’t seen it, the general plot is that there are four nations, each characterized by different “bending” or control over the elements (fire, air, water, earth). One hundred years previous to the beginning of the show, the fire nation began taking over the other nations, which it was able to do partly because the Avatar, the one person each generation who was able to do all four kinds of bending, disappeared. In the first episode, Aang, the Avatar, comes back and begins his quest to restore balance to the world.

One day, my mom and I were analyzing an encounter she’d had earlier that week, and I said, “I think the problem is that you were trying to firebend, but you’re an earthbender.”

She stopped what she was doing. “Say that again,” she said. And thus, Avatar Conflict Analysis (ACA) was born.

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Conflict Isn't Contention, A Love Letter to Elle

When I was seventeen, I took a mediation class, and I had to write a paper about a conflict I was in and analyze it using the theories we’d been learning. This professor was a family friend. I’d known him for years. We went to the same potlucks. We ran into him at Costco. He knew my family. So when I told him I wanted to write about my sister for the paper, he laughed and said, “How could anyone be in conflict with Elle?”

I pointed at him. “Exactly.”

If you don’t have the benefit of knowing Elle, I’m sorry. She has freckles and blue eyes that I absolutely covet. She is magic with little kids and pets. She likes puns and indie pop and clothes and immigration studies. Her first words were “no thank you,” as in we’d say, “Elle, time to go to bed” and she’d say, “No thank you.” I’ve known her her entire life, and she’s never been anything but delightful.

At the time, Elle was twelve. She was known for being happy and sweet, neither of which were very good reflections of the complexity of her personhood. (To this day, one of the fastest ways to make Elle upset is to call her sweet.) Professor Ford couldn’t imagine anyone getting on her bad side, because he couldn’t imagine her having a bad side. He couldn’t imagine us being in conflict, and that was the “exactly,” because we weren’t in conflict. We were almost never in conflict. That was the problem.

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I Can Fix That, And Other Lies I've Loved

The first time I got my heartbroken, I was an absolute mess. It was almost comical. It would have been, in a chickflick. It would have been like that part in Legally Blonde where she’s eating ice cream and yelling at the TV. My version involved a lot of crying in stairwells, only eating Clif bars, writing pages and pages of burn letters, and getting very little sleep. After two months of this, a guy in an elevator said to me, “You should probably take a nap.”

As always, my approach to this new problem was research. I listened to podcasts and read blogs and scientific articles. (Did you know that heartbreak is a physical phenomena wherein, deprived of the dopamine and oxytocin the relationship provided you, your body freaks out? Tylenol helps.) In addition to online resources, I pursued more traditional modes of research: people. I asked advice from everyone, all the time. Someone would say, “Hey, how are you?” And I’d say, “Not great. How do you deal with heartbreak?” My favorite response was Bentley’s. He said, “Reread Harry Potter. You’ll feel better by the end.”

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If You Can't Say Something Nice

When I was twenty-one one of my friends told me, “Risa, people don’t know you like them. They can’t tell. You don’t show them.”

Nate was my roommate Shelley’s boyfriend (hi Nate! Hi Shelley!) who had decided to adopt me as a little sister. (“But I’m older than you,” I told him when he informed me of his decision. “That’s OK,” he said, “I’m taller.”) He read my essays, forced me to watch bad actions movies, and coached me in my complete lack of a social life. He was one of my best friends, and he was sitting at my kitchen table, calmly informing me that most people kind of thought I didn’t like them.

I was a little devastated by the thought. I’m a Hufflepuff, meaning (as I explained to my therapist during one of our first visits, all the while saying, “You should really read Harry Potter”) that I am driven forward by relationships, by contact and closeness. By twenty-one I’d shut down the sun-shiny friendliness my mom insists I was born with, but I’d maintained the bounding enthusiasm in the existence of almost everyone around me. I figured that, being as great as they were, they were working off the assumption that I liked them. I didn’t need to go out of my way to communicate it.

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The Elder Prodigal: Sons and Slaves

In the story of the Prodigals the younger son runs away with his inheritance and spends it all, only to come back to his father, humbled. His father throws a big party for him, which irks the responsible elder brother, because dad never threw him a party. “All these years I’ve been slaving for you,” he says, “and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15).

We’ve heard a lot about this story and what it means in Sunday school over the years: in the extended metaphor, we are both the brothers, and the father is God. We are the obvious and the secretive sinners, and God runs to welcome us back no matter what kind of sinner we are on any particular day. It is the secretive sinner, of course, that is more interesting to me.

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Yes, We're Talking About Hope Again

When I was headed off to divinity school, I decided it was time that I figured out what I really thought about Joseph Smith. I’d had mixed feelings about him for a long time: on the one hand, he was a prophet and he revealed a lot of my absolute favorite truths, like eternal families, the importance of bodies, and the presence of Heavenly Mother. (For a really excellent book on what Joseph revealed and how it was different, check out The Christ Who Heals, by Fiona and Terryl Givens.) On the other hand, polygamy. Also, it sounds like he was charming, and my mom raised me to distrust charming people.

I read a lot about Joseph Smith in the few months before I went to Boston, mostly in Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. I found that, in addition to believing Joseph was a prophet, which I’d never really struggled with, I actually really liked him. He had faults I could relate to—an ego and temper that I recognized—but also qualities I really looked up to. Hope was high among these qualities. The hope on this guy.

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Power and Control

Austin gets grumpy during the semi-annual Sunday school lessons about the difference between joy and happiness, the ones in which we’re instructed to seek after “joy” (which is true and long-lasting) rather than “happiness” (which is fleeting and worldly). I think what actually bothers him is the repetition paired with the expectation that we pretend that this discussion is new to us, but what he usually says is, “They just made that up! I could have said happiness is lasting and joy is fleeting! That difference is pretend!”

This is obviously true—as we’ve discussed before, all words are made up distinctions, and they get especially slippery around any God talk. But here I am. About to do this same thing.

Power isn’t control. Power is actually control’s opposite. And I know these words are slippery and the distinctions are a line in the sand but, as we’ve discussed before, sometimes a line in the sand is all I’ve got. So let me draw the line a little deeper and offer the definition of control I’m working on: I mean absolute control. I mean control like the ability to make something happen, to determine the outcome. Control is a zero sum game—the more that one person has, the less that another has.

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Hunger, Bread and Stone

In Matthew, Jesus says, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matthew 7:7).

I read this a few weeks ago and thought, that is so not my experience with God. My experience is more appropriately summarized in a slightly altered John Green quote: “[God] is not a wish granting factory” (The Fault in Our Stars).

Lots of things I’ve prayed for did happen. My sister was safe on her mission. I got into grad school. My friends received some measure of healing. I received comfort. People were safe traveling, and I found friends. But these notebooks are also things I prayed for and didn’t get, including grad schools I didn’t get into and nights I didn’t feel comfort and friends I lost.

It’s worth noting that Jesus does not seem to promise that we will get what we will ask for, find what we look for, or that the door we’re knocking on will be the one that opens. Although Jesus does say “it” shall be given and “it” shall be opened, these pronouns don’t have an antecedent, at least in the English (Matthew 7:7). Verbs, not nouns, come before the pronouns, making it grammatically unclear whether or not the things that are asked for are the things that are given.

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