Slice of Sky God
During my last year at BYU, I went to study and work in the 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.
One of those fabulous old English churches, no idea where.
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.
Years ago, a friend and I wandered into a store filled with LDS Christian artifacts and art. It’s an odd building, camped out on the West of Provo. It used to be a house, then a car garage, now an art store and workshop. It is the embodiment of the kinds of things that I wish people wouldn’t bring up in Sunday school. Replicas of Egyptian thrones, Hyrum and Joseph Smith’s death masks—the works. At the back, we found a man working in the workshop. “Have you girls ever heard of Joseph Smith?” he asked.
We assured him that we, the two girls who had voluntarily wandered into his shop in the heart of Utah valley, had heard of Joseph Smith. We told him that my friend was recently returned from a mission, and we’d both grown up in the Church. He proceeded to tell us the origin story anyway, with some details that I’d never heard before. I was sure, looking around, that I’d never heard these details before because they were not true. The Rameumptom feeling rose up inside of me. I was right, he was wrong, I knew God, he had created God in his own image.
Then, as we left, a metaphor dropped on me. God often talks to me in metaphors. He seems to know that not much else manages to stick in my head, so when He really needs to make a point, He sends a metaphor coursing through me. This one was about the sky. God is the sky. Did you know that we need at least 56 star charts to map out the night sky? Did you know that, in Utah, the sky is huge and blue and spreads out forever, and in Boston the sky meets the trees so soon it looks a little confined, and in Hawaii it melts into the sea? The sky is vast and unknowable, and I only ever see the where-I’m-standing slice. God is the sky.
As I stood on the doorstep of Mormon Art, it occurred to me that, because I only see my slice-of-sky, I am wrong about God, the same way everyone else is. And the people who see a different God than me, they’re wrong too, but they’re also probably right in ways that I’m not.
This is actually one of the reasons I ended up going to divinity school. I want to see as much of the sky as I can, and part of how I can do that is by listening to people who are standing in different places than me. I want to listen to the people who see a very similar slice of the sky to what I see—like Adam Miller and Julian of Norwich—and I want to listen to people who absolutely don’t—like the man I met in Mormon Art and Simone Veil. All of them are valuable. They’re all seeing sky. They’re all wrong, and they’re all right. It’s only by listening, by being open to things that are not us, that we can begin to piece the sky together.