I Stand All Amazed

I 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 More

Be Ready Always

Once, 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 More

Holiness Will Come

It 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 More

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.

Read More

Hope and the End(s) of the World

A few weeks ago, I made Austin and my mother-in-law watch World War Z with me. (Sorry, Kathy).

I’ve loved this movie for a long time, which Austin says is “out of character,” just like my obsession with frozen pizza. I love it for lots of reasons—I like that it’s family instead of romance based. I like that it’s smart, that killing the zombies isn’t just about shooting them, but also about thinking. I like that there are strong women in it who are strong in different ways. What I wanted to watch it for this time, though, was the hope: in the movie the world ends, and it’s awful, but there’s still hope. It’s the worst case scenario, and then things keep going.

I’ve been thinking about how the world has ended lots of times. On March 13, the same day Austin and I decided to get out of Boston and left our apartment two hours later, I was listening to a podcast called Hardcore History on the Celtic Wars. The world ended for the Celts. Their society and culture were razed and their people were slaughtered. The world ended with Noah’s flood. Worlds ended in colonialism—with Native Americans wiped out by disease and violence, with tribes in Africa that lost their cultures and peoples to slavery, with the Hawaiians who saw Captain Cook’s soldiers walk up the beach and called them “ha ole,” no breath, because they were so pale they looked like the death they would bring.

Read More