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.

As you know if you’ve been around the blog for a while or have just spent much time with me, hope is kind of my thing. And by “my thing,” I mean that I’m not good at it but I desperately want to be, and I’ve been studying it for a long time. My favorite definition of hope comes from Joseph Spencer. He says that “in hope, the past event that calls for faith is recognized to contain . . . a promise, an indication that things can be different” (For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope). That is, faith is recognizing God’s work in the past. Hope is believing that He will work those same wonders in the future, through us.

This is the kind of hope that Joseph rocked: audacious, impossible hope. As a fourteen year old, he read, “if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him” (James 1:5), and he thought, “That means me.”

The First Vision, by Warren Luch, hand-rubbed linocut print, 1990.

As someone raised in the faith that came from this moment, a faith that insists that personal revelation is real, that anyone could have angels minister to them—I still sometimes have trouble thinking that scripture means me. I read “Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer,” and I think, well, yeah. If you’re a prophet. If you’re my bishop. If you’re my sister. If you’re a better listener than me.

So, to me, the miracle of the sacred grove is not just that God the Father and Jesus appeared to Joseph outside a tiny New York town, but also that Joseph walked into the woods expecting something to happen. Not what actually happened, I’m sure, but something.

This is the beginning of an example of something I’ve started calling grace cycles, which is the idea that we can enter into patterns of things and in those patterns have increased access to the grace of God. There are lots of cycles like this, but in this one Joseph had faith that God had talked to people before—> he figured he was a person, and maybe God would talked to him—> God talked to him—> Joseph maintained the faith that that had happened, even when everything and everyone reasonable said absolutely not, no way—> he had hoped that he might get to talk to God again.

Joseph saw something impossible, and it made him believe in impossibility. It reminds me of the brilliant Catholic essayist Brian Doyle, who wrote in his “Prayer on Easter Morning,” “This is the day when we admit, smiling, that the essence of our faith doesn’t make sense and isn’t physically possible; how great and brave is that!…. How refreshing to remember that we are sworn to live by our conviction that there is so much more beyond sense!” (Book of Uncommon Prayer 148).

This hope in impossibility meant Joseph was willing to try the impossible, so when God asked him to translate words inscribed metal plates in a language no one on earth could read, he said, “Cool.” And then he did. Joseph did the impossible all the time, and I think it’s because had the kind of hope that propelled you forward in situations where it genuinely doesn’t make sense to keep going. Even when he failed over and over again.

Because he did fail over and over and over again. He went big every time, and his hope carried him through a lot of crashing and burning. He built Zion and then watched it burn, so then he built it again, raising it out of the marshes. He built a temple even though everyone was desperately poor, and he didn’t really know what a temple was. And as he stumbled through his enormous successes and failures, he made big mistakes. He did not always treat his wife well. The introduction of polygamy was an all around mess. He was terrible at finances. His pride got in the way of being a good leader sometimes.

It’s easy for current members of LDS Christianity to imagine that the church, the gospel, Joseph being the one to bring it about was inevitable, but in the D&C the Lord told Joseph, “Behold, you have been entrusted with these things, but how strict were your commandments…. And behold, how oft you have trasngressed…. Behold, thou art Joseph, and thou wast chosen to do the work of the Lord, but because of transgression, if thou art not aware thou wilt fall” (D&C 3:5-9). It’s worth remembering that mistakes and failures were part of the process of Joseph becoming a prophet of God, because it is inevitably part of the process of all of us becoming people of God. We have to have hope to carry us through our crashing and burning because, with or without hope, we’re going to do some crashing and burning.

First Vision, Kendal Ray

Possibly it was seeing God work through him despite his own mistakes and faults that gave Joseph such strong hope in the people around him. If God could work with someone who lost his temper and threw a bugle at someone, who lost pages and pages of scripture, who was deeply human, then probably God could work with other people too. So Joseph kept his faith in people, often in spite of a lot of evidence. Joseph saw rape and murder and exile. He knew the evils of the world. He just kept believing that people were good anyway.

He said, “I teach them correct principles and they govern themselves,” which is a faith in humanity that very few leaders have shown throughout time. He taught that everyone was worthy of God’s presence in their life, that everyone could receive revelation. And he forgave—again and again and again, he forgave the people who despitefully used him. He believed that they could be better than they were, just as he believed that he could be more than he was. And, sometimes, people rose to his expectations.

I admire this even more than Joseph’s hope in God. God clearly deserves my faith and hope. People, though. People can be hard to keep the faith in, but hoping with and in them seems to be one of the things that is most likely to invite them to be better. Joseph’s hope was transformative. It transformed him, it transformed the people around him, it transformed the world—he made every place he lived Zion.

I’m not very good at this kind of hope. I struggle to believe that I could be the vessel of God’s transformative grace, and sometimes I struggle to keep the faith in people. I struggle to see their goodness before I see everything that is hurt and wrong. Sometimes, I struggle to imagine how God’s work can go forward in the midst of all this pain. 

But it was equally impossible that an uneducated boy from a poor family whose neighbors never really thought he was special healed the sick and cast out devils and brought back covenants that seal us to our families for eternity. From this side of history, Joseph’s path seems inevitable, but it could not have seemed that way to him. For him, it must have seemed impossible. He just did it anyway.