And with that the seekers took leave of the priests, turned hand in hand, and began what would become the most wonderful of journeys.
In a classic Indian parable, three blind men have the opportunity, one by one, to encounter a majestic elephant. The first blind man, passing his hands up and down the beast’s mighty leg, returns from the experience convinced that an elephant’s nature is that of a tree trunk, stout and solid. The next blind man, feeling the sharp tusk protruding from the beast, concludes that an elephant’s nature is that of a warrior carrying a spear. The last blind man, grasping only the bristled tail, is certain that an elephant’s nature is that of a length of rope. Afterwards, they contend with one another over the true nature of the elephant each claims to have encountered. Satisfied that they have correctly understood this magnificent beast, they return to their respective homes and each founds a new religion.
Here ends the classic parable.
But let us imagine what might happen next:
In one part of the village, the first man’s encounter has prompted him to plant groves of date palms. He eagerly instructs his throngs how to pat their hands appreciatively up and down the smooth trunks of the palms. “This,” he teaches them, “is the proper way to experience what I have experienced.”
In another part of the village, the second man’s encounter has convinced him that his followers should be properly armed at all times with a sharpened spear. “Only in this way,” he tells them, “can we emulate the nature of an elephant.”
And in another part of the village, the third man’s encounter has inspired him to reveal the proper way to worship the elephant. He instructs his believers to carefully gather jute fibers and to braid them into coils of sturdy rope. “Entwining these fibers into rope like this,” he explains to his followers, “has been ordained by the elephant as the proper form of worship.”
And so it goes.
Generations pass, and the blind men—each a beloved seer and revelator to his people—live on only in hallowed memory. Priests now carefully preserve correct beliefs about the elephant and regulate the proper forms of worship.
From time to time some of the adherents—often the most sincere and devout—seek further light and knowledge about the elephant.
Is it possible, they ask, that there is more to the elephant than we have understood?
“Nonsense,” the priests reply.
Some of us are imagining a creature so vast that neither a spear nor a rope nor the trunk of a tree can adequately describe it.
“Your imagination will only deceive you,” the priests warn, “and distract you from what has been revealed.”
Then will you yourselves seek out the elephant that our founders encountered, and report to us if there is more that can be known?
“How dare you dictate to us what ought to be done,” they snap.
But the seekers were not to be dissuaded. Then we ourselves will seek out this magnificent creature.
And with that the seekers took leave of the priests, turned hand in hand, and began what would become the most wonderful of journeys.
It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and several other women who told the apostles what had happened. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. (Luke 24: 10-11)
I’m so heartsick to learn of another case of sexual abuse in our community. Foremost, I mourn for the victims. In their vulnerability, they were manipulated and sexually exploited by the people they most trusted. With the deepest part of my heart, I wish them healing and peace.
I’m also troubled by how rarely these women—and women like them—have been believed. For 3 decades, this woman’s allegations were dismissed. The first leader she told did not nothing because, as he recently told a reporter, he “wasn’t going to risk sullying the reputation of someone based on that kind of report.”
This pattern is all too common. Men in power control the narrative—usually in ways that preserve the institutional structures from which they derive their power.
What happens when a disempowered woman dares to challenge that narrative? When she accuses a good man of doing something bad?
Just last month, when now-disgraced White House Press Secretary (and fellow Mormon) Rob Porter was first accused of emotionally and physically abusing his ex-wives, Senator Hatch (R) lashed out at anyone who’d raise such charges as “morally bankrupt character assassins that would attempt to sully a man’s good name.” Only when the photographs of a blackened eye surfaced did Hatch give credence to what the wives had been saying–and understood he’d most certainly lose power if he continued defending the man.
And now, after 30 years of being disbelieved or ignored, a woman has recorded her perpetrator admitting to sexually exploiting young women like her while serving as the President of the Missionary Training Center. Until now, it was easier to disbelieve that woman than to believe her.
Men protecting men, because they can’t risk “sullying the reputation of someone.”
Men silencing women so they won’t “sully a good man’s name.”
In the same decade that President Joseph Bishop has admitted to exploiting vulnerable young women, two Mormon scholars were silenced after writing Mormon Enigma, a historically-responsible book about Emma Smith that included uncomfortable details about her husband, Mormon founder Joseph Smith. These women were banned from speaking about the book to Mormon audiences. When challenged, the apostle Elder Oaks explained “if Mormon Enigma reveals information that is detrimental to the reputation of Joseph Smith, then it is necessary to try to limit its influence and that of its authors.”
A man’s good name.
Sometimes even when apostles believe the women, they make sure no one else does.
…When it comes to discovering truth, I’m discovering there’s no monopoly, no intellectual copyright, no exclusive contract with one provider…If a religion aspires to encompass all truth, its boundaries must be as wide as the universe. The same holds true for the spiritual life. My spirit can’t expand when I’m too provincial in my thinking, too fearful of new ideas…
POSTCARD #1 I’M FINDING GOODNESS FROM MANY SOURCES
YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED THAT I’m as enthusiastic about pursuing wisdom from outside the Mormon tradition as from within. Paul’s admonition to seek after anything that is “virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy” has become an invitation to shed my prejudices about how and where such things may be found. When it comes to discovering truth, I’m learning there’s no monopoly, no intellectual copyright, no exclusive contract with one provider. I’m understanding why Hugh B. Brown, a Mormon apostle, taught that we should search for truth everywhere:
Revelation does not come only through the prophet of God nor only directly from heaven in visions or dreams. Revelation may come in the laboratory, out of the test tube, out of the thinking mind and the inquiring soul.
Now, whenever Beauty and Truth reveal themselves, whether they wear the garments of religion, science, literature, philosophy, or even sacred myth, I will welcome them as honored guests and listen to whatever they’re willing to teach.
If a religion aspires to encompass all truth, its boundaries must be as wide as the universe. The same holds true for the spiritual life. My spirit can’t expand when I’m too provincial in my thinking, too fearful of new ideas. Didn’t Joseph Smith teach “we have a right to embrace all and every item of truth, without limitation”?
I love that welcoming stance. It’s expansive, unbounded, limitless.
That’s what I’m choosing. That’s how I want to live.
“His duty is to bear witness for the dead and the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time. The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.”
Elie Wiesel, Night, Preface
It’s hard to look honestly at our past. Especially when some of our actions fall so short of our ideals. And when we do take a good hard look, Memory finds she’s not permitted to publish her report until it’s first been redacted by a team of lawyers and then forwarded on to the suits at PR for a slick revision. I’m not making this observation theoretically; I experience it personally, time and time again. My own ego keeps thousands of employees busy night and day crafting narratives that preserve its sense of self-respect. This is human nature, isn’t it? Portraying only the most flattering versions of ourselves?
My own trouble confronting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about myself inclines me to be understanding when others flounder in the same attempt. So it’s without condemnation that I observe this all too human tendency on full display in the series of essays being added to the LDS Church’s official website. Taken as a whole, the essays suggest a growing willingness by Church leaders to acknowledge decidedly unflattering moments from our history. This may be a watershed moment in an organization for whom transparency has been a one-way mirror where they could see us but we couldn’t see them.
For me, this essay falls short in the same way the others fell short: it seems more intent on deflection than reflection.
Let me explain what I mean analogously by way of a familiar scene at our house:
Hearing some commotion, my wife and I discover that one of our children has struck a sibling. Called to explain, the child recites a litany of abuses to which they’d been subjected. Once they’re certain that I fully appreciate the extent to which they themselves are the real victim, they will mention their own misdeed, but in terms that make their actions seem justifiable—or at least understandable—given the circumstances.
In “Peace and Violence,” the Church seems to be following this pattern. The anonymous author(s) appear to have been given the task of explaining egregious acts of violence, such as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in a way that reinforces our persecution narrative while also acknowledging a few isolated incidents in which Mormons were the aggressor. Throughout, allegations of violence perpetrated by members of the LDS church are either dismissed as being unfounded or over-blown, or, in the case of the well-documented Mountain Meadows incident, characterized as a tragic instance of the early Saints reacting poorly to the religiously-motivated hostility and sustained aggression they’d so long endured.
I don’t object to context, mind you. Indeed, as the essay takes pains to establish, a pervasive culture of violence typified 19th Century frontier life (as any even-handed treatment of the subject would recognize). But this essay’s portrayal of early Mormons as peace-loving, turn-the-other-cheek folk who only occasionally lost their cool falls short of being fully candid. More importantly, it misses the opportunity to identify elements in our own church culture that kindled a spirit of vengeance and retaliation in our past, and which, I will argue in a future essay, continue to plague our present.
The audience for this and the other topical essays is most likely the member or investigator who has encountered deeply disturbing facts of history and returns to the official Church website seeking the most comforting explanation possible.
But what if we want our past to be a catalyst for transformation?
Comforting explanations only reinforce our sense that “all is well and was ever thus.” Such an approach lulls us into spiritual complacency and retards our growth, both personally and collectively. Sometimes we should squirm.
Hamlet’s words touched the nerve of his mother’s guilt. She wanted comfort, but he wanted her redemption. So he sat her down and said
…you shall not budge;
You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.
If we are honest, and if we are willing to squirm, we can use our history as a catalyst for transformation.
I’ll share two ways the essay fails to be transformative.
First, the authors of the essay didn’t invite us to learn from our past. While we can’t undo our historical failings, we can recognize the factors that contributed to those failings. As a Church, are we ready for those hard conversations? Can we recognize the presence of institutional factors that may still exist today, rendering us violence prone? I’m sobered by a passage I read in the prologue to Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Walker, Turley, Leonard), in which our own historians identify conditions that increase the likelihood of institutional violence:
Episodes of violence often begin when one people classify another as “the other,” stripping them of any humanity and mentally transforming them into enemies. Once this process of devaluing and demonizing occurs, stereotypes take over, rumors circulate, and pressure builds to conform to group action against the perceived threat. Those classified as the enemy are often seen as the transgressors, even as steps are being taken against them. When these tinderbox conditions exist, a single incident, small or ordinary in usual circumstances, may spark great violence ending in atrocity. The literature suggests other elements are often present when “good people” do terrible things. Usually there is an atmosphere of authority and obedience, which allows errant leaders to trump the moral instincts of their followers.
Coming to recognize that many of these same elements are systemically perpetuated in our contemporary Church culture, these kinds of insights could be truly transformative, helping us to become a peaceful people whose discipleship is more Sermon on the Mount and less “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
The second way the essay could have been transformative is by telling the truth in a way that lays bare our greatest vulnerabilities. No spin. Serve it up plain, without any dipping sauce. And when it comes to recounting our crimes against others, it seems to me we are under a special moral obligation to be completely and unreservedly honest.
Official poster of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.
By trying to preserve our own sense of our goodness, we fail to achieve a remission of our sins. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela taught the world this insight—that there is a redemptive quality found at the nexus of Truth and Reconciliation.
In a harrowing scene from Red Prophet, a fictionalized re-imagining of Mormon history penned by Orson Scott Card we see this principle of Truth and Reconciliation. Here, in a meadow flowing with the blood of innocent men, women, and children, the otherwise honorable men who did the killing are about to hear the conditions of their redemption:
From elbow to hands, they dripped with blood. Some tried to wipe it off on their shirts. Some searched for wounds that might be bleeding, but there were no wounds. Just bloody hands.
“Do you want your hands to be clean of the blood of my people?” asked the Red Prophet. He wasn’t shouting anymore, but they all heard him, every word. And yes, yes, they wanted their hands to be clean. “Then go home and tell this story to your wives and children, to your neighbors, to your friends. Tell the whole story. Leave nothing out. Don’t say that someone fooled you – you all knew when you fired on people who had no weapons that what you did was murder. No matter whether you thought some of us might have committed some crime. When you shot at babies in their mothers’ arms, little children, old men and women, you were murdering us because we were Red. So tell the story as it happened, and if you tell it true, your hands will be clean.”
Let’s tell the whole story. Leave nothing out. And when we tell it true, our hands will finally be clean.
From the laziness that is content with half-truths,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Oh God of Truth, deliver us.
~ Ancient Prayer
IN 1633, THE ROMAN INQUISITION CHARGED Galileo Galilei with heresy. His crime? Entertaining the notion that the sun “does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world,” and for espousing a theory deemed “false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scripture.”
While Galileo didn’t invent the heliocentric model of the universe, he discovered plenty of evidence for it. His own powerful telescopes were showing him things never before encountered, and mathematical reasoning confirmed what others, like Copernicus, had been saying. To a rational mind, there was no denying the soundness of the astronomer’s conclusion, but it was an inconvenient truth, to say the least, in an age where burning heretics, not fossil fuels, contributed most to global warming.
To be fair, scientists and philosophers, not just the Church, opposed him. But it was the Church with the power to coerce and intimidate. As the sole mediator of rites essential to salvation, God’s priestly representatives could strip Galileo of his eternal salvation. What could man do more?
I can imagine Galileo’s family and friends pleading with him to stop studying the heavens. It’s dangerous, they must have said. Put away your telescope.
Inquisitive Latter-day Saints hear that, too. Why study the night sky when its constellations have already been named, catalogued, and described in our Church-approved manuals? Why look at the heavens when Deseret Book publishes thousands of titles on Astronomy? There’s no need to look for yourself. And it could be dangerous: You could lose faith in the truthfulness of the Star Map. Put away your telescope.
And yet, like Galileo, the urge to know the truth by our own experience, to understand what’s really out there, compels us to look for ourselves. So we look. And then we begin to understand why there was so much institutional hand-wringing over what we might find.
We’re discovering some stars in the night sky that don’t correspond to the official Star Maps we’ve been issued at Church. Certain constellations have been left off the official charts, and it appears that some stars have even been redrawn to suggest patterns that aren’t present in a clear reading of the starry sky. Not only that, but those who’ve traveled far and wide report that what we see printed on our Star Maps constitutes only one perspective, from a Northern line of latitude, and that skywatchers in the Southern Hemisphere see an entirely different set of stars. The discrepancies are not easily dismissed.
We are confused.
We hear leaders telling us not to trust our own eyesight, to doubt our faculties of reason. We hear apologists pat us on the head and explain that there’s really no contradiction between what we’re seeing in our telescopes and what’s on our official Star Maps. Then we go to Church and hear people bearing testimony of the Star Map. And we sing, Praise to the Cartographer. And what we hear most of all is that we shouldn’t be looking through our own telescopes in the first place, but instead should exercise faith that the Star Map is True.
That last point prompts me to ask: Should we have testimonies of the Star Map and its Cartographers? Or should we have direct encounters with the Heavens they attempt to describe? Isn’t it rather like going to a restaurant and worshipping the menu instead of savoring the food?
I’VE BEEN AIMING MY OWN TELESCOPE at the spectacular cosmos that is Mormonism, collapsing its distance, but until recently I’ve been reluctant to share an honest account of what I’ve seen. For one thing, I realize my view is filtered through a particular lens, shaped by my personal and cultural biases, faulty reasoning powers, and limited perception. For another, I haven’t wanted to force anyone to look through the telescope with me, believing it’s the prerogative of each person to decide if and when they look for themselves. But mostly, it’s fear that has kept me–and so many like me–from giving an honest report of our experience. We stand much to lose by admitting that we see things differently. We are branded as arrogant, faithless, deluded, disloyal, and dangerous.
I get it. I’ve been there myself. By discrediting a person, we don’t have to grapple with the questions he or she raises. And when our most crucial claim as an institution is that we’re right about everything, it’s simply not permissible to allow someone to suggest we may be wrong about anything. The community protects itself from the vulnerability of uncertainty by marginalizing anyone who doesn’t reinforce their sense of certainty. And if there’s one thing out of which we Mormons fashion a Golden Calf, it’s our personal and collective certainty.
Fortunately, astronomical charts can be redrawn to more closely reflect reality. At the institutional level, curriculum and resources are being re-written to acknowledge some of the more egregious discrepancies between our traditional narratives and more honest tellings. No doubt, this change comes as the Church is hoping to earn back the trust of those who have been far more more troubled by the lack of openness than they are by a clear reading of the stars. I applaud this forthrightness for its own sake, and am persuaded that whenever institutions resist transparency they will lose credibility with Millennials for whom unrestricted access to information is seen as a birthright.
Call me crazy, but I still find value in those Star Maps. They fire my spiritual imagination. They bestow a mythic power on our collective narrative. And the awe they’ve instilled in me over so many years has become the prime motivator for me to seek my own direct, unmediated experience with the Universe.
Put away our telescopes? Not a chance. The Heavens are calling!
~
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Buddha in the Beehive 