General Conference Odyssey

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Here are three quotes from three different talks that follow up on the themes from my last post.

Life was made for struggle; and exaltation, success, and victory were never meant to be cheap or to come easily.

Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin

No one is perfect, but everyone should be striving for perfection.

Elder William H. Bennet

The Lord expects more of the disciple than ordinary response to need, to opportunity, to commandment. He expects more humility, more hearkening, more repenting, more mercy and forgiving and faith, more service and sacrifice.

Elder Marion D. Hanks in More Joy and Rejoicing.

These are some pretty stern quotes: high standards, striving for impossible perfection, and an intentionally difficult world. Then Elder Hanks goes on:

All the law is comprehended in this, that we love God and each other.

He also cites Pierre de Chardin:

The day will come when after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and on that day for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.

Without the strict discipline of duty and striving and opposition, we cannot have love. All we can have is a kind of watered-down sentimentalism or maybe cruel indifference masquerading as tolerance. And yet—without finding an ultimate aim in love—duty and striving and opposition are simply so much arbitrary pain or a thin veneer over a nihilistic, Nietzschean struggle for power.

True discipleship is found in the tension between these poles.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• They the Builders of the Nation by G
• In a Single Bound by Daniel Ortner
• Tides by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell’s talk about weaknesses was one of the best General Conference talks I’ve ever read. Not only was it an intrinsically fantastic post, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how relevant it is to some of the confusion and heartache swirling around us today. Elder Maxwell’s directed his talk:

not to the slackers in the Kingdom, but to those who carry their own load and more; not to those lulled into false security, but to those buffeted by false insecurity, who, though laboring devotedly in the Kingdom, have recurring feelings of falling forever short.

These are sometimes the people who, as Elder Maxwell eloquently described, are hardest on themselves:

Some of us stand before no more harsh a judge than ourselves, a judge who stubbornly refuses to admit much happy evidence and who cares nothing for due process.

Before offering words of comfort and counsel, however, Elder Maxwell did something really important. Here’s what he said:

The first thing to be said of this feeling of inadequacy is that it is normal. There is no way the Church can honestly describe where we must yet go and what we must yet do without creating a sense of immense distance. Following celestial road signs while in telestial traffic jams is not easy, especially when we are not just moving next door—or even across town.

This idea of a gap between who we think we’re supposed to be and who we feel we are is something that has always pained people, and that has become a particular focus in recent years. One poignant example–and one I’ve cited a lot in the past–is Ira Glass talking about the aesthetic equivalent of this gap.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

One of the most important things about this quote is something I haven’t heard many people point out before. Just like Elder Maxwell, Glass takes for granted that the standard must not change. Nothing that Glass said makes sense unless we take as our foundational starting point this assumption that our good taste (in his example) is accurate. Glass never questions this. And because of that, the idea of closing the gap by simply pretending that our first novel is good (when really we know it’s terrible) is never even on the table.

Glass’s quote is beautiful and uplifting because it is hard. He is giving advice for people on how to continue a difficult struggle. The idea of letting them out of the struggle never even enters the discussion.

What is true for Glass about art is true for Elder Maxwell about morality. When the Church teaches what is true, it’s going to create a moral gap a lot like Glass’s aesthetic gap. Glass comforts and encourages people to soldier on through this painful gap, but he never suggests anyone should give up. And so Elder Maxwell–and all true prophets–can offer comfort and encouragement only within the context of affirming the bedrock moral principles. There is no other way forward.

The title of this post is a riff on something Brené Brown likes to say. Brown is a shame researcher who studies how shame–as opposed to guilt, which is healthy–is a debilitating form of self-loathing that leads to needless suffering and, perversely, worse behavior. And I like almost all of what Brown has to say. But I confess that her crowning mantra rubs me the wrong way. “Your are enough,” she says.

Except that we’re not.

I don’t want to hammer this too hard, because there are different ways we can take that expression. But one way–and I think it’s an insidious and increasingly popular attitude–is to simply lower standards. It would be as if Glass’s attitude was, “Well, if your first novel is terrible, just lower your standards until it seems good.” Or if Elder Maxwell said, “Well, if the Church’s standards seem unrealistically high, just lower them until they fit your current behavior.” If you feel inadequate, if you feel imperfect, if you feel broken and flawed just tap your heels and whisper “I am enough. I am enough. I am enough.”

That worked for Dorothy, but it won’t work for us.

Let me show you what I recommend instead:

This is probably my favorite video of all time. It’s supposed to be about chastity–and it is, powerfully–but it’s more than that. In the example, the rose is broken. It does no good to try and pretend it’s not. It does not good to deny. It does no good to pretend we are blind. The. Rose. Is. Broken.

And Jesus wants it anyway.

We are broken. And Jesus wants us anyway.

Some people will try to convince you that you’re not broken. You’ll recognize this rhetoric especially from exclamations that “God made me this way, and God doesn’t make mistakes.” I may be cynical, but all I can say is: tell that to someone born with a congenital heart defect. Or any of a myriad of biological conditions–some minor, some deadly–that we come into this life with. As it is physically, so it is spiritually (in this case). We are all broken. Instead of trying to pretend otherwise, I opt for a different approach. I won’t say that “being broken is OK,” because it’s not. But I will say this: being broken is only the beginning. The story doesn’t end there. But the story can only get better–we can only get better–if we’re willing to accept where we are at the start.

Maybe, when Brown or others say, “you are enough,” this is what they mean. But to me, it sounds wrong. We live in a time where the individual is worshipped and judgment is decried as intrinsically hostile. The pain of the gap is real, but leaving someone on the wrong side of that gap is never the truly kind thing to do. Lowering standards is never the kind thing to do. Denying universal and particular brokenness is never the kind thing to do.

Elder Maxwell gave a great list of ways that we can respond to the pain of feeling inadequate. Here is just one of them:

We can distinguish more clearly between divine discontent and the devil’s dissonance, between dissatisfaction with self and disdain for self. We need the first and must shun the second, remembering that when conscience calls to us from the next ridge, it is not solely to scold but also to beckon.

This is the image that I like. Glass doesn’t mince words. Your first artistic endeavors feel terrible because they are terrible. Elder Maxwell doesn’t back down either: what is true is true. But both of them encourage. They beckon onwards.

Our Heavenly Father does, as well.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• Are We There Yet? By G
• To accept them on Satan’s terms by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

There are times when it is hard to get much out of a session of General Conference.

On the one hand, I don’t think this will surprise anyone as a general statement of fact. On the other hand, it might seem like an odd thing to focus on for a post that’s part of the General Conference Odyssey: a decade+ project to read every General Conference talk since 1974.

For me, just so we’re speaking honestly, the recurring problems I have with general conference talks are when they come across as triumphalist. Triumphalism, via Google, is “excessive exultation over one’s success or achievements.” One symptom, for me, are stories about members of other faiths—and especially leaders of other faiths—who convert to Mormonism. I confess that I don’t like these stories. For one thing, they offend my sensibilities as a data analyst. Sure, you can find a Catholic priest who converted to Mormonism, but here’s the thing: Catholics share stories of Mormons who convert to Catholicism. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, Catholics tend to share stories of prominent Protestant scholars who convert to Catholicism while Protestants tend to share stories of prominent Catholics who convert to Protestantism. Mormons, to be frank, often don’t even rate a mention in the ongoing Catholic vs. Protestant dialogue.

Just randomly, as one example, here’s a story a triumphalist Catholic friend of mine shared today on Facebook: The photo that lost radio’s ‘Bible Answer Man’ thousands of listeners. The story isn’t even about a conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism, but to Eastern Orthodoxy which just goes to show you the lengths to which people will try to use these kinds of stories to make their own tribe (er… religion) look cooler. These stories don’t mean anything.

I also find the way scripture is handled to be frustrating sometimes. In this conference, for example, we had Isaiah 29:18 cited, which goes like this:

And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness.

And then this interpretation is given:

Isaiah didn’t understand way back in his day of his own wisdom the theory of braille that makes it possible for the blind to read the words of the book.

Whatever Isaiah was thinking at the time, I really don’t think that it had anything to do with braille which, while we’re at it, can’t really be called a “theory” any more than Morse code is a theory. I was also greatly frustrated when, for example, a member of the stake high presidency described existentialism in a talk as (going from memory): “the philosophy that you can do whatever you want because nothing matters.” I can kind-of/sort-of see where he was coming from (there’s a connection between existentialism and nihilism, of sorts) but this is the kind of statement that would make anyone who had studied philosophy cringe. Or, to give one more example before we turn the corner and head in a new direction, all the ordinary interpretations of Revelation 3:16 are basically wrong. That’s the one that goes “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth,” and everyone thinks it means that it’s better to be really bad than to be mediocre. Which sounds kind-of/sort-of plausible when you’re thinking about someone like Alma the Younger or Saul-before-Paul, but—as a general rule—would just be crazy. I’m pretty sure if the options are “really industrious serial killer” or “excessively lazy person with homicidal tendencies” that God—and everyone else—would prefer you stay home on your sofa rather than get off your lazy butt and chop someone to bits with an axe.

So what does the scripture actually mean? Here’s a really informative passage from the excellent book Misreading Scripture Through Western Eyes:

In the summer of 2002, however, standing there among the then-unexcavated ruins of Laodicea, another interpretation of that famous passage presented itself. Several miles northwest of Laodicea, perched atop a small mountain, is a city called Hierapolis. At the base of Hierapolis is an extraordinary geological formation produced by the natural hot springs that surface around the city. Even today, the city is known for its steaming mineral baths.

Over the centuries, the subterranean springs have created a snow-white calcium deposit known in Turkish as Pamukkale, or “cotton castle,” that cascades down the slopes like ice. From our vantage point in Laodicea, Hierapolis gleamed white like a freshly powdered ski slope.

About the same distance from Laodicea in the opposite direction is Colossae. The city was not yet excavated in 2002, so we couldn’t see it; but it is almost certain that in the first century, you could have seen Colossae from Laodicea. Paul’s colleague Epaphras worked in Colossae, as well as in Laodicea and Hierapolis (Col 4:13Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)). It was a less notable city than Laodicea, but it had one thing Laodicea didn’t: a cold, freshwater spring. In fact, it was water—or the lack thereof—that set Laodicea apart.

Unlike its neighbors, Laodicea had no springs at all. It had to import its water via aqueduct from elsewhere: hot mineral water from Hierapolis or fresh cold water from Colossae. The trouble was, by the time the water from either city made it to Laodicea, it had lost the qualities that made it remarkable. The hot water was no longer hot; the cold water was no longer cold.

The Laodiceans were left with all the lukewarm water they could drink. Surely they wished their water was one or the other—either hot or cold. There isn’t much use for lukewarm water. I suspect that the meaning of the Lord’s warning was clear to the Laodiceans. He wished his people were hot (like the salubrious waters of Hierapolis) or cold (like the refreshing waters of Colossae). Instead, their discipleship was unremarkable.

OK, so we’ve taken our little tangent and I’ve shared with you the reality that sometimes I really don’t enjoy reading these talks. When I read irrelevant stories about Baptist ministers who converted to Mormonism or read improbabe and shallow interpretations of scripture, I get very, very frustrated. I don’t really blame myself for that frustration, because leaders are fallible, they do make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes can be genuinely frustrating.

But here’s the thing: I keep reading anyway. I keep going. I just muscle my way through the discomfort and the alienation and—without fail—I always find a reward that more than makes up for my efforts.

A few years ago we did an exercise in an old ward where we all used our cell phone to answer survey questions anonymously in real time. The questions were things like, “Who read your scriptures this morning?”

It was one of the most powerful lessons I’ve ever had in the Church. Partially because it spoke to me as a data guy. I hadn’t read the scriptures, but I read them most mornings, and so I was really tempted to fudge my answer. But that’s not how this works. Because the survey was unexpected it was basically random (close enough for government work) and so in aggregate—with lots of people answering—the folks who usually read but didn’t that morning and the folks who rarely read but randomly had that morning would equal out and we’d get a pretty accurate assessment of daily scripture study. I think the number was like 60% or something. I don’t remember. The point was that putting cold, hard numbers to the questions made me rethink my level of commitment. That feeling of kind of squirming in my seat and wanting to say I’d read my scriptures that morning (even though it was anonymous) and not being able to honestly say it stuck with me. I didn’t want to be in that situation again.

I can tell you now that I have read my scriptures every single day for the last 50 days. When I read today, it will be 51. I have said a prayer in the morning every single day for the last 51 days. I have said a prayer in the evening every day for the last 155 days. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I don’t think those numbers are impressive. That’s not the point. The point is this: because I’m tracking them I can’t fib to myself anymore about whether I do these things every day. I know when I do. I know when I do not.

And I will tell you one more thing: there are days when I really, really don’t want to read the scriptures. It’s late. I’m exhausted. I have to get up early. I don’t want to do it. And—because I’m tracking—I force myself to do it anyway.

There’s nothing heroic or profound about this. It’s utterly, completely, totally banal. If I forget to pray in the morning before I go to work, I go find a small room (they’re called “phone booths”) during the day and I shut the door, and I say my prayer. No matter what time it is, no matter how late it is, I kneel down every night and I pray. These prayers are sometimes pathetic, but I actually use a timer to force myself to spend a minimum amount of time on them anyway.

And then one day, not long ago, I discovered something incredible. I had come to love praying. There is a tenderness in how I view my daily prayers that has never been there before. It grew so slowly and so subtly that I didn’t even notice it was happening. I just happened to think about praying one day, and I realized I was looking forward to it. I have started to feel like praying is talking to God. It’s still hard for me sometimes, but overall it stopped being a chore and became something I genuinely look forward to most days.

And that’s when it hit me: repetition changes the nature of a thing. You can say a prayer, and I can say a prayer, but if you’re saying a prayer for the 10,000^th day in a row and I’m saying one for the 2^nd day in a row, then we’re not quite doing the same thing. Quantity, as they say, is a kind of quality. And the nature of what we’re doing changes when we do it day-in, day-out for weeks and weeks or months and months. And, I would guess, for years and years. Ask me again in 2027, and hopefully I’ll be able to tell you if my suspicion was right.

This is an utterly Mormon realization, because it does what Joseph Smith always did: weds the mundane and the sacred. The mundane is forcing yourself to do something every single day because you said you were going to do it. And somehow, when you’re not even paying attention, habit becomes holiness.

Not that I’m holy! No. But, by doing something again and again, I found a holy space that I didn’t expect to find. It’s a holy space that’s hidden in time rather than space. You don’t get to it by going to a certain location. You get to it by doing something a certain number of times. I know what it’s like to pray for ½ a year (almost) without missing a day. What’s it like to pray without missing a day for a decade? Some of you probably know that already. I want to find out.

And that’s why I’m not going to quote any particular passage from this session of the April 1976 General Conference. It’s not a cop out. I just reached a point—around the fourth talk—where gritting my teeth and soldiering on had ceased and my heart was soft and the words were starting to resonate. I felt like the talks got better, but who’s to say? Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. All I know is they started to enter my heart, and instead of noticing things to criticize I noticed things to ponder.

There’s a demon on my shoulder that always criticizes everything I read, listen to, or watch. I have a love-hate relationship with this demon. I hope that it will make me a better writer, because with a little effort I can turn it onto my own creations, and—even when I apply them to other people’s stuff—I can learn lessons about how to write better. I hope, at least; that’s the theory.

But this little demon is basically impossible to turn off, and one result is that I enjoy a lot less entertainment than most people I know. The number of books or shows or movies I can watch without a running list of mistakes (real or imagined) is infinitesimal. Another result is that sometimes I have to break through walls of instinctual rejection before I can get to the kernel of goodness in a General Conference talk.

But here’s the thing: there are a million different kinds of demons out there. We all have our own. Some are big, some are small. Some affect us publicly, some attack us in private. There are countless barriers—some high, some low—that give us excuses not to access the spiritual nourishment our souls need. It’s up to us all to figure out a way over, through, or around those barriers.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not tailor made for me. It’s never going to fit me perfectly. My interests, inclinations, aptitudes, and so forth are never, ever going to be the guiding star for the General Authorities. Their job is to talk to the general audience. My job, as a member of that audience, is to listen actively. Not to wait for their messages to deliver gift-wrapped enlightenment, but to greedily get out my rhetorical pick-axe and start digging to unearth truths I need.

Not long ago, I (not so gently?) poked fun in a group email at an academic for what I called his “nuance fetish”. Intellectuals, from my perspective, spend way too much time splicing and dicing and almost always miss the forest for the trees. When you talk to academics (most of the time) it’s like generalizations are not ever allowed. It annoys me.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who think I am needlessly specific in the way I communicate. To them, I am the one who would rather split hairs than simply accept the broad sentiment they are going for.

Of course I think that I strike the perfect balance between intellectual sophistication and subtlety and hard-nosed pragmatism, but the chance that I’ve actually found the Celestial optimum level of specificity in communication is essentially zero. What’s more, there is almost certainly no such thing.

We all have our own languages. Not just French and German and English, but also subtle or vibrant, technical jargon or folksy idiom. God speaks all our languages, but His servants can’t speak more than a few, and can’t ever speak more than one at a time. You may as well get used to subtitles, because you’re going to need them.

So here’s the point I’ve been driving at over this long, long post: I don’t apologize for disliking the triumphalism of the 1970s era General Conference talks. I don’t apologize for seeing some of the shoddy proof-texting for what it is. But I also refuse to let these complaints—no matter how legitimate—become stumbling blocks.

We often talk about members leaving because they were offended, and what we have in mind is that Sister So-and-So said something to Brother What’s-His-Face and then it got back to Brother and Sister Those-Other-Folks and they were deeply offended and vowed never to return. And yeah, I’m sure that has happened. But that’s a tiny fraction of what it means to be offended.

I’m offended, in a broader sense, every time someone misinterprets Revelation 3:16 or insists on reading Genesis literally. I can choose to let these offenses fester. I can take on a superior attitude or assume a stance of alienation and opposition to the Church and the people within it. Or I can buckle down and realize that my way is not the one, true, right way.

If I do that—if I insist on coming back to the General Conference talks (or listening to ordinary Sacrament talks!)—again and again, then I will find those holy spaces that exist in time but not space.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries

This is truth. There are sacred burning fires in all the General Conference talks and in humble Sabbath testimonies. There are temples in time we find when we say our prayers for the 1^st or 10^th or 10,000^th time, and I want to visit them all. There are sacred groves waiting for us to find when we make the sacrifice to read our scriptures—even on our busiest day, even only a verse—but we have to undertake the journey to find them. They are there, waiting for us. All we need to do is keep on the path of discipleship, and we will see vistas unravel before our eyes and discover universes of enlightenment sandwiched between the slices of everyday life.

I am not blind; I see the shortcomings of my leaders, my neighbors, myself.

I pray that I will not be blind; that I will see God moving behind them anyway.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• Human Capital by G
• Truth: Do We Shame, Squirm, or Stand? by Jan Tolman
• There will seem to be sacrifice by Marilyn Nielson

This is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

We’ve made it to the Priesthood session of April 1976’s General Conference. Most of the talks were kind of blah for me, but President Kimball had a few interesting things to say:

Indecision and discouragement are climates in which the Adversary lives to function, for he can inflict so many casualties among mankind in those settings.

The next bit stood out to me largely because of my research on the theology of work:

We hope you will make no less effort to fellowship those members and prospective members who are tradesmen and craftsmen. We must never come to feel in the Church that those who labor in the crafts and skills have somehow done less than they should. We are grateful, of course, for the many professional men in the Church and for those who are thought of as being in our white-collar occupations; but I want us to reach out more than we now do for the men—young and old—who labor in the so-called blue-collar skills, which are more essential to our society than many realize. Indeed, some of these skills are in short supply! Let us reach out in a special way to these men, for among them are many of our prospective elders whose strength and skills we need and whose families will fully affiliate only if these men come and join us in greater numbers.

I think there is something metaphysical about physical labor. Blue-collar work deserves more respect.

And finally:

Please avoid, even by implication, involving the Church in political issues. It is so easy, if we are not careful, to project our personal preferences as the position of the Church on an issue.

This was unexpected, especially given the recent debate over Mormon conservatism. But it’s a much-needed warning to not confuse political partisanship for discipleship.

My favorite talk, however, was Elder Peterson’s. Look at the way he breaks down the difference between authority and power:

From [D&C 121:34-36] I understand that there is a difference between priesthood authority and priesthood power. Power and authority in the priesthood are not necessarily synonymous. All of us who hold the priesthood have the authority to act for the Lord, but the effectiveness of our authority—or if you please, the power that comes through that authority—depends on the pattern of our lives; it depends on our righteousness. Note again, “The powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness.”

…If we live for it, ours can be a power given us from our Heavenly Father that will bring peace to a troubled household. Ours can be a power that will bless and comfort little children, that will bring sleep to tear-stained eyes in the wee hours of the morning. Ours can be the power that will bring happiness to a family home evening, the power to calm the unsettled nerves of a tired wife. Ours can be the power that will give direction to a confused and vulnerable teenager. Ours, the power to bless a daughter before she goes on her first date or before her temple marriage, or to bless a son before his departure for a mission or college. Ours, my young brethren, can be the power to stop evil thoughts of a group of boys gathered together in vulgar conversation. Ours can be the power to heal the sick and comfort the lonely. These are some of the important purposes of the priesthood.

When we have the power to bless families in some of the ways mentioned, then we are using this God-given authority for its most exalted purpose—to bind family ties and perform priesthood ordinances that will endure through the eternities.

For me, this focus on priesthood blessing families is rooted in Joseph Smith’s temple theology. It is about solidifying relationships in eternity, calling on the power of connection and love that transcends death. The approved words by the approved representative (authority) fall short without the meaning intact (power). It makes little sense to speak of eternal relationships via authoritative rituals if the very essence of the relationship has fizzled. This is why Peterson highlights the following when it comes to holding authority:

Many are the brethren who do not understand what these sacred words [D&C 121:39-40] mean:

We must not be inconsiderate;

We must not command;

We must not be dictators;

We must not become puffed up in pride.

These things are toxic to relationships. And toxicity erodes the very essence of what priesthood is supposed to maintain.