Margaret's Birthday Post

I wake to stars behind my eyes, pinwheels and kaleidoscopes of darkening dreams.

Tasting poetry, I stepped into the morning, tiny flakes of crystal cold melting into my hair and weeping down my jacket. The argument, caught in my teeth, that thing by which nothing greater can be thought is thought and thought again and draped, hanging out in the sun and dripping soapy water on the grass.

That thing, that noun, the encompassing arrogance robbing language with letters and blank slates that veil perceptions, assumptions. With groanings that cannot be uttered, as though my wrung out soul were washed in words, words, words. My hand, ebbing the tide of inky madness pouring unstopped from my eyes. My trailing fingers, my gasping breath pushing against the water. 

Named and unnamed, life and universe, what I know and don’t know ripping in pieces the careful hope I have crafted. Built on words which dry out—raisins in the sun— and loves long gone on dusty roads.

Burrowed into a couch, the screen governs my imagination and ends with Frodo gone to safety, into the west. As though the eye of Sauron fell today, and yesterday, and forever, as though the sons of Gondor and of Rohan were eternally circled in sanctity, as though the age of mankind could hold at bay the hours of wolves and shattered shields. And yes, at last, the burden is over and done, but some scars are too deep to return to. And forever the words swim through my sunken mind, Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild. With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

And we are the hollow men. Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response falls the shadow. Life is very long. We are the broken and the lost, we are the weary and the weeping, we are Original Sin. 

Power to the people? Power to this race of evolving souls who feel more deeply than death, who murder and create, who see beauty and who seek truth. Hosanna, save us, we are stuck between the lines of black and white, waiting for the light though we are underground, spinning past the world through subway doors and careening buses. 

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

A whimper like mother Eve, who said she was deceived as she saved the human race forever. A whimper like Jehovah, who hung from a cross and plead for an answer from silence. A whimper like Joan of France who burned her youth away and would not relinquish her grip on heaven. A whimper like mine, in the dead of night, when the walls close in and the prayer cannot hold words. 

Eve, you to whom all living owes blood and vibrancy, can no one know why it was that you took that first bite? Eve, my mother, did you weep to know that you were tricked, manipulated into darkness for your sacrifice? And when your choice was full and hope grew again, did you ever wonder why the beauty came from facade? 

Perhaps I am deceived. Tricked, manipulated into darkness by beauty and love that carries the voices of the world. Perhaps this tapestry of color and light is no more than distraction, clever ploy that disguises something rotting from the inside. Perhaps these voices, these millions of suppressed representatives who are finally speaking out, perhaps they are the light, but I am the fire. Or maybe the light is higher than us all, and we can only listen. 

And we’re trying to be faithful but we’re cheatin’ cheatin’ cheatin.’

Cello notes sing out from my lightly beating heart, breaking wide for all of the music that will never be played, never be heard. And Sonny pours his soul into the merciless black and white of piano keys, and he gives all. So at last, at last the brothers know.

While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

We suffer, we hurt in this never ending narrative of mortality producing the same agony and ecstasy. But in the lump sum of moral faces, in this mass entity that weeps and sighs together, sad echoes linger in the hemisphere and symphonies fade into tuning pitches, and it is only the raw tapestry that greets my unwashed eyes. For the madness, it is creation that speaks. It is the organization of newness, the reordering of material, the listening to notes centuries old. It is the action, stepping onto the canvas of this life to listen, speak, hurt. 

I am born again, and again, and again, standing where I stand in the embryo of creation, liberating the membranes of my mind, moving from passivity of observance to the action of interpretation. I participate, I accept and reject, I stand in the line of fire and burn. 

Get thee to my lady’s chamber, and tell her to paint her face an inch thick. Lady Ophelia, I will weep for you. I will weep for your mind which was broken and your heart which was weary. But I will wake to dream, and dream to wake, and act to place these pieces into wholeness. 

Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the Shadow. For Thine is the Kingdom.

I might understand your choice in the shadows. I too might know that I’m the hero of my story, red on my forehead and conviction in my bones. I might believe that meaning is mine and cannot be told.

To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words….

I wake to stars behind my eyes, and weeping fires on a summer day all to explain why I whisper that my thoughts are ashes. I am as a Phoenix, rising to sweep galaxies with hope.

Referenced Works (in the order they appear) Ontological Argument (https://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/ontological.html) Romans 8:26 Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2 “Raisin in the Sun” Lorraine Hansberry Speech at the Black Gate, The Lord of the Rings “Stolen Child,” William Butler Yeats “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Elliot “Hero” Regina Spektor “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin Hamlet, Act 5 Scene 1 John 6:68

With Healing in His Wings

Lewis Smedes' book “Shame and Grace: Healing From the Shame We Don’t Deserve” addresses a mindset most of us experience in varying doses and frequencies: shame. We've all experienced it; it comes in many different forums both public and private. It is pernicious and lingering, fueling self-destructive behaviors and an inability to accept love. Smedes writes that “the underlying dynamic of shame is the fear of rejection.” Shame begins when experience mocks an innocent trust, when expectations end in heartache, when people let us down and when disappointment convinces us that it is safer to just "take care of me."

I have often wondered about the seeming contradiction of the call to "become as a little child," or the ambiguity of "the natural man." These are trite little phrases meant to convey entire doctrines and mantras for mortality, yet to me they seem unequivocally enigmatic. My favorite professor once provided her own explanation, that the natural man is developed when we realize that trust disappoints. The natural man is the shame of Adam and Eve which Satan instilled by convincing them that they were unworthy to stand in God's presence, that they should be ashamed of their own mortality. The opposite of the natural man is the childlike willingness to trust again, and Smedes calls this experience grace. He writes, "“to experience grace is to recover our lost inner child. The heart of the inner child is trust. We lose our childhood when we feel that the persons we trusted to accept us do not accept us. Shame cheats us of childhood. Grace gives it back to us.” It is a beautiful idea, but I think many of us "are not prodigal sons who might come to our sense if we felt a shock of acute shame we are the obedient sons who stay at home and still suffer the constant cramps of chronic shame." This floating rhetorical idea of "grace" resides in a kind of liminal space, a grey area that promises peace and hope yet feels to many of us unreachable. It is overwhelming to feel vastly inadequate and even more so to be continually requesting the grace of heaven, knowing it is there, but not feeling the immediate peace of its presence. I recently read the most beautiful short book by C.S. Lewis,“A Grief Observed.” It is a collection of his raw thoughts directly following the death of his beloved wife. He talks about the shock of his grief and the depression and bitterness he felt lingering for months and even years afterwards. He talks about knowing the scriptural promises of grace and yet feeling like the “knock and ye shall receive” has left him with bloody knuckles and the same aching weight in his heart. He doesn’t offer solutions, he simply shares his agony and soul-wrenching grief. It was so moving to me to think about this man who we revere as practically the 13th apostle absolutely immobilized by his grief in the wake of loss. Somehow, it left me feeling so hopeful. I have felt that kind of heavy, dark, bitter grief for much of my life but there has been a deep sense of shame attached to it. It was quietly reassuring to recall that grief is real, it is raw, and it does not magically disappear with a few magic words. 

I think maybe grief itself can heal us. The experience of feeling our own emotions without attempting to mediate or appropriate them is the most universally human thing I can fathom, yet perhaps one of the most difficult. We are so convinced that we must feel a certain way to find approval that we can’t seem to allow ourselves to simply be. Smedes writes of a quintessential experience of shame, “I felt all alone. Helpless. Drained. The ideals I had tried and failed to live up to were so absolute and so undefined that my shame was equally absolute and undefined. I was hopeless. I seemed to be sinking into a darkness where I would be stuck forever. It was only a dark feeling you say. But feeling is what hurts when it comes to shame. When a person with more unhealed shame than he can bear finally gives in to his feelings, he falls into a sadness that he has stored up and not dared to feel for years. It is a mourning for a lost joy. He is not sad about something in particular, the specifics are buried in events he cannot recall. It does not matter. What matters is that, finally, he is feeling it.”

I suppose what I am trying to say with all of this talk of shame and seeking grace is that we seem to be universally craving freedom, and I think that grace is freedom. Freedom from self-hate and the demons of mental illness and personified disorders and hopeless, agonizing fear. I have to believe that the messages I am hearing today about the infinite atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ are as liberating and redemptive as they promise to be. Some days they fill me with bitterness and resentment when my knuckles knocking at the throne of grace are bloodied and the heavens are still silent. But other days, days like today, the suffering around me is too much to bear without believing with the particle of faith I can muster that somehow it can all be healed, that somehow there is a living hope. I must believe that C.S. Lewis' Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia, a representation of Christ, did rise from the dead because of "the deeper magic" that the powers of darkness and greed "knew not of." That like him, Christ does rise "with healing in his wings" and that in the sweetness of free-falling trust "justice, love, and mercy meet." 

Today I hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s words to the dampened spirits of cruelly discriminated peoples of black Americans. For him it was a dream that we are still working to fulfill, and I must believe that it is catalyzed in Christ. "Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” Christians preach freedom to the captives, and aren’t we all captives? I think of Elder Holland’s words of hope to those of us suffering from the “crater in the mind” that is mental illness: “I bear witness of that day when loved ones whom we knew to have disabilities in mortality will stand before us glorified and grand, breathtakingly perfect in body and mind. What a thrilling moment that will be! I do not know whether we will be happier for ourselves that we have witnessed such a miracle or happier for them that they are fully perfect and finally “free at last.”” I don’t know that I can ever describe that hope that those words provide me with. I will be “free at last” someday, and so will countless others whose demons threaten to drown them with the pernicious tides of fear and shame. The message of a Savior is a message is of liberation and healing. We cry “hosanna,” save us with both gratitude for what we believe and desperate yearning for what we wish to feel. We believe with all our hearts that as we do the work of compassion and grace in verb form, we ourselves become Saviors on mount Zion. I believe that Easter represents that prayer of hosanna, that pleading of the weary and broken, heard echoing through the valley of the shadow of death with a kind of hope-filled, life-giving music that begins to overcome the shame that would break us apart.

“Taking over this town they should worry,

But these problems aside I think I taught you well.

That we won't run, and we won't run, and we won't run.

And in the winter night sky ships are sailing,

Looking down on these bright blue city lights.

And they won't wait, and they won't wait, and they won't wait.

We're here to stay, we're here to stay, we're here to stay.

Howling ghosts – they reappear

In mountains that are stacked with fear

But you're a king and I'm a lionheart."

Of Monsters and Men, "King and Lionheart" 

In Praise of Literature

In commencement, it is only fair to state that I have always loved books. That said, as a high school student my English classes were interesting, but certainly not subjects of abject adoration. I distinctly remember a respected classmate once expressing her desire to be an English major upon entering that mystical land of “college,” and thinking to myself, why would you want to study that? In my mind, English majors were strange souls, bookworms who pored over fantasy novels and corrected everyone’s grammar, not to mention that everyone already speaks English. Fast forward several years: I was significantly more educated in the ways of the world (as far as majors go, that is) and was a rather discontented education major. Finding my classes un-stimulating at best, I spent my spare time reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It was on a deliciously warm day, with the delicate snap of fall approaching on tiptoe, that I sat on the grass outside the HFAC, soaking up the brilliant philosophy and genius exposition of the human soul crated in Tolstoy’s masterpiece. It was quite in the middle of my literary feasting that it fully dawned on me how utterly strange my situation was. My major bored me, and I satisfied my intellect and hunger for knowledge by studying literature, alone. I closed the book, walked across campus to the humanities center, and changed my major. 

When I announce that I am an English major, after the polite nods and affirmations, the predictable question greets me: “what are you planning to do with that?” Sometimes, the question is slightly more creative: “why are you an English major?” Without time to express a passion that could fill books, I generally answer with a smile and a quick, “because I love it.” It is here, however, that I wish to expound on what I mean by the love I throw so hastily out, what I meant by grasping Anna Karenina as my door to a new world, what I see as the fuel of my studies, why I am devoting my time to, of all things, literature. 

Stories surround us. The myriad of humans who stand at stoplights, wait for buses, go to church, raise children, find love, create beauty, hurt and destroy, eat, sleep, breathe, these masses are each carry threads of closely knit strands, composing narratives of desires, passions, heartbreak, fulfillment, bitterness, forgiveness, joy. We are tied to each other, tied by our commonalities that somehow make us different and distinct. We understand each other, we are separate from each other. We love, we create, we kill. We, we are the humans of the earth, and that role is ours alone. Questions with attempted answers billow around our existences: what is emotion, so central to this experience? How do we relate with the cosmic force propelling our lives forward? What is the purpose of the staggering number of us, seemingly infinite in our array across time and space? We have exhausted days hunting for food, painted our stories on the walls of caves, discovered fire, tied baskets and made pottery which became art. We have built boats and ravaged countries, built planes and escaped to far-off lands. We have climbed mountains and touched sea-beds, bowed to kings and fought for governments. We have raised swords for our families, dropped bombs on others’. We have crafted palaces and died in huts, fallen from pyramids and replicated human hearts. We have saved lives and we have destroyed lives, we have loved and we have hated, we are and we are not, we are survivors in a human experience, and it is ours. I study literature because I am a student of the human soul. Because I am alive in this world, because stories bridge gaps and build portals to empathy, because I see sadness and have heard broken sobs, I study literature to understand. What else has lasting meaning but the experiences which span centuries and unite men and women across time and space? What else but love and greed, hate and envy, joy and forgiveness, hope and redemption give unity to this cohesive experience that separates us from the rocks and trees teeming with life of equal value?

I study literature because I want to be awake in the haphazard passage of time, I want to know what has made us kill and what has made us weep for joy. I want to know who crossed the Panama Canal and why their experience was valid, what made them human and why it all matters. I want to live deliberately, knowing the world I am alive in, to greet with empathy those whose lives are vastly different from mine. I want to be informed, I want to be thinking. I want to greet tasks surmising my awareness with a depth of questions, thoughts, and dreams. I want to think, and I want to find meaning. I want to feel and I want to make it matter. I want to cross time and space, I want to decide for myself, again and again in a thousand new ways, why it matters that my heart beats. 

I will go to dark places in the pages of stories about rape and murder, greed and burning lust. I will not shrink from my self-appointed task, because I want to know what is real, I want to escape from my own narrative and understand others’. We students of humanity, we must have courage to gather material, knowledge, darkness and light, and assemble meaning and purpose. We are alive in this world, and will listen to it crying out, we will see it expanding, we will grasp the universe and reach into the soul, and we will reap mysteries. We will live.

Our Ends Are Our Beginnings

In Defense of Hope

Approximately 6 million people visit the Mona Lisa in Paris’ Louvre every year to squint at the tiny frame and revel in its artistry. Roughly 7 million visit Michaelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s Basillica, while another 3 million reportedly see his ‘David.’ I stood in front of St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna, Austria when I was 17, and the world I knew shifted and changed beneath my breathless awe. I heard the world famous Vienna philharmonic play Sibelius’ 5th symphony and watched tears fall down faces from around the globe. I saw the Beethoven Frieze in the unfinished basement of Vienna’s Secession building and I reminded myself to breathe during ‘The Prayer’ from Gounod’s Faust. The humanities offer significant insight into the mortality we are all a party to. The thirst for creation—as master, student, or bystander, seems to be insatiable, providing meaning to an otherwise drab landscape of suffering and finality. The extraordinary provides hope for the ordinary and mundane, and we flock to it. It is as though marvelous human creations provide a hope that this whole business of being human isn’t so bad after all, because look at what emotion is evoked and tell me that it doesn’t change us as mortal—and moral—beings. These creations give strength to mankind as a whole and give reason to believe that there is something, some spark of madness, that cannot be quenched and that lifts us as an entity higher through centuries of study. 

Take all of that and then imagine something more powerful than any tangible creation. An idea, this idea: We live and we die, yet we are not alone through the cycles of dust to dust. In the broad continuum of space, we have a place among the stars, a home in the infinite vacuum of incomprehensible grandeur. There is a being in complexity unparalleled to the most advanced mathematical sciences that has engineered the universe and perfectly created an organized splendor that responds to stimuli, builds and rebuilds without compulsion in response to changing weather patterns, naturally creates new life, and  even expands into the chasms of space throughout eons of time. He is not a magician, but instead a scientist so precise that his creations continue according to perfectly balanced principles. The precipitous entropy of the universe—all matter progressing toward chaos—is kept in check by an eternal equilibrium unattainable by any human means. He is not only omnipotent and omniscient, but in fact a Father to mortal children who in all their minuscule endeavors still relate to His perfected magnificence. This “idea” contains the most pervasive and extensive philosophy ever attributed to mankind. It is the most permeating and universal notion throughout every age of time and across social, racial, gender, and economic barriers. It is woven into stories etched on pre-historic caves and painstakingly carved into stone tablets. It has infiltrated every work of man since the beginning of time. It is undoubtedly the most unflinching concept, withstanding both the fiercest criticism and the deepest loyalty. It is an idea that has united millenniums of believers across continents and lent something more precious than the gold and silver which have ruled the world: hope. 

If we as a human entity created God, He is our single greatest creation. And if the great argument against the organized stems from this creation is that religion’s byproduct is merely mass mediocrity, it is only logical to conclude that the original idea of a universal creator does not match the suppositions of mediocrity in devotion to Him. Is it merely uneducated blindness to adhere to such a mystical idea as God? 

Contact, a 1997 drama, tells the story of a brilliant young astronomer who dreams of contacting extra terrestrial life. After a life-changing experience passed in a fraction of a second, her testimony is doubtful. All she has to back her story is her own conviction, and with that conviction she clings to the hope that the continuum of matter in the universe is not just a waste of space. As she testifies in court, she says (begins at 1:22):

I had... an experience.  I can't

prove it.  I can't even explain it.

All I can tell you is that

everything I know as a human being,

everything I am -- tells me that it

was real.

I was given something wonderful.

Something that changed me.  A vision

of the universe that made it

overwhelmingly clear just how tiny

and insignificant -- and at the same

time how rare and precious we all

are.  A vision... that tells us we

belong to something greater than

ourselves... that we're not -- that

none of us -- is alone.

I wish I could share it.  I wish

everyone, if only for a moment --

could feel that sense of awe, and

humility... and hope.  That

continues to be my wish.

All of the intelligence and logic and the world cannot compete with this stubborn hope that propels men and women to continue living, loving, and breaking, though it seems at times that we will bleed to death with the pain of it all. Yet what could be grander and more beautiful, more tragic and humbling than the idea that someone did in fact bleed and die so that we could continue to live and when life is exhausted so that we could die in order to go on living and loving forever. About this man whose sacrifice of death allows life, prophetic writers penned these infinitely powerful words: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him. Specters of mortal life and death laugh in the face of anything but despair facing a finite life, yet this figure who has become the beacon of nations and the foundation of magnificence took the brunt of that humiliation and destroyed it forever. In short, there is no chastisement for peace. There is no longer a hold upon its power. It rushes forth in all the glory and triumph of a thousand unstopped dams, and it is ours to hold with unflinching hands and hearts just broken enough to fill. It is this hope that cannot be explained or riddled through but that expands as the evening sky through any willing and open space. It is this hope that stirs in the hearts of those who seek truth or meaning in anything. It is hope that spills from art and music across centuries. It is hope that tells us that we as humans aren’t worthless and we aren’t forsaken and we have something bigger to cling to. Emotion, that beautiful orb that is so very human and yet so undeniably divine can be painted and sung and carved into stone. It was that fierce emotion of hope that expanded within me as I ran past a BYU soccer camp and caved at the thousands of stories running around the field and never colliding, yet bound in the nearly invisible but iron threads of silvery webs that connect us all. If nothing else makes sense in this mad mad world, that does. That hope is worth living for. 

So when we have received a vision of light, a reason of hope, I think we must cling to it. I see no other way than for us to believe or to die in abject misery. There is no middle ground, only a volatile frenzy of imaginings leading nowhere at all. If we are going to be in, I think we must be all in, or why dabble? I see nothing on the horizon of skepticism and mockery but narcissism and loneliness. If we are going to live, I think we must live deliberately and live with meaning. I see no lasting meaning in anything but that which I desperately hope and willingly believe carries beyond the grave. 

Hope and its byproducts can seem childish and naive. I defend it because I cannot deny that the wings on which it rises have stirred within my heart and granted something to cling to. It’s not merely a product of the imagination. I wish I could share it. I wish everyone, if only for a moment --could feel that sense of awe, and humility... and hope. That continues to be my wish. It is in defense of hope that I live because when I look at the David and listen to Rachmaninoff I cannot concede to mere triviality in the span of a few years. There is more, and through days of tears and days of joy I will hope from the inside out and the outside in and we will all journey on, treading softly or rising quietly on the light of hope.

“I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach” —The Brothers Karamazov 

So Comes Love

In his account of the Savior's brief earthly ministry, the apostle John includes the story of a woman taken in adultery. This story is often used to portray our Lord's mercy and compassion, which is abundant, but I would like to focus specifically on the experience of the woman. I wish we knew her name, but perhaps because we don't it is easy to step into her shoes and live the experience again and again with her. 

The scribes and pharisees, ever clamoring to find fault with Jesus, drag this nameless woman through the streets and publicly declare her sins to the throngs of people. Tossing her roughly at Jesus' feet they say, Master, this woman was taken in adultery. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?" 

Jesus doesn't immediately answer their incessant voices. Instead, he kneels on the ground and begins to write in the sand. The scribes and pharisees badger relentlessly, repeating the question that mocks the woman who can only wait to hear her fate decided. Our Lord stands, beholding a crowd eager for blood, and says simply: He who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.

The answer is as unexpected as it is bold. The raging crowd quiets, and one by one they disperse as their own consciences convict them. Finally, the woman is left alone with the Savior of the world kneeling beside her. The words He next speaks are not for the crowd, but saved wholly for her:

Hath no man condemned thee?

Her response shows a sorrow and regret that all of us have known. Her public accusers have left, yes, but now she is face to face with a perfect man whose unblemished nature seems to her to highlight her own stains. Her untold and disregarded story, the cruelty of her situation making her now the only cast member, plays behind her eyes. No man, Lord. In other words, she seems to be saying, Have I not condemned myself?

Surely self-forgiveness is one of the most difficult tests of trust in the Savior. God's love is a rather enigmatic concept for those of us wandering through mortality. We preach that "God is love," we testify that His love for us is as a perfect father for his children, we believe that his love was enough to send a perfect Son to die for the sins of the world. But though these truths build the foundation of our faith, they do not explain the minute details of individual lives thirsty for that love. This thirst is not just metaphysical, it is not just a yearning for more doctrine, it is a craving for living waters to seep into the very soul beyond the mental reservoirs that grasp words without yet grasping feeling. Mortality is draining and exhausting, and the love of God is the I.V. that delivers life-sustaining nutrients into souls desperate for spiritual life. 

This need for divine love is constant and eternally real. There are times, however, when that love seems very far away; when we feel far away and far below the throne of grace, and when that distance is self-inflicted and self-sustained. I am talking about times when our failures and mistakes balloon in our minds, distorting our own images in the mirror and permeating all waking thoughts and feelings. Times when our choices have clearly limited progression, times when despair--however constantly repressed--springs back into the landscape of our minds, taunting continual attempts at happiness. Times when we feel we have disappointed those we love, when we have been less than our best selves and when bad habits have become lifestyles. Times when the mistakes of others haunt every moment and when cruel words seem etched into our minds. It is these times that place us in the shoes of the biblical woman taken in adultery. Perhaps we feel foolish, recognizing mistakes or shortcomings. Perhaps we feel anguish, fear, even hopelessness as we look at the landscape of seemingly wrecked lives and devastated futures. Others have forgiven us, loved ones still love us, we have made amends and patched up old wounds. We have tried again and again, we have sought and felt the forgiveness of the Savior, we have applied every conference talk and every scripture in an attempt to live as we should, but still we look at our lives and feel disgust.  

Have I not condemned myself?

A quiet moment in Jerusalem now lives for every one of us as we read words spoken by the Lamb of God, responding to the woman whose sins are ringing in her ears.

Neither do I condemn thee. Go thy way and sin no more. 

I submit that the greatest act of trust the Savior has placed in us is reflected in that simple phrase. It is in the gift of agency that God's love is made manifest, and it is trust in the personal use of agency that the Savior shows with forgiveness. Forgiveness is only possible because of Christ's infinite atonement, so to believe in Christ is to believe in forgiveness, and to believe in forgiveness is also to believe in ourselves. By every act of forgiveness our Lord is freeing us to release the past and embrace the beautiful future. He believes in the majesty of each individual soul, so why should we cling to the ugliness of mistakes? Let them wash away with the tide of His love. 

Go thy way and sin no more.

What greater vote of confidence could she have been given? The perfect, unblemished Jehovah believed that she could rise up and live a beautiful life. He believed that she was not her mistakes, and He gave her and all of us the chance to live, not burdened by what we once were but lifted by what we are becoming. Indeed, He comes to bring "beauty from ashes," and how desperately we each need that redemptive transformation. 

Self-forgiveness is an act of faith. As Jeffrey R. Holland says, "faith is always pointed toward the future." God's love can fill empty hearts and become the life blood sustaining our eternal souls, but we must release the pressure and the ashes that are inevitable in this moral journey. Christ has made the future beautiful for all who choose to cling to Him, so forgive yourself and let Him fill the vacancy with the endless ocean of His love.

"let all go--the 

big small middling 

tall bigger really 

the biggest and all 

things--let all go 

dear

so comes love." 

e. e. cummings

Liz Lemon Swindle

"And We Are The Dreamers of Dreams" --Arthur O'Shaughnessy

I should have been studying. But it was a Saturday, there was much on my mind, and it just wasn’t happening. After some quality procrastination and a brave attempt to wake up by way of a 45 minute shower, I decided to go on a walk. My mind and I walked out of the door, and it felt heavy. I threw the hood up over my wet hair as snow fell lightly down. Meandering into a favorite mountain trail I climbed to the top of a small hill and perched on a rock overlooking the traffic of Provo. By now, it was snowing in earnest, and the thick flakes kissed my face and soaked into my jeans. Life, that cold February day, felt like a cage. As I climbed down the mountain some time later, the slick snow slid under my feet and threw me to the ground, hard. Alone, breath knocked out of me, I looked into the swirling sky and thought, “ouch.” This existence brings pain.

Maya Angelou wrote,

“A caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

His wings are clipped and his feet are tied”

Lying on my back against rocks in the snow, I felt like a caged bird. Dreams die, and when they do they do not go gently into the night. They go kicking and screaming and their ghosts never quite leave you alone. Wanting to fly away from demands and pressures and stresses and boxes of conformity, now isn’t that a yearning that haunts us all? Uncertainties can feel heavy with their dark threats boring into the hope of the future, and perhaps this is why Shakespeare wrote that “expectation is the root of all heartache.” When the imagined life doesn’t mesh with the real life, the hurt is deep. 

Charles Dickens, in his famous novel Great Expectations, creates the character Miss Havisham. Jilted just hours before her wedding, Miss Havisham spends the rest of her life in bitterness, resenting the heartbreak that destroyed her. Day in and day out she wears her decaying wedding dress. Her rotted cake festoons the tabletop and spiderwebs drape the corridors still decked with decor befitting what should have been a happy day. Her anger towards her lover infests her ability to love anyone else, and her hardened heart makes her cruel and wrathful, bent on destroying any love she can find. As dramatic and vindictive as the fictional Miss Havisham is, perhaps she is not so distant from any one of us. The reality of her life did not meet her expectation of it, and she would not accept it. She pushed against actuality until her bitterness consumed her, forcing aside any light of happiness that could have been possible. For her at least, expectation was the root of heartache.  

Type “expectation vs reality” into any search engine, and thousands of images will flood the screen bearing witness of the fact that "life is not obligated to give us what we expect." It is the pain of living in expectation that puts us in chains and cages. It is the clash of what the imagination dreamed up against the reality of day-to-day life that can be so achingly difficult. But what is the solution? Is it submitting to the swinging pendulum of fate that knocks one around like a feather in the wind? Is it simply to see life “as it is?” To this Miguel Cervantes spoke in The Man of La Mancha: “I've been a soldier and a slave. I've seen my comrades fall in battle or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I've held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning "Why?" I don't think they were wondering why they were dying, but why they had ever lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams - -this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all - -to see life as it is and not as it should be.” The madness, he asserts, is to cease expectation, forsake dreams, and live only in the emptiness of a harsh lucidity. Fallen dreams have landed me painfully on the ground to wonder, “why dream?” Would it not be easier to simply see life as it is and stop “beating ceaselessly into the past”? 

I submit that there is a path between the bitterness of crushed hopes that marked the decay of Miss Havisham and the blind optimism that ignores reality. There is a place for the “why”/"should" of things happening and the “what” of actuality to coexist. 

It might be called active dreaming.

Dumbledore said, “it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” But that is not to say that we should not dream. In fact, I think it is a call to dream. To dream fiercely and fully and loyally, but not to fall between dreams and illusions. Dreams inspire one to live deliberately. Illusions weave silver webs of nothingness that impede progression. 

Dream.

Imagine.

Prepare.

Live.

This is active dreaming. This is paying heed to Paul’s plea to “cast not away therefore your confidence” (Hebrews 10). This is life that is lived deliberately, acting and not being acted upon. Active dreaming is hoping and imagining and seeing beauty, but then when landed on the back in the snow, active dreaming is getting up and creating that vision of beauty. It is making meaning from ground zero. It is taking raw materials and breathing life into them. It is singing with tears streaming down your face and it is being real with God. Active dreaming is sometimes saying “I don’t know,” but recalling that someone does. Active dreaming is not expecting to get, but expecting to give. Active dreaming is why the caged bird sings. 

“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill   

of things unknown but longed for still   

and his tune is heard on the distant hill   

for the caged bird sings of freedom.”

This world does carry cages. Pressures come, heartbreaks come, stressors and pains and fears all come, but the caged bird sings of freedom, and freedom echoes the hope of Christ.

“Let your hearts rejoice and be exceedingly glad...for the prisoners shall go free” (D&C 128:22).

"Ukrainian protester plays piano on a barricade in front of the riot police line during the continuing protest in Kiev, Ukraine on October 2, 2014." Found on thisiscollosal.com via sophiebalice.blogspot.com.

--Kristen

Why Go To Church: Finding Purpose in Zion

I can honestly say that I have had a few transcendent moments in my life. One of them was a little over eighteen months ago in Natick, Massachusetts. It was my first day in the mission field and with all my fellow “greenies” I was in the mission home listening to Daniel Packard talk about the Massachusetts Boston Mission. I don’t know that I could tell you exact words or distinct images from that day, but I will never forget the feeling that enveloped me. President Packard taught us, it felt like he was teaching only to me, about Zion. It was an out-of-body experience as I listened to something that I somehow knew I had been waiting to hear for my entire life: Zion. Unity, love, sacrifice, consecration. The closest I can come to describing that transcendent feeling is to say this: I was home.

Many people that I worked with on my mission struggled with the idea of organized religion. Three hours of church?! And to be perfectly frank, so have I. Often my most spiritual moments come when I’m alone in the woods or writing on a seashore. Let me emphasize here that I crave solitude. I find peace and alignment when I can be by myself, de-cluttering from the stimuli of the world. So coming together in large groups of people has not always fit with my idea of spirituality or pure religion. It is not the gospel, I have often thought, to be forced to socialize. I still hold that opinion--the gospel of Jesus Christ is not about socializing. But what I am trying to learn from the master teacher is what it is about. So, what I would like to talk about today is the beginning of an answer: we go to church for 3 hours because the gospel of Jesus Christ is about building Zion.

In the movie Finding Neverland, the main character James Barrie is a genius playwright. Unfortunately, his private brilliance isolates him from his wife and their marriage is dissolving. At one point he finds her reading his journals and says, “You needn't steal my journal to get to know me.” She responds, “No, I suppose I could just go see the plays. I was hopelessly naive when I married you. I imagined that brilliant people disappeared to some secret place where good ideas floated around like leaves in autumn, and I hoped at least once you would take me there with you.” I hoped at least once you would take me there with you. Sure James Barrie had a lot of incredible ideas. But do they matter in the eternal realm of things if those ideas isolated him from the love of those around him? Does it matter what inspiration I find when I am alone if I don’t take anyone else to the places I discover mentally and spiritually? 

When I first got home from my mission, I was a wreck. I didn’t even unpack my suitcase for two weeks. I felt like something inside of me had died. It was like I had gone to Neverland--some secret place where good ideas floated around like leaves in autumn--and was now drowning in the triviality of civilian life. Returned missionaries often talk about feeling a lack of purpose, and mine was deep. It was especially deep because I knew my purpose was exactly the same--still and always a representative of Jesus Christ--but now I was questioning the meaning of life and purpose in general. Everything seemed so much of a facade, so meaningless, I felt like Macbeth in William Shakespeare’s classic play. Questioning the purpose of life, he says, 

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

I knew mentally that life wasn’t meaningless, but I was certainly questioning every aspect of it. Including, very honestly, why we need three hours of church and all sorts of activities during the week.

When Alma teaches the people at the waters of mormon, he established a church. The people that were converted and baptized there in that beautiful valley became a Zion people. The scriptures tell us what Zion looks like. We read that “their hearts were knit together in unity and love one towards another.” They had “all things common among them.” They were perfectly united and filled with a joy that was “unspeakable and full of glory.”

This little band of believers achieved Zion. But they got away from it. In Alma 5, Alma’s son comes to them preaching repentance. A close reading of the chapter reveals that the people weren’t guilty of any truly heinous crimes, but they had departed from the Zion society they once knew. That is what was so distressing to Alma the younger, that was what he preached so vehemently about. And that is what happened to me when I first got home. I remember getting on the plane departing from Boston, looking out of the window and crying my heart out. I felt like I was leaving Zion. But I am starting to piece something together that I knew in my head but hadn’t yet felt in my heart: We had achieved Zion in Boston. But for now, Zion is not a place. It is a calling. And it is a covenant calling. All of us who have been baptized have made covenants to build Zion. To take upon ourselves the name of Jesus Christ and to strive for unity with our fellow men and women.  It is not about simply living the gospel by checklist, going through the motions and going to church because we’re supposed to. The gospel is about building Zion. 

The scriptures often emphasize the importance of our personal pilgrimages. It is true that we need solitude to solidify our faith and to commune with God. But what gives us meaning in this mortality is when we are united with other people. Chaim Potok writes: “A blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives the span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.  A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.” We need each other. Life is meaningless without connections of love and service. We fill our lives with meaning when we are united. Gathering to Zion is what gives us meaning; finding the sacramental moments in the mundane things of mortality.

I don’t know all of the reasons mandating organized religion. I don’t know everything about culture or order or structure, but I know this: I can simply go to church, or I can build Zion. I can get my visiting teaching done, or I can build Zion. I can breeze through my scriptures, or I can learn about Zion. We go to church and we stay for all of church not because we’re good Mormons, not for checklists, but to build Zion. 

I submit that we all have places and things that are comforting and Zion-like. We all have our own Neverlands. They are different for each of us, and in many ways they are very personal and private. For me, one of those places is the Massachusetts Boston Mission. I lost a lot of meaning when I left the place. But we come together because it is not about the place. We go to church for 3 hours to bring the beauty we find personally and make it meaningful. It is about Zion. It is Zion that makes we want to get up in the morning. It is the hope and even the belief that Mosiah 18 can be real. Hearts knit together in unity and love. It is the prayer that my personal wilderness moments can become redemptive as I use them to help other people. The invitation in coming to church and building the kingdom of Zion is to allow the lines between heaven and earth to blur. This calling is every minute of every day, and we are a covenant people. What does it matter where you go alone if you keep yourself alone? There is purpose in Zion. 

As Peter said to the lame man at the temple Beautiful, “silver and gold have I none. But such as I have give I unto thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.” The lame man walks, and bearing the name and the calling of Jesus Christ, so can we. And we can do so together. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “There's a divinity that shapes our ends.”

In the words of Alma: “as to [every]thing I do not know. But this much I do know, that the Lord God hath power to do all things which are according to his word” (Alma 7:8).