Here's my talk from church today. I had to make a bunch of edits and change a lot of things around to fit the time constraint, so here's the director's cut:
In Doctrine & Covenants 88:118, we are told, "Seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith."
I was asked today to speak on our ward conference theme, the power of stories and of storytelling. I would like to approach this topic with these words from the Doctrine and Covenants in mind. How can we seek and how can we teach wisdom from the best books? How can we seek learning by both study and by faith?
In college and in my work since college, I've spent a lot of time studying stories and storytelling. In the BYU film program, in addition to telling our own stories, we watched films and read books and studied different methods of interpretation and criticism--ways of understanding the stories we are told. I want to talk about a few of those today, and how they apply more broadly to gospel principles.
First: What's a story? The most basic definition of "story" is something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. By choosing where something begins and where it ends (and by selecting what we include in the middle), we create stories--even true stories are created in this way. Fiction or non-fiction, we are creating stories all the time as we are accessing, reconstructing, and retelling memories, ideas, events, stories we have heard and stories from our imaginations, stories about our lives, our relationships, our careers, our day--even the Plan of Salvation is a story with a beginning in the pre-existence, a middle in mortality, and an end in the eternities. Stories are containers for meaning, and telling stories is an act of creation. And creation is one of the ultimate characteristics of godliness.
But a storyteller can only do half the work. God created the heavens and the earth; then, on the sixth day, God created men and women to experience, take part in, take care of, nurture and add to that creation--to recreate. In all communication, there is both a sender and a receiver, and we take part in creation when we hear stories, understand them, interpret them, build on them, and liken them to ourselves. We believe that our ultimate divine destiny is to become like God--a creator.
In 1978, Hugh Nibley published a collection of essays called On the Timely and the Timeless. The first two methods of interpretation I want to talk about have to do with these concepts: The timely and the timeless. First, the timeless. In high school, many of us learned to read for theme. This is a method of looking for clues in the text--looking for how the author develops the story and the characters, for motifs and ideas and language and images and other stylistic clues the author uses to build a thematic argument or ask a thematic question. This is a structural understanding of story--we create meaning through the linear development of ideas across beginning, middle, and end. We can "construct" our own reading of the text in the same way the text itself is constructed--by drawing out clues and building them into an argument.
This is a useful approach to take when we study the scriptures. While individual passages or verses may jump out at us as powerful or meaningful, we should also consider these passages in context of the whole. How does the book of Genesis begin and end? What about The Book of Mormon? What are some of the thematic throughlines, and how are they developed? Who are the characters, and how do they change? What clues can we find to support our reading? These tools can lead us to the timeless ideas, themes, and questions at the heart of any text we encounter, including and especially a text as rich and layered with meaning as the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, or Pearl of Great Price.
Some stories, like some of Jesus' parables, may be difficult to understand, but have a clear message. Others are more ambiguous. The Book of Job is a debate about the nature of God and the problem of evil. Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? At the end of the book, after a long debate between Job and his friends, God appears, but God offers no easy answers. Instead, God responds to Job's questions with more questions:
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"
God offers no answers, only the self-evident fact of God's existence in the midst of Job's suffering.
Next, the timely. An historical or cultural reading of a text situates it within the time and place of its writing. A book like Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, may read as antiquated, simplistic, even offensive in its understanding of race and racism today, but its place as a revolutionary document in American history is undeniable. We may also draw on our understanding of the author's biography, the things we know about his or her life experiences and personal beliefs, along with the rest of their writing, to inform our understanding of a story. The works of 19th century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, with their obsessive focus on crime and punishment, deep-seated dread, and miraculous redemption, gain added depth and dimension when we learn that Dostoevsky was, at age 28, wrongfully imprisoned, sentenced to death, and even led to the firing squad before being reprieved at the literal last moment.
We can and should take these reading skills into our scripture study. When and where and how were these stories written? To whom? By whom? What messages were they trying to communicate? What messages might they be unintentionally communicating? We believe scripture to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. We also believe prophets to be fallible men, inspired, but capable of error. A greater understanding of the time and place in which scripture was written, along with its intended rhetorical purpose, may help us navigate these complicated books as combinations of history, inspiration, prophecy, poetry, storytelling, and so on.
We may also read a text phenomenologically. Phenomenological inquiry is based on the premise that, because language is metaphor, a set of agreed-upon symbols to communicate ideas, meaning in the text is never entirely fixed--each of us as readers brings to the text our own meaning, interacting with the text to create meaning through our engagement. Each of us, writer and reader, is reaching for some spiritual truth that always lies just beyond our grasp, truth that may be sublingual, or superlingual, using the imperfect tool of language to touch it, like blind men feeling an elephant and trying to describe it. This incompleteness of language is the subject of the story of the Tower of Babel; Joseph Smith once described it as “the little narrow prison almost as it were total darkness of paper pen and ink and a crooked broken scattered and imperfect language.” Because of this imperfection, our reading is, by necessity, colored by what we bring to it--our personal life history, experiences, cultural context, and set of values, our spiritual impressions, all as valid and as potentially valuable as authorial intent. This kind of reading might be what Nephi calls "likening the scriptures unto ourselves." We can, should, and can't help but do this with all stories, scriptural or otherwise. I imagine if we asked everyone in the room what their favorite book or their favorite movie is, we would hear a lot of different answers. Even more interesting would be to follow up the question with, "Why?" Hearing what a story means to someone is always an exciting way of connecting with that person, and insight into their life experiences, their values, and their beliefs.
Hannah and Her Sisters is my favorite movie. It is a movie that came along at just the right time in my life. One of the characters in the movie, Mickey Sachs, worries he may have a brain tumor. Mickey goes in for further tests and soon realizes he is healthy and everything is fine. However, this brush with mortality sets him on an existential tailspin. Mickey begins questioning everything--what does anything matter if one day he's going to die? Like Job, he searches for meaning in the face of mortality's inevitable suffering. Mickey quits his job working on a TV show and he turns to religion and philosophy for the first time in his life, trying on different religions like one might try on different pairs of pants--seeing what fits, what's comfortable, which cut he likes best. Nothing brings him consolation. Finally, in the midst of a suicidal depression, Mickey goes to the movies. He sees some singing and dancing on the screen, and he realizes that even if he doesn't have all the answers, he does has an opportunity to enjoy and appreciate the life he's been given. Like Job, the questions are not necessarily resolved, they are transcended. Mickey realizes, in a sense, the teaching of Jesus from Luke 17, that "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." While Mickey's questions about what comes after this life aren't answered for him, he does find God's mercy and a sense of peace and joy in appreciating the life he has. This was a message I needed to hear when I first stumbled upon the movie, and I love it still, both because it continues to resonate for me, and because it reminds me of that personal connection the first time I saw it. I'm sure if I asked you about one of your favorite stories, you would share a similarly personal experience.
Finally, there is the redemptive reading. The definition of a redemptive reading is perhaps best explained by example. In October 1944, Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl entered a concentration camp in Auschwitz, Germany. He would spend the next six months moving from one camp to another, witnessing and experiencing unthinkable horror, losing his wife and his parents. In 1945, the war ended and Frankl was freed. The following year, he wrote about his experiences in the book, Man's Search For Meaning. "Everything," he writes, "can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Confronted by the worst of humanity, Frankl still managed to construct a positive philosophy through the work of storytelling, through the deliberate construction of meaning out of seemingly chaotic pain and horror, redeeming his experience through a constructive reading of his life. It would be difficult to conceive of a more powerful example of a redemptive reading.
We have discussed four types of reading: The formal and structural, the historical and biographical, the phenomenological, and the redemptive. Finally, I would like to turn more deeply to an example from the scriptures, to see how all of these different modes of interpretation together can provide us greater context for and unlock deeper meanings within a text.
The Book of Mormon as an historical record ends in death, bloodshed, rape, murder, cannibalism, and warfare. The book is, as writer Terryl Givens has pointed out, a story of "sibling jealousies...culminating in a tragic and genocidal finale painfully deferred until the record's final pages." The story ends with Moroni, the sole Nephite survivor, wandering the earth, hunted, with the preservation of a sacred record and a people's history resting squarely on his forsaken shoulders.
Yet the final chapters of the Book of Mormon contain some of the most deeply optimistic passages in any book of scripture. As he concludes the record, in the midst of despair and desolation, Moroni returns to the document's fundamental thematic throughline--the inherently redemptive hope at the heart of Christian faith. Writing, apparently, to a post-Restoration readership (the only audience to which he had access), Moroni recounts one of his father's, Mormon's, sermons in chapter 7:
"For I remember the word of God, which saith by their works ye shall know them; for if their works be good, then they are good also. For behold, God hath said a man being evil cannot do that which is good; for if he offereth a gift, or prayeth unto God, except he shall do it with real intent it profiteth him nothing." (Moroni 7:5-6)
Moroni, still recounting his father, Mormon, goes on to very clearly delineate that which is of God from that which is not, saying:
"Wherefore, take heed, my beloved brethren, that ye do not judge that which is evil to be of God, or that which is good and of God to be of the devil." (Moroni 7:14)
There is an unmistakable, black-and-white kind of clarity to this formulation—“a man being evil cannot do that which is good." There is fundamental, mathematical precision here; gray area is entirely eliminated. There is good and there is evil. Every man and woman must make a choice, both in his actions (in the gift he or she offereth) and in the judgment of the offerings of others. No man can serve two masters.
But this potentially polarized line of thinking is complicated by introducing an implicit spiritual phenomenology into the equation—there is the sender, but there is also the receiver. And, as always, “by their fruits [we] shall know them” (Moroni 7:5). Moroni writes:
"Behold, that which is of God inviteth and enticeth to do good continually; wherefore, every thing which inviteth and enticeth to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God." (Moroni 10:13)
If these are the fruits by which we know them, then the burden of meaning lies in the receiver’s interpretation of the “gift” to an equal or greater degree than it lies in the sender’s intention—different gifts invite and entice different receivers to “do good, to love God, and to serve him”; as we know, what yields fruit for one may not yield the same fruit for another. The stories that have been important and meaningful to you may be and often are different from the stories that have been important and meaningful to me. To liken it to and expound upon Jesus' parable, some of our soils have the nutrients necessary to grow one kind of seed and others have the nutrients needed to grow another kind.
In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan makes the case that, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” This might be a dangerous notion if we hope to construct a theology based upon the power of the sender, and there's a reason that Milton gives the line to the devil. Yet Joseph Smith expressed this very same sentiment centuries later when he said, “And if we go to hell, we will turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it.” Joseph’s vision of the hereafter is radically physical—a heaven with roads and architecture and dimensions—yet it remains rooted in a spiritual state of mind; like all else in creation, Zion becomes physicalized only after a pre-existing spiritual genesis. Jesus' kingdom of God is within us—in other words, a state of mind (as Milton’s Satan suggested), a spiritual state. Heaven is a kind of tuning in to the governing creative powers of the universe, a sense of alignment that provides the necessary groundwork for Joseph’s grand visions of city-building. Once we are of “one heart and one mind,” with “no poor among [us]” (Moses 7:18), the construction can commence. Zion is built with bricks and mortar—but the kingdom of heaven begins and ends within us.
If that's the case, then we can find no more humbling, no more inspiring, and no more moving an act of redemptive readership in the Book of Mormon than Moroni’s conclusion to his father's sermon at the end of chapter seven. Surrounded by death, brutality, and apostasy, in constant fear of his life, writing to an audience who wouldn't be born for centuries to come, Moroni has every external reason to be unhappy—but look at the words he chooses to record: “And now, my brethren, how is it possible that ye can lay hold upon every good thing?” (Moroni 7:20).
With no one left to talk to, his family and friends murdered, still Moroni sees this fundamentally optimistic question fit to conclude a grim, painful record of his people's history: “How is it possible that ye can lay hold upon every good thing?” In the midst of a hell, Moroni fashions a heaven through the transformative lens of the Spirit. There is more good to be found in the world—even a fallen, utterly infernal world—“than we can ever lay hold upon.” In one of the final chapters of the Book of Mormon, Moroni concludes by providing another testament of Jesus Christ and another testimony of the Atonement.
With this rhetorical question, Moroni bears testimony of the redemptive, healing power of Jesus—and the redemptive, healing power that lies within us when we access Him. Moroni is not physically translated to another plane of existence, but his spiritual eyes are opened to the entirely unexpected beauty around him; the power of Christ’s Atonement is perhaps not that it provides a clean slate, but that it does something more extraordinary—it redeems. It doesn’t remove our negative experiences or past mistakes or indiscretions, but it transforms all experiences into good and constructive ones. Jesus' Atonement is the ultimate power of story--through experiencing each of our stories individually, He is able to understand us, and it is this empathic understanding we seek when we yearn for redemption. This is the central faith and hope of Christianity, a faith and hope that turns a hell into a heaven (and the absence of which can make a heaven hell)—it is the kingdom of God that lies within us.
It is my hope that we can all access the divine creative power within ourselves and the ultimate power of Christ's Atonement to reshape, reframe, and redeem our own stories--to make sense out of the pain, sin, and shortcoming we all inevitably experience in this life. I believe this gift is readily accessible to any of us at any time in our lives if we are willing to open our hearts to the power of Jesus' love.
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