I am pleased to welcome you to the new site for “Home Waters” here at patheos.com.
Thanks,
George Handley
Home Waters: A Blog
The Mountains Can Heal Us
It’s that time of year in Utah. People are flocking to the trailheads and heading up into the mountains for the chance to visit high mountain lakes or to stand atop a peak and look out over where we live. Hiking for recreation is a relatively modern invention. It certainly held little appeal to Mormon pioneers who spent months walking to Zion and then exhausted their bodies living by the sweat of their brow. But it almost seems that for many hiking has become a vital method for coming to their senses, literally and figuratively. Before the advent of secular recreation, mountains long held a strong grip on the religious imagination of those who lived in their shadow. Imagined to be the homes of the gods, mountains have provided food and water to those at lower elevations. They help gather rain clouds for greater precipitation, they bring streams and rivers to the valleys, and by virtue of their various microclimates, they are hosts of diverse flora and fauna. They can be formidable, even frightening, but we are drawn to them because they are also staggering in their beauty. Perhaps for these reasons, they have come to remind us of something providential.
Most of us these days hike in groups, but if you have had the privilege of hiking alone, of seeking the utter solitude of high wilderness, there is no doubt that mountains facilitate a stripping down of the self. Once I found myself not far from my home, only about an hour or so by foot, but at an elevation of some 2000 feet higher, standing in a small and enclosed meadow on a foggy morning. A wind was blowing in bursts, rolling blankets of fog up and over a tree line that stood before me and then splaying the fog down across the meadow where I stood in a pulsing rhythm. I faced the fog as it blew across the meadow and pretended to let it blow right through me. I extended my arms out, as if hoping that the gusts might take me up. I don’t know why, but experiences like this cause tears of joy. I feel utter insignificance and yet at the same time a personalized embrace of love in the midst of such nothingness, and this seems to then allow a brief touch of the hem of life. It is embarrassing to talk like this, but the truth is that I cannot count how many times I have felt this intimacy and peace on a mountain, those close reassurances that I am known in my nothingness. Hiking with companions is also a privilege, of course, because something about the rhythm, the high mountain air, and the sound of mountain water lightens any mood and loosens the mind and the tongue. These are bonding conversations because they tend to come from the depths of honesty. And so it is no accident that in the biblical tradition, at least, mountains are spiritual refuges that require the deprivations of fasting and of retreat from the comforts of civilization, sites of encounters with the face of God or at least His writing finger, places of transfiguration, the home of the burning bush.
But there is a different kind of burning bush these days. In the last week alone several fires have erupted on mountains throughout Utah and thrown mushroom clouds of smoke into the air like volcanoes. This is a hot and scorched earth we live on, suffering from drought exacerbated by climate change. Of course, fires are not entirely unnatural and they are their own kind of renewal, releasing seed pods and energies in the soils to make the landscape anew. And skeptics like to get worked up about the scientific impossibility of linking any particular weather event, in its singularity, to human-caused climate change, even though climate science openly accounts for this impossibility. The difficulty of linking single events to human causes does not prevent us from seeing change in patterns and to link the range of those changes to increased level of carbon in the atmosphere for which we are directly responsible. This is well explained here by an analogy of how steroids are linked to increased home runs in an otherwise naturally gifted player. So we are merely distracting ourselves from our responsibilities. We know we are putting carbon into the atmosphere, we know this is creating climate instability, and we can see, feel, and smell symptoms that are consistent with what we would expect with a changing climate. In fact, such symptoms were identified as present dangers particularly in the American West by climate models at least twenty years ago. We didn’t seem too concerned then. Are we any more concerned now? If some deprivation, some sacrifice was once necessary to prepare the soul for deeper sanctification, I wonder what we are willing to give up today to cool the hot earth, restore the mountains, and rekindle the fires of the soul.
On My Marriage
As I read Kristine Haglund’s wonderful discussion of Lowell Bennion’s aphorism that we should learn to like people different than we are, I was struck by the comparison she made between our relationships with other people and with the creation itself. As a literary critic, I am well aware of a similar problem we create whenever we read. Peter calls it “wresting the scriptures,” but we might also simply call it narcissism. Instead of a window into another world, a book becomes a mirror, reflecting back what we project into it. Of course, on some level, this is inevitable, just as it is inevitable that we wrest other people, as it were, seeing in their faces and in their hearts what we want them to be, either consciously or subconsciously, always valuing or disliking in them what we already see in ourselves. And Kristine’s point too was that we do this to nature.
In Home Waters, I intended to draw a similar comparison between the loyalty, humility, and forbearance that are required in a successful marriage with the similar qualities that are required to sustain a commitment to a place. I drew comparisons between the ways in which the history of a place, its scars and degradation, and sometimes even its indifference will mean that facile and superficial affections will not suffice for a sustainable, long-term, and healthy relationship to the places in which we live. I had never intended to write much of a personal book at all, but the more I investigated where I lived, the more I realized that I had to come to terms with my own narcissism, the ways in which I was wresting nature, wresting history, and wresting others as I sought to form an identity and a home in the valley where I live.
I wrote frankly about my marriage and exposed some of its weaknesses. I did this not out of self-indulgence, nor out of some sort of therapeutic need to air my dirty laundry before an unsuspecting and uninterested audience. And least of all out of some sense that I had it rough or different than anyone else. I merely meant to describe the paradox that everyone is different than we are and the differences of those closest to us and those we love most fiercely are often the most challenging to accept. Ever since I published the book, I have worried that my affections and admiration for the woman I married were inadequately expressed. In case there are any misunderstandings about what I intended in writing about Amy in Home Waters, I want to set the record straight.
Amy is, indeed, a different person than I am. She has formidable energy for mundane tasks. She never rests, almost never naps, is almost always on her feet, and only very, very rarely wastes time. And I mean rarely. She knows no vanity and never, ever gossips. She has simple needs, simple desires, and does not complicate relationships or her self-image out of foolish pride. She thinks of others constantly and works quietly on behalf of her family and those for whom she has special stewardship, without expectation of reward or recognition for what she has done. She is not one to spend her time idly imagining, debating, or otherwise engaging in intellectual curiosities. That is not to say she isn’t bright. She loves to read, has completed more schooling than I have, and remembers everything she learns. She is uncannily right about almost everything. She handles the pressures of life with herculean strength. I have certainly observed moments when life has threatened to crush her will and her energy, but I am always astounded by her capacity to pull herself, almost by the power of sheer will, through the longest stretches of seemingly endless responsibilities. She does not flag; she is of what the scriptures call a “firm mind.” She has never yelled at the children nor at me. She never expects that words can be an adequate substitute for right deeds. Her emotional self-control and steadiness are the rock of my somewhat rollercoaster life. She read three drafts of my book, each time offering careful and thoughtful criticism but never once asking me to change a word about her, even though I left it up to her.
Yes, these are stark differences compared to me. I won’t make a long laundry list of my weaknesses but suffice it to say that they are not far from the opposite of what I have just described. I learn everyday from her about how to improve myself, and in working hard at our marriage, I like to think we have both become more than the sum of the parts. It’s a cliché but it’s true (she knows it; I know it): I wouldn’t be half the man I am today without her. And yes, it’s a cliché, but it’s also true that as of today, exactly 23 years of marriage have passed and I love her more than ever.
She will be embarrassed that I have posted this, but for the record, nothing I write here is anything she hasn’t heard me say to her privately many, many times.
Thanks for letting me into your life, Amy, and for keeping me around ever since.
“You are everything you feel beside the river”
When I was writing Home Waters, I had to deal with dueling impulses. On the one hand, I felt surges of desire to write that were, at times, almost overwhelming, and it seemed that the only way to deal with them was to get out of the way as much as possible, to trust instinct, and to let myself believe, even if only for a moment, that I was up to the task of giving adequate expression to the totality of what I felt. This is the power of self-confidence, a feeling of plenitude that needs to offer no apologies for itself. One cannot write without at least fleeting moments of this kind of excited self-belief and the feeling of true self-sufficiency. It is the engine of faith and the muse of inspiration. In this state, writing becomes an experience of a kind of radical freedom. It is, to borrow a phrase from Derek Walcott, to jump into art with the “linear elation of an eel.” It is the old-time fiat, “Let There Be!!”
The other impulse, which perhaps should never come first if we expect to write at all, is a profound self-distrust, a suspicion that what one writes is paltry, shabby, or trivial. It is a keen awareness that there is nothing like preening self-confidence that presumes too much to ruin a perfectly good sentence or an otherwise good book. If self-confidence is the engine, self-doubt is the mechanic; it is the perpetual impulse to pull over, because one knows that one cannot rely alone on a driving impulse to be a true writer. This is to understand that all writing is revision, that no sentence is ever truly begun from scratch, that we are not Adam but Noah, starting over, again. Writing is careful self-examination, a way of learning to see oneself from the outside. Again to borrow from Walcott, it is a kind of “sideways crawling,” to feel “crabbed by that style/ this epoch” always thinking of ourselves in comparison to the past, to others. It is a way of inhabiting thought as a perpetual dialogue.
Actors, athletes, and musicians know this dichotomy well. There are the hours of practice, memorization as methodology, the drills, the pretense of authenticity practiced so often and for so long, until finally, in that strange hour of alchemy, the body and the mind, the performer and the audience, the player and the team, become unified in a haunted dance and all pretense falls away. Walcott, in his Nobel Speech, said that “Poetry, which is perfection’s sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present.” He could have said the same thing of Lionel Messi making a run at the goal or Meryl Streep embodying Margaret Thatcher. Art is the promise that we can achieve the fullness of selfhood at the very same moment when we bow most submissively to the grand authority of Tradition, curiously most ourselves in our most devoted imitations. Who keeps these traditions alive but the teachers? And who are better teachers than the artists themselves, those who embody principles as naturally as our arms embody our blood, sinews, and bones.
Seamus Heaney wrote a lovely poem, “Casting and Gathering” that captures the paradox of the artistic will. He hears two sounds, one the sound of the fishing line forcefully casting, “whispering through the air” with a swish, and the other the sound of “a sharp ratcheting” of the reel pulling the line back in.
He concludes:
One sound is saying, “You are not worth tuppence,
But neither is anybody. Watch it! Be severe.”
The other says, “Go with it! Give and swerve,
You are everything you feel beside the river.”
And he has learned that the secret of life is not to finally choose between these impulses and risk perpetually defeating oneself but to see them as necessary halves of the same unified existence. We are paradoxes: self-conscious animals who make art, creative beings who can imagine and act altruistically as well as act in utter indifference toward others, beings who have the privilege to uniquely experience a sense of our own nothingness. And our world is cause for the deepest joys and the most wrenching sorrows. Writing as an act of faith, a prayer for wholeness in the midst of brokenness, is atoning, or perhaps it is capacitated by a greater atonement already performed for us, a God who wept and died, a perfect man acquainted with sorrow. For it is blessed, as St. Paul once taught, to learn how “in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” When we begin to think this is too tall an order on our own, he reminds us: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me (Philippians 4: 11-13). It might not be too much to say that this strength to withstand contradiction is the dream and hope of all literature, all art. It is certainly the art of the religious life.
Lutherans, Mormons, and the Poor
Community is only as wide as we imagine it to be. Life experiences provide the foundation, but imagination is the alchemy that allows us to understand ourselves as part of a community that is broader than what our one chance on earth as an individual can teach us. I cherish the qualities of local community as much as anyone, but without a connection to the planet and to the broader human family, community is a shallow value. When I meet people who not only care about but work on behalf of relieving the suffering of people they will likely never meet, I think I see the human imagination doing its finest and most important work.
This past week I had the unique privilege to meet such people. I was invited to join the staff and the President’s Advisory Council of Lutheran World Relief (http://lwr.org) for a meeting held in Salt Lake City. This is a group of Lutherans who work assiduously for the relief of human suffering. They are guided by a comprehensive and global approach according to six objectives: to improve access to clean water, to assist in emergency aid, to increase food security, to prevent or mitigate against the effects of climate change, to improve health care access, and to empower the poor through increased civic participation. Part of my responsibility was to arrange a meeting between the staff of LWR and a similarly devoted group of Mormons, the directors and staff of the Welfare and Humanitarian departments of the LDS Church. As I listened to the stories of success and the challenges that such efforts inevitably confront and as I observed the warm affections that such work instills, I felt a tremendous sense of gratitude that such people exist. Each person with whom I spoke felt called to this work. Everyone had been on a particular journey of awakening to the reality and pervasiveness of human suffering and to a growing awareness that the privileges and opportunities they had in their own lives were not merely intended for their own happiness but rather were given so that they might be in a stronger position to relieve the suffering of others. That such experiences and feelings happen across religious lines is only evidence that the hand of God reaches deeper and wider than we will perhaps ever know.
I learned a few things about what Mormons have to contribute to the world, and I learned a few things from the Lutherans about how to be a better Mormon. I was struck, for example, by how unusual and perhaps even enviable it is for the LDS Church to be able to rely on such extraordinary volunteerism from its members. So much of what the LDS Church is able to accomplish in these areas of service depends on voluntary service by hundreds and thousands of people devoting time, money, and means to others. That isn’t to say such volunteerism doesn’t exist elsewhere. Indeed, I caught a glimpse of just how many organizations and how many good people do this kind of work across the world. But it was nevertheless impressive to see how efficiently and effectively the LDS Church is able to deliver goods and services because of hours and hours of unpaid labor. The financial method of using fast offerings—money saved by fasting once a month as individuals and families— for such aid is also stunning in its simplicity and effectiveness. I also learned that this service relies on certain social behaviors that Mormons happen to excel in but are otherwise in decline elsewhere in this country. The Lutherans I spoke to were intensely curious how Mormons have managed to buck almost every social trend in America today with regard to marriage, family, family planning, and church involvement. Declining rates of marriage and delays in beginning families have been linked to declining rates of participation, giving, and service in religious communities, an issue that was forefront in their minds as they planned and strategized for the future church.
The people at LWR have a few things to teach the Mormons. As evidenced by their objectives, they understand that relief of suffering in emergencies is not enough. We must approach relief in a comprehensive way that includes sustaining the health of the environment, increasing local civic engagement, and improving access to long term and effective health care. There is a tendency among some Mormons to criticize this notion of the “social gospel” because of the way it tends to become political. Personally, I think we would do well to learn that social structures explain protracted poverty as much or more than individual choices. In my mind, self-reliance is only possible in a context of sufficient freedom from the slaveries of need and oppression and from the consequences of environmental degradation and poor public health. I was also impressed that the Lutherans were so devoted to a message of radical inclusiveness. Mormons hold to the same ideals of inclusiveness, but we don’t always manage to make the message clear to ourselves or to others just how inclusive the Gospel really is, for black and white, male and female, gay and straight, rich and poor, and so on. At one point during the meeting we heard this marvelous song, performed impromptu by the singer, who also serves on the President’s Advisory Council (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlmauwfxK7c). If the impulse behind this song seems trite, it is only because we have failed to take seriously or literally the mandate to love everyone.
It is a curious paradox of religion that the stronger we wish to adhere to a set of principles, the easier it then becomes to judge others and to withhold our love and compassion from them. Christ’s gospel is a message, however, of perpetual discomfort for the believer, at least in the sense that it makes us unconditionally answerable to the suffering of others. It provides comfort to the sinner, of course, but that comfort is intended to liberate the soul to then begin a life of service. King Benjamin, in the Book of Mormon, taught that forgiveness of sins is only extended to us to the degree that we respond to those in need. But as the tale of the Good Samaritan makes clear, the needs of others are only real to those who can imagine them.
Upon the Occasion of the 5th Annual Meeting of Mormon Scholars in the Humanities
Amy Hungerford in her book, Postmodern Belief: America Literature and Religion Since 1960, notes that we are caught in America between dual impulses. On the one hand, despite our secular age, we have a “longing for conviction” and the “transcendent purpose conviction brings.” At the same time, however, we are possessed of a “desire for pluralism and tolerance and perhaps even the celebration of endless indeterminacy.” She argues that literature’s decline over the past several decades perhaps has obscured its vital role in teaching us how to achieve both ends. I think it is fair to say that her argument can easily extend to the humanities in general, that we can understand the impulses of artistic production—in the visual arts, film, music—and in the deliberations of philosophy, a similar method for undertaking the serious task of making conviction meaningful in a plural context, one which might, at least temporarily, require us to suspend the specific content of belief.
It is certainly a unique irony of an age of increasing secularization that we have not only seen the rise of religion’s relevance but a persistent ambition in the arts to fulfill this longing for transcendence. This is one reason why I am convinced that scholars in the humanities ought to be at least minimally versed in the theological implications of artistic representations and of their myriad interpretations.
It is certainly a unique irony of an age of increasing secularization that we have not only seen the rise of religion’s relevance but a persistent ambition in the arts to fulfill this longing for transcendence. This is one reason why I am convinced that scholars in the humanities ought to be at least minimally versed in the theological implications of artistic representations and of their myriad interpretations.
I recently attended the annual meeting for Mormon Scholars in the Humanities (http://www.mormonscholars.net/), an organization that I helped to start back in 2005. It has been a singular privilege to be a part of the group and to listen to the range and quality of work it has sponsored, work that has begun to build a body of thought of the kind I mention. One of the main purposes of the organization was and remains to provide a social network among Mormon scholars in the humanities who might otherwise feel isolated by their beliefs within a profession that is not known for its warmth to religious conviction and practice. We seem to have succeeded in this. Nourished by soda and chips, our evening conversations on the beautiful campus of Southern Virginia University were replete with laughter, teasing, and even, occasionally, intellectually engaging conversation.
We did not intend to use the organization as an opportunity to foster a defensiveness among Mormon intellectuals; indeed, it would seem to contradict the very objective of open inquiry to expend our energies reinforcing such fears and anxieties, no matter how legitimate they might be. I am proud to say that this organization has become a small but vital engine that links the yearning for conviction and transcendence with the perpetual and ongoing task of fostering tolerance by listening and gathering the voices of artists and thinkers from across the world. Yes, it serves the purposes of the budding and important field of Mormon Studies, but it also more importantly brings Mormon thought into sustained dialogue across disciplines and cultures.
The conference theme was “Economies and the Humanities,” and we heard papers that explored such questions as how to determine the morality of work and play and more generally, of capitalist values; the role of gender within the economies of housework, homemaking, and environmental stewardship; the value of a liberal arts education and literature in hard economic times; and the place of technology within the exchange between human subject and the natural world and between texts and their interpretations. We heard charges to live with a greater sense of ownership for the beliefs and meanings that we choose to live by and the worlds we choose to make, to think of theology and maybe even revelation as an art, not a science, and to think of faith as a kind of trust within the context of risk and uncertainty. We heard challenges to live with greater attention to hard economic realities as they affect people of color, women, and the work of scholarship and as they pertain to the broader LDS call to live lives of consecration. Still other questions posed were: What might it mean to sacralize the mundane? In our efforts to consecrate life, do we risk justifying and sustaining unjust relationships of power and cultural values? Where is the dividing line between the sacred and the profane? How can we more meaningfully adapt scriptural principles to artistic representation and to the art of living well? What and how, in short, do we read?
We did not exhaust the possibilities of such questions, of course. But they were all posed within the context of honesty and abiding faith. And the fact that over the last decade there has been such an exponential growth in the numbers of LDS scholars asking these questions–many of these scholars young and stunningly brilliant– is reassuring. MSH is an open group, one wanting and needing to grow, but if the quality of the thinking I heard this past weekend is any indication, it is a group with a bright and important future.