Home Waters: A Blog

In relation to my previous post about patience in suffering and about my brother’s suicide in 1982, about which I write in greater detail in my book, Home Waters, and whom I remembered on the recent anniversary of his death, I wish to reflect on a few things that I feel I have learned in retrospect. These are spiritual lessons, mainly, and they relate to the specific nature of how my brother died, but I hope that they might apply to other circumstances as well. I admit that I haven’t suffered any loss quite as terrible as my brother’s death and that was a full thirty years ago. I am no expert in suffering. I don’t own the right to assert these ideas definitively. I only feel the urge to explore what I hope I have learned and what I hope I will remember the next time I enter the fires of intense sorrow.

1)    Heartfelt compassion is more important than explanation

I remember being in the hospital awaiting news of whether my brother was still alive, just hours after he shot himself. Family and friends were gathering in a small waiting room in the hospital. My bishop arrived. He was someone with whom I had grown close to in the preceding months as he was helping me to mature spiritually. Little did either of us know how important that help would be at this moment of crisis. I don’t remember if he said anything at all to me. I just remember how shaken he looked. And I remember at one point that he sat down beside me and wordlessly placed his own trembling hand on my leg. His compassion at that moment was palpable and beyond speech. I am grateful he didn’t feel compelled to offer words that might have trivialized my pain at the time. He instead offered his own shared pain. Too often we want to offer words of comfort, especially at a distance from a tragic event, when it would be a more Christian and healing act to be willing to simply mourn together. I am not sure this only applies to specific life events. It may apply to life circumstances. King Benjamin pleads with us to forgo the temptation to explain the reasons for someone’s misfortune and instead remember our common lot as beggars, to remember our nothingness and our creatureliness before God. If this is true of the actual beggar, it is true of the rich man too. We are not asked to link cause and effect to make coherent sense of the life stories of others and perhaps not even in our own. We are instead asked to feel our profound dependency on mercy and the great need for compassion.

2)    Mental illness is an illness

I am aware that there are serious questions about whether we are overmedicating for mental and emotional struggles. I believe a great many problems can be ameliorated by a healthy diet, regular exercise, sufficient sleep, and spiritual discipline. But I do not accept a theology that believes that all manifestations of mental and emotional breakdown are simply symptoms of a spiritual problem that can be “cured” by exercising greater discipline over the body and the spirit. The fact is, many illnesses attack our very capacity to exercise such discipline. Mental illness is as real as any other physical ailment, but it attacks the brain, the emotions, and one’s capacity to establish healthy relationships. It is cruel and even dangerous to suppose that someone suffering from severe mental illness can be “fixed” with just more effort to follow the regimen of daily caretaking of the soul. I watched my uncle live with schizophrenia for all of his adult life. His was a battle to find the right medication and the will to take that medication and he made mistakes along the way and his illness took a massive toll on his ability to have normal and healthy relationships with others, including his only son. But I believe his incapacities are acknowledged by God, and I believe his capacities, however narrowed by illness, were honored by those who loved him. We are sometimes especially hard on ourselves, adding at times unnecessary guilt to what is already a state of unexpected and perhaps undeserved misery. It is vital to remember that a truly expansive meaning of Christ’s atonement includes his suffering on behalf of our infirmities, our pains and afflictions, and not just our sins. To be honest, God and Christ make little sense to me otherwise. Even though I have never been severely mentally ill, I know I have suffered on a few occasions the symptoms of real depression. Those moments have taught me that I don’t know sometimes how to separate my sins from my afflictions, or my agency from my genes. I am not sure the Lord expects me to sort that out, and I am grateful for parents and a wife who haven’t demanded that I know myself perfectly. He wants to aid me in finding and magnifying my agency, but that happens in the context, I believe, of a host of factors we never chose—where we were born, to whom we were born, and the myriad choices made by others before and around us that affect the circumstances of our lives, not to mention the ever mysterious and complex interplay of our genes and our biology, our environment, and our agency. All I know is that the things that cause me the greatest sorrow are the character flaws that feel like they will take an eternity for me to fix. I keep working on gaining a greater measure of freedom and mastery over my self, and I believe the Lord expects me to continue this quest, but he wants me to do so with an awareness of his patience and compassion for my struggles. He knows better than I what my capacities and incapacities are. My only requirement is to remember my indebtedness to him, to make the best offering I can, and hope for and trust in his mercy.

3)    Suffering isn’t suffering if it isn’t, well, suffering

Sometimes things happen that contradict logic, defy expectations, and shake us to our roots. We might wish to cry out loud, “What is this for!? How can this be providential?!” This happens to Christ, so I am not sure why I should expect it won’t happen to me. He felt abandoned, he pled for release from what he knew he had to do, but his willingness to submit remained unbent all the way through. I doubt God cares much for whether or not I am always cheerful or in the right mind about my experiences. I am sure he doesn’t want me to be compulsively complaining and always seeing myself as a martyr. Surely many of our sufferings are self-generated through delusional thinking. But the fact is, sometimes really awful things happen and they don’t make sense and the more sense we try to make of such things, the bigger the mess we sometimes make of them. This is true mostly because we end up finding someone to blame disproportionately. In such moments, I suppose God understands and expects some venting on my part, some exasperation. I think he is most interested in helping me conform my will to his, rather than making me conform my emotions to a steady state of cheerfulness. In the midst of suffering, it is hard to feel comfort or to imagine how we will see this moment in retrospect. The older I get, the more I realize that I am prone to misinterpret the significance of what is happening to me. So that at least has tempered my own emotional reaction to things. It has led to a kind of existential pause in my thinking, an agnosticism not about the reality of God but about the ultimate meaning of what I am experiencing. In the midst of suffering, I think I am asked to suffer, not to rush to understanding. We are to learn patience and forbearance, what the scriptures call longsuffering. Panic, anger, or blame, or the emotional exhaustion that ends in apathy—these are all ungodly emotions that result from an overeager desire to escape contradiction. I think that what the Lord wants from me is to feel my experiences and to feel them deeply, and this patient waiting is precisely what facilitates such feeling.

4)    The Lord foresees tragedies, even if He doesn’t will them

I don’t believe for a minute that the Lord wanted my brother to die. I find it hard to assert that a great many terrible things that happen in this life are events designed and put into action by God. We get into trouble every time we pretend to have our own prophetic gifts of knowing why terrible things happen. I would like to call for a moratorium on such fast and loose and poor theology. We don’t need to know why something happened to know what can be gained from it. I believe a great majority of tragedies are the natural consequences of living in mortality, subject as we are to biology, to chance, and to time. We live in dying bodies. It is only a matter of time for all of us. So the fact that I have lived to see another day seems to be the true miracle. Once I understand that existence is the essential thing, the holy thing, to paraphrase John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead, then the trials of life seem less shocking to me. That doesn’t mean that the Lord can’t foresee when terrible things are going to happen or that He doesn’t know the time and circumstance of our death. I don’t pretend to understand how that works, but I do know that He prepared me for my brother’s death. This is too personal of a story to share here, but I believe He knew it was coming, that I needed help to be ready, and I believe that since that time, it has left me a better person. Knowing this made going through it much easier to bear. This is not the same thing as saying it was God’s will that my brother died. That would be ludicrous. But it is also not accurate to then have to imagine that God is nowhere or in no way involved in the unfolding of what we experience and how we learn to bear the burdens that are uniquely ours. I think giving personal aid in such matters is His central concern. This is what the scriptures call “tender mercies.”

NOTE: My book, Home Waters, after which the blog is named, treats the theme of environmental stewardship but not always directly. It also touches on themes of community, human suffering, the humanities (specifically poetry), and theology. While I have devoted most of this blog to themes related to environmental stewardship, I have occasionally touched on these other topics. After completing my first year of blogging, I would like to shift the focus of this blog to these other themes, but I will continue to blog about environmental themes at LDS Earth Stewardship. This post marks that shift.

People only look the same to us because we don’t know their stories and they only seem uninteresting to us because we don’t know their suffering. To love others is to bear their burdens. This is the central meaning of Christ’s call: “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30).

The paradox, of course, is that Christ is asking us to bear his yolk while simultaneously promising us rest. It would seem, then, that we are healed of our burdens to the degree that we repent and are “willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort” (Mosiah 18: 9). We must be knit together in a fellowship of shared sorrow. A deeper form of joy is found in such community, one that no longer stands apart or flees from sorrow but is instead informed by it, maybe even born of it. As William Blake put it:

Man was made for Joy and Woe,
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go.
Joy and Woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

It seems strange to say but I believe the greatest mortal emotion is neither joy nor grief but a commingling of the two. Would Christ’s pain at Gethsemane not be such a commingling? The pain of sin, the pain of our infirmities, of physical, mental, and emotional suffering brought together in one triumphant and even joyful healing act of compassion. We recall that, according to Alma 7:11, Christ suffered not just for the mistakes we make but also for the conditions of life we suffer, the very existence we are given. This makes sense, at least to me. I know I have sorrowed for my mistakes, but life itself, in its specific conditions imposed upon me and upon my loved ones, has been cause for sorrow enough to make some healing, some reconciling, some at-one-ment necessary for me to grasp the just cause of God’s purposes. A universe in which life’s burdens are only and always caused by sin is simply not the world I live in, or want to live in. I have no interest in wanting to find someone to blame for catastrophe, large or small. I want no truck with the business of scapegoating. I don’t mean to suggest that evil-doers don’t really exist or shouldn’t get their just reward. I only mean that I am glad not to be the one who has to make such determinations. Christ has called me to a life of compassion, a life of deep feeling, for life itself, for the earth, its beauties and its terrors, for people good and evil, rich and poor, strange and familiar.

This notion of a happiness infused by sorrow is sometimes counterintuitive to a people who believe in a Fortunate Fall, who see the conditions of mortality as necessary to enable human happiness. But the fall enables feeling as much as anything else, the entire range of it, which of course includes the grand prize of happiness, but not happiness selected apart from all other feelings. Happiness emerges from being fully sentient and fully alive, which only means that it comes with being a sufferer. Which raises the question: Is it a weakness to want happiness? In some categorical sense, the answer is obviously no. But it is if we want it like a drug, if we feel anger or betrayal when it slips from our hands, if we feel that it is something we can control or demand. If the fall of Adam makes joy a human possibility and even ennobles it as a human purpose, it is also true that such joy can only be conditioned and contextualized by the experience of sorrow. Just when we think he might have echoed Lehi and reminded us that “we might have joy,” Enoch explains, “Because that Adam fell, we are, and by his fall came death; and we are made partakers of misery and woe” (Moses 6:48). If we “might have” joy, as Lehi in fact understood, we must also have misery and woe.

In short, in this life we must learn to suffer and we must learn meaning and maybe even joy in that suffering, joy that comes of understanding and accepting the limitations of our mortal condition, of understanding the sorrows of our brothers and sisters, and of understanding them with love. This is deeply joyful understanding, even though it also means wading through the waves of sorrow that are the common lot of humankind.

I find this statement about trials by Elder Neil Anderson quite compelling:

These fiery trials are designed to make you stronger, but they have the potential to diminish or even destroy your trust in the Son of God and to weaken your resolve to keep your promises to Him. These trials are often camouflaged, making them difficult to identify. They take root in our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, our sensitivities, or in those things that matter most to us. A real but manageable test for one can be a fiery trial for another. How do you remain “steadfast and immovable” during a trial of faith? You immerse yourself in the very things that helped build your core of faith: you exercise faith in Christ, you pray, you ponder the scriptures, you repent, you keep the commandments, and you serve others.

He seems to suggest here that the nature of our suffering is radically individualized by our circumstances, our weaknesses, and by our personalities, with all their manifold attachments and fears, both healthy and unhealthy. So to suffer is to be uniquely ourselves. Patience, of course, in its root meaning means suffering, so patience in suffering is redundant. It merely means that we are no longer discontent with our particularity, that we have learned to suffer long in forbearance and hope as we are, where we are, who we are. Impatience with ourselves, with others, with the life we have been given, causes the pain of isolation, whereas acceptance brings a suffering that heals, since it a feeling that brings us out of solitude and into compassionate community. To do this we must be willing to experience vulnerability, to accept at least for the time being that the universe is less ordered, less safe, and less understandable than we had thought. In this state of being unsettled, we reach out toward others and to God in need, and in hope and trust in Christ, not because things make sense already but because things need our faith and God’s power to cohere.

History was made on Friday. Elder Marcus Nash, a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy of the Church of Jesus Christ, spoke as a formal representative of the church at the recent Stegner Symposium on “Religion, Faith, and the Environment” and presented an official view of Mormon stewardship of the earth. The symposium was remarkable in many ways. We heard from ecclesiastical leaders and representatives of evangelical Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. We heard a variety of scholarly perspectives on the topic as well, but Elder Nash’s speech was an unprecedented opportunity to hear an official representative of the LDS church on the subject. In all of my years of researching and writing on this subject, I have never found anything by a church leader this thorough, comprehensive, and exclusively focused on the topic. You can read a careful summary of the talk here. You can also see the video of his presentation. I fully stand by these teachings. As he spoke, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude that the church leadership had sent him to represent the church at the symposium. [Read more…] about A General Authority Teaches Stewardship

Polls in this country indicate a gap between the mainstream voter and elected officials at the state and national levels. I am not sure how different the trends are between the two parties, but there is certainly evidence this has happened on the right. Most recently, for example, we find evidence that a majority of Republicans are concerned about climate change and believe that more should be done to address the problem. This is true on other issues as well, including gun control and immigration. What accounts for this? [Read more…] about Stewardship and Citizenship at the State Level

“Please, let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.”

At first glance this is a counterintuitive statement. How might concern for the poor and for the environment be linked? Aren’t they often mutually exclusive? Aren’t humanitarians and tree-huggers loving different things? Can we be both Mother Teresa and St. Francis of Assisi? Pope Francis obviously seems to think so. Of course, this really is not new Christian doctrine. They are linked by a very basic and fundamental concern for the vulnerable and by the theology of protecting the imprint of God wherever we might find it, whether it is in the face of the other or in the fabric of creation itself. Love of humanity and love of the earth are not just different manifestations of our human need for affection; when twinned together, they are expressions of the same love that emanates from God. [Read more…] about Pope Francis Links Concerns for the Poor and the Environment

As I mentioned, this is part II of a brief investigation. I have spent a great deal of energy and writing on this particular question, so I make mention of some of these points at the risk of repeating myself. But perhaps now, stated in direct dialogue with perspectives within LDS culture that are decidedly anti-environmental that I described in my previous post, we can gain some clarity about how these positions might better understand one another. [Read more…] about LDS Belief as Ecologically Responsible