In the October
2010 general conference, Elder Dallin H. Oaks discussed two different lines of
communication from the Lord: the personal line of prayer and inspiration
through the Holy Spirit and the priesthood line of counsel and direction from
institutional authority. Elder Oaks pointed out that both lines are necessary:
“We must use both the personal line and the priesthood line in proper balance
to achieve the growth that is the purpose of mortal life.”1 But what
happens, in an imperfect world, when inspiration coming through the personal
line happens to be out of harmony with communication coming through the
priesthood line? Often, when this occurs, the individual is in error and needs
to reexamine his or her life and the source of the inspiration. But it is also
possible for direction through the priesthood channel to be in error. Since
priesthood leaders are not infallible, and since the whisperings of the Spirit
are often difficult to decipher, this is actually more than a possibility. Let
me illustrate with a close-to-home example.
Turning Down Callings
Many years ago my
wife received a call from our bishop to serve as ward Primary president. Being
a good soldier, she accepted. But immediately afterward she had a very unsettled
feeling—call it a stupor of thought, but it was actually more troubling and
more focused than a mere stupor. It wasn’t just that she was a young mother
with two little children and was feeling overwhelmed. Something more
fundamental was amiss. So, after praying about it and talking it over with me,
she decided to go back to the bishop and explain her unease. In essence, with a
great deal more tact than I possess, she told him she thought his inspiration
was faulty and asked for a second opinion. Well, he was a humble man, and he
prayed about it, and the next morning he called her and said, “Sister Terry,
you’re right. This calling is not for you at this time.” At that time we didn’t
know why this had happened, but not many weeks later my wife began a long
ordeal that resulted in the birth of our third child—twelve weeks early—and the
ensuing roller coaster ride that would have prevented her from fulfilling this
calling. A few years later, after life had settled down a bit, the same call
came from a different bishop, and she accepted with no feelings of unease.
In contrast to
this experience, consider another woman’s story. Her bishop extended to her a calling to write the
script and music for a special program celebrating the Relief Society’s
birthday. Normally she would have been happy to accept such a calling, but this
time she had a dark feeling and felt strongly that she was being prompted to
turn the calling down. When she told the bishop what she was feeling, he
questioned her faith and berated her for not believing in his right to receive
revelation for his ward. She tried to assure him that she was not questioning
his right to revelation, but that she seemed to be receiving a revelation as
well. A few days later, her father suffered a massive heart attack and was
hospitalized for several weeks before passing away. During the same period of
time she would have been preparing for the Relief Society program had she
accepted the calling, she was instead spending time with her father and then
planning his funeral.
Remember MMM
So, how do we
know when our leaders’ inspiration may be faulty, or their decisions in error?
Just the way my wife and this other woman came to know that their callings were
not right—by listening to the Spirit and to their own feelings. Most often the
counsel and requirements and callings that come to us from our leaders don’t
require a great deal of consideration or prayer, but sometimes they do. And in certain
situations, we need to be courageous enough to confront them about it, or to
respectfully disobey, or even at times to appeal to higher authorities. Many of
the participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre felt a great sense of dismay
over what their leaders were asking them to do. But they went against their
better instincts. If even a handful of them had stood up for what they felt was
right, they could have prevented a terrible tragedy and an embarrassment to the
Church that has now plagued us for over 150 years.
I have seen a
particular quote a couple of times recently claiming that we will be blessed
for following our leaders, even if they are wrong. But I cannot imagine the
perpetrators of the massacre at Mountain Meadows earning any special blessings
for their obedience. This matter of obedience to authority figures is more
complicated than we are often led to believe, and the pressure to conform is very
strong in the Church. Thus, although “follow the Brethren” is generally a good
rule, we need to understand that it is not a blanket requirement covering every
possible situation.
A Culture of Conformity
When I was a young
student in a BYU singles ward, I had an elders quorum president who devised an
ingenious plan to achieve 100 percent home teaching. He informed us that if we
didn’t complete and report our home teaching by the twentieth of each month, he
and his counselors would go out and do it for us. As I recall, his tone was
somewhat incriminatory as he explained the new program. Now, I’m sure he had
nothing but the finest of motives. But it was apparent that the numbers were
more important to him than the people. It was also evident that his
expectations were not entirely optimistic. The resulting impression was that he
was trying to coerce or manipulate us into performing our priesthood duties. As
I’ve considered his program for preventing failure in home teaching, I’ve
concluded that it had striking similarities to another plan that promised sure
success with no possibility for failure—Lucifer’s plan in the premortal
existence. This fallen angel may have tried to coerce us to do right, but if we
happened to fall short, we still didn’t need to worry—he would have saved us
anyway, in our sins.
Our Heavenly
Father, by contrast, will almost never infringe upon our free agency—and I this
term that has fallen out of favor intentionally, because we are not just agents in the sense that we are
responsible to carry out the will of another (our Heavenly Father in this
instance); we are free agents.
“Agents unto themselves” (D&C 58:28) is the term the Lord used to describe
us, and we are free to use our agency to do his will or to thwart it if we so
choose. I’ve lived for close to sixty years now, and in those six decades I’ve
come to the conclusion that there is virtually nothing more sacred to our
Eternal Father than our freedom to choose. Indeed, he is a remarkably hands-off
parent, preferring to nudge or entice rather than shove or demand. It appears
he is determined to allow us to have our own experiences, live our own lives,
face the consequences for our decisions and actions, and earn both our rewards
and our punishments. There is undoubtedly a lesson here about the importance of
individuality in the eternal scheme of things. And our pains and conflicts and
frustrations and sorrows shape us much more effectively than a life of ease and
serenity and perpetual pleasure ever could. Consequently, God’s perfect
commitment to our free agency also involves huge allowances for us to fail. And
it must. If we are not allowed the freedom to fail, we will most certainly fail
anyway—at the only thing that really matters, namely, our ultimate goal of
becoming like our Lord and Savior.
To our Heavenly
Father, individuals are always more important than any measurable
organizational success. He doesn’t manage by the numbers. He leads us, as
individuals, back into his presence, IF we will follow. This conditional
statement brings up the incompatible notions of control and liberality. Some in
the Church—primarily those who believe they are managing the Saints to
heaven—seek to control not only outcomes but also personal choices. They seek
to take the “if” away, and this interferes with free agency. Thus, there exists
in the organizational Church great pressure for its members to conform
unquestioningly to an approved pattern of both thought and behavior.
Conformity has in
many ways replaced individual, intelligent expressions of righteousness in the
Church. In a very real sense, organizational pressure to conform has supplanted
the simple invitation to follow. Consequently, conformity has not only replaced
an appropriate tolerance for failure but in the process has become its own
brand of failure. The higher law, which is always open-ended and can be
fulfilled in myriad unprescribed ways, is being supplanted by a lesser law,
which always focuses on specific minimum requirements.
Although the most
visible manifestation of conformity among Latter-day Saints is probably the
corporate uniform required explicitly of Church employees at work and
implicitly of all priesthood holders at Sunday worship services, other forms of
conformity are more troubling. Conformity is ultimately a state of mind, not
merely a matter of appearance. Indeed, we seem to have developed a culture of conformity in the Church, a
socially reinforced resistance to new or original ideas and patterns that
impedes our ability to spontaneously follow the Spirit or express any
appreciable degree of individuality. It most certainly impedes our ability to
entertain unforeseen possibilities and our willingness to embrace change.
It is interesting
to observe that seventy years after J. Golden Kimball’s death, Church members
who never heard him speak still love to tell stories about Mormonism’s cussing,
coffee-drinking General Authority and still purchase books about him.2
Uncle Golden was, of course, beloved by his contemporaries—after Brigham
Young’s, his was the best-attended funeral in Utah Mormondom’s first
century—but what is it about this man that still fascinates Latter-day Saints?
The answer is obvious. He didn’t fit the devout, restrained pattern of
propriety we’ve come to expect of Church leaders at all levels. He was
unpredictable, uncontrollable, and impetuous, yet loyal through and through.
And we find this extraordinarily refreshing. But we realize with regret that a
J. Golden Kimball will never again appear in the Church hierarchy. And soon
even the idea that such a man ever did exist in Mormondom will fade away.
Perhaps of
greatest concern, the culture of conformity we have nurtured in the Church
often reveals itself in the unwillingness—perhaps even the inability—of its
members to “think outside the box” and to question or even examine
authoritative statements, ill-defined doctrines, and strictly cultural
traditions. In contrast to the mental rigidity of many of today’s Saints,
Terryl Givens points out that a common activity in the Church in Joseph Smith’s
day was the debating of gospel questions such as “Was it, or was it not, the
design of Christ to establish His gospel by miracles?” and “Was it necessary
for God to reveal Himself to mankind in order for their happiness?”3
Joseph not only encouraged and attended these debates, but he also participated
occasionally. In February 1842, the Prophet recorded that he spent an evening
attending a debate, adding that “at this time debates were held weekly, and
entered into by men of the first talents in the city, young and old, for the
purpose of eliciting truth, acquiring knowledge, and improving in public
speaking.”4
Today, such
debating has revived after a fashion, courtesy of the Internet and the
blogosphere, where anonymity provides some protection for participants who may
fear Church censure. But this spirit of debate in “eliciting truth” has not
spilled over very effectively into our meetings and classes, where the official
Church curriculum offers only narrow doctrinal explanations and shallow
“discussion” questions for the Saints’ gospel study and teaching opportunities,
and it certainly has not attracted the participation of top Church leaders, as
in Joseph Smith’s day.
My friend Warner
Woodworth suggested almost thirty years ago that BYU students were being molded
into the corporate framework “to make them good, loyal servants of power.” He,
like Joseph Smith, recognized “a special need for confrontation with
alternative ideas” in order to arrive at certain crucial truths. He then told
of a visiting Stanford professor who mentioned that “while he observed BYU
students to be pleasant individuals, their educations were hampered by a lack
of classroom conflict and critical thinking.” According to Woodworth, we need
“a certain kind of barefooted, ragamuffin, irreverent spirit of debate. Too
many Mormons seem to believe that the glory of God is conformity, not
intelligence.”5
How, we might
ask—we acolytes of Joseph Smith, the world’s premier questioner and the
ultimate nonconformist—how did we ever arrive at such a destination? The
answer, I believe, has a great deal to do with how we view authority, how we
view our relationship with God, and what we understand about the source of his
authority, as discussed in part 14 of this series. This is certainly a topic we
ought to spend a lot more time discussing and thinking about.
________________________
1.
Dallin H. Oaks, “Two Lines of Communication,” Ensign 40, no. 11 (November 2010): 86.
2.
See, for instance, Eric A. Eliason, The
J. Golden Kimball Stories (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2007).
3.
Terryl L. Givens, People of Paradox: A
History of Mormon Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 80–81.
4.
Joseph Smith Jr., History of The Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts, 2d ed., rev. 7
vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1971),
4:513–14.
5.
Warner P. Woodworth, “Brave New Bureaucracy,” Dialogue 20, no. 3 (1987): 31.
No comments:
Post a Comment