Being the Bardolator that I am means that my preferences for Shakespeare's plays runs on a continuum more than a binary. I don't hate any of them, and while I do love some more than others (Richard II and Coriolanus come to mind once the masterpieces have leapt about the list), there are some that I like less well. Titus Andronicus is so bitter, so painful, so dark and depressing that I'm not a really a fan of it. Having seen Cymbeline a couple of weeks ago, I can also say that it was…fine. I'm okay with not experiencing it again for a long time. A Midsummer Night's Dream is also in that category of liking it less well than others, though that comes from exposure more than anything within the play itself. I've seen it performed I don't know how often and had it on my curriculum at least three times. Unlike Hamlet, which is a well deep enough for me to dip into it annually and still not sound it, A Midsummer Night's Dream does not have enough beyond light laughter to really draw me toward it. That isn't to say laughter can't be worthwhile in and of itself; The Comedy of Errors is even more sparse on the profundity and is still a lot of fun. In fact, I took my entire family, from my eight-year-old up to my teenager, to see the Utah Shakespeare Festival version of that play this summer, and I laughed all the way through. I enjoyed it for what it was, as that's all it's trying to be. Having just finished A Midsummer Night's Dream this afternoon, I find that I'm not much changed in my opinion about it. The fairy magic and Bottom will always be the best parts of this play; the problematic solution to the lovers' quarrel will always stick out to me. The premise, if you've forgotten, is that there are lovers: Hermia and Lysander, who want to get married. Unfortunately, Hermia's dad, Egeus, is a dirtbag who wants Hermia to marry Demetrius. Not only does Hermia not care for Demetrius, but the man has "made love" (1.1.107) to Helena, another young woman of Athens. (It's always important to remember that, despite how many sex jokes and innuendoes Shakespeare puts into his plays, this isn't one of them: To make love is to woo or court a person.) So Helena wants Demetrius who wants Hermia who wants Lysander. The antics of the play really take off when the four lovers head into the woods to escape Egeus' ultimatum that Hermia must marry his preference for her or face death. Because this is a fairytale, the woods are packed with fairies, including the irrepressible Robin Goodfellow (also known as Puck), King Oberon, and Titania. Oberon has his own subplot about laying claim to a changeling child that Titania has in her train of followers--a subplot that's resolved off-stage and related to us in a brief explanation in 4.1--but his main purpose is to get the squabbling lovers (remember, Demetrius wants Hermia) to stop fighting. To that end, he has Puck put a special love potion on the eyes of…the wrong guy. If one wanted to take a more cynical stance on this play, it's really about four horny people who are interested in having sex and which partner they get doesn't matter much. Yes, Hermia (and Helena, though she doesn't demonstrate it as Hermia does) is interested in consummating her relationship with Lysander, but only after getting married. Lysander is much more anxious for their relationship to become more physical, and that becomes parodic when the love juice accidentally lands on his eyes. He falls for Helena, spurns Hermia, and then ends up trying to woo Helena with a surprising level of gusto. Because Demetrius isn't interested in Helena, then changes his tune after he gets some of that Love Potion Number 9 in his face, Helena ends up with two men vying for her attention. Helena is furious at being made the butt of their jokes: Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born? She rightly takes issue with becoming this focus of infatuation, then has to deal with the fury of her best friend, Hermia, who is now being abandoned by Lysander… Look, the interplay of the characters can be a little complicated. It's harder to read than some other plays by the Bard because of the close proximity of the girls' names (Helena and Hermia) and the interchangeability of the men (Lysander and Demetrius both lust after Helena). Many years ago, I had to come up with a mnemonic to help me keep the pairings straight, or else I become hopelessly lost: Both pairs are supposed to have an L and an M in their names. So Lysander and Hermia go together, while Demetrius and Helena are a couple. And that's part of the point, I think, of the play: When it comes to purely physical relationships, the partnering is one of proximity and convenience, not of compatibility. It's a rather cynical take on what it means to fall in love, surely. The play is filled with slapstick, hijinks, and verbal flourishes, but it's all to further this thesis that love is as mercurial as…well, a dream. But that isn't all. (When it's Shakespeare, there's always a bit more than just the surface story.) Yes, there's a big problem with the concept of consent: Egeus will only consent to having Demetrius marry his daughter, Hermia. More alarmingly, Helena--who seems to love Demetrius purely, though she's not too happy about him behaving so unaccountably strange during the second act--ends up with Demetrius by the end, the love potion removed from Lysander's eyes and leaving Demetrius still drugged. We're told in the final scene by Oberon (or perhaps it's simply a song sung--the First Folio doesn't give him these lines specifically) that "So shall all the couples three/Ever true in loving be" (5.2.37-38). The spell, it seems, will always be on Demetrius, shifting his consent from Hermia to Helena. When I think of it that way, I bristle. These meddling fairies have essentially forced Demetrius into a situation that he didn't choose, their manipulation pushing him into a relationship that he didn't want. But I think there's something more to it. There's magic in words--well-wrought words, I should say--and there are many things about which we change our minds. What is it, exactly, that convinces us to change course? There can be a lot of things, from political ideologies to religious dogma to personal experiences, all of which work on us to get us to move. An example that's a bit of a thing right now is how President Nelson, the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has asked that members of the Church get vaccinated and to mask up when social distancing isn't possible. It has caused a kerfuffle, to say the least, as there is a strong anti-mask sentiment among the rank-and-file of members (in my experience, I should say) and now those who felt that their God-given right to breathe contagions into the air is being challenged by the man they claim has a God-given privilege to guide the Church on Earth. What will convince someone to wear a mask during church meetings? Science hasn't done it for many of them; social pressures likewise seem irrelevant. Fearmongers, grifters, hucksters, and other bad actors have eroded the faith of some members in the reality of the global pandemic. Will they change their minds because President Nelson asks them to? Am I comparing, then, the leader of my church to a magical love potion? Well, to a certain extent, yes. The largest difference is that this masking example still hinges on the consent/choice of those who are struggling with changing their minds, while Demetrius has no say in what happens to him. He doesn't even know why he suddenly can't live without Helena. On the other hand, how did you first fall in love? Was that a conscious choice, one that you made out of a rational weighing of the merits of the object of your affection? Or was it something that just…happened, something that, as Mr. Darcy says of his path toward loving Mrs. Darcy, "I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun"? Perhaps there is little choice in falling in love, which is all that this play is concerned with. For us foolish mortals, however, the choice remains on whether or not we remain in love. So maybe the love potion is the mechanism by which Demetrius falls for Helena; let us pretend that, once that has faded, he chooses to remain with her. Of course, there's a lot more to this play than just the lovers, and the hands-down best would have to be Nick Bottom, a weaver of Athens. He is guileless, charming, foolish, brash, and enthusiastic. He's also incapable of keeping the right words in his mind (when he says "deflowered" instead of "devoured", it leads to really bad connotations about what the lion purportedly does to Thisby) or of remaining dissuaded of what he wants. And what he wants is to perform a farcical play for Theseus and Hippolyta on their wedding day (at night). It is his genuineness that pulls me toward him. He is foolish, yes, but he's authentically so. He bungles most everything, but it does tend to go well despite all of that. And there is--though Bottom certainly doesn't know it--a profundity to the speech he utters upon waking up in the forest, his memories of having the head of a donkey and being wooed by Titania (another victim of the love potion): I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom… (4.1.199-209) His attempt to recreate 1 Corinthians 2:9-10 is delightful, and it points to the simplicity of the man who is trying his best despite not having all his facts straight. It's a brilliant bit of characterization that is in line with everything else we see of Bottom throughout the play entire. It's also rather indicative of the dichotomies, paradoxes, and oxymorons that Shakespeare weaves throughout the play. Okay, so a bit of personal history here: I took one (and only one) Shakespeare class during my college days. Most of the term was spent in rehearsals where I and four other girls were tasked with doing an abridgment of 5.1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream. As I was the only guy, they (naturally) cast me as Thisby, the female lover who kills herself most tragically for love. So there are parts of this scene that live in my memory, even if I wouldn't be able to perfectly recite the words. This part of the play is absolutely my favorite, as it resides close to my heart. In this scene, Theseus says the line "That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow" (5.1.59), which has stuck with me because of its fundamental paradox. How can you have hot ice? But it isn't just there: We get lots of paradoxes and oxymorons in the speeches of the characters, which adds to the impossibility and dream-like quality of the play itself. In other words, through this constant paradoxical pressure that Shakespeare baked into the poetry, we get a strange sense of a world where impossible things can happen, where our typical boundaries of expectation and reality are bent, twisted, or lost entirely. "So musical a discord," says Hippolyta in 4.1.115, "such sweet thunder." These are not typical--discord does not make music and what thunder savors of sweetness?--and neither is this enchanted wood just outside of Athens. I think that's really cool. There are some other components to this play that I noticed, but I think this has probably gone on long enough. If you haven't watched a Shakespeare play in a long time (or ever), my over-familiarity with it leading me to like it less shouldn't dissuade you from making the choice to give it a try. If you don't like it, just take Robin's advice during the Epilogue: If we shadows have offended, The New York Times has recently given a digital subscription to every teacher and student in America. As a result, I can finally read some of the more controversial--or blasé, depending on the day--op-eds and articles that have been behind a paywall. This morning, a number of the op-eds revolved around Christmas and worship. I read two of them, and I wanted to riff off of this one. (I recommend the one about the Zoom church meetings, too, for what it's worth.)
Peter Wehner's thoughts are interesting to me because he has stripped down just what was so revolutionary and radical about Jesus Christ during His own time. As a Mormon--a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--who doesn't really think of himself as a Christian in its modern form, there's a lot that appeals to me. First of all, I think that there's a large difference between Christ and Christianity, the former being of so much greater import than the latter that it hardly bears mentioning. Christianity is what much of the New Testament is interested in establishing; the four Gospels contain all that Jesus said during his mortal (and slightly post-mortal) ministry. It's not a lot, considering how large of an effect His life has had on the history of the world. And, as a Mormon, there are additional components to this--parts of the Doctrine and Covenants, as well as a few chapters in 3 Nephi of the Book of Mormon--that I would call "canonically Christ's". Even with the Mormonic "additional scriptures", what Jesus actually said and did is a pretty sparse account. Even the four Gospels mostly repeat each other, adding nuance, detail, flavor, or expansion in most of the stories. In short, there's not a lot that could be said accounts for Jesus' ministry among mankind. And that's what works so well about Wehner's look. He is drawing our attention to the radical ideas of love, acceptance, and seeking out those most in need of healing--the core concept of Christ's mortal ministry. There's more to what Christ did while He was here, of course. However, His divine ministry, as it were, involved the sacrifice and atonement of mankind, a singular act done by a singular Being that is not really what can be emulated by the rest of us. His mortal ministry shows us how to live; His divine ministry shows us why we live. So it seems fair to me that we spend some time focusing on Jesus' life, particularly as it's currently Christmas Eve and if I don't do at least this essay, there's no guarantee that I'll be having many spiritual experiences over the next two days of avarice and indulgence. I should say that I am definitely a Scrooge: I don't much care for the Christmas season--it's cold, it demands a huge amount for someone whose introverted nature balks at so much interaction, and the lies of the time bother me (kids may know that Jesus is the reason that we celebrate Christmas, but it's the gifts under the tree that make them excited about this time of year; also, lying about Santa Claus has not sat right with me; I remain silent on the topic every year, letting my wife carry that burden of perjury). For a long time, the fact that it lasted all month long--a type of "holimonth" instead of a "holiday"--irked me. Though it could be the COVID restrictions talking, but maybe I'm a bit past that? It certainly hasn't been as draining this year: We don't have to worry about family-, friend-, and ward parties, sledding (harder and harder to do on an ever-warming globe), watching a perpetually-growing list of "traditional" Christmas shows, and an entire miscellany of additional add-ons to the stresses of this time of year. Also, I continue to change as an individual, so my feelings likewise, perhaps, are changing. After however many years to think about it, I may have come to my conclusion about why Christmas, of all the pagan observations subsumed into Christianity's calendar, has left me cold. I think it's because people kept insisting that we should "put Christ back into Christmas". To explain that, let me talk about something else: Cathedrals. I've been to Europe only a couple of times, so I can only speak in a limited way on this, but one of my favorite things to do is to visit European cathedrals. The denomination doesn't matter to me--religiously speaking, Protestant or Catholic, I view them as spiritual cousins rather than ancestors--I just like being in them. I've been to Koln, Notre Dame (both of Paris and Bayeux), and a couple others. They're always exciting to me, letting me glimpse incredible architecture and religious iconography that is familiar-yet-different. After all of the cookie-cutter, utilitarian churches I attended throughout my life, with only a handful of similar artwork hanging on the walls of the hallways (LDS churches don't do bells, stained glass depictions, reliefs, triptychs, statues, candles, or much beyond ninety-degree angles and burlap-textured walls), seeing so much diversity in religious understanding really spoke to me. I would stand outside them and do the very thing their imposing and inspiring architecture was designed to do: Tip the head and direct the gaze heavenward. As far as the religious worship happening there--vespers and censers, kneeling and recited prayers, communion of soul and parishioner--I remained aloof. I had no problem being respectfully reverential toward those who visited the site as a religious duty or desire, but that wasn't my reason for being there. I had a different approach, one that satisfied me and my needs, albeit of a more secular or academic reason. The point of a cathedral is to help the worshippers have a spiritual experience. That's why they're made. (Yes, there were political shenanigans with the creation of many of them, but the motives of those few historical figures aren't what I'm worried about here.) Their splendor, their ingenuity, their imposition, their hope--all of these things are part of what they're designed to do. Just like it's a marvel-bordering-on-a-miracle to see a medieval cathedral rising up from the ground, it's a miracle that God has created Mankind by rising them up from the dust. From the shape of the building as a cross to commemorate the mode of Christ's death down to the materials used--to build upon a rock, rather than a sandy foundation--are all calculated to add to a person's devotion. Do some of the explanations come about through a post-hoc justification that was not part of the original intention? Surely that's so, though that matters very little. The point of the cathedral is to sweep up people in feelings of awe and reverence that can then be easily transmitted to even higher vistas of religious worship. It also acts as a tourist destination. The tragic loss of Paris' Notre Dame still hurts my heart. Seeing it in flames was one of the saddest images in my pre-2020 lifetime. But I haven't lost a part of my religious identity or my history with the loss of that cathedral. As a citizen of the world, I feel that its loss has impoverished humanity; as a worshipper of Christ, I do not feel that same loss. Other cathedrals exist, other churches, other temples. There are other ways for people to worship, but there's no other Notre Dame of Paris. I continue to mourn the loss of mosques, synagogues, monasteries, chapels, and cathedrals due to the degradation of time, the violence of wars, and neglect of parishioners. There is a rich human history in worshipping the divine that irretrievably slips from us whenever these important areas are no longer frequented, remembered, or appreciated. And sometimes, as in the case of the fire at Notre Dame, accidents rob us and our future generations of the devotion of previous generations. It isn't the slowing of worship that personally hurts me, it's the overall contribution to human society that causes my regret. However, true believers will know that it's less the stones and more the stories, less the place and more the people, less the gaudy and more the God that matters. Worship of a place is an idolatry, and loss of great places helps to remind us of that. Christmas is a cathedral. Inside of it, true believers can focus on the stories, people, and God that comprise its walls. Its outer confines, its spires and its clerestories, its flying buttresses and its apses…these are all the exteriority. You cannot see the how high the belltower goes from the pews. When you're inside the cathedral, you can appreciate much of its work, but the purpose is the worship that you can do while inside of it. Though there is some bits of religious performance, there isn't a performative nature to true worship, regardless of where you are. The cathedral is a place wherein the spiritual can happen. So, too, is Christmas an inside thing, a place where the spiritual can happen. And, like all spiritual moments, it is fundamentally and fortuitously personal: No one can be spiritual on your behalf. That's something that can better be done if in a place set aside for it. Christmas is a cathedral. Outside of it, anyone can focus on the marvels that it creates. This is where the lights, snow, red caps with white trim, and the commercialism reside. The sweeping architecture of a capitalist concoction is so stunning, so all-encompassing that it literally causes sleeplessness. This is the "secular" side of Christmas, but it is also part of the building. They are separate, yet connected. And the problem I have with "putting Christ back into Christmas" is that it strives to pull out what is only valuable within. The vespers are best suited for being spoken inside; what makes the cathedral significant to the parishioners isn't found outside. Yet it's the outside that most people see, most people interact with. There are Parisians who never bothered to step foot inside of Notre Dame; I, some random bloke from Chapelvalley Utah, have had the opportunity to walk over its medieval stones twice now. So Christmas is something that can be appreciated (or somewhat ignored…I don't know that any Parisian in the concourse of the past few centuries wasn't at least aware of Notre Dame) at whatever level. The point is, when people insist on their version of Christmas, that their internal become the external, I find myself bristling. There are very few ways that one can do Christmas wrong, but I think there are, still, a few. Those that get bent out of shape because they wish to be wished "Merry Christmas" by apathetic and overworked retail cashiers; that their coffee cups have the "correct" terminology on them; that the parties and the gifts be "correctly" observed; that the "right" meals must be cooked by unthanked and overworked mothers and wives; that the Christmas tree be visible in the White House or Rockefeller Center and bedecked with all of its glitz; that the radio station be tuned to the "Christmas station" in order to listen to the same three hours total of Christmas music that has been stale since before Thanksgiving; that there be a manger scene at their courthouse; that the kids dress up in itchy, ill-fitting clothes to parade in front of the grown-ups while a drowsy rereading of Luke chapter 2 drones beneath the children's buzzing voices; that we "take a moment to think about Jesus" before indulging in the avarice of the season…the issue here is the insistence that the cathedral be viewed from only one angle, that its purpose be monolithic. A believer can enter a cathedral without look up, without seeing the carvings of saints and apostles standing over the entrance and will walk away being fulfilled. A struggling Mormon can cross the ocean and marvel solely at the stonework. It can be a spiritual gift or a secular miracle. Christmas can be many things, but it can't be all things. Insisting that it must be will lead to disappointment, much like if you came to Notre Dame hoping to play some basketball. You've brought the wrong expectation to the right place. (If you really want to play basketball in a consecrated, holy building, just go to your local LDS chapel. We have more basketball courts than we have belfries.) This is more than a "let everyone enjoy Christmas in their own way" plea, however. I think there is active harm in the forcing the internal out or the external in. A cathedral must have both inner and outer walls. Even though it's of the same structure, there is a difference. If anything, I'm saying that the two "sides" of Christmas are fundamentally incompatible: You cannot hold up the façade of a cathedral and claim that people aren't worshipping it correctly when the worship happens on the inside. That, to me, is what happens when people grouse about a "war on Christmas" or think that secular resistance to the ubiquity of the holiday in some way prevents it from existing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that those who gnaw on the non-issue of who says "happy holidays" as opposed to "merry Christmas" have yet to walk in through the doors of the cathedral and instead are fixated on a single stone on the plinth. No, I think that an appreciation of Christmas needs to be as radical as its namesake, with that appreciation being much like salvation: A personal connection that transpires because the individual has chosen to walk inside. Merry Christmas… …and happy holidays, from both sides of the cathedral. Like most people, the news of the spreading corona virus has led me to some serious life reflections and considerations. What is essential? What am I prepared for? What do I view my life to be in the short term? How can I keep my family safe? For all of the unanswered questions, there's one that seems to nag at me the most, waiting in the wings: Is this it? For quite some time now, I've abandoned any millenarian theological interpretations about world events. My study of history--especially within the last hundred years--has shown me that as bad as things are, there have been times in the past where things were significantly worse than now. As a Mormon, I'm part of a millenarian church, but one that's been rather cagey about the end of the world, for the most part. After all, plenty of people--inside and, of course, outside--the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have made predictions about the pending apocalypse. My favorite would have to be the Great Fire of London in 1666. England, which had long thought of itself as God's Chosen Land™, was on edge about the whole year "666" thing. (I say "England", but really it was the more puritanically-inclined people; those who were less religiously devout/superstitious likely didn't mind it as much.) What better year to really show his demonic power off than in Satan's own year? Dire warnings about God's judgment were rife, particularly since the monarchy had only been restored six years prior and was still a sore spot for the revolutionaries who had believed in Cromwell's dictatorship. With a plague outbreak happening a year before, London was feeling like…well, that it was the end of the world. On 2 September 1666, in the King's bakery on Pudding Lane, a fire broke out. Due to a long, hot, dry summer, London was ripe for the roasting and soon half of the City was on fire. Attempts to detonate buildings with gunpowder to provide a fire break occurred (which is, in hindsight, rather an amusing picture), and despite their best efforts, by 4 September 1666, only a fifth of London remained standing. Even St. Paul's Cathedral was destroyed--the one that we all know and love today, that survived the Nazi blitz of World War II, was erected on the same spot in the aftermath of the Great Fire--and though only a handful of people died in the blaze, hundreds of thousands were left homeless and destitute. It was a catastrophe by every mark. (If you want to read more, here's a nifty article.) Who of that time wouldn't look at the great city of London succumbing to flames and think, "This is the end of the world"? On the first day of July 1916, the British launched a bloody and ill-fated attack on German positions near the Somme in France. The battle turned into a lengthy bloodbath, the likes of which have but rarely been seen since then. When I think of how we're behaving now, how convinced we are at the prospect of facing the End Times, I think of this footage. Filmed at 0720 on 1 July 1916 by Geoffrey Malins, this explosion at the Hawthorn Redoubt saw 40,000 pounds of explosive detonate underground. Watch this short clip and ask yourself: What does the end of the world look like? Surely seeing an 80 foot-deep crater, longer than a football field would be part of it? I see an image like this, and I'm reminded of Book 6 of Paradise Lost, when the rebel angels' cannon-fire pushes the loyal angels' ingenuity, and they begin to hurl entire mountains at one another: Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power When I think of the End of Days, I consider how, in the years between Hitler's rise and fall, human beings were turned into purses and riding pants, how Japan's Unit 731 experimented on Chinese prisoners with anthrax and vivisection, how Turkey yet denies having slaughtered a million Armenians…
…if that's not enough to spur Christ's return, why would a twenty-first century flu be sufficient? There's an entire cottage industry of predicting (thus far, wrongly) the end of the world, the Rapture, whatever one wishes to call it, up to and including the creation of a pet-service website for after the apocalypse comes. Mayans were believed to have predicted the end of the world in 2012, of course, and there's hardly a Sunday-gone-by where I haven't heard someone lament about how much more wicked the world is than in those idyllic yesteryears of yore. But I just don't know if that's true. Yes, the world is different, but it's been in a perpetual evolution since Day One. But more wicked than the wholesale enslavement of 16 million human beings from Africa? More wicked than systemic exploitations that led to children dying in mines and factories? History is replete with heinous behavior; why should this be it? The Mormon in me wants to believe that the end is nigh because there are many promised blessings. But the humanist in me wants to believe that we could have chosen differently; we could have aimed to save people, save our planet, save our future--that Christ would come not as a deus ex machina to prevent us from self-annihilation, but because we'd made the world safer, kinder, more loving, more caring, less violent, more equal…more heavenly. When I think of all the despicable things I know from my small store of historical knowledge, I can't believe that twenty-first century problems are what St. John the Beloved was looking at in his great uncovering of the end of the world. Maybe what really worries me is that if the Holocaust isn't sufficiently evil enough to trigger the Second Coming, what will be? I found out about Megan Phelps-Roper's departure from the Westboro Baptist Church when a video clip interview made its way across my timeline on Twitter. I poked about a bit and found out that Megan (I'm going to use her first name instead of her last because it's shorter) left the Westboro Baptist Church a handful of years ago. Now she's written a memoir and doing the whole book-tour thing, which piqued my interest. While I try to buy books as often as possible, sometimes I snag stuff from the library, which also shows support for writers. I put her book, Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, on hold and promptly forgot about it. When the text notification let me know it was there, however, I made it a point to pick it up as soon as possible. With all of the other things that I have on my plate--including Les Miserables (for the twelfth time) and Why Write? (for the second time…this year) among others--this was actually the best way for me to read the book: I knew I had to return it, so I couldn't pull a typical-Steve and buy the book so that it could gather dust at my house instead of Barnes and Noble.
I'm glad I read it, though. It really is a heartbreaking and inspiring story that traces Megan's involvement since she was a little kid with her family's church. If you aren't familiar with the Westboro Baptist Church…well, you're pretty lucky, then. This is the church that protests the funerals of soldiers, victims of mass-shootings, and other high-profile people. They tote around colorful protest signs that say things like "Thank God for IEDs" and, their number-one-jam, "God Hates F*gs". They use harsh, offensive language, manipulating press coverage to get themselves more publicity, though the "inside look" that Megan gives us is much more nuanced than this summary. And that's what I really liked about the book. It gave me a glimpse into a life that I had already judged--and, on occasion, was even right about--being one of a type of religious depravity. But there's more to what's going on than hatemongering--which they are absolutely doing. Some of what I've long heard about the church had to do with the late Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church and most prominent firebrand. His fiery sermons invoked hellfire, wrath, destruction, and condemnation on any who weren't the elect of God (e.g. his church and its handful of members, almost all of whom are family). His doctrines focused primarily on the collective sin that America has committed by allowing the LGBTQ+ community to have human rights; death was the ultimate punishment, in his mind, drawing attention to that sin during a community's most vulnerable moments (that is, at the funerals for victims of sundry events) was the best way to demonstrate the immorality of the country. From a theological point of view, his thinking was pretty messed up, though Megan points out that, as they were a Calvinist-inspired denomination, they didn't have to worry about trying to convince anyone of what they were preaching, as everyone was already heaven- or (more likely) hell-bound. It doesn't really behoove me to unpack their doctrine, in part because my Bible game is pretty weak, and also because that seems like a waste of time. I'm more interested in seeing the ways that Megan navigated her youth. She's about my age--within one or two years, give or take--which makes it easier to tap into some of the things that she had to deal with, including the way the internet changed everything in the late '90s. However, Megan had a couple of experiences that stood out to me: One was the cocksure way of approaching any problem. "We're right and they're wrong" was a catchall. Biblical explanations pasted over massive problems--while Megan doesn't report of any specific physical abuse from her grandfather, it's clear that he beat Megan's mother (his daughter) and his other children. When explaining this part of the story, Megan did what she does throughout--tosses in a verse of scripture, in italics, that would be used as the hermeneutics for the behavior. In the case of child abuse, she quotes Proverbs 23:13, which reads (in the King James Version of the Bible, which is the one both Mormons and Westboro Baptists use), "Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die." I don't think I have to explain--I hope I don't have to explain--why this was so startling to me. What really got to me was that I, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have a distinctly different relationship with the Bible than other denominations (probably one of the larger reasons why I'm not in the "Mormons are Christians, too!" camp, but I've already talked about that). More than that, however, I don't worry about fitting every moment of my life into a biblical narrative, which is clearly an impulse that Megan grew up with. If something bothers my heart, I don't turn to the Good Book to try to assuage what's bothering me--and it really doesn't take too much to find a biblical verse to support any specific idea that one might wish. That isn't to say, however, that I'm not also in a tradition that is cocksure about any and every question. Even if you take one that's non-eschatological (though, if we poke at it long enough, it could be eschatological) as the concept of evolution, some Mormons will assert that the official word is that evolution isn't true. Others, including my wife, will point out that there actually isn't any official stance on the topic (which is correct; the Church doesn't go either way), though there are plenty of opinions on the matter, even from high authorities in the church. The point of this example, however, is to show how "We don't know" can be a bit of a surprise answer when the theology is supposed to be one that "has all of the answers". My own understanding of that reality has been one of the necessary steps I've had to take in how I treat my belief system. Megan had a similar issue, and in the end she decided to abandon her church--which also meant that she had to abandon the family she deeply loved. She apologized for the hateful messages she'd been sharing for the majority of her life, and in many ways sought to make amends. This was hard to read about, not because I think she did the wrong thing (she didn't; leaving her church was the only logical thing for her to do in her situation), but because it's so familiar. Members of the LDS Church are taught to care deeply about families, and a family member who doesn't worship the way the rest of the family does can very often be ostracized. There are plenty of heartbreaking stories about kids who are transgender, gay, atheist, or somehow non-conforming to Church principles being exiled from family institutions. In Megan's case, she left her church after she'd already graduated from college*, making her able to land on her feet, to a large degree. Her process of self-discovery takes up the last third or so of the book, and her musings over what she'd learned, how she had to unlearn it, and what she did to try to make things right is a beautiful component of the text. On the whole, I would really recommend this book. It's thoughtful and thought provoking. I don't always agree with some of her conclusions--particularly the argument, voiced in the final pages, that a marketplace of ideas is the panacea for the poisoned discourse that we suffer through daily (though that's a different topic for a different day)--but Unfollow is a remarkable book. I would say that, of the two, Educated struck closer to home, as its theology more closely mirrors mine, but both memoirs of women leaving the theologies of their youths are worth pursuing. --- * This was one of the surprises about the Westboro Baptist Church: It is a well-schooled institution. Many of the highest members are lawyers, and they always sent their kids to school (Megan picketed her own high school graduation, then went inside to get her diploma), and they are a far cry from the homeschooling version of fundamentalism that I saw in Educated. The other large surprise was that Fred Phelps was instrumental in advancing civil rights for Blacks in America back in the day. That he could view racism (though not antisemitism: he had a lot of spleen for Jews) as a genuine evil but not homophobia is one of the most extraordinary examples of cognitive dissonance I've ever seen. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we now have two hours of Sunday meetings at the local chapels. The first hour is as a ward family--the sacrament meeting--and then there's an alternating schedule of Sunday School/Relief Society (or Elders' Quorum) meetings for the second hour. This is all new to us, as the change was announced back in October 2018 and is only now being implemented. During Sunday School today, the lesson was designed to be a primer for the rest of the year, explaining the roles and responsibilities of the class as well as the teacher. As far as purpose of a class goes--and helping to shift a more passive paradigm--I think it was a good move. As far as personal gains from it…well, that's a little more complicated. One of the things that a member of the class said that stood out to me was the idea that the comments from everyone ought to build on each other and not seek to outdo anyone else's insights--to keep the conversation on track, rather than distracting from the topic. As he said this, it suddenly made sense why I'm so quiet at church: I think my thoughts and questions would be a distraction. I don't do this on purpose, necessarily. That is, I don't approach the class with an attempt to be antagonistic or heretical or anything. But there are lots of unchallenged assumptions and, at times, fallacies that crop up and my instincts are to explore and expand on those concepts. Since I'm neither the teacher nor, as this brother in the ward pointed out, likely to be contributing to the conversation, I keep my mouth shut. Here's an example of something that interested me and would have been an area I'd want to explore, but left alone because it wasn't really the point. We were asked to read Luke 5:17-26. The verse that stood out to me was 17: And it came to pass on a certain day, as he was teaching, that there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were come out of every town of Galilee, and Judæa, and Jerusalem: and the power of the Lord was present to heal them. It's pretty straightforward, I think, except for the ambiguity of the final pronoun. What is the antecedent for them: the Pharisees and doctors, or the people whom Jesus was teaching (an implied group)? If it's the latter, what justifies that reading? I think "the power of the Lord was present" is a bit of a clue, as the Pharisees and doctors are notoriously antagonistic to Jesus. But maybe they really were there to learn and listen, and only after the bit with the man with palsy coming through the roof (the rest of this scripture's story) did they start to question. So maybe them really does mean the Pharisees and doctors, people who are learned in the ways of scripture and religious orthopraxy. It says something different if the purpose of the meeting was for Jesus to teach the learned and they are interrupted by the man coming through the roof in order to be healed. Perhaps their frustration and "Who can forgive sins, but God alone?" (21) question comes about less because of what Jesus said and more because of the fact that he shifted his attention away from them to someone else?
I don't know. An exegesis of Luke 5 is probably immaterial, since apologists for the New Testament much smarter than I have likely tackled the problem. It does, I think, show how my own way of approaching the scriptures is unlike how others do so. And that's kind of why I just keep quiet. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! A month or so ago, I was teaching my annual pass through John Milton's Paradise Lost. I don't have the time to teach the entire poem, so we do a highlights version that I cobbled together, spending a lot of my time helping them to understand the notoriously tricky poetry so that they can see the underlying beauty and power of the epic masterpiece. The omissions harm their understanding of the poem--that's the nature of abridgments, sadly--but I think the overall process is exciting and, for a few students anyway, worth their time and effort. One of the things that startled me this year, though, was during our conversation about Eden. In Book IV of the poem, Milton describes a place unlike any fabled paradise. Here's an example of what Eden is not: […] Not that faire field Notice how it's not "that fair field/Of Enna," nor "that Nyseian Isle", nor "where Abassin Kings their issue guard". Milton's trying to invoke the supernal superlatives of Eden, a place so magnificent that it defies all of the old tales that have likewise tried to paint a paradisiacal world. The one time that Milton concedes that maybe the Ancients' version of a utopia is in line 249-251, where he says, Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde If true, only "here" in Eden would the stories of the Hesperian fruit--the golden apples that Jason and his Argonauts sought--have any accuracy*. Milton goes through intense descriptions of what Eden is, too, citing beautiful beaches, enormous rivers, and trees overladen with ripe-and-ready fruit to eat. The animals are all peaceful and labor to entertain the two humans who live there, with even (my personal favorite) "th' unwieldy Elephant/To make them mirth us'd all his might, and wreathd/His Lithe Proboscis" (4.345-347). The place has entertainment, free and abundant and flavorful food, and no danger, fear, or worry. It is, indeed, a paradise. It is not static, either: The Garden of Eden grows and swells, with the verdure growing faster than Adam and Eve can tend to it, making their eternal task one to tame the Garden. It is for this reason that Eve looks forward to bearing children, as the additional hands will soon help to take care of the Garden. Later, Raphael (the affable angel sent by God to instruct Adam and Eve in the many areas of their ignorance) says, albeit with some conditionality, that the pair might be able to live until the […] time may come when men The concept is clear: Eden is the home of Mankind where, through the process of time, "men/With Angels may participate" and will, as it were, be wafted heavenward, made fit for the exquisite diet of the Heavenly Hosts. There is work, progress, entertainment, security, food, comfort, and companionship in the Garden of Eden. The Garden grows and changes, necessitating the efforts of the only humans in it until such time as greater numbers can tend to the place fully.
The place, frankly, sounds absolutely amazing. So you can imagine my surprise, then, when I asked the students about their feelings toward Eden and whether or not they wanted to live there, and the popular response--widely popular, if I remember correctly--was that "It would be too boring." "What?" I have to admit, I was caught flatfooted at this point. "You…you wouldn't want to live in Paradise?" "Well, what would we do?" "Watch the elephant writhe his proboscis, for one," I snapped back. "But we wouldn't grow or progress." "Yes! The Garden needs tending; you'd grow in your knowledge of husbandry." "Meh." I couldn't quite wrap my head around it, so I may be distorting some of what they wanted, but I walked away with the clear sense that they wouldn't want to live in Paradise because they wouldn't have enough things to do. (Others said they'd pass because they don't want to walk around naked all day, which I guess kind of makes sense, assuming we were dumped in there immediately, rather than having been born in the Garden and never knowing anything different.) They seemed pretty happy with the cost of this, too: In our lives we have disease, death, injustice, despair, sadness, famine, disparity, and an entire Pandora's box of woes--all of which are, apparently, preferable to the, I guess, greatest trial of all time: Being bored. I'd like to say that it's the "kids these days" who are so focused on the hedonistic pleasure of the digital age that makes them feel this way, but I'm not so certain. I've been teaching for eleven years now, and this is the first time I've seen such a commitment to, in Miltonic scholarship's parlance, postlapsarian reality. A lot of them, I feel, were operating on the Is/Ought fallacy, which would certainly explain their complacency. The thing that really gets me, though, is I know a great many of them--perhaps as much as 80-90% of the class--are Latter-day Saints, and a couple here or there are Christians. What, then, do they think heaven will be like? I mean, I know that my understanding of eschatology is pretty low, but isn't that, like, the whole point? An afterlife in which there's no disease, death, injustice, despair, sadness, famine, disparity…a paradise? Don't they want to go to heaven? "Heaven promises eternal progression**," I can hear someone saying (probably condescendingly, but that's because I'm feeling antagonized right now). Yeah. So does Milton's Paradise. The angels in Milton's heaven are some of the coolest creatures in all of literature. I'll have to talk about them some time. Becoming one of those--through an eternal process--would be amazing. Not only that, but there's a lot of other things to experience and explore inside the Garden. Once that were finished--a process that would take years, I daresay--then you could start over again. It would have grown and changed…there would always be something new to do and discover. And did I mention you're safe, fed, and free of death or disease? But, hey…there's no Netflix or even Wi-Fi. No wonder they'd rather live in this version of reality. --- * This actually kind of makes me laugh. Milton couldn't sneeze without it being a classical allusion of some sort, and he has such a soft spot in his heart that he can't fully-throatedly disavow the classics. Of all the allusions I've quoted, the one where the Ancients maybe got it right was in Ovid and it wasn't really Hesperia where the apples were, but instead Eden; Ovid, being pagan, failed to realize the Christian source of his own stories. ** I can also hear someone insisting that Adam and Eve couldn't have kids, so the whole thing is moot anyway. That point doesn't stand: I'm talking about Milton and his ideas in the poem: In it, not only is it abundantly clear that Adam and Eve aren't "living in a sin of omission" by not having children, they fully knew and understood that Eve was the vessel through which their children would come. Going against generations of theologians, Milton (and he wasn't alone in doing this) asserted that Original Sin was not one of sexual encounters. I think Milton was baffled that a married couple could be sinful by having sex. For him, there may be a bit of the concept of digestion--that consuming the fruit--was the capital-s Sin, but his primary interpretation is disobedience. It was less the act (eating) and more the violation (there's one rule to follow) that seems to fuel Milton's view. That the Book of Mormon lays out the double-bind shifts theological gears in all sorts of ways--ways that a footnote can't really tackle--and, I think for Milton at least, in a way that inherently undoes the point of the Garden of Eden. That isn't to say that Milton wasn't in favor of the Fortunate Fall interpretation: You can see some brief words to that effect coming from Eve at the end of Book XII. I believe that he'd have reservations about the Mormonic interpretation is what I'm trying to say. Today's lesson in Elders' Quorum was about reconcilement, which we treated as a matter between people. That is, how do we, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints react to offenses and mitigate the effects of when we inadvertently offend. It's a not infrequent topic, especially in a Church concerned with membership retention. Still, I ended up listening with less than half an ear as the word reconcile is one that does something different to me than, I'd guess, most people. See, back when I was a teenager, I had two musical interests: Third wave ska (with some punk thrown in for fun) and Dave Matthews Band. The two aren't particularly comparable, but hey…who can ever really justify the ways of their music tastes to men? And, in my defense, I liked the energy of the former and the technical abilities of the latter. (If you ever hear me play the guitar, you'll hear both influences heavily in the way that I approach music.) Anyway, one of the things about the Dave Matthews Band back in the nineties is that they encouraged their fans to record the live shows, to share and collect the unique versions that came out of each of their concerts, as it were. (I don't know if they still do that nowadays, as I've stopped listening to their stuff after the early aughts.) It wasn't as easy to swap that information back then as it is now. After all, high speed internet was for schools, colleges, and businesses that could afford it. I was still on a slow dial-up connection (56k baby!), so I couldn't really download those songs in any real quantity. Fortunately for me, one of the guys in my home ward was also a DMB fan, so he had a small collection of these "bootleg" songs. He burned me a CD so that I could enjoy the alternative versions. One of them, which later became the song "Bartender" on the Busted Stuff album, was called "Reconcile Our Differences"*. You can see the lyrics here, which are important for this particular post because they differ so much from the eventual "official" version of the song.** "Bartender" has some similar themes that clearly started in "Reconcile Our Differences", but since I listened to the bootleg version long before I saw the fully produced album, I often think of "Reconcile" as the superior version to "Bartender". In the song, Matthews sings about what remains of a person when life runs out. Though he drifts over a number of different possibilities, the section that always stood out to me was this part: We reconcile, our differences Matthews is a fairly irreverent person--I remember reading an interview back in '02 or thereabouts where he said he believed in God, but not that He had a plan or anything--so the particular image of a heavenly swimming pool isn't too far afield for the man. Nevertheless, I'm struck by its mundanity, especially as I consider the idea by Montesquieu: "If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides." Whatever the eternal nature of the attributes of God, there's always a contemporary insistence on how He thinks and behaves, one that shifts as time and cultures march forward. I once asked if God wears a tie; why would I not also be curious if He has a swimming pool? But it isn't the swimming pool that really gets to me: It's the whole verse. If we can reconcile our differences, could God and the devil? Today is John Milton's 410th birthday, and in honor of that--and because these types of questions push me in this direction…and because it's actually an accident I did this--I looked up the beginning of Book IV in Paradise Lost. This, you'll remember, is the moment when Satan arrives on Earth and has a deep, honest conversation with himself about what he's about to do. He asks some questions that…well, you should read it for yourself (starting on line 32). It's powerful stuff. So, instead of paying attention to my peers as they discussed not being offended when other people are jerks, I went through a close reading of Milton's masterpiece. It raises all sorts ideas in my mind, but the one that I'm always most struck by whenever I read that part is whether or not God would forgive Satan. Or, maybe, could. Both possibilities are fascinating, as I think both provide different ways of reading both Satan and God. If He would forgive Satan, I think it would be along lines like those that Satan outlines in the poem: […] is there no place In this sense, the price to get back into God's good graces are too high for Satan to countenance. God would; Satan wouldn't. This becomes less about God and more about Satan, as the metaphorical ball is in Satan's court. By the end of the Satanic soliloquy, we get this bit: "For never can true reconcilement grow/Where wounds of deadly hate have peirc'd so deep" (4.98-99).
And that's one of the saddest parts, in my mind, about what's going on with Satan in Paradise Lost. He has come to a conclusion that "all his good prov'd ill in me" (4.48) and, in the case of God's grace, "Be then his Love accurst, since love or hate,/To me alike, it deals eternal woe" (4.69-70). Regardless of God's love or hatred, Satan feels the same pierced wounds. If love feels like hatred, then how does one feel love? But what about the could part of the supposition? Could God reconcile His differences with Satan? Can He walk "on and on" with the devil, let His fallen angel Lucifer into his swimming pool? There's a bit of a double bind here, because if we argue God can't do that, then He isn't the omnipotent being He's supposed to be. Some might argue a won't that's strong enough to be a can't, though that might only be a semantic pivot. Here's some set up to the question that I ended my own exploration with during quorum meeting, and I'll admit that it comes from a uniquely Mormonic point of view: In Mormonism***, there's an understanding that before birth, all current humans had a soul residing in Heaven with God. Therefore, the human family antedates our current world. The extension of that is everyone--all of the angels, all of us, and even Christ Himself--are connected in a familial bond. Lucifer, then, is also part of the celestial family before he was evicted. In that sense, Lucifer is a spiritual sibling to everyone on Earth. And that leads to my question: Does God miss His son Lucifer? For some reason, I'd like to think that He does. --- * Despite my tepid efforts, I couldn't find a version of the song with the lyrics I've linked above. The song's tune is, as I said, on the Busted Stuff album. It's a good one, and the new lyrics in "Bartender" are also thought-provoking. I'd recommend checking it out if you like his style of music. ** At the time, Busted Stuff wasn't even produced--there was, as I seem to recall, a bit of a falling out with the band's producer that led to a bunch of the songs being scrapped--so I listened to the in-the-works music (called, alternatively, The Summer So Far and The Lillywhite Sessions), which had "Bartender" in basically its final form. *** I think there's a difference between teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Mormonism; hence my usage of the word. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! Aside from a brief summer in my grandparents' basement, I have memories of growing up in two locations. Both houses were blue, and my parents still live in the second one. Nevertheless, I have memories of the first house, which I lived in, essentially, until I was about five and my younger brother was born. That little place had a living room, kitchen, carport (not a garage), a master bedroom, a bathroom, and my bedroom, which I shared with my older brother. There may have been another room in the house, but I can't remember it. I don't even know where my mom did laundry. Was that a part of the bathroom? *shrugs* Being born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints means that I was introduced (if you're feeling indulgent; indoctrinated if you're feeling feisty) to praying from before I left the womb. For Mormons, prayers are a way of communicating with God that run the gamut from unofficially rote (prayers over meals) to dictated by scripture (the sacramental prayers offered every week in any LDS chapel are identical to every other congregation the world over). While we tend to teach that we don't recite prayers, much of what we say in prayers are formulaic. This is by instruction: The format for an LDS prayer is to begin by addressing Heavenly Father (the intimate nomenclature of Mormons to God is something else worth looking at, but not here), referring to Him in the informal voice (using Thee and Thy as pronouns). The expected order is to first thank God for His blessings--acknowledging the Divine's hand in one's life. That done, requests for assistance, additional blessings, and other implorations suffice. Once completed, the pray-er closes with the phrase, "In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen." If anyone is listening to the prayer, they echo the amen. Mormonic attitudes toward posture tend toward a nonce necessity: If a woman is stuck in traffic and praying that she gets home in safety, that person isn't likely to follow the formalities of folding her arms, closing her eyes, and bowing her head. If a fellow is in their own house, kneeling down in no particular direction is also considered correct behavior. While some Mormons hold hands whilst praying--say, around the dinner table before a meal--that is more a matter of personal taste. There are even more types of prayers within Mormondom, but I won't worry about those here. Suffice to say, there is a lot to keep in mind whilst in the act of praying, if one is a member of the Church. As I mentioned before, I grew up in this environment, so praying--and the postures of prayer--are familiar to me. When I was quite young--still in the first house--I remember being encouraged to voice my own prayers, rather than repeat my mother's spoonfed version. Early on, a parent tends to ask the child to repeat after her, letting them get used to how to construct the pieces of the prayer. Eventually they move to generating their own thoughts and prayers. It was at this point that my memory kicks in. The bedroom I shared with my older brother, Jesse, had a wooden bunkbed to help conserve space. As the oldest in the family, Jess got to sleep on the top. I slept on the bottom, obviously, and I said my prayers next to my bed before slipping between the sheets. One night, as I was working through my prayers, I did as my teacher (whether it was in Primary School during Sunday meetings or my mother, I don't know) advised and tried to picture in my mind the things I was talking about in my prayer. I believe the purpose was to make it so that I wasn't simply rattling off a memorized orison before I fell asleep. The instruction was to get me to be more involved in talking with the Supreme Power of all the universe. Unfortunately for me, there is an English homophone that came into play this particular night. As I was trying to conjure up a mental image of God--a task that has only gotten harder for me as I've aged, if I'm honest--I reverted to the only understanding of the first word in my invocation that I could picture: Dear. Only I didn't know that the phrase, "Dear Heavenly Father," addressed much like a letter, was using a different type of dear than the one I imagined. I thought it meant deer. So this night, as I was trying this new idea of imagining my Heavenly Father, I (for lack of a better phrase) misspelled the first word. "Deer Heavenly Father," I intoned. Instantly, an image formed. Just the way I was supposed to! What I pictured was the moment from a movie that I had seen. In it, the agent of salvation, power, authority, and grandeur entered, bathed in a resplendent glow. The main character, in dire need, sees the entity that would save him… …I pictured Bambi's dad. This ended up being something that stuck with me for a time afterwards. I couldn't quite figure out why God was a stag. In many ways, my childish image of what God looked like was similar to a creature in Princess Mononoke. In the thirty-odd years since that night, I've often thought about how often I've tried to infer something, only to get it completely wrong. Just today, actually, my wife invited the in-laws over for dinner. They're good company, so that was fine, but I had assumed (erroneously) that Gayle needed the evening without guests because she has a lot of work she has to do and very little time in which to do it. I made the assumption and therefore hadn't recommended to her to invite her parents, which I had thought that she should do.
This has led me to wonder about all of the other areas where I've made a mistake--a crucial one, perhaps--in my imagination that I took to be indicative of reality. Though God no longer looks like a Cabella's trophy in my mind, and though I think I understand some of what a Heavenly Father might be, I'm no closer at coming to a belief about what He looks like. I do think it's important--and I'll explain why another day--but it's not crucial for me to find an answer yet. I mean, there are plenty of people, I think, who would claim that there's a connect-the-dots method for determining the answer, but those types of assertions usually don't convince me. I feel as though there's enough ambiguity and "culture-turned-doctrine" that I'm reluctant to stake any claims at all about what I might see when I relocate from the blue to the black. Dr. Yuval Noah Harari wrote a sequel to his book Sapiens, which--just on the conceptual level--is kind of impressive. After all, Sapiens is a record of human kind, with a broad view of the entirety of the evolution and history of the species. And though he deliberately (and necessarily) has to abridge that history over the course of a single volume, that book is really thought provoking and detailed nonetheless. If you haven't picked it up, I'd recommend it (though realize that the guy's a bit of a polemicist, even if he wouldn't consider himself one, and he relies heavily on scientific processes and explanations) as it makes for some interesting reading and might adjust the way you view the world.
Homo Deus, then, is the sequel. And if you're writing a sequel to a history book that is supposed to cover the history of humanity on the planet, there isn't a lot of room to grow, is there? And, yet, here we are. Sapiens' subtitle is A Brief History of Humankind. For Homo Deus, Dr. Harari picked A Brief History of Tomorrow. That really sums up the thesis of the book: Where do we go from here? Harari starts off by talking about the three largest problems that humanity has had to deal with since its inception: War, plague, and famine. Most of human history involves looking at the struggle against these three things. Our current society is an outgrowth of those priorities…yet they are, according to Dr. Harari, conquered. Though war still happens, we don't see it on the same scale we did in the past--particularly a century ago. Diseases can threaten small sections of humanity, but modern medicine has made significant inroads--so significant that massive epidemics appear to be a thing of the past. And, as he points out early on, for the first time in human history, more people are dying because of overeating than undereating. The argument of the rest of the book is one of potential futures of mankind. He isn't looking closely at the ecological future (that's The Sixth Extinction), so there's an assumption in his arguments that we'll either fix the problem or invent a solution to massive ecological loss. In that sense, he's pretty cheery about the future prospects, which include self-driving cars, automated everything, and an eventual disappearance of humankind into a mass of information according to dataism (belief in the supremacy of data) and current trends. Harari attacks all sorts of closely-held beliefs, including liberalism, humanism, socialism, capitalism (though he gives it a utilitarian pass by avoiding the quickly admitted shortcomings), free will, and the reality of gods or God. This iconoclasm isn't particularly shocking, as he'd made similar claims in Sapiens. But he is more thorough in this book, taking time to address the strangeness of consciousness--which he admits science can't explain--and then pushes the argument further to dismiss the unique status of humanity as anything other than the current winner for survival. On the one hand, I can see where he's coming from: We exceptional humans have decided that we're exceptional, and since there's nothing else who lives up to the criteria we set out to justify our exceptionality, we must, therefore, be exceptional. It's a bit like arguing that the hare is better than the fish at running a race, therefore the hare is better. And there's a humbling allure to this. What makes us special? Almost every tick-box on our list can be found in another species of animal, including language, social behaviors, and a host of other human traits. Is it that all of these things together, rather than any one thing, makes us special? For humans, we often say that we have a soul, yet Dr. Harari dismisses this as being unprovable. Consciousness, of course, is inexplicable, but we see the effects. The assumption, then, that there's a point at which the intelligence gathered inside of a system switches over to consciousness is his reason for arguing that robots--in the near future--will have to be granted human rights on the same grounds. All of these ideas are interesting and any one of them is worth interrogating at length. But the one question that really got me thinking was (and I'm paraphrasing, since I listened to the book and don't have the text in front of me), the one about religion. It should be fairly clear that, if Dr. Harari believes what he's writing, he himself is an atheist. I'm not, so there's definitely a difference in opinion, as it were, on that front. However, what I can't argue is Harari's point about how religion used to be on the forefront of creating humanity. Looking specifically at the radical changes that grew out of the Protestant Reformation, Harari notes that religion used to be the hotbed of new thinking. Changes of behavior and society came because of religious impetus, with religious justifications. Now, however, he argues that religions are all reactionary. They aren't making any claims about the future, but rather cling more pointedly to the past. And while there may be more nuance than he's finding, he has a point with this one: Religions aren't equipped to answer the larger questions that scientific breakthroughs are creating on an almost daily basis. While the Bible may have some pretty solid answers for things like how to treat other people and how to behave around a neighbor's ass, there's nothing in there that answers the questions about robot consciousness. Transhumanism (which Harari alludes to but never calls out precisely) makes the argument that human experience, being exclusively mental, can be downloaded out of the human body, digitized, then put back into a new body--mechanical or organic, it varies on the transhumanist. What does the Bible say about that? To be more specific, Harari claims that death is a matter of a technical glitch in the human system. Once we figure out the technical problem, scientifically-generated immortality will be possible. How does one stand before the Judgment Seat of God if one never dies? What happens when 80 becomes the new 50? How does one go about "honoring thy father and thy mother" when there are multiple generations, each going in separate directions? Say that death isn't completely defeated, but is instead delayed (as every medical intervention is designed to do)? How does one plan a family in that instance? Is having children and a family a transient thing, like public schooling? The idea that Homo sapiens can be so modified means, for Dr. Harari, that we will step out of this species designation and become Homo deus…god-like Man. And that's enough to put religious readers on edge. Of course, the religious answers to the earlier questions are likely to be reactionary. "Oh, well, it's blasphemous to say we can live forever" (though that's the point of the resurrection). Or, perhaps, "we can live forever, but only through God's plan". In other words, it's not an approach to the changes, nor are there predictions for this sort of thing within religions themselves; instead, it's a denial of them, a push away, a rejection. Even on something that isn't so eschatologically fraught (though what isn't eschatologically fraught when it comes to religion?), such as human rights for sentient and conscious robots, I don't think religion is equipped to talk about it. I mean, I can see myself raising the question in Sunday School and being dismissed with a thoughtless snort. (Okay, I'd never mention the idea in Sunday School. I'm silently iconoclastic.) What frustrates me about this concept, though, is that, based upon the truth claims of Mormonism, we shouldn't be afraid of talking about these questions. That's the whole point of the religion: To seek out truth. And there are undiscovered truths, which Mormonism is supposed to accept. But can it? As I said before, the book is immensely thought-provoking, as well as replete with thoughts that ought to be grappled with. I don't know how many of his predictions (or, as he prefers to think of them, "possibilities") will--or even can--come true. Still, the book is worth reading, thinking about, rejecting or accepting. Unlike some of the other books that I've read lately, it's one that I feel like needs time to ponder and, perhaps, even a reread. Today I finished listening to the New Testament. Part of me wanted to be glib and approach my thoughts on it the same way I do with other book reviews ("good, but some of the writing is repetitive, lots of run on sentences, and the middle part drags"), but since it is part of the Holy Bible and one of the most important books of scripture to not only my own religious tradition, but for billions of others, I think I might skip over anything too cheeky. I listen to one or two chapters a day as I commute to work, so it's taken a long time to get through the entire thing. As a result, I'm not fully remembering a lot of what I thought throughout the past eight or nine months, though the stories in the Gospels are still fresh. They are, of course, the foundational texts of Christianity, and though there's plenty of scholarly debate about the timing of the writings and the order and the purpose, I feel like, of all that's in the Bible--certainly of the New Testament--the Gospels are the most indispensable. That's not a particularly radical take on the whole concept, I know. I'm not really looking to turn heads, rock boats, or rustle jimmies. I think part of the reason that I'm feeling more attached to the Gospels than the rest of it is because Paul gives me a weird vibe. He has certain fixations (the one about circumcision comes to mind) that, while I understand historically, don't have much context within the epistles and even less almost two millennia after the fact. I'm not trying to be glib here: It's just strange to me that holy writ includes the profundity and simplicity of a phrase like "Jesus wept" and also a request that Paul's cloak be returned to him (2 Tim 4:13). And while apologists can make some worthwhile in-roads on the necessity of such a verse, it has a post hoc feeling to it in my mind. I definitely understand the scholarly consideration that Paul created Christianity, though, as there is a lot that Paul defines, expounds, and hypothesizes upon throughout his letters. Hearing so much from Paul makes me wonder what Peter would have said had his writings been canonized, too. The end of the New Testament--and, of course, the end of the entire Bible--is the uncovering by St. John. Revelation is a peculiar book, one written in a similar, poetical vein as Isaiah in the Old Testament, and is notoriously ambiguous. In the LDS tradition, John the Revelator encrypted (to use an anachronism to describe something that's 1,900 years old) his vision of the end of the world in archaic and symbolic language. For Mormons, this was to help preserve the text, so that, once the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ was accomplished, the saints of the latter-days would be able to decrypt it via the insights and inspirations attendant to the Restoration. There's a long-view sentiment about that idea which appeals to me: God, wanting to preserve His words, made them intelligible only with future tools. That makes sense… …but Revelation as scripture is pretty strange, I gotta be honest. Serpents, whores, virgins, the number seven, death, plague, destruction…the whole thing reads like a Michael Bay fever dream. There are some moments of lucidity, of course. It isn't all symbolism and poetry. And, like any poem, it's hard to tell where the metaphors end and the literal interpretations begin. While Doctrine and Covenants 77 attends to the Restorative decryption, there are still major swaths of the 22 chapters of Revelation that have less authoritative interpretations. That makes the book opaque, still, and I found that my attention waned often whilst driving. That being said, I liked the last chapter the most. The concept of Alpha and Omega as being indicative of the Word (Jesus) really makes me consider His primacy and sacrifice--Him being from the beginning, but also the "last" one to enter heaven, unwilling to finish His work until the last of us is saved. I also am excited about the idea of seeing His face. It's more concise, then, for me to say that I liked the last chapter because it focused so much on Jesus. That, for me, is the entire point of scriptures. What about Revelation 22:18, though? It says For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: Any of my non-Mormon Christian friends might bristle (?) to think of a chap who believes in extrabiblical scripture enjoying that part of the Bible. I get it. There's a pretty clear condemnation of anyone adding words of scripture to the Bible, and what is the Book of Mormon but another batch of words (over 268,000 of them) being added to the Bible? I'm not an apologist--and there are plenty of Mormon theologians who tackle this and similar questions--so I'm not going to go into any debate here. I think the reason I don't have cognitive dissonance with this particular part of my religion is pretty simple: If God is behind the Book of Mormon, then no man added to the words. God did. And I think it's God's prerogative to add whatever He wants, in whatever way he wants.
There's room to discuss that further, but I'm not going to dive into that here. Maybe another day. But not this day. Nor tomorrow, I suspect. Last bit: Yeah, I recommend the New Testament. If you're not religious, then it's essential reading, as it gives a massive insight into a lot of (but not all) the ways Christians and Mormons view the world. It's one of the pillars of Western Civilization, fuel for an enormous quantity of important allusions, and foundational to most of European and American history. If you are religious (Mormon or Christian), then you don't need me to tell you to read it. You should anyway. Knowing what's in the scriptures you claim you adhere to seems like a bit of a no-brainer (though the scriptures can be draining to read…and I don't know when I'm going to reread the Old Testament, which I haven't read since I was twenty). I can't say that my faith was strengthened by listening to the New Testament, but that's less about the text and more about my spiritual levels, methinks. So, yeah: Read the Bible. |
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