The Hand of God

In 1986, Diego Maradona scored the first goal of the World Cup quarterfinal match between Argentina and England by punching the ball into the net before England's goalie could get to it. The referee thought it had been headed in and counted it. After the game, Maradona famously referred to it as being scored "a little bit with the head of Maradona and a little bit with the hand of God." Of course, Maradona just cheated, but the flair has stuck.

I'm interested today in how (whether?) the hand of God is "in" even those things that are wrong.

If you're reading this post later, the context in which it was composed was that a BYU religion professor recently said* some pretty racist stuff, including that God was blessing blacks by not letting them have access to the Mormon priesthood before 1978 because it would prevent them from potentially becoming sons of perdition and going to outer darkness. How nice, right?

I join the many others who have condemned these remarks as racist, hurtful, wrong, etc. That folklore does not deserve to be perpetuated, regardless of which long-dead church leaders can be quoted as believing it.

But I want to talk about the ban itself. My personal opinion, after reading a lot of history and thinking and praying, is that it was not inspired by God but rather a product of inherited 19th century culture creeping into church policies. Other people who hold this view often describe the ban as thus being against God's will. And while I agree that God, if he had been making the decision himself, would not have instituted the ban in the first place... God also tells us that he is offended by, or that his wrath is kindled against, those who "confess not his hand in all things."

Now for a four-paragraph semi-digression.

The prototypical test case for this scripture is the Holocaust: how could God's hand be "in" that thing? I confess I don't know how best to answer that question. Does the scripture mean that God cause the Holocaust, as some who posit an all-powerful and all-history-controlling God might claim? It seems like that could only happen if it was an overall good (unless we want to abandon the notion that God is good). Certainly the atrocious actions of the Nazis set the stage for heroism and amazing examples of faith and selflessness, but it's difficult to say that the net result was positive. Of course, God's "net positive" is not always ours--eternal perspectives change things a lot--; and yet, it's hard to conceive of that godawful time being a "good." I don't like this interpretation much at all.

But maybe that's not what God means when he says his hand is in all things. Maybe he's not saying that his hand is behind (meaning "causing") all things, but that whatever happens, his hand will be in it, meaning involved in it to some degree, working to mitigate the hatred and pain that occur. Thus we can say that the Holocaust was not God's "will" but that once it was underway God interposed himself and his grace into it where he could (D&C 122:7 - "all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good" comes to mind here). But this makes God sound incredibly weak--surely he could have interposed himself in such a way as to bury the Nazis in the bottom of an ocean a la Pharaoh's troops, so even if God didn't want the Holocaust to happen he surely could have prevented it.

One final (and more radical) interpretation of the scripture: perhaps God is not saying that his hand really is in all things, only that he wants us to look for it in all things. This would be then a commandment towards optimism: look for the good even in bad situations; sometimes it may not be there, of course, but erring on the side of finding good is surely more appealing than the opposite. Then again, this could also be spun as God commanding us to delude ourselves at times and/or to ignore the truth when it hurts.

In the end, I guess I'd pick interpretation #2 (God doing what he can in the context of human choices to commit evil acts) as the least-bad option. But this post isn't about theodicy in general, it's about the priesthood ban. /tangent

But that's the thing. Even if the priesthood ban was a mistake (aka "wasn't God's will"), we have to assume that he allowed it to happen for a wise purpose in him. Again, this is not to say that it was "right"--it may well have been, and I believe it was, a net bad--but in some way God's hand was "in" it. I want to struggle to see how that could be the case.

There are a lot of useful lessons we can draw from the priesthood ban. One is humility. We need to remember that, even if we believe this is the "only true and living church" (which I do), we don't have the final word. We never will until it's all said and done. We should always look forward with faith and perhaps some degree of impatience to those great and important things yet to be revealed.

I just don't think it's so easy to say "this was against God's will" and dismiss it completely. We can say it was wrong, but if we don't confess God's hand in it then apparently we're going to be making him angry.

What do you think? How can you find the good even in the truly bad? What would you say if Brigham Young (or the church tomorrow) declared that the priesthood ban was instituted "a little bit with the head of Brigham Young and a little bit with the hand of God"?

* Assuming the quote is accurate. I don't doubt that the gist is accurate--this professor had said basically the same things in other venues before--but the particularly ugly wording could have been trumped up somewhat for publication (or simply due to a misunderstanding).

I just had dinner with Terryl Givens

[Commence gushing.]

I just got back from dinner with Terryl and Fiona Givens. Terryl is the author of a number of books on Mormonism and a professor of literature at the University of Richmond. His wife, Fiona, is as outgoing and gregarious as he is meek and humble. Both are extremely warm, open, and thoughtful.

My roommate figured we should try to have dinner with him, and another friend put the plan into action by emailing him, and he immediately and graciously accepted. We met at a Cheesecake Factory outside Richmond and ate and talked for close to two hours. Besides just being ecstatic at getting to meet a Mormon hero of mine (I fell in love immediately upon reading his Lightning out of Heaven BYU devotional), it was also amazing to get to know two really good, down-to-earth people.

Highlights included: Fiona's descriptions of how, even in the midst of concentrating intensely on a book, Terryl is willing to drop everything when one of their kids needs something; their deep commitment to Christ and his gospel; Fiona's memory of Terryl reading her his recent book When Souls Had Wings (she's his first and last reader) when she had just had eye surgery and the spiritual impressions of the importance of the book's treatment of the pre-mortal existence; and Terryl's description of the important space that the burgeoning field of Mormon studies is creating for serious, independent, and faithful thinking about the LDS church.

In short: I highly recommend meeting him/listening to his thoughts on stuff/reading his books. Great guy and a great family.

p.s. For a similar discussion, see his interview on Mormon Stories.

A midrash on the existential necessity of charity

"Charity" by
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
courtesy of Wikipedia

Paul famously said "though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing." Why not take him at his word? Without charity, a man ceases to exist. This is backed up by Mormon, who said if a man "[has] not charity he is nothing; wherefore he must needs have charity." In other words, if a man had no charity he would not exist; ergo, since he exists he clearly has (at least some) charity.

Mormon also spoke of "how great" the "nothingness of man" is. That's interesting, that nothingness can be relatively large. You can have different levels of nothingness! This clarifies the above point about how not having charity leads to being nothing. The less charity you have, the less you "exist" in some sense. Which actually fits with our intuition: we think of the least charitable people as missing a part of their heart, or incomplete in some way. They're not all there.

Charity, then, is an existential need. If we were to become entirely devoid of charity, we would suffer the eternal destruction of both soul and body. Conversely, the more we cleave unto charity and are filled with it, the more we find ourselves, the more we exist, the more perfect (read: complete) and divine we are. It's a spectrum from nothingness to Godliness.

God is brimming with charity, so he exists in the fullest sense of the word. His light, which is intimately intertwined with his charity, actually emanates into all things, providing them with life. This is why he wants to fill us with his love, why he commands us to be full of love/charity. This is the same promise that as we become Gods we shall receive all that the Father has.

We already have a portion of God's love within us. We know this because we exist. If we would continue to exist, and to achieve abundant eternal lives, we need charity. Charity never faileth. We, with charity, will never die.

The essence of Mormonism

I was thinking yesterday about the essence of Mormonism. A lot of people think it's the Book of Mormon, or living prophets, or exaltation, or polygamy, or faith, or something or other.

I think it's sweeping and mopping. Or more specifically, the essence of Mormonism is getting up at 6 am on a Friday to consecrate a little bit of your time to cleaning a big, pretty building that we believe is sacred and call a temple. Because someone passed around a clipboard on Sunday asking for volunteers.

Yes, when I say "essence" I probably don't really mean "essence" there. But I think that sort of stuff--kind of boring but also kind of endearing in its sincerity--is a really really important part of Mormonism. Everyone just doing mundane, simple things. Running a church, keeping it clean, helping people out; probably not being very good at it but getting it done one way or another.

The "wealth redistribution" canard

Churchill: "Would you sleep with me for five million pounds?"
Woman: (taken aback) "Why, well... yes, I suppose I would."
Churchill: "How about for 10 pounds?"
Woman: "Mr Churchill! What kind of woman do you think I am?!?"
Churchill: "Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we're just haggling about the price."

Conservatives often decry "wealth redistribution," by which they mean taxing the rich at higher rates than the poor or middle class. "It's not fair," the argument goes, "to take more from one person and give it to someone else!" It is seen as an evil to be minimized (lower tax rates for the rich at least somewhat) or eradicated via a flat tax (everyone pays a certain percentage of their income no matter how much income they have).

However, as far as I can tell this is completely wrong-headed because of the simple fact that a flat tax would still be extreme wealth redistribution (I'm using "extreme" in the sense that it's a lot more than no wealth redistribution at all). That's because the conservative idea that a flat tax avoids wealth redistribution is either a) flat out wrong, or b) using words in a totally unnatural way.

The definition I gave of wealth redistribution seems pretty intuitive: taking more money from one person and giving it (or the benefits it buys) to another. But when you think about it, a flat tax would still do that, and on a large scale. To see this, assume you are Bill Gates and thus make $1,000,000,000 each year and under a flat tax you pay 10% of that, or $100,000,000, to the government. The government then uses it for providing roads, post offices, public transit, national defense, or whatever services you think government ought to provide. Now assume that I am a bum who makes no money at all during the year, thus avoiding any tax liability at all. I am still benefited by your tax money: I can still walk the streets lit well at night, the police will still arrest someone who beats me up or steals my stuff, I still get to use cheap public transit if I find enough quarters to buy a bus ticket, etc. In short, the money that was yours and was "taken" by the government is going to help me. Your wealth is being redistributed to me. I don't see why taking the same percentage from everyone avoids redistributing wealth; money is still moving from the richer to the poorer.

Of course, conservatives might argue that they're using "wealth redistribution" to mean "progressive taxation" (the correct term for making rich people pay higher percentages of income in tax). In which case I say: then use words to mean what they plainly mean! Conservatives win lots of political points by creating fears that the government is "stealing" money from more productive, innovating, "job-creating" people and redistributing it to the poor--sure sounds an awful lot like SOCIALISM to me! The problem is that their solution... still "steals" more money from the rich and redistributes it to the poor. I admit that the flat tax does so on a much lesser scale than progressive tax systems, but it indubitably still does it, and to a large degree.

So the real question is: how much redistribution of wealth do we as a society want? I'm not saying necessarily that the marginal rates we have right now are ideal, either morally or economically, but just that we should have a debate that answers the question of just how much redistribution of wealth is desirable. The only way to avoid all wealth redistribution is to have a "head tax" which is when everyone pays the exact same amount of money; truly no wealth gets redistributed under such a system: we all pay the same amount and we all get access to the same government benefits--something I haven't heard anyone seriously propose.* In other words, conservatives have already established what kind of party they are, now we're just haggling over the percentages. This isn't meant to be a slam-dunk against the conservative position--it's perfectly valid to argue that taxes are too high and that they should be lowered, and there may even be benefits to flattening out the tax system--but it is meant to be a plea that we all avoid scare tactics that don't make any sense on inspection.

In short: the specter of "wealth redistribution" to oppose progressive taxation is hypocritical demagoguery unless a head tax is advocated in its place (or no tax, but anarchy is a great topic for another post). Let's get down to haggling about the right price instead of calling the other party immoral thieves.

* Interestingly enough for the conservatives who point to tithing as divine approval for a flat tax, God also instituted a head tax in Exodus 30:13-15 for everyone 20 and older, so who's to say that isn't an even more moral way of doing things than a flat tax? Or if God's tax preferences change, why not have a progressive system now? [aka I don't think God particularly cares about the details of our tax system]

Commercialism: A Crucial Component of Christmas?

Ah yes, commercialism: the perennial chestnut roasting over the Christmas debate fire. It's easy and commonplace to denounce its reach and prominence throughout the holiday season. I say it's easy because Christmas' true meaning really is to remember Christ's birth and the sublime gift that he was and is; and what with all the stress and shopping and travel and everything, it can be hard to remember much of that. I say that it's commonplace to bemoan this fact because every religious service around this time of year that I'm aware of does this to one degree or another. And this is a good thing: we all need more reminders to focus on the eternal and not put too much stock in the transitory.

But it's also easy and fun (in the mean, bursting balloons way) to point out that there has never been a golden age of Christmas, in which families did not stress out, Christ was foremost in everyone's mind, and there was no exploiting the holiday for commercial gain. Jon Stewart and Christopher Hitchens love to point out how Puritans banned the holiday in America, for one (two?). And who can really believe that children since time immemorial didn't put too much stock in the gift-getting part? But this idea that Christmas commercialism is nothing new has been especially on my mind today as I read a great (commercial) present I got today: Christmas at the New Yorker. Some examples from the 35 pages I've read so far:

• One cartoon has a woman about to enter a scrum surrounding a "Xmas Sale $1.98" sign; she has a rope tied around her waist in the style of a mountain-climber; she's telling her husband, who's holding the end of the rope, "When I jerk twice, pull as hard as you can." The year? 1938.
• A 1962 tidbit reads in full: "Overheard on Fifth Avenue, a cheerful soprano voice: 'It's nice to see the Christmas decorations going up. Thanksgiving will soon be here.'"
• Searching for the center of Christmas in New York in 1962, John Updike wrote, with tongue in cheek, "We debated whether to head north, toward the great Norway spruce of Rockefeller Center, with its Currier & Ives prospect of skaters, or to head south, toward the gossamer, tree-shaped web of electric-light bulbs clinging to the front of Lord & Taylor. The latter seemed more crassly commercial, and hence more truly in the spirit of things, so south we went..."
• The Christmas-themed cover from the Dec. 13, 1930 issue (pictured on the right), which depicts harried shoppers, frazzled mothers, and crying (presumably greedy) children with all the same fervor that we employ today to decry the same.

But romanticizing the past to make it sound rosier than the present (the so-called golden age fallacy) brings to mind two related ideas and makes me not want to pick sides in this fight.

First, there's the universal of coming-of-age process, the motif of a loss of innocence. We as humans need to remember a time that was more idyllic, an Eden to which we want to return. Christmastime is a great time to do this culturally, to wish for a more loving, caring world in which family is more central than it is now, in which money is not the true focus. This ideal is the most important thing to aspire towards, regardless of how well it tracks the historical record of centuries past.*

But the most interesting thing about this conversation is that it is really a debate about ritual. Religious-minded people want to promote "the true meaning of Christmas" (a phrase, by the way, that I truly believe in, aka those aren't scare quotes). But as this intriguing (and contrarianly-titled) blog post Celebrating the Commercialism of Christmas argues, "commercialism" of some sort is probably an important vehicle for that true meaning. The author draws the devastating comparison with Easter, which by all accounts ought to be the most celebrated Christian holiday, and concludes that the lack of both meaningful traditions and, yes, commercialism surrounding Easter doom it to an eternal second-rate status in too many people's minds.

Rituals are a vehicle for a deeper truth that serve an invaluable purpose but also come with potential pitfalls. Without any ritual truths are easily lost or thought of only in passing. Think of the proud, millennia-long Jewish tradition and how often it can die out: all too often, non-observant Jews' children will not identify as Jews, and certainly their children won't. Rituals like the passover keep their community alive. On the other hand, if too much emphasis is placed on the ritual (see, e.g., some pharisaical practices in the New Testament era) then the underlying truth can be crushed. In the Mormon tradition, temple rituals are central to our worship and are in large part what helped give Brigham Young and the apostles the nod over Sidney Rigdon in the succession controversy--the apostles controlled those, and those were what created a lasting, distinct church that would outlast Rigdon's offshoot branch of Mormonism.

I don't mean to argue that we should celebrate Christmas commercialism for its own sake, but rather that we consider whether all its secular and commercialistic trappings might not be a "ritual" that makes us really care about the deeper meaning of Christ's birth. Let's face it, the excitement of presents, both giving and getting, the beauty (and even the tackiness, at times) of the lights, the distinctive carols, the crazy stressful family get-togethers--they all make us anticipate the big day and give a greater opportunity to think about what it all means. They provide a context (and a foil!) for the extended worship of the Christ child.

In summary, ask me whether the ritual of baptism is important, salvific, and even "true": I'll emphatically say "yes." I'll quickly concede that water literally doesn't literally wash away our sins when we're baptized, but I'll still argue forcefully for the necessity of the ordinance--with an appropriate emphasis on the underlying truth it symbolizes. Likewise, ask me whether Christ's birth heralded the beginning of the most momentous life ever lived on this earth, and I'll emphatically say "yes." And now, I think I might just argue that, while decidedly secondary and not in itself of any lasting significance, perhaps the busyness of the Christmas season might just be a necessary means of promoting the celebration of Christ's miraculous birth and the eternal gift that he has given each of us.

Merry Christmas!


* A discussion of how historically accurate our discourse about the past needs to be in these regards is beyond the scope of this blog post; suffice it to say that I think the answer is: "it depends."

Jõuluingel

Here's my contribution to Christmas this year:



The Estonian lyrics are available here (or on the youtube page) and here is my English translation:

On Christmas Eve, an angel visits each room
Flittering there in the candle's cascading glow
You can scarcely see her with your eye
But still you sense she wishes you well.

A tinge of Christmas wafts from the tree's branches
And in the angel's hair, a strand of tinsel glistens.
She pets the teddy bear in your hand,
Tells a fairy tale in your dreams.

You go to bed, feeling somewhat sad
But the tree remains in the room a while longer.
Upon waking you notice how
The angel's hair glistens there upon the branches.

On Christmas Eve, an angel visits each room
Flittering there in the candle's cascading glow
You can scarcely see her with your eye
But still you sense she wishes you well.