Rings of the Tree tells the story of Diana Applesong, a Victorian woman who has experienced tragedy after tragedy in her life. So eventually, after dealing with so much grief, she cloisters herself and her servants into her mansion, essentially cutting herself off from the world. However, a group of explorers stumble upon her secretive existence and set off a chain of events that places her face to face with that which she is most afraid of… love.

“She has experienced a lot of loss and pain in her past,” said Jaclyn Hales who is playing the lead role of Diana Applesong, “Her default reaction is living like a porcelain doll. Everything is beautiful and protected on the outside, but inside she’s nothing… she’s numb. She has nothing left to give… or so she thinks.” Hales is recently making headway in her career with starring roles in films like the upcoming Unicorn City, but she took a break from her film pursuits in LA to work on this show, for which she has expressed a lot of fondness and excitement. “As far as everyone here in the Utah audience, it’s going to be innovative,” said Hales, “It’s super creative and will keep the audiences’ attention and awe factor at a high the whole time.”

Rings of the Tree is not a new story to Utah audiences. It was originally produced at Utah Valley University to very positive audience and critical reaction, and Stewart’s screenplay version of the story won first place in last year’s LDS Film Festival’s Screenplay Competition (which screenplay Imminent Catharsis Media has optioned and plans on making a feature film, once funding is in place). This production of the play, however, is very different than the one that premiered at UVU. Zion Theatre Company and Imminent Catharsis Media are taking a multimedia approach with the show, meaning that in staging it they are also incorporating film and other mediums. The production has required several film shoots, the composition of original music, the use of projection, digital devices and theatre magic.

“This version of the script is much closer to the screenplay than the original stage play,” said playwright Stewart, a Utah native who is currently getting his MFA is Dramatic Writing at Arizona State University. “There is a lot more emphasis on the visual element, the spectacle, the magic. In the past, I’ve focused on language. This time around, although that beautiful language is still a vital component, yet I tried to make room for spectacle… for visions.”

Utah film actor, Danor Gerald, is taking one of the starring roles in the multimedia production, but is also one of the show’s producers. Along with the production’s director Jyllian Petrie, they are creating the show’s film elements and creative multimedia effects. “Rings of the Tree pushes the creative boundaries of theatre, and narrative cinema.  Zion Theatre Company and Imminent Catharsis Arts & Media are working together to develop this groundbreaking work of art,” said Gerald, “After doing so many movies in Utah, this project excites me as an actor, and as a producer because it brings me back to my roots in classical live theatre.  That’s my first love, plus I get to integrate my new zeal for digital cinema and web-based media to tell this story.”

As indicated, there is a digital, intermedia element to the show which will surprise audiences. “We’ve all been warned at the movies or theatre to turn off our mobile phones and silence our devices,” said Gerald, “But in this show we expect and encourage the audience to bring your web-enabled tablets and smartphones.  Bring your headphones, and a splitter for your date.  You will want to take the chances we give to you to use them… We aren’t using these as gimmicks.  We are making creative technical choices to deliver each part of the story in the most valuable and enjoyable way.”

Director Petrie has both been invigorated and challenged by the production. “It’s been an eye opening experience. I’ve worked for years in theatre and years in film, but I’ve never had to do both at the same time. It’s been very difficult, but very rewarding, but we’re doing the impossible—we’ve basically filmed a movie and rehearsed a play in a matter of weeks! But I’m very excited, because when it all comes together, it’s going to be mind blowing.”

The Off Broadway Theater is located at 272 South Main Street, Salt Lake City. The Grove Theater is located at 20 South Main Street, Pleasant Grove. All performances of the show will be at 7pm. Tickets are $12 for adults and $10 for students/seniors. Tickets for the Salt Lake performances can be purchased at http://theobt.org/ or by calling (801) 355-4628. Tickets for the Pleasant Grove performances can be purchased at www.ziontheatrecompany.com .

The Christ story, however, is not the only “true myth.” I’ve seen Campbell’s pattern not only pop up in religious narratives such as the life of Christ and Buddha and Muhammad (some whose historicity is obviously debated depending on your religious views), but also in the lives of more established historical figures… try applying Campbell’s pattern to Joan of Arc for example, and other epic figures like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. You’ll find some striking consistency. One of the most perfect examples I’ve found, however, is the life of Joseph Smith. His life plays out like an epic myth, the kind of stuff which would be seem obviously constructed after the fact, if we hadn’t so many historical proofs to back up the basic outline of the story. Now, obviously, events like the First Vision are up for debate, if you’re not an orthodox Mormon, but other events like Liberty Jail (which I’ll figure conveniently in Campbell’s “Belly of the Whale” stage) are without question historical facts in the American religious narrative. So I find it interesting that this pattern can crop up is non-structured scenarios in history, which attests to the universality of the Hero’s Journey model and how it is not only a convenient way to plot a story, but also an immortal way to show the truth of how spirituality plays out.

Which brings us not only to the life of Joseph Smith, but the pattern he layed out about man’s existence, what Mormons like to call the Plan of Salvation. In the rest of my essay, I’ll go through Campbell’s Hero’s Journey pattern and apply it first to Joseph Smith’s life and by then I think you’ll also see how the pattern applies to the Plan of Salvation and our individual journeys through mortality:

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE HERO’S JOURNEY

THE CALL TO ADVENTURE: In Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the Hero is always first called to leave his past life of obscurity and day to day existence and chart into a world of wonder and danger, where the Hero is to obtain some great boon or accomplish some great goal, which generally will be to the benefit of his fellow man.

Joseph’s early life is a perfect fit to this sort of beginning. Joseph Smith, the young farm hand whose strong body is hired out for his labor, but has very little room for upward mobility in his life. From all outlooks, his best hope is to become a farmer like his father, if he can escape the crushing dillemmas and ill twists of fate that kept his parents from escaping the constant threat of crushing poverty. Like Luke Skywalker in the beginning of Star Wars, King Arthur as a lanky squire, or an obscure carpenter’s son from Galilee, Joseph Smith at first glance would be an unlikely figure to make any sort of impact on the world around him.

Yet despite these unlikely beginnings Joseph Smith, like the most interesting of Heroes, has a complex and introspective inner world, and when we really launch into his narrative, we find him as a young 14 year old pondering the contradictions of the religious drama playing out around him. Church contending against Church, pastor against priest, all vying for the attention of parishioners, all claiming the truth to get more sheep in their fold. Who of all these Churches were right, asked the young Joseph.

Joseph finds guidance in the Bible’s book of James, which tells the young man to ask of God. In a grove of trees he prays, and is first attacked by an unseen, sinister force, but is delivered by a peaceful, light filled vision. The light is so bright that he thinks that the leaves are going to catch fire. In this light, he sees two figures, God the Father who then introduces Joseph to his Beloved Son, Jesus the Christ. And Joseph’s first call is delivered: he is to join none of the Churches. The call has not yet necessarily been defined in its particulars yet. There is yet no mention of the Book of Mormon, priesthoods, Joseph’s role as a prophet, or establishing Zion. Yet Joseph has been made separate, set apart from the world’s apostate religions, who draw near to him with their lips, but are very far from him in their hearts. He is to prepare himself for something else, a new journey.

REFUSAL OF THE CALL: In the Hero’s Journey, the hero initially shows some reluctance about his new role or mission. Like Muhammad questioning the validity of the angel coming to him, or Bilbo Baggins thinking a mission about thieving, gold, and dragons strays too far from his comfort zone of the Shire, the Hero shows some reticence to pry himself from the world he has known. Joseph Smith goes through a similar period after the First Vision, where he falls back into a circle of rough, boisterous friends, and is more concerned about the small doings of this laughing pack, than the more universal vision he has been given. Having been persecuted and separated from the religious herd, he is accepted by familiarity of undiscerning, non-judging friends, who may have been the force to lure him into treasure digging. Joseph is becoming aware of supernatural, prophetic gifts through the use of seer stones, which he uses in the search of treasure with his father and the local crowd. But this was not his mission, and in his heart Joseph knew it. A life of unsastisfied greed, alcohol, indolence, and irreverent laughter being his only relief from the otherwise strenuous day to day work he was engaged in, it was all a far cry from what he had been set apart for. He was straying, and if he lost sight of his quest, he may be swallowed up by this comfortable, unstrenuous, familiar world forever.

SUPERNATURAL AID: Once the hero finally commits to the quest, Campbell tells us that a magical or supernatural guide appears to assist them in their quest, often giving the Hero magical objects or talismans to assist them.

Again, this comes straight in line with Joseph Smith’s narrative. Joseph becoming painfully aware of his failings and sins in falling in with this wrong crowd and their less than pure treasure seeking. He prays and seeks a divine manifestation, as he had received before, to know of his standing before God. To his astonishment, the Angel Moroni appears in his bed room, giving him instructions to prepare him to receive and translate the Book of Mormon. Much like Merlin, Gandalf, or Obi Wan Kenobi, Moroni acts as Joseph’s guide and teacher, tutoring him and preparing him for the next several years before he receives the sacred talismans to add to his seer stones: the gold plates of the Book of Mormon, the Urrim and Thummim, Laban’s sword, etc. These are to be his Excalibur, the gifts bestowed by the elves upon the Fellowship of the Ring.Moroni would not be Joseph’s only supernatural aid to assist him in his quest. John the Baptist and then Peter, James and John the Beloved would arm him with powerful priesthoods. They are baptized and receive the Holy Ghost. Moses, Elijah, Elias, and Christ would give him the keys to usher in this new dispensation. Angels would continue to assist, even with difficult and trying principles, such as polygamy. Although God asks what may seem to be impossible tasks, yet he did not leave Joseph without aid.

Through these Supernatural Aids, Joseph’s mission also becomes more crystalized. His role as a prophet and a seer is defined, he is told about Zion and asked to try and establish it, he is instructed to carry out the Restored Gospel, and to baptize and confirm the Holy Ghost upon the nations. Through the priesthood, he is asked to begin the sealing of the human family, to begin the work that will eventually bind us all together. Joseph’s mission is a boon for all mankind, an eternal work with everlasting consequences.

THE CROSSING OF THE FIRST THRESHOLD: There is a point in a Hero’s Quest where they must move past all they have previously known and venture past the limits of their secure world into this larger, more dangerous world. Like Frodo and Sam moving past the limits of the Shire for the first time in their life, they finally let go of those last trappings of security and move into a wider world.

For Joseph Smith, this is when Joseph Smith and his followers are driven out of Palmyra and Colesville, New York, and move to Kirtland, Ohio. Here they start fully engaging in the quest they are asked to fulfill. They build a temple to God and bestow its initial ordinances, start gathering the Saints through missionary work, begin spreading the Book of Mormon and the Restored Gospel, and identify Zion in Missouri.

BELLY OF THE WHALE: Continuing on with Campbell’s monomyth, there is a point in our hero’s quest where he is completely enveloped by this strange, new world, often literally swallowed by it. In some stories like the Biblical Jonah, Pinnochio, or Finding Nemo, the protagonist is literally swallowed by a whale. In other cases, it is more figurative, as in Lord of the Rings when they travel through Mount Moria. This is a point of no return, and often is a dark point for the hero where they have to become introspective about what brought them to this point and how they are going to survive from here on out. In a sense, it is here that the hero figuratively or literally dies, only to re-born.

In Missouri we have find Joseph at such a point, where the Saints are driven from Jackson County, then end up in Far West are once again sieged upon. Many of the Saints are pillaged, raped, and murdered (Haun’s Mill being an extreme example of these persecutions). An extermination order is given against the Mormon religion by Governor Boggs and eventually Joseph Smith and some of his closest associates are arrested by the Missouri Militia in an act of betrayal by one of their own and duplicitous acts by their enemies. Joseph Smith and his associates are then carted off to the dank, cold, and cramped quarters of Liberty Jail.

Liberty Jail has become an iconic location for Mormons, acting as Joseph Smith’s closest proximity to Gethsemene. It is Joseph’s whale, a prison being an ironically fitting place for a hero to end up. Christ, Martin Luther King, Jr., Joan of Arc, Joseph of Egypt, among many other larger than life figures have a strikingly similar moment of unjust imprisonment by this threatening world, and it has a strikingly similar effect on all of them. A time of soul searching, introspection, hardship, revelation, and most importantly… transformation.

It is here that Joseph Smith receives the maginificent Doctrine and Covenants 121 through 123, and it is here that Joseph Smith makes a major shift in his life. Having survived a hellish ordeal where many expected him to be executed, he emerges more confident, less reliant on associates such as Oliver Cowdery or Sidney Rigdon who he has discovered, despite their gifts, were much less reliable than the inner vision which God placed within him. Less reliant on men, more reliant on God, Joseph Smith (much like Gandalf after Moria, or Jonah after the whale) was a new man.

THE ROAD OF TRIALS: Throughout many points of the Hero’s story, there will be trials which they have to overcome to achieve their goal or destination. A steadily increasing series of problems and adversaries crop up before any final confrontation or conclusion can be faced. In Joseph Smith’s life the examples are too numerous to list completely (the man knew something about opposition) but a short list of these trials include the attempts to steal the gold plates from Joseph; the loss of the 116 manuscript pages of the Book of Mormon; Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon being tarred, feathered and beaten (an indirect consequence which was the death of one of his adopted twin children); constant legal harassement and persecution; the Financial Crisis with the Kirtland Bank; the Kirtland Apostasies and their attempted coup of the Church; the falling away of the three witnesses; Zion’s Camp; the betrayals of Orson Hyde, Thomas Marsh, and W.W. Phelps; the expulsion of the Saints from Jackson County; the deaths of so many of his children and other family members, such as his brothers Alvin and Don Carlos, and his father; his family’s and his people’s often crushing poverty; the Fall of Far West; the widespread Malaria in Nauvoo’s beginnings; the Warsaw Signal; the storm surrounding polygamy, including William Law and the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor; the vacillating loyalty of Sidney Rigdon; and of course the long road leading to his martyrdom in the Carthage Jail.

Every step of the way, Joseph Smith was opposed, the hounds of hell pursuing him. Yet he braved onward despite great personal loss. When one chronicles the long list of suffering in his life in consequence of his commitment to his quest, one does not see the acts of a two faced charlatan, but rather the determination of the epic hero.

THE MEETING WITH THE GODDESS: In a great many stories, there is the goddess figure,whether a literal goddess (often a maternal or mother goddess) or a romantic other, that the hero receives a boon of love from, whether romantic, maternal, or otherwise. Lord of the Rings actually has both, with Frodo’s meeting with Galadriel fulfilling this requirement, while Aragorn’s nearly mystical relationship with and eventual marriage to Arwen also constitutes this aspect of the myth.

This aspect of the narrative has all sort of interesting corrolaries with Joseph Smith’s story. His wife Emma is an obvious example one can cite. Despite the strain that their relationship suffered due to the epic difficulties attached to the revelation on polygamy, Joseph and Emma shared an intense and legendary love. The Prophet and the Elect Lady’s relationship survived a host of strains that would have completely obliterated most human relationships. It is even more interesting when one reads some accounts where the claim is made that Moroni is reportedly to have been the one to lead Joseph Smith to Emma Smith, after his brother’s Alvin’s death required him to find a new helper with the Book of Mormon (if I remember correctly, my source for that tidbit was in D. Michael Quinn’s Joseph Smith and the Magic World View).

This concept is doubly re-enforced when one considers the Mormon doctrine of Eternal Marriage and Temple sealing and the repercussions that creates with this stage of the pattern. And if one is bold and comfortable with 19th century polygamy, one can even include Joseph Smith’s polygamous wives in this step. Joseph’s own mother Lucy Mack Smith could also easily fulfill the maternal aspect of this role, as she was always a supportive and prominent figure of love in Joseph’s life.

Yet the connection does not end there. Joseph Smith revitalized the concept of a Heavenly Mother, which was very foreign to Western, 19th century Christianity. A female wife or partner to the male Yahweh and/or Elohim has deep roots in Judeo-Christian thought, especially with the Hebrew goddess Ashera, consort of Yahweh. After King Josiah’s purge of the recognition of Ashera in Hebrew religion and the Jews’ ever increasing monotheism, recognition of a Heavenly Mother was all but obliterated in Judeo-Christian religion (for a really detailed hypothesis of this process, look up some of Margaret Barker’s amazing work on the Old Testament, including this essay. Barker’s not a Mormon, but she sure sounds like it sometimes). Joseph Smith, however, recognizes a Heavenly Mother as part of the oneness of God. This puts a very literal stamp on this phase of the Hero’s Journey, as Joseph Smith brings the male and female into greater unity in Mormon theology. In this way, Joseph Smith certainly experienced the love of his Heavenly Mother.

WOMAN AS TEMPTRESS: In the Hero’s Journey, there is a force or a figure that tries to lure away our hero from his goal with various temptations. This figure is often personified in a woman (Homer’s The Odyssey famously has the sirens and the nymph Calypso who fulfill this role), but does not necesarily have to take a female form. For example, the obvious source of malevolent temptation in the Lord of the Rings is the ring itself, in Star Wars Emperor Palpatine and the Dark Side of the Force fulfills this, and logically Satan plays this role when he tempts Christ.

If I weren’t a faithful Mormon (or at least had a more RLDS worldview), it would be easy to identify polygamy as Joseph Smith’s “Woman as Temptress,” but as I believe Joseph was not a fallen prophet in this (or any) instance, and that he was not misdirected with his and his contemporaries practice of polygamy during their commanded time, such a hypothesis doesn’t work for me. However, there are plenty of other occassions when Joseph Smith is tempted. Martin and Lucy Harris play this role with the lost 116 pages of the manuscript of the Book of Mormon , while the angel Moroni warned Joseph that he would tempted to use the gold plates as a means of getting rich (his early treasure seeking, and the Lord’s repudiation of it, could easily be applied here). Joseph Smith eventually overcame these tempatations, but they caused great havoc in his life and nearly jeopardized his quest. Fortunately, with the aid of Grace, he was able to fulfill his quest despite dark lures.

ATONEMENT WITH THE FATHER: Eventually our Hero in his Journey must confront a figure that holds great power over his life, and must either defeat it, be redeemed by it, or in some cases both. This is often a father figure, as we find in Darth Vader, but does not necessarily need to be. It could be a malevolent force, but more often it is a misunderstood positive force. Either way, our Hero must come to terms with it and emerge changed again because of facing it.

Again, as with Meeting with the Goddess, this has multiple levels of meaning in Joseph’s life. It can be taken literally with Joseph’s father Joseph, Sr., who Joseph in many ways redeems because of his revelatory solution to his father’s earlier religious difficulties of feeling desires to be connected to God, but having a natural dislike of and distance from organized religion. Joseph Sr. was also redeemed by his son, having his dignity was restored (after bouts with alcoholism, constant financial difficulty, and treasure seeking) by being baptized by his son and made the Church Patriarch (for a very interesting view on this process, see Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling).

But that is the son redeeming the father, like Christ and Adam, Joseph of Egypt and his family, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. In a Mormon worldview, it is much more important for the son to be redeemed so that he come into the presence of the Father. In fact, this is the prevailing goal of all Mormons, reflected nowhere better than the divine drama acted out in LDS temples. Mormons are prepared to meet with the Father because of of the redemptive power of the Atonement (there’s that word again) of Jesus the Christ, the Anointed One, the Savior. And its that chasm that Joseph was trying to breach when calling upon God in the Sacred Grove before the First Vision, as he was trying to find that redemption again when he called upon God in his bedroom before he received the visitation of the angel Moroni. He was striving for redemption, for re-connection to his Spiritual Father Christ, and his Heavenly Parents, Elohim.

So the building of the temple in Kirtland and then Nauvoo is Joseph’s most prominent example of his Atonement with the Father. In that holy building, the human drama is acted out, the hero’s journey is experienced by every Latter-day Saint, and it always ends with being ushered back into the presence of the Father. And in Joseph’s life, this was all his prophetic mission was pointing to, not only receiving his own redemption from sin, but helping carve a path out for others’ to receive of that same atoning blood which would bring them back to their Heavenly Parents.

APOTHEOSIS: This is the death of the hero, often a literal one, but because of that death a great change happens to them, and as they died in the flesh, they now live in the spirit. Through this death, the Hero finds bliss, enlightenment, and love. This is Christ’s death and resurrection, Hindu and Buddhist Nirvana, this is Frodo sailing off on a ship with elves to a land of peace.

In the case of Joseph Smith this of course happens with Joseph Smith’s martyrdom at Carthage Jail. Having tried to escape it at first, heading to build the Saints up in the Rocky Mountains, Joseph Smith then willingly chooses death as a way to save his people from the mobs that are brewing. “I am going as a lamb to the slaughter, but I am as calm as a summer’s morning,” Joseph said, having achieved that peace about all of our inevitable mortality… and then our subsequent immortality. When the angry and fearful mob shot him in Carthage Jail, and he fell from that second story window, his ascencion and transformation was imminent.

ULTIMATE BOON and THE CROSSING OF THE RETURN THRESHOLD: In the Hero’s Journey, there is an ultimate prize or accomplishment, the reason for the quest. Once that is achieved, the Hero has received what they came for.

From a Christian viewpoint, that boon is salvation in Christ. Although Mormons also adhere to that prize, because of Joseph Smith we bring it one step further. When Christ said, “Ye are gods,” in the Gospel of John 10:34, Joseph Smith took him at his word and in the King Follett Discourse he expounds and tells the world that God is not content with making us servants, but rather co-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17), as Paul tells us. And “when he shall appear, we shall be like him,” as John the Beloved said (1 John 3:2). So similarly Joseph Smith said at that funeral of King Follett:

The mind of man is as immortal as God himself. I know that my testimony is true; hence, when I talk to these mourners, what have they lost? Their friends and relatives are separated from their bodies for only a short season; their spirits existed coequal with God, and they now exist in a place where they converse together, the same as we do on the earth… I take my ring from my finger and liken it unto the mind of man, the immortal spirit, because it has no beginning. Suppose I cut it in two; as the Lord lives, because it has a beginning, it would have an end… if I am right, I might with boldness proclaim from the house tops that God never did have power to create the spirit of man at all. God himself could not create himself. Intelligence exists upon a self-existent principle; it is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it. Moreover, all the spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible to enlargement.

And so this boon of Joseph Smith’s is, after all, truly an “ultimate” boon. It is godhood. But unlike Lucifier, the Son of the Morning who sought to overthrow God and take his place, Joseph Smith was not commanded to take a high place and make everyone else subservient, but rather Joseph Smith was commanded to deliver this revelation of communal exaltation to all mankind. It is not a prideful, selfish upward conquering that Christ taught us here. It is Elohim, the Hebrew word used in Genesis for plural gods, or a council of Gods. It is the City of Gods, a Society of Gods, a Universe of Gods, the ultimate fulfillment of Zion. All who desire to partake and sacrifice for each other are truly equal, not equal in poverty, but equal in glory. And in true Hero’s Journey fashion, this is the message that Joseph Smith was meant to return from his journey and deliver the ultimate boon to all mankind, like Bilbo desiring to share the gold rather than hoarding it like the dwarves. God wasn’t small and selfish who hoarded his knowledge and ability like some medieval dictator, or like the dragon Smaug. Rather God has many mansions, an infinite number if needed, to fill up with his children and to share his glory.

There is more to the Hero’s Journey which I also believe applies to Joseph Smith (especially the steps “Master of Two Worlds” and “Freedom to Live”) but I’ll stop there and instead simply ask you to reflect upon this Universal Story. In the words of Joseph Smith, I say “this is good doctrine. It tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you.” There is a universal story echoing in all of us, a common unconsciousness, and if we hear it we become like the sheep who know their Savior’s voice.

I have been teaching about Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” in my high school creative writing class and so it has set me back on this track of thinking which has been boring its way into my everyday unconscious for a long time now. For those unaware of what exactly “The Hero’s Journey” is, it chiefly comes from a book Joseph Campbell wrote called The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Written in 1949, it was a very important book that set forth the idea that there are patterns and archetypes found in all sorts of disparate mythology, fairy tales, religious narratives, and folk lore. That all these stories from unconnected and far flung cultures follow one basic story. It is also a trend that can be found in epic literature and film, which is uncannily and unconsciously present in everything from Homer’s The Odyssey to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. And many writers now purposely craft their tales to follow this pattern, George Lucas’s Star Wars being one of the most famous examples.

BYU Experimental Theatre Company's production of _Prometheus Unbound_

I also purposely followed this pattern with my play Prometheus Unbound several years ago (and have addressed it less directly in other plays such as Swallow the Sun and my new work Manifest), much because the idea has fascinated me ever since I was taught it in my high school sophmore honors English class. Ms. Drummond mentioned Carl Jung’s revolutionary studies in the early and mid 20th century about archetypes (a simpler overview here) and the collective unconscious. In my terms, archetypes are repeating patterns that happen in mythology and other stories, in psychology, in dreams, and even (at least from what I’ve been able to observe) in many points in recorded, literal history (try applying this pattern to Joan of Arc, for example).

Carl Jung

If  Freud is the psychologist for the atheist, Carl Jung is the psychologist for the spiritual believer. Jung puts a lot of faith in religious or spiritual experiences, which rather than making one disturbed psychologically (as many psychologists would be apt to attribute), rather he believed that they made one more psychologically healthy. “Here we must ask,” Jung wrote in The Undiscovered Self, “Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God , and hence that will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving into the crowd?” To Jung, religious experiences, perhaps even “supernatural” experiences, fulfilled an innate need in the human subconscious and communicated something very important about the nature of man. Campbell draws a lot from these Jungian ideas of archetypes and universal consciousness in his concept of a “Hero’s Journey.” There is something in the human psyche (interesting that “psyche” translates to “soul”) that creates these spiritual patterns in our stories.

C.S. LEWIS AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUSNESS

I dealt with many of these concepts in the play I wrote about C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, Swallow the Sun. C.S. Lewis struggled with these re-occurring patterns he saw in his passionate reading of early world mythologies that he loved in his early life. Lewis loved Norse mythology, Greek mythology, the old stories which caused this difficult to define “joy” to spring up in him. However, this same pattern in the “dying god” myths who would have a kind of glorious resurrection (such as the Greek Prometheus, the Egyptian Osiris, or the Norse Baldr), he also saw in the story of Christ. This led him to believe that Christianity was no different than these other myths… Christianity may have had many things going for it, but originality was not one of them.

New Play Project's 2008 production of _Swallow the Sun_

This was a major stumbling block for Lewis and one of the causes of his fall from his childhood faith and his subsequent period as an atheist. It would be many years and many spiritual guides before his road led him back to a faith in some sort of deity, but eventually when he conceded to some sort of God, it wasn’t necessarily a Christian one at first. Again, there was that pesky pattern. Why was Christianity so similar to other myths? Was it simply spiritual plagiarism?

Fortunately for all we lovers of C.S. Lewis’s Christian fiction and apologetics, two important friends were attached to Lewis’s life. J.R.R. Tolkien (the yet to be author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) and Hugo Dyson (a University professor and an expert on Shakespeare). These two men were major causes of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity when the three friends and future Inklings took a long walk one night and discussed these major issues that were bothering Lewis. Tolkien and Dyson addressed this similarity between these narratives not by talking around them or ignoring them, but plainly accepting them as part of the religion. Christianity was the “true myth” they said. Christianity was the truth that all the other myths were pointing to.

I don’t know whether these three men were familiar with Carl Jung (although it’s not a shot in the dark that they may have, since their later commentary and work indicates that they were familiar with Jung’s associate Freud), but the line of reasoning they took at that point in C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity was very Jungian. Like Jung, their reasoning acknowledges that there is a kind of pre-existent memory, a “collected unconsciousness” that we all share in common. Whether it’s hard wired genetically, spiritually, or psychologically, the result is the same. Human beings inherently know the same story… when they create their stories, their myths, their movies, many of these components of that story tumble out unbidden, for it’s a natural impulse, it’s written on our bones, etched in our spirits, embedded in our psychology. And in this case, that story pointed to the reality of the Christ, the Savior Jesus. But it doesn’t stop there. It is also the story of Joseph Smith. And it doesn’t stop there either. It is the story of Buddha, and Jean d’Arc, and Abraham Lincoln. It is the story of so many people and so many places, so universal in its application that it can be called the Human Story.

In the next part of this essay, it is this story that I aim to tell. Or Re-Tell, for it’s been told many times in many places by many people, connected by nothing but a common humanity and a spiritual spark.

Photo by Vilo Elisabeth Westwood

Unlike many, I do not believe a text can truly be divorced from its author. Maybe it’s the historian in me, but the more I find out about an author, the more I am fascinated and enlightened by the text. So it’s difficult for me to address a work, when I have met the author, not to bring my experiences with, or knowledge of, the author to the text. So, first, I’ll talk about the author James Goldberg, as well as his relation to New Play Project. Then I’ll address his beautiful, award-winning play, “Prodigal Son.”

JAMES GOLDBERG AND THE COMMUNAL NARRATIVE

Now I wouldn’t call James Goldberg my best friend, although we are friends, and I certainly would love to be even friendlier. Yet there seems to have even been awkward tension during a few moments. We’ve seriously disagreed a couple of occasions. And I could tell that I annoyed him on at least a dozen occurrences..

However, I do think the world of him. And I think he is one of the best and unique writers Mormonism has. We should value him and the wealth of multiculturalism he brings to his Mormon faith and writing.  It’s interesting, the more and more I find truth in other religions, the more and more I believe in Mormonism. Comparing religions and cultures highlights the Gospel tinged truths whispered into the ears of every culture. And I get the sense from James that he believes the same thing.

James Goldberg comes from Jewish and Sikh heritages, while also happening to be a card carrying Mormon. When you talk to him, he isn’t shy about his diverse background and proudly celebrates his cultural past and freely intermingles it with his cultural present, not really distinguishing them. Because he shouldn’t distinguish them. Because Mormonism embraces all truth.  That is, if we should trust Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to be adequate spokesmen for Mormonism.

This idea of intermingling one’s diverse cultural and even religious identities is wonderfully evident in a good deal of Goldberg’s work, perhaps no where I have it seen so clearly so as in his fascinating and moving “Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenburgh.” In Mormon Artist’s first Contest Issue Goldberg mentions in an interview about the story , something that struck me:

Because the stories I was writing were so short, I didn’t have time to explain all the culture in them: the Jewish holidays that were thematically connected, the immigrant groups in each story. I figured in the age of Google, smart people could look up the stuff they didn’t get and discover the extra layers in the story, like mining for gems. Understandably, many of my class members didn’t take the time to look stuff up. What surprised me, though, was that the same people who hadn’t invested their time in the story were telling me to simplify it, to explain it more in terms they could understand. Some said they felt like I wasn’t including them because I wasn’t writing in their culture and explaining anything that came from anywhere else. And I thought, these stories wouldn’t be as beautiful if I explained them. And the best readers would get less out of them.

I also thought, I have unique stories to tell because of my own life heritage. Why should I only tell stories you can already fully understand? Isn’t one purpose of fiction to expand the reader? So I decided to write something next that did even more with mixing cultural traditions. I think when you get suggestions, you should try to respond to them, but responding doesn’t always mean doing what a suggestion says; sometimes you work against it instead, just to see if you can write that direction too.

Goldberg brought these ideas into his approach to New Play Project. From the get go, the writers’ roots in Mormonism was a vital part of NPP, and rather deflect that influence to write more secular work, NPP made their Mormon idiosyncrasies a central core to the organization. They wrote their Mormoness, not worrying whether that would stand in the way of the non-Mormons audiences that may not connect with cultural references or themes. In his preface to Out of the Mount Goldberg wrote:

So. Here we are… in a make shift theater in the Mormon community. Mormonism is technically a religion, but it’s also a tradition and a people–trust me, my last name is Goldberg, I understand how these things work. A religion can form a people. It’s been done before.

This people is a good people. We have a rich heritage that goes far beyond the founding of the Church in 1830. We’ve got unique institutions that have helped us keep a sense of community in an age when many communities are falling apart. And we have wisdom, a gift surprisingly rare in an age so saturated with information and opinion: we know something about how to treat each other, about our relationship to God, about the spiritual power that runs through this world. And along with that, we’ve got online sources with wisdom on food storage and stuff. Profound or practical, inherited wisdom is part of who we are.

This reminded me of a documentary I watched recently about the Old Testament. In it an archaeologist was theorizing, based on some ancient Jewish pottery they found which was astoundingly similar to the surrounding Canaanite pottery, that the Jews had not immigrated from Egypt at all, but rather had always been Canaanite. But that they had been the ostracized Canaanites, the poor, the destitute, the fringe. So they collected stories, created a text, which we now know as the Old Testament. Then they defined themselves by this text, created a whole new race and heritage of people.

Now I’m not sure I believe this (I’m not willing to throw away at least some sense of historicity of Genesis and the five books of Moses because of pottery shards). But I found the idea interesting and related it to what Goldberg is talking about. You can create a people, a culture and, perhaps in this supposed case about the Jews, a whole race by just declaring yourself so. In this case, it had nothing to do with genetic markers… it had everything to do with the creation of a narrative of a people, a story. As Mormons, we inherently understand that. The Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, the Doctrine and Covenants, the temple narrative, the stories of Joseph Smith and our early Church History, they all provide a powerful and potent rallying point.

We can be diverse as the creatures of the sea, of Middle Eastern, Indian, Asian, Polynesian, African, or European descent… and we can bring those heritages with us on our backs, like Goldberg has, and integrate them into a rich tapestry of universal (as far reaching as a world wide Zion), yet individual (as private as the soul), Mormonism. We can be a people (an inclusive people not determined by genetic markers!), not just a religion. We can be God’s people.

In my interactions with New Play Project, Goldberg’s vision-like goals always seemed to be at the center. I heard some members even jokingly call it the “James Play Project.” They were being sarcastic, of course, but there was some truth in it. Goldberg was one of the organizations founding members and seemed to be (at least from my perspective) the most persuasive and vigilant in giving the group a vision, a destination, instilling it with a passionate purpose. He’s a chief reason that the group has lasted this long. The money wasn’t there. The prestige wasn’t either. They were a small band of actors and writers, poor and distracted with the myriad of other concerns that plague college students. But when Goldberg would speak, he spoke as if they mattered, as if they could do something powerful. They spoke as if their common heritage in Mormonism and the theatrical arts could have a spiritual purpose beyond what any of them thought they were capable of.

And I consider it to be a prophecy fulfilled. Is it part of a new Mormon Renaissance? Doubtful. Possible, but doubtful. But by being brave enough to state it in those terms, by performing it as if it were true, by breathing in oracular fumes and letting prophetic uttering be written, they did something which I believe will have consequences which, even if they won’t be immediately obvious or traceable, will be deeply important to Mormon Arts, and perhaps even to Mormonism at large.

Am I waxing hyperbolic? No. No, I believe I am not. I am in complete earnest when I say that, whether New Play Project continues for many years to come (I hope they do) or not, that there was a resonating purpose to these seemingly insignificant students getting together to put on plays for the insular Utah County and BYU communities. And, whatever purpose that ends up being, Goldberg was at the forefront of that, in an unassuming button down short sleeve shirts and jeans, and a mad visionary’s wild growth of beard, sticking his staff in the water, believing to high heaven that the walls of water would rise.

FAITH LOST AND FAITH BORN IN “PRODIGAL SON”

When I read “Prodigal Son” this time, I had a much different experience with it than my previous encounters with the short play. When I had read or seen it performed before, I recognized it as one of the best plays New Play Project had yet produced, and a true triumph for James Goldberg. This time, however, it became much more personal and poignant to me, especially since I have recently seen a number of people I dearly love leave the LDS faith.

The play spins the classic Prodigal Son parable and switches the roles… the father is now the irreligious one, having abandoned his faith in Mormonism when he was younger, while the son disappoints his father by joining the LDS Church, even going so far to forestall his education to serve a mission. The Father’s monologue explaining his loss of faith is powerful and unnerving:

We’re far too casual, I think, in the way we talk about losing. “I’ve lost my keys,” for example, really means you’ve mislaid them….

I wish we wouldn’t dilute the best word we have for when things truly and permanently gone. “Lost cause” is a good phrase. It’s a cold, hard dose of reality. No one goes out to find a lost cause. It’s just lost. That phrase understands the power of the word’s finality….

So when I tell you that a long time ago I lost my faith, I don’t want you to imagine that I’ve misplaced it or that I could be capable of finding it again. Lost faith is like a lost limb… if it’s broken and bleeding, if you try to patch it up and it ends up inflamed and infected … at some point you have to cut it off. And after you’ve lost it the only thing left is the occasional  flash of phantom pain.

I lost my faith. Twenty years later I lost my wife. And now maybe I’m losing my son.

Don’t take away from me the only word I have to cope with all of that.

To those of us who still feel our testimonies vibrantly, this is a chilling moment in the play. It forces us to realize that those we love… who we cherish and have always taken for granted were going to stay in the Church… may not be coming to break the bread of faith with us any more. We still hold out hope that perhaps their paths may eventually lead them back to the beliefs they have now rejected… but what if they don’t? Not in this life. Perhaps not even in the next.

And if that connection to that common community is completely gone… what next? Is there a piece of that relationship that is now completely irretrievable? Is there a distance, a gulf that is now permanent? Or, if there is not hope in retrieving the common faith , does that mean that there aren’t equally valuable aspects of that relationship that can be salvaged, perhaps even strengthened? And what about the reversal that Goldberg explores here… when an atheistic father sees his son abandon what he considers to be rational truth, to stumble into what he considers to be an oppressive superstition, is that not equally traumatic to the man without faith?

I think of Lehi. When in his dream of the Tree of Life he sees in vision his sons turn away from the tree, the fruit, the family, the chance for redemption… and they’re gone, into the mists of darkness. He wakes up the next morning with no sense of hopeful resolution with these two beloved sons. There was no prodigal son returns moment in that dream. They’re just gone. “Lost” in the sense that the father’s faith in “Prodigal Son” is lost. The sense of desolation that would come upon me as a parent at that point would be nigh unbearable. In the Book of Mormon he still tries to encourage them, to save them, but you get the sense that much of the hope is gone. He senses it, realizes it. After grieving this loss, he strives to plant some sort of faith in the children of Laman and Lemuel, hoping that the priesthood blessings he gives them will eventually bless those who come after. But even with those blessings, Lehi seems to understand that this loss is going to have traumatic repercussions for his posterity.

I have thought a lot about my loved ones who left the faith for the past several months. I’ve prayed, pondered, and grieved over them. With some of them, I still hope for some kind of turn around. For some of them, I am starting to understand that they may be “lost” to the faith… forever. I’ve had to try and come with grips with that, try to understand how that should and shouldn’t change the dynamics of our relationship. My love for them is no less, my hopes for their success and happiness in this life no less fervent. If they can’t ever agree with me on this vital thing, then I certainly do not want to sacrifice the parts of our relationship that can still be salvaged. If you lose an arm, you don’t want to lose the leg as well. “Prodigal Son” brings up many of these sobering realities, all while still having an under-girding of spirituality and love.

The “wayward” son is, of course, the flip side to this  equation, being recently born into the faith. His conversion is real, never emotionally forced and never didactic. He’s a seasoned, likable character of faith and kindness, but capable of real grief due to this division from the father he has felt so close to in the past. Despite the havoc his conversion made in his life, however, the fire of his faith is undeniable and worth the pain. The son’s statements of spirituality are powerful:

I couldn’t tell it to him, then, but … all my life. I’d been waiting for something, you know? And I never knew what. But I’d have these feelings sometimes like when I went to my friend’s Bar Mitzvah, and it was like God was on a train but there weren’t any scheduled stops to pick me up. And maybe I could have run, maybe I could have jumped up there in front of everybody and said, “Hey, can it be my turn now? I know I’m not Jewish, but… Bar Mitzvah me, too!”

….I figured if God’s a train, and fate didn’t leave me any stops …maybe I’ve got to stand on the tracks. I can’t get on smoothly like everyone else, but if I take that step out onto those tracks then God’ll have to hit me. And I’ll know then whatever it is the prophets and saints used to know.

Goldberg, as much as anyone, instilled in New Play Project it’s ability to ask the hard questions, while never snapping the cord that tied them to the household of faith. In this information age of easy access and inquisitive fingers, gone are the days when a Latter-day Saint could simply put down the questions and expect that to satiate the inquisitor. You can’t hide documents, you can’t dodge inquiries. If we as a Church and as its members are not equipped to handle the tough issues, then a doubter can simply find all sorts of alternative attacks on the Church with a few quick key strokes.

Thus I believe it’s very important that, as Mormon writers, actors, artists, scholars, and thinkers, that we engage in the kind of work that is able to unflinchingly tackle the most disheartening and conflicted parts of our narratives. And I’m not necessarily calling for apologetics, although being a huge fan of C.S. Lewis, I warmly understand that they have their very necessary place as well. But writers like Goldberg are showing the complexity of the lives we live as Mormons. He is showing how, as Joseph Smith said, “in proving contraries, the truth is made manifest.”

James and I used to argue a little bit about show length. My shows tend to run long, while I would tease him that he had never written a full length play. Goldberg was a kind of champion for the usefulness and power of the short play. Although I still feel that our culture suffers from a post MTV/ Sesame Street short attention span, and I long for an audience who can sit through uncut Shakespeare and massive Eugene O’Neil playing times,  Goldberg certainly proved his point with “Prodigal Son” on how the short play can be a truly powerful form. I believe it may be the only short play to have won the Association for Mormon Letters’ Best Drama award and it was a very well deserved win.

But beyond form, its the soulful content of Goldberg’s work that digs deep into our hearts and bares the secrets we have kept there. Unearthed, we search through the record written thereon, and discover the Mormon in each of us, the Jew in each of us, the Hindu in each of us, the Christian in each of us. We realize that these stories we tell, whether you believe them literally or not, whether you have faith in them or not, the narrative has meaning, has significance… the narrative is true.

Impressed that the best place to start something is usually (though not always) the beginning, I linked to “Volume 01, Number 1, Spring 1966,” then to “Contents.” Having embraced Eugene and his piercing insights and rhetoric after finding “Mormon Literature: Progress and Prospects” on the Mormon Literature Database a few months earlier, I was especially drawn to his short essay, “The Possibility of Dialogue,” and to his poem, “The Firegiver.” Deciding it best to begin at the end this time, I’d linked to the poem, read it, and laughed, first off, at the interplay it illustrates between a curious and gifted child and the all-knowing, merciful, and just Parent, Muse, and Mentor he seeks to please; then at how perfectly his language captured (and still captures) the subtle tugs and pulls of my own nascent intellectual discipleship.

From line one in this psalm, Eugene leaves no doubt as to whom he’s speaking and why: “God,” he says, “forgive my pen its trespass, / And I forgive thee the sweet burning / That drives it on through thy dominion.” Approaching his Creator through this playfully candid revision of Christ’s statement that “if ye forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matt. 6:14), he highlights not just the often transgressive efforts we exert in our yearning for an eternal Parent’s approval, but the desire we all feel compelled towards at times to faithfully bargain with God while following the path of duty, talent, and love into the depths of consecration. Abraham exercised this entitlement when he negotiated with Jehovah for the sake of any saints left in Sodom, as did Jacob when he wrestled God’s messenger for a blessing and was afterwards renamed Israel because, in the messenger’s words, “as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed” (Gen. 32:28). Jacob’s strength and persistence thus became the ecclesiastical and political might of Israel, God’s covenant nation.

Likewise, when Mahonri Moriancumer approached God with the “sixteen small stones[,] […] white and clear” (Ether 3:1), that he’d crafted from a rock, he acknowledged at once his weakness and God’s power while very specifically and persuasively laying his case as to why these stones were needed for the Jaredites’ journey across the sea. Then there’s Joseph Smith who, after several dark months in Liberty Jail, recapitulated his desperate pleas for grace in a direct and influential prayer for God’s power to be extended in favor of his afflicted saints. And finally we have Christ, the Great Mediator who begged for the weight of our collective burdens to be lifted from his soul before ultimately submitting his will to the Father’s, earning himself the power and the right to save this round of Creation from the demands of justice. Only through his submission and his determined pleading in our behalf is it even possible for us to come to Elohim with our desires in hand.

Elsewhere Eugene borrows from this prophetic legacy when he relates how he, as the president of a sprawling branch of Saints, had laid his hands on his family’s unresponsive Chevrolet and, in his words, while “explaining to the Lord that I was about his work, that my branch needed me, and I needed some extraordinary help to get there,” blessed that it would perform so he could, too. Drawing from these experiences when he’d been able to petition God for help in the seemingly minute details of mortality (why should God, after all, really care about a dying Chevy?), he concludes that such opportunities—the times when our needs can only be met by a miracle—“come often, and the Lord’s response forms a bright thread in the texture of gospel living.” Eugene turns this thread through his poetry and prose as a subtle witness that God can be found in the details of a life and that, even without “fully understand[ing] why or how” God does what he does, as we “continue to ask” and then “acknowledge the Lord’s hand in all things,” he rewards our question with an increased measure of faith and a greater understanding of his infinite character and the intimate touch of his love.

He conceives this petitioner’s heritage further in “The Firegiver” with his obvious allusion to Prometheus, that crafty Greek titan who took fire from Zeus’ hollow reed to share with the mortals. Though he doomed himself to eternal punishment with this defiant act of compassion, his agency ultimately saved humankind from destruction at the gods’ hands, giving them, by Aeschylus’ account, a “measureless resource” of life and inspiration, the infinitely (re)generative muse “of all arts,” a mediatory presence through and with which they might discern and embrace the wonder of their created and creative universe and beyond.

Reading thus, I can’t help but connect Prometheus and his gift with the cherubim given a flaming sword and commissioned “to keep the way of the tree of life” (Gen. 3:24). Wielding an instrument representative of the purifying, illuminating, and separating power of God’s Word, these sentinels guard the tree against the filthiness of sin; they protect those who would approach the tree in ignorance or willful disregard of the rules governing such a celestial road lest these should partake of the fruit and stay forever cursed by sin; and they maintain the path for those ready with “the key words, the signs and tokens” (Journal of Discourses 2:31) required for admittance into the fullness of God’s glory, teaching and testing such individuals before allowing them to advance to the throne of Deity. However tenuous this association and however opposite its characters might seem—Prometheus challenged the gods by offering their power to humanity while the cherubim retain the tool and power given them by God as they act under His direction—each culturally distinct fire-bearer gives more than just heat and illumination to their patrons. They transmit, sustain, and protect the glory of the heavens in and through the living conduit of language, as typified by the pen, which, in this case, is not mightier than but analogous with the sword.

Such a correlation suggests that the guardians and conveyors of God’s holiness are not just the divinely-placed cherubs, but ultimately all those given charge over the word and the Word, either through the laying on of hands or through the incessant and undeniable call of vocation: the prophets and seers, priests and teachers, poets and critics, storytellers and storymakers, soothsayers and truthsayers of Zion. Affiliated thus with the Holy Order of God, either through an official setting apart or an act of self ordination, these wordsmiths essentially come to us “in a manner that thereby [we] […] might know in what manner to look […] to [the] […] Son for redemption” (Alma 13:2). In other words, their mediatory deeds function to one degree or another as types for the Atonement and presence of Christ, ultimately serving to draw people from the comfort of established ideas into new psychological, philosophical, and spiritual trajectories and marrying Self to Other (especially to God) through the mind- and soul-expanding acts of language.

Through his poetic entreaty and elsewhere in his writings on Mormon culture and theology, Eugene assumes this role of prophet and creator, mediator and seer, uniting elements from his literary and religious traditions in ways that illuminate the saving principles of a life lived “to serve […] [God] wittily, in the tangle” of one’s mind and that breathe life into the Mormon scholar’s struggle to engage the gospel with both heart and mind, to be faithful to both God and their intellectual facility. Eugene once described this intellectual gift as something that comes

from the Lord [and] that makes you delight in ideas, alive to the life that goes on in your mind as well as outside it, that makes you question set forms and conventional wisdom to see if they really are truth or only habit, whether they endure because right or merely because of fear or sloth; […] the gift […] that makes you curious about why as well as how, anxious to serve him by being creative as well as obedient.

In “The Firegiver” he acknowledges this divinely-ordained burden, recognizing that, as a self-ordained artist endowed with a keen intellect, an affinity for words, and an insatiable drive to explore and understand the range of God’s “dominion” in his personal quest for enduring knowledge, he has the obligation and the opportunity to develop and employ his talents in service to others and knows that God is bound, as an omniscient and eternally just Being and the ultimate Source of the artist’s passion, to hold him to as well as to help him carry that yoke. Firm in this awareness, he can confidently ask God to “Indulge the hand that reaches into flame,” exercising faith that the Creator will somehow gratify and make a place for the mind (of which the pen is merely an instrument of expression) that probes the creative yet potentially destructive “burning” of the soul even as it moves to synthesize “shapes of love, […] [God’s] face, or being / itself […] in its [avaricious] question.”

From what I’m able to know of Eugene through our limited textual interaction, I’m convinced he understood that such risk—both to reach and to ask—is necessary as the fully-engaged disciple seeks to explore and express the depths of their unique and independent selfhood and, in so doing, to commune with God, the Eternal Self whose agency propagates and grooms to potential other eternal selves. Through this risk, the artist and the man seems to have weighed and counterweighed the essential paradoxes of existence against his own being: of love—its sources, shapes, and possibilities; of life, as lived in a community and in the marrow of one’s soul; of the breadth and depth of God’s character and his relation to his universe, especially with us personally and as comes through his institutionalized Priesthood. Moving to prove these contraries in the deeply personal and at times mischievous dialogue that inhabits and informs his work (including “The Firegiver”) and the tragic depths of his (for us) too short venture through mortality, he prompts us to read God, his kingdom, and his saints through the lens of reasoned faith. He moves us to progress into that dialogue with our deepest selves and with God that will ultimately lead us through the principles and ordinances of his gospel into at-one-ment with him and into the fullness of our being as potential heirs to Eternal life, a dynamic condition, as Joseph Smith taught, that we “have got to learn […] the same as all Gods have done before [us] […], namely by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation.”

And so, compelled in part by a passion for language and some prodding from those who’ve come before me (like Eugene), I move from one small fire to another, hoping not to get burned. And if I do, hoping that God will “suffer my searching” because I’m doing it in my stumbling effort to become more like him. And what Parent can deny such adoration?

(This is an ever-so-slightly revised version of this.)

Unfortunately, they may be a tad dramatic for General Conference, at least in our current Mormon culture.

Still, it seems to me that we can do more with the scriptural metaphors at our disposal. In comparison to Martin Luther King, we don’t use enough metaphor in our discourses and speeches. This is especially sad because of the rich resources we have available — we have the Book of Mormon.

Let me give an example of what I mean: Samuel the Lamanite.

Samuel is, of course, an actual person, a prophet in the Book of Mormon. But he is also a character, a metaphor that can be used to describe a lot of our world today. Here’s a few thoughts on what Samuel the Metaphor might mean:

• Samuel represents overcoming tradition. Because he has become righteous out of a tradition that has been evil, Samuel is a metaphor for rising out of evil, for overcoming the influence of the culture that surrounds us from birth.
• Samuel represents ministry in the face of adversity. Our iconic image of Samuel is Arnold Frieberg’s painting of him standing on the walls of a Nephite city, preaching despite the arrows in flight headed towards him.
• Samuel represents overcoming racism. It occurs to me that the story of Samuel the Lamanite could be read as a racial story. The Lamanites had a different skin color, and lived apart from those of white skin color. It is possible that the historical record available to them led the Nephites to look down on the Lamanites as “evil.” When Samuel the Lamanite began to preach, the Nephites ignored him, and even the few righteous Nephites didn’t bother to include his writings among those of the prophets. It took Christ’s intervention to have his words included.

I’d love to hear what other concepts Samuel represents in your experience. Probably the strangest one for me came from a Spanish-speaking member I corresponded with who thought that Samuel the Lamanite was a “shameful and reproachful name like that of cursed and marked beings, especially among English-Speaking Mormonism.” (my rough translation from Spanish). I’ve since asked many other Spanish-speaking members and haven’t had that reaction from anyone. I’m having a hard time seeing this view as anything but a reaction to the “Lamanite” surname. Does anyone have an idea that might explain this?

Of course, there are other metaphors and symbols from the Book of Mormon that we do use. We use the Liahona, the Iron Rod, the Golden Plates, the Sword of Laban, the Great and Spacious Building, etc., etc. Book of Mormon stories are preached from the pulpit, and the metaphors there do have power. But I think Samuel is unusual.

As I’ve looked at Samuel the Lamanite, I see potential as a metaphor that seems very significant. I especially like the idea that he representgs overcoming racism. In a sense, Samuel the Lamanite is the Martin Luther King of the Book of Mormon — the figure that brings his people to cultural respect, who brings them into the promised land.

And for today, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, I think its a great metaphor to meditate on.

When a subject and object look at one another, there is no subject and no object, there’s only relation, the scope of which extends beyond either creature’s ability to fully grasp it.  You can’t grasp it, but you can step out to meet it.  If you do, prepare to catch on fire …

When I was in my early twenties, two events ignited my life.  The first involved a disagreement with a close friend whose feelings of friendship toward me had cooled.  I was changing, growing up a little, I guess.  I think my friend no longer felt needed, and feeling needed was important to her.  My feelings of deep friendship hadn’t changed, yet somehow that didn’t matter, not to her.  Why not? I wondered.  Why shouldn’t my feelings matter to her?

In a fit of confusion, I went a-walking.  I ended up in the playground of an elementary school where I straddled a seesaw.  There I sat, turning questions over and over.  It was an act of prayer, that deep mood of introspection.  Like Telemachus pinning Proteus to the strand, I watched a strange procession of ideas contort the face of the problem, each one trying to spook me into letting go.  I didn’t let go; finding out was too important.  Suddenly, the face quieted and the revelation came: Your love for others, a voice said, needn’t depend upon others’ feelings for you. 

It was a moment of liberation that illuminated the world.      

A voice of another kind touched off the second event.  I was sitting at a desk in an undergrad English class at BYU staring down at John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” where read I for the first time:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight
    Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
        Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
    Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine …

I didn’t care much for that “Veil’d Melancholy” bit, but the other image—that strenuous tongue bursting Joy’s grape against the palate—flashed in my mind like lightning striking summer grasses.  “I could do that,” I thought, as I squinted against the glare of Keats’s image.  “I want to do that.”  I meant, write like that.

Ten years of superheated life followed these moments, hyper-nomadic years during which I abandoned narrative constructs almost at the moment I finished assembling them.  At first, I felt afraid.  The world refused to hold still long enough for me to put down intellectual, emotional, or spiritual roots, though something about the movement itself felt natural and compelling, like the contractions I experienced later with childbirth. 

Fortunately, I had good mentors during this time, a lot of them, because that’s what it took.  Observing my growing love for life and humankind, Arthur King released me from dilemma when he said, “My dear, it’s all right to love, and to love deeply.”  Yes!  Leslie Norris: “You strike me as someone who wants to wander the face of the earth.”  That was pretty close, closer than I realized at the time, because I took him literally.  But he provided the metaphor for what I eventually understood my nature to have become.  I had learned to like living at the frontier of who I am, a frontier that, rather than shrinking as I crossed over into its gorgeous wilderness of the unknown, became all the more unbounded. 

At this point, my essay wants to fly off in several directions: to talk about love, the role it plays in writing, in a writer’s language, in the tendering of human agency; to talk about the priesthood as it shined through my interaction with those long-suffering mentors, all of whom were men; to talk about narrative constructs, houses for our beliefs where we attempt to settle but that suffer inevitable tensions of being built on sand or a floodplain; about my sense for how, in the spreading garden of the Creation, human beings shiver in the budtime of an indefinite spring; about the leading role language plays in the drama of the developing mind—indeed, in human progression overall.  But at the risk of reputation, I’ve decided to talk about one of the especially unsettling aspects of living at the frontier of who you are: those crazy voices. 

Reading her poetry at the Bluff Arts Festival, Lorraine Nakai, a Navajo poet and crop entomologist, remarked that new science suggests that schizophrenia is an artifact of the evolution of the human brain.  Now that this “the human brain is still evolving” idea has finally caught on, scientists, wrestling with the usual ironies of self-portraiture, are hurriedly applying, in broad strokes, yet another coat of paint to their never-finished (yet often exhibited) masterpiece of human nature. 

Because of my twenty-plus years’ experience with voices, dreams, and other cerebral pops, flashes, and fires over the personal pan-sized evolutionary course of my own brain, I had already wondered if schizophrenia was more than an unlucky misfiring of clay, a cracked pot.  My exploits in cognition suggested that not knowing what something is or not knowing what to do about it doesn’t mean it’s an impenetrable mystery or that nothing can be done.  In fact, in the case of the human encephalon, some mysteries are divine calls to action and epic adventure.

I began hearing voices at what is probably the usual threshold for it: mid-to-late teens.  The sound of someone calling my name often startled me awake, middle of the night.  The fact that the house was dark and quiet and that my sister, who shared the bedroom, was fast asleep, confounded my compelling urge to answer. Usually, I lay awake for a while wondering then fell back to sleep, sometimes to be awakened again later. 

Other than these middle-of-the-night wake-up calls, nothing happened until the two events mentioned above lit me up.  Then voices and other artifacts of heightened brain activity aroused and integrated themselves into my daily life, making in poetic/religious language statements about my prospects, summing up my condition, helping me find people, etc.  These in turn gave rise to more striking events.  Feelings of heightened clarity or transcendence accompanied most of these incidents.  Sometimes flashes of illumination occurred without a voice-over making a fortune-cookie-like remark: I simply saw through myself, clearly and hotly.  And the dreams … straight out of Joseph Campbell, redolent with archetype.

I spent a couple years worrying I might be going mad, because while LDS beliefs rightly herald the refining fires of salvation, accurate topo maps for said fiery terrains are rare to nonexistent.  The village spirit of the church displays itself in objectives and goals, the signposts of accomplishment. Indeed, objectives and goals do seem to be obvious destinations.  Problem was, I didn’t know where I was headed.  Every time I imagined I had arrived, the scene dissolved and another frontier opened.  But a few experiences (including a you-won’t-believe-this dream sequence culminating in a real-life encounter with Joseph Campbell) helped me understand that within a certain range of activity level in the brain, the voices and other artifacts not only were normal but also healthy, maybe even very healthy.  They are the brain’s strivings—at least, they’re my brain’s strivings—to integrate regions, update wiring, and get to the next level, or, as Joseph Campbell puts it, to answer the call. 

Accordingly, I made peace with my psychic fires.  Making peace with them didn’t exorcise them, nor have I outgrown them.  They’re not as concentrated as they were when I was in my 20s but they still come.  The voices accompany events I call “quickenings,” movements into new levels of awareness and social, artistic, and spiritual responsibility.  Other phenomena exert themselves more commonly than do the voices.  For instance, it was a brain flash, which feels like a charge of energy going off head to toe, that called my attention to the man I married.  I think because my mind is accustomed to these fireworks as a side effect of interaction with other humans, for which I have a great passion; the natural world, which folds me into its bosom; and God, who exudes irresistible mystery, these fires have jumped firebreaks into my middle years. 

Two elements proved essential for navigating by these fires: language and relation, which together form the double helix of human experience. I needed words of two kinds. First, words to work off of, forged in others’ fires, written or uttered expression from men and women who speak the language of transformation.  Second, I needed words to generate new prospects as my old take on life went up in flame, wrapped in the most recently woven shroud of broken-heartedness, bound up in shreds of contrite spirit.  But of course, I’m not the only one who needs to feel the fine touch of well-turned words; everybody needs good language, though it seems to me that many, despairing of finding the better part, settle for bad language and try hard to make something of it.

As for human relations, they formed—still do—my true north.  That might sound impossible and unwise, trust not in the arm of flesh, etc.  But I wasn’t trusting in the arm of flesh.  As I contended with the loss of bearings that often comes with traveling uncharted territory, over-the-pulpit sermons to “love thy neighbor” begged the question.  I finally developed a simple touchstone for testing the quality of a situation: If the new thought, event, question, association led me deeper into happy community with my fellow beings, then it was good—pursue it.  If the new circumstances led me away from people I loved or who loved me, or even from human society in general toward isolation or abandonment, then all engines reverse full.  So simple, a matter of learning to take responsibility for my actions, including my thinking, with is also action, and my language, which can be an especially long-lived form of action, as dynamic and effectual as physical exertion is thought to be.  Works for me.

A year and a half ago, I sat talking with my supervisor about a student I’d had in one of my classes and subsequently tutored.  This student posed challenges I’d never encountered.  As I wrestled with him and his needs, I found myself at the far reaches of my teaching experience.  My supervisor knew the student and understood the problems he posed.  He wasn’t the actual trouble, of course; the real bind was an intricately woven tapestry of human condition through which ran the frayed threads of our not knowing what to do.  All I understood was that in spite of the fact this young man challenged my skills and questioned my experience on many levels, pushing my patience to its furthermost borders, I had deep feelings for him and desired more than anything to find a way through. 

In the middle of a sentence I spoke to my supervisor describing my frustrations, the bookcase I sat facing, and indeed, the whole office winked out.  I found myself in a dark cave, or maybe an open but rocky area under ceiling of night.  Right of center stood a column of fire, slender and straight like an aspen tree, bright yellow flames wrapping tightly against its segmented core, driving upward in a spiral of combustion. The fire cast a glow that lit up a rock wall behind the column.   The dirt floor surrounding the pillar was vacant and smooth, except that slightly out from the pillar’s base something moved, some kind of backfire maybe, a small flame, so hot it burned clear, yet I could detect it.  Animated with intention, it circled the pillar, forward and backward, encouraging the fire to burn more intensely while at the same time guiding its energy upward.

If I were William Blake, I could make a painting of the thing, or if I knew Blake and described it to him he’d draw it exactly right.  I don’t know how long I sat gazing at the column, but when I came out of that cave and the bookcase rematerialized, I turned to find my supervisor throwing me a sharp look of concern.  I think I might have smiled; how could I not have.  As far as I know, I picked up the conversation where I left off and we continued exploring prospects for the young man in question.  She said, “We’re talking about love here.”  “Yes,” I said.  “I know.”  The burning pillar had rendered that much clear.

Out there at the edges of my known territory, that pillar of fire, my most extravagant brain-flash ever, oriented me to the work at hand—entering the wilds of my unknowingness to find the better place.  It provided light and, just as important, warmth to go by.  

Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as infinite.”  Thinking about the Exodus and those two, stiff-backed, preternatural ushers, the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud, I wonder now if they were manifestations of God’s standing with his people, creation’s support poles running between the apparent fixed position and the movable and growing mystery. But also, I wonder if those columns reflected the backbone of the Israelites’ burning desire to cross the frontiers of what they had become in captivity and get to Promised Land, that better place.  I wonder because that’s what my flaming pillar looked like—a backbone of fire.

BYU Experimental Theatre Club to premiere “Prometheus Unbound” July 31-Aug. 9

Written by award-winning playwright Mahonri Stewart

The Brigham Young University Experimental Theatre Club’s world premiere of “Prometheus Unbound” will begin Thursday, July 31, and run Friday and Saturday, Aug. 1-2, and Thursday through Saturday, Aug. 7-9, at 7:30 p.m. in the Nelke Theater of the Harris Fine Arts Center.

Seating will begin at 7 p.m. Tickets are $8 for presale through the BYU Fine Arts Ticket Office at (801) 422-4322 and www.byuarts.com. Tickets may also be purchased the night of the performance for $10 at the door. There will be no performances Sunday through Wednesday.

The show is directed by Penny Pendleton and is sponsored by the BYU Theatre and Media Arts Department.

Derived from a long tradition of plays about the Greek titan Prometheus, the play by national award-winning playwright Mahonri Stewart taps into the traditions of Aeschylus and Percy Shelley. Stewart’s unique take on the story follows a group of heroes recruited by a temple aide claiming to have received a vision that will guide them in their quest to free the titan.

“I consider it a kind of spiritual allegory or mythological morality tale,” Stewart said. “This ancient story has a modern context.”

This marks the first major collaboration between the BYU ETC and students from neighboring Utah Valley University. Students from both universities are involved with all levels of the production: directing, stage managing, costumes, lights, acting and producing.

“This has been a great opportunity to acknowledge the work that each university is doing to create professionals in the arts,” said ETC board member Dave Mortensen.

For more information, visit byu-etc.com

It’s because I took seriously his lesson to keep a writing journal at hand and write down what I think when I think it that I was reminded of a conversation that took place at the workshop.  My journal recalls that Craig asserted as if it was a given that writing is by nature narcissistic.  Everybody nodded in silent agreement, except for me.

Like many archetypal stories, the tale of Narcissus lingers in wisps and puffs in various contemporary contexts.  To fill in the spaces: According to the Roman poet Ovid, Cephisus, some kind of liquid deity, traps the river nymph Liriope in his current and has his way with her.  As a result she gives birth to a baby “with whom one could have fallen in love even in his cradle,” the fatefully gorgeous Narcissus.  Knowing firsthand the harm to which beauty may come, Liriope consults the blind judge, Tiresias, about Narcissus’s prospects.  Tiresias predicts that Narcissus will live to old age “if he does not come to know himself.”

Heretofore Tiresias’s prophecies had all come true, but this one baffles everyone hearing it.  What can it mean that Narcissus will do all right “if he does not come to know himself”? Such nonsense causes the blind prophet’s reputation to slip.

Even without knowing himself, by sixteen Narcissus develops unassailable pride.  Both girls and boys fall in love with him but his blasts of icy aloofness inflict upon all admirers severe emotional frostbite.  The haughty lad remains in all ways unapproachable.  Intimacy in any form becomes for this beautiful boy a social impossibility.

Enter Echo, another dysfunctional child.  Echo had once detained Juno with mindless chatter when the supreme goddess had been in a hurry to catch hubby Jupiter dallying with nymphs.  Thanks to Echo’s intervention, Jupiter escaped detection.  Juno punished Echo for her interference by stripping her of full powers of speech so that she could only repeat the last few words others said in her presence.  Poor Echo!  She had been rendered incapable of initiating conversation.  Even when someone did say something in proximity to her she could exert no control over the direction any conversation might take.

Seeing Narcissus one day Echo falls insanely in love.  She shadows him secretly, hoping he will speak, for then she can engage him in love banter.  One day as Echo follows Narcissus he becomes separated from his companions.  Trying to locate them he shouts, “Is anybody here?” Finally, the moment Echo hoped for has arrived.  “Here!” she answers.  “Come!” baffled Narcissus calls.  “Come!” Echo echoes.  “Come here and let us meet,” Narcissus calls.  “Let us meet,” Echo agrees.  She emerges from hiding and runs to embrace Narcissus, but he rejects her as severely as he rejected all lovers before her.

One of those previously spurned suitors had prayed that Narcissus would himself fall in a tormenting pit of unrequited love.  Nemesis heard the prayer and, given Narcissus’s track record, decides to grant it.  So it happens that on a warm day Narcissus stops to rest on the banks of a still pool.  As the boy leans down to quench his thirst Nemesis afflicts him with another thirst, a profound madness.  Or perhaps this thirst comes upon him as the natural next step in his escalating hubris.  Either way, as Ovid tells the story, Narcissus, seeing his reflection in the pool’s surface, falls “in love with an insubstantial hope, mistaking a mere shadow for a real body.”  His own cold beauty transfixes him, his hard heart cracks, and “[u]nwittingly, he desire[s] himself.”

“By his own eyes he was undone,” reports Ovid.  Yet the story is too delicious, too clever for Ovid to let it go here.  He pursues it further, reporting at length Narcissus’s pleas to the reflection to come out to him, obviously enjoying the ironies that arise when one witnesses a creature trying to get at another that is only itself reflected from a shiny surface.  Narcissus spends himself in impossible desire and his youthful bloom withers.

Echo witnesses Narcissus wasting away and laments it in spite of his treating her so badly.  As Narcissus dies on the pond’s bank, she hears him say, “Woe is me for the boy I loved in vain!” which is a double entrendre if ever there was one.  Echo repeats his words, which, although they are the same words, have a different meaning for her, and yet … it’s the same.  The ironic echoes differ but both Narcissus and Echo share between them the effects that problems Echo’s speech impediment and Narcissus’s vanity have caused.  But the ironies don’t stop with Narcissus’s death.  Even as Narcissus enters the underworld he continues to gaze longingly at his reflection in the river Styx.

Above ground, Narcissus’s friends and family prepare his funeral pyre, but when they arrive at the pond to retrieve his body they find only “a flower with a circle of white petals around a yellow center.”

Meanwhile, back at the writers’ workshop, I protested. “Everyone  seems to accept that all writing is by definition an exercise in narcissism.  I don’t see evidence bearing that out.”  After all, I pointed out, in the Narcissus myth that boy became frozen in place, fixed by his reflection.  “He became stuck in his own story,” a classmate, Heidi Hart, said.

That was it: enchanted with his beauty as reflected back to him Narcissus became stuck in his own story.  But even before he rooted to the spot fixated on his shadow self, Narcissus’s pride had brought him to the banks of social stagnation.  His existence came to nothing except to serve through the ages as a metaphor for drop-dead, self-obsessed, cruel beauty that does no better than provide a fascinating mask for unconscious psychological defects, including antisocial behaviors or physical fixations and impotence. 

Why would any writer want to claim as patron saint of her/his craft a mythological figure dragging such unattractive baggage?

Well, there are many reasons.  I believe a majority of writers simply don’t know the Narcissus myth so they don’t realize what horror they’re invoking when they reference it.  Or perhaps some writers suffer confusion over the nature of their craft and may leap to hasty generalizations about what that confusion means. 

For other writers, the Narcissus myth is dead on.  Writers suffering from narcissism deflect creative energy into constructing mirrors made of shiny language.  Such language eventually loses its cutting edge (if it ever manages to hone one) and the unfortunate writers become stuck in their stories for all the same reasons Narcissus became stuck in his.

One might think that LDS writers would not aspire to act the part of Echo rushing to embrace self-absorbed Narcissus.  In fact, I’ve heard LDS writers refer offhandedly to the narcissistic nature of their craft about as often as I’ve heard non-LDS writers resort to it.  The narcissism trinket that writers flash almost as a reflex is worth about as much as any other glittering generality.  Which is to say, it’s worth nothing at all.  Let’s get rid of it.  Even a metaphor for writing that involves cracking open one’s ribcage is better.  But please, let’s not linger over that one too long, either.