Stephen Carter’s 2010 essay collection, as you might expect, provides plenty stellar examples of the form, what with the personal essay being The Great Mormon Form (or so I hear) and Stephen Carter being Stephen @#(*&$^ Carter.

Before taking the helm at Sunstone, Carter racked up a few Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Competition notations, had been cited in Best American Spiritual Writing, and scattered his work through the major Mormon literary rags. He’s Stephen Carter, folks!

(Obligatory note: Although I paid for my copy, I still may be biased as Stephen is a friend of mine. Who knows.) (In similar news, see Wm’s earlier review.)

First, as an object (this is not relevant if you’re planning on saving money and buying the ebook). The cover has really grown on me since the book was first released. The type is huge making this 168-page book an even quicker read.

But the words, the words. What about the actual words?

I’m going to begin by focusing on the final essay (which I do not feel badly about as it’s available online) which provides a useful metaphor for the entire book. Frankly, I rather wish it had been first as it provides an intellectual framework—something of a shortcut to understanding the book as a whole. (Then again, perhaps that’s a good enough reason to make it last.)

In essence, as with his aunt May Swenson in the essay”Winter Light” (which, yes, I just spoke of yesterday), Stephen feels pulled in two directions. To quote him quoting Terry Pratchett in another of the book’s essays, stories etch grooves “deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a moutainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper” (118).

The final essay, “Writing as Repentance,” provides a different metaphor for understanding this idea. Rather than an ever-deepening groove, stories are mountains whose massive presence and gravity drag us towards and up. In Stephen’s case, he has two stories threatening to crush him, that of the Correlated Mormon and that of the Virulent antiMormon. Not that Stephen is anxious to join the latter camp or hateful toward the former, but both of those are stories and nothing more. To go back to Pratchett, “stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.” And if we are to work out our own salvations with fear and trembling, we can’t rely on the simplicity of one story or the other—we must write our own stories.

As Stephen writes in “Writing as Repentance,” “In order to really finish any of my essays, I had to forgo the satisfaction of an answer, promised at the top of either mountain. Instead, I had to forge into the canyon, filled though it was with mist and darkness. Because that was the only place not already built. It was the only place I could create myself without the dominance of one mountain or the other” (166-7).

This is a good time to quote Joseph Smith: ”By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.”

Often we would rather be safe, repeating rote stories rather than making Truth manifest. Stephen instead is plumbing the shadowy depths of the canyon between stories, and I wish him godspeed, with a note of thanks for sending us these postcards from his travels.

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A few notes for the curious:

• Not all the essays are such heady stuff (though, to a diligent reader, even the hilarious story of the cocky missionary who swallows a habanero will deal in contraries), nor do they all stay firmly entrenched in ambiguity. For instance, the penultimate story, “The Calling” (my favorite?), is about the lurking sense of failure that is an inherent part of being a missionary while, at the same time, ending with something that tastes a great deal like a miracle and teaches a lesson many of us would do well to incorporate into our home and visiting teaching.

• Much is written about family here, from the strayed brother to the beloved grandmother.

• Thanks to one essay, Eugene England will now be on my list when people ask which three people, past or present, would I invite to dinner.

• “There is only one way of knowing an essay is finished, and that is when I have wrought something new from the contradictions of my life” (167).

While WIZ loves poetry and heartily encourages poets to continue sending their nature-romancing verse, it’s perhaps time to follow nature’s own example of protean morphologies and bring more rhetorical diversity to WIZ’s environs.  WIZ is issuing a call for short, creative non-fiction and fiction pieces for publication on its site.   If you have a nature-oriented essay or field notes that run between 500 and 1300 words, please consider sending them to WIZ.  Longer essays will be considered if they can be divided into parts.

Nature-based flash fiction or short stories running between 100 and 1300 words are also welcome; longer pieces that can be serialized up to four or five parts will be considered also.  Excerpts from longer stories or novels up to 1300 words are encouraged–though pieces may run longer if they can be broken into multiple parts.

If you have written up adventures in the garden or the wilds or have a story that features a scary white whale or incorrigible pocket gopher, or even bees sleeping on flowers in a garden, please consider sending it. Fiction not directly about nature but whose drama unfolds against nature’s backdrop are encouraged.  Please read WIZ’s submissions guide before sending your work.  Then electronically submit your work either to wilderness@motleyvision.org or to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.  International submissions and submissions from nature writers who are not Mormon but are comfortable interfacing with Mormons are welcome.

This poll is completely non-scientific, and I’m quite sure that most of those who enter don’t read AMV, but for those that do, please take a moment and fill out the following. Also: this poll (or rather series of polls) is more oriented towards fiction writers (who may also be poets and essayists). If there is interest in polls that come from the point of view of poets or essayists, let me know, and I’ll set something up.

So here’s what I’d like to know:

1. What of the Night? is like a really good album. It’s of one piece but with variation. Themes repeat, tone modulates but doesn’t swing to extremes, length varies but within a range. These essays go together. There’s a rhythm to the collection and the reader (or at least this reader) feels that they were all written within the same energy.

2. There is humor. There is earthiness. There is doubt. But on the whole I like that the Church’s pull on Stephen is generally a good thing. Sometimes a perplexing thing, but a good thing. And that the essays are more about Stephen figuring out where he is located in relationship to the LDS Church, to Mormon culture, to the gospel, to his family than trying to make grand, global pronouncements about how the reader should feel about such things. He’s a dude trying to figure things out. I can relate, even if my particulars are very different because I never quite felt the pressures of Utah culture that he did growing up.

3. I like the cover.

4. There are a few sections where the writing seems too honed and needs to loosen up and breathe a bit. Endings end too early sometimes. Stephen seems at times too allergic to sermonizing or drawing larger conclusions. But really, that’s okay — he needed to err on that side of things as he learned his craft, and so does Mormon letters in general, I think. Right now honed and more personal, less socio-cultural is good.

Note: this review is based on a free PDF of the book provided to me by the publisher

Reviewed by Jonathan Langford.

Note: I received a free review copy of this book from the editor.

A good personal essay is like an evening spent in front of a fireplace with a longtime friend. It’s not about drama and high emotion. Nor is it about polished literary style — though there is a style and a demanding literary craft to writing such essays well. The essence of that craft lies in the achievement of a clear, intimate, authentic voice, as if the author were indeed a close and trusted friend. The satisfaction we as readers take from the experience springs in large measure from that sense of connection.

The other key to a good personal essay is the quiet insights it provides into ordinary life. Personal essays are the genre of the quotidian, focused into insight and clarity (there’s that word again) through the lens of an author’s mental reflection and then offered up for the reader’s recognition and acknowledgment. The underlying ethos of every personal essay is our essential similarity as human beings. As Jane D. Brady (author of one of the essays published in this collection) puts it: “There’s not a chasm between normal, functioning human beings and the bums on the street with no job and no life. There’s one hair’s breadth. Disaster is one step off the sidewalk. It is one migraine away” (p. 198). Personal essays persuade us of this truth (just as applicable to miracles as disasters) through a combination of narrated occurrence and quiet observation. We ponder the writer’s insights, resonate with the writer’s experiences, and feel that we know ourselves better as a result.

Adventures of the Soul: The Best Creative Nonfiction from BYU Studies makes accessible 25 high-quality contributions to this genre, well suited to the tastes of orthodox Mormons who enjoy thoughtful reflection on what it means to be Mormon and what it means to be human. The essays — ranging from memories of World War II among the Latter-day Saints in an Australian branch to insights interwoven with recuperation from back surgery — are organized into the 4 categories of International Vistas, Family Views, Gospel Reflections, and Introspection. Truthfully, though, all of the essays strike me as being in some sense about family, self, and gospel, each set in its own specific geographical, cultural, and temporal frame.

Personal essays in venues such as Dialogue and Sunstone often explore what it’s like to be in the boundary areas of Mormon experience. The essays in Adventures of the Soul, in contrast, stay away from the edges but drill down deep into what it means to be a thoughtful mainstream Mormon in a range of life circumstances. There’s no controversy, but plenty of fodder for reflection and sharing.

The presentation of these essays matches the quality of their content. The book is beautifully composed and typeset, featuring grayscale photographs of waterfalls that harmonize with the thoughtful and reflective tone of the content. Overall, it’s an ideal gift for the thoughtful, believing Mormon on your Christmas, birthday, or Mother’s/Father’s Day list who may not care for fiction but who likes to read and think about human experience.

I do have a few minor quibbles. The Introduction (by editor Doris Dant) provides thoughtful teasers about the specific essays included in the volume and how they fit within the myriad potentialities of the personal essay form. However, it doesn’t supply any information about how essays for this particular “best of” anthology were selected — and from how large a pool. I couldn’t help but notice that only two of the personal essays dated from prior to Volume 35 (published in 1995-96). Does this reflect a change in frequency of publication of personal essays in BYU Studies starting about 15 years ago, or an editorial process that found more recent essays to be of higher quality?

It would also be interesting to know how many personal essays BYU Studies publishes in a typical year, and who is eligible to submit them. Members of the BYU community only? Alumni? Anyone? What types of essays are they looking for? This kind of information is likely to be of interest to many of those who might read the anthology.

An editorial point that annoyed me in reading the essays was the lack of any headnote or footnote giving the date of original publication: information that would have help create a proper mental context for my reading. Irritatingly, the About the Authors entries at the end of the book included volume and issue number for the original publication, but not dates.

These complaints, however, are minor compared to the many strengths and pleasures offered by this volume. My only real regret is that due to the fragmented nature of the Mormon market, it’s likely that many people who would enjoy this book will never have the opportunity to read it.

Kathryn Little and Amos Omer in New Play Project's Production of _The Fading Flower_. Photo by Naoma Wilkinson.

I have written two LDS History plays, one called Friends of God (about the events leading up to Joseph Smith’s martyrdom) the other called The Fading Flower (about the conflict surrounding the LDS/ RLDS schism about polygamy, especially as it related to Joseph and Emma Smith’s family). I was criticized by some people for writing the plays (one family member even told me after seeing the play, that he thought I was going to go apostate). Some people thought that the plays brought up too many uncomfortable facts in Church history. They thought that presenting a less than ideal image of Church figures would be damaging to people’s faith. And, truth told, there are some people I know who struggled with both plays.
The irony, of course, is that I wrote the plays to build up faith rather than tear it down… I consider the plays to tell the faith of people who struggled, but were ultimately redeemed by those struggles, either in this life or the next. The plays clearly state God’s reality and love and show the Church’s leaders as inspired, although not perfect. I addressed hard questions, but I also believe I presented answers to those questions, if people were willing to put aside their prejudices and preconceptions. And that, more often than not, proved to be the case.

I had one actor who had gone inactive until he was in Friends of God and then decided to go on a full time mission as a result of being in the play and the Spirit he felt in being part of it. The plays opened up conversations with less active, former member, and non-member friends. I had numerous people come up to me (sometimes in tears) telling me how the play addressed issues they had been struggling with for a long time and that it had answered their prayers. I had people who came with thoughtful, faithful, spiritual experiences and we rejoiced together and were edified together. Both sets of casts, especially, felt spiritual uplift and a sense of mission with each play, even to the point where we had spiritual experiences in feeling presences and angels assisting and participating with us in our work. I won’t go into too much detail there, for its sacred ground for me, but I felt spiritual assistance in bringing those plays to their fulfillment. Again and again, I felt why the Lord had spurred me on in these projects.

However, there was one instance where I doubted myself on this front. The Fading Flower was accepted as part of BYU’s “Writers/Dramatugs/Actors Workshop,” which workshops new plays before producing a staged reading of the piece (I was excited about this since I wasn’t even a BYU student). The play, which deals with some pretty heavy historical realities, especially regarding the practice of polygamy in the 19th century by the LDS Church, hit a couple of the students pretty hard.

One of the students was a wonderful, intelligent, young woman and a feminist who strongly disliked my portrayal of Emma which, fortunately, we fixed to her satisfaction, for I have always been a strong proponent of Emma (I consider myself a kind of feminist myself, by the way). The practice of polygamy in any fashion was something that worked against this young woman’s feminist tendencies, so it was bound to be an uncomfortable topic for her, but she was smart, knowledgeable, and I wasn’t afraid that anything presented was going to take her out for good.

The experience of the other young woman was much harder for me to bear, though. She was a recent Hispanic convert of a couple of years, and had been taught a pretty simplistic version of the Gospel. She had sacrificed a lot, going against her family’s Catholic traditions and moving from Texas to go to BYU and be close to the Church. Her experiences at BYU ruffled her, as she confronted (at least from her perspective) intolerance, judgmentalism, and even some thinly veiled racism. Then there came this play of mine, presenting Joseph Smith as a polygamist (plus other hard facts), all information that she had never encountered before.

Her and I exchanged some long e-mails about the subject, and I did my best to give the context of the issues involved. A good friendship came out of it. However, some time later she later informed me that she had left the Church. She made it sound that it was due to a lot of the other issues she was specifically encountering in the weird culture that is BYU, but I had the feeling that my play certainly hadn’t helped.

I had written the play because of a vivid and prophetic dream I had that spurred me. I felt good throughout the process of writing it and when it was actually performed I, the cast, and many audience members told me the spiritual experiences they had surrounding it. But why then should I even write a play that could inadvertently damage some one’s fledgling faith?

I struggled with that question, but the more I thought and prayed about it, the more convinced I was performing the work the Lord had guided me in. There was a deeper problem at work here… we do not prepare the Saints for the information that is bound to fall in their laps.

It is not my fault that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. I did not create that fact. If you believe him, not even Joseph Smith is at fault for that fact. He was doing as the Lord directed. Yet in the Church we often build up this veil of secrecy, of enforced ignorance. Many of us frown on those who would discuss the less than savory elements of the Gospel and its history.

And it doesn’t only extend to Church History. The Book of Mormon, the Old and New Testaments have own fair share of faith challenging stories. I read a talk once where Elder Jeffrey R. Holland commented on how it said something about the Lord that he put Laban’s death by the hand Nephi within the first eight pages of the Book of Mormon. God wasn’t going to coddle us, he wanted us to face the facts and realize that discipleship in His Kingdom had a price. I look at the graphic and often disturbing stories in the Standard Works and realize that religion– real religion that hasn’t been watered down– is often a hard lesson in the rough nature of truth.

My play The Fading Flower is based on my research about the family of Joseph Smith, years after his martyrdom, especially centering on Emma Smith and her youngest son David Hyrum Smith. Joseph’s widow Emma strived to protect her sons and daughter from the principles which had caused her so much pain in her personal life with Joseph… the principle of polygamy and the “Brighamites” who practiced it. I made a lot of this issue of Emma’s protectiveness. Emma did not want to expose her children to the things and people that had caused her so much struggle. Essentially she wanted to protect them from the truth.

This, in the end, is the cause for the grief and downfall of Emma’s family. It’s Emma’s tragic flaw, this unwillingness to confront the full truth. It’s particularly catastrophic to her youngest son David Hyrum Smith, who not only loses his faith when he confronts the truth about his father’s polygamy, but also loses his sanity and spends the rest of his days in an insane asylum. Near the end of the play, I have David’s adopted sister Julia say, “David did not lose his sanity because he was told the truth in the end. David lost his sanity because he was not told the truth from the beginning. If he hadn’t a false world constructed around him, he would have been able to endure the real one.”

I certainly believe that people still need to learn “line upon line, precept upon precept,” and that we should get “milk before meat.” But I’m saying it now, as I’ve said it before, our enemies are not going to be kind to us in this regard. In this age of easy information, they’re going to shove that meat down our throats and hope that we choke on it. And I have seen just that, time and time again. We’re still feeding the full fledged adults milk, and I’m nervous about the day when they meet some one who has information to give them (without the context) and that our friends and neighbors, and sibling and children, our spouses and parents, they’re going to choke and their faith is going to die.

We often really don’t trust the Lord when He said, “The Truth will make you free.” We take that as some kind of statement about general, esoteric truth, not really applying to the nitty gritty of history and theology and science and anthropology. Yet the Lord makes it painfully clear that if we take that evasive, luke warm track, we are deluding ourselves:

I give you these sayings that you may understand and know how to worship, and know what you worship, that you may come unto the Father in my name, and in due time receive of his fulness….And, verily I say unto you, that it is my will that you should hasten to translate my scriptures, and to obtain a knowledge of history, and of countries, and of kingdoms, of laws of God and man, and all this for the salvation of Zion. Amen (Doctrine and Covenants 93: 19, 53).

To know “what you worship”… that’s a pretty big deal. “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Yet these are not what many people of faith are being led to. They are told to cover up, not to seek too deep into the mysteries… yet Joseph Smith responds to this kind of reasoning with some unequivocal sayings:

The things of God are of deep import; and time, and experience, and careful and ponderous and solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity—thou must commune with God (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 137).

That communion with God doesn’t come cheap, and it doesn’t come without some struggle. All the experience I have to base this on are my own, but I know that every experience with the Divine I have had has come like Jacob wrestling with the angel… the Lord tries me, tests me. He forces me into a corner, sometimes making me struggle with conflict, even doubt. But after that tempest, the lights emerge from the darkness and enlightenment comes.

I won’t lie. In writing the about hard questions in Mormon History, I have often had to shed my cherished cultural assumptions like snake sheds his outer skin. Underneath, however, I find scales of armor that have been tempered into a true strength and resilience. I know the history, I know the doctrine, I know the context. I’m no longer afraid.

I’ve always felt very connected to the marginalized. As a child, I remember choosing a stuffed rabbit at the store that was missing its arm because I knew that no one else would buy it. I felt great love for that disadvantaged toy. As I grew older, and I became interested in comic books, outsider heroes like the X-Men, who were hated because they were different, really resonated with me. I had number of childhood friends who were minorities and, more recently, I have a number of  friends who are specifically African-American. So the subject of Civil Rights, racism, and equality have always had a strong resonance with me from the time I was a young child and realized that people were treated unkindly for the most superficial and unjust of reasons.  

While reading these books, my thoughts often turned to my African-American friends:

 I thought of Mika Julien, who was a very close friend of mine in my old singles ward. I still remember her telling me her frustrations about the attitude many members had that she should marry within her own race. She was embarassed when people would try to set her up with other black Mormons who had nothing else in common with her except the color of their skin.

My thoughts turned to Cat Taylor, a friend from my high school theatre group, whose monologue from A Raisin in the Sun touched and impressed me so deeply that I looked into the play over a decade later and decided to direct it as my first production as a high school drama teacher. I have had my other classes read and watch it as well and it has become one of my favorite plays.

I thought of Cooper Howell, an actor friend from UVU’s Theatre Department. I thought of how appalled I was when a few of our fellow actors in The Tempest  used highly offensive, racist  epithets with him as “jokes.” I asked Cooper about it later and realized that, although he was laughing with them at the time, it was surely no laughing matter in his aching heart.  I also remember how frustrated Cooper became when he felt like he wasn’t able to get the roles he wanted at the department, even in one of my own plays, because he felt that the roles were all written for white people.

I thought of my friend Danor Gerald, one of the best actors I’ve ever known, who has worked in a number of professional film and theater projects. I thought of how proud I have been of Danor and impressed with how much he has been able to accomplish in his career as an actor. He and I have been working on some projects together lately with our friend Jaclyn Hales Lasseter. I don’t know whether he has felt the same, but from the moment I met him, I felt a deep connection and kinship with him.

I thought of  Quiana Arnold, who helped with costumes at UVU Theatre Department, and then afterwards took roles in the Department’s productions of Adam Slee’s Echoes of American Slavery and Carl Arrington’s Queens of Birdland, which, in the latter, Quianna played the powerful role of Tina Turner. She gave the show it’s most powerfully emotional moments.

I thought of many of my students who I currently teach and our production of A Raisin in the Sun last year. I got some complaints from a few students. A few of the caucasian students were miffed that, for our first production as a school, we were doing  a play that so many of the caucasian kids couldn’t get into (although we actually did end up having two non-African-Americans in the cast). I thought of the powerful experience the kids had with the text, even though the production itself was somewhat marred by the antics of an immature cast member. I also thought of how the subtle, and often destructive, race relations and politics that I see working in the microcosmic world my students.

I especially thought of  my friend Aaron Vaught, who has been my best, kindest friend in Arizona. He and his beautiful family live in one of the apartments across from us. In a time where we have been very lonely because of the move here from our previous home in Utah, his family have been a great haven of friendship and kindness for us. I sometimes only half-joke to my wife Anne that we should have an arranged marriage between our son Hyrum and their daughter Sophia. If we lived in a time of arranged marriages, it wouldn’t be a joke at all, for their daughters are absolute sweethearts.

And, more painfully, I thought of my dear friend Jessica LaMay. Jessica is as white as I am, but when she was investigating the Church when we were in high school, it was the Church’s previous race exclusion policy that really provided one of the biggest roadblocks to her joining the Church. I was very involved in the process of her investigating the Church, having been the one to invite her to consider it, and was there when she was taking the missionary discussions. I was thrilled when she had committed to baptism. I felt very personally invested and involved, as I considered her one of my closest friends. However, a week before her baptism she cancelled it, and has been at arm’s length from the Church ever since… and, honestly, I totally understand where she’s coming from.  

As I read Standing On the Promises, I re-lived all these memories vividly in my mind. As Young and Gray described the painful experiences of these historical, powerful, African-American Mormons,  it brought even more personal names and faces to my mind.

For those who are not aware of the basis of this series, it tells the historical stories of African-American Mormons. It begins in the days of Joseph Smith and shows how in the pre-Utah days, there was no race exclusion policy in place regarding the priesthood (as one African American Mormon named Elijah Abel received the priesthood from Joseph Smith himself and was ordained a Seventy).  It showed that Joseph Smith championed against slavery publicly when he ran for president, and tenderly cared for the few African-Americans in his own flock privately. That personal care included Jane Manning James, who he and his wife Emma personally invited to live with them when they discovered she had no home to go to, and they later invited her to be sealed to them as their adopted daughter (an offer she didn’t take up at the time, but regretted later).

But after the death of Joseph Smith, race became a hotter and hotter issue in American scoiety (these are the decades leading up to the Civil War). Things changed after the Mormon pioneers were forced to move to Utah and the leadership of Brigham Young implemented the priesthood exlusion for members of African descent. This is when the story starts to get really painful. We see things change from the way they were under Joseph Smith… not perfect, but inclusive, progressive… and then we see the culture of the Saints take a step back. And, frankly, from the context of the story, it had a lot less to do with any supposed revelation from God given to Joseph Smith (for there is no such revelation on this issue, and quite a bit from Joseph Smith that contradicts it), and has a lot more to do with the racist rhetoric which we inherited from the other Protestant Churches at the time, especially the stinking theory of the African race being cursed through Cain and Ham.

I’m not going to lie. A lot of stories in this series shocked and appalled me. When I found out about a lynching happening in early Utah, which I first discovered in Margaret Young’s play I Am Jane, ( and which Margaret Young and Darius Gray deal with again here ) I wanted to scream. I was equally horrified when I read that slavery was allowed in Utah (I simply didn’t realize this, and I’m pretty up on my Mormon history). But the horror became more somber as I realized a lot of that racism remained in Utah through a good deal of the 20th century.

When I read about how the very few black Mormons were treated at BYU and in Utah society even as recently as the 1960s and 1970s (to valiant souls who had already given up so much by joining a Church that excluded them from its priesthood leadership), I was deeply offended and had an uncomfortable rumbling in my soul, as I wanted to scrub away all the injustice and change the history to something more fair. But that’s the thing… I couldn’t. It’s all there, in our history. I can’t ignore it, I can’t pretend it didn’t happen. It’s there, on our permanent record, and we have to learn how to deal with it and make sure that we never allow such a blindspot to go away unchallenged again.

I once was naive enough to believe it was just the priesthood policy that was our issue, but that otherwise Mormons were kind and fair to their fellow human beings, that the policy was a thing that was forced on us, a thing we really didn’t believe deeply in our souls. Of course we knew that God created all people equal. And for many Mormons, I’m sure that was the case. But then it’s been proven to me that many Mormons became very ugly and sinister when it came to race. Their behavior did not live up to their religion. And I’ve had an even more jarring realization as I’ve gotten older that it’s still a problem for some Mormons.

In this supposedly enlightened period of the Church, I have still heard those horrible things that were said to African American friends, I have still heard Church members (even some of my own friends!) denigrate and stereotype other races, I have still seen the subtle and not so subtle racism that exists in many of our attitudes.

And, let me tell you, it’s not just the Mormon Church, and it’s definitely not just religious people, just as it has never been. Among my high school students, among the religious and irreligious, I’m horrified at some of the things they say to and about each other. And, living in Arizona, I’ve seen the stereotypes that are hurled against the Hispanic community among the general population here, especially with the immigation debate becoming so highly concentrated here. Sure, we’ve come a long way in recent decades, especially in the Church, but Zion is still far in the distance.  We have a lot of changes to make before we can deserve the title “pure in heart.”

But the injustices are only one aspect of these books. The flip side of the coin is the glory that these African-American Mormons had gained in their Lord, Jesus, and the bountiful, spiritual blessings they received in accepting the Restored Gospel… even if many of its less inspired members thought there was no place for them in it. It was inspiring reading about Jane Manning James having a vision of Joseph Smith so clear that she recognized him upon meeting him… after she had walked 800 miles on bloody feet to get to Nauvoo to join the Saints!  

It was equally inspiring reading about Elijah Abel who was Joseph Smith’s personal friend and risked his own life to go help Joseph when he was being captured by his enemies. And it was wonderful to read about this same Elijah Abel being ordained to the priesthood by Joseph Smith himself.

It was spiritually moving to read of Green Flake, a Mormon slave, who remained strong in his chosen faith and continued to be an inspiration as a pioneer in the vanguard company who was honored by black and white Mormons alike.

It was beautiful to read of more modern pioneers like Aidan Darius Gray who, although ostricized by some Mormons for being black, and ostricized by some blacks for being Mormon, stood up for their beliefs and their race and knew that Jesus Christ honored them for their multitude of sacrifices and had exaltation waiting for them.  

It was also wonderful to read that not everyone was blinded by prejudice, and that there were many Mormons, including a large number of its leaders, that were pushing for progress. Joseph Smith. Emma Smith. Eliza Partridge. Joseph F. Smith. Heber Grant. Lucy Gates Bowen. Marion Hanks. David McKay. Gordon Hinckley. Thomas Monson. Boyd Packer. And, of course, Spencer Kimball, whose courageous and inclusive leadership, and humble submission to the Lord’s Spirit, led to the revelation that extended the priesthood to all races. Although they were imperfect people who were still limited by their own culture’s boundaries, it took such visionaries to break off the chains of false tradition and usher in the new revelations of the Lord, a tradition begun in the Church by Joseph Smith himself.  

It’s a rather personal and sacred experience, but I feel prompted to write of a dream I had several years ago. It relates very much to what I’m writing here.  Some people get nervous when other people relate spiritual experiences, but as Mormons I believe we need to be more open with each other about these sort of things, for that is the life blood of the Church… revelation and spiritual gifts. It’s what makes us distinct from so many other faiths.

In this vivid dream, I was being led down a street by a guide, a beautiful, African-American woman. I remember being struck by her beauty, which was characterized not only by her inner warmth, intelligence, and kindness, but also of her outer beauty. She was beautiful, in every sense of the word. And she was Mormon, that much was clear from our conversation as we walked down the street, discussing our faith. Then she led me to a wall, or vision, or panorama… it’s difficult to describe, but I was seeing a number of individuals, all of them African-American. They were from various time periods. But some of them were very angry, seething with the injustice that had been placed upon them. I was confused why I was being shown such anger. After reading and learning all that I have since then I now understand that the anger, and understand that it was justified.

I awoke from that dream with the powerful feeling of the Holy Ghost pervading me. It has stuck with me since then, and I have strived to learn more about African-American history and culture. The Civil Right Movement, the Harlem Rennaissance, Civil War history and pre-Civil War African-American history fascinates (and at times discourages) me. I admire and honor such revolutionary Civil Rights activists as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. DuBois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. I love reading the work of writers and playwrights such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, and August Wilson. I love listening to soulfulness of Ragtime, Jazz, the Blues, MoTown, and even some R&B. I have no rhythm, I’m a white boy from Utah, really as white as they come, but the words and sounds and images and passion of the African-American culture has been making its way deep within me for the past several years and have made a deep impact on me.  

And now I can add these beautiful books as part of that journey and exploration of a culture that is not my own, but which has been slowly adopting me in my heart. Standing on the Promises  are beautifully written and a soulful exploration of the tragedies and victories of the race issue in Mormon culture. They have challenged my thinking, while never detracting from the core of my faith. Aidan Darius Gray and Margaret Blair Young have been anxiously engaged with the race issue within the LDS Church for a lot of years now. Go ahead, Google their names. You’ll find documentaries, interviews, articles, plays, and books by them, all dealing with this same issue, striving to tell the neglected African-American-Mormon story. Their names are becoming synonymous with Jane Manning James, Elijah Abel, and Green Flake. What these two novelists/playwrights/filmmakers/activists/pioneers create is beautiful, not only because of its skill and craftsmanship with which these projects have been made, but also because of the sense of mission behind all of it. I do not lightly talk of people being called of God to perform a mission, although I fervently believe that is the case with many people. However, I have no doubt that these two beautiful individuals, Margaret Young and Darius Gray, have a mission. The Spirit pervades their work.     

Some call the Book of Mormon a racist book, because of the division that occurs between the Nephites and Lamanites within its pages. But when you look deeper, you find the opposite message, of how racial tensions destroyed one nation physically and the other culturally, and that only when those two nations cooperated and loved each other, there was lasting peace. I believe it must be the same way within the modern Church, if we’re ever to build any lasting sense of Zion. In the Book of Mormon, the section 4th Nephi tells us about the most lasting peace that ever occurred in the Mormon book of scripture, the time when Zion was truly upon them after Christ’s visit to the Americas:  

And it came to pass that there was no contention in the land, because of the love of God which did dwell in the hearts of the people… There were no robbers, no murderers, neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites; but they were in one, the children of Christ, and heirs to the Kingdom of God.

And then earlier in the Book of Mormon we have my personal, all-time favorite scripture, which is one of the most clear condemnationsin Holy Writ of prejudice, in all its varieties:

For none of these iniquities come of the Lord; for he doeth that which is good among the children of men; and he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile. (2 Nephi 26:33)

In his memoir Adventures of a Church Historian, Mormon historian Leonard Arrington quotes the past Church President David O. McKay as saying that the priesthood race restriction was a “policy, not a doctrine.” I fully adhere to President McKay’s view on the priesthood restriction, that such division are created by men, not by God. As Nephi stated “none of these iniquities come of the Lord,” and I’m so grateful to literary pioneers such and Margaret Young and Darius Gray who continually remind us of that fact.

That first impression was less about what Nancy actually said and more about what she did. Nancy rarely answered Sunday School questions with words. Fairly often she gave a sound–some of which were musical, others guttural, and others as “humphs” or “ah-ha’s.” Other times she simply gave a movement: a flip of the hand or a drop of the arm or a roll of the head. When she did answer with words she usually started with, “I don’t know where this is coming from but I just find myself thinking. . .” And then the blank would be filled in with anything but what the teacher was expecting. When she was called as the Relief Society chorister instead of leading the music with standard 4/4 loops or 3/4 triangles Nancy waved her arms in circles and walked the room as if she were gathering our voices and hearing them and mixing them in some sort of harmonic alchemy. She would then nod and look at each of us and smile as if thanking us. Our half-hearted sounds had somehow turned to gold in her ears.

Nancy isn’t your standard “Utah Mormon” or “Molly Mormon” or whatever other label we use to describe each other. Nancy is something else. Nancy is unorthodox, but in a truly unorthodox way. She isn’t jaded or disaffected (which seems to be the standard version of unorthodoxy). She is unorthodox in a real way. An honest way. A faithful way.

I was doing my second tour of duty on the Enrichment committee when I finally got to know Nancy better. She offered to run an “expressive arts experience” for the sisters and it was my job to help her set up and take down and make sure the opening prayer got said. It was an easy-peasy, run-of-the-mill, do-it-with-my-eyes-shut assignment.

When I arrived that evening Nancy had already draped the door to the gym with red and orange fabric and posted a sign that said, “Silence Only.” She was contemplating adding flames to the door frames–somehow it just seemed right–but didn’t want to scare anyone off. When I entered the gym she had set up tables with clay, tarps on the floor dotted with small, empty canvases, and a big drum circle outlined with scarves.

This Enrichment was going to be something else. I completely forgot about the prayer.

That night only a few sisters showed up, but each left with several pieces of her own “art” and a slight smile on her face. As they walked out of the gym Nancy commented on each work and what she’d remember about it. Basking in Nancy’s glow, I felt like a three year old–but in a good way. Like I’d just played harder than I knew I could and felt things for the first time and learned things that I didn’t yet have the words to describe but couldn’t wait to discover.

Nancy said, “Jesus created the Earth. He is an artist. THE Artist. And He made each of us just like Himself. He made us to be artists. Each of us is the writer and painter and dancer of our own experience. We may not be experts but we are artists.”

Tonight we had another expressive arts experience for Enrichment. This time it was folded into our annual Relief Society Garden Party and there was a great turnout. “What color is Christ to you?” Nancy began. There were a lot of sidelong glances and giggles. A few sisters even asked if she was serious. But each picked out a single pastel, closed her eyes, and meditated on Christ and let the crayon guide itself. Then Nancy invited us to put ourselves into the image. What color were we? How did we fit ourselves into our vision of Christ? What did He mean to us? Then, what words would we add to the image?

Women began to panic a little. How were they supposed to draw the right thing with their eyes closed? How could they pick the right words when (for some of them) English wasn’t their first language and (for the rest of them) they weren’t even writers? Coloring and free-associating seemed silly and more than a little embarrassing. What was everyone else going to think?

One by one, as Nancy directed us, we gave in and played at creating something. We let go of our everyday selves and tried to find out what color Jesus really was. Lots of sisters picked cool blues because Christ calmed them and held them up like water does. Some sisters picked yellow because Christ was the light. Some made Him circle, like a hug, and others drew Him like a river. One sister even drew a turnip (she said she couldn’t explain it but it just came out of the crayon. Maybe because Christ nourishes her?). In another picture the sister drew a mermaid and layered Christ around her in different shades of water–some of which were yellow because she remembered someone describing faith as a glowworm and Christ was like a glowworm to her. And maybe, just maybe, we were all like glowworms for Jesus.

At some point, the Spirit snuck in and sisters were bearing testimony through simple art and disambiguated yet meaningful words, without even realizing it. And I couldn’t help but think that this was Mormonism at its best. People with little in common leaving behind their skill sets and comfort zones to bear–to create–testimony of a real, living Christ and fumbling to incorporate His light into their lives in artful ways. And through the process becoming just a little more like Him.

I’ve been reading Shannon Hale’s YA novels to my daughter, now 13, for four years.  The Books of Bayern are wonderfully emotionally textured, edgy enough to challenge my daughter, and filled with lots of girl power to encourage her to consider her options.  Hale’s attention to language attracts my interest sharply.  I’ve come to trust her writing as a source of fine language and narrative prowess for my daughter’s developing mind.  We snatch up her YA novels whenever they come out.

But I wasn’t interested in Hale’s adult novel, The Actor and the Housewife, until this discussion on AMV.  Complaints that the novel’s readers registered there piqued my curiosity.  Just before William’s not-necessarily-a-review, Kevin Barney put up this post reviewing the church’s article on emotional infidelity that drew a lot of comments.  In January, a BCC-er linked to this article in Slate on opposite sex friendship.  The stars seemed to align.  I decided to drop other projects and pick up The Actor and the Housewife, see what was what.  To make the narrative journey more interesting, I read it aloud to my husband Mark, who during our married life has done such gracious deeds as taking the kids outside so I could talk with male friends or helping me understand the man-side of baffling conversations.  I have included in this essay bits of our discussion of the novel as we read it.

We had a rough start.  The Actor and the Housewife opens with a flash flood of “spiritual signs” and unlikely coincidences that seemed to strain the storyline.  The banter between the main characters—Mormon housewife Becky Jack and movie star Felix Callahan—seemed at times to flip over into barely tolerable giddiness.  Sometimes the dialogue felt downright immodest, as in a scene where Becky tells her husband Mike about her first encounter with Felix.  In the wake of the recounting’s excitement, Becky and Mike wind up in bed.

Mark: Mike’s insistence on Becky’s femme fatale powers affects him.

I think I was expecting a story and language more along the lines of Hale’s Bayern Books—lovely, deep, connected all around and through, each book a satisfying environment in itself.  The tenor of the language in Actor and Housewife was so different, so abrasive by comparison that Mark and I wondered at times if Hale disliked Becky.

Patricia: This reads like a script.  And the witty dialogue seems contrived and irritating.
Mark: [Hale] is taking the book where she wants it to go.

Only my previous experience with the author’s writing made it possible for us to suspend our early judgment and trust that Hale would take us someplace interesting.  I began relaxing into the story when passages like these appeared:

“In a way, it almost feels like falling—“ No, she wasn’t going to say it.  “There should be a new term—falling in friendship or something like that.  I wish there was a word for it!  The English language is seriously flawed … (56)”

and

“I wish the English language gave us a better option.  ‘Pals,’ ‘chums,’ ‘buddies’ … but a word that implies the sudden and unusual nature—like ‘metabuddies’? (56)”

The “no language for this” issue surfaces repeatedly as Becky tries to relate her new experience to what she knows but can’t make it fit.  Through wordplay, Becky and Felix finesse the relationship, negotiating a space for its existence and continued development outside what the usual language of friendship allows for.  Language and relationship—for me, an absolutely dynamite combination.

Mark (speaking of the Valentine’s Dance scene where Becky and Felix go outside into the night air so Felix can test his theory that he’s falling in love with Becky): Becky wants to “get out there” and remain chaste.  How can she make it work?  She “goes outside” with Felix.

As the story progresses, the matter of social expectations and limitations—lines—where they are and whether or not Becky should cross them—arises frequently.  As Becky follows her instincts and her heart across her lines toward Felix while maintaining her lifelines to Mike and her kids, the flash flood turns into a deep, sinuously flowing river.  For this reader, the current became fully compelling.

Mark: The reader is not in control here.  The writer is.  Hale takes us through a series of emotional states.  By the break-up, the writer is exerting powerful control.

(By “break-up,” he means the point in the story where Mike expresses his misgivings about how deeply involved his wife and her movie star buddy are becoming. To save her marriage, Becky and Felix break up.)

As the story continues, Becky’s iconoclastic nature becomes increasingly apparent.  As she follows her attraction to Felix, she makes leaps of faith that shake up friends and extended family members, all of whom express their doubts about the relationship which they either expect or hope will fail.  Why would they expect or hope for the worst?  Because the friendship’s failure would confirm their own moral takes on the world.  The family get-together where Becky discovers her siblings are betting against her is one of the most important parts of the book.  There we begin to see just how deeply the Becky-Felix dynamic affects others’ lives as, watching the relationship intensify, Becky’s mother, her brothers, a sister, and a sister-in-law either manifest or confront their own social fears and limitations, including and especially, the fear of attraction.

Mark: As much as Becky loves her Mormon world, she has a hunger for something else—not instead of, but in addition to.  She has complete confidence in her social lines.  But she’s experimenting with various individuals to see “Can I make this work within the social universe where my children and husband live?”
Patricia: Becky and Felix’s relationship changes both their worlds.
Mark: Their relationship ends up relegating her older, primary relationships to supporting roles.
Patricia: She tries including the bishop.  He draws his line, re-thinks, changes.  Change is a main current in the book.
Mark: She was successful at integrating Mike.

One of the amazing elements of this book is how Hale makes Mormonism sexy.  This isn’t a matter of imbuing the book with only erotic energy but rather with life-begetting fertility operating within a Mormon moral context.  More than once, Felix calls Becky “a goddess” and clearly means it.  Likewise, he alludes to her physical fertility.  But the fertility language doesn’t just remark upon Becky’s childbearing prowess. Body and soul, Becky is a fountain of happy fecundity.

Mark: She is powerful as a demonstrably fertile woman, terrifyingly brave to outsiders.  Her character as a character is more developed than Felix’s.  More than Celeste’s also.  Celeste is supposed to be the demonstrable paragon.  But what is she in the face of this Becky power over her husband?  Celeste submits to the goddess.  She keeps what she can, relinquishes what she can’t hold on to.
Patricia: By virtue of their more open marriage, Felix and Celeste are completely vulnerable to the “cheeky [Mormon] minx” (12).

At the book’s outset, Felix and Celeste are statistics in Europe and Britain’s demographic winter.  Felix is hardened in his aversion to children and to fathering them.  This means that, philosophically, emotionally, and sexually a kind of sterility exists in Felix’s erotically charged bond with Celeste.  Following their involvement with Becky and her family, this cultural sterility leads to the collapse of Felix and Celeste’s marriage.

Mark: Becky could have Felix but doesn’t.  Celeste can’t have Mike.

Some readers complain that the story is unbelievable, a fact Hale herself has fun with toward its conclusion: “[S]eriously, who would buy a Mormon housewife as a romantic comedy heroine (320)?”  But Hale uses the device of extremity to frame up the story firmly.  If there weren’t unlikely extremes in the tale—the Hollywood scene vs. the Layton, Utah scene; Mormon housewife vs. famous actor—it might come off as “too Mormon.”  Yet via extremities, Hale brings Becky’s brand of Mormonism into relief.  Otherwise, the lines Becky draws and crosses wouldn’t show up nearly as vividly.

Mark: This is going to take everybody somewhere they haven’t been.  Is Hale working at illustrating a future archetype?

Some readers lament that Felix gets the best lines, making less stellar husband Mike look boring by comparison.  Me, I was amused by but not terribly impressed with Felix.  Nor did I find Mike boring.  Mike’s lines of dialogue are understated but impressively brave, since in a practical yet courageous way he navigates new seas he finds himself sailing as he opens his home to Felix.  Why does Becky love Mike?  She just does.  At first sniff she knows they have compatible pheromones and their genetic prospects are excellent: “His pheromones practically danced down my gullet and straight to my ovaries” (289). This line goes to the fertility motif woven throughout the book.

Mark: The best lines support the Becky character and they support the relationship.  It makes sense that Felix has charismatic lines.
Patricia: I want this to be a more beautifully written book, but it’s a screenplay.
Mark: The book is dependent on and devoted to that device.

Felix appears to have the male lead in this made-for-a-novel screenplay.  As it turns out, he can’t rival plain ol’ Mike, either his pheromones or his stolid Mormon stance.  Even after he dies, Mike exerts influence on the story and gets in Felix’s way, though many might wish that, when alive, Mike could have competed more compellingly against flamboyant Felix.  But it’s Becky that provides the narrative’s driving force. That neither Mike nor Felix as characters are as developed as is Becky’s character is hardly surprising.  The story is really about a Mormon woman and her “indomitable Mormon willpower” (214). In Hale’s stories, male characters commonly act in supporting roles, standing back as the strong female leads do their thing to keep the world in balance, plying extraordinary gifts separately and in alliance to unseat tyrants and preserve their families.

No tyranny overtly menaces the storyline of The Actor and the Housewife, only doubtful imperatives of social conventions and expectations bent on circumscribing the relationship.  Yet the language wrestles to pioneer a narrative trail for a definitely outside-the-usual mingling between two unlikely soul mates and their at-odds worldviews, thus directing its energy into deep space exploration.  In entering The Dance with Felix, Becky Jack, married Mormon mother of four, bravely goes where not very many Mormon mothers—maybe not many women at all, and with reason—have gone before.  Given the outcome for most of the story’s characters—more life for everyone all around—she does it with style, holding open prospects for everybody.

It’s important to the story that Becky and Felix not follow the usual romantic comedy script and become fully sexually entwined.  In my opinion, the reason is pretty simple. Becky is fully Mormon; Felix is fully not.  For Becky, family is everything.  Felix has estranged himself from even his mother.  By the end of the book, Felix, at nearly fifty years old, is only just coming to accept the prospect of being a father and “[settling] into [his] adult skin (301).”  By standards not just embedded in Mormon culture but also in other family-oriented societies, his social arc is way behind Becky’s.  But mainly, the idea that what she does and whom she does it with will affect prospects for others fully informs her sensibilities.  “Others” here include her children, whose lives are rather dramatically affected by her relationship with Felix; her husband, who must face his own fears and take his own leap of faith; her mother, who worries; her siblings, betting one an other that their doubts will be confirmed; her friends, who have their own lives to work out; and her church community, which at times behaves less than elegantly in response to Felix’s presence, an actual problem that exists between the church and the not-church communities.  Finally, there is Felix himself, so caught up in following Becky into “whatevership” that he makes himself vulnerable.  She is careful not to take advantage.  With her out there taking such chances, the agency and narrative prospects for everyone whose lives touch hers hangs in balance.  Fertility—not merely sexual fulfillment and not simply physical ability to bear children but also life-begetting, possibility-multiplying, world-building spiritual and emotional abundance—is the name of Becky’s Mormon game of risk.

Mark: The whole point is to prepare the Mormon reader to approach the point of agency.  Readers experience their own fears, doubts, expectations—all of which will be broken by this iconoclastic Mormon character.

Or not. Some readers, seeing Becky cross lines they themselves have taken pains to hold in place, will find the story unacceptable.  Many there be that have experienced worry, heartbreak, or the destruction of their families in situations that will uncomfortably resemble the arc of The Actor and the Housewife’s storyline.  To such people, the premise of the novel—that some men and some women can work through the confusion and intricacies of attraction—including sexual attraction—to establish positive, productive metafriendships might well come off as unbelievable, perhaps even painful.  This book isn’t trying to bully its point across, only to prompt thought: What if …?  The Actor and the Housewife is not for everyone, a fact Hale acknowledges and accepts.  I suspect that only a relatively small audience will find the novel to carry a stronger punch than can either an unconvincing and quirky romantic fantasy or an irresponsible and/or dangerous love story.  Yet The Actor and the Housewife’s intent is to be more than either-ors allow for.  I found it neither this nor that, but something else altogether different: a remarkably courageous work that chips away at the horns of social and spiritual dilemmas.

* * * *

I just finished a delightful (yes, I said “delightful”) little essay in the Spring 2006 issue of Dialogue: “Mormon Laundry List” by Julianna Gardner Berry.* Berry speaks about what I’ve come to call the Mormon Rhetorical Problem**: Despite our expansive theological witness that “the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” and that humans are beings of eternal intelligence, co-existent with God and heirs to eternal glory, much of our language seems to betray a lack of faith in that ideal.

In rhetorical terms, this manifests itself in a surprising lack of faith in audience, which further manifests itself in the fact that, as Berry observes, “Mormons love telling each other what to do more than any group I know.” Unqualified and subjective as this observation may be, I sense strands of its proof in the cultural pudding: the hundredth sacrament meeting talk in a row that lays out exactly how (“In just nine easy steps…”) I should exercise my faith or serve my neighbor or become self-reliant; the marriage and family relations class that tells my wife and me we should teach our kids faith by teaching them faith, repentance (in just six alliterative steps!***), baptism, reception of the gift of the Holy Ghost, and keeping the commandments (family scripture study, family prayer, family service, and family home evening—on Monday nights only, please–included); the Elders’ Quorum lesson—no class participation included—that emphasizes reaching our full potential by setting personal goals, which we can effectively set and keep track of and report on by following “this ten-step process I got on my mission.” And on. And on.

And on.

Don’t get me wrong, I realize the value of sticking to the small and simple things we’re taught, of learning to do them well so we can draw closer to God—I’ve still got a long way to go before I get these first principles down pat. And sometimes admonition comes along that isn’t cliché or trite or patronizing (like, for example, Luisa’s recent advice for developing a Christ-like attitude). And sure, drawing up lists of these small and simple things is easy, especially because seeing all the bulleted points in white and green (on a chalkboard, see; or in my ward, on a piece of paper printed out in a font that’s much too small for those on the back row to read when the teacher magnets the papers to the chalkboard—I say, just let them use chalk!) makes the gospel seem so functional and pragmatic. And if Mormon culture is anything, it’s become increasingly pragmatic, almost business-like.

But at what cost does dumbing down or pragmatizing or business-meeting-izing eternity come?

As Berry asks,

Do we need a weekly flogging with instructions? Will those who falter be buoyed up by a roster of requirements? God evidently trusts us more than we trust each other to “work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Morm. 9:27). Is our prevailing sense of one another that we’re all so wayward we can’t get past the remedial course? (Emphasis mine.)

Then this:

Lest I be misunderstood, I feel the tedious need to explain that I’m a card-carrying, calling-filling, sacrament-taking, choir-singing member of the Church, one who is more or less up-to-date with her laundry.

Though Mormons have always loved to admonish, I sense that the [Mormon] Laundry List has become more entrenched in the last decade, as talks are prepared in Microsoft Word, with the benefit of bulleted lists. Our many MBAs, trained in presentation skills, believe that all knowledge can be conveyed through PowerPoint. I cringe when sacrament meeting speakers emphasize their “takeaway message” or when missionary-themed conversations include the word “branding.”

In a larger cultural context, the impact of technology on language is partly to blame. Mass communication that isn’t pure tabloid has become technical writing, a slick how-to manual. Estate planning, quality parenting, weight loss, and cholesterol reduction can all be achieved in three easy steps. Why not, then, our eternal salvation?

While I must confess that I prepared my last sacrament meeting talk in Microsoft Word and that I used PowerPoint in a Gospel Doctrine lesson once to illustrate chiasmus in the Book of Mormon to a group of sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds (in which class, I assure you, the doctrines of Christ took precedence over the PPP), I must also confess that I fear we’ve lost something of the gaze-into-heaven-for-five-minutes rhetorical tradition of our forebears, that we’ve lost faith in the power of the word, of true doctrine, of pure testimony to literally change lives.

Perhaps I’m being naïve or too idealistic to believe that more responsible use of language can really change us. But as a believing Mormon who tries to keep up on his laundry, I’d like something a bit deeper every now and then, like, for instance, a little bit more faith in the Mormon audience and the rhetorical principles that can be derived from Mormon theology—in the power of human language (which is, after all, good enough for God—at least for now), for as Berry concludes, “Our scriptural canon is so broad and our theology so lofty that we should have no shortage of pure doctrine for an eternity of talks and lessons, with exhortation trimmed to a minimum.”

And all I can say to that is amen, Sister. Amen.

Now off to do the laundry.

No. Really. I need some clean socks.

—–

*The link is to the web page for the electronic offerings from that volume; both PDF and HTML versions of the article are available, though you’ll have to link to the full text and scroll down after linking through to find Berry.

**By no means are such questions of oration and audience entirely unique to Mormon culture, though they do bear specific implications for Latter-day Saints in terms of Mormon eternalism, as I discuss it here.

***I’m indebted to Brillig whose comment reminded me of this one. How could I forget?