Camazotz, Here I Come?

Many years ago, I read Madeleine l’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I was fascinated by the idea of the tesseract and identified with Charles Wallace's empathy and intuition. I was terrified by IT, ruler of the planet on which their father had been held for so long. At the time, I interpreted the enforced order on that planet, Camazotz by name, as a metaphor for the Communist regimes like the Soviet Union or East Germany that I was taught threatened the American way of life. It was the 1980’s after all, the era of Reagan and renewed flag waving and the last big run of the nuclear arms race. It was only as I got older and pondered on the novel that I saw it as the epitome of any repressive system that squashed individuality and stifled personal liberty. Those systems are everywhere, especially in places that say they grant freedom. Who wants to live like that?

Apparently these days, I do. I’m finding myself longing to live on Camazotz.

This recent realization of a longing for order shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. I’ve always thought I believed in individuality and championed the cause of liberty. I’ve always stood for the oppressed and the marginalized. I’ve always fought for people to be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do...up to a point.

Being raised LDS, there’s liberty and then there’s liberty. What I thought was liberty as a child seems much less so when viewed through more experienced eyes. And yet, reality is subjective, and within that youthful reality, there was a lot of room to breathe as long as one didn’t push past the limits, the boundaries explicit and implicit. In so many ways, I flourished in that structure. It allowed parts of me to grow straight, tall, and upright. But, as anyone who has read this blog knows, I was also severely bruised by that structure. Why would I crave it again?

This is a time of political and personal turmoil, when people steal books from libraries and cheese doodles sporting bad hair are in serious contention for the presidency of the United States, when All Lives Matter even though they don’t really seem to. This is a time when people steal your kidneys in public parks, when men are becoming women and vice versa and other people are taking advantage of the uncertainty this has caused society to push their own agendas. This is a time where people don’t push in their chairs and don’t ask if you’re available before they start barraging you with demands. They don’t say “please” and “thank you”, or “excuse me, do you have a moment?” Breaking “the rules” is now the norm. Whatever happened to everyone following the rules instead of being the exception? (Was there really ever such a time?) Where are the unquestionably good cowboys, the ones with the white hats that Paula Cole sang about in the ‘90’s? Where is the freakin’ Lone Ranger?

I think my own rule breaking has something to do with this longing. This summer, I married Chris, breaking one of the biggest rules taught me about life. I permanently put myself outside the protective ideological circle that once supported me and I’ve never felt more vulnerable, more precarious. It permanently altered my relationships with people I care deeply about. My entire world has changed and now I’m looking to find any vestiges of the order I knew. When they don’t materialize, I get angry, sometimes even hostile. I become the tyrant I say I despise. I think mean things about people, straying far from the Christian ideals I endeavor to espouse. It’s harder than ever to let people be who they are and to love them regardless. I should be grateful for the spiritual exercise, but I’m just tired. Tired of difference and division. Tired of discussion. Tired of variation and diversity. I want us all to walk lock step according to the stride I set forth.

I guess you could say I’m the devil.

I hope to come through this with an increased ability to love unconditionally. I also hope the world will wake up and realize we need both liberty and liege, freedom and restraint, if we are to cohere as a society of siblings, children of whatever lord of light we choose to acknowledge. Because really, who wants a giant, pulsating brain taking the choice away from us? Or my mediocre, sometimes active one calling everyone names when it doesn’t have its way?

Prophets Are People, Too

The apostle Paul and I disagree on a few things: the length of a man's hair, keeping women silent in churches, celibacy of priests, and so on. It seems to me the ways and thought patterns of the Pharisees didn't completely desert him after his conversion. Perhaps I'm judging his first-century teachings with a twenty-first century eye, but many of his words have led to strange rules about who is accepted of God and who is not. Only certain right-behaving people can belong to the God club, you know. (Many of these patriarchal, appearance-careful rules can be found among Latter-Day Saints behind the Zion Curtain.)

It is for that reason I was pleasantly surprised a couple of days ago while choosing music for upcoming services at Trinity to find a new and very helpful insight in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians. Easily dubbed "The Charity Chapter," Paul proclaims that charity, or pure love, is everlasting and the only thing that really matters. This idea is a "golden thread" of truth to which I cling and is not new to me. What I'd never really seen before now was one of the things that Paul said would not last.

In the eighth verse, according to the King James version, Paul says that "whether there be prophecies, they shall fail..." The Jerusalem Bible translates this passage "if there are gifts of prophecy, the time will come when they must fail..." He then goes on to call all human gifts of knowledge or foreknowledge imperfect and fallible; the limited perceptive abilities of humans make all our knowledge fallible.

Why was this such a gift? In light of recent events, especially Elder Russell M. Nelson's address to the LDS church, it was a reminder that prophets are people. They see through a glass darkly, perhaps not as darkly as others but their vision is still limited and distorted by their humanity. Fasting and prayer can alter the normal human state, but it is debatable whether this actually brings more clarity or just changes the lens.

I've been reading a short biography of Joseph Smith written by a noted biographer and non-member, Robert Vincent Remini. It makes a good attempt at interpreting the available facts fairly, giving the prophet the benefit of the doubt where many merely condemn. What has become clearer through this is that for all of his notable qualities and actions, Joseph Smith was a man, and a fallible one, who was likely seeking for something divine while dealing with his very human nature. I do not doubt he had experiences of a transcendent nature, and I do believe he encountered God. It was really only with the advent of Brigham Young's presidency that he was canonized as some kind of perfect saint, unquestionable and infallible.

So many prophecies have not come to pass; so many policies have proven changeable. Does that make the quest for the divine ridiculous? Does it make the search for the mind of God a quixotic endeavor? Not entirely, because amongst all the attempts to know the mind of God, the many prophecies made and the visions reported, there is one golden thread that weaves through the fabric, the one Paul wove into his first Corinthian epistle: love is what lasts. Love is what matters. Choosing to love will be our salvation in the end. Jesus's message of peace through love, even when filtered through the millennia, gleams golden and it's okay for everything else to crumble away. No need to be afraid or angry that Elder Nelson made that speech in Hawaii. No need to throw my love of friends or family away to mock or ridicule those that are still members. No need to bring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to its knees by trying to keep their guest artists from performing with them. Love is what matters because love is what lasts. When one is love, all the attributes of love Paul mentions are in evidence and there is, ultimately, peace.

In my own personal page of revelation, given long ago when I was a teenager, I was told that the devil would tempt and try me in insidious ways, desirous to take me for his own. That meant he was going to be sneaky about how he led me away from the fold; if I wanted to stay faithful and maintain access to the atoning gift of the Savior, I needed to cling to the words of the prophets, being as obedient and subservient as I could. I needed to question any other idea or voice with deep suspicion of the motives behind it. Thus, my entire mission was one big offering of as perfect an obedience as I could muster. I worked very hard to burn away sinful thoughts and impulses with the fire of the Holy Ghost. It became clear after my mission that I just couldn't stay away from the tree of knowledge and it's corrupting fruit. I was miserable.

I understand now that what I had really been doing was putting my trust in the arm of flesh. It has taken me a long time to arrive at the point I occupy now, largely due to my extreme caution that I not be led astray. It could be argued that the devil has won, but I don't think so. Little by little, my trust has shifted from the arm of flesh to the heart of love, and with all due respect to the brethren, I think that's where God can really be found.