. . . be with and strengthen them.
—D&C 20:53
If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. You are the continuation of each of these people.
—Thich Nhat Hanh1
I
Conflict, violence, and suffering touch everyone, even those who seek to uphold principles championed by Jesus.2 Many such people may in fact sustain acts of extreme barbarism. For example, two prominent Mormons have played leading roles in perpetuating State-sponsored violence. This became clear when the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report in December 2014 about the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program and the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”3 The report reiterates previously publicized information about the two Mormons. One, a psychologist, had co-developed, used, and taught others to use the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program; in 2012 he was sustained as a bishop only to step down a week later, perhaps because his CIA involvement had recently been publicized.4 The other—then Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the United States Department of Justice, now a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—had signed what some call the “Torture Memo,” which advised the White House Counsel on “standards of conduct for interrogation.”5 After discussing the legal foundations for justifiably inflicting physical or mental pain on foreign detainees, the memo concludes that “there is a significant range of acts” not legally considered torture that interrogators could use even though these acts “might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”6
Amidst such violence and confusion, when even some who claim to be “Saints” have lost sight of their commitment “to bear one another’s burdens,” “to mourn with those that mourn,” “to comfort those that stand in need of comfort,” “to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places”7 and who instead advise others on how to inflict pain; when the love of many waxes cold—where are grace and peace? Who will mourn with us and help us lift our burdens and simply be with us when we mourn and are burdened and need a sustaining presence in our lives?
Mormon poet Emma Lou Thayne offers a compelling answer. Thayne died 6 December 2014—three days before the CIA Torture Report released. I’m sure she would have been hurt by the report, as she was by the violence and oppression she witnessed during her lifetime. Tenderness at human suffering is part of the burden the pure in heart carry. It turns them inward and outward: inward as they consider ways they might be implicated in others’ suffering, asking, “What have I done to unjustly burden others or to perpetuate their struggles?”; outward as they do what they can to help alleviate suffering. Thayne’s tenderness emerges in her grace-infused language. Consider, for example, her lyrics to “Where Can I Turn for Peace?”8 When transcribed as it’s sung, this hymn doesn’t read like other hymns, which often end-rhyme the first and third lines and the second and fourth lines. Instead, these lyrics follow the rhyme scheme abac dbdc, as illustrated in the first two stanzas of the transcribed hymn:
Where can I turn for peace?
Where is my solace
when other sources cease
to make me whole?
When with a wounded heart,
anger, or malice,
I draw myself apart,
searching my soul?
When I read or sing Thayne’s words, the scheme trips my tongue—I want lines two and four to rhyme. But because the change disrupts my expectations, I become a little more awake, a little more aware of what I’m singing. My mind opens to a more intricate treatment of the hymn’s subject: I recognize that the rhyme structure mirrors the nature of introspection. When we look within, searching our souls, we draw our selves apart with questions. We dissect and rearrange our being, just as Thayne does with the rhyme scheme, reweaving our experience into a broader pattern that seeks to make sense of desire, learning, living, and relationships.
But beyond that, the more introspective we become, the more we may realize we’re being pulled between competing polarities within our selves and within our patterns of being with others and acting in the world. Thayne’s lyrics reflect this tension. Three of the four rhyme pairs in the transcription’s first two verses consist of conflicting terms: “cease” threatens “peace,” “malice” opposes “solace,” and “apart” strikes at “heart.” As we approach the fourth rhymed-pair, we may feel pulled between these tensions and begin—perhaps unconsciously—seeking resolution and release, which comes, in part, when we vocalize “soul” and harmonize with “whole.”
Whole/soul. This vital pairing points to the fact that our longing for grace and peace involves our entire being. Longing accumulates throughout the hymn as the questions introduced in the first stanza-pairing spill into the second. And then, in the third and fourth stanzas, the question words explode:
Where, when my aching grows,
where, when I languish,
where, in my need to know,
where can I run?
Where is the quiet hand
to calm my anguish?
With this repetition, the speaker’s aching and the intensity of her self-interrogation build until—as the rhymed-pair “languish”/“anguish” conveys—her accumulated sorrow threatens self-erasure. But, as she touches and is touched by this despair and seems ready to abandon herself to it, she changes her approach, suddenly asking, “Who, who can understand?”
The change is significant. While it echoes the statement sometimes made by those who suffer—“No one understands what I’m going through”—it revises the lament from self-pity to a plea for connection. “I need someone to be with me in my suffering,” it says. “I can’t bear the anguish alone—I don’t have the capacity to endure it myself. Whose presence in my life and whose comprehension of my needs can increase my capacity to bear my burdens well?”
That the speaker begins searching for a “who” and not simply a “where” is telling. The places we inhabit in this world no doubt matter when it comes to finding peace. My wife, Jess, and I are rooted in Ogden, Utah’s stretch of the Wasatch Range, but we transplanted with our kids to southeastern Idaho for six years. I didn’t realize how discontent I had become in Idaho until we moved home and had settled again in Ogden. The first time I went running after we returned, my being resonated with the trail: “This is the place. This is where my soul belongs.” My sense of belonging, of being joyfully tethered to this place arises from the connection I feel with these mountains. But more so it comes because this is where our family is. In my experience, who we share the where with makes the where matter more. Because in “Where Can I Turn for Peace?” the speaker’s plea gets an answer when she adds a who question to her litany of wheres, I imagine that Thayne understood this, that she sought to cultivate enduring relationships with both places and people. The most enduring of these relationships is with the One whose touch can calm and steady and revitalize the languishing soul, who doesn’t recoil when we reach—as children do—to nestle against his bosom. Because that is where the hymn’s speaker longs to be: encircled in the arms of a Being so constant and kind, so infinitely compassionate, so willing to run to us in our afflictions and to be afflicted with us that his reaching hand, his presence, his stillness, quiets our distress.
II
The open palm is a gesture of vulnerability, of connection-seeking, of grace. The sign is rooted in neural structures that developed during our evolutionary history to reflexively bend the body away from danger. For our quadruped ancestors this looked like a dog crouching in submission. In humans it manifests as head-tilts, shoulder-shrugs, bows, hugs; as an adult squatting—arms extended—to come face-to-face with and to lift a child; as someone leaning in and holding out a hand to offer or to accept food or language or a touch. When we encounter these gestures, our neurons respond as if we were performing the behavior: our brains mirror the performer’s neural activity, coupling us with her/him on a physiological level.9 Our capacity to neurally couple with others speaks to possible physiological foundations for empathy; and this possibility speaks to the idea that we’re designed to connect with each other, to feel our way into other lives.
The presence of Christ’s open palm in Mormonism’s sacred narratives calls us to be with him through those narratives and to mirror his mode of being in ours by being with and learning from those narratives. The divine gesture appears across the Mormon scriptural canon. Through Moses, Jehovah told the children of Israel that he would extend his arm to deliver them from enslavement.10 Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would bare his arm and extend his promise to “the ends of the earth,” offering mercy and grace to the planet’s inhabitants and to the planet itself.11 When the resurrected Christ descended on the Nephite temple, he extended his hand to those gathered.12 And in 1829 Harmony, Pennsylvania, Christ told Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery to “behold”—to regard, to keep hold of, to give themselves to—his messianic promise, as manifest in his still wounded body, in his eternal vulnerability, in “the prints of the nails” in his extended hands.13
Perhaps more than anywhere else in Mormon scripture, Enoch’s theophany (as narrated by Moses) shows how affected God is by our lives and suffering, how he extends himself to be with us in that suffering, and how our reception of the open palm of his presence can expand our capacity to be in the world. After gathering God’s people and establishing a Zion community among them, Enoch and his city are “taken up into heaven” and named by the Lord “mine abode forever.”14 From this exalted place, Enoch sees the happenings and the inhabitants of human generation upon generation: he sees “angels descending out of heaven” to teach them and Satan seeking to enslave them. While many join God’s ministering angels and ascend to Zion, others give way to Satan.15 Standing beside Enoch, God watches the latter group interact and it brings him to tears.16 The encounter shows Enoch, to his great surprise, that the God he worships is no disaffected Being whose knowledge and power set him at cosmos-length from his creations. No, this is a vulnerable God who refuses to turn his back on—to shun—human weakness, suffering, and misery. Rather, when he sees his children behaving destructively, rejecting each other and dissolving communal bonds, he mourns, he weeps, he extends his hands to embrace them.
This doctrine of a deity vulnerable to and affected by his creations and their agency makes different demands on adherents than does the doctrine of an absolute, ultimately disaffected God. In terms of the latter: Believing that God will ultimately negate the vagaries of the universe or reverse the consequences of human shortcomings and good and bad decisions, people can experience or witness suffering, attribute it to God’s will (i.e., he sent it for good reason, likely to humble, punish, or test), and claim that in the end, no matter our response, God will arrange everything (including us and our lives) as he would have it arranged. In this view, God’s plan will go off without a hitch, despite—no, in spite of our flawed and fumbling efforts to help. Compassion and service are therefore nice, but not necessary: people extend their hands to comfort, mourn with, and lift others and to right this world’s many wrongs as a temporary salve, or perhaps as an anesthetic to dull mortal pain and suffering. But, in the end, that’s all these efforts are: something to dull mortality’s effects until that rapturous moment when an absolute, all-powerful God will raise us up, once-and-for-all dispense his Medicine, and make everything right.
Those who hold this belief in God—even those who devote their lives to compassionate service and the pursuit of social justice—may have, in Eugene England’s words, an “escape clause,” an excuse to disengage with and distance themselves from others because they may believe that exercising compassion and pursuing justice on the earth matter less if Someone will overshadow our compassionate service and deliver ultimate justice later. England says of this situation: “I don’t know how you could prove this either way, but I have noticed a certain tendency in Mormon absolutists to finally throw up their hands in the face of our huge social problems and leave things to God.”17 I’ve noticed the same tendency surface as some Mormons sometimes lament the world’s current condition, saying, “Wow! Things are getting bad. Isn’t it time for Christ to come yet?”—the assumption being that things will only get better, social conditions will only improve and every wrong be made right when Christ returns and makes everything okay. Until then, the world be damned. I’ll be over here reading my scriptures.
This response might, of course, be hyperbolic. Mormons are taught to serve others, to do all we can to alleviate suffering, and many of us take those teachings seriously. But some might not fully understand why our service matters. We’re called to serve because Christ was a Servant—the greatest, in fact—and we want to be more like him. Yet, Enoch’s vision of a weeping God challenges what we mean when we say we’re trying to be like Jesus. Here’s a Being with knowledge and power enough to shape and to save or destroy worlds. At any given moment, he could intercede and solve the problems we’ve made for ourselves or that come by virtue of life in a bounded system. Or he could wash his hands of us and turn his back on our childishness. Or he could wipe the slate clean and begin again, this time making perfectly obedient lackeys. Instead, he is there, and his bosom—his deep sense of intimacy for and connection with others—is there.18 He refuses to withhold love or to withdraw his arm. His infinite compassion and empathy compel him to be with us no matter the cost.
Standing with this tragic Being, Enoch can’t help but respond in kind: he weeps and extends his arms to embrace and lift all creation. His being expands to make room for God’s suffering and he longs to minister to others with greater mercy and compassion. At Enoch’s response, Moses says, “all eternity shook.”19 Just as people often tremble when we’re overcome with emotion, it seems to me that eternity—the realm of Exalted Beings—would shake with the combined trembling of their deeply felt existence. Enoch’s revised understanding of God tunes him to that trilling, which then reverberates through his being, his language, and his relationships.
III
In late-November 2011, Dad called my siblings and me to his parents’ house so we could take something from their estate to remember them by. Grandpa passed in 2008 and Dad and his siblings had recently moved Grandma into an assisted living center. Sifting for nuggets in the mote- and memory-dense basement, I found Grandpa’s pocket-sized Armed Forces edition of the Book of Mormon (1943), inscribed “Property of Don L. Chadwick ~ Acquired at LDS soldier’s [sic] meetings in Tokyo, Japan, January 6, 1946”; and his triple combination with black, faux leather cover and red-edged pages (1957), inscribed “Don L. Chadwick Afton, Wyo.” Both books are worn, but the Book of Mormon especially: its bent and frayed cover is taped to the binding strip on the outside and, inside, to the book’s first and last pages; its leaves are amber with age and the oil from Grandpa’s repeated touch; and the index concludes with the references for “War,” the final pages having been lost sometime during Grandpa’s life.
Thumbing through the book, raising the mustiness and rot of decaying paper and glue, straining to make out the few notes Grandpa scribbled in pencil in the margins, I tried to inhabit the language as maybe he had done during that post-war soldiers’ meeting in Tokyo or during a homesick night on his bunk while he waited to return to his young wife or years later when he maybe pulled the book from a drawer, opened it to a random page, and mulled over the image of God he found reaching for him through the words. Beside 1 Nephi 22:11, which reiterates ideas Nephi likely discovered via Isaiah,20 Grandpa penciled a question mark in the margin. The question, it seems, is about an image in the verse: a God reaching down from his exalted place, who, as his sleeve pulls back at the movement, bares his arm before all nations. I imagine Grandpa re-visiting the verse, wondering over its meaning, reaching for some answer to a question that he carried like this book. And in response? Another question, another point of uncertainty—and eternal possibility—in a post-World War II world characterized by restlessness and flux. So he lifted his pencil and touched a question mark in the margin: a token that he had been there, inhabiting those verses, that language; that he had weighed himself against their meaning, their promise, and somehow found himself and his knowledge wanting.
I may be puzzling over this more than he ever did. The question mark is, after all, a very light squiggle and dot on the page. But it’s a question mark nonetheless, a symbol of uncertainty, of curiosity and desire, of possibility; and I’ve returned to the one Grandpa drew many times. It first grabbed my attention because it seemed out of place in a book to which millions of people, myself included, turn for answers. Maybe that’s why it was so faint in the margins, though: Grandpa was curious about aspects of the gospel, including God’s character, but didn’t want to appear the doubter or to let any uncertainties in his faith overwhelm the certainties that kept him grounded in Mormonism. Maybe he sensed the far-reaching possibilities and deep personal implications of Isaiah-cum-Nephi’s description of Christ baring his flesh and, with it, the marks of his death: a wounded God reminding all nations that, if they’ll let him, he intends to raise them from personal and social bondage and to teach them how to suffer with grace. The questions the image calls to mind, then, are among Christianity’s most pressing: What kind of God carries wounds? Why does he bear them and why would he bare them? For whom is he reaching? How do they accept his offering? What obligation are they under by virtue of their relationship with him? Remaining open to these questions, resisting the temptation to answer them once and for all, is one way we remain open to all that life, our relationships, our faith, and our God are holding out to us.
Considering these questions as I write, I remember the drifter I met years ago on an early morning run. As we approached each other, he hesitated then moved toward me. His movements made me skittish because I don’t often get approached by people while I’m running and I was in an unfamiliar neighborhood. But he didn’t move to threaten me. Instead he offered thirteen words that have stuck in my mind: “Have you necessarily taken the time to find out what grace is for?” I didn’t stop to answer, even though he turned as I passed and waited for me to respond. I just turned the next corner, anxious to get out of the rain that had begun falling, to wipe my glasses clean, to slip into dry clothes. But the question stuck. I’ve run my mind over it again and again, like I keep returning to an image of Grandpa sitting at a desk or table on his lunch hour or during a slow moment in the office he occupied after the war, or lying on his bunk in dawn’s blur, feeling his way through Nephi’s discourse on salvation, stopping when his mind catches on a metonymy that strikes him: God baring his arm as he reaches to lift his people. But for whatever reason, he can’t parse it, can’t figure out what this bare arm means. And as he reaches for his pencil, I see the warm flesh of his wrist exposed from the end of his shirt and, through the mark he leaves on the page, I sense him reaching to grasp what abides beyond each translucent verse.
NOTES
1. Thich Nhat Hanh, A Lifetime of Peace: Essential Writings by and about Thich Nhat Hanh, edited by Jennifer Schwamm Willis (New York: Marlowe & Company, 2003), 141.
2. This essay explores the implications of a question Adam Miller asks in Letters to a Young Mormon (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2014): “The question is, will we greet [the] passing [of everything and everyone we know] with a closed fist or with an open palm and a consecrated life?” (75).
3. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program: Findings and Conclusions, Washington: GPO (2012).
4. Alistair Bell, “Bruce Jessen Built CIA Interrogation Program; Quit Role as Mormon Bishop,” HuffPost Religion, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/bruce-jessen-mormon-bishop_n_6312234.html (accessed 21 September 2016).
5. Jay Bybee, “Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation Under 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A.” Memo to Alberto R. Gonzales, U.S. Department of Justice: Office of Legal Counsel, Washington (1 Aug. 2002), 1.
6. Bybee 46.
7. Mosiah 18:8–9.
8. Emma Lou Thayne, “Where Can I Turn for Peace?,” Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, 1998), #129. In my attempt to read the lyrics closely, I’ve transcribed the hymn as it’s sung, using line breaks to represent short pauses and stanza breaks to represent longer pauses. The transcription highlights the lyrics’ dynamic rhyme scheme that I discuss in my first meditation.
9. David B. Givens, “Reading Palm-Up Signs: Neurosemiotic Overview of a Common Hand Gesture,” Center for Nonverbal Studies, Center for Nonverbal Studies (2015).
10. Moses 6:6.
11. Isaiah 52:10.
12. 3 Nephi 11:9.
13. D&C 6:37.
14. Moses 7:21.
15. Moses 7:25–27.
16. Moses 7:28.
17. Eugene England, “The Weeping God of Mormonism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35 no.1 (2002): 78–9.
18. Moses 7:30.
19. Moses 7:41.
20. See Isaiah 52:10.