AML Annual 2004

Annual

of the

Association for Mormon Letters

2004

Association for Mormon LettersProvo, Utah

2004 by the Association for Mormon Letters. After publi-cation herein, all rights revert to the authors. The Associationfor Mormon Letters assumes no responsibility for contri-butors statements of fact or opinion.

Editor: Linda Hunter AdamsProduction Director: Marny K. ParkinStaff: Robert Cunningham

Marshelle Mason PapaJena PetersonAmanda RiddleJared SalterErin SaundersAnna SwallowJodi Traveller

The Association for Mormon LettersP.O. Box 51364Provo, UT 84605-1364(801) [email protected]

Note: An AML order form appears at the end of this volume.

iii

Presidential Address

Our Mormon RenaissanceGideon O. Burton 1

Friday Sessions

Keynote Address

The Place of KnowingEmma Lou Thayne 9

The Tragedy of Brigham City: How a Film about Morality Becomes ImmoralMichael Minch 23

The Novelization of Brigham City: An OdysseyMarilyn Brown 29

Pious Poisonings and Saintly Slayings: Creating a Mormon Murder Mystery Genre

Lavina Fielding Anderson 35

Murder Most Mormon: Swelling the National Trend (Part II) Conspiring to Commit

Paul M. Edwards, read by Tom Kimball 39

God and Man in The Miracle Life of Edgar MintBradley D. Woodworth 43

Brady Udall, the Smart-Ass DeaconMary L. Bingham Lee 47

Egypt and Israel versus Germany and Jews: Comparing Margaret Blair Youngs House without Walls to the Bible

Nichole Sutherland 53

Contents

iv

AML Annual 2004

Stone Tables: Believable Characters in Orson Scott Cards Historical FictionHolly King 57

Out of the Mouth of Babes: An Analysis of Orson Scott Cards Use of Dialogue in Enders Game

Casey Vanderhoef 61

Subversion and Containment in XenocideDaniel Muhlestein 65

Saturday Sessions

Keynote Address

Art and Soul: Lessons from Willa Cather for Mormon Writers, Critics, and Audiences

Marilyn Arnold 75

I Write Personal Essays to Save My Soul: The Sermonic Roots of Eugene Englands Literary Voice

Travis Manning 85

Bridging the Divide: Writing about the Spirit for the National Young Adult Market

Kimberley Heuston 97

Real Life, Who Needs It?: Real World Influences on the Writing of Young Adult Fiction

Randall Wright 101

Defiling the Hands with a Holy Book:Future of Book of Mormon Scholarship

Mark Thomas 109

Cities of RefugeHarlow S. Clark 115

Gathering in Nauvoo: Remembrances of the Lofgren FamilyElizabeth Mangum 123

Sister Bean and Satans Power: A Look at Contemporary LDS LegendsRonda Walker 129

Mormon Women Writers and the Healing Power of TruthKelly A. Thompson 135

Wallace Stegners Gathering of Zion: Creating a Usable Mormon PastJennifer Minster Asay 141

Telling the Truth: Teaching Creative Writing to LDS StudentsJack Harrell 145

The Cultural Shaping of American LDS WomenJacqueline Thursby 151

Questing I, Altogether Other, or Both? Three Poems and a Prose Bit on Nature

Patricia Gunter Karamesines 167

My Big Fat Greek Wedding as a Model for LDS FilmmakersEric Samuelsen 173

Dangerous Questions Affecting Closer Interests: Subversion and Containment in The Senator from Utah

Kylie Turley 179

A Mind-Body-Spirit Assault: The True Antagonist in The Giant JoshuaMichelle Ernst 187

Holiness Emerging from My MouthJacqueline Osherow 191

Writing Religion from a Christian PerspectiveDavid McGlynn 193

The Power of ParablesSarah Read 197

The Threat of Mormon CinemaGideon O. Burton 199

v

Contents

NOTE: Unless otherwise identified, all of the papers in this compilation were delivered at the Association for Mormon LettersAnnual Meeting, Passing the Portals: Mormon Literature for the Twenty-first Century, 2122 February 2003, at Utah ValleyState College, chaired by Cherry Silver and Jen Wahlquist, sponsored by the Association for Mormon Letters; the Center forthe Study of Ethics, UVSC; and the Department of English, UVSC. Also presented but not submitted for publication wereThe Mormon Literature Database by Gideon Burton, Connie Lamb, Robert Means, and Larry Draper; and A Spycho-SocialEvaluation of Edgar Mint by Charles J. Woodworth.

Renaissance. The very word conjures notions ofpossibility. It means revival, rebirth, and bythis term we celebrate the best of human creativity,the realization of our greatest potential in art andliterature. Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Galileo,Cellini, Montaigne, Raphael, Gutenberg, Giotto,Petrarch, Castiglione, Cervantes, Copernicus,Michelangelo, Miltonin the bright shadow ofthese leading lights, is it presumptuous to name aMormon Renaissance? Is it an embarrassing under-statement, an oxymoron? Of course it is! You cantcompare My Turn on Earth to King Lear, or ArnoldFriberg to Leonardo da Vinci, or an Enrichmentmeeting refrigerator magnet to Ghibertis baptistrydoors in Florence. Thats just not fair. The Euro-pean Renaissance looms so large, its accomplish-ments are so rich and vast, that the artistic andliterary achievements of our people in comparisoncould only seem, well, very small indeed.

Our culture is in the same position as Britishculture was in the early sixteenth century. The Ital-ian Renaissance had been underway for two hun-dred years by then, and English authors lookedback at Castiglione or Petrarch in Italy with shameand envy. And they should have been ashamed andenvious, for English literature was in pretty badshape. John Skelton, for example, wrote manypoems with form and content like this one, whoselines describe a grotesque moonshiner:

With a whim whamKnit with a trim tramUpon her brain pan;Like an Egypt-i-an. (77)

And this from the poet laureate of both Cambridgeand Oxford! English literature was in trouble. Writerslike Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard began toimitate Petrarchs sonnets. But it took most of thesixteenth century for British writers to experimentwith poetic meters that actually sounded good. Weoften think of Shakespeare representing theRenaissance, but long before Shakespeare camethe experimenters who were less successful withtheir subjects and their sounds. Consider RichardStanyhurst, who diligently translated VirgilsAeneid into English, producing lines like these:

Madness hath enchanted your wits, you townsmen unhappy?

Ween you, blind hoddypecks, the Greekish navy returned? [. . .]

But lo! To what purpose do I chat such janglery trim-trams? (55657)

To what purpose? I think I know. A few janglerytrim-trams must be coughed out before To be ornot to be can come to be. The European Renais-sance was a period of three hundred years. For theMormon Renaissance, patience is in orderas wellas tolerance and encouragement for those in theapprenticeship of their craft, or those who are will-ing to experiment with new forms of expression ormedia. In the nineteenth century, less than twentyMormon novels were published. In the twentiethcentury, there have been a thousand. Mormonpens have awakened, and we would do better tomeasure and commend each moment of literaryprogress, than to await the messianic arrival ofsome future Mormon Milton.

1

Our Mormon Renaissance

Gideon O. Burton

Presidential Address

For this reason the Association for MormonLetters presents its awards, prints its publications,and holds its conferences: to encourage and cri-tique Mormon authors. For nearly thirty years wehave been teaching one another upon whose shoul-ders we must stand to reach upward. I wholeheart-edly believe Wayne Booths dictum that Mormonswill never attain a great artistic culture until wehave achieved a great critical culture (Booth, 32),for until we learn discernment, until we can sepa-rate the wheat from the chaff aesthetically and eth-ically, we would not even recognize a MormonShakespeare if we had one. You will forgive me if Isuggest that, after examining hundreds of Mormonpublications and products, I find there yet remainssome winnowing to be done.

Criticism was a central component animatingthe European Renaissance, for the Renaissance wasnot simply a period in which genius somehow flour-ished; those accomplishments occurred in responseto and in very conscious appreciation of superiorworks of art that had preceded them. Paradoxically,the great strides forward of the Renaissance wereonly possible by looking steadfastly backward. Theylooked to models of the greatest works of literatureamong the Greeks and Romans and strove to imi-tate the powers they perceived in poets like Horaceand Ovid, in orators like Cicero and Demosthenes,in playwrights like Terence and Seneca, and in theepic writers Homer and Virgil. The past, they felt,was passport to their future. They felt inferior towhat was written long before, and in this stronghumility they found a patience to observe the for-mal qualities of Latin syntax or of Greek construc-tions, and studied the classical authors as much fortheir form and style as for content, for their rheto-ric, their arrangement, their use of reasoning andtheir riches of rhythm. The ancient writers wereheld in awe, but the Renaissance humanists turnedtheir awe into analysis, knowing they could nevermatch the achievements of the ancients withoutunderstanding their methods.

I believe we have the same inferiority complexas Renaissance authors did, but I dont know thatwe have transformed those feelings of inadequacyinto a similar humility in which we are willing tostudy carefully exemplary authors from the past. As

a writing teacher I am continually amazed howmany students fancy themselves to be writers with-out bothering to be readers. The greatest writersknow their debts to generations who preceded them,and in their long apprenticeships have tried on words,styles, and forms they found effective in the great-est writers. Shakespeare was derivative, and glori-ously so. I do not mean he simply borrowed plots.He studied and transformed the genres he had read,from Senecan tragedy to pastoral romance. His son-nets also show him working by imitation, closelyobserving specific rhetorical strategies and patternsfrom his predecessors. The great Renaissance liter-ary works came about as acts of emulation.

Can we pretend to achieve Mormon Shake-speares if we will not imitate Shakespeares respectfor and careful study of his predecessors? Can wepretend to aspirations in the novel if we will notstudy how the best of novels work, both in ourown tradition and the larger world? I have readsome current LDS domestic fiction and know fullwell the authors have read neither Jane Austen norJohn Updike. I see some LDS Young Adult fictionwhose authors havent bothered with E. B. Whiteor with LDS writer Virginia Sorensens Miracles onMaple Hill, which won the Newbery Medal in1957. And if Mormon writers of popular fictionhave read Dickens or Twain, it is not very apparent.Do you want to write a philosophical novel buthave not read Herman Melville or Umberto Eco?We have popular historical novels in spades now,but have these authors read Stephen Crane, IrvingStone, Lew Wallace, Gore Vidal? Any Mormonwriting historical fiction better have read MaurineWhipples Giant Joshua and Virginia SorensensA Little Lower than the Angels. We condemn our-selves to a cycle of ephemeral pulp unless and untilwe follow a literary spirit of Elijah, turning to ourliterary forefathers and foremothers, preparing forour children works that will outlast the first paperthey are printed on.

Such looking back and looking closely at ourliterary heritage does not suit well todays produce-and-consume markets, where appetites are quicklyfed and satisfied with little accounting to the past orto the future. When the entire culture has attentiondeficit disorder, it takes an act of bravery to look

2

AML Annual 2004

over ones shoulder even a decade or two, or tolook beyond the afternoons best-seller list into alasting future. Planned obsolescence is the realityof contemporary publishing, and Mormon mar-kets, like national ones, feed on novelty, not neces-sarily quality, and there is always the distinctpossibility that a popular success may be falselyequated with literary success. In contrast to todaysbook marketing, I think of the publisher AldusManutius in Renaissance Venice. Committed toissuing the best texts of the best literary authors ofantiquity, his press put out quality, affordable edi-tions of almost every significant Greek and Latinauthor and made possible the growth of thosehumanist studies that became the backbone of aliberal education to this day.

If we look back to the early days of Mormon-ism we can find this same Renaissance hunger forgood literature, an appreciation of things literarythat went beyond gift books and doctrinal treatises.We have an ardent desire to increase the value ofour literary productions, said Elder Francis M.Lyman in 1899, speaking of the Sunday Schoolorganization (Lyman, 83). The Sunday School had,since the pioneers arrived in Utah, establishedlibraries in wards consisting of classical literature,and church auxiliaries like the Relief Society pro-moted both the reading of great authors and thewriting of fiction. There have been so many ReliefSociety lessons on studying the English novel orShakespeare that in the Mormon Literature Data-base we have had to establish the Relief Society les-son as a distinct literary genre. The ImprovementEra meant improvement educationally and cultur-ally, not just spiritually, and tried to carry intoMormon circles larger discussions about educa-tion, books, and films. Mormon history is espe-cially rich in the literary contributions of women,from Eliza R. Snows poetry to the many literarycontributions of Emmeline Wells as editor of theWomens Exponent, to the annual short fiction con-tests in the Relief Society Magazine.

From the pulpit of general conference good liter-ature has been endorsed and recommended, notsimply in negative terms to contrast with inappro-priate entertainment, but because in its beginnings

Mormonism valued literature the same way thatthe Renaissance humanists didas a vital link bothwith the past and with the future, as a place wherea more holistic vision of human achievement couldfind its proper expression. Elder Levi Edgar Youngwas particularly ardent in the 1950s in attemptingto reanimate this early vision for language, learn-ing, and literature, reminding the Saints howJoseph Smith himself became a student of Greekand Hebrew, and classes in the ancient languageswere organized in the Kirtland Temple (Young,1950, 117). In Nauvoo schools and a universitywere founded. The need for a fine library waskeenly felt, explained Elder Young, for the seven-ties must then as now be eagerly reading andsearching for the truths of the gospel (Young,1952, 104). Like Orson Whitney before him, LeviEdgar Young emphasized that a missionarys rolewas not merely to dispense gospel truths, but alsoto discover them among the peoples and writingsof the world. In 1845 the Times and Seasonsdescribed Nauvoos Seventies library:

The concern has been commenced on a foot-ing and scale broad enough to embrace the artsand sciences, every where: so that the Seventieswhile traveling over the face of the globe as theLords Regular Soldiers, can gather all the curi-ous things, both natural and artificial, with allthe knowledge, inventions, and wonderfulspecimens of genius that have been gracing theworld for almost six thousand years . . . [form-ing] the foundation for the best library in theworld! (Qtd. in Young, 1952, 104)

A few years later in Salt Lake City, attempting stillto fulfill this ambition of gathering and appreciat-ing the worlds best achievements, the combinedseventies quorums proposed the erection of anextensive rotunda in Great Salt Lake City, to becalled the Seventies Hall of Science,some-thing like the British Museum that many of theearly Twelve had visited in London. BrighamYoungs brother, Joseph Young, headed the project,with Truman Angell designing the building inan ambitious gothic revival style (Young, 1952,1045). In this the early Mormons were like thoseof the Renaissance whose imaginations had been

3


fired by the architectural ruins of Rome and whosimilarly desired a cultural revival on a grand scale.

The great Rotunda was not built, but this idealof collecting and disseminating the best litera-ture of the past took hold, and soon the Seventieslibrary contained the works of John Locke, Tacitus,Goethe, Bunyon, Marco Polo, and Charles Darwin.

In 1851 a vast library was purchased in NewYork City and brought out to the Utah frontier,adding to the territorial library the works of Shake-speare, Milton, Bacon, Homer, Juvenal, Lucretius,Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, Montaigne,Spenser, Herodotus, Goldsmith, and others. Thelibrary received copies of the New York Herald,New York Evening Post, the Philadelphia SaturdayCourier, and the North American Review. Of thescientific works there were Newtons Principia,Herschels Outlines of Astronomy, and Von Hum-boldts Cosmos. . . . The treatises on philosophyincluded the works of John Stuart Mill, MartinLuther, John Wesley, and Emanuel Swedenborg(Young, 1952, 1056).

We have a very strong history of valuing litera-ture and writing in Mormonism, if we will embraceour own peoples history and reanimate their earlyvision of literatures role in building up a civilizedand sophisticated people, equally at ease with reli-gious doctrine and with secular knowledge.

The Mormon Renaissance is not something inthe distant future, but already something underway.It began with Mormonism itself, for the restoredgospel names the rebirth not only of the primitiveChristian church, but the rebirth of human civi-lization itself and of those liberal ideals of em-bracing all truth that shared by both Latter-daySaints and their Renaissance forbears. Our theo-logy, explained Parley P. Pratt,

is the science of all other sciences and usefularts . . . philosophy, astronomy, history, math-ematics, geography, languages, the science ofletters; and blends the knowledge of all mattersof fact, in every branch of art, or of research. Itincludes, also, all the scientific discoveries andinventionsagriculture, the mechanical arts,architecture, shipbuilding, the properties andapplications of the mariners compass, navigation

and music. All that is useful, great, and good;all that is calculated to sustain, comfort, instruct,edify, purify, refine or exalt intelligences.(Pratt, 12)

If we do not see ourselves as participating inthe ongoing Mormon Renaissance, then we haveabandoned the sense of vision that gave a few thou-sand immigrants and frontiersmen the courage tolay down cities and raise up temples, founding uni-versities, colonies and industries, confident thatGod was providently leading his people forwarddespite mobocracy, apostasy, and primitive condi-tions. Their small beginnings were matched bytheir grand vision.

The early Latter-day Saints shared with theirRenaissance progenitors a profound sense of oppor-tunity, renewal, wonder, and discovery that cameabout in the wake of those ships that had newlytraversed the planet and opened new worlds upto the Renaissance mind: Colombus had discoveredthe New World; de Gama had rounded the Capeof Good Hope and opened the East to the West;Cabot had sighted Newfoundland; Vespucci hadfound Brazil, Balboa had discovered the PacificOcean, Magellan had circumnavigated the earth;Jacques Cartier had discovered the St. LawrenceSeaway. Similarly, early advances in science hadopened up both the heavens and the earth: Coper-nicus purported the heliocentric universe whichGalileos telescope and Tycho Brahes observationconfirmed; and Robert Hookes microscope in theseventeenth century would open another world. Inthis context of expanded possibility, it became pos-sible to imagine new orders of being, new socialworlds to match the riches and wonders of thephysical world opening up. Thomas Mores Utopiais an excellent example of how the Renaissancehumanists both looked backward to the ancientworld as a model (Mores Utopia updated PlatosRepublic in fantasizing a better human order onearth) and forward to new possibilities that hadbeen opened in the human spirit just as new geog-raphies had been opened up on the horizon.

The nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints con-tinued this Renaissance tradition in simultaneously

4

AML Annual 2004

looking back to ideal societies in antiquitytheprimitive Church and Enochs City of Zionwhile embracing the American ideal symbolized bythe very frontier that they pioneered, where newhuman worlds seemed as possible as those vastnew landscapes before them. Mormons havealways envisioned a millennial society in the nottoo distant future, embodying our highest ideals.

Mormons put their social idealism to work, ofcourse, creating Nauvoo, Great Salt Lake City, andthe United Order communities of late nineteenth-century Utah in real-life Utopian experiments. LikeThomas More, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, ourliterature has included attempts to depict an ideal-ized society. In Added Upon Nephi Anderson por-trayed a millennial world where the literary artswould be as significant as the innovations in eco-nomics and politics that other utopian literatureshave emphasized. More and Anderson are fol-lowed by speculative Mormon authors like OrsonScott Card. In the realm of science fiction we canrecognize the Renaissance impulse to conceptual-ize new worlds.

Are we now reluctant to voyage upon the dan-gerous but rewarding seas of other genres, otheruses for literature? Are we content to settle forsome of the crass and hackneyed uses of literaturethat surround us? Or can we envision literature ascarrying us toward something, as proving not anornament but a necessary accouterment of an exaltedsociety? To see the Mormon Renaissance fullyachieved we must re-envision the function of Mor-mon literature. It will not be a vehicle for marshal-ing recruits; it will not be pulpit pablum todecorate doctrine; it must not be an inert alterna-tive to worldly media; it shouldnt be an uncriticalimitation of established genres. It must be seen asan engine, a vehicle for discovering truths sacredand secular, a medium for bringing about Zion.This is the understanding of literature that OrsonWhitney gave: literature is an epistemology, a wayof knowing, a way of capturing and focusing whatis of good report and praiseworthy within and out-side Mormon borders. Literature is not a travelbrochure, advertising an attractive destination. It isthe ship in which we travel, by which we wend our

way, finding treasures in foreign ports, and weath-ering storms and waves.

The transformative powers of literature, thespiritual resources of imaginative writing, were notlost upon the Protestant reformers who formed thesecond wave of the European Reanissance. I ampersuaded, said Martin Luther,

that without knowledge of literature pure theo-logy cannot at all endure, just as heretofore,when letters have declined and lain prostrate,theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lainprostrate; nay, I see that there has never been agreat revelation of the Word of God unless Hehas first prepared the way by the rise and pros-perity of languages and letters, as though theywere John the Baptists. Certainly it is my desirethat there shall be as many poets and rhetori-cians as possible, because I see that by thesestudies, as by no other means, people are won-derfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truthand for handling it skillfully and happily.Therefore I beg of you to urge your youngpeople to be diligent in the study of poetry andrhetoric. (17677)

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries brought a new focusupon the literary, and upon the obligation of eachChristian to find his or her way not only by read-ing scripture, but by writing. The personal journalbecame a necessary component of protestantChristianity, for each person needed to composehis or her own salvation narrative, a record of Godsprovidence. Sometimes I think we cheapen thenotion of a personal record, as though we toss abone to the grandchildren by assembling a passablescrapbook. We would do well to reread the soul-wrenching devotions and meditations of JohnDonne. When he wrote no man is an island, hewas not writing for posterity; he was writing forsanity, each line a lifeline to his God. GeorgeHerbert called his confessional poetry his privateejaculationswhich in his day meant shortearnest prayers uttered in moments of emergency.His poems may have lasted to futurity, but theywere his present means to wrestle with God, toexpress his joys and to calm his fears. Perhaps the

5


best Mormon tradition of devotional writings thatcan ever be written must never be done with an eyeto publication, but to meditation. I think, perhaps,that the great strength of Mormon writing willcome only as we give up worrying how our wordswill sell, or how they will represent our culture. Aninner Renaissance is the only authentic one wecan fashion. Revision is repentance; turning a pageis turning a new leaf.

Such personal literary reformation is dauntingat times, perhaps because of the very fact that ourliterary forbears loom so large in their eloquence.We fear we could never measure up. Why shouldwe write? Every ship is a romanitc object, saidEmerson, except that we sail in. Embark, and theromance quits our vessel and hangs on every othersail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and weshun to record it (252). But no life is trivial ifrecorded with vigor and honesty and with respectfor the reforming force of form itself. To recordones life is to reform ones life. In the spirit ofRenaissance explorationboth geographical andliterarywe should set sail across the unexploredregions of our past or present, with as much faithin where words can take us as they had faith thatships would take them. They opened up worlds,and words opened up them.

So let the Mormon Renaissance begin withineach of us! Enough of this hand-wringing andtimidness, this reluctance to compose ourselves inink, to do that work with words that is worthy ofthe Word, the Son of God, who descended belowall things and above all things, tracing for us thenecessary trajectory of our souls and our art.Enough of worrying ourselves into mumbling andstumbling, when we have so much to say, so muchto express, inspired doubly by a living faith and ourfaith in the lively, godly nature of the arts. We holdback our personal salvation and we mock the progressof Zion by not consecrating our aesthetic sensibili-ties, our drafts and redrafts, our stories, our narrativesof life in all its vibrant vicissitudes, its mystifyingcontradictions, its soaring ecstasies and soul-wrenching defeats. Eternity is within us and beforeus; we have tasted the goodness of God. Yet we aremired in ignorance and mortality and sin and self-

doubt and the misgivings and misfirings of a mil-lion sordid sorts. And in the middle of this messGod has slapped us on the cheeks, has shoved apaintbrush or a keyboard in our hands, presentedus with canvas and paper and stolen scraps of timeand told us Be like me, create. He has given usredeeming work to do, if we will take the invitationto work out our tangled thoughts, to work throughstyle and symbol, plot and character, to find himand to better know the suffering he has known, tofind our siblings, all our fellow sufferers, and findourselves renewing and renewed through the roughand tumble of these words and images, patternsand rhyme, music and color and rhythm. And yetwe stand like balking Beehives at our first youthdance, unwilling to embrace the Bridegroom,unwilling to accept the gifts he lavishes on usthrough that unspeakable opulence that is literacy.

I am a Mormon, and so I must create. I havecome to know a creating God, who calls himselfthe Alpha and Omega, the first and last lettersof the Greek alphabet, his very name remindingme that his good news comprises all that can besaid and thought within the bounds of language.Can I be his disciple, really, if I will not unleash thegodly gift of language he has given me? I do notthink I can.

The Mormon Renaissance begins for us all themoment any one of us steps forward to acceptthe rebirth offered to us through the mediumof the Word. Immersed in words, will we be bap-tized by the Word, by the divine capacities of lan-guage, or will we stand to one side idling withcatchphrases and soundbytes, regurgitating wordsand patterns acceptable within some applaudedgenre, unwilling to bite our teeth into the pith andcore of what our language can convey if given evenhalf its mighty scope?

The Mormon Renaissance begins as we respectwhat writing can effect within our souls and ourcommunities. The Renaissance Humanists believedliterature could rejuvenate both individual soulsand entire civilizations. Literature is a binding force.It makes communities and makes communion, bothwith God and every soul responding to its potencies.It finds the parts of us that we had hidden and

6

AML Annual 2004

ignored, it lets us feel the depths of wonder and con-fusion, pain and joy that we have never dared toshow to others. Oh, it is a messy thing, as messy asthe lives and thoughts that it reflects, deflects, inspects,and redirects. It is a salving, saving medium, andwe have not discovered its rejuvenating center if wereduce its function to teaching, preaching, or thenarrow motives of fame or money.

When will the Mormon Renaissance begin?When your Mormon Renaissance begins. So tellme, where is it you have hidden your true self whileyou have tried to write or say what others mightapprove of ? Where is that shadow self, the one sofull of anger and grief and profanity and lust andall the other potent passions in which you liveand move and have your being as much as any bet-ter self you show at church? Where is he or she?Free him. Liberate her. Grow brave enough to fol-low Jesus and to face your own Sanhedrin, and sayyes, this is who I am. Until we are willing tostand condemned in open drama, we are not readyfor the closure of redemption in the final act.

Your Mormon Renaissance takes shape mis-shapenly, of course. So show me, where are all yoursmudged and halting draftsdiscarded bodies ofyour vain attempts to say your say? There is noRenaissance without the thousand dying bodies ofthose false attempts, the skeletons of first or worstideas, piling up a mound of wadded paper, or clot-ting up your hard drive in a folder you namescrap. Creation is vivisection, things come half-alive and incomplete, a ream of shameful prosemust dung the way before a seedling roots itself inviability. The ink is amniotic fluid that surroundsand nourishes the thing you bring to being.

Renaissance means rebirth. Every birth is vio-lent and delicate, precious, and messy. Birth is asavage sea, says Pablo Neruda, that summons upa wave and plucks a shrouded apple from a tree(Neruda, 41). We must have the faith to be rebornagain and yet again, to find our vision in revision,and then at length we shall emerge, shining andupright, with words to match the glory of our God.

WORKS CITED

Booth, Wayne. Religion versus Art: Can the AncientConflict Be Resolved? In Arts and Inspiration.Ed. Steven Sondrup, 2634. Provo, UT: BrighamYoung University Press, 1980.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Writings of RalphWaldo Emerson. New York: Wm. H. Wise and Co.,1929.

Luther, Martin. Letter to Eoban Hess, March 29,1523. In Luthers Correspondence, trans. and ed.Preserved Smith and Charles M. Jacobs. Vol. 2.Philadelphia: United Lutheran Publication House,1918.

Lyman, Francis M. In Conference Report, October 1899,7683. Salt Lake City: Deseret News Publishing,1899.

Neruda, Pablo. Births [Los nacimientos]. In FullyEmpowered [Plenos Poderes], trans. Alastair Reid.New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975.

Pratt, Parley P. Key to the Science of Theology: A Voiceof Warning. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book , 1965.

Rollins, Hyder E., and Herschel Baker, eds. The Renais-sance in England: Non-dramatic Prose and Verse ofthe Sixteenth Century. Prospect Heights, IL: Wave-land, 1992.

Skelton, John. The Tunning of Elinour Rumming. InRollins and Baker, 7781.

Stanyhurst, Richard. The First Four Books of Virgil HisAeneis. In Rollins and Baker, 55357.

Young, Levi Edgar. In Conference Report, October1950, 11319. Salt Lake City: Deseret News Pub-lishing, 1950.

. In Conference Report, October 1952, 1037.Salt Lake City: Deseret News Publishing, 1952.

7


It is an honor for me to be here addressing youtoday, my friends. In many ways I am a babe inyour woods, you historians, biographers, genealo-gists, analyzers of facts, critics, purveyors of infor-mation, researchers, tellers of truth. In fact, when Ireceived a conference schedule from Jen Wahlqulstlisting my topic as Messianic Mormon Literature,and another from Cherry Silver saying I would talkon New Trends in Mormon Literature, I nearlyhopped back on a ship to the Panama Canal thathad just brought Mel and me home from elevendays of no-think indulgence on the Caribbean. Itwas my fault. Id been out of town for eleven daysas theyd tried to reach me. They needed a title forthe program, so Messianic? I looked it up: Markedby mystical idealism in behalf of a cherished cause.Maybe. But Messianic Mormon Literature? I wasflattered about their estimation of my scholarlypossibilities, and they could not have been moreaccommodating when I returned and asked themto include a more suitable title. My world of writ-ing is one that sometimes has little to do with facts,to say nothing of research. My historian husbandfinds truth in what has happened. Without a cal-endar of events, to him, nothing has happened. Mytruth is often in what surrounded that happeningand is most often not based on the calendar orwhats been written about it, even ordinary, letalone Messianic. So instead, my topic will be whatI know something about, like whats in my newbook, The Place of Knowing, The Spiritual Auto-biography of a Mormon Matriarch, out in Octoberwith Greg Kofford Books.

Its about knowing. In other languages there arethree verbs for our English verb to know. First,to know a factthat Im standing here, youre sit-ting there; that 2 + 2 = 4 (or did till quantumphysics had a say). Second, to know a person, tohave acquaintance with someoneas I know mydaughter Shelley, who drove me to Provo thismorning, or as I know many of you out there.Third is simply to know that I know, not related toanything palpable or provable, but to knowlikeabout the hereafter.

Last Monday at 4:35 P.M. I was at the bedsideof Virginia Parker Peterson, my friend sinceseventh grade at Irving Junior High. She wasdying. Her daughter Kari, a nurse, had called meto come. She knew the fact that I had known Vir-ginia for sixty-six years. She had lain in a benigncoma all day, not responding even to the love ofmaybe twenty of her family who surrounded herbed. Lou, we knew she wanted you to be here.And goodness knows I wanted to be.

I took her handbeautiful, the hand of apianist, slim, unmarked, always her nails polishedher beautician daughter Ginni had seen to thateven thenshe knew how and knew how much hermother liked it.

My friends face was stilled, immobile, far fromthe face Id known on a young girl, a vital, colorful,free-spirited young girl who dared to wear purplelipstick in eighth grade when the rest of us worenone, who dumbfounded us all by going from thesorority at the U, on a mission, and then marryingan ensign in the navy, getting her BA at the U

9

The Place of Knowing

Emma Lou Thayne

Keynote Address

when she was the mother of six, and counselingthere in Student Affairs. I knew her as a contribu-tor on our General Board writing committee, as askier and water-skier, a reader of novels and scrip-tures and news that shed pass on to me, saying,Lou, youd love thisor hate itshe knew me.What a privilege it is to be known.

When her one living son was called to the Sec-ond Quorum of the Seventy, she smiled; when hecareened off a mountain starting a machine for ayoung cousin and was paralyzed, she fell in a hall-way, broke her hip, was taken to a care center andnever left. When her angel, steady, sturdy husband,Wayne, died of cancer two years ago, she beganher disappearance. Now after surgery and compli-cations with her diabetes dictating the possibleamputation of a leg, her four daughters and thatson in his wheelchair knew her well enough toknow to tell her attendants to pull the tubes, to lether go.

Still holding her hand, as I kissed my dear buddyon her forehead, her girls standing near said, Shefluttered her eyelidsher only sign of life forhours. Then I leaned close to tell her what I wasthere forwhat I know I was there for.

Virginia, you will be with Marilyn [her sister],your folks, and Wayneand Kevin [who died ateighteen months]. You will be welcomed into a beautyyou cannot imagineinto the Light. I know, Ivebeen there, you know. I knew she knew. In a freakyaccident on the freeway Id had a death experience.Wed talked of it often. Her breathing changed. Infive minutes my once colorful friend was gone.Drew, her son, with tears streaming down hishandsome face, his hands immobile on the armsof his wheelchair, said, She waited for you, EmmaLou. She needed you here. What she needed waswhat I know.

True or not, I needed to be there, was gratefulbeyond words to Karl for calling me, to know to call.Ill go from here this morning with all of you whoknow so much that I dont, to speak at her funeral.

Thank you for allowing me this chance toexamine with you the knowing that is ineffable.

Ineffable.

I know thoroughly that angels abide. Miracleshappen. Prayer is expectation and fulfillment. Hereand there are undivided except by our inability tosee without seeing. Love is eternal. As is God. Weare too. For all of my life, Ive been showered withthese truths. But only in my growing older and uphave I noticed. Maybe because Ive found themmost often in the ineffable.

I remember looking that word up about thirtyyears ago to make sure I understood it when a son-in-law, Paul Markosian, used it in a poem aboutflying solo in a small plane.

Ineffable: Beyond expression; indescribable orunspeakable. Not to be uttered: the ineffable nameof God.

I understood it well. It was the moment beforethe coming of a poem, seeing a baby born, watch-ing that aspen drop its golden leaves in a wind, therich smell of their mulch, the song of a streamfalling into itself, an aria with flute, the flight of adancer. It was a wilted plant coming to life witha drink of water, the crescendo of making love, thedisappearance of a bruise. It was seeing a visionthat I later leaned was not there in the painting ofthe Sacred Grove in the chapel of my childhood.It was accord surrounding a table, eyes holding. Itwas that region between sleeping and waking, theultimate access to how. It was a daughter skiing aflawless slalom, another playing a concerto or cre-ating a stained glass window, any one of themdoing what I cantor can. It was the arrival of afriend I had just thought about or the safe return ofa dear I had just prayed about. It was the whisper-ing of my mother on the day she died, her talkingto someonenot meas I held her hand and knewshe was about to join that someone. It was whathappened to me in my death experience and longreturn. Ineffable. That third kind of knowing.

How does it work in our world? For us writers?Most of us dont write because we want to; we writebecause we have to.

Were all here because were writers, part of thatsolitary, confounding compulsion to put our kindof truth on a page. It is a solitary occupation. Thankall thats holy, remembering that God so loved the

10

AML Annual 2004

world that He didnt send a committee. But He hasgiven some instructions to the likes of us. As he didto Emma Smith: And thy time shall be given towriting, and to learning much (D&C 25:8). Oursis a kingdom of words and access to what inspiresthem. Again in Doctrine & Covenants 88:11: Andthe light which shineth, which giveth you light, isthrough him who enlighteneth your eyes, whichis the same light that quickeneth your understand-ings. That quickening is as persistent as a grain ofsand in the brain and then the surprise as it comesup on a screen or a page. The outrageous peace ofletting it out. . . . What a forever crazy, lovely dis-ease we have.

About this knowing as we write. Just because I cantprove something does not mean it is not true. Justbecause it does not appear on the calendar does notmean it did not happen.

We are, after all, our stories. How to explainthe ineffable with a story? A good example isJostein Gaarders in Sophies Choice: The astronaut,who was not a believer, said to the brain surgeon,I have been in the cosmos many times, and neverhas I seen a heavenly being. The brain surgeon,who was a believer, replied. I have been insidemany clever brains, but never have I seen a thoughtor an idea.

This is that third kind of knowing. Beyond believ-ing or even having faith. Its knowing. It involves asearch for wholeness as ongoing as prayer. Let metake you on my journey to that Place of Knowing,starting through the perception of a childthroughintuition and hope, my first experience with death:

First Loss

My grandma shared her bed with me Till she died when I was twelve. We slept with breaths that matched. (I went to sleep every night restraining Deliberately one extra breath in five To let her slower time teach mine to wait.)

She never knew I waited, but talked To me of Mendon where Indians ferreted

Her isolated young-wife home for cheese and honey, And of Santa Barbara and eerie tides that Drew her now for gentle months away from snow. And sometimes of Evangeline lost in the forest

primeval.

Grandmas batter-beating, white-gloved, laughing Daytime self slept somewhere else, and she visited Mellifluous beyond my ardent reach, always off Before me. I followed into rhythms I knew Were good, her chamois softness weighing me By morning toward a cozy common center.

She died there when I was twelve.I was sleeping, alien, down the hailIn a harder bed, isolated from the delicateDestruction that took its year to take her.That night my mother barely touched my hairAnd in stiff, safe mechanics twirled the customary

Corners of my pillow one by one. Grandmas gone,She said. Crepuscular against the only lightAlive behind her in the hall, she somehow left.My covers fell like lonely lead on only me.I lay as if in childrens banks of white whereAfter new snow we plopped to stretch and carve

Our shapes like paper dolls along a fold. Now, lying on my back, I ran my longest arms From hip to head, slow arcs on icy sheets, And whispered childhoods chant to the breathless

room: Angel, Angel, snowy Angel, Spread your wings and fly.

And later through experience with the ineffable:Many years into my adulthood when asked by

my poet friend Maxine Kumin about why I stayin my Mormonism, I wrote a story to explain it:

When I was a little girl, my father took me tohear Helen Keller in the Tabernacle. I must havebeen about eight or nine, and Id read about HelenKeller in school, and my mother had told me herstory. She decided it would be more important forme to go than for her. I remember sitting in thebalcony right at the back of that huge domed build-ing that was supposed to have the best acousticsin the world. Heleneverybody called her thatwalked in from behind a curtain under the choirseats with her teacher, Annie Sullivan. She talked at

11


the regular placewithout a microphone in thosedays, but we could hear perfectly, her guttural, slow,heavily pronounced speechall about her life andher beliefs. Her eyes were closed and when it cametime for questions from the audience, she put herfingers on her teachers lips and then repeated forus what the question had been. She answered ques-tions about being deaf and blind and learning toread and to type and, of course, to talk. Hearingthat voice making words was like hearing words forthe first time, as if language had only come intobeinginto my being at leastthat moment.

Someone asked her Do you feel colors? Illnever forget her answer, the exact sound of itSome-times . . . I feel . . . blue. Her voice went upslightly at the end and meant she was smiling. Theaudience didnt know whether to laugh or cry.After quite a lot of questions, she said, I would . . .like to ask . . . a fa-vor of you. Of course the audi-ence was all alert. Is your Mormon prophet here?she asked. There was a flurry of getting up on thefront row, and President Heber J. Grant walked upthe stairs to the stand. She reached out her handand he took It. All I could think was, oh, I wish Iwere taking pictures of that. I . . . would like . . .,she said, to hear your organ . . . play . . . your fa-mous songabout your pio-neers. I . . . wouldlike . . . to re-mem-ber hear-ing it here, all thetime holding the hand he had given to her toshake. I liked them together, very much.

I remember thinking I am only a little girl,probably others know, but how in the world willshe hear the organ? But she turned toward PresidentGrant and he motioned to Alexander Schreiner,the Tabernacle organist, who was sitting near theloft. At the same time President Grant led her up afew steps to the back of the enormous organit has five manuals and eight thousand pipes. Wewere all spellbound. He placed her hand on thegrained oak of the console, and she stood all alonefacing us in her long black velvet dress with herright arm extended, leaning slightly forward andtouching the organ, with her head bowed.

Brother Schreiner played Come, Come, YeSaints, each verse a different arrangement, theorgan pealing and throbbingthe bass pedals like

fog hornsas only he could make happen. HelenKeller stood therehearing through her handand sobbing.

Probably a lot more than just meprobablylots of us in the audience were mouthing the wordsto ourselvesGird up your loins, fresh couragetake. Our God will never us forsake, and then wellhave this tale to tellall is well, all is well . . .I could see my great-grandparents, converts fromEngland and Wales and France and Denmark in thatcircle of their covered wagons, singing over theirfires in the cold nights crossing the plains. Three ofthem had babies dieall under twoand my grand-mother, great grandpas second wife whom he loved,burried in Wyoming. And should we die, beforeour journeys through, Happy day! all is well. Wethen are free from toll and sorrow too. With thejust we shall dwell. But if our lives are spared againto see the Saints their rest obtain, Oh how wellmake this chorus swell. All is well! All is well!

So then, that tabernacle, that singing, my ances-tors welling in me, my father beside me, that mag-nificent woman all combined with the organ andthe man who played it and the man who had ledher to it, and whatever passed between the organand her passed on to me. I believed. I believed itallthe seeing without seeing, the hearing with-out hearing, the going by feel toward somethingholy, something that could make her cry and couldlift my scalp right off, something as unexplain-able as a vision or a mystic connection, somethingentering the pulse of a little girl, something that nomatter what, would never go away. What it hadto do with Joseph Smith or his vision or his gospelI never would really understandall I know tothis day is that I believe. Whatever it is, I believein it. I get impatient with peoples interpretationsof it, with dogma and dictum, but somewhereway inside me and way beyond impatience orindifference there is that insistent, confounding, sohelp me, sacred singingAll is well. All is well. Myown church inhabited by my own people, and prob-ably my own doctrines, but my lamp, my songmy church. I would be cosmically orphanedwithout it.

12

AML Annual 2004

That believing stayed. When I was a not-so-youngmother my knowing found voice in a hymn:

The year before my accident, the Mormonchurch published a long-awaited new hymnbook.On page 129 appeared the words I had writtenwhile trying to deal with the scary biological illnessof our oldest daughter, then a freshman in college.In 1970 manic depression or bi-polar disease,anorexia, and bulimia were unknowns. More thanbewildered by our usually happy nineteen-year-oldBeckys self-destructive behavior, we stumbled inthe bleakest time we had known in our family.Luckily, we sought professional help, found it in asuperb doctor and a newly found medical miracle,a simple salt, lithium. She would need it for therest of her life. In and out of hospitals, through baf-fling efforts at continuing school, as she fought forher very life, through anger and despair, she and Inever lost touch.

During that time of despair, I was working withthe General Board of the YWMIA to prepare a pro-gram for thousands of teachers of young women.My friend Joleen Meredith had composed musicfor a number of songs to lyrics I had written. Weneeded a finale. Why not a hymn? Like Becky, Joleenhad suffered from a genetic depression herself, soI knew that we both understood the imperativebehind asking Where can I turn for peace? Onone typically hectic Saturday morning I went tomy makeshift basement study among the lines andshelves of the storage room, let my pen find its way,and, in less than an hour, intuited three verses withthe answer. I called Joleen. She took the phone toher piano, sat, and as I read a line, she composed aline. We had our hymn, a hymn that would disap-pear after that program only to resurface in thenew hymnbook.

The search for inner peace is universal. Who ofus does not face grieving, loss, anger, illness, hope-lessness? I know that the peace expressed in thehymn is what provided the ultimate healing forBecky and for me as her mother. When we includedit in our book Hope and Recovery, our New Yorkpublisher declared it too religious. But we insisted.What it spoke of had been basic not only to hopebut to recovery. It stayed in the manuscript.

In the years since, the hymn has been trans-lated into uncounted languages, from Swedish toBaba Indonesian, from Spanish to Cantonese. Oncemy doctor brother on a medical mission with hiswife called me from an island off of Africa to say,Hello, Lou. Im homesick for you. We just heardyour hymn sung by wonderful black twelve-year-oldsin Portuguese! It has been used by otherfaiths, sung around the world and recorded on tapesand CDs by congregations, duets, solos, groups asvarious as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and NewAge improvising, even in jazz versions and rock androll in a new movie RM about returned missionaries.

Where Can I Turn for Peace?

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 for my soul?

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? Who, who can understand? He, Only One.

He answers privately,Reaches my reaching,In my Gethsemane,Savior and friend.Gentle the peace he findsFor my beseeching.Constant he is and kindLove without end.

Through her own strength and eventual willing-ness to accept loving support from family, friends,professionals, and much from a young man, Paul,who loved her, Becky found after three-and-a-halfyears the healing that we so longed for her to find.After twenty years of a good marriage to Paul, threeloving sons, success as a stained glass artist and realestate agent, but still feeling the stigma of any history

13


of mental illness, she called me, saying, Mom, I wantto tell my story. Lets write a booktogether. Ivetalked to lots of girls with the same problems I had,and their mothers hurt as much as they do. Besides,the problems I had are getting worse. She knew alot. I was proud of her. The book we wrote in a for-mat of alternating Beckys story with Her mothersstory about the same incidents was published inNew York by Franklin Watts, and after two print-ings is now out of print there and being publishedelectronically for print-on-demand by InfinityPublishing in Pennsylvania.

Then in my late fifties, seven months before theaccident that would take me to The Place of Know-ing, came a new kind of knowingthe immediacyof background meeting experience, coming toknow via the ineffableand the word suppose.

On November 16 and 17, 1985, seven monthsbefore my own cosmic event on June 29, 1986,Halleys Comet was said to be visible for the firsttime in nearly a centurythe comet seen only everyseventy-six years, the one that Mark Twain waitedurgently to see before he died. He did. It last appearedin 1910, the year of his death, and was now said tobe visible just to the right of the Plelades in theeastern sky.

Nine of us residents from the William Staffordpoetry workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Artswalked New Smyrna Beach, Florida, as we had forten nights of watching the ocean. That tenth nightwe took turns looking through four pairs of binocu-lars to see the sky.

Naive viewer of the skies, I took my turn, skep-tical of seeing anything but milky ways at everyfocusing. Instead, after scanning left and right, upand down, I called out, Hey! Near, but not at,the place we had been instructed to look, darted abright flamboyant light. I handed the binoculars tothe others, said, See? See? They couldnt see. Inlaughing frustration I pointed it out: Lookseethe star, very bright, just down from Pleiades?Now, see the two not-so-bright stars just down andleft of that? Now, make an equilateral triangle withthose. At the apex of thatSee?

All more experienced with heavens and binocu-lar sightings than I, they each tried, wanted to find

something as much as I wanted them to. No onesaw. You must be wiggling the glasses. Its aUFO, Emma Lou, they said, not making fun, justhaving fun, yet I think believing me. Why, Ithought, not just deny it? But I couldnt. Bracingmy elbows on a shoulder or the door of a car, try-ing to pick the light up anywhere else, using differ-ent glasses, taking time between viewingsnomatter what. I kept seeing that light. In exactly thesame place.

Finally one said, Oh well, Emma Lou, we knowyou come from a visionary background. We alllaughed. From across the country, we were of dif-ferent ages, backgrounds. and experience, selectedby William Stafford from our applications for resi-dency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. We hadwritten, each of us out of our uncommon religiousbackgrounds, from Catholic to Episcopalian to Ger-man founders of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to myMormon pioneer ancestors, all of us alive in ourdifferences. Bill Stafford, a poetic visionary, grownup from the Quaker-like Church of the Brethren,had said the day before, In any poetry workshopwe expect to be stimulated intellectually and emo-tionally, but this is the first time Ive been in on onewhere we were stimulated spiritually.

The night of my sighting we walked homealong the hard, rippled Atlantic beach that, by day,was for driving. Sticking up through the packedsand in the slim moonlight, a bright shell caughtmy eye. Jean, our naturalist, identified it for me.An angel wing. Its whole, too! Thats rare for adriving beach so much like Daytona. I took it tomy condo, set it on the table, and went to sleepwith it occupying my night.

For the next days workshop exercise, a Pan-touma Malaysian verse form Id never heard of,with lines repeated abcd, bedf, egfh, gihj, iajc. Minecame from the night:

Meditations on the HeavensThe Comet Is an Angel Wing

Angel wings are on the beachI found one shining in the sandOne late night looking for the cometWed been told would be by Plelades

14

AML Annual 2004

I found one shining in the sandA nebulous and luminescent cloud likeWed been told would be near PleladesA long curved vapor tail by the moons first lifted lid

A nebulous and luminescent cloud nowStriated fragile rippled bone of wave tide waveA long curved vapor tall by the moons first lifted lidThe shell as smooth and rough as what we walk

Striated fragile rippled bone of wave tide waveAn ancient icon like the comets head approaching

sun The shell as smooth and rough as what we walk A celestial body grounded for our view An ancient icon like a comets head approaching sunAn angel wing was on the beach A celestial body grounded for our view One late night looking for the comet.

Then, just before waking the next morning,out of the night, the word suppose, linking cometand shell to my visionary background. In myMormonism a fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith hasread James 1:5: If any of ye lack wisdom, let himask of God. On his knees, his heart full of ques-tions, in a grove of trees near his fathers farm inVermont, he has a vision.

A new pantoum for me from the night.

The Comet Is a Startling Light

Suppose he really saw the vision, God, the angelMy church owns the story: Joseph in the grove,

fourteen,A supernatural sight of extraordinary beauty and

significanceWhile praying for a truth that had eluded others

My church owns the story: Joseph in the grove, fourteen

Not unlike Joan, young Buddha, or MohammedWhile praying for a truth that had eluded othersFrom unusual encounter the gift more than

surprising

Not unlike with Joan, young Buddha, or Mohammed

It had to be believed, the unbelievableIn unusual encounter, the gift more than surprising.Looking through binoculars the night I found

the comet

It had to be believed, the unbelievable,The meteor, the incandescent sparkler writing

names by PleiadesComing through binoculars the night I found

the cometMore than white on black that no one else could see

The meteor, the incandescent sparkler writing names by Plelades

Suppose he really saw the vision, God, the angelMore than white on black that no one else could seeA supernatural sight of extraordinary beauty and

significance

Suppose. A new dimension to believing. LaterI read: All direct knowledge is mystical. You cannever prove your experience of a color, a form(Louis Thompson). The first major step in a reli-gious life is wonder. Indifference to the sublimewonder of living is the root of sin (Abraham JoshuaHeschel). By intuition, Mightiest Things / Assertthemselvesand not by terms . . . (Emily Dickin-son). Just as it had been in my canyon or in Israel,wonder was to be my friend in newly understand-ing the first prophet of my church, his dedicationto wondering and expecting a connection to thedivine, and his supernatural vision of extraordinarybeauty and significance.

Out of supposing, I wrote still another Medita-tion, this one while in seclusion in Sun Valley justthree months after my accident and before I couldeven read it back. A new kind of meditation wassupplying me. I was remembering with vivid clar-ity being a young Mormon girl sitting in church.

The Comet Is Remembering

Not until today this small comet in my scalp: The clattering of memory: the painting In the chapel of my childhood against the organ

loft: Joseph kneeling at the elevated feet of the Father

and the Son.

The clattering of memory, the painting, Backdrop to the hymns, the bishop, and the

sacrament. Joseph kneeling at the elevated feet of the Father

and the Son. Did the artist put it inthe visionor did I?

15


Backdrop to the hymns, the bishop, and the sacrament,

My quarter-century there, it rose indigenous as music.

Did the artist put it inthe visionor did I? In the Sacred Grove, sun streaming on the boy

at prayer.

My quarter century there, it rose indigenous as music,

More real now than Palmyra, where I occupied one grown-up Sunday

In the Sacred Grove: Sun streaming on the boy at prayer

Indelible on knowing, like features of a mother giving milk.

More real now than the Sacred Grove I occupied one grown-up Sunday

Not until today this small comet in my scalp: Indelible in the chapel of my childhood against

the organ loft: the vision.

Six months later, after another surgery had freedup an optic nerve and I could see, I returned to mychildhood church, the Highland Park Ward chapel,for the first time in maybe twenty years. Little hadchanged. Through the entire missionary farewellthat we were there to attend, I studied with amaze-ment the famous Lee Greene Richards paintingstill huge in the nave that I had sat below for twenty-five years of growing up. Only the Sacred Grovewas there, trees, sunlight, sky. No boy at prayer, noFather, Son.

Had it ever been there, the vision? I didnt askor need to know.

What more personal than believing? Knowing ourmost intimate truth? Last week my husband andI were on Mels dream, an eleven-day cruise to thePanama Canal, just the two of us anonymous amongstrangers. We sailed, we ate, we ate, we sailed. Andwe read! Oh we read! Two best-selling authors ofnovels took me to their personal place of life afterdeath, to their individual ideas of heaven. AliceSebolds The Lovely Bones is set in heaven. Susie atfourteen has been raped and murdered in the firstchapter and watches life going on without her. With

a friend her age, Susies heaven has an ice creamshop, where, when you asked for peppermint stickice cream, no one ever said, Its seasonal.

Better written, Leif Engers Peace Like a River isa novel about rare faith and even more rare familyaffection. In his heaven Reuben finds, And now,from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation.It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood stillwhile it hummed upward bone by bone. There isno adequate simile. The pulse of the country workedthrough my body until I recognized it as music. Aslanguage. . . . Like a rhyme learned in antiquity, averse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answerHim; be jubilant, my feet! And sure enough my soulleapt dancing inside my chest. Reuben knows he isin heaven, his heaven.

So what about the reality of the heaven that Iknow? The heaven I so ardently described to myfriend Virginia? My new book, The Place of Know-ing, A Spiritual Autobiography, begins:

Chapter 1A Journey to the Place of Knowing

. . . an exaltation of joy . . . even morebeautiful than anything in a dream.Madeleine LEngle, AWrinkle in Time

Things happen. Early in the world you travel into them. One day

You rise without prayer in a far camp and silently hurry away.

Having slept under stars and still breathing the greyed fire.

Who would take time to suppose this the middle of a lifetime? . . .

The day I died my son-in-law Jim and I had toleave camp early on that Saturday morning, 28 June1986. He needed to be at the hospital, where hewas chief resident in plastic surgery, and I wantedto be back to help a good friend with the announce-ment party at noon for her daughters wedding.Leaving our loved ones asleep, we drove my husbandMels new Taurus. Jim at the wheel, we laughed asI read from the manual about what knob or buttonwould activate what magiclike how many mileswe were getting or how far before we ran out of gas.Luckily. I was looking down, reading.

16

AML Annual 2004

Without warning, the crash. A six-pound rodlike a tire iron with an elbow in it, somehow air-borne, smashed through the windshield into myface. It missed my right eye by a hair and lodged inthe back window of the car.

Jim didnt see the iron bar until it was crashinginto me, when he saw my head fly back and thenforward. Without a seat belt, he said later, Id havecrashed through the fractured windshield. Whathit me? I asked him, my hand at my temple full ofblood. Glass in my eye. That handful of blood. Jimlooked at me, then to the back of the car. Youllnever believe what hit you, Grey, I heard him say.Its huge! A piece of iron as long as my arm, andits stuck in the back window. I guess I asked himto give me his T-shirt for the blood. He pulled ontothe shoulder of the highway, stopped, stripped offhis shirt, pushed it against my temple and eye.

What must it have felt like to him, specializingin plastic surgery, knowing what he did aboutfacial and head injuries? How frightened was he?Hed been my pal, my partner on the tennis court.He loved our daughter and their children. Id hap-pily helped pay his medical school expenses, in aweof his photographic memory. Wed planned to writea mystery novel about a bum patient incomprendiblywanting his fingerprints changed. Jim turned onthe flashers and drove ninety miles an hour to hishospital, almost hoping for a patrolman.

Outside of Emergency, attendants pushed here,there testing reflexes, asking questions of Jim, ofme. They put a collar on my neck, laid me on astretcher, and rushed me to X-ray. I felt nothing asdoctors tried to clean glass out of my eye. Only dis-tance and almost indifference. Windshield splin-ters covered me. My smashed sunglasses were inmy eye as well. What had hit methat spear fromthe godswas the L-shaped rod that holds a mudflap on a rig of two or three trailers with up toeighteen wheels. Later, Jim, the scientist, calculatedthe force of the blow when the three-foot rodflipped up from the freeway and through the wind-shield: six to eight pounds of iron moving towardus at fourteen miles per hour to collide with ourwindshield moving at sixty-five miles per hour. Sev-eral hundred joules of energy, Jim said, dissipated

on the end of a rod into my temple. X-rays wouldshow eight fractures. Jaw broken. Six teeth killed.My eyeball would have to be moved to allow repairof the socket. Concussion, what else to my brain?

No one should have survived, the police offi-cers, doctors, staff, and reporters said then.

But I thought I didnt even lose consciousness.Uncharacteristically, my family were all either

back at camp or otherwise out of town. Jim wasmeeting with his chief of surgery, Dr. Louis Morales,renowned for facial reconstruction on children, todiscuss what needed to happen for me. I lay alonein some white room, waiting but not waiting.

Out of the dim our oldest daughter, Becky,mysteriously appeared, almost vaporized for me.Jim had found her Markosian family where I hadtold him they wereweek-ending at Snowbirdresort twenty miles away. As any one of my fivedaughters would have done, she took my hand,I think crying. Her love palpable, she was realitybut not reality. It would be weeks before I couldreenter myself, let alone my world. Where I was,there was no such thing as emotion. Seven monthslater I would write:

To you nothing here is immediate, crucial, inthe least attractiveNo expecting beyond hours of X-rays, stitches,shots, ice.All that time returning, you vague about famil-

iar hands, Tangled in your head, the blow to trace, surely

someone elses story.

I never cried. I was not afraid. I felt nothing, noteven great pain. Someone else occupied my skin.

It would be seven months before I could read or putmy head down, seven months until the reality of afuture coming to pick me up and carry me home.But it took others to tell me what had happened.

I had never in my life before been a victim toviolence. What must it have done to a psyche sopreserved in loving-kindness to be smashed by atotally chance blow, to come so close to death andyet be saved, to be put back together in essentiallythe same fashion as before, and yet have stretchedand screwed and pounded into that same head so

17


much that wasnt there before? How must it be,I wondered, for people who are bludgeoned timeafter time by not only chance, but circumstance?

I didnt tell Rachel Jeraldine McFarlane, whomI had met a few months before, about the accident.The February before that June, a friend had rec-ommended Rachel to read my energy. Full ofhumor, insight, and original metaphors, young asone of my daughters. I found Rachel had astonish-ing gifts. After the disastrous trip in August, curi-ous about my slow healing, I went to her for anotherreading. At this point, there were no outward signsof my smashed face. After the swelling subsided,and I frequently applied liquid vitamin E, the scarwas barely visible.

Yet Rachel said, You are still you, but pastel,pale. And so sad. You are walking very lightly on theearth. You have been to the place of knowing, andyou have come back to do something. You have madea promiseto tell us about that place of knowing.Until you can do it, the sadness will be there.

Why should I be sad? I was alive. I was free ofthe great fear of dying that pursues us all. But nowI had the displacement of surviving and not under-standing why. But she was right. I could rememberhaving forgotten something. I had only the grey-ness of no desire, the absentness, the loss of wonder.Yet, because I could not read or jiggle in activityas I always had, I began to hear some inner musicthat I had been too busy most of the time to letplay. It was all there, waiting to be reconnected.The thought of making those connections did notfrighten me. Besides, I began to know what elsewas therethe other place where beyond myprayers I council with my guides, my departeddears, in the time and space where I had made thedecision to return.

Recorded in my journal in January, before Icould read, the knowing. One morning as I awokeI knew I had been in that place where I had gone inthe accident. The date of what would be the startof my revelation was 1/12/87the address of mychildhood home where Id lived from the time Iwas born until, at age twenty-five, I went away tobe married. It was less a dream than an awakingto the child life I had known at 1287 Crystal Avenue,

where I still knew every castor bean and crack inthe pavement, where my family, of no age as theirforever selves, were waiting for me, a total envelop-ing of time, upstairs and down, everywhere alive asthe long past must be for the very old who canremember so far back but little from today. Exceptthat today was there too, illuminated softly, every-thing softly, my heaven, the family at the table theway we always sat: Father, Gill, Mother, me, Grandmaat the end opposite Father, on the other side,Homer, Richard. Three gone, four still here. As Idsaid in one of those peace poems about my AuntEdna, only survivor of her generation, everywhereis now a dead and a living place. Then I was awake,crying, my tears welling and spilling in a joybeyond joy, everything and everyone utterly dear,accessible, totally there. But I was not separated fromnowI was the true me again, in my childness, myfreedom and rightness, effortless the being.

My journal said I went back and back to itearly and late that morning, held, freed, not want-ing to leave wherever I was. Crying. So strange forme. Yet that day the only natural thing. I did not wantto surface. I could hold to any part of the vision, letit play back and forth. I was a cloud, formless, inmotion but without a road or path, only the sky tofloat across.

The experience was far beyond ecstasy or joy oreven bliss. And I brought back that intuited wordchildnessnot childlike or childish, but childness.And not a dream. I remember the feeling of child-ness when I see a new baby at a mothers breast ora two-year-old like our final grandchild, Emma,born on my birthday, climbing adroitly into hercar seat and saying to her two brothers and the restof us adults in the van, Hey guys, Im happy! Yes.To a child everything is new, full of wonder thatgives rise to astonishment. Being is simply being,without dictum or expectation.

Four months after my visit to that other exis-tence, a poem came out of sleep explaining whathad happened. It happened again between sleep andwaking in that place Tibetans call lucid dreaming.Without changing a syllable, I wrote on the padbeside my bed what had been a mystery until thatgift from the place of knowing.

18

AML Annual 2004

Having DiedOut of fhe Night: Childness

More than a state of beingA new beingSuffused in light

Whatever is there like being heldIn Fathers armsWay beyond SafeCarried asleepFrom one quiet to another

All of it a heartbeatBack back back the coming togetherCarried in a dark velvet wombAcceptingFloating from densityInto light

This is only the beginningWhatever that isI like the others of no ageWilling for once to waitKnowing in timeOnly the exquisite balanceOf everywhere at once

Saying You are hereCome, you of no nameThat Emma fitsWho hears and answersThe answers

Childness knows no blameOnly the lightness of beingIn your childnessNothing will be lostThough all is rightIn the place of no sides at allOf return without going away

Know this that Time is LifeEnclave born to other enclaves

As I woke still scribbling the poem withoutpunctuation, reality began to take hold. The writ-ing was beginning to come from me rather fromsome other informing. The poem became mine toexplain my return:

Every step of the weaning Still heavy on my pillow The joy is lifted with me.

From even the light am I detached It takes me in only Till love calls me to The things of this world.

The Richard Wilbur quote came out of a long-agoresponse to his line. I knew much that I hadntknown before. The poem had made it explicit.

Still, it took another friend, Sonla Gernespoet, former nun, novelist, head of English atNotre Dameto speak my change outright. Shehad been on a Fulbright in New Zealand and,catching up, I told her of my accident. She was thefirst ever to actually say what had happened to me.But of course I understand, she said. You died.

Off and on, I got used to the idea. Was deathwhat Rachel meant by going to the place of know-ing? Was death why I was so profoundly altered?Out of the night, another poem told me:

Was a Woman

Was a woman a two-part woman played as if she wasnt all she was who passed the middle of the grave running into herself trying to round corners she got smaller or was it bigger and had trouble telling anyoneshe had disappeared.

Little by little, I sensed my role, my promise: totell about knowing about the place of ultimate know-ing that I had the privilege of visiting. Its aboutPASSING THE PORTALS, yes, about a new defini-tion of my believingfrom my grandmas death,Angel, Angel, snowy Angel, spread your wingsand fly; to Helen Kellers teaching me about see-ing without seeing, hearing without hearing, goingby feel toward something holy; to seeing a cometthat no one else could see. About supposing andthen knowing that Joseph saw the vision, God, theangel; to being carried from a velvet womb intothe Light of Childness; to T. S. Eliots

We shall not cease from exploring and the end of all our exploration shall be to arrive where we began And to know that place for the first time.

19


20

AML Annual 2004

Three kinds of knowing. All explored throughwriting. All found in my Place of Knowing like aphotograph coming out of developing fluidatfirst murky, then with an edge appearing here, adetail there, until finally when the book is finished,the clear picture of my death and my heaven. Mybelieving? My third kind of knowing? That is myMormonism with all my pillars still intact and withthe roof blown blessedly off the structure to reveala whole skyful of stars. Yes, ineffable. Perhaps thefourth kind of knowingthat heaven is as per-sonal as breath, as inviting as birdsong, as real asany fact or acquaintance or ineffable discovery. It iswhat waits like an angel or a vision or a heavenlybody, like an answer to a prayer:

The Wick and the FlameRe-Entry

Back from incandescence, flame full, wick high,

to snuff or lower brightness to accommodate the crossing of a sill from ultimate to less,

bewildered pulses run Amoco:

Head shoulders soul toes fingers feeling for a place to turn the screwthat separates bright then from

now:

a brilliant having been full of mystery and surprise

from inner feasting

back

to the wan approval of sameness in syllables and certaintiesof wicks long settled

in the obvious unfanned by air that stirs sweet night like fantasies and rapture

made holy by the shining elsewhere hovering out of sight.

Because I always know:

21


Epilogue from Psalm 139

O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising,

thou understandest my thoughts afar off.Thou compassest my path and my lying down and

art acquainted with all my ways.For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord,

thou knowest it altogether . . .

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be tight about me.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the nightshineth as the day; the darkness and the light are bothalike to thee. For thou hast possessed my reins: thouhas covered me in my mothers womb.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfullymade: marvelous are thy works; and that my soulknoweth right well.

Isuspect that in writing, directing, and portray-ing the main character in his film Brigham City,Richard Dutcher wanted to make a movie aboutthe moral fabric of a community of faith. It seemsclear that this is the principal theme of the film. Inwhat I take to be the core scene of the film, becauseit crystalizes the films purpose, an older memberand former sheriff of the community of Brigham,Utah, states, The worlds gonna drag us in whetherwe like it or not. See, what we got here is a para-dise, and nothing attracts a serpent like paradise.This is an allusion, of course, to the story of the Fallin Genesis 3, but its also an allusion to the filmsthematic dialectic: paradise is, well, paradiseuntil evil crawls in undetected from the outsideand then things change as evil begins to make itsmark. A pure community thus becomes harmedand changed, innocence is lost, as an evil one fromoutside makes his way into the community. Yes,indeed, here is an echo of our first parents corrup-tion, and a connection made between the innocenceof Gods children before sin and the innocence ofthe Mormon community of Brigham.

But, while the film is putatively about, intendsto be about, the moral character of a religious com-munity, it actually sends a different message to thosewho pay attention. A film that wants to be abouta strong moral community is a film that becomessubverted by itself. Thus, this movie becomes tragicthrough the unintended irony it offers. Interestingly,the film ends near to where it might more prof-itably beginwith the death of a guilty man whois a part of the community, yet perhaps not a part

of the communityand his pregnant wife and herchild still in the community. How will she be receivedby this community that so deeply values familiesand valorizes their cohesiveness? Will his guilt stainher too?

Well, I have signaled my take on this film, butI will explicate my exegesis of it a bit further beforeturning to a brief consideration of what a film aboutmorality requires by way of recognizing what moral-ity is. Throughout the film, the good versus evil,light versus dark dialogue is so frequent, obvious,and without sophistication, that there would bea comical element to it, except that since this isnt aSimpsons episode and the film is so earnest, it comesoff as hubris and self-righteousness. Very early inthe film, the main character, played by Dutcher, thetowns sheriff, a man who is also a bishop of one ofthe communitys wards, speaks of the real worldand the outside world. He says, Im sick of it,the murders [and other crimes]. . . . Heres all I careabout, he says, referring to the paradise of Brigham.

Soon, the film takes us to a construction sitewhere several men from elsewhere are a part of theconstruction crew building homes in a new devel-opment. One of them literally shouts from a roof-top about all the churches he sees around him(misidentifying the ward buildings about which hespeaking). He then shouts that where he is fromthere are taverns on every corner and whorehousesin between! Of course, this is not likely an accu-rate characterization of any community in America,but it serves Dutchers purpose to paint the corruptversus pure characterization he intends. Before long,

23

The Tragedy of Brigham City:How a Film about Morality Becomes Immoral

Michael Minch

we find the sheriff worried about what outsidersmight bring into his community, and he explainsto his young deputy, Im just trying to keep thingsreigned in. When the first dead body is found,a professional from Provo is called in. He tells thesheriff that he never expected to make [such] abusiness trip to Brigham. In response to this bloodycircumstance, the sheriff, named Wes Clayton, tellshis deputy, a young man relatively new to the com-munity, This doesnt have anything to do with ourtown . . . people dont even lock their doors inour townand I dont want them to start. . . .Terry, youre not even going to talk to your wifeabout this. Indeed, the sheriff soon tells us thatuntil now, Brigham had never had a murder.

When a couple of FBI agents arrive in Brigham,Dutcher makes sure they stand outtheyre alwaysdressed formally, and in black. They representanother instance of the other, outsiders who dontunderstand this unique community of true faith.In fact a relationship is created throughout themovie between Wes and one of the agents, who is,predictably, from Manhatten, so as to continuallydevelop this theme. In a dialogue between them,he assumes that she thinks these rural Mormons arenaive to the world. So he then has the opportunityto tell her that her kind of people are naive as well,and, of course, naive about more important mat-tersspiritual matters.

While there is only one dead body, and theassumption is that an outsider killed the victim,Wes can claim that all is well in Brigham, and thefirst sacrament meeting scene presented to us hasthe congregation singing these very words from awell-known hymn, all is well. Yet, after a secondvictim, and the former sheriff, Stu, has also beenkilled, Wes asks his deputy with anger, Haveenough of the real world, Terry?!

There are a great many indicators of the goodversus evil theme. A few more include the willing-ness of the sheriff, who is, of course, the com-munitys keeper of the law, to break the law, byordering the men of his ward to search every homein Brigham even by force and without warrants, ifnecessary. So righteous is their cause, such is theirgoodness, that not even the constitutional law of

the United States should deter them. During thesearch, theres the scene in which a member ofWess ward is found to have pornography hiddenin a closet in his home. The music builds, suspenseis created such that we might anticipate that this isthe murderer, but we find, not clues to murder, butinstead, porn. This guilt-ridden man proclaims thathe had meant to confess his sins to Wes, as hisbishop, and he begs Wes to keep this to himself,stating, I think I would die if anyone knew. Whenthe character of Stu buys cigarettes shortly beforebeing murdered, the clerk gives him a hard time,tries to dissuade him and tells him shell tell thebishop. Stu lets her know hell tell the bishop him-self, because he always confesses his sins to Wes.The sheriff s secretary is engaged and her fianctakes her to his house because hes worried afterthree victims have been killed. As they are drivingto his place, their conversation assures us that theyhave no intention of sleeping together. Even thecontinual look of astonishment and admiration onthe face of Meredith, one of the FBI agents, is meantto tell us constantly of the unique goodness ofthese people she has encountered. When Wes getsthe idea to dust the mug Terry has used, for finger-prints, it is an answer to prayer, so we are to knowthat God has led the bishop and sheriff to the evilperpetrator. Lastly, there is the penultimate scene,during which Wes confronts Terry, having discov-ered him as the killer. Speaking of his trustingacceptance of Terry, he says It couldnt have hap-pened anywhere but a place like this. Terryresponds, You brought the wolf right into the cen-ter of the flock.

I have by now, I hope, made this theme of goodversus evil, light versus dark, innocence versus cor-ruption, clear. It is, as I said, the principal themeof the movie. But this heavy-handedness does notwork. As I said, the film is clearly meant to be abouta moral community, but we actually get a differentmessage about morality other than the one intended.John-Charles Duffy has rightly noted this portrayalof white and blackness that Dutcher gives us.1 Butthe moral world in which we live is not simplywhite and black. The moral simplicity and claritythat Dutcher gives us is an illusion, a mythology.

24

AML Annual 2004

We do not live in such a Manichean world. Andsomething this film should know, but doesnt, isthat the Bible itselfparticularly Jesus and Paulwarns us often against this kind of either/or view ofsinfulness. That we simply are either holy or evil isnonbiblical in the extreme and is an instance of thevery sin of pride and self-righteousness that is sooften and strongly condemned in the Bible.

The characters of this film who display norma-tive morality are nearly devoid of any self-doubt orhumility. They, and especially the bishop and sheriff,who is the films embodiment of spirituality, law,and morality, are largely oblivious to the complex-ity of the circumstances in which they find them-selves. I am not speaking of any kind of technicalcomplexity, but moral complexity. Two scenes cometo mind in which an awareness of moral weaknessseems present. The first is when Wes recalls howwhen he was young he killed a rabbit and enjoyedit, and he tells Terry that he still possesses somemeasure of a taste for killing. And then, of course,we see him do just that at the end of the film, whenit seems he could have kept Terry from reassem-bling the gun he was cleaning and perhaps keptfrom killing him. But then, when that fatal shottakes place, it seems the film wants us to believe itwas justified and inevitable (an allusion to the doc-trine of blood atonement?). The second scene isthe second sacrament meeting episode in whichWes refuses the sacrament (which is a reflection ofhis sense of moral and spiritual impurity). The filmpresents us with a vision of moral simplicity thatDutcher would have us believe, it seems, is a moralclarity. But clarity means seeing accurately; it is dif-ferent from simplicity. In respect to morality, sim-plicity becomes mere moralism.

I will say something now about what moralityis and what morality requires us to see. It will be allthe clearer to us, then, what this film doesnt see.I will end by describing two lost opportunitiesmissed by this filmhow it could have been themoral film it wants to be. First, then, a few wordsabout morality. My fundamental point is thatBrigham City is an exercise in moralism, which,in turn, is a kind of propaganda. Let me brieflyexplain what I mean.

It is extraordinarily difficult to think aboutmorality without recourse to utilization of moralrules. We order our moral lives, rather intuitively,by way of rules. Further, we of course prioritize theserules, making a hierarchy out of them, so that whenthey come into conflict we can negotiate our wayby knowing which rules trump which other rules.But this common and powerful feature of morallife has its dangers. One of them is that we can beseduced into a reductionism whereby we think ofmorality in toto as an assemblage of rules. But rulesare abstractions of conclusions related to practicesand historical contingencies that allow us to iden-tify certain things as goods. That is, rules are rough-and-ready means to identify and protect goods andpractices. Further, rules are by definition reduc-tionistic, in that while they draw us to other rules;they do not contain the power to allow us to leapbeyond them, to see well what it is they are allabout. Rules tend to point to other rules, but in theend, what we need to know is where the rules comefrom. Rules are reminders and signifiers, valuablebut insufficient.

Another danger of morality reduced to rulesis that this paradigm carries the promise of self-just

Documents

AML Annual 2004