A Faith Beyond: The Gospel's Least-Understood Principle (Part 16)

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"Because I could not stop for Death"

  Because I could not stop for Death
  He kindly stopped for me―
  The Carriage held but just Ourselves
  And Immortality.

(Emily Dickinson, 1863)

If you're like me, chances are your faith could use a boost.  Have you felt the stiffness in your joints?  There is an arthritis that creeps into our faith; stretching our faith exposes the sore spots.

Faith is fluid and needs to be in motion; she must walk and run and fly, or else she grows weary; her ligaments will seize up, resistant to change, if neglected.

Isn't that why we call it "exercising" our faith?

   If ye will awake
   and arouse your faculties
   [yes, put on those leg warmers]
   even to an experiment
   upon my words,
   and EXERCISE a particle of faith . . . 

(Alma 32:27)

Like attending physical therapy, our faith needs regular stretching, such as feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.  Faith prefers to rock-out in yoga pants while visiting the sick, not feeling comfortable in the stuffed skirts of sanctimony. 

This is why we're not supposed to just "have" faith ― as if faith were a possession, or a passive noun ― as much as we are to "exercise" faith.  Faith is a verb circling the heavens as we jog to a mixed-tape on our 'Walkman' (Moses 7:69), playing Zion's greatest-hits.

Take the Book of James in the Bible, for example.  The main point in James is that faith must get up from the couch; she must dust the potato chip crumbs off her lap and do something. 

   Though a man say
   he hath faith,
   and have not works,
   can faith save him?

(James 2:14)

James goes so far as to call a sedentary faith "dead" (despite all of our covenantal pretensions and claims to the contrary).

Dead?  How can we tell?  Is our faith moving?  Is she creating?  Is she singing?

Corpses don't move; they are given over to professional morticians who charge a fee to pose the body in a pleasing fashion, so onlookers can admire the resemblance of the living at the Viewing.  So it is with a "dead" faith.

The one thing dead bodies all have in common is rigor mortis.  Has spiritual rigor mortis set in the members of the body of Christ in your area?

   It was not Death, for I stood up,
   And all the Dead, lie down―

(Emily Dickinson, 1862)

"I heard a Fly Buzz when I died"

On January 11, 2023, I returned home from work on the Frontrunner commuter train.  It was cold and dark, around 6:00 at night.
 
I got off at my station and saw a young man (mid-twenties? thirties?) lying on a bench, unmoving.

I followed the crowd down the platform towards the exit, tired.  My legs carried me on autopilot.  But as I walked down the stairs, something troubled me about the way the young man had been hunched over, almost unnaturally, on the bench.  I slung my satchel over my shoulder and turned around against the current, through the crowds, retracing my steps up the stairs to check on him.

By now the platform had mostly cleared.  I approached the man and took a good look at him.  I am not a doctor and wouldn't know where to put my fingers to check for a pulse.  So instead I kicked him.  Yes, I kicked the man's foot and said loudly, "Hey!  Are you okay?" (Not my most poetic utterance.)

No response.  I knew it would be another 30 minutes before the next train arrived.  I looked around, uncertain, and saw only one other person left on the platform, watching me, and he shrugged from a distance.

I became a bit more bold, grabbing the young man by the shoulder and roughly shaking him.  "Hey!" I yelled.  "Can you hear me?!”

Again, no response.  The man’s body slumped lower on the bench as I released him.  I stood back, pondering what to do.  I couldn't detect any signs of life.

  I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
  The Stillness in the Room
  Was like the Stillness in the Air
  Between the Heaves of Storm.

(Emily Dickinson, 1862)

Death takes many forms.  My guess was the man had overdosed on drugs.  Having been a prosecutor for 13 years, I recognized the man's sores; he matched the profile.  I sighed and removed my phone from my pocket, calling 911.  I told the dispatcher to send an ambulance, and explained I feared it was already too late.

I hung up and waited for the police to arrive.  My thoughts, oddly, turned to the young man's parents.  I imagined them receiving the dreaded call later that night, notifying them of their son's death.  What a sad way to go, all alone on a dreary winter night at a public train station.

I paced back and forth, keeping an eye out for the ambulance, while offering a silent prayer, hoping, if there was even a tiny life-spark left in the man, that the Lord would revive him, or help him hold on until paramedics arrived with Narcan.

Chances seemed slim because the man hadn’t breathed in the five or ten minutes I had been with him.  That is when I received one of the greatest scares of my life, as the man, out of nowhere, bolted upright and jumped to his feet as if struck with a defibrillator, nearly knocking me over.

He was jittery and disoriented; he waved his arms about and almost fell off the edge of the platform into the trackage.  I grabbed him and guided him back to the bench.

"Where's my suboxone?  My Adderall?" he said over and over, incoherently.  I stayed with him until the emergency responders arrived.  They put him on a stretcher and transported him to the hospital.

When it was all over, I headed back down the stairs to the parking lot to my car.  Again I thought of the man's parents, for some reason.  I thanked the Lord they wouldn’t be getting that dreaded phone call after all.  I asked Heavenly Father to bless the man, whose name I never learned, so he might bring joy to his parents in years to come.

I share this to say, God can breathe new life into our faith, regardless of our condition.  America has witnessed two Great Awakenings, why not a third?  Even if it feels like our faith has flat-lined, we must remember that God is (as Jesus declared) "the God of the living."

   He is not the God
   of the dead,
   but the God
   of the living.

(Mark 12:27)

​Like the young man I found slumped on the bench that night, I wonder how often God has looked at us, slouched on the pews at Church on Sunday: "Can you hear Me?  Are you okay?"

We all need a good kick, now-and-then.

"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"

​   I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
   And Mourners to and fro
   Kept treading, treading, 'til it seemed
   That Sense was breaking through

(Emily Dickinson, 1861)

Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55 in 1886, from what they think was kidney disease.

Emily was a contemporary of Mormon poet and Relief Society President, Eliza R. Snow, who followed Emily through the veil the following year in 1887.

Both women shared an affinity for poetry, but not husbands.  Emily was a recluse and never married.  I like to believe these two women were raised up by God as voices for Him, each expressing faith in her own unique way.

During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson only published a few poems.  After her death, though, her sister ― while cleaning out her personal effects ― discovered something Emily had kept secret from everyone: 1,800 poems that filled a large chest, carefully kept.  Emily's family published the poems posthumously.

Emily Dickinson left detailed instructions for her own funeral.  She wanted her favorite poem read, "No Coward Soul is Mine," by the other Emily ― Emily Brontë.  I love that poem, too; when I began Owl of the Desert four years ago, I quoted it on my poetry's main page.  It says:

  Vain are the thousand creeds
  That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
  Worthless as withered weeds
  Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.

I think it is safe to say that faith suffers most among "the thousand creeds / That move men's hearts, unutterably vain / Worthless as withered weeds."

I suppose I could list several creeds taught by the modern Church, but I do not wish to offend anyone.  Instead, consider a "creed" to be any belief we cling to, even when the Lord calls us through His Spirit to let it go for something better; and so we are left with the "lesser portion" of His word, when God wants to give us something higher, holier, and humbler.

In this way, creeds act like weeds in our spiritual garden (Matt. 15:13), cluttering valuable real estate and getting in the way of the Lord's lima beans and peas and radishes.  Creeds produce famines in the land.

An example of a creed among Evangelicals would be "A Bible, a Bible! We have got a Bible!"  This belief limits the amount of truth they are willing to receive.  If you try to have a rational argument that goes against their interpretation of something Paul taught 2000 years ago, good luck!  The equivalent among the LDS people would be "A Prophet, a Prophet!  We have got a Prophet!" (and to the same effect).

Now, to be clear, the Bible is a good thing!  Prophets are good things!  But creeds corrode and corrupt and canker what would otherwise be good, leading to error. 

On the other hand, what would the opposite of 'creeds' be?  Where does faith thrive?  If 'creeds' produce poor soil for planting faith's seed, what sort of soil should we be searching for?  What soil is fertile?

  Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
  We can find no scar,
  But internal difference –
  Where the Meanings, are

(Emily Dickinson, 1861)

The answer, of course, is love.  Faith is activated by love.  The test is simple: a living faith is something that breathes love into our relationships, our families, our communities.

I am sure you've seen instances of people attempting to exercise faith in the absence of love; usually in something they deem "right."  But that kind of faith is generally D.O.A.; when we place faith in "rightness" rather than in flesh-and-bone, it will be a cold, soulless thing.

Faith in creeds gets you the Crusades; faith animated by the love of God gets you crucified.​

"This is my letter to the World"

  This is my letter to the World
  That never wrote to Me―
  The simple News that Nature told
  With tender majesty.

(Emily Dickinson, 1862)

There is one statement by our Lord Jesus Christ ― one singular pearl in His fine strand ― that has given me more faith and hope than any other.  Whenever my faith flickers, when doubt whispers in my stomach and my heart feels faint, I clutch this pearl as a drowning man does a life preserver.

And no, I don't think it is a creed because my understanding of it keeps evolving, growing, and reorienting; these words are alive, and thereby I know they are not a corpse.

The scripture I am talking about is found in John 10.  When I die, if I had but one page of holy writ with which to cover me for burial, it would be John 10 ― where Jesus reveals Himself as our Shepherd, and us, His lambs.  The whole chapter, really, is a shot of adrenaline for our faith.  But the part in particular I cherish, are these words:

   [I] know my sheep, and . . . 
   they shall never perish,
   neither shall any man
   pluck them out of my hand.
   My Father, which gave them me,
   is greater than all.

(John 10:14, 28-29)

You and I read those words and think, "Ah, that's sweet."  But not the Pharisees.  When they heard it, "the Jews took up stones again to stone him" (John 10:31).  Why?  Why were the Jews so offended by Him declaring Himself to be our Savior, the Son of God?

Well, it went against their Mosaic creeds.  Did you notice the part where He said no man can "pluck them out of my hand"?  Those were fightin' words; they drew a fine line in the sand.  Ask yourself: who exactly is trying to separate us from God?

Well, that would be the religious leaders who taught the people to believe in various tenets and creeds, along the lines of: "Jesus, no, cannot actually save you without X, Y, Z" (where X, Y and Z are naturally considered to be under their purview).

The spiritual successors-in-interest to the Pharisees are still at it today, insinuating themselves between us and God, and developing theologies that place their authority at the forefront.  It really is unseemly, but they somehow make it appear holy.

The worst creeds in Christendom can be summed up as follows: "Jesus is powerless to save you without X."  Do they hear themselves?  Such is a mockery of God's Son and His infinite and eternal mercy.

That is why Jesus offended the Jews (and let's be honest, why He would not be welcomed in most churches): He cut-out the blubber; He dismissed the middle-men; He exposed their grift.  Jesus stood there and declared NO ONE ― especially no hireling or petty thief ― was going to kidnap one of His lambs.

But Mammon took umbrage!  For how will her priests be compensated if they cannot engage in spiritual human-trafficking, buying and selling "the souls of men" (Rev. 18:13)?

So the Judaizers and Constantine and the Neoplatonists, and all that came afterwards, went to the corporate handbook of Mergers-and-Acquisitions (as businessmen do), and befouled Christ's gospel and pure religion with their wares and trinkets, their scarlets and silks and gold, their granite vaults filled with vain imaginations and deceit ― so that here we are, in 2024, right where Nephi said we would be, bearing "a yoke of iron" (1 Nephi 13:5) instead of the yoke of Christ. 

  After great pain, a formal feeling comes―
  The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs―

(Emily Dickinson, 1862)

This is why, when I hear others telling us to "get onboard" with how the sausage is made and the pork is sold in the Church, and to not rock the boat (as if we were galley-slaves), I want to say, "Pardon me, I am not any ship you're steering; don't you see us, here, in the palms of Jesus?  Why would we trade that for rusty oars-and-chains?"  I am done with scurvy.

Held in the hand of our Lord, their protestations are rendered powerless (and it angers them).  Freed from the fear of their recrimination, we set forth upon uncharted seas, pressing forward, catching the Lord's breath in our sails, which fills ― and finishes ― our faith.

   Looking unto Jesus
   the author and finisher
   of our faith . . .
   despising the shame,
   and is set down at the right hand
   of the throne of God.

(Hebrews 12:2)

And guess what?  Once we've escaped the hierarchal order of things, we begin to love each other as "one," as equals, as brothers and sisters in very deed.

"Shadows hold their breath"

   Shadows ― hold their breath ― 
   When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
   On the look of Death
​
(Emily Dickinson, 1861)

God brought us back to life; for were we not dead, and now "liveth unto God" (Rom. 6:10)?  Can He breathe life back into our churches?  Can the Lord lift us from the serotonin-rich-quicksand of priestcraft?  Of course He can.

​The reason that faith is dwindling in the Church (among others) is because we have replaced the gospel of Jesus Christ with a neo-temple-theology.  I cannot be the only one who has noticed.

The problem, you see, with temple-theologies is that they are deleterious to a living faith.  Remember the veil of the temple in Jerusalem that was rent in twain at Christ's death?  Why have we stitched it back together with silver thread and super-glue, placing it under lock-and-seal so that now we must depend upon those with priesthood "keys" rather than upon Christ (who holds the Key of David)?

Earlier this month in General Conference, President Nelson gave a talk titled, "Rejoice in the Gift of Priesthood Keys" (I wish I were making this up).  Not "Rejoice in Jesus Christ" ― you know, as Nephi told us to (2 Nephi 25:26).  Nope.  Rejoice in the authority given unto men.

President Nelson said, "Priesthood keys give us the authority to extend all of the blessings promised to Abraham to every covenant-keeping man and woman.... Time in the temple will help you to think celestial and to catch a vision of who you really are, who you can become, and the kind of life you can have forever." (April 2024 General Conference).

Janey on Wheat and Tares said:

"Think Celestial?  The hymn Have I Done Any Good in the World Today? admonishes us to 'wake up' and stop focusing on our celestial reward and instead to look at the chances to do good that are all around us in this world.  In President Nelson’s talk 'Think Celestial!' there is not one word about reaching out to help other people."

A commenter on reddit wrote, "My parents are temple workers.  They would rather spend time 'working' in the temple than spend time with their grandchildren.  This is a fact."

A person responded, "Working in the temple is certainly a lot easier than dealing with the hungry, the naked, and the prisoners that Jesus mentioned."

We worship the God of the living!  A temple-theology should not eclipse the telestial-work God has called us to do.

To paraphrase Jesus, "Let the dead baptize their dead" (Luke 9:60).*

   And yet, it tasted, like them all,
   The Figures I have seen
   Set orderly, for Burial,
   Reminded me, of mine―

(Emily Dickinson, 1862)

(*Don't worry, we've still got the Millennium.)

Goodbye

​​I lived
    never whole
    but in bits and parts
    a life of interrupted starts
The assembly
    of my days, their meaning
    a bequeathal of soot
    I leave you
 
Life was
   an act of aching
   the coaxing of an ember
   breathless, trying to remember
Something lost
   love? arthritis is
   but innocence bending
   at the end
 
Death is
   liquid craving bone
   a smile upon your lips
   but this? an apocalypse
One embraces
   again, again the memory
   ―and absence―
   of you