A thought on spiritual experience in fiction

In ancient Greek drama, a common climax was to have an actor playing a god flown onto the stage with a special effects machine to solve the other characters' problems.

If you were actually in a Greek theater and actually saw a man with a really cool, brightly colored mask appear to fly through the air, the spectacle may have been enough to take away both your breath and your sense of story logic. The convenient miracle might have seemed perfectly acceptable.

But on paper, the deus ex machina moment is pretty underwhelming. If the story makes us feel the deep nobility of human struggle, it's disappointing just to have a solution handed down from a god. And so today, young writers are often taught to avoid any convenient solutions from the outside.

But where does that advice leave a religious writer whose actual life experience involves the active influence of the divine? How do you balance a desire to depict life-changing spiritual experience with traditional cautions against the deus ex machina?

A fourteen-year-old's talk on the Holy Ghost just before my daughter's confirmation on Saturday gave me what seems like a good answer: in life, revelation is typically the beginning rather than the end of a story. Because for every prompting of the Holy Ghost that comes, there's an immediate human question: how will you receive it?

The culmination of your spirituality doesn't come when you feel God, but when you find your own way to live in accordance with that experience.

Once the talk pointed this out, I realized the principle is everywhere in the scriptures. If the Book of Mormon were structured like Greek theater, it would open with a long sequence of Lehi in a decadent Jerusalem searching for goodness which would end with a god showing up and showing Lehi the light. But the Book of Mormon starts with Lehi's first vision and then goes on to ask how he's going to live it out. And opening with the divine is far stronger than closing with it.

Or consider the story of Alma. You could write a play where young Alma fights the church and does bad things and his father worries until--cue the angel--divine interference simply solves the core inter-generational problem. But the Book of Mormon doesn't tell the story like that. Scene one ends with an angel: the rest of Alma's long saga is about where that experience takes him and how he deals with the painful and difficult situations his choice to become a prophet later land him in.

In the Book of Mormon, revelations don't end our problems. They launch our journeys.

So sure, in a relatively agnostic era, where even many people who believe in God don't really believe he talks, it may be tempting to treat God as the surprise and to try to show spirituality by giving readers a sense of the guidance or comfort it provides.

But people don't read to see people change without effort, and the Bible doesn't teach that belief in God solves anything on its own.

I am a very religious person, but I think I would be disappointed by a story that starts with a young man puzzling over what to do with his life and ends when a revelation shows him what to do. I'd be interested, though, in a story that starts with something like: "On October 18th, 2008, the voice of the Lord came to Felix Hernandez, saying: go to grad school, my son."

We deserves stories that show the richness of revelation and the unique setbacks and triumphs people experience through deep religious commitment.

Will taking this structural cue from the scriptures help us write them?

R.I.P. Andy Griffith

When people here ask where I'm from, I tell them Columbus, Ohio--though the truth is that my hometown was less the 1.8-million person Columbus metropolitan area than the village of my LDS ward. It was the people in Riverside Ward who surrounded me and set my expectations for life, who both served my family and provided us with opportunities to serve. It is their faces I remember when I think of "home."

So even if we live in big cities or their suburbs, I think all Latter-day Saints have some vested personal interest in seeing people talk about small communities with some respect. Because ridicule of small communities will easily spill over into ridicule of our way of life.

With that in mind, I wanted to share a link in Rod Dreher's recent meditation on Mayberry. I think many of the ideas he discusses speak to life in a ward.

Freedom and Faith

Because Wednesday is the 4th of July, yesterday's testimony meeting mixed the usual expressions of faith and gratitude for God with expressions of gratitude for our country and our freedom. A brother who had lived in countries under military rule spoke briefly. A sister mentioned her specific gratitude for the families of those on military tours or between military tours right now. Another sister said something about the country's early years and her later immigrant ancestors.

And then a boy, probably about nine years old, got up and bore his testimony about how Jesus died for our freedoms.

I think he was just confused...and who can blame him on the week when George Washington keeps coming up in testimonies that end in Jesus' name?  But hearing our most sacred story confused with the much less significant story of the American revolution did make me wonder whether we should be more careful not to mix patriotism and piety quite so casually--even in July--if only for the sake of our children.

I'm grateful for his strange little testimony, though, because it got my mind and heart going. When the next testimony was all about our American freedoms, I found myself thinking about many of the things people have done with those freedoms and feeling really sad. Because I realized: Jesus dies for our freedoms all the time. But not the way a revolutionary dies to make freedom possible. No: Jesus dies to carry the burden of the ways we use our freedoms to make a mess of our lives and the lives of others.

I am certainly grateful to live in society that values freedom--but I'm not sure how much of a value freedom has in and of itself. After all, our culture of freedom has led to widespread drug use and high rates of divorce as well as to healthy religious diversity and genuinely constructive innovations. Our Constitution protects the willful distortions of pornography as surely as it protects the speaking of truth.

So just as the bishop was about to stand up and close the meeting, I stepped up to bear my testimony that I'm grateful to live in a free country--but still more grateful for a God who guides me as I exercise that freedom. And to testify that in a culture that says I should do what I want, I'm grateful for covenants that bind me to what's important and right.

So on this 4th of July, I'll be thinking about the tragedies as well as triumphs of a nation built on the slippery notion of freedom.

And I'll be praying for my country,
where a twentieth of the world's population consumes a fourth of the world's energy,
where people pursuing their own kind of happiness fuel other countries' narco-wars,
where parents abandon children to go off in search of themselves,
where we try to buy meaning on the marketplace instead of reaching it in our relationships.
Yes, I'll be praying that we can heal our two-edged freedom by finally learning restraint.

Which Superhero was Joseph Smith most like?

A friend of mine once told me about a conversation her son had with a church leader that centered on the question "was Joseph Smith more like Superman or Spiderman?"

It sounds like a pretty interesting conversation to have. I mean, we know that Joseph Smith was a prophet--but we don't know exactly what being a prophet means, or why God chooses the people he does to wear the prophetic mantle.

The Superman or Spiderman debate brings up an interesting issue. Was Joseph Smith a person with unusual potential in various areas, and chosen as a prophet because of that? Or was he more like a dorky teen who is suddenly infused with abilities beyond his natural capacity after a life-changing encounter?

There are plenty of other possibilities, of course. Some secular thinkers who have been fascinated by Joseph Smith seem to see him as most like Batman: an individual whose defining experiences gave him a strong sense of mission and whose genius enabled him to create new equipment to fulfill that mission with. Some critics of Joseph Smith talk about him a bit like Iron Man: as a charismatic, capable individual who had far more power and influence than personal responsibility.


If I had to compare Joseph Smith to a superhero, though, I think I'd choose Wolverine.

There's a strength that's been placed inside of him, but because he's only human, it can cut when it rises to the surface. And his superpower is the ability to keep moving when the pain comes, and to be healed.

Some thoughts on measurement--Lev 19:35

"Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure." (Lev 19:35)

There are recurring warnings throughout the Old Testament against cheating in the way you measure. And it's easy to see how, before the rise of routine government oversight, problems with measurement would have been common. The person in control of the scale has a clear motive to understate the weight of the goods he or she buys and to overstate the weight of the goods he or she sells. And a person without a scale is probably poor enough not to have a lot of bargaining room.

The great sin of mis-measurement, I think, was that it held vulnerable people accountable to a distorted version of reality more powerful people established.

In our days, fortunately, fixed scales and fraudulent yardsticks are rare--partly because government inspectors are common.

And yet...are we really living up to the commandment to measure in righteousness?

I saw a news report recently on the crowding Louisiana's prisons. The state has the highest incarceration rate in the world: five times more prisoners per capita than Iran, thirteen times more than China. Why? Primarily because Louisiana pays local sheriffs to run their own prisons. They've chosen to measure success by the number of full prison beds, and the vulnerable are paying the price for that decision.

I talked last week with a reservist who'd been trained as part of a U.S. army civil  affairs unit. In his training, he was taught to consider how a proposed development project might affect the local economy in the short and long term, trained to estimate multiple consequences of the project based on local context. When he arrived in Afghanistan, though, he learned that the area command had been given to Naval officers because they needed a command to qualify for career advancement, while civil affairs officers did not. And he saw the significant problems that had been caused by ill-advised projects during a period when the military used the number of aid dollars spent to measure unit productivity. Commanders with little background in careful project evaluation were expected to go out and act busy and often risked lives on projects without accurately measuring their value first. Soldiers died to protect work that only looked good on a military stats sheet. Once again, the vulnerable paid the price for a bad system of measurement.

Another friend of mine, a wonderful elementary school teacher, left his job at the end of this school year last week. He'd realized he was ready to give up during a training on how to administer a timed reading test to his second graders. "What if they stop reading to ask a question," he'd asked the state trainer, "can we stop the time until they start reading again?"

"No," said the trainer. "They need to learn to stay on task."

My friend didn't press the issue then, but what he told me later was this: "We're going to teach a lot of kids how to read, but we're also going to teach them to hate reading."

We keep inspiring teachers to do one thing, then measuring them based on how well they do something else entirely. We keeping asking children to learn, but measure their ability to shut up and focus rather than their capacity for wonder. Will a whole generation pay the price for the way we now measure?

I don't believe in a hell that lasts forever, but if there's a temporary hell where they ask you the wrong questions, where they claim you're unfit for eternal growth because of the test scores you got or the amount of money you made, because you jaywalked in New Orleans or couldn't fill up a stats sheet right...I tell you, even the thought of a bureaucratic hell like that is enough to scare me straight for the rest of my life.

I won't be perfect, of course, but I promise you all today I'm going to think hard about how I'm measuring. Because Jesus himself warned us that "with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

When I'm about to die, I don't want to see that as a curse. I want to be able to feel like it's a beautiful promise.

Three Irrational Things I Believe In

I love science. Considering that the survival rate for testicular cancer has gone from under 10% in the 1960s to over 95% today, I probably owe my life to scientific ways of thinking. For many problems, the scientific method (creating a clear and precise research question, gathering independently verifiable evidence, and coming to tentative conclusions about cause and effect) is absolutely the best route to useable answers. Scientific rationality deserves our respect for that.

But sometimes we seem to forget that scientific ways of thinking have their limits. As heirs to the Enlightenment, we've come to use the term "rational" as if it meant "good." And we often use the word "irrational" to dismiss an idea...forgetting that our whole lives are built around ideas that are beyond the scope of rationality.

So today, in celebration of just such ideas, I present you three irrational things I believe in deeply.

1) Choice

Science is essentially the study of causes and effects. As such, it assumes that every effect can be traced to a previous cause. When we're reasoning in a scientific way, then, we don't ask whether a person chose to be a certain way or not. Instead, we ask whether a person is a certain way because of his/her genetics or because of his/her environment--the existence of one cause or another is simply assumed.

From a strictly rational perspective, then, all of my apparent choices are actually the product of prior influences, which in turn would have been the product of still earlier influences, and so on all the way back to the Big Bang.

Now, I may feel like I am making choices quite frequently, but feelings and intuition don't count as evidence in a rational frame. From a rational perspective, if I choose not to cheat on a test it's because more factors or experiences have sharpened my desire to be honest than have sharpened my desire to be praised--not because I truly decided in any sort of moral way which value would matter most to me.

The only way I can see to believe in choice is to step outside of the rational frame of cause-and-effect thinking. To simply assert that my subjective experience of moral choice is more real than rationality.

I find that it's easy to describe choice in religious terms: to say that revelation supports the possibility of human agency, or that humans have inherited the divine attribute of being original causes. But I don't know how, in secular and scientific terms, to make a remotely convincing argument that human choice is real. 

Choice is one irrational idea it means everything to me to believe in.

2) Human rights

Most public schools in America teach evolution in their science classrooms and creationism in their history classrooms. Believing in evolution allows us to keep up with new strains of flu that would otherwise devastate our population. Believing that "all men are created equal" lays a foundation for our national social values.

But "all men are created equal" is not good science or universally verifiable reason. What evidence do we have that men were "created"? And in what measurable sense are human beings inherently "equal"? Can we perform experiments to find out which proposed human rights are actually inborn or inalienable?

We could perform experiments, of course, and they would prove that an individual can in fact be violated and deprived and limited in an endless number of ways. We could measure individuals with countless different quantitative metrics and find one where everyone comes out exactly equal.
 
There is no strictly rational basis I can think of to "prove" the existence of a single human right, however basic, as anything other than a passing social construct.

And yet, I refuse to accept that human rights are only an agreement we make. On an intuitive level (which holds no rational weight), I genuinely feel that certain wrongs go against the order of the universe, that some injustices are an affront to God. I would rather be irrational and believe in our fundamental equality and absolute right to dignity than be rational and accept that people are lumps of matter which can often be pushed around and manipulated without significant consequence. 

 Rational, objectively verifiable arguments for human rights break down quickly under scrutiny--but I'm proud to believe human rights can exist anyway.

3) The Church

I probably don't have to tell you it isn't rational to believe in our religion.

But I'll point out, just in case, that the Biblical account of Abraham includes numerous anachronisms, that there's no conclusive archeological evidence for the Exodus, that miracles can't be consistently reproduced and verified by independent and unbiased laboratories, and that it's outright bizarre to count an uneducated New York farmhand as an expert on diet and health.

So where exactly do I get off acknowledging all that and still saying that I know the Church is true?

Because I don't think the word "know" should be limited to rational kinds of knowing.

I know I'm responsible for the choices I make.

I know there are ways of treating other people which are absolutely and non-negotiably wrong.

And in the same irrational or extra-rational or soul-deep way, I know that God lives and that I've felt him in my faith.

I think rationality is great, and deserves an important place in our society. But I fail to see why I should be ashamed of ways of knowing that are intense, personal, burning, and beyond the scope of the rational.  

Writing Updates

It's been a surprisingly busy week in my writing life, and I thought I'd share three pieces of news.

1. A James Goldberg play reading will take place this Wednesday:

It's sort of strange...I used to be known in Utah Valley primarily as a playwright. But then I got married, moved to Pleasant Grove, had small children, and decided I needed to take a break from a theatrical schedule of rehearsing during evenings all the time. I think I've only had one ten-minute play produced during the past three years (after having several produced each year in the three years before that).

This Wednesday, though, in the Storytelling Wing of the Orem Public Library, there will be a 7 pm reading (with some minimal props and movement) of my play The Valiant Chattee Maker, which is written for young and old audiences alike. It's one of the few pieces I've written with no theme whatsoever other than fun. And I love it for that--it is a lot of fun.

If any of you, my blog readers, are close to Orem and able to make it to the reading, I would love to meet you there. Please introduce yourselves to me--I currently look like my photo on this blog (minus the hat), so I should be easy to find. You can read a little bit more about the play and/or invite friends to the reading on Orem Library's Valiant Chattee-Maker Facebook event page. 


2. I am currently leading in an online poetry contest by a margin of three votes. I'm not terribly experienced as a poet, so I don't know whether my current first-place standing has more to do with the quality of my poem or with the quantity of supportive relatives I have. But I do like the poem, which features both my son and the garter snakes who hibernate under our driveway in the winter.

The main character in my poem. Photo by Vilo Elisabeth Westwood.

The contest rules are that you can vote for your favorite three poems. Please consider doing so (at least if you like what I wrote...)


3. My very short story "Rite of Passage" is up this week on Everyday Mormon Writer. The story was indirectly inspired by my good friend Kayela Seegmiller, who encouraged me to think and write about Mormon masculinity, and by the "What did you learn in Mezeritch?" passage from Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of the Hasidic Masters. 

This story may be too didactic or apologetic for many contemporary readers' tastes, but I feel like we emphasize the role of a writer as a critic of his/her community today so much that we sometimes forget that writers have also long had a function of articulating their communities' values.