Recently an old high school friend from Connecticut came to visit me in Provo. I took him to one of my classes at BYU and gave him a tour of the campus. We found ourselves quickly engaged in the kinds of conversations that consumed us in our maturing years just before college: what we believed, how we wanted to live, and how we could live meaningfully in a diverse world. We had become friends at a crucial point in my own spiritual development, and I remember asking him what he would think if I chose to live my life as a practicing Mormon. In those days we had talked a lot about what was the best pathway to God and had never come to definitive conclusions. I wanted to choose to live the gospel without having to assume that other paths to God were categorically wrong. I wanted to be orthodox without being closed to the world. This was and continues to be an interesting and perplexing question, but it isn’t as vexing as I once felt it to be. This is in part because I have more evidence now than I did then that many people live good lives along many different paths and in many different cultures. As I have tried to dedicate my life to discipleship and to scholarship, I have also learned that gospel living involves both “forsak[ing] all evil and cleav[ing] unto all good” (D&C 98:11). It involves a double-edged paradox: there is no way to be truly open to the world without utter faithfulness to the Word and one cannot be truly faithful to the Word if one is not open to learning anew.
My friend was really taken by the openness of my students who were fully engaged in reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and who seemed appreciative of her rather powerful and unique understanding of spirituality and knowledge. I agreed that they were remarkable students, and I told him that they and the colleagues with whom I work were the main reason why living in a overwhelmingly homogenous community was not as claustrophobic as I had feared before coming to Utah. Although I had been born here, I was raised in Connecticut. Choosing to live here had felt like a homecoming, I commented. About this, he remarked:
“Isn’t that the Mormon pattern though?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean that you go out into the world, have dialogue with it, experience change and growth, and then return to your home base.”
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And we never stop doing that, I thought. I was thinking of all the Mormon scholars I knew who had built directly or indirectly on the profound experience of encountering the world on their missions by obtaining graduate degrees in fields that would elucidate their experiences. In this way we had continued the process of nurturing our faith, challenging it in contexts of new knowledge and experience, and returning again to a gospel source for reorientation and renewal. We had essentially embarked on a lifelong spiritual journey out from and back to our doctrinal home.
At the last meeting of the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association), we had dinner with 12 members of our fledgling organization (see the photo). I was able to hear many of their papers, and my colleague Scott Miller commented to me afterwards that perhaps Mormon belief and experience inspire us to be like Jesuit priests by devoting our lives to mastering knowledge of languages, cultures, and ideas so as to enhance our practice as Mormons as well as improve the quality of our engagement with the world. In light of President Hinckley’s most recent call for greater sensitivity and civility and Elder Oaks’s exploration of the profound relevance of the Book of Mormon to all of the world’s cultures, it seems that there has never been a time in our history when such engagement was more needed. Although this dinner and this organization are still only the earliest of indications of what is to come, I can’t help feeling optimistic about what we can contribute to the world and to the church.
I hope you will join us.