Blake Oster: Cocreative Participation Model of Revelation

When individuals attempt to verbalize their experience, they further interpret by using a conceptual framework of language. Concepts affect how we perceive, however, even before we interpret and explain. The way we conceptualize the world influences how we will perceive it. Further, language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of various items of experience, it also contains a creative, symbolic organization which not only refers to experiences already acquired but actually defines experience. Language constitutes a logic, a general framework within which we categorize reality (Bishin and Stone 1972, 159). Anyone who has learned to think in another language knows that there are expressions and nuances of thought that cannot be translated into English, for the cultural frame of reference necessary to understand the concept is missing. As Michael Polanyi (1962) noted, culture and language entail a tacit knowledge which  impacts upon how we conceptualize experience. We assume a structure of reality in the act of attempting to communicate about our experience.

These observations about experience are crucial to understanding revelation, but they are not the total explanation of revelation. If they were, nothing new could be learned in revelation; revelation would be a mere restatement of cultural and preconceptual presuppositions. Revelation is not experienced from God's viewpoint, free of cultural biases and conceptual limitations, but neither is God limited to adopting existing world views or paradigms to convey his message. Revelation is also a revolution in human thought, a real breakthrough that makes new understanding possible. In Mormon theology, revelation is necessarily experienced within a divine-human relationship that respects the dignity of human freedom. God does not coerce us to see him as God; that is left to the freedom of human faith. Revelation cannot coerce us because the divine influence is, of metaphysical and moral necessity, persuasive and participative rather than controlling. We exercise an eternal and inherent freedom even in relation to God. Revelation becomes a new creation, emerging from the synthesis of divine and human interaction. Revelation is part human experience, part divine disclosure, part novelty. It requires human thought and creativity in response to the divine lure and message (Cobb and Griffin 1976,101-5).

The ultimate reality in Mormon thought is not an omnipotent God coercing passive and powerless prophets to see his point of view. God acts upon the individual and imparts his will and message, but receiving the message and internalizing it is partly up to the individual. In this view, revelation is not an intrusion of the supernatural into the natural order. It is human participation with God in creating human experience itself. Revelation is not the filling of a mental void with divine content. It is the synthesis of a human and divine event. The prophet is an active participant in revelation, conceptualizing and verbalizing God's message in a framework of thought meaningful to the people. Human freedom is as essential to revelation as God's disclosure.

Blake Ostler - "The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source"

Eugene England - A Non-Metaphysical Atonement

It is clear that long before Christ had actually performed the central acts of the Atonement—the suffering in Gethsemane, the death on the cross, the resurrection—men were able to be affected by those acts through the prophetic knowledge that God was willing to perform them in the future. What this means is that the mechanics of the mission itself did not occur in time as a necessary precursor to their effect on men, as some theories of the Atonement would require; Christ’s mission was not to straighten out some metaphysical warp in the universe that Adam’s taking of the fruit had created. The effects of the Atonement were not metaphysical but moral and spiritual: they reach men living at any time and place through each man’s knowledge of the spirit and events of the Atonement.

-Eugene England, "That They Might Not Suffer"

Eugene England - Unsatisfactory Theories of Atonement

The question “Why is man’s salvation dependent on Christ and the events surrounding his death?” is the most central and the most difficult question in Christian theology. The answers (and there are many) are, as i have said, the chief scandal of Christianity to the non-believer. Attempts to define logical theories of the Atonement based on New Testament scriptures have been largely contradictory and ultimately futile—mainly because the New Testament is not a book of theology, a logical treatise, but rather gives us the reactions, the varied emotional responses, of men to the Atonement as they experienced it and tried to find images for their joy. Some men clearly felt released from the powers of evil and darkness which they believed, much more literally than any of us today, were all about them. Some believed that their souls had been bought from the devil. Some felt that Christ had taken their place in suffering the just and necessary punishment under the law for their sins. The explanation i have tried to develop, based largely on Book of Mormon scriptures, is at significant variance with most of these theories, especially on one major point: The redemptive effect of the Atonement depends on how an individual man responds to it rather than on some independent effect on the universe or God, which theories such as the ransom theory, the substitution theory, the satisfaction theory, etc., all tend to imply. of course, the rich reality of the Atonement lies beyond any theory or explanation, including the one I am suggesting here, and some men bring themselves into redeeming relationship with God from within the framework of each of these theories as they somehow reach through to that rich reality. But the need for powerful personal response and for a release from the immobilizing demands of justice within man seem to me crucial and best served by an explanation different from the traditional theories.

Eugene England, "That They Might Not Suffer"

Eugene England - On the "Demands of Justice"

Christ is the unique manifestation in human experience of the fulness of that unconditional love from God which Paul chose to represent with the Greek term agape.  As Paul expressed it, "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Christ's sacrificial love was not conditional upon our qualities, our repentance, anything; he expressed his love to us while we were yet in our sins--not completing the process of forgiveness, which depends on our response, but initiating it in a free act of mercy. This is a kind of love quite independent from the notion of justice. There is no quid-pro-quo about it.  It is entirely unbalanced, unmerited, unrelated to the specific worthiness of the object (except in that each man has intrinsic worth through his eternal existence and God-like potential), and that is precisely why it is redemptive. It takes a risk, without calculation, on the possibility that man can realize his infinite worth. It gets directly at that barrier in man, his sense of justice, which makes him incapable of having unconditional love for himself--unable to respond positively to his own potential, because he is unable to forgive himself, unable to be at peace with himself until  he has somehow "made up" in suffering for his sins, something he is utterly incapable of doing.  The demands of justice that Amulek is talking about, which must be overpowered, are from man's own sense of justice, not some abstract eternal principle but our own demands on ourselves, demands which rightly bring us into estrangement with ourselves (as we gain new knowledge of right but do not live up to it) and thus begin the process of growth through repentance, but which cannot complete that process.  an awareness of the true meaning and source of that last sacrifice and its intent has the power, as Amulek says, "to bring about the bowels of mercy, which overpowereth justice, and bringeth about means unto men that they may have faith unto repentance."

Eugene England - No Greater Need

We have no greater need than that there be a force of healing in all our public and inner strife: that there be some source of forgiveness and change for the oppressor as well as help for the oppressed; that there be something large enough in love to reach past the wrongs we each have done and can never fully make restitution for; that there be hope in the possibility that any man can be renewed by specific means to a life of greater justice and mercy toward others. But for most men the claim that such a possibility truly exists is scandalous.

Eugene England, "That They Might Not Suffer: The Gift of the Atonement"

Orson Pratt - Diligently Seeking the Gifts

This failure to realize all the blessings and powers of the Priesthood does not apply to the elders and lesser Priesthood only; but it applies to the higher quorums, and comes home to ourselves, who are Apostles of Jesus Christ. We are presented before the Church, and sustained as prophets, seers and revelators, and we have received oftentimes the gift of prophecy and revelation, and have received many great and glorious gifts. But have we received the fullness of the blessings to which we are entitled? No, we have not. Who, among the Apostles have become seers, and enjoy all the gifts and powers pertaining to that calling? And those who are called to perform special missions in opening up dispensations of the Gospel to the children of men, as Joseph and others were called of the Lord, He endows more fully with these gifts; but this does not hinder others from enjoying similar gifts according to His promises, and according to our faithfulness. And I have thought the reason why we have not enjoyed these gifts more fully is, because we have not sought for them as diligently as we ought. I speak for one, I have not sought as diligently as I might have done. More than forty years have passed away since these promises were made. I have been blessed with some revelations and prophecies, and with dreams of things that have come to pass; but as to seeing things as a seer, and beholding heavenly things in open vision, I have not attained to these things. And who is to blame for this? Not the Lord; not brother Joseph—they are not to blame. And so it is with the promises made to you in your confirmations and endowments, and by the patriarchs, in your patriarchal blessings; we do not live up to our privileges as saints of God and elders of Israel; for though we receive many blessings that are promised to us, we do not receive them in their fullness, because we do not seek for them as diligently and faithfully as we should.

-Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses 25:145-146

Daymon Smith - Blessings and Agency

We have no reason to assume our blessings have come of our own righteousness. This means there is no compulsion nor bribery which leads to righteousness, and no measuring worth doing; for you’ll find that the wicked are often blessed equally, if not in profusion, should you compare how much rain one has received with that sent upon another. If there is no material reason for righteousness, nor fear of wickedness because God will smite you with a plague, the only reason to do good, it seems to me, is because one prefers that to doing evil. And so we really are free to act.

-Daymon Smith, "Like Unto = Evil"

John Taylor - I Would Not Be a Slave to God!

I was not born a slave!  I cannot, will not be a slave.  I would not be slave to God!...I'd go at His behest; but would not be His slave.  I'd rather be extinct than be a slave.  His friend I feel I am, and He is mine: --a slave!  The manacles would pierce my very bones--the clanking chains would grate upon my soul--a poor, lost, servile, crawling wretch to lick the dust and fawn and smile upon the thing who gave the lash!  Myself--perchance my wives, my children to dig the mud, to mould and tell the tale of brick and funish our own straw!...But stop!  I'm God's free man: I will not, cannot be a slave!  Living, I'll be free here, or free in life above--free with the Gods, for they are free..."

-John Taylor, Life of John Taylor by B.H. Roberts, 424

J. Bonner Ritchie - Security Religion vs. Growth Religion

Security religion provides refuge.  It builds an ecclesiastical wall which protects from the onslaught of questions and doubts and decisions.  Growth religion, on the other hand, forces its adherents to grow, to accept responsibility, to assume the burden of proof, to move beyond extrinsic constraints.  Growth religion provides not a wall but stepping stones to climb for the purposes of understanding, analyzing, serving, and making choices. We all seek the safe harbor at times.  We need to be protected, to rest so we can go back for the battle.  Security needn't be an inhibiting force; it can and should be positive.  Whether it is or not depends more on how the member responds to the system than how the system makes demands of the member.

J. Bonner Ritchie, "The Institutional Church and the Individual",

Philip L. Barlow - A Self Critical Faith

"...it isn’t authentic inquiry as such that tends toward the erosion of faith. Without faithful inquiry, spiritual growth is not possible. Indeed, faith by itself, although necessary, is not necessarily good. Terrorists who fly jets into tall buildings full of innocent people have deep faith. What is required for mature spiritual health, however, is a thoughtful and even self-critical faith, which includes faithful inquiry."

Philip L. Barlow - "12 Answers From Philip Barlow: Part 2"

William James - The Choice & Consequence of Faith

"What do you think of yourself?  What do you think of the world?...These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them.  They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them...In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark...If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken.  If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken.  Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.  We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive.  If we stand still we shall be frozen to death.  If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces.  We do not certainly know whether there is any right one.  What must we do?  'Be strong and of a good courage."  Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes...If death end all, we cannot meet death better."

-Fitz James Stephen, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"

Quoted in William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - The Logic of Faith

...a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - Sceptics of Faith

We cannot escape the issue [of faith] by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.  It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home.  Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisevely as if he went and married some one else?  Scepticism, then is not avoidance of option; it is an option of a certain particular kind of risk.  Better risk loss of truth than chance of error - that is your faith veoter's exact position.  He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.  To preach scepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true...dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?

William James - "The Will to Believe"

William James - Science, Morality, Religion defined.

Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.

First she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word.  "Perfection is eternal" - this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we beleive her first affirmation to be true.

William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - Faith in a Fact Can Create the Fact

Do you like me or not?...Whether you do or not depends in countless instances, on whether I meet you halfway, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation.  The previous faith on my part in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes your liking come.  But if sI stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt...ten to one your liking never comes....The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence
...
There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.  And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the 'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking can fall.  Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!

William James, "The Will to Believe"

William James - Fear of Becoming a Dupe

Clifford writes..."It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

...

Beleive nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.  You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is very small compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true....he who says, "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe.  He may be critical of many of his desire and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys...It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound.  Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained.  Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.  In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness of their behalf.

-William James, "The Will to Believe"

James Faulconer - On Religious Expectations

When our religion ceases to challenge our ordinary expectations, either we have reached perfection or it has lost its power for us.

-James Faulconer, "Challenging Expectations," Speaking Silence

James Faulconer - On Alleviating Suffering

It is easier to give when we see pictures of disaster or when our heartstrings are tugged by someone forlorn. It is easy to understand the psychology of our reaction: seeing pain or suffering we want to alleviate it, and the closer the person suffering is to us, either spatially or in a relationship, the more our desire to help. But understanding why we are more prone to help our own doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to also help those who are not ours.

There are always people in need. We cannot escape our obligation to help them, even when we do not know who or where they are, or why they suffer. If we have received God's grace, we must share it. Not to share it would be to receive it ungratefully.

James Faulconer, "What Can I Do?", Speaking Silence

James Faulconer - Suffering With God

Paul tells us that life in the Spirit results in becoming part of the family of God, joint heirs with his Son. He says, "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together" (Rom. 8:16-17).

The glory of the divine inheritance provided to the disciple of Jesus Christ is wondrous, but the condition put on that bequest is puzzling: "if so be that we suffer with him." Divine glory requires not only the divine suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. It also requires our suffering with the Son.

The Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of revelations to Joseph Smith, tells us why the Lord suffered: "I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent" (D&C 19:16). Yet it responds to our demand for an explanation of our suffering, not with a method for escaping suffering or a claim that we do not really suffer, but with this rhetorical question: "The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?" (D&C 122:8). If even God himself, the Son of God, cannot escape suffering, how should we expect to do so?

God weeps at our pain and our death. He also, and probably more so, weeps at our sinfulness.
Enoch's response to God's sorrow—the way in which he becomes like God—is to weep like God.

To be like God is to suffer with him on the behalf of others. It is not to weep only with those who weep because they have been wounded (Mosiah 18:9), though that is essential. It also is to weep, as God does in Enoch's vision, for those who wound. It is to take responsibility for the sinner as well as the sinned-against.

Divine power is the power to feel pain with and for others, the power to feel pain and sorrow. To be in the family of God is to accept suffering as Jesus did. It is to respond to God's suffering as Enoch did. We too must stretch forth our arms. Our hearts too must swell wide as eternity. Our bowels also must yearn until eternity shakes. Like Enoch, like God, we must weep for humankind.
Only if we stretch and swell and yearn and weep as God does can we do what those who suffer need. Our righteousness requires our suffering. The redemption of anyone or everyone, whether temporal or spiritual redemption, requires our weeping.

-James Faulconer, "Suffer With Him", Speaking Silence.

Adam S. Miller - Religious Transformation.

The point of religion is to wake up.  "The dream of going to another world is just that: a dream, and probably also a deep sin" (WS 437). 

On Latour's account, the test for religious competence is clear.  "If, when hearing about religion, you direct your attention to the far away, the above, the supernatural, the infinite, the distant, the transcendent, the mysterious, the misty, the sublime, the eternal, chances are that you have not even begun to be sensitive to what religious talk tries to involve you in" (TF 32).  Religion has no interest in selling you insurance or in telling you something you don't already know.  It does not want to teach you or inform you.  Religion wants to change you.  It wants to render you sensitive to the passing worlds alrady hard upon you.  "Information talk is one thing, transformation talk is another" and religion is about the latter, not the former (TF 29).

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 156

Adam S. Miller - The Art of Losing

Subjects, whatever the limitations imposed upon them, can have their constraints transubstantiated into grace and liberation.  This is the message of the cross: redemption unfolds as the practice--as the art--of losing.  The cross is that most intimate detour to salvation.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 150

Adam S. Miller - Religion and the Two Faces of Grace

Religion corrects for our farsightedness.  It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen.  To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness.  Religion practices myopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace.  Redemption turns on this revelation. 
...
Double-bound, grace has two faces.  On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude's resistance.  On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility.  Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance.  Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of Grace.
...
The business of religion is "to disappoint, first, to disappoint" (TF 32).  Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects.  Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace.  To disappoint this drive, "to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after (TF 32).  Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the invompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside.  Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional.  Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by ta black box for the sake of obscuring grace.  In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely.  But in religious practices, "incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer" (TF 39).  Great effor is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable.  "Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored" (TF 36).

Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.
...
...This revelation of the ordinary as a grace already given, as a life already being lived, is nothing exceptional, but it is something that must be enacted. It is a revelationt aht must be practiced.  Attention is difficult to exercise, it resists focus and is available for distraction.  It is a little bit subtle and requires great care.  Religion, rather than fleeing, practices attending.  It bends the flight of our attention back toward the ground that's already bracing us.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 143-145

Adam S. Miller - Pluralistic Religion

In the same way that religion gets into trouble when it tries to out-science science, science gets into trouble when it tries to out-religion religion.  This is particularly true when science apes the confused, traditional view of religion as something that is all things to all people, a mixture of everything, and the final word on all of it.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 136

Adam S. Miller - The Relationship between Religion & Atheism

Belief is a lure, a shiny, spinning distraction.  Faith, in contrast, is the work to which religion calls us.

If the aim of religious practices is to enact, again, the nearness of what is too close to be visible, then we must always begin again from the ordinary ground upon which we stand.  If this ground is secular, that is neither your fault nor mine, but we must not claim it as an excuse for our own laziness.  "Christians take as proof of the tediousness and decadence of this age what is in fact the result of their own laziness in pursuing the translation task of their fathers" (TS 228).  There are nothing but translations all the way down.  If contemporary religion remind s us a bit too strongly of a dry well or a gaily painted sepulcher, this is not the fault of the age in which we live.  It is the result of our unwillingness to do the only kind of work that has ever been done: the work of repeating, copying, translating, concatenating, aligning, porting, processing, and negotiating the whole settlement, from the top, again.  Religion works crosswise to theism or atheism.  When, Latour asks, "will we be able to entertain a coherent form of atheism, that is to accept the the ordinary way of talking about religion today is through common sense atheism, which performs the same role as the common sense powerful Gods of a bygone past?" (TS 232).  Atheism is not an objection against but an invitation to religious work.

"Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist (or maybe does not exist yet, as Whitehead could argue), and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did, when it had to use the obvious common parlance of ancient people for whom God was as unproblematic as market forces are for us today. (TS 229)"

The force of religious speech depends on its ability to speak plainly about obvious things.  Religion addresses the most ordinary features of our most common objects and renders the difficult grace of the nearness visible again.  God himself has always insisted, not on orthodoxy, but on the religious centrality of the least, the common, the ordinary, the vulgar, the downtrodden, the poor.  The path beat by their feet marks the way.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 133-135

Adam S. Miller - God Suffers Grace

The very premise of an object-oriented metaphysics excludes the possibility of a traditional, omnipotent, impassible, wholly transcendent God who created the world out of nothing...God, if he does or will exist, is an object, one among many, who suffers the grace of resistant availability like the objects that compose him.

Adam S. Miller - Religious Expectations Revealed

To expect a modest arrangement of people and frescoes and bread and hard wooden pews to do what the Hubble telescope does and lay down a through-line to deep space is to court pretty certain disappointment.  But to think that a modest arrangement of these objects has no disclosive power is to miss religious phenomena altogether.  Religious practices do not, like scientific practices, send us far away.  Religious practices work in the opposite direction: they ratchet us down and in.  They display the invisible grace of what was already available.  Saying a prayer isn't like flying off to an exotic locale, it's like squishing your toes down through layers of mud.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 131

Adam S. Miller - Religion is not about "Belief"

Religion aims at illuminating objects that are too near rather than too far.  Religion is the work of making-present what is already available.  Religious narratives, rather than conveying us to some distant place, are meant to enact the nearness of what is already given. Enacting this nearness is the key to redeeming the present and unveiling grace. "The truth-value of those stories depends on us tonight, exactly as the whole  history of two lovers depends on their ability to re-enact the injunction to love again in the minute the are reaching for one another in the darker moment of their estrangement" (TF 33).
...
Religion should not and never was defined by belief in things absent and distant,  invisible and beyond. God is not the object of a belief-action" (TS 231).  Rather, religion requires something of an entirely different order. It requires that I be faithful to the grace of what has already been made available.  Only this fidelity can redeem the present of presence.  Religious work depends, of course, on faith, but "faith and belief have nothing so say to one another." (TS 231).

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 126-127

Adam S. Miller - Science and Religion

For Latour, religion and science do have distinguishable magisteria--but these magisteria are anything but "non-overlapping" and, more critically, Latour finds their commonly assigned division of labor laughable.  "What a comedy of errors!  When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of the beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous soul-lifting, uplifting.  And it is religion that should be qualified as local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy" (TF 36).  It is the work of science to build fragile bridges of carefully constructed, painstakingly tested, and incessantly extended chains of reference.  It is science that gropes out into the dark beyond and bring us into relation with the distant and the transcendent.  It is science that funds the miraculous, defends the counterintuitive, excavates the unbelievable, and negotiates with the resistant and unavailable.

But the invisibility of the resistant and transcendent is only one kind of invisibility.  The invisibility of the available, obvious, familiar, local, repetitive, sturdy, matter of fact phenomena remains.  This invisibility,while quite different in character, is just as difficult to breach. "The far away is just as foreign, just as difficult to reach, just as unrealistic, and I would add just as unreasonable as the nearby" (WS 465).  Confusion results when it is assumed that all invisibility is reducible to a single kind, and accessible from a single line of sight. In particular, confusion results when it is assumed that the invisibility proper to religious phenomena is identical to that of scientific phenomena.

On Latour's telling, though the analogy is mine, the story of our common confusion about science and religion goes like this:  To great applause, science works out dependable methods that correct for our near-sightedness and bring into focus distant, transcendent phenomena.  However, full of its own success and egged on by religious pretensions, science can't help but draw some unflattering conclusions about its neighbors.  Science borrows some spectacles from religion (spectacles meant to correct for our far-sightedness), puts them on, and then loudly complains that these glasses are useless.  Seen through these lenses, all of science's hard-earned, transcendent objects have suddenly become blurry or disappeared altogether.  

The mistaken assumption that commonly follows--for many religious people and scientists alike--is that religious talk, because it doesn't address the transcendent objects articulated by science, must then be referring to "an invisible world of belief" that is even more distant, even more transcendent, even more miraculous, than the one science itself is articulating (HI 433).  As a result, both science and religion get backed into a corner. Scientists think such religious talk about the super-transcendent is ridiculous and many religious folk feel compelled by the strength of their own practice--knowing that religion does in fact bring something crucial into focus--to make a public virtue out of believing in the super-absurd.  "Belief," claims Latour in response, "is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science" (TF 45).  both of these caricatures need to be abandoned.  Science doesn't deal with obvious facts any more than religion deals with magical beliefs and "the fights, reconciliations, ceasefire, between these two 'worldviews'are as instructive as a boxing match in a pitch black tunnel" (WS 464).

...

The same competencies needed to be good at science are those needed to be good at religion.  The practitioner needs patience, modesty, persistence, curiosity, concentration, generosity, creativity, rigor, care, and of course, and objective bent.  As commonly understood, neither knowledge nor belief describes the work of science or religion.  Both science and religion require the same compentencies and both science and religion produce the same output.  Both induce revelation.  However, where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our myopia, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our hyperopia.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 119-122

Adam S. Miller - Religion and Science, correcting two kinds of invisibility

Objects that are either too resistant or too available will fail to appear.  Both the unavailable and the acquiescent tend toward invisibility.  In one case, the object is too distant, too opaque, too transcendent.  In the other, it is too close, too transparent, too immanent.  Science and religion differ in that they address two different kinds of invisibility.  Where science aims to illuminate resistant but insufficiently available objects, religion aims to illuminate available but insufficiently resistant phenomena.  Science is a third-person exposition of the unavailable.  Religion is a first-person phenomenology of the obvious.  Science corrects for our nearsightedness, religion for our farsightedness.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 119

Adam S. Miller - Ontology & Hermeneutics, no original meaning to recover

The need for interpretation and translation is not the mark of a fallen world, it is the substance of life.  To live is to interpret.  This can be hard to swallow.  "When you speak of hermeneutics, no matter which precaution you take, you always expect the second shoe to drop: someone inevitably will add: 'But of course there also exist "natural," "objective" things that are "not" interpreted'" (RS 144-145).  But no--there are, of course, not.  This is not because all natural objects have been contaminated by the interpretive meddling of other objects.
...
There is no original meaning to recover.  There are only objects to be persuaded. The more, the better.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 108

Adam S. Miller - Truth is the product of a mundane democracy

In a metaphysical democracy, every object gets a vote. Producing statements that only some humans find persuasive won't get you very far. If you want to speak truthfully about icebergs, then it is not enough to convince your fellow scientists, some influential politicians, or even a bevy of soccer moms. To have real traction you must also convince the icebergs themselves to line up behind what you say. If you want to make claims about honey, your alignment will have to queue not just bee-keepers, but flowers and hives and bees as well. The more bees that agree, the more substantial your claim becomes. When it comes to truth, appeals to authority carry only as much weight as the masses that such authority can muster. Blanket appeals to truths sponsored by absent gods, angels, Platonic forms, natural laws, or noumenal things-in-themselves have no force...Truth is the product of a mundane democracy, not the province of a magic kingdom. In order to vote, you have to show up at the polling place.
...
Truth is a function of both popularity and durability.  If a truth hits it off with a persuasive mass of humans and (in particular) nonhumans and then manages to get itself copied and repeated, ti has a career on its hands.  Truths "are much like genes that cannot survive if they do not manage to pass themselves on to later bodies" (SA 38).  Claims that are not persuasive to humans and nonhumans alike will quickly die out.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 103-104

Suffering and responsibility are both universal.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 94

...to be is to be passible.  God is no exception to this rule.  God, should such an object exist, would be one being, one particularly complex multiple, that composes, is composed of, and is in interdependent relation with many other objects.  Like every other object, God would be available, passible, resistant, and graced by the unavoidability of hard work.

This last point about the link between grace and passibility is crucial to the experiment I've undertaken because it fundamentally reframes the problem of suffering.  To say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of passibility is to say that grace guarantees the universality of suffering.  Moreover, it is to say that the imposition of suffering (classically understood as the problem) and the reception of grace (classically understood as the answer to this problem) are equivocal....both sin and salvation turn on this equivocity.

However, whatever the nature of salvation, suffering, because it names the double-bind of resistant availability constitutive of every object, cannot be expunged.  To be is to suffer and, outside of classical theism, suffering must characterize both activity and passibility.  Available for relation, every object passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, repurposed, or redistributed by other objects.  Moreover, even in actively influencing other multiples, each object will suffer the only partially reducible resistance of those objects it means to influence.  And it is important to note that, because every object (God included) must also suffer itself.

This universality, though, is not simply bad news because suffering is the universal mark of grace.  Without exception, grace comes.  Suffering it to be so, grace is what enables us to act, think, feel, love, an be.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 80-81

Grace is suffered in that it is passively received rather than actively controlled...There are no exceptions to the rule of availability, interdependence, co-composition, passibility, and passivity.  This means in turn, that there are no exceptions to the rule of grace.  Every object is shaped by forces and relations that exceed its knowledge and control.  Every object suffers the conditioning and enabling gifts of the other objects that compose, sustain, and cannibalize it.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 79

As a working agent, every possible object is dependent both on the other objects that compose it and on the other objects that can be leveraged into business with it.  Grace is enabling precisely because the gift of agency is always borrowed.  Grace may no longer make every impossible thing possible, but it does enable the fermentation of every possible thing.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 78

Knowledge, though engaged in the work of tallying objects, is itself a tallied object. Facts unfold as workable chains of partially linked, abstracted, or reduced subsets of objects that, in their novel configuration, are added to or folded back into the multitude of objects from which they came.
...
Strictly speaking...knowledge (as a faithful, mirror-like reflection without surplus or deficit) does not exist.  Such "knowledge does not exist--what would it be?  There is only know-how.  In other words, there are crafts and trades.  Despite all claims to the contrary crafts hold the key to knowledge" (PF 218).  To know an object is to know how to connect with it, how to link it with other networks, how to repurpose it as a flexible widget in some novel situation.  This kind of knowledge is intimate, messy, hands-on, adaptive, and above all, real.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 76

Additionally, if we do try to divide "Nature" from "Society" in a neat and tidy way, then the transcendence that traditionally characterizes the supernatural simply gets transposed into Nature itself.  Nature becomes that which forever "transcends" any of our feeble attempts to represent it.  "When," Latour asks, "will we finally be able to secularize nonhumnas by ceasing to objectify them?" (PN 51).  When will we stop taking objects as masks for noumenal things in themselves?  Latour's response to this version of "natural" tanscendence is identical to his response to claims of "supernatural" transcendence: he doesn't deny transcendence, he affirms it while multiplying it.  he flattens and secularizes it by rendering it ubiquitous.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 64-65.

The human and the nonhuman bleed into each other as human intentions are animated by powerfully purposeless forces and purposeless processes like natural selection bear the emergence of order and direction...Agency is always only borrowed and a specifically human agency can be borrowed only from a complex of nonhuman objects.  Everything human is organized around an unavoidable detour through the nonhuman because everything human is composed of and dependent upon nothing else. 

..every agent is a machine that dissembles the multitude from whom its strength is borrowed.  An agent is an object that speaks on behalf of others fromt he sake of itself.  But such agency is always a two edged sword because there is no simple way to determine when the agent is ventriloquizing the multitude and when the multitude is ventriloquizing the agent.  We're not likely to go wrong if we say taht agency is always both.

In an object-oriented theology, grace is the concurrently imposed and enabling strength that emerges in the give and take of agency.  Grace shows up in the way that agency simultaneously endows an object with and divests it of itself.  Agency ist he grace of acting for oneself on another's behalf.  Or, agency is the grace of acting for another on one's own behalf.


Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 57-58

The world, always an imbroglio, is no different now than it is has ever been [sic].  It is the urge to reduce and purify that desacralizes the world, not the world's own ontological promiscuity.  We cannot be guilty of mixing up this world with another or of cutting the string that once tied us to a higher plane because this world (i.e. these transcendences) is all there is.  If the gods exist, they live and move and have their being in the same motley pluriverse as every other object. 

The good news is that, "as soon as there is no other world, perfection resides in this one" (PF 233).  Every object is simply and perfectly whatever that object is.  "There is no rear-world behind to be used as a judge of this one" (RS 118).  This does not mean that legitimate judgements cannot be made, but it does mean that non-messy, non-provisional, non-concatenated judgments cannot be made.  It means that the messiness of these judgments does not stem from our poor access to what is real, but from the messiness of the real itself.  And it means that, with nowhere else to go, "God has come down from Heaven to Earth" and he too must go "to work to discuss, through experimentation with possible worlds, the best of deals, the optimum that no one is allowed to calculate in others' stead" (PN 177).

..if we can manage to renounce our dreams of revolution and reduction, then "the most ordinary common sense suffices for us to take hold, without am inute of apprenticeship, of all the tools that are right here at hand" (PN 163).  This work of acknowledging both the modesty and adequacy of the tools an dinstruments at hand--of confessing both the "perfection" and sufficiency of the grace of this disheveled world--is the work of an experimental metaphysics.  and, if there were to be such a thing, it would be the work of an experimental religion as well.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 47-48.

The first superscripted word in each of the four Gospels is the Greek proposition kata.  The basic sense of this preposition is "according to..." The gospel according to Matthew, the gospel according to Mark, the gospel according to Luke, and the gospel according to John.  That this little preposition should so prominently headline each of the gospels is significant.  It indicates that what follows, in all of its personal particularity, is not an abstract or objective recitation of facts but a profoundly personal and subjective declaration of Jesus's atoning grace.

It is sometimes tempting to view the incongruous particularities of each of the gospel narratives as a kind of deficiency that needs to be corrected by correlation--but it is not.  Rather, the fact that each gospel narrative necessarily comes to us filtered through the beating heart of a particular, individual experience of God's love marks the exact point at which truth without truthfulness would show itself to be utterly inadequate to the gift Jesus wishes to give.  When it comes to the announcement of the good news, bare truth is no virtue.  The very aim of the gospel in confronting us with certain truths is to induce in us a reorientation of our subjective relation to the truth.  In order for the gift of grace to be received, we must take up the truth as our own, as something spoken truthfully with our own mouths about our own selves.  The kata that opens each of the Gospels indicates that what they give to us is not simply the truth, but their own personal experience of its truthfulness.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 117

The humanities remain essential to any genuine education not because they directly address the question of the being of the world (this is the work of science), but because they are faithful to the question of what is other that "what is."  Religion, art, fiction, music, film, theater, poetry, etc., are all essential because they protest the vanity of the world and aim to induce the birth of the new.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 110

The image of the "veil" plays a crucial role in Moroni's elaboration of faith in Ether 12 because (1) the image of the veil ties together faith, weakness, and grace, and (2) their divergence in relation to the veil marks the difference betweent he power of the word and the power of the sword.  Where the sword professes strength and refuses to acknowledge the limit of the veil, the word takes as its strength nothing other than a confession of the weakness that the veil marks.

Thus, to exercise faith, Moroni argues in verse 19, is to be like the Brother of Jared "whose faith was so exceedingly strong" that he "could not be kept from within the veil."  As Moroni recounts, "When God put forth his finger he could not hide it from the sight of the Brothe rof Jared, because of his word which he had spoken unto him, which word he obtained by faith" (vs. 20).  In this parting of the veil, all of the concepts at work so far come together.  Note the logic of their intersection.  (1) The veil can only be penetrated by faith.  (2) Faith comes only in response to the power of the word.  (3) The word reveals to us our weakness.  (4) To come unto to God, to penetrate the veil, is to be shown our weakness and, more importantly, it is to be shown the truth of this weakness: that our weakness is in fact the strength of God's grace.  When, in the presence of God, we see the truth of weakness, then "weak things become strong" unto us, not because our weakness has been expunged but because we have ceded our debilitating claim to mastery or autonomy.

The irony of the veil, then, is that it is self imposed.  We are separated from God by our unwillingness to faithfully confess our weakness.  God is hidden by the veil that we throw over our own weakness in a vain attempt to cover it.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 105

In reference to Ether 12:26-28

the Lord does not address in this passage the question of our human "weaknesses" (plural) but the question of human "weakness" (singular).  The difference is crucial.  The Lord is not claiming to be responsible for the particulars of whatever various sins or weaknesses we may have.  However, the Lord does claim to he "gives unto men weakness."  The weakness referred to here is constiutive and essential. Rather than naming our sinfulness it names precisely the opposite.  Weakness names our createdness, our lack of autonomous sovereignty, our persistent dependence on God and his grace for life and agency.  In short, weakness names our essential relatedness to God and, thus, our unity with him.  Or, again: our weakness is God's grace.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 104

A testimony, in order to be true to its unmitigated reliance upon the Atonement of Jesus Christ, must accept the indefensible weakness imposed upon it by its own boundless certainty.

The sign-seeker finds this prospect of weakness and dependence impossible to accept. In contrast to the humble submission needed for a testimony, every search for a sign is motivated by a desire for mastery and control.  To look for a sign is, like an adulterer, to want to be in control. To look for a sign is to say, in effect, that you are unwilling to take the risk that a testimony's objective weakness demands.  It expresses an unwillingness to cede control to God.  "We will participate," the sign-seekers say, "but only on our own terms and only if we are in control of the evidence."  Sign-seeking misses not only the point of a testimony, but the whole logic of a saving relationship with God: it fails to submit its will to his.  Saving truths, insofar as they are distinct from knowledge of actual facts, always take the form of a testimony.  They are always centered on the task of bearing the world-opening possibilities that God wishes to bestow.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 69

The stregnth of a testimony becomes inteligible only when it is distinguished from and purified of every desire for a sign.  A testimony can purify our hearts only to the degree that it is itself pure.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 67

It is nonsense to say that someone has a testimony apart from their actively and directly experiencing the power of the Atonement...Testimonies do not refer to objects or creeds.  They refer only to a living experience of what solicits their witness.  Testimonies are no accidental by-product of God's grace.  Rather, they are its indispensable embodiment....

To have a testimony of the Book of Mormon can only mean that through it one has experienced the Atonement of Jesus Christ.  The same follows for Joseph Smith, President Monson, tithing, the word of wisdom, the Church as an institution, etc.  To have a testimony of these things is to have experienced the Atonement in connection with them--nothing more, nothing less.  Who would be more horrified by the idea of people having a testimony of Joseph smith than Joseph Smith?  Who would be more horrified by the idea of people having a testimony of the Book of Mormon than Mormon?  We may be justified in making certain inferences about Joseph Smith, President Monson, or the Book of Mormon based on our experience of God's saving grace in connection with the, but this is not the same thing as having a testimony that refers directly to them.

In each instance, the message and the messenger are only as effective as they are transparent.  To claim otherwise is to claim for them something that they would not claim for themselves.  To claim otherwise is to exchange a testimony for a sign.  The moment when any person, object, doctrine, or principle detaches itself from the task of occasioning an experience of Christ's atonement is the moment when that thing becomes a sign, a dead limb splintered from the tree of life.  If adultery is a desire for sex without the demands of genuine intimacy, then the trouble with adultery is that it substitutes the sign of love for love itself.  In this sense, Joseph Smith was right to claim that every sign-seeker is undoubtedly an adulterer.  To want a testimony grounded in signs is to want the idea of a thing without the responsibility of submitting to the difficulty of the thing itself.  It is to want "a form of godliness" while "denying the power thereof" (2 Tim. 3:5).  Such is the perpetual temptation of religion.

The world will resist you.  It will exceed your grasp.  It will gractivce indifference towards you.  Like a borrowed shirt, it will fit you imperfectly, it will be loose in the neck, short in the cuff, and the tag will itch.  The world will irritate you, bruise you, thwart you, anger you.  In the end, it will even--for at least a time--kill you.  Suffering the indignity of these rounds, yo will, be default, be tempted to just flit from one offense to the next, simmering in frustration, stewing in quiet desperation.  But to live, you will have to let these offenses go.  You will have to learn how to make and accept recompense.  You will have to forget the fiction of cash equivelances and barter with whatever is at hand.  You didn't get what you wanted?  Or even what you needed?  Your life was repurposed by others fro something other than what you had in mind?  Join the party.  I'm sympathetic, but in the end these objections are going nowhere.  That bus, while always idling, never actually leaves the station.  You presume a world that doesn't exist, and you fantasize a fixer-God who, unlike ours, is Himself doing something other than divinely serving, borrowing, and repurposing.  Ask instead, what were you given?  where were you taken?  what was your recompense?  Learn to like lemonade.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 57

To address the unconditional character of the present moment is to address the nature of my relationships with my parents and family.  To lay aside the screen of judgment and preference in favor of life is to set myself the task of unknotting the threads of fear and desire that have prevented me from unconditionally embracing my family and my family from unconditionally embracing me.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 17

In sin, we become unplugged.  When we refuse the givenness of life and withdraw from the present moment, we're left to wander the world undead.  Zombie-like, we wander from one moment to the next with no other goal than to get somewhere else, be someone else, see something else--anywhere, anyone, anything other than what is given here and now.  We're busy.  We've got goals and projects, We've got plans.  We've got fantasies.  We've got daydreams.  We've got regrets and memories.  We've got opinions.  We've got distractions.  We've got games and songs and movies and a thousand TV shows.  We've got anything and everything other than a first-hand awareness of our own lived experience of the present moment. 

If we are not capable of being where we are right now, we will not be capable of being fully present when we arrive at some ostensibly more desirable destination later on.  Thus unplugged, what good would heaven be?

The zombie-life of sin sets us wandering away from the present moment because it sifts everything through a screen of preference that inevitably filters out the absolute givenness of life itself.  Spiritually undead, we see things only in terms of our own (often legitimate) preferences.  Undead, we see things only in terms of our selves.  How will this benefit me?  How will this harm me?  How might this current situation be leveraged for my own profit?  If something doesn't show up as being to my advantage, then typically it doesn't show up at all.  Absent the appearance of what fails to comport with my preferences, the fountain of life is squeezed back to a trickle.\

....

Sin refuses the unconditional givenness of life by imposing its own conditions.

The results are predictable. Striving after the gnat of pleasure, straining away from the sting of pain, we ignore the bulk of life and marvel at our own morbidity.  Failing to be where we are, to receive what is given, to feel what we are feeling, we fantasize instead about what has not come, fret over what has already passed, and are bored to tears by the grace of what is actually present.

Fantasy, fear, and boredom: the hallmarks of sin.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pgs. 11-12

The present moment, so irreparably and unconditionally given, brings the full weight of life to bear upon us.  givenness gives without consulting us, without condition, without recourse.  We suffer the imposition of its grace with an unavoidable passivity.  In opening our hands to receive what it offers and give what it requires, we must confess our dependence, our insufficiency, our lack of autonomy.  but we grit our teeth at the shame of it, refuse to suffer the grace of it, and seek refuge from the present moment in the conditional character of sequence.  we cower before the absolute, failing to recognize its image in our countenances, and hide behind a fragile veil of fantasies, memories, and projected improvements.  we withdraw from the present, abandon life, give ourselves wholly to the past or future, and die.

Sin: a refusal of life.

Sin: a refusal of givenness

Sin: a refusal of grace

Sin: a refusal of the present moment

Sin: death.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 10-11

A formula for attending to the givenness of life: take no thought for tomorrow but attend to the unconditional character of the present moment.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 6

To the extent that work is instrumentalized as a means to an end, its value is conditioned by that end.  Work, in and of itself, is devalued.  In order to take work seriously, a theology would hav to uncouple work from its outcomes and consider it non-sequentially.  That is to say, in order to take work seriously as work, we would have to acknowledge its unconditional givenness.  We would have to see work as a grace.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 8

Grace is not a kind of conditional supplement ot the present moment that takes us to some other place we would rather be.  Rather, grace is the unconditional fullness of the present moment.

Grace is the substance of life itself.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pgs. 8-9

A common feature at work in all of this living is that things are given and things are recieved.  Breath, rest, words, food, excrement, handiwork, sensations, ideas, bodies, and intentions--each of them, the very stuff of life, are given and each of them are recived.  Life is this giving.

A guiding axiom: life is givenness

A theological version of this axiom: life is grace.

Grace names what comes as a gift.  In short, grace names what is given.  Or, more precisely, as Jean-Luc-Marion puts it, grace names the givenness of whatever is given and received.

Givennes names the giving and receiving that constitute life.  It names our interdependence.  It names a dynamic process of exchange, of giving and receiving, acceptance and conversion, that is always already dependent on things outside of itself.  here, to be alive, to give and receive, is to be in an open relation of interdependence with the world for food, air, words, materials, sensations, and companionship.
...

The primary difficulty faced in approaching life in terms of grace is that grace so easily slips the knot of our attention.  Our preoccupation with what is given and received so easily eclipses any awareness of its having been given, of its givenness.  How easy it is to receive a gift from someone and, in light of its heft, shine, and appeal, forget that it is a gift.  How difficult it is to keep its gifted-ness at the forefront of our attention.

Addressing ourselves to the givenness of life (and not just to what is given), will require a kind of focused attention that we don't generlaly employ.  We will have to attend to the immediacy of life with a kind of awareness that we rarely bring to bear.  We will have to shift down a few gears, ease off the gas, and be patient enough to linger with the given-ness of the present moment.  If we are racing off to somewhere else, we will see only what is given and its givnness will fail to appear.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 4-5

In Mormonism, Christ's work of atonement is generally seenas operating on two related but distinct planes.  I propose that as a basic schema, we should see it as working on at least three planes.  Traditionally, Christ's atonement (1) gathers up and reunites human bodies with human spirits through the resurrection, and (2) reunites or reconciles human beings with God.  This is sound Biblical doctrine.  But in light of Joseph Smith's revelations, it seems essential to see the atonement as being at work on at least one additional plane: Christ catalyzes not only the reunion of bodies with spirits and humans with God but, additionally, he gathers and seals husbands to wives and parents to children.  Christ's work will not end until the whole human family has been gathered together in "one."

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 3-4

Happiness emerges from being fully sentient and fully alive, which only means that it comes with being a sufferer. Which raises the question: Is it a weakness to want happiness? In some categorical sense, the answer is obviously no. But it is if we want it like a drug, if we feel anger or betrayal when it slips from our hands, if we feel that it is something we can control or demand.

George Handley, "Patience in Suffering"

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.  If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.  God became Man for no other purpose.  It is even doubtful...whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

What we call the virtues are precisely those attributes of character that best suit us to live harmoniously, even joyfully, in society.  Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show kindness.  Patience is only manifest when another calls it forth. So it is with mercy, generosity, and self-control.  What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point.  The confusion is understandable, since our current generation's preference for "spirituality" over "religion" is often a sleight of hand that confuses true discipleship with self-absorption.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 112-113

We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering, and in imagining a heaven above, than creating a heaven in our homes and communities.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 111-112

As long as it is God's nature and character we are striving to emulate, and not His power and glory, we are on safe ground.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 105

God would not have commanded us to forgive each other seventy times seven, if He were not prepared to extend to us the same mathematical generosity.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 100

The work of love in remembering one who is dead is a work of the utmost unselfish love...If one wants to make sure that love is completely unselfish, he eliminates every possibility of repayment.  but precisely this is eliminated in the relationship to one who is dead.  If love nevertheless remains, it is in truth unselfish.

- Soren Kierkegaard

Quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 98

If the whole mission of Christ and His atonement is to enable change, to render repentance and personal transformation possible, to empower and sanctify, then what are we to say about the billions who have lived in obliviousness to such power and grace?  The question is not how can they be rescued from damnation, but how can the be elevated or ennobled, given their inability to participate in all that His grace makes possible?

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 95

Two Obstacles to spiritual growth that are often reflected in Mormon mantras:

1.  SUPERSTITION.  Mormon's aren't superstitious.  We are modern and sophisticated; we don't dance in circles or chant incantations. Or do we?  If someone uses words or actions to influence God to do what they want, I believe that is superstition.  Prayer and ordinances were designed to put us in harmony with God so we can be spiritually nourished.  They are not designed to turn God into a cosmic vending machine.  Acts of service are designed to benefit others, not to motivate God to be nicer to us.  Keeping commandments should be acts of faith and love, but too often they seem to be approached as ways to get "blessed" (which, in our minds, usually means getting what we want or avoiding what we don't want).

2.  "BAD" RELIGION.  Bad religion occurs when the ordinances and practices become ends in themselves rather than support for spiritual growth.  I've seen couples extend themselves to become worthy to get "married int he temple" only to return to past problem behaviors afterwards.  They somehow thought the ordinance itself would be transforming and give them power over sinful attitudes and behavior.  In counseling, several Latter-day Saints have said to me: "I keep the Word of Wisdom, pay my tithing, and serve faithfully in my calling.  Why is my marriage failing?"  Or "Elder _____ said in conference that if we attended the temple regularly, our marriage would be successful!"  My response is usually something like, "I'm glad you are doing all this good, church-related stuff,  but until you learn how to be patient, kind, affectionate, and emotionally honest, your marriage is going to be a mess."  There is no doubt that LDS practices and ordinances can help us acquire these qualities but only if they are seen as supports and not ends.

-Philip McLemore, "Mormon Mantras", Sunstone, April 2006

While suffering may indeed be a soul-making process (some psychological research indicates this to be true), it is not inflicted for this “greater good.” Perhaps it is not that God allows our hearts to broken, but, in many cases, He simply cannot prevent it. But because of the love He has and the at-one-ment He seeks with us, His own heart is broken and yearns to heal both ours and His. Atonement is about unity, unity is about love, and love is about vulnerability.

Walker Wright, Mourn With Those Who Mourn: The Weeping God and Me

[A]s soon as it is recognized, as in modern revelation it is, that there is more than one eternal will in the universe--indeed, an infinity of such wills or autonomous intelligences--we have cut the thread that supposes God can “do anything.” In all-important ways even He, the greatest of all, can only do with us what we will permit Him to do. Our center selves can agree or disagree, assent or resent, cooperate or oppose. To say, as the scriptures do, that God has all power and that He is almighty and that with Him all things are possible is to say that He has all the power and might it is possible to have in this universe of multiple selves. And as soon as it is recognized, as in modern revelation it is, that there are eternal inanimate things which are subject to laws, to “bounds and conditions” which God did not create but Himself has mastered, we have cut another thread of illusory omnipotence…[God] can do only what our wills and eternal laws will permit. In short, He did not make us from nothing and what He makes of us depends on us and the ultimate nature of a co-eternal universe.

Truman G. Madsen, "Human Anguish and Divine Love," Four Essays on Love, 57-58

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Thomas Keating advises people over and over again not to look for the fruits of this prayer in their subjective experience of it.  Centering Prayer is not about accessing sublime states of consciousness or having mystical experiences.  The fruits of this prayer are seen in daily life.  They express themselves in your ability to be a bit more present in your life, more flexible and forgiving with those you live and work with, more honest and comfortable in your own being.  These are the real signs that the inner depths have been touched and have begun to set in motion their transformative work.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 14

[The sacred word] is not a "special" word....It is simply a place-holder, the finger pointing at the moon of your intention...

After a while you begin to discover yet another added benefit of this sacred word: It will sometimes pop up even when you are not in Centering Prayer--right int he middle of your busy life--to bring you back to center when you find yourself getting agitated or ungrounded.  I can't recall the number of times I've been caught in traffic jams or airport security lines, my blood pressure escalating rapidly, only to have my word sweetly bubble up from the depths to remind me that every moment I'm actually here, I'm in the presence of God.

...the word itself is neutral.  It's your intention that makes it sacred.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 26-27

Whatever your mind serves you up is just fine.  If you sink immediately into such depths of stillness that when the bowl bell is rung at the end of twenty minutes, it seems like only a minute, great!  You've had an easy and blessed time of it.  If every minute feels like twenty and you've been bedeviled by thoughts more prolific than the heads of Medusa, but still you've been doing your best to let them go and return to the openness, great!  You've gotten a good aerobic workout of your "muscle" of surrender.

...For the moment it's enough simply to reiterate Thomas Keating's reassurance that "the only thing you can do wrong in this prayer is to get up and walk out."  To sit there and quietly continue to do the practice, even if you perceive your efforts as totally unsuccessful, is, in his words, to know what it means to "consent to the presence and action of God within us" in whatever for it comes.  The power of this prayer lies in the consent.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 24-25

I sometimes call Centering Prayer "boot camp in Gethsemane," for it practices over and over, thought by thought, the basic gesture of Jesus' night of struggle in the garden: "Not my will be done, Oh Lord, but thine."

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 24

In one of the very earliest training workshops, led by Thomas Keating, a nun tried out her first twenty-minute taste of Centering Prayer and then lamented, "Oh, Father Thomas, I'm such a failure at this prayer.  In twenty minutes, I've had ten thousand thoughts."
"How lovely!" Responded Thomas Keating without missing a beat.  "Ten thousand opportunities to return to God!"

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 23-24

Meditation rests on the wager that if you can simply break the tyranny of ordinary awareness, the rest will begin to unfold itself.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 16

If we could picture our plight, then, in this unusual state of our being, which spiritual masters from time immemorial have described as "sleep," we could say that each one of us has a Mary deep within us, glued to the feet of the Master.  There are incredible luminous depths within in which we know how to listen and to whom we are listening.  But the clarity of our listening is obscured because out on the periphery we also have a Martha who thinks that the whole world is riding on her back and drowns out the inner music with her constant barrage of "I need," "I want," "Pay attention to me,"

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 15

At the center of our being is an innermost point of truth which shares not only the likeness, but perhaps even the substance of God's own being.  And yet, following the bent of Christian tradition, he makes it absolutely clear that access to this center is not at our command; it is entered only through the gateway of our complete poverty and nothingness.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 14

In its final formulation by the Prophet, Mormonism...is generous, open, and expansive. Whether it is so in its embodiment in the world depends on the willingness of individual Latter-day Saints to continue their prophet's reformation by reforming Mormonism as it exists in their personal faith and lives...Mormonism will 'revolutionize and civilize the world' no faster than individual Mormons receive erstwhile enemies and strangers as friends and brothers and sisters. Mormonism will...build a heaven on earth no faster and more effectively than individual Mormons shoulder this responsibility themselves

Dom Bradley, "The Grand Fundamental Principles of Mormonism: Joseph Smith's Unfinished Reformation," Sunstone Issue 141, 2006

Our vision of others is distorted, because we see them only through the refracted image of ourselves. We play at love, but perform it immaturely, childishly. Paul doesn’t really explain how being able to “know, even as we are known” is related to enduring charity. But in that moment of really seeing Dwayne, I started to understand that once we see each other, we love readily, even inevitably. And real love–Christ’s–comes, undeserved and even unbidden, as a gift of clear sight. Because charity is a gift of God, and not an act of will, it bears all things–even human contradiction; it can come to us even in anger, disgust, or fear, as the infant Christ came to a dark, forgotten corner to dwell among the beasts and his beastly and beloved human kin.

Kristine Haglund, www.bycommonconsent.com, "To See Face to Face"

You might picture [spiritual awareness] as a kind of interior compass whose magnetic north is always fixed on God.  It's thre, it's as much a part of what hold you in life as your breathing or your heartbeat.  And its purpose, just like a compass, is for orientation.

...spiritual awareness perceives through an intuitive grasp of the whole and an innate sense of belonging.  It's something like sounding the note G on the piano and instantly hearing the D and the B that surround it to make it a chord.  and since spiritual awareness is perception based on harmony, the sense of selfhood arising out of it is not plagued by that sense of isolation and anxiety that dominates life at the ordinary level of awareness.

If we have within us a compass pointing to the magnetic north of God, does this mean taht God dwells within us, as the center of our being?...Caustously, the answer to this question is "yes."  I say "cautiously" because Christian theology makes very clear that the human being is not god and that ht einnermost core of our being is not itself divine.  And yet theology has always upheld the reality of our own divine being become more and more mysteriously interwoven.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 12

Like most of the great spiritual masters of our universe, Jesus taught from the conviction that we human beings are victims of a tragic case of mistaken identity.  The person I normally take myself to be--that busy, anxious little "I" so preoccupied with its goals,fear, desire, and issues--is never even remotely the whole of who I am, and to seek the fulfillment of my life at this level means to miss out on the bigger life.  This is why, according to his teaching, the one who tries to keep his "life" (i.e., the small one) will lose it, and the one who is willing to lose it will find the real thing.  Beneath the surface there is a deeper and vastly more authentic Self, but its presence is usually veiled by the clamor of the smaller "I" with its insatiable needs and demands.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 10

Intentional silence almost always feels like work.  It doesn't come naturally to most people, and there is in fact considerable resistance raised from the mind itself: "You mean I just sit there and make my mind a blank?"  Then the inner talking begins in earnest, and you ask yourself, "How can this be prayer?  How can God give me my imagination, reason, and feelings and then expect me not to use them?"  "Where do 'I' go to if I stop thinking?"  "Is it safe?"

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 8-9

Silence is God's first language.

-John of the Cross

quoted in Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 7

What goes on in those silent depths during the time of Centering Prayer is no one's business, not even your own; it is between your innermost being and God; that place where, as St. Augustine once said, "God is closer to your soul than you are yourself."  your own subjective experience of the prayer may be that nothing happened--except for the more or less continuous motion of letting go of thoughts.  But in the depths of your being, in fact, plenty has been going on, and things are quietly but firmly being rearranged.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 6

The law of moral agency, of choice and consequence, does not require that we entirely bear the burden of our own choices made in this life because those choices are always made under circumstances that are less than perfect.  Our accountability is thus always partial, incomplete.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 92

What can it mean, that Christ's blood was spilt for our sins, that "by his bruises we are healed"?  Perhaps His perfect love means His identification with human suffering is so complete, that in one fell vision He comprehended the depth and range and terror of all our individual pain.  Perhaps it is the almost irresistible power of His superabundant love manifest in His choice to suffer what He suffered, that transforms the sinner's heart.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 90

The great healing of the universe is centered on the breach in our relationship with our God.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 90

Heaven is not a club we enter.  Heaven is a state we attain...we acquire Heaven in accordance with a growing capacity to receive it...heaven depends on our attaining a particular mode of being, a character and mind and will that are the product of life-long choosing.  Conforming to celestial law, we become celestial persons. "That which is governed by the law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same (D&C 88:34-35)" in the language of scripture.  Salvation, in this light, is the imitation of Christ--or, to make the concept clearer, the imitating of Christ.  One is only merciful to the extent one extends mercy.  One is only honest to the extent one practices honesty.  One is only truthful to the extent one speaks truthfully, and so on.  That is why, all good intentions and Christ's grace notwithstanding, whosoever chooses "to abide in sin,...cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy."  heaven is a condition and a sanctified nature toward which all godly striving tends; it is not a place to be found by walking through the right door with a heavenly hall pass.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 88-89

...all this talk about punishment and rewards, about justice and merit an deserts, can be wrongheaded and misleading.  We are not in some contest to rack up points.  We will not someday wait with bated breath to see what prize or pain is meted out by a great dispenser of trophies.  We cannot so trivialize life that we make of it a coliseum where we wage moral combat like spiritual gladiators, for a presiding Authority on high to save or damn according to our performance.  Where would be the purpose in all of that?  He might take the measure of our souls at any moment and deal with us accordingly, saving Himself, not to mention us, a great deal of trouble.

How much more meaningful is a life designed for spiritual formation, rather than spiritual evaluation.  All tests evaluate, and life is no exception.  But the most meaningful and productive tests are those that assess with an eye to improvement, that measure in order to remedy, and that improve and prepare us for the next stage in an upward process of advancement. For these reasons, all talk of heaven that operates in terms of earning rather than becoming is misguided.  Such ideas misconstrue the nature of God, His grace, and the salvation He offers.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 87

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out.  That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character...What we are worshipping we are becoming.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 87

Only by choosing the good and experiencing its fruit do we learn to savor and embrace the good.  Similarly, only by choosing the evil and living through its consequences do we learn what evil is and why it deserves to be rejected.  Or as Julian saw, "So pain endures for a time.  Its role is to purge us, make us know ourselves, and it drives us to the Lord."  Ther in lies the "needfulness" of sin, the part it has to play.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 84

We find ourselves in a universe pervaded by laws that define the relationship of action and consequence. Some are manmade: speed and you get a ticket; rob and you go to jail; break curfew and you're grounded.  Some are physical: let go of a rock and it drops; expose potassium to air and it forms hydrogen gas; mix baking soda and vinegar and you get a frothing pot worthy of the witch's concoction in Shakespeare's Macbeth.  And some laws are moral: nurturing hatred cankers the soul; practicing kindness and forbearance develops serenity.

Parents and police officers alert us to the first category.  Physicians and chemists may give us fluency in the second.  But nothing short of trial and error will convert us to the unyielding strictures of the third.  To be adept at the first entails outward behavior.  Mastering the second challenges our mind.  but to live in harmony with the moral law of the universe requires body and soul, heart and mind, the will and the affections of the undivided self.  This is the meaning of Jesus' words that living the highest and holiest law; loving God, requires "all your heart, and...all your soul, and...all your mind."

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 84

Commandments are the expression of those eternal laws that will lead us to  a condition of optimal joyfulness.  They are the beacon lights of greater realities that define the cosmic streams in which we swim.  Operating in harmony with those realities, as a swimmer who works with the current rather than against it, empowers and liberates us to fill the measure of our creation. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 83

What is always at stake in any decision we make is what that choice turns us into.  We may suffer the unfortunate consequences of other peoples' choices.  People may honor or abuse us, harm or nourish us. But for the most part, it is our own choices that shape our identity.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 81

Sin is not an arbitrary category that God imposes.  And it is not synonymous with simple error or misjudgement.  This is a truth, like others we are examining, that is best revealed in the searchlight of honest introspection.  We know the difference between regret and remorse.  We regret giving erroneous directions that get the stranger lost.  We feel remorse for the slander deliberately spoken.  We regret an action that leads to harm.  We feel remorse for choosing that action to inflict harm.  Legitimate guilt, the kind we cannot explain away or therapeutically resolve, involves more than bad judgment or human error.  The degree of guilt we experience is proportional to the deliberateness with which we cause hurt.  Herein lies the clue to the meaning of sin, and the way beyond it.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 80

God is invested in our lives and happiness, because He chooses to be a Father to us.  His concern with human sin is with the pain and suffering it produces.  Sympathy and sorrow, not anger and vengeance, are th emotions we must look to in order to plumb the nature of the divine response to sin. 

...Sin is pain, and the intensity of His response to sin is commensurate with the intensity of that pain He knows sin will entail, and in which He has already chosen to share.  For He is the God who weeps.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 79

"A...paradox is evident in the prophet's admonition, that we "feast upon [Christ's] love; for ye may, if your minds are firm, forever."  Why should we need firm minds to feast upon love?  Like all gifts, love can be hard to recieve.  As children we welcome presents and affection with the same ready heart and hand, but we tend to lose knack as we grow older and more self-sufficient.  Love may be a heavy burden because of pride; we want to be self-made men and women, paying our own way, and are ashamed of our need.  Perhaps we are made to see our own littleness, by the great chasm that opens up between our merit and the gift.  Or perhaps we are genuinely ill ast ease, as one who knows at what great cost the gift has come.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 74-75

Our task is to school our appetites, not suppress them, to make them work in concert with a will that disciplines the spirit as much as the flesh.  For desire has both spiritual and bodily expression, and our life is a journey to purify both.  Along the way, we discipline and honor the body, even as we aspire to perfect the soul, finding in the end that the body and spirit, fitly framed together, do indeed provide the deepest joy.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 72