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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Your Favorite Novel9/30/2006 01:25:34Yesterday during my first class in graduate school (Modernization and Secularization with Thomas Carlson), a sign up sheet was passed around to all of us. On it, along with our names and emails and so on, the teacher cleverly suggested that we also put down our favorite novel. Now this is a pretty notorious question for me - it was the one that made me stop being a literature major in college, one night on a walk with a friend. I realized I didn't have one, I didn't want to have one, and novels weren't what felt ultimately important to me. And while I was thinking about what to write I looked through the list and saw there the book I happened to be reading at the time, The Book of Mormon. Someone's favorite novel, apparently. A moment earlier, I am ashamed to say, the thought had crossed my mind to write that too. I ended up leaving the space blank. But after a summer reading science fiction works that invent fabulous religions and ideologies, as well as some exploration into the masterwork of L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, I have gotten pretty used to the idea of "made up" religion. It is a kind of tradition in American popular literature, even. Now as I read the Book of Mormon I can't help feeling that it fits into that mold, that it so easily could be a work of careful invention by a 19th century American familiar with the King James Bible and prepared to exaggerate its rhetoric a little. At the same time, I just finished a pleasant tour through Utah (my third, each more interesting than the last - see this and this) and saw again all the faith and interesting architecture and distinctive culture that has grown out of the book and its "translator." It has taken on a life of its own, created a Promised Land, and grounded a spirituality for people. It becomes thereby not a lie. In a different form, it is related to the problem that arises for students of Christian historical criticism of the Bible. But in the words of a wonderful Orthdox priest I know: Is this something that we can bless? Can I take seriously a community that is founded on a text that I strongly suspect to be not what it claims to be? I can I take seriously my own community, which is founded on a text and tradition was probably not developed the way we used to think it was? My uncle once said (as we were riding our bikes along the Potomac River in Washington) that religions need to stop undermining each other because that which undermines any of them can usually be extended to undermine them all. When I remember the wonder that my father and I felt as we drove into Salt Lake a few weeks ago, that American Promised Land, I say yes: it is something that we have to bless. Not with the blind "respect" of most interfaith dialog that culminates in tedious self-censorship and the exclusion of everything out of the mainstream. What is holy deserves not to be rudely criticized but it also need not be empirically true. What if: the Book of Mormon is not a novel though it might be a lot like one, and it is something that we can bless. If we want. And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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Your Favorite Novel - 10/20/2006 03:47:44
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