Moses 7:28 is a pretty shocking part of our scriptural canon. Seeing how much the people of earth were going to suffer and all the mortal hardships the Plan of Salvation would engender, “it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept.”
Scripturally, canonically, our God’s heart can break. If you haven’t yet experienced sadness that feels like it could be so heavy as to make God weep, odds are we all will by the end of our lives. In turn, we might also imagine that God can feel joy commensurate with that level of sadness, joy that “swells as wide as eternity,” in the subsequent words of Enoch. Many of us probably feel as though we have glimpsed just a bit of this at one time or another, in holding newborn babies, reuniting with loved ones, or perhaps when practicing forgiveness.
Bishop Black asked me to draw on President Nelson’s October 2016 conference talk “Joy and Spiritual Survival” for my remarks today. This talk is the source of the well-known quote: “My dear brothers and sisters, the joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives.”
From my best reading of his talk, I understand that President Nelson is teaching us that, even in the most tragic, desperate of trials we can make room for joy alongside (though not in place of) suffering when we contextualize it in the Plan of Salvation and focus on Jesus Christ.
President Nelson offered the reason he and so many others are able to find joy in trials. As someone who craves specifics, especially in topics as overwhelmingly complex and powerful as the Atonement of Jesus Christ or the Plan of Salvation, today I decided to discuss three ideas I have for how we might do this—how to find joy in dark places by making meaning through these powerful religious ideas.
The first belief I have is that suffering, met with compassion, can engender beautiful creation.
Let’s travel back in history with a few examples. The first folding, lightweight wheelchair was crafted in 1932 by engineer Harry Jennings for his lifelong friend, Hebert Everest, who had paraplegia.
Surgical gloves were invented in 1889 by surgeon William Halsted not for infection control, but as a labor of love for his wife who had developed a distressing skin condition from harsh operating room chemicals.
Baking powder as we know it came about only because British chemist Alfred Bird’s wife was allergic to yeast and eggs. His tinkering was solely for her and only later did it go to market.
While Alexander Bell is largely credited with the invention of the telephone, two decades before Bell filed for a patent, Italian inventor Antonio Meucci installed in his home an electromagnetic telephone so he could communicate between floors with his wife, who was confined to bed with rheumatoid arthritis.
Based on my research, these aren’t just apocryphal stories. They’re merely a sampling of inventions I found that came about because someone loved a person who had a problem. In what once felt like a vacuum of suffering or lack, each of the above people loved a new creation into existence.
And it reminds me of a poem about Jesus’ father by Jay Hulme, titled The Carpenter, which reads: “He knew his son would outshine him from the beginning, so taught this child the only thing he could: The skill of taking blades and wood, and turning death into something else entirely.”
A second thing I believe strongly is that, in the words of Catholic nun Simone Campbell, “Joy is released when we touch the pain of the world.” In 2023, I began volunteering for an organization that provides free photography to families experiencing a stillbirth or the death of a child in early infancy. The first-ever call I received was for a newborn in Salt Lake dying of congenital heart defects. I have a distinct memory of lying my head on my then-fiance’s chest that morning before I left for the hospital and hearing Nate’s heart beating so strongly—knowing that an hour’s drive away was an innocent baby whose heart couldn’t sustain his life.
In her novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson wrote, “There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.” This was one such moment for me. For me, that mortal insufficiency manifested with the deep pang of the knowledge that there was no real reason the people I love most couldn’t be in the shoes of that baby’s family. I’ve felt the same twinge working at the hospital or in homeless shelters and knowing that if a few circumstances of my birth or family life had been different, it could instead be me on the other end of the exam table.
Utah poet Madeline Thatcher shared a similar sentiment in her “A Poem for Ash Wednesday,” writing,
“We hear the scream of a siren and my mother tells me someone’s life is changing, a phrase her mother used to tell her too. To have the heart break hit your eardrums—to know that the stroke, the kitchen fire, the child found floating facedown in a suburban pool has ripped up a life in a way that will turn this Tuesday into a circled square on a wall calendar, even though I will forget (because I will always forget)—is to let another’s pain become your own, an act of human kindness that no one will ever know but you.
My mother once told me that when she held her babies for the first time, she wondered why the world hadn’t stopped, why the earth’s axis hadn’t paused its rotation to look at me, my sister, my brother, slick with blood and gulping air into lungs that had only known fluid for months on end. And when her mother died the day after Easter, she thought the same thing, wondered why her mother stopped breathing but her tulips started blooming.”
It has really been my experience in life thus far that grappling with the scary fragility of mortality has the effect of bringing me closer to other people. It is so much harder to distance myself from people who make different choices than I do or have different life outcomes than my family when I can humbly accept that I don’t know the reasons God has influenced my life—or someone else’s—to be what it is. Earlier I mentioned moments of sheer love and happiness for other people that give us a glimpse of Godlike love. For me, one of the most powerful such experiences I had was when I served as a full-time Americorps volunteer in San Francisco for a year. One of the best parts of my service was how many opportunities I had to get into extremely intimate, close conversations with total strangers about their lives. I have one beautiful memory of looking around the dirty public bus I was riding and literally feeling my heart get mushy with love for the many strangers around me just based off of the stories I could imagine hearing from them.
The final quote I want to share in this section is from Rowan Williams, an Anglican theologian, writing on Christian baptism:
Baptism does not confer on us a status that marks us off from everybody else. To be able to say, ‘I’m baptized’ is not to claim an extra dignity, let alone a sort of privilege that keeps you separate from and superior to the rest of the human race, but to claim a new level of solidarity with other people. It is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected – you might even say contaminated – by the mess of humanity. This is very paradoxical. Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied. And the gathering of baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world.”
In the words of poet Devin Kelly, “If I am to be in possession of anything, I want it to be my state of witness.” When we resist the urge to rationalize other people’s suffering or to ascribe their suffering to wickedness as, say, Job’s friends did, the end result is that we can exist closer to our brothers and sisters. Their sufferings become our own. We mourn with those who mourn. And in doing so, we are able to rejoice with those who rejoice.
Speaking of rejoicing with those who rejoice, I come to my third idea about joy and suffering being bound up, which is that I love the Latter-day Saint theological openness to the idea of God suffering with us.
President Sharon Eubank, who, as you will probably soon tell, has a degree in English, wrote one of the most cutting, spiritual essays on grief I have ever read. This particular story is about grief at Christmas, which may well be the place some of us in the congregation have found ourselves in this season. Writing on the death of her friend, President Eubank shares:
The grief of her leaving rips and unravels things. It cries out and soughs through the nights. It creates a white space and a white noise. The pain is a blizzard, making unrecognizable humps out of my life. It turns me cynical and sneering when other people are stringing up lights over their tables and telling stories. I try to pretend it hasn’t happened. I close my eyes and shut my ears so I can hear the siblings in their red elf hats singing “Joy to the World” to their new baby sister, giggling and nudging each other knowingly at the pun. Joy to the world, the Lord is come. But my pretending does nothing to stop the white noise from raging on.
Into this endless, white wasteland, one day a man did come wading through the hip-deep snow. I could see him from a long way off and, God help me, I wished he wouldn’t. I didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with him. Undeterred by what I wanted, he patiently climbed over my frozen fences and beat a new track through the arctic yard. I barely greeted him though our eyes met. We knew each other well. I was angry and he knew it. Well — since he had insisted on coming – what would he do now? Fix things. That’s what he did, right? Melt the whole damned world to spring.
Ignoring my outburst, he simply sat down. We didn’t talk. He didn’t probe for an emotional baring of my soul. We spent a silent night. And in the days afterward, wherever I went, he simply followed and sat down next to me. After quite a bit of this, I noticed he was taking the windy side, keeping me between the storm and the wall.
Christmas is for grief. The grief of why and how and when. The grief of things that cannot be changed, no matter how much wanting or faith. I know that now.
It’s much easier to love Jesus as a little baby in the hay. But that just gets us to climb up into the truck. First and foremost, Jesus Christ is a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Rather than remain the sweet baby asleep on the hay, he accepted to be the man bearing all the messiness of our mortality. Jesus of the garden, the cross, and the tomb is harder to worship, but he also gives more in return. He rebukes the white noise that is stealing little bits of my soul. He sits on the storm side and puts me by the wall. He holds back the greedy, sighing night and gives me space to catch a breath. The chastisement of my peace is upon Him, and with His stripes I am healed.
In his talk, President Nelson shared Hebrews 12:2, which describes Jesus as he “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.” Jesus came to earth and experienced every single horrific or heartbreaking thing to ever happen to humans and humankind. From this scripture, we know that we can’t separate His suffering and His weeping—or that of God—from the joy of being our co-creator and savior.
The poet Maggie Smith, writing about the experience of taking a winter walk with her baby daughter, reflected: “I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.” Brothers and sisters, I feel the same way. I don’t have answers for us today about why brutal and unjust things partially define mortality, but I do have a lovely feeling and belief that God wants us to love our world, our lives, and each other. People are that they might have joy. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Aurora Golden-Appleton
Bonneville Sixth Ward
Provo, Utah
December 31, 2023
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