Loving The World
(Given by Trent at the Spring 2007 English Banquet as published by
Humanities At BYU.)
As a child, I would sometimes spend time listening to Elvis Presley sing on my mother’s well-worn copy of a 1974 RCA classic LP,
Elvis: Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis. In my mind’s eye, clouded by nostalgia that makes those lazy afternoons seem almost universally sunny, I would place the record on the turntable, start the RCA dog spinning into a blur, and stretch out on the floor in front of the speakers and listen to Elvis’s rendition of the Christian hymn “How Great Thou Art.” Backed by J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet and Sumner’s Guinness Book–record double low-C voice, Elvis’s live-in-Memphis exultations were a truly religious experience to hear. As the muted verses gave way to the bold “Then sings my soul, my Savior, God, to thee,” I could feel the glory of God in the ecstatic arcs and low rumbles of the voices. For those few moments before I would tuck the record back into its Graceland-bedecked sleeve, the young Mormon me and the sometimes drug-addled but seemingly genuine King together worshipped, however ironically, the King.
You can probably imagine how surprised I was several years later, in 1985, to see that our new LDS hymn book included Elvis’s majestic hymn in its pages. You can likewise imagine my dismay the first time that I heard an LDS congregation sing “How Great Thou Art.” To be sure, the hymn was very reverently and appropriately sung, but gone were my chills, the exultation of hearing Elvis’ voice swell from a whisper to something that shook the heavens. My ward’s version of the hymn assumed an eminently practical character: you could sing their version of “How Great Thou Art” for the opening song, the sacrament hymn, or the closing song in a sacrament meeting held any time of year; you could sing it at a missionary farewell or a funeral. Once converted to Mormonism, the hymn’s newly-acquired slow tempo, its sensible absence of dips and swells in dynamics, and its generally agreeable torpor meant that we could worship God and all of His creations without disturbing a single one of them. The hymn had been “rescued” from the world and rendered safe for our LDS consumption.
Might it be possible, though, that the elements of the all-shook-up Elvis version so carefully extracted from our LDS-style “How Great Thou Art” have something to offer that might augment that which we have in our own tradition as Latter-day Saints? At football games around the country, we’re admonished by huge, inelegantly-scrawled butcher-paper signs to read John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The sweaty end-zone banner bearers usually exclude the next verse, which seems to me equally important: “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” ( John 3:17). Through the lens of the restored gospel, we understand that Jesus’ mission to redeem Heavenly Father’s children is the center of the Plan of Salvation, and that it is Heavenly Father’s “work and glory to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life” of all humankind (Moses 1:39). But were we to collapse time and space and sit down with some of the serious folks you might read in an American literary history survey— William Bradford, say, or John Winthrop—and lay out our notions of God’s universal, saving love for them to consider, they might ask us, “But why on earth would God want to save
all of them? Surely they’re not
all worth saving?”
I wonder if we as Latter-day Saints, living in these the last days, don’t sometimes entertain our own versions of the same question, something like, “What is it that God sees in some of these people around us?” As English majors, we might be willing, as Elvis’s hymn suggests, to survey “in awesome wonder” all “the worlds that [God’s] hands have made,” but we may simultaneously desire to disown the “human” in “humanities,” seeing humanity as a potential synonym for corruptibility, inferiority, or depravity. If only God’s creations weren’t spoiled by all these imperfect people running around in them! Even if God wants to save all the humans in the messed-up world around us, we reason, perhaps our part in helping with this process could be limited to handing out pass-along cards, or to some other activity that would afford us the latitude to worry about fixing our own shortcomings but not have to see those of others too up close and personal. Perhaps we even look at that pesky sign at BYU’s entrance with some chagrin, understanding that yes, the “world is our campus,” but go easy on the campus part, and give it to me without the world, if you please.
For the LDS reader, there are practical concerns, of course, in approaching the texts of the world with such courage. I see these concerns manifest themselves not infrequently in the literature classes that I teach. In one way or another, these concerns always ask, “How ‘worldly’ will the material be that we read in class?” It’s a valid question, and I understand why smart, well-intentioned students ask it. I usually reply, in all earnestness, “Well, none of the authors we’re reading this semester is LDS,” and the students laugh and then say, “No, really.” The answer is usually that really, we aren’t reading anyone who is LDS, and sometimes these non- LDS writers approach the weighty issues of a fallen world differently than we, as readers, might wish them to. On the other hand, precisely
because they are not LDS, I would suggest that they have something to show us about our world that we might not be able to see, maybe even something that glorifies God and all his wonders in a manner that reaches us in ways that enliven the Holy Ghost within us. For we do believe, don’t we, “that God will yet reveal many great and important things” to us (Articles of Faith, v. 9)? Couldn’t at least a few of those things come to us through our reading, if we’re willing to give some of these writers a chance?
So how can we love the world and what it has to teach us while still being “in the world, but not of the world”? In his novel
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer details the life of a precocious nine-year-old named Oskar Schell, a New Yorker who lost his father in the World Trade Center collapse on 9/11. Oskar is, among other things, a brainstormer of inventions, and his ideas strike the reader as at once hilarious and poignant. One of Oskar’s inventions deals with his version of what an ambulance should be:
"What about a device that knew everyone you knew? So when an ambulance went down the street, a big sign on the roof could flash, “DON’T WORRY! DON’T WORRY!” if the sick person’s device didn’t detect the device of someone he knew nearby. And if the device
did detect the device of someone he knew, the ambulance could flash the name of the person in the ambulance, and either, “IT’S NOTHING MAJOR! IT’S NOTHING MAJOR!” or, if it was something major, “IT’S MAJOR! IT’S MAJOR!” And maybe you could rate the people you knew by how much you loved them, so if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash, “GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!” One thing that’s nice to think about is someone who was the first person on lots of people’s lists, so that when he was dying, and his ambulance went down the streets to the hospital, the whole time it would flash, “GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!”" (72–73)
Obviously, the world would be very different if Oskar’s ambulances sped down our streets. Sometimes, I suspect that a few readers in our community want books to operate in much the same way, advertising, “OK FOR YOU TO READ! OK FOR YOU TO READ!” or “ONLY MINOR UNCOMFORTABLE DIALOGUE AND SCENES WITH RICH TRUTHS TAUGHT ABOUT PEOPLE AND THEIR ETERNAL POTENTIAL BY SOMEONE NOT OF OUR FAITH!” Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, books don’t work that way. My sense is that, better even than these huge flashing signs, we should rely on the gift of the Holy Ghost to give us the discernment we need to draw the best out of the literature that we read. Moroni tells us that “by the Holy Ghost” we can “know the truth of all things” (Moro. 10:5), not just of things related to the Book of Mormon’s veracity or to the truth of the Church. Understanding the broad utility of the gift of the Holy Ghost helps us see it as something more than one of those radiation badges that shines green when everything’s A-OK but turns a gruesome red when radiation hits it—telling its wearer, in short, with its crimson face, “Sorry, buddy, you’re already toast.” Instead, if we see the Holy Ghost as that which can enlighten our minds all the time and not just in perilous situations, we can become people who, armed with an increased measure of the Spirit and sensitized to its capacity to give us knowledge wherever we seek it, find that many of the “best books” mentioned in the Doctrine and Covenants are not scriptural but are secular, or “worldly” in the best sense of the word.
In making these arguments, I am not oblivious to the fact that the world can often be a dark and ugly place. Every day, our world finds itself filled to the brim with suffering, torture, injury, sin, and hardness, and there is at some very important level nothing that poems or plays or songs can do to right these wrongs. Clearly, though, we have a choice as readers—we can either despair, seeing that history seems to illustrate the futility of hope, and cut our losses, washing our hands of the world, or we can take the knowledge we gain of the world and, as poet Seamus Heaney has written, help “hope and history” to “rhyme” by loving the world. We can see, against all odds, the continued capacity of the world for beauty, for truth meaningful beyond the grave, for emanating something that would inspire the Son of God to take up His cross on behalf of not just the covenant people but
the entire world’s people. We might consider the spirit of this excerpt from MartÃn Espada’s poem “Alabanza,” which commemorates the many anonymous victims of the September 11 World Trade Center collapse. The Spanish word
alabanza means “praise,” and perhaps if can do nothing else for the world then we can at least praise that which is praiseworthy in it:
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh,
Alabanza.It is true, as Elvis’s hymn still sings in my memory, that “when Christ shall come / with shout of acclamation / And take me home,” the “joy” will indeed “fill my heart,” as it will likely fill the hearts of all members of His Church. But until then, I praise His creations here, in this world. I praise the publicans and sinners, not for the worst of what they’ve done, but for the moments of transcendent truth that we can see flash in their eyes and hear from their mouths despite all their shortcomings. I praise the world for reminding us that “the work and the glory” isn’t simply a set of serialized LDS novels but a sprawling, global effort that involves many more people than the Steed family and their “Who’s Who among Early Latter-day Saints” friends. I praise that which is human in us; I praise the humanities that speak of us and of all our successes and struggles. I praise BYU for having the vision to know that despite our occasional LDS qualms the world is indeed our campus, and that if we will rise to the full measure of our creation we will not only live in the world as begrudging citizens but will love the world, freely, even as God has loved us.
Alabanza.
Noah and his new candy-apple red electric guitar. I must confess it is a beautiful color! 
Noah - almost 3 years old. I love the smirk!
