Alma 8-12: On witnesses and resurrection

Before I launch into my scriptural reflection, I want to note that today my partner and I celebrate our seventh anniversary. Seven years ago, we exchanged vows during a commitment ceremony on the Saturday before Utah Gay Pride, which is held on the second Sunday of June. Celebrating our anniversary on Utah Gay Pride is the easiest way to remember the day, if not the date.

The ceremony was held at First Unitarian in Salt Lake City. Neither of us was Unitarian, but we liked the “pioneer” look of the space, and one of the ministers was happy to conduct the ceremony for us. The structure of our commitment ceremony followed the structure of the sealing ceremony—as is also true of an LDS civil marriage ceremony—though we freely revised to reflect a more liberal theology. It was important to both of us that the ceremony reflect our Mormon heritage.

Friends from various dimensions of our life attended: people we’d met though Sunstone; people we’d met doing volunteer interpretation work at Primary Children’s; members of the Spanish-speaking Episcopal congregation I attended during the late 1990s; members of Affirmation, the gay Mormon organization; members of Integrity, the gay Episcopal organization. After the ceremony, there was a reception with cheap but abundant finger foods and a small two-tier wedding cake we ourselves had baked.

I thank God for my memories of that evening, for the friends who shared it with us and helped organize it, and for our continuing partnership. There’s a lot more I want to say to God about that, but I anticipate it will get rather too personal to post here.

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My Book of Mormon reading for this week was Alma 8-12. There are two themes I feel moved to comment on today: witnesses and the resurrection.

The text makes a big deal about the fact that Amulek is a second witness for Alma’s preaching. At first the people of Ammonihah ask Alma why they should believe the testimony of one man—then Amulek, as an insider to the community, stands up to attest that he has received his own angelic witness of the truth of Alma’s teachings. As a result, we’re told, “the people began to be astonished, seeing there was more than one witness who testified” (10:12).

Now, at one level, this faith in the persuasive power of a second witness is naive to the point of silly. I mean, really: Does the fact that there are two Jehovah’s Witnesses at your door instead of just one make you think, “Oh my gosh! Maybe they have the right religion after all! I’d better listen to what they have to say”? Of course not.

On the other hand, I can certainly attest to the psychological power of having someone speak up on your behalf. When you’re facing (literally or metaphorically) a hostile or skeptical audience, there’s a certain strength—a sense of support—that comes from having someone else say, “I think/feel/see it the same way.”

I don’t want to get maudlin about this, but living the Mormon tradition in the idiosyncratic way that I do can be lonely. I know from the feedback people have posted that certain things I’ve written at this blog or at LiberalMormon.net have resonated with other people, and I’m grateful for that. But I also suspect that, ultimately, my approach to Mormon spirituality is too radical for most liberal-leaning people who are trying to work out a place for themselves in the Church; and I suspect that most Mormons who become as radical as I have simply give up on Mormonism. So I’m in a very strange position. As Jewish novelist Chaim Potok used to cheerfully acknowledge: I’m a freak. And, to be honest, that feeling appeals to my vanity.

Still, it gets lonely. There are scriptural precedents for that loneliness I can look to in order to make meaning out of it. Not all the prophets had the luxury of a second witness, or companion, standing at their side. A number of the prophets we read about in the Bible and the Book of Mormon appear as lone voices. Lehi, at least before the conversion of Nephi. Abinadi. Samuel the Lamanite. John the Baptist. The lesson I take from this is that following the path you feel the Spirit is calling you down may be a solitary journey. It may require you to face skeptics and critics alone. I accept that. In fact, knowing me, even if God sent me someone whose approach to Mormon spirituality was almost exactly like my own, I’d probably end up disagreeing with him or her as a point of pride. But still . . . marching to the beat of your own call can be lonely.

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Alma preaches that in the resurrection our bodies and consciousness will be restored as they are now (11:43-44). This is consistent with other passages in LDS scripture which underscore that the resurrected life will be a continuation of our life now: the same bodies, memories, knowledge, character, and relationships (Alma 41:2; D&C 130:2, 18-19). It seems to me, in fact, that LDS scripture is more emphatic on this point than the New Testament.

Near the end of my mission, I taught a woman, Ramona, who was a Communist. Her father, who was Christian, had died a quite painful death not long before we met her. At one point Ramona asked him how he could go on believing in a God who would let him suffer like this, and he chewed her out for lacking faith. That experience, in connection with her grief over her father’s death and some other difficulties in her life, had shaken her up, which is why she was willing to hear us out. One day we were talking about the resurrection, and she said that she had a hard time with the notion of an afterlife because as a Communist—i.e., as someone committed to revolutionizing the world in the here and now—it seemed to her that promises of an afterlife simply served as “pie in the sky” to distract people from fighting injustice and inequity on earth.

An idea suddenly flashed into my head, and I became very excited. I told Ramona that if our eternal destiny is to live in a material world like this one—according to Mormon teaching, in fact, the celestial kingdom will be this very earth—then preparing for the world to come means learning now to organize the material world and its resources in the way God wills (which under the law of consecration includes equal distribution of goods on the basis of need, though I didn’t get into all of that talking with Ramona at the time. In retrospect, I probably should have). In other words, belief in the resurrection should make us take this world and its problems more seriously, not less—because we’re building now the world we hope to inherit hereafter.

I still believe that. I’m less committed now to the literal reality of an afterlife than I was then—at least, I’m less inclined to make firm assertions about the literal nature of the afterlife. But I continue to believe that teachings about the resurrection are intended to teach us how to live now. And I believe that LDS teachings about the resurrection are particularly instructive—because they emphasize so much the continuity between our lives now and our lives in the hereafter—about the importance of living now the kind of life we would want to live forever. We should build now the kinds of relationships we would want to experience forever; we should work on building now the kind of world we would want to inhabit forever. Because according to our tradition, when body and spirit are eternally reunited, we will pick up where we left off. We will occupy there the same kind of reality—the same sociality, the same glory, the same laws—we were willing to occupy here (D&C 88:22:33; 130:2). I believe that. When I say, “I believe that,” I don’t mean that I’m making an affirmation about what awaits us in the afterlife—at this point in my life I’m basically disinterested in that question. What I mean is: I believe that God wants me to construct now the kind of life and the kind of world I would want to last forever. And I have faith that if I do that, my life will be an instrument for whatever good God wills to bring about in the here and now—and, if that turns out to be the plan, forever.