Advent 1

Today is the first Sunday in Advent. My plan during this season is to write a little each week about a different facet of what it means to me to wait for the coming of Christ, which is what we're doing during Advent—waiting for Christmas, for the birth of Jesus.

This week I feel moved to post the words to a song I wrote several years ago, while I was living in Salt Lake. I wrote it during Advent, drawing from passages in the Gospels and the Psalms. I'd been reflecting that season on the theme of waiting in the context of the latest round of anti-gay legislation in Utah (probably the adoption ban, if I'm remembering the timing correctly). Once again we'd seen equality deferred to the future, which was discouraging... and then it occurred to me. We were waiting. Waiting for justice and equity. Waiting for a transformation, an enlightenment, in public opinion around these issues. As the Latter-day Saints have been doing for 200 years, as Christians have been doing for 2000 years, we as gay/lesbian people and our straight friends are still waiting for the hoped-for day.

I may spend my whole life waiting. I hope not—God, I hope not. But I would hardly be the first person in the history of the world who waited his/her whole life for the coming of something that s/he didn't live to see come. I trust in God's promise of a regime that implements justice and equity; I have faith that the Spirit works through our efforts to build up that regime. But I may never enjoy the fruits. Or, then again, I might. I don't know. That's what it means to wait: to live in uncertainty. But a hopeful, confident uncertainty, if that makes any sense.

Advent reminds me that this hopeful, confident uncertainty is part of the Christian life. We wait for the fulfilment of the promises. We wait for Millennium. We wait for the Messiah.

So here's the song.

CHORUS:
Take ye heed, watch and pray,
for ye know not when the time is.
What I say unto you, I say unto all:
Let your lights burn, and watch.

1. O Lord, be gracious unto us;
we have waited for thee.
Be thou our arm every morning,
our salvation in the time of trouble.

2. I wait for the Lord;
in his word do I hope.
My soul waiteth for the Lord
more than they that watch for the morning.

3. Rest, O rest, in the Lord
and wait patiently for him.
Fret not thyself because of those
that bring to pass wicked devices.

Thanksgiving: Five kernels of corn

It's Thanksgiving morning. Sitting on my desk is the cheap plastic rosary I cherish because I received it during my second mission trip to the Dominican Republic. I dug it out of the box where it's been stored with other keepsakes, so I can use it during my Advent discipline. The idea came to me out of the blue a few days ago: every day between now and Christmas, I'm going to thumb my way through the beads, naming for each bead a person (or group of people) for whom I pray. In Mormon terms, think of it as like compiling a prayer roll. I'm going to try to avoid repetition, which makes it feel like an intimidating challenge: Can profoundly self-absorbed John-Charles think of 60 x 30 different people to pray for? (Can he remember their fricking names?) It forces me to widen my circle of concern, Enos style.

No prayers of thanksgiving allowed—that would make it about me again, whereas the point of the discipline is to focus on others' well-being. But today's Thanksgiving, so a different discipline is the order of the day. When I was growing up, my family did the "five kernels of corn" tradition. You have five kernels on your corn on your plate before you start Thanksgiving dinner, recalling the five kernels of corn that at one point supposedly became the Pilgrims' daily ration. You go around the table, and for each kernel, each person has to name something he or she is thankful for.

Here are my five:

1. I'm thankful for my partner. As of tomorrow (the day after Thanksgiving), we will have been lovers for nine years.

2. I'm thankful that my mother is still with us. And while I want to be absolutely clear that this does not make her illness acceptable, I'm grateful that out of the evil of her illness has come the good of a kind of reconciliation.

3. I'm thankful that we have an incoming government that I'm confident (hopeful) is trustworthy, respects human rights, can move toward (re)building better relations with other governments, and didn't win by hatemongering. Sorry to be partisan, but having that kind of government makes a huge difference in the world. I pray now they can cope with the enormous challenges facing us.

4. I'm thankful for communities that have provided support—here in North Carolina and in the past. As I say that, I'm wincing: Is there anyone out there who gives thanks for my support of them?

5. I'm thankful for the guidance of the Spirit in my life. That's not just a sappy "big finish." I actually paused a good while after writing those words, feeling hesitant about them. I feel I've been guided because I feel like my life has purpose and meaning, which is to say that I feel like my life has a direction, with prospects for accomplishment, for contribution, for service. But what if today it all ended in a senseless tragedy—a car crash, say? Would my life have had meaning? Do all lives have meaning? This reflection has taken an unexpectedly dark philosophical turn—but it's good, I guess, to not be facile in thanksgiving. I feel I've been guided. I feel God is making my life meaningful. I trust he does that for everyone, even though I have some inkling of how improbable that faith is. I give thanks for the meaning I discern. Whether the dead can find it in them to give thanks, or the living who suffer, is a different matter. But I seem to be one of the privileged ones—which isn't something to give thanks for; it's something to try to magnify into a remotely useful (it will never be "profitable") servanthood.

And on that uplifting note, let's go get ready to have a feast, shall we?

This reflection was not at all the uplifting little moment I expected.

Praying for kittens, part 2

I just got back from the dog's night walk. As we were making our way along the fence, I saw the black-and-white cat who recently had kittens eyeing us from behind a cement barrier, and then as we kept walking, I happened to glance down and saw two of the kittens curled up in a nest of leaves just on the other side of the fence from us. Two of the original four—I take it the others haven't survived the cold. I held the dog back, peered through at the kittens, said a prayer for them, and then dragged the dog off on our way.

For several months now, Hugo's been leaving cat food out by the fence. He started after we discovered that one of the feral cats we always saw hanging out around our parking lot and dumpster and underground drainage pipes had had a litter and that the mother looked very malnourished. I think this latest litter is the third generation since then, if I'm not miscounting. Feeding the cats is a little act of charity, though we are aware that once we move away, that will create a hardship for the generations that have gotten used to having a daily meal provided.

"Come unto Christ" (Moro. 10:32)

Today is Christ the King, the feast that marks the end of the Western liturgical year. Next week comes the first Sunday of Advent. I finished the Book of Mormon this week so that I can dedicate the four weeks between now and Christmas to Advent reflections.

Given that today celebrates Christ the King, it seems even more especially appropriate to focus my final Book of Mormon reflection for this cycle on the theme of coming to Christ. That theme also sets me up well for Advent, which is fundamentally about waiting for the coming of Christ. I like the symmetry there: we come to Christ, Christ comes to us. "Draw near to me, and I will draw near to you" (D&C 88:63). I like that image because it doesn't require everyone to end up in one spot. If we move in Christ's general direction, he'll meet us somewhere in between. He'll meet us where we're at. That image best reflects my experience of the presence of Christ in my life.

Like last week's post, this is going to be an autobiographical entry. Last week's entry focused on the significance of the scriptures in my life. This week I want to construct a narrative—a testimony—about the significance of Christ in my life.

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My parents converted to Mormonism from different brands of Protestantism, so in our family we celebrated Advent, we held family sunrise services on Easter. Our family's Mormonism was distinctly Christ-centered, somewhat before Christ-centered rhetoric became so prominent in Church discourse.

As a teenager, I discovered the concept of grace while I was reading the letters of Paul. Again, this was before Stephen Robinson had rehabilitated that concept in LDS discourse: I grew up hearing in church that "salvation by grace" was an apostate concept, that Paul's teachings about the abrogation of the law referred to the higher law of the gospel superseding the lower law of Moses, etc. When I began to actually read the letters myself, I became convinced that the texts didn't support those interpretations. Paul was making a more radical point about how Christ's grace sets us free from law in the abstract—from judgment based on works righteousness. Christ enables us to do God's will, and his grace covers our inevitable failings.

As usual with me, this probably all sounds really cerebral. But it was hugely important to me. I'm a ridiculously perfectionistic person. Sometime after I was ordained a deacon, I got on my knees one night and vowed to God that I would never sin again. A week later, I realized I'd botched it (forgot my prayers, yelled at my brothers, etc.). In a panic, I renewed the vow—"I'll do it this time, really"—and then quickly I botched it again. I felt terrible because all the LDS discourse I'd been raised on, about commandments and obedience and becoming perfect, had given me the impression that I ought to be able to be perfectly obedient. Paul taught me that this perfectionism was hopelessly misguided. The concept of being transformed by grace was also important to me as puberty finally hit and I began to experience guilt about my sexuality.

What I'm trying to say is that embracing teachings of grace was an important part of how I embraced Christ in my life. But... this was happening at a time when embracing this way of understanding salvation through Christ's grace meant disagreeing with doctrinal authorities like Bruce R. McConkie and with the majority of the Latter-day Saints around me. So from early on, coming to Christ meant, for me, standing at some remove from the community of Saints and their leaders. That reality changed once Stephen Robinson and then Church leaders started speaking more about grace—which I found very exciting. But the pattern would recur: a relationship with Christ and a relationship with the Church have not been synonymous for me in the way Mormon orthodoxy wants them to be.

Perfectionism was a big problem for me during my mission—missionary culture encourages it, constantly pushing you to work harder, to produce higher numbers, to be more perfectly obedient, etc. In the midst of one depression, a letter from a friend serving her own mission inspired me to kneel in the corner of the bedroom and pray to feel Christ's arms around me. And I did—which may well have been psychosomatic or suggestion or whatever; but it's an experience for which I still thank God.

Dramatic change of scene: In the midst of the academic freedom controversy, during my last couple of years at BYU, I vented my anger at one point by setting next to my desk in my dorm room a postcard-sized copy of Del Parson's famous red-robed Christ with the slogan "Down with Big Brother!" (from Orwell's 1984) pasted over it. It wasn't really that I was rejecting Christ—I was attending the temple every Thursday—but it was a protest against an institution and a hierarchy that claimed to act as Christ's uniquely authorized representatives.

When I stopped attending the LDS Church, I retreated from orthodoxy and rejected even moderate versions of the claim that Christianity is the only true religion, the only way to salvation, etc. When I talked about my spirituality, I did so in terms of my relationship with God, not my relationship with Christ, because that seemed more ecumenical. And yet, in a paradox I wasn't entirely comfortable with but which seemed to be where I was drawn despite myself, I was worshipping with an Episcopal congregation where each week I affirmed faith in Christ by reciting the words of the Nicene Creed and participated in the sacrament of Christ's body and blood. For a few months in 1997, I served in the Dominican Republic with a Catholic program; the nun who ran the program often described our work as touching the wounds of Christ, which was an image that resonated strongly with me. In the years after I withdrew from LDS Church life, it remained (and still does today) extremely important for me—indispensible—to celebrate Christmas and Easter by attending Christian services, even if I didn't have a language for explaining why.

Grace, by the way, had become much less important to me as a concept or an experience once I'd gotten away from BYU and the LDS Church and started coming out of the closet and stopped feeling so guilty all the time.

I still tend to talk more about "God" than about "Christ." But I remember a moment at the end of the 1990s when I heard someone from the United Church of Christ talk about how her Christian faith called her to work for equality for gay/lesbian people; and the thought came to me, "Maybe it's time for me to start reclaiming a Christian voice. Maybe it's time for me to start speaking again in the name of Christ."

I need to wrap up and move on with my day. God—and for me, that term basically functions as a synonym for the Spirit—is integral to how I experience life in this world. I experience God's presence and guidance in ways that I understand as immediate. My experience of Christ is admittedly more abstract. "Christ" is a particular way of talking about the realities I more readily tend to call "God" or "the Spirit." I'm not comfortable talking about a personal relationship with Christ in the evangelical style that has become common among Mormons. That language doesn't really feel that it matches my experience, nor do I buy intellectually into the orthodox worldview that makes the Fall and the Atonement and the Resurrection straightforward, literal realities. Christ is not, for me, the bodily resurrected Jesus of Nazareth who looks down on me from another world. Instead, for me, Christ is "the revelation of God"—which is obviously a much more abstract concept (albeit one that can be found in the accumulated body of Mormon teaching). You can't relate to that kind of abstraction in the same way orthodox Mormons relate to someone they believe is an embodied human being who bled and died for them in places you can go visit in Jerusalem today and who now reaches out, unseen, to touch them through a veil. I don't relate to Christ as a person in that sense because I don't believe Christ exists as a person in that literal sense. I relate to stories about Christ, images of Christ, teachings attributed to Christ, rituals in which Christ is a central symbol. I relate to Christ as a particular way to envision the invisible God whose presence I detect in my life.

But still, even if abstractly, Christ is central to my spirituality. And not just as abstract theological concept, not just as language. My commitment to a Christ-centered spirituality is embodied concretely in the bread and water I bless each week, in the cross I'll be carrying in procession later today, in the Christian icons that hang on my walls, in the Nativity scenes I'll be setting out over Thanksgiving weekend, in the services I attend on Christmas Eve and Easter. I speak my prayers in Christ's name; I study texts that are said to be Christ's words. I take certain actions because I understand myself as being under a mandate to follow Christ's example, to serve Christ in others. Because my spirituality is Christian, rather than something else, it has a particular texture, particular emphases—most notably the fact that everything for me boils down to love.

Something's not feeling right about this reflection. There's something untrue about what I'm saying. I think I'm making my Christian commitments out to be more abstract than they are. Let me try to get closer to the truth by finishing with this story:

A year or two before we moved from Salt Lake to North Carolina, I walked down to Temple Square on a January evening. The Christmas crowds were over, and they were allowing free access to the Christus, so I sat in front of it for a while. They were piping in Tabernacle Choir music and periodically played that recording they do in different languages of a male voice reading selections of Christ's words from the various standard works. I was unhappy about the music and the recording because I resented the attempt at manipulating visitors emotionally and then trying to identify that as a testimony of the Spirit to the unique truth of Mormonism.

But then I thought, "Just ride through it." So I kept sitting, and after a while I got past my annoyance and began to feel meditiative, and I ended up having a rather long, intense, silent conversation with Christ as represented in front of me by the Christus. (The way Mormons construct a devotional space around that statue is so uncharacteristically Catholic—thank God!) I have no recollection what the conversation was about. All I know is that when I left Temple Square, I felt peaceful and emptied and yet at the same time overflowing with goodwill... so much so that I gave money to someone begging at the gates, which I never do.

That's what my relationship with Christ looks like in concrete terms.

Gratitude for a spiritual moment

Before I go to bed, I wanted to quickly record (since this blog basically serves as my journal now) something that happened to me this morning. I was on the bus, riding in to campus, reading the Book of Mormon on the way—Moroni 7, to be precise. And suddenly, for no particular discernible reason, I had that lifting-of-the-heart feeling that I've learned to recognize as the Spirit. It went on for, I don't know, a minute or so maybe. And then it subsided.

I haven't experienced that for a while. The time in my life when I experienced those moments most frequently was my mission. The temple was another place where I often had them, which was really important to me during my last couple years at BYU, when going to church had become a white-knuckled agony. Nowadays these moments tend to come, when they come, while I'm reading the scriptures, though I don't experience them very often. I don't feel as much of a need for them as I did at BYU or on my mission, when I was often discouraged or depressed. There are other ways the Spirit communicates with me, and especially since coming out, I've come to appreciate how the Spirit guides imperceptibly over the long term, even over a period of years.

But still, I'm grateful for those lifting-of-the-heart moments when they come. It's a grace, a touch, a gift.

P.S.: It occurs to me add—and maybe there's a connection here—that I taught a good class today as well. We were discussing Angels in America, my all-time favorite play. Just before class started, I said a silent prayer as I was washing up in the restroom that the discussion I'd planned would go off well, that I'd be able to communicate effectively with the students, that I'd know how to guide the discussion as it unfolded. And I feel that prayer was answered.

"Seek this Jesus..." (Eth. 12:41)

I'm going to zoom in for this week's scriptural reflection on a single verse from the reading (Ether 7-15). At the end of a section in which Moroni laments that he can't write as eloquently as he speaks and prays that God will give the Gentiles charity to receive the record despite its weaknesses—at the end of all that, he says the following:

And now, I would commend you to seek this Jesus of whom the prophets and apostles have written, that the grace of God the Father, and also the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, which bears record of them, may be and abide in you forever. (Eth. 12:41)

In response to that verse, I want to testify this week to the ways that, over the years, the scriptures have pointed me toward Christ, the grace of God, and the guiding witness of the Holy Ghost.

I've loved the scriptures since I was a child. I had scriptural storybooks from the time I started grade school. When I was eight, I decided for some reason that I wanted to actually read the Doctrine and Covenants, so I'd get up early in the morning and curl up by the heat vent in the living room and wade through a section. It was more about the accomplishment than about understanding, of course. The short sections were manageable, but then I hit section 10 and gave up.

Each Sunday during the four years between my baptism and my ordination to the Aaronic priesthood, my mother helped me memorize one of the high school seminary mastery scriptures. I read the standard works all the way through during high school, including the OT, start to finish. I had a rather elaborate system for marking verses in different colors and so on. The year before my mission, while I was taking a mission prep class at BYU, I decided I needed a less uncluttered set of scriptures to use with investigators, so I bought a new one, which is sitting on my desk as we speak, although the spines are starting to crack.

Before, during, and after my mission, I collected other translations of the Bible. I especially loved a Spanish translation of the Jerusalem Bible that I bought in my first proselyting area. It exposed me to critical scholarship—the documentary hypothesis, and so on—but also showed me how liberal religious thinkers found ways to listen to the Bible as scripture despite embracing theories about the text's historical origins that undercut literalist or inerrantist ways of reading scripture. As a missionary, I felt guilty about reading these non-LDS commentaries; I'd lock the Bibles I'd bought away in my suitcase for a few months, vowing not to look at them again until my mission was over and I was no longer under missionary restrictions regarding what I was supposed to be reading. But eventually my need for intellectual stimulation would win out and I'd return to them. One translation I'd bought, by the International Catholic Biblical Society, had commentary that I found quite inspiring and illuminating at a spiritual level. I still remember one line I underlined carefully in red: Without the Eucharist, the Bible is the words of one who is absent; without the Bible, the Eucharist is a mute presence.

At the same time, of course, I was reading the Book of Mormon every day, copying out passages that strengthened me for the work or gave me ideas about how to help our investigators, and taping them to the wall above my desk. When I felt the need for an aesthetic-spiritual pick-me-up, I would sit in a rocking chair on our balcony or porch and read out loud to myself from the prophetic writings in the Hebrew Bible.

After I got away from BYU and stopped attending church, there was a period of a few years when I wasn't sure where I was going. I assumed I was in a process of moving away from Mormonism. And yet I remained closely engaged with the LDS scriptures—so much so that when I look back I'm baffled that I could think I was moving away from this tradition. While serving as an education volunteer in a Catholic program in the Dominican Republic, I started writing songs for the guitar that drew on LDS scriptural texts but interpreted them in light of liberation theology. I wrote Endowed from on High, a short book that interpreted the endowment as a meditation on symbols from the scriptures; My Heart Cries out to Thee, essentially a Mormon "prayer book" composed of excerpts from the scriptures of the Restoration; For Times and for Seasons, a collection of ideas for family devotionals that used the scriptures as a resource for celebrating key life transitions and confronting adversity; and The Easy-to-Read Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, a simple modern English paraphrase for children but which I hoped might also help adults think about familiar texts in new ways.

During this period, an important influence in my spiritual life was a Salt Lake man named Michael Chase, a secular Jew who'd become a devotee of the writings of Mary Baker Eddy (but not a convert to the Christian Science church). Michael used to carry around a King James Bible in his pocket, almost like a talisman. It bothered him that I wouldn't let go of Mormonism because he wanted to persuade me to connect with God beyond organized religion; but conversations with Michael helped keep me spiritually grounded. Michael urged me to take seriously the idea that God was calling me to service. Michael's largely responsible for the fact that I didn't simply stop believing in God and spiritual realities—that I still understand the scriptures as texts through which God speaks to me, not simply as texts from the past.

During this period, I began to reread first the Hebrew prophets and later the Gospels. At first there was a kind of defiance about it: I was reading these texts for the purpose of reclaiming them from conservative Christians and Mormons. So at first I was reading all those prophetic denunciations of injustice and idolatry as being directed toward religious homophobes, for example. But the more I read, the more I found myself able to hear the scriptures calling me to repentance as well—toward greater charity, toward a vision of a future in which I would have to be reconciled to my enemies, to recognize my own failings to live out God's word.

After 2001, when I'd come to accept that Mormonism was and would remain my first language for communicating with God, I encountered Mormons for Equality and Social Justice. I'm grateful for the time I spent with that organization, and for the chance I had to help the organization identify resources for social justice work in the LDS scriptures. It was a chance for me to engage with these texts as God's word—to listen for the Spirit's voice in these texts, to articulate my faith and hope and my commitments to service and consecration in the language of these texts. Around the same time I began working on the project that eventually became LiberalMormon.net, which again involved engaging closely with the scriptures, listening for the voice of the Spirit. And I made the decision to start reading the scriptures on the Sunday School schedule, with weekly journal reflections, as a way of participating in the faith community's collective engagement with the scriptures, albeit from a distance.

The LDS scriptures are a lexicon. They provide the vocabulary, the language, that I use to speak to God and God uses to speak to me. They are an instrument through which God keeps calling me to Christlike living, through which God's love is revealed to me, and through which the Spirit guides me. That's my testimony.

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As I near the end of the Book of Mormon, I'm taking stock and thinking ahead to next year's scripture study. I haven't felt entirely happy with the blogging. The idea was to take the weekly journaling I'd been doing as I reflected on the scriptures and transfer it to a blog instead of a notebook. But writing with the knowledge that there's a potential audience has changed the way I journal. I'm pretty self-revelatory here—to a degree that I suspect a couple of my professors would find professionally inadvisable—but the journaling isn't as spontaneous or as intimate a conversation with God as it was back when I was writing in a notebook that I didn't expect anyone to ever see. And it hasn't felt quite as spiritually nourishing.

I want to keep doing the blog. I have no idea how many people actually read this—very few, I suspect—but I've received enough feedback that I think it's worth continuing to do, both as identity work and as testimony. But I want to make a couple of changes.

First, I want to make the reading itself more of a devotional experience. Lately, I've taken to reading the Book of Mormon on the bus. That's how I did it back in the late 1990s when I started to reengage with the Hebrew prophets, and it was fine then; but now I'm feeling like I want to be less casual about it. I want to clear time in my day, first thing in the morning, for some quality time with God—to commune with God through the scriptures.

Second, I want to be more open to other ways of reflecting on the scriptures beside written commentary such as I've been doing on the blog. In the past, I've reflected on the scriptures through the act of paraphrasing; by excerpting short verses or phrases to post where I'll see them frequently; by chanting passages of scripture; by creating songs based on scriptural texts; and through images. At the end of the 1990s, I taught a Bible study class for a Spanish-speaking Episcopal congregation, and at the end of every lesson I had everyone create a drawing that visually represented their reflections on the theme of that day's discussion. I still have the paperback copy of the Versión Popular with my drawings taped into it.

I may start doing more of that on the blog: posting a drawing, for example, or a paraphrase, or a single verse without commentary. I'll experiment, try the fruits, see how it goes. The bottom line is: I want to seek communication from the Spirit as I study the scriptures, and then, as appropriate, I want to share it or bear witness of it in the spirit of all being edified by all.

Marriage equality rally . . . and autumn leaves

This afternoon, Hugo and I attended a rally for same-sex marriage in Raleigh, one of the 300-odd rallies held at the same time around the country. Attending the rally was a spiritual act for me in the sense that I saw it as a way to be anxiously engaged in a good cause, to bear a kind of public witness to what I know to be true, if only by my presence. I'd say there were a few hundred people there. It was, in fact, my first participation in any kind of organized gay demonstration in North Carolina, since I haven't attended any gay pride celebrations since we moved here.

I was grateful that the tone of the rally was positive, oriented toward galvanizing support to push for marriage equality here in North Carolina rather than venting anger about Proposition 8—though certainly some people carried signs to that effect. The only Mormon-themed message I saw was a sign one woman carried that read, "Ironically, my first kiss was from a Mormon." Early in the rally, they talked about having an open mic after we marched around the capitol, and I decided I would say something as a gay Mormon. A testimony of sorts. But the march turned out to be very long, and we got rained on torrentially at the beginning of it, so in the end everyone just dispersed afterward.

I'm not a big fan of rallies and marches. I've participated in I don't know how many, all since 9/11 (if you don't count marching at Salt Lake's gay pride with Affirmation). I spoke at one in Salt Lake just before the Iraq war began. They're usually too long—too many speakers—and most of the ones I've been at have had a hard time staying on message. During probably my second march, a peace demonstration, I had the thought that this was a kind of ritual act, an attempt to make change happen by reenacting the primordial sacred moment of the civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the 1960s. Marching makes me uncomfortable. I feel on display and therefore awkward. I don't like chanting. I attend these events as a kind of discipline—like putting in your time at the Church cannery, if you will. They need warm bodies for when the media shows up, so there I am. It's a form of service.

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There's no self-evident connection between the above and what I'm about to say next, but there feels to me like there's some vague connection having to do with signs of grace and blessing and Providential favor. Before we went to the rally, I walked the dog along a local nature trail. A wind was blowing clouds of leaves off the trees, and at one point I found myself walking into one of those clouds, with the leaves showering down all around me. It was awe-some and called to mind the scripture about God sending the rain on the just and the unjust. I know (or suspect) that this kind of Romanticism is a luxury of the relatively rich in the global scheme of things, but expressions of beauty in nature have for a long, long time been an important way that I encounter God in my daily living.

Last week, as I was approaching the building where the religious studies department is housed, I suddenly found myself looking at a tree covered in bright yellow leaves, shining in the autumn noontime sunlight. I thought: That would make an incredible set for a temple film. Fill the Garden of Eden with trees whose leaves are different colors—brilliant shades of yellow, orange, red, purple. White leaves for the tree of life; a deep, dark, gorgeous wine-purple for the tree of knowledge of good and evil.