Ether 1-6: Daring to desire

The story of the 16 shining stones is one of my favorite in the Book of Mormon. It provides a model of human beings collaborating with God, working out together a plan for carrying out God's purposes. On a related theme, the story also shows God responding to human desire, incorporating our desires and dreams and aspirations into his own plans for history.

This theme of God responding to human desire shows up from the very beginning of the story, when Jared and his brother ask the Lord to spare them and their friends from the confounding of the people's language—which he does. Right off the bat, then, we see a community that seeks actively to shape the Lord's actions. This is not a community passively submitting to the Lord's will or trusting that if they're righteous, the Lord will spare them. They take their own desires to the Lord: "Cry unto the Lord, that he will not confound us" (1:34). And, we're told, the Lord takes compassion on them and does what they want.

Their next request is relatively more humble in one sense and more ambitious in another. This time Jared asks his brother to go find out what the Lord's plans are: Does he intend to drive them out of the land? And if it turns out that is the Lord's plan, then Jared wants his brother to ask the Lord where they should go—because, Jared says, "who knoweth but the Lord will carry us forth into a land which is choice above all the earth?" (1:38). In this case, then, we see the community going to the Lord with a dream, an aspiration, an ambition—a rather presumptuous one, actually: Maybe the Lord will lead us to the choicest place on earth. But again, despite the presumptuousness, the Lord gives them what they desire.

As I write this, I'm beginning to wince. As I'm writing, I'm realizing that this story can be read as childish wish-fulfillment. But that's not how I was reading it earlier this week, so let me shut down the potential Freudian reading and go back to reading this the way I believe the Spirit was prompting me to. What made this story "delicious" to my soul is the way it validates human desire and aspiration. This isn't a Calvinist story about how depraved human beings need to learn to relinquish their inherently evil desires and submit to the will of God so that he can regenerate them and give them godly desires instead. This story has a much stronger humanist bent in the sense that it validates human wanting, human willing, human ambition.

And what's particularly striking to me is that the story does that despite embracing a doctrine of the Fall and even a doctrine of human depravity. In 3:2, the brother of Jared is asking the Lord to touch the 16 stones and make them shine. He's apparently very hesitant about making this request because he does a lot of preliminary groveling. He asks the Lord not to be angry because of his weakness; we know we are unworthy before you; "because of the fall our natures have become evil continually." Pretty Calvinist, that. But then he continues: "Nevertheless, O Lord, thou hast given us a commandment that we must call upon thee, that from thee we may receive according to our desires."

I suspect a Calvinist theologian would see this passage as hopelessly confused and contradictory. But I think this passage is trying to move beyond the hard, clear-cut simplicities of Calvinism toward a more nuanced understanding of human nature—and I believe the Spirit is prompting that movement. Yes, we are fallen, which means we have ungodly desires, desires inconsistent with the divine nature. We want things that are bad for ourselves and for others. And yet, despite that, God wants us to lay our desires before him. He wants to give us what we desire—which I presume means that he wants to give us the best things we desire, or the things that will truly satisfy our flawed, misdirected desires. God is generous. God works with us where we're at. God wants us to desire. He commands us to desire. He even encourages us to dare to aspire to things we're not sure it's right to want or ask for. This story does not call us to submission, whatever truth there might be in such a call in the right circumstances and context. This story calls us to be daring, to be presumptuous even—to nurture grandiose dreams and then take those dreams to God and ask him to help us make them happen.

I'm sensing the need for caution here—I'm sensing what would horrify a Calvinist about what I'm saying, and I'm sensing the truth in that horror. There's something characteristically American about the message to dream and desire, and there's something to be said for critiquing that cultural gospel in the name of the gospel of Christ. Certainly desire and aspiration are at the basis of our insane consumer culture, our imperialist ambitions.

On the other hand: I entered young adulthood with powerful desires and aspirations that I was told were wrong—the desire to be held by a male lover; the desire to be part of the intellectual communities advancing critical scholarship (which culturally conservative Latter-day Saints saw as dangerous); the desire to see my faith community become more democratic, more egalitarian, more open, more culturally diverse, more politically progressive. I've seen injunctions to suppress one's desires and to submit to divine authority used for what the still, small, insistent voice of conscience tells me are repressive, even abusive and destructive, ends. And in that context, the story of the 16 small stones speaks to me as an affirmation of desire and aspiration, and a rebuff to the voices that preach submission and self-repression. It's a message that makes my soul feel enlarged, liberated. And so while I recognize that the message can be falsely applied—as is true of any gospel message, any gospel principle—I embrace this message. And at the risk of being presumptuous (which, after all, this story encourages me to risk being), I proclaim this message from the housetops as one that I think a conservative, conformist, authoritarian LDS faith community needs to hear.

I had planned to say more about the theme of collaboration, which you see especially in the dialogues between the Lord and the brother of Jared in chapter 2. But I need to move on to other tasks, and I sense this reflection has reached a natural ending point.