"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.