Message from the Directors
January 2009
Happiness and the Art of Loving
By Ty Mansfield
If there are two concepts that seem to be at the heart of the gospel message, it is happiness and love. The prophet Joseph Smith said that "happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it" (History of the Church, 5:134). Our yearnings for happiness were implanted in our hearts by Deity. In his patriarchal blessing to his son, Jacob, the Book of Mormon prophet Lehi stated, "Adam fell that men might be; men are, that they might have joy" (2 Nephi 2:25).
In addition, as Jesus spoke of the two great commandments—upon which all the law and the words of the prophets hang—they both concern a single quality: love. God, first; ourselves/others, second. God himself, John declared, is love, and "he that loveth not knoweth not God" (John 1:4).
One of the great difficulties of life, however, is that there are numerous messages about love, and what love is, that are only counterfeits or shadows of the eternal love, the charity, that is the essence of the gospel. In addition, one of the great paradoxes of the gospel is that even the truths at the very heart of the gospel can become idols to us if they become more important to us than God himself, or if we seek them outside of the eternal order God calls us to seek them. Family, for example, is central to the gospel plan. And yet, Christ said, "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matthew 10:37). Both are truth, but could actually lead us away from God if embraced out of the context of the other.
Pursuing our Divinely implanted desires for happiness and love—two noble and worthy attributes—could be like building a metaphorical Tower of Babel if men and women don't first seek them as ways of knowing our eternal Father and realizing His eternal plan. Elder Neal A. Maxwell once said that any principle of the gospel spun off by itself goes to seed and becomes wild. And, interestingly enough, it's the pursuit of these qualities that many seek as reasons for making life choices proscribed by the eternal laws of the gospel.
The Pursuit of Happiness
As Joseph Smith said, happiness is the object and design of our existence. In a fallen world, however, sorrow, oppositions, toil, and trial are likely to be as common as is happiness. It seems to me that the happiness spoken of in the scriptures is something deeper than the self-centered and hedonistic quest for pleasure that is often portrayed as happiness in our modern culture.
What's interesting is the story behind the story of Lehi's declaration to Jacob that "men are that they might have joy"—a statement that many have quoted as reason that they've chosen to pursue gay partnership rather than live within the parameters of Church teaching, for, the logic often goes, joy is to be found in love and intimacy, and love and intimacy in romance, and romance according to sexual/gender-orientation.
I was once listening to an Old Testament commentary on the etymology of "joy." In the Hebrew word construction, the author stated, the root of joy was always connected to the temple and the transcendence of natural (temporal) Self that came through adherence to temple covenant.
That type of transcendence has never come with a promise of ease or painlessness. "When we tear ourselves free from the entanglements of the world," Elder Maxwell asked, "are we promised a religion of repose or an Eden of ease? No! We are promised tears and trials and toil! But we are also promised final triumph, the mere contemplation of which tingles the soul" ("Why Not Now?" Ensign, November 1974).
Many years after this blessing, Jacob's prodigal, Enos, had a "come to Jesus" experience as he wrestled with his sins and felt to repent and return to God. One of the things that most affected him in this time of self-reflection and sorrow was recalling "the words which [he] had often heard [his] father speak concerning eternal life, and the joy of the saints." His father's words "sunk deep into [his] heart" (Enos 1:3).
What's particularly interesting in this is that Jacob's experience with joy seemed to be something deeper than temporal happiness. His life was far from easy or what many might call joyful when viewed through eyes that are blind to the things of eternity—or, what I call affected by "mortal myopia." As the prophet Jacob closed his record, he wrote, "Wherefore, I conclude this record...by saying that the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren... wherefore, we did mourn out our days" (Jacob 7:26).
Yet, these aren't the words recalled by Enos. The joy his father expressed concerning the inner life in Christ must have greatly overshadowed his loneliness and affliction.
Jacob knew that a life of joy didn't necessarily mean a life of ease or of harmony with temporal desire, for in the same patriarchal blessing which pronounced joy also acknowledged that he had already experienced much sorrow and suffering, and intimated that there would be much more to come, emphasizing that "it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things." However, the prophet said in comfort to his son, God would consecrate all our afflictions for our gain (2 Nephi 2:2). Elder Maxwell stated that "the cavity which suffering carves into our souls will one day also be the receptacle of joy" ("But for a Small Moment," BYU Devotional Address, 1 September 1974).
Life isn't easy, and it was never intended to be easy. President Gordon B. Hinckley was often heard to quote the words of Jenkins Lloyd Jones:
"There seems to be a superstition among many thousands of our young who hold hands and smooch in the drive-ins that marriage is a cottage surrounded by perpetual hollyhocks, to which a perpetually young and handsome husband comes home to a perpetually young and ravishing wife. When the hollyhocks wither and boredom and bills appear, the divorce courts are jammed.
"Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he's been robbed. The fact is that most putts don't drop. Most beef is tough. Most children grow up to be just ordinary people. Most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration. Most jobs are more often dull than otherwise....
"Life is like an old-time rail journey—delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride" ("God Shall Give unto You Knowledge by His Holy Spirit," BYU Devotional Address, 25 September 1973).
Our cultural obsession with happiness and self-fulfillment has led many to believe that anything we perceive will make us happy ought to be pursued. And, naturally, God would want use to have it, because God wants us to be happy, right? C.S. Lewis said the following concerning this idea:
"By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all'" (The Problem of Pain, 35-36).
Another Christian author observed:
"Theism does not affirm that God is always ‘nice' or pleasant or kindly. God's goodness is absolute purity, as much like the purity of a blast furnace…as it is like the indulgence of a sweet grandmother. God always does the right thing; God always wills what is best; God always thinks without error, incompleteness, or prejudice. Such a God may not always be likable, nor always comfortable. But such a God may well be worthy of worship" (John G. Stackhouse, Can God Be Trusted?, 13).
God's love, as well as His promise of joy, will often require us to do things or make changes in our lives that we will not immediately sense as being the bearers of glad tidings and great joy—but that is where our faith becomes prerequisite to the fullness of joy that awaits all those who will be counted as true disciples.
The Art of Loving
Love seems to be another of the great misconstrued qualities. Yet, because love is good, we may tend to think that anything that feels like or resembles love must be good as well. The German psychologist Erich Fromm wrote a book on love in which he stated that many seem to make the assumption that the "problem with love is the problem of an object and not the problem of a faculty. People think that love is simple, but that to find the right object to love—or to be loved by—is difficult." True love—eternal love—isn't merely a feeling. Feelings change all the time based on a myriad of factors; love is a capacity developed through longstanding commitment. Capacities are carved out over time, through experience, and often through great hardship.
Just days ago, I was reminded again of what true love is. I was invited to sing at the funeral of the wife of a dear friend in my ward—an 81-year-old man who, from the time I first met him, seemed to me to be one of the happiest people I've ever known. He is a Saint in its purest expression. His wife, however, I had never met. Over ten years ago, she had a severe stroke and became nearly incapacitated. Shortly afterward, she began to develop Alzheimer's disease. He nursed and nurtured her for three or four years at home until he could no longer take care of her alone. After putting her in a nursing home, he would drive 30 miles into town every day to feed her lunch and to sit with her for a time. This went on for nearly seven years.
Upon her death, I asked my friend how he was handling her absence. Speaking of the spiritual experiences he had had during the time of her passing, he said he had never felt more joy and confidence in his love for his wife and the gospel they both treasured. He would be with her and other loved ones again. The Spirit was thick at the funeral service as it testified of the Love that God is, and which He calls us to develop within ourselves and for others. That kind of love isn't sexy, or marketable, or conducive to boosts in sensational media ratings. Because it's hard, and often calls for more giving than receiving.
Often, what many call love is merely desire, and desire, Fromm states,
"can be stimulated by the anxiety of aloneness, by the wish to conquer or be conquered, by vanity, by the wish to hurt and even to destroy, as much as it can be stimulated by love. It seems that sexual desire can easily blend with and be stimulated by any strong emotion, of which love is only one. Because sexual desire is in the minds of most people coupled with the idea of love, they are easily misled to conclude that they love each other when they want each other physically.... [But] if [this] desire…is not stimulated by love, ...it...leaves strangers as far apart as they were before—sometimes it makes them ashamed of each other, or even makes them hate each other, because when the illusion has gone they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before."
Fromm also writes concerning the "confusion between the initial experience of 'falling' in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or, as we might better say, of 'standing' in love.'
"If two people have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love .This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction or consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature, not long lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their disappointments, their antagonisms, their mutual boredom kill what is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning, they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of their infatuation, this being 'crazy' about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness."
As humans and as relational creatures, we naturally long to experience love, affection, and intimacy with others, including those of our same sex. Genuine love, affection, and intimacy can be experienced with many men and women. What can be problematic for those who are same-sex attracted is to assume that the only way to experience the naturally-longed-for connection and intimacy is to seek out a romantic partner. What I've learned is that there are ways of experiencing that longed-for connection and intimacy that are in harmony with the gospel. In fact, I believe that harmony with the very heart of the gospel requires it.
One of the beauties and blessings I've experienced of gospel proscriptions on homosexual expression is that it forces men and women who are attracted to others of the same sex to take the hard road, the road less traveled, to discovery and expression of forms of love and intimacy that are becoming increasingly lost in a culture obsessed with sex and romance. (It's also quite possible that this cultural obsession is a direct outgrowth of a lack of authentic love and intimacy—like a frantic effort to fill a void with the artificial when only the Substantial can satisfy, "ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth" (2 Timothy 3:7).)
To some, perhaps especially men, love isn't love unless it's sexual or romantic. And yet, that's The Great Lie. God has given extremely tight laws regarding sexual expression, and yet, as stated previously, He is love—and He calls us to the same. He invites us to be completely transformed by and into the power of His love and to share that love with all of those around us. Cultivating the capacity, the art, to love and receive love—especially within the strictures of gospel teaching—is one of the greatest challenges and blessings of life in Christ.
As I alluded in a previous message, I believe this is one of the greatest gifts we have to give our brothers and sisters both of the church and in the world.
The Church community simply can't afford for same-sex oriented men and women to buy into the gay cultural myth hook, line, and sinker. Though shared in the context of vicarious aid in the salvation of our deceased brothers and sisters, Joseph Smith shared a statement that I believe applies equally well to the need we all have for one another in this life. He wrote, "For we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect" (D&C 128:18). Men and women who experience same-sex attraction need the church community as much as the church community needs us. Only as we come together and learn from one another the lessons learned and capacities gained through our respective experiences can we truly become the Zion people God has called us to become.