Testimonies

No dramatic incident occurred to awaken me to the reality that God lives, that He knows and loves me, and that His plan for me will bring greater happiness and fulfillment than any other. All that I have experienced through life’s successes and disappointments, and all that I have learned through academic pursuits, have reinforced to me what I learned as a child: A compassionate, omniscient, and omnipotent God is the one constant in the universe.

Certainly, my family and the environment surrounding my formative years influenced and strengthened my awareness of God and His plan. I learned to pray and to recognize through small but miraculous ways that Someone I could not see heard and answered me. My parents were believing and practicing members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We walked to church together every Sunday and spent Monday evenings together. My father made certain that we had a family prayer every morning. There was something in the consistency of these family devotions that contributed to the security I felt in my religious environment.

The lives of all of my great-great grandparents have contributed significantly to the family influence on why I believe. In various locations in Europe and the United States, these ancestors chose to sacrifice considerable security and comforts when they were baptized into the LDS Church. The more I learned of them, including visiting their homelands, the more awed I became with their fervent commitment to their new faith. Furthermore, when they arrived at their new home in the dry and desolate West, not one of them turned back or told their children to go back to their homeland. In every case, they taught their children to reverence the restored truth about God that they had embraced. Without question, their sacrifices have invited me to look more seriously into what they came to cherish and never deny.

When I was twenty-one years old and serving an LDS mission in an area of the world where no one seemed interested in scriptures and religion, I felt reinforced in my commitment to my faith because I knew my family, especially my father, believed in the gospel of Jesus Christ that I preached. My father was what I came to describe as a “healthy skeptic” about the practice of religion. A rational and critical thinker, he was not afraid to challenge standard explanations and encouraged us to find satisfying answers to our queries. For questions about doctrine, he trusted in the witness of scripture and latter-day prophets as valid arguments to support our conclusions. These doctrinal discussions with my father created a substantial foundation upon which to build my expanding understanding about the constancy of God and the consistency of His gospel.

Many families in the LDS Church, including mine, traditionally expected young women to marry and have a family for their primary focus in adulthood. When my life followed an academic-career path without including a husband and children until much later in life, I found that God still heard my prayers and His gospel continued to give me the best direction for my life. Doors of opportunity opened to me where I had not knocked and I discovered aptitudes in areas where I had not tried. Because my life’s trajectory differed from most of the LDS women around me, I was often asked by fellow-members how I could remain happy as a single woman and by those not of my faith why I remained faithful to such a family-focused church where women are often unnoticed. I found that my father’s training to search the scriptures (the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, as well as the Bible) had enabled me to know the answer, even when others were not convinced.

In random chapters and in times I would not expect, scriptures offered me the answers, insights, and solace to sustain my faith and keep me active in the Mormon Church. For example, I found profound personal connection with the Lord’s promise in D&C 6:14: “As often as thou hast inquired, thou hast received instruction of my Spirit. If it had not been so, thou wouldst not have come to the place where thou art at this time.” At any given point in my unexpected life, I could look back and see God’s influence and power leading me along. After so much evidence, I grew in trust that He would continue to do so in the future.

That is why I believe. God is constant—in His love, His plan, and His promises over all eras of time. Now that I teach numerous students with a myriad of gospel-related questions, I am struck again at the depth and breadth of God’s wisdom that is found in scripture. I am humbled at the wisdom of the Book of Mormon that is magnified in the New Testament and then reinforced in even greater clarity and power when viewed again in the Book of Mormon. I feel profound joy when I hear undergraduate students articulate clarifying connections that they discover in scripture to answer their own questions about God and their life’s path. And my confidence in God and His plan of happiness expands as I realize that He has a unique mission for each of us in life, with differing paths to follow. All that I have learned reinforces what I knew as a child: God lives, is keenly aware of each of us, and has the plan that will bring us joy in this life and in the eternities.

—————————————————–

Born and reared in Tremonton, Utah, Camille Fronk Olson is an associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in education from Utah State University, as well as a master’s degree in ancient Near Eastern studies and a Ph.D. in the sociology of the Middle East (her dissertation focused on Palestinian families in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). Before joining the BYU faculty, she taught institute and seminary in the Salt Lake area and was dean of students at LDS Business College. Dr. Olson served a full-time mission to Toulouse, France, and she is married to Paul F. Olson.

Posted July 2010

I was born to Catholic parents in Mandan, North Dakota, but we went to church only for christenings, marriages, and funerals. Only my maternal grandfather was a practicing Catholic, and he attended mass each week. I had the good fortune to live with my grandparents for a time, while my mother was recuperating from surgery. It was my grandfather who taught me to pray (from the heart, rather than the rote prayers for which the Catholics are known); he also made me promise never to smoke. Later, when he learned that I was studying with LDS missionaries, he sent me my first copy of the Book of Mormon.

Always fascinated by religion and by the Bible, as a child I attended a Bible study class with the Assembly of God for a time. Whenever Jehovah’s Witnesses would come to the door, my mother would say, “I’m not interested, but let me ask my son.” I enjoyed hearing another viewpoint of the Bible. After we moved to Salt Lake City, a man from the Gideon Bible Society came door to door selling Bibles for a dollar. In her usual manner, my mother told him, “I’m not interested, but let me ask my son.” She leaned in from the door and inquired and, of course, I was interested. I spent hours lying on the back seat of the family car reading the Bible and finished it. I was only eight years of age at the time, but my mother, a former school teacher and the first female game warden in North Dakota, had begun teaching me to read and write at age four.

We soon moved to another house in Salt Lake City, where we were visited by both Jehovah’s Witnesses and LDS stake missionaries. My mother again asked if I was interested and I began meeting with local missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I had already begun attending weekday Primary at the invitation of new friends, so I had some idea of what the Church was about. It was at this time that my grandfather sent me the copy of the Book of Mormon that missionaries had left at his home in Mandan (but which he, a non-native speaker of English, never read). Like the Bible, it, too, fascinated me. I could see that this marvelous book, along with the Church that used it, taught the same things I had found in the Bible but were missing in other churches. I was baptized just a month short of my ninth birthday. By the time I was twelve, I had added the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price to the list of scriptures I had read.

It was prayer that brought a spiritual witness of both the Book of Mormon and the restored Church. It also brought me much relief during hard times and opened the door to many miracles that have strengthened my testimony over time. In addition to strong impressions, I have been guided by voices (a rare occurrence), prophetic dreams, and other very spiritual experiences. One of these has been posted at mormonwiki.com/A_Mormon_missionary’s_dream.

When, at age sixteen, the bishop interviewed me to become a priest, he also asked if I would care to serve a stake mission. I was so busy with extracurricular activities in high school and elsewhere that I didn’t feel I would have sufficient time to devote to such a calling, so I asked him if he could at least wait until I graduated from high school. He remembered that and, about a month after graduation, I was interviewed by the bishop and stake president and called as a stake missionary. In those days, there were no full-time missionaries in Utah, so we did all the teaching. Halfway through my two years of service, I was ordained an elder and was endowed in the Salt Lake Temple, where my companion and I attended sessions once a week. We were also putting in about 60-65 hours a month in missionary work and managed to convert and baptize several people. Meanwhile, I received my patriarchal blessing, which said that I would “go to the nations of the world and preach Jesus Christ and him crucified.” I had not yet decided to serve a full-time mission, but the blessing got me to thinking about it. When the Church News announced that the French Mission would be split and that Henry D. Moyle was being called to preside over the new mission, I immediately knew he would be my mission president, and I cut out the article, which is still in my possession. I was called to a 2½-year mission in the French East Mission, covering eastern France and western Switzerland. Later, I served several years as a district missionary in Israel, at the same time serving as a counselor in the Jerusalem Branch presidency. So, in line with my patriarchal blessing, I have officially served as a missionary in four countries (USA, France, Switzerland, and Israel) and have taught people from 50 nations, baptizing people from the four lands as well as Australia, Greece, Algeria, and Italy.

My academic career has been inspired by the Lord’s words in D&C 88:78-80: “Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine, in the law of the gospel, in all things that pertain unto the kingdom of God, that are expedient for you to understand; Of things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations, and the judgments which are on the land; and a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms—That ye may be prepared in all things when I shall send you again to magnify the calling whereunto I have called you, and the mission with which I have commissioned you.”

One of my professors, Aziz Atiya, counseled me to “fly over the entire forest” before deciding in which grove of trees I wanted to have my “picnic.” Consequently, though I concentrated on the Near/Middle East in most of my coursework, I picked up degrees in four different fields and took many classes in other areas such as geography, history, French, and Arabic. I have long believed that new discoveries are most often made by people who can bridge the gap between different disciplines, and that too much specialization can blind one to new ways of looking at things. I explain some of my thinking in a 5-part series posted on the Meridian Magazine web site, 2005: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

While still involved in my undergraduate studies, I told the Lord in prayer that if he would help me learn all that I undertook to learn, I would use whatever knowledge I gained to help build up and strengthen his Church. Consequently, I acknowledge the Lord and his Spirit as key to my academic success and pray that I may continue to be of use in his kingdom.

——————————————————

John Alexander Tvedtnes was born 26 January 1941 in Mandan, North Dakota. His earliest years were spent in that state and in Wyoming and Washington, living on the farms of both pairs of grandparents and in several small towns. In 1949, his father obtained employment in Salt Lake City and moved the family there. Though born into a Roman Catholic family, John attended Bible classes with the Assembly of God. His mother, a former school teacher and game warden, taught him to read beginning at age four and he read the Bible when he was eight. Soon afterward, he became acquainted with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was converted by stake missionaries a month short of his ninth birthday, being confirmed on New Year’s Day 1950. Consequently, while the rest of the world was celebrating the new millennium on 1 January 2000, John was commemorating half a century as a member of the restored Church.

John’s high school years included many extracurricular activities, such as various clubs, ROTC teams, the Civil Air Patrol, the Ground Observer Corps, and the Civil Defense Corps. He graduated from high school in 1959 and worked for the Salt Lake City Police Department for more than a year before attending the University of Utah. He served a stake mission from June 1959 until June 1961, then filled a 2½-year mission in France and Switzerland (French East Mission) before returning to the University of Utah and various occupations to support a growing family. Over the years, he has served as counselor and president in elders quorums; as group leader, assistant, and secretary in high priests groups; as a Sunday School teacher (mostly Gospel Doctrine classes); and as first counselor in the Jerusalem Branch Presidency. He also served as a branch/district missionary in Israel.

John received his BA in anthropology in 1969, a graduate certificate in Middle East Studies in 1970, an MA in linguistics (specializing in generative-transformational grammars with a minor in Arabic, also in 1970), and an MA in Middle East studies (Hebrew) with minor in anthropology and archaeology in 1971, all at the University of Utah. Meanwhile, he earned enough credits for a BA in French, a BA in geography, and an MA in history, though he did not take those degrees. He did graduate studies at the University of California (Berkeley) and moved with his family to Israel, where he did graduate studies in Egyptian and Semitic languages and lived from 1971 until 1979.

John taught biblical Hebrew at the University of Utah from 1968 to 1971 and, during 1970/71, also taught several courses in linguistics at the same institution and courses in anthropology at the Brigham Young University Salt Lake Center. During 1972-1979, he taught many courses in the BYU Jerusalem semester-abroad program, including biblical Hebrew, anthropology (peoples of the Middle East), archaeology (of Israel and the Near East, as well as archaeological methodology and field work), history (ancient Near East, history of the Jews), historical geography (ancient Near East and Israel), and led most of the student field trips. He also guided tours for BYU and others. Returning to the United States, he worked in the private sector for a number of years, while teaching part-time at the BYU Salt Lake Center and the University of Utah (one course only), and taught CES courses in the Magna-Hunter region for a number of years. Meanwhile, he taught part-time at two high schools in Israel and served as a substitute teacher for about a year in the Salt Lake City School District. He currently teaches an adult institute of religion course in Bentonville, Arkansas.

In addition to formal university courses, John has lectured at the University of Haifa, the Jacob Hyatt Institute of Brandeis University, and for various other groups (Mensa, Sons of the Utah Pioneers, blind groups, Baptist seminarians, tour groups in Israel, etc.). He has also spoken in many Latter-day Saint church meetings, conferences, and firesides, and even spoke in the Sabbath services of a Seventh-Day Adventist congregation. He has delivered papers at symposia sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture, the World Union of Jewish Studies, the Society of Biblical Literature (Society of Biblical Literature or SBL), the Middle East Center of the University of Utah, the Society for Early Historic Archaeology (SEHA), the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS, now the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship), the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (FAIR), the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum (BMAF), and the BYU Religious Studies Center.

To date, John has had ten books and more than 300 articles published. Some of his works have been published by such prestigious institutions as the Magnes Press of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and others.

John has held memberships in such professional societies as the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Society of Biblical Literature, the World Union of Jewish Studies, the Society for Early Historic Archaeology (where he served on the board of trustees), and others. In 1995, he began to work full-time for FARMS, which became part of BYU and was incorporated into the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, where he was senior resident scholar. He retired from BYU in January 2007 and he and his wife Carol moved to Bella Vista, Arkansas, several months later. Most of his children and grandchildren still live in Utah.

See John Tvedtnes’s web site at bookofmormonresearch.org. For a comprehensive listing of his published writings, with links to those that have been posted on-line, go to bookofmormonresearch.org/john_tvedtnes_publications.

Posted July 2010

Psychology and other social sciences teach us that human beings interact in the world through three modes: affective, cognitive, and conative. These three ways of interaction are highly integrated, each one exerting an influence on the other two. Consistency between a person’s affect, cognitions, and conations creates an individual who is internally focused or disciplined and who may exhibit strength of character and consistency in action.

There is a fourth way or mode in which people interact with the world around them that is gaining recognition and acceptance in the social sciences. That is a person’s spiritual aspect. Spirituality also interacts with the individual’s affective, cognitive, and conative experience of the world, and consistency with those three elements increases personal focus, which in turn increases discipline, strength, and a sense of moral correctness in judgment and action.

It is very difficult to maintain internal consistency across all situations and across time. It is, however, important to recognize our spiritual nature as well as our emotional, intellectual, and intentional aspects. In the more secular literature spirituality becomes synonymous with intuition or insight. In reality it is a perception of or sensitivity to spiritual promptings that, when followed, brings insight, understanding, and intuition.

I have had direct experiences with the spirit as well as many prompting and subtle nudges that have moved me in paths I had not foreseen but have then provided great blessings, insights, and inspirations.

I will share one such experience.

In 1990, I had an opportunity to travel to Russia and teach workshops on entrepreneurship to Russians on a cruise ship on the Volga River. I actually spent six weeks on four different excursions on the good ship Zhukov going from Moscow to Nizhniy Novgorod and back, teaching free market principles to Russian passengers newly freed from Soviet Communism. Because the cruise company was operated by and employed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many of the Russians and other Americans on board were also members of the church.

The cruises lasted about ten days and inevitably went over a Sunday. This provided an opportunity for cruise passengers, both Americans and Russians, to meet together in a religious meeting. With permission from everyone who needed to give permission, each Sunday there was a testimony meeting (with translators) held on the ship.

On my second cruise from Moscow, Sunday fell about half way through the trip. About eighty members met in the ship’s theater on the top deck of the ship. I vividly recall sitting in the back of the salon as a young woman from St. Petersburg got up to bear her testimony of the Church and the Restored Gospel. She started off telling us her name and said that her family was the first, or one of the first, families to be baptized into the church in Russia. They were among the first converts in the entire country.

Immediately I had a flashback experience of a very spiritual nature. I remembered sitting in a Zone Conference in Uruguay in 1978. I don’t remember the exact date or location, but that didn’t matter. What I remember was our mission president, Gene R. Cook, standing up and telling us about his recent trip to general conference. I remembered very clearly the words he spoke.

President Cook said that he had been to general conference and that, as part of the conference, the Prophet, Spencer W. Kimball, met with all the General Authorities in the top room of the Salt Lake City Temple. Then President Cook quoted the Prophet as saying: “Brethren, the Spirit of the Lord is brooding over the continent of Africa and the countries behind the Iron Curtain, and it will not be long before the Gospel is preached in those countries.”

I remember being excited and thinking how wonderful it would be to have the church in Russia (I didn’t even think about Africa and what it would mean in terms of every worthy male member holding the priesthood). I returned from my mission, promptly forgetting the Zone Conference and the words of President Cook amid the activities of getting on with life.

At that time Russia was ruled by Brezhnev, a hard-line communist autocrat with no real prospects for any kind of meaningful reform. And later, I didn’t remember anything I had heard that day as the wall tumbled down, as the Soviet Union collapsed, as the Russian Republic was born on the rubble in front of the Russian White House.

I didn’t remember anything about that day in 1978 until that day in 1990 when a young woman stood before a group of American and Russian Saints and bore strong testimony of the Restored Gospel.

I received such a strong confirmation, not only of the truthfulness of her words but a strong, vivid recollection of the words of a Prophet of God through one of his designated authorities. It was an intellectual recollection accompanied by the joy the spirit brought to that young missionary in a Zone Conference in Uruguay in 1978. More important to me in 1990, it was a witness born by the Spirit of the literal fulfillment of a prophecy given to Spencer W. Kimball all those years before.

That same sweet spirit that touched me that day has occasionally touched me thereafter. When I think back to the salon on the top of the Zhukov I feel the spirit again, I remember what it looked like and how I felt when Our Heavenly Father blessed me with that experience.

Because of that experience in 1990 and many others I know God lives and loves his children. I know he takes an active role in the affairs of man. It was He who moved Russia from Brezhnev to democracy in 12 years with relatively little bloodshed.

Because of that experience I know God has sent Prophets in these latter days and I know Spencer W. Kimball was one. I have no doubt that those who have served in that position since him have also been Prophets. I have often received spiritual witnesses to that effect.

I know the Gospel has been restored and I receive witnesses of that restoration as the spirit confirms the testimonies of saints just like that young woman who testified on the aging ship Zhukov on the Volga.

I have felt the Spirit testify of many things over my life. It has confirmed the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. It has witnessed to me of the prophetic mission of Joseph Smith. I have felt that spirit in countless church meeting and in sacred places such as the Temple or the hills above Adam-ondi-Ahman.

Each time I am left with a desire to remember the other experiences I have had, to feel the joy of those experiences, and to act in accordance with Gods plan for me.

I bear testimony of these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

—————————————————-

Peter Robinson is the Morris Professor of Entrepreneurship at Utah Valley University, where he has taught since 2003. Prior to joining the faculty at UVU, he was director of research for the Center for Entrepreneurship and an assistant professor at Wichita State University (1987-1990), a tenured associate professor and department chair at the University of Calgary ( 1990-2003), and, in 1994 and 1996, a visiting professor of entrepreneurship at the State Academy of Management in Moscow, Russia. He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from Brigham Young University in 1982 and 1987, respectively. He is a Sam Walton Fellow and the recipient of a Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award, and, in 2005, was named Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Reviewer of the Year.

Posted July 2010

Testimony of Alan C. Ashton

I am one of the co-founders of WordPerfect Corporation and am indebted to the gospel of Jesus Christ for the happiness and joy in my life. My parents were both members of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and my mother’s father, David O. McKay, was the prophet and president of the Church.

Even with that close connection to the leader of the Church my testimony did not come from him, nor did it come from my parents. They were certainly influential in my attending Church meetings in my youth, but my conviction of the truth came from my individual study and obedience to the gospel principles. In middle school and high school I became interested in the stories and teachings in the scriptures which included the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. In the Church these are called the standard works. I enjoyed my Sunday School classes and Seminary classes. I loved the teaching of my 9th grade seminary teacher so much that during the summer when school was out I rode my bike three miles to his home early in the morning three times a week to hear him teach and explain the New Testament parables of Jesus.

As I was finishing high school I joined the 23rd Army Band in the Utah National Guard where I played the trumpet. I went to Fort Ord near Monterey, California, for my six months of army training. I had decided to serve a mission for the Church so I determined to read all of the standard works during my spare time during this training.

The first two months were basic training and I read the Book of Mormon during the hourly ten-minute smoking breaks. I had a pocket-sized copy of the Book of Mormon that I had with me as we had classes and as we marched from place to place.

I began to appreciate in a new way the writings of the prophets and teachings of the Savior, Jesus Christ, as they were recorded in the Book of Mormon. In the last chapter of the Book of Mormon the prophet Moroni gave this promise: “And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.” (see Moroni 10:3-5)

I had received the words of the Book of Mormon by reading and pondering them, and I desired to obtain this witness by the power of the Holy Ghost that the words in Book of Mormon were true and from God.

One night shortly after I had finished reading the Book of Mormon I climbed down from my top bunk and went alone into a large classroom in an adjacent room and knelt down on the hard, cold tile floor in the far corner of the room and offered a sincere prayer to my Heavenly Father in the Name of Jesus Christ asking if the Book of Mormon was true. I received a wonderful, powerful, warm, tingling sensation which enveloped me from head to foot. I rejoiced at receiving this confirmation of the Holy Ghost.

I have received similar feelings throughout my life in times when I have sought and needed spiritual inspiration, but this first occasion was most pronounced. I have learned to recognize these promptings of the Holy Spirit and found that I could not make them happen at will, but that they come from a source outside of me, bearing witness to truth.

These experiences are sacred to me and I am grateful to a loving Father in Heaven who because of His Son Jesus Christ has sent me guidance in crucial times in my life.

I have felt and received guidance as I served a two and a half year mission for the Church in Germany, as I became a husband and father, as I was deciding what to do for my Ph.D. dissertation, as I was making the decision to start a word processing product which became WordPerfect, and as I have served in a variety of callings in the Church including multiple times an Elders Quorum president, a gospel teacher, a member of a bishopric, a stake president, a mission president, and now currently a bishop.

My testimony and knowledge of the truthfulness of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown stronger as I have experienced growth and joy in my life. I have seen the power of the gospel in the life of my wife whom I love with all my heart and to whom I am eternally married, and in the lives of our eleven children and their families. I see the positive results and goodness in the lives of faithful covenant members of the Church as they serve one another and as they strive to keep the commandments of God.

I have treasured warm associations with people of other faiths and have enjoyed learning from them and sharing with them what I hold dear. I love the scriptures, and I read and learn from them every day.

I have come to know through the manifestations of the Holy Ghost that Jesus is the Christ and that He is the Savior and Redeemer of mankind. I know that I along with all mankind will be lifted up to stand before Him to be judged of our works because He was lifted up by men upon the cross. I know that salvation comes in and through Jesus Christ and that all will be resurrected because of Him. I know that the true gospel of Jesus Christ was restored to the earth in these latter days through the prophet Joseph Smith. I know that we are all children of God and that He invites us to come unto Him with full purpose of heart.

————————————————-

Alan C. Ashton, a former professor of computer science at Brigham Young University, is the co-founder and the former president and CEO of WordPerfect Corporation. He graduated magna cum laude in mathematics from the University of Utah and later received his Ph.D. in computer science from the same university.

In 1995, after WordPerfect was acquired by Novell, Dr. Ashton and his wife Karen founded Thanksgiving Point—a complex of gardens (approximately fifty-five acres, with fifteen different theme areas and approximately four-and-a-half miles of walking trails), restaurants, etc.—in Lehi, Utah. ““We wanted to create something for the people around us,” says Dr. Ashton. “We’ve been blessed financially and with a large family. We wanted to give something back to the community and the families in our area.” Thanksgiving Point provides a place where adults and children can learn about farming, gardening, and cooking, and includes a championship-caliber golf course (the longest in the state of Utah), a museum of ancient life (featuring the largest collection of mounted dinosaur skeletons in the world), and a multi-screen movie theater. Nearly 1.5 million people visit Thanksgiving Point annually.

Alan and Karen Ashton are the parents of eleven children. His other interests include farming, music (especially the trumpet), and competitive tennis. He has held various responsibilities within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including service as a missionary in central Germany, as a stake president, and, from July 2004 through June 2007, as a mission president in eastern Canada. He currently serves as a bishop.

Posted July 2010

My testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ as restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith centers in large part on its view of the infinite and eternal potential of mankind. To this point, I share and comment on five brief excerpts from sacred writings produced by Mormonism’s founder.

1. In a text attributed to the prophet Abraham, God describes himself thus: “These two facts do exist, that there are two spirits, one being more intelligent than the other; there shall be another more intelligent than they; I am the Lord thy God, I am more intelligent than they all” (Pearl of Great Price, Abraham 3:19).
2. In response to an invitation to summarize the essence of Mormonism for an American audience of newspaper readers, Joseph Smith appended to a brief narrative of the origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a series of basic tenets. These have become canonized in Mormonism as “The Articles of Faith.” The ninth Article of Faith reads, “We believe all that God has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God” (Pearl of Great Price, Articles of Faith #9).
3. In a letter to his followers during arguably the most difficult months of Joseph Smith’s prophetic ministry, he declared somewhat defiantly, “How long can rolling waters remain impure? What power shall stay the heavens? As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:33).
4. On another challenging occasion, Joseph Smith received “knowledge from heaven” that identified four essential qualities that God and mankind have in common. The qualities of eternal existence, intelligence, spirituality, and innocence establish a presumptive basis for an eternal relationship between our Heavenly Father and His spirit children (Doctrine and Covenants 93:23-39).
5. In a text attributed to Moses, the ancient prophet related successive encounters with God and Satan who invite him in turn to worship them. Moses concluded God’s offer to be the more compelling after having applied a rigorous and systematic comparative method that convinced him that God possesses more glory, power, and intelligence and provides a more exalted message to mankind than does Satan. Then, in declaring his own allegiance to God, Moses tells Satan, “I will not cease to call upon God, I have other things to inquire of him” (Pearl of Great Price, Moses 1:18).

These passages from Mormonism’s foundational scriptures describe a God who is more intelligent than all other beings and who willingly shares His abundant intelligence with all who receive and act on it. They also describe the human race as possessing essential qualities of godliness, implying that men and women can become like God to the extent that they nurture the divine essence within them. In these and other scriptural passages, mankind is richly rewarded for inquiring after the qualities of godliness.

Advocating a message that links mankind and God, heaven and earth, and time and eternity is very ambitious, even “audacious” (Harold Bloom’s term) for a religion that was founded by a frontier farm boy from New York’s “burned over district” and that is more often understood in the context of America’s religious past than the planet’s meaningful future. Whether Mormonism ever fully realizes these noble objectives is for the witnesses of another day. Those of our day must assess whether the ideology that Joseph Smith and his successors have advanced describes a God that we can faithfully worship and defines a gospel that can effectively guide our lives.

I find the Mormon worldview to be compelling, in spite of its essential ‘incompleteness’ (as required by Article of Faith #9) and the persistent imperfections of those, like me, who have attempted to live it through the years. Mormon history teaches me that its gospel obligates both leaders and followers to serve mankind and to work for the betterment of the earth and of all humanity, while developing personal virtues of godliness and overcoming their own and others’ imperfections. No exceptions, no excuses. Mormonism’s abiding emphasis on spirituality, service, work, and worship derives from the following basic tenets:

• The extent to which our life is one of service to others determines in large measure the “kingdom of glory” we inherit in the multi-tiered Mormon afterlife
• The “Celestial,” or highest, kingdom of glory consists of those who have covenanted with one another and with God to assist Him throughout eternity to bring salvation to all of His children
• Salvation is a never-ending process of realizing our innate potential of becoming like God.

Latter-day Saint scriptures consist of the records of holy prophets that:

• Reveal a vision of this plan of salvation
• Document the (largely unsuccessful) efforts of past and present societies to realize its possibilities in mortality
• Witness to the eventual fulfillment of this plan through the blessings of God and the persistent faithfulness of His children.

The central key to the success of this plan is the “infinite and eternal” atonement of Jesus Christ. Allowing mercy to play a major role in nurturing our divine potential, the atonement shows all mankind that charity is the essential quality of godliness and thus the most desirable of human virtues.

My witness is based on more than inspired writings and elegant systems of religious thought. Most importantly, it comes from personal spiritual experience. My knowledge of the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and its restoration through Joseph Smith in our day results from

• An abiding desire to understand my identity and place in the universe
• A concerted search for these “solemnities of eternity”
• A willingness to conform my life to the moral and ethical implications of the resulting witness from God.

As partial and imperfect as these personal efforts have been, they have borne the sweetest and most sublime fruit of all others in my life.

——————————————————

Steven L. Olsen received AM and Ph.D. degrees in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1978 and 1985, respectively. For the past three decades he has filled various professional and administrative positions with the LDS Church History Department, Salt Lake City, including Senior Curator and Managing Director. Major projects completed under his leadership include the permanent exhibits, “A Covenant Restored: Historical Foundations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” and “Presidents of the Church” at the Church History Museum; the historic site restorations, “Joseph and Lucy Mack Smith Farm and Sacred Grove” and “Book of Mormon Historic Publication Site” (western New York), “Historic Kirtland” and “John and Else Johnson Home” (northeast Ohio),” Cove Fort” and “Brigham Young Winter Home” (Utah); and the Church History Library in Salt Lake City.

He has presented and published widely in the fields of museum studies and Mormon studies. Major continuing research interests include the symbolism of community design, literary conventions of sacred texts, ceremony and ritual, and visual iconography. Steve has served on the boards or in the leadership of the following professional organizations: American Society of Church History, Western Museums Association, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Utah Museums Association, Utah Office of Museum Services, and Utah Humanities Council.

Steve and his wife Kathi have five children and two grandchildren and live with assorted pets in Heber City, Utah.

Posted July 2010

While working for a Democratic member of Congress, I met a co-worker who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We became close friends. I was about to start graduate school at the University of Virginia, and he offered to give me a ride to Charlottesville to help with my arrangements. During that trip, we talked about religion, and I agreed to attend church with him on the following Sunday. I cannot remember when I did not believe that Jesus is the Christ, and I wanted to better understand Mormonism. I had known a number of Latter-day Saints, and I found them to be strange in a pleasant sort of way. My willingness to attend services that Sunday and learn more was a sociological exploration, at first, for me. As I prayerfully read the Book of Mormon, however, a great feeling of assurance and peace swept over me, and I knew it was true. In that very instant, I said to myself, “Oh no, bring on the sackcloth and ashes, now I am a Mormon.” For me, in that instant, I knew that the Book of Mormon and the Church were true. From that simple act of religious conscience, when I agreed to follow that special prompting from on high and become a Latter-day Saint, I have had much joy in the gospel and have come to know very powerfully that Jesus is in fact the Christ, the anointed one, my Savior and friend. I have also dedicated much of my professional life as a professor of constitutional law to ensuring that the right of religious conscience, as found in our First Amendment, remains vibrant in this country and spreads throughout the world. It is my humble prayer that every child of God will have the opportunity that I have had to be free to follow the promptings of his or her religious conscience and do that which God would have them do with their lives.

——————————————————-

Rodney K. Smith received his B.A. from Western Colorado State College, his J.D. with honors from Brigham Young University, a master’s and a doctorate in law from the University of Pennsylvania, and an honorary doctorate from Capital University. He currently serves as President of Southern Virginia University, is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Academy of Liberal Education, has served on the International Board of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society, and is a Visiting Professor at the Washington and Lee College of Law. President Smith previously served as dean of the schools of law at Capital University, the University of Montana, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He also taught at the University of North Dakota, Widener University, Brigham Young University, and the University of San Diego. Dr. Smith held the Herff Chair of Excellence in Law and was serving as interim dean at the University of Memphis immediately prior to his coming to Southern Virginia University. President Smith has authored or co-authored four books and over twenty-five scholarly articles and is recognized for his scholarship in the freedom of religion and sports law areas.

President Smith is quick to note, however, that his greatest accomplishment is that he married well and that he and his wife, Danielle, are the parents of eight children and the grandparents of eighteen grandchildren.

Posted July 2010

My testimony of Christ’s divinity came in my childhood. My testimony of the restored Gospel and the authority of the priesthood came when I was a young mother. I was raised in a strict Southern Baptist home, and two of my great-uncles were ordained Baptist ministers. Because of that, much of the conversation and activity in our family was Christ-centered. I requested baptism into the Baptist church when I was seven. The pastor at first told my mother that I was too young to have much understanding, but she insisted that he interview me. I was baptized by immersion soon after the interview, and throughout my growing-up years, I thought I might become a missionary when I became an adult.

As a young child, I knew that Jesus Christ was my older brother and that he had come to earth to teach people what his father wanted us to know. I also knew about his death and resurrection and the promise of human resurrection. These were topics that I had heard in sermons on Sunday and had heard discussed by family members at home. Then and now I have loved the stories in the New Testament about his appearance to the Apostles (and others) after his resurrection. I knew then and I know now that he is the Christ, our teacher, and the divine son of God. As a child, I often thought Christ was present in my life whispering and coaching me along my way. As an adult the coaching has continued, always positively, and I now know that gentle voice in my mind is the Holy Ghost.

My literal conversion to the truthfulness of the restored Gospel came suddenly. Late on a February morning in 1966, in Glendale, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, my two toddlers and I were picking up sticks in our new back yard after a wind storm. A neighbor to the rear of our home was doing the same thing with two of her tykes. We introduced ourselves to one another and then began to visit. She asked me what church we attended, and I said that I had been raised Baptist and my husband had been raised Methodist, and though we attended church regularly, we were looking around because neither seemed to be quite what we wanted for our children. She asked what I knew about the “Mormons” or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I said that I knew about some golden tablets, Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, Brigham Young, and the trek to the West from Illinois.

She said that I knew more than most people, and would I like to read some materials about her church? I was interested in part because one of my Southern Baptist aunts had lived in Ogden, Utah, and she had expressed respect for the Latter-day Saint people there. I gave the children their lunch, put them down for their nap, and began to read the tracts and Book of Mormon she had given me. The children slept all afternoon, and I read. I read the tracts and skimmed the scriptures. There was one longer tract, “The Philosophy of Mormonism” by James E. Talmage, that particularly interested me. Though I had read Moroni’s promise from Moroni 10: 3-4 in the materials, I didn’t want to pray and put it to the test until I had read the Talmage tract. I remember worrying that the children would awaken before I could get through that last pamphlet, but they slept and slept.

I first learned of the Latter-day church’s teaching of the pre-existence from that tract. I had always thought that must be, but no pastor I had talked with would (or could) confirm that for me. I had been nicknamed “Plato” in high school because I excitedly embraced the concept of ideal forms; that is, that earthly creations were only imitations of perfect forms in another dimension. I had also read Kant and other philosophers because for several years I had searched continually for evidence of the preexistence.

I finally went to my bedroom and prayed. Remarkably, the children were still asleep. I thanked Heavenly Father and asked, as the tracts instructed, if the restoration were true, could I please be given unmistakable confirmation? The manifestation came in the form of a burning in my chest. It was literal, and it was so powerful that there was no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the Holy Ghost had witnessed truth to me.

Over the next few weeks the missionaries came to our home, gave us the lessons, and challenged my husband and me to be baptized. On March 26, 1966, my husband and I were both baptized and confirmed as members of the Church, and we received the gift of the Holy Ghost. The following year we took our children to the Salt Lake Temple, and on June 13, 1967, we were sealed as a family for time and eternity.

Over time I raised our children in the Church, and three of our four have testimonies of the truthfulness of the Gospel. The fourth is a Christian Lutheran which is also his wife’s religion. Two of our children were married in the temple, and our oldest son served a worthy mission. After the children were grown, I completed my university studies and was invited to become a full-time faculty member in the English department at Brigham Young University. My mother was negative about my conversion to the Latter-day Saint faith, and my husband became less-active soon after we went to the temple. Even so, I knew what I had experienced that February afternoon, and I have remained fully committed to Jesus Christ and his work of building the kingdom.

I have been blessed, I know it, and I know my work now is to do my best to bless the lives of others through my family, temple work, teaching, writing, and constantly learning to be the person our Heavenly Father sent me to earth to be.

I testify these truths and events In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

—————————————————–

I was born and raised in St. Louis County, Missouri, and our family moved to the West in 1979. I married at nineteen, and my husband and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary in December 2009. We have four married children and twelve lively grandchildren. I am a folklorist and professor and joined the English Department at Brigham Young University in 1996. I am also director of the Secondary English Teaching Program and past president of the Utah Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts. I have written several books, chapters, and essays. Probably the most important writing I have produced to date is a book called Begin Where You Are: Nurturing Relationships with Less-Active Family and Friends (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book: 2004).

Posted July 2010

“Without His Spirit We Are Left in The Dark”: The Spiritual Assistance of Literature

I have come to personal witness of the reality of the spiritual dimensions of existence. I have received, through the Holy Spirit, a witness, a testimony, of the reality of God the Father and the divinity of His Son Jesus Christ, of the prophetic calling of Joseph Smith, and of the divine re-establishment of the Kingdom of God in “the outward church below,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This belief was founded and fostered in my young years by believing parents and cultivated by many men and women who taught and exemplified for me the way and benefits of the happy, righteous, spiritual life.

As I grew in awareness, I learned, gradually, that the natural man/woman grows to spiritual man/womanhood to the extent that he or she becomes comfortable and familiar, while still in mortality, in the presence of spiritual realities. I learned that the ultimate goal of every person should be to become worthy, through personal endeavor and the grace of God, to overcome mortality and live in the presence of Deity.

I have learned, oh so gradually, that the key to belief and faith and spiritual oneness with the supernal is learning how to foster and use the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Learning to walk with the Holy Ghost is, of course, the study of a lifetime and a principal spiritual challenge for human beings. The wise prophet Brigham Young said, “The greatest mystery a man ever learned is to know how to control the human mind and bring every faculty and power . . . in subjection to Jesus Christ; this is the greatest mystery we have to learn while in these tabernacles of clay” (Journal of Discourses 1:46). And the key to achieving this subjection to Christ is, again, the Holy Ghost, who is also the key to finding the delicate in-the-world-yet-not-of-the-world balance between the world (always “too much with us”–Wordsworth) and the eternal realms of God.

I am a “man of letters,” a voracious reader who can state that, for me, as John writes, “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). In addition to being my introduction to God and the Plan of Salvation of Jesus Christ, literature, sacred and profane, has been, lifelong, my education, my profession, my scholarly engagement, and my daily avocation. For me, good and great literature, when selected and read by the power of the Holy Ghost, aids holy writ in clarifying our mortal purposes, enabling a vision of our mortal and eternal course, and reinforcing our divinely focused humanity. Literature is thus one of the great gifts of God.

To a great extent, I read my way to a testimony and then found that the eternal principles I was learning really worked in daily life, in losing ourselves in service to others. (I don’t claim to have accomplished that worthy goal, but there has been joy in trying.)

I was fortunate to have been strongly influenced by precept and example. Very early in my life, my parents and brothers and sister encouraged my reading by taking me to the public library and by giving me books for every occasion. There was always the expectation that I would be a reader. By the age of ten I was a devoted reader of boys’ (and girls’) books. I read all of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, and then discovered and devoured my father’s ancient volumes of Horatio Alger, the Motor Boys, and Dick Prescott at West Point. I learned contemporary history through reading Red Randall at Pearl Harbor and Agent 9 Solves His First Case, and Eddie Rickenbacker’s thrilling account of his raid over Tokyo in Seven Came Through; I learned to love football less by watching and more through reading John R. Tunis’s All-American, and Charles Lawton’s Ros Hackney, Halfback, and One Minute to Play, Goal to Go, and Touchdown to Victory, by cherished if forgotten authors. As I laid down the books after a reading session, I would rush out to join Sammy Park and other neighbors in a rousing game of sandlot football; I would hear triumphant music pounding in my head as I dashed for a touchdown or plunged into the line, a boyhood incarnation of whatever fictional player I was reading about, motivated by the prose of these thrilling stories.

It was clear, early on, that as a lover of words and stories, I was destined to be an English major, and I became such, earning the B.A. and M.A. (University of Utah) and Ph.D. (Wisconsin) in English, and enjoying (over nearly forty years) a productive career of teaching and scholarship at Brigham Young University, where I also served as department chair and as dean of the College of Humanities. But my great love was teaching eager students about literature, and writing many articles and books about American, Western, and Mormon literature.

During my first fourteen years, the only sacred writ I read and committed to heart was a thick comic book rendering of the stories of the Old Testament. I discovered this little book when I was about eight years old and read it so often that I distressed my Junior Sunday School teachers with my eagerness to spill the beans to the other kids about the stories’ conclusions and then turn back to disrupting the class, playing my various roles as FBI agent (wooden pistol in right breast jacket pocket), Superman (cape, towel concealed under jacket), or a P-38 pilot (fur-lined, goggled, pilot’s cap, parachute [pillow] tied on back)—at least so I’ve since been told by hand-wringing parents and teachers. Even today, in my mid-seventies, before undertaking any challenging task, I shout, internally, as I charge into the fray, a lá that long-ago Bible comic book, “The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon” (Judges 7:20).

Regardless of my youthful ignorance of scripture, I must have been paying partial attention to bits and pieces of the gospel as taught by the Latter-day Saints, for rudiments of my faith were congealing and rising to my soul’s surface. The Plan of Salvation all came together for me when I stumbled onto it one wintry Sunday afternoon in 1950, when I was fourteen. Passing the long, boring time between roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and Sunday evening Sacrament Meeting, I took up my father’s LDS triple combination, counted the relatively few pages (sixty) comprising The Pearl of Great Price, and decided I would try to read in one afternoon an entire Standard Work (the LDS faith recognizes four books of scripture as “the Standard Works”—The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price). So I sat down and read The Pearl of Great Price, which comprises the visions of Abraham, Enoch, Noah, Moses, and Joseph Smith. It was an illuminating Sunday afternoon. Clearly enlightened by the Holy Spirit (I say this from hindsight), I stumbled suddenly and without warning, like Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” onto a new world. That afternoon’s reading—attentive, authentic, and inadvertent—settled the philosophical foundation of my being and testimony, and forever changed my life.

From the moment I read “Behold, I am the Lord God Almighty, and Endless is my name” (Book of Moses 1:3), the Holy Spirit excited my imagination, which was primed by my voracious reading habits, and I was suddenly and surprisingly reading the adventures of Moses and Abraham, Adam and Eve, Noah, and Enoch with the same attention, absorption, and excitement I brought to the adventures of Robin Hood, The White Company, The Three Musketeers, Ben Hur—or Ros Hackney. The Salt Lake City living room (1067 East 4th South) dropped away and I was there, with Moses, viewing worlds without number; I was one of the Grand Council in Heaven watching the great immortal drama unfold before my mind’s eye; I thrilled to hear Elohim say to us assembled spirits, “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). I thrilled at hearing the Only Begotten say, “Here am I, send me”; I shouted with the two-thirds of God’s children who thrilled at the choice of God the Father: “I will send the first” (Abraham 3:27). I stood with Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, Noah, and Enoch and chilled at the dramatic “Enter, Satan, Stage Center,” as Lucifer comes a-tempting each prophet. I read, as if for the first time, Joseph Smith’s account of his First Vision, and I stood by his side, about the same age, fourteen, in the Sacred Grove, and felt very nearly overcome by Satan’s attempt to re-enter the drama; and I viewed again, this time with Joseph Smith, the same Alpha and Omega vision I had seen through the eyes of Moses and Abraham and Enoch, and imagined that I could see, reading words from The Pearl of Great Price and illuminated by the Holy Ghost, something like the glory of the Father and the Son, and hear, with all of them, the awesome witness, “This is my Beloved Son, hear Him,” and hear the call to “awake and arise,” and be about teaching “all men, everywhere his [Christ’s] Plan of Salvation” (Moses 6:62).

Reading this inspired literature seemed to make everything clear, dramatic, true—and vastly important, for I seemed to glimpse the repeated patterns of God in speaking to His mortal children. I felt marvelous, uplifted, good. And as I closed that book, now become more than a mere book, and returned to that Salt Lake City living room, everything looked the same, but everything was different, for I had read, partially comprehended, envisioned, and experienced for myself the Plan of God, as recorded in The Pearl of Great Price and which I first encountered in the sixty pages of The Pearl of Great Price and illuminated by the Holy Ghost.

The Plan was indelibly imprinted on my heart and mind and soul; and, when my earthiness and waywardness would permit, it would come to the fore. Even when my humanity too often pushed The Plan to the back of my consciousness, it had become so riveted to my soul that it dogged me, haunted me, and colored everything. Getting myself together at age nineteen, I answered the call to serve an LDS mission (Swiss-Austrian Mission) for two and one-half years. That experience was my spiritual coming-of-age. After teaching the Austrian and Swiss people the Plan, I would spend the rest of my life trying to teach others the reality of the visions of those prophets, and the way, the truth and the light. My ministry in teaching the gospel has been done as a missionary, a teacher of youth and adults, a father, twice as a bishop, as a stake president, and mission president (Zürich Switzerland). In my various teaching roles I have often been sustained by glimpses of that vision and been quickened by the intervention of the Holy Ghost in promptings, whisperings of the Spirit, counseling, healings, prophesying, and by direct revelation. I have been guided and strengthened by what I have come to call “Surprises of the Spirit,” which have recurred throughout my life.

Through it all, I have been, strengthened, in a lesser but reaffirming way, by my immersion in literature—which I read through spectacles tinted by The Plan. For example:

One summer evening in 1952, when I was sixteen, I bought a paperback book (35¢), Immortal Poems of the English Language, edited by the poet Oscar Williams. I devoured the book, cherished it, and ran, without warning, into William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” a poem which I found my parents knew and also responded to, a poem which thrilled me with what I recognized as a poetic rendering and reaffirmation of my experience with Abraham, Moses, Joseph Smith and the Plan of God. Wordsworth, feeling the mortal “prison house” growing around him and gradually shutting him off from his earlier intimations of immortality and bringing him face-to-face with the ironic fallen world, ponders, “Whence our lives come and where they go,” and asks, “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” and sighs, “But yet I know, where’er I go,/ That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” Then he declares, in words as familiar to Latter-day Saints as “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents” (I Nephi 1:1):

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

He continues:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Still, we have, throughout our lives, fleeting and haunting glimpses of our Eternal Home: Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither. . . . (in Williams 260-62,265 passim)

I thrilled—and still do sixty years later—sensing in William Wordsworth a kinship with a fellow “stranger and pilgrim in the earth” who has glimpsed the eternal and is haunted by the Cosmic Irony which besets us here below. I found these heavenly intimations echoing in other poets and thrilled, for example, at discovering Gerard Manley Hopkins, who taught me that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and that the world and its stranger/pilgrim inhabitants are daily renewed, “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings” (in Williams 458).

The Cosmic Irony I refer to describes the macro-micro jokes with which human life is fraught—the funny and sad differences between great expectations and mundane realities; the painful incongruity between is and ought to be; the wisdom in the comment by William Hazlitt, the great English essayist, that “man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.” Cosmic Irony, then, describes the macro-micro joke, the gap between man as he is and man as he ought to be and will be, or, as Robert Frost puts it, cosmic ironically,

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me. (Frost 428)

Believing readers who have once become aware of Otherworldly Reality in the midst of Present Worldly Reality and partaken of the Cosmic Irony in which we exist will find that their sense of being strangers and pilgrims in the earth” (Heb. 11:13; D&C 45:13) infuses and informs all of their lives, their philosophy, their enjoyment of music, their reading, and certainly in my case, their literary criticism, aware as they always are of the spiritual reality which overlays the temporal reality. This dimensional gap is affirmed in Mormon poet Eliza R. Snow’s profoundly true lines in the LDS hymn, “O My Father,” as she envisions our veiled lives with heavenly parents in a pre-mortal existence and sighs, “Yet ofttimes a secret something whispered ‘You’re a stranger here,’/And I felt that I had wandered from a more exalted sphere” (Hymns).

The Holy Ghost is in all of this. He enables us to read authentically, to balance and harmonize the two realms which we occupy: Mortal and Immortal, Flesh and Spirit. To balance literature of the fallen world, which must by nature describe the lives of fallen mankind, against the literature of the spiritual world, which attempts to describe the spiritual and ideal world. So the Holy Spirit makes us aware of Cosmic Irony, or Cosmic Incongruity, which haunts most of us believers on our mortal journey. In fact, a Latter-day Saint who has emerged from her own Sacred Grove must learn to walk the mortal walk cockeyed—if you’ll allow it—with one eye cocked to the pressing daily realities of this life—to the here-and-now, the temporal, while the other eye is cocked to the reality of infinity, the eternal now, the out-there. The spiritual mortal learns to read mortality like the youth in 2 Kings who is allowed to see beyond the threatening great host the “mountain full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha” (2 Kings 6:17).

In reading, as well as in daily life, the Holy Ghost can refine our tastes and sensibilities as we learn how to cultivate, discern, and respond to the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Even in reading. Brigham Young counseled us to, “Read good books, and extract from them wisdom and understanding as much as you possibly can, aided by the Spirit of God, for without His Spirit we are left in the dark” (Journal of Discourses 12:124; 29 Dec. 1867; my italics). He said at another LDS conference, “It is your duty to study to know everything upon the face of the earth, in addition to reading [the scriptures]. We should not only study good, and its effects upon our race, but also evil, and its consequences” (Journal of Discourses 2:93-4; 6 Feb. 1853).

For me, reading has helped me to harmonize heaven and earth. My baptism by immersion in the realm of spiritual literature (especially the Holy Scriptures) has increasingly enriched my faith and further established my testimony of the reality of the spiritual dimension, of Jesus Christ, of His Plan of Salvation for every soul, and it has schooled me in seeking the direction of the Holy Ghost; and my immersion in world literature has enriched my life and humanity and given me a better understanding of the forces at work in the world of man of God. I am still engaged in the struggle of finding that delicate balance between the flesh and the spirit (see Romans 8), and I still have setbacks, but I cautiously believe my course is set for Eternal Life, and I hope the current I have been following, in fair and foul weather, will lead my family and me—and each of you in your discovered way—safely Home.

——————————————————–

Richard H. Cracroft (1936- ) grew up in Salt Lake City. As he explains above, he has been a consummate reader since his early boyhood; by high school, he was thrilling to Julius Caesar and Macbeth and Cyrano de Bergerac and was already planning on majoring in English at college–and he was named as an All-State center on his state championship high school football team. Majoring in English with a minor in German literature, he earned the B..A. and M.A. at the University of Utah, and the Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1969). He joined the Brigham Young University English Department faculty in 1963, retiring in 2001. At BYU he was chair of the English Department, dean of the College of Humanities, coordinator of American Studies, and director of the Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature. He received BYU’s Abraham O. Smoot award and was the first holder of the Nan Osmond Grass Professorship in English. He established the courses in Western Literature and Mormon Literature at BYU and taught them for many years. With Neal E. Lambert, he published A Believing People: The Literature of the Latter-day Saints (1974), the first anthology of Mormon letters, and has published numerous articles and reviews on Mormon literature; for over twenty years he has written a book review column, “Alumni Book Nook,” in Brigham Young Magazine. He was president of the Association for Mormon Letters and was named a Lifetime Member of AML. He has published extensively in American literature and historical and LDS-centered journals and has authored and edited thirteen books on American literature and biography, Western literature (particularly on Mark Twain and Wallace Stegner), and Mormon literature. His article,”‘Cows to Milk Instead of Novels to Read’: Brigham Young, Novel Reading, and Kingdom Building,” BYU Studies, 40.2 (2001):102-131, was winner of the 2001 T. Edgar Lyon Award for the Best Article of the Year on Mormon History, sponsored by the Mormon History Association. Since retiring, he has taught for ten years a course in literature for the Elder Quest senior citizens group. He has been a lifelong local leader in the LDS Church, serving as a missionary in the Swiss-Austrian Mission, in bishoprics, on high councils, and as a youth leader, bishop (twice), stake president (of the Provo Utah East Stake), president of the Switzerland Zürich Mission, Branch President at the Missionary Training Center (MTC ), and high priest group leader (three times)–which adds up to about forty-five years in his ministry. He has been joyfully married for over a half-century to Janice Alger Cracroft; they have two sons and a daughter and seven grandchildren.

Posted June 2010

在我的家庭中最先接触教会传教士的是我的母亲。30多年前的一天，她在路上遇到两名会说中文的外国人，原本只是想礼貌性地打声招呼，却没想到这无心之举让我的母亲因此归信成为了教会的一员。

母亲和比我年长三岁的姐姐在我六岁时加入教会，而我则等待了两年，直到满八岁后，接受洗礼。至于我的父亲，虽然他从未接受过任何的宗教信仰，但他相当尊重母亲和我们的选择，所以我们可以依照自己的意愿参加教会的聚会和活动。

刚加入教会时，母亲非常积极。她不仅带着我和姐姐每周出席安息日的聚会，同时也接受了在妇女会担任事工的召唤。可惜的是，当所有熟识的传教士一一接着返乡， 母亲带着我们到教堂的次数也渐渐减少了。记忆中，虽然母亲和我们每天仍会固定的做早、晚的祷告，然而，除了一年一度的圣诞节晚会之外，似乎很少有机会和母亲一同上教堂礼拜。

高三那年是我人生的一个重要转捩点。当时除了需要面对巨大的升学压力以外，也对自己的生活方向感到十分迷惘。我很希望高中毕业后继续念大学，但是因为高中联考的失利，我没有进入一个理想的高中，以至于考上大学的机会几乎是微乎其微。也许正是这样的情况让我想试着自己去教堂，更进一步地了解是否可以在我所信仰多年的宗教中找到一些问题的解答。

我还记得第一次自己一个人进入小时候熟悉的永和教堂时，非常的尴尬，仿佛每一双眼睛都盯着我看似的。接下来的几个星期天，我总是想，“还要再去吗？”，我必须承认，当时的我一点都不喜欢被人一次又一次问相同的问题或受到过渡的关心以及好奇眼光的打量。现在想来，这样的反应对一个青少年来说，也许很正常吧！

值得欣慰的是，我没有放弃，每周都会静静地到教堂做礼拜，然后悄悄地离开。直到有一天，一位和我年纪相仿的姐妹在圣餐聚会后走向我并告诉我她的名字(洪莉娜)，我才认出这位姐妹原来是我国中一年级的同学，真是令人喜出望外！由于她的邀请和友谊，我开始参加女青年甚至福音进修班的课程，自此更深入了解经文和福音原则。

当我第一次看到“女青年个人进步计划 (Young Women Personal Progress)”这本书时的感动，应该是终生难忘的。因为那唤起了一个深藏已久的记忆——我是神的女儿，我能在智能、体能、灵性各方面都不断地成长和进步。按照进步计划的原则，我设定了各项目标，其中一个是教育方面的，很幸运，在大学门槛这一关，我通过了，也为我在学术领域深继续的造开启了第一道门。然而，另一个对我的生活具有更大影响的目标则是灵性方面的，借着每日经文的研读，特别是摩尔门经，我找到了个人的见证，正如基督教导的“寻找，就寻见；叩门，就给你们开门。”

—————————–

The first to come into contact with the Church missionaries in my family was my mother. Some thirty years ago she encountered two Chinese-speaking foreigners on the street, whom she at first just greeted out of a sense of politeness, never thinking that this chance meeting would lead to her subsequent conversion and to my mother becoming a member of the Church.

My mother and my sister thee years older than me joined the church when I was six years old, and I had to wait for two years until I reached the age of eight to be baptized. As for my father, though he had never accepted any sort of religious belief, nevertheless he completely respected the choice of our mother and us. Therefore, we were able to attend church meetings and activities according to our own desires.

From the time she joined the church my mother was extremely active. Not only did she take my older sister and me to attend Sabbath day meetings every week, but she also accepted the responsibility of holding a Relief Society calling. Unfortunately, as the missionaries familiar to her one by one returned home, the frequency with which my mother took us to church gradually decreased as well. As I recall, even though my mother and we still steadfastly kept morning and evening prayers, it seems as if we rarely had a chance to go to church on Sunday with my mother, except for attending church on Christmas every year.

My senior year of high school was a turning point in my life. At that time, besides the pressure of needing to confront the next major step in my education, I also felt utterly perplexed about the direction of my personal life. I really had hoped to continue my studies at the university after graduating from high school, but because of a setback on my entrance exam, I was not able to get into my ideal high school, making it unlikely that I would have the test scores to get into college. Perhaps it was precisely this situation that caused me to think about going to church on my own and to understand whether or not I could answer the various questions about my religious beliefs, for which I had searched for so many years.

I still remember the first time that I entered church as a young person all by myself and feeling utterly embarrassed, as if every pair of eyes were fixed in stares upon me. The following several Sundays I kept thinking: “Do I still want to go?” I must admit at the time I did not at all like being asked the same questions over and over again or being looked at with passing concern and curiosity. Thinking back on it now, such a reaction was probably quite normal for a young person.

What gives me comfort is that I did not give up every week going quietly off to church to attend meetings and then silently departing. Then one day a sister about my age walked up to me after sacrament meeting and told me her name (Hong Lina), and I realized then that this sister was a first year junior high school classmate. What a pleasant surprise! Because of her invitation and friendship, I began to attend Young Women’s classes and even Gospel Doctrine classes, and from then on I embarked on a deeper study of the scriptures and gospel principles.

I will never forget the feeling that I had when I first saw the Young Women’s Personal Progress booklet, because it aroused in me a profound remembrance—I was a daughter of God—I could continually increase and progress in every aspect of intelligence, physical ability, and spirituality.

I established each of my goals according to the plan of progression, among which was education and—fortunately—this related to my getting into the university and further became a stepping stone in academia. Even more, the objective of even greater influence on me had to do with spiritual aspects. Drawing on daily scripture study, especially the Book of Mormon, I found my own testimony, just as Christ taught: “Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened onto to you.”

———————————————————–

Shu-Pei Wang is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University. She received her Ph.D. in instructional psychology and technology at BYU in August 2007 with a dissertation analyzing grammatical (syntactic) errors and attrition among adult native-English-speaking learners of Mandarin as a second language. Previously, she had received an M.A. in language acquisition (with an emphasis on Chinese) from BYU and a B.A. in Chinese literature and linguistics from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.

Translated by Dana Scott Bourgerie
Posted June 2010

I have been fortunate to grow up in a loving and supportive family, and to continually find mentors who have encouraged me to pursue my love of science. As a life-long member of the Church, I am proud of my pioneer ancestors, and I have a strong desire to live up to their example of faith and sheer determination to overcome any obstacle. I have had to rely on those qualities many times. It’s still amazing to me how many roadblocks to being a scientific scholar face a woman who is LDS and is also a mother. And blonde. But my parents have always been supportive, and as an undergraduate at BYU I had wonderful mentors who encouraged me on my way. In fact, the most supportive men I have ever encountered are exactly those who are the most Christ-like, and this has been of fundamental importance to me in my moments of doubt and questioning.

I’ll never forget the day when, as I rode in a car with a good friend and fellow graduate student at the University of Colorado, he discovered I was LDS. I thought he was going to drive off the road. We’d been friends for at least a year, so he knew me fairly well. He kept saying, “You can’t be one of them!” This is not atypical of the reactions of many of my colleagues when they learn that I am LDS. It’s quite like their reaction when they find out I have three children. It’s a shock for them to absorb, and no doubt many of them think differently of me as a scientist upon learning these things. But really, what fun is there in conforming to everyone’s expectations?

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because the gospel it proclaims is true. As a scientist, I could not believe in something I did not believe was true. Yes, there are many benefits to being LDS. Yes, it provides a social structure and place of belonging. Yes, it provides significant support in raising a family. However, while all of these things are wonderful aspects of the gospel, I could not believe in the gospel itself without knowledge of its truth.

As a scientist, I choose to look at the world through the lens of the scientific method, as a way of gaining understanding about the world around us. Given that our knowledge of the world and the universe is very incomplete, and that in many cases our data has large uncertainties, the scientific method is still a useful tool for creating some order in our understanding. In my own life I have applied this method to the gospel. I have tested, through the methodology outlined by the gospel, and in every case, sometimes quickly and other times only through much effort and self-discipline, I have obtained the results the gospel has promised.

As a student I learned that one must not be sloppy in performing experiments. I watch colleagues perform meticulous experiments that take months to set up, in which any deviation in the methodology, in the measurements of the constituents, or any unexpected or careless changes in the environment can completely change the outcome of the experiment, or outright negate the entire process. So, I am not unused to the idea that dedication and care are needed, and that knowledge is sometimes difficult to acquire. I am also comfortable with the idea that there may be a very specific way to arrive at the results of an experiment, and that simply wanting to know an answer without being willing to study, experiment, and follow exact procedures will almost certainly not bring one to an accurate conclusion.

It is certainly not easy. There are still so many unanswered questions about the way the earth works (which is good: otherwise I would be without a job). Not all of current science agrees with all of our current understanding of the gospel. My faith is required to help me know that at some time, either in this life or later, I will have enough understanding to be able to reconcile all of the disparate elements. I’ve studied enough about the history of science and religion to know that religion which bends to adjust to science eventually takes a beating, because science is by its nature growing and changing.

With this as a preamble, I am so grateful my religion is true, because it offers so much. First and foremost, it provides a way for me to continue to have the most precious thing on this earth: my family. I can’t imagine wanting an existence without my husband, my children, my parents, and my brothers and sister. What could be greater than the opportunity to remain as a family? Without the gospel it is quite likely that I would have succumbed to professional pressure and decided not to have children. Certainly I would not have had three! And I would have missed the very experiences that have given me the most joy and my most personal stretching. So, while it makes me an outlier in the distribution of physical scientists, I don’t worry about this any more as I am now quite used to being an outlier in so many other ways. And I have the perspective to know that my career is not the only, or even the most, important aspect of my life.

———————————————————–

Carol Anne Clayson is currently an associate professor in the Department of Meteorology at Florida State University and the Director of the Geophysical Fluids Dynamics Institute. Her research covers the areas of high-resolution air-sea interaction, satellite remote sensing, and ocean modeling, and she has received funding for her research from NASA, NOAA, the Office of Naval Research, and NSF. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. She received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Bill Clinton. Dr. Clayson is the author or co-author of over forty journal articles, two books, two book chapters, and three National Research Council reports, has served on several committees for the American Meteorological Society and the National Research Council, and is currently a member of the AMS Committee on Coastal Environments. She is also serving as the chair of the GEWEX SeaFlux project, an international group of scientists working on improved estimations of air-sea turbulent heat fluxes from satellites. Dr. Clayson received her B. S. degree in physics and astronomy from Brigham Young University, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering sciences and the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She and her husband Tristan Johnson are the parents of three boys.

Posted June 2010