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Excerpt from Adam S. Miller, Letters to a Young Mormon (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell for Religious Scholarship, 2014), 17-23.

Used by Permission of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute. For FairMormon blog only. Not to be redistributed or copied.

3. Sin

Dear S.,

Being a good person doesn’t mean you’re not a sinner. Sin goes deeper. Being good will save you a lot of trouble, but it won’t solve the problem of sin. Only God can do this. Fill your basket with good apples rather than bad ones, but, in the end, sin has as much to do with the basket as with the apples. Sin depends not just on your actions but on the story you use those actions to tell.

Like everyone, you have a story you want your life to tell. You have your own way of doing things and your own way of thinking about things. But “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). As the heavens are higher than the earth, God’s work in your life is bigger than the story you’d like that life to tell. His life is bigger than your plans, goals, or fears. To save your life, you’ll have to lay down your stories and, minute by minute, day by day, give your life back to him. Preferring your stories to his life is sin.

Sin is endemic to the story you’re always telling yourself about yourself. This story shows up in that spool of judgmental chitchat—sometimes fair, sometimes foul—that, like an off-stage voice-over, endlessly loops in your head. This narration follows you around like a shadow. It mimes you, measures you, sometimes mocks you, and pretends, in its flat, black simplicity, to be the truth about you. This story is seductive. It seems so weightless and bulletproof and ideal. But as a shadow it hides as much as it reveals. You are not your shadow. No matter how carefully you line up the light, your body will never fit that profile. Sin is what happens when we choose our shadows over the lives that cast them. Life is full of stories, but life is not a story. God doesn’t love your story, he loves you.

Your story, like everyone’s, is a bit of a Frankenstein. Without your hardly noticing or choosing, it gets sewn together, on the fly, out of whatever borrowed scraps are at hand. You may have borrowed a bit from your mother, a bit from a movie you liked, and a bit from a lesson at church. You may have stitched these pieces together with a comment overheard at lunch, a glossy image from a magazine, and a second-grade test score. Whatever sticks. More stuff is always getting added as other stuff is discarded. Your story’s projection of what you should be is always getting adjusted. Your idea of your shadow’s optimal shape gets tailored and tailored again.

Like most people, you’ll lavish attention on this story until, almost unwittingly, it becomes your blueprint for how things ought to be. As you persist in measuring life against it, this Franken-bible of the self will become a substitute for God, an idol. This is sin. And this idolatrous story is all the more ironic when, as a true believer, you religiously assign God a starring role in your story as the one who, with some cajoling and obedience, can make things go the way you’ve plotted. But faith isn’t about getting God to play a more and more central part in your story. Faith is about sacrificing your story on his altar.

Everyone knows that little blush of pleasure that comes when you feel like your life and your story match. And I’m sure you know the pinch of disappointment that follows when you feel like your life hasn’t measured up. These blushes and pinches tend to rule our daily lives. They push and pull and bully us from one plot point to the next. “Now I should be this,” we say, “now I should have this, now I should do this. . . .” Meanwhile, the pedestrian substance of life gets shuffled offstage in favor of epic shadows.

Think about what it’s like when you buy a new shirt. You slip, hopeful, into the dressing room. Backed by doubled mirrors, you model it and ask, “Does this fit my story, does this match my shadow?” As a teenager, I never had much luck with this. In junior high, I grew fast, we didn’t have much money, and my clothes never seemed to fit. My sleeves were short and my pants were flooded. I was always yanking at my cuffs, trying to make them longer. Late one fall, my mother took me to buy a new coat. I picked a kind of knockoff ski jacket, bright blue and trimmed with red and green. We even bought it a size too big. When we got home, I put it on and went out for a long, cold walk along our empty country road. For a long time I walked back and forth, back and forth, on a half-mile stretch, imagining with great pleasure what a stranger might say if they saw me, what they might imagine about who I was or were I was going in that new jacket. I was buttoned up safe. The coat seemed like exactly the kind of prop I needed to tell myself a more convincing story. And a more convincing story seemed like exactly what I needed to better protect me. That coat was just one of the many, many stories in which I’ve tried to hide.

But even if you can get a story to work for a while, you’ll still be afraid. And when it fails to meet the measure of life, as all stories do, you’ll feel ashamed and your shame and guilt will manifest once again in that familiar pinch of disappointment.

Shame and guilt are life’s way of protesting against the constriction of the too-tight story you’re busy telling about it. The twist is that shame and guilt, manifest in this pinch, end up siding with your story and blaming life. Guilt doubles down on the self-important story you’re telling about yourself. Guilt is sin seen from the perspective of your sinfulness. Even if you feel guilty about how you’ve hurt others, that guilt remains problematic because your guilt is about you and about how you didn’t measure up to your story. Guilt recognizes your story’s poor fit and then still demands that life measure up. It recognizes that your shoes are too small and too tight and then blames your feet for their size. Repentance is not about shaving down your toes, it’s about taking off your shoes.

Jesus is not asking you to tell a better story or live your story more successfully, he’s asking you to lose that story. “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Hell is when your story succeeds, not when it fails. Your suffocating story is the problem, not the solution. Surrender it and find your life. Your story is heavy and hard to bear. “Come to me,” Jesus says, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30). Put down the millstone of your story and take up the yoke of life instead. You will find Jesus’ rest only in the work of caring for life. Let his life manifest itself in yours rather than trying to impose your story on the life he gives.

Obedience is important but this isn’t just about obedience. For sinners like us, the problem is not just that sin follows when we break the law. The problem is that sin severs God’s law from life and then, rather than discarding it, cleverly repurposes it. In sin, the law, rather than rooting us in life, gets pressed into playing a leading role in the story you’re trying to tell. Maybe in your story the law plays the role of an accuser: “You can’t measure up, you’re worthless!” Or, maybe in your story the law plays the role of an admirer: “You’re so great, you keep the law, you do measure up!” But either way, reduced to the role of an extra in your story, the law kills you because it abets your preference for tidy stories over living bodies.

Keeping the law doesn’t earn you heavenly merits and breaking the law doesn’t earn you hellish demerits. Both merits and demerits are about you. The purpose of the law is to point you away from yourself, free you from the self-obsessed burden of your own story, and center you on Christ. You don’t need to generate merit in order to be saved, you need instead to come unto Christ and “rely wholly upon the merits of him who is mighty to save” (2 Nephi 31:19). The law points wholly to Christ and his grace. Keeping the law is the work of relying on Christ’s merit, not the work of generating your own. This is still hard work, but it is work of an entirely different kind.

When you sin, you sin not because you’ve failed to measure up to your story but because you’ve privileged your story in the first place. Privileging your story, you don’t treat others or yourself with the care life requires. By freeing you from your story, Christ frees you from your guilt. He saves you by revealing that even your own life was never about you. Bought-back and story-poor, Christ frees space in your head to pay attention to someone other than yourself. You don’t need rigid rules and expectations, you need Spirit. You need to be sensitive and responsive. Rather than filtering other people’s voices through the shame-making screen of your story, you must learn to be responsible for the work of caring for what you share with them.

Jesus doesn’t want you to feel guilty, he wants you to be responsible. Your stories aren’t the truth, life is. And only the truth can set you free.

Love,

A.

Review of Adam S. Miller. Letters to a Young Mormon. Provo, Utah: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2014. 78 pp. $9.95.

An exclusive excerpt from Letters to a Young Mormon is posted here on the FairMormon Blog.

On their 1993 album Edge of Thorns, hard rock group Savatage included a piano ballad about a person and a letter:

Someone got themselves a letter, in the mail the other day

It’s already worn and tattered, and I guess it gives away

All the things we keep inside, all the things that really matter

The face puts on its best disguise, and all is well… until the heart betrays[1]

 

Adam S. Miller’s new book is composed of a series of “letters” which, like the one in the song, contain both “the things we [tend to] keep inside,” and “the things that really matter.” Like the song, Miller talks about the disguises we wear—though he calls them our “stories,” which is his way of labeling self-justifications or self-deceptions for our deeds and hence way of living. And he talks about how our hearts should “betray” our rationalizing stories and turn to God, who sees us and loves us for what we can be or who we potentially really are all along.

“Like everyone,” he writes to his young “friend,” “you have a story you want your life to tell” (p. 17). This “story” becomes a self-imposed standard that one feels one must live up to, and as such, it haunts us. “This narration follows you around like a shadow. It mimes you, measures you, sometimes mocks you, and pretends, in its flat, black simplicity, to be the truth about you” (p. 18). We tend to think, or at least we try to convince ourselves, that this is the same story everyone else sees us living. As such, we often live in fear of what happens when we fail to live up to this “story” we have fashioned. Miller talks about how we may even give God “a starring role” as the one who can make our story come true, “with some cajoling and obedience” on our part (p. 19).

Of course, life isn’t a story, and so we naturally fail to measure up. When this happens, an unhealthy guilt and shame try to force us into making life fit the story anyway; we rationalize, justify and engage in self-deception. Miller tells us that with God it is different: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, God’s work in your life is bigger than the story you’d like that life to tell” (p. 17). Miller lectures his young and troubled Mormon in the following way:

Jesus is not asking you to tell a better story or live your story more successfully, he’s asking you to lose that story. “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39 NRSV). Hell is when your story succeeds, not when it fails. Your suffocating story is the problem, not the solution. Surrender it and find your life. Your story is heavy and hard to bear. “Come to me,” Jesus says, “all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30 NRSV). Put down the millstone of your story and take up the yoke of life instead…. Let his life manifest itself in yours rather than trying to impose your story on the life he gives. (p. 21.)

But how do we abandon our deceptive, rationalizing stories, including our visions of grandeur or our narratives of self-deprecation, and let God into our lives? This is a question that Miller never explicitly asks, but it seems to me it is one that is constantly being probed throughout the book, which consists of chapters on faith (pp. 25–29), scripture (pp. 31–35), prayer (pp. 37–41), history (pp. 43–49), science (p. 51–56) and so on, all of which explore, in some way or any other, how to stay true to the life and work God has for us, rather than fabricate and then capitulate to the stories that we try to impose upon ourselves.

One “story” that can be told—we can tell it to ourselves, or others may try to convince us of it—pits science and religion against each other. But Miller urges young Latter-day Saints to embrace what is found in the sciences as “revelations.” He suggests that they “are among the most commanding God has ever given” (pp. 55–56).[2]

Miller holds that another false “story” we tell ourselves might be that the Mormon past is filled with heroes of epic proportion, veritable giants among men, “quasi-angels” (p. 46) who did no wrong and always accomplished great things with an eye single to the glory of God. As with the story we might tell about our own lives, this is a story that eventually fails, and when it does it can generate a crisis. But, also like the stories we tell about our lives, God’s work is bigger than our stories. Miller argues that

It’s a false dilemma to claim that either God works through practically flawless people or God doesn’t work at all. The gospel isn’t a celebration of God’s power to work with flawless people. The gospel is a celebration of God’s willingness to work today, in our world, in our lives, with people who clearly aren’t [flawless?]. To demand that church leaders, past and present, show us only a mask of angelic pseudo-perfection is to deny the gospel’s most basic claim: that God’s grace works through our weakness. We need prophets, not idols. (p. 47, brackets mine.)

Miller argues that, if we are going to reject the stories we and others tell about ourselves and about the world, then we are going to need to know something of the stories God has told us about ourselves and his relationship to us. This is where Miller believes that our scriptures come in. How can this happen? Careful study of our scriptures makes it possible for us to “put down our stories and take up theirs” (p. 32). Miller urges his young correspondent to “Get close to the scriptures. … God is in there” (p. 31). Our scriptures tell us about such things as the restoration, and the revelation of new scripture. As Miller explains it, Joseph Smith “always expected more revelations, and ‘translation’ was one vital name for the hard work of receiving them” (p. 32).  But “translation” is for Miller not merely the task of the prophet or scholar, nor is it merely the transferring of the text from one language to another. Translation is for Miller “a way, day by day, of holding life open for God’s word” (p. 32), which is his way of adopting and modifying the metaphor used by Joseph Smith to identify the process of reading, and then interpreting what we have read in ways most applicable to our lives, and as such it is pictured as a crucial task for everyone. Miller can be read as saying that we must make our own stories match the stories found in our scriptures. He argues that

Joseph produced, as God required, the first public translations of the scriptures we now share. But that work, open-ended all along, is unfinished. Now the task is ours. When you read the scriptures, don’t just lay your eyes like stones on the pages. Roll up your sleeves and translate them again…. Word by word, line by line, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, God wants the whole thing translated once more, and this time he wants it translated into your native tongue, inflected by your native concerns, and written in your native flesh. (pp. 32–33.)

Miller’s “translation” is something like Nephi’s “likening” (see 1 Nephi 19:23; 2 Nephi 6:5; 11:8). In this sense it involves, among other things, prayer, study, meditation, and also consultation of the “best books.” These are all part of what is necessary to successfully re-translate the scriptures by making them the ground for our own stories. It is something that will require faith, “You’ll have to trust that the books can withstand your scrutiny and you’ll have to trust that God, despite their antiquity, can be contemporary in them” (p. 34). What Miller means by “faith” is to “practice faithfully attending to the difficult, disturbing, and resistant truths God sets knocking at your door” (p. 27) and to trust “that the life God offers you doesn’t need your stories to dress it up,” (p. 25), hence “trust[ing] God enough to let your stories die.”

Miller explains that, like all translation, this will not be an easy task. It will take work, and, drawing on D&C 88:118, he stresses the importance of using the “best books” to help us in our efforts to believe and understand, and thereby be able to “translate” the scriptures anew so that we have the life offered by God. He tells his young Mormon that

Your ability to translate with power will depend on your faith and it will be amplified by your familiarity with the world’s best books. … The more familiar you are with Israelite histories, Near Eastern [and also, I believe, Mesoamerican] archaeologies, and secular biblical scholarship, the richer your translations will be rendered. Don’t be afraid for scripture and don’t be afraid of these other books. … Doubtless, the world’s best books have their flaws, but this just means that they too must be translated. You’ll need to translate them so that they can contribute to your own translations. (p. 34, brackets mine)

But in this process, there are inherent dangers: how can we be sure that when we “translate” the scriptures, we don’t read our false, rationalizing story into them? How can we be sure we are not fooling ourselves, or soothing our conscience by making the scriptures say what we want them to say? Miller answers:

You’ll know you’ve done it right if, as a result of the work, you repent. “Say nothing but repentance unto this generation,” the Lord told Oliver Cowdery when he came to help Joseph translate the Book of Mormon (D&C 6:9). This is your charge too: translate nothing but repentance. When you’re reading them right, the scriptures will bring you up short. They’ll call you into question. They’ll challenge your stories and deflate your pretensions. They’ll show you how you’ve been wrong and they’ll show you how to make things right. (pp. 33–34)

The proper scripture study will not reinforce the old self-deceptive stories you have been telling. Instead, it will assist you to “lay down your stories and, minute by minute, day by day, give your life back to him [i.e., God]” (pp. 17–18).

Miller’s book is not perfect. The chapter on “hunger,” for example (pp. 57–60), is confusing. He works with clever metaphors, but sometimes they are unclear. He carries his “hunger” metaphor over into the chapter on sex (pp. 61–66), creating some ambiguity where most parents of “young Mormons” would insist that blunt clarity is preferable. For parents who have open and frank discussions with their adolescent children, such ambiguity is easily remedied, but books like Miller’s cannot do the talking for them. Nonetheless, concerned parents may want to find a different book to help them deal with this particular issue.

Another point where the ambiguity is a concern is the chapter on eternal life (pp. 73–78). While I liked the idea that eternal life is “a certain way of being alive” (p.75), it is never clear in the chapter whether Miller genuinely believes in a life after death. While this might not be a concern for most readers, for any “young Mormon” struggling to believe, the lack of explicit reaffirmation in a hereafter could be disconcerting.

A recent press release from the Maxwell Institute indicates that a new Living Faith series, of which this is the initial book, “will commend and defend the faith more explicitly than our other [current Maxwell Institute] publications, while still maintaining the highest academic standards.”[3] Defending the faith is an admirable aim, part of our temple covenants, and something our leaders have admonished us to do. We sometimes call doing this “apologetics,” and Miller’s little book can be read as his effort to do such.

At the beginning of the first “letter,” he makes a straightforward declaration: “I don’t know” (p. 9). Presumably, young S., as Miller refers to his hypothetical correspondent, has asked him some tough questions. Miller then makes an  important point: “But it’s also true that even if I knew what to say and how to say it, you’d still have to work out the answers yourself” (p. 9). In defending the faith, we often provide answers to questions that are frankly quite peripheral and tangential to the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is not to suggest that scholars should cease seeking to provide answers to all the tough questions people are bound to ask—such endeavors are both necessary and important. In so doing, however, we are generally treating symptoms, and not the problem itself. But what more can we really do? A Latter-day Saint must come to his or her own faith. Miller points out that the working out of answers is ultimately a personal journey, and only the individual (along with God) can do it. The well-worked-out answers of others can be a valuable aid in that process, which justifies Miller’s effort to provide a little guidance to the “working out” process. Others, such as Mike Ash,[4] have provided some guidance for this often difficult process of sorting out issues that arise, and Miller’s book makes for an excellent addition to such tools and resources.

Overall, Miller’s book is quite good; it is an easy, subtle and an enjoyable read, which is ideal for a book targeting youth. Miller is also very articulate; some passages are quite “quotable.” For those interested, it could provide good fodder for sacrament meeting talks, devotional addresses, Family Home Evening lessons, and so on.

The “letters” in this book do not, of course, contain “all the things that really matter,” but those who want a little extra guidance (which can be all of us, at times) may find their copy “already worn and tattered” as they frequently read and reflect on Miller’s words while they endeavor to figure out, with God’s help, “what it means to live in a way that refuses to abandon either life or Mormonism” (unnumbered page in front matter, would be p. 7).