Lavina Fielding Anderson, “On Being Happy: An Exercise in Spiritual Autobiography”

Exponent II extends its deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of Lavina Fielding Anderson, who passed away on Sunday, October 29, 2023. Lavina was excommunicated in 1993 as one of the September Six for her work documenting spiritual and ecclesiastical abuse. In an obituary for the Salt Lake Tribune, senior religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote, “Though Lavina Fielding Anderson can aptly be described as an intellectual giant in the field of Mormon studies, a brave activist, and a moral force for her critiques of ecclesiastical abuse in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she also was deeply devout and never relinquished her Latter-day Saint beliefs or practices.” Lavina shaped Mormon studies for the better as a mentor, writer, editor, and voice of courage and wisdom.

From its inception, Lavina was a dear friend to many at Exponent II and left an indelible mark on the organization. She was an early supporter and contributor to the paper. She was a co-organizer of the 1982 Nauvoo Pilgrimage of Mormon feminists, which launched the network of “Pilgrims” retreats and inspired in part Exponent II’s first national retreat in 1983. In 1982, Lavina was the guest of honor at the final Exponent Day Dinner, where she delivered the speech “On Being Happy: An Exercise in Spiritual Autobiography.” This speech led to a retreat tradition that continues to this day, where before the retreat’s closing Sunday morning meeting, one or more individuals present their own spiritual autobiography. Hers is shared below.

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In the center image, Exponent II founding mother Carrel Sheldon pins a boutonniere on Lavina Fielding Anderson’s dress. Images on the left and right are of Lavina at events for the 1982 Exponent Day Dinner, where she was the guest of honor and keynote speaker. Images from an Exponent II scrapbook.

On Being Happy: An Exercise in Spiritual Autobiography

I must confess that my delight at the wonderful timing that juxtaposes the East Coast Association for Mormon Letters meeting with Exponent Day is matched only by my trepidation at the responsibility of meeting the expectations of one audience with something appropriately scholarly and of the other with something appropriately personal. I’ve decided to be personal to honor all of the writers and editors of Exponent II who have taken that great step beyond anonymity and conformity to speak in their own voices. I feel it would be discourteous and cowardly not to respond in kind. I’ve chosen to talk about my spiritual autobiography, specifically about the sources of my happiness. In so doing, I am presenting a literary problem that I hope will interest the scholars in the group.

The literary problem is that most presentations of good are not as real and as interesting as those of evil. This has, I believe, been a great lack in Mormon fiction, which has traditionally set up a conflict between a simple good and an equally simple evil—either the Saints vs. the Missouri mobs or the creative Mormon individual against the repressive Mormon community. We do not have the narrative tools perfected to make a successful Sunday School class—an experience in harmony, community, and communion—sound as important and as interesting as the case of adultery between the Sunday School president and the Sunday School secretary, or the battle lost between a local congregation and the Church Building Department. I think the next challenge for Mormon writers is to find meaningful, non-clichéd ways of sharing the positive aspects of the gospel.

In nonfiction, the spiritual autobiography has existed for centuries. It is not a Mormon invention although it may be a Christian one. I became aware of it as part of my Mormon heritage by reading through hundreds of life stories and journals in the Church archives. I am aware that many people are practicing it, formally and informally, with varying degrees of success today. This is my contribution toward their effort.

I have chosen to talk on happiness because of the quite outrageous happiness of my personal life and the hope that in sharing what makes me happy, I can prompt you to pay attention as well to what makes you happy. It is my firm conviction, to paraphrase a well-known scripture, that “Happiness never was wickedness.” There are all kinds of pitfalls with this statement, of course. C. S. Lewis was one who remarked that the happiest man he knew was also the most selfish. But I’m making some assumptions: that we’re genuinely trying to be good; that our struggles are to be better, not to suppress conscience; and that one of the things that makes us unhappy is a sense of always falling short, of being imperfect and unworthy. As I think about what makes me happy, it isn’t sin and wrong-doing. It’s belting out hymn with the rest of my ward under the baton of an enthusiastic chorister. It’s having our two-year-old, Christian, reach out from Paul’s arms to put an arm around my neck, then drape the other around Paul’s, bringing our heads close together so that he can contemplate the spectacle, beaming with satisfaction. It’s seeing zucchini sprouts pop through the ground with such vigor that the leaves pick up clods on their way. It’s settling down in bed with a big bowl of popcorn and a book I’ve been longing to read for weeks. It’s reading out loud to Paul or he to me and laughing at the same passage. It’s going visiting teaching to a home where the husband stays in the living room because he also enjoys the discussion. It’s getting the countertops and the sink and the floor and the refrigerator all clean simultaneously. It’s taking the pencil to a good idea struggling in the underbrush of a bad sentence and fixing it so that the idea can dance in the garlands of its words.

Now these are just little things. I don’t know what makes you happy, but the impression I sometimes carry away from lesson manuals is that some transcendent beneficence descends during acts of service, scripture reading, or answers prayer. All of those things happen too, but the implication that the homely happinesses are somehow different—worth less, not quite as important—is something I don’t believe. I don’t think happiness comes in two-week blocks along with handing in your four-generation group sheets. I think it comes for thirty-second snatches when you see something make sense that hadn’t before. And much of it is physical—a good laugh, singing, or as Emma Lou Thayne would tell you, playing tennis.

A reason I think we need to notice and cultivate and be grateful for all of these little moments is that they are a great deterrent to sin and selfishness. My experience has been that happy people are not cruel. They are not irreverent towards God. They are not insensitive to others. They are not unwilling to devote time and energy to meeting another’s needs. Happiness brings with it a kind of gratitude that pours itself out in love to God and to other human creatures. If righteousness seems particularly difficult and unrewarding, perhaps it’s because we’re concentrating on that infamous Mormon checklist of “oughts” instead of savoring our moments of felicity and proving to ourselves in the most unmistakable way that a person capable of feeling such joy is a worthy person, a beloved person, a happiness-giving person.

The elements of spiritual autobiography that I want to share with you are events and understandings that have made me happy. This has not been happiness I’ve merited because of any outstanding service or extraordinary obedience. Much of it has been of that beautifully gratuitous kind that we call “grace” and “loving kindness.” I want to begin when I was a graduate student at the University of Washington. At that point, I had spent the first eighteen years growing up in a family of six children. My parents had both served missions. We were farmers. There was always enough time for the Church, even when there wasn’t time for much else besides the farm. My father blessed us, baptized us, confirmed us, healed us. My mother told us endless stories from the Book of Mormon, asked us to evaluate our behavior by how it matched what Heavenly Father wanted us to do, and performed miracles in exercising her faith. I remember her harrumphing in some irritation one spring when a five-week nonstop dust storm made it impossible to see across the road and systematically blew the seeds out of the ground. “There’s no need for this,” she protested. “If the stake president would just call a fast day!” He did within a few days, as I remember, and the storm ended. Both my brothers served missions. So did I. All six children married in the temple. My parents are ordinance workers in the temple now, a blessed service that they joyfully perform after a lifetime of service.

In other words, the Church has always been home for me. I don’t remember learning to pray, the first time I read the scriptures, the first talk I gave, or the first lesson I taught. Socially, emotionally, and spiritually, I belong to the Church. And it also belongs to me. I feel a fierce possessiveness about it. It is not President Kimball’s church or the bishop’s church or the church of the fourteen grandmothers who sit on the first two rows in Relief Society. It is my church. There are other ways than growing up in the Church of making that emotional bonding, but I think that it is important that it occur. As long as it is “someone else’s” church, then that someone else has the power to decide whether it can also be your church.

Part of my six-year-long BYU experience included rooming with some fine roommates—among them Karen Perkins and Dawn Hall Anderson. We talked, read, and thought a lot about the gospel. As part of that study, I wrote a paper on why I was still a Mormon. It has been interesting to me to go back to that document, now more than a decade old, and see what I thought was important then. I talked about the social satisfactions of the Church but cheerfully admitted that socially I could do just fine without it. I talked about the solid intellectual stimulation of a philosophical system that can be explained simply in six one-hour memorized discussions but that keeps unfolding “like a magician’s multiplying handkerchiefs.” At the time I said, “It’s the only system I know that contains plenty of paradoxes but no contradictions, plenty of mysteries but no confusion.” However, the ultimate reason, then and now, that I am a Mormon is spiritual. “Something happens,” I wrote twelve years ago, “when you run into truth. It’s like turning on the electromagnet under the plate and watching all the iron filings line up. All of a sudden, there’s a pattern, order, no more misaligned lines—and although you control the power, you can’t control the pattern. . . . Things like that keep me humble; I need them to happen because I enjoy being a smart aleck, and I can tell when they happen because Joseph Smith’s test works for me too: ‘This is good doctrine. It tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you. You say honey is sweet, and so do I. I can also taste the spirit of eternal life. I know it is good; and when I tell you of those things which were given me by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, you are bound to receive them as sweet; and rejoice more and more.’”[1]

I think of the last twelve years as having been very eventful. It was interesting to me to realize that spiritually, it has simply been a continuation of those first twenty-six. In Seattle, the closest thing to a gentile environment that I had ever lived in, I immersed myself in the scriptures, in aspects of Church history that were available to me, in conversations with the born-again Christians I encountered on campus and in my classes, in sorting out my own identity as different from my community identity. It was an important experience and, at some point during that first year, I realized that I did not have a testimony of the Savior. I had a testimony all around him, if I can put it that way, like constructing a giant jigsaw puzzle with a large and precisely outlined section missing in the middle. I would have been able to have deduced his presence, there in the middle, from all the rest of the evidence even if I had known nothing about him—but that was precisely the problem. I knew about him. I did not know him.

With that realization, I set the goal of gaining a testimony of the Savior and his atonement. I plumped myself into the scriptures, prayer, and ponderings, quite sure that this was the kind of knowledge that was available on demand. To my surprise, it was quite clearly made known to me that I was trying to enter spiritual graduate school without having learned some prerequisites. The first step was learning how to pray. It was helpful to me to be reading C.S. Lewis at the time, to get his personal but also Anglican perspective on prayer. Quite clearly ritual prayer had an enormous importance to him, and I found myself discovering the richness that can be added to the life of a community when ceremonial prayer becomes interwoven throughout worship rather than being signs that the meeting is either beginning or ending. I found myself, as a consequence, paying a great deal of attention to the only two ritual prayers that are part of our ceremonial communal life, the sacrament prayers. I also found myself having a literary experience with the magnificent prayers, meditations, psalms, and devotional poetry that have accumulated in our cultural heritage for the past five hundred years. They became a private wealth for me.

But even more important was the aspect of private personal prayer—not only nonritualistic but deliberately antiritualistic. I was helped in this by my experience on my mission which acquainted me with an informal French style of prayer—addressing God as you, for instance. I also enjoyed the immediacy and intimacy of the informal, conversational prayers of my born-again Christian friends, including another set experimenting with Eastern religions. During that period, I learned a lot about conversing with God, about seeking Jesus Christ as a personage, about being sensitive to the Holy Ghost.

I also moved into a house full of other women of my advanced years, and my friendship with Karen Jensen, which dates from that time, has been another of the blessing friendships of my life. She combines a profound faith in God with an almost total irreverence for most of its cultural forms, and we used to disgrace ourselves regularly by fits of giggles in sacrament meeting. Her perspective on the gospel greatly enriched my own.

I remember one family home evening lesson on the Holy Ghost, in which we discussed the different ways it reaches people. It made Karen feel sobered. It made another roommate almost giddy and exuberant. It made me feel immensely alert and intellectually stimulated. The Holy Ghost engaged my mind, my seeing and understanding, enlarged my perception, and made the wonderful shaping of a pattern. But I didn’t quite understand what people meant when they said they received promptings. I just knew it didn’t happen to me. But as I began paying attention, I noticed subtle nudges, flashes of perception, a slow gathering of sensations clustered in a certain way. I simply hadn’t known what to look for, and therefore I didn’t acknowledge promptings when they happened.

A second important lesson on prayer during this time period was the discovery of the power of gratitude. It is not listed as a spiritual gift, and I seldom hear it discussed as more than a pleasant attribute. But I had been struck by the clear scriptural warning that “in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not his hand in all things, and obey not his commandments” (D&C 59:21).

Up to that point, I had made a point of thanking the Lord for my blessings and assuming that the things I didn’t like were to be endured in as much graceful silence as possible. With considerable dubiousness, I took the scripture literally and began acknowledging the Lord in problems and adversity as well. A remarkable thing happened. Somehow—and I’m sure a psychologist would be able to explain part of it—that act of doubtful gratitude brought the unpleasant event under my emotional control so that it had less power to vex or trouble me. Furthermore, it somehow gave the Lord whatever he needed to transform the experience from adversity into actual blessing. It was not simply an exercise in looking on the bright side of things. In fact, it had nothing to do initially with attitude. I didn’t try to pretend that I liked what was happening, and I frequently expressed anger, disappointment, and a genuine lack of faith that such-and-such an event could turn into a blessing, no matter what, in the same prayer in which I acknowledged the Lord’s hand in it. But it worked in a remarkable way. I think it was related to the discovery Karen had made years earlier: the fact that Heavenly Father would answer her prayers—no matter what the answer was—made her feel loved. I found that to be true too.

In 1973, I accepted a position on the Ensign staff and moved to Salt Lake City. Making that decision was difficult for me, not only because I felt that I had finally hit my stride in my chosen field, but because I didn’t know if I wanted to work for the Church. I’d already seen some of the difficulties an official publication has when I’d worked for the Daily Universe at Brigham Young University. As I was praying about what the right thing would be to do, the answer I got was a curiously oblique one but exactly the right one. (Many of my prayers are answered by a distinctively sarcastic personage whom I’ve come to regard as a kind of guardian angel.) It assured me that my friendship with Karen would not suffer. I hadn’t realized it myself, but that question—which I had not been asking—was the only one I needed the answer to. So I went.

In Salt Lake I had some additional experiences that gave me an understanding of the process of repentance and how atonement was a healing, a removal of barriers so that love could flow freely, not only from God to me but from me to God and from me to others. I learned about forgiveness, not only by receiving it but also by extending it to others.

The Ensign years were important. I enjoyed the people I worked with and those I met, I appreciated working with a group that prayed together for assistance in performing our duties. Many times I felt inspiration in carrying out my tasks. One of the important events of those years was the discovery of Church history, thanks to my roommates Jill Mulvay (Derr) and Maureen Ursenbach (Beecher). This discovery gave me access to my past, as a Mormon and as a woman, that gave me pillars for my identity, models for my own growth, and excitement about the options and possibilities for women. It also brought me into contact with Leonard Arrington, one of the finest Christians I’ve ever met and a thorough-going professional with high standards who has always honored the power of the mind in the life of the spirit.

Jill and I and our third roommate, Brenda Bloxham (Hunt), were deeply involved in Princeton Ward, our neighborhood ward. (I was boycotting single wards at the time on the grounds that they were ghettoes.) Princeton Ward had a limited population—under 200 as I recall—and was composed largely of what someone unkindly called “the newly-weds and nearly-deads.” The bishop was younger than we were and had grown up in the ward; his parents were still there. And he had overcome the inevitable resistance of a ward toward receiving leadership from so known a quantity to transform it into one of the most closely knit and caring units I have ever participated in. The bishop got all of us involved right away, and we soon had two or three major jobs. With that bishop, I twice had the experience of disagreeing with a decision. In both cases, he listened respectfully to my reasons, and we separated, agreeing to meet again after praying about it. In the first case, he was right, and I knew it after going through that process. In the second case, I was right, and he knew it after going through that process. That ward has been a model for me ever since of the kind of community feeling that can exist in a ward—a sort of ideal.

I met and married Paul L. Anderson, a young architect from Pasadena who had first come up on a fellowship with Leonard Arrington’s office to do some research on Mormon architecture. We have not been able to reconstruct how we met, but I do remember that, at the time, he was fetchingly bearded. He had to shave it off when Florence Jacobsen hired him as manager of historic sites for the Arts and Sites Division. When I met Paul, I was thoroughly and happily single. Paul became a delightful addition to the social life that swirled through our house, and I was genuinely surprised—and even a little angry—when he proposed. He later told me he was more than a little angry to show up for a date and discover that I’d invited two or three other people to join us. Since I was asking him places about as often as he asked me out, I wasn’t defining what we were doing as dating, let alone courting. Deciding to marry was difficult; it took me six weeks.

Those six weeks were a very significant spiritual education. I have never before or since had such a concentrated lesson in another aspect of learning how to pray. I discovered that Heavenly Father’s respect for free agency is so profound that there are many times the Holy Ghost cannot give us an answer because we have not yet asked the correct question. I have a mental picture from that time of the Holy Ghost (you’ll have to pardon the irreverence) hopping frantically around on one foot while I blundered through bursts of static into a clear signal of what the right question was. Interestingly enough, it was not “Should I marry Paul?” There were a series of right questions, and they included: What would marriage be like? What would be the hard places? What would be the easy places? What will the changes be? What strengths and what inadequacies would I take to marriage? I don’t particularly want to be married; do I need to be married?

I received extremely clear information about all of those topics. I received insight into my attitudes about privacy, money, priesthood, professionalism, and ability to communicate that was somewhat shocking though not, I’ll have to admit, very surprising. But possibly the most important question that I asked was, “What kind of person is Paul?” In answer to that question, I had the closest thing to a vision I have ever experienced. A personage with a definable personality told me, almost in so many words, “Let me show you how I feel about Paul,” and then I experienced that person’s feelings for Paul: the deepest, most profound sensations of love and a respectful savoring of personality. There was not a question in my mind that I was in the presence of someone who knew Paul differently and better than I did or possibly could know him, someone who loved him totally. I acquired an awesome amount of respect for Paul quite suddenly.

There were other issues to be worked through, but one sunny day, as I knelt again in prayer, I asked again, “Should I marry Paul?” expecting to learn of a new question I should ask. Instead, I was distinctly told, “You have enough information to make that decision now.” I was stunned. I was supposed to make the decision? Yes. There was a long internal pause, a kind of mental breath-holding, then I said, still on my knees, “Yes, I will marry Paul.” The reaction could not have been more vivid, an explosion of pleasure and excitement like being in the center of a fireworks display. It surprised me, pleased me, gratified me, and humbled me simultaneously. I knew that all of those emotions were not my own, and the delight shared with other presences who cared about the decision was reassuring in ways I don’t even know how to begin to describe. One of the consequences has been that I have never had to question the initial rightness of the decision nor had to wonder if I made a mistake. (That’s been important. I may be crazy about Paul, but I’m not crazy about being married.)

I might add that another great reassurance came when Marybeth Raynes, who was not only our premarital counselor but who also sold us her wonderful house on Roberta Street, gave us the California Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and I discovered that we both rated so high on dominance that we were in the abnormal range. Paul is so nice that it was important to know he also had a healthy streak of stubbornness.

The next experience I wanted to mention came just before Christmas of 1979 when I was about six months pregnant. It had been a horrible experience from the beginning, and I loathed the feeling of being trapped in that sick, sickening body. My method of dealing with the whole experience was to turn my mind off. I learned not to think or feel or remember for months and months. In short, if you were looking for spiritual sensitivity, you’d have had more luck shopping at Safeway’s. As I drove to my six-month check-up, cultivating my usual stupor, I was listening to Handel’s Messiah on the car radio, missed the turnoff, and had to drive to the next. It prolonged the trip enough that the choir reached “for unto us a child is born.” Simultaneously with that glorious section in my ears came words into my mind: “Your baby is dead. And it’s all right.”

Well, our baby was dead, and it was all right. I cannot describe the feeling of reassurance and calm that sustained me during the next few days, days that were much more wrenching for Paul than for me. There were no explanations that came along with that knowledge, no promises for the future, and no information about what to do—just the knowledge that I was loved of my Heavenly Father. The importance of that experience lay in its pure grace. At a time when I avoided talking, thinking, writing, praying—anything that would make me pay attention to my life—at a time when I had done nothing to deserve such a gift, it was given to me. My gratitude for that experience has touched and colored the rest of my life since then.

These experiences have done something for me. I am not sure I could debate justice and mercy, ransom and compensation as related to the atonement. I do, however, have a vivid knowledge of Christ’s existence as a being of love and light from whom I never want to be separated.

In summary, these past twelve years have been a time of intense bonding on several levels. The relationships with my husband and with my son are very precious to me, not only separately but as a unit. I love Paul for himself, but I have loved him the more as I have seen him loving Christian, who is so dear to me. All of our brothers and sisters are married with families of their own, and our parents are all living, so those relationships have changed—less proximity but in some ways more common interests, particularly as we all share a deep commitment to the gospel.

As important as these relationships are, my friendships have been powerfully significant, particularly my friendships with women. Thanks to Jill Derr, Maureen Beecher, Carol Madsen, and other friends, especially Leonard Arrington and Jeff Johnson, that bonding has extended backwards in time to my Mormon foremothers. I have found strength, faith, and deep pleasure in knowing more about these women. The pilgrimage to Nauvoo of fifty-three women last month was a journey in sisterhood for me, and I felt delight in that sisterhood, renewed strength, renewed power to love, and renewed commitment to build relationships based on our shared love and faith. I also felt intense validation as a Mormon woman—that my offering is one that the Lord can and does use.

However, as my professional and family obligations have intensified, I have found myself less willing to give the Church a blank check on my time. I have not refused any callings, but I have found myself taking a long hard look at some of the other activities. There are some stake meetings I have not been back to after a year or so of trying them out. I do not make refrigerator ornaments for the women I visit teach. I am selective about social activities, and I resist mightily being recruited to make anything that will be thrown away after it is used once. I also do not subscribe to the theory that forcing a tired two-year-old to sit through sacrament meeting will mystically instill in him a desire to go on a mission.

I think there are periods in most members’ lives where they find the Church sustaining and nourishing. I think there are also times in most members’ lives where Church involvement is at least as demanding and draining as it is rewarding. These cycles are natural; to weight the down side with guilt makes it harder, in my opinion, to accept the upswings joyously and naturally.

I feel that my spiritual life is my own responsibility—that the Church, the scriptures, and the Holy Ghost offer a smorgasbord of opportunities from which I select what my spiritual diet requires right now. I find myself attracted to the idea of personal spiritual power because now, particularly in contrast with certain other periods of Church history, the contributions of women seem circumscribed to carefully defined areas, and the very thoroughness of the organization of the Church means that there are few areas not covered by some rule, policy, or the need for someone’s permission to act. Yet I feel that the Church cannot indefinitely continue to afford the sheer waste of restricting women and their talents to the spheres in which they are most commonly exercised at present.

I do not want to imply that I think the work of women in the Church is trivial or unnecessary. Quite the contrary. I do, however, want to suggest that there are some limitations built into the current roles for women in the Church that may be limiting in ways that the gospel itself is not.

And now we come to the sermon. Let me introduce it with a poem by Maryann Olsen MacMurray entitled “Calling.”

When asked what I do in the Kingdom, I

Reply that I am in the Extraction

 Program with my husband and a few friends:

Extracting principles from procedures

And realities from types, determining

Whether we’re walking on water or thin ice.

(Used by permission of the author)

If Elder Neal A. Maxwell is accurate when he says that our trials are tailored to our capabilities—and I believe he is—then I believe it is also true that our blessings are bestowed with the same distinctiveness. My experiences have, I believe, given me the right to testify to the existence of a Heavenly Father whose love is matched only by his respect for our agency. I believe that I have not only the right but the responsibility so to testify. As I have felt this divine love directed toward me, I have felt the desire to respond in a manner worthy of the gift, a desire also given direction by President Kimball’s prophetic injunction in April 1979 that “the major strides which must be made by the Church will follow upon the major strides to be made by us as individuals.”[2]

I feel a particular need to focus on personal righteousness, on thoroughly developing and refining spiritual skills. I have already mentioned one of the most important—prayer. Fasting is another. Temple attendance is a third. I won’t go into detail about either, but I’d suggest thinking about both of them as processes as well as activities, as processes whose end result is spiritual power, as processes that engage us intellectually, physically, culturally, and emotionally. Thinking about them multidimensionally has let me discover new dimensions of power in them. Another skill I’d recommend for our contemplation is that of bearing testimony—meaning that we find ways of acknowledging the reality of Christ’s power in our daily lives, in daily language, beyond jargon and beyond formulae.

There are two spiritual skills that I’d like to discuss in greater detail. The first is reading the scriptures. It is also both an activity and a process. Like most of us, I find my scripture study most meaningful when I go to the scriptures with a question, a sorrow, a joy, a need of some sort. But also, if my scripture study isn’t habitual, I find that it doesn’t help me a lot when I am in need. So I have found that regular reading is essential even if there are times when, like prayer, it only seems like going through the motions. Those motions are important training for spiritual muscles.

I’m currently reading the Doctrine and Covenants, which has never been my favorite book. I’ve spent most of my life feeling bored by the lack of narrative and unnerved by its nineteenth century strangeness. But right now it is my favorite book. I am struck by two things. The first is the sheer quantity of the words of Jesus Christ. We have more instruction, counsel, sermons, and explanations from Him in this book than we do in the rest of our scriptures put together. The second thing is the revelation of His relationship over time with a small group of individuals, particularly with Joseph Smith. I find in that relationship a great respect for Joseph Smith’s agency, clear expectations for his conduct, chastisement when those expectations are not met, an enormous willingness to answer questions—including some that Joseph hadn’t quite asked—and a genuine delight in the attempts of those early Saints to be obedient, to understand, to emulate Him. It has given me great confidence that my own efforts will be acceptable and pleasing.

It was in this context that I found great reinforcement for yet another spiritual skill—seeking spiritual gifts. These gifts, according to Section 46, include a testimony of Jesus Christ as the son of God and the redeemer of the world, faith to believe those who have that testimony, “differences of administration, as it will be pleasing unto the same Lord . . . according to the conditions of the children of men” (which I interpret to mean a sensitivity to the kind of service that is appropriate in different circumstances), knowing the “diversities of operations, whether they be of God,” a word of wisdom, knowledge, faith to heal, faith to be healed, “the working of miracles,” the gift of prophecy, the “discerning of spirits,” and tongues and their interpretation (D&C 46:12-25). I would like to add to this list the gift of charity which, as Moroni tells us, the Father bestows upon those who are “true followers of . . . Jesus Christ” who “pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart for that gift” (Moroni 7:48).

I recall listening to many lessons on spiritual gifts, most of them centered around what they are and the fact that they are to benefit the Church. I remember one daring teacher who asked us to identify what spiritual gift(s) we possessed, a request that baffled and seemed to embarrass the class. Many lessons warned against the improper use of gifts, against sign-seekers and those who were deceived in thinking their gifts came from God. Some time was also spent redefining the gifts so that “tongues” meant the ability of missionaries to learn a foreign language easily, and “prophecy” meant a gift that was given to ecclesiastical leaders for their own stewardships. But I never recall hearing anyone mention that we are commanded to ask for gifts, that God promises to give them “liberally” provided that the seeker does “all things with prayer and thanksgiving” to avoid being deceived, remembers that the purpose of spiritual gifts is to benefit those who love the Savior, “and keep all [His] commandments” or “seek . . . so to do” (D&C 46:7-9, 26).

In the by-no-means extensive research that I have done into nineteenth-century saints, I have been struck repeatedly by their hunger for spiritual gifts and manifestations and by their willingness to pray directly for them. Sarah Studevant Leavitt noted crisply in her autobiography, “I lived very watchful and prayerful, never neglecting my prayers, for I felt that I was entitled to no blessing unless I asked for them, and I think so yet.”[3] Her blessings included symbolic visions. Sanford Porter, after three days of anguished fasting and prayer, heard a voice and saw a personage dressed in brilliant white who unfolded a vision of the creation, the atonement, and his own place in the plan to him.[4] Benjamin Brown, an ancestor of Hugh B. Brown and Nathan Eldon Tanner, specifically asked “for the witness of the Nephite disciples” and was visited by “two Nephites” speaking to him in the same tongue he had heard at a Mormon meeting.[5] When Elizabeth Francis Yates decided to be baptized in England, her mother “forbade her to reenter her childhood home.” Her husband first abandoned her and her four daughters, then when this economic bludgeoning did not work, returned and took the four girls away from her. She had to be baptized at midnight in 1851 because Mormons were fair game for harassment. On the brink of the dark river she hesitated and “felt as though I could not possibly go in it. But a voice seemed to say, ‘There is no other way.'” She remarried, came to Utah, was reunited to her two living daughters through extraordinary circumstances, and had a second family. One daughter, Louise Yates Robison, became general president of the Relief Society.[6]

It has long been commonplace to admire that first generation for their endurance in suffering but assure ourselves, “We have our own trials.” I would like to suggest that instead of making facile contrasts based on widely differing circumstances that we get serious about the gospel in the same way they did. They were not seeking inappropriate signs when they prayed for the gift of prophecy, for the ministry of angels, for visions, for healing, and for revelation. We would not be either if we, like them, did so “in all holiness of heart.”

Hugh Nibley addressed the topic in an unpublished address called “Gifts,” given in 1979, excerpts of which appear in one of the most delightful books of the decade, Of All Things!. He says:

The [spiritual] gifts are not in evidence today, except for one gift, which you notice the people  ask for the —gift of healing. . . .      

As for these other gifts—how often do we ask for them? How earnestly do we seek for them? We could have them if we did ask, but we don’t. “Well, who denies them?” Anyone who doesn’t ask for them.

“But if everything is given to us, don’t we have to work?” Of course. The gifts do not excuse us from work. They leave us free to do the real work. . . . The Lord. . .[says] ‘I’ll give you the stone and the chisel. Now you show that you are a Michelangelo.’ It is much harder to be a Michelangelo than to work enough to buy a chisel and some stone.”[7]

Brother Nibley is, I feel, correct. We have not asked for the spiritual gifts, and thus we have denied them, We are all, I think, aware of the dangers of the improper seeking of and exercise of the spiritual gifts, the dangers of being deceived, the dangers of wanting to be “conspicuously” holy instead of genuinely consecrated, the risks of emotional exploitation and spiritual pornography, and of playing the “I am a spiritual giant” game, There’s also the very real question that could be asked, “But why do we need them? What would we do with them?”

I think that asking that question is a confession. How could we explain the need for literacy to a person who has never seen a book and feels no need for records that extend behind his or her memory? Most of us have, however, either experienced the gift of healing in our lives or know of those who have. Let us ask those individuals if the gift is one they would dispense with.

Furthermore, as I study the scriptures, I am struck by the way in which the roles our society finds desirable shape and define what we identify as our spiritual natures. Women in the Church today are assigned to be teachers, auxiliary executives, visiting teachers, neighbors, and even wives and mothers—but what of previous generations and dispensations when a woman could also be a prophetess and a priestess? Is it possible that these roles could still exist for women prepared to fill them?

I feel very strongly that the relationship between spiritual authority and institutional authority has become lopsided in recent generations—that we are first given callings and then we seek for the spiritual skills and gifts we need to fulfill those callings, experiencing genuine growth but frequently losing the new talents when we are released from the calling. I believe, however, that if women were spiritually quipped to serve, opportunities would be created to match capabilities and that we could offer the Lord our strengths as well as our inadequacies. People I know who have sought and received the gift of charity do not need an assignment to exercise it, for it overflows any calling they receive. But these people are also likely to receive callings.

One of the women who has become a spiritual mentor for me has been Elmina S. Taylor, a convert who, during the first four years of her marriage, never lost faith in the promise made to her through the gift of tongues that she would have a family. She bore seven children and was later called to become the first general president of the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association. When she died, Joseph F. Smith preached the main sermon. He had been associated with Elmina since 1880 when he had become first assistant to the general YMMIA superintendent.

He was now not only its general superintendent but president of the Church as well. Announcing rather tartly that “it is not my custom to speak praise of our departed loved ones,” he made an exception to his own rule and characterized Elmina as “one of the few in the world” who walked by “the light within her” instead of by “borrowed light. . . . Therefore,” he said, “she had power among her associates and her sisters. She was legitimately the head of the organization over which she was called to preside. She borrowed no influence from others. She bore her own influence upon the minds of those with whom she was associated.”[8]

A great deal has been said in recent years about women and power. I suggest that we follow Elmina’s example and seek the power of personal righteousness, power from on high, power in testimony, and power in the Lord Jesus Christ. I was impressed by the Lord’s commandment to Oliver Cowdery when he was experimenting with translation to “trifle not with these things; do not ask for that which you ought not.” This warning could be a frightening one, but the next sentence urges, “Ask that you may know the mysteries of God” (D&C 8:10-11).

The Lord promised Joseph and Oliver that they should “both have according to your desires, for ye have both joy in that which ye have desired” (D&C7:8). It is significant to me that their joy confirmed the righteousness of their desire, that their joy was the reason the Lord granted them their desire. It reinforces my idea that the seeking of happiness is a spiritually healthy thing to do and corroborates my experience that happiness characterizes righteousness.

I feel that we may have circumscribed our limits too narrowly. Our birthright is joy not weariness, courage not caution, and faith not fear. By covenant and consecration, may we claim it.

[1] Joseph Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, edited by Joseph Fielding Smith, Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1977, p. 355.

[2] “Let Us Move Forward and Upward,” Ensign, May 1979, p. 82.

[3] Kenneth W. Godfrey, Audrey M. Godfrey, Jill Mullvay Derr, Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900, Salt Lake City Utah: Deseret Book Co., 1982, p. 29.

[4] Lavina Fielding Anderson, “Challenge to Greatness: The Nineteenth-Century Saints in New York,” Ensign, September 1978, p. 28.

[5] Ibid., p. 29.

[6] Lavina Fielding Anderson, “Elizabeth Francis Yates: Trial by Heartbreak,” Ensign, July 2979, p. 62.

[7] Hugh Nibley, Of All Things! A Nibley Quote Book, edited by Gary P. Gillum, Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1981, p. 5.

[8] “Funeral Services of Elmina S. Taylor,” Improvement Era, January 8, 2905, p. 221.