Come, Follow Me July 1-7: Alma 17-22
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Before Faith
By Philip L. Barlow
These chapters sketch a cluster of encounters, principally between Ammon and Aaron (converted missionary sons of King Mosiah II and friends of Alma the younger) and two Lamanite kings: Lamoni and his unnamed father and sovereign. Occurring in Lamanite lands nearly a century before the appearance of Christ, the events are so richly laden that, centuries later, Mormon thought them worthy of sometimes detailed inclusion or reconstruction in his highly selective abridgment project. The episodes might elsewhere be unpacked at length as case studies in the psychology and spirituality of faith and doubt. With allowance for context, however, the following meditation centers on a single sentence, uttered as prayer, in mid-conversion, by Lamoni’s father-king.
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O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee….
~Alma 22:18
These are arresting words: a plea that discloses a peculiar state of mind and heart at a peculiar, portentous moment. This is a mind and a heart in transition. But no: that reading is casual and premature, one that may lure those of us familiar with the story to trivial presumption, as though its outcome were sure from the first. Rather, in the moment that the king prays, his mind and heart are paused from their previous course. They are poised at a crossroads of possibility. More precisely, the words of the prayer show a receptive mind and heart, ones open to transition, but a transition scarcely begun and whose completion is not inevitable. Only later will we learn of its consummation. In this preceding moment, the king’s psyche is suspended between a familiar life, seemingly secure, in which the king imagines himself in command versus the prospect of radical change: a turn to something new and unknown. This moment should interest us. Because it is pivotal, let us hover over it long enough to apprehend its composition. To presume its aftermath is to distort the present as it then was.
The prayer is not uttered by a child. He who prayed is a fully habituated man; his view of the world and his people’s traditions are deep-set. Even more, he is accustomed to being obeyed. Our own modern, generic pride perhaps pales next to his, for he is Monarch. His will is law. At his nod, servants act, armies rise, subjects thrive or perish. Even to other kings, he is King. And yet, in this moment, he comes to us newly softened, inquiring. Perhaps the moment and the humbled king even convey something of that childlike disposition, a beginning of guileless trust and willingness, without which, we are told, we “shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)
How is it so? How is this essential, redeemable disposition so suddenly achieved?
The king has, of course, recently witnessed a mighty work performed by Aaron’s brother, Ammon, in his defense of the king’s son, Lamoni, and in sparing the old king’s life (ch. 20). Yet this by itself seems an inadequate explanation for the senior king’s new disposition. As with Moses’s pharaoh, with Nephi’s rebellious brothers, and with certain followers of the mortal Jesus, the daunting effect of even dramatic, observable miracles can be notoriously fleeting. The afterglow of miracles can, in time, be overridden and explained away unless additional elements of spiritual chemistry are nurtured.
What are these additional elements in the case of King Lamoni’s father-king, evidenced in his prayer? Beyond awareness of Ammon’s might, what characterizes this tense, pivotal moment during which entry into the kingdom of heaven and the discovery of God becomes possible to the king? What are we to make of his psychological-spiritual state in the brief space after his initial hostility and Ammon’s defense of Lamoni, but during his encounter with Aaron and before the king succumbs to a trance, to a full encounter with Christ, to a full awakening and mortification for sin, a complete cleansing and conversion and new birth? What are the key ingredients of his attitude during this “in-between” time, in the course of which he might as easily have regressed to hostility, derision, or indifference rather than turning toward God and being reborn in outlook and soul?
We might get somewhere useful in addressing these questions not by hurrying immediately along to the end of the “plot” of the tale but instead by slowing down to interrogate this crucial interim during which the father of Lamoni prays. What attitude lay behind the king’s being troubled not merely by the might of these individual Nephites he had encountered but “because of the generosity and the greatness of the words” of Aaron’s brother, Ammon? (22:3) When Aaron tells the king that Ammon will not be coming his way because “the Spirit of the Lord” has called Ammon to teach in another land, the king again describes himself as “troubled” and asks, “What is this that ye have said concerning the Spirit of the Lord?” (22:4-5) This query seems provoked by more than curiosity, but by what else? Why is the king troubled?
Aaron subsequently asks the king whether he believes there is a God. The king responds, “If thou sayest there is a God, behold I will believe” (22:7). Is this an admixture of the king’s humility and faith? Is it an admirable posture? What dimension prevents it from becoming gullibility before the next charismatic charlatan? In any case, the king’s attitude subtly shifts in his prayer. It is no longer “I will believe because Aaron has declared God’s reality,” but rather, in addressing God directly: “Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me[?]” (22:18) What shall we make of those two “ifs”–what difference do they make? And do we find one of the king’s two related but separable attitudes more spiritually advanced than the other? If so, why?
Such questions as these might be asked as fruitfully of Ammon’s encounter with Lamoni (chapters 17–19) as with Aaron’s exchange with Lamoni’s sire. At stake in both narratives, if they are to be relevant to us, is the quality of the faith we adopt. What attitudes of spirit lead us away from inert unbelief? On the other hand, what attitudes lead us to something better than an unthoughtful, blind, and headlong certainty by which fanatics and terrorists are born? What leads us beyond a fierce and apoplectic self-coercion by which some attempt to force themselves to believe that which they find hard to believe? Instead of such faux faith, the attitudes of these two Lamanite kings, under the spiritual tutelage of Ammon and Aaron, seem highly instructive. They feel authentic, emerging from a pleasing concoction of honesty, inquiry, meekness, vulnerability, pliability, and willing yet provisional trust and openness. Theirs is a healthy, replicable first step: openness becoming trust becoming faith: The king’s prayer is a “subjunctive” plea, marked by those conditional “ifs”: “Aaron has said there is a God…and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known to me[?]”
Let us make the king’s conclusion the conclusion of our brief meditation. His attitude in seeking God contains a final, difference-making element that changes the cast of all his yearning. Just prior to praying, he professes that he is “playing for keeps”: “Behold, I will give up all that I possess, yea, I will forsake my kingdom, that I may receive…joy.” He ends his prayer by pushing all his chips forward in a righteous wager. Or, better, in a total offering to the unknown God to whom he prays in hope–faith: “…and I will give away all my sins to know thee….” (22:18)
Was he serious?
Are we?
