Morgan Davis Wonder of Scripture Lecture
Transcript
Thank you, Miranda. It is a real privilege to work with Miranda on the Living Faith series, and it's a privilege to be here today. Thank you for coming. Most of the speakers in this series have written books and been on news programs and things, and you know their names, I am not one of those names that you know, and that's not a coincidence. I do not prefer to be known. And so this is a little nerve wracking for me, but I'm excited as well. So thanks for coming and bear with me as we ramble along here, I want to meander with you into my topic. People who know me recognize that meandering is my chief, perhaps my only MO in life. I'm the master of the non sequitur, so buckle up. There is, in fact, no method to my madness. Just make of it what you can. To start, I want to do a little show and tell. Actually, it's more about sound and tell or something, literally bells and whistles, shiny metal objects to distract you from my shambolic presentation. So what we have here, this is a conch shell that we got when we were living in the Philippines, comes from the bottom of the ocean. And some of you probably know they can be converted into an instrument by just knocking a hole right here in the end of the shell. And then, if you aren't too nervous and get the right embouchure and all that stuff, you can make a sound. That's exhibit one.
Who knows what this is, boys and girls. It's a gong. This is from Indonesia. Again, my dad brought it back. This used to be our dinner bell, our come to scriptures bell, our “come to prayer’ bell. I was raised with this sound so and I like to play it this way. It kind of builds on the succeeding waves of sound. So we start soft.
Feel that? It's cool, huh? So what is that? What's the name of that thing that Gong is doing and that the conch was doing?
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So this resonance. I love this concept of resonance. It is a, I think, a spiritual concept, something about it that I find that's well resonant with all kinds of topics, all kinds of metaphors in the world.
Now I want to meander back to one of the earliest memories I have of my time here as a student at BYU. I was a freshman during winter semester 1990, recently back from my mission in Guatemala and I was seated in the north benches of the Marriott center, yes, we used to sit on benches there, to listen to Elder Neal A Maxwell as he spoke at that month's fireside. If you had told me then that I would one day be at an institute at BYU bearing his name, I would not have believed you, for a couple of reasons. First, well, I'm just not sure how prophetic you are. Have you been keeping the commandments? Have you been listening to your mother and staying out of trouble? I don't know. The second was, I was pretty unsure at that point about everything in my future, so the idea that I would be blessed to have a seat at a place like the Maxwell Institute, which didn't even exist then, would have seemed like far more than I should hope for. But wonder of wonders, here we are. As I sat there that night, and the apostle stood to speak, just 20 seconds or so into his remarks, he said something that I've never forgotten. Fortunately, they had just recently invented Lo-Fi video recording, so I'm able to share that moment with you now. And here is what he said,
Maxwell:
“The day will come brothers and sisters, when we will have other books of Scripture that will emerge to accompany the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. Presently, you and I carry our scriptures around in a quad. The day will come when you'll need a little red wagon, and this university, by then, will want to sponsor some other symposia.“ (The Children of Christ, Elder Neal A. Maxwell, 1990)
It's a pretty memorable image. I love the idea of a little red wagon full of additional scripture, but what does he mean by it? When is that little red wagon going to start to fill up? Are we waiting for the Millennium or what? Let's let that question marinate for a minute, and we'll meander in another direction. There's another quote I want to throw at you, one that dates me even more, going clear back to President Kimball. There's not even video of this. We were still writing with cuneiform back then. I found this in a Liahona article that, as it turns out, has some other interesting things to think about as well. If you read fast, you can get the whole thing right now. But President Kimball, in this quote, says, “I find that when I get casual in my relationship with divinity, and when it seems that no divine ear is listening and no divine voice is speaking, that I am far, far away. If I immerse myself in the Scriptures, the distance narrows and the spirituality returns.” (Teachings of Presidents of the Church, 67)
And I found that to be true as well. And the rest of the article presents a series of suggestions from members of the Church of ways to go about enriching our engagement with the scriptures and through the magic of whatever software this is, that there they are. Those are the set of headlines from this article, and they're great. They're great suggestions. And if you've been attending the Wonder of Lecture Series, you've gotten even more. For example, many of our speakers have demonstrated what's called “close reading”, in one way or another, and today, I want to commend to you a particular kind of close reading, another suggestion for how we can realize the wonder of scripture, and that is to read Scripture comparatively. Now here I'm in danger of seeming to contradict my boss, Director of Maxwell Institute, JB Haws, who recently gave an inspired University devotional a few years ago on the dangers of comparison. But that was mostly about humans comparing ourselves to other humans. Let's not do that. I agree with JB on that, but when it comes to the scriptures of the world that express or answer humanity's desire for the divine, let's compare why. Comparatists love to quote the dictum that “he who knows one country, knows none”. In other words, if all you know is what you've always known, then how deeply can you really claim to understand it? We learn by comparing. “In comparison, a magic dwells”, as the famous treatise on this topic says. I would modify that to say as well, that in comparison, a resonance dwells.
For comparison to work, you need two essential ingredients. You need similarity and difference. Similarity is crucial to comparison. If two things do not bear some resemblance to each other, you're going to have a hard time even getting started. You can compare apples to oranges, because those two things are both fruit. They both have skins and pulp and come from flowering trees and so on. But try comparing apples to say the English language. Unless you are far more inventive than I am, that's going to be kind of a non-starter. They just don't have enough in common. When things are similar in certain ways, we can recognize that there are resonances between them, but that's only the first ingredient. The other thing you need, of course, is difference. Comparing two copies of the same book is not going to be very fruitful exercise either. But when you have two things that share certain properties, certain resonances, you have the beginnings of an interesting dynamic. Similarity is what makes comparison possible. Difference is what makes comparison interesting and meaningful.
Now there are two modes of reading scripture comparatively. The first is to compare different parts from within your own canon of Scripture. So ,we can compare the three different accounts of the creation in Genesis and Moses and the Book of Abraham, for example. And there a thousand ways to have adventures like this and really learn a lot through comparisons from within the relative safety of your own scriptural tradition. But then there's the other kind, where you step out of the familiar comfort of your standard works, and go flying clear to the other side of the scripture verse, in order to encounter someone else's scripture and try to grapple with ideas and expressions and imagery that might be more unfamiliar to you. Now, you are looking for similarities, the resonances that might allow you to compare the more unfamiliar scripture with your own, and then you are trying to understand the differences in light of those.
Now, why would someone do this? Why would anyone want to? Is it even a good idea? Might it not be dangerous or unwise? Ravi Gupta and Rabbi Sam Spector, who were both speakers in this series, a Vaishnava Hindu and a Jew, respectively, both offered us that kind of scriptural adventure reflecting faiths beyond the Latter-day Saint covenant. And yet, of course, they were showing us something of how they find wonder in their own scriptural traditions, all as a part of the Wonder of Scripture series organized by Latter Day Saints at BYU. This is completely unsurprising, just as it should be. Latter-day Saints believe that truth is to be found in every faith and in the scriptures of many people. As the First Presidency proclaimed in 1978, “the great religious leaders of the world, such as Muhammad, Confucius, and the reformers, as well as philosophers, received a portion of God's light. Moral truths were given to them by God to enlighten whole nations and to bring a higher level of understanding to individuals.” Now this isn't just a statement that all truths are the same and that all religions are just different paths up the same mountain. In the same statement, the First Presidency also affirms that the restored gospel of Jesus Christ “provides the only way to a fullness of joy forever.” And our own scriptures distinguish between inspiration that is available to individuals through the light of Christ, and revelations and commandments and scriptures that are given to prophets as the mind and the will of God for the whole church.
What I take the First Presidency statement to mean is that until the day when all humanity comes into a unity of faith, as we someday believe we may, we can exercise curiosity and wonder at the beautiful things that are to be found in every faith, in every culture and yes, every scripture, whether that be the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Pali canon, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Analects of Confucius, or the Tao Te Ching, or any number of other profound insights that have come to the various peoples of the world. We may learn from them, not by way of commandment, but by way of insight. As the Lord said of the Apocrypha “whoso readeth it let [them] understand, for the Spirit manifest truth; and whoso is enlightened by the Spirit shall obtain benefit therefrom.” (Doctrine and Covenants 91:4-5) The Book of Mormon shows that the restoration is here to broaden the interpretive horizons and the geographical borders of scripture. One of the many ways it does that is to explicitly create the kind of expectation that Elder Maxwell was talking about with his little red wagon image. Further light in Scripture may yet come forth through God's authorized servants. In the meantime, though, in addition to what we have been given in the Restoration, we already have an abundance of scriptures from other traditions that are just waiting for us to explore them. And I wonder if, in fact, our preparation to receive more scripture through authorized servants might not depend in part at least, on our willingness to seek and to treasure what is already here before us. Do we have eyes to see and ears to hear? Are we asking, seeking and knocking to learn from what other inspired people have received across time and across the world? In the language of our 13th Article of Faith, if there is anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy, are we seeking after these things? What's in your little red wagon? Not by way of commandment, but by way of invitation and of seeking to lay hold on every good thing.
I've done some exploring in the scriptures of other faiths, and some of the wisdom I found there has become integral to my personal understanding of truth. For example, I have never forgotten a passage that I read from the Tao Te Ching when I was still in high school. I memorized it and carried it with me onto my mission and through all kinds of situations. It's a classic text of Taoism, and it says the highest good is like water. Without striving, it gives life to myriad things–or 10,000 things. My daughter Margaret can give a better translation sometime. But that struck me as something that was profoundly true, but profoundly true in a way that I couldn't fully articulate or explain. I think one of the things that appeals to me about it is the resonance it has with the concluding language of section 121 of the Doctrine and Covenants. As the Lord concludes his master class on the uses and abuses of power and authority, he issues a promise to those who will refrain from unrighteous dominion, which we read is the nature and disposition of almost all men to exercise but those who act, “only by persuasion, by long suffering, by gentleness and meekness and by love, unfeigned, by kindness and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy and without guile, their domain, instead of being an unrighteous dominion, will be an everlasting dominion and without compulsory means, it shall flow unto them forever and ever.” Something in that language of flowing without compulsory means sounds very much to me like the way of water, that without striving gives life to myriad things. in the Taoist scripture. They're not the same idea, but there is a naturalness and a deep resonance in them that I find moving. I believe God is in the life-givingness of water, and in the motions of the Spirit that bloweth where and floweth wheresoever it listeth. I don't feel the need to analyze it much beyond that. What matters is that I feel the resonance, and it has borne good fruit for me. By the way, another famous saying from the Tao Te Ching is that “a good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving”, which is, I think, a great endorsement of the water-like meandering I'm demonstrating in this talk.
So off we go to another example from Scripture beyond the Latter-day Saint canon that has become significant for me, and that's the Quran, the principal scripture of the world's nearly 2 billion Muslims, delivered orally during the seventh century by the Arabian Prophet Mohammed. It collects a series of revelations that came over a number of years. In some ways, the Quran resembles the Doctrine and Covenants. It has no internal narrative running through it. Instead, we hear the first person words of God delivered by an angel, addressing his prophet and his people and repeatedly warning them of a judgment day that is coming, urging them to faithfulness to the one and only God and His messengers, including Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus and Muhammad and many others, and to the books of Scripture that have come through them, including the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels and, of course, the Quran. But the first chapter of the surah of the Quran is different from all the others. It's very short, and it is uttered in the voice of God, but as a supplication, an invocation in the voice of humanity, it is called the Fatiha, which, appropriately enough, means the opening. Since the Quran is an oral document, I thought it would be beautiful to let you hear what these words sound like in the mouth of an expert reciter. I believe this is Mishary Al‑Afasy. See, these are the words that are incorporated into the prayers of hundreds of millions of Muslims five times every day, alongside the recitation, I'll provide a translation that is kismila.
[Recording Plays]
I’d like to go over this short Surah with you and just discuss a few of the things that have stood out to me as I've studied it and translated it, and that I feel bear resonance with some of the Scriptures and teachings of my home tradition. I've had to cut a lot out of this section, so if you're curious about anything here that I don't touch on, I'm happy to revisit it afterwards. First of all, we have the first verse of the Fatiha, which becomes actually the preamble for every other surah in the Quran except one. It's so prevalent that it has its own name, the Basmala, which is simply the first word of the phrase, meaning in the name of God. And it connects God to two words that are related to each other, Al Rahman, al Rahim, translated as the Merciful, the Compassionate. These two words are siblings. They come from the same root indicated by the three consonants: Ra, ha, meme, whose basic meaning is mercy. My old Arabic teacher is sitting right in front of me. I wrote it down so I get it right.
Some version of this reference to deity is so common that philologists think it almost becomes the personal name of God in the Quran, even if the Bismillah is excluded from the count the root Rahama appears over 300 times in Quranic verses, making mercy and compassion one of the most common theological notions in the Quran. These words have cognates in other Semitic languages like Hebrew and Syriac, and they all share the further association with the concept of the womb, the belly of the mother, in which life is nurtured and protected. This notion of a soft, nurturing kind of love gets translated in our own scriptures as the bowels of mercy or the bowels of compassion. There's a great article on this by Jonathan Durham Peters in I think 1991 BYU studies. I won't linger over this topic, but there is so much more to explore here, so many resonances with ancient philosophy and modern theologies of creation ex materia, instead of creation ex nihilo. We'll leave those for another day.
Next, the Arabic word for praise to God here is Alhamdulillah. It carries the definite article, so literally the praise be to God, which elevates the sense of this expression from something ordinary to something universal. All praise belongs to God. This word is a pivot point in the whole Surah. It converts it from being a revelation from God to humanity, like the most of the Surahs, into a doxology, an expression of worship and adoration from humanity towards God. More on that in a moment.
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There's a repetition of the episodes for God the Merciful, the Compassionate, but then they are followed immediately by several different characterizations for God. Sovereign of the reckoning day, it says, now suddenly we have not just a kindly and merciful God, but also one who can be exacting and will require an accounting of each soul for its deeds and will judge each agent for the conduct of their affairs. In a coming day, there is going to be consequences for those deeds, good or ill. We can imagine that this awareness of God's judgment provokes the next sentiment in the recitation, “you we serve in worship, and you we seek for aid guide us on this upright way, the way of those who have your grace, not on whom is anger, nor those who are astray.” And here we come to a crucial metaphor, a cognitive metaphor of the journey, a journey here indicated by the way, or the path that is straight, but from which it is possible to stray. There are so many interpretive possibilities that open up with the journey metaphor just found in probably every language and culture, including our own. Here is a deep resonance we can start to work with right away... the plaintive mood of this prayer reminds me powerfully of the language of that Lehi uses as he relates the opening scene of his famous dream. “And I beheld myself that I was in a dark and dreary waste, and after I had traveled for the space of many hours in darkness, I began to pray unto the Lord that he would have mercy on me according to the multitude of his tender mercies.” (1 Nephi 8:7-8)
Listen to that passage. It's almost as if he's describing the conditions that give rise to the human plea for God's help in the Quran. Lehi is everyone. He stands in for all humanity as we find ourselves here on this darkling plain, wandering in confusion, and while this description supplies the mise-en-scene, the setting that is only implied in the Fatiha. The Quran, in its turn, supplies the unstated language of what might have been Lehi’s prayer for mercy. In reciting the Fatiha, we join the chorus of humanity, giving voice to Lehi’s prayer there in the dark wilderness of First Nephi. It's as if the two scriptures offer themselves to each other, forming a concatenation. I'm told that's a word that comes from the dictionary. A resonance of narrative and prayer like a conch shell making a gong ring. I know how to do that, we’ll do that after this. And in both cases, as it turns out, there's a divine response, and that response to both Lehi and his dream and to the voice of humanity in the Quran is revelation. In the Quran, in the very next verses of the surah that begins on the facing page across from Al Fatiha, the Lord proclaims, “here is the scripture in which there is no doubt, a guidance for the reverent.” (Quran 2.2)
It's call and response. The first Surah is a human plea for guidance. And the next Surah, and all that follows it in the Quran, is the divine response in the form of a scripture that is specifically called a guidance by God. Likewise, the revelation of the tree to Lehi in the very next verse, we learn is a revelation of the love of God.
It's call and response. Lehi prays for mercy, and he sees the tree that represents the love of God and the iron rod resonant with the straight, upright path of the Quran that leads toward Divine Mercy, rather than those who are astray or lost in the midst of darkness, more revelation, more of the Word of God as guidance on the way. Once our ears are open to these resonances, we begin to hear them more and more. If there were more time, we could continue to explore the ways that the themes of the Fatiha and the other parts of the Quran resonate with the story of Lehi and Nephi and with many other parts of our scriptures, although we're running out of time, so I'm going to have to leave it there, as they say on cable news. I hope this little exercise in noticing resonances allows you to feel empowered to load up your little red wagon with any great works of world scripture that interest you and just start to explore.
You don't have to know anything much to start. Find a good translation, and just dive in and start reading for resonance. You will find them soon enough. Once you've found those, you can start to ask about the differences and what they mean, and if you let it, this can be a way to enrich your scripture study and your witness of Christ. Why can I say that? Because Moroni has promised us that by noticing anything that “inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ” we can lay hold on every good thing. (Moroni 7:16) Does that suggestion surprise you, that by comparatively reading scripture from beyond the horizon of the restoration, one can actually come closer to Christ? I answer with another metaphor, perhaps the supreme metaphor in all of scripture, and it too participates in resonance.
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“And now my brethren, seeing that ye know the light of Christ, by which ye may judge, which light is the light of Christ, see that ye do not judge wrongfully; for with that same judgment which ye judge ye shall also be judged. Wherefore, I beseech of you, brethren, that ye search diligently in the light of Christ that ye may know good from evil; and if you will lay hold on every good thing, and condemn it not, ye certainly will be a child of Christ.” (Moroni 7:18-19)
My experience has been that when I read with faith, hope, charity and love, with an eye single to the glory of God, I find Christ even in the scriptures of others, even in the differences, and that, to me, is the wonder of Scripture. Thank you very much.