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Maxwell Institute Podcast #154: The Necessity of God, with Adam S. Miller (2022 Neal A. Maxwell Lecture)

MIPodcast #154

About the Episode
Transcript

In Adam S. Miller’s lecture, “The Necessity of God: First person, Present Tense, Imperative Mood” Miller talks about Tim Farnsworth, a man who cannot stop walking from the fictional book The Unnamed.

Miller said that everyone has different crosses to bear, and although we cannot change them, like Farnsworth cannot stop walking, we have to learn how to love and accept these challenges in order to connect to God.

Link to view the Annual Lecture here: https://youtu.be/N1L_ctSw2pk

Joseph Stuart: Hi friends, this is the audio version of Adam S. Miller's Neal A Maxwell lecture, which you can also find on YouTube at youtube.com/BYUMaxwell. I'll give you a little bit of a warning that the audio was a little bit rough here because of our recording circumstances. But we've cleaned it up as best we can, the audio is a little bit better on the audio version. And if you're interested in receiving a copy of Professor Miller's words, they'll be printed in the Maxwell Institute's annual report, which you can find at MI.BYU/edu/about. You can also see our past annual reports there and sign up to receive a free copy of the annual report. One of the things that we're most proud of, and you can read all about the things that we've done this year. Without any further ado, here's Professor Miller. God bless.

Adam Miller: I can't stop thinking about this man who couldn't stop walking. I keep rereading his story. Sometimes I dream about him. One day, he is fine. He does what he pleases. He sits, he eats, he works, he sleeps. And the next day he starts walking and can't stop. Robbed of any control he just keeps walking and walking, like an automaton for decades, for the whole rest of his life, away from everything he wants, and everyone he loves, until he dies. One day he has everything. Then he starts walking. And the next day, he doesn't.

And I can't help thinking that this is a story about you. Or me, that it's a story about me. And especially I can't help thinking that this is actually a story about God. That it's the story about what it means to meet God in the flesh, in my own flesh, here and now in the form of implacable necessities, and to suddenly find, as Jesus put it, that somehow God is already in me. And that that great day has already arrived when as Jesus promised, ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in Me, and I in you. In other words I can't help thinking that this story is actually about what scholars call Divine Indwelling. It's a story about what it means to have Christ in me, as he in turn is in the Father.

In Joshua Ferris's novel, "The Unnamed" Tim Farnsworth finds himself indwelt by a will that is not his own. Tim is a husband and a father, he loves his wife Jane and his daughter Becca, he's handsome and healthy and has a great head of hair. He's smart and he works hard. He's honest and generous and he's made a lot of money as a valued partner in a Manhattan law firm. Tim is a model of 21st century happiness and success. Until one day Tim walks out of his corner office, down 50 flights of stairs through the busy lobby and out onto the street, and then unable to stop just keep walking, with only a handful of remissions for the rest of his life. Tim is no longer in control. He's been occupied by a foreign power. He is host to an uninvited guest. Tim's mind says stop but Tim's body keeps going. Tim is diagnosed with benign idiopathic perambulation, but this really is just a made-up name for the nameless thing driven by unknown causes that his doctors don't understand. Tim and his family try everything, they visit every doctor and get every second opinion, they try every crackpot remedy but none of it helps.

His body wouldn't be contained or corralled, Ferris writes, his body had it seemed to him a mind of its own right. Tim's body had, Ferris says, a mind of its own. In this respect Tim's situation is dramatic, but ordinary. You already know what this feels like. When your body has a will of its own and won't do what you want. Your knee has gone out. Your hands are arthritic, you've had cancer, you've had back surgery, you can't have children, you suffer migraines, your teeth ache, your heart is weak, you can't sleep at night, you're allergic to nuts. You can't sit on these chairs, your skin burns easily, your hair is thinning, your vision is blurry, your metabolism is low and your blood sugar is high. You know what this is like. Even when you're well, your heartbeats, and your blood pumps, your lungs breathe, your food digests, your nerves hum and your senses sense, without consulting you. What could be more ordinary than a body with a mind of its own? And surely, what could have less to do with that very special otherworldly thing that theologians called Divine Indwelling.

(untelligible) Lacoste Monumental Encyclopedia of Christianity, the entry on Divine Indwelling certainly never suggests any connection between indwelling and Tim Farnsworth’s compulsive walking. The entry focuses entirely on three classical ideas, claiming that the term describes the dwelling of the Trinity in one another, the interpenetration of divine and human natures and the person of Christ Jesus, and the means and ultimate end of human redemption.

As the father indwells the Son, by divine nature, so the Son indwells the flesh, as the incarnated, and so ultimately the Son comes to indwell in us, redemptively. Much of this classical language about divine indwelling is, of course, borrowed directly from the Gospel of John. For example, in John 6, Jesus teaches, "he that eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me, and I in him".

Or in John 15, Jesus says, "I am the vine, Ye are the branches, he, that abides in Me and I in him, the same brings forth much fruit". Or most memorably, in John 17, Jesus prays for his followers to "all be one, as thou Father art in me, and I envy that they also may be one in us, I in them, and thou in Me that they may be made perfect in one."

Here all of John's talk about Divine Indwelling is clearly canonical. It's deeply formative for the whole Christian tradition, and also it's rarely used by Latter-Day Saints. Why? Because as the encyclopedia indicates, indwelling has become synonymous with a Trinitarian understanding of the Godhead, and Latter-Day Saints don't think about God in Trinitarian terms. We don't describe the Godheads mutual indwelling as con-substantial or as essentially inmaterial. Rather, for Latter-Day Saints, as section 131 puts it, there is no such thing as immaterial matter, because all spirit is matter. Further, section 130 gives the following warning. The idea that the Father and the Son dwell in a man's heart is an old sectarian notion. And is false, because the Father and the Son both have a body of flesh and bone as tangible as man. It's the Holy Ghost who dwells in us on their behalf. And so refusing the traditional Trinitarian interpretation of divine indwelling, Latter-Day Saints have understandably shied away from talking about indwelling all together.

But what if we didn't? What if Latter-Day Saints held tight to Jesus's own emphatically repeated claim that Divine Indwelling is real and redemptive, and then breaking with Trinitarian thinking, paired Divine Indwelling with the restoration’s claim that God has a body of flesh and bone.

If all spirit is matter, what if Divine Indwelling is material? Or if even God has a body, what if Divine Indwelling is about body? Thinking this way, would recast Christianity, and thinking this way might clarify what it means to be saved. If all spirit is matter, then we can't just borrow traditional Christian ideas about an immaterial salvation. Salvation can't simply be figured as an escape from the stubborn necessities that define matter. But thinking this way isn't easy. And if you have a body, you probably already know how difficult it is to think exclusively in terms of body and matter. As a rule, people don't like it. As a rule, we actively resist it.

When confronted with the kinds of material necessities that undercut our fantasies of control, our natural impulse is not to acknowledge their reality and bravely commit to living selflessly in this new world. Rather, our first impulse is to do some version of what Tim Farnsworth does, evade and deny. After Tim's first bout of idiopathic or ambulation, he enjoys a period of remission. He resumes a normal life. He has dinner with his wife and daughter again. He sleeps in his own bed. He goes back to his corner office, with some hard work and willful forgetting, Tim pieces back together a passable version of the natural man's primal fantasy. The fantasy that his will is the only will that really matters, and the fantasy that his own body certainly has no real will of its own. And so long as Tim squints just so, the illusion seems to hold well enough until of course, it doesn't. And Tim starts walking again and can't stop.

Once he starts walking again Tim can't bear to tell his wife. And even after he's forced to tell her he wants to pretend the next day like nothing has happened. He wants to pretend like his body is immaterial. Like his leg didn't just send to him on a forced march through Lower Manhattan and half of New Jersey until he blacked out from exhaustion. Even after he tells her Tim insists on going back to work like normal.

Tim: "Janie, I'm all rested up. I have to go in."

Jane: "You should take the day off."

Tim: "No, that would just be capitulation."

Jane: "Capitulation? It's called Reality, Tim."

But Tim doesn't respond. He isn't interested in reality, reality is too much to bear. As they pull into their driveway Tim snaps and loses control and starts “pounding the glove box. He rang blow after blow down on the glove box. Then he began to kick it until the latch snapped, he continued to kick, as if to drive his foot clear through to the engine block. One of the doors lower hinges snapped and thereafter the glovebox had a cockeyed lean, it would never be fixed. When it was over, Tim withdrew his foot and out spilled a handful of napkins. His heel had compacted the owner's manual and ripped the maintenance records and insurance papers.

"I have to go in" he said, finally.

"Okay", Jane said, "you should go in."

In this respect Tim is like the rest of us, even the best of us. Confronted by the fact that we are indwelt by alien wills. Who hasn't destroyed a glove box kicking until the latch breaks and the door goes cockeyed kicking with enough force to drive their foot clean through to the engine block. Who hasn't raged against matter who hasn't cursed their body. But what's to be done about it? If we are all matter, and if matter is all there is, how should we think about this kind of material indwelling? About matters of willful autonomy? And especially if all spirit is matter, what would it mean for matter to be saved? Rather than escape? What would it mean to redeem rather than evade and deny matter?

It would look, I think, like section 128 of the Doctrine and Covenants. Section 128 is to be blunt, weird. Familiar as we are with the work of performing vicarious baptisms for the dead, it's easy to overlook just how dramatically section 128 up ends the broader Christian tradition. Because on my reading section 128 not only assumes that all spirit is matter, it offers a model for redeeming matter. Section 128 explains the doctrine of vicarious baptism for the remission of sins. This section opens with instructions for performing proxy baptisms, and then offers us theories of surprising explanations described as quote, "a very bold doctrine." First, the prophet urges Latter-Day Saints to keep careful records of vicarious baptisms, because the dead will be quote, "judged out of those things which were written in these books." And these books he clarifies referring to the records which are kept on the earth. This is the first crucial twist. In Section 128, our earthly material records aren't addendums to the heavenly original. Rather, the records used in heaven on Judgment Day will be our material record. Second, as section 128 explains it, baptisms for the dead aren't patterned on those for the living. Rather baptisms for the living symbolizes death, burial and resurrection, because this ritual is itself patterned on the need for vicarious work for the dead. Baptisms for the living, the Prophet says were, quote, "instituted to form a relationship with the ordinance of baptism for the dead, being in the likeness of the dead." This is the second crucial twist. In section 128, the vicarious form of baptism is described as original, and the non vicarious form is described as derivative. And third, section 128 intertwines this vicarious logic of redemption with the necessity of genealogy. Vicarious work for the dead is not an additional obligation for the living required beyond their own salvation. Instead, the Prophet says, vicarious work is the key to one's own salvation, “their salvation is necessary and essential to our salvation, they without us cannot be made perfect, neither can we without our dead be made perfect.” As a result, we're told vicarious baptisms serve as a crucial welding link that works to reassemble the genealogy of the whole human family from the days of Adam, even down to the present time. This is the third crucial twist. Our lives are so deeply intertwined with other lives, that they cannot be saved in isolation. Our lives cannot be saved without their lives, nor their bodies be saved without our body. Salvation doesn't require our liberation from the trouble and difficulty of other lives. It requires being welded, through willing vicarious work on their behalf, to all those other lives. In summary, then these are the three key ideas, all of which are anathema to traditional Trinitarian thinking that I want to borrow from section 128: One, the heavenly and material are not different in kind. Two: vicarious relationships that are original, not derivative, and Three: redemption is essentially not accidentally vicarious and genealogical. A very bold doctrine, indeed.

Come back now to my original question. If all spirit is matter, what would it mean to save matter rather than escape it? And here now is my thesis to save matter rather than escape it, we must learn to live as vicarious agents, who compassionately serve the wills and necessities that indwell. To save matter is to act as a proxy on its behalf. Here vicarious work for the dead isn't just a model for redeeming the dead. It's a model for redemptive work of any kind. Meanwhile, of course, then Farnsworth is still walking day or night, scorching heat or wicked cold, it doesn't matter. He can't stop walking. In the summer, his skin cooks and peels, in the winter frostbite claims fingers and toes. One frozen day he removes his boot and sock to find a black pinky toe still inside. Loose in the wool like a shriveled raisin. Day after day, Tim walks until he blacks out, and then exhausted and unconscious, he's left exposed and vulnerable. Tim survives his second bout of idiopathic perambulation, only by strapping himself into a medical bed. But months of being restrained like this almost drive him crazy and if his second bout of walking hadn't stopped as abruptly and arbitrarily as it had started, he might have lost his mind. But now for a moment, at least he can rest. The second remission isn't a clean recovery though. The losses he's suffered aren't temporary. Tim has been voted out of his partnership at the law firm. He's not the handsome healthy man he once was. His face is scarred, fingers and toes are missing, he struggles to reconnect with his wife and daughter. His mind lacks poise and balance, he's afraid. But little by little Tim starts to gather the pieces. His daughter goes off to college, he and Jane sell their house and move into a small place in the city, he finds some legal work for modest wages. Tim and Jane survived by pairing their lives to the quick, by sacrificing in advance all the things they know they cannot keep, by priming their hearts and minds for consecration. This calm holds for a few fragile but priceless years, until one day it doesn't, and the eye of the storm passes and instead of coming home for dinner after work, Tim finds themselves walking again. This time Tim will keep walking for the rest of his life. He'll keep walking until the day he dies. But this time instead of evading or denying his body's will to walk, Tim finds himself surrendering outright. He can't pretend again. He won't. Whatever happens next, he can't deny necessity. So Tim makes a decision. On that first new walk before His phone's battery dies. He calls his wife to tell her what's happened. He tells her he loves her. He calls her as always “banana”. He asks her not to worry. He says he'll call when he can. But unlike before Tim doesn't try to tell her where he is. He doesn't ask her to come find him. He doesn't pretend he's going back to work. He doesn't kick in the glovebox. Instead as his legs carry him across the bridge and out of the city and away from everything he wants Tim just leans into the wind and walks, a hole in his chest where his heart used to be and emptiness in his head where his ambitions used to be, lost in necessity. Having crossed the river and left the city behind Tim has entered the Bardo, that no man's land between to lives, that sacred but trying and uncertain place, where he can no longer pretend that His will alone matters. In this space, Tim must face the hard kernel of truth at the center of every life, that all spirit is matter, that his body is indwelt by other bodies, that his life is composed of other lives. There's nothing to do now but walk. And so Tim walks and he walks one foot in front of the other, one necessity after another. But in this space, all is not lost. Face to face with necessity, Tim may now find God, he may find himself indwelt vicariously, by God, he may discover what the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called, "God consciousness".

Schleiermacher, magnum opus "Christian Faith" was published in Germany in 1830. An auspicious year, in it he aims to retrofit Christianity for use in a world that is increasingly about the reality of material bodies, rather than the dream of immaterial spirits. Whatever his other weaknesses. Schleiermacher's genius, I think, is this, rather than appealing to tradition, or history, Schleiermacher boldly grounds his defense of Christianity in the immediacy of God. Like Paul, in Acts 17 Schleiermacher claims that God is "not far from every one of us. For in Him, we live, and move, and have our being.” For Schleiermacher, to be alive, to walk about, to exist, even is to already be in God. God isn't absent or distant, God isn't dead or asleep, God is here and now in this room, I am in God, you are in God. And in some crucial sense, as Jesus insisted, God is already in us. We are indwelt. The Christian disciples defining work as Schleiermacher ceases to become conscious of this indwelling, to become conscious of God. Schleiermacher defines God consciousness as, quote, "a distinct formation of feeling, or of immediate self consciousness." But this kind of immediate self consciousness isn't lonely or solipsistic, the self isn't independent or isolated, the self isn't an island. Exactly the opposite. Rather than being autonomous, every self is vicarious. Every self is composed of other selves. Every self consists of other bodies and other will. Every life is made out of other lives. Which is to say that like Tim Farnesworth, every self of consists in part of stubborn and unchosen necessities. In this way, self consciousness as God consciousness opens immediately onto an awareness of our dependence on necessities we cannot control. As Schleiermacher puts it, God consciousness arises only when we become quote, "conscious of ourselves as absolutely dependent, or, as being in relation with God." Here Schleiermacher echoes King Benjamin, to become conscious of Divine Indwelling is to become conscious of my moment to moment dependent on God. Similarly, Schleiermacher also defines God consciousness as an intuition of the infinite. By the infinite Schleiermacher means that vast open-ended network of existential roots and branches, of selves, bodies, lives, wills, causes and forces that intersect in us and then shape who we are, and what service we are called to give. To be conscious of God in me, is to be conscious of myself as just one vicarious node in that vast genealogical web of causes and effect, actions and consequences. Or to close this loop with a restoration twist, God consciousness names and intuitive grasp of section 128's three very bold doctrines, that the heavenly and the material are not different in kind, that life is inherently vicarious, and that redemption is the work of saving, by proxy, the genealogies to which we belong.

But what does God consciousness mean for Tim Farnesworth? For a man who can't stop walking? It means first that surrendering to necessity is not enough. It's not enough for Tim to stop evading and denying the wills that indwell him. To become conscious of God to just not only feel in his bones his dependence on these necessities, he must actively affirm them, he must come to love them. He must learn to work in God's name on behalf of the good that opens from them. This again is redemption. Tim must learn to live vicariously on behalf of the wills that indwell him. Even if those wills present as his enemies. "I say unto you, Love your enemies. bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you."

To be God conscious is to love. And while God is not the stubborn necessity that indwells him, God is decisively manifest in the necessity of loving this necessity that indwelt Tim. God intervenes in the necessity of loving this stranger, this strange indwelling will as if it were God Himself. "Lord, when saw we thee a stranger and took thee in? And the king shall answer as he have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me." This is the vicarious principle at the heart of life and redemption. "As you've done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me."

Not only must we love these indwelling strangers, we must also love them vicariously on God's behalf. And by loving them on God's behalf, we succeed in vicariously loving God. This is the tightly braided round of Divine Indwelling described in Jesus's great intercessory prayer. Working vicariously in God's name, I work vicariously on behalf of those strangers that indwell me, and thus vicariously love God through loving them. Them in me, I in them, and thus God in us. Here every “in” marks the vicarious relationship, every vicarious relationship marked an occasion for love, and every vicarious expression of love marked the vicariously indwelling presence of God. This is the onset of redemption. And this then is what Tim slowly learns how to do. Tim keeps walking he's always still walking, but he stays in sporadic contact with his daughter as he wanders westward, but mostly he just walks and overtime, Tim not only stops denying the stubborn will that indwells them, he learns to work on its behalf. Tim learns to stay ready. He learns to keep his boots on his feet and his hat on his head and his backpack at hand. It keeps his water bottle full and his bags stocked with protein bars. And gradually, Tim also learns how to prop open a door inside of himself. He learns how to stretch out that quiescent block of time between the end of a walk and the moment that exhaustion claims him. And in that gray space, stretch a little farther each day. Tim gives himself room, he gives himself room to love and affirm. He gives himself room to turn and look down the length of road he's just traveled, to wash his face in a cold stream to choose a spot and pitch a tent for the night. Tim walks for years and years. His learning curve is rough and gradual; progress is slow. As a rule, he tries not to think about Jane. He tries to keep his eyes on the road. Thinking about Jane is too painful. Tim wants Jane to have a life of her own. He wants to set her free. He wants her to live and love again. So Tim walks and walks alone. He wanders aimless from the East Coast to the West. Until one day, a new necessity intervenes and his daughter confesses, despite her mother's strict instructions, that Jane has cancer, that her treatments have failed and that she's dying. Hearing this, all Tim's resolutions crumbled to dust. Every promise he's ever made himself to leave Jane alone and set her free is immediately annulled. Tim decides that distance doesn't matter. The fact that Jane is in a hospital on the opposite coast doesn't matter. Only necessity matters. But the difference now is that necessity has itself undergone a qualitative change. Because Tim has willingly doubled the number of necessities in play. He's added to the necessity of his walking, the necessity of seeing Jane. He's added to blind necessity, the necessity of love. So Tim determines to will something new with that gray block of time that remains after a walk. Tim decides that when the day's compulsory walk ends, he'll point himself back in Jane's direction and keep walking. Now have his own free will until his feet can no longer carry. This plan is mad, a continent separates Him from Jane but Tim starts walking that same day. He walks for months and months, through fire and flood, through rain and sun. He walks through spring and summer and fall. This route across the country traces a dizzy, spiraling pattern of aimless deviations and resolute redirection that only haltingly add up to miles crossed in the right direction. But this just is what it is. Things just are what they are. So be it. Amen. Tim doesn't evade or deny; he doesn't rage against matter, necessity must be honored. And anyway Tim isn't walking for himself. Tim rather, is walking vicariously. He's walking by turns for and on behalf of the strange will that indwells him. And now for and on behalf of Jane. And by walking this way, by walking vicariously, Tim's love for these indwelling wills has begun to bleed into a consciousness of God. Still, Tim is afraid he'll be too late. He's afraid Jane won't recognize him, and if he ever arrives, Tim is afraid he won't know what to say. And then he'll be stranded without a way to cross that last small gap between them. But Tim keeps going, he keeps walking by the time Tim arrives on the East Coast. He's nearly ground himself to powder. He finds the hospital he asks for Jane's room. He takes the elevator. But then Ferris tells us when Tim finally cleared the door to Jane's room, and he saw her in her hospital bed reduced the skin and bone by the cancer, quote "He knew at once what it had all been for. Why he had started off and why he had struggled. He went to her and she looked at him standing over her, all time and distance between them collapsed. And without any mental searching for the words, he said to her., “hello banana.” And then reached out to take her hand." Tim held Jane's hand and Jane his for a long time. She waited for him to speak. Tim pulled up a chair. He waited for more words to come. When he finally started talking again and tried to explain, quote, "where he had been and how he had come to be here.” “I thought the worst." Jane said "that I would be alive and look like this". Tim said the film with tears that glazed over her dark and hollowed eyes quivered as she smiled she squeezed his few fingers, no less bony and fragile than her own. "I think you look devastating." She said. "devastated". He said, "as handsome as you ever were if that. Now there is a tender lie". He said.

In book five of his ethic, Baruch Spinoza introduces a blueprint for what Schleiermacher 150 years later, will call God Consciousness. There Spinoza describes a state of blessedness that follows when we discover that we already live and move and have our being in God. And pointedly Spinoza is description of blessedness involves the same basic elements we've already identified. blessedness requires a keen awareness of ourselves. There's just one small note and an infinite genealogy of causes and effects, of actions and consequences, of parents and children, of life and death. But true knowledge of these genealogies, Spinoza argues, can be discovered in two distinct ways. You can, of course, reason your way back through the decision tree of causes that resulted in your being what you are and the world being what it is. And this kind of cognitive reasoning can facilitate blessedness that can prime God consciousness that can help. However, Spinoza suggests a second way to acquire true knowledge of causes, an approach that works not simply through reason, but through the gestalt of a global intuition. It's possible Spinoza claims to have an immediate intuition of this infinite genealogy in the form of a feeling. While you can't think your way into God consciousness, you can learn to intuit God. You can learn how to feel God in you. What does an immediate intuition of the infinite feel like? What does it feel like to become conscious of yourself as a node and an infinite genealogy to become conscious of God in you? It feels Spinoza says, like necessity, God feels like necessity. Now this necessity is not of course that dumb fatalism, determinism and predestination are incompatible with materialism. It is rather the redoubled necessity that follows when we work vicariously to redeem blind necessities by adding to them the necessity of love. And this redoubled necessity is, ironically, the lifeblood of true agency. It supplants the immaterial fantasy of a free agency with the material reality of a moral agency. Free agency is a fantasy that denies our dependence on God, the reality of consequences and the vicarious nature of our bodies and lives. Moral agency, in contrast, affirms the necessity of our dependence on God, the reality of consequences and the Gospel’s governing imperative to act as loving proxies. Real agency, moral agency is enjoyed only when we act in God's name, in line with his will as vicarious agents. But this kind of love is impossible without an affirmation of these vicarious necessities. Because to love someone is to affirm the joint necessity of both who they now are and what they now need.

When you wake up in the morning, this is your work. This is your prayer. This is the stuff of a Christian life, to dig out from under all the noise, all the nonsense and wishful thinking and vain ambitions, the load-bearing cornerstones of necessity that will uphold the truth of that day. As a Christian, your aim is to be as conscious of God as possible, by doing as closely to necessity as you're able, both in terms of your acceptance of what cannot now be changed, and in terms of your willingness to do what now must be done. This is your prayer. What Lord is necessary, what cannot be changed? What must now be given. As sinners, we continually ask "what if," but as Christians, we continually pray, "what must be". When God answers this prayer. When you become God conscious, you'll know it, you will know you have found God's will because it will arrive with the force of an imperative. God feels like an imperative. And that imperative in its necessity will always give two inseparable commands. You must continually forgive all things, the necessity of what they now are, and you must continually give all things whatever good they now necessitate.

Tim Farnsworth can't stay in that chair next to Jane's bed. He must walk, but he circles back to her each day. When Jane asks him what he sees when he leaves, Tim finds he can hardly answer. He hardly knows. Over so many years and so many miles, his gaze has turned inward, an old woman he offers lamely, a pair of boots, a chain link fence, in all that time Jane asks. So Tim, for and on behalf of Jane, tries to see the world. Quote, "for the first time he began to pay attention to the things he saw on his walk. So that when he returned to her, he had observations of the outside world to share. They were fleeting, they were middle without beginning or end; they were diverting for him to witness and for her to hear. And by doing this, he realized that he might have been doing it wrong for years, he might have seen interesting things had he been able to let go of the frustration and despair. He wondered what kind of life he might have had if he'd paid attention from the beginning. But that would have been hard. That would have been for himself. It was easier now doing it for someone else." Soon Jane dies, and Tim is walking again. No longer circling, just tracing necessity’s path. Ferris tells us that he maintained a sound mind until the end. He took care of himself as best he could. But more than this now Tim was also paying attention as Jane had taught him and he learned to distinguish 100 variations of unnamed winds and 100 kinds of anonymous bird songs. Tim carried on like this until one winter night, safe in his tent, he felt some indwelling necessity shift deep inside of him. Quote, "Tim relaxed into the warmth of his sleeping bag, and it felt his body wind down into a stillness that eventually made its way into his deepest interior. The wind was just starting to pick up, but beneath its bellowing he became aware of his heart whispering, "listen, listen, listen". He heard the blood pump out of his chest and flow down his arteries. The pulse faintly at his wrist. His breathing lifted him up and down, up and down. In the morning, Tim Farnsworth woke again. But instead of rising quote, "Tim chose to do as he'd done the night before, to settle deep inside himself, and listen to the strange subtle operations going on inside his body. He listened for his heart to whisper its soft word. He listened for the breathing that lifted him up and down inside his bag, but he could find neither. Tim detected nothing but an enormous stillness, radiating from the things inside of him. Both those he could name and those he couldn't, the organs and muscles, the cells and tissues. He never had to rise again. This time once informed him, he was dying. And in a measure of time, that may have been the smallest natural unit known to man, or that may have been and may still remain all of eternity. Tim realized that he was still thinking and that his mind was still a fire. This is the test, perhaps life's only real test. Can you love necessity? Can you forgive it? Care for it? Bless it?

Friedrich Nietzsche called his version of this test the eternal return. Imagine Nietzsche says that your whole life composed as it is of material troubles, indwelling wills and unchosen necessities were to repeat again and again for all of eternity. Not just some of your life, but all of it. The blown knee, the arthritis, the cancer, the back surgery, the infertility, the migraine, the toothache, the weak heart, the insomnia, the nearsightedness, the low metabolism and the high blood sugar, all of it, all of it. Could you still love your life? Could you forgive it? Could you will, joyfully, it's repetition? Could you add to life's blind necessity the necessity of loving them? Could you shelter these strangers and love these enemies? Could you as their proxy weld yourself to them? Baptize yourself for them, and live your life for and on behalf of them? Could you by caring for them become conscious of God in you? This is the straight gates, the narrow path that leads to eternal life. If you had to keep walking for eternity, if there were no such thing as immaterial matter, could you learn to love walking? Thank you.

Joseph Stuart: Thank you for listening to the Maxwell Institute podcast. Could you please rate, review and subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to this podcast and recommend it to others so that we can fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to inspire and fortify Latter-Day Saints and their testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and engage the world of religious ideas. Thank you and have a great week.