Maxwell Institute Podcast #173: What Does it Mean to Get "Proximate"? Featuring Michalyn Steele

What does it mean to “get proximate”? (featuring Michalyn Steele)

Rosalynde Welch: A couple of years ago in General Conference, Elder Dale G. Renlund spoke about a man whose name will be familiar to many. He said this: “Someone who has been anxiously engaged in combating unfairness is attorney Bryan Stevenson. His legal practice in the United States is dedicated to defending the wrongly accused, ending excessive punishment, and protecting basic human rights.” Elder Renlund continued, “Mr. Stevenson observed that self-righteousness, fear, and anger have caused even Christians to hurl stones at people who stumble. He then said, “We can’t simply watch that happen,” and he encouraged the congregants to become “stonecatchers.’”

I’m talking today with Professor Michalyn Steele, a member of the faculty at the J. Reuben Clark Law School, about Bryan Stevenson and his best-selling book Just Mercy. As Elder Renlund said, Stevenson has spent his career assisting people in some of the worst circumstances I can imagine: those on death row or facing a life sentence. He’s also a Christian, and his faith in Jesus and love of the Bible are on full display in his book. Professor Steele helped me see what Stevenson’s work with imprisoned people can teach all of us about mercy and justice. This is something she knows firsthand from her own experience ministering to incarcerated women in her community. As she says, “we're in a web of hurt and brokenness, but we're also together in a web of healing and mercy.”

Too often, though, we look away from that web or choose not to see our brothers and sisters in their lowest moments. Or we simply don’t know how to make the connections we want to make. How to “get proximate”, as Stevenson puts it, is a question we should be asking--and it’s the topic of our conversation today. I hope you enjoy it.

Welch: Good morning, Michalyn Steele, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Michalyn Steele: Thank you. Great to be with you.

Welch: Michalyn, today we are going to talk about justice and mercy. And not just in abstract terms, but hopefully in real life, real lived terms. How can we live justice and mercy not as opposites, as justice versus mercy, but how can we live justice and mercy together as allies that work hand in hand? And we're inspired in our conversation by a legal scholar, an attorney named Bryan Stevenson. That name is probably familiar to a lot of our listeners because he wrote a very popular book called Just Mercy, which was then made into a movie. And that book is going to be the launch point for our conversation today. So start us out just by telling us a little bit about Just Mercy and why Bryan Stevenson's legal career is inspiring to you.

Steele: Bryan Stevenson is a hero to me. He is living the gospel. He is the best of our profession. The story of Just Mercy is the story of him deciding that his Harvard legal education didn't feel like it would be that meaningful to him, given his background and experiences,

just to go to a big law firm and make a bunch of money for clients and corporations. He found a lot of meaning and purpose by joining a clinic that allowed him to go meet with a death row inmate as a law student and just tell him that there had not been an execution date for at least a year. And the experience that he had going into the prison, meeting and seeing the humanity of the person who had been convicted of a terrible crime, seeing the justice system up close and personal in that way, set the tone and the direction for his career. And he has spent his career working for those that he says society would otherwise sort of like to throw away, especially those who have been wrongfully convicted or those who have been convicted of a death penalty and seeing their humanity and questioning whether indeed it is justice when we essentially give up on the humanity of others and at what cost to our own humanity.

Welch: Yeah, it's such a readable book. It's a work of scholarship that's footnoted, but it's full of stories about real people, as you say, especially about inmates on death row, about children, children who have been sentenced to harsh sentences. And we get an up close look at the real life stories of a number of characters, of real people, whom he worked with over many years to try to secure their freedom or adjust outcome for them.

Steele: I think one of his gifts is that he sees their humanity. He sees their value as children of God, even when they've done terrible things. He sees some context. He sees, I think, the Lord's love for them. And that is one of the gifts that I've taken away from reading Just Mercy is, he says each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. And I think that's one of the great truths of the gospel that he illuminates.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, each of us, yeah, each of us is more than the worst thing that we've ever done. And so he can see that “more than,” and he's really gifted at making connections and seeing reflections of his own experience, his own feelings, his own thoughts in these mostly men but men and women that he has come to know in the most difficult of circumstances.

He has a number of incredible stories, everything from arguing before the Supreme Court. He has a conversation with Rosa Parks, but he also shares his own emotional ups and downs and his own brokenness. He is a person who has voluntarily put himself in proximity to death, to people who are facing their death. And that takes a toll.

And he doesn’t shy away the toll that it's taken on him. So Stevenson is, as you've alluded to, he is a Christian. He grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Here at BYU, we call ourselves, Michalyn, Disciple Scholars, and I think it's fair to say that Stevenson also is a Disciple Scholar, and we could probably add Disciple Scholar Advocate, because he brings advocacy into that beautiful combination of scholarship and Christian discipleship.

So Bible teachings and Bible stories appear throughout Just Mercy. And there's one moment in particular that I really love. He's just had an incredibly discouraging day. He's failed to prevent the execution of a man named Jimmy Dill with whom he had worked for many years. And he failed in his efforts. And he had learned that Jimmy, a man with an intellectual disability, would be executed. So as he's driving home after this incredibly discouraging and sad day, he hears a radio sermon on a passage from 2 Corinthians that says this, “my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Do you remember that moment in the book?

Steele: I do. It is part of the chapter where he recognizes his own brokenness and not just the brokenness of the clients who he says have been broken by war, poverty, racism, disability, broken by cynicism and hopelessness and prejudice. He says he recognizes that being broken is what makes us human, he says, and recognizes that we are all broken and in recognizing that, it gives us the opportunity to experience mercy, to accept mercy, to turn, I suppose, to the Savior for healing, but that it is, you know, fighting our brokenness can sometimes make us, I think he's saying resist mercy. He says at one point in the book, we're in a web of hurt and brokenness, but we're also together in a web of healing and mercy. And we have to appreciate the one to appreciate the other, that indeed we need a savior to heal our brokenness.

Welch: It's so powerful and you've just said something that's helped me make a connection here, which is that when we recognize that we need to accept mercy from our Savior, because we ourselves are broken, as you say, that maybe teaches us or enables us then to extend mercy to others. Right? That it goes both ways. When we receive it, then we're able to give it. And maybe...Maybe it works the other way too. Maybe when we are able to give mercy to others, we can put ourselves in a position where we're more open to receiving that love from our savior ourselves.

Steele: He says at one point in the book, the power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. And at some point, none of us has earned our salvation, our hopeful exaltation. We rely on a savior because we are imperfect, as he says that that's what makes us human, and we're supposed to be learning from those experiences and having compassion for one another, I suppose, in those moments.

The Lord assures him as he assures each of us that when we put forth our best effort, he makes up the difference. That's the essence of grace and that we're not a disappointment to the Lord because we're not perfect. We're not a disappointment to the Lord because we stumble and fall. And I love that Paul decides when I see these weaknesses, I delight in it because it helps me realize my dependence on the Savior. It's really self-deceit to think that we don't need a Savior and that we don't rely utterly on His merits and His mercy.

Welch: Yeah. There's another time near the end of the book when Stevenson talks about meeting a woman who describes herself as a stone catcher. Do you remember that woman? Remember that moment?

Steele: Yeah, it was an elderly woman who had suffered a lot of pain in her life. And she was attending some court cases that, that Brian Stevenson was arguing. And she wanted to tell him that, uh, she was there to help catch stones. In other words, she was referencing the story that the savior told of the woman taken in adultery.

They said, I think trying to goad the savior, they said, this woman's taken in the very act and the law says she should be stoned. And he says, let him who's without sin cast the first stone. And of course they all one by one go away. No one finds themselves sufficiently without sin to be the one imposing the punishment. And He asks her, where are your accusers? And essentially says, neither do I condemn thee, go and sin no more.

And we learn a great lesson about the Savior in that he's not eager to condemn us for the things that we do wrong. He wants us to get up and do better. And the woman that Bryan Stevenson met essentially said, there's a lot of people pretty eager in our society to go ahead and be the ones casting the stones. And she felt a need to put herself between the accused, the downtrodden and those casting the stones and catch those stones.

And, I recognized a kindred spirit in Bryan Stevenson said, you're a stone catcher too, and it hurts. It's painful to be the one catching the stones. It's a little different take on, I think that parable, but it helps us understand who the Savior is and who we ought to be. It's a little different than just refraining from casting the first stone. It is a more active advocacy and kindness, a more active kindness and more active mercy and love for justice and mercy for people when you step in to take the stones that are being cast.

I don't fully understand the implications of it as a lawyer or even as a Christian, but it's a really important principle and one that I think I heard an apostle talk about in general conference. Elder Renlund talked about being stone catchers in reference to Bryan Stevenson's chapter.

Welch: Oh, that's wonderful. It reminded me of President Uchtdorf's famous and beloved sermon on judging, right? Do you remember his, the shortest sermon in the history of all sermons? He says, the topic of judging others could actually be taught in a two word sermon when it comes to hating, gossiping, ignoring, ridiculing, holding grudges, or wanting to cause harm. Please apply the following, stop it.

It's that simple. And so in the context of stone catching, that takes on another meaning, right? We're asked, of course, to stop our own unjust judging. But beyond that, we're asked to take another step and perhaps to stop the effects of other people's unjust judgment of a third party, right? So we can get in there and can try to rectify a situation that wasn't of our own making, but we can still see a need just as Christ did and step in and be that defense, that stone catcher for those who would otherwise be the target of hatred or of prejudice or of other forms of unjust action.

Steele: It's really what the Savior did is put himself between us and our punishment to absorb the blow of the punishment upon conditions of repentance. He's done it, if we'll accept that sacrifice that he's done.

It's interesting to think about what that would look like as a lawyer, you have to work within the system, but as a human being, the way you interact with other people, are you casting stones? Are you judging as Elder Uchtdorf counseled us not to do, and certainly as President Nelson has insisted, are we being peacemakers actively, not just avoiding contention, but creating peace?

Welch: Yeah. And you make such a good point, which is that, you know, Stevenson is an attorney. He has argued before the Supreme Court. He is not somebody who is trying to tear down the justice system or abolish all law. It's not about inhibiting legal or moral accountability. Instead, it's about stopping collateral damage. It's about stopping the dehumanization that can lead to unjust outcomes within our justice system. It's about stopping injustice. And it's so powerful, the book was so powerful to me, even in its title, Just Mercy. And it took me a while, I think, to see the double meaning there. On the one hand, it could be, you know, his work is about just mercy. It's only about mercy.

But really, the other meaning is that it's about a just kind of mercy and justice work together. They're not opposites, they're not enemies. We don't need mercy as a deterrent to justice, but justice is divine justice when it is infused with mercy and when it is exercised in full view of the humanity, the shared humanity of all parties. I think the reason why he wrote the book in the first place, it wasn't about celebrating his own career. The reason he wrote the book is because he believes that real improvements in public policy and in legal policy can result when we change narratives, when we change stories, right? Around, for example, incarceration or immigration.

We kind of share a story together as a culture about what kind of a person would find themselves incarcerated, or what kind of a person would find themselves as a migrant. And when we can put in place humanizing stories that allow us to connect and see the common ground between all human beings, then we're able to work towards systems that produce just outcomes. Once again, not about trying to stop or inhibit moral and legal accountability, but to facilitate just accountability. So I'm wondering if you have seen that same kind of connection between law and human stories in your legal career.

Steele: I have, and just adding to what you're saying, I think Bryan Stevenson's message in part in Just Mercy is that the way the justice system treats the worst of us, the condemned, says something about the rest of us, what we allow the justice system to do in our name and on our behalf, that it is worth thinking about to what extent we've allowed that justice system to throw people away or to dehumanize them because they've done bad things. And that's not about accountability, that's about us and who we are and what we will allow.

I took when Bryan Stevenson came to BYU and gave a forum in 2018 and at that same year one of the classes I teach is civil rights. I was a civil rights lawyer at the Department of Justice for six years and in other iterations of my legal career I've been an attorney representing Indian tribes and working in the government in federal Indian law and policy. And so I come at this from a couple of different ways before I became a law professor, but in my work in civil rights, I saw that was for me about human dignity, that there's a certain level below which we don't allow society to treat each other.

My particular specialty was in the Fair Housing Act that everyone has a right to housing and that one of the reasons you should not be denied housing is because of your race or because you have children. That's what the Federal Fair Housing Act does is establish sort of a floor below which landlords cannot go in renting and selling property.

But one of the challenges that Bryan Stevenson had for us as a BYU community to seek more justice is he talked about the power of proximity, of getting close to those whose experiences are so different from our own. He talked about getting proximate to the poor and the excluded. And one of the things that I took from that was I realized that I live in a bit of a bubble. I interact with a great many lawyers and law professors and law students.

I interact with members of my congregation and a lot of people who share my faith and outlook. Even if we differ on a great many things, we have some shared values. And I realized that one day I was looking at the church news and I saw that someone had recently, announced that someone had recently been released as the Utah Prison Ministries Coordinator. And that really hit me and I thought, well, what is that? And I made some inquiries and I was able to get a security clearance and my bishop said I could have a calling in the Canyon Creek branch, which meets and serves at the Utah County Jail. And so I've been teaching Relief Society there for a couple of years.

And that has allowed me an opportunity to get proximate with people who really do have a much different life experience than me. And the great lesson that I've learned from being with those sisters week after week in many different settings, but mostly in the setting of church, we essentially have Relief Society classes with them. And on Tuesday nights, people from the congregation go and they can meet individually with folks who want to have an individual meeting with members of the church and just talk through what's happening in their lives. And in those experiences, it's been such a blessing to get proximate to them because the lesson that I have learned over and over again, the lesson that the Lord has taught me is just how much He loves them.

I sometimes say that going to church at the jail is a lot like regular church except there's more swearing and more face tattoos. But they and the sisters have had very different life experiences. Many of them struggle with substance abuse and have themselves been the victims of abuse that has led their lives to not look like I think they would have hoped and they find themselves for whatever reason in jail.

And some of them have made very costly mistakes. But every time I go to open my mouth to talk to them, I feel an urgency from the Lord to tell them that he loves them, that he knows them. He knows their circumstances. The lesson that I've learned is that he is really interested in being part of their journey. He wants them to look forward. He wants to be part of their healing.

And when Bryan Stevenson says we're caught in a web of hurt and brokenness, but we're also in a web of healing and mercy. I have seen that and it helps me to understand how the Lord sees me even in my brokenness and my weakness. I can understand that he just wants to be part of that journey. He wants to help us move forward that tremendous set of questions from 3rd Nephi right after the resurrection where he says” How oft have I gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings.” I love that he makes himself like a kind of a mama hen with the most protective. I was in Mexico on a literacy project when I was a student at BYU and a lady there showed me a hen that had, I don't know, six or seven baby chicks under her wings, and it was a beautiful, tender thing.

And I think of that every time. And he says, how oft would I have gathered you? And then how oft will I gather you? And he says, will you not now come that I may heal you? I find myself, when I think and pray about what to talk about with the sisters at the jail, drawn over and over to the stories, especially of the New Testament, where what Jesus is doing is healing. And you know I have an urgency that they understand that the Savior is eager to be part of their healing. Even things that seem impossible, many of them have been in rehab many times, the chains of substance abuse are forged of a very strong steel, it seems.

As much as they don't want to be caught in those chains, as much as they go to rehab and they try to get clean for a while and they resolve, they're not gonna go back to it. Sometimes we see them back over and over again. And this last Sunday I was there and as I was praying about what to say and how to talk with them, you know, that hour or so that we had, I was drawn to the story of the woman who had an issue of blood for 12 years and how outcast and unclean she was.

And that power in reaching to the Savior through a crowd where she's been used to being such an outcast, and that he was kind to her and that her faith allowed him to heal her from that issue that she said she had spent her living going to physicians and no physicians could help, but the Savior helped and healed her. And there is a powerful lesson in that.

I asked the sisters on Sunday at the jail to think about what lessons they might take from that story and they got it immediately. I asked them what kinds of things had been a plague for them for many years and they talked about mental health and substance abuse and we talked about ways to reach to the Savior in their brokenness.

Welch: You’re giving me chills. The idea of prison ministry is something that has been interesting to me recently because my father recently, through his ward and stake in Southern California, was given the opportunity to go and minister as a friend to inmates in the Los Angeles County jail who had requested a representative of the church to come and be with them. And so over the past year or so, he's gotten to know several men in this circumstance and he's learned a lot. He's also an attorney, but so he's seeing the legal system from a whole different point of view. And as I've read his letters and talked with him about his experience, I've noticed that the category of imprisonment is something that shows up often in the New Testament, in Jesus' own teachings.

In fact, in Matthew 25, when he's talking about the sheep and the goats and those who will be divided at the last day, the sheep, the ones who will find themselves on his right hand, he says, among other categories, are the ones who visited him in prison, right? The ones who fed him while he was sick and visited him while he was in prison. And then, of course, they say, what? We never visited you in prison. And then he says, “If you did this unto one of the least of these, you've done it to me.” So you have visited me in prison. And it's such a powerful and stunning teaching of the Savior that when we serve our fellow beings in the most difficult of circumstances where we're serving our own Savior, yet I wonder why it is that imprisonment is one of the categories that he chooses to highlight.

Do you have any ideas about that from your experience there in the jail and talking with these sisters who have experienced incarceration sometimes multiple times? Why would Jesus select that category in particular?

Steele: Well, I keep thinking about the scripture where he announces his ministry, essentially. He announces himself as fulfilling Isaiah's prophecies that he would set at Liberty the captives and bind up the brokenhearted. And he says, he's reading in the synagogue and he says, this day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears. And that is part of what he does is to set at liberty the captives. Without the savior, we would all be captive to sin.

And it is in, we are free to choose, as Jacob says, life and liberty, or else we're choosing captivity and death. And when we follow the Savior, we're following him. He sets at liberty the captives, and that's all of us. From death and hell, essentially, we would be captive without the Savior to those things, but he has broken those chains, broken the chains of death and that we'll all be resurrected and broken the chains of sin that if we repent we're cleansed and healed.

Bryan Stevenson says that the true measure of our character is how we treat the outcasts, the downtrodden. And that is, I think, certainly a true measure that we can see in the Savior's life, how he treats and treated in his life. The woman who had the issue of blood, who everyone else said was unclean, and everything she touched or sat on or anyone she spoke to essentially became unclean. The woman, the Samaritan woman at the well, she says, what are you doing talking to me? And not only did he talk to her, he knew her whole life and background. And so no one is an outcast for the Savior. And to the extent that we have something that is, I guess broken or captive, he is ready to heal us and set us at liberty.

I love that the brokenness is the brokenhearted, right? He's ready to bind up the brokenhearted. And that is really what he has tasked us with doing as his disciples and what we've covenanted to do. How do we set at liberty the captives and how do we bind up the brokenhearted in ministry to one another as his disciples.

It's a beautiful thing that when he was asked about the two great commandments and he said to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind and strength, and the second to love our neighbor as ourselves, just as he finished his ministry, he changed that second commandment a little bit and said, he said, a new commandment I give, love one another as I have loved you. And that is even better than you love yourselves.

And I think that is a beautiful injunction from the Savior. And whether we're lawyers or whatever we are doing, however way we spend our days, that love ought to be the guiding principle in the way we interact with one another.

Welch: That's amazing. I have the words of King Benjamin echoing in my mind right now. He asks, “Are we not all beggars?” And I'm hearing you ask a similar question. In a way, are we not all inmates? Are we not all the sisters there in the jail, imprisoned and captive by sin? But we have a liberator. We have a savior who came to set us free.

And not only that, but he shares with us his power and his love to minister to others and to do that work as well. So we find ourselves on both sides, on both sides of the bars.

Steele: Absolutely, and I think sometimes as members of the Church we can be a little bit tempted to imagine that we are really minimizing our contribution to the atoning sacrifice because we're trying to check all these boxes and do all the good things and of course we should do those things. But we don't earn our salvation and we don't, all of us ultimately need the Savior's atoning sacrifice. I don't say that as, so now we're free to sin, it's just that we shouldn't overestimate our contribution to our own salvation. That we have, each of us individually, has need of an infinite and eternal sacrifice, and so does everybody else.

Welch: I was really affected by Professor Steele’s description of the time she has spent with incarcerated sisters--the isolation they feel, and their hunger for connection and encouragement. It reminds me of the time that the Prophet Joseph spent unjustly imprisoned in Liberty Jail. During that time he wrote a letter to his wife Emma saying, “I feel like Joseph in Egypt: doth my friends yet live? If they live, do they remember me? have they regard for me? if so let me know it in time of trouble”

The scripture from 2 Corinthians 12 that Michalyn and I discussed earlier--about God’s grace being sufficient-- is closely related to a scripture from the Book of Mormon, Ether 12:26. But in this verse it’s the Lord himself who is speaking. For me, that makes it even more powerful. Jesus is speaking to Moroni about his fears and loneliness--but he is also speaking to the Prophet Joseph in Liberty Jail, and to the sisters in the Utah County jail, he says: “My grace is sufficient for the meek. If men come unto me, I will show them their weakness. I give you weakness so that you may be humble, and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me. For if they humble themselves before me and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them."

In the second half of the show, Professor Steele shares some personal history about her great-grandmothers, who were converts to the Church from the Seneca nation in western New York. She’s got great stories about their conversion and their testimonies of the Book of Mormon. And she shares some ideas about how to get started “getting proximate”--which is often the hardest part.

Well, shifting gears a minute here, Michalyn, you wrote a wonderful essay for a book that the Maxwell Institute published this year, Every Needful Thing. And it's a compilation of essays by Latter-day Saint Women scholars in every conceivable field and from every conceivable continent and country around the world. It's really amazing just to read the table of contents and see how many of our sisters are doing amazing work as Latter-day Saint scholars in different fields.

But your essay in that volume is titled Our Inescapable Connectedness. And I love it because you share the stories of your great grandparents, if I have that right, your great grandparents, Florence Huff and William Parker. They had incredible lives and incredible stories. Will you share with us a little bit about their lives and how their legacy has influenced you.

Steele: So I'm a member of the Seneca Nation. Our tribal territories are in western New York. In the 1940s, missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints went to the reservation and they really found a little handful of people, and among them were my two great grandmothers who were already, I think, grandmothers in their own right in the 1940s. One of them was Florence Huff, my grandmother’s mother, and a woman named Nina Tallchief, who was my grandfather's mother. And so both my paternal and maternal great-grandmothers joined the church.

Eventually, my grandmother also joined the church and my mother was baptized, I think, when she was about 10 years old, something like that, in her family. So she was raised in the small congregation there on the reservation. But that congregation's start, its heart, were these two women. And when I tell in the essay the story of Florence Huff, I knew her well because she lived to be 106. And so I had a lot of opportunities to talk with her and spend time with her and hear about her life. She lost, she had a first family, a husband and two little girls. It seems to me they passed away as part of the flu epidemic in the 1910s and she was obviously devastated by that. Eventually she met William Parker and married and they had, gosh, I think six or seven children, among them my grandmother.

And my great grandmother, we called her Grandma Parker, her Florence Huff Parker. She told me that the pain from losing her children, her little girls and her husband, never went away until she started reading the Book of Mormon. When she started reading the Book of Mormon and she, I would go up to her room and find her when she was at least a hundred years old, I would find her reading the Book of Mormon. One of those great big, very large print Books of Mormon, with a magnifying glass. Her eyes dimmed, but her faith never did.

And she was one of those ladies who would get up early in a fast and testimony meeting to bear her testimony. And her faithfulness helped establish that congregation. There's stories about those two, I guess, getting elderly ladies baking pies and selling them on the reservation to be able to have enough money to contribute to build a chapel that stands there on the reservation and running interference when people opposed the church or didn't want a congregation located on the reservation. Those ladies and their husbands, the one never joined the church, Grandma Parker, her husband William Parker, was baptized when he was an old man. And my mother remembers seeing him as a deacon passing the sacrament. And he had a kind of palsy that his hand would shake as he was passing the sacrament, but he was a kind of an elderly deacon. He joined the church about a year before he died. She told me that she didn't want to pressure him. And there's a kind of a funny story that she would tell about, she would tell about, she would get his Sunday clothes ready every Sunday so that he could come to church if he wanted to.

And for many years he didn't. But she said she had received the counsel to not give up on him, and she had a kind of a funny way of talking. So we sometimes quote her of her philosophy was, don't bug him, which was kind of a funny, don't bug him. But so she didn't bug him, but she set a great example of what the church meant to her and her faithfulness, and he eventually did join the church.

When my grandparents brought some of their children out to BYU in the 50s, the two, they called them the grams, the two great-grandmas, they were my mother's grandparent, grandmothers, they came out to the Salt Lake Temple to have, to receive their endowment and participate in the temple ordinances. They drove out from New York and sitting in the back of a car, and I have a great legacy of faith from those faithful women and their love for the Book of Mormon and their love for the Savior.

Welch: Family history is so powerful. And when you tell these stories of your grandmothers, I can feel the love and I can see their strength in you. In our conversation today, Michalyn, I felt the brightness of their faith shining through your words. Tell me why you titled your essay Our Inescapable Connectedness. What conclusions did you draw or did you find in thinking about their stories and thinking more broadly about the way we're all connected as children of God?

Steele: So the title is drawn from an idea that Martin Luther King Jr. expressed in a way that I really respond to. I think it's an idea that is common in many cultures. I think we could find this same idea throughout the scriptures. But when he was imprisoned in Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr. was getting a lot of pushback from other ministers who said, why are you causing this trouble? Right? The time isn't right. You know, they were sort of fighting in Birmingham with Sheriff Bill Connor. This is the scenes where they are fire hosing the young people who are marching. They are doing so with peaceful nonviolence, not fighting back. But they also had a strategy to sort of fill the jails.

Being children, sort of unjust imprisonment. We go back to that idea. And he wrote a letter to his fellow ministers, the letter from Birmingham jail, in which he explains his sense of timing and his sense of purpose and says, we just can't wait. For essentially says the time is always right to do what's right. And he tries to say that essentially the injustices that were being visited on black people in the South through Jim Crow diminished the whole country. It was beneath us essentially as a nation. It was not living up to our ideals as embodied in the constitution and our other values.

And so he says that, in part of that letter, he says, we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. In other words, we prosper together, we fall together. He says, we are tied in a single garment of destiny, and I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. I love that idea. We're tied together, whether we like it or not.

We sometimes get a little ahead of ourselves with sort of, rugged American individualism. And he's asking us to say, look as Christians, we have to understand that we're all tied up together. I think that's a notion that we see in that Bryan Stevenson was talking about our web of hurt and brokenness. He's talking about an inescapable network of mutuality and we're tied in a single garment of destiny.

I've heard President Nelson talk about salvation as an individual matter and exaltation as a family matter. And I think what Dr. King is asking us to think about is to think of that idea of family as the human family, that we have responsibilities to one another more broadly. And that if we just look away when society is being unjust to our brothers and sisters, that's not catching the stones, we may not be the ones casting the stones, but it diminishes all of us.

Welch: Well, Michalyn, that is the perfect segue as we're getting ready to wrap up our conversation today. For those listeners who have been inspired by what you've shared about Just Mercy and Bryan Stevenson's career, or who have been inspired by your experiences ministering in the Utah County Jail, what practical advice would you have for them about how to get proximate?

I think a lot of us have the desire, but we may be held back by fears or by unfamiliarity. How can we break through those barriers and really get to work in the way that we want to?

Steele: I think the Lord is eager to direct us when we ask Him that question. How do I get proximate? It happened for me that the Utah County Jail was an opportunity that I think the Lord knew I needed, and I would feel the love for those sisters that I needed to see how much He loved them. I need to be the one to be in, in all those testimony meetings there where I understand how much he loves them and how inappropriate it is to judge based on people's, you know, I don't know, some of them were exposed to alcohol in the womb and some of them were neglected and abused as children, both their anatomy and their DNA and all those things that really, it is really inappropriate for any of us to judge other than the Lord.

So I think he will provide a very individualized answer to that question. I think the first practical step is to desire to be proximate. We live in a world that wants to drive us into our corners of separation and say, well, those aren't my people and those are my people, or, you know, especially by politics, by race, by whatever kind of tool that Satan would use to create division and contention.

I think the first step is to say, I'm not going to yield to that temptation. I'm not going to be divided from my brothers and sisters in that way. And we're all working on that. I include myself in trying to work on that of just a greater love. And then as a practical matter, what would the Lord have me do? Maybe it's getting proximate to people in your very ward, who are different from you.

Maybe it's accepting an assignment to minister to someone who you're like, well, they're old and I'm young or they're single and I'm married, or all the things that can potentially divide us to overcome those and get drawn near to our brothers and sisters in whatever their conditions. Find ways to serve. I know that is it the just serve? There's all ways to be more proactive in the community, the Lord may lead you to those kinds of opportunities. I think there's as many practical ways as there are people and the Lord knows each of your gifts. He knows what would be a good experience for you, how to utilize and develop your gifts, and I feel confident that he has in mind things that each of us could do to get more proximate, to show more love, if we will involve him in that process.

Welch: I love that. And I'll add my witness to that, that once my eyes were opened, once I asked the Lord to open my eyes, I saw there was no lack of opportunity. The opportunities to get proximate were all around me and it was just then left to me to go and do.

Steele: Absolutely.

Welch: Michalyn Steele, thank you so much for joining us today on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Steele: It's been a privilege and a pleasure. Thanks for having me.