Maxwell Podcast Episode #144: A Spiritual Life in Literature, with Matthew Wickman

Welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. I'm Joseph Stuart. Spiritual experiences are famously transformative. They sometimes inspire dramatic effects of conversion and healing, of vision and new life direction. But even in their more quotidian forms, they expand our cognitive and emotional capacities, help cultivate virtues and intensify our feelings of closeness to God, others, and things we deem of ultimate importance. For Matthew Wickman, spiritual experience makes us feel more deeply alive and literature functions as a special medium for capturing the nuances of spiritual experience, helping us reflect more deeply on them and become more receptive to them. In Whitman's life experiences, which he reflects on in his new book from the Maxwell Institute’s Live In Faith series, Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor, literature has helped him to negotiate the complex relationship between spirituality, faith, and organized religion. He discusses all this by way of deeply personal experiences, theological reflection, and discussion of literary texts by Virginia Woolf, Denise Levertov, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christian Wyman, and more. Before we begin our conversation, could you please follow the Maxwell Institute on social media including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube under the handle @byumaxwell? Thanks for doing that. Let's dive into our conversation with Professor Wickman. 

Joseph Stuart: Matt Wickman, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Matthew Wickman: Thank you, Joey. It's good to be here.

Joseph Stuart: It is a blessing to have you here. We're here to discuss your book Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor, and let's start with the title of your book. The phrase “life to the whole being” comes from Parley P. Pratt. Can you tell us about why this phrase was significant and why you wanted it as the title of your memoir?

Matthew Wickman: Absolutely. Yeah. First of all, it may help to just read the quote here from Parley P. Pratt. Here's what he writes. He writes, “The gift of the Holy Ghost quickens all the intellectual faculties, increases in largest expanse and purifies all the natural passions and affections, and adapts them by the gift of wisdom to their lawful use. It inspires, develops, cultivates and matures all the fine tones, sympathies, joys, tastes, kindred feelings and affections of our nature. It inspires virtue, kindness, goodness, tenderness, gentleness and charity. It develops beauty of person, form, and features. It tends to help vigor, animation, and social feeling. It invigorates all the faculties of the physical and intellectual person. It strengthens and gives tone to the nerves in short, it is as it were, marrow to the bone, joy to the heart, light to the eyes, music to the ears, and life to the whole being.” I love that quote. In our Latter-day Saint religious culture we often speak about the spirit is what confirms truth, and what prompts us to know how to act well, like how to make decisions. So we speak about, in essence, what's true and what to do. But Parley P. Pratt’s definition is so much more encompassing, right? The Spirit quickens and opens our minds, it deepens our feelings that connects us to each other and to God, corresponds with modern neurocognitive research actually on the effects of spiritual experience, right? That it awakens our memories, energizes our imaginations, gives us courage to make larger decisions, and so much more. So life to the whole being is how Pratt concludes that thought and that phrase, it seemed to me was the best most fitting title for the book.

Joseph Stuart: Well, thank you for sharing that. It also brings into mind that as a Latter-day Saint missionary when I was trying to help folks to recognize the spirit in their lives, looking back I think I taught it far too simply, I made it look like it was a process, like it was sort of like Amazon Prime, where it's like, well, if you pray about the Book of Mormon, in two days, you'll receive your spiritual answer. In the book you talk about spiritual experience, not only as a single event, but as a complex web of events. Could you tell us more about what you mean by spiritual complexity?

Matthew Wickman: Yeah, complexity. So what I'm talking about with complexity is the kind of experience with which I became familiar really, as a missionary Joey, and then especially well further on in my 20s, into my 30s, and still today in my 50s actually. But it's the coexistence of cognitively dissonant realities. Okay. So, for example, a very real experience of God's love for us, but also a very real experience of pain, God's kindness alongside our misfortunes, ongoing revelation to the church and to us personally, alongside an abundance of never ending unanswered questions. God's responsiveness to our prayers, alongside long stretches of his apparent silence, certainly no brother to some prayers we offer. Complexity, to me is what holds these disparate realities together and says, you don't experience one and then the other. Usually you experience some version of both at the same time and in my experience, spiritual life is not absolved from complexity, but if anything gets more deeply attuned to complexity, even immersed in complexity.

Joseph Stuart: That's a good way of thinking about it. In some ways, we can see our lives linearly in the ways that domino's cascade one to another. But I think in reality, their Rube Goldberg machines where we aren't necessarily sure how we're getting to the end result of what the machine is trying to produce. Rather, it's complicated and nonlinear nature. Its less efficient nature, you might say, is something that brings us into recognizing the complexity of everything that comes to having a spiritual experience.

Matthew Wickman: That's well said, Joey, I agree with that. That's it. That's right. And it's not— I loved your Amazon Prime analogy. I thought that was very clever. In my experience, God does not use Amazon Prime.

Joseph Stuart: Well, I think that talking about complexity also leads us to talking about literature. As much as when we're learning to read and we love reading, See Spot Run, or Clifford the Big Red Dog, or as we continue onward, and leading in reading more and more complex books, we understand that the world isn't always as straightforward as it could be. It doesn't matter if you know how the book is going to end, you still want to know what is going to happen. For instance, with my daughter, I'm reading The Hobbit right now. And she knows that there is going to be Lord of the Rings and that Bilbo survives, but she doesn't totally know what's going to happen to him next. It reminded me of this because in the introduction, you say that, “Literature responds as almost nothing else can to the variety and richness, the depth, the mystery, the meaning of our lives. When it registers the pulsations of spiritual things, literature becomes the special instrument of a more divine language.” Could you speak to that point, because literature it seems in and feel free to push back on this, in your mind literature isn't just good books. It's about the changes that it makes within us and how it helps us to see the world.

Matthew Wickman: I agree wholeheartedly. I read a line recently by a 20th century Scottish poet named Edwin Morgan. And it gets to this question. Morgan says, “Pythias poets do.” That literature is half words, and half life. And that gets at how to invoke literature in a book. It takes two parts, half words first. Half words to me means using the best words, the words that we need to use if we're going to capture and articulate something of the nature of spiritual experience. People say, I think they're right, I say it too that you can't ever quite articulate what a spiritual experience was, the feeling of it, it can be overpowering, it can escape our powers to express it fully. But that description is also kind of a cheap cop out in a way. Literature represents the best possible use of words to express some other things, spiritual things in poetry and narrative and drama. The best words to get as close to being able to contemplate the nature of our own and others spiritual experiences, and to give readers a feel for the nature of such experiences. So in the class, I teach literature and spiritual experience, for example, students and I read poems and stories and novels that try to put their finger on spiritual experience that often do so very powerfully. That’s the half words part. Half life, literature is for me more than a way of using language. It's also a way of relating to life. The scholar in me has always been fascinated with the story, the history of how literature emerged in its modern form as imaginative writing and emergence that roughly coincides with the emergence of modern science and the 18th century. Science in the modern world became the domain of factual truth, right? Empirical truth, reality, the best we can get our minds around and prove it. Literature, meanwhile, became the domain not a fact but of meaning. Not as much of empirical reality, but of endless possibility of unmet needs, we convert into dreams and also have, for me at least, of all this possible to God, if not us, at least, not yet. So literature in this book represents a way to engage and describe spiritual experience. But it's also a way to turn our minds to aroma to bind possibility, a way of relating to the world meaningfully and not just factually, of being open what we don't yet know, turning our attention to all of this possible, but not actual, and short of living with what is deeply true, but not reductively provable.

Joseph Stuart: I think that's a really great way of putting it. I'm also thinking, I love that quote about halfwords and half life, because it helps me to think I was, just while you were speaking, thinking about experiences that I've had with reading. And it's one thing to say, I was reading Anna Karenina, and I had this experience knowing something that I should do. That's words I can put on a page. But as I was transported back to where I was reading that book, I remember how I felt. I remember the sunshine coming in through the window. I remember all these sorts of sensory experiences that go with it. So I really appreciate you bringing that out to us. Along with literature, you write in the book that your mission opened your mind in ways nothing else could. That for that reason, it complicated everything. And I think for a lot of folks who have served missions, they'll identify with that. Could you say more about how your mission complicated your life?

Matthew Wickman: You bet. I was a missionary in France and Switzerland. It was a French speaking mission, and I would often find myself confronting the challenge of having things I wanted to try to say that I couldn't quite manage in a language other than my own. You know, what I wanted to say was always a little beyond my power of expression. Well, by the same token, I became familiar as a missionary with the experience of having really feeling as though God would very kindly reveal things to me, small, but important things about the gospel with my testimony, or what maybe God saw in me or in other people, you know, the process of revelation of inspiration. And yet, what was revealed to me always carried with at the suggestion of so much more that God might reveal that his thoughts were that a little or a lot beyond mine, right? So that language barrier, French. Speaking French meant that what I wanted to say was always a bit beyond my power of expression. But the revelation barrier meant that what might be understood was always a little more than I could comprehend. There was always more that God might say. So with every trace of what God revealed, there was a whole host of things I felt I wasn't getting also. And that revealed to me the limitations of my own understanding, even spiritually. Deep convictions, but those convictions weren't the same thing as full understanding. if I could, there's a passage in the book that I would like to read just on this example, the kinds of confounding thoughts that came to me on occasion when I was a missionary. “I would often reflect on the day when a branch mission leader had arranged for a local radio station to interview my mission companion and me. The station was near the center of town, Christmas was almost upon us and as we drove away after the interview, I gazed out over holiday shoppers and made a brief calculation. What if the Mission President brought all twittered missionaries scattered through central and southeastern France into the smallish city? What if our mission reached his baptismal goal for the year, something like 200 convert baptisms, and all the new members lived in this one city? In place of a branch, the city would have a thriving ward. But that ward would still represent a small minority of the local citizens, even tinier portion of the inhabitants of the region, and an infinitesimal fraction of the people in my huge mission area. What then to key doctrines of the restored gospel like the Plan of Salvation, or Christ's sacrifice, or ordinances and covenants, principles, good living, and so on mean, relative to the mass of humanity? If God was God of the whole earth and if the restoration was central to his plan, why did the things that supposedly matter most count, literally count, are so little? A few needles scattered randomly among an endless field of haystacks?” To me, those kinds of thoughts would never have occurred to me without that mission experience and the distress I felt that that was not a distress, I felt God felt. So I knew I couldn't wrap my head around these very big things occurring to me. That's what I mean by my mission complicated things, for the better. But yeah, a complicated life.

Joseph Stuart: One question that goes with that, is that you're also having these experiences, you're understanding the complexity of God's plan for each of us, you're seeing the depth of God's love. But if your mission was anything like most people's missions, you're also facing a lot of rejection at the same time. Did that complicate how you were learning these lessons that God was presenting to you?

Matthew Wickman: Oh, yeah, no, I, one of the recurring phrases in the book is the French word for not interested. Non monsieur, pas intéressé” I heard that Joey. I was traumatized by that phrase for so long. I'm working through it in the book by bringing it up about two dozen times actually. Yeah, that rejection was a rude awakening, and a really important awakening. I mean, it was a reminder that the world was not going to conform to my sense of what it should do. People have their own lives to live, and that God has his own plan and his own timing, you know, and that my job was just to play a very small part in trying to do what I could to represent the church well, and to carry the message to a few people. I tried to do that well, and then to be observant, and to see and try to learn about how God worked with others, beyond my powers to perceive it in the present. What did it mean for God to be present in a world where people weren't necessarily believers as I was, that that became the thing that drove me into higher education at my mission. That question.

Joseph Stuart: We are discussing Matt Whitman's new book from the Living Faith series of the Maxwell Institute entitled, Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor. Now, after returning home from your mission, you ultimately pursue an education and a graduate education. And I'm still quoting from the introduction here that you say, “My academic life has long been a spiritual workshop, a place where I feel God has helped shape not just my scholarship, but my character.” What do you mean by that?

Matthew Wickman:One of the real blessings of my mission was that it taught me to rely on God. Not that I always heard God correctly or heard and well or not that God could work with someone so incapable as I. But it did teach me a dependence on God. And I didn't lose that when I got back from my mission. So when I was a graduate student, a young professor reading these very heavy things way beyond my own capacity, I had the habit still of approaching God in prayer and saying, ask me for help get my mind around these things, to know what to do with them, to have ways to understand them, and then to think through them and to write about them in ways that were compelling. And I always felt as though God responded to my prayer, not that he gave me the same intelligence that some people had, or the same ability to sort of write about things that some others had but, but expanded my abilities and my capacities. But that in doing that, I felt that it made me more open to whatever God might think. And not just to what I might want from God, it became not such a transactional relationship, Dear Heavenly Father, please give me this. Thanks. Now I'm done and off I go, but it made me more responsive to things that God also felt were important. So when I faced years of real crises, you know, meaning disappointment, disillusionment, and my faith, figuring out what end was up and what I you know, what it meant to be a Latter-day Saint, and what I felt about things. I felt I was much more inclined to try to respect things that I felt were important to God because God had been so kind to me, and answering my questions and meeting my needs. So it made me less quick to judge things I didn't like, made me quicker to honor things that God felt were important and I always felt that in my mind, I could hear things that church I didn't like, or that drove me crazy but it didn't feel that God was driven crazy by them, that there was a sense phrase used in the book as the phrase “gentle irony” that there was a gentle irony about God and that irony meant, he might not think of things that I would say in a church meeting or that others might say, but but there was a gentleness about that, a love about that, a willingness to work with people through that. And that became, therefore, really important to how I held on to my faith. So my studies and my relationship with God to help me get my head around philosophy and literature became also a tutorial on how to hold on at church.

Joseph Stuart: It's a great way of putting it, I had a friend who was learning more about the gospel and we went to a priesthood session of General Conference together, and President Monson wiggled his ears during his sermon. Yeah, and I remember being mortified thinking, “Oh, my goodness, how is this person going to receive a testimony that he's the Prophet? Is this something that we're going to have to explain?” Essentially anticipating every single thing that could have gone wrong. And my friend named Tom came up to us after and said, “Did you see that he wiggled his ears?” “Yeah, we did.” And he said, “He's just a normal guy trying to do the best he can and I think that means that I can be a normal guy trying to do the best I can and be a member of the church.”

Matthew Wickman: That's great.

Joseph Stuart: And so again, just this thing of me wanting everything to go perfectly the way that I would have them go, wasn't actually what my friend needed to receive a witness that that he could be a good member of the church.

Matthew Wickman:That's great. Can I read one more passage from the book here? It's an experience that's an example of that kind of workshop. It's not academic, and this is more recent but this is from the beginning of the last chapter of the book, which relates an experience I had in prayer. “So one recent morning, I was reminded of a lesson I've learned over and over, I'd gone to bed the previous night, brooding over the faith crisis of a loved one. My brooding was inspired by the reminder of a note this person had written two years earlier, expressing concern that try as she might, she had not been able to feel the closeness to the spirit to which she'd grown accustomed, she was reaching out asking to others fast, with her pray with her, and for her, that they help her try to recover her spiritual equilibrium. As it turns out, she'd not be able to do so. It had been a rough two years. The memory of this sequence of events sent me to sleep in a somber mood, something I carried into the next morning when I rose and began my routine, exercise, shower, read the scriptures. At its conclusion, I knelt to pray preceding directly to the questions I had carried as the previous night and to some extent, for the previous two years. Why? Why her? Where was God when she reached for him? How could this happen? As the questions unfolded one by one I could feel the veil separating me from Heaven grow coarser, heavier, turning from something like fabric into a denser and more solid substance, a kind of thick, low ceiling. My heart, which was hurting, grew cold. I began to feel my prayers as an echo rattling around in my head. I knew what this meant, this stupor of thought, I would have no answer to this question, once again, no answer, not posed in this way. I also knew though I learned this need not be the last word. So I shifted my thoughts, adjusted more than my attitude, almost the angle of prayer which I approached God. And it began again with different questions. Who was she in God's eyes? And what could I do to help? Once that thick, impenetrable substance separating me from Heaven began to attenuate growth, thin, almost flutter in a breeze of inspiration, the spirit gently rushing through me with words, images, feelings, God was not despairing, all seemed well, or, if not entirely well, then certainly better and more hopeful than how I saw things. This incident reminded me again, that spiritual experience is not only about asking and receiving, it's rarely a simple game of question and answer. Instead, there's usually something kinetic about it that requires us to move, shift our minds, find new questions, and take virtual steps in God's direction. Once we are in that different place, and from that vantage point, God may provide answers. But he almost always shows us something else too, something we could not have seen if we kept ourselves fixed in our previous place. Spiritual experiences move us but often only after we move in their direction, move in Heaven's direction. That's also how they're able to help change us. Open us to a degree we are changing, opening already.”

Joseph Stuart: Thank you for sharing that. You go on and this is something that I think is very important too, that in this spiritual memoir, it's not all peaks. It's not all these realizations of God's love and acceptance of God's plan and recognizing that God is pleased with your progress or with others' progress. But you also talked about living in divine shadow or about the gaps that we face not only as Latter-day Saints, but as human beings. Living with disappointment, living with other negative emotion and in chapter six, a chapter on gaps, you discuss Anya Krugovoy Silver's poem, Pedals. Could you read that for us?

Matthew Wickman: Yeah, love to. It's a great poem. Pedals, “On the corner of Cherry Street and Vine. The dump truck operator notices my son and me watching from the sidewalk, invites us to climb in the cab for a ride. My four year old helps push the levers up and down, observing how the shovel digs up dirt and rocks, metal teeth, grinding the hard red earth, widening and deepening the hole. My daughter passed when she was about your son's age, the man says suddenly. Leukemia, a fighter. They have the same light brown hair.’Then he changes the subject, points out the pedals. One pedal makes the truck move forward. And the other makes it stop.”

Joseph Stuart: That's a beautiful but very heavy, Paul. Yeah, it is many of the emotions I can't even describe, they feel unspeakable. What value do you find in the inability to express emotion the unspoken or are the gaps as he described that?

Matthew Wickman:I find that poem to be a poem of deep ironies, right? Discrepancies between what's on the surface, and what's on underneath. On the surface it's a poem about a mom taking her son, you know, to look at the dump truck and then they get in the truck because the truck rider says come on up here and it's all about childcare. It reminds me of when my daughters were young. But then underneath it, there are more somber realities. The truck operator, he's had a daughter who's died. The poet, Anya Krugovoy Silver was at the time she wrote this facing cancer and fighting cancer, and was kind of staring down her own very possibly terminal illness and in fact when we read the book, we realize that she died the year after the volume was published. So in the poet's case, it's a poem about all of these really awful dark ironies that reside just beneath the surface of life. For me, the poem speaks to how really for many of us, we recognize that we only see in part. That we see surfaces and not depths and that this absence of vision can be both a blessing and a curse. Right? We often don't see the misfortunes destined to befall us around the corner. That's a good thing. But we also, we don't see an end to our trials, we don't see answers to our questions. For me, literature reveals these kinds of gaps. It pauses in these gaps. It lights on some of life's most intense situations and says, pause right here. Look right here. Pay attention to this right here. It makes us more attentive to life and when you attend to life in that way, you see these gaps, things that you didn't recognize at first glance, but then reveal themselves in their depth underneath you, or you see that you don't see entirely. To me, that's what the poem petals brings so vividly into view.

Joseph Stuart: You go on, and you reflect on the reality that in your life and in everyone's life, miracles don't always occur, those prayers for help aren't always answered at least in the way that we expect them to be. How did grappling with that, accepting that, change your life?

Matthew Wickman: First of all, I should say, I do think that miracles occur. In reality, I'm a big believer in them. I've been the beneficiary of them, of large and small, I'm extremely grateful for them. And I've been amazed at seeing how they occur in other people's lives also. I'm a huge fan of the idea of miracles, which is not to say that they're always there in the ways that I want, we're back to the non-transactional relationship with God here, right? You can't order, Joey —I hate to sort of drop this, you can't order a miracle and Amazon Prime. It's not coming.

Joseph Staurt: What am I paying for then?

Matthew Wickman: Right, you know, that question, you know, what do you do when miracles don't happen? It is really a coming of age question spiritually, you know, it is a question I grappled with a lot in my 20s. You know, when I saw friends facing all kinds of crises that I did not face, or when I faced crises that I didn't want these to be crises, you know, for me, you know, I had a brother die when I was very young, and he got a priesthood blessing and he was not life here, more mortality was not preserved, you know, griefs over the loss of a close friend in grad school. Friends of mine, you know, dealt with all kinds of challenges in life, physical and emotional, spiritual. I'm the parent of a daughter with chronic illnesses, that's been a real trial not yet fully resolved. I believe in deliverance, God's deliverance. But deliverance does not always happen in the ways that we like. In the book, I talk about this in a chapter that tries to capture the anger I felt, and that others that I knew felt, from their prayers not being answered, or miracles not being delivered to them. And I talk about the distance, the difference between the larger truth as God sees it, which is ultimately a redemptive reality and my experience, a truth which is much smaller, I call it rightness, and I couldn't reconcile God's great truth with my really narrow sense of rightness. Eventually, unable to reconcile them, I simply had to acquire the ability not to demand so much from God or from others, but to learn how to hopefully sit with others in their distress, sit in my own distress, try to be better listener, and to learn, ultimately, you know, whether I'm talking about troubles and relationships, or jobs, or parenting, or illness, or accident or circumstance or whatever, to learn how to wait on the Lord. This does not mean Joey, I'm very good at it. But this is what I've tried to learn how to do.

Joseph Stuart: Yeah, recognition doesn't mean acceptance or immediate positive association with having to wait right?

Matthew Wickman: No recognition, application, different things.

Joseph Stuart: I think that listeners will recognize as they've heard our conversation and as they read your book, that there's somewhat of an arc throughout the book, there are cycles to it. It's not just one narrative arc, but it continues to go back and forth. It's not necessarily linear. But after setting the groundwork for some key principles, like following spiritual promptings, or recognizing the value of your religious life, or finding answers, how literature can help capture our spiritual experience, you then descend into periods of your life associated with faith crises, yours or others. And then you come out on the other side and write a chapter about the wonder of spiritual things. So what does it mean for you to be filled with wonder?

Matthew Wickman:Yeah, I love the category of wonder. In the book, I set wonder kind of alongside two categories I found very useful for describing spiritual things. There are categories articulated by the philosopher Wesley Wildman who writes about spiritual experiences. And wildness, two categories one is the category of anomalousness or strange things, unusual things that occur as examples of like, near death experiences, alien abductions never had that would happen to me before, you know, psychic experiences, kind of the strange things begin to go “Wow, dude, how weird was that?” He said, anomalousness alongside ultimacy, right? And these are things that — experiences that touch the deepest core of who we are, things that kind of give us a sense of purpose in your life orientation, coping power. You think about it, most spiritual experiences have both these qualities; they're both unusual, but they also touch on things that are ultimate, like the first vision did not happen to Joseph Smith every day. It was an unusual anomalous experience, but utterly changed his life, changed the life of millions of believers, right? It was both anomalous, and it was ultimate. Or think of like the example from Mark 4, where Christ calms the seas. The disciples are kind of freaking out about maybe drowning. And here is Jesus slipping on the boat. He calms the sea. Is there, not only like, wow, we almost died, now we didn’t. It's kind of like, wait, who is this such that the wind and the waves obey him? Wonder to me is the feeling that captures both those things, the anomalous, and the ultimate. And usually in a moment of reflection after the fact. It signifies something vast and great that's happened, but also very intimate to us, very personal. It could be a big thing. It could be a small thing, but it's a thing where God has seemed to present in our lives in a way that we think, wow. And then how did that happen? And why did that happen? Most spiritual experiences to me, even the small ones have that kind of wondrous quality to them. I think, to feel God's presence in any way is to feel a sense of what is both vast and also deeply intimate or personal. There is always a sense of surprise there, surprise that God should attend to us in that way, or even attend to us at all. That's wonder to me.

Joseph Staurt: So thinking about that interpersonal nature, that intimacy of knowing another person or getting to know yourself, can you tell us about a gentleman named Jerry, who you met in your ward in 2012?

Matthew Wickman:Yeah, sure. Some listeners may have heard me tell this, I told the story in a BYU devotional talk I gave back in December 2020. So I'll tell it again here. Back in 2012, I was at a really important kind of life and career juncture. I'd taken a job overseas at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and I was teaching Scottish literature. So to get a job in Scotland doing Scottish Lit was like the dream job. And I had offered the job full time I'd taken at halftime, because I was worried about pulling my family out of the US and I love BYU. I wasn't sure when to leave it yet and et cetera, et cetera. You're going back and forth, six months, six months, six months, six months. And I'd made an arrangement at the university to come back to the US for 12 months, and then head back over there full time. I wasn't sure I was going to do that. But that's the arrangement I had made. And it was 2012. And I had to decide what we were doing. And I was praying to know what to do. Heavenly Father helped me to know, should I stay at BYU? Should I go over to Scotland? And I was getting nothing, Joey. It was just not what I wanted. And I would not get answers. And it was about this time that I met this man, Jerry, and the timing of the story is important. On the second to last Sunday in March, I was in my high priest group. So these days it’s Elders Quorum, and the high priest group leader gets up and he says, “Okay brethren, next week, a man is going to be here who has not been in our congregation or any for about 50 years. He's been away from the church that long, because when you see him, though, you'll recognize them, you know, please say hi.” And I thought, well, okay, you know, it'd be a very friendly group that will all say hi. The next week, he was there in priesthood meeting. And you know, everybody said hi to him, and he was just himself and I took to him immediately, not immediately. He was a really nice guy. I liked how he was dressed, kind of a good taste. He had a gotee, and I was envious. I wanted a gotee myself, but I can't. I'm at BYU, all this stuff. But I liked him. And after priesthood meeting was over, I went to the hallway for a second and the second meeting was Sunday School in that very same room. I went back into the room and Jerry was sitting there with a chair beside them. As I sat down, I introduced myself, said hi I’m Matt. Well the lesson gets going and Jerry had an old Bible, and it was on the Book of Mormon and I open the Scriptures up to Jacob so I could see what the passages were that we were reading as a Sunday school class, and the class ends, pleasant class, and everybody’s going, getting out to go to sacrament meeting. And Jerry's kind of sitting there slumped. And I thought, well, I wonder what happened. So I just sat there for a minute, people leave the room and I asked him, I say, “Hey, are you okay? Are you all right?” And he sits there. And then he looks up a little bit. He says, “That lesson went over my head. Everybody here knows so much about the gospel. I know so little about it. I feel like I should never have come back. I feel like I wasted my life.” And I am just suddenly just so struck like a thunderous, like, oh my gosh, I'm in someone's life crisis here. Here I was in the middle of my own little mini crisis. Where do I work? It was such a privilege question. I was asking my two great jobs, where do I work? Suddenly facing a real crisis, someone else was like, I didn't know what to say. And so I sat there and prayed, “Help me Heavenly Father, know what to say right now.” And suddenly a lightning flash Joey, this impression came to me. And I turned to Jerry and attacked his Bible. And I said, when you get home from church today, I want you to open to Matthew chapter 20. There's a parable in there about some laborers in a vineyard that, that the Lord calls some people the first part of the day, then others later and then later in the later and then some of the very last hour of the day, but at the end of the day he pays them all the same way. It doesn't matter when you started. It's whether you responded to the call, eventually. The Lord pays them all the same wage. Jerry says, “You know, okay, you know, I'll do that when I get home. Sure, I'll do that.” This is the last Sunday in March, the very next Sunday. Okay. When I said to Jerry, I said, when you're here the next time when you're at church, let me know what you thought. When you read that what you felt when you read that. Next Sunday, no church or buildings General Conference. And there was a talk that weekend that really struck me; it was Elder Holland’s and it was titled Laborers in the Vineyard. And at the very end of that talk, Elder Holland, and these are his words here, “I do not know who in this vast audience today may need to hear the message of forgiveness inherent in his parable. But however late you think you are, however many chances you think you have missed any mistakes you feel you've made, or talents you think you don't have, or whoever far from home and family and God you feel you've traveled, I testify that you have not traveled beyond the reach of divine love. It is not possible for you to sink lower than the infinite light of Christ's Atonement shines.” I was so hit by that I thought what does Jerry think? Well, the very next week, I see Jerry back at church and he sees me, he comes up and goes, “Hey, did you watch conference last week?” And I said, “As a matter of fact, I did.” He said, “Elder Holland spoke about that parable!” I said, “He did.” And that parable that talk so moved, Jerry. Jerry suddenly felt like he was seen by God. He became this great member of our ward, eventually was an assistant in high priests group leadership. He began going to temples all across the western United States. He was loved by everybody. He was such a great minister, and just carer for everybody. And that's Jerry. And as it turns out, few years later, I had a calling now in the presidency of my stake and Elder Holland’s ward was in mine and I had a chance to tell him about the impact his talk had made on Jerry. That to me was an instance of God's care for somebody and revelation when I needed it. And not when I didn't like to know about when I was whatever it was going to work, and when, and I learned that all later. But in the moment when it's most needed, there was for Jerry.

Joseph Staurt: I think that it really exemplifies the half words, half life sort of approach to literature as well. Whereas, the thought about the laborers in the vineyard I'm sure came to some listeners' minds. And it seems a natural place to say, Jerry, you're right. You don't have as much time in the vineyard as other people have had, but you're going to receive the same wages, the same blessings are available to you. But then the way that it hit him, I mean, elder Holland must have been preparing that talk for months. And it ultimately hits him that way, those webs of complexity, just to me show that God has a plan, right?

Matthew Wickman:They blow my mind. That right there for me is what wonder is all about, you know back to that. Wow. And then how? Like how did that all happen? And then, why? To me, that's a classic instance of wonder.

Joseph Stuart: Your concluding chapter affirms Christ as the ultimate answer to every spiritual question, every faith crisis, every difficulty that we may encounter, and in that context, you share a poem from R. S. Thomas called, The Answer. Could you read that for us?

Matthew Wickman:Yeah, I love this poem. It's my favorite poem about spiritual things. Here's what Thomas's poem The Answer, “Not darkness, but twilight, in which even the best of mines must make its way now. And slowly the questions occur, vague but formidable for all that we pass our hands over their surface like blind men, feeling for the mechanism that will swing them aside. They yield, but only to reform as new problems. And one does not even do that but towers immovable before us, is there no way other than thought of answering its challenge? There is an anticipation of it to the point of dying. There have been times when, after long on my knees in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled from my mind. And I have looked in and seen the old questions lie folded, and then a place by themselves like the piled grave clothes of love’s risen body.” That poem gives me chills whenever I read it. Yeah, it's a poem about faith crisis, about big questions which we never have the answers that we want and there are questions upon questions. This begins not darkness but twilight in which even the best of mines must make its way now. Twilight. We don't live in a time of utter light. There's a lot of darkness, a lot of concern, a lot of anxiety, a lot of worry, a lot of really big important questions, which we only sometimes have partial answers. And you know, we pass our hands, like blinded or the surface like Thomas says in the poem. But these questions sometimes yield, we get answers, but then new questions, always reform and he says, one, one question right, does not even do that but towers immovable before us. That's the ultimate question, you know, is God even there? Does God even exist? And I love how Thomas turns this poem at that point, with the example from John chapter 20, of where the disciples Peter and John return to the sepulcher in the morning when Mary Magdalene tells them that Christ's body is not there and they go there, they find the stone rolled back, and they look in and see not Christ present, but Christ absent. But that absence is the great paradox. God or Christ was absent, therefore, Christ lived. And I think so many of our most important answers to our questions take that form. They aren't answered directly. They're not answered as we would want. They often take the form of questions unanswered for a very long time until we reflect back and see that you know, what, a stone rolled from my mind, a lot of these old questions that I had, are really no longer my questions. Those questions have been answered slowly, surely, profoundly by God over process of time. And we never had a dramatic response. We never had the dramatic answer. But we find that the answer has been given to us and the conviction is there. The questions we had aren't there, that God lives and loves us. And therefore we're really, truly profoundly okay.

Joseph Stuart: Thank you for that, Matt. But how do you feel looking back, knowing the pain that you felt in the moment, the distress, the disappointment that you felt when you were going through something? How do you look back on it now, from the comfort of having received answers, eventually?

Matthew Wickman:I believe very much in waiting on the Lord. I've been blessed over and over, where I’ve managed to wait on the Lord. It does not mean that I have a great gift for waiting. And I have felt pain, I still feel it very acutely. But I'll go back to something I've talked about. Earlier in our conversation, Joey, which is learning from the time that I was young, to turn to the Lord in prayer, to ask questions, often not to find answers, but just to feel myself in the presence of the Spirit, to feel God's presence that way. I find that being able to sit in the presence of the Spirit just sit, no answer, or there is an answer given, it's not going to be necessarily the full answer to everything I want to know. But to sit in the presence of the Spirit is tremendously healing to me. It calms my heart, and my spirit, it soothes the pain that I feel it doesn't take it away. But it suggests that it can be taken away, and that God doesn't see my plight, the way that I see it, and that God sees it more hopefully, than I do, and that God has an answer where I don't. And that in its own right is an answer in the Thomas sense. It's aversion of having a witness born to me, even if not in the form of full understanding or full knowledge. That's how I've learned to deal best with pain. Seek God through prayer, seek the Spirit, just sit with it. And let those feelings that come in contemplation work on me, such that it can change how I'm hurting, and change how I'm thinking.

Joseph Stuart: The name of the book is Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor by Professor Matthew Wickman. Thanks for joining us today.

Matthew Wickman: My pleasure, Joey. Thank you.

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