Re-Release of Living Faith Lecture: Making Zion with Melissa Inouye

Rosalynde Welch: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute's channel. My name is Rosalynde Welch and today we have something really special to share with you. We have been mourning the loss of our beloved colleague, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye. Melissa was so much more than just a colleague, she was a friend. She was a mentor and she was an inspiration here to us at the Maxwell Institute. So today we are delighted to re-release her 2019 Living Faith lecture which she titled “Making Zion.”

Melissa delivered this lecture here at BYU in 2019, to celebrate the recent publication of her memoir, entitled Crossings. But if you listen carefully, you'll find in this lecture, the unmistakable seeds of her next book, which would be titled Sacred Struggle. Sacred Struggle was published last year in 2023 by desert book.

Just the week before she delivered this lecture, Melissa had learned that her cancer had returned. And so she was able and willing to speak with real vulnerability and urgency to the question of what matters most in this life. And what she told us is that the worst thing we can face is not injustice, it's not suffering. It's not even death. As consequential as those things can be. The worst thing the real tragedy, she taught us would be to live life in a way that requires no transformative struggle from ourselves. And that makes no difference for good in the lives of others. Melissa urged us to opt in to that transformative struggle to be faithful to God, to be faithful to each other, and to be faithful to our ideal of Zion. I hope that you'll be as lifted and as moved by Melissa's words in her lecture “Making Zion” as I was.

Spencer Fluman: Everyone, welcome. We're very, very happy to welcome you to this, Maxwell Institute's lecture guests lecture by Dr. Melissa Inouye. My name is Spencer Fluman and I'm the Executive Director of the Neal A Maxwell Institute here at BYU, and I'm very pleased to welcome all of you. We're going to have an opening prayer for this event. And that will be given by Dr. Denise Johnson, a research associate at the Maxwell Institute. And thereafter, I will introduce our speaker.

Janiece Johnson: Our Dear Heavenly Father, we are thankful for this day. We are thankful for the opportunity that we have to be here and to listen to Melissa. We are thankful of her example of discipleship and scholarship. We're thankful for her thoughtful perspective, and the great influence that she has for us. Please help us to consider her words today. And to recognize how thou would have us apply them in our lives and in our interactions with my daughters and my sons on this earth. We are thankful for the Maxwell Institute and the blessing that it is in our lives and we say these things name of Thy Son Jesus Christ, Amen.

Spencer Fluman: Yeah, it's my honor to introduce Dr. Inouye, today. She is the author of the most recent living faith book published by the Maxwell Institute called Crossings and I will read the entire subtitle because it deserves a full reading: A Bald Asian-American Latter-day Saint Woman's Scholars Ventures Through Life Death, Cancer and Motherhood, Not Necessarily in That Order.

Melissa comes to us as senior lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Auckland. She received her PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. Her book China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2019. She is a member of the advisory board for the Neal A. Maxwell Institute. We love and appreciate her voice in that capacity, and she is deeply committed to the mutually reinforcing relationship between faith and learning. She and her husband Joseph have four noisy and joyful children. Those are her words not mine, I think.

Botanically nicknamed Bean, Sprout, Leaf and Shoot. I will say on a personal level that Melissa is much younger than I am, but I count her among my most important teachers in my life. And we have great love for Dr. Inouye. So, will you help me welcome her? Thank you.

Melissa Inouye: Thank you very much to the Maxwell Institute for hosting me here today. And thank you very much for providing a very short podium, I really appreciate that. This is a problem. Sometimes I have to stand on my tippy toes for the whole talk. And it's very, very taxing.

So this is my mother. When I was I think a freshman in university and several months ago, I realized I was shocked that I had reached the age that my mother was when she sent me off to the university. And I couldn't believe it, I double and triple checked the math. I always thought my mother was so old. But she was just me. I can't believe I'm her now because I feel like I'm the same person. Now that I was when I was an undergraduate, I seek out free food. I sleep in public places. I always look for good public places to sleep. I'm always having to run to class because I'm late. And in a way this makes sense. Ever since I returned from my mission on to Taiwan, I've basically been studying or working on a university campus. So it's like never having to leave one's childhood playground. But now I realize I'm actually not as young and cool as I thought I was. Even though Spencer says I'm so much younger than him. I can't just assume I understand how university students are feeling and I have to work hard and to listen to find out what they're saying.

So about a year ago, I had a chat with a young woman who was deciding where to go to college. She had been accepted by a number of outstanding programs and universities around the country. She had a bright future ahead of her but she wasn't sure whether that future included ongoing practice in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She laid out all of her pressing questions. I took notes, I'm going to share an excerpt from what she said with regard to women's issues and LGBTQ issues within the church. And whatever your own position on these sensitive topics. Can I just ask you to listen gently? With an open mind accepting that these are her sincere, heartfelt questions. Don't worry about responding just see if you can hear her.

She said, How can I be a member of a church that doesn't treat women equally compared to men? And that asked LGBTQ people to never date, seek loving companionship, or marry and have children? Didn't Christ commanded us to treat others the way we would want to be treated? I've studied history, I understand how structural inequality works, and what it looks like. Currently, the church looks like just another of the many conservative religious institutions that are part of the long human history of patriarchy and discrimination. Sure, I like the idea of eternal families. But when the promise of eternal families comes with treating men and women differently, and denying LGBTQ people love and the opportunity to start their own families, people like many of my friends and me are inclined to say no thanks, that gender and sexuality issues are deal breakers.

She expressed these concerns with eloquence and passion. In addition to concerns about women's and LGBTQ issues, she also cited well documented instances of racism and abuse within a church context. As I listened, I could feel that these questions came from a place of integrity, a belief in the worth of each individual soul and her desire to follow the Savior's fearless example. She wasn't looking for an excuse to be a slacker, or to lead a dissipated life. She wanted to love others as Jesus loved, to stand for truth and righteousness, to bring as many people as possible into the gospel fold.

If you or someone you love, has, and respect has ever expressed any of these concerns that she raised, can you please raise your hand?

Okay.

I've been thinking about her questions for a long time. Many of them have long dwelt in my own heart. But I was struck by the way that she asked them as a 17 year old with fire in her eyes with a clear understanding of the tensions that they generated in her life and worldview and personal relationships. These concerns are pressing too many within the rising generations of Latter-day Saints. If not you yourself, then perhaps your loved one or your friend, but it's also pressing as a desire for action. Today it is common for people to boycott restaurants or corporations because of political views or social policies associated with them, or to hold the walkout as a form of protest. In such an environment, it can seem inexcusable to many to remain within an organization that excludes women from the chain of organizational leadership, or compels LGBTQ people to make excruciating choices to remain in full fellowship.

Or that has a history that includes racist teachings and policies, or that has a track record of cases of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

So now some of you are looking at me and wondering if she's going to excuse this and say, just focus on the positive, read your scriptures and pray. If she sees the contradictions, I see, how can she still be here? Or others are looking at me and wondering, Why is she so critical? If she sees contradictions in the church's structure, or policies or history? Why doesn't she just go somewhere else. And I want you to notice that both of these positions are closely related. They're based on the same premise that some things are deal breakers. Either the church is supposed to be true and good and falling short of truth and goodness breaks this deal. Or faithful church members are supposed to believe that the church is true and good, and pointing out ways in which we fall short breaks this deal.

I have many friends and family members who have left the church because they felt they couldn't reconcile their moral values with our policies and culture. I have many friends and family members who will never leave the church, because their past experiences have given them a sense of certainty. That wherever the Church and its leaders are at any given time is where they want to be and where others should be.

How we come to our worldviews depends heavily on our own personal experiences and the environments in which we live. My own position, the basic set of assumptions that shaped my faith and worldview is different from the two deal breaking positions I just described. My position is that life is full of messy contradictions and that sometimes working with them and within them is the most productive way forward. This worldview is based on my experience as a scholar, returned missionary, athlete, mother, and cancer patient. It is based on my family background, and my relationships with people in other places like Orange County, California, Taiwan, Auckland, and Ganesan, Utah. If you don't mind, in the remainder of this talk, I'll share this position with you with an understanding that even within the body of committed Latter-day Saints, there are diverse experiences, values and concerns. All of us indeed, no matter what our religious tradition, I live in a world that bewildering contradictions. So even if our worldviews don't completely align, I hope that one or two of my perspectives today may be useful to you in some way.

I first drafted, excuse me, I first drafted this talk on an early morning train from Bordeaux de Paris in March on my way back home from a scholarly conference. As I watched the sun come up over the barren fields and warm the cold earth three sentences pop into my head, that seemed to usefully triangulate my life philosophy at this point in time.

Here they are:

Death is not the worst thing.

Patriarchy is not the worst thing.

Baldness is not the worst thing. By baldness, I don't mean just having no hair. But I mean imperfections, loss, scars, damage and other conditions that we acquire as life takes its toll. I don't just mean things that are easily visible like wrinkles, but also things that come to us in life that make us feel less secure, less confident, less buoyant or hopeful.

Death, patriarchy, baldness. These three are symbols of the suffering, imbalance and indignity of the fallen world in which Latter-day Saints believe we chose to dwell. There are features of human experience in every place in time. Our Heavenly Parents did not rejoice in untimely death, or revel in unfairness or gleefully inflict damage on their beloved children.

But they have prepared us for a world in which the laws of nature take their course, in which imperfect individuals make assumptions and exercise agency in which accidents happen. The whole point of life is to encounter opposition, to learn to discern good and evil, and to exercise the divine nature within us by following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. Therefore, from this perspective, what is the worst thing?

The worst thing is to live life in a way that requires no transformative struggle from ourselves. And that makes no difference for good in the lives of others.

So, death, let's talk about death.

All of us are dying. Some of us will finish dying sooner others will finish dying later. I was first diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017, did a round of treatments went into remission. And last week was told by my doctors as a cancer was likely recurring. Therefore, I will be thrilled if I live to see my credit card expire on March 2023. Put that on your calendars. The reason I'm here on the BYU campus today is because I wrote a book about my life, which I began shortly after my diagnosis, because I wasn't very sure whether I would live long enough to talk to my young children about my faith. At that time, they were 11, nine, seven and five. This is not exactly the age for complex, nuanced discussions about the meaning of life.

The weeks between my diagnosis and my surgery were the darkest period of my life as I contemplated the possibility that my time for influencing my children and being with my husband was coming to an end.

During this time, the thought of death accompanied my every action. As they dropped a bunch of library books on robots into the library book return slot, or watches my stir fried green beans and onions with lemon and soy sauce disappeared the dinner table. I thought about the fleetingness of the many acts that constitute parenthood. In themselves, they are so completely and unmonumental. Sure you create the kid's body out of a single cell. So there's that. It proves you were there. But so many things, the new diapers, the milk from the breast, the words of stories, the trips to the museum, simply go in and out, in and out delivered in a race on the daily tide. And then they're gone. Leave me no visible marker that says your, “Mother was here, She loved you.” I wondered whether I live long enough my youngest child nicknamed the Shoot and sometimes the Burger to have one or two strong members of me, memories of me. Would he know what mama would say or what mama would do?

In addition to worrying about my kids, I also worried about myself. I knew what cancer could do because of my mother's experience. My mother was a gracious lively woman who small stature, concealed fierce determination and 2008 she passed away due to a rare cancer the bile duct. She had been in terrible pain for several months pain so terrible that the strongest opioids could only take off the edge but never take it away. The pain had made her unable to eat and unable to sleep. Her frame became skeletal and her face acquired a permanent pinched grim expression. I wondered, well, I suffer like that too? Will, I have to be brave like that?

Morbid thoughts flicker in and out of my daily conversations. A couple of colleagues asked me if I could advise a doctoral student coming next year. I responded CC-ing everyone, “No problem. As long as I'm still alive then.” Radio silence. I now realized that was an awkward and unprofessional thing to say. Cancer, there's a learning curve.

Let's talk about patriarchy, by which I mean a system of men officially in charge. Men at the forefront men as the primary objects, primary subjects, symbols, actors and authorities. Patriarchy has been the dominant modus operandi for most of humanity for 1000s of years. It is everywhere in government, in scholarship, in art, gourmet cooking, and the great Cathedral of Notre Dom, it is in the Buddhist female acuity sutra, the Hebrew Pentateuch, the Koran the Hindu Ramayana, the Pauline Epistles the Book of Mormon. It’s a feature of religious organization at the top levels of the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, Tibetan Buddhism, East Asian Buddhism, our church. It's an element of my family history on both my mother's and my father's side, my beloved family that I love that bands together with such fierce loyalty that is, in my eyes, the awesomest family in the world.

We have a famous story in the inner way family. My– Oh, wait, oh, is this supposed to go with? These are my children. Um, we have a famous story in the Inoue family. My grandparents Charles investing in a way were farmers in Gunnison, Utah, and their children spent all their time working on the farm. One day grandpa and his high school age sons were out digging in a ditch. My father remembers standing up to his knees and thick oozing mud. Clouds of mosquitoes were swarming around biting every exposed surface. Grandpa's timing was perfect. He said, “Boys if you don't get an education, you can look forward to this for the rest of your lives.” It made a deep impression. All of grandma and grandpa's children, boys and girls went on to college, most of them here at BYU and on to graduate or professional school. Two decided to go to school indefinitely, that is become university professors. One Charles Shiro Inouye, is a professor of Japanese literature at Tufts University in Boston. Another Dylan Kazuki Inouye was a professor of instructional Learning Technology here at BYU until he passed away in 2008. That day in a ditch grandpa, himself a graduate of Stanford University, wasn't saying that if you get an education, you'll never have to work or get dirty, or that one should always avoid digging ditches. I think he was saying that education gives people more power to choose which ditches they want to dig. Here we see grandpa in his field looking over his furrows.

Now today in my work as a professional scholar, I dig particular sorts of ditches. In my research on Chinese history and global religious movements. I plow through texts line by line, I delve into historical sources like newspapers, organizational records, and religious teachings. Seeking to uncover the lives of ordinary people in another place in time, I also step back to look for the big picture. When one looks for the big picture of all human experience everywhere, one finds it just as most people's eyes and brown and most people's hair is black, most people experience, most people's experience within familial and other social structures is shaped by patriarchy.

I know that there are some spaces in the world, such as indigenous cultures that are traditional matriarchal, or perhaps some corners of the internet, that are patriarchy free. By which I mean that in these spaces, patriarchal assumptions, actions and organization are entirely absent. However, in the spaces where I live my life such as all the universities I've ever taught at New Zealand society, American society, Chinese society, Christian religious traditions, social media networks, my beloved church and my beloved family's history are not patriarchy free. Though some spots are better than others, I would not escape patriarchy by quitting my job moving countries or leaving the church. Now to clarify by using the term patriarchy free, I am not seeking to trivialize the negative experiences of women and men who have been harmed by patriarchal practices and assumptions, especially women who have been ignored, abused or dominated. And also men whose assumptions that they were inherently more important than women led them to ignore, abuse or dominate women, thus harming their families and stunting their spiritual growth. I am saying that patriarchal systems are rooted throughout the worlds in which I want to live. And since I see no feasible way to opt out, I have decided instead to dig in to sharpen my shovel and get to work. The challenge of bringing to pass in my worlds the Book of Mormon teaching that all are like unto God is one of the ditches I have chosen to dig.

Baldness.

Regarding baldness, you might be wondering why I don't have hair. No, it's not because of the chemo. The major effect of chemo for me was that I felt the overwhelming urge to watch all of the British history related shows on Netflix. From all the seasons of Downton Abbey to documentaries on Henry the eighth's residence, including his velvet colored velvet covered toilet seat, which sounds so inadvisable. Anyway, until the age of 29, I had long, thick, black hair, until inexplicably, it just fell out. At first, it was really hard. I felt like everybody was looking at me. Employees in stores flight attendants on airplanes frequently called me sir, it was very humbling. I began to realize that I had no right to be prideful, or to judge people based on their appearance. I was after all the bald women in the room. I would definitely love to have hair again. But losing it taught me a lesson. I learned that loss makes us both vulnerable and strong. We lose things that are dear to us that make us beautiful or happy or whole. Sometimes this loss is readily apparent, but sometimes it isn't. Losing my hair was the first time in my adult life I remember really feeling dependent on the kindness and graciousness of others. I had always been a competitive person, a Harvard graduate, a marathoner, but now I felt vulnerable, dependent on others to be kind to me. This vulnerability helped me better understand and accept the vulnerability and others. In this way, as it says near the end of the Book of Mormon in Ether 12:27, “our weakness becomes a strength.”

So I've come to a sort of understanding with death, patriarchy and baldness, which is to say that I've come to accept and even appreciate appreciate the imperfection of human existence. We in the 21st century live in an age of extraordinary contradictions. Sometimes even when we clearly see the problem and the answer, we still can't get it together. For example, we clearly see that the planet's fragile living systems are groaning under the load of the pollutions we have released into our little lifeboat in space, and that these problems are harmful now, and catastrophic in the future. But we are very far away from doing what it takes to clean things up. We see that through accidents of birth and locality. A very privileged global few have access to health, wealth, power, learning, equity, respect, and elaborate standards of beauty. While the majority of God's children must struggle just to eat, drink, sleep, and rise for another day.

This is the world on my radar screen.

Its systems are deeply flawed and inequitable. It can be a place of crushing despair and pain. And yet it is also a place of beauty, love and hope. It is a place worth seeing clearly, in all its terrible and lovely contradictions. Similarly, the more I learn about our church history and our governing structures, the more clearly I see that the church as it’s currently constituted, has never been the best of all possible worlds. As Elder Uchtdorf says, “The restoration is ongoing.” At the same time, the more I think about the church today, the more clearly I see that it has something to offer me, and that the Latter-day Saints have something to offer the world. What I see the church offering me is the opportunity to learn to follow Christ, and participate in the redeeming and processes of error, repentance and growth. By engaging with my sisters and brothers in the Gospel. It is the opportunity to think globally, and act locally, to think locally and act globally. These networks of human bonds and collective action are as close at hand as my own home and neighborhood, and as far flung as the entire world. This is cool. We the Latter-day Saints are weird and small enough to really try to be sister and brother to each other and our diverse and often contradictory circumstances around the world. Now, I know that many of you may be about to leave on missions or recently returned from missions and you might be thinking, “We are weird and small! Yay!” Doesn't sound like a very exciting missionary message. You wouldn't exactly put that on a bumper sticker.

Yet when I study the life of Christ in the lives of the prophets and prophetesses, like Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Miriam, Deborah and Anna, what they all have in common is that they lived at the margins.

In the scriptural narrative, the conditions of risk, injustice or loss that shaped their lives and actions, contrasted with the lives of revered and powerful religious councils, kings, wealthy citizens, pharaohs, military men and people who had not time to truly serve God, because their full comfortable lives kept them busy.

Sometimes we Latter-day Saints forget about our weirdness and smallness to our detriment. The more stadiums we fill, the more wealthy and politically influential we become, the more time we spend at the center and the apex instead of the margins and the lowly places of our worlds, the greater the temptation for us to feel that life is a competition and that we are rising stars. To all of us who may sometimes find ourselves feeling that forgetting our find ourselves forgetting our weirdness and smallness. Please remember, the worst thing is to live life in a way that requires no transformative struggle from ourselves. And it makes no difference for good in the lives of others.

If we surround ourselves with only those who agree with us and admire us, creating an insular Latter-Day Saint land and forget that we are a tiny 0.02% minority of God's children. We risk creating an artificial environment in which contradiction, tension and discomfort are seen as foreign. This is like digging in a sandbox, where there just uniform grains of sand. It's easy and it's clean, and children like to do it. But it is not fertile soil and it does not hold water. By contrast, the native ecosystem that our Heavenly Mother and Father created for their children was meant to be muddy, full of diverse elements and micro organisms, and frequently a bit wretched.

This reminds me of something uncle Charles said to me in college, Uncle Charles that Ganesan farm boy, Professor, poet and Latter-day Saint told me in college, “Mormons are like manure, if you keep them up in a pile together, they just stink. But if you spread them around, they can do a lot of good.”

Now in the scriptures, Jesus didn't exactly say his disciples, disciples were manure, but he similarly use metaphors to describe things that are horrible and concentration, indispensable and dissolution. He said in Matthew 5:13, “You are the salt of the earth.” He said in Matthew 13:33, “The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven yeast, which a woman took and mixed and three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.”

As General Relief Society counselors Sharon Eubank taught in April General Conference, Jesus made great efforts to reach out to people outside the circle of social privilege and religious orthodoxy. She says, “Lepers, tax collectors, children, Galileans harlots, women, Pharisees, sinners, Samaritans, widows, Roman soldiers, adulterers, the ritually unclean. These associations made Christ vulnerable to criticism from the community of those who considered themselves righteous, proper and mainstream and eventually contribute to his death.”

Christ's pattern of deliberate marginality can also be seen in Matthew 18:12, “If a man have one hundred sheep and one of them be gone astray, did he not leave the ninety and nine and go into the mountains and seek that which is gone astray.” Note the shepherd doesn't stand at the edge of the big flock in the pasture meadow, shouting for the stray to get back into the fold now or else! The shepherd leaves the meadow and goes into the mountains. Christ’s deliberate marginality, confidence that real people were more important to God than ritual purity, and emphasis on the sufficiency of loving God and loving others come together to form a pattern. In this pattern, Christ frequently teaches us to take the path of greatest resistance, therefore, death, patriarchy, baldness, these are not the worst things. They are features of where I live, but they do not define me or my work because I dig the ditches of life.

In a similar manner, my faith is a Latter-day Saint is not defined entirely by our mistakes, our imbalance and our weakness. These surely exists because we are a living community of people seeking God together. My faith is a Latter-day Saints encompasses both the deep flaws and the deep beauty of such a collective endeavor.

Sometimes in life, whether we be Latter Day Saints or Catholics or Buddhists or Muslims, the earth shakes and splits open and throws us into the bottom of deep dark trenches that we would never choose to dig. We wonder how we will ever climb out. And this is how I currently feel. Just last just on Tuesday, actually, my doctors informed me that recent health symptoms indicated that my cancer is likely recurrent. It's a heavy burden to bear. Sometimes we wish we didn't have to be so darn strong. Sometimes we wish we didn't have to be so terribly inspiring.

For those of you who grow weary in the ditches and the trenches with a sickness or depression, or discrimination or abuse, or any number of things, it's true that life can be so hard. And together, we will share these burdens so they may be light in keeping with the sacred covenant we made when we chose to follow Jesus Christ. I know from my own experience, that God is mindful of us in our weakness and that the power of the sacred can break forth into our everyday experience and transform us.

And to my young fellow Latter Day Saints who are troubled by the ways in which our church institutions or culture sometimes fall short of our highest ideals. I say please consider your tremendous power to lead us where we need to go. You are the future of our church. You are who we may become. You may find that God will concentrate consecrate these struggles for your good and for ours. As a people, where would we be without fearless questions and a fierce will depress on design over bogs and rivers and mountains? There are real hazards to undertaking a messy spiritual journey and the company of so many others as Latter Day Saints do that for me. It is a rich life, a consequential life, a life worth living.

Thank you.