A favorite verse in Isaiah reads: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9).

We usually read these verses in isolation, and we think we understand the gist: God works in mysterious ways, some of life’s questions don’t have clear-cut answers, yada yada.

But if we back up a bit and read the verse that immediately precedes it, we learn something powerful and profound about God’s nature. “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”

This is the sense in which God’s ways are not our ways. God is fundamentally merciful. He’s not scarce or stingy with his forgiveness. There’s nothing you could do that would make him love you any less. There’s nothing you can do that would even surprise him— he’s seen it all before. Whatever the cherry-picked clobber passages or shame-based theologies might try to tell you, God does not condemn you for your mistakes. His mercy is abundant.

We, on the other hand, are a different story. We live in a deeply unforgiving society. Our culture tends to view forgiveness as weakness. It sees mercy as a kind of moral complacency. In our online discourse, we join the latest social media pile-on when someone makes a public misstep. We rush to cancel those who fail to live up to our standards of orthodoxy. We see it as a sign of strength when political leaders refuse to ask forgiveness for even the most abhorrent behavior. We take secret pleasure when bad things happen to people we think are bad. And worst of all, we feel that in casting stones at others, we’re actually being righteous — “defending truth” or “standing up for what’s right” or whatever other pretty words we like to say to make ourselves feel better about being so uncharitable.

God’s ways are not our ways.

But we humans have a funny way of creating God in our own image. We find it hard to believe that God is really not as judgmental as we are. So we come up with all sorts of bad ideas about God — that he’s cold, or angry, or ashamed of us, or anxious to punish us. In maybe the most famous American sermon ever delivered, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 18th-century revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards paints the following picture: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire.”

Really, Edwards is just telling on himself. When we hate ourselves and hate other people, we project that hatred onto God and assume that he agrees with us. The apostle Paul, on the other hand, teaches: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19). In other words: God is already at peace with us. He’s already forgiven our sins. Now the ball is in our court.

Here and throughout the New Testament, Paul seems to suggest a truly universal notion of forgiveness. “By the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life” (Romans 5:18). Or in Colossians: “Having made peace through the blood of the cross, [God did] reconcile all things unto himself.” We don’t need to wonder if God will forgive us. It’s done. He has already done it. There is nothing you can do to earn his forgiveness. It has already been given. The ransom has been paid; the atonement has been performed; the sacrifice has been offered and accepted.

We waste precious time and energy agonizing about whether or not we’ve truly been forgiven for the sins we most regret. We feel that we have to be sufficiently obedient before God will extend his mercy to us. Sometimes we even make ourselves wait until we’ve “been good” for some arbitrary, self-imposed period of time before we dare to repent. We feel that unless we can prove to God that we’re worthy, our pleas for forgiveness might fall on deaf ears.

One of the more damaging misunderstandings of Book of Mormon theology has been our misreading of 2 Nephi 25:23: “It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.” It’s not a chronological sequence or a cause-and-effect statement. As Dieter Uchtdorf pointed out, “We must understand that ‘after’ does not equal ‘because.’ We are not saved ‘because’ of all that we can do. Have any of us done all that we can do?”

Additional research into the Book of Mormon’s nineteenth-century literary context shows that the phrase “after all [so and so] can do,” in the English of Joseph Smith’s day, was a commonly used idiom meaning “despite all a person can do” or “regardless of their best efforts.”

So the Book of Mormon rejects the idea that God’s grace operates from a position of scarcity, or that we can only receive it after we’ve been on our best behavior. His forgiveness is abundant and available whether or not we deserve it — and how could we ever really deserve it? Like the father of the prodigal son, God is not waiting to see if you’ll live up to some imagined standard before deciding whether or not to forgive you. At first sight of you, while you are “yet a great way off,” he runs to you, falls on your neck, and kisses you (Luke 15:20–24).

God does not struggle with forgiveness. We do. We are the ones who need to learn to forgive. Maybe this is what’s meant by the puzzling statement that “I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men” (D&C 64:10). At first glance, the verse seems to cast God’s universal forgiveness in doubt. But why would God hold himself to a lower standard of forgiveness than the rest of us? Perhaps this verse is suggesting that forgiving us just isn’t something God spends a whole lot of time worrying about. He’s already done it; now it’s our turn.

But if we accept that we’ve already been forgiven, wouldn’t we just stop trying to be good? Why not just lie and cheat and steal and hurt other people to get what we want? If God has already forgiven us, we might as well let our worst impulses run wild.

Not so fast.

The scriptures are clear that repentance is absolutely necessary for salvation. But I’m afraid that we’ve misunderstood why it’s necessary. We don’t repent in order to persuade God to let us into heaven. We repent because without inner transformation, we’re unlikely to want to be in heaven at all. Again, it’s not God’s forgiveness that we struggle to secure — it’s our own.¹ “The Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you” (Isaiah 59: 1–2). God’s willingness to forgive us isn’t diminished when we sin. His forgiveness is constant and non-negotiable. But our sins have the effect of making us so ashamed that we turn away from God and reject the mercy he has already offered us. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “hell is locked from the inside.”²

God doesn’t run from Adam and Eve when they partake of the fruit. In fact he goes looking for them, calling them by name. It’s Adam and Eve, not God, who are distressed by their sin. God takes it in stride, knowing that sin is a painful but necessary part of the plan. Adam and Eve, on the other hand, recoil away from God. “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:8–10).

Christ flips our notion of justice upside down. Ancient peoples sacrificed flesh to God, hoping he would eat and forgive. Christ offers his flesh to us, hoping we would eat and forgive. When we accept that offering, we can finally begin to accept ourselves.³

So now we move from God’s forgiveness to the much harder problem: our own. Jeffrey Holland gives some important caveats: “It is…important for some of you living in real anguish to note what [Christ] did not say. He did not say, ‘You are not allowed to feel true pain or real sorrow from the shattering experiences you have had at the hand of another.’ Nor did He say, ‘In order to forgive fully, you have to reenter a toxic relationship or return to an abusive, destructive circumstance.’ But notwithstanding even the most terrible offenses that might come to us, we can rise above our pain only when we put our feet onto the path of true healing.”

When Elder Holland calls forgiveness a form of healing, he invites us to think of sin and its effects as a kind of wound or illness. And since we all sin, that sickness is a shared experience. You’re not healed by denying treatment to another, and you don’t get any better by pretending you’re not sick. You and your worst enemy are far more alike than you care to admit. Maybe the first step in healing is acknowledging that you need it just as much as the next guy. After all, “He that is whole hath no need of a physician, but he that is sick” (Luke 5:31).⁴

I believe that for many of us, learning to forgive is a slow and gradual process. I won’t propose any quick fixes or easy solutions. But I can offer my belief that the atonement of Jesus Christ is the ultimate means to achieve complete forgiveness. How is this the case?

First and foremost, the Savior is able to offer us a power beyond our own ability. If the natural man, as we’ve discussed, is stubborn and unforgiving, then we need a truly supernatural power if we’re ever going to be able to forgive completely. I believe that this power is real; I don’t know how else to explain how people can find the strength to forgive the most egregious wrongs. I believe that when we need it the most, Jesus can impart to us a fragment of the infinite love and forgiveness that define his existence, enabling us to let go of even our most entrenched pain. I don’t know how this happens. I don’t think we can force it. But we can believe in it, and ask for it, and hold out hope that it will come. Truly we are saved by grace, beyond all we can do.

If this sounds a bit mystical, the Savior’s atonement also offers an eminently practical approach to forgiveness. Because in addition to providing us with grace, the suffering and death of Christ also serve as a blueprint or an instruction manual, teaching us how we can start the healing process. I’ll be the first to say I’ve got a long way to go in learning to forgive. But when I study the Savior’s example in the final moments of his life, I notice a couple of concrete steps that I can try to take as I navigate the murky waters of forgiveness.

Here’s one: when the Savior was on the cross, he prayed for his crucifiers. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). The Savior’s command to pray for your enemies has been the single most helpful step in my personal struggles to forgive others. When I practice asking God to bless those who have hurt me, I’m forced to replace thoughts of bitterness with generosity. I’m forced to see that person as a child of God who is every bit as valuable as I am. In my experience, nothing invites the free flow of the Holy Ghost into my heart quite like this simple Christian practice.

Here’s another: even when Jesus was being tortured, he ministered to other people. He ensured that his aging mother would be taken care of after his death (John 19:26–27). He helped ease the fears of the criminal being crucified alongside him, promising to meet him in paradise (Luke 23:43). When we serve other people, we invite the healing love of Christ into our lives. As we move to ease others’ pain, we often find that we forget our own, or at least that the burden feels a little bit lighter.

Jesus went even further in the Garden of Gethsemane. When Peter cut off the ear of the servant to the high priest, Christ instantly healed him — a man who would have him captured and killed (Luke 22:50–51). Sometimes the most healing thing we can do is reach out to our offender and show them kindness. Obviously, individual circumstances will vary — we are not asked to enable abusive behavior or subject ourselves to constant revictimization. But many grudges persist simply because both parties are waiting for the other to make a move. Treating our enemies with charity is a subversive way to reclaim our own power. We refuse to let another person’s actions limit our happiness. We accept that we are strong enough to move forward in kindness.

If the proactive approach is inappropriate, we can at least refuse to return fire for fire. If the situation requires it, we may choose to adopt Christ’s stance before Pilate and the chief priests: dignified silence and peaceful non-engagement (Matthew 27: 11–14).

Finally, we can follow the Savior’s lead by practicing empathy. This might be the hardest one of all. Alma teaches that in suffering for us, Christ took upon himself our pains and infirmities (Alma 7:11–12). He somehow entered into our place and allowed himself to see and feel the totality of our experience. Christ forgives us because he sees the full picture. He understands the reasons we act the way we do, how our life history and unchosen circumstances and biological predispositions and past traumas all work to shape our behavior. He is equally familiar with our badness as with our goodness. He knows, from firsthand experience, what it is to be you and why you hurt and how you hurt. And so he is “moved with compassion” toward you (Matthew 9:36).

In a sense, the atonement is radically, uncomfortably intrusive. There is not an inch of your soul that Christ hasn’t seen in up-close, perfect, 20/20 vision, including the parts you most despise. And he loves you anyway. In fact he loves you for all that you are. When you truly grasp that shocking truth, you can never be the same again. When you accept that you are accepted, you feel moved to extend that same grace to your brothers and sisters. The least you can do is feel a fraction of the empathy that Christ has already felt for you — because everyone else is hurting too, and Christ loves them just as much as he loves you.⁵

At the close of the Civil War, American poet Walt Whitman composed a set of poems based on his interactions with wounded soldiers. Some scholars see evidence that the narrator of the following poem is an African American soldier tasked with disposing the bodies of the dead on the battlefield. I hope we can see ourselves through his eyes. We are all, in a sense, wounded soldiers, fighting endless battles, committing fratricide, forgetting our true relationship to each other. And yet we have within us the capacity to forgive. It’s a powerful and haunting image of what is ultimately possible in our nation, in our communities, and in our souls when we give way to the Savior’s grace.

WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world:
…For my enemy is dead — a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin — I draw near;
I bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

It’s my testimony that the Savior can breathe into our dead bones and dead relationships new life; that he can wash the hatred and bitterness out of our soiled hearts; that he can give us eyes to see one another, and ourselves, as we really are.

Additional Sources:

¹Eugene England, “That They Might Not Suffer: The Gift of Atonement,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1, no. 3 (August, 1966): 141–55

²C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (Harper, 2002), 626.

³Richard Rohr, “Why Did Jesus Die?” in The Universal Christ (Convergent Books, 2021), 139–58

⁴Fiona and Terryl Givens, “Sin: From Guilt to Woundedness,” in All Things New, (Faith Matters Publishing, 2020), 103–11

⁵Paul Tillich, “You Are Accepted,” in The Shaking of the Foundations (Wipf and Stock Publisher, 2012), 153–63

In the October 2021 general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, church president Russell M. Nelson announced the reconstruction of the Provo Utah Temple. Out of reverence for its most sacred spaces, the church occasionally refurbishes the interior design of its aging temples. Recently, it has undergone extensive efforts to secure the structural integrity of its most vulnerable temples against earthquakes or other natural disasters. I welcomed the news that the Provo Temple would be treated with a similar degree of respect and care.

A month later, the church released renderings for its newly imagined temple design. Rather than simply update the temple’s foundation or interior, this new proposal would apparently require the demolition of the current building, with a completely different temple constructed on the place of the former. As currently constituted, the Provo Temple represents one of the most unique and interesting architectural achievements in the history of the church. The proposed redesign, on the other hand, looks nearly indistinguishable from the other temples currently under construction in Utah.

The Provo Temple turns fifty years old today. In the half-century since its dedication, the temple has served thousands of Provo locals, Brigham Young University students, and missionaries at the church’s flagship training center. There is simply no other temple like it anywhere in the church. The Ogden Temple, designed as a sister temple to Provo, was similarly stripped of its distinctive character with its 2010 reconstruction. The loss of the Provo Temple would mark the final extinction of mid-century modernist temples in Utah. Its loss is a tragedy not only for Mormon architecture, but also for the countless believers whose lives have been touched by this sacred structure.

Experts suggest that a building is most vulnerable to demolition between the ages of twenty and fifty, during which time the public is more inclined to view its design as unfashionable or out-of-date. After fifty years, public attitudes shift to reflect an appreciation for the aesthetic and historical value of a piece of architecture. On its fiftieth birthday, it’s worth considering what the Provo Temple represents — historically, artistically, and spiritually — and why it’s worth preserving.

The Provo Temple is, by most accounts, a bit of an oddball. From its conception, the temple’s experimental design marked a radical departure from the stately neo-Gothic sanctuaries native to Salt Lake, Logan, St. George, and Manti. In the late 1950s, trailblazing church president David O. McKay commissioned architect Emil Fitzer to design a temple that would serve the needs of a dense Mormon community while also providing a model for new, smaller temples to be built across the world. Its interior design plan, now imitated in dozens of younger temples, was a pioneer in its time. Fitzer’s vision called for a central celestial room encircled by six instruction rooms, enabling the temple to operate at unprecedented capacity. The temple’s concern for functional, graceful simplicity and machine-like efficiency reflects not only the ethos of the Modernist style, but also that of an evolving church — a church with its sights set on global expansion in a restless contemporary society.

Its unique exterior, consisting of a broad base, a paneled drum, and a tiered fountain spire, has cemented the temple’s status as a Provo icon. It’s impossible to imagine the Provo skyline without this distinctive piece of architecture. Since the temple’s design forgoes the elaborate ornamentation of pioneer-era temples, it can be easy to miss the building’s many elegant details.

Arch patterns, expanding with each reiteration, adorn each panel of the temple like Russian nesting dolls — a modernist nod to the gothic arches of the past. This motif is then subtly mirrored in the spire above, itself a kind of nested arch. The final arch, it seems, is Squaw Peak, which constitutes the temple’s majestic backdrop. The horizontal repetition of this figure around the circumference of the drum, as well as its infinite vertical expansion, presents a thrilling visual rhythm. To me at least, it suggests the essential unity and interconnectedness of the human race, as well as its potential for eternal increase — a message, of course, which the temple’s rituals attempt to convey.

A sense of fluidity softens the geometry of the exterior, with the top end of each panel gently inflected like a wave and each level of the spire flowing into the other. The drum floats on a body of gold glass which reflects the skies and appears to change color depending on the intensity of the light. Everything about this temple seems to be pointing us heavenward: its quasi-pyramidal shape, its ever-expanding arch pattern and multi-tiered spire, the angel Moroni with his trumpet pointed to the sky, and even its location in the heart of Rock Canyon. It’s been suggested that the temple echoes ancient Egyptian architecture in which angular, layered temples were situated against the backdrop of dramatic cliffs, signifying grandeur and godhood.

The Provo Temple, then, is a monument of contradictions: geometric but flexible, concrete but fluid, alluding to something very old while trying something very new. No other temple better encapsulates the central contradiction of contemporary Christianity—the struggle to make sense of ancient ideas in a modern world, or the impulse to link a time-bound humanity with a timeless God.

Sometimes the temple is derided as resembling a birthday cake or a spaceship (as if either of those were bad things). Others see echoes of a lotus flower. The temple’s eccentricity is its own kind of gift. You, the viewer, have to decide what to make of it. Like the temple endowment, the architecture is a living symbol, demanding careful reflection while offering broad flexibility of interpretation. It may be the only temple which is also a sculpture.

Maybe the most poignant interpretation hearkens back to the Book of Exodus. Local tradition holds that the temple was meant to depict the presence of Jehovah with the camp of Israel. “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.” The spire, originally painted orange-gold, was thought to connote the pillar of fire, while the drum, floating on the reflected sky, was meant to represent the cloud. Yet again, the temple weaves a connecting thread between the ancient and the modern, reiterating the hope that God will lead His desert-dwelling people into a future land of promise.

The Provo Temple first welcomed me as a brand-new missionary, wet behind the ears but bursting with energy and conviction. And yet for all my sincerity, I couldn’t shake the feeling, just below the surface, that I had perched myself in a rather precarious position. I began my stay at the Missionary Training Center with the conviction that God had sent me to proclaim His message to a starving world. But as the weeks wore on, I started to sense that my rock-solid foundation was sandier than I cared to confess. I had a good story to tell, and I believed in it, but I had to admit that it sounded far-fetched. A farm boy prophet, a backwoods theophany, buried treasure and ministering angels and Christ Himself in upstate New York. Add to this the fact that I was nineteen years old, secretly gay, and would soon be telling this very American story on the frozen streets of Russia — and you’ll get a sense of the absurdity of it all.

If I was honest with myself, even the most basic elements of my belief were slippery. What did I even mean when I spoke of faith? Was I calling people to repentance or to social conformity? And why would God care so much that we dunk ourselves underwater and recite a set of magic words? More pressingly, why on earth would I, a clueless teenager from the sleepy cradle of suburbia, think myself so important and enlightened as to declare the definitive truth of the universe? I couldn’t even fry an egg.

It seemed like none of the other elders worried about things like that. I was sure, at least, that none of them felt the way I did about other guys. So when I headed to the Provo Temple on a cool Tuesday morning in mid-August, I did so with the nagging sense that I did not belong there, that my pronounced and embarrassing differences might render me incapable of communing with God. But I knew that I needed answers, and if God was going to speak to me then I had as good a right as any to hope for it in the temple.

The morning sky was a pale blue with shocking streaks of orange pink, as if God was up early trying out a new set of paintbrushes. The temple facade reflected the first warm rays of the rising sun, and the angel’s golden trumpet directed my vision up beyond the harsh cliffs of Squaw Peak toward something higher and farther and yet strikingly immediate.

An elderly couple, wrinkly and warm, welcomed me into the house of the Lord. I changed into simple white clothes and took my place in the instruction room. As the endowment ceremony unfolded itself, I began to struggle, alternately dozing off or questioning the purpose of all the choreography. I felt my mood begin to sour. It didn’t help that I had come to the temple on an empty stomach, hoping that a fast might make me more receptive to whatever I was trying to hear. My mission companion, seated alongside me, nodded along contentedly with the ceremony as if everything made obvious sense. As my frustration flared up, I whispered a silent, urgent prayer for patience and clarity. My mind began to settle. I breathed in slowly. Exhaled.

Crossing over into the celestial room, I felt the atmosphere change instantly. I might as well have been plunged into a deep pool of water. It was perfectly still, silent, almost icy — not cold, exactly, but hushed and suspended and crystalline. I chose a soft white armchair and sank into it. I couldn’t find it in me to start my prayer, so I just sat there and drank the silence. I was utterly afraid of what might happen, or what might not happen, but as I drank I felt the fear wash off of me. My skin felt sparkly and clean.

I bowed my head and closed my eyes and thought about that farm boy, whose story now seemed not so distant from my own. And I asked God if his story was true. I felt a burning. I drank it deeply.

I arose and nearly left the room, but something pulled me back. I reclined directly under an image of the resurrected Christ. I’m sure there were other people in the room, but I can’t recall a single soul in that space. I sat alone with Christ, face to face, drenched in perfect stillness. And I suddenly received an answer to a question that I had never dared to ask.

Imagine every one of your bones, your lungs and your vitals and each of your organs, and every drop of your blood — imagine all of it filled with light. Golden, and piercing, and radiant. Imagine it bouncing off the walls of every cell, flooding your veins, refracting wildly off your ribcage. Imagine if every breath you took filled you more deeply, your innards overflowing, the golden excess spilling out through your eyes and ears and nose.

It was something like that. A particle of pure Christian love. He broke off a piece and let me hold it for a while. And I knew instantly, and beyond question, that He knew me better than I did, and that He loved me anyway; that somewhere deep beyond layers of flesh and water, I was made up of that same golden element — glorious, dangerous, eternal. It was the answer that I never thought I needed, to a question I was terrified to ask. And in the years since, other questions have come and gone, and some have never left and probably never will. All of them whither and disintegrate in the blistering light of that one great communication.

Part of the problem with the Provo Temple is that it doesn’t fit neatly into any of our comfortable categories. It’s not old enough to be revered as a relic of pioneer history. It’s not new enough to reflect the church’s most recent aesthetic trends. And since its design is so unconventional, a lot of people just don’t happen to like how it looks.

Whatever your personal taste, you owe it to the House of the Lord to discern what it’s trying to say about itself. If we view it in its proper context, we can recognize the building as a one-of-a-kind symbol of restored Christianity in the space age—bursting with enthusiasm, fearlessly embracing modernity, moving relentlessly into new, cosmic frontiers.

But it means something else to me.

In so many ways, I too find myself unable to fit neatly into one category or another. Even the way my Creator designed me is offensive to some. It can be all too easy to make fun of people like me, or dismiss us, or push us out and replace us with something that better fits the mold. But why shouldn’t a body like mine be a temple, too?

The Provo Temple is a beacon to the misfits. To the black sheep, it whispers: I will leave the ninety and nine, and I will come to you. To the weirdos, it says: ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people. To the square pegs in round holes, it declares: There is no end to matter. There is no end to space. There is space for you, too, in this house.

Allen Roberts, architect of the Tijuana, Mexico Temple, spoke recently about the communicative power of temple architecture. “Every building reflects the values of its owners and architects and builders. So the question is, when you look at any temple or any building: What does that building say about the values of that organization?” What does it say when we tear down the House of God and replace it with the latest cookie-cutter model, less risky but also less distinctive?

I want to believe that there is still room in the church for something unique. I want to believe that holiness doesn’t have to mean sameness. I want to believe in a creative, courageous Christianity — a Christianity that refuses to retreat from the modern world, but that loves it as God does.

Jesus throws down the gauntlet. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” It sounds like a dare. Try not to believe in my redemptive, restorative power. Try to kill this radical vision of universal love. I will prove you wrong. “But he spake of the temple of his body.”

Until we start to view the temple as a symbol of the embodied Christ, we’ll always underestimate its significance. We’ll always be scrambling to replace it as soon as it goes out of style. But what is the body of Christ, exactly? Paul makes it clear. “For by the Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit…And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.

And whether one member suffer all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”

Happy birthday, Provo Temple. And many more.

Note: Brother Juan Becerra, from the Church Community Relations Department, is the representative assigned to receive feedback on the Provo Temple reconstruction. Please contact him at JTBecerra@ChurchofJesusChrist.org to encourage the temple’s preservation. You can also indicate your support at change.org.

In Defense of the Provo Temple was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Book of Ezekiel opens with one of the weirder moments of the Old Testament (an impressive accomplishment, given the competition). The prophet is swept up in a whirlwind and a massive cloud of fire, out of which emerge four alien creatures, which have “the likeness of a man.” Except each of these humanoid figures is also decked out with hoofed feet, four wings and four heads: that of a lion, an ox, an eagle and a man. Their wings are linked together, and they walk forth upon the earth in a straight line, blazing a fiery trail wherever they go. Each creature is followed by a floating wheel, or ring, soaring far above them in the sky, “so high that they were dreadful.” And they’re made even more dreadful by a Kafkaesque detail stated with terrifying nonchalance: “And the rings were full of eyes.”

What are we to make of these fire Pokemon with eyeball halos? We are given no further explanation. But whatever they are, these creatures and their flying saucers draw our attention skyward, to the main point of interest: the sapphire throne of heaven, where God sits, radiating in power and glory. Ezekiel does what any of us would do. He passes out.

Awakening the prophet from his coma, God sets Ezekiel on his feet and calls him to preach repentance to Israel. First, though, an important instruction: “Open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee.” So like an obedient patient at the doctor’s office, Ezekiel opens wide and says ah. And what medicine does the Physician prescribe? A book. “Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.”

We’re told to feast upon the word of God, and it looks like Ezekiel has a head start. The Psalmist adds a second voice to the chorus. “O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” It seems right that God would be described as something that you have to taste to understand. Maybe it’s fitting that only creatures of such profound, mind-boggling weirdness could introduce the heavenly throne — something so utterly foreign and surprising that the only way to grasp it is to experience it for yourself. Because whatever image we’ve conjured up for God, whatever narrow boxes we’ve enclosed Him in, God is telling us that He exists beyond the bounds of our wildest imagination. “I AM THAT I AM,” He says — or, perhaps more to the point, “I will be whatever I will be.” He sees our constrictive theologies and rigid doctrinal prescriptions, and He is better and higher and holier than all of it. We can spend an eternity rotting away in the endless monotony of man-made definitions, but the only way we can really know of His character is to taste it for ourselves.

How fitting that Ezekiel would swallow a book. We’ve got to ingest the Word. We’ve got to eat the Logos. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

Clearly the ritual act of eating Christ is meant to teach us something about His life-giving power and His ability to nourish and sustain. But it’s also got to do with ingestion, with receiving something so completely that it becomes a real part of you. When you consume something, you dissolve the distinction between yourself and whatever you have taken in to yourself. In other words, you really are what you eat. “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.” And so the sacrament isn’t meant as a purely exculpatory exercise. Yes, it’s a weekly remission of wrongdoing and a recommitment to a Christian life. But at its core, it’s a ritual of oneness — a holy communion. And how is that oneness to be achieved? You have to taste the gospel, and swallow it, and make it a part of you. It’s not enough to accept a series of doctrines or recite a set of orthodoxies. Those are only approximations anyway. If you want the real thing, you’ve got to experience atonement for yourself.

The tasting goes both ways. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ speaks of a cup which He is willing to drink. Certainly the agony of the cross and the burden of sin would prove bitter enough. But perhaps one of the most powerful theological innovations of the Book of Mormon is how far it’s willing to go with its conception of Christ’s suffering. It’s true that Isaiah alludes to a Messiah who bears our grief and carries our sorrow. But Alma’s prophecy of Christ’s sacrifice states the scope of the situation with astonishing clarity. “And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind…that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.”

In this telling of the Christian story, God becomes mortal not only to loose mankind from the chains of death and sin, but also to fully taste for Himself what it means to be human. A conceptual, intellectual, or even a spiritual understanding of human suffering was insufficient. The intimate intricacies of our lives — our joys and pains, our triumphs and heartbreaks, our capacity to love and to hate — can only be understood through experience. And since human suffering takes place not only on the collective, but also on the individual level, Christ’s atonement grasps human life as each person encounters it. In Gethsemane and Calvary, Christ takes upon Himself the entirety of mortal experience — generally and particularly — and becomes a being of perfect empathy. He is able to become one with you because, in some very real sense, He knows exactly what it is to be you.

Maybe believers and nonbelievers have both fallen victim to their own hubris. Maybe we all struggle to accept that there are some things that our sophisticated systems can never adequately convey. We like putting things in neat categories: the natural and the supernatural, the holy and the heretical. Then we like chopping up those categories into tidy hierarchies, ranks, and orders. I think we like these systems because it’s terrifying to be honest about how much we can know for sure. So we stay safe in our little caves of certainty, fearing that if we ever let ourselves out to bask in the sun, it will shrivel us up. We’re afraid to feel God because we might get burned.

I’ve never understood the appeal of those cooking shows on TV. What’s the point of watching other people eat delicious food? Maybe you like watching the process unfold, or maybe you think the chef is charismatic. But at the end of the day, you will end up enjoying the meal just as much as someone who never turned on the TV in the first place.

That’s what we do with religion sometimes. We get so wrapped up in the performance that we forget what the whole enterprise is for. You might like going through the steps, or you might really like the people leading you along. But no amount of scrupulous observation is a substitute for eating the thing yourself. At best, those shows can teach you to make the dish on your own. Hopefully your religion will do that too. But it will never mean anything unless you sink your teeth in.

Don’t get me wrong — I like my religion organized. I wonder, though, if we sometimes become so rigid that we snuff out all the sparks that set our souls aflame in the first place. Ritual is good, and theology matters. But all of our best ritualizing and theologizing are no replacement for living. Properly applied, they are springboards to the real thing — something that can only ever be ascertained by trying it for yourself.

As much as it pains me to admit it, I have no way of demonstrating God with my own powers of reason or intellect, or even with my most circumspect behavior. I’ll do my best thinking, and I’ll play my part with gusto, but in the end it’ll all be woefully insufficient. I can never really express what it is that makes me believe in Christ. I can never really convey what it is to love Him and to be loved by Him. Not in a way that makes any sense.

I can only say that I’ve tasted for myself. And I can invite you to take a bite.

If you want to understand my church’s opposition to same-sex marriage, you need to start with a clear picture of how Latter-day Saints think about sexual orientation itself. “Same-sex attraction,” in the Mormon view, is a temporary, mortal experience — a trial to be endured or, in its previous iteration, a disorder to be cured. It is, essentially, an aberration from the correct, godly model, and will eventually be resolved upon completion of our earthly “probationary period.”

This belief need not necessarily imply a particular animus on the part of the average worshipper. Most of the church members I know are sincerely committed to loving their neighbor, but they resist full inclusion of gay people due to a series of deeply held doctrinal assumptions.

The Latter-day Saint theological view of homosexuality possesses a straightforward internal logic. It goes something like this: God consists of exalted man and exalted woman bound together in celestial temple marriage. We are literal spirit children of God, and as such, each person has the potential to achieve apotheosis through the same means that God achieved it: temple marriage to a member of the opposite sex.

The challenge, then, comes when we recognize the existence of people who are not attracted to the opposite sex. Successful temple marriages, for members of this group, are unlikely if not unattainable. (While some are able to find fulfillment in mixed-orientation marriages, most of these unions ultimately end in divorce— a reality recognized by the church, which no longer encourages these marriages as a matter of policy.) So we’re left with the fact that a fraction of God’s children, by default, will likely not attain the ideal of celestial marriage. And since we can’t believe in a just, loving God who would design any of His children to be permanently ineligible for exaltation, we must believe that homosexuality is a temporary condition that will be corrected in the next life. Once “fixed,” formerly gay people will be provided with opposite-sex eternal companions.

This view, believe it or not, is actually far better than many traditional theologies of sexuality. It doesn’t blame gay people for their sexual orientation, nor does it permanently condemn them for circumstances beyond their control. It refuses to consign anyone to a fiery hell — promising a “degree of glory” to all — while reserving divine status for those with temple marriages. It seeks to include gay people in the plan of salvation by promising the removal of mortal circumstances that make exaltation unachievable. Just hold on tight, endure to the end, and in time, “all that is unfair about life can be made right” (Preach My Gospel, p. 52). Or, to put it more bluntly — all that is gay will eventually be made straight.

My question for the faithful Latter-day Saint is a simple one: How are you so sure that this explanation is correct? How do you know that gay people will become straight in the next life? And since Christ has given us a useful metric to determine the truth or falsity of prophetic teachings, I would also ask: What are the fruits of this teaching? “I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God.”

Any Christian justification for a doctrine would typically begin with an appeal to scripture. So what do the scriptures have to say about the status of sexual orientation in the afterlife? Which verses teach that gay people become straight in heaven?

I’ve yet to find any.

But don’t the scriptures have quite a bit to say about the resurrection? Alma teaches that “not so much as a hair of their heads [shall] be lost; but every thing shall be restored to its perfect frame.” There you have it, some conclude. Homosexuality, as a mortal imperfection, will be fixed in either this life or the next, since, after all, “the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them” (1 Nephi 3:7).

But wait — upon which basis do we know that sexual orientation is a condition which would ever need to be “restored to its perfect frame?” Nothing in scripture supports this notion of sexual orientation as a pathology — in fact, the scriptures have no concept of sexual orientation whatsoever. Why are some of us so quick to assign sexuality to the realm of disability or illness, especially when no current, competent medical or mental health professional would dream of doing so? And, more urgently, what is the effect of telling perfectly healthy young people that their most powerful, personal experiences of love and affection are fundamentally broken — an infirmity or a perversion that needs to be healed?

Before we ever believed that God would heal homosexuality in the resurrection, we believed that we could heal it in this life. Our past is marred by a persistent failure to cure what we wrongly assumed to be a disease. Conversion therapies have taken various forms over the years. Bishops once routinely encouraged gay men to marry women, promising that obedience would yield a cure. Church counselors urged participation in sports and other “manly” behaviors to help young men unlearn homosexual inclinations. Apostles prescribed prayer and scripture study as a panacea. They required gay members to shun their gay peers, writing that “many perverts will claim to have great ‘love’ for some with whom they have been involved,” but “since the problem is in the mind more than in the body, it is necessary to find a new climate.”

Nothing worked. Gay people stayed gay, and the church quietly updated its policies to reflect that reality. Ex-gay ministries disbanded nationwide and LDS Family Services eventually disavowed sexual orientation change efforts.

In one of the darker chapters of our history, gay men at Brigham Young University were strapped to electric shock machines and shown same-sex pornography. Their arms and genitals were electrocuted if they exhibited signs of sexual arousal. The university’s therapists (along with many secular psychologists of the day) hoped to trigger in their patients an aversion response to homosexual images. Instead, patients suffered untold damage to their physical and mental health. Homosexual orientation, it turned out, could not be cured.

So we tried, and we tried, and we couldn’t fix this problem. We couldn’t turn gay people straight. For a while we could frighten or pressure them into living the kinds of lives we wanted them to live, but we couldn’t manage to flip the switch on their sexual orientation. In the process, we left behind countless broken lives and broken spirits as needless casualties to our ignorance. Eventually, the stain was so blatant and the destruction so irrefutable that we did the only remaining thing we could think to do. We punted the problem into the afterlife. We couldn’t fix it now, so we assumed that God would fix it later.

We looked at our hands, and they were filthy, and we couldn’t bear the thought that we in our good intentions could have made such a horrible mess. So we pushed the problem off to the next life and made God do the dirty work for us.

Let’s return to the Book of Mormon and read Alma a little closer. What else does he have to say about resurrection? “That same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in that eternal world” (Alma 34:34).

We imagine that in the resurrection God will somehow isolate the gay part of a person’s spirit, correct it, and leave everything else untouched. Even that much is a violation of Alma’s teaching. But the fundamentally interwoven nature of spiritual identity and sexual orientation is evident to anybody who knows a gay person. Think of the gay person in your life who you know most intimately. Do you recognize in them any unique spiritual attributes, and do you really believe that those God-given qualities are entirely disconnected from their identity and experience as a gay person? Would they remain unchanged in every other way — their spirit, their heart, their personality — if you could snap your fingers and turn them straight? I’m not suggesting that sexual orientation is the only or even the most important component of a person’s spiritual nature. But it remains an inextricable element, as intimately wrapped up in the whole as oxygen is to water. Even if you could somehow suck out all the oxygen, the result would cease to be water.

If the scriptures don’t show that the supposed trial of homosexuality will be removed in heaven, then we would do well to ask if modern revelation has anything to say about it. There’s nothing in our canonized body of revelations that approaches the idea head-on. Nothing in the Doctrine and Covenants addresses it, and no modern apostle, prophet, or general authority has ever even claimed to receive revelation on the question. I don’t know if they’ve ever thought to ask.

It’s true, however, that the church and its leaders have propagated the idea that homosexual orientation will be corrected in the afterlife. There’s a reason why people believe it. The idea was first posed, without a revelatory claim, by apostle Dallin H. Oaks in a 1995 Ensign article. It was reiterated in 2007 by the First Presidency with a booklet entitled “God Loveth His Children,” which aimed at supporting members who “struggle with same-sex attraction.” I was handed this booklet myself as a sixteen-year-old boy. “Many Latter-day Saints, through individual effort, the exercise of faith, and reliance upon the enabling power of the Atonement, overcome same-gender attraction in mortality,” it teaches. “Others may not be free of this challenge in this life. As we follow Heavenly Father’s plan, our bodies, feelings, and desires will be perfected in the next life so that every one of God’s children may find joy in a family consisting of a husband, a wife, and children.”

A year earlier, Elder Lance B. Wickman of the Seventy gave a public affairs interview alongside Elder Oaks, seeking to clarify the church’s position on homosexuality. Elder Wickman cites no revelation or scripture, but claims, “Same-gender attraction did not exist in the pre-earth life, and neither will it exist in the next life. It is a circumstance that for whatever reason or reasons seems to apply right now in mortality, in this nano-second of our eternal existence.”

While the church has since discontinued “God Loveth His Children,” its current teachings still implicitly assume the same set of ideas. Church leaders continue to promise unmarried members that if they hold faithful, all the blessings of eternity, including celestial marriage, will be made available in the next life. That may provide a modicum of comfort to single straight members of the church, but for gay members the message is clear: you are not really gay in the grand scheme of things. And yet no attempt is ever made to demonstrate that this assertion is true. If it’s really God’s word, just show us where God says it. It’s not sign-seeking to expect that doctrinal claims be based in scripture or revelation.

There are those who presume that the mere statement of a teaching by an apostle or prophet is enough to qualify it as revelation. “Whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.” I have nothing to say to persuade these people, by whose metric we would also have to accept as revelation the notion that the civil rights movement was a communist plot to destroy America (Ezra Taft Benson) or that black people were less valiant in the premortal existence (Joseph Fielding Smith). I could write a much longer list. The point is that something does not automatically become revelation as soon as it is spoken by a general authority or published by the church. Our leaders say lots of things, many of which I believe to be divinely inspired. They are general authorities called to speak to a general audience on a mind-numbing array of complicated issues. I have great respect and sympathy for those placed in that position. We, as individual disciples, are in turn called to use our God-given capacities of reason and faith to seek our own spiritual confirmation of what is taught.

I care a lot about getting at the truth of a question. Much of my opposition to our teaching about the gay afterlife is based on my belief that it’s probably untrue. And yet, if you could prove to me beyond any doubt that this teaching was absolutely, unequivocally correct, I would still consider it an unacceptable thing to teach the youth of our church. Why?

We’re telling gay people that the way to stop being gay is to die.

Kids like me grow up wishing desperately that we could be anything besides what we really are. We want to do the right thing, and we love the gospel, and we cherish the values that are taught to us. We grow up dreaming of a temple marriage and a minivan full of rowdy Mormon babies. At a certain point we painfully discover that our ideals don’t match the reality of our situation. In the meantime, we put up with bullying at school and hurtful remarks from those who have been called to shepherd us in love. We wish with all of our hearts that there was some way we could fix it, some way to just become normal like everybody else.

And so when we’re told over and over again that this is a temporary trial — that nobody will be gay in the next life — some of us conclude that the way to solve this problem is simple: we have to die.

Suicide is an immensely sensitive and complex subject, and nobody is served well by oversimplifications. We can recognize that many factors influence this phenomenon while taking care that our teachings and rhetoric don’t exacerbate the problem. With LGBT youth suffering from far higher rates of suicide than their straight peers, we need to think hard about the messages we send — well-intended though they may be. The church should be recognized for its efforts to speak candidly about this issue and to encourage church members to be more kind and loving. But as long as we perpetuate flimsy doctrinal assumptions of a heterosexual heaven, many gay youth will continue to feel that they have no place in this life or the next.

Our most devout, good-natured friends are trying their best to follow Christ’s example. They really do care about making the church a more charitable place for everyone. They hope that if they can just show more kindness and love, it will be enough to solve this problem. And while I can never overstate the importance of changing our words and changing our behavior, there’s one more thing we can do if we’re serious about loving our gay brothers and sisters: we can change our minds. We can stop believing and propagating unfounded ideas which suggest death as the solution to a nonexistent problem.

Well, now we have a problem on our hands. If we accept the notion that gay people might remain gay in the next life, what does that mean for our doctrine? One option is to conclude that God just doesn’t intend to save some of us. The standard, after all, is celestial marriage. And if the gays stay gay forever, they’re simply excluded from the plan because they won’t (or can’t) get on board with straight marriage.

The problem, of course, is that the blame here would have to lie squarely with God, since He created a heterosexual plan as well as a bunch of homosexuals. The notion that He would devise to eternally exclude any of us contradicts our conception of a just, loving deity — a deity whose “work and glory,” after all, is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39).

So what do we do with all the gay people?

There’s another option here, and it’s not really that hard. We can just say “I don’t know.” President Oaks, to his credit, has spoken usefully on the humility required when considering the afterlife. He quotes, “When we ask ourselves what we know about the spirit world from the standard works, the answer is ‘not as much as we often think.’” Describing the concerns of a woman contemplating marriage to a widower already sealed to his first wife, President Oaks sidesteps the question of post-mortal polygamy and simply counsels, “Trust the Lord.”

It’s not a bad response, really. It’s much better than making something up. We could apply the same approach to gay people as we do to anyone else in an ambiguous family situation: trust that God is merciful and honestly acknowledge what we don’t know. It might be that in the next life, sexuality (and for that matter, everything else) will look vastly different than any of us could have ever conceived. “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”

In recognizing the limits of our knowledge, we could abandon the hard-edged policies that presuppose complete understanding. We could, for example, grant the same grace to gay people as we do to those who have been divorced. Jesus, you may recall, spoke harshly on the subject of divorce, yet our policy treats the issue with a great deal of mercy. Why not extend the same compassion to the topic of homosexuality (an issue, by the way, about which Jesus was notably silent)? We could acknowledge that life is messy, that sometimes reality deviates from ideals, and that sometimes you need to do the best you can with the hand you’ve been dealt.

If temple marriage can’t include same-sex couples, we could recognize civil marriage as a viable path for gay couples to live equivalent chastity standards to straight couples (abstinence until marriage, fidelity within marriage). We could continue to teach our doctrinal ideals while recognizing, as the Family Proclamation teaches, that “other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation.”

I wonder, though, if even this approach falls short. I wonder if we’re living far beneath our privileges as Latter-day Saints. If we would like to be members of a static, ossified religion — a religion that never changes, never questions the status quo, never challenges our preconceptions — then Mormonism is about the worst choice we could possibly make. How could we miss the blazing irony that we, of all people, should be satisfied with a closed canon; that we, in practice, should proclaim, “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible”; that Latter-day Saints, of all the believers on this planet, should be content to accept that the Lord really does not intend to reveal “many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God” — at least not on this topic?

God really does intend to uncover His mysteries to us. But receiving depends on asking, and opening requires knocking. Dieter F. Uchtdorf once pointedly asked, “How often has the Holy Spirit tried to tell us something we needed to know but couldn’t get past the massive iron gate of what we thought we already knew?” Clearly there are elements of our understanding that require additional light and knowledge. And as long as we remain in the dark, the church will continue to hemorrhage both its gay members and its sympathetic straight allies — including huge swaths of the youth of the church.

So let’s love one another more than we ever dared to. Let’s lay aside our false traditions and presuppositions. Let’s live up to our birthright and dare to believe that God can still teach us something true. Let’s ask Him how He intends to give His gay children a place in His plan. Let’s pray that our leaders will do the same.

And since faith is the substance of things hoped for, let’s hold on to our faith while we take the Savior at His word. “As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints.”

What Do We Do with the Gay Mormon Afterlife? was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My grandfather worked with wood. The musty oak smell of his old Virginia home lingers in my memory like a ghost. Open the rickety side door, and a puff of sawdust greets you as you pass by the woodshop and up the creaky steps toward the kitchen. The old shop is littered with lathes and saws and gizmos of every kind, worn out with years of loving labor. It stands as a sanctuary for works in progress — a handsome dresser in need of polish, a spindly nightstand with a wobbly leg, a wooden chest yet to be carved.

Grandpa was a serious man with a deep sense of propriety and responsibility. He inherited the dignified, no-nonsense work ethic of his Mormon pioneer progenitors. Faith, for someone of our stock, is something that you build with your bare hands, with sleeves rolled up and sweat on your brow. His great-great-grandfather, also a woodworker, labored tirelessly as a carpenter at the Nauvoo Temple. The famous tabernacle, as it turned out, was excellent kindling; his sacrifice ended up a burnt offering once the mobs were through with it. Leaving behind a pile of ash where a temple once stood, he fashioned wheels for handcarts and trekked west with Brigham Young.

And so my grandfather built a life of faith and duty as had those before him. He rolled up his sleeves and got to work, marrying my grandmother and siring enough children to fill a station wagon. His firmness was magnified by a razor-sharp intellect, which he put to good use in his career as a city manager and professor. He was a scholar of leadership and the politics of power, observing organizational dynamics with a keen analytical eye. His mind was a saw which cut deeper than anything on his workbench, but he used it with judgment, and care, and wisdom. “A good leader,” he told me once, “has to have a clear vision. What is your vision?”

When I was twelve, Grandpa made me a simple wooden box. He sanded it down nice and smooth and fashioned a thin handle along the center of the lid. I peered inside and found the box was empty. It was up to me to fill it. Winters became summers, and I stored my secrets in that box. A favorite knickknack, a scribbled note from a friend, an old silver ring — each found a place inside, safe from the vulgarities of the world. Grandpa had produced the container, its shape and texture and contour, but only I could fill it with my treasure.

I was never any good with wood. My craft was to shape sound. When I was fifteen, Grandpa gave me a thick stack of elegant staff paper. Thin black lines stretched across the pages in rows of five. It was up to me to fill them. So I hacked off harmony, chiseled rhythm, and imprinted it all onto those pages, a blueprint for my sonic structures. And I tried my best to sand down the edges and make it polished and smooth and beautiful. It was a haphazard hack job, uneven and splintery, but I had built it all myself. I wrote my first composition on that paper. And I kept on writing after all the pages were filled.

When I was twenty-one, Grandpa wielded an ornately carved wooden staff as he led my family through the halls of the temple to a sealing room. He looked patriarchal and impressive, like Moses leading the children of Israel through the desert. My sister joined us with her husband-to-be and kneeled at an altar. Mirrors on opposite walls framed the sparkling room, and an endless chain of reflection bounced across the crystal in an infinite cycle. My family was suddenly without beginning and without end, interwoven into the timeless fabric of God. He had given us eternity. And it was up to us to fill it.

Sometimes I think back to that old musty workshop. It’s been empty for a while now. The buzzing of table saws has turned to silence. The tools are gathering dust.

Tomorrow I’ll join with my brothers to carry a casket — a final bit of woodworking, a final container to be filled. And I’ll remember the humble box, and the blank paper, and the carved staff, and the mirrors that glisten endlessly. And I’ll stretch back to the ashes in Illinois and the squeaky handcart wheels and the emigrant ship leaving London for America — and all the things and places and people that pump through my veins and animate my lungs as they once did for him. And I’ll thank God for all the calloused hands that whittled my contours so I could fill in the rest. And I’ll think of a certain carpenter from Nazareth who knows a few things about dying, and about living, and about how you have to do the first one if you ever hope to do the second.

the glory of god is intelligence
or in other words light and truth
glimmering speckles in rocky terrain
a shovel lodged knee-deep in cool soggy earth,
its treasures sifted and polished
and lovingly laid to rest in the pitch-dark chasms of a hat
and then allowed to glow

so it’s through a glass I see
darkly at first and only in part
shattered shards scraping my feet
as piece by piece, I forge my mosaic
and seeing is bleeding
and mending makes whole

oaks of righteousness
the planting of the Lord
which, tonight at least, obscure my view
the moon-kissed night tucked safe behind
boughs and bark and scraggly limbs
stretching skyward but keeping silent
and all I can do is peer between the cracks

Cinderella is on fire. Her platinum hair melts away in thick, waxy puddles. To be honest, there’s something kind of mesmerizing about it — jarring, sure, but oddly captivating. Kind of like how you can’t look away from a nasty car wreck even though you know you probably should. Her blue dress, yellow hair, white skin, all distilled to their most essential and vibrant colors, lie in tiny pools like acrylic paints.

I’m nineteen years old and wondering how I ever ended up spending Thanksgiving dinner alone with a hairy Russian. But here we are, in white shirts and ties, our already awkward attempts at small talk further exacerbated by the language barrier. We stare at each other blankly, hoping desperately that the other will say something to break the silence. Eventually Elder Kirdyapkin passes me some black bread and points to a pot of soup on the stove. “Borsch good for your soul.”

I stuff my face with borsch and my comrade seems more or less impressed with me. I’m scrawny but I shovel down far more than he thought I could. Satisfied that I’ve passed this first leg of the test, Elder Kirdyapkin decides it’s time for me to really sprout some hair on my chest. He beckons me to the kitchen sink. I see tiny dolls, action figures, and little army men standing silently in death row. Their expressions are as blank as they are helpless. I get a funny feeling and for the first time my Russian friend and I exchange grim smirks. First in line is the princess. We light a match.

Springtime in Russia is heralded by Maslenitsa. It’s a remnant of an ancient Slavic ritual in which everyone eats as many pancakes as possible and then lights an effigy in town square. The young and the old gather to “strip Lady Maslenitsa of her finery,” set her aflame, and scatter her ashes in the snow to fertilize the crops. I stare at Cinderella and wonder if spring is coming early this year.

I’m not exactly sure how to explain my newfound proclivity for princess-burning. But this first ritual sacrifice on Thanksgiving Day brings a bizarre sense of moral clarity. Three months earlier, I had embarked on my quest to bring salvation to the godless communists. Now, I watch as my bright-eyed naiveté and unbridled hubris coat the sink in an awful, gloopy mess.

Remember when Elijah called down fire from heaven? He builds a proto-baptismal font: an altar of twelve stones for each tribe of Israel. Then he chops up his bullock, lays it on wood, and drenches it three times. Elijah says the word, and the heavenly flame licks up the water and consumes the offering. A baptism of fire. “The Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God.”

Sometimes I wonder if God likes setting things on fire too. In the scriptures He’s burning stuff all over the place. There are those three Hebrew boys in the king’s furnace. Abinadi and King Noah. Sodom and Gomorrah. And that bullock on the wood. I think little boys have a natural intuition for this kind of thing. Call it a divine instinct. Have you ever seen cub scouts around a campfire? You’d think they’d never seen anything so exhilarating in their lives. They’re always poking their sticks into the flames, then chasing each other around with the burning wood and screaming their heads off. You could write them off as deranged little arsonists — and maybe you’d be right. But I wonder if they’re on to something.

I figure that everything needs to burn sooner or later. And like it or not, our vision of ourselves and of our world — of who we are and of how things are supposed to be — will need to go up in flames. We usually resent this because the fire hurts like hell. But I think there’s something sacred about it. A princess burns and her porcelain perfection melts away. She’s reduced only to color, to her most fundamental and intrinsic hues. Lady Maslenitsa ends the cold winter as her ashes give birth to a new season of life and light. And what about us? What happens when we burn?

I want to be that chopped-up bullock. I want to lay my hands, feet, head, and heart on the altar. The Lamb will lie with me on the wood. We’ll immerse ourselves in the water. The fire will consume us both. We’ll die together. In Him I’ll be raised up, cleansed by the water and made alive in the flames.

“How great a matter a little fire kindleth!”

Jesus the Pyromaniac was originally published in LIMINARIES on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.