the eighteen plates. Why should we put any credence in the religious ravings of a pubescent male? I can give no credence to that foundation of Mormonism. And yet in reflection, why should I put any greater credence in Christianity? I come up with three reasons why my Christian stuff feels so much more credible.
1. It’s mine. I grew up with it,
2. Smith’s stuff is just too radically revisionist, and
3. His stuff, and the rest of the Mormon stuff is just too bloody convenient (e.g., regarding visions about polygamy and race).
Definitely mystical stuff, but weird, deviant formulations, going off in its own direction. Compare to Norwich et alia. The choice is mine, not the divergent.
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My journaling ends abruptly here, but the wondering and wandering did not. Several months after this entry I had my one session with John Kaufman and learned that my wandering was not so odd, not so heretical. In fact I seemed merely to be growing spiritually, growing beyond the boundaries of conventional doctrine, though not beyond, nor out of synch with where others have been before. Some months later I discovered a group of people who were also wandering in this wilderness and who seemed ready for conversation about the reaches of our several pilgrimages. We dubbed ourselves the Beyond Orthodoxy group and talked for three years. Then I began to write this book.
8. A friend from seminary days, also a retired priest, active in healing ministries and a practitioner of reiki, who through regression therapy has experienced several past lives.
Part II
Chapter 4: Sin, for One Last Time
Preface: I find myself compelled to scrape together all that I have ever said and thought about sin and write it down; then I must close the book on that subject, never to return. My project is to put it all in order, to make some sense out of it all, and to arrive at a comfortable judgment, i.e., to make some reliable appraisal of sin.
Why begin these analyses with sin? The notion of sin has long gone empty for me, become debased coinage. It strikes a dull thunk instead of a clear ringing, and the face on the coin is so worn and faded as to show me no image. Economists say bad coinage drives out good. That is true in theology as well. The debased coinage, sin, has driven out of my sight and mind that previously useful Christian understanding of what in man is so destructive: of myself, of community, of the world. Sin has been the linchpin of Augustine’s fourth century system, the theology the church and our Book of Common Prayer that I have grown up with. So I seek here to jerk that linchpin clean out of the system and see where the other pieces fall, and then to search out a twenty-first century understanding of that complex of issues we formerly labeled sin.
Framework for This Conversation
Sin is somehow related to evil, but the relationship is not entirely clear. Sin may be the willful doing of evil, but that again is not completely clear. Sin would seem to involve some willfulness. There is some hurt, some damage to others, even evil involved. And God is somehow proximate. Sin is unnecessary, unnatural, and may be malevolent. The only parcel I can grab hold of in all of this is “evil.” So I must start with that. I observe that there is evil afoot in this world. I would be a fool to deny it. But I would be just as much an idiot to unthinkingly accept evil as simply as it has been presented to me. I must make some distinctions about evil first, and then I must sort out a twenty-first century understanding of sin.
What We Call Evil Changes9
Hitler was just coming into his full power when I was being born. By the time the U.S. entered the war I had already been taught to smell the evil that he embodied. As a child of five I could not understand it. I could not even begin to comprehend it. But I could smell it. I went with my mother to help fold gauze bandages, an appropriate way for me to fight that evil. We knew with a surety, and with passion, that evil was over there, in Germany, among the Nazis, in the Nazis. And in those days the Russians were our friends, our allies in fighting the Nazi evil. The war ended with the Nazis and the Japs (sic) defeated, and we entered a new world, a revised world. Now the Russians, the U.S.S.R., the Communists became the enemy. They were the new evil, and we were terrified of them, or we were at least supposed to be terrified of them, prodded by McCarthyism. And I should have wondered then about the nature of this very threatening cloud of evil that was morphing, changing form and location, and still supposed to be our enemy. But I was still young and that evil was still an absolute. Then my campus roommate stumbled onto a stash of sixteen-inch vinyl public relations War Department recordings, ordered destroyed but instead secreted after WWII, which talked about us driving down the right side of the road into Berlin, while the Brits drove down the left, and those crazy Russians drove right down the middle. And I was confronted with the changeability of the absolute evil. I began to realize that the evil I’d always known as an absolute, instead came in degrees, and sometimes even morphed. I could not really count on it. And through the intervening years since I’ve learned that evil is often a fairly relative thing.
Gradations of Evil with Ill-Defined Edges
Evil is not as simple as a huge basket into which we can throw everything bad. I discern that volcanoes erupting are not really evil: destructive, killing, bad, but entirely natural. Unavoidable. How then can they be evil in any objective way? And earthquakes! If you’re caught in an earth-quake I’m sure it feels overwhelmingly evil. But it is a natural event, an act of nature. Hard for me to call that evil. Hitler? He was evil, no doubt. And Stalin? Yeah, probably evil. But the Communists? Not so clear a call. Idi Amin? Yeah. Jeffrey Dahmer (the serial killer who ate his victims)? Oh yes, that was palpable evil. But what about accidents? I mean real accidents, not somebody’s negligent misstep, but real accidents. They happen! And are they evil? Well, they’re — they’re accidents. Hard to call them evil. More like “random.” And gradually I have come to realize that the world I live in is not made of blacks and whites, but of innumerable shades of gray, with never a true white or an absolute black among them. Always some shade of gray. And randomness. Not everything is intentional. Or caused. Some things just happen. In Newtonian physics everything is predicable, but in quantum physics probability is more like it, and now the physicists are playing with string theory in which even probability becomes improbable.
Evil Is What’s Left
So I must define evil and to do that I start by paring off the things we thoughtlessly call evil, but which are really not. First the random things: they feel bad, may actually have quite bad consequences, but are not evil in themselves, only random, natural, mostly unpredictable: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, landslides, mudslides, floods, rock falls, droughts, blizzards, avalanches, diseases, mental illnesses, epidemics and such, the natural disasters caused by very real, physical, measurable, sometimes even predictable forces of nature, though sometimes unpredictable, unforeseeable. Yes, they are destructive and injurious and leave a path of pain and even death and other forms of human misery behind them. But I cannot call them evil; they are natural, unavoidable, unescapable. Certainly not willful; they just happen.
I find a subcategory here: the things caused mostly by forces of nature, only slightly avoidable and rather unpredictable. When my first wife was diagnosed with cancer, I could almost feel the evil that was her tumor, it felt palpable in the room with us, it had an odor and color and, in my mind’s eye, a form and shape, so that while it was hidden deep within her body, I could almost touch and grasp it; it had some presence in the room. Yet in my saner, more reasonable moments I knew it was not a demon, not a touch of satan, certainly not an act of God; a single cell had mutated out of control and reproduced endlessly until it consumed and killed her. These are the factors, events, elements of the natural world in which we
