The Book of Mormon Tells the Truth About Spiritual Things

The title of this post comes from an article I read recently from an old issue of Sunstone.  It was written by Peggy Fletcher Stack.  It's basically her testimony.  In it, she writes of the Book of  Mormon: "It won't do to say these are faith-promoting stories but not literal events."  But then later on, the most she can say about it is: "The Book of Mormon tells the truth about spiritual things."  This is something I'm always telling myself, too.  It's sort of my "minimalist testimony" of the Book of Mormon.  But it got me to thinking: What do I mean by that?

Well, one of the more obvious spiritual truths that saturates the Book of Mormon is something that I've heard called the "pride cycle."  Peggy Fletcher Stack calls it "cycles of righteousness and falling away."  The Book of Mormon emphasizes that there are two main sources of pride - wealth and intellectual attainment.

A society that develops a self-congratulatory mood because of its riches and technological superiority is headed for trouble.  There is something called "hard-heartedness."  If a heart becomes too hardened, it no longer looks to God for anything.  There is the illusion of self-sufficiency, a refusal to countenance dependency or weakness; no perceived lack, no sense of having fallen short or missed the target, and therefore no recognition of the need for repentance.  Hard-heartedness is a societal as well as an individual characteristic.

I detect hard-heartedness in the mocking tone that so many people use when talking about religion; in ways of relating to others dominated by sarcasm and belittlement; in the complete absence of empathy, mercy, and compassion toward those who are in prison (a glaring symptom, in my view).  Another prevalent sign of hard-heartedness is a strident demand for fairness and equity that seems to stem from a desire to knock everyone else down to one's own level of dissatisfaction and frustration.  Above all, and this is another feature the Book of Mormon identifies with societies in decline, there is an acceptance of contention and strife as the normal course of things.  In fact, our media culture seems to be based almost entirely on conflict and controversy.  It's what sells magazines and keeps people watching TV. 

Conversely, anything that threatens to soften one's heart is frequently rejected as sentimental, tagged as emotional self-indulgence, "magical thinking", or weakness.  A softening of one's heart can be a bit scary.  Many people fend it off with alcohol, food, drugs, or "business as usual."  No one wants to be vulnerable, because the way the carnal mind operates, vulnerability is often thought of as a prelude to being attacked.  But to experience a softening of one's heart, one's guard must be let down, at least for a little while.  The key is to experience one's weaknesses and fears full-on, and to then see how this is the common fate of all of us on this planet.  Then comes something akin to the opening up of awareness that Moses experienced on Mt. Sinai while conversing with God: Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.  Mormon goes even further in the Book of Helaman: O how great is the nothingness of the children of men; yea, even they are less than the dust of the earth.

And yet ... to begin to understand that in spite of our nothingness, in spite of the apparent insignificance and contemptibleness of humans spinning around on this tiny speck in the endless void, we are somehow, at the same time, God's supreme concern:

For behold, this is my work and my glory -- to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.