LDS Testimony from someone who does not consider themselves LDS
For close to twenty years I had not gone to church. Not, at least, to any church or any place with the intention of fully committing to it. I had thought about God for most of those years. I had read and argued and wondered. What I had not done was commit.
I was working from home the day my dad walked into the room and told me that Charlie Kirk had been killed.
My son was one year old.
The first thing I felt was disbelief. The second, close behind it, was sorrow. Not the sorrow of politics. I did not agree with Charlie Kirk on every ideological point, and that was never the source of it.
It was an overwhelming sadness about the kind of world my son was inheriting. A young father had been murdered in public for holding opinions that some people did not share. My son was one. His world had just shown him what it does to young fathers, and he was too small to know it, and I was not.
Then it got worse. In Los Angeles, people were rejoicing. Some of my coworkers were glad. Most were indifferent. Between the gladness and the shrug I went into something I can only call existential shock. Whatever you thought of the man, a husband and a father had been killed for speaking, and the people around me were either pleased or unbothered. Hatred at least still cares about what it hates. Indifference to a public murder has stopped caring about anything at all.
That was the day the word darkness stopped being a metaphor for me. It is easy to say the world is dark. We say it flippantly and poetically, the way we say the sky is gray. I mean something more literal than that. I came to believe, and I still believe, that there is a spiritual war being waged over this world. Darkness is not only the absence of light. It is a thing with an appetite, and it takes many forms. Political violence is one of its forms. So is the crowd that cheers it. So is the shrug.
I was in a headspin. I was processing all of this and very emotional, and so I did what a person does when the floor gives way. I went looking for the sacred. I went to three churches.
I went back to Mass first, because that is where I came from. No one mentioned what had happened. No one spoke of anything that was going on in the world. There was a guitar. It might as well have been an evangelical service, and for a Mass that is a strange thing to be able to say. I did not feel anything of the Spirit there. So I went to an evangelical service, and once again nothing of substance was given. Nothing reached down to where I actually was.
I do not say this to condemn either congregation. I say it because it is part of the story. I had come in from a world that had just shown me its face, and I found churches that seemed to be looking at the same screens as everyone else, flattened the same way, offering the same comforts on the same terms.
A church that has learned to sound like the culture has very little to say on the day the culture reveals what it is. I had come looking for something that stood outside the world and could speak to it. I did not find it in the first two places I looked.
Then I went to the Latter Day Saint ward in Manhattan Beach.
In that tradition the blessing of the sacrament bread is entrusted to young men, often still in their teens, and the prayer they say is fixed. The words must be spoken exactly. If a word is missed, the prayer is said again from the beginning.
On that morning the young priest at the table was a boy with a cognitive disability and a severe speech impediment. He stood over the bread and he struggled to get the words out. He labored through that prayer syllable by syllable, and the whole room waited on him, and nobody hurried him.
I sat there and tears came down my face. I had tears because it was so beautiful.
I want to try to say what happened, because it matters for everything that follows. When you feel that the world is filled with darkness, and then in a single moment the world becomes a far more beautiful place than you had thought it could be, something has entered the room. I felt light coming into that room. Not a mood. Not a sentiment.
An arrival.
The people who came before us, in every age and every culture, would have known what to call it. The holy is not something you reason your way toward. It is something that comes upon you. It undoes you and it draws you, both at once. You tremble and you cannot look away. I was doing both.
Catholics believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ. We believe that in the bread Christ is made manifest, truly and substantially, not as a symbol but as himself. I know that many Latter Day Saints do not share that belief, and that is okay. I am not going to pretend the two traditions say the same thing about what happens on that table.
But I will tell you what I saw. That boy, with every ounce of his being, and I mean being in its fullest sense, the whole of what he was, was showing reverence and prayer to his Lord. He was blessing the bread so that the people could partake of the bread of Jesus Christ. And in that act, real presence was being made manifest. I believe that to be true.
But it was not only that. What broke me open was who the boy was, and where he was standing.
Outside that room, in the secular world, he is the kind of person a great many people dismiss. Maybe he gets bullied at school. Maybe he is talked over, or talked around, or treated as an obstacle to the schedule. Every other institution I know of would have found him something else to do, something out of the way.
And here he was the center of the room. Every eye was on him. He had been given the most important words that would be spoken that morning, and he had been given the time to speak them. He held an elevated status, and everyone present was content to wait on him.
I stopped and thought about how beautiful that was, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. Here was a disabled child, and he was the one blessing the bread. It was one of the most beautiful things I had seen in a church in decades.
And I could not help holding the two images side by side. The world had just silenced a fluent man in the middle of a sentence, and a crowd had cheered. The kingdom had just handed its holiest words to a boy who could hardly form them, and a room full of people had bowed their heads and waited. That is the difference between the two kingdoms. That is the whole difference.
All of this leads me to the point I actually want to make.
When it comes to arriving, or arriving again, at religious truth, we make a catastrophic error. It is the characteristic error of secular thought and of the postmodern mind, and most of us absorbed it without ever choosing it. We assume that everything must be treated like the scientific method. We assume that faith is a kind of equation, that you prove it the way you prove a theorem, by reason and logic and evidence lined up in the correct order, and that if you cannot do that you are not entitled to believe.
Nothing in the human story supports the assumption. For as long as there have been human beings, since we came down out of the trees, religious truth has not been arrived at by proof.
It has been arrived at by encounter.
Our ancestors buried their dead and carved ornaments tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote a word.
They met the sacred before they argued about it. They stood in front of something and knew they were being addressed.
That is where religion begins, in every people and in every age, and it is still where it begins. The modern person has been trained to be immune to being addressed, to stand behind a pane of glass and evaluate. But the glass is the anomaly. The encounter is the norm.
Truth, in the religious sense, is an encounter with the sacred. It always has been and it always will be.
Truth happens at the LDS Church on Sundays. This I know.
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