The Road to Middoni: In Your Mind and In Your Heart (Part I)

Before moving on to those central questions, I’d like to address my emotional response to such an interpretation of Nephi’s actions in 1 Nephi 4. And that emotion is fear. “Wait a second,” I (and you, perhaps) cry at this relentless logical march towards greater spiritual knowledge. “Wait! Before we go down this path that will reveal uncertainty and a stark view of the difficulties involved in receiving and interpreting divine revelation, isn’t there something safe to hold on to? What’s the iron rod here?”

I believe there is a principle of safety, and it’s a principle that helps elucidate an even deeper concern that I sometimes even hesitate to ask. How do you mess up something beautifully pure like divine communication? How do prophets mess up? How do I mess up in the exact same way? And if Nephi can miss or misinterpret part of the message, what can I possibly hope to gain from the moments when God speaks to me?

Both of these lines of questioning have, I think, a powerful answer contained in the scriptures. But before we get to that, let’s pause and contemplate the stakes of revelation.

In the previous chapter, we established something of a extreme--a prophetic leader seeking divine guidance while under massive pressure in a time-sensitive situation. This situation isn’t typical for divine communication, at least from what I can gather from my own experience and the stories put forth in scripture. Rather, the fact that God communicates with his children through what Nephi himself would call a “still, small voice” means that most of the time, communication from the heavens occurs in conditions fine-tuned for spiritual quiet and to ears fine-tuned to spiritual frequencies. Prophets are a group of individuals who have spent a lifetime learning to listen to this still, small voice.

That isn’t to say that the stakes aren’t high. In fact, when revelation from God is sought or received, the stakes are nearly always at their highest.

Take Moses leading the children of Israel as a case in point. Whatever the actual circumstances of crossing the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds), the divine command to “Go forward!” was surely given amid the din of panicked cries, wailing, animal moaning, waves crashing, and general bustle and hubbub (“Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?”).

Or take Abinadi, finding additional strength and knowledge poured into his soul at the very moment his life was under threat in the court of King Noah (“Away with this fellow, and slay him; for what have we to do with him, for he is mad.”)

But I will proffer here the idea that most revelation does not take place under physically taxing circumstances. Instead, the stakes are spiritually existential. Think of President Kimball wrestling with the tradition of liturgical racism, prejudice and segregation. Think of the spiritual stakes here. This was a razor’s edge, a theological minefield if ever there was one for a church that professes leadership through contemporary divine communication. One misstep, one decision taken for the wrong reasons, would have major ramifications. I think this chapter will make my interpretation of events quite clear, but try to put yourself in the shoes of church leaders in the spring of 1978. There were two logical possibilities in their minds.

1. God had truly decreed the ban against ordaining black men to the priesthood and against sealing black couples and families together in the temple, and despite both interior and exterior pressures to do away with the ban, doing so against God’s command would cut off the church from divine presence. As a result, the church would become a church of men, not a church guided by God.
2. The priesthood ban was wrong, and should be rescinded. At stake here was not only the spiritual well-being and access to blessings of millions of God’s children (and an institutional repentance process that would require the Atonement to make up for decades of missed kindness and salvation), but also the spiritual damnation among the current membership of the church if they were allowed to continue to hold on to racist beliefs that were not in accordance with divine truth.

I’ll grant you that I’ve somewhat oversimplified things (and we’ll see a third path charted by the very humbled Elder Bruce R. McConkie in the months after the church rescinded the ban), but that is how I imagine the spiritual stakes of the matter.

What has always bothered me about this process is not the origin of the priesthood ban. While the church hasn’t officially stated as such, the consensus among faithful members of the church who have thought and studied this deeply seems to be that cultural mores of the time, laced with a little political expediency and not a small amount of fearing men more than God all worked together to influence Brigham Young and other leaders to enact the priesthood ban, first officially articulated in an 1852 speech President Young gave to the Utah territorial legislature. Church leaders questioned the divinity of such a ban at first, but the passing of generations led to its general acceptance by both the general membership and leadership of the church as a hard and fast rule, even ascribing its origin to Joseph Smith. There are multiple excellent studies of this subject, some just recently published, so I encourage you to learn more if this all sounds new to you.

While tragic, I don’t find this hard to believe or destructive to my foundational belief in the church’s teaching and leadership. Just like Nephi, I can respect and listen to men who make mistakes. What is much more bothersome is the seeming reluctance among church leadership in the middle 20th century to question or move more quickly to rescind the ban. From what the scraps of history can tell us, it seems clear that each president of the church, from David O. McKay until Spencer W. Kimball ended the ban, sought with varying degrees of earnestness to receive an answer from the Lord concerning the matter. To put that in perspective, that’s at least 27 years of prophetic prayers (though likely a subject of prayer much earlier for these men as they served as apostles). Why did it take so long to learn the truth? Especially if we believe, as I do, that God’s truth is eternal, that racism has never received divine sanction, and that it was essentially waiting out there, in the ethereal heavens, for an attuned prophetic ear to hear?

Now seems like a good time to talk about that iron rod principle of revelation.

To be continued next week with a discussion of the iron rod principle of revelation and a close reading of prophetic interaction with race.