(I haven’t attempted to update or fix any of the details or translations I mention; I’m leaving it exactly as I wrote it, almost two decades ago.)

I stepped out of the Dong Suwon Hotel and breathed in the warm Korean air. It was about midnight, June 11, 1990, and I needed a taxi. Walking over to the sidewalk, I started waving. It took me less than three minutes to flag one down, which was good–when you’re running away from your parents you don’t want to be caught standing around. A one word command to the driver was all it took to send me on my way. No backing out now.

I knew the route the driver took. We passed by Dong Suwon Byongwon (hospital) where Bishop Chi Hyon-Chae had paced back and forth, waiting to see his wife and newborn son and where, less than three months later, they brought Biship Chi to die. We sped past the little apartment where Im Ch’ung-Bin and Hwang Yun-Hye had awaited their first child with joy and anticipation. The last time I saw them, there were still waiting–waiting for their son to heal, waiting for his heart to beat steadily, waiting for the doctors to tell them their baby need never go under the knife again. And we went through an intersection where I’d seen girls chant like cheerleaders, urging their fellows to pick up their rocks, ignore the gas, and charge the riot police one more time.

Yes, I knew the way. I could walk it blindfolded.

To cartographers, Suwon is the capital of Kyonggi Province, a city of approximately 600,000 people forty kilometers south of Seoul. To missionaries, it’s a decent post: it has a nice big ward, good bus routes, and is far enough out of Seoul to allow for a little relaxation. To me, it was–is–a home. I spent the last year of my mission there, surpassing all previous records for length of service in Suwon, at least for Americans. There had been a native sister that served nearly her entire mission there. In fact years later she returned to Suwon and married a young man by the name of Chi Hyon-Chae, who was later called as bishop. She bore him a daughter, Chi Na-Rae, and a son, Chi Sol, who will know his father only as a picture on the wall.

My father was sleeping soundly back at the hotel. Mom too. I was still a missionary, though I’d said all my final farewells and really didn’t consider myself one anymore. I had been released to the custody of my parents, meaning there were my “companions” and I was to stay with them while we toured Korea–a country I had wanted to understand more than I had wanted anything else before in my life. I didn’t though. In the end, as it slowly dawned on me that I was leaving, I realized I barely understood myself, much less the country I had served.

Why should I understand it? was the self-mocking question I asked myself. I was, after all, just a missionary.

The taxi stopped at my destination. I said “Kamsahamnida” (thank you), paid the man 1100 won (roughly $1.75) and stepped out. Before me stood Bukmun, the North Gate, one of the four old wide tower-gates of Suwonsong, the fortress that King Chongjo had built more than 200 years ago as an act of filial piety to his murdered father. Through time and war the original walls and gates of the once mighty structure had worn thin and crumbled. A massive restoration project in the mid-seventies had brought much of the fortress back, though the city of Suwon had long since out-grown the stone boundaries of that more medieval time. The new Suwonsong was, of course, different from its precedessor. It hid no archers, no caches of food, no assassins, no guards. Its walls, ramparts, and four restored gates were huge stony reminders now, speaking silently of Korea’s rocky past.

I had come to say goodbye.

My mission didn’t just end in Suwon; in a very real way it began there. The elder who came to Suwon in the summer of 1989 had long since left the scene, though as I looked upon that massive structure, before which the express buses coming south from Seoul make their first stop, I remembered him. He had left Seoul in the midst of the heat and humidity of the rainy season long before. What had he hated about the city? I wondered. I really couldn’t remember–it was all so petty and distant now.

Turning towards Bukmun, I read a little sign listing the fortress in the archives as a national treasure. I intended to climb it, to clamber up its left side, which sloped down into a grassy knoll, flip over the retaining wall that surrounded its top, and look inside the wooden chamber that topped Bukmun like a hat. See what’s there.

We elders had joked about climbing Bukmun before. In truth, what we really wanted to conquer was Nammun, the South Gate. But it was located at the city center and we couldn’t approach it without being spotted. It’s illegal to climb national treasures, and despite our irreverence, none of us really wanted to make our lot any more difficult than it already was. But the next morning would find my parents and me on a southbound train, and the Suwon I knew would disappear as Seoul had before it. I needed to do something, something foolish and spontaneous.

I needed one last look around. A final goodbye. I knew that leaving Korea on Friday wouldn’t be nearly as difficult as leaving this city the next day would be. I deserved this.

Climbing up wasn’t hard. Nearby, a drunken man lying on a park bench seemed to be staring at me. Korea’s a hard country, and Korean men have raised hard drinking to a fine art. This man’s performance (fully clothed, minimal movement, silent) was one of the more staid routines I’d seen. I considered waving, but decided against it. He was under enough stress already.

My mission had taught me about stress. Looking out over a side wall near the top of Bukmun I could almost seen the zone leaders’ house. Ten months before, two men in that house had struggled in vain to control a zone that didn’t care for control. I spent my first three months in Suwon there, and I saw a lot. I saw leaders who called men to repentance for crossing streets outside the crosswalks, leaders who though they could force men to do right. I saw missionaries who though a three-hour day was plenty, who sent letters of protest to the president saying they were “on strike” until he removed the zone leaders. Once, the assistants to the president came down, called the zone together, and asked all forty of us if we sustained our priesthood leaders. A Korean sister, a Korean elder, a former companion of mine and I were the only ones who raised our hands.

I reached the top of Bukmun, flipped over the chest-high retaining wall and landed on sand. The sand ran in a five-foot wide strip surrounding a wide open chamber elevated by thick wooden pillars and topped with an ornate roof. I climbed a dozen old wooden steps to take a look inside. Here, I thought, looking at the dust which covered the floor of the empty chamber, soldiers had watched for traffic from Seoul and played baduk while the Yi dynasty slowly collapsed around them.

There was a time when I though my mission would collapse. I had thought my situation hopeless, my goals lost causes. I surveyed Suwon’s main street beneath me, a road that connected the old North Gate with the city’s center, a road lined with restaurants, tea rooms, bookstores, and churches, a road I had walked a million times. Why had I gotten up those mornings, when nothin but an empty appointment book and long hours on the street faced me? Why hadn’t I given up then?

It was getting late and I knew I was teetering on the edge of melancholy. I wondered why I had come to Bukmun. Arrogance? Some wish for confidence, for satisfaction? There wasn’t any to be found–not for a simple, ordinary missionary who had come, as most missionaries eventually do, face to face with the real issues and found himself lacking, and especially not for one who disregarded rules, both his parents’ and his Church’s, in order to sneak out alone and satisfy his ego.

Keeping my eye on a young couple making small talk on a bench opposite the drunken man, I climbed down. The college kids didn’t see me, or maybe they did but just didn’t bother to make a fuss. To them, I was probably just another crazy American soldier. Just one more foreigner who didn’t care.

I decided to walk up the main street and catch a taxi back to the hotel. My route took me towards the chapel, the church I had attended for so long. I had spoken in sacrament meeting there for the last time just two days before. In the crowd that Sunday was Kim Myong-Hwan, the only man I had taught and baptized in my ten months in Suwon. My “greenie” declined to participate in those discussions, so I taught him along with two good friends, Lee Sang-Ho and Chang Si-Song. The day I stood to say goodbye to the Suwon ward Chang was off serving a mission and Lee was sitting behind me on the stand. Kim sat alone towards the back of the chapel, his silent demeanor expressing a filial sadness that made my heavy heart seem cheap by comparion. His father had died just weeks before, and he was the first-born son.

As I approached the church house, a bent-over old lady crossed the street in front of me and set down a heavy bundle on the sidewalk. “Ayonghasimnikka, harmonim. Sugo manu hasimnida” (greetings honored grandmother, you’re working very hard), I said. Barely looking at me, she started complaining about her heavy load. After a moment I said I would carry it for her. Looking at me squarely she consented, but warned me it was a long way. I picked up her bag of odds and ends and we started down the street. Soon we were talking freely, discussing life and the types of people that wander a city’s streets at 2:00am (old ladies and crazy soon-to-be-ex-missionaries excluded). We passed by the church and I pointed it out to her. I told her about my being a missionary, about my long service in Suwon, about my feelings as I now prepared to leave. I’m sad, I said, very sad.

We turned off the main street and started up a hill. The old lady began to tell me her story. She was fifty years old, and had no children. Her husband had grown ill, too ill to tend the farm they had lived on most of their lives. They had moved to the city just three days before, and she found work with a friend in a tiny restaurant to pay the bills. She walked to and from her job every day. The restaurant gave them food, which was good. They found an apartment, but it was up near the top of P’aldalsan, the tall hill that overlooked all of Suwon. So far to walk every day, she said, and no children to help her. No one to care for her in old age, no one to feed her or respect her. All alone.

We sat on the steps leading up the hillside and were silent for a moment. There were tears in her eyes. She asked my age and I told her. You could have been my son, she said, grabbing my hand. I said nothing, but instead listened to her weep, trying to understand the pain and weakness she felt. Then she turned her teary eyes to me and aske me why.

All I could see what Chi Na-Rae, Bishop Chi Hyon-Chae’s normally vivacious four-year-old daughter, now sitting silently beside her mother on the front pew of our chapel, listening to men say goodbye to her father for reasons that I’m sure she could barely understand. I rushed into the chapel late, dragging my companion, hurt and mad as hell. I wanted to be at that funeral, wanted to offer some consolation, show some grief. But my companion and I had spent a long day proselyting in a small village south of us, arriving at home to the sound of the phone ringing–the Korean sisters calling, asking how I could have been so insensitive as to skip the funeral of a man whom I had said I respected so much, a funeral I had thought was taking place the next day. By the time I got my companion and I there, it was all over. Standing at the back of the chapel I wept in pity and frustration. Na-Rae, glancing back as women surrounded her inconsolable mother, met my eyes. Hers were wet too.

Staring alternately at the starry sky and the steps below us, I began to tell my elderly friend what I wished I could have told Na-Rae–and myself–at the time. I told her what I knew about God and the world around us, about the despair and the joy, the goodness and the pettiness in our lives. I testified of the greatness of God–a choppy, relatively incomprehensible, off-the-cuff testimony, something you wouldn’t find in a discussion pamphlet. Doubting that she understood me, I lapsed into silence.

We were quiet for a time, and then she thanked me. Thanked me for, more than anything else I believe, simply being there.

A short while later we resumed our journey to her tiny apartment. It was a poor, dingy, ugly place, not worthy of this elderly lady who tended her ill husband within its walls. She invited me inside for tea. I declined. Fishing into my pocket, I extracted 10,000 won (about $15) and pressed it into her hand, saying that she needed it far more than I. Weeping once more, she asked if we would ever meet again. Of course we would, I lied. Bowing, I said goodbye, God bless. She stood waving silentely to me from her doorstep until I was out of sight.

Jogging down the side of P’aldalsan, I wondered, as I had at Bukmun, just why I was doing what I was doing. Had I been led to that lady, or her to me? But that wasn’t possible–this couldn’t have been a “spiritual thing.” I had been alone, enaging in free-lance counselling with an older woman in the middle fo the night. My mission president would’ve slapped me in irons. As a taxi pulled over and I climbed in, I questioned myself: how did I know that anything she told me was true, that she wasn’t just some batty old lady after me for insidiuous purposes?

I sat silently for the duration of the ride back to the hotel. I didn’t know, I decided. It wouldn’t matter if I did.

In Suwon, over the course of ten months, I grew a great deal. I can say I love the people there, with a love that I’ve not yet been able to feel for any other people. But despite that love and concern, I never really felt like a part of that city and ward. Often, I was more machine than member. I wanted to show my appreciation by being with the members, by becoming like them. But I was a missionary with a job to do, rules and leaders to follow, reports to fill out and transfers to anticipate. As much as my mission did allow me and did teach me, it never let me feel at home.

But that last night in Suwon, out alone, somehow I did. I felt right with the world as I feel asleep in my hotel room that night. Missionaries need that feeling. They need it, I think, more than almost anything else.

Crossing a rice field north of Suwon during harvest season, 1989

This isn’t because I was one of those “jackass missionaries” that Rusty attacked so eloquently last year. Sure, there was plenty of misbehavior on my part during the 22 months I was in Korea, but nothing that approached the style, the brazeness, the pure ignorant goofball foolhardiness that some of my fellow missionaries reached for, and often obtained, back then (and which some elders continue to aspire towards today). No, I fear that the causes and consequences of my poor performance as a missionary had little about them that can be romanticized or made into a good story, which I suppose is why I’ve done so little thinking about or sharing of my mission in the years since. I did attempt to put some ideas down at first, and did attempt to stay in contact with some fellow RMs for a while, but there came a point when I managed to pack most all of it away somewhere, and throw away the rest, and I was happy with that.

Basically, I was an arrogant, self-pitying, socially inept, judgmental, doubting intellectual smart-ass, right from the start. I went on a mission because, of course, I was supposed to go on a mission, because I’d never considered not going on a mission. And so there I was, a young misfit with an enormous amount of unrepented and complicated sinful and psychological baggage and with barely a clue of how to deal with it. And so I went through the motions. But it didn’t work; within a day upon my arrival in the MTC I was bitter and confused and paranoid, even as I tried to show off my smarts and find some sort of niche. I found the rules in the MTC bizarre, the strange mix of jock culture and cheesy spirituality (two words: “MTC basketball”) distasteful. And I hated myself for not repenting hard enough, for not seeking for the spirit constantly enough, so as to be able to stop disliking it, or even to stop condemning myself for disliking it. I spent hours in private prayer (when you add it all up, that is…I’m no Enos, I’m afraid) hidden in some shrubs in back on one of the MTC buildings, pleading with the Lord to sent me an assurance of the truth of the Book of Mormon or Joseph Smith or the validity of priesthood ordinances or anything. And then I would wonder: did I not receive anything because I was breaking the rules by sneaking away from my companion? Or maybe I did receive something, but I subconsciously talked myself out of it? Or maybe the trial of my faith just wasn’t over yet?

The pattern continued into the mission field. The work bored me, and then I berated myself for being bored by the work. Mission life was stultifying, and I condemned myself for not truly consecrating myself. I was desperate to ingratiate myself into what passed for cliques and networks and common points of experience amongst my fellow missionaries, but then would turn around and zealously condemn those very same things, almost just to see if going the self-righteous prick route might work. It didn’t. I didn’t have the spirit; I didn’t feel guided or inspired or blessed. (What was the cause? Was it the tape of Michael Jackson and Moody Blues and Cheap Trick songs I’d bought for cheap from a vender outside a military base? The fact that I’d desperately grab and hide for late-night reading a copy of every English-language newspaper I could find? My naughty dreams? Of course it was! So I’d give all those things away and repent of my hormones in a dramatic and heartfelt flourish, making pretentious promises and sacrifices to the Lord, and then weeks would go by, and nothing would change.) Ultimately, I was just filled with doubts, doubts that I’ve long since realized are a dime a dozen in the mission field–doubts as to why it was necessary to convert the whole world (isn’t the story that we’re going to be doing temple work 24 hours a day all through the Millennium, anyway?), doubts as to the inspiration behind the innumerable fine distinctions and regulations that plagued us as missionaries (wait, which kind of tea was it that we needed to tell people to stay away from again? I can’t wear what kind of tie? you want me just to make up a number when we didn’t give out any Books of Mormon this week?), doubts as the very notion that someone like mewas one of God’s chosen instruments to reach out to His children (oh right, like God is going to fault someone for not receiving a divine call to repentance when the messenger is a frustrated, self-aggrandizing, foolish American kid who can barely speak Korean). I suppose I could blame a lot of externalities for much of this, and I did, for a long time. But it all eventually comes back to me, to the way I was deeply divided in my feelings, the way I found myself impelled to turn from brown-noser to rulebreaker to repentant peacemaker to super-confident know-it-all at the drop of a hat. The repetitiveness and focus of missionary work demands constancy, maturity, and perspective on the part of those who perform it, and I had almost none of that.

There were good moments, or moments that I came to recognize as good, in later years. I discovered C.S. Lewis’s apologetic writings on my mission, particular The Great Divorce, which I read over and over again. I worked my way through the standard works (all except the Old Testament; I never did finish that), fell in love with the New Testament, and slowly began to develop a grasp an idea of the message behind it all (in a nutshell: thank God for His grace, because God knows we’re nothing without it). I was exposed to instances of terrible poverty, child abuse, sexual desperation, violence, gossip, unrighteous dominon, and invariably came away haunted and humbled by my own powerlessness and lack of comprehension (and even sometimes by my own unknowing, implicit participation) in the face of such. But I also met elders and sisters who maintained their balance, their confidence, their sense of humor, their testimony, through it all. More importantly, I think, I met more than a few good brothers and sisters in the wards and branches I served in, who watched us missionaries with kind bemusement and treated us with far more compassion and respect than we deserved. Finally, I was sent to a ward and thankfully, blessedly, was left there for a year, enabling me to put down some roots and actually develop some friendships that weren’t subject to the politics of the mission field. I can remember realizing one day that perhaps my greatest challenge as a missionary–and as one who feels committed to the church–was to learn how to deal with (in my doubtful, smart-ass, intellectual way) the fact that God really does sometimes, occasionally, without warning, bless people with knowledge and testimony and gifts in answer to their prayers….just not everybody, and perhaps not ever me. And there was another day, one particularly fine day, about a month before I came home, when a bunch of us were able to attend the South Korea temple, and on long the bus ride back, while looking around at everyone else (probably wondering who last had the Billy Joel tape we were surreptitiously passing around and listening to), I realized, with a surety that I’d never known before, that every single person on the bus was every bit as confused and screwed-up and sinful as I was…and yet, that God, somehow, knew us all and took care of us, just the same.

I came home, and all the good I mentioned in the previous paragraph was outweighed by the bad; it look a long time for me to sort through all the chaff, and retrieve that which I decided was worth preserving. At first I was an angry SOB, not wanting to talk about the mission or be reminded of it (except, of course, when I wanted to explain how it was the Toughest/Worst/Craziest Mission Ever, but then I realized that everyone’s mission was the Toughest/Worst/Craziest Ever, except for those who’d had the Greatest/Best/Most Successful Mission Ever). I treated much of my family and many old friends like crap (how dare they have had good mission experiences, the jerks!), closed myself off from others. Within a year I’d thrown away my mission journal (no big loss; just lots of philosophical ruminations and private, wretched confessions of all my resentments and sins), packed away my photos, got rid of most of my souvenirs. I’d survived, and now I was going to leave it all alone. I’d keep the Korean language and my fondness for kimchee, but that’s about it.

Except…I couldn’t truly leave it alone, because we’re a missionary church. Oh sure, I could avoid it for a while; for years, actually. But eventually, Melissa and I were married, and we were living ordinary lives in ordinary wards, and the assignments started coming: who is going to go out on splits with the missionaries this Wednesday? Who can help teach this investigator after church next Sunday? So I had to be active, had to articulate, when pressed, my refusal to proselytize. I won’t have anything to do with it, I said, so don’t ask. I will not teach, I will not preach, I will not put myself out as a representative of the gospel of Jesus Christ in that way; I’ve already done that, thank you, and I hated it. Oddly enough, my rigorous stand turned out to be something less than a mighty rebuke that scandalized all around me; they just stopped asking me (until somebody else would be called as ward mission leader, and then they’d start asking me again), and in the meantime, the church’s missionary program–everything that I disliked about it, as well as everything that, as I got older, I found myself sneakily admiring–just kept on rolling forward.

I’ve seen myself change, over the past two or three years. I no longer grumble when Melissa’s invites the missionaries over for dinner the way I used to, and I don’t mock them afterward with the frequency I once did. Sometimes I ponder about missionary work, and I’m more serious, and less snarky, about it than I have been in years past. The big breakthrough came when we moved to this ward in Wichita, and I was called to be a ward missionary, and I accepted. I’m still not sure why I did that. I mean, Mormonism is for me, but I’m pretty certain it’s not for everyone, and I kind of doubt you have to accept Mormonism or its ordinances–in this life or the next–for Christ to save you or perhaps even for God to exalt you. So it’s a bit of mystery to me, as I drive the missionaries around to their appointments and suggest scriptures for the curious to read and ponder. Maybe it’s because I was tired of being a member of this community, but eschewing one part of it. Maybe it’s just because I’m almost 40, and I’ve come to doubt that a lot of the things I was so emphatic about twenty years ago–even if I think my judgments from back then are still fairly legitimate today–are really worth making such a big deal about now. Or maybe it’s because I’ve figured out that I have something to share, and the context of sharing, of compassionate service, of messages of recognition and hope coming from lives touched by the goodness of Jesus Christ–or more importantly, messages that are contained in His words themselves–is often desperately needed, regardless of whether it’s accepted or whatever it leads to. That’s something, I suspect, that nearly every good missionary probably knows, even if the rhetoric and requirements of the environment they’ve thrown themselves into prevents them from saying so or even fully understanding it; the language and ideology of numbers and goals and reports and baptisms is just too strong. But that’s all right, I think: any program they commit themselves to–the Peace Corp, the military, the public school system, the job at the phone company, whatever–would have its own controlling language and ideology, and somehow, at least sometimes, the context of sharing and service shines through all the same.

I guess even I did some service, too, back then, though it’s hard to be sure how and when. (Is this where I’m supposed to put in a reference to how many people I baptized? Two.) Anyway, I’m glad I served. I can’t imagine what person I would be if I hadn’t. I have no real expectations, and no particularly strong desires here, but I do hope that the young men that I now work with will go on missions. I look at them and I think: honestly, they’re coming up on 19 years old; are they really going to try to tell me that they’ve got something better to do with their life at that age? I didn’t, and they probably don’t either. So go and serve, I say, the moderately hypocritical recovered (recovering?) missionary. Look at it this way: at worst, you’ll go, and you’ll suck at it, and the rules and the organization and your companions and the expectations will drive you mad, and maybe you’ll hate it, and maybe you’ll come home early, or maybe you’ll make it through, but either way you’ll be mixed up, and maybe you’ll be angry about it all, but then twenty years will go by, and you’ll realize that nobody–including yourself–really particularly gives a damn about your feelings or your mistakes anymore. And God will probably just be relieved, because most likely–no, most definitely– He was just happy that you were there, and He was forgiving all your little mistakes and doubts all along.

This past weekend wasn’t just Memorial Day; according to the traditional liturgical calendar, it also included Whitsunday, a celebration of the Day of Pentecost and the spiritual gifts bestowed upon the early disciples on that day. Acts 2:2-4: “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And there were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

I have never personally experienced anything remotely like this, or indeed, remotely like any of the spiritual gifts promised to the faithful by Paul or Moroni. I have never seen or been party to a healing that struck me as having anything miraculous about it. I have never prophesied, nor directly witnessed the fulfilling of a prophecy. I have never seen an angel, discerned spirits, or spoken in tongues. With only a very few and very small exceptions, mine has not been a life graced, so far as I know (or so far as my own pride and sins allow me to recognize), with spiritual guidance, revelation, confirmation, or testimony.

Yet I know I have been given one spiritual gift, or perhaps two (they’re related, I believe). My patriarchal blessing describes it as a gift of wisdom, but to me the truer description of my gift comes a couple of verses earlier: while to some it is given to know “that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world,” it is my lot, I think, to rather believe the words of those who have that knowledge, even if it is not something I’ll ever be blessed with myself.

I am, in short, a believer, if not a knower. While I have never seen with my own eyes evidence of any of the aforementioned, more spectacular spiritual gifts, and while I am often critical of accounts of such, I do not fundamentally doubt any of them. I’ve tried the existential, atheistic route, and it was a failure: I simply couldn’t pretend to myself that I didn’t believe, that I didn’t suffer from a sehnsucht or longing for that which I felt was plainly there, despite my inability to actually apprehend any of it. In short, certainty eludes me, but credibility comes easily. I would be lying if I said I knew where the power of God resides in this world, but I do not think I have ever doubted that it isresiding somewhere…and when I see men and women whom I know to be good and loving and intelligent people testify that they have found God through Christ’s grace, through the Book of Mormon, through service in the church, I can see no reason to dispute them. I believe them: I believe the words of my father, my wife, and so many teachers and neighbors and friends I have been blessed with. While I don’t think I have within me any great conviction that they are all right, it also doesn’t strike as at all possible that they are all wrong.

What I’m describing here probably sounds somewhat indiscriminate, and of course it is to a degree. I believe in lots of things (like Santa Claus, for instance), as I tend to think it reasonable to not discount the possibility that truth and beauty and God’s power may dwell within practically all things. (Which makes me into a kind of panentheist, I know.) But I’m also a debater and a doubter. Is that contradictory? I don’t think so–I think that a willingness to Socratically struggle (with oneself and with others) over what reality and wisdom really are, even if (perhaps especially if) you never feel as though you have arrived at a conclusion as to what that reality is, is a sine qua non of belief. Socrates was no sophist: he was a realist, in the sense that he never appeared to feel that there wasn’t something real to all this talk about justice and virtue and wisdom, even if he could never articulate it with certainty (indeed, even if, as was recorded, the most he was ever sure of was that he “knew nothing”). Socrates spoke of his daimon; we might speak of a sort of holistic intuition, or to borrow from the German romantic tradition, of Verstehen. When describing King Solomon’s wisdom, the Old Testament record curiously speaks of not only his knowledge, but of his “largeness of heart”–which I take to mean not simply his sympathy for others’ claims, but his capacity to believe what it was they said.

The fact that I can get all philosophical about what it is that I suspect is my most fundamental spiritual condition shouldn’t be taken to mean that I consider it to be an excellent one, as I don’t. Frankly, I’d much rather have conviction. I’d like to be able to speak with certainty about this thing that I did and these words which I spoke and this miracle which I witnessed. Being critical is often a drag, especially when one’s criticism always ends up becoming self-criticism. (“You say you doubt that’s true, but don’t you also doubt your doubts?”) It can be a very effective tool in polemical settings, but talking about deep yet inarticulate feelings by way of what you doubt you have any good reason not to believe (“I’ve never felt inclined not to believe that President Hinckley may be receiving revelation”) really kind of stinks as far as testimony-bearing goes. So I still pray for confirmation and revelation, though admittedly far less often than I used to. For now however, reflecting upon those I’ve known whose lack of conviction has led them anyway from the church, and thinking about how much my children need to see their parents grounded in something, I treasure the fact that somehow or another I am yet gifted to be bound by naive belief to the gospel of Christ.

In fact naivete, properly understood, is probably the best way to think about this. Paul Ricoeur described it (in The Symbolism of Evil [1967]) as a “second naivete,” one which calls us across the “desert of criticism” and makes possible a certain kind of belief or intuition of the reality of the sacred. To Ricoeur such naivete was a function of hermeneutics–but then hermeneutics was originally a theological (indeed a pneumatological) endeavor, concerned with the role of spirit, or spirits, in the text or symbol or world. While I realize that it is dangerous to wish for things–as you may get what you desire–I still wish that I could be one of those who see and feel, with great immediacy, as did the early apostles, the gifts of the spirit. But in any case, I’m glad that I believe they’re there.

Mormons from the West who live or visit the former Soviet Republics and find themselves sharing their testimonies in front of LDS congregations in this region regularly comment on what a “miracle” it is that the Church is here and that the Gospel is being preached and accepted in this part of the world. That is the big news, and the good news. But the current state of play is not without wrinkles.

Recently, the Russian government has established visa policies making it much more difficult and expensive for individuals from outside of Russia to serve full-time missions here. In short, there is a new requirement that individuals living in Russia on the type of visa that religious workers typically receive must leave Russia every three months and apply for re-admittance. We have been informed by local and regional Church leadership that this may mean a substantial dip in the number of North Americans and others from outside of Russia serving as full-time missionaries here.

That is the long and short of the current situation. The backstory, as I understand it from 10 years of traveling to and living in the former USSR, suggests that these recent developments are far from surprising and shouldn’t be seen as a severe blow to the Church’s prospects here.

The general consensus among Mormon visitors that it is truly a “miracle” that the Church is here at all is more correct than they know. And that is not necessarily because of Russia’s 70-year experiment with “godless communism.” In fact, the years of Communism and and the chaos that followed after its preciptious fall may have brought Russia into the modern world in ways that actually have made it easier for the Church to establish a toehold in the former USSR than if the 1917 Revolution had never happened.

The current change in policy effecting foreign LDS missionaries is part of a larger political, social and religious re-trenchment going on (at least in Russia) that is not at all a return to the official atheism that was propounded by the government during the Communist years, but rather a more conservative, more traditional return to “Russian values” that suggest that the “true Russian” is and must be the following: patriotic (obedient to and supportive of the government) and devout (obedient to and support of the Russian Orthodox Church). Anything outside this paradigm is perceived as a threat and, when possible, that threat is eliminated through all available means — political, legal, social, relgious.

While Mormons regularly talk about a “conversion” experience that even individuals born into the Church must go through at one time or another in their lives, that concept is foreign to (and is perceived as antithetical to) traditional Russian Orthodoxy. The idea that a person can or should “choose” their own religious path is as ridiculous to this mindset as the idea that a person can or should be free to choose their own ethnicity. It simply does not compute.

These attitudes are rooted much more in the “Old World” than they are in the state-sponsored atheism under Communism, and they are much more deeply ingrained than the socialist sensibilities that still survive in the former USSR. After years of hearing stories about the “New World” being attractive to the first European settlers because of their quest for religious freedom, I finally understand the conditions from which they were escaping. And I understand more and more now the claim one regularly hears among Mormons that the Church could not have been established anywhere but in America, where religious diversity, although not existing without resistance, at least existed in the early 1800s.

In Russia of the 21st century, many influential people (the President being the most prominent among them), believe and promote the traditional idea that the Russian is born Orthodox and must die Orthodox, and any deviation from that path by individuals or groups is a serious and foreign-based threat to Church and Country that must be met head-on through all available means, including the passage of legislation and the implemntation of governmental policy.

This affects the lives of the non-native LDS members living in Russia very little (aside from the full-time missionaries). I feel very free to be practice my own religion here, and the Russian government doesn’t try to interfere with that, largely because I am an American and the Russian government doesn’t care about my particular religious persuasion. However, these attitudes have larger implications for the growth of the Church within Russia, among the Russians.

Just as it is a miracle that the Church is here now, the future growth of the Church in Russia will be just as significant of a miracle, given these conditions. But we are a Church that believes in and depends on miracles. So, while we should be concerned, we need not worry.

The way I see it, the church of 2008 is, in a few subtle yet key ways, both more American and less American than it was in 1995, when Elder Hinckley became President Hinckley. The ways it is “less American” now are pretty obvious, if somewhat simplistic: since the time Hinckley ascended to his position, there has been significant growth in the church’s membership (though not as much as some people back in the 1970s and 80s were predicting), most of which has come in majority non-Caucasian nations in the Southern Hemisphere. At the same time there’s been an enormous investment in time and money made in building temples all around the world to serve local saints, and another very large investment made in the Perpetual Education Fund, which is mostly dedicated to the education and improvement of members from these same poor, non-Caucasian, non-North American populations. So in terms of basic growth, budget priorities, and the building program of the church, President Hinckley’s tenure has featured a concentrated effort to “internationalize” the way members of the church think about building Zion.

But when I say the church has also become “more American,” though, I’m thinking about “being American” in a fairly specific, more complicated sense. By it, I am referring to a way of life, a way of seeing things, one that might go by a number of different names: modern, pluralistic, “liberal” (itself a loaded word), cosmopolitan, individualistic, etc. The church of 1995 was already thoroughly Americanized, of course, but still…up until then, we had always been led by men who had been born in the 19th century (yes, I’m skipping over President Hunter here), men whose formative experiences in church leadership–provided by the authorities who had trained them–came by way of people who had some connection to the immediate post-Manifesto, post-polygamy, post-Deseret world of the late 19th century and early 20th century, and more importantly all the transformations the church went through during those years. These were all the “old grey heads” that were passing their prime and passing away in the 60s and 70s, whom Hinckley paid tribute to in conference a couple of sessions ago: men with names like McKay, Clark, Woodbury, Moyle, Tanner, etc. And you can see memories and influences of that connection, I think, in the way church presidents like Lee, Kimball or Benson–all of whom had been schooled by these transitional figures–sometimes seemed discontent with the modern world in a rather profound sense. Their moral traditionalism, their political conservatism, wasn’t just a function of the clash of church doctrines with changing mores; I think you can really see in many of their talks, alongside their obvious patriotism, glimmers of frustration with an America that had become so busy, so big, so urban, so competitive, and so immoral. It was if they were thinking “we compromised on so much to fit into the American way of life, and this is what we got in return?” This attitude, I think, helps explain the famed “retrenchment” via correlation and other policies in the 60s and 70s, as was described by Armand Mauss.

Then along came Hinckley, and we suddenly had a thoroughly 20th century leader. He was at ease with the modern media world, and more importantly seemed to understand how you need to think and act in order to relate with people–whether members of the church, enemies of the church, or just curious journalists–with whom you have this weirdly impersonal yet intimate media-conveyed connection. He could be candid, he could be sly, he could be funny. He took seriously the public relations and “interest group” aspects of modern American life, and engaged with it on its own terms. When it came to relations with African-Americans, he brought the church about as close to a formal apology for our past racist doctrines as we’ll probably ever get; sat down and had dinner with representatives from the NAACP, for heaven’s sakes. On the other hand, when it came to gay marriage or other moral issues, there was a lot of the old traditionalism at work, but there was also plenty of the “new conservatism” as well: church leaders getting active, leading political and legal fights, emphasizing “religious liberty,” talking about the need to “respect differences,” etc. Hinckley himself never became heavily involved personally in any of these battles, but I think he helped set the tone: if we were going to have to fight for our rights as believing Christians and moral conservatives in today’s America, then we would learn from how the religious right has tried to do the same thing over the past 30 years. (Mitt Romney’s sometime clumsy and ultimately not entirely successful embrace of the evangelical, “new conservative,” religious right is a case in point here.)

In short, President Monson is inheriting a church that, in a few subtle ways, both stylistically and substantively, has absorbed many of the perspectives of contemporary American life. We are wired, we are watching stake conferences broadcast straight from Salt Lake via satellite transmissions, we are downloading our Sunday School lessons on our Blackberries. And President Hinckley has had a not insignificant part in this change. The result is a church that is both less “American” (that is, less white, less Caucasian, less English-speaking, less North American, etc.), and more “American” (more technological, more media savvy and media dependent, more “political,” etc.).

President Monson is going to have to deal with all this, because once having begun to go down this road, I suspect the church’s membership will continue. You’ve got other forces that are pushing it along (like the globalization/”Americanization” of the economic world that employs and trains a great many of those who end up as leaders of the church), but even without that, the church’s own internal dynamics will be enough a tiger for him to ride. The big challenge facing President Monson isn’t, I think, going to be found in arguments over history or doctrine (those early 90s fights–the “September Six,” etc.–were partly the result of squabbles over retrenchment that I think the great majority of people in the church have long since grown past), but rather in the particularly American challenges of apathy and ambivalence: what will become of the youth of the church when being a Mormon is no longer really that hard of a thing to be? When, for a lot of them (and I have my own anecdotes I could share here), being Mormon (or a “Mormon-American”) is not really all that different from being, well, a gay American, an Ipod-carrying American, a Catholic American, a slacker American, a Woody-Allen-loving American, a black American: when it’s all “just” culture, lifestyle, and choice? I don’t know. Maybe the law of chastity and the Word of Wisdom and temple trips will provide plenty of empowering poles for the next generation of thoroughly modern Mormons to nonetheless stand fast around. And, of course, the basic missions of the church, the basic building blocks of conversion, won’t change, and they shouldn’t. But I suspect, as Mormons increasingly get tossed around and praised and attacked as, not members of some unique tribe, but just as oddball members of the general American (modern, global, wired) tribe, that we may see a lot of conventional American attitudes towards belonging infiltrate the church, even more so than they already have.

Gene England (1933-2001), Mormonism’s greatest personal essayist, wrote “Easter Weekend,” his greatest personal essay, twenty years ago. I reread it every Easter, usually on Holy Saturday. The following are only excerpts. It was originally printed in the Spring 1988 issue of Dialogue, was reprinted in the Autumn 2001 issue of Irreantum, and is available in full in The Quality of Mercy, a collection of his essays long out of print.

I didn’t know Gene well. But even many of those who didn’t know him well miss him, and look forward to someday hearing his voice again.

[Stopping over on his way to a conference in Montreal during Holy Week sometime in the 1980s (his inability to remember the exact date runs throughout the essay), Gene is in New York City, where he plans on visiting a friend and some museums and seeing a couple of plays. While walking through the city, he watches, with a feeling of superiority, various black hustlers and their pathetic white marks along Forty-second Avenue. He finds himself drawn into a shell game, to show off and to “save” another hapless tourist, puts down progressive larger bets, and ends up losing a $120, before realizing that he was the mark all along. Filled with embarrassment, racist anger, and liberal guilt, he meets his friend, and they go to a showing of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” in the old Manhattan Ward meeting house, but Gene is unable to focus on the play.]

It hurts very much to think of you. How could you suffer not only our pains but also our sicknesses and infirmities? Did you actually become sick and infirm or did you merely feel, with your greater imagination, something like what we feel when we are sick and infirm? But could you actually “know according to the flesh,” as you say, if you didn’t literally experience everything with your body? And if you did literally experience our infirmities, did you know our greatest one, sin? Everyone says you didn’t sin, that you were always perfect. But how then could you learn how to help us? And yet if you did sin, if you actually became sick and infirm and unwilling, for a moment, to do what you knew was right, how does that help us? I don’t want you to hurt like this, like I do now, to be ashamed, to hate the detailed, quotidian past. Yet I want you to know the worst of me, the worst of me possible, and still love me, still accept me–like a lovely, terrible drill, tearing me all the way down inside the root until all the decay and then all the pulp and nerve and all the pain are gone.

Can’t you tell us directly, without all the mystery and contradiction, if what I feel is right? Could it be that your very willingness to know the actual pain and confusion and despair of sin, to join us fully, is what saves us? It’s true, I feel your condescension in that; I feel your coming down from your formidable, separate height as my judge and conscience. I feel you next to me as my friend. Did it happen in Gethsemane, when you turned away from your Father and your mission for just a moment? I think so. So how can I refuse to accept myself, refuse to be whole again, if you, though my judge from whom I hide, know exactly what I feel and still accept me? Yet it hurts so much to hear you tell Joseph Smith of your pain when you remember that moment in the Garden. You say, “Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit–and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink–nevertheless, glory be to the Father, and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men.”

Was that preparation so painful, even when you recalled it as the resurrected Lord–and so many hundreds of years later–that you still shrank and could not complete your sentence? Is that pause between “shrink” and “you will be red in your apparel when you come, in garments like one “that treadeth in the wine-vat”? Why will you have to say then, “I havenevertheless” the actual moment of your atonement? And why did you also tell Joseph that trodden the wine-press alone, and have brought judgment upon all people; and none were with me”?

Who is it can withstand your love?

[Gene continues his trip through New York and on to Montreal, eating almost nothing, counting every penny, trying to figure out how make it through the days to come on the twenty-nine dollars cash he has remaining, “without getting any more money or admitting my plight–and in a way that would make me suffer (that seemed very important).” He gets to the airport, travels to Canada, presents his paper, then abandons the conference, struck by the stark racial differences between the streets of New York and the attendees at the Shakespeare Association meeting. He wanders Montreal, and attends a Good Friday service at a small Protestant chapel, lost in thought.]

In the mid-seventies I sometimes went fishing at North Eden, a tiny delta and valley, opening into the east side of Bear Lake in northern Utah. On a mid-August morning before sun-up, one of Dad’s clients drove us east from Salt Lake City to Evanston and then north along the Utah-Wyoming border through Woodruff and Randolph, down the long incline to Laketown on the south shore of Bear Lake, then up the east side. I was alone in the back seat, only half-listening to my father usual cheery commentary. My own thoughts were dull, almost despondent: I had been released from St. Olaf College the year before in what looked to me (and some colleagues) like a decision to remove my influence on students, one of whom had joined the LDS church. Then I had been turned down for a position at BYU, apparently because of concern about what parents might think about how a person of my unorthodox views and background might influence students. But I was also turned down at the University of Utah, because, as one of my former teachers there confided with regret, “This department simply won’t hire an active, believing Mormon.” (Which was I, too devoted a Mormon–or not devoted enough? Where was my home, my vocation? In Zion or in exile?)

We had out boat in the higher lake by 7:00am and headed for the upper end, where the fishing just out from the stream mouth had always been the best in late summer. Using wet flies cast with a bubble, we each took our limit of three trout over five pounds and (by mutual agreement of those fishing on this private lake) put back the many others we caught. Two that my father caught with his own self-designed version of a double woolly worm that ended in a red turft must have weighed over eight pounds. We tried some dry wasting in the early afternoon, but by four o’clock the wind up the canyon off Bear Lake was too strong, and we left. Dad and I both offered to drive, but the client, who had taken a nap, insisted he wasn’t tired and for variety headed around the lake to Garden City and down Logan Canyon, with me asleep lyging across the back seat and Dad dozing in the front.

When I came up out of unconsciousness I had my hands on my father’s head and could feel his hair and blood. I couldn’t hear the words I was saying but I felt it from the blessing part of me, the deepest part, before consciousness. Dad was more conscious than I but more hurt. I gradually began to see the ground, the fir trees, then the cars just down from us. The freezer of huge fish was splashed across the highway. I kept my hands on Dad’s head and began to hear his moaning, then felt pain emerging in my own chest and struggled to breathe.

Police came over soon and told me our driver had fallen asleep and run head-on into a blue Austin, which had been driven by a German tourist whose legs were broken in the accident. Ambulences were on the way. Each new face asked me where we caught the fish. Our driver, who wasn’t hurt at all, kept apologizing, frantically. He knew my father was dying. When the ambulences came they put Dad in the first one and tried to get me to lie down by him, but that made it even harder for me to breathe. At the Logan hospital they made me lie down for X-rays of my broken ribs and I nearly fainted. Then the technician told me they had seen what looked like a bruise on the upper aorta in my father’s X-rays and were going to rush him to Salt Lake because the artery could burst at any moment.

I asked the technician if he would help me give my father a blessing, and he nodded and went for some consecrated oil. We found Dad on a gurney in the next room, barely conscious, the whole left side of his face, where he had struck the dashboard, going purple. The words I used blessed him with life, specifically with the five years he had told me that spring he needed in order to complete the arrangements to consolidate our family investments and transfer them into the Church’s missionary funds. The words were given to my tongue, beyond my mind. I phoned Charlotte and Mom and told them we’d had a slight accident, and asked to call Dad’s friend, the heart surgeon Russell Nelson, and to meet us at the LDS Hospital.

But all confidence left me on the ninety-minure, blarins sirens ambulance ride to Salt Lake. I sat in the front seat, Dad and doctor and a nurse just behind me through a curtain. As the driver radioed ahead, asking Dr. Nelson to be ready and describing the emergency, I was constantly sure someone would soon push through the curtain to tell me the aorta had burst and my father was dead. When we arrived, Dad was rushed into surgery and Charlotte stayed with me while I got us checked in and walked to my own roon. Then I couldn’t breathe again. Charlotte got someone to look at my X-rays, which I was carrying; they decided that my collapsed lung needed immediate attention and sent Charlotte out while an intern gave me a local, made an incision, and pushed a hollow needle between my ribs and began to evacuate the chest cavity so my lung would reinflate.

Charlotte came back to tell me my father was fine–except for some missing teeth and a broken jaw. The new X-rays they had taken for Dr. Nelson showed no bruise on the aorta. I thought of the fish, and the part of me that moved to give my father a healing blessing before I consciously knew anything. We were alive.

[Gene returns to New York City, where he and his friend go to see Kevin Kline perform in a less than satisying production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (Gene continues to come up with excuses for not eating with friend, and for putting off paying him for the tickets he has bought). Afterwards, walking down West Fourth Street, they pass a pair of black street musicians, and Gene, after waiting until no one is watching, furtively puts five dollars in their tip cup, just about all the money he has remaining. He catches a bus to the empty apartment of another friend, lent to him for the weekend, and tries to fall a sleep, but is troubled by strange dreams. Here, the narrative of the essay breaks off, and we instead find ourselves reading a communication, written in a very different voice, between one of Gene’s ancestors and the Lord.]

This is my report. I have been assigned to George England, one of my descendants, for thirty years now. He carries my own name but does not use George often, though that is his first name. I have protected him well, but I do not understand him. I think I should remain on this assignment for at least one more ten-year term.

The main problem is that George understands what is right to do but does not do it. He knows more about the Atonement than I did when I was branch president in Lyme Regis–or even when I became a patriarch in Plain City after the crossing to Utah. He writes constantly about it, even when he is writing for the Gentiles about literature. Many people praise him for what he says. They write letters to him saying how he has helped them live the gospel better and helped them understand repentance. But he still does terrible things. It is still hard for him to be honest. He covers over his mistakes with lies. He pretends he knows things or remembers people or has read books when it is not true. I think he loves to do right, but he has a hard time being honest or kind when the chance to do so is sudden or embarrassing or when he is painful or lonely. If he has time to think, he is very often good, but is not when he is surprised.

When I helped him marry Charlotte Ann, you know much better he was for a while. He began to learn from her to be generous before he thought about it. He even began to be honest like she is, without toting up the cost. But after all that self-pity when he lost his job at St. Olaf ten years ago he began to be a hustler, to cut corners, to take advantage. I was able to use that car accident to help him know he was good. And when you arranged for him to be a bishop, that was fine for a while. But he seems to have lost contact with Charlotte Ann. He isn’t listening to her very well, and he isn’t telling her what he really feels. I think she is getting tired.

Perhaps he is writing too much. I am certain he is not praying enough. He is worried, though, and wondering–sometimes frantically, I think–why there is not someone to help him as he has helped some who have needed him. He does not seem to be able to ask for help. Perhaps something will happen that we can use. I hope so. My heart reaches out to complete the circle. I think some good chances will come now that he is a bishopric again and working with the Primary and the Cub Scouts–and also when he becomes a grandfather in two years.

I am sorry about the language of this report. I know you want me to learn from him, but it is hard when he talks so very little. Please excuse all mistakes.

[Gene sleeps late. He awakes and goes to the Metrpolitan Museum of Art, where he finds himself drawn to the Manet painting, “The Dead Christ with Angels,” a painting that, unlike many other depictions of Christ, captures “the dark time of struggle as Christ’s divine spirit is still creating the resurrection from within his still-dead mortal body, with the angels still sorrowing, holding him up, urging life to return.” Afterwards, he leaves the museum, and takes the bus across Central Park to attend sacrament meeting at the LDS-owned office building on Sixty-fifth and Broadway. It is a testimony meeting.]

After the choir’s “Easter Hymn and a women’s quartet singing “The Lord’s Prayer,” the choir leader (Andrea Thornock, I see from the program) sang “He Was Despised” from Handel’s “Messiah.” She had dark hair and wore a long surplice-like overdress. It was made of what looked like velvet and was dyed a striking grape red. Her somber alto voice reminded us of the costs of salvation: “He was despised, rejected, a man of sorrows”–in that three-note dying fall on “sorrows” her voice pronounced exactly the grief that must have come from Handel’s own pain. She looked straight into our eyes as she slowly turned and looked across the congregation: “He hid not his face from shame, from shame and spitting.”

Then Liz Hodgin, in a lovely floral print and a pink hat, sang the soprano solo, “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” that has been called, by Kenneth Clark and others, the greatest piece of human music. But it is that, I believe, only when it is sung by someone, like Liz, who believes, who sings her own testimony as well as Handel’s. And our hearts were lifted from the depth Andrea had properly taken us down to. I blessed Andrea for planning such a program and for being part of it, for remembering, though we Mormons don’t often notice Good Friday, what that somber day is meant to recall: that Christ was suffering servant as well as glorious victor, that, like the sinners the rest of us are, he had to die before he could be resurrected.

The bishop bore his testimony, not about the Resurrection but about the power of repentance, which he had experienced personally. A brilliantly dressed businessman picked up the theme by confessing, in a careful, broken voice, how Christ had changed him twenty years before, suddenly, completely. A short man with a beer belly, thinning long black hair, and a black leather jacket, almost a caricature of the aged hippie, spoke softly of his long, slow, still backsliding conversion. And a young Puerto Rican on the bench in front of me, who had been clearly struggling for courage to get up, spoke last. He told how a few weeks before he had made a Saturday trip to see this strange part of New York, had wandered into the LDS visitors center on the main floor just below us, and had met some missionaries and had joined the Church. He tried to describe his former sins and how he had changed. “I’m sorry in all the world,” he kept saying. “I’m sorry in all the world.”