We are no longer an agrarian society, no longer tied so closely to the land that we feel immediately the effects of our stewardship, for good or bad. Part of that may be because we own such tiny little pieces of land instead of family farms, grazing ranges, and ranches. Even if I do everything I can to improve on my own .21-acre lot in downtown Provo, even if in that small realm, I am the perfect steward, I will have a negligible impact on the larger environment of which I am a part.

For that reason, much as I hate to admit it, stewardship cannot be a completely private enterprise. I own little land myself, but I am a citizen of a country that owns vast tracks of land, much of it in my own state, administered by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, the  National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. And although my vote, my voice may be just as insignificant in shaping the policies that govern the use of that public land as my .21 acres is relative to the 1900 million acres of the contiguous United States, I still have a obligation to speak up, because that is a real exercise of stewardship in our country today. The fact that we don’t personally own the land neither excuses us when we fail to speak against environmentally destructive policies nor protects us from the ill effects of such use. We must come together collectively as stewards or suffer collectively the loss and damage allowed by our disagreement and apathy.

I don’t know what the best policies are concerning public land use, preservation, and development. I suspect that they would best be decided locally by people who balance immediate gains with long term needs. I do know that unless we have the discussion, and weigh our interests against our obligations, we cannot claim to be good stewards.

Elder Snow did not explicitly advocate political action in his essay. He did, however, talk about stewardship in relationship to our roles as citizens.

“I believe the Lord expects up to act as good stewards. We have many stewardships, not only in our family, church, and citizenship responsibilities but also in temporal things. That principle is clear in LDS scripture:

I, the Lord, stretched out the heavens, and built the earth, my very handiwork; and all things therein are mine…

Behold, all these properties are mine,…And if the properties are mine, then ye are stewards; otherwise ye are no stewards. (D&C 104:14, 55-56)

…it is required of the Lord, at the hand of every steward, to render an account of his stewardship, both in time and in eternity. For he who is faithful and wise in time is accounted worthy to inherit the mansions prepared for him of my Father. (D&C 72:3-4)

As Mormons we tend to focus on our ecclesiastical and family stewardships, which is well and good. But I believe we will also be held accountable for how we treat one another, the community in which we live, the land that surrounds us, even the earth itself (244).

What might give us pause is the description in the article of three prominent Evangelical leaders who typify the anti-intellectual approach. One has built a young-earth museum depicting humans and dinosaurs living together sometime during Earth’s 10,000 year existence; the second presents a history of America in which “the founders were evangelicals who intended America to be a Christian nation”; the third “has insisted for decades that homosexuality is a choice and that gay people could ‘pray away’ their unnatural and sinful orientation.”

While there are sometimes disagreements about what LDS doctrine does or doesn’t say about these subjects, the present position of the Church avoids the Evangelical/fundamentalist traps discussed in the article.

• Science students at BYU study evolution, not Creationism or Intelligent Design.
• While the LDS view of history sees the US Constitution and its guarantees of religious freedom as inspired, the Church does not embrace nativist thinking and has recently issued a statement calling for “a balanced and civil approach” to immigration.
• The Church does not presently take an official position on the origin or explanation of homosexuality: in the Same Gender Attraction statement, Elder Oaks said “these are scientific questions.”

The dedicated LDS critic could, of course, dig up statements from earlier LDS leaders that called evolution a heresy or that offered a questionable reconstruction of US history. But it is not Brigham Young or Reed Smoot or even George Romney that are running for president this year, it is Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. This is 2011 and if we are going to talk about LDS doctrine, it is present LDS doctrine that is the topic of discussion. In his interfaith writing, Robert L. Millet has regularly emphasized this point. In his article “What Is Our Doctrine?” he recounted a conversation with a Baptist minister who was genuinely puzzled about how to properly identify LDS doctrinal positions. Here is Millet’s response, which I’ll quote at length because it seems relevant to the sort of doctrinal angst that is regularly aired in the Bloggernacle:

1. The teachings of the Church today have a rather narrow focus, range, and direction; central and saving doctrine is what we are called upon to teach and emphasize, not tangential and peripheral teachings.

2. Very often what is drawn from Church leaders of the past is, like the matter of blood atonement mentioned above, either misquoted, misrepresented, or taken out of context. Further, not everything that was ever spoken or written by a past Church leader is a part of what we teach today. Ours is a living constitution, a living tree of life, a dynamic Church (see D&C 1:30). We are commanded to pay heed to the words of living oracles (see D&C 90:3–5).

3. In determining whether something is a part of the doctrine of the Church, we might ask, Is it found within the four standard works? Within official declarations or proclamations? Is it discussed in general conference or other official gatherings by general Church leaders today? Is it found in the general handbooks or approved curriculum of the Church today? If it meets at least one of these criteria, we can feel secure and appropriate about teaching it.

A significant percentage of anti-Mormonism focuses on Church leaders’ statements of the past that deal with peripheral or noncentral issues. No one criticizes us for a belief in God, in the divinity of Jesus Christ or His atoning work, in the literal bodily resurrection of the Savior and the eventual resurrection of mankind, in baptism by immersion, in the gift of the Holy Ghost, in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and so forth.

So is religious anti-intellectualism an Evangelical problem but not an LDS problem? Or did we just get lucky by having two pro-science LDS candidates in the spotlight this year?

1. If we love of God, we will care about the earth

• We believe that God created the heavens and the earth, and declared all that He had created “good” (Genesis 1:31, Moses 2:31).
• We believe that all things were created spiritually before they were created physically (Moses 3:5,7) which indicates two things: divine forethought in creation and the belief that all things have a spiritual as well as a physical component (more about that in #3). It seems to be incredibly disrespectful to be blasé about wastefully destroying something that God put thought and care into creating.
• We believe that God speaks to us in the wild places of this earth–mountaintops (Old Testament patriarchs), wilderness (Christ and John the Baptist), groves of trees (Joseph Smith). God’s people throughout time have sought refuge from the din of society and inspiration in the holy places God himself has provided.
• We believe that we are given the divine responsibility to be stewards of this earth, beginning when God placed Adam in the garden of Eden to dress and keep it (Genesis 2:15).
• Christ taught in the parable of the unjust steward that we must exercise our stewardship wisely, to make our portion more profitable, not for us, but for God, who is the Master (Luke 16). How to best to do this is open for interpretation, but I would propose that any activity that poisons, sterilizes, and otherwise destroys the productivity and viability of the land and makes it an uninhabitable or hostile environment for people, animals, and plants is unrighteous dominion. As stewards, we do not own the earth. We are its caretakers. The earth belongs to God.
• We believe we each received our physical body in order to grow in experience and knowledge through this mortal probation, and the physical world is the stage where we grow. If Alma was right, and all things denote there is a god (Alma 30:44), then this world is His testimony of Himself to us.

2. If we love of humankind, we will care about the earth

• We believe that we have a divinely mandated mission to preach the gospel to all the world, to bring everyone that will unto Christ. We believe that God loves all people, and as we serve others, we come to love them too. But inasmuch as societies, conflicts, and greed have created scarcity out of natural abundance, people are suffering and dying (See the Somalia series). If we are to fulfill our mission to share the hope of the gospel with these people, we need to first address their basic needs for safety, shelter, food, and opportunity to work on both a social and environmental level.
• The land that is ravaged by war, drought, deforestation must be restored so these people can live and have an opportunity to serve God.
• If we our wasteful consumption creates scarcity for other people living on the earth now and in the future, we are in the wrong. Consideration for others is one reason to be modest in our wants and wise in our use of shared and finite resources.

• We believe in the law of consecration, that everything we do and have must be given to the building up of the kingdom of God on the earth. If we can stop looking at our work and property as building up our own means, and see them instead as contributions to building Zion, we will attempt to work cooperatively to improve the world and the conditions of all people who live in it.

3. The earth (including environment, resources, and all living things on the face of it) has intrinsic value

• According to the John Locke, you have a natural right to property once you have mingled your labor with; your field is your property if you have worked it, and therefore, its fruits are also your property. The value is determined by the human labor exerted. This definition carried over into the convention of money. So the idea of economic value was first based on a human capacity for work. Now we have abstracted the idea of money from work and assigned it solely to purchasing power. We still assign economic value to natural resources, but that value is based on the price an end product will fetch. In this paradigm, the earth has value only inasmuch as we can sell it.
• But this narrow view is obviously too limited. It ignores aesthetic value, sentimental value, and intrinsic value. Other than being a beautiful place that has fostered fond memories for us, the earth (and all that is on it) is valuable in its own right, even the parts of it that man has not claimed as his property through his labor and the parts that he has not yet managed to sell.  It has a spiritual dimension. It was good as God created it, before we ever began dressing it and shaping it around our needs and desires.

Having established here that we do care about the earth, my next step will be to review the specific counsels and practices we live by that demonstrate our stewardship. But that will have to wait until another day.

The following is a modified excerpt from my presentation at Sunstone this summer.

We live, not only in a capitalist, but a consumerist, society. Our society is all about spending, acquiring, cluttering, and replacing, not about maintaining, restoring, renewing, and protecting. It is cheaper to buy new than to repair old.  We live in a disposable country, where everything is trash, if not now, then soon. How did we get here?

One of the best explanations I’ve found is in the work of the social theorist Max Weber (1). He examined the correlation between the Protestant religious belief and its accompanying work ethic and the accumulation of capital and the subsequent rise of capitalism.

One aspect [of the concept of calling that arose during the Reformation] was unequivocally new: the fulfillment of duty in vocational callings became viewed as the highest expression that moral activity could assume. Precisely this new notion of the moral worth of devoting oneself to a calling was the unavoidable result of the idea of attaching religious significance to daily work (39-40).

“Restless work in a vocational calling was recommended as the best possible means to acquire the self-confidence that one belonged among the elect. Work, and work alone, banishes religious doubt and gives certainty of one’s status among the saved (66).

As American culture has become increasing secular, it has lost the religious motivation to accumulate wealth. Money is now its own end.  There is some evidence that we are also losing our work ethic, as we require immigrants to do the hard manual labor and backbreaking work we are no longer willing to do ourselves.

Weber’s insights are applicable to the LDS church because we, like those early Protestants, retain a general belief that wealth is a sign of God’s approval. The Book of Mormon makes this claim explicit, with a warning (see Jacob 2:18-19, Alma 4:6, Helaman 12:1-2, and especially 2 Nephi 28:21 for examples). Modern revelation reinforces this message:

D&C 38:39 And if ye seek the riches which it is the will of the Father to give unto you, ye shall be the richest of all people, for ye shall have the riches of eternity; and it must needs be that the riches of the earth are mine to give; but beware of pride, lest ye become as the Nephites of old.

Hugh Nibley saw that we modern saints have become far more like the Nephites in their prideful phase than is good for us, and condemned us harshly in Approaching Zion (a book I find even more discomfiting to read than The Miracle of Forgiveness).

As Americans, we accept without reflection that we need a washing machine and dryer and disposable diapers (and cutlery and plates and bibs and towels and bags and really, what product hasn’t had a disposable version made of it?). We assume that we must keep our homes and public buildings at a temperature that is comfortable for t-shirts (or suits) all year long and accept that bottled water must be a good idea. A durable good is one that is expected to last three years (2). Planned obsolescence and disposable goods are a critical component of our economy.

This is the American consumer-driven disposable culture. It is this culture that is in conflict with environmental values. The peculiar Mormon culture that has evolved through our doctrine and history should naturally align with environmental values, not consumer demands. As latter-day saints, we need to not be turned off  by terms like “environmentalist”.  But as many saints are, let’s use the word “stewards” or “stewards of creation”.

I practice my stewardship on the home front, with the work I do every day to care for my family. I live the gospel, and show respect for God’s creation and my stewardship obligations through the quiet acts of trying to live a responsible, sustainable life. I know many saints who do the same, but don’t think of it in the terms of the environmental movement.

My hope is that through my writing, I can help these saints to recognize the environmental value of the work they already do, so that we can all move past the divisive language to embrace our stewardship of the earth. Most of my posts are brief meditations on the simple work of living: baking bread, hanging laundry to dry, canning tomatoes. They are not scholarly; rather they are reflections on my life as it is lived with the hope that I can come closer to meeting God’s expectations for me.

1. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism: The Expanded 1920 Version Authorized by Max Weber for Publication in Book Form. Roxbury Publishing Company. Los Angeles, CA. 2002.

2. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durable_good)

My contribution: Weather Underground, the best online source for hurricane tracking information. As of 11 AM EDT Saturday, their tracking map forecasts a storm path for Irene passing directly over New York City at about 8 AM Sunday morning.

George McCready Price (1870-1963), a Canadian, was a “self-taught geologist with little education beyond high school” (p. 124). Price was a Seventh-Day Adventist who defended the Young Earth theories (a six-day creation and a geological record created by a global flood rather than lengthy geological processes) of Ellen G. White, the visionary founder of the Adventist movement. Price’s arguments made little sense to trained geologists, but “lay readers, unfamiliar with geology, often find Price’s argument convincing” (p. 126). His lay readers included William Jennings Bryan and Joseph Fielding Smith, who both used Price’s ideas to promote their anti-evolution views.

President Smith’s reliance on Price is evident in the acknowledgments section of his book Man, His Origin and Destiny, which lists Price’s The New Geology as well his 1924 book The Phantom of Organic Evolution. A longer discussion of the sources President Smith cited as support for his views is available in “The B. H. Roberts/Joseph Fielding Smith/James E. Talmage Affair,” Chapter 6 of The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism (Signature, 1993). That essay also relates the views of James E. Talmage, the LDS apostle who also happened to be a trained geologist. Talmage was drawn into the discussion in 1931, when the Quorum of the Twelve was asked to mediate the disagreement between B. H. Roberts and Joseph Fielding Smith over the publication of Roberts’ manuscript The Way, the Truth, the Life, in which Roberts accepted an ancient earth and pre-Adamites (a dated but descriptive term). As explained in the essay:

Talmage was particularly upset by Smith’s use of George McCready Price as an authority in geology. Price was professor of geology at a small parochial college in the midwest and author of many books purporting to vindicate orthodox Christian belief by exposing the weaknesses of scientific theory. After a quorum meeting in which Smith quoted extensively from Price’s The New Geology, Talmage decided to prepare himself more fully for a debate on the merits of this type of evidence. He wrote to his eldest son, Sterling, for an opinion of the book. Sterling was a professor of geology at the New Mexico School of Mines.

Like Giberson in Saving Darwin, Sterling Talmage critiqued the shortcomings of Price’s work. As noted in the essay, the elder Talmage then presented that critique to the Quorum of the Twelve in a later discussion again called to resolve the dispute between Roberts and Smith. Both the Twelve and the First Presidency ultimately declined to rule in favor of either side, essentially allowing the two to agree to disagree while avoiding further public discussion of the disagreement (so Roberts’ book was not published). Shortly thereafter, the elder Talmage stated his own views in a public address in the Tabernacle in August 1931 in a talk titled “The Earth and Man,” later published in pamphlet form (apparently with the approval of the First Presidency but over the objections of some of the Twelve, including Smith). Like Roberts, Talmage argued in favor of an ancient earth, the existence of pre-Adamites, and the occurrence of death before the Fall.

Ironically, it was Smith’s restatement of his conservative views in the 1954 book Man, His Origin and Destiny that became the default LDS position rejecting science and evolution, in part due to Elder McConkie’s vigorous championing of those views in Mormon Doctrine, first published in 1958. The vast majority of Latter-day Saints are entirely unaware of both the sources of Smith’s conservative views and of how controversial Smith’s views were among his fellow LDS leaders. [I'm not suggesting the rejection of science and evolution is the official LDS view, just that many Latter-day Saints accept it as the LDS view because of publications by Smith and McConkie — see Jeff Lindsay's LDS Science page for helpful discussion and references.]

Three points in closing. First, the Giberson book is a friendly introduction to the science and evolution issue for an LDS reader and is highly recommended. Second, I find it odd Joseph Fielding Smith was so willing to accept the views of the Adventists James McCready Price and Ellen G. White while rejecting the views of LDS apostles and scientists like Talmage and Widtsoe. I think present-day apostles are more inclined to defer to their colleagues, especially on issues where that colleague has some expertise. Third, given the questionable sources that Smith relied on, why does LDS Correlation continue to defer to the views Smith and McConkie (channeling the views of Price and White) on these disputed issues, ignoring the views of LDS apostles like Talmage and Widtsoe? That seems like cafeteria correlation to me. [What's worse than Correlation? Cafeteria Correlation.]

Mind borrows mountains and rivers, earth, sun, and sky. But you can’t just keep these things forever. Even if they weren’t quite what you wanted, they gave what they had and now some compensation is needed, some recompense is required.

“Recompense is payback,” Handley says. “It means to weigh together, to bring back into balance” (xi). What was loaned must be returned or replaced. What was given must be given back.

Nobody gets to start from scratch, not even God. To make a world is to borrow, recycle, and repurpose the matter that, even if disorganized, is already out there mattering. All creation is reorganization. Even the mind of God must mooch its mountains, cajole them, persuade them, serve them, compensate them.

This is messy and its messiness is compounded by the fact that everything is in motion. “Nothing is still,” Handley reminds us (3). Nothing can be still because recompense is itself never done. Recompense compels the world’s motion: everything is in play as everything borrows from everything else in giant, intermittently harmonious rounds of exchange, compromise, and negotiation. Leaves borrow light, cows borrow leaves, people borrow cows, worms borrow people, etc., etc. The world is the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, everyone’s a broker, and the closing bell never gets rung. The whole thing echoes Anaximander’s famous lines:

Whence things have their origin,

Thence also their destruction happens,

According to necessity;

For they give to each other justice and recompense

For their injustice

In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

This is the world in a nutshell. It will die if it stops swimming. Handley sees it. He goes fly fishing, but “every time I step off the bank and into the water, the shape of the current is noticeably different. The water has risen or fallen, it is muddied, olive, or amber, the banks carved differently than before” (29). Every time he wades in, something new has been borrowed, added, or traded away.

But rivers are a cheap example. Take the mighty mountain instead. Handley sees it here too. “Mountains as landmarks belie what any hiker – or anyone with the eyes of an impressionist – knows, that a mountain never retains the same shape. There are as many mountains as there are steps it takes to climb them, or as there are angles of sun and shifts in the weather” (92). To climb a mountain is to negotiate its shifting face. You can borrow a handhold here in exchange – quid pro quo – for breaking up some ice over there.

Mountains and rivers both wake Handley’s mind to the “fundamental recognition of an ongoing creation” (130).  They wake him to the recognition that creation must be ongoing because creation is compensation. Everything must always start again – and again, and again! – because all the debt is shared, we’ve borrowed against our own lives, and what we’re borrowing is each other.

This is where things get sticky, where we begin to hear more clearly a call for re/pentance in our talk of re/compense.

We should do unto others as we would have them do unto us because we will all – inevitably, necessarily, repeatedly – be doing it unto each other. We will all impose on, borrow from, use up, and trade away parts of one another. Everyone will both repurpose and get repurposed.

Obvious problems result from all this claim-jumping: you will get borrowed as something you don’t want to be and you will have to borrow stuff that isn’t “exactly” what you wanted. Either way, our shared lives are such that the potential for offense abounds.

In response to these offenses, forgiveness must be understood as more than an occasional virtue. Rather, it must be cultivated as a baseline disposition. You will be forgiven only as you forgive, pardoned only as you pardon, free from offense only as you refuse to take it.

You’ll get lots of practice. The world will resist you, it will exceed your grasp, it will practice indifference toward you. Like a borrowed shirt, it will fit you imperfectly, it will be loose in the neck, short in the cuff, and the tag will itch. The world will irritate you, bruise you, thwart you, anger you. In the end, it will even – at least for a time – kill you.

Suffering the indignity of these rounds, you will, by default, be tempted to just flit from one offense to the next, simmering, simmering, simmering in frustration, stewing in quiet desperation.

But to live, you will have to let these offenses go. You will have to learn how to make and accept recompense. You will have to forget the fiction of cash equivalences and barter with whatever is at hand like a Bedouin.

You didn’t get what you wanted? Or even what you needed? Your life was repurposed by others for something other than what you had in mind? Join the party. I’m sympathetic, but in the end these objections are going nowhere. That bus, while always idling, never actually leaves the station. You presume a world that doesn’t exist and you fantasize a fixer-God who, unlike ours, is himself doing something other than divinely serving, borrowing and repurposing.

Ask instead: What were you given? Where were you taken? What was your recompense? Learn to like lemonade.

But you had plans? You didn’t want that recompense? Do not be so proud. You have done to others just the same. You have, in turn, taken, borrowed, and appropriated – and probably with quite a bit less grace and restraint.

What have you taken? At what cost? What recompense have you been withholding from whom?

You’ve been using up mountains and trees, the great wide earth, the sun, the moon, the stars? You’ve been drinking the rivers dry? You’ve been repurposing your spouse, your children, your parents, your friends? You’ve borrowed and wasted at your own convenience? You’ve squeezed hard, turned their other check for them, and then squeezed again? Nursing grievances, you’ve justified such actions with accusation and, often enough, even invoked God in your defense?

This, Handley suggests, is a kind of “ecological apostasy” (130). For my part, I doubt that there is any other kind.

We need to wake up to the recompense of what has been given. We need to freely offer that recompense in return. “We need,” as Handley advocates with a borrowed phrase, “to learn to think like a mountain” (xv).

[Home Waters: Overview, Home Waters: Soul as Watershed, Home Waters: Gene/ecology]

Use some wind, water, and pressure. Sift it, layer it, and fold it. Add an inhuman number of years. Stack and buckle these planes of rock into mountains of frozen time. Use a river to cleave that mountain in two. Hide hundreds of millions of purloined years in plain, simultaneous sight as a single massive bluff. It’s a good trick.

Bodies, made of earth, are just the same: in my face, unchosen, generations of people are stratified in plain, simultaneous sight. My father’s nose, my grandfather’s ears, my mother’s wink, the lines my kids have etched into my squint. My wife pats my cheek and says: “Dear, your genealogy is showing.”

She’s right. The lines on my face and in the palms of hands are family lines. But these lines aren’t easy to follow because, counter to expectation, time’s line isn’t straight. Time piles up. It loops around, knots up, peters out, and jumps ahead. It moves in fits and starts. Time’s inevitability, its straight-shot necessity, is tempered by the meandering play of accident, coincidence, and contingency.

In Home Waters, Handley finds the same thing. Alone in the family cabin, he tries sorting out his own family lines. He’s got rolls of genealogy, “full names, dates and locations of birth, dates of death . . . each name like myself, a knot of time and flesh” (75). But these knots are the trouble. They’re tough to untangle because life is not the line but its skein.

There are simply too many tangentials and too many generations in the past that must exhaust us and be arbitrarily ignored in order to create the impression that families are “lines” at all and not wide webs, connected below the surface of time like that grove of aspen trees out my window breathing in the same nutrients through the same shared root system. (71)

Call it gene/ecology. Here, stately family trees turn out to be more like thorny briar patches. And if we’re going to talk not about oaks but briars, we may as well just be honest and make room for sun, rain, rocks, and dirt. Who can draw the line between what lives life and what gives it? Plotting these family histories, we’re going to need more paper: “If genealogy teaches us anything, it is how narrow and contingent our understanding of kinship is” (104).

The illusion that I’m simply me, free of ecology, independent of pedigree, is just another variation on the illusion that only the “dramatic” events in our lives or notable names in our trees are decisive. This kind of “Great Man” history squeezes off stage the ordinary and tangential that compose the bulk of our lives. A more faithful history would have to be much more modest. We’re wading in a river, here, not digging an irrigation ditch. “It was irrigation that reduced the river to a straight shot of water and caused the wildlife to retreat to higher reaches” (12). Doing family history, we need to coax the wildlife out – squirrels, bugs, and all – not scare it off.

It’s as if we believed we could order time in a straight and sequential chain, belying time’s surfeiting fluidity, as if the past is not also our future, the dead our living. Dams have created the impression that water is manageable, fixed, and immutable. While this feat of engineering makes living comfortable, it elides reality. (83)

I’ll leave it to Handley to say what mark his brother’s suicide left on his life. Steven Peck’s review of Home Waters does better than I’m able:

Like a dark darting shadow in a streambed glimpsed only from the side, his brother’s suicide appears and disappears from time to time throughout the book. It has affected his life in numerous ways. It is a horrific event of shock and dismay that haunts his memory, his dreams, and his waking reality. Its complexity confuses and disorients him. The event is portrayed in full at the end of the section called ‘Winter.’ The event is never allowed to stand as a metaphor for anything: nature’s cruelty, or humans damaging the environment, or the river’s channelization. Unlike, Terry Tempest Williams work Refuge in which her mother’s cancer stands as a metaphor for the destruction of the Great Salt Lake bird refuge, this tragedy is described because of the complexity and confusion that it has caused to enter into Handley’s life. He does not ‘use’ it in the book for some literary purpose. Rather it’s there for us, as it is for George. A reality that has ripped and rippled through his history and touched much of who he is and what he has become.

Like a stiff punch in the eye, this death leaves Handley bruised and seeing stars.

But I am just as interested in the room that this book gives to a colleague, a gas station attendant, a peach farmer, a soccer mom, and a hiking buddy – Handley’s accidental companions, his collateral pedigree, tossed together by circumstance. Whether our lives are filled with or bereft of Spirit depends on learning how to see the small, unrequested contingencies of time, place, and family as a grace rather than a spoil. Doing this means learning “something about how to assent to circumstances, how to live within constraints of place and culture, and then maybe [we] will know the depth of extended mercy” (16).

We can resist these impositions, but family history is hematology, a study of how lives bleed into one another, spreading life from one body to the next. Whatever our choice, we’d better not offer resistance to the claims of these lines in the name of religion. “It isn’t religious energy that is misspent in denial of the bloody facts but rather the energy of our hurried automated lives” (65). “Whoever thought that the idea of eternal life meant we could disparage this fleshly life never finished the hard work of belief” because the hard work of belief is nothing but the work of assenting to the messy contingencies of this fleshly life eternally (68). Seal these bodies. Don’t abandon them.

Seeing my father’s hands in mine, hearing his words come out of my mouth, feeling the pulse of his ambitions in my own, time thins. Here, at least, we touch. Just so, I imagine, with his father.

Here at least it seems that the veil of the world is thinner, and I am always yearning to push through the surface of what I see, to feel a hand on the other side. Might not the angels also wish for the same, to reach back into us, to feel the pulse of our blood and to feel the swirling of the earth’s breath around them, to veil their minds with the blue sky and green canopies of trees that are our home? Yes, I think they envy us. (67)

[Home Waters: Overview, Home Waters: Soul as Watershed]

Like a shirt pulled off over your head, this thesis leaves the soul inside-out and exposed. You thought your soul was a kernel of atomic interiority, your most secret secret – but shirt in hand, everyone can see your navel.

Stegner’s novel, Angle of Repose, opens with the narrator’s own version of this thesis. An aging father, writing about his pioneer grandparents, names the distance between himself and his son:

Right there, I might say to Rodman, who doesn’t believe in time, notice something: I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were – inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial (3-4)

Right off, Stegner fingers what is different about this notion of a soul: time. Thinking that souls are tucked away inside us generally goes hand in hand with thinking that they are untouched by time. Dammed up inside, the soul, unmoved, is safe from the perpetual rush and tumble of Heraclitus’ panta rhei.

But wrong-side-out, the soul has no such repose. Here, nothing is still and the soul’s “I am!” is both compromised and constituted by its temporality: it moves but its movement is “composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other.” It moves but it moves as a gathering litany of brains, bones, beliefs, scruples, and prejudices copied from the bodies and lives of parents and grandparents and channeled through the narrow straits of my canyon walls.

As Handley points out, “this is the way with watersheds. They gather tributaries from upstream and connect all that is above, beneath, and beside and give life through unseen processes of exchange” (xv). Downstream, the river appears self-sufficient, its banks clearly defined, its water an unremarkable grace. But the accessible obscures the obvious. “A river is water, yes, but it is also soil, plant, and animal life – a watershed” (128). A soul is a body, yes, but it is also a place and a time.

A soul, like water, “seeps through the edges of stone, leaps out of rocky walls, or surges from beneath the soil, and it grows in size and momentum as it flows downward from the tops of the mountains. Little capillaries of water meet up with others to form small rivulets and streams, which meet others still in naturally formed transepts, until a river takes shape and creates inverted mountains to aid its way down. Down to the sea or directly to the clouds from where it drops on the mountains again”  (213).

The simile is striking but I don’t want to leave it as such. Handley’s attention to the force of place insists that we are dealing with more than metaphor. The soul names both the body’s place and that body’s being placed. There are no souls without bodies, but a body, in itself, is a wire unplugged. Souls socket bodies into the place of their time. It is in this sense, Handley suggests, that “geography teaches us the first lessons of being”: that every kind of being involves a being there (38).

This fits with Mormonism’s own original take on the soul. Sometimes we use the word like everyone else, but sometimes we don’t. D&C 88:15 gives the term a twist: “The spirit and the body are the soul of man.”

Where Plato’s soul is, above all else, indivisible, Joseph gives it as composite. “Soul” names the body’s being-there-with a spirit. Given that the separation of body and spirit is death, the soul – this being-there-with of body and spirit – is synonymous with life.

We might take this one step farther. In Mormon parlance, the separation of body and spirit is physical death, but the separation of my spirit from the presence of God is spiritual death. Eternal life, spiritual life, depends on my spirit’s being-there-with God’s Spirit.

Eternal life sparks when body sockets into spirit that sockets into Spirit. This compounding togetherness is the essence of a soul. Souls are the “taking place” of this shared life. They are the “there” of our being-there. There is no salvation without this shared place or promised land.

Sin, on the other hand, dis-places us. All sinners are expatriots – not because they’ve left some particular place behind but because they’ve come ungrounded from place altogether. Sinners, we no longer know where we are. We no longer feel earth beneath our feet, smell rain in the air, or stain our hands with walnut hulls. Sky turns unnoticed.

Religion, then, is revealed geography. Angels, when they come from the presence of God, do as Moroni did for Joseph Smith: they point to the ground and say “Here!”

Attention to place involves not just attention to landscape but to the body as well. The body is the place where life happens. While the soul is the place of the body, the body localizes the extended geography of the soul. “The body is the cup in which to drink the world” (42). This cup always runs over, but without the body life won’t hold water.

We stuff, abuse, and ignore our bodies at our own peril. The soul as watershed feeds the body’s current through the capillaries, rivulets, and transepts of sensation. In order be here, “sensation is what one needs” (57). A respiring body, a sweating body, a wind-chapped body, a sun-kissed body, is what one needs. A body in open air. We forfeit our souls, our place, if our bodies become just “excess baggage, things to be maintained so that we can continue to live as if they were irrelevant, as if we were not embodied biological matter” (34).

Handley climbs mountains in order to pace out the dimensions of his watershed and it is the work imposed by the slope that wakes him to it. “The mountain,” he says, “stirs me from strange and varied slumbers of the body” (187). Awakening to our bodies is the key to awakening to our place.

None of this is to deny that we are “insufficient vessels,” that our bodies are “not built to withstand [even] the daily tremors beauty offers” (162). But this insufficiency, this dependence of the river on a watershed that spreads from view, is the whole point. The body that I am, the repetition of blood, faith, and sin that I am, is necessitated only by this insufficiency. This insufficiency is the tie that binds body to place and parent to child.

A soul is the sharing of this insufficiency in a common place. It is the wakeful shouldering of its burden from one body to the next.

Home Waters models what, on my account, good theology ought to do: it is experimental, it is grounded in the details of lived experience, and it takes charity – that pure love of Christ – as the only real justification for its having been written. It is not afraid to guess, it is not afraid to question, it is not afraid to cry repentance, and it is not afraid to speak in its own name.

The book deserves some time and attention. It’s what you’ve been wanting to read. It may also be what you’ve been wanting to write. At the very least, it made me want to write about it.

I’ve planned a few posts that will air some of my ideas about Handley’s ideas: one on the importance of place, a second on the importance of genealogy, and a third on importance of (re)creation.

The book’s self-description reads like this:

People who flyfish know that a favorite river bend, a secluded spot in moving waters, can feel like home—a place you know intimately and intuitively. In prose that reads like the flowing current of a river, scholar and essayist George Handley blends nature writing, local history, theology, environmental history, and personal memoir in his new book Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River. Handley’s meditations on the local Provo River watershed present the argument that a sense of place requires more than a strong sense of history and belonging, it requires awareness and commitment. Handley traces a history of settlement along the Provo that has profoundly transformed the landscape and yet neglected its Native American and environmental legacies. As a descendent of one of the first pioneers to irrigate the area, and as a witness to the loss of orchards, open space, and an eroded environmental ethic, Handley weaves his own personal and family history into the landscape to argue for sustainable belonging. In avoiding the exclusionist and environmentally harmful attitudes that come with the territorial claims to a homeland, the flyfishing term, “home waters,” is offered as an alternative, a kind of belonging that is informed by deference to others, to the mysteries of deep time, and to a fragile dependence on water. While it has sometimes been mistakenly assumed that the Mormon faith is inimical to good environmental stewardship, Handley explores the faith’s openness to science, its recognition of the holiness of the creation, and its call for an ethical engagement with nature. A metaphysical approach to the physical world is offered as an antidote to the suicidal impulses of modern society and our persistent ambivalence about the facts of our biology and earthly condition. Home Waters contributes a perspective from within the Mormon religious experience to the tradition of such Western writers as Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams, Steven Trimble, and Amy Irvine.

If you’re unfamiliar with George Handley, you might try this.

You can also find an excerpt from the book here.