Author: Michael Haycock

I Even Remain Alone: LDS Men sans Families

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I wrote this in over three years ago in response to a call for personal essays on LDS single experiences; alas, it was declined primarily for a lack of anecdotes. It’s not something I would necessarily write today and is longer than a normal blog post. Nevertheless, it’s still a perspective that I rarely see, so I wanted to make it available somewhere. Please don’t take issue with my use of “Mormon.” I wrote this before Pres. Nelson was even Church president and the word “Mormon” is essential to the content of the essay. If it grates against you, please take a moment to ponder what the word “Mormon” meant to me.   My whole life I’ve wanted to marry someone whom I could love and who would reciprocate. For me, this stems from my identity as a Mormon man: marriage is what Mormon men do. My patriarchal blessing, like so many others’, promises me a temple marriage to a “companion” Heavenly Father has “chosen for [me].” But often I fear—for reasons irrelevant to this essay—I may always be single. And I’ve found that the lack of a permanent companion is, of course, a painful part of singlehood, but it isn’t the solitary painful aspect of being single. Indeed, something else oft outweighs it in my heart.  In Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “Imaginary Countries,” a woman admits to an aspiring Catholic priest that “the idea of celibacy terrifies” her.…

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The Author and the Congressman

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The Author In my childhood, I watched my evangelical classmates devour the Left Behind series, curious what a Mormon analogue would look like. Lo and behold, in 2003 Deseret Book published a novel titled The Brothers. Befitting his history as a military pilot, the author had previously focused on military techno-thrillers, and the book series to which The Brothers was a prologue — The Great and Terrible — was mostly of that genre.  While it turned out that The Great and Terrible was not exactly comparable to Left Behind — it wasn’t about the end of days — The Brothers did not disappoint. I unironically love the book as a ingenuous crystallization of a certain moment in Mormon political theology, projected back into a narrative set in the premortal, pre-Earth life. The author prefaces the book with an Author’s Note, in which he admits that he “was forced to take author’s license in many of the details presented in this book. The simple fact is that we know very little of what life was like for us in the premortal world, and the war in heaven is a mystery we know even less about. Yet any literary work, especially fiction, requires some sense of time, location, conflict, and description in order for readers to allow themselves to be pulled into the story.” Without these, he says, “the story turns out to be little more than a series of conversations.” He…

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Moral Hazards of “Integrity”

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The late Clayton Christensen spends a chapter of his book How Will You Measure Your Life? on how to make sure you live with integrity, in accordance with your principles. His suggestion: make resolutions and stick to them, 100% of the time. If you stick with them only 98%, before you notice you’ll have abandoned them altogether. A bit to my surprise, I found myself reacting strongly against this proposition. It took me some thought to articulate what I think Christensen’s approach to moral integrity leaves unexamined, and I think it comes down to a couple things that aren’t often discussed in LDS circles: The need for ongoing moral discernment The dangers of scrupulosity   Moral Discernment Teaching that you should define your moral principles once and for all assumes that, at the moment you do so, you already have a mature moral compass that will not need to be significantly tuned or realigned as you learn about yourself, your neighbors, and the world in which we live.  If someone does have a clear and morally informed idea of what they should be doing, constant adherence to her previously-defined principles is beneficial. However, if she has any need for growth, such determined adherence can lead to a prolonged moral adolescence — analyzing and addressing moral questions with a child’s logic — and even immoral behavior.  Think, for instance, of people who take as a principle that any sexual experience before…

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Laban… as a Christ Figure?

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This Holy Week I’ve been monitoring my employer’s livestreamed Roman Catholic masses and services, meaning that I (for the first time) attended a Holy Thursday mass and a Good Friday service. So it happened that, during the reading of the Gospel of John in the Good Friday service, I noticed something peculiar. In response to Jesus’s raising of Lazarus from the dead, the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, “What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” (John 11:47-50, NRSV) In the KJV, for reference, that last line is rendered thus: “It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” I was roughly familiar with Caiaphas’s role in the Passion narrative, but I had never clued into this particular pseudo-utilitarian line of reasoning — reasoning that was, in John’s telling, effective enough to convince the Council to pursue Jesus’s execution. This time, my mind immediately jumped to the…

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The Necessity of Weakness

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In honor of the late business professor and Latter-day Saint leader Clayton Christensen, I’ve been reading his book How Will You Measure Your Life? In many ways, the book is a breath of fresh air: instead of giving tactical advice, Christensen focuses on training us how to view and analyze our situations, our intentions, our actions, and our desires — and then devise our own tactics and strategies to become the people we want to be. This sort of metacognition isn’t based solely on anecdotal evidence (hallelujah!) and is broadly applicable outside of the business context. Even better, Christensen focuses on ensuring that his readers achieve success that matters emotionally — that is, not wealth, or power, or status, but deliberately crafting one’s vocation, relationships, and identity. I recommend the book. However, as I read, I detected an assumption that I’ve seen in many Latter-day Saint contexts: that living reflectively and in accordance with our moral principles will, and should, bring improvements in commonly-acknowledged, measurable categories. If we live life properly, work hard, and work smart, we will achieve success on the Lord’s terms: inner peace, meaningful community, financial security (if not prosperity), and fulfilling family relationships. (Here I move beyond Christensen, identifying tropes common enough that I hope I need not exhaust myself in finding illustrations.)  There are two issues I can identify with this framework. First, it might incorporate values that shouldn’t necessarily be assumed to be Christian…

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