Jack Harrell teaches English and creative writing at Brigham Young University-Idaho. His novel Vernal Promises won the Marilyn Brown Novel Award in 2000. “Calling and Election” will be included in his next book, a short story collection forthcoming from Signature Books. Jack and his wife, Cindy, live in Rexburg, Idaho.

I must also add that Jack is a real pleasure to work with. Now on to the interview.

-What was the genesis of “Calling and Election”?

As an undergrad at BYU, back in 1992, I presented a paper on King Lear at the National Undergraduate Literature Conference. My paper was called, “The Unburdening of a King.” In the first act of the play, Lear says,

’tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age;
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburthen’d crawl toward death.

I was intrigued with the idea of Lear being “unburdened” of his worldly cares and duties. The thesis of my paper was that Lear only lost things of worldly value, and nothing of eternal value. Therefore, the story was not a tragedy.

So a couple of years ago, I was teaching Lear in one of my literature classes, and the idea came to me to have a Mormon protagonist who loses everything of worldly value—his job, his money, his house, his reputation—but loses nothing of eternal value—his wife and his testimony. That’s what got the story started.

-Many readers have questioned whether or not Jerry’s brain tumor is intended to indicate that Jerry’s experiencing a delusion. Although I’m sure you’re reluctant to impose your authorial interpretation on this story (its open-endedness is part of what makes this story effective, in my opinion), could you speak in some way to how the brain tumor functions in this narrative?

In the conclusion of my novel Vernal Promises, Jacob, drunk and confused, bails out of the bishop’s moving pickup and has a vision of Christ while injured on the side of the road. Some readers could call his experience non-miraculous and explainable, due to his drunkenness and injury. They could say he’s just imagining it all. But for me, the vision is literal. I feel the same way about Jerry’s experience. I think it’s an interesting reading to call it all a hallucination—I’m open to the possibilities there—but I don’t read it that way myself.

-The spousal relationship between Jerry and Camille is also integral to this piece. Could you speak to Camille’s role in the story, and to her thematic importance?

For me, Camille is one of those “eternal” things in Jerry’s life that we won’t lose. No matter what Brother Lucy puts them through, Jerry and Camille will have each other forever.

-Brother Lucy is another fascinating character. How did this character evolve? What role do you see him playing in the story?

Brother Lucy is obviously a trickster figure. One could ask, is he good, and truly working for the brethren? That seems unlikely in the context of the church as we know it. Is he a bad guy, then, a tool of the devil? That doesn’t fully satisfy me either. However, he does remind me of something Flannery O’Connor says about how the devil is always accomplishing means other than his own. Though Satan tries to inflict misery upon us, we often end up turning, in our pain, toward God.

In the process of writing the story, I was also thinking about the Book of Job. In that story, God and angels and the devil are just sitting around chit-chatting one day, when God asks the devil, “What about old Job?” God says, “of course he serves faithfully, because you always bless him.” So God allows the devil to torment Job. Fascinating! In the end, though, the devil fails and God’s servant is proved.

-Did you do much research on having one’s calling and election made sure, or did this story grow out of your general knowledge of the doctrine, mingled with your own imagination?

Well, I’m no expert, but I feel like I know at least as much as the next person about Mormon doctrine. When I joined the church in 1981, I immediately started a pretty hearty habit of reading everything about Mormon teachings—Talmage, McConkie, Brigham and Joseph. (I think I read almost everything by Cleon Skousen back in those days, too.) Since then I’ve added others to the list—B.H. Roberts and Sterling McMurrin, for example. When I started this story, I probably did about an hour of Internet research, enough to assure me that—though some talk as if they know what this calling and election business truly is—we really don’t know much about it at all. One Internet source said that an early 1900’s Salt Lake Temple record of ordinances listed about ten performances of the ordinance of having one’s calling and election made sure. I’m not sure if I even believe this. I did enough research to satisfy myself that I wasn’t messing with something that’s cut and dried, but is, instead, something that’s pretty fuzzy in our collective understanding—and thus open to a bit of interpretation on my part.

-Some have labeled this story as Mormon magical realism. Do you think this label is apt, or you consider the story to be a generally realistic depiction of something that could, conceivably, happen?

I like that idea of magical realism, though I’m only now learning what that means. After seeing this mentioned by readers on your blog, I asked a colleague for some further understanding of the phrase “magical realism.” My understanding now is that it describes stories set on this planet, contemporary to the writer, in which everything in the world is basically normal—everything except a few magical things that are experienced by the characters as though they’re ordinary.

This fits nicely with the Mormon worldview, I think. As a Mormon, I believe in the material world in the same way that someone with a contemporary scientific worldview might. But I also believe in the ministry of angels—and lots of other things, like the Spirit. Not just any kind of angel, but Mormon angels. Some angels have resurrected, physically-real bodies. Others have bodies of spirit, which Joseph described as still being material, but of a more refined nature. So our Mormon worldview is pretty material and “real.”

-This story is inextricably bound up with LDS theology. Do you consider yourself a writer of “Mormon literature”? Is most of your fiction as “Mormon” as this story? Do you think non-Mormon readers would find this story (and other fiction you write) accessible?

As for “Mormon Literature,” I like how AML and Irreantum try to continually revisit what that phrase means. We’re in trouble if we try to fix it too strictly. Concerning non-Mormon readers, I’ve heard a lot of writers say that the way to the universal is through the specific.

A lot of my stuff is Mormon, but not all of it. I always ask myself a question: Must this piece be “Mormon” in setting and characters? If the answer is no, or if it doesn’t matter either way, then I don’t make it Mormon. But this particular story genuinely had to be Mormon because the conflict and circumstances are totally connected to the Mormon idea of calling and election.

-How does your work as a teacher affect you as a writer?

A few years ago I saw Robert Redford, on TV, giving advice to would-be actors. He said, “Have a day job,” and for two very good reasons. One, it’s nice to get a paycheck and eat. Second, he said the artist’s craft is always drawn from the real lives of others.

The fringe benefit of being an English teacher is that I get to assign my students all these great stories, and I get to learn from the stories and how the students engage them. Beyond that, I’m always hearing things from my students—about their friends, parents, church leaders—that make me think about how people really relate to each other. But this goes for any profession that keeps one interacting with others. There are lots of lives and experiences out there, and these real lives are the stuff of good writing.

-What are you working on now?

I just finished a novel about an Idaho state park ranger, a convert to Mormonism, who’s struggling in his marriage and with his father-in-law, a Mormon religious extremist. A lot of the novel deals with questions about pre-existence and how promises made there affect our fate or free will here. I’m just beginning to look for a publisher for it. We’ll see if I have any luck.

Thanks so much, Jack! It’s been fascinating.

Introductory question:

In Church culture we put a lot of stock in certainty (testimonies), but perhaps too much at times. At the same time, does God want us to give up what little certainty we have in our quest for greater light and knowledge?

Living the Mysteries, Loving the Questions

By Frances Lee Menlove

Are you a “without-a-shadow-of-a-doubt” believer? A 100-percenter for all Church teachings? A possessor of great quantities of certitude?

If your answer is, “Well, not really,” do not despair. Hold your head up. If you are rife with questions, you have two heavyweight Biblical champions in your corner. Two tag-teamers who, like you, wrestled with questions bigger than they were—and came out bearing the prize of mystery.

There are two stunning minority reports in the Bible, the Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes. The writers of these two wisdom books are both dissenters from orthodox positions, and they both claim personal experience as their authority. They both take the mystery of existence seriously.

Job strikes out at the conventional wisdom of his day (and often of ours), the wisdom that insists if you are good, good things will happen to you. As woe after woe tumbles down on Job; as he loses everything, family, goods, health; as he sits in a pile of ash and scrapes the boils on his skin with shards of pottery, his friends explain patiently to him that all his suffering is fair. But Job will have none of it. Then his wife advises him to “eat dirt and die.” Not very helpful. In fact, Job holds God responsible for the great cruelty being done to him. Job demands to know where God is and when Job will have his day in court. “I would speak to the Almighty,” he declares. “I desire to reason with God” (Job 13:3, NRSV).

God does finally show up, but the Almighty is completely uninterested in reasoning with Job. God is here to talk on his own terms and, instead of a reasoned argument, delivers a stern litany of questions.
Out of the whirlwind, with sound and fury, God asks Job:

Who is this that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge?
Have you commanded the
morning and caused the dawn to know its place?
Where were you when I laid the
foundations of the earth?
Have the gates of death been
revealed to you?
Where does light dwell?
Has the rain a father?
Do you know the ordinances of
the heavens?
Can you send forth lightnings, so
that they may go and say to you, “Here we are”?
Who has put wisdom in the
inward parts?
Who has given understanding to
the mind?
Do you give the horse its might?
Do you clothe its neck with mane?
Is it at your command that the
eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high?

And my favorite:

Where is the way to the dwelling of light and where is the place of darkness?  (Job 38–41, selected verses, NRSV)

The interrogation goes on, verse after verse, as God raises all the important questions: the origins of consciousness and wisdom, humanity’s relationship with the universe, the nature of death. What God holds up for consideration is creation, all of creation, its vastness and its detail, its complexity and its beauty. God accounts for himself not by logic or reason, but by simply enumerating the mysteries and wonders of this existence. “Everything you need to know is there in the vast mystery of my elegant world,” he seems to say.

The sheer awesomeness of this vast mystery was brought home a few years ago by what someone dubbed, “the most important picture in the history of the world.”

Try to take this in: The Hubble telescope, over the course of four hundred orbits around the earth, took eight hundred exposures of a core sample of the universe. The images were taken of a region of space where no stars could be seen. In other words, the Hubble was contemplating nothingness. But instead of a dark image, which many expected, the telescope found galaxy upon galaxy. Nearly 10,000 galaxies, each one a community of a hundred billion suns.

When my grandson and I were exploring the Natural History Museum in New York City, we came upon a statement designed to boggle the mind: “The universe has no center and no edge.” And if that is not enough, physicists tell us that most fundamental processes of the universe occur outside space and time. We abide in a place utterly inhuman in scale. If every person on earth got to name an equal share of the stars, we would each get to name more than a trillion: ten thousand galaxies, each one a community of a hundred billion suns. I like to imagine that somewhere Galileo, who got in fierce trouble in his day for re-imagining our solar system, is smiling as he watches our struggle to re-imagine our universe yet again, to situate ourselves in a story grander than our imaginations.

Job’s God is trying to tell us that God is beyond all of our categories, beyond all language. And Job finally gets it. He throws himself down before God and admits his presumption. “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42:3, NRSV).

Then, for good measure, God tells Job’s three friends, these representatives of conventional wisdom, that they have it all wrong as well. Whereas Job stays rooted in the integrity of his experience, the friends defend their worldview where everything makes sense; they force the facts into that worldview.

“Know then,” insists one friend, “that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves” (Job 11:6). “Is not your wickedness great?  There is no end to your iniquities,” insists another of Job’ s “miserable comforters” (Job 22:5).

But God cries foul. Speaking directly to one of the friends, God declares, “My wrath  is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).  Both Job and the friends are powerless to understand the Mystery, but Job stays honest.

“And I’m standing here talking about God?” writes Richard Rohr, a Franciscan, author, and retreat master.
I’m presuming to understand with this little head? It’s inconceivable. We’re one little planet in one galaxy in the midst of billions of galaxies, and we dare to presume to understand what’s going on. And then we get righteous about our theologies. I’m saved if I do this. I’m saved if I do that. If you don’t get dipped totally in the water, you’re not saved. If you don’t call God by the right name, he won’t like you. It’s hard to believe people can be that lost in their own little world and their own private importance. God does not allow Job to make that mistake.1

God frees Job from a place of small certainties and opens the door to a life of wonder.

The second maverick in the Bible is the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes, another book that honors the questions and makes peace with not knowing. Scholars often begin the study of Ecclesiastes with the question of how it  sneaked into the canon in the first place. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” it declares right off the bat, causing  us all to shift uncomfortably in our seats. It’s strange, existential stuff, but the book was too beautiful, too wise, and (yes) too pious to leave out. Work, study, rejoice in your labors, seek wisdom, but don’t assume the battle goes to the strong or riches to the learned. Time and chance happen to us all.

Like Job, Ecclesiastes is almost free of ideology. It’s more like a self-help book, advising its readers to focus on the day-to-day, the here and now. It has an almost Buddhist mindfulness quality to it. Accept the world and what it brings. Love what is. There is nothing to do but rejoice, do good, and be grateful.

The advice is so beautiful and comforting it feels good just to hear the words. Listen to what, in translation, is some of the most beautiful English prose ever written, framed as words from the Teacher. It comes from an oral culture. It was written to be spoken out loud.

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every matter under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to
pluck up that which is planted,
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a
time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to
refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace.

(Ecclesiastes 3:1–8)

Maybe the Teacher is trying to teach us that we ought simply to be glad we are alive. We ought to stay awake and pay attention. The Teacher tells us we live in a world of staggering complexity and beauty. The world is a mystery. But though we don’t know how the world works, we do know that it is and that it is splendid. Try to stay awake. Ecclesiastes is not about pursuing rewards but about living in the present. Live right here, right now, in the complex, beautiful present. Wake up!

A. J. Jacobs learned that lesson from Ecclesiastes in a rather unique way. Jacobs grew up as a secular Jew, but in 2005, he decided to devote one entire year to living the  Bible—literally living the Bible. He was set on finding the original intent of each biblical rule or teaching and following that to the letter, including the often neglected rules.3 He began by putting away his clothes made from mixed fibers.

On Day 91 of his project, he was sitting on the crosstown bus reading his favorite book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes. Not just reading it, but studying it intently. By now, he had a black bushy beard and therefore looked “more religious.”

“I’m concentrating hard,” he reports: “Too hard. I feel a tap on my shoulder. I’m annoyed. I don’t like strangers touching me. I look up. It is a 50ish man. “Excuse me, this lady is feeling sick. Could you give her your seat?” He points to a tall brunette woman who was standing right in front of me. How did I miss this? The woman looks horrible. Her face is sallow, nearly the color of lima beans. She is doubled over. And she is weeping. I get up in a hurry with mumbled apologies.3

Living in the present is a lesson from the Teacher of Ecclesiastes, but that is exactly what Jacobs wasn’t doing as he sat on the bus, his full concentration focused on his Bible. As he ruminates about this encounter, he draws a lesson, namely:

To everything there is a season,
There is a time to be born and a time to die,
There is a time for reading and a
time for getting off your butt.4

I think that would make a splendid refrigerator magnet.

So if you find yourself a little twitchy, surrounded by a sea of certainties (often conflicting), open your Bible to Job or Ecclesiastes and let them tell you, occasionally forgetting their indoor voices, that your small human brain just can’t get it and that you shouldn’t expect it to. And God might add that those singing their chorus of certainty around you don’t get it, either. I know that seems rather rascally of God, but it’s right there in the Bible.

I must have had some nascent penchant for mystery as a young teenager. I remember our 33rd Ward Sunday School teacher telling us about the nature of God—a male with a body, parts, and passions—and then, to emphasize the beauty and clarity of this view, contrasting it with what he labeled the Catholic view of God. (At that time, knocking Catholicism was quite fashionable.) “The Catholics believe,” he said, “that God is large enough to fill the universe and small enough to dwell in the human heart.” Clearly this summary was meant to be derisive, but I found myself preferring it to the “God is a man” view. Now I see in this paradoxical definition an attempt to articulate the tension between God’s immanence and transcendence; but back then, I just liked the way it articulated the mystery and bowed to the truth that God is beyond the human mind’s ability to understand or explain.

Marcus Borg, my professor of New Testament in seminary, told us the following story. While he was professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University, students would frequently speak to him privately, admitting, “You know I really don’t believe in God.” Borg’s invariable response was, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” Generally the God they described was some variation on the wise old man in the sky. After they had finished explaining, Borg’s usual response was, “I don’t believe in that God, either.” The students were somewhat shocked, because they knew he affirmed the reality of God.

He was, of course, suggesting that his students revisit their understanding of God, rather than simply jettison the whole idea. He was inviting them to become part of the Great Conversation, to feel no obligation to defend images of God that quake under scrutiny. Perhaps, he would suggest, they were not rejecting God but a caricature of God. As he frequently said, “It is hard to give your heart to something your head rejects.”

In fact, the Bible itself does not paint a static or consistent picture of God. As one scholar recently pointed out, “The book of Exodus paints God as a violent, murderous, genocidal land thief.”5

Something else I was taught as a teenager fits right in. Joseph Smith said: “I want the liberty of thinking and believing as I please. It feels so good not to be trammeled.”6

Seek truth wherever it can be found. Relish the mystery. Relish the awesomeness. And remember, mysteries are not like problems. Problems call out to be solved, but mysteries are best enjoyed as mysteries.

Albert Einstein—the same Einstein who tells us that gravity bends space itself—seems to be echoing Job as he says: “[T]he most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense, I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.”7

Two philosophers also champion respecting that which cannot be known. Aristotle’s advice is “to seek no more precision on any subject matter than its nature allows.” William James adds: “I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.”8 Do we miss the point when we try to be clearer than clarity warrants? Is the promise of certitude a promise that cannot be kept?

Listen to the advice the poet Rilke has for us:

Be patient with all
That is unresolved in your heart.
Try to love the questions
themselves
Like locked rooms and books
That are written in a very foreign
tongue.
Do not seek the answers
That cannot be given
Because you would not be able to
live them.
And the point is, to live
everything.
Live the questions now and
perhaps without noticing it
You will live along some distant
day
Into the answers.9

Perhaps the proper response to our awesome universe is simply gratitude. Gratitude that we have been bequeathed scriptures that are not monolithic, internally consistent treatises, but a compilation from many sources, by many writers who muse on their diverse encounters with the sacred. We have a Bible that is a library, not a handbook. Thus we can take the Bible seriously by embracing its contradictions.

In the end, Job and Ecclesiastes invite you and me to set aside our certainties and our false certainties. They call us to relish those sacred moments when we experience the sheer wonder of what is. Wake up, they urge, get off your butt, and listen to the hum of the stars.

Notes

1.    Richard Rohr, Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 161.
2.    A. J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2007), 118.
3.    Ibid., 119.
4.    Ibid.
5.    Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, “The Exodus is Not a Story of Liberation,” The Fourth R 21, no. 1 (January–February 2008): 10.
6.    History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols., ed., B. H. Roberts (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1957), 5:340.
7.    Michael White and John Gribbin, Einstein: A Life in Science (New York: Dutton, 1994), 262.
8.    William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 334.
9.    Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: Norton, 1939).

(This article first presented at the 2008 Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium and published in the October 2008 issue of Sunstone magazine.)