“Almost Thou Persuadest Me”

In a devotional address several years ago, I began by citing King Agrippa’s response to the Apostle Paul’s testimony of Christ: “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian” (Acts 26:28). I wish to reiterate that response again, for we must remember that time does not affect the limitations of “almost.” King Agrippa’s graceful rhetoric did not—and could not—loose the bonds in which Paul stood before him. Indeed, as the prophets regularly tell us, “almost” underscores the absolute distance that separates resolves completed from those still short of fruition—whatever the reason.

Consider what Lehi does not suggest as the end of human existence when he asserts that “men are, that they might have joy” (2 Ne. 2:25). Lehi suggests not knowledge, which can remain abstract and passive; not experience, which is means rather than end; not happiness, which usually bears the imprint of time and circumstance; but joy, the philosopher’s stone that can turn dross—which seems to make up so much of our lives—into unmistakable gold.

Why joy? Because joy is fulfillment. One is never “almost” joyful, for joy implies a qualitative difference that does not lend itself to relative description. Personal experience provides explicit corroboration of this difference. One may develop a skill without knowing the joy of mastery; one may respond dutifully without knowing the joy of service. The phrase “a fullness of joy” is almost redundant: fullness is joy.

Such fullness, such joy is the hallmark of the scholarly Mormon. As members of the Church, we speak easily—possibly too easily—about fusing the sacred and secular in a Church-sponsored school. Too often the hoped-for fusion is little more than an interlacing where the warp of our religious persuasion is easily discernible from the woof of our intellectual training. The interlacing is easily discernible because, as in all mere weaving, warp and woof are usually at cross-purposes. Without belaboring this casual analogy too far, consider that the most highly knit fabric has a tendency to ravel at the edges under stress.

Cloth may be an appropriate symbol for an artful human construct, but the life of a scholarly Latter-day Saint is not bounded by mundane limitations. Consider for a moment what happens to our concept of knowing when it is infused by the Spirit. Most academic knowledge, which is at the base of usual collegiate endeavor, is still a matter of probability. The scientific method does not presume to engage the absolute, but when I bear my testimony, the feeling I voice is as close to an experiential definition of the absolute as I am capable of conceiving. For a few moments I am free from the limitations of experimental evidence and, in faith, begin to grasp the significance of Paul’s words: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). I am sure I never use the term know so meaningfully—or more precisely—than I do when I say soberly, humbly, that I know the gospel is true.

My moments of joy are equally transcendent—and for the same reason. For joy is based on faith, faith being the critical component and binding ingredient. Faith turns the relative into the absolute, training into development, and participation into involvement. In giving substance to hope, faith makes me dogged in times of discouragement. I may not see the end, and I may not even articulate my hopes very clearly, but I can believe deeply, constantly, irresistibly. Lest would-be scholars point toward merely intellectual achievement—and in so doing mistake the excitement of the academic chase for the synthesis that is joy—I would like to emphasize that faith alone counters the sterility of secular learning and brings into focus that vision of what each child of God can become. At Church-sponsored schools, students are the heirs of faith in the fulfilling power of education, a faith our pioneer forebears held impressively, almost obsessively, during the first seventy years of the Church’s history. For example, only a few miles from where Abraham Lincoln trudged through the Illinois countryside to borrow a single book, the seventies of Nauvoo stocked a library with seven hundred volumes for circulation among the Saints. Furthermore, after the School of the Prophets was organized in 1832 to teach penmanship, arithmetic, English, grammar, geography, and theology, a more doctrinally focused School of Elders was organized by 1835. In a similar vein, by 1840 a charter for the University of Nauvoo had been issued, and the Nauvoo Agricultural and Manufacturing Association flourished.

As the Saints came across the plains, Brigham Young exhorted them as follows:

[You should carry] every book, map, chart, or diagram that may contain interesting, useful, and attractive matter, to gain the attention of children, . . . and, also every historical, mathematical, philosophical, geographical, geological, astronomical, scientific, practical, and all other variety of useful and interesting writings, maps, etc., to present to the General Church Recorder, when they shall arrive at their destination, from which important and interesting matter may be gleaned to compile the most valuable works, on every science and subject, for the benefit of the rising generation.”¹

Implementing this counsel, the Saints opened a free public library in Salt Lake City in 1850, and they established the University of Deseret in the same year.

As I read the history of the Church during its migratory and pioneer years, I am struck by how quickly each small community attempted to move not only from elementary and what we would now call secondary schooling, but into some form of higher education. A General Church Board of Education was established in 1888, for example, “to establish and maintain a system of Church schools wherein shall be given religious instruction in connection with the subjects usually taught in common schools and colleges.” Furthermore, the turn of the century saw eighteen stake academies in operation. The Ricks graduates we honor here tonight are direct recipients of the venture in faith that began as Bannock Stake Academy in 1888, grew to become Ricks Academy in 1903, and eventually Ricks College in 1923. Those who kept this school going during the early thirties, when others in the Church-school system ceased to function as Church-related institutions, did not “almost” believe in Ricks. They were not “almost persuaded” that Ricks should continue to operate. Rather than see the school close, they financed it themselves for a time, then appealed so persuasively to the First Presidency that Ricks resumed full operations under Church sponsorship.

Today seems an appropriate time for each of us to ask ourselves to reflect soberly on how well we have prepared ourselves to receive such a gift. Faith is always a gift, and the founders’ faith in Ricks’s destiny is caught up in their belief in the students here, the students’ capacity to bring that faith to fruition. If we appreciate our heritage in a merely casual way, we will lack a foundation on which to build. In the midst of pleas for academic innovation by those who are concerned lest current schools not respond to the needs of young people, we should remember that the very language we use to support change suggests building upon that which is gone before. The prefix that begins the word revolution turns us to the past. Research is not first search; to innovate is to renew.

So we see that the beautiful, the good, and the true still speak freshly to human needs while providing the base that undergirds the very concept of education. One’s sense of beauty may be intensely personal, but it can be both refined and expanded. Moral distinctions make society possible, and the search for truth gives coherence to human speculation. I assume that many here will be leaving Ricks within a few days, but I hope that this group will not be content to move in partial strength. By the very fact of your presence here tonight, you give both evidence of ability and evidence of that desire to achieve academically that should impel you toward additional schooling. In that assumption, may I speak to you as though you were still in passage, still growing, and still anxious to capitalize on native ability and hone the training you have already received.

In trying to use well the time we now have to grow intellectually and spiritually, we can build on our own past as well as the experience of others. Not one of us is so lacking in significant background that we come to college seriously deprived if, in the memorable phrase of Henry James, we are the kind of a person “upon whom nothing is lost.” Whatever your background, use it! If you come from a home in which education was not prized, you can have a fresh perspective denied those who have been raised in intellectual affluence. If your high school training was deficient (and secondary schools vary markedly in the demands they make on their students), you will only waste time in bemoaning and blaming. Recognize where you are and build on what you have. The ablest and best trained were once where you are. What you can become is limited less by your “innate ability”—a dubious concept at best—than it is by your determination, which for each person can be inexhaustible.

If you are anxious to employ your time efficiently, do not be misled by schedules that block out every segment of each day; a tightly scheduled life is no guarantee of achievement. What you do between classes may appear to fit your daily calendar, but effective use of time is not measured by minutes spent. The test of how well you utilize the hours marked “study” is brutally objective: How well did you do on the examinations, for which your study time was meant to prepare you? Students who complain that they took four hours to write one paper and only a single hour to compose a second—but received the same grade for both—are merely confessing that their minds were in neutral three-fourths of the time during the first effort. To study a text is not to scan, peruse, or even to ponder it. Until we have mastered the material assigned, our “homework” is not done—and the hours spent are actually irrelevant.

The part of each day or evening we give over to talking to roommates or classmates may be time well spent, but it needs to be recognized for what it is: playtime. The saddest of illusions on most college campuses is the prevailing and vaguely comforting notion that “rap sessions” are academically significant. Occasionally, they may be stimulating, but the higher brain centers are rarely involved. A healthy spinal column can handle most of the intellectual demands of dormitory chit-chat. Aimless gossip about most television viewing, on the other hand, cannot even qualify as relaxing time. The cheap, emotional spree of most TV fare is an offense against both brain and heart. Such activity not only wastes time, but deliberately kills it. Thoreau’s famous line “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity” should have special meaning to those who view this life as preparation for exaltation.

If our life is not an integrated whole, if it is only “almost” put together, we may succumb to the tyranny and frustration of legitimate but conflicting claims on our time and attention. Setting up a rigid priority list simply will not help. Success in the classroom cannot substitute for failure in our living situation or at church. By bringing the skills developed in our weekday courses to Sunday School class, praying for guidance in our studies, and letting the Church and school synthesize our daily activities, we will find that time and circumstance become our servants, and the challenge of the abundant life promised by the Savior will be fully realized in our own activities.

If we are to have the joy that Lehi promises as the true end of our existence, we must be whole. Remember that health, holiness, and wholeness all come from the same root. I am embarrassed for people who say they are “not interested” in music, art, drama, or literature. Wholeness is not a question of substituting these for something else. Indeed, no adequate substitutes exist. The arts are necessary supplements if we are not to be victims of cultural poverty.

The most obvious symptom of cultural poverty is boredom, that self-inflicted jail of cultural deprivation. Young people who confess boredom are revealing more than a narrow range of interests: they are refusing to grow. Lack of opportunity can usually be remedied, but refusing to participate is fatal to achieving wholeness. Integrity originally meant “completeness.” Today, unfortunately, it often suggests no more than adherence to a limited set of values.

We Americans are mildly incredulous when we discover the ancient Chinese custom of binding feet, but we are often fooled into applauding the dedicated skier who frets away the golden summer, waiting for snow that never lasts long enough. Bound feet are only a physical inconvenience. A soul bounded by narrow interests, however, mocks the Creator who gave it being and its potential for development.

I do not mean to imply that failure to participate in the arts is the only—or even the most serious—gap in the lives of young people who want the fullness of the Gospel. But participating in the arts is often discounted or rationalized away. In a world where the common gauge is material value, the arts will never be completely at ease. Culture is useful, but it resists translation into monetary units. The balance that the whole life strikes is not adequately described by double-entry bookkeeping. An accounting will occur, however, that will fairly evaluate cultural assets. That accounting is the one we will make some day at the judgment bar, an accounting prefigured for us in the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30). Note that the parable’s essential point is not how much we have, but that we do something to increase what we have.

In trying to integrate that which we receive in both church and school, we run some risk of mistaking complexity for significance and interdependence for strength. Many years ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote his “Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” as a parody of Puritanism, which to his mind had succumbed to both these illusions. Were the clever doctor alive today, I suspect that education, rather than religion, might tempt his satire. For modern America gives education a primary place that was reserved for religion in less secular times.

If Dr. Holmes’s elaborately interwoven buggy was an apt symbol for unexamined religious belief, the modern car reflects the strengths and weaknesses of current education. Mass production has enabled the car to be taken for granted. Each unit is composed of interchangeable parts and has been subjected to inspection before it is certified for use. Exterior appearances may vary, and superficial choices are evident, but the strengths of the modern car are its standardization, its relative efficiency, and its general availability. Let no one sneer: our cars are engineering triumphs. But the very best are not mass-produced. How carefully each part must be fit, how individually the final product will perform. Like our mass-produced cars, I see an “almost” quality about much of the education available in America today. For any standardized model is always a mildly flawed promise. Intellectual fruition is about as lonely a business as spiritual salvation.

When standardization is aligned with generalization, we have a truly fatal combination. When I was younger, I enjoyed the comfortable illusion that what an educated man should strive to attain was an understanding of the gist of many things. As I have matured, however, I have realized that no one is ever going to ask me about the gist of anything. All the real questions I am asked are arrestingly specific. (May I add, parenthetically, that ersatz questions such as “What is life all about, anyway?” are not inquiries at all. They are usually complaints, mildly disguised confessions or mere rhetorical flourish.) I have also realized that I cannot genuinely arrive at the essence of a subject—which is what “gist” should suggest—unless I have mastered its details. When I talked earlier about understanding the gist of something, I was really looking for an approximation, a summary that would give me the facade of learning rather than its foundation. The condensed books now widely available are ubiquitous examples of such slick cheating. A few years ago, a friend of my wife suggested that they write a book together. The friend further suggested that as a division of labor, she would provide the ideas and my wife would provide the “little words.” A similar experience must have provoked T. S. Eliot to insist that “the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.” Apparently he was so tired of people talking in vague generalizations that he tried to shock his readers into recognizing the primacy of detail. For so often the details, which we tend to dismiss rather cavalierly, provide the basis for the discrimination that is so vital to wholeness—or holiness.

As I interview the young people in my stake who come to me for temple recommends, I try to help them understand that if they are “almost” worthy they will “almost” get the blessings that worthiness promises. “Summer soldier” and “sunshine patriot” are phrases no more pejorative than “sometimes Saint” or “slack student.” In both cases, we can often trace our flawed commitment to our anxiety to skip the specificities of Old Testament justice for the genial indulgence of New Testament mercy. We really know better, but would excuse our shortcomings by the self-righteous plea that no man is without sin or by saying that “if this is the worst thing I ever do, I’ll be all right.” Sadly, as James 2:10 makes explicit, any deliberately wrong choice makes us guilty of preferring evil and thus partakers of the very nature of sin. How blithely we often mock the Lord by refusing to be what we might be! How briskly we discount the Lord’s creation by settling for a fraction of what he prepared us to become.

A few years ago, I was privileged to participate in a class taught by J. Reuben Clark, Jr., which was given for all seminary and institute personnel in the area and for all who taught religion at BYU. We were allowed to ask any doctrinal question we chose, and a seminary teacher finally presented a query just as it had been asked of him: “What happens to those who barely miss the celestial kingdom?” The student who asked this question illustrated his point by wondering if the Lord came along and pried the fingers loose of those who were barely hanging onto the edge of celestial glory. We waited, smiling, for President Clark’s reply. He too smiled, but ours faded as he gave the following, totally unexpected answer: “Why, there won’t be any close decisions. If anyone thinks there will be, all he needs do is reflect on where he would go if he died right now. It wouldn’t be a close decision, would it?” In my life, I have not known a more memorable consideration of “almost.”

As I began to speak tonight, I hope some of you noticed that I did not speak of the Mormon or Latter-day Saint scholar. I am white, middle-aged, American, born in the Church, but the faith that integrates all my activities, the faith that shapes my attitudes and disciplines my feelings, is at the bedrock of my being. A recent poet, who would appear to be a “golden contact,” summed part of this feeling up for me in a poem entitled “A Little Duck.” In the beginning of this rather long poem, the poet describes a storm on the New England seacoast—pointing out how susceptible man-made things are to easy destruction—and then continues as follows:

Now we are ready to look at something pretty special.
It is a duck riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf,
No, it isn’t a gull.
A gull always has a raucous touch about him.
This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles in the swells.
He isn’t cold, and he is thinking things over.
There is a big heaving in the Atlantic,
And he is part of it.
He looks a bit like a Mandarin, or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo Tree,
But he has hardly enough about the eyes to be a philosopher.
He has poise, however, which is what philosophers must have.
He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.
Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.
And neither do you.
But he realizes it.
And what does he do, I ask you. He sits down in it.
He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.
That is religion, and the duck has it.
He has made himself part of the boundless, by easing himself into it just where it touches him.
The people of the Middle Ages were more like this duck than we are,
They took life as it presented itself, and ran it up in spires of Gothic.
They crossed few oceans, but they floated on the sea of time.
And a cat is more like this duck than we are.
We can radio to the moon and get back a pip for an answer,
Or launch four kittens into life in a cracker box by the furnace,
Purring with pride because she has tuned in on cosmic waves,
I like the little duck, He doesn’t know much, But he has religion.²

Hopefully, we have religion as well. Moreover, we should have not only religion but truth, the truth that synthesizes our best impulses, our deepest yearning, and our finest training. In the final resolving lines to “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot describes the dynamic adjustment of truly religious people. The truly religious are a great deal more than “almost persuaded.” They hope, simply, to achieve

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

In such aspiration—and in solemn acceptance of the gospel fullness we share—I ask the blessing of our Heavenly Father upon you. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.