Goals without Goads

Ancient Israel spent not only forty years wandering through a forbidding, barren desert, but many centuries in a wilderness of disobedience and uncertain commitment after reaching the promised land. For attitudes can have a disconcerting immortality. One inherits what one observes, and the generation that left Egypt transmitted a rebellious spirit to its children as faithfully as it handed down a sense of destiny. No theme in the Old Testament is sounded more often than the failure of God’s chosen people to learn from their own history, to avoid repeating past errors, and to move toward their individual and collective goals without having to be prodded by external and internal goads.

Make no mistake: goads are useful—perhaps necessary—at certain stages in our development. But adults who must be warned not to “kick against the pricks” should recognize judgment as well as exhortation in such counsel. I am paid no compliment when I am identified as one who is still being herded, who is “actively engaged” only so long as I am actively prodded. Yet if my will is irresolute, my efforts are suspect—especially to myself, and I tend to retreat into a simplistic stimulus-response, struggle-reward mode. To many in ancient Israel, the promised land was little more than a conqueror’s booty, for opposition can only coarsen those too gross to be refined by it. Such people can be forced to conform—witness the detailed restrictions of Leviticus—but one must keep them in hand (in fact, this is the Lord’s description of his relationship to them) until they can replace law with love.

If we feel ourselves a bit above such physical coercion, we need to recognize that such modern, internal goads as fear, vanity, or envy are little different in kind from the duress we associate with Mosaic times and are, indeed, only a contemporary expression of Old Testament attitudes. Whether I am jabbed into conformity from without or pricked into compliance from within matters very little. In neither case am I genuinely free from bondage or prepared for the stewardship of the New Testament.

As we approach the sesquicentennial of the Church, have one-hundred fifty years of trial and disappointment, modest triumph, and exciting expectation prepared us to help make a promised land out of every country that is being influenced by converts to Mormonism? Or will we, in technical virtuosity but stunted sensibility simply duplicate a page from the history of our Israelitish forebears and meander toward our goals, counting on outside pressures or internal insecurities to refine us? Let me illustrate my concern by citing a few informal goals that many of us share.

First, many of us yearn for academic success. Yet our gauge for that recognition is probably obscured by a simplistic reliance on grades or degrees, and may not be that synthesis of revelation and secular training that an LDS scholar should aspire to. Because we tend to be goaded by comparative ratings or cowed by awards, we may accept the academic expectations of others, expectations that arrogantly exclude our unique contribution. Under such circumstances, we struggle to move in strength, for we play an Alice in Wonderland game that cannot acknowledge our score. The answer is not to substitute religious devotion for intellectual acumen—one soon learns that adequate substitutes for anything are rare—but we can add gospel insights to carefully honed, fundamental skills, and know the thrill of truly creative work. When this creative melding happens, we must establish and refine our own standards. At this point, relative reputation is not very meaningful; we cannot be compared to others easily and should not wish to be.

In trying to think of areas in which we might make original contributions, I recall the common, off-hand concession that, after all, “there can’t really be a Mormon chemistry or physics.” I believe, however, that Mormon physics might make a striking contribution to our understanding of the physical universe. We must go beyond the goads of academic acceptance and believe in our unique possibilities. To do so is not to reject secular insights, but only to refuse their limitations.

A second goal, closely related to the first, might be the dream of having all Church members, particularly those who have the opportunity for higher education, realize their highest potential. Those who are serious in this effort must begin by believing in themselves as stewards of unplumbed resources and not mock the roles the Lord would have them play. Who is to say what each may become if we are worthy to be inspired and thereby capable of magnifying our callings. The goad of peer pressure or the expectation of teachers or associates never drove any student to excellence; nor does the desire for academic recognition translate easily into brilliant achievement. All great Church members have found their life by losing it in concerns they felt wholeheartedly.

A third goal which seems to me to have gone out of focus for some of us is a determination to truly teach one another. May I speak to the instructors for a moment. Uncomfortable in the thought that we may be evaluating our pupils too easily—or too harshly—we are often deeply concerned about test week or schedules or grade inflation, but may not be sensitive to the failing student who sits in our class, day after day, with what E. B. White has described as “the unspeakably bright, imploring look of the frustrated.” The problem of the student who stumbles out of school after a few weeks or a few months, who finds semesters spent here traumatic and finally demeaning, who leaves behind a humiliating transcript, and who carries the black cockade of failure as the badge of attendance is not really answered by easy talk about inferior preparation or lack of motivation. Whatever the insulting explanation, the disheartening conclusion must be that we have failed to teach. Indeed, we have failed to teach that student and the many others who disentangle themselves from the university each semester with as much grace as they can muster, usually trying desperately to come up with reasons we will accept for allowing them to discontinue.

In tragic dimension, the problem of untaught students is without equal at every university today. Comparison with other educational institutions is about as comforting as insisting that our room in hell is not hotter than anyone else’s. However the books may be kept, no institution is truly in business if it wastes a significant part of its resources every year. I become a little uneasy when I hear professors occasionally boast that their classes are unusually rigorous and demanding. Has it occurred to these professors that their assignments may appear rigorous because they are perplexing? Have these professors caught on that the easiest way to be demanding is to teach badly? One of the hallmarks of great teaching should be the number of students brought to proficiency in a given discipline. Teacher/student ratios or cost per credit hour—the traditional measures of efficiency—offer little insight into the real challenge of education. The real challenge, of course, as has often been described, is sending all children on their way, singing, after they have been under our tutelage.

If I seem to belabor the goal of effective teaching, I am especially anxious to rescue it from such poor relations as checking attendance, giving and receiving assignments, lecturing, quizzing, entertaining, informing or reciting. At best these may be part of real teaching; at worst they are simply mistaken for it.

If most of you are sitting a bit complacently now, thinking I am talking about someone else, I would remind you of how consistently most of us are asked to teach in the Church (all of us are either home or visiting teachers) and how casually—even mechanically—we teach. My guess, however, is that effective teaching is just one of the unmet goals with which I should be concerned, and perhaps part of my difficulty lies in my definition of the term goal.

Not long ago I heard a man give a talk on goals. It was a good talk, sincere, sensitive, personal—but somehow incomplete. As I reflected on this lack of completeness, I suspect that what I found disquieting was clearly in the topic itself and not at all in how it was handled. The speaker drew persuasive distinctions between long- and short-range goals, but I still felt a bit uneasy, especially as I remembered the rather unsatisfactory discussion we had a few years ago when we attempted to set down goals for Brigham Young University. In trying to discriminate between objectives and goals, we finally agreed that objectives were more explicit than goals—and probably nearer at hand. If this distinction is reasonably good, what is the essence of goals if we have given particular focus to objectives? Inevitably, I think of a word like joy, which seems to suffer from the same vagueness of definition. “Lasting happiness” is as self-contradictory a definition for joy as “long-range objective” is for goal. Are we once again contrasting letter and spirit? Is any goal short of an all-encompassing one such as righteousness very useful?

I am sure this distinction between letter and spirit helps explain my uneasiness when I talk about effective teaching as a goal in my life. My objective may be to learn some skillful teaching techniques. My objective may be to get those whom I would teach to think, assess, discriminate. A true goal, however, must be eternal—something that no simple objective ever is. How awkward the sound of “My objective is exaltation.” How right the sound of “My goal is a temple marriage.” This difference may be part of the essential distinction between the secular and the sacred. My objectives are necessarily part of the world; my goals transcend mortality.

If this distinction is a true one, note what difference it makes in the goals I set for myself. Consider the goal of academic excellence. If academic excellence is too easily translated into vocational training alone, if academic excellence becomes merely an intellectual decoration, then it becomes at best a limited objective. If the hope of having all students rise to their full potential is seen merely in earthly terms (how often we are content with such a shriveled perspective), we may make choices that are dictated by expediency or materialistic pressures. A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints must not be content to live in one world at a time. How truly I am subject to my pre-existence, to the circumstances and opportunities into which I was born, the physical and mental legacies that are part of my very being. If the premortal world that I do not remember at all has thus to be very much one of the worlds in which I now live, my post-mortal existence must be no less real and compelling. Meaningful goals will bind my three lives together and give overriding direction and focus to the more limited objectives by which I direct my mortal life. When I, as a Mormon, confess that I am goal-oriented, I am really saying more than non-members of the Church might easily understand. I remember so well hearing the late President Harold B. Lee counsel a distraught young missionary who took him aside at the Language Training Mission a few years ago to ask for some very personal advice. No one of us standing nearby heard the nature of his questions to Elder Lee, but we will never forget the his reply. In a voice that easily carried to all in the immediate vicinity, he said simply, “If it isn’t eternal, Elder, forget it.” I have had occasion to remember that advice more often than I like to acknowledge.

If we keep our objectives tied to transcendent goals, we will be able to keep our moral and intellectual equilibrium without undue difficulty. We may even learn to obey—that hallmark of the truly elect. In so many ways, I am willing to conform—that is, fit my life to principles and procedures I have been long taught and in which I believe. My compliance may be a bit grudging—or even thoughtless—but it has the same appearance as that of someone who really obeys, and tragically, I may never learn to appreciate the difference between conformity and obedience. If I sincerely reflect about this difficulty, however, I soon realize that conformity is exacted—either externally or internally—while obedience is given. In essence, conformity and obedience mark the difference between the Old and New Testaments. When the Lord promises to put his law in Israel’s “inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jer. 31:33), he underscores that both letter and spirit are important, that the letter is not complete without the spirit and that the spirit without the letter may be little more than vague learning. When I obey, I integrate letter and spirit in the very wholeness that always bespeaks the presence of God.

The wholeness of a gospel concept can always be shared. Only the partial, ego-contorted concept resists being understood by others. No wonder the scriptures warn us to avoid personal interpretation. Reflecting upon this warning, we realize that a personal interpretation is usually more than a subjective one. A self-serving element exists in personal interpretations, setting them apart from mere individual analysis. Instead of being directed by the scriptures, our personal interpretation embroiders and exploits them. Once more, the cryptic wisdom of “Let your communications be yea, yea” or “Speak only repentance to this generation” becomes evident. We can share only that which transcends us.

Not long ago I presided in a Church court for a young man accused of abandoning his family. Threaded through a great deal of tawdry misunderstanding was the usually unrecognized tragedy of selfishness. Selfishness truly is the essence of damnation, for nothing, by itself, has much meaning. As the so-called Lehi doctrine points out, significance is always a matter of contrast, comparison—a locating that requires more than one point to be meaningful. Self-realization must always take place outside the self. I have never been more struck by the nature of loneliness than I was as I heard this young man speak. To be lonely is to lack identification more than companionship. One can be preoccupied with self in a crowd, but if one is to find gauges for life, one must relate at physical and spiritual levels to others. The Savior provides that supreme point outside oneself that establishes direction, distance, size—and all other relationships that set man in a meaningful context.

My goal must be to emulate the Savior; my objectives must be to gain tools, insight, and the self-control needed to make such emulation possible. If I can only manage to conform or, sadder still, if I must call attention to my insecurity by rebellion, my objectives shrivel into mere undertaking, and that which might have been aspiration turns into mere enterprise. If I lack the integration that the gospel provides, I leave myself to divided loyalties and hopelessly relative positions. In such a state, I let weaknesses degenerate into sins and possibly good ends become tarred and distorted by dubious means. The blunt truth is that no one of us is prepared to handle the pressures of this world without a base outside it. Natural man is an enemy to God, and unless we yield to the enticing of the Spirit, as this famous scripture continues, we simply are not going to survive. All of us carry enough sin—actual or potential—to completely capsize us. We would always like to assume that those who “know better” and yet fall are simply overwhelmed. Visions of the stout fortress being inundated keep our preconceptions in order and leave us quite unprepared for the tawdry fact of calculated wrongdoing.

We should feel discomfited to admit that years of apparent devotion may offer little hedge against sinful inclinations to which we have long been host. As with our bodies, so with our spirits; nothing about us remains alive that is not nurtured. As the late Richard L. Evans said so starkly, “Each man lives the life he intends to.” We are often genial in describing the weaknesses we sponsor. In the easy jargon of excuse we speak of “frailty that makes us human” or of “besetting sins”—as if we are tempted of the Lord. The sad truth is that we do not “desire the Lord to reign over us.” At best we grant him limited jurisdiction and are as loyal to the lowest in us as to the highest. A proper environment is an internal state before it is a place or a situation. The most profound compliment the Lord can pay us—our free agency—is potentially curse as well as blessing. Satan has no power over us that we do not give him; but when we choose to accept his influence, we can only make room for him by rejecting the Lord. Every ambiguous decision or compromised action is a declaration of divided loyalty. If current problems seem to highlight the choices we are making rather dramatically, most of us still manage to blow discreetly on the embers of evil that the natural man in us has banked so carefully. If we wish to yield to the enticing of the Spirit and put off the natural man, our sacrifice must be total, our eye single. The world alone offers me no place on which I can put my feet and know that I am on solid ground.

Gospel insights are always integrating. The thought that we all truly get the afterlife we choose is such an insight for me. For years I had wondered how anyone could reject the gospel when, after death, everyone finds that what the Church had been preaching in mortality is supported by clear-cut evidence. The same problem is suggested by Brigham Young’s statement that a number of religious sects will exist during the millennium. If I had thought the problem through, however, I would have recognized that it is not problematic at all. The key here is agency. Many people today realize that the Church is true, but they do not choose to live according to its precepts. They prefer gross pleasures and worldly involvements. Recognizing that the telestial kingdom will have its Super-Bowl bound, beverage guzzling, passive participants is depressing, but that idea is consistent with what we know of our afterlife—that third I mentioned earlier. To be set down in the celestial kingdom when one was not prepared for such company would truly be hell. Surely those who are sent to outer darkness will manifest the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth described in the scriptures, but I am beginning to understand that those who inherit the telestial kingdom will do so because they choose to be there in every sense and will not change after death. How important this understanding makes my efforts here to refine my life, to become what the late Apostle Orson F. Whitney called “a lady or gentleman in the presence of God.”

Some years ago, I attended a meeting of religion teachers at which we were allowed to ask the late J. Reuben Clark, Jr., any question we chose. It was an extraordinary opportunity, and we hardly knew how to take advantage of it. Finally, however, one local seminary teacher—in some embarrassment—said, “President Clark, I would like to ask you a question that a young man put to me just today, and I’ll ask it just the way he put it, which was rather colorfully. Holding his hands above his head as if he were grasping onto a very narrow ledge, the young man said, ‘What’s going to happen to the person who barely misses the celestial kingdom? Will he be dangling over the edge just hanging on and have someone come along and kick his fingers loose?’” We all smiled a little at this rather graphic illustration but we were not at all prepared for President Clark’s answer. As a few of you may remember, President Clark did not smile often, but this day his smile was very real as he said, gently, “There won’t be any close decisions. If any one of you thinks there will be, let’s spend the next minute or so thinking about where we would each go if we died this instant.” We sat there stunned. I have never forgotten that statement, and I have thought about it many times. Of course “there won’t be any close decisions.” The close decision reflects the happy illusion we would retain in our own uncertain commitment. If we would have that commitment sure, if we would move in strength given us of all mighty God, we need to foreswear all the paraphernalia by which we have been nagged, jostled, or coerced into line. We must move out of the Old Testament and into the New.

The energy we might use in explaining or justifying our weaknesses will be better utilized in overcoming them. If we lack the security to obey, we must recognize that problem for what it is and not engage in the pseudo-intellectual juggling that allows us to retain our weaknesses almost indefinitely as we explain them over and over. Let us move in the strength of God because we are tired of playing shabby games. All questions are finally theological questions and can only have theological answers. When I have grown up enough to realize that fact, when, in the words of Paul, I have “put away childish things” (1 Cor. 13:11), I can free myself from the groveling concerns that so often beset me and instead get a fix on that celestial point that will give order and coherence to all my actions. My earthly objectives can have meaning; I am happily in the world, but I am not of the earth earthy.

As most of us have risen above enjoying cruel, practical jokes or the barnyard humor that is little more than a mental belch, let us now move in the exciting, stimulating awareness of a gospel that is so encompassing that it can hold onto three worlds at once. Let us try to grasp and live by concepts that demand such discrimination and insight that only personal revelation from our Father in Heaven is adequate to our need. Let us cease being victims in search of a Samaritan and move in obedience to goals that truly make us independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world. Perhaps then we will begin to understand for the first time the Lord’s profound statement to Joseph Smith: “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence” (D&C 93:30). Let us therefore strive for that eternal perspective that can give each one of us serenity in this life and a true fullness of joy in the life to come. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.