"Behold, you have been entrusted with these things, but how strict were your commandments; and remember also the promises which were made to you, if you did not transgress them."
What's your tolerance for the hokey? Almost all religious ritual contains some element of it--of actions, postures, modalities, instrumentalities, sounds, smells, and call and response that outsiders would find utterly strange, if not entirely off-putting. And when I say "religious" I should probably expand even further--just think of a political swearing in ceremony, a sports event, or a fraternity initiation and how bizarre a foreigner might find the fixed verbal scripts, the objects imbued with symbolism, and the behaviors that occur nowhere else in lived experience. My guess is that you don't go through your average day thinking about how comically an outsider might describe your everyday actions, but a comedian would make you roar with laughter showing you how silly some of your routines appear from different perspectives. In other words, it's hard to have an objective perspective on the hokey, but we've probably all got some tolerance for it--we just accept that some groups have ways of doing things that might look weird to us, but which form some kind of tradition we just have to accept is theirs and decide whether we want to maintain the outsider's discomfort or conform to the crowd.
Add to that now, a layer of superstition. When the Harry Potter books started becoming popular, I recall a backlash from the Evangelical community, some of whom refused to allow their children to read books obviously geared for their age range because although they were hardly groundbreaking in the fantasy genre, there was a preponderance of allusions to occult powers in their pages. Deeply convicted Christians, in other words, were trying to pull their impressionable charges back from a line of flirtation with witchcraft, sorcery, and other forms of the worship of powers other than the God they believed in. Some roundly ridiculed them for their intolerance of innocent imaginative fiction, especially since the values the Potter novels teach are manifestly good: resourcefulness, courage in the face of challenge, self-sacrifice, loyalty, community, love of family and friends over power and control, etc.
Personally, when the framing of the tale is fiction, and especially science or fantasy fiction, my tolerance expands even further. And I'm not the only one. Taking Disney alone for its exemplarity as a purveyor of children's entertainment my entire life long, a survey would likely show a high percentage--well over half is my guess--of films featuring some kind of magic, ghosts, genies, gods, shamans, witches, fortune-tellers or other forms of occult reference. Our secular society loves to think highly of our rational selves and show our superiority over superstition by allowing stories containing them to be told innocently--as if no one could possibly indulge their nonsensical ideas seriously, so they are worthy of play, of entertainment, of marginal existence. Yet there is a thread within our society that persists in serious belief in ghosts, gifts of palm reading, tarot cards, and psychic hotlines--enough that a few people profit from such services.
In all of this, please recall that as a monotheist, I believe strictly in the commandment not to worship other gods or devote energy to idols. And I also believe that God can and has worked through instruments and through fellow mortals at times to accomplish His purposes, show His power, and lead His people. When you believe in the Resurrection, you don't really have much of a leg to stand on for refusing to believe lesser miracles, but you do still have to draw a line between God acting through people and instruments versus flirting with belief in some other power.
What strikes me is what we find out of bounds, and how quickly that line changes. I can recall two stories from my progenitors on the subject of folk mysticism that might illustrate. First, my grandmother, who was young in the 1930s, and who lived on the semi-arid great plains of Western Canada where livelihoods depended on grain crops, and where distance from sources of water were often insurmountable, spoke once or twice about divining rods. I remember her feeling particularly talented at taking a forked stick, letting the tines balance in her hands, and walking aimlessly until she felt the tip of the stick seemingly bounce downward with no apparent force of her own supplying the movement. It happened rarely, but when they dug, a worthy well was found. She wasn't the only one in her community who professed such aptitudes and to be in possession of objects, some of which proved better for it than others. She grew up in a Bible-believing home, and kept a devoted Christian faith her whole life long, and while I recall her explaining this with a hint of "I'm not sure how you'll take this" in her otherwise matter-of-fact manner, she seemed to see no conflict between her faith and this practice.
As a contrast, my father--whose adolescence occurred in the early 60s--tells of an instance where he was abruptly asked to leave from a social gathering he had been invited to because he and his family were known as believing Christians, and the Ouija board his fellow teens wanted to experiment with didn't seem to function while he was in the house. Thinking about what that implies for a minute--as far as society advanced in science, technology, and secularism in those particular decades, that same society mass produced an instrument of divination and sold it as essentially a board game. And it still does.
The question isn't whether there are hokey beliefs and practices in our society, it's what's your tolerance for them?--they aren't going away.
So here's one hokey tradition from way before the 1830s, which was extant in Joseph Smith's time: seer stones. Rare individuals claimed to be able to "use" rare stones to receive spiritual or other kinds of knowledge not available through normal means. The manner of their use varied widely, as did the claims of what the limits of their "powers" were. We know next to nothing about how Joseph Smith's various seer stones, or "interpreters" as he sometimes called them were "used", but he claimed to receive messages--whether translated from the Book of Mormon language on the Gold Plates or directly in response to prayer. There are reports of him using the stone in the above image between his forehead and an oversized hat to exclude the light so he could peer up at the stone and "read" in some way what ideas--thoughts, images, or words, we don't know--came to him "through" it.
While the precise manner of revelation reception through these stones, what is clear is that he equated them with the repeated Biblical mentions of Urim and Thummim.
And with that context framing the text, I find two facts to be noteworthy: 1. There are 4 and only 4 sections of the 138 in the Doctrine and Covenants which are explicitly labeled as revelation received "through" the Urim and Thummim, meaning that revelation received by a seer through an instrument is rare, and the fact that they are all very early chronologically suggests that attunement to the Spirit of revelation can be improved to the point of not needing tools; 2. The content of this particular revelation is a rebuke unflattering to the direct recipient of the revelation.
As a literary analyst, the above quoted verse strikes as a turning point in the text. Specifically the personal pronoun "you." Above that mark, the revelation appears to address a general audience and maintain general applicability of its topics. At this point, even the implied "you" in the imperative "remember, remember" from verse 3 gets refocused to become intensely personal to the prophet himself.
Keep in mind that as the preamble explains, Joseph had entrusted 116 uncopied manuscript pages that could not be reproduced except through retranslation to a friend who "lost" them. This friend had traveled a 3-4 day journey by horse, spent months away from wife and family during productive farming months (he was a reputable farmer noted for his success) serving as a scribe in the home of the Smiths, and later supported the publication of the script he had helped with through the mortgage of his own considerable property. There were certainly signs that this was a friend willing to sacrifice personally to serve a cause even if a certain openness to the full visual testimony was denied for a time. And this lack of access to see the plates themselves, so be able to give strong answers for the skeptics within his own family--his wife apparently chief among them, worried perhaps with good reason, that a potential charlatan may be seeking to defraud her husband of hard-earned means--as to the well-foundedness of his investments of time and property to this translation definitely pressed upon Harris. He repeatedly asked Smith for some material proof he could show others.
But note how the language of the revelation centers judgment NOT on Harris, but squarely on Smith. It calls for the latter's repentance, warns against further transgression, relays consequences, and reasserts the importance of the work and the need for strict heed to the directions and rules governing its progress. But even the verses singling out Harris as a "wicked man" guilty of breaking promises and boasting of his own strength stop there--they clearly lay out judgment and the behavior, but don't spend time further upbraiding or calling to repentance. 18 of the 20 verses humble Smith, not Harris, as the more culpable party, and point to reasons for redress to be made, and offer hope for forgiveness and a return of gifts of participation in a work greater than them both.
Whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies, to be sure, but He also chastens those He loves. Harris's character flaws notwithstanding, and his ups and downs with the Church and with Joseph Smith personally gave him a bumpy path in life through which he held true to his testimony of the Book of Mormon, and after which, we all hope, he found forgiveness and refinement. But the "you" in verse 5 must have hit like a ton of bricks to the man to whom already much greater testimonies had been given. Imagine also, subsequent to this revelation, the visit of an angel who had coaxed and coached him over years to be able to receive the plates--each year at which he arrived at the location fully expecting he would be ready to take them home with him--coming down one to physically remove the plates and interpreting stones from him.
To put a point on it, Joseph Smith spent weeks working on a translation work that he was primed for years to accomplish, but that he was just getting the hang of--pondering and praying over a script no one on the planet could read--and just when he was in the swing of it, and of how to use the Urim and Thummim efficiently in this revelatory process, he made a mistake and trusted in the promises of a well-meaning partner whose values he didn't completely share over the promises of the Lord. And his next impulse was to try to receive revelation through the Urim and Thummim again. And it was granted! The rebuke you read is a demonstration of mercy--of God's refusal to cut us off if we can be brought back--of His relentless love and pursuit of His children's happiness.
Whatever your tolerance for the hokey, the content and manner of this revelation teaches that no one is indispensable to God's work, that He has means by which He works, and requirements He expects followed, and that He serves up hope for a return to His favor, even when our actions fail Him. This is the perfect balance between motivation to do all the good we can, not letting ourselves off the hook for what we can do, and realizing that the work is actually His, He can do it without us, but will re-entrust us when we rely on His Son to cover our failings.
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