The Good Book

I love getting books in the mail. No seriously: I feel like no one could possibly understand how much I love it. It doesn’t happen often enough, but when we returned home from a recent trip out of town, there was a lovely hardback book waiting for us, hot off the press. I was especially excited to get hold of a copy of A. C. Grayling’s The Good Book, as the UK Amazon site sold out of its initial stock after only a couple of days. I hunted around, and on my second attempt, found a seller who would send me a copy.

The book is the culmination of more than thirty years of study and distillation, from Grayling’s eminent career as a Professor of Philosophy. Now, I’ll be straight up for those of you who don’t know: Grayling is known as one of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of British Atheism, with a long catalogue of books and public addresses that argue that religion is an unnecessary detour in man’s road to enlightenment. This most recent book, perhaps paradoxically, takes the pattern, form and language of the Holy Bible, filling the chapters and verses with the sayings and thoughts of the greatest secular and humanist thinkers from around the world. Thus, the spine reads ‘Made by A.C. Grayling’: he is the collector of a library of wisdom, and I can affirm that it is exactly that. Although I’m only partway into what must be a careful and slow reading of a text of this kind, I’ve been enriched, enlightened and warmed by its beauty and depth.

Perhaps The Good Book isn’t to your taste. Undoubtedly, some will be put off solely by the name on the spine. Yet, the book raises an essential question, to my mind, for the Mormon community, and all communities ‘of the Book’. What makes ‘scripture’, scripture? How do our holy texts function, and, regardless of their origins, how can we best make use of our libraries of wisdom?

Mormonism launched on the substance of a holy book, reportedly taken from a hillside in upstate New York, with new revelation for the modern world. After the publication of The Book of Mormon, there followed an electrifying succession of revelations up until and beyond the death of Joseph Smith, the first prophet. These revelations declared that ‘every man might  speak  in the name of God the Lord’ (pardon the gender-specificity): and invited all its readers to connect with inspiration for a personal conviction of its power.

I’ve felt the inspirational and revelatory powers of the The Book of Mormon, and Grayling’s The Good Book. I’ve felt the same process while reading Whitman, Thoreau, G. M. Hopkins, Wilde, Keats, and even (dare I say it: I was young!) Mitch Albom. The process, it seems to me, is a personal one, and has something to do with the respect with which we approach a text, or adopt when we’re moved by the word.  I’m intrigued by the special status that Protestant Churches give to the Holy Bible, and the LDS Church gives to The Book of Mormon. What do we gain from returning to one body of text repeatedly and regularly? I heard recently a saying that I can’t find a reference for. Perhaps that’s fitting. It went something like this:

When you look at a still object for a period of time, you perceive your mind moving.

This process, functional during meditation practises on a candle, for example, may also be at work with a repeated study of a single holy text. As I read back over the same passages of the Book of Mormon across a period of years, I saw the ways in which my mind had developed and moved. I treasure my old scriptures, for the insight they give into the places my mind went during those childhood, teenage and ‘mission’ years.

In our sunny garden this week (a rare enough occurrence in the north of England), my Dad and I were talking about the difference between two kinds of worldview, based on our respective ‘readings’ of the new Disney film, Tangled. For those of you who haven’t seen it: go. It’s brilliant. Loosely based on the tale of ‘Rapunzel’, its dramatic situation involves a girl with special powers who is kidnapped at birth, and locked in a tower, where — although safe and largely content — she can only see the outside world through a tiny window. While I interpreted the tower as being symbolic of invented narratives and inherited systems of thought, with the world outside representing direct experience, my Dad (an active, faithful Latter-day Saint) read the tower as being an analogy for the distractions and illusions of our world, with the landscape outside the tower representing a larger, cosmic and eternal reality. Our disparate readings of Tangled highlight an important question: can we perceive ‘truth’ from direct experience, or do we need a text to show us what our senses cannot perceive? Do our senses show us ‘the real life’, or ‘is this just fantasy’? My readings of the various holy texts of the world — of which Grayling’s book represents one, that of philosophical humanist discourse — leads me to feel accordance with the words of his ‘Book of Wisdom’, Chapter 4, verse 1:

Who or what is the best counsellor, to counsel us to be wise? Nothing less than life itself.

And, later in the same chapter, verse 15:

Wisdom belongs to everyone, and is possible everywhere: none need lack it who will only allow experience to teach them.

Books have taught me so much. I love reading, and I could never hope to live the wonderful life I now enjoy without the great wisdom of both sacred and secular texts. But, perhaps in part through the signposts I’ve followed from the prophetic tradition of Joseph Smith, I also believe that revelation can be something universal and direct — in no diminished or secondary form. Radical and challenging personal experience, I believe, can be ‘holy’ to us, and can inspire us to write words that transmit truth to the places that we need to receive it. So today, while affirming the value of all books that give us language and tools of Reason, I acknowledge the existence of another ‘text’: one that is truly infallible and infinite. Infallible, because it tells nothing, but always shows (as do the best authors), and infinite, as it will never close itself to us. The world is the book that has written our genetic code: it is our author. The challenge for us is to learn to read it: to maintain focus on the things and processes that will yield revelation to us, daily.

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