This year marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Holy Ghost, the third and final album of Modern Baseball, the short-lived Emo-Punk band from Philadelphia, PA. They had quickly garnered a small cult-following and received positive reviews among the Indie presses in the early-2010s, but then imploded under the pressures of even this exceedingly modest fame; and so, to preserve both their friendships with each other and their own mental health, they went on a Jeff Mangum-esque indefinite hiatus a year later in 2017.

Holy Ghost itself is split in half between the two guitarists-singers, Jake Ewald and Bren Lukens. Ewald’s songs on “Side J” of the vinyl LP release primarily centered on the recent passing of his grandfather—that is, it’s a song cycle that seeks to “mourn with those that mourn,” per our most sacred baptismal covenants—while Luken’s songs on “Side E” center on him and Jake’s shared struggles with mental illness and depression, the very factors that led to their indefinite hiatus shortly thereafter.

The band had first crossed my radar in 2014, when I spotted a glowing review of them on The A.V. Club–what was then the pop-cultural review wing of the popular satirical newspaper The Onion–back when I worried I was far too addicted to reading both websites daily, not realizing that I was then living near the tail-end of the wild-west golden-era of the world wide web, before private equity and vulture capitalism, the suffocating effects of social media siphoning off all ad revenue, the rise of the algorithms, chatbots, and AI slop, all conspired together to strangle the life out of the internet (“Slowly,” in the words of Hemingway, “Then suddenly”) before the end of the decade. I really should’ve just kicked back and enjoyed the show while it lasted, because by the time the 2020s rolled around, all of The A.V. Club‘s best writers would all be gone, the lesser-replacements hired in their stead would be gone too, the frontpage would be unusably choked with ads, the vibrant old comments sections closed, and the wit and depth that had made the site such a delight for so long would be utterly gone. I simply awoke one morning during the pandemic lockdowns when my doom-scrolling was at its highest, and realized I still hadn’t clicked on The AV Club in forever, and continued not to. The Onion has somehow made a miraculous resurrection and return to relevancy in recent years (they just bought InfoWars, in one of the supreme acts of irony in our time!), but The A.V. Club never did.

That was all still beyond the horizon, however, when I idly clicked on their effusive article on Modern Baseball the first year of my PhD program; and based on their recc, checked out their charming, understated little sophomore album You’re Gonna Miss It All. I liked it well enough, though it certainly didn’t change my life or anything (it definitely doesn’t break any new sonic ground—though in fairness, nor was it trying to); I would have been surprised to remember that album even later that same day, let alone a dozen years later (though isn’t that always the case? Seriously, I think if you’d asked me 20 years ago who I thought I’d still be friends with just 10 years later, I don’t think I would have made a single correct guess; people I thought I’d remain life long friends with I just sorta lost touch with, while people I thought were just passing through my life turned out to be the most important of all; but I more than digress). Yet because I clicked on that article and listened to that album, it did ensure that it’s follow-up Holy Ghost crossed my radar when it came out just two years later.

Not that Holy Ghost stood out to me all that much more at the time, either (though I did agree with the reviewers of the time that it was a marked improvement over their first two records). No, what most made that album stick in my craw was the fact that 2016 was the same year I moved back to Utah to marry my fiancee, where I would also complete my dissertation–when what should I spot on the cover of Holy Ghost, but a Seagull Books.

In fact, now that I examined it more closely, that was clearly a mountain on the Wasatch Front in the background there. That is, some Phillie-based Punk Band (and I would even be moving into the Philadelphia Temple district just two years later, for my first full-time position!) had randomly slapped a picture of a Utah parking lot to the cover of an album named Holy Ghost, the same year I moved back to Utah to get married (track 2 was even entitled “Wedding Singer”)! This was all especially meaningful for me personally, because the quiet assurance of the Holy Ghost that it would all work out in the end—that I’d finally get married, that I’d finally land a tenure-track—is all that had kept me motivated all throughout the long, despairing grind of grad school.

Seriously, I had, at best, a “Faith as a mustard seed” all throughout grad school. The full context of the original phrase matters here, before proceeding: that oft-quoted “Faith as a mustard seed” comes to us from Matthew 17, right after Jesus Christ descended down from the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James, and John. Earlier in the chapter, Christ had revealed the full glory of his true form to his closest disciples high on the mountain top, “and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light”, and Moses and Elias appeared beside him.  The voice of God the Father boomed as it had at Christ’s baptism, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him”, and the disciples were sore afraid, overcome as they were by the power and the glory.

But then the vision passed, and Christ reverted back to his humble human form, and Peter, James, and John were sworn to secrecy as to what they had just witnessed until after the Son of Man be risen again from the dead.  Hence these four men were forced to hike back down the mountain as though nothing had happened.  James E. Talmage in his 1915 magnum opus Jesus the Christ even speculates that this decent weighed on the Savior especially: “Our Lord’s descent from the holy heights of the Mount of Transfiguration was more than a physical return from greater to lesser altitudes; it was a passing from sunshine into shadow, from the effulgent glory of heaven to the mists of worldly passions and human unbelief; it was the beginning of His rapid descent into the valley of humiliation. From lofty converse with divinely-appointed ministers, from supreme communion with His Father and God, Jesus came down to a scene of disheartening confusion and a spectacle of demonized dominion before which even His apostles stood in impotent despair. To His sensitive and sinless soul, the contrast must have brought superhuman anguish.” 

I tend to agree with Talmage’s reading here, because how else to explain why he berates his disciples so, when he finds them unable to heal a young child suffering some sort of demonic possession?  Suddenly bereft of all his usual patience and long-suffering, Christ snaps at them, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.” In short order, he rebukes the devil within the child, and “he was cured from that very hour.” When his disciples meekly ask why they could not cast out the devil, “Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

In all honesty, this teaching that having faith as a mustard seed could enable you to move mountains, that nothing shall be impossible to you, has always bothered me. It has caused way too many good-hearted people in my observation to conclude that if they cannot move the massive obstacles in their lives, it must be due to their own lack of faith. But history is replete with people of deep and abiding faith who were nevertheless never spared from the mountains of misery that fell upon them. As Victor Frankl notes in the finale to Man’s Search for Meaning, the Holocaust victims who were marched into the gas chambers with the Shema Yisrael and the Lord’s Prayer on their lips were certainly not lacking in faith, though the death camps, let alone the mountains, had not been moved to save them—at least not in this life.  We might also note how there are still millions of faithful believers today—in Ukraine, Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza Strip, Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela, a girl’s school in Iran, even among immigrants and refugees here in these United States—who cry out for deliverance daily with far more than a mustard seed of faith, but no mountain has yet been moved to save them.  For that matter we might note that shortly after the Mount of Transfiguration, Christ Himself—who had far more faith than all of us combined—declined to move a mountain entirely, but instead allowed himself to be captured and tortured to death in the most painful ways possible, to bring about the Redemption of Humanity.

I’m sure you could add to this list; speaking solely for myself, I have all too often recounted how when I arrived home from my missionary service in 2004, I beheld the wasted visage of my mother in the airport terminal, deep in the terminal stages of ovarian cancer.  So the next day, after my official release, I made sure to set aside some time to kneel alone in my old bedroom like my namesake Jacob in the Old Testament, to wrestle with the Lord God for a blessing—in this case, to restore the life of my mother. I had just spent two years sweating hard on the beautiful island of Puerto Rico you see, preaching that the heavens are again open, that the veil is rent, that God is still a God of miracles; so I begged earnestly of God directly to prove me now herewith, and show the world a miracle, to give me this blessing, to move this mountain. It was the longest, hardest, most anguished prayer of my life, and it finished only with me feeling the calming reassurance from the still, small voice—the groanings beyond utterance, the peace which surpasses all description—that my mother would pass away, and to let her go and make my peace with it. She died in her bed later that night.

Was my faith insufficient in that moment? Did I lack even the mustard seed necessary to move that mountain?  The only way I’ve ever been able to reconcile this troubling passage of scripture with my own experience was when an old religion teacher of mine at BYU-I taught in class one day that the mustard seed of faith has nothing to do with wishful thinking or “manifesting” or “affirmations” or “wish-casting” or whatever the kids call it these days, but rather with the fact that, if you have ever felt an impression by the calming peace of the Holy Spirit that something can for sure happen, then if you exercise even just the tiniest, barely-visible mustard-grain of faith—no matter how impossible the event may seem at the moment—then it will come to pass.  But if you have not felt that impression, ye have no promise. I have some small experience in this: when I started my doctoral program at the University of Iowa in 2013, I did so with full knowledge that the odds of me landing a full-time professorship were decidedly against me. 

College administrators for the past 50-plus years, you see, have been slowly but steadily replacing full-time professors with part-time adjuncts, such that by the 2010s over two-thirds of all college instruction nation-wide was now being performed by poverty-waged adjuncts, lecturers, and grad students—a ratio that has scarcely budged since. Even brilliant PhD candidates at the Ivy Leagues were having immense difficulty landing tenure-track positions anywhere, at any level of higher ed, let alone graduates from a state university like me. At that point in time, me finding a full-time professorship really did feel as impossible as moving a mountain.

As I nearly froze to death through every harsh, Midwestern winter amongst the endless corn fields, I often questioned what I was even doing there, why I was subjecting myself to the grueling hazing ritual of grad school; I wondered if, for all my intellectual pretensions, it would not actually be far smarter and more intelligent of me to simply drop out and seek some sort of private sector work instead—maybe Law School like some of my friends, or even a K-12 position like my Dad. Yet each time I knelt down to say my nightly prayers, tired and broke and discouraged, I had the distinct impression that if I but exercised a mustard seed of faith, it would all work out. Well, again, at that point in my life all I had left was a mustard seed of faith; I feared that because the job I sought was the thing I then most desired, perhaps my feeling was a false positive, that I was confusing what I wanted with what was right, that my impressions were imagined and my faith in vain.

Nevertheless, I still exercised that mustard seed and completed my program; and to be clear, this thing I desired was after all a very small thing in the grand scheme of things, especially compared to the collected and catastrophic suffering of the human race today; there are so many much larger mountains I wish I could move instead; but the fact that I am here in New Jersey today, gainfully employed as a tenured English professor at Middlesex College in Edison, is evidence enough that I was able to at least move this one small mountain in my life, that the Holy Spirit was right, that I but needed to have a mustard seed of faith.            

To repeat and re-emphasize: the promise from our Lord and Savior is not that the mustard seed of faith will allow you to move any mountain you please or accomplish any sort of wish-fulfillment you desire (not even Christ in Gethsemane was granted his wish that this cup might pass from him). No, the promise is that if the Spirit whispers to you, in that still, small voice—with the peace of God that surpasses understanding yet can at times make your bones to quake within you—that this mountain can indeed be moved, then if you will exercise even a particle of faith, it will indeed come to pass.

Besides, it’s not the mountain moving that will save us in the end anyways, but charity, the pure love of Christ. As the Apostle Paul declared in 1 Corinthians 13:2, “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” Sometimes, especially in our day and age of endless wars and rumors of wars, “when because of iniquity the love of many shall wax cold,” our capacity to foster love and charity in the human heart—to love not only our neighbors, but even our enemies—feels more impossible than moving a mountain.  But ultimately, developing this love in our hearts for all of God’s children is the only mountain worth moving. Hence why Mormon, in a similar discourse, urged us to pray with all the energies of our hearts, that we might be filled with this love, which never fails, for all things must fail; “that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is;” and we will all be transfigured on the mountain with Him.

Which is what still keeps me listening to Modern Baseball’s final LP Holy Ghost. Somehow that massive convergence of coincidences–that, again, a short-lived Phillie-based Punk Band recorded an album of grief and mourning that uses a photo taken in Utah as their cover art the same year I moved back to Utah to get married, and two years before moving to the Philadelphia Temple district myself for my first full-time position, all of which followed promptings by the very real Holy Ghost–has made this album profoundly meaningful to me, almost in spite of itself. Because sometimes we need to feel like maybe God really is aware of us, and that maybe, just maybe, all things really will work together for our good. We don’t get it too often (lest it go to our head), but it’s nice when it happens.

Oh, and that transition from “Holy Ghost” into “Wedding Singer”? So simple, so childlike, and hence so sublime.