My husband of 20 years held a pistol to his head and demanded to know if he should pull the trigger. I said yes.
The convulsions from my overdose were so severe that my shoulder muscles shattered my own shoulder bones.
I went to confession to tell the Priest about how my father was molesting me, but the Priest called me a liar.
My fiancée was killed by a drunk driver the night he proposed.
I went drinking after work and woke up paralyzed.
They found my brother’s canoe in Alaska but never his body; I was homeless in Australia; I was bullied; I tried suicide; I bullied someone to suicide; I was arrested; I became bed-ridden and morbidly obese; the day I was laid-off I was side-swiped by a truck carrying my wife and her adulterous lover; I was abused, attacked, assaulted, raped. My uncle was disappeared in El Salvador. My family was driven out of Turkey. Every morning on our march from Sudan to Kenya, we buried someone new.
One day I got home early from Middle School, checked the mail, and found my report card. I saw I had gotten an A in Biology. I ran down to the furnace in the basement to burn it up, because I knew the only reason he’d given me an A is because he knew I would never tell.
I left my second husband once I learned how long he’d been abusing our daughter; I found one last hit of meth in a tube-sock under the bed, when I suddenly caught a glimpse of my reflection in a cracked mirror; I found the cat I’d once given LSD to in an alleyway; I giggled loudly as I blew the head off a jack-rabbit; I love my child but his twin heart-surgeries have me drowning in debt, as is his baby-daddy suing me for custody now that he’s out of jail; my ex-wife has cut me off from my own children; my father signed away his visitation rights and refused to see me; I watched my best friend fall from the side of a cliff; I bore the child of my rapist; my grandma died; my mom died; my wife died; I died on the operating table and saw God.
All these are excerpts from actual student essays I graded as an adjunct at Salt Lake Community College.
Brothers and Sisters, like Mormon of old, I do not share these to harrow up your souls, but that we may learn to be wiser. For it is one of the unique doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that Christ not only suffered for our sins, but that he also suffered for our pains, in order to know how to best comfort us in our sufferings. As the Book of Mormon reads in Alma 7:12, “And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.” This radical idea, that the Atonement is not just for when we sin, but when we suffer, is one that even Joseph Smith had to learn for himself, when he was imprisoned on trumped-up charges in Liberty Jail, during a freezing Missouri winter.
(On a side-note, part of why I believe Joseph Smith only translated the Book of Mormon, not wrote it from scratch—besides the confirmation of the Holy Spirit, I mean—is that the Book of Mormon keeps dropping these important doctrines on us that Joseph Smith himself did not seem to fully understand till he was older.)
Recall how Joseph Smith pleaded, as so many of us have pleaded, “O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?” The Lord himself responds, as recorded in part in Doctrine and Covenants section 122: “If thou art accused with all manner of false accusations; if thine enemies fall upon thee; if they tear thee from the society of thy father and mother and brethren and sisters; and if with a drawn sword thine enemies tear thee from the bosom of thy wife, and of thine offspring, and thine elder son, although but six years of age, shall cling to thy garments, and shall say, My father, my father, why can’t you stay with us? O, my father, what are the men going to do with you? and if then he shall be thrust from thee by the sword, and thou be dragged to prison, and thine enemies prowl around thee like wolves for the blood of the lamb; And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?” The Lord is really knows how to twist the screws here, doesn’t he!
As does Chieko N. Okazaki, the popular first counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency during the 1990s, who wrote the following harrowing passage in a book of hers ironically entitled Lighten Up!: “We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It’s our faith that he experienced everything—absolutely everything. Sometimes we don’t think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don’t experience pain in generalities. We experience individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer—how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism.
“Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman [or as a man] that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, ‘And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He’s been there. He’s been lower than all that. He’s not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don’t need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He’s not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief.”
But my goal here today, again, is not to harrow up our souls with suffering, but to remind us only that the Atonement of Jesus Christ is intended to not only heal us of our sins but also of our pains; as the late-President Thomas S. Monson once said in conference, God only had one child without sin, and none without suffering. Yet although the Atonement will not and does not spare us from suffering, it does give our sufferings meaning, and, like Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail, gives us experience, and sanctifies them for our good—that we, like Christ, might also know how to succor others in their infirmities. Such in fact are our baptismal covenants, as spelled out in Mosiah 18:8-9 of the Book of Mormon, wherein we must be “willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed of God, and be numbered with those of the first resurrection, that ye may have eternal life.”
When we bear one another’s burdens, when we mourn with the mourning, when we comfort the afflicted, we are doing the work of God, and laying ahold of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Remember that the English word Atonement literally means “At-one-ment,” to become at-one, reconciled, together; William Tyndale had to invent the word in 1535 when he translated the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek. We become a part of the Atonement when we become a part of each other. The Gospel is not a one-and-done deal, wherein we accept the Word once and then we’re off the hook for serving others, but an ongoing process. As Nephi writes in 2 Nephi 33:20, “Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life.” The Atonement does not take the pain away, but it does make the pain worth it—which Atonement we shall lay ahold of if we not only love God, but all humanity. It was for these reasons, Christ told the Pharisee, that the two great commandments are to love God, and love our neighbor, and that on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. That is, to love God and love our neighbors isn’t just good advice on how to live more civilly (although it is that too), but the process by which we lay ahold of the Atonement of Christ, and endure to the end.
To love our neighbors also means to not take advantage of them. Malachi 3:5 declares (and the Savior explicitly endorses it in 3 Nephi 21:5, so you know it’s important), that the Lord will come as a swift witness against those who “oppress the hireling in his wages” (KJV). More recent translations are even more explicit: “against those who defraud laborers of their wages” (NIV); “against those who cheat employees of their wages” (NLT); and so forth. Not to put too fine a point on it, but colleges relying overwhelmingly on adjunct instructors while paying them literal poverty wages is the very definition of oppressing the hireling in his wages—it is one of the sins of the world in which we as a Church must also needs repent.
Because back when I adjuncted at SLCC, I was also an adjunct at what was then called LDSBC (now Ensign College), where the pay was even worse. And at the faculty Christmas party, the Dean thanked all the adjuncts because we were “90% of the faculty” and “we couldn’t do it without ya!”
This is textbook oppressing the hireling in his wages. It is a sin of which we must repent, lest the Lord come as a swift witness against us.