The counsel and encouragement of President M. Russell Ballard in his devotional address on the Brigham Young University campus last week, and a subsequent letter of clarification about changes to its honor code, ought to stimulate a much deeper and more meaningful conversation about the challenging questions that face a diverse community than has taken place in the past.
“Let me assure you that the Lord is aware of you, He loves you, is concerned about you individually and collectively,” President Ballard testified, “He is anxious to heal any wounded souls on the campus and to bring each and every one of you together in love and peace. We can help in the process as we love, seek forgiveness, offer forgiveness and seek to build bridges of understanding.” He then spoke of the “need for open and honest discussions on campus to resolve issues and deal with challenges. What this provides is an antidote to anger, ill feelings, distrust, hate or demonizing one another. Of all the universities in the world, BYU should be where Jesus’ teachings and commandments are proclaimed, discussed and lived.” As he concluded, President Ballard said, “I invite you to look deep in your souls and ask how you can fulfill your purpose of being a child of God by loving the Lord and loving your neighbor more faithfully than you ever have before.”
I hope that invitation to dig more deeply, to learn more broadly and more profoundly, will be eagerly embraced by all members of the campus community.
During my years studying at BYU, I was not “out” to my fellow students or faculty; indeed, I was urgently trying not to be out to myself. That failure to be fully honest with myself and others cast a shadow over my whole college experience. The reality is that not only is an individual diminished by a foreclosed opportunity to contribute the whole of their unique gifts and talents, the whole community is the poorer when, to borrow Paul’s allegory, we say as “the head to the feet, I have no need of you.”
While the reaction of LGBTQ students to the new and improved honor code was more celebratory and less decorous than some might have wished, there yet remains an important wrestle with critical questions. After gratefully acknowledging a primary identity as children of Heavenly Parents, what of the identities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer? How can we fully engage with one another with respect, acceptance and love when discussing these questions can feel confrontational, and when it can be foreclosed by believing that one group or another holds the indisputable moral high ground, seeing those on another side as simply unwilling to follow Christ’s teachings?
How can LGBTQ students best learn the lessons provided by dating: to clarify and sort out priorities of how an individual can achieve the most critical desires of their hearts and minds, how to find and align with those who will provide essential support in those efforts, how to live outside oneself and learn to put the needs of another first? Failing to engage in the significant effort to identify common ground on a thorny but critically important issue robs the entire community of a valuable growth experience.
I hope students, staff and faculty, rather than burying disagreement or retreating from conversations that bring significant emotion and can, therefore, be contentious, instead will seek to promote honest sharing, with a willingness to broaden current perspectives, and engage in a real wrestle to reconcile competing claims of both faith and fairness.
Perhaps an experience gained with another community of Saints might provide a useful template.
I have been fortunate to experience a congregation that worked, not only to make space in a pew, but to rise beyond discomfort to gain greater empathy and compassion when complete answers were unavailable. Twenty-five years after leaving BYU, the man who would become my partner of 19 years and I had moved to a small town in southern Connecticut, as he completed his internship and residency in family medicine. I had become increasingly eager that the blessings and richness of my life might also extend to spiritual aspects as well. For the next seven years, I considered myself the “most active nonmember” of the local Latter-day Saint ward. The boundaries of the ward were the same as those of the town, which meant that in addition to inviting one another into our homes, those in the congregation would also see each other frequently while accomplishing errands, shopping and dining.
On those occasions, I think it likely that ward members would have observed evidence of affection between my partner and myself. I don’t know what their private reactions were; I only know that each Sunday as I passed through the doors of that chapel I felt their sincere delight that I would choose to worship with them, and that any “public display of affection” had not diminished their genuine desire to know me and my partner. Over time, in precious moments, as persons who desired to be disciples of Jesus Christ, we had opportunities to ask one another questions about our lives and to come to understand in some measure the experiences that had shaped both the foundations of our faith and, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so memorably said, “the content of our characters.”
And as with that congregation, the entire university community now has an opportunity to work together toward President Ballard’s charge to “fulfill your purpose of being a child of God by loving the Lord and loving your neighbor more faithfully than you ever have before.”
Is it possible to do that soul-deep work without incurring some challenges to our current comfortable understanding? Candid engagement with others whose life experiences have led to different perspectives can lead to greater awareness of our own priorities and our own foundational righteous desires. A willingness to allow one another the time to learn and grow, both from positive experiences and from painful ones, could be the process Joseph Smith was referring to when he said he taught his people correct principles and let them govern themselves. This can also be a time to recognize that all voices need and deserve to be heard, and one view of what is right should not foreclose the ability of those who hold a different view to express their deeply held convictions.
I hope all of us have had, or will have, those miraculous moments when we know that the Lord sees us as individuals, calling us by name, when we are warmed by the unending fire of His love for us. At those times, we fully understand Joseph Smith’s words: “My soul was filled with love, and for many days I could rejoice with great joy.” At such times, we feel no temptation to offer to ourselves the false consolation of categorizing someone else’s shortcomings as weightier than our own, rather we pray to see what it is that God loves about each child, and plead to ensure any in need can feel his love through us.
What an opportunity this is for the entire university community to take this moment to listen to one another with a desire for increased understanding and a willingness to expand current perspectives, to recognize that wrestling with the most important and challenging questions can be a cooperative work of progress.