Feast upon the Word Blog

Though we brought several zones together for conferences once a transfer, we did not often have “zone meetings” in my mission. I think I probably only attended four, and three of those were meetings I arranged for as a zone leader. It is that other one, the one I didn’t ask for, that changed my whole life. The point of the meeting was to teach us as missionaries how to study; what I learned was how to teach.

President Clarke had us open to Moses 1, and we went to work as a zone, collectively trying to understand that chapter. We dug into Egyptian culture and how that would have affected Moses’ thinking. We got down to the level of words, interpreting and discussing the way the chapter is arranged. We spent time drawing charts and parsing verses. We spent two hours as a group studying that chapter, and I think we got through about verse 8 (though we jumped here and there throughout the chapter). There was, needless to say, a powerful spirit about the meeting.

Towards the end, though, President Clarke began to discuss, as he was wont to do, missionary work. And he began to talk about the scripture’s images for doing the work. He took just a minute or two and focused on Isaiah 49:23. He read the verse, and then he asked a question that stopped me short: “What on earth is a nursing father, if a father can’t nurse?” I think that was the first time in my life I had heard someone ask a question like that of the scriptures, and I had no idea what to do with it. My automatic–I was well trained–demythologizing mechanism suddenly failed, and I was completely dumbfounded.

I was not, apparently, alone, since there was a sort of general silence. Then President Clarke began to think out loud about the image. Nursing, he suggested, is the process of eating meat and producing milk. And then he went on, but I didn’t. It was like a revelation to me: as a missionary, I eat meat, and my (missionary) body goes through a very natural process of breaking down that meat and making it into milk, so that I can feed and nourish investigators, etc. I couldn’t believe the light he had shed in just a moment.

But, as I say, I didn’t so much learn how to study then as how to teach. I went home and studied in much the same way (at first) that I always had, but when I went out to teach that afternoon, something had changed in me. I began to teach in a way that questioned the scriptures, that asked them (if not forced them) to tell me why they said what they said the way they said it. Within two weeks, I had completely fallen in love with teaching, and my mission experience changed drastically. In fact, my whole life changed drastically: suddenly, everything I had ever assumed I knew was out the window, and I was turned over to an incredibly fresh world of possibilities. That’s the word: possibilities. The gospel became, for the first time, a realm of possibilities.

Now I can look back on that moment as absolutely vital to my own development. I think that was the first time I stopped at the mark, that I looked at the mark instead of beyond it. The gospel had always been to me something of a mystery: so systematically simple, and yet so many difficulties and contradictions to be reconciled. Suddenly, the mystery was gone. The gospel–or perhaps rather, the scriptures–was a way of engaging God Himself, of asking questions of Him and receiving answers in the Spirit. Perhaps I should say that a different kind of mystery descended on the gospel in place of the one that was dispelled: it was no longer a mystery in the sense of something complex and frustrating, because it was now a mystery in the sense of a mystery play, a drama, something to take up and enact. I suppose, in the end, that it was for this reason that I learned that day to teach, and not to study: I began to study by teaching, by taking up the drama in a public realm (I still study best when I teach the wall, if no real person).

Anyway, Brian’s post got me thinking about when I realized for the first time that there was a mark. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, but I think most any work I’m doing now in the Church, in the scriptures, and–most importantly–with my family began in that relief society room in California.