A Church Talk From Last Thanksgiving

A talk I gave at the Berkeley Ward for the Sunday before Thanksgiving last year. Forgive the seasonal dissonance. I figure someone might find this helpful:

Brothers and Sisters,

My name is CJ Swenson, and I’m a PhD student at the Graduate Theological Union. I’ve been living and studying in Berkeley for a few months, but my wife and 21-month-old daughter live in Utah and I fly back every other week or so. So if you haven’t seen much of me, it’s not because I don’t want to be here. This building is amazing: it has a trophy case and a kitchen with a gas range and what looks like a bomb shelter downstairs. And this ward is amazing too. I feel the Spirit here in a way that I sometimes didn’t in Utah. I wish I could be here more.

It’s almost Thanksgiving, so it makes sense that I’d be asked to talk about gratitude. To begin ,I’ll give a quote from King Benjamin. In Mosiah 2, he says this:

I say unto you that if ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another—I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants.

I can’t pay back God. Every time I breathe in, every time the ground underneath my feet holds me up, every time I’m able to eat or beat my heart or think or feel or just exist, I am being sustained by a God who is investing in me. I don’t need to pay him back. That’s not what he asks. In fact, paying him back is both inappropriate and impossible. First off, trying to become independent from God is the definition of sin, and second, I simply am dependent on Him. I am sustained by Him. He is the ground beneath my feet and the air in my lungs and the blood pumping through my veins and arteries and capillaries. In him I live and breathe and have my being. 

Brothers and Sisters, I invite you to try to stop your heart from beating. Go on, try. I promise nothing bad will happen.Notice that you can’t. Your heart is smarter than you. I wouldn’t be good at beating my own heart, and I’m glad it does a better job than I would. I’m grateful for it. In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus all but dared his disciples to add a cubit to their height. Brothers and Sisters, I invite you to grow a foot taller. It’s not a cubit, so I’m cutting you a little slack. No? Well, I’m grateful for the height I have. Or I try to be. I’m grateful like birds might be for their nests or flowers might be for the ways they can’t help outshining even Solomon’s glory. 

And once more: I invite you to–just for a moment–pause and pay attention to your own thoughts. Just watch. Just listen. Do they come in words or pictures? Some combination of the two? Something else entirely? See if you can figure out where one thought starts and another stops. See if you can figure out where they come from and where they go. We don’t have all the time in the world, but I bet that if you really paid attention, you’d notice that even your own thoughts are like the Spirit that bloweth where it listeth. You hear the sound but don’t know where it’s coming from and where it’s going. Brothers and Sisters, I’m grateful for my thoughts.

And even when I fall apart, I’ve learned to be grateful for it. From the pieces, something much better can piece itself together. Right now, I often feel like the world is falling apart. Some of you might be falling apart right now. But that’s OK. Even if you can’t hold yourself together, I bear testimony that you don’t have to. Something is holding you: your breath, your body, your blood, yes, but also the One who lends you your breath and the One who crafted your body and the One who willingly gave his blood and his body for you. I’m grateful for Jesus like I’m grateful for the ground when I fall down. He descended below all things. Sometimes the world feels like an endless ocean where there’s no up and no down and no direction and, like Peter, it feels like you’re sinking and lost and flailing. But Jesus found the bottom. In a world that feels like an endless storm, he walks on water. And he invites us to try too.

So I suppose I’ll follow the hymn book’s advice and count my blessings:

I’m grateful for my body and for the miracles it does for me every day.

I’m grateful for my mind and for the things it can’t understand about itself. 
 
I’m grateful for this city and for how its weirdness has taught me to honor my own.

I’m grateful for the mentors and friends here who see the worth I sometimes forget I have.

I’m grateful for my wife who saw me and sees me and believes in me.

I’m grateful for my daughter, who has taught me to see the world the way it was when I was her age.

I’m grateful for you, all of you, who are caring about something sacred and bright in a dark world just by the fact that you are here.

I’m grateful for all the good, true and beautiful things in my life I never earned and will never deserve.

And I’m grateful for the One who gives them to me anyway.

And I say these things in His name, even Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Of Such Is The Kingdom

I know I haven’t written here for a while. I know that I promised to. I’m sorry. But I have an excuse.

These days, I'm a PhD student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Right now, I’m sitting in a public park under trees that don’t grow in Utah. I’m not connected to WiFi. It’s warmer here than back home. This city is—generally—marvelous.  I walk along a street called Telegraph every day past milling crowds of students who join and part like schools of fish. I regularly step over chalk art that manages to be both political and whimsical. I never knew a city could be eccentric. I’m at home here. In the basement of what looks like a cathedral, I work in a library devoted to Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic whose works I’ve been reading since I was barely in college and whose life has directed mine more than anyone else’s. The library might even be haunted. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. I don’t know if I want to know. It’s a strange, colorful, wonderful world I’ve found myself in. I’m lucky to be here. Swedenborg believed that Divine Providence is at work in even the details of our lives, and I often swear I feel it brushing up against my neck.

But there’s a catch. Berkeley is expensive, I need to be on-site for the first two semesters, and I couldn’t afford to bring my family with me. So I have a small room in an arts-and-crafts house with yellow walls and a lamp on the wall instead of the ceiling. I fly back to see my wife and my daughter regularly, and I spend about two weeks in each place. It’s a good compromise. I get to dive into this magical city, and I get to see my daughter for weeks at a time. 


But boy do I miss her right now.

She’s two years old now. I’ve watched the lights turn on bit by bit behind her eyes. First on her back and then on her stomach, she went from crawling to walking to running and climbing. Like Eve and Adam, she pointed at things and spoke their names. Mamma gave way to Pappa gave way to dog and cat and more and hat and bee. She knows her own name now. She looks in a mirror and recognizes  herself.She’ll dance. She’ll play. She’ll run, and I’ll catch her. I’ll run, and she catches me. As if she hadn’t caught me from the very beginning. 

I look into her eyes and see what I can only call innocence. Swedenborg taught that the highest heaven—where God shines for everyone’s eyes like a sun, where it’s always springtime—is a world of innocence. This innocence isn’t naïveté. It’s not weakness or ignorance. It’s wisdom, and angels, he says, are wise only insofar as they’re innocent. This is an old doctrine: Socrates was wise because he knew that he knew nothing. Zen teaches that, while the expert sees few possibilities, the beginner sees many. The 93rd section of the Doctrine and Covenants explicitly says that we were innocent in the beginning with God and are meant to become innocent again.

Swedenborg writes that the angels in this “Celestial Kingdom” wear nothing and  they are not ashamed. They accept what is given to them, whether much or little, and they trust that it’s what they need. Their vowels are round and their consonants soft. From a distance, they even look like children. Children on earth, in fact, are innocent because of what flows in from this place. It’s not a projection of our nostalgia. Our nostalgia is a projection of this place. 

This sounds naive. I know. We live in a time of hatred and murder and genocide and trauma. I am terrified of the world my daughter will inherit. I came of age with the carefree, eccentric optimism of the early Internet. I remember the hope of that time. I mourn it. But it is also true that one of the worst sins of our time is its war on childhood. I am one of the last people to have an undocumented upbringing, where play outside was normal, where screens stayed put and loading took patience. I was bored. I’m so grateful I was bored. I’m terrified that my daughter won’t be.

You know what I mean. I won’t be condescending and pretend you don’t. You know that the stakes are high and the prospects are dire. There’s no use denying it. But cynicism is the wrong response here. Like with all assaults on the innocent, we need resistance and action. Not just protests—at least not in this case—but something bolder and more counter-cultural.

We need wonder. My daughter is full of it. I saw her touch a tree last week, and it was the only thing in the world for her. It was a world. I don’t need to teach her how to marvel like this. But I’m responsible for protecting that marvel. The celestial glow haloed around the world she sees will fade with time, and it’s up to me to keep that fire as lit as I can. For my daughter, yes, but also for myself. And for anyone I have influence over.

There are ways to do this. I taught “Ethics and Values” for five years at Utah Valley University, and—relatively unsupervised—I designed my curriculum around curiosity as a virtue. As philosophy professors often do, I began my class with the Allegory of the Cave: a prisoner in a world of shadows who leaves it and finds a real one full of color and dimension. The world is so much bigger than he thought: shape where there was only shadow, light the darkness couldn’t comprehend. But I taught my students that this story isn’t just a thought experiment. It’s real. The cave is everything you’ve learned to lock your eyes to. The cave is your screen, your looping thoughts, your filter bubble. But it’s not real, and you can leave it. It’s actually not that hard. 

Every week I’d assign my UVU students to do a “random act of curiosity”: a little experiment in attention or action that they designed and wrote a brief report about. They climbed trees and found it harder than they remembered. They showered in the dark and noticed that soap had a smell. They found childhood blankets in their closets and counted the squares in their kitchen. They counted with the numbers they found and rarely made it past fifty. And—for every student who tried it, every one over years—fasting from social media dramatically improved their life in just a few days. All it took was a pulse of attention, a pinch of creativity, and a nudge from a professor. And it changed their lives. I have thousands of submissions, and the trends are clear. I’m writing a book about it.

But here I am staring at my screen with Berkeley spring around me on all sides. I stare at my screen too much. The shadows on the wall are tempting. They’re familiar, comfortable. And so I look up again. Just now a boy with a yellow shirt ran past me. There are bugs flying with twisting jerks, and they’re doing it everywhere. I look for purple, and I find it. I look for green, and I find more of it. The sun is shining through a tree I didn’t notice was there. 

Curiosity is a virtue, and like all virtues, it needs practice. I’m committing to that practice. I will cultivate that practice in my daughter. I implore you to cultivate it in yourself, your children, and in anyone who wonders why your eyes aren’t cast down. Look up. Please. This world needs it. Our time needs it. 

Jesus himself said that “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” He was speaking of children. I’ve since realized that—if we all learned to see like children do—the world would become heaven. That’s the world Swedenborg saw, the world children haven’t forgotten how to see. To them, Swedenborg marvelously said, all things “laugh and play and live.” They do for my daughter. They can for us too. That world—where it’s always springtime, always sunrise—is laid out all around us, and despite our blindness, It’s there. It’s really there. I promise you it’s there. All you have to do is open your eyes and look. 

So look.

See?