S U N S T O N E
EDITOR’S NOTE: The short essays in this section were
given as part of a panel discussion, “Doing Things that
Change Us: Mormonism as Praxis,” conceived and organized
by Holly Welker and presented in a slightly different
format at the 2004 Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium. The
session was a wonderful success, with several seasoned
symposium attendees telling Sunstone staff members that it
was among the best sessions they’d ever attended. As fate
would have it, however, our taping equipment for this session
failed. We’re very excited to offer the full symposium
session here with only minor editing.
______________________
INTRODUCTION
by Holly Welker
IN THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE, KAREN ARMSTRONG, A
former Roman Catholic nun, acclaimed author of A
History of God and The Battle for God, and noted biographer
of both Muhammad and the Buddha, recounts the research
she began in the 1980s after being hired to write and
present a six-part documentary on Saint Paul. Early on she realizes
she doesn’t know enough about Judaism, so she meets
with Jewish scholar Hyam Maccoby. Arguing against the New
Testament depiction of the Pharisees, Maccoby “[points] out
that in all likelihood Jesus had been a Pharisee himself” and
“could well have belonged to the school of Rabbi Hillel,” a
prominent Pharisee who had lived half a century or so before
Jesus. As evidence, Maccoby notes that “Jesus had, after all,
taught a version of Hillel’s Golden Rule” andrelatesthisanecdote:
Some pagans came to Hillel and told him that they
would convert to his faith if he could recite the whole
of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. So Hillel
obligingly stood on one leg like a stork and said, “Do
not do unto others as you would not have done unto
you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go
and learn it.”
Armstrong is troubled by the story and wants to know
where faith and belief come into play—how on earth could all
of Jewish theology and doctrine be reduced to one sentence?
Maccoby replies that “Theology just is not that important in
Judaism. . . . There’s no orthodoxy as you have it in the
Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody
must subscribe. No infallible pronouncement by a pope.
Nobody can tell Jews what to believe.”1
Armstrong then focuses on her own astonishment:
I could not imagine religion without belief. Ever
since I had grown up and started to think, my
Christian life had been a continuous struggle to accept
the official doctrines. Without true belief you
could not be a member of the church, you could not
be saved. Faith was the starting point, the sine qua
non, the indispensable requirement, and for me it had
been a major stumbling block.
“No official theology?” I repeatedly stupidly. “None
at all? How can you be religious without a set of
ideas—about God, salvation and so on—as a basis?”
“We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy,” Hyam
replied calmly. . . . “‘Right practice’” rather than ‘right
belief.’ That’s all. You Christians make such a fuss
about theology, but it’s just not important in the way
you think. It’s just poetry, really, ways of talking about
the inexpressible. We Jews don’t bother much about
PAGE 16 DECEMBER 2004
Leaving aside questions of belief, how do religious practices transform lives?
MORMONISM AS PRAXIS
By Phyllis Barber, H. Parker Blount,
John Dewey Remy, Jana K. Riess, Holly Welker
BACK
SEAT
LEGS
POSTS
NAPE
WING
RUMP
THIGH
FLANK
BREAST
THROAT
BILL
CROWN
SUPERIOR
VENA CAVA
INFERIOR
VENA CAVA
CORONARY
ARTERIES
PULMONARY
VEINS
PULMONARY
ARTERY
AORTA
S U N S T O N E
what we believe. We just do it instead.”2
Armstrong later details insights that eventually evolved from
that discussion. She writes:
Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible
propositions before breakfast, but about doing things
that change you. It’s a moral aesthetic, an ethical
alchemy. If you behave a certain way, you will be
transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not
true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific,
or historical reality, but because they are life
enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions,
but you will not discover their truth unless you
apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and
put them into practice. The myths of the hero, for example,
are not meant to give us historical information
about Prometheus or Achilles—or for that matter,
about Jesus or the Buddha. Their purpose is to
compel us to act in such a way that we bring out our
own heroic potential.3
Or, to paraphrase using a more familiar statement: “Even so
faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Yea, a man may
say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith
without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works”
(James 2:17–18).
THE SELECTIONS BELOW, presented in alphabetical order
by the author’s last name, explore how Mormonism’s “moral
aesthetic” and “ethical alchemy” can help transform us into beings
more closely allied with the divine. The authors leave
aside questions of testimony and belief, and consider the special
benefits offered by cultivating religious habits and behaviors
either unique to Mormonism or approached in a uniquely
Mormon way.
NOTES
1. Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase (New York: Knopf, 2004), 235.
2. Ibid., 236.
3. Ibid., 270.
______________________
THE PRACTICE OF
SIMPLE FAITH
by Phyllis Barber
TWO UTTERANCES OF my faith, sung in the voice of
my childhood:
In whatever corner we may chance to grow,
Whether cold or warm the wind may ever blow.
Dark the day or sunny, we must try, try, try.
Just one spot to gladden, you and I.
—“Little Purple Pansies”
Out in the desert they wander,
Hungry and helpless and cold. . . .
Off to the rescue He hastens
Bringing them back to the fold
—“Dear to the Heart of the Shepherd”
I consider myself well-introduced to faith, a child of the
faith, a child of faith, a person who believes deeply in a God
who wants us to share, a person who desires to brighten one
spot in this earthly garden wherever that might be.
As I thought about faith for this essay, a precept mentioned
often in my formative years, I realized that much of my introduction
to faith came through music. It came through those
songs we sang time and time again until they were worn into
our synapses and into our minds and pulses like grooves in an
old phonograph record.
After being totally active in the LDS Church for thirty-eight
years of my life and being a never-miss-a-meeting, acceptevery-call-you’re-given
kind of Mormon, my life changed dramatically.
All of a sudden, there was a one-hundred-foot waterfall
in the river’s course. Too high to keep my boat on the river.
Time to jump raft and portage.
In an effort to save my marriage to a man whom I’d married
in the St. George temple and who had many surprising-to-me
doubts, angers, and frustrations with the LDS way of life, at the
age of thirty-eight, I stopped attending church. I thought it
wise to maintain a more neutral ground, to step out of the war
zone, the never-ending loop. Together, we looked at other possibilities
of worshiping God. On my part, I believed in God
and had faith in what I’d learned as a child and in the songs
that I’d sung. God’s love shone over the rich and the poor, the
wise men and the sinners. God didn’t have to reside solely in
an LDS meetinghouse.
But, as fate would have it, the end of our marriage was imminent
and a three-year separation, then divorce, would
follow. Still, I didn’t want to believe that could happen. I’d always
felt we were committed to each other forever, that we
could work through any problem, that my faith in my ability
to do anything I set out to do (with God’s help, of course),
would hold us in good stead. One of my greatest stumbling
blocks in the marriage was my inability to face, literally, the
truth of my situation. I held onto the ideal as if it were a life
boat and couldn’t see that we’d been stuck for years, locked in
a grid and unable to shift from our positions. Something
needed to change.
Over a period of ten years, the waterfall which we didn’t get
out of the river in time to avoid, was in front of us. We stopped
going to church. I went into a long period of aberrant depression
when I realized things were falling apart. My husband and
I left Salt Lake City, where we’d lived for twenty years and
where we’d raised our three children, and moved with our
youngest teenaged son to the mountains of Colorado. We gave
up a beautiful home and network of friends and moved into a
dark, claustrophobic condo that was supposed to be temporary.
After three years there, we separated and I moved to
DECEMBER 2004 PAGE 17
S U N S T O N E
Denver where I knew no one, where I was determined to make
a new life, and where I had no intention of relying on my roots
or my church for help.
TOTALLY UNAWARE, I entered into a dark labyrinth of a
thousand-plus miles. From the fatted years of my life, I found
myself in the proverbial lean years. Very lean years, where
there were times I sank to the utter bottom of the bottom and
didn’t think I’d find my way back.
I didn’t call it pride at the time, but I convinced myself that
the LDS Church wasn’t a place for someone whose life had
broken to pieces. The Church was something I’d left behind. It
wasn’t a place for a single person about to be divorced, nor for
someone who was reckless and heedless and a sinner determined
to find a new configuration in which to be whole again.
I was in my own little rowboat, frantically rowing toward
something—yes, I did believe in something. There had to be a
place where I could worship God. Where I could feel communion
with Him. Where I could exercise the faith I once had.
Sunday mornings were the hardest hours of the week, as I’d
spent so much of my life getting up on Sunday mornings,
ironing my dress, curling my hair, preparing to go to church.
My loneliness trebled on those mornings, so I attended all
kinds of churches in Denver. Most of them felt cold or too contrived
or too soul-less.
Something about the way the African-Americans had suffered
made me feel simpatico with them, so I searched out the
black churches—the Second Baptists, African Methodist
Episcopal, charismatic Christians. One church had a sign out
front that read, “Sinners Welcome Here,” and I turned into the
parking lot eagerly, relieved to feel welcome in a church. I
loved the heartbeat of the gospel music, the choir rocking
down the aisle, the connection to people who were honest
about their place as sinners. I loved being able to worship, to
shout, “I love you, Jesus.”
In 1994, I taught at the University of Missouri in Columbia
for a semester and attended black churches there by myself,
sometimes the only Caucasian, and I loved sitting shoulder to
shoulder with impeccably groomed women, some of them old
and bent with pillbox hats, some of them fancy in broadbrimmed
hats and sequined dresses.
When I moved to Minnesota for a brief time, Sunday mornings
still found me yearning for a religious community. Even
though I lived with a man to whom I wasn’t married, I needed
a brief touch with my own church again. When one of the
bishop’s counselors called to welcome me to the ward, I told
him I wasn’t active but that I’d like to drop into church once in
a while, just so I could feel a sense of community and sing the
songs I loved again. I wouldn’t take the sacrament, I told him,
because I wasn’t a worthy member, but I did want to come.
“That’s strange,” he said, “but,” he paused, “okay. That’s pos-
sible.”
As if a person needs to be granted the privilege of walking
through church doors to commune with our Lord and Savior,
PAGE 18 DECEMBER 2004
F A I T H
( A L M A 7 : 2 3 - 2 7 )
NAPE
WING
RUMP
THIGH
FLANK
BREAST
THROAT
BILL
CROWN
I come from that part of the country where the Bible is considered
inerrant. Many of my fellow Southerners believe God
dictated it and ultimately it was printed precisely as God
wanted it. The Testaments, they believe, say what they say
clearly and without danger of being misread, misunderstood,
or misinterpreted.
My LDS background, however, teaches me that the Bible,
though the word of God, has errors due to mistranslations. In
addition, “plain and precious things” have been deleted. The
problem is I don’t know which parts have been mistranslated.
In fact, I don’t even know if anything is ever correctly trans-
lated.
Frankly I think a claim to an inerrant and infallible Bible
(not to mention popes and prophets) is bizarre—but even so,
it is an idea I sympathize with. I like the idea of a father—
earthly or heavenly—who makes clear to his children what
the rules and expectations are. He doesn’t deliver mixed messages,
and everyone who reads his proclamations arrives at the
same understanding.
That is what I would like from the ruler of heaven and
earth. That isn’t what I get. I agree with Carolyn Myss who says
that the language of the spirit is the language of paradox. The
same can be said of the scriptures. For example, think about
“If you are prepared, ye shall not fear” alongside “Take no
thought for your life. . . .”
SOME HALF-DOZEN years ago, our bishop asked me to
speak in sacrament meeting. At the time, I attended meetings a
bit more frequently than I do now. He said he knew I read the
scriptures regularly, and he wanted me to speak on why I read
the scriptures. Well my wife and I were going away that
weekend, so I was, so to speak, off the hook.
But I wasn’t. I was hooked. I couldn’t get the topic out of my
mind. Why do I read the scriptures? What do I get out of
them? Why do I feel my day is incomplete if I don’t spend at
least a few minutes with the scriptures? It wasn’t that I hadn’t
considered those questions. I had, at least to some extent; but
I hadn’t considered them deeply. As I did, what I discovered
surprised me. For one thing, I discovered that over time, the
lenses through which I read the scriptures changed.
Furthermore, I changed lenses according to which of the standard
works I was reading.
I acquired my first set of scriptures when I was thirteen or
fourteen, purchasing them with the money I had earned
working on our neighbor’s farm during the summer. This was
long before we Church members became a scripture-toting
and daily-scripture-reading people. I read them sporadically
until I went on a mission. I have read them regularly since.
Initially, I read the scriptures, particularly the Bible, to buttress
the claim that the Church was the only true church with
the only true doctrine. Later I tried to read the scriptures as a
guide for life. The scriptures, I was told, held all the answers to
life’s problems. So I would read and search for the best way to
handle various problems. I was also told that as I read the
scriptures, I should liken them unto myself.
I thought when I hung up the phone, angry all over again at
how I perceived some people in the church having such tunnel
vision.
At my first of a total of four sacrament meetings during my
year-and-a-half in Minnesota, I couldn’t sing the hymns.
Emotion would well up inside me. I choked on the words. My
voice cracked. I tried to hide the tears streaming down my
face. The flood. I was embarrassed. I couldn’t hide.
Singing this music was like negotiating a one-inch passageway
through the balled root of a gigantic tree with thousands
of strands and fibers all attached to the trunk of the tree
called me. I knew I was enmeshed by the large and small roots,
and yet this felt fragile, feeble, tenuous, and even dangerous. I
still believed I was Dear to the Heart of the Shepherd even
though I was the one who was “hungry and helpless and cold”
this time around, not some fictional stranger in the hymn
book. I believed He was out in the wilderness looking for me,
even if I felt an unfit gift for God.
I’M GRATEFUL THAT faith was planted so deeply into my
heart, my bones, my blood, my breath. I’m grateful that I believed
and still do believe in the Shepherd. I’m grateful that I
finally understand that it takes a crack in the armor for God to
move through pride and hurt. I’ve been proud, even arrogant
in my quiet way. I’ve been stubborn.
But whatever the stories of our lives—the betrayals, hurts,
disappointments, and losses—the great gift of faith in a God
who waits for us to open the door, for us to comprehend How
Great Thou Art, is there for each of us. Whatever any of us
chooses to do about attendance at the ward house, faith helps
us know that God understands our suffering. Furthermore, it
gives us an inkling that we can understand God and His ways
only when we walk some of the same paths as Jesus Christ
who suffered for the sins of the world.
______________________
WHY I READ THE
SCRIPTURES
by H. Parker Blount
I
N ONE OF our LDS Primary hymns, we sing, “Teach me
all the things I must do. . . .” One of the things I do,
among the many things I do not, is read the scriptures. It
is a practice I acquired from my membership in the Church,
although my earliest exposure to the scriptures had come from
my Baptist grandfather, who, each evening, would read a
chapter from the Bible as we sat around the table following
dinner. It was not then an entirely enjoyable experience for a
little boy who would rather be outside exploring the farm. But
now I enjoy exploring the scriptures just as I then enjoyed my
tramping about outside.
S U N S T O N E
DECEMBER 2004 PAGE 19
S U N S T O N E
I TEND TO read verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter. How I
engage the scriptures as I read is varied, though. Often I read
them as metaphors. I can’t help but think, for example, when I
read of Lot’s wife looking back and being turned into a pillar of
salt, that one just can’t spend too much time in the past. I also
read them wondering what the author was trying to achieve,
or why Israel wanted to tell that particular story. I read them,
too, as though they were written by men who have gone deep
into their souls and who wrote, like most of us who write, to
discover what we know and believe. Occasionally I read them
as if literal, but I am mostly on the side of the person who said
only fools read the Bible literally.
This issue of biblical inerrancy brings to mind the begats,
which I usually skip but sometime not long ago chose to read.
As I made my way through Matthew’s begats, I discovered an
interesting thing. In this patriarchal lineage, Matthew includes
five women: Tamar, Rachab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.
“Why,” I asked myself? What did the Lord want us to know?
What did Matthew want us to know? Why did Matthew include,
for example, Tamar, who played the harlot to conceive a
child by her father-in-law? Are we being warned that we can
choke on the ideal—the voice that says, “If only people would
live the gospel we wouldn’t have these problems?” Are we
being reminded of the paradox of having to stray the path to
stay the path? Or are we being subtly told something of the
profundity and the mystery of the workings of the Spirit? Or
was something lost in translation? I don’t know for sure, but
Jesus seems to have had some grandmothers who definitely
would not be the Relief Society sister of the month, and that
intrigued me.
One night my wife and I were lying in bed (don’t worry, I
am finished with the begat stuff), and she said she was memorizing
the Twenty-third Psalm and wanted to practice it. She
began:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he
leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with
me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of
mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my
cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the
days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the
Lord for ever.
Then she said, “Amen.” I said, “It doesn’t have an “Amen.” She
said, “It should have.”
In that single instance, the Twenty-third Psalm was transformed
and illuminated in ways I had not seen before. I had
never thought of it as a prayer, but it is, both an invocation and
a benediction. Later, at the Sunstone Symposium, D. Michael
Quinn, in his address during the “Spiritual Paths after
September 1993” session, said he would like to conclude his
remarks with his testimony. He then read the Twenty-third
Psalm. It was transformed again as I thought, “Yes, of course, it
is a testimony.” It wasn’t just the Twenty-third Psalm that was
transformed. I was transformed.
The outcome from the bishop’s asking me to speak was that
I realized I read and value the scriptures because they take me
to another place. I realized that having scriptural proof of LDS
doctrine and teachings isn’t that important to me. In fact, I
have come to believe that the scriptures don’t prove anything.
I also realized the scriptures seldom have an immediate answer
for my immediate problems. Furthermore, it is tedious to try
to apply every scripture to my life.
To show you how sideways I have become, I feel as though
I know as much about the plan of salvation as I want to know.
Having finer details about the degrees of glory really makes
little difference to me. Heaven is whatever heaven is. The resurrection—morning
of the first day, afternoon of the second
day—is whatever it is, and knowing more doesn’t make me
more of a spiritual person. What I want are the intimacies of
salvation, not a blueprint. To use church language, my desire is
to walk in the Spirit.
The scriptures, as I experience them, serve not as a daily
guide, but as a daily (if I am fortunate) transformation. What I
want from the scriptures is not the surface meaning but their
soul. I see the scriptures as the steward of the mysteries of a
godly consciousness and the passageway into those mysteries.
There is a distinct difference between knowing Church doctrine
and being obedient to rules and commandments, on the
one hand, and being taught and transformed by the Spirit on
the other.
It isn’t as important to comprehend the surface meaning as
to apprehend the soul of the scriptures. As Karen Armstrong
says in her book on Islam, “Reading or listening to the Qu’ran
is not a cerebral experience to get information or to receive a
clear directive, but a spiritual discipline.” Or, as a rabbi observed,
“Whoever busies himself in the Torah for its own sake,
his Torah becomes for him an elixir of life.”
ONE SATURDAY THIS past August, I intended to go first
thing to the store and purchase seeds and fertilizer for my
garden. It had been the first year in more years than I can remember
that I hadn’t had a garden. In our part of the country,
we can easily have a spring and a fall garden. Since I hadn’t
planted in the spring, I thought I should do it now. Somehow,
however, I couldn’t get in the spirit of the thing, and it troubled
me. Intending to tell my wife I was going to the seed
store, I walked outside onto the deck where she was sitting.
Ordinarily August is very hot in Georgia, but somehow nature
had given us an October day. I sat down on the edge of the
deck, enjoying the cool morning and the warmth of the early
morning sun just clearing the Georgia pines. This was more
enjoyable than going to the store. I went back inside looking
for something to read, picked up a book of poetry I had just
checked out of the library, and returned to my spot on the
deck and began to read. I would pause between poems, enjoying
the pleasant morning but fretting over the garden. “I rePAGE
20 DECEMBER 2004
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ally should go to the store and get what I need and plant the
garden,” I would tell myself, “it is the right thing to do.” On the
other hand, I really didn’t want to face the Saturday morning
bustle and then spend the morning preparing and planting,
and then later weeding, hoeing, and tending. I was puzzled,
for I had always enjoyed my garden and considered it a spiritual
component of my life. I felt as though I was rejecting
something basic to who I am. As I turned from my thoughts to
read another poem, I remembered Robert Frost’s comment
that poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Poetry, the language of allusions, enchantments, rhythms,
incantations, and symbols, is the life force of words as well as
gardens. I realized I had lost, at least for this season, the poetry
of gardening. When we take the scriptures too literally, the poetry
is lost there as well. Even if the words have been incorrectly
translated, as long as the poetry is there, the words have
the keys to take us beyond ourselves and transform us—not
an intellectual change but a felt change.
That is why I read the scriptures.
______________________
A SKEPTIC’S PRACTICE
OF PRAYER
by John Dewey Remy
IDIDN’T ALWAYS pray. I began my spiritual life as a preteen
skeptic but converted to Mormonism about the time
my voice stopped cracking. Now I’m way past puberty,
and I’m a doubter once again but with one key difference: I
still pray a lot. I’m a rational mystic, a praying Mormon atheist,
a peculiarity among an already-peculiar people. Prayer is a
hard habit to break. And I think this is a good thing.
I became a prayeraholic on my mission to Japan. I was nicknamed,
I hope with affection, “Inori Chôrô,” or “The Praying
Elder.” I loved the rich honorific language we used to address
Tenpu no Chichi naru Kamisama, explicitly exalting God and belittling
ourselves with each carefully chosen pronoun, modifier,
or verb ending. Japanese is still the language of my spirit.
I made my companions fold their arms and bow their heads on
the street before we began knocking on doors or cold contacting.
And it wasn’t just a benediction—I would really try to
feel for the wispy touch of the Spirit both after the “ahmen”
and while we moved up the street, scanning homes or faces for
instant golden converts (at the beginning of the day) or even
just someone to take a freakin’ Book of Mormon (at the end of
the day).
When I married Jana five months after my mission, it was
only natural that I continue my good missionary habits with
my new eternal, non-transferable companion. We’ve missed
few prayers through almost thirteen years of marriage. Even
when one of us is traveling, we still try to get our daily prayer
in. One example from my online journal:
I introduced Jana to the wonders of instant messaging
a little over a week ago [August 2001]. I
thought that it would keep the phone bills down
while she is in Utah, but it’s just made us more accessible
to each other—we just spend more time chatting
with each other, on the phone or online (the
perils of putting two very verbal people in one relationship).
We’ve already made both sacred and profane
use of this technology.
Here’s an example of the former, excerpts from a
prayer via MSN Messenger:
Jana says: Whose turn to pray?
John says: Your turn!
Jana says: Me???
John says: I prayed on the phone last.
Jana says: I did it last time on the phone!
John says: I think.
Jana says: Nope
Jana says: It was me in the hotel room with mom
John says: No prob.
John says: I’ll pray.
. . .
John says: Dear Heavenly Father
. . .
John says: Please bless Aunt Madge for her
hospitality, bless her with companionship in her
loneliness.
John says: Please bless Tom and his family during
this new trial,
John says: And please help us to serve him by
building a good site for him.
. . .
John says: We thank thee for people who create
works which inspire and lift and help us to think.
John says: We’re grateful for the examples of hard
work, dedication and sacrifice and service which
surround us.
. . .
John says: We’re grateful that thou hast blessed our
lives with such wonderful little ones.
John says: I’m grateful that thou hast blessed my
life with my wonderful, radiant, talented,
compassionate Jana.
John says: Please help us to have the energy to use
our talents, our time, our resources to serve
others.
John says: Please continue to bless our family with
safety and peace of mind.
John says: In the name of Jesus Christ,
John says: Amen
Jana says: That was beautiful
Jana says: Thank you
Jana says: Just what I needed tonite
John says: Say “amen”
Jana says: Really
Jana says: Oh, amen. I forgot
DECEMBER 2004 PAGE 21
S U N S T O N E
Jana says: God bless you John
John says: Thanks.
OUR FAMILY HAS a system. The adults pray on even days, the
kids on odd days. We have to come up with some new thing to
be thankful for each time we pray. This was really easy the first
couple of weeks, but now, after long silences, I find that my
children are extremely grateful for shoelaces, carpet, string, cat
toys, and other things I suspect are visible through downcast
eyes on the living room floor.
Has the practice of regular family prayer transformed our
family? I believe it has. It is a centering mechanism. No matter
how irritated we might be with each other before prayer, soon
we are reminded that we are grateful for one another, that we
want each other to be happy, and to succeed. Prayer is also a
form of communication with each other, even a teaching tool.
The children know that we want peace in the Middle East and
that we are grateful for our student apartment. Jana and I gain
insights into Emma’s love for our cats and Christian’s desire for
safety. And it is one of the primary ways that their skeptic dad
can teach them about faith.
While the Remy practice of family prayer might pass
Church correlation, my personal practice is perhaps more
problematic. Though I am a practicing Mormon, my methods
of supplicating God are a syncretistic, schizo mix of methods.
In the old days, my communication with God, especially in
the evenings (when I had the most time), was pretty straightforward.
I used to kneel down and make a mental checklist of
all of the Bad Stuff I had done throughout the day. (The list was
especially long when I was in the middle of Miracle of
Forgiveness.) Prayer became my period of mental self-flagellation,
my psychic hairshirt.
Over the years, as God became more distant to me, my attempts
to reach out to him diversified. My weekly sacrament
experience is inspired by the Quaker practice of community
meditation. I sit in silence, seeking the divine light within me
and feeling it not only there, but also becoming aware that
there are hundreds of little flames burning brightly in the
hearts of all of who are sitting around me. I practice various
Buddhist meditations, sometimes chanting mantras with
prayer beads in hand the way I watched my Japanese grandmother
do while growing up.
I also have set prayers that I recite. This Tibetan prayer fits
nicely in our tradition:
May I become at all times, both now and forever
A protector for those without protection
A guide for those who have lost their way
A ship for those with oceans to cross
A bridge for those with rivers to cross
A sanctuary for those in danger
A lamp for those without light
A place of refuge for those who lack shelter
And a servant to all in need.
I have others from St. Francis of Assisi, from the Dalai
Lama, from Emily Dickinson and Yeats, and ones I’ve created
from the lyrics of rock groups such as Rush and the Beastie
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SUPERIOR
VENA CAVA
INFERIOR
VENA CAVA
CORONARY
ARTERIES
PULMONARY
VEINS
PULMONARY
ARTERY
AORTA
S U N S T O N E
Boys. I may repeat these over and over, but I’ve selected those
which are the most meaningful to me, those words which ignite
the spark of the divine within me and which expand my
awareness of and my compassion for the teeming human divinity
(or divine humanity) all about me. They have more
meaning to me, and at this stage of my life, more power to
transform me than does the sacramental prayer.
SOME YEARS AGO in Salt Lake County, five little girls trapped
themselves in the trunk of a car on a hot summer day. As soon
as the mother watching the children realized that they were
missing, she drove around the neighborhood in a frantic
search, without realizing they were dying in the trunk.
As a parent, I know that mother was praying hard to find
them. Why didn’t God answer her prayers and prompt her to
open that trunk and find the children while there was still a
chance to save them? If God wouldn’t heed her prayers, then
why would he respond to my trivial requests? Father and I had
had a troubled relationship before that, but this marked a
falling out between us.
I have tried in this presentation to separate belief and discipline,
to focus on the benefits of prayer as praxis. The irony is
that this is the greatest alchemy that the act of prayer works
upon me—that, in spite of my doubts and unbelief, I still pray.
Most of the time, while my heart struggles with the pain that
fills this world, and my rational mind analyzes and synthesizes,
I live in a random, indifferent world, a vast universe with
a distant or non-existent God. My prayers are my tentative
phone calls home, where I suspend disbelief, and hesitatingly
dial out, hoping that someone, someone will pick up.
______________________
“MORE FULLY
UNSPOTTED FROM THE
WORLD”: THOUGHTS
ON SABBATH KEEPING
By Jana Riess
IAM A late convert to the spiritual practice of Sabbathkeeping.
I was raised by goodly atheist parents for whom
Sundays represented an opportunity to catch up on gardening,
shopping, work, or household chores. No one went to
church, although when I was nine, my mother started taking
my brother and me to Quaker meetings a couple of Sundays a
month. She was wary of organized religion, and Quaker
meeting was just about the closest she could get to giving us
some education in religion and the Bible. Because, as she put it
to me later, if she didn’t expose us to some kind of religion in
childhood, what would we have to rebel against when we became
teenagers?
It’s no surprise then, that when I joined the LDS Church in
1993, I was mystified by the strict sabbatarianism I observed
around me. I was startled to see Church members get so uptight
about what to do—or, as seemed more emphasized, not
do—on Sundays. I remember one sacrament meeting speaker
fretting aloud about whether it was okay to tape a football
game televised on Sunday to watch on a later day. He wasn’t
watching it on Sunday, but was it kosher to tape it if all these
godless heathen football players were actually playing the game
on a Sunday? Because, as Eric Liddell’s character admonishes
in Chariots of Fire, “The Sabbath’s no’ a day for playin’ football.”
Though I disagreed in spirit with the fear and anxiety that lay
behind some people’s strict interpretations of the Sabbath, I
began to realize I’d never given much thought to what, if anything,
the Sabbath was supposed to mean in my life.
Spiritual practices have the potential to be a soul-nurturing
constant, but their importance will wax and wane in different
periods of our lives. When my husband, Phil, and I lived in
New Jersey, for example, we practiced the spiritual discipline
of hospitality, of welcoming the stranger as well as the friend.
We hosted open Thanksgiving meals and invited many people
to stay, sometimes for months at a time. Now we live in
Kentucky, and—ironically enough for a region of the country
most known for its hospitality—no one ever comes to see us.
In five years of living here, a scant handful of our friends have
made the trek down south to visit. It’s not that we don’t have
other opportunities for practicing the discipline of hospitality—as
the Rule of St. Benedict puts it, of welcoming every
person who crosses our threshold as if she were Christ himself—but
there has been a discernible inward shift. Since we
had a child and moved to Kentucky, our approach has been
much more attuned to the quiet demarcation of time spent
only with each other. Our lives are more self-contained, introverted,
introspective. And in this context, we have started
keeping the Sabbath holy.
As Esther de Waal might say, the Sabbath is an inherent borderland,
a site of exchange and openness, a time when we relinquish
control in order to see beyond the mists of the
everyday into something liminal, something undefined.1
Sunday is the day where, on the surface, it seems that I am
most restricted. It’s a day that could easily be characterized by
all of the things I’ve gradually decided not to do on the
Sabbath: I (generally) don’t shop, don’t open my email or even
turn on my computer, don’t work, don’t pay bills, don’t talk
about business, don’t think about money or future purchases.
It’s a long list of don’ts that I’ve come to take pretty seriously
for the perfectly selfish reason that I know the rhythm of my
life has been improved immensely by keeping the Sabbath.
IN SPITE OF the fact that it’s a day of apparent restrictions, I
have come to see Sunday as the day when I am the most free.
The Sabbath becomes a day when, if I am very lucky, kairos
time steals into chronos time and affords me a glimpse of something
eternal. My usual life, dictated fully by chronos time, by
lists and demands and missed deadlines, allows no possibility
for those stolen insights. Sunday is the only day of the week
DECEMBER 2004 PAGE 23
S U N S T O N E
when every hour of my day is not scheduled. It is the only day
of my week where spontaneous phone calls and dinner plans
and visits to friends are even possible. It’s one of only two days
of the week, Saturday being the other, where my cooking has
the potential to become a lavish gift of love rather than a mere
hustle to get something nutritious on the table. It’s also the
only day when, as a writer, I routinely find unexpected and
unsought insights suddenly crowding my mind, which is usually
too cluttered to receive such astonishing gifts of discernment.
The resonance of the Sabbath is not just for Sundays. Right
now, I am in a tremendously lush period in my spiritual life.
Not to sound Pollyannish, but it feels like springtime, in fact. I
am renewed by the insights of gospel study and prayer. I feel
closer to God than I have felt in a long time, perhaps since my
conversion eleven years ago. But one of the major reasons for
this sense of renewal, I know, is that I recently took a year-long
sabbatical from church activity. From September 2000 to
August 2001, I didn’t go to meetings, participate in ward life or
take the LDS sacrament. I realized that after seven years of
church activity, I was burned out, and it was time for a break.
(Traditionally, a sabbatical year is supposed to come after six
years of labor, not seven, but what can I say? I was on Mormon
Standard Time.) My sabbatical year was a time of dormancy
and calm, when I continued reading but stopped running. I remember
one perfect Sunday morning when I sent Phil and
Jerusha off to his Methodist church and read back issues of the
New York Times at the kitchen table. That was a Sunday of re-
newal.
When I emerged from my year-long cocoon, it was with a
refreshed sense of eagerness and joy. The first few weeks of
church activity after my return were a bit tentative. Members
of the ward who thought I’d merely backslidden—and didn’t
know that I may be the only Mormon ever to live up to the remarkably
active term we have for backsliders, those who intentionally
“go inactive”—didn’t know quite what to make of
me. I mostly kept silent about my sabbatical, but people noticed
that when I returned to church, it was with a fresh sense
of what I could accomplish as a member and why I wanted to
be a Mormon in the first place.
Just a few weeks after I came back to full activity, September
11th happened. I found myself dreading the notion that the
following Sunday the ward might entirely ignore the most devastating
tragedy that had occurred in our nation’s recent history
in favor of such pressing topics as organizing food storage
or subscribing to the Ensign. But instead of simply tuning out
or sleeping in, which would have been my pre-sabbatical defense
mechanism, I picked up the phone and called the counselor
in the bishopric who was responsible for planning the
meeting. I gave it to him straight: “If we’re going to spend
Sunday ignoring this event instead of helping people to
process it, I’m not coming,” I told him. “I’ll go to a service
where people are paying attention to more than their little slice
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S U N S T O N E
of the world.” He readily agreed, which was very gratifying,
and immediately enlisted me to give a talk, which was not. But
it needed to be done, so why not me? Giving the talk was a
very difficult experience, as I felt deeply affected by September
11th even before I learned that one of my former students at
Columbia had been killed in the twin towers. But I was able to
give what I felt was one of the most honest homilies of my life
precisely because my sabbatical had stripped away any platitudes
and easy thinking that I might have been prone to a year
before. When we are tired, when we are burned out, there is a
danger that we will gravitate toward easy answers. We stop
thinking deeply because we are simply too tired to think.
For me, Sundays represent a chance to live that sabbatical
year again in microcosm, to devote myself to reading and to
shift downward for at least a day. Some weeks I also do a halfday
enclosure on Wednesday, following an ancient Benedictine
practice of devoting Wednesday afternoon to reading. But even
when this is not possible, I always have Sunday to look forward
to. In a nutshell, the Sabbath has become a life-giving
time of renewal for me, a day I guard jealously.
ONE FINAL THOUGHT. I’m concerned about the tenor of the
discussion about Sabbath-keeping in Mormon culture.
Conservative, self-described “orthodox” Mormons give talks
and discourses, both officially and unofficially, in which they
focus on the laundry list of things to do and to avoid doing on
the Sabbath. I always find myself wincing at these talks, because
invariably, the way that I interpret the Sabbath and the
way they do differs, and their dogmatism about what is right
and what is wrong makes me feel lonely and judged.
One would think that the counterpart of this would be that
liberal Mormons focus on the peace of the Sabbath without
sweating the small stuff; that Liahonas could talk about obtaining
Sabbath rest and other-ness without being judgmental
about the details of what is acceptable and what is not.
However, I don’t hear liberal Mormons talking much about the
Sabbath at all. They’re not writing about it; they’re not publishing
articles on it that I have seen. I’d love to be wrong about
this, so by all means, if they exist, please point me to appropriate
sources.
This is such a missed opportunity for a dialogue about the
Sabbath, because those who rigidly fixate on the nuts and bolts
of Sabbath observance risk missing the whole point of why we
do what we do, and clinging to a dead legalism. Liberal
Mormons, however, either by not talking about the Sabbath at
all or not engaging the kinds of specific questions that seem to
attract more conservative Saints, also fail to appreciate a fact
that Orthodox Jews know so well: God is in the details. The
God we believe in does care about whether we should drive a
car or turn on a light switch or use a Crock-Pot on the
Sabbath. So let’s talk about it.
NOTE
1. Esther de Waal, To Pause at the Threshold: Meditations for Living on the Border
(Morehouse, 2004).
RECOMMENDED READING
Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting by Marva
Dawn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989). In this modern classic, Dawn explores
the potential for the Sabbath to be a spiritual resource for Christians, who
can find rest and spiritual solace from its weekly observance.
The Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath Day by Francine Klagsbrun
(New York: Harmony/Crown, 2002). Klagsbrun looks at the Sabbath in Jewish
texts and traditions, drawing from Torah, Talmud, and midrash as she investigates
Sabbath observance in the modern world.
Mudhouse Sabbath: Eleven Spiritual Practices I Learned from Judaism by Lauren
Winner (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2003). The first chapter of my friend Lauren
Winner’s lovely collection of autobiographical vignettes deals with Shabbat, or the
Sabbath—one of the spiritual practices she carried with her when she converted
from Orthodox Judaism to Anglican Christianity.
Sabbath Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest by Lynne M. Baab
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005). Baab draws on her experience of
having lived for a year and a half in Israel, where everything shuts down on Friday
afternoon, and discusses how her participation in these Jewish Sabbaths informed
and transformed her Christian journey.
______________________
A JOURNAL WORTH
KEEPING (WHETHER
THE ANGELS QUOTE
FROM IT OR NOT)
by Holly Welker
ALTHOUGH I AM no longer an active or believing
Mormon, I still live a lot like one. OK, I drink an occasional
beer, though I have never been able to cultivate
any interest in substance abuse. I don’t worry about the ratings
of the movies I watch, though I have enough sense to avoid
films that are obviously crap. I don’t go to church on Sunday,
though I have tried to find a congregation where I feel at
home, but I can’t help noticing other meetings’ shortcomings
when compared to a Mormon service: I hate having to stand,
then sit, then kneel, then stand again; or I hate that other worshipers
sing stupid hymns accompanied by guitars or recordings,
like it’s some group karaoke thing; or I hate that people
show up in T-shirts and shorts, like it’s the grocery store.
But I still write down goals. I still strive to be scrupulously
honest in my business dealings and to give a good portion of
my earnings to charity. I still buy groceries in bulk. I still can’t
throw away anything, from a scrap of fabric to a cardboard
box, without asking myself, “Is there some possible use left in
this thing?” I still keep a journal.
For many years, I kept a journal for the same reason I
flossed, made good grades, and exercised: because somebody
told me that when I was seventy, I’d be glad I’d done such
things in my youth. In general, the journal has given me more
pleasure than the flossing. I was eleven when President
Kimball issued his encouragement to
get a notebook . . . a journal that will last through all
DECEMBER 2004 PAGE 25
S U N S T O N E
time, and maybe the angels will quote from it for eternity.
Begin today and write in it your goings and comings,
your deepest thoughts, your achievements and
your failures, your associations and your triumphs,
your impressions and your testimonies.
I’m now on volume thirteen, and I still look at old volumes
from time to time. For instance, volume five, my mission
journal, is almost 100,000 words long and quite hefty. I wrote
in it my goings and comings, my deepest thoughts, and things
such as this, from 14 June 1986: “I have decided that the angels
will not even flip the pages of this journal, though imperfect
beings might find something of interest here.”
Many people consider a journal the most private and intimate
of texts. In certain ways, my journal is intensely intimate,
in that it contains personal details and deep yearnings and
struggles. Nonetheless, I was affected very early and very thoroughly
by the Mormon view that journals are documents providing
personal accounts of shared experiences—an example
being the diaries or journals kept by those who crossed the
plains—and are in some ways intended to be shared, just like
the experiences they record. I took to heart the admonition
that someday, when I am dead, someone, somewhere, might
come upon my journals and use them—as faith-promoting
stories, as cautionary tales, or simply as historical documents.
Thus I have long been acutely aware of audience—it’s a concept
I understood instantly when teachers tried to explain it in
composition courses. And even though I began to suspect
early on that the angels would not quote from my journal,
filled as it was with doubt and dissent, still, I couldn’t help
wanting, at the very least, to entertain and edify those other
potential readers, the human ones—to give them an occasional
good laugh, or pose from time to time a difficult question
worth pondering.
In short, I wanted to give them reasons to keep reading, and
give myself reasons to keep writing. I felt an obligation to
make the record of my life relevant and compelling, both for
myself and for that future audience, and I don’t think that
sense of obligation hurt either my journal in particular or my
writing in general—or my cognitive skills, for that matter. I’ve
learned that to be a good journaler, one must develop an eye
for what is interesting and meaningful in one’s daily life, as well
as some skill and insight into analyzing one’s own behaviors,
utterances, and relationships. I believe that a journal should
accurately capture not merely what happened, but the mood it
left you in, the effect. Anyone who has kept a journal for very
long knows that a journal that does nothing but record events
makes for singularly dull reading—and yes, I have resorted to
that minimalist strategy from time to time when I’m feeling
lazy or overwhelmed; I do it primarily to maintain my habit,
not because I imagine that such entries are particularly valuable
in and of themselves.
I no longer attend much to a future audience (if someone
really wants to read through all those thousands of pages once
I’m gone, s/he is welcome to, but I’m not planning on it); these
days I write my journal mainly for myself, but I haven’t lost my
sense that my journal needs to be, on the whole, worth not
only writing in the first place, but reading again later—even if
I’m the only one ever to read it. Which raises the question:
what makes my journal, for me, worth the writing and reading
of it? I won’t deny that I find keeping a journal a pleasant and
entertaining use of my time, and that I do it in part simply because
I enjoy it. But I believe that a journal can indeed perform
a spiritual function, and I find that aspect extremely valuable.
A journal can be written with a specifically spiritual bent, as an
inventory of our efforts to live morally and behave appropriately,
what Catholics call “an examination of conscience.” It
can be a meditation upon issues that interest us, topics that
trouble us. It can be a way to pose important questions and
seek answers for them—as well as a place to record those answers
when they come, so that years later, we can look back
and be amazed by a youthful wisdom we somehow managed
to forget.
As a writing teacher, I also believe that spiritual discipline
can be built into the endeavor of writing well: although my
students don’t always believe me, I remain convinced that
good writing is carefully crafted and coherent, and makes use
of things such as 1) transitions, 2) support for ideas in the
form of specific and apt examples, 3) musical, rhythmic prose,
and 4) syntax that is lively and varied. Any account of your life
will, of necessity, be molded and shaped, whether poorly or ill,
and the transitions you use, the examples you select, even the
vocabulary you employ, can help you see a pattern to your life
you might otherwise miss. I can’t imagine how I would make
sense of my life without the profound and useful insights that
come upon me as I wrestle to bring inchoate sensations and
unconnected experiences, ranging from the devastating to the
delightful, under the greater order of organized prose.
Sometimes these insights arrive years after I’ve written a
journal entry, when I’m thinking about a new situation that
bears some similarity to an old experience. I’ll haul out an old
volume, read through it, and some mental flash will suddenly
illuminate both situations in remarkable and useful ways—an
event I often then record in the new volume, also quoting the
old passage that sparked the insight.
IN HER ESSAY, “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion writes,
“The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it
now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been
doing and thinking.” Instead, she says the point is to re-
member
How it felt to be me: that is getting closer to the truth
about a notebook. . . . I think we are well-advised to
keep on nodding terms with the people we used to
be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise
us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a
bad night and demand to know who deserted them,
who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
While I agree with Didion that it’s wise to remain familiar
with the people we used to be, I am, unlike her, interested in
having “an accurate factual record of what I have been doing
and thinking”—as the descendent of Mormon pioneers and
PAGE 26 DECEMBER 2004
S U N S T O N E
genealogers, how could I be otherwise? In Faithful
Transgressions in the American West: Six Twentieth-Century
Mormon Women’s Autobiographical Acts, Laura L. Bush points
out that
Mormon autobiographers pay close attention to
“truth” and to “accurate” history. They often begin
their narratives with recitals of their precise ancestry
and exact place of birth, carefully researching and
marking the progression of the story of their lives
until ending the story with a formal testament of faith
in God. . . . Mormon autobiographers’ meticulous attention
to testifying of God and to producing accurate
historical details . . . follows biblical and Book of
Mormon writing traditions.
I confess: I’ve written an autobiography of sorts, a memoir
of my mission, and I was not the least bit surprised to discover
that my book adheres to the formula Bush describes, since I
was very aware at the time of following a tradition. I wanted
my book to be as accurate as I could possibly make it, especially
since when I wrote it, I imagined it as the defense I
would muster in my behalf at the final judgment, and God
would be well aware of any conscious lie I might tell. I was
trying to produce a work of art, but it was also a deadly serious
moral enterprise. My first act in writing my book was to transcribe
every word of my mission journal—in which I had
meticulously recorded entire conversations, detailed impressions,
and the dates, places, and times of significant events; I
had even included supporting documents such as letters, zone
conference programs, and those yellow planners on which we
scheduled our work.
At a writing conference in June 2004, I met a woman who,
like me, is a scholar and writer of literary nonfiction, and who,
like me, had her heart well and truly broken by a man she was
ready to marry, and who, like me, suffers from insomnia. She
told me that to help herself unwind, clear her mind and prepare
to sleep each night, before bed she would write in a spiral
notebook, usually about how upset she was with Michael, her
ex, and how devastated she was that as soon as the engagement
ring was on her finger, he turned into someone else,
someone she couldn’t marry. She wrote pages and pages, she
said, about how she hated him, loved him, resented him,
could never forget him although she wanted nothing more
than to erase him from her memory. I sympathized, with the
difficulty in falling asleep, with the heartbreak, with the confused
writing. But then she mentioned that when she got to
the end of each notebook, she threw it away. “You threw it
away?” I repeated, dazed.
“Yeah,” she said. “It was just my ranting about Michael. It’s
not like the world needs any of that.”
“But what if there was . . . an insight? Or a good line? And
you threw it away?” I asked slowly, attempting to resist the
horror of it all.
“There wasn’t,” she said. And since I was having difficulty
breathing, having just heard someone be so cavalier about an
action absolutely inimical to my worldview, I made no reply
and the conversation moved on to other topics.
I tell this story to call attention to one part of keeping a
journal: the keeping part. As I mentioned, my journal does
contain boring, uninspired passages; I haven’t deleted them
and I don’t intend to. For one thing, when I’m overwrought,
it’s kind of nice to remember times when nothing much happened;
it’s also good to remind myself how flat even the most
exciting events can seem later if I don’t render them fully.
Furthermore, preserving what you produce is built into the activity:
keeping a journal means you not merely write but hang
on to the journal. And that keeping is also a spiritual practice:
finding the discipline to make writing a habit, to live with a
growing and ongoing document that demonstrates who you
were, who you thought you’d become, and who you actually
ended up being. If you’re lucky, it might also help you figure
out who you want to be next and how to achieve it.
I’LL END WITH Job, who, if he lived at all, lived before paper
was readily available: “Oh that my words were now written! oh
that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with
an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!” (Job 19:23–24)
We don’t have to be so desperate. If we want something
written, we can write it. We have plenty of paper, plenty of ink,
and really fast computers. All of which make keeping a journal
so easy that it’s something of a luxury, a way of acknowledging
how blessed—and I use that word advisedly—we are.
In conclusion, I bear testimony of the power of a journal to
help us live with more awareness of who we are and who we
want to be. I will always be grateful that I followed President
Kimball’s advice to keep a journal. It has enriched my life im-
measurably.
PHYLLIS BARBER likes Irish Oatmeal, bicycles, her rock-androll
sons, great storytellers, and the exquisitely wrought sen-
tence.
H. PARKER BLOUNT was eighteen before he learned “oil” was
not pronounced “awl.” He still prefers “ya’ll” to “you guys.”
Grits and chocolate are foods of choice.
JOHN DEWEY REMY’S greatest aspiration in life is to be a
mystic Mormon hippie. He is a struggling vegetarian, a parttime
Quaker, a lapsed Republican, and a compulsive book
junkie. He can be found, virtually, at www.mindonfire.com
(web) or john@mindonfire.com (email).
JANA RIESS’S New Year's resolution is to do more yoga and
eat more yogurt, though not necessarily at the same time.
HOLLY WELKER’S favorite song is “I Feel Loved” by Depeche
Mode, a catchy dance tune about the dark night of the soul.
DECEMBER 2004 PAGE 27