Preview Chapter One of Original Grace
Chapter One: Suffering
Which is original, sin or grace?
Last night I dreamt that my father was alive. He was still using a wheelchair, but he looked strong. He could hold his head up straight. He could make a fist. He had all his teeth. His cheeks were flush. He had flesh on his bones. What’s more, he could whisper. I was surprised to see him. I apologized for thinking he was dead. I knelt by his chair and laid my head on his breast. He cradled my head in the crook of his arm and whispered into my ear, every word distinct, and I understood every word he said. I heard everything he wanted to say.
But this was a dream. My father is not alive. As I write this, he’s been dead for almost a year. My brother and I dressed him in temple robes, and our family buried him on the side of a hill in Pennsylvania, not fifty yards from a cornfield.
My father died at home. He suffered from a degenerative muscle disease. He’d used a wheelchair for years. He’d needed a feeding tube for just as long. Apart from his painfully swollen feet, the disease had pared him down to skin and bones. By the end, it was hard for him to steer his chair and even harder for him to speak. He constantly struggled to clear his throat. A little more than a year ago,he took the dog and me for a walk. I held the dog’s leash. He waved to passing cars, and people waved back. He told me he couldn’t bear another winter in Pennsylvania. He told me he wanted my mom to be closer to family. He told me he wanted to buy a house in Texas down the street from mine. Was I planning to go anywhere? I stopped and stared down the length of that road. No, I told him. I’m not going anywhere. So late last summer, after seventy years in Pennsylvania, my parents came to Texas. And while the disease continued to whittle him down throughout that winter and spring, he was recognizably himself.
My father died at home on June 13, 2020. He’d been disoriented for the better part of a week. He’d seen a dentist a few days earlier. After examining my father’s palate, the dentist had declined to do any work until my father had seen an oncologist. My mother made an appointment for June 17. Those last few days, my father couldn’t get any rest. He couldn’t sleep at night. He kept ringing his bell, asking for help. Sometimes he asked for things that made sense, and sometimes he asked for things that didn’t. My mother was exhausted. More and more, we couldn’t tell what he was trying to say. It was hard to tell, from one moment to the next, if this was just because we couldn’t understand him or because there was nothing to understand. I spent the afternoon with him. I fed him chips of flavored ice. I tried to gather up passwords to his bank accounts. I helped my mother run him through his nightly ritual—a hoist into bed with his winch and sling, a bedpan, a change of clothes, and a hoist back into his chair, where he could breathe more easily—and we parked his chair in the living room. I sent my mother to bed. I wrapped myself in a sheet from the hall closet and slept on the couch, just a few feet away from my father.
My father died at home that night. I lay in the dark next to him and closed my eyes. They didn’t stay closed for long. My father was trying to say something, to ask for something. I tried to understand but couldn’t make it out. I told him, lamely, that we were going to rest and that we had to let Mom rest. I lay back down. He continued to mutter on and off for the next few hours—his head bent low, his chin on his chest, his eyes half-closed—but only occasionally with any urgency. Curled up on the couch, I drifted in and out of sleep. I let him talk. I couldn’t make any sense of it. I didn’t go get my mother. A couple of times, I got up and touched his shoulder and repeated that it was time to rest. Around three in the morning, his mumbling trailed off and he was quiet. I was glad. Around five, I opened my eyes and saw that he was very still. He seemed so still that, watching him from the couch, I wondered if he was dead. I didn’t go get my mother. I pushed the thought away. It felt too big and dramatic. It felt too selfish to hope for that reprieve. I closed my eyes again. I let my mother sleep. Sometime after seven, my mother came to get my father breakfast. He needed to stay on schedule. She laid out his feeding tubes and measuring cups and crushed his pills. She tried to wake my father. His chair was still parked in the same spot in the living room. I was still there on the couch. She called his name. She shook him, gently and then not, and called his name again. His hands were ice cold.
The doctrine of original sin is an explanation for suffering. The story goes like this: we suffer because we’re being punished, we deserve to be punished because we’re sinful, and we’re sinful because we’ve inherited that sinful nature from Adam and Eve. As Calvin puts it, original sin is “a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God’s wrath.”1 In short, original sin is the idea that suffering is always deserved and that beyond deserving to suffer for our own sins, we deserve to suffer for Adam and Eve’s transgression.
One day, “as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from birth.” Seeing the blind man, Jesus’s own disciples ask, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” In response, Jesus rewrites the question. He chooses none of the above. “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:1–3).
I think this story is quick and powerful. I think it’s “sharper than any twoedged sword” (Hebrews 4:12). I think this story cleanly divides all religions into two kinds.
On the one hand, we have a familiar, common-sense religion that accepts the premise of the disciples’ question. We have a religion that buys into the nearly universal logic that underwrites the doctrine of original sin: the story that suffering is a punishment and that suffering wouldn’t exist at all if someone—you, me, this blind man, the blind man’s parents, Adam, Eve, whoever—hadn’t deserved to suffer in the first place.
On the other hand, we have a rare and puzzling form of religion that denies this premise. We have Jesus who keeps surprising his disciples. We have Jesus who, rather than seeing the blind man’s suffering as a punishment, sees it as an occasion for “the works of God.” We have Jesus who, without accusation, simply judges what’s needed and offers the needed grace. “When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, and said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” And the blind man “went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing” (John 9:6–7).
Jesus’s disciples suppose that the blind man’s suffering must be a punishment for sin. But this explanation is built on the back of an even deeper supposition: that the natural order of material things is the moral order of things.
Jesus’s answer cuts this cord. As Jesus explains it, the moral order is not identical to the natural order of physical, chemical, and biological causes that resulted in the blind man’s suffering. The moral order—that divine order manifest in what Jesus calls “the works of God”—is instead a response to the troubles of the natural order of material things.
A few years ago, my father started sending group texts to his kids and grandkids. He sent them every Sunday afternoon, sometimes just a few sentences, sometimes several paragraphs. He called them “Love Grams, a weekly thought by Pappy to each of you.”2 He used these texts to tell stories and bear testimony. He wrote about his life, about mistakes he’d made and lessons he’d learned, about his own mom and dad and brother and sister, about my mom and our family, about his time in the Navy and his many different jobs, about his love for the Church, and—throughout all these things—about his own gradual initiation into the kingdom of God.
Reading through them now, you can see him returning to the same people and themes again and again—especially to stories about his mother and, even more, to memories of his father. While he wrote mostly about the past, he occasionally offered a glimpse of his present. For example, in February 2019 he wrote: “Monday night Grammy dragged me to the hospital because I was having trouble breathing. Tuesday morning early, I was admitted with pneumonia. That night I received a beautiful blessing which included getting well and more work to do on this earth.”3 A few months before he died, now in Texas, he wrote: “I have a muscle disease. Some days I feel fine, and some days a lot of pain. Some days I cry, and some days I laugh. Each morning I wake up and thank God for this day.”4
A hidden assumption lies at the heart of original sin: the assumption that suffering can be deserved. And this nearly universal assumption, far beyond the scope of any particular religious doctrine, has bled into the whole of our fallen world, shaping the lives of Christians and non-Christians, believers and unbelievers alike.
What if, as Latter-day Saints, we broke entirely with the story told by original sin, not only in name but in substance? What if, instead of implicitly affirming that suffering can sometimes be deserved, we rejected this assumption outright and claimed that, in light of the Restoration’s deepest truths, suffering can never be deserved?
Despite growing up in the Church—and serving a mission and attending BYU and being sealed in the temple and faithfully reading and praying and ministering and attending church—I suspect I’ve spent most of my life believing in something that isn’t true. The logic governing my life has looked a lot more like the logic used by Jesus’s disciples than Jesus’s own. Like those disciples, I assumed that suffering could be deserved. I assumed that suffering was a punishment and love a reward. I assumed that the moral order and the material order were the same. Without hardly knowing it, I suspect I’ve spent most of my life firmly believing in the story told by original sin.
Your own experiences may be considerably different from mine. God will work with you as he sees fit. But if my religious life has had some sort of discernible arc, that arc has bent toward simplicity. What if we broke entirely with the story told by original sin and argued that suffering can never be deserved? My religious life has looked like God peeling away, layer by layer, my dogged beliefs in things that aren’t true and logics that don’t add up. It has looked like God stripping me of bad beliefs and false assumptions until I stood exposed, head bare and shoes removed, to a deeper and more original grace that, far from being a clean escape from suffering, turned out to be the substance of God’s enduring response to it.
Little by little, I’ve stopped believing in original sin.
And, little by little, I’ve been saved by God’s original grace.