Note from Kent. . . I apologize for technical difficulties and not publishing recent posts in a more careful (correct) order. I hope that confusion does not distract from their powerful content / messages. (i.e. The following post was sent out yesterday, but it appears, in some formats, it didn’t.)
Continuing from a previous post Fiona and Terryl Givens shared from their book “All Things New” Fiona and Terryl Given wrote:
We are immersed in, confronted by, “the bitter, that we may know to prize the good”—that is, the sweet (verse 55). “That we may know” captures the educative, “behovely” nature of sin. “If nor for our transgression,” if not for this experience of the bitter, Eve confirms, we never should have known (experienced) good and evil, and the joy of our redemption” (Moses 5:11) continuing. . .
Where an instructive bitterness is one way of viewing “sin” in the book of Moses, the most pervasive image the New Testament and the Book of Mormon employ in reference to our condition is woundedness. The angel used that word to describe the human condition to Nephi. When Nephi sees the Christ in vision, he sees Him not preaching or rebuking or judging; Nephi sees Him “ministering unto the people” (1 Nephi 11:27). When Christ appears to the Nephites, He ministers to the afflicted, and “both they who have been healed and they who are whole, [did] bow down and worship him: (3 Nephi 17:10). We are born to a world suffused by suffering. We carry in our bodies, in our genetic makeup, the pain and trauma incident to mortality. As agents, and as beings subject to the agency of others, we act and are acted upon in a world of hurt and handicap. As we saw in religious history recounted previously, the trauma and wounds in our lives have often multiplied, been augmented rather than alleviated by religious traditions we inherit. For the majority of the worlds inhabitants, and foe most of us striving to find joy in the gospel, a great portion is protracted exercise in pain management.
The drama prevalent in society is not just the domain of veterans with PTSD or refugees from a war zone. It’s here,”even at our doors,” in middle class America. As author and psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk states, “One does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors.” He argues that much of the behavior we see as deviant, unhealthy, or in any way disruptive or criminal can be traced back to trauma experienced by people at some point in their lives. Brokenness, not sinfulness, is our general condition; healing from trauma is what is needed.4 Deanna Thompson says it most simply: “All of our lives bear the marks of suffering.”5 Toni Morrison’s writings are poignant meditations on this truth: “Cycles of violence play out across generations. The wounds do not simply go away.”6 The biblical scholar David Bentley Hart argues that this view of sin is in fact truer to Paul’s original language in Romans: “Paul speaks of . . . but never as an inherited contagion, a disease with which all are born; . . . but never as an inherited condition of criminal culpability.”7
Simply put: as Julian sensed, woundedness is the collateral damage that is essential to our learning process along the path to life eternal. Woundedness is essential and inevitable in the Great Plan’s unfolding. (continued)
~Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New (Meridian, ID: Faith Matters, 2020). 104-106
