From Bruce C. Hafen:
When I stood at the pulpit for my missionary farewell at age nineteen, even after much prayerful searching, I was stuck on the difference between knowing and believing. I couldn’t honestly say, “I know that the gospel is true.” Noticing a nearby potted plant, I said my faith was like that plant—and I believed it would grow.
Then, toward the end of my experience in that era’s one week-version of today’s Missionary Training Center, we practiced giving our companions the first missionary discussion. As I taught the apostasy, a supervising returned missionary stopped to listen. He interrupted me to say, “Elder, you bare your testimony there. Say you know the true Church must have twelve apostles today, like Christ’s original Church.” I politely said that I would gladly testify to a real investigator, but in that practice setting, it was a little too personal for me to say “I know” on that point. He pushed back: “Twelve Apostles, Elder. I want to hear your testimony.” Feeling a little stung, I said quietly, “I think Christ’s Church today has fifteen Apostles, not twelve.” He pulled up a chair and asked, ” Do we have a little problem here, Elder?”
Then, thankfully, we were interrupted. But I was distressed that my level of belief—honest and deep as it was—might not be enough for a missionary. I thought back on all those nights before my farewell when I would use the building key I had been issued as an assistant stake organist and enter the Saint George Tabernacle around eleven p.m. There, I would play the tabernacle’s fine organ for an hour or so at full throttle, singing the songs of Zion all by myself, with only the tiny light on the organ console shining in the sacred old pioneer building. In my own words I was bearing my testimony, but it was a little secret between the Lord and me, and it will still take shape. I must have “known” something, but what?
Those memories returned when I read Richard Bushman’s account of his sophomore year at Harvard, where his encounters with irreligious skepticism left him feeling that he was “in hostile territory.” Soon these pressures wore him down, until “religious agnosticism seemed like the only viable position given what we know for sure.” He “did not know there was a God or that any of the things Latter-day Saints believe had actually happened.” Nevertheless, he accepted a mission call. But “if I was such a doubter, he later asked in retrospect, “why did I go?”1
He has since “come to believe that in actuality my problem was not faith, but finding the words to express my faith.” What he lacked was the language (LDS) that made sense over the [Harvard] dinner table.” He now thinks he actually “believed all along through that year—why else the mission?—but I was dumb, unable to speak.”
Bushman has since spent a lifetime learning to communicate about religion “in a way that can be understood” by a secular audience rather than forcing them “to learn our language in order to understand us” What distinguishes his writing on Church history topics, then, is its tone, its language and vocabulary. Just as people unable to distinguish musical sounds are considered “tone deaf,” many people in today’s world have difficulty understanding religious language. So he consciously learned to write in a tone the secular audience could hear. Faith is not deaf.
At nineteen, like Bushman, I didn’t have the words to express my faith adequately—except alone at the pipe organ. The distinctions among knowing, believing, doubting, and wondering are not trivial. But they are often unclear because our experience is larger than our vocabulary. And when our-once untroubled faith abruptly confronts questions that leave us speechless, even temporarily, our faith can seem not only blind, but dumb. At that point we might want a book called Faith for Dummies—that is, when we feel speechless because of our spiritual growing pains, and we wonder if something is wrong. Would that mean we are also faithless? Probably not—but we might need a more complete vocabulary. A “growth in faith can [also] be thought of as an improvement in language.”2
Faith is not dumb. ~Bruce C. Hafen, Marie K. Hafen: Faith is Not Blind (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2018) p.3-5 (Some “verbiage” has been modernized according to current Church policy.)
