Review

Title: Mercy without End
Author: Lavina Fielding Anderson
Publisher: Signature Books, Salt Lake City
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 273
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781560852834
Price: $18.95

Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters

This is a hard book. Excommunication cuts through the essays here like a knife, and is likely to create sharp divisions amongst readers. For those who perhaps do not know, Lavina Fielding Anderson was excommunicated in September 1993 for “apostasy,” linked to her writing. Anderson, a former editor at the Church magazine The Ensign, and long associated with the Mormon History Association, had published earlier that year a chronology of what she categorized as ecclesiastical abuse directed towards Church members, primarily intellectuals, scholars, and feminists.

Anderson’s book is a collection of essays and addresses, most of them from the year or two prior to her excommunication, and in the years immediately following. A few are more contemporary, written in the last few years as her appeal to have her membership in the Church restored progressed, and the denial of that appeal “at this time.”

I will admit to struggling with this book at first, knowing most of the story and its outcome. At one point in the reading, I almost regretted requesting this book to review. While I have never met Lavina in person, she edited my two first articles for The Journal of Mormon History, and we exchanged a number of emails about that process. I learned through that experience that she is an excellent editor, quick to point out the obvious errors of a first time article writer, but also quick with encouragement. She helped me learn some of the finer points of being a historian, even an amateur one. It was a tutoring process as much as an editorial one, and I learned a lot through that experience. Throughout it all, she was patient, kind, understanding, and charitable. For those reasons, I sought the opportunity to read and review this book.

What I discovered is that Anderson is every bit as talented as a writer as she is as an editor. Still, the first couple of days reading were painful. I became intimately acquainted with her sense of loss as she was “cut off” from the faith community that she had grown up in, served in, and lived for. It hurt to read about the excommunication process, and about what it was like to go back to church, sit in the same pew that she, her husband Paul, and son Christian had been sitting in for years in her home ward.

But I did what Lavina did. She persevered. She did not stay away from church. She describes that first week after her excommunication this way:

“The bishop was standing at the door to the chapel. He took my hand and pulled me into a hug, smiling warmly. [Her husband] Paul was on the stand that day, leading the choir. [Her son] Christian was sitting with the deacons until after the sacrament was passed. I would have to walk alone to the third row from the front, north side, and sit there alone, at least until after the sacrament was over and the choir had sung. It was a very long walk, but it wasn’t a hard one. People kept stopping me, hugging me. When I sat down, it took me a minute to realize what I was feeling. Pride. I was so proud of my ward. They were behaving exactly as you’d hope a Christian community would behave.” [p56-57]

She still remains outspoken about the same issues that she was passionate about thirty years ago, yet she has continued attending church in her ward over all these years. So I persevered, and pushed forward in reading. As I did, I found that there is incredible grace, faith, and devotion in these essays. Excommunication is always lurking, ready to cut again through the narratives, always a raw presence. But she never lets it overwhelm her or the words on the page.

As I persevered, I found numerous gems scattered throughout her writing. Some are pretty basic, such as her commitment to remain a part of the ward community where she has lived most of her adult life. “I sit in church every Sunday,” she writes. “I cannot speak or pray publicly, but I sing the hymns I love and join in the communal ‘amens’ that echo the closing words of a sermon or prayer.” [p83] “…my relationship with the Savior is in my control, where it’s always been.” [p15] “…what I want to do in my ward is to offer the testimony of presence. I want to be there—not allowed to speak from the pulpit, forbidden to teach or pray aloud, but still testifying by my presence.”

Others are the kinds of thoughts that speak to daily life as a disciple for anyone. Anderson describes how she learned to pray and what personal revelation felt like for her, how it guided her early life, and continues to do so to this day. “I discovered that Heavenly Father’s respect for free agency is so profound that there are many times the Holy Ghost cannot give us an answer because we have not yet asked the correct question.” [p25] She also offers insights into gratitude as something remarkably powerful. “By being grateful, we insure two things: that the Lord can teach us whatever we need to know for our exaltation—whatever we need to know, and some of the lessons will hurt; and he can turn any circumstance to our blessing.” [p163]

Anderson celebrates diversity by describing the natural meadow near her mountain cabin, standing waist deep in the green plants. “Slowly, I rotated in a circle, looking at what was growing within a three-foot radius. I counted twenty-three different varieties, none of them trees or shrubs, none of them flowering, all of them a different shade of green. [It] was an exhilarating revelation of how highly God values diversity even in little things…God doesn’t plant lawns. He plants meadows.” [p185]

In all of this, Anderson provides us with some hard-won experience about handling even the most difficult of circumstances. She did not want the blade of excommunication to cut her off, and so she has chosen a different narrative that helps her to maintain her faith despite her circumstances. As an editor, she truly understands the power of language to mold our self-image and paradigm of place in the world. “Let us become editors—all of us. Let us shape our daily experience so that inclusionary language becomes our common speech.” [p196]

I am reminded of the old round grindstone at my uncle’s farm in Idaho where I spent many childhood summers. To sharpen a tool, you had to get the heavy two-foot diameter stone spinning by cranking some pedals, and then holding the edge of the tool against the spinning stone. All the while you had to drip water on the work surface to keep too much of the tool from being worn away, and yet still giving it a keen working edge. It was a balancing act between stone, water, and tool. There is a balance here in these essays between sharpness and grace, reason and faith, authority and personal responsibility, and living a life versus just living. It’s hard work, but if you are up to the task, the fruits of the harvest can be gathered. I believe Lavina has found that balance in her life. Reading her essays gives me hope that I can find a better balance in mine.