Review
Title: If Truth Were a Child
Author: George B. Handley
Publisher: BYU Maxwell Institute
Genre: Devotional/Religious
Year Published: 2019
Number of Pages: 244
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-9443-9473-8
Price: $19.95
Reviewed by Douglas Christensen for the Association for Mormon Letters
In 1971, Lowell Bennion published an essay titled “Carrying Water on Both Shoulders” wherein he works through the delicate act of honoring, at the same time, faith and reason. In his recently published If Truth Were a Child, George B. Handley follows a similar impulse, meditating upon his own spiritual and intellectual journey. Like Bennion, his hero and mentor, Handley is very good at this balancing act. He doesn’t shy away from his faith in God and Jesus Christ, nor in the restored Church with its sweeping missions and intimate covenants. Handley also maps out his faith in the-life-of-the-mind and in all the challenges and blessings that his academic work entails.
The meaning of his provocative title doesn’t come into focus until about halfway through the book, naturally in the chapter, “If Truth Were a Child.” Here Handley revisits the story of Solomon who was presented with two mothers contesting the identity of their respective newborns, one that had been accidentally smothered in the night and the other that remained alive. In deciding to whom the living child belonged, Solomon famously suggests that his servants divide the baby in two and give each mother half, knowing that the true mother will give the child up to spare its life. Handley wonders what would happen in our rancorous world if we considered the implications of truth with the same wisdom. He asks: “What if we thought of truth as something that couldn’t be owned or divided up into broken pieces but was instead something we had to learn to gather and keep together with love? Maybe all truth in the end is measured against the lives of children” (105). It is this kind of hope and optimism that informs Handley’s spiritual inquiry and for him, all inquiry is spiritual.
In the early chapters, Handley examines his confession of faith, exploring his incremental conversion where he thinks about his identity as a Christian, as a Latter-day Saint, and as a critic. In each case he traces his responsibilities as a scholar and as a true believer back to sacred personal experiences of charity and grace. The book gathers momentum as readers encounter yet another argument emphasizing the value of the humanities. From the time of Francesco Petrarch, and his studia humanitatis, to the present, writers have wrangled over cost/benefit analyses of the humanities. In his chapter “A Poetics of the Restoration,” Handley reiterates a welcomed claim: Latter-day saints will benefit from wider and more disciplined reading. “When the faithful disciple engages deeply with the particulars of a culture and emerges with a changed, reoriented, and enlarged vision of human experience, the humanities prove integral to the ongoing restoration of all things. Because the humanities ask us to engage in imagining the world—or in ‘world-making,’ as the word poetics implies—consecrated learning becomes a poetics of the Restoration” (62). Here Handley makes a case for the way a diverse and serious reading practice can transport people outside of their otherwise limited situatedness. Whether we are hemmed in by our own American exceptionalism or national pride or provincial politics, or we are held back by limited literacies, reading widely can transform us into better humans.
Handley’s later essays share an enthusiasm for egalitarian political and religious experience. Just as he wants reading to open fellow church members up to new vistas, he also wants them to open their hearts more fully to each other. He teaches his reader about “imago dei—the biblical teaching that reminds us that we are all created in the image of God and are therefore all, each in our own way, various manifestations of his presence. An encounter with another, then, is a holy encounter, one that requires our utmost reverence” (134). In this same spirit he muses over some of the paradoxes of a church that strives for the best of both a pre- and post-reformation approach to leadership—that is, a church that has both a centralized leadership and an expectation for personal revelation at the individual and grassroots levels. Handley observes the constraints involved in this utopian endeavor, recognizing that leadership in the restored Church can only be as inspired and meaningful as is the compassion and sustaining support of the general membership. He recognizes the value of reasonable expectations and pragmatism invoked in a lay ministry. Regarding modern prophets he explains that such a concept makes little sense to his academic peers, “But I believe I have an obligation of loyalty to them as special messengers from the Lord and this loyalty manifests itself by patient waiting on the Lord, a willingness to forego the sniffing out of error in fallible men and instead a desire to cultivate an understanding of what portion, large or small, of truth I can glean from their words” (163). This loyalty to them does not mean for Handley that he disregard his own probing questions; in fact, he argues that he shows his loyalty by caring enough about the Church and its leaders to stay engaged and to push himself and others, and the Church to, in the recent words of President Russell M. Nelson, “do better and be better.”
One of my favorite essays in the book is the final one, “The Grace of Nothingness.” I was drawn to it for its existential question about the futility of our fixed expectations, as if we could ever count on giving to the world and receiving back in equal or greater measure. Handley successfully complicates and reinterprets the maxim: “Pray as if everything depends on the Lord, and act as if everything depends on you” (235). I don’t mind either that he borrows upon Adam Miller, Terrance Mallick, The Brothers Karamazov, and Marilynne Robbinson’s Gilead (a key text throughout the entire book), among other greats. Handley doesn’t quote Henry Thoreau here, but he may as well have reminded the reader of one of Walden’s prominent passages about going to the woods in order to live deliberately because Handley’s essay emphasizes with style the idea that if life proves to be mean, then we may only appreciate it when we embrace the whole and genuine meanness of it, as Thoreau suggests.
We can only experience “the grace of nothingness” when we come to accept our nothingness, not only as inevitable, but as the very thing that gives us the eyes to see the elegance of the world around us, the joy in mundane pleasures. This vision only comes after we are disabused of our own grandiose self-deception that we deserve better. The closing chapter provides for Handley’s book the perfect benediction on a work fashioned out of the author’s hard-won care and concern, a work that feels like an elaboration on Walt Whitman’s poetic refrain: “Praised be for the fathomless universe, for life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious.”