Elder Holland, Free Soloing, and the Fall #ldsconf

My childhood memories of General Conference are replete with stories about farming; my memory may exaggerate, but in it, virtually every talk derived its moral lesson from some combination of scripture and farming.[fn1]

The omnipresence of farming stories sticks in my mind in large part because I couldn’t relate to them. At all. I grew up in a Southern California suburb, entirely removed from agriculture, or even agricultural heritage. (My great-grandparents, at least on one side, had been farmers, but had given it up in favor of dentistry, a field both my grandfather and my father subsequently pursued.

I wondered, as I sat hearing about chickening the cows, or milking the turkeys, or whatever it is one does on a farm, what stories General Authorities would be telling in the future, when they were no longer all the children of farmers, when agriculture had lost its primacy in our culture. 

This morning,[fn2] as Elder Holland started to talk, my daughters’ ears perked up. They are rock climbers, and Elder Holland started his Easter discourse with a story about two kids climbing.

Two teenage brothers, he told us, went free soloing up a canyon wall in Snow Canyon State Park. Only they chose a wall that was above their skill level—getting to the top, they discovered a ledge that they couldn’t get over. The older brother managed to boost the younger over the ledge, but couldn’t pull himself up. He asked his brother to find a tree branch, knowing there were no trees, so that, if he fell, his brother wouldn’t see him die. He then jumped up, but couldn’t hold onto the loose sand on the flat rock. As his hands slipped, suddenly his brother grabbed his arms, pulling him to safety.

Elder Holland uses this story as a hook into those “brotherly hands and determined arms that reached into the abyss of death to save us from our fallings and our failings, from our sorrows and our sins.”

He proceeds with a beautiful sermon, outlining the dire straits we find ourselves in, as a result of mortality and sin, and the grace that Jesus’ hands bring into a world that, without them, could be an indifferent cliff on which we’d hang until our eventual fall. But, he testifies apostolically, Jesus lives and, as a result of both his life and his death, we too can live, and can avoid slipping into a cold and indifferent abyss.

In his sermon, Adam and Eve function as an essential metaphor. Their fall—their fortunate fall in Holland’s cosmology—set the stage for Jesus’ triumphs; it was, in fact, necessary to and connected with the Atonement. Jesus was, in both Pauline and Lehite thought, a final Adam, the finisher and perfector of what Adam started.

(Though perhaps necessary and central  to Elder Holland’s rhetoric, I actually disagree that belief in a literal Adam, Eve, and Eden is somehow necessary to or sufficient for a complete understanding of the Atonement—even believing that their literal historicity doesn’t provide necessary insight into the hows and the whys of the Atonement, and Adam and Eve as allegory is can provide the same foundation for understanding it as Adam and Eve as literal people can.)

Literal or not, I want to expand Elder Holland’s initial conceit just a little: free soloing is dangerous; the talented climbers who do it understand their skill level, and do their homework before they start. The boys in the story didn’t—they apparently started climbing with no idea of what they would eventually run into.

In other words, they were stupid. If the older brother had fallen, it would have been, in no small part, his own fault.

But that’s the thing: Jesus’ sacrifice can save us not only from our unintended sins, but also from our stupid and deliberate acts. His grace is sufficient even when we don’t deserve it.

But there’s more than that: our community (including our church community) has a role in salvation. Without the older brother to push him to the ledge, the younger brother never would have made it. And without his younger brother to catch him as he slipped, the older brother would have dropped off the wall.

Yes, Jesus saves us, even from our stupidity. But his atonement doesn’t eliminate our obligation to bear one another’s burdens.

—

[fn1] Also, World War II.

[fn2] Early afternoon, actually, here in Chicago.