Humility before the Amazement of Life

I had the pleasure of taking a class from Eugene England on two occasions at BYU.  One of my favorite recollections of Eugene England’s legacy illustrates his depth and wisdom.  In 1993 (+ or -), a debate arose within the English department between England and Richard Cracroft over Cracroft’s attempt to define a standard for determining whether a specific literary work qualifies as “Mormon literature.”  England disagreed with Cracroft on the basis that striving to define Mormon literature in advance of reading a specific literary work would ultimately become too exclusionary and restrictive.  We would lose the opportunity to be surprised by a literary work that fails to meet our predefined standard of “Mormonness” yet resonates with us nonetheless as uniquely Mormon.  While Cracroft proposed to wall off the garden, England had the wisdom to see that the vines would grow over the garden wall.  England was right.  England’s perspective extended to people as well as literature.  His warmth and love seemed to embrace people in a way that drew them in and never shut them out.

Most importantly to me, this old debate within the English department evidences a theme in England’s thinking that has become more compelling to me over the years.  England was open, inclusive, and ready to be surprised.  He was intellectually and emotionally available to unorthodox forms of truth that show us that the systems of thought and the systems of doctrine we build can become a machinery that is too unnatural, too remote, too impersonal, and abstract.  England was right.  He shows us that we have constructed our towers too narrowly upward to a pinhole in the sky; that we cannot climb as it were to heaven by the machines of our own intellect, by the doctrines of this or that.

England’s openness is actually a humility before the amazement of life, the vastness of truth.  England’s vision shows us that theological pride is actually a closedness before the immensity of life; that our prideful orthodoxy and certainty often constrain the circumference of our understanding by gradual degrees until our spiritual vision has become a narrowly precast  pinhole.  So far down the rabbit hole, the sun and sky are barely visible.

Thank you Eugene England.  I enjoyed you as a professor, but I never knew what nourishment you would provide until long after I graduated and looked back upon your influence and realized that as your pupil in college, I was too young, too orthodox, too inexperienced to truly appreciate your vision.  Now I do.  Thank you.

Jonah Swan