Alma 32

So they went out preaching, door to door, synagogue to synagogue, street to street. Old school. The poor responded well, social victims all for their shabby dress, banned from synagogues as if they were the drippings from a side of ham. They approached Alma as he was speaking on Onidah Hill. Their spokesman—they all hung together—said, “Any tips for us? We’re scrubbed out of any churchy group we try to hook up with. You know, we built the synagogues and now we can’t go inside because these dimwit priests think God has a dress code and requires a financial statement.”

Alma smiled at how getting trounced by religious bigots makes people humble and ready to learn. Maybe that was condescending but it’s true. So he stopped his big hillside speech and talked straight to the poverty entourage. “You’re humble. And that’s a blessing. As for your question: what makes you think God needs synagogues? Not to mention once-a-week worship. Look, getting kicked out or even barred at the door has stiffened your resolve for justice and made you grateful for little favors. Compulsory humility is not such a bad thing, despite how it messes with your self-esteem. Because however one gets humility, one uses it to change. And changing for the better gets you mercy from God. With that in hand—and constancy thereafter—salvation necessarily follows.

“I will add, of course, that non-compulsory humility is better. But God takes what he can get. You do that when you’re Omnipotent.

“Luckily for your humility, I’ve got a great sermon on faith. Perfect timing. Here goes:”

A lot of people say, “Show me a miracle or something obviously supernatural and I’ll believe in God. I’ll even be sure.”

Okay, is that faith? No. If someone knows something, he’s past belief. Furthermore, if one knows there’s a God and then ignores him, he’s more doomed than the one who only believes and then ignores. A subtle point, I know, but I thought I’d bring it up.

At any rate, faith is explicitly not to know. Faith is more like hope that invisible traits and qualities actually mean something. That they’re true in some grand epistemological sense.

God admires that in a person. He especially likes it when people take a chance on believing ideas that people like me tell them. Or angels, by which he speaks to men—no, scratch that, to men and women. Oh, and children too. He’s totally liberal on gender and age and has no minimum educational requirement on revealing massive, mysterious, mind-blowing truths.

So, faith in my words. I say God thinks you should get some. Remember, we’re not talking about certainty here. Consider belief a down payment on a soul experiment. Just a sliver of belief, enough to act differently, is how you start to test what I’m teaching.

Or consider a seed. You’ve all planted them. Analogize to my words. I plant them in your ears and they sink into your hearts. If my seeds are good—and you don’t dig them up—you’ll start to feel something from believing them. It’s something in your chest, not like those spicy meals we all know so well. It’s a tingling feeling that almost seems to talk. It says, “This is a good seed. I want it to grow. Because the feeling it’s giving me is like the taste of something delicious. Fruit maybe.”

That would increase your faith. Not to say you’d know perfectly what you’re feeling or know perfectly what you’re actually having faith in. But as the seed plumpens and sprouts, faith grows. And you can truly say, “This seed is no dud.” If it didn’t start to grow, you can chuck it. It’s no good. Maybe it’s just a pebble or something.

So that’s the experiment. Try it and see if the seed grows. Does that mean you have perfect knowledge, just because the seed grows inside you? Well, kind of. At least in that one thing you tried out and it worked.

Once it’s started growing, you instinctively start to fertilize it. Because you want it to grow into a tree and grow whatever kind of fruit it can produce. If you don’t do that, it stops growing, dries up, and acts like it’s auditioning for a role in Jacob’s allegory. Just don’t blame it on the seed if you didn’t do your part. The seed was fine, you were the dud.

Fertilizing and trimming and watering and all that goes into growing a tree takes patience

and, well, faith. You do what you do expecting an outcome—in this case eternal life. If you do what’s expected you can take a little credit because you almost compelled the roots to grow by your attentiveness. You can eat the fruit knowing you co-created it with the seedmaker, since a seed without a gardener hasn’t got a chance, no matter how good the package says it is. And no other fruit compares to this one.