Some years ago on my return from the East, just after finishing my PhD, I had a phone call. A voice I hadn’t heard before said, “Is your name Truman Madsen?”
“Yes.”
“You just finished your graduate work?”
“Yes.”
“Was your field philosophy?”
“Yes.”
“Philosophy and religion?”
“Yes.”
“Are you still active in the Mormon Church?”
“Yes.”
“How come?”
I played dumb, which isn’t too hard for me sometimes, and said, “What do you mean, how come?”
“Well, anybody who has studied as you have—I don’t see how you get these things together.”
I said, “I’ll be happy to talk to you about it.” So he eventually invited me to dinner. It turned out—and I do not want to tell you too much about him because you might know him—that he was a fairly prominent young man who had graduated from a university which shall remain nameless, and that while at the university he had become seriously disturbed. He was now married, and, as we say, “married in the temple.” He was curious still and wanted to know if there was a way of reconciling his former faith and his new discipline.
Well, it was an interesting evening, and it was not until we had spent nearly an hour merely sparring that I suggested we do something else. I said: “Look, I think we can get to the root of this if I ask you some questions and if you answer them with a simple yes or no. In advance, you should be aware that the questions are designed to see if you have really been subject to the dynamic currents of the Church. I think it will be easy for you to say yes or now. All right?”
“All right.”
So began a series of questions, about twenty. He answered seventeen of them, “no,” two of them, “maybe,” and one of them, “yes.”
Of But Not In
When we were through I said, “Well, now in all candor, if I had been on the witness stand and had been pledged to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and if those same questions had been put to me, I would have had to say yes to about eighteen of them. So the difference between you and me is not so much the various enterprises we have studied or sought to master in the world; the difference is that I have had some experiences that you haven’t had. And that means that actually you are not about to leave the Church, as you say. You have never really been in it!”
Well, he resented that and told me that he had several standard quorum awards and other such “gold stars on his forehead” as evidences of being really in.
But I said, “No, the Church’s flowing powers have not really been in you, whatever the geography of your Sunday afternoons.”
Some Questions
Prayer
First about prayer, “Have you ever prayed and been lifted beyond yourself, both in the manner and in the content of your expression, so that it became more than a dialogue with yourself?”
He said no. He admitted that he had said prayers, though not recently; but so far as he could remember, he knew of no instance in which he was sure he was talking to anyone other than himself.
President Heber C. Kimball told his children than unless one feels before he finishes his prayer a certain wave of the Spirit of God, a certain burning in the center of the self, he can be fairly sure that his prayer is not heard under ordinary circumstances. If we apply that to our own prayers, I, for one, have to acknowledge a good deal of barrenness. But if any of your prayers are in that burning category, thank God and keep praying.
The Sacrament
About the sacrament. “Have you ever had the experience that Elder Melvin J. Ballard describes, ‘feeling the wounds on your soul,’ being soothed, being filled with the Spirit that warms, and thus being quickened in a hunger and a thirst to return to the sacrament table where you find healing? Has it been as if you were taking hold of a couple of electrodes and were subject to a current?”
He said, “No, I have always found sacrament meetings quite boring.”
A Patriarchal Blessing
About a patriarchal blessing. “Have you ever had what President McKay would call the “thin veil” experience? When a patriarch made promises to you, declaring your heritage and something of the promise of your destiny, was it as if you were surrounded by glorious, but somehow less tangible, persons?”
On that one he said, “Well, yes, I do acknowledge that I felt something; but I have since concluded that it was just my own wishful thinking.”
The Scriptures
About the scriptures. “Have you had the ‘before and after’ experience of Joseph Smith, who speaks of reading the scriptures after receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost? He was astonished, looking back and comparing the experience with his previous readings:
Our minds [his and Oliver Cowdery’s] being now enlightened, we began to have the scriptures laid open to our understandings, and the true meaning and intention of their more mysterious passages revealed unto us in a manner which we never could attain to previously, nor ever before had thought of.
Joseph Smith 2:74
“Another way of saying it is: There are times when the scriptures can leap up off the page and bomb you, hit you between the eyes and, as it were, between the ribs such that you know these phrases were written under inspiration, and you see clearly how they apply to you.”
It was Brother Marion G. Romney who told of reading with his son, in the upper and lower berths of a train on one occasion, taking turns—a verse at a time. After a while, he read a verse and his son was silent. He assumed his boy had gone to sleep. But a little later his son said, “Dad, do you ever cry when you read the Book of Mormon?” Brother Romney said, “Yes, son, there are times when the power and light of this book so permeate me that I find myself in tears.” His son replied, “I guess that is what happened to me tonight.”
Well if we have been awakened in that way—he said he had not—then we are not one of those who have read the Book of Mormon up to the Isaiah passages and quit. I have sometimes wished that the book could be reordered, starting with Moroni, then Ether, and maybe Third Nephi, and then moving on. I am afraid that there are hundreds of thousands in the Church who have been hung up on the Isaiah passages and missed the treasures.
Ordination
About ordination. “Have you ever, in receiving the priesthood, or an office within it, or a calling to serve felt what President Stephen L. Richards calls an ‘essence of power,’ or what Elder Orson F. Whitney calls ‘liquid fire,’ or what the Prophet himself spoke about as ‘virtue’ which somehow passed from the person into you?
He said, simply, no.
An Instrument
“Have you ever been involved at the other end, being the instrument for setting apart or ordaining or baptizing or confirming? Moroni records the words of the Savior that, after calling upon God in mighty prayer, ‘ye shall have power that to him upon whom ye shall lay your hands ye shall give the Holy Ghost’ (Moroni 2:2). Have you ever had the experience of thus being a vehicle?
“No, I have stood in a circle or two, but I would say it was a sort of mumbo-jumbo of remembered phrases.”
Testimony
About bearing testimony. “Have you ever stood up, not simply to express gratitude, which we often do, and not simply to parrot the trilogy of phrases (about the reality of God, the sonship of Christ, the prophetic mantle among us) that we often use, but stood up because there was an almost compulsive lift to stand? Did you have the sensation of being, as it were, outside yourself, listening to yourself, when your words came with a transparent clarity, running ahead of your ordinary thinking; and you felt the core of your soul coming to the fore with a glow of unqualified conviction?
He said, “No, I have occasionally ‘borne my testimony’ but I did not have one really. I was just using the words.”
“What about,” I asked him, “others who have spoken in your hearing. Has there never been a case in a classroom, or in a meeting, or in a conference, have there not even been instances when you have listened to the ‘living oracles’ at the head of the Church, when you were sure the person was speaking beyond his natural ability, when the power of his testimony seemed to cut through all the fog and go directly to you?”
“Beyond His Natural Ability”
I could have recalled the incident of President Heber J. Grant, who saw his brother enter the Salt Lake Tabernacle many years ago. His brother had been everywhere except in the Church, around the Horn, in mining camps, and oil fields. He had come to the point of suicide and then received, in ways I cannot detail, a strong feeling he should contact his brother, Heber.
Well, he stumbled into the Tabernacle. President Grant did not know that he would be called on to speak, but he prayed that if he were he could say something to touch his brother. But he thought perhaps he had better check a reference or two. He pulled down his ready reference and began to look through it desperately. He wanted to speak beyond his own natural ability and so prayed.
President Grant bowed his head and wept.
Well, he was called on. He soon forgot that ready reference and simply bore his testimony to the power of Christ that led to the Restoration and that led the people of this Church across the plains. Specifically he bore witness to the prophetic glory of the Prophet Joseph Smith.
I have read that talk. There is nothing, as far as I can find, that is distinctive or unusual about it—it is on the surface a fairly ordinary collection of words. But when he finished and sat down, he heard George Q. Cannon quietly say, “Thank God for the power of that testimony.” And President Grant bowed his head and wept.
Brother Cannon was asked to speak. He stood up and said, “There are times when the Lord Almighty inspires some speaker by the revelations of his Spirit, and he is so abundantly blessed by the inspiration of the living God that it is a mistake for anybody else to speak following him, and one of those occasions has been today, and I desire that this meeting be dismissed without further remarks.” And so it was.
I will paraphrase somewhat the event of the next day when President Grant’s brother came and said, “Heber, I heard you yesterday. Heber, you can’t speak that well. You spoke beyond your natural ability.” He used the exact phrase.
Does the Lord have to get a club and knock you down?
President Grant, who was pretty stark in his response said, “Does the Lord have to get a club and knock you down? What does it mean when you know I can’t speak that well when I talk about the Master and Joseph Smith?”
His brother said, “You win.” He became an active Latter-day Saint and a powerful speaker in his own right.
That kind of experience, occasionally at least, should have happened to all of us. It had not to my friend or if it had, he had long since forgotten.
Spiritual Gifts
About spiritual gifts. The Prophet said, in effect, that no one has faith in Christ unless he has something along with it. “A man,” he said, “who has none of the gifts has no faith; and he deceives himself, if he supposes he has.”
You can check the lists of spiritual gifts. There is one on Moroni 10, another in D&C section 46, and another in Paul’s writings, 1 Corinthians 12. You can check, if you want more carefully to go through all the Doctrine and Covenants, and you will find about thirty different ways in which gifts are manifest.
“Have you ever had such a gift, especially in serving others? Have you ever sensed, say, the gift of discernment—the gift for the word of truth or knowledge—or the gift to teach it, or of wisdom or the gift to teach that?”
He said simply, “No, I do not believe in these mystical gifts.”
Pure intelligence
About the more specific issue, the Prophet’s “flash of intelligence” phenomenon. “Have you ever received what the Prophet calls ‘pure intelligence‘ flowing into you,’ or a quickening in your souls that binds you to a truth or a person or a sacred place; a drawing power toward something or away from something that you cannot trace into your ordinary environment? Or have you ever just known by the spirt of prophecy that a certain thing was going to happen? I am not talking about wishes, guesses, hopes, hunches; I am talking about the phenomenon of just knowing.”
Occasionally I have asked groups how many present have known at times, in that sense of knowing, that they were about to be called on to pray or to speak or to fill a particular office. All of these groups have ended up with two-thirds of the hands high, many others halfway up, not quite sure whether these “sudden strokes” came from a divine source or from somewhere else.
Again his answer was in the negative.
Music
About the voice of God in music. “Have you ever sung a hymn, or is there a single piece of music in this Church that speaks to your soul in the way the others do not—like for example, ‘O My Father’ with Crawford Gates’s French horns and the Philadelphia Orchestra; or ‘Come, Come Ye Saints’ at its climax; or the Phelps ‘Spirit of God’ anthem?
A girl was leading music in a sacrament meeting at BYU some time back. (Mormons cannot sing without a conductor; I have often marveled at that. Maybe it is symbolic of the fact that we believe the script, but there has to be a living person handling the script.) She was leading in a fairly perfunctory way the Eliza R. Snow hymn “O My Father.” Then for the first time, I think she began to understand the words. This time they were given with power. As she led, she soon was not singing anymore and then was in tears. Somehow that was catching, it moved through the congregation. By the they reached the last verse nobody was singing, or at least not with their voices!
Well, he said he had never had that experience. The words meant nothing to him.
Conscience
About the question of conscience. We do a lot to suppress and even distort our consciences. It is not uncommon in a standard course having to do with environment, whether it is psychology, sociology, or anthropology, to say that all you have when you talk about conscience is the residue of your early experience, some no-noes and yes-yeses.
But conscience is not reliable, so goes the argument. Everybody has claimed the conscience for having done something that you would consider an atrocity, and then not having done other things that you would consider right, so it is very relative.
It gnaws at us.
I am not sure of this; I tend to agree with the view of Parley P. Pratt—that is, if you will go far enough back in your memory (and this is difficult because you have closed it off), you will find that at age four or five your first approaches to temptation and sin were attended by a fantastic burning. “No,” was the sensation, “no.” And if you persisted that sensation became a fever. Then if you went ahead and did it, you felt an after-burning of guilt. Had you hearkened to that, according to Parley P. Pratt, and honored it, you would have increased in light to the present day. Instead, you have smothered it and written it off as just some sort of psychological illusion.
This is an intrinsic awareness—all of us have it. We are loathe to admit it to anyone, last of all to ourselves, but it is here, in the heart. And as the Prophet put it, it “gnaws at us,” and it seems to be particularly unimpressed with any of the arguments that we can advance. It is as if it were deaf. We say, “I couldn’t help it, it was bigger than both of us.” “Everyone is doing it, nobody will find out.” But conscience has wax in its ears; it does not respond.
Well, he told me that he thought “conscience” was a wholly ambiguous concept and that we would do well to eliminate it from our vocabulary.
The Temple
About the temple—he had been there. He was not too impressed, or worse, he was impressed negatively. Someone had suggested to him in his earlier life that, in condemning “pagan ritual,” Mormons were saying they did not believe in symbols. The person had also pointed out to him that what matters is conduct, not just sacramental acts. And so he was disturbed.
(We do a disservice to condemn ritual per se. There is nothing intrinsically evil about ceremony or ritual. It can be distorted. But so can everything else. It can become an end in itself, and we can and often do lose its power and its meaning, but neither of those are necessary.)
I asked him if he felt anything about the promise given at Kirtland referring to the House of God as “a place of holiness.” I asked him if he was constrained to acknowledge as he entered the temple, regardless of the process within, that it was indeed “a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God” (D&C 88:119). I asked him, in other words, if he had a feeling or sense of the sacred.
He said no, not at all, and he had no desire to return there.
I could have borne him the testimony of President McKay (but did not) to the effect that he was disappointed—when he first visited the temple. He gave us the reasons, and they are the ones that bother us: that it was over his head; that he did not distinguish the symbol from the thing symbolized; that he saw the human elements—people, different personalities—not all of them appealing to him; that he had very strange expectations, few of them fulfilled; and that he was not yet ripe in spiritual things.
But I heard him say, at age eighty after having been in the house of the Lord every week for more than fifty years, that there were few, even temple workers, who comprehend the full meaning and power of the temple. I felt his witness to my core and decided I would reserve my misjudgments, keep quiet, and listen. I have learned—and absorbed—quite a good deal since.
Love
About love. How do you feel about this? Elder Matthew Cowley said he had never lost a friend (he made up his mind in his youth that he wouldn’t) over religion or politics. That is the Spirit of Christ. I think it is particularly needful in this Church at this time.
There is a spirit that can come to one who has tasted the flow of Christ’s power that makes it impossible for a person to push you out of his reach. He may for the moment reject you, he may for years do so. But always you are there compassionate and concerned—unwilling, just because you disagree, to say, “I will never speak to you again,” unwilling to breed distrust and suspicion, to nurture your own bad blood against him.
If a person has not tasted that spirit, then by the Prophet’s definition he has not yet begun to get close to Christ. For, said he, “The nearer we get to our Heavenly Father, the more we are disposed to look with compassion on perishing souls; we feel that we want to take them upon our shoulders, and cast their sins behind our backs.”
“Perishing”—that is a good word, it can mean a lot of things, any sense of perishing. When you find a spirit that wants to condemn, to attack, to pull down, you witness a spirit that is not of Christ. With love like his we are able to see others deeply, but seeing them, we are able to overlook the things that would otherwise antagonize us.
“I can’t work with certain people,” a man said once. He was being encouraged to do a task, a “dirty work” task, in his ward. “I can’t work with these people, they’re dumb, they’re oafish, they’re clumsy, they’re not pleasant to work with.”
And the person who had called him smiled and simply said, “Christ did.”
The young man I was talking with found joy with only one or two of his Church associates.
3 Nephi 17
In summary, I asked him whether he responded with anything unusual in reading Third Nephi. That happens to be a transparent book for me. I have a friend who says that the most sacred chapter of the Bible is chapter seventeen of John. For me the most sacred chapter of the Book of Mormon is the same number, seventeen, in Third Nephi.
The Testimony of Jesus
I asked him if he had received “the testimony of Jesus” (D&C 76:51–53). I asked him if the most thrilling prospect of his life was not simply to imitate Jesus in behavior patterns, but to become like him in nature, in very attribute and appearance, and eventually, even through being begotten of him with all that means, possessed of his power.
He told me that he did not see the point of all this talk about Christ, and as a matter of fact, he doubted most of the theological utterances that Church members made about Him.
So much for the questions.
Living Water
I have not reflected my own grateful experiences in each of these dimensions. I have talked instead of past worthies. But I can bear you a testimony that these currents and many more are part of the flowing fountain of the Church. If we do not drink, if we die of thirst while only inches from the fountain, the fault comes down to us. For the free, full, flowing, living water is there.
“Come Ye to the Waters. . .”
Perhaps more often than any other, the question is repeated today, “Why aren’t there as many spiritual outpourings today as there were in the first generation?” This is a very revealing question, because there are. But those who ask seem always to assume that their lack of experience applies to everyone.
It is like the person who comes in and says, “How do I know that I have a testimony?” In flippant moments I have occasionally replied, “If you have to ask me, you don’t!” That is pretty harsh. But it is true.
The Lord is hesitant to entrust more to us than we can carry.
The living water is with us. If anything, more is available today because of the varied and expanding opportunities of the Church. But it becomes actual only when the individual who seeks has a clear sense of the possibilities and is then willing to pay the price. I find any number of youths who are, as I was, very anxious to say what they would do for such blessings, but less anxious to say what they would do with them if they came. After a little introspection, we should not be surprised that the Lord is hesitant to entrust more to us than we can carry.
Several years ago I went to Jerusalem. A wall is still there, parts of it the same as anciently. East of the wall is a valley called the Valley of Cedron; there once was a brook that flowed down from it. East of that is a mount. It is called the Mount of Olives. And somewhere up on the side of that mountain—no one knows exactly where, though some profess to—there was a garden. Not the kind of garden you may have imagined, not a beautiful, flowered garden, but a garden of trees—olive trees. Into the grove, after he knew that he had to accept the will of the Father, and knowing what it meant, Jesus took three of his disciples. And then he prayed alone.
The Power of Christ
I sat there and looked back at Jerusalem. You do not comprehend, I think, the fantastic power of the opposition of all kinds that he faced. You have been impressed in our generation with the war machines of the major nations. They are not comparable in any way, in lethal enmity, in ruthlessness, to what was beyond that wall. One walked into the clutches of Rome with the confidence you would have in the clutches of an octopus.
Remember? Jesus did not answer all the objections of the learned, the canny, or the curious. In looking back and knowing what was ahead, he overcome them by his very life.
I say to you that when he said to the woman of Samaria and to others, “He that believeth on me, shall never thirst” (John 6:35); I say to you that when on the cross he looked down and back, under the searing sun, and said, “I thirst,” he was reflecting both the promise and the need that all of us have. We, too, thirst until we ache. We, too, are living and dying on deserts. There is no alternative.
Some of those deserts we are commanded to walk across without water just, I believe at times, to see what is in us. But when we struggle on, we find an oasis, and the living water, or what I have called the dynamic currents of the power of Christ. They flow into us.
A Testimony
I bear testimony that those currents are here. I bear testimony that the problem of reconciling this or that philosophy of religion with commitment is not as technical as we often make it. These problems are easily worked out when the mind is clear. The solution is simple: it is being alive, fully alive to the flow and power of the living Christ. When we are, everything is better; when we are not, everything seems dark.
May God help us to walk in the light; and, when we do not feel that we have it, to walk in the memory of it with integrity.
Excerpt. This adaptation of a 1968 Truman G. Madsen summer school devotional at BYU was included Christ and the Inner Life (Bookcraft, 1978). Minor style adjustments have been made to enhance the online reading experience.
Further Reading
- Who Was Truman Madsen?
- What’s in the Truman Madsen Biography?
- What Is the Latter-day Saint View of Human Nature?
- Who Was Truman Madsen’s Wife?
- Ann Madsen Reflects on Isaiah, Jehovah, and the Temple
Truman Madsen Twenty Questions Resources
- The Truman G. Madsen Collection, Including 20 Questions (Deseret Book)
- Devotional: 20 Questions / Truman G. Madsen, 1968 August 20 (BYU)
- The Olive Press (BYU)
- On How We Know (BYU)
2 replies on “Truman Madsen’s Twenty Questions”
This is one of the most interesting, beautiful, and practical articles I have ever read! I found myself answering the questions with my own experience. I discovered feelings within my heart that I didn’t know were there until the questions prompted a serious look at them . Thank you for sharing this.
As a new convert to the church, I took Christ and the Inner Life on my mission back in 1978. Encountering anti-Mormon arguments I had never wrestled with before, 20 Questions literally kept me on my mission as they helped me fight the powers of darkness one morning and REMEMBER all the ways the spirit had illuminated my path. Forever after, my heart loved Truman Madsen. What a gift he was…and continues to be…to the church and believers everywhere.