The world we live in today is a stage without a play. This was brought home to me thirty years ago when at the dawn of a cold March morning, I happened to approach the Third Mesa with Brother Virgil Bushnoff, a long time missionary to the Hopis. When we stepped through the little tunnel into the windy plaza, it was still dark and what I saw was most remarkable. To an audience consisting of only one or two ancients, and a handful of shivering children, a full scale Greek chorus and 52 dancers, elaborately and splendidly attired, tremendous headdresses and so forth. [. . .] were performing a sort of play with the protagonist in it. And why were they going to all that trouble with nobody to look at it? I soon learned that this drama was part of a cycle that went through the year.
We had come to the Mesa to visit Tom Quisho, 94 years old at that time, who was one of the grand old men of the Hopis, and he explained many things to us. These people were at that time enduring, and since have endured what we would consider, insufferable hardships. And that cheerfully because they knew what they were doing. They had a plot to their play; they had a scenario to go by. What was most impressive was that this carefully staged theater was being performed in a vacuum. At that time there was only a dirt road, (that was a long time ago), leading to the Mesa and it ran for sixty miles through a scene of utter desolation [. . .] There was nothing but sky and rock. So it seemed as it really was, that we actually were beholding a drama in space, in bare space with nothing but sky and primordial earth between. A rocky planet orbiting in a vast emptiness. To find an inhabited planet in space is remarkable enough but to find a full scale drama in progress when you stumble on it—what’s going on here? That’s something truly fundamental.
The whole strength and astounding survival of the Hopis lies in the plot to the scenario by which they live. And my point is that our world does not have such. A scenario in which their real life, the vicissitudes of life, were a parody, a side show, a mock play on the side—and that’s the only play outsiders ever see. And our existence is a parody, it’s not the real play. Scenario is a Hollywood word. It’s a good one, we have to use it [. . .] It’s very old, it’s a Renaissance word, but the dictionary defines it as an outline or synopsis of a play, or the book of an opera, showing the scenes and entrances and exits of the actors. An abstract of the chief incidents in any drama or work arranged according to act and scene, giving a sort of skeleton to the piece, that’s your godspell. That’s your spiel. That’s your play [. . .] And a scenario is then [. . .] a plausible story to explain a certain condition or situation.
Whereas a model is a plausible mechanism to show how something works. The dictionary calls that a set of plans or designs for a building to be erected or similar drawings to scale of a structure already built [. . .] In general, models are scientific, scenarios are religious or philosophical; they go together. The properties of the play suggest the play, they don’t determine it [. . .] There are a number of scenarios available today, not just the Hopis’. Every scenario is a model and has its merits and its faults. The best have survived for hundreds of years. And the weaker ones fall by the way. But all are tentative. Each one offers only a suggestive solution.
As with the gospel too. Try it on for size. Try it this way and see how it works. The best models are strong enough to dispense with dogmatic touchiness. The question is not which scenario explains everything perfectly, as we know none of them does, but which gives you the best explanation of the most phenomena to your greatest satisfaction. You choose the model that suits you best.
Now, what Joseph Smith gave the world was a remarkably full and complete scenario. An enormous structure actually. And this accounts for a good deal of what happened when he started giving it to the world. Brigham Young shows us the reaction on both sides. He “rushed as to a banquet, spread by the prophet.” He came like a starving man. Why? He tells us quite plainly: because his world had no real explanation for anything. No satisfying scenario. It was not hard work or austere living that made life gloomy in Puritan New England, but the sense of not really knowing what it was about. This went beyond the scope of their disciplinary rules. As Samuel Sewell sat in church one morning, he writes in his famous journal, “The idea occurred to me with great force and conviction that Jesus Christ had never existed.” And this from the most devout and conservative member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
So, Brigham says “being raised in that atmosphere there was more or less of a gloom over my feelings form the earliest days of my childhood that I have in my recollection. Until I heard the everlasting gospel declared by the servants of God. The secret feeling of my heart was that I would be willing to crawl around the earth on my hands and knees to see such a man as was Peter, Jeremiah, Moses, or any man that could tell me anything about God and Heaven. But to talk with a priest was no more satisfactory to me than it is now to talk with lawyers. And then when I saw Joseph Smith, he took heaven, figuratively speaking and brought it down to earth and he took earth and he brought it up and opened it up in plainness and simplicity the things of God. Under that preaching the gloom vanished and has not since troubled me for a moment. I gave away all I had, I started to preach the gospel. I was obliged to do it. For I felt as though my bones would consume within me if I did not. Consequently I devoted my time to preaching.”
So there you have it. As he said, “outside of the religion we have embraced, there is nothing but death, Hell, and the grave.” And my question is do we have any competing thesis to offer here? I have heard old timers, pioneers, declare more than once they would gladly, like my grandparents for example, gladly go through everything they did all over again. A thousand times if necessary. Why? They hadn’t seen Joseph Smith. They didn’t know him. They joined the church in the old country and came over here, and it was for the gospel. Why always for the gospel, a mere doctrine and abstraction? Because it told them what they yearned to know and nobody else could. There were times when they possessed nothing else and then they considered themselves richest. But that was enough.
The reaction of the world around Joseph Smith clearly proclaims bankruptcy. I think it is one of enraged frustration. Some years ago, surveying all of the anti-Mormon works, from the beginning to the 1950s, I noted there a standard stereotyped reaction to Joseph’s message. The trouble was not only that Joseph Smith was putting forth the most wildly extravagant story and doctrine that anyone had ever heard, but what was far worse, they had nothing whatever to put up against it. Hence, the two paradoxes often noted in the history of the church: the fierce, unparalleled persecution of the Mormons for no apparent reason whatever, and on the other hand, the incredible loyalty of the Latter Day Saints to their cause, regardless of the hardships they had to face or the difficulty in getting along with each other or accepting some of their leaders. Even the apostates could never shake its influence once they’d come under it. The scenario was worth everything. For that they were willing to sacrifice anything.
