Mets Day 19 - Why I Believe

I have received a number of  emails from my friends and colleagues who are of different religious faiths who have expressed admiration at how I have been sustained by my faith.  On the evening before my surgery, permit me to share my thoughts on why I believe as I do.

My mother was born in Holland in 1934, the sixth of seven children. Her mother was an indomitable woman who was unafraid to challenge the teachings of the Dutch Reformed Church.  In particular, she challenged the priests on the doctrine of original sin, refusing to accept that her babies were born into a state of sin.  She eventually refused to have her three youngest babies -- including my mother -- baptized, even though the priests warned her that she was condemning her children's should to everlasting torment should the die without baptism.  For years, my grandmother prayed that one day, she might find a church whose teachings were more enlightened.

After World War II ended, a retired couple from Ogden, Utah, volunteered to serve as missionaries for their church -- the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  They were sent to Holland, where in 1947 they knocked on the door of the Beuk family in Hilversum.  My grandmother challenged them on their church's teachings on original sin, and learned that the Mormons believed that each person is held accountable for their own actions, and not for Adam's transgression and fall from grace.  Having passed that screening test, the missionaries stayed at the Beuk home for hours, teaching my grandmother, then repeating the lessons as each family member returned home from school or work.  My grandmother was not an easy sale, however, and spent more than a year investigating every aspect of the Mormon belief system.  The original missionaries who made that first contact eventually went home, never having baptized a single person while on their mission. Other missionaries came and continued teaching the Beuk family; I am named after Kenneth Bacon, one of those missionaries.  In 1948, my grandmother, mother, and aunt were baptized into the Mormon church.  Over the next two years, the rest of my mom's family joined the church.  Were it not for the Mormons, I'd be speaking Dutch today. 

In 1951, my mother's family emigrated to the U.S., taking a ship to New York, and a Greyhound bus to Utah, where they settled in Salt Lake City. My mother met my father and were married in 1953. My father eventually left my mother and the church, leaving her to raise her three children as a single parent.  Her faith never wavered, however.  

I was born in 1962, and was taught the gospel by my mother and in Sunday School.  I grew up on a small farm in the mountains of Utah, five miles from a town of 500.  One of the interesting aspects of the Mormon belief system is that each person is encouraged to develop his or her own independent faith -- to study the church teachings, pray about them, and to decide whether or not you believed them and were willing to accept them.  No one should rely on borrowed light, we were told.  Only you can decide what is true for you.  My mother encouraged me to investigate and to decide for myself whether those things were good and true.  This has lead to a lifetime of critical examination and reflection, and the development of a core set of spiritual beliefs.

When I was 18, I was attending the University of Utah, and enjoying the independence from home.  Every other weekend or so I would drive 50 miles north to my home with a load of dirty laundry and attend church with my mom.  In the Spring of 1981, a high school senior named Jennifer Marberger asked me to a school dance, and we started dating.  A few weeks later, I broke my leg while riding my motorcycle, and had to withdraw from many of my college classes and return home to recuperate. Jennifer came over each day after school, and we had a number of intense discussions about religion and everything else under the sun.  We pushed and challenged each other on all aspects of our beliefs.  In large part as a result of those discussions, two weeks after my last cast was removed, I volunteered to serve a mission for the LDS Church, and was sent to South Bronx.  My spiritual understandings and depth of my personal convictions were greatly strengthened as a result of that missionary service.  (Jennifer went to BYU, waited for me to return, and we were married in October 1983).

I have spent the rest of my days balancing between providing for family by practicing law, and trying to live my life consisting with my convictions.  My church has a lay ministry, and I have served in a number of capacities, ranging from teaching Sunday School, to working with the youth, to leading the missionary efforts for a number of churches in the D.C. area, to administrative functions. Now, as I face a life-and-death struggle with cancer, I am drawing upon a lifetime of spiritual investments that are guiding and comforting me during this time of trial.

I am utterly comfortable with coexistence of the rational world of science and law, and the non-rational world of my religious beliefs.  God deals in absolute truths; mankind's truths are relative.  I try to be in the world while not of the world. This duality has infused all aspects of my life, and the friction between the things of Earth and the things of Heaven has helped smooth the rough stone that I am. 

I believe in God, and that He is the creator and father of my spirit, just as he is the father of all spirits.  Like Jeremiah, I believe that God knew me before I was born, and that I knew Him before this mortal life. I believe that I formed my personality in that pre-mortal life, that I understood that my Father had a plan for my life, and that I knew and embraced that plan.  Part of that plan, I believe, was that I would be sent to earth with a veil shrouding my memory of that pre-mortal life, so that I could learn to live by faith.  Faith is a belief or hope of things that are not seen, but are true. I believe in many things that I have not seen, but which I believe to be true.  I believe that I can communicate with God through prayer, and that He communicates with me through feelings, impressions, dreams, and the actions of others.  I have had many spiritual experiences that cannot be rationally explained.  Those experiences have created in me a deep and abiding knowledge that God is real, and that He loves and cares for us, his children. 



I believe that we are agents unto ourselves, to choose to do good or evil.  Through his or her choices, each person can bring light into the world, or darkness.  God permits his children to make those choices, even though it can cause great harm and suffering.  God can and does influence people, should they choose to listen, but does not grant all (or even very many) requests, because actions can and should have consequences.  I would like to think that God would hear my prayers, and the prayers of others, and heal me from this cancer, but I also believe that God gave us brains and skills that we might heal ourselves.  And if our knowledge of medicine is yet inadequate, then perhaps I will not recover.   

I do not rail against God for what I cannot control, but rather seek to accept that my mortal life is but a short moment to God.  I believe that, after my body dies, my spirit will continue to exist, possessing all of the knowledge and experience and tendencies that it now has. Like Job, I believe that, though my body will fail and be corrupted, yet in my resurrected flesh shall I know and behold God. 

I believe that my family relationships will continue after death.  When Jennifer and I were married, we were sealed to each other for time and all eternity, subject to our faithfulness.  In that period of time where I am dead and my family continues in mortality, I will be able to see them, even if they might not always be able to sense my presence.  I believe that I will see my children grow, see my grandchildren, and share in their joys and sorrows, even if I have no mortal body, because my spirit is eternal. 

I believe that God is merciful, and has given to all mankind a way to reconcile themselves to God.  I know that I am imperfect and that my sins a as scarlet, but that my soul can be made white as snow.  That reconciliation is made possible, I believe, through the atonement of our Savior, Jesus Christ. 

I am profoundly grateful that I can hold to the hope that these gospel teachings have given to me.  I am the fruit of seeds planted by the hope of my grandmother, by missionaries in the 1940's, and my own mother's faith.  I have spent nearly 50 years laying up sheaves for the harvest.  I do not know if I will be harvested soon, but I am deeply comforted by the sustaining faith that has been many years in the making.