J. Golden Kimball and the Straight and Narrow Path

J. Golden Kimball is known to many as a rebel among the early general authorities of the Church. He is often quoted to have said things like 

I may not have always walked the straight and narrow, but I try to cross it as often as I can.

I suppose I could dig up more interesting quotes and stories. I could also spend some time verifying whether there is substance to the story or not. But this quote serves the purposes of my present rant well enough.

Some people who interpret the priesthood of God according the rules of the power structures of human society tend to think he only avoided excommunication, or at least being demoted out of the Quorum of the Seventy, because of his father's influence, or, perhaps, in deference to his popularity. Such interpretations are completely unnecessary, and, I think, possibly indicative of essential misunderstanding of the reason the Priesthood of God exists.

Many people who know me personally seem to think of me as a straight-laced, by-the-book kind of guy. Then I dig deep into some gospel principle in their presence, and they started raising their eyebrows and questioning whether I might be apostate. 

I am no J. Golden Kimball. Not even close. He did a much better job of staying in the strait and narrow than I do, as nearly as I can tell. But I can sympathize.

Even back as recent as the late 1970s (two or three generations removed from Elder Kimball's time), the Church labored under the burden of a particular editing mistake made when Egbert Bratt Grandin (voluntarily) undertook the monumental task of editing the original edition of the Book of Mormon (without the computer-aided tools we would use today, no less).

I do not disparage his work. It was a necessary job and there weren't many people willing to undertake it, especially because of the generally critical attitude towards the book and the restored Church at the time. And we thank him for it. Overall, he did a great job.

But he did make a few mistakes. These were one: In a few places, where the scribes (under Joseph Smith's direction) wrote "strait" or "strait and narrow", Grandin substituted "straight" for "strait". 

It's an understandable error. "The straight and narrow" is still an idiom for living "the correct lifestyle" in many cultural contexts, and was a well-known idiom at the time.

The other (proper) meaning of strait -- "confining" -- is not nearly as commonly found in vernacular English, and especially not commonly intended in the idiom, "the straight and narrow".

Humans have this bad habit of thinking that the straight and narrow path they have found for themselves is the one-and-only path. And when we combine a scriptural phrase including "straight" with the mathematical (human mathematics) concept of the shortest distance between two points, we tend to reinforce such misapprehensions. 

Just One Way!

(You must always be careful when mixing human philosophy with scripture. It is not a safe thing to do.)

Think, for reference, of the Straits of Gibraltar. They are definitely not straight. There is no safe straight path through at all, and the safest path through for one ship at one season of one year will not be the safest route for another, or at another season of another year, even though most safe routes will include certain areas of passage and avoid certain others.

Life is full of straits. We do not want to try to take them straight through, unless we want to end up shipwrecked. Yes, there are specific points in the straits of life that we should avoid and certain points we should head for when we can. But permanently straight-on, never with any flexibility, is almost guaranteed to have very undesirable results.

I suspect that, if J. Golden Kimball actually said that about the straight and narrow (and, I really don't doubt that he did), he understood the difference between the "straight and narrow" and the "strait and narrow", even if he did not have the advantage we now have of the modern edition's restored wording of 3rd Nephi 14: 14:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life ...

Even with that rendered as "straight", it's talking about the gate, not the path. "Strait" is quite clearly the better grammatical fit in context. 

I recognized this while I was preparing for my mission. 

I had had a hard time with the common analogy of baptism and eternal marriage and the straight and narrow defining one single linear path to the Celestial Kingdom, and I had done a bit of moderately deep scriptural research on the subject. 

Even if the analogy is not taken to extremes, I considered Alma, son of Alma, and Paul to be proper counterexamples -- and I felt that the analogy itself was promoting the sort of self-righteousness typical of the Scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus regularly warned of results contrary to expectation in the New Testament.

There are several places in the Book of Mormon where "strait" is clearly correct and several where "straight" is clearly correct. And there are a few places where the current edition uses "strait", while certain scholars want to insist that "straight" works better.

You may expect me to join that argument, given the above. 

I won't actually join the argument, even if you think I am poisoning the well.

The path before us is strait. It is difficult. Life was not intended to be easy. We are distinguished from other animals by our trenchant for solving problems, and, if God designed us to be able to solve problems, He would have prepared a place for us where we would have plenty of very difficult problems to solve. And it appears that He has done exactly that.

A straight path in this sense is not a difficult path. That's why it is called straight. No twists, no sudden curves, no rough spots, no tests. Just gun those engines and go, go, go. Only interesting if you have high-octane fuel, high-acceleration drive train, high brake-horsepower engine, and a limited distance course: Quarter-milers.

That is not life for most of us.

However, we are to make the paths of the Lord straight. 

He is able to save us no matter how hard our case is, but there is no particular reason to make it more difficult than it needs to be, no need to give Him more twists than necessary. 

No need to feel so much guilt that we refuse to accept His help, but also no need to deliberately make it harder than necessary for Him to help us.

This is not the question we should be focusing on, especially because it's easy to listen to people tell us what is the socially acceptable straight path, and others simply can't see from our point of view, even when they think they are trying to.

There is a word in Japanese, 「本人」 (hon-nin), that means the person in question, or the person actually doing the job, him/herself. This is the only person who can ever see the path ahead, the person who must actually travel that path. (And you can only really see it if you open your eyes to what the Holy Spirit will show you.)

The socially acceptable straight path, if you missed it, is the wide, easy way that Jesus warns us leads to hell.

But Alma son of Alma, in Alma 37, talks with his son Helaman about the Liahona, the compass. He talks about the miracles that guided Lehi and his children as the journeyed through the wilderness and crossed the ocean. He says the way was easy and the course was straight.

In retrospect, it was easier to follow the compass than to ignore it. Ignoring it led to much more difficult paths, paths that led away from the destination, paths that required God's help to get out of. 

In retrospect, it was easier to listen to the Holy Spirit than to ignore conscience. Ignoring our conscience leads us to difficulties, to tangled paths that lead away from our desired course, into ways where we got lost and, again, have to have help to get out of.

Not just in retrospect. 

With the eye of faith, the strait path is the one possible path for each individual, uniquely tuned to that individual's needs, to that individual's state at any particular time. It is the path that leads forward. It is the straight path that leads us back to God. With the eye of faith, we can see that it is straight, even though, to the faithless eye, it may look quite tortuous.

Without the eye of faith, only the wide path appears to be possible, even though it leads in directions that we know we really should not go.

Without the eye of faith, the only straight and narrow path we have is the socially acceptable straight and narrow -- which is neither strait nor actually narrow, nor does it lead to heaven.

When our eye of faith fails us, when it is not perfectly single to the glory of God, we may not be able to see very far down the true path. 

But, if we reach out, God will show us the next step from where we are. And then, the next -- one step extending the previous until we can again look back and see that our Savior has, indeed, straightened our path for us so that we can again look forward with the eye of faith.

And we won't be inclined to look around us and question why the other guy is not on our straight and narrow.

Now, put J. Golden Kimball's comment about having not always walked the straight and narrow into that context. 

And it's worth thinking about why he would try to cross it as often as he could. I'm thinking it would have something to do with service, but that is another rant.