A few months ago, I visited the Rothko Chapel near downtown Houston. It was a nice, quiet, and thoughtful experience.
The art work was cool and thought-provoking, but also very modern and abstract.
I’m sure I could find meaning if I spent enough time pondering the Chapel’s twelve enormous slabs of art, but for a first-time visit the experience felt inaccessible to me, at least in a spiritual way.
Months later, however, I keep remembering my visit with fondness.
I keep coming back to what I saw at the entrance to the serene chapel: a display of holy books –the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, etc. These books have been around for a long time and belong to the world’s oldest religions, so I was not expecting to see the relatively new book of scripture from my LDS upbringing: The Book of Mormon (published in 1830). Yet, there it was. On the same bench as the other books.
The Book of Mormon is the one book I’ve read more than any other. I have read it every single day for the majority of my life. I gave this book to hundreds of people as a missionary in Madagascar for two years. Along with the Bible, The Book of Mormon has shaped my spiritual worldview more than any other book.
Seeing The Book of Mormon sit next to these other much-older religious texts was deeply comforting to me. I felt seen. I felt belonging. I felt validated.
I’m sure some people see The Book of Mormon on that bench and feel it doesn’t belong. “It’s fraudulent! It’s problematic!” they say –and maybe they’re right. Maybe the evidence against the historicity of the Book of Mormon is enough to “cancel” it.
However, for me, the book is just as spiritual as any of these other texts, regardless of historicity.
The LDS church, just like all other churches and religions, has ugly parts in it’s history and teachings. But it also has good parts, parts that have brought me closer to God and my community.
So yes, the Book of Mormon belongs on that bench. It has the same impact on me as the Bible has on an Evangelical Christian, or the Quran has on a Muslim.
In an increasingly divided world, it’s beautiful to me that the Rothko Chapel is trying to bridge the gap between faiths, not elevating one religion over another, but putting them all on the same playing field, on the same bench one next to the other.
Human spirituality is much more similar than we realize. Religious beliefs, values, traditions, rituals, sacred books, etc. are all slight variations of the same thing.
Kev's Blog 