Obedience: A Deeper Transcendence

A personal essay by Nathan Wood

When I got home from my mission in 2013, I picked up Walden for the first time. Before
reading it, I happened to be in search of what I started calling the natural state. The natural
state, as I imagined it, was a place I could live organically, without any outside influence. I
wanted to peel back the pressures of culture, so that all decisions I made came from me and only
me. I wanted to identify and then remove habits, biases or assumptions that I had learned or
created so that I could live my life as truly was meant to be lived. Reading Walden was crucial in
this pursuit of mine. Like Thoreau, I wanted to

work and wedge [my] feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and
prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearancethrough church and
Statetill [I came] to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which [I could] call
reality, and say, this is and no mistake... (Walden 120)
Even right after my mission, a time of great personal change and discovery, I felt like I found
a great treasure trove of wisdom and truth. I particularly found Thoreaus experience at the
beginning of Higher Laws instructive. Thoreau writes of a time he caught a glimpse of a
woodchuck stealing across [his] path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight and was strongly
tempted to seize and devour him raw (Walden 258) I was impressed at how closely he let his
natural instincts dictate his behavior. He had reached a point where he could feel his animal
instincts, his basic drive to survive. He did not let etiquette, standards, customs, or tradition stand
in the way of who he truly was, or how he truly behaved. He cut through all of those. The only

conventions, procedures, or behaviors he obeyed were the ones that naturally and organically
welled up within him. He was living.
It appeared that Walden and later, my study of transcendentalism, only enhanced the faith that
I had just spent the previous two years developing and sharing. During my missionary service in
southeast Idaho, I developed a love for the New Testament, especially the stories of Jesus
commanding the Pharisees out of the temple, which to me, was an utter rejection of the status
quo. I loved when the Savior asked his disciples to reconsider their closely and deeply held
beliefs. As I read John chapter 3, I imagined the looks in Nicodemus face as he realized, being a
master of Judaism, that he would have to work his feet downward through a slush of opinion
to follow the saviors instructions (Walden 120). To me, Jesus transcended Jewish customs and
traditions and instated a Higher Law. So, I felt like reading about a man retreating into the
woods to escape the influence of society only heightened or even expanded on what I read in the
New Testament. I felt that Emerson was absolutely spot on when he said that Jesus most
profound teaching was to be true to what is in you and me (Divinity School Address). In short,
Walden seemed to fit right alongside my fairly solid Mormon faith.
However, I ran into conflict as I realized the implications for Thoreaus doctrine of
authenticity. I was enthralled by Thoreaus pursuit to live life only as it should--that is
deliberately (111). Like Thoreau, I desperately did not wish to live what was not life nor
did I wish to practise resignation (112). This placed me in a difficult spot. How could I be one
hundred percent loyal to my own nature but also one hundred percent loyal to Gods will? If I am
to put off the natural man how can I experience an unrefined savage delight and not be an
enemy to God (Mosiah 3)? I came to a point in my spiritual and intellectual journey in which I
had to answer the following question: If I follow Thoreau and seek authenticity in each of my

few and precious waking moments, how can I possibly live a religious life? In other words, what
will I do, when I do not want to go to sacrament meeting?
There is a great deal of faking involved in religious life. There is a great deal of faking
involved in having faith. The scriptures say so. Jesus says so. By definition, to exercise faith, I
have put down my will in order to follow the will of God. I have to put down what I want, and
pretend for a few moments, a few weeks, or a few years, that I want only what God wants. In my
limited and mortal perspective, it is hard for me to want only what God wants, even though Ive
seen it pay off most times. But during the times I dont, I obediently lay down my desires, wants,
and passions in favor of Gods, and then pretend and fake it. Most of the time I keep
commandments, part of me is absent because part of me still wants to pay a much smaller tithe
(if at all), only attend the first hour of church, and not do my home teaching assignment.
Essentially I have to do what Thoreau warned against: sometimes I will have to follow the
stream, or, the testimonies that have been placed before me, and then wait as I fake a pretended
will. I have to suppress my urge to be self-reliant, deny self-direction, and instead follow the
example of others. I might even say that I must have faith for things which are not seen but
which are true, and go throughout the motions.
Here is my critique of Transcendentalism: I still find a great deal of meaning in faking it. 90
percent of sacrament meetings I have attended I have not felt passionate about, but the remaining
10 percent have changed my life. Most of the times I attend, I attend out of habit and out of
tradition. I have had revelatory experiences--but those have happened on an infrequent basis, at
best. These spiritual experiences, an answered prayer (God, was Joseph your prophet?) a miracle
after a family fast, the testimony of a convert standing in a baptismal font, constitute an
extremely small percentage of my religious experience. But they most definitely do occur, and

they make the parts of religion I dont care for worth the struggle to fake through. It is the
minority of spiritual, uplifting sacrament meetings that motivate me to endure to the end of the
great majority of meetings I have to fake my way through.
What I have seen is that our God, our Father in Heaven, gives us just--an only-- enough
reason to fight the good fight of faith. He persuades us gently and softly and infrequently
enough to maintain our faith. He does so because it is an essential part of the process of finding
him. Lehi of the Book of Mormon says that There must be an opposition in all things. I love
this verse because it admits that there will be times we will not have reason to believe. In other
words, because we are to obey with exactness in all times and in all places (be ye therefore
perfect), and because we will only partially have strong reason to believe (we live in an
imperfect world), we must at times, fake it. We have to consistently choose the right that is,
fake it, even when we do not want to. It takes an immense amount of humility to essentially shut
down your intellect, Thoreaus and Emersons cleaver of truth, and blindly accept that your
will is not the best. But I have found that the deepest transcendence we might penetrate, the
deepest living, the juiciest, most savory marrow of life we can suck out of this short 60-80 year
experience on Earth, is to obey prescribed rules, piously and humbly, 100 percent of the time.
It would require an immense amount of faith for me to tell Henry David Thoreau and Ralph
Waldo Emerson they suffered from a lack of humility, and even more faith to tell them that they
might transcend even deeper if they kept commandments produced by an ill-educated, once
treasure seeking, self- proclaimed prophet from Vermont. But perhaps in a moment of bravery, I
might critique them. I would tell them that Ive transcended through obedience. I would tell
them that believing in an almost impossible act (one Galilean martyr coming back to life) will
give us the confidence that we can overcome any tragedy that might befall us. I would use

Thoreaus own words to say that a hope in a resurrection makes our petty fears only the
shadow of the reality (118), and that when we know who we are spiritually, not naturally, all our
fears, preoccupations, and insecurities fall to the wayside. I might explain that sin, not only the
poor use of intellect, is the greatest sham and delusion that stands in the way of fabulous
reality (118). I might explain that our spiritual destiny and divine identity, our true natural selves,
are found while exercising faith in an ordered, established, and even dogmatic institution, and
that commitment, formed and kept with God, place us in an eternally round whole, of which
nature and our true natural selves testify.