#MormonArtsSunday in Berkeley

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This is our ward’s fourth annual Mormon Arts Sunday, though I’m the only one really aware of that fact. This year I brought back the sacrament-meeting topic from year one, What Creating Teaches Me About the Creator.

Speaker One

Our first speaker was a fifteen-year-old writer of stories, novels, and screenplays. He noted two things about God he’s learned from creating:

First, sometimes he feels frustration when art doesn’t turn out the way it’s supposed to. Yet our Heavenly Parents don’t strike us down with lightning!

Second, sometimes when writing you can get in the zone and that is true joy! This, he said, helps us understand our Parents love for us.

The rest of his talk, for a while, had me worried he was going off the rails comparing Odin to Jesus (he started, after all, by comparing Odin’s mead to Jesus’s Holy Spirit), but he ended up having a great point.

Succinctly: Odin’s self-centeredness v Jesus.

Odin hung himself from a tree to understand magic.

Jesus was hung from a tree to understand other people.

This understanding allows him to create ways to save us.

Well spoken, young man.

Speaker Two

This speaker is a fourth-generation leatherworker currently designing soft goods (eg, wallets, backpacks) for Levi’s. He started by quoting Genesis chapter one and his belief that sharing Creation with God makes us more like him. He suggested that this is why we ephasize the Law of Chastity so much—to know that God has given us the power to create a human is evidence we are related to God.

He added some thoughts about design processes as represented in the scriptures (God seems to have “sketched” things before he created them) and closed with this:

Creation defines me as one of his sons.

Speaker Three

The third speaker, I now know, is the San Francisco charter president of Women in Comedy. She likes comedy because  it allows truth telling and is, along with the gospel, all that makes life tolerable.

She quoted Gordon B Hinckley’s Stand for Something on humor, where he reminds us that if we can’t smile at ourselves, that’ll be a sad time.

She starts her standup routine by mentioning she is a practicing Mormon.

She also noted that there is humor in God’s creation—and not just sloths, but also … these animals whose name means forest angels? These things cover their eyes when they’re threatened, believing that if I can’t see you….

Humor can function as a defense mechanism. And creativity is a way to deal with pain. (Consider the great artists of history.) Therefore … perhaps God has experienced great pain?

She closed with stories of people she’s loved, who were very funny, and had lived lives rife with pain. But through the pain they found humor, and dealt sunshine.

Another of several ways she found to connect comedy and the gospel.

It’s easier than you might think.