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Morgan Jones Pearson 0:00
In Rosalynde Welch and Adam Miller's new book, Seven Gospels, in addition to exploring the gospel witnesses of Book of Mormon prophets like a Abinadi and Alma, they also chose to feature the witnesses of Mary and Abish. The authors wrote that they expect you'll find the chapters dedicated to the humble testimonies of these extraordinary women to be two of the most rewarding, inspiring and Christ-centered in the book. Mary and Abish both prove the gospel rule that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass. On today's episode, we will talk about Mary in Abish, but we'll also talk about another woman who proves that very same gospel rule. In addition to Mary and Abish, we'll talk about how Kate Holbrook's passing reminded us that one person's witness of Christ can make a tremendous impact. No matter how well known we may consider ourselves to be. We each have the ability to testify of Christ in a powerful Earth-shaping way, leaving a legacy in our wake. Rosalynde Welch is a senior research fellow and associate director at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. She holds a PhD in early modern English literature from the University of California San Diego. Welch is an independent scholar working in Latter-day Saint literature, culture and theology. She is also the host of the Maxwell Institute podcast. She helped usher Kate Holbrook's Both Things Are True through to publication, and is a co-author of the upcoming release Seven Gospels.
This is All In an LDS Living podcast where we ask the question, "What does it really mean to be all in the gospel of Jesus Christ?" I'm Morgan Pearson, and I am so grateful for the chance to talk with Rosalynde Welch today. Rosalynde, welcome.
Rosalynde Welch 2:04
Thank you, Morgan. I'm really grateful to be here.
Morgan Jones Pearson 2:07
Well, I told Rosalynde, this when we first got on this call, but I have heard so many wonderful things about you over the years. And so the chance to talk to you feels like such an honor for me. But we were going to talk today actually about two books rather than one. And these are two books that are in some ways different, but in some ways, they're the same. And I wondered if you could start us off by talking about the contrast between these two projects.
Rosalynde Welch 2:35
Yeah, so the first book that we're going to talk about together is a wonderful book called both things are true. And both things are true was written by the historian Kate Holbrook. It's a collection of five personal essays about what it's like to live our life in the Gospel. And Kate spent special attention thinking about some of the tensions or the contraries that we can encounter as disciples of Christ and how we navigate some of those tensions in our lived experience. For example, in her first chapter, she talks about what it means that the church is true. And how do we affirm the truth of the church without seeming exclusive, or as though we're kind of denigrating the faith of other believers as well. So she does a beautiful job of navigating that tension. And so in each of her five essays, speaking from her deep faith, from her craft, and her expertise as an historian, from her own personal love of food and cooking, and the domestic arts, and especially from her deep compassion and curiosity about other people, she explores a series of tensions in the Gospel. The second book that we're going to talk about is a book called Seven gospels. And that's a book that was co authored by me, and my friend, Adam Miller, who I know you've had on the podcast before. So in this book, Seven Gospels, we picked out seven passages from the Book of Mormon, that are sort of short narratives of Christ's life. A little bit like the gospels that we find in the New Testament write the Gospel according to Matthew, the gospel according to Luke, we looked for narratives of Christ's life in the Book of Mormon. So we found the Gospel according to Benjamin, the Gospel according to within a day. And we looked at each of these seven passages focused on Christ. And we wrote this book together as letters to friends. Adam and I have been friends for a very long time now and our friendship is based on reading. We're both lovers of the written word and we're always writing to each other about books that we're reading. So we wrote this book as letters to one another, diving deeply into these passages focused on Christ in the Book of Mormon. So these two books are similar, in that both of them are written in personal voices. And we hope that they'll be accessible and interesting to readers from all walks of life. But they're informed Kate's book is informed by the tools of her discipline as an historian. And for Adam and me, our book is informed by our tools. He's a philosopher, I'm a literary scholar, so by the reading, reading skills that we've learned in our academic disciplines, but both of them in the end are meant to share our faith and to build readers faith in Christ.
Morgan Jones Pearson 5:54
Well, I want to put in a strong endorsement for both of these books, but I actually was asked to provide an endorsement for both things are true. And in that I think I said this, but I feel like Kate Holbrook's gift is a bit of a contrary in and of itself, and that is that somehow she managed to create a bridge between academics and scholars, and maybe those that are more innately cynical. And then the strong, believing almost to a point of naivety, Latter Day Saint, and somehow she managed to marry those two, in this really beautiful way where people would say those two things can't coexist, and somehow in Kate Holbrook's world, they did. And I love her for that. But for those that are not familiar with Kate Holbrook and her work and her life, I wondered if we could start kind of that discussion by having you tell us who Kate is. And you actually ended up making an offer to Kate to help her compile this book. And I wondered if you could share kind of how that came to be.
Rosalynde Welch 7:10
Yeah. So Kate Holbrook was the managing historian of women's history at the church history department for many years. And in that role, she edited several really important books of church history. You might recognize some of these titles, a wonderful book called from the pulpit, showcasing Latter Day Saints, women's discourses, the first 50 years, which is a documentary history of the Relief Societies. A really wonderful book collection of essays from other scholars called every needful thing that collected scholarly voices of women, Latter Day Saints from around the world, really an amazingly global and diverse group of contributors. So I knew Kate, through our mutual association with the Maxwell Institute, where I now work here at Brigham Young University. And we worked together at the time, as outside advisors, helping the institute decide what would be what would be good to publish. But Kate had never written a book in her own voice. She was an extraordinary editor, and a tireless archival researcher who sifted through all sorts of documents to find the ones that would shine. But she had never really explored these same concepts in her own voice and in her own life. Kate battled eye cancer for many years of her life, and with great courage, she worked through treatment that went on for about a decade, and was incredibly productive professionally and personally during that time. But in the end, the cancer came back when she was around 50 years old. And when it came back, it progressed quickly and left Kate at the end of her life with a list of projects she wanted to finish, but not enough time to finish them. One of these projects was precisely what I've been talking about of a book where she would explore in her own voice, the Gospel things that were most important to her. So I wish I could say that I was the wise and insightful and sensitive friend who knew exactly what Kate needed and stepped in at the right moment to offer that to her. But I I can't say that at all. I was I was strongly instructed by the spirit that I needed to reach out to Kate's in the last months of her life and see how I could help her with these projects. I actually didn't even know that this project was underway, and I thought I might be doing things like transcribing her journals or putting files together, right, just kind of clerical tasks, but I was willing to do anything to help her. But that collaboration turned into something more. And as it became clear that her time was limited. She had a clear concept for this book, she knew what she wanted the title to be. And she knew what she wanted each of the five chapters to be. Each of them had started either as a speech that she had given or as an essay that she had written. But all of them needed to be revised, they needed to be stitched together and smooth together, they needed to be shaped around this idea of, of tensions in the Gospel. And so that work fell to me after Kate passed away. It was such a beautiful experience, of course, as you can imagine, to spend so much time in the company of Kate's mind, to learn from her wisdom, to follow every thought of hers to its source and, and see the beautiful structure of her testimony that underlies this book. And of course, it meant so much to me to be able to serve her family, her husband, who is my dear friend, Sam Brown, and her three wonderful children. But it was also something more than that, to work on this book. And to write in Kate's Voice, was really extraordinary experience as a writer, something that I had never really experienced before. And that is writing. Without ego. writers can be an arrogant bunch, you sort of have to, I think, to have the courage to put your words so definitively on paper and put them out there for others to read and to accept or to reject. And so writing can become really wrapped up in a kind of arrogant experience of, of the self and of ego. But writing on behalf of somebody else in the way that I was able to, in in editing and completing Kate's work, totally short circuited the ego in the process of writing. And it really gave me a beautiful experience of writing solely for love, and of acting on behalf of somebody else. Such a gift to be able to dedicate, you know, my time and whatever small abilities I might have for and on behalf of another person. That's something that as Latter Day Saints we are able to do in proxy ordinances in the temple. And it's a really, it's a spiritual experience. And there was something of that power that I was able to taste as I worked on, both things are true.
Morgan Jones Pearson 12:59
Well, I think the sweet thing about that, and you likely feel the same way. But I feel like one gift that Kate had was she was brilliant. But she was also humble. And without ego herself. I actually just pulled up so when she was working on this book, Roslyn, I think this would have been around the time that you were pulled in. Somehow I got word that she was working on it. And I also got word that she was very sick. And so I almost selfishly myself, because I wanted the chance to talk to her one more time, sent an email and said, you know, if you want to do this, I will move heaven and earth to make it happen. And she wrote back and said she would like to ultimately that never happened. Because her her cancer progressed so quickly. But at the very end of the email, this is July 29 2022. She passed away on August 20. She said, I hope you are well. I don't know whether adjustment to married life is easier or harder when you're older enough to have established your career. I just know it was an adjustment for me and I'm sending you good wishes. And I was like who are you? Like that's what you're worried about right now. And that is who Kate was. And that is why we all love her so much. So this is such a treat to talk about her words and the things that she offered all of us. When Kate passed away on August 20 2022. I was amazed by the number of tributes that poured in about her life. And I as a member of the media, I have the chance to receive like the church's Public Affairs emails and they even sent out probably one of the more lengthy emails I've ever seen from the church recognizing someone's passing. Why do you think Rosalynde that Kate made such an packed.
Rosalynde Welch 15:03
In one sense, I think, Morgan, you've already touched on it, Kate had an extraordinary ability to build trust with people and with very different people. And I think it was, that came from a kind of spiritual gift of understanding, I think she was able to understand people's motivations, understand what mattered to them, and find what she shared in common with them. So whether she was working with apostles, on a face to face broadcast in Nauvoo, or whether she was working with people who had left the church, and were struggling with very bitter feelings, she could equally and with equal sincerity and love, find what she shared in common with them. And then she herself could kind of serve as this bridge between those perspectives. So I think she gave a lot of people access to perspectives, and points of view that they themselves otherwise wouldn't have understood. And I think it's related to her greatest gift. As an historian, she loved women's history. She wrote her dissertation on foodways, literally on recipes, on recipes, and table settings and grocery lists. And she was a genius at reading these, getting inside those words into the minds of the people who wrote them. And what, to an outside perspective might seem insignificant, like a menu or a grocery list, she to her it was lit from within, and it glowed with significance because it it mattered to the person who wrote it. And she wouldn't rest as an historian until she had figured out what that person's life meant to them. And she would be she would work her fingers to the bone to find the best way to communicate that to other people. So that we see every in Kate's, in Kate's eyes, every person's life is significant, and makes a contribution to the world is full of dignity and meaning. And I think we can see that in her email to you, right, she she knew just what you were going through, trying to combine and you know, your new marriage relationship with your pre existing career and some of the bumps that might might cause if you were here, she would know exactly what it's like to be a new mother and to be combining that with your marriage and your job. She she was able to get inside people's life and to show it in the best light possible.
Morgan Jones Pearson 17:47
So well said I'm getting teary over here. So we're gonna have to see how this goes. One of my favorite essays Roslyn in the book discusses housework, which might seem like an interesting topic for a gospel scholar to tackle, but it talks about housework and the importance of what takes place in the home. When many people consider that to be tedious, Kate turned it into something that felt divine. And I happen to as I was researching for this episode, I found an old piece that you wrote, and you have a tremendous gift with writing. And you talked about how someone said that work and family evoke from us two distinct modes of being and of relation to others. The personal qualities required by professional work are directly opposed to the qualities that child rearing demands. They are fundamentally different existential orientations and the conflict between them is permanent. You proceed to argue that a mother's drive to care for relate to invest in her children is fundamental related to the drives that powers her achievement and other endeavors. As a new mom, you can imagine why that stood out to me and why I love that thought that I wondered Roslyn, you are also a mother. Why did Kate's perspective as a mother in this essay about housework as well as in other she she talks about being a mother and other essays as well? Why did that appeal to you?
Rosalynde Welch 19:19
Yeah, first of all, I just want to say that Kate's three amazing and brilliant children, Amelia Lucia and Saffy are extraordinary. And Kate loves them with all her heart and everything that she did was for them and imagining those wonderful people holding her book in their hands is what kept Miranda Wilcox who was the editor of the project and my close contributor and and collaborator on the editing process. That's what kept us going through this project is thinking about Kate's children and how much she loved them and how much you wanted them to have this book ate was a legendary housekeeper and cook, and people will tell stories about the dinner parties that she threw. She genuinely loved women's lives, women's worlds, and all the domestic arts, especially for the purposes of nurturing her family. But she also at the same time didn't romanticize it. And she recognized that housework has costs, especially opportunity costs, because when we're spending time cleaning the house, or bathing our child, that's time that we could be spending doing something else. So it was important to Kate that housework and family responsibilities be divided fairly and equitably between partners. But in the end, Kate understood that ambition and professional drive needs to be oriented toward and for love. Our professional efforts will be most fruitful when they are aimed towards something other than our own ego. And this is something that I have really experienced as well. I truly believe that better work results. In my case, I'm a writer, so better writing results, my work is more open and responsive to the world into reality. And it's more generous. And it's more attentive, when I'm oriented outside of my own achievement and ego. And so for me, that that alternates, you know that that destination and an orientation for everything that I do is my four children, and their faith and the thought world that they're growing up and growing into. So motherhood. It has sharpened me in some practical ways. It's a great way to become resourceful to learn how to manage your time, as you're experiencing now with a baby who doesn't give you very much time to work, I experienced that as well, I wrote my dissertation with a two year old and an infant. So I got really good at working during nap time really efficiently. Motherhood teaches you about endurance, and about hard work. And these are all skills that make me better in my professional life. But it's much more than that. For me, being a mother is what has grounded me in what really matters. And what Kate taught me is that what really matters is always in human form. It's never in a career, or accolades or empty honors. We invest our time in what we love, and what we believe in. And that makes our work better.
Morgan Jones Pearson 22:51
That is spot on. I could not, could not agree with you more. Another essay that I love discusses the idea of legacy. And I don't think there's any doubt that Kate left an amazing legacy. But the interesting thing is, I don't know how much she would feel that way. And actually, if you listen to the podcast, so she talks about her interview as faith matters, when you listen to that, I feel like you get the sense that she's not totally sure what kind of legacy she is leaving. What does this teach us about the impact that each of us are capable of having, and the legacy we can each leave as disciples of Jesus Christ. If Kate Holbrook left the legacy that she left? What does that mean for you or for me, Rosalynde?
Rosalynde Welch 23:43
First, I want to say that I think it took incredible spiritual and emotional courage for Kate to think about this in the last years and months of her life, she knew that her life was going to be shorter than she wanted it to be. She knew she wasn't going to have time to do everything that she wanted to do. So she had a perspective fueled by the urgency of her illness, on what really matters that I think all of us should pay attention to. I might disagree with you just a little bit. Because I think that Kate was ambitious. And I think that she did want to leave a legacy. She worked really, really hard. And as I mentioned through her illness, and through sort of unthinkable health circumstances, she continued to work hard because it really mattered to her to be the best historian that she could. These books really, really mattered to her. But what she came to understand is that academic fashions come and go. And as valuable as the books are on my shelf I have them sitting here right on my shelf as valuable as her wonderful Books are, there may come a time when those books are superseded, a new book will come out, and it will have a more fashionable approach or it will have access to new documents. And this is this is the way that knowledge progresses and grows. So she was open eyed about that. So she understood that the legacy that would really matter, and the legacy that would really endure, would be in the ways that she could build up human beings starting, of course, with her family and her children, but especially moving into mentoring young historians, and you can, you can find out there in these brilliant bright young minds that are doing amazing work at the church history department and, and all over all over the country and all over the world, historians who are trained and taught by Kate in, in the historians craft, but also in her particularly empathetic brand of doing historiography, which we talked about a little bit before. And it's in, it's in their work and in and in their activity, that her legacy will really carry on, she wrote, this is something that she wrote in the chapter, we want our lives to have mattered in God's eyes, we want to be useful. But if we serve only to gain approval, we're missing out. acting out of love for others, is a more pure, effective and satisfying motivation.
Morgan Jones Pearson 26:28
I love that. And that whole essay, I think is so powerful and does put things in perspective, I think when people are looking at the end of their life in a way that Kate was. It's viewed differently. And and you wish that you could have that perspective. Long before that. But I don't think that's that's possible. I want to transition now, Rosalynde, to this other book that you recently wrote with Adam Miller. And I have to tell you, I love the way that you set it up with the letters between you and Adam, because I think you're borrowing the idea of gospels from the New Testament. And after the Gospels, we have the letters from Paul. And so it feels almost like you're combining these two different conventions from the from the New Testament. But it's interesting, because in addition to Benjamin and abunda, die who you mentioned, you also chose to highlight the gospel of Amish and marry as witnesses of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. You said in the book, you acknowledge that this might seem like an odd choice. So tell me how you've reached that decision?
Rosalynde Welch 27:42
Yeah, well, you know, we know for sure that the Savior loves women believes in our spiritual capacity, and relies on us to to do his work in the world. But when you look at the scriptures, sometimes it can be a little harder to find those women's voices. And, and I think we understand basically why that is right, we have the treasure of the gospel in an earthen vessel. And sometimes that means that there are imperfections in the way that that truth is recorded. So if we want to all is not lost, though, I think we still can find and recover and learn from the voices of women in the scriptures. But sometimes, it requires a little bit of what I call informed imagination. We want to be so careful that we're not just putting words into an into a scriptural woman's mouth, right, that ends up erasing her as much as if we totally ignored her. But if we, if we know if we're deeply versed in the scripture, and in the history of the time and in the text, I think we can exercise our imagination in an informed way to reconstruct the voices of women. So yes, we wanted to find ways to highlight women's perspectives in the Book of Mormon. We decided to focus on Mary because Mary is very prominent in what we call the gospel of Nephi. Right and defies vision of the Savior's life. We read in First Nephi 11 that Mary was carried away in the spirit, just like Nephi was. So we wonder, maybe Mary herself, was given a vision we know, in fact that she was that an angel came to her and taught her and what if Nephi was able in his vision to incorporate the gist of Mary's vision in his own and when we focus on Mary's perspective as the mother of Christ, we see that it kind of colors and informs Nephi his own vision from the angel, so we decided to focus on Mary there. With Abish. She's such an iconic character. She's key to the events that unfold and Lamone eyes cord in Now the 19. And we realize and several scholars have noted this, it's possible that her own record or her own eyewitness account may have been used as one of the sources when Alma 19 was put together by Mormon and by the historians before him, because there are moments in time where Abish is the only eyewitness. So her perspective must have been instrumental in putting together Alma 19 as we know it now. So we decided to focus on Abish as the perspective from which we would explore the teachings about Christ in Alma 19.
Morgan Jones Pearson 30:39
Perfect. And in the Gospel of Mary, you write about how Mary agreed to bring the Son of God bodily into the world so that he could live fully among us, one of us in every way except sin. First Nephi, chapter 11. I had to tell you, Roslyn is one of my absolute favorite chapters in the Book of Mormon. When I was a missionary, we were teaching a woman It was right before Christmas time, and we were in her little apartment. And she was a single mother. And I was reading those verses to her in Spanish, which I'm, I'm a little bit biased, because I think that that chapter in Spanish is even more beautiful than it is in English. But I was reading, we're reading those verses together with her. And it was like, I could see it all in my mind. And I felt in that moment, like when talks about the condescension of God, I felt like the way that God chose to show Nephi, what the condescension of God and the love of God looks like. He showed him a mother. And I was looking at this young mother who was doing everything to try to take care of her kids. And I just got so so emotional. And so ever since then, I have been in love with this chapter. And so reading you and Adams, kind of breakdown of these verses, and what it meant to you was really remarkable to me, I wondered, what what would you say First Nephi. Chapter 11 teaches us about the condescension of God, and what does Mary have to do with it all? In your opinion?
Rosalynde Welch 32:18
Yeah, well, you're exactly right, Morgan, that the angel wants Nephi to understand something about who God is and who Christ is. And he uses this word condescension, and it takes Nephi a minute to figure out what he's being taught. But the angels is patient. And as you say, he shows him this image of Mary, and the image of the tree of life. And when Nephi sees these two images of the young mother and the tree with the shining fruit, suddenly it clicks, and he understands that condescension is a way of talking about the particular kind of love that Christ showed. It's a love, that is self sacrificial, that is humble that was willing to give up the glory of his premortal existence, and be born humbly in a stable in a human body, to a mother. And because Mary was was his mother, her body was the portal, she made it possible for him to come to earth, she kind of becomes the symbol for the the humility and solidarity that the Savior showed in being willing to give up everything and come to Earth for us. What I discovered, though spending time with this text, is that when we really sent her Mary's perspective, we learn something else. We've understood that there's a vertical axis that Christ comes down from on high down to earth. But as a mother, you're about to learn this Morgan, you hold your baby. And that baby grows day by day, gets heavier day by day, learns to walk. And pretty soon that baby is going to be a child, and then an adult, and is going to leave your arms and is going to go out into the world and be exposed to danger and to risk and to affliction and suffering and to death. as mothers, we understand that babies come down, but they also go out, they go forth. And I started to notice this theme and First Nephi 11 of the Savior going forth among his people. To me, that speaks to another element of His love. Not only was he willing to come down but he was willing to go out among us spend time with us experience all that we experience so that he would know how to help us and bless us and soccer hat sucker s. And when we look at it from Mary's perspective, I think it makes it all the more poignant to consider what it meant to her, for her son to be leaving her arms and going forth out into the world as the savior of humanity.
Morgan Jones Pearson 35:17
So, so good. Okay, so as we as we transition to Amish, I think it's interesting to go from married to Amish. And we're going to talk about how you and Adam both refer to a vicious story as an activity story. So I wondered if you could tell listeners what you mean by that?
Rosalynde Welch 35:35
Yeah, nativity story, of course, is a birth story. And the nativity story is the birth of Christ, as we've just been talking about in First Nephi 11. But in Alma 19, where Amish comes into the spotlight, there's a different kind of birth happening. It's the birth of the Lamanite church. I think sometimes, as readers of The Book of Mormon, we can overlook what an incredibly significant event this is. the Nephites had been had been trying to teach the teach the gospel to the Lamanites, and in different ways, over a period of time, but nothing had really taken. It wasn't until here with Lamone i and his queen and Abish and Amman, the neophyte missionary who came with his own special kind of humility, that the church is really able to be born among the Lamanites. And of course, as we as we follow the narrative of the Book of Mormon, we'll see that Lamanite church is going to grow in spiritual strength and power, while the neophyte church, of course, declines and dwindles away. Sometimes, the importance of Lamanite Christianity can be a little hidden from us, because we have neophyte narrators in the Book of Mormon. But Amish is at the center of this birth of the Lamanite church. She, as you remember, has had a testimony of the Lord for a long time, but has has practiced her devotions in secret. Now comes the moment where she is able to call as as her king and her Queen are both on the floor in a state of of spiritual unconsciousness. She is the one who goes and calls the limelight people to come and see, to come and witness she calls them out of their homes. And this is kind of the foundational act of the Lamanite church, a church is a coming together, of worshipers of witnesses. And a bishop is the agent who brings the people together, where they can then hear and witness Lamone, I and the Queen testify of the power of Christ in their hearts. And even more fundamentally than that, Alma 19 is full of, as I alluded to, these, these really interesting spiritual experiences where people appear to die, and then are brought back into consciousness and life. And this, of course, is a symbol of our own death and resurrection in Christ that we experience in baptism, and of the rebirth and the new life that is available to us in Christ. Once we come alive in Christ, we share our life with him, our life is bigger than it was before we've died to ourself, and we've come alive to Christ and to one another. And it's in that beautiful space of rebirth, that the fellowship of a church is able to flourish and grow. So we see we see that birth of the church and the spiritual rebirth of all the members of the Church, all thanks to the courage and the faith of Abish.
Morgan Jones Pearson 38:48
So I have to confess to listeners that Rosalynde just sent me the advanced copy of this book yesterday. So I only read Abish and Mary, because I was able to find this through theme. So I am right there with listeners in being excited to read the rest of this book, because you and Adam are both so gifted in pulling out insights that I never ever would have considered before. And that is, is certainly one of them. You said in an email to me that both of these books are fundamentally about Christ. You said Seven Gospels is overtly Christ centered, whereas both things are true enacts the atonement and a subtler way, as it brings together and reconciles disparate elements, just as Christ reconciles us to God. I wondered kind of before we get to this very last question, I wondered Roslyn. How you would say Kate took the opportunity to testify of Christ in her own unique way.
Rosalynde Welch 39:55
Such a wonderful question and I am so happy to reflect on Kate's faith. Kate testifies in very overt and straightforward ways throughout both things are true, she led with her faith, and she shares her testimony on almost every page. But as you say, there's kind of a deeper way in which the whole concept of both things are true, enacts what it is that Christ does for us. Every chapter is centered around, as I said, this, this tension between two things that are both true but are, there's distance between them. Sometimes she's able to reconcile those two truths. And she's able to harmonize them and show us how from different perspectives. If we bring them together, they testify in a unified voice. And to me that speaks of the way that Christ is able to reconcile us to God, through His mediation as our Savior, He brings us into the presence of God and allows us to be united with Him through the power of the atonement. In some of the chapters, though, it turns out that the two things aren't easily reconciled. And this is kind of a feature of real life and reality is that sometimes there's not always a neat unification and a neat resolution available. To me that still testifies of Christ. And I think there's something about the symbol of the cross, that shows us what it is to live in a world where there can be unresolved and unreconcilable truths that we have to live with. And it can be painful, in the two beams of the cross, those are never going to be made parallel with each other, right, they're always going to be at cross purposes to one another. And as disciples, were called, to take up our cross, and sometimes that means having the patience, and the largeness of mind and heart to live with two things are that are true, but not easily reconciled. And Kate shows us how discipleship following the Master Jesus Christ gives us the love, love, I think is the crucial attribute that we need to be able to navigate those tensions. And as disciples of Christ, we get from him the love that we need to make our way and take take up our cross.
Morgan Jones Pearson 42:33
Beautifully said, It has been such a treat Rosalynde to learn from you during this conversation, and I look forward to learning even more as I dig more into Seven Gospels. But my last question for you is, what does it mean to you to be all in the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Rosalynde Welch 42:53
You know, of all your questions, this was the one that that I had to think about the most, and and all of your guests have had such a wonderful answers to it. For me, what it means is that I can be all that I need to be in Christ. I am not all I am not everything I am far from perfect. And I think as disciples of Christ, we are called to reach outside of the bounds of the church, right? So so to me, it doesn't mean that I that I'm everything when I'm in the when I'm in the church, and it doesn't mean that, that everything that I do and think there has to stay, you know, within the membership of the church or the gospel, I think we're called to reach out into the world and to bless the world. So for me, in the end, what it really means is that when I am in Christ, I am all that I need to be because I have the Savior with me. And we are linked to each other by covenant. That means that that his work is my work, and my work is his work. And with that partnership, I think that I have all that I need.
Morgan Jones Pearson 44:07
Rosalynde, you are a delight. Thank you so much for for sharing so many wonderful things and given me so many things to chew on as I go forward, but thank you for your time and and for your scholarship and for sharing your gifts with us.
Rosalynde Welch 44:23
It was such a pleasure. Thank you, Morgan. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to remember Kate and to celebrate this beautiful book.
Morgan Jones Pearson 44:34
We are so grateful to Rosalynde Welch for joining us on this week's episode. Both Things Are True is available in stores now, and Seven Gospels is scheduled to release October 30. Big thanks to Derek Campbell of Mixed at 6 Studios for his help with this episode, and thank you so much for listening. We'll look forward to being with you again next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai