Keeping Faith and Reading Kafka

The first order of business, however, was moving to Greifswald, finding an apartment, and getting started at the university. When we called the mission home in Berlin to inquire about the nearest congregation, we were surprised to learn there was actually a branch in Greifswald. We found a city map and made our way to the address we'd been given. The rented hall was not crowded. Counting ourselves, we numbered thirteen, yet among that tiny band was a young man, recently called to teach Gospel Doctrine, who from his tone and copious preparation, struck us as someone who just might have heard of Die Betrachtungen, might even have seen it.

After the meeting, my wife and I approached him and I asked him if he knew of the publication. He looked at me very strangely, and I hastened to reassure him that the journal, as I understood it, was an outlet for thoughtful writing about our faith. I was curious and had some questions and would just very much like to get in touch with the editor. His look didn't change. After a moment he said, "My name is Jörg Dittberner. I am the editor of Die Betrachtungen." All three of us were stunned. He was, in fact, not from Greifswald, but from a very large university city in the west of the country. The federal government had assigned him to this remote town to serve a brief internship for his teaching degree. I, in turn, had arranged my grant residency through a professional connection in America. Moreover, I'd had to defer our visit for a year. There was a very brief window of time during which our paths might have crossed. Yet in a country the size of Montana with more than 80 million inhabitants and 36,000 LDS, on our very first visit to church, in a minuscule branch in this remote corner of the former Soviet Zone, we were encountering the very Mormon we most wanted to meet. It was a coincidence of such improbable magnitude as to give even a hardcore skeptic pause. It was also a gift that would anchor our happy encounter with the German church and lead to the very exchanges we had so hoped for.

Beyond these matters of sanctuary and of miracle, there is, I think, yet one more good reason, perhaps the most important one, for continuing, in effect, to proselytize a stone: the intractable and always unfinished business of humility. I remember being told once by a bishop's wife in New Jersey that it had stunned her and shaken her faith to discover that her non-member neighbors were such decent people. It violated the understanding of the world she had acquired growing up in Idaho. How could people be so dauntingly good without the gospel? According to a recent survey, 61 percent of Americans believe it is necessary to believe in God in order to live a moral life, yet among journalists, whose job it is to track and report on human behavior, the proportion who believe this drops to 9 percent. In the latter statistic, one suspects, ideology has been tempered by grim experience. We might easily ask how people can be decent and forthright and principled, not only without religion, but often in their resolve to resist it. The uncomfortable truth is, the world has often found itself better off for its heretics.

In 1961, Elder Henry D. Moyle traveled throughout Europe, visiting missions. At a conference in Hamburg, he spoke for more than four hours, a talk that inspired me, a talk that would now be unthinkable. After promising, in what I would later come to recognize as missionary boilerplate, that if we worked harder, studied longer, made ourselves more receptive to the Spirit, we would baptize, he continued on with a truly exceptional question. "You want to teach the German people something about life and religion," he said, shaking his head, "but what do you know about these people? How many of you have read anything by Johann Wolfgang Goethe?" There were more than two hundred missionaries in that room. Not a single hand went up. "How many have read Friedrich Schiller?" No one. "Gotthold Ephraim Lessing? Immanuel Kant? Friedrich Nietzsche?" We sat chastened and silent. He stared at us glumly. "The German people have a thousand years of history and culture. How do you think you are going to talk to them, get to their hearts and minds, when you know nothing about them?"

It seemed to me then a crucial question, and I hurried back to the small city of my first assignment, going straight to a bookstore. "I've got to read something basic and important in German literature," I told the clerk. "Where do I start? What do you recommend?" The young man thought a while then handed me a thin paperback book, one that looked as though I might manage it. He assured me it was important. As a new missionary, I resolved to make it a staple in my daily regimen, and following language study, scripture study, and the endless memorizing of lessons, I found myself thumbing back and forth through Cassell's German-English Dictionary and slowly reading Franz Kafka's The Trial. Such reading is forbidden to missionaries today, and to me, then, it was surely disquieting. Like all of Kafka's writing, the book's core is religious, but it narrates a nightmare gospel in which all revelation is profane and condemnatory and religion provides the precise antithesis to comfort.