Terryl and Fiona Givens

Quotes by authors Terryl and Fiona Givens

“We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering, and in imagining a heaven above, than creating a heaven in our homes and communities.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The God Who Weeps

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“Life is assumed to be about the fundamental, clear-cut choice between good and evil. Mormonism sees no such simple dichotomy in the primeval options. Yes, obedience and safety and security in God’s presence are presented as one of the choices, But Mormonism is more sympathetic to Eve’s perception of the alternative; the beauty of the fruit, its goodness as food, its desirability ‘to make one wise.’ Not coincidentally, ancient philosophers like Plato considered the triad of ideas – Beauty, Goodness, Truth – to be the highest manifestation of divine virtue. In the Mormon narrative, therefore, the circumstances that define the reality of the human predicament are not a blatant choice between Good and Evil but a wrenching decision to be made between competing sets of Good. The philosopher Hegel believed that this scenario, replicated in myriad artistic narratives, expressed the inescapably tragic nature of the universe. There are very few simple choices. No blueprint gives us easy answers. Life’s most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong but between competing demands on our time, our resources, our love and loyalty.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The Crucible of Doubt

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“God would not have commanded us to forgive seventy times seven if he were not prepared to extend the same mathematical generosity.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The God Who Weeps

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“Any joy we savor in the absence of our loved ones is a partial joy, a fractured joy. Heaven apart from those we love is just hell by another name. Joseph said as much: ‘Let me be resurrected with the Saints,’ he said to his people in Nuavoo, ‘whether I ascend to heaven to descend to hell, or go to any other place.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“The Book of Mormon affirms more simply: ‘Men are, that they might have joy.’ Plato was closer to the gospel on this point than the larger portion of Christian theologians: ‘He who framed this whole universe was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible.’ Not for his glory or happiness, but for theirs.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“Satan, in fact, is the Hebrew word for accuser. Accusatory judgment is Satan’s role, not Christ’s. We do not know the inmost depths of the human heart; it is only revealed by love. But those who condemn have generally little love, and therefore the mystery of the heart which they judge is closed to them. It is impossible to know another completely and not love that person deeply.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“To be open to truth, we must invest in the effort to free ourselves from our own conditioning and expectations. This means we have to pursue any earnest investigation by asking what the philosopher Hans Georg Ger calls the ‘genuine question. And that is a question that involves openness and risk. As he explains, ‘our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  The Crucible of Doubt

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“The Restoration scriptures encourage us as individuals and as a Church community to seek after good everywhere and make it a part of our religion. ‘The grand fundamental principle of Mormonism is to receive truth let it come from where it may.’ As the prophet Joseph Smith stated: If the Methodists, Presbyterians, or others have any truth, then we should embrace it. One must ‘get all the good in the world’ if one wants to ‘come our a pure Mormon.'”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“Our task on earth is to resist the conforming of our spirit to our natural environment with its allures and distractions, and to shape our affections, inclinations, and desires in the mold shown us by the Savior. This is repentance: a conscious choice, born out of contraries, to be shaped and directed into a genuine spiritual begetting after the image of God, in accordance with the seed of divine potential in all of us.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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“Heaven is not a reward for merit or a repair of an Adamic catastrophe; it is an eternal sociality of celestial beings, existing, striving, and creatively engaging in loving relation…As the image and likeness of the Creator, man is a creator too, and is called to creative co-operation in the work of God.”

Terryl and Fiona Givens  |  "The Christ Who Heals"

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