Tyler: A Stanford Oncologist Shares About the Evolution of His Faith

An Oncologist and Professor at The Stanford Cancer Center, Tyler discusses how understanding the complicated reality of a life of faith, including dealing with church history, is similar to being vaccinated. He discusses how confronting complexity head-on, even though it was uncomfortable, helped him to handle and even appreciate the gap between experience and understanding.

Further Reading in Faith Is Not Blind:

“Such resources can help us work our way through complexity to mature simplicity. At that point, we are not just optimists and not just pessimists. We are open-minded believers who know that history and life are not always clear-cut and tidy, but we desire to keep learning and improve the status quo, not just to criticize it.”

(Faith Is Not Blind, Chapter 3, “Simplicity, Complexity, and the Internet Age,” p. 21)

FULL TEXT:

Faith Is Not Blind: This is the Faith Is Not Blind Podcast. I’m Bruce Hafen. Today we’re in Oakland, California with Tyler Johnson. Tyler, thank you for coming across the Bay. 

 

Tyler: My pleasure.

 

Faith Is Not Blind: Where do you work and what do you do?

 

Tyler: So I wear a couple different hats at work. I’m a medical oncologist–that means I’m the doctor who gives chemotherapy to people with cancer. And I spend about half my time doing that, and I do that at the Stanford Medical Center at the Stanford Cancer Center. And then I spend the other half of my time teaching medical students there, teaching Residents there– General Internal Medicine Residents.  I teach oncology fellows there, so I do a lot of teaching.

 

Faith Is Not Blind: Given that experience, we’re very interested in knowing how you got there and what you have learned, what you’ve bumped into along the way. You’ve certainly encountered some questions that have challenged your worldview and your ideas about your faith,  but you’ve come through it. You’re Bishop of the Stanford Ward. So start at the beginning. Where did you grow up and what was your home life like in terms of your religious experience?

 

Tyler: Sure. So I grew up in Salt Lake City. I have ancestors going back many generations on both sides who were members of the Church. My dad is an ammature Church Historian of sorts. So I grew up in a home where we literally had Brigham Young’s footstool in our basement and John Taylor’s hymnal from his prayer circle at the temple on my dad’s bookshelf, along with maybe 2,000 Church History Books. So it was just in the water where I grew up.

 

Faith Is Not Blind: How did that affect the development of your own faith? 

 

Tyler: You know, it’s funny because it actually worked in a sense both ways. What I mean by that is I’m not really given much to dramatic spiritual experiences. I’ve had a few of those, but not many. Most of the meaningful experiences I’ve had have been pretty subtle. And it’s more in reflection that they grow in importance.

 

Faith Is Not Blind: So it’s the meaning of the experience maybe more than the drama. WIll you talk about some of the early experiences that kind of helped to shape your faith? 

 

Tyler: When I was probably about sixteen I remember this one night–or a sort of combination of a number of nights before–where I felt what now I think looking back I would probably call an existential angst of sorts. I didn’t know any of those words back then, but I just felt this deep unidentifiable sadness, this just sort of “What is this really about? What am I really about? What is the meaning of my existence?” It was also a time, as often happens when you’re a teenager, when, you know, I didn’t have a lot of friends, I hadn’t been making it into the things I’d been trying out for. I think I’d gotten a grade that wasn’t as good as I wanted. I had had sad nights about each of those individual things, but this was not that. This was a deeper, aching sadness that I really could not put my finger on. So I remember going to my dad one night and crying. And I said, “I just don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why am I feeling like this?”  And my dad had a way–and my mom too (they sort of took turns) of coming through in important ways at crucial moments. And I’ll never forget. He listened–really listened. And then he thought for a moment and took down off of the bookshelf the Hymnal and opened it to “O My Father” and started reading. And he read a number of things, but among them was the line that says “And then a secret something whispered, ‘You’re a stranger here.’ And I felt that I had wandered from a more exalted sphere.” And that cut through me like a sword. It was the answer. I mean, it didn’t just cover up the angst or move the angst or disguise the angst. It was like pouring water on a cube of sugar. It  just dissolved. And I just knew it was true in some way. I mean, I was still a 16-year-old kid and was probably playing video games an hour later. But in a way that was fundamental and deep, it just spoke to me and I knew. And I actually try to be very careful about using the “know” because it’s a really complicated word, but I just did. 

 

Faith Is Not Blind: So you identified with the idea that–well. Eliza Snow’s term for it is actually a little ambiguous–”I had wandered. . . and I’m a stranger here.” I feel like I’m in a strange place. 

 

Tyler: Right. I mean in a funny way it’s not a purely comforting idea. It’s actually sort of a melancholy idea. 

 

Faith Is Not Blind: It has echoes of an identity from another place.

 

Tyler: And that’s what was so important about it. It was a recognition of my melancholy. It wasn’t saying, “Don’t worry about it” or “That’s not real.” It was saying, “This is real.”

 

Faith Is Not Blind: Yeah. It’s real and it’s meaningful. Thank you for that, Tyler. So keep going.

 

Tyler: It’s interesting, though. As I said my dad was sort of this Church History buff. A I feel like in a lot of ways my dad in particular sort of had a vaccine before almost anybody else had the vaccine. And so I got the vaccine when I was still growing up. 

 

Faith Is Not Blind: A vaccine for?

 

Tyler: Well, it was a vaccine to help me handle complexity. Let’s put it that way. So I’ll give you an example. So as many listeners or watchers may know, Fawn Brodie many years ago wrote a psychological biography of Joseph Smith called No Man Knows My History. My Dad had that on his shelf next to other biographies of Joseph Smith–this was before Rough Stone Rolling. And then he had right next to it, he had a little pamphlet that Hugh Nibley had written called “No Ma’am, That’s Not My History,” which was supposed to be a direct rejoinder to Fawn Brodie’s presentation of Joseph Smith’s life. Well, one day I skipped No Man Knows My History–it was much longer than the pamphlet. And I picked up the pamphlet and I read it and brought it back to my dad and said, “This is so great. I don’t even have to read No Man Knows My History because all of the things that are in there are answered in this pamphlet by Hugh Nibley.”  And of course everybody knew that he was the smartest person in the Church. And my dad stopped what he was doing. He put his stuff down and said, “Well, you know, it’s complicated.” Hugh NIbley is 1000 times smarter than I am and my dad told me, “He is a brilliant Egyptologist, a brilliant student of ancient languages and many other things, but professionally he’s not really particularly a student of Post Revolutionary War and early American Religious History and his rejoinder to Fawn Brody was kind of shallow and actually didn’t really answer the substantive things that she brought up.” And I think that you can make an argument that maybe nobody did until Richard Bushman wrote his biography. 

 

Instead of doing whatever I’m sure he was very busy doing and just saying to me, “Oh, you’re right. Tyler. There’s there’s nothing to see ther. Move along. Hugh Nibley is right,” then I think that would have embedded somewhere very deep inside of me. And I would have skipped merrily along my way thinking that I had solved the complexity of Joseph Smith’s life. But because he didn’t, I knew from a very young age that Joseph Smith–like most other parts of the church–is really complicated. You know, vaccines are actually really weird. I mean, the idea of the vaccine is that you introduce a little bit of a disease into somebody so that the immune system learns how to recognize it and to grapple with it. And then the immune system on its own expands and sort of mounts this arsenal against the disease. Then if you actually ever really get the disease, the immune system knows how to grapple with it. I felt like that being raised by my dad. When I read Rough Stone Rolling, for example, which is chock-full of really complicated things, I felt like, “Yes, this is complicated.”

 

Faith Is Not Blind: But you could handle it. 

 

Tyler: Right. I knew I could handle it.

 

Faith Is Not Blind: Your immune system was ready for it. Very interesting analogy. Let’s go on to your medical school training. I’m wondering how that showed up when you encountered whatever you found in medical school. I don’t know what it takes to get on the Stanford Medical School Faculty. What does it take? 

 

Tyler: Probably much more in most cases than what I have. I think I just sort of slipped in somehow. I went to BYU for undergrad and majored in American Studies, which has nothing to do with medicine. But it was important to me to get a Liberal Arts education and American Studies really spoke to me. Then I went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for medical school and it was different then BYU. At BYU there were however many tens of thousands of members of the church in the student body, and at the University of Pennsylvania there were probably 15 or 20 of us scattered across all of the undergrad. With the Law School and Business School there were probably a few more than that with the married folks. But of the young single adults there, there were probably about that many. 

 

So maybe one of the most complex experiences I had was when I was younger. I remember when I was about seven, we went to visit my father’s Aunt Caroline. I was obviously too young to understand what was really going on, but they told us that she was dying. But she was sitting there with her hair carefully coiffed in a big bouffant even though she was dying. And she was sitting up in her bed and she looked completely serene. I don’t know what was wrong with her, but it didn’t appear to be painful at all. And I just remember she was as peaceful as if she was getting ready for a trip to Ogden. I mean, she just could not have been more at peace with the world and God and herself. She was just ready to go to the next life. But I remember having that experience and it just felt as intuitive to me as my own name that she would be resurrected. How could she not be? It was not as if she would cease to exist after she died. 

 

Well, in medical school I spent three months painstakingly dissecting a dead person’s body. And I mean dissecting every artery and nerve. I held the person’s heart in my hand. I hefted the liver. I picked apart the very complicated nervous architecture of the arm. I looked at the person’s brain. I cut through the bony vertebrae to look at the glistening spinal cord. So on the one hand, it was a fascinating and beautiful experience. And that may seem strange to say, but just take my word for it. But it’s complicated. What does Alma mean when he says “not a hair of the head shall be lost?” Here we were dissecting this body. The body is mutilated when you’re finished with it. So what does it mean that “we should be restored to our perfect form?” Does that mean that that very same body and those same atoms that make up that body are going to be restored?  

 

Faith Is Not Blind: So how did that complexity about the physical body and your training that you so vividly describe affect–testimony seems too shallow of a word–your religious understanding, your feeling, your comprehension? Did you just try to take it all in stride or did it add something and make you see more?

 

Tyler: Well, I think a lot about fairy tales. Everybody loves fairy tales. When you’re growing up, who doesn’t love a good fairy tale? And the reason that we love them is because the characters are carefully delineated into good guys and bad guys. And everybody gets their just desserts. And the older versions of the fairy tales, the bad “just desserts” are pretty gory. So sometimes the bad guys get punished by having part of their body hacked off and even that seems somehow fundamentally satisfying because the good guys end up married in the castle and the bad guys end up being punished. And I think that when I was young I had a very “fairytale understanding” of the Gospel, which is satisfying when you’re young. But as you age, I think all of us want to hang on to a fairytale understanding of the Gospel because there’s a part of us that always loves that. That’s why people pay so much money to see Star Wars. But I think there’s a deeper part of us that knows that it just doesn’t wash. Fairy tales in that sense just aren’t true. Life just doesn’t work that way. And the Gospel, if it’s going to be deeply, fundamentally meaningful in the way that the lyrics from that hymn were to me all those years ago, has to be capable of dealing with a much deeper complexity and a much richer, more meaningful, more complicated way of looking at the world.

 

Faith Is Not Blind: How has it done that for you? How has the Gospel kept up in terms of its maturity and depth–what you were just talking about–with the complexity you’ve seen in your education and in your practice?

 

Tyler: Well, the thing that I think is really the key is that the Gospel doesn’t always “keep up” in the moment. In my view, faith is the willingness to continue diligently doing my very very imperfect best to be a Christian disciple, even in the moments where there is a gap between my understanding and my experience. Now sometimes the gap goes the other way. Sometimes my understanding outstrips my experience, like that time I mentioned earlier with the hymn when I was a teenager. The understanding that infused into me in that moment outstripped what I could articulate. It was beyond my ability to articulate. So that happens sometimes. But then there are times when it goes the other direction and that gap is very troubling. When my ability to articulate my understanding of the Gospel seems for a moment–and sometimes moments are long–to fall behind what I am experiencing. That can be a deeply difficult and painful time, but my experience is that if I continue trying my best to be like Jesus and trying my best to keep my covenants, even in those “gap moments,” then a sweet peace comes eventually. 

 

Faith Is Not Blind:  Let me be sure I understand. It seems like you’re saying that you’ve seen that gap close enough times that your faith is not  just a kind of an idle, desperate hope–it’s the result of experience.

 

Tyler: You know Moroni says that the witness comes after the trial of our faith. I actually resonate in a lot of ways more intuitively with Alma’s way of describing this. So Alma compares planting the word in our heart to cultivating a tree. Well, there is nothing more boring, more painstaking, and more requiring of faith than planting a tree. It’s the idea that you can take this little, teeny thing you can press between your fingers–you can make it disappear under your thumb–and you can put that in the ground and if you do the right combination of things, you and nature and grace and the soil over 30 years will produce a tree. In California we have these redwood trees that are the oldest living things on the continent. All of those come from these little seeds. You know, we have people in our ward who have lemon trees that put out so much fruit that they just bring baskets around to the members of the ward to get rid of them. But the point is that it is by definition a faith-full (in the real meaning of that word) exercise. And so I would say that cultivating my own faith is like that. It requires trust that the fruit will come. And, yes, I have seen the fruit come and come and come and come.

 

Faith is Not Blind: But it sounds like from the way you’re describing it with that gap and the faith that will fill it–based on trust–that this is what the Lord wants us to experience. It’s going back to the beginning of the interview when you talked about the lyrics that say “you’re a stranger here.” There’s a little angst and the feeling that “I just don’t get this,” but then you feel something that makes you trust and then you start to understand it. And then you say, “Oh. Okay. I can repeat that cycle because that’s how things grow.” 

 

Tyler: Yes, and that’s what Alma describes–that you have faith. He describes a sort of a “big F Faith” and a “little f faith.” The “big F Faith” is that one day I’m going to be standing here in the shade eating fruit–that’s the “big F Faith.” But the “little f faith” is if I keep watering this I’m going to see a sprout. 

 

Faith Is Not Blind: And we need to remember both kinds of faith. Tyler, beautifully expressed. Thank you very much for coming in today.

 

Tyler: Thanks so much.