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[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 13 October 2008.]
(Notes for a Sacrament Meeting talk I gave to the Alpine 1st Ward on 7/13/08)
It’s
a universal principle that if humans aren’t permitted to breathe, they
will die. It’s true across the globe, and we ought not to have to say
any more about it than that--you should just believe it. But the way to
get this universal principle to become very important in your lives
would be for me to pinch your nose and put my hand over your mouth for
a minute or two. It’s by exploring very specific situations that we
really come to learn very general truths. Some folks don’t feel that
the experience of the pioneers is particularly relevant to their lives,
because they’re not related to any. And it was a long time ago. And
they dressed unattractively. Nineteenth-century pioneering appears to
be a situation that isn’t specific to everybody. I want this to be
relevant, and I want to speak to a situation in which each of us,
specifically, finds ourselves.
In 1842, two years before the
martyrdom of Joseph Smith, four years before the departure of the
saints from Nauvoo, one year after the temple was begun, the prophet
gathered a council of fifty leaders of the church to discuss where the
saints should settle in the Rocky Mountains. He made particular mention
of “The Valley of the Tampanogos.” The spelling was wrong, but the
meaning was obvious. In 1776, the Catholic fathers Dominguez and
Escalante had come to this valley and considered it, hands-down, the
high point of their lengthy expedition. They were in the valley for two
days and made it as far north as Lindon. The Indians here were called
Timpanogotzis, named after their mountain, Timpanogos, an Aztec word
meaning “stone person.” In the first hours of the fathers’ visit, the
Indians were taught the rudiments of the gospel and, almost as one,
wanted passionately to be baptized. Dominguez said that priests would
be sent back to the valley within the year, along with Spanish settlers
intent on building four large communities, one each along the four
rivers flowing out of the Wasatch mountains above us, and that the
Indians would be baptized and cared for then. Political trouble in New
Mexico prevented that return, and the next Europeans they saw in any
numbers were the Mormons, 71 years later.
The records and maps
made by the Catholic expedition were accurate and extremely well
detailed. But in 1842, they were not widely known. Still, Joseph knew.
He saw this place.
On a spring morning in 1820, the boy prophet
may not have been thinking of monumental migrations of Christians at
all, but on that morning a stone was cut from the mountains without
hands, to roll forth and expand and fill the earth. Well, fill it with
what? Not rock. I think the substance of that planet-sized stone is
dreams--a dream of zion, a dream of living forever with the kind of
beauty and love that our Father enjoys, a dream of angels speaking
again to the children of the earth. It was in pursuit of dreams, not of
gold or of richer soil, that a few adventurous souls 162 years ago
became pioneers.
How big a deal was it? By the numbers:
The number of Mormon pioneers? Men, women, and children? 70,000.
Number of pioneers who walked the entire trail? Certainly the vast majority.
Number
of pioneers who came by handcart? 3,000, or 4%. (There are reasons why
the handcart pioneers loom large in our imaginations. We’ll talk about
them in a moment.)
Frequency of deaths on the trail? One in eighteen. (One in maybe 23 would have died had they stayed home.)
Period of the exodus? Twenty-two years.
Number of companies? Two hundred.
Number
of companies a giant eagle high above the planet might see, stretched
out along the trail, all at once, in an average September? Nine,
averaging 350 souls in each.
Number of pioneers born as Americans? One in every four.
Number of pioneers who began the trail immediately after crossing the Atlantic Ocean? Two of every three.
Now
these Mormons did not arrange to meet in small groups at the docks and
buy tickets on ships that were bound for America, hoping they might
meet another nice Latter-day Saint family to pal around with on deck.
No. They chartered whole ships and filled them–-every soul a Latter-day
Saint, except the captain and crew. And more often than not, when the
ship finally landed, every soul was a Latter-day Saint.
How many ships? Ninety-seven. Eighty-seven from Liverpool, six from Hamburg, four from London.
Among
them were The Argo, The Olympus, The Ellen Maria, The Forest Monarch,
The Golconda, The Old England, The Germanicus, The Rockaway, The
Emerald Isle, The Chimborazo, The Caravan, The Enoch Train, The
Horizon, The Tuscarora, The William Tappscott, The Monarch Of The Sea,
The Antarctic, The Amazon, The Caroline, The Arkwright, The S. Curling.
Average number of saints per ship? 434.
Distance from Liverpool to New Orleans, where more than half landed? 5,000 miles.
New Orleans to St. Louis? 1,173 miles up the Mississippi River.
St. Louis to the trailhead at Kanesville or Florence, where Winter Quarters stood? 620 miles.
Winter Quarters to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake? 1,035 miles.
Length of the journey for most? 7,828 miles.
Minor interruptions in the flow of pioneers:
1846, war between the United States and Mexico.
1854, war between the United States and the Sioux Nation,
1858, war between the United States and the Mormons,
1862, war between the United States . . . and itself.
So
what is the appeal of handcarts? Were the hardships stiffer or the
sacrifices greater for them than for the others? Generally not. Brigham
Young, who got the idea from seeing street merchants selling things
from carts in the cities of the east--carts that were never meant to
travel farther than the few blocks between the merchant’s home, the
source of his supply, and his spot on the sidewalk--promised the
handcart pioneers that they would come to the valley cheaper, faster,
and be more healthy when they got there than the wagon companies. He
was right. It was obviously cheaper. The handcart companies averaged 25
miles a day to the wagon companies’ 20. And the travellers were not
only stronger by the end, but a whole lot more of their children
survived the trail, not having been run over by wagons--the leading
cause of death among pioneer children.
There were ten
companies over the years of 1856 and 1857. Eight were hugely
successful. Two were not. A company led by James Willie began their
trek in the latter half of August, 1856, followed shortly by a company
led by Edward Martin. It was a bad idea. Everybody voted in favor but
one. Levi Savage boldly objected, saying that he thought it the height
of foolishness to set out that late in the season with so many
untrained pioneers. But then he went on to say that if they went, he
would go with them, help them, suffer with them, and even die with
them, should it become necessary.
John Watkins, a mason from
Britain, had a strange dream just before the day of decision. He
dreamed that all six hundred saints were gathered in a room about 40
feet square (in a dream, that’s possible), and an angel turned a crank
on a rotating cage in which were six hundred slips of paper. Then, one
by one, each of the six hundred drew out a slip, and on the slip was
written whether or not that pioneer would live or die. When John
Watkins drew out his slip of paper, he folded it over without reading
it and said, “I am willing to take my chances with the rest.” He was
bugler for the company.
They set out. The weather was fine. They
were in a hurry. They did what they thought was wise. To lighten their
loads, they tossed out heavy blankets, heavy coats, extra boots. Barely
into September, the deepest, earliest, harshest winter in anyone’s
memory hit them like a freight train. They weakened. They slowed. They
stopped. The Willie company stopped at a point on the wide Wyoming
highlands later called St. Mary’s Station. The Martin company, in no
communication with the Willie company, fatally stalled at about the
same time, seventy miles behind on the alkali plain east of Devil’s
Gate, a plain called by the pioneers “the valley of the shadow of
death.”
Food was virtually gone, and there was no shelter at
all. All of them would have perished, every one, were it not for the
fact that some weeks earlier they had been passed by a party of
returning missionaries in a fast horse-drawn carriage, who themselves
shortly experienced the rigors of the winter.
The missionaries
got to Salt Lake just in time for Brigham Young to stand up in the
Saturday session of General Conference and require a rescue. On
Tuesday, the wagons were rolling eastward through deep snow. The Willie
company was found on the open Wyoming highlands and driven over Rocky
Ridge to a more sheltered camp at Rock Creek, where 11 died the first
night. Their mass grave was dug by two men whose own graves are only a
few yards away. The 15-mile march took 27 hours, killing many and
saving many more. The Martin company was taken to Martin’s Cove, where
their dead were buried in the snow and ravaged by wolves. At Echo
Canyon, a rescued Martin company pioneer named Squires gave birth to a
baby girl, who was kept alive by being wrapped in the still-warm temple
garments of one of the rescuers. Sister Squires, perhaps wanting her
baby to appreciate the horrific and triumphant circumstances
surrounding her birth, named the child, “Echo.” Margaret Dalglish, a
29-year-old single Scottish sister somehow showed up at the brink of
the descent into the Salt Lake Valley with her handcart intact--most
others’ had disintegrated or been burned for firewood or simply been
left behind much earlier. She thrust her cart into the ravine beside
the trail, sending the earthly treasures she had brought from the
British Isles and pushed across the plains crashing end over end into
the stones and snow. Then she stuck out her chin and threw back her
shoulders and, with nothing but the rags on her back and the faith in
her heart, marched down into her new home. That’s what eyewitnesses
saw. But I see her as a treasure galleon, with banners waving and a
hold rich with gold and spices and silk. I imagine her having learned,
through unutterable trial, the poverty of material things relative to
spiritual wealth.
Some of us have the notion that the Mormon
pioneers saw the world in bold strokes of black or white, while we
moderns squint through myriad shades of gray. If you read the pioneers’
journals, those blacks and whites are bold and clear, but the
surprise is what arched in between--not “shades of gray” at all, but a
rainbow of passions and fears, dares and enormous presumptions. Their
“trail of dreams” paralleled, often at a stone’s throw, two rivers that
have taken on mythic proportions--the Platte and the Sweetwater--and
along each of them the pioneers traveled upstream.
By
the side of the Sweetwater today lie countless dull stones. Toss them
into that bracing current and suddenly they are the deep blue of the
night sky, the gold of sunset through clouds of dust, or the pink-white
of snow, or stars. So it was with the lives of common souls who plunged
into the river of pioneers and walked their thousand miles upstream
into the valleys of the Wasatch to make us a home.
The Spirit
has helped me imagine that the pioneers would plead with us that these
valleys (very much including the valley of the “Tampanogos”) not become
ordinary. The “valleys of the saints,” be they shaded by the Wasatch,
the Appalachians, the Andes, or just very tall Iowa corn, should never
become ordinary.
The whole idea of pioneering was (is) to
leave Babylon behind. The trail along the south bank of the Platte was
crowded with travelers pursuing richer soil and gold. The trail along
the north bank, the rougher trail, was blazed by Latter-day Saints
pursuing the dream of spiritual bounty and beauty. The south-bank trail
ended in the rich Willamette Valley of Oregon and the gold fields of
California. The north-bank trail ended in a desert waiting to blossom
as a rose. To allow any stretch of real estate that has been
consecrated as Zion to become ordinary, be its borders as tight as four
walls and a door, is a betrayal of the dreams that drove Pioneers to
pay extraordinary prices to get there.
To get here. To get wherever Zion is. Or to wherever it was imagined or commanded to be.
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 21 July 2008.]
(These are notes for a lesson I taught the 14-year-olds in Sunday School.)
LOGIC OF THE FALL
You can’t be like God until you learn how to do what God does.
You can only learn to do what God does by doing it.
But in all eternity, only God can do what He does, so you can’t learn how.
So God needed to make a place where this rule could be broken just long enough for us to practice doing what He does--marry, create and procreate, and taste the joy of seeing our children love each other. He made us the earth. Only if we discover here how these godly things feel can we have a fair choice between accepting or rejecting God’s dream for us.
But how to get us into this temporary, broken-rule practice-place?
God can’t break rules, nor can he tell us to break them. If He did, He would cease to be God. Only we can choose to dive into a world that’s based on a broken rule, where our attempts to practice godhood will pretty much fail, but will help us understand in a candle-sized way what it feels like to be God.
This Eve chose to do, for herself, her husband, and all her unborn children.
We call her choice “The Fall” because the children of God literally fall into a world where we will fail at doing what in all the rest of Eternity only gods can do. Marry, create and procreate, and help our children love each other.
But we will learn and we will qualify, by experience, to choose what we want for the rest of our endless lives.
Great. But having chosen, how do we get out of this place? First of all, the tools we were given to learn with, our bodies, crumble to dust, and so we wind up at death with just enough sweet knowledge and desire to go on doing what God does, but without the one tool He always had and we didn’t, a body. Eve saw this physical death coming, and made her choice anyway, because she wanted the knowledge of good and evil that would help her become like God, knowledge that comes only with some good long years of laughing and living and hurting and dying.
Second, our struggles to learn, our trials and errors and misunderstandings and pride, have left our spirits scarred and seared and stained. We have lost our innocence here and we have become, to one degree or another, friends or prisoners of the Anti-God, Satan. Eve might have seen this spiritual death coming, too, and made her choice anyway.
With the stage set for the great wrestle with the earth, with desire, with death, and with the Adversary, God showed our first parents the Way out at the end of it all, not the way back to where they’d been, walking parallel with Him but never on His plane--He showed them the Way out to where He is, to where only those who are like Him can go, where only those who are like Him would even want to be.
The Way out is a Person, God’s Son Jesus. He came into this broken-rule world and never allowed His spirit to get scarred, seared, or stained. And because the father of His body was God, Jesus had the power to raise His own body up from the dust--and, having done that, to raise ours, as well. He offered, before the earth was made, to absorb and suffer all the sorrows, sickness, and pain that arise from all our errors and foolishness, man by man and woman by woman and child by child, so that He would have the knowledge to judge us and the authority to forgive us. (Because the mother of His body was an earthling girl, getting this knowledge and authority hurt Him immeasurably.) But His forgiveness heals and cleans us and, with our sacrifice of self and proven desire for God’s quality of joy, finally clears the way for us to be “at one” with our Father.
The idea is not to get back to the Garden, or try to hop from there to Heaven, but to fall from it into the trying and dying world and then be lifted from there above all gardens and earths to live in the light of God, now knowing a little of what He knows and having lived, with those we love, at least a pale copy of what He lives.
Everything I believe is based on the beautiful idea that God loves us enough to want us to have all the happiness, power, and opportunity He enjoys. It’s the keystone of my testimony, without which all the weighty theological blocks cave in on themselves. It’s the purpose behind our descent into this hostile and hazardous universe, and only faith in Christ justifies the vastly presumptuous risk.
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 5 February 2005.] (I gave this talk to the men in church 30 January 2005) RESTORATION I think the Restoration of the Gospel is both bigger and smaller than we usually see it. We talk about how great movements in the world like the Protestant Reformation, the discovery of America, and the establishment of the United States are all part of the Restoration, all preceding Joseph's vision in the grove. But what about significant developments in the world after the grove? There's a family history software company that's had the vision to use as its theme "It's what computers were invented for." They were using that line even before the appearance of the Internet. Now LDS.org or Meridian Magazine or the Family History Department or, perhaps very soon, the Missionary Department, can say the same thing, with some reasonable authority: "It's what the Internet was invented for." I happen to think that spreading and celebrating the Restoration of the Gospel is what the modern musical theatre was invented for. I can even stretch that idea to say that it's what the C.F. Martin Guitar Company was invented for. By the gift of heaven, man makes tools. Often man doesn't know what the tools are for. He just starts pounding or sawing or typing or strumming away at whatever projects ignite his passions. But God knows what the tools are for. If, in the centuries preceding Joseph's prayer in the grove, we might have found merely a hammer or tongs or maybe a compass or a set of simple scales in some metropolitan marketplace, now we virtually live in a vast combination Home Depot, Ultimate Electronics, and Musician's Friend. Is it too much to imagine that all this invention is a consequence of the Spirit of the Restoration moving in the earth? We freely acknowledge that the otherwise inexplicable passion for family history in the world is a consequence of the Spirit of Elijah moving in the earth. The stone may have been cut from the mountain without hands, but its inexorable progress and expansion across the globe is lubricated and accelerated by tools that weren't here before Joseph prayed. Another thing that wasn't here before Joseph prayed is between 60 and 70 percent of the total population of the earth from the beginning of time. That's the proportion of father's children who are said to have come to earth during this latter-day Dispensation of the Fulness of Times (nothing very arbitrary about the timing of the Restoration). If we allow that the light given to humans to empower the development of technology might be part of the Restoration, what about the light given to humans to empower the development of compassion, reason, courage, beauty, and charity. Just as we honor and respect the reformers, the framers of the constitution, and the inspired inventors, so many of whom were not Latter-day Saints, and insist that the Lord has used them to advance the Restoration of His Gospel, ought we not to honor and respect those nurturers of compassion, reason, courage, beauty, and charity who are also advancing the essence of the Savior's gospel, be they Latter-day Saints or not, and celebrate the notion that the Lord is using them? It's certainly not their fault if they don't know their work is part of the Restoration. But I suggested that the Restoration is smaller than we usually think it is, as well. To understand this, we need to think of Apostasy and Restoration as principles and personal patterns rather than merely as history. I used to imagine that the Apostasy occurred because the Savior's original apostles were killed and their message corrupted, and that it took at least a couple of centuries to happen. But I remember Elder Neal A. Maxwell suggesting that the Apostasy occurred not because the apostles were taken, but that the apostles were taken because the apostasy had already occurred. We usually think of "apostasy" meaning that the priesthood has been withdrawn. But this withdrawal of priesthood can be very personal. D&C 121 41 No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned... 37 That (the powers of the priesthood) may be conferred upon us, it is true; but when we undertake to cover our sins, or to gratify our pride, our vain ambition, or to exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness, behold, the heavens withdraw themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man. Didn't the Apostasy of old have these precise causes? Well, anyone who has ever repented will know that restoration can be just as personal, certainly as intimate, if not always as spectacular, as was Joseph's experience in the grove, where he did battle with the Prince of Darkness, held conversation with the Creator of the Universe, and heard the Father of Light speak his name. And how ought we to feel about the Restoration, big or small, universal or personal? This is part of how Joseph Smith felt, as shared in a letter to the saints. D&C 128 19 Now, what do we hear in the gospel which we have received? A voice of gladness! A voice of mercy from heaven; and a voice of truth out of the earth; glad tidings for the dead; a voice of gladness for the living and the dead; glad tidings of great joy. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those that bring glad tidings of good things, and that say unto Zion: Behold, thy God reigneth! As the dews of Carmel, so shall the knowledge of God descend upon them! 20 And again, what do we hear? Glad tidings from Cumorah! Moroni, an angel from heaven, declaring the fulfilment of the prophets-the book to be revealed. A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county, declaring the three witnesses to bear record of the book! The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light! The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness between Harmony, Susquehanna county, and Colesville, Broome county, on the Susquehanna river, declaring themselves as possessing the keys of the kingdom, and of the dispensation of the fulness of times! 21 And again, the voice of God in the chamber of old Father Whitmer, in Fayette, Seneca county, and at sundry times, and in divers places through all the travels and tribulations of this Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! And the voice of Michael, the archangel; the voice of Gabriel, and of Raphael, and of divers angels, from Michael or Adam down to the present time, all declaring their dispensation, their rights, their keys, their honors, their majesty and glory, and the power of their priesthood; giving line upon line, precept upon precept; here a little, and there a little; giving us consolation by holding forth that which is to come, confirming our hope! 22 Brethren, shall we not go on in so great a cause? Go forward and not backward. Courage, brethren; and on, on to the victory! Let your hearts rejoice, and be exceedingly glad. Let the earth break forth into singing. Let the dead speak forth anthems of eternal praise to the King Immanuel, who hath ordained, before the world was, that which would enable us to redeem them out of their prison; for the prisoners shall go free. 23 Let the mountains shout for joy, and all ye valleys cry aloud; and all ye seas and dry lands tell the wonders of your Eternal King! And ye rivers, and brooks, and rills, flow down with gladness. Let the woods and all the trees of the field praise the Lord; and ye solid rocks weep for joy! And let the sun, moon, and the morning stars sing together, and let all the sons of God shout for joy! And let the eternal creations declare his name forever and ever! And again I say, how glorious is the voice we hear from heaven, proclaiming in our ears, glory, and salvation, and honor, and immortality, and eternal life; kingdoms, principalities, and powers! 25 Brethren, I have many things to say to you on the subject; but shall now close for the present, and continue the subject another time. I am, as ever, your humble servant and never deviating friend, JOSEPH SMITH. The more we know about the nature of and reasons for apostasy, and the nature of and reasons for restoration, the more we understand this pattern, the better equipped we will be to live.
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 7 February 2005.] [A talk I gave to the men in church 25 January 2004] FIRM, STEADFAST, AND IMMOVABLE 3 Nephi 6:14 "...the church was broken up in all the land save it were among a few of the Lamanites who were converted unto the true faith; and they would not depart from it, for they were firm, and steadfast, and immovable, willing with all diligence to keep the commandments of the Lord." Being firm,
steadfast, and immovable suggests to me resistance to some force
that would move me. In the sixth chapter of Third Nephi, there
are listed a few very specific things to resist. They are pride,
disputings, railing against railing, seeking for power and authority,
and distinguishing by ranks based on income and education. If
we don't resist these things specifically, the church may be broken
up. Not only may the church be broken up, but wards, primary classes,
families, and friends may be broken up, and all still attend the
same sacrament meetings and sing the same hymns together. And
they would look, to the careless observer, entirely un-broken
up. I love my church. I love my ward. I love my quorum. I love my family. I would share in our Savior's sorrow if any of them were to be "broken up."
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 26 January 2004.] [This is a presentation for a stake conference session on 12 December of 2002. My wife and I were asked to speak together, and since we're both actors, we wrote ourselves a script.] I'M NOT A "NON-YOU." LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE MARVIN LAURIE
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 18 November 2003.]
[I gave this talk at my son Joshua's missionary farewell on 7 June 1997. I include it here because Joshua's birthday is in this season, and because I think the sentiments in the talk resonate both with spring and with Easter.]
MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE! Josh excites
me--his power that so clearly comes from the Lord, his mind that
so earnestly seizes light. His past excites me, because it's so
full of victory and love--his future because the clear destination
of his countless daily choices is glory. 30 April 1978 23 October 1982 12 May 1989 6 March 1993
22 May 1994 19 November 1995 27 October 1996 I wrote a
song for Josh when he was pretty young: Josh has
for many years practiced music for several hours a day--three
to six, sometimes more. In junior high school the time wasted
in class trying to guess what the teacher was thinking or listening
to his noisy friends finally got to him, and he persuaded his
parents to let him go to night school at A.F. High with the juvenile
delinquents so he could do schoolwork at a faster independent
pace and have more time to practice. It was his joy to find the
treasures within and learn how to share them. That kind of focus
and dedication demanded our respect, although legions of experts
and even other parents might have thought it very strange of us
to allow it. Now he has chosen to answer the call to serve as
a missionary. That kind of focus and dedication, that unrelenting
drive to make a joyful noise, demands our respect, though all
the world might think it strange.
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 16 April 2003.]
(This is a talk I gave in church. I don't remember when, but I'm certain it was in the past.) TESTIMONY We are a "do
it yourself" people, which is mostly good. We are self-reliant,
accountable, and responsible. An early visitor to the West looked
out over the well-cultivated and neatly civilized Salt Lake Valley
in the company of Brigham Young. He said something like "My,
President Young, it's miraculous what you and the Lord have done
with this desert valley!" and Brigham Young said, "You
should have seen it when it was just the Lord's." We try
to grow our own food, we publish our own scriptures, and we don't
pay anybody to preach to us. We even have the idea we could get
perfect if we could just manage to get organized. This is mostly
good. ... the natural man receiveth not the things
of the Spirit of My sister recently
brought me from Hawaii a lovely little seashell lei. If you were
to see it, you might want it. How would you get it? Would you
imagine yourself having it until all of a sudden it was yours?
Would you somehow "work" at having it until suddenly
it was around your neck? Of course the only way you could have
this thing is if I gave it to you. Because it's mine. If I were
wise and kind, and felt that it would bless you to have it, it
would please me to give it to you. The key word here is "give."
You can neither take, make, nor "build" a testimony.
You are given one. If the Lord feels that it would bless you to
have one, He'll give you one. To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world. To others it is given to believe on their words, that they also might have eternal life if they continue faithful. The people who find this threatening are those who think they have a testimony, act like they have one, and think that it would be sinful to pretend to be a Latter-day Saint without having one. The people who find this passage confusing are the "do it yourselfers" who can't imagine why anyone without a testimony wouldn't just "build" one. The people who are deeply comforted by this passage are those who are 19, 29, or 63, who love the work, want with all their hearts to know of its truthfulness, but who cannot honestly say they have a testimony. The comforting part is not that they are "off the hook" and can say "It's the Lord's fault if I don't know." People who would be comforted in that way generally leave the work early, because it's hard to spend a lot of time in an environment where something you don't have is talked about so much, an environment in which everybody seems to have it but you. No, the real comfort comes in the last phrase ... they also might have eternal life if they continue faithful. Let's read "faithful" the way a lover reads the word. To the lover, there's no question at all that his beloved exists. In that sense, there's really nothing to "believe in." "Faithful" to the lover means remembering the beloved, counting on the beloved, reserving one's intimate affections for the beloved, and above all else, being loyal to the beloved. This is, in fact, the faith the gods have in each other. They have a complete knowledge of each other's existence. But C.S. Lewis points out to us that the gods have much more important things to do than "merely to exist." Yet Joseph Smith, in his "Lectures On Faith" teaches that the gods do everything they do by faith. He must mean this loyalty kind of faith rather than the mere believing kind. Jesus teaches us this meaning of "faith" when He calls the church His bride, and in his heartbreak when the Old Testament saints left Him, their first love, to go "whoring" after other gods. In natural life, the virgin, man or woman, dreaming of the marriage, having been "faithful" to the beloved, is finally invited into the bridechamber and is given direct and intimate knowledge. In spiritual life, Ether said that the righteous are given that which they have first seen "with an eye of faith." But as with the newlywed, the knowledge is better than the vision. Paul said Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. (1 Cor. 2:9) This marriage knowledge is, for everyone,
a surprise -- never something that can be rehearsed or faked or
even fully expected. I think it's interesting that the word so
often used in the scriptures for this physical intimacy is "know."
Anyway, spiritual knowledge, or testimony, is a little like that. (Eye hath not seen ...) But God hath revealed [or given] them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. So in the meantime,
what can you "do yourself"? You can remain faithful,
like a lover. Because, again from Ether, "ye receive no witness
until after the trial of your faith" -- faith that is, like
the lover's, really loyalty and longing. ... this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. As with the actor seeking to know his character, we can only know God by feeling His feelings, suffering His sorrow, enjoying His glory. From 1 John 3:2: ... now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is And from Moroni 7:48: Wherefore my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure. Amen. There are things
I feel and suffer and enjoy that my younger children cannot feel,
suffer, and enjoy. They will, but not yet. I can wish to impress
upon my little son the humbling and exhilarating feeling of becoming
a father, but try as he might, or want it as he may, he will never
know the feeling until he stands by his wife in the moment of
childbearing. He cannot, and this is key, have a testimony of
that. Nor can we have a testimony of certain godly feelings until
we have felt them. What we "do it yourself" types are
to do is try to be good, so that when God chooses to reveal a
facet of His grace to us, we will feel and know it, and testify
of it, rather than be consumed with confusion or mangled by misunderstanding.
To prepare for a testimony of God's forgiveness, we forgive. To
pepare for a testimony of God's creative power, we create. To
prepare for a testimony of God's love, we love. Even to feel God's
mercy we must be good enough to be humble. The king of the Lamanites
had it right when he said "I will give away all my sins to
know thee."
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 3 January 2003.]
"THREE DAYS" (Joan is my wife's mother.) Here is the
doctrinal part. I hope I don't blow it. But this is, for us, a
holy time, and I feel the Spirit's supervision and pray for His
protection from excess and error. I also feel keenly the trust
of Joan's family--that has become my family, my parents, my brothers,
my sisters, my wife, my children--and thank them, and her, for
this honor. Her husband Dave asked me to talk about Family. "The Father of love and light and
dreams has given us family, so we can stream all our light, spend
all our love, and dream all our dreams for them--tasting for the
first time in this awesome walk on earth, the sharp sweet joy
our Father in Heaven feels. Whether
or not that world, or any inhabitant thereof, believes this is
not the point here. The point is that Joan did. She hung another
document on her wall, headed "The Koralewski House,"
describing it as a "house of prayer, a house of fasting,
a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house
of order, a house of God." It was sometimes all of those
things and always some of those things. It was Joan's hope that
it would always be all of those things, but she wasn't the only
one living there. She wanted her family to be full of love and
light, and sought that blessing from the Source, backing up her
faith with the heroic work of trying to create family unity by
driving to the ends of the earth together in a friendly but totally
unreliable Volkswagen bus and bonding through the adversity of
being stranded in ghettos and rain forests, by hiking every inch
of every canyon in Utah together, and by insisting that every
act of living be somehow creative, from the organizing of flour
into fanciful cookies as well as into head-to-toe adornment for
her grandchildren, to her demand that every family gathering feature
the blowing of piano-sized soap bubbles or the playing of PVC-pipe
didgeridoos. For Joan, green Jell-o was not so much a cultural
icon as something to finger-paint with. These phenomena existed
or occurred only because she loved her family. Her husband has
likened her to a bright balloon tethered to the earth by the slightest
thread. I believe her keenest (and most frequent) disappointments
were when we failed to hover alongside her in the sunshine, blown-up
and shiny and multicolored. She knew what it was like up there.
"Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me." (Psalm 139: 7-11) Paul, as well, sang, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ...I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Nor, according to prophets living and dead, will even our sins interfere with that love, except to dull our senses to its steady sweet flow. Moving from doctrine to mere observation, I will now take a reckless running leap into Joan's heart. But I leap with confidence, because in the last moment I spent with her, on Saturday afternoon when she was past speech (or above speech), she smiled at me with blazing clarity a peace that could arise from nothing less than this testimony: "I am not ashamed of who I am. I am not ashamed of how I feel. I caused the scars He wears forever, I am not ashamed to say His name. "For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way. Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise. And about the eleventh hour [which is starting to sound like a pretty long workday to me] he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive. So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first. And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny." (Matthew 20: 1-10) Just like the laborers who were hired in the first hour. Accounting for twenty-two centuries of
inflation, that would be about a bazillion dollars. And those
who join the workforce in the last hour of the day get the same
wage. What should that matter to those who have worked there all
day? A bazillion dollars is more than any of us can ever spend.
Father has promised us everything He has. We can never spend it
all.
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 18 November 2002.]
(This is a talk I gave in church sometime in 2001.)
THE POWER TO HOME TEACH When we were
asked if the elders quorum presidency would speak today, the first
topic that popped into our heads was Home Teaching. We thought
for just a minute and then kicked it out of our heads, because
it seemed like something we ought to talk to just the brethren
about. And we prepared for a week to talk about something else.
Then we met on the back lawn last Sunday evening and the Spirit
calmly corrected us and reminded us that He was the one who had
popped home teaching into our heads in the first place. Because
every soul here today is involved in home teaching. Every girl
and boy and mom and dad has a home teacher, and everyone here
deserves to know what the Lord has asked your home teacher to
do for you, and everyone here deserves to know just how the Lord
intends to go about making your home teacher into someone who
will amaze, delight, and bless your life.
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 24 September 2002.]
(A talk I gave in church in April, 1996.)
LEARNING SELF-CONTROL Self-control doesn't
sound like much fun. The world has conditioned us to feel negative
connotations when we hear words like "self-control."
The word "righteousness," for example, feels solemn
and sour sometimes, even to us, whereas "mischief" (another
word for "wickedness") actually feels fun, on a certain
level. But because we all know all the time (on a certain level)
that self-control and righteousness are good, it's easy to see
that the Adversary is trying to plant in us the suggestion that
things that are good are unpleasant. And it's working. Haven't
most of us heard an outwardly righteous person reporting that
some sinner has "gotten away with it"? You will only
find that veiled jealousy in people who haven't yet noticed that
righteousness is a great deal of funit makes us very happy.
When the Son of Man shall come in his glory,
and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit down upon
the throne of his glory: The fascinating
discovery about these people is that they reached their long-term
goal without even seeming to have one! Their refrigerator doors
were blank! And yet their short-term goals, to bring relief to
the suffering, joy to the sorrowful, mere company to the lonely,
were so purely Godlike that they were drawn straight to the shining
home of God, and were surprised when they got there!
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 12 May 2002.]
(This is a short thought I shared in church a few years ago. Or maybe a long thought I shared shortly.)
LONELINESS In the church
film "Together Forever" a young man points out that
to be accepted by the drinkers, all you have to do is drink. To
be accepted by those who abuse drugs, all you have to do is abuse
drugs. To join people in a sin creates a kind of bond that, as
a counterfeit of real friendship, fools a lot of people. But at
least the appearance of acceptance is undeniable.
[The following was retired to the Soapbox Archive 1 April 2002.]
(This is a talk I gave in church a few years ago. The sacrament is a piece of Easter we can touch each Sabbath.)
A SACRAMENT TALK Imagine you
are lost on a rolling rutted desert fanning out from the feet
of bare rocky mountains. Hours ago, long before daylight, you
set out with friends and family for a lake lying somewhere along
that distant hazy range. At first you were cold and hoping for
the sun--you hiked faster than you should have, just to get warm.
Then it rose, glorious, and soon you tied your sweatshirt around
your waist. Then you took off your hat, because your head was
sweating so much. Then you put it back on, because the sun beat
on your head and hurt your eyes. |