Frisson

I want to be a bird
just for one day
to briefly flit around you in
the flickering light of evening
before alighting fluttering onto your
outstretched palm
full of song so sweet
that you can't help
believing in miracles

85:10

The Psalmist doesn’t say

whether they were in a tree or not

or whether it began with holding hands

or really anything about how these two

old friends ended up in passionate embrace

Just this: “Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other.”

Reported with the laconic stroke of a headline.

How does he even know something so personal?

Were there witnesses?

Was old David hiding in the bushes

stilling the strings of his old harp

as these two came ambling into the space

lighted by streetlamp, laughing together?

Were they walking home

from the house of a mutual friend

where their eyes just happened to collide

for the briefest, most enduring moment?

Did the singer see the brush of hands,

the lighting of eyes and the quickening

of pulses?

Did the two just decide by happenstance

to climb a sycamore tree

to watch the moon rise over the valley?

And was it Righteousness who made the first move

or Peace, with his gentle, shy, yet manly ways

who first leaned in with more than friendly intent?

Did he grab her by the arms like they do in the old movies,

or was it just a gentle peck on the cheek?

These are only questions, but one thing is certain:

Things have never been the same since the day

that Righteousness and Peace kissed each other,

and everything is charged with hope.

The Thaw

Between the rain this morning and the temple, my stale winter mind caught a whiff of the slow, distant advent of spring. The brief thaw brought forth these brief thoughts:

“Barefoot”
 

God’s shoes

were long ago flung

so far into the dark recesses
of the multiverse
that it will likely take
twelve legions of angels
their whole seraphic lifetimes
to locate them.

Not that the winged ones

mind much.
For they have each other,
and the boy angels are thinking
about the eyes and smiles of all those
girl angels who will be joining them,
the ones who packed a picnic
of sandwiches—eternal light spread heavy
between thick slices of
the bread of praise.
And the prospect of adventuring
into the bright, mysterious heart of nowhere—
lifting rocks and uncovering things the eternal mind
may have long forgotten—
seems just the thing to prove
their undying love.

Meanwhile God

stands barefoot and laughing,
fully cognizant that the ground
on which He stands is holy
precisely because of His transfiguring presence.

But He can’t help wriggling

His toes deep into the earth—

a sigh on His lips and a

song in His eyes—

because this particular patch of grass,

halfway between the mailbox

and the front door,

seems especially full of glory this morning.

“This fine”

I can’t help thinking this fine Thursday

that the God of Rilke has come to me—

this infant in my arms

with her laughing mouth open

to eat my nose.

Again God in the least of these

has done it unto me.

 

Invited

So when God invited me to His choir practice, I said yes.

He carried me like an infant in His enormous arms.

I usually feel like a newborn when I’m with Him, helpless and soft.

He took me to this room on the other side of town,

Mostly stone and earthy wood. A cricket chirped outside.

Dimmish lights. I could tell the acoustics would be good.

When the room filled with music, my heart inflated.

God held me against his massive chest, and sound

Thrummed through my body. I shuttered and shook.

I breathed pure song.

I’ve always liked to imagine what it would feel like to be a baby

In someone else’s strong, brave arms.

The way my daughter puts her face into the crook of my shoulder,

The way my son feigns sleep so that I will carry him in from the car.

I looked around the room at all these warm glowing faces

And bright white robes—

Robes of light and righteousness and glory,

And I wondered,

“Who does all the laundry?”

Something Beautiful From God

"Flight Practice With Instruction" by Brian Kershisnik

During my freshman year of college, I one day sat transfixed as a teacher sang the world anew. I don’t know what the reality was, but in my mind’s eye Steve Walker stands in the middle of a room full of students, a radiant smile on his face, his hands uplifted. Swallows and some other small passerine birds shoot from his fingertips and flutter around the room, alighting on my head and arms, lifting me. Light emanated from him as he wove poetry into the air—a bright, warm covering.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

He was a magician and a miracle-worker. It was more than the words. His very being was poetry. His love and his enthusiasm and his gentleness and his humor. It was then I knew I wanted poetry flowing through my veins, quickening me and hastening my pulse. I perceived the igniting of a holy fire inside my immortal soul.

Teaching is more than mechanics and mnemonics; it is miracle and mystery. It is grace and a gift. A class is more than a system or a structure. It is soul and song and something else.

Professor Walker had memorized everyone’s name in a class of fifty students by the second day. He had us all up to his house for waffles and assorted jams. He loved us, and we knew it. He possessed an infectious enthusiasm. I have always loved the etymology of that word: en theos—God inside. One day he called me at my house. “Hi, this is Steve . . .” I racked my brain thinking of all the Steves who might be calling me. “You asked me a question in class and I didn’t like my answer. I looked into it.” He had done some research and spouted off three distinct sources for the answer he provided. No one knew about that call but me and him. He was genuine. He had a photographic memory and could read a ten page paper in five minutes and then quote back his favorite parts. My spirit stirred in that classroom. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” was the first poem I memorized.

This is my thesis: teachers matter. They make a difference. Mr. Jackson who surprised me by sincerely seeming to care when I dropped out of his calculus class. I still dropped the class, but his concern lingers with me. His gentle eyes. Mrs. Sillito, who asked me if I was alright one day as I slept through her Spanish class. Mrs. Black, who years after she taught me tracked me down where I work to tell me I was a bright and fun child in elementary school.

What was it old Nicodemus said to Jesus (who was the world's greatest teacher)? “Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.” Sometimes teaching is thankless, but this Thanksgiving, I want to express my gratitude for teachers come from God.

My friend Brandon was born to drug-addicted parents. His mom was fourteen. His dad was fifteen. He had an older brother. By the time he was three, he was smoking marijuana. By five he was doing cocaine. He said that when he went to school, the other kids would make fun of him because he didn’t have any underwear and he was dirty and hungry and smelled like cigarettes and drugs. He would eat maybe once a day, at the local food shelter or at the school. His parents were dealing to fuel their addictions. One day in first grade he told his dad that he wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to go to school. His father punched him in the six-year-old face, breaking his nose and making him bleed and vomit. Then he told him to go to school. He went.

As a small boy he watched eight police officers attack his father. His dad sent three of them to the hospital before they finally subdued him with a tasers, batons, and a bean bag round. One officer had led him away so that he would not witness it all. He told me that by second grade he was so tired of life that he began to consider suicide. He wondered if he would always hurt, always be lonely, always be unloved. He felt worthless. No one cared about him. By second grade he was stealing and doing heavy drugs, and his second grade teacher pulled him aside and asked what was going on. He told her nothing. His father had threatened his life if he ever told about home. She told him she wasn’t going to let him leave until he told her. She told him everything would be alright. She told him she cared about him and wanted to help him. For the first time in his life he felt a faint glow of hope. I love that second grade teacher. I wonder if she knows what her career meant. If all it meant is that Brandon is okay, it was enough. He got taken into foster care and changed. He had more teachers who encouraged him, especially in his artwork. He became a sterling scholar in art with a 2.3 GPA. He is now a teacher. He teaches ceramics and makes pots with his feet and does one-handed pull-ups and wins rock-climbing championships and changes lives. And his students love him because he loves them and he has a catching laugh and a lot of joy. And he knows that love matters and love saves us.

There’s another teacher who I don’t really know, but who I heard speak in a church congregation I visited a few weeks ago. He teaches elementary school music. He said when they invited him to be a crossing guard before and after school he wondered why he got a masters degree. But that he loves to see the kids coming and going. That he loves to hear them laugh, and he loves to make them laugh. That nothing is better than serving kids. When he was in high school in California, he had a music teacher with a lot of enthusiasm. He loved him and kept in touch with him. This teacher had no kids, and when he retired, he and his wife moved out to Utah to be close to this man who was speaking in church. And when the old teachers wife had died and he was dying, this former student cared for his former teacher like a son would. Because teachers matter. Because teachers are holy. Thanks be to God.

Prayers for the Dead

"Rowing Slowly Through Eternity" by Anthea

The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

That’s good old Billy Collins. The imagery makes me smile. I sometimes wonder about the dead and about the relationship between those who breathe light and those of us who are still inhaling oxygen. Halloween is tomorrow. All Hallows’ Eve. I remember last year seeing a small mass of slightly-older-than-my children running freely and costumed across the grass in a yard in our neighborhood on their way to ask for candy. It was a quintessential scene of childhood. While there’s much that’s unsavory about the way some celebrate the night, there’s so much that can be beautiful about Halloween. Illuminating smiling, carved gourds. Small heroes and princesses, animals and ninjas padding from house to house receiving kindnesses in the form of small edible things.

The holiday has its roots in Samhain, the Gaelic harvest festival which usually takes place on the night directly between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, the threshold opening onto the dark half of the year. It is traditionally a night of liminality, in which the veil separating this world from the Otherworld is opened and the dead can visit this mortal sphere. An intermingling of the seen and unseen worlds. I learned this from a humanities professor who specialized in medieval cathedral architecture. The class was called “Framing the Sacred,” an interesting notion, I think. How do you frame the eternal and unbounded in artwork or literature or liturgy? These were the questions we studied. She took our class to the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City one All Saints’ Day. As the choir music rained upon us and raised itself to the stained-glass cherubim circling our heads, I felt the veil thin.

My wife sits at the computer with my eternity-eyed infant daughter in her lap, typing names. Each name is a prayer of sorts—a testimony of Jesus Christ’s infinite, unbounded mercy—and of the role we play in grace. These names, gathered like blueberries from the bushes of old censuses and city records, will be carried with gentle care into holy temples and spoken with affectionate reverence, sweetness on the tongue. Prayers for the dead. “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?” asked Paul, “Why are they then baptized for the dead?” This in the middle of a discourse on the triumph of life over death, the energetic reality of resurrection: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? . . . But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”

Almost all religions that affirm the eternality of the soul offer prayers in behalf of the dead, to keep them in remembrance, to ask special protective care as they enter that bright unknown. Catholics perform masses and offer prayers for the dead. Jews offer Kaddish—the prayer of making holy. There is a lovely Jewish prayer of mourning, memorial, and obsecration called El Molai Rachamim: “God, filled with mercy, dwelling in the heavens’ heights, bring proper rest beneath the wings of your Shechinah, amid the ranks of the holy and the pure, illuminating like the brilliance of the skies the souls of our beloved and our blameless who went to their eternal place of rest. May You who are the source of mercy shelter them beneath Your wings eternally, and bind their souls among the living, that they may rest in peace. And let us say: Amen.” The Shechinah is the radiant cloud of God’s presence. What a nice place to rest.

Like so many others, members of my church believe perhaps paradoxically that death is not the end of living and that every life matters. Our way of offering prayers for the dead is to perform sacred ordinances on their behalf. We are baptized for the dead, immersed in water in the name of someone who has crossed over the expansive river of death. There is a physicality to the prayer, a heft and a weight. There is a sheer loveliness to it. It is a sanctifying experience to stand in another’s shoes as it were to receive the ordinances of salvation. I often imagine the people whose names are read with such affection sitting near me, or floating above me. Sometimes I imagine them laughing at the prospects and possibility opened up to them through these ordinances. Sometimes I imagine tears of joy and gratitude. Once when I received the ordinances for a long line of men from Italy, I could almost smell the spaghetti and hear their warm, excited voices. Perhaps it is only my imagination. Perhaps not.

Joseph Smith once wrote of the practice, “And now, my dearly beloved brethren and sisters, let me assure you that these are principles in relation to the dead and the living that cannot be lightly passed over, as pertaining to our salvation. For their salvation is necessary and essential to our salvation, as Paul says concerning the fathers—that they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect.” I’ve thought often about those words “neither can we without our dead be made perfect.” My soft-spoken mission president once told me that “the salvation of a soul always requires the sacrifice of another.” He said that for all humanity, that sacrifice was the Savior, but that each of us is called upon to give of ourselves, to extend ourselves, to offer our time and our energy and our love to bring another to grace. This is what happens in the temple. Christ’s was the great vicarious sacrifice, but unless I become like Him and empty myself out for the blessing and benefit of others, neither I nor they can be saved.

These ordinances take place in temples. The temple is a liminal space, halfway between heaven and earth. What happens there conjoins the worlds. The late, gentle, Swedish Lutheran, Krister Stendahl, who in his lifetime was Dean of Divinity at Harvard University, once said of Mormon temple worship, “In antiquity, . . . the Jerusalem Temple was a place where you went to carry out holy acts, sacrifices and the like. I feel that the Mormon experience of the temple has sort of restored that meaning to the word temple.” Stendahl was a thoughtful, lovely soul. Of baptisms for the dead, which his church does not practice, he said, “It’s a beautiful thing. I could think of myself as taking part in such an act, extending the blessings that have come to me in and through Jesus Christ. That’s a beautiful way of letting the eternal mix into the temporal — which, in a way, is what Christianity is about.” He speaks of “holy envy,” saying if we might speak of such a thing, he has holy envy for the Mormon temple experience. What a nice thing to say.

In September of 1842, Joseph Smith was living in hiding from the infamous Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, who had it out for the Mormon prophet. He spent much of his time in the space between the rafters and the roof of Edward Hunter’s house in Nauvoo, Illinois. In this setting, he wrote some gorgeous lines about salvation for the dead. Truman Madsen calls it “a rhapsody in an attic.” If poets are the minor prophets, Joseph belongs to both camps, major and minor. Here are his words:

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.

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.

 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!

The temple is a house of poetry, of imagery and spirit and symbolism and beauty, like Emily Dickinson’s house of Possibility. It affirms the great mystical connectedness of humanity, of all hallowed ones, all saints, all souls. We matter to each other. This life matters to eternity. I always leave the temple more in love and more appreciative of this dark green living, this golden-bright autumn day.

Tastes Like Glory

My friends are famous rock stars. I am not. I am a father of four with a part in his hair who loves to sit on the front porch of an almost-autumn afternoon watching the bees hover and buzz around the flowers of green onions which sprang up of their own accord and which remind me that so much that is gifted to us in this life is unmerited. I am a father whose heart breaks into a thousand pieces—shatters with joy and love and longing—every single day. Rilke says that we live “forever taking our leave.” In the eighth Duino elegy, he writes:

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

facing all this, never the beyond.

It overfills us. We arrange it. It falls apart.

We arrange it again, and fall apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this, so that

whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude

of someone going away? Just as that person

on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley

one last time, turns, stops, lingers—,

so we live, forever taking our leave.

What is it to live forever taking leave? I think Rilke is lamenting that we don’t walk recklessly, unencumbered into the eternal light—we are always and forever returned to this mortal world, we cannot get past it. But sometimes I think that I take my leave and take my leave because life is flowing always away from me. Because I perceive the light of each mortal moment. Facing the beyond of all this, I grant that no moment will linger. Everything flees and flies. And yet it is miracle. It is eternal, somehow. Marilynne Robinson writes, “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.” Of course, she is quite familiar with the sage of Concord, who said that Jesus “spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines.” 

These daily miracles shine: Oliver crouching—squatting, really—like a small animal, tail end one inch away from the ground as he colors with many markers. He is slender and has a sly grin. Today he bent over the bushes as a cricket chirped: “I hear a small bird singing,” he said, “Where is it, daddy?” He will grow and will no longer squat. At what age do children lose the capacity to squat so without tiring? Hopefully he will still smile and love, but I mourn the passing as it happens. Each heartbreakingly beautiful moment is heartbreaking both in its beauty and in its transience. Today I found Emerson eating a mini peaches and cream pie made by my solicitous, gracious mother. He sat on a blanket in the middle of the kitchen floor and ate with such delight I felt like crying. Ellie has dark, piercing, intelligent eyes, and she smiles at me and stares sternly at me and opens her mouth to eat my face, and I melt. I melt. Several times since Eleanor was born, Emerson has come close up to her face and said, “Hi, Eleanor. I'm not a giant. I was just born before you.” The other day we were on a walk in our triple stroller and suddenly Emerson said, “I want to walk now, dad. Can I get out?” I stopped the stroller and he hopped out and climbed up onto the low brick wall structure at the entrance to the little complex where we live. He followed the curve of the wall and climbed up to the top--higher than my head. The he clambered down the other side, hopped off, and climbed back into the stroller. The image of him crawling up and then down the wall is strangely delightful to me. It seems to encompass something, something I want to record and bear witness of. I saw this. And it made my day. 

 From the time Lydia was born and I knew that kind of love that comes pouring into this world with a child’s birth—not romantic love, not friendship, not even just family love, but paternal, fatherly love—from the first time I wept while singing and holding her, I always knew she would flow away from me and leave a hole the size and shape of a very small and lovely girl in my soul. She will one day marry. She will date and I will worry. Yesterday, as we snuggled in her bed, she told me how she was made to zip up her lunchbox before she was done eating and run out of the school cafeteria because Keaton was chanting to Dylan, “Kiss Lydia! Kiss Lydia! On the lips!” She flees now and tells me these things to hear me laugh, but one day she will hate me and yell at me. But now she tells me she loves me—every single night. She gives me two hugs and two kisses before I leave her room. It is our ritual. She told me the other day, after taking the book I was reading her out of my hands and looking at it with an intent intensity that I have seen in pictures of myself reading, “I love reading. I can’t wait until Emerson and Oliver and Eleanor can read.” I love to see language come alive in her, words sparking and crackling with luminescence in her bright child mind.

There’s a song I love by Mason Jennings. “Where would I be right now if all my dreams had come true? Deep down I know somehow I’d have never seen your face. This world would be a different place. Darling, there’s no way to know which way your heart will go.” You should hear him sing it: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/boneclouds/id162459623

When I was young, I hoped I would grow up to be a rock star. My friend Jared and I made music videos long before we could play. I bought a beat-up old electric bass from a kid leaving on his mission for $100. He got a guitar for Christmas, I think. I didn’t have an amp or even a cord. We would plug his cord into his guitar and then not into an amplifier but into my bass, and we would jump on the trampoline with our guitars, pretending to play. We videotaped this.  

I loved the music scene: the broken, holy people who had hearts the size of small elephants and who looked like very prickly souls. I once watched a kid get thrown through a wall while we were playing. The hole was large. That was almost exactly twelve years ago, the Friday before the Wednesday that changed my life. Twelve years ago today, I left my little country of music and walked into the vast ocean of my ministry as a young missionary. While I learned Spanish and cried myself to sleep; while I sat on the bed in a one-room house of a small, beautiful Mexican family; while I rode my bicycle through rivers of street, my friends signed a record contract with a major label. One day, while I ate rice and beans and chicken, a smiling Mexican husband turned to his wife and said, “Sabe a gloria.” “It tastes like glory.” That felt right. Goodness, quietness, peace tasted like glory. And I liked the flavor. By the time I got back from Mexico, I knew what T.S. Eliot was getting at in his poem about the Magi: “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another death.” 

Once my feet again touched the ground and the sound of the choir faded, I called my old friend on the phone to see how life as a rock star felt. He told me that they had just played sold out shows throughout Japan. That the kids knew every word to their songs. I ran into the band, by this time part firmly in place in my hair. We hugged and talked. My friend said that he never imagined touring would be like this, and he pointed to his tour bus the size of Rhode Island. I might have felt a twinge of sadness then, of regret, perhaps, but there appeared in my mind a simple, dear picture. It was of me pointing upward. That was all. “What doth it profit a man . . .” rang in my thoughts.

Harold B. Lee, a gentle Idaho farmboy who grew up to be a prophet of God, wrote, “You may know you are living a full, rich life when you have the real joy of living, for ‘men are, that they might have joy’ (2 Nephi 2:25). What is it, then, that gives you that high emotional ecstasy called joy? Does it come from the unusual or does it come from common things? He who is moved thus only by the unusual is as one who must flag a failing appetite with strong spices and flavorings that destroy the true sense of taste. You are making a serious error if you mistake an emotional thrill that passes with the moment for the upsurge of deep feelings that is the joy of living. If one feels strong surges of happiness and desire from the quiet of a happy home, from the unfolding of a beautiful life, from the revelation of divine wisdom, or from a love for the beautiful, the true and good, he is having a taste of the fulness of the joy that the living of a rich, full life only can bring.” That’s a nice thought.

Jesus once said something that I did not understand until very recently. Perhaps I still don’t. He was always saying enigmatic, mystical, wonderful things. He is my favorite teacher. I love Him. He said, “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” For those familiar with the revelations to Joseph Smith, the idea of a singleness of eye reminds us of that marvelous phrase “an eye single to the glory of God,” an eye focused on the essential, the true, the godly. When my mother-in-law was a young mother, and my wife was a young girl, they were going through the nighttime ritual, preparing for sleep. My mother-in-law was impatient to finish the routine so she could watch a television show that she loved. Then a thought arose, or fell, perhaps, upon her. It was essentially that in eternity, she would not regret not having seen that show, but she might lament not taking time with this holy, bright child. She wept and determined not to sacrifice essential things for things that hold no value. She would lay up her treasures in heaven. After the girls were asleep, she went to tell her husband that she did not want to have television in her house. At all. She wanted her eye single. I love that story, because I see what it did. Not only did it fill her whole being with a radiant, infectious light, but that light has been the fruit that my wife was raised on. And now she is filled with light. And it tastes like glory.

So now I sit on my front porch and contemplate the grace that descended on my life, and I notice the watermelon vine snaking among the green onions. This, too, was not planted by my hand. We imagine that someone spit a watermelon seed into the front flower patch sometime during the summer. Now, the leafy plant winds around the entire garden, putting forth buds. There are at least five small watermelons on that vine. That seems like a metaphor to me. He who once spit in dirt to heal a blind man can take spit and folly and brokenness and carelessness and make beauty and grace and bright, red, juicy fruit. And I love Him for it. And I praise His grace. And it tastes like glory. 

Blessed Thankfulness

"Healing" by Brian Kershisnik

I came across something recently in my scriptures that instructed and delighted me. Have you ever noticed the peculiar, powerful, lovely connection between giving thanks and blessing in the accounts of the life of the Savior? The two ideas seem to be synonymous, interchangeable, in the Gospel writers’ minds. When John Mark—that young boy who lived in the bright warm home of a mother who received apostles and prophets after they had escaped from prison with angelic help, and who grew up to write the greatest hero story in the universe—records the feeding of the four thousand, he writes that Jesus “took the seven loaves, and gave thanks, and brake, and gave to his disciples.” And then Peter's friend Mark writes that Jesus, (perhaps smilingly, certainly knowingly and  compassionately) reached for “a few small fishes: and he blessed, and commanded them to set them also before them. So they did eat, and were filled.” As I read this, I wonder if He did or said anything different when He gave thanks and when he blessed. Or are they one and the same? Is gratitude the essence of blessing? Does it sanctify and set apart? Does it render a thing holy and wonderful and blessed? Does the act of thanksgiving make life more radiant, saintly, godly, blessed?

And this isn’t the only time this connection occurs in scripture. Matthew—that filthy treacherous publican who used to take taxes from hard-working gentle Jews to fill the coffers of their overreaching Roman overlords, and who immediately abandoned money at the first beckon of the Divine Rabbi and thus showed the true tenor of his heart—writes of the feeding of five thousand that the sensitive, holy Son of God “took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude. And they did all eat, and were filled.” And when he records the later feeding of four thousand, the words are almost identical, with one slight variation: “And he took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and brake them, and gave to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude. And they did eat, and were filled.” But the stories don’t end there. These are stories of abundance and extravagance. God’s grace was not only sufficient on these days to fill the hungry masses, but the profligate kindness of the mortal Messiah produced baskets and baskets of excess. Seven. Twelve. More than we can possibly eat. When I give thanks, I acknowledge and access the prodigality of God’s goodness. And I am blessed.  

During those last solemn hours with His mortal friends, Jesus broke bread and blessed wine. Both Matthew and Mark make the link between blessing and thanking obvious: “And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they drank all of it.”

Joseph B. Wirthlin, that tender, temperate apostle with the small voice and enormous soul once said, “Gratitude turns a meal into a feast and drudgery into delight. It softens our grief and heightens our pleasure. It turns the simple and common into the memorable and transcendent.”

My grandmother was a small, smiling woman. Her family was her life. She had eleven children in a small and loving home. She played the piano and my grandpa sang. When grandpa died, she was left with three small children still at home and no money. She taught piano lessons and trusted in miracles and grace. Every year at Christmas, she made batches and batches of strawberry jam. Every child and every grandchild got their own, with a small loaf of homebaked bread. And when I got married and had kids, I got a loaf and a jar of jam for every new member of the family. Everyone was family to grandma. She sent a dollar bill and a handmade birthday card without fail every year of my life. For me and my wife and my children and my forty-five cousins and all of their wives and husbands and children. She came to every baptism, every baby blessing, almost every baseball game. I don’t remember seeing my grandmother sad. When she was dying, her children and grandchildren took turns spending the night at her house. It’s just a matter of time, the nurses said, we just want to make sure she’s as comfortable as possible. There was lots of singing in those days around her bed. One night when I was sleeping over, I read to her from the Book of Mormon, sang her some of her favorite hymns, and asked her to tell me all the wicked things my father had ever done in his youth. She couldn’t come up with one. He was always such a sweet child, she said. If he hadn’t been so good, I wouldn’t have had any more children, she laughed. As it turned out, he was number six; five more would follow. After changing her briefs and her pads, I went to wash the dishes. The Christmas before, all of her progeny had banded together to buy her a dishwasher. She had lived for sixty-plus years of marriage with eleven children and she never had a dishwasher. As I rinsed the dishes in the sink to load into the automatic washer, I noticed a small sign I had seen before. It sat on the sill above the sink. It said, “Thank God for dirty dishes, they have a tale to tell: While others may go hungry, we’re eating very well.” I thought of my grandmother silently, smilingly washing dishes for all of her holy children for all of those years, and I sobbed at that sink as I thought of the power and beauty of a life defined by what is present rather than by what is not.

Gratitude is the highest form of praise. To acknowledge all that God is, all that He has done, all that He does, gives Him pleasure, I think. He does delight to bless us: “Yea, and the herb, and the good things which come of the earth . . . are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart; Yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and enliven the soul. And it pleaseth God that he hath given all these things unto man.”

I spent two years living in Mexico as a missionary, and I wasn’t especially surprised at the poverty when I arrived there. I had expected dirt floors and one-room houses. I had not, perhaps, expected houses with no running water or cockroaches in the bathtub. But they did not shock me. The shock came when I returned home from that gentle, violent, miracle-ridden land. I remember very clearly my astonishment at the size of houses in my home state. And when I stepped into my parents’ house, I rolled on the ground with explosive, joyous laughter. My little sister thought I was crazy. And I was—crazy in love with carpet: wonderful, soft, miraculous carpet. I had not seen it for two years. And then, wonder of wonders, I stepped into the shower. I didn’t have to wear flip-flops to ward off cockroaches or snake bites or fungus. And when I turned the water on, not only did it come out of the faucet, but it rushed like a mighty river, with enough pressure to drench my whole body. It was the beginning of the cold season, and the wetness plummeting from this miraculous indoor waterfall was warm warm warm. I said a silent prayer of gratitude. And then it struck me: if I wanted to drink the water, I could, and I would not vomit violently, would not spend days in the bathroom, would, in fact, be nourished and refreshed. I cried, and my tears mingled with fresh, purified water. Now every shower is a prayer, if I remember. Every shower is a praisesong. And when I remember to give thanks, my life feels brighter, holier, blessed.

One of the greatest of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s holy sonnets is “God’s Grandeur”:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The whole commonplace world shimmers and sparks with a brilliant holiness. God’s grandeur is ever-present. I think that gratitude is the act of removing one’s shoes and wriggling our toes in the rich, astonishing earth. It is the removal of that which separates us from the divine. Every child’s face and every sunset and every blade of grass possesses “the dearest freshness;” everything glistens, glimmers, glows, glitters, gleams with a miraculous light. Gratitude is the lens through which this light is perceived. It is attentiveness and reverence, awe and affection. John Ames—my favorite fictional pastor—writes, “It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light.” In this passage it appears that visions of the divine come unannounced and apparently uninvited, which may be true in certain instances, but Ames recognizes that the temporary nature implied in these words does not quite do justice to his notion of theophany. He amends, “But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than [that] seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?” When I live in thanksgiving, swim in gratitude, bask in open-eyed awareness of God’s goodness and the blessedness of life, I manifest such courage. I see and I bless.

Alma Mater

("Halo Repair" by Brian Kershisnik)

When I was a young boy, my mother read to me every night. She sang the world to me. She told me the stories that created my being. Every act of mothering is sacred. And every mother is a minister in the highest, holiest sense of the word, because every mother spends her life immersed in brilliant charity. When the Savior walked this lovely, dusty, weary, green planet, He elevated seemingly insignificant acts of service to a godly level. “But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matthew 23:11). I still marvel at the gentle selflessness my mother appears to have inherited from her mother, and I stand astonished at the greatness of my wife’s mother-soul—her willingness to give of herself, to gift her time, her love, her strength. How many of a mother’s everyday activities are exalted because they are the shadows of the very actions of the mortal Son of God? How often have I watched my wife wash small feet and thought of that last night Jesus spent with His closest friends in that warm upper room?

Often I’ve seen her bending over a bathtub to perform sacred ablutions for my lithe, holy children.

I saw the world anew today

Holiness written on every forehead
First morning
Morning stars
Morning songs of praise

My wife bathed my three holy children today

Anointed their heads with shampoo

Washed them with water

Clothed them in towels

Draped like robes

Oh, the holy

And I have watched four times in stunned powerless awe as she gave birth. That act seems as close to the saving act of the Atonement as anything I’ve ever witnessed. To suffer and to bleed so that another might have life. Isn’t that the very essence of Christ’s offering? David O. McKay, that gentle prophet whose devoted love for his wife Emma blessed the whole church, once said, “Motherhood is the one thing in all the world which most truly exemplifies the God-given virtues of creating and sacrificing. Though it carries the woman close to the brink of death, motherhood also leads her into the very realm of the fountains of life and makes her co-partner with the Creator in bestowing upon eternal spirits mortal life.”

Each mother has offered her body—has experienced discomfort and disfigurement and deep pain—so that others might live. Thinking of this one day, I wrote this poem. It’s called “Stretchmarks.”

Something holy happened here;

something sacred slept.

a luminescence brought to light—

premortal promise kept.

She wept, and as she strained,

in pain, to introduce to earth

pre-resurrection miracle:

this angelsong-bright birth.

Motherhood is not always popular, praised, or applauded in contemporary society. But it seems like Jesus’s priorities are more often than not at odds with the attitudes and foci of the world and culture that swirls around us. The things that matter most seem to be the quiet, simple things of everyday life: stories and songs and laughter and family and kindness and the beauty of the world and the lives of little ones. I suppose that motherhood ranks fairly high among these gentle, lovely, holy things. Neal Maxwell once said, “When the real history of mankind is fully disclosed, will it feature the echoes of gunfire or the shaping sound of lullabies? The great armistices made by military men or the peacemaking of women in homes and neighborhoods? Will what happened in cradles and kitchens prove to be more controlling than what happened in congresses? When the surf of the centuries has made the great pyramids so much sand, the everlasting family will still be standing, because it is a celestial institution, formed outside telestial time. The women of God know this.”

So much of a mother’s life may seem uninteresting and unimpressive. But those who have eyes to see perceive. She is a healer. She is a creator. She is a teacher. When you think about what the Savior spent His mortal life doing, it seems like He did a whole lot of what I watch my wife do every day, and what I took for granted almost every day of my growing up years. He fed people. All the time. How often have I sat down to eat a meal that appeared on my table as if by miracle? Every meal offered by every mother at every table every night is a holy thing. Every meal is a chance for communion, a nourishing, a grace.

Even all the laundry that piles up and smells and needs to be folded and returned to closets. Even this is holy. Clothing in scripture is a symbol of covenant. And Jesus Christ was the first one to provide clothes for the newly distraught and naked Adam and Eve. One day our robes will be washed white in the blood of the Lamb. Until then, praise be to the mothers who keep us covered. The Hebrew word for cover, kaphar, is also the word translated as “atonement.”

When the Divine Mind sought for a perfect metaphor to express the love and devotion of the Savior for the inhabitants of this bruised, broken, blessed world, He came up with this: “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” He is the mother hen who would gather her chickens under her wings, who would give herself for the life of her brood.

As I snuggled you this morning in our bed,

I snuggled, too, two other hearts you made.

The one, our son, lay between us,

His fevered heart pounding.

I felt it through his unzipped pajamas

And thought of David and Absalom.

No wonder that father wept so.

Thank you for giving me a love like this.

The other heart, smaller, faster, fainter—

Still beating like bird wings under the umbrella

Of your strong, stable, mother-bird heart

What a blessed child to have you for mother.

Life within life. Light within light.

All these loves within the love we share.

On our kitchen counter,

The evidence of your bright hands’ work:

Sustaining bread, children’s homework, and

This paper profusion of hearts.

Symbol of your life-giving, love-quickening power.

Four times I have watched in utter powerlessness as my wife has performed the ordinance of childbirth: the desire to help, the inability to do. Just as the Father had to allow the Son to suffer alone on the cross, the gift of agony that brings life is a solitary struggle. The mother is alone with the babe to be born, the new universe to be brought forth.

Her scream was a song

As she sang you to light

People speak of birth—almost flippantly—as a miracle

Almost like a magic trick,

With a wave of a wand

And Voila! See it!

But if you’ve seen it,

You know it's not like that.

It is a miracle in the most expansive sense—

A grace

A mercy

The miracle is your mother—

The pain she bore to bear you,

The grace she gave to give you air:

Divine means of help or strength

Every father knows the impotent vigil

Of prayer and powerlessness

Hope in a power beyond

Trust in lovingkindness

Love for the one who sacrifices to give life

How many times is Jesus likened unto a mother

In scripture?

No better image.

Praise Song for Marriage

I lived in Mexico for two years as a missionary, and I’ve been accustomed to speaking, and thinking, of those years as the most formative of my life. There I walked a godly walk—entering into the homes and hearts of real people who loved and longed and ached and wept. I laid hands on heads and pronounced words far beyond my experience or knowledge. My heart expanded and my soul soared. It was more humanity, sometimes, than I could bear. I was only twenty. But I felt so much sorrow and so much love. I learned there what Paul means in his letter to the Philippians when he says that Jesus “emptied himself” and took upon himself “the form of a servant.” I poured myself out in service, and I felt close to God and his angels.

But it struck me the other day with the force of revelation that the most truly formative, shaping, re-creating experience of my life has been my interaction with my bright, holy wife. If my missionary years gave me a sense of the way I wanted to live my life, then my Half Orange (as they would call her in Mexico) has shown me how to mobilize those desires. Julie is the most salient element in my mortal experience.

Let’s celebrate in song-and-dance

the day that she said yes

and I said yes,

and songbirds sang, and angels left their nests.

Marilynne Robinson writes, in my favorite novel, “I know this [life] is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.” If that is true, and it feels true to me that we will look back with great affection on this strange and wonderful mortal existence, then for me the songs will largely deal with the quiet, gentle struggle for joy that marriage has mobilized.

I don’t really know why I feel so inclined, but I want to sing a paean for marriage today, in praise of the brilliant, dizzying adventure of matrimony. Marriage is holy. It is ordained of God because God loves us, and marriage is the vehicle for more joy in this life than any other thing. Joy is the measure of our creation. This is why a man leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife. This is why the twain should be one. In our world there is a fear of marriage extant that frankly baffles me, and a propensity to give up on it too easily that saddens me. When I knelt in a sacred place across an altar with the girl—and she was really just a lovely, scared, excited girl—I love more than anything in the bright world and received a promise from her holy, wise grandfather that our love would sing and shout and shine long after the earth was a smoldering heap of rocks and steam, I could not have been happier.

But that was just the beginning. I had no idea then the strength that would come from having a helpmeet, a perpetual teammate who would always play on my side, lay by my side laughing in bed about something one of our little bedlamites said or did. This communion is the closest thing to contact with God I have ever achieved. And we do laugh. And it’s one of my favorite things. If I were trying to calm young Von Trapp children on a stormy night, I would sing of late night laughing and two heads on a pillow. Still, my wife is a holy mystery to me sometimes. But I know her better than any person on the planet. This is the deepest and richest of friendships. And that fact alone—the possibility of really coming to know just one person on this earth—makes marriage a really remarkable thing.

In oneness she’s shown me some things—

eternity is made up of more than solemnities,

though solemn sometimes I feel in the face of her faith,

her sunbright soul, her singsong spirit,

her God-gifted goodness, her yes.

And yes, this yes whispers shoutingly, brightbird-singingly.

My heart sits on the edge of a warm dirt path, next to hers,

(life-green grass) smells the air, takes in the dawnsong,

feels her fingers feeling, blessing, giving.

Outstretched and open.

And, oh, my heart beats: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that marriage can be quite difficult sometimes. Catholic theologian, Michael Novak, wrote something very nice about the benefits of marriage: “Marriage is an assault upon the lonely, atomic ego. Marriage is a threat to the solitary individual. Marriage does impose grueling, humbling, baffling, and frustrating responsibilities. Yet if one supposes that precisely such things are the preconditions for all true liberation, marriage is not the enemy of moral development in adults. Quite the opposite. Being married and having children has impressed on my mind certain lessons, for whose learning I cannot help being grateful. Most are lessons of difficulty and duress. Most of what I am forced to learn about myself is not pleasant. . . . My dignity as a human being depends perhaps more on what sort of husband and parent I am, than on any professional work I am called on to do. My bonds to my family hold me back (and my wife even more) from many sorts of opportunities. And yet these do not feel like bonds. They are, I know, my liberation. They force me to be a different sort of human being, in a way in which I want and need to be forced.” Do you sense what he’s saying? Of course it can be hard to pour yourself out, to empty yourself. That can hurt. But that is what makes a person like Jesus. This is a sanctifying experience.

Our first, and to this day most memorable, major argument was about chocolate chips. I argued emphatically for the benefits of milk chocolate chips. My wife retaliated with a fervent testimony regarding semi-sweet. I stormed out of the house. I really did. Now that all is affable we find the whole thing laughable. But not then. It mattered. It wasn’t until I realized that it didn’t matter that peace came. I had to pour myself out. And I’ve come to learn that it’s relieving, liberating, to do so. My soul wants to let go of things that don’t matter. And marriage has given my soul the opportunity.

Back to Robinson’s Gilead. Reverend Ames writes of the experience of blessing an infant, “There is a reality in blessing . . . . It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that.” Well, marriage is performed in holy places. And the ceremony certainly sanctifies the union, or at least acknowledges that this is a sacred thing: a man and a woman are about to become like Christ, to give themselves for the good of the other, to empty themselves out. They are about to experience communion and joy unrivaled. They are about to embark on the most creative endeavor.

We sometimes speak of some future godhood in which we will create worlds. But I think that is here and now. That is marriage. We create a home and a brand new culture, a small world, and children. That is surely godlike. Every day I am Adam, deeply grateful for my Eve.

Do you remember the morning

we awoke to see the deer

there,

right outside our window?

I was Adam, you were Eve

and the golden world was new,

glistening with possibility.

He ate the trees, and you

kissed my cheek.

And now, every morning I awake

to the song of your smile,

and the world feels refreshed,

renewed,

as if your lips had gently,

ever so gently,

brushed its brilliant face.

She is the mother of all living. Praise her. And praise the union that made us one.

(The painting is "Dancing on a Very Small Island" by Brian Kershisnik)

The Temple

Mary Oliver asks in a poem, “Where does the temple begin? Where does it end?” It seems an apt question. There is so much that is sacred in existence and in human interactions. One day I came from receiving ordinances in the temple—where my heart burned with real joy—to my home, where that morning I had spent some time in my young sleepless son's bed and where I was honored to tuck that same four-year-old son, Emerson, into bed. That is a sacred ritual of story and song and communion, and my heart burned with the same light. I wrote this poem. It’s called “Friday at the Temple.” Hineni is what Abraham answered when God called him, and Samuel, and Jesus.

Friday at the Temple

I have known angels,

have seen them in all shapes and sizes—

sometimes silhouetted in the distant streaking sun,

flitting lithely as swallows in spring.

But more often I have known them up close,

slender, stern, portly, pleasant.

They have laid hands on my head—

sometimes hands heavy with the weight of glory,

sometimes a touch so light and brief it could have been a passing fly,

stopping for an instant in benediction on my skull.

Either way, it has been a blessing to be ministered to

in that way: washed with light,

anointed with luminescence,

clothed in brilliant radiance.

This morning as I snuggled my young son in bed,

I fell asleep, awakened to the sound of his voice:

“Dad, did you say Hey Em?”

No. “I thought I heard someone say that.”

Maybe it was an angel, I told him.

He got quiet for a minute, and I lay back down.

When he next spoke, his face was close to mine,

his bright eyes shining. “Maybe it was Jesus,” he said.

Maybe it was. I should have told him to answer, Hineni.
Here I am.

(The picture is called "Untitled (Angels)" by Brian Kershisnik)