Because of the angels

Just this note to the late apostle Paul: Thank you for writing this verse to your old friends in Corinth, “For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.” It has made me smile for two days.

Turns out the old scholastic theologians, Aquinas and his cronies, should have been asking about the dancefloors sitting atop the shoulders and necks of their wives and daughters. Forget about the pinheads. Angels and angels sitting, pirouetting, leaping, reading, sipping, sighing, smiling on the tops of girl’s heads.

My favorite commentary on this verse is from Albert Barnes’ comprehensive notes on the Bible: “There is scarcely any passage in the Scriptures which has more exercised the ingenuity of commentators than this verse. . . . After all the explanations which have been given of it, I confess, I do not understand it.” Or maybe this briefer one from the 1557 Geneva Bible (Will Shakespeare’s Bible, you know?), annotations by Laurence Tomson, who was himself compiling generations of commentary: “What this means, I do not yet understand.”

Well, I understand it well enough. I sent my wife and daughter on a plane to Arizona today, and well, I miss them, angels, power, and all.

Burning the Couch

"Dancing Home" by Brian Kershisnik

Grace is not a word you hear very often spoken from the pulpit in my church. I don’t know why that is. We believe in grace. Desperately and gratefully. We live in it, breathe it, swim in it, laugh through it. It anchors and elevates us. It heals us and helps us. Every day. Every hour. Grace stands at the door and knocks, leans in the doorway and smiles, sits at the dinner table after the meal has been finished, pushes back the chair and roars with laughter. Grace makes the meal. Grace is the meal.

The Book of Mormon is about as heavy and ripe with references to grace as any of the writings of Paul:

“Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.”

“Wherefore, redemption cometh in and through the Holy Messiah; for he is full of grace and truth.”

“Nevertheless, the Lord God showeth us our weakness that we may know that it is by his grace, and his great condescensions unto the children of men, that we have power to do these things.”

“And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”

“And also my soul delighteth in the covenants of the Lord which he hath made to our fathers; yea, my soul delighteth in his grace, and in his justice, and power, and mercy in the great and eternal plan of deliverance from death.”

“For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.”

That “after all we can do” might be read two ways: grace makes up the difference and fills in the gaps; but grace also is ultimately the only means of hope, notwithstanding all we may do, we cannot save ourselves. I have long loved the LDS Bible Dictionary entry on grace. It declares that the main idea of the word is “divine means of help or strength given through the bounteous mercy and love of Jesus Christ” and “It is likewise through the grace of the Lord that individuals, . . . receive strength and assistance to do good works that they otherwise would not be able to maintain if left to their own means. This grace is an enabling power . . . . Divine grace is needed by every soul.”

Yesterday a student brought me an article from a music magazine I used to read. I would pore over the shiny pages, admiring the rockers inside. He brought it to me because it had a piece about my friends, and they mentioned me by name. It was a strange thing to see, my name in that magazine. It was an erstwhile dream come true. This one musician friend and I were the same kid growing up. Same name. Same dreams. Same background. I may have imagined it, but I felt pain in my friend’s words in the magazine, a hollowness and a sorrow. I thought about all the sorrows and griefs that sit so heavy, like dark, brooding birds of prey, on the shoulders and backs and heads of so many people who grace this planet. And an image came into my mind of my two-year-old son the night before when I put his pajamas on him. He laughed out loud and did a spin-jump, landing in a crouch. He shouted, “My very favorite pajamas!” He was wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt and rocketship pants and giraffe slippers. It struck me again that my life is blessed with a radiance and a warmth which seem somewhat uncommon and perhaps unfair. And I know that there is no comparing of two lives and beauty wears a thousand dresses, but I wondered why grace has struck me so.

There’s a passage in the novel Gilead in which the prodigal son character, Jack, wonders about the apparent arbitrariness of grace. He feels outside of it, immune to it, as it were. He grew up with a pastor father but he could never really believe. He seems to wish he could. He tells of going to a revival meeting: “One night a man standing just beside me, as close to me as you are, went down as if he’d been shot. When he came up again, he threw his arms around me and said, ‘My burdens are gone from me! I have become as a little child!’ I thought, If I’d been standing two feet to the left, that might have been me. I’m joking, of course, more or less. But it’s a fact that if I could have traded places with him, my whole life would be different.”

Does it seem like some lives are more grace-riddled than others, some cups overflow more abundantly? It is snowing outside my window, and I am reminded that God’s goodness and graces rain on the just and the unjust alike, without respect for persons. And yet.

For Augustine, who thrived on a grace which struck him like unmerited, holy lightning, grace is essentially God’s prerogative to do whatever He likes, to act in a boundless, incomprehensible love which may baffle and confound humanity, for all God cares.

Mormons believe that although you cannot command or control grace, you can put yourself in the pathways of grace. And grace puts you in new pathways, as well. A grace-touched life is visibly changed and charged with brightness. Grace feeds the roots and the ripening fruit is a life of holiness.

But grace is not a wage. Grace is a gift. Grace comes regardless of merit. When I was a teenager, my friends and I found a lonely-looking couch on the side of the road. We asked my mom if we could borrow the minivan, and we drove the couch down toward the marshy land near the lake. Among yawning, stretching cottonwoods, we sliced that couch up using Bert’s mom’s knives. We jumped on it and howled and threw couch pieces into the air. Then we doused it in gasoline, lit a match and stepped back, laughing. JD filmed the thing. As I recall, we were making a music video. Dallin had brought a fire extinguisher from home. When the flames were twenty feet high and licking the trees with great relish, we rushed forward with the extinguisher. We pressed down the lever and expected a spray. We were disappointed. Someone had broken the seal, and it had no pressure. The couch crackled and blazed in the dry summer heat, and I began to fear the trees would catch. A school bus drove by on the road which was just visible through the trees. A few minutes later, it drove by again, this time more slowly. We began to scramble, looking for a way to put out the fire. We grabbed a towel from the van. We whipped at the flames, but it just served to fan them higher. We tripped over weedy plants ripe with burs, scooping up mud and flinging it at the couch. We doused the towel in water and tried to wring it out over the blaze. The fire grew hotter and angrier and higher. I began to feel despair. Then we heard the sirens. My heart sank, thinking of my parents faces on finding me brought home by the police. But it wasn’t a police car. It was a fire engine. A burly fireman came trampling through the trees with an enormous fire extinguisher. He sprayed and covered the couch until it was a black, smoldering frame. The air hung heavy with smoke. The fire fighter looked at me out of the corner of his eye and said, “So. What’s going on here?” “I, uh,” I stammered, “we were just being idiots.” He smiled and said, “Well, sometimes being an idiot catches up to you.” And then he walked away. He got in his truck and drove away. We kept waiting for the fist to fall, for the police sirens. But there were none. Sometimes being an idiot catches up to you. But here’s the thing, this time it didn’t. We didn’t deserve his kindness. But he showed us mercy. The boomerang doesn’t always come back to hit you in the back of the head. Surely, this is grace.

John Ames says, “Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.” Praise be to God. Grace is everywhere. God walks among us, gracing.

Even the sometimes austere and righteousness-minded apostle Bruce R. McConkie understood the ubiquity of grace. He wrote, “God’s grace consists in his love, mercy, and condescension toward his children. All things that exist are manifestations of the grace of God. The creation of the earth, life itself, the atonement of Christ, the plan of salvation, kingdoms of immortal glory here after, and the supreme gift of eternal life–all these things come by the grace of him whose we are.” Everything is grace. Every single thing. A child’s eyes staring back at you in the mostly-darkness of the morning. Leaves and leaflessness. Clouds and clear skies. Hope and light and joy and forgiveness and peace and strength. The air we breathe and the lungs that drink the air. The requirement for reception of grace is ultimately reception of grace. Acknowledgement of brokenness and need, hunger and thirst—these open the floodgates of grace. The requirement is open eyes and open heart. It is open arms and an embrace. Perhaps perception is the only key to grace. To see grace is to experience grace.

Ultimately grace is a mystery. What it looks and tastes and smells like. The sound and feel of grace. Why and when and where it comes. Sometimes the distribution of graces seems unfair. But every life is a vagueness, a cloudy holiness, and as the old hymn hopefully sings, “Grace shall be as your day.” Grace will shine. Grace will always come. Ready or not. God’s grace must be sufficient for every circumstance. Each life must be filled by sufficiency. Stuffed with grace. Infinite, incomprehensible grace has a thousand thousand faces, and all of them shine like Moses’s on the mount. 

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.

 

Freely

"We're Just Doing This" by Brian Kershisnik

Winter is dark. Oh, there is beauty in winter. God still sings, but the song is sometimes muted. Silence can be a song, I know. When we packed up Christmas, I asked Julie if we could leave a lighted wreath on our front door, an affirmation that light still prevails. It will give warmth and light and hope. It will beat back the darkness. Someone will be encouraged by its light. It will be worth the couple of dollars it adds to our electric bill. Freely we have received. Freely we will give.

Oliver ate so much candy on Christmas morning he puked. And then he ate some more. On the day after Christmas, Lydia asked if she could take some of her stocking candy to her friends in the neighborhood. She piled various saccharine substances shaped like or by Santa into a plastic bag, put on her snow boots, and dragged Emerson out the door. (This is not uncommon. A few weeks ago she got to pick anything she wanted at the dollar store for some reward she had earned. She chose a bag of red vine licorice. When we got home she asked if she could distribute licorice to her friends. One neighbor told me that his son was given a half piece because the rest was all gone. This son is two years old, and he was ecstatic. Freely Lyd had received, freely she gave.) Fifteen minutes after the kids left, they came home shivering and Em refused to go back out into the dark and cold. Lydia asked Oliver if he wanted to go delivering candy. I was only half paying attention and didn’t notice what the two-year-old was wearing. Half an hour later I was putting on my boots to go find my vagrant children when the door blew open and Oliver came in wearing a red coat I had never seen. Someone had seen my waifs out in the bitterdark winter and had compassion. Freely we have received.

A couple of weeks ago the skies scattered maybe six inches of snow on our city. I took up my shovel and went out front. Before I had cleared a path down the driveway, gentle brother DeRosier from next door appeared shovel-in-hand and smiling. Silently he began to help me clear my driveway. I don’t know how old he is—old enough to seem wise and mild—but he has had a stroke and moves somewhat slowly. I love that man. I asked him about Christmas. He told me that the best part was lying down on the carpet after dinner and watching his grandchildren play. After he had watched for a while, he closed his eyes and just listened to them. He smiled as he told me about it. By the time we were finishing, a new neighbor from across the street was out shoveling his driveway. He has a north-facing house. We went to help shovel and to get to know him. His name is George. He is a computer programmer and has four daughters. They all play instruments except the youngest. She plays the ipod and has a keen appreciation for the poetry of rap music. We smiled at each other as we finished shoveling and went our ways. Freely we received. Freely gave.

The summer after I graduated high school, I was driving my parents’ minivan near my house. On the side of the road was an old three-speed cruiser bicycle with a sign on it that said, “Free. Take if you want.” I stopped the van and had my friend drive it home. I got on the bike. I rode everywhere for the next few weeks. As summer ripened into fall, crispautumn smells filled the air. Crispautumn possibility shimmered. I was in love that fall. I put flowers in the small basket at the front of the bike. I whistled to myself and sang as I rode along cracked, uneven sidewalks underneath yellowandorangeandbrownred trees. I wondered if the golden streets of heaven might have these charming irregularities. I thought about mystery and how, well, mysterious it can be. Love and life and all that. One day as I rode off a curb, I pulled up on the handlebars so as to soar. The handlebars came off in my hands as the bike fell away below me. I continued my trajectory, steering an invisible bicycle through the air. Surprised, I almost landed on my feet. I called my friend to come pick me up. I was miles from home. I left the bike in a heap on the sidewalk and tacked a note to it. It said, “Free. Take if you want.”

That bike was a blessing to me. It is now a fondness residing in my memory. I always imagined that somehow it would go on to bless someone else. Someone in love. Someone in need. Some romantic. Some tragic. I imagined the small delegation of angels launched forth from heaven, wheeling and reeling with their tools, circling the old bicycle and making it shine like the day I found it, good enough to ride. I don’t know why I would imagine that my broken offering was somehow sufficient. Like the loaves and the fishes, broken and blessed. Broken bread. A broken heart and a contrite spirit. But I think it might be true. God gives liberally and then gives the grace necessary to make what we give in return somehow meaningful. Freely we have received. Freely we give what little we have. We do our best with the world and with the people in it. Our broken offerings are rendered sufficient.

My kidneys don’t work very well. And it’s just as well, really, because I got to get an MRI. It was fun. Truly. I don’t often have an hour to lie still and think. As I lay in that cold room, listening to beeps, I thought about the fact that I will soon begin a new semester of teaching. I was lamenting, really, that I will need to learn one hundred and seventy new names. They will not think I’m funny at first, perhaps ever. They will be depressed and sullen because the cold is beginning to infect our bones. We are losing the optimism that comes from the life-warming sun. But a thought entered my head: “Robbie, the most sacred experiences in life are the opportunities we are given to know other people. There is nothing so holy.” I thought about how my life has been blessed by the humor and the pain and the depth and experience of the students I currently teach. And what a blessing it will be to rub spiritual shoulders with a new batch. One hundred and seventy new and sacred names. And I felt a keen sense of my responsibility to share light. There may be something I am to do that would otherwise remain undone. Something to awaken in a young person’s heart. Something to spark. A poem from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours comes to mind:

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear

without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels

into the open sea.

I hope it is not arrogance, but I realized that I am God’s song. I am the harmony that floats above the whistling ruach. I am the laughter of His lips. My life is to disperse joy and meaning. And to receive. One Sunday morning my young son lifted the sacrament bread to my lips. I ate from his hands. I was the recipient of the ministrations of this small, holy child. Sometimes we are ministered to, and sometimes we minister. Freely I have received. Freely I will give.

The Light Sings

"That Song" by Brian Kershisnik

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” —Plato

Charmer of stones and trees, Orpheus could make the clouds dance with his song. The poet-seer manifests the power of godsong, the truth that God sings. Or plays the lyre. Or both. A couple of months ago, as we listened to my cousin Annie play heartbreakingly beautiful music from her lonely, lovely violin, I thought that God must play an instrument. Oh, I imagine He could play all instruments. But what would He have played as a man if He lived in a world like mine? That question occupied my mind for much of the concert. I think I have often pictured him playing the piano—ragtime—and laughing like my father-in-law. But he might be a violinist. I can imagine His mortal self as a wiry, intelligent violin player with a wry smile and a twinkling eye playing plaintive, mournful, wonderful music. My cousin Wayne imagines a cello, and that can’t be far off. There is a godlike resonance to the cello. And of course He sings. Oh, how He sings. I can’t wait to sing with Him. That’s why angels sing—His voice is infectious: you just have to join in.

We took the kids to the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake for the Christmas Carols service. It was a mingling of disparate holinesses: transcendence and imminence intertwined. God up there, and godliness loudly, wildly here in the bodies of my children. There were times I was anxious about the rambunctiousness of my four. And there were times I closed my eyes and let the music wash over me and wash me. When the choir began to sing, the air shimmered with the sound. It was absolutely breathtaking. We were sitting toward the front of the chapel, and the choir started at the back, walking down the aisles. Oliver couldn’t see the choir from his seat. “Who’s singing?” he asked, over and over again in his one-volume two-year-old voice. The cathedral ceiling was painted with angels, and angels populated the stained-glass windows. “Are the angels singing? Is it the angels singing?” I tried to explain that it was a choir at the back of the chapel, but he wouldn’t have it. Finally I said, to silence him, “Yes, the angels are singing.” And I imagine they were.

“Music is part of the language of the Gods. It has been given to man so he can sing praises to the Lord. It is a means of expressing, with poetic words and in melodious tunes, the deep feelings of rejoicing and thanksgiving found in the hearts of those who have testimonies of the divine Sonship and who know of the wonders and glories wrought for them by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Music is both in the voice and in the heart. Every true saint finds his heart full of songs of praise to his Maker.” That’s Bruce R. McConkie. And it’s true.

A year ago I was driving Lydia to her ballet class. Lyd wanted to listen to some music, but all I had in the car were some old cassettes. So I told her she could choose between Simon and Garfunkel (“I can’t remember that, so I’ll just call it Uncle Carbuncle”) and Huey Lewis and the News. “This is kinda rockin’,” she said of Uncle Carbuncle. Her assessment of the News: “This is just plain.” She expounded: “My dance teacher always chooses rockin’ music to dance to, which is funny because we do pretty dances to rockin’ music. There are four kinds of music: rockin’, pretty, plain, and both. Some music is both pretty and rockin.” So there you have it. I think Lyd is both pretty and rockin’. Both is the best.

I love living in a world of music. Music is evidence to me that I have a soul. It moves me in ways that don’t make sense, communicates to a part of me that transcends understanding. Plato said, “Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.” My testimony of God’s attentive love for humanity began with a song. I was twelve and in church and we sang “Joseph Smith’s First Prayer”—that song about a pillar of divine light falling on a wiry boy in the woods—and I felt truth and light pour into my slight frame.

“Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.” Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Last Christmas, an institute choir came to my work’s holiday banquet as we were finishing our food, and my expectations were low at best. But they scattered themselves throughout the hall, among the tables—a tenor here and an alto there. And then they sang. They sang glorias and alleluias and they sang light and love and grace. They were close enough, the close ones, to hear the particularity of their voices, but they blended with unseen others off in the distance. I closed my eyes and let it flow over me. Audible grace. I felt close to heaven. Of course I can’t really explain it because it was ineffable. And we all sat there stunned and silent afterward, unsure of what to say to those at the table by us because words were insufficient. I know words are often sufficient (because love engenders language and a desire for communion begets communication), but music is extravagant, abundant. It is transcendent. And I love it. It seems that God might well have sung “Let there be light,” don’t you think?

Berthold Auerbach said, “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” We were gathered as a family on Christmas Eve. After we had acted out the nativity and shared scripture and story and song, we were wrapping up. Oliver asked, “When are we going to sing more songs?” Julie asked, “Do you want to sing more?” “I’m not going to sing. I’m going to wave my shaker.” He was holding a pom-pom. “Well, what song do you want?” “Drummer boy!” We started singing. My family likes to sing, so it was lively. As soon as the song struck, Oliver began leaping, a manifestation of what might rightly be called earnest gleefulness. His face was sincere. His body was exuberance. He bounded and bounced. I thought of Frederick Delius’s thought: “Music is an outburst of the soul.” After a few songs, my brother laughed and said, “That was healing.”

“The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.” Johann Sebastian Bach.

Eight-month-old Eleanor loves to sing. She likes the pretty songs more than the rockin’. In church or with the family, when the world erupts into song, she opens her mouth and opens her eyes and sings along. She is very earnest. She feels it. “Aaaah! Aaahh!” Victor Hugo said, “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.” She neither has words nor can she remain silent. So she sings.

When we were up in Salt Lake one day, Emerson said to me, “Dad! The light sings!” He lay down on the cobblestones and placed his ear near the base of a lamppost which was emanating music. And the light does sing. How many celebrants expressed their joy at the birth of the Savior through song? Angels, Mary, Simeon, Anna, Zacharias. All sang. As well they might. One of the ancient temple responsibilities was that of singer. Because song is sacred. Because God sings. Because the song is light.

Newtown

Could it be that the snow this morning might mean that even sins as scarlet as this new Adam’s may be made white? How can twenty small names, so sacred and so beloved, be scattered so easily, so quickly to the breathy wind? And six. And two. I have spent two days heartbroken and hurting in a world of holiness.

I have held my children close, have read with them and snuggled with them and have picked up scattered shards of light that I had left lying around, unnoticed until these two days. The way Ellie washes up to my ankles and then my knees like a rising tide. Oliver’s voice, telling me stories and singing me songs in his bed because I am too tired to tell them to him. Lydia’s rampant imagination. Her secrets and her crushes and her conspiracies. She is becoming a woman. Ellie’s habit of looking up when the family or the congregation has broken into song, a knowing look on her face, evidence that she came from a world of music.

Last night as I thought of those parents and all those children and the angels who were not fast enough, not strong enough, not here enough, I put my hand to Emerson’s chest as he lay next to me in bed. He is five, and his heart flutters and then thumps steadily as a five-year-old heart should. He bounces and shouts, and his exuberance is impossible to contain, and I love him. And I ache. And I pray. And I hope. “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”

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?”