A little child shall lead them

"Madonna Child John" by Brian Kershisnik

I sat on the front porch contemplating the songlessness of entropy, the way the weeds creep and crush and encroach on my garden, my lawn, my flowerbed; the way the messes multiply and replenish. There’s a certain dark miracle there in the relentless march of chaos and mayhem. It sinks into the soul sometimes, too.

I looked up to see the stumbling, toddling, mad amble of my beautifully fat fourth-born making her way across the grass, barefoot as a discalced Carmelite, holding the hands of her two oldest siblings who gazed at her with reverent attentiveness. This small child has oceans in her blue eyes. There are constellations and congregations of solemn clouds swirling behind her piercing glance. She communicates much without words. There are worlds in her seeric eyes.

My third-born son followed behind the procession, bent toward the small prophetess. Ellie crouched at the edge of the green lawn to examine a rock. She made a wondering sound. Lydia, Emerson, and Oliver all joined her in her genuflection toward the stone. They each touched it in turn with gentle affection. Then Ellie shot up and pointed excitedly. The neighbor dog had come wandering into her consciousness. The children admired with her. She bent for a snail. They dropped to their knees. And I wanted to join them. Isaiah says that in the Millennium, when there is peace among all creatures, when the wolf and the lamb bound recklessly and joyously united down the grassy slopes and the lion and the ox share a communal feast of straw, that a little child shall lead them. I think it was Boyd K. Packer who said that every time a child is born the world is renewed in innocence.

This small baby comes angling toward me with her dimpled smile and her wry laugh and her knowing, ancient eyes, carrying something that looks like a bag full of translucent shards of colored light, and I think that this is what it will take for the world to be born again. We will have to trust to the eyes of a little child to walk into the new country of wonder and awe and magic that God has in His infinite generosity and imagination prepared for us. We will have to become such astonished, bright-eyed creatures ourselves. And I think I will like that world, too.

On Vegetarianism, or A Sweet-Smelling Savour

Joseph Smith said something about being wary of fanciful and flowery and heated imagination. So I am wary of what I will now write. But Einstein said that imagination is better than knowledge. And there’s just so much that God seems to have left to pure imagination.

So my mom was practically vegan for a time. It was for health. My grandma had lots of strokes, and my mom didn’t want that. When I was a teenager, my friend Blake who drowned in an underwater cave shortly after I got home from my mission, told me that the most political statement I could make was vegetarianism. He was a devout Krishna devotee, and he prayed and meditated while the rest of us scampered unawares over this God-created dust. He was vegan; for animal-rights reasons. Religious reasons. He gave me my first copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I think somehow that changed my life. It was the first book I had read in a long time for fun. I wept thinking of poor Holden Caulfield. I used to give copies of that book to every girl I fell in love with. One gave me my copy back with all the swear words marked. “This is your favorite book?” she asked. Well, Holden smears out the swear words on the school grounds, you know? And he’s a good brother to Phoebe.

But I wanted to write about vegetarianism. Did you know that in the Millennium we will all be vegetarian? When I tell my students this, they usually groan. Oh, there’s often that girl with the hemp shoulder bag with patches all over it who rejoices in this knowledge. But most teenagers just like hamburgers.

But, think about it. There is no death the way we experience it now after Jesus comes. There’s just the changing in the twinkling of an eye. You die, but you don’t sleep. Your body goes from translated to resurrected, just like that. So, it would follow that eating dead animals would be difficult, don’t you think? You go ahead and try to catch that glorified cow and grind immortal beef products. I don’t imagine it happening.

And, here’s the part that makes me smile: God lives in an immortal state. “Wait,” my students say, “so you’re saying we will never get to eat meat again?” Well, no, I’m not exactly saying that. But think about it, when God wipes away all tears from off all faces, do you think anyone’s really going to be lamenting the absence of hamburgers? “Yes,” says one of the boys on the back row, “I don’t want to be resurrected.” I try to assure them that Jesus will probably just open up a Burgers-of-Light stand and that no one will miss the cow ones. They’re not always convinced.

“But Jesus ate fish and honeycomb after His resurrection,” a shy girl on the front row might say. Ah. Now we are getting somewhere. But where was He when He did it? On a fallen, broken, death-filled world. I don’t know how the immortal palate is, but I imagine that a god might long for a taste of beef or fish again. So the first thing He does is to eat. I imagine the smile of delight.

But then He goes to His world of light and life. But what if, just what if He visited His worlds every once in a while just to get a burger? “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby many have entertained angels unawares.” And as often as not in scripture, it’s hard to tell if an angel is an angel or if it’s God Himself. Jacob wrestled an angel and declared, “I have seen God face to face.” In the plains of Mamre, Abraham rushed hospitably to feed a trio of angels “a calf tender and good.” But as they converse, the trifecta becomes God Himself: “And the LORD said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh?” Well, so God could show up on my porch or on the sidewalk in front of my favorite restaurant and ask for a little hospitality. He might be testing me. But He might just want a burger, you know? And this mortal world is one of the only places to get one.

And that would explain why He delighted so in the olfactory aspect of offerings: “A sweet smelling savour unto the Lord.” Well, it’s something to think about.

(painting is "Bringing Food" by Brian Kershisnik)