The Tiptoe

So often the prelude to the rhapsody is the ticking of a clock. Like a toddler waiting to be lifted into the arms of God, we sometimes tire of looking up, hands outstretched, and content ourselves instead with the blocks and toys which surround us. But then the embrace comes and we are raised. And we remember what we were waiting for.

My theology stresses the reality of continued, continuing revelation: God speaks, not spake. It affirms that every person is worth communicating with, even if you’re God. No—especially if you’re God. But it is sometimes a real wrestle to know when He is speaking and what He wants. It takes attentiveness, and patience. Sometimes weeks pass without a whisper. “And he hath put a new song in my mouth,” soliloquizes the Psalmist. Ah, the taste of that song. But two verses earlier, he wrote, “I waited patiently for the Lord, and he inclined unto me and heard my cry.” The song only comes after the wait, after the cry. And it is always put or placed in my mouth. I cannot conjure it or command it. Every poet knows this. The mornings glisten once in a while. So much scent of sidewalk before the smell of honeysuckle. The music is a gift and one can only stalk the Spirit and wait. How many hours does a prophet spend under a juniper tree or inside a cave before the gentle rustle of leaves and the still, small voice?

It’s sort of like this: Was it last summer we were camping at the Henry Cowell Redwoods? When we pulled up to the forest, four-year-old Emerson said he knew we would see squirrels. But the squirrels in the camp proved very elusive, very timid. After a day of camping, I had seen brief glimpses of a couple of squirrels and chipmunks off in the trees and bushes, but not a single furry animal made its way into our camp. I asked my young son if he had seen any squirrels. He told me no. So we went on a squirrel hunt. As we walked I told him to listen very carefully, and if he heard a rustling, we would watch the bushes carefully. After a short distance, the bushes quaked a little. We stopped and strained our attention toward the spot. After watching for a while, we finally caught sight of a slight movement. But as we kept watching, we found only a small bird hopping around in the leaves. We went on. Emerson climbed a tree and we went down a little trail. No squirrels. I prayed, “Heavenly Father, Emerson knew he would see a squirrel, and it’s important to him. Can you help?” Just then I saw a squirrel at the foot of a camper in a nearby campsite. I tried to point it out to Emerson. He couldn’t see it. We went closer, slowly. The squirrel ran into the bushes. “Did you see it?” I asked. “I think so. I saw the bushes move.” But he wasn’t content with that. We surrounded the little rodent and listened as he crashed through the bushes. Now, I have more experience stalking squirrels than my son does, and I’ve got a bit of a height advantage so I saw the squirrel a couple of times as it darted back and forth. But Emerson never caught a clear view. We walked on. “Well, thanks for trying,” I said to God. I bet He laughed at that. “Trying?” Within a few feet, I saw another squirrel at the base of a tree. I tiptoed Emerson over and lifted him up. He saw it. He wanted to get closer, so he walked after it. It ran up the tree, chattering, and another squirrel joined it. Then it happened. Like a flood. Like an ocean wave. Like sunlight or like grace, God poured down what we had so cautiously been stalking. The squirrels ran around and up and down the tree, chasing each other. They ran two feet from our toes. One stopped on the tree, just above our heads and looked squarely at us. I almost thought he winked. He may have been an angel disguised as a squirrel, but my prayer had been answered. Emerson’s faith had been answered. The wait had been rewarded. We saw. Our attentiveness had paid off. Sometimes it does.

A day or so later we were out for a family walk through thick green woods. It was evening and the light was gray and mossy. It slid in sideways to illuminate the trail. We were walking through these curvy, moss-covered trees at twilight, and we saw an owl. First owl I’ve ever seen. It was hunched in the branches of a tree, and we stopped to tie a shoelace or something. And then it spread its enormous wings and lumbered through the air off to another perch. Grace unbidden.

Days go by, and months, and the reverie remains restrained. The mute muses shy by disguised as fellow pedestrians on the sidewalk we stroll. Life is just life. Mondays are mundane, and nothing extraordinary presents itself. And then the symphony awakens, stretching like a dance; the song is planted and shoots forth and ripens all at once. And we partake of the fruit of the tree of life.

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. 

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.

Ezekiel

A couple of months ago, I taught my classes about Ezekiel. Four years ago I skipped Ezekiel completely. I think I did not understand him well or I did not have time. But I will never skip Ezekiel again. He is one of my mortal heroes. And his heroism is precisely in his mortality, in his humanity. God calls him over and over again "son of man." Most commentators see this as a humbling appellation, the Hebrew word for “man”—“adam”—meaning also dirt or earth. But it can also be seen as affectionate. Either way, Ezekiel is very earthy, and that may be the source of God’s affection. I imagine He has great tenderness for this earth.  

Well, I love Ezekiel because of his unorthodox (but not all that uncommon among Old Testament prophets) mode of teaching. At the beginning of the book, Ezekiel is given a scroll to eat, God’s message. It seems that God wants Ezekiel to internalize the message in a very real way, to make the message a part of himself, deep in his bowels. And if you really are what you eat, Ezekiel is supposed to become the message. And he does. God asks him to enact several prophecies—to do strange acts in the presence of his people in order to teach them about some forthcoming destruction or hope. After making a tile on which he portrays Jerusalem, he is asked to lie on his side for 390 days next to the tile to represent the siege of Israel, and then to switch sides and lay another 40 days to symbolize the burden of Jerusalem, all the while eating defiled bread (see Ezekiel 4). Then he shaves his head and beard and divides the hair into three piles before burning one, chopping one up with a knife, and scattering the last one (Ezekiel 5). This is supposed to show the fate of the then-rebellious covenant people. He is asked to move and to eat his bread quaking and drink his water astonished (Ezekiel 12), to sigh (Ezekiel 21), to not mourn his wife’s death (Ezekiel 24), and to write on sticks and pick them up (Ezekiel 37), among other things. Can you imagine this? It heartbreakingly funny and wonderfully lonesome.

So I wanted to make a movie of it to make it real for my students. So on a whim the day before I taught it I bought a beard from a party store and got Julie to film me enacting a few of his dramatic prophecies (while holding the camera in one hand and Eleanor in the other. Who is this girl? Pretty cool, I say). When Oliver saw me with the beard, he said, “Take it off, daddy. You a bad guy. Take it off. It creepy. Take it off.” By the end of the filming, Lydia and Emerson loved Ezekiel. “Ezekiel’s funny,” they said. If that’s the only thing that came of the movie making, it is worth it to me, that they sense the humanity and humor of a prophet. Tonight I was singing “Ezekiel saw the wheel,” and Lyd asked what wheel he saw. I briefly explained the vision in Ezekiel 1, and she said, “That’s a cool vision, dad.” At dinner she tried to tell Emerson about it. You try telling someone about that vision. Ezekiel evidently had a hard time: “round about within it,” “the likeness of the appearance of the glory of the Lord,” etc.


But I digress, I wanted to tell you about the message of Ezekiel. His name means “God is strong,” and the whole book seems to support that thesis. Well, okay, let me tell you about His strength of goodness and mercy. This was Tuesday night, and I got the kids tucked in about nine o’clock (have I mentioned yet that we have missed Nana and Papa for myriad reasons—bless them for all the help they are). I came downstairs to do a (hopefully) quick editing job on my little video so it would be ready for the next day. My video editing software on my computer was damaged and would not work. It took me about an hour to figure this out. By then it was ten and I was thinking I should go to bed in case Ellie woke up for hours in the middle of the night. So I went to pray. I told Heavenly Father that my computer was broken, but I had shaved my head and cut up a really great fake beard, and well, I really wanted it to be worth something. “Go to bed,” He said. “I want to,” I told Him, “but I can’t sleep.” Okay, He relented.

Cue Allie and Alex, my sister- and brother-in-law. While I am praying, I hear a key turn and the front door open. I come downstairs to find Allie and Alex, whom we had invited to stay with us until they move, but I didn’t know where that had ended up. And Alex had just made a movie for his History of Creativity class and happened to have his laptop. Well, God is strong. Alex and I sat up for an hour or so editing and went to bed tired and happy with the result. Their arrival certainly felt like a tender mercy. Perfectly timed. Perfectly orchestrated. God is strong and God is good. He is smooth, I say.

Well, so the next day, first period kids are laughing and they clap at the end of the movie (they had complimented me on my haircut as they came into class). My next period, just as we are getting into the lesson, my computer crashes. Just stops working. I try rebooting it four times. Nothing. It comes up with a diagnostic thing. I try it. Nothing. My students can tell I’m a little disconcerted. So I set them to studying chapters two and three of Ezekiel, which they do very diligently and sweetly. I run to the office of my co-worker who has a little experience with computers. It is his prep period. God is strong. He tries a couple of things. Nothing. I need to get back to class. So I leave the computer with him, call Alex and ask if, maybe, he could bring his laptop down to the seminary. Luckily I had made it on his computer, so that it didn’t crash with mine. He is so good. So willing. I ask another co-worker if by chance I emailed him my Ezekiel powerpoint. It would make some of the teaching smoother. He finds it and lends me his computer. I get back to class. Students are very engaged and sensitive. We get past the point for the video and move on with the lesson.

Just then Alex shows up. I grab his laptop and am about to set it up when my co-worker with my computer comes it. It’s fixed. And my other co-worker is back for his computer. I look at these three men in my classroom, all sacrificing for me, for this lesson, and I feel like crying. God is strong. So strong. And He gives strength, which is an alternate reading of the meaning of Ezekiel. We watch the video and the kids laugh and tell me they are touched that I would shave my head for them. And then we look into Ezekiel’s testimony of the majesty, grace, power, and goodness of God. And I get to tell them that they have witnessed it that day. Prophetic object lesson. Acted out. As if on purpose. Oh, children, God is strong.


Here’s the video:

(the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3MX9arWxGo )

Liberty and Judgment for All

Of all the depictions of the final judgment in scripture, three resonate most with me. I love the absoluteness of grace in Doctrine and Covenants 45:3-5. I think I used to imagine standing before the judgment bar of God with Jesus pleading my case, saying something like, “Look, Father, at all the good Robbie has done. He was baptized and served a mission and married in the temple and . . . .” And I would stand there, feeling proud and pretty cool, trying not to blush as the Savior sang my praises. But the scene portrayed in this Second Coming section shows that there will be no place for pride in that day: “Listen to him who is the advocate with the Father, who is pleading your cause before him—Saying: Father, behold the sufferings and death of him who did no sin, in whom thou wast well pleased; behold the blood of thy Son which was shed, the blood of him whom thou gavest that thyself might be glorified.” He will not point to me at all. He will, in fact, ask the Father not to look at me. I have no merits on that day. Nothing I can or will do on this lovely green planet will qualify me for salvation—only the sufferings and death of Him who did no sin. “Wherefore [because of me, Jesus], Father, spare these my brethren that believe on my name, that they may come unto me and have everlasting life.” My greatest commendation, if indeed it can be honestly said of me, will be my friendship with the Light of the World. If that doesn’t urge a certain doctrinal humility, I don’t know what does.

The second judgment scene that captivates my imagination also appears in the Doctrine and Covenants, this time in section 88. It essentially shows judgment as a non-issue. There will be no adversarial banging of a gavel, proclaiming my ultimate fate. Instead, I will receive what I have become, what I have developed the capacity to receive: “They who are of a celestial spirit shall receive the same body which was a natural body; even ye shall receive your bodies, and your glory shall be that glory by which your bodies are quickened. Ye who are quickened by a portion of the celestial glory shall then receive of the same, even a fullness” (verses 28-29, italics added). What I have persistently chosen will be what I have become. Dallin H. Oaks puts it this way: “The Final Judgment is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts—what we have done. It is an acknowledgment of the final effect of our acts and thoughts—what we have become.” Joseph Fielding Smith writes that the difference in bodies will be literal—if you are resurrected with a Celestial body, you will glow like the sun; God will need only to look at you, nod, and say, “Well done. Enter.” President Smith says, “In the resurrection there will be different kinds of bodies; they will not all be alike. The body a man receives will determine his place hereafter. There will be celestial bodies, terrestrial bodies, and telestial bodies, and these bodies will differ as distinctly as do bodies here. . . . Some will gain celestial bodies with all the powers of exaltation and eternal increase . These bodies will shine like the sun as our Savior’s does, as described by John. Those who enter the terrestrial kingdom will have terrestrial bodies, and they will not shine like the sun, but they will be more glorious than the bodies of those who receive the telestial glory.” I like the thought of luminosity as the determining factor at that day.

The final scene of judgment I like best comes from the mortal lips of Jesus. This last one does seem to imply merit of a sort, but perhaps only that which proves that I am indeed the friend of the dusty, compassionate God incarnate, and that I have actually become godlike. In Matthew 25, the evangelist records Jesus as saying,

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (verses 31-40)

This seems to make the incarnation universal. Everyone we meet is Christ. Which is another way of saying that everyone we meet matters to God, is godly and holy. The determining factor on judgment day will be the way I cared for the people around me—the poor and the needy, the vulnerable and the lonely. I love the way C.S. Lewis puts it: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship . . . . It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

I have felt the holiness of the people around me. I remember walking down the sidewalk in college when I looked into someone’s eyes and realized there was a depth and strength and probably sorrow and fear and loneliness I would never comprehend. And I felt a lot of love that day. I began to choose person after person and to look into their eyes and to love them. My wife tells me that the more she gets to know people, the more she loves them. “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”

I know I run a risk bringing politics into, well into anything, but Lewis brought it up first. He said that in light of the divinity inherent in every person we should conduct our politics. I don’t want to say much, but just this: I am glad the Supreme Court ruled the way it did on immigration and the Affordable Care Act these last couple of weeks. God seems to have a lot to say about caring for the stranger among us. And I know some people use the word “entitlement” when speaking of the health care reform, but I like to think of it as compassion. I recognize that am not the most politically-informed person, and it is okay to disagree with me, but I like what King Benjamin said about succoring those who stand in need of succor and administering of my substance to those who stand in need, no matter how "deserving" they might or might not be. And I like Moses’s injunction to “open wide thy hand” and to give liberally. I really am alright, even happy and perhaps grateful, if I end up sacrificing a little so that someone else gets the care they need. I hope I’m not just saying that. I hope when it comes down to it I really do believe in generosity and kindness and charity. I guess all I’m saying is that every person is holy, and I’m okay letting that be the guiding principle for my politics. I’d better end this one “with love.” It really is.

(Photo by Kyle Poulter)

Ubiquitous

A few months ago, my then-almost-two-year-old, Oliver, had a peculiar tendency to associate every thing with the person to whom the thing belongs or with the person who gave the thing to him. We’d ask, “Are you drinking a sippy?” expecting to hear his crisp little “Yeah.” But instead he’d say, “Daddy” or “Mommy,” depending on who filled it. “Is that a toy car?” “Emy.” I loved it. Things were not things to him but manifestations of people he loves and people who love him. (I often ask him who loves him, just to hear him say, “You love me. An mommy love me.”) So I’ve been thinking about the way that kind of associative labeling would play out with an eternal perspective. Is that a comfortable bed? “God.” Do you love your family? “God.” What a beautiful sunset (this would have been last night as Julie and I drove home from the temple; the sky was on fire)! “God.” Everywhere we look is God. Everything we eat is God. He is the source. And He is the owner. The music, the mountains, the memories, my wife. God. God. God. God. I love Him.

Astonished By Grace

God speaks to me in nature. A couple of weeks ago I stood at the top of a mountain, looking down the canyon at the sweep and flow of trees clapping and shouting for joy. And a wind picked up to touch me, almost to lift me. The Hebrew word for wind, ruach, is also the word for spirit, often specifically the Spirit of God. It’s no wonder to me that wind has often been seen as holy, a manifestation of the invisible yet tangible. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” (Interestingly, the Greek word pneuma is used for both wind and Spirit in this verse.) We live in a world in which the invisible is as real, I think, as the visible.

But what I see with my natural eyes often teaches me of what I do not. So I try to perceive with other eyes. “Earth’s crammed with heaven,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “And every common bush afire with God; / But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.” Last summer we had rains and water like I’d never seen. And a waterfall taught me of God. I made this little essay-on-video:

(If the video doesn't work, here's a link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui4odDwMfns )

Moses hit a rock and water gushed forth. Refreshment from a stone: an astonishing moment. But it was the liberality of the act that delights and teaches me. “And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly.” Or this from the Psalms: “He brought streams also out of the rock, and caused waters to run down like rivers. . . . the waters gushed out, and the streams overflowed.” God’s grace is sometimes sufficient: the Israelites were given manna from day to day. And that would be enough. And yet, sometimes, God is prodigal in his tender mercies and lovingkindnesses. Annie Dillard notes, “If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor.” Quail up to the elbows as far as the eye can see.

Muhammad said that God is beautiful and loves beauty. The beauty of this world shows me the face of God. Dillard again: “Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator’s exuberance that grew such a tangle . . . . This, then, is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over.” Praise him.