The Natural History of the Chicken

"They're Just Doing This" by Brian Kershisnik

I liked the film all right, for the most part. It had a lady in it who resuscitated a frozen chicken. That was a heroic and a lovely thing. And she called her hens “girls,” just like the kind Long Islander who runs the little bed and breakfast in Salt Lake and makes exquisite morning food. And the movie had that gentle bearded man with the intelligent eyes who likes to know where his food is coming from and so he raises chickens and sends his small children out into the slanting early sun to gather the eggs of the free-range birds from the long grasses of his backyard—like Easter every day.

But sometimes the film almost seemed to smirk a little, you know? And that sort of bothered me. Look at how idiosyncratic some people are, it seemed to say, elbowing me in the ribs, urging me to join in with a conspiratorial smile, I mean, this lady puts underwear on her rooster and drives him around in her car.

Well, people are idiosyncratic. That’s a lovely thing. Quirky, sacred human beings living out their eccentric, holy lives all over this peculiar, blessed planet.

Here’s Hopkins:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

That’s what was missing from the movie—a sense of reverence for the strangeness in others, for the otherness of others. Idiosyncrasy is to be met with honor, I believe, with great affection. I have long appreciated something Joseph Wirthlin, that quiet-voiced apostle, once said: “The Lord did not people the earth with a vibrant orchestra of personalities only to value the piccolos of the world. Every instrument is precious and adds to the complex beauty of the symphony. All of Heavenly Father’s children are different in some degree, yet each has his own beautiful sound that adds depth and richness to the whole.”

The novel Gilead begins and ends with a similar affirmation. Old Reverend Ames tells his young son, “You might have a very different life from mine . . . and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life.” And this from the final pages: “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” And thousands of thousands of people living this life, every one of them cherished and sufficient and worthy of reverence.

Which makes me think, for some reason, of that baffling response Spencer Kimball once gave when someone asked him what he does when he finds himself in a boring sacrament meeting: “I don’t know,” he said, “I’ve never been in one.” That anecdote is usually told in the church with a little bit of a chuckle, because heaven knows some meetings are tedious. But a large part of communal worship may be the privilege of experiencing the holiness in others, of attending to someone’s utter otherness. This may be a large part of why I go to church—to learn to love and to briefly inhabit the foreign countries and strange planets of other people’s souls. Neal Maxwell once commented that “God is never bored . . . because of His perfect love for His children.” Boredom, then, is a failure of love, and also, I think, a failure of imagination. Every unusual human being, every ostensibly wearisome speaker, every oddity and every quirk I encounter is an invitation to see God’s image in the countenance of the other, is a summons to reverence.

Wine to Water

"Unknown Allegory . . . " by Brian Kershisnik

Holiness is in the eye of the beholder. As I took the sacrament yesterday, I thought about how Jesus turned water to wine, and Joseph Smith turned it back into water. Both acts were, I think, gestures toward acknowledging the holiness of common things.

The thing is, Jesus turns water to wine every day. “I am the true vine,” He said. Wine is water which has passed through the vine. Jesus is the Creator. This is what He does. He breathes miracles. Everything He touches turns green and buds and blossoms and changes. He can change hearts and souls. Of course He can make the extravagant, impossible move of generating fifteen firkins of the finest, holiest wine from six regular barrels filled with liquid made of two parts hydrogen for each part oxygen. Of course.

But the theology of Joseph Smith is one which acknowledges that so can man. Harold Bloom, that old poetic-religious atheist, called Joseph a religious genius, and I think his genius lies in his vision of mankind as holy and of the universal availability of sacred experience. The revelation that changed wine back into water is found in the Doctrine and Covenants. The historical background for section 27 reads like this:

Revelation given to Joseph Smith the Prophet, at Harmony, Pennsylvania, August 1830. In preparation for a religious service at which the sacrament of bread and wine was to be administered, Joseph set out to procure wine. He was met by a heavenly messenger and received this revelation, a portion of which was written at the time and the remainder in the September following. Water is now used instead of wine in the sacramental services of the Church.

What the angel actually said, using the words of Jesus, was this: “I say unto you, that it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory—remembering unto the Father my body which was laid down for you, and my blood which was shed for the remission of your sins.” Eat donuts or tortillas, but think of me, and it is sacred. So yesterday I ate store-bought white bread and drank water from the tap, and I remembered Jesus. And it was a sanctifying sacred experience. Think of the implications: holiness is what you find in your pantry at home. It is what you water your lawn with. It struck me and stayed in my mind this week the way the water looked as it came out of the hose onto the sunbaked lawn and dirt. It was perfectly clear until it reflected back the high sun and became a resplendent glory, the rounded edges of water looking liquid and eternal before they sank into the earth and became just mud and wet yellow grass. Holy mud and holy yellow grass.

Wine is holy, yes, but there’s a holiness in water, too. Simpler and more ubiquitous, but perhaps no less exquisite. It is the stuff of rain and tears. Something to swallow the pills. Walk into the world and listen to the swallows spill their songs to the clouds, harbingers of holiness. And see the miracle. Taste the wine in the water.