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.

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.

The Water's Edge

Friday night I held Eleanor’s small, perfect, pajama-clothed body against me to warm her and to be warmed by her as we stood outside on a rooftop and listened to human beings pour music out of their insides and out of their (mostly stringed) instruments. Ellie watched wide-eyed and happy. She cooed and sang and I felt her small head vibrate under my warm hands which perched atop her head in the attitude of blessing, covering her ears to muffle the sound and offering what heat or fire I could. The songs they sang were mostly about light and water. The water ones washed around my thoughts:

Now Jordan’s banks they’re red and muddy,

And the rolling water is wide.

But I got no boat, so I’ll be good and muddy,

When I get to the other side.

And when I pass through the pearly gate,

Will my gown be gold instead?

How many times did ancient Israelites cross the river Jordan into a new life, an unknown? Joshua’s priests, hoping against hope that this swelling spring river would stop when the soles of their feet hit the wetness. As a heap. Those priests carrying their precious ark got a little wet, a small splash on the robes, but the others passed over dry-shod to the unknown of those high walls of Jericho. A new life. Utterly different from the wilderness they had just left. Of course, their fathers had passed through the waters as well. From slavery to freedom. From relative comfort to uncertainty, too. And Elijah crossed that same river to board his chariot of fire, off to a life of certain light. A new and different ministry. But he left behind poor Elisha to pick up the mantle and cross back—lonely, confused, uncertain. He walked into a world of miracles, though. They usually did. And then the Savior walked into that river a carpenter’s obedient Son and walked out the very Son of God. Well, or so it seemed to His mystified neighbors.

And there was this song: Wade in the water. Wade in the water, children. God’s gonna trouble the water.

A man sat by the pool of Bethesda—the pool of the house of mercy—waiting for an angel to trouble the waters. Troubled waters bring healing. But the waters came to him. A woman sat by a well, cracked like the worn jar in her hands. The Son of God said to her, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.” How? You have nothing to draw with. “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” This woman spoke with the embodiment of Living Waters. The waters had come to seep into and soothe her broken soul. “Give me this water.”

So, then, just this: Maybe the water meant so much because I had come to that music from the baptism of a student of mine—a bright, glistering, good young woman who has waited a long time for this. It was good for us to be there. Baptism is a death and a birth at the same time. Every crossing of the waters is. “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” But this burial is into life itself, not in earth or under stone, but we are immersed in water, enveloped in life. “Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Newness of life. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” To die into living waters and to emerge transformed. The very air is different.

I don’t know the quality of life we will enjoy in the next world, but I feel somewhat certain that it will be life “coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.” There will likely exist certain parallels between this life and that—for life is life. But we will glow. We will know. Life elevated. Death will be a birth into a newness of life. Resurrection always follows a passing away.

So, too, I suppose that the quality of Shain’s life will change dramatically after being immersed in that font of living water. She will breathe differently. When she came mewling into this world and screamed her first breath of mortal air, she began to experience something unparalleled in her existence. From the light of God into this diffused, slanted earthly light. But now embodied. Able to hold a hand and to hug a friend. To smell the wispy fresh-washed hair of an infant. That former life surely held its glories. But without dying to that life, I could never have experienced this.

For the past two days, I have bathed in a flow of Spirit and words. I love living apostles and prophets. My heart has hummed and sung and glowed. This new life. This new life.

When I was born, I was given a new name and a family. Every birth provides these gifts. My name identifies, distinguishes, and associates me. Shain too received a new name at baptism. She took upon her the name of Jesus—distinguished from the darkness of the world by her new relationship with the Light of the World and associated with the fellowship of the Saints. This is a family of open arms. She will stumble as she begins to walk in newness of life. She will stutter as she speaks with the new tongue—the tongue of angels. But she will grow up in this new life. She has come to the water’s edge. And she has crossed. I have come to the water’s edge now several times. Every crossing brings death, cleansing, and a resurrection to newness.

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.