Victory and Possibility and the Mortal Experience

Here’s a post that looks like it was meant for the election news but its actually something I’ve been noodling for the last couple of weeks.  This is a little deep for me, so if you can think of a pithier, better way of making the point I’m struggling to make, please drop it into the comments.   Here goes.

Having possibility feels great.  The more possibility the better.  Like Christopher Columbus on the edge of a new continent, or Brigham Young looking down at the valley and saying ‘this is the place.’  That is a deeply spiritual feeling.  In fact its literally spiritual, that is what it is like to be a spirit.  As a spirit you are undefined and have every option in front of you.

But mere possibility is a prison.  Possibility without actuality is dead.  It is a horrible sin for the spirit to want to live forever in that sense of possibility and shrink from coming to earth as a mortal.  Not because God has arbitrarily defined it as a sin but because it is in the very nature of possibility, the very thing that makes it good, that it demands to be converted into a reality.  Spirit is possibility but body is actuality, and the spirit needs the body.  What we find limiting about mortality is what makes it valuable.  The struggle, the fact that as a body you can only be in  one place at one time with a limited life span in which to do anything, the fact that you interact with things around in a way that radically constrains your choices, the fact that you have to heave overboard most of the possibilities to even sorta achieve one of them, the fact that  mortality is difficult, is precisely what makes the mortal experience necessary and good.

Too many saints define spiritual experience as feeling good which to them means never making judgments, never saying no, never striving and falling short, good vibes only.  Those saints are trying to recapitulate the pre-earth experience.  But that experience is over and done with and its inherent in what made it valuable that it should be over and done with.  All that glorious potential cries out to heaven to be made something real.

The arc is from possibility to struggle to victory.  Your own wedding, and then the diapers and the bills, and then crying at your kids’ weddings because you made it.  You say ‘this is the place’ and then you tell the wagoneer to drive on into a dusty valley with no houses and no fields and the temple you try to build has a cracked foundation and the US Army invades but it works–there are towns and churches and a people–and when you die Brother Joseph comes to welcome you home.  The arc premortal existence–>mortality–>heaven is itself true but is also an archetype for the nature of existence.  Possibility–>struggle–>victory.  You live that arc in every way small and large.  You live it every day.  Morning–>daytime–>evening.

The good news is that you decide when the arc is over.  It doesn’t end in failure unless you decide that failure is the end.  This is the essence of repentance and why I think Elder Bednar was so profound when he said the repentance isn’t an add-on, its built right into the very hear of things.  Repentance is literally just that when you experience a failure you decide that the failure wasn’t the  end of the arc but still somewhere in the  middle.  I don’t mean that as a stylish metaphor, I mean it literally.  That is, in fact, what repentance is.  There are no final defeats unless your spirit decides to stop seeing the possibility.  (But the nature of mortality means that the shape of the final victory is constrained by what has happened, you  have to move forward from where you are.)

President Nelson is a prophet.  He has said repeatedly that the best is yet to come.  He knows.