Nostalgia for Revelation

There’s something Faulkner says that I always associate with Shelby Foote, who I heard it from first.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory.

I wish I could find a clip of Foote reciting it.  There’s a tight analogy here with the social justice left.  Many of them are quite well meaning.  Their problem is (the well-meaning ones) that they are lost in the past.  For them, its always 1965 and they are marching in Selma and this time, this time, we’ll achieve perfect justice.

That shouldn’t be our attitude towards the Doctrine and Covenants.  If you really let yourself–and you should–you can feel that sense of magic.  A time and place where the heavens opened, where God spoke, where Jehovah stood in the air and thundered, and revelations poured down like dew from heaven.  But you shouldn’t stop there.  If you don’t long for Nauvoo or the plains or the early Valley you are kinda broken as a Saint.  But if you stop there, you are stagnant as a Saint.  You have to move on to living your own age of miracles.  If the heavens are quieter with you than they were with Joseph, don’t descend into an elegiac mood.  Prepare yourself. This is the calm before the storm.