Child of Light on display in the Conference Center, Salt Lake City
Sculptor Laura Lee Stay Bradshaw b.1958
Cast bronze, 2003
The sculptress: “Ever since I can remember I had an insatiable desire to create.”
My teenage daughters have a delightful custom of putting on favorite conference talks while we cook and clean up on Sunday. This Sunday it was Elder Holland on why understanding the Fall was important to understanding the Atonement.
Coincidentally, I had been thinking about the logic of Eden and the Fall on the drive to Church and during the Sacrament, for no particular reason.
What I am going to tell you is that the story of Eden and the Fall has a deep logic to it that connects with the basic and unavoidable features of mortality and progress. It’s a fount of philosophy.
Wherefore, I will that all men shall repent, for all are under sin, except those which I have reserved unto myself, holy men that ye know not of.
-thus D&C 49:8
I don’t know what this means and I wish I did. There is no context to speak of.
There are two references I could find. One from Spencer W. Kimball which doesn’t address the holy men part. The other was added by a later editor in a footnote in the Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, to a statement by Joseph Smith saying that God had reserved Enoch unto Himself.
There once was a church that was a secret. The secrecy was sacred to them. Anyone could learn about it, but you had to do it this way. You had to go to a certain place, a hidden alcove in a wall, and there you would be taught a truth and be given instructions for the next location to go to. They would give you a token–the first one was a lumpy black polished stone turtle about the size of a chocolate. If you wanted to know more, you would then go to the next location, present your token, and learn the next step. Eventually you would have to make commitments and join. If you see some of your neighbors slinking along a back alley on a Sunday morning and then fugitively disappearing into an apparently abandoned warehouse, you might suspect what church they belong to.
Of course any large organization has to have some flexibility built in, so there are other methods for the church to get people to come in on some of their secrets. There was a young man who was not a member of the church but had done some important work for the leadership and knew them and a lot of their affairs–in confidence of course. They complained to him that there was a church that was even more secret. This even-more-secret church was out in the open and its doctrines were all openly taught and its rituals conducted in public, but all these had a hidden truer inner meaning that no one was ever explained, if you belonged you just figured it out in a moment of illumination. The first secret church was desperate to figure out which of the many open churches around them was secretly the second even-more-secret church but so far they hadn’t been able to.
—
This came to me a in a waking dream.
Doctrine and Covenants 46 on spiritual gifts. Here are some unexpected points
On that last point, I think I had a genuine insight of sorts.
Stasis + Misery = Hell
Stasis + Happiness = Eden
Growth + Misery = Mortality
Growth + Happiness = Heaven
Pride is climbing a hill and building a house there for the view of the plains.
Humility is scaling the summit and learning you still haven’t touched the sky.
We were so busy Mother’s Daying yesterday we forgot to put anything up.
The JG salutes mothers.
There was a man who fell into a shining portal and woke up in another world. At the very first he thought he was just somewhere foreign, or in the past. He appeared in what seemed to be a normal village from old times, children running around, a busker juggling for coins, blacksmiths, tanners, a market square for crafts and foods…but he soon discovered he was a in a land of magic. Wizards worked spells. Warriors developed their talents until they could leap across streets and bring down lightning with their sword.
Oddly enough, the people of that land were as impressed with the novelty of his background as he was with theirs. A land of … tech nah loe jee? But when he insisted that Earth had no magic they didn’t believe him. Every place had some magic. Scholars assured him that it was a natural law–every land and every dimension might have a different form of magic, but magic they had. He in turn assured them that Earth didn’t.
One day a chance remark of his led the people he was with to explain to him how babies were made. The mother had to collect and work a series of powerful spells (long, arduous, dangerous) while the father had to go on a series of dangerous quests for rare alchemical ingredients (long, arduous, dangerous) and then they jointly had to seek a boon from the Gods. It was all they could do to barely maintain their population. All of their feats and might were earned in the service of eking out a child or two.
“Weird,” he said, “that’s now how we do it on Earth…” and then he explained.
The people were dumbfounded. They were struck with a vision of a world so magical that nearly any man and woman, who wished, could work the greatest feat of magic known merely through love and the workings of their bodies. The rumor of the magic of Earth spread like a wildfire throughout the land. It created decades, centuries, of wistful art and literature about the fantasy of a land where even the very flesh was magic.
There are so many wonderful Madonnas with child. From my LDS perspective, I wish there were also some Madonnas with children.
There once was a land that was blessed with the greatest wizard of all time. He just spent his time muttering and wizarding in his high tower, so from a practical standpoint his presence didn’t make much difference. But everyone agreed it was neat.
But one day God put it in the heart of some tradesmen and yeomen to ask the wizard for a great gift for the people.
On the sweetness…
You are away from home. There is an older woman sister missionary who is acting as the greeter. She says, “welcome to the church of joy!” She grins puckishly.
When you get back, one of the friends you are staying with is Protestant. He tells you, sheepishly, that there’s something’s been on his mind, and he wrote a sermon–would you like to hear it? You say yes.
Nehemiah 8:13, he says. The joy of the Lord is our strength.
Hebrews 12:2. Look unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.
Today in the sacrament we remember a body broken and blood shed, and then that same body made whole again, a person again, and clothed in spotless unbloodied white.
I also remember a pale unmoving body and look forward to when she moves again, ruddy with life.
This is what I wrote on Betsey’s 4th birthday. What would have been her 4th birthday.
One promise of the Resurrection can be found in the fact that the grief never fades. We were not meant for separation.
Betsey, wherever you are, think kindly of your father.
Someone from a prior era, maybe John Derbyshire, once said sleep made him an atheist. The existential horror of just… shutting down completely
I have never felt that existential horror (though I have sometimes idly speculated that maybe spirits aren’t fully self-aware until embodied).
But there is a stage of sleep that makes my flesh creep. It’s when you wake up in the night and can’t sleep. You look at the clock. You then lie there wide awake for what seems like half an hour but when you look its only 10 minutes. You then toss and turn some more, again, it feels like half an hour. You look at the clock again, and two hours have passed. Somehow you have slipped in and out of consciousness without realizing it. And this does horrify me. It does not lead me to atheism, but it strikes some kind of existential fear in me. To be so powerless that your mind can disappear and you not even know it. Just you are there and then you are not.
