The Dark Lord and the Doctrine and Covenants

Here’s another edition of the D&C When Everybody Else is Done.    But instead of being a specific doctrinal comment on D&C 137-138, this is a daydream or a reverie.

Once upon a time, a Dark Lord rose in the land.  With cruelty and hate and plunder he drove his conquests on, leaving burnt villages, dead and wounded men and women, orphan children, weeping starving people marched off in chains under the lash….

With great difficulty, the heroes defeated him and his dark arts.  But they didn’t kill him.  They harried him instead as he fled.  For years and years they harried him.  He used his magic to walk strange paths, to flee to unknown lands… still they harried him.  At last, he found refuge in a small valley in a different time and place, where no one knew or could know about his past, and there he found peace.  He became a craftsman, kept some goats, and lived quietly at last.

This, is turned out, was the purpose of all the harrying.  The divine plan the  heroes were called to live out was not just for saving everyone from the Dark Lord.  It was also for saving the Dark Lord himself.

But the ambition and perhaps the cruelty of Providence didn’t end there.  Because once the Dark Lord had found peace and become, in a small way, a good man…. Heaven granted him all his power back.  His newly formed character was unable to handle it and he became the Dark Lord again.  In that new land,  he once again rose in villainy and horror and was defeated.  Every few hundred years the Dark Lord rose again and the cycle repeated itself.  But this was all by design.  Every person in that land, from child to peasant to blacksmith to knight, was a redeemed soul who had volunteered for the experience just to give the Dark Lord another chance.  Because heaven’s aim was not just for him to be good in a small way.  Heaven aimed for him to be good and great.  And so these loving souls labored year after year, decade after decade, century after century, while the Dark Lord labored through what might still prove to be purgatory on his way to heaven, or his own hell.