Of What We Know and What We Are

Recently, while reading in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I thought back to when my two oldest daughters attended nursery during Sunday School hours at church.  We were then members of a congregation with many young families.  There were so many children that they divided the nursery into Senior Nursery and Junior Nursery.  The dividing line was between those who had turned two by the start of the year and those who had not yet reached that august age.  My older daughter—who is a real sweetheart and has since become the mother of daughters herself—was very proud that she was in Senior Nursery, while her sister was in Junior Nursery.

The mysterious relationship between my reading of the Romans and those events of not so long ago is that both emphasize how brief and transitory this life is.  Whether our mortal life is allocated more than 70 years or fewer than 7, the time all told is rather short, and I dare say mercifully so. 

This life is filled with the rich, the beautiful, as well as what is poor and ugly, and mostly what is very much temporary and does not matter.  The emperors of Rome came and went so quickly, few living to die of natural causes.  They scraped and fought and intrigued and connived to possess what they could not hold for long and which at the end left them nothing.  The royal purple for the emperors at last was little more important than whether my daughters were in Senior or Junior Nursery.  It all mattered about the same.

Some things do matter, greatly.  While they can involve tangible things, all that in this life of lasting value is intangible and survives the universal tomb.  Now I am watching my children cope with the mighty challenges that life concentrates into the years of transition from adolescence to adulthood.  Life’s calling, personal dedication, education, careers, marriage, family, truly life-changing decisions come at these young people inexorably in relentless and rapid succession.  They have tangible elements of mortality to employ as tools to aid and markers to help measure the evaluating and making of these important decisions.  They wade into deep problems when these material tools are mistaken for the real things.

As parents we watch, support, counsel, encourage, but the decisions are no longer ours.  With no small amount of concern, and with generous measures of satisfaction, we can witness these whom we love the most exercise their own free will to lay out the remaining course of their mortality.  For Mom and Dad, this period of life has been rich, sometimes painful, and frequently joyful.  It is for us a harvesting time, even while for our children it is mostly a time of planting.  

I am reminded that, with each graduation, one proceeds from the top of a staircase onto the bottom step of a new one.  When my daughter left Senior Nursery, she was at the bottom of the classes of Primary.  The seniors in high school become the freshmen in college.  The college graduate becomes the “newbie” at work.  In my employment I frequently am called upon to consider candidates for jobs.  Shall I tell you how little impressed I would be to learn that a particular applicant had been student council president or editor of the yearbook?

I believe that so it goes in the heavens.  We eternally progress from stage to stage, with Jesus Christ as our Guide, Leader, and Teacher, each stage well done qualifying us to begin the next, bringing us ever closer to become more like our Father in Heaven.  The value is in this very real becoming.  Our greatest worldly achievements of rank and fame bring with them into heaven as little weight as our grade school awards convey into adulthood.  With much concern God watches how we make our decisions, how we develop our character, with satisfaction and joy as we choose what is good and act well.  Like wise parents, God cannot and will not choose for us, our choices at planting being part of His joy in the harvest.

Again, as I recall my children in nursery, and my grandchildren there today, I reflect that there is so much that I would tell them but which they would not begin to understand.  There is a treasury of what I have learned in over 5 decades that I would share but that would be completely incomprehensible to a granddaughter or grandson in primary school. 

Then I reflect that compared to my Heavenly Father, my treasury is the knowledge of an infant, that I even today am such a little child in terms of what I know.  Indeed, were I to know all that there is available to know in this life, it would still be so very little compared with what our Father in the eternal worlds knows and has for us to learn when we once again live with Him.  A modern Apostle, Dallin H. Oaks (a former university president), once remarked that an omniscient God is not all that impressed with our Ph.Ds.  

But if I do well with what He has given and taught me, I have received the living hope from His Son that I may come step by step in the presence of the Father to know all that He would share, which is everything.  That is humbling and exhilarating.  I am glad that I have not really very long to wait, and that I can learn my first lessons even now.

Of Vanity and Christmas Gifts

The prophets, ancient and modern, are clear that this life is a very artificial thing.  The earth and this mortality did not just happen.  They were carefully planned in the sphere of the eternities, for very specific—and lasting—purposes.

Abraham reported this, from a vision wherein he saw God speaking of us, His spirit children, before He created the earth:

We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell; and we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them; and they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; . . . and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever. (Abraham 3:24-26)

Some centuries later Moses had a related vision, in which the Lord told him,

For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. (Moses 1:39)

Our glory appears to be the Lord’s glory.  It is the Lord’s work and glory that we grow and progress forever.  The mortal mission and sacrifice of Jesus Christ were all part of His work for our immortality and eternal life.  I am not sure that the Lord cares anything at all about anything we do other than what we do that affects His work and His glory.  I do not find any evidence in the scriptures that anything else that we do matters to Him.  Of course, in an eternal context, nothing else we do really matters to us, either.   All of that other stuff is what the author of Ecclesiastes refers to as “vanity of vanities” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

That vanity, the key theme of the Book of Ecclesiastes, is what many people seem to think that this life is all about.  Many people live this life as if this life really mattered much, when in truth, all that matters about this life is how it affects the true reality, which resides in the eternal worlds, beyond this world and life.  Lasting value and meaning are found in what we take with us when we leave this world. 

That is a good filter, if we wish to discern what in this life is imperishable and real and what is temporary and vain.  If you take it with you past the grave, it matters.  If it does not, fuhgeddaboudit.  Or, at least, do not set your heart on it or waste much time with it.

That might be a good guide for Christmas gifts.  By that I mean, consider the purpose behind the giving of the gift.  Is its purpose to transfer possession of vanity, that has no reach beyond the grave?  Or is it instead intended to communicate and strengthen ties of love, friendship, to show kindness, to build relationships, to facilitate personal growth and progress, to memorialize pleasant shared experiences, to express and transmit value?  Consider how it may be tied to this list of eternal verities that stay with us?

Remember faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence. (Doctrine and Covenants 4:6)

There is a lot of Christmas Spirit in that list.  Such solemnized gifts are not likely to break and never grow old.  They are very real.  To the extent they embrace such virtues, I think we remember them.

Of Christmas and Faith in Miracles

The events associated with the birth of the Savior occurred in a miraculous time during an age of miracles.  It was also an era of grinding poverty, breathtaking opulence, and many gradations of wealth in between.  People were ignorant, well educated, parochial in vision, and metropolitan in view.  Religious beliefs involved spurious superstitions, animistic traditions, polytheistic practices, monotheistic faith, and sophisticated atheism.

That is to say that those times and ours have more in common than we might have supposed, which is the point of my writing this evening.  Perhaps we create too much distance between us and the birth of the Savior.  Measured in human lives, 2000 years is a long time.  In the eternal measures of God and heaven, it must be acknowledged as being brief, a matter of yesterday and common memory.

That being true, it would be odd to assume that God, whose miracles were on prominent display in Judea of long ago, would work by miracles yesterday and not do so today.  The lack of belief in either one logically undermines faith in the other, because it assumes limits on either God’s ability or His willingness to work by miracles, a possibility hard for the mind to accept.  The disbelief in either ancient or modern miracles inclines the mind to reject God’s miraculous interventions entirely. 

For some it can be much easier to believe in miracles of the past than to recognize modern ones.  Others may be willing to see God’s hand in their own lives but consider the ancient scriptural accounts as morality stories, the details of which should not be taken too literally.  We find examples of both among our contemporaries and throughout history.    

Of course, among the sophisticated set have always been those who doubted miracles of both past and present.  With no recognition of personal involvement in miracles, they reject the word of those who actually witnessed them.  They are quick to dismiss others’ experiences, with nice attitudes of condescension for the “lovely legends” and “faith traditions,” that must be taken figuratively if accepted at all.  When those who know assert the reality of the wonders, the sophisticates can be known to turn to anger and scorn.

And yet reality can be stubborn and defy rejection.  Angels delivering messages from God to priests in the Temple and to shepherds in the fields, God speaking to common men by dreams, signs from God to men in distant places motivating them to “traverse afar” to witness God’s works of salvation, and many other examples of heaven’s direct involvement in human affairs can be easier to dismiss if they only happened in hazy history.  When presented with facts of past and present miracles skeptics are hard put to know how to deal with them, other than to dismiss them out of hand and cast ignorant aspersions on those claiming any direct and tangible involvement with Divinity.  Nevertheless, the facts remain.

It works the other way, too.  Denying modern miracles makes it easier to deny their existence long ago and to convert them into lovely stories instead of real world evidences of the power and love of God and of His involvement in our lives.  If there are no miracles now, then they were unlikely to exist in the past.  The miracles attendant to the Savior’s birth are transformed into fabulous fabrications rather than marvelous signs of the reality of the birth of the Son of God.  The reality of modern miracles, however, attests to the reality of the miracles recorded in ancient scripture.

Admittedly, with rare exceptions, miracles are not for the edification of the faithless anyway.  The Lord usually provides room for disbelief for those who choose to disbelieve and for their own sake spares the doubtful from divine confirmation of what they doubt.  The Lord did not send angels to invite the leaders of society to the stable in Bethlehem, but instead He called out to those who readily accepted His invitation to witness the baby laid to rest in the cattle’s manger.  He did send signs, and through the signs a summons, to the believing wise men of the East who had faith that this child was to be the King of Kings.

Similarly, in modern times, to prepare the way for the approach of the Savior’s second coming, the Lord has reached out through angels, heavenly messengers, and by His own voice to the humble faithful who are ready to believe His word, confirming their belief with many and miraculous signs and wonders.

It is a lot easier to believe in the wonders of the Savior’s birth when we witness and receive their like in our own day.  Our unchangeable God works by similar methods with all of His children.  And the saints of all ages rejoice.