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Reason must be a part of any solution to the mystery of life that we find satisfactory. A supreme deity would no more gift us with intellect and expect us to forsake it in moments of bafflement, than He would fashion us eyes to see and bid us shut them to the stars. Our vision draws us to that which lies beyond our ken—too distant, or too small, for our mortal powers of perception. Yet we do not abandon our gift of sight, but fashion Galileo’s telescope or the electron microscope, which together with naked eyes unlocks new worlds.
So must reason work with will to fashion understanding. The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true and which we have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true. There must be grounds for doubt as well as belief, in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore the more deliberate, and laden with personal vulnerability and investment. An overwhelming preponderance of evidence on either side would make our choice as meaningless as would a loaded gun
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For most of us, at least, there is neither a choir of heavenly heralds proving God exists, nor a laboratory of science equipment proving He doesn’t. Rather, we find a persuasive body of evidence on both sides of life’s competing propositions. Only in the case of us mortals, there is something to tip the scale. There is something to predispose us to a life of faith or a life of disbelief. There is a heart that, in these conditions of equilibrium and balance, equally “enticed by the one or the other,” is truly free to choose belief or skepticism, faith or faithlessness.
Like the poet’s image of a church bell that only reveals its latent music when struck, or a dragonfly that only flames forth its beauty in flight, so does the content of a human heart lie buried until action calls it forth. The greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not.
As premortal individuals, possessing self-awareness and the power of choice, we existed in God’s presence long before the foundations of the earth were laid.
Clearly, to aspire to be God is sin; to desire to be like God is filial love and devotion. So any concept of eternal life must be framed by the invitation to share in the divine nature. And God’s nature and life are the simple extenuation of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth.
That chemicals which are ‘merely material’ should come to understand their own nature is a staggering supposition..
our minds are driven to answer questions that far transcend the bounds of our own lives. The human mind itself is far more powerful and capacious than any instrument necessary for mere self-preservation or the construction of huts or skyscrapers.
Tenderness suggests sensitivity. A loving heart, like an exposed nerve, is by definition susceptible to pain. Do we really want to believe in a God who is thus exposed, unshielded from human sin and evil? Not merely as God incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Man who suffered, bled, and died—but as God, the Eternal Father, the Everlasting One, the Man of Holiness. The Christian church’s first theologian, Origen, was sure this must be so. “The Father, too, himself, the God of the Universe, ‘patient and abounding in mercy’ and compassionate, does He not in some way suffer? Or do you not know
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The astonishing revelation here is that God does set His heart upon us. And in so doing, God chooses to love us. And if love means responsibility, sacrifice, vulnerability, then God’s decision to love us is the most stupendously sublime moment in the history of time. He chooses to love even at, necessarily at, the price of vulnerability.
His freely made choice to inaugurate and sustain costly loving relationships is the very core of His divine identity.
In the Garden story, good and evil are found on the same tree, not in separate orchards. Good and evil give meaning and definition to each other. If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness. The presence of such pain serves the larger purposes of God’s master plan, which is to maximize the human capacity for joy, or in other words, “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the
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The Lord Himself describes for Job His laying of the earth’s foundations, as a moment “when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy.” It is as if God’s own nature spills over, and His gladness multiplies through a progeny that will share in His own capacity for joyful activity and love-filled relationships. In a more recent scripture, Christ proclaims that this was His purpose all along, and His central, even His only concern. For “He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world; for he loveth the world.”
The naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch thought it was this very song of the birds that demonstrated an excess, a redundancy in nature. Birds sing to warn of danger, or to attract a mate. But they also sing for joy. One biologist has written, “To be a bird is to be alive more intensely than any other living creature, man included. . . . They live in a world that is always the present, mostly full of joy.” Joy itself is not necessary, useful, or productive to the workings of the natural world. In a universe limited by the economy of the essential, joy is proof of a surplus. In the grueling contest
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God’s desire, so manifest in the texture of the created order, is to enlarge the sphere of human joy, and we discover the marvelous truth that our joy is His joy. What greater motivation could there be for us to seek out and secure our own, our friends’, our families’ happiness, than to know it adds to His. Truly, God has made us His central concern, and as long as humans live—He will share in all our sorrows. But He also shares in all our triumphs and joys. For He has set His heart upon us.
strike us, not as the babble of a foreign tongue, but as a song
chose. If we could have acted differently, then we were free to act differently at that moment of choice.
Guilt is how we know we are free to choose.
the only basis for human freedom and human accountability is a human soul that existed before birth as it will after death. Moral freedom demands preexistence, and preexistence explains human freedom.
We might, therefore, reasonably hypothesize that Christ saw His own incarnation as progression, rather than regression. He knew only the body and soul, “inseparably connected, receive a fullness of joy.” Some early church fathers saw His incarnation as ennobling the body, rather than degrading the Divine. Gregory Nazianzen wrote of a day in Christ’s mortal life, “Perhaps He goes to sleep, in order that He may bless sleep . . . ; perhaps He is tired that He may hallow weariness also; perhaps He weeps that He may make tears blessed.”
The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has.”
Our task, it would seem, is to retain or recapture the innocence with which we began this life, while passing through the crucible we call mortality.
For desire has both spiritual and bodily expression, and our life is a journey to purify both. Along the way, we discipline and honor the body, even as we aspire to perfect the soul, finding in the end that the body and spirit, fitly framed together, do indeed provide the deepest joy.
An ancient allegory, “The Hymn of the Pearl,” recorded in a book of scripture never canonized, gives expression to the purpose of this life, traceable to a premortal past, not a random birth in recent time. The first stanza tells of royal parents who send their son on a quest in search of a great pearl. His parents bless him, clothe him, and send him on his way:
Sympathy and sorrow, not anger and vengeance, are the emotions we must look to in order to plumb the nature of the divine response to sin.
It is not the injured pride of a tyrant that we see here, but the pain of a suffering parent. “Ye have abandoned me,” He responds. Then we read, “and He could no longer bear to see Israel suffer.” (“His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel” in the King James Version.) In the language of scripture, this is God’s response to human sin, an underlying sorrow, not anger. Sin is pain, and the intensity of His response to sin is commensurate with the intensity of that pain He knows sin will entail, and in which He has already chosen to share. For He is the God who weeps.
What is always at stake in any decision we make is what that choice turns us into.
We may suffer the unfortunate consequences of other peoples’ choices. People may honor or abuse us, harm or nourish us. But for the most part, it is our own choices that shape our identity.
But to live in harmony with the moral law of the universe requires body and soul, heart and mind, the will and the affections of the undivided self. This is the meaning of Jesus’ words that living the highest and holiest law, loving God, requires “all your heart, and . . . all your soul, and . . . all your mind.”
Genuine moral agency entails necessary consequences. Choice is always choice of something. In John Stuart Mill’s classic treatment of the subject, human liberty requires the freedom “of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow.” Those consequences may look like punishment or reward from our perspective, but they were chosen. That is how freedom operates, ideally at least. Consequences are chosen at the time actions are freely committed. To choose to indulge a desire is to choose its fruit—bitter or sweet—assuming, and this is a crucial caveat—that “men are instructed
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The underlying principle, however, does not vary: we are becoming what we love and desire. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. . . . What we are worshipping we are becoming.” Every moment of every day our choices enact our loves, our desires, and our aspirations. And we are molding ourselves into the God or gods we thereby worship.
Heaven is not a club we enter. Heaven is a state we attain, in accordance with our “capacity to receive” a blessed and sanctified nature.
“That which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same,” in the language of scripture.
Heaven is a condition and a sanctified nature toward which all godly striving tends; it is not a place to be found by walking through the right door with a heavenly hall pass.
God’s purpose is to give us not mere existence in the eternities, but “an abundant life,” a life fully like His own. His design is not to extend our life indefinitely, but to enhance it permanently. That is why atonement involves much more than Christ’s death on a cross.
As He collapsed under the compounded weight of human sin and sorrow, “an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.” The garden was aptly named; Gethsemane means place of the olive press, where “Ev’n God himself [was] pressed for my sake.”
If we fall short of salvation, it will be because our cumulative choices, our freely made decision to reject His rescue, have put us beyond His reach, not because His patience has expired.
If some inconceivable few will persist in rejecting the course of eternal progress, they are “the only ones” who will be damned, taught Joseph Smith. “All the rest” of us will be rescued from the hell of our private torments and subsequent alienation from God. “All except” the intractable will be saved, for God will force no man to heaven.
Relationships are the core of our existence because they are the core of God’s, and we are in His image.
It is a belonging that we crave because it is one we have always known.
It means that “nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father and how familiar His face is to us.”
Nietzsche was right when he said Christians had a tendency to turn away from this life in contempt, to dream of other-worldly delights rather than resolve this-worldly problems. We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering, and in imagining a heaven above, than creating a heaven in our homes and communities.
The cosmos revolves on comforting the sick. When you act in this way, you are sharing in the love which built the stars.”
Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriages, families, and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us. And then, and only then, those relationships become the environment in which those perfected virtues are best enjoyed.
conformity to law breeds both freedom and individualism.
“The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful . . . whether the whole universe was created for any
other purpose.”
“Our ultimate felicity,” writes the poet Coventry Patmore, “will consist . . . of innumerable unique . . . individualities, . . . each one shining with its proper lustre, which shall be as unlike any other lustre as that of a sapphire is from that of a ruby or an emerald.” This is fortunate, since love is what occurs in the face of difference, not sameness. In God’s garden, we will continue to blossom differently. And in that difference, we find a chemistry and a harmony, a spark across the gap, that consumes us all.
The divine nature of man, and the divine nature of God, are shown to be the same—they are rooted in the will to love, at the price of pain, but in the certainty of joy. Heaven holds out the promise of a belonging that is destined to extend and surpass any that we have ever known in this wounded world.
And it will be a project that opens to us the vision of Heaven as a new beginning, not a final end, to our eternal education. “This
