Sabbath Devotional :: Re-Visions

“***Oh How Lovely Was the Morning***“
From David Tolk’s CD “*In Reverence*” which is available at www.davidtolk.com and via digital download at iTunes.

In preparing a talk last week, I re-read Joseph Smith’s earliest account of the First Vision for the first time in a long time; I had forgotten how beautiful it is:

I looked upon the sun, the glorious luminary of the earth, and also the moon, rolling in their majesty through the heavens, and also the stars shining in their courses, and the earth also upon which I stood, and the beasts of the ﬁeld, and the fowls of heaven, and the ﬁsh of the waters, and also man walking forth upon the face of the earth in majesty and in the strength of beauty, whose power and intelligence in governing the things which are so exceedingly great and marvelous, even in the likeness of him who created them… My heart exclaimed, “All, all these bear testimony and bespeak an omnipotent and omnipresent power, a being who maketh laws and decreeth and bindeth all things in their bounds, who ﬁlleth eternity, who was and is and will be from all eternity to eternity.” [https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/…/1832-account…]

But besides the poetry, I was struck this time by how Joseph describes the thoughts and feelings that propelled him to the grove. Unlike the account published in the Doctrine and Covenants, this account is not very concerned with doctrinal questions. Instead, Joseph describes the combination of longing and grief that we now often describe as a “faith crisis:” He had told Alexander Neibaur that when his mother and brother and sister converted to Methodism, “he wanted to get Religion too wanted to feel & shout like the Rest but could feel nothing.’ [https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/…]

He was disillusioned with what he had learned about religious leaders: “My intimate acquaintance with those of different denominations led me to marvel exceedingly, for I discovered that they did not adorn their profession by a holy walk and godly conversation agreeable to what I found contained in [the scriptures]. This was a grief to my soul.”

And he was almost torn in two by the contradictions he perceived between the beauty and goodness he described in the paragraph above, and the darkness of sin and confusion that he perceived in himself as well as the rest of humanity:

. . .from the age of twelve years to fifteen I pondered many things in my heart concerning the situation of the world of mankind, the contentions and divisions, the wickedness and abominations, and the darkness which pervaded the minds of mankind. My mind became exceedingly distressed, for I became convicted of my sins, and by searching the scriptures I found that mankind did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatized from the true and living faith, and there was no society or denomination that was built upon the gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament. I felt to mourn for my own sins and for the sins of the world,

All of these sound familiar to me, from my own times in the wilderness and from many conversations I’ve had with friends who find their earlier convictions insufficient — the longing to feel the peace and happiness that all around them seem to feel, the crushing disappointment in leaders who are fallen like the rest of us in ways we didn’t anticipate, the ache of beauty and the grief of sin. We often acknowledge that our Church was founded by a boy who asked questions, but these are more than intellectual questions or even earnest inquiry — this is an agony of soul that lasted years before Joseph was able to put his petition to heaven in the Sacred Grove.

And listen to how Joseph first described the resolution of his anguish:

Therefore, I cried unto the Lord for mercy, for there was none else to whom I could go and obtain mercy. And the Lord heard my cry in the wilderness . . . . And he spake unto me, saying, “Joseph, my son, thy sins are forgiven thee. Go thy way, walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments. Behold, I am the Lord of glory. I was crucified for the world, that all those who believe on my name may have eternal life . . . “.

My soul was ﬁlled with love, and for many days I could rejoice with great joy. The Lord was with me, but I could ﬁnd none that would believe the heavenly vision. Nevertheless, I pondered these things in my heart.

I wonder how our relationships would change if we regarded those in the midst of losing certainty and growing in faith not only as troubled or struggling, but also as courageous souls recapitulating the prophetic journey, cultivating the radical curiosity and wonder that are the precursors of vision and revelation. What would it mean if instead of “none,” they found a whole Church full of friends who would listen and “believe the heavenly vision” and join with them to “ponder these things in [their] hearts”?

It sounds messy and more than a little bit terrifying to think that we should be encouraging uncertainty and radical re-vision, but I wonder if it would also be joyful and revitalizing, a way of learning over and over again that the Lord is with us. Perhaps a Church founded in faith crisis is uniquely suited to minister to the world in this moment when brittle certainties seem to slash and tear us apart rather than uniting us.

Anyway, I love this account of Joseph’s vision — stripped of the questions about denomination and authority that we usually focus on in the canonical account, this version lays bare the heart of Christianity: the world is beautiful, and the world is terrible; we have sinned; we yearn for God’s reassurance and love; when we seek and find God’s presence, we remember that the measure of our creation is to “rejoice with great joy.”