Sabbath Devotional :: Come, Let Us Anew
Facebook makes me cry a lot this time of year. The month-long onslaught of back-to-school photos wrings my heart and wets my eyes. My nest has been empty for a while, but apparently still not long enough for the ache to go away. It isn’t exactly envy of my friends who still have their babies at home, although it is partly that. I don’t necessarily want to go back in time, although I think I would if the choice were offered. But those days were hard, and I don’t have any confidence I’d do any better a second time around. I’d just make different mistakes. I don’t think there is a name for this mix of longing and regret and love, salted with just the tiniest bit of relief. Maybe it’s just the end of summer.
It also feels like New Year’s to me. I think maybe you can recognize the deepest sort of nerds by whether they keep buying notebooks in September for their whole lives, and whether they are seized with ambition on Labor Day rather than January 1. Anyway, that has always been me — my goals generally have to do with libraries and long rainy afternoons, not oceans or campgrounds. Which means, I guess, that there is hope, too, in the impossible welter of late August feeling. And that I will choose “Come, Let Us Anew” for the closing hymn this Sunday. My ward members will be inevitably befuddled by the odd meter (10 16 6 6 6 12 12 ??!) and odd, mid-measure fermatas that accompany the exhortation to “roll round with the year.” It has been one of my favorites since I was a little girl — I had heard “labor of love” in other contexts, but the “patience of hope” was striking to me, both as a phrase and an idea. It still is —one of the truest descriptions I know of a Christian life. And what I used to think was just the melodramatic milleniarian fervor of the last verse lately strikes me as the only way to make sense of the relentless forward march of time coupled with the repetitive seasons and rituals that compel us to face the grief that time’s passing imposes on us all, soon and late. We all long for an apocalypse (https://www.etymonline.com/word/apocalypse) — an end of time, the uncovering of our truest selves, the durable revelation of our worth.
Oh, that each in the day of His coming may say,
‘I have fought my way through;
I have finished the work thou didst give me to do.’
Oh, that each from his Lord may receive the glad word,
‘Well and faithfully done.
Enter into my joy and sit down on my throne.’
For me, these words are permanently associated with a talk my dad gave when I was 10 or 11. My dad is a physics professor by nature as well as vocation, and, when I was little, he was as likely to explain how combustion works as to share a personal experience when he explained something like a “burning in the bosom” — emotion isn’t really his native language. So I remember those occasions when he was overcome by emotion, and this was one of those times.
He gave a talk based on Alma, chapter 5, and I remember that he read this passage and then had to pause for a long time to collect himself.
And now behold, I ask of you, my brethren and sisters(2) of the church, have ye spiritually been born of God? Have ye received his image in your countenances? Have ye experienced this mighty change in your hearts?
Do you look forward with an eye of faith, and view this mortal body raised in immortality. . . to stand before God to be judged according to the deeds which have been done in the mortal body?
Can you imagine to yourselves that ye hear the voice of the Lord, saying unto you, in that day: Come unto me ye blessed, for behold, your works have been the works of righteousness upon the face of the earth?
He challenged the members of the ward to obtain that witness of their efforts, to try to really hear the Savior’s voice saying “Come unto me, ye blessed.”
And I wanted to hear it — while I was a difficult and prickly child, I wanted to be good — I was earnest in my longing for my parents’ and my teachers’ approval, and even God’s. But my parents were hard to please, and my own capacity to imagine God’s pleasure was somewhat constrained by that. Knowing how often I failed to live up to their expectations, how clumsy and sometimes lazy my efforts were, it was hard to imagine God declaring my works to be “the works of righteousness upon the face of the earth.” I mostly hoped that God might say, “well, that wasn’t too bad.” [I think now, too, that my father’s emotion at this passage was also because *his* father had been even harder to please!]
It didn’t get any easier as I got older and became ever more aware of my flaws and the pain that my failures inflicted on the people around me. In many ways, my life did not go according to plan, and I heard the “song of redeeming love” more and more faintly as the years passed.
But then one day, having dutifully dragged myself to church, I was sitting just behind our ward’s nursery leader. About halfway through the meeting, the ward’s wiggliest three-year-old spotted her. His joy was uncontainable, and as he propelled himself out of his longsuffering mother’s arms and ran down the aisle, I could see their smiles, the sheer bliss in both sets of eyes. And for me, forever after, the looks on those two loving and beloved faces are what I see when I try to imagine the Lord saying “come unto me, ye blessed.”
This was an apocalypse — the end of a world where God seemed one way to me, and the revelatory beginning of a new world where I saw more clearly.
Apocalypse takes so many forms: the first child going to kindergarten, the last child leaving for college. Illness and death, but also birth and marriage and moving. Few lives are unpunctuated by cataclysm. We don’t (yet) experience the end of the world for all of us all at once; while time lasts, human worlds are passing in and out of being at every moment. When we love each other well, we uncover the saving truth of God’s joy in our own being and reveal God’s presence in each of those apocalypses. In the patience of hope, we can enter and share God’s joy, even before the moment when we will finally sit down on his throne.
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(1) This isn’t the most polished performance available, but I love it because it is a Methodist choir singing Mack Wilberg’s arrangement of a Methodist hymn text (Charles Wesley), set to a tune that only Latter-day Saints used to sing with that text. I love the full circle.
(2) Yes, even in the early 80s, my dad would have made the language more inclusive, bless him!
Kristine Haglund is senior director of the faithful root at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.
