Honor, Covenants, Moses

When the Prophet Joseph accepted the Presidential nomination, in his speech he listed his platform. I really like this one: “Make honor the standard of all men.”

We are a people of honor. We are also a people of covenants. I didn’t realize until this week, that whenever we make covenants with our Heavenly Father, He blesses us with strength and power to fulfill those covenants. For example, when we covenant at baptism, He promises us the gift of the Holy Ghost. When we covenant in the sacrament to take upon us the name of Christ, to always remember Him, and to keep His commandments, He promises that we will always have His Spirit to be with us. When we go to the temple to make those sacred covenants, He promises to endow us with power from on high.

We have been blessed by covenants and with covenants to receive strength and power. I was able to get a glimpse of this while reading Orson Scott Card’s book Stone Tables a fictional account of Moses. I liked it. I was intrigued by the differences in Moses as he led with the proud knowledge and strength of man as a son of Pharoah, but it was in sharp contrast to leading as a humble servant and prophet of God under sacred covenants.

So I’ve also been reading Exodus and the Book of Moses. In the first chapter of Moses, this now shepherd/prophet shares his meeting with and learning from God on the Mount. Repeatedly God tells Moses, “Thou art my son,” and Moses covenants with God. Soon after the glory of God leaves him, Satan appears to Moses asking to be worshipped. Listen to Moses’ defiant response: “Get thee hence, Satan; deceive me not; for God said unto me: Thou art after the similitude of mine Only Begotten.”

Because of Moses’ preparation and because of his covenants, God blesses Moses with a true knowledge of his relationship with Father and with the strength to rebuke temptation and Satan.

Armed in Mercy

In a prayer, the Prophet Joseph pled for the Saints to be “armed in mercy.” That phrase intrigues me—we don’t generally think of mercy as a weapon, as a source of strength. Yet the Prophet clearly understands the power of compassion and forgiveness—two manifestations of mercy.

This week I’ve read three plays which demonstrate the devastation resulting with the lack of mercy in individuals’ lives. I reread Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t read this play since I was an undergraduate at least thirty years ago. At that time I disliked Willy Lohman because I saw him as a demented old man who lived in another world. I was looking at Willy through my eyes of just starting a career with all its possibilities. However, now, I see Willy differently with eyes nearing the end of my career. Yes, I see Willy’s mistakes and failures, but I’m empathetic towards him.

The next day I read another Arthur Miller play—one I had never heard of before: All My Sons. Immediately I’m pulled into the play and into main characters because they are the Keller family in 1947. I like Joe Keller, his wife Kate Keller, and their son Chris Keller. They are likeable, and we feel their continued mourning for their son Larry who died in World War II. We gradually learn the nightmare that Joe Keller knowingly manufactured some faulty airplane parts that caused the unnecessary deaths of American pilots during the war.

And I read Judith Thompson’s recent play Palace of the End. Thompson’s play consists of three separate monologues based on news stories involving the real person named as the speaker in the play. The first monologue My Pyramids is told through Lynndie England, the female American soldier convicted of tortue of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. The second monologue Harrowdown Hill is based on the publicized life and death of Dr. David Kelly, the British weapons inspector and microbiologist. And the final monologue Instruments of Yearning is based on the true story of Nehrjas Al Saffarh, a well-known member of the Communist party of Iraq, who was tortured by Saddam Hussein’s secret police in the 1970s. She died when her home was bombed by the Americans in the first Gulf War.

Not one of these characters in any of the three plays exhibits or receives mercy. The lack of mercy destroys them as individuals and as families. I know see that mercy, especially the divine gifts of compassion and forgiveness strengthen lives and provide us with hope and peace. So much of our unhappiness, especially in relationships, can find peace through godly and individual mercy.

Hell into Heaven

The more I learn about the Prophet Joseph, the more I sense his goodness and strength. Shortly after the dreadful Missouri persecution period, some mobsters threatened that they would drive the Saints down to hell. When the Prophet heard about it, he remarked, “Never mind, brethren, if they do drive us to hell, we’ll turn out the devil and make it heaven.” Joseph wasn’t being just idealistic and optimistic—he had a very acute sense of the reality and the difficulties and terrors that are possible, but he also had a clear perspective of the future and what work with God’s help can accomplish. He saw the future as positive and hopeful. He knew it would take work and faith—Joseph saw possibilities.

This week I stumbled on a play that I had never read before. It was the poet Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. This 1959 Pulitzer Prize play is a modern retelling of the Biblical Job. I have to admit that Job’s story is difficult for me. It’s hard for me to see someone so good (described as “perfect”) suffer so much—he loses everything, and it all seems so meaningless. Yet this same account reminds me again and again, that no matter how forlorn we feel, no matter how much we lose, no matter how terrible our nightmares and difficulties, we really are not alone. The world tries to get us to see how alone we are, how all is lost, but through persevering faith, we will know that God is with us, even if we don’t understand and even if we don’t always feel His presence. Our Father will restore and bless us beyond measure.

This week I also read Joseph Banks’ A Distant Prayer: Miracles of the 49th Mission. Brother Banks is LDS who was a flight engineer in World War II. After 50 missions, flight crews could go home from the war. On Banks’ 49th mission, he is shot down over Germany, and is the only survivor of his crew. He becomes a POW, and this book is about his survival in concentration camps, 600+ mile prison march in winter with only ragged shirt, pants, and shoes, about his escape, and most importantly about his faith and determination to survive.

I read these stories, and I question what power these individuals must have to keep going. But I begin to think of individuals I know who have struggled for years with debilitating illnesses and pain, but they continue day after day. For many of them, others are simply unaware of these heroic but so quiet struggles and even more quiet even imperceptible victories these individuals face alone. In their own agonies, they become and are Saints.

I know we all have our own quiet, difficult struggles. We must continue day after day, even when we question your own strength. We need to remember that there are those who know us and love us, have faith not only in us but in our Heavenly Father. He’ll strengthen us and help us turn our private hells into glorious heavens.

Families and Manliness

I've read two powerful novels this week—they’re all about strong marriages and family relationships.

To help me prepare to teach Toni Morrison’s new novel, A Mercy. this week in English 336 as a companion piece to McCarthy’s The Road, I reread Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize novel Beloved. Sethe is a young slave whose new master allows his slaves to marry and raise a family without fear of being sold or broken apart. She and Halle marry and have four children. Unfortunately, their master dies, and they decide to run away to keep their family intact. Halle is killed, but Sethe and the children reach freedom in Ohio. When the new master tracks her and the children down, Sethe, wanting to protect her children from slavery, begins to kill her children. She is only able to kill her toddler Beloved. The novel is about the consequences of that event on her, her sons, and especially her daughter Denver. Beloved haunts their lives. It is an incredibly powerful novel—well worth the painful read. I also liked the strong male characters of Paul D and Stamp Paid--good, good men.

I also read Elizabeth Stout’s Olive Kitteridge, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner. It is a great, great book about maturing relationships. It’s episodic which means each of the thirteen chapters reads as a separate short story, but it pulls together revealing events and characters pertaining to Olive Kitteridge and her husband Henry. Olive and Henry very much remind me of Anne Tyler characters, and the organization remind me of Sandra Benitez's A Place Where the Sea Remembers.

And I’m still reading George Q. Cannon’s The Life of the Prophet Joseph Smith. A particularly good chapter this week was titled “Manliness of Joseph.” It provided a lot of physical descriptions of him and his strength and gentleness. Also much of the chapter were impressions of the Prophet from non-LDS people who had met him. I’m so touched by Joseph’s integrity and goodness to all. He was never two-faced—he was who he was both in private and in public. He wasn’t fragmented—he was whole, complete. I know much of that is a result of refinement through trials and the Spirit, but I also assume it also results from a man who truly loved and served others.

Gods and Gifts

I finished The Aeneid this week, so I’ve made it through the great triumvirate: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and now The Aeneid. However, what really makes them significant are the lessons about relationships with others including friends, family, and the gods.

Of course, the gods are very closely connected with individuals’ lives. In fact, this is as much a battle among the gods as it is between the Greeks and the Trojans. Here in The Iliad is a passage about Zeus and Poseidon taking opposite sides:

After Zeus had brought Hector and the Trojans
To the Greek ships, he left the combatants
To their misery and turned his luminous eyes
Far away. . . .
He never dreamed that any of the immortals
Would go to help the Trojans or the Greeks.

But Poseidon wasn’t blind. He sat high
On the topmost peak of wooded Samothrace,
Marveling at the war going on beneath him.
He could see all Ida, and Priam’s city [Troy],
And the Greek ships, from where he sat.
The sea crawled beneath him. He pitied
The Greeks being beaten by the Trojans,
And he was furious with Zeus.

So both the gods take sides. The lonely mortals are not only fighting against each other but against the gods who are trying to defeat them. Some of the gods try to level out the impossible odds by giving their favorite mortals special divine gifts. Two such gifts include special god-made armor. Achilles’ mother, who is a goddess, gets the god Hephaestus to create this incredible seven-layered armor for her son which protects him and allows him to battle the Greeks—Achilles is blessed by the gods because of this gift.

In The Aeneid, the Trojan Aeneas is battling the Italians who is favored by Juno, the Queen of Heaven. But the goddess Venus wants to protect her mortal son Aeneas, so she goes to the same god Vulcan (Hephaestus) to create armor and a shield for Aeneas. And this gift of armor helps Aeneas to be victorious.

While reading these accounts, I’m so grateful we have a Heavenly Father who loves us, who wants what is best for us, and does not pit other gods or evils to impede us. He, too, wants to give us divine gifts to protect us and to strengthen us as we do His work. He gives us the Holy Ghost and spiritual gifts. In Doctrine and Covenants 46:8, 26 we’re counseled to “seek earnestly the best gifts, always remembering for what they are given. . . . And all these gifts come from God, for the benefit of the children of God.”

We have been given divine gifts to protect us and to strengthen us. Our Heavenly Father loves us and wants us to succeed and to be happy—we are his sons and daughters.

One other great thing about the armor gift Aeneas received from the gods. The shield’s design has images of Aeneas’s future generations (they become the founders of Rome and the great Roman emperors). Get the meaning of this neat experience:

Aeneas was moved
To wonder and joy by the images of things,
He could not fathom, and he lifted to his shoulder
The destiny of his children’s children.

What we are doing now and the choices we are making not only will bless our lives but will bless our children’s children’s lives. We are lifting them to our shoulders as we battle for what’s right and good.