How did you get here? I arrived in a plane, with my family. It took us many hours to get here; in another time it would have taken many months or even years. You also may have arrived by plane, or by boat, or by car—if your home is on Oahu. In every case you left someplace in order to get someplace, and the getting required some doing: planning, walking, paying, sacrificing, overcoming obstacles that only you know about. See if you can identify the leaving, the overcoming, and the arriving, in this rather strange story, written by Lewis Carroll in the late nineteenth century. A father calls his son and counsels him in preparation for a journey:
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
If you only understood half the words, don’t panic. The author made up many of them: you won’t find “frabjous” or “frumious” in the typical dictionary. But, you probably recognized the main characters: a father, his son, and the terrible Jabberwock that has claws, fearful teeth and a rotten disposition. The son is about to undertake a major journey and the father gives him advice: beware—where you are going there are many dangers! The son departs, wisely arms himself with a “vorpal sword” and for a “long time” seeks out the Jabberwock. In his seeking he makes time to rest and to reflect, “so rested he by the Tumtum tree /and stood awhile in thought.” Why he chose the Tumtum tree as a place of meditation isn’t clear, but we are familiar with mythic trees and groves—places of knowledge and of revelation (the Trees of Life and Knowledge, the Sacred Grove). In this particular place, rested and “in uffish thought,” the wisened boy finally confronts the Jabberwock and with a “snicker-snack” deprives the beast of its head. He has overcome. He returns to his “chortling” and joyous father.
You know this pattern well; it is everywhere: Homer’s Odysseus leaves home, wins a war, and overcomes intimidating obstacles before he returns home; perhaps more familiar, Dorothy arrives in the Land of the Munchkins, strikes out with her friends to the Emerald City, each in search of a personal goal (compassion, wisdom, courage, home). This pattern is the pattern of the scriptures. Let’s start with the big one: Exodus.
Joseph is his father’s favorite—fathers should not have favorites—and the jealous brothers put in motion a series of events that leads Joseph away from home and toward Egypt. He overcomes a number of obstacles (pit, prison, Potiphar’s wife) and his misfortune turns to his family’s fortune; after a number of generations, the people once considered privileged guests become slaves. Enter Moses and the indecisive pharaoh. Moses and his people wander in a barren wilderness for a very long time. They murmur and get a pillar of fire to guide their travels. They murmur again and receive sacred words written miraculously on stone tablets. They murmur some more and get manna. They get tired of eating manna every…single…day and wish they were back in Egypt. Even Aaron and Moses have bad days. Eventually, they arrive at the land that God promised them.
Even if we didn’t have the Old Testament, we would still know about the Exodus because it was a story that was important to Nephi. He tells his weak-kneed brothers, “let us be strong like unto Moses”[1], and in case they had forgotten about Moses’s journey, he retells the entire tale: the children of Israel escaped Egypt because God loved them and sent them a prophet; this same prophet performed saving miracles at the Red Sea and at the rock that became a river of living water; nevertheless these blessed people reviled God who in his mercy still “did lead them,” and “after they had crossed the river Jordan he did make them mighty”[2].
For Nephi, Moses’s story was not ancient history, it was a story he and his family were living personally and daily, one that was easy to “liken” to their experience. “We did take… our journey in the wilderness”[3]. They left home (including all the comforts that make home home). They wandered in a wilderness, including a stretch through the worst desert in the world. They murmured and got plates. They murmured some more and got married. Like Aaron and Moses, even Sariah and Lehi had bad days. The bow broke leading the big brothers to wish (again) the family had never abandoned their former life. More murmuring, and then the Liahona appeared with its sacred and corrective writings. “I am going to build a boat,” said obedient Nephi. “You must think you are a rocket scientist,” shot back his brothers—for so this boat-building must have seemed to them—a technologically unachievable project. The impossible boat, a new ark, carried the family to a promised land where they got to start over—a culture baptized and washed of its sins. They arrived at a land that God had promised them. Little wonder that at the end of all this troubled journeying Nephi quoted Isaiah: “Can a woman forget her sucking child…? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee…Behold, I have graven thee on the palms of my hands”[4]. Like the boy’s father in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” our Father wants us back and He never abandons us, even in the midst of our existential waffling.
In 1846 thousands of saints left their homes and their gardens and their memories in Nauvoo the Beautiful and headed into the mud. It would have been easier to stay behind (and some chose to do just that), but they dreamed of “the place which God for us prepared, /far way, in the West.” It was not any place, but the place, the right place, and this place was prepared for them. It was also far away; this wasn’t going to be easy (but it was going to be worth it). Some murmured. All suffered. Some quit. Some participated in miracles. A few died (“Happy day! All is well”). Eventually, they arrived at the land that God had promised them. Though “hard to you this journey may appear, /Grace shall be as your day.” That last phrase is key: “Grace shall be as your day.” My wife’s and my several greats grandmother, Karen Marie, crossed an ocean (like Nephi), then crossed a desert (like Nephi) and buried four of her children along the way, pulling a handcart to Zion. Her daughter remembered,
I remember my mother was always very sad. Her face was stern and determined. She often explained to us girls that we would soon be safe in the great city of the Rocky Mountains. Little did she or we realize the terrible hardships we would face on that journey. I walked all the way from the Missouri River to the Salt Lake Valley. Nights when we made camp, my feet were often bleeding and sore, but through the kind and loving care of my mother, I was ready to march the next day. Her unfaltering faith, courage, determination and her tremendous capacity for work made possible that long and hazardous journey.
“Grace shall be as your day.” Grace is as dependable as the daily sunrise, even though we sometimes take it for granted. “Our God will never us forsake.” Grace is designed for murmurers and the imperfect, that is, for all of us. “I have graven thee on the palms of my hands.” No wonder “All is well.”
These journeys are a type and a shadow of an eternal one known as the Eternal Plan of Happiness. We left our Heavenly Home with instructions, we journey during a specified period of time we call mortality and during which we confront our Jabberwocks, and then we return home. That being true, your college years are the mortality of your mortality: you have left home, journeyed to a strange (but beautiful!) place where you are tested and tried and where you will form habits and make decisions that will affect the rest of your life.
So, we must ask ourselves, what kind of travelers will we be? “It had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness,” said the reluctant Israelites[5]. “These many years we have suffered in the wilderness, which time we might have enjoyed our possessions and the land of our inheritance; yea, and we might have been happy,” complained Laman and Lemuel[6]. “I’ve already left homes in New York, Ohio, and Missouri,” said a non-pioneer, “and I am not leaving my apple trees in Nauvoo.” The thing is, I get the nostalgic Israelites, the always annoyed Laman and Lemuel, and the exhausted Latter-day Saint: what the Lord asked was really hard. What they didn’t realize was that the hard journey was easier than staying put. The Israelites could have remained enslaved; Laman and Lemuel could have been carried away captive to Babylon like their neighbors who stayed behind. The resident of Nauvoo could have escaped the Mississippi mosquitos and helped the desert blossom as a rose. In the end the journey forward is always more rewarding than looking back—just ask Lot’s wife. What do wise travelers do? They don’t avoid hard things. They rest. They are patient. They hang on. Let’s look at each of these more carefully.
They don’t avoid hard things
Cervantes’ Don Quixote described the sacrifices required for success in school: “To become distinguished in letters costs time, sleepless nights, hunger, nakedness, headaches, bouts of indigestion, and other things of this sort.” Can you relate? If you have to stay up all night studying, or rewrite your paper four times, or stay on your knees until your back aches, that’s not bad—it’s journeying. “We are a chosen generation, held back for this day. We are special and talented. Therefore, this thing called mortality should be a cinch for souls like ours.” This is what I call the entitlement of easiness. The entitlement of easiness is a perversion of the idea of innate or God-given talents. It proposes that those who possess certain gifts develop and display them with unlabored ease. Conversely, the entitlement of easiness leads us to conclude that if something is hard we must not be good at it. As a consequence, we veer from challenge to challenge in search of unearned excellence. The entitlement of easiness promotes a revised translation of 2 Nephi 2: 25: “men are that they might have fun.” A couple of decades ago one of my colleagues reminded us at graduation that “what is easy is never satisfying very long.”
Fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri describes a pilgrim’s epic journey—through hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, and into Paradise. At a particularly treacherous point Dante lets us look in on the pilgrim who climbs from one boulder to the next, until “the breath was so spent from my lungs…that I could go no farther.” Vergil, the pilgrim’s poet guide, shows little sympathy for his companion’s fatigue: “‘Now must thou thus cast off all sloth,’ said the Master, ‘for sitting…down…none comes to fame…Rise, therefore, conquer thy panting with the soul, which conquers in every battle if it sink not with its body’s weight. There is a longer stair which must be climbed.’”
The entitlement of easiness relies on new metaphors of knowledge. We are tempted to think of learning in terms of turning on, turning up, logging on, and downloading. The intensified form of searching called research seems old school in the face the new verb “Google.” The illusion of instant erudition that reinforces the entitlement of easiness worries me. Agricultural metaphors for learning were more honest -- remember the mustard seed, and Alma's seed of faith. Ground was prepared, seed knowledgably sowed, vulnerable shoots nurtured, irrelevant and distracting weeds removed, all in preparation for the harvest. In agricultural metaphors, sequence is unalterable and imposes discipline. And patience: the agricultural cycle cannot be accelerated—a full season is required for the harvest.
President Hinckley was fond of quoting one of his “favorite newspaper columnists,” Jenkin Lloyd Jones:
Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed…. Life is just like an old time rail journey... delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.
Vergil was right: there is a longer stair that must be climbed, and as the pilgrim learned, it leads to opportunities, lessons and graces that only our Creator fully understands. In accepting His invitation to climb, we renounce the false promises of the entitlement of easiness—promises that were never part of the covenant made with Adam and Eve or with their descendants. Adam and Eve started their journey by learning that learning itself would be purchased by the sweat of their brow. The Savior ended his journey with an entirely different kind of sweat—unimaginable, painful, infinite. It wasn’t easy, but it was necessary.
They Rest
What the story from Dante doesn’t tell us is that from time to time the pilgrim needed to rest. In Lewis Carroll’s poem the boy interrupts his seeking in order to rest (by the Tumtum tree) and to reflect (in uffish thought). God modeled constructive leisure by resting after creating, and commanding us to do the same. The Savior prepared for his public ministry by spending forty days by himself. Enos got away from it all so that “the words which I had often heard my father speak concerning eternal life…sunk deep into my heart”[7]. Nephi “sat pondering” and received a revelation[8]. Joseph F. Smith “sat…pondering” and received the revelation we recognize today as the 138th section of the Doctrine and Covenants.
The road we travel on our journey has many rest stops. Some of those exits are dangerous and if we linger we risk losing our way. Some of the rest stops are neutral; they simply let us unwind. A dinner and a movie, pizza on the beach, or going to a dance may not get us closer to the Celestial Kingdom, but they might help us recover a bit of physical and emotional resilience that will allow us to do a hard thing tomorrow. Some rest stops are also gas stations, places where we refuel. You can’t get gas without stopping; likewise, intellectual and spiritual refueling requires that we stop doing for a bit in order to take account of what we have been up to. Resting and refueling are part of journeying. “And after we had traveled for the space of many days, we did pitch our tents for the space of a time, that we might rest ourselves and obtain food for our families”[9]. “For the space of a time”—a strange phrase with an important message: rest is part of the journey when it is measured rest. Too much rest and we put down roots in unproductive places; too little rest and we never put down roots. Creativity, resilience and revelation are stems that sprout from rested roots. “I sat pondering…”
They are Patient
One of the afflictions of time-bound mortality is nowism. We want it, whatever it is, now, please. Later is too late. I want relief of my suffering…now. I want to get married…now. I want to understand math…now! The now, now, now of nowism led C.S. Lewis to speculate that we don’t really want a Father in Heaven, we want a Grandfather in Heaven, benign and generous and eager to spoil us. God, however, taught us an important lesson through what I call the syntax of creation, the orderly sequence in which things unfold as the Creators plan, counsel, and watch together. The sequence is necessary and unalterable. The narrative tells us that at each stage the Gods declared that what had happened on that day was “good”: they do this eight times in the Book of Moses[10]. We grow day-by-day, line upon line, experience by experience. Sometimes we struggle because we want Day Six privileges and capabilities on Day One. God could not put animals on the land until they had something to eat; he could not cultivate vegetation until there was dry land; dry land was not possible until it was separated from the seas; and the sea first had to be divided from the firmament. And of course, first, there had to be light. What I find reassuring is what God did not do. At the end of Day Five he did not say, “after all this work and all this time, all I have to show for my effort is fish.” What He did say was that “all things which I had created” up to that time “were good”[11]. So it is with us. We are sinful and imperfect, true, but that simply means we are “under construction.” If our hearts are right, at the end of each day we can know that God looks at our efforts and declares them to be good.
Hang On!
Lehi journeyed so much that he even dreamed about journeying. One of his dreams is especially familiar. His children travel in a mist of darkness. It is dangerous and it is unavoidable. The mist envelopes everyone. One misstep and you might find yourself swimming in a polluted river. There is a tree way down yonder, maybe a Tumtree tree, or a Tree of Life, but the mist is so thick you can’t quite make it out; you have to trust your father that it is there. He motions to you to stretch out your right hand and grab on to something—what is it, smooth and straight? An iron rod! “Hang on,” your father yells. You have two choices: to hang or not to hang. If you choose not to hang you begin to wander into a mist that levels everything, where everything looks the same, good, evil, lovely and wretched, and pretty soon you stop believing that there is a wondrous tree down the way, and you forget all about the iron rod.
A few years ago my wife and I took some friends to Zion National Park in southern Utah. We decided to hike to Angel’s Landing up a narrow and winding trail that led to a small mesa high above the canyon floor—really high. At one point the trail is so narrow and drops off so abruptly (and so far!) on both sides that the park rangers have provided a railing made of linked chains affixed to the rock. We inched our way forward, hanging on for dear life, knowing that one misstep on the slippery sandstone would lead to disaster. I moved ahead, never letting go for a second, hand over hand, heart pounding. Don’t look down. Don’t look down! So I looked ahead, and there was my dear wife in the scariest, deadliest section of all—letting go! I yelled, Lehi-like, “hang on, my dear, or our children will be motherless!” She looked at me like I had lost my mind, confident that she was in complete control of the situation. Now, I must clarify, that when it comes to Lehi’s iron rod, my wife is the most assiduous hanger-on-er of anyone I know, but in this one instance I felt like Lehi fearing for the salvation of his loved ones, knowing that safety was in hanging on.
So, you choose to hang on. That is not always easy. On the hill over there your friends call to you from a really nice house—pool, Jacuzzi, great and spacious in everyway. “Now there’s a rest stop I can get into,” you think. Just a short detour won’t hurt. It’s not that you can’t get back to the iron rod after a weekend in Hotel Great and Spacious, but it is really hard—a lot harder than just hanging on in the first place.
Sometimes your friends call out from the mist. “Its great out here,” they cry. “There are no roads at all. No rules. Everyone can go in whatever direction they want. No one judges you! Best of all, out here in the mist there are no consequences.” The no consequences part gets you to relax your grip a bit, because that sounds really enticing. But you hang on and head down the path a little more, and pretty soon you begin to see the distant glow of the tree, just like Dad said, and you understand that the promise of no consequences was a lie. Everything is consequential.
Sometimes the mist gets so thick, and the wind blows so hard, that you can’t see the tree’s glow or hear your father’s voice. Now, you think, there is no visible evidence that there is a tree and you haven’t seen your father for so long that you are not sure he cares, or even that he exists. You decide that the iron rod was made in China, and that path you have been on is so strait and so narrow—it seems kind of exclusive. All of a sudden your doubt seems noble, even virtuous, and you head off into the mist thinking you are oh-so-open-minded. Hang on! Hang on, because if you do you will discover that God is the most open-minded being that can exist. The mists of mortal open-mindedness disappoint when compared to the infinite horizons of divinity. Hang on, because the path prepared for you has been leveled and lighted and curbed, and from time to time there are scenic overlooks that allow you to see beyond the mist and to catch a glimpse of the Tree. Of course, hanging on is hard. It requires hard work, and patience and reflection. It requires a simple faith in the Journey: Father sent me on this trip because he knew it would be good for me, that the journey would help me become something I could not become if I stayed home. But he really wants me back, and so he provided a way, the Way, and a railing (the rod, the Word), and he pleads, “dear child, hang on, because the voices from the mist that cry out, ‘be this or do that’ have no idea of what you are truly capable of being and doing.”
It is said that in the old days the god Thor drew a circle around the Middle Earth in order to constrain the forces of evil. Each year these forces grew stronger and the forces of good inside the circle were unable to resist. Finally, Woden, the god of wisdom, left the protection of Thor’s circle and went in search of the king of the trolls (leaving home, confronting adversity). He located the king, put him in an arm-lock, and demanded to know how Good might defeat Evil. “Give me one of your eyes,” replied the troll, “and I will tell you.” Woden considered the proposal and finally decided that the sacrifice was worth the knowledge. He plucked out an eye and handed it to the king. “Now tell me,” he demanded. The troll replied, “watch with both eyes.” The trolls in the mist offer a one-eyed bargain. At first it seems like a good deal, maybe even the only deal, but it is counterfeit compared to the stereoscopic whole sightedness available to diligent, patient and reflective travelers who hang on.
Why should we mourn or think our lot is hard?
‘Tis not so; all is right.
Gird up your loins; fresh courage take.
Our God will never us forsake;
And soon we’ll have, this tale to tell—
All is well! All is well![12]
Elder Neal A. Maxwell wrote, “All the easy things that the Church has had to do have been done, so you’re going to live in a time of high adventure. You were brought to this earth because you can handle that time of adventure, and you will do well.” That all is well as we do well is my testimony, because our Father and His son know us, and they miss us - longing for our company -- and they really want us back.
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
[1]1 Nephi 4:2
[2]1 Nephi 17:23-32
[3]1 Nephi 17:1
[4]1 Nephi 21:15-16
[5]Ex. 14:11
[6]1 Nephi 17:21
[7]Enos 1:3
[8]1 Nephi 11:1
[9]1 Nephi 16:17
[10]Moses 2:4, 9, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31
[11]Moses 2:21
[12]"Come, Come, Ye Saints" Hymn#30