A Personal Testimony

A view of Lauterbrunnen, the most beautiful place on Planet Earth — Lauterbrunnen, in the Berner Oberland region of Switzerland — the inspiration for Tolkien’s elvish Rivendell and, for roughly seven months, within my area of missionary assignment. (Wikimedia Commons) Landscapes such as this thrill me, but they also inspire me with a powerful and unexpected yearning for something more.

Back in 2009, I posted a (relatively) brief expression of my belief, and of why I find Mormonism so very deeply satisfying, on the Mormon Scholars Testify website:

http://mormonscholarstestify.org/151/daniel-c-peterson-2

It seems appropriate for me to call attention to that statement every decade or so. Just so people know where I stand.

The lake and village of Grasmere — Grasmere, from above (Wikimedia Commons)

I fully understand how Wordsworth derived inspiration from the Lake District, which has long been another of my favorite places on Earth. I am, very decidedly, a Romantic.

Consider this famous poem, a lament regarding what he saw as the materialism, the lack of spirituality, the frenetic overactivity, and the distracted distance from nature that he sensed in his time, that Wordsworth wrote in 1806, while he and his wife and sister were living at Dove Cottage in Grasmere:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

If Wordsworth thought life too hectic, materialistic, and divorced from spiritual sensibilities in 1806, what would he make of us now? He thought that the occasional carriage traffic past Dove Cottage was irritatingly distracting. What would he think of today’s non-stop automobile traffic racing past his little home? And of the buses full of tourists that disgorge themselves in front of it several times each day? And of the hotel that blocks its view of the lake?

Posted from Brockwood Hall, Cumbria, England

A personal testimony