“Adam-ondi-Ahman”

We spent yesterday afternoon and evening at the incredibly beautiful Butchart Gardens.

Walking through and around them, and sailing just off of them, I found myself thinking of two rather distinct things.

First, I thought of the hymn “Adam-ondi-Ahman,” written by William W. Phelps and included in the first Latter-day Saint hymnbook in 1835.  But I thought of it very specifically in my favorite recording of it, which I have at home on vinyl but cannot find online.  That recording is by Marvin Payne, and his lyrics, if I recall them correctly, differ just a little bit from those of Brother Phelps.  Here’s how I remember them:

1. This earth was once a garden place,
   With all her glories common,
   And men did live a holy race,
   And worshiped Jesus face to face,
   In Adam-ondi-Ahman.
2. We read that Enoch walked with God,
   Above the pow’r of mammon,
   While Zion spread herself abroad,
   And Saints and angels sang aloud,
   In Adam-ondi-Ahman.
3. Her land was good and greatly blest,
   Beyond all Israel’s Canaan;
   Her fame was known from east to west.
   How great the peace and pure the rest
   Of Adam-ondi-Ahman!
4. Hosanna to such days to come,
   The Savior’s second coming,
   When all the Saints and nature meet
   And bow in beauty at his feet
   In Adam-ondi-Ahman.

For those who may be unfamiliar with the tune, I include here a link to a rendition of the hymn by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which I don’t like much but which I prefer to the other versions that I’ve found — apart from Marvin Payne’s.  (The melody is even slightly different.)

Second, I thought of the very many reports of those who have had near-death experiences, describing incredible flowers, gardens, and colors in the next world.  I offer here just a few items from my notes:

One near-death experiencer speaks of “vibrant,” even “exploding” colors.[1]

[1] $Lee Nelson and Richard Nelson, Near Death Experiences, vol. 4 (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 1994), 15.

“The place where I was, seemed very desirable to remain in,” remembered Jacob Hamblin, who had fallen from high in a tree in 1858 and had been unconscious for roughly eleven hours after the fall.  “It was divided into compartments by walls, from which appeared to grow out vines and flowers, displaying an endless variety of colors.”[1]

[1] Little, Jacob Hamblin, 58.

George Russell wrote of “seeing the world illuminated by ‘an intolerable luster of light’; of finding himself looking at ‘landscapes as lovely as a lost Eden’; of beholding a world where the ‘colors were brighter and purer, and yet made a softer harmony.’”[1]

[1] Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell,  94-95.

In his dialogue Phaedo, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato has his master Socrates speak of an ideal world that exists beyond the material world in which we live:

In this other earth the colors are much purer and much more brilliant than they are down here.  .  . .  The very mountains, the very stones have a richer gloss, a lovelier transparency and intensity of hue.  The precious stones of this lower world, our highly prized cornelians, jaspers, emeralds and all the rest, are but the tiny fragments of these stones above.  In the other earth there is no stone but is precious and exceeds in beauty every gem of ours.[1]

“When worshipers offer flowers at the altar,” says Aldous Huxley, “they are returning to the gods things which they know, or (if they are not visionaries) obscurely feel, to be indigenous to heaven.”[2]

Huxley:  “prodigious buildings set in rich, bright gardens with distant prospects of plain and mountain, of rivers and sea.  This is a matter of immediate experience, a psychological fact which has been recorded in folklore and the religious literature of every age and country.”[3]

William Blake saw visionary landscapes “articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce” and “infinitely more perfect and minutely organized than anything seen by the mortal eye.”

[1] Plato, Phaedo.

[2] Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell,  104.

[3] Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell,  121-122.

Bob Helm speaks of “the most beautiful landscape I had ever seen.  The colors were outside my experience, vivid beyond my dreams,” and he saw a celestial city, with “buildings constructed of a translucent material.”[1]

[1] Ring, “Amazing Grace,” 29-31.  Compare Pat Clark’s experience, recounted at Ring, “Amazing Grace,” 26.

The colors at Butchart Gardens are stunning.  If those of the next life are incomparably more beautiful, then that is really something to which to look forward.

Posted from Victoria, British Columbia