Our only hope for full flowering

***

I continue to be struck by a quotation from then-Elder Russell M. Nelson that was, I believe, cited in the September 2014 issue of the Ensign.  Back in 1992, he wrote:

We were born to die and we die to live.  As seedlings of God, we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven.

This is one of the great arguments for the desirability of life after death.  Not for the truth of the idea, of course — it’s certainly conceivable that the universe might simply be the kind of place where hopes remain ultimately unfulfilled, where purposelessness and extinction triumph — but for its desirability.

Because the simple fact is that we all die without reaching our potential.  We’re all eventually defeated by failing energy, declining strength, faltering minds, and/or death.

This is true even if we reach a hundred years of age.  But it’s most painfully obvious with regard to little babies who die in their infancy, to small children whose lives end before they’ve fully grown, to young people whose development is never completed.  Disease, war, crime, and accidents have brought so many lives to premature ends!  How many symphonies have gone unwritten, how many songs have been left uncomposed, how many medical breakthroughs unfound?  How many novels and poems were never begun?  How many acts of nobility and kindness have remained unperformed?  How many dances were never danced, how many books were never read, how many sights never seen?

Nobody leaves this life having done and experienced all that he or she could potentially have done and experienced.

Nobody.

But, mercifully, we have all eternity ahead of us.

(For related thoughts with respect to the specific case of Ludwig van Beethoven, see here.)

***

God loves all of his children, even if they have sinned grievously or have rejected him.  In Moses 7, we see God weeping — to the utter astonishment of Enoch — over the suffering of those who have turned their backs on him and on his other children.  He doesn’t cease caring for them.  His love is far deeper than that of even the best mortal parents, who commonly — and often very painfully — still love their children even when those children are behaving hatefully or self-destructively.

For that reason and others, I’ve always inclined toward something like universalism, and I’ve long loved Pope John Paul II’s response to a question about whether Christians are obligated to believe in Hell.  “Yes,” he replied.  “But we can hope that it will be empty.”

However, God honors human agency.  We are free to reject him.  And, thus, it’s possible, even likely, that there will be some who will never accept the gift of Christ’s atonement, who will refuse to repent or ask for mercy, who will defiantly turn away from divine grace.  Such, I presume, are the “sons of perdition.”  I believe that their numbers are, and will be, relatively few.

For everybody else, though, there will be at least some degree of salvation.  And I personally have deep faith in the patient and never-ending love of God, which leads me to hope, at least, that most people will eventually receive the fullness of all eternal blessings.

I don’t believe that we can be saved in a state of either indifference to divine law or defiant refusal to repent.  However, I also doubt that anybody who sincerely seeks truth and goodness will be punished merely for having made a mistake.  Moreover, I believe in repentance and progress beyond this life.  The great plan of happiness is very, very, very good news.

I’m not God.

I’m not even slightly confused about that.

And one of the implications of my not being God is that I’m not obliged to judge the eternal destination of the people around me or of the people about whom I read in history and hear on the news.

I find that deeply liberating.  When I consider many people that I’ve known who were genuinely bad in certain respects but remarkably good in others — Oskar Schindler will serve as a good public example of the kind of person that I have in mind — I’m enormously relieved that the task of judging them falls to Someone else.

Obviously, I’m often obliged to judge people on smaller issues for the shorter term.  Do I trust this person as a financial advisor?  Should I vote for my department to hire that person?  Does she seem reliable enough to be a babysitter?  Should I vote for Councilman Gladhander?

But I sometimes do wonder on what basis the ultimate Judge will decide.

And it occurs to me that the fundamental issue isn’t so much whether Jones affirmed proposition X or denied proposition Y or accepted creed Z as what it was that Jones fundamentally wanted.  What was the principal intent of his heart?

During this mortal life, only a relatively small proportion of the inhabitants of Earth will have heard so much as the name of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a far smaller percentage still will have had any really clear idea about the Church’s teachings.  But that can and will be fixed in the next life, and via the work of the temples in this one.

However, over their lifetimes, most members of the human race will have had quite adequate opportunity to demonstrate what they wanted, what they really valued and desired.  In the useful phrase of the late German-American Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965), their lives will, to a large degree, reveal what was, under all their activity and their talk, their “ultimate concern.”  Or, if you’re more comfortable with Star Trek references, their personal “prime directive.”  Over time and despite the occasional lapse, we show what we most want, what we value.  “For where your treasure is,” says the Savior at Matthew 6:21, “there will your heart be also.”

“All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God; also all that shall die henceforth without a knowledge of it, who would have received it with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom; for I, the Lord, will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts” (Doctrine and Covenants 137:7-9).

And the Lord is, we’re told, watching us carefully.  Lovingly, yes, but also carefully and discerningly.  As Ammon taught King Lamoni, God “looketh down upon all the children of men; and he knows all the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Alma 18:32).  Similarly, the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews indicates that God “is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” and that “all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him” (Hebrews 4:12-13).

I’m serenely optimistic about the fate of people, whatever their creed or lack thereof, who genuinely sought to do good, to find and serve the truth, to be faithful to what truths they knew or sincerely thought they knew.  They’ll be fine.  I’m less confident of the fate of the wicked, the cruel, the disingenuous, the coldly calculating, the malevolent, and the selfish.  Even there, though, I withhold final judgment.  I have no idea what made them what they were or are, and it’s not my place to pronounce judgement upon them.

I take this notion quite seriously.  Thus, on several occasions when people have posed to me what they plainly (and understandably) consider the ultimate test of my stance — “Well, what about Hitler?” — my reply has been that, while I certainly wouldn’t want to be in his position and consider him as good a candidate for an eternity of torment as anybody of whom I know, I really can’t say what went into making him the genocidal monster that he was, and that it simply isn’t my role to declare his ultimate fate.  I leave that to the Lord.

“We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material,” C. S. Lewis once wrote.  “But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.”  In other words, as Lewis is also reported to have advised:  “Don’t judge a man by where he is, because you don’t know how far he has come.”

***

A sinner died, and, as his coffin passed,

A man who practiced every prayer and fast

Turned ostentatiously aside — how could

He pray for one of whom he knew no good?

He saw the sinner in his dreams that night,

His face transfigured with celestial light.

“How did you enter heaven’s gates,” he said,

“A sinner stained with filth from foot to head?”

“God saw your merciless, disdainful pride,

And pitied my poor soul,” the man replied.

Farid al-Din ‘Attar (d. 1220), The Conference of the Birds

***

http://www.mormonchannel.org/video/mormon-messages?v=3019287996001

This little Mormon [sic] Messages video from quite a while back has stuck with me for at least two reasons:

1)  Charity, kindness, and forgiveness are vitally important and fundamental — and especially so in a world (and I’m not talking merely about distant Syria, and not merely about Those Other People) riven with hostility, malevolence, slander, thoughtlessness, deliberate cruelty, unkindness, treachery, selfishness, and even, too often, violence.

2)  The hymn Abide with Me was never among my favorites.  Not growing up, and not for many years thereafter.  But, as I think I’ve said here before, it suddenly and unexpectedly took on special meaning for me when my father died.  It ran through my mind continually that week and for perhaps a week thereafter.  And then, nearly two years later, when we had made the appalling, unthinkable decision to detach my mother from life support and her pulse began to slow and then stopped, I heard an instrumental version of that hymn, Abide with Me, piped through the sound system of the critical care unit of that California hospital.  That hymn now moves me as few others do.