Line upon Line

The Envy of Angels

The Catholic writer Thomas Howard—whose liturgical prose is a master class in finding the holy in the humdrum—once made a disarming observation. In Chance or the Dance? ¹ he notes, quite simply, that angels have no noses.

He was not, of course, offering an anatomical diagram but a theological contrast. In traditional Christian thought, angels are pure spirits—“ministering spirits,” beings of wind and fire who cry glory before the throne of God but do not dwell in the heavy, humid world of taste and touch. They behold the Beatific Vision; they are dazzled by the unveiled glory of God. But they cannot do what you did this morning. They cannot smell hot chocolate. They cannot taste the sharp, cold shock of orange juice or the warmth of buttered toast. They cannot feel the scratch of wool, the stubborn resistance of a garden stone, or the sticky warmth of a child’s hand—that small, gummy sacrament of trust.

Historic Christianity, at its best, is far more friendly to the body than the caricatures admit. It affirms the goodness of creation and the resurrection of the body. Yet even so, it has often imagined the highest forms of life—God, angels, and our most exalted experiences—as “spiritual” in a way that leaves our senses behind, as though God preferred ghosts to gardeners. By that logic, Samwise Gamgee—with his love of food, rakes, and potatoes—would seem distressingly unspiritual. (Which, of course, is why most of us trust him.)

Here the Restoration quietly but firmly parts ways with much of that tradition and offers something far more scandalous. It declares that God Himself has a nose—and, one might say, a taste for worlds.

Latter-day Saints confess that the Creator of galaxies is not an abstract mind floating in a void, but a Man of Holiness with a glorified body of flesh and bone—a being who can touch and hold, and, presumably, smell the franks on a grill and the frankincense in a temple with equal delight and in perfect order. We are taught that many “angels” are resurrected beings—men and women who have reclaimed their clay, glorified and quickened, but still tangibly, wonderfully real. The Restoration also acknowledges other messengers—premortal spirits, disembodied spirits—but even the bare possibility that many angels are resurrected neighbors changes the picture dramatically. It turns the hereafter from a rumor of mist into a city with streets and kitchens.

Doctrine and Covenants 137 gives that city a surprisingly concrete feel. Joseph sees the celestial world, and how is it described? Not as a vague brightness, but as a place with “streets…paved with gold.” Heaven, in other words, has pavement. It has architecture. It has somewhere to walk. The gold is not there to impress Wall Street; it is there to say, in the most ancient biblical shorthand, “This place is solid, radiant, and real.” In John’s Apocalypse, the New Jerusalem descends with foundations and measured walls and gates that swing on hinges. The seer does not come back stammering about an idea; he comes back talking about a city grid.

Taken together, Joseph’s vision and John’s revelation suggest that exaltation is not a promotion into abstraction but an entrance into the most real neighborhood you have ever known—only transfigured. Imagine, if you will, a celestial cul-de-sac with lawns that never quite die in August and porches where resurrected grandparents are forever “just about to take the bread out of the oven.” Gold streets are not an excuse to escape the material; they are a divine joke at the expense of our suspicions. The Lord seems to be saying, “You were afraid matter was too shabby for Me, so I paved the sidewalks with it.”

If this is true—if God is embodied, and if the destiny of the human soul is not to escape the body but to be eternally welded to it—then the physical world is not a distraction from the spiritual life. It is the very terrain on which the spiritual life is lived. Re-enchantment does not mean floating above the world to find God; it means pressing deeper into the grain of reality until we taste the glory hidden there—discovering that the ladder to heaven is built, inconveniently, out of ordinary days.

The Doctrine: Radical Materialism

To understand why a grilled cheese sandwich can be holy—aside from the obvious—we have to dismantle what S. Brett Savage calls “unwitting dualism.” This is the vague, Neo-Platonic suspicion that haunts even the most faithful Latter-day Saints: the idea that our bodies are heavy, clumsy cages trapping our bright, shiny spirits. We assume the “real us” is the ghost inside, and the body is just the mere carapace—a rental car we have to fuel and repair until we can finally trade it in for a cloud. It is a poor bargain if you happen to like strawberries.

This dualism is the factory setting of Western culture. It urges us to divide life into sealed compartments: Sunday is for the spirit; Monday is for the body. Prayer is spiritual; doing the dishes is physical. Studying scripture is holy; eating lunch is merely biological—as though God made mouths only for speaking hymns and never for tasting soup.

Joseph Smith shattered that partition in 1843 with a single, thunderous sentence:

“There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure.” (D&C 131:7)

By “Radical Materialism,” then, I do not mean the flat materialism of some modern philosophies, where everything is just particles and laws and nothing more. I mean Joseph’s claim that even what we call “spirit” is a kind of matter—finer, purer, and capable of relation, covenant, and glory. On that view, matter is not the enemy of spirit; it is the medium of spirit—the score on which God writes His music.

We are not ghosts trapped in machines; we are beings of integrated matter. The spirit and the body are not enemies; they are distinct forms of the same holy stuff. As the Doctrine and Covenants reminds us, “the spirit and the body are the soul of man” (D&C 88:15). You do not simply have a soul that resides in a body; you are a soul constituted by a body—a truth which makes the resurrection less an afterthought and more the punchline.

The implications are staggering. If spirit is matter, then matter matters. The physical world is not a disposable wrapper around the “real” spiritual gift; it is part of the gift itself. The sensation of hot water in a shower, the crunch of an apple, the ache of tired muscles—these are not interruptions to eternity; they are the texture of it, time’s way of teaching us what permanence will feel like.

The disenchanted believer tries to look past the physical to find the divine. The re-enchanted Saint looks at the physical and sees God’s fingerprints. We believe in a God who didn’t just create the abstract concept of “nourishment,” but invented the specific, crunching, tasting reality of a honeycomb. We believe in a Savior who, in His resurrected glory, did not ask for a hymn or a philosophy lecture, but for a piece of broiled fish (Luke 24:42). And in 3 Nephi, as a resurrected Being, He breaks bread and blesses wine among the Nephites, binding His glorified life once again to eating and drinking with His people. Heaven, it seems, keeps opening its doors at mealtime.

The Sacrament of the Mundane

Once we accept that matter is holy, the “ordinary” parts of our week begin to glow with a strange new light. We begin to see that God is constantly using the physical to communicate the infinite. C. S. Lewis called this principle “Transposition”  ² — the way a richer medium (the spiritual) descends into and expresses itself through a poorer medium (the physical). Grace, one might say, speaks with a local accent.

The supreme example of this is the Sacrament.

Every Sabbath, we witness a miracle so routine we often sleep through it. We take a piece of bread—usually cheap, mass-produced white bread from a grocery store shelf—and a plastic cup of tap water. These are the most banal, utilitarian objects imaginable. To the “factory worker” view of the world, they are carbohydrates and H₂O—fuel for a bipedal mammal on a spinning rock.

But under priesthood authority, these common elements are sanctified. They are pressed into service to hold the weight of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The bread becomes the body of the Redeeming God. The water becomes the blood of the New Covenant. We eat and drink, and for a moment, the barrier between heaven and earth is as thin as a dove’s feather and just as easily overlooked.

The Sacrament is unique—covenantal, priesthood-administered, explicitly focused on Christ. Yet it is not an exception to the rule of nature; it is a revelation of the rule. It shows us what all matter is meant to do. Bread is meant to mediate love. Water is meant to carry life. The world is not only habitable; it is hospitable.

We are often eloquent about sunsets and mountains and strangely tongue-tied about cheese and bread. We write odes to oceans and constellations, but ignore the “submerged sunrise” in a block of cheddar or a loaf of sourdough. The very ordinariness of these things makes them easy to overlook.

A re-enchanted imagination sees the grocery store not as a depot of commodities, but as a cornucopia of God’s largesse. He knew we needed fuel, so He gave us strawberries, avocados, and steak. He could have made us photosynthetic, soaking up light in silence. Instead, He made us masticating, digesting, tasting creatures who must kill and eat to live—a daily reminder that our life is sustained by sacrifice, by life given for life. Between the beefsteak tomatoes and the bakery, the shelves preach a quiet commentary on Calvary.

In that sense, every meal is a small, echoing sacrament of the Atonement of Jesus Christ—not in the formal, ordinance sense, but as a living parable enacted in our bodies. We live because something else is broken and offered, taken in and transformed. The table quietly preaches what the altar proclaims; grace, like bread, is meant to be broken and shared.

The Altar of the Kitchen Table

If the chapel Sacrament table is the center of the ward, the kitchen table is the center of the home. In a re-enchanted world, they are, in a deep way, two ends of the same altar—one in polished wood, the other in peanut butter fingerprints.

We often view family dinner as a logistical nightmare—a chaotic friction of picky eaters, spilled milk, and weary parents trying to extract details about the school day from reluctant teenagers. We rush through it to get to the “real” spiritual work of Family Home Evening or scripture study.

But what if the eating is the lesson?

When a family sits down to break bread, they are enacting the central drama of the Gospel: fellowship. They are saying, “We are distinct individuals, yet we draw life from the same source.” When a mother or father spends an hour cooking a meal that is consumed in fifteen minutes, they are teaching the doctrine of sacrifice—“This is my time, given for you.” When we pass the steaming potatoes, we are acting out a small oblation—practicing the law of consecration in miniature. The gravy boat becomes, absurdly and truly, a kind of chalice.

These aren’t just “automatic family triggers” playing out a biological script; they are real choices of offering, receiving, and bearing one another’s burdens—the kind of agency that makes us more than machines.

Modern culture has largely mechanized eating. We “refuel.” We eat in our cars. We drink “energy” from cans. We treat our bodies like engines that need gas. In doing so, we strip the act of its holiness. We become “angels with no noses,” trying to bypass the sensory joy of creation and then wondering why the universe smells of nothing in particular.

Our language betrays us. When we call a meal “fuel” or a home a “busy machine,” we are not just being efficient; we are hiding. Those metaphors let us pretend that nothing sacred is at stake—that we are merely organisms optimizing inputs and outputs, not souls choosing to love.

To re-enchant the home, we must recover the table. We must refuse to apologize for the physical needs of our families. The laundry, the dishes, the sweeping—these are not enemies of our spiritual life. They are the liturgy of care. The Restoration collapses the false distance between “sacred” and “secular”; it brings the temple into the kitchen—and, mercifully, does not ask us to vacuum on streets of gold.

Think of Christ in the New Testament. How often is He eating? He turns water into wine at a wedding feast. He feeds the five thousand on the grass. He institutes the memorial of His death at a Passover supper. After His Resurrection, He cooks breakfast for Peter on the shore of Galilee. The God of the Universe seems incredibly interested in dinner—as though the menu itself were a minor prophet.

Why? Because He knows that we are not brains on sticks. He knows that the way to the human heart is often through the human stomach. He knows that when we eat together, we drop our defenses. We become, literally, companions—from the Latin com panis, “with bread”—friends defined not only by what they believe, but by what they pass across the table.

This, Too, Is Holy

There is a story of a young missionary who, overwhelmed by the humidity and smell of a foreign city, prayed to be delivered from his physical discomfort so he could focus on the Spirit. His mission president, a wise and weathered man, corrected him: “Elder, you weren’t sent here to float above the people. You were sent here to sweat with them.”

That is the call of the re-enchanted life. It is the call to stop trying to be an angel and start trying to be a Saint—which is a much earthier thing. Sainthood, in the end, is holiness with dust on its shoes.

It means we stop resenting our bodies for being tired and start honoring them as temples where the Holy Ghost is pleased to dwell. It means we stop rushing through our meals and start savoring them as gifts from a Father who loves us. It means we look at the mess of a family dinner—the noise, the spills, the chaos—and say with a shock of recognition: This, too, is holy.

Pure spirits cannot taste the bread. Devils cannot enjoy it. But we, with bodies and agency, can receive the world as a gift and return thanks through it. For now, we stand in a unique posture—poised between the dust of the earth and the fire of heaven, able to lift a fork to our mouths and taste the goodness of the Lord.

So let us eat. Let us feast. And in the very act of tasting the world, let us remember the God who gave us noses to smell the rain, tongues to taste the cheese, and bodies to rise in the morning of the First Resurrection, ready to live—and eat—forever. Salvation may be less an escape from supper than an invitation to stay for dessert.