Line upon Line

The Same Creak Twice

You wake at the hour you always wake, and the first sound in the room is your own body. Not pain exactly. A creak. The hinge-noise of a machine left out in the weather. Then you put your feet on the floor and the boards answer with a creak of their own, the same note, the same grievance, and for a moment you cannot say which is the house and which is you. The oatmeal takes its four minutes. The window over the sink shows the same fence.

And you prayed last night. Not idly, and not out of habit. You knelt, you meant every word, and you asked for something that mattered.

Now here is the morning, unamended. It’s at that hour, not in any lecture hall, that a person begins to wonder what prayer is for. I’ve done my share of the wondering.

Two Drawers

Notice the shape of the disappointment before you accept its verdict. It assumes a real answer would have arrived as a change in conditions. A quieter stair. A hand that could be trusted with a cup again. Something shifted in the furniture of the world, so that afterward you could point and say, there, that wasn’t there before.

Under that expectation lies a conviction so common that we have mistaken it for common sense. It runs like this. Matter is inert, meaning is abstract, and each keeps to its own house. A spiritual gift must therefore be either a fact about the world, such as a hand that works, or a mood about the world, such as a warm feeling. And if it’s only the second, we suspect we’ve been fobbed off with poetry.

We keep two drawers. We put the water in one and the meaning of the water in the other. Then we complain that heaven has given us meaning when we asked for water.

According to the Flesh

Before the argument goes to work on that disappointment, let the disappointment stand there a moment and say its piece. Wanting the body back is no failure of faith. It’s not a lapse in discipleship, nor a desire beneath the Lord’s notice.

The God being petitioned in that bedroom is no stoic. Enoch looked up and found him in tears, for “the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept” (Moses 7:28). Enoch could hardly take it in. “How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?” (Moses 7:29). Look at the shape of his astonishment. He assumes holiness and grief cannot occupy the same room, that a being of that magnitude must long since have risen above the indignity of tears. Enoch had the same two drawers. He had simply put God in the wrong one.

Alma is more specific. The Son would go forth “suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind,” and would take upon him “the pains and the sicknesses of his people” (Alma 7:11), and their infirmities besides, “that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:12). According to the flesh. Alma says it twice in one verse, and he isn’t being ornamental. Not according to the record. Not from a safe height. He went and got a body, and this is a church that says the Father has one too (D&C 130:22), because the knowledge had to be the kind you cannot get by reading about it.

Elder David A. Bednar has pressed that same phrase in our own day, teaching that there are lessons we must learn and experiences we must have, as the scriptures describe, “according to the flesh.” A body is not the obstacle to that learning. It is the equipment.

So when I lie there at six in the morning wanting my hands back, I’m asking after something the Lord took considerable trouble to learn from the inside. Worth knowing before anyone starts correcting me.

A line has to be drawn here, and drawn carefully, because it’s easy to put it in the wrong place and do harm. Grief is not a sin. Wanting is not a sin. But somewhere past the grief, generally later in the morning, a second thing sets in that isn’t grief at all. It’s the accusation, the low and steady case being assembled against God, or against the body, or against the people in the house who still have working hands. I know that one from the inside, and I’ve kept the file open on days I could have closed it. Grief comes for you. The accusation has to be picked up, and picked up again every hour or it goes cold, which is the surest evidence that it was mine all along.

And the morning is still unamended, and the question stands where it stood. Which suggests the trouble is somewhere other than in the wanting.

All Matter, and Purer Eyes

The Restoration cut through this a century before Barfield reached it, and did so as doctrine rather than philology. “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes” (D&C 131:7).

The difference between the seen and the unseen is put down to two grades of eyesight rather than two kinds of stuff. Joseph isn’t describing a world of objects with meanings attached to them. He’s describing one world, made of one thing, most of which we aren’t yet equipped to look at. And the promise that follows is a promise about the body: “when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter” (D&C 131:8).

Owen Barfield came at the same unity from the side of language. His argument in Poetic Diction is that words such as pneuma and spiritus did not begin by naming wind and then climb, by poetic metaphor, into spirit. They belonged to an older way of seeing, in which the material and the spiritual had not yet been pulled apart. John keeps some of that whole coin when Christ tells Nicodemus, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof,” and then adds, “so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

One Greek word, pneuma, moves through the saying as wind and as Spirit. Christ isn’t decorating the one with the other. The word still remembers a kinship we have trained ourselves out of. The splitting into literal and figurative came afterward, and it came to us. So anyone who says the water in the font is “only a symbol” has told you less about the water than about his own eyesight. He’s holding up a broken coin and calling it two coins.

Ordinance and Ordinary

Consider what happens when you carry the two drawers into a temple.

You arrive fluent in abstraction. You can define covenant. You can define grace, and at some length. You expected, if you’re honest, to be told things.

Instead you show a recommend at a desk and find a locker with a key waiting in it. You take off the clothes you came in and put on white ones. The white is not a metaphor. It is cotton; it is somebody’s laundry, and somebody folded it. You walk on carpet in white socks, or in slippers that make no sound at all. Elsewhere in the building, in a room you may not visit that morning, a font rests on the backs of twelve oxen cast in bronze, and the water is warmer than you expect, and a boy who hasn’t yet needed to shave stands in it to his waist saying names out loud. Names. Not the idea of a name. Bridget. Nathaniel. Somebody’s actual grandmother, dead a hundred and ten years, spoken to in the present tense by a fifteen-year-old in wet clothes.

None of it is efficient. All of it is slow. A tidier religion would have handed you a pamphlet at the door and let you get back to your Saturday.

The house of the Lord refuses to hand you the abstraction. It will not let you take the meaning home without the water. It teaches you to see by giving your eyes something to do. The whole building rests on the premise that your two drawers are a mistake.

Here the English language has been keeping a secret in plain view.

Ordinance and ordinary come from the same Latin root. Ordo, ordinis: a row, a rank, the place a thing stands in. Ordinarius is what stands in the usual order. Ordinare is to set a thing in its rank, to appoint it. Ceremony and humdrum are linguistic cousins who have forgotten one another.

That is more than a pun. It is a doctrine preserved in a dictionary.

An ordinance offers no exception to ordinary life and no furlough from it. An ordinance is the ordinary put back in its rank. When you’re washed, or anointed, or handed bread broken by a boy with unsteady hands, you’re being shown, in a room cleared of distraction, that matter was always capable of bearing gift, covenant, and grace, so that when you meet water and oil and bread again on a Tuesday you’ll know what you’re looking at. The point was never escape from matter. The point was literacy in it.

You cross your own doorstep at the end of a working day and you’ve performed a small procession without knowing it. Most of us don’t. That’s the whole trouble.

They Opened Their Ears

At Bountiful the people were gathered round about the temple, and they heard a voice out of heaven, “and they understood not the voice which they heard” (3 Nephi 11:3). They heard it a second time, “and they understood it not” (3 Nephi 11:4). Then the third: “And again the third time they did hear the voice, and did open their ears to hear it” (3 Nephi 11:5). Three hearings of the one voice.

What follows is an argument from silence, and I’d rather admit it than smuggle it past you. Mormon never tells us the voice held one volume. He tells us it was small at the first hearing, “not a harsh voice, neither… a loud voice” (3 Nephi 11:3), and he never returns to the subject. What he does tell us, twice, is what changed, and both times he puts it on the hearers rather than on heaven. They opened their ears. Their eyes were toward the sound. Heaven’s volume is not the record’s subject. Bountiful is.

President Boyd K. Packer said as much without hedging. “The Spirit does not get our attention by shouting or shaking us with a heavy hand. Rather it whispers.” That is no description of one unusual evening. It is a description of the ordinary manner of heaven, and it puts the burden of the encounter exactly where Mormon put it. If whispering is heaven’s ordinary manner rather than an accident, then silence is not proved merely because nothing shouted.

This is what the Psalm asks of us in a line we’ve mostly mistaken for permission to relax. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10, KJV). Stillness of that kind is the opposite of slackness, because the thing to be stilled is the sorting habit itself: that swift internal clerk who files water under chemistry, pain under orthopedics, and the morning under nothing whatever. Attending is harder work than achieving. Ask anyone who has tried it for ten minutes.

President Russell M. Nelson has made the same demand in the form of a plea, asking us to “do whatever it takes to increase your spiritual capacity to receive personal revelation.” Capacity is the word to notice. He did not ask heaven to send more revelation. He asked for more room at our end.

Eliot named the failure in six words. “We had the experience but missed the meaning,” he wrote in The Dry Salvages, and then added the line readers tend to skip: “And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form.” Nothing is confiscated and swapped for something better. The same experience comes back to you, legible.

Four Minutes at the Stove

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’ve quietly written the miracles out of the world and left you a consolation prize made of language. I haven’t. Hands are laid on heads and things happen that nobody in the room can account for, and I have no interest in explaining it away. Anyone who says the age of miracles is over has made the same filing error in the other direction, putting the whole business in the drawer marked history.

But I have come to prize the slower miracle because it comes every morning and the other kind does not. The sudden mercy arrives in a moment. The daily mercy must be received again tomorrow, at six, in the dark, with the creak going. A mercy that must be received again every morning is no lesser mercy for being ordinary.

So go back to the kitchen.

The stair still creaks. So does the body. Nothing has moved except, perhaps, the meaning. Bountiful leaves open another possibility: something may happen in the hearer while the room remains stubbornly the same.

Suppose the answer was aimed at the eye rather than the room. Then the four minutes at the stove are four minutes of something. The stair is speaking a language you’ve lived inside for years without once construing it. And the creak in the body, which will not stop and cannot be argued away, is still the sound of a person, not merely a mechanism.