Cover image: Drone image of Lahaina, Maui taken November 2017
Mark Twain once pronounced Hawaii “the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.” Ordinarily a cynic who took a sardonic view of everything and everyone around him – contrast his very negative opinion of the Holy Land in “The Innocents Abroad”! – Twain reflected that,
“No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me the balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the spirit of its wildland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”
For Twain, Hawaii was a kind of earthly paradise. It was mortal life at its simplest, most pleasant, and most benevolent. That was, of course, before mass tourism and urbanization wrought their changes on Oahu. Many others since his time, though, have continued to seek paradise in Hawaii, particularly beyond Honolulu and on such relatively undeveloped and idyllic islands as Kauai, the Big Island, and Maui.
The shocking destruction of the historic city of Lahaina on Maui (to say nothing of the heartrending loss of life there) is perhaps rendered all the more horrific for many of us because it represents a loss of innocence. It is a great gash in what we had regarded as something of a demi-paradise, a memory of Eden. I myself first visited Lahaina when I was sixteen, staying in the old Pioneer Inn (built in 1901) and walking for hours along the beach to and from what is now the highly-developed resort area of Kaanapali, the first glimmerings of which were just beginning to appear at the time. Now, the wooden Pioneer Inn is gone. Nearby stood a great banyan tree that had been planted in April 1873, covering nearly two acres. Severely damaged, it may not survive.
We should, frankly, not be surprised that such whispers of paradise on earth are as ephemeral and transitory as they are elusive in the first place. And the tragedy of Lahaina should be a reminder to us. At Matthew 6:19-21, the Lord himself advised us to
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
At James 4:13-15 (quoted here in the translation by J. B. Phillips for maximum clarity), the apostle James has a word about the fragility of our plans and projects:
“Just a moment, now, you who say, “We are going to such-and-such a city today or tomorrow. We shall stay there a year doing business and make a profit”! How do you know what will happen even tomorrow? What, after all, is your life? It is like a puff of smoke visible for a little while and then dissolving into thin air. Your remarks should be prefaced with, “If it is the Lord’s will, we shall be alive and will do so-and-so.””
As a popular song from my adolescent years put it, “Some may come and some may go; we shall surely pass when the one that left us here returns for us at last. We are but a moment’s sunlight fading in the grass.”
We have a natural tendency to assume, when we are comfortable and prosperous, that such comfort and prosperity will persist. Of Laman and Lemuel it is recorded that “Neither did they believe that Jerusalem, that great city, could be destroyed according to the words of the prophets.” (1 Nephi 2:13)
And our ease may well continue, for a while. In the end, though, it will not. And its end can come swiftly, suddenly, and with little or no warning.
“Therefore be ye also ready,” said the Lord, “for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh” (Matthew 24:44).
If the end doesn’t come in the apocalyptic end of the world altogether, it will most assuredly come for each of us individually. For all of us will die. Once again, for the sake of freshness, I cite a translation by J. B. Phillips:
“Then he gave them a parable in these words, “Once upon a time a rich man’s farmland produced heavy crops. So, he said to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have no room to store this harvest of mine?’ Then he said, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll pull down my barns and build bigger ones where I can store all my grain and my goods and I can say to my soul, Soul, you have plenty of good things stored up there for years to come. Relax! Eat, drink and have a good time!’ But God said to him, ‘You fool, this very night you will be asked for your soul! Then, who is going to possess all that you have prepared?’ That is what happens to the man who hoards things for himself and is not rich where God is concerned.”” (Luke 12:16-21)
In March 1981, President Spencer W. Kimball recounted a powerful story about a man whose cattle ranch he had visited, who had boasted with considerable satisfaction about the vastness of his holdings. He had, he said, acquired them by “my toil, my sweat, my labor, and my strength.” President Kimball probed, hoping for some glimmer of recognition on the man’s part of the contingency of what he had accrued. Was he aware of the divine blessings that he had received that had made his wealth possible? Apparently, there was none.
“That was long years ago,” President Kimball said. “I later saw him lying in his death among luxurious furnishings in a palatial home. His had been a vast estate. And I folded his arms upon his breast, and drew down the little curtains over his eyes. I spoke at his funeral, and I followed the cortege from the good piece of earth he had claimed to his grave, a tiny, oblong area the length of a tall man, the width of a heavy one.
“Later I saw that same estate, yellow in grain, green in lucerne, white in cotton, seemingly unmindful of him who had claimed it.”
It is, I think, actually significant that fire is very commonly used as a metaphor for the final purification of us and of all things. According to Hebrews 12:29, “our God is a consuming fire.” “And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver,” testifies Malachi 3:3, “and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.”
In the end, many scriptural passages testify, the world will be cleansed as with fire.
But please don’t take this as a proverbial “hellfire and damnation” sermon. That’s not my intent. Nor am I aiming my comments here solely to those other people, “the wicked.” They are for myself as much as for anyone, and I’m probably at least as self-satisfied and complacent as anybody else. We should simply never forget that this world and, indeed, our lives, are transitory. And we should be asking ourselves every day whether we have lost our focus on the things that matter, the things that are eternal, or whether we might need to shift our focus.
These comments from Jesus are worthy of note:
“There were present at that season some that told him of the Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay . . . Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay.” (Luke 13:1-5)
Those of us who fly on commercial airliners should be familiar with the instructions for the evacuation of an aircraft in the event of an emergency. (Were we listening?) We are always told that we will not have time to grab our belongings. Rather, we should leave everything behind and head straight to the nearest emergency exit. The instructions for the end time – whether general or personal – are much the same:
“Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.” (Matthew 24:17-18)
When Lehi and his party were told to depart from Jerusalem in order to escape its pending destruction, they left everything except what was absolutely necessary for their journey. And, when some of them returned to the city at divine command, it was not for their family’s material treasures but, instead, for the scriptures that they would need to preserve the faith among their posterity. (Contrast the Mulekites, who brought no scriptures with them and who – according to Omni 1:17 — had forgotten not only their language by the time the Nephites encountered them centuries later in the New World, but their belief in their Creator.)
Many years ago, massive wildfires threatened some of the expensive communities in the coastal canyons north of San Diego, California. A family that my wife and I knew there had a beautiful home filled with fascinating artifacts that they had gathered during decades of residence outside of the United States. They were given mere minutes to evacuate their home, and they presumed that it would be destroyed. In the end, happily, it wasn’t. But the requirement to grab only what you could gather in a few minutes and only what you could carry with you was a useful, if horrifying, exercise.
We will all die. However good this life may have been for us, it will not and cannot last. What is it that we consider most important? If we were to consider this question more often, what would we do differently? How would we spend our time, our energy, and our resources?
For the complete version of President Spencer W. Kimball’s story, see “He Did It with All His Heart, and Prospered” (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1981/03/he-did-it-with-all-his-heart-and-prospered?lang=eng). See also “When George Q. Cannon Saw the Savior” (https://latterdaysaintmag.com/when-george-q-cannon-saw-the-savior/) and “The Sacred History of the Church in Hawaii” (https://latterdaysaintmag.com/the-sacred-history-of-the-church-in-hawaii/).
