Line upon Line

The Amnesiac King

G.K. Chesterton, that great defender of the sanity of wonder, once remarked, “The most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven.”¹ It is a haunting accusation. It suggests that our modern disease is not ignorance but amnesia. The ache in the human chest is not a craving for novelty, but a homesickness for something impossibly old. We do not suffer from knowing too little about the world; we suffer from having forgotten that the world was once a wedding, not a warehouse.

Imagine a man who wakes in the middle of a vast, roaring factory. The air is thick with oil and iron. Pistons hammer the air into noise. To a visiting angel, the place would not have looked like ‘industry,’ but like a great idol that ate hours and exhaled smoke. A foreman strides up, presses a wrench into his hand, and tells him his story:

You are a cog. You are a biological accident — a machine made of meat — thrown up by the random collisions of atoms over billions of years. Your purpose is to tighten this bolt until you rust and fall back into the silence you came from.

The man nods. He takes the wrench. He eats, he works, he sleeps. He accepts the foreman’s gray, utilitarian tale as the whole of reality. And yet, in the thin stillness between the pounding of the gears, he hears a melody he cannot explain. It is only a fragment, like a song from a country he does not remember visiting, the fragrance of a garden he cannot recall seeing. He looks at his grease-blackened hands and feels, absurdly, that they were meant to hold a scepter, not a tool.

The modern world — the world of material reductionism and secular disenchantment — asserts that we are that factory worker. It tells us the universe is a machine and we are only its temporary ghosts. Our loves are chemical flares. Our prayers are private monologues. Our existence is a statistical fluke in an indifferent void.

But the Gospel of Jesus Christ, particularly as restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith, dares to tell us the terrifying and beautiful truth: we are the amnesiac King. The scandal of the Restoration is not that it tells us we are worse than we feared, but that it tells us we are older and higher than we dared to hope.

This is not a comforting metaphor we have invented; it is an ontological claim. As President Russell M. Nelson has repeatedly taught, before any other label — before we are employees, Americans, introverts, or even “sinners” — we are children of God, children of the covenant, and disciples of Jesus Christ.² That title is not greeting-card fluff; it is a royal name. It says that the irrational dignity we sometimes feel is, in fact, the most rational thing about us. We are not trying to survive a cosmic accident. We are trying to remember a royal lineage. The world tells us we are accidents pretending to be royalty; the Gospel insists we are royalty passing through a world that only looks like an accident.

In this light, “re-enchantment” is not pretending that the world is magical. It is the rigorous discipline of anamnesis — the work of un-forgetting. It is the refusal to let the factory’s din drown out the music of home. It is the decision to trust the half-remembered melody more than the clamor of the pistons. In other words, re‑enchantment in the Restoration is not about inventing a fantasy, but about remembering reality as it truly is.

The Disenchanted Universe

C. S. Lewis, describing the medieval imagination, wrote of a cosmos that was alive and musical. For the ancients, the space above us was not a cold vacuum called “space” but the Heavens — layered, luminous, and ordered by intelligence. The stars were not mere flaming stones; they were signs and singers (see Moses 2:14).

We have traded this vision, Lewis says, for a joyless cosmology. We have emptied the sky. We have silenced the music. We still speak of the “heavens,” but only as a place where rockets go to feel lonely. We now treat the universe as silent, empty, and dead.

The tragedy is not merely that the secular world believes this. The tragedy is that we, as Latter-day Saints, have sometimes sprinkled this disenchantment with left-over Sacrament water. We possess a theology of thunderous glory, yet we frequently flatten it into a flowchart.

We handle the Plan of Salvation — a cosmic drama of risk, valor, and deification — as though it were a business plan or a legal contract. We speak of “checking boxes” and “enduring to the end” with the weary tone of accountants closing the books. We take the wild, prodigal love of the Father and reduce it to a tidy transaction. It is as if we were handed a thunderstorm and asked for it to be explained on a spreadsheet.

We see this drift in the way we compartmentalize a “spiritual life” alongside the other quadrants of growing physically, mentally, and socially, as though the “stature” of Luke 2:52 were just a slice of a self-improvement pie chart. Spirituality becomes one more metric to optimize, one more tool in the kit. We start asking, “Does it work?” as if the Atonement were a wrench or a software update. As my friend and scholar Dr. S. Brett Savage has observed, when we reduce the Gospel to utility, we clear the stage for “counterfeit explanations” of our own being. We begin to believe the world when it tells us we are “things to be acted upon” — by trauma, by genetics, by environment.

But the prophet Lehi, standing on the edge of a wilderness twenty-six centuries ago, shattered that machine. He divided all reality into two grand categories: “things to act and things to be acted upon” (2 Nephi 2:14). The disenchanted world contends that you belong to the second class — a thing buffeted by biology, driven by chemistry. The Gospel claims you bear the burden and glory of being among the first.

When we forget this, we adopt a mechanized imagination. We strip the Ghost from the machine. We construct a flattened anthropology where there is no spirit, only firing neurons; no agency, only stimulus and response. We risk becoming Chesterton’s “madman”: not the man who has lost his reason, but the man who has lost everything except his reason.³ We preserve our diagrams, policies, and handbooks — and misplace the poetry.

When that happens, we commit a kind of spiritual suicide. We become people who, at least in practice, risk becoming functional atheists who attend church. We keep God in our vocabulary the way some people keep old family portraits: politely dusted, carefully hung, and never consulted. God remains on our forms, but not in our fears. We assent to a Deity who once wound up the cosmic factory, but who does not kneel beside us in the dark. We forget that the universe is not a locked room; it is a cathedral. We forget that we are not employees of the Almighty but His kin.

Olam and the Ancient Self

Into this silent, mechanistic void, the Restoration speaks a word that alters the very being of the human person: co-eternal.

Traditional Christianity, for all its profound beauty, has often been constrained by the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo — creation out of nothing. If God summoned us from absolute nothingness, then we are fundamentally unlike Him. He is the necessary Artist; we are the fragile artifacts. He is the Potter; we are the pot. The pot may adore the Potter, but it can never grow up to be of His kind. In that world, we are strangers in a universe built, finally, not for our joy but for His glory alone.

Joseph Smith, by revelation, tore open the sky and showed us a more ancient truth. In May 1833 the Lord declared: “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (D&C 93:29).

That single sentence explodes the factory. If you were there “in the beginning,” then your life is not a brief accident in God’s afternoon; it is a chapter in a story that began before clocks. If you were “in the beginning,” you are not a product rolling off an assembly line. You are not a manufactured good. You stand as old as the story itself. Put simply: you did not begin when your birth certificate says you did.

As Terryl Givens has argued, the Restoration recovers the pre-mortal life not as a quaint prologue but as the guarantee of our identity. We are not objects fabricated by God; we are intelligences co-eternal with Him. We were not conjured from the void; we were tutored from the beginning. In the King Follett discourse, Joseph Smith used the image of a ring—a circle without beginning or end. If the soul had a beginning, he reasoned, it must also have an end. But because it has no end, it could have had no absolute beginning.⁴

Jeremiah hears the Lord say, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee” (Jeremiah 1:5). The Hebrew term for that kind of “before” is olam — a time beyond the vanishing point, a depth of past our minds cannot sound. The Restoration takes William Wordsworth’s poetry and engraves it into doctrine:

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.”⁵

Wordsworth guessed what Joseph saw. The poet felt that we were homesick; the prophet remembered the home. If we lived before, then this world is not an alien warehouse. It is the Father’s house.

The beauty of a mountain range, the hush of a sealing room, the sudden spear of joy at the sight of a child — these are not brand-new experiences. They are recognitions. We are not learning a foreign tongue; we are recovering our mother language. Conversion, in this light, is not the invention of a new self but the courtesy of finally introducing yourself to the one you have always been.

This doctrine annihilates the “joyless cosmology.” It insists that you are not “a machine made of meat.” You are a being of immense age and dignity. You once stood among the “noble and great ones” (Abraham 3:22). You shouted for joy when the foundations of this world were laid (see Job 38:7). The stubborn melody you hear in the factory — the one the foreman calls a hallucination — is the echo of your own history.

Re-enchantment, then, is the choice to trust that echo. It is the refusal to bow under the “iron yokes” of the world’s definitions (D&C 123:8). The world says you are your job, your bank account, your diagnosis, your wound. The memory of heaven says you are an eternal intelligence, uncreated and indestructible, presently enrolled in a harrowing and holy tutorial called mortality.

Living with “Double Vision”

How, then, do we live as amnesiac kings and queens in a world that keeps shoving a wrench into our hands? We must cultivate what Richard Williams calls “a turning of things upside down.”⁶ We must learn to live with double vision. If this is who we truly are, then our way of seeing the world must be turned inside out. That is the work of double vision.

We must begin to see the physical world not merely as matter, but as witness. In the Pearl of Great Price, the Lord tells Moses: “And behold, all things have their likeness, and all things are created and made to bear record of me, both things which are temporal, and things which are spiritual” (Moses 6:63). The world calls this superstition. Heaven calls it accurate eyesight.

Here is the key to the re-enchanted eye. To the materialist, a tree is only a photosynthetic machine scrambling for light. He is right about the scrambling and wrong about the light. To the baptized imagination, the tree is a sermon in bark and branch, reaching for the light as we are commanded to do. To the materialist, a neighbor is a competitor, a resource, or a nuisance. To the enchanted eye, that neighbor is a brother or sister whose future glory, as C. S. Lewis warns, would tempt us to worship if we saw it unveiled. “There are no ordinary people,” Lewis writes. “You have never talked to a mere mortal.”⁷

This shift — from managing behavior to awakening awe — changes everything. It transfigures our boredom. It reinterprets our pain. It turns religion from a list of demands into a romance of redemption.

Consider the Sacrament, the quiet center of our weekly worship. To the factory-trained eye, it is frankly dull: a crumb of bread and a plastic thimble of water, passed by a teenager with a crooked tie, consumed in a room full of people checking their watches or their phones. It is “nothing but” carbohydrates and hydration. It is, as modern charity might put it, ‘the bare minimum’ — and so we naturally do it with the bare minimum of attention.

Now bring the Restoration’s lens. Bring the memory of heaven. Suddenly that bread is the torn flesh of the God who wept (see Moses 7:28-37). That water is the blood of the Innocent who bought our freedom at infinite cost. The carpeted chapel falls away, and we are back in the Upper Room; deeper still, we are back in the Grand Council, once again choosing the Lamb over the accuser.

When the priest kneels to pray, he asks that we may “always have his Spirit to be with [us]” (Moroni 4:3). What is that if not a plea for permanent re-enchantment? He is asking that the Holy Ghost overlay our ordinary vision with divine sight — not for ten reverent minutes, but always. He is asking that we carry this double vision from the chapel into the parking lot, the office, the kitchen, and the hospital corridor.

Under such a gaze, the “ordinary” world begins to burn with meaning. The family dinner becomes a faint rehearsal for the marriage supper of the Lamb. The fragile act of forgiveness becomes a small participation in the Atonement itself. The awkward, faltering ward member reveals himself as a “noble and great one” in disguise. Our tragedy is not that we sit beside saints in disguise, but that we insist on treating the disguises as the most interesting part.

The Submerged Sunrise

We are called to “dig for the submerged sunrise of wonder.”⁸

We inhabit a world fiercely determined to keep that sun under the waterline. The forces of disenchantment are tireless. Despair has all the advantages of laziness; hope is the stubborn decision to keep swimming when the statistics say you should sink. They will chant at you, day after day, that you are broken beyond hope, that you are merely a victim, that you are a complicated machine in slow decay. They will press the wrench back into your hand and bark at you to get on with your shift.

But we know better. We have records. We have prophets. The world offers us data; God, in His untidy way, insists on sending us witnesses. From Abraham to Joseph Smith to Dallin H. Oaks, they testify that we are strangers here only because we belong to a better country.

Re-enchantment is the choice to swim toward that light. It is the refusal to live as a cog. It is the daily, defiant decision to remember that we are royalty in exile, and that the King is coming back for His household. It is to look at mountains and stars and the faces around our dinner table and say, with a jolt of recognition: I know you. I know this place. This is not merely a factory. This is a school for gods, and the bell has already rung.

Let us, then, handle the doctrines of the Restoration not as tools in a toolbox, but as windows thrown open to glory. Let us refuse the ghastly simplicity that wants the function but will not endure the living organ. Let us marry our clear doctrine to a baptized imagination, so that when we speak of the gospel of Jesus Christ we are not only offering a lecture on ethics, but singing the song of redeeming love—a song which, if we listen closely, we will recognize as the first language of our hearts, learned long before the world began.