Let me know when you go on tour… I would love to get tickets;)

It’s 11:38 p.m. You just finished paying the last bills, put away the dishes from dinner, put in a load of laundry, folded what seemed a hundredfold small articles of clothing, fed the animals, and put the toys back in the toy chest (even the Matchbox cars pushed under the sofa). You hoist a brimming laundry basket and, dimming the last light, wearily turn and head up the stairs. At the top of the stairs you set the laundry basket down, thinking you will look in on your son and daughter where they sleep. You stand at the side of their bed and watch their deep breathing, the sweetness of a face at peace, see the perspiration on their face as the surplus energy of a full day of play oozes out. A feeling of joy wells up in you, unbidden, the kind that swallows up all your deep weariness. And then you sense something else underneath the joy, something you recognize as a profound sadness, and you turn to leave, an unspoken prayer caught in your throat.

West quotes Alain de Botton:

Christian philosophers have been singularly alive to the sadness which beauty may provoke. ‘When we admire the beauty of visible objects, we experience joy certainly,’ observed the medieval thinker Hugh of St. Victor, ‘but at the same time, we experience a feeling of tremendous void’ . . . Beauty, then is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and our yearning for the life denied us.

I would not want to fight too strenuously with these beautiful thoughts. I would just suggest that perhaps things are beautiful precisely because they are fragile, precisely because they carry the seeds of decay. This make beauty so much the more wonderful. In Mormon thought we will not be restored to our premortal form, but to a reunion of the soul with the body. This is the soul in its truest sense!

Now that he is back in the motherland, I wonder if he talks ‘merican to get the natives’ attention . . .

this world’s fallen state, with its “opposition in all things,” offers the canvas upon which our lives our painted. It is not a monochrome white, but a messy splash of red, and blue, and black. As we learn to choose good over evil, a Caravaggio emerges — complicated, but beautiful, human and divine.

That’s one of the things I miss about Elder Maxwell. He did it very well. I am but a novice. I too feel the pain when people do not equate me with being Christian. Even more so if they are insensitive enough to take joy in that pain. I’ve found that it’s hard to be a Christian. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.

Evans,
Call me Loki.