Alma 29

[This next passage appears to be a psalm by Alma. I’ve tipped it in here, since it seemed to fit the mood.]

Would I were an angel shouting, or at least a trumpet in an angel’s hands. Either way, something that blared the need to wake up to a better life. Something between thunder and an earthquake. Because sorrow runs us aground every morning if we haven’t thrown our sins overboard. I want everyone’s sorrow to end and that’s why I want so much startling noise in my voice.

Yes, I know it’s silly and overambitious and a kind of cheat on life, since God made me what I am and he’s de facto correct. I can’t wring my emotions like a rag and think something better will spill out. God made me, made everyone else, we’re all different, but all the same in being different from one another. It’s a cosmic plan, a blueprint of our lives we can’t redraw.

Our wills are structures, the joists and rafters we hang our happiness on. If we don’t have the facts to calibrate our choices well, God understands and looks the other way—or tells us the facts. If we know the facts, then we’re accountable. Good, evil, and all the strains and particularities and species of either or both, all arrayed in the cosmos with price tags hanging on each one.

That being the case, why do I think I need more to do with my life? Angels, trumpets, thunder, earthquakes—I need to pull these out of my rhetoric, even my imagination, just like weeds.

God gives what he wants to every nation on earth, in every language, to multitudinous desires of multifarious hearts. He’s wise. He’s fair. He’s apt. If you don’t think so, I can’t imagine what kind of God you believe in.

God’s assigned me to the right tasks in my life. They’re like jewels all around me, shining in various lights. That’s my “glory.” But indulge me this: I want to be a pickax he uses to dig out more jewels for others. If my ambition is for others to be as happy as I am, no one can find fault with that.

I see others get happy and I get happier. I see how their behaviors change and I recall so deeply how my behavior did. I see God overlooking their past and I twinge at the thought of my own, smile at God’s willful blindness to us all.

Our whole history is one of captivity, from Egypt to Jerusalem, the raunchy chained-up lives people have always lived. And our whole history is one of deliverance, God snapping the chains if we just have faith and straighten our lives, reorient the bent geometry of our self-will.

Nations go into bondage one person at a time. I was one of those. God, inexplicably, tore up my slave papers, called me to learn and then preach, successfully. If the heart were a bucket, mine overspills, sloshingly. And not just for myself: my brothers underwent the same metamorphosis. I think of them and the whole cycle of joy, its pangs and ecstasy, roll in my chest again.

I think of how all our hard work now means something. Shrug off the body, but the work remains. And my happiness now is as if the body were already gone.

Okay, I’ll change the metaphor, as I always peripatetically do: May God allow us all, once done picking fruit from his worldwide orchard, to sit down and eat it at his own banquet table. If so, you can lock the doors. We don’t need to go anywhere else for pleasure.

Would that I were … not an angel, but one of God’s migrant workers, finally getting to eat, at last, like a king.