Be
thou humble; and the Lord thy God shall lead thee by the
hand, and give thee answer to thy prayers.”[i]
“Well now, wait a minute.
That injunction was given to Thomas Marsh. How can you presume ubiquitous application
when this directive and promise were given to one individual?”
“Then are you saying only one person can be
proscribed by this admonition?”
“I only know the sanction in this verse is personally
singular. However, if you want to impute
encyclical application from singular mandate, how about this:”
And, behold, one came and said
unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal
life?
And he said unto him, Why callest
thou me good? There is none good
but one, that is, God : but if thou wilt enter into life,
keep the commandments.
He saith unto him, Which? Jesus
said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery,
Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false
witness,
The young man saith unto him, All
these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?
Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt
be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow
me.[ii]
“Is that
admonition yours … mine … everyone’s questing for perfection?”
“Maybe that was meant as his challenge. Is everyone assailed by the same homogenous
pool of seduction?”
I have confronted this epistemological process in conversation
and thought more than once. I have
watched it unfold in group dynamics, resolution found in equanimity of group
consensus, inquiry seeming to evade the appellate source of directive. Still
yet, does the drive toward unity speak of an underlying theme of existence?
Should
you choose to continue reading, Socratic pursuit invokes questions whose
answers, or absurdity, can only be exclusively personal.
Can
anyone mortal seeking perfection pierce the austere resolve required to perceive
unity with The Eternal Father: heart, might, mind and strength? That apprehended as distant is difficult to
resolve into terrestrial practicality.
“When I lay this mortal by … let me come and dwell with you.”[iii] Is Divinity foreign so as to require breach
of distance at mortal termination to merge in a faraway abode? Where is that place of serenity? Does eternal dimension incorporate distance
to validate remote, foreign?
Is that God
foreign—the person next encountered, and the
next, and… Isolation seems a cultured
capability to perceive God as distant, or nonexistent, and people as the
creation, or anomalous evolution, consigned to an esoteric habitation in recondite
universe.
The provenance of this segment, is it tinctured
with unanimous resolution? Is Bart
Ehrman right; the Bible is so eviscerated by translation, chimeral authorship,
and copyist preference as to make legitimate its interpretive flaccidness?
What about
Interpolation within the realm of educated reason [to exonerate the group
consensus model]? I would believe, not
textually justified, that Jesus was not diverted from a lesson’s progression to
passively, and prematurely, note that loving others as oneself implied that a
rich young ruler, obsessed in possessory discrimination, was well distant from
compliance with even a singular law of love, co-existent with the laws of
mosaic carnality, to which he vouched obedience.
What is progressive fact? Where is
liberating truth—perhaps
imbedded in principle universally intangible?
Then who has acumen sufficient to discern it perfectly? Am I to know?
What am I to know?
[i]
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Doctrine and Covenants, sec.
112:10
[ii]
Original King James version, Bible, Matthew 19:16-21
[iii]
Hymns of the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. (Salt Lake City, UT: Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1985), p. 292
[iv]
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Book of Mormon, Mosiah 2:17
[v]
Op. cit., Bible, Matthew 25:40