Come, Follow Me November 4-10: Mormon 7-9
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Hope in Christ
It’s common, when we meet Moroni, to express sympathy for his plight. We gather in Sunday School, nodding soberly, as we imagine wandering alone, grieving a fallen nation, being hunted for commitment to Christ.
This time through, however, I’ve been struck by the language in which he writes his loneliness. Speaking at the beginning of Mormon 8, Moroni’s words are all constraint and negation: “I know not,” “it mattereth not,” “I have not [room],” “ore I have none,” “I have not friends nor whither to go,” “I say no more,” “no man knoweth” (Mormon 8:3–5, 9–10). Moroni reminds us that even despair is an acceptable posture before Christ. Righteousness does not always result in happy, shiny people. Here a prophet of God, tasked with one of the most crucial steps in the transmission of the Book of Mormon, feels desolate in the face of certain trials. Surely, then, modern Latter-day Saints can also struggle under depression and loneliness and still be welcome in the pews, in prayer, in their callings. It is at times like these, in fact, that pews and prayers and callings arguably matter most.
Scripture acquaints us with many different portraits of sainthood. And while lamentation and sorrow are part of those portraits, they are easily drowned out by the seemingly endless supply of scriptural miracles and triumphs and just-in-the-nick-of-time blessings. I occasionally grow discouraged under the relentless barrage of Nephi’s stalwart resolution, Mary’s quiet faith, Peter’s fearless zeal, Mormon’s historiographical confidence, Martha’s efficient pragmatism, and Abish’s courageous evangelism. I am grateful that the Book of Mormon also gives us Nephi’s self-doubt (2 Nephi 4), Jacob’s despondence (Jacob 7:26), and, here, Moroni’s depression. Because I, too, have sometimes gone to church with the attitude that “it mattereth not” (Mormon 8:4) and lain alone in a hospital bed feeling like “I have not friends” (Mormon 8:5) and faced down testimony questions where “I know not” the answers (Mormon 8:3). In these moments, I am grateful to know that even prophets have walked these paths before me.
But I am struck by something else in this early introduction to Moroni. Somewhere around verse 11, his tone begins to change. The change is slight—barely perceptible, even. But ever so faintly, Moroni begins to dwell less on his present and more on the future; he speaks less in terms of what he does not know, and more in terms of what might be possible (Mormon 8:12). And there are clues about the reason for this slightly renewed hope: he reports being “ministered” to by Jesus’ Nephite disciples (Mormon 8:11) and hints at some kind of revelation of “all things” (Mormon 8:12) that includes, at the very least, a vision of his latter-day readers (Mormon 8:35). Though we can’t be sure of what, exactly, Moroni has seen, it’s clearly something that begins to outstrip his individual despair. As he witnesses the larger scope of Jesus’s redemptive work, his individual misery begins, just barely, to matter less.
In December of 2013, I was a very young stay-at-home mom to twin toddlers, trying to hold down the domestic fort while my husband completed an intensive nine-month master’s program at a prestigious university. I was trying to claw out time for my own research and writing, but mostly I spent my days exhausted, depressed, and hopeless about the prospect of ever doing anything other than changing diapers and sweeping up crushed Cheerios. We were hundreds of miles away from family and friends, the money was tight, the living quarters were tighter, and that year’s Christmas season refused to deliver any of its normal cheer. I remember going through the motions of gingerbread-baking and present-wrapping, but none of the usual things held any joy for me. It was, all told, a miserable Christmas that I wouldn’t care to repeat.
Within all the depressive haze, however, I remember a brief experience that taught me a lesson about hope. Scrolling Facebook, I stumbled across a music video for the hymn “O Come O Come Emmanuel.” I remember hitting “play” and proceeding to weep for the next three and a half minutes as I was reminded, through song and image, that the season pointed to a hope that far exceeded my own feelings that December. I was depressed, and yet Christ had been born in Bethlehem. My own life seemed frustratingly banal, and yet Christ performed miracles in early Palestine. I could not imagine a life on the far side of young motherhood, and yet Christ rose from the dead. It felt something like sitting in a dark basement and knowing that, even if this light switch hadn’t yet been flipped, electricity was still real and that somewhere out there light existed.
After the video ended, I was not suddenly reborn into a jolly avatar of Christmas cheer. The rest of my Christmas season remained largely the same. I was still despondent, my twins were still rambunctious, the Cheerio crumbs were still on my kitchen floor. But I felt a new sense of confidence in Christ. And I learned that hope is not a feeling but an objective reality won for us by the Savior, and that it exists independent of our feelings at any given moment.
We watch Moroni experience something similar across the opening verses of Mormon 8.
He presses forward in fidelity to a covenant work that outstrips his individual griefs, acute and unimaginable though they may be. He is a saint who lived and experienced life in its entirety, who expressed hope in Christ not by being happy and smiley all the time, but by showing up in faith precisely when he was not feeling happy and smiley.
The hope that Christ offers remains true in the times when we are optimistic and the times when we are not. Resurrection is on the agenda, even at the times when we feel despair. The atonement has been accomplished, even when its new life feels far from us. And regardless of the season-to-season vagaries of our changing emotions, all the Lord’s redemptive energy churns inescapably toward the day when He will wipe every tear from our eyes (Revelation 21:4).
Confidence in Christ can be a resolution that carries us through our most difficult times, not by fixing our emotions (emotions are not problems, after all) but by reminding us of what remains invariable as we walk the changing seasons of life. Even when we cannot feel hopeful ourselves, hope is our horizon because Christ stands always at the ready.
Images
Maddie Baker, Moroni Alone, 2023. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/moroni-alone-2/].
Jon McNaughton, Mormon Abridging the Plates. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/mormon-abridging-the-plates/].
Glery Becerra, The Lord Has Shown You Unto Me. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [Bookofmormonartcatalog.org/the-lord-has-shown-you-unto-me/].