Rosalynde Welch Wonder of Scripture Lecture

Transcript

Thank you, JB. I learn volumes every day about servant leadership from working with JB, Haas, I'm so grateful to do it. Grateful as well to my wonderful colleagues and friends at the Maxwell Institute, to our brilliant students who work with us there and our supportive faculty colleagues across campus. We're blessed to be so generously resourced by BYU administrators and our Board of Trustees. I feel very, very blessed to be a fellow at the Maxwell Institute.

I'm here today, as both Kim and JB have mentioned, as the last and least in a superb series of speakers over the past few months. I say, let's do a quick semester review. It is final season, after all.

...

Starting at the top, Jared Halverson kicked us off in January with the “Why” of Scripture. He issued a passionate invitation to enter into Scripture with our whole selves to grasp the iron rod as the outstretched hand of Christ extended from the tree of life. Kristian Heal exhorted us to live into Sacred Scripture, and he showed us how early Syriac Christians did so by honing their spiritual imaginations on biblical texts. We were taught the “how” of Scripture by Rabbi Sam Spector, who demonstrated his traditions parties, method of studying Torah, which uses systematic question asking to guide the reader through layer after layer of scriptural meaning. And we were taught the “how” by brother Ben Lomu, who invited us to ask with Enos: “Lord, how is it done?” We've been taught the “what” of holy writ, as Morgan Davis introduced us to some highlights of world scripture and invited us to fill our little red wagons with sacred texts from every corner of the globe. We've been treated to unforgettable readings of beloved scripture passages. Patrick Mason interpreted the parables of Luke 13 as a lesson on God's Endless Love. Rachel Givens: mind Moses 1 for lessons on prayer and contemplation, and Adam Miller showed us the plain sense of Alma 34, that mercy is the whole meaning of justice. And we can't forget our new book series: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants. Authors, Phil Barlow showed us how time is not the fifth but the zeroth principle of the gospel. Amy Harris taught us that family history is the work of heart turning, and Mason Allred showed us how seeing, really seeing, is a spiritual practice. And with JB, I have to just give a shout out to all of you, some of you I know who've been here every week or every week that you were able, and you have brought so much energy and joy to the room. That has been the unexpected gift of this experience for me is getting to know some of you I've loved my little 10 minutes every week handing you chocolates and greeting as you've come. Thank you so much for coming and contributing what you have to this experience we've shared together.

So how can I put a cherry on top of this feast of wonder? A few weeks ago, I started writing down my deeply cherished convictions about what Scripture is for and why and how we should read it, and before long, I realized I just wanted to say what Jared Halverson had said in his first lecture of the semester. Only I'd never be able to match his energy and his charisma. So instead of going big today with my treatise on hermeneutics, I decided to go small. Instead of a manifesto for something I believe in, a love letter to something I cherish, which is reading. The wonder of reading scripture.

But first, let's step back for a moment. Imagine with me that you are an alien anthropologist visiting Earth to study human technology. In a room, you see a rectangular object sitting on a four legged platform. The object shows no movement, no sound, no sign of life. Curious, you brush the surface of its upturned plane and trace the rigid right angles. You note that it would fit comfortably in a human sized hand. You lift it, surprised by its modest weight, and you turn it to examine all six sides. Three of its surfaces show a curious striated pattern, and when you gently press the longest of these edges, the object yields unexpectedly and opens to reveal a complex internal structure of hinged sections. Now you can see that this curious object is not a single thing, but composed of hundreds of flexible sheets that move under light pressure. Each is covered in patterns of dark markings at a scale easily distinguished by the human eye. The symbols are organized in sequences of repetition with variation. The sheets are bound together at one edge, fixing their sequence, and this suggests that they're meant to be examined in order, yet each one is easily accessible with the flick of the finger, suggesting that they are also meant to be referenced and re-examined. So what clues to the purpose of this object might you gather from its physical properties? It's sized to be easily handled and visually examined. Its structure protects and also provides access to its internal parts. The symbols are dense, deliberate and non-pictorial. All these things invite interaction, inspection, and interpretation. Eureka, you excitedly conclude that humans have developed a technology allowing one person to encode information in symbols that later, at any time or any place to which the object can be transported, may be accessed and visually decoded by any other person who knows the code. This modest, rectangular object so much more expansive and complex than it looked at first, defeats the limits of ordinary sensory communication and allows information to be preserved and shared across time and space.

Amazing. The book itself has taught you what it's for and what to do with it. The book itself has taught you what reading is. If this idea seems farfetched to you, consider that we have a version of it in our own history. Think about the experience of young Joseph Smith, who encountered a set of metal plates inscribed with strange, even alien markings. In a four-year tutorial, Moroni helped Joseph understand that the pieces of gold were not a treasure hoard but a sacred book to be used for God's purposes. But what exactly was he supposed to do with it? Richard Bushman writes that, before Joseph had the plates in his hands in September 1827, he seemed to have only "slight acknowledgement of the ancient language written on the plates, and no realization of the need to translate the characters.” Joseph's exclamation, “I want them translated,” seems to have arisen after he got the plates in his hands. Not until he had the plates in his hands and saw the ancient characters engraved on their surfaces, did he understand what was required. The gold plates drove him to translation. Moroni taught Joseph what the plates were not, but the angel allowed the plates themselves to teach Joseph what they were for–translation. Objects have a kind of agency of their own, and they act on us. They shape us. They teach us. For my money, the feature of a book that is most agentic and most communicative is its capacity to open, to move in an instant from a state of self-enclosed contraction to a state of self-revealing availability. ...

The graphic created by our student designer Meranda Brodowski, for Wonder of Scripture branding, perfectly depicts the way a book's openness expresses an invitation to enter. I'm thinking here with the literary critic Georges Poulet who, in a famous essay about reading, wrote this: “Take a book, and you will find it offering opening itself. It is this openness of the book that I find so moving. A book is not shut in by its contours, it's not walled-up as in a fortress. It asks nothing better than to exist outside itself, or to let you exist in it. In short, the extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside.” (George Poulet, Phenomenology of Reading)

When we interact with Scripture in the form of a book, the opening of its physical covers mirrors the cognitive process of reading itself. Reading is essentially the process of opening meaning. Reading is a collaboration between a human mind and a string of symbols, when the symbols with their ability to signify come into contact with a mind with its ability to interpret, meaning opens into view. The literary theorist Stanley Fish calls this meaning as an event, something that is happening between the words and the reader's mind. As Fish sees it, reading is less like the extraction of nuggets of significance, less like mining for copper below the surface of the earth, and more like an event that happens between a mind and a text. Reading is how the meaning of a text happens, or in my favorite metaphor, reading is the way meaning opens.

We see precisely this parallel between the opening of a physical book and the opening of a meaning event in the narrative of Luke 4, one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. Here in the first scene of Christ's formal ministry, Luke tells a riveting story. Jesus, "came to Nazareth where He had been brought up, and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day,” during the service, he stood up to read the Torah at the prescribed moment. "And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah, and when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And He closed the book and gave it again to the minister and sat down.” (Luke 4:16-20) Something about his reading electrified the crowd, and every eye was fixed on him as he continued. “This day is scripture fulfilled in your ears.” (verse 21) Jesus's reading caused a meaning event, what Luke calls a fulfillment. And the meaning that happened is that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah of the prophets.

I read this scene as a series of three openings. First, Christ opens the scroll and accepts its silent invitation to enter its world. Next, he opens the text and invites the prophetic meaning of the Messiah's identity into his world, the world he shares with his people. Finally, after opening first the scroll and then the text, he opens the understanding of his friends, or at any rate, he tries, as you may recall, the people of Nazareth declined to attend this event and run him out of town. With artful symmetry, Luke frames Jesus's ministry at beginning and end with parallel scenes of meaning events. Luke returns to this theme in the last scenes of his gospel, the post resurrection appearances narrated in chapter 24. In fact, he does it twice. You remember the stories. Two disciples walking the road to Emmaus converse unknowingly with the resurrected Savior, who, quote, expounded unto them in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself. Only after sharing a sacramental evening meal, however, do they recognize Christ in person. Later, the Savior appears in the midst of the disciples and shows them his hands and feet and eats with them, reminding them, as he does so, “that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the Law of Moses and in the prophets and in the psalms, concerning me.” (Luke 24:44) The point of both interactions is not just to demonstrate the physical reality of His resurrected body. It's to cause a meaning event, the fulfillment of Old Testament scripture, just as in Nazareth, the meaning that emerges is that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah of the prophets. And just as in Nazareth, Luke uses the word “open” to describe these meaning events. “Did not our heart burn within us?” the two disciples asked one another that evening in Emmaus, “while he opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32)

Later, when Christ is among all the disciples, Luke tells us that he, “opened their understanding that they might understand the scriptures.” (Luke 24:45) These are the second and third openings I described above. In these scenes, Christ doesn't seem to read from physical scriptures, but Luke draws on the metaphor of an open book or open scroll to show how Jesus opens the text of Scripture and invites meaning into the world, and then how he turns to his community and opens the understanding of his friends.

Just a quick note here on books versus scrolls. Of course, the Codex form, the book form that we're familiar with, isn't historical to the time of Christ or the Book of Mormon that I'll talk about later, but the Book of Mormon, following the King James Version, does use the word book in those cases, so I'll use book and scroll interchangeably. Luckily, for my argument, a book and a scroll are quite similar as technologies, and they both exhibit the feature of being able to open and close. So it's all good, book versus scroll. No worries.

It's hard to imagine any scenario than the one that I just described from Luke that better illustrates Poulet’s description of the relationship between book and reader. When Christ interprets Isaiah as poem as a prophecy of his own messianic mission, he is the paradigmatic reader of Scripture. Here, Christ with the scroll of Isaiah in his hands fully embodies Poulet’s idea. The book of Scripture asks nothing better than to exist outside itself or to let Christ exist in it. In short, the extraordinary fact in the case of Scripture is the falling away of the barriers between Christ and it. Christ is inside it. It is inside him. There is no longer either outside or inside. Christ more fully than any other reader who has ever lived enters into or lives into scripture, as Jared and Christian exhorted us to do.

If Christ is the ultimate reader of Scripture, we should follow him into the text. We should open and read as he reads. This is exactly what we see in this scene from The Book of Alma that bears a strong resemblance to Luke 4. In Alma chapter 21, the Nephite missionary Aaron travels to the Amalekite city of Jerusalem, where he "enters into one of their synagogues to preach unto the people.” When he learns that they reject the Messianic prophecies of Christ's coming, he “begins to open the Scriptures unto them concerning the coming of Christ.” Perhaps like Christ in the Nazareth synagogue, Aaron mounts the Beimma and opens the scriptures physically before he opens their messianic meaning. We don't know which passages he reads, but maybe like Abinadi, he reads from Isaiah 53. Or like Nephi, he reads from the Prophet Zenok. After opening first the book and then the text, Aaron attempts the third opening, the opening of the people's understanding. But like Christ in the Nazareth synagogue, his words are rejected and he is run out of town. Alas, even good reading does not guarantee good reception.

Let's take stock for a moment. I've been talking about the humble practice of reading scripture from a book. I've suggested that the structure of a physical book gives a sense of opening to the personal revelation that happens when we read scripture from a book. I've suggested, via Georges Poulet, that the opening of the book is a potent metaphor for reading itself. And I've submitted via Stanley Fish that the meaning we find in reading is more an event than an extraction. I've read passages from Luke and Alma to draw out a three stage process of scriptural interpretation. First I open the book, then I open the text by inviting forth its meaning, and then I turn to my friends and invite them into this newly opened understanding. Everybody with me so far? Yeah, okay, so with all that under our belts, I'll turn in just a minute to look at an archetypal scene of reading in the Book of Mormon. But first, let's take a break for some caveats. Like I said today I bring you a love letter, not a manifesto. I'm not arguing that reading scripture from a book is superior to other ways of taking in the Word of God. I'm not trying to persuade you to read scripture from physical books. In fact, let's take a moment to appreciate the many forms in which revelation can be given, received, and transmitted. We're all familiar with language based revelation heard in a divine voice or read from a brass ball or from glowing letters on a seer stone and then written down and transmitted via text. And we're familiar with dreams or visions like the apocalypses of John and Nephi, again, often written down and then transmitted textually. But what if the prophet instead transmitted the vision in a painting or in a video? Consider a revelation received as emotion, like a burning in the bosom. What if it were transmitted in music or in dance or a tactile revelation received in a sensation of touch, like the embrace of Christ. How could that revelation be preserved and transmitted? Could revelation be received in a smell or a taste, or most powerful of all, Revelation received directly in the presence of a divine being, what would be the best way to preserve and transmit the ultimate revelation of God?

My point is that language and text are just one of many possible forms of revelation. Each medium would have its own special affordances and powers, and would have to develop specialized skills to fully decode and appreciate its meaning. I'm no language supremacist. I'm not a text absolutist. I look forward to a millennium where our religion classes will be on dance criticism and oil painting. But it so happens that my favorite revelation, the one that has brought me closer to Christ than any other is transmitted in language and takes the form of a book. In fact, it has book in the title, The Book of Mormon, more than any other revelation, has taught me that regardless of our personal differences, Christ is willing and able to show himself to all of us, and that he'll use any available means to do so, dreams and visions, angels and prophets, famines and earthquakes, glowing stones and brass balls, holy records and the Holy Spirit. Still, that stream of light has come to me in the form of a book.

President Nelson once asked me a penetrating question, what would my life be like without the Book of Mormon? He actually asked all of you that exact same question too, in general conference in October 2017. I thought about that question a lot. Without the Book of Mormon, my life would lack one of its enduring sources of astonishment. Imagine a lantern stone in a Jaredite barge, but instead of generating light, it generates fascination and awe for the proposition that Jesus is the Christ. That's the Book of Mormon for me, and that's a rare thing in this lone and dreary world. From where I stand, the Book of Mormon eludes every attempt at unmasking or final accounting, but not because it's shy. On the contrary, it invites and then transcends ever closer inspection of its witness of Christ, and this inspection happens primarily, though maybe not exclusively, through reading. This suggests a follow up question to President Nelson's What would my life be like without reading the Book of Mormon? I've been lucky to spend years learning how to read from the best teachers and mentors, including many here at BYU, from my freshman general education instructors to my dissertation advisor, and indeed, from the greatest minds anywhere in the world, thanks to the magic of a library. One of the great gifts of my university education was, believe it or not, general education, where I first read the finest texts across many disciplines trained in the tools of active interpretive reading and practice moral reasoning, alongside those great minds I just mentioned. The gift of reading well has long been the promise and the premise of the liberal arts model of education. For Latter-day Saints, this gift is redoubled precisely these moral and intellectual faculties are what allow us to experience our Keystone revelation in its original form, and to experience and to fulfill the commandment to seek learning, even by study and also by faith. This must be at least partly why the Lord desires a university in Zion, together with temples and chapels, bishop storehouses and houses of hospitality.

But at this point, I think I have definitely strayed into manifesto territory. So let's get back to work on that love letter. I'd like to spend the remainder of my time with you looking at a scene in the Book of Mormon where we see somebody reading. We'll see if we can draw a few preliminary conclusions about how reading functions as a revelatory practice, focusing now mostly on the second opening I introduced above, the opening of meaning between reader and text. Here I'm going to pull out one of the interpretive tools I learned from those professors I was just talking about: close reading, which is a slow, attentive style of reading that looks at specific textual details to draw out patterns, differences and possibilities. It can be a little hard to follow in an oral format, like a lecture, but I'll try to be as clear as I can, and I'll try to make it worth your mental effort to follow along. So question for you, when is the first time that we see somebody reading in the Book of Mormon? Think you know?

Just eight verses into the first chapter of the first book, we're already into Lehi’s second vision. Lehi is initially visited by a pillar of fire that burns from a rock, and in this fire, he hears and sees something that causes him to quake and tremble exceedingly. Exhausted and overcome, he returns home and throws himself onto his bed. You may recall what comes next, and here I'll put it up on the on the scene we're going to read. It's kind of a long passage, but this is the text that we're working with, so we'll read it through together. “He saw the heavens open, and thought he saw God sitting upon his throne... He saw one descending out of the midst of heaven... [who] gave unto him a book and bade him that he should read. As he read, he was filled with the Spirit of the Lord. And he read saying: Wo, wo unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations! Yea and many things did my father read concerning Jerusalem–that it should be destroyed, and the inhabitants thereof; many should perish by the sword, and many should be carried away captive into Babylon. When my father had read and seen many great and marvelous things, he did exclaim many things unto the Lord; such as: great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God Almighty! ... And after this manner was the language of my father in the praising of his God; for His soul did rejoice, and his whole heart was filled, because of the things which he had seen, yea, which the Lord had shown unto Him.”

This vision, compelling as it is, raises more questions than it answers, in part, because it leaves out more than it includes. Lehi's first vision was raw, solitary and elemental, with a fire at its center. This one is complex, social and textual, with a book at its center. In both however, God is strangely reticent. Nephi reports no divine voice at all in the first vision and in the second, the divine figure who descends says only that Lehi must read the book. One of the strengths of writing, in comparison to speech, is how densely it compresses information. So despite the introversion of the book-bringer, Nephi reports that Lehi had read and seen many great and marvelous things, including the destruction of Jerusalem and Israel's exile in Babylon.

Nephi’s phrase, read and saw, or read and seen, catches my attention here, especially in contrast to the earlier vision in which Lehi reportedly saw and heard many things in the pillar of fire. Hearing and seeing make sense together as complementary modes of sensory perception in the first vision. But what is the link between reading and seeing in the second vision? Seeing is often a metaphor for understanding, of course, so maybe the phrase simply means that Lehi understood what he read. But there's a more interesting possibility, maybe we have here a clue to what the experience of reading is like for Lehi, maybe for him, reading produces a kind of seeing. I think this is the case for many, though not all, readers, when we read the symbols on the page generate visual, mental imagery, sometimes vivid, sometimes rudimentary, but present enough that reading becomes a kind of witnessing in the mind's eye. In this case, maybe seeing isn't just a metaphor for coming to understand a text through reading. Maybe it's a super close and precise description of that process. No doubt, individual experiences vary. My own mind doesn't typically produce super detailed pictures, but it does create an encompassing sense of space and spatial orientation, so that reading a passage feels a little bit like moving around a room. Nevertheless, Nephi pairing of reading with seeing can be read as a precise, granular insight into what I earlier called the second opening of the text, the arrival of meaning as an event. Here, that event seems to arrive as a kind of vision. When Lehi reads the heavenly book then, he experiences a vision within a vision. Lehi is a visionary man, at least partly because he is a reading man.

In its opening scene, then the Book of Mormon gives us the reader as visionary, not in any especially mystical way, but naturally emerging from the way our minds process written language. Lehi’s nested vision suggests that I need to revise the laundry list of revelatory experiences that I gave earlier, because it's now clear that divine communication doesn't stick to a single format, but can mix, overlap and hybridize. A multi modal revelation like the Liahona, for instance, might be an oracle that is an object and a text, remember, they're writing on it, and a vision all in one.

The heavenly book might be a text, a vision and a tactile revelation conveyed in the book's physical form, or an embodied revelation conveyed in Lehi’s act of reading aloud his own voice filling the silence of the book-bringer, it's interesting that despite its central role in this scene, we're not actually told what the book is. The identity of the book is one of the many pieces of information that Nephi omits or defers from his abridgement of the dream, along with the identity of the Divine Being who descends the fact of Lehi’s prophetic commission and the book's announcement of the redemption of the world, these are some pretty big deals, but Nephi chooses not to include them here. We do get some clues as to the identity of the book, though, at a minimum, it narrates the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, the subsequent captivity of Israel and Babylon and the eventual coming of the Messiah and the redemption of the world. One possibility is that the book is an expanded heavenly version of the book of Jeremiah. Lehi's contemporary who prophesied extensively about Jerusalem's destruction, captivity and eventual restoration. Jeremiah's Messianic prophecies of the righteous branch from David's line do seem to line up with the reported content of the vision book. But if the book is a divine elaboration of prophetic warnings already circulating in Jerusalem, then why does its content so astonish Lehi? The reported contents of the book, including the covenant history of Israel, the coming of the Messiah and the ultimate renewal of creation, seem to cover the full sweep of the Christian Bible, from the Old Testament covenant through the Gospels to John's revelation of the new heaven and new earth. So another possibility is that the book given to Lehi is a full and complete version of that Christian Bible, somehow both past and future, primordial and eschatological in relation to Lehi the Bible, or that Bible, is the very book that Nephi would envision, see, dismembered, distressed, and stripped of its plain and precious covenant truths. In fact, the great purpose of the record that Lehi and Nephi will inaugurate is precisely to heal and revitalize the Bible's wounded witness of Christ and covenant the heavenly book then may give Lehi his marching orders, as it were, it may show him the Messianic and covenant truths that will fall to his branch of Israel to steward and preserve and eventually rejoin with the biblical witness. Preeminent in this mission is the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the eternal God, manifesting Himself unto all nations.

Assuming that Christ is the Divine One who descends to offer Lehi this book, this scene can be read as another instance of multimodal revelation, the Bible is the textual revelation par excellence. But Jesus, Christ is a revelation in himself, and what he reveals is his father's divine character, His love, mercy, holiness, and truth. Jesus Christ is God's self disclosure. When he gives the book to Lehi, then, he reveals God twice, in both his presence and in the text. As in the Nazareth Synagogue of Luke four Christ, here is both the subject and the object of this revelation. But this time, instead of reading the text aloud himself, he hands the book to Lehi and bids him to read it aloud. This is a fascinating moment. If we strip away for a moment the heavenly setting and the divine beings, we see very simply the fundamental exchange between an author and a reader. The author gives the reader his written words and asks him to read them, simple enough, but to read the words of another person is, when you think about it, a very strange thing indeed. The thoughts of another person are now unfolding in my mind. It's as if two minds are nested within one another. Here's how our old friend Georges Poulet describes it, “reading [is] the act by which a thought managed to bestow itself within me with a subject not myself... I am on loan to another, and this other thinks, feels, suffers and acts within me... When I am absorbed in reading, a second self takes over, a self which thinks and feels for me... To understand a literary work, then, is to let the individual who wrote it reveal Himself to us in us.” (Poulet, Phenomenology of Reading, p. 56-58)

When Lehi reads, He reads in the voice of, from the subject position of the Messiah. “Wo, wo unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations.” the Messiah's compassion and distress unfold within Lehi. Lehi’s mind is on loan, as it were, to the mind of Christ. In fact, it's not just his mind. Reading aloud is a fully embodied activity involving eyes, hands, lungs, larynx and lips. By allowing Lehi to read the heavenly book, Christ reveals Himself, not just to Lehi, but in Lehi. The Savior is standing immediately in front of him, true, but to have the mind of Christ at work in him, the experience produced by reading is, if anything, an even more direct and immediate revelation, Lehi experiences what all scripture readers ultimately seek, not just knowledge about God, but communion with God. That communion is available to anyone who reads the words of Christ through the ordinary cognitive mechanics of reading. By small and simple things are great things brought to pass.

Let's sum up our tentative observations from this reading scene. We've noticed that revelation sometimes works in multiple modes at once, combining material, object, vision, text, and communion. We've seen how reading often unfolds as a vision, not metaphorically, but cognitively, through the mental imagery generated by textual engagement. And we've explored how reading produces a melding of the minds between writer and reader through the medium of the text. Still, I've so far skirted what I think is the central vision of the central question of the vision, which is why Christ chooses to communicate with Lehi through the mediation of a written text rather than speaking to him directly. It seems to me that, in contrast to a scene like Luke 4, the Book of Mormon emphatically affirms Stanley Fish's idea that the reader is crucial to the way a text produces meaning as an event. From its opening scenes, the book insists that any interpretive method take the reader as an actively mediating presence fully into account. We cannot bypass our responsibility to read, interpret and wrestle with the word of the Lord in order to gain access to his presence, even were he to be present in person. Reading scripture is not a passive reception of divine instruction, but an active participation in the ongoing work of Revelation.

Christ is the paradigmatic reader of Scripture. In Christ, all barriers between reader and writing fall away. He is inside it, and it is inside him. No other person will ever live into Scripture as fully as he does. Still, even human readers like Lehi and like you and me, have access to extraordinary spiritual experience through simple everyday practices like scripture, study, prayer and worship. My friend Adam spoke to us last week, suggests that Lehi receives his first vision, the pillar of fire on a rock as he offers sacrifice in the desert. In other words, the Divine Manifestation settles on the altar he himself, Lehi himself, has built and in the fire that he himself has set aflame as sacrifice. If Adam and I are both right, very unlikely as that may be, then the extraordinary manifestations in 1 Nephi 1, the miracles that kick off the marvelous work in a wonder, that is the Book of Mormon, come from simple practices of worship, study and prayer offered in sincerity and obedience. That, it seems to me, is ample reason to join in praise with Lehi, whose “soul did rejoice and his whole heart was filled because of the things which he had seen, yea which the Lord had shown unto him.” (1 Nephi 1:15) In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.