Mason Kamana Allred Wonder of Scripture Lecture (February 28, 2025)

Transcript

Thank you so much. Thank you, Roslyn. I appreciate that introduction. Thank you, JB Hawes to the Maxwell Institute, all those dinosaurs that put it together. Really grateful to be here with you today, and let's see if it still works here like it does on Oahu. Brothers and sisters, aloha, I bring you that love Aloha from Laie, and super happy to be here and to share part of this work that I was able to do through the Maxwell Institute in thinking about ways of seeing, habits of seeing, the practice of spiritual vision. That was the kind of way I chose to reread the Doctrine and Covenants as part of their series. I should probably mention that when I was first invited to be a part of this, I was very honored. It was like March of 2021, so we're just barely starting to come out of the pandemic lockdown. My son and I were all kinds of locked down in Oahu, so my approach to reading the Doctrine and Covenants was kind of different. It just sort of hit differently after that experience. I have to admit, a lot of what I'll share today it comes out of that context, and to also be quite clear, it comes out of my love-hate relationship with these, that you may also have. I do media studies, and you know, we have a lot of great research on this, and these are fascinating devices. I want to share with you ways of being intentional, thinking about, like, sort of, how to, how does spiritual vision in the age of digital devices will be, sort of, the background of what I'm talking about today. In fact, I'd like to invite you with me for the next little while to, sort of, I'm going to talk behind the backs of our phones for a little bit, so if you would just hide that for a second, if we can kind of get that out of the way to not distract us for a moment. Ideally, it wouldn't even vibrate on your leg, but just see what you can do.

For the next little bit, I'd like to take our attention span at hand and our vision at hand and bring those together as we think together and try to fill something together as I work through a little bit of a section from this book. Can I start, though, as if it were like the opening to a movie, like a montage sequence, I'm going to cut through a few scenes of my life before I jump into a more formal presentation?

So, cut to the first thing, I'm in Berlin, it's nighttime, and I'm going to pick up my daughter, my oldest daughter, who was just helping out at a fashion show for someone in the ward, she's like, in third grade. I go to pick her up, and I'm trying to hurry, because I'm looking at my phone and it's time to catch the next train, and I don't want to miss that Subway. So, I'm trying to pull her along, and she stops, and she starts catching these snowflakes on her tongue, and just kind of plays with them. She lets my hand go, and she's like, “Dad, look,” and I stop, and I look, and I didn't really grow up here, where there's snow. These snowflakes were like, huge, I don't think I've ever seen snow like that, and we just stopped and we played at muse. I remember, after a minute, I actually took her by the face and said, “Mia, don't ever forget this moment,” and it's still like a really cherished moment for me and her. That moment we had in Berlin, that moment of just kind of reveling in these snowflakes for a second.

Cut to my next daughter, we're out surfing on the North Shore, and it's like a right, so you're facing the wave, and we're looking, we're always trying to look for the best wave coming through, you want good wave selection, having a great time, I love this daughter as well. We then turn around and we notice behind us is just the huge both beautiful, like crisp rainbow, but like the kind we can see, like end to end, all the way. It seemed like if I paddled a little further, I could be in the rain where there might be a pot of gold in the ocean. It was beautiful. But I was just overcome with the kind of feelings that are really, really hard for me to articulate. I was overcome with the sense that like, not only was I connected to my daughter, to the ocean, to the rainbow, I just felt like everything is going to be all right, and everything is accounted for, and there is a Creator who loves us that made these things and knows what's going on, and you don't need to worry about anything. I love those moments, and I'm always trying to live my life up to those moments and try to have faith after they're gone. I think a lot of the reason why I'm religious is because of those moments I've had.

But cut to, my son comes in after basketball practice, and he's trying to tell me how something happened during practice, and I'm trying to do my calling, which today means a lot of texting. I'm trying to finish this text because I'm trying to magnify my calling, and he's trying to tell me about this thing, and I'm like, “I should never finish this, so forget the thought, so I'm ignoring you” and then by the time I finish, he's like, “never mind.” He walks up and goes upstairs and jumps in the shower, you know, and I can pick up the conversation later, but I hate that moment, I really hate that moment. I don't like having those, and it was tough, there was a tension, right about what's good, better, best, that moment, but I don't like this.

Cut to this week, getting ready to come here, I go to my office in BYU Hawaii, I'm walking down the hallway, and it is during class times, so there was only, like a handful of students walking down the hallway, but literally, every single one of them was staring at their phone as they walked down the hallway. This is an open hallway to a beautiful courtyard with beautiful landscaping, flowers, and trees, and I was trying not to judge them. I just felt like, ‘what a missed opportunity, anything could happen right now, between you and what's around you, between the person behind you,’ whatever it just I felt like it was a missed opportunity distraction. I know I do it too.

So, I just realized, looking at the Doctrine and Covenants, for me, and thinking about how the Doctrine and Covenants talks about how conceptualized this vision for and stuff is maybe different, but just as profound for us today in the ways that we live. If you're like me, I want more snowflakes and rainbows. I want fewer never-minds and fewer distracted minds. I want to see the Lord, and I want to live my life to the fullest as much as I can. So, I'm not just going to hate on those phones, but let's talk behind their back for just a little bit. As more of this world is made visible to us through the global spread of technology, we swim in a sea of other people's sight. Through our screens we vicariously live in their visions. On the one hand, this visual superabundance is exciting. We have never had so many representations of the world and of others, or even of different perspectives, as we do now. But it also carries the risk of passive vision, full of distraction, distortion, and deception. In light of our current media circumstances, I want to read the Doctrine and Covenants, especially its promise of heavenly visions, as well as its anxiety around deception for our day. I'm interested in how training our eyes might help us see heaven now, in our current earthly circumstances, to find joy in seeing things as they really are. It's part of the reason why I don't have a PowerPoint today, I didn't want to actually put slides or photographs or images. I'm going to invite you to think in your own mind and see where your inner vision takes you.

We might not articulate it always, but I think that we feel the net effect of seeing so much but discerning so little. In fact, I echo the insightful concern of a German cultural critic named Siegfried Kracauer, who voiced this like 100 years ago in the 1920s, about the way that illustrated magazines were slowly turning the whole world into aesthetic snapshots, like that was his concern, just those old magazines. For him, they seemed to make reality into a product to be consumed but not fully experienced. He said, quote, “never before has a period known so little about itself,” end quote. That was his lament. With magazines, then our social media today, we see pictures of the very world that these media might prevent us from actually perceiving. The way we're conditioned to view emanates from a trend toward consuming, desiring, purchasing, and also that of curating an image of ourselves for others to compare themselves to you. This is not new to you. Besides that, we spend a lot of time looking at manicured images of reality that might prevent true perception. Think about that for a second. Our screens might show us everything, but simultaneously screen out individual experience and raw reality. We are all too often looking without actually seeing, and if you've ever seen studies on this, even like on cognitive offloading, they call it when you try to externalize your memory, if you take groups and you have them say, go to like they do often with like, I say monument or landmark, you have the group that use their phones and takes pictures, and you have a group that not allowed using technology. If you quiz them after, you can guess, those who didn't use their phone to take pictures know the thing better. They actually remember it better, like details of it, if you took pictures of it, you just subconsciously realize, like, I've got the picture, I don't need to remember it, so you don't, it's not written on your body in the same way, think about that the next concert you go to.

Although they have exponentially grown, our optical issues are not new. Throughout the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord was teaching his followers how to see with new eyes during the same historical period when optical science, the study of light and the study of the human eye, enjoyed unprecedented breakthroughs. The first ophthalmology courses and clinics began right when Joseph Smith was born, and they multiplied during his lifetime. Experiments and inventions around optics and lenses were booming. In fact, the mid-19th century is considered the golden age of studying eyes and sight. A really important shift took place at that time period in the way that eyes were understood, especially during the 1830s and the 40s, that I think might have significance for our reading of the Doctrine and Covenants. Instead of basing their understanding on a disembodied conception of the eye, where you would consider it to just be sort of a retinal system within itself that views things, scientists began explaining the eye as inseparable from the physiological functions of the body. The way that humans see couldn't be fully explained if you divorced it from the rest of the body. Indeed, as we learned in First Corinthians, “the eye cannot say it unto the hand, I have no need of thee.” It just so happens that during this period for the flourishing of the study site, the early church revelations were promising extraordinary visions, even while they were equally anxious about visual deception. The Lord was opening the eyes of the saints’ understanding, but often he did so through words of instruction that I think resonated for our day in new ways. So, considering this context as a sort of precursor to our own. The Doctrine and Covenants suggests that instead of always needing new technological visions, we might do well to learn to see our world now, we just might find Christ and heaven here. Instead of taking us away from our world to find the divine some distance off in space, Section 59, for instance, the Doctrine and Covenants reveals some powerful insights into the way we look at our own Earth to find God. The way this section talks about vision is especially resonant for our digital age, when eyes are particularly prone to deception and constant distraction. In fact, the section begins with this recurring challenge put to the reader, to have their eye single to the glory of God and to find joy, even pleasure, in the way they see. So today, I'd like to deliberately move from a reading of Section 76 with its heavenly vision to Section 59 with its earthly vision. I want to do this to suggest how we can be grounded in the terrestrial, to help us as we learn to think celestial. By connecting the earthly with the heavenly and recognizing the pleasure of looking this section will provide a major puzzle, or piece to the puzzle of just how we are to calibrate our vision while on earth, toward an alignment with how God sees. So, let's first consider the prospect of glimpsing heaven and how visions of heaven and glory might then turns to glorifying visions of earth.

On February 16, 1832, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon saw heaven. In fact, they saw separate degrees of glory as unique realms within heaven, and what they saw came to be known simply as ‘The Vision.’ This was the first groundbreaking vision received by the modern-day Prophet and circulated widely among the saints since the founding of the church, and for many, it completely reshaped their understanding of heaven, and of course, challenged some. The revelation confirmed Joseph's prophetic ability while showcasing the fantastic possibilities of reading scripture with faith and an open mind, the resulting write up of experience was itself a revelation. After the section's introduction that commands the heaven to hear and the earth to give ear, the Lord takes over the narration, along with Joseph and Sidney, the reader is now invited to tune their senses to recognize the Lord and see beyond their current visible surroundings. In this sense, scripture here becomes a portal to another world, both for Joseph and Sidney, but also potentially for us. As the Lord promises in verse 10 of Section 76 “By my Spirit, will I enlighten them, and by my power, will I make known unto them secrets of my will,” and these secrets are so magnificent they include quote, “even those things which I have not seen, nor do you have heard, nor yet entered into the heart of man” end quote. This is then a revelatory pattern written a sequence that's revealed throughout the Doctrine and Covenants, often, though in reverse order, often an idea or desire will be coupled with faith that enters the heart, and then we'll hear the Word of God, at which point you might see him. We'll come back to turning these senses in a minute. But we all benefit from modern-day prophets having these kinds of veins, even as it is committed to text and read by us, this section's visionary vitality persists. But I also think we might be reading it incorrectly if you take it as the final word on the subject. In other words, it might be tempting to understand the section as having received the heavenly vision for us by thinking that we don't need to see the heavens, because Joseph already did, and we have a record of this vision that's certainly true to an extent, and it should evoke deep gratitude. This section is amazing. We should be grateful for Joseph and Sidney's faith, for their preparation to receive such a sight. We should be grateful for the technology of paper and pen that captured the event and made it visible to us. We should also be grateful for print that stored it and spread it across time and space in a standardized way. But at the same time, if we base our knowledge of heaven on one singular event, we would rob the Lord and ourselves of personal and personalized experiences to potentially see heaven. Subsequent scholars, or excuse me, subsequent sections of the Doctrine and Covenants prepare us to, like Joseph and Sidney, have our eyes opened and our understandings enlightened so as to see and understand the things of God. How are we to emulate this experience, then? How are we to see in ways that we invite more light into our eyes, our bodies and our minds? One clue to our answer comes in recognizing Joseph and Sidney's preparation for this visionary event, because it was after reading and translating scripture and meditating on that process that then quote, “The Lord touched the eyes of their understanding, and they were opened and the glory of the Lord shown round about them,” and that's Section 76 verse 18. The Lord expanded their vision by touching their eyes, much as he had done with spittle and clay to make a blind man see in the New Testament, or with Enoch in the book of Moses, Joseph and Sidney emphasized the sensory experience in their account. It wasn't just an intellectual exercise, they beheld, they saw, they heard, they were even commanded to write the vision the Lord had shown them. They were commanded to write that vision was shown to them before it was then promptly shut up. Their revelation was embodied, that we are rooted in sensory perception and also action. So, the vision of Section 76 came to Joseph and Sidney because they were first diligently fulfilling the work which the Lord had appointed to them, specifically in reading, pondering, and reworking scripture. And then, while engaged in this work, they marveled. For a lecture series on the Wonders of Scripture, this is a fantastic word for us today, to marvel at the scriptures and the work of the Lord, to get into this mindset. They were present and mindful enough to recognize and appreciate just how amazing it was to be about the Lord's work. No matter how mundane, difficult, or long the work might be, even trying to send a text when your son's trying to talk to you, a proper attitude would shape what we see and how we understand what we see.

Lastly, they meditated on the details of their efforts. One way, as Bruce R. McConkie suggested, is to get our spiritual antenna correctly calibrated, as he said 1971, quote, “Revelations and visions of eternity are always around us, and that the visions of the degrees and glory is being broadcast before us, but we do not hear or see or experience because we've not tuned our souls to the wave band on which the Holy Ghost is broadcasting,” end quote. So, one key is certainly then trying to tune our senses, our whole body, so they can become full of light, as the way the Doctrine and Covenants splits it. The next is to learn to see the Earth and others more clearly, after all, the Earth is a celestial body in the making. As Joseph Smith taught, I remarked to my family and friends present that when the earth was sanctified and became like a sea of glass, it would be one great Urim and Thummim, and the saints could look at it and see as they are seen. Someday it will become a full revelatory medium, but it can already function at one to see heaven; we must learn to properly see this earth.

Seeing on Earth is essential. In the beginning, the earth itself was actually seen into existence, of course, in the Genesis account, God spoke creation into being. God said, Let there be light, and there was light before. Then He saw the light, and the light was good. But in the Book of Abraham, it seems that vision was integral to the birth of our Earth. Its creation came about as the gods watched the elements they had ordered into becoming our planet. They looked at the organized matter until it obeyed, it says, and the result was a stable, beautiful, and singular world. What we look at and how we look at things helps bring them into being. By focusing on them I'm not saying that we create the whole self, like God, deter the planet or even have existing materials, but how we understand them, how we react to them, contributes to their mean and it shapes us in the process, that's integral to being a disciple of Christ. Now that we inhabit this world with all its diverse sites, our vision must be trained in specific ways. We find ourselves surrounded by all sorts of natural things to look at, from mountains to trees to waves to clouds, but we are also increasingly surrounded by human-made things that divide our attention, from clothes to buildings to photographs. Because what we look at and how we look at it has a productive element to it, choosing where to direct our attention and how to understand what we're viewing will always be a fundamental aspect of our efforts in getting our eyes single to the glory of God. Seeing things can evoke powerful responses in us. Looking at images on a screen can excite us, but nature and the creations of the earth can do it too. Section 59 offers, then, a revelatory description of joy in seeing that, I think, can resonate with our current understanding of just how pleasure chemicals in the brain, like dopamine, can be connected to our vision. We might look at something that entices our eyes, and our brains release dopamine as a reward. In Section 59’s instance, it can happen by looking at the natural world, though. Verse 18 declares, “All things which cometh the earth and the season thereof are made for the benefit and use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart.” But remember, the restoration of the church and the invention of photography both occurred in the same decade, and ever since, our eyes have been simultaneously opened, challenged, distracted, enlightened, and targeted for deception. Just three months before the instruction on earthly looking in this Section 59 that I'll keep recurring or keep turning back to today. Joseph Smith also dictated a revelation, stating that spirits were going forth in the earth to deceive. Now we have ghosts and machines and more chances for visual deception, including AI, deep fakes, misinformation, and enticing images of hollow lifestyles. I think I'm old enough I get to talk like that now. These are obvious and intended distortions, but I also just mean the general style of looking conditioned by these platforms and devices, against not just the content of them, but the actual habitual form, the ways of seeing.

In a world saturated, in a world saturated with digital images, our ways of seeing have expanded, but so have the challenges to spiritual vision. The Doctrine and Covenants emphasize the importance of looking at the world with divine purpose. So, in an era of visual overload, how do we ensure our seeing leads to the Lord, rather than away from him? Because let's face it, today, we are overwhelmed with visual stimuli designed to hijack our brains’ natural reward system. Have you felt like going on your phone yet? Are you on your phone right now? This is what I'm talking about. It's the elephant in the room that you always have to think of, if you're a disciple of Christ in 2025, they're not all bad, but it's constantly there, and I think it needs to be more explicit in the way that we think, the way that we act, the way we feel. Especially online, our eyes are flooded with carefully crafted visions that are meant to trigger dopamine release, often in ways that are more addictive and deflating than uplifting. This too often means that we're making chemical connections with concepts and attitudes that link pleasure with surface appearances in misleading and even harmful ways. Hopefully, no one even ordered something just barely on Amazon; that would be an ultimate illustration. We've normalized the act of habitually leading this world to enter a virtual one of constant manufactured simulation. That's the only reason why I sound so judgmental about my students walking by, because they chose to leave our shared space to enter more exciting ones. It's maybe not that big of a deal to you, but I think it says something about how much we're in the moment. Like addicts, we then need ever more intensive engagement with the digital world, images and interactions just to get that hit our brains looking for and research shows that our other real-world interactions, in comparison, can begin to feel less rewarding the pleasure we might normally feel looking intently at a sunset, for example, becomes dampened. Such things can no longer chemically compete with the exact with excessive effects of social media. This downward spiral of dopamine from ways of seeing is rooted in a focus on gratification and objectification that often leads to feelings of numbness and can lead to feelings of depression. It's an imbalance in rewards and pain, or pleasure in work. That's the way that an analytic at Stanford would call it, we end up wanting more than liking and failing to enjoy the process and the actual work of this life we lose that focus on the doing and the actual work of life which brings joy. If we aren't careful, deliberate and selective in our visual consumption, the most quickly rewarding, viral and accessible examples will often link our seeing with our feeling and our thinking in what can be dangerous ways. If modern media has exacerbated this effect and turned our world into a spectacle to be consumed rather than perceived, well, then what might modern revelation offer as an antidote? Section 59 teaches of the earth and everything that comes of it. Remember, we too are from Adam, so we're made of the Earth as well. It is made for the fulfillment of the plan of salvation, but also to please the eye and gladden the heart. What a perceptive way, I think, to capture this connection between seeing and pleasure, we must remember that what we look at, and even more especially, how we look at things. How we understand them, and how we conceptualize them is sparked by, and or followed by, dopamine release in the brain. So seeing is indeed wonderfully and sometimes tragically connected to pleasure. Learning to see the earth and everything that comes of it in the best ways is our training now to get this figured out, to develop spiritual vision in an earthly state, we can't focus on surface appearances, to objectify, to judge or to marginalize others. The Lord's clear in Section 42 and section 63 that, as he says, anyone who looks upon another, clearly in lust for instance, will deny the faith; any of those intentions would deny that faith. Faith, righteous intentions, and vision link with actions is precisely what he would be foreclosing, denying. We can't serve God and mammon in the way we see true spiritual vision requires us to look at others and the world with reverence, not as objects of consumption or exploitation. Human souls can't be looked at as sexual as bodies or transactional connections for personal gain, and earthly creations can't be looked at as mere profitable resources or disposable objects. Trees live and fill the measure of their creations without becoming timber/kindling, water, too flows, drops, and rushes, even before it's seen as a commodity or a public utility. Every bug, plant, cloud, a speck of dust, could also be seen as a beautiful, even miraculous creation that points back to God. In fact, it's in this very context, in Section 59, that we're told that the Lord is most upset when we don't recognize his hand in all things, His hand in all these things. Realizing and remembering that each thing in our visual field is a creation that points back to the Lord. It should motivate us to keep his commandments and to love the world around us, to then interact with it differently. That's a powerful way to visually take in our environment at the same time spiritually extend ourselves out into it. The Earth is our orientation and our divinely appointed training ground. It's a source of strength, beauty, and it's a model, I think it's a model for our fulfilling of our purpose here, because it lives up to its potential. By abiding quote “the law of a celestial kingdom and filling the measure of its creation.” So, we need to see the Earth as a body on its path to celestial glory. We must see it as it will be, envision its full potential in order to find the sacred and the heavenly in the terrestrial; we might expand the ways that things of the earth are given to strengthen the body, it says. Certainly, this means herbs, plants, and nutrients of the Earth as they are digested into energy with our bodies, and they sustain the chemical processes of our physiology. But I think it also means the earthly creations we seek to see with our whole bodies. These sites might then invigorate and strengthen our spiritual Earth's bodies. This would be feasting on the beauty of God's creations to find him and heaven.

Section 59 presents a vision of seeing the Lord in the earth itself, rooting our feet in the physical world while lifting our heads towards celestial chord pain. As the text reads, “Blessed are they whose feet stand upon the Land of Zion, who have obeyed my gospel. For they shall receive for their reward the good things of the earth, for shall bring forth in its strength.” Our actions interact with the earth, and what it does. The very next verse continues that these same individuals will also be crowned with blessings from above. So, linking our earthly vision and actions with, say, our feet, with celestial understanding of our heads, helps us then fulfill the way that Brigham Young described Joseph's work to make heaven and earth shake hands. Brigham Young praised how Joseph, would quote, “took heaven, figuratively speaking, and brought it down to earth, and He took the earth and he brought it up and opened up in plainness and simplicity the things of God. That was the beauty of his mission.”

So, we are to be firmly planted in the world we live in. Of course, that phrase, not of the world, is familiar, and it's a valuable teaching. Yet what I'm saying is that we are quite literally of the Earth as Adam and Eve were. So, while the world is often equated with Babylon and human fallibility, the earth itself remains our divinely appointed home. It's a place not to be vilified, but to be sanctified. It's where we learn to become gods, and it's what will become purified like us, to become Heaven. The Doctrine and Covenants teaches how to see the spiritual and eternal potential, even the destiny of this very world, how it will become sanctified and receive celestial glory. As the biblical scholar NT Wright observes, the final scenes of the Bible are not about saving souls going up to heaven. No, it's of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth. This earth will become a new earth, as we are in and of it with pure intent. Leaving the world of sin to care for and be at one with the Earth is part of the restoration of all things, and it's the divine end goal of both of our creations. We help each other along the path towards the celestial glory.

Seeing Earth, really seeing Earth with proper vision, means rooting ourselves in stewardship and care of the environment, plants, animals, and eating creeping things. Doctrine and Covenants, Section 59 says, if we come up to the Land of Zion, eye single to His glory, we shall inherit the earth. He goes on to highlight the beauty and creations of the earth that can enlighten our souls. This is significant because, as verses 45 and 47 in Section 88 teach us, even in the least of these kingdoms created by God, we can discern His glory. So, all these creations I've been talking about typify and witness to him, if they're seen correctly, if we learn to do this well, then one day, once we actually see the literal figure of God, we will know that we've already seen him. For anyone who has seen the Earth, this is what it says: anyone who has seen the Earth rolling upon its wings, or the sun giving light, or any of the least of these things pertaining to the plan of salvation, hath seen God moving in his majesty of power. We can already see God now by seeing bits of his plan. As the next verse in Section 88 puts it, we can see God now because he has already come among us in the least of his creations around us. Even though most of us don't realize it, we don't look up and take account of it. We don't see it, and we often fail to recognize him in others. We fail to recognize him in daughters and snowflakes and spouses and waves and rainbows. But we can begin to glimpse his countenance in these daily miracles. And if we can scrape together, collect, and cherish enough of these, then, once we do finally stand before God, we will know that we have already seen Him. It will be confirmed that it was in actuality, he whom we felt. It was he that we glanced at and him that we drew close to. As the Lord promises, then shall ye know that “ye have seen me.” Now future moment of direct seeing will confirm and corroborate all the past experiences of seeing when, in this more diffused sense, by seeing his creations as then daily art.

So, the Earth itself has a unique visionary power that I think we can learn from. It's a model. It's a reminder for us to gain spiritual vision, and it will become the ultimate visionary medium when it's a Urim and Thummim, or a seer stone. At that future time, literally looking into the glass ball version of the Earth will reveal the visions and truth we desire. Instead of passively staring into glass screens, we'll actively see into a glass ball of truth. But even now, we can learn to look through the earth as a lens toward heaven with proper understanding and openness, we actually see what is really around us. It's no wonder that even the boy Joseph Smith literally found Heavenly Father and the Lord after going into the forest. Our visions of our surroundings can be delightful. They can be enlightening. Yet too often, we are conditioned to look away from Mother Earth and gaze at screens, replacing lived experience with curated, commodified imagery. The Doctrine and Covenants calls us to reclaim our vision, to see with fresh eyes, and to reject the distortions that might dull our spiritual vision. The Doctrine and Covenants is then visionary, not just because it contains heavenly visions, but more especially, because it teaches us to see the spiritual in the temple, to see it now. Truly seeing this world means finding heaven now through our earthly circumstances, not despite them. Calling and training our bodies to notice and appreciate more of the natural world can help bring our voracious eyes into alignment with God's will. As we get our eyes single to His glory, we will glimpse the heavens and find the divine all around us. Let us that as section 59 urges be planted deeply rooted in the Earth's beauty while reaching towards celestial heights. We will then see others with love and reverence. We'll see the Earth with stewardship and awe, with wonder, and we'll see our surroundings with an awareness that we are in a sense and through our senses, already seeing him. Thank you.