Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants

“A great and marvelous work is about to come forth unto the children of men . . . Behold, the field is white already to harvest; therefore, whoso desireth to reap, let him thrust in his sickle with his might, and reap while the day lasts, that he may treasure up for his soul everlasting salvation in the kingdom of God.” (Doctrine and Covenants 6:1, 3; 11:1, 3; 12:1, 3; 14:1, 3)

When modeling and teaching of the Sabbath, my goodly parents, Latter-day Saints from birth, were encouraging rather than heavy-handed. This was prudent, given their children’s temperaments. Despite wise and faithful parents, a vague reluctance sometimes came upon my young self when the declining Saturday afternoon sun made long shadows. Thoughts of the morrow–a more regulated day–encroached. Transposing my imagination from an antebellum Missouri village to the twentieth-century suburbs of Salt Lake City, I retained enough Tom Sawyer in my blood to find the prospect of preachings and formal Sunday attire to be constricting.

The Doctrine and Covenants makes the provocative wager that spiritual vision is a mode of seeing that lights up the whole body so that we feel, sense, and know not just through the eyes. This realization illuminates passages like those that promise readers if their eye is single to God’s glory, then their whole body will be filled with light.

The notion that divine inspiration informs the U.S. Constitution is a distinctive teaching of the restored Church and a striking declaration, thrice repeated, of the Doctrine and Covenants. The revelations declare that the Constitution incorporates a “principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges” that “belongs to all mankind, and is justifiable before” God (98:5); that God “suffered [it] to be established” and that it “should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles,”