I want to see truth in all its bearings and hug it to my bosom. I believe all that God ever revealed, and I never hear of a man being damned for believing too much; but they are damned for unbelief.
---Joseph Smith, History of the Church 6:477; also Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith (2007), 265.
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Pondering this thought earlier today, I discovered my deepest fear: that the post-mortal life will be so completely different than life on Earth, that the things from which I derive my deepest satisfaction---especially mastering new truths---will dissolve in the transition. And then I remembered this, from Brigham Young, and took some comfort: "[W]hen we have lived millions of years in the presence of God and angels [...] shall we then cease learning? No, or eternity ceases" (Journal of Discourses 6:344).
Eternal progression, then, signifies, in Eugene England's words (from "Perfection and Progression: Two Ways to Talk About God" [in Making Peace: Personal Essays]), an "expansive vision of continued, unlimited learning and experience" (48)---an eternal engagement with and the eternal expansion of truth. This was, England concludes, for Brigham Young---and for me, as I grow older and realize how little I really know---"both the reason for and the means of continued existence, of eternal life" or life as God lives it (48).
And so, I've begun to exercise greater faith that my deep enjoyment of learning won't stop once I become a God (yes, I'm optimistic about that---have to be). Rather---and sue me for perhaps believing too much---it will continue and deepen for as long as I exist.
And that just excites me all the more.
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ReplyDeleteMe too. I don't like it when people try to chip this idea off the Block of Mormonism, because it's a big part of what makes it work.
Due to a series of events I call childhood in a very conventional LDS home, I used to be one of the people who believes that God progresses, not in terms of learning, but simply in terms of dominion and posterity, gaining glory and exaltation as His children progress. Yet, as I've grown spiritually and intellectually and taken greater delight in the act of learning itself, the idea of a universe limited like this---in terms of knowledge---scares me more than the opposite: a universe of unlimited truth (which, as you know, is simply knowledge of things as they are, were, and are to be---our understanding of it is thus dependent on our position) or rather, in terms of my parenthetical, a universe with infinite variations on the same set of truths, things we see differently based on our personal state of progression.
ReplyDeleteBecause our lives as mortals is so dependent on language (as we presently understand [or fail to understand] it, that is), our understanding of truth is tainted by our words. What we have here, then, is just an approximation of things as they really are in God's mind. But when we leave these mortal limitations behind, what will our perception of the truth be and how will it change as we continue to progress?
(Excuse the long-windedness: I had some epiphanies as I was writing and couldn't stop myself from pushing through them...)