Thoughts on the Novel Coronavirus, Ether 3, and the Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Manual

Thoughts on the Novel Coronavirus and Ether 3

As we now navigate what the head of the World Health Organization today calls the "uncharted territory" of the novel coronavirus--including what for many Latter-day Saints is already a limited access to public worship--it surely will be things "which [look] small unto the understanding of men" (and are sometimes even despised) that may fire souls with joy, encircle hearts with peace, sustain all in comfort. 

Consider the 2020 Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Manual, as prepared for both Sunday School and home study. There may be a few for whom such a vade mecum to unlocking the Holy Scriptures looks small indeed (and it is unusually sparse), utterly lacking in any and all learned profundity or sophistication. Yet if touched by the Lord with His finger, the verses of Ether, Helaman, Mosiah, and the associated questions and comments found in a simple manual, "shall shine forth" unto us as if an inexaustible fountain of light--shining stones--an everflowing source of bright joy. 

It is yet Bicentennial 2020, and we can still respond to the invitation of a living Prophet, President Russell M. Nelson, to celebrate, to immerse ourselves in the glorious light of the Restoration. By doing so, we yet observe the prophetic counsel of Elder Neal A. Maxwell about not mistaking instances of "local cloud cover," however glum today, for "general darkness" (from a talk given at BYU in 1999).

And let's remember one thing which we've probably considered only a curio of the past, a remainder of the premature apocalyptic worldview shared by our millennially minded ancestors, and that is: One cannot read the first volume of the History of the Church, without noting how the outpour of revelation after revelation runs alongside the contemporary outpour of a cholera pandemic of startling measure. The outbreaks, as recorded and tallied in the Prophet's History, hit with a fury beyond anything we can imagine today. 

We skip over those tales of the past. And what of the Saxton Letter? 4 January 1833: Does that ring any bells? Latter-day readers of the Prophet's earnest letter to editor Saxton find in the Prophet's poignant sentences about plague and pestilence simple, even simplistic, reflections of a millennial imminency that today's student, in fulsome 21st century sophistication, can scarcely tolerate. Even the helpful and thoroughgoing commentary in the Joseph Smith Papers Online pauses to nuance for the latter-day student how Joseph Smith "saw these events, on which Saxton had reported in several issues of his newspaper, through a millenarian lens." 

No, Brother Joseph, child of your times--mumbles the reader--you shot your bolt too soon. No. This alarm bell you sound concerns a typical 19th century pandemic, no Millennium in sight; wait a century or two--or even three or four. Maybe even wait until the end of the world. Yet on his second visit to the boy Prophet, Moroni "informed me" of the coming pestilences. It is Moroni's voice, a voice and mantle now assumed by his young Yankee apprentice, that we so urgently hear in the Saxton Letter.

There was nothing pertaining to the unfolding of the Kingdom for which the young Joseph Smith was not carefully prepared. And the same tutoring--daily study of the Book of Mormon--is available to each of us in all our varied circumstances, and throughout the prosperous years to come, the years of Gospel prosperity and continuing Gospel restoration. And some of those years will surely be joyfully spent, under Brother Joseph's continuing dispensational direction, in perfoming temple ordinances for those very souls who once perished of disease in the first decades of the 19th century.

The only "millenarian lens" through which Brother Joseph gazed, unlike every other man of his times, was the Urim and Thummim, the same that was given to the Brother of Jared on the Mount (see Doctrine and Covenants 17). And who knows but what our own personal Urim and Thummim might be the 2020 Come, Follow Me vade mecum? 

And now Ether, and the prayer of Jared's brother on Mount Shelem, a location most of us would place in eastern China:

 3:4 And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of man; therefore touch these stones [or verses], O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea.

5 Behold, O Lord, thou canst do this. We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks small unto the understanding of men.

The Book of Mormon and the 2020 study manuals, however small these may look unto the understanding of men--and I'm afraid that they often are made out to look very small indeed--can be touched by the Lord with an ever brighter, and forever inexaustible, light, a light which is the preparation of the Gospel of Peace.