"Auguries of Innocence:" My Story

TO see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Auguries of Innocence
William Blake (1757–1827)

As I grew into the Church as a re-convert, it happened because I came to know truth. As I finished my formal university studies, my education actually was just beginning. I was only then to realize the importance of the spiritual, if only indirectly. I had been raised in a solid LDS family with a heritage that is traced through the pioneer trek and back to the Mayflower group when William Clark traversed the Atlantic in search for religious freedom. Because of him and because of the freedom offered in this choice land and because of the gospel of Jesus Christ brought back in its authentic form by Joseph Smith Jr., I have the choice to accept it once again in my life.

I left the Church when I was 19, I was in no way, shape or form ready to face any bishop about a missionary interview, even though I knew it to be the right thing. What I imagined would be a bishop in a state of shock. Of course this is untrue and any good bishop would have taken whatever time necessary, but my mental state was such that I could not believe this, that I could not be worth that, that there was no hope for me in the Church, and instead of getting myself spiritually aligned to serve a mission, I unofficially stopped going to Church and officially left for Europe on my own "mission.” 

The next twenty years, roughly spanning 1992 to the commencement of 2012, was a journey in deciding what my spiritual fate would be and using my agency to make my choice. Being a Mormon is very strong in me. I am many in a line of generations of eldest sons of eldest sons and the fourth generation with initials EEC directly going back to William who was my early spiritual forefather. I was destined to find truth once more. During this 20 year trial period, I never gave up on the Church, how ever much the counter worldly adversity weighed against it, as appealing and as "real" as it might look, how absolute and unavoidable it might seem, the scales were never absent of my devotion, that runs thickly in my veins, to the Church.

What happened when I left university, came home and then left home in 2005 to live on my own, was a burning in my heart, a yearning, and a renewed love and a realization of and for my family. The purpose of my having survived my trials was due to them and this was made very acute when, still in a time of acute danger, I tried twice to commit suicide very late at night, and both times, near death and once with my heart stopped I was saved miraculously by my father. Yet my mother's supportive role in my life had been just as real for my survival since my diagnosis, just as real as are all of my family who are my prime happiness in existence, and at this time of trial and change I embraced a joy in the being of my nieces and nephews who became more precious than life itself and who now make existence one of wonder and pleasure.

During this time of trial I, because it felt right, in 2007, started to attend Church again on a regular basis. At this point my spiritual journey was realized for I found truth in God. I had long since recognized and acknowledged His guiding hand in all aspects of my life... through the dark and desolate pathways of schizo-affective disorder, a God whom essentially, more over absolutely, carried me through a darkness of a low viscosity, who made bearable what would have been otherwise unbearable on my own, and had made my life, tailored to necessity by the symptoms of my affect, livable, even delightful and a unique entity that I am forever grateful for in its sublime simplicity and humility. These realizations, of the worth of family and the truth of God, specifically Jesus Christ and the role He has played in my life and how He leads me, guides me, and walks beside me moment to moment through still turbulent waters, were very real and true at the time and still are very real and true. Everything of this world suddenly seemed inconsequential, and that which had caused the most confusion and had been the source of unmeasurable personal and spiritual pain and a real hazard to my life and my value system suddenly and simply became insignificant and irritating... something that angered me.

It was something I now had the power to control as I was able to choose was right and true for me. As is the nature of truth, for those who are themselves true, they will know truth as distinguishable from illusion, I recognized clearly happiness from a life of pain caused by my inauthenticity to myself. As I had adhered to every decision made during the years of illness and blackness guided by God and choosing as if groping in the dark and going only by a feeling of right to flee from fear, so I knew this truth and the value of it being overcome in my life. As I who have been granted grace to live life by truth, I adhered to this truth as I adhere to all truth and do not go back on it. Of this I am certain.

I had other factors in my life that needed dealing with... to the world, cumulatively, these might seem like many and insurmountable... to me these were simply temporary temporal conditions of temporality and I met each one by one, head on, until I received my Melchizedek Priesthood honorably on August 24th of 2011 and in December 27 of 2011, I finally accomplished my "mission" as directed when I was 19, set off on a different course but a course set to find its way back to truth by God, I found Eternity with all of my brothers and sisters and my Mother and Father in the Temple.

What made this experience real and profound for me, what made these obstacles that many and most spend a lifetime overcoming one if they overcome any, what made them simply "had to do's" and nothing more, nothing really complicated, worldly distractions that had nothing to do with my familial relationship or my relationship to Jesus Christ, or Heavenly Father or the Spirit that can now dwell within me, or anything really real was the testimony that I relearned as I became reconverted culminating in the experience of the Temple. This testimony was relearned, not repeated. I had to learn it not as a child does or a young missionary does but as someone who has known the truth of the harshness of life, someone who knows knowledge well and the bloody history of humanity, someone who understands thinking well and who questions all through analysis, this being innate to my way of processing thought.

Coupled with a study of art at a level of depth and complexity that is due to my penetrative nature, as I was given the gift of art in my life as a light to guide me through darkness and its beauty and tradition giving me a self when I had none, I therefor took to my testimony on such an intellectual level as came naturally and was authentic to me as was the only way I could. A Gospel that could stand to my line of questioning and analysis, penetrative mind and sensitivity to truth, done because I had to know the only way I could, through logic not allowing myself to trust easily as I had seen so much blackness and falseness and was acute at distinguishing between truth and illusion, such a Gospel that could stand to my line of questioning and resonate with my spiritual self had to be true. At a critical point I did try other congregations. They simply did not have the truth.

As I fought on and as I met my challenges further with greater surety and courage, step by step, day by day I learned and relearned more about the gospel that was in essence what I knew in youth but now, not as a young man but a new man with a different mind, I was able to see something in it, specific somethings and universal somethings that thrilled and excited me and the more I learned of truth the more I could and will never go back on it, would not consider that as a possibility for a moment, it would mean denying Reality. For the first time in my life my answers were sure, my mind was more secure, I was standing on firm ground, my sense of self also more grounded, my feeling of self worth and esteem grew as never before, my hope for my mental wellbeing was and is real, my knowledge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ was and is absolute.

The simple things that I knew to cause me, personally, the greatest joy in my study of art, particularly the essence and natures of beauty and truth, was such not to be found in "the world" anywhere more acutely and wholly than in the eternal message taught by Jesus Christ. I had found my true self, a self more authentically spiritual than I could have believed or ever hoped to be amidst worldly pain and inner darkness. Several months prior to my Temple experience, in an undated journal entry, I, with a sense of submission and inspiration wrote in bold purple capital letters of colored pencil, "The Most Profound Event of My Life: I Have Been Searching For Reality For 17 Years and I Have Finally Found It In The Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

To myself at that point, considering all, I felt like I had to be exaggerating but in truth it was truth, it was my most profound event, and soon after another event of even greater magnitude would occur to me in the Temple that would be as true and would resonate even deeper as I recognized my sister Emily as Eternal and tears that might never have ceased flowed with ease and joy that I had never known in this mortal state. Grounded in this Reality I am still living the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I am blessed more and more each day and am awed by this, and am eternally grateful for the blessings I am showered with on a daily basis, and for what commensuration I know not.

This Reality grounded me securely and from it comes such truth that to deny it is unthinkable and to waver from the security, safe and distanced from my worldly obstacles, is to give up on an existence oriented towards greatness, not set on this mortality, for that I care little about outside of that which is truly real- family, friendship, faith, truth, goodness, virtue, integrity- and for this brief span I have already lived a life well and honorably lived, but oriented for eternal greatness... THAT is something to rejoice in! In this grounding and from my "relearning" of my testimony something beautiful happened, something that I can see now and can bravely say was meant to be, because it is, I have put my abilities to use, put my shoulder to the wheel and am making use of my "relearning" in a philosophy called Mormon Existentialism.

Like the above poem by William Blake, a humanist and Romantic poet with a keen sense of the spiritual and the Real, Mormon Existentialism expresses the full reality of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as taught in the living authentic entity of the Mormon Church in the context of Reality as it exists beyond space and without time and unconditioned by mortality. It is a place where progression continues and perfection is possible, as in the poem, as is the possibility of living in accord together with the God of the Universe, something I personally find very appealing and aim towards. Like the poem, everything is possible, everything can be. This is counter to its ugly binary- traditional Existentialism- grounded on the nihilism of Nietzsche and which has subsequently laid ground for a questionable worldly reality of doubt where existence, naive and raw, precedes any essence and an "other" that is absurd to all other "others," casting an ugly shadow of anxiety and angst, tainting philosophical ideological inquiry today to which the idea of God is a joke and very little is possible for humanity in terms of any reality. This is the kind of thinking of those who think in terms too lofty to allow for truth or anything of the absolute especially the idea that the Universe has as its nexus a Supreme Being, a God.

For those with a questioning mind, for those who think analytically, and even for those expert on philosophical method as I am not, I challenge they to this Mormon Existentialist philosophy, I invite it to interrogation from the best of the philosophically minded and I have the security of mind and the assurance of The Spirit to be rest assured that this philosophy will hold true. If cornered and given opportunity, it will answer with truth and reason, two companions essentially linked as one must know the other to realize the first.