LaVaughn Barfuss was born of Swiss-German converts to the Church in Paris, Idaho, in 1924. When World War II came along, he enlisted in the army at age eighteen. He trained as a medic and ended up at Fort Adair, Oregon, working in a military hospital. In a letter he wrote in 1944 to his hometown newspaper, The Paris Post, he stated: “I’m finally back on duty again and working the dayshift. I’ll tell you I know what a lot of patients are going through, because I just got out of the hospital myself. Before I got sick I didn’t pay much attention to these patients—but after spending three months of hospitalization I know what they go through.”[1] He recounted how, having contracted pneumonia in December of 1943, he had gotten progressively worse and eventually spent eight days under an oxygen tent. Fluid was drawn from his left lung on five occasions, whereupon he spent 45 days recuperating in a hospital bed.

Looking back on the ordeal, he could finally understand what it meant to be sick and how good the milk of human kindness tasted. “During my sickness I had a number of people call to visit me. The lady from the Red Cross came to see me every day. Our Chaplain came a lot, but when I was real bad he prayed for me and I’ll never in my life forget him. He is a mighty swell fellow. A buddy of mine from Texas called at my room also. I think an awful lot of him. There is one person I haven’t mentioned and I know that he is a better doctor than anyone a fellow could ever know, and that is the Lord. I said my prayers every night and when I did it seemed I was getting better all the time. I can’t tell you how lucky I am to be alive today.”[2]

We are all lucky to be alive today. But as Barfuss came to realize, life is a walk “through the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4). It is an interplay between light and darkness, and illness and injury are among the dark shadows. Shadows, however, depend on light for their existence and so seem less real than light—shadows appear only when light is blocked.

Three poems touch on this theme of light before shadow. Familiar to Latter-day Saints is the fifth stanza of William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”[3] Wordsworth describes early childhood as an experience “appareled in celestial light.” Everything shines because of the light we bring with us from heaven at birth; as Wordsworth writes, we come “trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our home.” In time, however, “shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing Boy” until “at length the Man perceives it die away, and fade into the light of common day.”

Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” similarly addresses the encroachment of shadow on primordial light during our early years. He tells us that as a child he was “young and easy under the apple boughs,” and when he awoke each morning the farm was “all shining, it was all Adam and maiden.” Eventually, though, he was “led out of grace” as time took him “up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand.” The poem ends with him singing in his “chains like the sea” while protesting the passage of time and the aging, dying experience.[4]

Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” begins with a celebration of clouds only to resee them through old, jaded eyes. At first they are “rows and floes of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air.” Eventually, however, they “only block the sun . . . [and] rain and snow on everyone” while disrupting our plans. Once delightful facets of our experience, clouds become irksome impediments to our fun and happiness. [5]

Mitchell’s point, of course, is that everything has a double aspect, an upside and a downside. Even illness, injury, and death, I suggest. Barfuss indicates that his illness rounded him out as a human being, made him a kinder, more caring medic and filled him with gratitude and reverential devotion. Normally we think of illness and injury as irksome impediments to our fun and happiness, but surely they are more than that. For one, they are intimations of death; they disabuse us of the conceit that we are impervious to the aging, dying process. For another, they are harbingers of a better world, or a world better understood and appreciated, the like of which Barfuss discovered upon emerging from his illness.

Life-friendly Visions of Nature

Second only to Jesus, Socrates is the best-known martyr to a righteous cause in the West. In the tumultuous aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, when some of his fellow citizens were casting about for reasons to explain Athens’s defeat, Socrates was brought to trial, convicted of crimes against the city-state (corrupting the youth and introducing the worship of false gods), and sentenced to death. He famously went to his death calmly, although not without a bit of drama and mystery. According to Plato, he told his jurors that although the trial would forever blot the good name of Athens, he bore them no ill will and further stated that only deity knew whether their fate—going back to their everyday lives—was better than his death sentence.[6] Thirty days later, he drank the hemlock that killed him.

Plato recounts that he took the cup of hemlock from the jailer in charge of his death, but before drinking from it asked if he could pour a little on the ground as an offering to the gods, who he hoped would prosper his journey to the next world. The jailer said no—there was just enough poison to kill him, and no more. Whereupon Socrates, in the company of the jailer and a few grieving friends, offered a prayer and finished off the draft. He then walked around his jail cell a bit and, upon feeling the effects of the poison, lay on the ground and covered his face with a cloth. Just before he died, he did something that has kept scholars guessing ever since. He removed the cloth and asked his friend Crito to make a sacrificial offering of a rooster to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. Crito promised to do so, and Socrates died shortly thereafter. Plato ends his account by writing that “such was the end of our comrade . . . a man who, we would say, was of all those we have known[,] the best, and also the wisest and the most upright.”[7]

Why the request to sacrifice a rooster to Asclepius? It was customary to pray to Asclepius when ill and to thank him with an offering if one got better. But Socrates did not expect to get better, at least not physically. Friedrich Nietzsche surmised that the rooster offering was Socrates’s way of thanking Asclepius for healing him of this sickness we call life: death is life’s cure.[8] Many modern students veer toward other explanations, but few doubt Socrates’s sincerity in supplicating the gods as he stood at death’s door. His vision of this life, of mortality, lapped quite naturally into larger oceans of possibility and meaning.

Today such visions of life are mostly lost or at least much endangered and diminished. Many people do not see physical life as anything other than a cosmic accident. No lasting significance, no larger resonance, no potential to blossom into something bigger and more beautiful. Listen, for example, to Margaret Drabble, a noted novelist and biographer:

We are often told that in earlier times all cultures had a concept of the afterlife—that “everybody” believed in some form of life after death, be it a journey over a river to a dark land, an eternity of hellfire and torment, a paradise with angels and ambrosia, or a reunion with loved ones. . . . But I’ve always suspected that most of us, even in the pious, priest-dominated Middle Ages, didn’t really believe what we said we believed. Most of us knew that when we were dead, we were gone. We went nowhere. We ceased to be. That’s what we didn’t like about death—not fear of hell, but fear of nothingness.[9]

I beg to differ. Going back to Blaise Pascal’s thought, there are traces of God scattered throughout our experience along with traces of cosmic indifference and pointlessness, and we are here to make a choice. Unfortunately, however, we live in an age when some highly influential people, people widely recognized for their accomplishments, speak as if the matter is settled. Writing as a Nobel laureate biochemist, Jacques Monod insisted that “man must at last wake up out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings and his crimes.”[10] He said further, “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.”[11]

This conclusion flowed from Monod’s scientific work, some of which he incorporated into a series of lectures published as Chance and Necessity. He explained that life arises from the interplay of random interruptions of the otherwise invariant replication of the DNA code. These interruptions result in genetic mutations, and by Monod’s lights, they are random because they are blind and purposeless, yet also blindly creative. “Randomness caught on the wing and preserved, reproduced by the machinery of invariance and thus converted into order, rule, necessity. A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.”[12] Here Monod is thinking of vision as belief that we are more than accidental by-products of a blind evolutionary process, that some glorious destiny awaits us. But this he does not buy. Preferring to derive hope and happiness from slim, almost non-existent pickings, he opens his book by quoting from Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus realizes that his ordeal will never end—the rock will always roll back down the mountain after he has pushed it up—but the unending “struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”[13]

This, of course, is not science; it is philosophy that dramatizes science for ideological ends. Plus, there is Monod’s oversight of the third ingredient in his recipe of life. If life boils down to chance and necessity, what about choice? Sisyphus chooses to be happy, and Monod ends his book by stating that while we emerged “only by chance” and have no inherent destiny or duty, we nevertheless must “choose” between the “kingdom above and the darkness below.”[14] The “kingdom above” reflects Sisyphus’s choice.

So the recipe of life consists of more than just blind chance and mechanical necessity, by Monod’s lights. The oppositional tension between the two—what may be and what must be—opens a space for choice, and that choice, by Monod’s reckoning, is laden with moral significance. Sisyphus’s choice was better than the alternative—“the darkness below.” Not only that, but Monod himself led a morally admirable life. One scholar remarked that “chance and necessity” would have been an “apt title for Monod’s autobiography.”[15] He could not change the circumstances of his birth nor the Nazi occupation of Paris during his early adult years, but he did choose, at considerable risk to himself and his young family, to join the French resistance rather than align himself with those who supported the Vichy regime. After the Second World War, he worked to smuggle two scientists out of Hungary, at the time a Soviet satellite state. Despite his insistence that “the ancient covenant is in pieces” and the universe is indifferent to our hopes, his life was consequential because he made consequential choices, just as Adam and Eve did.

The takeaway is that choice, or the freedom to choose, is more fundamental than the stories we tell ourselves regarding our arrival in the cosmos and our departure therefrom. They, after all, track back to choices we make while making sense of reality, and so even when human life is authoritatively explained as the result of blind chance and mechanical necessity, that explanation acquires meaning only when it is lit up from within by choice. Even in the low-temperature setting of Monod’s cosmic indifference, Adam and Eve’s dilemma—whether to stay put or reach for something bigger—lights up the world with meaning and significance.

Who or what created this story of cosmic indifference, if not a capacity to pick out various “facts” about the world and to imaginatively play dot-to-dot with them? “Science,” writes Stephen Toulmin, “is not an intellectual computing machine: it is a slice of life.”[16] It lives from commitments of its own, which is the only way it can selectively pick out phenomena to serve its purpose of crafting God-free explanations of nature.[17] And the background myth that scientists dispassionately map nature—a blind and uncaring nature at that—is what Margaret Drabble and others channel when they argue that deep within our hearts most of us know that we just blink out when we die.

As Pascal proposed, along with evidence of just blinking out, there is also contrary evidence. Or, to cite Lehi, existence is a compound in one: it takes two to tango, and reality is neither life by itself nor death by itself but the dance that results as the two opposites sway back and forth. Maybe at death we blink out for a while but then blink on again. This, after all, is what nature does all the time, and for thousands of years the back-and-forth, on-off cycles of nature imprinted our ancestors’ thinking. Innocent of models of reality keyed to nature’s seeming pointlessness, they took their cues from their firsthand observations of nature’s alternations. Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, and so on. The round of the seasons with its swing from deathly cold to life-renewing warmth. These swings predisposed people toward belief in life after death.

Take sunrise, for instance. For most people today, its beauty does not suggest anything more than a happy (that is, accidental) coincidence of atmospheric circumstances. The sun, we tell ourselves, is not living, not able to communicate meaning; it is just a ball of gas locked into its orbit about the center of the galaxy. This is the story we have inherited from modern science, and although it is correct in many particulars, it is nevertheless keyed to a mechanistic, lifeless vision of nature. Step into a different vision and sunrise shapes up very differently. For people long ago it was mapped onto the creation of the world and the primordial triumph of light over darkness. In ancient Egypt, two scholars tell us, “Each morning the sun defeats darkness and chaos, as he did on the day of creation, and does, every day on New Year’s Day. These three moments coalesce; they are felt to be essentially the same.”[18] Simply put, sunrise restates the birth of the cosmos, and by extension, our own birth into a world keyed to the miracle of light and life. Sunset also plays into the drama, for without it and the darkness that follows, there would be no burst of life-awakening light.

What is more beautiful than the Persephone story, the tale of Hades’s unlawful seizure of Demeter’s lovely daughter and her abduction to the underworld, where Persephone languishes six months of the year while the earth, feeling mother and daughter’s grief, grows cold and begins to die; then when Persephone is released and reunited with her mother, the earth rejoices and life flourishes again for six months. This is a dramatization of the seasonal round, keyed to the belief that the living earth feels the seasons and their light-dark, warm-cold, life-death undulations.

We may dismiss the story as poetic fancy, but we should recall that nature is susceptible to many different mappings, because no mapping is imagination-free. Albert Einstein wrote that “physical [scientific] concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”[19] Said differently, no map of reality is as richly textured as reality itself, and human imagination fills in the gaps. This is not to propose, of course, that we make up everything as we go along. Einstein did not believe that scientific truth is whipped up out of the void; there is an external world, but it does not uniquely determine our concepts. There is therefore always breathing space for other concepts, other mappings, other visions of nature, and we are enriched as we come to appreciate them.

The Persephone story issues up from a more life-friendly vision of nature than the modern one that normally guides our thinking. It is a big picture vision of nature because it grants life to a wide array of things. By contrast, the modern scientific vision denies life and intrinsic purpose to stars, planets, rocks, rivers, mountains, clouds, rainbows, and so on. Under its aegis, some thinkers have even written off animals and plants as lifeless mechanisms.[20] Going the full distance with this outlook, others now characterize human beings as lifeless, soulless robots fooled by illusory, unreal emotions, suggesting we are zombies who foolishly believe that we are something more than mere machines.[21]

Is one vision of nature or worldview better or more truthful than another? I would say that some perspectives are more generous than others and there is much to be gained by erring on the side of generosity. Error, as noted earlier, can be eye opening and soul stretching. What is more, generosity should be extended even to those worldviews that repel us. The zombie outlook is a piece of the big puzzle, a part of who we are at this moment in our history. Our ancestors might have anticipated it several centuries ago, for it is a predictable consequence of our love affair with technology, a romance sparked by the invention of the mechanical clock during the late Middle Ages.[22] That invention played into the thinking of the architects of early modern science—Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others—who collectively ushered in the mechanical or clockwork universe worldview that now colonizes our thinking. Machines and gadgets can so mesmerize us that some people now imagine that that is all we are. Others, like George Dyson, foresee that we will achieve immortality by merging with them.[23]

Realizing that one’s worldview is smudged with human fingerprints is mind-stretching, like realizing that milk doesn’t ultimately come from spotlessly clean grocery stores but from mooing, grazing, slobbering, grass-digesting cows that get milked by humans. Every worldview has human fingerprints and that is why each is so interesting. They play into the human languages we live within and the different ways our languages dissect the world. When my wife and I lived in Japan many years ago, we noticed that occasionally Americans spoke louder when their Japanese listeners didn’t understand their English—as if the problem lay in the listeners’ hearing. Until they learn otherwise, native speakers may feel that their language is crystal clear and self-explaining; they, after all, have no problem understanding it. Similarly, every worldview feels crystal clear and self-explaining to those who have grown up in it. Together with languages, different worldviews flavor our experience of reality differently.

A case in point is the blue traffic lights in Japan that signal “go.” When we lived there, we wondered why they were not green. But to the Japanese, they are. Long ago there were four colors in the Japanese language—black, white, red (reddish or “warm” colors), and blue (blueish or “cool” colors). The color blue embraced what Westerners call green, and to this day some “green” things are called blue in Japan (even though there is now a Japanese word that corresponds to the West’s definition of green). For example, green apples are aoringo, or blue apples. Being a very old color, and one found in the sky and the water surrounding their islands, blue is a very popular color among Japanese people. When traffic lights were introduced in the twentieth century, government officials went along with the rest of the world, but only up to a certain point. For green they chose the bluest shade of green possible, which looks blue to many Westerners.[24]

Japanese people can, of course, see the color spectrum as well as anyone. But historically they divided it up differently than Europeans did, and this gave their world a different flavor—or to state the obvious, a different coloration. Few people would be so chauvinistic as to assert that there is just one right way of dividing the spectrum; that would be like insisting one language is inherently better than all the rest.

The question is not whether one vision of nature is more truthful than another but whether we can see our reflection in every vision. We tend to dismiss the old “poetic” visions and even passages of scripture that ascribe life and feeling to the earth, but these do not go away just because they are superseded by newer, less life-friendly outlooks. As Thomas S. Kuhn remarked in his study of the displacement of Aristotle’s earth-centered universe by Copernicus’s sun-centered cosmos, “No single panoramic view of the heavens will suffice.” Why? Because “seen on a clear night, the stars speak first to the poetic, not to the scientific, imagination. No one who views the night sky can challenge Shakespeare’s vision of the stars as ‘night’s candles’ or Milton’s image of the Milky Way as ‘a broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, and pavement stars.’”[25] Conceptions of nature come and go, some more life-friendly than others, but nature remains, sparking our wonder and firing our imagination.

The Interplay of Life and Death

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates criticizes physicians for encouraging sickness through the invention of medical jargon and cures that fail to address moral issues or matters of the soul. To treat people as if they were merely physical beings, he said, is to court unhappiness and ill health, because many of our ills and dissatisfactions track back to that part of us that lives on after the death of the body.[26]

It may seem incredible that Socrates, living over 2,400 years ago, would concern himself with the healing arts and what we now call bioethical questions relating to death. He noted, however, that the goal of some physicians was simply the ongoing postponement of death, not patient quality of life or concern for the community. This way of practicing medicine was rooted in the fear of death, a fear that had no place in Socrates’s understanding of ever-cycling opposites.

In an argument that approximates Lehi’s, Socrates insisted that life and death presuppose one another. Each lives from the other, so to speak, because each draws energy and meaning from the other, and while one waxes the other wanes. Obvious evidence of this give-and-take process is our birth: we now live physically, whereas some years ago we did not, and by oppositional symmetry, said Socrates, we will die and be plowed back into death to arise again in the future. If either process, life or death, should proceed “in a straight line” and not loop back on its opposite, everything “would ultimately be in the same state, be affected in the same way, and cease to become.”[27] Nothing would happen. Perfect torpor. But things do happen, so it is reasonable to suppose that the life-death cycle or polarity remains in play.

According to Lehi, paired polarities generate all existence. In our own day we see this in the minimal polarities that enable a great deal of communication and computation. In telegraphy (Morse code) the alphabet is reduced to dots and dashes; computers work their seeming magic through on/off electrical states. A single state cannot compute; it is completely powerless on its own. Again, it takes two to tango. A circuit must blink on and off for information to emerge—almost magically, it seems. We similarly must blink on and off for something magical or heavenly to happen.

I vaguely intuited this truth many years ago. Throughout high school I had an early morning newspaper route. The newspapers were driven from Salt Lake City very early in the morning and dropped off on our porch about six o’clock. One morning in the dead of winter I got up once again to face the dreary prospect of delivering papers in the cold and snow. As I was eating breakfast the phone rang and my mother answered it. After hanging up, she said the truck from Salt Lake City hadn’t been able to make it through a snowstorm in Logan Canyon. While this meant I would have to deliver the papers after school, I didn’t care; all I wanted to do at that moment was go back to bed and get another hour’s sleep. As I crawled into my warm bed on that dark, snowy morning, I thought, “This is heaven.” Not the bed itself, but the moment of transition between the two extremes—the bleak cold outside that I had just been rescued from and the warm bed that now awaited me. I thought that if I could just relive that moment again and again, always feeling the marvelous contrast between the two extremes, I would never ask for anything more.

My chance discovery that morning was that bliss happens as two opposites or extremes intermingle. Of course, many others before and since have made this discovery. Why do people in Scandinavia and Russia bring hot and cold into tight proximity? Why do they go back and forth between saunas and snow or icy water? Why do people run marathons? Why does anyone seek adventure and hardship when there is no requirement to do so? Because, as Lehi said, life arises as opposites touch and spark. A steady diet of the same thing is a recipe for boredom, and unrelieved boredom is like an electrical state that can’t compute by reason of its unchanging, unbroken value.

Transhumanism is the movement that fully embodies the modern aspiration to live forever by dint of science and technology. The term is shorthand for transitional human, and the premise is that aging, dying, and death are not inevitable outcomes of the life experience and that one day, through the leapfrogging progress of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and modern medicine, immortality will become our default state. To the extent that we embrace artificial body parts (prosthetic limbs, knee replacements, heart valve replacements, dental implants, brain implants to control epilepsy, mental illness, and Parkinson’s disease, and much, much more on the horizon), we catch a glimpse of what might be possible in the future.

My misgiving about transhumanism has nothing to do with the belief that science and technology can transfigure human life—science and technology have already done that in the last two hundred years—but something more is needed than scientific progress, however rapid.

Arthur C. Clarke famously stated that “any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.”[28] Think of radio, television, and telecommunications from the point of view of someone living about 1850. Then throw in airplanes, automobiles, wastewater treatment plants, blight-resistant crops, plentiful food (more than enough for everyone on earth), refrigeration, water sanitation, personal computers, the Internet, moon landings, international space stations, space probes, nuclear energy, antibiotics, GPS navigation, and the virtual elimination of infectious and nutritional diseases. Upon hearing that all this would come about within less than two centuries, our nineteenth-century friend might well imagine a world of perpetually happy people, based on the premise that problem-solving technology invariably clears a path to happiness. As denizens of this imagined paradise, however, we know we have a long way to go. Inventions that solve one problem often introduce another. When automobiles replaced horse-drawn carriages, for instance, automobile exhaust replaced horse excrement as a public health concern. Nuclear energy is the quintessential double-edged invention, full of promise but also of peril.

And then the biggest challenge of all—learning to deal honestly and kindly with one another. The Internet was once envisioned as a means of promoting democracy by allowing widely scattered people to respectfully share and discuss their ideas. Instead it has become, in many cases, a painful reflection of our worst selves and a new frontier for insult, bullying, misinformation, propaganda, deception, sabotage, and warfare.

In my mind, the straightforward, linear pursuit of immortality leaves too little to the imagination. Not long before his own death, Jesus observed, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). A corn of wheat—a seed—is a living thing packed with immense potential. Under favorable conditions, it germinates and becomes a plant, effectively dying as a seed by giving itself up to something much bigger. A tiny apple seed may become an apple tree with many apples, each of which contains seeds whereby the miracle of “much fruit” may be further expanded. That Jesus was likening this process to his own death and Resurrection—and ours as well—is evident in what he says in the next verse: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (John 12:25).

If we love mortality so much that we try to hang on to it at all costs, always chasing a problem-free horizon, we end up like seeds that never germinate. But if we learn to see mortality as ground in which our lives are buried like seeds, we fold ourselves into Christ’s promise of “much fruit” or “eternal lives.”

The promise of death giving way to life is not pie-in-the-sky. As Jesus made clear, it is illustrated in the exponential expansion of life itself. That expansion, of course, may be checked in various ways, but even so life often “finds a way” while further illustrating the promise. Fires destroy forests but in the process set the stage for regrowth and the flourishing of forest animals. Trying to hang on to a forest at all costs, protecting it from death by natural catastrophe, can make things worse because it aborts the natural life-death cycle of the ecosystem.

The Shape of Life

In brief, death is an essential part of life. That the two opposites should intermingle so intimately is not really surprising. The gospel, as noted earlier, is full of paradoxes and surprising reversals. Consider, for example, the apparent contradiction of the following scriptural passage: “For God does not walk in crooked paths, neither doth he turn to the right hand nor to the left, neither doth he vary from that which he hath said, therefore his paths are straight, and his course is one eternal round” (Doctrine and Covenants 3:2). Can a straight path coincide with an eternal round? Well, yes, just as, in God’s economy, life can coincide with death. As Nicholas of Cusa pointed out several centuries ago, any finite segment of an infinitely large circle is necessarily straight—otherwise the segment would curve back on itself to form a finite circle.[29] There is also the thought that a straight line (defined as the shortest distance between two points) on a curved surface like a sphere does, of course, curve.

Each realization breaks the frame of everyday thinking that would turn straight lines and circles or “rounds” into mutually exclusive entities. And each bespeaks God’s twofold, compound-in-one nature. Infinite circles composed of nothing but straight line segments boggle the mind, and straight lines on curved surfaces are sometimes invoked to introduce Einstein’s realization that material bodies travel straight-line paths through curved spacetime.[30] The compounding of infinity and finitude is not easy to grasp, but it is important to note that finitude adds as much to God’s reality as infinity. To follow Alfred North Whitehead, “What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality of heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.”[31] In short, heaven and earth accomplish one another as each is awakened and renewed by the love that passes back and forth.

“Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” wrote William Blake.[32] Both Whitehead and Lehi, I believe, would add that reality arises as opposites crisscross, intermingle, and compound together.

There is another way that straight lines and circles may be said to blend. A helix is a spiral with a fixed radius from a central (often imaginary) axis—think of a screw with threads spiraling around the axis or shank of the screw. Elder Neal A. Maxwell stated that although “routine and repetition may bother us, may bore us . . . God and His Son, Jesus, are never bored with Their ‘one eternal round’ because of Their perfect love.”[33] Their infinite patience saves them from boredom. Additionally, God’s eternal round and our path of salvation can be visualized as a helix. We return to our premortal heavenly home at a higher turn of the spiral: like the prodigal son who was in some sense enriched by his poverty and hardship away from home, we see heaven with new eyes and a new heart upon our return. Here it is hard to resist a line from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”[34]

The DNA molecule resembles a ladder whose rails twist around each other in opposite directions. Courtesy of ShapeShiftCreative, Etsy.com.

The central axis of the helix—the iron rod, as it were—is the straight and narrow path to heaven, but our foibles and need for experience cause us to wind around it. Repentance keeps us moving upward. On this model, life has helix structure. Whether by coincidence or design, the helix figures prominently into the structure of the DNA molecule, sometimes called the molecule of life because it carries the genetic information that defines living organisms.[35] DNA consists of two helixes linked by rungs or steps of nucleotide base pairs. The image that pops to mind is that of a twisting ladder or two interconnected spiral staircases of opposite directionality (see below). When helicopters go straight up or down, their rotor blades trace out helixes, as do squirrels climbing up and around tree trunks while escaping predators.

The shape of life, Lehi said, is opposites compounded together, and the archetypal instance of this compounding is the life-giving miracle of Christ himself. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, the baby Jesus was “God’s infinity / Dwindled to infancy.”[36] Jesus was the divine coincidence of God and human, the highest expression of Lehi’s compound-in-one reality. Infinity hidden up in what Brigham Young called “infantile weakness.”[37] “All things were made by him,” writes John, “and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Incredibly, though, the Creator of countless worlds “dwelt among us” (John 1:3, 14). He lived in our tiny, mortally cramped neighborhood, pitched his tent close to ours, carried our sorrows, and offered himself a sacrifice for our sins.[38] Further, as Matthew makes clear, he has never left us. Matthew begins his gospel by citing Isaiah: Jesus shall be called “Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.” (Matthew 1:23; see Isaiah 7:14). He ends it with Jesus’s promise to his disciples: “And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).[39]

Notes

[1] “Pvt. LaVaughn Barfuss Released from Hospital,” The Paris Post, March 9, 1944.

[2] “Pvt. LaVaughn Barfuss.”

[3] “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.

[4] “Fern Hill,” https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/.

[5] “Both Sides Now,” https://genius.com/.

[6] Plato, 39c–39d, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 17–36.

[7] Plato, Phaedo, 118a, in Cooper, 100.

[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 193–94.

[9] “Margaret Drabble: ‘I Am Not Afraid of Death. I Worry about Living,’” Guardian, October 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/.

[10] Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 172–73.

[11] Monod, Chance and Necessity, 180.

[12] Monod, Chance and Necessity, 98; original emphasis.

[13] Albert Camus, quoted in Monod, Chance and Necessity, front matter.

[14] Monod, Chance and Necessity, 180.

[15] Sean B. Carroll, Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013), prologue.

[16] Stephen Toulmin, Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of Science (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1961), 99.

[17] According to Alfred North Whitehead, science’s tremendous success in revolutionizing human existence in recent centuries tracks back to the narrowness of its vision. Speaking of the Newtonian worldview, “which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter . . . senseless, valueless, purposeless” and moved only by outside force rather than from its own inner nature, he insisted that “the narrow efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its supreme methodological success.” Nevertheless, “when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thought, the scheme breaks down at once.” Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 17.

[18] Henri Frankfort et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 24. The two scholars are Henri and H. A. Frankfort.

[19] Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961), 31.

[20] René Descartes (1596–1650) is famously associated with the argument that dogs are merely complex machines or automata. Lacking the mind or ability to reason, they have no feelings or mental states and yelp, bark, or whine only because they are engineered to do so when prompted or struck by outside stimuli. Humans, on the other hand, possess immaterial minds in addition to physical bodies. Although Descartes was not always consistent in his mechanical characterization of animals, the mechanical outlook that he and like-minded contemporaries fostered proved critical to the development of early modern science. Things are, after all, easier to explain if they act according to well-understood mechanical principles rather than elusive spiritual truths.

[21] Daniel C. Dennett insists that the vast majority of humans fall for the “zombie hunch,” which is the suspicion that because we have conscious states, we are more than zombies; to be precise, we are beings who transcend, direct, and survive consciousness. But science, he continues, does not justify this hunch; it is only a product of our illusory sense that someone (the existential I) is home inside the brain. He suggests that for centuries, people fell for the hunch that the earth is motionless in space, and even now the earth feels that way, although we know it is moving. When people finally come to realize that they are just zombies (with conscious states mindlessly lighting up their brains), they will still feel otherwise. Consciousness, for Dennett, consists of momentary happenings, signifying nothing. See his Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

[22] Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000).

[23] George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012).

[24] An oft-cited example of another culture seeing colors differently than we do is found in ancient Greece. Homer described the Mediterranean Sea as “wine-dark” rather than blue. See Maria Michela Sassi, “The Sea Was Never Blue,” Aeon, 31 July 2017, https://aeon.co/. The tagline to Sassi’s article reads: “The Greek colour experience was made of movement and shimmer. Can we ever glimpse what they saw when gazing out to sea?”

[25] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 7.

[26]Republic, 405a–409b, in Cooper, 1042–46.

[27] Plato, Phaedo 72b, in Cooper, 63.

[28] Arthur C. Clarke, Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (New York: HarperCollins, 1972), 139.

[29]De docta ignorantia [On learned ignorance], trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning, 1981), bk. 1, ch. 23, https://jasper-hopkins.info/DI-I-12-2000.pdf.

[30] See, for example, Edwin F. Taylor and John Archibald Wheeler, Spacetime Physics (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1966), 184–88.

[31] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1985), 351.

[32] William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” The Portable Blake, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York: Viking, 1972), 253.

[33] Neal A. Maxwell, “The Precious Promise,” Ensign, April 2004, 45.

[34] T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/winter/w3206/edit/tseliotlittlegidding.html.

[35] For a discussion of how spirality seems to figure into our physical (and possibly spiritual) being, see Antonio Amodeo et al., “Spiral Shapes in Heart and Shells: When Form and Function Do Matter,” European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery 41, no. 3 (March 2012), 473–75, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejcts/ezr149. The authors write: “In humans, the spiral architecture of the cardiac system, including the great arteries, participates in a strongly coadapted system. . . . Moreover, it is interesting to note that the spiral pattern present in animals, plants, and other aspects of nature, including the DNA structure, is in close relation with the ‘Fibonacci numbers,’ suggesting that an unknown geometrical order links biology with mathematics.”

[36] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe,” https://hopkinspoetry.com/.

[37] Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses, (London: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1860) 7:193. President Young added that “there could not be a more helpless child born of a woman than was Jesus Christ.”

[38] John writes, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). In Greek dwelt means “tented” or “pitched a tent,” from the word for tent, σκηνή. The word can also be translated as “tabernacle,” suggestive of the portable, tent-like temple that the Israelites carried in the wilderness. See Bentley C. F. Chan, “John 1:14: And the Word Became Flesh and Tabernacled in Us,” in Theological Metamorphosis, Christian Disciples Church, https://www.christiandiscipleschurch.org/content/theological-metamorphosis-chapter-08.

[39] See Jacob Michael Carlson, “Jesus-Immanuel: Matthew’s Narrative Christology of Divine Presence,” (master’s thesis, Seattle Pacific University, 2017), https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/spseminary_etd/9/.