The tree of life vision is probably one of the defining stories in the Book of Mormon. Full of interesting images that keep the attention of children, but also symbolically meaningful. A quick summary:
Lehi dreams that he is wandering through a dark and dreary wilderness. A man in a white robe shows up and commands Lehi to follow him. He obeys, and is led to another dark, horrible place. He travels for hours in this darkness, until he prays that God will have mercy on him, and upon so doing enters a field. He sees a tree and knows that the fruit of the the tree is the source of happiness. He eats the fruit and is filled with joy. He immediately thinks of his family and desires that they too eat this fruit and enjoy this same happiness. Sam, Sariah, and Nephi follow his directions and also partake of the fruit, but Laman and Lemuel do not. There's an iron rod leading to the tree, and he sees people holding onto it in order to find their way to the tree through a mist of darkness that makes it impossible to see. Nearby, there is a big building where people are dressed up in ostentatious clothing. They mock the people who have partaken of the fruit, and because of that some people are embarrassed enough to let go of the iron rod and get lost. However, a great deal of people use the iron rod to guide themselves to the tree and partake of the marvelous fruit.
There is enough in this little allegory to write books about. But here are some of my humble insights:
1. Initially, Lehi knows he is being guided, because he has an actual, physical guide. Then the guide leaves for no apparent reason, and Lehi wanders for a very long time. However, that doesn't mean he is lost, or abandoned. Heavenly Father doesn't always give us the assurance we want that we are being guided, but that doesn't necessarily mean we are doing something wrong, either. He might just be testing our faith.
2. The guide didn't lead him to the field right away. He led him to a dark and dreary waste, and then Lehi got out of there on his own. Sometimes, God's will is for us to be in places that are frightening and far from ideal. Being unhappy or sad or discouraged for a time doesn't mean we took a wrong turn, as it were. It might just be a sad time in our lives.
3. Lehi didn't receive comfort and arrive at his destination until he prayed.
4. The first thing that Lehi thinks after he eats the fruit and experiences that great joy is he desires for his family to feel that same joy. We used this story in Hungary when we met with members to encourage them to share the gospel with their friends and family. If you feel joy because of the things you have learned, why not share it?
5. One assumes that the fruit resembles true conversion, not just baptism or being taught the gospel, because Laman and Lemuel were most likely baptized and taught the gospel as children. But they failed to accept it and find joy in it.
6. The people who fall away from the truth because of the mockery of others go "crawling towards" the great and spacious building. But since the building was high above the ground, they never reached it. They were just lost forever. Giving in to people who mock you does not mean they will let you join their ranks. You will just end up bereft of what you had, lost, and all alone.
Nephi says there was more: that what he wrote was just a summary of the vision (making my puny paragraph a summary of a summary). This is one of those stories I'm excited to see the video of when I die.
4 comments:
Wow, this chapter could certainly be unpacked into books of commentary. I think your summary is pretty great, though. It makes all the info more manageable because you can run through it quickly. I have to say that it's not clear to me that the guide ever left him, but your interpretation is fruitful, so I'm willing to go with it.
Whether or not the guide departs, it's clear that the guide is not enough to make things better. The Church provides us with a number of guides to help us grasp and apply Gospel principles, but ultimately understanding the Gospel, seeing things clearly, requires a personal relationship with God. Only through personal communication from God do we gain a clear understanding of where the commandments, scriptures, and prophets are trying to lead us.
This dark and dreary waste reminds me of a great verse from Isaiah: "Behold all ye that kindle fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks, walk in the light of your fire and in the sparks which ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand—ye shall lie down in sorrow." I've certainly kindled my own fires and compassed myself about with sparks. I light up my gloomy world with projects like learning a language, getting attention with facebook posts, playing an instrument, running a club, or getting good grades. I fend off the darkness with raucous laughter, dancing, and music. But these things by themselves aren't enough to keep the absurdity of it all from creeping in. The nausea. The horrible, unremitting French existentialism lingering in the back of my mind.
"Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness and hath no light?" Sometimes I'm tempted to see this as a purely rhetorical question. No one, of course. Those that fear the Lord and follow his servant have light. Not necessarily, as Lehi shows. Lehi walked for many hours in darkness before turning to God for light. But the light is there, if we seek it. The light is there, as long as we don't give up searching and kindle our own fires, as long as we don't set down roots in this world.
Speaking of roots, I don't know if Nephi meant the first verse to have any relationship to the narration of Lehi's dream, but it always makes me curious because it seems totally unrelated to chapter 7. I checked the old testament for seed references, and most of it is reference to posterity. I wonder if Nephi is making a subtle reference to the fact that the Lord had sent a family with both wicked and good people to the promised land. Deuteronomy 22:9 actually warns against sowing diverse seeds in your vineyard, lest it be defiled. But God saw fit to sow the promised land with all kinds of seed.
But at the same time it could be a reference to the fruit of the tree in the dream. In a metaphor not distant from the olive trees of Jacob 7 or testimony cultivation in Alma 32, Nephi might be alluding to the law of the harvest. Although I'm not sure there was much conscious connection between the two, I feel that Lehi and Alma are getting at the same thing in these verses:
"And it came to pass after I had prayed unto the Lord I beheld a large and spacious field. And it came to pass that I beheld a tree, whose fruit was desirable to make one happy" (1 Nephi 8:9-10)
"Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me" (Alma 32:28).
Living the Gospel doesn't just result in generic blessings. If it were all about obeying the consequences and then interpretting the good stuff that happens afterward as a blessing for obedience, then a testimony would be a pretty flimsy thing, because you can always turn back and say that what happened was chance, and there are always times when you don't get the blessing you were expecting. A key aspect of testimony is understanding, not just knowledge of facts, but a feeling of enlightenment. Lehi followed God's messengers and then prayed and received light and understanding. The Gospel gives us perspective. It's the light by which we see people and things. And it's a pretty comprehensive light. It gives us answers to many of the deepest, untractable problems.
Laman and Lemuel don't get that kind of understanding because they don't ask and because they don't obey long enough to become immersed in the vision. They catch brief glimpses of it, but their eyes are not changed. They can understand the commandments their father gives them, but they can't feel the truth of it. It's like Sunday School answers. People raised in the church have the answers so thoroughly drilled into them that there's nothing left to learn, but in practice, we fail to apply them. Why? Because in practice we usually see with worldly eyes. We've heard someone tell us about the tree, the building, the field, the river, etc., but we don't see them. Instead a dark and dreary waste. And naturally, if all we see is a dark and dreary waste, it's hard to remember what the world is supposed to look like in the light. We fall back into our worldly ways of reacting to people and things. We need prayer and communion with God to bring light to our misty world.
One thing I wondered about this time through is why a tree is a good representation of Christ's atonement. What do the two have in common? The sweetness of the fruit matches the joy of salvation through the atonement, but that doesn't seem like it exhausts the metaphor. The tree is also perhaps a reminder of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. But why should there be a tree of life in the Garden of Eden? What does that tree represent?
I feel like a tree might be a good symbol of eternal life because it is always growing. Eternal life is not a static experience. It doesn't mean being removed from time. Rather, eternal life is a healthy, continual process of growing. Unlike humans, trees continue to grow physically throughout their lives. They always put out more branches. Sometimes those branches need to be pruned, but the tree continues to grow year after year.
Another peculiar element of the allegory is that people seem to be aware of the tree they are heading toward. My first inclination is to say that this is a shortcoming in the metaphor. People who are heading toward salvation often don't have a very clear picture of what they are heading for. They're just grabbing hold of truth and stepping forward. That fits the iron rod image, but the iron rod is strange in it's own way: Why do people want to hold onto an iron rod?
Now that I've asked these two questions, though, I'm pretty satisfied with the tree and rod together. I think that having a vision of salvation, Zion, a perfect world, is an important part of building a testimony (hope for a better world; Ether 12:4). People grab hold of the rod because they have caught a vague but inspiring glimpse of what might be on the other end. But they move forward by small and steady steps, by laying hold of every good gift (Moroni 10:30), not by aiming their rockets toward the destination in their mind and launching. In the process of laying hold of good gifts, their understanding and idea of the destination change.
That's how the mist of darkness gets people to stray. It makes the destination hard to see and therefore hard to believe in. If all you have guiding you is your picture of Zion, you could very well be wrong; you could be heading toward the wrong destination. People leave the rod because they're not sure it's taking them where they want to go; they're not sure it suits their ideals. We need the rod because we need something to correct our picture of Zion when it's wrong. But we also need to see the tree of life through the mists of darkness from time to time to confirm that the iron rod is indeed heading somewhere.
One way I think you have to stretch the metaphor a bit is that some people get to the tree and taste and become ashamed. That's true. Some people are so worried about what others think that they can't enjoy the fruits of salvation. But that makes it sound like most members of the church are already at the tree. I feel like sometimes I'm at the tree and sometimes I'm on the path, holding tight to the iron rod. It would ruin the simplicity of the dream to fix this, but a more accurate way to describe the process might be to place various trees along the path to the big one, each with delicious fruits to sample. Or just a grocery store sample lady. Every so often you get a little sample of the fruit on a toothpick.
Backtrack: It's a bit mind-blowing that you could try the sweetest of all fruits and become ashamed. How does that happen?
It's interesting to me that Lehi would fear that Laman and Lemuel would be cast off from the presence of the Lord. It sounds so passive that way, when the imagery of the verse implies that if anything kept them from the presence of the Lord,it would be their own choice. Nowhere in this verse is there any hard force. There wasn't a monster along the path gobbling up children or picking up people and launching them from his trebuchet into the great and spacious building. There is only soft power: mocking fingers, obscuring mist, confusing paths. If Laman and Lemuel are not in the presence of the Lord, it won't be because they are kicked out. It will be because they never arrived.
Maybe the river is an exception to this. People drown in the river. It seems to suck them in. Of course, they have to decide to go for a swim in the first place, so it isn't taking away their agency, but I think of the river as a sort of addiction or depression that we choose to get ourselves into, after which it is difficult to return.
Verse 34 is pretty strong. Is it really true that all who heed the people in the great and spacious building fall away? I certainly heed more often than I would like. I'm likely to sympathize with them occasionally. But I suppose that if we're not totally committed to the Lord then the devil will get us. As long as he can find a place to sink a hook.
You know I just realized that perhaps because of the movie of this dream that I watched in primary, I've always associated the great and spacious building with Hollywood. Actors and rock stars, those are the people to watch out for. But in reality, my great and spacious building is not Hollywood at all. It's intellectuals and activists. It's Ivy League schools and PETA. Not that Ivy League schools and PETA have nothing good to offer, but they are the mockers who are most likely to get my attention. Who's your great and spacious?
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