Approaching Zion: "Whithersoever Thou Goest"

Shepherds Keep Their Day Jobs

   In the bleak midwinter
   frosty wind made moan,
   Earth stood hard as iron
   water like a stone

​     ― Christina Rossetti, "A Christmas Carol"

​When I saw the Shekhinah of the Lord, the thing that surprised me the most was the utter meekness of it all.

You would expect God to appear with some fanfare, with an entourage, streaming clouds of glory, to the sound of trumpets heralding the arrival of the Almighty (like Ezekiel's Merkabah).

But instead of cymbals and neon lights, there was stillness.  I felt a bit like the young shepherd boy peering down at the unassuming babe in the manger ― with awe, but also with a hint of, "This is what all the fuss was about?"

I often wonder what happened to the shepherds after that fateful night.  The scriptures say:

   And the shepherds
   returned [to their flocks],
   glorifying and praising God
   for all the things that they had
   heard and seen.

(Luke 2:20)

That's a bit anticlimactic, isn't it?  After witnessing the heavens open, and choirs of angels singing, and receiving a glorious message of "good tidings of great joy" . . . the shepherds returned to their fields.

Back to work.  Monday morning rolls around.

It reminds me of the Zen proverb:

   Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

   After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

The first part of our lives is spent seeking after God.  But once we find Him, the question arises:

   What now?

What Does it Mean to "Follow" Christ?

   Snow had fallen,
   snow on snow,
   snow on snow,
   In the bleak midwinter
   long ago

​    ― Christina Rossetti, "A Christmas Carol"

Great, you've found Jesus.  Now what?  How do we "follow" Him? 

I think Christianity has struggled because it doesn't seem to have a handle on where Christ is going.

You see, Jesus is on the move.  We don't want to be where He was 2000 years ago, or a hundred.  We want to follow Him where He is now.

In the Gospels we read about a man who came to Jesus one day and said:

   Lord, I will follow thee
   whithersoever thou goest.

(Luke 9:57)

"Whithersoever thou goest."  How gutsy!  Almost foolhardy.  Are WE prepared to follow Christ whithersoever he is headed?

Now, this disciple had no idea where Jesus was leading them to, of course.  None of the Lord's followers did.

The crucifixion was the furthest thing from their minds as they followed the Savior into Jerusalem at the Triumphal Entry, watching Jesus ride upon an ass to shouts of Hosanna, feeling the breeze of waving palm fronds upon their cheeks.

None of the followers foresaw the nails and wood, or the weeping women whose tears could not quench Golgotha's thirst.

Not even the mother of James and John, who loved and worshipped Jesus, understood where the Lord was going (Matt. 20:20-21).

Do we?  (Even with the benefit of hindsight?)

Sister Zebedee asked the Lord awkwardly for her sons to sit with Him in His kingdom, on his right and on his left.  Isn't the kingdom where we want to go, too?

Jesus answered:

   Ye know not what ye ask.
   Are ye able to drink the cup
   that I shall drink of?

(Matt. 20:22)

Which cup was this?  Not the cup of Cana filled with wedding cheer and salubriousness.

No, the cup Christ meant was the grail of Gethsemane ― the one weighed down with great drops of blood and bitter dregs.

I can picture the Lord turning to the eager disciple who promised to follow Him whithersoever, with tender sorrow, knowing the man would not be found at the foot of the Cross in a coming day.

   Then all the disciples
   forsook him,
   and fled.

(Matt. 26:56)

Everybody wants to follow Christ to the temple, to the kingdom, to the celestial realms of glory.

But to leper colonies?  To hold hands with the unclean dead (Mark 5:41)?  Nobody seems to want to follow Him into the holes and nests and dens.

With great compassion I imagine the Lord turning to this man, this fellow whose heart brimmed with loyalty, and I think the Savior tried to give him a glimpse into the future, into the borderless expanse we call the straight and narrow path that is filled with love's bane:

   Foxes have holes,
   and birds of the air have nests;
   but the Son of man hath not
   where to lay his head.

(Luke 9:58)

It was as if the Lord were saying, "Are you sure you want to follow where I am headed?"

​If so, then we best start by throwing away our pillows.

New Wine vs. Old Whine

   Our God! Heaven
   cannot hold Him,
   nor earth sustain;
   Heaven and earth
   shall flee away
   when He comes to reign
​
  ― Christina Rossetti, "A Christmas Carol"
​
In 1901, Richard Bucke (1837-1902) published a book called Cosmic Consciousness in which he described this mystical experience:
​
I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city. The next, I knew that the fire was within myself.
 
Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe.

Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then.
 
I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure, all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love.

     *****

Following Christ is scary and requires faith because He is leading us beyond our traditions into new territory.

We're all lined up in a row, holding out our canteens for Him to fill, wanting Him to pour His wine into our old bottles, but He can't. 

We wish for Christ to produce fruit from our dead trees, our withered vines.  But where He's taking us, we need newness, even a new heaven and a new earth (Mark 2:22).

​Remember, hydrogen and oxygen feed fire, while water extinguishes it.  We require new eyes, new thinking, to formulate spiritual cells that arrange atoms into new molecules carrying greater charity than we have yet experienced.

Imagine a white blood cell that has lived its whole life in the liver.  All it knows is the processes of the liver, doing its business in the darkness of the bloodstream.

But one day the white blood cell has a remarkable, out-of-cell, visionary experience: it sees it is part of something much greater, this thing called a liver.

And the white blood cell goes out for drinks with its friends and tries to describe the majesty of this incredible organ that it belongs to, which they cannot conceive, being interior to it.
 
But one of its buddies, a red blood cell, goes home and prays about it, and is shown a vision in which it sees that the liver is actually NOT the godlike thing its friend supposed, but is in fact part of something even greater.

The red blood cell goes back to its friend and says, "Don't worship the liver!  For I have seen this extraordinarily complex and weird-looking organism called a human being."

So you see, it actually goes on and on and on: through planets and stars and galaxies and universes.

You and me?  We are living inside a living organism we call God, which we experience as the creation, which is alive.  And whatever aspect we think is "it" . . . believe me, there's more!

And what is Christ doing?  Well, He's doing what He has always delighted in doing: healing the body.

See Christ Being Born Today

   Breastful of milk,
   and a mangerful of hay;
   Enough for Him,
   whom angels fall before.

​   ― Christina Rossetti, "A Christmas Carol"

Sin is symptomatic.  Sin is invariably symptomatic of separation.

Now, awareness of sin does not erase the sin anymore than diagnosis of the disease cures it.  How does one repent?

Assuming the patient wishes to be healed, how does the physician treat the patient?  What is the balm, the medicine?  What is Christ’s great healing art?

For the Healer does not heal, but acts as a conduit through which the patient finds the path to heal himself.

Healing means wholeness, which is found only in the workings of love.  Healing arises from reconciliation.

Christ does not bring wholeness by setting Himself apart, but within. 

He does not seek to be elevated above others, but to be One with all.

For what heaven, or what kingdom, or what religion, could possibly contain the whole of our Father?

He spills forth with healing in his wings into all things, through all things, around all things.

To "follow" Christ is to embody the reconciliation of all forms of alienation.  This is what the prophets refer to as "atonement."

All things shall be reconciled except those who choose to remain separated, for whom it is as if "there had been no redemption made" (Alma 11:41).

Notice, though (this is important), that those who choose to remain separated ARE redeemed, but they persist "as though" they were not, according to the scripture.

We have been raised with many theories of the atonement; these are helpful to some extent, but I have found them all to be incomplete.

I mean, there are many ways to describe the scent of a rose, but do not confuse the description with the thing itself.

Words are inadequate to capture the Word.  The Word must be experienced.  Nevertheless, the Logos is best understood through love.

I asked earlier, what is Christ up to now?  Just as we saw 2000 years ago in Bethlehem, so now Christ continues the embryological work of becoming.  We are seeing a new earth and a new heaven being birthed from the old, in which Christ receives a new body.

This might sound strange (and heretical), but the ongoing divine work of cosmogenesis is as much the body of Christ being born as was the babe Immanuel being born in the manger to Mary.

In other words, Christ's condescension is continual and recursive and eternal ― as is His resurrection and exaltations.

Stained Glass

   What can I give Him,
   poor as I am?
   If I were a shepherd,
   I would bring a lamb.

   ― Christina Rossetti, "A Christmas Carol"

Before anyone freaks out, or begins sharpening their pitchforks, let me just say that we are not going to get a "complete picture" while in mortality.  We are here to 'walk by faith.' 

So relax, we are not graded on how perfect our understanding is.  To the contrary, we are graded upon our humility and awareness of our genuine ignorance.  We truly are little children.
 
None of our belief systems are completely adequate, as yet, for what God is up to.  Religion, theology, and philosophy all strive imperfectly to describe something transcendent, something that cannot be expressed.

   They cannot be written,
   neither can they be uttered
   by man.

(3 Ne. 19:34)

So let's remain humble about what we believe.  There's a lot more we have to discover.
 
The trajectory of God's work is towards synthesis, not separation.  We are heading towards "one fold." 

The thing that unifies us is not a belief system, but a broken heart and contrite spirit.

We are like God's stained glass.  You would think being stained glass is a bad thing, and that God wants us all to be clear, white windows ― but no, that is not how an artist creates such marvelous patterns!

The pure white light of God must needs pass through our pane of colored glass, as a revelation to the world, so that we see His light in new ways.

Everyone thinks Jesus was hue-less, sinless, like crystal-clear glass, without stain.  But no, Jesus was made like as we are, a Window of creation, a stained glass masterpiece who bent God's light into the spiritual spectrum of the rainbow.  Like Him, we too are the "light of the world," He said (Matt. 5:14).

Sure, we could all sit outside on the lawn in the noonday sun, basking in the unadulterated white light, soaking in its perfect rays.

But the work of creation, which was manifest through Christ (and each of us), is to play with color and shadow to reveal beauty unseen in the undifferentiated polychromatic white light.

God's light must shine through prisms to be Seen, revealing the rainbow of His glory.  Everyone is an expression of this light, a window through which divinity is instantiated into the material.

The point is, the return back to God is not back to the original purity of the white light: it is to a new reality created by the majesty of God being shone through infinite panes of stained glass.

"Sorry, Tim, but how is this going to help me pay the grocery bill?" someone asks sincerely.  "What’s the use of any of this spiritual philosophy in my practical life?"

True, this isn’t going to make us any money.  (And why I haven't quit my day job.)

But I keep writing in an attempt to breathe upon the smoldering coals of faith, to fan our vision of God into something sweeter, softer, and more soaring than we have been raised to believe.

For we cannot follow Christ to where He's leading us without experiencing ourselves as the Christ.  We must each have the gnosis, the epiphany, that we are One.

Sam Hinds wrote:

"We find ourselves situated as co-shapers of vast clouds of unmanifest potential. Every choice we make introduces limits into this field of potentiality, foreclosing upon countless possibilities in service of granting actuality to those lucky few that become real events.

"If we reflect deeply upon our condition as creative agents, as participants in the ever-unfolding process whereby indeterminate potentials collapse into concrete actualities moment-by-moment, we are inevitably brought to the boundary conditions of finitude and infinity, being and nonbeing.

"There are rare moments when, by some unknown grace, we may be carried to an experience of the borders of the boundless, where we almost begin to taste the edge of divinity that dissolves the tongue along with the tasting. This domain of Being can’t be spoken of or represented because speech and representation, by their very nature, scar the infinite by imposing boundaries.

"It is here, at this edge, that we may be flooded with a profound longing. We may wish to voice this longing, to somehow get a hold of it by naming it—as if this could achieve some first step toward resolving the yearning.

​"It is here that we stumble into the terrain of mysticism."

Mount of Transfiguration

   If I were a Wise Man,
   I would do my part;
   Yet what I can I give Him:
   give my heart.

   ― Christina Rossetti, "A Christmas Carol"

When God parted the veil of His flesh "in plain humility" (Ether 12:39) and I entered into His body, as Nicodemus reentering his mother's womb, I had just returned from a work trip to Boston.

Before my trip I asked my prayer group that I meet with weekly to remember me in their prayers, because I had big spiritual plans for my time away from five boisterous children and my work email inbox.

I flew to Boston and all my hopes collapsed in a metaphorical heap; my trip was a dud and I returned home exhausted and disappointed.  (At least I was able to visit the Monet exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Art.)

The next morning, October 3, 2025, was a Friday and I took the day off work.  After the kids left for school I spent some time in prayer.

When I opened my eyes, all was light, as if a nuclear detonation had seared my retinas, and the whole world had turned to shades of white ash.

But what’s more was the light pulsed as if it were alive.

I found myself in an ocean of potentia and seemed to be stepping into it, first my toes, then my ankles, until I had entered the sea and it swallowed me, embraced me.

I just went with it.  I became the sea and all things in it; I became the light dancing upon its surface, the waves and the sand and shore.  I was the seagull and the seagull's cry.  Wherever I looked, I was it, as if all were one.
 
And I sang!  This was funny, because there arose this feeling of freedom and playfulness, like I was a little child playing at recess, and in this joyfulness came unbidden the words, I don't know why or from where, but I sang, "Let there be light!"

And then I wasn't singing so much as I was the song: the sound of creation.

When I returned to my senses the entire world, the trees and mountains and sky and clouds ― everything, everywhere I looked ― were shades of white. 

"Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow."  It was as Isaiah said: "white as snow" (Isa. 1:18).

I sensed the whole of creation as wool woven into a new garment draping the glory of God, rising and falling as linen upon His chest.

​Afterwards, reflecting on the experience, I thought of Job, whom the Lord asked, "Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?" (Job 38:22).

I was speechless because this time, during this experience, I had no escort; there were no personages who greeted or conversed with me.

Instead I beheld, and realized for the first time, as I witnessed the pulsating light like the breath of God, standing as it were within His heart, that the whole of creation was God ― and yet, He was greater still than that.

And like countless others before me, and those that will come after, I knew that the life of men was found in the love of God.  I wanted to share that love with everyone, and everything (the following week a spider crawled across my desk at work and instead of smashing it I lifted it with a tissue and took it outside).  A lingering warmth filled me where I didn't want to hurt a fly.  I wished only to proclaim with the trump of God, "Peace on earth, good will toward men!"

And like the shepherds of long ago, when all was said and done, and my natural sight had returned, I picked myself up and returned to my fields.

To Taco Bell and Walmart, of course, on my afternoon errands.

   Chop wood, carry water.