M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Letter from the Highlands, July 2002
by Anne Perry

Actually this is not from the Highlands, at least the beginning is not. I am sitting in a hotel in Paris, where I have been for a couple of days, attending a book fair. As always they have made me very welcome, and looked after me wonderfully. If I were to stay in France long, I should end up the size of a house. The food is delicious. So was the food in Italy earlier in the year! Definitely for a diet when I get home!

It is marvellous to travel – with a little self-discipline you can prevent it from broadening the hips, but with a little courage, it can broaden the mind, and that is always exciting. I have never been anywhere yet where I have not found the people likeable and full of feelings that are the same, and so I identify with them, and yet different enough also to make me feel and think new things.

Continued as I have just returned from dinner with an assistant to one of the principals, and her Irish fiancé. What charming and interesting people. We spoke of all manner of things: mathematics, philosophy, religion, politics, history – ancient, medieval and modern, and names and linguistics, particularly in Ireland and ancient Britain. I have loads of new ideas to play with, and new perspectives on understanding all manner of things. What a gift is conversation without prejudice or any pre-set personal agenda!

In this wonderful conversation this young man, Patrick explained several things to me, including non-Euclidean geometry. I had heard of it before, but never understood it. Euclidean geometry makes the most exquisite sense – parallel lines can never meet, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle always equals 180 degrees – half of a circle. These things we either accept as self-evident, or can prove.

But the whole logic of it depends upon a level surface, like a table, or the flat earth as believed in Euclid’s time.

Suddenly I saw light to non-Euclidean geometry. Try the whole thing on the surface of a sphere, like the spherical earth. Then parallel lines will eventually cross each other - twice! The sum of the interior angles of a triangle will be more than 180 degrees. The whole structure still makes perfect sense – it is simply different!

I see it!

Perhaps much of our understanding of the plan of salvation, as taught by Joseph Smith, and encapsulated by Lorenzo Snow – as man is God once was – as God is man may become - depends upon perceiving a different geometry! We are not the creations of God, fallen from Eden – but the children of God, in Eden choosing to begin the long path towards becoming even as He is. We are born of the SAME spiritual elements as He is – NOT different.

There is your spherical base, rather than flat!

What else do we fail to understand, because we have not yet grasped the one thing which makes it all other than how we assumed? Perhaps to do with time? Or space? Or some spiritual quality we are not yet ready to contemplate, let alone understand.

Is it not exciting almost beyond endurance to realize how many possibilities there are ahead of us – learning beyond learning – forever – just as Brigham Young has taught us.

Yet it will be very good to get home again also, especially this time of the year when it is light nearly all night, and the reflections from the water all around make it like living in the middle of a sea of mirrors. Even at midnight the hollow of the sky reflects the sun beyond the horizon and makes arches of light and shadow across the heavens. And dawn at about two o’clock, or a little after, is spectacular, a fire around the edge of the blinds on my windows to the north.

The garden is full of lupins, giant oriental poppies, and the first roses, and curtains of clematis hang from the walls of the courtyard.

My lesson to Relief Society this month was about The Temple. At first I did not know what I was going to say that would expand upon what was simply written in the book. I feel that if I have nothing to ask or to tell beyond that - then we could as easily have stayed at home and studied alone.

But as always when we began to discuss, ideas sprang up, people expressed their thoughts and we all gained. We never got any further than the analogy of a pilot seeking the way home when his instruments were broken, by rising above the clouds until he could see the stars, and because they were fixed in the heavens, navigating by them. The things of the Temple, the eternal perspective and the understanding of the value of what we seek, or at least that it is more important than anything else at all, are the stars by which we set our course.

However we were able to bring many more ideas to share as to what the various clouds might be, which temporarily can obscure our view. We came up with the obvious answers of seeking after wealth or worldly fame. Personally I don’t know anyone who finds those distracting from seeking the Lord. Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young have told us that we should seek all the influence we can, and then use it to do good. It is what you do to get wealth or fame which may be wrong, or if you place it ahead of caring for people, or before honesty or kindness, that it injures. Similarly there is danger in what you will do to keep it when it threatens to slip from your grasp, and if it does, what bitterness or anger may possess your mind. We must place on it only the importance it deserves: which is what good we can accomplish with it.

For most of us the distractions, I think, are more ordinary, and far more difficult to evade.

We also mentioned just regularly being so busy with day- to-day detail that we lose the larger picture, the reason for it all. Perhaps the analogy works of watching the ground as you walk, so you do not trip over the loose stones, the pot-holes etc., and forgetting to look up and see in which direction you are actually traveling! Pot-holes can feel very deep when you have fallen over, made a fool of yourself in front of everyone, skinned your knees and your hands! (not to mention torn your hose, and broken your nails!) But in the scheme of things it’s nothing, it’s the wrong direction that matters.

Oddly enough, we spoke of various kinds of success as destructive. I think just as often disappointment can do terrible damage. One disappointment can be overcome, a string of them is much harder. It is so easy to begin to think that you, personally, have been overlooked when good fortune was handed out. God is answering everyone’s prayers – except yours. This is especially so when what you want so much is a righteous thing, and others seem to gain it easily. I say ‘seem’, because we never know what anyone else has paid – not the fullness of it.

Nor do we know what they have gained, only what they seem to have. And why should they take the bandages off their wounds for us to look at? Part of being able to bear some of the wounds of life is being able to conceal them from others, and therefore from pity, or the speculation as to how you came by them, or even if somehow you deserved them!

How often I have envied people, only to learn later that what I thought so wonderful was actually not at all what I had assumed. We have a culture in the Church of saying that all is well with us, and then at times we each feel desperately alone, as if we were the only person who fails in something, who weeps within, amidst a crowd of successes. Whereas if we only knew it, most of us are feeling the same. It isn’t good to concentrate on the hurts, or to complain too openly, but a little honesty might bring us far closer to each other, and make us realize that we are not alone. A failure in one thing is not failure altogether. We might even find ways to help each other, from a common experience!

A sense of failure can be crippling. We did speak quite a bit about lack of self-worth, of self-esteem and the belief that we can do all that is necessary – but not all at once! There are times and seasons, and to do the job of ‘now’ is vital, not to yearn after ‘then’, and lose the chances of the present. ‘Then’ will come soon enough. How tragic if it comes before we have finished what is needful ‘now’. Then it will be too late to go back and do it the best we can, rather than merely the second best.

We, of all people, who know we are children of God (most of the world does not know that they are), should not feel that we are lacking in the gifts necessary for success. That is false doctrine, and it is a terrible insult to our Heavenly Father – perhaps the worst we could give. Among other things, we are calling Him a liar, and accusing Him of mocking us by commanding us to do things that are impossible for us – and He, of all beings, would know that!

Surely that is not what we think of God!

More likely it is a mixture of lack of faith, lack of courage, and perhaps a lack of diligence to work at things which may well be very difficult to accomplish. But if it were easy, what manner of success would it be at the end, what quality of achievement?

We CAN do it – that is God’s gift to us from the very beginning. Whether or not we WILL do it is our decision – made up of a hundred thousand small decisions reached and acted upon over a lifetime.

All manner of false doctrine can cause clouds of dust and fog which blind us to the stars which give us direction, and remind us of the glory towards which we are struggling. Among such things are the idea that for some it is easy, and for some hard. Easy steps develop no spiritual strength. And how would we know what another’s burden may be? Too often if you receive what you want too soon, you have not yet developed the wisdom or the strength to hold onto it! How tragic to have had heaven in your hands, and let it slip because you did not understand what it was! What great songs of the angels are there for those who are spiritually deaf? Is it not better to abide in grace of heart while you tune your ears to the music of life, and of earth, so that when you are offered the music of heaven you can hear every note of it – all its glory?

It comes back again to trust, as does so much. Do you trust the judgement of God – or not? I need to remind myself of it so often! And I need friends to remind me as well – I forget so quickly. I want things now!

One crippling grief we did not have time to touch on was disillusion. We do not speak of it often, and yet I think it is at the root of many of our deepest pains. The best of our vision is so very high, as it should be, that at times it is particularly bitter to find that those we love and have admired, perhaps set on too high a pedestal, are flawed after all. Sometimes all we have expected was reasonable: courage to face some hard truths, to pick oneself up after a bad fall and to try again, to keep going even when hope has been deferred many times: to have the humility to admit error and to change, even when others are looking, and not necessarily helpful, the compassion to forgive errors – and forget them, (it is wretched to be regularly reminded of one’s mistakes as if they can never be left behind), to try to understand and to LIKE those who are different: the honesty to seek truth whatever it is, comfortable or uncomfortable: loyalty not to leave when the going is tough.

There are so many virtues we would like to see, and sometimes we cannot. Sometimes those we love and trust betray us. Bitterness is very easy to step into. And yet how often do we betray the best in ourselves, and thus betray the Saviour who believes in us?

How often do we hear of people abandoning the Church because members, or even leaders, have behaved less well than we believe they should have. Of course they, like we, should be without sin, but none of us is! No leader, however highly called, is the Gospel. Our covenants are with God – and God only.

It needs a great deal of strength to live up to that. We all like to travel with companionship, and not alone. We look to others to guide, to comfort, to show the way, to tell us what is right or wrong. Yet our testimony of what is true, our understanding of the teachings of God, are our own, and should be able to stand no matter what happens. In the silence and the darkness at the end of the world, there may be no one else to hold out a hand, or lift up a torch. The light must be within.

If somebody we had relied on stumbles and shortens their steps, then should we not lengthen ours? It is a wicked and a slothful servant that needs to be commanded in all things! Who stands at God’s elbow and says ‘do this’! and ‘do that’? We can learn at least some things: trust in God, kindness to others, courage to keep going forward whether we can see or not, however we hurt inside, integrity to have a clean heart and an undivided mind, compassion to forgive, love to nurture anything God has made whether someone else is there to lead us or not, because we know of a certainty that these things are good - in any circumstances, any place on earth or beyond it, in light or in darkness.

Then we will see the stars and stride towards them, whatever the earthly weather around us.

‘Per ardua ad astra!’

(By labour to the stars – roughly!) But upwards, always upwards.

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