Alma 36

In this chapter Alma is sharing his own personal story of how he came to know the joy of the Gospel,.  He is speaking with his son Helaman. What I like here in this chapter is the stark contrast.

I was racked with eternal torment.

I could remember my pains no more.

My soul was racked with all my sins.

I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more.

I was tormented with the pains of hell.

What marvelous light I did behold.

I saw that I had rebelled against my God.

My soul was filled with joy.

Isn't life just like this? It is so filled with opposites and with extremes. I have friends who lost their 17 year old son to cancer. Oh, how they grieved! The grief remained deeply planted until their first grandchild was born. The excitement of that birth brought healing and joy into their lives once again.

Sometimes as in Alma's story the truth we need to know lies within us personally.  That truth is that we as humans can always change. We can learn from our mistakes and make better choices. When we do the past is gone, the pain is gone (I, the Lord, remember them no more) and we are free to experience joy.

But much pain and sorrow is not of our own doing. Survivors of horrendous deeds find joy again. How is it possible to survive a concentration camp and then laugh again? How can you be sexually abused and later have a wonderful and happy intimate relationship?

I have certain books that I return to over and over. One of those is called "The Faithful Gardener" by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. She shares her deepest belief that there is a faithful force that will rise from any tragedy if we will let it.

"Through the lives we lived, I learned the harshest gift-lesson to accept, and the most powerful I know - that is, knowledge, an absolute certainty that life repeats itself, renews itself, no matter how many times it's stabbed, stripped to the bone, hurled to the ground, hurt, ridiculed, ignored, scorned, looked down upon, tortured, or made helpless.

"I know that those who are in some ways and for some times shorn of belief in life itself - that they ultimately are the ones who will come to know best that Eden lies underneath the empty field, that the new seed goes first to the empty and open places - even when the open place is a grieving heart, a tortured mind, or a devastated spirit."

"I am certain that as we stand in the care of this faithful force, that what has seemed dead is dead no longer, what has seemed lost, is no longer lost, that which some have claimed impossible, is made clearly possible, and what ground is fallow is only resting - resting and waiting for the blessed seed to arrive on the wind with all Godspeed. And it will." (p. 74-75)

A Prayer

Refuse to fall down.

If you cannot refuse to fall down,

Refuse to stay down.

If you cannot refuse to stay down,

Lift your heart toward heaven,

And like a hungry beggar,

Ask that it be filled,

And it will be filled.

You may be pushed down,

You may be kept from rising,

But no one can keep you

from lifting your heart

Toward heaven -

Only you.

It is in the midst of misery

That so much becomes clear.

The one who says nothing good

Came of this,

It's not yet listening.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Related thoughts:  

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."  Viktor Frankl

Psalms 30:5 says, “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

D&C 121: 7-8

My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment;  And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes.