For Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, or Part Five, make your choice and click away.
Now, we come to a talk by the Presiding Bishop of the church at that time, Bishop John H. Vandenberg, who gave a talk called, "Turn Heavenward Our Eyes". Bishop Vandenberg gave us a plethora of references, the first of which we'll consider today.
We are no strangers to William Wordsworth, neither to this poem, since it was quoted earlier in Conference this same year. Bishop Vandenberg expands the quote in his talk:
The Quote
"William Wordsworth must have given a great deal of thought
to the mystery of life
when he was inspired to write his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,”
in which he says:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother’s mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.”
The poem itself keeps on going - I think this poem is so often referenced because it echoes our doctrine that each of us were with God before mortality came upon us. I don't hear about this very often outside of my faith, and that's what seems to make this poem so unique in literature - mostly that it came from Western canon, and not from Eastern religious thought in regards to reincarnation, which would have been more likely.
There was some early Greek philosophic thought from Plato, mostly, that said there was a preexistence which again tied closely to the idea of reincarnation:
"...they say that the soul of man is immortal,
and at one time has an end, which is termed dying,
and at another time is born again, but is never destroyed.
And the moral is, that a man ought to live always in perfect holiness.
"For in the ninth year
Persephone sends the souls of those from whom she has received the penalty of ancient crime
back again from beneath into the light of the sun above,
and these are they who become noble kings and mighty men and great in wisdom
and are called saintly heroes in after ages."
The soul, then, as being immortal,
and having been born again many times,
and having seen all things that exist,
whether in this world or in the world below,
and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance
all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything;
for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things;
there is no difficulty in her eliciting or as men say learning, out of a single recollection -all the rest,
if a man is strenuous and does not faint;
for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection."
I don't remember learning that the Greeks believed in reincarnation, but I guess at least some of them did. It's also certainly possible that Wordsworth may have combined this idea with what he knew of Christianity at the time - it does sound somewhat similar to his poem.
In my faith, we're taught differently - we were born spiritually of heavenly parents, and lived with them and were taught by them before birth. Mortality then became a time of testing, to see if we would live up to the best knowledge we had available, and there's only one shot at life. Afterwards, we are judged and placed where our choices on Earth will make us the most comfortable. And the only reason we have that choice in the first place is because of our generous Elder Brother, Jesus Christ, who made that way possible for us.
I know not everyone believes as I do, and that's okay. We've all forgotten, and we each have to find our way back to remembering our own way. The Lord is patient and steady with us all, and I'm trying to be that way with myself as well.