In 3 Nephi 15:9, the risen Christ says to the people, “For unto him that endureth to the end will I give eternal life.” After having faith, after repenting, after making our covenants, joining the spiritual body of Christ and receiving the Holy Ghost, our final task is to Endure to our inevitable mundane end.
When I was growing up, this step always seemed kind of dreary and dreadful. Endure is such a grating word. Usually, the things I have to endure are painful, sorrowful, and sometimes boring. I have to endure the dentist. And when I’m enduring being at the dentist I spend my time wishing the end of my time at the dentist would come.
Typically, when we teach about enduring to the end, we speak only about the trials, sorrows, and sufferings of life. This is why it must be endured — it’s hard. But there is a lot more to it than that. Sure there are some fun parts also, but a lot of life is kind of boring. In fact, I’d wager that the majority of our time spent on Earth ends up falling into the category of repetitious and boring. How much of our day is spent waiting? How much of our day is spent simply chewing food? How much of our day is walking from one place to another? How much of our day is spent in boring conversations where we repeat the same words in the same order over and over again? Every second of your life your heart has been ordinarily thumping in your chest and your lungs have been expanding and contracting, just keeping you alive. What could be more ordinary than taking a breath? Much has been said about the pains & trials as well as the thrills & joys of life. But seldom do we focus on the ordinary, mundane, and sometimes boring moments that comprise everything in between.
Milestone Mormonism
We do this, I think because a lot of us live what I’d call Milestone Mormonism. One of the hallmarks of being a member of this Church, especially if you grew up in it, is that there are a lot of milestones to chart your progress. Blessed as a baby, baptized at 8, young men/womens at 12, various mile markers throughout our teenage years, then we graduate high school and seminary, then we go to the Temple, go on missions, go to school, get married, have babies, etc.
Living by milestones is easy. It helps us know what is coming and what we have to do to get there. But living by milestones can also make life more challenging. When we see life as a series of steps that must be completed in the right order to receive our salvation, we begin to focus on the milestones at the expense of everything else. The problem is that the older we get the distance between milestones grows larger and larger. And some milestones never come at all because they aren’t up to us. Measuring our lives by milestones is a good way to be miserable, anxious, guilty, and ashamed — but it is no way to live a life.
In his book The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff explains,
“a way of life that keeps saying ‘around the next corner, above the next step,’…makes it so difficult to be happy and good that only a few get to where they would naturally have been in the first place—Happy and Good—and the rest give up and fall by the side of the road, cursing the world, which is not to blame… If we add up all the rewards in our lives, we won’t have very much. But if we add up the space between the rewards, we’ll come up with quite a bit. And if we add up the rewards and the spaces, then we’ll have everything—every minute of time that we spent [being alive].”
So, how do we begin living like this? How do we learn to count the milestones and all the time between? How do we learn to not just endure to the end, but to endure to the end well? In order to do so, it might be helpful, within this Mormon context, to pull back the curtain a bit and ask what living an eternal life is like. How does God approach his work? How does God approach living?
Living like Creation
The best and most obvious example of God’s work is in Genesis — the creation of this very good green Earth. For six eternal days or 4.5 billion years by our reckoning, God works and watches patiently as the forces of this universe cool and condense and burn and accrete until the seventh day, when he declares it very good and rests from his labors. In his book Letters to a Young Mormon, Adam Miller writes,
“But notice…, that God doesn’t wait until after his work is done to declare that it is good…He doesn’t wait until after the world is created. He doesn’t wait until the official end has passed. Even while the world is unfinished — even while the world is half-baked, imperfect, and incomplete — God already “saw that it was good.” Every day he sees that the world is good. This is the way God works. In God’s way of working, the goodness we expect to find only at the end, the rest we’ve been hoping to enter at the finish, is always bleeding right back into the middle and the beginning. From God’s point of view, life is itself a working sabbatical where each task is already seen as ‘good’ because each job has become an end in itself. Each job is already good because it’s something worth doing for its own sake.”
Not only does this speak to God’s unending patience towards works in progress like us, but it shows us how we might approach enduring, or living, to the end. We must approach each day, each task, each meal, and—most importantly—each person as an end in themselves. Waking up is good, wishing you didn’t have to leave your bed is good, eventually getting out of bed is good, showering is good, toweling yourself off is good, remembering you didn’t actually use soap is good, showering again and using soap this time is good, preparing breakfast is good, eating breakfast is good, leaving the house is good, driving home because you forgot something is good. On and on our lives go. And it’s good. Breathe in and breathe out. Good. Breathe in and breathe out. Very Good.
The act of breathing is life in a microcosm. It is the most familiar, simple, and mundane act that we have been doing for our entire lives. Give your attention to that familiar act. Breathe in. Feel the air cool your nose, rush through your sinuses, feel the air in your throat, feel your chest expand. Notice the sensations. Notice the expansion and contraction of your lungs. Feel the breath being warmed by your body. Exhale. Feel the air on your lip. Now repeat. Practice breathing for its own sake. As if breathing were the only thing worth doing. Your attention will be nagged at by an itch, a cough, an uncomfortable chair, a looming test. Notice your quivering attention, so easily distracted, then with compassion return to breathing as an end.
Beautifully Banal, Magnificently Mundane
This way of giving attention to our lives helps us endure to the end, or better yet, to live life as an end. Eternal life will come, yes, but it will still be life. Joseph Smith told us as much when he revealed that the same sociality that exists here will exist there. Heaven and God haven’t transcended mundane, they have made the mundane sacred. In another essay, Adam Miller writes that “God has a body? Fingers and toes? He’s married? He must, every day tie the sash on his white robe? His immortal lungs perpetually expand and contract?…Heaven? Where people are still married, still work, still have children, still change diapers, still share casseroles? Heaven, for Mormons, is what seals our union with the mundane rather than terminates it.”
When we’ve given them our attention, treated them as ends in themselves, the very normal ordinary things we do everyday take on a new life. In fact, our lives take on a new life. The Spirit is able to reveal to us the sacred beauty of banal boring things. We will learn to relax and live into our salvation. God will show up in the smell of pine and dirt, the compassion of strangers, the taste of a simple dinner with friends, the crispness of morning air. We can learn to say, along with Edward Abbey, famed environmental writer and one of the first Rangers in Arches National Park,
“I am pleased enough with the surfaces – in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or lover…, the sunlight on the rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind – what else is there? What else do we need?”
Through living the way of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we are able to wake up and live our lives as ends in themselves. We get to feel what living feels like. Not wishing we were somewhere else or with someone else doing something else. But we get to be here, now, in the present wherever we find ourselves, with whoever we’re with, doing whatever we’re doing—as an end in itself. We get to live in and through our joyously beautiful, mundane, ordinary, imperfect, half-baked lives. Eternity weaves its way back from the future to our present and we get to practice living eternity right now. Instead of being out there in our eternal future, we can remember that we have already been welcomed into the rest of the Lord and eternity can show up right now.
