Children of the Promise

I have a friend in Peru, a young woman that I have known for about five years. She is of a fairly mixed lineage with beautiful Inca features: jet black hair, aquiline nose and high cheekbones. She is a staunch Catholic and got very burned by a radical Christian group several years back. Over the years, I have given her a couple of copies of the Book of Mormon and asked her to read it. She has never responded other than to read the odd page here and there.

She works for me now and I had pestered her about it just before year’s end and asked when she was going to read it. Anyway, I came back to Peru and met up with her after my three weeks trip home. I asked all of the niceties, how was your Christmas and New Years??? She said, “o, bien, bien… Adivina que estoy leyendo. Guess what I am reading.”

I actually had no idea and when she said, “The Book of Mormon!” I was surprised. She then went on to tell me that it was like a story and that it had her gripped and that she was already almost finished with 1Nephi. She is reading five chapters a night. She told me that she can see the people in her mind’s eye and that the book has come alive for her. She sees them as she thinks they might have looked. Then she said, “They are like my family.”

I felt that powerful impulse of the Holy Ghost and told her, “That, I think is more profound than you imagine. I think that that is literal because these are your family, your distant ancestors and this is a book, first of all for you and your people and not necessarily for me and mine.” In all of the years I have lived among the Lamanites of Peru 11 now, I have never felt a sense so strong of someone identifying with the characters in the Book of Mormon. I am still kind of overwhelmed by it.

Book of Mormon Intro

I have re-read the Book of Mormon again. This is not exactly a news flash, rather, something I do twice a year since 1986. Before that, I read it once annually since 1978 but first read it all the way through in 1973. I have read the Italian and Spanish translations each a couple of times. “Why,” you may ask, “Would a sane person read the same book over and over again with such frequency.” The answer comes only with reading it over and over again in reality and in simple terms, it is not just, “A book.” In my estimation, it is simply the most profound and poignant book to have been written in human history.

By the way, it is not the only book I read either. I have read the Bible three times and the Koran once (I understand that to a Muslim, I have not read the Koran but an English translation of it but, that is ok too). I have read much of the writings of Buddha, the Apocrypha, much of the Pseudepigrapha and the Gnostic gospels. I have read works by Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon, Julius Caesar, Churchill, Marx, Hitler, Jefferson, Voltaire, Che Guevara, Mao, Aldus Huxley, Jimmy Carter, Plato, Yeats, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Socrates, Aristotle, Solon, Shakespeare, Heaney, Keats, Shelly, Milton, Dickens, Payne, Swift, Steinbeck, Llosa, Einstein, Hawking and Kaku and lots of others, ad nauseum really. Simply stated, nothing compares with the Book of Mormon for content and relevance.

Since I first started to read and then immediately re-read the book each year, sometimes a page per day and sometimes ten or twenty, the book has overwhelmed me with its contemporary relevance. Joseph Smith translated the sacred volume by the gift and power of God and hence, it is not so much a translation as it is the word of God spoken directly to us in our own language of modern times. Indeed, even the strange names in the book were each spelled out by Joseph Smith to avoid misunderstandings by his scribes. These people spoke a vernacular of Hebrew with Egyptian overprint, much like the Jews at Elephantine Egypt but corrupted by time and separation until the book itself says that no one knew their language… Hence, Joseph Smith’s need for the support of God to translate it was met and we have this remarkable volume essentially direct from God to us and to serve as a guide to us. I love it and treasure it above all other books.

As a result, I have decided to create this Blog and dedicate the space to my thoughts on the Book of Mormon this year.