The Door

The third question

Our first series asked: what is growing in you? The field of the heart, the seeds of truth and lies, and how to tell them apart. Our second asked: what can you hold? The vessel, the fire, the wine, and the wedding it's all for. This series asks the last question, the one the other two were always leading to:

Whom will you meet?

Because the gospel's final promise is not a feeling, a doctrine, or even a blessing. It is a face. "Every soul who forsaketh his sins and cometh unto me... shall see my face and know that I am" (D&C 93:1). "Sanctify yourselves... and the days will come that you shall see him; for he will unveil his face unto you" (D&C 88:68). The scriptures end where they've always been pointing: "and they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads" (Revelation 22:4).

Between every soul and that face hangs something scripture calls the veil. This series — we call it Rending the Veil, because rending is scripture's own word for how veils open — is about that veil: what it actually is, why it exists, what it's made of, and the road that leads through it. And we should say plainly at the door what this series is not: it is not about the sacred things of the temple, which are honored by pointing toward them, never by describing them. Everything here stays in the open scriptures — where, it turns out, the veil doctrine is taught more fully than most of us were ever shown.

What the veil is

Start with what the veil is not: it is not a punishment, and it is not a wall God built to keep us out.

The veil is a mercy. Unveiled glory would overwhelm the unprepared — when Moses brought Israel to the mountain to meet God face to face, "they hardened their hearts and could not endure his presence" (D&C 84:24); the distance wasn't God's preference, it was the people's capacity. Love that arrives before readiness isn't love; it's overwhelm. So the Bridegroom paces himself — the veil is his patience, woven: a covering that thins exactly as fast as the one approaching can bear.

And notice where scripture locates it. When the heavens opened to Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, the record says: "the veil was taken from our minds, and the eyes of our understanding were opened" (D&C 76:19). From our minds. The veil is not out there, hanging in space between earth and heaven. It hangs in us — in the understanding, in the heart. Paul says the same thing about Israel's inability to see Christ in their own scriptures: "the veil is upon their heart. Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be taken away" (2 Corinthians 3:15–16). The veil is a condition of the seer, not a barrier of the seen — which is the single most hopeful fact in this whole subject, because it means the veil's location is somewhere you have access to.

Two more facts complete the picture. Hebrews gives the veil its most tender identification: we enter the holiest "by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh" (Hebrews 10:20). The veil is his flesh — the way through God's covering is God's own body, offered; every approach to the face goes through what he did in the flesh, for us. And Matthew records what happened to the great temple curtain at the moment that offering was completed: "the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom" (Matthew 27:51). From the top. Not torn open by climbers from below — opened by God, from above, over his Son's finished sacrifice. The way through the veil was opened from the far side, before any of us started walking.

The veil's true name

So if the way is open from God's side, what still hangs between us and the face? The Book of Mormon answers in one of its most electric passages — the Lord's own words, given at the summit of the book's greatest vision story:

"Come unto me, O ye Gentiles, and I will show unto you the greater things, the knowledge which is hid up because of unbelief... Rend that veil of unbelief which doth cause you to remain in your awful state of wickedness... and then shall my revelations which I have caused to be written by my servant John be unfolded in the eyes of all the people" (Ether 4:13–16).

There it is: the veil's true fabric, named. Not distance. Not God's reluctance. Unbelief. The covering that remains is woven of the things we won't yet trust him about — and the Lord's verb assigns the rending to us: rend that veil. God's side has been open since the ninth hour; the remaining curtain hangs in the heart, and it comes down the way it went up — one belief at a time.

And notice what the Lord says happens when it comes down: then shall the revelations of John be unfolded. The Book of Mormon explicitly ties the rending of the veil of unbelief to the opening of John's writings — and it does it twice, from both of its great summit visions: Nephi, shown the end of the world, was told to stop writing because "the apostle of the Lamb of God" would write the remainder (1 Nephi 14:25); the brother of Jared's full vision was sealed up until the day of John's unfolding (Ether 4:16). Both summits point at John. Which gives this series its charter, straight from the canon: a journey through the veil, walked by way of the book of Revelation, is exactly the itinerary the Book of Mormon says exists.

The veil you are wearing

But go back to Hebrews' identification — "through the veil, that is to say, his flesh" — and read it one step further, because it holds a discovery that reorganizes everything.

If his flesh is a veil, then flesh is the kind of thing a veil can be. And you are wearing some.

Think about what actually happened when you were born. The forgetting — what we sometimes call the veil of forgetfulness — did not descend on you as a separate event. It came with the body. You passed behind the veil by being born into flesh; the covering and the tabernacle arrived together, as one thing. Which suggests the veil is not only "in the mind" as a figure of speech. It is the condition of unrenewed mortality itself — the natural man, the carnal mind, the flesh in its fallen state, standing between the spirit inside you and the God outside. Paul says it with the veil-word hiding in plain sight: "the carnal mind is enmity against God" (Romans 8:7). And the great veil-promise of D&C 67 says it in the clause almost nobody quotes: "the veil shall be rent, and you shall see me — not with the carnal neither natural mind, but with the spiritual" (D&C 67:10). The carnal mind is the veil's weave. Ether's unbelief, Section 67's fears and jealousies, and King Benjamin's natural man are three names for one fabric — and the fabric is not hanging somewhere in the distance. It is worn.

This is also, we believe, part of the wonder of the condescension: when the Word was made flesh, God voluntarily put on the veil-material — wrapped himself in the very covering we wear — so that for thirty-three years, the veil between God and man was walking around Galilee, and the way through it was opened in his own body, on a cross, at the exact hour the temple's curtain tore.

And if the veil is worn, then the rending has a mechanism — and the revelations name it with perfect consistency: the renewing and sanctifying of the mind and the body. Listen to them line up. Paul: present your bodies a living sacrifice, "and be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:1–2) — body and mind, one renewal. The Doctrine and Covenants, describing what the Spirit does to the covenant-faithful: they "are sanctified by the Spirit unto the renewing of their bodies" (D&C 84:33) — the body itself, renewed by the Spirit, as a covenant blessing. And the summit promise we have already met, now readable in full: "if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light... and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things... and the days will come that you shall see him" (D&C 88:67–68). The body filled with light is the stated precondition of the unveiled face — because the body is the curtain, and a curtain filled with light is a curtain you can see through.

Scripture even shows us the process in two faces. Moses came down from the mountain and "the skin of his face shone" — the veil thinning from the inside out, so visibly that Israel, unable to bear it, asked him to cover it: they put a veil on the man whose veil was dissolving (Exodus 34:29–35). And the brother of Jared's great moment is described in the language of sight itself giving way: the Lord "could not be kept from within the veil" of the man's seeing — as if the fabric of his mortal vision had gone transparent, like the stones he had carried up the mountain: molten, refined past opacity. Sanctification is the veil going to the furnace.

One guardrail, held firmly, because an old and destructive lie lives one step from this doctrine: the body is not the problem. Ancient false teachers taught that flesh is a prison and salvation is escape from it — and that idea is a weed, root and branch. The restored gospel teaches the opposite: the body is the prize of the whole plan, the thing spirits shouted for joy to receive. The veil-condition is the flesh unrenewed — never the flesh as such — which is exactly why the gospel's answer is renewal and not escape, sanctification and not shedding, resurrection and not release. The final rending of this veil is not the body's removal. It is the body's glorification: the curtain not torn away, but transfigured — "this mortal shall put on immortality." The fabric was never the enemy. The fabric is the bride's own dress, mid-alteration.

And here this series joins hands with the last one, because you have seen this body before, under another figure: the wineskin. The vessel being made supple to hold the new wine, and the veil being renewed toward transparency, are the same body undergoing the same sanctification — the vessel is the veil. Every practice the last series taught is veil-work: baptism soaks the fabric; the sacrament works it weekly; the Spirit's fire refines it; and the two great commandments launder it — "let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God" (D&C 121:45). Kindness and clean thought are literal veil-treatment. You are not waiting for a curtain somewhere to open. You are wearing the curtain — and everything the gospel asks of you is quietly making it sheer.

Seven love letters

So open Revelation — and begin where it begins, with something most readers hurry past to get to the beasts and the trumpets: seven letters, dictated by the risen Lord himself, to seven congregations in Asia (Revelation 2–3).

Read them one way, they're ancient church correspondence. But read them as a sequence — and the early Saints of Asia would have noticed that the seven cities sit on a single postal road, a circuit a letter-carrier would walk in order — and something else appears. Look at what the Lord promises "him that overcometh" at each stop, laid end to end: the tree of life → the crown of life → the hidden manna, the white stone, and a new name → the morning star → white raiment, and a name confessed before the Father → a pillar in the temple of my God... I will write upon him the name of my God... he shall go no more out → to sit with me in my throne.

That is not seven separate prizes. That is one ascent: love, life, name, star, garment, temple, throne — the stations of an approach, ending at the seat beside the King. And each letter carries a matching warning — a lost first love, a fear of suffering, a divided loyalty, a counterfeit intimacy, a reputation without life, a weak grip at the door, a lukewarm self-sufficiency — and here is the pattern that makes the letters a map: every station's pitfall is a veil-thickener. The things the Lord warns against are, every one, made of the same fabric Ether names — a form of unbelief, a thread in the curtain. Which is why one revelation in our own dispensation can serve as the whole journey's spine: "Strip yourselves from jealousies and fears, and humble yourselves before me... and the veil shall be rent, and you shall see me" (D&C 67:10). Fears and jealousies — the letters' own warning-list — named as exactly what must be stripped for the veil to open.

We offer the frame plainly as our reading: the letters are the received text; the road between the cities is geography; reading the seven stops as stations of one soul's approach to the face — a kind of long betrothal, the Bridegroom's courtship of the bride — is our lens. But it is a lens the letters keep rewarding, as this series means to show: seven stops, each with its gift, its counterfeit, and its thread of the veil — ending at a throne, a wedding, and a face.

The door opens with a question

Before the first station, one more discovery — about how the door actually works. And for this we go to the Book of Mormon's own two summit-visions, because they reveal something about heaven's manner that changes how you pray.

Two men, centuries apart, climbed exceedingly high mountains and were shown everything — Nephi (1 Nephi 11–14) and the brother of Jared (Ether 2–4). Lay their experiences side by side and the same order emerges, step for step, almost like a liturgy: desire, belief, ascent — and then, in both accounts, before showing them anything at all, God opens with a question. To Nephi: "What desirest thou?" (1 Nephi 11:2). To the brother of Jared: "What will ye that I should do?" (Ether 2:23).

Heaven's protocol is interrogative. Revelation does not begin with God announcing; it begins with God asking — requesting the human's desire before unveiling a thing. The door through the veil opens by consent, never by force, because the One behind it will not overwhelm; he invites. Which means the first practical step of this whole journey is embarrassingly available: the door is opened by wanting, spoken. "What desirest thou?" is already the standing question. Most of us have simply never answered it out loud.

The two doors

And here the two mountain-climbers give the journey its most comforting gift — because when heaven examined their belief at the door, it asked them two different questions, and the difference describes every traveler who will ever read this series.

Nephi was asked: "Believest thou the words which thy father saw?" — do you trust the testimony you inherited? He did, and the door opened. The brother of Jared was asked something far starker: "Believest thou the words which I shall speak?" — will you trust words not yet spoken at all, on the character of the Speaker alone? A blank check, signed in advance. He did, and the door didn't just open; it says he "could not be kept from within the veil."

Two doors into the same room. One enters through the fathers — the child trusting the parents' witness, the convert trusting the missionary's, the reader trusting Nephi's — testimony inherited, and honored by heaven as a fully valid key. The other enters through advance trust — the pioneer's door, for souls standing where no testimony has reached, trusting the Person before the content. Neither is lesser. Most of us are offered Nephi's door first — and it is not the lesser door; the Spirit erupted in rejoicing the moment Nephi walked through it. But some readers of this series stand at the other one, with no inherited witness they can lean on — and the brother of Jared is proof that door opens too, all the way.

So the journey ahead has two guides walking it with you: Nephi and the brother of Jared, the two men who climbed the two doors to the same summit — one by pondering, one by building; one through his father's words, one through a blank check; both to the face. They'll appear at nearly every station, having been there first.

The road ahead

Here, then, is the itinerary — nine essays, seven stations and a threshold at each end:

The door (you are standing at it). Then First Love, where the journey begins and the tree of life waits. Myrrh, the station of suffering, where hope anchors inside the veil before you ever pass it. The White Stone, where you learn the name no one else can read. The Morning Star, where beholding begins to change you into what you behold. The Garment, where the name you wear and the life you live are measured against each other. The Open Door, which no man can shut — the station nearest the veil itself. The Knock — where the whole journey turns inside out, and you discover who has been standing at the door all along. And The Wedding Day, where the veil does what veils were always for.

One promise as we set out, and it is the Lord's, not ours: the way is already open from his side, torn from the top, consecrated through his flesh. The only curtain left is the one Ether names — and it responds to belief the way darkness responds to a lit lamp. "Strip yourselves from jealousies and fears... and the veil shall be rent, and you shall see me. Not with the carnal neither natural mind, but with the spiritual" (D&C 67:10). The journey is real, the destination is a face, and the first station is the one every love story starts at and every tired believer eventually needs to find again:

first love.

That's where we go next.

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Rend that veil of unbelief... and then shall my revelations, which I have caused to be written by my servant John, be unfolded.