The First and the Last

The shape of scripture's favorite sentence

The Hebrew writers had a beloved structure called the chiasmus: a sentence, a poem, or a whole chapter built as a mirror — ideas laid down in order, then repeated in reverse, A-B-C-C-B-A — so that the meaning does not sit at the end, where our essays put it, but at the center, at the turn, where the mirror folds. The Book of Mormon is full of them, and its masterpiece is Alma 36, where Alma tells his conversion as one long mirror — descending step by step into the horror of his memory, and rising step by step out of it — and at the exact center, at the fold of the whole chapter, one sentence: "I remembered also to have heard my father prophesy... concerning the coming of one Jesus Christ... Now, as my mind caught hold upon this thought, I cried within my heart: O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy" (Alma 36:17–18). The turn of the greatest chiasmus in the record is an act of remembering, and the remembered thing is Christ. Keep both halves of that; this essay is going to need them.

Because the chiasmus is not just scripture's favorite literary form. It is, we want to suggest — plainly, as our reading — the shape of the plan of salvation itself, and the shape of time: and the name written at its center fold is the name the Lord announced from the Kirtland pulpit on the welding day: "I am the first and the last" (D&C 110:4).

The chiasmus of creation

Lay out the great mirror. The record of creation states the first half in one verse: "For I, the Lord God, created all things... spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth" (Moses 3:5). Everything ran spirit-first: the spiritual creation, then the physical — every soul a spirit before it was a body; every tree, the verse says, before it was in the ground. That is the descending arm: spiritual, then physical — A, then B — the pattern of the first half of every existence, including yours: you were spirit; you were embodied; you are here.

Then death — the fold in every mortal story. And now watch what the restored gospel builds on the far side of the fold, because it is the mirror image, exactly: in the house of the Lord, the living perform physical ordinances — real water, real hands, actual bodies kneeling and speaking — in behalf of the dead, who then receive spiritually what was done physically. Physical, then spiritual — B, then A — the first half of the plan run backward: we, who were created spiritually and then physically, now act physically so they can receive spiritually. The whole economy of salvation for the dead is the second arm of a chiasmus — the descending order, reflected and reascending — and the two arms are welded at the fold by the One whose title is the fold: the First and the Last, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end — the Lord who stands at the center of the mirror the way "I remembered Jesus Christ" stands at the center of Alma 36, the way the shining stone sat at each end of every Jaredite vessel. Time itself, in this reading, is chiastic: it does not run in a line away from God; it runs down into embodiment and back up through it, and everything on the descending arm has its answering member on the ascent. "They without us cannot be made perfect, neither we without our dead" is what a chiasmus says when it becomes a doctrine: neither arm means anything without the other, and the meaning of both lives at the center.

The instrument knowledge is sealed into

Now the question the mirror raises: why does the plan insist on the physical arm at all? If spirits existed first and persist after, why route everything — creation, probation, ordinance, resurrection — through bodies?

Here is the answer this whole study has been circling, and it can finally be said plainly: the body is the instrument that knowledge is sealed into. Think of how a musician learns. Not by comprehension — by repetition in the body: the same passage a hundred times, the same bow-stroke a thousand, until the knowing migrates out of conscious effort and into the hands themselves — "muscle memory," we call it, and notice what it is: knowledge that has become part of you, retrievable without deliberation, nearly impossible to forget. A pianist who has not touched a keyboard in twenty years sits down and the hands still know. That is embodied knowledge — and it is a different kind of knowing than comprehension: sturdier, deeper, welded in — and mortals can only manufacture it one way: with a body, through repetition, over time. The three-strand cord, run through flesh.

And now look at what the gospel actually asks of us and see it fresh: the gospel is relentlessly physical. We do not contemplate baptism; we are bodily immersed. We do not meditate on the atonement weekly; we take bread into our mouths, water onto our tongues — the tokens of his sacrifice, physically eaten, week upon week upon week. We kneel. We lay on hands. We gather, walk, fast, sing, serve with our arms. The ordinances are the gospel taught to the muscles — the doctrine of Christ, drilled into the instrument that does not forget — because heaven is not trying to produce people who know about the way, but people in whom the way has become reflex: written, as the new covenant promised, not on tablets the hands hold but in the parts that do the holding. And this is why the resurrection matters so fiercely in the economy of knowledge — "whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us" (D&C 130:18): the resurrection restores the instrument with its training intact. What you sealed into yourself here — by the Spirit, by repetition, by time, in the flesh — comes back with the flesh, glorified. The body was never the soul's prison. It is the soul's conservatory — and the whole mortal assignment, said in one line, is: practice, until it is sealed.

Sure knowledge

Because sealed is the goal — and the revelations define the summit of all learning in exactly those terms: the "more sure word of prophecy" is "a man's knowing that he is sealed up unto eternal life" (D&C 131:5). Sure knowledge — knowing made permanent — and the Sealer is named: the Holy Spirit of promise, the Ratifier of all covenants, whose teaching office was described by the Lord in the double phrase that contains this entire essay: the Comforter "shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance" (John 14:26). Teacher and Remembrancer. The muscle memory is the body's side of the operation; the sealing is the Spirit's side — one process, two surfaces: truth drilled into the instrument from without, ratified into the soul from within, until the knowing can survive anything, including the grave. That is what the sealing power is, in its inward application: the divine pedagogy that makes knowledge un-forgettable — Elijah's welding, performed on the mind. Alma's chiasmus turned on a remembering; every soul's does. And the entire apparatus of the church — the weekly table, the repeated sessions, the calendar of gathering — is the Remembrancer's curriculum, running until the remembering no longer needs the reminder.

The lengthened days

Which gives its full meaning to one of the most quietly astonishing mercies in the record — stated in the second chapter of the Book of Mormon's first great sermon, and easy to read past: after the Fall, "the days of the children of men were prolonged, according to the will of God... their time was lengthened... for he gave commandment that all men must repent; wherefore, their state became a state of probation" (2 Nephi 2:21).

Lengthened. On purpose. Mortality's duration is not an accident of biology; it is a granted extension — and Alma names what the extension is for, in the phrase that should reframe every birthday you have left: "this life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God" (Alma 12:24). A time to prepare to meet God — the final exam is the Presence itself; the whole course is training to abide him, to endure the glory that consumes the unprepared; and the days were stretched long because the training is embodied, and embodied learning takes repetitions, and repetitions take time. Seventy, eighty years of weeks — some four thousand sacraments, if you take them all — is not God being slow with us. It is the Teacher sizing the semester to the students: enough Sundays, enough kneelings, enough mornings of the same prayer, for even the slowest hands among us to get the music into the muscle. The lengthened days are strand three of the cord, issued in mercy's measure.

Desire compresses the timeline

But — and here the doctrine turns exhilarating — the semester's length is the maximum, not the mandate. Nothing in the plan requires you to learn at the slowest permitted speed. The revelations are explicit that the pace of the school is throttled by exactly one variable, and it is not aptitude: everyone receives "that which they are willing to receive" (D&C 88:32); the Lord's own mortal curriculum ran "grace for grace... until he received a fulness" (93:13), and the until has no fixed date — it arrives when the receiving fills. And the standing promise puts the summit inside mortality's reach in the plainest possible grammar: "every soul who forsaketh his sins and cometh unto me... shall see my face and know that I am" (93:1); "the days will come that you shall see him; for he will unveil his face unto you, and it shall be in his own time, and in his own way, and according to his own will" (88:68) — his time, yes; but sought, prepared for, desired, now. The veil thins at the speed of wanting. The aperture is the throttle. Which means "prepare to meet God" is not a euphemism for "get ready to die" — it is an invitation with a due date you help set: the more the meeting is desired, the more the practicing intensifies, the more the Spirit can seal per week — the same lengthened days, lived at higher voltage, and the exam available early to any student hungry enough to request it. The days were lengthened for the reluctant. They were never meant as a leash on the eager.

What the night closes

And now, at last, Amulek's warning can be read at its true depth. "This life is the day for men to perform their labors... the night of darkness wherein there can be no labor performed" (Alma 34:32–33) — and behold what the night actually is, in the terms this essay has built: death closes the conservatory. The instrument is returned. The spirit persists with everything it sealed in — and, we would suggest carefully, as reasoning held with open hands rather than declared doctrine: only with what it sealed in. A spirit without its body can no longer train new reflexes into flesh; the workshop where knowing gets welded into muscle is shut; what was embodied remains, retrievable, yours — and what was postponed waits for hands that are no longer there. "That same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life... will have power to possess your body in that eternal world" (34:34): you keep, precisely, what you became. The urgency of "do not procrastinate" was never about God's patience expiring — his hand is stretched out still, and the teaching goes on beyond the veil. It is about lab hours: the one classroom where knowledge can be sealed into an instrument closes at sundown, and everything after runs on what was practiced before.

And then the chiasmus performs its final mercy — because the plan's answer to the night is the mirror's second arm. The dead, workless in the dark, without hands — and the living, lending them ours: the physical arm of the ordinance performed by proxy bodies, so that souls past the fold can receive spiritually what they can no longer do physically. Our repetitions — the same session, again and again, the reps we need — became their rescue; the conservatory's students, practicing, hold the recital for those who ran out of term. The night wherein no man can work is real. And the family was designed so that no one faces it alone: the First and the Last stands at the fold of every life, at the bow and the stern of every crossing, holding the two arms of the mirror together — and the whole instruction of the lengthened days comes down to this: practice now, seal now, want it now — for the day is given, the days were stretched for you in mercy, the Teacher is in the room, and the piece you are learning, measure by measure, week by repeated week, is the one you will play at the meeting the whole semester was always preparing you for: the day you meet God — and find that your hands, after all those years of practicing, already know the way home.

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And now, as I said unto you before, as ye have had so many witnesses, therefore, I beseech of you that ye do not procrastinate the day of your repentance until the end; for after this day of life... then cometh the night.