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The Words of the Covenant

The Ten Commandments read as what the text twice calls them — the covenant itself: a marriage document with a ring called Sabbath, deposited under the mercy seat beneath the wings, re-mediated from stone to heart and folded into the beatitudes. Keeping the covenant is not a transaction but the portrait of the Bridegroom worn as a state of the soul — and the terms open onto proximity: the presence, the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the gathering home under the wings.

5 essays

  1. 1The Words of the CovenantThe Ten Commandments, read as what the text twice calls them — the covenant itself: a marriage document with a ring called Sabbath, deposited under the mercy seat and beneath the wings; the operating conditions of proximity to God; and the terms by which the Almighty has bound himself — so that every kept commandment is a draw on pledged heaven rather than a bid for its attention
  2. 2The Law Before the TabletsThe Joseph story read with the Ten Commandments in hand — the second table shattered by the brothers, the first table kept by a slave in Egypt, the fifth commandment healed at the reunion, and the Sabbath administered at national scale by a man reading rhythms no stone had yet prescribed — with a coda on the two great bondages, and which one the Sabbath came from
  3. 3The Fold in the LadderPeter's seven attributes and the Lord's beatitudes, read as one covenant document — the sermon delivered at Bountiful as "my commandments," the prohibitions of Sinai as silhouettes the beatitudes fill, the first epistle of Peter as thirty years of the sermon carried verbatim, and the ladder of 2 Peter 1 folded at its summit so that charity and the Holy Ghost meet in the center
  4. 4Cry unto the VoiceThe pattern of those who receive the gift of the Holy Ghost — assembled from the Book of Mormon's own case files: a nation on its knees, a persecutor mid-collapse, two kings, a prison full of enemies, and a lonely hunter in the woods — and the same six marks, in the same order, every time. The anatomy of a broken heart, and the liturgy that turns out to be eight words long.
  5. 5Under the WingsThe gathering of Israel, read as what its own charter-passage says it is — a covenant-return: the family called by testimony back in under the wings, to the mercy-covered terms, into the rest which is the fulness of his glory — with the watchmen seeing eye to eye like the cherubim they understudy, the waste places rebuilt by repairers of the breach, and the three Kirtland visitors restoring one covenant-architecture: root, terms, and weld