Twelve days after Christmas the decorations are packed away, I’m back at work, kids are back at school, and the long month of January looms. I left the lights up around my front door, but the cozy feelings of Christmas have faded. This is normal. The Christmas magic I’ve worked to create for my family has a pretty short half life. Like light, it’s impossible to capture and preserve.

Light cannot be trapped. Even between two mirrors, a beam of light will bounce back and forth but eventually decay to heat because no mirror reflects light perfectly. Since light can’t be saved it has to be newly generated from an energy source—for example from nuclear fusion in a star, or through heating a metal filament until it glows, as in an incandescent light bulb.

Without frequent renewal, faith, like light, becomes dim. I’ve seen it flicker in myself, and I’ve watched it fade in friends and family and people I admire. When that happens I miss the times when we functioned like mirrors for each other, allowing our light to bounce back and forth between us, making it last a little longer. I believe that serving as mirrors for one another’s faith is something we do for each other when we worship together.

Twelve days after Christmas, the coming of the Magi is remembered in churches that observe a liturgical calendar. On this Feast of the Epiphany, I’m thinking of them. The Three Wise Men are known for their gifts to the baby Jesus, but perhaps they should be just as well-known for their faith. Scripture doesn’t say where they came from, what prophet they were reading, or whether they ever knew Jesus’s teachings after he began his ministry thirty years later. But they had apparently come some distance, and were willing to travel wherever it took and for as long as it took to find Jesus. They prepared for the journey by study, they undertook it by faith, and they brought gifts with them because of their confidence that their journey would end in the fulfillment of prophecy. And when the star that went before them stood over where Jesus was, they “rejoiced with exceeding great joy.”

I wonder whether their joy lasted. Did they look back over their shoulders on the way home, needing one more glimpse of the star? Did they search the sky for it later when the light that the Christchild lit in their hearts inevitably began to fade?

How does a person develop faith and keep it shining over the course of a lifetime? This is the question I’m thinking about as I pack away strings of lights and star ornaments. Paul said faith is a spiritual gift. Alma said a desire to have faith is enough at first. Jesus said faith as small as a mustard seed can become enough to move mountains. But keeping faith is seldom easy. President Harold B. Lee said a testimony is as hard to hold as a moonbeam, and it must be “recaptured every morning of your life.”

At times I have felt that among the spiritual gifts Paul lists in his letter to the Corinthians, I didn’t get much of the gift of faith. I may have started as a small seed like everyone does, but I don’t feel that my faith has grown into a large mustard tree like the kind seen in ancient Palestine. Nevertheless, I’ve realized that in fact I do have the gift of faith. I’m just not a mustard tree. I may be more like a yew, an evergreen shrub that grows slowly but with great longevity. You have the gift of faith as well. Maybe you are like a red maple—strong and fast-growing. Maybe you’re like aspen trees, whose strength comes from being part of a collective. Maybe you’re a spruce, beautiful and fine-textured. Or maybe you’re like a palm tree whose seed takes a long time to germinate, then grows to become tall and graceful. You might be a deciduous tree in a dormant phase. I have been that, too. Maybe you are still a sapling and not sure what you’ll become. In a favorite Christmas carol of mine, a poet imagines Christ as a source of shelter and nourishment: an apple tree.

Like the Magi, each of us is on a journey of uncharted paths and unknown length, navigated by faith. We carry gifts. Maybe your gift is something visible like teaching, performing music, or planning events. Other gifts are more private. Maybe you provide the gift of friendship to someone at church. Maybe the simple fact of your presence holds the door open for someone else. Maybe your gifts are most needed outside of Sunday worship, in visiting people who need to be ministered to. Maybe your gift is that you have faith like a mature and well-developed tree that provides for the needs of others. Whatever your gifts are, they can serve to amplify the faith of yourself and others.

The season of Epiphany is meant to remind Christians of the various manifestations, or “epiphanies” of Jesus’s divinity. This season, I long to renew my faith that Jesus came to fulfill the prophecies of Isaiah, to bring good news to the poor, healing to the brokenhearted, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed. I want to keep faith in Jesus’s teachings to love God and one another, and to feed his sheep.

I want to renew my faith in the future. Jesus never preached despair. Remember what the prophet Jeremiah wrote to the Israelites who were captive in Babylon? Even in that hopeless time he told them to build houses and live in them, to plant gardens and eat their fruit, marry and have children, and seek the welfare of the city where the Lord sent them, and pray on its behalf, for in its welfare they found their own welfare.

Epiphany concludes as Lent begins, the season of preparation for Easter. I want to renew my faith in the ultimate promise that Jesus made to Martha and the disciples: “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.”

It’s a whole year before another Christmas season. I’m asking myself how I’ll be able to keep the star in sight over the coming months. In other words, how does a person keep faith over life’s long journey? One way is to show up and share our gifts. Others are to re-read the stories and the poetry of the scriptures, to pray, to make good choices, to wrestle with hard questions, to find a friend to share my questions with, and to find meaningful spiritual practices, like spending time in nature and listening to sacred music.

The light from our closest star is freely given to all. Trees are perfectly tuned to receive it, as their little green solar panels absorb light and spin it into physical growth. Likewise, the light of God’s love is the energy source that builds faith. May we receive that light, renew it daily, and reflect it upon one another.

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Emily Parker Updegraff lives in Wilmette, IL with her family and has published essays and poems in Exponent II, Dialogue, Irreantum, and other journals.

Art by Melissa Tshikamba.

This piece is included in our special Advent print issue of Wayfare. To receive a copy in the mail in time for Advent this year, become a paid Wayfare subscriber or place an order here by October 31. To read more from this issue, click here!

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I will continue to create the universe today
right where God left off.

Little pockets of chaos
Somehow survived the ordering
and I feel moved to move upon them
as in the beginning the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters.

I will move upon my backyard today
and the weeds will be subdued
and the flowers can grow
and it will be good.

I will move long-distance
upon a broken heart
and leave a little balm
and it will be good.

I will move upon
the hunger of my children
with salad and spaghetti
which is Emily’s favorite
and it will be good

and even they will say so.
And I will move too upon their minds
leaving a little poem
or an important thought
and that will be even better
though they won’t say so.

I will move upon birth defects and cancer
with five- or ten-dollar checks
to help the scientists
who are battling the big chaos.
And I will move upon world hunger
with a twenty-four-dollar check
for little Marilza in Brazil
and it will be good.

I will move upon the kitchen floor
and the dirty laundry
and a blank piece of paper
and at the end of the day
have a little creation to show.

And the evening and the morning
are my eighteen thousand
and ninety-sixth day
and tomorrow will start another one.
And here is chaos and there is chaos
and who knows if creation
will finally be done?

Carol Lynn Pearson (1939-2026) was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, and social critic. She wrote more than forty books, including poetry, plays, fables, memoirs, and social commentary.

This poem first appeared in Beginnings & Beyond, published by Cedar Fort in 2005.

This piece is included in our special Advent print issue of Wayfare. To receive a copy in the mail in time for Advent this year, become a paid Wayfare subscriber or place an order here by October 31. To read more from this issue, click here!

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Christmas, everyone knows, is a holiday for children. This is its magic.

It’s the day we celebrate the fact that, as Abinadi put it, “God himself” chose to “come down among the children of men” and join us by becoming a child (Mosiah 15:1).

At Christmas, we celebrate the fact that God became a baby.

Ten fingers and ten toes? I assume. Five or six pounds of flesh and bone, dimples, a shock of dark hair, eyes squeezed shut, already hungry, sucking his thumb? I imagine.

And all this—God as baby, Christ as child—is pivotal to “the great plan of the Eternal God” (Alma 34:9). This, somehow, is how God sets in motion his wild plan to save us.

Christmas isn’t just a reminder that God came as a child to save me. It’s a clue to how God, in his coming, saves me.

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I am a hardcore partisan of a well-celebrated Christmas. My wife imposes a strict no-Christmas-music-before-November 1 rule, which is the compromise between my preference for anything post Labor Day and her more traditional attitude toward Thanksgiving Week at the earliest and then rationed thereafter. Truth is, I will sometimes smuggle in some Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby like I’m reading Bulgakov in Soviet Russia, thrilled in secret by the promise of what might be coming.

I’m not exactly sure when this fanaticism arose. It’s adult-onset, of that I am sure. There’s something about the magic of the Christmas season I see through the eyes of my four children that feels both evanescent and immanent in ways that divine light often does. The Christmas season is divinity. I feel close to heaven during those magical weeks.

One aspect of my fandom is clear, though. I do not love Christmas just in the easy times of American affluence and physical security that I can easily take for granted. I know this because I have experienced Christmas both ways, in the lap of security and hanging on to an edge, badly. If, following Tolstoy, each good Christmas is good for similar reasons but each hard Christmas is uniquely hard, the story of my Christmas 2008 was uniquely hard.

Our oldest child was just born days before.

It should have been our best Christmas.

Instead, our world was falling apart.

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My grandfather didn’t see the births of his six daughters. The first was because he was posted to a Canadian Air Force training base during World War II. The year was 1944, and he was allowed home on one harvest leave, hoping it would fall on the due date, but the harvest came and went and the baby never arrived. She was born soon after their desolating farewell at the train station. He did come home at Christmas to hold her for the first time and bless her at church, but he was called away again after just one day. My grandmother says his hands shook when he held her.

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The song itself is believed to be over four hundred years old, though it’s new to Joan when she first hears Julie Andrews’ voice ringing over the sandy wash of the LP. Firestone presents Your Favorite Christmas Music, volume 4. The record sleeve is done up to look like a Christmas gift with an elaborate red bow, mistletoe sprouting from the middle as if it had grown there. And the song feels like a gift as she cradles her fussy one-year-old boy to her chest and sways to the lullaby. Rock you, rock you, rock you. The melody settles somewhere deep inside her. She hums along and pads through the quiet house by the light of the tree.

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Often when we think of Christmas, we remember the splendor: the beatific vision of the miraculous Mary, the angelic heralds, a star called out of the night’s black ink, the professional magicians with expensive gifts for the toddler, the strategic battles with the treasonous King Herod, the anointed prophet the infant would become.

We also remember the census and the famously oversubscribed inn where the Messiah was born. In the language of Luke 2:7, Mary “birthed her firstborn son, swaddled him, and placed him in a feeding trough because there was no space for them in the inn.” Jesus’s mortal parents tried to find lodging in a faraway town, probably in a private home run like an ancient Airbnb, and they ended up in the ground-floor garage where the animals were stabled. Exceedingly pregnant and straining under the pressure of a state dictate to gather for a census, young Mary gave birth in the ancient, dirty equivalent of an attached barn and then stuck the baby in a feed box because she had no bed for him. What mother lives like that? What child is born in a manure-spattered hovel and sleeps where the donkeys, goats, and cattle eat their hay?

Homeless people, that’s who. They do it all the time. They don’t have much choice.

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Why should I wish to see God better than this day? —Walt Whitman

It didn’t look like Christmas in the desert, but we always knew when it was coming. Citrus trees hung heavy with fruit. The golden late-afternoon light turned orange and pink faster. And the chill in the air found its way under our flimsy windbreakers as soon as the sun sank behind the horizon. It was only in December, when the scorching summer days had finally surrendered their heat, that we could stay outside under the high sun from the minute school let out until the streetlights came on. That’s when we heard Mom’s whistle echo through the neighborhood, like some wild birdsong, calling us home for dinner.

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Facing a growing epidemic in the late nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hawaii initiated a controversial law that ripped apart families in the name of public health. Leprosy had afflicted Hawaiians for years, and the disease spread faster than medics could contain or understand it. Still decades away from the discovery that a simple regimen of antibiotics can cure leprosy, many societies believed that isolation was the only way to contain the disease.

So in 1866, at a high point in the epidemic, a desperate King Kamehameha V authorized the Board of Health of Hawaii to establish leper colonies on a remote peninsula of the island of Molokai. Infected persons would, under government orders, bid their families farewell and board ships to Kalawao, where they lived in squalor until the disease took their lives.

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The night is soft and dark around me, my movements muted and fuzzy. I pull myself up and arch over the cradle, gathering my infant to my breast. I wrap my arm around his soft, warm head as he calms and begins to nurse. I close my eyes and lean my head back, half asleep in the faceless still of night. My body wanders into the memory of a still night in Bethlehem, hills ringing with the songs of angels, and a night sky strangely lit by a blazing star. I peek into a stable and find a manger. I see a young mother, spent from her labor, and a tiny babe, wrapped in swaddling clothes. I watch the mother, half asleep on the straw by the manger. She wakes at the baby’s cry and lifts him gently in her arms. She gazes at her child, unmoved by the sounds of the stable. Tiny, half-focused eyes center on her face and the child’s small fists still their hungry movements as the mother brings the infant to her breast, cradling his soft head in the crook of her arm.

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Why did Jesus come as a baby?

Jesus the infant has an enduring power to capture the imagination of the Christian heart. I bet if you close your eyes, you can see the ample round curves of a baroque Baby Jesus, or the strange solemnity of a medieval Baby Jesus. According to scripture, Jesus had to experience a complete mortal life if his divine grace was to have the power to transform all human experience. One inescapable fact of mortality is that we were once all babies. That’s reason enough for Baby Jesus, and that’s reason enough to worship him.

That God would and did subject himself to the vulnerabilities of his own flesh and others’ was a tremendous act of faith as well as love. But I’m not convinced that the theological reasons for Christ’s condescension fully explain our delight in Jesus as a newborn. Why do we revel in his babyness? Why so many cherubic Holy Infants?

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The bright-purple Advent banner at St. Thomas Episcopal Church caught my eye as my two daughters and I drove along Main Street. We decided, on a whim, to pull over and attend the worship service there before our five-hour journey home, arriving just in time to slide quietly into the back row of wooden pews. The sanctuary’s A-frame ceiling rose like folded hands in a prayer posture, the honey-colored wood beams converging toward a large, bright window behind the nave. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, rows of worshippers in fleece jackets and ski caps exuded both outer and inner warmth. The altar was modest and luminous, lined with candles flickering like small promises on the cold winter morning. Behind the altar, the snow-capped mountains rose, solemn and enduring. Their silent presence felt devotional, as though they were keeping vigil alongside the worshippers gathered within. We peeled off our coats, and I found myself exhaling as my body settled and relaxed.

The topic of the sermon was time: the passing of time, the relentlessness of time, the cruelty of time, the gentleness of time, and, most poignantly, the bending of time. “It is in moments when time stands still,” the priest said, “—moments of transcendent beauty, awe, and joy, as well as paralyzing moments of agony and sorrow—that Christ in-breaks.” The priest introduced two Greek words that are used to define time: chronos and kairos. Chronos suggests quantitative time that can be measured in seconds, hours, days and years, while kairos is qualitative time, measured by significant moments of meaning. Jesus is “predictably present” in kairos, the priest suggested, if we are willing to receive Him.

Despite the years that have passed, I haven’t forgotten the sermon I heard on that first Sunday of Advent, and how it felt to be held in that space of shelter and sanctuary, carved from wood and light.

The word advent, from the Latin adventus, means “coming.” During Advent, we prepare and look forward to the coming of Christ as the Babe in the manger, but we know, of course, that Christ has already come. “Jesus has already brought the kingdom of God near. He has already stretched out His hands to heal and to bless. He has already been broken on the cross and defeated death. He has already poured out His spirit. So why do we re-enter a season of waiting each year? What are we waiting for?” Perhaps, as Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren suggests, we as Christians put our hope in not just one coming of Christ, but three: the coming of Christ in the incarnation, the Second Coming of Christ in the last days, and “the coming of Christ in our present moment, through the Holy Spirit’s work and through Word and sacrament.”1 Advent encompasses all three “comings” of Christ, past, present, and future. Ancient yet urgent. Chronos and kairos.

As a hospital chaplain, I experience both chronos and kairos on a daily basis. Time marches, time drags, time stills, time transcends. Time can be so gentle, allowing space for healing, connecting, and hoping, and in the very next hospital room, time can be so cruel, robbing patients and families of the chance to say goodbye. Chaplains are witnesses, holding space and watching for grace as time moves between chronos and kairos.

In this season of Advent, I offer four glimpses of kairos from my experiences as a chaplain, where the in-breaking of Christ bends time. Perhaps these glimpses will allow you and me to pause and to “remember that we do not bring the kingdom of God to the world through our own effort or on our own timeline. We wait for one outside of us and outside of time.”2 Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this presciently when he wrote from prison to his fiancée that “for the greatest, most profound, tenderest things in the world, we must wait.”3 Just like that middle space, that Holy Saturday, between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the space between the celebration of the first Advent and the waiting for Christ’s ultimate return is “rife with contingency and unpredictability.” However, in this space of waiting, we find love “that remains even amid its weariness.”4 Love sustains us as we wait. Love breaks through as “plea and gift and sign,”5 interrupting and bending time through moments of kairos.

Come, Lord Jesus.

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There was food. Not just some
treats, but dinner—down to the
gluten-free lasagna made to let 
one sister’s mother-in-law know 
she was remembered and welcome 
as often as she came. There were 
games: including the one like 
musical chairs, but with 
questions instead: stand 
up and scramble for an 
open seat if your hair
is brown, or if you’re 
birthday’s in the spring. 
Stand up and scramble for
a chair if you’ve been 
listening to Christmas 
music since before 
Thanksgiving—and again 
if you’ve been listening 
since July. But most of all, 
and best for all, there 
was the annual crazy
Christmas sweater
contest. 

My wife’s entry was very 
meta: an ugly sweater she’d 
decorated with a half-dozen 
tiny ugly sweaters. But the 
competition was stiff. 
Alongside found pieces
from the nearby DI and 
classics like “Fleece 
Navidad,” there were 
a few that challenged the 
very conventions of the genre:
like the Christmas Special Sweater, 
complete with a slot to slide 
in a smartphone as if it were 
a TV screen and play clips
from Charlie Brown or 
It’s A Wonderful Life— 
or the conjoined twin
sweater two literal 
sisters wore. 

I wasn’t, of course,  
invited to attend, 
but still it’s fun  
to imagine those two
girls, on opposite 
ends of the years
we’ve come to call
youth, laughing as
they rush together
to the open chair
in the question game. 

And no one called out
stand up if someone
you should have been 
able to trust made 
choices that hurt you. 
No one said stand up 
if pain you might have
wished to keep private
became public when 
your father’s arrest
made the evening news. 
No one said stand up
if you’re reeling but
determined to find joy
in the midst of this
world’s darkness. 
But they stood up, 
and they laughed
as they stumbled
toward the open 
place in a circle
of women who
loved them.

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James Goldberg is a poet, novelist, and champion of Mormon literature. This poem was originally published in Phoenix Song.

This piece is included in our special Advent print issue of Wayfare. To receive a copy in the mail in time for Advent this year, become a paid Wayfare subscriber or place an order here by October 31. To read more from this issue, click here!

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Two months before Christmas, I miscarried. We think we can plan our families, reverse engineer that ideal June due date, conceive exactly when we want. But that doesn’t happen for everyone, and it didn’t happen for me. 

I had what is technically called a “chemical pregnancy,” a miscarriage that occurs very early, sometimes even before a positive pregnancy test. But because I was tracking ovulation and cycle days, I’d been looking for it; I had the faintest of positive tests, those two lines weak yet still present, enough to calculate that the baby would indeed come in June. Except it didn’t.

I entered the holidays with sorrow and disappointment shrouding my heart. Please God, I prayed. Please lift this grief. Everything around me was primed for celebration: I had a two-year-old little boy, family visiting, and ample friends and loved ones to lean into. I wanted to experience the season the way I always had, to receive all the joy of Christmas. But this year, I couldn’t feel any of it.

Please God, let me feel Christmas, even for a moment. This prayer was my constant refrain, a desire so rooted in my heart that my lifeblood pumped this entreaty into every thought and breath, a fervent orison begging for reprieve. 

And then God answered.

Unlike anything that has happened to me before or since, the grief lifted, a very literal clearing of my heart. I didn’t see a new star, no angels came to bear good tidings. But for two full weeks, I no longer felt the sorrow of quiet loss. I could smile, laugh, and feel every moment of that Christmas. 

I hadn’t forgotten; I still very much wanted a second child. But the ache of the wanting and the pain of the loss had vanished. Against every expectation, Christmas was light that year. A week after the holiday, the grief returned, a familiar weight settling back into my chest. But God had given me undeniable respite and one of the most direct manifestations of divine love I’d ever witnessed.

We grieve because we love, proving that our love and our grief are different expressions of the same thing, however much we’d rather deny it. The babe born in a stable would one day weep over His friend before restoring life, weeping because He loved so deeply. He would grow into the man who retreated to pray when his cousin was executed by King Herod Antipas. This is the same being who allowed Mary Magdalene to weep at the empty tomb before revealing himself and alleviating her grief. As I enter each new Christmas season, some years more battered and weary than others, I find myself sitting more and more in that tension between love and grief. (Perhaps this is why I’m so drawn to Advent and the opportunity to find peace in liminality.)

Each Advent I close my eyes and go back to that silent Christmas miracle gifted me so many years ago. Please God, I whisper. What did that mean? I don’t know why I was surprised at the time at such a direct and unequivocal answer to prayer. (Isn’t it funny when we’re surprised that God does what They say They’ll do?)

Did Mary whisper a similar prayer when the angel visited her, proclaiming a future inconceivable? Please God, keep me safe. What about when she later lay next to barn animals with the Son of God cradled in her arms, pondering in her heart? Please God, show me the way. Or when she lost Jesus in the crowd at Jerusalem, afraid in the way only a parent could be? Please God, protect him. Forgive me. Lead us both. What was her prayer when, decades later, she knelt at the foot of the cross holding up her precious, firstborn son? Please God, make it stop. And then three days later, when she visited an empty tomb: Please, God. Thank you, thank you, alleluia.

Love is so transcendent that whenever we try to put words to it, we almost always fall short. Poets, playwrights, novelists, and essayists like myself try and try again, our words never quite hitting the mark. But we pour our imperfect efforts into the world trusting that the heart will know and hold fast to the knowing.

Whenever I plead Please God—and I have more times than I could ever count—I’m invited to accept His love by offering my trust. My mortal self wants to hold skepticism in the asking, wants to protect against rejection and disappointment. Why would God give me what I ask, anyway? Never mind that Jesus repeated over and over, “Ask and ye shall receive.” Ask, and I will feel loved. Ask, and I will learn trust. Ask, and I will know God a little better than I did yesterday.

Just a couple of months after that Christmas, I would experience another chemical pregnancy, the pain still poignant and isolating. But I didn’t forget what God had given me, couldn’t forget that They had once answered me so directly. In my heavy heart, I resolved to lean into God’s love by trusting Their fidelity. Love and grief are inextricable, and some Christmases we feel one more than the other. But the beauty of Advent, the miracle of Christmas, is that God keeps Their promises. They keep Their promises because of how deeply and fully They love. And when we practice receiving that love, we learn to ask, to trust, to love as They do.

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Charlotte Wilson is an editor and writer running a small business between school pickups. She lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest, loves watching shows late at night with her husband, and ignores the laundry piles in favor of a good book.

Art by Lovetta Reyes-Cairo.

This piece is included in our special Advent print issue of Wayfare. To receive a copy in the mail in time for Advent this year, become a paid Wayfare subscriber or place an order here by October 31. To read more from this issue, click here!

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In September 2024, Jennifer Thomas and Patrick Mason, hosts of the Proclaim Peace podcast, invited Thomas McConkie to discuss the urgent need for healing and peacemaking within ourselves.

Jennifer Walker Thomas: I would love to hear from you about this idea of inner peace. What does it look like, and how do we cultivate it, especially when pieces of ourselves are in tension? And I ask this question with deep personal pleading because I have a whole cacophony of monkeys that live inside my brain that are always chattering, and one of my great challenges in life is finding a way to be able to be still and be at peace.

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Fear not.

When I think of the Christmas story, that divine phrase stands out in my mind. I hear it in Linus’s voice as he tells Charlie Brown “what Christmas is all about,” and recalls the angelic visitation to the shepherds. I remember that phrase intoned by my grandfather as he read the Christmas story from the Bible, while his children and grandchildren acted out the scenes with bathrobes and headbands.

We have a grainy home video from the mid-1990s of one of these performances, where I make my debut as Mary (a highlight of my short-lived acting ambitions)—draped in a blue blanket, head slightly bowed—as one of my aunts, playing the role of Gabriel, mouthed out the words dictated by my grandpa:

“Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus” (Luke 1:30–31).

I like to imagine that my response to such a call would be like Mary’s: humble, faith-filled, grace-filled. Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. It embodies the type of bravery to which I aspire.  

But when I’m honest with myself, my response to an angelic visitation would align more closely to how Mary’s cousin-in-law, Zacharias, reacted to his angelic message.

Zacharias and Elisabeth only sometimes feature in Christmas pageants. In our family pageants, their story received just a passing mention in Gabriel’s message to Mary:

“And behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.

“For with God, nothing shall be impossible” (Luke 2:36–37).

Elisabeth and Zacharias's story is meant as a witness to Mary: Look at this miraculous conception, look at what the Lord can do. The Lord will work a miracle in your life, too, no matter how incredible it seems.

Mary believed. She took heart from this story. 

But for Zacharias, his fear initially impeded his ability to believe in the miracles and peace God wanted him to have.

When Gabriel appeared to Zacharias, Zacharias was participating in a significant priestly duty.  As a priest at the temple in Jerusalem, he had been chosen (by lot, Luke tells us) to enter the Holy of Holies and offer incense to the Lord, pleading for the deliverance of Israel. I also imagine that within Zacharias’s heart, he kept an impossible prayer that somehow, someway, he and Elisabeth could have a child (and, if not, that somehow, someway, they could find peace without that desire of their hearts).

When Gabriel unexpectedly appeared to Zacharias, he was, understandably, astonished. More than that, he was afraid. His fear undoubtedly prompted Gabriel to preface his remarks with fear not.

“But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John. And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth” (Luke 1:13-14).

But when gifted this message of hope and peace—a message of deliverance, both figurative and literal—Zacharias shakes his head. “Whereby shall I know this?” he asks. “For I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years” (Luke 1:18).

He can’t bring himself to believe. He has lived in grief-soaked fear for so long that he cannot fathom a miracle for himself, his family, or for his people. He knows the earthbound limitations—perhaps too well. And speaking out of fear, he does violence (even if unintentionally, reflexively) to the angel’s message, to himself, and to his wife.

I see that skepticism—perhaps even cynicism—in myself more often than I would like. It can make hearing (let alone believing) divine messages of peace difficult. 

Is anything too hard for the Lord? Well, maybe not for him, but probably for me.

With God, nothing shall be impossible. Really? Can I really believe that?

Glory to God in the Highest! And on earth, peace, goodwill towards men. I know we all crave peace, but I don’t see how world peace works out given the current circumstances.

For me, looking askance at God’s messages of peace comes, in part, from fear. It comes from being disappointed, hurt, and wounded. The bright, shiny pin of reality has burst my expectations one too many times, causing me to forget that reality can exceed expectations too. I wonder if one reason Zacharias feared so greatly was because he couldn’t comprehend the reality of love given to him in this miraculous news. He had to learn how to receive that gift of peace and love—love from God, love from Elisabeth, and love for this unborn child promised them.  

It is no small thing to believe in a God who comes to us, who calls us by name, who knows our hearts and our deepest fears. Being known on such a level—to feel that Christ knows our inner, hidden parts that we conceal even from ourselves—is scary. The things Christ asks us to do—to break out of complacency, to change our lives, to give our lives to him—is overwhelming. To allow ourselves to be loved—to truly believe that Christ loves us despite everything we are or aren’t—can be frightening.

Fear gets in the way of building on and believing in the promises of peace, which is why, I think, the angel Gabriel prefaced his angelic messages to Zacharias, Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds with fear not. These angelic messengers not only invited their listeners to transcend their terrestrial circumstances. They also asked them to receive the message of God’s immanence—of the material, holy reality of God with us (Matthew 1:23). When the angels sang of “peace on earth, goodwill to men,” they sang not only of the future, but of the now. Peace was lying in a manger, in the very human, everyday form of a baby. The “condescension of God,” the miracle of God’s peace coming to us, is the Christ Child resting in Mary’s arms, bringing light to the world on that night and healing to the world in the days to come (1 Nephi 11:16–20).

Defining peace is easier said than done. But here is my attempt. Peace is a refusal of violence—to the world, to our communities, to our families, and to ourselves. Peace brings a certain kind of clarity—of recognizing the power of God and the power within ourselves—to take necessary actions to change our point of view and take steps to build peace. Furthermore, peace is born where Christ’s transcendence and immanence meet. The promise and promises of Christ are transcendent, lifting us out of ourselves and breaking the paralysis of fear. But Christ’s promises are also immanent—reaching into us, witnessing the pain and heartaches of our lives. The Christmas story, and, specifically, the newborn Christ Child, holds the potential and kinetic power of peace.

We live under clouds of fear. Daily life’s grind and grime wear out our bodies and souls. Wars rage on; the world changes faster and more maddeningly than we ever could have anticipated; natural disasters spread destruction; family challenges burden our hearts; loved ones grow sick; we experience gutting loss. 

And yet, the light of Christ’s peace still breaks through. Because Christ loves us, because he knows fear and overcame fear, he can help us to fear not. Christ lifts us out of despair, ennui, and fear, but also meets us in our heartache, allowing us to step out of our gloom and look forward with trust in his promises. “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Zacharias did, eventually, accept the peace the angel promised. This peace was hard-earned, after nine months of divinely-imposed silence. He had had nine months to contemplate the angel’s message, witness Elisabeth’s changing body, to perhaps feel the child move within Elisabeth, to hear Elisabeth recount her own visit with Mary and her own miraculous conception, and, finally, wonderfully, to hold his newborn baby in his arms. This meditation allowed him to “ponder [these things] in his heart,” and thus have a change of heart (Luke 2:19).

He witnessed his acceptance of the Lord’s message by supporting Elisabeth. When friends came by, rejoicing in this “mercy” given to these new parents, they called the baby Zacharias, according to custom. 

“Not so,” said Elisabeth. “He shall be called John.” When their friends gently pressed both Elisabeth and Zacharias to call the baby after himself, Zacharias refused.  Even though these friends were well-meaning, Zacharias knew that this child was a grace from God, and that his name was divinely chosen. He had doubted the angel once, he did not mean to doubt again by ignoring Gabriel’s counsel.

“His name is John,” he wrote to the surprise of cousins and neighbors, and “immediately” he could speak again (Luke 1:59–64). He broke into praise, prophesying of the role his son would play in preparing the world for the Messiah:

And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways;

To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins,

Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,

To give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace (Luke 1:76–79).

The story of Zacharias, Elisabeth, and baby John is intimately connected to the larger Christmas story. The baby that entered Zacharias and Elisabeth’s life would prepare the way for the work of another baby still in utero at the time of Zacharias’s song of praise. John would prepare the way for Jesus and his message, offering lessons on how followers of Christ—regardless of place or time—can “guide” others into the “way of peace.”

Christ’s peace still transcends place and time. And still, it comes in unexpected ways. But in the gentle, wonderful, piercing gaze of his love, Christ invites us to fear not. “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine” (Isaiah 43:1). His love dispels fear, prompting us to build peace in our own communities, in our world, in our families, and in our hearts.

In our wildernesses, in our fields, in our daily commutes, at our workplaces, in our sacred spaces, in our dreams—Christ comes to us. He shakes us out of the well-worn grooves of our lives, shows us the offerings of peace in his hands, and invites us to follow him in building peace. It is no small thing to believe that Christ descended below all things, that he walked with men and women on dusty roads in Galilee, that he allowed himself to be mocked, tortured, crucified, killed, and that he transcended death, pain, and sin by taking those griefs upon himself. It is no small thing to allow his love to fill our hearts with peace and courage to take up his invitation to follow him.

Receiving that love is the beginning of peace.

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Megan Armknecht is an Associate Editor for Wayfare. She currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand, where she has switched her favorite seasonal hot cocoa for iced hot chocolate this Christmas.

Artwork by Rose Datoc Dall.

This piece is included in our special Advent print issue of Wayfare. To receive a copy in the mail in time for Advent this year, become a paid Wayfare subscriber or place an order here by October 31. To read more from this issue, click here!

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I remember fighting to stay conscious as the room filled with doctors. One I had never seen walked over to my husband, shaking his head. I remember my husband pushing through the crowd to grab my hand as he told me our perfect baby boy was gone. I remember screaming but not being able to hear it. With Simon’s life gone, the focus became saving mine.

Several needles pierced both my arms, though the sensation was muted. Someone commanded another to run to get blood from the bank. The doctors and nurses were urgently yelling, but it all faded to a dull hum as my ears filled with a high-pitched ring instead. I didn’t look away from the lights above me, my body completely numb. A new heaviness settled into my gut. The triangle pattern of the bulbs glaring down imprinted in my memory.

I remember closing my eyes and wishing I could fade away, but something kept bringing me back. I wasn’t allowed to leave. Still fixed on the lights on the ceiling, the only thought in my head, the only words in my mind, were, “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” (John 14:18).

I could not have recalled or quoted that scripture a day before. Those were not words I knew. And yet they played over and over again in my mind. In those initial moments after Simon died, I felt more like an observer than a participant, but each time I tried to drift away, those words would snap me back into my body.

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I am honored, humbled, and more than a bit nervous to speak on the 250th anniversary—the semiquincentennial—of the United States of America, at a moment of national celebration and sober reflection. Taking the pulpit to talk about civics in an age where even Mister Rogers can spark partisan snipings . . . well, I plead for your prayers that today we might hear and speak with the spirit of the free, the brave, and the holy at once. Namely, I’m going to make four points: (1) the USA is a great country; (2) patriotism, properly understood through goodness not greatness, is a deep virtue; (3) civics and public life make up a “sacred secular” we should serve; and (4) the Fall in Eden has a lesson about the US Constitution.

But first, what’s in a flag? I remember as a five year old making a US-flag birthday cake with my Mom. We used strawberries for the red stripes, whipped cream for the white stripes, and blueberries for the stars. The USA was delicious and fun, I thought (I know my flag code well enough now to have my doubts about flag cakes). My flag enthusiasm soon hit a self-imposed speedbump: A couple months later in my international kindergarten art class, each student was assigned to paint the flag of their nation of origin on a large canvas. Slowly it dawned on me that, without my mom there to help me, the US flag is surprisingly complicated—thirteen stripes and then fifty stars! After seeing another flag (all white with one red circle) that my friend Kenji was drawing, I appealed to my teacher, might I not have some ancient Japanese ancestry? Ms. Kate smiled and told me “no.” Instead, I toiled to paint the US flag, eventually felt good about my work, and learned a lesson from the flag that sticks with me today: Countries, like flags, are about more than delicious cake and celebrations. In helping to tell us who we are, they involve complexities, require work, and help us grow up a bit.

Fast forward about fifteen years, I was walking through my first area in provincial Russia as a missionary, white shirt and tie, with Book of Mormon in hand. The events depicted in The Saratov Approach took place in exactly my first area one month earlier. I quickly learned that whenever Russian young men dressed in Adidas track suits gathered in groups greater than three, one of them would surely holler at us from across the street: “khey, Amerikan bois!” I remember thinking “well, yeah, that’s true enough; I am an American boy, although my companion is German, and our common language is broken Russian.” As Lord Acton put it, exile is the mother of nationality. I have never felt more American than in provincial Russia.

1. Great is a Given

Today, Sunday, June 28th, sits midway between Juneteenth and the 4th of July 2026. Today we celebrate the two founding Moses moments of our country: the day the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached the last enslaved people on June 19, 1865, 161 years ago, and the day the founders signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, 250 years ago--or the two days the United States threw off Pharaoh’s two greatest sins: slavery and monarchy. May such independence stretch ever into the future!

Since then, the United States has risen to become an indisputably great country. It would feel silly to imply otherwise. Consider: the USA is great in landmass, great in population, great in economic impact, great in diversity enriched by immigrants from around the world. (As the Moses moments make clear, even its sins are great.) The USA has also enlarged the world’s political imagination by proving for the first time that large-scale republican constitutional democracy is possible, even desirable. Our prophet and constitutional scholar President Oaks remarked, “God revealed that He ‘established’ the Constitution ‘for the rights and protection of all flesh.” For all flesh indeed! The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are for more than the US; they have helped shape divinely inspired templates for the universal rights of all people. As many as 180 countries have since drawn from, and even improved upon, our documents (a fact we should celebrate on behalf of our brothers and sisters everywhere). “Without a Bill of Rights,” President Oaks adds, “America could not have served as the host nation for the Restoration of the gospel, which began just three decades later.” In the twentieth century, the US intervened to help the Allies stop the mundane evils and monstrous designs of Nazism and Japanese imperialism, then helped generously rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan and Asia through similar programs. Leading US research universities have pioneered life-improving breakthroughs: vaccines that stopped polio, astronauts that walked on the moon, computers that changed everything. And don’t forget jazz: a great and uniquely American gift to the world. None of these gifts can be returned. Our greatness is guaranteed. The USA has long had much greatness about it.

II. Good Patriots, not Great Nationalists

The 250th anniversary invites us to remember what the Constitution actually gave us: not a nation of blood and soil but a divine theory of plural goodness—a framework designed, as Madison wrote in Federalist 51, to protect minorities and pursue justice as “the end of government” and “the end of civil society.” That theory still awaits its full practice. Our task as dual citizens—of this republic and of the Restored Gospel—is to close that gap.

This is why I distinguish flag-waving patriotism from flag-wrapped nationalism sharply, and why Jesus Christ recognized the first (the dignity of kin and people) while teaching meekness before the powers of empire. Patriotism is the love of a people enough to see them clearly, lift them together, and hold the country to its founding promises. Nationalism is something else: It starts with something good, the love of kin, but then nationalism mistakenly generalizes that local good and tribal decoration for a divine mandate. It elevates blood and soil over covenant; nationalism says to live for and die by blood while the restored Gospel says, because the resurrected Christ lives, we all too may live on the covenant path. Curiously, wherever I have encountered nationalisms in our seven years abroad, in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Germany, and the United States—it sounds exactly the same. Each nationalist tradition claims its own unique ethno-supremacy, and in doing so, they all sound alike. Patriotism is hard and particular; nationalism is as dull as it is dangerous, and both its root and its fruit is war.

The Latin nacio—birth, natal origin—gives us a key. There is only one human family of common birth—spirit children of the same Heavenly Parents. That fact leaves no room for the Rameumpton myth that any one nation is supreme. Where nationalism peaks at the top of the pride cycle, patriotism begins at the bottom in the hope and hard work that follows repentance. The 250th anniversary invites us to ask: Where is our nation in that cycle? Where is our community? Where are our loved ones? Where am I? What can I do better?

III. The Sacred Secular of Public Life

The US Constitution is a covenant to the oppressed and the excluded—and members of the Church have known exactly what that means. The divinity of the constitution lies precisely in that it protects the Biblical “least of these” while establishing protections for the rights of all sorts of minorities, including religious minorities. The founders invoked our Creator but never named a specific Church—and for good reason. Our faith had to be restored in a country first committed to protecting religious freedom, separating church from state, and sustaining what I call the “sacred secular” of public life below. In short, we live in a society made up of many minorities, a plural society: a plural society requires living with compromises. Our constitution, covenants, and status model precisely such the blessed compromises of our being a minority.

Our faith’s history is a history of protecting minority traditions from the “tyranny of the majority.” Consider the scriptures: The Old Testament is written by nomads surviving between neighboring empires; the New Testament, by a few followers of Christ fed to lions for Roman entertainment; the Book of Mormon, by minority groups eventually exterminated by majorities; and the Doctrine & Covenants touches on the decades of violence and then pariah status early Latter-day Saints faced before the United States in the nineteenth century. Ranging from the Lord giving Abraham “a land wherein thou art a stranger” to a Quorum of Twelve Apostles today with five or six origins of nationality, our whole history is a history of minorities in need of protection all the way up to heaven--and after that too!

Remember, as LDS historian Paul Reeve makes clear, early Saints of European background, alongside the Italians, Irish, and Poles, were not considered “white” in the very decades the USA was tearing itself apart over its greatest early sin: the enslavement of our Black brothers and sisters. May we lead with solidarity: we all have once known what it means to need, and not receive, the constitutional protections for minorities; what it means to need, and not yet taste, that Moses moment of freedom from oppression. Let us not turn away from the gaps between constitutional theory and practice: insofar as hardship teaches us how to treat others, may they teach us how do so and become saints together.

President Oaks stresses, “Minority religions are especially dependent upon a constitutional guarantee of free exercise of religion. We are fortunate to have such a guarantee in the United States. The importance of that guarantee should make us ever diligent to defend it.” Now, with almost two hundred years of growth, our faith today remains (blessedly, I might add) a religious minority in nearly every country, including this one. Protecting minorities is at once the most American and Latter-day Saint thing. It just is the right thing to do. (Paraphrasing a dear friend’s grandfather, we often now tell our children, “Do the right thing for the best reason you can think of, and if you can’t think of any, do it anyway.”) For not long ago, our faith was an oppressed minority. Who else can stop the cycle of former minorities oppressing current minorities except former oppressed minorities?

Consider a few other faces of this sacred compromise: what McKay Coppins calls the “most American religion”—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—is populated in its first decades, as well as increasingly in the last few decades, by people outside of the USA, especially Europe, then Latin America, and now Africa. Like many of you, I stand before you today as a sixth-generation US patriot because I am first a seventh-generation Latter-day Saint with more countries of ancestral origin than generations in that period. We all come from immigrants and wanderers. Even David’s grandmother was a Moabite, Ruth. Each of us is plural through and through.

A wise commentator recently publicly praised what a General Authority taught at BYU, writing, “one of the senior leaders of the Church had told the entire student body—twenty-plus thousand—that their mission is peacemaking: civic peacemaking. This is an example of how a church can be very demanding, very counter-cultural, and asks a lot of its supporters—and yet not go down the road of fear. It’s going down the road of pluralism and compromise.” I pray we realize those demands together by love and solidarity, not fear or violence.

IV. The Fall and the US Constitution

We can learn something about the US Constitution from the Fall in Genesis. Borrowing from and paraphrasing Jonathan Rauch’s book here and Wayfare essay here, both are founding creation stories that begin with sacred compromises. Both point us, in an LDS reading, not downward from a state of innocence but forward into a space of sacred compromises, covenants, and sweat, toil, and engaged citizenship toward others. Both mark the beginning of the maturation of a people, reminding us that our government and public life will be only as good as its people. Under the US Constitution, we continue the wisdom of Eve and Adam in making complex, complicated choices in civics and conscience.

Madison sees this fallen yet divine compromise clearly, writing, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

The last 250 years required what the next 250 years will as well: the post-Eden sweat and tears of parents and children serving and growing, living and learning together in local communities and growing global families. The Savior cannot save us from ourselves. There’s no magic solve-all. As we learn in the temple, the Savior saves us through one another—our covenants, commitments, communities, and even our sacred secular compromises to love, work, and build heaven on earth, here and now. Here and now are the real politics we all must act on. Our constitution and covenants alike remind us of a timely truth: The only way we get out of this mortal mess is through it, together, with eyes and hands wide open, anchored in Jesus Christ to serve the real needs of every person here and now.

The sacred secular invites us to do other next right things too: jury duty, paying taxes, and of course informed voting, all this and more baked into the twin divine right and responsibility of “we the people” to act for ourselves. No rights without responsibilities; no authority without consent. The 11th article of faith is one of our subtle superpowers: each of us must be able to make decisions according to the dictates of our own judgment and conscience. In these articles of faith, we have no less than, the commentator continues, “a fully formed, coherent scriptural foundation for Madisonian pluralism.”

My personal prayer is that all those eligible to vote run with the 11th Article to the secret ballot booths: the First Presidency itself has recently cautioned, “Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on tradition without careful study of the candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy and inconsistent with revealed principles.” In democracies abroad, our brothers and sisters often weigh the vote compromises amid five or more parties; I am confident all compatriots here can manage to vote in conscience for more than one. May our votes be moved by careful learning, study, and conscience, never constrained by party; that goes double for those who serve in public office. When they fall short, replace them at the ballot box. Heck, run for office to replace them. And if that doesn’t work, reform the election laws until you—and I’m thinking of, say, any of the Relief Society or Primary leaders I’ve known in our ward—can run for office and win. A sacred secular Zion suddenly sounds more feasible to me!

Jury duty, paying taxes, informed voting. Behold practical constitutional patriotism.

V. The Jubilee Call

We are now a quarter millennium into our country’s history. What call shall we issue in its honor, except to continue the perpetual struggle for fuller liberty and equality for all? In that spirit may we solemnly declare this 250th anniversary an ongoing jubilee, a return to our Moses moments, to abandon all oppression in all of its forms: wherever the hydra heads of cruelty and poverty, sickness and racism, bigotry and braggadocio bear their teeth, may free and fair people everywhere meet them with sevenfold increase in kindness and service, justice and discernment, care and the very civic sobriety necessary to build heaven on earth at home, in every community and clime. What awaits a better future is no hero, no mythological escape hatch but hard work, sobriety, and action with a conscience: PTOs. Neighborly gatherings. Reading, not watching, the news. (Not too much. Pay for it. If paying for the news is not an option, the Associated Press and Reuters make money by syndicating documented facts, not selling our attention.) I believe firmly in such practical politics, the story of six generations of practical people before us, and I’m honored to help retell that story forward today.

It’s now forty years since I learned a lesson in kindergarten about the reality and complexity of our beautiful red, white, and blue flag. The flag, in its full dignity not idolatry, has never waved as beautifully to me as today. It’s been twenty-five years since that “Amerikan boi” first saw my own origins anew in provincial Russia. How will I see that legacy in another twenty-five years, when my adult civic life is mostly spent: how will each of us have served our country and the world? I pray that, in 250 years from now, on the half millennium of our country’s independence, the Lord will find the United States of America full of patriots, not nationalists, seeking goodness before greatness, bound together in a constitutional patriotism and pluralism, fulfilling sacred secular compromises of covenant and constitution to build Zion for all.

For ours is a vision for all. As Elder Bednar notes, borrowing from J. Reuben Clark, Zion is built by and for all of us little people too—not just the Brigham Youngs or the Eliza R. Snows on the pioneer trail—but what Clark calls “They of the Last Wagon”: I add my testimony to Elder Clark’s conviction: “To these humble souls, great in faith, great in work, great in righteous living, great in fashioning our priceless heritage, I humbly render my love, my respect, my reverent homage.” Now this is the greatness I seek.

May God bless the United States of America. May we become that blessing to others by how we live. On the 250th, I wish you all a delicious piece of cake.

This essay is a lightly-edited text of a sacrament meeting talk given on the 250th anniversary of the USA in the New Haven Ward in Tulsa Stake, Oklahoma on June 28th, 2026.

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Benjamin Peters is an editor-at-large for Wayfare.

Art by Childe Hassam (1859–1935).

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I love America. I rarely make it through the Pledge of Allegiance without choking up. I can’t sing “God Bless America” without my heart swelling with emotion. I love the ideals upon which our nation was founded — ideals of liberty, equality and justice for all.

I consider myself a proud patriot. The United States of America is extraordinary in so many ways — the beauty and variety of her landscapes; her devotion to democracy; her strong, resilient economy; the admirable work ethic and generosity of her citizens; her remarkable, inspired governing document. I love America.

In fact, my love for America is so strong that at one point in my life I allowed myself to be manipulated by ideologies that present themselves as patriotic but are, in fact, insidious counterfeits of true patriotism. Nationalism is one of these ideologies.

Patriotism is defined as devotion to one’s country or homeland, but it doesn’t assert that one’s country is better than all other countries. Nationalism, on the other hand, exalts one’s country above all others and insists that its interests must be privileged over the interests of all other nations. And it often goes beyond even that. Charles de Gaulle, who led France against Nazi Germany during World War II, stated that nationalism is “when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

Nationalism is sometimes described as patriotism on steroids, but that’s not quite right. Nationalism is a perversion of patriotism. It is patriotism gone tragically awry. Adolf Hitler’s rise in Nazi Germany was accomplished by appealing to patriotism and then perverting it into nationalism.

Patriotism inspires unity and cooperation; nationalism divides and isolates. Patriotism celebrates diversity; nationalism is threatened by it. Patriotism engenders charity and optimism; nationalism fosters fear.

A patriot recognizes both the strengths and shortcomings of his or her country, and is eager to work hard to make it better. A nationalist turns a blind eye to his country’s failings and views any mention of mistakes or weaknesses as disloyalty or an attempt to undermine allegiance. Patriots acknowledge nuance; nationalists see only black and white. Patriots yearn for and work toward the aspirational ideal so beautifully expressed in our Pledge of Allegiance — that America may truly become “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” Nationalists are more concerned about safeguarding their own privileges.

Loving one’s homeland as a patriot is much like loving one’s own family. You treasure it, warts and all, and feel gratitude and absolute loyalty, but you clearly see that it’s not perfect, and you do whatever you can to make things better for every member. You also recognize and honor the equal preciousness of other families.

I love America. I also love my children. More than anything in this world. But I don’t think that they are better than other children. I don’t feel a need to declare their superiority or to insist that they be first. In fact, I think doing so would be fundamentally wrong. My faith teaches me that we’re all children of God, fellow passengers on this fragile planet, sisters and brothers, all, no matter who we are or where we live, and that “all are alike unto God.”

So, yes, God bless America! But also, God please bless Ukraine and Nigeria and Haiti and Spain and Uruguay and the Philippines and Mexico and Syria and El Salvador and…

This essay was originally published in Deseret News on September 20, 2023.

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Sharlee Mullins Glenn is a contributing editor at Wayfare and has published poetry, essays, short stories, articles, and criticism in various publications, including The New York Times.

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