A House of Many Spirits

Life in Divine Harmony

Michael Jagamara Nelson, Four Stories at Pikilyi, 1988, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia

We can’t see the wind, but with mature eyes we can perceive it in the rustling leaves. Skilled sailors partner with the wind, and it carries them across the world. Gardeners and builders plant windbreaks to create islands of warmth and stillness or channel the breeze to refresh and cool a courtyard. Almost everything important is similarly invisible: the stories of the past, the outline of the future, the unutterable feelings locked in every heart, the flame of desire that burns in each of us, the waves of collective captivation that draw our attention as one. Wise people watch for rustling leaves and billowing sails, and they learn to work in the world of invisible things. Seen with clear eyes, all things are spiritual; all visible things have an invisible reality concealed behind them (D&C 29:34). If so, then learning to see the world as spiritual is not a surrender to fantasy. Instead, it may be the most time-tested way of immersing ourselves meaningfully in the real.

What Is a Spirit?

I worry that we Latter-day Saints may stifle this question before asking it. We each have a spirit body, created by God, we remember well from Sunday School, so that’s a spirit. But there is so much more hidden in our tradition. At Galilee, Jesus said, “the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63, emphasis added). To Joseph Smith he said, “For the word of the Lord is truth, and whatsoever is truth is light, and whatsoever is light is spirit, even the spirit of Jesus Christ” (D&C 84:45, emphasis added). When Joseph wanted to prepare people for imminent revelatory communion with God, he did not dwell on the idea that the Holy Spirit is a divine individual premortal personage in a spirit body but instead taught that it is the mind, wisdom, glory, and power of God shared by all of the sanctified (Lectures on Faith 5:2). Let’s gather these synonyms together: the “spirit” of Jesus Christ is the structured interweaving of his words, life, truth, light, mind, glory, intelligence, wisdom, and power. In other words, his spirit is the whole pattern of being that makes him what he is; it is all that he embodies.