The Image of Heaven
Communion as a Visionary Work of Art
The Nephite Cosmic Circle
Gathered in the courts of the temple, the crowd of thousands was now too tired to understand Jesus’s words. For hours since he appeared they had waited and watched as each person embraced him to feel his wounded side, clasped his hands to feel the tokens there, and knelt before him to touch his feet. Only after that intimate ceremony did Jesus teach them his law in a long discourse. Having exhausted their ability to listen and comprehend, he prepared to leave, but then delayed when he saw their longing for him to stay. He lingered and taught them in ways deeper than speech. He healed the sick, and then carefully organized the congregation into formation. He brought the children near to him, then moved himself to stand “in the midst” of them. After kneeling in prayer with the crowd encircling him, and after blessing each child, Jesus directed the adults to look toward the inner circle and “behold your little ones.” As they did so, the concentric structure into which they had been arranged by Jesus was complemented by heaven, as angels encircled the children and fire encircled the angels.
What was the purpose of this? Why such care in the arrangement? Some things jump out as meaningful: Jesus’s deliberate placement of the people, and the specificity of the location of the angels and fire, and the explicit concentricity and circularity of the attendees. What was Jesus trying to teach?
The description reminds me at once of the kinds of ancient universal maps which placed the most sacred site at the center and laid creation out from that axis. A congregation arranged in tiers of holiness with their God at the center could be seen as a kind of living temple. As a temple, It is also an image of Eden: God at the center as the fruit of the tree of life, surrounded in turn by circular concourses of innocent children, of angels and fire echoing the cherubim holding flaming swords, and finally by the adult congregation symbolically outside of Eden. This was also an image of what Jesus called “my doctrine” in his earlier sermon, for those who would draw near to Christ must be baptized by fire, receive the tongue of angels, and become as little children.1 It was a ritualized vision, using the people as creators of the intended image and as the receivers commanded to “behold” it. Things which had been explained in words—ideas and metaphors previously not visible to their natural eyes—were now made visible, palpable, spatial, and alive.
The Nephite Eucharist
In that same tiered cosmic circle, perhaps after the angels had withdrawn, the congregation sat and ate bread and wine. A chapter break which did not exist in the original text obscures the continuity between the shape of the gathering and the Lord’s supper. When we ignore that artificial break in the text the circular gathering appears to be Jesus’s preparation for the meal to follow.
This type of springtime feast was a common rite all over the ancient world. At the end of the year after Jesus’s death observant Israelites would be celebrating Passover, a pilgrimage feast in which people gathered at the mother temple. Those gathering might have in mind earlier spring feasts at which God joined in, such as when Abraham and Sarah had served fresh cakes to their heavenly visitors in the presence of Jehovah and received his promise that they would conceive,2 or when Moses and seventy elders ate and drank in Mount Sinai in the presence of Jehovah.3 These and thousands of other similar sacramental meals were among the central purposes of ancient temples the world over. As people prayed and ate together, the feasts were visions of heavenly atonement, an echo of the unity among the divine council in eternity, and a foretaste of the day when heaven and earth will meet again in a feast of reunion. They reached both backward and forward in time, collapsing history, futurity, and the present into the eternal moment, gathering the bodies of worshippers into an image and extension of the divine council on earth in the presence of God.4 The Greeks called their temple feasts the panegyria, the gathering of all in a circle. As the Nephites encircled their divine king at the temple a year after his sacrificial death, they kept the ancient custom of the feast.
We saints claim to do weekly the sacrament the Nephites were taught to do by Jesus at Bountiful, occasionally referencing 3 Nephi 18 as an articulation of the meaning of our ritual; but we certainly don’t take such care in our arrangement, nor include chapter 17’s events in our explanations. Our informal weekly meetings are the product of centuries of Protestant iconoclasm in the religious upbringing of most early Latter-day Saints; By “informal” I don’t mean that our gatherings are not ritualized nor our interactions often rote. I mean we do not purposefully shape our weekly gatherings into a physical form that reveals their underlying purpose. We are so informal that we are prone to overlook such visions even when described dramatically, as in 3 Nephi 17 and 18. By contrast our temple worship is formal, an acting-out of visions of individual ascent: we progress up the hierarchy of being and physically upward in space,5 endowed with ritual clothing, surrounded by symbolic images, gathered briefly in our own cosmic circles of prayer and communion. What would our sacrament look like if it were administered as Christ did for the Nephites, with visionary form, as temple worship? If we had a vivid example, perhaps we could better see the divine pattern hidden beneath our own informality.
In fact, we have an excellent model of the celebration of this archetypal feast, with thousands of years of useful documentation to help us explore it: the weekly liturgy of traditional Christians.
The Lord’s Supper as a Temple Ritual
The Christian celebration of the Lord’s supper, called the “Divine Liturgy” in the eastern tradition and “Mass” in the west, is temple worship strikingly similar to that of the Nephites at Bountiful: held in spaces modeled on the Tabernacle of Moses, with public instruction from the Gospels followed by the stratification of the congregation in symbolic tiers of holiness and privacy, overseen by robed officiants acting as icons of Christ and his holy angels, with the intent of bringing about real and intimate communion between heaven and earth.
Early Jewish Christians treated the ritual of the Lord’s Supper as a continuation of the priestly ministration of the Jerusalem Temple.6 Their public preaching and teaching happened on the Jewish sabbath at the synagogue, while they met privately in homes on the following day, the Lord’s day, for the holy feast. When later Christians began building dedicated spaces for worship, they modeled their chapels and churches on the tabernacle of Moses: with narthexes, naves, and sanctuaries corresponding to the tabernacle’s courtyard, Holy Place, and Holy of Holies, respectively.7
As in the earlier tabernacle, access to sanctified spaces in Christian temples was mediated by ritual. The tabernacle had been patterned after the mountaintop vision of Moses, the throne of God in the center of all things and material creation flowing outward from there in a descending cascade of holiness.8 As YHWH had been envisioned enthroned in the Holy of Holies of heaven’s temple surrounded by the divine council, in early churches the priests surrounded the Bishop seated on the synthronon, a tiered semicircular structure behind the altar in the most holy place in the church.9 During the public portion of the liturgy representing Christ’s incarnation and mortal teaching, the whole congregation sat in the nave together as the officiant read scripture—emphasizing Christ’s teaching as recorded in the New Testament Gospels—and gave a homily or discourse. After the public liturgy the deacons would forcibly dismiss the unbaptized:
“Those who are catechumens [not yet baptized], depart; catechumens depart; all those who are catechumens, depart. Let none of the catechumens remain.”10
As the catechumens withdrew and the Bishop consecrated the bread and wine, the gathering gave body to the same cosmic pattern by which Christ arranged the Nephites: the unbaptized at the perimeter, those “little ones”11 who had been baptized by fire in the Holy Place being ministered to by angels, and Christ at the center of focus in the Holy of Holies. As the High Priest had carried the holy blood of YHWH out of the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement to sanctify and renew creation, the Bishop and the angelic attendants carried the consecrated gifts through the chancel screen in a vision of Christ’s second coming.
It is that theophanic aim which most clearly marks traditional Christian liturgy as temple worship: to bring about atonement between Christ and his people, including their personal communion with him and their dawning godhood as his reborn children. After unveiling the body and blood of Christ on the altar, the priest in the Nestorian liturgy says “my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. How terrible is this place, for today I have seen the Lord face to face, and this is nothing if not the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” For Orthodox, Catholic, and other traditional Christians, these consecrated gifts become the “real presence” of Christ in the congregation, and at the altar table they are “made worthy of the visitation of God and are united with him.”12 As Christ was a manifestation of both divine masculinity and divine femininity, both “the power of God and the wisdom of God,” and as the sacred bread in ancient Israel was always associated with mother Wisdom, the bread is also an invocation of the divine mother.13 Orthodox Christians recognize this ritual as symbolic of and a catalyst for the transformations of the disciple which bring us through three primary stages of spiritual development: out of a state of willful sin through repentance, through the spirit-enlightened contemplation where we learn to see creation as it really is, and finally into “theological mystagogy:” a union with God wherein we are initiated fully into the mysteries. “Those who arrive at this stage are raised beyond the limits of created nature; and they attain a union with God that is beyond all sensory, cognitive, and rational apprehension because they are now completely filled by the uncreated and deifying energy of God, and become God by grace.”14
If I were explaining Latter-day Saint temple worship to an Orthodox Christian, I would say that our ceremonies are comparable to the consecration and enthronement of a Bishop that prepares him to officiate in the ordinances of the Divine Liturgy. The ritual culminates in the individual’s or couple’s ritual theophanic union with God and ritual qualification to administer in ordinances which reach beyond the veil. A similarly brief explanation of the Divine Liturgy for Latter-day Saints would be that it is the communal counterpart to our largely individual temple worship: The ancient temple was the setting for both individual priestly initiation rites (washing, anointing, clothing, consecration), and for communal worship and atonement. The initiation and endowment of individual priests was not the ultimate aim of ancient temple liturgy; The true objective was the sanctifying communal worship that those priests would be qualified to facilitate. Continuing that same tradition, the Christian Divine Liturgy aims not only to bring individuals up to God and prepare them for divine service, but ultimately to bind all creation together in one in Christ. Today’s Latter-day Saints ritually seal some isolated relationships in that communion, sealing spouse to spouse and parent to child, but we never formally enact the feast of communion which actually brings the whole cosmos together.
More precisely I should say that we no longer formally enact it, because this formalized feast was the primary function of temples built by Joseph Smith. Unlike later temples built with successive chambers for small groups of individual initiates to be endowed, Joseph Smith’s temples were built with open plans for communal worship. Like ancient churches, they were laid out cosmically with a separable Holy of Holies. As in the first Christian temples, that Holy of Holies featured a sacramental altar and possibly the first true synthronon built since the Byzantine era. 15
While the building could adapt by the drawing of fabric veils to individual initiation and small group instruction, it is the communion feast which was built into the wood and stone of the building. Though we still administer the sacrament, it has been carefully de-formalized: sacrament tables are moved to the side of the chapel with an empty pulpit at the front and center, iconography has been vigilantly eliminated, communion is held before teaching rather than as the culmination of it, and there is no formal verbalization of the eschatological or transcendent unions symbolized by the rite.
Envisioning Cosmic Mormonism
We find more windows into this vision as we examine the early years of the Latter-day Saint movement. In Joseph Smith’s teaching, “sealing” did much more than solemnize unions within nuclear families or to our dead ancestors along genealogical lines. He spoke more frequently of being sealed to the fathers and mothers who are in heaven,16 and taught that Christ would visit the faithful and “seal you his.”17 He predicted a future gathering between the earthly saints, their redeemed dead, and all members of the divine council at the end of the world, when the family of God takes possession of the Earth as in the beginning.18 This is the gathering of all things in one in Christ: the living and dead, earthly and heavenly, creation and creator. When priests and priestesses are endowed in Latter-day Saint temples, it is ultimately in symbolic preparation to walk themselves and others through the ordinances of this cosmic atonement:
The power and authority of the higher, or Melchizedek Priesthood, is to hold the keys of all the spiritual blessings of the church—
To have the privilege of receiving the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, to have the heavens opened unto them, to commune with the general assembly and church of the Firstborn, and to enjoy the communion and presence of God the Father, and Jesus the mediator of the new covenant. (D&C 107:18-19)
Whether we actually grow into that invitation to become officiators is dependent, we are told in the ritual, on our own faithfulness.
That eschatological feast is the same divine moment sought by Christians in their weekly liturgy. In Orthodox Christianity, the communion loaf is stamped—the Orthodox say “sealed”—before baking with the image of Christ, of Mary the mother in heaven, of the nine angelic orders. When it is sacrificed, those portions are divided up and placed deliberately on the communion plate. Additional bread is then torn and arranged for the living and the dead and placed before the pieces representing the heavenly members of the divine council. Each group is mentioned carefully in prayer as the bread is dismembered.
A small cosmic architectural dome (the asteriscos or “star cover”) is then placed over the plate, completing the revelation of the bread as a vision of the cosmic communion in the temple. It is a small icon of the congregation in the church, worshiping before the icons of Christ, Mary, and the saints and angels of heaven. The bread is further dis-membered as it is distributed and then re-membered as the congregation comes together in unity and love in Christ. Orthodox Christians see the icon of All Saints as an image of the communion sought during the liturgy:
Shining through the Nephites’ circle at Bountiful and the Divine Liturgy of traditional Christians, this is the vision underlying our own Sunday sacrament, waiting for eyes to see it.
Become a Seer
At both the Nephite and traditional Christian communions we are invited to see
A general assembly…19
At which the gospel message is ritually read to prepare for communion…
Arranged in the same cosmic structure as the Garden of Eden and Moses’s Tabernacle…
With the initiated brought higher upward and inward within the ontological structure…
With angels present to minister and witness…
With the initiated eating and drinking in the presence of Christ…
Enjoying a foretaste of the glorious final atonement between those in heaven and those on earth, the gods and their children…
Expressed in a work of living art using the bodies of the participants.
It is unlikely that the format of Latter-day Saint sacrament meetings will change to better disclose this sublime vision. More likely, you must learn to see it for yourself and to allow it to transform your approach to Wisdom’s table. Once seen, this vision will change not only how you worship on Sunday, but how creation shines forth to you moment to moment. Like Nephi after his ascent or Enoch after washing his eyes, you will learn to perceive those patterns of being not visible to the natural eye.20 In an echo of Alma the Younger,21 seventh-century monk and theologian St. Maximus the Confessor taught that the initiation into the mystery of communion symbolized the dawning of seership in the faithful; they were to learn to see beyond the material world into the mysteries—the invisible patterns governing all things— culminating in the vision of and union with God.22
Someday you may be invited to a feast that reflects the image of heaven so perfectly that heaven itself shakes with gladness and cannot be withheld from attending.23 May we have our eyes opened by God to see that invitation when it arrives. In the meantime, I pray that each day finds us more prepared to officiate, prepared to gather and conduct all creation around us in the right praise of God.
Bob Sonntag is an architect and artist, seeking understanding through drawing and writing. Explore Bob’s iconographic artwork here.
3 Nephi 11:33-38
Genesis 18:1-15
Exodus 24:1-11
The archetype of the new year temple festival, the "year rite,” has been thoroughly described with vivid examples by many scholars. See Mircea Eliade, “Sacred time and Myths,” The Sacred and the Profane. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich); Hugh Nibley, “The Hierocentric State,” The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley Volume 10: The Ancient State. (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 1991) John Lundquist, “What is a Temple? A Preliminary Typology,” and Brian Hauglid, “Sacred Time and the Temple,” Temples of the Ancient World. Donald W. Parry, ed. (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 1994) 83-117, 636-643.
Contemporary Latter-day Saint temple designs deemphasize or eliminate this upward movement, but it was a prominent feature of many earlier temples.
Margaret Barker. “The Temple Roots of the Liturgy.”
The earliest Christian church building yet discovered, built around 300 AD in Aqaba, Jordan, reflects this arrangement.
Margaret Barker. “Beyond the Veil of the Temple. The High Priestly Origin of the Apocalypses.”
At the moment of enthronement the congregation sang the “trisagion hymn,” including the acclamation of “holy, holy, holy” to God on his throne, just as the cherubim in Isaiah 6 did in their worship in the heavenly temple. The earthly congregation echoes the adoration of the heavenly, creating a vision of the divine council.
Catechumens in most Orthodox liturgies are now welcome to stay and observe most Eucharist services, though the formal dismissal may still be announced to preserve the cosmic structure of the gathering.
Matthew 18:6, “little ones” here includes all those who had become like little children.
Father Maximos Constas, “The Body as Ritual Space.”
1 Corinthians 1:24; Proverbs 9:1-5; Margaret Barker. “The Temple Roots of the Liturgy.”
Father Maximos Constas, “The Body as Ritual Space.”
In the Holy of Holies of the heavenly temple, Joseph Smith envisioned a large multi-seated throne (JST Revelation 4:4). When the divine council attended the feast at Kirtland, they appeared as traditional Christians would expect: atop the synthronon built per Joseph’s vision (D&C 110).
Refer to his sermons of 08/13/1843 and 03/10/1844 for his identification of the “fathers” of Malachi’s prophecy with these heavenly patriarchs.
Mosiah 5:15
JST Genesis 9:21-25; Moses 7:62-65
Hebrews 12:23, from the Greek panegyris, meaning “the gathering of all in a circle”
1 Nephi 11:36; Moses 6:35-36
Alma 12:9-11
Saint Maximus the Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy. Translated by Jonathan J. Armstrong (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Yonkers, 2019) p.82-85.
JST Genesis 9:22-23
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I like that idea so much more than the visual representation of distant planets. Christ remains central and we have eternal progression towards him.
This is a totally new concept to me but I’d like to ask a question. Can we envisage the three degrees of glory in the same way that you have described ‘behold your little ones’, with Christ and light in the centre and concentric circles?