Hie to Kolob

There’s a scene in the film Contact where, after traveling to the star Vega, Dr. Ellie Arroway is met by an intelligent being that greets her in the physical form of her father, chosen deliberately by the alien contact to comfort her after her bewildering journey from Earth. “You feel so lost,” the being says of humans, “so cut off, so alone. Only you’re not.” For billions of years, he explains, countless civilizations have traveled the same network of wormholes that lead Ellie to their encounter. It’s a feel-good scene, especially when he tells her that, “in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness [of space] bearable is each other.” This sentiment recalls the Restoration’s unique take on heaven as an elevated mode of relationality (see D&C 130:2).

I was reminded of both this film and the concept of celestial sociality after my wife caught up recently on a video call with some old friends from our time in Georgia. Most of us who ended up in the Atlanta area were not originally from the South, and none of us knew any of the others before moving there. For a few formative years, though, we walked side-by-side, sharing in the joys and struggles common to young families getting an education: dinners and game nights, the birth of new babies, and service in the kingdom when time was scarce. For most of us, we were each other’s family away from family. Until one day when we weren’t.

As was bound to happen, our futures followed divergent paths and life scattered us across the country. Some ended up in Washington state, others in Utah and New Jersey. My wife and I landed in Illinois. Where once we rubbed shoulders in the intimacy of daily living, now we only share occasional conversations, and we sometimes feel as distant from each other as the stars. Computer screens bridge some of the separation, but they cannot bridge long periods of mutual absence. And so we go on living our separate lives—the friendships that once burned bright at the center of our hearts now reduced to occasional flickers.

Is it by divine design that we must drift apart from those we love and who love us? If distance, disruption, and dislocation are inevitable experiences of life, where is the hand of God in guiding our paths to love, connection, and belonging? Such are the melancholy questions that disquiet my mind when my wife says goodbye to her cherished friends from Georgia, and I ask her how things went, and she answers with a subdued smile that tells me that to love others is to yearn against the entropy of creation.

I’m convinced the Restoration can respond to these questions in beautiful, if still incomplete, ways. I’m almost equally convinced that the pursuit of a response must invariably lead us down a path where God will “take hold of [us] and wrench [our] very heart strings.”¹ Ultimately, however, whatever grief may accompany our experiences, I trust that it will be finally and fully “swallowed up in the joy of Christ” (Alma 31:38).