Imagining Light

Review of "Brighter and Brighter Until the Perfect Day" by Sharlee Mullins Glenn

Brighter and Brighter Until the Perfect Day is an epic poem, a style hearkening to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Homer’s Iliad, or the epic of Gilgamesh. A narrative poem, aptly named epic, Mullins Glenn’s focus is no less ambitious than the heart of Mormonism’s Plan of Salvation: creation, fall, atonement, salvation. Ambitious as it is, Mullins Glenn manages a text that avoids didacticism while weaving together core tenets of Latter-day Saint belief with remarkable freshness.¹

In this sense, Mullins Glenn’s offering is a work of theopoetics, a theological process that uses poetic forms to present not irrefutable theological dogma but expressions of relationality and encounter—making theology from scraps rather than from blueprints.² Theopoetics insists that God emerges from the brokenness of the world, not always in glistening grandeur but more often in the aching woundedness of touch, gently, right where it hurts.

In reshaping the central pillars of Latter-day Saint thought, Mullins Glenn is not presenting a densely fortressed theological argument. Rather, she is suggesting—imagining—anew. To join her imagination is to gain new perspective; to behold, by immersion in the poetic word, a vision of what might be possible without being tied to that vision. This uniquely cultivated tone may be what allows the poem to glisten as it spans the Latter-day Saint story of salvation. Mullins Glenn’s prose soars, with dazzling moments of song like this one:

O light resplendent, light divine

Which shineth forth from God’s own face

Same light which giveth sight to eye

And lendeth life, and filleth space.³

Yet the prose is less grand than the arc of the poem itself, meant to be a story experienced rather than extracted attention to a singular verse or two.⁴ With extraordinary tenderness and gentleness, the arc encompasses creation, the meaning of suffering and evil (theodicy), the human condition (theological anthropology), and the salvation and eternal life of earthly creation (eschatology). In only sixty pages, including simple but evocative illustrations, this depth of engagement seems ambitious, but the poem’s gentle openness explores rather than proclaims the profundity of existence. It is this work and play of imagination that allows the poem to speak so deeply and yet so broadly.

For instance, Mullins Glenn brings forward a complex theology born of distinctive Latter-day Saint ideas yet resurrected with forms that give new life to the whole. She spends significant time on the premortal existence and its importance for human agency and consent—a theme that has profound importance throughout the text. But the premortal existence narrative also includes without preamble or apology the presence of women, including “gracious Ora, daughter of the light . . . brave Adira too, and Nava, Ezrah, Abigail, and more.”⁵ Mother God is introduced as the fullness of Elohim, the two together forming the wholeness of God.⁶ This enriching of the present shards of our common story is somewhat reminiscent of a midrash,⁷ the filling in of gaps found in the scriptural text, but its distinctive characteristic is less filling in than reimagining or imagining anew.

The gentleness of her imagined world opens new possibilities for a narrative most Latter-day Saint readers are familiar with. The presence of embodied, emotionally complex characters challenges nagging notions of human depravity. Her depiction of premortal beings suggests tender, brave, relationally-woven, intelligent souls who work with their God to forge pathways forward. This relational depth opens new dimensions for understanding the “problem” humanity finds itself in, including the meaning of sin, suffering, and relationship with the divine. A reimagined beginning, subtly but not radically different from the old and familiar, ripples new meanings and questions into the whole fabric of faith. The problems of sin, suffering, and relationship with the divine take on different hues in Mullins Glenn’s imagination. Rather than being defects in the human person or consequences of poorly exercised agency, sin and suffering are natural consequences of a vulnerable humanity.

Theological response to this woundedness, for Mullins Glenn, is light. Light, the essence of the divine, is likewise at the core of all living things. We lose light, our true being, as we are wounded by sin and despair. But the light remains our inheritance and true substance. Through relationship with Jesus, we can gather light and move to a fullness of being. Thus, relationship with the divine reconciles the core of our vitality, helping us move toward the fullness of self and unity with all things.

This is markedly distinct from other approaches, both within and without the LDS Church. Reading the human problem of sin as a defect requiring correction in Eve’s consumption of the apple, for example, has colored centuries of interpretation, including John Milton’s depiction of the Fall. Milton’s Adam is (apparently by nature) delighted at Eve’s beauty and “submissive charms” on which he looks with “superior love.”⁸ His Eve is the corruptive influence, gesturing to entrenched Christian teachings about women.⁹ Mullins Glenn follows strands of Latter-day Saint tradition in reworking this narrative, casting Eve as an intelligent agent rather than a corrupting influence.

But in fleshing out and dignifying Eve and Adam, Mullins Glenn does not shy away from some of the complexities surrounding this creation myth. Her deeper concern seems to be with the relationship between humanity and deity and the apparent contradiction in communication portrayed in traditional depictions of the Fall. The Gods were not, in other words, hoping that their Eve would make the right choice despite their explicit commandments against it. Lucifer as the serpent genuinely deceives Eve in Mullins Glenn’s narration, intending to destroy her. Rather than eating an apple, the serpent Lucifer kills an innocent sheep from which Eve partakes. It is the advent of death that allows Eve and Adam to become carnal. This death, then, at the behest of Eve, represents the first sin.

While the choice to eat allows Eve to gain knowledge and experience, it also takes an innocent life; it has consequences. Eve did not know that in agreeing to partake the serpent would slaughter the sheep. She gains knowledge through an innocent sacrifice. The parallels to Christ’s passion narrative are already ripe, but the payoff for Mullins Glenn’s distinct imagination now comes to fruition. In her version, Eve’s choice was not the only way; God was not issuing contradictory and ostensibly manipulative decrees. The choice Eve made had consequences, positive and negative, including the vulnerability of mortality. The need for a Savior is thus not to compensate for something fundamentally and irreconcilably wrong about fallen humans but to allow them to tether themselves to light and so make their illuminated way back home.

This is a distinctly nuanced concept of sin and salvation. Moreover, it is a distinctive atonement theology ultimately reflecting what might be called a Christus Victus atonement model, where Jesus frees humanity from their bondage that they might be truly human, or in Mullins Glenn’s terms, truly light. She is careful to steer clear of substitution, ransom, or satisfaction theories, which undermine the theological anthropology she espouses. Sin cannot be a form of depravity that fundamentally alienates humanity from God, and it cannot be the helpless predilection of fallen humanity that nothing but payment to justice can diffuse. Sin must be the consequence of vulnerability, and its salve must be within the fundamental nature of the human being. This core nature, this true human nature, is light.

This light, we are reminded, is equivalent to God. Humans, the children of God, can become more and more like this light through both agential choice and the merciful help of the divine. The light of our core nature can become, indeed, brighter and brighter. The significance here is paramount: If humans are fundamentally light at their deepest core, they are fundamentally good. Accordingly, they are capable of genuinely choosing good. By contrast, a theological anthropology that assumes basic human depravity expects humans to choose poorly (sinfully) if left to themselves. The ability to volitionally choose light in concert with the deepest core of human nature, then, is pivotal to Mullins Glenn’s theological imagination of agency exercised for good and ill.

Agency, so central to Latter-day Saint theology, is thus paramount to Brighter and Brighter. It is choice (and, for Mullins Glenn, consent) that provides the experience necessary to learn. We are wont to choose amiss, not because of natural corruption but simply because we lack knowledge or experience. And in so choosing, we lose light, which light is our true nature.¹⁰ This is the central theological problem for Mullins Glenn, not corruption. We might consider sin a loss of light, a loss of our true nature, and suffering a consequence of a world of free choice. The follower’s task, then, is to grow in light. This is explained at the very beginning of the saga in the premortal council. Father God explains:

“It’s all about this vital light,” said El.

“The light you bear, the light you gain, the light you share.” He paused, then, smiling, looked around.

“The hoped-for aim is that you all become

pure conduits of light—receiving light,

bequeathing light in one continuous flow.

For this is truth eternal, that the more

you give, the greater your capacity

to reap, to grow, to learn, and to obtain.”¹¹

In gently redirecting the problem that needed to be solved (human sin as vulnerability more than corruption), Mullins Glenn is expanding the parameters of possibility for what it means to be human, to be in relationship with the divine, and to follow the path of discipleship. Light is our true, unborrowed nature. With the link she makes to the premortal realm, this true nature is crucial. Always, between the divine and the human, there is deep love, tenderness, and gentleness. The anger and paternalism often found in depictions of God’s relationship to humankind are simply absent.¹²

Indeed, Mullins Glenn emphasizes the great depths of love that the divine parents traverse in order to accompany their children on their mortal journey. In addition to Jehovah’s agential choice to sacrifice himself on behalf of the human family, Mother God lays down her body for her children, choosing to take on the disembodied form of Spirit in order to accompany enfleshed spirits through mortality. Her body is laid with love at the foot of the Tree of Life, to be taken up again at the end of time when balance is restored to creation and the Mother takes her rightful place in the fullness of God. Mullins Glenn’s imagination here invokes Lehi and Nephi’s dream of Asherah, the symbol of the tree,¹³ and the presence and absence of the divine female throughout history. A consensual sacrifice in contrast with the viper’s attack of the lamb, God’s body is

Cocooned in living funerary pyre,

with cherubim and flaming sword to guard

the way. Then, in exhalation of

suspended animation, El, alone,

sealed off the Garden, reliquary of

the body that would rise again in glory

to restore the Earth to her Edenic state.¹⁴

It is through the efforts of Jehovah, El and Mother God (Elohim), and all the children of light that salvation, balance, and harmony are procured.

This is a powerful yet subtle shift, requiring refreshed language about power, hierarchy, and authority. The power of God is not strictly power over creation, but power for and with creation. The gathering of light is the gathering of this kind of power, a power that connects and welds and seals humans together by their own choice.

As a woman who feels the absence of the divine feminine keenly, I was moved by the depiction of a powerful deity’s sacrifice. I sympathize with Mullins Glenn’s choice to give a possible explanation for the aching gap in female representation, with her dignified and characteristic emphasis on agency. Moreover, I appreciate her eschatological gesture to the time when balance will be restored, even if I might quibble with the moves she makes. This is masterful storytelling: In contrast to proclamation, which insists on certainty, a storyteller can insist only on imagination. When I can imagine differently, I am living within an expansive story, one with boundaries flexible enough to create new life.

Mullins Glenn is clear: “I am not attempting to set forth doctrine; merely using imagination to present interesting (and feasible) new perspectives. Fundamentally, that is what Brighter and Brighter is—an offering of imagination.”¹⁵ As a work of imagination, Brighter and Brighter invites the reader to step into new possibilities, and its form enables this. In contrast to an academic paper, a novel, or an essay, which can function rather like a hammer in pressing a point, a poem glistens like a beam of light through a window. A poem can also sometimes evoke what other forms can only gesture to. The work of evoking, illuminating, imagining is deeply spiritual.

Yet our discourse often veers away from the translucent sheen of the poetic in favor of the more sturdy hues of prose. Yes, there are times for hammers and points. But in terms of spiritual life, we need the art of theopoetics—theology done through the imprecise medium of art and poetry. Rather like a mother dressing a child’s wounds, a work of art can nurse us in places we didn’t know were aching. A work of art can open our hearts to questions we want to ask but have not found words for, to curiosity that begs to be let out to play in the grass, to feelings of wonder and awe and sadness that have been corralled by prescriptive certainty. This is what Brighter and Brighter as a theopoetic work of art did for me, awakening new questions, new longing, new hope, new curiosity.

Creation, for Mullins Glenn, is ongoing, ex materia¹⁶ from the beginning. We as eternal beings are co-creators:

And as they exercised their will,

they co-created what the world would be.¹⁷

If we can continue to create what the world has been, will be, could be, might be, we can continue to create what our church might be and become. In this I reach with hope for work like Brighter and Brighter Until the Perfect Day. It is perhaps especially with imagination, with theopoetics, that we can construct places of shelter against the storms of doubt, drought, and certainty. I hope that Mullins Glenn’s work will inspire renewed imagination in and attention to the cornerstones of Latter-day Saint faith so that we may continue to wonder together, exploring the halls and gardens of our living faith. Brighter and Brighter Until the Perfect Day gestures toward a horizon of balance, nurtured by a creation imbued with light and bolstered by a Jehovah of abundant and flowing illumination. Tendril by tendril of unquenchable light, we might build the faith to imagine our way home.

Kristen Blair is a practical theologian working on her PhD in Theology at the University of Toronto. She is focused on feminist interpretations of kenosis, exploring dimensions of submission, agency, and dependency. She loves good food, the good earth, and mothering her two babies.

Art by J. Kirk Richards.

1. As Michael Austin’s foreword to the poem notes, previous attempts at Latter-day Saint works paralleling the “greats” have fallen short of their ambitious endeavors, their wide scope weakening their ability to speak substantively.

2. See Heather Walton, “A Theopoetics in Ruins,” Toronto Journal of Theology 36, no. 2 (2020): 159–69, https://doi.org/10.3138/tjt-2020-0082 and “A Theopoetics of Practice: Re-forming in Practical Theology,” International Journal of Practical Theology 23, no. 1 (2019): 3–23, https://doi.org/10.1515/ijpt-2018-0033. In the latter she writes that theopoetics is like bricolage rather than engineering: “The bricoleur . . . is a person who reworks and recycles existing materials, scraps they have accumulated over the years and shapes these to meet needs as they arise. . . . The bricoleur must work with fragments and detritus, having neither resources or opportunity to enrich or renew their stock . . . . In contrast, the engineer, representing the modern rationalized disciplines and their technical expertise, uses the correct tools for the job and the materials which are appropriate.”

3. Brighter and Brighter, page 12.

4. In her preface, Mullins Glenn notes that “as with all epic poems, this one is best experienced when read or heard aloud” (page xii).

5. Brighter and Brighter, page 1.

6. “Then in a blaze of radiance unsurpassed / the great and glorious Elohim appeared, / not spirits sole, but bodies glorified, / unmatched in luminescence and in grace.” Ibid, page 3.

7. Other similar midrashes include Rosemary Radford Ruether’s in Sexism and God Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, Beacon Press, 1993.

8. Paradise Lost, IV:498, 500.

9. Such as those from church father Tertullian: “Do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.” From Tertullian’s On the Apparel of Women, Book 1, Chapter 1.

10. “But when we choose amiss, our light recedes,” Brighter and Brighter, page 4.

11. Ibid, page 12.

12. Mullins Glenn mentions one of her influences being Julian of Norwich, an influence I surely see here. Julian writes that she sees “no wrath anywhere,” much to her surprise (see Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 49).

13. 1 Nephi 8 and 11, see also “Nephi and his Asherah” by Daniel Peterson, in Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9, no. 2 (2000), Article 4, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1253&context=jbms.

14. Brighter and Brighter, page 52.

15. Ibid, page xiii.

16. In contrast to creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) or ex profundus (out of chaos), ex materia means “out of something.”

17. Brighter and Brighter, page 59.