Neal A. Maxwell in his book “All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience” continues with his chapter ‘The Fellowship of His Sufferings’ by sharing things specific to doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (to be included here, tomorrow). His concluding remarks (below) are from a popular Christian writer, Malcolm Muggeridge. As a preamble, Neal A. Maxwell wrote:
“Appropriate to this chapter are the eloquent, though not necessarily doctrinally precise (to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) words of faith of Malcolm Muggeridge (a popular Christian author) as, with tenderness, humor, and insight, he looked forward to the great adventure ahead:
I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God’s purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand. We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse—and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse–and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistibly growing power of materialism and materialistic societies. But it will not happen that that is the end of the story.
You know it’s a funny thing about when you’re old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. . . . The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say 3 a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your old battered carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up as to whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God’s creation, you are a participant in God’s purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.
Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as part of God’s love. We ourselves are part of that love, we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene does our existence here have any reality or any worth.
The essential feature and necessity of life, is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second-class hotel. (“The Great Liberal Death Wish, ” Imprimis, May 1979, Hillsdale College, Michigan.)
Concluding his chapter, Neal A. Maxwell wrote: “This mortal could not be a first class experience if we did not encounter some “first class ” challenges as measured out by an all-wise God who is perfect in His love for us. Nor can we expect to pass through this mortal experience without having relevant experiences in learning to love others by serving them. We could not learn love in the abstract any more than we could learn patience and the other cardinal virtues. Just as we cannot know the fellowship of his sufferings” without suffering, we also come to know real fellowship with our fellowmen only by serving them.
Neal A. Maxwell, All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1979), 49-50
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience, and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
