HOUSE OF GLORY
Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.
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Joseph Smith once said “Ours is the time upon which prophets, priests and kings in ages past have dwelt with peculiar delight; and have looked forward with joyful anticipation to the day in which we live;… we are the favored people that God has chosen to bring about the Latter-day glory”. Gordon B. Hinckley believes that “The Lord has used imperfect people in the process of building his perfect society. If some of them occasionally stumbled, or if their characters may have been slightly flawed in one way or another, the wonder is the greater that they accomplished so much”.
Tolstoy, on the other hand, eloquently argues in War and Peace: “Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.” Dr. King wrote, “Progress does not come on the wheels of inevitability”. It is the same within Mormonism. We must be willing to act as God’s co-workers in the establishment of the Beloved Community that Dr. King envisioned. We just happen to call it: Zion.
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Martin Luther King’s Nonviolence Step 6: Reconcile
Keep all actions and negotiations peaceful and constructive. Agree to disagree with some people and with some groups as you work to improve society. Show all involved the benefits of changing, not what they will give up by changing.
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A Great and Marvelous Work is about to Come forth
For the time cometh, saith the Lamb of God, that I will work a great and a marvelous work among the children of men; a work which shall be everlasting, either on the one hand or on the other — either to the convincing of them unto peace and life eternal, or unto the deliverance of them to the hardness of their hearts and the blindness of their minds unto their being brought down into captivity, and also into destruction, both temporally and spiritually, according to the captivity of the devil.
- Nonviolence in a Revolutionary Context (themormonworker.org)
- Preparations for the Restoration and the Second Coming: “My Hand Shall Be Over Thee”
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Who is God and What is Our Destiny?
Mormons believe that God is not much different than we are. “When the Savior shall appear, we shall see him as he is. We shall see that he is a man like ourselves”. D&C 130:1. In that light, God is a finite being, in a resurrected body, who like Jesus Christ, his Son in the flesh, became a resurrected being after having overcome death. And together with the Holy Spirit, the Gods have infinite power to challenge violence, counter sin and overcome death – to progressively turn back the tide of evil in the world. Since we were there from the beginning (as spirit-children of God), together we established the rules of the game prior to life on earth. Then we came to earth and the process of Creation – of establishing the rules – did not stop. The act of Creation and re-Creation continues, it evolves, independently from God’s intention, but not without His continued participation.
- Zion cannot be built up
- High on the Mountain Top with Martin Luther King (mormongandhi youtube channel)
- Climb Every Mountain: A Message of Hope from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir
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Catastrophic or Progressive Millenialism?
An Islamic scholar observed that, ‘when our whole existence is threatened, as it is today, the eschatological veins in various religions come to the fore’. Millennialism is in relation to eschatology (the doctrine of the latter days) a kind of outrageous hope that it is actually possible for embodied human beings to live in a just society together. But when it comes to millennialism, the essential question is: HOW do we get to the promised kingdom? Good deeds? An apocalypse? A proletariat revolution? A messiah? We could say that there are two types of millennialism: the catastrophic and the progressive.
- Zion in the midst of Babylon (lds.org)
- How Will America End? Can Mormonism Preserve America?
- Preparing for the Final Act
- The Problem with the Battle Hymn of the Republic (mormongandhi youtube channel)
- What does the Future hold for the Younger Generation?
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Mormongandhi: Celebrating my First Anniversary
Wow, time flies and it’s been already a year since I embarked on the cyber-sea of Galilea with “latter day satyagraha”. This site is the continuation of a dissertation I wrote in 2004 while studying peace in Bradford. This website has been an attempt to enable mormons, and especially mormons, to revisit their faith through the lenses of the great historical advocates of nonviolence. How would mormonism look like, if Gandhi had been among its founding members? How would the LDS Church look like today, if Thomas S. Monson had been active in the Civil Rights movement alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. ? Where would we be today as a people, if we had not rejected in 1838 the principles of nonviolence taught in the Sermon on the Mount ?
- Barack Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize
- Aung San Suu Kyi on Nonviolence
- War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives (Call for Papers)
- Mormons on a Mission: MoTab and the Cold War (nytimes.com)
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Nearing a Mormon Regeneration
Life on earth must be seen as the tireless efforts of men and women being God’s co-workers in the establishment of the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned, and that we, as Latter-day Saints, recognize as Zion. Having successfully gone through the Reformation, the Restoration and the Reorganization, is our movement ready for a sorely needed Regeneration? Regeneration could mean that, “God brings us to new life from a previous state of subjection to the decay and the power of death”.
