And after this manner shall ye baptize in my name; for behold, verily I say unto you, that the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one; and I am in the Father, and the Father in me, and the Father and I are one (3 Ne. 11:27).
In preparation for a post on my Book of Mormon blog, I have been going through references in that book to being “cut off.” One of these is in Mormon’s epistle to Moroni, in which he discusses disagreements over baptism — disagreements not addressed by Christ in 3 Nephi, even though his stated purpose was to end such disputations. Mormon says:
[T]each parents that they must repent and be baptized, and humble themselves as their little children, and they shall all be saved with their little children. . . .
Behold I say unto you, that he that supposeth that little children need baptism is in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity; for he hath neither faith, hope, nor charity; wherefore, should he be cut off while in the thought, he must go down to hell. For awful is the wickedness to suppose that God saveth one child because of baptism, and the other must perish because he hath no baptism (Moro. 8:10, 14-15).
In the afternoon, I finally finished Joshua Cutchin’s very long book Ecology of Souls, reading it in one of the coffee shops I frequent. In the afterword, the author discusses his Christian faith and how he reconciles it with his Fortean interests and theories. Here’s one paragraph from this afterword:
This, in my opinion, is the point. To show humility, to show compassion, to realize that, while we should never neglect our individuality, we are all one when everything is said and done. While I remain unconvinced that a just universe would deny immortality solely because someone didn’t meditate, didn’t go to church, didn’t go to South America for an ayahuasca session—didn’t take the time to forge an “afterlife vehicle”—we do need to put our own houses in order, so to speak, if we stand any chance of evading Ammit’s maw.
This clearly echoes Mormon — the need for humility, the unacceptability of the idea that God would allow anyone to perish solely because he neglected to participate in a particular rite — but I wouldn’t have noticed had I not been hit over the head with a much more striking synchronicity. At the very moment I read “we are all one,” the background music playing in the coffee shop was a song called “We Are All One”:
