From the Narrow Desert

I soon as I saw the title, I figured it was synchronistically relevant. St. Peter has been in the sync-stream of late, particularly in his role as "first pope." He went by two different names, Simon and Peter, the latter meaning "stone." The name Garfunkel ultimately derives from the Latin carbunculus, meaning "reddish, bright kind of precious stone, probably comprising the ruby, carbuncle, hyacinth, garnet." Catholics consider Peter to have been the first pontiff, a title which literally means "bridge-maker." So when Simon and Garfunkel sing about a bridge, that seems likely to have something to do with Peter.

Furthermore, Peter has been associated recently with the title character of the Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus," in which Aengus pursues a "glimmering girl." I figured this tied in with the "silver girl" in "Bridge over Troubled Water," and I saw that Emily was even wearing a glimmering silver dress to sing it, as if in costume as the glimmering/silver girl herself.

When I played the Emily Linge video, though, I found that she had changed the lyrics -- something she never does! -- and replaced "silver girl" with "children." Now this is unacceptable. Children don't need a bridge over troubled water, nor do they need to sail. When the water is troubled, they wade.

Since Emily had dropped the ball on the "silver girl" bit, I decided to listen to the original. When I put bridge over troubled water in the search box, though, what came up was another Emily Linge cover of the same song, uploaded just a month ago. She's wearing the same silver dress, and this time she gets the lyrics right:

A few hours after writing the above, mentioning three different ways of crossing "troubled water" -- sailing, wading, and using a bridge -- I read this in Louise Varèse's English translation of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell:

Yet another way of crossing troubled water! And of course, Jesus was one of two people to walk on water, the other being Peter. The "emerald wave" also syncs with one of Ramer's recurring dreams in The Notion Club Papers:

This is presumably a vision of the destruction of Númenor, which happened in the reign of its last king, Ar-Pharazôn -- whom William Wright identifies with Peter.

This surprised me because the Petersens are Protestants, and I had always thought that this was an exclusively Mormon hymn. I had assumed this because of the opening lines -- "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, / Is laid for your faith in his excellent word" -- in which saints is used to refer to all believers, implicitly including even those who may be struggling with their faith. I had always thought that this was a distinctively Mormon use of that word, that in the larger Christian world a "saint" was always an extraordinary person of exemplary holiness, and that our giving ourselves the title "Latter-day Saints" must sound incredibly pretentious to outsiders, as if we had dubbed ourselves "heroes" or "geniuses" or something.

Well, that just goes to show how little I really know about non-Lutheran Protestantism. Here's Wikipedia setting me straight:

I suppose this shouldn't surprise me. Mormonism grew up in a Protestant milieu and would naturally express itself in a Protestant-derived idiom.

One question I haven't been able to find the answer to: Do the less-Catholic branches of Protestantism (excluding Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists) use saint as a title, as in St. Peter, St. Paul, etc.? Mormons don't, but I had always assumed that most other Christians do -- based, for example, on references to "St. Peter" in bluegrass music, Negro spirituals, etc. If any of my readers happen to be of the Protestant persuasion, perhaps they can enlighten me.

But this post isn't really about the use of the word saint. As the title indicates, it's a revisiting of my November 2022 post "In Mormon Russia, the Lord consecrates things unto YOU." In that post, I noted that in the Bible, people always consecrate things to the Lord, while in the Book of Mormon, the Lord always consecrates things to people. The one exception is a single reference, which appears in both books (Micah 4:13, 3 Ne. 20:19), to the Lord consecrating things to himself. Well, like the broad use of saint, this turns out not to be as distinctively Mormon as I had thought. Here is the third verse of "How Firm a Foundation":

The whole verse is in quotation marks because it is meant to be the Lord speaking -- saying that he will sanctify to you, Christian, your deepest distress. This is very close to the language of the Book of Mormon: "thou knowest the greatness of God; and he shall consecrate thine afflictions for thy gain" (2 Ne. 2:2).

The word used is sanctify, not consecrate, but these are more-or-less synonymous. Checking all occurrences of forms of sanctify in the Bible, I find that it is generally used without a preposition, but when things are sanctified to someone, that someone is always the Lord. (See Ex. 13:2, Lev. 27:14-22, Num. 8:17, Deut. 15:19, 2 Chr. 30:17.) In the Book of Mormon, things are always sanctified by the Lord to people. (See Jacob 4:5, Moro. 4:3, Moro. 5:2). This is the same pattern I found with consecrate.

"How Firm a Foundation" -- which first appears, with an anonymous author, in a 1787 Baptist hymnal -- follows, or rather foreshadows, the Mormon usage.

I found it unexpectedly moving, this old song about Messianic hopes that never came true. People were expecting a Messiah, King David 2.0; what they got was the Christ. Having one's hopes upended isn't always a bad thing. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him" (1 Cor. 2:9).