cakeIt seemed crazy, riding a camel up a moutain at midnight. Helpless, six feet in the air, I tried to tell myself that the camel didn’t want to die any more than I did. I listened to the sound of the pebbles as they spilled down the drop-off cliffs, and echoed as they bounced down the rocks far below me. Hours passed, as I made my way up barren Mount Sinai. I felt my dusky white camel’s sputtery hot breath as I swayed in the saddle, rocked by his rhythmic lurching step. I found myself entranced with the luminous stars peppering the inky night sky. While I had seen moonlight hundreds, thousands of times, this was the first time I had ever seen undeniable starlight. I now knew why they called it the Milky Way. It was as though I could see all the billowy transcluscent milk of the Milky Way,  swirled around with space dust and gasses.  The halting expanse of it all made me think of God and life and heaven.

It made me realize the thing that converts me, that makes me a Latter-Day Saint, is –heaven. Simply put, I “like” our theology about heaven. My husband finds my use of the word like an awkward one when it comes to religion, because for him it’s about truth. I argue that for me it is about truth, but still there is something about this certain doctrine that I have a delicious affinity for. Like my favorite dessert, it’s my cake doctrine. 

 I have many friends of many faiths. As I try to understand their rootings of beliefs,  I find the lack of this developed concept of heaven to be difficult for me. It’s the part I can’t imagine living without.  For most of Christianity, hell is actually defined more than heaven. I cannot really latch on to the passive vague heaven as understood by most Christians, a sort of restful, good place conjured in images of saints, harps and angels. Judaism has very little concrete doctrine regarding life after this. The Hindu concept of reincarnation feels almost sad to me. Buddhism leaves me wondering about the personal relationships of this life that mean so much to me.

I know in our modern world, religion really isn’t en vogue, and is often considered the panacea of the masses. While many can accept religious teachings as  “nice teachings to encourage a good life”,  heaven is especially spurious to many.  Often it is viewed as the ulitmate philosophical dangling carrot to induce morality. Yet ironically, heaven is the strongest belief I have, the one I cannot deny. Nothing is more logical, more real, more exquisite than my belief in what comes after this life.

I love knowing the best is yet to come, that God is generative, creative, intimately relational. It’s like dessert to infinity.  Those things resonate so deeply with the core of who I am.  Loving, learning, creating are the best parts of life  and if heaven as more of that–I’ll definitely take a second slice.

I think we each have it, some portion of our doctrine that hooks us, that our testimony hangs solidly on, that amidst any other struggles resonates so strongly in our soul. What is your cake (or pie) part of  our doctrine? Why?

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