"No age has been decisively left behind, and in some sense all earlier ages walk with us. The past provides us with imaginative alternatives to the present, and that which to one age seems dead and decisively left behind appears to another age as something only left in storage, which retrieved, again seems beautiful."
-Glenn W. Olsen in Beginning At Jerusalem: Five Reflections On The History of the Church. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004.
This quote has left me pondering on the numerous assumptions and presuppositions that I inherited based on the context of my personal history. I like to think that I am an original. However, history shapes me.
Functioning outside the LDS Church I recognize how the LDS world view is still very much a part of me. I write that statement without malice for my heritage, but simply to say that I accept my past and look forward with an awareness that the future is not at all unaffected by where I've been.
Yet the future seems like a white canvass. Could it be an allusion that the future is a white canvass? It seems that the future is not free from the affects of the past, even a past that reaches beyond my control and engulfs me and you in a world of great transition. The world itself enters the future in a constant flux of change and, most importantly, the past does not simply dissipate with time. Like tentacles it reaches into the black abyss of the future to shape it in ways that make it approachable, comprehendable and a reality that we can anticipate with hope. Without the past to inform our future, the future becomes something to be feared, incomprehendible, and hopeless. Of course, if one were to evolve from a hopeless past, the future too would seem hopeless.
I ramble.
Let me rap up this rambling with this thought. The LDS Church was not formed in a vacuum. It emerged as a part of a larger restoration movement on the American frontier of the 19th century. The early converts, even Joseph Smith, entered into this emerging world we call Mormonism with presuppositions that would affect the formatino of the LDS Church. So I begin to wonder what carried over with the early LDS Saints into the emerging LDS movement? What philosophy and was most predominant in the early LDS church? Where did that philosophy come from? What did they, the early LDS Saints, see left in storage, viewed as worthless by others, but to them, held deep meaning and beauty?
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