A Lament for Our Day: Mormon’s Witness Revisited

I lay before you Mormon’s lament, a voice that trembles for a people who once called themselves believers.  It was written for us today because it happens amongst us now.

Hear the hush between his words, the small, stubborn grief that will not be quieted. Similarly today, I see the righteous being driven out, step by measured step, as if the world exhales them into exile. Light is no longer welcomed; it is folded away, hidden beneath the hands of those who fear its burn.  

They turn from truth and gorge on feeling, carried by tides that move them rather than by choices made with clear eyes. Anger rises where conviction should stand; softness becomes hardness; the Spirit’s pleadings fall like rain on stone. They have lost God, or let Him slip like a thread through their fingers, and the land remembers what it once was—civil, delightsome, bright—and grieves what it has become.  

Yet we must speak. While we remain in the flesh we must declare the truth, not to wound but to witness. Our words will draw the ire of those around us; they will be met with scorn and with silence. Still we speak, because to be silent would be to betray the light that lingers in us. We bear the sorrow and the stubborn hope that speech, though it may wound, might also wake.  

I bring this lament not to condemn but to mourn and to call—to hold up what was once bright and to keep the memory of that light alive in the dark.  

I lay Moroni's words down here as a mirror to mine own though we live ages apart, we are seeing alike.

"And now behold, my son, I fear lest the Lamanites shall destroy this people; for they do not repent, and Satan stirreth them up continually to anger one with another.

"Behold, I am laboring with them continually; and when I speak the word of God with sharpness they tremble and anger against me; and when I use no sharpness they harden their hearts against it; wherefore, I fear lest the Spirit of the Lord hath ceased striving with them.

"O my beloved son, how can a people like this, that are without civilization—

"(And only a few years have passed away, and they were a civil and a delightsome people)

"But O my son, how can a people like this, whose delight is in so much abomination—

"How can we expect that God will stay his hand in judgment against us?

"Behold, my heart cries: Wo unto this people. Come out in judgment, O God, and hide their sins, and wickedness, and abominations from before thy face!" (Moroni 9:3-4, 11-15)