The Law of Undulation

In Ward Conference our Stake President challenged us to read the Book of Mormon by Easter and we, as a family accepted the challenge, and our attempting to do o through accelerated nightly family reading. This week we covered the start of 2 Nephi which includes Chapter 4: 16-35. In his 1947 monograph Our Book of Mormon, Sidney Sperry christened this passage "The Psalm of Nephi," and it has carried that epithet ever since. As we sat in the living room the words resonated once again with sweetness of the Spirit.


John S. Tanner wrote the hymn “I Love the Lord”, which until descrying the internet for writing this note I had forgotten, had moved me so at General Priesthood when it was performed by the BYU Men’s Chorus in April 2007. A powerful rendering of Nephi’s thoughts and testimony, which are so strengthening when put to music.

The following thoughts by John Tanner I also found interesting as they relate to the development of hymns based in the Book of Mormon.

Nephi's psalm (2 Nephi 4:16—35) constitutes one of the great lyric outbursts in the Book of Mormon. Like the psalms of David, it is replete with vivid figurative language, dramatically rising and falling emotions, and parallelism (the principal formal feature of Hebrew poetry). It also contains themes that figure prominently in the Psalter—praise, thanksgiving, love of scripture, anger with enemies, and the conviction of sin. Like biblical psalms, Nephi's psalm articulates universal feelings of self-reproach and rejoicing, of pleading and praising.

I Love the Lord"
I love the Lord. In him my soul delights.
Upon his word, I ponder day and night.
He's heard my cry, brought visions to my sleep,
And kept me safe o'er deserts and the deep.
He's filled my heart with his consuming love,
And borne me high on wings of his great dove.

Yet oft I groan,"O wretched man am I!"
My flesh is weak and I'm encompassed by
A world of sin, which holds me in its thrall,
If I give in and to temptations fall.
Then strength grows slack, I waste in sorrow's vale.
My peace destroyed, my enemies prevail.

Awake, my soul! No longer droop in sin.
Rejoice, my heart! And let me praise again
The Lord my God, who is my rock and stay
To keep me strict upon his straight, plain way.
O let me shake at the first sight of sin
And thus escape my foes without and in.

Nephi's psalm speaks not only to his individual experience but to our common experience with anxiety, discouragement, and temptation. Such musical adaptations of scripture can greatly enrich our understanding of sacred texts as well as implant them more deeply in our souls. (Think of musical versions of The Lord's Prayer, Handel's Messiah) But we need more sacred songs drawn from the Book of Mormon. Too few hymns derive from our unique scriptural tradition. As a result, restoration scripture has not been borne by song into the sinews of our speech, the wells of our memory, and the affections of our hearts.

Those such as this that do.

C. S. Lewis sheds light on this same discussion through the advice of the senior devil to his nephew in The Screwtape Letters:
Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to
produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to
withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as
animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an
eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to
be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—
the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of
troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen
this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection
for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth
periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of
numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now
going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural
phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

“The common experience of all human beings is that life on earth is filled with peaks and valleys.
Yet, there is something within all of us that longs, however inarticulately, for a life free from these undulations.” “ When the clouds of life cast a gray shadow over us, it is especially important to remind ourselves that what we are experiencing is a normal part of life in a fallen world and that in due course the sun will shine again.”

I have been unable to source the Conference Talk but remember the journey being described as a winding mountain train ride sitting in an open-window coach car behind the coal-driven locomotive. Many times the wind and direction of the train around the mountains would drive the soot-filled smoke to cloud the view but suddenly an incredible vista would break forth – and oh the view, what an incredible vista.



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