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Joseph Smith
Restoration

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Lyrics: 3-9 Debate
RIGDON
Where will the Twelve take you?
You will leave Adam-ondi-ahman, and leave your home;
You will scatter over the land,
And forget the vision and gathering of Israel.
But let me confide in you:
Toward the end, Joseph fell from grace,
But who can blame him?
He grew anxious about life;
He married secretly, desperately;
He talked fearfully of the West.
I knew him once, when the waters flowed evenly,
Blue in the grace of heaven;
But then I could not know him:
The distant cry of tomorrow,
Away from Nauvoo,
The wheeling wings
Above the barren land
Of your future without me.
In the last extremity,
Joseph lost the humming vision
And gave it to me.
I am the guardian
Until his spirit rises again.
You are lost in the Twelve;
The tests will overwhelm you.
Know my voice;
I am the staff of God;
Rest in me.
YOUNG (To the congregation)
Joseph knew the freedom of God,
The new keys to the gates of knowing,
And the provision of the great Zion of the mountains
Where natural truth and the word of God
Shall be indistinguishable from each other.
The effort is mine and yours,
The work and glory of Him
Who struck Sinai with the stone law
That grew into love.
RIGDON
We have all we can do;
The canon is full;
You will fail.
YOUNG (Still to the congregation)
We shall fail as Adam failed;
We are not pure as Eden,.
Where palms and fern might hide our innocence,
But with the keys we have we shal1 try every door.
What may meet us, the sunburst gold,
The forest green, the ivory legends of St. Paul,
The sackcloth of Amos, Hosea, the wonder of love,
Or the bright clouds of the millennium,
We do not care, for these we address
With openness, as the Spirit is open.
RIGDON
Think of the desert skull;
It is yours, where the prairie
Widens into the desolation of Coriantumr.
YOUNG
Brother Rigdon, the Prophet charged you to set your house in order;
He did not mean for you to pull the blinds
And light a candle in the darkness.
RIGDON
Let us arrange the truth in the convenience
Of him who bequeathed it.
He was the spirit of rest;
The age of the hero is gone.
Do you suppose the wilderness is yours?
YOUNG
The western wilderness is ours,
And may it always be,
Though we return from it
And find the old lands again,
From which our people came.
Israel is the hand reaching through fire
And finding the gate of Eden.
RIGDON (In a half-light to the congregation)
Will you follow him, who gives you fire?
YOUNG
The fire is the Ghost, our minister to Him:
We do not fear.
RIGDON
To the fear of your graves...
YOUNG
From which we shall rise and live;
We wait not alone for what must come;
The day is ours.
The Church is the rod of our will
To rise as the Spirit moves us to rise
Like the breath of morning over Zion.
Who can guess what may be before God comes again?
He is not so far from us
That we cannot resemble Him where the fires gleam
Like islands on the sea:
In our hands and as the Spirit rules,
We shall make the world and ourselves
The just inheritors of what shall come.
RIGDON (Moving into shadow)
As you will; I shall have nothing of it.
YOUNG
You have drawn away.
Stay with us, Brother Rigdon,
Whatever the struggle.
RIGDON (From shadow)
Kirtland is mine;
The visions will come again,
Though Joseph is gone.
(He leaves slowly.)

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