GRAPHING A SPIRITUAL CARDIOGRAM

I have heard commentators comparing the questions in Alma five to temple recommend interview. Others have compared it to taking a spiritual cardiogram of your physical heart. Physical EKGs can tell a doctor a great deal about your physical heart by measuring the patterns of its electrical impulses in each beat.  

President Russell M. Nelson, an internationally renowned cardiologist and surgeon, prior to his calling as an apostle, studied the incontrovertible natural rules governing the heart.  It was through his knowledge that a natural law is an irrevocable law that he was able to make pioneering advancements in cardiac surgery by using natural law to stop a beating heart so that it could be repaired and then natural law to start it beating again. He was one of the first to make use of a heart/lung machine in surgery to take over the life-saving tasks of the heart while it was stopped to be repaired by the surgeon.

Just as there are irrevocable laws in the natural world, so, too, are there laws in the spiritual realm that are irrevocable. (See Doctrine and Covenants 130: 20-21) They are not as easy to see as the balance of calcium and sodium on the heart muscle, but they are just as binding. Alma the Younger in his sermon in Zarahemla gave a remarkably codified list of markers to measure our own spiritual heart condition.  After he reminded his people of their own personal history, he asked them if they, like their fathers, had been given a new heart.  Then he asked several probing questions of some of the everyday things we all can do to improve our spiritual/cardio health.

Some gifted Book of Mormon scholar created a way of graphing our own progress on these tasks, for lack of a better word.  Hats off and kudos to those scholars.

Verse 15 asks about faith - faith in Jesus Christ and His atonement and resurrection.

Verse 16 asks can you imagine yourself hearing Christ saying Well done?

Verse 19 asks if you can imagine approaching Christ's judgement with a pure heart and clean hands?

Verse 26 asks if you can sing the song of redeeming love?

Verse 27 asks if you have walked blameless before God? Have you been sufficiently humbled? Have your garments been made white with the blood of the Lamb?

Verse 28 asks if you have been stripped of pride?

Verse 29 asks if you have been likewise stripped of envy?

Verses 30-31 asks if you ever mock your brother? If you do, you must repent.

If you do this exercise on a 5 X 8 table, placing a dot in the appropriate square for each question, then connect the dots with straight lines, you should have a document that looks somewhat like an EKG. Then, with Alma and President Nelson, you can look at your results and see those areas that need a spiritual intervention.  

One final note: be honest with yourself, but don't be too hard on yourself either.  The only person who ever lived that could answer each of these questions always is Jesus Christ. 

© Dr. Kathleen Rawlings Buntin Danielson June 2020