Turning to the Fathers

Today I attended a production of the musical The Lion King and was impressed by the incredible performance.  In one of the scenes Simba looks to the heavens to commune with his father Mufassa who had died, and his father through the heavens told Simba that he had forgotten him and therefore forgotten who he was.  This idea of looking to our fathers or forbearers for guidance and meaning in life seems to be common among many cultures and stories.  For example, in the African novel Things Fall Apart, the tribe was constantly concerned with the ancestors and even had people dress up and pretend to be the dead ancestors.  In the book The Rent Collector, the main character in Cambodia constantly looks to her dead father and grandfather for comfort and direction, an action that I assume is not foreign to their culture in general.  In the fairy tale The Little Match Girl, the girl looks to her dead grandmother and ultimately is taken up into heaven by her.  Even in Harry Potter—and I haven’t read all of them—Harry looks towards and longs to understand his dead parents.  Surely there are many more similar examples in literature.  Watching Simba reach out to his dad made me thing about the famous verse that really describes this: “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse” (Malachi 4:6).

               It’s interesting to me that the very first scriptures that Moroni quoted to the boy Joseph were Malachi 3-4.  Of all the scriptures that he could have used to introduce the restoration to Joseph, he chose this one.  And he also changed it from how it reads in Malachi, focusing on the children turning to their fathers: “And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers” (D&C 2:2).  Clearly we have some kind of responsibility to turn our own hearts to our fathers.  If the “whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming” if the hearts of the children in general were not turned to their fathers, then for us personally surely the implications are just as serious: if we don’t turn our hearts to our fathers our lives will have been wasted.  That turning of our hearts certainly includes looking to the great spiritual fathers such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, following their covenant path with the Lord.  It also involves looking to our own posterity in both temple work and simply understanding our heritage.  Perhaps it might also mean looking towards the Father of our spirits as well as the Father (Jesus Christ) of our salvation.  And surely spending our days such that we never come to know Them we would have indeed wasted our time on earth.