The City of Enoch Taken Up

I’ve always heard that the City of Enoch was taken up from the Gulf of Mexico.  I found one document online with this quote: “Joseph Smith said on another occasion, in the hearing of some of the saints still surveying, that the City of Enoch would again take its place in the identical spot from which it had been detached, now forming that chasm of the earth, filled with water, called the Gulf of Mexico.”  Wilford Woodruff also apparently recorded, “Joseph also said that when the City of Enoch fled & was translated it was whare the gulf of Mexico now is.  It left that gulf a body of water.”  Some have remarked that when you fit the three continents back together like it might have been originally before they separated, there is a hole where the Gulf of Mexico is.  It seems pretty amazing to think that a whole city, with the people, the buildings, and the ground itself was literally lifted up and taken into heaven whole.  The Lord described it this way: “I am the same which have taken the Zion of Enoch into mine own bosom” (D&C 38:4). 

                I just finished listening to the short book called The Enoch Letters in which Elder Maxwell portrayed a correspondence between someone inside the city of Enoch and someone who was outside.  At the very end the man who had been receiving the letters finally decided to go and see the city and his friend Mahijah.  But he was too late.  He wrote, “I was at last awakened to the need to follow your counsel and to visit the City of Enoch….  I had not gone far in my journey when runners brought word that… your large city was no more in its place!  That it was gone!... I persisted to the place that was the City of Enoch, and saw with my own eyes.  Of a truth, Zion is fled! Oh, Mahijah, what has happened? Where may I find you?”  How astounding it must have been to the rest of the world to find that a whole city had completely disappeared.  What struck me about this account was the procrastination of this man who had waited just too long to try to be a part of Zion.  He had been given many chances by Mahijah, but when he finally accepted the invitation it was too late. Likewise we have numerous invitations to be a part of Zion today, but if we wait too long we may lose our opportunity. 

The city of Enoch must still exist in heaven, for one day it will come back.  In one section of the Doctrine and Covenants we learn a song and we will sing after the coming of the city: “The Lord hath gathered all things in one. The Lord hath brought down Zion from above” (D&C 84:100).  The other passage that teaches us about the return of the city of Enoch contains these words of the Lord to Enoch: “Then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other” (Moses 7:63).  In some way the city will return and we will great them and rejoice in their doming.  What a glorious reunion that will be for the righteous in Zion upon the earth!