Well, you’re in your little room and your working on something good. But if it’s really good, you’re gonna’ need a bigger room.

~ Jack White, Little Room

Unlike U2’s David Howell Evans—more commonly and most unfortunately known as The Edge^[1]I’ve grown in my respect for Evans in recent years, but his stage name still sounds like a bad marketing gimmick from a bygone era—Jack White of the White Stripes didn’t look like a tool next to Jimmy Page on the documentary It Might Get Loud. Yes, that Jimmy Page: the guitar legend who founded Led Zeppelin. Though Mr. Page’s post-Zeppelin career hasn’t been particularly epic, the guitarist has grown old with remarkable grace—unlike so many classic rockers who cling in futile desperation to the trappings of youth—so he didn’t make it easy for Jack.

But even more impressive than Mr. White’s physical presence was something he said:

In the Bible, God cursed the ground, so that man will always have to work hard; whether you’re a farmer or a carpenter or a guitar player, or whatever it is. You have to fight these man-made materials.

Clearly, the root of this statement is the idea that God never intended an easy life for man. But that last bit—about fighting man-made materials—could use a little context. Jack plays crappy guitars. One of them is an old mail-order Airline guitar made in the sixties.^[2]See here for specs. It’s made of plastic.^[3]Actually, it’s made of Res-O-Glas glass fiber with a bolt on maple neck, but I’m pretty sure Jack just called it a “plastic” guitar, so here we are. Structural inconsistencies make it harder to play. It’s a battle to get the sound you want; you have to fight this man-made machine. This begs the question: why would a man who possesses a fortune of nearly forty million dollars play a plastic guitar? Answer: the Book of Genesis says fruitful creativity comes through struggle, so he intends to keep struggling. It’s a Luddite philosophy^[4]As so often happens, we may have been wrong about “What the Luddites Really Fought Against” when we began using their movement as a slur. with a twist. The Luddites destroyed the machines that stole their jobs; Jack White avoids well built, easy to play guitars and effects pedals because he thinks they’ll steal his soul. Or, at least, his creative voice:

Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth… Yeah, it makes it easier and you can get home sooner; but it doesn’t make you a more creative person. That’s the disease we have to fight in any creative field: ease of use.

~ Jack White

I guess that means Jack would have got along with Thoreau. He’d probably have called him Hank and told him he dug the neck beard too.^[5]Jack white has grown his own fair share of ill-advised facial hair experiments. I’ve ragged on Thoreau in the past, about how he couldn’t really have rejected modern society as much as he claimed if he was still coming in for pie and coffee with the Emersons on a regular basis. But the fact remains: the man built his own cabin—a little ten-by-fifteen foot room where he could live deliberately—which is more than I can say for myself. Thoreau concluded:

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

And Jack put it this way:

When you’re in your bigger room, you might not know what to do. You might have to think of how you got started standin’ in your little room.

~ From Little Room

I’m fascinated at the thought of seeking and embracing the wildness of God’s cursed earth. The idea of suffering for one’s art is not new, but most artists/rock stars/writers who laud pain seek it in debauchery, not spartan industry. And I admire the determination of men like Jack White and Henry David Thoreau, who persistently shun the luxuries of human progress—those bigger rooms built by mortal hands, mankind’s imagined refuge from the austere schoolmaster of natural law.

I want to be part of the resurgence of things that are tangible, beautiful and soulful, rather than just give in to the digital age.

~ Jack White

I share Jack White’s love of analog creativity. Sure, this essay was helped along greatly by the digital age: fueled by Kindle and Google, auto-tuned by Microsoft. And if Thoreau could live deliberately while partaking in modern comforts and conveniences in measure, creativity and technology use mustn’t always be mutually exclusive. But I love the smell and heft of an old book. I prefer the organic grain of a photo shot on film. And the only thing sweeter than the sound of my vinyl record collection is my wife’s unrecorded voice. As she sings, I know I’ll never hear it precisely the same way again.

One sound can hold back a thousand hands when the pipe blows a tune forlorn. And the thistle is a prickly flower. Aye, but how it is sweetly worn.

~ Jack White, Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn

Thorns, briers and thistles seem abundant enough as it is, and I don’t know that a farmer would benefit from encouraging such scourges. But if such a method produces books like Walden and albums like White Blood Cells, Thoreau and White must have been on to something. Maybe we should embrace the briar and kiss the thistle.

~

Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life…in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.

~ Genesis 3:17-19

~

The Christmas of 2010 was spent with my wife’s parents in Oakland, California. While driving back from a daytrip to San Francisco, my wife’s father said he’d been thinking about the reasons civilizations regress and how important hard work is. He’s spent most of his life working construction, so he knows something about such things. He started me thinking again about that passage from Genesis and how we’ve been trying to undo God’s curse ever since. Not just trying to pull up briars and noxious weeds to plant a crop, but to replant Eden: a place where ripe fruit hangs low year-round unfettered by thorns. Later that night, we sang Joy to the World:

No more will sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground; He’ll come and make the blessings flow far as the curse was found.

The portion of the hymn I’ve quoted differs slightly from the original words penned by Isaac Watts. I am a Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; the version that appears in our hymnals was modified back in the 1830’s. Our changes are not corrections; they simply reflect a Mormon preoccupation, reframing the rejoicing as anticipatory of Christ’s second coming. Accordingly, where the original exhorts, “no more let sin and sorrow grow,” our version speaks of a future time when the resurrected Savior will reign on this earth after restoring its Edenic glory.

I wondered that Christmas in Oakland, and still wonder, if sweat, sin and sorrow will ever end. I have no doubt that God will replant Eden on earth, or that Heaven will be heavenly. But when the Messiah came the first time, He brought a new law to replace the old one: a higher standard, a greater challenge, a bigger room, the law of the Gospel to replace the little room of the Mosaic law. Man once lived “an eye for an eye,” but Jesus said:

Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

What a staggering command that must have been.  Our Christian world has been reciting those words for nearly 2000 years and the idea of loving, blessing, serving and praying for our enemies still sounds impossible and foreign. Jesus continues:

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

God’s children fight, curse, hate, despitefully use and persecute Him in the very moment He pours out His most tender blessings. We hate and torture one another. To look on the horrors we commit with a perfect knowledge would be agonizing. Did God curse the earth so we might learn how to labor through pain and become, in some inconceivably small way, more like Him? If so, to what end? Is the law of sorrow-bought bread a preparatory law given that we may, in the life to come, witness and endure the pain a Father feels when His children curse themselves? Mormon’s believe man may be deified through Christ’s grace; we hope for a life and labor like our Father’s. For Mormons, tough skin and a tender heart are the demands of Christian discipleship.

I believe God is the most joyful being in existence. How could it be otherwise? But I also believe that God has wept. Enoch, who came closer than any man has to replanting Eden, saw the Almighty God of Heaven weep and finally wept with Him. This is according to an expanded version of the book of Genesis, as delivered to the first Latter-day Saint prophet, Joseph Smith:

And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept…. And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men; wherefore Enoch knew, and looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook.

I lose my breath every time I read that. I feel the same way when reading this two-word sentence penned by the Apostle John, written in connection with the death of Lazarus:

Jesus wept.

I’ve always been puzzled by that moment in the New Testament. Echoing Enoch, I want to ask the Lord, “How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?” Only moments earlier, Jesus had called Himself the Resurrection and the Life; surely He had an expanded view of what death is and leads to. John seems to suggest Jesus wept in empathy with those who mourned for Lazarus’ death. This seems the most probable answer. If so, if Jesus weeps in empathy for a small group of mourners, how does He feel when multitudes are in agony?

The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

~Matthew 13:41-42

Eden will be replanted. Christ will reign. Blessings will flow as far as the curse was found. But first, our wicked earth will burn. Our Savior, who wept at a temporary death, will send destroying angels to cleanse the whole earth. What I find most bewildering: none feel the agony of this more than Jesus. He has spent an eternity in the great expanses of heaven, filled with joys and heartaches we cannot begin to comprehend in our provincial world. And one night in a lonely garden, He bore all our grief and iniquity.

~

In my own small way, I am a father. I am blessed with two sons and a daughter. When they cry because the oatmeal isn’t sweet enough, when they fight over a toy, or when they tantrum at bedtime, I sometimes think: what I wouldn’t give to exchange problems for a day, to have problems so small and simple. But I don’t really mean it. I wouldn’t trade the joy and love and fullness I feel as a father and husband. Maybe not even just for a day. And I know childhood trials are huge compared to children; I do my best empathize with patience.

Still, the idea of facing such trials armed with my present maturity does seem appealing at times. Is that temptation anything like what Jesus felt when—hungry in the desert—He looked at a pile of stones and knew He could make them bread? Jack White called “ease of use” a disease to creativity; under this definition, the earth must have constituted a plague to its Creator. But He knew better. He chose hunger. He chose the bitter cup His Father gave Him. He chose the cross. He chose to live (and die) deliberately. He chose to prepare mansions, not little rooms, for us in our Father’s house.