Ever since I wrote last week’s Beatles post, I’ve been reflecting more and more lately about that empty, motivation-less Summer after High School–when I didn’t want to go to college, get a job, serve a mission, or do anything, really–when I would just listen to “Across the Universe” on repeat for an hour at a time. What was it, exactly, that I was trying to accomplish? Or, more precisely, why was it I felt such repulsion at accomplishing anything?

We are taught that when Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, they were cursed to have to toil and sweat and work for their bread and substance. Work, especially in the Protestant Ethic tradition of Christianity (of which our Busy-as-Beehives faith fully participates), has therefore frequently been cast as something almost holy, a pre-requisite for returning to God. And listen, I’m willing to work as hard as anyone when necessary^[1]I would hope that my High School job limbing trees, my mission, my roofing job in college, and the grind of a PhD would be sure enough evidence of that. But I also wonder if this is a case wherein the Biblical literalists have actually not been literal enough: that work really is intended as a curse–and what’s more, is strictly provisional, something that will be suspended once we really do return to the presence of God and the Earth again attains its “paradisaical glory” (to quote our own 10th Article of Faith). No, I think it’s that tacit assumption that there is something intrinsically holy about work that I think I was rebelling against that Summer–and there are days that I look back on my 18-year-old self and wonder if he wasn’t right all along.

Who hasn’t, after the end of a long work day, or after a brutal work week, gone to bed with the sneaking suspicion that this isn’t how we are intended to spend our limited time on this earth, that this simply isn’t the way things are meant to be? We as Latter-day Saints often like to brag that our concept of Heaven isn’t a mere static, never-changing borefest like the sectarians (tacitly agreeing with Nietzsche’s “In heaven, all the interesting people are missing”), but one of Eternal Progression, ever working, ever growing. And to be clear: I really do believe in, and am deeply inspired by, the revolutionary concept of Eternal Progression. But I think we shouldn’t sell short the more “traditional” Christian idea of Heaven as a place of eternal rest, one where the curse of work will follow us no more.

It’s a concept of Paradise best exemplified by the Talking Heads’ 1979 song “Heaven.”

Similar to how I listened to “Across the Universe” on repeat that one Summer, the Talking Heads sing of how “The band in Heaven, they play my favorite song/They play it once again, they play it all night long.” Here, the doing-nothingness is the point; as David Byrne further sings, “It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all/Could be so exciting, could be so much fun.” It is our Stockholm Syndrome to our own misery that makes us think that a world without work must be something hellish, monotonous, and cruel; the Talking Heads ask us to consider instead, if in reality, “Heaven is a place/A place where nothing/Nothing ever happens.”

On another personal note, last September I was hiking in Acadia National Park with some old college buddies. After tackling some high peaks (yes, yes, I know, the work is was made it worth it, but bear with me), we laid in a meadow beside a clear-water pond for over an hour, while awaiting our reservation at the only restaurant in the park. It struck me that it had been ages since I had last just laid down like that, literally doing nothing. Not only did it feel heavenly, like the Talking Heads song, but it struck me how much better off this world would be if we all just laid down more often and did nothing–how much less pollution, less exploitation, less oppression, less anxiety, less stress, less waste. “Work less, wear less, eat less, and we will be a much wiser, wealthier, and healthier people,” no less than Brigham Young himself once said (a man no stranger to hard work himself), and boy oh boy, do I wish that that was the prophetic counsel we followed most often.

Maybe its less that we work, than it is the kind of work that we do. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” said the Savior himself, implying that the work that we should be dedicating ourselves to in Eternity is far lighter–and light-hearted–than the work we feel cursed to do in this life–which is, specifically, the work of “getting ahead,” of enriching ourselves, of taking advantage of each other. Such is the implicit message of Arcade Fire’s 2007 track “(Antichrist Television Blues),” from their second album Neon Bible

As I wrote in a more in-depth analysis of the implicit Mormonism of Arcade Fire for AML back in 2018:

“The song is a story about a self-declared ‘God-fearing man’ who pushes his talented singer of a daughter into show business (the working title was purportedly ‘Joe Simpson Blues’). The song’s narrator spends most the song trying to convince himself that by doing so he’s fulfilling God’s plan, singing ‘I just gotta know if it’s part of your plan/To seat my daughter there by your right hand.’ All the while, however, he fears he’s not, singing, ‘Lord, would you send me a sign/Cause I just gotta know if I’m wasting my time.’ The track builds up to the final line where he passionately pleads, ‘O tell me Lord, am I the antichrist.’ Now, this song, like so much of Neon Bible, speaks to anxieties common to many religions; it’s in the details, then, that his Mormon upbringing peeps out:

“For example, the line ‘My lips are near but my heart is far away’ is a direct allusion to Isaiah 29:13; in Mormonism, this is the scripture cited by Jesus Christ Himself to Joseph Smith, when the Lord explains to the boy prophet why he is not to join any existing church. Thus, in Mormonism, to say that ‘My lips are near but my heart is far away’ is to make an abject confession of complete apostasy, to feel one’s self terribly withdrawn from the presence of God. It is a scripture that Win Butler would have been familiar with growing up, and he most likely understood its full passionate import when he used it here.

“Likewise, the lyric ‘You’ll always be a stranger in a strange, strange land’ alludes to Hebrews 11:13, and is often cited within the LDS faith to express our belief that we existed Pre-Mortally as spirits, that we are in fact strangers and pilgrims upon this Earth; while the line ‘I’ll be your mouthpiece’ expresses the LDS belief that the Prophet is the mouthpiece of God —but with this caveat, that in Mormonism, one cannot wish to be His mouthpiece, for God must choose a Prophet for Himself. Therefore, to aspire to Prophethood, to presume to tell God who He should choose, is to sin in Mormonism. Thus, the singer’s fear of being the antichrist is derived in part from him seeking an honor that he is expressly forbidden to seek for himself.”

The only addition I’ll make at this time is a point I also raised during our discussion of Kendrick Lamar, namely that this doctrine of everyone pushing themselves and each other and exploiting even our loved ones to get ahead, wherein “every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime” (Alma 30:17), is the literal doctrine of the Antichrist. Hence the likely root of the song title “Antichrist Television Blues.”

For again, it is Christ who wants our “burdens to be light,” it is the Antichrist who wants them as heavy as possible. The Book of Mormon also speaks of “the easiness of the way” (Alma 37:46); let us not ruin the gospel by making it harder. We are supposed to be ending the curse of Adam, not indulging in it.