I Hold With Those Who Favor Fire
An Introduction to Jerusalem's Flame
As many of you know, I recently completed an online version of my autobiography, Lighting the Torch: Narrative of the Early Life of John C. Hancock. Now that I have a category called “Jerusalem’s Flame” (companion to the category “Athens Flame”) in this Substack The Torch, I would like to share some thoughts about a few chapters in my autobiography that pertain to the city of Jerusalem and my experiences in the Holy Land, even as I introduce this category that I call “Jerusalem’s Flame”.
In my autobiography I explain my lifelong interest in Jeruslaem, in Israel, in Judaism, in Hebrew, and in all things related to the Holy Land, and I recount the story of my two voyages to the Middle East, the first in 2004 and the second in 2016.
I first embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the fall of 2004 in order to study Hebrew and to learn everything that I could about Jerusalem, Israel, the Jews, the Muslims, the Christians, and the land of prophecy and the Bible. Challenges that I experienced beforehand as a result of corruption in modern medicine impelled me to change my study and career plans. I first travelled to Israel to participate in a masters degree program in Judaic studies, but my progress in that program was also cut short by challenges that I experienced as a result of corruption in modern medicine.
My first experience in the Holy Land was simultaneously one of the best and one of the worst experiences of my life. I’m grateful that one of my friends later helped me to create a slide presentation with pictures that capture a portion of the beauty of my experience. I describe my first experience in the Holy Land in detail in the following chapters of my autobiography:
Chapter Eleven: Let Your Light So Shine: Beginning Adventures in the Holy Land
Chapter Twelve: Let There Be Light: Illuminating the Dark Abyss of Psychiatry
About a decade later, and still in the midst of a long and painful healing process, I had the opportunity to travel to the Holy Land again. At the beginning of my studies at Hillsdale College in Michigan, I embarked on another pilgrimage to the Holy Land, this time for a much briefer time, and thankfully without any harm or injury. Even though this second voyage only lasted for a couple of weeks, it was packed with wonderful and amazing experiences. I even got baptized in the Jordan River. (Now Evangelicals can’t argue with me about Jesus because technically I’m one of them too. 😊) I describe this experience in a later chapter of my autobiography:
Thus far the category of “Jerusalem’s Flame” in this Substack The Torch consists mainly of my Book of Mormon Notes, a chapter by chapter study of and commentary on the Book of Mormon. There are a few other posts on topics pertaining to faith, religion, theology, and Mormonism, and I aim to write more on such topics in the future. But I share these things in order to demonstrate that for me, the meaning of the title “Jerusalem’s Flame” isn’t merely rhetorical or metaphorical. With the Lord’s help, I endured a furnace of affliction in Jerusalem and the surrounding regions, and the dungeon in which I was tortured was almost incinerated in 2021.
The more important meaning of “Jerusalem’s Flame” 🔥 concerns the baptism of fire and the Holy Ghost that ignites the flame of revelation, or what the Prophet Joseph Smith described as follows:
A person may profit by noticing the first intimation of the spirit of revelation; for instance, when you feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes of ideas, so that by noticing it, you may find it fulfilled the same day or soon. . . . And thus by learning the Spirit of God and understanding it, you may grow into the principle of revelation, until you become perfect in Christ Jesus” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith (1976), 151).
After my apartment complex went up in flames just before the so-called pandemic, and after the Maui fires and the more recent inferno in California, it seems like the earth’s baptism of fire has already begun. Lorenzo Snow once recounted a story about Joseph Smith when someone asked him in a tone of wonder “Who are you?” The Prophet replied: “Noah came before the flood. I have come before the fire.”
I agree with the poet Robert Frost:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
This is another reason why I call my Substack The Torch, not because I am eager to see the earth and the wicked consumed by fire (especially after I was almost consumed), but because I want that same fire - the fire that inspired the Prophet Joseph Smith and the poet Robert Frost and everyone else who has ever testified of Christ or done good or written or created something of lasting value - to inspire me and to help me to shed light in this dark and ever darkening world.
May it be so, God willing, for whatever else I write on topics pertaining to faith, religion, theology, Mormonism, and so forth in this category of The Torch: “Jerusalem’s Flame”.