As Moroni’s instructions on the ordinances turn toward the administration of the “flesh and blood of Christ unto the church,” he offers the Book of Mormon‘s only statements on ritualized prayer (Moroni 4:1). He provides the precise wording of the blessings on the sacrament—wording that he indicates came from Jesus Christ four hundred years earlier, wording that would be essentially affirmed in a subsequent revelation to Joseph Smith fourteen hundred years later. These words clearly matter. They would thus seem to warrant our close attention.
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A Sacrament of Multiple Gifts
“We know the manner to be true.” —Moroni 4:1
The first thing to notice in the remarkable persistence of the wording is that it remarkably persists, and therein lies one of the gifts of this rite: it offers a moment of shared reliving, a chance to collapse the temporal distance between sacred timed of the past and the regular occurrences of the present.
When we show up on a Sunday and together listen to the words that have been uttered (and partake of the emblems that have been blessed) in just this way by people who lived many centuries before us, we momentarily transcend the barriers of time that separate generations of God’s children.
Today, the presiding officer in every sacrament meeting is tasked with a solemn responsibility to preserve the ordinance’s linguistic stability, policing each word with a kind of fastidiousness that is foreign to other aspects of our Sunday services. This meticulous preservation of the prayers is a kind of defiance of historical change.
When we hear the sacramental words from Moroni 4 and 5, we share an auditory experience with ancient Lamanites and Nephites. (Similarly, with a morsel of bread we emblematically re-create the evening of the Last Supper, reaching through the epochs to eat with the original apostles.) Where the march of history creates temporal divisions among humans, the careful maintenance of ceremonial practice affirms a sense of connection.
This gift may reach its ultimate expression in the temple, where vicarious ordinances become offerings of love and service that explicitly burst free of our temporal limitations and flow fully to all generations, but elements of it are present in every ritual that links us to sacred moments of other eras.
As every Latter-day Saint knows, however, the sacrament prayer has changed in one significant respect between Moroni’s day and today. The word wine has been changed to water. That alteration is a reminder that even the most stable of sacred rituals exists in a tension between the now and the then, an illustration of the fact that the timeless and the temporary elements of human life are constantly interacting in our religious practices. Complementary realities of persistence and change shape the sacrament experience, granting us the chance to be connected to both the past and the present in our day.
These are not the only gifts provided by the sacrament prayers. Attention to their form and content reveals an ordinance that offers multiple benefits to those who would receive them. In the seemingly simple ritual of the sacrament lies a host of blessings.
Sacramental Gift: Transformation by Habituation
“. . . and witness unto thee. . . and always remember him. . .” —Moroni 4:3
Let us return for a moment to the internal order in which Moroni places his materials: instructions on ordinances, a description of a church community, a discourse on pure love leading to personal transformation. The sequence of topics here—a process that starts with rituals and ends with the formation of a new being—bears resemblance to an argument made by the modern scholar of religion Saba Mahmood.
Again, audience matters here.
Interviewing Muslim women in Egypt and observing these women in their devotion to the Islamic practice of daily prayer rituals, Mahmood noticed that their experience did not exactly correspond to some of the prevailing academic theories about ritualism. She concluded that the repetitive performance of religious rituals functions in people’s lives in ways that modern scholars have too often overlooked.
Mahmood notes that the rituals are usually seen by their practitioners as a substantive way to connect with the divine while they are usually seen by academic observers as symbolic expressions of identity and an affirmation of group cohesion.
In close observation of her subjects, however, Mahmood noticed a third implication of their ritual lives. She recognized that the women approached their prayer rituals as repeatable acts of spiritual training, disciplines whose repetition over time would facilitate a gradual internal transformation. They did them less as professions of faith and more as avenues toward faith. They did not observe their prayer practices because they self-identified as part of a righteous people; they observed them in the hope of developing into a righteous people. Their rituals were about the diligent, repetitive work of forming a new self. They were not static symbols so much as active exercises. Mahmood’s women did these things in order to become.1
Though focused on a cultural setting and a religious practice quite different from my own, Mahmood’s research has helped me understand something powerful about the possibilities of our sacramental services. I do not take the sacrament because I always remember Jesus Christ, because I always keep his commandments, or because I always bear his name well. To eat those emblems under such pretenses would transform the Lord’s Supper into the sin the Lord most frequently condemned: hypocrisy.
No one perfectly lives the promises entailed in those prayers. Rather, I go to church and partake of the sacrament because I want to be more mindful, more righteous, and more courageous. I hope to remember, obey, and represent better. The sacrament is, in this sense, much less about who I am and much more about who I yearn to be.
In it, we bear “witness unto him.” Again, audience matters here. If the sacrament prayers stated that I partake of this bread and water as a “witness unto the congregation” or a “witness unto the world” that I always remember him, that I keep his commandments and bear his name well, then—for the sake of truth and integrity—there would have to be a direct correlation between who I already am and what the sacrament declares. But the sacrament prayer makes no reference to any such messaging to fellow mortals.
Rather, I do these things as a witness unto God, the one Being who already knows absolutely everything about me. I am at no risk of deceiving him. He is fully familiar with the yawning gap between who I am and who he wants me to be. Thus, to declare to him that I am these things becomes a prayer of hope rather than an act of hypocrisy. It is a form of repentance rather that a profession of status.
In addition to the sacrament’s essential role as a communal act of connection, it is also an individual aspiration from a supplicant to a God who knows the petitioners are not yet everything promised through this ordinance but who is determined to help them become equal to that expression.
The ordinances are therefore not the culmination of my righteousness; rather, they are a foundational exercise that allows me to develop righteousness. That reading of the ritual is underscored by Moroni’s sequencing. The ordinances described in chapters 2 through 6 are a staging ground for the personal transformation to which his book builds.
Its cumulative effect can rewire a soul.
In rough calculation, a Latter-day Saint born into the Church and living to eighty will partake of the sacrament some four thousand times. This reliable punctuation to our weekly calendar—a conscious effort to step repetitively into a state of remembrance toward Christ and into a covenantal conversation with our God—has the potential to create a kind of spiritual muscle memory. It constitutes what Mahmoud, drawing from Aristotle calls a “habitus.”
Its cumulative effect can rewire a soul. Like a pianist running through scales over and over again, this repetitive ordinance sharpens my reflexes of remembrance and covenanting. Scales do not an artist make, and neither are the ordinances sufficient for the full development of discipleship, but the conditioning exercises of the sacrament help shape a disciple’s character. Week by week, crust by crust, sip by sip, I change.
Or, at least, I should.
The Promise and Pitfall of “Oft”
When describing the sacramental practice of the ancient American church, Moroni reported that they did “meet together oft to partake of the bread and wine, in remembrance of the Lord Jesus” (Moroni 6:6). Those Saints clearly saw the Lord’s Supper as a matter of frequent replication. The modern Church does likewise, typically citing Moroni’s words.
The current Latter-day Saint practice of receiving the bread and water every week sets the Church’s sacramental rhythm apart from the communion cultures of many other Christians, especially among Protestants. (Frequent communion is standard, of course, for Catholics and their closest High Church relatives, such as Episcopalians, who place much heavier emphasis on the redemptive power of the sacraments than their Low Church Protestant counterparts.2) Though the restored Church’s weekly calendar of communion often differs from many Protestant practices, it actually corresponds to the original vision of various founding figures of Protestant denominations.
The two great theological forces running through the environment of the early restoration—the Reformed (e.g., Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and many Baptists) and the Wesleyan (e.g., Methodists)—had founders in John Calvin and John Wesley who believed in the importance of weekly communion. Calvin, for instance, adamantly insisted that it should be provided “at least once a week” to “feed us spiritually.”3 And yet, in the denominational practices of the early United States, groups such as the Presbyterians and Methodists were celebrating the Lord’s Supper much less frequently—in some denominations, as little as twice a year. In the case of Calvinists, this was the product of centuries’ worth of theological debate that moved them away from Calvin’s original vision; for the Methodists, this reflected the practicalities of early American preaching circuits that circulated pastors through pulpits at infrequent intervals.4
As part of a culture dominated by such denominations, early Latter-day Saints themselves played around with difference cadences to the ordinance, but—often with the Book of Mormon in mind—they settled into a weekly repetition relatively quickly. Moroni’s “oft” has prevailed.
Familiarity could bring irreverence.
Latter-day Saints may have set themselves apart from other groups of Christians by their adherence to Moroni’s description of a frequently administered sacrament, but their Protestant contemporaries have sometimes complained about another element of the Latter-day Saint practice. They have objected to the fact that the elements of the Lord’s Supper were administered quite broadly, to almost all members, including even small children. This, the critics have felt, undermined the solemnity that should attend such a sacred ritual. It rendered the holy mundane.6
Familiarity could bring irreverence. But, in combination with its weekly availability in Latter-day Saint worship, this extensive participation in the ordinance of the sacrament suggests its role as an exercise whose lifelong and frequent observance can help train a Saint’s soul from her earliest years. Less a special observance and more a regular discipline, the sacrament and its culture lead us to consider the ordinance’s steady and repetitive role in the gradual development of our being.
As Christian critics of such sacramental practices have rightly noted, however, that repetitiveness comes with certain spiritual dangers. Christians are hardly alone in fearing the threat of empty formalism. Saba Mahmood’s Muslim women saw the same risks. They not only embraced the transformative implication of reiteration in our ritual lives; they also repeatedly expressed a warning. They constantly reminded themselves “that an act of [ritual] performed for its own sake, without regard for how it contributes to the realization of piety, is ‘lost power.'”7
To go through the motions of the sacrament, without consciously tuning its repetitive actions toward the formation of a new self, is to miss its purpose.
I have to be intentional about my quest for holiness.
Put simply, sacramental habit can be powerfully transformative, but only if it does not descend into thoughtlessness. I have to be intentional about my quest for holiness when I place that bread on my tongue and bring the water to my lips over and over again. Otherwise, I squander the gift. I have “lost power.”
This, then, is one of the sacrament’s central challenges: the relentless repetitiveness that lends it a particularly transformative capacity may also contribute to a certain mindlessness in the performance of it.
Moroni’s “oft” conveys both an opportunity and a risk, calling on us to embrace the former and guard against the latter. Only then is the gift of repetition truly realized.
Book excerpt. From Moroni: A Brief Theological Introduction. Pages 36–43. Copyright © 2022 by Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University. Style has been slightly modified to accommodate online reading.
About the Author
David F. Holland is the John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History at Harvard Divinity School. He holds a PhD in History from Stanford University and specializes on the intersection of theology and culture in vast early America. He is the author of several books and articles, including Moroni: A Brief Theological Introduction, and is the son of President Jeffrey R. Holland and Patricia T. Holland.
Further Reading
- Does Atonement Theory Matter to Latter-day Saints?
- How Does the Book of Mormon Reinterpret the Bible?
- Revolutionary War: American Revolutionaries Printing the News
- Scriptural Differences of Latter-day Saints and the Community of Christ
- The Religious Lives of the Adams Family
- Latter-day Saint Liturgy and Cosmology
Sacrament and the Book of Mormon Resources
- Moroni: A Brief Theological Introduction (Maxwell Institute)
- Behold the Lamb of God (General Conference)
- Sacramental Theology (Oxford)
- The Savior, the Sacrament, and Self-Worth (BYU Women’s Conference) [PDF]
- The Sacrament (Gospel Principles)
Brief Theological Introductions Interviews and Excerpts
- Series Introduction
- 2 Nephi
- Enos, Jarom, and Omni
- Mosiah
- Alma 1–29
- 3rd Nephi and 4th Nephi
- Book of Ether
Sources
- Aristotle, Politics. (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 1253a.
- Matthew Bowen, “Getting Cain and Gain,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 15 (2015): 115–41.
- Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 220.
- Jonathan Stapley, The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 14.
- Quoted in Isabel Rivers, “John Wesley and the Language of Scripture, Reason and Experience,” Prose Studies, 4:3 (1981): 252.
- B. H. Roberts, The Seventy’s Course in Theology: Years One through Five, ed. David Hamer (Createspace Independent Publisher, 2013), 738; originally published as The Seventy’s Course in Theology: Fifth Year: Divinity Immanence of the Holy Ghost (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News, 1912), 120.
- Duties and Blessings of the Priesthood: Basic Manual for Priesthood Holders, Part B (Salt Lake City: UT: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2000), 41.