A Street-Legal Version of the Beatitudes

I am reading The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book by BYU music professor Michael Hicks (and recently did a Mormon Stories Book Club podcast with him . . . stay tuned for its release).   The book is not a translation of the Book of Mormon nor a simplified version.   Rather, Street-Legal is Michael’s re-writing of the Book of Mormon, in modern, updated language.   Reading it is an experience.   The book is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny (which I have not experienced previously while reading the Book of Mormon–an observation I’m sure goes without saying, ha!) and, more often, striking and poetic and beautiful.     The artistic rendering of the stories humanizes the people in the stories for me in a way that I’ve never been able to do.  

Michael explains in the introduction that what he needs in “any readable, let alone re-readable, book, is a friend . . . [w]e have to speak the same language and have a conversation in the mind . . . That means, in part, that I and its text should converse with common words.   Hence this paraphrase, which I call my ‘street-legal version.'”

And he says he did it for his own profit and learning–and maybe ours as well.

I can’t really explain what it’s like reading the book, so you’ll need to get your own copy, of course.   But until you get your own copy, I offer Michael’s rendering of the scene in the Book of Mormon where Mormons believe Jesus Christ visits the Nephites and shares the Beautitudes with them, as he did in the New Testament [if you’re not Mormon and you’re distracted by the whole Jesus-visiting-the-American-continent-thing, just suspend your disbelief long enough to read this; you won’t regret it].

Blessed are you whose faces droop with the weight of unfulfilled possibilities.   You are citizens of heaven already.

Blessed are the depressed–yes, I said that–because I will soothe you through the actions of someone in your life, maybe even someone you’d have never thought of.

Blessed are those who haven’t got an arrogant bone in their bodies, because they already own everything worth owning.   And someday I’ll give them the rest.

Blessed are you who salivate for goodness, because someday you’re going to gorge on God’s spirit.

Blessed are the merciful, because mercy always comes back to you when you need it.   And you will.

Blessed are the few whose hearts throb with purity, because God cannot remain invisible to you.

Blessed are people who not only want peace but make it.   “Come to papa,” my Father will say to you as he’s always done to me.

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