Provo’s Daily Herald reports the death of Bruce Porter, an LDS General Authority. His death leaves me with questions, all of them irrelevant: (more…)
Most people believe in God because they feel that life means something.
-thus Walter Russell Mead, who is yule blogging.
As previously noted by others, a sacrament service on Christmas day is a glorious thing. One thing that can be expected at some point in such a service is fairly direct preaching of Christ’s full mission as Redeemer. But before things that were to come, Christmas marks the commencement of the hero’s march, before any of the hard work, a time for music and singing and celebration. A happy time when he was protected and cared for.
A week and half before Christmas, Mrs. Mansfield and I saw a son off at dawn for a flight to the missionary training center. There will be hard times ahead for him before we see him again, but for this month he is a baby missionary in a nurturing place.
This was our family’s smoothest, most comfortable Christmas that I can recall. No stress, no melancholy, lots of coziness.
On the sweetness of Mormon life. (more…)
File this under, I can’t possibly see how this could go wrong.
File it right next to: Britain’s Doomsday Nuke Subs Still Run Windows XP (more…)
Today we will sing the hymns of Christmas and take the sacrament.
One of the several things a belief in and love of the supernatural does is increase one’s admiration for nature.
If nothing else, looking at the intricacy of nature as a divine handiwork makes one grateful for the gift the creator bestows by crafting the stars to look as they do; or planets and comets in their careers; or the rings of Saturn and his moons like Christmas tree ornaments; or snowy mountain crags; or thunderstorms at sea; stately oaks with crooked limbs;or hawks on the wing; or horses who race with manes like banners flying; or the look of a girl just turning her head to expose the line of her throat and the curve of her cheek; or the laughter of a child ringing; or the shapes of leaves of beech and ash and elm; the whisper of wind in wintery branches; the crash of the surf at the strand; the energetic dance of butterflies in a sunlit meadow; the ungainly speed of the ostrich; the whistle of birds at dawn; the twitch of a rabbit’s nose; the sweetness of honeycombs; the intricate mathematical beauty of crystals and chemicals; the abstract elegance of a noble helium atom.
If all this was merely the product of blind forces, it is certainly amazing, but the amazement is merely within our brains, and has no further meaning. If all of this is handiwork, it was made for you.
It is a gift, just as much as the child God sent to the Virgin on this day to redeem all these things from time and death.
And if it is a gift, then let us give thanks and rejoice, because gratitude is the only thing that makes life not just endurable, but joyful
-thus John C. Wright.
In hymns today we will rejoice with sound and lips and tongue and soul and feeling. Spirit and flesh. (more…)
Bryce Harper wed Kayla Varner. The bride was Nevada’s high school soccer Player of the Year in 2009 and 2011.
A while ago there was an interesting exchange of views here initiated by commenter Agellius, who is a Roman Catholic. In his pertinent line of questioning, I think he put his finger on a major point of difference in how mainstream Christians have traditionally regarded Heaven as compared with Mormons.
My impression is that traditional Christians have usually seen Heaven in terms of a static perfection of state – a situation of complete fulfilment in joy, with no shadow of suffering and no unfulfilled desires. To my interpretation, this implies a situation that is essentially unchanging.
Or if there is change, then it would be cyclical: an analogy might be the unending, daily cycle of prayer in a monastery.
From such a perspective the Mormon Heaven seems more like a continuation of mortal life than a transformed Heaven – because in Mormon Heaven there is marriage, families and friends, work to be done, and spiritual progression to be made. All this requires that we continue to have needs in Heaven, desire that we strive to fulfil. On the surface, it doesn’t sound very Heavenly – more like an endless and gruelling job!
This means that Mormon Heaven is not a state of perfection. Why, then, is it Heavenly? (more…)
His Majesty was in a rather pleasant mood this morning.
John Glenn (1921-2016) was the oldest of the Mercury Seven, almost two years older than Wally Schirra, the next oldest. Gordon Cooper, the youngest, was six years younger than Glenn, and the astronauts ranged from 32- to 37-years old when presented to the world on April 9, 1959. After Scott Carpenter’s death three years ago, Glenn was the last of the Seven still alive.
Finwe and Miriel as depicted by ‘steamey’
I was reading in JRR Tolkien’s posthumous History of Middle Earth about how unrequited love and the grief of the bereaved were regarded as a serious flaw in the elven paradise of the undying lands; and it struck me that much the same might be supposed about the Mormon understanding of Heaven.
Even on earth, the primacy (rightly) accorded to Marriage and Family does necessarily challenge those Mormons who (for many possible reasons) lack one or both. And since Celestial Marriage is an essential pre-requisite of the highest exaltation, and current revelation seems to be is that this marriage is monogamous, there appears to be a problem…
At a ‘numerical’ level, there is the matter that there seems to be a requirement for an exact matching of the numbers of men and women, and that each individual will have find one beloved spouse among this number – with none left over.
But of course, all depends on agency, and some will almost-certainly choose not to marry (indeed, some may choose not to be incarnated). And then there is this problem of unrequited love…
I mean when one truly loves the other and nobody else, but that love is not reciprocated. Or that more than one woman a particular man or vice versa – perhaps many-fold?
It seems that the numbers do not add-up and cannot necessarily be made to do so?… This is surely a flaw in the ‘perfection’ of Heaven.
But the problem is illusory – or, at least, not necessary nor permanent – in the context of an open-ended, evolving universe such as Mormons envisage.
In the first place Heaven is not a state of perfection. That is to say: for Mormons perfection is not a state but a process. Heaven changes and the loving creative-process of exaltation is the perfection of Life. The population is being added to (presumably without ultimate limit, assuming the number of ‘intelligences’ is not fixed; and especially once Men become fully divine and can beget spiritual children), and the individual people themselves are each becoming more exalted – they continue to change, experience and grow.
Therefore, over time, there is no reason why everyone should not find a truly-loved spouse; and having found such a person, celestial marriage will of its very nature make an unbreakable creative dyad of husband and wife; such that there is no ‘comparison’ of the kind we experience between potential-spouse A and potential-spouse B.
The perfection of love is both permanent and also a dynamic state ; and will overcome all such temporary problems in the course of eternal time.
To my mind, the most distinctive feature of the recent presidential election was the way in which it scrambled previously-stable political coalitions. Even Mormon voters, who are perhaps more similar to one another in mindset and political views than any other religious group, found themselves opposed in ways they never thought possible: Mommy-blogger was divided against mommy-blogger, and church-baller against church-baller.
Mormon Trump voters and McMullin voters differed less in political or moral views than in the meaning they impute to the act of voting. McMullin voters (like my in-laws) seemed to think of their vote as an affirmation of their values. By withholding a vote from Trump, they were making a statement about what they consider to be acceptable behavior in a president.
Although I voted for Trump, I have no quarrel with the “endorsement” view of voting. Not one person in the whole country can say, or likely ever will be able to say, that his vote changed the result of the election. Thus, the “meaning” which we attribute to our individual vote is essentially metaphysical, and not really subject to rational argument. (more…)