In circles where manhood still has nominal rhetorical value, there is a tendency to say

Real men do X

Real men don’t do Y

Where X and Y are whatever the speaker happens to be for or against.

Real men brush their teeth

Real men don’t disrespect their wives

Don’t mistake us, my poppets.  We are four square for brushing your teeth and respecting your wife, preferably at the same time if possible.

But we are against mindlessly inserting “real men” in front of every piece of good advice (or, sometimes, bad advice).

It comes across as manipulative and meaningless and makes the concept of manhood pretty empty.

What there needs to be is some connection to an actual concept of manhood.

Elder Holland makes the connection here

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I love the wind in the mountains

I love the wind in the hills

I love the ripple of water

over the high mountain rills.

I’ve made a bed near the willows

A bed on the sun-heated grass

I’ll watch the light on the water

and watch my thoughts ambling pass

and let the day ambling pass

and let the day ambling pass

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Imagine some stodgy old town that has stodgy old town meetings.

Except one day some incredibly brave youth stands up and says something incredibly brave that shocks literally everybody, maybe something like the truth is that there is no truth. He says everyone should just look out for themselves and never mind the rest, lie a little if they need to, there is no truth and morality so do whatever it takes to be comfortable and have a few of life’s little pleasures.  It’s so brave because he may well lose his job and his fiancee over what he is saying.

That is the fundamental myth of modernity.  Society LARPs it every day.

The myth is in the air we breathe, so much so that I’ve struggled to write it in a way that shows it’s absurdity.  The truth is that there is no truth …get out.

By him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God

-thus Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon

Worlds, plural.  He is the savior of multiple worlds.

But I want to focus on the begotten part.  There is a lot of interesting mysticism in the scriptures about how we becomes sons and daughters of Christ, how the Son is the Father and so on.  But this revelation first emphasizes the Son’s status as the Begotten of the Father and then says that we are begotten sons and daughters of Father through the Son.  To me, the obvious answer is just that we take on Christ’s identity.  We are part of Christ, we are the body of Christ, and so in becoming Him, we become what He is–the Son of God, the Daughter of God.

Great shall be their reward and eternal shall be their glory

And to them will I reveal all mysteries, yea, all the hidden mysteries of my kingdom from days of old, and for ages to come

Yea, even the wonders of eternity shall they know, and things to come will I show them

And their wisdom shall be great, and their understanding reach to heaven;

and before them the wisdom of the wise shall perish, and the understanding of the prudent shall come to naught.

For by my Spirit will I enlighten them, and by my power will I make known unto them the secrets of my will

–D&C 76:6-10

His purposes fail not,

neither are there any

who can stay his hand.

From eternity to eternity

he is the same,

and his years

never fail.

–D&C 76:3-4

This was the dream.

There was a conclave of the gods. Around the open marbled floor were ringed the towering pillars and the towering thrones and the towering gods, who were grave and almost unmoving.

Into the middle of that floor through an entrance came clattering a funny looking stone and behind it ran a little boy and his dog

.

The boy did not notice the gods. He ran straight to the stone and resumed playing with it.

The bright-faced goddess of joy laughed.  The boy looked up. He contemplated the gods gravely. They contemplated him gravely.  After a time he went back to his playing and then left.

For all that the gods made him greatly blessed.

How they greatly blessed him is jumbled.  It partly seemed that he grew up and became handsome and talented and rich but with the unselfconsciousness and the delight of a child.  Partly it seemed that his blessing was he died soon after

Dark under the trees

through the branches stars still seen

crescent moon rises

Here are my Conference top two. (more…)

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

-Frances Bacon

I noticed this morning that there was the tiny tip of a thorn still there in my middle finger a little below the first joint. Late afternoon yesterday I had grabbed a thorny vine by mistake, but I washed the scratches and went on to other things. This morning that one spot still hurt, and with no blood obscuring the view there was obviously a little dark speck bedded deep. With tweezers I pulled away skin until the speck was exposed and the tweezers could grasp it and pluck it out. It is a marvel how immediate the change is when foreign debris is no longer touching a place it shouldn’t. Plying the tweezers to reach the thorn tip hurt more while I was doing that than the thorn itself had. Due to experience with such things, though, the immediate pain did not deter me from pursuing the relief I was confident I would gain.