In these days of corporate greed, its good to see a huge company take a stand for moral values. (more…)
Driving back from a family trip to some springs, the Lovely One and I had a conversation that clarified for me The Worth of a Soul.
Let’s say you have a couple of little kids, close in age. One is around 18 months, the other is around 3 years old. The three-year old is a little late in getting potty trained so you are working with her intensively now. It’s finally sticking. Meanwhile the 18-month old is watching you and her older sister and she amazingly just potty trains herself.
Which child has more worth? (more…)
Something we noticed recently when talking over the story of Peter walking on water (inspired by this talk). Peter was fine walking on water, apparently, until he noticed the boisterous wind making the waters rough.
That’s something we noticed recently when talking over the story of him walking on water (inspired by this talk).
But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.
As if walking on calm waters was no thing.
This may be a case of Peter ‘looking back.’ Obviously to a fisherman in a boat the difference between calm water and rough water with buffeting winds is huge. He borrowed that experience, so to speak, for the new context of miraculously walking on water where it did not apply.
What it made me think is that maybe we should be grateful for turbulence in our lives. The turbulence makes us aware that we are engaged in doing something miraculous and need constant help. Whereas when the waters are placid, we sometimes kid ourselves that its really solid ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=xoTWeitx0nk%3Fauto_play%3Dtrue
Lyrics here, since the singing is as authentically muddy as any ol’ congregation on any given Sunday.
I don’t think it quite worked, but I admire the ambition. I’m glad they tried.
What might have worked, same song, same lyrics–would be a liturgical chant affect instead of a congregational hymn affect.
With apologies to Mansfield.
Health ministers of the world, united only by one thing: their deep concern for your well-being.
i.e., flawed imitator and perverter.
Discovering that your desires and will and body are all misaligned is a fundamental part of the human experience. Discovering and then becoming who you really are is essential to the plan.
The perversion of it is seizing on one desire, real or manufactured, and making that “who you really are.”
The plan is to bring all those misaligned things, body and soul, into harmony.
The perversion is to discard everything else about you in devotion to some monomaniacal personal or social plan.
You have a beautiful car. Nearly every part is broken or worn.
You can fix it.
Or you can pull it apart into a deliberately ugly heap and call it modern art.
They say that Joseph Smith made the mistake of being a prophet in the modern era where all his foibles and hiccups could be recorded, and all the allegations and slanders against him could be written down.
Whereas everybody loves the old prophets because we only have the official story now.
Maybe.
But I think prophets are always shocking and controversial in their own times. Its just that Joseph Smith is part of the same culture as we are. We can feel what’s controversial about him in our bones. We feel the shock.
Whereas for the old guys, we don’t. The way they cut across the grain of their existing social consensus is either opaque to us or just something that doesn’t impinge in any way.
Yesterday morning driving to work, I heard a radio ad from IBEW Local 26. An electrician was telling listeners why they should think of joining an apprenticeship to enjoy the life he does. Featured were freedom from tuition debt and an attention to safety so that “you always go home at the end of the day.” Most attention-grabbing, though, was the electrician’s enticement, from memory, “I am able to support my family with a single income, so my wife is able to stay home and take care of our children.”
Miracles are happening.
One day, really vividly, I thought of the names and faces of a couple I used to home teach maybe 20 years ago when we lived where they do. They live a thousand miles from here. I had had no contact with them since we moved. It took me a bit but I enjoyed this blast from the past and slowly dredged up my memories of them. The next day they called. They were so thrilled that I recalled them so easily and so well.
The day after Betsey’s death day, a person who used to be very important to her, some people we know here mentioned that the person was visiting them. We didn’t know they knew each other at all, the way they do know each other turns out to be totally strange, because out here we are thousands of miles from those old stomping grounds. Our friends reintroduced us. I was moved and my wife in particular was very moved, and our kids got to put names and faces to stories we tell them about their older sister who died before most of them were born.
The heavens are silent when I pray to know the One Weird Trick to vast unearned wealth (I have prayed this, yes). But they hear the tender wishes of the heart.
Or rather “failure”
https://mobile.twitter.com/pmarca/status/1504324416984866816
Andreessen’s Law of Leadership Failure: It’s not leadership failure; the leaders are in on it.
I would replace leader with manager, but yes.
For basically ceremonial and liturgical reasons, in the restoration of all things the features of other times and places, every one, have to be exhumed and recapitulated. Such is my belief.
I was thinking on that and thinking how alien the ancient world really is from us. For example, there’s the whole star-based thing. Star watching was something the wise did, and time was a celestial phenonemon of the movements of the stars instead of an earth-based phenomenon. How on earth are we going to fit that in, I wondered. An inner voice was like, lolwut the Book of Abraham? The temple symbolism?
My daughter recently recommended to me Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery (The Anne of Green Gables woman). She thought I’d like the bit about the 12-year old girl bustling about to run her own little household.
What I discovered is that its an idyll. And hat tip to friend E.C. who pegged Montgomery as an excellent idyll writer.
Idylls are hard, of course, because where does the drama come from if people are happy and the land is green?
In this book her technique was interesting. There is an over arching drama about the girl’s parents. It’s played lightly, but its there, and it gives you the plot. There is also the daily challenges of the girl figuring out how to run a household on her own. Quotidian challenges–the plum pudding that doesn’t quite work–would be a normal technique for a cozy domestic idyll. But here Montgomery plays them very lightly. They are just mentioned in passing and not given much in the way of arc.
The main thing Montgomery does is to start the girl in a bad situation and then to go on for pages and pages and pages about how bad it is. She’s with her grandmother who’s awful, so awful that I had a hard time suspending my disbelief. It all seems tedious. But then when the girl makes it to the idyll, it all seems interesting by way of implied contrast to the now off-stage horrors. It works quite well.
Some interesting parallels to the plan of happiness and why we needed a messy mortal experience before our own eternal idyll.
Glenn Reynolds is trying to find a way to make exploding nuclear bomb space ships — Project Orion — compatible with existing international agreements.
Make Project Orion Legal Again.
If that doesn’t grab you, I don’t know what to say.
One of my young fellas comes to me recently. “Dad, when I grow up, I decided I want to pilot a nuclear bomber.” “Why does that appeal to you, son?” Silence. Then we both burst into laughter.
I had a daughter who was the perfect kid. She hit an age, 10-11, that was ideal for her. Everything about her was suited to that time.
One day I caught her crying. What’s wrong, sweetheart? I don’t want to grow up, Dad. I like being a kid.
I hugged her and told her it would be OK. And it was OK. She’s a good, even a great teenager.
But she was also right to cry. The girl she once was still echoes, but that year or two of perfection is gone and who knows if she will ever hit her stride quite like that again. And it is still gone even if she does; no matter how perfect the rhythm, it won’t ever be quite the same rhythm. She was right to cry. I should have cried for her too.
Today was Betsey’s dying day. (more…)
Let righteousness cover you like a blanket, held close to ward the chill.