There once was a great wizard who by his arts learned the logic of sleep.  He found that every sleep deficit must be paid for or it would turn into general malaise, specific ailments such as a trick knee, or above all an earlier end to life.  Old age, he came to believe, was nothing more than the accumulated sleep deficit of a life time.

By his arts he was able to probe the secret of his own sleep deficit.  It was a staggering sum.  He could only recover it by sleeping for days and days, and who had time for that, or would be able to?  Nonetheless returning to the flush of good health was attractive, not to mention long life, so he fully intended to find time and means to recover his sleep deficit.  In the meantime he kept on with his affairs.  Unfortunately, from time to time he even added to his own sleep deficit.  There was always something pressing.  He had aches and pains, but he was used to them.

He became old and withered.  He felt his life force growing thin.   Finally the whole issue of sleep deficit became urgent.  He researched like made some method of regaining all his lost sleep, and on the very verge of death cast the spell that put himself into an enchanted slumber. (more…)

There is a point in a man’s life when he sees a weedy gawky nerdboy teen trying to do push-ups, and in the man’s eyes the moisture starts.

https://nitter.it/ed_hagen/status/1563205487625404419#m

I’ve been visiting Deseret.  The homeland will languish until Utah goes dry.  Total Prohibition Now.  When tech giants write us proposal for more Silicon Slopes investments if only we relax our rules a little, we should take those proposals, douse them in alcohol, and light them on fire.

Bonfire of the boozes.

The place can’t be ours if we don’t treat it as ours.

I’m not even that anti-alcohol, its the principle of the thing.

No one will take this seriously and nothing will happen, naturally.  But that is exactly the problem.  We don’t have the will to be a people.  Total prohibition isn’t something that inherently needs to happen itself, but it is what having a real identity would look like.

An old man was dying in great pain. His children and grandchildren and their spouses and some great grandkids and a few other relatives were gathered into his hospital room chatting quietly and occasionally singing hymns. (more…)

Was the Psalmist filled with the spirit of prophecy to foretell events of Jesus ministry? Or were Jesus and his chroniclers so familiar with and fond of the Psalms that they could often find one to fit the circumstance and the mood, much as a modern-day fan of Bob Dylan or the Killers might?

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Your family has gathered to a popular vacation spot in rural Deseret.

You go to the church Sunday morning. The sign says Visitors Welcome.  Inside is just one big room stuffed with folding chairs.

It is a sea of wrinkled short sleeve white shirts, tshirts, polo shirts, and the kind of one piece knit dress that washes and folds easy.

There are so many visitors they have a building just for us. The local Saints run services three times a Sunday.

You feel very welcome.

I dreamed that we were all of us, everyone, all mankind, standing on the edge of the canyon of eternity.

The winds blew hard there.  Constantly gusts picked up one person or another and carried them over the edge down into the depths.

But those of us left behind ignored all this. Instead we all engaged in the strange physical postures and gesticulations that passed for status

The Pfizer mrna jab docs that Pfizer and the FDA fought to withhold show that 44% of pregnant women had a miscarriage, reports say.  22 out of 50 women in the trial.  Though that is a not a huge number for the test, the odds of a 44% miscarriage rate by chance are low.  50 pregnant women would normally have 5 to 8 miscarriages.

If these reports hold up, as I suspect they will, we have here a crime against humanity.  The natural fury you feel is entirely justified.  The horror you feel is a just reaction to the magnitude of the cruelty.

If true, Pfizer should be disbanded, the executives involved should be indicted on capital charges, the employees involved should be imprisoned, and the CDC and FDA should be investigated to within an inch of their lives to determine who, if anyone, knew.

When the mantle of Joseph Smith fell upon Brigham Young, the enemies of God and His kingdom sought to inaugurate a similar career for President Young; but he took his revolver from his pocket at the public stand in Nauvoo, and declared that upon the first attempt of an officer to read a writ to him in a State that had violated its plighted faith in the murder of the Prophet and Patriarch while under arrest, he should serve the contents of this writ (holding his loaded revolver in his hand) first;

to this the vast congregation assembled said, Amen. He was never arrested.

–George A. Smith

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Sitting in the middle of the pews for Sunday school in the chapel.  I am looking at all the Saints on the side benches, looking at the woman behind me as she talks in answer to a question, each person with his or her own distinct posture, face, wrinkles.  Some looking at the speaker, some looking down at scriptures, one resting his head on the bench in front, one staring straight ahead.  The big white expanse of the wall behind them. . .

I wish I were a Rembrandt to paint them.  Or a Norman Rockwell.

Tomorrow morning our Washington DC temple will be re-dedicated. It closed in the spring of 2018 for two years of renovation and another two years of waiting out COVID-19. I remember going to the temple one last time with Elizabeth that spring four years ago. During that rollercoaster year, that was one of the periods that was looking up. Elizabeth went to the temple one more time in the summer. A dead friend’s mother had given Elizabeth permission to perform ordinances for the friend in the temple, and Elizabeth’s sister took her to the Philadelphia temple.

I had been looking forward to having our temple back, but I did not have strong feelings about the re-dedication itself. This week that changed for me. (more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

One of your teenagers says, ‘our house is like a reverse Narnia.  Never winter, always Christmas.’

And because she does not mean it literally, your eyes become wet.

John C. Wright’s latest.

John C. Wright is Captain Kirk passionately convinced he is a Vulcan.

***

Bruce Charlton

This idea of ‘immersion’ in life; of life as unselfconscious – of living in the world as given and joyfully embraced – was at the back of most of these pleasant, yearning, day-dreams.

This bears a more-than-coincidental relationship to similar day-dreams of early childhood; where I can remember some of what it was like to be a happy child in a happy family, in the years before I was five. For instance; Christmas day aged three or four was a total and immersive experience of being swept along in colour, warmth, joy and unfolding excitement. My life in early childhood – when it was good – was good without comparison; it was living in the best possible world.

When, from the late 1990s, I began to read accounts of the life of ‘simple’, nomadic, foraging, hunter-gatherer societies; it was impossible to miss the similarity with childhood – which was indeed often pointed-out by anthropologists (before the cancer of leftism utterly destroyed their capacity to experience and think).

Yet, although there was intense nostalgia for states of being; I could seldom whole-heartedly take the inward step of wanting actually to live in any previous state of society – in the sense that I could not imagine me-as-I-am-now, finding life better in any past society as-it-was-then.

For the daydream to work properly, I would have to be a different person from the modern Man I had become.

Much more at the link.

This is interesting enough in itself.  But for me its more, because I feel that he is describing from a different angle something that I deeply feel we are also approaching from our study of virtue sets.  The difference between being a little child and becoming as a little child and the extent to which becoming is the purpose of all of this.

You will hear conventional Christians, Catholics and Orthodox in particular, talk about asceticism and detachment from worldly things.

And up to a point, they have a point.

Thou shalt have no other Gods before me and so on.

Lay not up treasures on earth, where rust doth corrupt and so on.

Fasting.

Repentance with sackcloth and ashes.

But what if you go beyond that point?  What if you try complete asceticism and total detachment so you can better focus on God? Or at least feel that your failure to do so makes you less? Many Christians do feel that way

Then you are making a big mistake.

(more…)