Brightly Hulled Ships at Sea

Like brightly hulled steel ships at sea, we live in a spiritually corrosive environment where the most gleaming convictions must be mindfully maintained or they can become etched, then corrode, and then crumble away.

Elder Lund put something into words that I have been struggling to say in my charnel house post and elsewhere.  Elsewhere in conference Elder Bednar talked about the power of parables.  One of their powers is how much feeling and truth they convey in such short space.  For example, should we withdraw from the world?  Well, should a ship go to drydock?   Yes, absolutely!  But not forever, or what good is the ship.

The other powerful image he uses is one of Chesterton’s paradoxes.

The stalwart youth of Zion are voyaging through stunning times. Finding joy in this world of prophesied disruption without becoming part of that world, with its blind spot toward holiness, is their particular charge. About a hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton spoke almost as though he saw this quest as being home centered and Church supported when he said, “We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.”