Singing in the Easter Quartet

All institutions have problems and often the same types of problems.  Some of those problems can be very, very bad.  The soul-killing stuff that stagnation and therefore damnation are made of.

Nearly everything awful that has been said about institutions and bureaucracies and management is mostly true.  Even institutions run by well-meaning, good people with insight and etc.; the problem isn’t necessarily  the people.

Corporations, bureaucracies, militaries, schools, churches, fraternal organizations, you name it.

Read your public choice theory or Dominic Cummings or anybody at all on bureaucratic managerialism or Dilbert or just get a job.  There are laws of social organization in conditions of mortality that just are.  Being organized for righteous purposes doesn’t free  you from the diseases of organizations any more than being a righteous person frees you from the diseases of persons.

( Look at the Pharisees for example.  You will not understand them until you realize that for most purposes their movement was more righteous and more moral than those around them, which is why even the good ones were prone to doing wickedness when the movement approved it, which is why the Savior said what he said about them.)

Now let’s flip the script.

I had a spiritual experience singing in an Easter men’s quartet for church.  Also during the congregational hymns.  Great, slow, rolling waves of peace entered my body.

In the silence and the lightness of being afterwards, the Holy Ghost said to me, “this is because of the institution.”  It is possible to sing hymns with people on your own, sure.   But you don’t.  The ward music director had suggested a quartet, that’s why I put one together.  I went to church because it’s a habit, a rule, an organizational feature of the Church every Sunday.   That’s why the others were there too. We sang hymns because that is the organizational routine.  The Spirit gave life because of the letter. (Being ‘bound’ to a body is what frees the soul).

All institutions are at best broken, the Church is an institution, the Church is true.  One thing that atonement means that there is no simple answer in mortality.  It’s all blood and mess.  The tragedy is built in.

So what?  Be at peace.  After the atonement the resurrection happened.  The tragic unresolvable dilemmas get resolved.  There’s no apparent way through, but there is a way through.

All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.