Our Friend Kent Budge Has Died.

Vader Our Friend.

Kent Budge – A Great Friend, a Bright Intellect

Thereby have many entertained angels unawares.

Vader wrote me a letter just before he got in the wreck that eventually killed him.  He was at BYU Education Week, thought of me, and wrote a letter of testimony and concern for my spiritual welfare and, frankly,of just a touch of rebuke.  It is one my prized possessions.

When you drive a route you’ve driven before it goes faster.  You tend to zone out, time passes quickly.  Even a trail you’ve hiked only once before seems much shorter the second time.

As you get older time flies by.

I think both phenomenons have the same explanation.  When something truly novel is happening, you devote much more awareness to it so time passes slowly.  When  you are used to it you only devote part of your awareness to it, just a little part of your brain on minder setting to see if something that needs addressed comes up.  The older you get, the more even novel experiences pattern match to things you’ve done for so you don’t have to slow down your awareness to the max for anything.  Time flies by.  (I think this is why older people more and more get lost in their childhood.  Everything around you more and more fits into larger patterns and your mind increasingly goes back to when the world was new, when you first started seeing the picture that you know have more or less complete before you.)

I was thinking about  this, getting sentimental, thinking about my own parents getting older, when I had a thought.  What is it like after this life?  Perhaps genuine newness, perhaps you are like a child again. But also with time and time and time perhaps everything slows down.  I’m not serious about this at all, but it did occur to me that could be one explanation for the odd teaching that a thousand years for us is like an hour to God.

More seriously, it does help explain why the eternities are only attainable through love.  Only love can make seeing this mortal great great grandchild of yours, one of many, an experience that is still fresh.  Only by caring enough about him or her that you can enter into their own experience of freshness.

We already see hints of this in mortality.  As a parent and then grandparent, you relive your own life through these little ones.

A BYU professor tells students, if I’m parsing it correctly, that God is going to smite the nation for the sin of voting for Trump.

Well, politics breaks people.  It does.  The professor is more to be pitied than anything.  And frankly I always have a soft spot in my heart for people with extreme views who are willing to air them.  We are too locked down, a little free-wheeling vigor and a few sharp elbows including at BYU is all for the good.

My issue isn’t that the professor is mixing in politics.  If BYU mathematics professors, between theorems, are bellowing at each other in the hall about how abortion is ungodly vs. Trump is evil I would be cheered.  Civility and courtesy and putting friendship over politics is something that happens on the other side of getting right down to your painfully honest convictions.  Just being frozen solves nothing and is a false parody of real civility.  We are in an extremely fraught situation politically in this country that presents real conundrums from a gospel perspective and BYU among other places is actually a location where something new could emerge if we allowed ourselves to own the problem.

But that’s not what is happening.  Instead, how many professors at BYU are functionally emissaries for the elite culture to their benighted students?  Enter to learn, go forth to serve managerial class ideology?  If BYU is just any other university but with gospel quotations sprinkled on top, MSNBYU, then away with the foul thing.

I’ve been thinking lately about how there is a difference between being a peacemaker and making peace.  You can make a desert and call it peace, but you weren’t a peacemaker.

There is this weird phenomenon these days where people will decide who is on their side and then feel comfortable bullying those people and belittling them and dismissing their concerns, because they aren’t our enemies, as if the Savior’s command was to love only our enemies.  In the old days we picked sides so we could attack the ones we labeled as not on our side.  The Savior rebuked that, so now we label people as on our side when we want to attack them and still feel morally twee.

By becoming a neighbor to the beaten jew, the Good Samaritan did not thereby cease to have obligations to his neighbors in Samaria.

Here’s a post that looks like it was meant for the election news but its actually something I’ve been noodling for the last couple of weeks.  This is a little deep for me, so if you can think of a pithier, better way of making the point I’m struggling to make, please drop it into the comments.   Here goes.

Having possibility feels great.  The more possibility the better.  Like Christopher Columbus on the edge of a new continent, or Brigham Young looking down at the valley and saying ‘this is the place.’  That is a deeply spiritual feeling.  In fact its literally spiritual, that is what it is like to be a spirit.  As a spirit you are undefined and have every option in front of you.

But mere possibility is a prison.  Possibility without actuality is dead.  It is a horrible sin for the spirit to want to live forever in that sense of possibility and shrink from coming to earth as a mortal.  Not because God has arbitrarily defined it as a sin but because it is in the very nature of possibility, the very thing that makes it good, that it demands to be converted into a reality.  Spirit is possibility but body is actuality, and the spirit needs the body.  What we find limiting about mortality is what makes it valuable.  The struggle, the fact that as a body you can only be in  one place at one time with a limited life span in which to do anything, the fact that you interact with things around in a way that radically constrains your choices, the fact that you have to heave overboard most of the possibilities to even sorta achieve one of them, the fact that  mortality is difficult, is precisely what makes the mortal experience necessary and good.

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The title is deliberately provocative, obviously, but there’s a real point there that came out in Sunday School.

4th Nephi through Mormon 6 makes very grim reading.  It’s more horrifying when you think that the Book of Mormon was written for our day, as Elder Bednar confirmed recently.  Here is the good news.  The end of the Nephites was and is awful but they also could have stopped it at any time.   They had multiple chances to repent.  If they had taken any one of the off-ramps they would have been fine.  Perhaps they could even have repented on the very morning of the last battle.  The tragedy of the Book of Mormon is the tragedy of the addict who doesn’t even enjoy the addiction any more but who just won’t stop.

Here’s a way of looking at it.  Suppose we had a book of scripture that was written about one particular person in Moses’ time who was bitten by a snake but refused to look at the brass serpent representing Christ because “of the easiness of the way.”  The book of scripture  could be pretty hard reading as it chronicled the person dying.  The wound turning black, the creeping paralysis, the person turning pale, the struggle to breathe, the death rattles.  It could be arbitrarily awful to read.  But the ultimate message, as applied to oneself, would still be optimistic.  All of this can be avoided if you just look.

That is essentially what we have in the book of Mormon chapters 1-6.

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Angel showed Soul the earth below where it would go and explained how life was in a body.  Soul in Body would be helpless and need to grow.  This would require food, which would require planting seeds and preparing the ground, and raising animals, and, oh,  a myriad of things.  And shelter!  And clothing!  And warding off dangers! And relearning the gospel and sociality and…. Soul began to weep.  It is too much, Soul said.  I am just a little soul.  How can I do so much?

O little soul, Angel said, you don’t have to.  You will have Parents.  They will give you food and shelter and teach you the gospel.  They will help you grow.

And so it happened.

Soul was now an Adult in mortality.  Soul looked around and wept.  I have to figure out food and shelter and clothing and safety for myself in these wild and unpredictable times, and courtship, and marriage, and I have to take care of children and raise them and I don’t know how.  It is too much.

Angel said, o little soul, it is too much.  It is impossible for you alone.  But you are not alone.  Christ will lead you.