This morning I selected at random a podcast interview with Dana Gioia. I have enjoyed Mr. Gioia’s thought, language, and voice before and expected I would again. This instance exceeded my hopes, and it surprised me with how moving I found it, and I thought I should share it. I suggest listening to three minutes of his poem starting at 49:32 until 52:28 to test if the hour may be of worth to you. It left me thinking about what it means to be sealed to the dead and considering what I should be doing to maintain that a living bond.

EconTalk, Dana Gioia on Poetry, Death, and Mortality
On Spotify

God does not despise weakness at all.  What he despises is the refusal to become strong.

There once was a little wolf who had a little crooked tail.

The wolf was born that way.  The other wolves  mocked it mercilessly for having a lamb’s tail.  But there was a compensation.   With its little crooked tail, and the aid of a sheepskin and some flour, the wolf was able to do a wonderful imitation of a sheep.  It could get right down into the flock.

This being the one thing it was good at, the wolf really leaned into its strength.  It studied up on sheep, spent hours and days mingled with them, getting to know their ways.  It its own way, the wolf came to love the sheep.  It even came to think itself as a sheep.  Down in its heart, where it counted.

It still ate sheep, of course.  What, did you want it to starve?

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There once was a fertile valley surrounded by high mountains.  The valley had its villages and a few towns and was a very pleasant place.  No one had ever left the valley because of the tall mountains that surrounded it and through some geographical oddity, beyond the mountains desert in all directions.

But if you laboriously scaled the right peak, and had rested your eyes, and the visibility was right, you could see that there was an end to the desert and something beyond.  Perhaps even towns and cities.

One day a man in the valley announced his intention to cross the mountains and the desert to the other side.  He set about planning his journey and making the equipment he would need to get there.

Not long after, he had a knock on his door in the evening.   When he opened it, he saw a delegation of men there.  They asked to speak to him, he invited them in.

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Something interesting happened in Sunday School.  The teacher handed out a worksheet.  On the first part you were supposed to write down what you needed and what you desired from Sunday School that day.  On the next part you were supposed to pick from a list of topics/scriptures from the reading and do a little personal study on it.   The topics weren’t supposed to directly connect to what you wanted or needed, but the idea was that formulating those to yourself you were more likely to get spiritual insight while studying the scripture.  It worked for me.  It worked very well.  Indeed, I have noticed that many barriers to the Spirit fall when we are forthright about what we want and need; I think this is a big part of what Jesus meant when he said to become as a little child; little children want things, they don’t dissimulate to themselves about it.

I will forgo telling you what I wrote down in the needs and desires sections.  Suffice it to say I went big (though not Napoleonic–pic unrelated). (more…)

I made notes over the weekend on a bunch of Good Samaritan ideas.  One note was just the title to this post.  It included a parable but also a novel and non-obvious insight that I thought was really cool.  Now I can’t remember it.  So all you will get is the parable.

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“Neighbor” — etymology — one who dwells nigh

(I believe the Greek word in Luke 10 we translate as “neighbor” is “person who is nearby.”  The internet reliably informs me that the OT original word for “neighbor” that Jesus and the lawyer were referring to in the Good Samaritan parable is something like “someone you have a connection to”)

Here is more on our deep dive into the Good Samaritan parable.

the Good Samaritan is a story in which a Levite and a priest de-prioritize the needs of their physically close neighbor in order to do the abstract good of maintaining purity for physically non-proximate neighbors

let the reader understand

-thus LymanStoneSky, more at this link

A compelling interpretation, though still too mechanical

These people are your neighbors.

The JG weighing in (in  typical JG fashion) on the Ordo Amoris controversy long after everyone else was finished with it has really sparked a lot of good discussion (in my head).

So given our firm policy of always giving the people more of what they want, lets talk about the Good Samaritan.

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For whatever reason, some lines from Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo keep returning to my mind lately:

Captain Mitchell, pacing the wharf, was asking himself the same question. There was always the doubt whether the warning of the Esmeralda telegraphist—a fragmentary and interrupted message—had been properly understood. However, the good man had made up his mind not to go to bed till daylight, if even then. He imagined himself to have rendered an enormous service to Charles Gould. When he thought of the saved silver he rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. In his simple way he was proud at being a party to this extremely clever expedient. It was he who had given it a practical shape by suggesting the possibility of intercepting at sea the north-bound steamer. And it was advantageous to his Company, too, which would have lost a valuable freight if the treasure had been left ashore to be confiscated. The pleasure of disappointing the Monterists was also very great. Authoritative by temperament and the long habit of command, Captain Mitchell was no democrat. He even went so far as to profess a contempt for parliamentarism itself. “His Excellency Don Vincente Ribiera,” he used to say, “whom I and that fellow of mine, Nostromo, had the honour, sir, and the pleasure of saving from a cruel death, deferred too much to his Congress. It was a mistake—a distinct mistake, sir.”

(Guest post from ~lagrev-nocfep)

Given the recent discussion of ordo amoris and the morality of foreign aid, there’s an important elaboration or modification of naïve biblical morality (the sort of surface reading that less-lettered Christians fall prey to, or which is used rhetorically by leftist religious leaders) which the Book of Mormon adds. The BoM is explicitly conspiracy-theoretical, which means it adds a layer of nuance concerning subversion. Should you care more for people suffering overseas than for children in your neighborhood is one question. Should you try to solve the problems that you personally know, or the problems that a network of untrustworthy—possibly hostile—possibly malicious—people inform you exist and will be solved if you take the actions they tell you is another.

The origin point for this discussion is the statement by Vice President JD Vance that,

There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world

In a follow-up, Vice President Vance clarified that he referred to ordo amoris, the Christian belief in a “a hierarchy of obligations”. (Indeed, this order of love is Confucian and Taoist as well: classical moral theories prioritize proximity.)

Many have scoffed at Vance’s interpretation. Citing the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Sermon on the Mount, interlocutors of Catholic, Protestant, LDS, and secular persuasions have attacked Vance’s theology, demanding instead a utilitarian calculus of needs that prioritizes overseas tragedies over cleaning one’s own home and town.

However, the hierarchy of responsibility and love is good doctrine. “It tastes good.” Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught that,

The same God that placed the star in a precise orbit millennia before it appeared over Bethlehem in celebration of the birth of the Babe has given at least equal attention to placement of each of us in precise human orbits so that we may, if we will, illuminate the landscape of our individual lives, so that our light may not only lead others but warm them as well. (That My Family Should Partake, p. 86)

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Doctrine and Covenants 5:19

For a desolating scourge shall go forth among the inhabitants of the earth, and shall continue to be poured out from time to time, if they repent not, until the earth is empty, and the inhabitants thereof are consumed away and utterly destroyed by the brightness of my coming.

Twenty years ago when I read this I was embarrassed.    I didn’t believe that there was any likelihood of a Black Death level plague, let alone one that ‘utterly destroyed.’  For sound biological reasons, there are usually biological limits on how deadly a plague can be if it is going to spread.  Plus the advance of medicine and so on.  I could come up with pretty implausible and far fetched scenarios where you get a very destructive plague, but even then I had a hard time imagining one that recurred every time people were wicked.

I know better now.

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Section 7. The Come, Follow Me manual skirts around it other than to note:

Notice how many times words like “desire” or “desires” appear in sections 6 and 7. What do you learn from these sections about the importance God places on your desires? Ask yourself the Lord’s question in Doctrine and Covenants 7:1: “What desirest thou?”

For Joseph and Oliver in April 1829, the desire of their hearts was to debate the meaning of an unclear and not particularly important snippet of scripture. Was John the Beloved still alive? Or not? Unlike you and your buddies, they had Urim and Thummim handy and got to use company equipment for their own little side job. They were allowed a revealed answer given in the first-person voice of the Beloved himself. And to keep up for others after them the supply of puzzlers to wonder about, they were shown the parchment on which John wrote this otherwise unknown account.

As one who sometimes likes to muse on extraneous spiritual matters that no, are not strictly necessary for salvation, I feel catered to with Section 7 by a loving Heavenly Father who is willing to indulge unnecessary banter.

“Bertie old boy,” sayeth the Elon, “I bet you and a couple of boys at the Drones can’t take over the DoD’s computer systems for me?”

“It’s a wager, my dear old African,” quoth I.  “There is no technology, no matter how quaintly old-fashioned, that can pull a fast one on me.”

So here I am esconced, as it were, in the bowels of the quaintly old-fashioned, wondering for the everloving life of yours truly what the dashed procedure is for operating an abacus.  If any of the readers to which these presents shall come know the d.p. for operating an abacus, please contact Bertram eftsoons and right quickly.

D&C 4

Therefore, if ye have desires to serve God ye are called to the work;

For behold the field is white already to harvest; and lo, he that thrusteth in his sickle with his might, the same layeth up in store that he perisheth not, but bringeth salvation to his soul;

And faith, hope, charity and love, with an eye single to the glory of God, qualify him for the work.

Remember faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence.

Ask, and ye shall receive; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Amen.

D&C 6

Yea, whosoever will thrust in his sickle and reap, the same is called of God.

To be called by God to do a divine work, all you have to do is want to.  All you have to do to be called to do it is to do it.

The qualifications are not skills or competencies or connections.  They are just (1) doing it and (2) trying to be virtuous and (3) asking for help in prayer.

Missionary work is the divine work par excellence but so is anything, even wealth or learning or, whatever, building a dam, if you hearken unto God and have a holy purpose in doing it.

You can literally just do things.

Most people wanted to talk about the lost 116 pages so that is what we discussed.  It was strong and went like this.

No matter how badly you screwed up, you probably haven’t permanently lost over a hundred pages of scripture.

God makes it possible to have meaningful choices but also to not do unrecoverable damage.  He has route-arounds.  This is how he can give us meaningful choices but also not have us be damned, which is what our unfettered choice would leave to.

It is better to ask amiss than not to ask at all!

The small plates were Plan A, not Plan B.  (This felt very right to me on many levels.)  Repentance is the plan.  Repentance is why his purposes cannot be frustrated.

Because of the lost 116 pages Joseph grew as a prophet–it  may be part of why he was so forgiving throughout the rest of his life, even to a fault.  At a profound level, Joseph did not come to restore a set of doctrines and practices but to make us all into Josephs.  It is extremely significant that part of our foundational story is that there is truth we could know but don’t, that there is more out there.

For, behold, you should not have feared man more than God. Although men set at naught the counsels of God, and despise his words—

Yet you should have been faithful; and he would have extended his arm and supported you against all the fiery darts of the adversary; and he would have been with you in every time of trouble.

This assurance is to you also.