Seeds of Faith, Helaman, and Shiblon

This blog will never be a popular Come Follow Me site. What people understandably want is a site that gives them cool insights when they are reading the material. But I get most of my insights in Sunday School when we are discussing the lessons from the last two weeks, or even in the days after when I am thinking about the Sunday School conversation. I believe that there is an intensification of the available spiritual insight as more and more of the Saints simultaneously turn their attention to a subject.

So here goes, thoughts and comments on the part of the Book of Mormon you are no longer reading.

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What is humility? Alma 32 reveals that humility is directional. Humility is knowing that you need to be more than you are and an openness to outside help to achieve it. Its directional because anyone can recognize their need to be more than they are. A king can recognize his own inadequacy. So can a beggar. When the great are not humble it is because they have not set their sights high enough.

Though reverses and failures can force us to recognize our own inadequacy—”compelled to be humble” in Alma’s terms—we can also get a clearer understanding of where we are supposed to be headed and recognize our ongoing inadequacy in light of that wonderful destiny—”choose to be humble.”

Once you understand what humility actually is, it falls neatly into a virtue set.

Humility:Despair::Pride:Confidence

Despair distorts humility. Pride opposes it. The synthesis of the two vices is despairing pride, which is actually quite common. It marks the Nephites at their end but you see it all over, not just in civilizational gotterdammerungs. “This is unacceptable but also nothing should change” is Jacques Barzun’s definition of decadence. “Everything is unjust and I’m perfect just the way I am.”

Confident humility is also extremely common. I know where I am (humility) but also where through grace I am going (confidence).

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Alma 32:35 Light is good and has a taste. Intriguing.

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Alma 38:12, bridle your passions so that you might have more love. Passions can just mean something like bodily desires; most people interpret the verse that way.

But that is not really the context. Alma is talking about pride, and being bold but not overbold, stuff like that. I believe that ‘passions’ here means emotions and desires, which is peculiar because love is itself an emotion and a desire (for someone else’s good). I believe there is a pathological compassion or an overweening love that leads people who indulge in it to have less love over time than they could have. This is the indulgent parent, for example, who lets themselves have all the pleasures of love in the moment by giving their kid whatever the kid wants, but in the long term it does the kid evil.

There are other things that are going on in the pathological compassion scenario. Letse use a parent spoiling their child to illustrate. One is that it isn’t actually love, its just fear of the kid throwing a fit. Another is that the parent is almost just focused on the act of being loving as their goal instead of the kid as their goal. But partly there is still some genuine love going on, the parent is just indulging themselves in it too much at the expense of future love.

I think this verse is saying restrain and guide your love so that you might have more love.

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These are highly structured chapters. Very literary. Its not just the giant chiasmus in Alma 36. There are these deliberate references to the brass serpent, the brass plates, the brass Liahona, and the iron rod that are all tied together. Symbolically these are all the same thing in these chapters.

These three brass items are the only references to brass in the entire book.

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Repentance is the synthesis of justice and mercy. Alma 34:15-16

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We don’t usually testify that we know that sin is disgusting and that Satan cheats all his followers, but these are still things that we often do know and that are useful to know. For example Alma 34:39.

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Keep the commandments and prosper in the land. We usually spiritualize that. Maybe we shouldn’t. If I am not prospering, perhaps I am not righteous enough. Perhaps I have an overly constrained vision of what righteousness is.