He was gifted.  No one is indispensable, but some are irreplaceable.  We will not have his like as a writer and deliverer of talks again.  Some of them were genuine literary and spiritual masterpieces.  He was the guy that first made me understand the 18th C. taste for reading sermons.

Off the top of my head, Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet — the title of this post is a reference to it–

and An High Priest of Good Things to Come

One of the least of his techniques was to incorporate lines from hymns without highlighting that he was doing so.
I will miss him a lot until I also reach the top.

I wrote this story for you.

There once was a king who had three sons, the Prince of Was, the Prince of Is, and the Prince of Becoming.

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Once there was a world of snow whose interior was filled with crystal palaces of ice where beautiful people danced under shining lights. There was a widowed king there, and he had one beautiful daughter. This princess had everything her way and was at the top of the social pyramid. She did not abuse her position though she made sure to maintain it. When rivals tried to be catty or to whisper against her, she deftly put them back down. She was not cruel, but she was firm.

Then there was a revolt, her father was thrown down, and she experienced humiliation after humiliation. She was brave, she endured insults and replied with spirit when she could, but her real mastery of social technique helped her only a little now that she was no longer the Princess and her father the King.

But a princess born was still a princess so she carried herself with dignity and even at times merrily. But if anything her quality made the persecution worse. It escalated to violence, against which she was helpless. Came the day when she was struck and clawed and knocked down by a coterie of her former rivals and weeping, clothing torn, she fled into tunnels and long forgotten ways until she came to the desolate surface.

The surface was deep in snow and ice. It was night perpetually, and dark birds flitted from dark pine to dark pine under the stars, and strange crags loomed.

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Winter has the best twilights and sunsets.  They are the best thing about living out here on the plains.  Everyone loves the clouds, and I do too, but my favorite is a cloudless day when the rim of the sky turns golden after the sun sets.  You see the scattered lights come on around you, a tree or a house here and there black against the deep yellow glow in the gathering darkness.

I picked up my daughter from school for the holidays.  We were driving south for the whole sunset and twilight.  It was vivid, then we rolled down the window and were stunned into silence.  It was cold, but we kept rolling down the window for another glimpse.  It is remarkable how much even just a slightly tinted window put an unwelcome barrier between us and our world.  Then we tried to take a picture.  Fat chance.  I have never seen a photograph or a painting  that did justice to a sunset.  Even the best of them are only reflecting light.  Whereas the sunset in the world is light itself.

For a contest, I wrote a short story once about an artist who had invented a light-producing series of pigments so he could paint sunsets.  He was being sued by someone who had damaged his eyes staring at it.  The editor wrote me a note that he really liked my story but they had another story that was also about the impact of art and it was shorter, so he couldn’t justify adding mine to the anthology.  My response was I deserved to have my story rejected.  It wasn’t about the impact of art at all.  It was about how durn cool it would be to have light producing pigments.  If my story sounded like it was about the impact of art I had failed pretty badly.

When we got  home, my daughter eventually found her way to the piano.  It was like old times listening to her play.  Sure, we have a fair amount of music in our home to listen to.  Speakers and playlists, we got ’em.  But I had forgotten how much more real and more  moving live music was.

There’s less live music every year, but it still means something that no perfect recording can match.

You might say the same about the written word.  We few friends here are some of the last connoisseurs of the word in the age of the algorithm.

This Christmas will probably not be the best Christmas I have ever had.  Some of my kids are grown.  My glory days of Christmas are probably behind me.  But those Christmases can only be seen through the tinted glass of memory.  This Christmas is real and now, glowing with light on the horizon.

There is some very interesting back story here.  Frost says this poem refers to an unsuccessful trip to the village he took on a winter solstice to sell produce to buy gifts, and his return. (more…)

(With a side helping of hating on Dr. Spock).

From time to time, we manfully try to grapple with the paradox of the Proclamation on the Family, because we have reason to believe from both personal revelation and personal experience that the paradox is true.

The paradox, if you recall, is that on one side the Proclamation says that the husband presides, i.e., is the President, i.e., is in charge of, rules, is the authority, has dominion over the family. We are using a lot of synonyms including some shocking ones because we Saints have mostly responded to the paradox of the Proclamation by assuring ourselves it isn’t there, that ‘preside’ here is a contentless formality akin to being the Emperor of Japan with the wife acting as the Shogun. The results of this view you see around you–declining birth rates, declining marriage rates, and a number of unhappy flabby uninspiring marriages. But on the other side of the Paradox the Proclamation very clearly proclaims that the husband and wife are equal partners. It isn’t just Old Timey Patriarchy.  So…. what to make of it?

One advantage of having bright nerdy friends is that you can be having a casual conversation on, say, current politics and end up getting an impromptu master class on principal-agent problems in hierarchies. I was going to say, in hierarchical organizations, but that would be redundant. All organizations are hierarchical. The guys were specifically talking about corporations and how its hard for the CEO to know what’s actually going on. The numbers always lie. One technique that has been practiced by business executives and kings alike is to go undercover into their own organization. But short of that, good CEOs are always getting down into the line, talking with the people there, taking a turn or two at the machines, keeping themselves in touch with the actual work of the organization. I have a peculiar bent of mine, so my own contribution to the conversation was to talk about status. The person in charge is always high status and whatever they don’t concern themselves with is lower status by default.
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The proclamation says that the husband presides and the husband and wife are equal partners.
This is a contradiction.  Or rather, a paradox, and we would do better to face it squarely.  The usual way to is to deny the paradox by reinterpreting “preside” into meaninglessness.

A lot of things that are paradoxes to the mortal mind are not paradoxes when experienced by the mortal soul.

I have lightly revised our two Christmas fairytales.  In substance they are the same, but last year I wrote them in a hurry and put them up straight away.

A Christmas Fairy Tale

Another Christmas Tale

The annual Christmas Page (see the header) had some broken links.  They have been fixed.

This was a hard read.

There is a tendency to ascribe mystical or magical meaning to sacred texts or even just to poetry.

Hence practices like gematria, bibliomancy, or sortae virgilinae.

These tendencies probably exist because sacred texts or even just poetry do sometimes have mystical or magical meanings.

On the poetry side, it’s hard not to see a lot of poetry as quasi-revelatory.  For us Latter-day Saints, Milton’s Paradise Lost has some distinct hits.  Or even Wordsworth ‘trailing clouds of glory.’  It’s probably no coincidence that one of the biggest ‘problem’ phrases in the Book of Mormon is a quote from Shakespeare.  I myself have sometimes been strongly, spiritually caught by a line from poetry and when later told ‘that’s not what the poet meant,’ have thought ‘that’s not what the poet thought he meant.’

On the scripture side, the Savior himself repurposed Old Testament scriptures as if they had a deeper meaning than just their surface context.  There is clearly something more to how numbers are used in the Bible than just pure counting, as anyone will know if they read Revelation.  Nephi more or less admits that there are lots of esoteric layers to scripture, though he doesn’t seem to be a big fan.

Which is a pretty high-falutin’ way of bringing up something weird about the Articles of Faith.  They kinda seem to have a number thing going on.

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Here’s another edition of the D&C When Everybody Else is Done.    But instead of being a specific doctrinal comment on D&C 137-138, this is a daydream or a reverie.

Once upon a time, a Dark Lord rose in the land.  With cruelty and hate and plunder he drove his conquests on, leaving burnt villages, dead and wounded men and women, orphan children, weeping starving people marched off in chains under the lash….

With great difficulty, the heroes defeated him and his dark arts.  But they didn’t kill him.  They harried him instead as he fled.  For years and years they harried him.  He used his magic to walk strange paths, to flee to unknown lands… still they harried him.  At last, he found refuge in a small valley in a different time and place, where no one knew or could know about his past, and there he found peace.  He became a craftsman, kept some goats, and lived quietly at last.

This, is turned out, was the purpose of all the harrying.  The divine plan the  heroes were called to live out was not just for saving everyone from the Dark Lord.  It was also for saving the Dark Lord himself.

But the ambition and perhaps the cruelty of Providence didn’t end there.  Because once the Dark Lord had found peace and become, in a small way, a good man…. Heaven granted him all his power back.  His newly formed character was unable to handle it and he became the Dark Lord again.  In that new land,  he once again rose in villainy and horror and was defeated.  Every few hundred years the Dark Lord rose again and the cycle repeated itself.  But this was all by design.  Every person in that land, from child to peasant to blacksmith to knight, was a redeemed soul who had volunteered for the experience just to give the Dark Lord another chance.  Because heaven’s aim was not just for him to be good in a small way.  Heaven aimed for him to be good and great.  And so these loving souls labored year after year, decade after decade, century after century, while the Dark Lord labored through what might still prove to be purgatory on his way to heaven, or his own hell.

Friends, its that time of year when you have a million happy bustling things to do and so, in fear that you might have a free moment, we post our Christmas page.  Please see above in the header bar.  There’s enough there for one or two books, and probably we will publish them, maybe as soon as next year.

May we suggest that you particularly check out our two fairy tales from last year?  Here is a tale of a princess, and here is a tale of a knight.  The first one is in the classic style whereas the second one has more of a Norse flavor.

Merry Christmas!

I personally am grateful for any time you spend here with me this season, and don’t begrudge it at all if the time you have to spare for your JG friends is not as much as you would like.

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I’ve been thinking about Mosiah 15, a sorta mystical chapter about how Jesus is both the Father and the Son.  About the atonement.  And about Christmas.

Children always like stories of when their parents were little.  They eat them up.  They like stories of their parents doing cool stuff a lot, but stories about when their parents were little even better.  I wonder if this has something to do with the popularity of Christmas.

Jesus being born is a fatherly role because showing your children the way is a fatherly role.  Jesus atonement is a fatherly role because claiming a relationship where someone’s successes and failures affect your deeply is a fatherly role, especially if you then claim responsibility to step in to right the failures.

Its no surprise in our age of credentials that a lot of Christians think of salvation as a credential.  It’s just something God gives you.  It’s a database somewhere where God toggles your file from Salvation:hell to Salvation:heaven.

Salvation is a state of being.