[The Tree Son fell in love with a Starmaiden, and learned to sing so his voice could reach her in the sky.  But his father, the Father of Trees, heard the voice also, and the longing for something above and beyond the forest that was in the voice.]

The Father of Trees was angry with his son. He heard longing in the song of his son that carried on the winds. He called out his sleigh. Every part of it was made of the bones of trees, and highly polished. He threw a pinch of pollen into the air and chanted a call for the winds to aid him in his journey, and, reluctantly, they did.

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Once upon a time in the land of winter, the son of the father of trees roamed his father’s forests in delight. He learned the nature of roots and stones and snow and cold.

But with time everything he knew took his mind upward. The stones piled up in mountains made him look to the sky. After he learned the ways of roots in the earth he learned the ways of trees to rise high and spread their pine or fir or spruce needles against the sky. He saw the sky was from where the snow fell.

So one night the Tree Son raised his eyes to the dark sky and between the needles of the tallest pine he saw very far off, high and remote and twinkling, the Starmaiden.

He longed to speak to her as he spoke to the trees and the stones and the earth. He shouted, but all that came out was rough like bark and did not reach the sky.  He longed for the sky like the trees long for it, but like them the Tree Son could not reach. Then he wept for love of the Starmaiden and because he could not speak to her, with tears like a tree weeping resin.

The North Wind heard and took pity on him. The North Wind blew through the trees like the note of a whistle, and made the icicles ring like bells. The Tree Son heard it from afar off long before the icy blast of the wind reached him, and he understood the message that was carried on the  voice of the North Wind. The Tree Son understood he should sing like the wind did.  The Tree Son sang in the starry night like a bell ringing, like a wind blowing, and the Starmaiden heard.

But the Father of Trees heard it also and was angry.

(Next episode here)

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The Daughterperson No. 1 had an interesting conversation with me about peace.

What vice distorts peace, she wanted to know. It was a fun chat.

The likely answer is complacency, stagnation, apathy . . . and that led in some interesting directions. Because the opposite of that vice is ambition or striving for excellence which is an aspect of glory

PEACE : Complacency/stagnation

Reckless ambition : GLORY

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Let’s talk about Christmas and Easter and how they work as holidays. For lack of a better term, maybe we’ll call it vibe engineering.

Yes, Christmas is a bigger deal than Easter as a holiday and there are extremely good reasons for that. If you want to make Easter a bigger deal for you (as per the Brethren in April conference), you need to understand something about holidays and apply your knowledge. You can’t just willpower your way into feeling more celebratory.

Each holiday has certain holiday flavors to it. Thanksgiving for instance has Family, Heritage, and Gratitude. Those all organically flow from the nature of the holiday and the time of year it is at.

Christmas has a lot. There is a strong Family element, both for traditional reasons, because it is celebrating something that happens overnight so a morning celebration is appropriate which is when you are more likely to be with family, and mostly because the holiday is celebrating the formation of the Holy Family.

It has Gifts, both because of tradition, the wise men, and also because its a birthday and we associate gifts with birthdays. And because Christbaby is a gift. (more…)

When you cuss in your prayers, God gets irked.

It turns out.

Snow began to fall on 29th November – second anniversary of Storm Arwen, which was the most destructive storm in this region for a century; and has continued being added to since.

It is not very deep snow, but it has persisted for five days so far; and is proper snow – covering every twig of every tree – and the leaves have not yet fallen from the oak in our garden; and thick enough for sledging and snowmen.

–Bruce Charlton, with a personal touch.

I haven’t been to his place in a few weeks, so I was interested to see that roughly the same thing has been on our minds lately.  This post in particular really spoke to me: (more…)

You taste the fruit of the tree and for one impossible moment the sweetness explodes in your mouth.

For one impossible moment you have the knowledge of paradise and you still live in it.

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You have never not been on the cliff’s edge leaping.

Plans make heaven roll with laughter.

There is no control, only the deed and submission to the deed.

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The conventional approach is to get  help when your marriage has trouble.  But why worry about your marriage when its awesome?  Its already awesome.

Wrong.

When your marriage is awesome is precisely when you should be working to make your marriage better.  You are that close.

The conventional approach seems to me to like a horticulturist with plenty of tips on how not to fall off the ladder, but nothing more, as if being on the ladder were the summum bonum.  It is not.  Stretch out to the edge of your fingertips to pick the fruit.

On the sweetness . . .

The man who prays at Church looks nervous.  “Dear kind graceful heavenly father . . . “

A young man had remarkable spiritual experiences and was very happy.  But one morning he woke up and found that he just didn’t believe.  There may have been reasons for it–he thought of some himself–but he eventually decided that if ti was possible for a mood like to come on to you, everything you experienced was just moods, including the spiritual experiences.

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Does the Garden of Eden story tell us anything about the types of social pressures that men and women are most vulnerable to?  Eve was hit by general social pressure and an appeal to increase her status, whereas what got Adam was a pretty woman and/or domestic appeals.

Does that generalize?  Dunno.

Yes, I know there are profound doctrinal truths and mythopoetic insights to be garnered from the Garden of Eden story, but I happened not to be thinking about any of those.  I happened to be thinking about this instead.  So sorry.  Our normal insight suppliers have experienced 48% YoY cost increases, so we are offering these substitutes instead.  ICantBelieveItsNotInsight!

Hebrews 10 contrasts Christ with the Judaic priests. They have to sacrifice every year, whereas Christ did it once. The argument is that Christ’s sacrifice was obviously more effective. Are you really sin free if you keep sinning and need a new atoning sacrifice every year?

The yearly atoning sacrifice makes sense from the childish view of sin that it’s a question of debits and credits with the sacrifice periodically topping off your account. This forensic view is not totally wrong but it is badly incomplete.

Hebrews 10 talks about how the Mosaic sacrifice was meant to compensate for violations of the law but Christ’s sacrifice makes you holy.  The New Perspective on sin is that it is primarily a state of being. It is who you are. Sins are a reflection of your inward weakness and malice, and pay the price of your existing sins all you wish, if the inside of the vessel is not cleansed, you are still in sin.

Christ pays your debts, to be sure, but only incidentally. He spends freely to do something much more difficult and lasting–to make you the kind of person who is not a debtor.  We might extend Elder Packer’s old (and good!) LDS parable of the debtor in this way:

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Thereby have some entertained angels unawares.

For me, the best application of this scripture is to be open to reproofs from people who aren’t just echoing Great and Spacious Building propaganda.

All criticisms gratefully accepted.

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On the sweetness…

In your unusually quiet family ward sacrament, one young fellow abruptly stands on the bench and gives just one bellow.