My daughter helped me solve a puzzle about peace.

Quotes below are excerpts from her journal she sent me.

In my Classical Civilization class we spent a lot of time talking about what violence does to us psychologically/when it invests us so heavily in a story.  One guy said something I thought was really cool – he said that that’s something we’re drawn too because God is perfectly violent – (sometimes death is merciful) and that same ability to conquer/defend/protect is sooo appealing to us, but easy to get wrong.

Then a ton of girls raised their hands and just tore into this guy.  “God isn’t violent.  He’s the opposite.  He is loving and kind and anything violent ever comes from the devil” etc.  [No wonder guys today are emasculated.  God is being emasculated.]

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From Eric, in the Anti Nephi Lehi post

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I’m reminded of a story President Eyring told in conference about a man who had once been a district missionary companion of his. The man had a pretty rough past that included a bitter divorce and losing his children, along with losing an eye in an accident, before coming back to the Church when he discovered a copy of the Book of Mormon in the bottom of a trunk. Brother Eyring described one time when he and the man were teaching together:

I asked the people we were teaching, as I testified of the power of the Savior’s Atonement, to look at him. He had been washed clean and given a new heart, and I knew they would see that in his face. I told the people that what they saw was evidence that the Atonement of Jesus Christ could wash away all the corrosive effects of sin.

That was the only time he ever rebuked me. He told me in the darkness outside the trailer where we had been teaching that I should have told the people that while God was able to give him a new heart, He had not been able to give him back his wife and his children and what he might have done for them. But he had not looked back in sorrow and regret for what might have been. He moved forward, lifted by faith, to what yet might be.

One day he told me that in a dream the night before, the sight in his blind eye was restored. He realized that the dream was a glimpse of a future day, walking among loving people in the light of a glorious resurrection. Tears of joy ran down the deeply lined face of that towering, raw-boned man. He spoke to me quietly, with a radiant smile. I don’t remember what he said he saw, but I remember that his face shone with happy anticipation as he described the view. With the Lord’s help and the miracle of that book in the bottom of a trunk, it had not for him been too late nor the way too hard.

While repentance and accepting the atonement set us in the right direction, we shouldn’t be surprised when some things, like a missing eye, aren’t set right until the resurrection.

It occurred to me that the Anti Nephi Lehis are a type of the view we have that judgment is when capabilities we absolutely cannot handle well are stripped from us.

A lot of people in the Church are extremely whiny about the idea that repentance might not completely wipe away the effects of some kinds of sin, especially sexual sin.  Be very careful about what analogy or metaphor you use to describe it or else the Analogy Police and the Metaphor Cops will descend upon you.  (And you will inevitably be accused of fostering suicide).

But.

Dangit, I’m going to poke the tiger.  (Sorry if the tiger is you.  Sorry sorry sorry).

The thing is, a lot of sin IS like nailing a board.  When you repent the nails gets removed, the damage stops, the board is fit for the purpose again, but it still has a nail hole.  Getting back into grace is sweet and right but your life doesn’t instantly jump timelines and get back on the track you would have been sans sin.  The effects can linger for months, years, or a lifetime.

Look at the Anti Nephi Lehis.  Because of their sins of rage, they had to lay down their weapons and become pacifists.  The capability and the blessings of self-defense and righteous physical power were denied them for a generation.  There were other blessings that came of it, their magnificent martyrdom for instance, but they couldn’t just act like the thing they repented of had never happened.

P.S.  What are the best theories about what Anti Nephi Lehi means anyway?  I remember reading something in the good ol’ days of FARMS, but can’t find it now for some reason.

Three Saints met.

I am the Prophet, said the first. I give guidance from God.

I am the Bishop, said the second. I am a Judge in Israel and a minister to His flock.

I am just the Nursery Leader, said the third. The Nursery Leader looked downcast.

The Bishop tried to offer some kind of reassurance but the Prophet hushed him.

All I do is . . . the Nursery Leader went on . . . All I do is . . . is personally hold and sing with and teach literal children of God at their earliest and most impressionable stages.

The Nursery Leader brightened.

The Nursery Leader then added, “and I wouldn’t be able to do any of it if it weren’t for the guidance from the Prophet and the calling from the Bishop!”

They all three were very happy together.

Catholics believe that the sacrament literally becomes the body of Christ in a sense. I used to think that belief was grotesque. Just as every drop of water you drink is probably dinosaur pee, it would mean the communicant was — pardon me for being vulgar here — pooping out Christ. But the3 grotesqueness of that image is just a hangover from the false sectarian belief that the body and its functions are lesser. All that is really grotesque in Christianity comes from the Incarnation, where God Himself stunk into his nappy when he was a baby and squatted to poop when he was an adult.

Now I think that if I were a Catholic, I would relish the image of God slowly filling up the world as he was sluffed off from my skin, sweat from my pores, emptied from my bladder, and evacuated from bowels and nostrils. Bled from my hurts. Shed from my tears. Puffed out with my breath. I would be in awe that through me God was slowly making the world into divine flesh.

I would not give a hang about transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation, but this I would care a lot about.

I’m not Catholic. So lets bring this idea home. Let’s talk about substantiation.

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Be ye wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.

That’s pretty straightforward, even though in real life serpents are stupid, they will literally swallow their own tail on rare occasions, and doves aren’t harmless. As my denuded grape vines can attest.

I wonder if there is a symbolic meaning?
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I find in my notes the following quote

The pursuit of kleos is to internalize the judgment of a lofty tribe – to observe yourself from the perspective of historians & poets & try to create something that they will notice, & find inspiring & beautiful

if you live for kleos it matters very much *who* you want to remember your name

(From whom I have neglected to mention, perhaps twitter user EDJCB)

Kleos means glory.

Generally the people you want to admire you are the people you yourself admire. And you want them to admire you for who you are, not for a façade. (more…)

One theme of this blog is that the great value of mortality and the body is opportunity cost.  It is the great gift of being able to do things, which also means the great gift of not being able to do other things because of the one thing you are doing.  We don’t  normally think this way, but it is true that every time you do something you are sacrificing a million different actions that you could be doing but aren’t; in fact, literally sacrificing an infinite number of possible actions.  The limits of mortality make each action of yours extremely valuable.  And that, for an immortal spirit, is a desirable thing.

Some economists point out that in some situations scarcity is a good thing.  It increases the value of the scarce good.

You have perhaps 70 years of mortality as compared to the forever of immortality.  This time is infinitely precious (which is one reason why even believers are right to fear and avoid death).

A child is gestated and dies in the womb.  That means that experience of just being, of just existing in rhythm with its mother, is one unique experience which compared to forever is infinitely precious. The person will never have that experience again.

The usual thrust of this line of thinking is to deplore how much you are wasting your time on frivolity.  And, sure, be sure to improve the shining moment.

But I would like to look at it a different way.  Because your mortal time is infinitely precious, the most valuable thing you as a divine being will ever have to spend, you are every day engaged in acts of wild generosity.  If you read some pulpy genre novel for a few hours, you have conferred an immortal boon on the author, you have lavished on him generosity beyond the human scale.

By writing this, I have poured out infinite profligate gifts on you to a height that only a god can conceive.  By reading it, you have reciprocated at that same princely divine level.  Here I give you the the jewels of the Orient, which we call time.  You respond with peacocks and ivories, also called time.  We don’t know what we do now.  But when we are grown, we will appreciate how greatly we have gifted each other.

There is a connection or metaphor to the atonement here.  I am groping for it.  Perhaps a Jordan Petersen type would better be able to explain.

In the atonement, my solitary mortal acts require an infinite sacrifice on the part of a God.  And the whole thing is an act of grace.

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In a manner of speaking, there are some who wander out into the sun because they reject the shade of the trees the pioneers planted.  Surely they wither.

It would not be bad description of our little sociality here–writers, commenters, and readers–to say that we mainly consist of those who still say in our hearts, “Blessed, Honored Pioneers.”

Happy Pioneer Day.  Go and do thou likewise.

PS- from a younger daughter (more…)

We of the Jr Ganymede have no intention of being accused of simply entertaining conspiracies. Nothing half way about it! We have the Lizardmen from the Hollow Flat Earth over for Sunday Dinner with their wives and lizard children. And Bigfoot.

If you have been carefully following the news, there are some seriously weird things going on, as in significantly weirder than normal. Which is pretty weird these days. On top of government officials discussing evidence for UFOs and massive conspiracies of deep black programs hiding things that terrify and unsettle all who know them. Things that are too terrible for the public to know, (but conveniently, not too much for the powers that be.) Seriously, I am not exaggerating. We have even had a Congressman suggest that perhaps these beings are not evolved on other planets, but stem from out own ancient history. And major congressional hearings to reveal what is known on July 26th.

Am I honestly willing to engage the scriptural aspect of these wild irresponsible lunatic conspiratorial rumors? (more…)

Elder Bednar spoke in conference on the theme of the Savior saying “Abide in Me, and I in Thee.”

One of the men in my quorum was pretty touched by it.  He said he knew he was supposed to get closer to Christ but it was pretty moving that Christ also wanted to get closer to him.  Big truck, soft heart.  He said he loves coming home and people meet him at the door, or the little ones run out into the yard.

I thought of that prodigal son painting, where the father has run out onto the road.

I have a particular for thinking that going to heaven will be going home in just that way.  In the words of the old song, “we will all come out to greet you when you come.”

When we say “heaven is our home,” we are not primarily making a doctrinal point but a phenomenological one.

We were talking about Isaiah proclaiming woe for those who call sweet bitter and bitter sweet and somehow the conversation revealed that we had opposite interpretations of this passage from Lehi

15 And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man, after he had created our first parents, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/2-ne/2?lang=eng

I interpreted the tree of life as sweet and the tree of knowledge as bitter.  She interpreted them the opposite. (more…)

A crow on a fence spoke to the bull in the field.

“Your bellow is not beautiful,” said the crow. “You should try to sound more like a nightingale. ” The crow squawked triumphantly at what it evidently considered to be a real zinger.

The bull replied,  “Nightingales sing beautifully, no doubt.  What my herd needs to hear is the bellow of a bull. ”

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Loosely inspired by Father’s Day, I intended to put together a JG collection on “becoming as a little child.”  While so doing I started to wonder if we were also meant to become as an adult, and if so, what does that mean?

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A follow up to the post about the Reflection Index, with all its valuable comment, and Friday’s post suggesting that if we are complaining, we should be complaining that the Church doesn’t fail enough or spectacularly enough.  And lo, Laman and Lemuel murmured because Nephi wasn’t lost sometimes.

A good start

Let the stream of consciousness and half-formed thoughts begin.

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