Some time ago I listened to a podcast on the conundrum (from a certain point of view) between our lowliness before God and our own desire for more and greater things for ourselves which desire we sense in some aspect is right.  Put crudely, whose kids are these?  Is God their Father or am I?

The man thought the answer was stewardship.  We possess what we possess as stewards for the owner and thus we and God both have them in some sense.

There is some scriptural basis for this idea.  I don’t like it all the same.  I wrote in my notes, similitude, not stewardship.

These relationships we form here are not just on someone else’s behalf.  They are not even practice.  The relationships we make are the foundation of eternity.

Sonship, not stewardship.

The blessing of burden

Lowing,  the oxen

pull steadier with the load

In a world where people are having trouble ‘adulting’, and where both lower and higher education are in complete shambles, it behooves us to understand what ideal education looks like. And what it is for.

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I was pondering AI, and what jobs it will eventually replace and I thought, ‘At least spirituality will be something machines can never do.’

Then I realized that is what a Urim & Thummim is.

(Because it can be obtained on no other principle).

Not only does absolute power not corrupt absolutely, the purpose of this life is to learn to exercise power without being corrupted.

-thus EdJCB

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There are three symbols for Jesus in Lehi’s dream. (more…)

Maundy Thursday

 The last supper — This is my body, this is my blood — Gethsemane (meaning oil press, symbolically meaningful) — The betrayal.

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God is love, Christ violently drove the wicked from the temple.  Turn the cheek, wield the whip.  Lion and lamb.

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I decided to do something a little different this time.  Instead of looking over my notes, I am going to just list what struck me from memory.  (If you want to do the same, jot down what you can before you read further).

I also am going to record my impressions.

Hopefully Elder Ballard will not frown if I say that I am thankful for the conference, my personal experience was the best I have had in years, and thankful for you.  For me this was like the conferences of old, the most spiritual its been for me since President Nelson’s legendary talk about the 8 keys to revelatoin.

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Royal triumph entering Jerusalem — In the mouth of babes and little children —

— If these should hold their peace, the very stones would cry out.

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On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Your daughter comes to you. She says, I read your post on how I’m spoiled rotten. (She never reads your posts.) She says, it was funny. You’re funny, daddy. Will you play with me?

You play with her.

Time is a flood.  Who can tell where we flotsam are going?

Who can say what day when you or I will be washed up on some bank while the flood goes furiously on.

Sunrise over the Marriott pool,

the commercial strip, and the warehouse zone

–God’s promise that even man’s rule

He’ll one day turn to loveliness.

Time is a wave of experience that moves through the water of eternity but the water remains.

The wave here is fleeting–mortal–and then it rolls on.

Behind it are great depths of love.  Before it are great depths of love.

C.S. Lewis once said something like the essence of myth is that the person who makes it doesn’t see it as an allegory, but the hearer keeps seeing hints of allegories in it.

He is technically wrong, but substantially right.  A mythmaker can have an allegorical meaning in mind.  But the myth has to be stronger than their allegory for it to work.

Take Mr. Lewis’ own allegory, Pilgrim’s Regress.  Its nothing but allegory and pleasant enough in its way.  I can speak, though, of three different passages which I keep coming back to.   They have that kind of force.  For some of them, I don’t even remember what the original allegorical meaning was supposed to be.

The first is the giant whose sight turns people transparent so that you can see their bowels and their bones.

The second is the parable of the man closely pursued by enemies.  His wife sees him coming and is perplexed.  If she cuts down the bridge that leads to their home, he will be stranded on the other side with his enemies.  If she doesn’t, his enemies will cross with him.

Those two I don’t really recall the allegorical point Lewis was making, at least not off the top of my head.

The third passage proves my point the best, since it is the most clearly allegorical but is also a passage that I have *felt* many times.  It’s about the home of Mr. Wisdom.  He and his children live a quiet, sober life there.  They dine on plain fare and are content.  But at night, his children in a trance fly off to participate in witches sabbaths and bloody melees and the like.

The point is that a myth, to really work, has to have some weight to it apart from the message its supposed to be teaching.  Which is why Mr. Wisdom and his children have come to my mind at times that had nothing to do with the message that rationalists subconsciously derive their emotional satisfaction from elsewhere.

My best parables can sometimes have a very clear message, but they have a power beyond the message.

Poet Head, for instance, is so self-consciously message fiction that I literally call the head poet heads and sober heads.  But it still works.