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.
God is love, Christ violently drove the wicked from the temple. Turn the cheek, wield the whip. Lion and lamb.
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.
Royal triumph entering Jerusalem — In the mouth of babes and little children —
— If these should hold their peace, the very stones would cry out.
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.
We have been entrusted before with the true story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and true story of the Good Samaritan (Not just one true Good Samaritan story, but lots of them! All of them true, true, true, and true.) Now we bring you the true story of the Grasshoppers and the Ants Bees.
Why bees, you ask? Hmm. Hard to say.
In the original story, the grasshopper fiddled and laughed, the ant worked and saved, and when winter came the ant thrived while the grasshopper starved.
The reality is more complicated.
With no further ado, my honies, the true story of the Grasshoppers and the Bees:
There is a book review on how humans evolved to speak. I can take or leave the theory. So can the reviewer.
What really got to me was the section on cradling. I think that got to the reviewer too.
Only humans cradle. Cradling means the mother and her child’s eyes are close together—they share each other’s gaze, called “intersubjectivity.” From immediately after birth, mother and child engage in a complex interaction, in which the child imitates the mother, and vice versa, sharing affect. This leads to “joint attention,” where they share perceptions of objects in the world other than mother or child, with their intersubjectivity making it possible for them to communicate they are seeing the same object. (This is different from “gaze following,” which does happen in other species.) This leads to the ability to “share intentionality,” that is, to cooperate. (Apes cannot cooperate or share to achieve joint objectives.) From this flow words,
If words don’t come from cradling, I bet sociality does. That is just as important. It’s amazing to me how important God made men and women and fathers and mothers.
There was a rich kid sitting by the side of a stream flipping gold and silver coins into the water. (more…)
I’ve been working to reconcile these two perspectives:
90% of mothering is showing up–getting married and having the kids and not getting divorced–everything else is gravy and probably only makes a difference at the margins.
vs.
The mother’s influence makes a tremendous difference in the life of each child.
Both of which I hold. At first glance, being able to believe both is an amazing intellectual feat. The contradiction doesn’t bother me that much–I am large, I contain multitudes–but it bothers me enough I’ve been thinking about it.
First, the reasons I believe each one. We are pretty relaxed about our parenting (except for media) and its worked great. We don’t let our children read until they are five, minimum, no early interventions. They have quite a bit of free time. There’s twin studies and a lot of other evidence saying that within the same broad social context (very broad, like the same country and the same decade), how you raise kids doesn’t seem to make much difference absent abuse, malnutrition, or divorce. Except possibly in their level of religious commitment when they are grown. (I made a big hit with the school board when I spoke against some proposed program on the grounds that probably nothing the school was doing made any difference).
G raising his kids —
But in a lot of ways when it comes to media and discipline and manners and dress and, I don’t know, gardening and stuff, we are that family. Again, as far as I can tell, its working out great. Everyone comments on how well mannered and happy our kids are, and our kids love being our kids, knock on wood.
Also G raising his kids–
Here are some possibilities. (more…)
