I was often the guy who blatantly ignored the mask mandates. I got a real kick in walking through a sea of masks with my grinning face grinning, daring somebody to say something about.  But also sometimes I just forgot.

A few days ago the masks around here just evaporated. Mandates gone overnight.

The strangest thing happened. All of a sudden I started feeling weird not having a mask on in public settings.  The brain’s little alarm goes off every time I’m about to go through a door and I have to remind myself we’re all done with that now, and me long before now.

I can’t account for it.

I just now realized that the word wholesome means “whole”-some.  I love wholesome things.  But I also love things being integrated together, integrity through time, integrity across relationships.  Maybe they are one and the same.

StC recently took us to task, somewhat feistily, for grumbling a bit too much.

I said something extremely funny in response, because I’m a funny guy, and some of our friends pushed back on him a bit.

Which is fair enough.

What I do want to say, though, is that there is never a bad time to be reminded to be more faithful to the kingdom and the prophets.  StC, his comments, and others like him are always welcome here.

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Working together as a family and having fun while you work is one of the peaks of human existence.

Watering each other and the plants.

Singing while washing the dishes.

Making charcoal for your garden and deciding among you to see if you could make a charcoal cardboard crown for no good reason.

Its a synthesis of virtues.

Getting there is not just a matter of will.  It takes a fair amount of slogging and sloth and labor without much fun and fun without labor.  The Plan of Salvation in microcosm.

By the way —

Slog + Sloth = Boredom

The LO was researching some Hebrew for her Isaiah studies.  She said that is was interesting that the same word-core that means strength or power also means hold or grip.

I thought about the iron rod.

“Hold to the rod.”  We think that implies commitment and it does.  Maybe it also implies that we are strong, and therefore able to hold on strongly.

There are two different ways of holding the rod in Lehi’s vision.

The first group

they did press forward through the mist of darkness, ^aclinging to the rod of iron, even until they did come forth and partake of the ^bfruit of the tree.

This group all make it to the tree and all fall away under the mocking of the great and spacious building.  “Clinging” is not, it would seem, a good thing.

The other group does not fall away.  They are the ones who

did press their way forward, continually holding fast to the rod of iron, until they came forth and fell down and partook of the fruit of the tree.

I would be very interested in hearing what you think the difference is between the clingers and the ones who hold fast.

My thought–its tenuous but it feels right to me–is that the hold fasters have some strength and purpose in themselves.  We are all weak, but those who hold fast have used the savior’s lifeline to become less weak.

The clingers, fear of the darkness motivated them, but once they got to the tree and the darkness wasn’t obviously present, they had no real purpose of themselves and fell under the sway of the Great and Spacious Building’s values.

One of life’s little pleasures is getting up extra early–maybe you have work, maybe you just have projects–and sneaking around to get dressed and ready in the dark so you can let your loved one’s sleep a little longer.

Maybe I enjoy it so much because I only succeed about half the time.  The other half– sneak, sneak, oops, oof, crash, bang, clatter clatter clatter BOOM.

The glory

The infinite magnificence

Of small things.

-thus P.E.

Can we all just settle on one adjective for Noah, and can we all agree that adjective should be Noachide?  What a great word.

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I had this vague memory reading Genesis 9 last week of a Jewish tradition regarding the Noachide covenant applying to everyone, not just Jews.

I looked it up.  Sure enough.

The Seven Laws of Noah

Its interesting to compare them to the Ten Commandments.

Also interesting–they don’t seem to bear more than a passing resemblance to the actual commandments found in Genesis 9.  I’m sure they have reasons for them if only I bothered to look them up.

But what interests me are the actual commandment God gave Noah.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about that bit in Moses 1 where God “covers” Moses with his glory so Moses can bear His presence and have a vision of the infinities and the eternities.

It reminds me of that Atonement metaphor where you are short on a debt and God covers the difference.  God becomes your partner.

Sometimes people get upset that God wants them to repent and grow, because that stuff can be kinda miserable.  Why would a loving God expect me to change, they say?

But when you think of how God covers for your inadequacies it puts a different complexion on the question.

The real question is, why would a loving God want to enter into a partnership with somebody who doesn’t contribute anything and doesn’t want to?  Who doesn’t even contribute the widow’s mite of desiring to please Him and trying to please Him?

Friend of the JG Tom Stringham has a pithy essay on what a working dating culture looks like (it looks like our dating culture, still, some).

Latter-Day Saint Sexual Ethics Work

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Which reminds me.  I love seeing Gentiles gradually reinventing gospel truths about sex and family.  Though rarely do they have the hardihood to go all the way.  That has been happening lately.

There’s Peechy Keenan, Operation Marriage Material 

Then there’s some young edgy people’s manifesto on modern dating I saw a link to.  And there’s an exhaustive article analyzing beauty that I ran across somewhere.

Besides the bit where they work their way into heresy on the Sexual Revolution, all three had some dating advice which I will pass on and save you the trouble of reading the articles yourself.

The best dating advice still is, of course,

Don’t be fat.  Be not fat.  Be someone people like to be around.

But that isn’t all.  A lot here is basic, but reminders never hurt.  None of these advice pieces are the gospel, not the gospel of dating nor the gospel of salvation and eternal life, and shouldn’t be taken as such.  Some of it may be bad advice.

It is interesting to see how much of good dating advice applies after marriage (answer: quite a bit).

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Eler Christofferson has a simple, logical way of thinking about how God can love us unconditionally but also love us for the good we do and are.

Love despite vs. Love for.

Unconditional love is love despite our faults.  Conditional love for is love for our successes.  Love despite vs. love for.  God has both.

The good man rejoices in being loved despite and longs to be loved for.

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I was telling someone about a dream.  I and some men and boys were clustered around on a dirt track in the woods.  At the point we were, there was a trail heading up the side of the mountain.  I think we were talking about heading up it, or getting ready to do so.

Along up the track comes a horseman with a horse that is really wild, just flat out running and bucking and swerving around.  Its eyes were wide and white.  We all back off to the sides to let the man and his out of control horse through.  Some back up against the slope on the one side of the dirt track and the rest of us back into the grassy verge on the other side.  But this is all happening very fast, you must not imagine that we have made a very big lane between us, most of us have just had time for a step or two.  I should also mention that on my side of the track–the side opposite the slope–there is a low lying ‘disc’ made of several grey limestones placed together.  They aren’t very tightly placed, there is plenty of grass growing up between the cracks.  It looks a bit like a low lying altar, but it isn’t anything of the kind.  The Forest Service put it there for something or other.

As the horse gallops by it grabs my shirt near my collar in its teeth and tries to drag me off.  I grab the stones, the horse is being pulled in a curve now, and then the dream ended.

“That sound’s significant,” she said (I disagree).  “Let me tell you another dream I think was significant,” she says  (I agree, and I think you will too once you hear it).

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There is an old saying on alcohol’s effects on male lust that I will not repeat since I cannot vouch for its accuracy (he said, modestly alluding to his laudable lifetime adherence to the Word of Wisdom).

There isn’t a similar saying about depression.  There should be, and it goes like this.

Depression gives you the insight, but takes away the ability to act on the insight.

Certain levels of depression really do give you extra insight into the world.  Depressing insight, usually, but not always.  It doesn’t help you much, because the depression also stops you from doing anything about the insight.  There you still sit.

I believe that I held on to some of my depression for longer than I needed to because I loved the extra insights.

But everything is all tied together.  The insight came at a cost that gradually got too high.  That’s one reason  I’m sceptical of the latest techie trend to use LSD or mushrooms or whatever as a way of generating insight.  The implicit notion is that you have a box labeled insight and the LSD will stay safely inside that box, not leaking out into character and aspirations and motivation and vigor.  It won’t.

Denethor and the palantir is a symbol of depression.

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, then, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the ‘married’ couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

-thus Wendell Berry

Happy Last Day of Christmas to everyone, great or small.

Odd thing.  This is been one of the happiest Christmases I can remember.  But also one where I am having less melancholy that is is ending than is usual.