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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
Professor Hugh Nibley once noted that the kingdom of God cannot endure if it indulges even the smallest sin: “The slightest taint of corruption means that the other world would be neither incorruptible nor eternal. The tiniest flaw in a building, institution, code, or character will inevitably prove fatal in the long run of eternity.”
(from Elder Christofferson)
It follows, conversely, if an incident does not prove fatal in the long run of eternity, it was not a sin.
Some wonder why God would punish people. The answer is that it’s a kind of celestial engineering. Sin making you unfit for eternity isn’t a consequence. Its the definition of sin. That’s what it is. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be sin.
I want to be careful because I am going to say something a tiny bit shocking. It is true but not in every sense. It is that sins you repent of are not even sins at all, anymore, because once you repent of them they won’t stop you from pursuing your course.
It’s as if doing something wicked in mortality isn’t yet sin. It’s Schrodinger’s sin. Whether it was sin or not remains to be determined by whether you repent of it later.
Like most Christmases, this Christmas we made an experimental ice cream. Eggnog ice cream. It was such a hit that we made some more batches for relatives. I am now dreaming of a yellowish Christmas.
We made up the recipe ourselves. Here it is.
This recipe is meant for a standard 6 quart ice cream freezer.
A 12-year old girl is crying. She says to her father, “I don’t want to grow up. I like being a kid.”
A man is crying. He says to his wife, “I don’t want them to grow up. I like being a dad.”
I dreamed there was this family that moved up to the hills for the peace and quiet. By choice they had no phones nor internet. Instead in the evenings they would sing and the girls in the family would play the violin and cello. There they would sit in the twilight playing the music.
Then I had a sense that somehow they were my family, this was my home, and the music would be there waiting for me when I came on home.
And then I dreamed that this place was the place Joseph and Mary were headed for the nativity and they were somehow also going home when they went there. I saw a tired man and a tired woman on a donkey headed up a country road to a white house where they would be welcome in. They were close enough now to catch a hint of the music of the strings and to see the dim figures on the porch.
There is of course a meaningful arc to Jesus own life.
The innocent baby
The atoning sacrifice
the triumphant resurrected king
For this reason we celebrate Christmas. It is the beginning.
But sometimes I wonder if the real significance of the Christmas story isn’t Mary? There is something heroic in a supremely womanly way about her role.