it must needs be that there be an organization of my people, in regulating and establishing the affairs of the storehouse for the poor of my people, both in this place and in the land of Zion—

4 For a permanent and everlasting establishment and order unto my church, to advance the cause, which ye have espoused, to the salvation of man, and to the glory of your Father who is in heaven;

5 That you may be equal in the bonds of heavenly things, yea, and earthly things also, for the obtaining of heavenly things.

6 For if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things;

-thus D&C 78:3-6

Like some of you, I have developed an allergy to the concept of equality, as who wouldn’t if the whipmasters shouted “equality” with each blow on you of the lash.  But that is the fault of the whipmasters, not the (sadly much abused) concept.

Paradoxically, I have become more alive to the idea of a group of people joining together as peers because of some great animating friendship and cause.  Like it says right there in those verses, “to advance the cause.”

But that isn’t the point of this post.

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What if you are the hero farm boy in a fantasy novel, but there is no Dark Lord of Darkness for you strike down, no One Ring to throw into the cracks, not even a Mt. Doom?  Just creeping malice and sludge and miasma and mediocrity?

In circles where manhood still has nominal rhetorical value, there is a tendency to say

Real men do X

Real men don’t do Y

Where X and Y are whatever the speaker happens to be for or against.

Real men brush their teeth

Real men don’t disrespect their wives

Don’t mistake us, my poppets.  We are four square for brushing your teeth and respecting your wife, preferably at the same time if possible.

But we are against mindlessly inserting “real men” in front of every piece of good advice (or, sometimes, bad advice).

It comes across as manipulative and meaningless and makes the concept of manhood pretty empty.

What there needs to be is some connection to an actual concept of manhood.

Elder Holland makes the connection here

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Imagine some stodgy old town that has stodgy old town meetings.

Except one day some incredibly brave youth stands up and says something incredibly brave that shocks literally everybody, maybe something like the truth is that there is no truth. He says everyone should just look out for themselves and never mind the rest, lie a little if they need to, there is no truth and morality so do whatever it takes to be comfortable and have a few of life’s little pleasures.  It’s so brave because he may well lose his job and his fiancee over what he is saying.

That is the fundamental myth of modernity.  Society LARPs it every day.

The myth is in the air we breathe, so much so that I’ve struggled to write it in a way that shows it’s absurdity.  The truth is that there is no truth …get out.

By him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God

-thus Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon

Worlds, plural.  He is the savior of multiple worlds.

But I want to focus on the begotten part.  There is a lot of interesting mysticism in the scriptures about how we becomes sons and daughters of Christ, how the Son is the Father and so on.  But this revelation first emphasizes the Son’s status as the Begotten of the Father and then says that we are begotten sons and daughters of Father through the Son.  To me, the obvious answer is just that we take on Christ’s identity.  We are part of Christ, we are the body of Christ, and so in becoming Him, we become what He is–the Son of God, the Daughter of God.

Great shall be their reward and eternal shall be their glory

And to them will I reveal all mysteries, yea, all the hidden mysteries of my kingdom from days of old, and for ages to come

Yea, even the wonders of eternity shall they know, and things to come will I show them

And their wisdom shall be great, and their understanding reach to heaven;

and before them the wisdom of the wise shall perish, and the understanding of the prudent shall come to naught.

For by my Spirit will I enlighten them, and by my power will I make known unto them the secrets of my will

–D&C 76:6-10

His purposes fail not,

neither are there any

who can stay his hand.

From eternity to eternity

he is the same,

and his years

never fail.

–D&C 76:3-4

Here are my Conference top two. (more…)

Christofferson, the Covenant Path

Obedience can be good.  Independence can be good.  But there is a tension between them.

They both have bad versions–unthinking conformity, prideful rebellion–and it should interest you that Satan appears to aim for both.  The conformist rebel is one of the defining archetypes of our age.

Covenants reconcile the tension between obedience and independence.

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On the sweetness . . .

A strange ward.  A woman gets up to speak.  It’s a full on blue collar ramble.  She’s talking about her alcoholism, taking a shot at her addict exhusband, boasting about her lawn ornaments (!), and talking about service and repentance, all mixed together  She says she was floored when they ask her to be Relief Society President.  I am in the back laughing and laughing but also crying by the end.  It was pure and beautiful.

There was a farmer with land that had been in the family for years and generations.  Every day he walked the land with his boys.  He checked on the pasture.  He watched each one of his cattle.  He knew them by name.  He checked the brightness of their coat and the brightness of their eye, so he could tell if they were less than at their peak.  He repaired fences.  He drained wet spots and pulled noxious weeds.  He tried slow and careful experiments here and there, introducing a new clover in one field, growing chestnuts in another with grazing in the understory.  But his fathers had created deep rich pasture so he was slow and careful to modernize too much on every whim of theory.  He milked and drank the rich cream with his boys.  He told them stories as they did their rounds.  “This is where we went ice sliding the year the creek ran over.  That dead stump there?  That’s where Grandpa killed a bear.  No, not the bearskin by the hearth, that’s a different bear.”  He educated them that way, and by being with him as he did his work.  They were also taught by the storms and the sun and the stars at night.

There was a lord with a small city that had been in the family for years and generations.  Every day he walked the city with his boys.  He checked on the roads.  He smelled for sewer or pollution.  He talked to the shopkeepers and police and families.  He knew them by name.  He knew their houses and their way of dress and could tell if they were less than at their peak.  He would step in and direct traffic if he saw a snarl.  If the kids at the school seemed restless and quarrelsome, he would declare a holiday and put on a parade.  He found lifeless areas of empty buildings and rebuilt them for families and little shops and home industries.  He did experiments here and there.  A neighborhood nuclear generator over here.  A community managed homestead as the center of an HOA over here.  But his fathers had built a happy and prosperous people so he was slow to modernize too much on every whim of theory.  He collected his taxes and decorated his ancestral home with beautiful art made by his own people.  He told his boys stories as they did their rounds.  “This is where your great great grandfather–our founder– and his neighbors confronted a gang.  This is where we had the wrestling exhibition when I was a young man and our city stood off every challenger.”  He educated them that way, and by being with him as he did his work.  They were also taught by the storms and the sun and the swirl of human life healthily lived around them.  And even by the stars, because this was a town that cherished its darkness at night, and where everyone was safe even without lights.

The first sea breeze when you crest over the sand dune,

The smell of the pines when you come up from the plains,

The first ‘Daddy’ you hear when you step ‘cross the threshold,

These treasures rest in my goodly store.

Send me as envoy to the Great Cham of Tartary,

Invite me to dine with the underhill King . . .

What to me, Cham, thy peacocks and ivories?

What to me, elf, thy revels and lights?

Think about your relationship to your own history.  You could reject that history entirely.  You would embrace a principle of radical discontinuity.  Or you could embrace that history entirely.  You would reject any discontinuity at all.

If you refuse to change at all, you are rejecting being alive.  Life is an arrow in time, which means change and dynamism.

But if you refuse to embrace your past at all, you are rejecting any meaning in your being alive.  If you act like the past has never been, then you have no way of making sense of what you do now.  Because what you do now will soon be the past and by your own principles should be ignored as if it had never been.

You must have growth within continuity.  We call that repentance.

Repentance cannot be just a rejection of your past behavior.  It must be an improvement on it.  Like as The Great Divorce, you must discover what you were really looking for.  Like in Berger’s City of Earthly Desire, you must work through your past, understand it, make some meaning of it.

Then God remembers your sin no more, because it is no longer sin.  What He does recall with perfect clarity is your story of growth and grace and overcoming, of which what once was your sin is a part.

At the deep level, having a body is the same as being individual. Mortal embodiment is acquiring a unique location in space and making each moment unique through time. This place, and not that place. This time, and not that time. This choice, and not that choice.

In that light, think about gospel truths such as “a physical body is necessary for salvation.”

There are deep resonances between

individuality and unity — body and spirit — time and eternity

This diagram is a first attempt.  It can be improved on.

There was an ordinary countryside where ordinary people lived. They baked their bread and swatted their flies.  They had their little gossips and they told their little lies.

It was bordered on one side by a mountain range.  The mountains were grim but not magnificently and starkly grim.  Just dusty and rocky.

There was a gap through the range.  Through the gap you could glimpse higher, white peaked mountains, and a valley covered with a deep forest, all vanishing into far blue haze.

No one who went through the gap ever came back.

But the Gap called to you. You longed to walk under those trees. You longed to pass on to what could only be dimly seen in the far blue haze.

And so from time to time when the falsity and the small malices and accumulated desperations got too much a person would walk up to the gap and leave. They would never be seen again.

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Everyone here should grapple with Evils and Designs, by JC Bennett.  Its I, Pencil the horror story.   And also a commentary on the Word of Wisdom.

The key insight here is hyperstimulus plus impersonal leaderless systems. (more…)