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.
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…)
Judging or doing judgment in the earth is, according to their capacity and position, required not of judges only, nor of rulers only, but of all men; a truth sorrowfully lost sigh of even by those who are ready enough to apply to themselves passages in which Christian men are spoken of as called to be “saints” (i.e. to helpful or healing functions); and “chosen to be kings” (i.e. to knowing or directing functions). . . . All true sanctity is saving power, as all true royalty is ruling power; and injustice is part and parcel of the denial of such power.
John Ruskin, Unto This Last
(I put in the italics)
Three crows set on a fence rail. “We’re not a very diverse bunch,” said one crow. So he caught a fish and dropped it on the rail, while another crow dragged a mole up there and the third crow cajoled a calf into balancing there precariously. “Much better,” said the crow. “Now we have diversity, and equality too.”
Any valid form of asceticism is aesthetic. Aesthetic because it fits into a larger pattern of creation. Asceticism for its own sake is asceticism which uglifies. It is gnostic, creation hating. Gnostic is evil.
The more individual and distinct we become, the more we become like each other.
(Dusting off the Archives)
Authenticity is integrity with the element of time irrationally and wickedly stripped off. It is trying to be true to yourself right now, without regard to being true to who you were and especially to who you will be. The honest seed sprouts and flowers. The authentic seed falls on stony ground and stays a seed, then a withered caricature of a seed, then a husk. Authenticity is death.
In Mormon terms, where damnation means the cessation of progress, authenticity is damnation.
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;
These can be challenging verses. Enough so that the official Church header to this chapter has the extremely mealy-mouthed description “Husbands and wives should love each other.” Right.
It has been suggested that one way of making sense of these verses is to see that Paul is giving people permission to do what they might want to do anyway but that their culture might tell them not to. For instance, in Roman culture and other cultures of the empire, a man loving his wife could be seen as unmanly.
Another possibility is that Paul is giving people a way to elevate the role that their culture expects of them. Instead of just being something you have to do, it becomes something that moves you more towards God. For instance, in a culture like that prevailing in ancient Rome where women were very much expected to do as their husbands told them, Paul is giving them a gospel pattern for this cultural expectation. In a bourgeois culture where men are expected to be affectionate and dote and cater to their wives, Paul is giving them a nobler way of doing it.
These are possibilities. I don’t know if any of them are true or not.
In D&C 92, the Lord tells Williams to be a lively member of the United Order.
Scriptures about being active, having energy, being quickened–we think those are about accomplishing more. It’s good to accomplish more. But we may be looking beyond the mark. Being lively is itself beautiful. It reveals what is glorious about being alive. It and stillness and contemplation seems to be the two states that God loves best. Those are also the two states where the glory of being human are most manifest. A child playing energetically, a child at rest.
God loves deeds, great or small. To praise deeds is to participate in the divine nature.
Mostly we praise people to cheer them up or make them like us. The right reason is delight. Paradoxically when you praise from delight they are then much more likely to cheer up or like you.
The best smell in church is old cigarette smoke on someone’s clothes.
The best sound is a crying child.
The best touch is straightening a son’s tie.
The best taste is water.
The best sight is the one blurred by tears.
The sensations you sense outward and in.
I read a book recently called a Month in the Country. It’s billed as an idyll. It isn’t, but it has parts that are. Moments of peace, as the sun rises, seen from the belfry of a country church.
I think that writing an idyll is one of the most difficult tasks a writer can have.
The high-school book A Separate Peace is not an idyll, but it has its moments. Those are what give the book its power.
The Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy are idylls in homespun.
Put your recommendations below.