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…)

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.

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