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;

Ephesians 5.

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.

Some ruins have to be hunted by archaelogists.  Others stand out in the open.

There is one such that is barely even a ruin at all.  Inside there is nothing to be seen, only dirt and scrub.  But the walls still stand unfallen, as proud and erect as when they were built thousands of years ago.  The marvelous techniques the builders used still puzzle archaelogists.  There is nothing like it in the world.

Over the gate there is a beautifully wrought inscription.  Translated, it is believed to say something like, “I, the Farsighted One, built these walls to stand forever for the greater protection of my people and my family.”   Underneath it and to the side there is a straggling,less well-made inscription that has been ravaged by time.  It is reconstructed to say the following:

“He raised taxes for these cursed walls until the people fled.  He fought wars for tribute for these cursed walls until the people were died.  By arts he drew strength from the soil to sustain these walls by magic until all the strength of the soil is gone.  Where now are those abundant fields full of grain?  Gone, all gone.  He is dead.  We, his family, make this inscription before we too flee.  May this place be cursed.  May it be an inhabitation for dragons and for owls.”

The walls still stand, unfallen, as proud and erect as when they were first built thousands of years ago.  Inside there is nothing to be seen, only dirt and scrub.

Inspired by D&C 86:4.

The male archetype of evil is a specific being, Satan.  The female archetype of evil is a symbol–Babylon, the Great Whore.

The male archetype of good is a specific being, Jesus Christ.  The female archetype of good is a symbol–Wisdom.

So, concrete male but abstract female.  What does it mean?  I personally have no idea.

(more…)

But whoso breaketh this covenant [of the priesthood] after he hath received it, and altogether turneth therefrom, shall not have forgiveness of sins in this world nor in the world to come.

And wo unto all those who come not unto this priesthood

-thus D&C 84:41-42

It made me think of some of our work on progression through a virtue set, where refusal to take up power and authority is a sin, acquiring it and then rejecting it is a terrible sin, and so is acquiring it but not wielding it with the appropriate limits.

Three crows met to brag on a fence rail.

“Friends,” said the first crow, “friends, I am a world class deceiver.  I tell mostly truths, I work to get the details correct, and then I tell the Big Lie.  So huge that no one can believe I would make it up entirely.  They think there must be at least something there.  I get experts, I get emotional narratives, I get ordinary people to come forward as witnesses.  I have planned techniques and fallback positions for when people question the lie.  I am one fine liar.”  And perhaps the crow was telling the truth about himself, who knows.

“That approach is infantile,” said the second crow.  “I don’t say untrue things at all.  I just lie by omission.  I will paint the victim as the aggressor by leaving out who struck first.  I will get other groups to tell my lies for me, then I just quote them.  It’s so professional, the way I do it.”  Perhaps that crow was also telling the truth, who knows.

The third crow smirked.  Finally he said, “I just lie.  I tell big lies and little lies.  I tell lies constantly.  I contradict my former lies.  I say whatever would be convenient at the moment.  I contradict myself in the same sentence.  If someone calls me on it, I lie and say I didn’t.”

“Hey,”  one crow cawed to a nearby grazing cow.  “Which one of us has the best approach to get you to believe stuff?”

The cow ignored them.

A certain lamb was being loaded onto a livestock trailer for the trip to the slaughterhouse.  As the tractor-trailer drove off, the lamb squirmed its way through the tightly pressed sheep to catch a glimpse out a ventilation hole, a glimpse of the pastures the lamb was leaving behind.

“At last, freedom at last,” the lamb exclaimed.  “No more fences, no more herd dogs!”

A boy built a sand castle on the beach to stand against the sea.  Every wave that ran far enough up the sand to reach it melted its walls and filled in the moat.  The only could keep up by furiously shoveling.  He fought for hours, deadly serious about his play the way a boy can be.  He kept the castle up and even grew it a little.  But when he left, he turned back for one more look.  He saw that the castle was already half melted away and waves coming in all the way to the horizon.

The boy was a man.   A hard-charging man with firms and farms and factories.  A subordinate came to him with a new enterprise proposal.  It would be delicate, complicated, amd maybe quite profitable.  “No,” the man said.  “No sandcastles.  Nothing you have to work at constantly or it will all fall apart.”

The man was old.  “They are all sandcastles,” he said.

The Syllogism
by William Ellery Leonard 

All men are mortal. Death marks every zone,
His low white cities gleam in every land,
The king goes down with peasant hand in hand;
Death hath all earth, all seasons, for his own.

I am a man, somehow to stature grown,
Somehow (as all) with feet to walk the strand;
Somehow with eye to see and to command,
Somehow with heart to suffer all alone.

And I am mortal; I too must be gone,
From hill or meadow smit of flame and sky,
Or from the shadow with the shutter drawn–
And long a watcher of the stars am I,
A listener at the sea from dusk to dawn,
And need no schoolmen, Death, to prove it by.

Via.

(more…)

A worker put some wood into the furnace of an unlit boiler then tried to light it.

“What are you doing?”  his boss said.  “Studies show that there is a tight correlation between the amount of the wood and the heat of the fire.  Corporate wants us to do nothing but add more  wood.  Everything else is a waste of time.”

Moral:  You cannot start a fire by adding more wood.

Related: Light a Fire that will Never Go Out

Earth’s joys grow dim,

Its glories pass away.

I was walking along thinking about the quest for physical perfection.  Physical perfection might be too highfalutin’ a term.  I mean people trying to lose weight, put on some muscle, clean up their diet and so on.  What I was thinking is that a lot of people fail.  Losing weight is hard.  They get injured and cannot lift weights for awhile.  Or they have a surgery or get depressed.  Or they get old.  I know a man in wonderful physical shape who developed dementia and withered away.

So when you set out to better yourself physically you are setting out to a goal you cannot guarantee you will reach.  But some people do, the goal is at least possible, and that makes the effort itself worthwhile and in a technical sense glorious.

In fact, I mused, that’s true of any kind of glory.  If you were guaranteed to succeed it wouldn’t be glory.  No risk of failure, no glory.  But if success is impossible, its just vainglory.  There needs to be some chance of success.  At least one person you can point to who set out on the path and made it.

Ahem, the Spirit whispered.  Jesus Christ.

as ordinary things get better, one must rise to higher things, which induce their own trials.

-plucked from the ether.

I don’t think Neil A. Maxwell said that, but he could have, word for word.