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.

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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.

And thus we saw, in the heavenly vision, the glory of the telestial, which surpasses all understanding;

And no man knows it

There was a large heap of wood in the campfire ring. But when the man tried to light it, it would not light. The wood was laid too thickly. The flames choked out. Much of the wood was punky and would by no means take a light.

The man removed bad wood and more bad wood and overstocked wood until all that was left were a small stick and three twigs. But those caught the flame and burned with light.

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D&C 59 v. 15 encourages a glad heart and cheerful countenance, but not ‘much laughter.’  WJT points out that this verse is specifically talking about ordinances and sacraments.  The implication is that some laughter is fine when performing ordinances.

That is the gospel I know.  I was recently down at the temple with family at a sealing performed by an old family friend.  He smiled a lot and laughed some and so did we all.

A gospel like this I am compelled to believe.

One of Our Favorite Poems, introduced to Us on this very blog, is Nothing in Heaven Works as It Ought.  That captures something real about heaven.  But my actual image of heaven is some combination of impossible blazing glory and genial garrulity out on the front porch.  Somehow the combination makes sense to me.

Let’s think about how we progress through the virtues.

A virtue set is static.  Here are virtues and vices that relate to each other.

Its true that real men and women tend to experience a mix of most virtues and vices to greater and lesser degrees all at the same time.   That mix changes over time.  We can become more or less virtuous.  Our existing virtues become stronger.  Our branches grow.  The real experience of virtue is growth, repentance, and change.  A virtue set is a terrain.  We move around on it.

There is a lot of precedent in the scriptures.

For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts, and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have.

-thus 2 Nephi 28:30.

That which is of God is light; and he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day

-thus D&C 50:24.

We have the Plan of Salvation which moves us from stage to stage.  In mortality we have dispensations and the Law of Moses giving way or being fulfilled in the higher law of Christ.  We have the concept often preached in the Church and elsewhere that we need to move on from negative virtues (thou shalt nots, direct commands) to positive virtues (thou shalts, open-ended principles).  It is a wicked and slothful servant who must be commanded in all things.

What if for fun we rearrange the virtue set as a virtue chain?

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There is glory (earned love) and unconditional love.  What does their synthesis look like?

Atonement and repentance.  Unconditional love that cares for you even though you don’t deserve it yet.  Earned love, that is offering you another chance to deserve love.

The arms that are always open for you, no matter how prodigal.  The arms that guide you towards your potential.  The insistence that you are always valuable.  The insistence that you live up to your potential.

Whether or not we identify earned love with the male principle and unconditional love with the female principle, we can see that family expresses this same synthesis.  Caring and growing.  Safety and learning at the same time.  I suspect that on some deep level, family and atonement/repentance are metaphysically identical.

This may seem like a short toss off post.  It is.  I also suspect it may be one of the most important things found on here.

If there are two types of virtues, maybe the two types are male and female. WJT says maybe, though he’s just trying the idea on, he’s still working it through.

Only later did I realize the correspondence between Ahuric/Devic and male/female. By simply exploring these models of good and evil, without thinking of sexual identity at all, I had inadvertently arrived at a possible explanation for the eternal nature of sexual identity — the necessity that good be expressed in two complementary forms rather than in a single asexual Supergod.

-thus WJT

Looking at lists of Ahuric and Devic virtues, I found that the first list made me think of Jesus Christ and the second of Our Lady. This led me to the tentative conclusion that these two types of good corresponded to masculine and feminine, and that the Ganymede model helped to explain why the two sexes were necessary and eternal.

–thus WJT.  He also discusses some problems with the idea.  This post is one you will definitely want to read.

Also this one on the two types and eternal sexual identity.

Let’s mull it over.

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The Lord praises sheep, wheat, tame olive trees, etc bc they take no thought for their own nourishment – everything they get they give away If there is no Cultivator obviously this is a very stupid way to live.

The parable of the olive trees in Jacob 5 introduces gradations of tameness & wildness The lord of the vineyard doesn’t just kill the wild & save the tame – he gradually prunes away the hard, woody, wild portions of each tree.

But we also learn that tame branches are prone to decadence & decay – & the solution is to graft strong, wild root systems with hungry, tame boughs that will draw out their strength It’s not just “tame good, wild bad”, both are necessary which is why both are allowed to persist

-from ExDeJCB

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The only true virtues are the combination of hot virtues and cool virtues.  Things like prudent courage.  Or courageous prudence.

The true virtue is not a moderation of the hot and the cool.  It is not lukewarm.  It is a synthesis of the two where each is enhanced.  Ice cold bravery.  Hot, unrelenting calculation.

The true model of manhood will be an archetype that combines the two.  Or a combination of two archetypes.

Every man a holy pirate king.

Or every man a priest and a king.  (Thanks, Zen.)

Or righteous dominion.   (Thanks, Joseph.)

What is it about us, how could we misunderstand righteous dominion for so long?  How is it that I didn’t understand the plain meaning of that passage of scripture until late last night while musing in the bath?

Holy.  Pirate King.

Priest.  King.

Righteous. Dominion.

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Inspired by friend of the JG WJT, lets apply virtue set concepts to some of our work with manhood and womanhood.

I’ve tried my hand at capturing the essence of man and woman before.  Never perfectly.

Women are love (unconditional love), men are glory (earned love).

Men are agents, women are ends.

My favorite: Every man a holy pirate king.  Every woman a luxury and a necessity.

Glory is clearly a hot virtue, its hard to say where love fits in.  Being an agent is a hot virtue, being an end, its hard to say where it fits in.  But for me what’s interesting is my favorite one.  My ideal man and my ideal woman are both combinations of hot and cool virtues  (I more and more think that the synthesis of a hot and cool virtue pair is the only actual virtue).

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I am too indulgent a father.  I killed two of the kids’ roosters for them this morning.

Afterwards I spontaneously asked God for forgiveness for killing them.  I didn’t think about it, it just happened.

It felt right to do.  But I did not and do not feel guilty.

Go figure.

Thinking about the historical development of the term virtue made me realize something about virtue sets.

Think about the scripture where the woman touches Jesus’ hem and “the virtue went out of him.”  It wasn’t His righteousness that fled.  It was some inner power.

Or think about the phrase that is a holdover from an older English where we talk about “the virtues of a course of action.”  We don’t say that because we are evaluating its morality.  We just mean the benefits of the course of action.  And of course virtue as everyone knows comes from the Latin “virtus” which just meant qualities that were good to have in a man, whether they were chosen or not.

With our emphasis on free agency, we put a strong emphasis on choice and those “virtues”–old sense–that are freely chosen, i.e., also virtues in the modern sense.    But even there the ultimate goal of a choosing a virtue is that it becomes automatic, written on the fleshy tablets of the heart, no longer something chosen and now just a good quality.

And lately we have been recovering the full extent of the Atonement.  It applies not just to sins but to flaws, imperfections, struggles, obstacles.  There is no hard and fast dividing line between virtue (new sense) and virtue (old sense).

That is why you can have a virtue set using virtue (old sense).