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).

Emeritus general authority Tad Callister recently published an essay in the Church News called A Fence at the Top or an Ambulance at the Bottom making a fairly standard LDS point:

 you were asked, “What is the greatest challenge facing our nation today?” how would you respond? The economy, national security, immigration, gun control, poverty, racism, crime, pandemics, climate change? While each of these is a valid concern and deserves attention, I do not believe that any of them strikes at the heart of our greatest challenge — a return to family and moral values. To put our prime focus on other challenges is to strike at the leaves, not the root, of the problem. It is, as some have noted, to put an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff rather than a fence at the top.

Later he took it up several notches.

 He [Satan] disguises his plan of attack with alluring labels such as “pro-choice” for abortion, “love and compassion” for endorsement of same-sex marriage, and “environmental emergency” for promotion of a zero-growth population agenda.

There was an online brouhaha from online brouhahaers.   And the editor of the Church News responded to them favorably.

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A few days ago we were talking about how the cool earthly virtues seemed chthonic and the hot heavenly virtues seemed apollonic.

Today I read this verse.

Behold, I am from above, and my power lies beneath.

-thus D&C 63:59

SPDI has a eulogy for femininity and a girl he knew.  I was touched.

It made me think of Barfield’s idea of the second consciousness–you start off innocent then you wise up then you wise up even more and intelligently and consciously work to reconstruct a non naive version of your innocence.

What would second femininity look like? I think it looks like trust.

Trust in people who are trustworthy. Trust in your family. Trust in your husband. Trust in your God.

And without need, there cannot be trust.

D&C 42

D&C 42:2 — Don’t let your goals and your focus get in the way of alert watchfulness.  Optimizing to take 100% advantage of current circumstances is a trap.

42:45 — Weep for those who die.

42:52 —  Those who believe enough to ask for a blessing but do not have enough faith to be healed will receive exaltation.

I suppose from the eternal perspective the healing that we so long for is basically a parlor trick.

42:68  Wisdom and answers to prayers are described as two separate things.  Wisdom is like glory, its all over the scriptures, seems to have some transcendent meaning beyond the ordinary use of the word, but doesn’t get a lot of attention

42:80-81  Pretty old school take on adultery.  Not a lot of sympathy and ‘we love you, man’

43:33  “And the wicked shall go away into unquenchable fire, and their end no man knoweth on earth, nor ever shall know, until they come before me in judgment.”

Huh.  I certainly thought we knew the fate of the wicked.  Could it mean that we do not know the fate of any one wicked person until the judgment because we do not know their heart and their potential for redemption?  The idea that our picture of the afterlife is still simplified and leaves stuff out tastes good to me.

Everyone wants to know about what happens after this life.  Everyone wants to know about the Judgment.

It is simple.  You see God.

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Power to get eternal life

-D&C 45:8

In this verse God does not offer eternal life as a reward.  He offers power to get eternal life as a reward.

That’s a big difference.

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D&C Bits

37:1  “And let every man choose for himself until I come.”  More there than meets the eye.

38:11  “All flesh is rotten before me.”  We are so used to this metaphor we don’t even notice it anymore.  We automatically translate it as “all people are corrupt.”  But what does corrupt mean?  It also means rotten.  You should read this scripture as “everyone is rotting flesh.”  The world is your charnel house.

38:17-20  These scriptures are promising land for a family inheritance, meaning for the children to grow up and farm, and the grandchildren, and on and on.  We don’t have or understand this mindset any more.  We live like nomads but without the willingness to get up and leave.  We are fettered by temporary things.  No generational ambition any more.

38:28  “but if ye are prepared ye shall not fear.”  “Ye” is plural.  We have to be prepared as a people.  If its just you who is prepared, you should fear.    We badly underestimate the degree to which the scriptures are collective, not individual.  Nephi says ‘liken the scriptures unto us’ and we mentall convert it to ‘liken the scriptures unto me.’

38:39 Interesting balance in the phrase about being the richest and about having the riches of eternity

Live in beauty in the sea breeze.

Live in the beauty under the trees.

Live in beauty where the mountain meets the air.

16 years ago my little daughter died of cancer. This is what I wrote on the birthday she never quite made it to that year, with slight updates since.

Today would be your 20th birthday, Betsey. The full flower of young womanhood!  Instead you are always not-quite 4.

Happy Birthday, Betsey Pearl.

We miss you. We want to see you.

We are a society now where people say, “sort of,”, “kind of,” “in a way,” “I mean ,” “I mean to say,” “you see,” all those things — over and over and over again — like the gossiping women who say, “She said, she said, she said …” They’re a kind of stuttering, a kind of self-imposed idiocy, a kind of pretense very often found in people trying to show that they are just like everybody else — quite stupid really. Stupidity in a democratic society as a whole produces pseudo-stupidity in its leaders, with appalling results. Once there is television in the House of Commons — and I hope it will never happen — everybody there will be pretending to be as stupid  as their electorates. This kind of manipulative pretense at being more stupid than the other person was first noticed by Wyndham Lewis in the twenties and documented in the speech of Bertie Wooster.

–Arthur Henry King, The Abundance of the Heart

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