Could this meeting be a zoom?
Could this zoom be a phone call?
Could this phone call be an email?
Could this email be a text?
Could this text be unsent?
Could we in silence retreat to the forest?
Could we, by game trails & forgotten paths, vanish into the trees?
-thus Louis Evans
Women connect, men synthesize.
Not completely sure its true or kind.
But our ironclad policy is to post whatever pops into our heads.
I recommend this talk by Elder Maxwell about Joseph Smith. His literary bent shows him the rhythm and contrast, the tragic poetry, that lies in Joseph Smith’s life and in ours.
Great courage, great strength, great passion — and going peaceably to his death.
After a glorious visitation, a laborious implementation.
Remarkable manifestations, along with constant vexations.
Befriended by heavenly notables, betrayed by some of his earthly friends.
Receiving keys and gifts, but the painful loss of six of his eleven children.
That is Joseph Smith’s poetry.
When you come to passages in your own life that are troubling, keep reading. Dauntless the slug horn to your lips set and blow.
P.S. I loved this passage.
President Young said that those who knew Joseph could tell when “the Spirit of revelation was upon him, … for at such times there was a peculiar clearness and transparency in his face.” (In Journal of Discourses, 9:89.)
Marilyn Nielson The very best available
My children, my children,
my jewels of my heart.
Time, death, and distance
will ne’er long us part.
Romans held actors and actresses in great contempt. They classified them as a form of prostitute. The plays they acted in were often extremely lewd and they often just were prostitutes. The Roman attitude makes sense and one wishes we could adopt it. It is hard to think of a single redeeming feature of our celebrity culture. (more…)
My wife says that I have a subconscious rule that I must move things from one place to another at least a hundred times before I can bring myself to give them away. Suffice it to say, if you need help in this, there are better experts than I to teach you.
-thus Brother Bradford, from his talk Unclutter Your Life.
It is not really a talk about clutter. It is a talk about systems, and means and ends, and goals. (more…)
The one Lord,
from the two branches hung,
three days in the grave,
the four quarters saved
In mortal terms, a father is someone who went from thinking it would be fun to gleefully and dangerously blow up stuff with his friends to thinking it would be fun to gleefully and a little less dangerously blow up stuff with his kids and his friends.
Mortal fathers, by natural design, have a lot of fun with their kids in the rough and tumble.
God is the Father.
I dreamed an old-fashioned general of the French type and his intelligent friend were seated at an outdoor cafe, talking.
“Young officers who are wild are better than young officers who are spiritless,” the general said [I think I read this somewhere recently]. “The wild ones you can sometimes teach self-discipline too. The spiritless ones cannot be taught spirit.”
“But wouldn’t it be better if you could teach them spirit? That would be wonderful.”
The general is shocked. “Why? You don’t like the wild officers?”
“No, no, that part is fine. But if you could have *all* your officers have both spirit and self-discipline, what a fantastic force you would be.”
The general is deeply shocked by the suggestion. “Absolutely not. It would never do. The great mass of bland officers, we rely on them to keep the spirited ones checked. A whole force full of self-disciplined officers with vigor and dash and self-purpose, it staggers my imagination. It would be chaos, sir. Chaos. The Army would dissolve. The nation would dissolve. The world, sir, the world would dissolve.”
The friend is deeply disappointed in what this reveals about his old friend the general. “Yes,” he said, and then certain words of remonstrance that I do not now recall.
Repentance is the path to greatness. That is the path we have to choose.
We could also say it is our path to glory or goodness or heaven. All true. We were meant for greatness but we are not yet great. We are too illformed as yet. So we must change.
We can imagine someone who doesn’t need to be change to be great. They only need to develop further who they are inwardly. Christ was like that, I think. We are partly like that too. We were meant for greatness, the seeds are already there, we are just unfolding them. But for us it also means changing who we are. We have contradictions inside us.
Where we are, and where we have to go to get to our destination explains why ‘strait is the gate and narrow the way.’ We will all wander. But if we wish to arrive at greatness, eventually we are going to have to choose a path that leads there. “Why can’t I be saved in my sins?” is morphologically the same question as “why can’t I go to Paris without having to go to France?” (more…)
There are those passages in D&C 19 where God says something like ‘endless punishment doesn’t mean punishment without end, it means divine punishment, because Endless is my name”. We usually take it to mean that God is proclaiming that his punishment is temporally bound. But He doesn’t actually say that. Its a puzzling passage, but I think a better reading is that he is telling us that we if we are concerned about how long His punishment is, we are asking the wrong question. The better question is Whose.
Like when I put my kids in time-out because they have been quarrelling. If the first question they ask is ‘how long?’ I know they need to be in for awhile, because they are not yet in a penitent mood.
To make sense of endless punishment, remember that you are amphibious with respect to time. You swim in it and will forever, but you also breathe the air of eternity. (More here). So the punishment you experience at any one time will have an end at a future time–it is not endless–but that punishment will also be present with you always in eternity–it is Endless.
Punishment being God’s punishment means that it is terrifying. The real punishment is that you have displeased Him. Punishment being God’s punishment means that it is being administered lovingly–He wants all things to turn for your good. Punishment being God’s punishment means that you can repent–what He has put out He can draw back.
I read a talk recently by Elder Oaks. The whole thing is great but you would love it if only for the first three lines.
Joy is more than happiness. It comes from being complete. . . and in harmony with our Creator and his eternal laws.
The opposite of joy is misery. Misery is more than unhappiness, sorrow, or suffering. Misery is the ultimate state of disharmony with God and his laws.
Joy and misery are eternal emotions whose ultimate extent we are not likely to experience in mortality.
Marilyn Nielson Find relief in charity
Reap.
Behold, the field is white already to harvest; therefore, whoso desireth to reap let him thrust in his sickle with his might, and reap while the day lasts, that he may treasure up for his soul everlasting salvation in the kingdom of God.
Yea, whosoever will thrust in his sickle and reap, the same is called of God.
Therefore, if you will ask of me you shall receive; if you will knock it shall be opened unto you.
There is nothing to indicate here that harvest is a metaphor for missionary work alone.
The world’s field is overflowing with ripe excellences. You only need to claim them as yours for God to claim you as His. Ask, and He will give to you. But you must ask with your whole soul. You must ask with your time and with your deeds.
If you want the Spirit to come to you, you must be willing to let the Spirit come through you.
I am following up on my post yesterday about the Eternal Imperative. I riffed off of Kant’s Categoral Imperative to offer a basic rule for morality, in three different formulations.
*Act as if you were part of a story that involves your ancestors and your posterity.
*Act as if you were working towards an ultimate goal that you could will everyone would be working towards.
*Act as if you eventually would come into a relationship with everyone past, present, and future.
Here are two more formula that I think are equivalent to those three. But they are not obvious.
Act as if you had zero time preference.
Kant’s Categorical Imperative had a bit of the right idea, but along the wrong dimension.
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
It is too universal. It abstracts away from the embodiment of being in a particular time and place. It is all blandness and universal solvent. It acts as if time need not exist.
