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.

(more…)

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.

Also from the Sunday afternoon session of the October 1991 General Conference

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Recently people in high places have been astonishingly candid and honest.  They come in for their share of lumps from me but here I have to admit they are better men than I–were I in their place I would not dare to be so honest.

Rich businessmen and powerful leftists admit they ran a shadow collaboration to, ah, guide the 2020 election outcome.

A Washington Post journalist goes on the record that journalists are powerful and can promote people they like and damage people they don’t (and they should be able to, because democracy is important).

Because journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power. It is about bringing important people to heel. . . .  [T]he Post could offer the carrot of great exposure to those who needed it, but also, always, the stick of negative coverage to those who spurned them.

I can only hope to have half so much integrity.

A father was out with a giant chipper feeding it brush and cuttings. The small stuff slipped down between the cogs and was ground down.  The large stuff got caught between the cogs and was ground down.  But one straight piece around the thickness of a finger bounced off the cogs, bounced around for a bit, and then went hurtling out the other side like a javelin.

The dad was hugely delighted.  He grabbed another little limb about the same size and tossed it in.  It bounced and was hurled.  Wow!  Again!

His son was out playing in the field and when he heard his dad laughing with glee came running.  Unfortunately he came running straight down the path that the sticks were hurled.

The dad yelled, “Out! Out!  No!  The sticks!” and suddenly the boy realized what was coming.  He turned ashen, span around, and started running away.

“No!” his dad yelled, “run to the side, to the side!”  By some father-son chemistry or through a long habit of obedience the son, even in the crisis, was able to understand his father and turned to the side.  He had only gone a step or two sideways when a stick came hurtling through the space where he had been.

Moral: It can better to dodge than to flee.

I still recall a dream on the eve of my conversion (this would probably be in 2008) in which I saw a globe being covered by darkness; with the darkness being added like black pieces of jigsaw to cover the nations and oceans.

(I knew what was implied by this darkness from my own life and work.)

I saw that Good and evil are sides in a war. And I realized that I had to choose one side or the other: either that Life which was valuable, or incrementally-expanding darkness and spiritual-death.

At last I recognized that the we either take the side of Good – or else we are evil.

And I knew that I personally wanted to take the side of Good.

I put off linking to a marriage article because its framing is way more plebeian–One Weird Trick to Have More Sex with Your Wife!–than is suitable for the austere dignity of this blog thingo.

My poppets, my misgivings remain, but I have now relented.

The article is about how husband and wife should counsel together.  Good, and better yet it has a formula.  I like formulas, and this one fits with my own experience.  It isn’t anti-man like some marriage advice you see.  It also treats men and women as different and has a common sense explanation of how those differences each help when counseling together.    The Church puts big emphasis on the marriage counsel but even a lot of what you hear from members treats the counsel as if the two in it were fungible units.

That said, feel free to take issue with the advice if you are so inclined.

A far-away land had the same proverbial warning about riding a tiger as us, except that tigers were not unknown in those parts.  A villager with an inquiring bent of mind one day thought that the trouble with riding the tiger was not the ride, but what happened on getting off.  Whereas, he thought, if you could contrive to stay on safely, it would truly be a magnificent steed.  Could it be made safe?

He did a close study of the different types of harnessing for horses and oxen and reflected how to adapt them to a tiger.  Certain aspects would need to be strengthened, others changed . . .  He worked and tried and discarded and improved and created a system that got better and better.  He even made a life-size fully articulated wooden model of a tiger to experiment on.  At last he was ready.  He had made a peculiar and very sturdy saddle at the center of an intricate and interwoven network of large and small leather straps that allowed fine control of the movements of the tiger and dampened its wayward movements.  There were also semi-detachable sheaths for the riders legs and, in short, any number of ingenious and well-though out contrivances.  As close to perfection as anything can be in this world, his tiger-riding harness was perfect.

He hoisted his harness onto his shoulders and set out into the jungle to try it out on an actual tiger.

On his way he met an actual tiger.  The tiger sprang on him and devoured him before he could even lift the harness off his back.