This post is about sex and I apologize in advance for those of you–you know who you are–for whom this topic is justly painful.  Would that it were not so.

I’m no Francis Berger–I have neither the depths nor the heights–but I do have some more Deep Thoughts about porn.  Or rather, my brain does.  Yes, at 3 AM.  It’s no literary affectation, poppets, from time to time my brain really does wake me up at 3 AM to brood about Deep Thoughts.  There seems to be no consistent connection to what I ate or my mood or my activity or mindset the night before.

In addition to the many more obvious problems with porn, one big problem is that it conditions men’s brains to associate sexual satisfaction with being passive and inert.  There is no masculine energy involved.  Further, because we have a celebrity culture where screen time is status, it conditions them to approach sex as an inferior.  Passive and low status, they are getting sexual reward from being passive and low status.  Like a rat that gets a little bunt of cocaine for pushing the button, but the button they push is the destruction of their own masculinity.

Oh, the crafty plan of the Adversary!  He’s a sly devil.

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Remember when our ancestors built their own meetinghouses?  I grew up in a little church by a stream that the ward there had built.  Some of the old men had laid the foundation.  Most of the people there had painted or remodeled or added a wing where we had classrooms.  There was a ‘cry room’ for nursing mothers that was built on a second story at the back of the chapel, with a little balcony, so they could still see the service.  Naturally, because there were no piped-in sound systems back then.

There were real joys to doing it that way.  At the same time, the hardship of building and paying was intense.  It is a blessing that we can now afford to hire builders.   But we only know it is a blessing if we remember there used to be another way.

Years ago I had the opportunity to preside over a stake whose roots reach back a great while. When the first ward was formed in that area, the local people, out of their own meager resources, bought the land and constructed the building without any help from the general funds of the Church. When that building became too small, they constructed a larger one entirely from their own resources.

By the time I came into the presidency of that stake the Church policy provided for matching funds, the Church to put up one dollar for each dollar provided by the local members. Under that formula, we in that area built six new chapels, in addition to providing funds for their maintenance and all of the activity programs carried on in the various wards.

There may have been a few murmurings, but the faith of the people overrode all of these. They gave generously, notwithstanding the stresses of their own circumstances, and the Lord blessed them in a remarkable way. I know of none who went hungry or without shelter. And I know something of the fruit of those homes which have produced a generation and almost a second generation who walk in faith and who have gone across the world and become men and women recognized for their various skills and integrity, as well as for their activity in the Church.

In those days we would have thought the Millennium had come if we had received word that the Church would bear all of the costs of providing land, all of the costs incident to building construction, operation, and maintenance, let alone an activity and administrative budget allowance of forty dollars per year per individual, based on the number who attend sacrament meeting.

It is not the Millennium, but this long hoped-for and prayed-for day has come. Though I have been a party to its inauguration, I still stand in awe at what has happened.

-thus President Hinckley

Other Posts from the April 1990 Member Finances Fireside

Marilyn Nielson Let us not quibble or complain

The Nephites and the Lamanites have a complex history. They split, they merge, they have dissenters, they have converts, they split again…

In 4th Nephi they apparently completely merge and become just one people.  Then when they become wicked again they become Nephites and Lamanites again.  But it’s even more specific, they split into their individual varieties of Lamanites and Nephites–the old tribes that they used to belong to. (more…)

Goodness is always underrated.

It can’t be overrated.

Think of the goodness you know in your family and friends.  There is nothing better.

I dreamed Miss Swan went gliding along the sparkling water, white and sinuous and effortless, and as she came by Mr. Stork she gave a demure and graceful bob of her head.

Mr. Stork, he bowed.  His stilt legs pushed back and his stilt body pushed forward.

And just like from her, from him I had an impression of great beauty.  In his own way.  It was not curved and elegant.  It was angular.  But it was a real bow with real grace–his body lent itself to the essence of bowing–and it was distinctly like a stork.

Moral: achieve the glory that is yours.

I have this idea that beautiful things are more likely to be true.  Friend of the JG Tanner Greer over at Scholar’s Stage has written a very beautiful piece, and I think a true one, about the best of the old America that was.  The 19th C. America where everybody had an ambition in their pocket; the 19th C. America of a 1,000 voluntary associations.

We are in a kind of twilight now.

G. once told us the rest of the story for the Emperor’s New Clothes.  It’s good.  I went back and it predicts Black Lives Matter.

I want to talk about the back story.

Swindlers come in, talk up their new clothes, tell lies about how only good people can see the cloth, and then social pressure and lies do the rest.  Everyone pretends to see it and half-believes that everyone else has.

You can believe that in a story.  It wouldn’t happen that way in real life.

Unless the court were already used to lies and  manufacturing opinions and fashion and trying hard not to be caught out with the wrong set of beliefs.  (more…)

It’s a baptismal talk for a new convert and its interactive.  (New converts haven’t always had the interactivity sluiced out of them.) So in the interaction a picnic comes up awhile back where the new convert and a bunch of us were there and one of the missionaries brought a tightrope thing to winch up between two trees.  We spent most of the hours trying it.

The next thing in my talk is ‘strait is the gate and narrow the way’; so I liken it to the tightrope.  But that’s bad, because none of us made it across the tightrope.  So I add that the way may be narrow but we’ve got plenty of tries.   Each and every sacrament.  Then I move on.

But I keep thinking about walking that narrow tightrope and walking the narrow way of salvation.

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I gave this talk in Church a few weeks ago.

There are things going wrong that we all know about.

-Fires breaking out around the world

-lockdowns and disease

-Massive debt and deficit

-gender issues, gender identity issues

-secret combinations, the Book of Mormon says

-BYU infected

-an aggressive China

-Coronavirus exposing how dysfunctional the US is

-all time low birthrates

-declining IQ

-trust levels in our society keep going down

-obesity is at an all time high, we are less healthy than we have ever been

-social media is more addictive and more soul-destroying than ever

-pre- Corona but death rates were going up and life expectancies were going back down

[I elaborated on some points a little but I still went through it like a list, boom, boom, boom.  I had a number of people afterwards tell me it was a really disturbing list, they knew about all or most of these things but hadn’t put them together] (more…)

Let us say that the coronavirus were real.  Oh, of course its real.  But I’m talking about the coronavirus of our hysteria and nightmares.  What if 5% or 10% or 25% were dying?

What kinds of measures would be appropriate?

My wife and I talked about this back in February.  We agreed that this disease wasn’t going to be it, but in the event of another plague, we would do things like utterly isolate, living off our stores; if I had to go to work I would never come back inside, I would eat and sleep out on the lawn; if one of us got sick we would house that person somewhere else and nurse them wearing improvising hazmat suits made out duct tape and garbage bags.  We would do things like that and so would you.  Extreme measures are not extreme in the face of extreme threats.

Now consider this.  We live in a spiritual plague land.  The dead souls are strewn everywhere.  They lay stacked in the streets.

What kinds of measures are justified?

When people tell you, ‘don’t be extreme’ because you don’t voluntarily hook yourself up to the IV of lies, what they are really saying is that the threats are mild.  Pornography, divorce, childlessness, mobs, gossip, wrath, depression, desolation–“It’s just the spiritual flu, bro.”

Remember life in a charnel house.

One small prayer for a boy, Elder Asay says, referring to the 1st vision, one great prayer for mankind.

The moon landings were great.  They almost seem greater because we receded and can’t do them anymore.  But in reality they would have been greater if they were a beachhead.  If they led to hundreds of other footsteps, workers’ footsteps, settlers’ footsteps, fathers’ and mothers’ footsteps, babies’ footsteps . . . .

The great glory of Joseph’s prayer is that millions can and do follow his footsteps.

You can soar.  You can reach what is out there.  You can span the heavens.

Until the Eagle has landed, and Christ welcomes you home.

Other Posts from the Sunday Morning session of the April 1990 General Conference

Marilyn Nielson A harvest of mercy

One of our missions is to recover the central place and meaning of glory in the gospel.

To that end, this popular article on the classical Greek concept of thumos.

Awhile back we all read the Boys in the Boat and went through an enthusiasm for it.    Around then we made a rare trip to the sea and I and the oldest daughter went on a little kayaking tour.  The rest of the tour paddled on sedately after the guide.  We ignored the guide and kept dashing off on sprints, pretending to be the boys in the boat.  We took turns being the coxun.  “Ten big ones!” we’d yell then we’d row as hard as we could for the indicated count.

We saw a whale surface within 10 yards of us.  We saw some dolphins not much further off.

That was several years ago.

But she was excited to tell me Monday that the Boys in the Boat was mentioned in the women’s session of General Conference.

Monday night I had an incredibly short dream.

I was sitting in a right-hand pew part way back in a church with a center aisle.  We were for some reason having a movie Protestant-style wedding; my daughter was the radiant bride.

As she got to the front my enthusiasm got to me and I yelled out, “ten big ones!”  She gave a dazzling smile.

I’m reading a trash novel right now.  The Hero leads a band of faceless peasants through hordes and hordes of orcs/zombies/monsters, hack, hack, slash.  Sometimes the peasants die.  But sometimes  a light turns on within, they become endowed with power, and they also become heroes, with names and character and participation in the story.

Your trash novel, the Spirit whispers, is truer to life than great novels.

Brigham Young:

that act alone will ensure C. Allen Huntington, George W. Grant, and David P. Kimball an everlasting salvation in the Celestial Kingdom of God, worlds without end.

So let us now speak of Tanner Lund.

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The old mansion on the edge of the woods rambled on and on.  Room after room after room.  Passage after passage.

It was said to be haunted.

It was said to lead to treasures if you went in far enough.

It was said that deep in, it led to other times and other places.

One boy went exploring far in and came to a peculiar double door.  The door was ornate and carved round about.  It led to what looked to be a large dark hall.  Not a passageway.  A hall in the old manorial sense.  But it was hard to see because the room was nearly pitch black.  There may have been, the boy was almost certain he saw, a gleam far off.  Some intuition told him that through the hall was the way to marvels.

But it was nearly pitch black and as he progressed a little way he discovered it was full of obstacles.  Things  lying on the ground, furniture, whatever it was, he kept tripping and falling.  Worse, he didn’t know where the other side was.  But Determination.  Grit.  Willpower.  He pressed on.  When he fell too  many times, he groped his way back to the opening doors–thankfully he’d left them open–and fell again and tried again.  Over and over, because Never Give Up.  He might still be there today, except along came another boy.  That boy had brought a light.

Comment: This is a story about a lot of things, but one thing it is about is grace.  Or revelation, which is a form of grace.  Only the Light will get you through.