It’s the last verse that gets me every time.  Lyrics here. (more…)

At one point in the New Testament, Peter tries to give the Savior a pep talk, telling him he didn’t need to die on the cross. Perhaps he just didn’t want Jesus to be so pessimistic. The Good Shepherd replied with,

23 But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.
24 ¶ Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
25 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Matt 16:22-26

Now, why am I posting this? I was angry when I last posted about Brandon Sanderson and his apostacy. Stages of Grief, perhaps. If the pattern of LDS artists who make it big holds, he will dwindle into obscurity and become a footnote. But I should be less contentious… while still speaking the truth boldly.

But this has given me much to ponder. One person pointed out, it may be he has a child who is struggling with this. There are many members who throw their beliefs and covenants away at the first sign of LGBTQ+ struggle or questioning in their children.

This is a level of Niceness that is Abhorrent Sin. As CS Lewis said, The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men.
In coming days, we are going to need both charity and faith guiding hardness. If we are this soft and weak, we will merely be puppets for any man or devil to manipulate. So easy to manipulate. We can not be a light to the world, if we are shaken by every wind. We need to be kind like the Savior and CS Lewis, not the World.

One of the talks in the most recent General Conference, talked about flying a kite. A child wished to see the kite fly higher, so he suggested they cut the string. But the Father saw the folly in that, because it was only that string that held it up. Our difficulties are not our enemies.

I remember a story from Conference not long ago, about a man who drove into the mountains to get firewood, but his truck got stuck in the snow. Since he was already there, he cut wood and loaded his truck. Then he tried again to drive in the snow, and was successful. The weight of the truck made him able to get through the snow he could not have otherwise. We do ourselves and others a grave disservice if we deny others their struggles and weights.

Abraham could not have become the Father of the Faithful, without first sacrificing Isaac. That seems a bit paradoxical, but it is no less true. Nor could Jesus have sat down next to the Father, without first undergoing Gethsemane and Golgotha. Our desire to follow Jesus must also include bearing our crosses, and not stealing them from others. It is taking the Atonement away from people. They need the power of the Savior in their lives.

The Savior said he can make our burdens light. Do we believe in Jesus? Do we believe Jesus? It is easy to believe Him when nothing is on the line. When things are difficult, is when the rubber meets the road, and we learn what we really think.

Of course, we should comfort the afflicted, but we dare not deny them the Cross they so desperately need. There are some who are too nice and too comforting, to where they will deny all crosses, to make things easier. They are damned souls who do such things. Utah in particular, is especially vulnerable to this kind of apostacy.

In the climax of one of Sanderson’s Stormlight books, Dalinar (a repentant Warlord) is offered to have all his pain and guilt taken away by a demigod Odium (Divine hatred, without context or restraint). Dalinar replies with a defiant shout, “You can not have my pain!”.

May we all understand this, and bear our crosses, and not take them from others.

The Book of Mormon for a long time was more seen as a miraculous sign than as a source of scriptural content.  For a long time, the Doctrine and Covenants has been the opposite: mined for doctrine.   But it would be better if we balanced that by also seeing the Doctrine and Covenants as itself a miraculous sign that the heavens are still open.  In a sense it almost doesn’t matter what God wants to talk to you about–the mindblowing thing is that God is talking to you!  Let it be his views on the dimensions of the temple, so long as it be His!

Approach the Doctrine and Covenants not only for what is in it but as a celebration that it exists at all, pay extra attention to your patriarchal blessings and General Conference talks this year, make a revelation journal yourself, and you will not be far from the mark.  Your theme this year should be that the Heaves are Open.

In Lehi’s dream, there is a fountain that starts clean and then quickly becomes dirty.  The image  you should have in the D&C is not a fountain flowing from Joseph Smith from which we now draw refreshment.  The image is a fountain that sinks into your soil, and mine, that saturates all of mount Zion, and now a new fountain is springing up where I am and where you are, saturating the soil even more, and my children and yours are also now fountains, and our neighbors, our friends, their children, fountain after fountain after fountain, and now the whole  hillside is one great spring and the flow is too wide and too clear to ever be dirtied.

I am told that Elon Musk has asked for more positive news.  Here I am, answering the call:

There are more 84-year old South Koreans than there are 1-year old South Koreans.

Everyone loves Grandmas.

A doctor drew a sample from a milkmaid’s cowpox and said he would use it to create a vaccination against smallpox.  He told her she’d made a great contribution to the world.  The next day the rest of the milkmaids lined up outside his house, but he told them there was no more need.  He already had his sample.

They went away sad.  As the cows came running up to them for relief from the pressure of the cows’ udders, the milkmaids said, ‘there was our only chance to do something significant.’  As they expertly and smoothly sprayed liquid streams of milk into their pails without hurting the teats, they said ‘we will never be able to do anything of value.’  As they walked back down the lanes and laborers and childrens came out to the fences begging for a taste they said, ‘here we are stuck in this meaningless job.’  As housewives and farmers grinned at the pails they delivered,  they said, ‘we just aren’t good for anything.’

I’m looking for any suggestions you have to make engaging with restoration scripture more valuable this year.  Any and all thoughts welcome.

As part of this it might be helpful to start by reflecting on what helped you with the Book of Mormon this year.

A magpie was disgruntled.  “Look at those two turtledoves,” the magpie said.  “All they do is coo.  They coo when they peck for seeds.  They coo when they settle down to rest.  They coo when they are just looking at each other.  It’s pointless.  Clearly its not a form of communication.”

The wise old owl said, “they are saying they are happy together.”

After each Christmas and each Christmas season, the fortunate who aren’t in the middle of a crisis have enough energy to feel a let down. There is in fact an actual spirit of joy and peace and merriment that pervades this season, it is not fake or forced, and when it goes you feel blah.

“Well, just keep Christmas in your heart all year round.”  You can say it, but you can’t do it.

But that doesn’t mean you need to despair.

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We here at the JG are 12 Days of Christmas Respecters, and though all the rest of the world only wants to sink into the grey torpor of post-Christmas blahs we are going to continue with a parable each day until Christmas is over on January 6.  The first two are already up.

Not just with Christmas posting though.  We will have some stuff about hymns, and the Book of Mormon, and probably about nonsense.  But those are just palate cleansers–a spoonful of medicine to make the sugar go down.

A goat kid was traipsing along a road when it saw a partridge attending to its domestic affairs in some bushes hard by a pear tree.  The goat kid bustled right up and started asking questions without any preamble.

“Why are you in this bush?

The partridge answered, “because its by the pear tree and I love pears.”

“Are there ripe pears right now?”

“Not yet.  Do you know when the pears get ripe, goat kid?”

“I don’t know, I’m just a goat kid.”

“I don’t know either,  I’m just a partridge.  But I have no other bushes I’d rather be in and these ones are where the pears are.”

Once upon a time a Princess finely dressed in scarlet and ermine lived by herself in an enchanted castle by the sea.   Just further north along that coast there was a thick forest where every day at the edge of the woods a gift appeared for her, whatever her heart desired. The women of the little village around the castle would go every day and bring that day’s gift to her. They were finely wrapped in silver and gold, with bows of red and white, and inside it could be chocolates and dried fruits from distant lands, or little mechanical toys that sang and danced, horns that blew clear notes like starlight, beautifully lettered books in a language no one could read, or any other manner of good thing.

Sometimes the princess went to the edge of the woods herself to see her gift of the day. But she never went in. The trees along the edge stood thick and vast and gnarled and leafless and needleless, as if in a drought or a weary winter, and appeared like nothing more than grim, fierce men. When she got too close, she could feel a chill from the woods, no matter what the season was, and the limbs of the trees would move threateningly and the whisper of the wind in the trees would deepen into a howl. None of her villagers would go into the woods either, for foreboding of the trees.

One day there was no gift. The princess leaned on a balcony looking past the white rollers of the sea that came padding up to the stone headlands, to the dark line of the forest and she wondered at this prodigy. It was then that she something flash in the sun from the direction of the forest and she saw drawing near her beating frantically through the air a tiny bird. It landed on her outstretched hand. It was no bigger than her hand, and its feathers were bright silver and bright gold. But blood dripped down over the feathers from a wound.

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This review of the book Sick Societies fits with the ending of the Book of Mormon (and of the Book of Ether).  In short, not every society is functional.  Societies can get locked into nasty and destructive practices that keep them back or even cause them to dwindle to extinction.  The Tasmanians, e.g. (not mentioned in the article).  Some of the societies mentioned were locked into cycles of genocidal violence and feuding among themselves, just like in the Book of Mormon.

I believe that our own society has a number of nonfunctional features, many of them comparatively recent innovations within the last decades or the last century  (serial monogamny and widespread divorce come to mind) but some even older than that, and we collectively are blind to it because our society is comparatively more functional than most.  But only comparatively.  Like Adam and Even in the garden, we keep accepting a simulacra of godliness.  ‘You shall be as gods,’ the serpent said, and we said, hey, close enough.  I say this as a proponent of Western civilization.  It really is superior in many, many ways.  But only comparatively superior.  We look down and think we are something.  We should look up, and realize we are nothing.

This has implications for the Saints.  The worst thing the Gentiles ever did to us was make us think our mediocrity was excellence because they were worse than mediocre.

Here’s another interesting aspect of sick societies that has implications for the gospel, particularly the 2nd Coming. (more…)

Recent events have helped me understand the Book of Mormon better. That’s no surprise. Since the Book of Mormon is written for our day, it follows that living through the events the Book of Mormon was written for illuminates the Book of Mormon. Expect it to become clearer and clearer as time goes on.

The people repent and then fall apart remarkably fast in the Book of Mormon. How? Why? One answer is that repentance isn’t flipping a switch between righteous and wicked. Repentance is some collective embrace of something good even if the people on the whole have a bunch of wicked practices they still adhere to. In the same way, the turn to wickedness isn’t them going all black, its the population choosing some evil, while still otherwise mostly remaining the same including the good they already have. Life goes on. Even as they choose wickedness after wickedness, each step may not have obviously changed a great deal. They continue to marry and be given in marriage.

It’s not some insane step function

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The Lovely One and I have been exploring the parallels between premortality—mortality—heaven, Eden—mortality—millennium, and childhood-adulthood-old age

She had an insight that surprised me. The very common desire to regress to Eden—the very common desire to regress to childhood—are both gnostic in that they are both deeply connected with a disgust with the body and the flesh. Sexuality and illness and fatigue and bodily functions and desires almost too strong for your spirit is what we were meant for. Going back is retreat. The way to salvation is through.

Flesh and blood, that is the way.

No more a stranger nor a guest, but like a child at home

I know what I want for Christmas and I know I can’t have it.

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