A fun stem winder

https://xcancel.com/DouthatNYT/status/1898813621381243082#m

Atheists used to be villains. Now they are just sad.

More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

For what are men better than sheep or goats

That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

-Tennyson

Lent starts today.

Over the years I have had zero desire to participate in it.

Yet a couple of weeks ago when President Oaks released his video about Easter and the Easter season I have the impression that my family should try to observe Lent.  I shook the impression off.  I did not have a great desire to do something that seemed cringe and larpy.

A day or two later I was talking to my daughter and son-in-law and they said that they had been watching the video and had the impression that we as a family should participate in Lent.

So that’s what we’re doing.

The things we are giving up range from cheese to procrastination

We’re also trying to make it into not just a negative observance but also a positive observance by having one member of the extended family post a spiritual thought to the family chat each day.

What the Lord says about Himself clears up what righteous dominion in D&C 121 is.  It’s a verse found in D&C 15 and 16.

I speak unto you with sharpness and with power, for mine arm is over all the earth.

What caught my eye is the word sharpness.  There is a much-discussed verse in D&C 121 that uses the same term.

Reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost

The whole passage is describing the ideal authority and its very winsome, he’s full of love, he doesn’t push people around, etc., but then there is this about reproving betimes with sharpness.  A number of Saints have manfully striven to argue that sharpness means something other than speaking cuttingly, but these attempts have run up against the brute fact that speaking sharply means what it means in English.

D&C 15 and 16 tie it all together though.

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This is another installment of the Junior Ganymede’s focus on sections of the D&C that you have already stopped thinking about.

Saturday my daughter introduced us to a pen-and-paper game called Racetrack.  You accelerate out of the starting position but have to brake and turn to navigate curves.  A lot of fun!  If you don’t brake and turn enough, you crash.  The simple rules here.  But make those curves, or else you will crash!

As were were playing, it seemed to me that we were also playing a game about repentance and revelation.

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This morning I selected at random a podcast interview with Dana Gioia. I have enjoyed Mr. Gioia’s thought, language, and voice before and expected I would again. This instance exceeded my hopes, and it surprised me with how moving I found it, and I thought I should share it. I suggest listening to three minutes of his poem starting at 49:32 until 52:28 to test if the hour may be of worth to you. It left me thinking about what it means to be sealed to the dead and considering what I should be doing to maintain that a living bond.

EconTalk, Dana Gioia on Poetry, Death, and Mortality
On Spotify

God does not despise weakness at all.  What he despises is the refusal to become strong.

There once was a little wolf who had a little crooked tail.

The wolf was born that way.  The other wolves  mocked it mercilessly for having a lamb’s tail.  But there was a compensation.   With its little crooked tail, and the aid of a sheepskin and some flour, the wolf was able to do a wonderful imitation of a sheep.  It could get right down into the flock.

This being the one thing it was good at, the wolf really leaned into its strength.  It studied up on sheep, spent hours and days mingled with them, getting to know their ways.  It its own way, the wolf came to love the sheep.  It even came to think itself as a sheep.  Down in its heart, where it counted.

It still ate sheep, of course.  What, did you want it to starve?

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There once was a fertile valley surrounded by high mountains.  The valley had its villages and a few towns and was a very pleasant place.  No one had ever left the valley because of the tall mountains that surrounded it and through some geographical oddity, beyond the mountains desert in all directions.

But if you laboriously scaled the right peak, and had rested your eyes, and the visibility was right, you could see that there was an end to the desert and something beyond.  Perhaps even towns and cities.

One day a man in the valley announced his intention to cross the mountains and the desert to the other side.  He set about planning his journey and making the equipment he would need to get there.

Not long after, he had a knock on his door in the evening.   When he opened it, he saw a delegation of men there.  They asked to speak to him, he invited them in.

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Something interesting happened in Sunday School.  The teacher handed out a worksheet.  On the first part you were supposed to write down what you needed and what you desired from Sunday School that day.  On the next part you were supposed to pick from a list of topics/scriptures from the reading and do a little personal study on it.   The topics weren’t supposed to directly connect to what you wanted or needed, but the idea was that formulating those to yourself you were more likely to get spiritual insight while studying the scripture.  It worked for me.  It worked very well.  Indeed, I have noticed that many barriers to the Spirit fall when we are forthright about what we want and need; I think this is a big part of what Jesus meant when he said to become as a little child; little children want things, they don’t dissimulate to themselves about it.

I will forgo telling you what I wrote down in the needs and desires sections.  Suffice it to say I went big (though not Napoleonic–pic unrelated). (more…)

I made notes over the weekend on a bunch of Good Samaritan ideas.  One note was just the title to this post.  It included a parable but also a novel and non-obvious insight that I thought was really cool.  Now I can’t remember it.  So all you will get is the parable.

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“Neighbor” — etymology — one who dwells nigh

(I believe the Greek word in Luke 10 we translate as “neighbor” is “person who is nearby.”  The internet reliably informs me that the OT original word for “neighbor” that Jesus and the lawyer were referring to in the Good Samaritan parable is something like “someone you have a connection to”)

Here is more on our deep dive into the Good Samaritan parable.

the Good Samaritan is a story in which a Levite and a priest de-prioritize the needs of their physically close neighbor in order to do the abstract good of maintaining purity for physically non-proximate neighbors

let the reader understand

-thus LymanStoneSky, more at this link

A compelling interpretation, though still too mechanical

These people are your neighbors.

The JG weighing in (in  typical JG fashion) on the Ordo Amoris controversy long after everyone else was finished with it has really sparked a lot of good discussion (in my head).

So given our firm policy of always giving the people more of what they want, lets talk about the Good Samaritan.

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For whatever reason, some lines from Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo keep returning to my mind lately:

Captain Mitchell, pacing the wharf, was asking himself the same question. There was always the doubt whether the warning of the Esmeralda telegraphist—a fragmentary and interrupted message—had been properly understood. However, the good man had made up his mind not to go to bed till daylight, if even then. He imagined himself to have rendered an enormous service to Charles Gould. When he thought of the saved silver he rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. In his simple way he was proud at being a party to this extremely clever expedient. It was he who had given it a practical shape by suggesting the possibility of intercepting at sea the north-bound steamer. And it was advantageous to his Company, too, which would have lost a valuable freight if the treasure had been left ashore to be confiscated. The pleasure of disappointing the Monterists was also very great. Authoritative by temperament and the long habit of command, Captain Mitchell was no democrat. He even went so far as to profess a contempt for parliamentarism itself. “His Excellency Don Vincente Ribiera,” he used to say, “whom I and that fellow of mine, Nostromo, had the honour, sir, and the pleasure of saving from a cruel death, deferred too much to his Congress. It was a mistake—a distinct mistake, sir.”

(Guest post from ~lagrev-nocfep)

Given the recent discussion of ordo amoris and the morality of foreign aid, there’s an important elaboration or modification of naïve biblical morality (the sort of surface reading that less-lettered Christians fall prey to, or which is used rhetorically by leftist religious leaders) which the Book of Mormon adds. The BoM is explicitly conspiracy-theoretical, which means it adds a layer of nuance concerning subversion. Should you care more for people suffering overseas than for children in your neighborhood is one question. Should you try to solve the problems that you personally know, or the problems that a network of untrustworthy—possibly hostile—possibly malicious—people inform you exist and will be solved if you take the actions they tell you is another.

The origin point for this discussion is the statement by Vice President JD Vance that,

There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world

In a follow-up, Vice President Vance clarified that he referred to ordo amoris, the Christian belief in a “a hierarchy of obligations”. (Indeed, this order of love is Confucian and Taoist as well: classical moral theories prioritize proximity.)

Many have scoffed at Vance’s interpretation. Citing the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Sermon on the Mount, interlocutors of Catholic, Protestant, LDS, and secular persuasions have attacked Vance’s theology, demanding instead a utilitarian calculus of needs that prioritizes overseas tragedies over cleaning one’s own home and town.

However, the hierarchy of responsibility and love is good doctrine. “It tastes good.” Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught that,

The same God that placed the star in a precise orbit millennia before it appeared over Bethlehem in celebration of the birth of the Babe has given at least equal attention to placement of each of us in precise human orbits so that we may, if we will, illuminate the landscape of our individual lives, so that our light may not only lead others but warm them as well. (That My Family Should Partake, p. 86)

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