On the sweetness of Mormon life
The girl reads her talk artlessly then puts her phone up on the podium. It plays–cheap, tinny–Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. She sings the first verse. She looks down the whole time. She is shy but also–you are close enough that you can see–she is fighting back tears. Your own tears start. You first heard this song on your mission when you needed streams of mercy. They came and never ceased.
Our big church camp family reunion got shut down due to fire threats. We scrambled and were able to pull off a shorter smaller one at another church camp.
I get far more irritated than I should by any whiff of bureaucracy and safetyism at church, but nonetheless I am very grateful for church camps.
On the sweetness of LDS life.
I got a Manifest Destiny t-shirt and was wearing it around this week-end feeling just a bit edgy. I had a background mental dialogue that was something like, ‘if only they knew, wouldn’t they be shocked,’ etc.
Then I went to Church on Sunday and my staid respectable congregation, part Anglo part Mexican, sang with gusto,
Pushing on the wild frontier,
Forging onward, ever onward,
Blessed, honored Pioneer!
Well!
There are other sources that talk about the Giants, such as the Book of Jubilees, and the Book of Giants, which is highly fragmentary, but does at least mention Gilgamesh, though the full context is not clear. To some degree, these things might be seen as a polemic against heroes of Mesopotamia, but I don’t think that is the whole story.
Saturday night waiting for fireworks that would start an hour later, sitting around talking, enjoying being together, conversation with my sister-in-law turned to her son’s call to be a missionary in the Czech Republic. It turned my mind to a woman from Czechoslovakia I met in ’93. That year started my four years in Baltimore. My bishop there had joined the church as a teen-ager in Korea, served a mission in his native country, and when his family was young moved them to the United States so he wouldn’t have to work on Sundays. The ward mission leader was from Trinidad, and I got to spend a bunch of time with him as a stake missionary. The ward executive secretary told me of his compelling first encounter with the Book of Mormon in his native Ghana. For a year and a half in 1989 and 1990, recent times when I met him, Ghana’s government expelled the missionaries and locked up the meetinghouses. (link)
The Relief Society president was from Czechoslovakia. She said that sometimes people would correct her. “You mean you are from the Czech Republic?” “No, my country doesn’t exist anymore.” (more…)
A pair of teenagers using a quirky AI approach deciphered some old carvings. They appeared to give instructions on how to open a gate or a portal to cross dimensions, when the stars were right. Teenager-like, the two decided to do it and that it would probably be safe because ‘it felt ok.’
They succeeded. They were instantly transported to a multi-dimensional civilization with portals and gates galore. Countless realities living cheek by jowl, all the genres and works of imagination made flesh that you could imagine!
Because of that, the boy and the girl were in a sense not nearly the novelty they expected to be. But they still attracted mass attention. It seems that every other being, when they crossed a portal, got to transform themselves into a native of the arrival dimension, specifying their characteristics and appearance and nature for their new setting. But these teenagers had nothing of the kind happen. They remained a human teenage boy and a human teenage girl.
This was astounding.
Crowds followed them everywhere, with adulation and envy. They had heard rumors of such a place as Earth, where you were what you were, but they had never imagined anything so fabulous could be real.
Ordinances are brown M&Ms, and a lot of commandments are too.
It’s a check to see who is really paying attention. Who says they want in, but don’t.
Think about the various excuses and justifications people have for not doing them.
I don’t go to church because I get closest to God on the golf course.
Now apply that elsewhere.
Hey, man, we are here for you. Anything you need?
Can you just come by more often? I get pretty lonely these days.
Nah, man, I feel the closest to you on the golf course.
“The Old Testament after you’ve read it, not before.”
Here are some thoughts on the last two weeks reading: David-Solomon-Rehoboam and Jeroboam–Ahab and Elijah
Today’s theme is Providence and nations.
One of the under-explored aspects of the Gospel is that it implies groups are real. Whereas the Old Testament was almost all about the group, Israel, with individuals being almost secondary. And the New Testament was all about the individual salvation (modern reading) or at least about rejecting all other groups to form one ‘ur’-group, the Church (ancient reading). Whosoever shall leave father or mother…
The full gospel synthesises these perspectives. There is individual salvation occurring in the context of family exaltation, with lineages and nations having their own purposes and character.
Including America. As per various scriptures and the recent preaching on religious freedom, America and American characteristics are in some sense an operation of Providence.
So what is America?
I and a teenage son have been listening to a podcast called How to Take Over the World. The host is an LDS brother who does a deep dive into various great men of history and then does a podcast about them. In a nod to the demands of the podcast biz, he then does a little summary for each one of the lessons of their path to greatness. Some of these little lessons are strained, especially if you treat them as lessons on business success, but some of them are quite interesting.
The last two I heard were about Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, and one of the ones on Jesus. The best thing from the Land podcast was Land’s conviction that ‘you are only two weeks from changing your life.’ What he meant by this was that if you could dedicate two solid weeks straight to something, no distractions, decks completely cleared, you could do great work and achieve great skills that otherwise might take years. I have only ever done this once or twice–it worked (for certain levels of greatness). The most interesting insights from the Jesus podcast were Jesus’ conviviality. He liked feasting and dinner parties. And also Jesus’ keen eye. He *noticed* people and the natural world around him.
The implied conceit of the podcast is that greatness is one singular thing and each biography is revealing a little more to you of its secrets. But what strikes me is how little these great men often have in common. The secrets to one guy’s success are the opposite of the secrets of another guy’s success. Here is Edwin Land and team buried in a little warehouse he rented, he’s on one of his two-week sprints, straw-tick mattresses on the concrete floor, literally working until he drops from exhaustion and is dragged over to one of the mattresses…. and here is Jesus, feasting with the publicans and Pharisees.
I have the strong conviction that each one of us has a path to greatness in this life. It may not be the same path as anyone else. Nor is it the same greatness as anyone else. But it is there, and the Spirit beckons you to take it.
***
There are many doctrinal arguments that are unworth having – they amount to angels dancing on pins. There is currently a debate online amongst Latter Day Saints, about the Doctrine of Infinite Regress, or if you prefer, the Doctrine of an Infinite Lineage, of Family of Heavenly Parents. And this debate does have both genuine importance and current relevance, beyond simply agreeing with former prophets.
It is also worth noting we are not in the position of churches with a dead canon with largely settled creedal theology. There are still real debates to be had. And God does want us to really think and struggle with profound doctrine. But instead of relitigating the evidence in this debate (it was certainly what the Brethren taught for a long time), let’s discuss why this is important, instead of only arguing about LDS Sola Scriptura.
Because it has everything to do with the doctrine of the Family. (more…)
Once long ago a dog set out to visit the Great Oracle at the End of the World. His journey took many months but at the end he came to the Great Oracle at the End of the World which gave him many wise sayings.
On his long weary journey back he repeated the sayings over and over again to fix them in his mind as well as he could.
When he returned he went from place to place repeating them. The animals were moved and delighted and many tried to repeat them and pass them on also.
After many generations, crow scholars were able to show that different variations of the current wise sayings existed in different places among the animals, and that some of the sayings attributed to the Great Oracle at the End of the World were of more recent provenance, showing no sign at all of reverent antiquity; and other sayings had been corrupted. One that stuck in everyone’s mind was a saying ‘when life is darkest, there is the piggest hope.’ The actual saying was ‘biggest’ it turned out.
The crows also unearthed a saying from the dog where he admitted that he himself was not sure he remembered all the sayings accurately. “These are the best I’ve got,” he said.
From then on, when anyone tried to repeat some wisdom from the sayings, the jackals and the parrots and the hyenas and even the crows would jeer, ‘biggest piggest these are the best I’ve got!’
So on the one hand you had all the nasty animals and even some decent ones mocking and disgusted with the sayings because they had flaws. And you had good and decent animals defending them and benefiting from them.
But there were no more dogs proposing to make another trip to the Great Oracle at the End of the World.
This is from a different text, called the Cave of Treasures. If the Garden of Eden was Adam and Eve’s temple before the Fall, the Cave was their temple after they left the Garden. This text gives details about the reign of each Patriarch. The descriptions of what the descendants of Cain were doing are quite explicit. Ahem… quite explicit.
One of the interesting things, is that this is telling the same story as in 1st Enoch, but it is clear, that the people who sinned, were the descendants of Seth who left the Saints. We also see something that the Book of Moses makes clearer than Genesis does, that their were two bloodlines, Seth and Cain, and they were parallel in many ways. Next time you read Moses, notice how Cain ends up doing all the things Adam was doing. Adam makes covenants with God, while Cain makes covenants with Satan.