We are very interested in what you and yours are doing for the Easter season this year.  Please comment or post links.

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N. T. Wright quote:

We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts. …

This is our greatest festival.

Take Christmas away and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else.

Take Easter away and you don’t have a New Testament;

You don’t have a Christianity.

Boo.  I hate that quote.   It’s Reddit-tier.

I had the unusual experience yesterday Sunday of hearing the quote twice, hating it both times and getting a rush of insight as to why, but also getting insight into how to make Easter more meaningful  this year.

Let’s talk about both: why you shouldn’t feel guilty if your Easter doesn’t have quite the same valence in the same way as Christmas, but also how you can make more of your Easter.

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It is well-known that some of our people have a persecution complex. It is unsightly the way they see a Baptist under every bush and an atheist worming his way into every apple. (Though abusus non tollit usum).

Less well known is the more common form of the persecution complex, which involves truckling to the persecutors to preemptively stave off persecution. In its secular variation, we call that Stockholm Syndrome or battered wife syndrome. The scriptures tell us in the day the Lord comes, that form of persecution complex will at last end.

20 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the remnant of Israel, and such as are escaped of the house of Jacob, shall no more again stay upon him that smote them, but shall stay upon the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth.

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This was my dream.  Probably because all of the waking time I have spent thinking about Lehi’s Dream.

In the midst of dry and forbidding wilderness that no one had ever crossed nor indeed knew if there was anything beyond it, there was a great fountain of water that gave life to a village that was all the people in the world. This was no ordinary fountain. Its water was so sweet and pure that it made the land it watered greener and lusher than ordinary water, and the people who drank it happier and healthier than ordinary water would.

But the water had one peculiarity. It made the people who drank it want to follow the fountain’s river down to the end. For the fountain, naturally, gave rise to a great river that wound its way through the dry lands to some mysterious end lost in the blue haze and shimmer of the horizon.

But there was a problem. The wonderful water of the fountain soon became dirty and brackish in the river, and as the people knew from short jaunts along side it, the further the river went the worse the water seemed to become.

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Mortality is divisive and is supposed to be.  That is what it’s for.

Your first clue is that Satan’s plan was so inclusive.

One soul shall not be lost. . .

But the main reason is in the nature of mortality.

Now, its true that mortality is divisive in all sorts of ways.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

But the only inescapable divisiveness is within yourself.  The essential point of mortality is to divide you from yourself.  What is precious about mortality and what makes it important is that you are limited in time and limited in space.  You can only do one thing at a time.  That is what makes choice possible.  Every moment that you choose you are choosing to exclude all the other options.  You are dividing the potential from the real.  Your agency creates a chasm and thousands of possibilities are left on the other side.

I made two unusual decisions about prayer.

The first was several years ago when I decided to pray for ridiculous amounts of blessings. Absurd excess. But I soon realized that I would not be able to handle such a bounty of blessings. A flawed character does not benefit from a wider scope in which to express the flaws.  So then I started praying for much better character and then a fire hose of blessing.

Today I realized that this was not the order of heaven. You don’t become fit for a trial before you have experienced it indeed, probably cannot, it is impossible.  This morning I prayed for vast unmerited Good Fortune and the grace of Christ to bear it when it came here

A bull was grazing near a bull calf.  The bull contemplatively chewed his cud and then spoke about how much he loved the pasture.  It was rich, green, with deep roots.

The bull calf disagreed.  The grass was greener on the other side of the fence, he said.

The bull examined the rank, brown, patchy grass in the wildlands outside and asked the bull calf what he could possibly  mean.

The bull calf replied that a crow had told him that the founder of their herd had eaten too much alfalfa once and almost died of bloat.  The same crow had said that founder had also got into a bloody fight with a cougar.

The cougar was attacking the herd, the bull replied.

The bull calf replied that whenever he tried to voice his honest concerns the herd replied defensively and with excuses like the bull had just done, and that was his final reason for thinking the grass was greener on the other side.

Moral: the spirit and the fruits are the proof you  need

WORDS by Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

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God is divisive.

God divided the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1)

Nephi’s describes his father’s dream, which includes “the awful gulf which separates the wicked from the tree of life.” Nephi comments that his father “saw that the justice of God did also divide the wicked from the righteous.” (1 Nephi 15)

Towards the end of his reign, Nephi concluded, “For the time speedily cometh that the Lord God shall cause a great division among the people, and the wicked will he destroy.”

In the last days, Christ will divide his people like a shepherd divides his sheep from his goats. (Matthew 25)

Behold, I am God; give heed to my word, which is quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, to the dividing asunder of both joints and marrow; therefore, give heed unto my word.

(D&C 12)

God is divisive.  He will divide and divide and divide. He doesn’t want you to end up on the other side of the divide. He doesn’t want anybody to. But he will divide. You can’t stop it anymore than you can stop the Mississippi rolling, nor should you want to. Let God divide.

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There is a puzzle in Lehi’s dream, little remarked on, that I think I have solved. The answer is continuing revelation.

The puzzle has to do with the river of water and the fountain from which they come.

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I keep  meaning to use Lehi’s Dream as an interpretive lens for the parts of the Book of Mormon we are reading now.  I had this bit about the Nephite journey ending in Jacob revealing the name of Christ-symbolically finding Christ–and another bit about Father Lehi dying and wondering if that was the end of his long journey through the dark wilderness or if it was just the beginning–but instead I keep coming back to the dream itself.

On Sunday a speaker quoted Paul on charity.  Paul says that revelation without charity is nothing.

And though I have the gift of ^aprophecy, and understand all ^bmysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

One interpretation of the Iron Rod/the Word of God is that it is revelation, not just scripture.  I think that is the best interpretation.  But the Word is another name for Christ.   Revelation is not just a guide to Christ.  It is an experience of him.

We tend to think of revelation as a set of instructions to achieve a goal.  Often it is.  But that is the least important part of revelation.  The main thing is the presence of God that fills you with light and love.

We think of the gift of charity as loving others, and it is, but that is secondary to experiencing the love of God where your love for them and their love for you overflow and bounce back and forth and mingle and you can no longer tell where one begins and the other ends.  The love for others is a result of that.

Perhaps the difference between the two different types of those who hold on to the Iron Rod is that the one group treats it just as a set of instructions for getting to the tree, and for the other group the Rod is the Tree, they experience them all over and over again in a cycle of enjoying to the end, and they fall down when they get to the Tree because they recognize Him.

On the sweetness of Our life.

You make one of the last sessions at the old Provo Temple before it all comes down.  You have not been there since you were in college many years ago.  There are swarms of people.  It is a reverent  madhouse.  You could only wish that it were the old endowment to go with the old temple, for just this once.  When you come out at twilight, the lake and the mountains and the clouds mount up in layers of blue and purple behind the dim white of the fountain.

You meet with old friends.

You drive home directly to your stake conference.  Old friends there too.

The temples close annually for a couple weeks of deep cleaning and maintenance. Sometimes they close for a year or two of renovation. Very rare is for one of these buildings, which in their design and purpose point to eternity, to close and never open again. Saturday night the Provo Temple in Utah will close and never open again. Scheduling for the endowment rooms and baptistry for today (Thursday), Friday, and Saturday shows those spaces completely reserved.

After Saturday, the Provo Temple will be demolished, and to the west of where it will have formerly stood, the Provo Rock Canyon Temple will be erected.

Last April I was in Provo for BYU graduation ceremonies, and while I was in town I entered the Provo Temple one last time. I could not devote the hours to engage in ordinance work, but I stopped at the painted/sculpted mural of Jesus with the woman at Jacob’s well. After that I changed into white temple attire and went to the Celestial Room. After perhaps half an hour there, I continued to the floor with the sealing rooms and lingered another half hour. I had last been present in those spaces thirty-three years before, when I was finishing up as a BYU student.

I looked at the aged people around me who had been younger than my present age thirty-three years earlier. I thought of the aged people of that prior time, when I was young, who are now all dead.

I once noticed in the home of a friend a picture from her wedding day in 1993. There she was standing in front of the Provo Temple, which a year from now will only exist in pictures and memories and ordinances like hers.

The Golden Minute, Bruce Charlton’s latest characteristically winsome post, is crying out for a virtue chart.

On the one hand, “for just one time I would take the Northwest passage”–“this was their finest hour”–“better 50 years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay”

On the other hand, “masterful inaction”–wu-wei–“be still and know that I am God”–“the unexamined life is not worth living”

On the one hand, we’ve all had the unhappy experience of being listless and getting nowhere.  We all know energetic people who seem to accomplish much.

On the other hand, so many driven people seem to accomplish things that end up going nowhere.  They do a lot, but what they do doesn’t do anything.  Having goals doesn’t mean you have good goals.  For every Elon Musk, dozens of Jeff Bezos.

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Young G used to think that the chapter in 2 Nephi which is basically Yay Joseph Smith was embarrassing.   It felt like Joseph  Smith was making the whole thing up and felt the need to write his own reviews.

Older G as of last week finally realized that the Book of Mormon being for our day doesn’t exclusively mean 21st C America.   “Our day” is probably everything from 1830 or so on.  Therefore a lot of it is about the Saints and the Restoration.  Joseph and the friends needed the reassurance that they were part of foretold divine history to get them through the trials to come.

For those of you who have been at this party for years and wonder what took me so long, well, I’m just  happy to be here.

Sunday is like going to a retreat every week, or it should be.  If the calling does not permit it, the calling, or the way you perform it, ought to change.

21st Century Nephi: And lo we did travel without recipe apps, and cooked our meat without online instructions

Anecdote/Joke:  The kid is handing over the cash in a tithing envelope.

It’s for you, bishop.

Tithing or fast offerings?

It’s for you, Bishop.

But I don’t need the money, kiddo.

But my dad says you are one of the poorest bishops we’ve had.