On the sweetness of Mormon life–

you are traveling.  You stop in at a small branch on the edge of a small town.  The nearest congregation is 70 miles away.  The high councilman and his wife drove about 120 miles to be there.  The Branch President holds the service to introduce you to all 20 congregants, from about age 80 to about age 5.  When the service begins you weep from the presence of the Spirit.  The peace of God whose intensity passes your soul’s capacity to bear.

The people of God and the Holy Ghost.  The people of God and the Holy Ghost.

And it came to pass that the Lord did warn me, that I, Nephi, should depart from them and flee into the wilderness, and all those who would go with me.

Wherefore, it came to pass that I, Nephi, did take my family, and also Zoram and his family, and Sam, mine elder brother and his family, and Jacob and Joseph, my younger brethren, and also my sisters, and all those who would go with me. And all those who would go with me were those who believed in the warnings and the revelations of God; wherefore, they did hearken unto my words.

And we did take our tents and whatsoever things were possible for us, and did journey in the wilderness for the space of many days. And after we had journeyed for the space of many days we did pitch our tents.

-2 Nephi 5.

Parts of the Book of Mormon were meant for our day,  meaning right now.  Parts were meant for the 1800s.  In particular, there are multiple exoduses described in the Book of Mormon.  Lehi’s family, Nephi’s group, and later the exodus to Zarahemla.  Even Lehi’s Dream begins with an exodus.

 All lovingly preserved for long centuries to prepare the Saints for their trek to Salt Lake.

The pioneers were one of the great works of God and his people, long prophesied and prepared for, and are rightly treated as such.

And the beginning of Lent, if that is something you want to add to your Easter observance

Fire, Burn, by John Carr, 1957.

A neat little locked-room mystery novel transposed to the late Georgian era, combined with a tragic romance, combined with a mystical time travel element.

Quite engaging.  It held me to the end.

I have two criticisms.  The explanation of the mystery seemed a little contrived, and I never got the full sensation of being submersed in a different era.  It came close, but  never quite moved beyond being a contemporary story with historic trappings.

P.S.  If you don’t like these little reviews, let me know.

What you reading?

An adult comic book.

Eww, like superhero sexy time?

Ick, no.  It has adult superpowers.  The hero’s superpower is when he makes decisions he ignores sunk costs.

What?  What’s his weakness?

When he makes decisions he ignores sunk costs.

. . . Fascinating.

The villain’s superpower is he has a big network and lots of social influence.

Update

One of the boyos–his superhero name is DeaconBoy!–said that having a social media influencer villain would actually be pretty cool.  But the hero should be RealLifeMan!  Their epic showdown would take place in augmented reality.

I think its really hard for moderns to grasp how  much the Book of Mormon is concerned with corporate salvation as a group, not individual salvation.  Though this changes throughout the book, and may be one reason the Lord told them up front that corporately their effort was going to fail.  Even so, the famous promises in the Book of Mormon about keeping  the commandments and prospering are corporate commandments and corporate promises.  Lehi’s original dream was about part of his family not willing to be led by him to the tree.

Weird thought of the day:  because we do not have an ancient world view, do we mistake the extent to which the Book of Mormon is a satisfying read as a revenge plot?  We tend to see the narrative arc as “eventually the Nephites are all destroyed.”  If we extend it a little bit, we end on a hopeful note, “eventually the Nephites are all destroyed, but their record comes forth and creates the modern church.”  But the actual arc as portrayed by the Book of Mormon prophets ends with, “and then the Great and Spacious Building is thrust into the pit it dug for the Saints.”

That is a phrase that came into my head and won’t leave.  I don’t have an answer to it yet.

We all know what the iron rod is.

But what is your iron rod.

Here’s a simple but unique approach to understanding the atonement and law and justice that I believe is at root the same point that Lehi is making in 2 Nephi 2.

Be warned: our friends have not been very excited about this insight in the past, probably because its a bit horrifying.

(more…)

Benjamin West

The church’s newsroom reports that date nights were sponsored in the last couple weeks at the church’s colleges and 15 of the larger institutes. (link) One obstacle to addressing a problem is that recognizing the problem can be embarrassing, and that was my first reaction: Is our current crop of 20-year-olds so undeveloped that they need their college presidents to coax them into pairing off for an evening? Well, yes, they are, so let’s face up to it instead of pretending all is fine or just grousing that those young people aren’t doing what they ought to on their own. The world they live in isn’t all of their own making, their cluelessness in pursuing romance is not just a personal problem, and improving the climate within our communities to one more conducive to their success is a job for all.

“While Elder Gilbert [church commissioner of education] said he realizes a one-night event won’t be ‘a silver bullet,’ the hope is that it will be a catalyst to help re-instill a culture of dating.”

Mr. Elon Musk has in mind an “Everything App” for social media, but I have in mind to do him one better.

I have in mind an app that’s Urbit for personal transportation, Door Dash for food including even  in-home catering, but also includes laundry, life coach, house cleaning, first responder, friendship matching, and tutoring.  I call it Momm-E.

Best if used with our partner app, Dadd-E.

It occurs to me that one of the great things about vacations is that you have small defined problems that  you can then solve.  Getting to the airport, unpacking your stuff, finding a replacement for the charger that didn’t get packed.   No one consciously wants this and too much of it can spoil the vacation but in moderation it gives you a sense of order and accomplishment and rest.  Most adult problems are either not containable into a tidy little task or keep getting repeated and repeated and repeated.

Which means that there are probably discrete little tasks that people set themselves just for the joy of doing a discrete, intelligible, doable job–and now that I think of it, yes there are.  They are called hobbies.

Let’s make a gospel point out of it.  Mostly we think of callings as an extra burden.  One more thing.  Most of us accept them dutifully, even cheerfully, but even so we feel that we have one more task to do.

Perhaps we can see callings differently.  Start from the standpoint that we are aspiring angels, sons and daughters of God that He has called to grow up, and in principle the tasks and goals we face are limitless.  This is a point C.S. Lewis makes; this a point the temple also makes; we owe all of our time and talents and effort to the work of the Lord.  What a relief then to be able to take a little vacation, where your only difficulties are this nursery, or this ward, or even this Church, and this family and neighborhood of yours.

Vocation, vacation.

Don’t ask my why, it just is.

And sometimes standing around talking about why a hole was dug is also fun.

There are two good ways to understand dreams.

The first way is as an allegory.  Things happen in sequence because they are some kind of over all natural progression of meaning and events.  We usually interpret Daniel’s dream of the statue this way, or the opening of the seven seals in Revelations.  Or else you treat the sequence as just the order in which the elements were revealed and ultimately the over all meaning of the dream is all of the elements and their symbolic meanings taken together.  A lot of cool paintings of Lehi’s Dream show it this way.

The other way is to interpret the dream as a series of flashes of images which can sometimes have the same meaning.  The Christmas Carol is more like that, each ghost essentially has the same message for Scrooge.  Hebrew writing is like this, but in dreams its not just the Hebrews.  Looping around a message or insight is just one of the ways dreams work.

When you apply this second dream approach to Lehi’s dream, you get some pretty cool insights into what enduring to the end means, and the importance of revelation.  More to come.

From a daughter:

I was thinking about how our God – who places such a high emphasis on individual agency – made the qualification for His highest degree of glory so dependent on someone else

And I remembered reading that in the Sermon on the Mount, the verse that says “be ye therefore perfect” is actually better translated as “be ye therefore complete/whole”

So… maybe we aren’t really ever complete by ourselves

Men and women compliment each other quite well – I would say men in general are more justice-oriented and women are more mercy-oriented.

But God is where justice, love, and mercy meet – he is perfectly just and merciful.

I was thinking that marriage is something also like where justice, love, and mercy meet.

So it’s the only way we can be complete (and therefore like God).