Once upon a time there was a bored shepherd boy who cried wolf a couple of times just to laugh at the villagers’ fluster and for something to do.  You know the story.  So did the villagers, who told the boy the story and warned him he was endangering his own credibility.

A few days later, a ravening pack of wolves attacked the flock.  The flock fled downhill towards the village with the wolves snapping and gashing.  The boy yelled ‘wolves, wolves!’ as loud as he could and even blew a little horn he had.  The villagers came out in the street and watched without doing anything as the flock was killed sheep by sheep and then the boy.

A visiting stranger asked in some surprise why they hadn’t sallied to rescue their sheep and their shepherd boy.      The villagers explained.  “It’s a story,” they said, and told him the tale. “Just like the story, this boy cried wolf before so he had no credibility when wolves actually came.”

“There was no question of credibility!”  the stranger said.  “You saw the wolves!”

But the villagers looked at him with pity and a bit of contempt, and explained the story and its moral again.

Moral:   The Boy Who Cried Wolf has a moral for shepherd boys, not for villagers.

Today would have been my daughter’s birthday.

This is what I wrote on the first birthday she didn’t reach, on Betsey’s 4th birthday.

Betsey, so much time has gone by.  Your younger siblings are within reach of having children of their own and discuss naming daughters after you.

You were the oldest, now you are the youngest.

I think about you and how everyone else changes, time touches us all and we get injured or break down and add lines to our face, but you were touched so hard by time that now you aren’t touched at all.  Only our memories of you are still subject to mortality.

I think about all the times we never had together and all the times we did and I miss them all so much and I miss you so much.

I want to carry you in my arms or change your trache one more time.  Anything.

Betsey.

I want to follow up with yesterday’s insight, that the Mosaic law challenged almost none of the Israelites’ cultural assumptions.  It just asked them to be decent by their own lights.

And they failed.

You’ve heard of the famous Trolley Problem–a turgid thought experiment where you have to decide to switch a trolley off the tracks where it will kill 5 onto tracks where it will kill 1.

There was a Twitter Sage who pointed out that the real trolley problem we actually encounter in our lives is much simpler:

The choice is obvious, there is no real cost at all to throwing the lever and saving five, but the lever keeps not getting thrown.  Inconvenience, unwillingness to admit error, malice, not wanting to rock the boat… the lever keeps not getting thrown.

The Trolley Problem and all its ilk are cope.  They invoke an abstract world of tough ethical choices to distract us from the real world of easy ethical choices that we keep not making.

Whatever your complaints about the Mosaic Law, you should keep in mind, front and center, that it was too ambitious.

I’m thinking more about Moses’ rules and how they don’t fundamentally challenge any of the Israelites’ assumptions other than perhaps on idolatry.

Sometimes, nearly all the time, I go to God in prayer on some major life decision  and He says, ‘well, what do you want to do?”

And it seems that sometimes, nearly all the time, a people goes to God to know how to be and He says, ‘well, have you tried being decent by your own lights?”

“Worship me and be decent by your own lights.”

And when we abstract universalist Westerners get frustrated because God doesn’t give us or any other people the TRUTH as such, perhaps we should remember that sometimes, nearly all the time, when He tells a people to ‘be decent by your own lights,’ that people thoroughly and comprehensively fails.

Once upon a time there was a tyrant/aspiring tyrant His power waxed and waned, but what he had he used relentlessly for the acquisition of more power.  His two great skills were this–he had, at times, a great deal of control over what was taught in the schools and put out over the media of mass transmission, and he and all his servitors were remarkably good at fencing.  This was a fencing, dueling people, so perhaps that was not so unusual, but even by the standards of this people he and his minions were good at it.  In particular, they were known for their deadly snap lunge-and-thrusts.

Which last skill would have been more useful if the people of that place were not also accustomed to wearing chestplates and armor.  Wonderfully light, wonderfully curved, the armor would make a good rapier rhrust skitter right off of it.

It so happened, however, that many years ago at a time when the tyrant had particularly strong grip over the schools and the tranmission of cultural information, he had put out, over and over, the virtue of left-chestedness.

Left-chestedness was an interesting virtue that combined savoir faire, ‘cool,’ unflappability, and strength and sword skill, but in practice and in the tangible world the way this virtue manifested was having a hole in your armor over your left chest.

Left-chested heroes in the movies were just so cool.

Nearly everybody started small–let’s not be crazy–but some people got more and more left-chested over time.  Why be less virtuous after all?  Plenty of ordinary people still only went around with small holes in their left chests and rolled their eyes or even angrily condemned those impractical ideologues who were almost uncovered on the left side,  and there were writers and intellectuals who were also of their persuasion and wrote learned discourses on why it wouldn’t do to be too left-chested–but all these people tended to be ineffective because, after all, they felt themselves to be arguing against virtue.

(more…)

When I wrote ‘what kind of people did Moses have in mind?”  I meant “persons,” “individuals.”

But I was wiser than I knew.  Reading his rules, it does seem like Moses had in mind a people.  This is a different perspective for us.

It also explains, in part, why the rules seem to  take so much their existing attitudes and assumptions as a baseline.  A people largely is those attitudes and assumptions.  The kinds of changes in habits and attitudes a people can make are not the same as the kinds of changes in habits and attitudes a person can make just writ large.

We are reading the laws right now and I have slipped into a bit of literary exercise. I am reading them just like you read a science fiction novel, where you are supposed to be deducing bits and pieces about the environment and culture from what people say.

Specifically, I have been thinking about what kind of person Moses seems to have in mind–who is the target of his laws–who is the ‘you’?

Oddly enough the picture I am getting is the Scottish Highlands.  Maybe Albania or the old English-Scotch border with its micro-clans and hundreds of hill forts.  The picture I have is that Moses is addressing patriarchs, these small-scale Big Men, leaders of large households, gentry.  Those are the ‘you.’  Are they the same as the ‘elders’?  I don’t know, but probably.  The elders maybe are the older portion of that group.  And I get the impression that Moses identifies with them.  These are the ‘you’ whom he is addressing, but they are also, for him, ‘us.’

(more…)

There was a church class for teenage boys whose teacher was extremely gifted at teaching.  But many Sundays he didn’t teach them at all–he had one of the boys do it.  They did it poorly.  They taught by rote or tried to liven it up by being jokey or playful in ways that were inappropriate for what they were trying to teach.  He would issue gentle pointers here and there, and some minor improvements would happen, but on the whole the boys’ lessons continued to be much worse than his.

A visiting friend asked him why he allowed the boys to degrade his average output in this way.

“True,” the teacher said, “but I won’t be around forever.  The  only way for them to become good teachers someday is to start by being bad teachers.”

The friend was puzzled.  “But you said it yourself,” the friend said, “you won’t even be around then.”

A young woodpecker with a newly-minted Ph.D. in lignite impactology set out into the world.

Aha! he said, alighting.  Here is what appears to be wood.  As I have studied ash, beach, elm, oak, pine, and fir, and many other varieties of wood, I can be expected to accurately identify wood even when in an unusual form that would deceive the layman.  And here by this wood am I, viz, a woodpecker with credentials in impactology.  I shall then surely proceed to encounter, acquire, and consume insects in this wood.

Thus satisfied, he set to busily pecking a fresh plywood sheet nailed over a store front, while a hurricane rolled in.

Something happened this morning that made me think.

We were out late at a community theater production last night so I let everybody sleep in.  When I woke them up, late, I told them they had to hustle to get to church on time.

A certain young man was not very cooperative.  He dawdled, poked around playing chess, reading his Kindle, took a relaxing bath…  I got on his case pretty hard.

After things were calmed down and he was finally moving well under the impetus of Dad-Power, the Lovely One told him what an exceptional young man he was, how few young men went to Church each Sunday, were worthy to prepare the Sacrament.

She was right and I told him so.

Now, this would be the point in the typical LDS talk where I would say my wife had a better perspective than I did.

But you know me better than that, my poppets.

My wife and I were both fully right.

It is a bad mistake to think you are doing well just because you are doing better than almost anyone else.  Measure the climb by the mountain ahead, not by the people on the path behind.

But it is also a bad mistake to not recognize the good you are and the good you are doing.

There once was a family with a little boy and a talking dog and a talking cat.

This family had rules, and they were good rules.  They were posted on the refrigerator.  Now the cat, of all the family, seemed to make no effort to follow the rules unless he was sure to be caught, but he was also inordinately interested in the rules.  For instance, once when Mom was dicing some cucumber peels to put in the compost, he wanted to know why that didn’t violate the rule against damaging things, and refused to be pawned off with the explanation that ‘this was different.’  Finally the family had to add a rule to the rest on the fridge stating that composting was not damaging property.  And so on, that was the kind of interest he had in the rules.  The little boy, on the other hand, didn’t bother too much with the exact rules but tried to follow them when he remembered.  And the dog kept them completely.

Now one day Dad and Mom had to go on a long trip and wouldn’t be back until late.  On the white board by the front door they wrote one big new rule; it said, “FOLLOW THE RULES ON THE FRIDGE.”

When they left, the cat promptly went to the fridge and started to tear down the paper with the rules.  The boy and the dog stopped him.  The cat hissed, “no grabbing, no force, that’s a rule!”  The boy retorted, “but you are tearing down the good rules!”  “Is there a rule against that?” the cat asked.

The boy was perplexed.  There really wasn’t.  But after some thought he brightened.  “Look!” he said.  “Right there! It says ‘no damaging things.'”

“I am going to to put in the compost,” the cat said triumphantly.   “That’s allowed in the rules.  Now let go of me.  Holding me is against the rules!”  The dog let go.

“But you are trying to destroy the rules,” the boy said, and held on even though there was no rule saying he could.  And the cat bit and scratched and the boy still held on.

Which of these loved the good rules?

A dove was cooing sadly by a stream.

Another dove asked what wat the matter.

“I am the deputy director in charge of a crew of beavers to build a dam here,” the first dove said.  “I did everything right I knew how.  I consulted the crows.  I consulted the parrots.  I held many meetings to explain my plan in detail to the beavers.  I fired beavers who didn’t display a team ethic.  I set metrics.  I reviewed records.  I monitored implementation of the plan.  But…” she tilted her head towards the stream.  It ran undammed.

“Maybe the beavers had low morale,” the second dove said.

The director dove replied, “I had an open door policy, so long as the discussions were constructive.”

“Then you did everything right,” the second dove replied.  “It must be the beavers’ fault.”

The King of All took three young men in his service and set them down on the shores of a new virgin America, thick with trees.  You will found me three great houses here and settle this land, he said.  What will the motto of your house be?

Manifest destiny, said the first.  For a continent lies before us!

And the King nodded and blessed him.

Ad astra! said the second.  For even the sky and very stars lie before us.

And the King nodded and blessed him.

By axe and by womb, said the third.  Because my brothers are right.

And the King nodded, and blessed him, and smiled.

(more…)

It just occurred to me that Moses standing above the fray with the Amalekites, arms outstretched, is an image of Christ on the cross.  In other words, this is a very similar message to the episode in Numbers 21 with the brass serpent:  Look to Christ and live.  Look to Christ lifted up on the cross and live.

I am going to have to re-read Alma’s sermon on the subject to see if there is more depth there that I have overlooked not knowing there would be another image of Christ associated with the Exodus that would be context for his sermon.

I saw my son correct a new deacon into the right place in the sacrament line-up by grabbing him by the shoulder and moving him into place.

Afterwards I told him to try asking.  I said that a man should be as powerful as he can but also have his power as under restraint as he can.

That is I think the right answer, but I’ve just been reading about the cultures of early America so I reflected that my answer wasn’t the answer that everyone would give.

Some of the earnest, pious settler groups would emphasize the meekness and restraint only.  Some of the more hard-bitten groups would emphasize the power only.

And while I think my advice to my son is right, it isn’t perfect and it can’t be perfect.  Nothing mortal can capture the fulness of the truth.  There are situations where power is called for that only the unrelenting focus on power, with all its faults, is going to be equal to.  There are situations where meekness and restraint are called for that only the relatively pure emphasis on meekness and restraint will have prepared a man for.  Every approach leaves money on the table.  Every approach folds on winning hands, and matches bets with no cards worth betting.

All we can do is muddle through.