Once there was a man who owned a wonderful horse.  This was a wonderful man–he was stronger, braver, more agile, more skilled, and altogether better than anyone else around.  So was his horse.  The man and the horse could outpace any other rider and horse, be the race short or be the race long.

One day a stranger rode in.  His appearance was striking.  He was taller, handsomer, nobler, and in every way superior, including to the man.  So also was the stranger’s horse more excellent.  But the man was full of his own greatness and knew it would be beneath him to cede pride of place without a fight.  So he told the stranger.  “Let’s race and see who is the better man.”

“What distance?” the stranger asked.

“Any distance,” the man said.

“To the ends of the earth,” the stranger said.

To his credit, the man did not outwardly blanch.  “To the ends of the earth,” he said fiercely, “I swear it by the LORD God!”

“I am He by whom you swear,” said the stranger.

Then they turned and raced.  Off through the plains and then the deserts.  Up mountains.  Plunging into rivers.  Always the stranger led, and his horse never tired, but by  the greatest strength and the greatest horsemanship the man and his own horse at least stayed within sight.  The man’s horse ran like never a mortal horse has run; the man rode like never a mortal man has rode.  When his animal was too tired to carry him further, he got off and ran alongside.  But they never lessened the distance between themselves and the stranger and his horse, not even by an inch.

At last they came to the sea, where the stranger and his horse stood waiting for them.

“The ends of the earth,” the man gasped.  “I am defeated.  We have lost.”

But the stranger shook his head.  “It is only the sea,” he said, and with a gesture he threw the  horse and his rider into the sea.

What happens next? Well, it possible that the man and his horse struggle until he drowns in the sea.  A jest, cruel but a jest.  It is possible that the horse flounders a bit then rises until he rides it across the top of the water like no horse and rider have ever run before.  It is possible that the ending is not yet–he and his horse are struggling still, and whether they rise or sink is not yet known.

Which is the ending depends on who you are and who you think the mortal man on the mortal horse is.  God comes to you in your season.  Sometimes like Coyote, sometimes like a trumpet and a war cry, and sometimes like a watching, unmoving Judge.

But whichever it is, I think they call come to the glorious ending in the end.

The song in Exodus 15 is a very long song.  I have a hard time imagining 12 tribes of thousands of people singing it together.  We should probably imagine they were doing something other than polyphonic choral singing.  I just learned, for example, that the early Puritans in New England did something called rote singing instead of regular singing: everyone bellowed the words as loud as they could with their own tune and own meter, and they found this experience strangely moving.

It is also very moving.  Even now, oceans and centuries away, I can feel the Israelites’ awe at what the LORD had done for them.  The horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.   I took accomplishment for granted when I was a kid but now that I am an adult I realize how remarkable and praiseworthy it is that anything gets done, even the simplest task is full of physical and psychological obstacles, and that a thing is done is a thing of awe–and this is not just true by comparison to failed efforts–to have a thing done in the world is a beauty–much less when it is the shattering things that the LORD has done.

I had a surprising literary revelation.  In reading the drama of Moses’ efforts to get the children of Israel out of Egypt I asked myself a simple question: who are the protagonists?  Who is acting?

And the answer isn’t really Moses and Aaron.  At all points, they seem to be following a script that the LORD sketched out for them.

The two decision-makers are the LORD and Pharoah.  The LORD makes an offer, Pharoah rejects it, the LORD sends a plague, Pharoah relents, the LORD ends the plague, Pharoah changes his mind.

It is possible to read this entire thing as the LORD offering Pharoah chances to repent over and over and over.  Even at the very end, when the LORD has Moses lead the children of Israel out by a way that apparently traps them against the Red Sea, this is yet another chance for Pharoah to see the apparent opportunity to go back on his word and to forego it.  Instead, he takes.  The Lord’s offer has once again, and finally, hardened his heart.

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

2Speak unto the children of Israel, that they turn and encamp before Pihahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, over against Baalzephon: before it shall ye encamp by the sea.

3For Pharaoh will say of the children of Israel, They are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.

There is something interesting about water in the Exodus.  Rivers to blood, the parting of the Red Sea, and then several times when Moses had to bring water out of stone.
The primordial chaos, entropy, the Fall–too much of it kills, but you  need some of it.

We emphasize completely going under the water as the baptism rite, which is correct, but the key thing to me seems to be the coming back up again.

I dreamed I was in a dim, cavernous room in some Mediterranean country.  The walls were thick, there was one door opening on the street which was an exteremely narrow cobblestone passage with a blank-faced row of houses across the cobbles.  It was an empty house being let.  It was all one room with a couple of appliances in one corner, a small closet bathroom, and stairs on one side.   The ceiling was very high and  there was one naked bulb, the light was almost all the weak autumn or winter light from the open door and one high, narrow window.

Three young men and the real estate agent came in.  I was only a viewpoint off at one corner.  They looked around a bit, asked a few questions, and after one unusual answer the agent sighed and said,  ‘you guys aren’t renters, you are here to rob me, right?’  They nodded assent and shoved him at gunpoint back into the corner near where my point of view was.  (By now the room had altered.  Still basically the same, but now the stairs came down from the entrance to the main room where I was.)  Suddenly one of the robbers drew his firearm and shoved it into my gut.  “You too,” he said, “hands up.”  I was completely taken aback to be involved in the dream.  More awkwardly, my hands were in the pockets of my trench coat (we were all wearing trench coats) and the way the guy pressed up against me my hands were trapped in there.  I told him I would have to jerk to get my hands out and not to be alarmed, and that was where the dream ended.

I woke up around 2 extremely tired but struggling to breathe with allergies.  I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and then sat there with the lights off.  Eventually I was bored enough and partly awake enough to try doing a sudoku puzzle with a reading light (the reading light so I didn’t get woken up fully).  I must have been partly delirious because I then had an imaginary dialogue with an interlocutor and it seemed real to me at the time.  I explained to the guy that I had gotten a few numbers in and realized I had made a mistake, so I looked at the solution to find where I had gone wrong and erase everything I had done after that point.  I was doing pretty well right then so he said it was probably because I had unconsciously seen all the numbers and memorized them.  I patiently disagreed, saying it was possible but I had a lot of late night experience doing these puzzles.  We went back and forth as I worked the puzzle further, with him getting increasingly baroque in his insistence that I was too unskilled to do the puzzle as well as I was, and the only explanation was that I had committed 81 humbers and their arrangement to memory in about 15 seconds of looking at the solution.  We were arguing and I was hunting for a phrase that any educated person would know, I had said the first part but couldn’t bring to mind the second, and he just stared at me blankly, and that was when I realized I didn’t like the guy.

One message of the Ten Plagues is how willing the LORD is to offer repentance.  Pharoah got ten chances.  And at any time the LORD could have kept the plague going until the children of Israel were actually out of the country, instead of ending it and then seeing whether Pharoah would go back on his promises or not.

Sin is always trying to bargain.  Sin is always saying, ‘well, I promised, but at the time this bad thing was happening so I had no choice, it doesn’t really count’ even though the bad thing was because of the sin.  Sin is always saying, ‘well, that bad thing happened but its over now, its a price I can pay,’ not admitting to itself that the price is going to be demanded over and over and over again, worlds without end, the ceaseless fires of hell.

There’s a lot of what appears to be dishonesty here–Moses and Pharoah keep  negotiating the terms of ‘going out into the wilderness for a few days to serve God’, the Israelites are told to ‘borrow’ treasures from their neighbors.   There is some context or symbolism that I am missing.

I have a lot of trouble seeing any particular symbolic freight in a lot of the plagues–maybe Zen will tell us why there were 10–but the three days of darkness and the death of the firstborn both have a lot of meaning.

Fiercely secular scholars identity the LORD alternately as a storm god or a plague god and the ten plagues of Egypt are part of their narrative.  But what He really is is a God outside context disruptions.  Whether its storms or plagues or enemies from over the horizon appearing at the gate–or a shepherd boy become king, or a carpenter become KING–he is the god who disrupts our stagnant mortal likelihoods.  Kings shall see that which they had not considered.  Whether eucatastrophes or catastrophes.  Or, in the Second Coming, both.

A very American religion

Probably connected:

https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-is-happiest-married-mothers-and-fathers-per-the-latest-general-social-survey

A fairly young person today referred to “Music and the Broken Word.”

“Burying your talents?”

https://xcancel.com/CaitlinJustini/status/2042701493766418873#m

My youngest said, “what’s wrong with frogs?”  It’s a good question.  I don’t know.  The quantities I guess.   Many such cases.

Tiny Egyptians or colossal frogs

The Bible says that God hardened Pharoah’s heart.  The JST says that Pharoah hardened his own heart.  I think they are both right.  Pharoah’s heart was neither hard nor soft until God caused him to be given the hard  choice, over and over and over until Pharoah’s heart was what it was.  He does this with all of us.  He will either harden your heart, or soften it–the choice is yours.

Pharoah has a real lack of integrity.  He lies, sure, but I mean that in the fuller sense of the word.  He is not whole across time.  He wants relief and makes promises to get it, but once the relief happens he is unable to integrate himself with the way he felt the day before, so he goes back on the promises, and the cycle starts again until the awful end.  The Pharoah and the plagues are a perfect parable for sin. (His over all approach to the Hebrews shows the same lack of wholeness.  He apparently wants to get rid of them–hence the edict to kill the baby boys–and apparently doesn’t value their labor–or else why would he set them to making bricks without straw, which is more difficult but also valueless; but then when Moses repeatedly gives him perfect opportunities to get rid of them the Pharoah is desperate to hold on to them.)

I don’t understand why Moses keeps asking just for permission to go into the wilderness to make sacrifices, with the implication that he and the Hebrews will then return.  This seems to be a lie, but why?

Exodus 7:

• a rod is turned to a serpent
• water is turned to blood

My pain and suffering for Lent list was  meant to be theoretical and contemplative, but post-Easter they all seem to be piling up on me.  Allergies asthma fatigue injuries-from-fatigue.  I feel silly asking for a blessing for hayfever but I may gotta.

https://x.com/DataSciFact/status/2040193480006263023

An Answer: Elder Renlund’s story about his dog lady was an answer to a prayer I have been praying for a long time.  Too many balls.

An Easter Egg:  Elder Andersen quoting an altered version of the quote from Chariots of Fire which is itself an altered version  of Isaiah was an easter egg to me–I have spent the last week memorizing it.

A Theme: Not spread out over conference at all, but in the last session four talks in a row referenced the sealing power and the Kirtland temple.

A Contrast: the hymns covered the gamut, but quite a few of them had a militant and triumphalist air.  Even the children’s song Tell Me the Stories of Jesus ended with Jesus is King!  Jesus is King!  Which the arrangement emphasized.  In constrast, the talks were patient, loving, meek, and inviting.  The whole, put together, was transcendent.