A magpie was disgruntled. “Look at those two turtledoves,” the magpie said. “All they do is coo. They coo when they peck for seeds. They coo when they settle down to rest. They coo when they are just looking at each other. It’s pointless. Clearly its not a form of communication.”
The wise old owl said, “they are saying they are happy together.”
After each Christmas and each Christmas season, the fortunate who aren’t in the middle of a crisis have enough energy to feel a let down. There is in fact an actual spirit of joy and peace and merriment that pervades this season, it is not fake or forced, and when it goes you feel blah.
“Well, just keep Christmas in your heart all year round.” You can say it, but you can’t do it.
But that doesn’t mean you need to despair.
We here at the JG are 12 Days of Christmas Respecters, and though all the rest of the world only wants to sink into the grey torpor of post-Christmas blahs we are going to continue with a parable each day until Christmas is over on January 6. The first two are already up.
Not just with Christmas posting though. We will have some stuff about hymns, and the Book of Mormon, and probably about nonsense. But those are just palate cleansers–a spoonful of medicine to make the sugar go down.
A goat kid was traipsing along a road when it saw a partridge attending to its domestic affairs in some bushes hard by a pear tree. The goat kid bustled right up and started asking questions without any preamble.
“Why are you in this bush?
The partridge answered, “because its by the pear tree and I love pears.”
“Are there ripe pears right now?”
“Not yet. Do you know when the pears get ripe, goat kid?”
“I don’t know, I’m just a goat kid.”
“I don’t know either, I’m just a partridge. But I have no other bushes I’d rather be in and these ones are where the pears are.”
After a night away, the barn cat came slinking back to its stable, sleek and smug and full.
He told all the animals there-there were some humans there too that morning, he would have told them also if they could understand speech–“what a night I’ve had. Let me tell you all about it!”
There was a great King, a ring-giver, a man-wielder, who ruled from his great hall where the the fire was never put out. The strengths of his rule were two. First, when he sat in his great chair in his great hall with his sword Life-and-Death laid across his lap, his judgments never erred and he never turned away a true petition. Second, his war-band were all heroes and lords every one, from his mighty son the Prince to all the rest. They were bound to him and he to them by great oaths. They loved him deeply but he loved them even more, and rewarded them often. Silver and gold and rings and treasures flowed from his hands.
Now it so happened that each hero of that band had a peculiar strength that belonged to him alone. There was Bear, whose anger shook mountains. The Fear-giver made foes tremble and flee. The Cunning Man had riddled with a dragon three days and three nights at the end of which the dragon repented his sins and died. The Truth-teller was terrible in war. But among the greatest heroes was the one known as the Lord of Merry. The very rumor of his jollity quelled disturbances. He could make even gray days and iron-cold nights seem festive and a lone candle in a drafty steading like a haven of warmth and light. Perhaps for this reason he went dressed in the red and white of snow and and late sunrises and holly and winter flowers and delighted in winter sights such as sun on dripping icicles. He was strong and quick. His metal mace was called the Dasher. He laughed in the war dance.
Once upon a time a Princess finely dressed in scarlet and ermine lived by herself in an enchanted castle by the sea. Just further north along that coast there was a thick forest where every day at the edge of the woods a gift appeared for her, whatever her heart desired. The women of the little village around the castle would go every day and bring that day’s gift to her. They were finely wrapped in silver and gold, with bows of red and white, and inside it could be chocolates and dried fruits from distant lands, or little mechanical toys that sang and danced, horns that blew clear notes like starlight, beautifully lettered books in a language no one could read, or any other manner of good thing.
Sometimes the princess went to the edge of the woods herself to see her gift of the day. But she never went in. The trees along the edge stood thick and vast and gnarled and leafless and needleless, as if in a drought or a weary winter, and appeared like nothing more than grim, fierce men. When she got too close, she could feel a chill from the woods, no matter what the season was, and the limbs of the trees would move threateningly and the whisper of the wind in the trees would deepen into a howl. None of her villagers would go into the woods either, for foreboding of the trees.
One day there was no gift. The princess leaned on a balcony looking past the white rollers of the sea that came padding up to the stone headlands, to the dark line of the forest and she wondered at this prodigy. It was then that she something flash in the sun from the direction of the forest and she saw drawing near her beating frantically through the air a tiny bird. It landed on her outstretched hand. It was no bigger than her hand, and its feathers were bright silver and bright gold. But blood dripped down over the feathers from a wound.
I just wrote something for a new Latter-day Saint men’s site, some of you might enjoy it or one of the other articles on the site.
What did you get out of reading the Book of Mormon this year? I’ll probably ask it again at the end of the year when we have more time to think about it. That’s what we talked about in Sunday School. It was very nice.
Friends, its that time of year when you have a million happy bustling things to do and so, in fear that you might have a free moment, we post our Christmas page. Please see above in the header bar. May we suggest that you particularly check out Holiest Madness?
Merry Christmas!
I personally am grateful for any time you spend here with me this season, and don’t begrudge it at all if the time you have to spare for your JG friends is not as much as you would like.
Last Christmas I did a long episodic fairytale. This Christmas I plan a short parable for each of the 12 Days of Christmas.
One idea that will drive conventional historians screaming from the room is that civilizations have cycles. A lot of Americans have heard of the Strauss and Howe ?? theory on generational cycles. Peter Turchin is an actual historian doing work on historical cycles that you may have also heard of (He’s an elite overproduction theorist with a quantitative focus). Or maybe you’ve just seen the meme HARD MEN GOOD TIMES or Thomas Cole’s paintings on the Course of Empire.
But these are only the latest of many. From antiquity on, a number of independent thinkers from different starting points have hit on surprisingly similar versions of an overall civilizational cycle. There is a rise where the civilization is on a growth swing. The confident civ gets experimental with various cultural standards. The original unity is lost and there is quarrelling over the spoils. This goes on until the weakened civ goes under during a crisis.
The Book of Mormon has a pretty clear reflection of this cycle that its writers mostly seem to be unaware of. (This overall civilizational cycle is different from the pride cycle, which can occur at a much faster rate and on a much more local scale.)
This review of the book Sick Societies fits with the ending of the Book of Mormon (and of the Book of Ether). In short, not every society is functional. Societies can get locked into nasty and destructive practices that keep them back or even cause them to dwindle to extinction. The Tasmanians, e.g. (not mentioned in the article). Some of the societies mentioned were locked into cycles of genocidal violence and feuding among themselves, just like in the Book of Mormon.
I believe that our own society has a number of nonfunctional features, many of them comparatively recent innovations within the last decades or the last century (serial monogamny and widespread divorce come to mind) but some even older than that, and we collectively are blind to it because our society is comparatively more functional than most. But only comparatively. Like Adam and Even in the garden, we keep accepting a simulacra of godliness. ‘You shall be as gods,’ the serpent said, and we said, hey, close enough. I say this as a proponent of Western civilization. It really is superior in many, many ways. But only comparatively superior. We look down and think we are something. We should look up, and realize we are nothing.
This has implications for the Saints. The worst thing the Gentiles ever did to us was make us think our mediocrity was excellence because they were worse than mediocre.
Here’s another interesting aspect of sick societies that has implications for the gospel, particularly the 2nd Coming. (more…)
We already discovered that the rapid Nephite cycles of repentance and sin make more sense when you realize that repentance is not total righteousness and falling back into wickedness is not total depravity. Each one just represents a course change. Just like with individual people, a society that is objectively in a bad moral state could be described as repenting and worthy of blessings if it has recently rejected some evil and is trying to do better, whereas a society in quite a high moral state is still falling into wickedness if it has recently discarded some good thing or embraced some new evil thing.
If you looked back over your last few years, it would not surprise you at all if the chronicler of the Book of You described you as repenting and righteous one year and wicked the next. It would not surprise you if the Book of You described you that way on a monthly, a weekly, or even perhaps a daily basis. Not that you have been transfigured and not that you were depraved, but just that you have seasons of change for the better and seasons of change for the worse. (Let the first predominate. I.e, let God prevail.)
But how does applying a common-sense understanding of repentance to the Nephites explain the rapid changes in their prosperity and levels of conflict each time they make a spiritual change for the better or for the worse? Is God just putting a thumb on the scales? (more…)
Sorry. We are really quite sorry. Sorry, sorry.
On Christmas morn
a mouse forlorn
At 12 it could speak
But now just a squeak