On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Your speaker at Church is a hardbitten, no-nonsense type who just got back from 6 months of hardbitten, no-nonsense type highly paid contract work in an African country where the Church has no presence (and is not allowed to).  To take the sacrament, he had to get permission from a branch president in another country several hundred miles away using WhatsApp and Google Translate.  Saturday mornings he read the Bible with a 7th Day Adventist fellow contractor.  Sundays he sang hymns, blessed his own sacrament, then had “2 Apostles speek at every meeting.”  He said he had a favorite picture from his trip he wanted to show us.  It was a picture of a white plate with a rip of bread on it, a white teacup with water, both on a white napkin.  He started to cry.

You are singing Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee and idly check the notes in the footer.  Translated in the 1800s from a medieval text by St. Bernard of Clairvaux.  The weight of years comes crashing down you, hundreds of years between you and the translation, hundreds more years to the monk in his cell, and a thousand years from him to Christ, like you are looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

The sun hasn’t quite set on America’s vacation from history but for  Alma, as for many souls throughout the history of mankind, mass death was a reality.

And from the first year to the fifteenth has brought to pass the destruction of many thousand lives; yea, it has brought to pass an awful scene of bloodshed.

And the bodies of many thousands are laid low in the earth, while the bodies of many thousands are moldering in heaps upon the face of the earth

–Alma 28

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I do not recommend.

It starts out winsome.  Extremely winsome.  A cozy alternate history where England is still half-medieval, half-Victorian.  Ornate trains whisk sturdy yeomen over Channel-spanning bridges on pilgrimages to Rome.  Diplomats gather to pay their respects to England’s fallen king as the sung notes of the funeral mass soar in a time-hallowed cathedral.  (The protagonist is one of the choir boys singing said funeral  mass)

It’s fun.

But the one thing you can’t have in a mid-century novel is fun.

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The trek is not over.

* It’s odd how casually and offhand we get a few verses in Chapter 28 mentioning a horrific war with bodies piled up all over.

Read carefully the switch to the reign of the judges was a disaster.

the fifteenth year of the reign of the judges is ended.

10 And from the first year to the fifteenth has brought to pass the destruction of many thousand lives; yea, it has brought to pass an awful scene of bloodshed.

11 And the bodies of many thousands are laid low in the earth, while the bodies of many thousands are moldering in heaps upon the face of the earth; yea, and many thousands are mourning

This is a fact. The fact does not mean that the switch was wrong or that Monarchy is the One Perfect System. But it is a fact and when or if we turn to the Book of Mormon for political insights, it is a fact we need to take into account.

Nephite Modernity–https://www.jrganymede.com/2024/06/12/32551/

(If you do decide to use the reign of the judges to guide your beliefs about politics, you should also take into account that the reign of the Judges was not The Republic of the United States except with more feathers and turquoise).

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* Peculiar that one of Alma’s first chief captains who led a victorious war against the Lamanites was named Zoram (Alma 16). Then just a few years later we have the Zoramites, who are named after their leader, Zoram. No apparent connection. Just a common name?

* Sometimes bad guys in the Book of Mormon are introduced as if they were randos. So in Alma 30 you have “there came a man into the land” (its Korihor) and then the leader of the Zoramites is introduced as “being led by a man whose name was Zoram.” I think this is meant to indicate a lack of legitimate authority or office. (more…)

What is Freedom?

There are many different definitions of freedom floating around. They contradict each other, and they all have their limits. Worse, there are some actual experiences of freedom that don’t fit any of the definitions and at least on their face contradict each other.

So I am going to propose a new definition.

A Mexican-American kid on a temporary work assignment in our ward spoke about freedom last Sunday. He apparently had some real interest in the subject of free agency and freedom on his mission to the Midwest and talked with various Saints there about it, and gleamed some interesting insights. He concluded that for him freedom was freedom to become (like Christ).

That struck me profoundly and instead of listening to the remainder of his talk as he moved on to other subjects, I mulled over freedom.

Let’s talk about the experience first.  Freedom is first and foremost something we know from the inside.   I have had real felt experiences of freedom and so have you.

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A modern day parable of the refiner’s fire:

If you treat wood so that it partially destroys the inner structure, then subject it to heat, and pressure, it ends up stronger than steel.

Can literally stop bullets.

The greatest sculptor who ever lived began where Michelangelo left off.  He made statues that changed their meaning a hundred times as you walked around it.  He made great, towering works that shifted their content as you walked towards them–the work was not just one sculpture of genius but several, depending on your angle.  He made outdoor pieces whose meaning and beauty shifted with the sun.

That was the first phase of his work. (more…)

No unclean thing can enter the kingdom of heaven.

Christ cleans every repentant thing.

WARNING: Political musings follow. (more…)

This is an incomplete thought that has been percolating in my mind for a long time. Tear it apart as you see fit.

I think Enoch could not have done what he did without Adam and Abel having died first.

I think that the Tribes of Ephraim & Manassah prospered to such a degree, because of their father, Joseph. Likewise, for Abraham’s children VS Lot’s, Isaac’s children VS Ishmael’s, Jacob’s VS Easu’s.

I think that the early church after the Savior, never had a chance to keep the fulness of the Gospel, not because of their spirituality, because they lacked the spiritual foundation of ancestors supporting them.

The church in our day, was given a chance to establish Zion, but failed, at least a bit partly because of their roots. We will have no excuse not to establish Zion, because even if we are first generation members, the roots of the Church members go back 200 years.

Those roots are important. We, without them, can not be saved.

There are two frames I’ve found for understanding the Mosiah-Alma transition in the Book of Mormon and all the political and social change that comes fast and heavy until Christ appears to them.

1. Nephite modernity
2. Nephite cultural conquest —  the Nephites effectively brought the Lamanites into their cultural sphere at this time. With a little help from the priests of King Noah, the Amalekites, and other Nephite dissenters.

It’s striking that Ammon and the 4 Sons of King Mosiah were able to convert Lamanites at this point which had never really happened before.   This is less an act of cultural conquest and more a result of it already happening.  It’s interesting that in Alma 22 Mormon stops describing all the Lamanites as idle nomads and only describes “the more idle part” that way.  In contrast, there is a newly urbanizing population that is also Nephitizing that seems more susceptible to conversion.

Which brings us to

3.  Partly as a result of 1 and 2, the Lamanites are also going through some kind of state formation transition around this time.

The Book of Mormon is for our day.

Modernity and cultural conquest are defining elements of our own era.