I read a lot of low quality genre fiction.  Recently I’ve been going through some new genres popular with millennials.

Nearly 100% of the time, when the author wants to give their paint-by-numbers pulp a little emotional depth, they do it by giving the protagonist Trauma.  That’s it, always.  Trauma.  The trauma is usually caused by some cookie cutter family situation, abusive and/or distant mom or dad, but the abusive and/or distant mom or dad is never the problem, its always the Trauma caused by the abusive and/or distant mom or dad.

The stories are like this because it appeals to the readers, because we live in a culture that encourages trauma worship.  Trauma has become an idol.

On the third test, Starship made it all the way. Some problems later on the return but they are basically there.

Happy birthday to @SpaceX! What a day!

HUGE congratulations to the entire team for this incredible day: clean count (glad the shrimpers could get out in the nick of time!), liftoff, hot staging, Super Heavy boost back and coast (and likely a couple engines making mainstage… pic.twitter.com/D3YUPIgKNH

— Gwynne Shotwell (@Gwynne_Shotwell) March 14, 2024

We live in the best of times. All the broken, wicked people, if they will not repent, are there to make our ascent more glorious.

Prepare yourselves for victories.

Gossip is surprisingly hard to define but its real.  Like loud laughter, peace, and the Spirit, its one of those things you have to experience yourself to know what it is. (more…)

We are very interested in what you and yours are doing for the Easter season this year.  Please comment or post links.

—

N. T. Wright quote:

We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts. …

This is our greatest festival.

Take Christmas away and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else.

Take Easter away and you don’t have a New Testament;

You don’t have a Christianity.

Boo.  I hate that quote.   It’s Reddit-tier.

I had the unusual experience yesterday Sunday of hearing the quote twice, hating it both times and getting a rush of insight as to why, but also getting insight into how to make Easter more meaningful  this year.

Let’s talk about both: why you shouldn’t feel guilty if your Easter doesn’t have quite the same valence in the same way as Christmas, but also how you can make more of your Easter.

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As you have probably heard, the Church is buying out the historic restoration era properties owned by the Community of Christ (RLDS) along with artefacts from that era.

From a correspondent:

Yesterday afternoon, the shocking news broke that the Utah-based LDS church had acquired the Kirtland Temple in Ohio and essentially all of the common-history documents of Mormonism prior to 1844. These had been in the care of the “Reorganized LDS” (later “Community of Christ”) since the 1860s. In fact, they’d been the subject of acrimony for decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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It is well-known that some of our people have a persecution complex. It is unsightly the way they see a Baptist under every bush and an atheist worming his way into every apple. (Though abusus non tollit usum).

Less well known is the more common form of the persecution complex, which involves truckling to the persecutors to preemptively stave off persecution. In its secular variation, we call that Stockholm Syndrome or battered wife syndrome. The scriptures tell us in the day the Lord comes, that form of persecution complex will at last end.

20 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the remnant of Israel, and such as are escaped of the house of Jacob, shall no more again stay upon him that smote them, but shall stay upon the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth.

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This was my dream.  Probably because all of the waking time I have spent thinking about Lehi’s Dream.

In the midst of dry and forbidding wilderness that no one had ever crossed nor indeed knew if there was anything beyond it, there was a great fountain of water that gave life to a village that was all the people in the world. This was no ordinary fountain. Its water was so sweet and pure that it made the land it watered greener and lusher than ordinary water, and the people who drank it happier and healthier than ordinary water would.

But the water had one peculiarity. It made the people who drank it want to follow the fountain’s river down to the end. For the fountain, naturally, gave rise to a great river that wound its way through the dry lands to some mysterious end lost in the blue haze and shimmer of the horizon.

But there was a problem. The wonderful water of the fountain soon became dirty and brackish in the river, and as the people knew from short jaunts along side it, the further the river went the worse the water seemed to become.

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An interesting juxtaposition

Isaiah describing a decadent and fallen state

And I will give children unto them to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.

5 And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbor; the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honorable.

Isaiah describing the millennial state of perfect peace

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

The coincidence here could be what conservatives awhile back used to call immanentizing the eschaton, meaning trying to create utopia using secular means. Which usually leads to dystopia.

Or it could be the old, old problem of confusing the side effects for the causes. In an idyllic small town no one locks their doors, so if we just stop locking our doors we will have an idyllic small town.

Or it could be something else.

Mortality is divisive and is supposed to be.  That is what it’s for.

Your first clue is that Satan’s plan was so inclusive.

One soul shall not be lost. . .

But the main reason is in the nature of mortality.

Now, its true that mortality is divisive in all sorts of ways.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

But the only inescapable divisiveness is within yourself.  The essential point of mortality is to divide you from yourself.  What is precious about mortality and what makes it important is that you are limited in time and limited in space.  You can only do one thing at a time.  That is what makes choice possible.  Every moment that you choose you are choosing to exclude all the other options.  You are dividing the potential from the real.  Your agency creates a chasm and thousands of possibilities are left on the other side.

From today’s Gospel Doctrine lesson:

• 2 Nephi 6:3-4.  General information can be as useful as tailored teaching.
• 2 Nephi 7:1-2, 11; 2 Nephi 18.  Sin brings its own punishment; or sometimes the punishment is God just leaving you to try your luck with the wicked, who can be extremely punitive.  What are some sins that bring their own punishment in your experience and observation? What protection from the wicked does God give you now?
• 2 Nephi 8:1-2.  Pit is usually a bad thing in the scriptures.  Hell, the trap laid by the wicked into which they fall at the last day.  Interesting to see it as a positive origin.  It reminds me a bit of what we were talking about recently with the water in Lehi’s dream, how it appeared to be originally clean (and in fact representing Christ) and then because dirty as it went along.  Your origin an ancestry is good, but trying just to go back to it is a trap.
• Why Isaiah chapters:  God wants us to seek the spirit of prophecy and the Holy Ghost.  Therefore the scriptures aren’t a manual and need to have more challenging sections.  This is  more important than getting all the specifics right.  We live in the  most unpoetic and ametaphorical society of all time.  Poetry and imagery sticks in your mind better.  Assume Isaiah was talking about the biggest events of salvation and world history.  Jot down the 8 or 9 biggest events: that’s his subject.  What are your 8 or 9 milestones, now or to come?
• 2 Nephi 2 and 9 are less an explanation of the atonement and more a statement of the principles about the atonement that an explanation must account for.
• The problem of leadership.  2 Nephi 13:1-7, 12; 2 Nephi 14:1.
• 2 Nephi 9:28-29.  Wo to those who are learned but not wise, etc.  Interestingly, there follows a long list of ‘woes’ but without the qualification that there is with being learned that there is a redeemable version of the trait.  There is no “wo unto the liar, but to be a liar is good if . . .”   Later, despite the earlier contrast between the learned and the wise, the chapter talks about the learned and the rich and the wise going to destruction because of their pride.
• There is a lot of stuff in Ch. 13 and later in  Ch. 15 (they call evil good and good evil) that sounds pretty crazy, but its 2024 and here we are.

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

You are sitting at your kitchen table making notes from the Book of Mormon.  Your youngest daughter finishes brushing out her hair and asks Dad, can I  brush yours.  You agree  She brushes.

Did you know, Dad, dust is partly made of human skin?

You do know.  You  are the one who told her.

She brushes some more.  Some dead skin is on the brush.  She blows it off.

Heavenly Father made us out of dirt but our dead skin is dirt, right?  Isn’t that weird?

I made two unusual decisions about prayer.

The first was several years ago when I decided to pray for ridiculous amounts of blessings. Absurd excess. But I soon realized that I would not be able to handle such a bounty of blessings. A flawed character does not benefit from a wider scope in which to express the flaws.  So then I started praying for much better character and then a fire hose of blessing.

Today I realized that this was not the order of heaven. You don’t become fit for a trial before you have experienced it indeed, probably cannot, it is impossible.  This morning I prayed for vast unmerited Good Fortune and the grace of Christ to bear it when it came here

A bull was grazing near a bull calf.  The bull contemplatively chewed his cud and then spoke about how much he loved the pasture.  It was rich, green, with deep roots.

The bull calf disagreed.  The grass was greener on the other side of the fence, he said.

The bull examined the rank, brown, patchy grass in the wildlands outside and asked the bull calf what he could possibly  mean.

The bull calf replied that a crow had told him that the founder of their herd had eaten too much alfalfa once and almost died of bloat.  The same crow had said that founder had also got into a bloody fight with a cougar.

The cougar was attacking the herd, the bull replied.

The bull calf replied that whenever he tried to voice his honest concerns the herd replied defensively and with excuses like the bull had just done, and that was his final reason for thinking the grass was greener on the other side.

Moral: the spirit and the fruits are the proof you  need

WORDS by Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

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