The Clan Chief’s piper played badly out of tune.  The Clan Chief, who had the Benefits of an Education, was not worried.  ‘I’ll just get in more pipers,” he said.  “Lots more pipers.  Given that being out of tune almost certainly varies in statistically standard ways, if I get enough pipers the average will be in tune.”

It didn’t work.

Holiday time is often family travel time.  We were shuffling bedrolls from the cartop carrier to a sibling’s guest room, or from a sibling’s guest room back to the car top carrier, I forget which, with a spectacular view of distant mountains, when I realized that finding beauty and joy in these ordinary moments is of the essence.  Because even extraordinary things mostly just consider of ordinary moments organized and directed toward some great end.  The ordinary moments never end.

As we approach the end of the Christmas season, it is worth considering that the biggest holiday of the year is the one celebrating a birth, something that happens everywhere everyday, and not the one celebrating the Resurrection, a much less common event.  I expect that the Resurrection holiday will become a much bigger feast when the event it celebrates has become less out of the ordinary.

There was a young lord, rich, handsome, happy, admired, well-liked, and with a number of good friends much like himself.  Perhaps because of all these blessings, out of the lightness of his heart instead of walking in to a grand reception he leaped over the threshold.  The other young lords took it up.  It was quite the fashion of their set.

But one of the young lords grumbled to another.  “It’s an arbitrary fashion,” he said.  “We only do it because he who leapt first is the apple of every eye.  There are a thousand different ways we could express our gaiety and show we belong to our group.  We could, I don’t know, whistle after meals!  It’s all arbitrary!”

“Then whistle after meals,” said the other young lord he was talking to.  “But wouldn’t that be just as arbitrary?”

“Pfft,” said the first lord.  Then sighed.  Then laughed.  Then leaped.

At a dance, the ladies were chatting.

I’m here, one said, to attract a man.

That is a good reason, her partner in conversation said, but I’m afraid I am here just because I love to dance, and her eyes shone when she said it.

That’s very nice, the other said, but in her mind the lady wondered, how will she ever attract a man with an attitude like that.

The lady needn’t have worried. She attracted a man.

A doctor drew a sample from a milkmaid’s cowpox and said he would use it to create a vaccination against smallpox.  He told her she’d made a great contribution to the world.  The next day the rest of the milkmaids lined up outside his house, but he told them there was no more need.  He already had his sample.

They went away sad.  As the cows came running up to them for relief from the pressure of the cows’ udders, the milkmaids said, ‘there was our only chance to do something significant.’  As they expertly and smoothly sprayed liquid streams of milk into their pails without hurting the teats, they said ‘we will never be able to do anything of value.’  As they walked back down the lanes and laborers and childrens came out to the fences begging for a taste they said, ‘here we are stuck in this meaningless job.’  As housewives and farmers grinned at the pails they delivered,  they said, ‘we just aren’t good for anything.’

I’m looking for any suggestions you have to make engaging with restoration scripture more valuable this year.  Any and all thoughts welcome.

As part of this it might be helpful to start by reflecting on what helped you with the Book of Mormon this year.

The first step in charting where you are going is knowing where you are and have been.

I think it would be very helpful for all of our LDS friends if they took a few minutes to reflect on

1.  What  they learned from reading the Book of Mormon this year
2. What, if anything, helped their study to be more valuable?

It would also be very helpful if you were willing to share some of your reflections.

(more…)

Two boys set out at dawn on a hike into the woods.

They can around a hill and discovered a small stream-fed lake they had never seen before.  Mist was rising from the lake, the sun rose, and then gliding silently into their view they saw swans.

The one boy was awestruck.

The other complained, “where are they going?  There is nothing in this lake.  This is pointless.  Why aren’t they all in a line?  Why aren’t they forming a pattern?”

“I sometimes wonder,” the goose said to her gaggle, “how good I could have got at my career if I had just put off laying?”

Her friends were enthusiastic.  “It’s true!” they said.  “You were always so good at eating weeds.  And your honk!”  “You were always so good at pooping,” added another.

There once was a man with a withered hand who had four thick golden rings on the other.  He mourned when he acquired a fifth ring, because he had nowhere to put it.

At the edge of a wilderness, a wandering fox stopped to share gossip and news with another fox who happened to be there.

“Friend,” the wandering fox said, “back in that wilderness I saw many strange things and  I experienced a marvel.  As I was going I heard a bird call.  it was too complex to be a warning that I was present, because as you you we foxes are often maligned by birds as predators.”  The other fox nodded sagely.  “So I assumed it was a mating call.  Especially when the same call was repeated and repeated until I had heard it run through all the quarters of the wilderness.  But then the same bird, or another one much like, did a completely different call of equal complexity.  It too ran throughout all the forest.  As I traveled, the same phenomenon happened again, and then again.”

“This is easily explained,” the wayside fox said.  “It is had in memory among the foxes and the owls and the crows in these parts that once there was a great empire that ruled from where this wilderness  now grows.  No doubt you marked the ruins.  It is said they were great breeders and among other things they bred a kind of message bird.    They had pet ones that they would give a long message coded into song.  The bird would then sing it in the clear, carrying tones that you heard, and its compatriots that had been released into the wild would then repeat it and repeat it until it reached its destination.”

“Ingenious,” the first fox said.  “Do they taste good?”

The second fox, ignoring this interruption, went on.  “But now of course there are only ruins.  The birds make up nonsense to sing partly in memory of their glory days, but mostly because their breeding compels them to.”

(Based on real life examples)

There once was a small flock of hens.  One of these hens spent an inordinate amount of time each day finding her way out of her flock’s enclosure to carry on an affair with a rooster a couple of backyards over.  Another of these hens was, to the extent you could say it of a hen, lucidly and ethereally rational.  The hen seemed to spend a great deal of time considering everything around her with a skeptical eye, and when the poultry routines were interrupted would act as if it were beneath her to notice.  The last hen had something like dash or elan.  She would strut right up to dogs, give them the stare, and then fly into their faces.

A turtle lived in their backyard with them.  Sometimes they would perch on his back.

One day all three of them were perched there.  “You are all so distinctive,” said the turtle.  “What is the reason?”

The first hen said, “I’m committed to my heritage and living it out to the fullest.”  “Me too,” said the second.  “Me too,” said the third.

In chorus, they all cackled, “We’re french hens!”

Moral:  identity and heritage is not a straitjacket.

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.

(more…)

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.