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 foundations 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-hall 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.

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Once upon a time a Princess finely dressed in scarlet and ermine lived by herself in an enchanted castle by the sea. North along that coast there was a thick forest where every day at the edge of the woods a gift appeared, 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. Finely wrapped in silver and gold, with bows of red and white, she would open them to find her gift. 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 things.

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, always leafless, and appeared like nothing more than grim, fierce men. When she got too close, their limbs would start to 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 bright 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 even to the hazy hint of green beyond that, and she wondered at this prodigy. It was then that she something flash in the sun 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.

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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.

Brigham Age Mindset

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.

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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.)

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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

That hymn moves me greatly. When the choir sung in General Conference this last time I was rapt. I had a sort of a reverie or daydream.

There is a vast, corrupt empire. There is a little frontier war being fought. The center of the Empire hardly cares, but it is a desperate struggle for the ones fighting it. Their foe, a people of tribes and villages, is outnumbered but deadly. And of course in the way of things in a vast corrupt Empire, their strength isn’t being brought to bear. Funds and men are frittered away, bizarre orders are given, competent leaders seemingly reassigned at random.

But the Empire soldiers are far enough away and left enough to their own devices that over time they develop their own identity and even something like elan. Perhaps the single biggest factor is the enemy’s battle song. It is not a fierce song.  It is unspeakably sweet.  It is a song of the tragedy and glory of the fighting both sides do, and of respect for all who stand and fight in spite of fears. It points to something greater than this fight or even this war.  The song includes the Empire soldiers. They are greatly moved by it. They have a higher conception of who they are because of it. They act with greater valor, but also with greater kindness to their foe. They respect their foe. Unlike in every other imperial campaign, they don’t commit atrocities or tortures or brutalities. Even though they are engaged in a campaign of naked conquest for a nasty imperial center, in some ways the struggle has become noble on both sides.

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The previous section was the Gospel to the House of Israel.
This section is the Gospel to the Gentiles.
We also get to look at the first of the four Servant Songs.
But what I think is interesting is the identity of the Servant… there is more depth there than I originally supposed.

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Recent events have helped me understand the Book of Mormon better. That’s no surprise. Since the Book of Mormon is written for our day, it follows that living through the events the Book of Mormon was written for illuminates the Book of Mormon. Expect it to become clearer and clearer as time goes on.

The people repent and then fall apart remarkably fast in the Book of Mormon. How? Why? One answer is that repentance isn’t flipping a switch between righteous and wicked. Repentance is some collective embrace of something good even if the people on the whole have a bunch of wicked practices they still adhere to. In the same way, the turn to wickedness isn’t them going all black, its the population choosing some evil, while still otherwise mostly remaining the same including the good they already have. Life goes on. Even as they choose wickedness after wickedness, each step may not have obviously changed a great deal. They continue to marry and be given in marriage.

It’s not some insane step function

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