I had a daughter who was the perfect kid.  She hit an age, 10-11, that was ideal for her.  Everything about her was suited to that time.

One day I caught her crying.  What’s wrong, sweetheart?  I don’t want to grow up, Dad.  I like being a kid.

I hugged her and told her it would be OK.  And it was OK.  She’s a good, even a great teenager.

But she was also right to cry.  The girl she once was still echoes, but that year or two of perfection is gone and who knows if she will ever hit her stride quite like that again.  And it is still gone even if she does; no matter how perfect the rhythm, it won’t ever be quite the same rhythm.  She was right to cry.  I should have cried for her too.

Today was Betsey’s dying day. (more…)

I am following up on my post yesterday about the Eternal Imperative.  I riffed off of Kant’s Categoral Imperative to offer a basic rule for morality, in three different formulations.

*Act as if you were part of a story that involves your ancestors and your posterity.

*Act as if you were working towards an ultimate goal that you could will everyone would be working towards.

*Act as if you eventually would come into a relationship with everyone past, present, and future.

Here are two more formula that I think are equivalent to those three.  But they are not obvious.

Act as if you had zero time preference.

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Kant’s Categorical Imperative had a bit of the right idea, but along the wrong dimension.

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

It is too universal.  It abstracts away from the embodiment of being in a particular time and place.  It is all blandness and universal solvent.  It acts as if time need not exist.

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I remember being 4 years old and watching my father split wood in the fall. (more…)

We are excited to watch Poppy Hill when it gets here. John Mansfield got me with this:

This involvement connects to her relationship with her departed father, and the climax of the story takes the girl and a boy to the bridge of a ship in Yokohama harbor where its captain delays departure fifteen minutes to tell them of his admiration for their fathers, his friends that he remembers every day.

And so I have been thinking about the memories we leave behind us. I want my children to think of their time at home as the happy, golden years. That doesn’t come through indulgence. It comes through structure and discipline and light and love and water fights on the front grass.

Which brings me to eternity. (more…)

Bruce Charlton hit on a pretty meaningful question.  Is heaven static or dynamic?  The Saint Christian view of heaven is very dynamic–millennia of progression followed by forever of creation–so when I got old enough to digest the scriptures on my own I was surprised that the consistent image of heaven in holy writ was static.  Peace.  The end is come. Never more to go out.  Enter thou into my rest.  The gospel, in other words, has the static view and the dynamic view.  Our lives have both also.  There are sometimes when we want to be out and doing and striving attracts us.  At other times we just want to be done.

Some thoughts.
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The best way is the the long-term way of thinking: building or rebuilding beautiful architecture and infrastructure that lasts; planting trees and gardens wisely and well, with an eye to the end result perhaps 20-100 years in the future; being good stewards of the land for future use and enjoyment; accumulating wealth for descendants; learning from the mistakes of ancestors and healing the wounds of abuse and sorrow that have been passed down through families; and preserving the best of our culture while discarding the dross.”
-thus E.C.

Once a King set out to build a cathedral.  A famous old architect oversaw the construction of a grand edifice of arches and domes in a sound baroque style.  In a master stroke, the architect found a source of very light stone that would weather well for the main construction, but a nearly black stone with a different texture for accents and structural elements.  Even when the building was going up, any one could see how spectacular and lovely the final result would be.

The King and the architect consulted together and employed the most skilled craftsmen to build.

When the work was nearly finished, the king and the architect were taking a tour and noticed one lone gargoyle sticking out sideways from the dome, in a pink stone.

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Behold, I say unto you that all old covenants have I caused to be done away in this thing; and this is a new and an everlasting covenant, even that which was from the beginning.

-thus the Lord, D&C 22:1.

I don’t fully grasp this verse.  For one, there is the intriguing hint that old covenants may have had some lingering validity despite their apostasies.  The way the Jewish high priest gets treated in the gospels and Acts.

Even more, what about the reference to a new covenant, which is also an everlasting covenant that has already been around.  “This brand new car isn’t a billion years old.  Its older than that.”  Continuity is a theme around here.  I suppose that sometimes continuity requires ending a failed effort and starting over again back at the basics.  One might say that continual repentance is the true principle of continuity.

 It’s not a problem to make emotional decisions, as long as you are taking all your emotions, now and later, into account. Integrating those later emotions with the current ones is a big purpose in life.

-thus Friend of the JG Lucinda.

It’s also a big purpose of the gospel. Decisions made like that are what we call wisdom.

Time is always included in any ultimate analysis, which means (to jump a few steps) that every ‘thing’ is ‘defined’ as a lineage, extending through-time.

-thus Bruce Charlton

One of the themes of this blog is something we call “integration.”   It is a real insight (though we now only perceive through a glass darkly, and though  the word ‘insight’ falsely implies its our genius, instead of the work of the Holy Ghost).

Let me explain.

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My mother tells me that when I was a little fella, I would spend the late afternoon standing on the couch looking out the window for my father to come home.  When he did, I would quickly sit down and act like I was absorbed in a picture book.  But he was never fooled.  In he’d come and we’d wrestle.

Kids waiting for you to come home is one of the pleasures in life.  They are so eager.  Its mostly the younger ones, though the older ones sometimes rush over with news they’ve been busting to tell you. (more…)

One of the missionaries in our ward said she really likes a Mormon group called the Nashville Tribute Band. Her favorite song was one called “Apostles“:

I could criticize the song, but it does have the strange power of cheap music.  And the song has a heck of a situation: a last meeting of the New Testament Apostles before they go out across the world never to see each other again. (more…)

I have nostalgia for lives I’ve never lived.

I was just driving through a tiny foothills Spanish colonial landgrant.  There are a few small adobes, willows and cottonwoods by the streams, a twisted apple tree, a few cattle, stacks of firewood, everyone related.  And I felt a strong sense of the distinctness and value of their life.  And an attraction, like nostalgia.

That’s what the best tourism usually is.  Nostalgia for unlived lives.  Imaginative communion with them. (more…)

A beautiful woman, ice cream, little kids — the experience always exceeds your memory.

But if you have the experience often enough for your memory to be equal to it, the quality of the memory itself declines.

There is a way out of the dilemma. It is time and eternity.