Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid

Peace, but not as the world understands peace. His peace is different. The world sees peace as the absence of violence. They make a desert, and call it peace. The Savior makes the desert blossom like a rose, and calls it peace. His peace is a synonym for victory.

But not victory as the world understands it either.

The victory that is won by God as a newborn babe.

Peace on earth, good will to men.

There is a paradise place where the grass is lush and soft; the dew sparkles; the trees whisper in the wind.  There is a farm there.  The farmer and his family have a routine.  Every morning, for example, he or one of his children go to see the ducks to make sure the fencing for their run is still well, to check for predators, and to collect eggs.  The land is beautiful and so is the routine.  But to make sure they avoid stagnation of the mind, each time they go to the ducks they recite a poem or a passage.  They do this for all their many ordered activities.

It is not necessarily a poem about the activity.  It is often just a poem they like.  But it is the same one for each activity.  They find it more beautiful that way.  At the ducks, Dover Beach.  Cutting cabbage for sauerkraut, Out Out Brief Candle.  There are a thousand or more that they recite.

At nights, they play together doing geometry proofs.

If you go past the influence of the farm and its people, past the woods they log, past the hills where they pursue game, past the event horizon of their lives, you find a wasteland.  It is dark and roiling with chaotic forces, with an anarchy of brutal energies.

The farm family doesn’t know it, but that roiling darkness is what underlies their farm also.  Only it is guided and tamed and brought into order by their poetry and their passages and the harmony of their lives.  It is what makes everything so lush and green.  The lush farm is the natural end those forces were meant for.

Here is  a story in which you are the hero.  Well, the sidekick.

There is a hero and his group and the villain and his group.  But you must not imagine that you are in a superhero story.  The hero is a suburban dad.  You are, well, you.  The rest of the hero’s crew are neighborhood people.  The villain is a rangy, rawboned young man in a wifebeater who operates out of a collection of trailers out in the sagebrush.  His crew are trailer park people.  One of his sidekicks is a woman in her 30s who looks like a cafe-waitress: a bit the worse for wear, stringy mouse brown hair, prettyish if not so unkempt, face a bit lined, a little too thin.  There are no superpowers.  Maybe minor powers, the woman can possibly do a few spells or something.  There are devices that work better than they should.  You are definitely a sidekick in a pulpish or cinematic story.  But no superpowers.

There is a backstory by the way.  Act 1, before the story starts, you and the hero tangled with the witchy woman.  You of course prevailed.  Now, in Act 2, she found this villain and helped him put together a group. (more…)

On the sweetness.

Our ward sang beautifully but absurdly today.  We still cannot sing together.  So we had some families record songs in advance.  Others had stations in rooms around the church building where they could sing to have it piped into the chapel.  It was beautiful but also absurd.  Much like, I suppose, God in a manger.

Mormon and Moroni 9 are the horror chapters of the Book of Mormon.

But they are necessary.

They show that God really does make us free.  We are free to choose for good or for evil.  Our choices matter.  We can make destruction happen if we choose.

No one prides themselves on not murdering, but in fact that is something you could do, it is something people have done, and it is to your credit that you don’t.  But only to your credit in a world where murders happen.

Last night I was out under the stars splitting farm chores with a neighbor when I listened to the Christmas Devotional from the phone in my pocket. The devotional lacked those minor cringes that had crept in the last few years–at least in audio. It had Christmas beauty, and most of all the talk by Elder Holland.

He talked about the birth happening at night, and night as the time for dreams. He quoted Parley P. Pratt about revelation through dreams.

This morning as a I built the fire I was rueful about the long and tedious dream I had. “I love the cool dreams that have insights,” I thought, “but what is the point of those daily life ones where you do mundane things for hours on end?” I thought it was especially ironic after hearing the Pratt quote.

I heard the Spirit giggle.

Here was my dream. Summarized, because it really was that long and boring.

We were at a ward party of some kind at a picnic ground up in the mountains. From the look of things it was Indian summer. Everything was brown but it wasn’t cool. Only a few families had shown up and we awkwardly sat around trying to make conversation and go through the planned activities with barely anybody. This went on at GREAT length. Finally about half of the few families there left, having put in the requisite showing.

I went down the dirt road a bit with a couple of my kids, down the hill to the main campground where the entrance was. There was a long tedious sequence where we were walking on dirt and kicking rocks and such.

At one point–yes, my dreams are indelicate–we then pulled off to the side of the road so I could find a tree to pee on. About that point I saw several trucks and vans pulling into the main entrance and I remember thinking ruefully, ‘I bet they are coming this way, I am going to have to wait to pee.’ Sure enough, they did. It was all late arriving members of our ward. I waved cheerfully but somewhat antsily to each family as they drove by. I remember thinking ‘ha, those families that left forgot that everyone was going to show up around now [the time in my dream was about quitting time from work plus driving distance]’ Finally the last of the caravan passed me, I peed, and that was the dream.

It really was tedious.

But like I said, the Spirit giggled.

It quickly brought to my mind that sitting through the tedium but leaving before the fun really gets going was a strong metaphor for life.

Moral: Don’t leave before the party gets started.

Too many of us practice getting the medal but never practice the sprint.

In courtship and elsewhere, we see and ape the manners and methods of the victory parade and know nothing of the victory.

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

You drive a recent convert to Church. He is half drunk and reeking. His father just died. You say what you can.

You bear you testimony. You try to say, “Christ already won the victory, the Baby was already born”; you cry.

Your daughter plays O Little Town of Bethlehem on the organ.

Imagine you are having a dream. Imagine you dream  you are somehow transported to the distant past. You are a SF/F/TF fan so you know and like these kinds of scenarios. Modern-type person ends up stranded in a primitive world, like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Martin Padway in Lest Darkness Fall, H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan works. You know the tropes: natives are hostile but you establish communication and wow them with your technical knowledge which sometimes eventually creates a reactionary backlash against you from religious or superstitious types.

So in your dream you find yourself transported to a plain spotted with trees, you are given the dream knowledge that you are in the distant past, and while you are very scared you also feel a bit excited. You get to live out a scenario you have read about many times. You almost feel like a tourist making your first trip to a famous site you’ve long collected postcards for.

Your dream is a bit confused the way dreams can be. At one point you seem to be living with hominids. At another point you introduce monogamy. But the main thrust of the dream you are imagining is this.
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The Willie and Martin handcart companies left too late in the season. They thought the Lord would do miracles for them and they would come through, so to speak, on dry ground. They did not. The miracles they got were different and later and came along with a heaping of suffering.

A Ephraim Hanks biography reminded me of two reasons why they should not have expected the miracles they did.

First, Brigham Young and the first exodus of the Saints intended to make it out to the Valley the year they left Nauvoo. But they eventually decided to halt at Winter Quarters because it was getting dangerously late in the year to try the journey. So the handcart companies were in effect claiming a larger store of virtue and faith than the Brethren or the Saints (to their credit, they probably did not realize this). Miracles do not come as rewards for lavish displays of conspicuous virtue.

Second, when Brother Brigham first announced the handcarts one of his main reasons is that the handcarters could leave earlier in the season since they had less kit to assemble. Blessings are not likely to attend following a commandment contrary to its expressed intent.

The companies themselves I bet were not aware of any this. They were just ignorant and foolish like the rest of us. But facts are facts, and consequences attend our choices according to the choice that we made, no matter what our motives may have been.

Still and all, for my own well-intentioned choices I plead mercy.

I dreamed of a temple built only by hand, and lit only by sunlight.

In it, for each new ordinance you did for yourself, you started back at the beginning and did anew every ordinance.

A young man came for his endowments.  He brought with him a building stone and his family.  He and his family had hewn out the stone themselves, and hauled it themselves.

One of these bright, soft fall mornings, if you walk down the dirt road along the orchard, and take the turn where it bends out of sight in the haze… (more…)

Some lessons from the end of the Book of Mormon.

• It is both true that our side is our side and that our side is wicked.  I am all for core America, but are we free from divorce, childlessness, greed, dishonesty, betrayals, and all the rest?  Would that we were.

• It doesn’t have to get better.  The signs that things are getting much worse for us could be true.  People who think we can just go through the normal processes and are bound to come back are, I fear, taking for granted something that is not at all sure.  There is no guarantee that this election is a normal election, or that the  Revolution against us is going to subside or even stagnate.

• Suppose the President wins due to an election fraud challenge or something.  It would not be a sign that we were wrong to think we were and are on the brink of disaster.  It is still hopeful, though!  Because it means God is giving us another chance to repent, and thinks we are able to do so.

There is a place you can go.  You say hello to God, he says hello to you, then he hands you a list.  It is a list of all your sins.

You check off all the sins you are willing to repent of, then you hand the list back to God.

The name of the place is called “Judgment.”

Random thoughts from the end of the Book of Mormon

*  It’s droll to read the Book of Mormon as a historical document.  You know, with the same scepticism we usually give to ancient documents.  Except that you are treating it as a real document, which drives the sceptics mad.

There are limits to doing that.  Because if the Book of Mormon is real, it is inspired.

That said, and just for fun, here is what I would infer from the ending of the Book of Mormon if I were reading it as just a document from some ancient civilization.

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