In verses where it says something along the lines of ‘and the people glorified God,’ what does that mean? (more…)
I find in my notes the following quote
The pursuit of kleos is to internalize the judgment of a lofty tribe – to observe yourself from the perspective of historians & poets & try to create something that they will notice, & find inspiring & beautiful
if you live for kleos it matters very much *who* you want to remember your name
(From whom I have neglected to mention, perhaps twitter user EDJCB)
Kleos means glory.
Generally the people you want to admire you are the people you yourself admire. And you want them to admire you for who you are, not for a façade. (more…)
tfw having beautiful meaningful experiences that can only be described with cheesy cliches
— ??? bosco ??? (@selentelechia) December 9, 2022
having beautiful meaningful experiences that can only be described with cheesy cliches
Reply — https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1601174924340887552
I wonder if this is an inescapable problem or if we just have no shared artistic vocabulary for it
Serious Artists are well acquainted with how it can go wrong from their own sordid personal lives, seemingly no familiarity with the joys
Most folks who come across this site probably think I’m nuts. Oh, that guy who rants about glory. Really over the top. Even some of our dear friends think I go a bit overboard at times.
I have been blessed with a family that hits real highs in domestic happiness. Sometimes the coziness is indescribable. In trying to make sense of it, I ultimately decided there was no way to do it without connecting it to the transcendent element: ineffable glory, worlds uncountable spilling like jewels through your fingers.
Eler Christofferson has a simple, logical way of thinking about how God can love us unconditionally but also love us for the good we do and are.
Love despite vs. Love for.
Unconditional love is love despite our faults. Conditional love for is love for our successes. Love despite vs. love for. God has both.
The good man rejoices in being loved despite and longs to be loved for.
The light of truth. The light of Christ. He is the light of the sun and the power thereof. He is the light of the moon and the power thereof. He is the light of the stars and the power thereof. The earth also, and the power thereof. The light in all things, even the power of God which sitteth upon the throne.
-thus D&C 88:5-13.
Now, one might say truthfully that glory = power plus light. Righteous power = power plus light. But the scriptures say that you cannot even really separate the two concepts. Power without light is ultimately not actually power. Light without power is ultimately not actually light.
We are all reading D&C 121 this week.
Here are some of the best JG posts on righteous and unrighteous dominion.
They are really good.
In D&C 92, the Lord tells Williams to be a lively member of the United Order.
Scriptures about being active, having energy, being quickened–we think those are about accomplishing more. It’s good to accomplish more. But we may be looking beyond the mark. Being lively is itself beautiful. It reveals what is glorious about being alive. It and stillness and contemplation seems to be the two states that God loves best. Those are also the two states where the glory of being human are most manifest. A child playing energetically, a child at rest.
Earth’s joys grow dim,
Its glories pass away.
I was walking along thinking about the quest for physical perfection. Physical perfection might be too highfalutin’ a term. I mean people trying to lose weight, put on some muscle, clean up their diet and so on. What I was thinking is that a lot of people fail. Losing weight is hard. They get injured and cannot lift weights for awhile. Or they have a surgery or get depressed. Or they get old. I know a man in wonderful physical shape who developed dementia and withered away.
So when you set out to better yourself physically you are setting out to a goal you cannot guarantee you will reach. But some people do, the goal is at least possible, and that makes the effort itself worthwhile and in a technical sense glorious.
In fact, I mused, that’s true of any kind of glory. If you were guaranteed to succeed it wouldn’t be glory. No risk of failure, no glory. But if success is impossible, its just vainglory. There needs to be some chance of success. At least one person you can point to who set out on the path and made it.
Ahem, the Spirit whispered. Jesus Christ.
D&C 59 v. 15 encourages a glad heart and cheerful countenance, but not ‘much laughter.’ WJT points out that this verse is specifically talking about ordinances and sacraments. The implication is that some laughter is fine when performing ordinances.
That is the gospel I know. I was recently down at the temple with family at a sealing performed by an old family friend. He smiled a lot and laughed some and so did we all.
A gospel like this I am compelled to believe.
One of Our Favorite Poems, introduced to Us on this very blog, is Nothing in Heaven Works as It Ought. That captures something real about heaven. But my actual image of heaven is some combination of impossible blazing glory and genial garrulity out on the front porch. Somehow the combination makes sense to me.
SPDI has a eulogy for femininity and a girl he knew. I was touched.
It made me think of Barfield’s idea of the second consciousness–you start off innocent then you wise up then you wise up even more and intelligently and consciously work to reconstruct a non naive version of your innocence.
What would second femininity look like? I think it looks like trust.
Trust in people who are trustworthy. Trust in your family. Trust in your husband. Trust in your God.
And without need, there cannot be trust.
there shall be a great work in the land, even among the Gentiles, for their folly and their abominations shall be made manifest in the eyes of all people.
D&C 35:7
Revealing folly and abominations is a great work. It is a form of greatness. Why?
To paraphrase Confucius, all glory begins with the rectification of names. Glory is a true appreciation of someone’s deeds. So true glory comes from establishing the truth of each person and their deeds. Glory consists of the merited love and praise we receive for our goodness. But where anything depends on the perception of others there is a possibility of a gap between the perception and the thing perceived, love and praise where it is thought to be merited but it is not.
Bringing perception in complete union with reality is a task worth of a God. Is this why the Holy Ghost, a member of the Godhead, interpenetrates? Is this why the Atonement seems to involve a total communion between Christ and every man and woman?
Judgment therefore is a form of greatness and Judgment Day is not an arbitrary imposition but a necessary fulfillment of God’s nature and our need for true recognition. Every kingdom is a kingdom of glory because everyone there knows in the presence of God that they had some worthy principle about them that He, the Almighty, found worthy.
Repentance is the path to greatness. That is the path we have to choose.
We could also say it is our path to glory or goodness or heaven. All true. We were meant for greatness but we are not yet great. We are too illformed as yet. So we must change.
We can imagine someone who doesn’t need to be change to be great. They only need to develop further who they are inwardly. Christ was like that, I think. We are partly like that too. We were meant for greatness, the seeds are already there, we are just unfolding them. But for us it also means changing who we are. We have contradictions inside us.
Where we are, and where we have to go to get to our destination explains why ‘strait is the gate and narrow the way.’ We will all wander. But if we wish to arrive at greatness, eventually we are going to have to choose a path that leads there. “Why can’t I be saved in my sins?” is morphologically the same question as “why can’t I go to Paris without having to go to France?” (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.
I recently read a talk by President Hinckley from what doesn’t seem like so long ago. But I guess it is now. The talk is Our Solemn Responsibilities.
For me the talk was like a switching yard. It started a number of different trains of thoughts. (more…)
Glories, glories, what are those?
Strifes turned to stories, in repose.