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Very strong bolo-tie game

I am glad to see that I am in good stead when I dress up for Pioneer Day by throwing on some Western/Southwestern gear and calling it  a day.

Pioneer Day is a good day to feel filial piety.  Our ancestors were great.  They may not have thought so.  Greatness, from the inside, is a lot like humans from the inside: hot, messy, bloody, gross.  From the outside, they were great.

In a superficial way, the popular understanding is the Old Testament is about the national salvation of Israel and the New Testament is more about individual salvation.  The restoration synthesized that–they built Zion because they wanted their kids to grow up in Zion.

More precisely, the Old Testament is about individual and group salvation in the form of the nation, and the New Testament is about individual and group salvation in the form of a new thing called a church.  Because the pioneers were a church, they built a nation.  And because they built a nation, we still have a church.

• “A ship in harbor is safe, but ships weren’t meant for harbors”–this is a saying about the Fall.
• There are colors you can see only at twilight.

On the sweetness of Mormon life

The  girl reads her talk artlessly then puts her phone up on the podium.  It plays–cheap, tinny–Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.  She sings the first verse.  She looks down the whole time. She is shy but also–you are close enough that you can see–she is fighting back tears.  Your own tears start.  You first heard this song on your mission when you needed streams of mercy. They came and never ceased.

Our big church camp family reunion got shut down due to fire threats.  We scrambled and were able to pull off a shorter smaller one at another church camp.

I get far more irritated than I should by any whiff of bureaucracy and safetyism at church, but nonetheless I am very grateful for church camps.

On the sweetness of LDS life.

I got a Manifest Destiny t-shirt and was wearing it around this week-end feeling just a bit edgy. I had a background mental dialogue that was something like, ‘if only they knew, wouldn’t they be shocked,’ etc.

Then I went to Church on Sunday and my staid respectable congregation, part Anglo part Mexican, sang with gusto,

Pushing on the wild frontier,

Forging onward, ever onward,

Blessed, honored Pioneer!

Well!

There are other sources that talk about the Giants, such as the Book of Jubilees, and the Book of Giants, which is highly fragmentary, but does at least mention Gilgamesh, though the full context is not clear. To some degree, these things might be seen as a polemic against heroes of Mesopotamia, but I don’t think that is the whole story.

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Saturday night waiting for fireworks that would start an hour later, sitting around talking, enjoying being together, conversation with my sister-in-law turned to her son’s call to be a missionary in the Czech Republic. It turned my mind to a woman from Czechoslovakia I met in ’93. That year started my four years in Baltimore. My bishop there had joined the church as a teen-ager in Korea, served a mission in his native country, and when his family was young moved them to the United States so he wouldn’t have to work on Sundays. The ward mission leader was from Trinidad, and I got to spend a bunch of time with him as a stake missionary. The ward executive secretary told me of his compelling first encounter with the Book of Mormon in his native Ghana. For a year and a half in 1989 and 1990, recent times when I met him, Ghana’s government expelled the missionaries and locked up the meetinghouses. (link)

The Relief Society president was from Czechoslovakia. She said that sometimes people would correct her. “You mean you are from the Czech Republic?” “No, my country doesn’t exist anymore.” (more…)

A pair of teenagers using a quirky AI approach deciphered some old carvings.  They appeared to give  instructions on how to open a gate or a portal to cross dimensions, when the stars were right.  Teenager-like, the two decided to do it and that it would probably be safe because ‘it felt ok.’

They succeeded.  They were instantly transported to a multi-dimensional civilization with portals and gates galore.  Countless realities living cheek by jowl, all the genres and works of imagination made flesh that you could imagine!

Because of that, the boy and the girl were in a sense not nearly the novelty they expected to be.  But they still attracted mass attention.  It seems that every other being, when they crossed a portal, got to transform themselves into a native of the arrival dimension, specifying their characteristics and appearance and nature for their new setting.  But these teenagers had nothing of the kind happen.  They remained a human teenage boy and a human teenage girl.

This was astounding.

Crowds followed them everywhere, with adulation and envy.  They had heard rumors of such a place as Earth, where you were what you were, but they had never imagined anything so fabulous could be real.

Ordinances are brown M&Ms, and a lot of commandments are too.

It’s a check to see who is really paying attention.  Who says they want in, but don’t.

Think about the various excuses and justifications people have for not doing them.

I don’t go to church because I get closest to God on the golf course.

Now apply that elsewhere.

Hey, man, we are here for you.  Anything you need?

Can you just come by more often?  I get pretty lonely these days.

Nah, man, I feel the closest to you on the golf course.

“The Old Testament after you’ve read it, not before.”
Here are some thoughts on the last two weeks reading: David-Solomon-Rehoboam and Jeroboam–Ahab and Elijah

• There is an extremely odd pattern of the royal father’s sins not really being punished until  his sons or even his grandsons
• God loves proof.  He is obvious, in your face, blatant.  But only after you’ve been tried, not before.
• Elijah is one of the great prophets of all time.  But it is remarkable how many of the miracles God did for him were only temporary, and then he was left to figure out the next step and to find the next miracle without knowing exactly what was going to happen.  The ravens fed him by the brook, than the brook dried up.
• I wrestled with the story of the man of God in I Kings 13 who was betrayed by a fellow prophet.  He came to deliver a warning to Jeroboam but was ordered to leave fasting, which he did until a local prophet lied to him, at which point he got devoured and the lying local prophet  mourned.  Perplexing.  The obvious message is that you have to get your own inspiration–you can’t just accept what the local prophet tells you.  On the local prophet, my theory is that he thought the man of God was lying and being performative with his fasting so he didn’t mind lying himself to interrupt the supposed performance (and he didn’t pray to confirm this conclusion, failure #1) and then the man of God didn’t pray to confirm (failure #2) but then the local prophet to his horror received a revelation during the dinner that the man of God was legit, which horrified him, so he mourned his death.
• After the tremendous story of Elijah and the Priests of Baal–easily top 10 OT scripture story–Elijah runs down the mountain to beat Ahab to Jezreel.  Why?

Today’s theme is Providence and nations.

One of the under-explored aspects of the Gospel is that it implies groups are real.  Whereas the Old Testament was almost all about the group, Israel, with individuals being almost secondary.  And the New Testament was all about the individual salvation (modern reading) or at least about rejecting all other groups to form one ‘ur’-group, the Church (ancient reading).  Whosoever shall leave father or mother…

The full gospel synthesises these perspectives.  There is individual salvation occurring in the context of family exaltation, with lineages and nations having their own purposes and character.

Including America.  As per various scriptures and the recent preaching on religious freedom,  America and American characteristics are in some sense an operation of Providence.

So what is America?

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I and a teenage son have been listening to a podcast called How to Take Over the World.  The host is an LDS brother who does a deep dive into various great men of history and then does a podcast about them.  In a nod to the demands of the podcast biz, he then does a little summary for each one of the lessons of their path to greatness.  Some of these little lessons are strained, especially if you treat them as lessons on business success, but some of them are quite interesting.

The last two I heard were about Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, and one of the ones on Jesus.   The best thing from the Land podcast was Land’s conviction that ‘you are only two weeks from changing your life.’  What he meant by this was that if you could dedicate two solid weeks straight to something, no distractions, decks completely cleared, you could do great work and achieve great skills that otherwise might take years.  I have only ever done this once or twice–it worked (for certain levels of greatness).  The most interesting insights from the Jesus podcast were Jesus’ conviviality.  He liked feasting and dinner parties.  And also Jesus’ keen eye.  He *noticed* people and the natural world around him.

The implied conceit of the podcast is that greatness is one singular thing and each biography is revealing a little more to you of its secrets.  But what strikes me is how little these great men often have in common.  The secrets to one guy’s success are the opposite of the secrets of another guy’s success.  Here is Edwin Land and team buried in a little warehouse he rented, he’s on one of his two-week sprints, straw-tick mattresses on the concrete floor, literally working until he drops from exhaustion and is dragged over to one of the mattresses…. and here is Jesus, feasting with the publicans and Pharisees.

I have the strong conviction that each one of us has a path to greatness in this life.   It may not be the same path as anyone else.  Nor is it the same greatness as anyone else.  But it is there, and the Spirit beckons you to take it.

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There are many doctrinal arguments that are unworth having – they amount to angels dancing on pins. There is currently a debate online amongst Latter Day Saints, about the Doctrine of Infinite Regress, or if you prefer, the Doctrine of an Infinite Lineage, of Family of Heavenly Parents. And this debate does have both genuine importance and current relevance, beyond simply agreeing with former prophets.

It is also worth noting we are not in the position of churches with a dead canon with largely settled creedal theology.  There are still real debates to be had. And God does want us to really think and struggle with profound doctrine. But instead of relitigating the evidence in this debate (it was certainly what the Brethren taught for a long time), let’s discuss why this is important, instead of only arguing about LDS Sola Scriptura.

Because it has everything to do with the doctrine of the Family. (more…)