Using even the bad times

From a sacrament meeting address by a recently returned full-time missionary:

• It was tough, because i was stuck with a companion who was ill.

I understand the thought, actually, but the reaction strikes me as showing a lack of imagination. When i was a full-time missionary and my companion was essentially bedridden for just shy of a month, i took it as an opportunity to really intensely study the scriptures during the time i would otherwise have been out preaching—and i learned more about the scriptures during that not-quite-a-month than i’ve learned probably any other entire year of my life.

“When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” is a silly (maybe even stupid) little saying, but the thought behind it is valid, after all.

The purpose of home teaching

I thought this was a one-time statement, but i’ve now heard it twice in sacrament meetings, so i’d like to register my objection to it:

• Home teaching is intended to provide priesthood leadership in homes that don’t have the priesthood present.

This is, i would argue, untrue—rather, home teaching is intended (in part) to provide priesthood assistance to homes without the priesthood present (as well as those that do). This is an important difference.

Elevation

We’re counseled to live close to the Lord—maybe my family did do a Bad Thing, moving from the mountains to sea level some years ago.

(Or maybe such counsel is simply a way to keep the Utahns’ self-esteem up…)

On prophecy

The latest thing that bores me in sacrament meeting speeches: Someone reading something of the “If the world doesn’t repent, then God will pour out punishments on them” variety from, say, Spencer W. Kimball or Joseph Fielding Smith while they were president of the church, and then drawing the conclusion that the problems the world is facing now are in direct fulfillment of that prophecy, and that that’s proof that the prophet was divinely inspired, since otherwise how could they have known thirty whole years ago?

Thirty years? Thirty years is nothing! I mean, John prophesied all that in the Book of the Revelation nearly two thousand years ago! And how about Daniel, long before that?

When disguises don’t work

I don’t get parts of the Book of Mormon. I mean, take the story of Abinadi. He gets hunted down (unsuccessfully, apparently), and then he pops up in disguise (presumably so nobody’ll recognize him), and the first thing we hear him saying? “Hi! I’m Abinadi!”

Apparently secret agent training wasn’t quite as advanced back in those days as it is now.

Continuing to think about virgins

Another thought on the parable of the ten wise and ten foolish virgins: If the parable says that you can’t borrow a testimony from those that have one, isn’t it also kind of saying that you can buy one, as long as you leave yourself enough time?

Who knew? You really can buy anything in this world with money!

No oil in my lamp

The parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins has gotten really popular in the church over the past few years, and some of the ramifications of that parable worry me sometimes—i mean, my family uses compact fluorescent lights in our lamps, so not only don’t we have any spare oil for our lamps, we’ve never had any oil in them to begin with!

Back in the saddle again—and Job

Well, after much Sturm und Drang about it i finally have reliable internet connectivity, so i figured i’d share an insight i’ve had—i’ve finally figured out the ultimate moral of the Biblical Book of Job:

• If you make a wager with God, you’re gonna lose the bet.

Thank you, it’s just a little service i like to provide.

An anniversary, and the return of the testimony glove

So this blog is officially one year old today.

Looking back through all the posts, i find it interesting that the one that got the most comments, including some from people who just popped in to disagree with me on that topic and then disappeared completely, was on the rather bizarre phenomenon of the “testimony glove”. (The link should pop up a new window with my post on it. You may want to read it to provide context.)

I just think it’s interesting that such a cutesy item can be the source of such vehemence, both against it (that’d be me!) and for it (i’ve found a “testimony of the testimony glove” written by the person who claims to have invented them).

I still maintain that the whole “testimony glove” is harmless enough, except that it gets taken way too far when we start recommending that people use things like that as a cheat sheet for testimonies. Testimonies are supposed to come from the heart—any claim that there are “five essential elements of a pure testimony” (yes, that’s a quote) and that testimonies should stick to those misses the point, really—outside of a couple of rather technical uses, a testimony is a statement of what the utterer avers to be fact. In Mormon contexts, this is something you aver to be fact because the Holy Spirit has given you a witness of it. Full stop.

And creating a crib sheet for things that are claimed to be essential is dangerous, i’d argue. If the speaker knows the five things on the testimony glove to be fact (God lives, Jesus is God’s son, Joseph Smith is a prophet who translated the Book of Mormon through divine inspiration, we’re in the true church, and the church is led by a living prophet),* then that person should call that their testimony. However, if the person knows other things that aren’t on the testimony glove to be true (say, that priesthood keys have been restored, or that angels minister to humans, or that the book of Doctrine and Covenants contains revelations from God,** or that having love for each other is a good thing in God’s eyes), that’s still a “pure testimony”, no matter what the testimony glove may say.

The really interesting thing about the comments i got from my earlier post on the testimony glove is how (politely) vehement some of the responses were that the testimony glove is a good thing. (Sidebar in response to a comment i got off-blog: Just ’cause an idea appears in the Friend doesn’t mean it’s divinely inspired, you know?) One of the memes seemed to be that we have poor models of testimony-bearing in testimony meetings, so kids need a cheat sheet of sorts. Though i disagree that children need a cheat sheet for testimonies (a testimony in testimony meeting is supposed to be at least semi-unscripted, after all, since it’s supposed to be delivered when the Spirit moves you to deliver it, not when you’ve planned out what you’re gonna say)—and particularly that full-time missionaries don’t need one, or at least shouldn’t—i can understand the urge. However, the testimony glove does two things wrong in relation to this: It misdefines what a testimony is, and it wrongly limits the sorts of things that ought to appear in testimonies.

And yeah, as a couple commenters noted, travelogues and thankimonies can be annoying, but when they’re very short and used to illustrate a deeper point, they actually work. The people in your ward don’t do that? Fine. Start modeling better behavior, don’t hand out scripts. Is that so hard?

Well, for some people, apparently it is.

* I’d argue that some of these are wrong, in minor though not unimportant ways—for example, the church is not led by a living prophet, it’s led by Jesus Christ.
**I suppose some could argue that this one is subsumed within the Joseph Smith one—but if so, why would the testimony glove be needed to remind people that the Book of Mormon was translated via prophetic means?

A thought for Pioneer Day

I have no pioneer ancestry—at all—but i’ve often had people tell me that i have a spiritual pioneer ancestry, ’cause my parents were taught by people with pioneer ancestry.

You could actually play that game with pretty much anyone in the church—if they weren’t taught by someone with pioneer ancestry, they were taught by someone with pioneer ancestry (or if their teachiers didn’t have pioneer ancestry, they were taught by someone who did…and so on).

Hmmm…

You know, i like this idea, i just don’t think it goes far enough. My parents were taught by someone with pioneer ancestry, who was taught by someone with pioneer ancestry, who was taught by someone with pioneer ancestry, and so on until you get to someone who was taught by someone from upstate New York (who was, if you want to take it even further, taught by angelic ministrants and deity).

So much for everyone in the church ultimately having a pioneer ancestry.

What’s an abode, then?

Some things you hear in church just make you want to say “Um, dude?”—like the sacrament speaker who took the line in the scriptures that Jesus can “abide” with us and claimed that that word doesn’t mean he can “live” with us, it means something much, much stronger (though that was never defined, oddly enough). Um, dude?…

On evidences of apostasy

Today’s entry is semi-inspired by spending time in Kirtland, Ohio last Sunday with three different Latter Day Saint Movement churches, though i’ve thought it for a long, long time:

So what’s up with this widespread Mormon point of view that all the arguing amongst the existing Xian churches during the Second Great Awakening is proof that they were in apostasy? Given all the different Latter Day Saint Movement churches right now, and the doctrinal differences and occasional open disagreement between all of them, wouldn’t that mean we have proof that we are all in apostasy right now? I mean, if you’re gonna use the one, you have to be ready to be skewered with the other, right?

Diminishing returns?

I feel like i’m hearing more and more people in church saying that the role of the father in the family has been diminishing in recent years.

Recent years? I’d say the role of the father has been diminishing since humans decided that the best way to deal with a pair-bonding society was to do the hunter-gatherer thing, really.

Pianos

What is it about Mormons and pianos?

With only very, very rare exceptions, the only homes i’ve ever been in that have pianos (a) have at least some of the same occupants as were there in the 1950s, and/or (b) have Mormons in the household.

I, for one, find this weird. (Of course, i have to admit to not really liking the way pianos sound, even when they’re perfectly in tune, which is rare for an in-home piano.)

I know this blog doesn’t have a wide readership, but surely those of you who do read have some sort of collective wisdom on this one.

The church’s moving company

So as i mentioned a bit ago, my family is moving to Alaska. We’re in the midst of the move itself right now (hence the gap between the last post and this one), and so i’ve been thinking about moving, naturally enough, and particularly:

When did the Elders Quorums become the official moving company for the church?

I was an Elders Quorum president a while back, and i got a call once from someone about 10:00 am, and he told me that he was on the road driving his U–Haul, and would get in about 2:00 pm that same day, and could i get a few of the elders to help him move in?

Well, since i didn’t get the message until the evening, i didn’t get him any help—and you know what? I felt no guilt. At all.

Well, Jeanne and i just loaded everything up by ourselves without using help from the elders quorum. I am apparently not a good member of the church—i should have called my elders quorum president for help the night before our shipping containers were to be picked up. Right?

Unoriginality in speaking

Can somebody tell me when it became completely acceptable for people to simply read General Conference addresses instead of coming up with their own original work when they speak in sacrament meeting? I mean, i assume there was a letter from the First Presidency or something, since it’s occurring so often—so when was it? Was i home sick, or maybe traveling for business on that particular Sunday?

Up to 490, or so it seemed

So if the scriptures say that we can have up to seven quorums* of seventy, and the change from local to general seventies quorums was done, at least in part, to match prophetic guidance on the subject,** why do we now have eight quorums of seventies?

* Why do i always want to say “quora” instead of “quorums“?

** Look particularly at the text leading to note 12.

Architects gone wild!

A couple weeks ago, A Soft Answer* ran one of its periodic “Flickr Find”s—this time, a picture of the Mormon pavilion at the Expo 74 World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington.

(Click on the image for its Flickr page, including copyright information.)

Yeah, the whole “golden plates” thing is cool and all, but like i wrote on A Soft Answer about it, i strongly suspect that this bit of weirdness from the church’s architects is what got church leadership to finally speak out against the use of mind-altering drugs.

That is all.

* A blog which, in a bit of small-worldness, is done by Dave Sundwall, who i went to college with.

MoTab we ought to hear

To begin: I’m not a fan of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s sound. At all. (Actually, i’m not a fan of much of what you might call the “Mormon sound”—Gladys Knight was right about the, well, boring nature of our music.) However, i will readily admit that they have the right sound for some stuff—and so there are two things i’d like to hear (preferably live, but i’ll take a high-quality recording) MoTab do before i die, ’cause they have the perfect sound for them.

The first, and the longest shot: Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. You have to figure this one isn’t going to happen. (Legend says they backed out of a recording in the 1960s when they read it—it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s true, since the book has lyrics that translate to stuff such as “May God grant, may the gods grant/​What i have in mind:/​That I may loose/​the chains of her virginity.”) Of course, when i taught at Brigham Young University (this was right around the turn of the century) the BYU combined choirs did an absolutely amazing performance of Carmina Burana, so maybe Mormons have mellowed out about singing Latin- and Middle German-language erotic and drinking songs. I can only hope.

The second, and much more along the lines of what i’d expect from MoTab, is Mozart’s Requiem. They may have done a recording of this, in fact, and i’ve missed it (they recently released a recording of Mack Wilberg’s Requiem, which may be getting in the way of what i went looking for, and i know they’ve done Brahms’s German Requiem)—it seems their sort of thing. Once again, they have the right sound for it.

(And if they’ve actually done either of these, pointers to them would be appreciated. Thanks.)

Naming a patron saint

I would like to nominate my friend* Craig Olson as patron saint of this blog. In support of this, i present the following shaggy dog, which he once wrote in a discussion in response to a troll asking, among other things (with typos preserved)

Do gods eat and drink? Do gods sleep? Since gods are glorified men do they do the same activities as they did during their probation on earth. I realize they perfect. But as they are married do they carry on othernormal human activities like eating, drinking and sleeping?

It had been a long day, and God was tired. He stared out the window of the train, and watched the kingdomside draw by in the afternoon light. He sighed, impatient for the train to reach the station, tired of watching mansion after mansion pass before his view.

With a series of subtle slowing lurches, the train hissed and clanked into the station. God reached out the window, and opened the door from the outside. Stepping down to the platform, he reached back into the compartment to grab his briefcase. He crossed the platform and walked through the turnstile, whose plaintive squeak seemed to set his teeth on edge. No one, it seemed, ever bothered to oil the thing. It had made the same squeak every day for as long as God could remember.

Walking to his car, God unlocked, then opened the door and swung his briefcase over to the passenger seat. After resting his hands for a moment on the edge of the door, God sat, heavily, behind the wheel, then swung in and closed the door. The key slid easily into the ignition but, when turned, produced no results. No cranking, no lights, no clicking, no luck. Some days, it seemed, were just more difficult than others.

With a sigh, God climbed back out of the car and locked the door, leaving his briefcase on the front seat. “It’s not like I need it for anything this evening,” he thought. And without a glace back at the car, he set off on the walk home.

The house was set well back from the road at the far end of town—not a difficult walk, and quite pleasant as the light began to fade from the day. The house was dark as God strode up the drive. “I’m home,” he called as he walked through the door, but there was no reply. There was a note on the kitchen table—something about a Relief Society Board meeting, and a casserole in the Kelvinator. Hungry as he might have been, the long day and the long walk had lessened the desire for food, at least for a cold casserole.

Turning aside to the den, God sat down and leaned back in the recliner. He could see the sky through the window turn slowly to a clear cobalt glow. “At least it’s Saturday,” he sighed, and closed his eyes for a welcome rest.

* Both a real-life friend and a net.friend. I met him and his family when i was a teenager, then we fell out of touch, then we re-met on the net.