All along the watchtower, princes kept the view

"And behold, the watchman upon the tower would have seen the enemy while he was yet afar off; and then ye could have made ready and kept the enemy from breaking down the hedge thereof, and saved my vineyard from the hands of the destroyer." Doctrine and Covenants 101:54 

One of my favorite scenes in the film The Return of the King is when the warning beacons of Gondor are lit. As the camera pans out and moves (if I recall correctly how it goes) and we see the beacons on the tops of the mountains being lit each in turn, I was in awe. Part of it was that I like mountains, snow, and fire, and putting them together in a scene is really nice, but also what was happening as the distress call was being made from Minas Tirith. So many miles being spanned so quickly, and all might have been lost without those fires. 

But what if those fires had been ignored by Rohan? It would not have mattered that they were lit, then. In the same way it does not matter if God guides us, whether through scriptures, living prophets, or personal revelation, if we do not listen to His guidance. 

"Behold, I sent you out to testify and warn the people, and it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor." D&C 88:81

We can stretch the idea a little bit more, however, in a way that we cannot with the typical "man in a watchtower" analogy that is used by many Latter-Day Saints to describe the role of living prophets and apostles. The prophets are in a position to receive revelation and counsel for the entire world, and so they are akin to a man in a high tower who can see what we cannot and warn us of dangers of which we may not be aware. However, not every person hears the watchman's cry- not that they fail to take it to heart, but that they literally never heard it. Nor is every invasion is one which the watchman is placed to see- an apostle cannot be in every neighborhood and family at once, and typically does not offer counsel for each local situation. 

Instead we find ourselves in the position of needing to light a warning fire ourselves when we see the prophet light his, and also of needing to light a warning fire should we be the first to see the problem, without waiting for someone else to do it. Let us not fall prey to the bystander effect when lives and souls are on the line. We must, all of us, be ever on the watch for danger both to ourselves and others. We're all in this together. 

Your turn: How can we be better beacon-wardens for each other? 

Fiction: The Seller of Stars

Beneath the hang of every rainbow there is the fairy market. Here there is every thing for sale, both pottage and signets, silver and blood, and for any price there is something to be had.

Symphony and Flood

Follow-up to: Song and Rain

"The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?" Luke 13:15

"Don't let yourself get distracted by the small stuff; cut through to the meat of what must be done" is how I could summarize the idea put forth in Song and Rain.

The Pharisees were not wholly bad folk. Despite what they may have transformed into by the time of Jesus Christ, for most of their history at least they were deeply concerned with social justice and even in His day enjoyed mainstream support among the Jewish people. It was a Pharisee, Hillel, who famously stated the maxim, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary." The group arose out of the turmoil following the Exile, concluding that Israel had suffered so because they had neglected to properly follow the commandments of God Because of this they sought to raise the bar and fill the profane life entirely with the sacred: there was no room in a properly holy life for impure things.

Phariseeism anticipated the Church of Jesus Christ in these latter-days with this focus. Their intention was to make Israel live up to its calling as a "kingdom of priests" by laying down the temple ritual onto everyday life. The name itself derived from the Hebrew word pārûsh, meaning "set apart." Over generations they apparently degraded into straining over gnats while swallowing camels, however, and herein we see a warning sign provided us by history and the scriptures: When we forget the principle behind the law and follow the law blindly for its own sake we make are left holding a corpse. The principle is the spirit and the law is the body, and though the spirit is ennobled by a tabernacle of flesh it is nevertheless the superior partner. Without the body there is still intelligence in the spirit, but without the spirit there is only death in the body.

Wisdom from the Tree of Life

Go to the flower, thou malagrug; consider his ways, and be wise: How he moves, and how he is still.

For the lady of the house takes him in her hand and moves him from room to room, and sets him here, then there, and thus the flower goes. And where he is set, he remains, and how she adjusts him, he remains; his image and his incline are according to the eye of her desire. As she cuts, transplants, and bends, he yields beneath her touch.

Where he is, he is, until she takes him up again. Where he is, he stands, and his beauty is beheld by all; it cannot be hid. He drinks of the still water of his rest, and his bread is the light that is without end.

And as he was taken from the garden of his beginning, he is dying. And he leaves petals behind in every place that he is taken, here a little, there a little. He does not look toward them as the lady takes him elsewhere, nor think back to them, but is content for knowing that, wheresoever he might go, some of him is left behind.

Where his lady moves him, there he is, until she moves him yet again, and in this he fills the measure of his creation.

Prodigals fallen off the bandship

Two bishops are discussing the problem that they each had with a rat infestation in their respective meetinghouses. One said, "We called an exterminator to handle the problem, and since then we've never seen the rats." The other replied, "We baptized the rats, and we haven't seen them since."

I wish that the joke weren't reflective of a sobering truth. Sometimes, people stay. But too often- once would be too many, as Gordon B. Hinckley once said- they fall away. And sometimes- once would be too many- we don't pay them as much attention as we do non-member investigators.

On July 1st, 2012, I was transferred with many other missionaries from the Utah Salt Lake City Mission to help found the Utah Salt Lake City West Mission. Its purpose was to pilot several new programs for the missionary work, and the most important of these was one that gave a new focus on the reactivation of members who had fallen away from the Church in one form or another. While I am hardly about to speak a new doctrine in this post, it is nonetheless a point that some have not yet grasped.

In some of his discourses Brigham Young used the image of the Good Ship Zion, headed surely toward the Port of the Celestial Kingdom. Those that have not boarded the ship are in a sorry state, to be sure: The heavenly city of Jehovah-shammah lies across a great ocean, and they will never reach it on foot or even by another, less-sturdy ship. But at the very least they are still on the ground. 

In more dire circumstances are those who boarded the Good Ship Zion but then jumped overboard at some later time. The ocean across which Zion sails is treacherous, hardly something that a man could swim through under his own power. The ship could surely reach the Port with neither crew nor passengers, but where God does not need us we certainly are in need of Him. Those that have jumped from the ship and its protections are caught in the raging waters of the tempest, and they perish if they are not saved. 

The reason for this is that they have made sacred covenants. Whether they have "only" made the covenants of baptism or have gone all the way through the temple and been sealed to another person for time and all eternity, they have made certain promises to God and God cannot turn Himself away from the obligations that they have entered into. If it is a sin to do something, how much greater the condemnation for one that has expressly covenanted with God, as did Abraham, to not do that thing?

What this means is that the rescue of less-active members is actually of greater importance than baptizing new members. "So many of us look upon missionary work as simply tracting," said Gordon B. Hinckley. As well could he have said, "So many of us look upon missionary work as simply the responsibility of the full-time missionaries." This is changing, if slowly (it takes time to change an entire culture), but if we are less able to say what President Hinckley did we can just as easily say "So many of us look upon missionary work as simply baptizing new members."

It is all the same great redemptive work, because when all is said and the artificial boundaries of terminology are broken down, what "baptizing new members" and "reactivating old members" both mean is: Inviting others to come unto Christ. 

Fiction: Song and Rain

A training missionary and his son were walking on the dirt road again one day when, without any permission whatsoever, or even a polite advance notice, the storm clouds gathered and the rains descended. And so fiercely did they descend that after a few minutes the younger missionary looked too and fro for a handy ark, observing that circumstances were looking as if it would be necessary. If nothing else, his feet were certainly drowning by this time.

The Other Side of the Line

Follow-up to: Two Fishers

What is it that is most sacred? What is it that lies on the other side of the line which divides the sacred from the mundane, the divine from the profane?

Have we stepped into the realm of sacredness when we break bread in remembrance of the body of Jesus Christ and drink in remembrance of the blood that He shed? Or when one, sitting, has hands placed upon his head to confer the Melchizedek Priesthood upon him and ordain him to the office of an elder?

Most would argue in the affirmative. But what about a hike? A bowl of soup? A transient dream?

For Mircea Eliade the Sacred hearkened back to some First Example, but we can draw another concept for this same term: The Sacred is that which changes you.

When you have seen the Mountain, you have seen neither foothills nor an uninspiring pillar but Mount Kenya, where according to Kikuyu myth God lived when He ventured down from Heaven. You have glimpsed the footrest of His throne, or the dome of His revelations. You have seen His temple, which is like a reagent. It will work through you like yeast until you are transformed, and nothing can rid you of it.

Whether you welcome the change or despise it, an encounter with the Sacred does not leave you the same as you once were, and the only question is whether or not you encourage further change.

All of us must one day cease to ask whether it was Father Lehi that they encountered in the night or specter from the subconscious and experiment upon the word, so to speak, then ask what change, if any, it worked upon them. This is what the man in Two Fishers must wrestle with, and perhaps it is what he understands from his partner's words in the dream.

The Eagle Oath

Recently I was privileged to be in attendance at the Eagle Court of Honor for Ed Parker [name has been changed], a young man in one of the wards that I am currently serving. I went only to support him and expected to have no noteworthy experiences- I must admit that, as I was once a Less-Active member of the LDS Church, to some extent I might be considered a Less-Active Boy Scout. Instead, however, I was pleasantly shocked to be touched by many comments and stories made, and learn from the whole experience.

I received some interesting thoughts, some of which I will weave into my posts in days to come, but the real turning point was when the time came for all of the other Eagles to arise and sit in the Eagle's Nest. Despite my complete departure from Scouting soon after I received my own Eagle I was nevertheless an Eagle, as always I will be, and I went up with my companion to sit there beside two other men in our corner of the room, and about eight others total. We sat there to show Ed Parker, the other boy receiving his Eagle, and every younger boy there who was or might one day be on the path to Eagle, that they were not alone and that we had gone before him. Just as others had gone before us and paved a path of example for us to follow, so too did we pick up a few stray rocks that had come onto the path to make the way clear for them. Just as they will do themselves, when as men they sit in the Eagle's Nest for a boy who may not even yet be alive. 

At that time I had the opportunity to recite the Eagle Oath with my fellow Eagles and those two boys that would momentarily join our ranks. The time that I first said it, very soon before my eighteenth birthday, I was exhausted. It had been an ordeal after moving to get all of the necessary paperwork from disorganized people back where I had moved from to less-than-motivated people where I was now living, and if it weren't for a single very helpful Scout Leader I doubt that I would have kept pushing it forward. While in both places that I had lived Scouting was not dead, neither could it be said to be thriving and jumping about. So after many years of working after one badge and then another without much enthusiasm, and coming to meeting after meeting to see that not even the leadership was present, I had decided that I had earned my rest, upon getting my Eagle, and resigned from an experience that felt less an adventure than a Great War of paperwork. 

I must be clear that half of it was my fault, as it was when I was Less-Active in the Church in my later years. It was not my choice how others acted, but it was my own responsibility to decide how I would feel about it and what I would do after. Reciting the Eagle Oath made me realize this, and I want to again affirm it, this time not with my voice but with words that will stay for as long as this blog does. 

I reaffirm my allegiance to the three promises of the Scout Oath.

I thoughtfully recognize and take upon myself the obligations and responsibilities of an Eagle Scout. On my honor, I will do my best to make my training an example and my status and my influence count strongly for better Scouting and for better citizenship in my troop, in my community, and in my contacts with other people.

To this I pledge my sacred honor.

This I state not to any authority in the BSA, or to anyone that reads this blog, but to God, and the standard by which I measure my example, and how I influence the world as an Eagle Scout, will be determined not by what others expect of the Eagle Scout that I am but what God expects. 

Repentance never ends

"Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." Isaiah 55:7

I had planned on starting a blog for some time before the word was given that we could start one on our missions. One of the reasons was to chart my progress in developing a more luminous life, or becoming more self-aware and applying that self-awareness. I was also going to be discussing some of the issues that I struggle with, most principally depression, and how I was getting on with resolving it as best as I could.

That second thing is what I'm going to ever-so-lightly touch upon. You see, there's a little agent in my head that is responsible for saying "You're doing enough" or "You're not doing enough." Something playing havoc with that agent was the idea that all of these people that I admired were complete. They were finished products. They were demigods, you could say, and everything that followed was merely them continuing to add awesome deeds to their pedigree ala Heracles. Christopher Lee was already a boss by the time that I rolled along. It was not a question of whether Terry Pratchett would write a book that deserved to be remembered for generations but how many: how many books, and how many generations.

History doesn't remember the guys that don't do anything worth being remembered for. Reading up on it, it was often easy to forget that they didn't just stroll into this gig, knowing deep down it was all inevitable and they just needed to mouth the words until It Happened.

Because I forgot this, I began cultivating in myself, without consciously realizing that it was my own doing, a desperate need to be finished. I couldn't be, when I was forty, that guy who knows the scriptures front and back or that guy with twenty-five published novels to his name, or that guy who had sorted out his problems and never broke down. I had to be that guy now, if I ever would be.

Obviously this isn't true, or I wouldn't be writing this now. We are always "in-progress," never done, never the final product. There is always room for improvement, and what is important is where I am headed. What I want to do now is draw a connection from this idea, and link it to something theological. Repentance, specifically.

Repentance is an ongoing process. There is always something we can improve on. President Hinckley said once, that even as President of the Church, he still had to repent every day. The issue at hand is not whether you need to repent nor even, really, how much but whether or not you are repenting at all.

A righteous man may stop repenting and thus become wicked, and the most wicked man in the world, at the moment that he turns himself toward God and begins to repent, can become righteous. Don't worry about where you've been; worry about where you're going.

Fiction: Two Fishers

Two sat alone in a boat, a fisherman and a fisher of men. They sat with their backs to each other, poles in hand, and the silence of the cool night air was broken only by their low voices and the occasional plop of a fishing line.

And of what concern of yours is this?

Follow-up to: They called him Judas, after the dagger

"For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." 3 Nephi 14:2

But story isn't entirely about Judas, you know, even though I could say an awful lot about him. It's about all of us, "for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of  God." Judas betrayed his Savior, Peter betrayed his Savior, and so has every other soul in all of the worlds of Creation. As President Uchtdorf repeated in last year's April session of General Conference, talking of a bumper sticker that he had seen, "Don't judge me because I sin differently than you."

We have all done things that we aren't proud of. When the Son of God was in such agony as to bleed from every pore, such agony that even He, who healed the sick and raised the dead, shuddered at the thought of it and asked His Father to take, if it were possible, the experience away from him- how much of this pain was on our own account? How much does it matter that one of us was responsible for one drop, and another of us for another drop?

We don't know what their circumstances are. But we do know that we're all unfinished products, and if God has forgotten their sin then surely we have no justification in remembering it ourselves. Every time that we do so we make a mockery of the Atonement, and the greater sin may well be on our own heads.

I could do no better than to again repeat the words of President Uchtdorf again: "This topic of judging others could actually be taught in a two-word sermon. When it comes to hating, gossiping, ignoring, ridiculing, holding grudges, or wanting to cause harm, please apply the following: Stop it!"

Have a good day, folks.

Giving comfort to those in need of comfort

"O Lord, my heart is exceedingly sorrowful; wilt thou comfort my soul in Christ. O Lord, wilt thou grant unto me that I may have strength, that I may suffer with patience these afflictions which shall come upon me, because of the iniquity of this people." Alma 31:31

In my very first area, serving in the Holladay North and Olympus Stakes, I had occasion to meet a young woman who had grown up in the LDS Church but had fallen away almost as soon as she had left the nest, going straightway from Rome to Vegas, so to speak. Some years later she chanced to get a glimpse of her lie from the outside and decided that she needed to put it back in order.

Meeting with the missionaries was one part of her journey back, and I was fortunate enough to work with her for almost the entire time that she received lessons from us. In that time we also received some insights from her. On one occasion she told us of when she had come to work and found that her schedule had been changed without her knowledge: she would be starting an hour later that day than she thought. Because of her tight budget she decided to stay rather than go home and come back later.

While waiting for her shift to start she sat outside on a bench. Shortly thereafter a homeless man sat down beside her and began to talk. There wasn't much direction to it: He would talk about his current problems, then his childhood, then again to something else. And she listened, and she responded with words of comfort, with whatever she could give, and that she responded at all was comfort to him, to know that someone was listening for the first time in so long.

And she realized that she was acting as a proxy for Christ at that moment, that she was His hands there. We are all prodigals and sojourners from our eternal Home, but it wasn't until she related that story and her realized that I grasped that image in my mind and realized, myself, an aspect of His mission and how to follow Him in this aspect. Sometimes, to lift a burden, you just need to listen.

Your turn: When have you had opportunity to help someone with something little and only later realized how much they needed it?

Love is a celestial motivator

"Therefore, if you do not remember to be charitable, ye are as dross, which the refiners do cast out, (it being of no worth) and is trodden under foot of man." Alma 34:29

On an online community called Less Wrong, where folks try to improve the way that they think in order to be, well, less wrong, a returned missionary named Calcsam discussed his idea for the "governance structure" of a rationalist community whose members would, on a regular basis and in person rather than over the internet, support each other in all spheres. The entire thing was explicitly modeled after the LDS Church, right down to the manuals.

Less Wrong is a predominantly atheist community, notwithstanding the presence of such members as Calcsam, and one poster responded with something to the effect of "Sure, Mormons would sacrifice all that time and money to this kind of thing because of the perceived rewards and punishments, but atheists never would." I don't think that this is quite true, to begin with. A man named Eliezer Yudkowsky is the most prominent member of the community and himself an atheist. He is also someone that cares an awful lot about everybody, which fact hit me most strongly with a single sentence that Brother Yudkowsky used at the end of one of his blog posts: "I want you to live."

But this is merely the clearest expression of a love for others that I detect in Brother Yudkowsky across the board. He does not want any person to die or suffer, and he is willing to put in significant work to this end. You could argue that it is the purpose of his life's work, in fact. And that love, the potential to have which is part of our divine birthright, is why an atheist could do it. Fear shouldn't be a part of it, nor greed.

But this brings us to, well, us (that is, the LDS). Why do we do these things? I can't say for everyone, only myself, but even if I could there would be little point to doing so. What I want to do is ask. You see, there's no point to doing any of it if you don't do it out of love, and as Latter-day Saints we need to hold ourselves to as high of a standard as anyone else. When the two great commandments are centered on love, how can we think to get into the Celestial Kingdom of God by living for that purpose? That is to say, Jesus Christ lived not for the glory that we give Him but for others, and had He lived for the glory He would not be worthy of it. Similarly, our own motives must be not for reward but out of love, and so I ask you to look inside yourself and determine where you fall, and if necessary get onto the Lord's side of the line.

Fiction: They called him Judas, after the dagger

A soul met with Peter to thus sojourn with him at the gates of Heaven for a time. Their conversation came to turn to Judas, and the soul mentioned its pity for him, that he was cast into outer darkness for betraying the Son of Man.

And why these stories?

Follow-up to: Stories We Tell Each Other in the Dark

There are some stories that we tell to each other in the dark because they are scary, and we like to scare and be scared. There are some stories that we tell to each other in the dark because they are comforting, and in the dark we desire to be comforted, to know that there is light around the corner of midnight and that our dying campfire is not all there is.

These stories are of the second variety. We are real, tangible, flesh-and-bone entities with flesh-and-bone dreams. But we are also stories. Stories being told for our own comfort and for the comfort of other stories, who in turn are for our and their own comfort. 

These are Just So stories, It Gets Better stories, This Is Your Purpose stories. When God saw the darkness, He spoke, and order was forced upon the chaos. In the oldest stories that we have, God told a story and thereby created the universe. 

I don't consider myself up to par with God or even Terry Pratchett, but I am at heart a storyteller, even if one of dismal talent, and when I see a truth I feel a need to tell it with a story. They may not be stories of facticity, but that does not mean that they are not, so far as I am able to understand and express truth, stories of truth. 

But what IS a lie?

"And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God—he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God." 2 Nephi 28:8

But this talk of whether even white lies are acceptable: Of how much value is it if we aren't meaning the same thing when one of us says "lie" and the other hears it? I here term a lie as any deception, which is any act or failure to act whose motive is for another to draw a conclusion that does not create an accurate map of reality. A lie is not, however, a false statement which you honestly do not intend to be taken as fact. When Hemingway wrote novels he was not lying,because it was not a deception. 

If your wife asks "Does this make me look fat?" and you respond "What do you think?" with such a tone that your intention is for her to conclude that she looks so not-fat as to make the question pointless, when you do in fact think that the dress makes her look fat, then it is a lie. 

Indeed, those that dissect words and say "But technically I said nothing untrue" may be more untrustworthy than those that acknowledge the lie. If you acknowledge it, it should cause some mental distress, which should make you reluctant to do so. But if you do not, then you can potentially escape this consequence and be more inclined to speak what is technically the truth whenever it is to your advantage. If you use such weasel words as "technically" to defend yourself to others, then please be honest about what you are doing. And if you use them to defend yourself to yourself, then isn't it obvious that some part of you doesn't believe it? 

Is the "Noble Lie" Ever Noble?

"And the Lord said unto him: Believest thou the words which I shall speak? And he [the brother of Jared] answered: Yea, Lord, I know that thou speakest truth, for thou art a God of truth, and canst not lie." Ether 3:11-12

When is it ever proper to lie? The Egyptians believed "never," and quite firmly so. Though we gathered information from all manner of sources (ears, eyes, etc) we could transmit it only through speaking and writing, and oft were others required to rely on testimony for a time or forever. A lie, then, gave false information, which information was the basis for an individual's every action, which could make it impossible to act in the right manner. If those that are receiving false information through malfunctioning senses, such as those that hear voices in their heads, are insane, then lies can be said to make the hearer insane: The lie was the first step to the primordial chaos and the Logos, the true word, was the catalyst for creation.

Plato gives us the term "noble lie," which is a lie told for some good reason in an example of the belief that the ends justify the means. The noble lie is generally something very big but in principle could be a tiny thing, and many white lies probably fall into this category as a result.

Fichte remarked "I would not break my word even to save humanity." Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed out that if that were where your ethics ended, then nobody would believe you once the world were on the line. Similarly, if you lie about whether or not your wife looks fat in that dress, she can't trust your words on the matter, and will likely not trust your words on similar matters even if you do always speak truth on them. If you are not honest in all things then you are not fully honest, which means that in some situations you can't be trusted.

I am used to greasing the wheel with little white lies, and "simpler explanations" that replace the reason for a true fact with another, less wordy one (often entirely rewriting key points of my history for the sake of a shorter story, especially as I generally have to give it many times a week whenever I am eating with a new family). I can't do that anymore, "even to save humanity," or to save the feelings of a single person. I should know better than most that that doesn't help anyone, when I can be so suspicious of people that I ask outright for harsh criticism so that I know that that, at least, is true. Maybe I won't say what they want to hear, and maybe it won't be a big deal in that isolated incident, but if I want them to believe me when the truth is what they want to hear then I need to always do it. Even when the answer is "Yes, you look fat in that dress."

 I want to be able to say "I do not lie. No, not ever; that's the way that I get things done."

Fiction: Stories We Tell Each Other in the Dark

There was a couple and their children that I witnessed, sitting all together around a silent pit. The wind howled, and the trees shook, and the storm clouds gathered above them.