Nathaniel

Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site. Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children. In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.

The Stapledon Problem in Mormonism

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

We’re gonna start in a little bit of a strange place today, with an obscure (to most people) science fiction writer named Olaf Stapledon who lived from 1886 to 1950. One of Stapledon’s important works [ref]Important for the history of science fiction, anyway, and relevant to today’s General Conference musings, too.[/ref] is a book called Star Maker. According to Wikipedia:

The book describes a history of life in the universe, dwarfing in scale Stapledon’s previous book, Last and First Men (1930), a history of the human species over two billion years.

So, Last and First Men covered the history of the entire human species and spanned two billion years. And it was dwarfed by Star Maker.

This brings us to one of the perennial problems of science fiction. It was a problem for Olaf Stapledon writing before World War II, it was a problem for writers like Isaac Asimov grappling with his galaxy-spanning Foundation epic in the 1980s, and it’s still a tough one for contemporary stories like the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin, released in China from 2008-2010 and in the US from 2014-2016.

In his series of lectures, How Great Science Fiction Works, Gary K. Wolfe named the problem after Stapledon and described the problem this way:

…for all these mind-blowing vistas of deep space and deep time Stapledon invites us to ponder, how do you make a human-scaled story out of this with fully drawn characters and emotional reactions that a reader can relate to in some sort of traditional novelistic fashion?[ref]My own transcription of one of his lectures from The Great Courses[/ref]

Now, here’s the thing: this is not just a problem for science fiction.

Human beings live and breathe stories and narratives. Narratives, fundamentally, are the way we understand the universe around us. When we come to the biggest and most important questions of all—things like, What is the meaning of life? or What is truly good?—we frame our answers in terms of stories. The Gospel, what we call the Plan of Salvation, is delivered in terms of a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has heroes and villains. It has a climax and a resolution. And it also has a really, really large scope.

So if we want to understand the gospel narrative—if we want to grasp the Plan of Salvation—then we actually end up confronting the Stapledon Problem in our own scriptures.

If that sounds far-fetched or like a bit of a stretch, let me give you this concrete example. Have you ever heard an atheist mock religion using an argument that goes a little like this: “So,” our hypothetical atheist says, “You’re telling me that you believe the God who created the Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, and the entire Universe—containing billions more galaxies each with billions of planetary systems of their own—that God actually cares whether or not you say your prayers tonight?” This is the Stapledon Problem.

So let’s keep that in mind as we think about Elder Eldred G. Smith’s talk from the Sunday afternoon session of the April 1976 General Conference. Elder Smith cites President J. Reuben Clark:

And if you think of this galaxy of ours having within it from the beginning perhaps until now, one million worlds, and multiply that by the number of millions of galaxies, one hundred million galaxies, that surround us, you will then get some view of who this Man we worship is.

The Stapledon Problem in Mormonism is that we’re not really quite sure how to picture God in general and Christ in specific. On the one extreme, we have the Lorenzo Snow couplet:

As man now is, God once was:
As God now is, man may be.

The couplet itself has not been canonized, but the sentiment behind it is basically doctrinal.[ref]Reference for that would be the 1982 Ensign, in which Gerald N. Lund opens his discussion with, “To my knowledge there has been no “official” pronouncement by the First Presidency declaring that President Snow’s couplet is to be accepted as doctrine. But that is not a valid criteria for determining whether or not it is doctrine.” He ultimately concludes: “It is clear that the teaching of President Lorenzo Snow is both acceptable and accepted doctrine in the Church today.” The Ensign isn’t canon and so it can’t establish canon, but at a minimum this is a clear indication that the couplet is pretty deeply embedded in Mormon belief.[/ref]

This view of God is pretty radical, and it seems to envision God as basically a super-advanced sentient being, which is (ironically) the kind of God that even someone like notorious atheist Richard Dawkins could theoretically envision. He has said, for example:

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.[ref]From an interview with Sheena McDonald in 1995, via Wikiquote[/ref]

This kind of God—the one that seems to be implied by President Snow and that even Dawkins would grudgingly concede is theoretically plausible—is radically different from the God of historical Christianity, which Hugh Nibley has derisively referred to as “the God of philosophers.” That kind of God—the one “we need to explain the origin of the universe” would have to be the “unmoved mover” (to plunder Aristotle).

The trouble is, we believe in that kind of God, too. In the very same session, Elder L. Tom Perry spoke eloquently about this kind of God. Not one who perfectly follows the laws of nature, but a God who decides the laws of nature. Thus, after describing how God tilted the earth and started it spinning, Elder Perry mentions, “His physical laws,” which “are eternal and unchangeable.” He also emphasizes, “As man grows in his understanding of God’s physical laws, he can know with absolute assurance what the result will be if he conforms to those laws.”[ref]Emphasis added in both quotes.[/ref]

I am not trying to tell you that Elder Perry and President Snow contradicted each other. That is going too far. It is certainly possible to reconcile their statements. There are many views that could embrace both perspectives. But I am telling you that there is a tension between those two views, and that that tension pervades the way Mormons talk and think about God. Depending on who you talk to—and sometimes depending on when a person is talking—we emphasize either the facets of God that are most like us (for example, His ability to weep and be deeply impacted by the decisions of His children) are the facets of God that are most majestic and awe-inspiring and therefore least like us (such as his ability to set down the physical laws which govern the universe).

And this tension is the Stapledon Problem.

For science fiction authors, the question is: how do incorporate aeons and lightyears into stories that still have a meaningful place of human beings? How do you make such stories fun and accessible and comprehensible? Science fiction authors are, in the end, trying to entertain us.

The Gospel is obviously not a question of entertainment, but—because we understand it as a narrative—it faces the same problems of cohesion and coherence in the face of vastly disproportionate scopes. How do we reconcile a God who ignited the suns and breathed life into the first humans with praying to that God to find our lost keys? Or thinking that God cares about anything we pray about?

Since I’ve raised the issue, let me hazard a few words in closing. First, I do think it’s a bit silly to criticize people for praying to find their lost car keys. This has become a little fashionable as late, and you can find memes making fun of athletes who pray in thanks in the end zone. And, well, OK. That does seem a little ridiculous to me. Anyone who prays to God that their team will win a game is uttering the kind of prayer I simply cannot understand. But that’s because I don’t understand fanatical sports loyalty at all. But let’s set aside issues of weirdly sublimated ritualistic tribal warfare for another day. The point I’m driving at is that if we’re talking about the author of the universe, then the difference between praying for your car keys and—not to be too blunt about it—praying for your life seem like a rounding error. If the being who created a billion galaxies listens to individual prayers at all, then whether those prayers are for life or death or for car keys probably doesn’t really matter. I mean, a billion galaxies compared to your life and a billion galaxies compared to your car keys, aren’t they both about equally absurd? It’s like scoffing at the notion of Bill Gates stopping to pick up a penny but taking it for granted that obviously he’d stop to pick up a nickel.

Second, the Stapledon Problem is an expression of our limitations. It says we can’t picture a really epic scope—galaxies and eons—and keep our focus on the significance of an individual human being at the same time. That’s beyond our capacity to do, which is why science fiction writers have to come up with all kinds of clever ways to get around it,[ref]This usually involves putting their characters to sleep for a century or so every now and then and/or playing with relativity effects so that all the key players can be awake and present for the important events taking places across centuries of time and hundreds of light-years.[/ref] but nobody said it was beyond God’s ability.

After all, his thoughts are not our thoughts. He framed the sky above the earth, and He still cares when a sparrow falls from the latter to the former. We don’t know how He does it. But we can still believe, affirm, and even know that He does.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Gentle Practicality

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

In the Sunday morning session of the April 1976 GC, Elder Tanner talked about patriotism and stressed the importance of voting for honorable representatives:

…it is our duty to seek diligently for and support and uphold good, honest, honorable, and wise representatives to govern us.

Next, Elder Marvin J. Ashton spoke about families, and the need to be gentle, non-judgmental, and empathic.

One of the interesting things for me has been seeing the consistent personalities of some of the General Authorities from the 1970s that I never knew in my own lifetime. This wasn’t the first time Elder Tanner had stressed the need to vote based on character and honor, for example. And it was far from the first time that Elder Ashton had promulgated such a gentle, practical gospel. These themes go all the way back to one of the first talks I read in the GCO, his October 1971 talk Love of the Right where he stressed the importance of understanding why our young people are tempted by drugs instead of simply condemning those who become addicted:

If we as parents and friends advise our youth that drugs are bad, evil, and immoral, and yet we do not try to understand why our youth turn to this evil substitute for reality, then the drugs themselves become the issue and not the symptom of the greater issue of unhappiness. We need to know why our loved ones want to run from their present life to the unknown yet dangerous life of addiction. What causes a strong, lovely, vibrant young person to allow a chemical to control his or her behavior? What is there at home, school, work, or church that is so uncomfortable that an escape seems necessary?

This is a much more thoughtful approach than I had expected from a 1970’s era GC talk about drugs. And, in the year of reading since then, Elder Ashton has become one of my favorites. His talk from this session, Family Communications, is definitely worth reading. If we want to have meaningful communication within our families, this is what we must have:

  1. A willingness to sacrifice
  2. A willingness to set the stage
  3. A willingness to listen
  4. A willingness to vocalize feelings
  5. A willingness to avoid judgment
  6. A willingness to maintain confidences
  7. A willingness to practice patience

While explaining the fifth point, Elder Ashton quoted a familiar scripture in a way that was totally new to me. He described a son’s heartache when, moments after his father passed away in a hospital, his mother told him that his father had loved him. Later on, as he cried alone in the hospital room, a nurse tried to console him. The son wanted to tell the nurse:

“‘I’m not crying because my father is dead. I’m crying because my father never told me that he was proud of me. He never told me that he loved me. Of course, I was expected to know these things. I was expected to know the great part I played in his life and the great part I occupied of his heart, but he never told me.’”

Then Elder Ashton quoted Matthew 3:17 in a way I’d never heard before:

How significant are God’s words when he took the time to vocalize his feelings with, “This is my beloved Son,” yes, even the powerful communication, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

I always assumed that Heavenly Father’s introduction of His Son was exclusively for our benefit. It never occurred to me, until this moment, that the Father was not only delivering a message to us (“Hey, listen up.”) but also to His Son (“I love you and I appreciate you.”)

That changes things.

And it’s a pretty good example of how I’ve come to love and value Elder Ashton’s unique, gentle, and practical perspective. He became an apostle almost a decade before I was born. He died when I was a young man. I must have heard at least one of his talks in General Conference, but I have no memory of him whatsoever. I’m sad I missed him, but I’m glad I still have his words to read.

One day, when my time here is done, I will thank him in person.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Family First, Church Second

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

This is a principle that I have long suspected is true, but have not seen stated plainly very often. I think that’s because it’s an easy principle to misunderstand. God is the God of Nature. That’s true. But the idea that you can worship as easily in the woods as you can in the pews is false. It takes one true principle—God is the God of Nature—but forgets another—we are saved together and not alone. The important part of going to church is not the building or the pews.[ref]Anyone who has seen our pathologically ugly cinder-block meeting houses intuits this at once.[/ref] It is the other people sharing the building and the pews next to us.

Same basic idea here: the church exists to serve the family and not the other way around, but—perhaps—there’s a risk of the teaching being used as a rationalization to shirk responsibility that need not be shirked. In any case, I highlighted an awful lot of Elder H. Burke Peterson’s talk, with passages like this:

May I suggest that many of us have lost sight of one of the most important reasons for our holding the priesthood. To be an effective teachers quorum president, elders quorum president, bishop, or counselor is important—we spend many hours in training these officers. To perform the vital priesthood ordinances is essential. But even more important than all these is the need to learn how to use the priesthood to bless our families and homes.[Emphasis added. Then added some more.[/ref]

There’s always a risk of taking a single passage—or even a single talk—and making too much of it. One of the major reasons for this entire General Conference is precisely to avoid that. To see a large volume of prophetic preaching in context. But I don’t think I’m stretching too far because the centrality of the family is a central teaching across all the conferences we’ve read, even if it’s not always expressed in such start terms. Elder Peterson goes on:

If we live for it, ours can be a power given us from our Heavenly Father that will bring peace to a troubled household. Ours can be a power that will bless and comfort little children, that will bring sleep to tear-stained eyes in the wee hours of the morning. Ours can be the power that will bring happiness to a family home evening, the power to calm the unsettled nerves of a tired wife. Ours can be the power that will give direction to a confused and vulnerable teenager. Ours, the power to bless a daughter before she goes on her first date or before her temple marriage, or to bless a son before his departure for a mission or college.

Let me emphasize: these are not suggestion for auxiliary or optional exercise of priesthood power. This is it. Actions like these—the service of our family—is the whole point. It’s the rest—the Church and all its ordinances—that are appendages to the family, and not the other way around. Families are not God’s preferred method of raising new church members. The Church is an instrument by which God intends to reclaim His family. Or, as Elder Peterson puts it:

When we have the power to bless families in some of the ways mentioned, then we are using this God-given authority for its most exalted purpose—to bind family ties and perform priesthood ordinances that will endure through the eternities.[ref]Emphasis added.[/ref]

That—brothers and sisters—is what it’s all about. The whole point. I don’t think we get it. And I think the failure to grasp the correct priority, family then Church, is a major contributing factor leading to misunderstanding of so many of the moral issues where well-intentioned members are hoping for changes from the Church that, frankly, will never come.[ref]I have no grounds to make that claim authoritatively. I’m simply expressing my view of the implications of the theological primacy of the family in conjunction with the Church’s repeatedly-demonstrated willingness to fight and die on this particular hill.[/ref]

So, where does this lead? One more quote to leave on:

He who has developed the power and uses it to do the things we have mentioned will honestly consider the righteous desires of his family, even though they may not be exactly the same as his. He will listen to those in his home with the same attention he would give a priesthood leader. He will listen—even to the smallest child.

He will put his family’s welfare ahead of his own comfort.

He will learn to control himself. He will not use a quick temper as an excuse—he will rise above it. It needn’t always be with him.

He will understand that a soft answer turneth away wrath. His voice will never be heard in anger in his home; he will never punish in anger.

As one of his most significant attributes, he who has developed this priesthood power will not only by his thoughts but also by his actions give honor, respect, and dignity to the loveliest of the Lord’s creations—his daughters.

God knows I desperately wish my wife and my children could have a husband and father like the man described here. Since they’re stuck with me instead, it is my greatest desire to become that man.[ref]My second-greatest desire is for them to be able to forgive me for who I am in the meantime. My third-greatest desire is to be a world-famous author.[/ref]

I believe Jesus can fix what is broken, find what is lost, heal what is sick, and sanctify what is unholy. He has performed miracles with clay before. This is my faith: that He can do so again. If I can just learn how to let Him.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

An Upside to Trump?

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It’s no secret that I was, am, and will remain #NeverTrump. But two stories I saw today made me think of a possible upside to the Trump presidency.

Now, I’m not saying Coulter is turning on Trump because he endangers our relationships with allies by handing over intel that has been trusted to us to a third-party without permission[ref]And not just any third-party, but our strategic opponent in Syria![/ref]. She’s mad he hasn’t built that wall yet or what-not.

Still, the depth, breadth, and stunning intricacy of Trump’s incompetence is such that all those who backed him–the Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys of the world–may take a serious, serious hit as Trump’s once bright star turns into a screaming, self-annihilating meteor crashing from the heavens.[ref]Let’s just hope it’s small enough not to take us all with it, yeah?[/ref]

This occurred to me today as I was driving around after 7pm when NPR has started playing weird jazz instead of news and talk, and so I flipped to AM radio and hear Sean Hannity. I’ve always disliked Hannity–even when I was at my right-wingiest–but tonight was different. I only caught a few minutes, but he was interviewing a guest about Hillary Clinton and (as far as I could tell) her emails.

Seriously. In 2017. With the election over. And Trump as president. And he was talking about Hilary. Clinton’s. Emails.

If that’s not the definition of sad irrelevance, I don’t know what is. The fever-swamp of paranoid right-wing alternative media conspiracy theory peddlers is a major reason we ended up with Trump. The idea that he takes a few of them down when he falls has a pleasing symmetry. Oh, I’m sure his hard core will praise him until the end, but their audiences will be much, much smaller.

Or so we can hope.

An Antidote for Smugness

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Suppose Frank and Joe get into a Facebook debate, and suppose Frank knows a lot more about the issue over which they’re disagreeing. Neither one of them is really an expert, but Frank has read a lot more and maybe even has some sort-of relevant background. The longer the discussion goes, the more he realizes that Joe doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

Let’s give Frank the benefit of the doubt. He’s not just a victim of confirmation bias. Joe really doesn’t know that much about the issue, it’s evident in what he’s written, and Frank’s assessment on that score is accurate.

So, naturally, this can lead Frank to feel a little smug, and smugness is toxic. It’s a poison that clouds our thinking, alienates us from people who could be our friends, and fuels arrogance and pride.

Frank is self-aware enough to realize that he’s having this reaction, but–as it turns out–there’s more to good character than just being able to recognize your own bad behavior. It’s good to suppress an angry outburst, for example, but it’s even better to overcome the anger itself. Controlling behavior is nice, but shaping character is better. Unfortunately, character can’t be shaped directly. We have to come at it sideways and ambush our own bad character traits when they least suspect it. We have to–wherever possible–cheat.

So here’s an idea.

The reason that Frank knows more than Joe about this issue is that Frank took the time to research it. He read dozens of articles. Joe didn’t, and so Joe doesn’t know as much. Instead of attributing his superiority in this one realm to some kind of personal attribute, Frank should ask himself: “What was Joe doing with the time I used to study this issue?”

 

Maybe Joe is lazy, and Joe was just watching reality TV show reruns. Maybe Joe is actually very curious and diligent, and was using the same amount of time studying some totally unrelated topic which–if they discussed it–would quickly demonstrate to Frank what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t really get it. Or maybe Joe wasn’t  studying, but he uses his time volunteering to make his neighborhood a better place.

It doesn’t really matter, because–in practice–Frank will never know. The point of the question is to ask it, because asking it reframes the context of Frank’s smugness. It’s not about some kind of overall, general superiority of intellect. It’s about the simple fact that Frank spent time studying a particular issue, and Joe didn’t. This is a smugness antidote. On top of dispelling the person-to-person comparison, it raises questions for Frank, such as: Was studying this particular issue really that wise an expenditure of his finite time and energy? Maybe it was, but maybe it wasn’t, all things considered. This should make Frank a little uneasy. That’s healthy. Certainly fair healthier than smugness, at any rate.

I am not a very good person. This isn’t a statement of false humility. I suspect, all things considered, that I’m probably about average by most comparisons with others, although I’ll never really be sure.[ref]Assuming that I’m average seems a good rule of thumb, all things considered.[/ref] But that’s not the point. I don’t care about comparing myself with others; I care about the gap between who I am and who I’d like to be. And the person I’d like to be doesn’t have to devise strategies for decency or play tricks on himself to mimic virtue. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not a very good person.

But we don’t get to choose the kind of person we are. Not in an instant, anyway. We come into this world with a load of genetic and environmental baggage that, by the time we get around to being thinking, self-aware little human creatures, is already more than we could ever hope to sort through in a life time. All we can ever do is start where we are. Hopefully we make incremental steps in the right direction, but human character can’t be perfect in a life time. There’s the old expressions, “fake it ’till you make it.” We’re never going to make it. So we just have to keep faking it. Play-acting at being a good person–when it’s done out of a sincere desire to learn to be good–is the best we can hope for.

This is one technique I try to remind myself to use in that game, and I thought I’d share it.

Failing Forward

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Jesus walks on water, by Ivan Aivazovsky (1888, Public Domain)

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I stopped reading the conference talks of the Saturday afternoon session when I got to Elder Maxwell’s talk, because I’ve learned that Maxwell talks are meant to be savored. His testimonies of Christ are always sincere, and are often frequently provocative in the best sense of the word. If you’re a Mormon adult, you’ve heard a lot of talks about Jesus. Like, a lot. So finding something new to say—without being trivial or silly—is hard. And also refreshing, when you find someone who can do it.

Of all the lines I highlighted from the talk—and there are a lot of them—here is the passage that meant the most to me:

I thank him now for the tender times, the jarring times, the perplexing times, and even for the times when my learning is so painfully public—lest in such moments to come I am too taxed to testify or too anguished to appreciate. [emphasis added]

I can’t fully explain why this passage means so much to me. I hope one day I can. For now, the best I can do is say that I love something about the idea that we recognize when our ideals outstrip our capacity, and we choose to fail forwards anyway. That is, I think, the quality I aspire to more than any other in life, and the one that affects me most deeply. It’s why I love the song, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” with that line, “Bind my wandering heart to thee.” It’s why I love Peter jumping overboard to walk on water, and then nearly drown. It’s even why I love this seemingly incongruous quote from Kurt Vonnegut, the most meaningful literary quote of my life so far:

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.

I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience — the accidental one.

So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, “He’s up in Heaven now.” Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.

My epitaph in any case? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.” I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on

Let me give you just a little context for this Vonnegut quote. Vonnegut, as anyone who has read his books will know, was not a happy man. He was, in many ways, obsessed with the incomprehensible pain of life. That comes through in the quote a little bit, but maybe not enough if you’re not already familiar with Vonnegut. He is, after all, talking about laughing hysterically at a memorial service for a dead friend. He also mentions a near-death experience that was “the accidental one,” implying non-accidental near-death experiences. And there was one, he tried to kill himself in 1984. Other tragic experiences in his life include his World War II combat experience (his unit was overrun in the Battle of the Bulge with 500 KIA and 6,000 captured, on his to a prison camp his train was attacked by British planes killing 150 prisoners, and as a prisoner he was a witness to the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden) and his mother committing suicide on Mother’s Day weekend when he was visiting on leave. Vonnegut was not a happy man, and yet his epitaph? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.”

This is failing forward. It is aspiration beyond capacity, and knowingly so. It is the same kind of devotion that Elder Maxwell is talking, the same commitment to an idealism we know we cannot accomplish. The only real difference is that in Vonnegut’s case the aspiration is somewhat abstract while in Maxwell’s case it is reified in the person of Jesus Christ. But the underlying motivation—the willingness to fail forward, to shoot for the moon even though you know you’ll go down in flames, to eek every ounce of idealism out of our exhausted and overwhelmed selves—is the same.

I don’t know if I’ll ever accomplish anything genuinely good or useful in my entire life, but I hope I can do that. I hope I can say—along with Vonnegut—that everything was beautiful. That nothing hurt. That I got off light.[ref]That part is true.[/ref] And I will strive to pray—along with Maxwell—in gratitude for even the experiences that hurt while I’m capable of doing so, knowing that because of my own weakness I might not always be able to form the words.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

The Challenge Matches the Reward

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A Hopeless Dawn 1888 Frank Bramley 1857-1915 Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1888 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N01627

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

President Spencer W. Kimball:

You will find so-called Mormonism to be a growing, vibrant, dynamic, and challenging church, indeed a way of life, touching upon every avenue of living, every facet of life.

What an interesting way to describe the church: “challenging.” Other words you could pick include: demanding, exacting, and strict. From the same talk:

Prophets say the same things because we face basically the same problems. Brothers and sisters, the solutions to these problems have not changed. It would be a poor lighthouse that gave off a different signal to guide every ship entering a harbor. It would be a poor mountain guide who, knowing the safe route up a mountainside, took his trusting charges up unpredictable and perilous paths from which no traveler returns.

There are a lot of people who wish that the Church would changes its message on fundamental matters of morality. It’s not going to happen. The challenge, the demand, the exacting expectations are here to stay. Discipleship is difficult by design.

President Monson described how, “for [those] who have loved and lost dear ones, each dawn is hopeless,” this being “the experience of those who regard the grave as the end and immortality as but a dream.”

Against this darkness, President Monson contrasts the reality of a literal resurrection:

This is the knowledge that sustains. This is the truth that comforts. This is the assurance that guides those bowed down with grief out of the shadows and into the light.

There are many who see Christianity—perhaps all religion—as a kind of cosmic bribe. If you are good, then you can have a reward. I understand the misperception, but it is misperception. The deliberate difficulty of the discipleship is not some arbitrary test for which divine blessings are meted out, like a trainer putting a dog through an obedience course.

But there is a symmetry. It is simply not the symmetry of a barter or exchange or tit-of-tat. It is the deeper symmetry or resonance. Discipleship is part of a shaping process that fundamental changes who we are, and prepares us to recognize, receive, and appreciate the blessings God has prepared for His children.

It is less, “If you are good, you can have something nice,” and more “If you strive to become good, you will—with God’s help—become good; and the truly good truly experience joy.”

The apparently transactional nature of the relationships is an illusion, but the symmetry is not. The challenge matches the reward. Much is asked; much is given.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Our Hearts Are Filled With Songs Of Forever

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

So, you’ll have to forgive me, but I got out of synch with the General Conference this week (and last). Last week, I wrote about the Welfare session (instead of the Sunday afternoon session) and so this week I’m writing about the Sunday afternoon session) instead of the welfare session. My bads! We’ll all be on the same page again starting next Tuesday (May 2) when we cover the Saturday morning session of the April 1976 General Conference.

I really liked this passage from President Kimball’s concluding talk, Spoken From Their Hearts. After summarizing several of the talks from the October 1975 GC, he said:

I wish there were time to mention some of the other wonderful sermons, because it helps me to summarize these things and decide what I have heard, what I want to retain, what I want to do something about.

I like this passage because it is—in many ways—a kind of mission statement for the General Conference Odyssey. This whole shebang got started when I and a few others got to thinking: if the General Conferences are really the words of living prophets and apostles, then we should be familiar with them. Going back and reading through them is good, but it’s also the writing we do that helps us “decide what [we’ve] hear, what [we] want to retain, what [we] want to do something about.”

One of the talks that President Kimball called out in particular was Elder Featherstone’s But Watchman, What of the Night? The topic of that one was patriotism and—as Mormonism is a famously American religion—you might think that it was about American patriotism. But I went back and checked, and it isn’t. From that talk:

We need to feel the thrill and sensation and have the swellings within our bosom about this country. The priesthood of God should be an example of patriotism and loyalty to our country. As I talk about the United States of America, each one should consider his homeland, his flag, and his country. [emphasis added]

Mormons believe in being part of the community we find ourselves in, and in contributing to whatever society we’re a part of. American Mormons should be loyal American patriots, Mexican Mormons should be loyal Mexican patriots, and so on across the globe. Patriotism is in our blood and tradition, yes, but it’s also just a temporary condition. This Earth is not our real home. It’s like Dustin Kensrue sings in Thrice’s song “In Exile”:

I am a pilgrim – a voyager; I won’t rest until my lips touch the shore –
Of the land that I’ve been longing for as long as I’ve lived,
Where there’ll be no pain or tears anymore.

My heart is filled with songs of forever –
Of a city that endures, where all is made new.
I know I don’t belong here; I’ll never
Call this place my home, I’m just passing through.

That message doesn’t contradict Elder Featherstone’s call for patriotism. It might seem hard to reconcile the two, but this gets much easier when you throw Elder George P. Lee’s talk, My Heritage Is Choice, into the mix:

You might as well realize that we are all going to the same place. As an Indian I will not find an Indian reservation in paradise. As a Hopi, you will not find a Hopi reservation. As a Japanese you will not find Japan in paradise. As Chinese, you will not find China in paradise. Let’s live together as children of God. We are all brothers and sisters. We will all go to the same place if we are righteous, and if we endure to the end. There is no United States, there is no Navajo reservation, nor any way of life, except God’s, in paradise.

We’re patriots while we’re here, because building and maintaining communities is important. We take that role seriously, just as we take a lot of our Earthly tasks seriously. But the Earthly tasks—whether it’s being a good patriot or a good accountant—are never the final point. They’re just stepping stones to something higher. We all sing the respective national anthems of our home countries with genuine pride, but when we sing the heavenly anthems we feel something even deeper.

Our hearts are filled with songs of forever.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

A Pragmatic Zion

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Ephraim Moses Lilien, Zion, 1903. (Public Domain)

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I forgot that—after the Sunday afternoon session—the October 1975 General Conference had one more session to go: the welfare session. And this, my friends, is the most quintessentially Mormon thing ever.

Back in the day, my father[ref]Terryl Givens. He and my mum are kind of a big deal.[/ref] said in a PBS interview:

One of the hallmarks of Mormonism, and of Joseph Smith in particular, is the collapse of sacred distance. Joseph insistently refused to recognize the distinctness of those categories that were typical in traditional Christianity, the sense that there is an earthly and a heavenly, a bodily and a spiritual.

That stubborn refusal to see any distinction between spiritual and the physical, the practical and the ideal, the holy and the mundane, is one of the most distinctive attributes of Mormon faith, and also one of my favorite. We’re relentlessly effective at finding the sacred in basically everything. We’re as universalistic in our aspirations to find holiness everywhere as we are in our plans to save all mankind.

And so it is that we’ve got an entire session of General Conference dedicated to such mundane concerns as how to pick a career, the importance of budgeting, and the necessity of having enough food storage on hand. And yet at the same time, there’s the stubborn insistence that working out the nuts and bolts of practical self-sufficiency is a stepping stone towards reaching Zion.

I love it in part because it’s just deliciously paradoxical, and paradoxes are fun. But that’s at best an adolescent appreciation. There’s nothing deep or lasting in that regard.

What matters to me more is this: the only kind of Zion that could ever be realized—in practice—is one that is fundamentally pragmatic in conception. If anyone could ever build the kin of society we believe a Zion society to be—one with no distinction between rich and poor, and where the people are united in heart and mind—it would be practical people, willing to take every mundane step necessary in pursuit of their heavenly aspiration.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

On the United Debacle and Deliberation

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By now you’ve all heard about United Airlines forcibly removing David Dao from a flight. That happened on Sunday, April 9th,  and so over the past few days we’ve had time for the first-round “analysis” (United is the devil incarnate) along with the second-round “analysis” (United is angelic) and even quite a lot of third-round “analysis” (capitalism is the devil). But we’re only just now starting to get the kinds of analysis that don’t deserve the Bunny Quotes of Shame.[ref]Apparently this not a real thing. But, like the CAPS LOCK OF ANGRY, ANGRY DOOM, it should be.[/ref]

Or you could call them the Air Quotes of Shame, I guess.

Newsweek is running one of the first of these analyses, and it concludes that United may actually have violated their own contract when they forcibly removed Dao from his seat. The contract allows them to prevent passengers from boarding in the event of an oversold flight, but the problem is that the flight wasn’t oversold (for one) and that Dao was kicked off after boarding rather than being denied boarding (for another).[ref]Overselling is a common practice in the airline industry. Since out of a few hundred people who are buy tickets at least a couple won’t show up, the airlines sell a couple more seats than they have tickets to ensure their planes are as full as possible. However in this case, it wasn’t a matter of overselling, but rather of four United employees who needed to hitch a ride.[/ref] There are also provisions for kicking someone off a plan after they’ve boarded, but none of those provisions appear to apply in this case, either.

This is far from the last word. Jens David Ohlin, who wrote the piece, is a lawyer who’s read the contract, but he’s relying for his facts on news reports of what happened. He doesn’t have any more access to the facts than the rest of us. The “last word” is probably months or even years away, at the end of one or more lawsuits.

I wrote this post because I thought Ohlin’s analysis was interesting. But also because the whole “first post” syndrome is interesting in its own right. Over a decade ago, I spent way too much time on Slashdot.[ref]I just had to check to see if it still exists. It does.[/ref] It’s a social news site–kind of like a pre-Reddit with only one forum and centered on tech–and one of the little oddities is that whenever a new topic was posted there was an immediate rush of utterly useless replies that said only “first post” (or intentional misspellings thereof, sometimes with vulgar and offensive commentary added in for trollish fun.) The replies were utterly useless, the Slashdot filtering algorithms almost always rendered them invisible for most users, but still there were actual human beings out there who either frantically typed and clicked to try and earn that first post privilege or, perhaps more depressingly, spent their time writing macros or scripts to win the prize for them.

Well, the initial reactions to the United debacle–as with all such controversies–are basically wordier versions of the same thing, just content-free “first post” declarations. Don’t get me wrong, some of them were hilarious. The memes were great. (And some of the Slashdot first posts, every now and then, were funny too.) But nobody knew what they were talking about. Seriously, nobody. As far as I can tell, 5 days later, we’re just starting to get analysis that isn’t a total waste of time to read. So, referring to all the blog posts over the past few days, why do people write this stuff? Why does anyone read it?

Those are kind of dumb questions. People read this nonsense because they’re curious and impatient. And people write it because they want attention. I’m not immune. In 2015 I wrote two hot-take pieces[ref]Here’s one. Here’s another.[/ref] because I wanted to catch that viral wave. They were both shared widely on Facebook, but I noticed from the stats that only the headline of the first was shared. Practically nobody clicked the link to read my post. And on the second, as more facts came to light I realized my “analysis” had been exactly the kind of facile, self-righteous rush to judgment I usually deplored.

I had another encounter with hot-take fame earlier this year when I wrote a fairly negative review of the newest book in The Expanse series. I listened to the book right after it came out, wrote a review like I always do, posted it, and then was perplexed to see comments and likes start pouring in. It turns out that–just like with news stories–whoever gets the first reviews out for a new book gets the most attention. This is why there are so many people who cheat and write “reviews” weeks or months before the book actually comes out.[ref]Some of them have ARCs–advanced reader copies–but it’s obvious that most do not.[/ref] And–also just like with news stories–the hot takes break down into simplistic takes: 4- or 5- star raves and 2- or 1- star slams. As of right now, my review appears to still be at the top of the list of over 800 reviews. I doubt it would have done so well if I’d published the review later or published it with 3-stars.

So I get it, the temptation to write and to read rapid reactions is strong. But it’s also–usually–a waste of time. We can get more accurate info and more reliable, interesting analysis if we can just wait a few days. And if enough people do that, maybe we can find a way to curb first post syndrome.