Stunning

Elder Maxwell gave two BYU devotionals (that I'm aware of). One was in 1990. The other was in 2004. He looked quite different in the two. Understandably. The one in 2004 was given 4 months before he died of leukemia.

The themes of these two devotionals were quite different, but a significant point he made in both involved the nature of God. Put his intellect together with Elder Scott's particle-physics background and you get an insight into the nature of God that is shocking. It is similar to the insight to which I have belatedly become aware and which I have mentioned in the last few blogs.

Elder Maxwell calls this insight "stunning."

I called it terrifying.

That this insight keeps coming up in scripture, in prophetic writings, and in journals is attested to by common scriptural description of the discomfort and even terror of the wicked as they are brought before God. They will want mountains to fall upon them to hide them from His glory. And the oft-quoted statements from early 19th century brethren that if an angel were to appear in their room, they would be out the window in an instant even if it meant leaping to their deaths.

These brethren had a very clear view of the nature of God and His glorified servants.

As mentioned in recent blogs, this insight has bothered me. It makes me nervous. It scares me. I've never been scared of Heavenly Father before. To whom am I praying? To whom have I prayed for 70 years? How dare I?

With relief, I grasped at the image of Christ. He's definitely loving, gentle, accessible. He reaches out a comforting arm and puts it around my shoulders. He encourages me. He draws me into his presence in intense love. All of this is enabled by the atonement -- by the way he sacrificed his own life to save me.

Amazing grace.

And he is just like God, the Father. God, the Father -- stunning, terrifying -- is just like him.

It is comfort.

If I could believe it.

God is infinity. Infinity of power. Infinity of energy. Infinity of complexity. Infinity of perception. Infinity of knowledge.

All in a man-sized being. Composed of tightly encapsulated infinitesimals of energy -- an infinite number of infinitesimals -- each comprising the mass and energy of an entire universe.

Infinite universes in a finite man-sized being.

A mathematical concept.

It is only mathematically that we are able to characterize this. Intellectually, it is beyond us. As is the case in so many areas of nature. Einstein looked at his math and his eyes went wide and his jaw dropped. Incomprehensible. Among the first incomprehensibles of the 20th and 21st century.

And there it hit me. A solution to my discomfort, my terror, my inability to believe that such a God is approachable -- that He is truly like Christ, His son.

Mathematically.

God has be be absolutely humble and meek. He has to be. Mathematically. Because if He has the slightest, tiniest, non-zero portion of vindictiveness -- or whatever else the opposite of humble and meek may be -- multiplying this by infinity creates a catastrophe. A demon. A devil.

The only thing you can multiply infinity by -- without creating a catastrophe -- is zero. A singularity.

Ergo God is absolutely humble and absolutely meek. His declaration that "I am a jealous God," the description of us being subject to the "judgements of God," His raining down fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, the destruction on this continent that accompanied the Crucifixion of His son -- all those things are for our instruction and tutoring, and a reflection of His mercy. He will bring to end the doings of the wicked so that they will require no further reconciliation. He will bless us as greatly as it is possible for us to be blessed and He will punish us a little as it is possible for us to be punished.

And we are to become like Him -- and through the atonement, we shall become like Him -- equally humble and meek.

Lost Language of Symbolism

I'm reading Gaskill's book. The unimaginable is represented and made conceivable by expressing it in symbols. Symbols touch upon the abstract. Concrete objects expressing abstract concepts.

"How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings." Feet upon land represent ownership. Feet upon mountains represent ownership of the world. Mountains represent temples. Temples represent the universe. Ownership of the universe. Symbolism within symbolism. Concept within concept. Take the terrifying and make it comforting. Allow us to grasp it. Become familiar with it. Become comfortable with it. Become grateful for it. Become idolizing servants to it. To Him. A circle returning us to the beginning, only now with a bit of understanding.

And the Lord made coats of skins and clothed them. Lambs' skins. The lamb is the symbol of Christ. They were enclosed in the protection of Christ. With what reverence, what confidence, what love we enclose ourselves. Infinite power. Protecting us. Depending on our faithfulness.

What is Reality? Truly?

God is truly terrifying. The image of God described in my last post has shaken my confidence in His presence. It's increased my faith. His ability to manipulate matter and energy, space and time is infinite. His ability to perceive and understand is infinite. He knows everything. He can do anything. But the image is terrifying. When I am brought to stand before Him and be judged, will I be totally freaked out? Will I seek to flee from Him, wish the mountains would fall upon me to hide me from His presence?

Quite possibly. Not inconceivably.

Christ is identical.

Width can be rotated into depth and height into width depending on the location and orientation of the POV (point of view). Einstein's relativity shows that time can be rotated into any of these dimensions and any of them into time depending on location and orientation (and relative velocity) of the POV. Physics shows evidence of as many as eleven dimensions, each infinite, each can be planes packed infinitely close or encapsulated infinitesimally tiny in the next higher dimension and can exist in infinite number. Infinities of infinitesimals, inimaginable.

God is terrifying.

Christ is identical.

Christ is an image of love. Of gentle consideration. Of washing the feet of His disciples -- a token of servitude.

God is love.

Is this world an egg? Are we wormy embryos? Is this entire universe, 14 billion light-years wide, packed with immense quantities of matter and energy, simply an extravagant nest for this one little egg? Why not? Our heavenly parents have access to any quantity of mass and energy, space and time. As we develop from embryos to adolescents to adults, how much mass, energy, space, and time will we need to become educated adults?

"Worlds without end have we created." Each an egg? Each in it's own finite 14-billion-light-year-wide nest? Why not? If we dare imagine infinity and know that our imagination is woefully naive and tiny, what is reality? Truly?

"My ways are higher than your ways...

...and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:9)

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." (Arthur Stanley Eddington)

"Is that what you think about during the endowment?!" (Carolyn Head)

OK, so lets get a few things out of the way -- amazing though they are, they're science. No fiction here. No fantasy.

E=MC²

Everyone knows that equation. Right? The basis for nuclear bombs. It means that if all the energy in my little fingernail were to be released at once, it would be an explosion comparable to a nuclear blast. If all the energy in my body were to be released at once, it would be comparable to hundreds of simultaneous detonations of the largest nuclear bombs the US is thought to possess or dozens of simultaneous detonations of the largest nuclear bombs Russia is thought to possess.

That's what E=MC² says. It's not science fiction.

Ok, the significant word here is "if." We haven't figured out how to do that yet. Nuclear bombs release only a tiny portion of the energy in a very small part of a very tiny percentage of the atoms. That's enough. If we could improve the efficiency just a tiny bit more, the effect would be devastating. God forbid that we ever learn how.

The Big Bang Theory

OK, it's a "theory," but it's pretty well acknowledged. The evidence supporting it continues to grow. We think we know what the universe was like right back to 10^-43 seconds after the big bang started when all the energy and mass in the entire known universe was in a particle only 10^-35 meters in diameter. That's smaller than even the most powerful microscopes could see. There is serious controversy, but it involves conditions in the first few seconds of the life of the universe, not so much in the big-bang, itself, or that it started tiny!

OK, so now we've gotten the you-gotta-be-kidding out of the way. People might say that what I'm going to record next is deep, mysterious, far out, and, by definition, should not be preached. "Let's stick to faith, repentance, etc., and not get carried away with the mysteries."

Ha! My take is that we already have the deep, mysterious, and far out, and they seem to be valid. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take these apparent difficult-to-understand-but-apparently-valid "mysteries" and relate them to the gospel?

I think so.

So here goes.

These are all things we've heard all our lives and we accept them because we've heard them all our lives:

God has a body. His glory would consume us if we were in His presence and unprotected. Christ has a light that permeates the universe. It is the light of the stars, etc. When we die and are separated from our bodies for a time, we will consider this separation to be a prison.

Why the latter? Let's start with it. Why would we consider separation from these corruptible bodies to be anything but a liberation? Joseph Smith says that spirit matter is a fine matter (as in wispy, insubstantial matter), but it's still matter. There's no such thing as immaterial material. How big an explosion would you get if you released all the energy in a spirit body. Not much, I expect. We interact very nicely with the things of this universe because out bodies are tightly encapsulated packets of incredible amounts of energy. If spirit bodies are so much more insubstantial with so much less matter, they are much less able to interact with very much in this universe. No wonder spirits consider their disembodied state to be a prison after having had the experience of being able to interact with so much.

But God and Christ have bodies. How much energy is encapsulated in their bodies? As much as a star? As an entire galaxy? As the entire universe? As many universes? Remember that 10^-35 meter particle that contained all the energy in the universe? We have no idea what things were like when the universe was younger and smaller than this. Infinitesimal? That's how it's described. What if God's body was composed of such infinitesimals? Perhaps his body encapsulates an infinite amount of energy.

Perhaps it is the source of all energy of the universe and however many other such universes.

And people think the idea of God having a body restricts Him some way.

They don't understand physics.

But then neither do any of us -- including the physicists.

And, to the extent that the laws of physics helps us to imagine any of this -- the actual universe, the actual reality, the actual nature of God, ourselves, and this wonderful universe home of ours -- reality, that we can't imagine, that it's not possible to imagine, is likely to be much more glorious and wonderful than that. Perhaps infinitely more.

Humility

In the most recent "Spoken Word," what's-his-name quoted a rabbi (I've forgotten his name, too): "Humility is knowing that everything's not about you." That created an epiphany for me. If everything is about someone, it must be about God. He's the ultimate reality. That makes our joys and miseries, our successes and failures, our glories and shames pretty much insignificant. The only thing we can do is fill the hole into which God has stuck us and do it as competently as possible. In that way we can share a tiny portion of His joy, success, and glory.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Is that true? Someone famous (don't remember who) wrote a short story suggesting that this well-known and oft-quoted saying is not necessarily true.

In the story, a man was shipwrecked on an island and discovered that the people who lived there were blind. I will be king here, he thought. It didn't quite turn out that way. He learned that people do not like someone who appears to be cocky and arrogant. They don't like to be given advice they don't ask for. They don't accept information that disagrees with their prejudices. They especially don't like it when someone catches them in illegal acts. The community, who in the beginning received him warmly and kindly, came to consider him to be an anti-social trouble maker and decided to surgically remove his eyes.

This has a moral for both sides. I'll leave that to the reader to determine what they are. This ties in with our "humility" theme.

Eyring and the Three Nephites

More than once Elder Eyring has talked about humility in the sense of purification-of-motives. It's clearly a topic which worries him.

He's a great speaker. I love to hear him talk. I suspect he gets a lot of praise for his talks, and he is tempted to speak in order to get that praise rather than to serve the Lord. That worries him. That's why he expresses his concerns publicly. Such expression is cathartic. It helps him to clarify both the concerns and the possible strategies for addressing them.

I recently read through the BofM where Mormon and Moroni talk about the three Nephites. "They will be among the gentiles and the gentiles will know them not. They will be among the Jews and the Jews will know them not" (3 Nephi 28:27-28). And, of course, both Mormon and Moroni were looking to our day. For them, the entire population of the world would be divided into these two groups and everyone would be a member of one or the other. So that means that the three Nephites will be anywhere in the world and no one will know them.

These three gentlemen are powerful. They can't be killed. They move freely between the mortal plane, the Spirit-world plane, and the Celestial plane among others. They know (see) a great deal that we don't. Such men must be wonderful tools in the hands of the Lord for accomplishing his work.

But they do it anonymously. No one knows them or knows what great power they have or what wonderful secrets they could share. They are free of arrogance. They help wherever help is possible and they don't care who gets the credit. They go about quietly doing whatever the Lord wants. There is no honor, no glory -- just the knowledge that the Lord is pleased with them. The Lord is their ultimate reality -- even their total reality.

That's where we should be, how we should act, what attitude we should have.

And it is possible -- for each of us.

And, to hear Elder Eyring talk, that's where he wants to go -- difficult for him, being so in the lime-light as he is.

It would be easier for us.

Sunday Sessions

Sunday A.M., I spent a few hours doing my extraction-director work and when 10 A.M. arrived I realized it was time for my nap. The only thing that would have prevented me from immediately going to sleep would have been to sit on a tack or to take Vivarin intravenously. A pill simply doesn't work fast enough. Both of those involve sharp points, and I determined to take a nap, instead, so I missed a lot of the 4th session of GC.

However, I did pick up on at least two speakers saying that righteous acts are not a spectator sport. We don't get credit for them by observing and commenting on them.

For the 5th session, I noted a very interesting thread:

Elder Bednar talked about the temple -- one of my very favorite topics.

Elder Stevenson (?) told a story, the punch line of which was that the little boy said, "We aren't lost. Even though we are way out in the boonies, on muddy roads, across rickety bridges, as long as we can see the temple there, we're not lost!" The image on the screen was that of the Logan Temple seen above the trees in the foreground.

At that time, I thought that the being-able-to-see-the-temple was much like navigating with a GPS that does not have a map. It's as though your destination is like some high landmark that you can see so you know where it is, which way it is from your current location, and how far away it is. You may not know the absolutely optimum way to get there, but since you can see it, it's just a matter of time and patience to find it.

And then Elder Teixeira startled me by giving the talk that I have thought of giving if I ever got a chance. The GPS is such a great metaphor for so many things. It tells you where you are, where you're going, and how to get there. It works fine as long as it can hear the satellites. The metaphor is obvious, in my opinion.

Then Elder Watson told of having been taught that, when you are in a fog so dense that you can't see your hand in front of your face, you can give the horse completely free rein and it will find the way back home. The metaphor for him was that there are times when we simply have to give our trust over to the Lord who knows and perceives things that are hidden to us. He will guide us through his servants, the prophets as well as through inspiration directly to us.

Even though I'm not particularly comfortable with the use of a horse as a metaphor for the Lord, his point is well taken and ties in nicely with the rest of the thread.

Conference Synthesis

Just as Michelle's 40-day approach to reading the Book of Mormon brings unique benefits, a single-sitting viewing of General Conference also brings unique benefits. For the Book of Mormon, it helps you conceptually knit together principles and ideas from different books and pages. For conference, it helps you conceptually knit together principles and ideas from different speakers. Such a knitting-together requires a bit of personal synthesis, so my apologies for blending my own perspectives with the ideas of the apostles.

Note that this is not the way I usually think of watching GC. I sit through all the sessions, but I know that I will later view them and/or read them again, as individual talks, and I give them less thought and consideration the first time -- being satisfied with simply "absorbing the Spirit" so watching with an eye (ear) toward synthesizing things that can't easily be put together talk-by-talk was different -- and as it happened, quite valuable.

This morning, Elder Hales taught that obsessions can only be overcome by a love of Christ. I was touched and received a powerful testimony that it was true. It impressed me because I have worried about obsessions for some time. What makes a person bash in car windows and steal sound systems in an HP parking lot in broad daylight, and what makes a pedophile stalk victims on the web? Both of these people know that they will soon be caught.

The movie "Silence of the Lambs," which I did not like and have no desire to ever watch again even though it made a great impression on me, illustrates how obsessions can totally overcome a person's rationality. It was scary, and I have worried about how such things -- such impossible-to-resist obsessions -- will play out in the eternal judgement, and how they are to be reconciled with never being tempted beyond our ability to resist.

And yet, Elder Hales points out that this same obsessive irrationality is present in many things we do, especially, he pointed out, in the bad habits that lead to financial problems. He concluded by stating that obsessions can be -- and perhaps can only be -- overcome by submersing them in the love of Christ.

Do you remember our cousin, Scott (last names withheld for web security reasons)? His father abandoned his mother, Brenda, to go shack up with a cute little Korean masseuse. At that time, Scott told his father that he (his father) had done that because he had abandoned the love of Christ. I thought that was a quaint, if not a bit naive way of stating it, but it looks like Scott understood a phase of the Gospel which, up to now, has eluded me.

That also suggests how impossible-to-resist temptations come into being. We are promised that we will never be tempted beyond our ability to resist, but we aren't promised that we will not be allowed to place ourselves in conditions where temptations cannot be resisted. That's our choice. And submission to an obsession is, in the beginning, just such a choice. Correcting this means returning to Christ and renewing our inherent love of Him.

And Elder Christoffersen expanded Elder Hales thoughts by telling us how to get the strength to do this. He quoted extensively from the Sixth Lecture on Faith. This reminded me that this lecture was the most powerful and wonderful thing I had ever read when I first encountered it early in my mission. We get strength and faith needed to acquire a love for Christ (as needed to overcome obsessions) through sacrifice. In fact that is what we do to acquire powerful, i.e., all, faith. Sacrifice is the way to come to know that our path of life is entirely acceptable to God, and this knowledge allows us to exercise all faith. In fact, it is a requirement for being able to exercise all faith.

And Elder Eyring expanded Elder Christoffersen's points by telling us how important adversity is to give us -- even to force us to have -- experience, motivation, and strength to pursue such a marvelous effort of faith to its ultimate, successful conclusion.

All these things came together in this morning's session. In a few minutes, the afternoon session will begin. I'm looking forward the wonderful ideas that I will get from this session -- assuming I can stay awake to listen. (Not that obvious at the moment.)

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And the afternoon session was a bit of a challenge to keep my eyes open, but I did notice that one of the Latino seventies continued Elder Eyring's comments about the benefits of adversity. He lost a child to drowning. And Elder Scott also continued this theme having lost two children and his wife. Elder Scott also said that the temple strengthens us in our adversity and helps us learn whatever we are supposed to learn and that he attends the temple weekly and participates in all ordinances.

That was special to me because a couple of months ago, I helped administer the initatory to him.

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I assumed that this "40-day" effect would likely not be present in the Priesthood Session. A third of the speakers would address the 12-year-olds giving them inspiration and entertainment. The other two thirds would talk about honoring our priesthood.

And, ho-hum, Elder Packer started just that way. He told us how we, as priesthood holders, should do righteous things.

But then another Latino seventy (De Costa?) brought that into our family relations and told us which righteous things in particular strengthened our family and how great our obligation was to our family.

Then Elder Uchdorf told the story of the airplane crash in the Everglades that occurred because the crew was distracted by a burned-out indicator light and he drew our attention to the need to never let unimportant things distract us from important righteous acts.

Then Elder Eyring talked about the need for valor and bravery in approaching needed righteous acts. He used the story of Blackhawk Down to powerfully illustrate this.

So, from Packer to Eyring it was a continuous, thrilling crescendo.

It thought that President Monson was going to have trouble continuing that crescendo. Eyring had pretty much raised it as high as it would go.

Then President Monson talked about keys of the priesthood and referenced D&C 107:18-19 without actually stating exactly that. This is just about the most exalted statement I know:

"The power and authority of the higher, or Melchizedek Priesthood, is to hold the keys of all the spiritual blessings of the church. To have the privilege of receiving the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, to have the heavens opened unto them, to commune with the general assembly and church of the Firstborn, and to enjoy the communion and presence of God the Father, and Jesus the mediator of the new covenant."

Elder Monson just referred to the "spiritual blessings" part. The rest of it is pretty high up there and is so exalted that it is seldom mentioned. That's about as high as the crescendo can get -- so high that you only understand it if you know the scripture he's referring to.

And all this from Michelle's 40-day reading approach applied to General Conference.