"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.)

---------------

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.

---------------

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.

I'm becoming my mother?

“Why do you read those trashy novels?” Mom asked me on more than one occasion.

“They're not trashy,” was my habitual defense.

“They're just made up stories,” she'd counter. “Worthless.”

“What should I read?” As if I didn't know. She'd always point to the scriptures.

I considered this to be inexcusably provincial on her part, and I attempted to broaden her appreciation and tolerance by drawing her attention to our great body of uplifting literature. She remained unconvinced and, with time, read only the scriptures and finally only the Book of Mormon before she lost her sight to macular degeneration and descended into “sweet confusion” as described by her assisted-living caretakers.

In general, I'm happy. I have a joyful lightness of step much of the time if not most of the time. I've often wondered if I'd have achieved this decades earlier if decades earlier I'd have adopted the habit of weekly endowment sessions. I know twenty-somethings who do this and they show obvious spiritual benefit. I wish I'd have been one of those twenty-somethings. I feel like I lost decades.

In any case, the joyful lilt is enhanced by said endowment sessions, BYU devotionals, CES firesides, general conference, In Performance, Orchestra at Temple Square, Music and the Spoken Word, FARMS, J. S. Papers, the Ensign, and, of course, the scriptures. I'm proud to say that I'm addicted to all of these.

And this lilt is diminished by ER, CSI, Heroes, Numb3rs, Fringe, Cold Case, Without a Trace, Law and Order, most novels, and much of the public news media. And, I'm embarrassed to say, I'm even more addicted to these.

I fully understand the experience Cindy described. Cindy's a quiet, spiritually sensitive mother of four including twins, whom we knew in our California ward. She was a great fan of Harry Potter, and once she described how, after she finished reading Rowling's latest publication at the time, she had to go into the bathroom and pray to dissipate the dark feeling that enveloped her.

Since that's the way I often feel, how long will it be before I determine that it just isn't worth it to subject my spirit to such depressing influences when there's so much better material to choose from? I suspect it may happen. If I live as long as Mom (not likely) I can imagine that this determination may come well before then.

Mom Insight

So there I am, subbing Wednesday night at the SL temple, and an ordinance worker whom I didn't know walks up to me and starts talking with no introduction:

"In our mission there was an old-woman missionary named Ireta Head who enjoyed playing basketball with the young elders. She was quite a person. She always complained about how difficult it was to get people ready for baptism, but she and her companion baptized more than anyone else. They were the ones to keep up with. I don't remember the name of her companion or many others anymore, but I'll never forget her or her name."

Of course that is only a synopsis of what he said. I admitted yes, that was my mother and it sounds typical, but those were details I had never heard before.

...going on fourteen

"Grandma says we're going to make valentines," I informed Claire when I picked her up today after their school valentine party was already history.

"For who?" she asked bluntly.

Hm. Direct challenge to adult rationality. From a six year old. She's going to be some teenager.

"Lucas gave me a transformer," she said.

The non sequitur threw me for a moment.

"A girl's transformer?" I asked. In the past, she's shown distinct antipathy toward boys' toys.

"No."

"I guess that means he likes you."

"He does."

"How do you know?"

"He only talks to me when he's around me -- or when I'm around him."

"Do you like him?"

Pause. "Yes. We met in the hall today and had a little chat."

I didn't dare pursue that any further. Hope the hall is well chaperoned.