Simple complexity

I was inspired by Daniel Hill again, though I think this will only be one post.

He asked recently "If you were trying to summarize the mission of God to one sentence, what would you say?"

http://pastordanielhill.com/2015/02/03/if-you-were-asked-to-summarize-the-mission-of-jesus-to-one-sentence-what-would-you-say/?

His thoughts are good, and I appreciated his wanting people to not be glib with it, because this is an important mission, children and followers need to understand it, and it is easy to look find conflicting messages.

I almost felt guilty that I had such a simple answer that came to mind so quickly:

"For behold, this is my work and my glory--to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man."
-Moses 1:39

Then the more I thought about it, the more I realized was in there.

Here is the level at which I had previously thought about it. Christ's resurrection means that we will all be resurrected, bringing to pass the immortality. His suffering for our sins means that we can be free of them, and thus eligible for eternal life. Fulfilling these two aspects of the Atonement brings the mission to fruition. It's important to know and understand, and true, and you have it all together in one short sentence.

There is more in there when you look at it. His mission on earth contained those two events, but also contained the organization of the church, teachings that were captured in the scriptures, his life as an example for us to follow, and the lives that he touched individually. Those are all still relevant to the mission, but then it is expanded.

This includes some of the other phrases that Hill mentioned:

"For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost." Luke 19:11

"...The Kingdom of Heaven has come near." Matthew 10:7

You can find many other scriptures where Jesus refers to the Kingdom. Many were parables that told us what the Kingdom of Heaven was like. For all of their differences they were all true. Reflecting on that may tell us many things. Reflecting on reclaiming the lost will certainly teach us many things.

There may even be important lessons in reflecting upon the difference between being man, with personal concerns, and being God, where the primary source of purpose and satisfaction comes from saving persons.

So it is interesting for me to see that yes, that is a simple and complete answer in one way, but on another level complete is ever-expanding. There will always be more, and there is complexity within the simplicity. It sounds like paradox, but it isn't.

Answers

I am going to refer to The Secret History of Dreaming again, because it correlated to something in my regular scripture study, when I was reading about Abinadi's testimony and death.

K'ang-hsi was an emperor in 18th century China, and a man given to study. He relied on many sources of information, but he also believed in verifying. Unlike many royals, he believed in being open to unwanted messages.

"My diviners have often been tempted to pass over bad auguries, but I have double-checked their calculations and warned them not to distort the truth: the Bureau of Astronomy once reported that a benevolent southeast wind was blowing, but I myself calculated the wind's direction with the palace instruments and found it to be, in fact, an inauspicious northeast wind; I told the Bureau to remember that ours was not a dynasty that shunned bad omens." (Moss, p. 42)

I admired the wisdom at the time, and at least in this book that was reinforced later by stories of Aztec emperors punishing those who dreamed of the coming invasion and destruction. Then I got to reading about Abinadi.

This was also influenced by a speaker I had listened to many years ago at an enrichment conference. He showed how that really seemed to get prophets killed, in both the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon, was when the prophesied that Christ would be killed. They were looking beyond the mark, so that they could only see the Second Coming, and not the first.

This time I started to think about why it would be such a cause of outrage. I believe the speaker had focused on the aspects that would have seemed blasphemous, saying that a god could be killed. It would be a pretty big accusation of sin, but the people hearing the prophesy aren't going to be the one's doing it. I'm still not sure I fully grasp that, but it did strike me how important it is to be able to listen to things that are hard to hear.

You may be called to repentance when you didn't think you were sinning. That is not fun. It is very important to hear that message.

You may be praying for the end of a trial and receive word that it is going to go on longer. That will not feel good, but if you receive the message you can prepare, and because you leave yourself open you can receive comfort.

You may be warned of upcoming struggles, which can bring fear or sorrow or resistance, but listening will give you the tools that you need to endure.

We have to trust God. There is a plan. That plan involves suffering, but that suffering develops us. It gives us agency, and it provides healing for the results of that agency. There is comfort and restoration. There is reunion. We need to trust in that.

One of the greatest things about mortality is that we are not completely cut off from Heaven, and that while we do treasure the words of prophets, they are not all we have. We have the ability to receive personal revelation and guidance. It is beautiful and helpful. It will also sometimes be something we don't want to hear.

Listen anyway.

Preparation

I have been reading recently about dreaming. One of the more interesting accounts was from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. It described the process for those dreaming at the temple of Asklepios.

Asklepios was a god of healing, and people would come seeking healing, often for medical issues but not exclusively. As part of their preparation there were actions that they would take, like bathing, changing their clothing, and making an offering. There were also visible markers in the designs and architecture of the temple that would serve as reminders of the purpose of the visit.

I believe in the power of dreams, both as a vehicle for communication from God and as a way to be aware of what's going on in your subconscious. I don't believe in the Greek pantheon, and so there was a tendency to not want to take that part too seriously.

That's not to say that I didn't believe that the supplicants could receive answers or healing. We believe that God is no respecter of persons, and we believe in personal inspiration and revelation. Answers should have been possible. Looking at it from those eyes, it occurred to me to take a second look at the preparation.

It was a set apart place, designed specifically to focus the mind on the purpose. Washing and changing clothes can be symbolically important. They are trying to be clean and set apart. That is reasonable to do when you seek a blessing from God.

Making an offering is reasonable. It can be a part of acknowledging gratitude for what has already been given despite still wanting more. It can also help bring one into the frame of mind where one is ready to take action. Some people would be healed in the night, but it was very common to find a necessary course of action. You might need to be ready to change.

We can just ask for blessings in normal prayers, and we do that, but there is greater blessing in taking time to listen. Hearing can be easier with a separate place. Maybe sometimes we need to prepare more.

It can be easy to over-ritualize things and fall into a Pharisee trap, where we focus so much on the steps that we forget the spirit, but there can be steps to get more in tune with the spirit. Taking time to reflect on what will help, and why, is worthwhile.

This blog started with emergency preparation, but it expanded as it recognized that there are a lot of factors that go into our ability to handle things physically and spiritually. You can prepare for dreams too. I have had a few dreams in the past few nights that have given me insight, and I haven't really been doing anything that different. There may be a time to do something more drastic, but even a little shift in focus can be profitable.

Literally?

I recently read Spiritual Progression in the Last Days by Blaine Yorgason.

It wasn't everything I hoped it would be. Some things felt oversimplified and some felt obvious, but different things hit people differently, and I know the book has still been great for other people.

One thing that I am trying to incorporate is praying for my family in the middle of the day.

Yorgason takes it from Alma 34:21...

"Cry unto him in your houses, yea, over all your household, both morning, mid-day, and evening."

I have read that scripture many times. That section is one of my favorite passages in the Book of Mormon. I thought of it as a commandment that you should pray for your households regularly and frequently, but I never would have interpreted it the way Yorgason did:

"Praying at least three times daily concerning our families must be added next (see Alma 34:21) if our prayers are to be mighty in faith." (p. 66)

Really? I thought. Your prayers can't be mighty if they are only morning and night? I thought that he was being overly literal, and that is not the only part in the book where I thought that.

However, that's the part that I am trying to incorporate. The reason is that while I do pray in the morning and evening, I do that when I am getting up and when I am going to bed. There is the family prayer that we do together, and there are prayers over meals. There are also times when I just need to pray.  Regardless, my main prayers are waking up and going to bed, and I am not at my best at those moments. I am tired and my head is fuzzy, and it is probably easy to forget things. Since I need to start my day or go to sleep, it is easy not to wait for an answer. Adding a third prayer may make a difference there.

I don't know that it would have to be mid-day. It could be very reasonable for me to pray right after getting off work, which would be evening technically, but I am changing my focus for the day, from work to personal life, and that could be a good spot for a prayer.

That actually encapsulates my overall reaction to the book. The book is about having your calling and election made sure. I am not sure that I learned anything about the topic that I didn't already know, but it did remind me that it is easy to be casual with our spiritual paths, even though it is important enough that we should not be casual, and so I have been thinking about that, and the book did help with that by getting me thinking. Are there other books that would have worked better? Probably. It's still something.

Saul

The last few posts have caused some thoughts about David and Bathsheba, but that is also where we have been in our family scripture reading.

I often find myself in sympathy with people in the scriptures who are doing the wrong thing. I can see where their choices would feel reasonable. I always feel badly for Saul.

He started out so well, and his first offense of getting impatient for the delayed Samuel, and feeling like he can't wait any longer, feels familiar. He still should have known better, and clearly he acted out of pride, and not just fear, because his later actions show that is the course that he stayed on. You still see moments when he knows he is wrong, though that never really changes anything.

This time I was thinking about what he could have done to turn things around, and it occurred to me that he should have abdicated. Once Samuel cut Saul off, Saul should have stepped down.

Sometimes royalty seems like a trap where you can't extricate yourself easily, but in this case, David was popular enough that I think it could have been accepted by the people pretty easily, especially with him marrying into the royal family.

That started me thinking about what else might have changed. If David had not spent years on the run, acting as a mercenary and collecting wives, perhaps Israel could have been in a better position with the Philistines. It could have been better for Michal, instead of being abandoned by David, being given to Phalti, who loved her, and then ripped away from  him and back to David after her family was dead and she was just a means of strengthening his claim to the throne. (I have sympathy for Michal too.)

If David had stayed with Michale, ruling and building a family with her, perhaps he would have never been on that rooftop, leading to David's downfall.

That is all merely speculation, and there is no way of knowing. It is a good reminder that our actions affect others. They make their own choices, and there are plenty of ways to make bad choices, and sin, but I don't want to be actively causing pain to others.

Ultimately, that can't all be predicted. The reason Saul should have stepped down was to stop the path of his own rebellion, and work on his own peace with God. The two acts of disobedience that led to the rift were bad, but staying on his course led to Saul trying to murder David, deception, ordering the deaths of innocent people who had helped David without even knowing that David was out of favor, and finally to his suicide on the battlefield where three of his sons died and the Ark was lost.

Staying on a bad course does not make things better, and for his own sake Saul should have gone back. It could have also done a lot of good for others. Our own actions can do the same.

Bathsheba

I actually made two mistakes when giving the lesson all those years ago.

One was that a question came up, and I put it aside to get back to the material. I have made that mistake twice when teaching. Both times it bothered me later, and so I wrote something up for the person who had asked, but there may have been multiple people who needed to hear it, and there is no way of knowing. That doesn't mean that all questions need to be given significant class time, but it is important to be sensitive to the moment.

In addition to wanting to finish the material I had, it felt like an awkward question, but it was one that I brought on. As I was going over the issues that the different women had, I said of Bathsheba "essentially raped". I thought the question came up because I used the word "essentially", but it could have been because I used "raped".

Not using the word has been fairly common. Artwork tends to refer to the "seduction" of Bathsheba. If you think about how they defined rape under the law of Moses, a man taking hold of a woman in a field would be, but if it was in the city, she could have screamed, so it must have been consensual.

In Bathsheba's case, they were in the city. We don't ever learn much about her really, or how she reacted to it. The reason I used the wording I did was because I don't believe she would have thought that she had the right to refuse. David sent for her, and that was after asking about her where part of the answer was that she was married. No one questioned it, just like no one questioned it when he gave orders to get her husband killed. Kings can do things like that, which is one problem with monarchy.

Because of that, I questioned whether she would call it rape, and that is why I put in the "essentially". Now I would have just said rape, because a lot of women who get raped don't call it that. They feel it was somehow their fault, or they brought it on somehow, and society will do a lot to reinforce that, when the real problem was that the rapist did not respect another person's right to determine what happens to her body.

Bathsheba may have accepted that the king can do what he wants, and in a society where women were disregarded, and their status was dependent on men, she had probably further internalized that she didn't have a lot of power. She does come across as far more passive and dynamic than Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth.

The terrible thing about that is that I don't find any reason to believe that would have made it feel any better. There would be that sense of powerlessness, the guilt for what was not her fault, the fear that she would be shamed and her husband would not want her, and then the guilt for his death, which was again not her fault, but I do not doubt that she felt guilt for it.

I do not believe it is a coincidence that the chapter starts out saying that it was the time when kings go to war, but then says that David was at home, or that Bathsheba's story is followed so closely by that of Amnon raping his half-sister Tamar (a different Tamar), and all of the consequences from that. They might not have used the word rape, but they all knew it was wrong.

I write this partially because I regret the mistakes I made in that one lesson, so many years ago, but also because of last week's post, where sometimes we need to be rebels. That doesn't mean rebelling against God, but we will often have to cast aside convention and popular opinion.

Part of that can be a need to speak plainly, and to use the proper words for things instead of euphemisms. We can't be afraid to speak openly of sex or drugs or anything that matters. We don't have to wallow in it, or be unnecessarily crude, but we can't be so afraid to name a thing that we find ourselves unable to say anything useful about the thing.

Things are speeding up, so there's no time for beating around the bush.

The women in the lineage of the Savior, part 2

When I gave the lesson, my focus was on how these individual women had specific hardships that were answered in the promises of the Savior. I still believe that all sorrows and trials have their eventual answer there.

Daniel Hill's writing pointed out that showing foreigners and sinners in the lineage was a deliberate way to emphasize the inclusiveness of Christ's mission. That is also a good point, and it shows that you can see the same facts and notice different things from them.

There is another new aspect for me now, that I am open to for different reasons, and that's what I want to get at today.

One thing that helped was my friendship with Marla. I haven't seen her for a while, but in one conversation she had mentioned a professor telling her that her name meant "little rebel" as a diminutive of Mary.

That was interesting. If you look at baby names now, Mary is often shown as meaning "mother of God", but it didn't mean that before. Possible roots for the Hebrew name are "desired child", "bitterness", and "rebelliousness".

That seemed surprising, because we don't think of Mary as a rebel. Prophecies about her showed her as fair and pure, she is commonly referred to as blessed, and even today some people will hold on to that image so strongly that they believe her own conception was free from original sin, that she always stayed a virgin (even though the scriptures mention siblings to Jesus), and that she was bodily taken up into Heaven. Those are mainly Catholic beliefs, and I don't know how popular they are, but they seem to demonstrate an inability to let Mary be human and have a life of her own.

That may be due to a general distrust of humanity, and there is evidence to support that, but to imagine yourself capable of playing a role in God's work, which we are asked to participate in, then we need to be able to believe that as mere and fallible humans we can still accomplish good things.  We will grow from serving God, and we can't wait for that growth before we get started. You may be doing bigger things later, but you should be doing something now. It may also turn you into a rebel.

We'll talk more about Bathsheba next week, but with Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, it had always been clear how they could be marginalized and on the fringes. It was also clear that they took actions that were dangerous and unladylike. Judah did declare Tamar more righteous after finding out the whole story, but before that he wanted her burned, and that was thinking she had only played the harlot, which Rahab made a career of. Ruth's gleaning and seeking out Boaz would have been the most acceptable actions, but they were still pretty bold.

The eternal virgin free from original sin doesn't fit into that company unless you think about her position. She was righteous, but once she turned up pregnant before being married she would not have looked righteous. Joseph could have had her killed. Before the angel's visit he was going to put her away quietly, which would not have been a great position. There would have been shunning and insults, and she probably still got a fair amount of those, even with Joseph marrying her. Mary could be righteous or appear righteous, but she couldn't do both.

That struck me hard this time through the stories, mainly because of the protests against police brutality that have been going on since the death of Mike Brown.

These protests are against the social order, which is built upon some lives being more valuable than others. They make people uncomfortable, and yet, people should be uncomfortable. There have been so many deaths, even if you don't count the other signs of inequality, that no follower of Christ should be comfortable with the current system.

As people who proclaim themselves Christians become more avaricious and hardhearted, there will be more condemnation for actions to try and work for equality and declare the value of every soul. There may be loss of prestige and respect, there may be jail time and injury, and there may even be loss of life. There may even be ridicule from people at your own church.

Sometimes God works through unexpected sources, and there may be ways in which they are more open, having less to lose. That is good, and it is a reason to not look down on anyone, but the message for today is that as believers it should not be hard to get us to hear and act.

The women Matthew named were not well-behaved women by some standards. Sometimes it was just that they did what they needed to do rather than what they were expected to do. They made history.

We need to be prepared to do the same.