Clearly, to aspire to be God is sin; to desire to be like God is filial love and devotion.

--The God who Weeps

Why faith?

The call to faith, in this light, is not some test of a coy god, waiting to see if we "get it right."  It is the only summons, issued under the only conditions, which can allow us fully to reveal who we are, what we most love, and what we most devoutly desire.  Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in out hearts.

--The God who Weeps

I love this grown-up faith.  Refreshed honest faith is invigorating.

death by facebook (or wii for me)

We are, as reflective  thinking, pondering seekers, much like the proverbial ass of Buridan.  The Beast in the parable starves to death because he is faced with two equally desirable and equally accessible piles of hay.

--The God who Weeps

I think this neutrality is death by escapism.  Escapism is very powerful and often desirable, but it is a beast that when you feed it, it become larger and more ravishingly hungry. 

Faith is natural

What ever sense we make of this world, whatever value we place upon our lives and relationships, whatever meaning we ultimately give to our joys and agonies, must necessarily be a gesture of faith....James Stephen noted that "in nearly all the important transactions in this life, indeed in all transactions whatever which have relation to the future, we have to take a leap in the dark,...to act upon very imperfect evidence..."

---The God Who Weeps

Why the Tao?

Whether by design or by chance, we find ourselves in a universe filled with mystery.  No picture ever painted fulled explains the cast landscape of human experience.  Science doesn't try to, and religion often fails. But we humans are meaning-making machines.  We are complex creatures of logic and superstition, who crave both clarity and wonder.

     -The God Who Weeps, by Terryle and Fiona Givens

Welcoming Weakness

Having a strength, means having a weakness.

Over my life, I have been frustrated by weakness.  Even the concept of weakness seemed to equal imperfection or flaws.  Flaws that I should fix.  In fact, they were given to me as a type of challenge.  That if I organized myself and truly tried that I would be able to be victorious and the weak thing would then be strong.  Like Captain Moroni purposefully finding the weakest city, knowing that it would be attacked as an easy conquest, and making that city one of the strongest in the nation.

I have no doubt that this is true.  We can improve as in we can become more strong or more stable.
However, this can not apply in all things.  Another truth is that in order for there to be a strength, there must be a weakness.

Martial arts: attacking leaves openings for counters
Economy:  spending money on something meaning denying money from something else.
Plants:   grow in strength and grow in flexibility
Taoist:  day and night, plug in any yin/yang example.
Mormonism: following the commandments, inability to see the exceptions to the commandments  (even Nephi had a hard time with this)

Many weaknesses do not need fixed.  They are simply the yin or yang from our choices that is present now and it will change again soon.

Interestingly, it only when the that yin or yang force becomes controlling, that it becomes an issue.

Martial arts: attacking wildly leaves dangerous openings for counters
Economy:  spending money excessively on something.
Plants:   too much strength and it breaks in the wind.
Taoist:  too much day and its Vegas in the summer, beware red heads.
Mormonism: following the commandments, inability to see the people (looking beyond the mark)
Alma expressed this frustation in making his wish that he was an angel to shake the earth in crying repentance.

We must make choices, this actions remove us from wu chi  into the yin or the yang.
(see: http://www2.nau.edu/taichi-p/images/wuchi.jpg   or Adam, Eve and the garden)

After time with one, I would bemoan that I could not have both.  In fact, we can become choice debilitated by knowing that choosing will make a weakness.

This is a matter for faith.  Trust that in choosing yin; yang will be along soon.  It is the natural response and must come.  Welcome it with open arms.

the miracle of cocoons

This came to me as my intermediate orchestra class has been struggling.  Not the expected struggle of apathy or need to practice, but some students really wanted to do a hard song but some (one very vocal one) did not.


So today had a student print off a bunch of cocoons and post them around the room.
(see:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Monarch_Butterfly_Chrysalis.JPG  )

  The are ratty, ugly, a bit alien looking (as some students said)
and when they asked what they were and why the pictures where around for about the 10th time I said something like:

      I read a lot of children's books.  They frequently tell the book of how a caterpillar turns into a ....(wait for it)....BUTTERFLY! (they all say it together)  However, once the butterfly has come out then, thats the end of it.  Hooray and cheers for the pretty pretty butterfly.
     But seeing the butterfly is not the miracle.  The miracle happens in the cocoon.   A worm-like creature enters it and somehow, by some miracle, the caterpillar twists, turns, grows new limb and changes, indeed metamorphoses, into something completely different!  If anything demands our study or attention is it not the cocoon?

So orchestra (or fellow travelers), this is your cocoon.  It is going to be hard, restrictive, and frustrating but if we work and be smart for it, we will emerge something completely different.  So, to the cocoon!