Parkerville

As a new parent, I am already astonished at how quickly kids grow. Every month, my daughters change. I never know when we do something, if it will be the last time.   But as I approach 40, I’ve come to learn that everything in life is like that…..it comes, and it goes. This can be one of the great sorrows of life. It's all too easy to base our need for fulfillment and happiness on one or more of these fleeting things. I’ll list a few below, and I’ll omit obvious categories like pleasure, wealth, and youth. Instead, I’d like to focus on the “good” things we are often encouraged to place at center. As good as these things are, they are still fleeting and insufficient as a foundation for life. Community: it’s always in flux. We experience a change in our state in life, like marriage or parenthood, and suddenly the old friend group doesn’t make sense. We get a new opportunity and move. We grow older and leave the community of our birth.  Education: no matter how much we try...

In my post of October 21, "Seeing Through the Paradox" I shared why it is easy for me to prioritize my reason (and desires) over God's commands using the Parable of the Royal Wedding Feast as a text.  In this post, I'll come at it from the other direction, that our reason alone isn't reliable enough to be our sole source of wisdom for making life decisions.  Let's start with a quote from my favorite thinker: But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.   Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fr...

  central panel from Adoration of the Mystic Lamb , Jan van Eyck Revelation 5:11-14 (NABRE) "I looked again and heard the voices of many angels who surrounded the throne and the living creatures and the elders. They were countless in number, and they cried out in a loud voice: 'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches, wisdom and strength, honor and glory and blessing.' Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, everything in the universe, cry out: 'To the one who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor, glory and might, forever and ever.' The four living creatures answered, 'Amen,' and the elders fell down and worshiped." What a vision from the final book of the Bible! There are many beautiful scriptures about praising God, but this one in particular captures the image of total, cosmic praise. I think that praise is the privileged way of calling down the Holy Spirit, and...

 Christmas Message-Cuesta Park Ward-Christmas Day 2022 One of my earliest memories as little boy is of a Christmas morning in central Utah.  That Christmas morning I decided to walk the quarter mile down the highway to my cousin's house to see what they got for Christmas.  The snow was uncommonly deep, and I can still hear the crunch of the boot high snow underfoot.  My mind then goes to a memory of his childhood that my dad shared from the 1920's when about my same age. A trip he would have made down the same road in a sleigh on what was then a wagon path in the dirt, a few miles further to my great grandfather Joseph Falcouner Parker's home to celebrate Christmas Eve.  There the large extended family gathered around the piano, the only one in town I think he said, to sing carols and share a pioneer meal.  At the end of the night, bricks were put in the fireplace and then placed in the bottom of the sleigh. When covered with a blanket these made for a warm...

The Enlightenment, that flowering of faith in reason and individual liberty was largely a reaction to the Renaissance which had looked to the past for answers.  Rather, the Enlightenment looked forward with a firm believe that man, armed with reason (largely without God) was the source of progress.  Kant defined the spirit of these times in his epoch defining essay Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment with its challenge to Sapere aude (Dare to Know). In many ways this faith was well placed. The scientific method, based on induction rather than deduction (much favored by the Scholastics) has extended our life spans, improved the quality and comfort of our lives piling up one achievement in process.  When a man was put on the moon even the sky didn't seem to be the limit. Most enlightenment thinkers thought the realm of human affairs would follow the same happy upward slope fostering systems such as the French thinker August Comte's Positivism (1798-1857) which la...

 Elder Bednar's address in the most recent General Conference (Oct 22) carried a message that will resonate with any Christian who has made covenants with the Lord. It certainly did to me. For context, take a few minutes to read his address which is a bit of a midrash on the Parable of the Royal Wedding Feast found in Matthew 22. Put On Thy Strength, O Zion (churchofjesuschrist.org) To begin, I'll assume the King represents the Lord, the wedding represents the covenant made between the Lord and his children and the wedding feast represents the blessings/fruits of a faithful life. Note that Elder Bednar doesn't take the common reading of this parable, that the King's tossing of the recalcitrant wedding attendee (who refused to wear the King's garment) represents God punishing the wicked.  Rather, his focus is on the attendee's use of their agency. Recall that early in the parable those first invited declined to attend having prioritized their business interests o...

The longer I live, the more convinced I am that God works in mysterious ways. Easy prescriptions of what to do, or even what a good Christian “looks” like, simply fall away when we honestly account for the complexities of lived experience. At this point in my spiritual journey, I am inspired to focus on spiritual  tools  instead of rules or archetypes per se. The idea is that the right tools will get you in alignment with God so that He can guide you through the unknowns, even as questions will realistically remain. The spiritual tools are those extolled by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, and traditionally referred to as the theological virtues: faith, hope, love. Faith : right thinking. No matter what, I will choose to trust that God has a purpose for my circumstances as they are. God has a plan for each of our lives that involves a unique sequence and allotment of blessings and sufferings. For this reason, there is no room for nihilism, insecurity, arrogance, victim-based thinking...