John W. Gardner: Why We Need to Travel

John W. Gardner (1912-2002), was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, the only Republican in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.  Gardner had an illustrious career in public service and was a life-long advocate for education.  He was also an important author.

In his book Self-Renewal:  The Individual and the Innovative Society, Gardner writes:

As the years go by we view our familiar surroundings with less and less freshness of perception.  We no longer look with a wakeful, perceiving eye at the faces of people we see every day, nor at any other features of our everyday world.

That is why travel is a vivid experience for most of us.  At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us.  Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience.  The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.

Gardner, as an author received mixed reviews on his books.  According to an obit:

He was the author of many books, with titles like ”Excellence,” ”Self-Renewal,” ”Morale” and ”On Leadership,” and he sometimes sounded like a preacher. Some critics called his books utopian and vague; even his friends thought he was a bit too moralizing. But many readers found his books inspirational. ”Self-Renewal” was translated into eight languages.

Elder Ronald E. Poelman and “The Conference Talk”

According Peggy Fletcher Stack writing in the SLTrib (21 Nov 2011):

Ronald E. Poelman, an emeritus LDS general authority known as a gentle leader who spoke often of service, unselfishness and forgiveness, died Saturday at his SLC home.  He was 83.

Elder Ronald E. Poelman and his wife, Dr. Anne Osborn Poelman, one of the world's most prominent neuroradiologists.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), he will be remembered for a conference talk he gave (or did not give) in 1984.  According to Pure Mormonism:

Elder Poelman began his talk by reminding the congregation that there is an important difference between the gospel and the Church. “There is a distinction between them which is significant”, he said, “and it is very important that this distinction be understood.”

Poelman cautioned that failure to distinguish between the two, and to comprehend their proper relationship, could lead to “confusion and misplaced priorities”.

The gospel, he explained, is the substance of the divine plan for personal, individual salvation and exaltation. The Church, on the other hand, is the delivery system that provides the means and resources to implement that plan.

Elder Poelman admonished the congregation to remain mindful that every church member has not only the right, but also the obligation to exercise his free agency and receive a personal witness not only of gospel principles, but also of Church practices. “In response to study, prayer and by the influence of the Holy Spirit we may seek and obtain an individual, personal witness that the principle or counsel is correct and divinely inspired.”

And the punchline was:

“As individually and collectively we increase our knowledge, acceptance, and application of gospel principles, we become less dependent on Church programs. Our lives become gospel centered.”

Some among the brethern were not too excited about the punchline, and Elder Poelman was encouraged to retape his speech with the ”controversial” lines either taken out or rewritten.  The version of the talk which appeared in the Ensign magazine was also censored.

Let’s all honor Elder Poelman for his strong belief in “free agency.”

Mormons and the Nature of God

I recently attended the funeral of the youngest son of a friend and neighbor.  While it was a sad event, the funeral was short and the speakers did a good job.  The sermon by the Bishop was short and to the point.  After the Bishop spoke, another neighbor (a former Bishop who is now in the Stake Presidency) made a few brief comments about the deceased.  Here is where it got bizzare for me.  He related the following story.

He (the former Bishop) was headed to SLC to visit a young ward member who was in the hospital (a 5-year-old girl suffering from an inoperable brain tumor).  After leaving Orem (located 40 miles south of SLC), he noticed he was out of gas.  But he didn’t want to gas up, because it was a Sunday and he didn’t want to do business on Sunday.  (About this time in his story, our former bishop started to weep.)

In his story, he prayed that he could make it to the hospital without running out of gas, which, in fact, he was able to do.  After visiting the young Ward member in the hospital, he was then able to drive past Orem to Spanish Fork (located 10 miles south of Orem) and visit my neighbor’s son at his apartment.  He then returned to his home without gasing up.  Thus, he was able to travel approximately 80 miles on an empty tank of gas.  This “miracle” was attributed to the intervention of God.

I’m not trying to mock my former Bishop here; he has related similar stories in the past.  The interesting point to me, is that Mormons have a very ill-defined definition of God and his role in the universe.  I personally have a rough time relating to a micromanaging, “omni-” God, yet this is the God of President Joseph Field Smith and Mormon Doctrine.  The other vision would be that of a progressing, largely hands-off God of some liberal Mormons.  The conservative view seems to be the more accepted view at the moment.

William Blake's Version of God

It would seem on the surface, that these two images of God are not very compatible.  And further, that the idea of a hands-on God is becoming increasing incompatible with the progress of science.  This might explain some of the current dissatisfaction among young Mormons with their church.

Uganda: In the News

Uganda continues to stay in the news for a variety of reasons.  The three articles quoted below are about as diverse as you can get:

• According to Time magazine’s “The 50 Best Inventions of the Year” (28 Nov 2011):  The Digital Drum/”UNICEF’s Digital Drum is designed to help rural communities in Uganda that have difficulty getting information about health, education and other issues.  These solar-powered computer kiosks, which come loaded with educational content, are made of locally available metal oil drums and built to be durable against the elements.  The first Digital Drum was installed in March at a youth center in the northern Uganda city of Gulu, and UNICEF plans to deliver the devices to all parts of the nation.”
  

  Demonstration Model of UNICEF's Digital Drum

• According to an article in the SLTrib (18 Nov 2011) by Lisa Schencker:  Ugandan rabbi visits Utah/”Uganda isn’t a place that typically springs to mind when people think of Jewish populations around the world.  But [Rabbi Gershom] Sizomu, a small man who exudes an air of calm, want to change that.  He hopes to turn his 1,500-member community of most poor subsistence farmers into a thriving center of Judaism in Africa that will benefit his people and their Christian and Muslim neighbors.
• On Core77.com (posted by LenYee Yuan on 19 Oct 2011) there is another interesting development for Uganda and the world:  “Designers are using a human-centered approach coupled with local leaders and resources to empower communities from within. A great example of this is the work of Design Without Borders in Kampala, Uganda. With 75% of hospital-reported injuries in Kampala linked with motorcycle taxi-related accidents, there has been multiple attempts to get the boda boda drivers to don helmets. Using Design Without Borders‘ human-centered research approach, designers worked with boda boda drivers and local manufacturers to develop the bePRO Motor-taxi Helmet, a lightweight helmet suitable for hot climates using readily available fiberglass composite. The final design is affordable, includes integrated ventilation, holes for hearing passengers, durable closures and graphics from the young Kampala artist, Ivan Bargiye. As Kristoffer Leivestad Olsen, designer with DWB explained, “The shift from export to local production and manufacturing for a potential market of millions is powerful.”

Harold Bloom’s Recent Op-ed Rant in the NYTs

According Thomas Burr reporting in the SLTrib (8 Nov 2011):

“The secular liberals are going to mock Mormonism,” Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission [stated], ”they’re going to start doing documentaries on Mormonism and try to scare independents about him.  They ought to be ashamed of themselves . . . “

Well, to a certain extent, the mocking has started.  An early salvo was launched by Harold Bloom, Mormon observer and Yale University scholar.

Harold Bloom, Yale University Scholar and Mormon Observer

In an op-ed piece for the NYTimes (12 Nov 2011) titled “Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?”, Bloom goes after conservative Christian religions, Ronald Reagan economics and politics, and Mormonism in particular.  His article is a rambling mess and has already been eccoriated on websites like getreligion.org and religiondispatches.org. 

While there is much to disagree with in Bloom’s polemic, I think there is also some things we need to consider.  Quoting Bloom:

• “I recall prophesying in 1992 that by 2020 Mormonism could become the dominant religion of the western United States.  But we are not going to see that large a transformation.  I went wrong because the last two decades have witnessed the deliberate dwindling of the [LDS Church] into just one more Protestant sect.”
• “The Salt Lake City empire of corporate greed has little in common with the visions of Joseph Smith. . . .  The hierarchy’s vast economic power is founded upon the tithing of the faithful . . .  That dark insight (money is power) has animated the Mormon hierarchy all through the latter 20th and early 21st century.”
• “The Mormon patriarch, secure in his marriage and large family, is promised by his faith a final ascension to godhead. . .  From the perspective of the White House, how would the nation and the world appear to President Romney?  How would he represent the other 98 percent of his citizens?”

As a reaction to each of the above, I would propose the following questions:

• Mormons may, in fact, be trying too hard to make accomodations to Christian conservatives.  Are we giving away too much of our doctrinal identity?
• To many Mormons, the LDS Church is losing its moral high ground by being so involved in economic endeavors in Utah and around the world.  Could tithing money be used better in humanitarian causes?  What can we learn from Christ’s example and from the teachings of President Spencer W. Kimball and Elder Marion D. Hanks?
• Many Mormons are too inwardly focused.  Shouldn’t we try to relate better to the rest of the world?  Can we be more engaged, in a non-political and non-religious ways, with the entirety of mankind?

In many respects, the Bloom op-ed piece is similar to The Book of Mormon musical now being performed on Broadway.  The South Park boys and the Yale scholar are both shooting at a bigger target–conservatives religions in general.  Mormons just happen to be the easiest bullseye.

The difference is that the Broadway musical is surprisingly sweet and the op-ed piece is surprising bitter.  But just because Bloom’s piece is mean-spirited, doesn’t mean that some of his observations don’t have merit.

Harold Bloom: On Mormon Cosmology and Mitt Romney

According to Harold Bloom, Mormon observer and Yale University scholar, wrote the following as an op-ed piece in The New York Times (12 Nov 2011):

Our political satirists, with Mr. Romney evidently imminent, delight in describing the apparent weirdness of Mormon cosmology and allied speculations, but they forget the equal strangeness of Christian mythology, now worn familiar by repetition. Jorge Luis Borges shrewdly classified all theology as fantastic literature, and Joseph Smith’s adventures in the spiritual realm are at least refreshingly original, and were even in 19th-century America, when homegrown systems of belief sprouted prodigiously. Smith was not a good writer, except for one or two of his sermons, as reported in transcriptions by his auditors, but his mythmaking faculty was fecund.

The accurate critique of Mormonism is that Smith’s religion is not even monotheistic, let alone democratic. Though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints no longer openly describes their innermost beliefs, they clearly hold on to the notion of a plurality of gods. Indeed, they themselves expect to become gods, following the path of Joseph Smith.

Bloom continues:

Mormons earn godhead though their own efforts, hoping to join the plurality of gods, even as they insist they are not polytheists. No Mormon need fall into the fundamentalist denial of evolution, because the Mormon God is not a creator. Imaginatively liberating as this may be, its political implications are troublesome. The Mormon patriarch, secure in his marriage and large family, is promised by his faith a final ascension to godhead, with a planet all his own separate from the earth and nation where he now dwells. From the perspective of the White House, how would the nation and the world appear to President Romney? How would he represent the other 98 percent of his citizens?

Source:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/will-this-election-be-the-mormon-breakthrough.html?pagewanted=2

Spencer W. Kimball: On Oppression of the Poor

I found these quotes while reading the SLTrib; their blog was quoting from a post on www.timesandseasons.org by Julie M. Smith.  It is worthy of being read and reread.

According to then-member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles Spencer W. Kimball in an October 1953 General Conference address:

Now, all money is not lucre—all money is not filthy. There is clean money—clean money with which to buy food, clothes, shelter, and other necessities and with which to make contributions toward the building of the kingdom of God.

Clean money is that compensation received for a full day’s honest work. It is that reasonable pay for faithful service. It is that fair profit from the sale of goods, commodities, or service. It is that income received from transactions where all parties profit.

Compromise money is filthy, graft money is unclean, profits and commissions derived from the sale of worthless stocks are contaminated as is the money derived from other deceptions, excessive charges, oppression to the poor and compensation which is not fully earned. I feel strongly that men who accept wages or salary and do not give commensurate time, energy, devotion, and service are receiving money that is not clean. Certainly those who deal in the forbidden are recipients of filthy lucre. . . . I am sure that money is unclean when it is obtained through oppression, fraud[,] bribery, or through misrepresentations. . . . He that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches, and he that giveth to the rich, shall surely come to want (Prov. 22:16). Much is said about the hirer and the hired in the scriptures, and about the employer and the employee:

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth ( James 5:1-4). . . .

Source: http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2011/11/a-prophet-occupies-wall-street/

Occupy Wall Street: Is it Really Leaderless?

Van Jones is a past radical who joined the Obama adminstration for a short period of time early in the President’s administration.  According to Time magazine:

. . . Van Jones (is) a Tennessee-born activist who just two years earlier had resigned his post in overseeing green-jobs programs in the Obama Administration amid a growing scandal over his radical past.  Jones is now back in the spotlight, leading the fight to get progressive groups to support the Occupy Wall Street protests.

. . . There isn’t another leader who can pull people like that together,” says Robert Borosage, a director of the Campaign for America’s Future.

Robert (Bob) L. Borosage, Liberal Washington Power Broker

Borosage is a big-time Washington DC organizer (and lobbyist?) for liberal causes.  (I think I went to High School with Bob in East Lansing, Michigan.  Back then he had more hair and no mustache.)  In 2008, Jones wrote a book titled The Green Collar Economy, which earned praise for laying out a vision of envrionmental change that would lead to new jobs in the inner city insulating homes and installing solar panels.

Van Jones in Front of Solar Array Installation Work

According to Jones, if liberals want change, they need a grass-roots movement of their own.  It needs to be organized around a set of ideals, not just any particular leader:

We don’t want leader-centric movements,

We want leader-full movements.

I’m not big on slogans, I wondered what a “leader-full movement” is?  According to one website:

Each person is waiting for nobody to tell [him or] her what to do. Rather, each is leading his own piece of the movement, and trusting that all the other pieces are handled by others, equal in their brand of leadership.

Walking for the Mind

At work, I’m a pacer.  Between work tasks, I get up and walk around.  It helps clear my mind, it helps transition my mind from one task to the next, and it helps me think.

Aparently this is not a unique exercise.  According to Walter Isaacson in the Introduction to his recent biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs sometimes liked to walk as he conversed:

. . . We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado.  He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage.  He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk.

That seemed a bit odd.  I didn’t yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. . .

Longer walks can also be helpful.  Time magazine (21 Nov 2011) published a short interview with Werner Herzog, the German movie director.  One of the Q&As is enlightening:

Q:  In addition to being a feature-film director and documentarian, you seem to have become an amazing interviewer.

A:  I’m not an interviewer.  I have conversations.  And I know the heart of men.  I know it because I had fundamental experiences like traveling on foot.  The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.  I’ve walked from Munich to Paris, but I’ve also done longer walks.  You’re unprotected and have to talk to people to ask them to fill you canteen because there’s no creek for dozens of miles.  You really learn what men are all about.

I also enjoy long walks.  And while I don’t always like Herzog’s documentaries and movies, he is right about the wonders of hiking.

“The Plan of Salvation,” A Personal Critique

The LDS Church has a fairly complicated plan for what happens to the eternal man; it is referred to as “the Plan of Salvation.”  From late in Joseph Smith’s life until the mid-twentieth century, it involved humans potentially becoming gods.  I always appreciated this part of Mormon theology.

A Simplified Version of the LDS "Plan of Salvation"

“The Plan of Salvation” is widely described elsewhere, so I won’t repeat the details here.  While I like the general concepts, I have issues with the particulars:

• Mormons as part of their worldview believe in a pre-existence, and this belief has historically been used to explain a variety of worldly inequities.  For example, those who were less valiant in the pre-existence were somehow cursed with a “lesser” position here on earth.
• The alleged “war in heaven” in the pre-existance seems very much like a metaphor.
• Those who aren’t valiant here on earth get a lesser position in the afterworld.  For me, this brings up a serious issue of equality of opportunity.  It’s one thing to have noble views about post-mortality; it’s another thing to try and understand how this works in a world where earthly opportunities are so unequal.   Obviously, I have different opportunities than an individual living in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, or Mexico City, or Mumbai, India.
• Mormons believe in a literal Satan.  I do not.  If there is a God, then Satan is defined as the lack of God.  God is like “hot,” and Satan is like “cold,” the absence of heat.  If you are a mass murder, it is not because Satan captured your soul, it is because you are a sociopath. 
• Mormons don’t believe in a literal Hell (some Evangelicals are also evolving into a Hell-less, post-mortal experience).  I find this comforting.  But Mormons do believe in 3 degrees of glory.  And once you are assigned to one of these “degrees”, based in part on your earthly performance, you are stuck there for eternity.  Only those in the highest “degree” can be with their family and achieve anything remotely resembling godhood.  I’m personally not a big believer in fixed walls.  I think they are a human invention.  If there is life after death, I can’t see being stuck anywhere.

If you are an agnostic, is it possible to admire the general plan but have issues with the details?  Or, am I headed for a multiple personality disorder?  Or, am I already there?