Tonight

Tonight we went for a drive. We often like to drive to new places. Tonight it was a church parking lot up the hill from our house. We got out of the car and ran around, burning off some energy and playing in the decorative rocks before bedtime.

I took my shoes off. It was cool and windy, and the asphalt still had a pleasant warmth from before the clouds had rolled in. So, with warm bare feet and cold wind whipping my hair, my husband and I chased our kids around, and "ate" rocks. (They were strawberry cakes. For Jesus' birthday, per my oldest.)

The weather was my kind of perfect. I have always loved the wind. I love the rain. I love me a good storm. I know that storms often depress people, but for me there's something about that thick storm air that is invigorating. So taking my shoes off, getting in some good "grounding" time there, I felt close to God. 

But also so very very sad.

Just across a field from our parking lot was the Saratoga Springs Temple construction site. It absolutely looks like an Orthanc on a dead plain. No insult to construction. I know building buildings takes time, but this is also one temple I'm not happy to see go up. It feels so unnecessary, with eventually no fewer than ELEVEN temples within a one hour drive from our home. That's not an exaggeration. When the construction is done on the next two, there will be ELEVEN. ELEVEN in one hour.

Seeing this temple makes me feel that we've lost the vision of what temples are supposed to be for, so now they're status and power symbols, rather than ascension symbols. They're symbols of prosperity rather than an Axis Mundi. To me, the hypocrisy level is high as the Church continues to build more temples where no more are needed, and we still have a grossly unfathomable slush fund of wealth. While there are still poor Mormon kids starving to death in third world countries, while their parents are told to pay their tithing instead of feeding their children. To me it seems wrong. It seems like the Church is trying to help their own image instead of God's own children. In these tithes and offerings they have robbed God - taking meat from the house for themselves, so to speak.

Feeling the wind, feeling the warm asphalt, hearing my children laugh, I was close to God. 

"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." John 3:8

The wind can bring hurricanes. It brings life-giving rain. It destroys in tornadoes. It parted the Red Sea. The wind can sweep your feet out from under you. It can dry a tear. 

The work of the Spirit isn't something we can completely understand. It's giving reassurances and peace, while simultaneously giving dark, honest truths - things which seem to contradict one another, and yet it is manageable. THAT is knowledge of both good and evil. 

"As we bow to His leading and guiding, promptings and training, so the indiscernible, unfathomable movement of the Spirit of God can be observed in the man or woman whose life is yielded to the Lord." (Knowing Jesus.com) 

It is hard to be a nuanced Mormon. But it makes me grateful for stormy nights.

Parables and Parallels

Jesus taught in parables, a fact that I've latched onto multiple times throughout my life. 

Parables are fantastic. Parables are a fantastic way to learn "line upon line." A story can change meaning for you from one day to the next. Parables are symbols in action. 

Recently I had a bit of a "revelation" come to me, through the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan. It came as I pondered on "uncleanness" in the Biblical tradition. It occurred to me that one reason why the priest would have passed by the wounded, beaten man, was because he couldn't be certain the man wasn't already dead. If the priest had touched a dead man, he would have become unclean, and wouldn't have been able to participate in his temple service until he became "clean" again. The priest did not stop to help the wounded man because he had "temple stuff" to do, and wouldn't allow another's uncleanness to come between him and God. He missed the point, however, that "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me." His concern for becoming "dirty" prevented him from being with God. After some pondering that, I found new ways to apply that to my life, and it taught me things. 

Because parables. Parables and symbols alike, though repeated with the same words or images, time and time again, can mean different things on any given day, often with meanings changing to help answer our own questions of the soul. I, personally, find great comfort in these symbols and symbolic stories. 

The other day I was watching a lecture that included a lot of Egyptian symbology. (One of my favorites.) I found truths in it, and later tried to explain something that had been quite a beautiful revelation to me to my husband. He was polite, but obviously it wasn't as mind blowing/life altering for him as it was for me. Because my husband doesn't speak symbols. 

He doesn't speak symbols?! Symbols are what God uses!!! Parables are what Jesus taught with!!! 

Maybe he'll learn to like them, I told myself. Maybe if he studied enough, learned enough about world history, cultures, historical theology, etc, etc, he would come to like them too. Maybe his ability to find value in the symbolical aspects of religious learning is something that would come with time, with... spiritual maturity. 

Because that's what Jesus used. 

As always, I'm a proud person. It's not unusual for me to automatically assume I'm right. Fortunately, I have a very patient husband who knows this about me, and allows ME the space to learn my own "line upon line." 

Today I figured it out. All of us are different. In the one brief year where I studied Elementary Education, we studied learning styles. I, myself, am a visual and kinetic learner. There's auditory, and reading/writing too. Are any of these learning styles wrong? Are any of them "better" than the others? Maybe some of them are easier in a given learning environment, but no one is "superior" to the others. 

God created all of us, and I believe God created us as individuals, in omnipotent wisdom. I also believe God created a multitude of environments for us children to learn in - Scripture, Prophets, Rituals. Who am I to judge if scripture speaks to my husband more than stories or symbols? Maybe God created Ritual and Isaiah to teach people like me, and had his prophets speak bluntly and with the plainness of the Book of Mormon for people like my husband. 

Is my learning style better? For me, it is. Is his best? For him, it is. 

Frankly, it doesn't matter if Creation stories have been told in ancient temples, by differing groups of people, with intricate parallels to each other and our own religious tradition, for thousands of years, and isn't that symbology beautiful. In the long run, my knowing that stuff doesn't benefit or change anything about my day to day actions in a way that is superior to people like my husband, who doesn't care about that stuff, but is already living a Christian life from doing from what he's learned from reading scriptures. 

All of us are different, and we all learn to draw closer to God in the context that fits our understandings best. 

Because Jesus taught in parables, but He ALSO taught the Sermon on the Mount.