Hope, Life, and Love

Words, a central theme in my life, are sadly insufficient. Like paint on a canvas, they cannot ever fully capture the world they seek to represent. They are symbols that point our mind on to the Truth that stands behind them. Because of this, words are messy and sloppy. Meanings spill over from one word to another tainting this idea or that thing. They are loaded with emotions that obscure the object, but they remain, however feeble, our main source of communication.

But not the only. There are subtle contextual clues, a wink, a hesitation, a nod. Then there is soul communication; when spirit connects with spirit and pure knowledge and truth and emotion are exchanged. I have had that experience in my life; not nearly so often as I would like.

This brings me to my themes: faith, hope, love, charity, life. I do not believe I can truly discriminate among these to the extent that I can say where one ends and where another beings. How does faith differ from hope. In my mind's eye I see a non-Euclidean plane of hypergeometric, interlocking Venn diagrams. Words, in a instance such as this, can obfuscate the truth. How distinct, really, are faith, hope, and charity. In my experience they are so intertwined that I can scarcely disentangle my thoughts.

Hope is the first and the last of the virtues. It is the foundation for faith and its most powerful result. Hope and faith do not begin with doubt, but with a question. There is a subtle difference. The sincere seeker is ready to believe, but is not a naive dupe ready to believe anything. He does not doubt, but rather hopes and believes. Once faith is acquired, the seeker finds peace, love, charity, hope, and mercy are abundant in him. The abundant life the New Testament speaks of. The Book of Mormon often contrasts prosperity and being cut off from God. It is interesting that it is not prosperity and recession! It is prosperity, which comes from the Latin Spero, meaning "to hope", that is the reward of faithfulness. Faithfulness, in turn, combines hope, necessary to endure, faith, the knowledge about ones outcome, and diligence, which comes from the Latin for "to love."

Somewhere in all this concatenation of words is some truth. I find myself, sometimes, throwing all the words I can at an idea until a few stick. Hope brings us to faith and secures us with an anchor of love to persevere the trials of this life. The reward of our diligence is the hope to know that there is a place for us on the right hand of God.

Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God.

Ether 12:4 ~The Book of Mormon

On Human Insufferability

Some time ago I was reading "Twice Told Tales," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which ranks as one of the greatest works of fiction in American history. I feel a kinship with Hawthorne, who, like me, often felt as though he were merely an observer of human society and never a participant. He recognized, however, that participation in human affairs is a necessary defense against losing one's tenable grasp on life. This moderating effect is important; for otherwise, locked alone, following the idiosyncratic lines of logic dictating by one's own experience, the absurd and the dangerous becomes seemingly true.

Still, I find it difficult to be around others on a continual basis. Solitude is somehow essential to relationships just as togetherness is. As in all human activities, balance is key. Relationships require togetherness just as they require separateness. That is the rub. There is no divine commandment on how a perfect relationship should be conducted. They all required continual negotiation and balance. I believe that is why the scriptures devote so much more time to principles such as forgiveness, patience, love, charity, and faith, rather than a detailed exposition of rules. As Joseph Smith once said, teach the people correct principles and they will govern themselves.

Good intentions, however, can do a great deal of harm in relationships. I do not believe that humans inherently crave evil. They are, instead, inherently weak, cravenly, and short-sighted. That is not just cynicism, it is scripturalism! The scriptures state that man will pick the easier of two options, but in the long run, the easier option becomes the most difficult to bear. In the path to the top of the mountain to which scholars of comparative religions love to refer, one can select many different paths. Not all of them go up the mountain, however. Many merely meander around the scenery. Some trails are assiduous and some, the easy paths, lead no where at all.

Returning to the bad outcomes of good intentions, I have experienced this many times in my life. Two well intentioned, obstinate people will eventually have trouble. The story is told of the Transcontinental railroad that when the two sides met in Utah, they did not exactly line up. Rather than being the one to bend, both sides built parallel tracts in the desert to no where. Humans do this often in relationships. We talk past each other with parallel words, never listening, thinking we have the solution for a problem we have not bothered to fully inquire into.

This is what I so often find insufferable in relationships. Two ships, as they say, passing in the fog of life never inquiring fully into the other, neither listening nor hearing, so full of the self-conceit in one's own rightness, so well-intentioned toward our beloved, we do damage by our active neglect. So, let us all listen a little more than we speak.

تأملات مورمونية

من حين الي اخر سوف اكتب بالعربية التي درست وانا طالب في الجامعة. إنها في رايَ من اجمل اللغات في العالم. وسوف احاول ان اكتب علي شكل صحيح وإني ليست بفصيح الآن بما انا ما زلت ان ادرسها. تتناول كتاباتي العربية و مقاماتي تتناولاَ عميقاَ نفس المواضع التي
اخوض فيها بالإنكليزية إلا وسوف اتجهها إتجاهاَ اكثر مناسبة لكتّاب العرب والمسلمين

واذاَ سوف اتناول الدين والتريخ و النحو والاخبار العاجلة والفلسفة والمنطق والعلاقة بين الإمان والعقل ومرض التوحد اذ أصاب انا بنفسي به

Meditations Part I

The purpose of these missals will be entirely personal and whether I have an audience or not is frankly unimportant. Words are the central and consuming pursuit of my life. The Word, the Logos, in all its shades of meaning semantic, christological, philosophical, and so on. These are the private musings of one who finds it easier to write than to speak. Words come bubbling up inside of me and will have an outlet. This will include dialogues, essays, fictions, poetry, and the unthought-out meandering jeremiads of my mind.

I have called this site Mormon Meditations because I am a Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My purpose is to explore my experience and my beliefs through my writings. Often I have had the experience that not until my words are cogently written down do my ideas begin to crystallize. I am hoping through these writings to explore and understand my own experience.

However, I will not confine myself to "Mormon" specific targets, but will range upon the whole spectrum of my experience including my diagnosis some years past with Asperger's Syndrome, my personal interests in history, religion, language and linguistics, culture, literature, philosophy, physics, and current events.

I invite readers to comment and challenge my ideas so that I will be forced to reconsider them. Without opposition, there is no growth and with growth, there is slow decay and death. I follow the philosophy of the Muslim scholar Ibn Hanbal who said (and I am paraphrasing) I believe my beliefs are correct, but I am aware they could be wrong. I believe my opponents' beliefs are incorrect, but I am aware they could be correct. Truth, as I once heard it said, is larger than any one man's conception of it and as we grope and fumble in the darkness of this world, we all stumble over the truth occasionally, but fall more frequently into error. I subscribe somewhat resignedly to the Weltanschauung of Alexander Pope:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

Still, there is hope -- the final thing that remains to man after he loses everything else. Hope remains when all else flees. It is the basis for faith and charity and the sustainer of the soul. I will write a great deal about hope; a topic that has occupied me lately. Until later...