Of Darkness and Light

As far as I am aware, man is the only animal with a conscience. This is not that animals do not feel bad from time to time. Anyone who has every been around a dog knows that they can evince something that resembles shame when you get mad at them. However, like Robert Burns said of that ill-fated mouse whose cozy winter home the Poet's plow so rudely overturned:

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Man is doomed by his intellect to suffer for the pains of the past and fear for the future. That is why, perhaps, so many of the world's mystical traditions encourage their initiates to put the future in God's hand, the past in His mercy and become immersed in the present. So taught the Taoists, the Stoics, the Sufis, the Christian Mystics, and even Jesus Christ Himself. Consider these words:

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself ~Matthew 6:34

A few years ago, a heard what was a paradigm shifting sermon for me by Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. It was October of 2000 in the Saturday Afternoon session of General Conference. Elder Oaks spoke on Becoming. He said:

[T]he Final Judgment is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts--what we have done. It is an acknowledgment of the final effect of our acts and thoughts--what we have become.

Not long before this I had encountered as a missionary for the Mormon Church an angry minister of another faith who accused me of believing that each good deed somehow got me a certain number of "points" with God and that I need only achieve a particular threshold in order to enter heaven. Having only said, "Hello," to him, I was startled by this brazen declaration and no manner of refutation on my part could dissuade him of his error. However, I though a lot about his words and about the perceptions our words and actions can give to others. I have addressed this topic many times before in this site.

Elder Oaks' talk, however, gave me great clarity. Many more scriptural passages became clearer like Jesus' parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), which Elder Oaks cites. It is not the things we do that matter, but the effect of the things we do on our soul. This is at once comforting and frightening.

On the one hand, it means that where we labor, whether it be as Prophet, Relief Society President, or the guy who vacuums the Church on Saturdays, does not matter at all because the ultimate goal is the effect of our work on our soul. Elder Oaks notes as an example that, "the pure love of Christ" (Moro. 7:47), is not an act but a condition or state of being. Charity is attained through a succession of acts that result in a conversion. Charity is something one becomes. Thus, as Moroni declared, "except men shall have charity they cannot inherit" the place prepared for them in the mansions of the Father (Ether 12:34; emphasis added)." Doing charitable things does not matter nor does the size of the charitable deed; it is that we become charitable beings. Thus repentance makes more sense. We can never truly ameliorate or mitigate the bad effects of our poor choices and sins. Indeed, we may be forced, as Paul with his thorn in the flesh, to suffer for our bad choices all the days of our probationary mortality. However, we can become better in our souls and through the mercy, grace, and charity of God and Our Savior, we can return and be sanctified though this ultimate end may not come for many years even after our mortal deaths.

On the other hand, we learn here that only true repentance that wrenches the very roots of our souls will ever suffice to obtain God's grace and mercy. The Prophet Joseph Smith said that we would all be tried as Abraham and our very heartstrings would be wrenched. The purpose in all this is not to torture us, but to purify our desires. Hence there are scriptures that say we will be judged by the very desires of our hearts.

The one raised to happiness according to his desires of happiness, or good according to his desires of good; and the other to evil according to his desires of evil; for as he has desired to do evil all the day long even so shall he have his reward of evil when the night cometh. (Alma 5:41)

And yet, throughout all the days of our erring mortality, we are all full of darkness and light warring within us. Each of us has different strength and we fall to different temptations according to our desires.

It is overwhelming sometimes. I often feel beset with my failures and weaknesses. In quiet moments when I should feel peace, I hear only the voice of self recrimination. I am convinced that cynics and idealists are really the same class of being, but we cynics, though we hope for perfection and beauty, see too often the failure. We over emphasize the bad perhaps to justify our own failings.

Light and Dark are continually at war within us. The more I ponder this, the less I am inclined to judge any man for his sins. I cannot do it. He is tied to me in the same ultimate endeavor. At stake is the very integrity of an immortal soul. How can I dare to cast one of those aside? C. S. Lewis remarked that when he looked upon suffering souls, he saw gods. The Bible tells us that we are gods (see Psalms 82:1-6). But fallen so far we little resemble what once we were when we walked with Angels for a time. We are as much now like God as a pebble resembles a mountain.

Lately I feel that I have been trying to compensate for what Hemingway called, "the burden of a happy childhood." Through this, I have come to understand the wisdom of what Jesus told the Pharisees who endlessly debated the measuring of tithes and the "deep doctrines" of God's presence in the Burning Bush as if such could possibly affect their souls while they omitted the true "deep things of God" as Paul termed them. Jesus said:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. (Matthew 23:23)

Mercy, faith, judgment, hope, charity, peace. These are the doctrines upon which it is our duty to meditate. Oh be sure to pay your tithes, as Jesus said. He never advocated neglecting these temporal duties, but rather He cautioned us to look at what underlies the Law. In doing so, the very powers of heaven distill themselves upon our souls.

In the Year 20878 AD/AH

I can still do basic Algebra! Hurray!

I discovered this recently as I attempted to solve a problem that had plagued me for literally minutes. That was this: The Islamic Calendar and the Gregorian (i.e. Christian Calendar) have different lengths. The Islamic Calendar is Lunar and has twelve months. It begins in what is 622 AD in the Western Calendar (on Thursday July 15, to be precise, according to some calculations). In 622, the nascent Muslim community in Mecca fled persecutions and took refuge in the city of Yathrib, thereafter renamed Medina. This flight is known in Arabic as the Hijra, an Arabic word meaning migration or flight.

Ten Lunar years later, in 10 AH (Anno Hegirae, Latin for In the Year of the Hijra), the Prophet Muhammad revealed that God told him that each year should have twelve months and that they should stop adding extra days every year (know as intercalation). The intercalation had been done to keep the months in the same seasons; however, Muhammad stopped this and Muslims today view this as a great blessing since Muslim feast days, such as the fasting of Ramadan and the Pilgrimage to Mecca, are calculated according to the Hijri calendar, the seasons of the festivals change over time.

Since that time, the Islamic world has followed this Hijri calendar. Days, as in the Jewish tradition, begin at sunset, and new months begin with the first viewing of the crescent moon. Today, rather than rely on plain eyesight, mathematical algorithms are done to determine the phases of the moon. This concern for the phases of the moon and the necessity to determine the direction to Mecca for prayer drove Islamic scholars to become masters at astronomy and it was through their work that the world got the astrolabe and the compass; those inestimable tools of navigation.

The problem becomes, however, in this global world, that going between these two systems can be difficult and complex. The following formulas help one convert dates:

AH = 1.030684(CE-621.5643)

CE = 0.970229AH + 621.5643

Where CE equals the Common Era (or the Christian Calendar) date and AH equals the Hijri or Islamic date.

There are difficulties in this calculation though and dates are frequently disputed. An Islamic date recorded in a manuscript in the middle ages, for example, can be extremely tricky to determine precisely in the Western calendar for a variety of reasons. Firstly, in those times, determinations of new months required visually seeing the new crescent moon; though mathematical formulae existed even then. Furthermore, there have been, over the centuries, different Islamic calendars in use in different parts of the Islamic world. This, of course, is not surprising. Europe has only had a unified calendar for a few centuries. In the middle ages, some regions had their own calculations and there were constant debates about which one was best even though there was general agreement on the months (holdovers from Roman times). I can also through another wrench in the gears: namely, that the moon recedes from the earth every year by a couple of centimeters and hence the length of its rotations subtly change. Of course, this has virtually no impact in the short run even including centuries, but over millenia this might affect things. And let's not even discuss the horrors of leap years which exist in both systems!

So, the other day, my coworker and I were discussing these facts. He asked me what year it was in the Islamic system and I replied: 1429 AH. That means that 1429 lunar years have passed since the Hijra; however 1386 solar years have passed (2008-622=1386). Furthermore, in the first year of the Islamic Calendar, the difference between the two systems was 621 (a thoroughly meaningless number by itself since it is a combinations of two systems). Today, the difference is 579. The Islamic calendar is catching up to the Christian calender at a very slow rate. Indeed, it has gained by only 42 in 1386 solar years. Eventually, the years would be the same, I realized. But when? So, I did the following math:

Let x=CE
Let y=AH
x=0.970229y=621.5643
y=1.030684(x-621.5643)

Since I wanted to find the point at which x=y I substituted x for y and set the two equations as equal, hence:

0.970229x + 621.5643 = 1.030684(x - 621.5643)

I proceeded to calculated as follows:

0.970229x + 621.5643 = 1.030684(x - 621.5643)
0.970229x + 621.5643 = 1.038684x - 640.6363789812
0.970229x + 1262.2006789812 = 1.038684x
1262.2006789812 = .060455x
0.060455x = 1262.2006789812
x= 20878.350492

That means that in the year 20,878 AD it will also be the year 20,878 AH. Christianity and Islam will finally come together and peace will reign upon the earth. Now we need only wait 18,870 years (19,449 lunar!) for peace. At the current rate of the peace process in the Middle East, this might be early.