Mission Training Days 4 & 5: Go Forth!

Our Group of Senior Service Missionaries with the Mission Presidency front, seated.

Yesterday went well. I was just to tired to blog after a day of training then an evening at the local Family History Library.

It's funny (or not) how they tell you only parts of what is happening when you come to it. They did say there would be a week of training to start. And now we hear that we will need a week of training in our assigned areas. Basic retirement was a lot easier. But this is good. And I'm still done by 4:00 so I can come home and take a nap.

The trainers did really well on "Merging," of all things. No crying or general break-downs. It went a bit slow and steady so I found one of my own to merge thanking the Heavens for good Dutch records. Someone had put in an individual as a female reading "Cornilus" as "Cornilia." I could easily check Dutch sources wonderfully laid out on-line recently by the Dutch government to confirm it was a male. We learned some good search techniques too (surprising me a bit with FamilySearch as I usually search with Ancestry).

Thomas Vaughan and the "Magic" of Adam

You can find this online here.

We're going a little Nibleyesque here as I was startled by some passages I read in the writings of my distant cousin, Thomas Vaughan, the 17th Century Alchemist. The point is, Cousin Thomas draws some very interesting conjectures about the first man, Adam, and his knowledge of the Second Adam, Jesus Christ.

First, I must explain that Thomas Vaughan was a very religious man and his study of Alchemy, while a bit unorthodox, fit within his religious faith as he defined Magic in this manner:

Magic is nothing else but the wisdom the the Creator revealed and planted in the creature. . . . Magicians were the first attendants our Savior met withal in this world, and the only philosophers who acknowledged him in the flesh before that he himself discovered it. I find God conversant with them, as he was formerly with the patriarchs; he directs them in their travels with a star, as did the Israelites with a a pillar of fire; he informs them of future dangers in their dreams, that having first seen his Son, they might in the next place see his salvation.*

Live-Blogging April 2012 LDS Conference - Saturday Afternoon

Here we go again! I had some lunch - crackers and tuna and did my Saturday cleaning. My wife went shopping again and cleaned up on chocolate chips. My BYU daughter woke up from her nap in my big chair, so I got it back. We have limited seating space in the family room as my 15-year-old boy is lying, stretched-out on the couch and we really can't complain because he went to the doctor yesterday and was diagnosed with walking pneumonia! He has his germ mask so we can hope it doesn't spread.

Keep clicking for my updates, but you don't have to rely on me, conference is better direct at this link.

Trails Hurt and Heal: In Honor of Milton Smith, 1825-1846

I have a new idea which I think is original on the differences of understanding and perception among humans. At least I think I think it's original, so stop me if you've heard this one.

Santa Fe Trail cut just south of Cimarron, NM, north of Villa Philmont (through the low point of the fence line)

Could it be that the veil that separates us from the Spirit World works the same to cloud our individual minds and cut us off from each other's spirits in the here and now? Otherwise, we would more easily understand, and love, and have no further need for experience in this life to help us learn how to live the Lord's Charity with each other. Yet there are certainly those times where spirit connects to spirit and we understand things we cannot easily express in human terms.

Meyers-Briggs INFP: What Sir Galahad and I Have in Common

Sir Galahad by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915)

It's not exactly the purity (although far from me being some kind of libertine!) Rather it's the idealistic temperament we share. I feel the need to explain myself yet again, which, of course, is also part of the psychological profile.

Happy Solstice!

The winter solstice is actually more important to me, as I think it was for a lot of ancient people. That is the point the sun stops to move back south north saving mankind from eternal winter. Yet the summer solstice has its charms as I went out this morning before the sunrise to see if the fairy circle had appeared in our backyard. Even with our extra-wet year, it hasn't. My fourteen-year-old boy noted that we haven't seen it since we had the wedding reception for our oldest boy and his sweetheart in our backyard two years ago. Maybe she's the pixie who has spirited him away along with the circle.

Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England, 23 August 2010

Andrew Sullivan - Almost Fair and Rational

Well, you have to give me some credit for getting quoted. And Andrew's style is to quote his readers' e-mails anonymously, which is just fine. And I will reveal here that the second block quote in this recent piece of his is none other than little old Passionate Moderate Mormon - me. But I think Andrew still doesn't get it.

Live-blogging LDS Conference April 3, 2011

This is a lot of fun! It helps me stay awake and pay attention to do a good job knowing my notes are going out to the whole world. I hope I'm being respectful enough to the speakers. This should be no substitute for going to the official transcriptions or the live and recorded broadcasts at lds.org. But it also pleases me that this conference blogging has had more hits than anything else I've ever posted.

Daughter Anne is fixing breakfast burritos. Of course, I have already broken into the 72-hour snacks we eat every April Conference to rotate out the old stuff so when the earthquake strikes we're not eating stale goldfish crackers, etc. But it's nice to have Anne home from BYU for the weekend.