While America wakes up, Hyderabad drives home.
https://youtu.be/G8H0N_FJ3No Rush hour at night…
https://youtu.be/Gof3BBZ8oF8 Random guy walks into the street at 2:20…
https://youtu.be/LRzqwM8Z3M4 Making a U-turn…
and…
https://youtu.be/OPpUE3cbH4s It’s a river of motorcycles!
There are times when the cosmos seems to be an idiot: blind, thrashing, killing innocents indiscriminately. My heart mourns for the family of a dear friend, who has suffered the loss of a child, as my family endured in 2001. Such anguish, such grief, such violence… the cold feeling of death penetrates the body and it feels no hunger that can be satisfied. It endures a sadness without end. It experiences a wound without closure. The shock passes over, the pain lingers long, and though one becomes accustomed to the pain, one never truly ceases to feel it, not entirely.
Even so, God is Love, and healing may still be found, though bitter experience may still make it hard to find. Healing may still be found.
God rest thy soul, good child. Thy light was dimmed too soon, but it shall burn brightly in a day yet to come.
God rest thy souls, friends and survivors. The search for meaning is difficult, even impossible at times, but meaning can be found. One must never abandon hope.
God rest thy souls, mothers and fathers; sisters and brothers. These are the sharpest tears you will ever shed. Your eyes will be cut raw with their passing. Even so, in the days to come, never abandon hope. Never abandon faith. Never abandon the pure love of Christ.
The sun eventually rises anew, and in that dawn, there is the hope, the promise of a new life and an ending to the pain.
Never lose that hope. Never.
The day will come again when Jarom Webb and Zoe Hastings will smile and laugh again. Until that day comes, never lose that hope.
Never.
Since everyone had the day off, my work colleagues in Hyderabad took me and my fellow American traveler to Charminar, Mekkah Masjid, and Golconda Fort. I’ve posted those pictures on my Facebook page, so I’ll leave those sights to those pictures. Here, I want to talk about my non-photographic impressions.
First, the smells of India. Yes, there are spots where the sewage is noticeable, but those have been very few. Instead, the overwhelming aroma is of spices and fragrant incense. Everywhere I’ve been, I could smell the perfumes of spice in the air. It’s wonderful. I’ll never be able to enter an Indian market again without remembering the bazaar in Hyderabad.
Next, the tastes. I’m at a hotel with an amazing restaurant, and I’m tasting things I never dreamed possible. It’s a different palate, sure, but again, the spices penetrate the mind and heart and win me over, every time. I have to be careful what I put on my plate, because I will clean it, totally. And while I could order French toast or waffles for breakfast, I want to try the Indian offerings while I’m here. So far, it’s been amazing, and I don’t see any break in the action. I’ll be adventurous, and order something different each day. Today was upma with sambar. Out of this world. It’s like grits with masala.
Now, the sounds. Horns all the time on the streets. Peacock calls on occasion. Hindi, Urdu, and Telugu whizzing past my ears, with me being able to pick up scraps of the Hindi and Urdu. Bargaining. Sharp rebukes. Kindnesses. Grace and gratitude, it’s all here. I’ve slept very well in my quiet room, but the noise of the city is its heartbeat.
You might gather that I’m loving my trip here. You would be correct in that observation. Now I need to start my second full day here…
“For behold, this is my work and my glory – to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” – Moses 1:39
God’s purpose is clear: this verse reveals the love and care that motivated His creation of the universe as a place where we could, with His guidance and planning, pass through trials that we might be able to learn better how to love one another. By loving one another, we become more like God, for God is Love.
“It is a paradox that men will gladly devote time every day for many years to learn a science or an art; yet will expect to win a knowledge of the gospel, which comprehends all sciences and arts, through perfunctory glances at books or occasional listening to sermons. The gospel should be studied more intensively than any school or college subject. They who pass opinion on the gospel without having given it intimate and careful study are not lovers of truth, and their opinions are worthless. To secure a testimony, then, study must accompany desire and prayer.”
– John A. Widtsoe
Evidences and Reconciliations
Think about this: if everyone gave up two means a month and donated the cost of those meals to a charity such as a local food bank, we could end hunger in the world. We really could. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WNxFYJcK28
Video is here. I hope you enjoy it and please do share, like, and subscribe if you do!
Of course, the title needs some qualification. “End” can mean a lot of things, thanks to its multiple meanings. In this case, I mean the end phase of the run of Western Civilization. As for “near”, speaking of processes such as these can mean anywhere from 50 to 500 years, depending on the breaks. Sorry if anyone wanted an immediate, everything goes all at once scenario, but that’s not historically probable. These civilization things tend to lurch towards their finish, not hit the wall and then vanish. When a historian or archaeologist says “suddenly”, he usually means, “over the course of decades”.
Classic Mayan civilization, took 100 years or so to grind to a halt, and it’s not like the Mayans vanished off the face of the earth. They just started their Postclassic period, which saw the population centers shift northward and change their architectural styles. The Romans didn’t suddenly cancel their empire in 476: the thing had been falling apart since the reign of Commodus, back around 190. 476, by the way, was just a date set for the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire wasn’t totally wiped out until 1453, although it had been in definite decline since around 1050-1100. These “end of civilization” things take time.
But they do happen, and the onset of decline is typified by a convergence of crises. The 20th Century was one of the worst ever for Western Civilization: two horrific global wars, a global economic depression, and massive erosion of traditional values and virtues. The 21st Century started off with a global economic depression that got papered over by central banks in a desperate effort to contain its potential damage. The result of that has led to major upheavals in Europe among nations economically trapped by their Euro membership. Tensions run very high between the West and its rivals in Russia and China, with both those powers eager to pick away at the edges of the West and expand their spheres of influence.
Even the key ideal of The West, that our aspirations are unbounded, is challenged with the realization that resources are finite and that some barriers are insurmountable. Perhaps we can put a man on Mars, but to what avail? What would a colony of humans there profit us? No, Tibet is as far into space as human colonization will go.
Look also to our architecture. Where once cathedrals and skyscrapers reached for the stars, now we build with an eye towards greener construction, with preservation of resources foremost in our minds. The very fact that we now think electric power doesn’t come cheaply is a strong opposite to the ideal that we could have power “too cheap to meter.” Like the case of the Mayans – and it was also true for the Romans, by the way – when the architecture changes, it’s a sure sign that the civilization is changing with it.
Changes in architecture, doubt of the core ideal, and crises accelerating and deepening: all these are signs that the end of Western Civilization is upon us and that it will convulse and grind along until the people in the lands once dominated by its thinking choose to think a different way. And that’s really not a bad thing, in and of itself.
The idea of preservation, conservation, and stewardship of resources is emergent not just as a fad of the times, but as an actual challenging idea to that of Western Civilization. It’s not yet ready to take flight on its rise, noontime, and fall over a millennium, but it will. Perhaps one day, maybe 50, or maybe 500 years from now, we’ll see this new way of thought dominate the minds of men… and then another way of thought will come along, after that. Such is history.
But to say, “The end is near!” is to also say, “The beginning starts soon after that!”
My comments below are based upon the April 2015 Conference talk “Choose to Believe” by Elder L. Whitney Clayton of the Presidency of the Seventy. I will present these comments in sacrament meeting today. This is what I believe, and so I should also make them part of my personal record, here.
Elder Clayton’s talk was hard for me to listen to during this last conference. I get queasy very easily, and this talk had descriptions of some pretty harsh injuries. He described how a young girl named Sailor lost both her parents in a plane crash and, in spite of the darkness of a Kentucky winter night and her own harrowing injuries, she braved the wilderness and made her way to safety. What guided her to safety? A light, in this case, from a house.
Elder Clayton chose his example because of the extreme conditions the protagonist endured – but nevertheless survived. She survived because of hope. She survived because she had faith that the light she saw was the answer, that it was the solution to her problem. She survived because she had that faith – and then because she acted upon that faith.
Elder Clayton took a quote from Alma Chapter 32 to illustrate his point further. Alma 32 is a powerful description of not only what conditions must exist for us to have faith, but also instructions on what to do to acquire that faith. Let me emphasize again – there are things that we must do in order to get our faith, for faith does not fall gently into our laps from angels passing overhead. Faith is something which we must rise up from our beds and walk towards. It is something which we must tend to, both with care and with regularity.
Consider these words from Alma:
26 Now, as I said concerning faith—that it was not a perfect knowledge—even so it is with my words. Ye cannot know of their surety at first, unto perfection, any more than faith is a perfect knowledge.
27 But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.
28 Now, we will compare the word unto a seed. Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.
29 Now behold, would not this increase your faith? I say unto you, Yea; nevertheless it hath not grown up to a perfect knowledge.
30 But behold, as the seed swelleth, and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow, then you must needs say that the seed is good; for behold it swelleth, and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow. And now, behold, will not this strengthen your faith? Yea, it will strengthen your faith: for ye will say I know that this is a good seed; for behold it sprouteth and beginneth to grow.
I want to call attention to how Alma said that there are things we say within ourselves that increase our faith. We bear testimony of this faith: we must needs say that the seed is good. One could argue, perhaps, that Alma is making a suggestion on how one would observe the swelling and growing. I hold the view that this is an action to take, for Alma tells us that after we bear this testimony, “Behold, will not this strengthen your faith?”
So we bear our testimonies in church on Fast Day. If we cannot face the congregation, we should bear our testimonies to our friends and family at more intimate gatherings. If that is too much to bear, then we should confide a testimony in our most trusted friend. And, should we be even too shy for that, there is always the mirror, where we can look ourselves in the eye and bear our faith-growing testimonies there. The habit will improve our courage and deepen our faith, for faith truly is the opposite of fear.
Imagine that poor girl, if she were immobilized by fear. She would have perished in the cold. That would have been her choice, and perishing would have been the consequence of that choice. We are free to create as many reasons as we desire to allow fear to rule our lives. But that fear is the emotional manifestation of the power of Satan’s chains on our souls, and there are many sins that we can fall into that will intensify that fear, but provide us with a lie to justify their influences in our lives. We are free to fall into a trap of fear and then help Satan to chain ourselves down harder and tighter with his awful powers.
But the young girl chose instead to walk out of the trap that she was in. The sorrow of losing her parents was a chain that did not bind her. The injuries she had suffered did not bind her. The darkness, the wilderness, the cold, none of those bound her. She allowed her faith to guide her steps, until the spiritual hope became a very real physical hope. So it is with us.
We all face a wilderness in our lives. We all face something that we know to be our greatest challenge. We all face something that we know to be our most protracted battle with sin. All of these things are traps. The most important thing about a trap is knowing how to get out of it. Nothing else matters. Complaining about the trap does nothing. Lamenting about how unjust the trap is does nothing. Studying, analyzing the trap can be helpful if one does not know the way out of the trap, but clear instructions from someone that knows how to get out of the trap are the best. Follow them to the letter, and you can’t go wrong.
So how do we emerge from the wilderness of sin, depression, and hopelessness? We have clear instructions from Jesus Christ, both in the scriptures of old and the revelations of today. Choose to believe. Choose to act on faith. Follow that faith from consequence to liberating consequence. Note that God will not compel us in this matter. Satan, however, will compel us as much as he and his minions can to keep us in our traps of faithlessness, our prisons of unbelief, our private hells of inertia.
Satan will tell us lie after lie, that we cannot succeed if we leave behind our sin. He will lie that we need our sin to get through the night. He will lie to us to build up our self-absorbed pride, that we would reject any help offered to free us from his grasp. Depression is the same thing, as it is a lie we tell ourselves as skillfully as Satan does that we cannot hope, that we cannot have faith, that we might as well give up.
Should we rise up and begin to cast aside his chains, he will throw them back at us. He will bellow out threats and curses and all manner of evil things. He will surround us with darkness, spiritual and physical, that we might not discern the gleam of hope that pours forth from the Kingdom of God.
I find it fascinating that in Hindu religious teaching, following sacred duty is considered to be the best path. Following the pride of one’s own passion will lead to misery, according to their teaching, and inertia is considered worst of all. I find this resonates with the truth of the Restored Gospel. We do not find happiness in raging against this thing or that thing in the world, and we absolutely do not find it in spiritless inaction. We find it in disciplining our souls, in doing the hard but necessary work of faith, and in accepting the love, grace, and care of the saviour Jesus Christ as we do that work.
Choose to believe. In that belief is the light of Christ, the saving grace for us all. Choose to believe. In that belief, there is peace and an untroubled soul. Though we will endure harrowing ordeals as we remove chains of sin in our lives and as we pass through awful wildernesses, we do have that light of Christ to guide us as we pray, as we study, and as we bear testimony.
When we seek to not struggle with a sin or when we entertain a doubt about the truth of the Gospel, we give place not to faith, but to fear or pride. When we fail to say that our sin or our doubt is evil, we allow it to grow and to spread and to take deeper root in our heart, like a weed that cannot be easily eradicated. When we are in that state, we allow contention to disturb our peace and pride to blunt our intellect. If there are things in our lives that cause contention or confusion, they are of Satan. They are not of God. Let go of them. See them for the chains that they are, and seek to struggle against them, that you may remove them from your lives.
Had that young girl Sailor sat down in the ruins of the plane crash and cried out, “Don’t judge me! This is who I am and who I will always be, for fate has made it so!” she would have perished. Even if all mankind refused to cast the first stone, she still would have had to go before the judgment bar of Heavenly Father, for He will judge us all, and he will not tolerate the least degree of sin. While it is no sin to be a victim of fate, it is a sin to try and make what is wrong to seem right. It is a sin of pride to think that not even Jesus Christ can change who you are, for he can change any one of us when we allow Him into our lives with a choice to believe.
I know a story that is the opposite of Sailor’s. It is that of an addict, who I once tried to help. He had his reasons for his addiction, and they were like golden treasures to him. He allowed those reasons to justify his addiction, and those lies allowed him to live a life that, in spite of all the physical hardships it gave him, was spiritually easy. For him to recover, he had to see those reasons for the lies that they were, and that became a painful process of admitting to himself how wrong he had been.
He hated pain. Physical pain was bad enough, but he found the spiritual pain to be unbearable. Sailor, on the other hand, endured both the spiritual pain of making the brave choice to move out into the night and the physical pain of her injuries as she crossed a briar-infested wilderness. The addict actually saw the light once – I gave him a blessing that he requested, and he had what was then, to him, an undeniable impression of the presence of the Holy Spirit – but he then chose to return to a life that was spiritually much easier and he then cast his doubts all around his eyes, that he would no more see that light. Sailor kept searching for the light until she saw it and then never averted her gaze from that saving beacon.
I suppose that addict hoped that a kick in the bottom or a bash on the head would cure him, as it would require no effort on his part. The kick or the blow would land on him and drive the sin away, and that would be that. He loved programs where everything was done for him and all he had to do was affirm with words that he was cured, that he had seen the light. In reality, his lack of action meant that those words were empty and that he would blind himself from any light that he had been shown.
I myself have been made with a brain that is prone to depression and a body that is prone to fits of pain. This is who I am, for fate has made me so. But it is not who I will always be. When I realized the grip that the darkness of my own wilderness of depression had upon me, I had to choose to believe. I had to choose to humble myself and to let others not only tell me that Christ could help me, but to believe their words and then follow up that belief with appropriate action. I have seen the path of the addict, who refused to act, and decided it was not for me. I know that the path Sailor took, however arduous and difficult it is for me to hear about, is exactly the path that I should follow. It will free me from my trap.
I choose to believe. I choose to act on that belief. It is a good thing, and it has brought peace and clarity to my life. I have to be honest about my imperfections and my sins if I want to emerge from their agonies. I know that Christ loves us when we do the difficult work of repentance, and that his light is always here in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, even when others claim to be unable to see it, or say that it is visible, but only in another place. I testify that this is the place of truth, and that when we work alongside Jesus Christ to make our lives change and conform to the truth, we are truly perfecting ourselves and preparing correctly for our return to Heavenly Father.
I said Elder Clayton’s talk was hard for me to listen to. I did not say it was impossible. I took the example of young Sailor to heart and made it through the wilderness of things that I found uncomfortable and made it to the light of Christ that awaited me through it all. That is an example to us all. It is not up to us to ask for the light to be easier to reach, nor is it up to us to ask that the light change its character to suit our needs. It is up to us to be thankful that the light is there, that there is a way to reach it; to choose to believe in that light, that pure light of Jesus Christ, and then to rise up and act on those beliefs. Jesus never said, “wait right here and I’ll bring you everything you need.” He said, “Come, follow me.” Let us choose to believe, and then follow Him.
In the name of our beloved saviour who sacrificed his all for us that we might return with him in love and joy to our Heavenly Father, even Jesus Christ, Amen.
Flower petals snow
Bamboo chattering greetings
Water wind whispers
Birds call their kindreds
Maples reach to the ripples
Fish swim anciently
The path beckons me
To where the lowest branch laughs
Where vines turn and twist
Soft colors float by
Songs decorate the spring clouds
I rest in heaven