Ring! Salt Lake Speaking….

Well, you’ll be happy to know that I’m definitely having a better Monday morning than are 12 old men in—presumably—Utah*.

These guys have a problem: the world they knew went away somewhere and came back entirely different. Because, in the past, it was easy: you kept everybody busy and isolated. So if you were in small towns in the American west, you devoted forty to sixty hours to making the desert bloom—which they did—and twenty or thirty hours going to church. That didn’t leave too much time for anything else but sleep. Oh, and since everybody else around you was doing the same thing, there was no possibility of dissent.

So that meant that all of the rest of us could—in spare moments—chuckle snidely at the more preposterous claims. Who can forget Mark Twain, one of the earliest and certainly one of the best critics, on the Book of Mormon?

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the “elect” have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason. 

So all of us could sit around and snigger when every other institution in the States had to confront its own racism throughout the sixties and seventies, but the Mormons? Still barring blacks from the priesthood, which is generally given to every male child at age 12, until 1978. And then, as Wikipedia tells us, there came a little problem named Brazil, since it was no problem telling the women from the men. But the blacks from the whites? Right—so Spencer W. Kimball, the leader of the church, went off to his study, and guess what! There God was—in all his white maleness—dishing up a revelation! Wow—all in a day’s work!

But the 70s must seem like the most halcyon of days, since the most potent threat were quaint little things like newspapers and magazines, as well as books, of course. But all of that was easy enough, since it was easy to brand any criticism as that ol’ debil, the Eastern liberal intelligentsia. Oh, and do you think a librarian in Provo, Utah, is going to be putting seditious books on her shelves? Not likely.

So change, when it came, arrived as the gentlest of mists, not as a gale. And then?

Someone invented the Internet.

Which one person described as the gateway drug out of Mormonism, ‘cause how are you going to keep them down on the farm, once they’ve clicked on Google? And there’s another problem: since all the rest of us can fritter away the time with vices like drinking and smoking, the Mormons? They’re grimly, and soberly, sitting in front of their computers, writing blogs.

Yes—it seems that the Mormons are writing blogs to such an extent that a term had to be invented: the bloggernacle. Right, my computer doesn’t know it—nor will I teach it—but Wikipedia does:

The Mormon blogosphere (often referred to as the Bloggernacle) is a segment of the blogosphere focused on Mormon issues.[1] The term "Bloggernacle" was coined by individuals within the LDS blogging community as a play on the name of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; however, not all LDS-themed bloggers like or use the name Bloggernacle, or even consider their blog to be part of it. Furthermore, not all bloggers within the Mormon blogosphere are Mormons themselves.

So on 17 March 2013, Kate Kelly, a lawyer and devout Mormon—she did her year of missionary service in Barcelona, and why does that feel ever so slightly bogus?—created a website, ordainwomen.org.

Hmmm—let’s see: who was it that said there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come?

Answer—Victor Hugo….

Astonishing, really, how all the world’s media has followed this blog’s lead in championing this story! Not just people like me, but little guys like The New York Times, and Yahoo, and even way down south in Australia—anywhere, in fact, where they have Mormons (everywhere) and women (also everywhere). So yesterday, we were all sitting around scratching the collective head: some of us at home, but 200 people or so with Kelly in a vigil in Salt Lake City. Oh, and there were vigils in seventeen other countries—eighteen, if we count little Marc down here in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And why were we all vigiling?

OK—return to your seats, fasten your seat belts and lock your tray tables onto the seat in front of you: it turns out that ordainwomen.org advocates for the—deep breath, here—ordination of women! And that, to the twelve “apostles” of the Mormon Church, is apostasy, another word for which is heresy. So Kelly’s local leaders called her in for a trial yesterday.

Except not—since Kelly is now living in Utah, and had requested that the church transfer her records there.  Here’s what Kelly wrote in the first paragraph of her letter:

I beg of you not to impose any form of discipline during the trial you will hold on Sunday. I also request that you do the right thing and revoke the “informal probation” that was placed upon me and remove the “move restriction” placed on my records so that I can participate in the ward where I currently reside. Please reconsider this punitive process and allow me to continue to worship in peace.

In theory—and Salt Lake is playing this trumpet as loud as Gabriel ever did—discipline is entirely in local hands, and the central hands have nothing, nothing, to do with it.  But it is interesting that the big boys from Salt Lake had visited Kelly’s stake—the words blogging teaches you!—and then, boom! Oh, and the same thing happened to another blogger, John Dehlin. Stay tuned—his trial is next Sunday….

Well, if the French word for a bluffer is bluffeur, am I—on this issue—a scoffeur?  Because of course I know what has to be done. Tom Monson, the current president, needs to be sent to his room, in order to be served up God’s most recent revelation: the Internet, and especially Google, is the work of Satan himself, sent to snare the faithful and lead them to perdition!

Easy for me to laugh—but in one sentence, which of course I can’t find now, Kelly pleads not to be excommunicated and deprived of spending the rest of eternity without her family. Because that, you see, is what she / they / if-not-I believe. When she dies, she will—if in good standing with the church—spend all eternity with her loved ones. If not, not.

The church asked her to take down the site and sit down and be a good girl, and in her letter she makes it clear: no dice. So the trial was yesterday, and then the three judges announced—they were stumped! So they fired off an email—guys, is an electronic transmission an appropriate media to announce loss of eternal life? Shouldn’t the local bishop drop by to break the bad news? Right—the judges announced that they would sleep prayerfully on the matter, and let Kelly know in a day or two.

Why do I think there are a lot of calls to and from Salt Lake this morning?

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*Ever faithful to my bloggerly vocation, I calculated the total years of the twelve, and guess what? It’s 940, or almost halfway back to Jesus himself! Oh, and the average age is 78.3….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_of_the_Twelve_Apostles_%28LDS_Church%29

When Grandmother is Right

I swore, as a younger man, that I would never sing that old tune, made popular by (I think) Mark Twain: “when I was twenty, I though my father was an idiot, at age 25 I was surprised how much he had learned…”

It’s so smug, assuming the young know less than us, assuming that they too will grow up and make the compromises and—too often—forget the dreams and the ideals which on occasion can have real worth. And if they don’t? Well, isn’t it better to have had them? Who wants a 21-year old Republican investment banker? I’ll take a kid writing the great American novel in a garage studio any day….

So why am I reading a book called Willpower, a New York Times Bestseller by Roy Baumeister (the social scientist) and John Tierney (science writer)?

Well, the first reason is that I want more of it. As I sit writing this, my eyes see a group of coupons for Swanson Vitamins (excellent source, by the way, and cheap), two containers of juggling balls (decided to learn to juggle in lieu of getting a job), a little device that I had no idea what use it could provide until I figured it out—it’s the iPod (from aPple!) charger.

Well, Messieurs Baumeister / Tierney would hate that. The first thing they suggest is to clean your desk. Get a to-do list that is concrete, not fuzzy. No “clean the house”—who can possibly do that? Where to start? Instead, “clean guest bathroom sink, dust piano, remove junk from desk…”

You get the idea…..

The book has much to commend it. Which is better—to give kids self-control, or to give them healthy self-esteem?

Confession—that’s the next chapter. Haven’t got to it, yet. But I did sneak and read the two quotes under the title. The first is by someone called Lady Gaga—a popular entertainer (haven’t heard her, don’t know if she can sing): “You’re a superstar no matter who you are or where you come from—and you were born that way.”

Back in a moment—gotta do 100 units of insulin for that surge in blood sugar….

The second quote is just a bit tarter: “Brats are not born. They are made.”

That’s from a lady called Deborah Carroll, a.k.a. Nanny Deb (which does suggest somebody with a bit more hands-on than Lady Gaga…)

Why do I feel that I pretty much know the thesis of this chapter—just by reading the two quotes?

OK—the book also has some great ideas for increasing will power. In the first place, like a muscle, the will can be strengthened. How? By repeated exertion, so that the act or action stops being an act of will, but becomes instead a habit.

And thus steps the explorer Henry Stanley into the book. You’ll remember him—the guy that set off into darkest Africa to find Dr. Livingstone? By the way, it appears that Stanley made up at a later date the famous line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” A fascinating guy—our Stanley. Born poor, was put into the workhouse, and emerged pretending to be an upper-class American—he even affected the accent. Anyway, he kept voluminous diary accounts—he never missed a day—and guess what one page has been torn out of all his diaries?

Yup, the day he finally stumbles on Stanley….

Well, besides being rigorous on the diarying (oh, all right, computer! Diary keeping!), he also shaved every day of his life. Even in the jungle. Even when he had yellow fever or malaria or whatever-it-was and had gone from 160 pounds to 110 pounds. Even when his beloved Miss Alice—to whom he was romantically attached; who was his North Star; who said screw-this and up and married someone else almost before the ship had left the harbor—wasn’t there to see him. Just the cannibals.

With whom he dealt quite well. In fact, on one of the expeditions, he was the ONLY guy to walk out of the jungle—his entire party had died. And yes, he seems to have understood and empathized with the natives.

Was it because he had shaved, that morning?

Yes and no. It seems that by building habits that promote self-control, you no longer have to exert self-control except when really necessary. His sense of rectitude and command, in other words, came easily. When the cannibals shouting “meat, meat!” set upon the group, Stanley had the strength to—as we would say—dialogue.

In addition, the book tackles the thorny question—why do religious people, in general, live longer and happier than agnostics / atheists? Does AA really work, with its invocation of “a higher power?”

Seems so—which is why I may start to meditate again. In the case of Stanley, he was an agnostic, as am I, officially. But his Miss Alice—that less than faithful fiancée—worked for him as God does for the religious. He spent years of his life struggling to be worthy of the woman he had chosen to be his goddess (you do have to be sorry for her—all that adoration would drive anybody into another’s arms….). So, she served him well, in a sense.

Lastly, we come to Trollope.

The learned and educated Readers of this blog don’t need to be told that Trollope has some claim to be a major Victorian novelist—and the Victorian era industriously produced some great writers. And no one was more prolific than Trollope. A more devoted blogger than I would have counted the works listed on Wikipedia. But I can tell you that the list is two-columned, AND you have to scroll to come to the end of it.

Not all was great, of course. But what is great is like nothing else. Or at least George Eliot thought so—she wrote that she could not have written Middlemarch without the novels of Barsetshire (this is too funny—Barsetshire was the fictional shire created by Trollope, and the computer has red-squiggled it! Self-reference turning back on itself?)

And how did Trollope do it? Did he devote himself to working from dawn to dusk?

Nope, he had a job—working at one point for the Royal Mail. He’s the guy who dreamed up a little red post box—an obvious idea, but novel at the time.

He also wrote every day from 5:30 to 8:30. His routine output was 2500 words per day. (This post is at 1083—and will be ending soon…) He charted his progress, and wrote in his Autobiography, “a week passed with insufficient pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”

Well, it goes against the romantic myth of the writer, desperately awaiting the muse, struggling and fighting to give birth to a work of genius. Trollope is at his desk, counting his words—250 words a quarter-hour, 1000 words an hour. 

“I have been told that such appliances (i.e. the watch) are beneath the notice of a man of genius,” he writes. But he’s not, he claims, a man of genius. Yet goes on to say, “a small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”

Well, such ideas—shaving in the jungle, dining formally in the desert, industriousness and duty—all seem from another time, when ladies wore corsets and the legs of the piano were seemly dressed, so as not to provoke wanton desire. The time of our grandmothers.

“You can’t grade papers with a red pen,” a student told me, I thought in jest. But no, it’s true. A paper slashed with red ink wounds the self-esteem of the students, according to popular theory. Red pens are no longer permitted in the schools.

Yeah? There was a lot not to be kept from those times. But there may also be a place for self-control—for the rigor of sane and healthy habits practiced over a lifetime.

Note to readers—1341 words. Just over half of Trollope’s daily production….