A PROPHET

In 1923 a Lebanese-Syrian immigrant to the United States named Kahlil Gibran published a little book of poetic essays which he entitled The Prophet.  When I picked it up as a college boy in the 1960’s I was immediately struck with the many provocative and, of course, some debatable insights and thoughts the book presented.  I resonated with the book.  I thought at the time how fortunate it would be to have a real, a living prophet—like the Biblical prophets—on the earth to learn from. 

I later learned—though few on the earth yet know it or believe it—that there is a Prophet on the earth.  Indeed, there are several men who carry by ordination the divine prophetic mantle who serve with him.  But there are other ‘prophets,’ men and women though not ordained, who are on the surface very ordinary individuals who have lived lives of sufficient purity to receive divinely inspired insights. I have also learned that we all can.

Kahlil Gibran, and doubtless others, are of that caliber. 

How does one know?  I believe that one resonates to one of like mind.  As Gibran said, “Even as the strings of a lute are alone. . .they quiver with the same music.” C. S. Lewis said essentially the same thing—that there are men and women walking around on this earth who, if you are attuned, you immediately connect with because you, too, ‘quiver with the same music,’ or you would like to; they are that attractive to you.  

Brigham Young said that of Joseph Smith, Jr., the Prophet of our dispensation: “I feel like shouting Hallelujah, all the time, when I think that I ever knew Joseph Smith, the Prophet whom the Lord raised up and ordained, and to whom he gave keys and power to build up the Kingdom of God on earth and sustain it.  I can truly say that I invariably found him to be all that any people could require a true prophet to be, and that a better man could not [now] be found upon this earth.” 

  

But to stick with our Lebanese ‘prophet’s’ more secular insights, I present a few of Kahlil Gibran’s gems:

 

·        Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

·        Do not fear the thorns in your path for they draw only corrupt blood.

·        Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

·        Your children are not your children.  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.  They come through you but not from you.

·        I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange[ly], I am ungrateful to these teachers. 

·        You give but little when you give of your possessions.  It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

·        You pray in your distress and your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

·        Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.  And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.  And how else can it be?  The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

·        It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship.  Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity, and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created in years or even in generations.

·        You may forget with whom you laughed, but you will never forget with whom you wept.

·        To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but what he aspires to. 

·        Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.

·        Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

·        Desire is half of life; indifference is half of death.

·        They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.

·        When you love you should not think you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

·        Work is love made visible. 

·        The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. [I would say 'your heart.' See his next quotation.]

·        Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

·        Words are timeless; you should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness. 

Finally, I present one of his more “debatable insights” and let you (as with all the rest) draw your own conclusions drawing upon your mind and your heart:

·      “Modern civilization has made woman a little wiser, but it has increased her suffering because of man's covetousness. The woman of yesterday was a happy wife, but the woman of today is a miserable mistress. In the past she walked blindly in the light, but now she walks open-eyed in the dark. She was beautiful in her ignorance, virtuous in her simplicity, and strong in her weakness. Today she has become ugly in her ingenuity, superficial and heartless in her knowledge. Will the day ever come when beauty and knowledge, ingenuity and virtue, and weakness of body and strength of spirit will be united in a woman?” 
― Kahlil Gibran, Broken Wings

EXCUSES

As a former public school teacher I was quite used to the many excuses I would hear each day from students and receive as written notes from their parents.  In conversations with friends who were law enforcement officers or with colleagues who are golf course marshals we sometimes comment on the disingenuous excuses (they are rarely very creative) we hear from those we engage with who are in violation of laws/rules/expectations of the course. 

  

As a duty as an interviewing officer in my Church with ecclesiastical responsibilities I have also heard a fair number of excuses which had to be dealt with in the confession process before repentance could be complete and forgiveness come about.  Judges in courts of law and parents hear excuses all the time and have to cut through them to get to the truth of the matter.

If we were honest we would know that nearly everyone wants to rationalize or attempt to justify misconduct or deficient performance.  Even I have caught myself occasionally trying to gloss-over things until I bring myself up short and remember the folly of so doing.

In light of these realities I tender a few quotations (in italics and in red) I have accumulated over the years that give us some insight as to this unfortunate tendency of human behavior.  After all, “Since excuses were invented, no one is ever in the wrong.” 

The Bible warns us that “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the Lord pondereth the hearts” (Proverbs 21:2)  In fact, the entire book of Proverbs gives us many pithy and insightful variations on this and related themes.  I read it often. 

A few other warnings to those who tend to make excuses are:

         “He that once deceives is ever suspected.”

         “The truth doesn’t hurt unless it ought to.”

          "The sting of a reproach is the truth of it.”  B. Franklin

          “Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”A. Huxley

“He that always complains is never pitied.”

Two wonderful quotations by Abraham Lincoln remind me of the “more excellent way” to deal with excuses or opposition by others:

            “Better give your path to a dog than being bitten by him in contesting for the right.  Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.” 

            “I wish no explanation made to our enemies.  What they want is a squabble and a fuss; and that they can have if we explain, and they cannot have if we don’t.  I shall do nothing in malice.  What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”

Another way of putting it is: “Soft words are hard arguments.”  I take this to mean that 'soft words' are words like 'you are right, I really messed up on this one;' or 'I don't why I did that, I hope you will forgive me;' or 'I'm sorry.'

The use of 'soft words' or even no defense at all are an important part of the development of character.   Character is the ability to win an argument by keeping your mouth shut. 

So, why is it we are so prone to make excuses?  If we really think about it, we know we are not fooling ourselves.  And we should know that most of the people who we make excuses to are not fooled.  And certainly God is not fooled.  

How refreshing it is to engage with people who do not make excuses.  

LOYALTY (thanks, Jon)

I was never in our country’s armed forces and I never saw the movie, Band of Brothers.  I was never in a youth gang or took one of their oaths.  As a boy I was never such a rabid baseball fan that I would get into a fist fight or bitter argument over who was better, the Yankees or the Dodgers (the Yankees were indubitably better, although the Dodges had Sandy Kofax).  But I was in the Boy Scouts and I learned the Scout Law and recited it with conviction: “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.”

The training stuck.

It is hard for me to understand why more people do not more consciously choose to seek out those signal values (how can a person have a quarrel with any of them?) in being loyal to people and principles and causes that are true and will lead to peace in this life and set one on a course to a positive outcome in the life to come.

I work with a friend who recently said something like this to me:  “I check your blog every day but have been disappointed to see that you haven’t posted for 3 months.”  Well, that is loyalty.

 

I am embarrassed, sorry and will simply have to find the time produce these thoughts that I have been so prompted to do.  I have some reasons why I have lagged so badly these last several months but they just come down to excuses and I don’t have an abundance of patience for others who constantly have ‘excuses’ for certain of their behaviors. So why burden you with my excuses?  In fact, I have been thinking about writing about excuses as a topic for exploration and will do so sometime soon.  So thanks, Jon for getting me fired up again.  Even my own family members, I am quite sure, stopped looking long ago.

 

Now it is true, I cannot hope for a loyal following unless I produce something that benefits people and they recognize it.  Though it is satisfying to know that over the course of several hundred postings I have, at times, had several dozen (at least) regular readers, but I wonder if that is the real test of loyalty?

   

A Japanese dog that I read about decades ago locked me into the virtue of loyalty as a component of character and I have reflected upon his story as I have ‘examined myself’ periodically as encouraged by scripture.  Read about Hachiko on Wikipedia or on You Tube or other sources.  I have since learned of other dogs demonstrating this remarkable characteristic.  Though it would be absurd like ‘man’s best friend’ to daily lay on the grave or stand sentinel at the last place we saw our departed spouse/parent/child/hero in this life,  it would not be too much to be loyal to their memory, their teachings, their highest loyalties that we have inculcated in ourselves. 

   

For us, we should give our deepest loyalties to the highest causes.  For me, it is contained in the life and mission and gospel and teachings of Jesus Christ.  I believe that with an eye single to that standard, all other worthy loyalties will fall naturally into place.

Believing, as I do, that God is my Father in Heaven, (Jesus, himself, prayed to his Father who he said was our Father as well) we could keep this thought in mind:  ‘Be loyal to the Royal within us’ for our spirit is a child of royal birth.

   

As an aid to reflection or contemplation (as you will know if you have, over the years, been even an occasional reader of my weblog) I often turn to music to be my prompter or brain default which then turns on a stream of worthy thoughts that remind me of my loyalties.  I close with lyrics from two songs from my Church hymnbook that bear on loyalty and that you might consider adding to your mental lexicon:

            The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose

            I will not, I cannot, desert to his foes;

            That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,

            I’ll never, no never, no never forsake!

                                                Hymns, 1985, no. 85

            He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. O be swift my soul to answer him; be jubilant my feet!  Our God is marching on.
Hymns, 1985, no. 60

Things as they really Are

My weblog essay of January 27, 2013 was titled Things as they really Aren’t.  Having just re-read it after 3 ½ years I would say that it was pretty insightful.

 

Today I will briefly treat things as they really are.  This phrase is taken from The Book of Mormon, Jacob 4:13, part of which reads, “. . . the Spirit speaketh the truth . . . it speaketh of things as they really are, and of things as they really will be; wherefore, these things are manifested unto us plainly, for the salvation of our souls.” My earlier essay was a paraphrased variation of the same scripture.  This little nineteen page book (the book of Jacob from which the phrase came) goes on to speak of those things.

My treatment of the topic today, however, will not be primarily theological but simply observational—insightful, I hope, in a different way.  It will be because of a rather common occurrence experienced by people of my age.  I had cataract surgery recently that has restored my sight to what it was many decades ago. 

 

One of the first things that I observed came when I first looked in the mirror following the surgery.  I saw all the wrinkles and increasingly hoary gray hair. I am getting old, something now observationally validated but performancally (I know that I just coined a new word) denied until just the last couple of years. It was brought home to me that being limited in one of your senses limits you other ways. For the last 2-3 weeks I have just been walking around observing things (not just myself) with ‘different eyes.’

This brings me back to the scripture cited above.  Read it again.  It brings us to the point of this essay. 

    

The things in our world that are occurring around us, and that could be “manifested unto us plainly,” if noticed, should be a wake-up call to us that we must get our lives in order while we still can.  As we age and as the world comes closer and closer to the abyss and chaos that will precede the ultimate deliverance and victory by the Prince of Peace, there still are things we can do to protect and improve ourselves (“for the salvation of our souls”) and to be helpful to others who could benefit from our help and contribution to them—physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. 

 

Look at things as they really are in the sphere of our influence and see where we could better fit in to be useful as long as we are still around and competent to “act and not be acted upon.” 

Fences

The astute religious writer G. K. Chesterton made the observation that one should “never take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”  Another great thinker, Alexander Pope, put it this way: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.” 

These are not just clever sayings, but illustrate the truth that there are some foundations, some standards, some foundational principles, some basic qualities of character that are firmly fixed, and fixed for a reason, and are dismantled only at our peril.

 

Such values and virtues as honesty, kindness, morality, respect for law, the value of work, charity—such things do not go out of force even if, with some, they seem to go out of fashion.  It is so easy to tear down, so easy to reject, so easy to discredit, but the commandments are still there, and the consequences will still come to pass.

 

If we tamper irresponsibly with the basic laws of life, we shall find to our sorrow why the fence was put up in the first place.  Don’t be among the people who tend to remove time-honored safeguards, the reasons for which they do not know and do not make the effort to find out.

 

There are, among other things, decency and good taste to consider, but in our time they have been, alas, among the first to go.

But be warned:  the strongest fence, Divine judgment, will not be dismantled.  It is coming and will yet serve its purpose in the life of every person.