prayer

Make Your Home a Temple

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President Thomas S. Monson

President Thomas S. Monson

President Monson spoke at a regional meeting in the Conference Center yesterday, as reported by the Deseret News.  The focus of his counsel was to put our homes in order.  This is wise counsel since the Dow dropped 500 points today, the biggest drop since 9/11.  We are living in troubled times, and I suspect that it will get worse sooner than it gets better.  The Lord’s prophets have been giving us this message for a couple decades now, to put our homes in order in a multitude of different ways.  Are we listening and doing?

Part of President Monson’s counsel was this, in words reminiscent of the temple (cf. D&C 88:119):

This, then, is your building project, brothers and sisters, to organize yourselves, prepare every needful thing, and to establish a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God.

Levi Rightmyer on “Kings and Priests of the order of Melchisedec”

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Title Page

Title Page

I was doing some research this morning when I stumbled upon a very interesting passage from a book published in 1916 by Levi Rightmyer entitled, The Light of Truth as Revealed in the Holy Scriptures.  The entire text of the book is available for perusal on Google Books here.  The author is not LDS, although he appears to have known something of the Church (see page 482 for his reference to “Joseph Smith and the Mormons of Utah”).

What I found was a passage which discusses Christ, a priest after the order of Melchizedek, and that “all who are called to God’s kingdom and glory are called to fill the positions of Melchisedec kings and priests in the ages to come under the Lord Jesus Christ…” and if this truth is not so today it is because of apostasy:

…mankind have been deceived by false and ignorant teachers who in the early days of the church corrupted the way of the Lord as the antediluvian sons of God did before the flood, who walked after the vain imaginations of their own evil hearts even as it is now.  The world is full of religion, but nearly empty of the true knowledge of God. There are many great revivals in which are developed a high degree of religious feeling, but unfortunately they are attended with a very low degree of scriptural knowledge and true religious intelligence. (p. 740)

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Catholic Prayer and Mormon Prayer

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Book cover

There is a great article over at LDS Views by Dr. Alonzo Gaskill in which he discusses the differences and similarities between Catholic prayer and Mormon prayer.  It is quite interesting the comparisons he makes, particularly those with prayer in the temple.  I believe this article is from his latest book Know Your Religions, Vol. 1 – Mormonism and Catholicism.

The focus of the article is on Catholic prayer, and that when Catholics petition saints on their behalf it does not mean that they are praying to them.  Gaskill explains that praying to anyone else besides God is against Catholic theology.  What they are really doing is asking those saints, those faithful followers of Christ, to pray for them, to combine their faith in petitioning God for blessings.

In this way, Catholic prayer is similar to LDS prayer in the temple, where faithful members of the Church combine their prayers of faith with each other to make it more effectual in reaching God’s throne.

While I have personally witnessed many Catholics seemingly worshiping saints other than God, such a practice does not accord with Catholic teaching.  In this case, a benefit of a doubt might be granted, since Latter-day Saints also have practices which don’t accord with our teachings too.  My wife once worked for the library at BYU cataloging Mormon folklore, and she could give you a laundry list of interesting practices or beliefs among the Saints.

Read the article at LDS Views here.

Blowing out Birthday Candles

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As most people know, it is a tradition in many parts of the world to bake up a birthday cake for a friend or family member celebrating a birthday.  Typically this cake is decorated nicely and topped with birthday candles, one for every year of the celebrant’s life.  When the time comes to eat the cake, there is a tradition that the candles are lit and the birthday boy or girl makes a silent wish and then blows out the candles.  If they are successful in their comedic (and sometimes spittled) extinguishing, it is said that the wish that they made will come true within the year.

Well, as with most things, there is more here than meets the eye. [Read more…]