preoccupation

Hugh Nibley Quotes from Approaching Zion

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The following quotes are from Hugh Nibley’s Approaching Zion volume, and were compiled by Chad Merrill.  I am grateful that he shared them with me, and gave me permission to share them with you. They are great quotes from that singular book, one of my favorites of all time, and one which I am currently re-reading for the nth time.

In these quotes, Nibley is highly critical of his fellow Latter-day Saints, in our love of wealth and covetousness, lack of living the law of consecration (and our apparent confusion of it), our quibbling over free lunch, lack of faith in the Almighty, and our misunderstanding the purposes of life. “Zion cannot be built up unless it is by the principles of the law of the celestial kingdom; otherwise I cannot receive her unto myself” (D&C 105:5). Do we truly believe the Lord? What’s our progress report? Please share your thoughts in the comments.   [Read more…]

Radically different views of Death

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A couple months ago I received an email from someone who stumbled onto TempleStudy.com.  It read in part,

[The Bible] is purely a creation of man to placate the ego’s fear of death and nothing more. All religion was invented to buffer the ego against the fear of death.

That’s certainly one way to think of death.  Another way to think of it is that religion gives meaning to life and death.  Hugh Nibley often quoted a poem by A.E. Housman about man’s preoccupation with death:

. . . men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts. ((Qtd. in Nibley, “Prophets and Glad Tidings,” The World and the Prophets, 259-67,http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/bookschapter.php?bookid=54&chapid=515))

The prominent literary scholar Harold Bloom once said,

What is the essence of religion? … Religion rises inevitably from our apprehension of our own death. To give meaning to meaninglessness is the endless quest of all religion. ((http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/commentary/what-is-this-thing-that-men-call-death))

I recently came upon two vastly different modes of thinking about death.  The juxtaposition of these two starkly different views is very interesting.   [Read more…]

Our Daily Focus Should be Eternal

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The temple is like a great lens. It’s a reflector and a magnifier, a redirector and a viewer. Many have said how attending the temple allows us to leave the world around us and enter a different sphere. It is a place where time and fashion disappear. It is the nearest to God that we can come on earth, but how much nearer can you come when you are in His house?

As such, the temple allows us to redirect our attention and refocus our lives on those things that really matter. If we attend the temple often enough, the things we learn there will spill over into our daily comings and goings.

Sometimes we get too caught up in the world to notice those things that are the most worthwhile. We get so preoccupied by satisfying the world that we forget that we ultimately need to satisfy God. In the October 2000 Conference, Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught,

Maxwell

Elder Neal A. Maxwell

Many individuals preoccupied by the cares of the world are not necessarily in transgression. But they certainly are in diversion and thus waste “the days of [their] probation” (2 Ne. 9:27). Yet some proudly live “without God in the world” (Alma 41:11), with gates and doors locked from the inside! . . . Let us adopt the attitude recommended by President Brigham Young: “Say to the fields, . . . flocks, . . . herds, . . . gold, . . . silver, . . . goods, . . . chattels, . . . tenements, . . . possessions, and to all the world, stand aside; get away from my thoughts, for I am going up to worship the Lord” (Deseret News, 5 Jan. 1854, 2). There are so many ways to say to the world, “stand aside.” (“The Tugs and Pulls of the World“)

Running from place to place, buying this and that, [Read more…]