By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

I think this really happened, but one can never be sure.

We went to the church building on a Sunday evening, and the foyer was decorated vaguely like an airport terminal. The buffer zone was set up like an airplane, and we pretended to be going somewhere. Then the plane crashed, and we were taken from room to room, reenacting the post mortal world or the judgment — I don’t remember that part so well. The grand finale was going into the chapel to see all of our parents dressed in all white clothes, hugging us as we came in, congratulating us on our valiance. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for something else, I ran across this the other day:

Marvin J. Ashton, “The Prophet and the Prison,” Ensign, May 1980, 35 Read the rest of this entry »

In a church talk, a member introduces herself or himself and includes this, presumably as a means of establishing their success as church members:

‘We have 6 children, and all of them served missions and/or married in the temple.’

How much empathy does it require to understand how a majority of parents and others might feel about themselves and their families when hearing this?

Twenty years ago today — 4 January 1989 — I entered the MTC as a missionary, headed for the Netherlands Amsterdam mission. Following a grand tradition, I thought I would reflect for a moment on that experience. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a few Christmas songs in the Finnish LDS hymnbook which are not in the English hymnbook. One is entitled ‘En etsi valtaa, lositoa,’ which gets translated into the English as ‘I Do Not Seek for Glory.’ The original lyrics are from the Finnish poet Zacharias Topelius, written in Swedish. The tune is by Jean Sibelius. The English translation is by J.J. Mary Hatakka.

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you feel about tithing settlements, on a scale from 1 to 10?

1 = ‘What a massive waste of time and energy. I refuse to participate.’

10 = ‘I treasure the moment when I can publicly declare my sacred offerings.’

For myself, I waver. Of course, it’s no big deal to show up and meet with the bishop in order to answer a question, but it seems like an awful lot of energy is expended on this one issue. I wish I could get a better sense of any doctrinal reasons for doing them in the way we do. A few years ago, after an odd interaction where it seemed I was being investigated, I refused to go again, but I got over it.

So I’m going with a 6: I’m not hostile about them, but neither do I have any enthusiasm: I see the tithing settlement as a basically empty gesture, but one which does me very little harm. But I might ask the bishop’s family about that.

The idea for this grew out of a series of conversations I’ve been having with a Mormon kid in my high school English class about the books we read.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has faced considerable criticism over the years: most recently for its use of racist language and a questionable depiction of an African American, more generally for its cynicism regarding human nature and criticism of social authority. Regardless, I would argue that Twain’s Realist premise — that idealism and social mandates ought to be rejected in the face of pragmatism and experience — raises some useful questions for the Mormon reader. Read the rest of this entry »

This will be the Message from the Bishopric in the November ward newsletter (after being translated into Finnish, natch). Just a bit of devotional for the holiday.

I am always touched as I go past a cemetery on Pyhäinpäivä (All Saints Day) and see all the candles. I appreciate the effort so many people make to honor their dead, and I think a little about what the gospel has taught me about death. Read the rest of this entry »

Five years ago today, I took a very early morning flight from London to Stockholm, and then took a train to the suburb of Västerhaninge. There, on the temple grounds, I met Vaimoni for the first time in two months, who had taken the overnight ferry from Finland with her parents. My parents had also flown in from New York, where they were serving a mission. (When I asked if the mission president gave them permission to come to the wedding, my father said, ‘We let him know we were coming.’) It was an exciting moment: my parents and Vaimoni had not yet met, and since the two sets of parents didn’t share a common language, there was a flurry of translations. Read the rest of this entry »

We sang this in sacrament meeting a few weeks ago (listen here):

1. I’m a pilgrim, I’m a stranger
Cast upon the rocky shore
Of a land where deathly danger
Surges with a sullen roar,
Oft despairing, oft despairing,
Lest I reach my home no more. Read the rest of this entry »

This is adapted from a journal entry in spring 2002, about six months after I had moved to Helsinki. Names and details have been changed, but the mixed feelings I had at the time about my own mission and missionary work generally have been left intact. Any efforts to alter those feelings are several years too late.

So I went on a teach with the missionaries last night.

They are the kind of missionaries that I disliked on my mission — humorless, scanning everything for its righteousness quotient, earnest to the point of callowness. They know the missionary book forward and backward, but they don’t seem to know anything else. Needless to say they’re ZLs. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll come right out and say it: I’m not interested in being peculiar. Not for it’s own sake. I’m interested in doing what is true and doing all I can to be more like Christ, but I don’t really care to go out of my way to display my removal from the ‘world.’ I have no desire to identify myself as starkly different from my non-Mormon neighbors and friends beyond the application of rock-solid gospel truths applied in my life. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been going through some of early journals recently, and I’ve created a post out of the content of a few of the entries. This should fulfill the quota of ‘anecdotes and short stories’ for which BCC is apparently famous.

In early 1980s Dave and Julie Elliot* lived down the street from us. They were a mormon married couple in their early twenties, and they were incredibly cool. (They still are, actually.) Both my sister and I were enthusiastic music fans, and the Elliots encouraged that with a vast and progressive record collection. (Dave made me my very first mix tape.) They seemed to like having us around, and my parents approved of their influence on us.

In 1983, they decided to go to a day of the US Festival, a rock and technology festival held in Devore California, about an hour’s drive from us. I was 14, my sister was 16. They offered to take us with them, and my parents agreed. That may surprise you, but my parents subscribed pretty strongly by the ‘teach correct principles … govern themselves’ idea. When I asked them about it many years later, they said that they felt that this would be a good way for us to explore something we would be interested in and would come into contact with anyway, but with knowing and trustworthy guides. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know, we at BCC are big fans of the liturgical calendar. So I wanted to give a big shout-out to St. John’s Day, or as it is known in Finnish, Juhannus. It is celebrated here this year on the 21st, the Saturday closest to the June equinox. For, as you may already know, St. John’s Day is basically the celebration of Midsummer, the longest day of the year. Read the rest of this entry »

I am this year’s faculty speaker at our graduation. Here’s what I said after the traditional humorous anecdotes about the graduates:

I hope you have the sense of accomplishment you richly deserve. You have learned an amazing amount. But the real richness, the real accomplishment does not lie in the scores you will get on your exams. To learn in order only to get exam scores is like earning money only to look at the pictures on the bills. The real value of your learning is not only in those scores, nor is it only in the facts and ideas you have stored away in your memory – it is the knowledge of how to learn, the pattern of thinking and processing that strenuous learning requires. An athlete or a dancer, through the repetition of a specific series of movements, will develop a muscle memory, allowing them to make those same movements with greater ease and grace; likewise, serious thinkers develop an intellectual muscle memory, allowing them to process information and ideas with greater ease and dexterity. This is the prize you carry with you, more valuable than any exam score could be. But it can atrophy through as lack of use, as an athlete’s muscle can lose its strength. Read the rest of this entry »

In March, Natalie posted about ways of reading The Book of Mormon, especially close reading. I’ve tried applying the close reading skills I teach as a high school literature and composition teacher — a sort of basic formalism, which involves coming to conclusions about the author’s intentions based on the text and the techniques used by the author. Read the rest of this entry »

In London, we had dinner with a group of young married American couples who made up about half of the active population of our ward. Someone told the story of how they got engaged –it involved a scavenger hunt around Utah Valley — and other couples picked up the theme, telling of the elaborately romantic gestures involved in popping the proverbial question. There were horses and orchestras and airplanes involved in these stories, with weeks of planning and a fair amount of money. I mean, how cheap can it be to rent a suit of armor?

Someone asked how we got engaged, and my wife laughed. I told them the story.

We were at H’s apartment on a Monday night watching The Matrix on TV. During a commercial, H was in the kitchen, and as I saw her through the door, I said, ‘Hey, we should get married.’

And she agreed. Read the rest of this entry »

A few Sundays ago, we had an American visitor in English language Sunday School. He was starting a three-month trip around Scandinavia and the Baltics. Travelling around for thee months sounds good to me, but he felt the need to tell us the motivation for his journey: ‘I’ve come here to find a wife.’ Read the rest of this entry »

So we’re talking about the priesthood in Sunday School today, and a fairly recent convert asks the following question:

If the priesthood is the authority to act in the name of God and to perform acts that have eternal significance, why do you need to the priesthood to prepare the sacrament? What authority is necessary to get some slices of bread in a tray and fill those little cups? Or do those trays and little cups have a significance that means that only the priesthood can handle them?

As the answer to the last question is clearly no, a missionary suggested it was because the sacrament required a high level of respect because it was a sacred ordinance — but as the questioner pointed out, you don’t need the priesthood to show respect.

Any ideas? I came up with an answer, which I’ll post later. A hint: it was historical rather than doctrinal.

The Dodgers beat the Padres 3-2, but I was interested in this buried lead from the LA Times:

There was plenty of pregame chatter about still images of Padres ace Jake Peavy that surfaced on the message board of a Dodgers fan site the previous night. The still picture was taken from Fox’s national broadcast of the Padres’ 4-1 victory over the Dodgers on Saturday, when Peavy held them to two hits in a complete game.

The images show a black substance on the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger of the San Diego Padres ace’s right hand and didn’t appear to be doctored, as it was part of a sequence that was included in a highlight video posted on mlb.com. The black substance was also visible on the video.

They asked Dodgers manager Joe Torre about it. Read the rest of this entry »

When we called a new ward music leader and ward pianist, we wanted to see the music in our ward change. We very rarely had any special music in our meetings, and always from the same source. The bishop told me he trusted my judgment and the three of us sat down and started to talk.

Besides the abstract brainstorming I’ve discussed before, we wanted to establish what we saw as the purpose of church music. We purposely ignored the CHI, wanting to generate these ideas ourselves and then compare them to the guidelines afterward.

We decided church music should have two goals:

1. Music in church ought to help listeners have spiritual feelings.

2. Music in church ought to allow the musicians to make an offering of their talents to God and the community. Read the rest of this entry »

‘E’ is 25 years old. She received training as a singer at the pop/jazz conservatory and sang with a commercially viable pop group and a prestigious Lutheran cathedral choir before her mission. She now serves as the ward pianist.

‘V’ is in his early thirties. He has worked in several performance-related fields, including arranging music for television and stage managing for alternative theatre groups. He plays several instruments and sings. He serves as the ward music leader.

‘N’ is in his late thirties. As a hobby, he plays the trombone, and he has played in a big swing band, a ska band and a jazz trio. He is the bishopric member responsible for music in the ward.

It was at a meeting between these three that the idea for the ‘choir planted in the audience’ concept was discussed. All three thought it was interesting because it broke down the barrier between the audience and the singers and because it encouraged a measure of spontaneity, both which seemed like opportunities for emotional and spiritual interaction with music. N thought it was too manipulative, but both E and V argued that everyone would know it was a performance and appreciate it from that level: but we all realized most Mormons, especially in Finland, would never spontaneously stand and sing. (V pointed out that men had to be told to take off their jackets in hot weather.) We agreed to sit on the idea and to perhaps split the two concepts of a congregation-based choir and the encouragement of spontaneous involvement. (I showed them the comments from the first post, and they laughed at how seriously people took the concept of standing up to sing.) Read the rest of this entry »

A few of us in my ward have been talking about the possibilities of church music. These posts have grown out of those conversations with the permission of the participants.

In sacrament meeting, a piano solo is announced. Brother H goes up to the stand and stops at the podium. He says, ‘ “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” is one of my favorite hymns, and if you would like, you could follow along with the words as I play the music. It’s number 136 in the hymnbook.’ And he proceeds to the piano. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I was chatting with a young man who as thinking about attending BYU, and a third person chimed in to let him know it wasn’t all purity and goodness there, and told the following tale: Read the rest of this entry »

The posting of this was inspired by Ardis’ post.

In September 1988, I was a missionary in a small city in western Belgium. There were twelve active members in the branch, and ten of them could be described as eccentric; the other two were crazy. My companion and I were were both quite relaxed and happy to find interesting things to do that we could call missionary work, but inevitably we had to spend many days tracting. Read the rest of this entry »

If you hadn’t noticed yet, I am the cute but stupid one at BCC. So here’s what I’m wondering:

How has Mormon scholarship affected the average member of the church? Read the rest of this entry »

So last night I left my wife and three small children at home for three hours to go to the stake center to hear the message that I should spend more time with my family. (Irony level: 5.4 — surprisingly low because it happens about twice a year.) Read the rest of this entry »