Ben Crowder

Earlier today I came across an interesting post on the Mormon Artists Group blog:

What will the hymnal of 2043 be like? If the evolution of our hymnbook is any indicator, the 2043 book will have many new voices…. Hymnals are a reflection of the church’s population. They contain the creative ideas of average church members elevated through the arts of music and literature but made sacred by their prominent use in our worship…. With that trajectory, won’t the 2043 hymnal include melodies from Argentina, Samoa, Russia, and Nigeria too? Won’t the Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Sibelius, and Vaughn Williams scores be joined by the world’s greatest modern composers? Will Stravinsky, Copland, Britten, Bernstein, and Messiaen appear? The pattern of our history says yes. I, for one, welcome the idea that my children (who will be merely my age in 2043) will sing the testimonies of people whose landscapes were starkly different from Mormon pioneers of the American West. I want them to sing the hymns of African, South American, and Asian LDS songwriters. I fully expect them to sing harmonies and rhythms that would have sounded completely wrong to my grandparents. We call that inclusion. It is the anthem of progress.

A very good question. Down in the comments, Dan Carter (who has typeset hymns for the Church for the last twenty years, and yes, I want his job ;)) has a good counterbalance explaining why such a hymnbook is unlikely.

Thoughts?

Speaking of hymns, by the way, the annual Church music submissions are due March 31, so if you’re itching to send something in, now’s the time to get on that. The last time (er, the only time :)) I submitted something was in 2005. But this year, I’m definitely going to write something, so help me. Both in the general music category and in the hymn text category, in fact.

(On the same note, the Daily Universe ran a story about the Church music festival not too long ago, along with a piece on two BYU students who write hymns.)

Anyway, let the hymnwriting begin…

[tags]LDS, Mormon, hymns, Mormon Artists Group[/tags]

President Hinckley died an hour or two ago.

So far I haven’t been able to verify it, but it’s all over the place (it brought down my cell phone network at least three times in the last half-hour), and apparently it was on Channel 4 here in Provo. Deseret News’s website is getting pounded, though — I’ve been waiting for five minutes for it to load and still all I get is a blank page with the little rotating thingie. But googling “Gordon Hinckley dies” brings up a Deseret News article and a Salt Lake Tribune article. So it’s real.

Darn. He was my prophet, for the last thirteen years. I found out during our ward prayer, when two of my friends walked out halfway through saying they’d gotten a text that he’d died. Everyone else got a flurry of texts after that, and the girl next to me said it had been on Channel 4 earlier. At first I thought it was a joke — sure, Pres. Hinckley died, right. He’s immortal, silly. But then the corroborating evidence piled in and a shockwave hit me. Dead. He’s dead. My prophet is dead. I mean, sure, there’ll be another one, and President Monson will do a smashing job, but this is the first time I’ve been old enough to really care when the prophet died.

And yet I’m happy for him. He’s back with his wife again — that’s what matters.

It’s still hard to believe. I knew this day would come, but wow. What a way to dampen a day. But it really is a bittersweet kind of feeling — it’s weird but it’s right. He was 97, after all.

Dang.

[tags]Gordon B. Hinckley, LDS[/tags]

Last night I finished Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl, and wow, it’s good. Spun into a novel from the Grimms’ fairy tale of the same name, Goose Girl easily pulled me into its world, coaxing me with a love potion that’s got me head over heels for its characters and its story. This book is so well done. It’s beautifully written, the magic is delightfully plausible, and it perfectly captures the fairy tale feel. I love this book.

And the fact that Shannon is LDS is icing on the cake. Is it just me, or is there a new, rising generation of LDS authors — Hale, Brandon Sanderson, etc. — who all seem to be writing primarily science fiction/fantasy for general audiences? It’s almost as if they’re Orson Scott Card’s literary children, so to speak. Not meaning that they necessarily write like him — just that they’re LDS and do sci-fi/fantasy. (Which does makes perfect sense, at least to me. Card’s got a great essay in Storyteller in Zion which talks about Mormonism and science fiction being intertwined.)

Speaking of Orson Scott Card, I’ve already blocked out Feb. 14-16 for this year’s Life, the Universe & Everything conference, at which both Card and Gail Carson Levine (of Ella Enchanted fame, and no, she’s not LDS) will be present, along with Brandon Sanderson and a dozen or two others. It’ll be good. Geeky, too, but good. ;)

[tags]Shannon Hale, Brandon Sanderson, Orson Scott Card, Gail Carson Levine, LTUE[/tags]

This morning I was reading in the Joseph Smith manual (Teachings of the Presidents of the Church), and it just struck me that Joseph was only 23 years old when he started translating the Book of Mormon. Twenty-three! Somehow I always forget that, and in my mind I superimpose the 38-year-old Joseph onto those events. After all, it’s easier to imagine a grown man translating something like that. But that’s not what happened.

Beyond that, Joseph was only 24 when he organized the Church. Heck, I’m twenty-four. What have I done with my life?

Which reminds me of something Dean Hughes said at a reading yesterday on campus. Rather than butcher what he said by attempting a paraphrase, I’ll just recast it like this: When we get to the next life, the Savior isn’t going to care whether we were a writer or a doctor or whatever. He’s going to ask if we were kind, if we were meek, if we were selfless. It’s not so much what we did — it’s more about who we became.

With this bubbling around at the back of my mind, I was sitting in the temple earlier this morning, and I realized that somewhere along the last couple of years, my priorities have gotten a little skewed. Some of the more important things have had to step down and take a seat a few rows back while on the front row I’ve entertained what I in my foolishness thought took precedence.

This isn’t to say that those things were bad. They’re good, worthwhile things. But not when they swell to fill space that ought to have been dedicated and consecrated for better things.

You’d think I would have realized this while listening to Elder Oaks’ good/better/best talk in general conference. Alas, epiphanies seem to work on their own timetable, and it’s taken this long for mine to come together. But I’m glad it came.

On the walk home, I continued thinking about all of this, of course, and the burning question was how I actually go about changing myself. I can use up a lot of air saying I want to be a better person, but there’s a huge gap between just talking about it and actually doing something. Lots of somethings, even.

While I can’t say I have a definite answer yet, what I’ve come up with so far is this: action items and daily reviews. Yes, it’s a process. Yes, it’s mechanical and artificial. I’d prefer something more organic, frankly, but I’m finding that it often takes something mechanical to get to that point.

For the action items I’m thinking along the lines of David Allen’s “next actions” in GTD — the next step I need to take to make progress in that area. It has to be a verb, something I can actually do — not just vague, fluffy, abstract concepts and ideals. Being more kind is not a concrete action; washing the dishes for my roommates is.

When I get inspiration on how I can become a better person, I always write those things down in my journal, since I know I’ll forget them if I don’t. But I’m finding that I never do go back and review what I’ve written, which makes the exercise pointless except as a matter of historical note. And while I do care about my history, I’m more interested in my future.

To get there, I’m thinking I’ll start a new “improvement notebook.” In it I’ll record all of these things I know I need to work on. But that’s not enough. And so each morning I’ll review it (along with those New Year’s resolutions :)) so that I remember. It’s all about remembering. If you’ve got a perfect memory, great. I don’t. I’ll probably also start a weekly review — an hour or so, maybe on Sundays — where I can take a deep breath and look at how I did that past week.

Reviews and notebooks do give the impression of trappings, of things we do to do what we really want. But since without them I’m not making the progress I want to make, I’m willing to use them. After all, I don’t want to show up in the next life only to find that I totally missed the boat to heaven and instead get myself dumped onto Charon’s ferry. :P

Isn’t it funny how we forget things so easily? Just a month ago I wrote about trusting in God, then promptly forgot pretty much everything I’d said in that post and returned to my crowded nest of worries. Over the last week, though, after stewing about on inadequacies both real and imagined, I’ve realized once more that I have to just place my trust in the Lord.

Now, there are some things I can do pretty well on my own. (Or at least what I assume is on my own; perhaps his hand has more a part in it than I realize.)

But then there are the things I think I can do but actually can’t, and the things I know I can’t do on my own. It’s maddeningly frustrating to be incapable of doing something, especially something which ought to be so simple, so easy. Makes me want to tear my hair out. (But then where would I be? I’m not as ready to go bald as I thought. :P)

After I buzz about in frantic worry long enough to wear the carpet down to the floorboards, though, the feeling changes. It deepens, expanding into a vise-like weight that pushes me down to my knees and wrings my soul raw. All I can do is watch my pride drip away, far below. I’m left quivering and vulnerable.

And it’s then that the second change happens. I surrender. I let go my obsessive grip on my future — what I think is my future, at any rate, with all its incomplete and skewed data that makes it worth nowhere near what I appraise it at — and I calm down into a peaceful quietness that fills my soul. “It’s okay” is the murmur that sounds in the corners of my heart. I don’t have to worry any more. Someone else is taking care of that for me.

Sometimes it’s then that I find my abilities have jumped up a level or two, and suddenly I can do the thing I couldn’t do before. But more often I’m left where I was before — nothing’s changed, really.

Except me. In giving myself up to God, trusting in his promises, I grow. Those forces tug on me and enlarge my soul, and then they start replacing bits and pieces of the old me with a new, refined, more God-like me. I may still be in the same boat I was before, but I’ve got new eyes that bring the surrounding sea into sharper and more vivid clarity. It makes a difference. Or at least it does if I let it.

It’s a process that takes a lifetime, of course. It hurts. But it hurts in a good way. C.S. Lewis said it so much better than me:

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurt abominably and does not seem to make sense. What oil earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of-throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

In the mythsoc digest that came through last night, there’s a fascinating article by Jef Murray as part of the January 2008 issue of his Mystical Realms newsletter:

In the Lord of the Rings, all of Hobbiton was paralyzed by Saruman and just a few dozen of the Big Folk. Why? Because, after a few killings, everyone became too fearful to fight. They shut their doors and tried to blot out the bad stuff. The good folks locked themselves in, and those who had consented to evil were free to do as they pleased. This is a whole lot of unpleasantness. Turning the other cheek is OK in theory, but if evil is real, and if we want to spare the “least of these” some of the vast suffering available for the dispensing, aren’t we obliged to kick up a fuss? C. S. Lewis thought so. In his essay “Why I am not a Pacifist,” he methodically lays out the moral need to resist evil. Thomas Aquinas, likewise, helped to define what a “just war” was. And if a saint says we should defend the innocent, who am I to argue?

That feels right. But at the same time, as Jef mentions, we’ve got Christ telling us to turn the other cheek, effectively advocating a policy of non-violence.

So, where’s the line? Is it a personal rule? (Meaning, is it okay to resist evil if the victim is someone else, but not yourself? Is the line a circle around you, with unacceptable resistance inside and acceptable resistance outside?)

Or is it a matter of degree? If someone’s trying to kill you, turning the other cheek may or may not be the best idea. (And of course it depends on the situation.) But now that I’ve said that, I’m thinking back to the people in the Book of Mormon who knelt down on the ground and let the Lamanites slay them.

Then again, I don’t think that necessarily counts. The reason they didn’t even try to fight was that (1) they’d already been a very bloodthirsty people and (2) because of that, they’d taken a vow of non-violence to atone for what they’d already done. Most of us aren’t bloodthirsty and won’t have taken a vow like that because there’s not much if anything to atone for (in that regard).

Besides, the history of the Saints is chock-full of us defending ourselves from attackers, whether in the Book of Mormon or at Haun’s Mill or pretty much anywhere there’s been a covenant people.

If Jesus really meant non-resistance, then that’s what we ought to do, of course. But somehow I have a hard time believing he wants us to just throw up our hands and give up, flinging the door wide open for evil to come slaughter us both physically and spiritually.

Believe it or not, what all of this boils down to is the nature of hope. J.R.R. Tolkien described the Catholic worldview as a “long defeat”. That is, the Christian believes that things will continue getting worse and worse here on planet earth until the final days. But, that doesn’t mean we can just hole up and wait things out. There are plenty of Sarumans still out there, plenty of Slubgobs and Screwtapes. And they may win a lot of skirmishes over the next months and years and even centuries, but they’ve already lost the war.

Quite true. Holing up is not an option.

I don’t know where the line is between turning the other cheek and defending yourself and your family (any thoughts?), but generally speaking, the Spirit will let us know if we’re in the wrong. Let’s just hope we’re still in tune enough to notice it.

[tags]C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Book of Mormon, Mormon, LDS[/tags]

The other day I came across a quote about happiness that I can’t get out of my head:

It has given me much of trouble, and a great amount of perseverance, to be happy under all circumstances. I have learned not to fret myself. It has taken me a great while to arrive at this point … I want the Saints to live in a way that they can feel happy all the time, and then we shall enjoy the Holy Spirit. (Jedediah M. Grant, Journal of Discourses, 3:11-12.)

Happy under all circumstances? Isn’t that a little too idealistic?

I don’t think that’s what Jedediah meant, though. Sure, there’s a time to mourn. A time to cry. A time for sorrow. He doesn’t mean we have to be bubbly and chipper every moment of every day. There are limits. ;)

But that’s not really the point. I could be wrong, but it seems to me like the happiness he’s talking about is the soul-deep joy that encompasses even our sorrows, infusing us with the strength we need to get through whatever trials come our way. It’s a quiet happiness. It’s soothing. It’s mature. It’s real. And it’s even realistic — it doesn’t ignore the bad things in life, but it shines its light upon them and transforms them from bogeymen into something we can deal with. It’s beautiful and poignant.

Too many of us, however, live far beneath our privileges too much of the time. One of those privileges is happiness. After all, men are, that they might have joy. Why are we settling for anything less? Sometimes I think our “thy will be done” attitude renders us a little too complacent, to the point where we completely deflate ourselves and think that whatever happens to us must be the will of God, of course.

But that’s not the case.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not denying that God is omnipotent. He is. And he wants the best for us, even when that means sending us through the refiner’s fire.

And yet as far as I can tell, the last thing he wants us to do is just slouch back and let life happen to us. Ours is a God of activity, not passivity. Act, not acted upon.

Now, things do happen to us, of course. We can only control external events to a very limited degree; the rest is beyond our sphere of action, and every day of our lives we’ll have things happen that weren’t in our plan.

But just because we can’t control externalities doesn’t mean that the state of our heart and mind has to succumb to outside pressures. Each of us has a will. And that will, that self, is a whole lot more powerful than we realize. And God is okay with that.

That’s the point, after all: to become like him. Gods and goddesses and angels are beings of power and glory who move mountains and shake the heavens. Apathy just isn’t going to get us there, I’m afraid. God doesn’t want to remove our will — he wants to train it into a mighty force for good. He wants us to burn with that same power and glory that cloaks the celestials, because there’s a kingdom of God to build here on earth and a kingdom of heaven to populate when we pass on to better things.

A huge part of the training is, of course, learning to want the things that God wants. And God wants us to be happy. Do we?

Of course we do. We may cover it up with self-deceptions, we may try to bury it in the backyard of our mind, but deep down inside we all want to be happy. It’s part of who we are as humans and as children of God. It’s okay to want to be happy. We don’t need to apologize for it.

And, like Jedediah says, we really can be happy under all circumstances. It’s up to us. We do need the Lord’s help, yes. There’s no way that we can do it without his love and light pouring into us. It’s impossible without him.

But he’s not going to just give it to us. It’s part of that training, where we learn what it really means to be kings and queens, princes and princesses in the palaces of the Most High. If it only took a casual request in passing to get true happiness, we’d all end up brats. :P

No, we have to want it bad. We have to be willing to sweat for it, to sacrifice, to work our tails off until we come off conqueror. Joy comes at a price. In fact, I don’t think it could come any other way — part of the richness of happiness comes from the tears that precede it. The Himalayas of happiness are mere foothills unless you have a Mariana Trench (of misery? I don’t want to stretch this alliterative taffy so far that it breaks :)) to give you a point of comparison. Happiness only has meaning when there’s something out there that isn’t happiness.

Anyway, I know that I for one could stand to be happier. It’s not like I’m moping around the apartment in a cloud of depression all the time, but too often I settle for a pallid middle ground that isn’t bad but it really isn’t all that good, either. Happiness is a choice. Am I choosing?

Liz has a great post today called A Heresy against Feminism:

I guess this gets me right down to the reason I am afraid to write about marriage: I believe in it. Every last traditional gender role, anti-feminist part of it. I have come to receive a witness that the pattern of a father working and a mother running a household is not only a social necessity, but a divinely inspired pattern.

I highly recommend it. (And I’m not married so I’m not going to expound on things I know nothing about. :P)

Twenty-five percent of girls graduate from BYU without getting asked out on a single date.

I don’t have a source on that statistic, so take it with a grain of salt, but even if it’s only 15% or 20%, that’s still significantly and painfully higher than I ever imagined. For years I naively assumed that girls being girls, they all got asked out at least a few times a semester. It wasn’t until a few months ago that a friend mentioned in passing that she hadn’t been asked on a date her whole time at BYU to that point, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve learned that she isn’t alone. (And if this statistic is right, there are many, many girls like her.)

It still boggles my mind. Surely somehow, some way these girls are getting asked out…aren’t they? But no. Apparently probability fails us here.

I’m not a girl, but my imagination’s pretty vivid, and it hurts a lot to think what these girls must go through — always wondering if there’s something wrong with them, if it’s something they’re doing (or not doing), if they’re cursed.

It’s not just dating per se that we’re talking about here. Since we (here at BYU) live in a culture where a sky-high premium is placed on dating and marriage, everything’s magnified so much that it often seems our value and worth is directly tied to how well we’re playing the dating game. Yes, it’s stupid. But that doesn’t make it any less real. In many cases, self-confidence is inextricably bound to marital status.

Heaven knows I’ve felt this way often enough — pounding my head against the wall (metaphorically, of course :)) asking over and over again why on earth I seem to be unable to get married, and then with a queasy feeling in my stomach wondering if it’s because there’s something horribly, horribly wrong with me. And it’s easy from there to slide down the slippery tube of despair, to feel as if my lack of success in the dating world means I’m an utter failure in all aspects of my life.

I do realize that this is nonsense, but it’s a real feeling (while it lasts). And if it happens to me, someone who actually does have the power to ask the other side out and who therefore shouldn’t be complaining about anything (I figure I may as well deflect the spears before they’re thrown :P), then how much harder it must be for a girl whose role is to wait until the boy comes a-calling.

I wish I had a solution. Sure, I can ask more girls out, but there’s only so much one guy can do. And it’s nigh impossible to mobilize all the other guys out there to ask out all the girls. (Especially since we don’t know who the unasked are.) There is the small worry that asking the unasked will make them think you’re really interested in them, and then after you don’t ask them out again they’re crushed and perhaps even more hurt than before. Perhaps it’s an unfounded fear. Perhaps not. I don’t know. Even if it’s a valid concern, though, it seems like it’s better to have had that chance for a little while even though it disappears than never to have had it at all. But then again, I’m not a girl, and even though my imagination’s pretty vivid, there are limits.

Which is why I’m turning the discussion over to you. The topic’s on the table — have at it.

[tags]BYU[/tags]

From ldsWebguy, earlier today I found a talk Elder Ballard gave today at BYU-Hawaii, Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church:

While you studied here at BYU-Hawaii, you no doubt came to understand the power of words. Words create conversations, and conversations create understanding. There is truth in the old adage that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” In many cases, it is with words that you will accomplish the great things that you will now set out to do. And it’s principally about ways to share those words that I want to talk to you today.

Being a writer, I of course got rather giddy at this point. :) But it gets even better:

Now some of these tools — like any tool in an unpracticed or undisciplined hand — can be dangerous. The Internet can be used to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ and can just as easily be used to market the filth and sleaze of pornography. iTunes can be used to download uplifting and stirring music or the worst kind of anti-social lyrics, full of profanity. Social networks on the Web can be used to expand healthy friendships as easily as they can be used by predators trying to trap the unwary. That is no different from how people choose to use television or movies or even a library. Satan is always quick to exploit the negative power of new inventions, to spoil and degrade and to neutralize any effect for good. Make sure that the choices you make in the use of new media are choices that expand your mind, increase your opportunities, and feed your soul.

Exactly. The Internet — and most of the tools on it — is neutral. Not evil. I think the newer generation understands that, but there’s still a large segment of older folk who see the bad that’s on the Internet and think we should boycott the web entirely. Which is folly.

That word conversation is important. There are conversations going on about the Church constantly. Those conversations will continue whether or not we choose to participate in them. But we cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what the Church teaches. While some conversations have audiences in the thousands or even millions, most are much, much smaller. But all conversations have an impact on those who participate in them. Perceptions of the Church are established one conversation at a time.

And that’s one of the (many) reasons I blog. :)

Now, to you who are graduating today, along with the other students at this wonderful university, may I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the Internet, particularly the New Media, to share the gospel and to explain in simple and clear terms the message of the Restoration.

If you didn’t catch it, that’s an official endorsement of blogging (and Facebook et al.) by an apostle. :) Granted, he’s specifically talking about missionary work, but I don’t think that means every post you write has to be straight from Preach My Gospel. If we’re true to who we are, the gospel will shine through us even when we’re talking about non-Church topics. There are many, many ways to share the gospel. (And by saying that I don’t mean that we should avoid talking about the gospel directly. I just mean that we shouldn’t limit ourselves to that. After all, the gospel does touch every aspect of life, not just theology.)

So, if you haven’t already got a blog, what are you waiting for? ;) (I’ve got some instructions on how to get started at the bottom of my What’s a blog page.) And if you don’t quite feel ready to start your own just yet, at least join the conversation by commenting on the blogs you read. You really can make a difference.

Speaking of that generation gap I mentioned earlier, it’s kind of funny that this talk comes from an 80-year-old man. :)

[tags]LDS, Mormon[/tags]