{"id":15592,"date":"2011-05-14T23:40:27","date_gmt":"2011-05-15T04:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=15592"},"modified":"2011-05-14T23:43:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-15T04:43:04","slug":"schweigt-stille-plaudert-nicht","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2011\/05\/schweigt-stille-plaudert-nicht\/","title":{"rendered":"Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pot\"<\/a>Now that I\u2019ve moved to BYU-Idaho, I occasionally (read: yesterday) get asked interesting questions when I\u2019m at professional conferences, like: “How are you adjusting to life without caffeine?”<\/p>\n

To answer that question, I could have selected from a few different ways to bring the conversation to a sudden and awkward conclusion:<\/p>\n

1. “In fact, the prohibition on caffeine is a folk doctrine (despite occasional statements by General Authorities to the contrary) that has entered the popular imagination, owing to what is<\/em> an authoritative injunction against the consumption of coffee (including decaf) and tea (black and green, but not herbal). I believe the history of this teaching has been traced in a Dialogue<\/em> article. Could I send you the bibliography?”<\/p>\n

2. “While caffeinated drinks such as coffee and tea are proscribed, during my two-year missionary service I often accepted caffeinated cola drinks from generous people after I had declined their offers of wine, beer, and coffee. Would you like to know more about the missionary program of the church?”<\/p>\n

3. “Oh, well, I sometimes still have caffeine. I know this might make me seem not so uptight as most Mormons, but sometimes I like to let it hang out a little.”<\/p>\n

Instead, I opted for:<\/p>\n

4. “I have only known life without caffeine.”<\/p>\n

This proved to be a nice way to keep a pleasant and productive conversation from crashing to a halt. The main drawback of this response was that it wasn\u2019t true. At that moment, I had a suitcase back in my room stuffed with some high-percentage chocolate containing appreciable amounts of caffeine.<\/p>\n

(Kalamazoo has an Aldi, a discount grocery chain based in Germany that is a reliable source of excellent German chocolate at bargain prices, and we hadn\u2019t seen one since moving west almost a year ago. So the day I arrived, I undertook a pilgrimage of two miles on foot to the store – but I felt as if I should have been on my knees, confessing along the way: \u2018Yea, I have sinned the sin of ALBERTSONS against thee; lo, my heart hath gone after the strange idols of WALMART…\u2019 I am now returning with a suitcase full of relics for my family. Aldi also had N\u00fcrnberger Bratwurst for sale, which I couldn\u2019t cook and consume on the spot or bring back with me; sometimes relics cannot replace the real presence. Twice a store employee asked me how I was doing and I said \u2018fine,\u2019 when in fact I was having a quasi-religious experience. But I digress.)<\/p>\n

For the truth of the matter is that neither I nor the person I was talking with were interested in moralized nutritional chemistry or in measuring my Mormonism by the microgram. Instead I wanted to indicate, simply and painlessly, that I happily self-identify as a Mormon, including with respect to the current boundary-markers of Mormonism. I sacrificed the smaller point to the cause of expressing a larger truth.<\/p>\n

But I still feel uneasy about shaving corners off of complete accuracy, so if that person is ever curious if I have actually avoided all forms of caffeine, they can google me and find the truth, although the truth might make them flee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that I\u2019ve moved to BYU-Idaho, I occasionally (read: yesterday) get asked interesting questions when I\u2019m at professional conferences, like: “How are you adjusting to life without caffeine?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":15593,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/pot.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15592"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15597,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15592\/revisions\/15597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}