{"id":34023,"date":"2015-09-30T04:00:03","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T09:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=34023"},"modified":"2015-09-29T20:57:09","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T01:57:09","slug":"reading-nephi-11-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2015\/09\/reading-nephi-11-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Nephi – 1:1-6"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"068-068-the-liahona-full\"<\/a>\u2018I, Nephi\u2019 begins his record in a remarkable manner, and I\u2019m tempted to write long-windedly exploring the labyrinth of the first verse. I\u2019m grateful that he acknowledges goodly parents and not just a goodly father. Some have certainly had only goodly fathers and not goodly mothers (Disney loves this scenario), but as written, I see a reflection of my own life in the first line of the Book of Mormon\u2014of all of our lives. We have goodly Parents — Heavenly Parents. And, accordingly as Nephi notes, we have been taught somewhat in all of their learning, and are continuing to be so taught, which is the purpose of our sojourn.<\/p>\n

Indistinguishable from this learning is Nephi\u2019s frank admission of affliction being integral to the whole process. And too often this can come to dominate our view of life. Nevertheless, there is goodness. And how these things are able to comingle in a divine setting is itself the substance of the mysteries of God\u2014whether it\u2019s God in Christ to which we refer or a God-created cosmos with evil in it or a garden with life and death in it or Nephi\u2019s or my own experience. However intimate and outsized I might think of my own pains and afflictions, however irrevocably tainted with suffering and injustice the world appears, I deeply want to affirm with Nephi and with God: it is good.<\/p>\n

Toward that end, I remember something that my wife taught me about verse three. We might take truth here\u2014the perspectival I, Nephi-truth\u2014in something like a truth and reconciliation council\u2019s truth. Nephi obviously has a great deal to reconcile given the tragic split of his family and an unfulfilled promised land, together with whatever personal tragedies he\u2019s experienced (perhaps he never discusses his wife because her life ended tragically and Nephi separates out his personal pain from the godly record he\u2019s trying to write; or perhaps he just can\u2019t bring himself to it). Truth & reconciliation councils just are<\/em> the unhindered tellings of personal stories, personal truths, of how one has experienced and the meanings this has engendered. And I find that in reading it, I too experience something of a truth and reconciliation — a reconciliation between my own soul and God.<\/p>\n

Which leads us into Lehi\u2019s reconciliation. It\u2019s surely not coincidental that Nephi\u2019s own account of co-mingling of the good and bad in his affirm-able life (which he states in verse one as the reason for his writing this account) needs to begin with the experiences of his father. We can\u2019t tell our story without telling the story of our progenitors. And of course, here we have Lehi \u201crepeating\u201d Joseph Smith\u2019s experience. In the midst of many prophets\u2014I can almost hear some crying lo here and others crying lo there; not concerning the fundamental need to be saved as in Joseph\u2019s day, but rather over what rivet\u2019s their sense of salvation in the first year of the reign of Zedekiah: the fate of Jerusalem\u2014and in the midst of these prophetic cries, Lehi himself retires to the wilderness to pray on the subject. And now we have the theophany that launches a new dispensation.<\/p>\n

And this is where we always already find ourselves: swimming in good and evil, our world undergoing seismic shifts, voices all around us crying lo here and lo there, irrevocably inheriting a legacy not of our choosing, and through it all a divine invitation to seek spiritual knowledge ourselves; which, if we take up, becomes the foundation for all things to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018I, Nephi\u2019 begins his record in a remarkable manner, and I\u2019m tempted to write long-windedly exploring the labyrinth of the first verse. I\u2019m grateful that he acknowledges goodly parents and not just a goodly father. Some have certainly had only goodly fathers and not goodly mothers (Disney loves this scenario), but as written, I see a reflection of my own life in the first line of the Book of Mormon\u2014of all of our lives. We have goodly Parents — Heavenly Parents. And, accordingly as Nephi notes, we have been taught somewhat in all of their learning, and are continuing to be so taught, which is the purpose of our sojourn. Indistinguishable from this learning is Nephi\u2019s frank admission of affliction being integral to the whole process. And too often this can come to dominate our view of life. Nevertheless, there is goodness. And how these things are able to comingle in a divine setting is itself the substance of the mysteries of God\u2014whether it\u2019s God in Christ to which we refer or a God-created cosmos with evil in it or a garden with life and death in it or Nephi\u2019s or my own experience. However intimate and outsized I might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34023","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\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34023"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34031,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34023\/revisions\/34031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}