{"id":34121,"date":"2015-10-13T04:00:06","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T09:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=34121"},"modified":"2015-10-07T08:21:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T13:21:00","slug":"reading-nephi-28-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2015\/10\/reading-nephi-28-15\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Nephi – 2:8-15"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"068-068-the-liahona-full\"<\/a>This passage doesn\u2019t seem to reflect well on Nephi. I don\u2019t blame Nephi. To the degree that any of us have good reason to think poorly of family members who have wronged us, I think that the older man Nephi has cause to think poorly of his brothers. But how can we not also see the older, embittered Nephi projecting back on his brothers here? Our memories are inevitably colonized by our present experiences\u2014sometimes glamorized and sometimes darkened.<\/p>\n

If I read past Nephi\u2019s retrospectively projected interpretation, however, I am deeply moved by Lehi\u2019s wisdom and love. There is no way to see what this family is going through as anything other than wrenching and difficult. I keenly remember feeling like my whole life was torn out from under me when as a melodramatic young teenager my family moved towns. I certainly murmured. I continue to feel my feet kicked out from under me as I move through life (and alas, I continue to murmur). I think we can see a general <\/em>phenomenon in Lehi\u2019s wrenching experience; but we can also see a particular<\/em> affinity to our experiences today: we maintain very little in terms of solid, stable, long-term cultural transmission. By which I mean that time and place and identity and purpose are no longer tightly married together and stable over the course of multiple generations.<\/p>\n

When I was young, Utah was a homeland, even though I never lived there. Politics and pollution and the shift to an international church have done a lot to make that feeling fade, however much I continue to love Temple Square, Manti, and the mountains above Fairview. I feel like I\u2019ve inherited just enough of an understanding of homeland to catch the tiniest glimpse of what it must feel like to have actually had one\u2014but maybe that\u2019s just substituting sentimentality for the real thing. In reality, I don\u2019t even have a hometown, let alone a homeland<\/em>. I never know what to say when people ask me where I\u2019m from. I tend to say the Washington, DC area\u2014my most recent place of residence. I\u2019ve moved more than twenty times in fourteen years of marriage, and will move again before this next summer. I have no wealth, no lands, no physical inheritance, no stability of long-term relationships and community coinciding with physical geography. While my experience is perhaps a little extreme, this seems to be normal today.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t Lehi\u2019s normal. Quite the opposite. I don\u2019t know how many generations his family had lived in Jerusalem after their exodus from the North\u2014one or two, or was it more? Long enough that his sons seem to have fully assimilated. It was their homeland and hometown and theological home in addition to its being their physical home. It was likely the same for everyone that they knew or encountered.<\/p>\n

But change is something with which we all must cope, even those who lived in this ancient city. Lehi was a prophet called to prophesy this very fact: prepare yourself, for the Eternal City is about to change and be destroyed. Prepare yourself, my family, our entire world is about to be disrupted and change.<\/p>\n

Where then is our Polaris?<\/p>\n

Lehi gives us two articulations of how we can remain grounded and overcome the vertigo:<\/p>\n