{"id":37550,"date":"2018-01-22T05:00:08","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T10:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=37550"},"modified":"2018-01-08T06:47:03","modified_gmt":"2018-01-08T11:47:03","slug":"embodied-spirituality-reading-nephi-177-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2018\/01\/embodied-spirituality-reading-nephi-177-12\/","title":{"rendered":"Embodied Spirituality – Reading Nephi – 17:7-12"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This post is part of a series of reflections on I Nephi. If you’re interested, the introduction to the series is here.<\/a>\u00a0To peruse earlier entries, click the authors tab at the top of the page and then click on my name. I welcome your own thoughts on these specific verses (or on my reflections) in the comments below.<\/p>\n

* * * *<\/p>\n

I Nephi 17:7-12<\/a><\/p>\n

Another statement of many days. How long were they in Bountiful? Had they already created a permanent settlement, or were they still weary from their journey and longing to create permanence in this bountiful land when Nephi again begins to uproot them?<\/p>\n

In passages like this one, Nephi strikes me as incredibly concrete and practical in nature\u2014much more a Brigham Young than a Joseph Smith. Here the focus shifts immediately from God\u2019s directive to \u201cbuild a ship\u201d to Nephi\u2019s inquiring about ore, to a description of his building a bellows from the skins of animals and striking rocks to make fire. It\u2019s very corporeal, hands-on. This again fits in well with the political narrative, highlighting Nephi\u2019s practical, able-bodied, can-do approach; it pairs well with his obtaining the Plates of Brass. But it also fits in well with his overall personality and demeanor. Here is the same man whose response to a frightened Zoram was to tackle him.<\/p>\n

In order to build a ship Nephi needed to make tools. This seems to suggest that either there weren\u2019t people nearby making ships (from whom they could purchase\/barter\/work for tools), or else Lehi\u2019s family was destitute and had no means of acquiring the tools (seems less likely since they could surely have traded or worked for them), or perhaps that there were significant tensions between the locals and the newly arrived, self-righteous, upstart Jerusalemites squatting on a prime piece of the collective commons. The first option argues against those who claim Nephi learned to build a ship from the locals, but not the second two.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gotten to know and become friends with our \u201clocal\u201d primitive skills expert, a man who goes by \u201cDrev,\u201d a shortened version of his last name. He can do absolutely anything in the way of primitive skills, though of course he is better and worse at various things. That said, he\u2019s a true blue expert in hand- and bow-drill fire starting. I watched him start a fire using his hand drill and some local cattail fluff in less time than it takes a boy scout with matches and lighter fluid (less than 30 seconds). Genuinely awe-inspiring. Despite his skill, which once-upon-a-time many people living in the Americas might have had, he insists that indigenous peoples\u2019 primary focus was not on starting but on maintaining fires\u2014it\u2019s simply far more efficient given the exigencies of weather. This point includes when traveling. There are certain mushrooms, for instance, that can smolder in your leather carrying case for over a week. Consequently, it stands out conspicuous to me that Nephi takes the time to explicitly note that he struck two rocks together to make fire. It\u2019s a throwaway line that\u2019s easy to miss, or simply throw in with the other details of Nephi\u2019s concrete, practical-oriented narrative. But I suspect it would\u2019ve struck the ancient reader\u2014especially a second generation Nephite born and raised in the promised land of Meso-America\u2014as odd that Nephi needed to do this. Why wouldn\u2019t they have just carried fire with them everyday? Surely they had fires going \u201cafter many days\u201d in Bountiful, right? Nephi feels the unasked question of his contemporary audience and answers it: God hadn\u2019t suffered them to use fire in the wilderness. The fact that they didn\u2019t have fires going in Bountiful either perhaps speaks to the fact that relations weren\u2019t so good with the locals, and they didn\u2019t want to attract attention to their newfound, squatted settlement.<\/p>\n

While Nephi\u2019s practicality reminds me of Brigham Young, this constant intermingling, this tacking back and forth between the sacred and the mundane, is paradigmatic Joseph Smith. Both Bushman and Givens dwell on this point at length in their writings concerning Joseph Smith. The story of the Restoration is a story of concrete details and mundane events overlapping and interweaving with the doctrinal, the sacred, the profound. The Doctrine and Covenants is a prime example, but all of Joseph\u2019s accounts are this way. I can\u2019t help but think of the Kirtland temple. Nephi and Joseph reacted very similarly, a variation of Lord Nelson\u2019s famous quip on naval strategy to forget the tactics and just go straight at \u2018em. Neither Joseph nor Nephi were terribly concerned about the economic, social, and political strains created by gathering and building. In both instances this created serious hardships for their people. It\u2019s another reminder that we can well receive directives from heaven without receiving (or employing) the wisdom of how best to implement those directives. Their accounts make it quite clear that this was the case for both Joseph and Nephi. How much more so for me?<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but wonder: what would Laman & Lemuel have preferred Nephi to do? Despite their rhetoric, they obviously thought Nephi more than a fool. They found him dangerous. His visions were a continual threat to Laman\u2019s plans and hopes and desires. Had Nephi not bent all his energy and ingenuity on building a ship, but instead united with Laman to build a life in this rich and fertile land\u2014what kind of a home could they have acquired? Bountiful was undoubtedly different than Jerusalem, culturally and ecologically, but not even a fraction as different as Jerusalem and, say, ancient Guatemala. It\u2019s hard not to feel the weight of Laman\u2019s implied argument: Here there\u2019s the possibility of a genuinely good life. Taking to the seas is a guarantee of further and perhaps even greater hardship than they\u2019d already passed through in the last eight years. The line between revelation and insanity is never very clear; it must have looked a great deal like Nephi had crossed it.<\/p>\n

That said, my own suspicion is that Bountiful\u2019s other inhabitants and near neighbors would not have stood for the newcomers taking up this land. I suspect Laman\u2019s desire for permanent settlement as a people was a pipe dream. Much like our early Mormons, their options were probably assimilation or annihilation\u2014even if that choice hadn\u2019t yet become clear to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In passages like this one, Nephi strikes me as incredibly concrete and practical in nature\u2014much more a Brigham Young than a Joseph Smith.<\/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-37550","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\/37550","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=37550"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37579,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37550\/revisions\/37579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}