Night

When I was around eight, my family went to a World War II exhibit that was being held in Payson, Utah.  I don’t remember a whole lot about that night.  I remember being in awe that the whole world had been at war—twice, no less—and there were a lot of photographs and artifacts.  Most of these things are so blurry I can’t attest to anything I learned about the military aspect of it.

What I remember best is my family splitting off and I went with my grandma to see a documentary of Anne Frank.  I don’t remember a word the film said about Anne Frank and her family, but I came away that night amazed at this family that hid so long but finally became victims of the great and terrible Holocaust.

More than that, I fell in love that night.  I joked the other day that Anne Frank was my first crush, but really, I looked at her as the model of the big sister I never had but would have loved.  Learning how devoted she was to her diary, I think that may have been the moment I decided that I was going to be a writer.

I am embarrassed beyond belief that I have still never read her book.  Yet I’m still not in a great rush.  This is a story I’m saving for a special occasion.

Despite this obvious failing on my part, the Holocaust continues to fascinate and overwhelm me.  In a time and period when so little is held sacred in our modern culture, the world still holds this particular subject with reverence.  The few I’ve met who don’t earned quite a deal of contempt unless they quickly apologized.

We approach stories from survivors with the same respect.  Their words and stories are sacred to us.  We stand amazed at their sufferings and sorrows, the cruel brutality and genocide inflicted upon them.  The victims’ names are not all remembered, but their sorrows are never forgotten.

There are not many open enough to share their sufferings with the world, but the snatches we get are incredible.  I’ve read Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning twice, and what is stunning is how this man managed to live with hope and love even in that most awful of all circumstances.

I just finished Night by Elie Wiesel, and his message is very different but just as powerful and resonant.  He was around age 15 the year he lived in the concentration camps, and instead of finding purpose in suffering, his story is about how the Holocaust broke him.

He explores this in the two most important relationships he held during that time: his relationship to God and the other to his father.

In his youth, Wiesel was devout, eager to learn the mysteries of heaven.  During his stay in the camps, he rebelled against everything he’d been taught in his heart.  As he says, it wasn’t that he doubted God’s existence, but he could no longer love the Being who created him and let His chosen people be murdered body and spirit by their enemies.

The scene that drove it home is when the Day of Atonement arrives.  I’ve been studying the Old Testament a lot the past few months, and one thing that becomes clear when looking at Israelite holidays is that the Day of Atonement was the most sacred holiday they participate in all year.

Fasting is an important religious observance of this day.  As Wiesel saw it, he fasted every single day and when the Day of Atonement came around, he emphatically ate his bread.  I got the sense that he was saying, “God has ignored me, so I will ignore him.”

From what I’ve read since this book, Wiesel still holds this view.  He has declared himself an agnostic and at his age, I doubt he’s about to change his mind there.

The relationship with his father is a little more complicated.  It’s clear that he loved his father and refused to ever be separated from him.  He threw himself in danger several times to stay with his father.

Yet there were times when he allowed himself to be angry.  Even as he made a vow to never abandon his father, he knew how much of a relief it would be not to look after the old man.  When Wiesel’s father finally died, all the young boy felt was free.

Wiesel has written many books over the years, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and is still living a long and full life.  At the end of the day, though, Night may be what he is best remembered for, and that’s appropriate.  I feel that his story and all the stories of the Holocaust should remain alive through our generation and the other generations that will succeed us.  It’s not only important that we learn the lessons these stories can tell us, what’s critical is that these stories are remembered at all, because they are part of who we are as people.

It’s also the best way that we can honor them.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

I’ve talked about EdX here before.  I’ll repeat here that this is a website, www.edx.org, that is providing a wonderful service.  Some of the most prestigious universities across the world are offering free classes to learn many advanced and interesting subjects.

One that just started is a course studying the Pauline epistles.  This has been a fascinating course thus far.  I can’t say a lot of the information is new, but the discussions and ideas that get explored are fascinating.

At one point, our professor had us look at rhetoric and was particularly engaged with how Paul’s delivery changed depending on who he was writing to.  To drive the point home about how every person does this, we read a series of other historical letters, and one that stuck with me was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

The class was focused on how King presented himself to his audience, but I couldn’t help but read beyond that.  I’ve studied his life and listened to his “I Have a Dream” speech a couple times.  I’ve found him to be admirable and passionate.  Reading this letter, though... if better words ever came from the Twentieth Century, I don’t know what they are.

In this letter, King answered some criticisms he received from fellow clergymen regarding his nonviolent crusade to break the racial laws in the South.  The clergymen suggested that he should not get involved in such a direct manner but let justice run its course through the legal system.

King’s brilliant reply included this statement, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed... For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’... This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.’  We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

What is truly unique in King’s work is that even though his work was nonviolent, it was still a fight and he led others into battle with their faces towards their enemy and feet marching forward.  “I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’  I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”

The question that is so tempting to ask—at least it was for me—is, It’s a noble idea, but does it really work?

King asked that question as well.  “Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification.  We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: ‘Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?’  ‘Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?’”

I’ve been asking myself for a week now these same questions.  If something was important enough, would I be willing to suffer the same things that they prepared themselves for?  Is it even the right way to do things?  We’re a nation that has agreed that there are times for violent measures; the United States only came about because of violent war, and violent war has been used again for stability and to help bring peace in the world.  Was King’s way really the right way?

While I do believe there are times when violence is permissible to stem evil, King and his followers were trying to live a higher law, and it’s a law that Jesus taught in the glorious Sermon on the Mount:

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.  And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.  And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”  (Matt. 5:38-41)

King showed us a way to live like Christ, apply the Savior’s teachings in a way that few had ever tried before, certainly not on grand scales like this (except, of course, Gandhi.)

I’ve recently had conversations regarding morality, nobility, and what heroism is.  Is it right to put your life into danger for a cause when you don’t have to?  King didn’t have to get involved. He could have stayed out and cared for his family, instead of going to jail and suffering great indignities for many years, putting hardship on himself and the loved ones around him.  Was it right of him to do so?

I, for one, feel strongly that, as high priority as we should give to ourselves and to our families, there are times when we have to sacrifice for the greater good.  It’s not enough to be concerned about our own personal spheres, we have to look after the whole community, because in the end, we are all related together.

King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  We are caught in an inescapable mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  (emphasis added)

I have long wanted to write an essay on the building of Zion.  If I never do, though, that last statement that I just quoted, especially the final sentence, says everything I would wish to be understood by my readers.  If that sentence, “whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” were burned into hearts of every saint and we comprehended their full import, we would understand what it is to be of one heart and one mind.  On such a principle could that Zion be built.

Just one final quote from King regarding the state of justice.  King went to jail because he broke laws.  His answer was to say that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

This is a frank and open reminder that there is no compromise between good and evil. 

We often feel that this is a world in which there are various shades of gray.  That’s because our lives are imperfect.  We have strengths and we have weaknesses.  But just because we tend to waver, and often that wavering comes every single day, what is good and what is evil never changes.  They do not combine or mingle or cross from one line to the other.

We may live our lives moving from one camp to the other, but King reminded us here that if we are to be champions of good, we must actively and unashamedly fight the bad.  If there is an evil law, we are morally obligated to dishonor it, show it the contempt it deserves, and do all in our power to blast it into oblivion.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  Sadly, it’s an easy holiday to overlook.  Unless I’m in school where it’s required that they take the Monday off, I’ve tended to forget that it’s even there.  It’s not like we have firework shows, family get-togethers, or even a big feast to bring us in.

And yet we ought to take some time in this day to learn about this man’s life, consider what he taught, but more importantly, how he lived and the battle he fought to overcome one of the greatest evils in our nation’s history.  If you don’t know much about King, though, at least take the time to ponder the teachings, because they are truth and did not come from him.  He was merely a disciple of the truth, albeit an eloquent and provocative supporter of it.

#57-59: Aesop, Siddhartha, Two Cities

This goal of mine to read all the books in that 1,001 list of mine is definitely a stretching goal.  I’ve been surprised and pleased at how many of them I’ve genuinely liked.  I was expecting to hate many of them—and that may yet be the case when I start really digging into the Twentieth Century picks.  As it is, though, here are three that I managed to get through over the holidays:

Aesop’s Fables.  Best of the three here.  There are tales that many people would be familiar with, like “The Grasshopper and the Ants,” in which the grasshopper plays music the whole summer long but when winter comes starves, while the ants who worked all summer long survived the winter.

There were over two hundred fables in the book I read, and what struck me was the great pessimism shadowing the animal tales.  It’s common for the protagonists to die, and whether they deserve their fates or not, the ends seem inevitable.

Especially harsh, though, are the maxims.  One of the earliest fables, four beasts agreed to divide their kills equally, but when it comes time to dividing their plunder, the lion takes it all.  The maxim: Might makes right.

The value of Aesop’s Fables is not so much in their moral value, but in its observational use.  “Might makes right” is morally reprehensible, but in the world, it is the strong who tend to make the rules.  If the reader learns from Aesop’s observations, we can understand the nature and behavior of society and the individuals who contribute to it.

Beyond that, these stories are very clever.  My favorite fable is not an animal tale, but one about Aesop when he was a slave.  The slave Aesop requested the lightest basket to carry on a journey.  He was allowed to have first choice, so he picked the breadbasket.  At first, all his fellow-slaves mocked him because the breadbasket was the heaviest of all.  In the middle of the trip, though, all the bread was eaten and Aesop got to carry an empty basket the rest of the journey.

That may be the cleverest thing I’ve read all year.

Siddhartha.  Herman Hesse’s spiritualistic novella is quite enlivening.  It examines the life of the eponymous Siddhartha, a young Brahmin who joins the ascetic Samanas, meets the Buddha, decides to live a wordly life of material and sexual pleasures, renounces his wealth, becomes a ferryman, faces rejection by a son he never knew, and at the end of life has attained enlightenment, a kind of awakening to the universe.

I experienced this book on two levels: the first as a fictional biography, a style of story I’ve quite enjoyed over the years.  The first time I recall running into this sort of story was Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, and shortly after with Orson Scott Card’s Songmaster.  Each story takes a character and follows them from their entry into the world until their death.  (I say entry instead of birth, because it’s not crucial that we watch them grow up.  The story starts when they embark to achieve a goal.)

I’m fascinated by watching the progress of a person from a young stage in life grow and change over the course of their existence.  I love to see the catalysts and reasons for why they choose a certain path and later discover reasons for their being on the wrong one and so run down another.

Such stories make me contemplate the directions my life has headed in.  They make me see what changes I’ve made and make me wonder about what new directions and views I’ll hold in the future, what revelations I’ll discover.  These fictional biographies give me a taste and make me ponder the beauty, complexity, and grandeur of life.  That Siddhartha is also such a short book only adds to its achievement.

The second level, Siddhartha is also a quest story.  Just as Santiago from Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist goes on a quest and has many adventures on his search for treasure, so too does Siddhartha have many adventures and experiences that are really checkpoints on his long quest for enlightenment.

That story works well and is interesting.  Unfortunately, the quest story fell short for me, if only because I really don’t appreciate the treasure he gains at the end.  Siddhartha’s enlightenment is that he discovered word “Om” bound everything together, all the pain, pleasures, sorrows, and cares, and all the lives were bound together in that sacred word.

It’s a lovely expression, but because I don’t belong in that culture and have a different concept of unity in the universe, this climactic moment didn’t have the same power over me that it had for the story’s hero.

But that’s the trouble with any story of spiritual journey.  If you already belong to that belief system, it’s going to touch your soul and affirm all you’ve accepted before.  If you’re searching for something more, than perhaps this kind of story will lead you to discover a deep truth unknown to you before.  But if you’re in neither camp, you can appreciate the journey for what it is, but you won’t feel a part of it.  There’s a wall between you and what that story is trying to convey.

In the end, I liked it well enough, but it really didn’t mean very much to me.  But that shouldn’t deter you from looking at it and seeing if it won’t sing straight to you heart.

A Tale of Two Cities.  I have two pieces of advice for people who don’t consider themselves readers.  First, find what you love and read that, and keep reading what you love until you consider yourself to be a reader.  Second, once you are a reader, challenge yourself.

I’ve considered a reader all my life, and I have been pushing myself to improve my talent for years.  I’ve read a great variety over the years: scripture, mystery, science fiction, military history, fantasy, science, biographies, classics, poetry, short fiction, and cereal boxes.  There isn’t a lot in the way of the written word that terrifies me.

Classics least of all.  I was reading Shakespeare in the fourth grade.  Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allen Poe are favorite authors of mine.  I’ve plugged away at the overwritten Moby Dick and Les Miserables without breaking a sweat.  I thought The Brothers Karamazov to be lively.

For reasons that continue to baffle me, Charles Dickens is a challenge.  I’ve started and never finished Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and Bleak House.  I finally got through A Christmas Carol, but only because it’s short and it still took two attempts.

When my book club picked A Tale of Two Cities, I met this with excitement and trepidation.  I knew because it’s a book club book that I’d be able to hunker down and finish this one.  Deep inside, though, I knew it would be a push.

Part of the difficulty with Two Cities is the lack of a central character.  You could say that it’s about Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, the man who is sentenced to be executed during the French Revolution and the man who takes his place, respectively.  Yet Darnay gets fewer pages devoted to him than Lucie, Dr. Manette, Jarvis Lorry, and the Defarges.  And Sydney Carton goes missing for the bulk of the story until he performs his eleventh-hour rescue.

In short, this was an all-star cast story, all of them bound together by the most spectacular of coincidences.  It’s the kind of epic I tend to enjoy the most, but it was difficult this time because with all the events taking place, I barely felt invested with a character before Dickens moved onto somebody else with little hint as to whether this person was going to be a major or minor character.

The benefit to this is that everyone really does get to be the hero of their own story.  The problem is that there is barely time to really connect with anybody.  In fact, I found that the less time spent with a character, the more attached to them.  Sydney Carter has two chapters total that explores his perspective, and yet his personality, pain, and longing for unrequited love stuck with me.

Then there were the endless time spent among reprehensible people and long, historical drafts spent with the ruthless Defarges and an abusive and whiny grave robber.

The only truly moving part of this book, that I feel has made this book last over a century, is the last page when Sydney Carter looks into the future and sees the fruits of his sacrifice.  It’s a great payoff, but it takes a long time to come and I almost dropped off before I got there.

Using Time Wisely

In 2004, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a significant change in its missionary program.  For decades, missionaries memorized six “discussions” that covered the basic principles and doctrines of our church, and when missionaries were invited into homes, they were expected to repeat these discussions verbatim.

I do believe that this organization was inspired and helped the missionaries greatly during that time, but after many years of relying on the same system, it was time for a change.  So the church published a new missionary manual called Preach My Gospel, and has been the basic handbook for Latter-day Saint missionaries since.

One of the significant changes was how missionaries were expected to teach.  They were no longer required to memorize lessons (of which they’d now brought down to five.) In fact, in my mission we were encouraged not to memorize the lessons.  Instead, we were expected to study the concepts, the scriptures, and how the doctrines were organized, and then teach the lessons in our own words, from our own experience, and as otherwise prompted by the Spirit.

The thing about Preach My Gospel lessons is that they were all combined into one chapter.  The manual has twelve other chapters focused on different subjects; some are for personal use, like how to study scriptures effectively, recognizing the Spirit, and (for foreign speaking missionaries) how best to learn to speak a new language; and others are for working with others, like teaching methods, encouraging people keep commitments (like helping someone recover from addictions) and how to best work and cooperate with local church leaders and other auxiliary organizations.

This is all a long preamble to an experience that changed the way I conduct my life.

I’d been on my mission about eight months when Elder M. Russell Ballard (an apostle) came to visit us.  My companion was asked to play the organ at the meeting he spoke, so I got to sit in the rostrum where I got a lovely view of the back of Elder Ballard’s head.

Elder Ballard was very engaging as a speaker and was more open about the actual work we were involved in than some other leaders I’d listened to before.  Sometime around the Q&A portion of his talk, he mentioned Preach My Gospel, and specifically the one titled “Using Time Well,” which he had had a heavy hand in writing.

Honestly, up to then, “Using Time Well” was the most boring chapter in the world.  The majority of it covers the paperwork, the planners, goals, reporting your progress, and all the other humdrum activities that you do on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

As he talked about it, though, he made an emphatic point that the concepts in that chapter were not meant to end with our missionary service, but if we applied the principles of using time wisely for the rest of our lives, greater productivity and success would follow.

I went home that day and for months afterward I looked over and thought about that chapter until I realized that using time well is distilled into three basic points: set goals, make plans, and be accountable.

Considering this is a new year, resolutions are being made, kept for a month, and given up on by citizens all around.  This starts an endless cycle of frustration and depression, and it really doesn’t have to be like that.  I’m hoping a brief examination of these three points can help your resolve, not just for your New Year’s dreams, but in whatever big or small things you wish to accomplish at any time.

Set Goals

This is the easiest step, and yet a lot of us do it wrong.  The most common New Year’s resolution is to exercise more and live healthier.  Thus the sudden rise of gym memberships each January.

Trouble is, exercising more and living healthier are good things to want, but as a goal, it’s too vague.  Effective goals shouldn’t just be specific, they ought to be measureable.  A common example would be a weight goal, like in my case, maybe lose 30 pounds (I’m not setting this goal, by the way, despite how much it needs to happen.)

Or if not weight, maybe you want to be fit for an upcoming marathon, hike a particular mountain, lift so many pounds, or perform an activity for an increased amount of time without fatigue.  Whatever it be, be specific, manageable, and make it stretch.

The second part to setting goals, though, is the breaking it down to smaller goals.  Say you have your overall goal for the year.  Next step, create a monthly goal.  Ask yourself, What can I accomplish this month that will help me reach my goal for the year?  Once you have your monthly goal, then set a weekly goal, with the thought in mind, What goal this week can I accomplish that will make me reach my goal for this month?  Then do a daily goal to accomplish the weekly goal.  I’ve known a couple people who then make hourly goals.  I think they’re fanatics, but they feel a sense of accomplishment.

The thing is, each small goal builds on each other to help you reach the overall dream.

Important thing to keep in mind: if you don’t accomplish your goal, at least not in the time you set for yourself, you are not a failure.  When you don’t reach your goal and start to feel bad about it, take a step and look at what you achieved just by trying.  Would you have done as much as you did if you had never set the goal and worked for it?

Successful goal setting isn’t always about achieving the goal (however awesome that would have been.)  Goal setting is a success if you really worked at it and really did improve yourself between the time you set it and the end date.

Make Plans

I’m good at setting goals.  I am terrible at making plans to achieve them, because they involve planners, which involves scheduling, which involves dedication to keep scheduling, which takes up time and... and... and I’m lazy.

Making plans to achieve your goals is about maximizing optimal use of all your available resources, and of all your resources, your most precious is time.  Thus, when making plans, your first priority is figuring out how you’re going to make the best use of the time you have.

Planners are a great tool for organizing your time, especially in achieving your daily goals.  They put things in perspective and are a great reality check.

I like planners and I feel at my most productive when I use one.  I’m not diligent enough to use them for more than two months at a time, though, and there are two reasons for that.

First, in order to schedule time, you need to schedule a planning time.  Once a week, you ought to take 15 to 30 minutes to plan out the next week in order to set your goals and figure out how you want to accomplish them.  And then every day, take at least five minutes to go over your plans for what’s coming up.

The daily and weekly planning times are crucial, but they are not exciting.  My mind constantly wanders while I’m doing it, so it takes even more time than it should, and there’s this really cool thing on YouTube that I have got to check out right now.  I can get to the planning later.  That’s when the $20 I spent on the new planner pages goes to waste.

The second trouble with planning is that, at least twice a week, something comes up and throws my plans completely out of whack.  A smart thing to do is to have backup plans on hand (if Plan A doesn’t work out, Plan B is a good option, and if you’re that farsighted, you’ll have a Plan C as well), but that takes up more time, and honestly, there are days when all your backups fly out the window.

On days when none of your plans work out, you ask yourself, What was it all for?  This is stupid.

It is stupid, but the thing is, when these crises and emergencies come up, I’ve found that in planning my days, I was still more productive and achieved more than if I hadn’t planned it out and see where it led.

Making plans are crucial and I will attest to it.  Even though I’m not diligent about it, I do recognize the difference in how I behave and how I feel when I have made plans and the times when I haven’t.

Be Accountable

Most.  Important.  Step.

Fact: You are lazy.  Somewhere out there is a person who is accountable only to themselves and they can and do keep themselves on track.  You are not that person.  How do I know?  Because you’re reading this blog instead of accomplishing something real.

By yourself, you will not achieve anything.  Your goals will turn into wishes and your plans will lie forgotten by the wayside.

The cure to your laziness is to have somebody hold you accountable to your goals.

In athletics, you have coaches and trainers holding you accountable to your improvement.  In education, teachers and professors are holding their students accountable in their knowledge and comprehension.  In the workplace, bosses hold their employees accountable for the work that they do.

Without someone to keep you in check, you’re not going to do the work.  That’s why in goal setting, you should know who is keeping you accountable for the work.

And here’s the secret of accountability: everybody you tell your goals to holds you accountable to them.  The more people you tell your goals to, the more pressure you’ll feel to achieve them, and thus, the more likely you’ll be to work at it.

Sometimes it’s not the quantity of people you share your goals with that makes the difference.  Sometimes it’s the quality.  Your spouse is more likely to hold you accountable to your goals than coworker you only see five days a week.

Accountability makes all the difference though.  This blog is proof for me.

See, I like to write.  I really do.  I’m not the greatest in the world; I’m not even half as good as I think I am, but I like it.  I’ve always wanted to write a novel (and I’ve made three noteworthy efforts to achieve that) but none of my attempts ever paid off, mostly because I never had enough people holding me accountable to produce a novel at a certain date.  No matter how I talk about writing it or setting goals for it, it never happens because of my lack of accountability.

When I started this blog, though, I made darn sure that every reader would hold me accountable to updating this on a regular basis.  I’ve changed my schedule multiple times.  A few months back, I said that I would update four days a week for six weeks straight.  Because I have regular readers (and know several of them, even the ones who don’t comment) I feel compelled/accountable to be sure that I published when I said I would.  Not only did I publish four days a week for that six-week period, I over-achieved and was publishing five days a week.

Even though that’s now done, I’m still being held accountable to publish these obscenely long posts once a week, It’s not a lot of readers that keep me in check, but it’s enough so that I’ve felt obligated to keep going.  You, the readers of this paltry blog, have kept me doing this almost two years and 201 posts later.

Thank you.