More or Less Blessed

More or Less Blessed
Is it really more blessed to give than receive?
Jesus thought so, so that’s fine to believe.
But the problem with that, if you ask me,
is it makes giving something we should all try to get,
And getting a thing about which to fret.
It forces spontaneous virtue to be,
and makes Heaven a place that just isn’t free.

The thing about giving that nobody notes
(perhaps they are too busy looking for motes),
is although it is great to give things away 
(so great you should try to give things each day),
there’s no way to get this giving to do,
without someone there to receive it from you.

You can’t be more blessed 
(And someone blessed less),
without someone to take what you’re giving,
so if it wasn’t for them, you could get no gem, 
no pearl of great price for good living.

Givers and Getters, neither is better,
if you have to have both for the blessing.
So they both can be great, and share the same fate,
or else who will you give to in Heaven?

—Saint Andrew of Snohomish

Saint Andrew of Snohomish – True Forgiveness

The scriptures of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints contain a well-know verse about forgiveness that I heard many times during my life in the Church. In Doctrine and Covenants Section 64 Verse 10 we read:

“I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.”

This is probably inspired by verses dealing with forgiveness in the New Testament, such as Matthew 6:14-15 and 18:21-22.

I used to accept these scriptures without thinking, but after being exposed to the work of the philosopher Alan Watts, I’ve gained a different, and I think more true and useful perspective on forgiveness, as well as living, loving, and all forms of human behavior really. I’m particularly interested in his application of Gregory Bateson’s concept of the “double-bind” to certain kinds of behavior that we tend to require of ourselves and others.

In his 1966 book, The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts wrote “Nothing fails like success – because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.”

And so, in response to The Church and The New Testament, and as inspired by Alan Watts, I created the following graphic using a photo I purchased from iStock and my original design and words:

The social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways:

The first rule of the game is that it is not a game.

Everyone must play.

You must love us.

You must go on living.

Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.

Control yourself and be natural.

Try to be sincere.

Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere – all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen “of themselves” like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores – weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith – in other people, and in oneself – is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

-Alan Watts, The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The Son of Some Other God

Matthew 16:15-16

15 He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?

16 And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

17 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.

If Jesus Christ is Yahweh, or Jehova, the God of the Old Testament, as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches, then who is Jesus talking about when he refers to his “Father which is in heaven,” in Matthew 16:17?

Is Jesus’s “Father which is in heaven” different than Peter’s? Is Peter’s “living God” different than the God of the Old Testament?

It seems like in order for Jesus to be both the God of the Old Testament and “the Son of the living God,” that he would have to be the Son of some other God or he would have to be the Son of Himself.

Why would Jesus refer to himself as his own Father? Or, why would Peter refer to Jesus as “the Son of the living God” if he meant any God other than the one from the Jewish scriptures? If both Jesus and Peter are referring to some other God, perhaps they would have been wise to provide a little further expanation to kind of clear things up a bit for future generations.

I would think most faithful Mormon responses to this argument would appeal to some kind of supposedly lost knowledge that didn’t make it into the Bible, or perhaps include a list of comparative scriptures from the Bible that they feel indicate a match between Jesus and Jehova. To me, either type of response would still fail to explain why the Jesus of the New Testament would teach his own Jewish people that he is the Son of any God other than the same living God who is found in their own scriptures, or why he would teach them that he is the Son of Himself.

If Jesus is the God of the Old Testament, as The Church teaches, then what does God the Father, who is supposed to be the all-powerful Master and Creator of the Universe, even do in the Bible? For such a dutiful Son who supposedly was chosen to be the Savior of the world because he was willing to give all glory to the Father, Jesus sure gets an awful lot of attention. Apparently he even got to play the role of God Almighty before he was ever even born, leading his people out of Egypt and doing all kinds of amazing things, but I guess he just never could get them to understand who he really was. If the Mormons are right, then I guess those silly ancient Jews just never could figure out who they were really dealing with for all those years – here they thought they had a special relationship with the boss, and come to find out it was really just the boss’s son all along.