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I read the following post a few minutes ago and want to provide the link, since I think there are a few really profound insights in it: “The View from the Great and Spacious Building” (
http://bonnieblythe.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/the-view-from-the-great-and-spacious-building/ I want to highlight one point specifically for everyone here to consider:
Quote:I know someone who is desperately fearful that she will never be good enough, and just as most insecure people do, she often turns that fear to criticism of others. Nobody else does what they do well enough, can be trusted with her children, or is worthy of emulation or appreciation. To say the least, she is prickly.
She portrays an image that she is sure she is on the path, but she points at others, noting what they do and don’t do, making people around her embarrassed and unsure of themselves. She is as surely in that building as any “worldly” person could be. But I too have a vantage point from that building as I look at her and note her failings (whether or not my “pointing” is ever conscious or spiteful).
Perhaps our place on the path is not so easily defined, if a simple change of focus can move us suddenly from one spot to another in that epic image, like characters in a virtual reality that disappear and reappear in a completely different position.
I absolutely love that miagery, but I also love how the “journey” from iron rod to great and spacious building (and back and forth and back and forth) is much more fluid when viewed this way than we normally see it as being. That fits my own experiences in life much better than the orthodox reading of the vision.
As it relates directly to us here in this forum, yes, we can point out things that bother us and things we want to see changed (about anything), but when we cross the line into mocking (in ANY way) we really are standing firmly in the same place/condition we are mocking others for inhabiting.
Certainly food for thought.
Sometimes I wonder if I’d be with a group in the big nice building, trying to tell those with me not to heed all those Iron Rodders who are preaching how worldly and unrighteousness everybody else is, pointing at us and making us feel guilty we’re not on “their path”, shaking their heads at the people journeying in the mists, or navigating across the waters. All the talk about us vs them, on both sides of the perspective, makes me shake my head.
Ray, I kinda like the image your giving, going back and forth. Not fearing one or the other. Maybe I’d even want to check out the waters, who knows…I might even find wayfarer rafting down some rapids and having a grand time.
Heber13 wrote:Sometimes I wonder if I’d be with a group in the big nice building, trying to tell those with me not to heed all those Iron Rodders who are preaching how worldly and unrighteousness everybody else is, pointing at us and making us feel guilty we’re not on “their path”, shaking their heads at the people journeying in the mists, or navigating across the waters.
All the talk about us vs them, on both sides of the perspective, makes me shake my head.
Ray, I kinda like the image your giving, going back and forth. Not fearing one or the other. Maybe I’d even want to check out the waters, who knows…I might even find wayfarer rafting down some rapids and having a grand time.
You would find me in my canoe, not a raft. Rafting tends to be on the surface, with no ability to steer, really, other than brute-force trying to avoid hard collisions from rocks and the like. A canoe truly needs to be connected to the flow, it uses currents that are not only on the surface, but under as well, and with a proper feel of the flow, one can effortlessly steer one’s way amidst the rapids.either canoe or raft, however, is to go with the movement of the Way through this life. ’tis so much better than fighting the flow and rigidly trying to hold on to an iron rod while being inundated by the flow of this life. Interestingly, the prevailing LDS position is to avoid the flow entirely: after all,
D&C 61:9 wrote:I, the Lord, have decreed, and the destroyer rideth upon the face [of the waters], and I revoke not the decree.
:wtf: I know too many members who love to boat or engage in other watery activities to believe that’s prevailing position. 
Old-Timer wrote:As it relates directly to us here in this forum, yes,
we can point out things that bother us and things we want to see changed(about anything), but when we cross the line into mocking (in ANY way) we really are standing firmly in the same place/condition we are mocking others for inhabiting.Certainly food for thought.
I have done my fair share of mocking from the great and spacious building, both as a full believing TR holding LDS member, and as a less active heretic.
It certainly works both ways. However, it wasn’t until I became a heretic that I realized how possible it was for me and many of my fellow TR mormons to misunderstand what it means to be in the great and spacious building.
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