My CMS The View from a New City

The pandemic is raging in America. We don’t know if we are at the beginning, middle or end — no work, no restaurant food, no church. Something good will come from this: humility in the face of trials. We will find out if life in this world depends on our usual frenetic economic activity or something more fundamental.

Watched the movie, Jo Jo Rabbit, last night. This movie tracks the hero, a ten year old boy, from naive enthusiasm for a system (German National Socialism) to disillusionment and rejection of that system. In the process the hero suffers a full range of experience including fear, danger, heart breaking tragedy and a developing love. At the end of the movie the following quote appears from a poem by Reiner Marie Rilke:

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

In that spirit, today I read the following quote from the Doctrine and Covenants to an invalid in my neighborhood:

And if thou shouldst be cast into the ^apit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the ^bdeep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to ^chedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of ^dhell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee ^eexperience, and shall be for thy good.

The ^aSon of Man hath ^bdescended below them all. Art thou greater than he?