On Friday morning I took the kids to Qualtrics and passed a peaceful morning in the playroom.
In the afternoon and evening the girls had their final ballet rehearsal performance. I saw the rehearsal but missed the performance because Ammon and Clarissa were a mess. Abe got a darling video, though:
After the performance Abe and the girls rushed home so we could hand the kids off to a sitter and drive to Salt Lake to see our friends, the Sonntags, do a reading at the Avrec Art Center. My friend Kathryn is a poet and we have been emailing, and in our morning exchange she invited me to her reading. Bob, her husband and Abe’s high school friend, also gave a reading of a paper he wrote on Joseph Smith that blew our mind. Then another person stood up and gave a paper on sin metaphors in the Temple period 1, Temple period 2, New Testament, and Book of Mormon. (Hebrew sin metaphors imaged sin as a weight. Exilic Israel experienced a new economy and then the concept of sin morphed into quid pro quo debt, with Daniel hinting that good works could potentially balance the ledger. The New Testament alludes to an impossibly balanced ledger with Jesus paying our debt, and the Book of Mormon takes this concept even further in its teachings that atonement covers not just sin, but weakness and physical infirmity as well.) Then, wonder of wonders, Ruediger Matthews gave a talk on the allegory of Eden and the transgressive act of Eve. I literally almost cried in delight. It was the exact subject not only of my recent meditations, but of my Mother’s Day talk.
It was a wonderful evening.
