https://www.lds.org/ensign/2015/10/joseph-the-seer?lang=eng
What a fascinating and uplifting essay. It illustrates so much of what I absolutely love and have always loved about mormonism. I gave a talk a couple of years ago about my dad (a very cerebral law professor) 's very matter-of-fact description of using a divining rod to find water on the ranch he grew up on. It evinced to me a much more nuanced understanding of our relationship to the physical world, that there is spirit and divinity in, not just the living things, but the supposedly dead objects around us, something the enlightenment stripped us of. Earlier today in my score analysis class, we explored Cage's incredible Cartridge Music, which uses an ingenious chance procedure to generate its score. I suggested to my students that Cage was interested in opening people up to the divinity or magic in everyday experience. That by seeking the most random arrangements of objects, and rejecting deliberateness, we might experience the divinity the surrounds us at all times. Musicians understand the way that objects we call instruments have a certain sentience, that they can call forth something from the beyond, indeed that they sometimes play us, when things are really cooking.
