Jonathan Simcoe

THE JAPANESE HAD already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.

And in that moment Augustine’s counsels took on a new relevance for me as I realized that in this season of our marriage and in this stage on the road, the kind of detachment Augustine encouraged—the refusal to be dominated by the libido—was exactly the word I needed to hear.

Use what’s helpful. Let go of the rest.

This week, I’ve been researching an ancient mnemonic technique called ‘the mind palace’, where people imprint a real or imagined building onto their memory - a palace, a mansion, a church, even a whole street - and then fill it with striking images, to which they attach bits of information they want to remember.

I began to realize why it was important to have a script, a set of motions you followed: First we’ll say this invocation. Then we’ll read from this book. Then we’ll raise hands. It meant you didn’t have to build the rituals of fellowship from scratch. You lived in the caves and hollows of what had worked before.

It’s hard for my wife not to feel cursed. Instead of a warm and welcome space for her children, she can picture her body to be dangerous and uninhabitable. She wants to think of Aiden as our miracle child, the only one to survive the harsh climate of her broken body.

The revered prophet described plural marriage as part of “the most holy and important doctrine ever revealed to man on earth” and taught that a man needed at least three wives to attain the “fullness of exaltation” in the afterlife. He warned that God had explicitly commanded that “all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same .