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After a morning swim, we drove into Honolulu to take a look at a couple of historical sites — Iolani Palace and Washington Place — that were connected with the last queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani, who was deposed in 1893 by a conspiracy of white businessmen and who died in 1917. She’s one of the foci of a column that I’ve just completed for Meridian Magazine and that I will submit shortly.
Thereupon, we drove via the Likelike Highway over to the Kamehameha Highway, heading northward on the Kam Highway (as the locals call it) for the predominantly Latter-day Saint town of Laie. And we very nearly got to our intended destination. We were within seven or eight miles (and much less, as the crow flies.). However, when we reached Kahana Bay, we couldn’t go any further. The road was closed in both directions, owing to what one person told us was a hostage situation. While we were in the area, we counted forty-nine police vehicles headed to the scene, including several large trucks (one perhaps a mobile command center of some sort) and an armored SWAT vehicle from which we saw at least eight heavily armed men emerge. There may have been other vehicles that we missed, of course, and we don’t know how many may have arrived at the scene from the other direction. We reached Kahana Bay at about 1:45, and that is apparently when the standoff began. We were curious all day as to what had finally happened, and here’s something that I’ve just found:
“Man found dead after Windward barricade situation that closed Kamehameha Highway for hours”
We turned around, headed back over to the general vicinity of Pearl Harbor, and then managed to get to Laie from the other side of the island. We had planned to take Matt Bowen out to lunch. Instead, we ended up taking him out to dinner. Again, there are very few things in this world that are as gratifying as good conversation with good friends over good food.
Still, notwithstanding the delay in our getting there, we had a few minutes to reacquaint ourselves with the idyllic (and historic) town of Laie — and specifically with its campus of Brigham Young University, its famous Polynesian Cultural Center (owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and the glorious Laie Hawaii Temple.
I’ve been to Laie numerous times. I even spoke, quite a number of years ago now, in a campus-wide devotional or some such thing. (Maybe it was the annual Joseph Smith Lecture. I can’t quite recall offhand.) But I fall in love with BYU-Hawaii anew each time that I visit. And, each time, I’m surprised by the impact that it has on me.
The desperate, sad, fatal ugliness that happened just a few miles away earlier this afternoon stands in stark contrast to the serenity, holiness, and beauty of Laie’s temple. I’m so very deeply grateful for such outposts of divine light in this too often dark and difficult world.
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Some of you might want to mark your calendars this year for the annual meeting of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, which will be held from 1-4 September 2022 in Salt Lake City, Utah. I myself hope to be able to participate.
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I’ve long loved this passage from the great Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), who was, by the way, a brother of the novelist Henry James:
Religions differ so much in their accidents [i.e., in their specific attributes] that in discussing the religious question we must make it very generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.
First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. . . .
The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.
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Finally, I want to share a trio of moral outrages that I recently found in the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File©:
“Nearly 300,000 people visited the Giving Machines in 2021. Here’s how much was donated”
Don’t they just make your blood run cold? And I discovered this terrifying piece just outside the Hitchens File©, from which it might perhaps have fallen — though I’m not absolutely sure that it ever quite belonged properly inside. But it’s definitely connected with the residents of what the cognoscenti know as the benighted Western American state of Utard, most of whom are said by such folks to be Mor(m)ons, who are otherwise known as brain-dead Morgbots:
What a horrible place it must be!
Posted from Ko Olina, Oahu, Hawaii
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