From Stephen M. Bird’s book, ‘Prayers that Bring Miracles’:
John Steinbeck was one of our greatest American writers. In one of his finest novels, East of Eden, he used the beginning of chapter thirty-four to ask the question, “What is the World’s Story About?” He answers by saying that there is only one story in life and that it encompasses and transects every aspect of our lives. In every dimension of experience, we are entangled in a web which continually confronts us with moral choices. “Virtue and vice,” he said,” were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last. . . . there is no other story. . . . After we have brushed off the dust and chips of this life, we’ll have only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
Warp and woof are terms used in weaving. The warp is the “threads running lengthwise in the loom,” while the woof is the horizontal thread crossing the warp in a woven fabric.”19 These threads are carried through the warp with a shuttle and are woven together with the warp into fabric. Any cutting out or unweaving weakens, damages, or destroys the fabric. Hence the warp is sometimes referred to as the very essential part of something; [the] foundation [or] base. The notions of virtue and vice are woven into the very fabric of our souls from the beginning to the end of our existence. Our souls are lifted and strengthened by our virtuous choices, and conversely, our souls are pained and diminished by choosing vice.
Our Heavenly Father built virtue and vice detectors into the fibers of our souls. The biologist, Lewis Thomas described one such right and wrong detector that is built into our minds and sends alarms throughout our bodies. He said we “cannot tell a lie, even a small one, without setting off a kind of smoke alarm somewhere in the deep lobule of our brain . . . .The outcome, recorded by lie-detector, is a highly reproducible cascade of changes in the electrical conductivity of the skin, the heart rate, and the manner of breathing, similar to the responses to the various kinds of stress.” According to Lewis Thomas, even if we lie for pleasure, blaring signals are sent screaming throughout our bodies, warning us that something is wrong. Physiologically, lying is not natural; it is stressful.
How could it be otherwise? Our Heavenly Father is a God of truth, and as his children, we inherit a need to live in truth. We hurt ourselves when we lie, and we hurt ourselves every time we sin because “every sin is a lie.’ Sins deliver something very different from what they promise. They are illusions. If we were to look closely, we would discover that every one of Satan’s tempting reasons to disobey God’s commandments is a lie which will degrade our lives if we believe it. ~Stephen M. Bird, Prayers that Bring Miracles, Aspen Books, Murray Utah (ISBN 1-56236-238-0) 43-45
