Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site.
Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children.
In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.
The first talk in the priesthood session of the April 1973 General Conference was The Aaronic Priesthood MIA by Elder Victor L. Brown. Even after reading the talk, I really have no idea what the program was, and I couldn’t even tell you if it’s still in force. (Some parts of it seemed familiar, others less so.) It’s a very odd feeling, to read a talk given nearly a decade before I was born about a bold, new program that I’ve never heard of.
It made me think of Mosiah 26, when
there were many of the rising generation that could not understand the words of king Benjamin, being little children at the time he spake unto his people; and they did not believe the tradition of their fathers.[ref]Mosiah 26:1[/ref]
Even though Alma and Mosiah’s lifetimes were only separated by a couple of decades from their children, the separation of a single generation was enough to create a wide chasm in their worldview. Alma and Mosiah’s children had to rediscover their own faith.
And it’s the same for us: every generation has to rediscover many of the truths and relearn the lessons that their parents’ generation already discovered and learned. It’s so easy to think that—because we’re members of the same Church our parents were members of—we understand the things that they did. Perversely, the complacent assumption that we get it is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that holds us back from actually going out and discovering and learning what we don’t yet know.
There’s a sense in which the Church is always the same. It’s right there in our Articles of Faith: “We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church.” [ref]Articles of Faith 1:6[/ref] But there’s also a sense in which every generation—and every single individual and family—has to recreate or rediscover the Church for themselves not just once, but again and again throughout their lives.
The Church—when you think of it as the actual members—changes when those members change. It also changes in reaction to the surrounding culture. That’s what prophets are for, after all, to warn the people of present problems. If society didn’t change—and if the Church didn’t need to change its programs and policies and emphases in reaction—then we wouldn’t need continuing revelation and an open canon.
The mission and the doctrines do not change, but the policies and the members do. The twin imperative of stasis and change may seem contradictory, but here’s how I think about it: It’s our job to sink our roots deep so that we can grow.
It is not often that you hear someone share a testimony of the existence of Satan, but that’s exactly what was so striking about Elder David B. Haight’s talk on the Power of Evil. Towards the end he said plainly, “I bear witness this day that the devil is real. I have felt of his influence.”
Which raises the question: why? Why is it important to know this? Mormonism is, generally speaking, a relentlessly optimistic faith. We have very strict rules, but we don’t generally hear a lot about brimstone. The motivation is generally love rather than fear. And so it’s possible to ask—if we already have such strict standards and an emphasis on hope—does it really matter if we talk about the devil?
Well, in one sense, not that much. After all, this is the first talk that has focused on that topic that I’ve ever read. Clearly it’s not our primary emphasis and it won’t ever be.
But on the other hand, the topic was worth bringing up, and Elder Haight’s talk explains why:
Unfortunately, along with much of the world, some of our loved ones are influenced by false prophets, false Christs, and modern movements of spiritualism. Some have become victims of satanic influences because they do not understand or realize the power of the adversary who knows human weaknesses and is ever present.
The reason some are led astray is especially that “the current wave of permissiveness in many areas of our lives is being encouraged by false interpretations of our true, basic, moral principles.” I wasn’t alive in the 1970s, but I’d hazard a guess—based on what I know of the time period and what I’ve read from these talks—that the notion of agency and individual freedom was one thing that led people astray. The same kinds of mistakes are happening today.
But we have to resist the temptation to take a talk like this and morph it into something along the lines of “my political adversaries are devils; my political allies are angels.” If there’s one thing I’ve observed, from following the interplay of politics and morality, it’s the that devil knows how to play both sides of the spectrum. When anti-federalist militia members took over a federal building in eastern Oregon earlier this year, they included flags quoting the Title of Liberty and even one individual who identified himself as Captain Moroni. It’s hard to think of a clearer example of “false interpretations” of Mormonism.[ref]I picked this example because Mormons are famously politically conservative, so I wanted to show that they can be led astray in that direction as well.[/ref]
What it comes down to for me is that we should apply prophetic teachings to ourselves rather than to others. Nephi said that he “did liken all scriptures unto us,”[ref]1 Nephi 19:6, emphasis added[/ref] not that he related scriptures to their enemies. The same principle applies here. Elder Haight’s talk is a warning to examine our own convictions, our own beliefs, and our own actions. A reminder that the devil can lead even the righteous astray is an opportunity for humility and self-reflection. We must be discerning, and tribalism–political or otherwise–is blinding.
There’s a saying that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Perhaps the second-greatest trick is letting the world believe that he does exist, but convincing them that he’s always on the side of their enemies.
As I was reading the Saturday morning session of the April 1973 General Conference, I realized that there are seven sessions for this GC! They had two each on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and then the priesthood session. That’s hardcore!
The talk that stood out the most to me was (then) Elder Monson’s Yellow Canaries with Gray on their Wings. It centers, as so many of his talks always do, on a story. In this case, an elderly woman passed away and left her two beautiful canaries to others, but left her favorite—a canary with gray on its wings—to Elder Monson, writing in a note: “He is my favorite. Billie looks a bit scrubby, and his yellow hue is marred by gray on his wings… He isn’t the prettiest, but his song is the best.”
The symbolism is straightforward, but that’s not actually what drew my attention. This is:
Can we not appreciate that our very business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves? To break our own records, to outstrip our yesterdays by our todays, to bear our trials more beautifully than we ever dreamed we could, to give as we have never given, to do our work with more force and a finer finish than ever—this is the true: to get ahead of ourselves. [emphasis added]
This is one of those quotes that contains a confounding, counterintuitive twist that you won’t even notice if you’re not paying close attention. The idea that we’re competing against ourselves and not against others, that our struggle is to improve rather than to win, is as true as it is familiar. I just gave this advice to my little kids after they were disappointed with their placement in their very first swim meet. But between those bookends is something rather unconventional, the aspiration “to bear our trials more beautifully than we ever dreamed we could.”
Shifting from beating someone else to beating our own past selves is totally conventional (and very good advice), but who out there really aspires to bear trials in any sense? Overcome trials, sure. Avoid trials, even more so. But to accept trials, to bear them, and to find excellence in the endurance of them? I don’t think it’s something we generally consider.
A friend asked me the other day what I’d learned from the GCO thus far, and I mentioned a few of the things that have stuck out repeatedly (first, the consistent teachings about the family going back nearly a half century and second, the surprising gentleness of a lot of the teachings), but I forgot to mention a third that I’ve just started to pick up on: a lot of the kinds of nuance that some folks complain about not hearing from our leaders is there. The role of common sense in obedience, the importance of exceptions to the rules and—in this case—the important realization that being righteous doesn’t get you out of troubles.
Because that’s the implication, right? If sincere disciples pray to “bear our trials more beautifully” then clearly discipleship isn’t exclusively about avoiding trials (by, for example, avoiding sin and thus the painful consequences) or even overcoming trials (by, for example, having faith to be healed).
If we really embraced this, then the endemic judgmentalism that often infects our wards—a kind of small town, everyone-knows-everyone’s-business consequence of our tightly integrated communities—would be nipped in the bud. If we really understood this, then a lot of the disappointment and even bitterness that happens when faithful members can’t understand why—after doing basically whatever they’ve been taught to do—life throws tragedy, failure, and disappointment in their path.
One of the common responses my parents get to their books (like The God Who Weeps and The Crucible of Doubt) is something along the lines of, “Well, that’s wonderful and lovely, but I don’t recognize it as the Mormonism I was taught growing up.” Culturally, there’s a lot of truth to that. Culturally, Mormonism has its problems because it’s a human culture. But, theologically, a primary goal of my parents is to unearth truths and teachings that have been there all along.
When we make good choices, we do avoid a lot of unnecessary heartache and pain. When we have faith, we can overcome a lot of obstacles that would otherwise be insurmountable. But no one should assume from these two statements (which are true) that making good choices and having faith makes life easier. It’s like they say: the reward for work well-done is more work. There are two simple reasons for that. The first is that the object of our mortal lives is to grow, and we can’t grow by just doing things we already know that we can do. The second is that, quite frankly, there just aren’t ever enough good people to go around. It’s not like there is a deficit of hard work for us to take on. If we understand this, then our expectations for what we get out of discipleship are going to be radically different. Not lower, necessarily, although it might seem like that at first, but different.
If this teaching seems novel, it shouldn’t. It’s right there. It’s been there all along, baked into our scriptures (with their emphasis on progression and growth) and it’s also in the words we hear in General Conference, such as (also from this talk): “to live greatly, we must develop the capacity to face trouble with courage, disappointment with cheerfulness, and triumph with humility.” Again, the clear implication is that a great life is going to have trouble and disappointment. There’s no avoiding them.
Just in case this sounds a bit depressing to anyone (what’s the point, if you’re just going to end up with trouble and disappointment no matter what?) here’s a little analogy I thought of. Imagine a hard-working child learning math. Over years of public school and into college, they move on from basic arithmetic, learn some algebra, eventually get into geometry, and then take on calculus and even real analysis and group theory. If this student has good teachers, then at every step along the way they are challenged. Perhaps, in terms of grades, this student is a B+ student from start to finish. That means that they are failing, on average, at 15% of the time (give or take). There is trouble. There is disappointment. There is failure. It never goes away.
And yet, looking back, this young person can see how much they have gained, trouble and disappointment and failure notwithstanding. By the time this young person has become proficient in differential equations, of course they could go back and do high school geometry more or less perfectly. But how pointless would that be?
That’s why sincere discipleship doesn’t spare us troubles and trials, disappointment and failures. Because—just as with school—the point is to be challenged.
And that is why, following President Monson, the dream of bearing our trials more beautifully is, itself, a beautiful dream.
Għallis Tower in Malta. Copyright H.J.Moyes (harry@shoka.net) Sept 2005.
The concluding talk of this Friday afternoon session was (then) Elder Ezra Taft Benson’s, “Watchman, Warn the Wicked,” and it was a powerful talk that I think will resonate with a lot of issues that we’re facing today. But as I looked back on the passages that I’d highlighted from these talks, there was a quieter theme that tugged at my attention.
“We are to reason as intelligently as we are able,” said Elder Bruce R. McConkie in Upon Judea’s Plains. “We are to use every faculty and capacity with which we are endowed to proclaim the message of salvation and to make it intelligent to ourselves and to our Father’s other children.” He goes on, “But after you have reasoned and after you have analyzed, you have got to stand as a personal witness who knows what he is saying.”
I like this “yes, and” approach to the alleged reason/science vs. faith/religion conflict. “Yes, and…” is the cardinal rule of improvisational comedy.[ref]I co-MCd an improve comedy group in high school.[/ref] The idea is that responding to someone else’s suggestion with a no kills the performance. You can’t ever say no in improv. Instead, you accept what someone says and add your own contribution. In this way, the communal creation incorporates the individual perspectives of the players and the whole—if all goes well—is greater than the sum of the parts.
For me, this is an ideal approach to the apparent conflicts we will see as we seek to construct a worldview incorporated modern prophets, ancient scripture, and our own moral sense and reasoned positions. I believe that the truth towards which we’re striving is generally above any of the alternative views we see down here, and that has two major implications. First, we shouldn’t be too concerned with either/or selections between different interpretations or explanations of apparent contradictions. Second, we should keep the entire endeavor of human intellectual reason in its place: part of the story. Not the whole story. And thus, Elder McConkie’s call to “reason as intelligently as we are able” but then to seek out and then stake out “a personal witness” resonates with me very deeply.
I was also struck by some comments of Elder John H. Vandenberg in his talk The Agency of Man. He said that “When reason is joined with truth, there is convincing logic that sets up the path in our hearts that leads upward and onward to a nobler life,” and also that “Reason is only compatible with truth. Error and evil, no matter how one may try to reason with it, still remain error and evil leading to chaos.”
That last one is really stuck in my brain, rattling around like a mysterious broken piece inside an electronic device. It means something, but I’m not exactly sure what.
I’m generally skeptical of the Enlightenment’s worship of rationalism. Like Jonathan Haidt, I’m an intuitionist. In that, when it comes to how humans actually think and believe and behave, rationality is neither a good model nor a useful goal. Reason—by which I mean the application of the rules of logic—seems to be an essentially valueless and therefore amoral and empty approach. It is, in my view, just a tool. A tool that can be used for good or for ill.
But that’s not what Elder Vandenberg has in mind. His view is much more pro-reason. Maybe he and I are thinking of slightly different things. Maybe my suspicion of reason is, itself, an overcorrection to the modern world’s excesses.
The most important statements of these General Conference talks are the ones that are the plainest and the most oft-repeated. Savior and home. That is the core. That is where our attention and our priorities should be. No one-off statement, or even one-off talk—is going to revolutionize my epistemological worldview at a stroke. That’s not how this works.
On the other hand, I don’t just discard or ignore what I can’t immediately process. It will go on, rattling back and forth with the other odds and ends, until one day it clicks into place.
The middle man gets a bad wrap. Take this video from Purple (the mattress retailer) which bears the title, “Purple Saves You Money by Skipping All the Freeloaders”:
According to the video, all the people in the value chain between the producer and the customer (sales people, retail store owners, corporate managers) are “freeloaders.” It’s the kind of offensive stupidity that makes me never want to buy a mattress from this company as retaliation for insulting my intelligence. I mean, honestly, they explicitly called out by name “marketing” as a waste of money in a marketing video. They single out the retail store owner as a “freeloader” because he spends money on “shipping, warehousing, and general overhead.” Unless Purple mattresses exist in an alternate dimension and are delivered by magical flying carpets, Purple also spends money on “shipping, warehousing, and general overhead.”
The phrase “cut out the middleman” should be one of those red flags that makes you immediately turn and go the other direction because it’s designed to prey on people’s ignorance. How, pray tell, is Purple going to cut out the “shipping” middleman? Are they just going to refuse to work with FedEx and UPS and instead hire their own fleet of trucks and send their own full-time employees to hand-deliver the mattresses? And if they did try to reinvent that particular wheel, does anybody think that they’d be saving you money? ‘Cause here’s the thing, if Purple is better at logistics and shipping than UPS, then they should probably not be in the mattress business.
I’m reasonably certain Purple’s employees aren’t acting in this commercial, aren’t directing this commercial, didn’t do the lighting or camerawork for this commercial, and probably didn’t even write the commercial. They hired (most likely) an ad agency. Who in turn probably hired a film studio. Which in turn contracted with a casting firm. Who worked with agents. To get professional actors. How many different companies and independent contractors were involved in producing this video about those freeloading middlemen?
I’m ranting a bit, aren’t I? My apologies. This is a pet peeve of mine. But I’m going somewhere with it.
In the retail sector, distrust of the middleman makes for stupid and unintentionally ironic commercials. But the exact same mistrust of specialists in the political world is how we got to Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz. So says Jonathan Rauch in a long–and very interesting–article for The Atlantic: How American Politics Went Insane.
His basic thesis is that the Constitution is a barebones document that, by itself, couldn’t possibly lead to efficient government. And so, right back from the earliest days, an informal Constitution sprung up around it to actually manage the day-to-day work of getting things done, starting with the creation of political parties:
Beginning in the 1790s, politicians sorted themselves into parties. In the 1830s, under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the parties established patronage machines and grass-roots bases. The machines and parties used rewards and the occasional punishment to encourage politicians to work together. Meanwhile, Congress developed its seniority and committee systems, rewarding reliability and establishing cooperative routines. Parties, leaders, machines, and congressional hierarchies built densely woven incentive structures that bound politicians into coherent teams.
Rauch even draws the connection to middlemen himself, writing:
The informal constitution’s intermediaries have many names and faces: state and national party committees, county party chairs, congressional subcommittees, leadership pacs, convention delegates, bundlers, and countless more. For purposes of this essay, I’ll call them all middlemen, because all of them mediated between disorganized swarms of politicians and disorganized swarms of voters, thereby performing the indispensable task that the great political scientist James Q. Wilson called “assembling power in the formal government.”
Just like the middlemen in retail, political middlemen got a bad wrap. And, just like the middlemen in retail, this bad wrap stems primarily from naivete and, to be less polite, ignorance.
The book I’m listening to right now is Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, so this is kind of on my mind. Fukuyama spends a good deal of time on the corrupt system of American politics between the 1840’s and 1860’s when these middlemen were running amok and proving a real threat to good governance. When all the staff positions in all the government agencies are being handed out essentially as bribes to your supporters, you can hardly expect to get a lot of competence and efficiency in those agencies. It’s bad news. However the alternative–a world without middlemen altogether–is just as impossible in politics as it is in retail. You need someone to actually handle marketing. And shipping. And warehousing. To bring order out of chaos. And that’s just as true in politics:
The middlemen could be undemocratic, high-handed, devious, secretive. But they had one great virtue: They brought order from chaos. They encouraged coordination, interdependency, and mutual accountability. They discouraged solipsistic and antisocial political behavior. A loyal, time-serving member of Congress could expect easy renomination, financial help, promotion through the ranks of committees and leadership jobs, and a new airport or research center for his district. A turncoat or troublemaker, by contrast, could expect to encounter ostracism, marginalization, and difficulties with fund-raising. The system was hierarchical, but it was not authoritarian. Even the lowliest precinct walker or officeholder had a role and a voice and could expect a reward for loyalty; even the highest party boss had to cater to multiple constituencies and fend off periodic challengers.
If this doesn’t sound idea: it’s not. But if you think it’s a bad idea, you should consider the alternative. Which we’re looking at right now. Government shutdowns were just the start. If this chaos continues, if someone like Trump wins, than we’re talking about the real possibility of a total breakdown in America’s governmental institutions. I’m not talking about a zombie apocalypse. I’m simply talking about a return to mid-19th century incompetence and corruption, when the government offices were essentially nothing but prizes for people to fight over. Unless you think that S. American and African countries are models of good governance, then you don’t want to go down that road.
And yes, yes, my libertarian friends: you can always shake your heads and say, “Well, if we just had fewer government bureaucrats…” But the reality is that’s not helpful. As long as you’re a libertarian and not an anarchist, we have to have some governmental infrastructure. And so as long as we’re in that world–as long as the number of bureaucrats is greater than zero–then it makes sense to talk about quality of government independent from quantity.
I really encourage you to read Rauch’s entire article. I’m just going to leave one final quote of his here:
Parties, machines, and hacks may not have been pretty, but they did their job—so well that the country forgot why it needed them.
This is the curse of success: when something works too well it is taken for granted, and next thing you know people are questioning why we even have it. That, in a nutshell, explains an awful lot of what is going wrong in the United States these days. From kicking out political middlemen to eschewing the free market, we’re busy dismantling the infrastructure of our own prosperity.
If you Google “Trump” and “Brexit” you’ll get an avalanche of articles suggesting that the explanation of the UK’s vote to leave the EU is an expression of populist outrage, resurgent nationalism, and an admixture of xenophobia to boot. That might not be accurate. Walker’s post highlighted an alternative view.
Well, in that case then we need to add someone else to the list: Bernie Sanders. Because–on issues of nationalism, protectionism, and even xenophobia–Trump and Sanders are reading from the same script.
What am I talking about? Well, let’s look at Sanders’ take on NAFTA.
NAFTA, supported by the Secretary, cost us 800,000 jobs nationwide, tens of thousands of jobs in the Midwest. Permanent normal trade relations with China cost us millions of jobs. Look, I was on a picket line in early 1990’s against NAFTA because you didn’t need a PhD in economics to understand that American workers should not be forced to compete against people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour. … And the reason that I was one of the first, not one of the last to be in opposition to the TPP is that American workers … should not be forced to compete against people in Vietnam today making a minimum wage of $0.65 an hour. Look, what we have got to do is tell corporate America that they cannot continue to shut down. We’ve lost 60,000 factories since 2001. They’re going to start having to, if I’m president, invest in this country — not in China, not in Mexico.
Sound familiar? It should. Sanders might stay away from some of the more visceral rhetoric that Trump revels in–he doesn’t slander Mexicans as rapists or promise to build a wall–but his targets (Chinese and Mexican workers) are also two of Trump’s favorite targets and his hawkish stance on trade wars matches The Donald’s.
Not content to merely keep Mexicans from working in the United States (where, thanks to US capital and infrastructure, they could earn three or four times more than they make in Mexico), Bernie Sanders now objects to the right of Mexicans to work in Mexico, if they dare to sell goods and services to Americans — or, God forbid, try tocompete with American firms.
On the specific topic of economic policy, how is this different from Trump? How is it different from the populist outrage that purportedly led the UK out of the EU?
Then again, we could just ask Bernie Sanders how he feels about Trump’s policies. From Slate:
Daily News: Another one of your potential opponents has a very similar sounding answer to, or solution to, the trade situation—and that’s Donald Trump. He also says that, although he speaks with much more blunt language and says, and with few specifics, “Bad deals. Terrible deals. I’ll make them good deals.”
So in that sense I hear whispers of that same sentiment. How is your take on that issue different than his?
Sanders: Well, if he thinks they’re bad trade deals, I agree with him. They are bad trade deals. But we have some specificity and it isn’t just us going around denouncing bad trade. In other words, I do believe in trade. But it has to be based on principles that are fair. So if you are in Vietnam, where the minimum wage is 65¢ an hour, or you’re in Malaysia, where many of the workers are indentured servants because their passports are taken away when they come into this country and are working in slave-like conditions, no, I’m not going to have American workers “competing” against you under those conditions. So you have to have standards. And what fair trade means to say that it is fair. It is roughly equivalent to the wages and environmental standards in the United States. [emphasis changed from the Slate article]
Jordan Weissmann writes:
It is one thing to argue that we should not do business with nations that actively manage or manipulate their currencies… It’s also entirely reasonable to support workers’ rights to unionize abroad or push for stricter environmental protections… But a blanket rule against trade with low-wage nations is different.
Weissmann is right. Sanders’ and Trump’s position makes no sense, morally or economically. Economically, a major benefit (maybe the key benefit) of trade is to allow countries to specialize where they have a comparative advantage. If there’s no comparative advantage and no specialization… what does he think trade is for? And, morally, the idea that you’re going to help people who earn very low wages by taking their jobs away is questionable. It’s about as useful as helping the homeless by making sure they can’t sleep where you can see them.
But I digress. The main point of this post is not to enumerate all the ways in which protectionism is bad. We’d be here all day.[ref]And note: there are exceptions to that general rule.[/ref] The point is to note just how similar Trump and Sanders are on these matters, and to also observe–based on the results of the Brexit vote–that these forces might be globally ascendant.
In many ways, we–all of us humans–are on the threshold of a brighter future. Never has global poverty fallen so rapidly. Never have so many been lifted out of the depths of abject deprivation.[ref]See Walker’s and my article for details.[/ref] Never has the promise of prosperity and peace and freedom been brighter for the entire planet. But–if the Brexit vote and the populist movements of Sanders and Trump are any indication–we might just slam that door shut instead of walking through it, and return to the tribalist, zero-sum mentality that treats trade as a competition to win instead of a policy of mutual benefit.
It’s not clear how far down that road we’ll walk, but we already know where it ends.
The Friday morning session of the April 1973 General Conference had a remarkably clear trajectory over the course of its five talks: a smooth change of focus from the leaders to the “nobodies” of the Church.
President Harold B. Lee began, in Strengthen the Stakes of Zion, by stating that “the greatest of all the underlying reasons for the strength of this church is that those who keep the commandments of God are 100 percent behind the leadership of this church.” Following that talk. Elder Theodore M. Tuttle (in What is a Living Prophet?) observed that:
It is an easy thing to believe in the dead prophets. Many people do. For some mysterious reason there is an aura of credibility about them. It is not so with the prophet who lives among us, who must meet life’s everyday challenges. But it is a great thing to believe in the living prophets. Our salvation is contingent upon our belief in a living prophet and adherence to his word. He alone has the right to revelation for the whole Church. His words, above those of any other man, ought to be esteemed and considered by the Church as well as by the world. One day this truth will be understood.
And finally, continuing the theme of emphasizing leaders but shifting more to the concerns of the rank and file members, Elder L. Tom Perry described (in Consider Your Ways) how he had:
watched [the leaders] armed with the Holy Ghost as a constant companion, taking on enormous work loads at an age when most men would be confined to rocking chairs, and engaging in strenuous travel schedules with great enthusiasm to be anxiously engaged in building the kingdom of God. Then by observation, the realization has come to me that this great Spirit that blesses them in their activities is not a special gift to them alone, but is available to all mankind if they will but be partakers and earnestly seek it and be humbly guided by it. [emphasis added]
Emphasis on leadership within the Church is not my favorite doctrine nor my favorite cultural aspect of Mormonism. I have never been a very good follower. That is, to a great extent, why I set out on the General Conference Odyssey to begin with: to offset my innate contrarian personality. But I do appreciate the necessity of leaders for the institutional Church and—more than that—the unique Mormon theology that works to combat (to the extent that we pay attention to it) humanity’s innate fixation on hero worship and hierarchy.
Revisiting the talks I quote just now, President Lee’s discussion of a leader’s role is unconventional:
The great responsibility that the leaders and teachers in the Church have is to persuade, to direct aright, that the commandments of Almighty God will be so lived as to prevent the individual from falling into the trap of the evil one who would persuade him not to believe in God and not to follow the leadership of the Church.
Emphasizing persuasion (rather than obedience or command or compulsion) is more than just a softening of the traditional ideas of authoritarian leadership, it radically shifts the obligation away from followers and on to leaders. This is a profoundly service-oriented model of leadership.
Elder Tuttle had a similar sentiment, writing that it is the “right and responsibility of the prophets to counsel the Saints” (emphasis added). I believe that within the Mormon emphasis on leadership and conformity there is also a kernel of subversion. To lead, within the Church, is not the same thing as what we typically expect from leadership in business, or in government, or in the military.
And so we come to the last two talks of this session. In “Go, and Do Thou Likewise”, Elder Robert L. Simpson makes two points that further deepen the Mormon idea of leadership. First, referring to the greatest leader, he writes that “the Savior is even more concerned for our success here in mortality than we ourselves are.” This an echo of the uniquely Mormon teaching that God’s work and glory is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.” The kind of leadership that President Lee described—a leadership of calling and enticing rather than commanding and compelling—is God’s own form of leadership.
Elder Simpson goes farther, however. Not only is there a connection (service) between leadership of Christ and the leadership that our prophets and apostles strive for, but all of us are engaged in this same program. This isn’t some kind of exclusive responsibility of formal leaders. The difference between someone with a formal leadership calling and someone without one is a difference of degree, not of kind. Thus, “Before the foundations of this earth were laid, a glorious decision was made allowing you and me to be our brother’s keeper.” In other words: we’re all responsible for influencing (for good or ill) each other, and formal leadership within the Church hierarchy is just one specialized example of the general concept of interdependent influence.
According to Elder Simpson, the most important thing is not some kind of abstract leadership of organizations, but rather concrete concern for singular individuals. Thus: “No man can become “perfect in Christ” without a deep, abiding, and sincere concern for his fellow beings,” and finally:
There are those who associate high calling in the Church with guaranteed rights to the blessings of heaven, but I wish to declare without reservation that the ultimate judgment for every man will be on the simplest terms, and most certainly on what each has done to bless other people in a quiet, unassuming way.
All of this prepares the way for the final talk of the session, In His Strength by Marvin J. Ashton. Elder Ashton begins with a story about all the trouble he and many other people went through to help Bill get married on time despite an impending blizzard. Bill said thank you to Elder Ashton and added, “I don’t understand why you went to all this trouble to help me. Really, I’m nobody.”
Elder Ashton’s reply was both stern and loving: “Bill, I have never helped a ‘nobody’ in my life. In the kingdom of our Heavenly Father no man is a ‘nobody.’” Elder Ashton went on:
I am certain our Heavenly Father is displeased when we refer to ourselves as “nobody.” How fair are we when we classify ourselves a “nobody”? How fair are we to our families? How fair are we to our God?
And then he stated flatly:
I declare with all the strength I possess that we have a Heavenly Father who claims and loves all of us regardless of where our steps have taken us. You are his son and you are his daughter, and he loves you.
In this way, Elder Ashton has completed the shift from an emphasis on formal leadership in the beginning of the talk to the fundamental concerns of Christian religion at the end: love of individual sous, each of which has great worth in the sight of God:
God help us to realize that one of our greatest responsibilities and privileges is to lift a self-labeled “nobody” to a “somebody,” who is wanted, needed, and desirable.
My unease with hierarchy and authority is not the kind of thing that will evaporate in a day, a month, or even a year. In fact, there are aspects of that unease that should not disappear, because the conventional model of hierarchy and authority is one of inequality and coercion. The work I am engaged in is disentangling the counterfeit, worldly model of leadership from the true model of leadership in the kingdom.
This is tricky work, because the true model of leadership is something that you will never see reflected perfectly in any of our leaders here on Earth. As much as we might love and respect the Lord’s chosen leaders, they are mortals just like us, striving in their flawed way towards an ideal that can’t be reached in this life. But—through the example of the Savior and through the teachings of prophets—we can catch glimpses of that ideal.
We’ve come to the last session of the October 1972 General Conference, and it was a very strong session. Elder James A. Cullimore’s talk Home Teachers – Watchmen Over the Church ought to be required reading for pretty much everyone in the Church. I’ve never seen such a powerful, thorough explanation of what home teaching is all about.[ref]The talk also contained several quotes that further strengthen my two-fold sense that (1) family has always been central to the Church and (2) the Church is for families rather than vice versa. For example: “as the Church is concerned, the same order exists within the families as God set it up originally with Father Adam. And this same order will extend into the eternities.”[/ref]
The lost sheep should have an anxious shepherd seeking him. The lost coin must be searched for. The prodigal who comes to himself and turns homeward will find his Father running to meet him. Thus taught the Lord.
He also told the story of how rebel soldiers at the Battle of Missionary Ridge were pushed from their impregnable defenses by a Union advance that was actually weak and disorganized because:
The soldiers… were so isolated from each other that they had lost touch with each other. They could not hear their leaders through the din. Plainly visible to them were the large numbers of the enemy coming up the hill to attack them. Feeling alone and frightened, a few individual defenders panicked and surrendered and were soon joined by large numbers of their fellows. The battle was lost. They were not cowards; they thought they were alone.
That’s one of my primary motivations for writing (about the General Conference Odyssey or anything else that I write), because I often get the sense that there are people out there who feel that something is amiss with the trend the world is taking, but who also feel alone. I want them to know that they aren’t. So I write.
I was at Manti, Utah, some years ago. As we came out of the Saturday night leadership meeting, there was a heavy snowstorm. As we drove to the home of the stake president, he stopped his car and turned back to the temple hill. There the lighted temple was standing majestically. We sat there in silence for a few moments, inspired by the sight of that beautiful, sacred place. He said, “You know, Brother Lee, that temple is never more beautiful than in times of a dense fog or in times of a heavy, severe storm.”
Just so, never is the gospel of Jesus Christ more beautiful than in times of intense need, or in times of a severe storm within us as individuals, or in times of confusion and turmoil.
But the one that stuck with the most was Live Above the Law to be Free by Elder Hartman Rector, Jr. In it, he taught two important principles. First, he taught that we should make our own rules that go above and beyond the minimum requirements based on “past experience and your own particular weaknesses.” Second, he taught that we should never forget that such private rules are “your own addition” and should never be “mixed up with the law.” I thought it was a pretty beautiful—and sensible—compromise between good intentions and the dangers of stereotypical pharisaism.
He also talked about the connection between loyalty and honesty:
Loyalty is akin to honesty; and if you are not honest, you are really not much good. You are no good to yourself because you lie to yourself. This is called rationalization, but it is really just lying. You are no good to your friends because they cannot trust you. You are no good to the Lord because he cannot use you—unless, of course, it would be as a bad example. If you make a mistake, all is not lost. You can always be used as a bad example.
That’s a lighter version of what he had said earlier in the talk, “Everything, no matter how dire, becomes a victory to the Lord.”
I had two conflicting feelings as I started to write this post. First, I really did enjoy this session immensely. Second, I couldn’t help but think of how crazy I must appear to some of my friends (if they’re paying any attention) for spending this much time reading religious sermons from the 1970s. It reminds me of when, while on my mission, we were visited by Elder Ballard and my friend said, “Can you imagine a group of 20 year-old guys getting this excited to hear an old man come and talk about religion?”
He was right on both counts. It was weird, by the standards of the world. And we really were excited. But that’s just part of the authentic Christian experience, isn’t it? We are, best case scenario, a little weird.
Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. – Paul (1 Corinthians 3:18)
I really enjoyed Elder H. Burke Peterson’s talk, Harmony in the Home. It’s another one of those talks that makes you realize that there’s nothing recent about the Church’s emphasis on family: “In countless writings the prophets of the Lord have been trying to teach us that throughout time and all eternity the most important organization is the family.” That alone is a talk that makes it interesting to me, but what stood out to me in this particular talk was the relationship between Christ and family.
That’s something that’s not always obviously apparent. To some extent, it seems that the Church’s emphasis on family is separate from and might even detract from a focus on Christ. I happen to be reading a draft of my father’s next book,[ref]Sorry, no spoilers.[/ref] and those three topics (church, Christ, family) are central to his first chapter.[ref]Maybe the whole book, but I’m still in the first chapter.[/ref] And I saw a lot of the same themes in Elder Peterson’s talk.
First, it strikes me that “the Lord” comes before “family” in that snippet I quoted. It seems like such a small thing, but it really matters. Where does the emphasis on family come from? It comes from “prophets of the Lord.” The message is from Him. This kind of connection between the family (or the home) and the Lord ran throughout the talk, for example: “The home should be the great workshop of the Lord. Here is where children must be taught to walk in ways of truth and soberness, of love and service to each other.” Or also: “The gospel of Jesus Christ is more easily taught and longer remembered in a happy home.”
But here–and this is my second point–is the paragraph that struck me the most from this whole talk[ref]I’m patching together two quotes that are kind of far apart in the original[/ref]:
May I suggest that as parents we must require more of ourselves. May I suggest that we give more of ourselves, that we give more good experiences to our children, experiences that are love-producing and family-solidifying…What if you decided to be cheerful tonight at the dinner table, and in spite of what others might do or say, hold to your course. See how long you can uplift your whole family.
On the one hand, this could be read as such a banal little passage. “Be cheerful!” What could be more simplistic or, a cynic might argue, shallower? But I really love this idea at the end, “see how long you can uplift your whole family.” Because here are two great realities of Mormonism within this talk. The first is that little, everyday things matter. We’re used to seeing talks about controversial moral issues, but Elder Peterson’s focus was simpler:
One of Satan’s most effective tools is at work among us today—it is a destroyer of happiness, peace, contentment, family solidarity. Families are stumbling and falling because of its hobbling and crippling effect. This tool of Satan is called contention.
In other words: don’t argue. Be kind. Be nice. How simple! And yet, if you practice it in your everyday life, how profound the impact. Kindness matters. And if kindness really matters, than sacrificing yourself–your time, your energy, your priorities, your pride–to try and bring more happiness to your home is not banal. It’s truly following the example of the Savior. Not in a dramatic way, but in a true way. Giving that last ounce of energy when your day is long, your kids’ questions are irritating, and the to-do list seems never-ending is hard. You want to hold something back. You want to keep something in reserve. You want to give less than everything. But when you summon the courage and the love to go beyond what you thought you could do, even if it’s something as simple as putting aside your expectations or plans to just be with your kids, well… you’re being a savior in your home. You’re following Him.
It’s true that the Church’s emphasis on family goes way back. And it turns out there’s a reason for that. Home really ought to be the workshop of the Lord.
This is how I pick which talk to write about every week: I pick the one I can’t stop thinking about. This means that there are basically two kinds of talks that I write about.
First, I write about my favorites. These are the talks that strike me when I first read them, and that continue to resonate in my mind and heart long after I have reached the end. Elder Marvin J. Ashton’s talk Love of the Right from the April 1971 General Conference is one of those, and I ended up quoting from it in my Sunday School lesson on Sunday. This week, I liked Elder Gordon B. Hinckley’s talk Watch the Switches in Your Life, and especially one line that I took as a great comfort: “the work of the world is not done by intellectual geniuses. It is done by men of ordinary capacity who use their abilities in an extraordinary manner.”[ref]I’ve met some really brilliant people in my life, and so I’ve long since realized that in terms of raw mental power, I don’t have much to offer. Two things keep me going. The first is that there aren’t enough geniuses to go around, and so there’s lots of important work left for mere mortals to attend to. The second is this idea that Hinckley refers to: effort probably matters more than talent in practice.[/ref]
Second, I write about the talks that confound, puzzle, or even discomfit me. The first are talks I don’t want to leave behind, the second are talks that don’t want to leave me alone. This week, that would definitely be President Harold B. Lee’s concluding address to the priesthood session: Admonitions for the Priesthood of God.
There was an awful lot that I highlighted from this talk. Here’s one part that has been troubling me since I read it. President Lee recounts a question a sister asked “concerning the promise made that if one would keep the Word of Wisdom he should run and not be weary and should walk and not faint.” The sister asked, ““How could that promise be realized if a person were crippled?”
This is the kind of technicality my 7-year old son is always asking me about. It seems that every time I ask him to do something, or give an explanation, or basically say anything at all, he turns into a pint-sized lawyer and finds the exceptional case and then asks me about it (if I’m lucky) or does it (if I’m not lucky).
So sure, the question seems a little pedantic to me. General promises aren’t fulfilled in a perfectly regular, obvious, and transparent way without exceptions. And for good reason. That would turn Heavenly Father into a sort of cosmic vending machine. As with many hardships we face on Earth, the chaos and confusion of this fallen world are features, not a bugs. And yet here was President Lee’s response, “Did you ever doubt the Lord? The Lord said that.”
Well.
President Lee then goes on:
The trouble with us today, there are too many of us who put question marks instead of periods after what the Lord says. I want you to think about that. We shouldn’t be concerned about why he said something, or whether or not it can be made so. Just trust the Lord. We don’t try to find the answers or explanations. We shouldn’t try to spend time explaining what the Lord didn’t see fit to explain. We spend useless time.
If you would teach our people to put periods and not question marks after what the Lord has declared, we would say, “It is enough for me to know that is what the Lord said.”
Some of this, I love. The phrase, “too many of us… put question marks instead of periods after what the Lord says” is refreshing and memorable. But the thing is that if you were to boil everything I write about religion down into its distilled essence, you would be left with “try[ing] to find the answers or explanations.” That is, by and large what I do. And it is this which President Lee dismisses as “useless time” spend trying to “[explain] what the Lord didn’t see fit to explain.”
Well.
I, for one, certainly preferred Elder Tanner’s tone in the preceding talk: “let us listen to the prophet’s voice and follow him, not blindly but by faith”[ref]emphasis added[/ref] then President Lee’s sternness.
The peril for you, dear reader, is that when I pick talks the way I do, I don’t always know quite how to process them. I’m afraid that if this is a troubling passage for you, as it is for me, we must simply be troubled together.[ref]If it’s not troubling for you, then you’re probably one of the folks who already thought these kinds of pieces were wastes of time. So why are you reading it? :-)[/ref]
In this case, my provisional understanding is that President Lee’s primary point is that we should not let our questions or searches for explanations interfere with our obedience in the meantime. The pattern of faith emphasizes experimentation. If you try to work out all the pros and cons of (for example) following the Word of Wisdom without every trying it for yourself, then the quest for theoretical knowledge will crowd out and replace more valuable experience.
Rationalization? Cherry-picking? Perhaps.
There is no member of the Church who couldn’t benefit from prophetic guidance. We’re all wrong about something. That much is a given. It’s the reason we have prophets in the first place. But I don’t think that rushing precipitously from one view to its opposite is the best approach. The most important doctrines are the one that are repeated most frequently and most plainly, and that is where our attention should be focused.
For lesser issues—such as the precise implementation of the principles President Lee was teaching in this passage—I think the most important thing we can do is allow ourselves to be bothered by what we hear and read. Dismissing it out of hand is obviously folly. But rushing to try to adopt it before we really understand is another, lesser species of folly.
There are lots of quotes about how you should be kind to everyone you meet because everyone is fighting some battle, carrying some burden, wrestling some demon. This is both dramatic and, for the most part, true.
But it’s also true that everyone you meet is walking around with pebbles in their shoes. Little things that don’t make sense. That they haven’t figured out. Little irritants that remind them that they have something to learn, something to change, something to do, but they haven’t figure out just what or how quite yet.
If you have pebbles in your shoes, as I have in mine, that’s OK. Don’t ignore them, because they mean you have something to learn, but don’t obsess over them either, because there are probably bigger concerns.
In time, you will figure many of them out. And when you do, they will be replaced with new pebbles. And that, too, is OK. A kid who graduates from pre-algebra to algebra may feel equally challenged by both subjects, but they’re still progressing. That’s how it is for us a lot of the time, too. We learn and grow, but so do our challenges. It’s OK. Be patient. Trust God. He’s a good teacher.
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