General Conference Odyssey

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

As usual, some of the best talks from this General Conference come from the Sunday session. In particular, I’m really developing an appreciation for President Hunter. He was only prophet for a very brief period when I was a young man (June 1994 – March 1994) and I’m sorry to say that my main takeaway at the time was a kind of disappointment. My father had often told me of how you developed a special connection to the prophet who was alive when you were developing your own testimony—often in your teens—and so I thought that President Hunter would be that man. When he died so quickly—before he could leave much of a mark of his own—I felt a tiny sense of betrayal.

I confess I haven’t thought a lot about him in the years sense, but that started to change when I taught Elder’s Quorum a couple of weeks ago using Chapter 21 of the manual based on his writings. I was shocked at how sophisticated the lesson was, and at how much time President Hunter spent dealing explicitly with one of my pet issues: the relationship between faith in science and in religion. For example:

Whether seeking for knowledge of scientific truths or to discover God, one must have faith. This becomes the starting point.

The idea that faith plays a role in both faith and in science is one that bowled me over when I first read David Hume in light of Alma 32 as an undergrad. Since then plenty of people have made similar arguments—so I’m making no claims to originality—but I was still surprised to see the topic handled so directly by a prophet.

As it turns out, that manual was drawing from his talk in this session: To Know God. In the talk, he makes the case even more clearly than the manual, writing that “scientific research is an endeavor to ascertain truth, and the same principles which are applied to that pursuit are used in the quest to establish the truth of religion as well.”

Also, continuing that first quote from him, her references Hebrews and the idea that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,”[ref]Hebrew 11:1[/ref] and relates that directly to science as well:

The scientist does not see molecules, atoms, or electrons, yet he knows they exist. He does not see electricity, radiation, or magnetism, but he knows these are unseen realities. In like manner, those who earnestly seek for God do not see him, but they know of his reality by faith. It is more than hope. Faith makes it a conviction—an evidence of things not seen.

I’m a little embarrassed to ride my hobby horse this far off down a tangent, but—since I know that equating faith in religion and science is bound to tick off plenty of people and confuse even more—I’ll provide a succinct overview that, I hope, falls in line with what President Hunter is saying.

The first point comes from David Hume, and it’s a simple one: we don’t observe causation directly. We infer causation. The implications might not be immediately obvious so—just to give a sense of what a huge problem this was—consider that one of the most famous philosophers of all time (Emannuel Kant) “changed[ed] his entire career after he [read] Hume.”[ref]This quote, and most of the one to follow, are from Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It by Steven L. Goldman.[/ref]. Why? Because if causality must be assumed, then no amount of observation or experimentation can jump the chasm from a collection of facts about what has happened to have taken place in the past to certain knowledge about how the universe works.

Now, why does this matter? Because, of the “inextricably realist character that is woven into the rhetoric of science.”[ref] Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It by Steven L. Goldman.[/ref] In other words: science—the way it is discussed in the media and among scientists themselves—is the business of uncovering facts (certain knowledge) that are about the world. Which, if Hume is right, is quite impossible.

And, in fact, if you press philosophically sophisticated scientists on the topic (speaking historically), they’ll concede the point for the simple reason that nobody has found an adequate rebuttal to Hume. And so there’s a “parade of absolutely first-rate scientific thinkers who have insisted that science is not about an independently existing reality,”[ref] Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It by Steven L. Goldman.[/ref] but the reality is that nobody really has that in mind. When the Higgs Boson was discovered, everyone—from the physicists to the journalists to the general public—took the realist view for granted. There’s this idea of a particle-thingy and scientists have discovered it and so now we know that the particle-thingy is really out there, a part of an independent reality that exists beyond human mental constructs.

Professor Goldman goes so far as to call the scientific establishment “schizophrenic” in this regard. They plainly talk and act as though they are learning facts about the real world (that’s the realist view) despite the awareness—now centuries’ old—that this is impossible to do with certainty.

There are basically three solutions to this conundrum.

On the one hand, you can just give up on rationality entirely. I won’t say much for this course because, once you’ve decided to just abandon making sense, there’s nothing left to talk about. But I suppose—for the sake of completeness if nothing else—I ought to mention that you can try that course if you’d like. Hume proved that deriving certain knowledge of the world through experimentation and observation is impossible, but you can just pretend that he didn’t if that suits your fancy.

Now, if you’re not willing to jettison logic and reason, you have two remaining options. On the one hand, you can retreat. You can agree that—because causality is never observable—science is basically just a game where we invent explanations for our experiences, and no explanation is ever really “true.” Scientific theories and laws are more or less coherent with each other and with our experiences and they have varying degrees of simplicity or aesthetic beauty, but in the final analysis they are socially constructed and subjective and that’s that.

On the other hand, you can stand your ground and assert that science is about something objectively real. That there are things out there—matter and energy and laws governing them—that have a kind of independent and objective experience and that—no matter how imperfectly or partially—science is in the business of learning about those things. But if you want to take this view, you have to swallow the reality that science rests on faith. Faith, for example, that although we may not be able to see or observe something (for example: causality), it’s still there, undergirding our experiments and observations and building a faith-based connection between science and reality.

We’ve gone rather far afield at this point, so let me wrap it up. If none of the philosophy appeals to you: that’s fine. Let me just say that it’s exciting—and unexpected—that in reading old talks from the 1970s I’d come to such a greater appreciation for a man who served as President for less than a year while I was a teenager. This General Conference Odyssey has already covered some unexpected new territory in just the first year, and we have more than ten more to go.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• What Type of Superhero Are You? by Jan Tolman
• But then there would be no purpose by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Two thoughts from two different talks.

In “Blessed Are the Peacemakers”, Elder Burton said that:

We forget that we are not, and cannot be, totally independent of one another either in thought or action. We are part of a total community. We are all members of one family, as Paul reminded the Greeks at Athens when he explained that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth.” (Acts 17:26)

Although Elder Burton went in a different direction, that thought made me think about the talk before his, Elder LeGrand Richards’ What After Death?

I thought today that I would like to direct what I have to say to those parents who have lost children in death before they reached maturity and could enter into the covenant of marriage and have their own children here upon this earth. I reckon that there aren’t many families who haven’t had that experience.

Elder Richards was born in 1886. I wondered what childhood mortality rates looked like for him, so I checked a great site (Our World in Data), but data for the United States only goes back to 1933.

I added in the United Kingdom and then France to get an older data set.[ref]You can see from the graph that, while the lines are not identical, they follow a similar trend.[/ref] So, using France as a proxy, the kind of child mortality that Elder Richards would have been familiar was between 250 and 225 children per 1,000 dying before the age of 5.

By the time of this conference in 1974, the rate was down to about 20. For the most recent data (2013) the rate is about 4. In other words, the chances that a given newborn would die before age 5 have falledn from 25% to 2% to 0.4% from the time that Elder Richards was born to the time when he gave his talk to the time we are alive today. For a family with small children, the chance that none would die before the age of 5 was only 32% when Elder Richards was born. It was 92% in 1974. It is 98% today.

When he said, “I reckon that there aren’t many families who haven’t had that experience,” he was absolutely correct for his time, but the world has changed substantially since then.

The reason that I connect the two talks is that Elder Burton reminds us of how integral family is to our identity. As the saying goes: we’re social animals. And the first society is the family. This is a vital truth to who we are as human beings. I don’t think anything could possibly drive that lesson home than the unimaginable tragedy of losing a young child and having that family circle broken, at least temporarily.

I say “unimaginable” because to me it is. In my lifetime, having all your children survive to adulthood isn’t the exception; it’s the rule. But Elder Richards didn’t have to imagine it. As he discussed in his talk, two of his children died before they were old enough to be married.[ref]I realize my definition—dying before age 5—and Elder Richards’ definition—dying before being old enough to have married and have children—are not the same. I hope you can forgive the inaccuracy; I just went with the data I could quickly find.[/ref]

Right now I am reading The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. The author—Edward Dolnick—is at great pains to show how different the world of the 17^th century was from the world of today. Back then, for example, no one knew what caused disease and nobody could do anything about it. From the Great Fire of London (1666) to a resurgence of Black Death (1665), the men and women who lived at that time lived their entire lives under the shadow of inexplicable, uncontrollable death.

One thing Dolnick doesn’t understand, however, is how recently that has changed. Modernity may have dawned in the 17^th and 18^th centuries but—as the childhoold mortality figures show—disease and accident continued to make death a common, everyday experience well into the 20^th century. Not long ago I read Samuel Brown’s incredible book, Through the Valley of Shadows. Althogh it’s a technical book in many ways, Brown sets up his main discussion (of living wills, advance directives, and intensive care units) with a discussion of “the dying of death.”

Before the Dying of Death, death was part of everyday experience. Death was recognized as horrifying, but people were able to understand it as part of the overall meaning of life and knew how to prepare for it when the time came. The understanding of death was broad enough to cross religious boundaries… By the end of the Dying of Death, Americans had contained the terror of death by simply ignoring it until the moment of crisis, but the sanctity of death had disappeared along with menacing presence. People found themselves newly unprepared when they came to die. Where many generations of humans had spent most of their lives preparing for their deathbed, modern Americans spent only hours to at most days, right in the their death agony, trying to come to terms with what was once called the King of Terrors… Since twentieth-century Americans had not generally spent their lives in the shadow of death, when they came to approach Death, as every human being inevitably does, they discovered just how culturally defenseless they were before it’s terrible power.[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 27[/ref]

These changes occurred during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when basic understanding of the germ theory of disease led to incredibly advances in public health, but at that time there was still effectively nothing doctors could do to combat most diseases once they took hold. I was surprised at how recent this transition had occurred, but according to Brown, “physicians were mostly bad for your health until the recent past. The Baby Boomers are really the first generation born under the aegis of modern medicine.”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 32[/ref]

So, prior to the 1960s, doctors really couldn’t do anything at all to actively intervene in a wide variety of life-threatening medical emergencies. Since that time, however, our ability to postpone death has grown tremendously, to the point where ICUs frequently perform medical miracles. So, what has this newfound power achieved for us?

Well, it hasn’t all been good. Brown observes that “A major problem in contemporary society is that we combine our distaste for struggle or pain or disability with an unspeakable fear of death.”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 29[/ref] We have, in effect, stigmatized dying. As a result, “The dying–once celebrated as people with special wisdom who deserved the rapt attention of family and even strangers—[have] become America’s dirty secret.”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 29[/ref]

Additionally, ICUs—the frontlines in modern America’s war on death—have become places of trauma: “Many people leave the ICU with emotional scars as severe as those carried by combat veterans. Only a minority skate by without anxiety, depressing, or PTSD or some combination of the three.”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 167[/ref] This trauma is often the result of delusions, and rape delusions in particular: “it’s common for female patients to have memories of rape from urinary bladder catheters”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 140[/ref]. There are others, however:

The rape delusions associated with bladder catheters are haunting enough, but they don’t exhaust the list of terrible memories people often acquire in the ICU. Most of these frightening delusions relate to imprisonment, capture, or torture. Some feature aliens or homicidal doctors and nurses. More than a few incorporate the famous Capgras delusion, in which the important people in a person’s life are replaced by evil duplicates. These interpretations likely derive from the intense, paranoid attention that comes with high stress coupled with acute pain. The distressed brain tries to weave a meaningful narrative to explain why familiar faces (or people in professional gear and lab coats) are poking and prodding you as you are tied to a bed… some are frankly horrifying.

Let me explain why I’ve taking us on this long, long tangent. What I’m trying to explain is that as we’ve grown in our power to confront death, we have rediscovered an ancient truth: that power brings responsibility. This isn’t just about superheroes. It’s about ordinary men and women with no medical training and no preparation suddenly being told by doctors that it’s up to them to determine if their loved parent, or spouse, or child should live or die. But—precisely because death is so remote and even taboo—we’re completely and totally unprepared to shoulder this burden. As a result: many are crushed underneath it.

The majority of patients and families [emphasis added] come out of the ICU with post-traumatic stress, anxiety, or depression. They are more shell-shocked then combat veterans, according to an array of recent studies.[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 5[/ref]

When it’s not about individuals staggering under the weight of responsibility they have no preparation for, it’s monstrous institutional inertia instead:

A friend’s elderly father, a devout Catholic, receive his last rites in a hospital. He struggled against the wrist restraints to create the sign of the cross in response to the priest’s gentle ministrations. The restraints intended to keep him from dislodging any medical equipment obstructed his desperate hunger to participate in the healthful rituals of the deathbed. He died later that day. It never occurred to the nurses and doctors to release the restraints for this final interaction with his priest. My friend and his family still remember that angry straining for divine connection, stymied by medical handcuffs.[ref]The Valley of Shadows, pages 137-138[/ref]

I share all this because if I just said, “Gee, now our children don’t die, and that’s weakened our appreciation for family,” it would sound banal (at best) or monstrously cruel (at worst). That’s not what I want to say. But I do want to illustrate how our medical prowess—despite absolutely being a blessing we should never surrender[ref]I don’t want any confusion on that point[/ref] has nonetheless presented us with fresh sets of problems we did not have to confront before.

When we stood powerless before death we had a kind of innocence. Now death seems to be far more contained, striking not children and spouses in their homes but the elderly in hospitals and hospices, and so we are all the less prepared to deal with it when it comes, as it surely must. That innocence is gone. Before we didn’t have to choose. Now—collectively and often individually—we do.

I feel like I need to say it again, and so I will one more time: I do not want to turn back the clock. I do not want to live in a world where having four children means probably having to watch at least one of them die in my arms. I want to live in a world where we can cure diseases and heal the sick. I thank God daily that my children are healthy and safe.

But this is a world that presents new and strange challenges. Elder Richards knew the pain of burying his own children, and this cemented in him a conviction of the importance of family relationships and the reality of life after death. He paid a high, high price for these blessings, one no parent would willingly pay.

The questions we have to ask are these: How are we going to acquire the wisdom and understanding to shoulder the responsibilities of technologically sophisticated modern medicine? How do we hold onto a fundamental understanding of the vital importance of family relationships in a world where—because death is so are—we so seldom have to learn through the painfully direct method of heartbreaking loss? How do we find the kind of life-sustaining, bedrock faith of Elder Richards without paying that staggeringly high cost?

I don’t know.

But I do believe that the best place to start is by understanding and cherishing the words and experiences of those who have paid that price before us, and then left bequeathed their words and testimonies to us who follow.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• The New Aristocracy by G
• United As One In Power by Jan Tolman
• You can exert this divine power by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Just like Walker, the talk that stuck out to me from this session[ref]the Saturday morning session in October 1974[/ref] was Elder Ashton’s talk: Who’s Losing? His answer? Nobody.

All of us, young and old, will do well to realize that attitude is more important than the score. Desire is more important than the score. Momentum is more important than the score. The direction in which we are moving is more important than position or place.

I think this is fantastic, empowering, encouraging, and maybe even consoling advice. But I also think that there’s a particular application of his counsel that might surprise people. That comes a couple of paragraph later, when Elder Ashton says, “Proper attitude in this crisis-dominated world is a priceless possession.”

The juxtaposition of “proper attitude” with a “crisis-dominated world” seems even more relevant to me today in 2016 than in 1974.[ref]That might be easy for me to say, however: I wasn’t alive in 1974.[/ref] If there’s one thing that seems to dominate so much of our conversation in person and social media it is fear. Fear of terrorist attacks. Fear of a Donald Trump Presidency. Fear of racism and oppression. Fear of political correctness and the stifling of free speech. The nation—at least from my perspective—is crazy-drunk on fear.

Some of these threats are very real. Some of them less so. But it doesn’t really matter, because the answer to both kinds of fear—the rational and the irrational—is “a proper attitude.” Calm, resolved, pragmatic optimism is the best way to dispel the fears that are not grounded, to find solutions to the problems that are real but also solvable, or to face with dignity that fears that are real and also insurmountable. “We need to lead with good cheer, optimism, and courage if we are to move onward and upward.”

One of my favorite books of the New Testament is the first epistle of Peter. At a time when the struggling, nascent Christian faith was facing persecution and ridicule, Peter wrote:

13 And who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good?
14 But and if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled;
15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:

This is what I mean by “pragmatic optimism.” There’s no false hope or blind refusal to see problems when Peter talks, quite frankly, about “suffer[ing] for righteousness’ sake.” I think vs. 15 gets quoted a lot, and people forget the context. If your life is going well, then there’s no reason for people to ask why you have hope. It’s only when your hope is inexplicable that there’s any cause to justify “the hope that is in you.” Optimism doesn’t deny the darkness. Optimism shines in the darkness. Thus:

We constantly need to build hope in ourselves and those about us. We need to personally make dark days bright ones. Isn’t it a joy, a lift, a light to see someone with heavy challenges and burdens moving forward to victory in the only contest that really matters. Hope makes it possible for us to know that even in temporary failure or setback there is always a next time, even a tomorrow.

The world says, “All I do is win,”[ref]Actually, it’s DJ Khaled, specifically, but it’s not like the song’s message is unique.[/ref] and the world is talking about money and fame. For a Christian—especially one who is persecuted or facing tragedy—to talk about winning makes no sense. Paul understood that, too. “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.”[ref]1 Corinthians 1:18[/ref] But it only looks like foolishness from this side of the veil. We have hope that there’s more to the story. We know to “Fear not,” because “they that be with us are more than they that be with them.”

We believe that nothing is lost in Christ. We believe that when we lose our lives, we live. We believe that even as we die, all we do is win.

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• The Rally will Come by G
• No Losers by Walker Wright
• Take A Moral Stand by Jan Tolman
• Service is abundance by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

In his talk Be Valiant in the Fight of Faith Elder McConkie is unabashed in his embrace of the rhetoric of war. “Be valiant,” he says, “Fight a good fight. Stand true. Keep the commandments. Overcome the world.” And lest you think that words like “fight” and “overcome” are too subtle to be conclusive, a couple of paragraphs later he is even more clear:

As members of the Church, we are engaged in a mighty conflict. We are at war. We have enlisted in the cause of Christ to fight against Lucifer and all that is lustful and carnal and evil in the world. We have sworn to fight alongside our friends and against our enemies, and we must not be confused in distinguishing friends from foes. As another of our ancient fellow apostles wrote: “Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”

This kind of us-vs-them logic is not very popular these days, but Elder McConkie was not shy about it, stating:

We are either for the Church or we are against it. We either take its part or we take the consequences. We cannot survive spiritually with one foot in the Church and the other in the world. We must make the choice. It is either the Church or the world. There is no middle ground. And the Lord loves a courageous man who fights openly and boldly in his army.

I want to make a couple of observations about this. First, it would be a mistake to write off the strong language of Elder McConkie as peculiar to his personality or to the particular time (the Cold War 1970s). The black-and-white view is not unique to his writing. It is a pervasive strain within scriptures. The quote above (“Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?”) comes from James 4:4. Another stark example comes from Nephi: “Behold there are save two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil.”[ref]1 Nephi 14:10[/ref] And of course Jesus himself made the same kind of dichotomy, as in “If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.”[ref]John 15:19[/ref]

Second, we don’t need to water down these stark statements to avoid crazy extremism like occupying federal buildings. The war is real, but it is “not against flesh and blood, but against… spiritual wickedness in high places.”[ref]Ephesians 6:12[/ref] Or, to cite a couple of non-scriptural sources, we’ve got Sirius Black declaring, “the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us.” Or, even more eloquently, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

There is a war. In that war there are only two sides. At any time, a person is fighting for either the light or for the dark. We do not need to mitigate or explain away or rationalize the teaching that the world is at war, but we do need to understand it.

So, what is the point? If we’re in a war, but that war is not like a historical war with armies and swords or guns, then what’s the point of talking about war? One of the best explanations of this comes from one of my all-time favorite blog posts: The Military Mental Model of Mormonism. In it, MC explains precisely why viewing the conflict as a war is practically relevant in our day-to-day lives, and contrasts the “military mental model” with the “schoolhouse model.” Neither is the complete and total truth—the struggle of our mortal existence does involve leaning—but the military mental model has some particular insights that make it indispensable. I strongly urge you to read the entire post, but I’ll just summarize one of MC’s points (he makes three) which is that the military mental model answers the question: “Am I really going to be kept out of heaven for drinking coffee/wearing a bikini/watching vulgar movies? Is God really that uptight?” MC explains that:

… in the military model it’s a silly question. “I’m really going to get killed for not wearing my helmet during our transport to the base?” Maybe you will, maybe you won’t; depends whether you get attacked along the way or hit a roadside bomb. The rule is there to protect you, not to evaluate you. There will likely be many bikini-wearers in the Kingdom of Heaven (well, former bikini-wearers). But not everyone who makes the choice to dress immodestly will find that decision to be so free of spiritual consequences, as “way leads on to way.” It’s not fair. One guy never wears his helmet and never gets hit. The other takes it off just for a second to wipe his sweat and takes a bullet. That’s war. [emphasis added]

Lastly, I think it’s abundantly clear that Elder McConkie understood all of this, which is why the practical side of his talk is about self-examination. He doesn’t talk about how to identify if someone else is on the right side or not, but how to question if we ourselves are fighting valiantly with a long list of questions we are to use to gauge our own place in the war, not anybody else’s.

My approach to reading the council of prophets and general authorities is simple: I’m greedy about it. I don’t want to pick and choose. To the extent possible, I want to synthesize all of it into a single, cohesive, harmonious world-view: the scriptures, the General Conference talks, my personal experiences and beliefs, and everything I learn or think I understand about science, philosophy, history, psychology, and everyday life. I don’t have containers or boundaries: I want to incorporate it all.

It’s a tricky, error-prone process, and it’s never finished.[ref]Not in this lifetime, anyway.[/ref] There are always pieces that don’t fit quite right where I’ve placed them, pieces left over with no place to go, and holes in the model I’m building with no pieces that seem to fit there. The errors come from lots of places. Even if we believed scripture were absolutely perfect,[ref]As Mormons, we don’t.[/ref] I would still have to interpret and apply the words I read, and that introduces errors due to my own imperfections and limitations. Add to that the fact that the scriptures were written in languages I don’t know for audiences of cultures that are alien to me, and you can see how my problems multiply. Then, for good measure, toss in the fact that these leaders[ref]I’m thinking of General Conference talks in particular now[/ref] aren’t perfect and, for that matter, are given general rather than specific council.

All of this means we have plenty of excuses to set aside the council that seems outdated, naïve, or even embarrassing. I get it. All I can say is: stay greedy. Hold onto as much of it as you can. And the parts that don’t make sense just yet; set them aside if you must for the time being, but don’t discard them and don’t give up on the hope of one day seeing things in a new light and being able to make sense of them after all.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• The Savior’s Program for Caring for the Aged by G
• Satan’s Triumph by Daniel Ortner
• Predominant Message: Family by Jan Tolman
• Be and move and breathe and think by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Before I even finished reading Elder Maxwell’s talk from this session[ref]the Friday morning session of the October 1974 General conference[/ref] I had to fire off an email to my mum, dad, and wife. The subject line was just “I see why everyone loved Elder Maxwell” and the body was just, “This talk is awesome.”[ref]With a link to the talk.[/ref]

As it turns out, Why Not Now? is not Elder Maxwell’s first talk in General Conference. I found a list here, and his first GC talk was in 1970, which is before the first session covered by the General Conference Odyssey. He spoke again in April 1974, but I confess that talk did not leave much of an impression on me. The talk—Response to a Call—was just that: a reaction to his calling as an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve.

But this talk, Why Not Now?, was something different. I think I highlighted more of the talk than I didn’t. I was bowled over by both his sincere love: “to such individuals [those who “do not participate fully in the Church”]… be assured there is a real craving for your companionship and a genuine need for your unique strengths.” And then I was knocked over again by the passion of his message. Writing that “if… you really do not wish to commit now” he gave a list of things such individuals should avoid if they want to maintain their position half-in, half-out of the Church, including:

Do not look too deeply into the eyes of the pleasure-seekers about you, for if you do, you will see a certain sadness in sensuality, and you will hear artificiality in the laughter of licentiousness.

Do not look too deeply, either, into the motives of those who deny God, for you may notice their doubts of doubt.

Do not risk thinking the unthinkable, lest you find yourself drawn with a deep and powerful pull toward the reality that God does exist, that he loves you, and that finally there is no escaping him or his love!

I’m not going to write anything else about this talk. I’m just going to urge anyone and everyone who is reading this post to make time today to go and read the full talk. It’s worth it.

And as for me? I’m really looking forward to reading many, many more talks from Elder Maxwell in the future.

—

Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• Live in Thanksgiving Daily by Jan Tolman
• The satisfaction and dignity of work by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

If there was a theme to the closing session of the April 1974 General Conference, this was it: get to work. I can’t think of a better way to summarize a series of talks that really focused on just going out to do the hard things that we’re supposed to do: paying tithing, going on missions, and bearing testimonies. Towards the end of this session, (then) Elder Spencer W. Kimball shared an anonymous quote that went along with that theme:

Someone said, “Many people are willing to plod along for 16 to 20 years, from grade one to a Ph.D., to learn medicine or engineering or psychology or mathematics or sociology or biology—to study, research, attend classes, pay tuitions, accept help from teachers and professors—and yet to learn about God, the maker of all, the author of it all, in a few intermittent prayers and some very limited hours of research, they feel they can find the truths about God.”

It was a good reminder for me to check my priorities, especially on this week. We’ve been doing the General Conference Odyssey for almost a year now, and one of the most consistent and consistently surprising things I’ve learned is how much I can like or dislike a session almost entirely based on my attitude when I read it.

This past Sunday I taught two lessons (Gospel Doctrine and also Elder’s Quorum) and—with all the lesson prep—I didn’t get to my General Conference talks until later than I wanted to. I has zero desire to be reading the talks. I knew—as I was going through them—that I wasn’t getting very much out of them. I did it anyway.

The best case scenario: you do the right thing, for the right reasons, with the right spirit. Next-best case scenario: you just do the right thing any old way you can. I prefer that to quitting. I’m glad I frog-marched myself through those talks so that I could keep going. But I’m even more glad when I can approach the talks with some time, some real attention, and be open to learning.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• The Promise of Eternity by Daniel Ortner
• Testimonies Sometimes Have Bandages by Jan Tolman
• To develop Gods by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

From the Sunday morning session of the April 1974 General Conference, it was Elder Boyd K. Packer’s talk We Believe All That God Has Revealed that caught my attention. Elder Packer has a reputation for being stern and doctrinaire that—to my mind—seems undeserved. In this talk, for example, he not only quotes from Hugh Nibley but also states flatly that Joseph Smith—aside from acting as a conduit for revelution—“was otherwise an ordinary man, as were the prophets in ancient times and as are the prophets in our day.”

This is an important perspective to keep in mind, especially when the other talks sometimes verge on the hagiographic. I dislike it when folks use needlessly complex words, but I like “hagiography.” It means “the writing of the lives of saints” or, in common usage, “biography that idealizes its subject.” So, it’s a useful word to employ when it comes to how Mormons sometimes interact with our leaders. There is a tendency to hero worship that we don’t always do a good enough job of avoiding.

Whenever new General Authorities start waxing poetic about how much they love each other and how great they all are, I confess to feeling a little alienated. It makes me uncomfortable when they testify to each other’s positive qualities, much as I’m uncomfortable when people get up and bear testimonies of their friends or family in the ward. I honestly don’t care that much if the General Authorities are good people. Joseph Smith said, “I do not want you to think that I’m very righteous, for I am not. There was one good man, and his name was Jesus.” That is my concern.

I believe in loyalty to the Church and in obedience to the leaders, but they can neither earn nor disqualify themselves from that loyalty and obedience because it has nothing to do with them. I owe everything to my Savior. When He calls representatives to serve in His Church I follow them out of my devotion to Him, not because I think they are particularly wise or spiritual people. I hope they are, but it’s not really my concern one way or the other.[ref]The Catholic writer Graham Greene expressed this concept eloquently in one of my favorite novels: The Power and the Glory.[/ref]

But before anyone gets too excited about agreeing with me or disagreeing with me on this point, I think it’s wise to keep in mind that it’s almost always possible to miss the mark in either of two directions. Speaking of acquiring a testimony of the scriptures, Elder Packer said in the same talk that:

There are those who have made a casual, even an insincere effort to test the scriptures and have come away having received nothing, which is precisely what they have earned and what they deserve. If you think it will yield to a casual inquiry, to idle curiosity, or even to well-intentioned but temporary searching, you are mistaken. It likewise will not yield to the overzealous or to the fanatic.

You can miss the mark by not trying hard enough, by being casual, insincere, or even lazy. But you can also miss the mark by trying too hard, by being overzealous or fanatic.

If you preach a sermon only on the peril of blind belief and fanaticism, you’re going to risk misleading or enabling those who already have a tendency towards taking an insincere interest in their testimonies. If you preach a sermon only on the peril of casualness and insincerity, you’re going to risk providing ammunition to the zealots.

So I am more bothered by the tendency towards hero-worship in the Church. But it seems plain to me that there’s also a problem—and probably a far larger problem—of members who don’t take the leaders and their council seriously enough. It’s not an either-or. It’s even quite possible that I go too far in my sense of alienation and in my skepticism towards the hagiographic approach to our leaders. If that’s the case, then I rely on the Savior to bring me into line as I continue to follow Him and sustain His leaders.

There are two more quotes I want to mention from his talk. First, he said that in order to learn of the scriptures, “one must, of necessity, move from criticism to spiritual inquiry.” Our society is hyper-critical and drowning in irony. That is because irony and criticism are safe. A critic is always detached from and opposed to the thing he considers, and never risks being accused of foolishness because he never fully accepts or embraces anything. This is short-run wisdom and long-run folly. In the end, if you have not fully given yourself to anything in this life, then what was the point?

The pretext of superiority that comes with an attitude of cynical detachment or hardened irony is just that: a pretext. Understanding requires love, and love requires risk. We have to be willing to venture if we want to gain.

Then:

When a humble man bears testimony based on spiritual inquiry and righteous living, be careful before you repudiate his witness because he is otherwise unlearned. Many an academic giant is at once a spiritual pygmy and, if so, he is usually a moral weakling as well. Such a man may easily become a self-appointed member of a wrecking crew determined to destroy the works of God.

I’ve got an uneasy relationship with the term “intellectual.” I like to analyze and think and ponder and talk about ideas. If I could get paid to do it, I would do nothing but take classes in linguistics and philosophy and history and physics and math and computer science and psychology for the rest of my life. So maybe I am an intellectual. But I’m pretty profoundly disappointed with what passes for academic discourse—in the secular world and also within the religious community—and so I have to confess to a predisposition to agree with Elder Packer. After all, I think the ambiguous relationship between intelligence and learning is rather baked into our scripture, with “the glory of God is intelligence” on the one hand, but also the pointedly conditional, “to be learned is good if [you] hearken unto the counsels of God.” These days, it seems like most of the counsel from PhD-holding Mormons tends to flow the wrong way. We’ve got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to councilors willing to tell Christ’s Church how to amends its policies and teachings.

And—last of all—a quick quote from a different talk. In Build Your Shield of Faith, Elder L. Tom Perry said, speaking of his siblings as they were growing up with faithful parents, “While our shield was being made strong, theirs was always available, for they were available and we knew it.” I love the image of parents extending their own shields of faith over their children to give their kids time to grow their own shields before going out to face a hostile and treacherous—but also beautiful and promising—world.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• Covering Others with Your Shield by G
• Blessing Our Families Through Our Prayers by Daniel Ortner
• Revelation is Holding the Hand of God by Jan Tolman
• Carefully constructed for you by Marilyn Nielson

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

One of the talks from the priesthood session of the April 1974 General Conference stood out to me, and that was Elder Marion D. Hanks’ talk Boys Need Men. I took the title of this post from one of the lines of his talk: “Only God knows the worth of a boy, but we too are fathers, and we have an inkling.”

Some of that sentiment is universal. He could have as easily said, speaking to a more general audience, “Only Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother know the worth of a child, but we too are parents, and we have an inkling,” and that would have been just as true. I love that sentiment, and the idea that—as parents—our highest calling is to emulate our Heavenly Parents and provide our children with the love, support, and challenges to foster their growth and happiness.

Along those universal lines, Elder Hanks went on:

Every individual is a kind of an omnibus carrying with him all the past that has gone into his making, all the potential in him for influencing the present, and he has, in addition, the sobering reality to face that he carries within himself the seeds of the future.

But there is also something unmistakably specific about fathers and boys as opposed to mothers and daughters, and that was also part of Elder Hanks’ message:

Boys need men to learn from, men to be with who understand their need for activities that are challenging and socially and spiritually constructive and that stretch them and give them a chance to learn manly skills, men to love and who love them, men who are models of what a man ought to be. The father should be the first line of strength, and a boy blessed with such a father is fortunate indeed.

He even specifically stated that “we have no lack of appreciation for the wonderful influence of mothers and other noble women in guiding boys. . .but it takes men to make men.” And I believe that’s true. We’ve even written about that at Difficult Run before, for example here and here.

In fact, that’s one of the most important things that Mormonism—as a religion and also as an institution and a culture—does for its members. It provides a template for pro-social, principled masculinity (and femininity). And I think that’s essential for our growth as human beings. We are social beings, and to live vibrant lives we should understand ourselves as unique individuals, as part of non-universal group (and the groups: male and female are the most fundamental such groups), and as part of a universal collective. Those are the three fundamental levels of human experience: alone, part of an exclusive us, and part of an inclusive us.

Coming back to the talk, here are two more quotes that I really liked:

How foolish we are if we reserve to ourselves, or for others than our own children, the knowledge and testimony of the gospel we have gained. They, no less than others, need and deserve this from us.

And then:

It is no small thing to reestablish confidence and faith in a man at a critical point in his life when he has failed and is full of self-doubt.

And then a final thought that gives me both direction and hope in my life:

God bless you boys to appreciate your dads, to be patient and gracious and forgiving.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

• Priesthood Meeting: Counsel for Women Too by Jan Tolman
• Boys Need Men by Marilyn Nielson