1.
The Stake High Councilman opened his talk to our Singles Ward in Salt Lake City by recounting how he led his High School basketball team his senior year all the way to the State Finals, only to be defeated in the final game. Sitting alone in the bleachers after the court had cleared, he made a solemn vow to himself that he would marry himself a tall woman and raise a son to win the state high school basketball championship for him.
So, after serving as an AP on his mission, he enrolled at the University of Utah and met his wife, a model-tall ex-Miss Utah contestant, and proposed to her before he even graduated. As he applied for Dental School or Business School or whatever, they obeyed Prophetic counsel and began bringing forth those tall children immediately, being fruitful and multiplying.
Yet as his various sons entered high school, one disaster after another struck: one joined the wrestling team, not the basketball; another also played football and was injured before the basketball season began; a third simply showed no interest in basketball; and so on and so forth.
We in the YSA congregation meanwhile chuckled good-naturedly at his story, but only because we thought we knew where this story was going: clearly he was going to reveal that none of his children had vicariously fulfilled his juvenile dream for him, that he had learned some humility and perspective, and to love his children for who they were, not merely what they could selfishly do for him; that he had come to appreciate their unique and diverse gifts, as indeed all of God’s children must be appreciated; that, as he matured and grew older, he had learned in his own small to view his children as our Heavenly Father views us, in all our divine potential, so much greater than mere basketball games. Or something along those lines.
Yes, I dare say that we mentally corrected his talk for him as he spoke (the same way we sometimes mentally correct a grammar error in an essay as we skim along), because the one thing we were not prepared for was the fact that he had been, all along, completely sincere: breaking into choked-up sobs, he concluded his talk by recounting how his youngest son at last fulfilled his childhood dream of leading the high school basketball team to win the Utah state championship. The moral of his talk, it turned out, was to trust in the tender mercies of the Lord, if we will but put our faith in Him.
I imagine he took our sudden silence to mean we were as deeply moved by his story as he. Rather, ours was the sudden shock, the sinking realization, that this man had literally nothing to tell us. He knew nothing of what it was to wait long years after college, trying, seeking, hoping, fasting, praying, on many calloused knees over many lonely nights, to find at last that Eternal Companion, all while grappling with the creeping dread that our silent tears were useless, that the Lord God Almighty was deaf to our entreaties, that there was nothing for us in this life or possibly even the next.
He knew nothing of what it was to fail, to have your hopes and dreams blasted–to not make the team, to not have enough money, to not get accepted to graduate school, to not get your dream job, to not have your crush reciprocate, to see your business fail, to not get that promotion, to not be healed, to miscarry, to lose a parent two days after you get home from your mission, to not feel loved. This privileged man had never had his faith tested, nor his faithfulness unrewarded, nor his desires unfulfilled. In short, he had always seen himself as the main character of reality, spawning forth a race of superior Aryan supermen to fulfill his most childish ambitions. He sincerely could not imagine anyone passing through a harder spiritual ordeal than him, because he utterly lacked imagination, and therefore lacked empathy.
The mood in the chapel had soured completely by the end of his talk, because we finally realized he had utterly wasted the last 20 minutes of our lives. He probably was the type who honestly thought that if we hadn’t gotten married yet, or hadn’t gotten rich as he, it’s because we weren’t really trying, or didn’t really want to. I supposed one of us should’ve called him out on it, but why bother? We instinctively knew his type already; trying to get guys like him to recognize their tone-deaf privilege would just waste our time even more.
2.
Such was the bad taste left in my mouth by that last stake speaker that I didn’t even bother to enter the chapel the next time a High Councilman spoke, electing to instead just hangout in the foyer to flirt with some cute girls out there. Hence, I didn’t immediately pick up how utterly different this one was–but so sharply different was he indeed, that even a cynical skeptic like myself couldn’t help but notice.
He spoke of his acrimonious divorce, and of having to raise his children on his own as a single father. He spoke of how, just to make ends meet, he had to work four jobs–such that when he finally returned to activity after many years away, it was a genuine sacrifice and test of his faith, when the Bishop asked him to start paying tithing again.
He described at long last remarrying again in middle-age, though even that was tinged with regret and sadness, because his bride had waited so very long to finally marry herself, only to be denied the Temple wedding she’d dreamt of since a child, because her long-awaited husband was still inactive at the time. He mentioned finally getting solid employment as the groundskeeper for the Salt Lake Bees baseball stadium, only to be laid-off when the Steven R. Covey group took it over, and hence having to make the hard decision to go back to school in his fifties. “I’ll be 54 by the time I graduate,” he complained to his wife. “We’ll, you’ll be 54 anyways,” she said, so he re-enrolled–not at BYU, not at Utah State or the University of Utah, but at Salt Lake Community College–and that not for a doctorate, not for an MBA or an MA or even his BA, but just for his Associates, so that he could be employable again.
And in his deadpan style, he also mentioned his current assignment delivering the sacrament and ministering to inmates at the Utah State Prison.
He had us riveted to our seats.
This was a man who knew. This was a man who had actually suffered more than us. This was a man we actually looked up to, whom we would like to take counsel from, whom we could take for an example.
And it has occurred to me many times in the decade since I heard those two High Councilmen speak in my old YSA ward, that we have far too many leaders of the former sort, and not nearly enough of the latter. We have far too many Church leaders who have drunken of the felix elixir, who have soared from mountain peak to mountain peak in their personal and professional lives, and not nearly enough who have drunken from the bitter cup, yeah, to the very dregs.
This is extremely relevant to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–not only because the Brethren have (a little too) casually noted that singles now make up the majority adult membership of the Church, but because Jesus Christ himself did not hang out with the successful and accomplished, but with the prostitutes, the publicans, the lepers and the outcasts–he was despised and rejected of men, so he preferred the company of all the other despised and rejected–and when he did visit the wealthy (as he did with Nicodemus or the rich young man), it was solely to call them to repentance for their illiberality.
It is of course not a sin to be prosperous; but as the Book of Mormon repeatedly and explicitly spells out for us, it is a sin to take our prosperity as a sign of divine approval, and therefore as an excuse to disregard the poor and suffering within our midst. Brigham Young said his greatest fear wasn’t that we would be persecuted, but that we would become rich, and thus lose our way and drag ourselves down to hell. History can testify as to whether that was a true prophecy or not.
Yet even if you are prosperous and accomplished and honestly strive to remain humble and meek throughout, there is still the fundamental problem that–unless you are exceptionally imaginative and curious–you will not understand how to sympathize with others. I suppose the point of the Atonement (at least according to Alma 7:12) is that only Christ has ever truly felt all our pains; but it is also (per Mosiah 18:9) one of our baptismal covenants to “mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort”–and that presupposes that we be aware of who mourns and who stands in need of comfort. And that, I am sorry to say, cannot be modeled by those who have never suffered a real setback before.