From the General Conference archives:

The One Hundred Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was held in the Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Utah, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, April 6, 7,8, and 9, 1951.

President George Albert Smith, President of the Church, having passed away Wednesday, April 4, President Smith’s funeral services were held in the Tabernacle Saturday, April 7, at 2:00 p.m., which services are included as a part of this Conference report.

General sessions of the Conference were held at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Friday and Sunday and at 10:00 a.m. Monday. The General Priesthood meeting convened in the Tabernacle Saturday evening, April 7 at 7:00 p.m., with overflow assemblies in the Assembly Hall and Barratt Hall.

The session Monday morning at 10:00 was a solemn assembly, at which the First Presidency of the Church was reorganized, with David Oman McKay as President, Stephen L Richards as First Counselor, and Joshua Reuben Clark, Jr. as Second Counselor.

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On the sweetness…

A very obese man who joined a few years back–he was in and out of jail at the time, has made a remarkable turn-around–gives his very first lesson in church Sunday for Elders Quorum.  He is very nervous, especially since the Prophet had just died.  He struggles to talk about what President Nelson has meant to him.  His sincerity and goodness shines through.  The Spirit is present.

Afterwards, you and he and a couple of others are standing on the church porch, watching the rain.  You talk about President Nelson.  You talk about the dead in Michigan.  These are heavy topics.  After a pause you ask him what he thought about his first lesson.

“It was good,” he says.  There is a short pause.  “When you feel the Spirit, it feels like floating on a cushion of air,” he says.

One of our congregations has been shot at in Michigan and the building set on fire.  There are preliminary reports of several victims.

There is never a good way to die but being found at church on Sunday is a good way to live.

We are used to hearing about this sort of thing from the saints overseas.  But now America’s long vacation from history appears to be on hiatus.  I, and notably president Nelson, are very optimistic about what the future is going to hold, but we may have rough waters until we cross to the other side

Russell M. Nelson was released from his call as President and as a mortal yesterday.

He was a doer and a changer.  The two-hour block and everything that went along with it such as no priesthood opening exercises and limiting announcements, Come Follow Me, getting rid of “Mormon,” emphasizing “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” encouragement for Saints to form study groups and to engage in private gospel efforts, a temple-building spree, revising the hymn book and even how we do music, multiple serious revisions to the endowment and other aspects of temple worship, democratizing the act of witnessing ordinances, no more priesthood session and women’s session, gawky youth broadcasts, the first church-wide social media fast… the list goes on. (more…)

If I had been a Heathen,

I’d have praised the purple vine,

My slaves should dig the vineyards,

And I would drink the wine.

But Higgins is a Heathen,

And his slaves grow lean and grey,

That he may drink some tepid milk

Exactly twice a day.

If I had been a Heathen,

I’d have crowned Neaera’s curls,

And filled my life with love affairs,

My house with dancing girls;

But Higgins is a Heathen,

And to lecture rooms is forced,

Where his aunts, who are not married,

Demand to be divorced.

If I had been a Heathen,

I’d have sent my armies forth,

And dragged behind my chariots

The Chieftains of the North.

But Higgins is a Heathen,

And he drives the dreary quill,

To lend the poor that funny cash

That makes them poorer still.

If I had been a Heathen,

I’d have piled my pyre on high,

And in a great red whirlwind

Gone roaring to the sky;

But Higgins is a Heathen,

And a richer man than I:

And they put him in an oven,

Just as if he were a pie.

Now who that runs can read it,

The riddle that I write,

Of why this poor old sinner,

Should sin without delight-

But I, I cannot read it

(Although I run and run),

Of them that do not have the faith,

And will not have the fun.

GK Chesterton

The Song of the Strange Ascetic

My grandpa smoked a pipe.  It smelled good, and it was my grandpa, so I have always had an association between pipe smoking and solid old fashioned worth.

But lately I and the Lovely One have been watching a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie of a weekend.  Frothy and fun.  They are obviously meant to be young, fashionable concoctions, with the dressmaker for Rogers getting top billing in the credits and the two of them embodying hip young style.

Which includes a pipe.  In almost every movie, there’s a scene where Astaire mosies around with a pipe artfully casually dangling from his lips, obviously just full of being young and cool.

Those movies came out when my grandfather was a young man.

It is disorienting to find that all my life my old grandfather was still that young dashing man from the 30s on the inside.  He grew old and gruff and gray and crotchety but somewhere in his soul it was still 1938 and the stars were out and here was this stylish young man, full of beans, making his way under the night stars towards the sound of of the big band orchestra.

It’s a meme these days that men are the romantic sex and women are the practical one.

Like many claims about men and women, it  seems true and not true.

I see guys have romantic ideas and am romantic myself in a lot of more-or-less masculine ways whereas their women and my wife are practical about them.

“Well, yes dear, I do think a custom, wearable suit of armor embossed with the family arms  you just created would be nice.  But the dishwasher needs replaced and we don’t have anyone to polish the suit…”

And vice versa.

And in my own life, we are sometimes romantic-practical or practical-romantic in other areas that don’t line up exactly masculine or feminine.

Sorting it out becomes more difficult because there is often not a lot of daylight between “[Men/women] are romantic while [Women/men] are practical” and “I, a [man/woman] want to be romantic about a specific [woman/man,] but [she/he] is practical about me.”

I don’t claim it is specifically by divine design, but  a clever solution to the problem of having unity with someone different from yourself is having some areas where they are different from you in the ways that you are different from them in other areas.  That way you are both different from them–you have something to unite–but you understand how you are different and where they are coming from–uniting is possible.

Where is Poet Head when we need him?

A bearded pilgrim without a pilgrimage was walking down a path when it forked.

He looked down the path to the one side and thought, “who knows, if I take this path I may end up coming to a village that needs a carpenter like me.  I settle down, marry a nice bouncy lass, have a brood of kids, rollick in the harvest festivals in the autumn, grumble about the scarce food with everyone else in the spring… and then when I am old, I will lie in my bed dying and think, was this all, what of the drums and bugles and clash of arms, what happened to the greatness I could have achieved?”

He looked down the path to the other side and thought, “who knows, if I take this path I may end up coming to a town where there is a sergeant taking recruits at the drumhead.  I will enlist, perform prodigies of valor, and due to  my strength and cunning and the casualties of war become an officer and a captain and a colonel.  Then I will throw off the strictures of my corrupt government, seize rule myself with my loyal men at my back, and then turn to the liberation of all the nearby countries till I am crowned emperor on the edge of the endless sea with all the known world at my feet behind me–and then when I am old, I will lie in bed dying and think, was this worth it, I left so much behind, what it is like to tell tales to your apple-cheeked children around the fire while the winter wind howls outside?”

Another man came down the path.  At the fork, he found a bearded pilgrim laying stretched out on the ground, arms stretched out desperately reaching as far as he could, one down each path.

Do you think there is calamity abroad now among the people?…All we have yet heard and all we have experienced is scarcely a preface to the sermon that is going to be preached. When the testimony of the Elders ceases to be given, and the Lord says to them, ‘come home; I will now preach My own sermons to the nations of the earth,’ all you now know can scarcely be called a preface to the sermon that will be preached with fire and sword, tempests, earthquakes, hail, rain, thunders, and lightnings and fearful destruction. What matters the destruction of a few railway cars? You will hear of magnificent cities, now idolized by the people, sinking in the earth, entombing the inhabitants. The sea will heave itself beyond its bounds, engulfing mighty cities. Famine will spread over the nations, and nation will rise up against nation, kingdom against kingdom, and states against states, in our own country and in foreign lands; and they will destroy each other, caring not for the blood and lives of their neighbors, of their families, or for their own lives. They will be like the Jaredites who preceded the Nephites upon this continent, and will destroy each other to the last man, through the anger that the devil will place in their hearts, because they have rejected the words of life and are given over to Satan to do whatever he listeth to do with them. You may think that the little you hear of now is grievous; yet the faithful of God’s people will see days that will cause them to close their eyes because of the sorrow that will come upon the wicked nations. The hearts of the faithful will be filled with pain and anguish for them.

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Bob, an 89-year-old in Utah, died this week. He was 21 when he and 19-year-old Lola got married in Las Vegas. They had four children togeether, but later in life they divorced and each married someone else. Lola was born in Provo and raised in a Mormon family; Bob was never a member of the Church.

So how many days will it be before some enterprising fourth cousin of Lola takes care of temple ordinances for Bob? Will that cousin, or another of Lola’s hundreds of such cousins, set up news alerts so she will know when Lola dies, so she can attend to a proxy sealing before someone else does? Will another cousin jump the gun and set up a proxy sealing before Lola dies?

Church policy, in case that matters to anyone, is:

Except as noted in 28.3, proxy ordinances may be performed for all deceased persons as soon as 30 days have passed from their date of death if either of the following applies:

A close relative of the deceased (undivorced spouse, adult child, parent, or sibling) submits the name for temple ordinances.

Permission to perform the ordinances is received from a close relative of the deceased (undivorced spouse, adult child, parent, or sibling).

If neither of the above conditions applies, proxy temple ordinances may be performed 110 years after the deceased person was born.

My Dear Wormwood,

What a time to be in the field, tempting souls! I am absolutely envious. Even a tempter of your modest skill and experience with more souls than you can handle! I don’t need to hear your complaints. You are not overworked, you are in the midst of a feast, with souls throwing themselves at you. Enjoy it.

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A  knowledge of truth is essential to salvation.  What is truth?  Let’s check D&C 93, starting around verse 24.

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Father Time in his wisdom made me too old to be interested in Charlie Kirk.  I had heard of him, that’s it.  But some of my kids I found out are fans and my daughters in Utah County had gotten out of work/class and were on their way to his event at UVU yesterday when we got the news.  Perhaps for that reason, it has affected me a lot more than I would have thought.

https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1964469113352573401

https://xcancel.com/charliekirk11/status/1964469113352573401

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Covering Sections 89 through 97.

* I think the most important verse in the Word of Wisdom is verse 2.  This section can only be understood by revelation and wisdom; and God cares about temporal salvation.

* 90:17 suggests a virtue chart.  This verse is advice to the First Presidency on how to be the First Presidency.

Be not ashamed, neither confounded; but be admonished in all your high-mindedness and pride, for it bringeth a snare upon your souls.

In particular, I think the implication that shame is what leads to being confounded, whereas being admonished in some way complements being unashamed and not being confounded, is psychologically astute.

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A few weeks ago I snapped the above photo about 27 minutes after the closing prayer of my ward’s sacrament service. This is what will usually be seen in the chapel at that time most Sundays. One of the ways in which holding priesthood meeting prior to the sacrament service works out nicely.