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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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.

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.

Catherine Pakaluk, mother of eight, social scientist, and author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, will speak at a BYU Forum next month. Below are links to a couple interviews.

Public Discourse
“I did not go into this project thinking about her, but at some point analyzing my data—we should call the narratives ‘data’ or use the sociological term ‘hearing data’—various aspects of the story of the biblical Hannah jumped out at me. I saw that her basic attitudes about childbearing and the meaning of life looked like the women in my sample. The biblical Hannah became, for me, an archetype to help describe what I discovered in the stories. Though barren, Hannah prayed to be blessed with a child. We all know what came next: she received her son, Samuel. What we all don’t know these days, however, is that God sent her five more children after she brought her firstborn, Samuel, to live in the service of God. The women I met generally didn’t set about to have large families—rather, they valued children greatly, like the biblical Hannah, and saw children as blessings.”

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Child of Light on display in the Conference Center, Salt Lake City
Sculptor Laura Lee Stay Bradshaw b.1958
Cast bronze, 2003

The sculptress: “Ever since I can remember I had an insatiable desire to create.”

This month’s Going Against the Grain Award recognizes newly called Seventy Motoshige Karino and his Wife Merei.

“Motoshige Karino, 52, Togane, Japan; Representative Director, Modere Japan GK; currently serving as president of the Chiba Japan Stake; former bishop, mission presidency counselor and stake presidency counselor; wife: Mirei; seven children.”

Only such as those two ignore the scorn of the world, set aside fear, and realize the happiness and fullness available to those who want it.

This morning I selected at random a podcast interview with Dana Gioia. I have enjoyed Mr. Gioia’s thought, language, and voice before and expected I would again. This instance exceeded my hopes, and it surprised me with how moving I found it, and I thought I should share it. I suggest listening to three minutes of his poem starting at 49:32 until 52:28 to test if the hour may be of worth to you. It left me thinking about what it means to be sealed to the dead and considering what I should be doing to maintain that a living bond.

EconTalk, Dana Gioia on Poetry, Death, and Mortality
On Spotify

For whatever reason, some lines from Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo keep returning to my mind lately:

Captain Mitchell, pacing the wharf, was asking himself the same question. There was always the doubt whether the warning of the Esmeralda telegraphist—a fragmentary and interrupted message—had been properly understood. However, the good man had made up his mind not to go to bed till daylight, if even then. He imagined himself to have rendered an enormous service to Charles Gould. When he thought of the saved silver he rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. In his simple way he was proud at being a party to this extremely clever expedient. It was he who had given it a practical shape by suggesting the possibility of intercepting at sea the north-bound steamer. And it was advantageous to his Company, too, which would have lost a valuable freight if the treasure had been left ashore to be confiscated. The pleasure of disappointing the Monterists was also very great. Authoritative by temperament and the long habit of command, Captain Mitchell was no democrat. He even went so far as to profess a contempt for parliamentarism itself. “His Excellency Don Vincente Ribiera,” he used to say, “whom I and that fellow of mine, Nostromo, had the honour, sir, and the pleasure of saving from a cruel death, deferred too much to his Congress. It was a mistake—a distinct mistake, sir.”

Section 7. The Come, Follow Me manual skirts around it other than to note:

Notice how many times words like “desire” or “desires” appear in sections 6 and 7. What do you learn from these sections about the importance God places on your desires? Ask yourself the Lord’s question in Doctrine and Covenants 7:1: “What desirest thou?”

For Joseph and Oliver in April 1829, the desire of their hearts was to debate the meaning of an unclear and not particularly important snippet of scripture. Was John the Beloved still alive? Or not? Unlike you and your buddies, they had Urim and Thummim handy and got to use company equipment for their own little side job. They were allowed a revealed answer given in the first-person voice of the Beloved himself. And to keep up for others after them the supply of puzzlers to wonder about, they were shown the parchment on which John wrote this otherwise unknown account.

As one who sometimes likes to muse on extraneous spiritual matters that no, are not strictly necessary for salvation, I feel catered to with Section 7 by a loving Heavenly Father who is willing to indulge unnecessary banter.

Source: Area Seventies page at ChurchofJesusChrist.org
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“While most bridge-jumpers are attempting to commit suicide, and others fall accidentally, it should be noted that there are two further groups of voluntary jumpers, both gamblers in a sense. The first of these are those, usually young males, who jump on a bet. Strangely enough, we have only one case of a known ‘bettor’ who has been killed. But frustratingly enough, there are seldom records of such cases, and the individuals usually, presumably clutching their winnings, elude official searchers. In recent cases of this nature, a Rhode Island youth leaped 60 feet from a bridge while his companion stood by yelling encouragement, and another jumped 135 feet and was last seen swimming to a pier. In Ohio, a 17-year-old boy jumped 65 feet, and in New York a 32-year-old man jumped 107-feet — for the third time — from a bridge on which 67 other jumpers have been killed.”

from Survival of High-Velocity Free-Falls in Water by Richard G. Snyder, Ph.D., April 1965, Federal Aviation Agency, Office of Aviation Medicine

WARNING: Political musings follow. (more…)

For an upcoming ward youth summer activity, a permission and medical release form created by the church needed to be signed. This form, copyrighted by Intellectual Reserve, Inc., includes a second page regarding “conduct at church activities.” No pornography, no vaping, no shoplifting, no threats to harm self or others, etc. If a youth participate in any of the prohibited activities, “leaders at the event or activity will speak with you, your parents, and your bishop or stake president. These leaders may decide to send you home immediately.” Stuff that sometimes needs to be spelled out explicitly now and then.

But I found the form’s first admonition disheartening:
“Please note that Church activities are not the time or place for romantic behavior or for conversations and actions that distract from the purpose of the event or activity.”

President Oaks needs to have a conversation with some form writers and those who direct them if he is really concerned about young adults not marrying. Habits of mind leading to lots of unmarried 26-year-olds have taken hold. Learning to engage in initial stages of romantic behavior should be listed somewhere as one of the purposes of bringing youth together for activities. Chewing tobacco and carrying guns at a youth conference should be discouraged. Flirting should be encouraged. We who believe in chastity should be the ones teaching romance as something good and distinct from unchaste actions that we teach people not to mire themselves in. We should exercise faith that those we call young men and young women can learn to talk to one another and experience attraction in the Lord’s uplifting way instead of Satan’s degrading way. If we don’t believe we can teach that . . . prepare for tiny Primaries, consolidated wards, and fewer stakes of Zion.

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We climbed a steep trail that was a mile long. The trail was wet and muddy.

At the top we could see for many miles all around. There were a hundred happy people and a dozen dogs up there. We used eclipse glasses to look at the sun.

When the moon completely blocked the sun, it was dark like it is an hour after sunset. I could see the planets Jupiter and Venus in the sky near the sun. Because the moon was blocking, the sun looked black with a white fringe all around it.
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