Last week with Thursday off I took my two youngest children to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Musuem. It is a huge hanger at Dulles Airport stuffed full of retired airplanes and a few rockets. Its signature collection pieces are Space Shuttle Discovery, an SR-71 Mach 3 reconnaissance jet, and an Air France Concorde. It had been several years since I had last visited, and there were more people than any time I had been there previously. One enjoyment in that was the several times I was close enough to overhear fathers explaining exhibits to their families.

—An aircraft I had not noticed before was the Aerodrome that Langley was trying to get airborne at the time the Wrights succeeded. When I saw that suspended cloth-draped stick skeleton, I thought it was someone’s fanciful project to bring a Leonardo da Vinci sketch into 3-D full-scale reality.

—The Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum in Ohio is a vast collection. I visited once in 2003 (the day the Space Shuttle Columbia failed on re-entry). The last few years I keep wanting to return.

The First Presidency directed the Church, “To allow additional time on Easter Sunday for worship with family and friends, we have asked all wards and branches to meet only for sacrament meeting.” Worshipping with our families at home is a familiar concept, but how should we go about worshipping with our friends on Easter with our additional hour that we will not be at church? The option that comes first to mind is to attend Easter services that are not associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Perhaps an interfaith sunrise service, or a worship service in one of our friends’ churches. My own ward’s sacrament meeting on Easter will begin at 11 AM, so it should be easy for me to find another church service before that.

Another option would be for me to arrange some private Easter worship with a friend. Invite him to my house or elsewhere to sing a hymn, pray, and share expressions with one another of our joy in Christ’s triumph. I’ve never done anything quite like that. What do you think the First Presidency is telling the Latter-day Saints to do on Easter with our additional time for worship with friends?

The last time Easter fell on the first Sunday in April was 2021, and many of the General Conference talks on that day were what one might prepare with Easter especially in mind, while others focused on other things, such as President Oaks on “Defending Our Divinely Inspired Constitution.” Easter and General Conference will next coincide on April 5, 2026. If the pattern of last year and next continues, I suppose the Sunday sessions of Conference that day will be limited to a single hour, or perhaps omitted altogether.

WORDS by Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

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The temples close annually for a couple weeks of deep cleaning and maintenance. Sometimes they close for a year or two of renovation. Very rare is for one of these buildings, which in their design and purpose point to eternity, to close and never open again. Saturday night the Provo Temple in Utah will close and never open again. Scheduling for the endowment rooms and baptistry for today (Thursday), Friday, and Saturday shows those spaces completely reserved.

After Saturday, the Provo Temple will be demolished, and to the west of where it will have formerly stood, the Provo Rock Canyon Temple will be erected.

Last April I was in Provo for BYU graduation ceremonies, and while I was in town I entered the Provo Temple one last time. I could not devote the hours to engage in ordinance work, but I stopped at the painted/sculpted mural of Jesus with the woman at Jacob’s well. After that I changed into white temple attire and went to the Celestial Room. After perhaps half an hour there, I continued to the floor with the sealing rooms and lingered another half hour. I had last been present in those spaces thirty-three years before, when I was finishing up as a BYU student.

I looked at the aged people around me who had been younger than my present age thirty-three years earlier. I thought of the aged people of that prior time, when I was young, who are now all dead.

I once noticed in the home of a friend a picture from her wedding day in 1993. There she was standing in front of the Provo Temple, which a year from now will only exist in pictures and memories and ordinances like hers.

The church’s newsroom reports that date nights were sponsored in the last couple weeks at the church’s colleges and 15 of the larger institutes. (link) One obstacle to addressing a problem is that recognizing the problem can be embarrassing, and that was my first reaction: Is our current crop of 20-year-olds so undeveloped that they need their college presidents to coax them into pairing off for an evening? Well, yes, they are, so let’s face up to it instead of pretending all is fine or just grousing that those young people aren’t doing what they ought to on their own. The world they live in isn’t all of their own making, their cluelessness in pursuing romance is not just a personal problem, and improving the climate within our communities to one more conducive to their success is a job for all.

“While Elder Gilbert [church commissioner of education] said he realizes a one-night event won’t be ‘a silver bullet,’ the hope is that it will be a catalyst to help re-instill a culture of dating.”

It was April 1998 that I sat at dinner next to a future member of the House of Lords. (more…)

The church announced that Patrick Kearon was ordained an apostle yesterday. He was baptized on Christmas Eve 1987 at age 26, so I went looking for the last time someone baptized as an adult was later ordained an apostle. I had to look back farther than I had guessed.

Ulisses Soares was a child when his parents were baptized, and he was baptized at age 8.
Dieter Uchtdorf likewise.
John Widstoe was baptized in April 1884 at age 12.
Charles Penrose was baptized on May 14, 1850 at age 18 and ordained apostle July 7, 1904.
Anthon Lund was baptized about 1856 at age 12.
Marriner Merrill was baptized April 1852 at age 19 and ordained apostle October 7, 1889.
Albert Carrington was baptized July 18, 1841 at age 28 and ordained apostle July 3, 1870.

So, the last apostle prior to Elder Kearon to be baptized at age 20 or older was someone born in 1813, when Joseph Smith was seven.

Long-time perusers of this web site may remember the birthday greetings issued here to Ken Mattingly following his 75th, 80th, and 85th birthdays. This morning at breakfast looking through the pages of the newspaper I noticed the photo above and knew why it would be appearing. (more…)

The obituary for Elder Ballard says he is survived by seven children, 43 grandchildren, 105 great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild. So at first glance at least one of the Elder Ballard’s children had as many children as Ballard and his wife did. The ratio of great-grandchildren to grandchildren is 2.4. What might that ratio grow to with future births?

I am not interested in Elder Ballard’s family per se, but I find it a case put in my lap of a faithful Mormon public figure, who had several children and whose children had several children, that I might use to ponder what the drop-off in fecundity may be for the current generation involved in having children. It is also a big enough family that individual cases of involuntary limited fertility shouldn’t throw off the population-scale picture.
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Church president Russell Nelson exhorted the saints to “Think celestial!” As one point of difference between what he was encouraging and its alternative, he taught, “Thus, if we unwisely choose to live telestial laws now, we are choosing to be resurrected with a telestial body. We are choosing not to live with our families forever.” Some detractors of the prophets and Christ’s church characterize this doctrine as a threat to take away from those who won’t toe the line something important to them. The more I see of non-celestial thinking, though, the more President Nelson’s words feel like a restatement of choices, explicit or implied, that people deliberately make. For some, family life is not a desired eternity.

Some righteous people through the circumstances of their lives and bodies are for now denied the blessings of spouse or progeny, and prophets have taught that these desires will be fulfilled in the eternities if they live faithfully. Others have these blessings in mortality, but do not value them, and will not be burdened or blessed with them in eternity.

Many choose to be “childless by choice,” or cheer on those who so choose. Many who are married decide to abandon wife or husband, and others do not seek marriage. Their like-minded friends who are happy enough with their spouses for now cheer on the separateds’ and singles’ lack of attachment. Older people declare that their retired, empty-nest years are “my time” and reject any notion that they will be wasting significant swathes of it fortifying relationships with six-year-olds. Married, single, separated. Five children or two dogs. It’s all the same to them, neither good nor bad, all a compound in one. And thus dead, or as President Nelson’s taught, not celestial and alive forever. Think celestial.

[This photo shows the tracks left by my son Saturday night a week and a half ago as he sped off with his bride from the wedding reception to begin their honeymoon. I took the photo Monday morning.]

Thinking on yesterday’s post warning that “Births are not Well in Zion,” a number of things we could potentially do better came to mind, and I will elaborate on one: Start early.

Wise counsel I have heard a few times from a friend in our elders’ quorum meetings is: Whatever it is you want your children to know three years from now, talk to them about that now. (more…)

“At least within the Church, those who feel a need to be a bit shocking still have tattoos and piercing available. You have to feel a little sorry for the John Waters types of the world who have to keep reaching farther into the absurd as past deviances become normalized. Sometimes it can be unkind not to at least pretend something disturbs us. Forty years ago Mrs. Howell could present the Skipper with a gold earring and it was a funny little joke.” —September 7, 2005

In the eighteen years since, the tattoos have grown to Lydia proportions, requiring some to take up more grandiose abuses of the flesh, cheered on by an army desperate to embrace everything and appear shocked by nothing. And with reference to fasting from corporations, every corporation this month is celebrating this escapism from reality.

“Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death.”

“Shane Reese’s career sounds like a boyhood dream: full of sports, wildlife, bombs, race cars and space exploration.

“He worked with nuclear weapons and helped the National Academy of Science monitor the demolition of two chemical weapons stockpiles. He consulted for an NFL team and the U.S. Olympic volleyball team. He published original research on baseball legend Babe Ruth and NASCAR icon Jeff Gordon. And he predicts the power of solar storms and helps government scientists understand a shape-shifting mass of energy on the edge of our galaxy.

“For all that, this year he will join the hall of fame for statisticians by being named a fellow of the American Statistical Association.”
–from a BYU news release from July 1, 2013

The light on the horizon at 6:00 AM on this late February morning brought a song back to mind. The summer before last (2021), the Killers put out the album Pressure Machine. At some point maybe I will write an analysis of it, which will be titled “Eleven Songs about Nephi, the town in Juab County.” The album is well worth an uninterrupted hour set aside to hear it continuously in order from end to end. My favorite of those eleven songs is the fifth, “Sleepwalker.”

Back from dropping off a son at seminary, I went into the backyard to take care of a small task suited to the time available before the sun would rise. And I pulled up a 1996 BYU speech from Elder Neal Maxwell, and in the way that sometimes happens when a thought has already entered the mind, I found in Maxwell’s words reminders of what I like in “Sleepwalker.”

I am so grateful for these intertwinings of our lives. I could say the same with regard to Elder Eyring. The manner in which our lives have intersected has been such a great blessing to me, and it is likewise so with Bruce Hafen and with so many more. It is a marvelous thing when the Lord gives us these experiences, and, of course, you have them as well.

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Considering what an opinionated bunch we are around here, full of gloom about “the current situation,” we don’t really touch politics much, so I hope this comment of mine doesn’t ruin things. (more…)