The talk My Son and Yours—Each a Remarkable One was given at the October 1986 General Conference by Ted E. Brewerton, then a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy. It is offered in the form of the speaker talking to one of his sons, with the invitation for the fathers in the audience to imagine they were speaking the same words to their own children. I find it interesting that despite this talk being delivered at a regular session of the conference, and not the priesthood session, it was specifically the fathers who were asked to advise their children, without mention of the mothers. I’m sure I missed that detail at the time, but it stands out to me now as a married man, armed with the knowledge that my wife has just as much, if not more, to teach our children as I do about who they are.
The first part of the talk is largely devoted to describing how big the universe is. The end goal is to assure Brewerton’s son, and by extension us, that despite its enormity and our relative smallness and insignificance, we are in fact children of God and therefore the reason that the universe was created, so we are all remarkable in our own way. In describing some of the numbers of stars and distances of light years, there is an amusing definition of one million:
[A] million is like your mother telling you to clean up your room 274 times every day for ten years.
Having three children myself, that seems like a good way to get a kid to grasp the concept of a large number.
We are then assured that God knows us individually, “where [we] are,” and “who [we] are and what [we] may become.” Just like out of the many stars in the universe, our sun is the remarkable one for us that provides our planet with light and energy, we too can be a remarkable one among many other people. To illustrate this, Brewerton shares a couple of allegedly true stories about figures from Church history being a “remarkable one.” (I say allegedly because while I do not necessarily distrust the account of the stories, I have no desire to independently verify them, and Church leaders have sometimes shown a track record to conveniently ignore any facts that may be unfavorable.) He then closes with a quote from former apostle James E. Talmage, about which I’m not completely sure of my feelings:
What is man in this boundless setting of sublime splendor? I answer you: Potentially now, actually to be, he is greater and grander, more precious according to the arithmetic of God, than all the planets and suns of space. For him were they created; they are the handiwork of God; man is his son. In this world man is given dominion over a few things; it is his privilege to achieve supremacy over many things.
On the one hand, I agree that mankind has vast potential (and I believe there is some sort of higher power in the universe). On the other hand, I’m not sure what to think about it being “his privilege to achieve supremacy over many things.” I’ve been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my children for the past few months, and I cannot help but think of the Federation’s philosophy of respect and equality for all life, with no intent at “supremacy” over another. But I think the intent of the statement is probably simply to emphasize the LDS doctrine that man may eventually become like God and enjoy his own multitude of creation.
A couple of other things I noticed about this talk:
As part of the description of the vastness of the universe, there are quotes from a 1975 publication by the National Geographic Society titled The Amazing Universe in an attempt to explain the scientific world is on the side of the Church in “[seeing] the evidence of a supreme being.” I may be reading too much into it, but that seems like an odd thing to slip into a talk unless you are trying to reassure people that science and faith are not mutually exclusive. (I don’t think they are, but there seems to be a large number of people who do.)
Also, after saying that we are God’s “most important creation,” there is an interesting statement:
So we must be master of our beings and control ourselves, and not be controlled by some habit or by someone else.
This, to me, is somewhat ironic given that the Church today generally expects members’ total obedience to the words of its leaders, and actively disapproves of dissenting or differing voices (see e.g. Kate Kelly, John Dehlin, Rock Waterman, Denver Snuffer).
All in all, I like the core message of this talk, that each person is remarkable and has something great to offer.
Poetism Commentary: “Means To The End”
The poem in question: Means To The End
About the time this poem was written, my family took a trip to Oregon, via motor home. I don’t recall if it was the primary purpose, but we visited some extended family there. We also drove through the redwood forest in northern California, where I bought some “happy rocks,” which are little tiny rocks with smiley faces drawn on them.
It was a long drive (I know approximately how long, given that last fall I made a similar drive with my wife and children), but it was nice to have a bit of room to move around in rather than just being crammed into our minivan. As I recall, the old LDS movie Saturday’s Warrior was watched over and over during the drive by my sisters, along with My Girl. I read some books, and I think wrote this poem during or shortly after the trip.
The reason the subject matter was on my mind, I think, is that a shortly before we left, our bishop stopped by for an impromptu interview regarding whether I should be ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood. In another six months I would be 19 years old and eligible to serve a mission for the LDS church. We had a brief discussion and the bishop told me he would consider things while our family was gone.
Throughout my life, I have often had a difficult time fully relating to things that I could not tangibly experience, though the written word helped me out a lot, in that it was both easy to ingest emotion and to filter out things I didn’t really want to experience. So one of the ways I tried to experience a deeper closeness to the Lord was to write about him from a fictional spectator’s point of view.
The title Means To The End is a mixed bag. It evokes the common phrase “the ends justify the means,” which does not generally carry positive connotations. I suppose I was trying to turn that around somehow. I’m not sure how appropriate it is, but I stand by it.
A man who has been traveling for a while sees Jesus ahead on the road, and looking for some walking company (but not necessarily anything else) speeds up a little to catch him. The first thing out of Jesus’ mouth is that He’d like to be friends. For me, that is the fundamental characteristic of Jesus. Regardless of all the other godly characteristics He may possess, the personal relationship is first and foremost.
The man is a little taken aback by this statement; I just met you and that’s the first thing you say to me? But he’s drawn in by a kind smile. He’s not a sucker; I like to think that when Jesus smiles, you just feel that good. Within just a short amount of time, Christ has been betrayed and is on trial. Despite not knowing Jesus personally for long, the man already knows “no horm could this man ever do.”
Then the scene switches to the Crucifixion. Despite the reworking (and somewhat recontextualizing) of the famous words, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” I think the heart of the matter is actually in the middle of the last stanza:
Again, despite the overarching reach of Jesus to be a savior for everyone, the focus for this person is, well, personal. Even though this moment is terrible, he is individually reassured. And that’s what I think Jesus is all about. It is also in this final stanza that the capitalization of pronouns referring to Jesus commences. It’s at this moment of true, personal connection that he becomes Him.
Now, a few words about a different, apparently earlier version of the text. I have one that changes three lines. The first is inconsequential: the last line of the second stanza,”This man would serve them better dead” became “The man would serve them better dead.”
The second is also relatively of little note: near the end of the first stanza, “We set off again, and as we walked…” became “We walked again, and as we walked….” I think the final version flows better.
The third change is the most interesting to me. The lines
originally read:
The change to use of the word straightway was deliberate. The word is used several times in the King James Version of the New Testament, and I take its meaning to be that of suggesting immediacy. The reference I always connect with use of the word is Mark 1:18, where Jesus tells some of the apostles who are fishermen to follow Him, and “straightway they… followed him.” The use in my poem reinforces to me the priority of Jesus to establish a personal friendship with each of us.
Finally, two years later, while serving as a missionary in France, I used this poem as a basis for one I wrote in French to share with members of the Church there. I debated whether to give the text its own blog entry, but I think maybe it fits here. I am pretty proud of the job I did of translation, especially the use of the passé simple tense, which is generally reserved for literary or other written texts. It is not something generally learned in high school French class or as part of missionary language training (but is used in The Book of Mormon and the Bible), so I had to struggle to get it right.
The rough English translation of the above text is: