In Praise of Pastoral Wisdom

On a written ministry that is as magisterial as it is unheralded.

Image credit: Beck Seamons

A month or so ago, the Church News happily announced that for the first time in its history, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has four nonagenarian apostles. I’m not convinced that this milestone is newsworthy, nor am I convinced that having extremely old men at the head of an ever-evolving church is necessarily cause for full-throated celebration (I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, just that it comes with pros and cons). But I won’t dwell on either of those points here because the reason for the announcement was the ninetieth birthday of Henry B. Eyring, and Henry B. Eyring’s written ministry has changed my life. For most members of the church, Jeffrey R. Holland’s rhetoric is the benchmark to beat, but I’ve always been drawn to Eyring’s corpus, which is perhaps less literary than Holland’s, but at least as effective.

One of the most distinctive qualities of Eyring’s style is his tendency to endear himself to his audience by reassuring them of their competence. When he shares scripture stories or gospel principles, he prefaces them by telling his readers and listeners that they are already familiar with what he is going to say. For example, in a speech he delivered at the Church’s general conference in October 2018, he said the following in order to introduce a passage of scripture: “You remember God’s words regarding his children at the creation of the world.” Likewise, in an October 2017 general conference address, Eyring introduced his subject—“the wonderful way in which the Lord leads his kingdom on the earth”—with the caveat that “you already know the fundamentals.” The inclusion of “you remember” and “you already know” might seem superfluous or merely rhetorical, but it works. At least for me, Eyring’s reflex towards humility feels sincere, and is a productive habit for a leader to have in an organization that can tend towards the deification of those at its head. (I’m reminded of the joke that holds that Catholics preach papal infallibility but think the pope is imperfect, whereas members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints preach against apostolic infallibility but think their leaders are perfect.)

In addition to being a means of identifying with his audience, I believe that Henry Eyring’s low-key approach represents an intelligent way of dealing with repetition. As is frequently noted in Sunday school and other settings, men and women who remain active members of the Church their entire lives will be brought to read the same words, sentences and stories again and again and again. If you hang around long enough, you’ll soon realize that there is nothing new under the sun. Rather than resisting this phenomenon and scoring some new insight or drawing our attention to minor details, Eyring tends to take the standard reading of a passage and consider it aloud until it reveals its implications. A slight revision of my previous statement, then, is called for: there are no new principles under the sun, but when practiced in a human life those ancient principles are endlessly generative. 

One example of this is Eyring’s address in the October 2020 general conference, “Tested, Proved, and Polished.” As part of those remarks, Eyring draws on Abraham 3:25–26—by no means an unexpected reference given the subject matter—to make the point that life is difficult by design. Certainly, this can come across as a trite observation, and if cited willy-nilly can even seem like indifference to the suffering of others, but from the mouth of Henry Eyring, I receive it as wisdom. Maybe that’s because in previous remarks, Eyring has proven himself capable of speaking with great wisdom and compassion on the subject of life’s difficulty. While on my mission in southern France, I remember being struck by his brief but precise analysis of missionary work, included in a fireside address he gave in 1999:

He knows what it is for a missionary to arrive in a strange country, perhaps try to speak a new language, eat unfamiliar food, work until fatigue almost overwhelms, be rejected often, savor the moments when the miracle of the gospel changing lives occurs, and then return home to face another set of challenges and changes. And He knows how our human powers to cope are not constant.

Though Eyring’s description of the mission itself is surely accurate, what I find particularly incisive is his recognition of the fact that those two years or eighteen months are part and parcel of life tout court. If done correctly, there is no before, during or after, there is just, as Adam Miller puts it, “you and the work and the people who share in the work with you.” You weather the highs and lows of the mission and then, without taking a breath, you come home and get back to work. The brief and pulsing triumph of the return soon fades into new duties, new habits and new joys, and there is no cycle and the cycle never ends.  

_________________________________

I spent my first few months as a missionary in Yverdon, Switzerland, a lakeside town located about an hour north of Lausanne. Like many new missionaries, I was constantly anxious and spent much of my free time trying to persuade myself that things would get better with time. At night, I would stare out our back window towards the mountains outside of town and wonder how I was going to get up and do it all again tomorrow. My solaces were sleep, the Swiss countryside and my weekly calls home. In the grand scheme of things, I was fine, but at the time I felt fragile, lonely and decidedly out of place. I had never done something so hard. 

I arrived in Yverdon on August 1, and in early October, Henry Eyring and a host of others spoke at the 189th Semiannual General Conference. That whole conference was a source of great joy and peace, but I remember being particularly moved by Eyring’s remarks on the intertwined ascendance of our holiness and happiness as we navigate life alongside our Heavenly Parents. I listened to a recording of his talk on my bunk bed, and I nearly wept as he talked persuasively of the transformation made possible by the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Speaking of some family friends, he asserted simply and powerfully that he “had seen the Atonement of Jesus Christ work in their lives and in the lives of their family members.” Later, I would reflect in an email home that his talk taught me that “the process of becoming increasingly pure and holy through the Atonement of Jesus Christ is sufficiently meaningful to account for the banality of other aspects of [missionary work].” It’s not as though things shifted dramatically from one day to the next, but I carried Eyring’s insight with me for the rest of my mission, and drew on it frequently to explain to myself and others the import of what I was doing in France and Switzerland.

___________________________________

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. is supposed to have said that “for the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” Henry Eyring’s simplicity is the kind that situates itself on the far side of complexity. Like Lowell Bennion, Erying knows that “faith, repentance, love, God, atonement, are but words in a book, symbols of attitudes and realities that we comprehend only in part.” Which is to say, the basic rubric of a covenant life is far more than scaffolding for the more consequential and ambitious theological claims that are to follow. The milk is the meat.