It Helps to Have a Village

Abstract: In preparing the next generation, it really is helpful when parents don’t stand alone and they have the help of others outside the family. This is one of the reasons why the seemingly growing gulf between gospel values and the values of the societies around us is such a cause for concern: “The truths and values we embrace are mocked on ev’ry hand.”[1] All of us have benefited from innumerable influences—from teachers in and out of the Church, from writers, from youth leaders, from coaches, from role models of all kinds. We may even have forgotten many of those influences, and, no doubt, many of those who have influenced us are unaware of the impact that they’ve had. We should be trying as hard as we can to see that we pass on the gifts that we’ve been given, to do for others what has been done for us. Indeed, we should try to multiply those gifts. “Pay it forward,” goes the currently fashionable (and very admirable) slogan. “Freely ye have received,” commands the Savior, “freely give” (Matthew 10:8).

Occasionally, I fall into a reminiscent mood. It’s probably part of my advancing age and a precursor of my approaching, inevitable demise. Barring some unforeseen and unprecedented medical miracle, much more of my life—much more, even, of my adult life—is behind me than lies before me. Many of the people who most formed my life and who (for good or ill) most shaped my personality and character have now moved on. This thought really sobers me.

I was born and raised in southern California, the youngest in a religiously tepid and denominationally divided home. I had one half-brother (though I, at least, never thought of him as a half-brother) who [Page viii]was ten years older than I. My mother had grown up in southern Utah, in St. George, in a marginally Latter-day Saint family (with an often-absentee father whose somewhat migratory principal occupation was sheep-shearing). My father was a non-practicing Lutheran who had grown up on a farm in rural North Dakota.[2]

They were children of the Depression who then lived through World War II. My mother had left St. George soon after her high school graduation, seeking work in Los Angeles. My father had also come to Los Angeles, following in the footsteps of an older brother who found work in the booming construction industry of southern California. My parents met several years after his service on the European continent as a non-commissioned officer in the Eleventh Armored Division of General George S. Patton’s Third Army. By the time of their meeting, my father and one of his younger brothers had started their own paving and grading company, which was a significant element of the environment in which I grew up. (For several years, I knew the company’s mechanic as “Uncle Warren,” and I believed that I had other uncles named Joe, Frank, Hank, Charley, and Tino. Happily, I never entirely outgrew the feeling that we were family.)

Both of my parents were highly intelligent; neither could be remotely considered an intellectual. They hadn’t been raised to be such and, although they probably enjoyed reading more than most in their circles, their lives afforded them little opportunity to indulge in “bookishness.” Books were for your spare time, if you ever had any. By strange contrast, from my earliest memory, books were as essential for me as breathing. I devoted scores and scores of hours to poring over articles in the World Book Encyclopedia that my mother purchased from a traveling salesman.

After some time spent quite out of harmony with the Church, my brother transferred to Brigham Young University for his final undergraduate year. He then went on to earn a night-school law degree while working in the family construction business, of which he eventually assumed control after the death of my uncle and the retirement of my father. For some reason, nobody ever seriously considered the possibility of my permanently joining the business. I suppose it was plainly obvious that I wasn’t cut out to be a paving and grading contractor. Instead, I’ve become the kind of “doctor” for whom nobody ever desperately cries out when there’s an emergency. I once threatened [Page ix]my department chairman, warning him that, unless I received a substantial salary increase, I intended to leave the university and open a lucrative consulting business on eleventh-century Arabic Neoplatonic philosophy. He laughed without any trace of concern, and I was given no additional salary boost.

My parents were, however, surprisingly supportive of my life as what, at first, seemed a perpetual student and, later, as an academic. Still, while my college-educated brother endorsed my choice of career, I’m not sure that my family ever really understood it. Nor did several in my extended family: A blunt-spoken maternal uncle, a farmer, citing the venerable adage that “those who can, do, while those who can’t, teach,” urged me on one occasion to take up welding, which, he explained, is a real skill, and a useful one. My parents called me one night after I had been teaching at Brigham Young University for a couple of years to tell me—I think this was my mother’s idea, rather than my father’s—that, if I ever decided to go to law school, they would be more than willing to pay my expenses.

And, frankly, I had always been intrigued by the law. But I quickly realized that, if I went the “legal route,” it would be to go into the academic side of it all, not the really lucrative side. Constitutional law interested me. So, too, did the philosophy of law, or jurisprudence. Tax law, though? Or corporate law? Not at all. In other words, I would have become a law professor. I think my mother would have remained perplexed—gently and lovingly and mostly silently disappointed, but disappointed nonetheless.[3]

It was obvious to even the most casual observer that I had heard the siren call of a quite different career. One summer, when I was about thirteen or fourteen years of age, it occurred to a kindly couple in my home ward in San Gabriel, California—Tom and Mary Simmons—that I might enjoy BYU Education Week. (I had never so much as heard of BYU Education Week, but they were more right than they could have known.) So they invited me to come with them when Education Week was being held not far away, in either—I don’t recall which—Covina [Page x]or West Covina.[4] On the roster that summer, for the program that I attended, were such lights as Hugh Nibley, Truman Madsen, Daniel Ludlow, and—believe it or not—Elder Bruce R. McConkie, who was still a member of what was then called the First Council of the Seventy. At that point, from having heard him speak in General Conference, Elder McConkie was the only speaker with whom I was to any degree familiar; I may already have been vaguely aware of Hugh Nibley, but I’m not quite sure.

I cannot overstate the impact that my experience at that Education Week had on me; it changed the direction of my life. Thinking of it now, in fact, I can’t help but think of a very famous poem (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”) written by John Keats, then only twenty years old. He composed it immediately after being introduced to the translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey done two centuries earlier by the Elizabethan poet George Chapman. Of their effect upon him, Keats wrote:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.[5]

[Page xi]Before that Education Week, I never had any real glimpse of the inexhaustible depth and intellectual fascination of the restored gospel; I had only recently become really interested in the claims of the Church. As I said, I had grown up with a non-member father and a marginally active mother who, I think, mostly attended Church, when she did, because she enjoyed the people and partly because it gave her social contacts with fellow émigrés (including some relatives) from Utah. I can’t recall ever having had Family Home Evening or family prayer or scripture reading or even discussions of the gospel in our home during my childhood. And, although I had a wide circle of friends in elementary school and high school, very few if any of them were Latter-day Saints.

Truman Madsen gave four nightly lectures. I blundered into the first lecture but, thereafter, made absolutely sure to attend the next three. Two were on “Existentialism” and “Logical Positivism.” I don’t recall the other pair of titles; “Marxism” might have been one of them. I sat spellbound. Hugh Nibley also spoke four times, and I was mesmerized. I don’t even recall his topics; I think that I remember his talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Specific details of that Education Week are lost to me, but the effect remains. This was a rich intellectual and spiritual feast quite unlike my weekly experiences in sacrament meeting, Sunday school, and priesthood quorum lessons. It opened a whole new world to me. Truman Madsen and Hugh Nibley were enormous formative influences on me from then on. Their impact came into my life at a time when I was ready to receive such influences. Moreover, my interests today still reflect the continuing legacy of those early formative experiences. My forays into philosophy and the history of philosophy, especially the philosophy of religion, echo my early exposure to Truman Madsen. (It is, I readily admit, a pallid echo.) My excursions into antiquity and the medieval world, and particularly into the pre-modern Middle East, are a direct result of the influence of Hugh Nibley. I subscribed to BYU Studies right there at Education Week as an early teen, and I eagerly devoured each issue as it arrived. I still subscribe today.

I’m grateful to say that Truman Madsen and his wife, Ann, ultimately became friends and, to a somewhat lesser degree of familiarity, so did Hugh and Phyllis Nibley. They never disappointed me. In everything I saw of them, they were wholly committed believers, dedicated [Page xii]intellectually and spiritually and in every other way to the restored gospel.

While I’m at it, a funny story: During my first freshman semester at BYU, I was enrolled in one of Truman Madsen’s classes. I was still star-struck, but I went once to his office to ask him a question that I no longer recall. As I was waiting to speak to him—he was talking about something fairly substantial to somebody else—he suddenly realized that he had parked his car in a spot where it would become illegal within just a minute or so. He turned to me: “Could you please move my car?” Surprised, I nodded that, yes, I could. He reached into his pocket and tossed me the keys, telling me where his car was and what it looked like. Thrilled to be of service to someone whom I so admired, I trotted outside, opened his car, and discovered that it had a manual transmission. I had turned seventeen not all that long before and, at that time, had never driven a car with a “stick shift.” However, I managed to move it to a better parking place nearby, though not without a few jerks and stalls that probably amused anyone looking on. I then returned his keys to him, and he was very gracious in talking with a lowly first-semester freshman groupie. It was my first direct personal contact with the great man. I’ve never forgotten it; I like to think that he did, though. (It’s amazing to me, by the way, to realize that he was much, much younger that day than I am now.)

Why do I relate these experiences? The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often credited with the insight that “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”[6] Anyway, had it not been for that invitation to Education Week—thank you, Tom and Mary, wherever you are!—I might not have bothered applying, a few years later, to Brigham Young University. I certainly had never thought of any such thing prior to then. And the rest, as they say, is history. My entire career of vicious character assassination, mercenary lying, shameless pseudo-scholarship, and mean-spirited rage (as some of my critics like to describe it) might never have occurred.

Now, it’s true that I’ve oversimplified the origin of my own life-path here. There are other factors that I might have mentioned, there are spiritual influences that I’ve chosen not to mention, and there are [Page xiii]undoubtedly many other elements that I can’t even quite remember. My lifetime enthusiasm for C. S. Lewis began at about the same period in my life; he has certainly affected me. My brother returned from his year in Provo as an absolutely converted fan of Brigham Young University, and he lost no time in trying to convert me.

Another influence was a then-recent reading of Nephi Anderson’s 1898 novel Added Upon, a copy of which we had inherited from my maternal grandmother.[7] I picked it up one day when I was home from school, sick and very bored. For all of its serious limitations and flaws—I’ve tried to re-read it since, but have been unable to get past the opening pages—Added Upon provided me with my first real appreciation for the plan of salvation, a glimpse that proved transformative, firing my imagination and casting the world in a whole new light that has never altogether faded. Added Upon was a precursor, in a very real sense, of the 1973 Latter-day Saint musical Saturday’s Warrior—which, curiously, I’ve never seen. I was on my mission when it first appeared, and, in a way, perhaps I no longer needed it.

Of course, nobody else’s testimony or path is identical to mine, and nobody’s story follows my particular pattern. Each of us is unique. But I’m grateful for those who intervened in my life, knowingly or unknowingly, and who made it possible for me to find the path that I’ve found.

Years ago now, Hillary Clinton published a book bearing the title It Takes a Village.[8] She received a great deal of criticism for that title, which she apparently took from an African proverb: “It takes a village to raise a child.”[9] To the extent that she may have been suggesting that the state should assume the role of parents in raising children—if that is indeed what she was suggesting (I never read the book)—she deserved the criticism. But it really does, ideally, take a village to raise a child. Or, at a minimum, it is exceedingly fortunate when parents have a village—a neighborhood, a ward, Primary teachers, priesthood advisors, youth leaders, grandparents, role models, and others—behind them to reinforce (and not to contradict) their teachings and their examples. And passing values and wholesome practices from [Page xiv]one generation to the next is absolutely vital. As Elder Jeffrey R. Holland has said, “This Church is always only one generation away from extinction.”[10]

I was fortunate in this regard, as I did have a village—several villages, in fact. I hope and pray that many of us can serve similar roles in the lives of those who will succeed us. Perhaps, for at least a few odd ducks such as myself, The Interpreter Foundation, with its articles and books and films and conferences and, most importantly, its people, can function in such a way. We never know whether something we say, something we write, or something we bring to others will have an impact like the one I experienced in that Education Week so many decades ago. I hope we can keep our eyes open, our minds keen, and our spirits alert so that we can recognize opportunities to have a life-long impact for good.

At this point, as is customary, I want to thank all of those, very much including the authors and the donors, who made possible this sixty-second volume of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. In particular, I thank Allen Wyatt, Jeff Lindsay, and Godfrey Ellis. With this issue, Jeff steps down as one of the journal’s executive editors, although he remains a member of the Foundation’s board of directors. He has devoted enormous time and effort to his editorial work, and we will miss him in that regard. We are, however, very pleased to welcome Brant S. Gardner and Rebecca Reynolds Lambert as new members of our editorial team. The members of the village may change from time to time, but I openly recognize that without such devoted volunteers in the village, Interpreter simply couldn’t exist.

1. “As Zions Youth in Latter Days,” Hymns, no. 256.

2. I was privileged to baptize my father on the night I was set apart as a missionary. My brother confirmed him.

3. I like to think that my parents came to recognize that I was actually fairly successful, in my own way, when they were able to attend a dinner and reception in Beverly Hills in honor of the Islamic Translation Series, which I had founded at Brigham Young University. The event was attended by representatives of most of the Arab and Islamic nations that had consulates in the Los Angeles area. BYU’s president, Elder Merrill J. Bateman, conducted the meeting. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Council of the Twelve was the principal speaker.

4. Back in those days of yore, there wasn’t just the one huge Education Week at BYU. In fact, for all I know, that hadn’t even begun yet, but there were four-day regional Education Weeks in various locations where relatively large numbers of Latter-day Saints resided. Such was the case in the southern California of my youth.

5. John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Poetry Foundation (website), poetryfoundation.org/poems/44481/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-homer. In his excitement—he evidently composed the sonnet in a sudden burst of inspiration—Keats mistakenly wrote the name of Cortez instead of Balboa. Somewhere, presumably, he had read about Cortez’s conquest of Mexico and Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean during an expedition in Darien, an old name for part of Central America, and he conflated the two.

6. The statement is a paraphrase of a point that Kierkegaard makes in his journals. Further information can be found at Jack Maden, “Kierkegaard: Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards,” Philosophy Break (website), October 2023, philosophybreak.com/articles/kierkegaard-life-can-only-be-understood-backwards-but-must-be-lived-forwards/.

7. Copies of the novel are available from a variety of sources. Having long been available in the public domain, though, Added Upon can also be found at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org/ebooks/17249.

8. Hillary Clinton, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

9. Efforts to pinpoint the source of the proverb have, to date, been unfruitful. See “It Takes a Village,” Wikipedia, last modified 17 March 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_takes_a_village.

10. Jeffrey R. Holland, “That Our Children May Know,” (devotional speech, Brigham Young University, 25 August 1981), speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-holland/children-may-know/.

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