On Being Human and Being a Prophet
Book Review
Originally published: BYU Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Summer 1978), 591–98.
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ON BEING HUMAN AND BEING A PROPHET
With the death of President Lee many members of the Church wondered as Elder W Grant Bangerter expressed it in general conference last fall, “What will we do now? . . . We had never expected Spencer W. Kimball to become the president, and we had not looked to him for the same leadership evident in the life of Harold B Lee. We knew, of course, that he would manage somehow until the next great leader arose, but it would not be easy for him and things would not be the same. ‘O Lord,’ we prayed, ‘please bless President Kimball. He needs all the help you can give him’” (Ensign, November 1977, p. 26).
Since that time Spencer W. Kimball has announced the first additions to the canon of scripture in our century, has activated and nearly filled the First Quorum of Seventy, and has sought and received a revelation giving blacks the priesthood. With his call to “lengthen our stride,” and by his own example, he has sparked an explosion of new energy and growth in the whole Church. In just four years, the number of full-time missionaries has increased fifty percent and convert baptisms have doubled. Organized Stakes of Zion have gone from 600 to nearly 1000 and membership has increased from three to over four million. Half again as many temples are in process or announced. New countries, including Poland, have given the Church official standing; there is expectation that other countries will be opened and many more temples built and that his goal of 45,000 missionaries, many from other countries, will soon be met. That energy—that quickening spirit of expectation—pervades the Church, and there is a surge of faith that the Kingdom will indeed soon fill the whole earth and the Savior come.
Along with all this there is closer moral scrutiny, greater concern about inadequacy in others and ourselves, greater attention to homely fundamentals like getting married, working in the earth with our own hands, keeping our yards clean, writing journals, carefully examining our own lives and trying to improve. The Church, in just four years, has been profoundly influenced by the vision, the energy, the moral rigor and restless sense of inadequacy of President Kimball. And in the biography Spencer W. Kimball, Edward L. Kimball, a son, and Andrew E. Kimball, Jr., a grandson, have shown us with unusual and moving clarity the roots of these qualities.
As good as it is, this Mormon biography is not without weaknesses. It is not the best structured and does not contain the most elegant writing or best analysis. The chapter “Stake President” is weak in organization and sparse in detail, and the usual biographical challenge of theme versus chronology is badly resolved there and a problem elsewhere. Also, the book is not the best researched. While most biographies suffer from not having sufficient first person primary materials, this one relies almost wholly on them. We see how President Kimball perceives himself, but not enough of how others perceived him in the same situations or of documentary evidence that would give the solidity of granite facts good biography needs.
Nevertheless, Spencer W. Kimball is a landmark in Mormon biography. It stands in relation to Mormon biography as Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson stands in relation to all English biography: it is the best so far and the first to take a great subject and give us the whole man, warts, divinity, and all, and thus make his life unavoidably and eternally part of our own. For the first time we have a book about an LDS Church president which is not mainly an attempt to tell us why he was or was not a prophet of god. Rather, it shows us, with remarkable directness and fullness, a human life, one in many ways like our own, which through long, painful struggles was touched by extraordinary experiences and influences that the reader can believe, with the authors, were from God.
The authors achieve this by firmly holding to their decision not to ignore any weakness or problem or exaggerate any strength. They say that in that decision “we were faced with no real test of our integrity as biographers since our burrowing into the past only confirmed our personal impressions that this was a man of rare consistency, exemplifying in his private life the same virtues ascribed to the public man” (Preface p. x). Nevertheless, the authors, as close relatives and faithful Mormons, and Bookcraft, as a semi-official LDS publisher, have demonstrated remarkable courage and ability in producing such a handsome, well-edited, detailed, and complete piece of work—and thus have shown the Mormon public how LDS biography has to be written now that it has come of age.
Spencer W. Kimball is the first Mormon biography to lead the reader so completely to genuine identification rather than to mere adoration or idolizing, to accept the prophet as a real model for his own human struggle. This is accomplished by the very openness and completeness with which the book deals with a prophet’s own humanness and sense of inadequacy. It is the kind of book that probably could not have been published concerning a dead prophet. And it could only be published in the time of a living prophet of the profound humility and habitual self examination of President—and Sister Kimball—whose concern for truth and lack of personal protectiveness not only prevented censorship but provided, in their great volume of personal journals, correspondence, and oral history, the bulk of material for the book. As the authors say, “the whole undertaking was possible only because of their willingness to talk and write openly about themselves (p. x). In this demonstration that the humanness of a prophet can be shown without being either antagonistic or patronizing, both the faith of the saints and Mormon literature and history have been well served.
That President Kimball has apparently come to feel the great value of teaching through the model of his own life is clearly seen in the unusually personal but highly effective sermon in the priesthood session of April Conference 1978, as he recounted the details of his own youth and past for both positive and negative example. For the many who have responded to this emphasis, Spencer W. Kimball provides a mother lode of detail. Those who have identified with the boy who was proficient with a slingshot but learned to respond to the singing of “Don’t Kill the Little Birds” will warm to the teenager who usually worked hard but sometimes avoided chores by using his fathers willingness to let him practice the piano instead, or who did not participate in “acts of vandalism” but still remembers painfully that he stood by and watched others perform them and did not speak out, who was expelled from school with the rest of the boys for insisting on a “sluff day,” who has dark memories of a boyhood in a near-frontier desert country, including seeing two sisters die within a year (one, the tenth child, whom his father referred to as the “tithing child,” given back to the Lord) and then, a year later, of seeing his mother sicken in pregnancy and slowly die, but who also remembers his father, the stake president, promising life to the near dead and serving selflessly, also among the Spencer W.s. We see the young man caught up enough in the coils of life that when he was himself called as stake president, he and Camilla spent that first Sunday night visiting “those with whom there had been some trouble [to] clear the slate so that he could go forward with free conscience (p. 171). We see a young boy from a somewhat reserved background on a trip from salt lake city surprised when his uncle Joseph F. Smith stooped down in full beard and kissed each of his many children as they came home from school; then we see him as a newly called apostle, deeply moved when he visited Heber J. Grant, and the aged prophet, who was too weak to stand, drew him down into his arms and kissed him; and we see him eventually develop into the prophet who as he was leaving the third solemn assembly he had conducted that day, while all present stood in respect, noticed his son among the choir members and without hesitation or self consciousness went to him, embraced, and kissed him. We see the man who could take delight in remembering that when he was called as an apostle and other well-wishers were saying how appropriate, even inevitable, the call was, an old cowpuncher who had watched him grow up declared what Spencer was feeling himself: “It’s clear the Lord must have called you—no one else would have thought of you” (p. 198).
When he was called as an apostle, the first in the twentieth century from outside Utah, he was stunned, uncomprehending, reduced to uncontrolled weeping, even skeptical for the first time of the authorities’ inspiration—until he spent a day on a mountain near Boulder, Colorado, and received a dream-vision of his grandfather, Heber C. Kimball, and an assurance that the call was divine. This anxiety over adequacy and worthiness continued, expressing itself in what he felt might be compensatory hard work, until in 1948, after pushing his car repeatedly through drifted sand while visiting reservations in Arizona, he was struck down with his first heart trouble. The enforced time in bed as he tried to recover only increased his anxiety: “There were just twelve apostles, he berated himself, and so much work to do. What good was he on his back? Even on his feet, he felt he was the least of them. Others were smoother, smarter, more efficient, better educated” (p. 251). So he went back to work too hard too soon and his heart trouble returned.
One night he lay for eighteen hours in agony, his chest seized with pain. For long hours in his room he thought through his life. He told Camilla what to do with the investments and property if he died. He mused that “thousands of people in the Church are measuring the Church, their church, by me. They look at me with my smallness, my ineptitudes, my weaknesses, my narrow limitations, and say, ‘What a weak Church to have such weak leadership.’ It is one of the things that has brought me to my back now. I have tried by double expenditure of energy to measure up….” (p. 253)
That last sentence, which may be taken for the motto of his life, gives special poignance to President Kimball’s present call to lengthen our stride. We know now what it has cost him to lengthen his. But of course, he has also been blessed—the unexpected “false vocal cord” that grew in and allowed speech, the perfect surgery on his heart, the continual disciplined development of skills and perspective—and that is the lesson of his life.
We are surprised to learn that uncertainty over being drafted, then marriage, then being called into a stake presidency at age 29, kept him from finishing college, because we have been made familiar with the fruits, in his speaking, his decisions, and his vision, of long self education. We are even a little surprised to learn of the years of pain and trouble with apparent cancer in his throat, the biopsies and then the operation (he insisting that part of the vocal cord be left, despite the risk to his life, so that he could have some chance of continuing to serve with his voice), the difficulty and embarrassment of long silence and then learning to speak again in a new way and having to speak with a raspy voice to vast audiences—because the force of the content make us forget that the voice is unusual or even notice the special electronic aids. It is a surprise to learn of his suffering for years with carbuncles as well as with the severe recurring heart pains without slackening his pace or to recall the extremely risky open-heart surgery in 1972, because the long struggle and perseverance and the resulting blessings have brought him to a state of health and energy in his mid-80s that allows him to wear out younger colleagues and leave us all breathless in the whirlwind of his creative activity.
Part of the quality of that life revealed in the book is centered in the theme of moral rigor combined with persistent effort on behalf of the resistant or neglected soul. President Kimball’s long service as an apostle on special assignment to deal with temple divorce and with the worst morals problems has sharpened his concern with repentance. We learn of night after night spent away from his family trying to help with troubled people; of seven hours with one couple trying to avoid divorce; of the telephone call from a distraught wife in California whose husband had deserted her and come to Salt Lake City, of elder Kimball’s locating him, making an appointment for the man to come to the office, and when he did not show up, going to the cheap hotel to sober him up, only to have the man disappear while being transferred from the hotel to Alcoholics Anonymous. And then, unwilling to give up, despite almost missing a train to Los Angeles for the temple dedication, the apostle walked up and down the alleys of Salt Lake City, in and out of bars and movie houses trying to find him. This particular man, we learn in the book, has been in and out of President Kimball’s life through the years since, through relapse and reclaiming again and again, and we are left only knowing that the effort continues unabated. The book tells of his success in his special assignment to aid the progress of Lamanite members but also of his unpopular, courageously outspoken (especially for the early 50s) struggle against prejudice among Mormons: He declared to a white audience in Tucson that in the story of the Good Samaritan “the robbed and beaten traveler … is the Spencer W. and we whites are either priest or Good Samaritan” (p. 258). He told the students and faculty at BYU that there were “too many Pharisees among the white men”; too many who worry about “unwashen hands … too many who ascribe the degradation of the Spencer W. as his just due … too many curiosity seekers and too few laborers” (p. 274). He told a congregation in New Mexico to accept the Spencer W.s and Mexicans with “open arms and hearts and meetinghouses. God will bless you if you do; God forgive you if you don’t” (p. 274).
The book tells of his feeling divine direction as he calls a stake president whom he does not know and whom no one expects to be called but also of his recording after a sermon, “I rambled and made a failure,” or again, “I floundered miserably.” Of two missionaries reconverting his brother whom he had tried to help and couldn’t, of his willingness to stay up late when bone tired to answer the questions of a branch president’s wife about her son recently killed in the war though a patriarch had promised him a mission and family “but having no answer for the unfathomable question.” Of his administering twice to a man who had been blinded, without any physical effect—but how, “two months later, the apostle led the tall man, still blind, by the arm through a temple endowment, ‘letting him see the temple with its rooms and paintings through my eyes’” (p. 216).
that kind of control and openness in a biographer takes enormous skill and we can be grateful that Edward and Andrew Kimball have the skill, but ultimately the power of this book as literature derives from the quality of its subject—the man’s life, as well as the technique of selection and expression. For instance, the authors skillfully help us see that powerful complexity which prevents President Kimball from being boxed in by traditional categories. He was furious at the University of Utah Pen for reprinting articles in 1947 by authors who had been hostile to the Church and in the early fifties could take pride in being compared with Joseph Fielding Smith for his outspoken fundamentalism, especially in matters of sexual morality and dress standards (he called for a “style of our own” in a scathing denunciation of immodest worldly fashions at BYU in 1951). He could also be impatient with other General Authorities for their apparent foot dragging on Lamanites or for certain fiscal policies, and on a trip through the Far East in 1960 could write, “I’d proselyte in Burma, but not in our conventional style. I’d go back to Paul’s program to some extent. Mission president who would go without his family and be prepared to rough it. No mission palace with a host of record keepers, typists, etc. … Establish the work by one of the 12. A mission president almost without portfolio” (pp. 328–329). He saw the work of a Baptist missionary couple who ran a home for twelve orphans in Karachi as “real Christian faith in action,” and suggested that the first LDS efforts in Pakistan could well copy this pattern. (p. 330)
And we can see the prophet who pleaded with the Lord for many days in the upper room of the temple concerning blacks and the priesthood in the apostle who in general conference in 1953 denounced the racism of an anonymous letter he had received complaining about “an Indian buck appointed as a bishop—an Indian squaw to talk in the Ogden Tabernacle—Indians to go through the Salt Lake Temple…. The sacred places desecrated by the invasion of everything that is forced on the white race (pp. 273–74).
It will take some time to fully assess the impact and significance for Mormon letters of the book Spencer W. Kimball. It is our hope here to convince Mormon scholars, writers, and teachers to read and recommend the book, and not to overlook it because it comes from the “popular press.” We feel certain that the book will become a model for all of us who try to write about Mormon culture. It succeeds in making us feel about its subject, Spencer W. Kimball, as William Clayton felt when he first met Joseph Smith:
He is no friend to iniquity but cuts at it wherever he sees it, and it is in vain to attempt to cloke it before him. He has a great measure of the spirit of God, and by this means he is preserved from imposition. He says, “I am a man of like passions with yourselves,” but truly I wish I was such a man. (In BYU Studies, Spring 1978, p. 479)