On Dodgeball and Forgiveness

One day when I was in 4th or 5th grade a huge crowd of kids collected to play dodgeball during recess on the dodgeball circles that were painted on the asphalt “playground” on the west side of Bluffdale Elementary School. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was 4th grade, because that was the first year Bluffdale Elementary was open, and the school district hadn't brought in any portable classrooms yet to deal with overcrowding. The presence of these portable classrooms is relevant to my story here because when they were brought in, they got parked right on top of the dodgeball circles that provide the setting of this story. If it weren't for the fact that my friends and I had shifted our recreative attentions to basketball by the time the "portables" took up residence, I'm certain there would have been considerable, though ultimately futile, outrage regarding their placement. Such outrage would have been misplaced because, honestly, it was a terrible idea to paint circles on asphalt and encourage kids to throw balls at one another in them. The skinned knee that makes an appearance in the story-to-come was a clearly anticipatable and preventable injury. So parking the portables where they did was a serendipitous byproduct of the school district’s bureaucratic short-sightedness (and/or cheap-skatedness) manifested in its building a school that, within a year, was already over-crowded. I probably shouldn’t be so critical of school districts and their decisions. I have no idea how they make the decisions they make and I haven’t done my mile-shoe-walking, etc. But here I'm getting away from the story I came to tell. So, back to that lovely Spring day in 4th grade when there was a big dodgeball game going at recess.

The size of the game is important to note here because it was hard to get enough people together to play a decent game of dodgeball. Especially when they had the whole world of recess opportunities open to them and a mere 20 or 30 minutes in which to take advantage. So having such a large game was a rare and wonderful thing. In the run-up to the game getting going, probably during the teams being chosen, I remember specifically thinking I needed to make the most of this opportunity and have as much fun and as good of a time as I could, because these kinds of dodgeball games didn't come around all that often. 

Just thinking about this game, I can still smell the way your hands smell when they’ve been dirtied by a rubber ball that has, in turn, been dirtied by asphalt. And I can still feel the occasionally painful roughness of a rubber dodgeball as it is thrown/caught/ricocheted off one’s face. And my stomach still remembers the thrill of elation that accompanies a successful dodge as well as the devastating shame and disappointment of being gotten out. It's a cliche of cliches to rhapsodize about wanting to return to these halcyon moments of childhood, so it’s probably a good thing that this story isn’t headed in that direction. 

Don’t get me wrong, for most of the kids playing dodgeball that day, this probably was about as near an approximation of the platonic ideal of elementary school recess as could be asked for. But for me, and for Ben Tolman, this was not such a day. At least, not in the way you might think.

Ben and I were the same age and lived a mere 2-3 miles away from one another, but we weren't in the same class, and, if memory serves, he was on A track or maybe B, and I was on D track. So while we both took up residence in the same basic plane of existence and in fairly proximal social circles, the year-round school schedule made it so we didn't see much of one another. Whenever we did interact and play together, we did so on friendly enough terms, but he was, from my experience, just another one of the many somewhat flat characters that existed on the fringes of my life, which, as everyone can agree, is the central plot of all human drama. 

I can't remember blow-by-blow account of exactly what happened in the dodgeball game that day, but I remember enough to remember that there was an altercation between me and Ben. One of us probably did something to get the other one out of the game, and the getter outer probably did their getting out a bit underhandedly or in a way that resulted in some kind of uncertainty about whether the one of us that was allegedly gotten out was, in fact, out. 

You'll remember that there were considerably more kids playing this day than usual, and so, while having a crowd made the game that much more exciting and wonderful, it also made getting out that much more devastating, because it meant you had to wait longer to be able to play again. And to be gotten out in such a game by illicit and/or uncertain means was the absolutely height of unfairness. To make matters worse, whatever it was that the getter had done to get the other of us out had also resulted in a skinned knee for the gotten, adding further insult to the miserable unfairness of the situation. 

So the one of us that was gotten out decided to protest vociferously about whether he was, in very fact, out, thus causing the game grind to a halt. This was by design, of course, as the allegedly out boy assumed that the assembled masses would readily side with him. Surely these clear-eyed, cool-judging 9-year-olds could see just how egregious the offending out-getting was. In fact, they would probably see that it was so egregious that not only should the one of us who was provisionally out not be out, but, rather, the shady getter outer who committed this heinous crime against the holy institution of recess dodgeball should be the actual one made to be out.

As I’ve written out this remembrance of the altercation I've realized that I was almost certainly the one gotten out and Ben did the getting. As is true of most 9-year-olds, I went about all aspects of my life with a righteous assurance that I was always right about everything. (If you want a corroborating witness, just ask my sister Heather.) So it feels all-too-familiar that I would be the one outraged beyond all reason at the unfairness of having been got out due to some patently unjust play while engaged in this, the most transcendent dodgeball game in all of human history. 

Anyway, I ranted and carried on for some time, appealing to everyone that I wasn’t actually supposed to be out. But everyone didn’t really care who was out, they just wanted to keep playing. So they told us both to get lost and to quit ruining the game. 

As I left the game fuming about how wronged I was, the truth is I was mostly just crushed to be on the outside of the only important dodgeball game that had ever been played. And, frankly, that was a considerably more painful blow than the one that had caused the trickle of blood dripping from my knee. 

As I started to cool down and began considering what, among the vastly inferior options, I was going to do with the rest of my recess, I started to feel more and more awful. But not from being kicked out of the game, and not from being on the receiving end of an unjust ruling, and not from being told I was ruining recess by everyone whose opinion I actually cared about. No, I realized I was feeling awful about how my making such a big deal out of the issue made it so that Ben was kicked out of the game too.

That dodgeball game was the only thing I cared about in the whole world right then, and, in a rare moment of clarity wherein I comprehended that I was not the only being in existence with complex thoughts, feelings, desires, and motivations, I realized that maybe Ben wanted to play just as much as I did. And in contemplating this I realized that if our places had been switched, I would’ve tried to get Ben out by doing the same things he had done to get me out, and probably more. In contrast, he probably wouldn’t have been such a whiner about getting out like I was. And that thought, coupled with the fact that it was my whining and pleading and game-stopping that got him kicked out of the game, was eating away at me and making me thoroughly miserable.

So, rather go for a swing on the swing set, or chuck dirt clods at whatever it is kids chuck dirt clods at, or do any of the other activities on offer that I might ordinarily have done, I started looking for Ben to apologize. And it wasn't too long before I found him because, you see, he had been looking for me too.

It came out that both of us had been feeling pretty crummy along pretty similar lines. That is, while both of us were somewhat at fault for the situation — though clearly I was the more culpable of the two of us — we were both feeling complete ownership of the guilt for the whole situation, and we both felt compelled to tell the other how sorry we were. 

Make no mistake, this was no grand cinematic apology. There were no eloquent speeches, no sweeping admissions of wrong-doing, no gracious acceptances of the other's apology, and no plaintive orchestral score accentuating the emotional poignancy of the moment. We both probably just kind of mumbled and stumbled our way through our apologies, and that was the extent of it.

Though our apologies lacked the showmanship and panache of a more practiced repentant sinner, the results were not less miraculous. Where I had been feeling increasingly miserable because of the guilt-ridden pit in my stomach that deepened with every step away from the dodgeball game, after chatting briefly with Ben I felt wonderful. I felt light and free. I felt like laughing and smiling. And while I can't say for certain that Ben felt the exact same way, I was pretty sure he did because where he had come up to me with shoulders hunched and head down, now he was smiling broadly and openly, reflecting back to me the joy that I was feeling. 

It would be a nice, Frank Capra-esque ending auto this story to say that a deep and abiding friendship was born on the back of that moment of reconciliation, but it wouldn't be true. Ben and went back to existing on the peripheries of one another's lives. And that would have probably continued to be the case if not for the fact that a few years later the State of Utah decided it needed to build a new highway through my family's front yard, causing us to move to another part of Bluffdale. And who should be at church that first Sunday after we moved but Ben Tolman himself. 

Being the same age, Ben and I attended the same classes at church, and we were in the same Boy Scout troop, so by the natural course of events we became much better and closer friends. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was Ben that, for one of my early teen birthdays, gave me that fateful bag of Starbursts that I ate in its entirety in the space of about an hour, and that my stomach rejected in short order, and that resulted in the most stunningly colorful vomit that ever was vomited.  

I’m pretty sure that even without our post-dodgeball dustup mutual apology we would have still become the good friends down the road that we became. After all, when you spend a lot of time with people your own age, and those people aren't outright jerks, there's a pretty good chance you'll be friends. (And maybe even sometimes when they are outright jerks too.) Over the course of that friendship, I don’t even thing we've ever talked about the dodgeball incident. I honestly wouldn't be at all surprised if Ben doesn't remember that it even happened. 

In the course of human events, it really wasn’t that remarkable of an occasion. Two kids whose problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world got their feelings hurt and then made up. Great. But sometimes it’s those unremarkable events that I can’t help but remember 30 years later and that I feel compelled to remark upon on Sunday evenings when I’m in a more contemplative mood.

Of Banana Slugs, SEO, and Finding Joy in Little Things

In the fall of 2000, Jasmine Morrow, an undergraduate student at San Francisco State University, was taking a Biogeography course (GEOG 316). In that course it seems Jasmine was required to write ~1500 words about the biogeography of the banana slug, and then to publish that biogeography on the web. Jasmine chose to use a light blue background for the site, pairing it with a sufficiently contrasting shade of brown for the text. In keeping with the times, Comic Sans was selected as the font du jour. It was and is, a fantastic representative example of the amateur web design of the era:

Fast forward 20 years and we find a young English professor who has finished his work for the day. While waiting for his wife to finish her meeting about seismic...engineerings, he decides he wants to learn more about where he might go to find banana slugs. So he types "banana slug range" into the Google search bar and hits "return." 

Let's pause in our narrative for a moment -- the suspense is palpable, I know, and I apologize -- to talk about search engines.

The very first result on the very first page of a search engine results list is, as we all know, the most prized of all positions in which a website might find itself. That first page is the object of an entire industry in the modern marketplace. Dozens of my very own friends have dedicated their lives to helping companies land their websites on this most auspicious of real estate.

Occasionally though, when a website answers a search engine user's query so perfectly that its greatness cannot be denied, the search engine will go beyond merely giving the site a place on its coveted page-1 results, and it will further extoll the virtues of this website by copypasting some of the website's text onto page 1 itself, naming this a "featured snippet." 

This is, truly, the highest honor to which any website can hope to aspire.

Returning again to our young English professor who has finished his work and who wants to learn more about slugs, as he sets forth on his quest, typing the words "banana slug range" and hitting "return," he finds that the Google has returned to him a first result featured snippet. 

The source of this most exalted website was not, as one might have guessed, a Wikipedia page (search result #2). 

It was not an eminently credible science outreach publication (search result #3). 

It did not feature the work of scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying biologies and geographies and such (search result #s 4, 5, 6, and 7)

No, none of these. 

Instead, as you've surely guessed, the search engine algorithm gods (so inscrutable and powerful are the ways of the search engine algorithm that it unquestionably merits being described so) bestowed this honor upon none other than the lowly undergrad Jasmine Morrow's light blue, Comic Sans-y homework website, "The Biogeography of the Banana Slug." 

My friends, I am the young English professor in this tale. (Twist!) 

And let me say that in this moment, the cup of my joy is full to overflowing.

On Playing Music

When I was younger, from the ages of about 8 to 18, I took piano lessons from an angel of a woman, Shari Aston. I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that Shari teaching me how to play the piano has had a deep and profound influence in all areas of my life, and in ways that I probably am not totally aware. But one way in which I am aware of this influence is in the ways that music, and the playing of it, has helped me through life's difficult moments.

I'm a relatively cheerful, easy-going fellow, so it may surprise some to hear (read) me saying that I have hard times, but it shouldn't. Everyone does, and I'm no exception to that. And in those hard times, I've always found that playing music brings a relief and even joy where it has seemed like there could be none. And I wanted to take a minute to talk (write) about it.

My parents' piano at home in Bluffdale, UT

When I was getting my bachelor's and master's degrees, I was lucky enough to attend school where a large number of the classrooms on campus had pianos in them. So whenever I got stressed over a test or overwhelmed by social pressures or really frustrated at the football or basketball team losing (you know, the big things), I could always go up to campus, find an empty classroom (they were typically open until 11 pm), and play. More often than not I didn't play any of the more difficult pieces I'd learned over the years. Rather, I played whatever felt right in that moment, which was usually something relatively simple. And in doing so, peace, in varying degrees, would return to my life.

One of the hardest things about starting my PhD program was that I was at a new school where I no longer had ready access to a piano on campus. And things got real stressful real fast. So after about a month in the program, I got on Craigslist and bought myself a guitar, knowing that I couldn't reasonably bring a piano (even a free one) home to my drafty, thin-walled, 2nd story apartment. Buying the guitar was a little outside of my budget (most everything was then), but it seemed a worthwhile investment in my mental and emotional health. I had no idea how to play, but I figured I could probably teach myself enough that I might access the stress-relieving aspects of playing music that I needed. And in time I did. And that guitar is one of the many factors that helped me survive those first few years. 

When we moved to California after graduating and as I started work, life predictably got stressful in new and *ahem* interesting ways. I still had my guitar and found it helped, but I missed playing the piano regularly as it had been several years since I'd been able to do so. Not long after we moved, I was asked at church if I would play the piano for the Primary. I agreed and began to spend 1-2 hours on Sundays hanging out with kids, pulling faces at them, and trying to play the piano well enough for them to be able to sing along. (I wasn't always successful at that last bit.) Since we don't have a piano at home, I was given a key to the church so that I could practice. And it was wonderful. In playing the piano again more regularly, I could more readily feel life's tensions melt somewhat away. Then, after 6 months or so of playing for the Primary, the organist in the ward moved out, and I was asked if I would play the organ for Sacrament Meeting. 

Now, I want to be clear that I don't consider myself a musician. I play alright, the piano at least, but I'm very uncomfortable with playing in front of an audience, no matter how low stakes the setting or how small the audience actually is. And here they wanted me to play the organ, an instrument with which I had very little experience, in front of upwards of 200 people, on a weekly basis? Despite my misgivings, and fully aware of my inadequacy, I agreed. But in doing so I knew that I'd have to start coming over to the church more regularly to practice and get ready for Sundays. 

So for about a year (up until the pandemic), I spent 6-10 hours a week at the church teaching myself how to play the organ and practicing so that I could, at very least, not be too much of a distraction from the spirit of the meeting. And while I'm no Richard Elliot (far, far, FAR from it), I got to where I could get by fairly well each week. Well, except for the one week when Shar was out of town, and I bombed so hard on the hymn "For All the Saints" that afterwards a friend in the congregation said to me sympathetically, "As you were starting to play the 5th verse, I leaned over to my husband and said, 'How bad do you think Sam wants to be done right now?'"

But the important thing here isn't that I got better at the organ, the important thing is that this assignment forced me to spend A LOT more time playing music. I started practicing first thing in the morning, before going to campus, and it changed the complexion of my professional life. Those days when I practiced the organ were considerably brighter, more productive, and just overall better, despite the stress and anxiety of feeling like I wasn't (amn't) good enough at my job.

In writing this I'm not trying to brag about how wonderful of a person I am because I can play around a bit on a couple of instruments. If anything, I'm still terribly self-conscious of my musical abilities, and am always a little hesitant to even tell people I play at all for fear that they'll want to actually hear me. But in this season of thanksgiving, I want to express gratitude for the undeserved, unearned, and beautiful gift of music. 

Music makes no sense to me. Somehow, by contorting your body in very specific and objectively weird ways, while in appropriate proximity to an awkward assemblage of inanimate objects, a (sometimes) beautiful sound is produced. 

And that sound, I've come to appreciate, can be a blessed balm to the soul, especially in times of struggle and difficulty. It somehow manages to wriggle into all of the achy, empty places inside, and it fills them with light and hope. And, well, I think that's really lovely. And I'm grateful for it.

I Have a Problem and I Need Your Advice and It Is Absolutely Urgent

Okay folks. I have need for some good advice on a dire situation that I'm facing. If I'm reading things correctly -- and I know that I am because I went to college for 12 years to ensure that I know how to read things correctly -- the decision I make in the face of this situation might not merely affect my own life, but it has the potential to hold sway over the hopes and dreams of literally, and I am using that word very conscientiously, hundreds of thousands of people every fall.

To get a sense of the gravity of the situation, I'd like you to consider for a moment this cabin:

It's lovely, right? The setting is nice. The trees are beautiful. You can almost smell the mountain pines and fresh, natural air. But let's take a closer look:

The cabin is old. Decrepit. Empty. There's a broken bed in the dark, dank interior. The screen door hangs limply. The windows are crusted over. The family that once inhabited is long since gone. Probably dead. No one knows who this R.D. Skidmore was, just as no one will likely know you once you are 50 years past your shuffling off this mortal coil. Life is short. Life is not fair. Life, in a word, is pain.

Now that you're in the mood and you have a sense of the gravity of the situation, allow me to describe the context of the decision that I'm facing before asking for the much-needed advice:

Let's say you are an incredibly superstitious sports fan, and today your team played one of the more storied programs in all of college football (top 15 all time according to the worldwide leader). Let's say that the game was pretty rocky to start and frankly not looking great, so at halftime you decided to go do other things like read scriptures with your wife to get your mind off it. And then you came back into the room only to realize that the game had already begun again, and that while you were gone, your team intercepted the opposing team's quarterback and subsequently had scored a touchdown. Encouraged with the newfound momentum, you sat down and settled in to watch. And immediately the other team started to play really well. And your team started to not look so great. A kernel of an idea started to form, so you decide, tentatively, that maybe you need to leave again. Just to see what happens. And so you leave fore a while, but the game is a siren song that can't be ignored so you come back. And the minute you came back, you watched the opposing team's running back run for like 30 yards. So you leave again.

And you yo-yo like this for the rest of the game. And every time you were out of the room your team did great things. And also every time you came back into the room you saw the opponent's team do things that were, for their purposes, great, but that for your purposes were decidedly not great. And so you decide to leave for good. But you're still following the stats on your phone because somehow that doesn't seem to affect anything. And then as the game was coming to an end and when the opposing team had a 99.9% chance of winning and when you were out of the room, you started to feel pretty good about things. Because the team was going to lose, but you weren't there to see it happen, so it clearly wasn't your fault but rather some other cosmic force was at play here. And you start to relax.

BUT THEN, with just seconds to play, your team did some borderline miraculous thing and they scored, and by doing so forced overtime.

So you stayed out of the room. And while you were out of the room, your team scored a touchdown in overtime to take the lead in the game for the first time. At this point you had been doing some pretty heavy reasoning with yourself, and you had concluded with much adamance that you know with every logical fiber of your being that your presence before the television set can have no impact on individuals' -- strangers, really -- abilities to play a game 2500 miles away. So you came back in to watch the end of the game and to see your team win and relish in the accompanying joy. And then nearly immediately after you came back in, the opposing team scored a touchdown to force a second overtime.

Mildly shellshocked, you became aware that you had to go to the bathroom, so you went away again. And you lingered away because you still had your phone and the live stats. And as you lingered, your team won the game in the 2nd overtime.

Naturally you were overjoyed at your team winning, but there frankly wasn't as much overjoy as there would have been had you watched it.

Now, any being with any ounce of reasonability would attest to the fact that your actions, specifically with regard to your viewing habits and your general presence in front of the television set, directly affected the outcome of this game.

D.I.R.E.C.T.L.Y.

Thinking ahead to next week, and the weeks beyond, you are left with a very large concern. There seems to be a new rule coming into effect after some 33 years of fandom. You watch; your team loses. You avoid watching; your team wins. Simple.

The world would have you think that winning=happiness and losing=misery. So, logically, under this new rule, not watching=happiness.

But it's more complicated than that: While you acknowledge that sports and such have no real eternal significance, you also know that the action of *watching* your team play, win or lose, brings very real enjoyment to your life. The watching itself makes you feel kinda like this:

Certainly winning is better. And when you win really big ones, and you get to watch, you might feel a little something like this:

But when you don't watch, even though winning is nice and helps a fair bit, when the dust settles, win or lose, you feel more like this:

That said, you know that the world doesn't center around you. You know firsthand that other people also are brought very real enjoyment by watching your team play and very realer enjoyment by watching them win.

And so we arrive to the part where I ask your advice and you give it to me. If you were in such a situation, what would you do? Would you sacrifice your own pleasure for the greater good? I mean, if you could guarantee -- GUARANTEE -- that your team would win by the mere act of not watching them actually do it, would you? There is still joy in the win. Sure. But because you know the sheer and utter enjoyment of both watching AND winning, the joy of watchless winning is quite and considerably less. And isn't the fact that you know that you are not actually experiencing the full allotment of joy available it's own class of misery? Would you willingly increase the misery of your own life, knowing you've created greater joy for others?

It might be easy for you, dear reader, sitting outside and above the situation to say, "Well, my dear Sam, certainly it is incumbent upon you to do all you can to provide for the well-being of your neighbor." I get that that's the right answer. Logically. But, as the paterfamilias has taught us, it's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart. Put yourself in my shoes here. What would you do?

On America and Patriotism and If/Where They Fit at Church

I was recently asked to be the organist at church, and because the chorister was out of town camping the week of July 4th, I got to pick the hymns for that Sunday. Traditionally (at least according to the 33 years’ worth of Independence Days I’ve experienced) we sing the patriotic hymns in the back of the hymnbook on the Sunday closest to Independence Day. This makes sense according to the calendar, but in recent years it has made me somewhat uncomfortable. To be clear, I consider myself a patriotic sort, but with the Church being global, I've wondered about how appropriate it is to sing region-based songs during worship service. So as I set about deciding what hymns to sing, I did a lot of  "studying it out in my mind," pondering about the relationship between America and patriotism and God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, some of which I have now written out and present to you.

*Quick note: This is kinda long. My thinking and writing here strayed at times away from the direct question of “what is appropriate to sing at church?” into larger questions of patriotism and American greatness. So if you don’t want to read the whole thing, I get it. That said, if you’re not going to read the whole thing I would encourage you to skip down and read the last dew paragraphs, starting with the one that begins “While these hymns rhapsodize about American greatness…”*

Before I explain what I decided regarding the hymns, I want to show you a picture of some fireworks to get us in the mood and then outline some of my ponderings on the subject.



The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a worldwide church that makes a special effort to emphasize that everyone in this world belongs to a universal family regardless of nationality. In a similar vein, Joseph Smith once claimed that, “We ought to have the building up of Zion as our greatest object” (160) with “Zion” being defined elsewhere in the scriptures as a group of people that are “of heart and one mind, and [dwell] in righteousness; and there [are] no poor among them.” Similarly, Christ himself taught (as interpreted by King James’ translators), “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

Unity, community, and love. And not just for those we like, or get along with, or who happen to live within our same a relatively arbitrary set of lines drawn in the dirt. Love that extends across the entire family of humankind.

So, if part of our purpose in congregating on Sunday to worship is to increase in unity, community, and love, where do patriotic hymns fit in?

This isn’t an easy question for me to answer. I love patriotic songs, and I love this country. But there’s no denying that these songs are often used to prop up ideas of American exceptionalism with which I heartily disagree. And because of these exceptionalist undertones, I’ve seen where some have compared singing such hymns in Sacrament Meeting to that part of the Book of Mormon where the wicked and apostate Zoramites build a big tower upon which they stand and thank God for making them better than everyone else.

We, meaning Americans, are not necessarily better than everyone else. But by saying that Americans are not better than anyone else, I’m not also saying that we are worse than anyone else. Comparisons of this sort are unhelpful. 

From my point of view, when we frame life as a competition with winners and losers, better and worse, we are moving in the opposite direct of the ultimate goals of unity, community, and love. 

If we are exclusively focused on being better than others, then those others automatically become, if not enemies, then at least threats. Life, so-conceived, is a zero-sum game where there is a winner and the rest are losers. It’s like the old joke: when outrunning a bear you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than whoever you’re with. While this is perhaps true in situations where you’re hanging out with hungry bears, and with people you don’t like, and also you’ve lost all capacity for human compassion, this is not true of life or “greatness” more generally.

I do believe that America is great, though certainly far from perfect. But just as my own self-worth does not depend on my neighbor’s self-worth, American greatness does not necessarily exist at the expense of or in relation to the greatness of other countries. The greatness that we find within this country is a greatness that is common and available to all nations, kindreds, tongues, and peoples across the world. Such greatness is achieved through a combination of hard work and divine support.

I recognize that talking about the Divine isn’t politic or cool when discussing international relations and geopolitical concerns, but I believe that any greatness we attain to in this life, in any sphere, is a shadow of an eternal Greatness (capital G), and that American greatness itself is such a shadow. To that end, I believe that divine inspiration accompanied the founding of this nation and the enumeration of its ideals.

While there are many “American” ideals that I might identify that lead to American and general greatness, allow me to mention just three:

• Individuals ought to be allowed the freedom to choose how they will spend their time and energy, though they are not immune from the consequences of those choices.
• All people have an inherent dignity. (This ideal was rather myopically applied in the early days of the nation, but we have made progress in broadening its application even if it seems we are still working towards full and true acceptance.)
• All people have the right and even duty to take active part in governing their own affairs. Such active engagement can take many forms, including voting, interpersonal discourse, personal improvement and growth, and, if necessary, perhaps a little bit of revolution.

Any greatness that we claim as Americans comes as we adhere to, work towards, and accept the responsibilities born from ideals such as these. And, by all rights, I find that America can be a pretty great place.

But any greatness comes with a warning from history. As Kenneth Burke explained in 1967:

“We know of many empires that rose and fell. We know of none that rose and didn't fall. Hitler, at the height of his arrogance, promised his followers, who obeyed him as automatically as conditioned cattle, that his dismal outfit would last a thousand years. That dream was soon over. I don't have the least idea how permanent our setup is likely to be, though it is a fact known to us all that a considerable number of our most characteristic contrivances have to be junked strikingly soon after we buy them.” (“Responsibilities of National Greatness,” The Nation, vol. 205, 17 July 1967)

We may think we’re pretty great and have things pretty well figured out for now, but that’s also what the Egyptians thought. And the Greeks. And the Assyrians. And the Romans. And the Huns. And the British. And so on. America is another empire, so to speak, in a long line that will eventually follow the others to a similar end, only to be replaced by another. In fact, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we actively look forward to the establishment of a new government that will override all others.

Why, then, in our worship services should we celebrate momentary and ephemeral political power (divinely inspired though it may be) in the same space in which we teach what we claim to be eternal truths? 

Additionally, why should we celebrate this provincial political power when we claim worldwide familial relationships, including brothers, sisters, and siblings in our very midst who do not identify as “American?”

These concerns and misgivings were the starting point for me as I went about deciding if/which patriotic hymns to include in Sunday's worship service. And with that as my starting point, it might seem that I’m building up to the conclusion that patriotic hymns are inappropriate for Sacrament Meeting. But I’m not. In fact, I eventually concluded that they are entirely appropriate and I ended up selecting two. Allow me to explain how I got there.

I decided that to come to a sound decision I needed to carefully read through the words of the four patriotic hymns in the LDS hymnbook that I was considering to see specifically what kinds of messages were being communicated. I recognize that others far more inspired and qualified than me have already done the work of reading carefully and determining propriety, but I wanted to come to my own conclusions. These were the four hymns in question:

The Battle Hymn of the Republic
America the Beautiful
My Country, ‘Tis of Thee
The Star-Spangled Banner

(“God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand” would also have normally been under consideration but we had just sung it 3 weeks earlier.)

Upon reading the words of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” I decided right off that it was a go. While it has distinct roots in American history and is a stirring patriotic anthem, nothing in it is overtly nationalistic or even mentions geo-politics at all. The Union army may have marched to its refrains during the Civil War, and they may have interpreted themselves to be representative of the truth that is marching on, but the words of the song itself (at least those included in the hymnbook which admittedly do leave out some of the more militaristic stanzas) can be read and sung as a rallying cry to the cause of Christ -- a battle with the worst impulses within each of us.

But the other three were a little bit trickier for me. At least at first blush.

I say they were trickier because these three, and perhaps most especially “The Star-Spangled Banner,” are much more overtly nationalistic and often used popularly as a kind of signboard for American exceptionalism. But upon reading through the words of the hymns themselves, a different picture began to emerge.

While these hymns rhapsodize about American greatness, the takeaway message in all three is that while America is great, its greatness is owed directly to God. Rather than self-aggrandizing assertions of our individual greatness in comparison to other non-Americans, there is a call to humility. There’s a recognition that our greatness has nothing to do with our own merits; instead it invites us to recognize with Ammon that we are, in fact, nothing. As to our own, individual (or even national) strength, we are weak. Therefore, we ought not to boast of ourselves, but rather we ought to boast of our God. For in his strength we can do all things.

Unfortunately, humility is not often seen as a precursor to greatness. And humility as a national ideal does not sit easily on the shelf next to the full-throated assertions of America’s superiority over all comers. 

But that kind of militaristic, hierarchical, zero-sum greatness is, in my view, a counterfeit, rather than a shadow of divine Greatness. 

The kind of national greatness described in these hymns, a greatness that owes its very existence to divine allowance, is a greatness available to all. It is a greatness that is found as we align our ideals with divine mandate. It is a greatness that, perhaps, America might do well to search out more diligently to, yes, make itself more great. But what does it mean and what would it look like to find and make America greater?

I've decided that finding and augmenting greatness is not about rooting out the unclean from our midst, as many on all sides of the political spectrum seem to keen on doing. Such attitudes and actions are not greatness, but rather mere vanity. It is the puffing up of our own selves with empty air and is soon and easily released and deflated. 

Finding and augmenting greatness, rather, is a matter of rooting out the unclean from within ourselves. 

It's about searching out our own hate, anger, disgust, and pride and laying it on the altar. 

It's about rededicating ourselves to loving our neighbors, even to the extent of showing compassion and mercy for national rivals. 

It's about rededicating ourselves to unity, community, and love. 

And as we go about doing this kind of work, we will hopefully come to realize that we have and do and will continue to fall short. 

We are imperfect. 

We require a little extra help that goes beyond our own human frailty. 

In short, if these are to aspire to greatness in any sphere, we need to recognize that to achieve greatness we may depend upon "God shedding his grace," his enabling and ennobling power, upon us.

The patriotic hymns, when read/sung while paying close attention to the words and message they relate, make this compelling claim that humility before God is a precursor to any and all greatness, even the national variety. And if these hymns celebrate and emphasize humility before God as a truly American ideal, what could be more appropriate in a worship setting?

Ultimately, I chose the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” to play and sing in church on Sunday. (My decision to go with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” rather than the other two was made expressly as a commentary on my own comfort level playing it on the organ in front of 200+ people.)

As I played these hymns and heard my fellow congregants singing them, I felt that in doing so we were "[praising] the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation" not thanking God for making us better than all other nations. 

As we did so, my hope was that we were all, as Americans specifically and humans more generally, remembering and rededicating ourselves to the notion that to attain or maintain any greatness at all, we need to continually acknowledge the true source of that greatness.