God be with Pres. Hinckley--a wish that has now come true.

Donna's tribute post on President Hinckley inspired me (I am not going to even CLAIM that I thought of doing it too, it was merely from looking at hers). It was very touching and well written, and I am glad she did it, for my benefit and whoever else she might inspire. She mentioned the most important things that I would touch on, but I would also add that his emphasis on Public Affairs of the church was quite motivating to me.

It is kind of like we have something to offer, but many of us are too isolated to share it, or even be an example of it to anyone who might want to know more. Either many of us are huddled together in Utah without much contact with non-Mormons, or we just become overwhelmed by our busy lives, since we obviously register high on the family commitments and religious obligation scale. It becomes easy to think that we have as much as we can handle, and maybe our obligation, nay commandment, to spread the gospel to all the earth doesn't seem pressing. We think to ourselves, believing highly in a personal God that knows and understands our struggles, that he would understand what we are going through. That maybe it could actually be true, contrary to his clear messages to us in the scriptures, that God's dearest hope for us would be that we spend our life as much as possible in our own comfort zone, with people we already know and like.

Most membership even though younger than Hinckley was is still far behind the times in the need to enhance the church's pubic image, and do it deliberately. Often we don't get a chance to communicate to or even show anything about who we are and what we are about. President Hinckley's formalizing that program for the church was another very significant accomplishment, and I think it helped to take the church into the modern era a bit. Conservative religions tend to be twenty years behind the larger culture in many ways, but he believed in striving for the best this world has to offer, and not fearing or shunning technological advances because we are afraid of change, but to embrace them because we are confident about what we have and that the gospel will only go forward through whatever technology God chooses to bless us with.

During his tenure in the First Presidency, another significant change was that I think during the last fifty years it has became ok, even maybe preferable in some ways, to be a member of the church somewhere else but in Utah or the collonized smaler areas. Converts (mid century, when Hinckley would have started to have an influence) were discouraged from moving to be around large numbers of members, even if it included family, because the church needs strengthening where THEY heard about it – pretty much everywhere else BUT Utah.

And I tend to draw inspiration from those areas and their fervency, and wish so badl that circumstances would permit me to live somewhere outside of the Western Unites States at some point in my life. If I lived in New York or Mass. I would never be bored in church again. I have attended wards in NYC, New Jersey, and London among others, and I think President Hinckley was active in encouraging the strengthening of the church where the converts live, so they can better reach out to their friends, relatives, and communities that they know best, rather than try to live uprooted in a wholly unfamiliar culture accross the country. When everyone was first settling the Utah territory, it was one thing. I am sure that all of the first residents of that area managed to feel on equal footing, having a variety of personal differneces, with one big similarity: that the truth of the gospel had born witness to them and they had to leave everything to go practice it. Today, however, Utah has acquired all the hallmarks of a geographical region that has existed for nearly 200 years, including its own REGIONAL (distinct from RELIGIOUS), culture.

I know that the quorum probably doesn't read any of my blogs and has no use for my advice, but think it would be interesting, and consistent with what President Hinckley might have wanted, if the next quorum member chosen was not from the Wasatch Corridor. There are some US nationals making up the GA body, but if they are American they are Wasatch American, and I actually think that is a bit of a shame. It can seem very much to those who haven't grown up in the area that perhaps there is something different about them that will keep them from the comfortable expression of say a testimony in General Conference by a Utah native.

Especially as a dialectologist, I know that ways of speaking can have cultural currency, occasionally even religiosity. I notice outwardly what most just have a vague sense about,that the current state of affairs, where every American GA has the tell-tale Utah dialect, fuse the religion in people's minds with its surrounding geographic region and its various cultural characteristics—not all of which those of us raised outside this culture appreciate entirely.

I think President Hinckley, though he was a product of that Utah culture, he was also able to see beyond it. He recognized that the church can benefit from all the world has to offer us that will help us in our cause. I remember him saying several times that he believed that there was too much unnecessary apostacy and that in areas other than Utah, he anguished that the church was struggling, sometimes even declining, despite any feel-good statistics to the contrary. Germany has about the same number of LDS members as when he visited there during the depression. Why is that? In my opinion it is not a reflection of the restored gospel itself, but rather that its practice tends to be too culturally isolating.

But President Hinckley saw way too much of the world to be isolated anywhere he was—and perhaps that is something that all Utah residents, and the rest of us, can strive for: to make contact in some way with the ‘mission field’ outside ourselves, either by living there for a time, traveling there, or making an online presence that might affect someone.

I don’t think it is a stretch to guess that President Hinckley would relish the day where a New York Accent (as Joseph Smith spoke), a lower Midlands accent (as did Brigham Young), or a British accent like countless of the pioneers whose descendents today make up a large percentage of today's membership, might just as easily be an outward sign of church membership as the Wasatch variety dialect currently does.

Gordon B. Hinckley was the best of modern men, with the charm of a bye-gone era. That's how I would describe him if I had to in a pinch.