An escatological moment

An eschatological[1] moment

This was written on 2 November 2011.  This is obviously a letter to someone, which I have edited now in 2014 and expanded.

I hope that my ramblings will make some sense to you.  You asked what advice I could give to you.  I have pondered a lot about that.  The advice of men and particularly my advice is probably not worth much.  It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that gives us the insight that we need at times like this.

I will only relate here a few disjointed observations.  You can, with a gentle breath, blow the chaff away.

A number of years ago, I took a class from Hugh Nibley.  He talked about eschatology.  That is; the pondering of life, death and what he described as the “terrible questions”.  We are only forced to think about them when we have an eschatological moment.  That is some event in our life that forces us to look hard at the future in terms of our mortality.  This happened to me in 1991 when I discovered that I had a brain tumor.  I was fifty-seven years of age. It was the size of a billiard ball and had been growing slowly over a number of years.  The surgery lasted 8 hours and I came through without any sequelae.  Although I had always been a good member of the church and read the scriptures and had felt that I was literate, I realized that my outlook needed to change.  I suddenly realized that I was mortal.  I took a hard look at what I was doing and decided to change. 

Things that had been priorities were not that important anymore.  Although change is not easy, I think that it requires more effort than we realize.  What happened is that it changed my priorities.  I knew that I could not be everything to everybody.  My family came first now more than ever.  It has been a slow but steady process for me.  Fortunately I have had 20 years to do this.  As I have grown in years, I have found new challenges and new things to do.  I have tried to do things that my father, grandfather and great-grandfather had not done.  I have documented my family history and now I am writing a blog called “Letters from Grandpa”.  The reason is; I want to, in someway, connect to my posterity in a personal way. 

When we get to the age when we turn our thoughts to our posterity, we are usually to old to make any impact in their lives.  You have grandchildren who will remember you and what you have done for them. That is important. The relationship with people and in particular family members is the most important of any relationship. Our impact on people and society in general will long be forgotten as in the case of Ozymandias,[2] a poem written by Percy Shelly which ends:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Most of us will not have the impact on civilization that Ramsesses II had, but unless we do something to develop the relationship with our posterity, it will be like the “lone and level sands”, of no consequence to those who follow after.

I suppose that writing letters in my ancestor’s day and doing blogs and writing published writings is a way of connecting to our posterity through the ages.  I think of Mormon’s letters to his son Moroni that have echoed through the centuries and are relevant to us and to his posterity who do not even know the connection to their patriarch.  Perhaps by leaving our observations on life and putting in our “two cents worth” we can connect by the spirit to those yet unborn who will never know us personally. 

Family reunions have a place in developing relationships, but in most of the ones that I have been to, the age groups connect, but the youth only develop a superficial knowledge of the elderly.  Rarely does the teenager sit down and have an in depth conversation with the grandparent. 

My Aunt Alta had a remarkable way of connecting with her grandchildren. She was in close proximity with her grandchildren.  She only had two children and her sons lived in the same city.  They came over for sleepovers and sugar cookies. Later on they found in her someone that was interested in what they were doing and encouraged their creativity. A couple of them even started a business in her basement. Proximity can foster these types of bonding.  In my case the only grandparent that really was around me was my grandmother Stucki, because she lived in our home for some of the time.

Now that I am older, I wish I had talked more in depth with her.  I only have a short history of her life and a written testimony, nothing more about her feelings and her desires.  These are the things that can bond the generations.  We never think that our ancestors had similar problems and challenges in their life, although logic tells us that they must have gone through like experiences.

So, because I cannot sit down and give pony rides on my back to my great grandchildren and rarely did for my grandchildren, I write the thoughts of my heart.  Perhaps some day they will connect in a way that will have some eternal significance in their life. Reading the scriptures and listening to general conference will help to guide them on the path to eternal life, but if the same instruction came from grandpa, it might sink deeper into their memory and spiritual brain to instruct them more perfectly in the things of eternal worth.  As I wrote at the beginning, it is the gospel of Jesus Christ that gives us the insight that we need at times like this. 

The times and challenges that await my posterity will require that they be rooted and grounded in the gospel as at no other time in history.  I hope, in some way, to light their path in times of darkness and despair.

Love,

Grandpa

---

[1] The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell’".

[2] In antiquity, Ozymandias was an alternative name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum's acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth-century BCE, and some scholars consider that Shelley was inspired by this. The 7.25-ton fragment of the statue's head and torso had been removed in 1816 from the mortuary temple of Ramesses at Thebes by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823).