“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow”

Modern humans are often inglorious tenants in time—ignoring the past, exploiting the present and presuming on the future—yet the pessimism that Shakespeare suggests in the soliloquy that provides the title for my remarks¹ should not go unchallenged by those whose faith in the future is both realistic and buoyant. That faith will sustain us in the three senses of tomorrow in which we all can live, and which appear to be necessary if the future is to take on its full significance.

Most of us are relatively comfortable with what I call Tomorrow 1—the chronological future. Whatever our isolating differences, we share this tomorrow, with its jostling challenges of political, ecological, and moral survival. We face these challenges as the blandishments of central control continue to enervate us politically, as competing claims regarding the environment show signs of hardening into stances, and as needed distinctions between right and wrong appear as limp as they are unfashionable.

Our attempts to solve these problems must not wait for long-range solutions based upon major agreements. We already have what we need to make an immediate difference, if we are willing to look beneath the cynical assumptions about one another with which we usually begin and seek areas of concurrence, modest though they may be, thereby establishing the base upon which more complex harmonies can be composed. I have never forgotten a story, told me by the late Colonel Howard S. Bennion, which illustrates vividly the force that can be unleashed when one begins in agreement, however minor.

As the United States representative to a conference empowered to distribute vast amounts of surplus material at the end of World War I, Colonel Bennion arrived in Paris with delegates from all the allied countries. Apparently, the conference was expected to last about a month. At the end of the first week, many eloquent, patriotic speeches had been given; the contribution of each nation to the war effort had been dramatized and extolled, but not a single area of agreement had been found. Monday’s tentative statements had become Friday’s flat assertions. Beginning bon homie had long been replaced by grievance and greed. In despair, the delegates prepared to cancel the meetings and return to their governments with detailed reports of hopeless disagreement. In the last, acrimonious hours on Friday afternoon, a delegate from one of the smaller nations was grudgingly given the floor. Where others had been choked with anger, he was only inhibited by embarrassment. Haltingly, he explained that he simply could not go home in abject failure. Perhaps a major nation could shrug off the problems the delegates had been debating, but his small country could not accept such a conclusion. Failure would not only cost him a career but, quite possibly, his head. Could the delegates agree upon just one unimportant matter so he could take home some accomplishment?

Sobered by the plight of a fellow delegate, and a bit ashamed, those representing the most influential nations quickly found an item that received unanimous consent with very little debate. In the short silence that followed such surprising consensus, another delegate ventured that total agreement on the item they had just considered really resolved the one that followed it. Crumpled agendas were smoothed out and read again for the first time in days. The remainder of my story is easily anticipated. In an attitude of responsibility and concern, all problems were handled in the second week, and the conference adjourned to widespread congratulation.

If one example hardly establishes the principle, we should consider our own experience when we have been thrust into the presence of strangers. Since silence can be a fearfully intimate thing, one usually comments about the weather to keep relationships comfortably impersonal. A rhetorical question such as “A lovely day, isn’t it?” invites inoffensive agreement. We acknowledge one another’s presence as our conversational antennae touch. If we feel any interest at all in one another, we continue an innocuous exchange that really allows no possibility of disagreement. Instinctively, we know that we must establish common ground, however trivial, if our relationship is to develop—or if we are to avoid overt discourtesy.

In Tomorrow 1 we will need to look freshly at problems that have been conceived in misunderstanding and fed by contention. A fresh look, however, needs to be more than a superficial glance, and it needs to do more than put an edge on soft iron. My own experience in working with metals makes that figure precisely illustrative of a common problem. The trouble with trying to give a cutting surface to iron is that it simply cannot hold an edge. It can be honed until it appears to be sharp, but it breaks under any real pressure. We must use tool steel if we need an instrument that will cut efficiently and can be re-sharpened.

So many of our contemporary procedures try to utilize traditional iron when steel is required. A case in point is our pervasive use of majority rule, when we might try the steel of common consent occasionally. If we were patient enough to establish real participation by counsel and consent in just a few areas, we might find this principle—so much a part of Mormon polity—more generally practical than we have been willing to appreciate. For majority rule, as my friend Don Sorenson insists, is an imposed consensus. Those outvoted are forced to conform; perhaps for that reason they sometimes disobey. For conformity has to be exacted, while obedience is given. When we try to find principles that we share, we generate responsibility and concern and thereby take a solid, first step toward that cooperative effort which bespeaks more than a rhetorical brotherhood.

Much of our success in Tomorrow 1 will depend upon our ability to remain youthfully responsive without retaining the callowness of adolescence. Consider how we struggle as adolescents to know where we are—and what we truly share with others—when our hearts are disorderly with hope and our bodies seem to be developing chemical experiments. But the faith of the young—their willingness to try, to think freshly and react warmly with peers—is a continuing legacy we all need to claim if the chronological future, with its split-second intensity and millennial sweep, is to stay in human focus.

Tomorrow 2—the second sense in which the future can be conceived—is not so much succession as it is fulfillment. It is the “someday” of our aspirations. When I tell myself that, someday, I will do my genealogy or learn to ski, I focus on goals that are rarely time-bound. I may have no schedule, no precise plans, but Tomorrow 2 is more than yearning. In the desire to believe that Alma identifies as the precursor of faith (Alma 32), I generate a hope to which my faith gives substance.

Tomorrow 2 adds a dimension to the future that keeps it from being merely sequence. We can become so attuned to clock and calendar, the hallmarks of Tomorrow 1, that we lose qualitative perspective. We neglect that reflective rubbing of one idea against another that sparks creativity and develops insight. Yet Tomorrow 2 must be more than rumination. No re-chewing of past accomplishments or past mistakes, no reactive remembering, will be enough. Memory often supplies only the hobbles of consistency and the wasted effort of regret. For unless my regret is transmuted into repentance, I continue to pluck uneasily at snags and loose threads that are beyond my reweaving. Repentance provides both present and future tenses for regret: it provides vitalizing immediacy and a motivating goal.

If repentance is a key, Tomorrow 2 is far more personal than Tomorrow 1, for collective repentance has a slightly false ring. Collective repentance is that pleasant abstraction we urge on our enemies. The only reform that ever really occurs takes place in individual resolve. Deeply within, we know with Thoreau that a man in the right is “a majority of one.”² Dependence upon numbers is usually the refuge of the desperate or the totally materialistic. When young David was capable of listening to the Lord he was not concerned about the size of his army. In an old age made querulous by disobedience, he was preoccupied with counting the men in his command.

The special temptation of personal emphasis, however, is becoming absorbed in ourselves. If we become self-absorbed, we fail to keep the primary commandments to love the Lord and other people. For selfishness, rather than hate, is the true opposite of love. We can always hope that any strong feeling we have for others—no matter how negative—can be turned into love, but the person to whom the world is a mirror reflecting only the self will struggle to hold a concept of love that rises above ego-fulfillment.

Tomorrow 2 must also go beyond mañana—that vague account-payable we tend to substitute for current obligation. We can fritter away the future without every really encountering it fully if our ideals lose their hard edge and degenerate into hazy longing. “I will” must indicate resolution as well as futurity. In the challenge of such resolution, we should be ready to free ourselves from the shackles of the crowd. Among the most insidious of these shackles is the use of extreme labels. How easily I subject myself to dichotomies that may have little basis in fact but have been established by wide use. In trying to gauge the relative importance of research versus teaching, or vocational training versus liberal arts, I assume opposites that my own experience does not justify. I am finally dismayed at the extent to which I may have narrowed my perception by accepting diametric labels: liberal vs. conservative, applied vs. theoretical, academic vs. non-academic; the list becomes a litany of simplistic discrimination. I do not mean to suggest that polar opposites are non-existent. Rather, we must understand that simply using polar opposites because others do can become an intellectual addiction. We must overcome this addiction if we hope to keep our Tomorrow 2 free of popular prejudices.

As we mature emotionally and intellectually, we should be able to keep our balance in the tumult of public opinion, but we should not underestimate how compelling social expectation can be. Social expectation may seriously undermine the trust in oneself that is part of the necessary freedom of Tomorrow 2. As Emerson suggests, we need not “quit [our] belief that a popgun is a popgun,” even if it is publicly affirmed to be the “crack of doom.”³ We begin to appreciate Tomorrow 2 when we become sensitive enough to recognize and brave enough to live the directing, transcendent principles available in the least of our experiences. This change can occur very early in our lives—for most of us can remember a moment or two when we burst through the fog of our limitations and caught a glimpse of the Promised Land—but our youth can also make us unusually susceptible to some forms of public pressure. While, for example, we may sense vaguely that many of the maxims we have been taught are contradictory—“Haste makes waste” and “A stitch in time saves nine” do not reconcile neatly—repeated slogans seem to take on pontifical weight and often wield powerful influence, even though they are belied by our individual experience.

To illustrate my own confrontation with social expectations, I was in my middle years before I had the temerity to say, out loud, that not all things worth doing are worth doing well. A garden is worth having, even if every weed cannot be kept under control. If I try to do everything well that I find worth doing, I am merely pulled apart and end in undiscriminating frustration. I lose the power to distinguish between the important and the incidental. Now, I had known this for years but had not been courageous enough to live by it. I really learned it—as I learned so much—working with my father.

My father had a small coalmine, and on Saturdays and during the summer, my brothers and I delighted to work at his side. One of my earliest memories is of helping him prepare the charge of explosives—what coal miners call “shots”—that had to be set off each night after the miners had left work. The drilling of the long hole and the wrapping of the tubes of mud tamped into the hole after the charge was set were tasks that my father let me try under very relaxed circumstances. The hole did not have to be bored perfectly, and the tamping could be used even if a youngster could not get all the cylinders the same size. But when we came to that part of the procedure in which the blasting cap was attached to the fuse and carefully inserted into a stick of dynamite, the whole tenor of the operation changed. Gone was the cozy, relaxed manner of our earlier effort. My father’s concentration was intense and unremitting. He did not speak, and his deft hands worked with infinite patience and precision in setting the charge. I can still remember the extraordinary attention we gave to checking the long fuse to be sure that no break could cause the charge to misfire. With a surgeon’s skill, my father inserted the cap and fuse into the dynamite, then pushed all into my slightly crooked hole with consummate care. Somehow I knew—without being told explicitly—that there were certain mistakes you never made once. Furthermore, I learned the difference between the real job of setting explosives, which required skill and concentration brought to their acme, and those preliminaries that had to be done but did not have to exhaust anyone’s best effort prematurely. I realize now that I might have picked up the significance of this experience much earlier—and avoided a great amount of wasted effort—but I was too willing to stay in Tomorrow 1, with its necessary but also coercive sense of others, and I came late to an appreciation of Tomorrow 2.

The third Tomorrow, and the one which synthesizes the demands of Tomorrows 1 and 2, has the vision of age without its deprivations. To the temporal and aspirational it adds the spiritual. In a profound sense, however, the spiritual cannot be added, for it is encompassing and eternal. The Lord reminds us that “all things” are spiritual unto Him (D&C 29:34), and that all things are “present” before Him (D&C 38:2). In such eternal perspective, we can effect continuing reconciliation. T. S. Eliot’s vision of Tomorrow 3 is “a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything).”⁴ Thoreau finds a dynamic integration of the practical and the theoretical, the mundane and the heavenly, in the following lines—which may be, for me, the high point of secular prose in America:

Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.⁵

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may truly—and especially—partake of the culmination that is both reward and requirement in Tomorrow 3. The Book of Mormon, for instance, provides arresting examples of this culmination. Here we are not only introduced to a dialectic that sees opposites as part of a “compound in one” (2 Ne. 2:11), but we are given a reason for human existence that catches the essence of Tomorrow 3’s vision. As the prophet Lehi presents the panorama of creation, he affirms that “men are, that they might have joy” (2 Ne. 2:25). Consider here what is not chosen. If Lehi had been influenced by the philosophies of the world, he might have said knowledge with Plato or power with Cato. The Stoic would surely have pled for serenity, and the Hedonist for pleasure. But an inspired man of God spoke of joy.

Most of us will experience happiness in Tomorrow 1 and satisfaction in Tomorrow 2, but joy can only be apprehended in the spiritual synthesis of Tomorrow 3. Joy simply does not carry the imprint of time that inevitably accompanies happiness, and it transcends the subjectivity of satisfaction. A little reflection helps us see that we may develop a skill without knowing the joy of mastery. We may respond dutifully, for example, without knowing the joy of service. Obviously, joy presents something qualitatively different that can only be understood in a potentially celestial setting. The family provides such a setting. To Mormons, the family is a spiritual unit, not merely a biological, legal, or temporary one. I live in Tomorrow 3 when I accept my role as patriarch and am able to say with Joshua of old, “Lord, for me and my house” (Joshua 24:15). Joy requires propriety as well as responsibility, personal worthiness as well as concern.

I experience joy in the love of my wife, a love that is as inspiring as it is complete. Our shared expectation of each other celebrates our combined potential. I understand more deeply the culmination that identifies joy when our daughter brings to fruition the dearest qualities of her grandmothers, and then smiles at me with my wife’s eyes. Our delight when we heard from our missionary sons turned into joy as we read the contents of their letters. Separated from us and from each other by thousands of miles and alien cultures, our sons were often not having an easy time of it. Neither was totally well physically (although they were a bit airy about this), and little in what they reported could suggest that these were the happiest two years of their lives. One had been robbed again and was being regularly taunted with an abusive play on his name; the other had been spattered with rotten eggs and warned to leave the area in which he was working under threat of bodily harm. But coming from those scrawled lines on inexpensive Mexican paper and from an envelope bearing an unpronounceable Welsh postmark was the elemental force of two testimonies being forged in the refining fire of hostility and dysentery. I thought of our forebears, whose still portraits suggested the rigor and unforgiving discipline of pioneer life. Across a hundred years and thousands of miles we find no easy exchange, but I sensed that our joy was being shared.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow may be no more than a sequence of days fretted into insignificant moments. But if we are not content with the future so drearily conceived, it can—simultaneously—take on the focus of chronology, the insight of aspiration, and the vision of the eternal. Commencement rhetoric often asserts that the future belongs to those being graduated. Tomorrow 1 is no one’s possession. It simply occurs, but it is malleable. To make our shaping of the future significant, we must also bring the individual contribution of Tomorrow 2 and the wholeness of Tomorrow 3. If you are leaving BYU today, we trust that you leave with appropriate attitudes and skills, with a soaring sense of your own potential, and with an abiding, resolving testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and find in His will, your peace.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.