Priest Ordination

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Dear Paul, Ben and Sarah, Melanie, Roice, Bridget, and Rob,

cc: file, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner. Diane Cluff, and Andrea Shirts

Welcome to "Thoughtlets." This is a weekly review of an idea, belief, thought, or words that will hopefully be of some benefit to you, my children, with an electronic copy to on-line extended family members. Any of you can ask me not to clutter your mail box at any time.

"Paul, this is the next to the last Thoughtlet I will send to you in Omsk. After next week I will sent one on the 20th to the mission home, and then we will see you within a couple of weeks. As I followed Doug Hasting's new daughter walking down the hall of the church this morning, I realized how fast the last two years have gone.

Today was an important day for me. I ordained Rob, my youngest son, to be a Priest in the Aaronic Priesthood. Rob, I am very proud of you. Despite regrets and disappointments, it is good to know I have been able to ordain each of my four sons to each of the three offices in the Aaronic Priesthood. I have sought to teach you each the truths I have discovered by example and by preaching. As you each make your choices in life, I hope and pray that these teachings will hold you in good stead and will prove to be a rock you can build the foundation of your lives on.

In some sense, I have continued my Thanksgiving vacation this week. I slept in most mornings until about 7:00. I didn't leave for the office until 10:30, 9:45, 8:30, and 7:36 respectively Tuesday through Friday of this week. There was some catch-up from being gone 10 days on Tuesday morning. Then on Wednesday morning there was a meeting on this side of town at 10:00 with Bob Peebler, the President of Landmark. There were a lot of planning meetings and catch up activities at the office. We had our first demonstration on Friday for Leon Wells and Joe Roberts. They were both suitably impressed. However the real activity for me this week was not at the office, it was at home in the evenings and early morning. I received a book my cousin Diane recommended I read while I was in Utah. I read it the first part of this week: `Tornado Zone' (TZ) by Laura Moody. Then I received a birthday present from Roice, `Into The Wild' (ITW) by Jon Krakauer. I finished the first book Thursday and the second this morning at 12:20 AM. This week is the first time in a year I have cried and cried without really understanding why, I just know the two books brought up some deep emotional feelings. Oh well!

So I decided to share some passages which were particularly strong in my mind (although I didn't have much reaction as I retyped them) and see if any of you have comments about the concepts and words I read.

`There was no reason to go on. It was out. The truth was finally out. As awful as it was, there was also a sense of relief that I was finally out of the Tornado Zone. Now I had the truth, something concrete that I could use to make my life-long decisions.' p. 83 TZ `... looking at me like a deer caught in headlights. And there was that awful tilt in his head. Something finally dawned on me right then and there. The cocked head was the answer that I had been looking for during all of those years of lies. It was that ackward, unnatural, sideways twist of the head that told it all. It was his body language that I was finally recognizing. It was the language of guilt.' p.131 TZ `Both father and son were stubborn and highstrung. Given Walt's need to exert control and Chris's extravagantly independent nature, polarization was inevitable. Chris submitted to Walt's authority through high school and college to a suprising degree, but the boy raged inwardly all the while. He brooded at length over what he preceived to be his father's moral shortcomings, the hypocrisy of his parent's lifestyle, the tyranny of their conditional love. Eventually, Chris rebelled - and when he finally did, it was with characteristic immoderation.' p. 64 ITW `"He was really into pushing himself," explains Gody Cucullu, a younger member of the team. "Chris invented this workout he called Road Warriors: He would lead us on long, killer runs through places like farmers' fields and construction sites, places we weren't supposed to be, and intentionally try to get us lost. We'd run as far and as fast as we could, down strange roads, through the woods, whatever. The whole idea was to lose our bearings, to push ourselves into unknown territory. Then we'd run a slightly slower pace until we found a road we recognized and race home again at full speed. In a certain sense that's how Chris lived his entire life."' p. 112 ITW `He got real emotional. He was almost crying, fighting back the tears, telling Dad that even though they'd had their differences over the years, he was grateful for all the things Dad had done for him. Chris said how much he respected Dad for starting from nothing, working his way through college, busting his ass to support eight kids. It was a moving speach. Everybody there was all choked up. And then he left on his trip.' p. 118 ITW `As a youth, I am told, I was willful, self-absorbed, intermittently reckless, moody. I disappointed my father in the usual ways. Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please. If something captured my undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a zeal bordering on obsession, and from the age of seventeen until my late twenties that something was mountain climbing.' p. 134 ITW `My father was a volatile, extremely complicated person, possessed of a brash demeanor that masked deep insecurities. If he ever in his entire life admitted to be wrong, I wasn't there to witness it.' p. 147 ITH `I had been granted unusual freedom and responsibility at an early age, for which I should have been grateful in the extreme, but I wasn't. Instead, I felt oppressed by the old man's expectations. It was drilled into me that anything less than winning was failure. In the impressionable way of sons, I did not consider this rhetorically; I took him at his word. And that's why later, when long-held family secrets came to light, when I noticed that this deity who asked only for perfection was himself less than perfect, that he was in fact not a deity at all - well, I wasn't able to shrug it off. I was consumed instead by a blinding rage. The revelations that he was merely human, and frightfully so, was beyond my power to forgive. Two decades after the fact I discovered that my rage was gone, and had been for years. It had been supplanted by a rueful sympathy and something not unlike affection. I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infurieated me. I saw that I had been selfish and unbending and a giant pain in the ass. He'd built a bridge of privilege for me, a hand-paved trestle to the good life, and I repaid him by chopping it down and crapping on the wreckage. But this epiphany occurred only after the intervention of time and misforture, when my father's self-satisfied existence had begun to crumble beneath him. It began with the betrayal of his flesh.' pp. 148-149 ITW `There was another irony he failed to appreciate: His struggle to mold me in his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit.' p. 150 ITW `As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals. But I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with our fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul. ... Eighteen years after the event, I now recognize that I suffered from hubris, perhaps, and an appalling innocence, certainly; but I wasn't suicidal. At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman's sex. In my case - and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless - that was a very different thing from wanting to die.' pp. 155-156 ITW `It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. ... McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme. He had a need to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying, "that mattered." According to the moral absolutism that characterizes McCandless's beliefs, a challenge in which a successful outcome is assured isn't a challenge at all.' p. 182 ITW

The pronouns are not necessarily correct, and this isn't very many passages for 410 pages. Roice, I realize you sent one book, it was meaningful to you, and you will probably think I'm trying to understand how these words to just apply to your relationship with me. I expect Ben and Paul and Rob and especially Melanie and Sara have similar thoughts as those expressed in `Into The Woods.' I apologize again for my mistakes. I have never wanted to nor tried to hurt any of you, and as long as I am alive I want you each to know I will do anything I can to help you individually or collectively work through any issues you have with me. Believe this is all I can do, and I do commit to each of you again to do it!

On Thursday night the Grua's invited me over to dinner. Sister Grua has taken over Rhonda's role in the Walden 3-D and personal finance area, and has worked for me long enough she had a whole bundle of questions and an even larger number of suggestions. I expect it was because of the frank conversation, or maybe the books, that as I was leaving I responded to some comment with `Yes, I remember on my mission being promised by a General Authority that if I served a good mission my parents would become active in the church; so I must not of served a good mission. Then my Mission President was disfellowshiped, and although I spoke up, I felt I didn't speak up loud enough, and somehow felt responsible for the whole thing.' Sister Grua just said, `Roice your shoulders are not big enough for all of that load.' Good advice.

I just read on page 113 of my missionary journal about my interview with Loren C. Dunn. I wrote that he said `Are your parents active?' Then he said `You will be the means by which they become reactive in the church. The letters you have written home have already made a big difference to them. Continue to write and put your heart into the missionary work and the Lord will bless you. The next couple you baptize have them write home & tell your parents what they think about the gospel. Will you do that?' I remember when I got home from my mission Mom read my missionary journal and she was very offended by these words. Paul, it is interesting how often patterns repeat in families. The way things are right now, I expect you will be similiarly disappointed. Just don't repeat some of the other patterns of my life, like bottled up anger, criticism, and sarcasm as a response to being caught in the tornado zone.

Friday evening I went to the movie `Meet Joe Black,' because it was highly recommended to me. It is so sad to me that there is such a focus on sex in the movies these days. Although I greatly enjoyed sex when it was part of my life, there is much more to life than just this. There was a message of hope in the movie, and Des it wasn't just `negative art.'

Saturday morning I went to the joint choir practice with Epiphany. One of the Catholic bases had asked if I would be there when I missed practice last week. It felt real good to hear that. It is a very nice program this year. Sara and Rob came over in the afternoon and we went to `The Olive Garden' for lunch. Rob was in fine form. He asked for `one of those things (making a square motion) that you put the (pointing to his uneaten pizza) into and take it home.' Then when the waitress brought a box, he looked at the box and read `To Go' and said `What is togo?' It was a real nice lunch and we each seemed to have a good time.

When we got back to the house, I had a brief conversation with both of them. I told them, and I repeat for those not there, `I love you Mom and I always will. I am tired of being rejected and being alone and have been going on some dates. I have written in the Thoughtlets about my dates with Andrea at Thanksgiving, and since Sara doesn't get those I wanted to tell both of you I have invited Andrea to come down and go to the Ward and the Company Christmas Parties with me. I will pick her up at 2:00 on Friday afternoon, and we will probably go to a dinner party that night at Joe Robert's house. Then I will take her over to the LaQuinta to stay.'

Rob said `But Dad, you have 4 rooms upstairs?' And Sara said `Rob, it doesn't look right.' I agree.

Ben and Sarah, I invited Rob and/or Sara to join us Saturday and thought I would bring Andrea up to College Station to have lunch with you guys and take her to the George Bush museum. Melanie, any chance you could get a ride to come over from Austin and join us? If not maybe we can make it by Austin and see you there. I am hoping we will have time to go by Ken Turner's house to see his studio and talk about the paintings of the Savior he is sketching out. As long as we get back to Houston in time to get ready for and to go to the Ward Party at about 6:00 and the Continuum Party about 7:30. Sunday morning will be church from 9:00-12:00, I will have lunch ready when we get back, and take Andrea to the airport to catch a 2:00 flight. Sara said I had already told her about Andrea, and Rob seemed ok with the whole thing. Introducing a date to your kids is a big thing.

Later in the afternoon Joe Roberts came over and brought some petrified wood from his new property. He started talking about indian arrowheads, and so I showed him the ones Uncle Glenn and I dug up when I was about 10. He was really impressed and said they are worth about $5,000. Typical Joe. Sara and her friend Brian came back and we took some digital camera shots and talked for a while. Then Ken Turner came by and Joe and Ken and I sat on the back patio and defined how to organize `Heritage Galleries On-Line' (see http://www.walden3d.com/hgol) for a couple of hours. It was fun.

Saturday evening I went to the church to see the `Classical Sounds of the Nativity Concert.' Your Mom played `Sheep May Safely Graze' by Bach and `Simple Gifts' on the harp with Lindsay Weber on the Flute. I went up and said `Really nice.' She bowed her head and said `Thanks.' She still wants nothing to do with me, and I'm becoming OK with the rejection. In one of the comics I was catching up on this week Andy Capp is reading the paper and hears "Goodbye Forever!" to which he responds by running to the door thinking "A good wife is worth chasing after" and when he opens the door it is raining and in the fourth frame he says to himself "Mind you, would a good wife be walking out on you?" As I have said before, this whole experience is a real test of my understanding of meaning of eternity, and I assure you I know eternity is not two years. However, my mind and almost my heart now accept truths taught in the scriptures related to what has happened (Matthew 24:24; D&C 35:18, 42:10, 64.40, 93:47-50, 104:77, and 107:99-100). I am not going to make any decisions, nor allow myself to be put in a position to need to make any decisions for the next couple of months. And still, I frankly do not see any changes on the horizon. It really hurts me because I know the choices that have been made will affect each of you, every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every birth and birthday, every funeral and every wedding for as long as your Mom and I are both alive. I do not want you to have this emotional pain nor this example because I love each of you. Oh well!

Another place the choices affect us is at priesthood ordinances like blessings, baptisms, ordinations, endowments, and sealings. As a missionary and as an active member of the wards we have lived in, I have had the opportunity to perform a priest ordination for others. However, there is something very special about being worthy and able to perform this ordination for your own son. Rob it was nice to see your Mom attend and to see you give her a hug afterwards. It was nice to have a dozen of yours and my friends join in the ordination. It is nice to know we are loved by others who truly care. This experience is something I strongly recommend and hope each of you will choose to experience in your own lives as you get married, have children, and help them grow with a knowledge and a love of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ and His restored gospel."

I'm interested in sharing weekly a "thoughtlet" (little statements of big thoughts which mean a lot to me) with you because I know how important the written word can be. I am concerned about how easy it is to drift and forget our roots and our potential among all of distractions of daily life. To download any of these thoughtlets go to http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets or e-mail me at rnelson@walden3d.com.

With all my love,
Dad
(H. Roice Nelson, Jr.)

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Copyright © 1998 H. Roice Nelson, Jr.