Spencer W. Kimball

            My VIP for this week is Spencer W. Kimball. He is very important for many reasons, and I could write a lot about him. However, today I want to share some of his thoughts during the time that he served as the Prophet of the Lord and the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

            I started another class today, a humanities class. One of our assignments was to read an article by President Kimball titled “The Gospel Vision of the Arts.” (A shorter version was printed in the Liahona, and a longer version was printed in the Ensign. It seems that President Kimball wrote the article to encourage members of the Church to strive for excellence in all fields, including the arts and science. He begins his article with this paragraph.

In our world, there have risen brilliant stars in drama, music, literature, sculpture, painting, science, and all the fields of excellence. For long years I have had a vision of members of the Church greatly increasing their already strong positions of excellence till the eyes of all the world will be upon us.

            President Kimball names some of these “brilliant stars,” such as Wagner, Verdi, Back, Handel, George Bernard Shaw, Paganini, Liszt, Paderewski, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and da Vinci. (I will be writing about some of these men in future posts.) He suggests that these men are not the only people that came to earth with such great talents. Following are some of his statements about these artists and the capability of producing more like them.

With regard to masters, surely there must be many of the quality of Wagners … in the Church, approaching him or yet to come in the future – young people with a love of art, talent supreme, and eagerness to create. I hope we may produce men greater than this German composer, Wagner, but less eccentric, more spiritual.

… Can there never be another Verdi or his superiors? Could we not find and develop a Bach…. Our day, our time, our people, our generation, should produce such, as we catch the total vision of our potential and dreams and see visions of the future….

If we strive for perfection – the best and greatest – and are never satisfied with mediocrity, we can excel. In the field of both composition and performance, why cannot someone write a greater oratorio than Handel’s Messiah? The best has not yet been composed nor produced….

And Niccolo Paganini, the Italian violinist ...! Why cannot we discover, train, and present many Paganinis and other such great artists? And shall we not present before the musical world a pianist to excel in astonishing power of execution, depth of expression, sublimity of noble feeling, the noted Hungarian pianist and composer, Liszt…? We have already produced some talented artists at the piano, but I have a secret hope to live long enough to hear and see at the piano a greater performer than Paderewski, the Polish statesman, composer, and pianist…. Surely all Paderewskis were not born in Poland in the last century; all talented people with such outstanding recreative originality, with such nervous power and such romantic appearance were not concentrated in this one body and two hands! Certainly this noted pianist with his arduous super-brilliant career was not the last of such to be born! But then we ask, “Can there never be another Michelangelo?”  … Did all such talent run out in that early century? Could not we find a living talent like this, but with a soul that was free from immorality and sensuality and intolerance?

It has been said that many of the great artists were perverts or moral degenerates. In spite of their immorality they became great and celebrated artists. What could be the result if discovery ere made of equal talent in men who were clean and free from the vices, and thus entitled to revelations?

Then there is Shakespeare…. Everybody quotes Shakespeare…. Has anyone else ever been so versatile, so talented, so remarkable in his art? And yet could the world produce only one Shakespeare?

            In calling for excellence like these great artists, President Kimball suggests that there are other people with the same potential talents to develop and refine but who also have knowledge of God’s plan for His children and the Holy Ghost for a guide.

… Take a da Vinci or a Michelangelo or a Shakespeare and give him a total knowledge of the plan of salvation of God and personal revelation and cleanse him, and then take a look at the statues he will carve and the murals he will paint and the masterpieces he will produce. Take a Handel with his purposeful effort, his superb talent, his earnest desire to properly depict the story, and give him inward vision of the whole true story and revelation, and what a master you have!

            Can you see why I was so impressed with President Kimball’s thoughts? Who would have dared to think that someone could produce something better than Handel’s Messiah? A prophet, seer, and revelator would do it. President Kimball was not only a prophet, but he was also a seer who could see into the future. What did he see? He saw the possibility of greatness in people of our day!