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Personal Encounters with Elder Packer (Part 3)

Personal Encounters with Elder Packer (Part 3)

Last updated on: July 5, 2015 at 12:27 am by Dan Peterson

Personal Encounters with Elder Packer (Part 3) 2015-07-05T00:27:35-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A sculpture created by Boyd K. Packer
(Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Despite the almost instant phone call that I mentioned in my previous installment, that episode didn’t begin a period of constant interaction with Elder Packer.

So this next encounter was quite discrete and unexpected.

First, you need to understand that I’m a living, walking, breathing violation of Doctrine and Covenants 88:124 (“retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary”). I’ve tried to repent for years, but the repentance never lasts. And I’ve dragged my wife down in this regard, as well.

So, when the phone rang at about 5:45 one Friday morning, quite a number of years ago, we weren’t up just yet. To put it mildly.

Nor was the phone in our bedroom, where it should have been.

My wife got up and staggered through the darkness, looking for it. After a minute or two, she came back into the room.

“It’s Brother Packer,” she said.

“I don’t know a ‘Brother Packer,'” I replied, still half asleep.

“I think it’s the Brother Packer,” she said.

Suddenly, I was wide awake.

“Am I calling too early?” he asked.

“No! Not at all!” I answered, quite dishonestly. I felt like adding “No problem! I’ve been in bed for nearly three and a half hours already!” but I didn’t.

Anyway, he explained that he’d been reading my book Abraham Divided: An LDS Approach to the Middle East, and he had a few questions. He had a weekend without a stake assignment, though. Would I mind possibly coming up to his home on Sunday morning for a visit?

So, on Sunday morning, I drove up to Elder Packer’s home in the southeast Salt Lake Valley. We sat in his living room and talked for something on the order of two or two and a half hours. It turned out that he’d read Abraham Divided twice through, and had heavily annotated it. His questions were extremely acute. I was very impressed.

I was also struck by how different he was in private from his public persona — or, perhaps more accurately, from the image that some have assigned to him. Far from being grim, imperious, arrogant, and stern, I found him to be very kind and utterly without any sense of self-importance.

Afterward, he gave me a partial tour of his house. He’d chosen to live so far from Church headquarters, he said, because, when he was called as a General Authority he’d wanted to be “as far away from pharaoh’s court as possible.” Which I took to mean that he wanted to be really home when he came home, not tied to the office, not going back and forth.

He showed me his basement workshop or studio, where he did his painting and sculpting. His art work was a way, he said, of unwinding a bit, and of finding the peace in which to think.

It was an extraordinarily pleasant visit, and it permanently changed my view of Elder Packer.

His death is being greeted in certain ex-Mormon circles online with undisguised delight, sometimes expressed in extremely foul terms. Their graceless reactions are oddly comforting to me: Their hateful, embittered, angry world is not one that I want to live in. Plainly, I’ve chosen the right side.

As I’ve observed this sort of thing over the years, I’ve found myself thinking often of the apostates described in Alma 14:21 and their treatment of the imprisoned prophets Alma and Amulek:

“And many such things did they say unto them, gnashing their teeth upon them, and spitting upon them, and saying: How shall we look when we are damned?”

To which, of course, the proper answer is, “You’ll look exactly the way you look right now.”

It baffles me that they can’t seem to see how ugly they’ve become.

And I’m pleased that the very same people who hate and despise me hate and despise Boyd K. Packer. It’s good company to be in.

One other matter: Some have sought to portray Elder Packer’s home as a sort of palace, built with tithing wealth extorted from the poor by a greedy theocrat.

This is flat nonsense.

It’s a fairly large home, somewhat larger than mine. But it’s also considerably older than mine, and far from luxurious. Nothing remarkable. Elder and Sister Packer raised ten children in it.

The value of the property presumably derives from the relatively big piece of property on which the house sits; Elder Packer told me that he wanted his children to have room to play. I would guess that both home and property have appreciated tremendously since the Packers moved in. (The population of Utah in general and of Salt Lake Valley in particular has tripled since that time.) That’s what happens. It no more proves greed on his part than forgetting about an old coin in a box and then finding that it’s now rare and valuable would demonstrate avarice.

Posted from San Diego, California

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