{"id":115790,"date":"2026-04-15T13:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T19:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=115790"},"modified":"2026-04-15T16:01:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T22:01:11","slug":"feeling-small-just-wait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2026\/04\/feeling-small-just-wait.html","title":{"rendered":"Feeling small? Just wait!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Facs.<\/a>
Facsimile 1 in the Book of Abraham
(LDS Media Library)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Newly up on the never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation: \u00a0\u201c\u2018That Lineage\u2019: Rival Priesthood Claims in Abraham 1,\u201d in Abraham and His Family in Scripture, History, and Tradition,\u201d<\/a> written by Avram Shannon<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Abraham and His Family in Scripture, History, and Tradition<\/em>, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, John S. Thompson, Matthew L. Bowen, and David R. Seely. For more information, go to https:\/\/interpreterfoundation.org\/books\/abraham-and-his-family<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Book of Abraham is one of the books of our scripture most concerned with notions and ideas of priesthood. In the English standard works of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>, the word priesthood appears 182 times. Most of those references are, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the Doctrine and Covenants. However, priesthood appears twelve times in our short Book of Abraham (including the three instances in the facsimile explanations), suggesting that this is a term and concept that is important to the discourse in that book. So many references to priesthood as a concept are striking in a book as short as the Book of Abraham. The introduction in Abraham 1:2 illustrates the importance of priesthood to the entire work.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I point out, too, that Avram Shannon is one of the co-hosts of the new Conversations with Interpreter<\/em> podcast<\/a>, installments of which are posted every Saturday on the completely moribund website of the Interpreter Foundation.<\/p>\n

\"NASA<\/a>
\u201cI am the Lord God Almighty, and Endless is my name. . . . And worlds without number have I created; . . . and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten\u201d (Moses 1:3, 33). The observable universe is more than 93 billion light-years across. Thus far, even after Artemis II, no human has ventured more than 1.3 light-seconds from Earth. (NASA public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last night, my wife and I attended a concert in the Recital Hall in BYU\u2019s new Music Building<\/a>, by \u201cBridge & Wolak.\u201d<\/a> \u00a0They are a digital-accordion-and-accoustic-clarinet duo, and I have to admit that I wasn\u2019t exactly looking forward to the evening. \u00a0(At the beginning, they said that, so far as they know, they are the only accordion-clarinet duo in the world \u2014 which, they pointed out, meant that, if we didn\u2019t enjoy the performance, we probably never need repeat it.)<\/p>\n

I was very pleasantly surprised. \u00a0They were personable, entertaining, and very funny. \u00a0And they are superb musicians. \u00a0(Michael Bridge, the accordionist, earned a doctorate in musical arts from the University of Toronto, and Kornel Wolak, the clarinetist, received his doctorate from the Paderewski Music Academy in Poznan, Poland. \u00a0And, as they each demonstrated more than once, they are both excellent pianists.)<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe that I\u2019ve ever encountered a digital accordion before. \u00a0As Bridge explained, it\u2019s essentially a computer in the form of an accordion, and it can mimic just about any kind of musical instrument. \u00a0In their opening \u201cBaroque Suite,\u201d a trio of pieces by George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), it was a convincing harpsichord. \u00a0At various subsequent points in the concert \u2014 which ran from modernized Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) through Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin (1810-1839), Sidney Bechet (1897-1959), George Gershwin (1898-1937), Benny Goodman (1909-1986), and Ennio Morricone (1928-2020), as well as traditional Bulgarian and Polish melodies, all of them newly arranged for digital accordion and clarinet (since nobody writes<\/em> for digital-accordion-and-clarinet duos!) \u2014 Bridge\u2019s accordion became a Wurlitzer organ, a church organ, percussion, a piano, brass, and so forth. \u00a0It was really quite amazing.<\/p>\n

For some reason, I found myself wondering during their opening Handel trio whether Handel ever heard the music of Bach. \u00a0The two were born in the same year, 1685 \u2014 a good year for musical history! \u2014 in Germany, and were thus contemporaries. \u00a0But Bach remained in Germany, in relative obscurity, while Handel spent much of his career in England. \u00a0What a pity it would be if Handel didn\u2019t encounter Bach. \u00a0Which he might not have.<\/p>\n

But then I began to think of all of the music that neither Bach nor Handel ever heard. \u00a0Neither ever experienced Mozart, or Beethoven, or Brahms, or Mendelssohn, or Wagner, or Strauss, or Mahler, or Bruckner, nor, for that matter, any of the other composers on last night\u2019s program. \u00a0I\u2019m so blessed to have experienced all of them, and many more besides.<\/p>\n

But then I thought of the future Bachs, Handels, Mozarts, Beethovens, Brahmses, Mendelssohns, Wagners, Strausses, Chopins, Mahlers, Bruckners, and Gershwins that I<\/em> will never hear, and the finitude of mortal human life forcefully presented itself to my mind yet again.<\/p>\n

I can understand not believing that human personality survives death. \u00a0I can\u2019t really understand not wanting<\/em> it to survive.<\/p>\n

To draw from a rather different musical piece, which you may recognize:<\/p>\n

From the day we arrive on the planet
And, blinking, step into the sun,
There\u2019s more to see than can ever be seen,
More to do than can ever be done.
There\u2019s far too much to take in here,
More to find than can ever be found.
But the sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Pale<\/a>
Seen from a distance of about six billion kilometers, Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right) within the darkness of deep space. This famous photograph is often called \u201cPale Blue Dot.\u201d \u00a0It was taken by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990, when, at Carl Sagan\u2019s suggestion, the spacecraft turned its camera back toward Earth. \u00a0(Public domain image from NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some of the pieces that they performed were accompanied by videos projected onto a screen above and behind them. \u00a0For their jazzified version of a piece by Bach, for example, they showed scenes from a spacecraft orbiting Earth, prefaced by Michael Bridge reading a quotation from the late astronomer and science writer Carl Sagan relating to the image immediately above. \u00a0It ran somewhat like this:<\/p>\n

Look again at that dot. That\u2019s here. That\u2019s home. That\u2019s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every \u201csuperstar,\u201d every \u201csupreme leader,\u201d every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.<\/p>\n

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. \u00a0(Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Newly up on the never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation: \u00a0\u201c\u2018That Lineage\u2019: Rival Priesthood Claims in Abraham 1,\u201d in Abraham and His Family in Scripture, History, and Tradition,\u201d written by Avram Shannon: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Abraham and His Family in Scripture, History, and Tradition, edited […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":115665,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39818,74,39809,39815,39812,1513],"class_list":["post-115790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-avram-shannon","tag-book-of-abraham","tag-bridge-wolak","tag-kornel-wolak","tag-michael-bridge","tag-priesthood"],"yoast_head":"\nFeeling small? 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