Indifference rests quietly alone in the universe while love, hate, and hurt rage tightly together elsewhere across safely defined demarcations. Some Love secretly yearns for rest but plunges deeply into the scramble of human emotions:
One Day a hurt hits
with a fact and a sorrow.
It makes me want to
write. It makes me want
to go away, to cry
in the arms of a lover,
past words said and actions
you cant take back not even in
a next life—on that day you
choose the one who comes to you.
From his childhood in Sicily as a Catholic altar boy through his latter days as a Mormon “saint,” Caldiero recalls in verse his emerging passion for performance and for the sensual liturgical marriage of physical space—the church or temple proper—with bodily space. This ritualized confluence of architectural structure, human bodies, images, movements, smells, and sounds affects him as much today as it did in the past. It is this memory of the religious ritual that keeps him striving for a poetic creation and richness that achieves a depth of symbolic meaning.
Self-educated and preoccupied with the day-to-day business of his widespread empire, Young rarely found time to read. But he delivered hundreds of lively, extemporaneous sermons which blended common sense with theological speculation. Such homespun treatises carried an immediacy that was absent from the philosophically-oriented studies of his ecclesiastical colleague Orson Pratt, though, at the same time, Young’s speeches could be unfocused and contradictory.
Several of the more controversial teachings that Young promulgated—Adam-as-God, divine omniscience, and blood atonement—have sparked considerable debate since they were first uttered more than one hundred years ago. “Will you love your brothers and sisters likewise,” he once asked, “when they have committed a sin that cannot be atoned for without the shedding of their blood? Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed their blood?”
Other favorite topics were the “personality of God,” “election and reprobation,” and “the resurrection.” His sermons usually begin in a chatty way: “I remarked last Sunday that I had not felt much like preaching,” or “When I contemplate the subject of salvation, and rise before a congregation to speak upon that all-important matter, it has been but a few times in my life that I could see a beginning point to it, or a stopping place.” Readers will find themselves drawn into the rhythm of Young’s rhetoric in the same way as his original hearers were.
Best known for his fiery apologetic writings such as A Voice of Warning (1837), Key to the Science of Theology (1855), and for his autobiography which was published posthumously in 1874 by his son, who wrote most of it, Pratt nevertheless defined Mormon doctrine and theology for much of the nineteenth century. He was killed in 1857 in Arkansas by the estranged husband of one of his polygamous wives. The husband, an outsider, did not share Pratt’s and other Mormons’ contempt for civil authority over marriage.
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