Hank Smith:                      00:00:00             Coming up in this episode on followHIM.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:00:03             I feel like I should give your father a blessing. Is that okay? It’s more than okay. I warned my parents, Neal Maxwell is coming home with me and he wants to give dad a blessing, which he did. After the blessing, both of them were going to die the next month. My dad asked Neal Maxwell, “When is it time to just give up and say to the Lord, I can’t go on anymore?” And Neal Maxwell said…

Hank Smith:                      00:00:37             Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of followHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m your host. I’m here with my pelican of the wilderness co-host, John Bytheway. John, I bet you’ve never heard that one.

John Bytheway:               00:00:51             I have never been introduced as a pelican before, but a pelican in the wilderness is even better.

Hank Smith:                      00:00:57             Yeah. John, we are privileged to be joined today by Dr. Michael Ballam. Dr. Ballam, Michael, if it’s okay if we call you Michael, thank you for being here.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:01:08             It is a pleasure to be in the presence of you two remarkable men.

Hank Smith:                      00:01:12             I knew that you were the perfect guest for this, knowing your background. John, we’ve been studying Psalms for the last two weeks. This is our last lesson in the book of Psalms. What have you loved so far?

John Bytheway:               00:01:23             For part of my life, I’m embarrassed to admit, I didn’t really know what to do with the Psalms. I thought they were just some nice poems. When you hear Jesus in the end of Luke say, “There are things that are going to be referred to about me in the Law and in the Prophets and in the Psalms.” Here’s Jesus endorsing the Psalms. I’ve always loved music. This is like the ancient hymn book. I’m just excited to have an expert in music here with us today.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:01:52             That is exactly what they are. They’re an enormous hymn book. And David actually wrote 4,000 of them. We have in the Old Testament 100 of them out of the 150. But in 1956, they found the Dead Sea Scrolls and one was devoted to the Psalms of David. And there are 41 new ones. One of them is my favorite of all. 151. I’ll explain why. But what we need to understand first is that God’s word was always sung. Did you realize that? I think it was part that you remember things that you sing. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, you can teach that to a child in 40 minutes. If you teach them the first letter of the alphabet is A, the second letter… it’ll take you a lifetime and they’ll never remember it. Music causes us to remember. And the most important one, the Spirit lives in inspired music.

                                           00:02:48             The Psalms, 4,000 by David, they’re all hymns. They’re all lyrics. We think of them as poetry. It’s not poetry, it’s lyrics, which meant it was to be sung. And everything in the Old Testament was sung for thousands. Well, it still is for 4,000 years. In Judaism, everything is sung. Let me show you something. I went to Israel to spend a year. I wanted to learn Hebrew and translate the Bible. I was successful. I got as far as Genesis chapter one, verse one. Because I became so confused. For example, the word beginning is not in there. The first word is bereshit, which is a word that means the most important, the chief, the head. Well, it’s supposed to be created. It’s not created. It’s organized. The third word is Elohim. Now, I had just learned in my kindergarten class in Hebrew that Hebrew words become pluralized when you put an IM on the end of it. Elohim is actually a plural word. Those first three words say, “The chief of the gods organized.” Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.

                                           00:04:16             Now, they, Moses never did that. This is what it looks like. Okay, if you can see up there in the upper right-hand corner, you have to read from right to left. You can see Bereshit bara Elohim. Now, he sang Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz. All of the Old Testament was sung. Maybe so people remember them. I think it’s because the Spirit can live in music. Isn’t this beautiful? I got it when I was studying at the great synagogue of Jerusalem. I wanted to learn how to sing the scriptures, and I couldn’t find anybody who seemed to know how, except from oral tradition. Oral tradition is not always the best way. I found a professor, Ezri, like Ezra, Uval. I said, “They’re not written down.” And he said, “Yes, they are.” In the original Hebrew, there are little markings, little dots and tittles, a jot and a tittle. Not one of them would be lost. We think of that as little teeny things. They’re crucial. A jot and a tittle are really crucial.

Hank Smith:                      00:05:32             This is going to be a lot of fun. John, for those out there who don’t know Dr. Ballam, maybe later on in our episode, I can talk about my first experience because I went through the temple that first time and it had a profound effect on me as it does for many.

John Bytheway:               00:05:49             I am holding in my hands an ancient cassette tape called Music and the Mind. There’s Michael on there. This bios may be dated as cassette tapes are. Dr. Michael Ballam is an opera singer, pianist, clinician, professor at Utah State University, founder and general director of the Utah Festival Opera Company. He holds a PhD from Indiana University. He and his wife, Laurie, have six children. But what I love about Michael Ballam is last September, we had a tough month down at UVU, some of those events, as you all know. Two days later, I was up at the Logan Tabernacle, and what a comfort to look out and see my friend Michael there, and to look behind and see Ben Ballum, Michael’s son, in the choir. His countenance calmed me down, saw that he was there. These credentials and accomplishments and degrees are wonderful, but I got the nicest email from Michael after that event.

                                           00:07:00             I consider him a dear friend because of his kindness, but also his love of music speaks my language. As I’ve told you, Hank, my mom was in the tabernacle choir. My grandparents were, my great-grandparents were. Michael’s been a part of my home. I’m sure a lot of people will also see that countenance and think, “I know him.” We are so happy to have you here with us, and like Hank said, I’m so excited just to hear. You know so much about music and about the hymns, so we’re just excited to have you and welcome.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:07:37             Great. And thank you for that introduction with my bio, which was all correct, but nowadays, I give people that and I say, “All you need to say is he’s Ben’s dad.”

John Bytheway:               00:07:48             There you go.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:07:49             That’s the most important thing to me.

Hank Smith:                      00:07:52             That’s beautiful. Michael, before we turn the reins over to you, I’m going to read from the Come, Follow Me manual and we’ll be underway. The lesson this week is entitled Let Everything That Hath Breath Praise the Lord. “The traditional Jewish name for the Book of Psalms is Tehillim, a Hebrew word that means praises. It’s related to the exclamation hallelujah, meaning praise Jehovah or praise the Lord. If you had to choose one word to sum up the main message of the Psalms, praise would be a good choice. Some Psalms contain the direct invitation to praise ye the Lord, and all of them can inspire worship and praise. The Psalms invite us to acknowledge the Lord’s power, his mercy, and the great things he has done. We can never repay him for any of this, but we can praise him. That praise might take different forms for different people.

                                           00:08:43             It might involve singing, praying, or bearing testimony. It often leads to a deeper commitment to the Lord and to following his teachings. Whatever praise ye the Lord means in your life, you can find inspiration to do it as you read and ponder the Psalms.” That is perfect. It’s almost like Michael was chosen for that introduction in this lesson. So with that, Michael, how should we go about this?

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:09:09             You just quoted my second favorite Psalm. That’s 150. And in the Kennedy Center, it’s huge on brass because it says, before it says, “All who have breath, praise him.” It says, “Praise him with the cymbal, praise him with the trumpet, praise him with the tambourine.” Those are all recorded in Chronicles because David hired professional musicians to play instruments in the temple. He hired 188 horn players. Now, horn players in that period of time were not the kind of horn players we think about.

John Bytheway:               00:09:47             Shofar, what do they call that thing?

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:09:50             Yeah, this is a horn on David’s period. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a ram’s horn, and it has significance because Joshua used it to fell the walls of Jericho. It is symbolic of Abraham and Isaac saved by a ram. If you cut the end of it off, that one is hard to play because I was the world’s worst trumpet player.

Hank Smith:                      00:10:20             Wow.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:10:21             You can hear that for five miles. And to be in Jerusalem during Rosh Hashanah, when they blow the shofar, we lived on the Mount of Olives, which is a long way for the great synagogue of Jerusalem, and I could hear somebody blowing a horn. David is saying you can praise him in so many different ways. He loved to praise him in music. He hired 4,000 professional musicians to play in the temple. You can see who they are, because in Chronicles, he lists about 125 of them because there were three families that were very musical. One was Asaph, one was Jeduthun, and one was Heman. They all had sons and daughters. The sons were all musicians, and you can read in Chronicles what instrument they played, and David procured their services. He didn’t end up using them because he was denied the opportunity to open the new temple, but Solomon used those very musicians, 4,000, because everything in the temple was sung.

                                           00:11:33             Now, you mentioned their importance to Jesus. You bet your boots they were important to Jesus. The last thing he did in the upper room in Jerusalem, it says, “And before he went out to pray, they sang an hymn.” Think of that. The last thing he wanted to do was sing a hymn. What was that hymn? I suspect it was one of the Messianic hymns. I’m going to find out which one it was. Then I’m going to set it to music. I’ve never composed anything, including my own emotions, but wouldn’t you like to hear that? Imagine, Zephaniah says, when he comes back, he’s going to sing to us, not talk to us. He’s going to sing to us, and those of us who know him will recognize his voice. I told you my second favorite one is that 150, but my real favorite one is the next one, which is not in the Old Testament.

                                           00:12:34             It was found in the Dead Sea scrolls. It’s labeled 151, A Psalm of David. He talks about how he was called, how Samuel called him to be a prophet as a little boy. Here’s the second verse. “My hands made a harp, my fingers fashioned a lyre.” Then he says, “He sent a messenger to my father’s house to anoint me king, and he looked at my brothers who were tall, were handsome, but the Lord did not want them. He wanted me because I had music.” David was called into the palace to sing for King Saul, because King Saul was having emotional difficulty, and they’ve told him there’s this boy in Bethlehem who plays an harp. Let me show you what it maybe looked like.

                                           00:13:31             It’s called a psaltry, P-S-A-L, like in Psalm. It was an instrument to be used to accompany the Psalms, and David was good at it. So he goes into the palace, Saul is healed by it. It says in Samuel, “He played for the king and the king was made well.” He was so pleased by that, that he kept David around in the palace, and he became like a son to him. Samuel knew that when he was a little boy, that his musical gift was going to make him king of Israel. I like the fact that music has power. It’s not there just to entertain us. Sometimes it is, but when it’s really powerful is when it enlightens us, endows us with the Spirit. I think music has those three E’s, and the most important one is the third one. It endows us with the Spirit inside of us, and Moses knew that.

                                           00:14:40             That’s why he sang God’s word, every bit of it. It has been doing that ever since. And then when Catholicism was born, guess what they did? Same thing. In fact, they’re doing it still. The priest sings them. I wanted to learn how to do that, so I studied at the great synagogue on Jerusalem, and I learned how to cantor the scriptures. It’s called. It was just amazing to me. Imagine being able to do that. I don’t have all of the holy scriptures that I can sing them, but I know how the Psalms, some of them went by. How I would love to know what Jesus sang.

John Bytheway:               00:15:23             Yeah.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:15:23             I think it was Psalm eight. I think he sang 150. Bruce R. McConkie called music God’s most eloquent language. There’s a reason for it.

John Bytheway:               00:15:36             Michael, you talked about music being healing. I want to tell you of an experience that directly connects to you that I’ve never told you about. We have in our stake a memory care branch. We used to have assignments to go and speak there. I listened to your tape and thought, “Well, can I come and sing?” Instead, I took my guitar. It’s very sobering. The spouses come attend with their spouses who are maybe some sort of dementia or Alzheimer’s or something. I just started playing I Am a Child of God on the guitar, and I’ll tell you, the people who were slumped over began to sit up. They started saying the words with me. There’s something, and you talked about this in your presentation, the form of music, of good music that reformats the mind. Every time I go there now, I don’t talk, I sing.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:16:37             God bless you.

John Bytheway:               00:16:39             Those memories come back. You’ll see people sit up straight and be with you. They can remember the music they learned in Primary.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:16:49             And that song in particular, because they learned it as a child, music’s not just entertainment. President Monson asked me to come down and sing for the 15 brethren. It was at Christmas time, and he wasn’t there, and he’s the one who had asked me to come. I said, “Where is he?” And they said, “Well, he’s in a difficult situation. Francis had a stroke and she’s just hanging on. In fact, she’s in a coma.” So I went to the LDS hospital. I went to the room. There was President Monson and Francis and his wonderful daughter. I said, “I’m going to sing for her.” I knew she loved the student prince, so I started singing, “Overhead the moon is beaming. White as blossom on the bow.” I knew she loved that. I went through the practice of the whole thing, and I said, “Can you join me in some of the hymns?” And both of them joined with me.

                                           00:17:48             I could sense she was hearing me. I could see a flicker in her closed eyes. The next morning, his daughter started singing the hymns, and Francis awoke. That music lived in her mind, but more than that, in her heart, and it brought life to her. And a grandfather was able to do that with a little girl singing I’m a Child of God, who’d been in a coma for three days. I got a call from her dad in Loma Linda, California, and I said, “You need to sing that for her.” He said, “I can’t sing, but my father’s coming and he’s a singer.” I said, “Have him sing and drop out some of the words.” And a grandfather, can you picture it, sitting there singing to this little girl in a coma? She was eight years old. He sang, “I’m a child of God,” and he dropped out a word, and Mindy put it in there.

                                           00:18:48             She came back. About 10 years later, I was at BYU Education Week, and the hostess came up to me and said, “There’s a little girl out there that wants to talk to you.” And I said, “Now? I’m about ready to start. What’s her name?” “Mindy Mink.” I said, “You’re kidding? She’s 18 years old now.” I went down there and she said, “I had to relearn to walk and to talk, but I’m okay.” And I said, “Have you built enough courage that you could come up in front of 5,000 people and tell them what happened that night?” She said, “If you will help me, because I’m still having a hard time walking.” So I brought her up to the microphone. She told what happened that night. She said, “I could hear my grandpa. I was there, but I wasn’t there. I could hear his voice, and the Spirit that lives in that song brought me back.”

                                           00:19:47             It’s the Spirit that lived in that song that brought me back. It’s not just entertainment, and Moses knew that, and David knew that, and all of the prophets knew that. They sang. The Psalms are not poems, they are to be sung.

Hank Smith:                      00:20:10             I remember being in a meeting once and Elder Holland said, “We need to sing and pray a lot more and talk a lot less.”

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:20:17             That’s right. It’s the only time we do something together. Think about that. We say, “Amen,” together, and we sing together. We all participate. Very important.

John Bytheway:               00:20:33             My wife and I had a tradition we’ve kind of dropped the ball, but we used to go downtown to the Messiah singing every Sunday after Thanksgiving. The thing I loved about it was you’ve got this incredible score of Handel’s Messiah. Sometimes the soloist would sing, sometimes the Utah Symphony chorus would sing. Sometimes the conductor would turn around and all of us would sing. When everybody is singing For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor. I’m looking around going, “Nobody’s performing for anybody here. This is praise,” as Hank pointed out. Yeah. You probably know this, but at the end of the performance, the coolest thing happened because the conductor, he would do this every time, he would have the orchestra stand up and we’d all clap, “You guys were great,” and the Utah Symphony chorus and, “Yay, you guys were great.” Then he would look at the audience and the chorus and the orchestra would clap at the audience with a, “Oh, bless your heart,” type of a look.

                                           00:21:40             Then the conductor did the coolest thing. He picked up the score of Handel’s Messiah, and that’s the biggest cheer of the night, was, “Look what George Frideric Handel did.” Every year that brought me to tears, saying, “All right, here’s the master work right here” it makes me emotional right now to remember.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:22:06             The first time I ever experienced a Messiah sing-along was in San Antonio, Texas. I was the tenor soloist. They got to the part where the angels. And there’s. “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying.” Then 5,000 people sang, “Glory to God” I was blown out of my chair. All of that sound from unpaid singers coming up on the stage, it blew me away. In fact, the review the next morning said that tenor soloist was blown away by the experience. I was! And when it was over, I said to my, one of my friends who lived in San Antonio, “Oh my, think of that experience. Think of what that must have been like in shepherd’s field that night.” She said, “Well, we were all there. We sang it. You think we had something better to do?” Of course, we were part of that heavenly choir that opened up because we were so joyful. We couldn’t just talk. We had to sing and we had to praise him for the birth of his son. Glory to God. Ah, I want to hear that again.

Hank Smith:                      00:23:25             That’s beautiful. Is there any specific of these Psalms we want to look at?

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:23:31             The world’s favorite one is the 23rd. It’s gotten me through some very difficult times. When Ben was born with spina bifida, it was really tough. And we were down there in the University of Utah Medical Center, went back to the room we were staying with as Ben was being essentially reconstructed in surgery. We were in bad, bad space. I said, “Let’s recite the 23rd Psalm. The Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” It’s a Psalm of solace. It is so beloved that it’s living in our hearts now. It’s not living just on the page. It lives in our hearts. And there are moments when life becomes so problematic and we have nowhere to turn. The 23rd Psalm reminds us, He’ll get us through. He will lead us through clear water pastures.

                                           00:25:00             He will restore our soul. All glory be to him for that. That Psalm alone is worth in making a book about it. There is this book called the Psalms. It’s the largest book in the entire Old Testament. It represents 10% of the script of the Old Testament, but what a powerful 10%. Imagine if we had all 4,000 that David wrote. Well, we’ve got about 141. And they’re all glorious. They’re prophecies. They’re songs of hope, songs of praise. There’s something for everything we need in life in the Book of Psalms. Imagine in Qumran, when that little shepherd boy tossed a note, a little rock down into a cave and heard something break, he went down and there was a big tube sealed immensely, and there were 41 new Psalms. Many other scriptures were there, and they were there in a perfect state because they were in a desert environment. They were in excellent condition. It would take 11 years to translate them. Now we have them. You can see them in Tel Aviv and parts of them in Jerusalem. God saved them for our day.

Hank Smith:                      00:26:37             In Psalm 119, this is beautiful language. “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path. I have taken an oath and confirmed it that I will follow your righteous laws. I have suffered much. Preserve my life, Lord, according to your word. Accept, Lord, the willing praise of my mouth and teach me your laws. Though I constantly take my life in my hands, I will not forget your law. The wicked have set a snare for me, but I have not strayed from your precepts. Your statutes are my heritage forever. This is beautiful. They are the joy of my heart. My heart is set on keeping your decrees to the very end.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:27:23             You are the light unto my feet. You’re the guiding force. 119 is one of my favorite as well. As you can see, they move me so deeply because they live in here, and just hearing you recite them brings it all back to me. You’re a lamp unto my feet. How much more beautifully could that be said? The Psalms are priceless. They’re not just little bits of poetry. They’re priceless, and many of them are prophetic. The Messianic one, they tell us who he’s going to be.

Hank Smith:                      00:28:03             I’ve sometimes asked my students what they do to help them stay focused during the sacrament. Many times they’ll say, “I just read the sacrament hymns since I usually have the book open and it keeps them right there. They can feel it and they can hear the words in their mind or hear the music in their mind. Something is speaking to their soul.”

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:28:26             Bruce McConkie said, “Your copy of the hymns needs to sit next to your holy scriptures because they are a form of scriptures.” Once in my life, I was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I was singing the role of Hoffmann in a five-act opera where he never leaves the stage. It is so tough. After the second act, I came off and I was so frightened, and all of a sudden I heard the Tabernacle choir singing, “Fear not, I am with thee oh be not dismayed, for I am thy God and will soon give thee aid. I’ll strengthen thee help thee and cause thee to stand upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.” I heard it, and I went out in the hallway and I could still hear it. I thought, “Who’s playing that?” One of my colleagues was walking by and I said, “Who’s playing that?” She said, “Playing what?” It was there for me so that I could make it through a very difficult time. They’re there for us, and they live inside us forever.

John Bytheway:               00:29:37             I’m just thinking about thy word as a lamp unto my feet, and I was thinking of Abinadi. They’re trying to ask him a gotcha question when they quoted Isaiah saying, “What does this mean? How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of them that bring good tidings and publishes peace.” When Abinadi answers them, I think it’s Mosiah 15 where he says, How beautiful are their feet in the past tense, how beautiful are the feet of those who are bringing good tidings now, and how beautiful upon the mountains will be the feet of those who are in the future. And I think of all these missionaries out there who are bringing good tidings right now. How cool that was that Abinadi took that thought of feet which indicate a direction. And here in the Psalm, “The word of God is a lamp, gives light to which way I should walk and ought to walk.”

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:30:38             I love Isaiah too, because he was a poet.

John Bytheway:               00:30:42             Michael, I have a favorite. Remember how President Uchtdorf gave a talk called It’s Better to Look Up? Psalm 121 begins, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” Now, I have heard that put to music.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:31:01             Yep, beautifully.

John Bytheway:               00:31:02             “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” Oh, I think, John Rudder did it maybe.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:31:10             Yes, yes. He’s inspired. No question about it. “Thou hast prepareth a table before me in the presence of mine enemies, thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me.” All the days of my life, hymns do the same thing and primary songs do the same thing. I went to speak at the state penitentiary. I was very nervous to do that. What do you say? I got there and I thought, “I got to go to the piano. I need to play something to get in the spirit of what I need to say.” And somebody shouted, “We can sing you a song.” “Really? You have a chorus here?” “No.” “Well, I’m sure every man here knows I am a child of God.” And they started to sing it, still remembering that they were children of God. It was there all their lives.

                                           00:32:28             I am a child of God. It’s a psalm. It lingers forever. Powerful, powerful. I was offended when the new hymnal in 1985 was brought out because they didn’t put me on the committee. I realized they were inspired. They were inspired not to put me on the committee or the hymnal would have been a 13 volume set because I love so many hymns.

John Bytheway:               00:32:54             They just can’t fit on the pew in front of you. Let’s see where’s volume 12 right now I can’t find it.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:33:00             You know about the Psalm, How Great Thou Art? They did not put that in. And President Benson read that and he said, “Where’s How Great Thou Art?” And they said, “We felt like it was so evangelical. It belongs to Billy Graham.” President Benson said, “This church is mature enough now to realize that we don’t know the only truth. We have an abundance of it, but there’s other truth out there. Our job is to seek after it and when we feel it, cling to it, cleave to it. Put it on page 86. How great thou art is there because of President Benson insisting that it be included and think of the lives it has changed.

Hank Smith:                      00:33:46             I wanted to speak of one because I know both of you have, as everyone, have deep feelings for your children. This is 127. It says, “Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty one, so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.” When I think of my kids, can you catch me on a day that they’re not being overly difficult? John, you have a missionary. I have a missionary. When you think of them out there teaching the gospel or I have a daughter who’s married, you see them progressing. This speaks the truth. They are a gift from the Lord. It really is a gift to be a father.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:34:38             We need to be reminded of that. That Psalm does just that.

John Bytheway:               00:34:43             Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them. Now, some of our kids are straight arrows and some aren’t. You still are happy with the quiver full. That’s fun.

Hank Smith:                      00:34:55             That’s a fun one.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:34:56             It’s a poetic image. You see it in your mind’s eye and that’s why it stays there.

Hank Smith:                      00:35:02             I remember Elder Cook talked about a funeral he went to when he was in his 20s. He was kind of deciding which direction his life was going to go and he said he went to a funeral of a grandfather and there was 30 grandchildren up there singing the primary songs. And he said, “I knew what I wanted. I knew what happiness looked like.” It really changed the direction of his life, hearing those songs sung at a funeral by grandchildren.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:35:34             By grandchildren. Beautiful. Many, many years ago I was hired to sing a very difficult role in Michigan. I went to the conductor, he said, “You’re from Utah. You were born in Utah, weren’t you?” And I said, yes. “You got to be a Mormon.” I said, “Yeah, would you like to know more about us?” He went to the piano and he started playing that. And he said, “I went to a Mormon church once and I heard that hymn and I’ve never forgotten it.”

                                           00:36:12             I said, “That hymn is the reason I’m here in America because my great-great-grandfather, he had missionaries come to see him for years and he was a Bible scholar and he put them in their place when they didn’t understand, 19-year-old boys from Benson, Utah, he would confound them. One day, he was in Randers Denmark and he was walking down the street and he heard that being sung by a congregation. I’m sure they didn’t sound like the Tabernacle Choir, but he stopped dead in his tracks and he went up to the door and thought, “Who are these people on the other side of this door?” And then he read the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And he thought, “I need to be with these people.” A couple of weeks later, he was a member of the church and determined to leave Denmark and to come to Utah. My great-grandfather was converted to Mormonism because of Oh My Father.

Hank Smith:                      00:37:20             There’s something about music that as much as I love to teach, John and I both love to teach, you can’t replicate it with the spoken word.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:37:29             You get pretty close, but you add the music to it and it’s a vehicle that will carry the Spirit with those words. That’s why we remember them. They’re poetic. They’re powerful. Oh My Father, by Eliza R. Snow, it’s scripture. It is. It describes what makes us different. Heavenly parents. Imagine that we can go and dwell with them. Do you know all of Eliza Snow’s hymns? We should.

Hank Smith:                      00:38:02             I’ve always loved Psalm 130. It says, “Out of the depth I have cried unto thee, O Lord.” Michael, John and I frequently talk about, we hear from listeners who are in some really hard places. I’ve had people say, “As I was grieving the death of my spouse, I would listen to your show, not necessarily because I wanted to be taught Hebrew or Greek, but I felt better hearing someone teach about scripture.” It says, Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If thou Lord shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the Lord. My soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. My soul, here it is again, waiteth for the Lord. More than they that watch for the morning, I say more than they that watch for the morning, let Israel hope in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy and with him is plentious redemption.” Don’t you love that? “Plentious redemption and he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.” You can feel that. Those are the words deep in someone’s heart.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:39:32             And David wrote a number of those. Can I show you one? Pity me, Lord, for I am weak. A refuge and harbor I seek thy weary head with wings shall cover when will this endless night be over? One of the psalms he wrote after Bathsheba, pity me Lord, for I am weak. We all have those moments. So his Psalms about forgiveness are so important. We need to memorize it. We should know that one because there are many times when we need the pity of the Lord to help us. I’m thinking of the 84th Psalm, which is so powerful. This one, 84. How lovely are my dwellings O Lord of hosts. My soul longeth yea fainteth for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God. And I love this part. Yea the sparrow has found her a house under the swallow a nest where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.

                                           00:41:48             Yea the sparrow has found her house and the swallow a nest. If he notices the difference between a sparrow and a swallow, he knows the difference between all of us because he created us. When Brahms wrote his requiem, he didn’t want to put in the portion which is, I’m sorry God, I’ve been a terrible person. Forgive me if you can. And he said, I don’t like that. And he was writing this requiem for his mother who had just passed away. And they said, well, don’t use it then. Use one of the Psalms. “How lovely are thy dwellings, O Lord of hosts. My soul longeth, yea fainteth for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh reach out to the living God. Yea the sparrow has found her house and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young.” That’s in his requiem, which makes it very special to me because that’s how he viewed his mother, not as a please be merciful to us God because we’re nothing but sinners. The 84th Psalm. So powerful. You need to memorize it. If you set it to music, you’ll remember it for the rest of your life.

John Bytheway:               00:43:08             I’m certain that every hymn has a backstory. One of my favorite was it John Henry Newman. He’s on a ship. The Mediterranean, the fog closes in, he’s sick. They have no wind. They can’t move. He writes these words, “Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom. Lead thou me on. The night is dark and I am far from home.” When you hear the backstory, now I see what he was feeling at that time.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:43:38             It’s inspired. When the first hymnal came out, I was speaking to Boyd Packer about it and he said, “What do you think of the new hymnal?” I said, “It’s great, but it’s missing one.” “Which one?” He said. “Amazing Grace.” He said, “It’ll be in the next one.” Well, he passed away before the new one that is coming out. I wrote the committee. Again, they didn’t put me on the committee, that was wise. I said, “You need to put Amazing Grace in there.” I told them the story of Boyd K. Packer saying, “It needs to be there. It will bring people together.” It has. It’s there. Think what it’s doing because it speaks to every Christian on the face of the earth, and if they happen to come to us, they’ll hear something familiar. Amazing Grace. And you remember Elder Holland.

Elder Jeffrey R…:             00:44:38             Nevertheless, I sing amazing grace. How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:45:27             It was his final testimony that the grace of God is amazing. I’m so glad. It’s part of our repertory now.

John Bytheway:               00:45:38             Michael, I want your opinion on this because it sounds to me like there’s a bit of a sense of humor here in Psalm 135, starting at verse 15. “The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not. Eyes have they, but they see not. They have ears, but they hear not. Neither is there any breath in their mouths” and then this. “They that make them are like unto them. So is everyone that trusteth in them.”

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:46:10             There is. There’s a sense of humor in there. The first time I met Amelia McConkie, Bruce McConkie’s widow, she bought the first two tickets to the Utah Festival Opera, which I founded in 1993. I said to her, “What was it like to be around your dad and your husband when they got together? What was it like?” And she said, “They laughed themselves silly.” I said, “What do you mean?” Because I never saw that from either one of them at the pulpit. She said, “Every Sunday, we’d have dinner together and the boys would play baseball on the back lawn.” That tells you something. “They’d tell each other jokes until one of them would fall off their chair.” Imagine. She said, “When they were speaking to the general public in the church, they needed to give them a profound message, but they had tremendous senses of humor.” That makes them all the more lovable to me.

Hank Smith:                      00:47:18             Yeah, me too. I just thought of one other that I just think is a wonderful lesson. We use this quite a bit. The stone which the builders refused has become the headstone of the corner. And the idea is that there’s things that the builders looked at and went, no, we don’t want to use that. Now it’s become the most important stone of all, very much a Jesus, that rejected but became the most important stone of all. Even we could say the restoration. Rejected by many, but will be one day the most important stone of them all. It’s a line from a Psalm, but there’s a lot to it.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:48:03             Not everyone sees the majesty. When Michelangelo did his crowning achievement, the David, he used a discarded piece of marble that had been slightly used and nobody wanted it. It was junk to everybody. So he got it free and he said, “I looked at it and I thought, I just have to chip away everything that’s not David.” And God does that for us. He chips away those parts of us that are not really who we are, and he’s chipping it away so that we can become in his image as best we can. And there it is in the Psalms. David is talking about it.

Hank Smith:                      00:48:49             Michael, this is something you are so passionate about. I think John and I and our listeners would love to just. What are your favorite songs? What are Michael Ballam’s favorite songs?

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:49:08             [Plays the Spirit of God on the piano] That one. And all the children in my ward know that, and they’ll sing it in Primary if I come for a visit. That is an important hymn. Let me explain to you. I made a motion picture for the church. It was played many, many, many times in some glorious buildings around the church. It required admission. You had to pay 10% of your income to get in. But when I was called to play that part, I knew in advance, because 10 years before that, I was sitting in the Logan temple next to my grandfather, and I heard him say, “Prepare. You’re going to play that role.” I thought, “Grandpa?” And I realized he hadn’t said it, and then I heard it again. For the next 10 years, I’d look at it and think, “How would I play that?” The day that I was called, it wasn’t a job, it was a calling.

                                           00:50:08             I was in Provo at the tabernacle down there just before the Messiah began. A guy came up to me, didn’t know who he was, said, “You got to call this number, and you have to call it right now. It’s really, really important.” I said, “I’ve come down because my student, David Warner, is going to be the tenor soloist. It’s the first time he’ll make a public appearance as a tenor. I’m not going to miss that.” I listened to the whole Messiah, got in my car, and I headed north, and I got after about 40 minutes, it dawned on me, I was supposed to make that call. I pulled off, this was before cell phones. I pulled off to a Wendy’s where they had a payphone. I knew where every payphone in the state of Utah was. The guy on the other end answered, “This is Peter Johnson.” I said, “Brother Johnson, this is Michael Ballam.” He said, “Brother Ballam, on behalf of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we’d like to call you to play the role of Lucifer in a new temple film.” Sometimes people go in to see the Bishop, and just a moment before, they’re told, “He’s going to call you to be the Relief Society President.”

                                           00:51:22             It’s a tender mercy from God who’s going to say, I’m in charge. This call is coming from me, so you better be good at it. That’s what it said to me. So powerful. When that project began, they brought all of us together in the space it was going to be produced. President Hinckley determined that he needed to consecrate the area, because he said there are going to be some modifications made, and it’s going to make somebody in the universe angry, and he’s going to try to stop it. We needed a dedicatory prayer. He offered a dedicatory prayer. It sounded like any one that you can read from the Logan Temple, the Manti Temple, just like that, ones that John Taylor dedicated, but at the end, he cast him out. Before it started, before he gave that dedicatory prayer, he was walking up and he said to a secretary, Lowell Hardy,” We need to sing two hymns, the Spirit of God and High On a Mountaintop.

                                           00:52:30             Lowell Hardy, who was very much like a Barney Fife, like our friend John here, he said, “But President, we have no hymnals,” President Hinckley said in a very loud voice that we could all hear, “They shouldn’t need hymnals for those hymns.” Which said to me, I better memorize the Spirit of God and High on a Mountaintop. They’re scripture. They’re that important. They are our Psalms, and they are holy. We need to know the Psalms, and we need to know the hymns, especially those two that President Hinckley thought we should all know by heart.

John Bytheway:               00:53:16             I had a roommate when I was at BYU. His name is Tom McKnight. Tom went to officer candidate school after he graduated. He was a Marine pilot. He flew F18s. He was as handsome, probably more so than any of those guys in the movies, but Tom was flying an A4 Skyhawk, learning how to land on an aircraft carrier. He had an unsafe landing gear in Decatur. They told him, “You’re going to have to do a belly landing in Key West, Florida.” He tried inside loops out. He’d everything to try to get the gear to come down, and it wouldn’t. He told me, “I was remembering my patriarchal blessing and singing hymns on the way to my landing.” That’s where his power was coming from. To Tom’s credit, he did a perfect belly landing, popped the canopy. They were running, “Get out of there.” He got out of there. I’ll never forget that he was singing hymns.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:54:12             That got him through.

John Bytheway:               00:54:14             That got him through.

Hank Smith:                      00:54:16             Amanda Barnes-Smith was taking care of her son, who was shot in Hauns Mill. After her husband had been killed, another son had been killed. She’s taking care of another son who had been shot in the hip, and she hears that soul who on Jesus hath leaned for repose. I will not. I cannot desert to his foes.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:54:44             You see, they need to live in your heart. You never know when you’re going to need them.

John Bytheway:               00:54:49             How interesting. You’re going to do a temple video. What better than the song that was sung in the Kirtland Temple Dedication, then High on a Mountaintop, that’s what Isaiah 2 go up to the mountain of the Lord, a banner is unfurled. It’s kind of fun Hank up at the BYU Salt Lake Center. I used to be able to, when we looked at Isaiah 2 or 2 Nephi 12, the banner’s unfurled. I used to be able to point out the window and say, “There it is, Ensign peak.” But now there’s some high density housing in the way. That’s it. That’s where they unfurled and said, all right, everybody. Gather.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:55:28             We remember Isaiah saying that because it’s poetic. He wrote in poetry as the Psalms are in poetry. The night before Neal Maxwell was going to announce to the world that he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he called my wife and me to warn us. He said, “I don’t want you to open the Deseret News and see it. I wanted you hear it from me. Colleen and I have determined we’re not going to do anything. We’re going to let it take its course and take me home.” He told President Hinckley that, and President Hinckley said, “You’re going to do everything you can to maintain your life as long as you can, because Neal, you are our Isaiah. No, the rest of us are replaceable. Neal, you’re not. You’re our Isaiah, and we need you for as long as we can have you here.” And he lived 10 years longer. He battled, battled so much. Those bone marrow transfusions are so painful, and he endured them every week, and it sustained him. He was able to complete that full volume of his works before he passed away. He was valiant. A month before he died, he came to Logan to see an opera, La bohème by Puccini.

                                           00:57:04             He loved that. He was very, very sick. Very, very sick. He knew that my father was dying of cancer. He said, “I don’t want to impose, but I feel like I should give your father a blessing. Is that okay?” It’s more than okay. I warned my parents, Neal Maxwell is coming home with me and he wants to give dad a blessing, which he did. After the blessing, both of them were going to die the next month, my dad asked Neal Maxwell, “When is it time to just give up and say to the Lord, I can’t go on anymore?” And Neal Maxwell said, “Never. We need to endure to the end.” Sometimes that’s really, really hard. He knew, and my dad knew, because he also had cancer in his bones when he passed away. There’s been nobody like him. There never will be anyone like Neal A. Maxwell.

Hank Smith:                      00:58:09             Michael, you’re so wonderfully passionate about music. Why is it so healing? It is. It can soothe your soul when almost nothing else can. It can lift you from darkness.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        00:58:22             For one reason or another, I’ve played the devil in many operas. He’s in a lot of operas. The first time I played him, he was called Mephistopheles in that instead of the devil. I went before the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera. I had prepared like crazy. He opened the score and started playing and I started singing. And after about 30 seconds, he closed the score, handed it to me, and said, “There’s nothing I can do for you. You’re going to be terrible.” “What do you mean? I have worked so hard.” He said, “Yeah, but you play him like a villain.” I said, “He is.” And he said, “But if you play him like that, the audience won’t understand why he was able to compel Faust to sell him his soul. You need to be compelling and endearing so that he will accept the invitation to hell.”

                                           00:59:29             I always did that in the portrayals of Satan, and then all of a sudden the church calls me and I thought the same thing. I can’t play him so evil that he would repel Adam, because he’s not. He’s very cunning, he’s very beautiful, until he turns on you. And that was really important for me that I wanted to convey that in the film.

John Bytheway:               00:59:57             Hank, one time I was in the Joseph Smith Building at BYU, and there were boxes outside the dean’s office with old cassette tapes that said, “Take these if you want them.” I grabbed some CES symposium tapes, a church educational system symposium, and I listened to all of them, and I kept some of them. One of them that I kept was Michael Ballam talking about playing the Apostle Paul. It was so good. I’m going to let him tell you, but one thing I want you to tell us, because it touched me, and I know this isn’t part of the Psalms, but it’s the Apostle Paul. You talked about wearing chains. I will never forget that part of the talk. Do you remember that? It’s got to be 30, 40 years ago, but do you remember what you said? Because I can remind you if you can’t remember.

Dr. Michael Ballam:        01:00:47             It is ingrained in my heart. When the church asked me to play Paul, who was one of my heroes, he was an enemy to God. Then all of a sudden, he changes and becomes the greatest missionary possible, but he’s imprisoned in the maritime prison in Rome, which is enough to stand there in the darkness. He’s in chains for years. We filmed one of the scenes where I was in chains, appearing before King of Grippa, where Paul tells him, “I have seen him. I know he lives.” I called a break. I said, “Let’s go to lunch.” And the prop master came up with a key and said, “I’ll take your chains off.” I said, “No, don’t take them off. I need to wear them. I need to feel what that felt like. Even if it’s just for a day, I need to feel what being shackled in chains feels like.” I went up to the commissary with chains on my feet and chains on my hands and consumed dinner.

                                           01:01:50             Very difficult to do that, but I got a glimpse of what he must have felt like. When the day was over, my wrists were raw and bleeding. That was just for one day. Imagine months at a time shackled in chains. That speech you refer to, I’ll never forget it either. I went to that conference with a speech in mind and they showed the film about Paul right there. They showed it. I’d never seen it. It was brand new and it was going to be released to all of the church educators. And I watched it. And when I got up to give the speech I had prepared, it wasn’t there. I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t remember anything. I don’t write speeches, maybe outline of five or six things. And I looked at it and I thought, “I don’t know what this means.” And I said to the people there, “I’m not supposed to give this speech.

                                           01:03:01             I’m not sure what I am, but here it is.” With no warning at all, I gave a speech about the Apostle Paul. None of those words were mine. Somebody wanted me to convey to those important brothers and sisters who were going to teach about him the experience I had had of just living his life for a little bit of time. The Spirit can do that, but you have to be willing to do what the Spirit asks you to do. And if you do, it’ll be stronger the next time.