Charley’s Blessings
By Davis Bitton

Charles Lowell Walker, another foot soldier of the restoration, did not have an easy life.  Many trials came his way, but I think he would describe himself as a happy man.  Before looking at Brother Charley, let me first refer to the teachings of two men who lived long after him.

The first is Hugh B. Brown. He became an apostle and then a counselor in the First Presidency.  A Canadian, a military officer during World War I, a lawyer, he was my teacher at Brigham Young University in a course called Principles and Doctrines of Mormonism.  I was eighteen years old.  Always able to stimulate my mind and stir my spirit, he was just the right person for me at that time.  “I thank God for the experiences in life I would have avoided if I had had the choice,” he said.  In the fine biography of Hugh B. Brown by Eugene Campbell and Richard Poll, we discover what some of those trying experiences were.

Experiences in life can be unpleasant, as we all know.  They can be horrible, excruciating.  No one enjoys pain, physical or emotional.  Yet looking back over his own life, Brother Brown was saying he had emerged a better person.  If nothing else, through trials we learn our own vulnerability, our own humanity.  We can be kinder, more empathetic, to others in their hour of trial.  We can resolve to be humbler, more dedicated disciples.

The other person I wish to mention is Dennis Prager, a Jewish rabbi who thoughtfully discusses issues of importance to all of us in today's world.  Not long ago I heard him emphasize the importance of gratitude.  Gratitude and happiness, Prager said, are inextricably linked.  You can’t be happy without being grateful, and you can't be grateful without being happy. “Wickedness never was happiness” – we could adapt that powerful Book of Mormon aphorism by saying gratitude always means happiness.

So who was Charley Walker, and what kind of life did he have?  Born in England in 1832, he and his parental family migrated to Utah, where he arrived in 1855.  He married Abigail Middlemass in 1861, and a year later was called to join the settlers of the new Cotton Mission in St. George.

For more than forty years he lived out his life in a hot, dry environment, acutely aware of what he had given up, symbolized by the fruit trees at his little home in Salt Lake City.  He and his wife faced sickness and death of children and neighbors.  As a committed Latter-day Saint, he followed the hate-filled language of the national press and suffered whenever the church suffered.  He was distressed at the apostasy of his father.  He was not spared the hardship and trials of life.

Yet Charley was fundamentally a cheerful man.  As a faithful home teacher, or Sunday School teacher, he attended to the needs of others.  He tried to lift them up.  Blessed with a verbal facility and an aptitude for poetry, which always remained untrained and undeveloped, he wrote toasts for special occasions, poems or essays in honor of individuals, and comments on current events.  Often his remarks were humorous.  People loved to hear from “the poet laureate of Dixie,” Charley Walker.

Charley Walker was the kind of person you would like as a friend or neighbor.  With no pretense, you and he could talk about life.  Always he was the encourager.  He wrote the words to a tender song still found in our hymnal, “Dearest Children, God Is Near You.”

Walker was one of those who labored to construct the St. George Temple.  When President Brigham Young arrived in May 1876, people lined the street and displayed flags and banners.  Charley held a banner inscribed “Zion’s workmen.”

Brother Brigham remained in St. George for a few weeks.  He attended meetings and addressed the people.  He urged them to finish the temple, even giving them the deadline of September 15.  At one of these meetings he beckoned to Charles L. Walker and asked if he might have a copy of the special temple song Walker had composed.

How would you feel if the prophet made such a request of you?  I think we can say that Charley was excited and thrilled.  Let us hear his own words as recorded in his journal:

After meeting I went home and got the song and took it to him.  He treated me very kindly and asked me to sit beside him and take dinner with him.  I spent the time very pleasantly and found him to be very polite, genial, and sociable, and I felt quite at home in chatting over the work on the Temple, old times, and other general topics.  In bidding him good bye He took my hand in both of his and said, God bless you Br Charley, and God has blessed you hasn’t He?  It seemed that in an instant all the blessings I had ever recei[v]ed were before Me.  My emotion was too much to answer him and I chokeingly said, I have learned to trust in the Lord.

A month later, back in Salt Lake City, Brigham Young reflected further about blessings and happiness:

How vain it is in man to allow himself to think that he can make himself happy with the pleasures of this world.  There is no lasting pleasure here, unless it is in God.  When men leave the kingdom of God, their lives are filled with bitterness, their thoughts are full of fearfulness, and they are sorrowful, day by day.  They may tell you they are happy.  But when you probe them, and find out the inmost recesses of the heart, it is a cup of gall; they are not happy.  They may seek, to the uttermost parts of the earth for happiness, but they find it not. 

Where is happiness, real happiness?  Nowhere but in God.  By possessing the spirit of our holy religion, we are happy, in the morning, we are happy at noon, we are happy in the evening; for the spirit of love and union is with us, and we rejoice in the spirit because it is of God, and we rejoice in God, for he is the giver of every good thing.  Each and every Latter‑day Saint, who has experienced the love of God in his heart, after having received the remission of his sins, through baptism, and the laying on of hands, realizes that he is filled with joy, and happiness, and consolation.  He may be in pain, in error, in poverty, or in prison if necessity demands, still, he is joyful.  This is our experience, and each and every Latter‑day Saint can bear witness to it.  (Journal of Discourses 18: 213).

Brigham Young would die a year later, but not before he had dedicated the St. George Temple.

Charley Walker lived for another twenty-eight years.  Despite his trials, sometimes because of his trials, Charley was consistently grateful for the blessings of his life.  And Charley was a happy man.