Elder Holland is one of my favorite speakers. His talks are almost
always powerful, and this conference was no different.
While there are many reasons his talk was so effective and
there are many rhetorical examples in it, I’m going to focus on his use of the
topics of invention—particularly comparison and degree.
Elder Holland’s entire talk was basically a comparison
between the love of Jesus Christ and the love of a mother. He used words like
“bear, born, redeem, carry, lift, deliver, labor” to describe Christ. Then he
pointed out how we use those words with mothers as well.
Also, Elder Holland made many allusions to mothers in the
scriptures. While this comparison was not as explicit, he was still setting up
mothers today with those great women in the past, implying similarities.
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In addition to comparison, he also employed degree. One
example of this is when he stated “no love in mortality comes closer to
approximating the pure love of Christ than the selfless love a devoted mother
has for her child.” He had several others throughout the talk.
Degree helped with comparison. We hold Christ in the highest regard, so this added to the comparison of mothers
being high as well.
The comparison between Christ and mothers was the most
memorable for me. I think it is what made this talk so effective. Comparisons
can be used to show similarities between different subjects, and the purpose of
this could be to better and explain one or both of the differing subjects. That
was the case for this comparison.
I generally understand Christ’s love and I generally
understand my mother’s love. But in my mind, they’ve always been different.
However, when Elder Holland put them together, I learned more about both types
of love.
After Conference, I think we all generally come away with a greater appreciation for Christ. Since Elder Holland compared mothers to Christ, this time we came away with a greater appreciation for our mothers, as well.
I feel like one of Elder Holland's greatest strengths is, like you said, looking at the story of Christ's life and then comparing and applying it to our lives. This talk was a great example, as was his one about Christ performing the Atonement... Okay, I was going to list some more but I realized that I'd have to just list every talk he's ever given. Point is, he uses these comparisons well, and it really does make it so we can get more out of these stories, and also teaches us how we can do it for ourselves, which is super important.
ReplyDeleteI love your insight involving a blend of comparison and degree. Yes, perhaps the closest thing to Christ's love is one of a mother. But Christ's love is infinitely multiplied as a force even more powerful. For a "supernatural" element like the love of God, I did feel Elder Holland did a fine job at comparing a lesser degree that most of us are familiar with.
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