Pruning

by John S. Tanner

It is pruning season again. I dread this time of year. Over the winter my fruit trees have been surreptitiously branching out in now exuberant displays of wild abundance. I look out my window, see what mischief they have been up to, and know a day of reckoning is near between me and my garden. But I dread it. For I am a lousy pruner.

I am a good weeder, but weeding by comparison is a relatively simple task. The weeder’s work is straightforward. He operates in a Manichean world, divided between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. His is the warrior mentality: to search and destroy the enemy and thus liberate innocent nature from the stranglehold of evil.

Pruning requires a different mindset, a more delicate art. It requires the surgeon’s art rather than the soldier’s. For the pruner cuts into a living plants he cares about and wants to preserve, not uproot. He amputates to prevent further decay; he thins current abundance confident in greater future abundance. While weeding entails simple moral choices between good and evil, pruning requires subtle prudent choices between competing goods: e.g., which one of these good branches will produce the best fruit; which should I save and which should I slice off?

At BYU, and perhaps in the Church as well, we are better at weeding than at pruning. When the choice is between good and evil, we stand tall. But when the choice is between competing goods, it’s harder to know where wisdom lies in order to act courageously. When the choice is among good, better, and best, we need a master pruner’s wisdom to choose the best.

For years, both the Board and BYU presidents have tried to get us to engage seriously in institutional pruning. In his Second Century address, for example, President Kimball used a cognate metaphor, describing the need to replace planks in the good ship BYU to keep it seaworthy. President Holland was wont to say that because BYU can’t do everything, what we choose to do we must do superbly well. Likewise during the Lee and Bateman administrations many units engaged in self-study and some in significant restructuring. We are now in a period when the Board has imposed strict caps on enrollment, FTE, and square-footage, requiring us to make hard choices among competing goods. These limits enforce a pruning discipline on campus, captured by President Samuelson’s oft repeated mantra: “If you are going to add, what are you prepared to cut.”

Pruning can be gut-wrenching work, whether in our backyards or at BYU. It can seem a cruel labor, too. But I recall, from Jacob 5, that pruning is in fact a labor of love. God sends his servants to prune his vineyard because he wants it to flourish and bear fruit. Over and over we hear that it “grieveth” the Lord to lose his overgrown trees. So his servants and his son must not only dung his trees, but lop off branches that overburden the roots.

We have no less a responsibility to prune our part of the vineyard if we are to cultivate a fruitful harvest at BYU. Let us master the pruner’s art, which is to let light in so the fruit can flourish. This can apply to our 415 programs, our curriculum, and our syllabi–all of which tend to become overgrown without regular pruning. The pruner knows that less truly can be more, and that teaching is as much about what we uncover as what we cover.

© 2008 BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.