Patriarchal blessings are an up-close-and-personal example of exercising faith even in cases where there is a possibility of disconfirmation. Of generally trusting in something while reserving for some possibility that it might be wrong, or at least very different from your expectations.

Of course, there are different “outs” for patriarchal blessing particulars that don’t pan out. Maybe it will happen in the hereafter, maybe you didn’t do what you were supposed to do, etc. Some of these are valid and I’m not dismissing them. But a priori I would be surprised if, out of the thousands if not millions of patriarchal blessings given, some of them have parts that are just wrong, even if there is a real signal in the noise worth meditating and praying over (which has most certainly been my case personally). 

The classic case is, of course, family. Nowadays enough people will remain unmarried and childless that what is in some cases a staple of patriarchal blessings, personal prophecies and advice about marriage and children, becomes a little more trepidatious, and we’ve all heard the stories of people who were promised children and marriage and none were forthcoming.

Ironically, my wife’s is the opposite of this; she’s a stay-at-home mother of eight and has less-than-zero desire to be anything else…and her blessing has no mention of any spouse or children (sharing this with permission; she half jokes that as a taller woman there may have been some hedging going on about her marital prospects.) However, she can point to a time when she had to make a decision about whether she wanted to be married, and she admits that not having it in her patriarchal blessing made that decision more free and open for her. So while we all want a Magic Eight Ball, it’s more sophisticated than that. 

And on the subject of the patriarchal-blessing-as-Magic-Eight-Balls. Skeptic types would point out that Latter-day Saint patriarchal blessings are a version of cold reading practiced by mentalists, with most statements being vague enough that you can interpret them in myriad ways, with confirmation bias on the part of the recipient doing the rest. 

However, even from a naturalist perspective there are some fundamental differences between a patriarchal blessing and a mentalist or fortune teller. First of all, in contrast to many mentalists and mediums, patriarchs are sincere in their beliefs about their own prophetic ability. They are not trying to scam anybody. If there are “cold reading” techniques they are either subconscious or are seen as a version of preparation proceeding inspiration. It makes spiritual sense that a patriarch would talk to you a bit about your background before the blessing, and that whatever hints he gets from that could be used in the inspiration process. 

They also do not make money at what they do. Well, some of the early ones did, but they were still sincere in the same way that, dare I say, some money diggers in 19th century upstate New York were. Finally, many patriarchal blessings do indeed include major life events that risk disconfirmation. One could argue that the outs of having it happen in the hereafter and such essentially make it non-verifiable—but that’s okay. The accuracy of patriarchal blessings aren’t meant as some evidence of priesthood prophetic ability, and it’s a category error to treat them as the kind of thing that the Amazing Randi or similar skeptical debunker types would take on during a cable special.  

My understanding is that one of the responsibilities of stake presidents is to read through patriarchal blessings, and I assume there’s some unspoken backstory to that “quality check.”  So I’m sure there are some bad apples out of the thousands of patriarchs who have ever lived, but to strain a metaphor, I’ve only seen and experienced holy apples. 

Matter of fact, in my anecdotal experience patriarchs are just about the farthest thing from a shyster as you can get. This isn’t false pride in the Church. While they are in the minority, I have met some rank-and-file church leaders for whom I don’t get much of a spiritual vibe from. (In a way I relate more to them). However, I’ve never met a stake patriarch that didn’t give off that holy glow. I’m sure they exist, but anecdotally in a way it seems like, bereft of administrative responsibilities and able to completely focus on the spiritual they occupy another tier of holiness. (On a somewhat orthogonal note, ambitious young Church leaders come and go, but I’ve never met a young patriarch.) 

On my mission we once gave a blessing to somebody who was on death’s door, and in a case like this one would expect advice along the lines of being cautious about promising too much, so I was surprised when my very grounded and not-sensational companion instead gave me the opposite take: be open minded about raising them from the virtual dead if that’s what you feel. And that would be the hard part of being patriarch, knowing that your in-the-moment personal spiritual messages will be poured over, studied, and analyzed for decades, and having the confidence to make prophecies, sometimes fairly pointed ones, that you know could be disconfirmed. All Church leadership and management ideally would involve the spirit, but to have the faith and spiritual confidence and sensitivity to pronounce lifelong prophecies and blessings is its own category.