In elementary school, my music teacher taught all of our class how to play the recorder. The recorder is the most basic in the family of woodwind instruments that includes the flute, clarinet, oboe and saxophone. The last of these instruments was the one I dreamed of playing as a boy.
My proficiency on the recorder with timeless classics like “Hot Cross Buns” made me feel the saxophone would be easy to master when I could choose to play it in sixth grade.
In one of our first band classes after starting sixth grade, our teacher, Rick Torcaso, taught us about a practice called circular breathing. The idea of circular breathing is that you can simultaneously inhale and expel air. As an 11-year-old, my mind was blown.
How do you both inhale and blow out air at the same time? How do you hold a note or series of notes playing the saxophone while also taking a breath? Impossible, I thought.
Throughout that school year, Mr. Torcaso taught us how to use circular breathing as we played different situations — we varied musical styles, group sizes, sitting, standing, marching, written and improvised. In the end, I moved from saxophone to choir, but I had learned some valuable lessons.
At this year’s RootsTech Family Discovery Day, Mr. Torcaso’s words came bubbling to the surface of my memories as I listened to President Jeffrey R. Holland speak about prayer. The acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles bore testimony of the power that comes from honoring covenants with God while sharing the stage with Elder Neil L. Andersen, also of the Twelve, and Sister Kathy Andersen.
In his comments toward the end of their presentation, President Holland recounted the two invitations he felt compelled to share after recovering from illness that left him hospitalized in what he called in April 2024 general conference “an acute medical crisis.”
The first invitation was to pray more.
“I thought I prayed all the time,” President Holland said on the RootsTech main stage. “However much you have prayed, pray more. And in however many places you have prayed, pray in more places. However many times during the day you pray, pray more times in the day.”
It was that last line that brought my band teacher’s words back to my mind. Some songs just couldn’t be played without circular breathing. The notes came too quickly. The amount of air needed was too much. The fermata telling the conductor he could hold the note as long as he wanted pushed us past our lungs’ limits for a single breath.
And in these days where we prepare for the Second Coming of the Savior, Jesus Christ, as President Russell M. Nelson has encouraged, sometimes our prayers might require some spiritual circular breathing.
We may be acting on inspiration we felt during one prayer while offering another at the same time. We may live the answer to one prayer while asking a new question in another. We may serve someone we felt directed to while simultaneously asking for prayerful help on another matter.
“Pray always, that you may come off conqueror,” the Lord taught the Prophet Joseph Smith in Doctrine and Covenants 10:5.
Later, the Savior taught what might be His version of circular prayer. Instead of using air stored in the cheeks while the lungs take their next breath, the Lord taught in Doctrine and Covenants 19:28 to use both the physical voice and the heart to pray.
“I command thee that thou shalt pray vocally as well as in thy heart; yea, before the world as well as in secret, in public as well as in private,” he said through Joseph Smith.
The second invitation President Holland made closely mirrored the first.
“However much you testify, testify more,” he said. He said that no matter how many people one has testified to or been a witness to, one must do so to more individuals.
While my saxophone-playing aspirations didn’t last longer than a school year, I hope the lesson learned there can help me fulfill the apostolic invitation to pray more and testify more when I think I have prayed and testified enough. Because, as President Holland concluded, “it has got to be more.”
— Jon Ryan Jensen is editor of the Church News.
