It took me the longest time to stop thinking of July 24 as a holiday after we moved away from Utah. I just naturally wanted fireworks and wienie roasts and Jell-O salads in a backyard or a park, nestled comfortably somewhere in Utah County. I wanted Home.
As a kid, I felt about the 24th of July the way most Americans feel about the 4th. It seemed the 24th was always bigger than the 4th to me. Somehow I felt I owed my patriotism to my pioneer heritage as much, if not more than, to my country.
It was part of growing up Utah Mormon.
I'm not sure how the whole pioneer thing resonates with members of the Church in other areas of the world. I can imagine that it probably doesn't resonate much at all. It's an example of one of those places in the Church where there is a divide between the Utah Original and the Modern Worldwide versions.
We're on to Mormonism 2.0 now. And sometimes running the updated software on the old equipment can be a bit glitchy.
Why do we western-variety Mormons love our pioneer stories so much? Because they're ours. Uniquely ours. And they speak volumes about the dedication of the people who sacrificed everything to be able to live the religion they loved, follow the prophets they believed in and worship the God they chose. When we tell those stories, we feel connected at the roots. To a belief system and to a place. We feel like a family with somewhere to call Home.
Church members in other parts of the world forge their own stories and connections, I'm sure. They feel rooted to the first generation members in their families, the missionaries who shared the gospel with and/or baptized them, to influential Church leaders in their areas, to the community of people they serve with and worship with. They feel connected to temples they sacrificed to attend, chapels they waited and prayed for eagerly and with great faith. They have their own stories to love and to tell. They may themselves be pioneers.
And perhaps we would benefit more from learning their stories than they do from hearing us repeat ours over and over. It might help better unify the whole, and give us a more accurate picture of the Church we are all part of now. I don't know.
Mostly I'm just for sharing stories.
I'm for sharing stories because it is in our stories that we come to identify as a family. What happens when you sit a family down around a table together? After awhile, they always trot out the old stories.
And even if we've heard them a thousand times, we all stick around to hear them again.
Feeling connected to the lore makes us part of the tribe. Even things that happened in the family before we were born seem somehow to become part of our personal experience.
It's the same thing that makes great literature great. In telling the human story, suddenly everyone is in the club.
A friend who is not a Mormon described it well. He said, "I've thought for a long time that the afterlife, which is to say our real lives, once these birthing pains are ended, will involve accessibility to each other -- an understanding so deep that we'll finally get each other's basic joke."
In my favorite of the Gospel Topics essays, Becoming Like God, our eternal relationships are described in this way:
"Church members imagine exaltation less through images of what they will get and more through the relationships they have now and how those relationships might be purified and elevated."
They're both saying the same thing, really. Heaven will mean understanding and being understood, loving and being loved perfectly...relationships distilled. Through sealing we all become connected to each other and to God by covenant. An elevation of our human family.
This is the end goal of our faith, the Home we're all journeying toward. Our eventual Zion.
In preparation, maybe we should focus more on strengthening our connections here and now. Knowing each other in ways that lead to understanding and loving. I think it's swell to trot out our old stories for pioneer day, but I'd really like to become better acquainted with some of the new ones too. I want to know all the ways in which we're family. It's an arduous Mormon trek right here in 2014. And since we're traveling together, at the end of the day I'd like to hear about your journey.
(Did anyone bring marshmallows?...we're gonna need a bigger campfire.)
- S.
No comments:
Post a Comment