Day 6

A Helpful Educational Sidetrack

      Canandaigua Lake is the westernmost of New York’s Finger Lakes.  (So called, I assume, because there are six of them.  I guess early New Yorkers must have been a bunch of freaks.)  Now, if you are like me, you probably do not have the names of the Finger Lakes memorized.  And who can blame you?  Unlike the Great Lakes which have dozens of clever word games attached to them in order to stir the memory, the Finger Lakes have had no such help.  And with names like Canandaigua, how can you be expected to simply remember them?  It’s a preposterous thing to expect!

      And this is where I come in.  Recognizing your dream of winning new cars and money on television game shows, and realizing that if a question regarding the Finger Lakes was to come up, you would, by half-hour’s end, become a prime candidate for suicide, I have decided to take a breather from my religious pilgrimage to educate the Finger Lake ignorant.

      First, the names.  If you ever need to remember all six names, just ask yourself, “What should we do about our inbreeding problem?”

      Then answer, “Stooge Olly can shoo kissing cousins.”  This handy sentence corresponds perfectly with the Finger Lakes which are, running from east to west, Skaneateles, Owasco, Cayuga, Seneca, Keuka and Canandaigua, of which only Seneca is in my spellchecker.

      Well, if that’s not a first-class memory jogger, I don’t know what is!

      If you feel the names alone are not enough to save you from televised ruin, one more tidbit:  Seneca and Cayuga are the largest of the Fingers and there was a famous women’s suffrage thing connected to one of them, but if you want to know which, look it up.  We really must be moving on.

The Sabbath

      It has been my opportunity to attend sacrament meetings in Nauvoo and Palmyra and a temple dedication in Kirtland.  I remember one of my very first evenings in Nauvoo was spent at a stake priesthood meeting.  It was thrilling.  A priesthood meeting in Nauvoo!  What, I ask you, could be more thrilling?

      The Palmyra Ward’s chapel remains the smallest I have ever seen stateside, but being from California (a major Mormon state with lots of temples), perhaps this is not surprising.  However, since our attendance at one Sunday’s meetings doubtless doubled their budget for the following year, I’m sure the Saints of Palmyra were very pleased to see us.

      After church, we were surprised to learn that our bus was broken.  We were supposed to head back to the hotel for a change into warmer clothes, and then go out to the Sacred Grove and environs.  But without a bus, these plans were complicated.  Fortunately, we were blessed with insightful leadership and Brother Dahl arranged for a twenty-five passenger shuttle to get us to the hotel and our myriad other places to go, until Bev was back on the road.

      We went once more to the Palmyra Temple.  Being Sunday, it was closed, but we walked around the grounds.  Of special interest to me was the ceremonial cornerstone.  The astroturfed ramp was still against the temple wall, and wooden wedges still held it in place.  Only days before, the Lord’s vessel stood here and placed mortar, joking that later, professionals would come, wash it out and do it properly.  But that had not been done yet.  And as I stood next to this sacred building, I imagined that I was one of the children he had invited to come smear mud in the crack.

      I remember when I was a kid, watching tv the entire day that President Kimball died—or maybe it was the day of his funeral—either way, I watched the footage streaming out of Salt Lake—I think I watched more tv that day than when the Challenger exploded; it was a day to be remembered.  Sometime between then and the day President Benson was officially sustained, my family was visiting Grandma Jepson in Nephi, Utah.  She asked me who I thought would replace President Kimball as prophet.  I figured it would be President Hinckley.  She figured it would be some guy I’d never heard of before named Benson.  I was pritty surprised when she was right and I was wrong.

      I suppose I imagined it would be President Hinckley because of his visible position as the only consistently walking member of the First Presidency.  I did not, at that time, have any understanding of succession among the Twelve.  When I learned about prophetic succession as a youth, I immediately realized that Grandma had had inside knowledge.  It’s a good thing she didn’t challenge me to a little wager or she probably would have been locked up on racketeering charges.  My own Grandma!  Can you imagine?  And me a little kid!

      Of course, the fact that she did not take this opportunity to fleece my piggy bank makes her all the more deserving of my respect.  Would I have been able to resist such an easy sixty-three cents?  Maybe not without her example a shining beacon before me.

      The Palmyra Temple is located in the same neighborhood as both Joseph Smith Sr. homes (more on this later) and the Sacred Grove.  Speaking of the Sacred Grove, when do you suppose that term came into common use?  The Community of Christ doesn’t use it, best I can tell, so I imagine it may have come later than the Nauvoo era, but I can’t be sure.  What I could use right now, is a nice LDS etymological dictionary.  Alas, there is none.

The Official Joseph Smith Sr. Home

      By official, I mean the one where Moroni came to see Joseph and kept him up all night.  The unofficial Joseph Smith Sr. home is just down the street and still undergoing restoration last I heard.  It’s the one Alvin was building when he died.

      It was a funny thought to realize I was standing in the space where Moroni stood (albeit he didn’t stick to the ground) when I found myself upstairs, and interesting to squat next to the empty fireplace and read James 1:5 for myself, then imagine a young kid about to set off on an unimaginable adventure.

      Nice as Brother Smith’s home was, it certainly was not originally designed for group tours—a little cramped and low ceilings—so I didn’t linger.  Besides, I was anxious to follow the boy to his destiny a short walk away.

The Sacred Grove

      I always imagined the Sacred Grove to be further away from Joseph’s home than it actually is.  The Grove is startlingly close, actually.  I had imagined Joseph in the depths of a great forest, miles from home, but no.  The Grove is just that—a grove, and not so large a one at that.  And though it may seem strange, this was a testimony to me.  For although it is the story of a boy going to pray, it is even more the story of God coming to one of His sons.  God came to Joseph.  And thus, God came to us.

      The path from the log cabin to the Grove has signs posted, reminding us of the sacredness of the site.  This is where a new dispensation was opened; it is sacred; if you must speak, do so reverently.  Signs you might expect in a temple, if a temple had signs up its driveway outlining appropriate conduct.

      I felt the temple feeling there.  I removed my hat.  But it was too cold to maintain that level of reverence and I had to return it to my head.  But once I found a rock to sit on, I did remove it, then I reread Joseph Smith History.  I was sitting at the site of a great miracle, where God appeared and spoke to a new prophet.  Could it have been right at this spot?  Perhaps, but it doesn’t matter.  All that matters is what happened all those years ago, and what has since come of it.

      [ill:rocks]

      After finishing my reading and sitting, I stood and followed a small stream of water.  Immediately I was forced to return my hat to my head.  As I walked, I considered the trees.  They all looked much too young to have been present that day almost 180 years ago, but they were of the same type and the same family and perhaps the story is whispered still among their bare branches, carried by the cold winter wind.

      One striking thing about the Grove today is that from it can be seen the gleaming new temple.  It makes a full circle, from “I am God; there is a way” to “This is the way; welcome home.”

      Temples are heaven on earth, just as this small grove of trees was once, so many years ago.

Loneliness

      Isn’t it interesting how you can be surrounded by people—all friends even—and somehow still be lonely?  Even though I had spent much of the day surrounded with a calmness and peace ascribable only to the Holy Spirit, once on the bus again, a tender melancholy prevailed.

      Although I had long been a skeptic about the whole love thing and all that two bodies / one person jazz, after it happened to me, I ceased to doubt.  Being in love is an indescribable thing; the feeling that comes from knowing you can spend time longer than imagination with the same wonderful person is impossible to demonstrate to an outside audience.  When I was with Lynsey, my religion had a clarity and focus unequalled even in the mission field.  And now that I have been wedded for over a year, I know that married love transcends everything else in this oft silly world.  I suppose as time goes on and children are born, that I will continue to learn about love.  Even at the beginning, as I am now, I understand that Godliness must be inseparable from the role of spouse and parent.  That day on the bus, fresh from considerations of my Heavenly Father and His Son, being away from my love seemed intolerable.  So I rummaged through my bag to see what distractions I could uncover.  My recent purchase C. S. Lewis on Love presented itself and I began to read.

      Being an overanxious groom, the chapters on being nice to everyone you meet were not of the most pressing interest.  (Perhaps “chapters” is not the right word.  Each so-called “chapter” is only a page or three, and merely a clip from some other of C. S. Lewis’s books.  But the table of contents teats them as chapters, and so thus will I refer to them.)  Rather “My noble bride”, “Christian marriage”, “Her absence” and another one that would embarrass you if I mentioned it demanded my attention.  Unfortunately, my mind was unwilling to read in much depth, and so Mr Lewis’s phamous phraseology did not reach me this day.  Too bad, really—I may have learned something.