In July 1847, under the yoke of a piercingly dry summer heat, a company of Mormon pioneers breached the Wasatch Mountains. In crossing this final hurdle, the group had finally reached the destination toward which they had been devoutly marching for the last four months. Orson Pratt, one of the scouts leading the company, recounted the first moments that the Salt Lake Valley came into view, writing that he “could not refrain from a shout of joy, which almost involuntarily escaped from our lips the moment this grand and lovely scenery was within our view.”

Brigham Young had led the group to the area based on rumors of the valley’s fertile land. He believed it would be a place where he could plant the Church and watch it grow. When they arrived, Young and company were not disappointed. The valley exceeded all expectations; it was full of grass and streams and what felt like the light of God shining down on it.1

These sights came after years of struggle as an organization. The Saints had scavenged for food from Palmyra to Utah, had buried their loved ones on the sides of wagon trails, and had been chased out of every place they tried to settle. Contrast that pain with the relief that those early scouts must have felt swarming across that valley. Every bit of green from the white-tipped wild buckwheat to the rough bark of pinyon pine was a promise from the Earth of a bountiful future. The relief must have flown heavy through their veins, pulling them down into the dirt to rest. They had made it.

But their time to rest was short. The first company arrived with the summer firmly on the wane, and the largest influx of pioneers wouldn’t arrive until fall’s wan tendrils had come to choke out the summer’s color. With what little time was left in the year, the Saints got to work. They planted what they could and scrounged what little was available. Reports note that those early arrivers survived on crow and wolf meat, weeds like thistle tops and lily bulbs, and when they got desperate enough, tree bark.2 This spartan diet was supplemented with dreams of a full harvest in the coming year.

The Saints spent the winter preparing and fencing off more than five thousand acres of land for agricultural purposes. And when spring came, the fields were sown with an array of staple crops: buckwheat, corn, beans, peas, and more. Everything that would make this strange new valley a little more like home.

As the temperatures rose in early 1848, so too did the crops. On April 16, one settler wrote that “green stuff is coming very fast” and that the crops were “looking grand.” Finally, their wandering in the wilderness seemed to be at its end. But even the best-laid plans of pioneers and parishioners often go awry.

May brought with it a plague of Mosaic proportions. Without warning, swarms of crickets poured across the valley. Mrs. Lorenzo Dow Young wrote of the crickets: “Today to our utter astonishment, the crickets came by millions, sweeping everything before them. They first attacked a patch of beans for us and in twenty minutes there was not a vestige of them to be seen. They next swept over peas, then came into our garden; took everything clean. We went out with brush and undertook to drive them, but they were too strong for us.” The forward march of the cricket army caused nothing less than devastation.

The Saints used every tactic they could think of to try to stop the crickets. They smashed them, stomped them, burned them, and drowned them. They tried feeding the dead crickets to the live ones. They even resorted to the psychic warfare of loud noises and dance in an effort to scare the bugs away. Nevertheless, the insect horde marched forward.

The crickets, of course, destroyed the pioneers’ crops, but their assault was more insidious than that. Those who had spent their winter tending to the earth and expecting a bountiful harvest began to doubt what had brought them here. They murmured that perhaps Brigham Young, who had only recently won the power struggle for control of the Church, might have been wrong to lead the Saints to the valley. Some began to murmur that they ought to abandon Zion for a comfortable life in the settlements of California. The threat of a mass exodus from this fledgling colony was existential to the whole Mormon experiment.

But, the story goes, the Lord would not permit the restoration of his gospel to be upset. And as if on some divine cue, thousands of California gulls arrived. One diarist wrote: “Their coming was like a great cloud; and when they passed between us and the sun, a shadow covered the field. I could see gulls settling for more than a mile around us.”

The clouds of birds must have shocked the already fragile bunch. But any fear the Saints harbored quickly dissipated as they watched the gulls begin a full-on offensive against the crickets. The gulls would land in the fields and gorge on the insects, snapping up beakfuls at a time and swallowing them whole. And when the gulls were full, they would flap over to the nearest ditch and wash their insect meal down with water. After a brief rest, the gulls would regurgitate cricket pellets and start the process all over again. More greedy feeding. More water. More pellets spat out in the field. And repeat. The birds brought hope that the plague would pass, and eventually it did.

This story has been passed down in Utah and among the broader Mormon community for generations. We’ve raised a monument to it, and we’ve repeated the story during family home evenings, in Sunday School classes, and over the pulpit. And the facts, which more or less make it into these recitations, underline one clear point: The gulls were a miracle from God.

In the early months of 2019, I stood, in the style of Orson Pratt, on the precipice of the rest of my life. Just months before this inflection point, I had begun my first year of law school, I had proposed to my girlfriend, and I had bought into the idea of a career path that a smooth-talking upperclassman had pitched me on. At this point, I had already matriculated into law school, and I had known for some time that I would marry my then-fiancée, so it was the final career piece that felt like cresting the hill of change.

Just after receiving my rather middling grades for the first semester, the upperclassman explained how he was able to land a job at a top law firm despite grades that were comparable to mine. It all started with his first summer of law school. During that summer, he signed up for an underutilized program that was available at BYU’s law school. The school called it “International by Request.” The program was sponsored and run by one of the Church’s associate general counsels. This particular Church employee cared deeply about mentoring, and so he used the Church’s connections to law firms across the globe to get BYU students unpaid internships in law firms outside of the United States.

Not many students had taken advantage of this program because it required the student to pay their way to another country where the student would spend their summer providing free labor to a foreign law firm. There was no guarantee as to what type of work the student would do or even which country a student would find themselves assigned to. But the upperclassman had run the numbers. He realized that because the Church tends to hire well-respected firms, students had a decent chance of being placed in a foreign satellite office of one of several elite US-based law firms. He also figured out how to craft an application that increased his likelihood of being placed in such a firm, and that’s just what he did. He was ultimately placed in the Barcelona satellite office of a US firm that he turned into a stateside return offer. The program, he explained, was like a career hack. Someone with middling grades, like I had, could still land in an elite law firm with a sickeningly high starting salary.

The catch to this program, beyond the lack of pay and the uncertainty of where you might be assigned, was that you had to guarantee that you would accept whatever offer you were matched with. The program operated on goodwill, and BYU made its students sign an agreement that they wouldn’t embarrass the general counsel by reneging if a better offer came along later. This catch was offset by the guarantee that you would be placed somewhere. You could rest assured that your resume for your first summer of law school wouldn’t be left blank. With the guarantee of a job and based on the upperclassman’s advice, I rolled the dice and applied. I was on the precipice of the rest of my life. I looked down at the valley below me—a wedding with the woman I loved, a path forward to financially care for the family I was building, and a foreign adventure that would help me get there. I wanted to shout for joy at the grand and lovely scenery that was within my view.

I was raised in the Church, and I grew up with a cosmology that bounces from one miracle to the next. First, God said let there be light, and he spent the next several millennia demonstrating his power to the people of Earth. Man is created and cast out of paradise. Noah is commanded to build an ark just before the whole world is flooded. With Moses, the sticks turn to snakes and the waters part. Elijah promises a widow that her barrel of meal and cruse of oil will be replenished. Elisha summons she-bears to attack the children that persecuted him.

Skip forward, and God sends his Only Begotten Son to the world. Christ saves a wedding by turning water to wine. He feeds the masses with just a few loaves of bread and fishes. He heals the sick and raises Lazarus. Christ himself rises from the dead. Peter then takes up the healer’s mantle. Saul’s vision is restored. Not to mention all the Book of Mormon miracles that occur a world away on this same timeline.

We Mormons tend to skip forward to Palmyra in the early 1820s when young Joseph Smith saw God and Christ in the flesh. He translated golden plates from an ancient language into English. Angels restored first the Aaronic and then the Melchizedek Priesthoods. Joseph Smith is killed and succeeded by Brigham Young, who proves his rightful succession by speaking in the voice of Joseph. Brigham leads the Saints across the plains, and the Saints are saved by a flock of gulls. All of this was foundational in allowing Christ’s restored gospel to spread across the globe. Every step, a miracle.

As faith-promoting as these stories of miracles can be, they also beg some complicated questions for a twenty-first-century church. Church leadership teaches that miracles still occur, and many believers would testify that they have experienced one. But the types of miracles that are discussed today are of a different kind than those recorded in scripture. They are stories of triumph over disease, mental clarity in an increasingly chaotic world, and gifts of kindness arriving just when they’re needed the most. These modern-day miracles can fulfill a similar faith-promoting role as those recorded in scripture, but they diverge from the scriptural miracles in that they carry with them an implicit plausible deniability.

Consider, for a moment, Moses. If we could verify his parting of the Red Sea, such an action would still be totally unexplainable by any modern theories of the universe. It would show a break in our knowledge and would point to the divine. Compare that to a Saint’s miraculous recovery from lung cancer. When the Saint is diagnosed, they’re told that if they work together with their medical team, they should have about a 20 percent chance of survival. If that person is later declared cancer-free, it may feel like a miracle to that person, and it may be. But an outsider, or even a questioning survivor, might attribute that survival to medicine, the biological function of a human body, or even just dumb luck. It was, after all, a one-in-five chance to begin with.

None of this is to say which view is right. I often find myself swinging back and forth between skepticism in this age of science and recognizing God’s hand in all things. But this tension deserves some consideration. For many, the lack of grand scriptural miracles in the modern day is itself proof that those old stories are nothing more than myth. If those miracles are just myths, what language—what reason—is there for the synchronicities that we experience today? That line of thinking, when taken to its logical conclusion, leaves us stranded in a world of chaos, without any hope that the divine might intercede on our behalf.

When the gulls arrived in 1848, they did not bring the Saints total relief. Even after the gulls arrived, the crickets were still innumerable and continued their sustained campaign against the farmers. Thus, despite the arrival of the gulls, the 1848 harvest was relatively poor. The Saints survived, but contrary to their expectations, they spent another year hungry.

The failure of the gulls to “save” the crops, coupled with a modern understanding of local ecology, calls into question the miraculous nature of the birds’ arrival. While the appearance of ocean birds to a landlocked place like Utah was strange to those early settlers, the gulls were not new to the area. Written accounts of gulls—and of crickets—in the Great Basin predate the Mormon arrival in the area by several years. It’s not as if either species arrived to the area for the sole purpose of afflicting or saving the Saints. Moreover, flocks of gulls have followed swarms of crickets into several Western US communities since that 1848 incident. Similar events have occurred in North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, and Oregon. Where the crickets go, so do the gulls.

Additionally, the strange behavior of the gulls, the cycle of eating and regurgitating and eating again, has a biological explanation. Gulls can’t digest the hard exoskeleton of the crickets and will habitually regurgitate the indigestible portions. This makes room for more calories and nutrients. So, the gulls were presumably sating their hunger rather than purposely bingeing and purging for the benefit of the pioneers.

Finally, a proper historical understanding of the appearance of the gulls in 1848 must recognize that some contemporary records credit the work of humans to push back the crickets as a coequal reason for the Saints’ ability to salvage some of their harvest. Brigham Young himself acknowledged this when he wrote that “the crickets are still quite numerous and busy eating, but between the gulls and our own efforts and the growth of our crops we shall raise much grain in spite of them.”

In other words, there are logical explanations for each of the main points of the story of the gulls—the birds’ appearance, their behavior, and the Saints’ survival. Nothing in the story is unexplainable. It all could have happened at any point in the history of the Great Basin.

But it didn’t happen at any point in history. There is still the coincidence of it occurring during that first year of Mormon settlement. As natural as the gulls may have been, their arrival cannot be fully separated from the human context that they unwittingly landed in. The Saints had taken their faith to the edge of the empire and had abandoned known civilization under the leadership of a man whose succession was far from certain. The crickets arrived and tested their faith in Brother Brigham, and the gulls affirmed that the Saints’ faith was well placed. As a result, none of them fled the fledgling settlement for California. Those extra hands helped to build a community in the high desert; they helped erect the Salt Lake City temple; they laid the foundation for much of Utah history. The crickets were the first major test of faith in the valley, the gulls the answer. A miracle for those who needed it.

The closing months of my second semester were stressful. Time kept passing, and I still hadn’t received my summer placement. I didn’t know which country I would be sent to, nor how expensive it might be to get last-minute tickets and accommodation. This stress compounded with the mini skirmishes that can accompany wedding planning when operating on a shoestring budget. But my faith remained steadfast that a bright future sat just on the other side of finals. I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I’d courted a lovely young lady and then asked her to be my wife. I’d taken my education seriously. And I’d followed the advice of someone whose career path I wanted to emulate. I believed that all things would work together for my good.

But spring came, and the tapestry of the future that I’d spent months weaving in my mind began to unravel. First, an email came letting me know that the Church’s associate general counsel was unable to place me with any foreign law firms. The so-called guaranteed placement had fallen through, and I was left with just a couple of weeks to scramble to find a summer job. The career services office was of limited help, as most jobs had been filled while I was honoring my commitment not to apply for any other roles. I felt like I was on my own to salvage my career before it had even begun.

Worse yet, the arguments over wedding planning escalated in the days leading up to the event. The reasons are nuanced and not the subject of this essay, but these arguments isolated me within my own relationship. This isolation ate through my last days as a bachelor, and with just hours remaining until I was set to make an eternal commitment to another, I was fighting off the pallid tendrils of doubt.

On the day of my sealing, I arrived at the temple early and filled with hope despite the setback of the preceding days. But in coming face-to-face with my soon-to-be spouse, I felt that what divided us was still unrepaired. We moved forward with the ceremony, but not even the sealing power of God could bridge the cavern that lay between us.

I hovered through the rest of my wedding day like a ghost unable to give or receive warmth as I wandered through rooms full of loved ones. I tried to play my part, but really I felt detached and sick. At the reception that night, I sat down to our catered dinner. As soon as I put it down, I excused myself to the bathroom where I threw it back up.

The distance between us remained even as we packed our bags for our honeymoon. It felt like going through the motions. We’d booked the trip; therefore, we must go. When we did reach our destination, the trip quickly devolved into us spending time apart. Only threads of a shared pain and talk of divorce kept us loosely stitched together. I wasn’t sleeping, and I wasn’t eating. The vision of my future was threadbare, empty, gray.

When the honeymoon was over, my wife and I spent the following weeks separating, trying to reconcile, and separating again. Our relationship never really improved, but I did find a job with a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He was chambered in Pocatello, Idaho, just an hour from the town where my family lived. My wife did not join me there. Instead, she stayed with her family in California. I drove down to see her. I called her every night. I started therapy, and I invited her to join me in couples counseling. I wanted so badly for this to work. But three months and one day from our wedding, we filed for divorce. This was the existential threat of the summer. Could I keep moving through life without the woman with whom I had made an eternal commitment?

Like the arrival of the crickets and the gulls that kept the Saints from fleeing to San Francisco, the associate general counsel’s inability to place me in a foreign law office bound me geographically to the place where I needed to be. I had planned on spending my first summer of law school in another country with my new wife. Instead, I found myself spending that summer walking from a bare basement apartment on the outskirts of Idaho State University to a quiet courthouse next to a freeway. The work was interesting and challenging, but I had never given even a thought during the previous year to working in Idaho. It was never part of my plan.

And yet, when the reality of my divorce set in, when I started spending nights hunched over a toilet bowl, when I found myself in the ER at 4:00 a.m. due to some unknown pain that I struggled to describe, my family was always nearby. In the midst of my anguish, there was relief that I wouldn’t have experienced had my summer plans panned out. Looking back, I don’t think I would have survived the summer if I had been living in an unfamiliar country with no support network. In that way, being the first and only person in the history of BYU’s guaranteed placement program to not receive a placement felt like a miracle.

Like the story of the gulls, there are several reasonable explanations for how I ended up in Pocatello that summer. First, and perhaps most important, is that the upperclassman who pitched me on the international match program had been evangelizing it throughout the law school. As a result, a record number of students signed up for the program that year, and the sheer volume of students overwhelmed the system. I also suspect that students were being placed in order of our last names because the last person to be placed was a friend whose surname started with an “Sc,” just before mine alphabetically. I was just the unlucky end of the list.

There’s also an explanation for why a federal judge still had room for me in his chambers so close to the summer and so late in the application cycle. The judge was a BYU graduate, and every year he held open a spot for a BYU Law student. This opening was supposed to be advertised by BYU’s career services office, but that year the office had undergone some major personnel changes. With those changes, my class was never made aware of the judge’s long-standing offer. When I finally reached out to the judge’s chambers, I was immediately offered the spot that was supposed to have been filled several months earlier.

“Memory fixates on times of intense passage, but also mythologizes them.” That’s why it’s important to step back and look at the situation objectively. In doing so, I’m left with an explanation for every crack that I fell through, for every misstep that caused me to stumble into a courthouse just down the road from my family. There was nothing fundamentally magic about how I ended up where I did that summer. In that way, maybe this was all bound to happen to someone at some point. But it didn’t just happen to someone. It happened to me. It happened right as I was on the cusp of deciding, at least in broad strokes, what the rest of my life would look like. It happened just ahead of the lowest point of my life. Being on the receiving end of so many unlikely though explainable coincidences makes me feel strangely connected to those pioneers who looked into the face of uncertainty and remained resolute. Like them, there was a miracle when I needed it. A miracle, it seems.

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Dominic Shaw is an attorney living in Virginia with his wife and their two cats. His writing has previously been published in Inscape Journal and Brigham Young University Law Review.

Art by John James Audubon (1785–1851).

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Screams went off like a bomb in the bedroom. I sprung from my kitchen seat up the stairs to the top of the landing and tossed the door open. Entangled in sheets, his arms and legs flailing, my dad was on his back fending off attackers like an injured ant. But he was asleep, I quickly realized, and safe. Standing in the doorway, silent, motionless, I monitored his contortions and listened.

Suddenly, after a sequence of moans, yells, and shrieks, he shouted, “Yessir!” as he raised his hand to his forehead and saluted an officer in his dream. Then, as if taking his orders to the troops he commanded, he muttered that it’s time to “kill some fucking dinks.” Dad left the jungles of Vietnam in 1969, but that night, forty-three years later, he relived his combat from a pillow-top mattress in suburban Salt Lake City.

He’s not alone in this. Nine out of ten United States military veterans are men. A third of them served, like my father, in the Vietnam era or earlier, and since September 11th the US has added more than five million to the ranks. A majority of these post-9/11 veterans deployed overseas, and half of them were in combat. Of those with combat experience, half say they suffer from post-traumatic stress.

Many of our estimated eighteen million veterans say the American public has little awareness of the challenges they and their families face. I grew up not knowing the details of my father’s distress, in a faith community that valorizes military service but offers no direct means for veterans and their families to process the visible and invisible wounds of war.

The Impact of Killing

Combat trauma is not new. Soldier’s heart, shellshock, and combat fatigue were the “PTSD” of the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Even Roman general Gaius Marius, who died in 86 BC, suffered from night terrors and flashbacks and had to numb himself to sleep with alcohol near the end of his life. This condition has been around for as long as war itself.

Post-traumatic stress affects the brain’s limbic system and results in hyperarousal, a persistent fear of and need to be on guard for physical danger nearby. But there’s another dimension of combat trauma that is often present with post-traumatic stress. It’s called moral injury.

Moral injury occurs when someone sees or does something that violates their personal principles. It’s processed in the prefrontal cortex—the thinking brain—where reasoning takes place, and it tinges a soldier’s beliefs, values, and identity with guilt and shame. “Moral injury,” Reverend Rita Nakashima Brock says, “is an inner anguish that can lead to you feeling like you’re not a good person and if anybody ever figures that out, they’re never going to love you again.”

Moral injury amplifies fear and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress even when what one did or witnessed was warranted and unavoidable, when the call of duty entails harming others on the battlefield.

War is a minefield of moral wounding, and some situations set it off more than others: when a commanding officer gives an order that affects the survival of others, or a medic is unable to care for all who were harmed, or an enlisted soldier fails to report an unethical event. In each case an individual may second guess his decisions regardless of the moral bind he was in.

In Ken Burns’ documentary series The Vietnam War, John Musgrave, who served in the 1st Battalion 9th Marines, explained his experience with the moral complexities of combat. “I only killed one human being in Vietnam,” he said, talking about the first man he killed in the war. Beset with guilt, he thought he’d go insane if he had to keep it up for a year. When he saw a fellow Marine step on a land mine, he made a deal: “I will waste as many gooks . . . wax as many dinks . . . smoke as many zips as I can find,” he said. “But I ain’t gonna kill anybody.”

Soldiers have to dehumanize the enemy in order to cope with killing them.

Boots on the Ground

My father was twenty-five when he volunteered to go to war. In March 1968, he sat at his mom’s bedside in her hospital room as they discussed his impending deployment. “I believe, Billy, you’ll be protected,” she said. “I’m very close to my Father in Heaven.” She was forty-seven and terminal with cancer. The next day she went into a coma, and three days later she died.

He left for Vietnam after the funeral. It’d been two months since the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong launched a coordinated series of surprise attacks on Lunar New Year. Although the Tet Offensive was winding down, American antiwar sentiment was increasing. Amid public disfavor and his own private doubts, President Johnson announced he would not seek reelection and declared a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. “Our purpose,” he said, “is to permit the contending forces to move closer to a political settlement.”

But in late October, the South Vietnamese government withdrew from negotiations. Republican nominee Richard Nixon, fearing a diplomatic breakthrough would hurt his campaign, had promised them a better deal if he were elected.

Between the bombing halt and the election, U.S. troop levels rose to over half a million—the highest of the war—even as the country searched for a way out.

On December 9, as the commanding officer of Troop C in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, my father received a call about a company-sized infantry unit in trouble in a rubber plantation west of An Lộc, about 30 kilometers south of his position in Lộc Ninh, near the Cambodian border. Because the 115 soldiers were so deep in the rubber, calling in air support or flying in reinforcements wasn’t an option.

Dad road-marched his cavalry troop down Highway 13 on a rescue mission. They blew through one ambush and, nearing the firefight, “smoked” another. Then they came upon the infantry soldiers, mired in hand-to-hand combat with the NVA. “It was difficult to distinguish between American and Vietnamese dead,” my dad recalls. “The only way you could really tell is that the Americans had their dog tags laced into their boots.”

Dad, who kept his Army-issued copy of Principles of the Gospel in the pocket of his jungle fatigues, assessed the situation and decided the only way to help was by laying down grazing fire a mere three or four feet off the ground across the entire area. He coordinated with the infantry company commander.

“We’re going to assault into the fight through your position,” he told him. “Tell your people to lie down.”

Then he gave the order. Machine guns swept back and forth, cutting down enemy soldiers, including those crouched or on one knee. An hour and a half later, the position was secure. The NVA had either been killed or had fled.

“That night we brought out fifty-four American dead and rolled them into ponchos and poncho liners,” Dad says. “It was a bad day.”

The Army awarded him a second Silver Star for his actions, the third-highest decoration for valor, after the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor. From the citation:

“With complete disregard for his own safety, he exposed himself to the enemy volleys while coordinating mounted and dismounted elements with precise artillery and airstrikes. He made certain that firepower was increased until the hostile force was forced to withdraw. His aggressive actions and leadership turned the battle into a successful victory over the large North Vietnamese Army force, resulting in thirty enemy killed and no friendly casualties after Troop C arrived.”

The next morning he rode out from the scene atop his armored personnel carrier, or “track,” a nimble, tank-like vehicle. He was sitting in the rear hatch behind the .50-caliber gunner, flanked by M60 machine guns, when black smoke streaked toward him from the right. A rocket-propelled grenade struck the gun shield, ricocheted up into the air, and burst.

The explosion shredded his flak jacket and slammed him into the floor of the track, where metal ammunition cans cracked his ribs. A helicopter evacuated him to a field hospital before he was transferred to Cam Ranh Bay to recover. To this day he carries shards of shrapnel in his face and hand.

But scars and shrapnel are not all he brought home from his yearlong tour of duty.

Rules of Engagement

Vietnam strengthened my father’s testimony of the restored gospel. For my dad, war and religion are comfortable bedfellows. While watching Saints and Soldiers, a 2003 film featuring an LDS American soldier in World War II, he remarked that Mormons aren’t pacifists. The Book of Mormon backs him up.

The prophet Nephi, after describing his family’s departure into the wilderness, recounts his dilemma when he returns to Jerusalem and the Spirit prompts him to kill Laban to obtain the brass plates: “Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. I shrunk and would that I might not slay him” (1 Nephi 4:10).

But he resolves the dilemma, declaring, “Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief” (1 Nephi 4:13).

Nephi then cuts off Laban’s head, killing him with Laban’s own sword.

American members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are more likely than the general population to believe that military strength is the best way to ensure peace. But how often do we contemplate the cost of justifying those means to accomplish that end?

LDS soldiers returning from combat face a conundrum. Speak about their troubling experiences and risk being seen as critical of the military, or as weak, given traditional masculine values that discourage emotional vulnerability. They carry their burdens alone in silence when at least some ward members might be “willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort” (Mosiah 18:9).

I grew up hearing my dad talk positively about his experience, telling stories around the campfire at Fathers and Sons campouts. Later I learned what he was keeping to himself.

Absence Without Leave

Unlike my father and grandfather, I’ve never worn a uniform. As a teenager I read in the Book of Mormon that “the preaching of the word had a . . . more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword . . .” (Alma 31:5) and thought to myself, this is how Dad and I are different. Although I had a sense even then that I was more poet than warrior, and that my influence in the world would involve my love of language, it would be at least another decade or so before I set off on an adventure to uncover the values and worldview that are my own.

The night I watched my father flail in bed he woke me up several times screaming. After the fourth time I gave up on sleep, grabbed my tablet, and typed the keywords “ptsd vietnam retirement” into Google, finding evidence of a trend in veterans from his era seeking help for the first time for symptoms of post-traumatic stress. My dad had just retired from his career as an executive in the defense industry, and he, like many others, had fenced off his past with busyness and workaholism. But now a slower pace of life and fewer demands were leaving his psychological perimeter vulnerable to ambush.

The next morning I called my mom to tell her what had happened. “Oh, this started a few months ago,” she said. A day later she called to say they had spent the night in the ER. While thrashing in bed during another night terror, Dad had split his lip on the corner of a nightstand.

My dad and I started to drift apart. A month earlier I’d left behind a promising media career in New York City and my traditional religious faith. I was questioning my inherited model of masculinity: Why do we equate success with wealth? When is it no longer admirable to fend off feelings in order to press on? And what does it even mean to be a good man?

An Honorable Discharge

When Nephi laments, “O wretched man that I am!” (2 Nephi 4:17), we have to wonder if slaying Laban weighs on his heart. My dad remembers the first guy he killed, looking him in the eyes and shooting him. But that hasn’t troubled him as much as the day he ordered the grazing fire.

A few years ago, when he was turning eighty, Dad got up to bear his testimony in his ward. He recalled the events of that day, then revealed a fear he’d never openly acknowledged: Had his troops inadvertently killed any of the American soldiers they’d been sent to rescue? Nothing disturbed him more than the possibility that even one might have died by his own men’s fire. Although the Army commended his decision, he had ruminated on it for fifty-five years. Still, he downplayed the toll it took, brushing off labels like post-traumatic stress.

Six months ago, my dad went to the Salt Lake City VA hospital for congestive heart failure. When I arrived at his room in the telemetry ward, he was grimacing and unable to stand up from a chair or get into bed on his own. “Did I tell you about PTSD?” he asked me under the fluorescent lights. “I signed the paperwork to start the process.” A week before his scheduled stay, he had admitted—like an outlaw turning himself in after years of evading arrest—to suffering from post-traumatic stress. The next step would be an evaluation to qualify for increased benefits.

After a week, without consistent progress and high on painkillers, he was pensive and wondering whether he’s a good man. That’s when I did something I did not anticipate: I asked him if we could pray together. “I’d love that,” he said. We clasped hands and for the first time in thirteen years, I prayed aloud to our Heavenly Father. In that instant, the separation between me and God and Dad disappeared.

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Drew Hansen is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. His work braids personal narrative, history, and reporting to explore place, memory, faith, and the creative life.

Art by László Mednyánszky (1852–1919).

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                “Do you have anything here to eat?”

                             Luke 24:41

Again, He wrestles with their disbelief.
They’d watched him crowned and heard his final cry.
To see his face and hear his voice—not grief
but joy so close to shouts of Crucify!
The fact of resurrection shines too bright
to certify itself.  For evidence
Jesus anchors triumph in appetite.
All breath ceases in quivering suspense:
A fish?  Was it a miracle’s encore?
Surely, some thought the fare would multiply.
But then He eats! And then for joy they roar.
What but a man could food so satisfy?
From Eden, for eating, we were cast out;
But He, eating, feeds them and consumes doubt.

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Dr. Phillip Aijian holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance drama and theology from the University of California, Irvine, and an M.A. in poetry from the University of Missouri. His poetry has been featured in journals such as ZYZZYVA, Heron Tree, Poor Yorick, Zócalo Public Square, and Christian Scholars Review. He is also a visual artist currently commissioned to craft liturgical clocks. He teaches in Southern California where he lives with his wife and children. You can find more of his work at www.phillipaijian.com

This poem originally appeared in Wayfare’s Poetry section. To receive each new poem published by Wayfare, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select “Poetry.”

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It is warm, but so bright. I must close your eyes. /
Now we may face it. And yet it glows.

What it is, is light, and me telling you–-the obstacle and the vehicle are the same /
The body we view through, we also risk being consumed.

Do you know the color of light when you close your eyes against it? / It is the color of a rose.

When I say glory this is what I mean / what I am unable to withstand but somehow perceive / that I perceive, and that there is, and I am, and I, eye, aye—the place where the twain shall meet—

What I cannot say with all my saying /
I will say another way: lux. Look / the eye of a needle is an eye—

I can see it / I can see. / And beneath us still the turning of the world. Close my eyes, face the sun, and walk.

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This poem originally appeared in Wayfare’s Poetry section. To receive each new poem published by Wayfare, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select Poetry.

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“Silence is the first language of God.”

—St. John of the Cross

Don’t let his silence leave you voiceless.
Don’t let your anger, either. 
Scream to the winter skies. Say it all. 
Nothing you can shout, no profanity 
divides the wholeness of his heart. 
	    He has 	      all eternity. 
            He is                 all eternity. 
And all of time that you can fill or feel 
he’s set apart for you—all his powers, 
at hand, ready, all his gifts. 

And he gifts you this silence—
silence, like a canvas against which 
you may throw your every color. All of them.

Silence, like a wrestling mat or boxing ring. 
The god you fight is the god 
whose mettle you measure, blow by blow. 

Step into the ring, gloves off, eyes blazing. 
Face the unanswering one. 
Look up, throw down.

His silence—it is not the danger; yours is. 
So shout your curses at the silent god. 
Say everything you know he should have done or said. 
Be eloquent. Be vile. 

But be there ready, waiting
in the oily dust of beige-gray, 
anything-but-sunrise skies. 
Be there with your manifesto and your megaphone,
with your pillow-muffled primal screams
to loose at last. 

not this not me not them not now how come
come back why this oh god oh god why this, not this 

And then, be still.
Be ready to receive 	
             the emptiness, 
             the vast expanse, 
             the quiet cosmos, 
                          turning in its patient arc of eons, 
                          far beyond your miniscule existence. 

The ratio of your life or pain 
to all of God’s domain 	   is nothing. Nothing. 
But that of what you feel 
to who he is, 			           is everything. Everything. 

Eternity is his name, and Endless. 
Match the harsh infinity within you to his own.
There is only ever one abyss. 
Go down it, down until you see him. 
See him all gobsmacked, stunned— 
not for all the sins of humankind—
but just for your hurt, a hurt that has no bounds. 
He can hardly take it in.
But he takes it, accepts it—all your hell.

The god who weeps, 
he weeps endlessly with you. 
The full infinity. The full insanity. 

The aching without limit aches in him. 
His groan, your groan. 
His cross, your cross; 
your cross, his cross. 

You meet him in the bitter garden. 
He meets you in your endless anguish. 
There, connected, shattered all across the ironies.

Here is where the traitor silence 
faithfully betrays the lowered God. 

Listen to me!
God holds his silence 
so that He can feel it all, don’t you see? 
             Your emptiness, 
             his emptiness. 
You are forsaken; you are together. 

His silence is God listening to you. 
His silence is his reverence, his awe 
at just how dark, how broken is your world. 
His silence is his offering to you, not refusal. 

Accept the bitter grace and 
break with him the bread of silence. 

Now fill it! Sing! Use all your words! 
Don’t you see he’s made wide-open space for you?
Behold how he withholds! pulls back, makes way, 
allows your words, your will.

Don’t feel neglected, 
as though this were a human, mortal silence: 
reproach, passivity, or ignorance. 
No. He doesn’t deal in pettiness. 
His silence, it is never small. 

You be the agent. 
You, the answerer—
the sum of your divinity is never told. 
You share so much infinity. 
You are mostly divine. So, go on.

Be the generous one, 
            anywhere you choose, to 
            anyone at all. 
Be the gracious one, 	
            the mother goddess granting milk and love, 
            the angel who shows up, with wings or not,
            the father ordering the fatted calf be killed. 

You have his voice, his hands, his heart, 
if not his every power. 

Feel him filling wide the space 
you thought was empty. 
Touch the silence, enter it. 

Revere his reverence for you. 
Give him space and 
time to grieve your grief, and not just some of it;
time to lend your longing more eternities, 
time for him to reel and retch at those regrets,
the ones you’ve only dared to feel in doses.

Three days returned his body, but 
do we know how far his spirit flew,
flung headlong down the vast abyss? 

And tell me, 
Would not the stun of so much grief 
arrest your words? 
Would not the ache of holding back 
from healing every human hurt 
make you mute? My God! O, Abba!

Dumbfounded 	in the garden, in the crowd, 
                                at the trial, on the cross— 
and then,	emptied into emptiness, 
the void 	        approaching him, 
                        engulfing him, 
                        becoming him. 

Only silence widens far enough. 

The quiet lets you listen 
for his breathing. There. Hear it? 

Begin to breathe along with him: 
long, even rhythms, surf against the sand. 
But also, catch his catch breaths, and 
those sighs that have no size. 
His gasping shudders echo through 
the space you thought was empty. 
Touch that semi-silence, 
enter it without a word, 
with nothing, with everything.

A forehead rests against another’s.
Hands come up to cup a face. 
Can we afford to fall to words like this?
There are not words enough, nor time. 

So let this silence hold. 
It 	     holds us as we’re holding in, 
             holding out, holding on, 
             holding him, beholding him 
                        in mute magnitude, his and ours. 

Hold fast this silence. He’s giving all of it to you. 
So take the gift. 
Feel his silence, heft the weight inside of waiting. 
Measure silence out of measure, all of it you can. 
There’s always more. 
Feel the silence as it ripens, 
             as it swallows you in sweetness, 
             as it empties out the emptiness. 
Whisper thank you, thank you,
my god it is too much it is enough.

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Gideon. Burton is Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University where he teaches Renaissance literature, literature of the Latter-Day Saints, and rhetoric.

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I want to tell the story. But—
there is no approaching this, 
strange crux
of everything.

Come at it sideways.
Come at it from the edge.

Picture, then,
a hardscrabble patch of land.
Rocks. An olive tree. Sparse, 
straggling desert grass. The rocks

have been waiting. The wind
has been waiting. The living souls nearby
sleep through the whole thing.
(This is important. I have slept
through many things.)

And then—
What

can be known? There has never been
any moment more private
nor more public.

So.
What I know: the screaming windy cliff
of unavoidable onus, the weight
of what must be done.
For me, it was the abyss
of being about to give birth. The way
the self shrinks
to a pinpoint in a vacuum, the way
one becomes lost, faceless, 

the way 
the thought that there is another soul depending on you
can pull you inside out and through
to a new place.

But of course
even in that, my most impossible moment,
he was already there,
having been there before me.

Oh, how is a human
to comprehend godly heartbreak?
Might as well teach a point on a line
about temples and spires,
about stars. It's a matter of dimension:
impossible geometry.

What we know:
he went to a place.
He knew that ahead of him
was a pain yet unknown in the world,
extra-dimensional. That
seeing it, he, who had maybe
never known fear before this,
asked to be excused,
but not really.

We know:
the contemplation of that pain
was so terrible it required the ministration
of an angel before it could be approached.

We know:
at point zero
he was left alone
in a way no human can comprehend.

We know:
he came out on the other side
gentle, generous,
quieter.

Forever after,
he would say very little about it.
Only: shrink.
Only: nevertheless.

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Darlene Young is author of the poetry collection Homespun and Angel Feathers (from which this poem appears) and teaches writing at Brigham Young University.

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This poem originally appeared in Wayfare’s Poetry section. To receive each new poem published by Wayfare, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select Poetry.

If you wish to stop receiving emails from Wayfare Celebrations, click here to manage your subscription and turn off notifications for Celebrations.

Don’t miss celebrating Holy Week with Wayfare poetry! Read the bread of life, by Kyle Beshears, linked above.

MY HEART AT GOD’S ALTAR

O God

The call cracks my heart. Splices it, pares it down, strips it to bare essence. A primordial reaching, a beckoning for home, for release from displacement, loneliness, fear, acedia, ennui; it’s a plea from the belly of this post-truth cavern. A shout from one side of a canyon to another. I approach the bridge to cross, the way to fly over the cliffs, the path around the loose and falling sediment. I yearn for escape from the consistent brush with physical and spiritual death. This cry to God loops me into the fray, but still, the signifier can’t begin to capture the width and depth and height of the signified.

I meditate over the appellation, measure it with what and how I know, actually know, my own earthly father. A monument exists in the title and reveals granite in his justice, temperance, and honesty. He’s sent me here to breathe and bathe, winnow and receive, understand what’s gained and lost in time, money, mountains, and dust. No matter how much of eternity I see in my own parents, I’ve come to this communion table to seek out his span and reach, his care, work, and unwearyingness.

In the name of thy Son

I remember the grumblings from earlier in the week: a friend who couldn’t keep their mouth shut, a relative I assumed was sidewinding, a child who didn’t listen each time I told them to cut their siblings some slack. The anger leached out in passive-aggressive moves against my wife, who admitted she found it hard to breathe when she heard the edge in my voice, my facial lines crinkling, aging me ten years in five minutes. I rankled, pivoted, and left the room. I then gave way to trolling through MLB.com, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Hours passed through me into others’ polished lives; those photos scintillated with an intoxicating veneer, cruise-like waves, and opening night spotlights. When I couldn’t fall asleep, I remembered the rationalizations that kept me from saying sorry, the ballooning pride still rising. The mumbled murmurs, “But then . . .” and “I never . . .” and “How do you expect me to . . . ?”

Entering church felt robotic (almost like an afterthought). But now with my head bowed, my face flushed and burning, my hands pressed together, forehead nearly touching the pew in front of me—I ask for another shot, another clean and usable slate.

No WhatsApp call here. No text message or comments post. No canned phone ring or buzz. His name renders me mute, speechless. Irrational thoughts and guilty ticks slow down. I turn away from the mental gymnastics of justification and regret. I feel perfectionism and the simultaneous lack of it start to whirl away. I speak his name so that only I can hear. I say it again, slowly, when someone behind me won’t stop talking, when the kids in front of me turn their heads with their shy, giddy glances, when the bishop catches me looking in his direction. I imagine limestone and lambs and date trees in the Holy Land. I begin to feel olive oil coat my lips. I consider his Mediterranean hands, how they might pull me up, his even gaze whispering, “Be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27, KJV). The words are something between a tackle and an embrace. The waters of mourning and baptism pour down my face.

Bless and Sanctify

One is nearly sixteen, red-headed, taciturn, and staid. Another carries the load of autism. The one on the far left is a wrestler. They offer the ordinance—quickly, haltingly, sometimes quietly, most times figuring out where to pause, what to emphasize—to cleanse and purify on my behalf, on behalf of those sitting next to me, around me, and in the adjacent hallways. Somewhat tongue-tied. But earnest. Unsure. Leaping. They hand the emblems to former versions of themselves, something of Enoch and Jeremiah in each of them. Like me, they are as common as salt. No less unruly, except maybe in appearance. Insouciant. Peach fuzzed. Nascent.

Souls

There’s the sister who uses a walker. Sitting near the chapel doors, she smiles often. She teaches weekly institute classes. Or, the stuttering young single adult who waves in my direction, so frank and dutiful. He shows up to clean the chapel, mop the gym floor, or move the transients when others won’t. The calloused-handed brother who works with drill bits, wood, and electrical tape, the “wases” and “weres” mixed up in his speech, all settled in the back. And the 40-year-old woman, just entering college, recently arrived from a distant land, looking at the floor, perhaps wondering about rent and debt. I’m not surprised by the octogenarian who tapped me on the back just as the prelude ended, said, “Gotcha” for the fifth time this month, the stare in his eyes at once coherent and vacant.

Yet I slip back into solipsism. I look over my knuckles, open and close my hands into fists, feel the cricks and stiffness in both hips and back, my knees and ankles somewhat calcifying, ligaments tightening. From the past week, I mull over the missed conversation with my daughter, wonder why I assumed my son didn’t want to spend time together, rehash the spousal conversation that revealed my tendency to play the victim and spew hasty generalizations. It’s close to noon, yet my eyes won’t stop squinting in the middle of my own blundering darkness.

And then, I hear something, like a sheep bleating in the distance, or like water running down the block, or a child pattering around the house. Sometimes it’s a good friend’s voice. Sometimes it’s wind chimes. As I hunker down, stillness wells up like water in a well. My skull recalibrates. My hearing amplifies with an increased measure of attention. For a few seconds, my eyes are unobscured, focused. My mouth prepares to taste. I envision those hands with scars fastened in both palms and wrists. Searing pangs. Wrenching hours. Unspeakable gift.

Body

Frayed. Cracked. Fractured. Split. Severed. Broken. Torn. Whipped. Shredded. Cut. Slashed. Rent.

Willing

The word’s easy on the lips, especially here in this air-conditioned chapel. I’m willing to shovel snow in the middle of July. I’m ready to garden when the harvest is thick. Willing to show up on a Saturday at 10:00 a.m. to help someone move three doors down, all the household goods boxed up, ready to heft.

The word is a world away from reality. I pause at late-night texts and phone calls. I reach for pretext when someone else’s barn is burning. I shrink when scorn flows fast, raw, and fresh.

Not now lingers like 6:00 o’clock traffic.

I feel the weight of soldiering on, agreeing to full-send a thumbs up next time, bring a wet rag, stay another hour when a friend or stranger at the end of the line is ready to give up.

Too often I’ve hesitated to knock on doors across town, wondered about the hunch to return to the store, equivocated with slumping posture, bumped through excuses until I’ve heard those words, “let this cup pass . . . nevertheless . . .”(Matthew 26:39).

Blood

Wine. Pores. Sweat. Platelets. Hematidrosis. Consanguinity. Flagrum. Thorns. Press. Cup. Hemothorax. Shed.

Always

I find it easier to remember specifically during Christmas and Holy Week. Palm Sunday emerges with the spring sun. I measure time, pore over the gospels, calculate distance. Hear sober joy and cheerful sorrow in the ineffable silence of Wednesday. Betrayal of Maundy Thursday. Paradoxical goodness of Good Friday. Hymns cycle one after the other throughout Easter Sunday.

Often, though, budget analysis, travel songs, and baseball season lure me away. I trip over petty arguments, tumble down the slippery slope of a news story’s bitterness. Sidle up to the rumors of increased property taxes and speculate over what happened to the neighbors down the street. My tongue grows thin and silent at the first signs of heat.

I avoid work complications, fissured relationships, financial woes, communication breakdowns; embrace athletic distraction, weather illusion, meme attraction. Some days, I need stillness like I need breakfast, but don’t admit it. When I hit a breaking point, I tell myself to turn around, cease backsliding, stop being impatient. “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). I keep hoping the line will act like a mantra even when it doesn’t. At times, I’m a faulty socket.

Still, now, his wordplay, invitations, and equilibrium return: Give up navel gazing to find your life, embody the wisdom in serpents, treat others with dove-like gentleness, love without conclusion or pretense. Accept his word when he speaks of light and doors and vines. Day Star. Shepherd. Yoke and rest.

I hang on to when he healed Bartimaeus, admire the woman who cleansed his feet. I pray, seeking to understand what it means to worship. In my mind, I run to the borrowed, empty tomb. I savor the word Rabboni. My hands grip the plow, push through the impulse to turn back.

I recognize the quivers and closed eyes in each fellow disciple’s face and know it’s not just temple trips and ward parties and firesides and morning meetings and all our testimonies. And it’s not about my mission or singing at the assisted living center, or that dozen or so times I’ve donated blood. It’s the hours and minutes right now, yesterday and tomorrow, next week, and the entire stream of months and years and however many decades ahead.

Commandments

Once the bread and water have passed, I arch my shoulders back, sit up straighter, plead for more chutzpah to leave the old self burning on the altar, seek a skosh of steely discipline, a touch of confident stoicism, to allow nothing between me and him. To cease polishing my trophies, quit fishing for accolades, refrain from mentioning how I can dig a ditch. I want to use his name less like punctuation, routine, or doorstop. More like the feeling that arrives after a first snowfall or when I’ve heard my children breathe at night. I imagine a Sabbath without dos and don’ts. Commit to calling my parents on a Monday morning, Thursday afternoon, or whenever they least expect. “Watch and pray” (Matthew 26:41) becomes the honey to bolster my wits.

Spirit

It’s like the selah after Amen or like the wassail I drink after shoveling snow, or perhaps it’s like the occasional nap I take on the basement couch on summer afternoons. Or maybe, like the organ when its notes gather slowly, deliberately, rising in my backbone, circling my lungs, tingling through my forearms, palms, and fingertips. Yes, and just like the time my wife and I walked out of the hospital, together, for the first time carrying the no-longer-empty car seat. Wind and rain pushed us off the curb and into the parking lot, waking me to the Light that I almost forgot, but instantly knew was there. I leaned into that pure singular presence. It kept my broken heart then—and even now—secure and driving through the viscous October air.

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Since 2000, Mark has taught writing and literature at BYU-Idaho. During that time, he has authored four collections of poetry. He and his wife, Kristine, are figuring out gardening, home repair, and grandparenthood.

Art credit: Church Pew with Worshippers (1882) by Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890).

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The prayerful one promised bread like seeds
feathering on dusts of wild Sin, where wisps
of lowly morning water held God’s glory
in their mist. Here, child, mother said, go find pearls
of honey before they melt beneath the candle sun
—bright till late when even comes, hot while whirls
of coveys run. Have you forgotten? God can grow
flocks of quail from stone in single turns of earth,
will try our optimism with daily acts of sacred birth.
We tasted meat with manna, bit feathered flesh while
grinding colors from the seeds, baking cakes to turn
sweetness into fresh oil without a single olive tree.
Have you forgotten? Who God creates, God sustains
and we must keep for generations the seeds we have
been rained. I prayed to know my own mete hunger,
testing fullness as I ate. Here, child, I told my daughter,
plan what to ask from Heaven’s plate. Know you the needs
you call your own? Trust you the seeds you pleaded sown?
The prayerful one promised God our eyes, gazing up
into the clouds, and I promised God my words until
the heavens all fall down. Then song, then dance, then surer
faith until the mountains all but drown, and up on ridges
kin will gather to watch the dew again disperse. I’ll pray
for you to see your manna, child, flooding this universe.

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Fleur Van Woerkom is a lover of earth, art, movement, and stories. She is currently studying writing at Columbia University.

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This poem originally appeared in Wayfare’s Poetry section. To receive each new poem published by Wayfare, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select “Poetry.”

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“Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate, there is a pool . . .” (John 5:2).

Light tickles the tops
of water molecules whose
number and strength defy
the human mind, a liquid
quilt stitched by Mother God.
Yet the pool lies still, a peace-filled
elixir for broken bodies and spirits
camping at its edges, waiting not in awe
at water’s cohesion but in hope only
realized through loosening
bonds, an angel-touched stirring,
a divine troubling.
Do you want to be made well?
Jesus, straight to the point.
Wrong question, we plead.
The “how” plagues us.
If not doused in the deep then . . . ?
Bypass the water, proclaims the Jesus who
made the sea his footpath.
Stand up . . . walk.

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Kellie Brown is a violinist, music educator, and award-winning writer. Her words have appeared in Ekstasis, Foreshadow, and others. In addition to 35 years of music ministry, she serves as a UMC lay minister and is pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Theopoetics at Bethany Theological Seminary.

Art by James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903).

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This poem originally appeared in Wayfare’s Poetry section. To receive each new poem published by Wayfare, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select “Poetry.”

If you wish to stop receiving emails from Wayfare Celebrations, click here to manage your subscription and turn off notifications for Celebrations.

HOLY MONDAY

HOLY TUESDAY

HOLY WEDNESDAY

MAUNDY THURSDAY

GOOD FRIDAY

SILENT SATURDAY

RESURRECTION SUNDAY

EMMAUS

Oh, You That Are, placer of pains, of cures
tight-fisted, dripping out the calm before
the worm will scurry in our veins, whose burrs
shove out your own too soon drooping blooms — more,
You who circles with vulture’s stomach me,
who stands and stumbles through the desert’s cool
and star-dim sky, unknowing that the tree
You roost on stands dewing steps away. Cruel

Love, circle closer, let my sunburnt face
feel the thin shadow of your night-blurred wing,
let me pull my eyes from my sandy heap
to search the blue and dappled sky’s holy lace
rigid over the night air, let me fling
to find that beaded bark and of that seep drink deep.

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Scott Darrington is a small-town Nevada escapee currently in Utah. He has always enjoyed the rugged beauty of the high desert and the strange ways nature and civilization intersect. Besides poetry, he enjoys cats, board games, and pickleball.

This poem originally appeared in Wayfare’s Poetry section. To receive each new poem published by Wayfare, first subscribe to Wayfare and then click here to manage your subscription and select “Poetry.”

If you wish to stop receiving emails from Wayfare Celebrations, click here to manage your subscription and turn off notifications for Celebrations.

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A Church That Is Real

As a youth I always had questions about faith, but I did not dwell on them seriously until I went to university. At Harvard College, I wandered happily in the library stacks, surrounded by books analyzing events, ideas, and problems that had never before crossed my mind. I learned to interrogate an idea and poke hard at its soft spots. This was mostly fun. However, when I poked at my own beliefs, especially in the light of new things I was learning about my church’s history, I felt tender and a bit at a loss.

At Harvard, I became acquainted with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a renowned professor and beloved mentor for Latter-day Saint students. When I read her 1986 essay, “Lusterware,” reprinted in the spring 2024 issue of Wayfare, it made a deep impression on me. “Lusterware,” Laurel explained, was a type of ceramic dishware popular in the late eighteenth century. It was plated with a platinum film so as to resemble solid silver, but if you dropped it, it would fall to pieces like ordinary crockery. In an Emily Dickinson poem, lusterware was a metaphor for disillusionment—a shining, supposedly solid thing which fell and unexpectedly shattered on “the stones at [the] bottom of my mind.” Warning against a “lusterware” view of what we then called Mormonism, Laurel recalled one time in which a distressed young person in the middle of a faith crisis came to her worrying that the Church was perhaps only ninety percent (instead of one hundred percent) divine. To this, Laurel responded, “If you find any earthly institution that is ten percent divine, embrace it with all your heart.”

This idea sent shockwaves across my mind. Growing up, the gospel message drummed into my head was the message of the hundred percent. To my young self the stock phrases, “I know the Church is true” and “the fulness of the gospel” referred to my church’s complete sufficiency and comprehensiveness. Church leaders were always divinely directed, whether it was a bishop giving dating advice or a general authority criticizing the theory of evolution. This hundred percent outlook meant that there was no room for error, no possibility of contradiction, and no need to improve. In this view, the Church was the best of all possible worlds. Everything was as it should be, and should have been.

This is why Laurel’s suggestion to treasure a venture that was less than “one hundred percent divine” was both provocative and lifesaving. As a university student, the “all or nothing” framework left me with a faith crisis as I learned about church history, including past church leaders’ flaws and fallibility. Clearly, there were times when Latter-day Saints had made mistakes with long-lasting and harmful repercussions. As I struggled to readjust my worldview, Laurel’s example of embracing both divine direction and human limitation was a lifeline.

The Church that is true is a Church that is real, and a Church that is real is a Church that embodies contradictions and contrasts, which characterize the nature of reality itself. God’s plan does not call on us to escape life’s messiness by retreating to a bubble free of doubt and conundrum. Instead, our Heavenly Parents have given us the opportunity to struggle mightily with life’s puzzles, thereby exercising our divine capacity. We reason and rage. We stumble, and correct course. We learn to be unshaken. We learn to bend.

The Church that is real is a Church that is patriarchal, hierarchical, and USA-centric. It is a Church with a history that, like its wider host society, includes racism, sexism, and nationalism. It is a Church that shapes a distinctive “culture region” in the American Intermountain West known for conspicuous consumption and religious elitism. It is a Church in which some men in positions of ecclesiastical power have used that power to abuse others emotionally or sexually, in egregious violation of the Lord’s instructions for righteous authority. It is a Church founded by Joseph Smith, Jr., who instituted a radical new system of marriage, and who concealed some of his additional marriages from his first wife Emma, for whom plural marriage was an excruciating ordeal.

The Church that is real is also a Church that engaged in radical redistribution of wealth and communitarian economics. It teaches a theology of humankind’s literal divine nature as beloved children of a Heavenly Father and Mother. All over the earth it facilitates the formation of local communities with their own distinctive cultures. It is a Church that unites rich and poor, north and south, women and men in sacred covenants to take upon themselves the name of Christ and mourn with those that mourn. It is a Church that calls people to serve, regardless of their caste or occupation, and obliges them to develop their capacities and become blessings in the lives of others. It is a Church whose founder, Joseph Smith, Jr., had a radical new vision of eternity and humankind’s limitless potential to make enduring connections and bring forth good fruits.

Looking at the previous two paragraphs, if some were to read only the first they might conclude that I am an “anti-Mormon” being critical. If some were to read only the second they might call me an “apologist” pushing a rosy ideal. But there are not two Churches and I am not divided. There is one Church, and I claim it as my own, ashamed of what is shameful and proud of what is praiseworthy. My loyalty does not arise out of a calculation that the pros outweigh the cons, but out of reciprocity. In addition to the gift of Christ’s atonement, which he gives freely to all, I owe a debt to my sisters and brothers. Fellow Latter-day Saints have taught me to want to be good, protected me from danger, and helped make real the things I wanted to be true but could not see.

For me, one significant cost of this repayment is not merely time, money, meals, and mileage, but cognitive and emotional effort. Why must I labor to contextualize the racist language sometimes recorded in the Book of Mormon, our precious and holy book of scripture? When will the fundamental truth that women and men are spiritual equals created in the image of a Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father, with the same potential to lead, teach, and bless the lives of their fellow beings, be meaningfully reflected in institutional Church decision-making structures? How do I maintain my faith in living prophets and apostles when history shows that over time, teachings sometimes change and contradict themselves? At one time in our early history plural marriage was elevated above monogamous marriage, but now it is grounds for discipline (unless it is for time and all eternity in the temple). At one time, using birth control would damn you and your posterity to the third and fourth generations, but now it’s not a problem. At one time, some Church leaders wrongly depicted Black people as “fence-sitters” in the pre-existence, but as of 2015 this has been officially disavowed (though it lingers on some Church-members’ family bookshelves). If the Church is true, why can’t it be “right” all of the time? Sometimes I grow weary of always having to explain! To compensate! To wait patiently! To put things “on the shelf”! The—damn—shelf—is—full!

For me, the long-term solution to these frustrations is not to abandon thoughtful reflection by compartmentalizing spiritual life. Some feel that critical thinking and deep faith do not mix. But for me, life with God in it comes as a whole package. If I can’t make sense of my Latter-day Saint belief and practice in relation to all experience and all knowledge, then it isn’t worth the effort. True, there are many things which we cannot know. But some basic paradigm should be reliable and worthy of wholehearted trust.

Nor do I feel that I personally would be happier, in the long run, abandoning the Church with the intent of moving on to a dissonance-free lifestyle. In today’s world, nearly all of the institutions, organizations, and global structures within which we make our lives are ethically compromised, devilishly complex, and muddied by human error and apathy. To thrust in one’s sickle in any of these places, cultivating a good harvest and eradicating weeds, is not only to improve that part of God’s vineyard but also to develop capacity and experience for acting in the wider world. Time and again, my Latter-day Saint sisters and brothers have lent me inspiration and strength to bring to pass what I want, and need, to accomplish in my community, profession, country, and planet.

When someone asked Jesus what was most important, he responded: first, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; second, love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments, he said, hang all the law and the prophets.

I am thankful that Jesus included “mind” and “strength” as ways to love God. To engage the mind in the project of faith is not a slippery deviation, but a consecrated contribution to God’s kingdom. Such intellectual engagement requires effort (strength). Here Jesus is putting this kind of effort on par with humans’ other capacities of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual power. Perhaps effort is valuable in and of itself. As we seek to obey the two great commandments within the Church, we practice unselfishness and persistence. We never get it just right, but it is honest work.

Honest intellectual work sometimes leads to cognitive dissonance. That is to say, when one becomes aware of contradictions in what Latter-day Saints believe and do, particularly when these contradictions uniformly invoke divine authority, a murmur develops in the mind which is hard to ignore. For me, at one point, this cognitive dissonance was a deal-breaker. To my way of thinking, I was a smart, rational person who could not belong to an incoherent, irrational religion. Now, however, I have come to believe that cognition is not the most important aspect of being human. Like digestion, cognition is an essential process. Without it we would die. Yet in order to live in accordance with the reality of who we are as children of God (i.e., in accordance with truth), what is most vital is for us to pursue being good, as God is.

The Apostle Paul argued that even if someone had tremendous spiritual power, enough to prophesy, but had not charity, that person’s utterances would be empty as a “tinkling cymbal.” Even someone who understood all mysteries and knowledge, but had not charity, he said, was “nothing.” Spiritual and intellectual power are not substantial in and of themselves, but only in relation to others. They help us to love God, but unless we also employ them to love our neighbors and “our strangers” they are for naught.

When I ask, “Which is harder: to say something smart and critical about Latter-day Saint practice, or to care for others as much as I care for myself?” the answer is clear. When I ask, “With what do I need more divine help: becoming smarter and more knowledgeable, or becoming kinder and more able to help others?” the answer is clear. When I ask, “Am I better positioned to accomplish God’s work by myself, or in the company of fellow-travelers?” the answer is clear. For me, being a Latter-day Saint and participating in the mission of the Church is an opportunity to be more: to develop greater capacity to love; to know and serve; to enlist help. It is an opportunity to do something difficult but worthwhile.

I have friends who have decided to do good as individuals, without an organized religious community. Sometimes I envy their escape from the constant struggle to sort between divine fiat and tyrannical culture, godly practice and rote process. More often, however, I rejoice in my many sisters and brothers, in our humble collective search for the divine.

I also have friends who have left the Latter-day Saints and joined another religious community unencumbered by the “baggage” peculiar to our own faith and history. I respect their sense of integrity and feel that God consecrates their worthy work. In my professional study of religious traditions, particularly Buddhism, I have learned profound spiritual truths. I have also learned that all religious traditions have their own human histories, contradictions, and reasons for regret.

For myself, I choose to be a Latter-day Saint because I love our covenants: to God, to each other, and to the world. I love the baptismal covenant to bear one another’s burdens, the sealing covenant to make human love everlasting, the temple covenant to consecrate our time and talents in establishing a Zion in which there are no poor among us. I rejoice in the power of these covenants to bind us across the world, to make us equal as we stand before God, to convert hope into solemn promises. I believe that these Latter-day Saint covenants are true, which is to say I believe God’s power truly inhabits them, and through this power things which were otherwise impossible become possible.

In early 2017 I was diagnosed with colon cancer. I had surgery to remove the tumor in June. During the weeks of recovery, I remained home by myself in New Zealand while my husband and children went to the United States to visit our family. One night a sister from Relief Society, Sister Samuelu, knocked on the door. She was a Samoan woman who spoke English as a second language. She stepped into my kitchen with a bunch of flowers. Her face, with its wrinkles and sags, and her voice, worn-down with use, reminded me of my Chinese grandmother. She chatted genially about the new investigator from Brazil, and her granddaughter who is on a mission in Australia, and how once the missionaries lived in a haunted house but how “they’ve just got to be brave.” I thanked her for the time she had spent with my two younger children when she was their Primary teacher. She replied that in truth, she had been getting tired of Primary, but felt that it was important for the kids to have a teacher who showed up. She gave me her phone number and told me to text her anytime.

As her visit seemed to be coming to a close, I thanked her and gave her a hug. Then, surprising me, she asked: “Can I leave you with a prayer?” “Sure, thank you,” I said, sitting down again. For some reason, I didn’t close my eyes all the way, but stared down at the floor. I felt as if I were an observer. At that time of anxiety and pain, I didn’t really know what to expect from prayers. I was afraid that beyond “Thy will be done,” there was nothing to say.

Sister Samuelu said: “Bless Melissa so that she can live to take care of her kids.” With great eloquence, she invoked blessings on my body, my spirit, the house, my children and husband far away. The specific words escape me, but I remember a feeling of deep, settling calm. I felt as if I could feel my blood vessels widening and my lungs expanding. This is what the presence of the Holy Spirit feels like to me. Sister Samuelu hadn’t laid her hands on my head, but she had indeed blessed me, as did our Latter-day Saint foremothers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

At this lonely juncture in my life, I was blessed by an older Samoan woman who has never made an academic argument, who but for the Church would never have come into my life to teach my children and minister to me. Her prayer said what I had been afraid to say and asked what I had been afraid to ask. It is frightening to face a life-threatening illness and wonder whether God intends for you to make it to the other side. You feel foolish pleading for your life, because it’s quite possible that God has already seen that this will go nowhere. But if someone else makes this plea on your behalf, you feel not presumptuous, but grateful, and receiving. Through Sister Samuelu, I felt God’s power and care in my mind, my heart, and my body.

Sometimes we need others to plead with God alongside us. This is not because God responds to popularity contests, but because sometimes individuals wrestling with mortality are just not up to the task. The Church’s many structures, some of which I have experienced as teeth-gnashingly bureaucratic and subject to patriarchal control, are nevertheless designed to facilitate this sort of potentially transformative human interaction and intercession. Here, in the spaces between us, spring up fountains of living water.

Although they are irreducible to neat percentages, we can embrace both the human and the divine within the Church. We, Latter-day Saints all over the world who labor to build Zion, are ordinary people with ordinary shortcomings. We regularly fail to live up to the measure of our divine callings. Nevertheless, God is real, and patient, and among us.

It is genuinely painful to encounter un-Christlike behavior not only “in the world” but also within one’s own Church and its history. But since I myself am a regular source of un-Christlike behavior, this pain is something I must own. I must have the integrity to take responsibility for what needs fixing and put my shoulder to the wheel. Just like volunteering to vacuum carpets and empty trash in the meetinghouse, there are ways to volunteer time and energy to repair and renew the living structures of my Church.

The work of living with contradiction and tension is also something I must own. While it can be a relief to associate only with like-minded individuals with “correct” educational backgrounds, political views, class values, and theological inclinations, it is also a sort of prison—a sanitized separation from the fecund soil of humanity in which God wants us to spread our roots. If our Heavenly Parents had intended for everyone to think alike and to follow the same path back to them, they could have endorsed Lucifer’s plan. Instead they gave us the power of agency, which is the power to make terrible mistakes and cause lasting damage. But it is also the power to be brave, to be wise, to extend the self, and to be a true healer.

The fundamental reality of humanity is that our values and assumptions are rooted in the diverse circumstances into which we were born, and we disagree deeply about what is good and true. The Church is not a solution for the problem of diversity, but a preserve within which to practice diversity’s values. It is a gritty sandbox within which we bump against each other and become more polished. It is a place with enemies to love, peace to make, and cause for meekness. In this our teacher is the Holy One who ministered in the shadow of imperial power, associated with tax collectors and centurions, met with despised outcasts, and taught people in their own lands and languages. His was always the path of most resistance.

The path as a Latter-day Saint in pursuit of Zion is not always an easy path, but ease is not its purpose. Here I have found people to love and people who love me. Here I have ample cause to rejoice, to grieve, to act, and to be still. Here I am becoming more than I was, and more as I hope Christ has invited me to be.

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Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye (1979–2024) was a historian specializing in modern Chinese history, Christianity in China, women and religion, and the history of global Christianity.

Art by James Rees.

MORE WOMEN’S VOICES

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Lent marks a beginning in our journey to the dawn of an Easter morning. May we carry a prayer with us through every turn along Jerusalem streets, the descent into a dark valley outside the city walls, and finally our astonished arrival at the threshold of the empty tomb.

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As we pause this Presidents’ Day to reflect on the legacy and weight of national leadership, we are reminded that the work of tending to our shared civic and moral life belongs not only to those in office, but to all of us. We have gathered a collection of essays that invite us to move past partisan thinking, embrace difference with dignity, speak to our children about politics with courage and charity, and remember that simple niceness falls short of real peacemaking. In this sensitive political moment, we hope these essays offer new ways to lead in our own circles with curiosity, humility, and hope.

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Please enjoy this diverse collection of writing about love. Whether it’s the love of happenstance between two strangers in a library, an enduring love across a lifetime of hardship, a love not yet recognized between a Heavenly Parent and child, the loving refuge of the natural world, or love in the imitation of Christ, our experience of love is our experience of life. Long may it flourish! So from us to you, Happy Valentine’s Day.

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POETRY

ESSAYS

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When we talk, we usually “speak into the air” (1 Corinthians 14:9). What we say disappears as quickly as our mouth closes. But occasionally in the past, and much more frequently today, spoken language is made semipermanent, either through note taking, written transcription, or audiovisual recording. When this happens, a speech can become a kind of time capsule, revealing an entire world—its norms, priorities, and its own unique place. This temporary permanence enables speech to travel across time and space as a voice from the grave or from the dust, precisely as the Book of Mormon describes.

This talk, by a stalwart Argentinian saint, is an example of the space- and time-binding power of communication. Notice how timeless and eternal parts of it still sound—“a world engulfed in crises that jeopardize peace”—but also notice which parts remind you that the past is a foreign country. Hugo Salvioli impressively synthesizes Homer’s Odyssey, the Old and New Testament, as well as details from South American political history into a message about how all humanity must learn to break bread in harmonious community together. Salvioli reminds us that “lasting security and stability can only come to the nations through righteous living.” That’s a sentence worth speaking in the past, the present, and the future. As a result, Salvioli performs today the very ideas he described in 1978; in a prophetic mode, as a classical orator, and as an important figure from Latter-day Saint history in his country, Salvioli can “make no better contribution” to the grand and global story of eloquent Mormon preaching.

Dear brother and sisters, dear friends, being here with our beloved Prophet I cannot help but remember the words found in Amos: “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7).

As we study the life and works of prophets across time, we realize that the Lord never called on the timid or indecisive, but rather he called strong men, humble but determined men who showed great spiritual strength. Their words were always challenging and precise: “arise and shine forth,” “go and preach the Gospel.” Such commands were always uttered with encouraging promises: “if ye are prepared ye shall not fear” or “rejoice and be exceeding glad.”

To lead His kingdom in our times, the Lord has chosen President Spencer W. Kimball, who reveals His will, both through preaching and the example of his life, not only to the members of the Church but also to all humankind. For this reason, we often joyfully sing, “We thank thee, O God, for a prophet, to guide us in these latter days.”

This year (1978) is very special for us as Argentines, because we celebrate two hundred years since the birth of General José de San Martín, who is esteemed not only as the liberator of our country but also of our sister nations of Chile and Peru. His virtues and lack of concern for the glory of men shows his love of God, as well as his belief that the divine potential of people can only be fulfilled in an environment of liberty and justice. He once stated, “You shall be what you ought to be, but if not, you shall be nothing at all.” We believe that the political liberation of our people cleared and prepared the way for the 1925 dedication in Buenos Aires of these South American lands for the preaching of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In a world engulfed in crises that jeopardize peace—peace as in the lack of warfare and also as in spiritual peace—we do well to remember the warnings issued by President Kimball. In a message to the world after the end of World War II, in October 1945, he said, “Peace is obtainable, but what is the price of peace? The efforts of peace conferences, and the prayers of suffering humanity, may bring an armistice of uncertain length, but peace with totality and permanence can come only when men repent and turn to the Lord.”

In short, the path or the foundation of peace is righteousness. Upon reading Homer’s beautiful poems, I’ve always been impressed by the way in which Odysseus was recognized by his faithful wife Penelope and his people. He returned home, after a twenty-year absence, to discover that an engraved iron bow had been prepared and that each potential suitor was asked to string it if they were to be declared heir to the throne. Yet none of the suitors had the strength to bend it. Only Odysseus was able to perform the task, with but minimal effort. Despite being disguised as a beggar, his ability to bend the bow caused him to be immediately recognized. He won the contest, and with that same bow, he put to death Penelope’s insolent suitors.

Let us now move to the Gospel’s heart-warming tales. After Christ’s crucifixion, two of His disciples walked with a heavy heart toward the village of Emmaus, near Jerusalem, when Jesus, as a resurrected being, appeared onto them on the road. They were certain He was dead and failed to recognize him. When they reached their destination, they invited him for dinner.

And it came to pass,” read the scripture, “as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him (Luke 24:30–31).

While Odysseus was revealed because he could bend a bow, Jesus was revealed because of how he broke bread. Bread is universally accepted as a nurturing substance, one that sustains life. Christ himself, when He taught us how to pray, asked the Father to always give us daily bread. Stringing a bow is an act of strength, a thing of strife and war; breaking bread is an act of generosity, one that nurtures, one that is shared; it is a bestowal of life and goodness carried out through wheat’s golden grain.

Nowadays, when so many people and nations would prepare for war rather than in peace, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints raises its voice to the nations of the world declaring that it is obtainable, and urgently necessary, that we all learn to break bread.

Brothers and sisters, as members of the Church, let us take on the commitment of witnessing to the world that lasting security and stability can only come to the nations through righteous living. Thus, we can make no better contribution than an adequate and fair attitude, as well as firm convictions that will counter evil and indecency.

I wish to leave with you my testimony that truth will prevail. This is not only the expression of my desire but also my firm spiritual conviction. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

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Hugo N. Salvioli was born in 1929, in La Plata, Argentina. He was baptized in the River Plata on December 10, 1939. He was a CES director for 22 years. Among his many callings, he has served as a regional representative, mission president (Bahía Blanca Argentina), temple president (Buenos Aires), and MTC president (Guatemala City).

Art by Andres Segovia (1929-1996).

“Celebrations” is a newsletter that celebrates sacred moments throughout the calendar and liturgical year. To subscribe to this newsletter, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for “Celebrations.”

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The roads carved by the constant treading of heavy feet over the ages had long since faded away. Not for lack of travelers, but rather, for the abundance of them. These were days of widespread war and rage, where others were enemies just because they were others. Any prudent traveller knew to keep away from them if he desired to keep his life.

Ivar and his wife had skirted alongside these paths, under cover of treeshade and running hunched over in the clearings, hoping to avoid hostiles each time they arrived at the following grove. Something was guiding Ivar, seeing as how they had made their way to the northernmost coast and now found themselves facing the sea without any setbacks, only having to hunt a bit, like moles or a red squirrel, fighting off hunger and the cold, both of which increased the further north they advanced.

The wind whipped through Ivar’s long hair and the salt air parched his lips, a sign of the nearby sea. He remembered, as he walked, how they were forced to run when their village was attacked, hiding, he taking only his sword and a bag with some belongings, and she the quiver with a handful of arrows and the bow.

“Gakk út þadan, Ivar! Come out! See your people here, your people!” shouted a captain, pointing his sword toward the kneeling prisoners, all lined up. “Your people need you. I promise to free them if you show yourself,” he mocked between the complicit hoots from others who held their arrows pulled back, ready to fire.

“Get out of here, Ivar!” yelled a captive, joy in his voice, eyes trained heavenward while everything around him burned. “Here come the valkyries, dróttinn.”

The captain silenced him with a slash to the neck.

“Come, dróttinn,” the captain repeated in mockery, looking around in circles, “and the others won’t have to ascend to heaven today.”

“My love,” Ilda whispered to him, frightened as she witnessed the scene from the trees.

“We have to leave, ást min; they won’t suffer, they die in innocence,” said Ivar, turning around and falling back further into the trees.

As he turned his back, he heard how the captain went on monologuing, preaching of cowardice and freedom and foreign gods, until finally, after screams of terror and defiance, he heard no more.

A silence forced by arrows. Then howls of war and triumph.

Survivors: That’s what Ivar and Ilda were, escaping from the south and the wars they themselves had tried to stop. Their children had been slaughtered. “Foolish Vikings,” thought Ivar as he recalled those experiences. He shut his eyes and out streamed tiny tears with each step. He recalled the horror of burning homes, friends in flames, blades that disemboweled children’s corpses and stripped women of that which was most sacred, to later use their remains as a trophy.

They had arrived at the stony seaside crags. Ilda tripped, falling to her knees, wounding herself.

“Ást min, just a little further,” he said to his wife, after raising her back up, lovingly caressing her braids to the side. “We are so close.”

She threw up what little breakfast she’d had that morning. Ivar looked upon her admiringly: That wasn’t from the exhaustion of the inhuman journey that they were on, but rather the proof that a child was taking form in her womb. He had already suspected it. That’s why he couldn’t allow himself to be killed; that’s why he chose to flee rather than perish together with his tribe. Something higher than he and his Viking pride was just over the horizon.

Since when had his people gone from being farmers to raiders? Had they strayed so far from their roots? Ivar remembered how, when he was young, the tribes began to fight among themselves, and how to the south there rose up an empire, which, as it expanded its territories, devastated everything in its way. Ivar knew that the internal wars, when added to the external ones, would be the end of them. He warned them; he told them; he pleaded with them. And they didn’t understand. Pride, arrogance, and traditions had blinded them. Roots run beneath the earth and all that sits above lives because of them. His own people had become the enormous serpent Nidhogg, hatefully biting at the roots of the mighty tree Yggdrasil. They had caused their own demise.

To the north they now went, not just for safety, but for a specific task. Afterwards they would turn west, toward the place where their enemies would surely go first to look for them.

They arrived at the north coast beside the sea, and upon a stony hill, Ivar began digging with his sword. “By Odin,” he thought with no faith in those gods. The earth was frozen. He spent hours breaking through the soil. Ilda went looking for loose stones with smooth sides, and she brought them close to where her husband was digging. It was the third day and if they didn’t find water soon they would die.

“Are we the last living branch of a fallen people?” Ilda asked as she touched her belly, her lips cracked by the salt air.

“Yes,” he answered, leaning on his sword. “This is why we are going to be grafted to a mightier tree. The past, ást min, only tells us where we come from, not where we are going. And as a branch torn off, we will escape being thrown into the fire.

After a while the freezing winds let up. With effort and help from his wife they filled the hole with the stones, turning the interior into a sturdy box. In her tongue, she began singing a sad tune, but one that carried a message of hope:

Brutu mik

Ek em brotin grein

Vindr berr mik

Helgi viðr minn brennr

Eitr lagði Níðhǫggr

Rætur hans deyja

Sjái eigi lengr þessi fjǫll

Vex eigi í þessum, mínum dǫlum

Vindr berr mik

Frá eldi

Hann býðr mik yfir mar

Þar verð ek gróin

Í nýju heimkynni mínu

As she sang, Ivar knelt with some effort and pulled out of the bag that which he had salvaged from his clan and which was wrapped in skins: a weighty book, not too thick, made of skinny sheets of silver, held together by rings of the same metal—a technique acquired through trade with the Islamic caliphates. What he was about to hide up needed to last for ages. It was written in runes and Celtic symbols gathered from other cultures. Engraved on the first page one could read the following runes:

ᚢᛅᛏᛏᚱ ᚼᛁᚾᛋ ᚼᛁᛚᚴᛅ ᚴᚱᛁᛋᛏᛋ

“Váttr hins helga Krists.” Into the box he also placed a knife with his name carved into the handle, two clear small stones: one white in color, the other black, attached to his helmet; also, an unadorned gold crown, the armband of his clan, and several dírhams. Then he covered it with an enormous stone. Kneeling together, they offered words to a god known to few of the northern peoples and who, in coming years, would be introduced to them by swordpoint from the south, just as Ivar had prophesied.

They departed towards the west and below, alongside the mountains; then they would venture across the great waters. The Guiding Spirit, which had helped Ivar, told him that there awaited a boat ready to set sail for a new land, flowing with milk and honey.

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Jonatan Walton was born in Pergamino, Argentina. He loves reading, writing, and drawing. He has studied photography, graphic design, and archery. He started writing when he was young, but it is only recently that he has begun to truly prioritize this passion of his.

Art by Amalia Nieto (1907-2003).

“Celebrations” is a newsletter that celebrates sacred moments throughout the calendar and liturgical year. To subscribe to this newsletter, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for “Celebrations.”

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La huella de los caminos formados por el paso constante de pies pesados hacía tiempo se había desvanecido. No por falta de pies, sino por exceso de ellos. Eran tiempos de guerra y cólera generalizada, donde el otro ya era enemigo por ser otro. El viajante precavido sabía que debía abandonarlos si quería salvar su vida.

Ivar y su esposa habían viajado costeando esos caminos, bajo las sombras de árboles y corriendo agachados entre claros, esperando no encontrar hostiles al llegar a la próxima arboleda. Algo guiaba a Ivar, porque pudieron llegar a la costa más lejana del norte antes de enfrentarse al mar sin ningún percance, cazando lo mínimo, como topos o alguna ardilla roja, para saciar el hambre y el frío, que se iba incrementando a medida que avanzaban al norte.

El viento sacudía el largo cabello de Ivar y la sal del aire le resecaba los labios, señal de que el mar estaba cerca. Recordaba, al caminar, que tuvieron que salir corriendo cuando su aldea fue atacada, escondiéndose, tomando él solo la espada y un saco con algunas pertenencias, y ella el carcaj con unas pocas flechas y el arco.

—¡Gakk út þadan, Ivar!, ¡sal de ahí! tu gente aquí, tu gente —gritaba un capitán, señalando con la espada a los prisioneros arrodillados puestos en una hilera—. Tu gente te necesita. Prometo dejarlos libres si te apareces —bromeó entre risas cómplices de los que sostenían saetas listas para ser disparadas.

—¡Vete, Ivar! —gritó uno con alegría en su voz, mirando al cielo mientras todo ardía alrededor—. Aquí están las valquirias, dróttinn.

El capitán lo silenció con un corte en el cuello.

—Ven, dróttinn —repitió con burla el capitán, mirando en círculos—, y los demás no tendrán que ascender al cielo hoy.

—Amor —le susurró Ilda, asustada, al ver la escena desde los árboles.

—Tenemos que irnos, ást min; ellos no sufrirán, mueren siendo inocentes —dijo Ivar, dando la vuelta y metiéndose más entre los árboles.

Al dar la espalda, escuchaba cómo ese capitán seguía monologando, hablando de cobardía y libertad y de dioses ajenos, hasta que luego de unos gritos de terror y desafiantes no escuchó más nada.

Un silencio hecho por flechas. Luego, alaridos de guerra y triunfo.

Sobrevivientes: eso eran Ivar e Ilda, escapando del sur y de las guerras que ellos mismos quisieron impedir. A sus hijos los habían exterminado. “Vikingos necios,” pensó Ivar al rememorar esas vivencias. Cerraba los ojos y pequeñas lágrimas brotaban a cada paso. Recordaba el horror de casas incendiadas, amigos quemándose, espadas que exponían las entrañas de los cuerpos de niños y que despojaban a las mujeres de lo más sagrado que tenían, para luego usar su cadáver como trofeo.

Habían llegado a los riscos junto al mar. Ilda se tropezó, cayendo de rodillas, lastimándose.

—Ást min, un poco más —le dijo a su esposa, luego de sostenerla, acomodando sus trenzas con cariño—. Ya estamos cerca.

Ella vomitó lo último que esa mañana había comido. Ivar la miraba con admiración: eso no era cansancio del viaje inhumano que estaban haciendo sino la manifestación de que un niño se formaba en su vientre. Él ya lo sospechaba. Por eso no pudo dejarse asesinar; por eso huyó y no se dejó matar junto a su tribu. Algo más elevado que él y su orgullo vikingo estaba por venir.

¿Desde cuándo los de su pueblo habían pasado de ser sembradores a saqueadores? ¿Tan olvidadas estaban sus raíces? Ivar recordaba que, cuando era joven, las tribus empezaron a pelearse entre sí, y que del sur había surgido un imperio que, en su expansión territorial, estaba arrasando con todo. Ivar sabía que las guerras internas, sumado a las externas, acabarían con ellos. Les avisó, les dijo, les suplicó. Y no entendieron. Orgullo, soberbia y tradiciones los habían cegado. Las raíces van debajo de la tierra y todo lo que está arriba vive gracias a ellas. Su propia gente se había transformado en la enorme serpiente Nidhogg, mordiendo con odio las raíces del gran árbol Yggdrasil. Ellos causaron su propio fin.

Al norte no iban solo por seguridad sino por una tarea específica. Luego se dirigirían al oeste, lugar donde seguro fueron a buscarlos primeramente sus enemigos.

Llegaron a la costa norte cerca del mar y sobre un monte rocoso Ivar empezó a cavar con su espada. «Por Odín», pensó sin creer en esos dioses. La tierra estaba helada. Le llevó mucho tiempo romper ese suelo. Ilda iba en busca de rocas sueltas de caras lisas y las traía cerca de donde cavaba su esposo. Era el tercer día y debían buscar agua pronto o morirían.

—¿Somos la última rama viva de un pueblo caído? —preguntó Ilda tocando su panza. Tenía los labios partidos por la sal.

—Sí —le contestó él, apoyándose en su espada—. Por eso vamos a ser injertados en un árbol más fuerte. El pasado, ást min, solo nos dice de dónde venimos, no adónde vamos. Y como rama desgajada no seremos parte de la quema.

Al cabo de un rato el viento gélido amainó. Con esfuerzo y ayuda de su mujer rellenaron el agujero con las piedras, convirtiendo el interior en una caja maciza. Ella, en su lengua, empezó a entonar una melodía triste pero con un mensaje de esperanza:

Brutu mik

Ek em brotin grein

Vindr berr mik

Helgi viðr minn brennr

Eitr lagði Níðhǫggr

Rætur hans deyja

Sjái eigi lengr þessi fjǫll

Vex eigi í þessum, mínum dǫlum

Vindr berr mik

Frá eldi

Hann býðr mik yfir mar

Þar verð ek gróin

Í nýju heimkynni mínu

Ivar, mientras ella cantaba, se arrodilló con dificultad y retiró del saco lo que habían salvado de su clan y que estaba envuelto en pieles: un pesado libro, no muy grueso, hecho de finas láminas de plata, sostenidas por anillos del mismo metal, una técnica transferida del comercio con califatos islámicos. Lo que estaba por esconder tenía que permanecer por mucho tiempo. Estaba escrito en runas y otros símbolos célticos que habían derivado de otras culturas. En la primera hoja se veían talladas las siguientes runas:

ᚢᛅᛏᛏᚱ ᚼᛁᚾᛋ ᚼᛁᛚᚴᛅ ᚴᚱᛁᛋᛏᛋ

“Váttr hins helga Krists.” Puso también en el hueco un cuchillo con su nombre tallado en el mango, dos pequeñas piedras diáfanas: una de color blanco y otra negra, unidas a su casco; también una sencilla corona de oro, el brazalete de su clan y varios dírhams. Luego tapó todo con una piedra enorme. Ambos, arrodillados, dieron palabras a un dios poco conocido por los pueblos del norte y que, en años venideros lo conocerían a fuerza de espada desde el sur, como Ivar les había profetizado.

Se desplazaron hacia el oeste y abajo, junto a las montañas; luego se aventurarían a cruzar grandes aguas. El Espíritu Guía, que ayudaba a Ivar, le había dicho que allí un barco estaba por zarpar a una tierra nueva, donde fluía leche y miel.

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Jonatan Walton nació en Pergamino, Argentina. Es un entusiasta de la lectura, la escritura y el dibujo. Ha estudiado fotografía, diseño gráfico y tiro con arco. Aunque escribe desde joven, recientemente ha comenzado a dedicarle verdadero énfasis a esta pasión.

Art by Amalia Nieto (1907-2003).

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Cuando hablamos, por lo general “habla[mos] al aire” (1 Corintios 14:9). Lo que decimos desaparece tan pronto como cerramos los labios. Sin embargo, en el pasado de vez en cuando, y con mucha frecuencia hoy en día, lo que pronunciamos se vuelve semi permanente, ya sea por medio de la toma de notas, la transcripción por escrito o la grabación audiovisual. Cuando esto sucede, un discurso puede llegar a ser una especie de cápsula del tiempo en la cual se revela todo un mundo, con sus normas, prioridades y lugar en particular. Esta permanencia temporal le permite al habla atravesar el tiempo y el espacio como una voz desde ultratumba o desde el polvo, tal cual lo describe el Libro de Mormón.

El siguiente discurso, pronunciado por un firme santo argentino, es un ejemplo del poder de la comunicación para aunar el tiempo y el espacio. Obsérvese que partes del discurso parecen atemporales y eternas —“un mundo envuelto en crisis que comprometen la paz”—, mientras otras parecen recordarnos, en palabras de L. P. Hartley, que “el pasado es un país extranjero.” Hugo Salvioli sintetiza de forma impresionante la Odisea de Homero, el Antiguo y el Nuevo Testamento y algunos elementos de la historia política de Sudamérica para comunicar el mensaje de que toda la humanidad debe aprender a partir el pan en harmonía y comunión. El resultado es que en la actualidad Salvioli cumple con las mismísimas ideas que esbozó en 1978. En modalidad profética, como un orador clásico y en calidad de importante figura de la historia de los santos de los últimos días en Argentina, Salvioli contribuye de lo mejor a la gran historia mundial de la elocuente predicación mormona.

Queridos hermanos y amigos, al estar junto a nuestro amado Profeta, no puedo menos que recordar las palabras registradas en Amos: “Porque no hará nada Jehová el Señor, sin que revele su secreto a sus siervos los profetas” (Amos 3:7).

Al estudiar la vida y las obras de los profetas en todo tiempo, advertimos que el Señor nunca llamó a tímidos o indecisos, sino a hombres fuertes, humildes, pero decididos y con gran fortaleza espiritual. Sus palabras siempre fueron desafiantes y concretas: “levantaos y brillad,” “id y predicad el evangelio.” Pero siempre estaban acompañadas de promesas estimulantes: “si estáis preparados, no temeréis” o “gozaos y alegraos.”

Para dirigir Su reino en esta época, el Señor ha elegido al presidente Spencer W. Kimball, quien revela Su voluntad, no sólo a los miembros de la Iglesia, sino a toda la humanidad, por precepto y mediante su vida ejemplar. Por eso frecuentemente cantamos con mucho regocijo: “Te damos, Señor, nuestras gracias, que mandas de nuevo venir, profetas con tu evangelio, guiándonos cómo vivir.”

Este año [1978] es muy especial para nosotros, los argentinos; ya que recordamos el bicentenario del nacimiento del general don José de San Martín, reconocido no sólo como libertador de nuestra patria, sino también de las naciones hermanas de Chile y Perú. Sus virtudes y desinterés por la gloria de los hombres demuestran su amor a Dios y su confianza en que el potencial divino del hombre sólo iba a realizarse en un clima de libertad y de justicia. En una ocasión declaró: “Serás lo que debas ser y si no, no serás nada.” Creemos que la liberación política de nuestro pueblo favoreció y preparó el camino para la dedicación de las tierras sudamericanas en Buenos Aires, en el año 1925, a fin de iniciar luego la predicación del Evangelio restaurado de Jesucristo.

En un mundo envuelto en crisis que comprometen la paz, no sólo la paz en términos de guerra sino la paz espiritual, conviene recordar las advertencias que hizo el presidente Kimball en un mensaje dirigido al mundo en octubre de 1945, luego de finalizada la Segunda Guerra Mundial, cuando dijo: “La paz es posible, pero ¿cuál es su precio? Los esfuerzos de las conferencias para obtener la paz y las oraciones de la doliente humanidad tal vez traigan un armisticio que tenga cierto tiempo de duración; pero la paz total y permanente, vendrá únicamente usando los hombres se arrepientan y se vuelvan al Señor.”

En una palabra, el sendero o el cimiento de la paz, es la rectitud. Al leer los hermosos poemas de Homero, siempre me resultó interesante saber cómo fue reconocido Ulises por su fiel esposa Penélope y su pueblo. Al regresar después de veinte años de ausencia, encontró que habían preparado un arco de hierro labrado que cada posible sucesor debía doblar, antes de ser admitido como heredero del trono; pero ninguno de los postulantes tuvo fuerzas suficientes; sólo Ulises pudo hacerlo sin mayor esfuerzo, a pesar de presentarse con la apariencia de un mendigo, y por ese hecho fue inmediatamente reconocido, venció en el certamen y con el mismo arco dio muerte a los atrevidos pretendientes de su esposa.

Pasemos ahora a los cálidos relatos del Evangelio. Luego de la crucifixión, dos discípulos de Cristo se dirigían muy apesadumbrados hacia la aldea de Emaús, cerca de Jerusalén, cuando Jesús, ya resucitado, se les apareció por el camino. Seguros de Su muerte, no lo identificaron y cuando llegaron por fin a su destino lo invitaron a cenar.

Y aconteció —dice la escritura— que estando sentado con ellos a la mesa, tomó el pan y lo bendijo, lo partió y les dio. Entonces les fueron abiertos los ojos, y le reconocieron . . . (Lucas 24:30–31.)

Si Ulises se reveló al doblar el arco, Jesús era reconocido en la manera de partir el pan. El pan es aceptado universalmente como una substancia que alimenta, que sustenta la vida. Cristo mismo cuando nos enseñó a orar, le pidió al Padre que siempre nos diera el pan de cada día. Tender el arco es un acto de fuerza y un elemento de lucha y guerra; partir el pan es un acto generoso, que alimenta, que se comparte; es prodigar vida y bienestar, mediante el grano dorado de trigo.

En la actualidad, mientras muchos hombres y naciones están más dispuestos a prepararse para la guerra que a vivir en paz, la Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días alza su voz a las naciones de la tierra, para declarar que no sólo es posible, sino urgente, que todos aprendamos a partir el pan.

Hermanos, como miembros de la Iglesia asumamos el compromiso de ser testigos al mundo de que sólo el vivir rectamente traerá la verdadera seguridad y estabilidad a los pueblos. Por lo tanto, la mejor contribución que podremos hacer es una actitud adecuada y justa, y firmes convicciones que contrarresten la maldad y la indecencia.

Quiero dejar mi testimonio de que la verdad prevalecerá, que ésta no es sólo la expresión de un deseo, sino una firme convicción espiritual. En el nombre de Jesucristo. Amén.

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Hugo N. Salvioli nació en 1929, en La Plata, Argentina. Fue bautizado en el Río de la Plata el 10 de diciembre de 1939. Fue director del SEI durante 22 años. Entre sus muchos llamamientos figuran representante regional, presidente de misión (Bahía Blanca Argentina), presidente de templo (Buenos Aires) y presidente de CCM (Cd. de Guatemala).

Art by Andres Segovia (1929-1996).

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Omar Ibayú was born at an unknown date before 1800, probably in San Francisco de Borja. The lack of documentary evidence about this early period in his life has created a number of mysteries. This has resulted in several unfounded legends about his youth (e.g., that he often spoke with the deer and birds that lived in the town he grew up in). Fortunately, the period of his life in which he carried out his ministry is well documented. He kept many records himself through letters, journals, reports, and so forth—always in his elegant handwriting, which he probably developed in the years when he is believed to have lived in Purificación. Below, we transcribe a fragment from the very first known account of the Glorious Vision. This text comes from a letter he wrote in 1823 to Father Damian, a Franciscan priest in San Miguel Arcángel with whom Ibayú had, up to that point, a close relationship. The letter clearly shows the profound difference in worldviews that would eventually lead to the Flight of 1825:

I have always trusted you very much. It is because of it that I am now pointing out to you, with all the brotherly love found in my heart, that the time has come for the people to open their eyes and see all that the Lord wishes to show them. God has always shown kindness to the natives of this land. If, in his infinite wisdom, he has suffered us for a season to be in bondage, it is because he desires to cleanse us so that as his people we can take his sweet gospel to every corner of the earth, in the manner in which he himself commanded his disciples in former days. Wickedness shall not triumph, for the Heavens protect us, and this the natives of Paraná and of other lands will soon know. I myself was once ignorant, having no knowledge of these and many other things, until my kind God in his infinite mercy sent to me three Indians from Colombia. They came to this San Borja reduction after crossing all of Tawantinsuyu. I cannot reveal their names, but let it suffice to say they were disciples of the Lamb of God.

On a Monday evening after mass, I was making a harp out cedar when three men of short stature entered the workshop. I could tell they were American Indians, like myself, but their appearance was different from the Spanish or other American natives. They wore long blue ponchos and blue hats. Their espadrilles had no upper so that their soles were held to the foot by means of rope only. Instead of wearing their hair loose, they tied it behind their back in a long and curious braid. They communicated with each other in a language they indicated was the language of the Kichwa. Because they had no knowledge of most languages spoken here, for they knew no Guarani or Portuguese, we spoke in Spanish. They earnestly asked for water, so I took them home and gave them to drink. We conversed for many an hour in a manner such that, had it been heard by others, it would have been considered nonsense. They explained in all manner of details the error in the superstitions of the natives in these lands, who refuse to follow our Lord Jesus Christ and instead worship other gods and fear the spirits. They explained many other things which I have laid before you above, things regarding how the hour of deliverance for the natives of this land is near. Moreover, they invited me to pray in seclusion that I might know the will of the Lord God.

That same evening they took leave and headed down to the river without revealing their final destination. Many of their words penetrated deep into my heart, affecting my mood for several days. It became difficult for me to give all my might to my duties. I so deeply pondered the words of the three foreigners that I even failed to show for the harvest of lettuce and beets. It was in this manner of circumstances that I decided to retreat into the jungle to pray as commanded. After having walked about a league, I bent my knees and made the sign of the holy cross. Straightway I heard some noises around me, as if a troop of bandeirantes was circling about, and a great fear took hold of my thoughts. I wished to stand but a dark mist came down upon me, and I felt as if bound by heavy chains.

In terror, I cried out to my dear God that he would have mercy on me. It was then that a marvelous miracle occurred as thousands of white butterflies descended all about me, on the soil, on the shrubs, on the treetops, and with the flapping of their wings, they dispelled the evil mist. I looked up, and I saw two beautiful, glowing men standing in a gigantic burning flame in front of me. One of them, who had flowing black hair and beard, pointed to the other, and speaking in my beautiful Guarani tongue, said to hear his Beloved and Holy Son. The other took a step forward and raised the palms of his hands, showing me the bleeding wounds of his crucifixion. I looked down at his feet, and there too were found the infamous injuries. When I looked at his eyes I noticed his face, his weary face, under the cruel crown of thorns, all of which was greatly moving. In his eyes, I saw pure love as he tenderly told me to renounce my religion and the Mother Church, for her sole purpose was to prepare the hearts of men to receive the true gospel, which would be revealed to me by the mouth of my forefathers. He expounded to me many other things, after which both of them walked away among the tree until I could no longer see them, and all the beautiful butterflies, who had silently witnessed this glorious vision, flew after them. As I write all of this that has happened to me, the recollection of it makes my hand tremble, but not my heart, for it overflows with infinite gratitude due to the greatness and kindness of my dear God and his tender Son, who loved me so much that they appointed me to be their prophet in these Americas!

The reason I had not yet revealed any of this is because they commanded me to say nothing until divine Providence would make it clear that the time had come to do it. That time is now, as was manifested to me last night, next to my own bed, by another pious and beloved apparition. With your permission, I shall now recount this second vision, and all that in it transpired . . .

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Gabriel González is a translation professor at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the author of thirteen children's books, a novel, a book of poetry, and a short story collection, all of them in Spanish. He self-translated his Estampas del Libro de Mormón into English as Book of Mormon Sketches.

Art by Olga de Chica (1921–2016).

“Celebrations” is a newsletter that celebrates sacred moments throughout the calendar and liturgical year. To subscribe to this newsletter, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for “Celebrations.”

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