Climbafamilytree123: 9-8-2013 "Fire in the Bones"

9-8-2013 "Fire in the Bones"

“Would you be my accompanist for our stake choir at the end of August?”

The question was launched at me during a very long Saturday in July, where I might have been contemplating Sister P’s story of the temple missionary in Lima, who rode the subway to the end of the line, for something different to do on his day off.

Though exquisitely lovely, residing within the same four walls on the same land quadrant six out of seven days can bring its moments of wanderlust. “Of course,” I breathed out the response. And I lodged the opportunity as a prized delicacy in my subconscious, until conference week crept forward, and the music choice was still a question mark. Exactly when and how would our practices take place? Panic threatened. A piano was located, regular practices kicked in—5 a.m. comes early with seminary students at our building.

They lock the doors at 6 a.m., if they don’t leave early to go to school. If you catch the doors while they are open, the piano is yours! Every day for over a week, the ivories got a work out, and so did Audrey Clark’s grand advice ("play it perfectly at least four times!") and Pamela Davies’ motto ("know the words and play it so the message sings!") Spanish lyrics wormed their way to coincide with musical moments of yesteryear, and found a way to orchestrate a family letter. But I need to back up a few years to find the setting for verses that worked to distill themselves in Braille from resolute fingers to permeable mind.

Rewinding five decades: My father was beginning his graduate school in soils when I was born;

Yes, Evelyn, I get the idea! This is what being third is like--try the word "mauled" and then wait til you have three bosses!

and when I was four and a half, he accepted a teaching position at the University of New Hampshire. Neither he nor my mom nor any of us kids (three—starting second grade, first grade and kindergarten, with Steven on the way) had been much east of the continental divide.

After searching high and low with Mom on bed rest, our family moved into a small green house that had been vacant long enough to have overgrown grass, flies in the windows and much work needed for our home to become inhabitable.

Sisters from our nearby well-established branch

came to the rescue, whipped the house into shape. And within a few months, Mom delivered a healthy New Year’s baby.

This was Porstmouth--our first chapel, until the boundaries changed.

During those months, the boundaries of the branches were rearranged with a circle around our house--to scoop us up and dump us into a struggling new branch in Maine that at the time met in a telephone office. Primary there consisted of possibly eight children including three Gees and we learned in a hallway, underneath the coat hangers. Mom brought Little Women

and read to us in the car while Dad went to Priesthood meeting. It was not until years later, that we learned that the tears she shed while reading were not just for Louisa May Alcott’s mastery of writing.

My father accepted a calling to preside over the branch, and our meeting place moved from a rickety apartment building, with a memorable pump organ, to an Elk’s hall, where we would sweep beer cans and other remains of previous gatherings prior to beginning meetings over the echoing wood floors. It was here that my Sunday school class met in the women’s bathroom. And, oh, what memories! We formed fast and solid friends. As we did our part to earn the required funds to build a much-needed chapel with

Sister Marden and Sister Pouliot taught me Primary, and I remember watching them crochet at lightning speed

Little Steven is toting the fire extinguisher, and the rest of us are enjoying holding the money for a moment!

bazaars, bake sales, marketing scones and corn at county fairs, selling fire extinguishers door to door, and even hosting an authentic Tongan luau on the beach during a hurricane,

(We did not think to bring a camera to the luau...this is my best representation from a more recent storm

in close to the same place.)

the barometer my father had penned with red ink to show how we were doing with funding, rose. Leaders came from Salt Lake to preview land for a chapel. The land sales were anticipated and then fell through. Finally, beginning our eighth summer, about the time my father’s University department was under reconstruction, and he accepted an invitation for a temporary work assignment in Sri Lanka, a piece of land was approved, and construction began on our own little chapel—in our own little city!

Before the ground breaking, members of our little branch planted corn on the property. And there was a bumper crop! As our family prepared to leave, and we met for the last time in the Knights of Pythias Hall in Berwick, a familiar song echoed across the upstairs wood floors, where Sister Ridley had arpeggiated the chords with one hand, as her other hand had been crippled in arthritis. Red-haired Brother Haskell, testified with tears, as he did every month, and something happened between the tears, as I mouthed, “God be With You Til We Meet Again." I felt something warm, lovely and tangible creep from my heart to the bottom of my arms and my toes to the tip of the roots of my hair. (Press blue link to hear Mormon Tabernacle choir...)

It was much later, in high school,

after hearing Elder Dilworth Young at a local youth fireside challenge us to become acquainted with feelings of the Spirit, when I attended Seminary class, where friends stood to share their understandings of truth. I remembered distinctly the feelings of that New England day, with tangible love for dear friends coupled with conviction that, though our paths would part, relationships can be eternal. And over the years, I am coming to understand more clearly the words of Jeremiah—when he described his “heart as a burning fire shut up in [his] bones.”

Years later, on the lower bunk of a missionary training center bed, heading toward Fort Lauderdale, I discovered something else that struck a chord:
The convincing power of the Holy Ghost is so great that there can be no doubt that what He reveals to us is true. President Joseph Fielding Smith said: “Through the Holy Ghost the truth is woven into the very fibre and sinews of the body so that it cannot be forgotten” (Joseph Fielding Smith, Gospel Principles Chapter 7.)

Thirty years later, accompanying this “Same Song, Second Verse” in Spanish, imagine what might happen to a heart hungry for friends far away, with one or two in another sphere? “Para Siempre Dios Esté con Vos” “God be With You Til We Meet Again." And Heavenly Father will raise up friends where he plants us!

Here is the family who drove us to and from their Stake Conference. It was one of "the best" conferences Val remembers attending. Saturday night, the stake president encouraged us to learn the stories of our grandparents and parents. He told a story of his mother, receiving a Book of Mormon from a young elder who was discouraged, not seeing results from his efforts, ready to return home. The elder was the younger brother of Steve Young (the famous football player.) Upon receiving the book, Pres. Torres' mother had a dream, where she felt she needed to read the book and join the church. This she did. The missionary stayed, a young fledgling country divided into districts was strengthened one person at a time, a family was shored up, and a leader raised up to encourage one of Honduras's now 22 stakes and teach them to gather family stories--to love, attend, and utilize their new temple--lauded as neighborhood and community asset by neighbors and ecclesiastical leaders of surrounding denominations.

Who can resist smiles like these--and here's a question: what do you do when your glasses are red and you work in the temple?? (You get noticed easier!)

This is the Idaho farm house, next to a train track.
Grandpa paid a nickel a song
if we would play something he did not recognize.
Sometimes, he would give it a new name like "Old Black Joe"
and claim he really did know it--no nickel!

The second song was Secreta Oración (Secret Prayer.) As an adolescent I remember practicing this, its lilting chorus, with a comment or two from the basses and tenors! I think I learned it in the key of E flat—and I learned to love flats--on Grandpa Hillman’s farmhouse piano—the place I learned to love the Book of Mormon.

Our third hymn was Nearer My God to Thee. (Again, press blue link to hear it done right!) For me, this was a paralysis song—at my first organ recital when I decided I would/could never in right mind try something like this again (like Dad, who in his fifties, took piano lessons with our cousin Lona, and told me that his first recital was scarier than his doctorate orals!)

In 2009, I accompanied my sister Carma and her sons, to perform this hymn at the funeral of their other Nevada Highway Patrol Grandpa. This week, his son, their uncle,

Scott Sorensen

age 49, was honored by hundreds of Reno police officers, commemorating a fellow officer who recently lost his struggle with cancer.

Prompted by conversations with our taxi drivers and in the temple with ordinances and people of various sizes, shapes, and origins—reminded of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who were promised that through their children and children’s children all the families of the earth could be blessed--I have begun to scour the Bible in Spanish. Over the past hundred plus pages, prophets and patriarchs have journeyed to and from promised parcels, and wrestled with themselves and other than earthly powers to secure promises for themselves and posterity. My rest a stone...steps unto heaven...angels to beckon me!

Michael and Karly

Saturday, Scott's nephew and mine, my sister Carma and her husband Patrick’s son Michael married Karly, his best friend, who he met in an institute class on his way to work in the Consulate in Spain last summer.
Most of our family was there to celebrate with him.

Maria and Sarah

Steve, Pam, and girls

I was not. (Imagine me photo shopped in, between Carma and James for balance!)

These are our droves of missionaries
on nursery shelves!

I was missing home, grateful that the stake conference accompaniment facilitated a trade in schedule so I might be in our temple at the same time. And the day began that way—only after a first endowment session, it was announced that there were children in the nursery, and I was needed. Now! At nine a.m., I found myself rocking an inconsolable baby and watching an eight and four-year-old topple legos—not exactly my idea of joining the family. Time passed. My companion quieted the baby. The children calmed and sang with the video, “Families Can Be Together Forever” and the bubbles decided to bubble. I was able to accompany Rigo Yamir and Brianna Michelle to meet their father and mother in the sealing room. As the children joined this sacred moment, quieted and stilled, something again happened in my heart—you know the burning that begins in the middle and extends outward, warm and wonderful.

After seeing them standing hand in hand to look across the altar to mirrors of forever, clasp hands to cross the parking lot all in white, return to change and await their Mom and Dad, I pulled up some chairs to our little round table, wondering what they would like to remember about today. Brianna, age 4, wanted to write a book. It was the eight year old who drew a picture of the temple. “Today, I felt the Spirit in the temple. My mom and my Dad did, too.”

Brianna Michelle: "In the temple, I felt good. The temple makes me sing. I felt better. I will watch over my parents so that we can be a forever family. In the room, all the people loved me. I saw millions of pictures of my family [the mirrors.] I love the Book of Mormon. I like to be protected from the rain and the storms."

“Your Mom and Dad were crying, Rigo Yamir.” Were they sad?”
“No, they were happy. They were feeling the Spirit.”

“Maybe you can remember this feeling always. It can help you in your life to choose the right. You can come back to the temple on your way to be a missionary. And you can marry here.”

If it is true that “through the Holy Ghost the truth is woven into the very fibre and sinews of the body so that it cannot be forgotten” we can work to remember it.

The fourth song that I was able to accompany was written by Joseph Fielding Smith’s son in law, Bruce R. McConkie. He introduced his poem, “I Believe in Christ” or “Creo en Cristo” at a General Conference early in 1972, as it was nearing time for our little branch to break ground for the Somersworth chapel, as my family was wrapping things up in New Hampshire, and as Val, unbeknownst to me, was in the middle of his mission to Central America. (Blue links, you can hear the real deal.)

A piece of his introduction: “I bear record of the truth and divinity of this work. But my voice is not alone… the testimony that I bear is but a harbinger of that testimony which yet will be borne by ten thousand times ten thousand people, redeemed out of every nation and kindred and tongue and people, redeemed by obedience to the message that God [has] restored… I proclaim these truths and desire in my heart to have men believe and obey. I think I can say with Nephi that the fullness of mine intent is to persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob and be saved—because the work is true, because salvation is in Christ.

Then two weeks before surrendering to cancer, Elder McConkie stood again, with fire in his bones to witness: And now… as pertaining to Jesus Christ, I testify that he is the Son of the Living God and was crucified for the sins of the world. He is our Lord, our God, and our King. This I know of myself independent of any other person. I am one of his witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in his hands and in his feet and shall wet his feet with my tears. But I shall not know any better then than I know now that he is God’s Almighty Son, that he is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through his atoning blood and in no other way.

The little boy promised to remember. The music washes over me as I
remember. There is fire to be had, in the bones. Something to help us remember who we are, and what we have to do! After leaving the nursery, rather than joining the “leaving” crowd, I answered a call to another part of the temple. And there was no one to spell me past time. But it was during the “after hours” that some ideas were confirmed in my heart and in the sinews of those bones--that the things we are trying to do here may take some time. Enoch’s city took 600 years to build.

We may have disappointments but “come what may” we can anticipate something wonderful in our time after this, as like Jeremiah, we are weary with forbearing and can not [be restrained.] Like people of Nehemiah rebuilding their city, we can know we are doing a good work, so [we] cannot come down [--we will not be distracted!]