Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Latter-day Saint
Travel and Religion
Until we meet again

Until we meet again

Last updated on: January 17, 2025 at 11:48 pm by Dan Peterson

0 Comments

Until we meet again 2025-01-17T23:48:56-07:00 Dan Peterson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Abner Leonard Howell (1877-1966)
(public domain photograph)

A new article appeared earlier today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “Small Hinges, Great Doorways: How Some Descendants of an Enslaved Youth Unexpectedly Became Prominent Utah Citizens,” written by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw

Abstract: A vivid illustration of how “the doorways of history turn on small hinges” is found in the Howell family tradition about Wilford Woodruff’s short stay at the home of slaveholders in the South, where it appears he may have taught a 14-year-old enslaved boy named Jackson Howell. Decades later, Jackson’s son Paul C. Howell would migrate to Utah and become a prominent citizen of Salt Lake City. Later, Paul’s son, Abner, would serve a unique mission and would continue to speak and serve in the Church. Several Church leaders played a key role in the story of the Howell family throughout the years when priesthood and temple restrictions remained in place.

Dr. Bradshaw’s article was accompanied online by “Interpreting Interpreter: A Hinge for the Howells,” which was written by Kyler Rasmussen:

This post is a summary of the article “Small Hinges, Great Doorways: How Some Descendants of an Enslaved Youth Unexpectedly Became Prominent Utah Citizens” by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw in Volume 63 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. All of the Interpreting Interpreter articles may be seen at https://interpreterfoundation.org/category/summaries/. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreter series is available at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/.

A video introduction to this Interpreter article is now available on all of our social media channels, including on YouTube at The Takeaway

Bradshaw tells the story of Abner Howell, a prominent African American Latter-day Saint in the early 20th century. Bradshaw proposes that Abner’s grandfather may have been a slave boy that Wilford Woodruff recorded teaching in Arkansas in 1835, and presents new records that shed light on Abner’s mission to reactivate Black members in various parts of the U.S.

The grave monument of Matthew Stanford Robison (1988-1999) in the Salt Lake City Cemetery

We said our final farewell to my wife’s ninety-eight year-old father today. It was a wonderful funeral, full of tears and humor. As I’ve said many times before, the funeral of a good person can be one of the best, most inspiring, and most humbling meetings that we have — and my father-in-law was a remarkably good man in every respect.

The only thing that went awry was that one of his sons, who had flown over from his home in the Washington suburbs of Portland to be with his clearly dying father and then to assist with funeral preparations, became very ill last night and was unable even to attend his father’s services today. That seems to me deeply sad. What it meant was that his wife had to read his remarks today and that, in his stead, it was I who dedicated and consecrated the grave in the Salt Lake Cemetery.

Only a few feet to the east from where the burial took place today, which was amidst the graves of other members of my wife’s family, is the unostentatious marker of Harold B. Lee, eleventh president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And maybe about a hundred feet further eastward from President Lee’s grave is the small but moving monument shown above. Here’s some background on my interest in it:

Back in 2013, I was moved by the obituary notice for Matthew Stanford Robison that appeared in the Deseret News: https://www.deseretnews.com/article/682084/Obituary-Matthew-Stanford-Robison.html I saw that notice at just about the time that a national atheist organization — in what was plainly intended as an in-your-face jab at the benighted Latter-day Saints — was very publicly planning to hold its national convention in Salt Lake City, and I commented on it in a blog post, as follows:

I know the arguments against theism reasonably well, and I don’t discount their force. By natural temperament, as it happens, I’m more inclined to skepticism than to faith. There are legitimate reasons for disbelief, though I ultimately find the reasons for belief more persuasive and find belief itself far more satisfying. What I’ve never understood, though, is how some people can seriously claim that atheism represents good news. I can understand coming sadly to the conclusion that life is purposeless, that the cosmos doesn’t care, and that, at death, we and our loved ones cease to exist. I simply can’t grasp why anybody would find this a message to be enthusiastic about.

I simply cannot imagine a more glorious, joyous message than the one that is implicit in the grave monument shown above. Certainly the message that we’re here briefly, pointlessly, and then rot, that all human relationships end in death if they haven’t already ended before, doesn’t quite compare. And almost every other message or fact seems trivial nonsense by contrast.

I can’t help but think of my father-in-law’s passing as a liberation. He had become very deaf, and his vision became poor. And, in his last months, his mind was noticeably less clear. He has now burst through those limitations.

But back to today’s funeral. At the conclusion of her remarks, my wife read a poem that has been credited to Henry Van Dyke. Many of you will, no doubt, be familiar with it. It expresses very well my own view of the subject:

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
“There, she is gone!”

“Gone where?”
Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, “There, she is gone!”
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout;
“Here she comes!”
And that is dying.

We had a service at the graveside, following the funeral at the mortuary chapel. My father-in-law enlisted in the Navy in 1945, when he was eighteen. But his service was cut short by, among other things, the surrender of Germany and the capitulation of the Empire of Japan. Accordingly, he was never particularly proud of his military career. However, his family requested a military honor guard, and I must say that I was impressed by it. (It was a Navy group, but one of his granddaughters is an active-duty Air Force officer currently stationed near Washington DC and, happily, she was allowed to participate with the honor guard, in uniform.) I wish that we had done the same for my own father’s graveside service. He was already serving in the Army when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and he remained enlisted ’til the conflict was o’er — that is, until the end of the Second World War, by which time he was attached to the Eleventh Armored Division of General George S. Patton’s Third Army.

The chaplain of the Naval Honor Guard recited a poem that I had never heard before. However, I was able to track it down online, and I found that it was written in May 1942 by one Sherman Walgren, who was (along with the future stage and screen actor Jason Robards) a sailor aboard the cruiser USS Northampton, which was sunk by Japanese torpedoes on 30 November of that same year at the Battle of Tassafaronga. Here is the poem that was recited early this afternoon:

What is it the billowing waves impart,
and repeat and repeat with each dash
What is the pounding in my heart?
I’m sailing home, at last.

The salt spray stings on the naked cheek,
and the wind sings in the mast,
but it only sings because it knows,
I’m sailing home, at last.

Was it centuries since we sailed away
Out of the harbor there,
or was it only yesterday
I don’t know, nor care.

For gone are the lonely nights and the days
mid tropical isles alone
and gone is the hunger countenanced there,
At last I’m sailing home.

And tho the sailor sails the seas
and in distant places roam
There is no “call” that’s quite so sweet
as the call “I’m Sailing Home”

My father-in-law has gone home. We will sorely miss him. If, however, there was ever an honorable return, his was one. May his memory be a blessing.

From left to right, in a still photograph by James Jordan from the set of the Interpreter Foundation’s 2021 film “Witnesses”: Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Joseph Smith (who has the plates in a box)

“Episode 8: What was the Cost of Being a Witness?”

Once again, in a bid to support teachers and students of the 2025 Come, Follow Me curriculum, which turns shortly to the translation of publication of the Book of Mormon, the Interpreter Foundation is making materials from its Witnesses film project as available as possible to the public. Here, for example, is a short-video feature that we think some of you might find interesting. And we encourage you to share it further:

Witnesses of the Book of Mormon—Insights: What price did the witnesses pay for being witnesses—and for never denying their testimonies of the Book of Mormon? This is Episode 8 of a series compiled from the many interviews conducted during the course of the Witnesses film project. . . . These additional resources are hosted by Camrey Bagley Fox, who played Emma Smith in Witnesses, as she introduces and visits with a variety of experts. These individuals answer questions or address accusations against the witnesses, also helping viewers understand the context of the times in which the witnesses lived. This week we feature Gerrit Dirkmaat, Associate Professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. For more information, go to https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/. Learn about the documentary movie Undaunted—Witnesses of the Book of Mormon at https://witnessesundaunted.com/.

Posted from Bountiful, Utah

Travel and Religion

History and Religion

Previous Post

January 16, 2025

Strolling on the ice floes of the Galilee?

Next Post

January 18, 2025 Songs of the Heart

What is the correct order of the seven churches addressed in Revelation?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Ephesus, Pergamum, Smyrna, Sardis, Thyatira, Laodicea, Philadelphia Laodicea, Philadelphia, Sardis, Thyatira, Pergamum, Smyrna, Ephesus Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea Smyrna, Ephesus, Thyatira, Pergamum, Philadelphia, Sardis, Laodicea