Today, February 4 (the day I wrote this anyway), is Annie Nijs day. The day of the only person I baptized on my mission. The day (well, half-day) that Annie Nijs was Mormon. The day that I commemorate to myself every year, for the past 33 years, not because of the baptism (which wasn’t much), but because of the surreal and indelible events around it.

Elder Roy and I first met Annie soon after we were assigned to a small town outside Brussels, just before Christmas 1976. The missionaries we replaced left a cassette telling us about the people they’d been working with, and Annie was obviously the star.

She was in her early 30s, tall and striking, married with three children from 6 to 11, but most striking of all was her insistence that she wanted to be baptized.

No one ever said that. Not in my 18 months of experience anyway. A few said they would think about it. A few said they would and then wouldn’t even open the door the next time we came. One family said they wanted to be baptized, but because they had no car decided it was impossible (maybe they were right; travel times on public transport made it hard indeed for such people to feel a regular part of the church community).

But Annie was adamant. The departing elders proudly told us this of course not only to inform us of her progress, but to implicitly claim part of the credit. Baptisms were so rare that if you even shook the hand of a convert at some point before the big day then you wanted some credit. You tried not to think that way, but you wanted to have something to write home about.

Especially when everyone kept telling you (from your leaders to friends on missions in South America to people back home, all of whom had the most amazing stories of converts) that a mission was all about converts and all you needed to make converts was a little faith.

During our first visit to Annie’s home, she repeated her desire. In her strong and deep but slightly slurred voice (from her various medications for various operations on her back), she explained that something like a vision had convinced her to be baptized.

I sat there open-mouthed. And tried not to calculate in my head whether it would count more as a baptism for me, or the last missionaries, but the thought wouldn’t go away. It depended on how much work it took, I decided. Because if she got baptized right now, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel, and how hard was that? Where was the big dramatic story of how we found her and then the laborious discussions to bring her along? The sorts of stories everyone else in the world had? It had to take at least awhile before I could really count it.

Over the next month, we visited Annie two or three times a week to finish the discussions. Though she was foggy at times because of her medication, she was intelligent, and there were many moving moments. But something still nagged me. I still wasn’t sure that she knew what she was getting into.

For instance, she kept smoking like a diesel bus, even though she knew that Mormons didn’t smoke. Also, the church was so far away (an hour and a half by public transport, and of course she didn’t have a car), I wondered if she really had the energy and desire to regularly make the trip. And what about her husband and kids? Joos, a postman by trade but a chef by avocation, was friendly to us and made us fantastic meals (who knew that eel could be fantastic?), but he wasn’t interested in religion at all. He never sat in on the discussions, but he said he didn’t mind if Annie did. The kids always wandered in and out as if torn between their parents. Or maybe they were simply curious.

When we finished the discussions, and Annie could recite everything to us, she still insisted that she wanted to be baptized. And that Joos was fine with it. The Zone Leaders came to interview Annie, and the big day was set.

Still uneasy, I called the Mission President: I think I wanted him to tell me that it was okay to baptize someone I had doubts about. That way I wouldn’t have to take responsibility for my selfish motives of just wanting to have a baptism, any baptism.

Though he wasn’t thrilled about her prospects either, he said that if she wanted to be baptized so badly and she was willing to do what it took then we shouldn’t stop her.

So it was okay.

Then on the morning of the baptism, a Friday, Joos changed his mind. Anatol, the middle child, came around to tell us tell us that the baptism was off. After a little hesitation, we rode to Annie’s home (they had no phone either, also still common), and were met at the door by an obviously upset Joos. “It’s over,” he said. She didn’t want to talk to us either, as she lay upstairs, sick from her medication.

We rode away dejected. Elder Roy was brand new; he’d have other chances at baptism. But based on past experiences and too many almosts to count, I wasn’t sure I’d get this close again.

Too upset to do anything else, we went back to our apartment. I went upstairs to the attic, to be alone. Sometimes I looked out the windows in the slanted roof to all the houses across the rolling cityscape and felt this great (and now I think presumptuous) sense of responsibility for everyone. But today I just lay on the floor exhausted and wrestled with the feelings inside me.

It took about an hour for me to realize how silly I was being. This was about her and her family. If it wasn’t good for her, I should give it up. And what was good for the branch? Did they really need another uninvolved member, like the other 90% on their rolls?

By the end, drained, I was able to let the baptism go.

A couple of hours later, Anatol came knocking again. He said that Annie wanted to go through with it after all, and that Joos had finally consented. We rode to the house once more, and there was Annie, lying on the couch in pain. She lit a cigarette. “The last one,” she promised.

Joos wasn’t anywhere in sight. But after awhile he came into the room, to let us know that he was unhappy about things, but that he wouldn’t stop her. I apologized if we’d caused trouble, but didn’t know what else to say. Our church was supposedly about family togetherness, and here we felt like we were causing division.

Annie told us to come back at 4, and that she would arrange for a cab to take us to the church for the baptism at 5. That way she wouldn’t have to endure the train and tram ride. Full of doubts, I called the Mission President again to tell him she was still smoking but that she still insisted she would quit after the baptism. He sighed, but told me to do what I thought best.

We arrived at her place at 4, full of anxiety, but she was ready and eager to go. The oldest child, protective Natalie, wanted to go too. Joos and the boys were gone. The four of us climbed into the backseat of the cab, a big Mercedes, so we fit fine. And we pulled away: it was really going to happen, I thought.

Five minutes later, Annie, to my horror, shakily pulled a cigarette from her purse, and lit it. Maybe it wasn’t going to happen after all.

Kindly as I could, I coughed a reminder through the smoke that if she were baptized she’d have to give those up, and she responded that she knew: “it’s the last one,” she said again, and gave me the pack.

At the church, we were greeted by the famously grumpy custodian, who had seen plenty of cancelled baptisms in his day and he wasn’t about to fill the font all the way until he was sure. I was just hoping he wouldn’t notice the cigarette smoke on our clothes, or worse the pack of cigarettes in my coat pocket.

Well? he asked. Is it going through? I think so, I replied. “Think so!” I mean, yes, it is, go ahead and keep filling it please.

I wasn’t sure though, and went down the hall, to be alone again, while Annie changed, and Natalie helped her. This time I was on an even bigger roller coaster of emotion than before. Here I had been ready to give up the baptism, but once we got in the cab I got my hopes up again. Then the cigarette threw me off once more.

My mind filled with images of how many times I’d been disappointed, with the faces of families and individuals we were sure would convert but then did not, with the wind and rain we’d endured, with the hours we’d put in, with the sweat and emotion and bicycle spills, with the 60 Proselyting Skills we’d tried to master, with the 60 Points of Spirituality we’d tried to attain, with the countless will-breaking times we’d forced ourselves to talk to people in awkward situations, with images of my parents and friends and the glorious expectations I assumed they had of me.

And I wasn’t being completely selfish, of course: every week I sat in the sullen little branch in Brussels and looked at the few members trying so hard and vowed that I would find some co-believers for them and I tried with all I had to make it happen. But so far no one. And here was a chance!

Still, I could give it up, I thought, if it wasn’t a good idea.

After the deluge came the calm. It sank in even deeper now that I did not have to baptize her to feel fine about my time as a missionary. The whole business was about giving your heart to people, whether they joined or not. Joining was up to them.

Sure I’d heard that before, but it got confusing because then someone else would always come along and condemn such lazy thinking: no, no, no, went the refrain, don’t let anyone tell you that you are here merely to plant seeds or to make friends, because you are here to baptize (a lot) and you just need faith!

Sure there were some who easily took this to heart, and could adopt the mindset of a New Jersey car salesman (sorry, I love New Jersey, but had some bad experiences with cars there). This basically says that no one is bright enough or brave enough to decide important things on their own; instead they must be pushed and manipulated, for their own good, or they will never go through with it. I tried that approach myself, and hated it. But I felt guilty about hating it, because although missionary culture was dressed-up sales culture it was still missionary culture and must be good so I must be wrong.

But tonight I stopped feeling guilty.

I didn’t have to make this happen. I didn’t even have to baptize Annie. I could baptize none, or 100, and neither gave a perfect clue of where my heart was.

I felt a lot lighter. And, improbable as it sounds, also more sure that the right thing to do at that moment was to baptize her. Not for the local church: she wasn’t likely to contribute anything. And certainly not as some sort of reward for me or Elder Roy, to legitimize our missions. But rather in some big cosmic sense, because she really wanted to.

I can still feel precisely the weight of Annie in her heavy gown as I eased her into the water, and brought her out. She was beaming, and so was Natalie.

The branch president went far out of his way to give us a ride home, and promised that he would be Annie’s home teacher. But I wondered how he would manage, as he lived clear across Brussels, and already had ten times too much responsibility (within a few years he quit the church, exhausted). And I sensed that Annie would never set foot in the church again.

We went by the next morning to see how she was. Joos was at work, but Natalie let us in, and told us that Annie was sick upstairs. We could see her if we liked. I smelled cigarette smoke and just smiled and shook my head as we climbed the stairs. There she was, propped up and smoking again.

“Hello Elders,” she said groggily. By now my energy was shot and I just smiled and said Hi Annie. How are you feeling? We talked a bit. I said nothing about the cigarettes, but she asked me to take her pack. Again. I was sure she’d probably get more soon.

She didn’t go to church the next day, or ever at all. We kept visiting during the rest of the time I was there, about six more weeks, and Annie and Joos were always friendly, and cooked us a great meal when I transferred. Months later, just before I went home to California, I made a point to go through their town and give my bicycle to Anatol. I was glad to be able to say goodbye to them. Joos was especially nice to me, maybe because he didn’t lose Annie after all.

Over the years, we stayed in touch with cards and the occasional visit, as I went back to Belgium often to do research. Annie’s health got a lot better. She even gave up smoking, which made me laugh. It also made me laugh that she still called me “Elder,” which was a lot easier to say than my impossible first name but which I suppose was also how she always thought of me.

One year Joos was hit on his motor scooter, while delivering mail, and suffered damage to the part of the brain that controls taste and smell. But he laughed that he was still cooking anyway, he loved it so much.

Another year I called and Annie said, “Joos is dead.” A complication from his accident. She took me out to visit his grave. I really liked Joos.

A few years after that, not so long ago in fact, I called and the number was disconnected. I found Natalie, who now ran a restaurant, and she told me that Annie had died too, barely 60.

I’d hardly seen Annie the previous 25 years, and her baptism was hardly a highlight of church history. But when I heard she had died I felt as if I lost something. Not the baptism, of course, which she never mentioned again, and which proved meaningless for the local church, to my regret. But rather that thanks to the experience I had with her I learned to enjoy people more on my mission, and to feel friendlier toward everyone. To this day I am still close to people I met then, almost none of them Mormon.

I finally realized that baptism wasn’t the measure of success and that it didn’t all (or even mostly) depend on me. It depended on people themselves. And it probably depended even more, I learned much later, on a lot of other things I couldn’t have grasped—economic and political conditions, social structures, cultural movements, and especially personal relationships.

It turns out that most people convert to, stay in, or leave a religion because of relationships. In Belgium almost no one knows any Mormons. They only know someone who knew someone else who knew something (bad) about Mormons. Thus very few join. Those who do have some exceptional experience (even Annie’s), or they tend to be social outcasts and are happy to join a group that will accept them (at least until they realize that Mormons aren’t so acceptable themselves, at which point many leave).

I wish I would have know this early on, rather than only after I met Annie. I don’t think I would have tried any less hard, but I would have tried differently. I would have tried to be one of the Mormons people know so they realize that Mormons aren’t (necessarily) from another planet. That would have been huge progress. (And is a big reason why I’m in favor of significantly more humanitarian and cultural missions, or hours for current missionaries, including in the developed world: proselyting missionaries wearing suits and nametags are scary or laughable for most people I know in Europe, but those same people would be favorably disposed to good deeds.)

And I wouldn’t have beaten myself up as much those first 18 months.

Still, better late than never. Without Annie I may never have learned it at all, and felt awful long afterwards about the mission. Ironically, I may not have learned it in a well-oiled mission either. There, I would have (knowing me) imagined that people’s joining was due mostly to my superior skills and faith, and was also a reward for my efforts. I wouldn’t have imagined that their joining probably had a lot to do with big invisible things I could neither see nor understand.

Sure they had to feel something, but they were a lot more likely to feel it if the big invisible things around were right.

It’s also not too late to tell it to others in my shoes, such as my niece in Finland. She wrote recently, discouraged because someone passing through had given the usual talk that only their faith was preventing them from doing what was being done in South America. As if all the missionaries with faith are there, and all those with little faith are in places like Belgium and Finland.

I tried cheering her up. Sure, we can always think of ways to be better. But no matter how badly we want to run a four-minute mile (she’s a great athlete or I would have found another metaphor, don’t worry), only a very few can. At some point you have to see that what you can do is just as valuable.

And sure, if you don’t go out and open your mouth, then people won’t join. But even if you do, people may not join anyway. Because of other things going on in that world. If you can accept that, and can find other ways to make a contribution and feel satisfaction, you’ll feel better than you do when you punish yourself. And a lot happier.

Maybe that’s heresy. But that’s how it started to come together for me on that February 4, amid the smell of cigarette smoke rising from my brown stainless steel suit.

This isn’t meant to provoke another tiresome debate over what’s right or wrong on Sunday, but to try to understand how sport became common that day. I hope comments will go in that direction. I also hope for world peace.

Super Bowl Sunday is such a prominent part of the American cultural landscape that maybe only a few egghead historians (or die-hard Sabbatarians) would even stop to wonder how in the world “Sunday” and “Super Bowl” ever wound up in the same phrase at all.

It wasn’t inevitable.

The Puritans would have been horrified at the phrase. Most of them were not against sport per se, but they were most energetically against sport on Sunday.

They were convinced that the Sabbath had shifted from Saturday to Sunday, and that the Sabbath commandment’s ban on work somehow banned play as well.

But most Americans, even if they were Christians, were not Puritans, and for these others Sunday wasn’t just a day that might include play but was actually the ideal day for play. Most, after all, didn’t know such a thing as the weekend, an English invention, until after 1920: until then, their only free day was Sunday.

The competing visions of Sunday were strong enough that struggles over Sunday sport, and Sunday anything else, were the predictable result, extending all the way from colonial times to the 1920s.

In other words, to precisely the time when Sunday professional football was born. The national debate ended just about then too, and mostly in favor of the Sunday sport people.

The NFL became possible at that moment for two main reasons.

The first was practical: Sunday was the only real day available for the pros. Saturday, the other serious possibility, was ruled by college football, which was far more popular than any pro version into the 1950s. The earliest pro leagues, made up mostly of factory workers, tried Saturdays, but they couldn’t compete with colleges and folded fast.

Right around the time of World War I a new league in the Midwest, which became the NFL, had the idea to try Sunday instead. Some professional baseball teams (not all) had tried the same for decades, once they realized that they drew their biggest crowds that day.

The NFL decided to imitate them: they built (well, mostly rented), and people came, even if for long in fewer numbers than college crowds.

But there was a second reason, besides convenience, why Sunday football came to pass (no pun intended): growing respectability, even reverence, for sport in general.

Games couldn’t be moved to Sunday simply because the day was available. Attitudes about sport and Sunday play had to change as well. Because though not all fans belonged to churches, of course, the vast majority did; in fact people were joining churches in record proportions by now. And without their general approval, there would be no pro sports on Sunday—as even those who liked Sunday play weren’t so sure they liked pro sports on their sacred day.

Those hesitations were overcome largely because sport itself was made sacred.

By 1900, more and more Christian leaders were mixing sport into a religious message often called “Muscular Christianity.” Mormons joined in this movement too: this was just about when gyms began showing up in church buildings and health became a big Mormon identifier.

In other words, religious leaders did to sport what had been done to so many other aspects of religion over the millennia: they “sacralized” it, bringing something once seen as profane into the realm of the sacred.

Jesus was now held up not merely as a perfect spiritual leader, but a perfect physical specimen and the “captain of the team.” Games were sanctified with prayer, even transformed into prayer. Father John O’Hara called Notre Dame football a “new crusade” which showed that “play can be offered as a prayer in honor of the Queen of Peace.” And Coach Jesse Harper of Notre Dame said that he got the “Notre Dame shift” (sending a man in motion), from Amos Alonzo Stagg, who in turn got it from God.

Reverent attitudes about sport were not universal, and they did not automatically lead to the acceptance of Sunday play. But once sport was sacralized, it proved difficult (and even seemed nonsensical) to banish it completely from society’s holy day.

Most ancient and more recent civilizations celebrated their holiest days with some form of sport—played not merely for fun, but to act out the great cosmic struggle of good versus evil, right versus wrong, even life and death. Such things transcended ordinary time, precisely one of the goals of a holy day.

At any pro football game today you’ll find the struggles and the timelessness in abundance. The ecstasy and crying and anger (not all of it beer-induced) suggest that fans are there for something more meaningful than fun or more important than their jobs or daily lives. The same holds true at BYU games, even without the beer.

Sport has always been uncannily good at condensing and giving tangible form to an achievement-oriented society’s highest and usually invisible values: courage, physical prowess, and especially winning.

Once Christian leaders and coaches saw the ability of sport to promote those virtues, and sacralize them, then Christian followers did the same—even on Sunday, when those virtues were arguably on greater display than any other day because of the proficiency of the athletes.

And make no mistake, winning was the greatest virtue of all, even on Sunday. Vince Lombardi was famous for his supposed quip that winning was the only thing, but less known is how central this sentiment was to his religious makeup. He found winning, and his other cherished values, present in both football and Catholicism and thus had no second thought about whether the game was suitable for Sunday, or whether to give away tickets to nuns and priests.

Other factors also mattered in the growth of Sunday football. Pro sport’s twin, business, was also sacralized in the US. So was a growing consumer culture, which included spectator sports. Also vital was a strong dose of patriotism: peculiarly American pro sports such as football and baseball, which began with the Star-spangled Banner from World War I on, were most sacred of all.

The growth of Sunday sport didn’t occur everywhere at once. Leading the way was the Midwest, where a largely Catholic and non-Puritan Protestant population had few qualms about Sunday recreation after church. The Northeast moved more slowly, thanks to its Puritan roots. The South, more relaxed on Sunday in the nation’s early years, was stricter by the 1920s and was thus the last holdout: pro teams emerged there only in the 1960s.

But clearly Sunday football in America is now widely entrenched, and Super Bowl Sunday most of all. Sunday debates about anything are all local now, or occur within specific religions or groups, which any Mormon knows. But that some churches put a giant television right in the middle of the building on Super Bowl Sunday, hold a “holy huddle,” “pre-game prayer,” a cheer, and a pep talk with the “team owner,” Jesus, reflects the generally successful sacralization of Sunday sport.

Super Bowl Sunday now has all the hallmarks of a holy day, whether understood in the sense of civic or traditional religion. The Super Bowl does not occur on Sunday coincidentally, or in spite of it being Sunday, but precisely because Sunday in general, and Super Bowl Sunday in particular, are holy to Americans, however differently they may understand the term.

For it is on holy days that a society collectively shows, for better or worse, what it values most. On display during the Super Bowl are the values of winning, religion, spectacle, festival, money, consuming rather than producing, and much more.

As James Michener once put it, an NFL game (and especially this game) is a strange mix of religion, strip-tease, violence, and patriotism.

All supremely American.

Most Mormons probably don’t love all of these values. Some won’t participate in Sunday sport at all, whether as athletes or spectators, and they always get a pat on the back for it.

But Mormons love most of these values enough that plenty have played in the Super Bowl, and far more have cheered them on, even felt a surge of pride when a player’s Mormonness or BYU connection is mentioned (except die-hard Ute fans maybe). Even if they may not cheer quite as loudly on Sunday as some other people. At least until Austin Collie catches a pass.

After all, empathy requires imagination—more specifically the ability to imagine what it feels like to be in someone else’s shoes. Among the ways atonement can be understood, the most helpful to me is as the supreme act of creative imagination: for while most of us probably only fully empathize with others when we’ve been through an experience very much like their own, an atoning Christ was somehow able to put himself fully in the shoes of even the most miserable creature simply by imagining himself there.

A good reason to foster the Arts (which Kent urged in several posts some time ago) is to help us all develop our own creative imaginations, stretching them into more at-oning shape. Through literature and film and painting and history we often are presented a chance to understand vicariously what it might feel like to be this person or that, or to be in this situation or that. Most of the time, again, vicarious experience isn’t enough for us, but maybe with enough practice it can come to be.

Of course creativity extends beyond the Arts, and beyond empathy, to touch just about every rung on the ladder of virtues. Yet the crucial role of creativity is not usually at the forefront of discussions about spirituality.

In fact we sometimes speak of creativity as if it’s optional, something nice to have but not required. Or we speak of it stereotypically, as something reserved for people in the Arts, or young children, or women, or gay men. Yet as Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, among others, has shown, creativity not only can be brought to even the most mundane activity, but ultimately determines the shape and meaning and benefit of any activity.

It’s not always easy to spot creativity. The nature of the task doesn’t guarantee it: a mechanic can be highly creative while a violinist can be highly mechanical.

The social psychologist Erich Fromm suggested, in his book Escape from Freedom, that the tell-tale mark of creativity is originality. But that doesn’t make creativity much easier to spot, because we spend so much effort avoiding originality, “escaping” it.

He explained: though we react strongly, even violently, when someone tries to take our freedom, we are often terrified once we have it, because it means we, not someone else, must choose. This realization often causes us to hand over our freedom (and thus creativity) to someone else.

This handing over brings some relief to the burdens of uncertainty and responsibility, but it also reduces or eliminates our originality, which to Fromm was the key to becoming a fully developed human.

By originality Fromm did not necessarily mean that we have to create something absolutely unique to us. Rather, he meant that an idea, shared or not with others, must feel original within us. We might learn about an idea from another source, but we develop that idea in such a way that it comes to be part of us, and, crucially, we take that idea and shape it in our particular fashion.

It’s not any easier to be original than it is to spot originality. A recent NPR segment featured a psychologist whose research argues that the vast majority of the decisions we make are subconscious or unconscious. In other words, not very original or creative.

On the one hand, this keeps our brains from being overloaded: by deciding as others have already decided, or as we’ve unconsciously decided in the past, we avoid angst at every turn. But on the other hand it means that we’re mostly not deciding consciously. Someone else, something else, is deciding for us.

Unconscious decision-making might be fine in certain situations, such as when we have to quickly act or react physically. But according to John Sanford’s The Kingdom Within the key to spiritual growth and adulthood is choosing consciously. For the more conscious we are, the more freely we have chosen and the more we have taken responsibility for our choices. If others choose for us, then they are essentially responsible for our decisions.

Again, there is a certain comfort in this, but a certain stunting of growth as well.

The need to choose, the virtue that can come through choosing, is also evident in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, in which a circle of Chinese scholars become so interested in the original Hebrew meaning of a phrase in the Old Testament usually translated as “Thou shalt” that they spend years studying the phrase. And they decide that the “Thou shalt” is in fact better translated as “Thou mayest.”

This of course is the heart of the story: that what makes a human noble is the “Thou mayest.” It’s also what makes us terrified, what makes us want to say, “will someone please just decide for me!” or, yes, simply tell me, “Thou shalt.”

The fundamental role of creativity and choice in spiritual growth is further evident in the Creation story, as one of God’s supreme acts was to impose his particular vision upon chaos.

It’s implied in D&C 58 regarding not being commanded in all things, or in Moses’ lament that he wished all the children of Israel were prophets so that they’d stop running to him for every decision.

It’s suggested in Jesus’ promise to his disciples that they would do even greater works than they had seen him do, a result which mere imitation would not achieve.

It’s suggested by Elder Oaks’ address to Young Adults in May 2005, when in Moses-like fashion he urged those seeking exceptions to his advice not to write him personally but take responsibility for themselves: “As a General Authority, I have the responsibility to preach general principles. When I do, I don’t try to define all the exceptions. There are exceptions to some rules…Whether an exception applies to you is your responsibility.”

Originality, creativity, consciousness, responsibility—all go hand in hand. All are crucial to growing to adulthood, to full personhood, to mature spirituality.

If creativity is as important as I’m suggesting, then it also seems important to foster the friendliest possible environment for it, in the Arts and in Life. Some level of creativity can certainly occur in a limited environment, or one that offers simply a binary choice—of choosing to obey or disobey, yes or no, A or B—but an environment that allows and even encourages us to develop our own solutions requires more, and would seem to lead to greater growth.

This is why students learn and grow more from essay exams than from multiple-choice exams, even though they tend to prefer the latter. And this is why, in my view, the progression of life suggested in temple rites begins with the binary choice of obedience or disobedience and culminates with the open-ended choices of full agency.

In other words, if Fromm is right, we’re not so much born with “free agency” as working our whole lives to attain it, and to accept the creativity and responsibility that go with it.

This view may well be the prejudice of someone raised in “free agency” culture. That was the theme of the Mormon culture in which I grew up anyway. In fact it’s the only doctrine I can recall from my childhood. Which tells me that I didn’t listen much, or (surely more likely) that the topic was repeated a lot, just as obedience has been repeated a lot for kids of the past thirty years or so.

The decline of the emphasis on free agency perhaps stemmed from a fear that the doctrine might be misunderstood to sanction all sorts of behavior, or to lead people to thinking there are no consequence for their actions—to be creative in bad ways.

But true creativity doesn’t seek non-conformity or libertinism as its goal, as Emerson’s famous quote is sometimes used to suggest (“whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist”). For being a nonconformist can itself be simply a binary choice, a condition defined by someone or something else rather than from within. Rather (and I think this is what Emerson meant), when we’re all truly creative, some amount of nonconformity is simply inevitable, for we’re all different in some respect.

The myriad elements we have in common with each other, including 99-point-whatever percent of our DNA and a belief in spiritual kinship, should motivate us to get along with each other, and will surely result in our creating some very similar ideas or things. But the most crucial part within us may be that small difference where our deepest originality (and probably greatest non-conformity) lies, which brings us to maturity and enables us to make our particular contribution to life.

Obviously it’s risky to foster creativity. It can manifest itself in awful, even evil ways, too well-known to have to be listed here. But it’s the very riskiness of it, and the conscious acceptance of responsibility for how we exercise our creativity, that allows full growth.

“Things” referring to the miracles and visions we have been reading about in the sixteenth-century autobiography assigned that week.

What the student means is this: did the miracles or visions happen in an objective sense, so that if I or other witnesses would have been there we would have seen them too? Or was the author just Nuts? For how else to explain that she saw Jesus everywhere she went, including at the breakfast table?

The autobiography in question this year was written by Ana de San Bartolomé, a Spanish nun who lived from 1549 to 1626 and who toward the end of her life, at the behest of her confessor, put down her spiritual odyssey on paper. Or in Mormon lingo, she wrote her personal history.

A lot of other nuns and mystics did the same thing, including the most famous authors of this genre, St. Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola. Most are chock full of visions and miracles and the otherworldly—which makes perfect sense when you understand that the point was to show God at work in their lives. But students, including Mormon students, are puzzled about how to read them. More specifically, they want to know, were the fantastic events described “real?”

My job isn’t to answer that question, of course, but to suggest approaches to such accounts, and especially to draw approaches out of the students. After all, I’m not sure that my reading is any more right than theirs. I’m also not sure, after years of exposure to such accounts, that the “reality” of the miracles or vision is the right question to ask, at least in the way “real” is usually understood.

It’s a perfectly understandable question, of course, for people of various backgrounds. I asked it myself when I first read some miracle stories, because I had learned when young, through word or cultural osmosis, that the heavens were closed until around 1820 and that most people before and even after that date thought the same thing. It didn’t take long to figure out that more than a millennium of Catholics certainly did believe in miracles and visions, but still, they couldn’t actually be “real,” could they?

My early response was similar to what my students still go through, though they might be a little more inclined to view such experiences as “partially real.” As in “partially true,” or a “portion” of the truth or the spirit. Just not the full deal. Just God granting a tiny sliver of light to keep people going until the full light emerged. (I’m not guessing here, as this is the idea that initially prevails in the discussion of such readings.)

When I was a student, I began to open up to the idea that other believers’ claimed encounters with the divine might be just as real as my own, thanks largely to an old religion professor at BYU named Burt Horsley. He must have been 65 or 70 by the time I took his class on Christian History, but he had a mind far more supple than those of his overwhelmingly returned-missionary students, and a grounding markedly different from that of other religion professors I’d known. For he calmly responded with contrary evidence whenever some student confidently pronounced that only someone holding the priesthood could possibly receive a genuine vision, or whenever someone scoffed at the claim that the bones of Peter might actually lie in St. Peter’s in Rome.

His openness to the reality of the experiences of other-believers was reinforced when I started reading for myself thousands of claimed miracles from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, especially when I read them in their original handwritten form. Such documents were produced in mountainous quantities by the Catholic hierarchy, which went to a lot of trouble and expense to interview witnesses, doctors, and the alleged beneficiaries of every claimed miracle and vision because the Church wanted believers to believe only in the “true.”

Sorting out the true from the untrue was trickier than it might seem. It came to focus on distinguishing between events that had either natural or supernatural causes. Yes, nature too was a miracle, said Augustine, for it was created by God, but when God worked through the ordinary course of nature most experts regarded Him as working only indirectly. What we have come to call miracles involved events in which God could be said to work directly, or in other words, supernaturally (“above nature”).

This is where the Church’s investigators devoted their energies when they went about judging claims of direct divine intervention: was it real or unreal, natural or supernatural? And it’s also the approach that still dominates today, including for Mormon students, even if they don’t see any juridical process at work around the miracles people claim in their own culture. They still want to know: did the event really happen (in an objective sense) and was its cause divine?

But maybe there’s a better question to ask about claimed miracles. While writing a book about miracles, I came across the work of a Catholic psychologist named J. H. van der Berg, whose 1956 book Metabletica offered something beyond the usual “natural” and “supernatural” dichotomy.

Such an approach was unsatisfactory to him because understanding of what is “natural” changes all the time, thus changing as well understanding of what is “supernatural.” Moreover, this approach tends to severely limit the number of miracles and visions regarded as genuine, as possible natural explanations can often be found. In fact, of the hundreds of thousands of miracles claimed over the centuries, only a small fraction have been judged as genuine.

Better, argued Van den Berg, is to regard a miracle as a sense of nearness to God—and that sense is inherently highly subjective. It does not fret about an objective and scientific distinction between nature and super nature.

In other words, the reality of a miracle or vision does not lie in the thing observed, but in the observer.

To illustrate he uses an example from the French writer André Gide, who as a child went walking in a valley with a young girl; at a certain moment he lost sight of her, but then suddenly she stepped from the trees into the meadow, and with the light shining on her face in such a way as she smiled that suddenly for Gide the valley was filled with love and happiness. Someone else walking past the valley might have looked and seen merely a geological cleft in a geographical landscape. But Gide saw something else that to him was absolutely real, and that made him feel God.

That miracles are rooted within us rather than in God (for again according to Augustine nothing is a miracle to God) is confirmed, according to Van den Berg, in Jesus’s saying in Mark that he could do no miracles in Nazareth, for no one believed; he didn’t say he would not do them, or that he would do miracles and people just wouldn’t see them, but rather that he could do no miracles.

This helps to explain why there will never be consensus as to whether this event or that is a miracle or not: because the miracle depends on the viewpoint of the person looking. And it’s not merely about faith—yes, you must believe in a miracle to see it, but how you believe also matters. For people believe in different ways, and God speaks to them in their own language, according to the Book of Mormon.

Which means not only that God may speak to people in ways we find strange (Balaam’s ass, anyone?), but that the way God speaks to us is strange as well.

And if our miracles and visions are strange, and subjective, but real, then there is no reason that the apparently strange encounters of a Spanish nun in the sixteenth century were any less real.

The key is whether a person feels the nearness of God, and who but the person can judge that? Maybe we feel it in silly ways sometimes, or fool ourselves into thinking that this or that is God. But we learn from such experience and perhaps find the nearness more easily as we go.

Maybe this highly subjective approach is also inherently wishy-washy: “then people can claim anything as a miracle or vision!” This is certainly how I feel sometimes listening to claimed miracles in church, when I start longing for the sort of juridical process that would greatly restrict such claims. But then I remember Gide, and the boy in the magical valley in France. And I think of Emerson’s insistence that a true religious experience must be an original religious experience—thus your own encounter with God, not someone else’s encounter with God.

By the end of the discussion, most students have come to this conclusion themselves, and the distress has abated. Until the next interesting time around.

My daughter’s student ward in Seattle had a Saturday evening service (the usual night for the vigil among most Christians), and a sacrament meeting devoted fully to Easter. My Utah ward included two choir numbers, one of them about Easter, and the speakers discussed their favorite conference talk. Not my ideal, but it wasn’t bad, because the speakers were very genuine. Better than some years ago when the Easter day theme was food storage. I kid you not. And what about the lessons in Sunday School and Relief Society and Priesthood? Just whatever’s next in the manual?

I don’t know of any good reasons why Mormons can’t engage in Holy Week, or develop one of their own (okay besides the fact that we already have too many meetings; so scuttle them that week), or at least have a serious Easter program on Sunday. We participate wholeheartedly in Christmas, and that’s a much more contrived holiday than Easter. But Easter seems to be a second-rate holiday among Mormons. Not only might it have benefits spiritually to develop such a week (one reason assorted Mormons attend Holy Week services put on by other faiths), and promote a greater awareness of the importance of the events of this week, but it would have the added benefit of letting other Christians know that yes Mormon beliefs in the events of this week are very much like theirs. Which I think a good thing to convey. In fact I suspect that the reason Holy Week did not develop in Mormonism was simply a negative reason: it was seen as too Catholic, or Episcopalian, or something. And since most emerging religions tend at first to develop their identity in a negative way (this is what we are NOT rather than this is what we ARE), it wouldn’t be surprising if we sought our identity partly in abandoning some of the things other Christians did, in order to differentiate. But again, I don’t see any reason now (except too many other activities during the week) why we couldn’t join the fun and celebration. The services I’ve attended on Good Friday or the Easter Vigil are some of the most moving I’ve ever known.

Within your particular culture, the rituals aren’t all that baffling, I suppose, even if, once you stop to count them, they are surprisingly numerous. In my little American Mormon Male corner of the world, it’s plenty of hand-shaking, frequent but selective hugging, and virtually no cheek-kissing. (And I’m not saying any of this is good or bad, merely offering my decidedly subjective observation.) You shake hands with new acquaintances of both genders, and with pretty good male friends. With really good male friends, there’s usually no formality, though a few might insist on shaking hands still. With family, there’s always a hug, for both genders. At a wedding reception or some meaningful event, good male friends and male relatives give a big hug with a loud double or triple pat on the back (no lingering) to lend the potentially awkward embrace a manly edge or something. Call it Touch and Release hugging. It reminds me of noble rituals in medieval France, which might include a kiss on the mouth to seal an agreement, but also a heavy fist, the accolade, across the back of a new knight’s neck, as if to neutralize more intimate gestures. At the last reception, I grew so weary of manly pats that when it was time to hug my brothers good-bye I told them I wasn’t going to pat any more, and I drove them crazy by simple keeping my hands on their backs. You can also hug good female friends, though you don’t pat as hard—but you must pat, to convey that there’s nothing threateningly intimate about this particular hug. For more casual female friends you hug a little more sideways and one-armed. And so on to a bunch of other possibilities, such as the friendly slug to the shoulder teenaged boys used to give each other when I was a kid, or the rituals at more somber occasions such as funerals, or the particular rituals of a family.

The confusion is much greater, however, when you cross your own culture’s boundaries and you have to figure things out on the fly somewhere else. In France and Belgium it’s lots of cheek-kissing rather than hugging. A kiss on each cheek in Paris for casual and good female friends, including among females. Good male friends and male relatives in France might kiss each other once on the cheek. In Brittany, a woman entering a room will give two kisses on each cheek (left-right-left-right) to everyone present, including people just met (as long as they’re friends of friends), and she’ll go all around the room to include everyone; men will kiss at least all the women in the room twice on each cheek, and shake hands with older men, while boys through the teen years will kiss the cheeks of all. The ritual takes so long that at least one course will go cold while everyone takes a turn, and you’ll all develop a little whiplash. In Belgium it’s three kisses (left cheek-right cheek-left cheek) when you greet a woman you know fairly well, but only one kiss on the left cheek if you know them well; men shake hands, softly, as opposed to a firm (perceived as aggressive) American handshake. In Italy lots of kissy greetings among all. In Sweden I never could quite figure out any pattern, but there was no kissing, nor was there in Switzerland, or England. The kissing corridor of Europe seems to run from Italy through Spain and France and stop at the northern Belgian border (though there are variations among generations too, I’m speaking mostly of my own). And the examples would multiply across other countries and cultures, about which I’m sure T&S readers experienced in other parts of the world can say much.

Trickier still than merely mastering the outward rituals, and most important of all, is learning what they mean. Sometimes it’s not entirely clear even within your own culture. Does a culture’s preference for hug or kiss or handshake suggest that a non-preferred form of greeting is perceived as more threatening or less threatening? Thus does a kissing culture regard a hug as more threatening and invasive than a kiss? Or do they truly think that kissing best conveys affection? Is a hugging culture terrified of a kiss, which involves far less overall touching? And of course is either a friendly hug or kiss necessarily sexual? You might say no or mostly no if you hug or kiss people of both genders. But a recently returned missionary in the wedding line told me that she was weary from hugging so much on her (US) mission, then quickly added that of course she hugged only people of the same gender. So maybe a hug was somewhat sexual. Yet many of the people who insist on same-gender hugging only also believe, ironically, that same-gender attraction is learned rather than innate. Then there were the early Christians, who routinely engaged in the holy kiss before participating in the Eucharistic meal; the main purpose of their weekly Sunday meeting, and of the Eucharistic (or Thanksgiving) meal at its heart, was fellowship, and so before the meal was served they all engaged in the holy kiss to signify and even promote fellowship. The kiss was on the mouth, rather than the less intimate cheek, because breath was believed to bear the soul and thus to promote unity of souls. Even this gesture wasn’t meant to have a sexual edge, but by about 200 bishops were lamenting that some were “injecting the poison of licentiousness” into their kisses. Thus the practice was modified—either restricted to those of the same gender, or, in later centuries, modified to everyone kissing the same object, a “pax” (peace) board that was brought around for the “kiss of peace.” Nowadays Christians engage in the kiss of peace usually by shaking hands at the appropriate moment. My mother told me that when I was a child at least our Mormon ward was still drinking from the same large mug or container during the water portion of the sacrament, which also suggests an effort at physical if sexually unthreatening fellowship (I’m sure it was threatening in a lot of other ways).

I’m not proposing a solution or central argument here. I’m too exhausted for that, and my back too sore from so many manly accolades. If you want tentative answers, anthropologists and historians have studied these things in great detail. I’m merely reflecting on how interesting and complicated humans can be, how my head is spinning from trying to figure out who should be greeted in what way, and how especially at this time of the year trying to cope with a bewildering array of greetings is a good problem to have. Despite all the risks and cultural mazes, many people (at least those in my cultural circles) obviously think it’s important to touch and be touched, however awkwardly or differently we go about it.

I was already scheduled to attend another conference this week, an annual conference for historians of the Reformation (surely you knew about it), where I’ll be part of an ongoing panel devoted to issues in teaching. This year’s issue is “Defining Protestantism,” as everyone is rightly concerned about labels we impose on people. Five or six scholars make up the panel, and we all get about 10 minutes to reflect on our particular experience with that issue. I’m supposed to talk about teaching the Reformation to Mormon students, both in general and in regard to defining Protestantism, as some of the panelists are wondering how Mormons fit or not.

I’m planning to touch on some of the following, but would be happy to hear what T&S readers have to add.

Like most students at American universities, Mormon students know little about religious history, outside of their own, and even that they usually know superficially. To a Mormon kid, religion really begins with Joseph Smith, and oh yes that ancient church was around very briefly too. They have a vague notion that Protestants were the good guys, but Catholics are a complete mystery. Of course this is generalization (as are most observations below), but it’s held up pretty well over the years.

I know that generalization not only from experience in teaching, but because it’s how I grew up too. I remember taking a trip with my family to Salt Lake when I was around 12, and going to the visitors’ center, where there was a brief display on Christian history (all geared toward the Restoration). First came an image of some churches in ruins, shrouded in mist, with a few hooded figures walking around outside them, heads down. Obviously the bad times. Then came the Protestant Reformers bathed in light, saying things (in quotes) about the then-current state of religion that would obviously resonate with Mormons. A smaller version of this presentation was also on display in my home ward in California for many years. It really got my attention; even though I forgot about it for awhile, when I overcame adolescence and got interested in History again, I went right back to studying that subject.

Imagine my surprise, after a few years of study, when I began to realize that Mormons (at least the present version) had more in common with Catholics than they did with the good-guy Protestants. On about ten major issues of the Reformation (grace and works, scripture and church authority, the need for sacraments or ordinances, form of worship, confession, free will, works for the dead, church and state, etc.), present-day Mormons were more like Catholics on all but one. The only exception I saw was form of worship, or liturgy (which mattered a lot), but even that was only if you didn’t count temple rites. (The book How Wide the Divide does a nice job of showing commonalities between Mormons and some Protestants, but even this effort, not to mention the upcoming conference at UVU, implies that real similarities are to be sought with Protestants, not Catholics.)

That’s how it looked to me anyway. Maybe earlier versions of Mormonism were indeed more like Protestants, especially the radical sort of Protestants (in fact one presenter has already told me that he’d always thought of 19th-century Mormons as the last bloom of the Reformation’s radicals). But not the version of Mormonism I knew. This realization didn’t turn Protestants into the bad guys for me, but it certainly changed my image of Catholicism. It also made me more interested in seeing what we have in common with all traditional Christians: growing up, or as a missionary, the differences were always harped on, over and over.

Then onto defining Protestantism. One of the presenters is going to note that the term Protestant isn’t very useful at all, as only a couple of non-Catholic streams identified themselves that way. Another presenter envisions five streams moving away from Catholicism (Lutherans, Calvinists, Church of England, Zwinglians, and Radicals such as Anabaptists and Spiritualists), rather than a single Protestant stream. I think Mormon students would consider Mormonism at least a sixth stream, that went underground soon after the apostles then reemerged in the 19th century. Thus to Mormon students the definition of Protestantism just doesn’t matter much: the religious world is divided into Mormons and non-Mormons, and all the worries my colleagues have about what a Protestant is, so as not to offend their students, seem unimportant. The recent court decision mentioned on T&S, that Mormons don’t count as Protestants, probably doesn’t offend many Mormons. (Of course more sensitive is whether Mormons are Christian, but even there Mormons should take heart: many Catholics and Protestants today engage in warm ecumenical dialogue and services, but during the Reformation they flung all sorts of non-Christian labels at each other.)

This indifference toward what makes a Protestant is precisely why most of the Mormon kids don’t much identify with traditional Christianity, in any of its various forms. Yet I’ve also seen that because Mormon kids are interested in religion, they are willing to learn and get over their vague images and prejudices. They begin to appreciate the connections they have not only with Catholics, but Protestants too. They realize not only that there are far more similarities than they imagined or had learned, but that when they know the similarities they are in a better position to see the differences—real differences rather than imagined ones. I think they also begin to realize that you can only hold to the usual and non-nuanced Mormon view of Christian history if you don’t bother to study what actually happened, or what Christians actually believed. And that we need a new view of the Reformation, indeed of all of Christian history, along the lines of what Jonathan has been trying to do here on T&S. One that will give us new concepts and labels and perspectives. We ought to worry every bit as much about how we label others as we do about how they label us.

In an effort to regain control, you flash a forced smile in the direction of the goof-offs. You pause and wait until they’re finished before you continue. You have a chat with them after class and ask them to be a little more attentive next time. And then after another day or two of rudeness, and despairing that your more subtle techniques have failed, you lose patience and let them have it, right in the middle of class.

And rightly so. They deserve it. They’re ruining the learning experience for most everyone around them, and showing little respect for you and the effort and thought you’ve put into the subject at hand. You don’t even have to yell: just a few choice words will vanquish them.

There’s just one problem. Your tongue-lashing shuts not only them up, but everyone else too. Now no one will talk. You’ve killed whatever good feeling was in the room–killed it more than those students were killing it. Now you’re the one ruining the learning experience for everyone. You were right, those kids deserved it. But you were wrong as well. Wrong in how you handled it. Wrong in your tone, and delivery. Wrong in your meta message, which was (whether you meant to say so or not) that you probably don’t care enough about the offenders to figure out an approach which not only solves the problem but allows the offenders to feel that they still matter to you. And thus, just plain wrong.

Obviously you don’t have to be a teacher to be familiar with the paradox of being right and yet wrong. It can happen in various settings, including of course your home. If you’re a parent, you often know that the substance of what you’re saying to your child is right, yet somehow you can still feel lousy, even wrong, after winning a particular battle. Usually because of how you won it. Or because you looked at it in the context of winning and losing. An unkind tone or sarcasm or impatience or arbitrary reliance on authority says (whether you mean it to or not) that you really don’t care about the child as much as your words suggest.

Why wouldn’t the paradox apply to blogs as well, or any other sort of public forum for discussion, especially those with religious claims? 3 Nephi 11:28 gives a good clue that there was a lot of well-meant but ill-natured discussing going on over doctrine even before blogging was invented, and verses 29 and 30 clarify it as “disputing” and its companion “contention.” I infer from this and from experience that the problem doesn’t lie in discussing doctrine but in disputing it; not in disagreeing but in contending. Good-willed discussion can push you along and stretch you and thus help you to understand. Disputing brings in ill will and rigidity, and makes the discussion more about winning an argument than advancing understanding. Disputing puts the need to be right about a given doctrine above the doctrine that matters most: love and respect for one another. I Corinthians 13 applies here too: we can have all the insight in the world, all the one-upsmanship in the world, but if there’s no charity, or good will in the discussion, then it’s empty and vain, and therefore wrong.

Thus in a religious sense any discussion is partly about the subject at hand, but mostly it’s about the conduct of the discussion itself.

The subjects or doctrines under discussion matter, but they matter less than how we treat each other while discussing. If there’s ill will after a discussion or exchange, then the discussion was a failure. Even if we think we won, or were right, we were ultimately wrong.

I’m hardly perfect at the art of good-willed discussion (I hope none of my relatives read this post, for instance, lest they burst out laughing). That’s why I’m thinking about it here before I get blogging on such crucial subjects as the virtue of white shirts. I succumb often to the temptation of supposing that what I have to say is so important and convincing and obviously true that I’m going to say it bluntly at all costs, including the cost of good will with someone else, because the world needs to hear it, because a person just has to stand up for what’s right. And then I’m proven wrong again. My stated message turns out once more to be less consequential than my unstated meta message.

Instead of standing up and dividing, maybe I should have done some sitting down and reconciling. With my students, or kids, or fellow bloggers.

Good-willed discussion makes everything a lot more pleasant. Ironically, it also better promotes understanding of substantive issues: for when ill will takes over, the substantive issue becomes secondary to the desire to show someone up. And the results are predictable: calling names, questioning motives, and distorting the arguments and evidence from the other side, all in the name of winning and defending an unbending position.

I’m sure I’m not saying anything new to readers here. There’s already a lot of good-willed discussion at T&S, and any adult is familiar with the right-but-wrong paradox. But I want to plaster this ideal on my forehead before plunging in, lest I get a little snippity in discussing how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, or its modern equivalents. If a boxing referee can say “Let’s keep it clean” before two guys go out and bludgeon each other, then we who enter the discussion ring should be able to commence with a similar mantra, and actually mean it. At least I tell myself.

I had known since childhood of Carl and Mathilda’s existence, but they became flesh and blood to me only recently.

In May 2004 my family and I made a long trip to visit New York, where my son had recently finished a mission, and we wanted to meet some of his friends. We stayed about five days, and on one of them, a Saturday, my wife suggested we visit the new immigrant museum at Ellis Island. I was less than enthusiastic, because of the crowds that were sure to have the same idea on a weekend.

And I was right: the lines to catch the boats out to the island snaked back and forth for what seemed like miles. But I was also wrong. Because thanks to those crowds I had the fantastic experience.

When we finally got out to the island, the museum was indeed impressive. Even though my legs soon became lethargic in the way legs do while walking slowly through museums, I endured, and thank goodness. At the end of the tour stood a bank of computer terminals, where you could type in the name of an ancestor, to see whether any had come through Ellis Island. But the sight of yet another line at these terminals did me in. I, the historian, gave up, and wearily took a seat near a pillar. My wife and daughter stood gamely in line, however, eager to type away.

Several minutes later, my daughter came running excitedly, to say that they couldn’t help noticing that the woman right in front of them had typed in Harline.

It’s a rare last name, and we have always been related to anyone who has it. And so my wife struck up a conversation, while daughter and I, at last arisen from my fainting couch, rushed over to join in as well.

The woman’s name was Annika. She was from Sweden, just like my ancestors, and was here in New York for three days. She was at the computers looking for a distant uncle, named Carl Harline, who had disappeared from the family in the late 19th century. Perhaps he had gone to America, she thought, and that’s why she typed in his name.

I responded that my great grandfather was also called Carl Harline. He converted to Mormonism in the late 19th century and emigrated from Sweden to Salt Lake City soon after. Maybe it was coincidence: Carl was the most popular name in Sweden, and lots of Swedes were emigrating at that time. I decided to call my parents immediately and find out where our Carl was from: a parish called Simtuna, replied my mother.

I had no idea where this was but repeated it to Annika, who almost fainted. That’s where she was born and still lives today, and where her Carl was from as well.

We were all astonishedthat out of the few days we were both in New York, out of all the sights in New York, out of the eight hours the museum was open, out of all the people packed in that day, out of all the computer terminals, we had converged at the same spot at precisely the same moment. And that my wife and daughter, forgive them, had bothered to look over her shoulder.

We could have missed meeting by five seconds and never known it, especially since I’d been lounging on a bench 50 feet away, not helping.

And now my wife even started saying that Annika resembled my father in her features (I wasn’t sure it was flattering to a fifty-something woman to say that she resembled a 77-something man, dear though he is). It was all very moving.

When we left Ellis Island, Annika and I thought that we were at least second cousins. Our New York friends who had been with us told the story to others. Within days it was repeated on the sacrament meeting circuit as an inspirational genealogical miracle—which really ticked me off, mostly because I’d already lost control of the story.

Even more fundamentally than that, however, it turned out that Annika and I weren’t related at all (no retraction ever followed the miracle talks, I’m sure). After Annika returned to Sweden, her husband Bengt, a museum director, investigated the miracle. He discovered that there were two Carl Harlines from Simtuna. One was Annika’s relative, one was mine. They had, however, lived in the same house, and that was where they got their common name.

Names in Sweden were fluid for centuries, and you could get them any number of ways besides the most famous (Carlsson, Petersson, and so on). One way was through the army. Each village provided a house or two for soldiers. The army then assigned a name to the house, related to the village name, and the soldier took the name as well.

Annika’s great grandfather Ulrik lived in the Harline house, as a soldier, and thus took the name Harline. One of his sons, Carl, was Annika’s great uncle. My great grandfather Carl took Ulrik’s place in the house, and also the name Harline, which he kept when he moved to Utah in 1891.

Thus they weren’t related, but they did know each other. And that, plus the unbelievable meeting at Ellis Island, made Annika feel like family anyway. It was still a fantastic experience.

It became even more fantastic because thanks to Annika and Bengt, Carl and Mathilda became three-dimensional people to me. I never would have gone to Sweden without meeting Annika, as I spend most of my time in Europe in Belgium and France. But Annika and Bengt invited me twice briefly, and then a third time I spent two months of my sabbatical there. In between writing on the subject of religious conversion and families, I learned more about Carl and Mathilda than I had ever known before, including how religion had affected their own family relationships.

Carl Eriksson and Mathilda Petersson were both born in 1859. They were both the children of farmhands and maids, which meant their families owned no property (no nobility for me of course), which meant that when Carl and Mathilda became teenagers they too would be farmhand and maid, working for farmers who actually owned land.

Much of what I learned came through Lutheran church records. There I could see the scores each person in a household was assigned for : religious understanding,” “ability to read,” “catechism,” and so on, by the visiting priest. My relatives all received average to below-average scores in religion. Figures.

I could also see on which farms Carl and Mathilda had gone to work. At her second farm, around age 19, Mathilda heard about a meeting with Mormon missionaries, and, perhaps like many other Swedes with low religious scores, decided to attend (in fact there were a lot of non-Lutheran, evangelical sorts of movements around the countryside at this time). She believed that she heard the truth, and bought the books they had for sale; but when they asked whether she wanted to be baptized, she said “not yet.” She saw no more missionaries for 9 years.

By the third or fourth farm, Carl and Mathilda were working at the same place, starting in November 1880. By June of the next year (maybe it happened on Midsummer Eve, the longest day and party of the year) Mathilda was pregnant, thanks to Carl. This was common all over premodern Europe: a couple became engaged and started determining whether they could have children. When the woman became pregnant, marriage soon followed. A woman who became pregnant without a promise of marriage, however, was blamed for the problem, and sent back home.

Anyway, Carl and Mathilda married later in 1881. Carl decided to give up being only a farmhand and tried to improve his station by becoming a soldier—and this was of course how he became Carl Harline. As a soldier he received a little cash, a house (with a name), an acre for potatoes, training with the army a few weeks a year (no wars for Sweden since the early 19th century), soling some shoes, and working for the farmer on whose land the house stood.

Their first child was born in March 1882…and died in November. Four girls were then born from 1883 to 1889. When Mathilda was pregnant with the third, in 1887, the Mormon missionaries came around again. This time she asked to be baptized, but now the missionaries told her to wait until she was sure. For three months she read and studied after chores, and once fasted three days. Twice a day she went into the forest that bordered their home and prayed for a dream or sign.

Nothing came yet, but she felt she wanted to be baptized, and told Carl so. He said that she was foolish and should stop being so crazy. When Mathilda’s mother heard the news, she ran to her daughter’s home and begged her to be sensible, then cried and told Mathilda it was all of the devil. With such emotional pressure, with her usual extremely physical work (including storing 35 bushels of potatoes on the day before her third daughter was born), with a nursing baby, with her fasting, and with her late-night study, Mathilda was in an ideal state to receive a vision.

She received two, both of which convinced her that she should become Mormon. Thus despite Carl’s opposition she remained firm, and went through with being baptized. The usual crowd of people, mixed with supporters and opponents and the merely curious, came to watch. It’s not clear whether Carl was among them, or Mathilda’s parents.

About two years later, Carl converted too, but no one in the family ever bothered to write about this, and Carl’s religiosity remained an enigma. His joining didn’t solve familial tensions, because now Mathilda wanted to emigrate to Utah. Not all Mormon converts did so: about one-third of the practicing Mormons in Sweden stayed there. But Mathilda wanted to leave. Maybe Carl did as well; maybe there was economic allure for him; maybe his position in the Swedish army was threatened when he became Mormon. Whatever the case, both sets of parents were at wits’ end. His own parents told him, “Let her go if she wants,” but they wanted Carl to stay there. It couldn’t have been easy to be Carl at that point, torn between his two families.

By 1891, however, both Carl and Mathilda decided to leave, with their four daughters. Tens of thousands of Swedes had emigrated to America since the 1850s, most of them due to economic pressures at home and the (usually exaggerated) promise of opportunity abroad. Still, it was surely a sad day for all the families when Carl, Mathilda, and the four girls left for Utah in April 1891. For although some emigrants did move back to Sweden, most expected that they would never see their families again. And Carl and Mathilda never did; in fact they heard rarely from them, as far as I can tell.

The trip to Utah was easier than it had been thirty years before, as it was made now with steamships and railroads rather than sailing vessels and covered wagons or handcarts. But it was difficult enough. Carl became seasick during the Atlantic crossing, and the four girls all caught measles. On May 15, two days after arriving in Salt Lake, the baby girl, Anna Maria, died from her measles. She had been sick the whole way, been cared for the whole way, and just when they reached their destination she died.

I often wonder whether Carl ever recovered from that. Whether he, like many emigrant converts, felt that this was some sort of punishment from God, just as those back home had told him would occur if he became Mormon and moved to Utah. Because although Mathilda left every indication of being zealous in her faith, Carl didn’t. He and Mathilda never married in the temple. Still, everyone seemed to like him, and regard him as a quiet and musical man. He was always whistling while he worked, and no doubt helped inspire the song by that very title, which his youngest son would later write. But I always wondered whether the move to Utah, and the death of baby Anna Maria, wasn’t too much for his soul.

Mathilda was not only zealous but tough. She was thrown by a cow at age 47, when she ran to protect her children from it. She ran a loom and made carpets for sale, and sewed, cooked, washed, bottled, raised crops in the garden, much as she had done in Sweden. She still had a cellar out back, but also now a toilet, chicken coop, stable, barn, and haystacks. One of her children thought she was the real Old Woman in a Shoe. One of her children, my grandfather, was nicknamed “Bulldog,” and I would wager he learned or inherited that trait from her.

She and Carl had a total of 13 children, four of whom died young. At age 47 she had her last and most famous, Leigh, who after Mathilda and Carl both died won two Oscars in Hollywood for his musical scores for Walt Disney, including the song all Swedes still sing on Christmas, “When You Wish Upon a Star.” My grandfather was one of the obscure children.

The family struggled in Utah for a decade, even tried Idaho for about a month, before finally getting their own house, in 1905. Life seemed more settled then. But Mathilda had her first stroke in 1915, her second in 1921, and the third, which killed her, in 1922. Carl remarried soon afterward, and died in 1929. Some of the kids stayed in Utah, some left for California, including Leigh and my grandfather.

But none of them heard much from Sweden again.

Thanks to Annika and Bengt, I found some of Carl and Mathilda’s relatives in Sweden just last year. Most of these were from Mathilda’s family, and all the old resentments about religion had by now disappeared, or perhaps weren’t even known. It was a lot of fun. My daughter organized a game of ultimate frisbee, and soccer, and bicycling, with her fourth cousins, a category that’s all but meaningless I suppose, but she loved calling up and saying, “Hi Toby, it’s your cousin! Wanna play frisbee?” We had a big barbeque together and got brain freezes from trying to figure out who was where on the descendancy chart, and after awhile I just started talking to people and didn’t worry what degree of relation we were. I wasn’t sure how much it mattered really, as the personal relationship seemed the important thing. I saw the stone foundation of the house where Mathilda was born and raised. I saw the stone foundation of the Harline house, where she and Carl lived, near the forest, where her mother begged her not to be Mormon, where Mathilda fasted and slaved, where baby Anna Maria was born, and from where they left to go to Utah. And I saw the farm where Carl and Mathilda worked as teenagers, fell in love, and married. I even met the descendant of the farmer who ran the place when Carl and Mathilda were there, pointing out to him that my ancestors had worked for his ancestors. He invited me to play golf next time I was there, and I assumed he would pay, given the old relationship.

And now I go to Salt Lake occasionally to visit the cemetery where Carl and Mathilda are buried, side by side.

All thanks to meeting Annika on Ellis Island. Ironically, though she’s not my cousin, I actually feel stronger connection to her, thanks to that meeting. But I was unspeakably grateful to have learned about Carl and Mathilda, for real.