In most of the ways that matter, I grew up in a fairly typical Salt Lake City Mormon home. What this means is that I went through most of the various Mormon rites of passage right on schedule in an environment that looked very much like an photograph from the Ensign<\/i>: baptism in the basement of the Salt Lake Tabernacle, priesthood ordinations by a faithful father surrounded by family, and all the rest. Coming home from my mission, however, was slightly different.<\/p>\n
The traditional Salt Lake City missionary home coming consisted (in those pre-9\/11 days) of a vast throng of family and friends waiting at the arrival gate with banners posters, cheers, hugs, and happy reunions. Return of the conquering hero. Mine was somewhat different. The mission office, run as it was by 20-year-olds who really didn’t know what they were doing, messed up my return flight. They failed to confirm my seat from Los Angles to Salt Lake, which was given away. Hence, I arrived in Los Angles from Seoul with no way of getting to Utah. A friendly ticket agent was able to book me a flight on an earlier plane (I had originally been scheduled to have five or six hours in LAX) to Utah, but calls to my family to let them know of change proved unavailing.<\/p>\n
The result was that I stepped off of the plane in Salt Lake and there was no one there. I walked down to the luggage claim, got my bags, called and left a message asking that I be picked up at the airport, and went outside to sit on the curb and wait. About an hour later my mother and sister arrived to take me home. During this whole adventure, I was, of course, dressed in my missionary uniform, complete with the name tag declaring that I was Oman Chang-no of the Mal-il Sung-do Yae-su Ku-rhee-su-do Kyo-hwae. This being Salt Lake, many if not most of the people passing me by in the airport, were Mormons with senses finely attuned to every nuance of LDS ritual and symbolism. There I was, a single missionary very much without the traditional throng of family members. “Elder, are you coming home?” a number of people asked. “Yes,” I responded, and they hurried on, constructing in their heads, I am sure, imagined stories to account for the Salt Lake anomaly of a lone returning missionary. I imagine that the narratives ranged from the judgmental to the heroic: Perhaps he came home early because of “worthiness issues”; perhaps he is the lone member in his family, having served an honorable mission (in which he no doubt baptized thousands, Amon-like) despite the fact that his whole family has disowned him. I thought the whole exercise was funny — especially the puzzled expressions on well-meaning Mormon faces — and in any case, I had a book to read while I waited.<\/p>\n
I am certain that there is no greater significance in this story, but I do like to hold it in my mind as a reminder of how our Mormon amateurishness so frequently tangles our attempts to work through the scripts that we sometimes set for ourselves. I like to remember the fact that Mormonism is basically run by people who don’t really know what they are doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In most of the ways that matter, I grew up in a fairly typical Salt Lake City Mormon home. What this means is that I went through most of the various Mormon rites of passage right on schedule in an environment that looked very much like an photograph from the Ensign: baptism in the basement of the Salt Lake Tabernacle, priesthood ordinations by a faithful father surrounded by family, and all the rest. Coming home from my mission, however, was slightly different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn","category-mormon-life"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}