{"id":23981,"date":"2013-01-05T17:19:40","date_gmt":"2013-01-05T22:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=23981"},"modified":"2013-01-06T16:28:33","modified_gmt":"2013-01-06T21:28:33","slug":"a-mission-epiphany-for-epiphany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2013\/01\/a-mission-epiphany-for-epiphany\/","title":{"rendered":"A Mission Epiphany For Epiphany Eve"},"content":{"rendered":"

Snow White. <\/em><\/p>\n

If on Christmas Day of 1975 you were for some harebrained reason outside on the frozen Belgian tundra and you squinted up your eyes against the shiny white landscape to look east from the edge of the little town called Zichem, then you would’ve almost certainly noticed in the houseless distance the improbable sight of four overcoated and possibly harebrained missionaries-dressed-as-local-businessmen trudging along a slippery, messy path next to a big\u00a0field.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

They weren\u2019t exactly sure of where they were going or even of whether the person they were going to see was\u00a0interested in seeing them, but they kept trudging on anyway because Christmas was a time to try extraordinary things.<\/p>\n

They\u2019d actually begun trying such things the night before, on the plush mauve carpet of their magnificent new living-room church, where they\u2019d organized a combination housewarming\/Christmas-pageant extravaganza to celebrate not only the season but\u00a0the fact that they were out of their bar-room church at last. But it\u2019d turned out that not all that many people\u2019d been as excited about the extravaganza as the four missionaries dressed as local businessmen\u2019d been. In fact the four of them\u2019d\u00a0made up four entire fifths of the audience that\u2019d come to watch a few of the few local Mormons act out the parts of the Christmas story requiring only a very very\u00a0few characters.<\/p>\n

It\u2019d also turned out that the fifth person in the audience, the mother of the teenaged girl playing Mary,\u00a0‘d happened to have some very strong opinions against<\/i> acting out any part of\u00a0the Christmas story, and she\u2019d decided to stand up and\u00a0voice those opinions just as her daughter\u00a0was\u00a0making her way in full character across the mauve-colored Egyptian desert: this story<\/i>, insisted\u00a0Mary’s mother at unnecessarily high volume, is too sacred as a common skit performed to be<\/i>. This\u2019d caused the teenaged boy playing Joseph,\u00a0walking next to Mary in\u00a0an ancient terry-cloth bathrobe, to do the unthinkable and break character.<\/p>\n

Turning toward the audience to\u00a0look\u00a0at Mary’s mother, instead of looking stage left and forlornly into the desert distance the way he was supposed to, he\u2019d started moving his scarf-covered head back and forth and raising his voice at her\u00a0in return. This\u2019d only caused Mary’s\u00a0mother to raise her voice even higher, this time in her native German, her more natural yelling language, but Joseph knew that language well enough to yell in it too. Mary\u2019d just veiled her face hoping everything would be over soon, while district-leading Elder Shepherd\u2019d broken character as an audience-member and intervened.<\/p>\n

In the end, the German-speaking scene in the Egyptian desert set in a living room in Flemish-speaking Belgium\u2019d calmed down, the Holy Couple\u2019d finished their journey to Bethlehem (the kitchen), and the evening\u2019d ended well, with everyone apologizing to each other for so many offenses freely given and taken in the Spirit of the season.<\/p>\n

Christmas Day\u2019d started better than Christmas Eve, not least because the four local-businessmen-looking missionaries knew they wouldn’t have to tract that day, which would have been too much for Belgians whose patience was already stretched thin by the bell-ringing and door-knocking carried out by said local businessmen at other sacred times, like dinner and Sunday afternoons. Today all the four of them had to do was attend a Christmas dinner and go around bearing gifts like the four local magi, which gifts they quickly realized endeared them a lot more to people than did appearing on doorsteps empty-handed,\u00a0the way they usually did.<\/p>\n

Their first stop that morning had been at the home of precious Zuster Jans, who they called Zuster<\/em> even though she\u2019d never been Mormon and never would be. In fact the four local magi liked to call all the precious old ladies Zuster<\/i>, not so much because the ladies liked the title but because by saying it the\u00a0local magi could feel like they were still sort of doing their missionary job,\u00a0like they were subtly reminding the ladies\u00a0that the invitation to convert was still out there, even if they were as old as Sariah.<\/p>\n

Zuster Jans\u00a0was even lonelier than most precious old ladies,\u00a0because she had no family\u00a0at all, so today the local magi\u2019d brought her a card and a tart from a good bakery (open Christmas mornings because high Belgian dining standards demanded it). They\u2019d prayed that Zuster Jans would offer them some of the tart itself rather than some of her endless peperkoek<\/i> and bubbly water,\u00a0which she like all precious ladies supposed they loved. The prayer\u2019d been partly answered, because\u00a0she\u2019d brought out a tray filled with both peperkoek<\/i> and the new tart, which they\u2019d managed to get entirely down.<\/p>\n

\n

The four filled-up local magi\u2019d then taken another tart to their next stop, Christmas dinner with the Mormon Jaspers family. The family wasn\u2019t close to rich, but of course they’d\u00a0brought out their best today in the form of countless courses, starting with a feast-day favorite like shrimp cocktail, then\u00a0moving on to tomato soup with little meatballs, then Koninginnehapje<\/i> (the “Queen\u2019s Dish,”\u00a0or in French Vol au Vent<\/i>, a fluffy round pastry covered with a sauce of chicken and mushrooms), then the main course (which might actually be two courses disguised as one) of potato croquettes and pork roast adorned with peas and carrots, and\/or meatballs topped by a heavy sweet sauce of half-apricots, then dessert of tart and herbal tea (coffee for most Belgians), then cheese, and then capped at last in most homes but not here (unless\u00a0young\u00a0Willi Jaspers\u00a0was sneaking something in the other room) with cigars and brandy. How salvific it\u2019d been to the four local magi to taste real food after a week of eating stale Christmas treats sent long ago from home and after months of oatmeal boiled and fried and maybe poached.<\/p>\n

The local magi\u2019d had to leave the dinner a little early and a little embarrassedly around 2:30 in order to get to their third and final destination of the day, which turned out not to be very local at all: a house in the country out near Zichem,\u00a0Flemishly named after the old Canaanite town and about 35 kilometers away,\u00a0which meant they\u2019d have to go by train. In that country house lived a women the local magi\u2019d just learned was officially part of their little branch but who\u2019d never even come close to showing up for church. The four of them\u2019d decided that they\u2019d go introduce themselves and wish her Merry Christmas by bringing her (surprise) a tart as well.<\/p>\n

How in the world had this woman become Mormon, they\u2019d all wondered as they sat on the slow (only) train to Zichem? All they knew was that she was poor, and that her house that\u00a0lay another 5 or 6 kilometers from the station hadn\u2019t exactly shown up on any of their torn-at-every-fold maps, mostly because it didn\u2019t have an actual street address but was just out in some direction somewhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After arriving at the station, the local magi\u2019d been able to pin down the location a little more precisely, thanks to the help of the few genuine locals who\u2019d happened to be\u00a0outside that afternoon, which\u2019d led them to realize that any bus they\u2019d hoped for to get themselves closer to the mysterious house did not exist, and not only because it was Christmas but because the roads leading to that home were mostly dirt paths, not roads. If the local magi wanted to reach their destination, they\u2019d have to walk across some fields and through the woods and maybe over a river as well.<\/p>\n

Which was how anyone outside would\u2019ve been able to see them in the distance today, looking like hunters in a Bruegel landscape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The farther the little band of local magi trod through the frozen and half-frozen mud in their ill-suited dress shoes, without seeing any houses along the way, the more they wondered whether the local fellows at the train station had maybe played a trick on them, \u2018d maybe given them wrong directions on purpose, the way people sometimes did to them for a laugh. But they decided to trust the locals and just keep going, hoping that they\u2019d get to the house before dark (around 4:30), and thinking that if they made it there then they could find their way back to the station just fine, dark or not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The unexpected and unsought-after epiphany came to The Protagonist (one of the local magi)\u00a0three or\u00a0four kilometers in, around dusk. He didn\u2019t know exactly where they were, and in fact\u2019d never be able to find the spot again in his whole life even though he would try. He just\u00a0knew that when it happened he was looking to his right (west) down into a slight valley with slight rolling ground and rickety-fenced fields that stretched all the way to the horizon where the sun was probably just setting (you couldn\u2019t tell for sure\u00a0because as usual gray clouds were over and behind everything).<\/p>\n

But what he saw most of all as he looked west was the low white mist that seemed to rise from the little valley, a mist so white that he could barely make out where the white snow-covered ground ended and the white-trending-gray heaven began, but still low enough that he could see over it to the gray horizon.<\/p>\n

And suddenly from The Protagonist’s slightly raised angle looking across the valley into the last remaining light of the day, the whole scene was no longer a frozen field bordered by rickety fences and a half-frozen path, but something ethereally magical. The big puffs of white mist veiled the white ground here and revealed there, and moved up and down where the terrain moved up and down, which only made everything even more beautiful than it already was. No one was saying a thing, and except for\u00a0some occasional sloshing where the snow hadn\u2019t entirely frozen, it was completely silent.<\/p>\n

\n

The Protagonist didn\u2019t know whether the other local magi were seeing what he was seeing, or maybe just happened to be turning their heads to the right like he was, but he was smitten, overcome by not only\u00a0an unfamiliar calm\u00a0but\u00a0an unexpected joy too\u2014at seeing all this, at being in this place, and in this land. This beautiful gray and occasionally white land.<\/p>\n

The French writer Andr\u00e9 Gide once stood near a meadow in summer as a boy and saw a young girl move into it: when she did\u00a0the whole place was transformed. Anyone else walking by at the moment might have seen a scientifically defined geological formation\u2014meadow, hills, sunlight\u2014and a young girl. But Gide saw a vision. That\u2019s how it was for The Protagonist\u00a0near Zichem in winter: he saw a vision where someone else might have seen the usual bunch of gray clouds in the background and some freezing mist and partly-sloshy really cold snow in the foreground, and not because he was more perceptive than anyone else but because he was made to see this place this way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

He was even more content as he continued walking toward the unknown woman\u2019s home. Just as darkness arrived, they reached it. They thought.\u00a0There was no other house around, but there wasn’t any\u00a0nameplate or identifying address hammered up somewhere either to declare that this was absolutely the place. But this had to be it, didn’t it? It sort\u00a0of fit the vague description they had from their file, and\u00a0the really vague coordinates on their torn-at-every-fold map, and the especially vague directions from the chin-scratching fellows back at the station.\u00a0The house stood at the edge of a bluff\u2014not exactly a big bluff, but any bluff was big in the flat Belgian landscape. No one answered their knock, and not because they were pretending not to be home this time but because they really weren\u2019t. Like half of Belgium today, they were at someone else\u2019s home. The local magi hadn\u2019t called in advance because the woman didn\u2019t have a phone, so they\u2019d just taken a chance. But no luck. And now what to do with the big Christmas tart in the big bakery box that they\u2019d taken turns carrying all this way?<\/p>\n

\n

They couldn\u2019t leave it on the unsheltered porch, they decided, because there were probably wild animals lurking. The only sheltered place nearby was the chicken coop. That was it. The obvious place to put a fancy Belgian tart was right inside a chicken coop, at least if you were a pathetic city\/suburb boy.<\/p>\n

The local magi reasoned (sort of), well the chickens were in individual cages so they couldn\u2019t get at it, and there was a door to the coop that could be latched so no animals from outside could get at it, and someone from the family would have to come home pretty soon to take care of the chickens, and so even though the tart might stink to high heaven before the woman and her family found it, even though it might taste like the stink too, even though it might be completely stale by the time they got home, at least it wouldn\u2019t get rained or snowed on or eaten by the wrong people\/creatures.<\/p>\n

And what a shock it must have been for the family if\/when they discovered the fancy Belgian tart in the chicken coop with an unsigned note on top that said just\u00a0Vrolijk Kerstfeest<\/i>. The local magi\u2019d decided to give their gift anonymously, supposedly in the spirit of pious giving but probably to avoid the embarrassment of being identified as the idiots who\u2019d left a tart in a chicken coop. Real locals might\u2019ve talked about that for weeks if they\u2019d found out.<\/p>\n

The local magi never knew\u00a0what the family or any other locals thought, though, because they never went back to see the woman again, and she never came to visit them in town, which meant that the local magi\u2019d sort of defeated their purpose for going out there, which was to identify themselves. And which meant that the woman would forever be completely oblivious to the thing that’d happened to\u00a0at least one of the magi.<\/p>\n

The four of them headed back toward the train station in the dark now. They couldn\u2019t see any misty field anymore or much of anything else either, because everything had faded to black, but like Gretel in the fairy tale they\u2019d marked their path if only in their minds. Along the way back, they noticed something they’d missed the first time–the ruin of a castle tower, which was when it’d hit the\u00a0The Protagonist for the first time that more life’d gone on here and all around than he could possibly imagine. Someday he’d learn\u00a0some of the bloody things that’d happened around that tower,\u00a0and they were\u00a0a lot less romantic and a lot more horrible than he could possibly\u00a0imagine too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even though when they finally reached the station\u00a0they had to wait almost an hour for their train, it felt good to at least have tried\u00a0something extraordinary that day, however harebrained it’d ended up being.\u00a0But mostly what The Protagonist remembered about the day was\u00a0the field, and the ruin, and the transformation of the formerly obscure land of Belgium.<\/p>\n

Once he started seeing it for what it was instead of what he thought it should have been or what he wanted it to be, it was more beautiful than he\u2019d ever imagined it could be. Maybe that’s how it was for any place. Or thing, Or one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

It was the best Christmas The Protagonist\u2019d ever had, and maybe the best he\u2019d ever have. But when he finally flew back home, and people asked him as they always asked newly returned missionaries to tell a Christmas story from their mission, it didn\u2019t turn out so well. Because even though people said, Tell us a Christmas story from your mission,<\/i> what they were really saying was Tell a conversion story that happened at Christmas<\/i>, Conversion Motif 1M or so, which included the usual finding the convert at the last door on the last street on the last hour of the day, but added the seasonal touch of some holly and ivy and exceptionally good cheer to the picture, all of which made everyone listening feel even better than they did when listening to an ordinary conversion story. Make us feel even better than usual!<\/i> was what people were even more really saying when asking for a missionary Christmas story.<\/p>\n

The reason The Protagonist knew this was that the one time he tried to tell his Christmas story he just got a lot of blank and confused looks. Oh, his story was a conversion story all right, but not the sort that the clamoring crowd\u2019d been expecting. It didn\u2019t include a baptism, and he couldn\u2019t even come close to getting across what he\u2019d seen in the landscape, and of course he left out the most personal bits that really gave the story its meaning\u2014and bowdlerized like that even The Protagonist had to admit it sounded like a dumb boring story.<\/p>\n

The smiles of anticipation the crowd’d had at\u00a0the start of the story, the knowing looks of knowing for sure what was coming, just kept fading and looking more and more puzzled as he went along, and then at the end just screwed up into absolute confusion. That was it? No baptism? No liturgically white Christmas but only environmentally white? Just a pie in a chicken coop for some people you never saw and who never even got active again and who might never have actually even seen the pie and who come to think of it might actually not even have lived there? That was it? What kind of a Christmas story was that? What kind of missionary (eyebrows furrowing now) were you? Next story from someone else! The Protagonist never told it again.<\/p>\n

Even though he didn’t,\u00a0the story still meant everything to him. Seeing gray old\u00a0Belgium in a new way\u00a0got all tied up with seeing himself and people around him\u00a0in new ways too. All the things that\u2019d bugged him about Belgium started either not bugging him so much or\u00a0became\u00a0not necessarily the wrong way to do things but just another and potentially interesting way, including the bad-tasting witloof and the gray and the whiny motorcycles and the sometimes closed-mouthed people.<\/p>\n

He started understanding that people shook hands like they were holding a dead fish because they didn\u2019t want to come across as aggressive rather than because they were weak or unenthusiastic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

He started liking the horses he saw pulling plows instead of thinking they were so backward.<\/p>\n

\n

He started liking the old farms instead of thinking they were smelly, and liking the lumpy pastures with rickety fences instead of thinking they were messy.<\/p>\n

He started seeing the benefits of serious cloud-cover as opposed to the 105 degree heat of his hometown.<\/p>\n

He started waving in a friendly and not sarcastic way to those old ladies who never ever let missionaries in and thus never became precious but just kept watching fearfully from the window.<\/p>\n

He’d already liked the old men on the street who would stop and talk to you about the wars anytime you wanted, all you had to do was say 14-18 <\/i>or 40-45 <\/i>with a question mark and off they would go, but now he liked them even more.<\/p>\n

He started liking the funny dialects people spoke at him instead of thinking they were just bad Dutch.<\/p>\n

He liked the food even more the more he understood how things went together and what food meant here, and without even trying he started learning the names of a lot of the 300 local beers he didn\u2019t drink.<\/p>\n

He saw better how kind people in general were here once they got over their suspicions, even if they rarely wanted a first discussion much less a second or third, like the really sweet\u00a0lady on the old-fashioned (as in non-electrified)\u00a0farm who one night let them inside and said\u00a0she didn\u2019t want to hear any talk of religion but\u00a0gave him and Elder Klein some warm cow\u2019s milk and told them in all sincerity that she saw halos around their heads, which wasn\u2019t just the result of the dim firelit room, she assured them, which\u2019d made them feel surprisingly good.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Of all\u00a0places, Belgium was inside him, more like something he discovered\u00a0was already there instead of something he\u00a0learned, because when he later saw Flemish art and read Flemish history they weren\u2019t the only art and history he liked around Europe or even the world, but they always felt the most familiar, and not just because he was partisan but because they somehow already fit him, just like the Flemish language, or the Flemish landscape, especially the landscape with snow on it near Zichem. Okay Belgium wasn\u2019t exactly the most famous of countries, even with all its immortal art and food. It wasn\u2019t exactly the country you\u2019d expect a guy to pick as his favorite.\u00a0But it was perfect (and perfect not meaning flawless here) for him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

Oh sure, his mood’d been helped too by moving into the\u00a0new mauve-carpeted house, a move made possible because the Mission President\u2019d visited town and gotten a taste, or more precisely a whiff, of the bar-room church and had immediately told them to look for something else, which they compliantly and joyously did.\u00a0The living room was the church, the upstairs bedrooms were the Sunday School classrooms (classroom), and the modern kitchen was the modern kitchen. They couldn\u2019t live in the bedrooms\/Sunday-School-classrooms upstairs, said the rules, but they could live in the little spare room just off the kitchen, which was separate from the rest of the house, and so the four of them had gladly squeezed two bunk beds and maybe one armoire into that little room.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what changed The Protagonist’s\u00a0view of Belgium and Belgians even more than pile carpeting and efficient heating did was his epiphany\u00a0just before Epiphany while\u00a0walking unsteadily alongside a big misty field somewhere in the frozen environs of the once-sad\u00a0town called\u00a0Zichem.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is another excerpt from a manuscript I’m writing, tentatively titled <\/em>Young Men Dreaming: The Pretty Clearly Troubled But Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Live Mormon Missionary (as opposed to the strictly musical sort of missionary).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Snow White. If on Christmas Day of 1975 you were for some harebrained reason outside on the frozen Belgian tundra and you squinted up your eyes against the shiny white landscape to look east from the edge of the little town called Zichem, then you would’ve almost certainly noticed in the houseless distance the improbable sight of four overcoated and possibly harebrained missionaries-dressed-as-local-businessmen trudging along a slippery, messy path next to a big\u00a0field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn","category-missionary"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23981","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\/110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23981"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24026,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23981\/revisions\/24026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}