Last night at 6:30 PM Pacific time, most members of my family dialed in to a conference call to Provo, Utah—to the lobby of Stover Hall on BYU campus, to be specific. My brother Benjamin—seventh child, sixth freshman at BYU, fifth missionary, third son, and a few days shy of nineteen—was about to open his mission call.<\/p>\n
With six different lines dialed in, and with several of those lines on speaker to accommodate even more participants, it was no small feat simply to follow the telephone conversation: the Frandsens are prolix as well as prolific. On top of that, the ambient noise in the Stover Hall lobby was just a few decibels short of shattering: a crowd of Benjamin’s friends and ward members, male and female—even his BYU bishop, I think—had gathered for what, during this season, must be a near-daily ritual to witness the opening of the call. After all parties were connected, Benjamin got started, narrating the process into his cell phone: insert letter opener into large white envelope, fumble through the colorful sheaf inside, locate the right sheet, try not to skip ahead, “Dear Elder Frandsen… You are here by called… You are assigned to labor… Germany Munich\/ Austria mission!” The telephone line shredded into squeals and exclamations, but it was the Stover lobby that really erupted: in the video of the event that Benjamin emailed to me today, the room burst into sponaneous cheers and extended applause, Benjamin beaming but mostly composed, absorbing the shared joy and memory and projection and release of this collective living of a life-moment. <\/p>\n
Every missionary in my family has served in Europe. Our collective harvest has been small, and, surveyed without the eye of faith, its generational yield is unlikely to increase much. I occasionally wonder why we send missionaries to Europe, I wonder why we send ninteen-year-olds, I worry about those nineteen-year-olds we don’t send. There are real costs to, even casualties of, our modern Mormon lifeplan—as there are of any fully theorized subject position, really, particularly one as rooted in a to-the-bedrock moral plot as ours is—and there are those who must consider those costs and casualties. But the rewards—the rewards! To be able to step into a role infused with such a rich mythology and invigorating ethic, an identity that houses so many of our collective hopes and vulnerabilities, and to do so to the singing and shouting of throngs—well, Lord, give me at least seven children, six freshman at BYU, five missionaries, and three sons of my own.<\/p>\n
At 6:30 Pm Pacific time yesterday, it was sweet to be a Frandsen, sweet to be a Saint, sweet to orient another arm of the family compass backward and forward in time, across longitude and latitude, across the veil, even, to the promised land of the shared soul. <\/p>\n
Oh, my brother, did you come for help to me?
\nPray and give me your right hand
\nOh, my sister, did you come for help to me?
\nPray and give me your right hand<\/p>\nOh, the land I am bound for
\nSweet Canaan’s happy land
\nI am bound for
\nSweet Canaan’s happy land
\nI am bound for
\nSweet Canaan’s happy land
\nPray give me your right hand<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last night at 6:30 PM Pacific time, most members of my family dialed in to a conference call to Provo, Utah—to the lobby of Stover Hall on BYU campus, to be specific. My brother Benjamin—seventh child, sixth freshman at BYU, fifth missionary, third son, and a few days shy of nineteen—was about to open his mission call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928","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\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}