Finding Zion

Fellow Musers; I am happy to announce a return to Mona's Gospel Musings each Sunday. I hope you will join me again, and as we used to, muse together here. The romantic side of our time overseas (nearly a year now) has been mused upon at Mona's Musings with a Hint of Romance, which blog I will continue - featuring YOUR romances and more specific ideas on strengthening marriage. I have also been invited to become a regular contributor to Mormon Mommy Blogs (at least monthly). However, here we are at gospel musings, and its a Sunday, and so we begin. I love you and look very very forward to your thoughts.



As a new expat in the United Kingdom, I found I could regard people like postcards, idly turning them over in my mind with mild interest: three-dimensional-me did not expect to be included in a world that felt like a guidebook. At church though, I assumed I would be find instant and comfy assimilation.

Cue the proverbial-culture-shock: we stood on, what to me, felt like an island called the Staines Ward: the most ethnically diverse group of Saints in all of London. Sunday after Sunday, I buzzed round the middle like a flustered bee hitting glass until at last we cross-pollinated: a magic moment that dissolved the window between us.

When I walked into the chapel that morning, I felt drawn to the woman on the other side of the room. She watched me with a shy smile, perfect teeth and wide eyes glistening against a chocolate face. After Relief Society, she inched her way to me, ready to make contact, her beauty even more breathtaking at close range.

"I love your hair," she said.

What? It took me a split second to process her Nigerian spin on English. My hair? My hair is a mass of coarse curls, once brown, now streaked with unruly silver. I dislike it very much most days.

"I love your eyes and face and make-up," she continued passionately.

Blue eyes, white face, Bare Minerals.

"I love the way you talk -- and I loooove," (emphasis on love), "the way you dress."

Without taking my eyes off hers, I mentally compared a blue blazer and black skirt with her flowing...Flamboyant... FLORESCENT --

Oh my! She thinks I'm EXOTIC!

Sound of break glass.

A week later I was called as Relief Society President of two hundred women from twenty different nations: a village with too many windows to look like 'Mormonville' to me, but nevertheless, built on the foundation of apostles and prophets; one faith and one baptism (Ephesians 4 & Mosiah 18). My sole journal entry for 11 July 2010 reads: "God help me.God
help me."

He did. He showed me that you cannot pack a box with scrapbooks, funeral potatoes, and snicker-doodle props, stamp it "Mormon Women" and ship it overseas. He taught me about the real Zion, a phenomenon that will not be defined or contained that way: it is organic. It breathes and grows and if necessary, shatters silly notions in order to expand (D&C 82:14). The tiny pane from which I used to view the world has, after a year amongst my sisters, morphed into a great glass conservatory and I contentedly dangle like a prism there, spinning in the sunlight.

Muse with me: What does Zion mean to you? What experiences have you had in the church that relate to the ideal of Zion?

The Holy Men

I woke on Tuesday morning, December 2nd, and felt an almost instant prompting to go to the Church website. I fought it all through my morning gospel study and when I finally made it downstairs to head off for exercise, I could resist no more. I opened the website and there saw the headline that Elder Wirthlin had passed away. The flood of tears that followed surprised me, though I remember feeling just the same magnificent and holy sadness when Elder Maxwell, Elder Faust, and Pres. Hinckley passed away.

I just held my head in my hands and wept and wept and wept. The tears are still fresh on my cheeks.

The Council of the Twelve ARE true Apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am so deeply, deeply grateful and beholden to these men who serve as our anchor to the truth (Eph. 4:11-13). The office has always been important, but becomes more and more relevant as the last days intensify with confusion on every hand.

A few years back, while living in Florida, where “Christian” radio is big, I remember hearing a talk show host interview a leading Christian theologian, minister, and author. He was describing a compatriot, of his same stature, who ministered in Europe. This European theologian and philosopher had come to the United States to study “American” Christianity. The most important question he had come to seek out, which no Christian leader had yet been able to answer was this: “Who are your holy men?” That is, who are the persons in your American movement that are truly revered as holy? -- the ones that people look to for infallible leadership because they have attained such a degree of uprightness and humility? This man being interviewed, the one telling the story, had to admit with some embarrassment that he knew of none such in America.

We know the “holy men”.

And as America, indeed, the entire world, reels in a leadership vacuum, we are prospering under their example and teachings and inspiration.

“Man may deceive his fellow-men, deception may follow deception, and the children of the wicked one may have power to seduce the foolish and untaught, till naught but fiction feeds the many, and the fruit of falsehood carries in its current the giddy to the grave; but one touch with the finger of love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior [we may add, through his Apostles]…strikes it all into insignificance….” (Oliver Cowdery, JSH appendix).