She's moving on.

Because of illness, my wife and I and one of our sons were unable to participate in the funeral of my brother’s widow this morning in San Gabriel, California.  That saddens me greatly.  I would deeply like to have been there.  However, we were able to watch the services via the modern and, to my mind, much under-appreciated miracle of Zoom.  I was pleased at what was said; I thought that the remarks that were given nicely captured my sister-in-law’s unique personality.  And I was grateful that my niece was willing to share what I had written with the congregation.

I found myself thinking about the modern Latter-day Saint hymn, “Each life that touches ours for good,” which is a quiet favorite of mine.  The late Karen Lynn Davidson — who wrote the lyrics of this hymn as well as those of another of my favorites, “O Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown,” which she set to a melody adapted from Johann Sebastian Bach’s oratorio St. Mathew Passion — served as a professor of English at BYU for a while, but then taught at a private school down in the San Marino neighborhood where my brother and his wife raised their family:

1. Each life that touches ours for good
Reflects thine own great mercy, Lord;
Thou sendest blessings from above
Thru words and deeds of those who love.

2. What greater gift dost thou bestow,
What greater goodness can we know
Than Christlike friends, whose gentle ways
Strengthen our faith, enrich our days.

3. When such a friend from us departs,
We hold forever in our hearts
A sweet and hallowed memory,
Bringing us nearer, Lord, to thee.

4. For worthy friends whose lives proclaim
Devotion to the Savior’s name,
Who bless our days with peace and love,
We praise thy goodness, Lord, above.

I also found myself thinking about this famous passage from John Donne’s Meditation XVII, which in turn is a part of Donne’s “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions”:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Death is an obscenity.  In many cases, it is the most unjust of oppressions.  And yet — we have no choice — we accept it, we have, most of the time, made our peace with it.  We mostly pretend that it doesn’t exist, that it will never touch us.  We’re like a herd of gazelles out on the east African savannah.  Every once in a while, with the suddenness of the crack of a rifle, death takes one of us.  Like that herd of gazelles, we look up, startled.  Within a few seconds, though, we return, heads down, to our grazing, as if nothing had happened.

I think about this not only in the sense that deaths of others remind us of our own mortality.  No, beyond that, each death impoverishes us.  Human spirits, minds, personalities are the richest, most complex things in our experience.  And each person who leaves us behind takes with him or her a unique, irreplaceable wealth of individual biography experiences.  We take friends and relatives for granted, and then they’re gone.  And the questions that we had intended to ask them someday remain unanswered.

Per assignment, my remarks today were mostly reminiscent in character.  But here is something that I said early on:

In 1945, the British author and editor Charles Williams died at the age of only fifty-eight.  One of his closest friends, C. S. Lewis, was among those who were stunned by Williams’s death. Two weeks later, Lewis wrote a letter to a friend in which he commented on his reaction:

You will have heard of the death of my dearest friend, Charles Williams and, no doubt, prayed for him. For me too, it has been, and is, a great loss. But not at all a dejecting one. It has greatly increased my faith. Death has done nothing to my idea of him, but he has done—oh, I can’t say what—to my idea of death. It has made the next world much more real and palpable. We all feel the same. How one lives and learns!

What Lewis meant, I think, was that, when the idea of Charles Williams and the idea of death collided, in his mind it was death that had to give.  Williams’s personality had been so vivid, so powerful, and so unique that, Lewis was confident, death could not erase it.

I’ve had similar thoughts about [my sister-in-law’s] passing—and that remembered passage from Lewis’s letter came powerfully and immediately to my mind.  She, too, was a vivid and unique personality, and I don’t doubt at all that she still is.

A new online article appeared today in the virtual pages of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.  It was written by Brian C. Hales and is entitled  “Simultaneous Promised Lands, and Lamanites by Location?  Possible Ramifications of the Book of Mormon Limited Geography Theory”:

Abstract: This paper is composed of three parts connected consecutively because their conclusions build upon each other. The first part investigates the transportation methods used in the Book of Mormon, concluding that horse and river travel contributed little and that foot travel dominated all journeying. The second part uses that conclusion to estimate the overall dimensions of the Promised Land by examining Alma the Elder’s journey from Nephi to Zarahemla. This exercise reaffirms the 200-by-500-mile size promoted by John L. Sorenson decades ago. The third part looks at four ramifications of this 100,000 square-mile Promised Land footprint when stamped upon a map of the Western Hemisphere. (1) It allows for more than one Promised Land (occupied by other God-led immigrants) to exist simultaneously in the Americas. (2) It predicts that no matter where the Book of Mormon Promised Land was originally located, most Native Americans today would have few or no direct ties to the Jaredites-Lehites-Mulekites. (3) It demonstrates that research efforts to identify evidence of the Book of Mormon peoples could be exploring locations thousands of miles away from their original settlements. And (4) If any of the post-400 ce localized population losses in the Americas due to disease, war, or unknown causes involved the original Promised Land location, then the primary locus of organic evidence of the existence of the Jaredite-Lehite-Mulekite populations might have been largely destroyed.

See also “Interpreting Interpreter: A Limited Geography,” written by Kyler Rasmussen, which likewise appeared today:

This post is a summary of the article “Unavailable Genetic Evidence, Multiple Simultaneous Promised Lands, and Lamanites by Location? Possible Ramifications of the Book of Mormon Limited Geography Theory” by Brian C. Hales in Volume 56 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreter series is available at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/.

The Takeaway: Hales uses information on methods of transportation in the Book of Mormon to conclude that the narrative takes place in a limited geographical area (approximately 200 by 500 miles), which has implications for prophetic references to the “promised land” (sometimes referring to a limited area and sometimes to the entire American continent), how we define “Lamanites” (as a term with application that has shifted over time to apply to more than the descendants of Laman), and whether we should expect to find concrete evidence of Lehite nations in the Americas.