Purchased at Such Precious Cost, Abandoned for So Very Little

In America today, condemning and turning your back on the faith and heritage of your family has become almost popular. It shouldn’t be.

Pioneer Couple at Graves, by Michael T. Malm

Happy Pioneer Day everyone! (even if you’re not in Utah, where we celebrate with hard ice cream like it’s 1847).

I’ve been working in my free time on a write-up of the known history of my early Hess ancestors – courageous immigrants who arrived 1753 in Pennsylvania, America’s compassionate colony for religious refugees. All the evidence suggests my family, like so many others at the time, was fleeing persecution in the Old World that became so severe – imprisonment, executions – as to compel certain groups of hated believers (including Mennonites and Anabaptists) to abandon the motherland they had once loved. 

The sweetness of knowing who you are. Reading and relishing the few shreds of evidence in our possession about Frederick and Rachel’s lives has been surprising therapy to my soul. I’m not the only one who finds the incessant anger and accusation of our age exhausting. But when I draw even a little closer to my forefathers and mothers, it does something inside – a relief, a settling, a grounding, even a thrill. 

Whatever curse there may be associated with our hearts being estranged as families – there’s an opposite blessing from closing that gap that’s been overwhelming to personally feel.

It all makes me wonder what any of this would or could mean for the many young (and old) men and women flailing emotionally right now – grappling to know who they really are and how to hurt less. What difference could it make not just to know where they come from – but to experience a newfound sense of identity and connection as they begin a new relationship with their own people? (Family history as public health initiative in our mental health crisis, anyone? Click here to get started at the world’s largest family history site – you’ll be heartened at what you can find even just with a name and date from one of your ancestors).

In a quiet Sabbath moment, I wept yesterday recognizing the new love I felt for these people I had never met – but who are very much a part of me. Frederick and Rachel yearned to have a place to worship their God freely. Yet rather than arriving to some American paradise, this young family endured hunger, sickness and the terror of two wars – the French and Indian and the American Revolution – happening right around them. This, of course, was a moment in which nearly 7000 patriot soldiers (along with nearly 20K others lost to prison and disease) gave their lives to establish an enduring land of liberty – to think, act and believe what we want today.

Dear sacrifices for a dear cause. This last weekend, I also had the privilege of attending a reunion of some of the descendants of Frederick and Rachel – whose grandson, Jacob (my namesake) later heard a message on the Missouri frontier about a “pillar of light….above the brightness of the sun,” which descended gradually until it fell upon a boy prophet, Joseph Smith. 

There was Something and Someone amazing in that pillar (more here). Jacob trusted what Joseph said – and his entire family too, like so many of their descendants today. Joseph Smith stayed at the Hess home for 13 days in the fall of 1838. Jacob’s son John remembers the “kindness and simplicity of his nature” – saying “there was something heavenly and angelic in his looks that I never witnessed in the countenance of any other person.”

Although just a boy of 14-years old himself, John said he learned to love Joseph “more dearly than any other person I ever met, my father and mother not excepted.”

The next time John saw Joseph was in chains at the Richmond Courthouse – walking 6 miles every day to see the imprisoned prophet for the next three weeks in cold November weather.

Six years later Joseph would be murdered by a mob – leaving behind John and many others “convinced beyond doubt that he was a prophet of God.” That was a testimony that “never left” John.

For that conviction, the Hess family was driven from their farmland and later robbed of all their goods; John’s aging father Jacob was stricken with a shock of paralysis, no doubt related to the extreme stress.

C. C. A. Christensen (1831–1912), Saints Driven from Jackson County Missouri, circa 1878.

When it became clear they were not welcome even in this “land of the free” – having grown weary, like their European forebears, of being driven from their homes, raped and killed due to their faith – Brigham Young led our people and family out of their city beautiful in Illinois.

Months of trudging through deep mud in a thawing Iowa winter was too much for the aging Jacob, who was buried in a mass grave at a place sacred to our family, Mount Pisgah, Iowa. 

Yesterday in Church, two elderly members of our ward who have likewise given much of their lives in service, shared in tears about some of the sacrifices of these pioneers trying to reach the Utah valley. They recounted Mary Gobles having her frostbitten toes cut off after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, with her traveling company having left over 200 people in shallow graves covered with rock so wolves wouldn’t eat the bodies.

Why would people make such sacrifices, and endure so much?

Although logistical mistakes clearly played a role in these Martin and Willie company tragedies, those mistakes are not the lasting legacy of such treks. In response to criticism of the late season journey, one older pioneer, Francis Webster, famously said publicly many years after arriving in the valley:

I ask you to stop this criticism. You are discussing a matter you know nothing about. Cold historic facts mean nothing here for they give no proper interpretation of the questions involved. Mistake to send the Hand Cart Company out so late in the season? Yes. But I was in that Company and my wife was in it. . . . I have looked back many times to see who was pushing my cart but my eyes saw no one. I knew then that the Angels of God were there. Was I sorry that I chose to come by hand cart? No. Neither then nor any minute of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay and I am thankful that I was privileged to come in the Martin Hand Cart Company. (italics my own)

Like Frederick and Rachel, Jacob (and Elizabeth) and John (and Emeline) – and Joseph and Brigham too – they each willingly suffered what they did for a reason. And a purpose. And a Person.

Pioneers burying a baby.

A passion greater than everything else. When Jesus stood before Pilate in the hours before his own torture, he said “my kingdom is not of this world.” It’s this otherworldly kingdom that believers the world over – all throughout history – have prayed will “come.” Martin Luther King Jr. called it the “beloved community” – a place the Saints today call “Zion,” a place we work towards every day where there will be “one heart and one mind” and “no poor among [us].”

How many people across the ages have given their all for this kingdom – sacrificing their lives, their pleasures, their privileges – to be able to do even a small part to advance the work of gathering people to this kingdom.

I grew up watching my own father and mother give everything for the same cause – finding an evident joy and peace that simply doesn’t come across in the flashy celebrity smiles all around us.

My grandfather Milton Hess, another real-life hero of mine, spoke of a moment when he was encouraged to turn away from his faith – leaving it behind to pick up another life. Instead of doing that, Grandpa left the raucous military party and drove back to the barracks in an open-air jeep, singing:

“True to the faith that our parents have cherished

True to the truth for which martyrs have perished.

To God’s command, soul, heart and hand,

Faithful and true we will ever stand.”

Grandpa Milton Hess and Grandma Fern, with Uncle Tad

Grandpa as I knew him!

Seeing great beauty as only ugliness. Others, of course, make a different decision. Nephi wrote anciently that the things which some people “esteem to be of great worth, both to the body and soul, others set at naught and trample under their feet. Yea, even the very God of Israel do men trample under their feet….they set him at naught, and hearken not to the voice of his counsels.”

The very passion and dream that so many others have embraced at a precious cost, others turn away from as essentially worthless – not even worth another minute of their time or attention.

For some, there is little thought or energy to the decision. For others, of course, there is a great wrestle involved internally, over a long period of time. I respect that, along with their space to choose.

I know from experience how soul-stretching it is to try and live the gospel of Jesus Christ in this cynical and seductive world today. And for those who step away, I acknowledge the goodness of their hearts and the thoughtfulness with which they seek to live. So many of these people remain dear to me.

Even so, I lament and mourn the choice of those rejecting their own heritage of faith – knowing in my gut how much they are ultimately giving up, if they continue. For people like me, it will never not hurt to witness this kind of aching loss and rejection. But in the same breath, I commit to love these former brothers and sisters of faith forever – no matter what – as long as they want me a part of their life.

And precisely because I love them, I will never give up hoping they will see how precious the truth is they have stepped away from – both historically and currently. 

Those hard historical questions. By the way, none of this is to over-glorify such history. There are challenging and confusing things in all history, much like today, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable of society. I have lots of my own questions about what life was like for my great great grandmother, Sarah Lavina Miller, who endured the certain heartaches of plural marriage as a wife of John W. Hess. I can’t wait to meet her one day!

Sarah Lavina Miller in an enhanced photograph estimated from 1875, when she would have been 25 years old.

Yet it’s one thing to ask important and challenging questions – and quite another to dismiss the faith and courage of an entire generation as morally condemnable, portraying them as cartoonish villains driven entirely by pleasure and power.  

This acidic historical narrative portrays actors of a previous era as fundamentally motivated by the basest of instincts (and nothing more). I would feel frustrated by such an attitude if I didn’t feel so much pity for those who have embraced such extreme suspicion and cynicism (reminiscent of so much partisan politics around us today).

The question I would honestly ask is this: How would your own life look if someone applied the same suspicious-to-the-max lenses to evaluating everything you have said or done?

Not fun. I know what it’s like to be smeared and portrayed as someone you are not, and so do many of my colleagues.

For those who see themselves enlightened by some “special knowledge” of the true dastardly nature of some of these same historical figures, consider that experts estimate 90% of anti-Latter-day Saint rhetoric today references back to some of the same small set of defamatory actors who intentionally conjured up falsehoods designed to make Joseph Smith and others look like awful, despicable souls. (Because these affidavits and statements come from the same era, they’re frequently presented online as if they were historical facts, rather than the 19th century equivalent of the National Enquirer).

If this is what you want to hang your hat on – sweeping away the miraculous and heart-healing work began by these same early believers, you really do have my deepest pity.

Many of you hold on to such angry convictions with a ferocity and certitude that would make even a convicted Christian blush. Yet even so, I would want to ask further: Do you feel peace about these convictions? Do they bring you joy? 

That’s the sign of sure truth. Even the Buddha once taught “follow the peace.”

If you don’t possess that right now, maybe let yourself fantasize one day about the possibility that it’s you in the wrong – not only these historical figures who tremble before your withering gaze.

Perhaps that old pioneer said it best, “I ask you to stop this criticism. You are discussing a matter you know nothing about. Cold historic facts mean nothing here for they give no proper interpretation of the questions involved.”

Far beyond that, do your best to also hold on to the possibility of beautiful things being actually True, capital T – beyond your wildest imagination. That’s how good the truth actually is, I bear my own witness. It’s why the angels called it “good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”

If you’re needing some of that in your life right now, I hope you feel some of it today.

And if you don’t, well hey: you can at least have a big ice cream cone wherever you are – and blame it on Utah. In the absence of lasting peace and joy, I suppose ice cream is a pretty good second place.