Sabbath Devotional :: A Blessing Upon the Land

Trying to make family history fun and relevant to others, I recently hosted a tea party with some relatives to honor a British pioneer ancestor’s birthday. Ellen Williams died a hundred years ago this month. We have a handful of photos of her, but she didn’t leave a journal or personal history. I don’t know if she was excited to exercise her newly-granted right to vote in 1920 a few years before she died. And I don’t know if Ellen thought much about her descendants, and what life would be like a century later.

However, being a family historian, I often think about being a good ancestor as well as a good descendant. It’s actually a lot easier to be a good descendant — you can research, honor, and care for historical memories. You can write and share and deal with their life legacies. Perhaps there is some therapy required for generational trauma, or hard decisions about what messy truths to carry forward. Yet for the most part, history is fixed. It is not all revealed, but there are limits to the available records and a finite amount of information to reckon with.

Being a good ancestor is more complicated. There are immediate physical considerations: am I organizing my household and memories so that the important things will be passed down? Am I writing and sharing my life story in a meaningful way? Am I making choices that will benefit my descendants financially and relationally? There are emotional concerns: how will my behaviors and attitudes impact my descendants? Will they be proud of me or horrified at the choices I made? I think about this on a societal level as well as a personal one: as planetary concerns evolve, for example, will my descendants think that having a household pet, eating meat, using air conditioning, or driving a car were bad the way we now understand past racist attitudes to be? Posterity will be our future judge as well as our legacy.

It’s hard to know how this legacy will endure, and which stories will be perpetuated. Ellen had a lifetime of experiences and ideas I don’t know; instead, we tell one story about burning down the outhouse, because that was passed on by grandchildren. In only a century, most artifacts, stories, and memories are gone.

When I think about the challenge of preserving the relatively recent past, I’m impressed at how the Nephites cared about their descendants’ future. The Book of Mormon demonstrates the far-seeing consciousness of those recordkeepers: from Nephi knowing his writings had to be on metal plates to endure, to Enos covenanting with the Lord to preserve the records for future generations, to Mormon and Moroni and Ether compiling these works that no one in their lifetime would read. Nephi speaks to us directly: “You and I shall stand face to face before his bar; and ye shall know that I have been commanded of him to write these things” (2 Nephi 33:11). This transgenerational thinking is unusual — we don’t get that sense of scope and foresight in the Bible. It is inspiring to think of caring for unborn future generations so strongly that we pray for them, covenant for them, and leave records written directly to and for them.

Being a good ancestor, the way these ancient Nephites were, required acts of faith, hope, and charity. They had faith in record preservation throughout centuries, faith that their people’s story wouldn’t be erased forever from history. They had faith that a future recipient would be able to find, translate, and care about the message. It was an act of desperate hope. Mormon’s narrative and Moroni’s subsequent burial of his time capsule stone box are also acts of supreme charity — of love for a dying people, love for the enemies who destroyed them, and love for this future audience (us).

D&C 10:46-51 explains how the ancient Nephites also left a blessing upon this land in their prayers for far-distant time and people: “And, behold, all the remainder of this work does contain all those parts of my gospel which my holy prophets . . . desired in their prayers should come forth unto this people. And I said unto them, that it should be granted unto them according to their faith in their prayers; . . .Now, this is not all — their faith in their prayers was that this gospel should be made known also, if it were possible that other nations should possess this land; And thus they did leave a blessing upon this land in their prayers, that whosoever should believe in this gospel in this land might have eternal life; Yea, that it might be free unto all of whatsoever nation, kindred, tongue, or people they may be.”

This Nephite record speaks to our time, and the book of Helaman’s tumultuous governmental upheavals feel particularly relevant. In Elder Bednar’s recent General Conference address, he counseled, “Please remember that the Book of Mormon looks to the future and contains important principles, warnings and lessons intended for me and you in the circumstances and challenges of our present day.” Those golden plates were kept and preserved — guarded and saved — so that voices from the dust could again share warnings and testimony across time and space, to us. And they remind us of He who guards and saves us, even the great Keeper and Savior of mankind.

Like keeping records and organizing heirlooms, elections are important opportunities to shape the kind of ancestors we will become to the future world. I am fasting today, praying for a blessing upon this land. And I invite you to vote this week. May our choices now, and the legacies we leave, bless generations to come.