Facebook makes me cry a lot this time of year. The month-long onslaught of back-to-school photos wrings my heart and wets my eyes. My nest has been empty for a while, but apparently still not long enough for the ache to go away. It isn’t exactly envy of my friends who still have their babies at home, although it is partly that. I don’t necessarily want to go back in time, although I think I would if the choice were offered. But those days were hard, and I don’t have any confidence I’d do any better a second time around. I’d just make different mistakes. I don’t think there is…

My favorite moment in the film “Babbette’s Feast” is at the beginning of the feast from the film’s name. The feast is being shared by the lowly parishioners of a tiny country church in 18th-century Denmark. The foods, prepared by the French immigrant maid, Babette, are utterly exotic and strange to the villagers, who have lived lives of uncompromising plainness. As they taste the first course of this real French meal, they look around the table, wondering if what everyone is tasting is as sublime as what they are tasting. As the courses follow, the villagers blink in disbelief, transfixed with the sensory delight of beautiful food, the likes of which they…

An early typewriter, patented by Dr. Samuel Ward Francis in 1857, was nicknamed a literary piano. When I think about what could be created on a literary piano, it is certainly different from the document made by the monotone tapping of the word processors I know. Under the direction of Orson Pratt, my great-great-grandfather, John Davis, translated the Book of Mormon into Welsh. At that time, Dan Jones had done a great missionary work in Wales and there were thousands of converts, who were anxious to read the Book of Mormon in their native tongue. John Davis knew the urgency of getting the translation completed. Although his translation was accurate,…

This weekend I had the opportunity to see “The Hunchback of Notre Dame“. As it often does, the song “God Help the Outcasts” resonated deeply with me. For those less familiar with the musical, Esméralda (a French Roma girl) sings this song in the Notre Dame cathedral. As a French Roma girl, she has suffered much persecution, poverty, and misfortune. She finds herself there because she came to check on Quasimodo, who has been ill-treated. While there, she sings this song as a sort of prayer. She begins by saying she doesn’t know if he is listening or even there, but “Still I see your face and wonder, Were you once…

I have been thinking a lot about journeys — both in a literal, physical sense as well as figurative sense, and including the many iterations and types of journeys that occur in the scriptures and Church history. Last week I departed from Utah as I made a cross-country move to Philadelphia. My driving route criss-crossed several of the historic routes taken by 19th Century settlers heading west, although my direction was the opposite. At my particular life juncture, my cross-country move is accompanied by assorted other major life changes and I am feeling somewhat emotionally and mentally taxed while navigating them. I have again and again been thinking back to…

In preparing a talk last week, I re-read Joseph Smith’s earliest account of the First Vision for the first time in a long time; I had forgotten how beautiful it is: I looked upon the sun, the glorious luminary of the earth, and also the moon, rolling in their majesty through the heavens, and also the stars shining in their courses, and the earth also upon which I stood, and the beasts of the field, and the fowls of heaven, and the fish of the waters, and also man walking forth upon the face of the earth in majesty and in the strength of beauty, whose power and intelligence in…