Remembering

Several years ago I heard a remarkable quote that will not leave me. Thomas S. Monson, a past president of our church—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—said, "When you learn about your ancestors, you learn about yourself." It's a simple enough statement, but I pondered it for weeks, then months, and now it has been years. I mean, who doesn't want to learn more about themselves? Isn't that one of the main purposes of life?

This simply stated truth was actually the driving force for me in writing Hope's Power. I took a one page history, written by Margaret's daughters, and really studied it. I thought deeply about the one sentence that said she was apprenticed to be a dressmaker at age 14 for 2 years. I asked myself a lot of questions. What would that have been like? What class of people would send their youngest daughter to be apprenticed, and why? What would she have done with that knowledge? Would she have lived near to or far from her family while at her apprenticeship? What was her family like? I knew that none of them joined the Church, as she did, but why didn't they? When I studied the temple work Margaret did for her family, she did only Mary's and her parents'. Why? Why did Susannah and her husband and child travel all the way to America, only to leave Margaret in St. Louis? And what was so remarkable about Margaret that the Chief wanted to take her away from her new husband? What would it have been like, to get married two weeks before embarking on a life-changing journey that would take you far from home and loved ones, and involve many unknowns, challenges, and trials? These and many other questions were ones I asked myself as I buckled down to begin writing this novel. And I did learn a lot about myself in the process.

I recently listened to this wonderful podcast, with Margaret Bendroth, a historian of American religion, about her book, The Spiritual Practice of Remembering, and I highly recommend it if this interests you. She talks about the importance of remembering our dead ancestors. She says, "But the underlying idea is that the living still owe something to the dead and that there is this eternal connection. These people are not dead and gone. They’re still in your life and you can help, or they can help you."

When asked what defines a spiritual practice, she answered, "...to me, a spiritual practice is something that takes the ordinary—an ordinary act that is part of your everyday day or everyday practice—and imbues it with larger eternal meaning." And in regards to memory as a spiritual practice: "I think memory has to be a spiritual practice because we don’t do it normally. We don’t have a good cultural vocabulary for remembering that we easily live—we live in the present."

Then she points out that through telling stories, we are connecting with our own history on a much deeper level. She says, "And so, we are actually doing it. We are actually being people of history when we tell these stories. When we create narratives."

So, let's keep sharing our stories! Two of my readers shared with me that reading Hope's Power made them turn immediately to their own family history and seek out their own stories, and that they were already thinking of creative ways to share those stories. This is so exciting to me, and I hope more people do it! Not only will it bring your ancestors to life for you and help you know and understand them better, you'll learn a lot about yourself in the process! And then there are some other really great side benefits as well. Check out these wonderful blessings below. There are so many reasons to look back in time, to help us make sense of the here and now:

Rachael