Place and Pilgrimage: About my Church History trip

When we flew into Boston, it was raining. Most of the other students in my Church History had never been to the east, so they were admiring everything—“welcome to Boston” signs, Red Socks paraphernalia, accents sounding over the speakers. I noticed all that too—I just was more interested in the rain. After we boarded the red coach bus that would be our traveling home for the next five days, I called my mom in San Diego.

“I’m in Boston now,” I said. Without further ado, she asked the question I had been expecting.

“Is it raining?”

Of course it was raining. This wasn’t the first time that I had taken a non-stop Delta flight from Salt Lake to Boston. My family moved to Connecticut from Utah when I was ten, and we had taken the same flight. And when we arrived, it was raining. It rained all three hours to Connecticut. My mom hated moving to the east and hated living there—so of course she remembered the rain.

My Church History class trip was to consist of an “educational and academic” tour through the eastern sites—Sharon, Palmyra, Harmony, Kirtland. I jumped at the opportunity to be a part of BYU’s first

experimental “class on wheels” because I love Church History and, unlike my mother, I love New England. I had been looking for chance to go back there, and was delighted such a convenient and exciting opportunity as this trip.

I was most looking forward to our first stop: Sharon, Vermont, the birthplace of the prophet Joseph Smith. When I was fourteen, I had gone to girls camp at Camp Joseph, near the monument. Camp that year was one of my favorite experiences—I guess you could say I had a spiritual awakening there—and I wanted to relive at least a piece of it.

When we got there, it was raining (surprise, surprise), and I had an annoying chest cold that made it a little difficult to pay attention during the tour. But, despite the rain, the site was beautiful! The last time I’d been there, everything was green; this time, I was amazed by the colorful foliage on the ground and in the trees. I walked around the grounds by myself for a few minutes, admiring the familiar granite monument reaching thirty-nine and a half feet into the sky (one foot for each year of Joseph’s life). I wondered over to the remains of the cabin where Joseph was born. As a fourteen-year-old, I had placed my foot on the Smiths’ doorstep and took a picture. I still have that picture in my scrapbook. So I placed my foot in about the same location and took another picture.

That place held a lot of history for me. It held my own past, my family’s past, and, of course, Joseph’s past. Later, I pointed out a spot where I had been stung by a bee to my teacher, and he said “Wow, Sara, you are on your own personal pilgrimage.” I suppose I was. A lot of Mormons make this same Church History “pilgrimage”—it seems to be a requirement for Mormon families to spend at least one summer touring these sites. I was on that pilgrimage, but I was also on a personal pilgrimage, a quest for a piece of my past self that would enable me to see the present more clearly.

Why do places have the power to transport us, to teach us? Places are just…places, geographic locations that have no meaning other than what we give them. Then why, at every stop we made, did I fell compelled to pull out my camera in a vain attempt to capture everything I saw and felt? Why did my roommate collect leafs from the Smith farm, the Sacred Grove, the Susquehanna River, and other sacred sites? Why did my class mates take turns bearing testimony of the prophet Joseph Smith in the Peter Whitmer farm in Fayette? Why even have this trip—why does the Church spend so much money purchasing and preserving these sites, anyway?

Maybe its just human nature—but that is hardly an answer. I think it is because places are living monuments, living testimonies, of the things that happened there. I know that I was once a slightly confused fourteen-year-old. And I know that despite my immaturity, I had, and still have, a testimony of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ, because the place where I felt this knowledge burn within me for the first time is real, tangible, and it still stands—I know, I’ve been there.

Our Church builds monuments and we visit them because we believe that the events we claim as the foundation of our religion actually happened. They happened in reality, in time, and in space. Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ in the Sacred Grove. He found the Gold Plates in the Hill Cumorah, and translated them in Harmony. As Latter-day Saints, we believe that these things really happened—Mormonism is not a philosophy or a nice idea. To us, it is reality. This is why we believe in the Spirit of Places: place is powerful because it makes history alive and doctrine reality.