I also got to attend a conference about Latin American Jews. Recommended Reading: Hotel Bolivia, by Leo Spitzer.
Better than the conference was that visit to the relative. They have a home by one of Vermont's many lakes. A calm day with a cool breeze. Tooling around the lake in a pontoon boat. Life is a paradise.
Incongruously, I also visited the birth Place of Joseph Smith. The place is located not far from "Sharon" Vermont. He was the son of a dirt poor farmer who lost his shirt and had to travel from farm to farm, sharecropping as he went. His followers put up an obelisk there nearly a century ago. It is made of a single piece of highly polished Granite. The top of it shines brightly on a sunny day and it was a real piece of engineering to get it up country roads using only horsepower, manpower, and yankee ingenuity. As always with the Mormons, the men solved one engineering problem after another, until they reached one final one that technology couldn't solve. Mud so deep it swallowed a buggy. Mother nature took care of that problem when a freeze came and froze the mud just in time for the dedication on Joseph Smith's birthday.
As usual, I found the place by serendipity. I was looking for a place to eat and found myself lost (and going the opposite direction from the one I thought I was going). The bargain for my pancakes involved listening to a spiel about that man Joseph Smith. My wife says my face said I didn't want to be there. She was right. According to the official myth, the boy was confused about religion. At last he decided to meditate on the subject in the woods. When he did this he had a life-altering vision of two men, presumably one Jesus and the other "God" -- side by side. At least that is how he interpreted that vision. He thought that he was destined to solve the problem of all the "confusion" between the sects of Christianity and years later he'd claim to find a book made of gold that he'd translate with the help of the Angel Moroni. Did that vision solve the problem he sought to solve? There is still a powerful spate of religious confusion, and Mormonism has contributed it's share to that. So, no I don't think so. But his life altering vision transformed his own life, and those who bought it's content from him. Life Altering visions tend to do that. Literalism gets in the way of valuing such experiences. Visions use the language of dreams. They aren't even intended to be taken literally. This is true even of the Book of Mormon:
The Elder kept his end of the bargain. After listening to the whole spiel, we were rewarded because the Elder knew where we could get a "real" local flavor meal. Pancakes thick enough to use as a plate. It was worth it. Nothing better than real pancakes with real maple syrup.
Posted by cholte at July 1, 2004 08:11 PM