See Your Beauty, Feel Your Power
I.
MY GRANDMOTHER TRAVELED the world during the waking sleep of her final days in a Salt Lake City hospice center. Sometimes she imagined herself in Austria, at other times in Japan, Massachusetts, or Virginia. As a former military wife, her memories spanned the globe. And when she revisited those memories, she always found work to do. There were roasts to cook, table settings to arrange, family members to speak with. “Please, thread the sewing machine for me!” she begged my mother as she moved her hands back and forth along the blankets, sewing in her mind.
“Those who are dying,” her doctor explained, “often feel they have work to complete before they are ready to let go.”
I wondered then about the work Grandma had done all the days of her life. And I wondered if during those final days Grandma ever imagined herself back at work in her rose garden.
II.
I fingered the pale pink basket on a fall afternoon, nine years earlier. Spilling over the edges were roses, a gift from my grandmother at my daughter’s birth. Even into her ninth decade my grandmother still grew and arranged roses to grace the lives of friends and neighbors.
“And when will you have her blessed?” she asked.
“Blessed?” I said in surprise. “Never. We don’t have anything to do with the Mormon Church.”
My grandmother loved roses. Our photo album is dotted with pictures of petals in soft shades of pink, yellow, white, and red. Grandmother’s rose garden framed summertime family portraits. Roses formed the background for births, deaths, and Sunday meetings. In the pages of my memory, fresh-cut roses line her refrigerator, carefully preserved until the next opportunity for sharing.
“Thanks, Grandma, these are lovely,” I told her before sliding the basket onto the table.
When I was younger, I didn’t much care for roses. Perhaps they seemed too formal and conservative for my colorful tastes. Or perhaps it was the gardening itself that scared me. It seemed too uncertain, that business of trusting the cycles and seasons, of creating alongside the sun and the soil. I couldn’t control it; I couldn’t even take full credit for the results. And so I didn’t do it. I didn’t realize then that life is like gardening, a dance of faith in which the gardener is both cultivator and beneficiary of the rewards.
In those years I searched for beauty independently, creating my life without regard for the rhythms of nature or the God who created it. In retrospect it’s little wonder that no flowers grew in my world, for I had made myself its god. I studied feminism, became the breadwinner for our little family, and comforted myself with the illusion of control and freedom. When I called and signed up to attend a Native American healing ceremony, I didn’t realize that I was searching for something different.
III.
“Are you happy?” came the stranger’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Well, uh, my husband and I have been undergoing some recent transitions, which have their inherent challenges, and—”
“But are you happy?” the voice persisted.
My thoughts turned to my struggling little family. A few months before, Don and I had bought a cheap secondhand bed we found through a classified ad in the newspaper.
“Is this for your little one to grow into?” the seller had asked cheerfully. We didn’t tell him the bed was for Don, who was moving out of our bedroom.
Nor did I say now, on the phone, that I feared Don might move out of our home altogether, but my momentary silence seemed to answer the question. No, I was not happy. It seemed strange and disconcerting to me even to be asked such a question—as though happiness were to be expected, or could be promised.
Without any further comment the voice answered, “All right, you can come.”
Once I was at the ceremony, the questions didn’t get any easier.
“What do you need help with?”
I felt pride tighten my throat. I knew the answers; I didn’t need help. My eyes trailed around the room. Instead of a teepee we were sitting in a circle in someone’s basement, surrounding a lighted candle. A woman was moving around the circle, brushing the air around each participant with feathers. What had I gotten myself into?
“You need an intention; it’s like a prayer. Many people begin with, ‘I want to see myself as God sees me.’ Others ask for peace and joy. I would suggest that you ask to see your beauty and feel your power as a woman.”
I was taken aback. Could joy be more than a fairy tale? Could it be a lifestyle? And wouldn’t peace be sort of, well, boring? I especially wondered what that ridiculous phrase “as a woman” had to do with anything. But in such strange and yet familiar surroundings, lulled by the soft rain of drumbeats and voices chanting music in a language I could not understand, I simply nodded, and repeated, “I want to see my beauty and feel my power as a woman.”
IV.
We formed a motley group. A heroin addict who had lost custody of her children, a professional athlete, a workaholic white-collar professional, a man trying to renounce satanism, a preschool teacher, a college student trying to “find” herself, an ex-convict, and a couple on the brink of divorce. We began each ceremony as strangers and ended as the most intimate of friends. The names and faces changed each time. The problems were all different, yet somehow the same. We laughed and cried and yelled and prayed and sweated and breathed and told our stories together. I lived a thousand lifetimes in proxy, by the candlelight.
Then came the words that changed my life.
“Oh, so you already know how to be happy.” The medicine man spoke the words calmly, dismissively, and turned his head as though to speak with someone else.
“Wait, what do you mean?” I leaned forward as I spoke, propelled by an urgency that surprised even me.
“You are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?” He said the words slowly and distinctly.
“Well, technically,” I stumbled, confused by the strange turn our conversation was taking. As I had just told him, I attended Primary sporadically as a child. I had attended many other churches since that time.
“Then you already know how to be happy. I must give my attention to those who do not.”
Perhaps because of the sheer incongruity of it all, God finally had my attention. I tasted the possibilities; let them roll over my tongue and around the sides of my mouth. Could something so outlandish be possible? Could the path to happiness have something to do with the Mormons?
I felt questions and images reverberate through me as I reflected on his words. I suppose other people had probably said the same thing to me at other times, but if so, I had never really heard them. In that world of flickering firelight and soft drumbeats, reality felt different. All of the logical ideas and neat reasons that I had built my crumbling life upon seemed fleeting and insignificant. It was there, surrounded by eagle feathers and burning sage, that I heard again the distant voices of my childhood—and something inside me opened.
The voice of the medicine man interrupted my thoughts. “You need to pray.”
V.
“You want what?” My husband stared at me incredulously.
My tongue felt too thick in my mouth as I forced myself to say the words again, “I want to go to the temple.”
His eyes searched mine, and I felt again how ridiculous my statement sounded. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t go to church. I didn’t even believe in the Church. For once, I had no logical reason for what I said. The image and the feeling had simply haunted me since my Native American ceremony experience, and I knew it was something I could no longer ignore.
“Do you have any idea how much that will cost? They’ll make you pay tithing, you know. Didn’t you want to buy a new house this year? And another thing, I don’t want to spend every Sunday sitting in church for three hours.”
When I didn’t back down, he finally shook his head and said, “Well, I guess some women want diamonds; some women want fur coats; you want to go to the temple . . . How much will a year’s worth of tithing cost us, anyway?”
It wasn’t a fairy tale beginning, but a seed was planted.
VI.
For months Don and I navigated the bumpy, awkward journey toward Church activity. We attended sacrament meeting irregularly, sneaking out halfway through. We made lists of all our good reasons not to get involved with Mormons. We searched for unresolved childhood issues to which we could attribute our strange new feelings. And despite all our fears and uncertainties, we prayed and read the Book of Mormon. Somewhere along the way, the seed sprouted and then blossomed.
On the day our bishop approved our temple date, Don joyfully notified every one of his family members. “Couldn’t you move the date back a couple of months to correspond with the family reunion?” his mother asked. Don just threw his arms around me and answered, “No, we’ve waited much too long as it is.”
VII.
When the day came for me to receive my patriarchal blessing, many things had changed. We were just a few weeks away from our temple sealing. I had become a full-time mother. Don had become a full-time provider. We had welcomed a new child to our home, and our love was strong and beautiful. Still, as I waited in the patriarch’s living room I was overwhelmed by feelings of regret and inadequacy. As I had come to embrace the truths of the gospel, my own shortcomings became ever more apparent. I felt tremendous guilt for my years of inactivity in the Church and for the slowness of my conversion. What good could I have brought into the world if I had only focused my energies differently? What would my Father in Heaven say to me about those barren years?
I waited with fear and anticipation as the patriarch placed his hands on my head. Then to my surprise, he expressed to me that my Heavenly Father was pleased with my choices, and he promised that my future influence for good would be significant and far-reaching. I felt my heart unfolding with gratitude and love. And in that moment the truth hit me: my impact has nothing—and everything—to do with my own efforts. I am a gardener.
VIII.
We were surrounded by family on the day of our sealing. Don’s aunts, uncles, and grandparents traveled cross-country to attend the ceremony. Other relatives—Don’s siblings and my parents—also traveled from out of state to celebrate the birth of our eternal family—even though they were not eligible to attend the ceremony.
My grandmother did attend the temple with me. Afterwards she brought roses to the reception. She placed them on the table, turned to me with tears and said, “I put your name on the prayer roll every time I went to the temple. Every time.”
IX.
It seems that many people remember my grandmother for her gardening. On the day of her funeral, roses were everywhere—in the arrangements brought by friends and family, on the cover of the program, in the memorial talks. Even the final, private moment when our family gathered to close the casket was interrupted by roses. As my cousin adjusted Grandma’s temple veil, an elderly woman with a walker pushed her way through the doorway saying, “Wait, I have to see her face. I have to give her these.” In her hand was a porcelain teacup filled with an arrangement of dried roses. “She fixed these for me years ago.”
Later that afternoon at the cemetery, my aunt pulled four long-stemmed pink roses from the spray on the casket and gave one to each of my daughters. Silence turned to laughter as we watched them dance, strong and lovely, twirling their roses in the September sunshine.
Angie is prose editor of Segullah.
