I sit on the farthest seat of the front row choir seats. It’s actually not an official choir seat–it’s a cushioned Relief Society room chair brought in to hold the overflow of all the people who want to sing at this meeting with President Ballard. I can see the backs of the speakers’ heads, or if I look in the monitor they placed beside the podium I can see the front. I’m not in the camera’s line of view.
We’re asked not to transcribe what President Ballard says, or to record it in any way. I still take notes, extensive ones, for my daughter who was unable to be there. I’m listening so hard, praying for her, and for myself.
***
If I want to write about transcendence, how do I go about it? Obliquely, from an angle, telling a slant truth only because words don’t wrap around the holy very well. Because it feels like a desecration to pin down the Spirit with mere words, a kind of taxidermy, killing a living creature and putting it up for display. See what I witnessed. It used to be alive, but because I’ve decided to tell you about it, to display it, I’ve destroyed it, paralyzed it, placed it in infinite stasis, to be examined and analyzed and perhaps dismissed, which feels unbearable.
And yet if I leave the words unwritten, unspoken, especially when I feel I should bear witness, the memory of holiness can erode, etched away by life and time and doubt and fear. In some ways pinning down the holy with words makes it more real, solidifies the memory so that it lives in my mind and my heart.
I need those solid memories; I need to take them out again and look at them and remember what I saw and how I felt. I write them for myself, and for my children.
And sometimes for the internet, too.
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