I want to put a plug in for us to celebrate Spirit World Saturday as part of the Holy Week observances of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The belief that between his death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday, Jesus visited the world of the dead is not unique to our church. The harrowing of hell is a venerable Catholic tradition that is also found in various other Christian traditions, all of which draw scriptural support from 1 Peter 3, which says that Christ was “put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit; by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.”

In 1918, at the very height of the Spanish Flu Pandemic, which had just killed his son, President Joseph F. Smith, the fifth prophet after Joseph Smith, describes how he was pondering on God’s atoning mercy when his mind was drawn to that very scripture in 1 Peter. And as he pondered it, he writes, “the eyes of my understanding were opened, and the Spirit of the Lord rested upon me, and I saw the hosts of the dead, both small and great.” He then saw a vision of the faithful dead as they waited, eager and joyful, for the advent of Jesus into the spirit world, anticipating not only the Lord but also their own imminent resurrection. It was to this faithful multitude that Jesus appeared and ministered. And Joseph F. Smith perceived that he did not minister in person to the spirits in darkness. Instead, “from among the righteous, he organized his forces and appointed messengers, clothed with power and authority, and commissioned them to go forth and carry the light of the gospel to them that were in darkness, even to all the spirits of men; and thus was the gospel preached to the dead.” And what was the gospel message they were commissioned to preach to the dead? The same one we preach to the living, with one difference. It’s first principles are faith in Jesus, repentance, baptism, and receiving the holy ghost. Only, for the dead, who could not be baptized in water, they were taught that they could receive baptism vicariously through their living descendants.

Everyone will eventually have every blessing they are willing to receive!

It is poignant for me to imagine two parallel scenes. Jesus’s followers on earth, weeping and reeling or else numb with despair. Jesus’s followers in the spirit world, kneeling in worship before the triumphant lamb of God, rejoicing as he proclaimed their liberation from the bondage of death. For, President Joseph F. Smith writes, the dead had looked upon the long absence of their spirits from their bodies as a bondage.

And I love that some of the faithful spirits apparently agreed to postpone their own resurrections in order to accept the Lord’s call to bring the light of the gospel to the spirits in darkness.

The year 1840 is an important year for the salvation of the dead. In 1840, my fourth great grandfather Holladay was a plantation owner in Alabama who treated his slaves relatively well when he was not drunk, my third great grandfather Robert Henderson was fighting the Seminole Indians in the Second Seminole War, enforcing the Indian removal policy, and my fourthgreat grandmother Elizabeth Terry was suffering in an abusive marriage. That is not exactly a proud heritage, so far, but God brings beauty from ashes.

Grandpa Holladay’s plantation slaves worked in his cotton fields. Slaves working in the fields would sometimes sing spirituals. One of most tragic yet moving verses they sang was this one.

Refrain:
Soon-a will be done-a with the troubles of the world,
Troubles of the world,
The troubles of the world.
Soon-a will be done-a with the troubles of the world.
Goin’ home to live with God.

….

2 I want to meet my mother,
I want to meet my mother,
I want to meet my mother,
I’m goin’ to live with God.

We’ll come back to Grandpa Holladay and his slaves.

Grandpa Henderson didn’t leave any surviving record of his service in the Second Seminole War. That War aimed to enforce a purported treaty signed by certain Seminole leaders that they would relocate west of the Mississippi within three years. Whether they fully understood what they were signing, whether they felt they were at liberty to refuse to sign, and whether they had authority to bind the entire Seminole nation is doubtful. But the war resulted in Grandpa Henderson receiving some Florida land as a most natural compensation for his service. He settled down and raised a family in Taylor county, Florida.

Grandma Elizabeth Terry wrote in her autobiographical sketch, “I spent the time doing the best I knew until July 18, 1833, at which time I was married to a young E:nglishman named Francis Kirby. He was almost an entire stranger to us, but father advised me to marry him and go to keeping Tavern, but I soon found he was not such a companion as I wished to have for life. . . . Kirby was seldom at home during the whole day, but kept going about getting drunk and coming home at night and abusing me.”

So that’s where these ancestors were in the year 1840—a plantation owner, a Seminole fighter, and an abused wife.

It was during a funeral in 1840 that Joseph Smith first publicly taught the doctrine of baptism for the dead, in Nauvoo, Illinois, where the Saints had regathered after being driven from Missouri. The Saints were so thrilled that immediately after the meeting ended, they waded into the Mississippi River and began baptizing each other for their deceased family members. God later clarified that baptisms for the dead belonged in temples, not in rivers.

I don’t think there is a beginning to God’s efforts to gather his children to himself. But I want to tell you how he continued gathering these three ancestors.

Grandpa Holladay took pity on the missionaries and gave them a ten dollar bill. One of the missionaries later wrote that it was the first time he’d seen a ten dollar bill. That was about $439 in today’s money! And Grandpa Holladay ended by getting baptized the very month that Joseph Smith was martyred, June 1844, along with many of his slaves. According to several accounts I’ve seen (but no primary source), he sold his plantation, freed his slaves, and travelled to Salt Lake with the Mississippi Company, with many of his former slaves accompanying him. That was a pioneer company that came directly from the South and passed through Colorado, while the Nauvoo saints passed through Wyoming. In fact, the Mississippi Company wintered in Pueblo, resulting in the first recorded white baby ever to be born in Colorado. Some of the Mississippi Company actually beat Brigham Young to SLC! But Grandpa Holladay and his family got there four days after Brigham Young. He became a civic leader in multiple LDS settlements, and the suburb of SLC, Holladay Utah, is named after Grandpa Holladay.

Down in Florida, Grandpa Henderson’s wife had a dream of two men who would bring a message from God. She recognized them the next day when they showed up at the gate of her front yard. They had walked over twenty miles that day, right out of the county where they were assigned to labor, knowing they had to get somewhere but not knowing where, in a direct line to her. She was promptly baptized. Grandpa Henderson took five more years to convert. Many of their children and neighbors would also convert to the restored gospel. Their son, also named Robert Henderson, would eventually be persecuted by his neighbors for his family’s conversion, to the extent of having their barn burned down . . . twice. The police refused to press charges. They decided to move to Alberta Canada, which is where my Sabey grandparents were raised, met, and married. It was not only the Seminoles who were violently driven out of Florida.

Grandma Terry was actually baptized in 1838, two years before baptisms for the dead began. Here are some excerpts from her autobiographical sketch: “One very cold day in the winter, Brothers Turley and Robert B. Thompson called  at our house on their way to my father’s where they were going to preach. George Thompson sold me a Book of Mormon for $1. 25 and Kirby was near when I received the book and he snatched it out of my hand and threw it into the fire, which was very hot, and it went in open, and he kicked it down between the sticks of wood. I was across the room from the fire, but I sprang as quick as I could and took out the book, which, to our great astonishment, was not burned, and neither was there a letter scorched. Brother Turley took the book and presented it to Kirby and told him it was the word of God which, if he did not receive, he would be damned. Kirby cooled down in a minute and told me to give them something to eat. Right then I received a testimony that the Book of Mormon was true. He soon hardened his heart again, and said he would burn Brother Thompson in the fire.”

Grandma Terry writes a little later that the Lord eventually softened Kirby’s heart temporarily and just enough for him to consent to her baptism as long as she denied it to the neighbors. But she remained stuck in her abusive marriage to Kirby. Some of her family had converted as well, including her father, and she made a trip to Nauvoo to visit them in 1842. She intended to ask the Prophet Joseph whether she should leave her husband. At the time he was in hiding because the Missouri mob was trying to extradite him, so she did not get to speak with him, but she did see Hyrum Smith, the prophet’s brother, and he told her to return to her husband and the Lord would bless her. So she returned, only to be told on her arrival that her husband Kirby had just died and had asked for her on his death bed. She settled her affairs and moved to Nauvoo.

About a page later, and this is perhaps the most remarkable and beautiful line in her record, she writes, “August 13, [1843], I was baptized for Kirby and his mother, Ann Waples, his Uncle William Kirby, his Aunt Charlotte Foster, and his sister….” She does not go into any details. She gives no indication whether she had struggled to find forgiveness in her heart for her late husband.

I’ve covered some messy history in this essay. My goal is to explore how the gathering of God’s children back to him is a messy business—messy, yet divine. Messy mainly because it involves deeply flawed people working with other deeply flawed people. There are miracles but the miracles don’t always clean up the mess. Some parts of the mess don’t even begin to get cleaned up during this life. It is exasperating from a human perspective to watch God permit an addict, or a culture of racial domination, or a pattern of family abuse to sink lower and lower or to persist and persist, with no obvious intervention.

But for all the messiness it entails, I love that God works through us, and generally moves no faster than we allow him to move us through the processes of repentance and forgiveness. I love that we get to be involved in the salvation of our brothers and sisters through missionary work, including even after we are dead, and that we are connected to our ancestors through baptism for the dead and the other ordinances of the temple, culminating in families being sealed together for time and for all eternity. I love that, for us in this church, heaven is not just basking in God’s presence, but also enjoying sociality with its other residents, including especially our families. Families epitomize the messy yet divine nature of God’s work as carried on by humans. The chief beauty of the temple sealing for me is not that our family relationships will endure, but that our hearts and our relationships will be healed enough that they should endure. And in God’s kingdom, all that should be is, eventually.

George Macdonald is one of my favorite Christian writers. In his book Unspoken Sermons, he writes about how sad and how wrong it is that many Christians doubt that they will have ongoing relationships with their loved ones in the next life. He writes, “The early Christians might now and then plague Paul with a foolish question, the answer to which plagues us to this day; but was there ever one of them doubted he was going to find his friends again?” He goes on to write that it would be “either a mockery or a torture” for God to make our love for our friends, the thing in which we are most like him, to be obliterated by death. And then he writes this: “Little would any promise of heaven be to me if I might not hope to say, ‘I am sorry; forgive me; let what I did in anger or in coldness be nothing, in the name of God and Jesus!’ Many such words will pass, many a self-humiliation have place. . . . It is the joy of a true heart of an heir of light, of a child of that God who loves an open soul . . . , to say, ‘I was wrong; I am sorry.’ Oh, the sweet winds of repentance and reconciliation and atonement, that will blow from garden to garden of God, in the tender twilights of his kingdom! Whatever the place be like, one thing is certain, that there will be endless, infinite atonement, ever-growing love. Certain too it is that whatever the divinely human heart desires, it shall not desire in vain.”

I too “want to meet my mother.” By this, I mean my great great great great grandmother Terry, and all my other grandmothers and grandfathers too, and all my distant cousins, and all their friends. Unlike many slaves, historically, I largely know who my ancestors are—but I want to meet them. I want to meet step-grandpa Kirby for whom Grandma Terry was vicariously baptized, cured of his alcoholism, and I want to see Grandpa Henderson walk down the street arm in arm with a Seminole Indian, and I want to hear slaveowners apologize to their former slaves and the slaves respond that Jesus has made everything right between them. And I want to make my own apologies and swell the chorus of the joyful spirituals that are sung in heaven’s cottonfields. We will sing and be joyful not because everything is suddenly fixed when we die, or when we are resurrected for that matter, but because the messy, divine labor of loving, repenting, and forgiving, will continue after death until it is complete.

That is my hope and conviction that I wish to share this Easter season