Thor's Day: Glimpses of Jesus in Salt Lake City

The Beehive House, 67 E South Temple St

Why the tour was free

By Morris Dean

My wife and I returned to Salt Lake City on April 30, hoping this time to have no problems with that city's street nomenclature. I had its coordinate system securely installed in my head this time, the x-axis being South Temple and the y-axis Main, and my mind was clear this time that South Temple (and all streets named South or North) run east-west, not north-south, which I had been confused about last October and was forever spinning my head over ["How long does it take to become fluent in Salt Lake City's street nomenclature?," October 29, 2014].

Note that West Temple & State Street
replace 100 West & 100 East,
and North Temple replaces 100 North 

    And I was clear now that South Temple, as the x-axis, was the zero east-west street, and Main, as the y-axis, was the zero north-south street, and I could do arithmetic on the numbered streets and reliably calculate how many blocks separated them. Was I on 600 South wanting to go to 500 North? Well, 500 North was 11 blocks away (six blocks south of South Temple and five blocks north of it). No, there would be no confusion over the streets this time.
    Nor were we expecting to have any run-ins with Jesus. But on that score, we should have known better.

Baby orangutan Tuah, whose parents
died late last year

May 1 was Friday. I remembered only later that it was the third anniversary of my retirement from UNC, but I was aware that Storm Large would be singing that evening in Portland ("Who is Storm Large?"). But, because it was a Friday, our son would be at work, so after visiting Utah's Hogle Zoo in the morning, I suggested to my wife that we visit Brigham Young's two residences again. They would be open this time, and we could even have lunch in Lion House and then tour Beehive House next door.
    Lunch was lunch, but the tour was something else. No admission fee was charged, and it was led by two devout young female proselytizers who were only disguised as tour guides. It quickly became clear that they were Mormon missionaries, fully intent on using the occasion to witness their latter-day Mormon faith to the few of us who weren't already Mormon, which I think was only my wife and me out of nine or ten people – at any rate, we were the only two who said no when one of them asked the tourists whether they were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
    In a well-practiced alternation of speaking roles, the missionaries told us about the Mormon prophets and apostles, and averred that the Book of Mormon was true ("as true as the Bible" – even we professed gentiles seemed to be assumed to accept the truth of the Bible). And they showed us only one bedroom besides the Prophet's: "the bedroom of his wife" (singular), not batting an eye when I asked, "Which wife?" but seamlessly giving me the name of one of them (I forget which). And they invited us to stay afterwards if we had any questions about the faith. I think that was when I began to think of SLC as "Mormon City."

Maybe Jesus really does work in mysterious ways, for Sunday morning found us in church. The American International School of Utah's performing arts center was funded by K2 the Church, on the understanding that the space would be first of all for church activities, with K2 controlling its scheduling for other purposes.
    We were there on Sunday morning, both to see the space and to hear a string quartet performance in which the school's director of orchestras would be playing cello, and for which our son had done the arrangement. The space was quite impressive – sort of theater-in-the-round, with a box for control panels and three or four computer screens in the upper reaches of the center section.

Photo from  Deseret News, taken at a celebration for K2 the Church's grand opening on March 1

    The service began with a high-energy homily about having an adventure with God, followed by a large-screen video of a woman telling of her despair and near-suicide and being saved by Jesus or something, during the last half-minute of which the members of the string quartet marched in and sat down, ready to play the moment it ended.
    In the darkened auditorium, I had not seen two singers walking on with the quartet. We had not been told there would be singers – two more women, also missionaries, I guess – expertly alternating and harmonizing phrases of a lyric that I learned later was the song "Stand Up," written by the Christian rock band Fireflight. The auditorium's sound system projected the quartet and the singers well, and I enjoyed the music: it was entertaining, although church seemed an odd setting for it. I'm not sure that "Christian rock band" isn't an oxymoron. The lyrics had been projected on the screen where the near-suicide had appeared. They weren't much, but you can see them too, on Youtube, and hear them performed by Fireflight, if you're up to it:

    As soon as the music ended and the musicians retreated, we filed out to rejoin the cellist. We'd seen the space, we'd heard the performance, we had no more to do there, not expecting Jesus to make any more of an appearance than he already hadn't.

While the others in our entourage went to the zoo, we bought a spade, a pickax, and small shears, and did some gardening in the Rose Park neighborhood of northwest Mormon City (23 blocks away from our hotel, as calculated by coordinate-system arithmetic).
    Thursday evening, after dinner with our son and the cellist, we had walked through some of the park and along half a mile of the Jordan River, which the Mormons had named in 1847 because, like the River Jordan in the Middle East, which drains the Sea of Galilee into the Dead Sea, it drained Utah Lake into the saline Great Salt Lake.
    I of course wondered whether it was here that the New World Garden of Eden had been located, and whether Jesus might have bathed in one of the very spots we walked along when he visited North America before returning to the Middle East to preach his dangerous apocalyptic message....
    The afternoon after church was fairly cool, with just a hint of threatening rain, and the hour of gardening went by fast, leaving us lethargic and in need of a nap.
    We put away the tools and got into our rental car. My wife was no longer automatically turning on the GPS, having developed sufficient confidence in my sense of direction and understanding of the street coordinate system. My own confidence permitted me to experiment, taking different streets each trip, knowing, whichever street I was on, where I was, relative to our destination.

    On this particular trip, as I approached the railroad tracks along 400 West at either 100 or 200 South, a loud horn sounded and the red RR light came on just as I was about to drive across the tracks. "Jesus Christ!" I yelped, and floored it.

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean