Missionaries and LDS Pilgrimages

A tall, redheaded guy in a BYU ball cap slowly wound with the line waiting to go through security at the Lima airport for national flights. He conversed in unusually fluent Spanish with a Peruvian guy about his same age dressed in an iteration of twenty-something style.

There was an easy camaraderie among them that you seldom see. Tourists (European looking people, or the groups of Japanese and Chinese) tend to stick to themselves while Peruvians have their own family and friendship relationships that clump in these too slow lines. These two guys fit together. There was just something that connected them that was more than an occasional or temporary relationship between a local guide and a foreigner. 

Given the red-head’s BYU cap and his age, I assumed he had served a mission down here and was traveling with a former companion. Ties that develop while spending four, five, or six months together can be very significant and endure for years after the mission, if not for a life time. 

We Latter-day Saints just live our lives and often do not see the significance of what we are doing. And that goes for Mormon Studies which tends to focus on those things that are focused to seem important, such as the historicity of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, and nineteenth century history, or Church organization and politics, rather than the ordinary that in reality is even more critical. 

Whether this particular young man was with his former companion or not, LDS mission work establishes strong ties. It impacts the lives of Americans who serve here and live in close quarters with people they otherwise would never interact with, at the same time it changes the lives of Peruvians, and others, who now have personal and strong ties with people from a world away in a very powerful nation. 

The anthropologist Jason Palmer is writing about the importance of this connection in building a religious life embedded in social relationships for Peruvians and is making an important contribution, as a result, to our understanding of Mormonism in Latin America. I wrote from the perspective of the red-head, who could have been a much younger version of me, someone who returns to Latin America. Instead Jason shifts that so our focus would be on the Peruvian guy and his sense of empowerment, vision  and religious worth that is supported by this enduring friendship. 

There are indeed many points of view from which to build and grasp Mormonism, even if it is not always the same in every one of those views. 

I chose the red-head because he stood out. But so did his companion, and by focusing on him I was inadvertently fitting into discourses that give power and weight to Anglos above other Latter-day Saints. 

The scholar Gina Colvin is justifiably helping us in Mormon studies be more aware of hegemonic and other perspectives and experiences in our common faith. 

Still, I am seeing more and more Anglo young men returning to their mission field as I travel. They are still college age, or just past, and return because of the powerful ties and experiences they had while missionaries that left them feeling solidarity, whether critically formed or not. On my flight out of Salt Lake there was another guy, traveling alone, blond and about five 10 on his way to Paraguay. It was not hard to see his background and to observe more in it by the way he interacted with people around him, looking for a chance to serve and engage them. 

Though his garment lines were evident, I did not really need to look because of what he embodied, a post mission ethos and way of living in his body. 

This pilgrimage back to the mission field has passed from being a common wish to something more and more young men seem to be carrying out. It is a pilgrimage where, in the other culture they served in, they placed sacred value, something they wish to reconnect with in the post mission challenge. 

Palmer tells of a paired pilgrimage of Peruvian return missionaries to go to Utah with or without visas, and to live in the society of their former companions, one filled with sacred value as an end point. 

In both cases, as in other pilgrimages such as the famous one to Santiago de Compostela, the experience can be filled with challenges and even failures, at the same time the movement itself, the travel gives it spiritual and social value. It transforms lives, no matter its success. 

I am in Peru, deep Peru. Though I did not serve my mission here, I wish there were Peruvian scholars like Colvin who would write with power and passion about their experience of the gospel and of Latter-day Saint worlds. In fairness, very few Anglo intellectuals actually grasp this stuff, since it is the water we swim in rather than something that stands out as exemplary per se. 

Nevertheless, its ordinariness matters. I think of my family from Netherlands who talked over and over about my grandfather’s baptism and my noticing the irony that my mother actually married into that missionary’s large family crossing ethnic and class lines.

I think of visiting cities in Argentina with my father who had been a missionary fifty years before. One night a local bishop pulled out his box of missionary photos going back decades. Each photo had at least one story and covered years of interactions and life, whether there was ongoing contact or not. 

I lived in New Mexico and Texas. We also were very aware of the Elders who served in our branches and wards. They were an important part of our lives and their names and photos still come out occasionally to make one point or another,, or just as spiritual remembrance and re-knitting the relationships of our religious community that go far beyond the local and the single ethnicity. 

The pace of return of former Anglo missionaries may have increased (and we should note that Latin missionaries also return to their mission field to visit as a kind of meaningful pilgrimage), just as the travel of Peruvians and others to the US also increased, but it is not new.

Spiritual and personal ties between Latter-day Saints and their missionaries, or vice a versa, have a long history among us. We should write more about them.