LDS doctrine on children who die fulfills a primal desire

The second-hardest thing I have ever done is hold my infant son in my arms and watch Ray die. The hardest task for my wife and me were allowing Ray to die without a fight. He was born in 2000 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which meant that his heart wouldn’t function on its own. After reviewing the doctors’ options, which involved a high expectation of pain for Ray and a survival chance that a dispassionate observer would rate as virtually nil, we allowed our son to die.


A key advantage of grief is that it allows sorrow to be put into perspective. The months before Ray’s birth, when he was diagnosed, and several months to years after his short life, were very difficult. Moments intended for matrimonial passion become a time for tears when you look into your spouse’s eyes and know what both of you are thinking of. You look at children born at the same time as Ray and resist an impulse of bitter envy. You mentally plug your ears to condolences that your child “was too pure for the world” or vain exclamations from the pulpit of how prayer saved so and so’s child.

But grief is a positive. With time, it allows comprehension to sink in that what happened to your child happens to many, many others every year. You realize that 24 hours with a healthy baby makes you very lucky compared to the countless others left to die too early in terrifying circumstances, with no one to comfort them. If you don’t understand that life’s not fair, that our Creator doesn’t play favorites, then grief can turn you into a selfish, self-pitying person — and that’s a bigger shame than the loss of an innocent.

My wife and I do cling to a faith-based belief that others may call fantasy. We’re LDS, and we regard Joseph Smith as a prophet. When Smith was alive, he taught this, according to a 1918 edition of The Improvement Era: 

President Joseph F. Smith, the sixth President of the Church, reported: ‘Joseph Smith taught the doctrine that the infant child that was laid away in death would come up in the resurrection as a child; and, pointing to the mother of a lifeless child, he said to her: ‘You will have the joy, the pleasure and satisfaction of nurturing this child, after its resurrection, until it reaches the full stature of its spirit.’ …

"In 1854, I met with my aunt [Agnes Smith], the wife of my uncle, Don Carlos Smith, who was the mother of that little girl [Sophronia] that Joseph Smith, the Prophet, was speaking about, when he told the mother that she should have the joy, the pleasure, and the satisfaction of rearing that child, after the resurrection, until it reached the full stature of its spirit; and that it would be a far greater joy than she could possibly have in mortality, because she would be free from the sorrow and fear and disabilities of mortal life, and she would know more than she could know in this life. I met that widow, the mother of that child, and she told me this circumstance and bore testimony to me that this was what the Prophet Joseph Smith said when he was speaking at the funeral of her little daughter."

I choose to believe that I, with many other happy parents, will raise children who died too soon. I’m not convinced of that because a group of retired businessmen say it. I base it on my faith in a loving God and a primal desire to have that privilege. 

But if I’m wrong, I refuse to be disappointed. The 24 hours my wife and I had with Ray was another blessing we will always thank God for.


-- Doug Gibson

Originally published at StandardNET in 2010

Do you have your own, personal Three Nephites experience?

We Mormons have our own personal religious lore; one that tops the list is the Three Nephites. A healthy percentage of members who make it to church more often than not either have their own personal Three Nephites tale or can relate at least one that has been passed onto them.

The Three Nephites are mentioned in The Book of Mormon as disciples of Jesus Christ who ask to remain on earth until Jesus Christ returns and convert souls for him. Christ says yes, which is the same answer he gives to John the Beloved in the New Testament.

(I digress here to wonder how often the Three Nephites and John the Beloved have met the past 1,977 years or so. Do they ever get tired of each other? Do they ever squabble? I couldn’t imagine being on my best behavior waiting for a guest who won’t tell us when he’ll ever return.)

Despite my occasional skepticism, I’m one of those who can boast of his own “Three Nephites experience.” But first, some more about the LDS folklore of the Three Nephites. Besides John the Beloved, the Three Nephites have parallels to The Wandering Jew, Catholic saints and even the Prophet Elijah. Although reports of Three Nephites activity are not — for good reason — official Mormon doctrine, their calling is mentioned in Mormonism’s most unique scripture. One who claims a literal belief in the Book of Mormon must agree that the three are still hanging around somewhere. The same goes for the Bible and John the Beloved.

The first Three Nephites tale I recall hearing is about an army officer on the front in World War II who gives a lift in his jeep to three wandering civilians. When he drops them off, one of the men asks what he can do to repay the officer. The officer flippantly replies, “Tell me when this war will end?” The man gives him a date. The officer thinks nothing of the answer until the war ends, and you guessed it, on the exact date the man told him!

There’s a million of these tales. In 1949, author Hector Lee published “The Three Nephites: The Substance and Significance of the Legend in Folklore,” Albuquerque, The University of New Mexico Press. Here are a couple of accounts that Lee collected:

• The Hitchhiking “ghost” Nephite, where an old hitchhiker was picked up by couple traveling to Grand Junction, Colo. It was 1944. The old hitchhiker was a whiz on current events. At the most desolate part of their journey, the hitchhiker insisted on being let out. Naturally the couple protested. The hitchhiker told them they would soon be hauling a dead body to Grand Junction. He then told them the exact date that World War II would end. Sure enough, the couple came upon a car wreck with a fatality and hauled the dead driver to Grand Junction. The war ended on the same date as well.

I mention this tale because it’s similar to the one I heard as a child. The setting had changed and there was no dead body and there were three hitchhikers instead of one. I imagine that as “Three Nephites sightings” are passed along over and over, the tale can change significantly.

• Here’s another Three Nephites tale Lee compiled with a lot of the supernatural included. Mrs. Aylda Abbott Squires of Wa Wa Springs, in Utah, recounts an 1874 experience when she was all alone on the homestead and a lone man came by and asked for food. Mrs. Squires was frightened but provided him a meal. The man blessed her and promised her that a pain she was feeling in her liver would go away and that she would never want for basic necessities. As he turned a corner leaving she followed to see where he had gone but the man had disappeared. She returned to her table and discovered the lunch she had seen him eat and drink was untouched. Later, her mother reminded her that her Patriarchal blessing had mentioned she would see one of the Three Nephites.

I just love these tales. They’re part of what makes Mormonism so interesting and unique.

So here’s my “Three Nephites” tale. It’s got more holes in it than that once-sacred garment with the tokens cut off that grandma uses for cleaning, but here it is:

• It was 1983, in Chiclayo, Peru. My senior companion and I were in a massive slum, thousands of people living in homes without electricity or water. We were searching for the home of a referral. The potential investigator’s name was Marcos. After traipsing through the dusty dirt streets for the better part of a day, we stopped to stare at a very peculiar sight. A pig was hog-tied, presumably moments away from the slaughter. You’ve never heard screaming until you’ve heard a hog-tied pig scream. A crowd had gathered to stare at the pig. For some reason a man standing a few feet away caught our attention. One of us, I can’t recall which, asked — for the 100th time — “Do you know where Marcos lives?”

The man casually made a fist, thumb out, and glanced and pointed over his back toward an alley with a few house inward. “He lives back there,” he said.

To sum up a long story, we met Marcos, baptized him and later were baptized about 10 or 11 of his family members. Soon after we left Peru, Marcos went on his own mission. I’m glad Marcos and his family helped me to meet one of the Three Nephites.

A footnote

That same day, during our first visit with Marcos, the pig stopped screaming. When we returned to the site, there was only a dark, dank-smelling wet stain where the pig once screamed.

It took me about 10 years to realize that it would have been an impressive encore if the wandering Nephite had taken a moment to save the pig.

-- Originally published in 2010 at StandardNET.

Long before Hatch became a Senate institution, there was Utah’s Sen. Smoot

(This post was first published at StandardNET in 2010.)

There’s a lot of talk about Sen. Orrin Hatch, who has served 34-plus years in the Senate and intends to go for 42 year in 2012, and former Gov. Mitt Romney, who gets the question of who will he serve if elected president? The Mormon Church or the U.S. nation? What’s interesting is, long ago, Utah Sen. Reed Smoot (seen above) faced some of these questions.


Smoot, who was in the Senate for 30 years, was handpicked, or more or less called to the job, by the First Presidency and Quorum of the 12 Apostles of the LDS Church. In fact, the monogamous Smoot was not only a Mormon, he was a member of the 12 Apostles. It’s unthinkable today that an LDS apostle would be elected to that high of an office, let alone sent there by the Brethren. However, there is apostle Ezra Taft Benson becoming President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture in the 1950s.

Smoot had to fight for years to be accepted into the Senate. It wasn’t so much for his “church calling” as it was to general suspicion about the Mormon Church’s commitment to the federal government and of course, the big issue, polygamy. He won that battle, though, and like Hatch, became a respected member of the U.S Senate. His trademark achievement was the Smoot-Hawley tariff act and Smoot eventually became chairman of the committee on finance.

In the October, 1960 issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly, Dr. Milton R. Merrill, then vice president of Utah State University, praised Smoot, who died in 1941. Despite Smoot’s status as apostle, Merrill says that he regarded himself as a Republican on a mission for the church. But it was more of a political mission, and Smoot loved his job as much as Hatch loves his today. Some positions of Smoot’s: He opposed prohibition; helped get Warren Harding nominated in a smoke-filled room; worked to get non-Mormons in Utah into the Republican Party; and he opposed the League of Nations.

Smoot would have stepped down if LDS Church Presidents Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant had asked him to, but they didn’t. In fact, according to Merrill, the church leaders never requested Smoot vote a certain way. However, just as Hatch may face closure from a nation tired of economic recessions, Smoot’s tenure was prematurely ended in the 1932 Depression-era election, where he was upset by Democratic challenger Elbert D. Thomas. 

Smoot retired to finish his life as an apostle and died in 1941 at age 79. He is buried in Provo.

-- Doug Gibson