Just prior to visiting my parents’ graves at Rose Hills Memorial Park yesterday afternoon, my wife and I paid our respects to my brother’s grave in the San Gabriel Cemetery, adjacent to the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour. He is my only sibling — though, strictly speaking, my half-brother — and I still feel his sudden loss acutely. I very much agree with the inscription on his tombstone (“A Life of Service”) and, although it’s not actually quoted on the stone, with the scripture reference that is provided there, Matthew 25:40: “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
Visiting Kenneth’s grave was one of my goals for this particular stay in California.
Another goal was to attend a session in the Los Angeles California Temple, which we did this afternoon. As I grew up in southern California, this was my temple. Briefly, while I was in graduate school at the nearby University of California at Los Angeles, I volunteered in the temple’s baptistry. And, eventually, it was in this temple that my parents were sealed together and, later, where my brother and I were sealed to them. The Los Angeles Temple is engraved on my mother’s and father’s grave markers.
My wife and I were allowed to take a look this afternoon at the very room in which those sealing ordinances were performed. This meant a much to me.
***
At the conclusion of his “Chronicles of Narnia,” C. S. Lewis has Aslan, the Lion-Christ hero of his story, say to Lucy and the other children who have been the Chronicles’ human heroes,
“You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.”
Lucy said, “We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.”
“No fear of that,” said Aslan. “Have you not guessed?”
Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no on on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.[1]
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 183-184.
***
“I believe we have all been created for greater things than we can comprehend.”
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
Posted from Newport Beach, California
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