The Weight of Priesthood

One evening, a few weeks before I left for my mission, I was sitting in the chapel of the Manti Temple. This temple is located in a tiny town in the middle of miles of Utah's sagebrush and sun. The original settlers built a temple -- the second to be dedicated in Utah -- on the hill east of town. It's an odd building, a kind of mutated Puritan-style church house, or diminutive castle, with towers on each end of the building. But instead of being steepled, they end in a trapezoidal taper. The whole building is made of limestone, solid as the mountain it's built upon. During the day, its silhouette is visible for miles. At night it lights up, stunning the whole valley. It's my favorite temple. I'm not sure there are any Mormons from Utah who don't have a pioneer-built temple as their favorite. There's an element of sweat and studiousness that draws us to them. Men and women sacrificed to build those early structures. Some of them are our own flesh and blood. A million stories surround each one of them. And you can feel it. Like priesthood.

I was dressed in my white clothing, waiting for the next endowment session to start. I was looking forward to the ritual. In the Manti Temple, it is especially dramatic, as the walls and ceilings of the large rooms are painted with scenes from the creation, the Garden of Eden, the telestial world, the terrestial world, and finally God's kingdom. As you move from room to room, the light increases, giving you the feeling that you're getting closer to God with each step.

But that was the night the lights went out in Manti. A storm had chased us there, and apparently it had struck something important. My mom, dad, and aunt were sitting with me when the room went black. As the little emergency lights came up, one of the temple officiators walked in and told us we'd have to wait till the electricity came back before we could start our session. My dad and aunt walked the halls to console my dad's bum back. A car accident early in his twenties had doomed him to a life of back pain and periodic migraine headaches. I moved to the back of the chapel to get away from the tapestry at the front. It's an attempt at a Raphaelesque group with women and children. And it's awful. The people's noses are huge, and the babies' heads are deformed. But the pioneers did it. So we keep it. After all, they did a great job on the building itself.

I talked to God in the dark of His temple. I gave Him the low-down again: I'm headed out and I don't want to be a total greenhorn, okay? Just give me something to break me in. I'll take anything.

The lights came back on. The air conditioning started pushing the air again. I walked up and sat next to my mom. She leaned over and said, "You know, your dad's back and headaches have been hurting him a lot lately. I bet he'd appreciate a blessing from you."

Well, there you go.

I wasn't familiar with the biblical parable of the sleeping housemaster at the time. If I had been, I might have looked on this incident a little differently. Jesus said that prayer is sometimes like a fellow going to a man's house to ask a favor -- except that he's doing it in the middle of the night. He annoys the housemaster with his request until the housemaster gets fed up and gives it to him. What the man actually gets is never made clear.

So I guess I got my chance. I set a date with my dad to give him a blessing, then proceeded to worry myself sick about it. When the day came, I fasted, hoping to have God's spirit with me. Because, when you give a blessing, there's no telling what's going to happen. Sometimes nothing happens. But someone doesn't ask for a blessing without thinking something is going to happen. So the blesser is in a double bind. On the one hand, he's not sure God is going to will anything to really happen. On the other hand, the blessee is really counting on the blesser to bring those blessings down. I retract -- the blesser is actually in a triple bind, because he doesn't know if it's right to invoke healing upon the person. It seems a little presumptuous to tell a person he or she is going to be healed without the go-ahead from God. The problem is, you don't know what God has in mind until the oil has been applied, the hands are on the head, and the blessing is being spoken. Everything hangs on the spur of the moment. Are you ready to receive whatever intelligence it is God is willing to send down? Sheesh. Talk about a burden. I found out later that Joseph Smith had some of his apostles do a healing blessing over and over again until they finally got the Spirit. But that's just not done these days. It's kind of like baptism: You want to get it right the first time, because after that, it gets plain embarrassing.

Besides that, it was my dad. And I happened to like my dad. I knew that he had suffered from back and head pain for his whole adult life. I really wanted to be part of a process that might heal him.