The Weight of Priesthood

Over the next few weeks, we became regular visitors and started to meet Evelyn's family. There was her husband Raja, her son Rohan, and Gita, his wife. Rohan and Raja had also been baptized into the Church, but Gita, being a new member of the family, was Hindu, which turned our missionary meters right back on. But for some reason, we never really got around to having lessons with Gita. Whenever we visited, we talked with Evelyn. The only thing she wanted to do was pray with us and tell us about Jesus -- and we thought we were the missionaries. It was a strange, exhilarating experience to sit next to her lump of a body, sizzling with cancer, and listen to her praise Jesus. It was all we could do to agree with her as quickly as she praised.

The months wore on, and November arrived. The humidity now cut through clothes and iced everyone who was silly enough to be outside, meaning, of course, the missionaries. Evelyn's health followed the decline in weather. More often she would be asleep when we came over, and she would wake only briefly from time to time. No one complained, though; sleep is certainly preferable to pain. One day we stopped by for no particular reason. The odor of deterioration hit us as we walked in. We found Gita, a stick-thin girl with large black eyes and lips perpetually formed into a kiss, trying to comfort Evelyn, who was groaning and rolling her head from side to side. Her fingers were crushing Gita's tiny hands.

"She hasn't slept for days," Gita told us.

Evelyn saw us and gurgled, "Elders, come pray over me." What she meant was, "Give me a blessing." This time the stakes were way up. My dad's pain of a few years ago had been almost theoretical to me. It was something he could take care of, a sort of test case for me. But now I saw Evelyn sunken so far that she was barely coherent. There's a certain feel to the area around someone in complete pain. It smells, oddly, like the flesh of a child. The pained skin gives off an almost electrical charge. Your own nerves vibrate sympathetically with the pain. We put our hands on Evelyn's head. Since my companion was a new missionary, he wanted me to give the blessing -- coward. But I did it. And I said, "The pain will lift. You will sleep. God is watching over you."

Her hands loosened their grip and her eyes closed. She fell asleep saying, "Thank you, Jesus." I swear this is true.

We weren't always so helpful. A week later we stopped by Evelyn's house to sing some Christmas carols. My companion, Elder Christopherson, happened to be an opera singer, fullback, and retired illegal fireworks smuggler. When we had finished, one of the more long-winded members of our quartet said a closing prayer; and during it, Evelyn lost her breath. She gasped and coughed with a vigor that meant she needed a hospital. But our prayer-giver didn't seem to notice and droned on while Evelyn's family rushed to her rescue and called the fire department. The medics carried her out on a stretcher, and we were left to wonder if our rendition had really been that bad.

The mission office transferred me out of that part of town a few days later. A week after that, I got a call from Elder Christopherson; Evelyn had passed away. But not, he told me, before he gave her a blessing. She'd been in a coma for a week. But when he blessed her, she came out of it, grabbed Elder Christopherson by the shirt and said, "Fat Man, baptize my family." Then she talked lucidly with her family for a few moments, closed her eyes, and died.

I'd really like to end the story there. It's a good, happy ending. Boy gets priesthood, boy struggles with priesthood, boy succeeds. The problem is, life goes on. Things change.

Most of the people I had baptized on my mission have fallen away from the Church. Even Evelyn's family. They all either wandered off or rejected the Church outright. I'm still not sure what to think of that. I had been part of the great story: healing, blessing, converting -- exercising the priesthood of God. I had made covenants, and I had helped other people do the same thing. And somehow it had all blown away. My priesthood legacy.

There's a popular saying in the Church that a person's mission experience is the high-water mark in his or her spiritual life. You'll never really progress beyond the faith you gain in the mission field. As disheartening as that idea appears, it seemed true to me during the five years after my mission. Mainly because I finally had the time to doubt.

Doubting is a difficult business in Mormonism, especially if you were raised in the Church. There's a sense that the whole gospel, from Joseph Smith's first vision to the latest general conference talk, is completely intertwined. That you can't remove one thread from the tapestry, or the whole thing will unravel. I don't know how many times I taught potential converts that if they believed the Book of Mormon was scripture, then Joseph Smith, who brought it forth, must be a prophet. And if Joseph Smith is a prophet then the church he started must be God's true church. And that was only the beginning of this giant game of dominoes.