Chapter 23: Homeward Bound

By the time I arrived at the mission home in Berlin, I was as physically and emotionally drained as I had ever been. I gave my report to President Schulze and headed off to the airport, completely wiped out. Despite my exhaustion, I boarded the plane more anxious for some solitude and introspection than sleep. Was this really it? Was I really heading home to nearly forgotten family and friends? Was this plane really going to transport me back to that parallel universe of academia, where grades and girls governed above all else? The deeper questions that followed never even had a chance to register; by the time the pilot pulled up the landing gear, I was already drifting into a world of dreams.

My sleep was interrupted a few hours later by the voice of a Nazi commander; I opened my eyes to catch a glimpse of a steam engine. I thought I was losing touch with reality, but there, right in front of my eyes, was the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, swarming with Nazis and passing for Berlin on the on-board movie. It was the very same movie set I had stumbled onto the day after arriving in Germany almost two years before: the same steam engine, the same banners, the same goose-stepping extras. The rest of the world had apparently gone about its work: within the time that had elapsed since my initial arrival in Europe, someone had spliced and edited and distributed a movie, all while I went about my less tangible work among the people of East Germany.

The work of the producers seemed to be quite an accomplishment; they had managed to turn the phony sets into authentic backdrops on celluloid. I wondered how my own efforts compared. Could a missionary’s influence among the people rival that of a Hollywood production? The time warp in front of me made my small role feel like part of something much greater. On screen, the Leipzig train station seemed frozen in an era of shock troops and fascist propaganda. But if I could rewind the scene far enough, I’d see Hamp and Herbie passing through peacefully, completely unaware of the pending doom. Jump ahead a bit and I’d see Gordon and Homer as tourists, awestruck by the gathering storm. Fast forward even further, and I’d see Ezra Taft Benson, with Herbie at his side, passing through the rubble that remained of the station, leading the charge to gather the Saints and keep them alive – both physically and spiritually – through the dark days to come.

An unintelligible, foreign voice came over the loudspeakers. I must have been thinking in German, since my brain hadn’t switched over quickly enough to understand the Lufthansa pilot’s English – concealed within a thick, German accent. Window shades came up, and the blinding light dimmed the flickering movie. I strained to understand his words as he continued his tour-guide commentary.

“The coast of Greenland is visible over the starboard wing,” he said. I cracked open my own window shade and squinted my eyes. The endless expanse of the North Atlantic spread all the way to a crisp horizon. Above the firmament, only an occasional contrail broke up the scene.

“Star light, board to right,” I recited in my head as my mnemonic reminder, disappointed that I wouldn’t be catching a glimpse of Greenland.

“…and the wreck of the Titanic lies under the waves on the port side,” the Captain continued, offering the bland but historic scene as a consolation prize to those of us stuck on the left side of the aircraft.

Somewhere, miles below the surface, the newly discovered wreckage of RMS Titanic lay in pieces, its whereabouts having remained a mystery since the day it plummeted to the depths. Given the vast sea before me, it seemed no wonder that it took so long to find the miniscule gravesite. I continued to stare out the window and spotted a few cargo ships, traceable from rippling wakes that gave away their positions like monstrous arrowheads. Though they were following the Titanic’s path, each of these leviathans was now armed with radar, sonar, and a newfangled GPS system gradually being uncloaked in the aftermath of the Cold War, rendering ice bergs virtually harmless.

We passed each ship in a matter of minutes, and I thought of Hamp’s own missionary voyage home. What had been a week-long voyage for him, Homer, Gordon, Rulon, and thousands of others who had made the crossing by ocean liner, I was covering in a single, restless bout with sleep.

My next jolt to consciousness came from the landing gear hitting the JFK runway. I was upset with myself for having missed the entire landing approach, including what would have been my first view of New York City’s skyline. It was a brief layover, though, and if the next leg departed on time, I figured there would be just enough daylight left to watch the sun set over the Big Apple and maybe even catch a glimpse of Lady Liberty herself. I crossed my fingers for a smooth transfer process and soon got my wish. After a quick crew change, we taxied back out to the end of the runway and waited for clearance to take off.

The light was fading fast as I stared out the window and eagerly awaited takeoff, but I still hoped to spot the famous Empire City landmarks I had seen time and again in the movies. I was relieved to hear the cockpit crew announce that we were next in line; but after a few minutes, we still hadn’t moved. Twenty minutes and then half an hour went by, and we still had no update. We ended up sitting on the tarmac for well over an hour with no word from the cabin. The passengers were getting quite restless; theories regarding the cause of the delay spread from one end of the cabin to the other. I impatiently looked at my watch, knowing that my welcome home party in Michigan had already left for the airport and would now wait a minute longer for my arrival with every additional minute we spent on the runway. Either way, I’d now have to settle for a night-time view of Gotham.

Finally the Captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “There’s been a problem with the plane ahead of us,” he said enigmatically, “and we’ll be returning to the gate.” He offered no further explanation, and everyone in the cabin groaned.

We were all asked to disembark at the gate, and I knew something had gone horribly wrong on a massive scale when I saw the crowds concentrated around television screens that were broadcasting breaking news. I packed myself into a throng to get a closer look at the news report; my heart sank at the sight: a jetliner in flames!

A stranger next to me saw my jaw drop. “You can see it in person if you manage to get close enough to a window,” he said, pointing toward the horde glued to the large plate glass overlooking the runway. I forced my way through the crowd to see the calamity for myself; sure enough, thick smoke was billowing up from the wreckage of a huge plane, lying directly in what would have been our take-off path.

Hundreds of flashing lights strobed from an army of emergency vehicles. The fire engines’ pumps continued to douse the shell that remained, which had almost certainly been a tomb for dozens of unwary passengers. These were passengers who just an hour before had no more inclination of their fate than I did of mine. Though I was watching the real-life spectacle with my own eyes, I felt like I was really viewing a scene straight out of a disaster movie. If it’s possible to go into shock in proxy, I was feeling the onset. Our pilot had likely seen the crash in real time, but opted for censorship in a deliberate attempt to avoid panic among the passengers who would have felt trapped inside his own aircraft.

Conflicting information was being broadcast in the news reports, but eventually the truth emerged: The pilot of ill-fated TWA Flight 843 had aborted takeoff shortly after lifting off; the plane hit the ground so hard that it damaged the wing, spilling a trail of fuel. The plane skidded off the runway on its belly, and the sparks had ignited the fuse. When it finally came to a halt just short of Jamaica Bay, the heroic crew had apparently evacuated all 300 passengers down the emergency slides within 90 seconds – just before the flames spread through the cabin. There were spontaneous bursts of applause throughout the terminal as the good news gradually emerged: There had not been a single fatality. The sense of relief was palpable.

I checked the departure screens for an update. A string of six monitors, each showing dozens of flights, flashed the word “cancelled” after every single flight. The entire airport was shut down and – given the cleanup task ahead – nobody would be leaving that night. I tried calling my family from a payphone to let them know what had happened, but there was no answer; they were already waiting for me at an airport five hundred miles away.

The counter agent handed me a hotel voucher from a quickly disappearing stack. I caught a shuttle bus to a nearby hotel, checked into my room, and sat back in a chair in disbelief. I stared at the fancy bedspread but never touched it; I was fully jet-lagged in the wide-awake phase. I turned on the TV for an update on the situation; though the flames had been extinguished and the debris was already being cleared from the runway, each station was still playing incessant footage of the wreckage being consumed by flames. Facing a sleepless night alone to reflect on things, the bizarreness of the situation was starting to hit me. At that very moment, a small crowd of well-wishers was taking down their banners and returning home after realizing I was AWOL. What a strange way to finish a mission!

I shut off the TV, put my camera on the table, and set the auto-timer for a quick self-portrait of my last day as a missionary. The flash went off, and I kept right on staring at the camera, thinking of the images I had captured through that lens. My random shots could never do justice to the whole experience that had somehow ended up culminating in a New York City hotel, but I treasured them nonetheless. Armed with my insomnia, I pulled my little box of mission photos out of my tattered suitcase and decided to put the pictures in order. I finished the task within a few minutes and stared at my watch. With the memories still fresh, I decided to start writing any names I could remember on the back of each photo. The subjects began a procession across the stage in my head as I recalled their names and their stories. Among others, I saw:

These few photographs had captured just a small sampling of the people I had met. Upon arrival in Dresden two years before, President Peters had asked each member of our greenie bunch to try to meet at least 25 new people every day; more often than not, we’d easily reach that goal. Over two years that added up to well over 10,000 ice-breaking conversations, each initially with a stranger.

Many of these faces flooded my mind with vivid memories, but there was no way to keep that many images compactly filed away in my brain. I could still see the East Bloc pioneers arriving at the Freiberg Temple from their diverse, native lands for the newly translated temple sessions – the stalwart Church members who had tacitly ignored or even actively fought against their communist oppressors. But I could also see the less-than-valiant members who had previously joined the Communist Party and then later returned to the fold to be met with grudges and, at times, fisticuffs.

An endless line-up began a procession through my head; we had met with anybody willing to give us a minute of their time. In the process, we had engaged both Skinhead nationalists and the foreign refugees they hunted at night. There were Ossies and Wessies, communists and capitalists, imperialists and peace marchers, alcoholics and chain smokers, war widows and Red Army veterans…the list was unending, covering every imaginable background. There were Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, each with their own conviction. There were Kazakhs and Slovaks, Greeks and Ghanans, Cubans and Cossacks, each with their own unique blend of nationality and ethnicity.

These people had shared with us their stories of brutality, hunger, hopelessness, and despair, coupled with kindness, forgiveness, restitution, and all of the things that are inherently part of this human experience. Their faces were etched into my mind; by proxy of the stories they shared, their experiences had been driven even deeper into my psyche and seared into my heart. They had opened their lives to a couple of spoiled Americans they had barely met, sometimes offering much more detail than we could possibly process, and sometimes only hinting at stories they couldn’t bear to retell themselves. And a few – really just a handful by comparison to these masses – a chosen few came to the sweet realization that there’s more to this life than meets the eye, dressed in white to enter into the waters of baptism, committed their lives to Christ, and never looked back. In my mind’s production, aided by jet-lagged delirium and a box of photos, they all came out together to take a final bow.

I had to smile and shake my head at some of the characters who had crossed that stage during the performance. In a two-year span I had compiled statistically significant proof that normal, sensible people won’t open their door to a stranger…and they certainly won’t invite you in. That latter category comprises a special cross section of humanity. These souls include debt-ridden drug addicts, chain-smoking drunks, overzealous bible bashers, asylum-seeking refugees, desperate housewives, lonely homosexuals, the terminally ill, the mentally ill, the outright insane, and – hidden somewhere in that mix – a handful of elect truth-seekers.

A good chunk of my two-year effort was spent sifting through these masses to identify the bonafide truth seekers from among them. After almost 200 years of modern-day missionary work, Missionary Department still hasn’t figured out a more effective or efficient way to help its 50,000 full-time missionaries meet that challenge. Perhaps I wasn’t properly in tune enough with my internal divining rod to accelerate the process; but looking back on it, I wouldn’t have wanted a program that would have deprived me of the sifting process itself, much as I would have welcomed it while knocking doors.

I had entered Germany two years before intending to shed light on the convictions of others. Teaching had been the primary goal; learning was only secondary on the agenda. In the end, it seemed, the roles ended up reversed.

I had personally learned something from each one of these contacts, and I would hope that the benefit was mutual, whether or not they accepted our message. Sitting in that hotel room, I had one of those epiphanic moments where the journey itself suddenly becomes more important than the tally sheet at the end. Perhaps this whole experience had been more about opening my own eyes to humanity rather than spreading my beliefs to others. In that retrospective moment, I wasn’t so sure that I’d trade in a single connection to this diverse and lively group of people for a “golden” investigator.

Having overloaded my memory circuits, I couldn’t process any more; I turned the TV set back on to see if the airport had reopened. Instead I caught a newsflash about an erupting conflict in the Balkans. My previous knowledge of the situation had been limited to cursory comments on the street; I had been naïvely oblivious to the politics and comfortably numb to the few rumors I had heard about the conflict. The horror of the real situation now unfolded on the television screen. Over the past few years, democracy and freedom had spread and paved the way for the preaching of the gospel – or vice versa if you asked the East German Saints – but at what price?

I knew from the very onset that the same fissure in the Iron Curtain that allowed us to enter as missionaries would likewise indulge scam artists, mafia bosses, pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, child slave traders, and all sorts of similar forces for the populace to contend with. And it didn’t surprise me that I ended up meeting hundreds of people who preferred tyrannical rule to this devilish deluge. In spite of this backlash, though, I had still been under the delusive illusion that democracy’s descent on the people would eventually solve their problems. The winds of change would certainly sweep the world, I thought, and freedom, liberty, and democracy – coupled with capitalism – would surely prevail in the process.

My naïvety was becoming apparent with this news report. It became all too clear that the iron fist – that for all its faults had at least kept racial tensions in check – was exploding into thousands of trigger-happy fingers. Those finding themselves on the wrong end of the gun’s barrel were certainly crying to bring back Stalinist rule in place of this new lunacy.

I wasn’t prepared to entertain these broader thoughts; I was still selfishly stuck in my own itinerary. Instead of being met with cheers and banners, my homecoming had now been blocked by a flying machine in pieces on the ground. The burning wreckage seemed somehow symbolic of the conflagrations beginning to erupt around the world, bringing an end to blissful ignorance and peaceful obliviousness. Had the world’s optimism at the Wall’s collapse been merely an overreaction? Was this a sign from above to stop cheering and get to work?

The world powers seemed to stand idly by in these early days of this new conflict, perhaps blinded by the stunning period of public elation that had transpired over the previous years. Engulfed in our glasnostic euphoria, it seems we had collectively convinced ourselves that the flames of war would subside on their own. Apartheid was famously crumbling, after all; so what if a few sparks of racism were scattered around the Balkans? Surely the world as a whole was on its way toward lasting peace, and these minor problems could be whisked away and swept under the rug of denial and ignorance.

Those blind hopes were now dashed; instead, news reports were surfacing with present-tense terms that had been out of use in the western media for fifty years: war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, systematic rape… These were supposed to be relics of a bygone era from which we as a civilization had graduated. Hadn’t these ghosts been exorcised in Nuremberg, yielding lessons we learned long ago? Yet in that very instant, as I sat glued to a television screen, innocent villagers were being rounded up and massacred just a few hundred miles from my mission field.

Though perhaps less systematic, these crimes were no less gruesome or hate-driven than those committed by their Nazi counterparts. These were the very scenes that prompted a missionary who had returned from the Balkans to record the haunting harmonies of the Prayer of the Children, in which war-torn children try to make sense of “angry guns in their shattered world.” Kurt Bestor’s lyrics were about to be driven in with a whole new measure of force. The gathering powers were polarizing all across the Balkan Peninsula, and I wondered what harsh turn things might take from there. Would the wave of peace make a rebound or would it be just the opposite?

I listened ever more intently to the reporter, but the relatively brief newsflash soon gave way to a breaking story: Reports were surfacing that a pop duo had lip-synced their concerts, and an all-out hunt for the real Milli Vanilli was ensuing.

I was still a missionary. I had a right to ignore politics for one more day, and I certainly didn’t care one bit about Milli or Vanilli. So I shut off the TV – briefly bothered by my complicit guilt as a spoiled consumer with a short attention span – and packed my box of photos back into my suitcase.

Before I knew it, the telephone rang, and the airline representative let me know they were back in business and I had been rebooked on the next flight out. Never having touched the neatly made bed, I pushed in my chair, picked up my suitcase, and made my way back to the airport. This time we took off uneventfully, and I finally caught a view of that incredible skyline, including what was to be my first and final glimpse of the Twin Towers.

Having wrapped up his ministry, Hamp had watched that same skyline fade into the distance in his rear view mirror as he embarked on the final leg of his journey home. Back in those Depression years, thousands of nobodies in New York City were desperately trying to become somebody. And hundreds of these starving actors, artists, and musicians did, in fact, succeed in eventually giving up obscurity and making themselves into household names. As the skyline shrank, I wondered what still-anonymous celebrities inside those apartment windows might be on the verge of becoming future global phenomena.

The Finger Lakes came into view along with the endless forests that surround them. One of the rolling hills dotting the landscape from 30,000 feet was Cumorah – the origin of an entire dispensation. As he puttered off to upstate New York in a crippled Plymouth, Hamp had shared his mission stories with his mother and sister. They had stopped at an inn in Palmyra but didn’t retire to bed; instead, they stayed up late in the evening while Hamp laid his mission photographs out on the large oak table in the atrium. On that muggy summer night in 1933, Hamp pointed to each photograph and – with crickets chirping loudly in the background – recited one life story after another to his audience.

As each set of photographed eyes stared back at them in the flickering electric light, the trio never could have imagined what life might have in store for these people. The smiling faces in the photographs were completely unaware of the calamities that were about to descend on them. How could they even begin to comprehend what they would be called to go through – on parade grounds with fluttering red banners, in bomb shelters with fire raining down around them, or in Siberian death camps with no defense against the bitter cold?

Nearly every building in Hamp’s photographs would be reduced to rubble in the following decade. Every German citizen would in one way or another be pulled into the global conflict. They would be forced to choose sides by one occupying force after another, gambling their lives by trying to predict the future victors. They would – in many cases – pay the ultimate price for their choice of allegiance. Many would not emerge from the conflict alive; the rest would be forever scarred by their experience. Armies would sweep across their lands; in some of the cities in Hamp’s photographs, every German would be eradicated from his home and hunted down, with the survivors ultimately forced to flee the fight in an endless stream of refugees. On the other hand, every American companion in Hamp’s photographs would feel torn at the prospect of doing battle with their former friends.

As he finally retired to bed that night within earshot of the Sacred Grove, Hamp must have thought of the lives he had touched as a missionary. What purpose had the message served among these people? Some had been converted to a new set of beliefs centered on the Restoration that had commenced in Palmyra. Some would remain faithful and would find their faith strengthened in the ensuing furnace of affliction; others – including some long-standing Church members – would lose their faith in the face of these pending trials, not only their faith in the Latter-Day message, but their faith in God and humanity as well.

Were my photographs any different? What unwritten mysteries might life have in store for these people, for my companions, for myself? Would we all just get along and live out our days in peace, harmony, and prosperity? Or would there be some test ahead – some descent into chaos that would tear us in different directions? The balance of powers that had kept a nuclear nightmare in check was evaporating – what might a fight over the dismantled pieces have in store for the planet? Who would survive and who would succumb in the generations ahead?

I certainly had a growing list of questions – and no answers to speak of – but before I knew it, the airplane had touched down, and the cabin door opened. A brave, new world lay beckoning from beyond the jetway. Hamp and hundreds of thousands of other returning missionaries must have felt the same, strange sensation as they crossed gangplanks, airstairs, and other contraptions back into the real world.

Day in and day out, I had left a piece of my soul with the German people. But now I was entirely on my own, re-entering a mad, mad world of politics and pop culture. I had spent two years in the land of Schiller and Goethe, Bach and Beethoven. The changes that had occurred during my period of insulation had been staggering. The English Language had a whole new set of catch phrases, courtesy of Wayne and Garth, and a brand new language called html had been coined in the meantime. I had missed the advent of e-mail and the explosion of the World Wide Web. I knew nothing of Seinfeld’s debut, Bart-Mania, the birth of grunge, or the death of techno. I had missed the Rodney King L.A. Riots, the Persian Gulf War, the dismantling of apartheid, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and, as it turned out, the first shots of the Bosnian War that was just beginning to rage. As I passed through the plane’s door, I reluctantly but willingly entered this strange, new environment, completely unprepared to deal with it.

I arrived in anonymity; there was no welcome home party, no greeting at the gate. My best friend Vera picked me up at the curb, dropped me off at home, and rushed back to work. She would soon find herself entering the world from which I had just emerged, preaching the gospel in the same Silesian towns in which Hamp had labored, but under the direction of the newly opened Warsaw Mission; for now, though, we were both stuck inside the maniacal present-tense of everyday life, making everyday decisions with everyday consequences.

I was done with the introspection and reminiscing. Now it was time to dive back into this real life, with concerns over money, a major, and – somewhere in the process – marriage. The mounting choices seemed overwhelming. My next transfer would be entirely my decision; I wouldn’t have the luxury of opening a transfer letter and leaving the responsibility for the inspiration to someone else. How would I decide where to go? How would I decide who to be…and whom to be with? Which trait changes would be permanent, and which ones would wear off with time? My body had made it home, but my mind certainly had a long way to go in the transition.

I looked around at my old bedroom, which had been completely transformed in the meantime by a kid brother who had apparently welcomed my absence as a chance to remove any trace of my existence. “Welcome home,” I said to myself. But this wasn’t my home anymore; I was just a visitor. I had looped the loop, and this particular slide down the helter skelter ride was over. Like it or not, it was time to find a new ride – to climb up those stairs alone and start a circle of my own.

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“Yell at me in German again, Dad!”

I laughed at Jaedin’s request. In trying to locate the photograph Hamp had signed for Sister Kuropka, I had been digging through a box of my mission memorabilia; Jaedin recognized the red, black, and gold stripes of the folded German flag and pulled it out of the box. He loves the sound of German – especially when harmless words are shouted like expletives with Nazi-style intonation – and he thought he’d get another taste of it.

“OK, but remember, you asked for it!” I answered him with a smile.

I picked one of my most prized mission artifacts out of the box. Back in the day, as Elder Koblenz had so dutifully instilled in me, every missionary was asked to carry the Little White Bible – the small booklet with a white cover containing the mission rules – in his suit coat pocket and read a page every day, lest we forget.

It just so happened that there was also a miniature German edition of Sendak’s children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, of the same size, and also with a white cover. One missionary had somehow managed to secure a whole stack of these companion volumes. As a rite of passage, each missionary assigned to the mission office received a copy on his induction. In addition to the official rulebook text, we would then just as dutifully read a page of this alternative Little White Bible aloud to each other each morning before leaving the apartment; sacrilege or not, it kept our spirits up, and to this day I still have it memorized. Those memories came flooding back.

“Well, Dad, let’s hear it,” Jaedin said, waiting impatiently for me to stop reminiscing.

I obliged; opening the book, I put on my meanest angry-eyes, and shouted out the words – rolling the r’s in my best Austrian dialect. “Du hast nur Unfug im Kopf! … Ich fress Dich auf! … Sie brüllten ihr fürchterliches Brüllen! … Jetzt machen wir Krach! … Ich habe Dich am allerliebsten!”

“What did that mean?” he asked.

“Well, to sum it up, it means I love you more than life itself,” I replied, giving him a ferocious hug.

Though the past is interesting, it takes moments like these to convince me that there’s nothing like the present; as I put the book back into my box, this snap back to reality convinced me that if there is a meaning of life, it is in the here and now…which I had found right then and there – with a little help from above.

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Chapters:

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