Museums of the Soul

They're after your soul. You got to know that going in. There's a bunch of them across the land, from the woods outside Manchester, NY, where Mr. Smith saw his visions, all the way to Salt Lake City, the place they called Zion and some still do, Mormon museums created to celebrate the LDS story, artifacts and videos and life-sized scenes from the drama that has attended their entire history, and docents who'd just as soon have you leave believing.

Let me tell you, LDS museums are as immaculate as they are comprehensive, and they tell a simply great story. You really ought to stop by, but if you do, don't forget that unlike any other museum around, Mormon museums are after your soul. You won't leave without one of their books. You don't have to buy it--it's gratis. You don't pay for anything when you stop by an LDS museum--aside, maybe, from a little dignity. 

But don't let that bother you. You could do worse than have good folks concerned with your eternal welfare. 

And, the fact is, the Mormons have an amazing story to tell, a story most unbelievers, like me, don't know and don't figure we need to because it's all about them and not us, and maybe that's true. 

But next time you go to the Omaha airport, take an extra half hour, go a few blocks south of the turnoff and head straight up the hill to an absolutely dustless museum where some fervent docent will offer you a smile so harrowing you can't help but recognize she's looking for converts. Just listen to her. Won't hurt you.

Across the street there's a cemetery with just three stones from the days of the Winter Quarters, a time when the neighborhood held nothing but saints on their way to the glory of Zion. Utah--a place none of them had ever been but most could have described, I'm sure, a place close to heaven, a place in their dreams they called Zion. 

So they stopped right there, before there was an Omaha, and, just about overnight, they built a city. Seriously. They stopped right then and there--June, 1846--and built a city where there wasn't any. That whole community--eventually, 4000 Latter-Day Saints left from the Winter Quarters and Kanesville, a town they built that now goes by the name of Council Bluffs. There wasn't a Council Bluffs in the mid 1840s; there was only Kanesville, their word, hard as that is to believe. 

There's a museum there too, by the way, a little one so completely tucked in by suburbia that it wouldn't be hard to believe life-long residents have never visited nor have ever even seen the place. Stop by sometime--won't take you a half hour--and have a look yourself at the replica Tabernacle where Brigham Young was sustained (you have to use the right word. He wasn't voted in--a church is no democracy, after all. So Brigham and his cohorts were, right there, in 1848, sustained in the original temple, which was back then the biggest building west of the Mississippi. 

It was 1846, and there wasn't much up on a bluff above the Missouri. A man named Brigham Young couldn't help but know that if they were going to make it over the Rockies, all the way to Utah, June on the Missouri was way too late in the year to start the trek. He'd imperil the lives of hundreds, of thousands of Mormons full of his and their peculiar vision of the American West.

And then, almost overnight, it was gone, as were most of the Mormons, thousands of them, vanished, their entire abode emptied, the whole bunch of them following the dream. The whole city maybe the west's very first example of planned obsolescence--here today, gone tomorrow. 

It's not that the whole story has been erased--there's a Mormon Bridge over the Missouri, and the Mormon Trail Motel in old Florence, north Omaha, a couple dozen other uses of the name. But there's nothing but museums to commemorate that massive movement of people in, and then, two years later, out of what the Mormons call Winter Quarters.

I stopped at the Kanesville Tabernacle last spring, when a volunteer crew of men off the canvas of American Gothic were putting in some scrawny annuals, noble work. The docent, the man who dedicated himself to me, the visit of a single tourist that afternoon, was outside in a white shirt and tie, getting his hands dirty with the landscaping crew of other retirees. He excused himself for his dirty hands.

The Kanesville Tabernacle Monument is an enterprise run righteously. Just think of it--175 years ago there were thousands here overnight, thousands in the Winter Quarters and all around the region, on their way to Zion. 

If you're like me, that whole story may not be yours, but I'll have you believe it's ours. Go ahead and stop by. Those places are perfectly clean--spotless restrooms. Go ahead and take a Book of the Mormon they'll try to stick you with. Stop by and listen to the incredible story they'll tell. You could do worse than a friendly chat with good-hearted folks with dirt on their hands and eternity on their minds. 

They've got a story. Right here among us, they got a tale to tell.