Reaching the Unreachable

A personal essay by Brietta Bishop

“Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.”

- Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons

I often think of my friends and family as the people I know the best. I am able to talk with them, ask them questions, and live experiences with them. I know I don’t see everything, but is what I do see enough to really know them? Do I passively read their life stories?

I often think of people in the past as unreachable, unknowable. I can never know all of their experiences, their motivations, their thoughts. But how many people in distant history have I studied; tried to get to know by examining the few experiences I am able to find? I have spent countless hours reading history’s writing and wondering what the past was like. For some of the people in that distant land, I have even attempted to live a small portion of their lives at the Hill Cumorah.

Driving to Palmyra, New York was five hours of excitement and nervousness. It was my first time being in any kind of performance. Luckily for me, I didn’t need to have a background in acting to be part of the Hill Cumorah Pageant. There would be hundreds of other people performing with me, and we would all be on a huge stage taking up half of the Hill Cumorah. Nobody had any speaking parts, really, because the whole script was recorded and played over speakers.

Despite my excitement, I don’t remember much. A lot of my time at Cumorah I see through a hazy fog. I see shadows and silhouettes, but I can never get close enough to see the many details I am missing. Some memories I see as though I am looking through a magnifying glass- I remember small bits in great detail, but I am missing the whole. 

Through the fog, I see the shadows of rehearsals, but I cannot see the details of each one; I know there are silhouettes of conversations I had with people before a performance, but the details escape me. Under my magnifying glass, I see singular experiences that I don’t believe have shaped me nearly so much as the fog has, although the memories obscured by mist don’t seem to have shaped me either. I see frogs the size of my fingernails sitting on a tent one wet morning; my Zion’s Camp neighbor swinging a lasso around his head; playing card games late at night with my brothers in the tent we were staying in. 

Despite only seeing the majority of my time at Cumorah through the obscuring vision of fog or through the limiting vision of a magnifying glass, I look back on it as one of the most impactful experiences of my life. Why? Because the small portion of memories that I still experience with no blur or limitations are my experiences on stage, living the life of someone in the Book of Mormon.

In the perfect weather of a summer evening, I walked around a grassy area, wearing clothes that belonged in an era long before my birth. There was music playing over speakers- Joseph Smith’s First Prayer; Come, Come, Ye Saints; Battle Hymn of the Republic. I smiled and greeted people, talking about what was to come, until I heard the Spirit of God start to play. My heart started beating faster and louder as I moved my way toward my line for the beginning of the show. The Spirit of God finished, silence for only a second, then a prayer. I saw bright angels with horns start a trumpeted cadence on the stage. 

To this day, every time I hear or sing the Spirit of God or hear the trumpeted cadence, I am filled with both the spirit that filled me the very first time I was preparing to go onto the stage at the Hill Cumorah and a longing to be there once again. Every time I read the Book of Mormon and come across a line that is used in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, I hear exactly how it sounded in my head, I can imagine exactly what was happening on stage, and I know what I was doing at that time. When I read about Christ coming to the Nephites I am filled with wonder and humility because I was once in that situation.

I saw a man stand on a wall, telling me that there was to be a Christ child born, that when he was, there would be light for three days and a new star, but when he died- no when he was killed- there would be destruction and darkness for three days. Soon, there was a bright light in the night sky; it was the new star that had been prophesied of. What followed not long after was just as the man said. I ran through fire, falling buildings, and explosions. I saw a girl fall off a waterfall. Then darkness. I heard people calling for help. I heard others lamenting their refusal to repent. 

But through the dark mournings there was a different voice. It said “Behold my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name—hear ye him.” Suddenly a man appeared high in the air, glowing with the radiance of hundreds of lights. He descended from the sky and was soon walking among us. He healed those with injuries, gave sight to the blind, and taught us. After the immense destruction we had witnessed, this man gave us a new life.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but while I was at Cumorah I had somehow managed to reach the unreachable- I had come to know people in the past more intimately than I had ever known anyone before. I had only seen a tiny portion of the thousands of years covered in scripture, but I hadn’t just seen it- I had lived it. 

Since my time at Cumorah I haven’t ever gone to the same lengths to live someone else’s experiences, and I often wonder how or if I can. Is listening to someone’s story just as good as attempting to live it? Is it better? Can I really have an understanding of what it feels like to be in someone else’s situation without actually being in that situation myself?