Mormon goes to great lengths for faith

BANGOR – Dedication to religious worship is limited to occasional Sunday mornings for many Protestants, but to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called Mormons, frequent visits to remote regional temples are expected.

Michelle Thomas, director of public affairs for the Bangor stake of the LDS church, used to drive to Kensington, Md. – 12 hours one-way – one weekend a month, with her husband, Scott, and their children.

Thomas is a cheerful young mother who was happy to spend an hour or more explaining what the Mormon Church is all about. Her large French Street house, nestled tightly among the white clapboard homes along the narrow residential street, was filled with the sounds of a young family on a recent spring day.

“The temple is the most sacred place,” Thomas said. “Going to the temple was a three-day trip, a day each way and one at temple, and it is a huge sacrifice to families. Many couldn’t go as often as they might like.”

Now, travel requirements have been eased greatly for Bangor church members since the 100th Church of Jesus Christ Temple was dedicated in October in Boston, Mass. Travel is cut by two-thirds, but still is a marathon trip, when compared with a brief ride around Bangor facing most Sunday morning worshippers.

The Boston temple is not the latest addition to the church, which dedicated the 103rd temple in Uruguay in April.

The same character that meets the challenge of long-distance travel fosters strong family values, Thomas said.

“We believe in strong family values and families are for an eternity, not just ’til death do us part.’ We conduct sealings – marriages in the temple – and believe that all the benefits of the Gospel apply to everyone who has lived at some point on earth,” she said. “A lot of ordinances are for deceased members and many times you might hear of baptisms for the dead, in which we provide baptism for someone who has died if they could not be baptized while alive.”

Only a week before, Thomas sealed her great-grandparents’ marriage in the temple. Whether the deceased couple would accept the rite, Thomas cannot know, but in church ritual, the deceased retain the right to accept or reject whatever is done on their behalf by living members.

Thomas showed off eight squares from various area Church of Jesus Christ churches that would go to Boston to become part of 80 homemade squares in a quilt commemorating the 100th temple.

The squares are from churches in Belfast, Lincoln, Machias, Ellsworth, Skowhegan, Farmington, Rockland, and two in Bangor. All are in the Church of Jesus Christ Stake, or region, taking in central and eastern Maine and including two more churches that did not provide quilt squares – Waterville and Dover-Foxcroft. Each square represents 100 of something, usually a commitment to the community surrounding the local church, such as the 100 hygiene kits for Spruce Run, or 100 baby hats knitted for a hospital nursery. One of the local LDS churches collected 100 cans of food for a food pantry, and another arranged a blood drive in which 100 volunteers donated blood to the American Red Cross.

Still, the 100 donations from each church might seem small when compared with the hundreds of miles driven to temple as close to once a month as can be managed by families.

How the 100th and the 103rd temples came to be is that the LDS church prophet, President Gordon B. Hinckley of Salt Lake City, Utah, decreed it. Hinckley, at 91, is the most-traveled prophet in the church history, and the most energetic, if temple construction projects are counted. It was he who decreed that by the millennium, there would be 100 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temples in the world.

Hinckley could do that as a prophet because, as Thomas explained, “We believe that God speaks, now, today, in regard to how the church should be run and about church affairs. Gordon Hinckley is a prophet because we believe that God still speaks to man, just as in the Old Testament … just as Moses was a prophet, he has the authority to speak in the name of the church.

“That’s the difference between us and other churches,” she said. “We know that Jesus Christ truly leads our church. We don’t believe he is just our savior but leads our church, speaking through our prophet.”

How the church became referred to commonly as the Mormon church, Thomas was unsure. “We never refer to ourselves as Mormons.

“That’s a label that was given to us,” Thomas said. “The Book of Mormon, that’s probably where it came from.”

The church officially discourages use of the word “Mormon,” except in The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, The Book of Mormon, or Mormon Trail. But it has stuck and is not likely to change in the near future.

The black-clad young men seen walking on Bangor’s streets, going house-to-house in a quest to spread the word about Mormon worship, are becoming more common in East Coast communities. That is how Thomas became a Mormon.

“My dad met the missionaries at the Bangor Mall – that was when they could put a booth up in the mall – and he became a Mormon.”

Thomas joined the church while she was in high school in 1984.

The church requires two years of unpaid missionary work be done by young people before they become adult members of their church communities. During the two years, they can neither see nor hear radio or television, never drink alcohol and lead exemplary lives that include no sexual relations.

After that, they go back to jobs and homes, to their families to raise more children in a tradition that is both rewarding and very demanding.