Religion at its best when it combines the spiritual with the practical

Most of the residents in Davis County, Utah, became aware in the early hours of the morning of December 1 that something was wrong. It was the wind that woke most of us - howling over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains and barreling through the canyons as if channeled and focused on our homes by some giant wind tunnel.

Salt Lake City isn’t Kansas, and Davis County isn’t Tornado Alley, so we aren’t used to winds over 100 mph. Snow we can handle, but we’re not too used to freak winds. Even as dawn came, we were hesitant to venture outside to survey the damage because the gale was still blowing hard. But during the course of the morning we saw what the worst windstorm in 25 years had done. Semi-trailers overturned on the I-15 freeway. Power lines down. Countless homes with roofs laid bare to the sub-structure. Roof shingles everywhere, along with broken branches, wrecked fences, demolished mailboxes, overturned trash cans and lots and lots of debris. In my own yard, two 25-foot favorite blue spruce trees were toppled, and along my street the scene looked more like an earthquake, with huge trees uprooted and lying at impossible angles. Two county golf courses alone reportedly lost 800 trees between them.

Over the next two days, people cleaned up as best they could, and we received word that if we piled tree branches by the side of the road, the city would collect them. We dutifully did the best we could so the snowplows could operate freely when the first heavy snow arrived.

Then on Sunday morning, something happened that I will never forget.

Davis County is a predominantly Mormon community, and one of the most efficient channels of communication is through the local “wards” or Mormon congregations. At 8.50 a.m. on Sunday I received a phone call from the local bishop-- the congregational leader. He had just received word that all church meetings would be canceled for the day, and that we were invited to meet in our neighborhood emergency groups - out in the street - at 10 a.m., by which time we would have received emails with more detailed instructions on what to do. Another big windstorm was coming, and state and city authorities were worried that with so much debris still in the streets there could be more serious damage from flying missiles. As part of the ward “phone tree,” I immediately began to phone others.

The instructions when they came were clear and simple: clean up your own property first, especially shingles and blown down fences and anything likely to move in another storm. Then work on your neighbors’ homes, and if you have time after that see what you can do to help neighboring communities.

Sundays are normally quiet and peaceful days in our community. I rarely hear a lawn mower in my street on a Sunday. People take their Sabbath seriously. But by mid-morning on this Sunday there was a sudden proliferation of noisy chain saws, tractors, trailers pulled by four wheelers, and masses of people descending on homes armed with all kinds of tools. Davis County opened up extra areas to dump green waste - and there was plenty of it (more dumped in one day at the regular land fill than all of last year, I learned later). Lines of cars and trailers extended for miles, while helpful residents with two-way radios directed traffic to the quickest dump spot.

Two things really surprised me about that Sunday. The first was that any group of people could remove almost all traces of the mountains of broken tree limbs and uprooted trunks and associated refuse in anything less than a week. But by 5 p.m. that day, in only seven hours and after multiple trips to the hastily designated green waste dump, our neighborhood looked better than it usually does after a spring cleanup - apart from a few sad- looking, denuded tree stumps still in the ground, and lots of open space where there used to be mature trees.

The second thing that surprised me was the almost tangible spiritual charge I got on that very different kind of Sabbath. There was something extraordinarily touching about thousands of people, Mormons and their neighbors of other faiths or no faiths at all, working side by side in a unified display of mutual caring and sharing, even though we normally all get along well. Something special comes from serving together.

I thought several times that day of something Brigham Young said when faced with an emergency in October of 1856 - a party of pioneers was marooned out on the plains and caught in an early snow.

“I shall call upon the bishops this day, I shall not wait until tomorrow, nor until the next day, for sixty good mule teams and twelve or fifteen wagons,” he said in his sabbath day sermon. “That is my religion,” he said. On this particular Sunday in Davis County, it was our religion, too.

The following Sunday we attended church in the usual way. The bishop read a letter of thanks from the stake presidency-- the three-man leadership team that oversees about a dozen wards in our part of Davis County. It was laced with scriptural references, and it made me think of how religion works best when it combines the spiritual with the pragmatic, what the apostle James in the Bible calls “pure religion.” (James 1: 27)

“We sit in our [meetings] each week and talk, instruct and discuss how we should live our lives,” the letter said. “But Sunday we did what we’ve discussed. We practiced what we’ve preached. Our faith was not without works. Truly this was a day of being of one heart and one mind…and there was no poor among us.”

This was not Katrina or Hurricane Andrew. Our twin storms were timid by comparison, and relatively few people were forced from their homes through major structural damage. But it was a fine example of a community coming together, of self-sufficiency and self-reliance, of citizen leadership, of old and young working side by side, where city and state authorities played supportive rather than paternalistic roles, and where religion showed its practical as well as its spiritual face.

Michael Otterson  | Dec 14, 2011 11:00 AM