This is one of a series of seasonal posts I put up every year.
When the mission president announced to our small group of greenies that I was going to Strasbourg, on France’s eastern border, I shrugged the resigned shrug of a missionary who knew nothing about anywhere but was willing to go wherever. One of the sisters expressed jealousy; Strasbourg, she said, was one of the best cities in the mission.
She was right, and it would not be a good thing.
Strasbourg is beautiful at Christmas time. Several weeks passed before I fully acclimatized to the major time-change, and the schedule of missionary life, but I loved Strasbourg almost instantly. The eastern area of France bordering Germany is known as Alsace, and offers the best of both countries in terms of food, architecture, and other things. Parks are plentiful, the accent is easier to master, and doner kebab is cheap.
Two wards meeting in an actual chapel with a basketball court were staffed by over a dozen hard-working missionaries who made me feel welcome as we did splits. My trainer, a stand-up guy, introduced me to the endless variety of bread, cheese, pastries, roasted chestnuts, and other delights as the weather cooled. On Saturdays, we played ultimate frisbee and soccer with other missionaries and ward members.
Things were happening in the ward; we had at least one solid person we were teaching regularly, who came often and participated more than some members. Work was hard, but had enough positive things going that I felt we had some energy. The ward choir we sang in was prepping some of my favorite classical Christmas music, Es ist ein Rose Entsprungen (or, D’un Arbre Séculaire, or the awful English title, “Lo, How a Rose ‘Ere Blooming”), and I loved the tenor part. Life, it seemed, was Good.
Then, shortly before Christmas, I was transferred to a two-man town in Belgium called Verviers (VERR-vee-ay). 45 minutes away from other missionaries in Liège, the little industrial ville seemed to border the arctic circle. My companion was depressed, having seen a previous companion abandon his missionary post to live with a French girl. The branch was small and dysfunctional, and met in a small but Mormon-feeling house-chapel conversion. Mostly I remember a 10-yr old girl who liked to provoke missionaries, who closed the piano on my hands mid-hymn at least once. The mission president confided that he was considering withdrawing the missionaries and shutting it down.
No choir sang. We tracted much and taught little, but one young couple with two small children always welcomed us. She was more friendly and sympathetic, but had lost all faith in God because of a miscarriage. Her husband saw us as helping encourage his wife back into faith, but was less receptive to us as missionaries. That was the highlight of our non-LDS contact.
The Belgian architecture in that area consists of long narrow streets, bordered by narrow sidewalks, and endless row houses of dark brick. The weather got colder, the heavens closed permanently for winter, and dustings of snow on the ground quickly dirtied. From ground to sky, everything was despairingly grey. The transition from dim to darkness came around three each afternoon.
To make matters worse, doing what middle management does best, the AP’s misconstrued something the mission president said, and required everyone to wake up half-an-hour earlier every day to exercise. This somnalent curse would not lift for several months, and created perfectionist guilt when, after a few half-hearted pushups, we’d fall asleep on the floor by the heater until 8 am.
While we had a few moments of levity and brightness in Verviers, such as a MoTab Christmas tape and our “Christmas tree” constructed from some pine branches found in the street, twined onto the drying rack, decked out by a few Belge Francs worth of Christmas lights, these were merely stars in a black night. It was the darkest period of my mission, literally, figuratively, and spiritually. My struggles went deeper than what I have enumerated here, and I think I cried some bitter tears. Never have I felt more like crying out “o God, where art thou?” “How long, o Lord, how long?” My temporal suffering in hell was all the worse for having previously been in the mission heaven. Better to start in the mission armpit and get transferred somewhere nice, than start at the pinnacle and mistakenly establish that as the baseline norm for missionary life.
Things didn’t get much better until Spring began to dawn, and another transfer came. In retrospect, it strikes me that temporary and shallow as they were, feelings of despair, abandonment, and futility may be some of the best preparation for appreciating the spirit of Christmas and the mission of Jesus the Messiah. Though my discomfort was largely selfish, my wounds hardly mortal, and my guilt that that typical of missionaries, my darkness nevertheless felt very real to me. Having been in the gloom, I could appreciate the light, instead of being distracted by the cultural trappings of Christmas. Christ came, not to provide fleeting comforts or entertainments, but to “swallow up death in victory and wipe away the tears from all faces” and to “heal the broken-hearted and bind up their wounds.”
Now go and do thou likewise and remember that “This is Church.”
Merry Christmas
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December 20, 2019 at 12:23 pm
My wife visited Strasbourg when she was on her mission in 97. She traveled with others In her zone to sing at the cathedral. She was nothing but praise for Christmas in Strasbourg. It was a tough mission though.
September 8, 2020 at 9:58 am
Hi Ben – Love your blog! I served in the Belgium Brussels mission in the 1980s and was in Verviers for a month. The feeling in Verviers is different than any other town I visited in France or Belgium. I was there in June, and have fond memories of my time there. While in Verviers, on several occasions my companion and I were invited into homes of people who had been part of or were aware of the French Mission apostasy scandal in 1958. During one particular visit, a kindly, elderly woman told me that I reminded her of Elder Tucker and she said, “His name was also William, and he sat right there where you are sitting… such a nice young man.” This was likely during the time that Tucker had been assigned to Herstal (where I spent nine months of my mission). In the early 1980s local members throughout the Liege region were still very aware of the Apostasy events that rocked the mission in the late 50s and apparently it wasn’t just missionaries who were affected. Older residents spoke of joining the LDS church specifically because they were converted to Tucker’s unique vision of the gospel. None of the people we’d spoken to remained active members of the church and at the time we spoke to them, they hadn’t been to the local branch. As an aside, we lived on Rue Aux Laines, and some previous missionaries had painted a huge stencil silhouette of Mormon praying over the golden plates. I still have a photo of that wall. We also found some old photos of previous missionaries in a shoe box. The photos appeared to have been taken sometime in the fifties or sixties and we always wondered if some of those elders had been part of the Tucker/Silver movement.
December 19, 2023 at 9:38 am
When I served in Nancy in 1961 we had district meetings in Strasbourg where I recall the great pasteries and throwing centimes from the top of the cathedral.
The work was not hard back then; my comps and I baptized a number of families and some singles also. The French loved JFK’s wife Jaclyn Bouvier and there were no antis.
Becoming bilingual later helped me get a job with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa. (-: KLK
December 19, 2023 at 3:29 pm
Thanks for your terrific post, Ben. Your story is 95% like that of my first two areas on the mission, except that my experience did not involve that level of insight. But happily, I think it’s never too late to learn.
One thing that was instructive for me, however, was that as I met people in towns like your second area, I wasn’t just meeting people here and there who were without hope; I was encountering entire communities without hope. We are blessed beyond measure to have the hope that comes through the restored Gospel, which is represented to some extent by the current Christmas season. Many of those who are in darkness may not want to hear about our hope, and we don’t have a magic wand to transport them to a place where there is hope, but the contrast between the hope that we have, and the hope that they lack, remains seared in my mind as a basis for my gratitude to God.