Week 66: Dispatches from Liberty Jail
Dear Loved Ones,
Quarantine is rough, but I am still able to teach people and the great kinda-perk of my life is that I'm one of the only people with a key to Liberty Jail right now. Bet Joseph Smith wished he had a key to Liberty Jail. On this day, April 6, 1839, Joseph and his fellow prisoners left the jail for the hearing and were able to escape ten days later. I've been thinking about him a lot. I watched part of conference in the computer room in the jail basement. I counted two direct references to Liberty Jail and one quote about it.
One of my goals I set when I first came to Missouri (one year ago this week) was to figure out Liberty Jail. I don't know that I'll ever be able to give tours there now with the jail currently being closed and the short time I have left, so I stand on the stairs in our house that put me next to the window with a view of the jail and think about him. Everyone always talks about how the experiences he suffered there-under lockdown, underfed, under false charges, with scanty knowledge about how the people he was in charge of were faring-were for his good. But what good did he actually get out of jail?
Before serving at the history center in Independence, all I could come up with was that his suffering on earth might have prepared him for exaltation in eternities. But then a senior elder who spent a lot of time at the jail pointed out something much more temporal: Liberty Jail turned Joseph Smith into a writer. Before, Oliver Cowdery and Sidney Rigdon served as his spokesmen. Much of the Doctrine and Covenants is Joseph receiving revelation from the Lord and other people taking down dictation for him. But he learned to write there, and wrote eloquently. He gave language to suffering. I read his words, "Oh God, where art thou, and where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?" and try to step back. Strip back all the layers of quotes, pretend I haven't heard those words a thousand times before, and imagine them being said for the first time in utter agony.
Joseph Smith is hardly the only man to produce a magnum opus in prison. In high school, I had to read Martin Luther King's Letters from Birmingham Jail. It's an annoyingly long document to manage as homework, so long that he apologizes at the end. I can't find the exact quote without access to google, but he says something like, "What has an imprisoned man to do but write long letters and think long thoughts?"
Joseph Smith's long thoughts in prison were about injustice and suffering. I think this section gets misapplied a lot as a beating stick on those who are already suffering. So many times while I was barred from serving, people I turned to for help or comfort shot back that all my experiences were for my good.
It got to the point where I dreaded any encounter with Liberty Jail. As I read Saints in Idaho, I braced myself for the part where I'd have to read about Liberty Jail. When I did a church history study trip back in 2016, I dreaded the Missouri leg of the journey. I even prayed for a time after I got to this mission that I wouldn't be assigned in an area that ran the jail. But then I shifted to wanting to understand Liberty Jail.
People who wield Liberty Jail against each other misunderstand the very nature of suffering. The big question in life is not "Why do bad things happen to good people." Nobody wonders why bad men are allowed to hurt people, but why those bad people go unpunished. Nobody wonders why grandparents die, why people have cancer, why babies are born with disabilities. All of us are fully aware that that's part of life. But why, why can you kneel so many times in agony, crying out the same tired prayer for relief, to feel of his love, to get the spirit, to not endure alone, and feel nothing?
I think it is important to have monuments to misery, reminders that we're not alone in agony. My companion and I were on a walk the other day and started chatting with a man who lives just a few houses down the street from Liberty Jail. She asked if he'd ever been to tour it, and he said he hadn't. It creeped him out to "think about how people actually were down there" and suffering. Members of the church romanticize the jail a lot and seem to forget that bad things are actually, in fact, bad for you. He wasn't happy there.
There is a difference between suffering and self-pity. Liberty Jail stands to suffering. His writings in section 121 remind us that there is always injustice, and that injustice ought to end. God told him, "And not many years hence, that they and their posterity shall be swept from under heaven, saith God, that not one of them is left to stand by the wall."
A few short decades after the saints were expelled from Missouri, the Civil War swept through the South. No state in the nation was hit as hard as Missouri. No county in Missouri was hit as hard as Jackson. And no part of Jackson was hit as hard as Independence to the state line, the very place the Saints had been told to settle. Liberty Jail carries promises of divine retribution.
Section 123, the first section of the Doctrine and Covenants to be Joseph's own original writing rather than a revelation from God or Oliver Cowdery taking notes at meetings, is Joseph urging the Saints to take account of their own sufferings. He told them that it was "an imperative duty that we owe to God, to angels, with whom we shall be brought to stand, and also to ourselves, to our wives and children" to report damage. Liberty Jail teaches us that it is right-more than right, honorable-to speak up about oppression, loss, and affliction.
Last and not least, in the jail revelations, God told him of the importance of friends. Joseph had so many friends turn on him and he was in jail now because a trusted church-member military commander, George Hinkle, turned him over to the Missouri militia. He was spared execution because an old lawyer friend, non-member General Alexander Doniphan, told General Lucas, who ordered the execution, "I will not obey your order," and if Lucas killed them himself, "I will hold you accountable before an earthly tribunal, so help me God!" Some of Joseph's friends and fellow inmates fell away from the church after his death, but not one of them betrayed him in life.
After so much internal dissent and outward oppression, "Thy friends do stand by thee, and they shall hail thee again with warm hearts and friendly hands."
I will work on having more insights about the jail to share, but that's all I've been able to learn for now.
Thank you, friends who do stand by me.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
Quarantine is rough, but I am still able to teach people and the great kinda-perk of my life is that I'm one of the only people with a key to Liberty Jail right now. Bet Joseph Smith wished he had a key to Liberty Jail. On this day, April 6, 1839, Joseph and his fellow prisoners left the jail for the hearing and were able to escape ten days later. I've been thinking about him a lot. I watched part of conference in the computer room in the jail basement. I counted two direct references to Liberty Jail and one quote about it.
One of my goals I set when I first came to Missouri (one year ago this week) was to figure out Liberty Jail. I don't know that I'll ever be able to give tours there now with the jail currently being closed and the short time I have left, so I stand on the stairs in our house that put me next to the window with a view of the jail and think about him. Everyone always talks about how the experiences he suffered there-under lockdown, underfed, under false charges, with scanty knowledge about how the people he was in charge of were faring-were for his good. But what good did he actually get out of jail?
Before serving at the history center in Independence, all I could come up with was that his suffering on earth might have prepared him for exaltation in eternities. But then a senior elder who spent a lot of time at the jail pointed out something much more temporal: Liberty Jail turned Joseph Smith into a writer. Before, Oliver Cowdery and Sidney Rigdon served as his spokesmen. Much of the Doctrine and Covenants is Joseph receiving revelation from the Lord and other people taking down dictation for him. But he learned to write there, and wrote eloquently. He gave language to suffering. I read his words, "Oh God, where art thou, and where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?" and try to step back. Strip back all the layers of quotes, pretend I haven't heard those words a thousand times before, and imagine them being said for the first time in utter agony.
Joseph Smith is hardly the only man to produce a magnum opus in prison. In high school, I had to read Martin Luther King's Letters from Birmingham Jail. It's an annoyingly long document to manage as homework, so long that he apologizes at the end. I can't find the exact quote without access to google, but he says something like, "What has an imprisoned man to do but write long letters and think long thoughts?"
Joseph Smith's long thoughts in prison were about injustice and suffering. I think this section gets misapplied a lot as a beating stick on those who are already suffering. So many times while I was barred from serving, people I turned to for help or comfort shot back that all my experiences were for my good.
It got to the point where I dreaded any encounter with Liberty Jail. As I read Saints in Idaho, I braced myself for the part where I'd have to read about Liberty Jail. When I did a church history study trip back in 2016, I dreaded the Missouri leg of the journey. I even prayed for a time after I got to this mission that I wouldn't be assigned in an area that ran the jail. But then I shifted to wanting to understand Liberty Jail.
People who wield Liberty Jail against each other misunderstand the very nature of suffering. The big question in life is not "Why do bad things happen to good people." Nobody wonders why bad men are allowed to hurt people, but why those bad people go unpunished. Nobody wonders why grandparents die, why people have cancer, why babies are born with disabilities. All of us are fully aware that that's part of life. But why, why can you kneel so many times in agony, crying out the same tired prayer for relief, to feel of his love, to get the spirit, to not endure alone, and feel nothing?
I think it is important to have monuments to misery, reminders that we're not alone in agony. My companion and I were on a walk the other day and started chatting with a man who lives just a few houses down the street from Liberty Jail. She asked if he'd ever been to tour it, and he said he hadn't. It creeped him out to "think about how people actually were down there" and suffering. Members of the church romanticize the jail a lot and seem to forget that bad things are actually, in fact, bad for you. He wasn't happy there.
There is a difference between suffering and self-pity. Liberty Jail stands to suffering. His writings in section 121 remind us that there is always injustice, and that injustice ought to end. God told him, "And not many years hence, that they and their posterity shall be swept from under heaven, saith God, that not one of them is left to stand by the wall."
A few short decades after the saints were expelled from Missouri, the Civil War swept through the South. No state in the nation was hit as hard as Missouri. No county in Missouri was hit as hard as Jackson. And no part of Jackson was hit as hard as Independence to the state line, the very place the Saints had been told to settle. Liberty Jail carries promises of divine retribution.
Section 123, the first section of the Doctrine and Covenants to be Joseph's own original writing rather than a revelation from God or Oliver Cowdery taking notes at meetings, is Joseph urging the Saints to take account of their own sufferings. He told them that it was "an imperative duty that we owe to God, to angels, with whom we shall be brought to stand, and also to ourselves, to our wives and children" to report damage. Liberty Jail teaches us that it is right-more than right, honorable-to speak up about oppression, loss, and affliction.
Last and not least, in the jail revelations, God told him of the importance of friends. Joseph had so many friends turn on him and he was in jail now because a trusted church-member military commander, George Hinkle, turned him over to the Missouri militia. He was spared execution because an old lawyer friend, non-member General Alexander Doniphan, told General Lucas, who ordered the execution, "I will not obey your order," and if Lucas killed them himself, "I will hold you accountable before an earthly tribunal, so help me God!" Some of Joseph's friends and fellow inmates fell away from the church after his death, but not one of them betrayed him in life.
After so much internal dissent and outward oppression, "Thy friends do stand by thee, and they shall hail thee again with warm hearts and friendly hands."
I will work on having more insights about the jail to share, but that's all I've been able to learn for now.
Thank you, friends who do stand by me.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
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