The day after our Lily Dale video presentation we packed up and began our trip back East. Before heading to Schenectady for our final tour stop (come see us this Saturday at 7 PM), we stopped in Palmyra for the Hill Cumorah Pageant, a presentation of the story of the Book of Mormon through an elaborate pageant. The event is staged atop the Hill Cumorah where Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) is said to have found the gold plates he translated into the Book of Mormon. It was incredible.

We arrived at Palmyra at about 7:30 on Saturday, after a few hours drive through dreary, rainy Western New York. Friendly LDS parking helpers and somber anti-Mormon protesters greeted us as we arrived at the Hill Cumorah and were shepherded through a sea of cones to lines of cars forming in the fields.

We found some seats and chatted with a few friendly LDS teens in full Nephite and Lamanite dress who were in town for the week to participate in the pageant.

About 650 Saints, many of them teens and children, all amateur actors, volunteer as participants in the pageant. Additional hundreds volunteer with the crew. All spend a week in Palmyra preparing, building the stage, making costumes, learning their roles, before putting on the show.

The show started shortly after dark with white-robed trumpeters playing a fanfare from the top of the hill. As they played, the full cast marched up through the aisles, walking up on stage. This was so impressive, both for the coordination and scale of the tableaux. I was pretty much won over at that point.

The pageant traced ten episodes from the Book of Mormon. Starting in ancient Jerusalem, the pageant followed the prophet Lehi and his four sons as they left Jerusalem for the wilderness, and eventually made their way to the sea, built a boat, and sailed to the Americas. The pageant then depicted stories of the descendants of these prophets, including some battles between the two rival Nephite and Lamanite factions, and the persecution of prophets like Alma, Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni, who predicted the coming of Jesus Christ to America after his death in the Old World. The final chapter of the pageant portrayed Joseph Smith, recovering the gold tablets Moroni had buried on the Hill – this is all staged right on the hill itself – and the beginnings of the LDS Church.

Throughout, the production was impressive. The 10-tiered stage was used to great effect: bathed in different colors of light, appended with columns, trees, enhanced with bursts of flame, and streams of lighted mist. The battle scenes were dynamic, and certain scenes, a vision of a white tree, a prophet spreading his message by a waterfall in the wilderness, a storm, tearing apart a ship at sea were truly moving, thanks in part to their creative and beautiful staging.

Neither Carrie nor I ran off to join the LDS Church after the show, but we both found it moving, and thought provoking. It’s fascinating to see how LDS theology inscribes itself on the Judeo-Christian story, rearranging certain building blocks to make way for this compelling but strange story of Jesus Christ and the descendants of Lehi in America. The friendliness and happiness of the many Saints who have travelled across the country to see (and in many many cases) participate in the pageant, is also compelling, as is the story of the staging of pageant: this truly awesome event, a mere week in the making, staffed by amateur volunteers.

A thing I’ve noticed about myself over the past few years, is that I can suspend my disbelief about things, and engage very fully and deeply in religious contexts, but then afterward sort of just turn that suspension off, and return to my regular state of mind, but with the benefit of a more open, earnest understanding of whatever I’ve just experienced. While watching the pageant, I let myself be engulfed by the story, taking it as a real depiction of the lives of these prophets, as the actual burial and discovery of the Book of Mormon on the Hill Cumorah. I let myself be emotionally overwhelmed by the pageant, I came close to crying several times, and was left feeling elated, nearly numb with feeling.

Attending a spectacle like the Hill Cumorah Pageant reminds me of how entranced I am by passionate convictions. Much of my recent work (Rapture/Rupture, Azariah: Whom Jehovah Helps), has been about struggling with belief, the tension between connect and disconnect with spirituality, or the power and attractiveness of religious zeal. I find this zeal compelling, yet I can’t earnestly be a believer.

After the pageant Carrie and I went back to Palmyra where Bonnie was letting us stay at her house. We bracketed a good night’s sleep with marvelous conversation, and we got to see Bonnie’s husband Steve, just back from a fishing tackle convention, and Irene, our host at the Liberty House B&B, before leaving town.

–Jesse