I was strolling through the LDS Church plaza the other evening when — with everyone else — I looked for the image of the Salt Lake Temple in the reflecting pool there.
But this time, the image chimed with something in my mind. It reminded me of something. And, knowing me, I figured it had to do with something I'd read.
It did.
The reflection of the "water temple" called to mind a scene from Unamuno's novel about "San Manuel Bueno" (Saint Emmanuel, the Good).
In the novel, two of Manuel's most devoted disciples are walking by the lake near the town when one of them recalls a local folktale. According to tradition, he says, there was an entire village buried under the water at the bottom of the lake. What's more, every year at midnight on St. John's Eve, the townfolks could hear the bells of the submerged cathedral ringing away.
God's house, living in the water.
The young disciple goes on to say he believes that buried inside of the old priest San Manuel, there was also a village of people. And if you listened close, you could hear the deep, resonant bells of that village cathedral ringing in the heart of the old priest.
Remembering that scene from the novel got me thinking.
Maybe the young fellow was right.
Maybe, as with San Manuel, there really is a community of people inside us all. It is the village of our ancestors.
Those ancestors who gave us our eye color and our receding hairlines are all inside of us, submerged in our DNA. But more than that, so is the ancestor who left a foreign land to come to America, the ancestor who opened the door to the Mormon missionaries and the one who decided to take a risk and move west — or north or south.
They all linger within us, making us who and what we are.
My "inner-village," for instance, is home to Uncle Will, the man who loved music and passed that love on to my father, who passed it to me.
My village has my grandmother in it — the poet who taught me to love language. And my great-great-grandfather, the Welshman with a wonderful appetite for the divine. They are all in there.
As for how this relates to the reflection of the temple — isn't the temple where our "inner-villages" come to life?
Isn't it where we not only think about our ancestors, but link hands with them and share their lives?
In the novel about San Manuel, the young disciple finishes his thought by saying the village at the bottom of the lake is not really a living village, but "a cemetery for the souls of all our grandparents."
For Mormons, however, there's nothing "dead" about the villages in our hearts.
The souls in those villages live on — not only as part of our own makeup, but as part of a spiritual family, summoned to worship — perhaps — by the bells of a grand cathedral we sometimes hear, but can never see.
Jerry Johnston is a Deseret News staff writer. "New Harmony" appears weekly in the Mormon Times section.