Last week I spent a few wonderful days on a pre-Holy Week vacation in Utah. Back in graduate school, I gave a paper at a conference on Kierkegaard at Brigham Young University, an event which sounds implausible but which really did happen. During that trip I didn’t have time to explore the outdoors, so it was a joy to finally be able to do so.
While I was there, I started reading a book that I came across quite accidentally: Missionary to the Mountain West: Reminiscences of Bishop Daniel S. Tuttle. Bishop Tuttle was a larger-than-life character in the history of the Episcopal Church. After he was consecrated bishop at the age of only 29, he traveled by train and then by stagecoach into the heart of the American frontier. Establishing his home in Salt Lake City, he served as missionary bishop of the combined area of Utah, Montana, and Idaho. By the time he died in 1923, he had been a bishop for an astonishing 56 years.
Bishop Tuttle arrived in Salt Lake City only 20 years after Brigham Young saw the Great Salt Lake and exclaimed “This is the place’ to build his theocratic American Zion. When Tuttle established St. Mark’s Cathedral, it was the first non-Mormon religious building in Utah. The Latter-Day Saints knew him as a tireless leader who treated them with respect, even as he vehemently and publicly opposed their theology and practices, particularly the practice of polygamy.
One might expect this lion of the Church to be supremely self-confident, maybe even egotistical. But he was not. In a bout of loneliness while ministering in a particularly rough Montana mining town, he wrote to his wife:
Ah, dear, do you not see and know that if I leaned on, or trusted in, this community, or in my large audiences, or in aught human here, I would now be plunged in the lowest deep of despair? It astounds me to think of and realize the breadth and depth of wickedness and vice in which this whole community is steeped.
Nothing but God's Almighty power, with His loving, cheering grace, keeps me patient and courageous, or in fact restrains me from giving up in despair and fleeing Eastward across the mountains, scarcely daring to look behind me, any more than Lot upon the cities of the plain.
The stories of our faith are full of people like this. They were ordinary people with ordinary fears, yet they relied on God who empowered them to do extraordinary things. They were also people who were empowered by grace to treat everyone with respect and kindness, even when they profoundly disagreed.
Our own stories may not be epic Western tales like Bishop Tuttle’s. But each one of us is given the same grace as he was to meet our own difficulties and opportunities.
Yours in Christ,
Kara
PS The book is sadly out of print, but you can request a copy through inter-library loan at the public library. You can also find it online here:
https://archive.org/details/reminiscencesofm00tuttrich/page/n7/mode/1up
