Remarks from Elder Bruce Hafen

Talk given by Elder Bruce Hafen, at the funeral on February 14^th, 2009

What a wonderful service this has been. I pray that the Lord’s spirit will continue with us. I see so many who were with us in that mission, with Pat, almost 50 years ago. And if I multiply that across her influence since then, in the groups with which she’s associated, I marvel. I’ve been stirred by what we’ve heard today. I’ve been thinking that as joyful as the music in heaven is, it got better this last week and it will be better and well taught from now on.

It also occurs to me, Kent, that some people would say Valentine’s Day is a pretty sad day for a funeral. But if such a day must come, as it does and will to all of us, I think it is a wonderful day for it, because it makes me think of the red roses of Valentine’s, prompt a memory of a song that I know Pat loved because we sang it together, it’s a beloved German Christmas hymn, “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, aus einer Wurzel zart.” , the English is “Lo how a rose ere blooming from tender stem hath sprung, of Jesse’s lineage coming as man of old have sung, It came a bud so bright amid the cold of winter when half spent was the night.” Elder Neal A. Maxwell once said that some of the doctrines in the gospel are warm and fuzzy and we love them, but there are some doctrines that are outright wintery and we’ve been tasting of one of the wintery one’s today. Because it’s so hard to be tutored by adversity and by the reality of the pains of mortality in this kind of separation, it is very real and it runs very deep. The Lord has told us we should weep at the loss of those who die. If we understand, we will, but for all that it means but amid the cold of that wintery doctrine and the line of the song says, “amid the cold of winter”, there’s that rose blooming and the rose is the symbol of Christ. And it is because of Christ that we will be resurrected and it is because of His atonement that we can be together again. And so the Valentine symbol is a symbol of Him and His blessing on love.

Pat loved all things Germanic, I heard a line from a German opera once where somebody said, “take me to the place where love lasts forever”. They dreamed of that in the operas. Their hearts told them that there really ought to be a place like that, and there is.

Here’s how I came to know Pat. There’s an old ancient record in my little pile of books at home, my missionary journal. I blew off the dust and found this entry: “In the Stuttgart Germany district, December 17, 1960,” Pat and I had both just arrived and started our missions there. I didn’t describe every event in this kind of detail, I was a sporadic journal writer, but I was so glad to find this much because I’d forgotten completely that it was there. Listen, “Last night we went to Kornwestheim for the Primary Christmas party sponsored by the Sister Missionaries there, Sister Jane (Sharon) Turman and Sister Patricia Haglund. They had over 20 kids in the program. Most of them were non-members, the Sisters had just gathered up in the neighborhood where they’d been tracting. Their program showed the polish of lot’s of rehearsals and enthusiasm. The program was the one outlined in the primary pilot class lesson manual. The Sisters got the Primary going by just finding those kids and contacting their parents about letting them come to Primary and of course the parents came to the program to hear their children sing. We met in a music school with plenty of room and facilities. Sister Haglund accompanied the songs with some kind of guitar like instrument, then they served hot chocolate in paper cups and donuts and Santa Claus paid a visit and Elder Wunderli gave a short message of the restoration talk. The whole Ludwigsburg branch was there, they’re a tightly knit group. It was a great evening.”

And then, almost a year later, one more entry, from a conference I still remember and always will ~ an all mission conference in Frankfurt for our mission when Royal K. Hunt was our mission president. And I wrote in my journal that it was the most inspiring conference I’d ever attended to that time. I wrote, “the whole mission was there. We fasted for a day and a half. We started the conference at 9am on Thursday morning and met together until 8:30pm that night with just a couple of stand up breaks.” Think that through. Those of you who worry about a 3o minute attention span. “During the last two or three hours on Friday morning, we had the sacrament and then a testimony meeting. I played the piano and Sister Haglund lead the singing.” I wrote in my journal, “During the song and the sacrament, I am sure there were tears in the eyes of every missionary in the room. One couldn’t keep them back. I will never forget that burning inside and the desire I felt to rededicate myself to the work. I think the sacrament meant more to me that day than it had ever done prior to that in my life. In his testimony, President Hunt said, that as he watched Sister Haglund lead us in the sacrament song, he honestly believed she looked like an angel.” We all did. I still remember the image, and I want to keep it always. She’s played that kind of angelic role in keeping the Lord’s spirit with so many groups, as we’ve heard about today, ever since.

The song we will sing at the end today, is the one that we’ve been singing at the end of our missionary reunions every six months for four plus decades. Pat would always lead it. I would say to Kent what President Hinckley said at Danzel Nelson’s funeral. This was not long after he’d lost his beloved Marjorie. I was glad he was so honest, he said, speaking to Elder Nelson, he said, “the loneliness is indescribable and any words of comfort that people offer you, will be well meant, but they won’t be enough. It’s devastating and there will be times when you wonder if you can go on, but then there will be moments in the night when a voice unspoken but real nonetheless comes to you to assure you that (Pat) lives, that God loves you and ultimately that all will be well.”

There will be another reunion, with the same songs, and we’ll pick up the same happy conversations just where we left them. Imagine Pat smiling and leading us once more. I love the timelessness. I feel that timelessness now as I see our missionaries of those 50 almost years, it was nothing. I’m reminded of Brigham Young’s words, when he said, after a lifetime of troubles and sorrow. One day we’ll be together again in the Lord’s presence with each other, we’ll look back on our lives and say, “but what of all that, we’re here together now.”

I found myself thinking of Joseph Smith’s teachings about the pre-mortal world. Reference has been so clearly made to that, we’ve heard wonderful doctrine. We may underestimate the significance of that doctrine and the fact that no other church teaches it. Even though you could find it in the hearts of so many, many people through so many centuries, because our hearts tell us there has to be something like that.

Because Pat loved things German, for some reasons I thought of what I might say, I remembered that the story of a German romantic writer named Novalis, his real name was Georg Friedrich von Hardenberg, you can see why they called him Novalis. The German poet of the late 18^th Century who influenced later romantic thought ~ sometimes called the prophet of romanticism. The central image of his writing was something he described in a little novelette, where the hero, the young hero of romantic young man had a dream about a blue flower and he longed for something he couldn’t describe when he saw this blue flower in his dream. And when he awoke, he just couldn’t overcome the longing. He didn’t understand it. He searched for it and then he found a young woman and fell in love with her and as his love grew he began to sense that sort of image of a flower about her. This, the blue flower that became the symbol for the romantic longing. This was autobiographical for Novalis because as a young man, studying at a university he had fallen in love with a young woman named Sophie. He’d fallen deeply, madly in love with her and then she got sick and died after about two years. And Novalis, who only lived a few more years himself, spent the rest of his life longing for her. And he concluded that this longing was sort of the human plight and condition because it can’t ever be fulfilled and that’s why the romantic longing, there’s something so poignant and well, to the Germans so powerful about it, to know that it can’t be fulfilled. There’s something kind of noble about that and so the longing pierces even more deeply. So, to quote Novalis, “the blue flower is unattainable and it is to remain unattainable.” So, the romantics expressed a longing for home, a longing for that which is far off. The great German poet Schiller called this the romantic exiles pining for a home land. So the longing is what the Germans call the “Sehnsucht” – it’s searching and it’s longing.

But the wonderful news of the gospel, brothers and sisters, is yes, it’s there, we know it’s there, we want to feel it. We don’t apologize for feeling it. Because it is through the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ that we know those feelings are instilled in us because we came from our heavenly home as children of that Father, for whom we long, we want to be with Him. And as our missionary friend Alan Keele has discovered in German opera and literature and movies, for a long time people have been saying, oh there must be some way that we lived somewhere else before we came here or we wouldn’t feel these things, but the churches don’t teach that. You can’t believe it. So I guess that’s why it can’t be fulfilled and that’s maybe one reason that it’s hard to take those churches seriously because they don’t seem to understand what that longing is about.

The great news of the gospel is where it comes from. We did come from another place. This world is not our home. I’m stirred by what I heard Elder Holland say on an occasion like this, at a funeral, when he said, “This earth is not our home, but too many of us live as if it were.” So a funeral is such a remarkable time of focus to be reminded that what we’re feeling is given to us by God, a sort of call from home. Stay close. What you feel now is a taste of what you can always feel.

As Brigham Young wrote, “God is the Father of our spirits. If we could know, understand and do His will, every soul would be prepared to return to His presence, and when they get there, they would see they formerly lived there for ages. That they’d previously been acquainted with every nook and corner with the palaces, walks, and gardens and they will embrace their Father and He will embrace them and say, ‘My son, my daughter I have you again’. And the child will say, ‘Oh, my Father, my Father, I am here again.’” We are feeling that that is true because it is true. And it feels like a call from home because that is home. This isn’t our home. We’re away at school, learning what it takes to go back.

And we have seen a life, Patricia Haglund Nielsen, that teaches us how to go home. And what’s so remarkable about her life in today’s world is that most people in today’s world wouldn’t believe that a woman would really live like that, could find fulfillment and meaning by living like that, much less that it would be connected to where she came from and where she’s going. She was really remarkable. And her life shows that it’s possible to live like that in a world that denies that you can live like that or many that it’s even desirable to live like that. It is the most fulfilling way to live and the adversary doesn’t want people to know that. So we’ve been blessed with a witness of it. a witness of a noble woman who was a disciple of Christ. And it’s so much better so see that sermon than to hear it.

And so I pray that our life will be indelibly impressed on us that we will want to live like that, and we will. It’s not that we have to live the gospel. It’s that we get to. And to know how, just look at her life. I want to echo Kent’s wonderful testimony today. Thank you for that Kent. It was like Lehi bearing testimony to his posterity. I know that what you said is true and I know that what we feel is true.

And I ask God to bless us, that as we leave here, we will be strengthened in our resolve to overcome the natural oppositions all around us, the wintery doctrines of adversity that surround us, that we can cling to the rose of Christ, and the rose of love in this life and in the life to come. I testify that we will be with the Lord, with our families, in that great missionary reunion, that family reunion, again one day. I know it of a certainty. Joseph said, “the same sociality that exist among us here will exist among us there.” I testify that it’s true and ask the Lord to bless us to live for it. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.