Letter from the Highlands
by Anne Perry

‘Love me, and I can be good!’

What a strange period of time it has been as far as the weather is concerned. Here in the far north we have had nothing damaging like floods, violent winds, droughts or fire or dust storms, as have many other parts of the world. And I need to remind myself of that as one grey day follows another.

Actually today, Monday, August 12th, is lovely, bright sunlight, blue skies and blue sea, but there has not been much of that this summer so far. Yet the flowers bloom, and above all the raspberries are superb! They are huge, sweet and so abundant we cannot pick them fast enough before the birds get them. But they are welcome to a few.

Perhaps there is a lesson in that. The fruits of life do not need sunshine to ripen, only light. Sometimes we think that without the warmth, the beauty and the comfort of the sun we will not be able to give of our best. It seems it is not true. Without water we die. But a good deal of miserable weather seems to have made the sweetest of fruit flourish as never before. Maybe a certain degree of hardship will yield the best fruit in our lives as well.

If it were all brightness, and the everlasting harvest might be meagre.

The wild flowers are blazing in the fields and hedgerows, and the heather is purpling till the closer margins of the roads seem to be mounded with it, and the distant hills splashed and daubed with colour so rich it burns. We have a daisy-like weed the local people call ‘Stinking Bill’ – not a very attractive name, but a tall clumped flower of so vivid a yellow it seems as if it would shine even at night. The purple and gold of the two together, mingled in fields and verges, are as brilliant and rich as any cultivated garden.

When the sun does shine, and the harvest fields are dark gold, the shaven ones pale as dry sand, the sky and sea are blue, the sheep grazing in meadows of unbroken, blemishless green, and the yard-high fireweed lies in long banners and swathes over the slopes, it is enough to make up for weeks of greyness. I get dizzy with it and cannot take it all in at once.

And thinking of flowers, this is the time of year when the seed and plant catalogues come. The pictures seem to get more lush every season, the colour more vibrant and the shapes more exquisite. I lose all sense of proportion when it comes to tulips. There are the ordinary Darwins, the feather-edged, the lily-flowered which are flute-shaped, the peony-like with 100 petals, the triple-headed, the specie, the wild Turkish which open like stars, the viridian-striped with green, the artists’, the Rembrandt streaked with colours, and my favourite – the parrot – huge jagged-edged, daubed and splashed and spotted. And of course there are scores of daffodils, narcissi, crocuses, bluebells, and all sorts of other spring flowers.

This year I am totally beguiled by lilies. I close my eyes and imagine them blazing in my border next year.

And then there is all the rest of the catalogue, page after page of every kind of flower you can imagine, and several you can’t! What a glorious dream! And what an act of faith every gardener performs in planting with the vision in mind, and waiting and working half a year or more in the trust that seeds will grow, the leaves will flourish, eventually the flowers will come, and they will all be as good or better than the pictures we now see in the heart.

There is a pretty big lesson in that too. It can be no accident that Adam and Eve were placed in a garden to begin their existence on this side of the veil. We will all abide the law of gardening, if not here, then hereafter. What seeds we plant now will be the flowers and the fruit we live with in eternity.

Perhaps we should look at the catalogue and study it a bit harder – choose very carefully what we want to grow so we nourish with sweat and with tears, with time and patience and faith, the flowers that will bloom forever.

I love the Old Testament, and we are now reading some of the most beloved of prophets, Elijah and Elisha. What sublime stories of faith, especially the Shunnamite woman who fed and sheltered Elisha. I could read those stories over and over and not grow tired or over-familiar with their clean and powerful beauty. How sublime to have faith like hers!

Yesterday we had tremendous news – the Church has actually purchased the land in Invergordon for us to have our own building! It is ours, as from 31st. July, 2002. Of course we still have a long way to go, because we must have the numbers to justify a building, and we are about to lose a family of five, including two Melchizedek Priesthood holders – something of which we are desperately short! We will be extremely lucky if we can gain an active family to replace them. Baptisms are very slow, possibly for many reasons, but the scattered population is one. Our Branch actually covers Scotland from the east coast to the west – and I mean our Branch, not our Stake! Our Stake Centre is in Aberdeen, and that is three to four hours’ drive away, and in the winter a very poor road, with snow and ice it can be impassable except to four-wheel drive vehicles, and sometimes even to them.

But we are a giant step forward!

On a personal note, I have finished and sent away the third draft of my first World War One story, and am waiting on tenterhooks to hear what my agent thinks of it. Have you ever seen tenterhooks? Very cruel looking things for stretching and combing wool.

I know that it needs a bit more immediacy of physical presence for at least two of my important characters, most particularly the principle character through whose eyes we see most of the story. I realize now that I describe him too little and too late. One of the many good things about writing is that you can go back many times and tinker with bits here and there, add, take out, reword, even restructure in order to make it better. Life is a one-off affair, no rehearsal and no rewrites!

I suppose we had all those in the pre-existence? Trouble is, I can’t remember them!

Four times I have been asked by publishers of classic books to write introductions to reprints. The latest, which I have just finished, was to Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera. I leapt at the chance, then when I received the book, found it very difficult to get into, and started to wonder if I had bitten off far more than I could chew! Had I made a fool of myself and was going to have to labour mightily to produce even a third rate effort?

Then suddenly it took fire! What a story! The beauty and the passion of it will stay with me for ever, if I am lucky, and I will work hard to be lucky! (Was it Henry Ford who said ‘Funny thing, the harder I work the luckier I get’)?

I expect you are all familiar with the musical of Phantom of the Opera, or the film, or both? The story is extraordinarily powerful, concerning Erik, who was born with a hideous deformity, so dreadful even his mother rejected him. She could not bare to touch him.

He was brilliantly clever, and the constant turning away and denial by society even of friendship, caused him to take a bitter revenge. Late in the story he is deeply in love with Christine, and cries out ‘Love me, and I can be good!’

Is that not the cry of every human soul? ‘Love me – then I can reach the measure of my creation. I can believe in myself. I can become all that God intended me to be’.

It was my lesson in Relief Society again yesterday. It was on motherhood, not a subject I find easy to address, and I must admit I seem to have had rather a lot of it lately. I looked at the material and thought that it would help very few in our branch, and had the strong possibility of making many feel very miserable and alone.

Those without children would feel totally excluded, as if they had failed even before they began.

Those with children already grown up would look at all they had missed out in teaching, all their errors and take to heart any slips their children may have made, and that it is too late now to go back and do it differently. And they would also feel they were failures.

And those with small children would feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task before them, and discouraged before they begin.

Those who longed for children and could not have them would feel crucified yet again by their grief.

If I could say only one thing to those who design lessons, I would say – ‘Teach those things which lie within the individual person’s control to achieve. Not everyone is married, not everyone can have children, not everyone is clever, talented, beautiful, can achieve excellence in work or society, or learn skills. To add to their sense of failure by telling them to do things they cannot, is profoundly destructive, as well as deeply hurtful.

But we can all strive to be kind, to judge only when we have to, and then to do so gently, to be generous if not with goods, we may not have them, nor may we have time we can give, but we can give a listening ear, thoughtful praise, gratitude for gifts, however small. We can all try to face our problems with courage, with inner honesty which can be very difficult indeed – the truth can hurt!

We can all try to pray more often and more meaningfully. We can, most of us (all except the most deeply handicapped) try to study our scriptures with more insight and see beyond the stories to the lessons of the spirit. We can all try harder to have compassion for those who suffer, to rejoice with those who succeed (even if we don’t! – one of the hardest of things!) to endure difficulty with more grace, and more faith that it will be only for a short time.

There are an abundance of virtues that are open to everyone! Lessons can be addressed in a way that leaves no one feeling diminished, excluded or of less worth. I believe that a lesson which leaves anyone feeling spiritually lower than when they came in, and offers no way within their power to be uplifted, is a failure. Perhaps it is even cruel and spiritually damaging. And that is a terrible thing to answer for.

So I struggled very hard how to address this lesson on being the ideal mother!

The answer I found came from the Phantom of the Opera. That cry of the soul, ‘Love me, and I can be good!” is surely the key. Everyone, anywhere, at any time, needs to be loved in order to be the best that is within them. God knows us all! But we need human love and human approval as well, not necessarily for all we do – that would not be possible – but for who we are.

But small children need it the most of all. And that is the greatest single task of a mother, or anyone (male or female) who looks after children. The belief - ‘Yes, I am worth something – I can do all sorts of things – good things, if I try my hardest’ is the foundation of all success – and ALL HAPPINESS. It begins at home.

But it should not exclude anyone. We never grow so old, or so successful, so wise or so far along the path towards righteousness, that we cease to need the love and belief of other people.

And there is no place here, or in eternity, where we do not need to give that kind of love. It does not mean giving people everything they want, it means giving them all you can of what they need, and that difference is major, and crucial.

Our Father in Heaven knows it perfectly. How many of us have all we want? How destructive it would be if we had! We would become weak, selfish, short-sighted, ungrateful, and very probably lose it through lack of care.

But we all have everything we need – even if it doesn’t always feel like it.

We are trying to become like our Father in Heaven. One of His greatest attributes is to love us, believe in us, and nurture in us all that is good, because we CAN become even as He is.

Of course we can be good – and one of the greatest steps towards that is to help others to be good. We may sink down into darkness alone, but we rise up to the light by taking others with us.

Until next month – look upwards!

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