Contact
Subscribe
May 2008 Issue
By Annette Lyon
Every day when I came home from school, I could predict with relative accuracy what I’d find Mom doing. It might her monthly bread-baking day, where she’d make thirty loaves of whole wheat to freeze for the month. In that case, I’d hop onto a bar stool and eat a warm slice with melting butter and honey.
She might be downstairs sewing one of us girls a church dress. I’d sit close by and watch her work her magic.
But usually, I’d find Mom sitting at the counter with a book open. Often it was history or something scientific, but more often than not, it was her scriptures.
These wouldn’t be her pretty black leather ones that she took to church. These had worn, white covers and pages covered in markings of ball point pen, yellow highlights, and notes scrawled into the margins. Individual pages were thinning, some nearly falling out. These were her “working set,” as she called them.
I thought this kind of devotion to scripture study—focused study—was normal.
I couldn’t have been more than five or six when I figured I must be very behind: I hadn’t read the entire Bible. I grabbed one from a shelf, hunkered down on the couch, and cracked open Genesis. I hardly understood a word, but I was reading scriptures. Like Mom.
Her thirst for knowledge, both spiritual and temporal, could never be quenched. When called as Gospel Doctrine teacher, she spent two weeks preparing each lesson, books and scriptures scattered across her comforter as she knelt beside the bed and studied. She’d come home from her lesson, surprised that Sister Smith didn’t know something about Isaiah. “I don’t get it,” Mom would say with a confused shake of her head. “She has a Ph.D.”
As if university degrees automatically bestowed a flood of gospel knowledge.
Whether the topic was nutrition, Israeli history, or a dozen others, Mom considered it her duty to learn and find out and grow. Yet she felt for years as if none of that really counted, because she had left college to raise us kids. She lacked a diploma to prove she was intelligent.
Ironically, people often asked what my mother’s Ph.D. was in. Naturally someone with that much knowledge must have had formal training, right?
When she finished her university schoolwork—after raising all of us children—I had half a mind to take a marker, scratch out “BA” on her diploma, and write, “Ph.D” in its place. That would have been a better representation of her knowledge base.
But even that wouldn’t have been enough, because she knows so much in so many subject areas, as evidence by dinner table conversations from my childhood, which were filled with curiosity and questions. Invariably, we’d pose something that neither of our parents knew the answer for.
Mom would pop up from her chair, race downstairs and soon returned, balancing six encyclopedia volumes open to various cross-references. She’d plop the books onto the counter and read the entries aloud, murmuring things like, “Well, that’s interesting,” or, “I’ll have to read more about that later.” With the original question satisfactorily answered, she’d return to her now-cold dinner.
In the days before the Internet, she was our personal Google and Wikipedia.
Mom’s hunger for knowledge turned into filling—and then stuffing—bookshelves. Every room of the house held at least one bookcase. Including the bathroom. They held an eclectic collection: classic, histories, biographies, doctrinal tomes, joke books, scientific studies, how-to books, reference books, cook books, and so much more. When I moved out, bookcases moved into my bedroom.
When my first child was born, a friend and I discussed some of our future concerns for our sons. Will he gain a testimony? Will he have friends? Will he do well in school?
“What if he asks a question, and I don’t know the answer?” she said, concerned.
“You say, ‘I don’t know. Let’s find out together,’” I told her. Of course. That’s what moms do: dig up information with you.
Not long ago, a sister in my ward worried over her mother’s health. After hearing the description, I said something like, “Goodness, if it’s peritonitis, no wonder you’re worried.”
She looked at me curiously. “Are you a nurse?”
Um . . . no. How did I know about peritonitis?
Mom’s curiosity for all things had rubbed off on me. I knew about peritonitis for the same reason I read the entire book of Genesis one Sunday as a teen. It was the same reason my scriptures looked suspiciously like her “working set.” Mom infused in me a love of learning, expanding my mind, discovering new things.
I too have shelves packed with books on odd topics—like the one that taught me about peritonitis. I devour newspapers and magazines. I’m frequently researching questions in the library or on the Internet. When one of my children has a question, we look it up together.
But the most important kind of learning I got from Mom is her devotion to the Gospel, coupled with her desire to know all she can about it. That lesson shines in the testimony she bore to us children when teaching Gospel concepts and principles. It was the quiet strength when she related her conversion story. It’s her dedication to the Church, which has determined every major choice of her life.
She still doesn’t see her study as anything exceptional. Yet it is that very humility that keeps her wanting to know more. As if the more she learns, the more she realizes there is out there that she doesn’t know. There’s no trace of pride, no hint of an “Intellectual” about her.
Joseph Smith taught that the more we learn in this life, the more of an advantage we’ll have in the world to come.
And since the “glory of God is intelligence,” my mother will not only be far down the race track from me; she will be beautifully glorious.
