71. Angels and Ministers of Grace

A funeral sermon I preached on Tuesday, December 28, 1993, at the funeral of my grandmother, Hazel Jane Lee Batt Pledger (1894–1993), who at her death on Christmas Eve in 1993 was in her 100th year of life. The talk was published in the Family Journal on November 20, 1995, the 101st anniversary of her birth. This talk is also found in chapter 26 of Batt & Lee Ancestors.

Last Friday morning, after learning that Hazel had passed away, I told our children that Grandma had died. Our ten-year-old Eliza, with wisdom far beyond her years, asked, "Is that good or bad?"

"Good," I replied. Very good, indeed. In fact, as I reflected further upon it, I could not think of a single reason why we would consider it bad. Grandma had gone home for Christmas.

Hazel Jane Lee was born November 20, 1894, in Milo, Bonneville County, Idaho, the sixth of eleven children born to Orrin Strong Lee Jr. and Martha Jane White. At the time Milo was known as Leorin, so named after her father or grandfather, both of whom were named Orrin Lee; before that the area was also known as Willow Creek.

Ten years earlier, in 1884, her parents, who had been married not quite two years, came in late November to eastern Idaho, still six years away from statehood. The young couple arrived in Eagle Rock (now Idaho Falls), having traveled for 11 days by wagon in cold, bleak weather. They spent the winter with Martha’s sister and her husband in the Willow Creek area.

The next spring they drove around the valley looking for suitable land and finally filed a homestead claim on 160 acres covered with heavy sagebrush growing in excellent soil. That first year they cleared only an acre and a half, on which they planted wheat and alfalfa. The first crop of wheat yielded sixty bushels to the acre.

Their first home was a one-room log cabin, which Orrin built with cottonwood logs he cut on the island east of Menan. As the family grew, Orrin added two rooms to their home. Later, the original log room was taken down and a two-story frame building added on to the two rooms. It was into this home that Hazel was born on November 20, 1894.

In 1906, at a cost of $7,000, the home was completely modernized, including a pressure water system and a telephone, one of the finest homes in the valley. Eighteen months later, on April 27, 1908, when Hazel was fourteen, a fire destroyed the home. I can remember Grandma's telling me about seeing the flames in the distance as she was returning home from school.

That summer Orrin's hair turned white. Discouraged, the family moved their few remaining belongings into the apple cellar and set about rebuilding the house.

Hazel’s mother did a lot of sewing for the neighbors because she had the only sewing machine in the area. She was an artist with a needle, crochet hook, and knitting needle. She was a master gardener and took much pride in her flowers and gardens. The Lee homestead had a fruit orchard, beautiful trees, shrubs, big lawns, flowers everywhere, and always a big vegetable garden whose produce was freely shared by all. From 1892 until 1910 she operated the Leorin post office out of their home. She was long involved in the work of Relief Society. For six years she served as a trustee of the local school district.

Is it any wonder Dorothy and Ruth and Bill and Berniece remember the things they do about their mother, as we've heard in these earlier tributes: her industry, her thrift, her insistence on a job well done, her devotion to duty.

In the years right before World War I, Hazel left the pastoral scenes of her childhood in eastern Idaho and went off to school to attend the Utah Agricultural College in Logan. There she met, became acquainted with, and fell in love with one of the stars of the football team, William B. Batt. They were married in the Logan Temple on October 8, 1914. The next year Dorothy was born, and only weeks later they were off to Idaho, where they would live in various locations throughout southeastern Idaho and northern Utah while Grandpa taught school. Ruth came the following year, 1916. Bill was born in 1921. And Berniece in 1923.

Jackie, as she read Dorothy's tribute, summarized in fine fashion the middle years of Grandma’s life—her severe illness during World War II that nearly cost her her life, her finishing her college degree, her teaching school in Idaho, her mission to New England, Grandpa’s death in the mission field on February 4, 1959, and the lonely years that followed after that.

And then Harry Pledger came into her life. On March 1, 1973, Hazel and Harry were married for time only in the Ogden Temple. Grandma had been a widow for fourteen years. She was 78 years old. They had a good decade of wonderful time together before their advancing years started to catch up with them and their health started to fail them. After the floods in the spring of 1983, which forced them to evacuate their Farmington home, Harry declined until his death on January 13, 1985.

For a second time she buried a husband. A little over two years earlier she had buried her oldest daughter, Dorothy, my mother. She never thought she would live to see the day one of her children would go before she did.

She is survived by three of her four children: Ruth Tovey of Bountiful, Bill Batt of Spokane, and Berniece Palmer of Tooele. And, according to our best calculation, by 26 grandchildren, 104 great-grandchildren, 60 great-great-grandchildren, and one great-great-great-granddaughter. She is also survived by one brother, Perry Lee of Butte, Montana.

There is in the revelations what has been called the "law of the mourner." In it the Lord says, "Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die, and more especially for those that have not hope of a glorious resurrection" (D&C 42:45).

That much of the revelation does not apply in this particular case, but the next verse does: "And it shall come to pass that those that die in me shall not taste of death, for it shall be sweet unto them" (D&C 42:46).

And that does apply to Grandma. She is one who, from everything I understand about the scriptures, qualifies as one who has, to use the Lord’s terminology, "died in me." She has been faithful. She has endured to the end. She has hope of a glorious resurrection. She has died in the Lord. And that is why there is really no sadness, but rather rejoicing, on this occasion.

Grandma turned 99 on November 20 of this year. She was in her 100th year. Imagine the incredible things she witnessed during the century that she lived—from the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to men walking on the moon, from the days of horse and buggy to modern means of rapid travel and nearly instant communication.

In November 1894, when she was born, Wilford Woodruff was the President of the Church and would be for another four years. The Salt Lake Temple had been dedicated just a year and a half earlier. The Manifesto, which announced the end of plural marriage in the Church, was only four years past. She would be four and a half years old when Lorenzo Snow, the next President of the Church, traveled to St. George, in southern Utah, to receive the revelation on tithing that was depicted in the Church movie The Windows of Heaven. She would be nearly seven years old when President Snow died and Joseph F. Smith became the next President of the Church. She has lived during the administrations of 10 of the 13 Prophets who have presided over the Church.

In November 1894, when she was born, Idaho had been a state less than five years. Statehood for Utah was still a year in the future. Grover Cleveland was the president of the United States (his second time around). William McKinley would be elected in 1896, just before her second birthday, and would lead the country through the Spanish–American War. President McKinley would be assassinated in 1901, just shortly into his second term and during Hazel’s seventh year.

She lived to see the beginning of the fulfillment of the Prophet Joseph Smith’s prophecy on Christmas Day 1832 that "the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations" (D&C 87:2). World War I—that war to end all wars—was raging in Europe during the years Hazel was marrying and beginning her family. A generation later, as World War II erupted, she would see her only son Bill in the uniform of his country. And she lived to witness the incredible world events that all of us have seen, as prophesied by President Spencer W. Kimball, in these closing years of the twentieth century.

A personal note before I close. I inherited from both my grandmother and my mother a love for reading. In one of Shakespeare’s immortal plays, Hamlet wisely implored, "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!" (Hamlet, act 1, scene 4, line 39). Angels and ministers of grace! All of us, I am convinced, both need and in fact receive far more help in our daily lives than we realize from the angels and ministers of grace who surround us—on both sides of the veil.

Grandma was just such an angel and minister of grace in my young life. Our family moved from Oregon to Idaho in the early spring of 1959, just shortly after Grandpa Batt died in the mission field. I was nine years old. And shy. And probably having a difficult time with leaving the people and surroundings that I had been used to. That was the first time I had ever moved, and when we went to church in the old Nampa Second Ward I was put in the wrong Sunday School class. Well, a week or so later, after I discovered that error, I was so embarrassed that I decided I could never go back to church again.

And somehow, it seems incredible to me now, my parents let me persist in my inactivity for several weeks or months, and I shudder to think how different my life could have been had that continued. But then Grandma came to visit. Sunday morning came, and to Grandma it was unthinkable that a nine-year-old grandson of hers would not be in church on Sunday, and so I went and have been ever since. Angels and ministers of grace!

A few years later, when I was 11 and 12, we would go visit Grandma, who then lived next door to the Palmers in Grantsville. I loved to hear Grandma tell of her experiences in the mission field in New England. And to hear her talk about the gospel. She fired in me what has become a life-long love affair with the holy scriptures. It was probably she, more than any other person, who got me to read the Book of Mormon cover to cover when I was only twelve. And how that marvelous book has changed my life. All our lives. Angels and ministers of grace!

Well, in conclusion. Grandma has gone home. I can only imagine how sweet the reunions have been on the other side. What a neat Christmas present!

Elder Orson F. Whitney, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve earlier in this century, once said: "A funeral sermon is not for the benefit of the departed; rather it is for the good of those who remain. The dead, as we call them—though they are no more dead than we are, and are as much alive now as ever—are beyond our reach, just as they are beyond our vision. We cannot add to any¬thing that they have done, nor can we take anything away. They have made their record and are in the keeping of a higher Power. But we can do something to comfort those who mourn, and by acts of kindness lessen human suffering. Our Father in heaven expects this at our hands" (Improvement Era, Nov. 1918, 3).

Hazel has now gone into the spirit world. "And where is this spirit world?" asked Elder Whitney in a funeral sermon he delivered in 1918, when Grandma was a young mother only 24 years old. "Is it off in some distant part of the universe? Do we sail away into space millions of miles in order to get there? No. The spirit world, according to Joseph Smith, is right around us. Our dead friends, as we call them—our departed loved ones—are very near us, so near, the Prophet says, that they are often grieved by what we do and say. To get into the spirit world, we have only to pass out of the body.

"The spirit world, as I understand it, is the spirit of this planet. When God made the earth he made it twice. When he made man he made him twice. When he made the animals, the fishes, and the fowls, he made them twice. When he made the beautiful flowers, such as you see here today, he made them twice. First as spirits and then as bodies, and when the spirits entered their bodies they became souls. This is the teaching of modern revelation; the teaching of Joseph Smith. God made the earth first as a spirit and then gave it a body, and what we call the spirit world is simply the spiritual half of the sphere we dwell in" (Improvement Era, Nov. 1918, 8).

Earth life is a school. "This earth was made for God’s children, his spirit sons and daughters, who take bodies and pass through experiences of joy and sorrow for their development and education, and to demonstrate through time’s vicissitudes that they will be true to God and do all that he requires at their hands.

"When we have done the things that we were sent to do," continued Elder Whitney, "when we have gained all the experience that this life affords, then is the best time to depart. School being out, why not go home? The mission ended, why not return? That is what death means to a Latter-day Saint. The only sad thing about it is parting with the loved ones who go, . . . but it is simply a passing into the spirit world, to await the resurrection, when our bodies and spirits will be reunited—the righteous to enjoy the presence of God.

"If we can be patient and resigned, and by God’s help do his holy will, all will come out well. Trials purify us, educate us, develop us. The great reason why man was placed upon the earth was that he might become more like his Father and God. That is why we are here, children at school. What matters it when school is out and the time comes to go back home?" (Improvement Era, Nov. 1918, 9–11).

We have paid tributes to Hazel today, but the ultimate tribute is the way we live our lives in quiet devotion to the cause of the Master whom she loved and followed. On her 80th birthday, back in 1974, at my invitation Grandma wrote a birthday greeting to all her family. I close with the words that she wrote on that occasion nearly two decades ago:

"As our eightieth year has arrived, there are many lessons we have learned and many, many things we have neglected to do. It is of these procrastinations I would warn you.

"I have had many people ask me, 'When do you think one should start to train a child?' And my answer has always been, 'Before they are born.' We cannot wait until a child is half past seven, depending on the Church to prepare them for baptism.

"All the beauty, value, and wonder of this great privilege should fall upon the parents. The same is true of celestial marriage, a mission, living a clean life, just to mention a few. This should be the very atmosphere of their lives from infancy—not preached or forced upon them, just lived day by day.

"So once again," she continues to write, "do not put off until tomorrow learning the things the Lord would have us do and, in turn, passing this knowledge on to your children, relatives, friends, and 'the stranger within your gates.'

"Pay your tithes and offerings in full. Be diligent in your prayers, and from long experience, I can guarantee that the Lord will bless and guide you beyond your wildest dreams.

"If I have influenced or helped any of you through the years, I am humbly grateful. We love you and pray for you." Signed Grandma Hazel.

God lives. His Son, whose birth we've just celebrated, lives. They send angels and ministers of grace into our lives to bless us everlastingly. Such has been the life of Hazel Jane Lee Batt Pledger. May we, like her, be as the Book of Mormon writer described, "instruments in the hands of God in bringing many to the knowledge of the truth, yea, to the knowledge of their Redeemer. And how blessed are they! For they did publish peace; they did publish good tidings of good" (Mosiah 27:36–37).

May we go and do likewise, I pray in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen.