Presented to: Karin Anderson England
For: "The Man at the Chapel"
Mormon literature includes sizeable amounts of serious fiction -- especially stories and story-cycles -- about missionary experience. And the missionary homecoming talk must be one of our most stable and perennial oral narrative genres, with conventions nearly as fixed as those for public prayer or testimony: the mission is "the best two years" of the elder’s or sister’s life, and the tale of those years must arrive at a faith-promoting sum of successful conversion stories, in which the missionary serves mainly as a fibre-optic conduit for the signals of the Spirit. So we sit and wonder, What is it really like? Karin England’s "The Man at the Chapel" offers us a taste of what a forthright severity of self-scrutiny, it searches experiences that won’t easily add up, hard cases of the wandering and lost, the poor, the beaten, the dubious in spirit; cases as tough as the one that face Bartleby’s employer, and of less certain ending. And though at its end it still fears and trembles, her essay moves from harrowing toward healing.