“More Power, More Light,” Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, Volume 3, Boldly, Nobly, and Independent, 1893–1955 (2022)
Chapter 38: “More Power, More Light”
Chapter 38
More Power, More Light
One day in mid-1954, Jeanne Charrier made her way along the road leading to the hillside village of Privas, France. Ever since Jeanne’s baptism three years before, she had been making frequent trips to the home of Eugenie Vivier. A widow whose children had long since moved away, Madame Vivier had been studying about the Church for nearly a decade without committing to baptism, but Jeanne did not mind visiting her. Time with the widow was more of a pleasure than a duty.
When Jeanne arrived at Madame Vivier’s home, the woman’s face broke into a welcoming smile. She ushered Jeanne inside and took her seat by an open window.1
As usual, Jeanne came to the house with a lesson. Her scholarly mind and love of ideas had led her to study the gospel deeply.2 A few months earlier, she had written an article for L’Étoile about that year’s MIA theme, Doctrine and Covenants 88:86: “Abide ye in the liberty wherewith ye are made free; entangle not yourselves in sin, but let your hands be clean, until the Lord comes.”3
“In obeying the laws,” Jeanne had written, “we get more power, more light.” She quoted from the New Testament and several ancient and modern thinkers to make her point. “To be free is to shake off sin, ignorance, and error,” she continued, “and dwell in the freedom of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”4
Along with serving as the president of the MIA in her small branch in Valence, Jeanne taught Sunday School and Relief Society lessons. She took her responsibilities as a teacher seriously. She had a burning testimony of the restored gospel and longed to share it.5
Unfortunately, few of Jeanne’s friends and none of her family members wanted to hear anything about the Church. Jeanne still lived at home, but her relationship with her family had deteriorated ever since her baptism. Her parents rarely spoke to her, and when they did, it was to express their disapproval or accuse her of betraying their family’s Protestant heritage.6
Most of her friends and professors at the university, meanwhile, were dismissive of all religion. If she tried to tell them about Joseph Smith, they scoffed at the idea that any person could see a vision.7
In Madame Vivier, however, Jeanne had found a kindred spirit. One of the reasons the elderly woman had put off baptism for so long was that her family opposed it. But she, like Jeanne, enjoyed studying the scriptures. Madame Vivier was also an example of how a person could live a contented, simple life. She did not have much material wealth besides her small home, some fruit trees, and a few chickens, but every time Jeanne visited, Madame Vivier pulled fresh eggs out of her apron pockets and pressed Jeanne to accept them.8
Jeanne knew that, like Madame Vivier, she might have to learn to be content with a more solitary life. There were few young men in France who were Latter-day Saints, and Jeanne had decided she would not marry outside the Church. Nor was she willing to marry a Church member she did not love or who did not love her. Even if she were to remain single, she decided, the restored gospel was worth it. The truths she was learning—of the plan of salvation, the restoration of the priesthood, and the reality of a living prophet—filled her soul with joy.9
After finishing her gospel lesson and reminding Madame Vivier to read the Book of Mormon, Jeanne ended their visit by bringing up baptism—something she had talked about many times with her friend. This time, however, Madame Vivier was not wary of the subject, and she agreed to be baptized.
A rush of happiness filled Jeanne’s heart. After nearly ten years of study, this faithful woman was ready to join the Church.10
Not long after receiving the assignment to help modify the presentation of the endowment, Gordon B. Hinckley assembled a team of professionals to produce a motion picture for the European temples. But by the spring of 1955, the film was still far from finished, and the Swiss Temple dedication was only a few months away.11
Sensitive to the sacred nature of the endowment, President McKay authorized Gordon to shoot the film in the large assembly hall of the Salt Lake Temple—the same room where, more than sixty years before, Wilford Woodruff had dedicated the building.12
Although temple workers normally performed the endowment wearing white suits and dresses, Gordon received permission to film the ceremony with actors in costumes. The committee hung a massive gray backdrop in the assembly room and positioned lights to illuminate the set, where artificial rocks dotted the ground amid large trees that had been hoisted through the temple windows with pulleys. To help portray the creation of the world, Gordon received permission from the Walt Disney Company to insert a short clip from the film Fantasia into the production.13
Everyone involved in the temple film, from the actors and crew to the editor and Gordon himself, worked on it in addition to their regular full-time jobs, giving up nights and weekends. By the end of May 1955, Gordon and the production team had put together an initial cut of the film, but Gordon was not satisfied with what he saw. The flow of the film seemed rough and choppy, and some of the acting and costuming needed work.14
He reached out to Winnifred Bowers, the costumer who had been working on the film, to get advice on improving the production. She suggested ways to smooth out the transitions and recommended making small changes to the costumes. And she was sure the director, Harold Hansen, could help the actors adjust their performances after seeing what it looked like on-screen. “But with all this, Brother Hinckley,” Winnifred noted, “I think you’ve got it more figured out than you thought you had.”15
Gordon and his team worked for several more weeks to refine the film. On June 23, they showed it to the general authorities, and President McKay was pleased with their work. “You’ve done a fine job,” he told Gordon and his team. “I think this is the way things should go.”16
But their work was not yet done. Since the Church did not have the equipment necessary to dub motion pictures into other languages, Gordon and his team decided to reshoot the film in German, French, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish. Fortunately, the translations had already been done, but completing six more versions of the film would take months, even for a seasoned director.17
Gordon did not have a lot of time. President McKay and all the Saints waiting to receive their temple blessings in Switzerland were depending on him. He could not rest until every film was complete and had arrived safely in Europe.18
In the GDR, meanwhile, Helga Meyer played hymns on a small organ in her living room to welcome family and friends to Sunday school. Nine years had passed since she had left Berlin to live with her husband, Kurt, in the small village of Cammin. Despite the challenges of living in the GDR, the Meyers had made a comfortable home for their three young children. Their door was always open to anyone who wanted to visit.19
Many of Helga’s neighbors had attended Sunday school meetings enthusiastically. After an opening hymn and a prayer, Kurt would take the adults aside for a lesson while Helga sang hymns and shared Bible stories with dozens of eager children.20
But these large gatherings had recently shrunk. When a Lutheran pastor heard about the Meyers’ Sunday school, he forbade his parishioners from attending. Now only a handful of Latter-day Saints living in and around Cammin came on Sunday mornings—a much smaller class than what Helga had attended as a girl in the Tilsit Branch Sunday School. Yet Helga could always count on Elise Kuhn, a widow from a nearby village, to make the long walk to the Meyer home, even in rain or snow. The family of Edith Tietz, Helga’s good friend who had joined the Church a few years before, also attended faithfully.21
In the class, Helga and Kurt usually taught directly from the scriptures, since they had few other lesson materials to draw from.22 For English-speaking parts of the world, the Church’s magazine for Sunday Schools, the Instructor, supplied plenty of resources for teachers, from articles on using flannel boards effectively to maps, charts, and illustrations. One recent issue included full-color reproductions of some of Arnold Friberg’s newest Book of Mormon paintings, Abinadi Delivers His Message to King Noah and Alma Baptizes in the Waters of Mormon.23
German-language lesson materials, by contrast, had been in short supply after the war, and strict censorship in the GDR had made them almost impossible to acquire.24 For the East German Saints, Church headquarters now seemed more distant than ever.25 Helga still longed to emigrate to the United States, as her aunt Lusche and other loved ones had done since the end of the war. But she knew how dangerous it would be for a whole family to try to leave the GDR. And apart from the danger, she would never go without her parents. Her mother’s health, which had always been poor, had only gotten worse after years of waiting in vain for Helga’s brother Henry to return from the war.26
In difficult times throughout their lives, Helga and her family had found strength and comfort in the Church. After Sunday School, they and the handful of Saints in Cammin would catch the train for sacrament meeting with the Neubrandenburg Branch, a little over ten miles away. Sometimes strangers would appear at the meeting, and Helga feared they were spies who had come to listen in on their talks and testimonies.
The Saints in Neubrandenburg did their best to ignore such threats and continued on, teaching one another from the scriptures and singing the songs of Zion.27
Early in September 1955, about a week before the Swiss Temple dedication, Gordon B. Hinckley carefully placed two suitcases in the hands of airline employees at the Salt Lake City airport. The bags contained the completed temple film in all seven languages. He hated to let the thirty thousand feet of film out of his sight, but the suitcases were too bulky to bring into the cabin of the airplane that he and his wife, Marjorie, would take on the first leg of their trip to Switzerland. At least the accompanying audio tracks, stored separately in two compact canisters, were small enough that he could carry them himself.28
Gordon had been anxious about protecting the sacred content of the film from the moment he sent it off to a lab in California for final processing. He had asked a close friend who worked in Hollywood to take the film to the lab and stay there to ensure its privacy while it was processed. Gordon now needed to see the film safely through airports in New York and London before delivering it personally to the Swiss Temple.29
William Perschon, the new president of the Swiss-Austrian Mission, greeted the Hinckleys as they stepped off the plane in Basel. They retrieved the film, and Gordon filled out a customs declaration form, noting the film materials among his possessions. A customs official looked over the form and said, “I can’t let this in. We don’t permit the entry of film into Switzerland without clearance through the federal film board.”
“I have to get it in some way,” Gordon said. “You certainly permit film to come into Switzerland?”
“With proper clearance, yes,” the official replied. He then explained that the Swiss film board needed to review and approve the film before releasing it back into Gordon’s care. The official, meanwhile, would send it to the customs office in Bern. Since it was Saturday, Gordon would not be able to retrieve the film from customs until the office opened on Monday morning.30
Gordon thought about trying to persuade the official to simply let him take the film to Bern himself, but he worried that an argument would make matters worse. So he and Marjorie left with President Perschon for the mission home, deeply concerned about the safety of the temple film. The following day, they fasted and prayed that the film would not fall into the wrong hands.31
Early on Monday, Gordon and President Perschon picked up the reels at the customs office and took them directly to the film board. There a man ushered Gordon into a private room. “What is the title of this film?” he asked.
“It doesn’t have a title,” Gordon replied. “It’s just music and instruction to be used in this temple out here.” He offered to let the man listen to the audio track. As a precaution, he had put a long recording of organ music at the beginning of the film to deter any unauthorized person from accessing its sacred contents.32
The man listened to the music for a while. “Well,” he finally said, “what is it?”
“It’s just church instruction,” Gordon repeated. “It’s church music, dull organ music.”
A look of friendly understanding then came over the man. “All right,” he said. Without asking to hear or see more, he took out a stamp and approved the film.33