The Church has announced a new mural in the Missionary Training Center (MTC) intended to inspire sister missionaries with the first single women to serve missions. However, this mural is a lie. Although based on photos, it is an image that has been fabricated by the church. The pictures used of the missionaries are different from how the two women look, and there are no pictures of the scene depicted. It is art. Most art is rooted in lies.
The MTC used to have different murals, murals that depicted actual missionaries because they were super enlargements of actual photos. I know, because my father made them for the church. He didn’t know what the church did with them until I served my mission, and the MTC director allowed him to go see them all where they hung in the main building before they left after dropping off my brother two years later (something they would never allow today). When the MTC was remodeled, those pictures were removed and disappeared. They were of men, and so I suspect they were not sufficient to validate 18YO single women who decided to serve missions.
(me beside one of the murals my father did, outside the MTC cafeteria)
If you want to inspire young women to serve missions, you could use real people and real pictures. I served with a woman named Sister Rabald. I believe she was from Romania. She was there when I arrived, and she came back to serve a SECOND mission before I came home. I know because I picked up a missionary to train when she returned as a “greenie” and I remember feeling bad for her “trainer”. Sister Rabald was a widow and a convert, and she decided, in her retirement years, to serve the Lord as long as possible as a proselyting missionary. I don’t know how many missions she served, but I have pictures of her.
(Sister Rabald is seated at rear, Vienna, first mission tour)
(Sister Rabald, center, back row Vienna second mission tour)
You can inspire anyone you like. You should inspire them with truth. Elder Paul H Dunn was released as a general authority in part for taking credit for other people’s life stories as his own (like Gilderoy Lockheart). This mural they made just inside the entrance is a reimagining of true events and real people. The scene maybe never happened and the women in the scene didn’t look like they do in the mural. By the church’s own admission, this “was designed and created by the Church using models and photography of buildings, boats, streets and water in Liverpool, England, to create a scene”. Well, you sure created a scene. Models and photography are not factual. Will the young sister missionaries be able to discern this? Is this any better than AI? How are we expecting them to be taken as messengers of truth when we inspire them with half truths and whole lies?
I take no exception with Inez Knight and Jennie Brimhall. I didn’t know who they were until today. I am grateful for their zeal and service. I think we do them greater honor when we report their story in truth. Otherwise, any Faustian imagery is simply an attempt to cheat the devil and there is no virtue in using the adversary’s methods to achieve the Father’s goals. We don’t need a painting. We could create a mural or rather a mosaic using pictures of real single sister missionaries like Sister Rabald who inspired me. I remember that she respected me because she never heard me speak English in Vienna, unlike other American missionaries in “leadership” positions. She didn’t speak English, so I felt it was rude to speak in front of her in a language she could not understand.
We do honor to women most when we honor them with truth. We do honor to God most when we honor HIM with truth. Once upon a time, the art in the MTC was photos. Now it’s half truths and whole lies.
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