Hello, my friend.
I'm so glad you're here. Come in, settle wherever you settle best --- I'll wait.
Last time, you and I sat with Olga of Kiev. Do you remember her? A woman who turned grief into iron, and built a kingdom out of the wreckage of betrayal. It was a hard story, in its way. A necessary one. Power has its own cold beauty, and Olga wore it well.
Today is different. Today isn't a story about power at all.
It's a story about staying.
About a woman who had almost nothing, and who kept giving pieces of that nothing away --- to her neighbors, to her church, to a promise she never stopped believing in, even when no one in charge of that promise seemed quite ready to keep it.
I've carried her with me a long time. I think you're ready for her now.
Get comfortable. This one moves slow, the way real devotion does. There's no rush in it --- and there shouldn't be.
Let's begin.
It's the spring of 1849, in a valley that hasn't learned yet how to feed the people living in it.
Picture it with me. Salt Lake, before it was much of anything --- a scatter of cabins, fields still raw from the plow, mountains standing close on every side like they're watching to see if anyone survives the winter. The harvest the year before had failed. Crickets had come down out of the hills in a black tide and eaten what the frost hadn't already taken. Families were boiling roots. Some were eating the hides off their own wagons, softened in water, just to put something warm in their stomachs.
I remember the sound that spring made. Not silence --- worse than silence. The particular quiet of people rationing their hope along with their food.
There's a cabin on the edge of things. Small, plain, nothing about it to mark it from any other. Inside, a woman is doing what everyone in that valley is doing --- counting. Counting what's left. Counting how many days it has to last. Counting the mouths she's responsible for feeding, and coming up short every time she does the arithmetic.
A knock comes at her door.
A neighbor. A woman whose husband has gone on ahead, sent off on a mission with barely enough provision to get himself there, let alone leave anything behind. She has children. She has an empty bin. She has come, I think, more out of desperation than hope --- the kind of asking you do when you've run out of other places to ask.
I watched the woman in the cabin go still for just a moment. I've seen that stillness in a thousand kitchens across a thousand years. It's the moment where a person does one more piece of arithmetic --- not how much do I have, but how much can I survive on giving away.
She doesn't deliberate long. She goes to where her own flour is kept --- and I want you to understand, this isn't abundance, this is the last guard against her own family's hunger --- and she divides it. Not a token. Not a crumb to ease her conscience. Half. She gives away half of what stands between her own children and an empty table.
I don't know what passed between the two women at that door. No grand words, I'd guess. Hunger doesn't usually make for speeches. Maybe just a nod. Maybe just hands, passing a small weight from one set of arms to another.
But I was there. And I remember thinking --- who does that?
Who looks at almost-nothing, and still finds half of it to give away?
I think you'll want to know her name. I think, by the end of this, you'll understand why I've kept it close to me for so long.
Her name was Jane.
To find her, I have to take you back further than that cabin --- back across an ocean's width of country, to a green corner of Connecticut where she was born, sometime in the early 1820s, to a free Black family named Manning. I say "sometime" because even I have to admit the records blur here --- different accounts give different years, and Jane herself wasn't always certain. It didn't trouble her much. She knew who she was. The date was the part other people needed, not her.
She grew up working --- in service to a well-off family in the town, learning to cook and clean and iron, the way so many young women of her station did in that century. She was raised in the church, baptized as a Presbyterian in her early teens, and I think she was, even then, the kind of person who listened harder than most people thought she was listening.
In the fall of 1842, two missionaries came through her part of Connecticut, preaching a faith barely a decade old --- a new American scripture, a prophet still living, a gathering of believers building something out west they called Zion. Jane's own preacher told her not to go hear them.
She went anyway.
She told it plainly, later in her life --- she went on a Sunday, and she was convinced. Not talked into it. Convinced. There's a difference, and I think it mattered to her that people understood which one it was.
Within a year, she had gathered eight members of her own family --- her mother, her brothers, her sisters --- and they sold what they had and set out for Nauvoo, Illinois, where the new faith had its gathering place. They traveled by ship and by rail as far as their money carried them. And then, in Buffalo, the money --- or perhaps something crueler than money --- ran out, and the group Jane traveled with was separated from the others.
What was left to her and her family was their own two feet, and eight hundred miles of American road between them and Nauvoo.
I walked beside them, though they couldn't see me. I watched their shoes wear through to nothing. I watched their feet crack and bleed on the frozen ground, watched them leave a trail behind them that Jane herself would later describe --- feet bleeding until you could see the whole print of them in the dirt. They walked through that. All of it. And they arrived in Nauvoo still walking toward something, not away from anything.
Joseph Smith himself welcomed them when they came in, that autumn of 1843. Jane stayed on, working in his household, in the Mansion House, until his death the following year. And when the body of the Saints began its long migration west in 1846, Jane --- married now, to a man named Isaac James, with children coming one after another --- went with them. Winter Quarters in Nebraska. The Salt Lake Valley in 1847, among the very first wagons in.
So by the time we find her again at that cabin door in 1849, dividing her flour in half --- she is not a stranger to hardship. She has already walked further on faith than most people walk in a lifetime. The valley's hunger that spring was simply one more mile of a road she had been walking, in one form or another, for seven years.
She had given everything else already. The flour was almost easy, by comparison.
I want to take you back inside that house in Nauvoo for a moment --- the Mansion House, where Jane worked in the years before Joseph Smith's death. Because something happened there that I think you need to understand, if you're going to understand everything that came after.
Jane was trusted. Not just employed --- trusted. Joseph's wife Emma would stop her in the middle of her work, just to talk. His mother Lucy did the same. And once, in Lucy's own room, Jane was allowed to hold something most of the faithful would never come near in their whole lives --- the instrument Joseph himself had used to translate the very scripture of this new religion. Lucy told her, as she held it, that she would live long enough to tell others she'd been permitted that closeness.
I remember Jane's hands in that moment. Careful. Almost disbelieving. She was a servant in that house, by title and by daily labor --- and yet here she stood, closer to the sacred center of this new faith than nearly anyone else who would ever walk through its doors.
And then, not long after, Emma asked her something else.
Would Jane like to be sealed to her and Joseph --- adopted as their own spiritual child, bound to their family forever, the way the new faith was beginning to bind its people to one another across this life and into the next?
Jane said nothing, that first time. Emma let it rest, told her to think on it. Two weeks later, Emma asked again.
Jane said no.
She would tell people, much later in her life, that she hadn't understood the question --- not really, not what it meant or what it offered. She was new to all of this. The language of sealing, of eternal family, of belonging that reached past death --- it was new to everyone in those years, Jane included. By the time she understood the size of what she'd been offered, the moment for a simple yes had already closed behind her.
I don't think Jane spent her life in regret over that missed answer. But I do think something settled into her in those years in Nauvoo --- a knowledge, plain and unshakeable, of what this faith meant when it was at its fullest. She had seen it offered. She had held its most sacred instrument in her own hands. She knew, with total certainty, what closeness to this church could look like.
She just didn't yet know that the rest of her life would become the project of trying to reach back and claim it.
That's the seed of everything that follows. Not bitterness. Not doubt. Just a woman who had once been so close to the center of things that she could never again be fully satisfied standing at the edge of them.
So Jane spent the rest of her life trying to close the distance between what she'd glimpsed in Nauvoo and what the church was prepared to give her.
She didn't do it the way you might expect. She never left. She never softened her devotion, never spoke of the church except with affection --- to the end of her days she called Joseph Smith the finest man she ever saw on earth, and I believe she meant it without a trace of irony. What she did instead was ask.
She asked to be endowed --- given the temple ordinances every faithful member was meant to receive. Asked to be sealed, the way Emma had once offered. Asked again. And again. Five times across the better part of fifty years, by my count, though I confess I may have lost track of a few --- Jane herself might have lost track. Refusal becomes its own kind of rhythm, after enough repetitions.
She didn't ask carelessly, either. I want you to understand how carefully she built her case --- because this is the part of Jane I find most remarkable. She didn't invent a new claim or demand an exception be made for her alone. She reached back into the church's own promises and its own reasoning. She remembered Emma's offer and held the church to it. She pointed to other Black men who had been ordained to the priesthood in the faith's earliest years, men like Walker Lewis, and reasoned --- correctly, by the church's own earlier practice --- that the door she was knocking on had once stood open.
Every petition she wrote was built from materials the church itself had given her. She wasn't arguing from outside the tradition. She was arguing from deep inside it, in its own language, using its own promises as her evidence.
In 1894, after years of asking, she was given something --- a ceremony, newly created for her circumstance, that bound her to Joseph Smith's family not as a daughter, not as the sealed child Emma had once offered, but as what the record calls a servitor. Attached to his household. Obedient within it. It was not nothing. But it was not what she had asked for, and Jane knew the difference. She said as much, and asked again.
Her final petition went out in 1903, addressed to the church's president, asking simply to be allowed to finish the work I have begun for my dead.
She died five years later, in 1908, having outlived all but two of her eight children. The petitions, as far as the record shows, were never granted in her lifetime --- not in the form she'd asked for. It would be 1979, seventy-one years after her death, before she was given by proxy what she had spent half a century requesting in person.
I don't tell you that ending to make this story tidy. It isn't tidy. Jane never got to see it. What she got, instead, was a lifetime of asking --- faithfully, patiently, inside the only language she had, which was the language her own church had taught her to use.
That, I think, is her real contribution. Not the ending. The asking itself.
Let me take you back, one more time, to that cabin door --- to a woman dividing her last flour in half for a neighbor with even less.
I think now you can see what I saw standing there. That same instinct --- I will find something to give, even from almost nothing --- is the same instinct that carried Jane through fifty years of asking. It's not two different stories. It's one story, pointed in two directions.
I want to tell you about something else now, something that happened in a different century, in a different corner of the world entirely --- because I think it will help you understand what Jane was really doing.
For most of human history, the work of a thoughtful mind was to look backward. If you wanted to understand the heavens, you studied Aristotle. If you wanted to understand the body, you studied Galen. The old masters had spoken; the careful work was to read them closely, argue their fine points, pass their wisdom forward unbroken. New truth wasn't really the expectation. Faithful transmission was.
And then, somewhere around Kepler, around Galileo, something shifted. People began to believe --- really believe, in their bones --- that new truths about the world were findable. Not just inherited from the old books. Discoverable, if you were willing to look at the world itself directly, with your own instruments, your own eyes, your own careful patience. Galileo didn't burn Aristotle's books. He picked up a lens and looked at what Aristotle never had the chance to see.
I think something like that same shift is available in the life of the spirit. And I think Jane was living inside it before anyone had given it a name.
She didn't treat her faith's promises as a finished book, closed and only to be reread. She investigated them. Directly. Patiently. On her own authority, using her own life as the instrument. She turned her attention to what her church had actually promised --- to Emma's offer, to the ordination of men like Walker Lewis, to the plain words of her own scripture --- and she looked harder into them than anyone around her had thought to look. And she found something true there. Something the institution itself had not yet confirmed, but that was, I believe, already real, waiting to be seen.
She didn't leave to find it. That's the part I most want you to hear. She found it by staying, and looking deeper into the very house she already lived in.
That door is still open. Whatever you believe --- however you came to believe it --- the deepest truths you hold are not only yours to inherit. They are yours to investigate. To turn over, to look at directly, to ask new questions of, the way Jane asked her church new questions for fifty years.
But --- and I say this with the same warmth I say everything else --- investigation is not the same as restlessness. Galileo didn't arrive at truth by guessing wildly at whatever caught his fancy. He looked patiently. He tested carefully. He stayed disciplined, even when the sky was full of wonders that might have tempted a less careful mind to leap to conclusions.
Jane didn't arrive at her truth by abandoning her tradition's own reasoning. She arrived at it by trusting that reasoning enough to follow it all the way down, past where anyone else had bothered to go.
That discipline is not a limitation on the investigation. It's what makes the discovery real.
Somewhere in your own life, my friend, there is probably a room you have not finished looking into yet. Some conviction you've inherited but never quite investigated for yourself. I wonder, gently, what you might find there --- if you looked at it the way Jane looked at her own faith. Patiently. Without leaving. All the way down.
There's one more thing I want to leave you with before we part today.
When Galileo turned his lens to the sky, he found moons that no one had ever seen --- circling Jupiter, patient and silent, waiting the whole long history of human stargazing for someone to finally look closely enough to notice them. They weren't new. They'd been there the entire time. What was new was someone willing to look.
I think there are truths like that still waiting in the world today. Spiritual truths. Undiscovered, not because they're hidden on purpose, but because looking for them takes a particular kind of nerve most people never quite work up.
Jane had that nerve. I don't think it's too much to say it plainly: she saw something deeper in her own faith than the people standing right beside her saw. Not because she was given special sight. Because she looked, when it would have been so much easier not to. Because she kept looking, year after year, petition after petition, long after a quieter spirit would have decided the search wasn't worth the cost of asking.
That takes courage --- the plain kind, the kind it took to keep knocking on a door that kept staying shut. But it takes wisdom too, the kind Jane also had and that I don't want you to overlook: the patience to look carefully rather than wildly, to stay disciplined inside her own tradition rather than wandering off in search of easier answers elsewhere.
Courage without wisdom is just noise. Wisdom without courage never finds the moons at all.
So here's what I leave you with, my friend, and then I'll let you go think on it in peace.
Somewhere, I believe, there are still truths like that --- circling quietly, unnoticed, waiting for someone willing to look as carefully and as bravely as Jane once did.
Do you have that kind of courage in you? And --- harder question, maybe --- do you have that kind of wisdom alongside it?
I don't expect you to answer me today. I'm not sure Jane could have answered easily either, the first time she felt the question rise in her. But I'll be here, watching, the way I always am --- curious to see what you find, if you ever go looking.
Before I go, I want to give you something to carry until next time.
The next thread I'll bring you is a woman named Betsey Stockton. She started life enslaved, in a quiet college town in New Jersey --- about as far from the wide Pacific as a person can be. But somewhere inside her, something was already turning toward the horizon. One day, she would cross an ocean most people in her position never dreamed of crossing, and on a green island called Maui, she would open the doors of a schoolhouse to children no one else had thought to teach.
I think you'll like her. She and Jane never met, never knew of each other --- but I find myself noticing how often the thread runs this way. Someone given almost nothing, who goes looking anyway. Who finds a door no one expected to be open, and walks through it.
I'll see you there.
For now, though, I just want to sit a moment longer with Jane. With the flour she gave away. With the questions she kept asking, year after year, never once raising her voice, never once walking out the door. I think about her more than I let on. I think about all the quiet, disciplined courage in the world that no one ever writes down --- and I'm grateful, every time, that I get to be the one who remembers.
Thank you for sitting with her today. Go gently. Look closely, if you dare.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.