On the 1st Day of Christmas Past,
Question: Dec 7th was Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, what reminders can we find in this Pearl Harbor Christmas memory of Pres. Eyring?
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“Peace of Christmas”
“We gathered around our radio at the end of the living room. Someone must have told my parents to listen. I still remember looking at the lighted dial on the front of the round-topped radio as we heard a man’s voice.
The newscaster described bombs, fires, and sinking ships in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I had known that war was raging for others far away for years. Now it had come to us. I heard alarm in the man’s voice. Yet as I watched my parents, I could see that they were calm. They seemed to be at peace. A feeling of peace flooded over me. That feeling persisted in the days before Christmas, on Christmas Day itself, and in the Christmases that followed. I now know what a miracle that Christmas memory of peace was, especially for my mother.
As a young girl she had grown up with a beloved cousin. His name was Mervyn Bennion. He was the captain of a ship anchored in Pearl Harbor on the Sunday of December 7. On December 6, the night before, he had been with his wife at a pleasant social with the Latter-day Saints in Honolulu. Their hosts were the stake president and his wife, who was a relative of Sister Bennion. They invited the Bennions to stay for the night. Brother Bennion thanked them but said that he felt his place was to be on his ship.
The following morning, Sunday, December 7, Mervyn Bennion was in his cabin getting dressed for a trip ashore to meet his wife for Sunday School when a sailor dashed in to report an air attack. Captain Bennion gave the command: “To Your Battle Stations!” He ran to his place of command on the flag bridge.
It was nearly Christmas Day when my mother learned of the heroic death of the cousin she so much loved. For hours after he was mortally wounded he resisted the efforts of his men to take him to safety. As well as I can recall, when my mother learned of Mervyn’s death she shed no tears, just as she showed no fear as she heard the radio report of the battle that took his life and might take the life of others she loved. Faith in the Lord drove out fear. Faith in His Atonement brought her the peace that passes understanding.
Time and many experiences have made that memory of the 1941 Christmas season more precious and clear. I am not even sure that we received the Church News in New Jersey in that far-away time. But the First Presidency of the Church had published a Christmas greeting in January of 1941 that I didn’t read until much later in 2011. As you would expect from prophets, seers, and revelators, they wrote foreseeing the Christmas Day at the end of 1941 and all the Christmases that would follow until the Savior comes again to bring perfect peace:
“We send to the Saints in all the earth our greetings and blessings. …We invoke upon all war-ridden countries the spirit of love, forbearance and forgiveness.”
And then they spoke for the Savior:
“We pray the Lord to heal all those who are stricken with disease and not appointed unto death. May He soften the pain of the wounded and bring to them health and strength. We ask Him to bless all those who are bereft—the lonely orphan, the sorrowing widow, the heart-wrung mother”
I realize now that the prayer of the First Presidency was answered for my mother and all those who are bereft by the loss of those they love. One of those who signed that letter was J. Reuben Clark, the First Counselor in the First Presidency at that time. His daughter was the wife of Mervyn Bennion and became a widow on December 7. President Clark was blessed by the prayer for peace as was my mother in the tragedy of war and those tested by the tribulations that followed. All have been blessed with the testimony that the First Presidency bore in their Christmas message.
They pleaded for this blessing: “May there come to every man that walks the earth the testimony of the Savior that came to Martha: ‘I am the ‘resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live’ (John 11:25).”
My mother showed me in that Christmas season long ago and in the years that followed that she knew what Martha knew and so felt peace. That was and is the experience promised in the last days, “When peace will clothe the world as with a mantle.” I still feel warmth coming from the Christmas memory of many years ago.”
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