In graduate school, where I studied early American literature, I sometimes described my parents affectionately as the last two Puritans. My father had been born and raised in Massachusetts, and because of his work as a police officer, he sometimes seemed as stern and austere and obsessed with discipline as the Puritan colonists who settled the Bay Colony and founded the United Congregational Church where he was first taught the gospel of Jesus Christ as a child, in Walpole, Massachusetts.
But beneath that gruff exterior was a man who dearly loved to laugh and sing and dance. My father regularly swerved off the street when a favorite song came on so that he could dance with my mother on the side of the road. One of my earliest memories is of being cradled in his arms as he sang “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and as I grew older he taught me to love music by Paul Simon, Alan Jackson, and Bob Sieger. When he sputtered on a mouthful of sour milk and my brother Aaron challenged him to drink the rest of his cup, promising that he, in turn, would chug the remainder of the gallon—Dad threw back the milk and laughed uproariously at the horrified expression on Aaron’s face. In his mischievous old age, he took to calling himself “Bad Dad,” and anyone who knows the story of how he laid with me in a ditch, hiding from the Northborough police officers he led so that they wouldn’t catch him toiletpapering the house of a family friend, knows he would have made a bad Puritan.
And yet: my father shared an important perspective on life with those first colonists. When the Puritans left England for North America, they thought of themselves as embarking on an “Errand into the Wilderness.” They never intended to stay in Massachusetts; they believed that after a few years had passed and the religious persecution that drove them from Old England ceased, they would cross the Atlantic again and return home. Many of the Puritans who took refuge in New England did return after a few years, but others forgot their first home and settled permanently in North America. Like those first Puritans, my father thought of his life as an “Errand into the Wilderness.” He knew that before our entrance into this world we lived as spirit children with loving Heavenly Parents, and he understood that “this life is the time for men to prepare to meet God” before returning to our heavenly home. That is our errand, as it was his: preparing to see God again. The Savior declared, “Wherefore, as ye are agents, ye are on the Lord’s errand,” and Ken Hutchins embraced that doctrine fully.
In his retirement, my father loved to go on errands. He bantered with his fellow shoppers and winked at the clerks. Everyone he interacted with on these errands felt his warm and genuine interest in their well-being because my father understood that “Love is the first principle of leadership.” But as much as he loved the strangers that he encountered in stores and barbershops, my father loved something else even more: he loved to be at home, with his wife, Priscilla. In the final days of his life, all he wanted was to leave the hospital and go home. He wanted to be home so badly that he escaped from the hospital, walked to the Worcester Police Department, and demanded to be taken home in a cruiser.
None of us, when we finish an errand at the store and turn homeward, mourn that we are leaving the clerks and our fellow shoppers behind. Nor do we mourn if we meet a friend at the store and their errand concludes before ours. We do not mourn because we know that we will see them again, whether in their homes or in our own. I do not mourn today because my father IS NOT DEAD; he is home. And home has always been the place he most desired to be.
In the morning of the first resurrection, when Jesus Christ calls the righteous from their graves, I will see and hold my father again. When I wrap my arms around his left shoulder blade, I will no longer feel the scar left there by a deer hunter who thought he was a ten-point buck. The bulges and knots in his cancer-ravaged abdomen will have disappeared. When I look into his face, his right eye will be a centimeter or so higher, as the effects of a childhood fall that crushed his skull are counteracted by the miracle of the Resurrection. Until that day, I will miss him fiercely. But I know that day will come as surely as I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, and so I do not mourn.
For some people, the Resurrection and our continued existence after death as spirits capable of learning, growth, and progress, might seem conjectural—a hypothesis unsupported by evidence. But thousands have felt the nail prints in the hands and feet of the resurrected Redeemer, and many others have been ministered to by “the spirits of just men [and women] made perfect.” For these reasons, my father exited mortality firm in the faith that he would be “received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise,” where he would continue to testify of Jesus Christ, “preaching of the gospel of repentance and redemption . . . in the great world of the spirits of the dead.” Occasionally, in quiet moments, he would describe private, sacred experiences through which he came to know personally that those who had preceded him in death were still conscious of his presence—as he continues to be conscious of me and you and all those he loved in this life.
While serving aboard the USS Cassin Young as a sonarman, my father learned to be patient in seeking evidence that those believed dead and departed continue on. A Category 5 hurricane had cut off communication from a “Texas Towers” drilling platform, and the Cassin Young was sent into the hurricane to investigate. The platform had vanished, so the captain asked sonar if they could locate any large metal objects below the water’s surface. One of the sonarmen “pinged” the platform and located it under water. For twelve hours, my father circled that platform aboard the Cassin Young, trying unsuccessfully to raise a signal from the submerged platform via underwater radio or using Morse Code sound pulses. Nothing worked, and those aboard ship might have been excused if they concluded that no evidence of life was, in fact, evidence of no life aboard the underwater platform.
Then, one of the sonar operators suggested sending sound pulses to the well-known cadence of “shave and a haircut: two bits.” My father would tap out the first part of the cadence, and men trapped aboard the platform banged the last two beats on the metal walls. After a while, the stranded men began to send back the first part of the sequence, and my father would tap out the final two beats. For 18 hours, they used this pattern to communicate; then, those aboard the platform stopped responding. They were never rescued.
If that was the end, and “if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” But death is not the end, and now that he has passed beyond this veil of tears, Ken Hutchins can continue in the rescue efforts that occupied so much of his attention in mortality, sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with all. To his fiftieth high school reunion, he brought a copy of the Book of Mormon for every one of his classmates. If he were here today, he’d probably be standing at the exit, handing out copies to all in attendance, in the hope that just one of us would accept that volume’s invitation that we “come unto Christ, who is the Holy One of Israel, and partake of his salvation, and the power of his redemption.”
I cannot see him now, any more than he could see the men aboard that oil platform, and I haven’t heard from him for more than twelve hours, even though my thoughts have been circling around his life, just as the Cassin Young circled that sunken platform. Given his sense of humor, it’s not totally out of the question that he would respond to the cadence of “shave and a hair cut” with two thunderclaps, but I don’t need that witness to know he lives and is, again, encircled about in the arms of his Savior.
My father was not a Puritan, but he was one of those spoken of by Paul, “who died in faith . . . and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they . . . desire a better country, that is an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.” Of these truths I testify, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Zachary Hutchins
