Moroni’s Quest v. Pioneer Trek

Our stake did Moroni’s Quest for the first time several years ago along with another stake.  This summer was the second time.  I went along as a general hey-you and chaperone.  Some of my teenagers went along as youth.

Having also gone on Pioneer Trek as an adult chaperone, I thought I would do a comparison.

For those who are unaware, Moroni’s Quest is when the youth normally ages 14-18 go somewhere and simulate participating in the events of the Book of Mormon for a few days, usually in costume.  Pioneer Trek is where the youth go somewhere and simulate participating in the western trek of the LDS pioneers by camping in the woods but pulling their supplies in a handcart instead of in a backpack,  usually in costume.  Both have a number of little set pieces and devotionals and such, and fun activities mixed in.

Trek has two huge advantages.  First the physical action of pulling the handcart towards a destination gives the whole thing a coherence that Moroni’s Quest lacks.  The body half of the soul is bundled into the activity necessarily.  Related, the unrelated group of youth in the handcart ‘family’ bond much more readily than the unrelated youth in the Quest ‘tribe’ because they have to pull the handcart together.  The leaders for the Moroni’s Quest tribes had had to work harder to get their groups to gel and it took longer.

The downside of Moroni’s Quest is that the thing consists of a series of arbitrary simulation and that the entire arc of the Book of Mormon is hard to fit into an overall personal narrative as a participant.  At some point you feel more like a spectator, which is not ideal.

The costumes were fun and even though we had very little guidance at all, it was fun to see how much everyone has absorbed from art a sort of general sense of how to convey they are dressed as a Nephite or a Lamanite.  Lots of vaguely bible clothes but more colorful and with more headbands.

The battles also went over in a big way.  They were pretty unruly naturally.

The highlight was the Savior’s visit.  I expected to cringe and in fact there was a cringe factor but sometimes you have to not fear the cringe.  The way it worked was that morning, it would have been the last morning of the camp, a number of the actors came to where we were socializing outside the dining hall and told us that he was come, and we should come and see.  We went around the side of the hall to this grassy slope (we were in a high, hilly location for the event).  Then a man portraying Christ in white came down the hill from higher up.  There was a narration, then he hugged every single participant one by one while cheap LDS pop and then the Mormon tabernacle choir played.  Each person sat down once hugged.  It took the actor about 45 minutes.  A hundred yards back on the dirt road to the dining hall was a crippled girl who had trouble getting places and an accompanying adult.  She had given up at that point.  The man portraying the savior didn’t overlook them and after finishing everyone else walked that way and then broke into a jog.  Many of us cried buckets.

For me the hardest part of the scene was a self-outcast girl of very bad posture and a certain amount of cultivated gender ambiguity who refused the embrace.

In the end the scene struck me as sacramental.  Sacraments are also portrayals, with a priesthood man representing Christ or the Father, which informally is what this was.  It gave me some sympathy with D. John Butler’s claim in Plain and Precious Things that some claims in ancient scripture to having seen the Lord were actually references to a particular temple rite.