Commentary: At the ‘Church of Boyhood Mischief’ with Tom Sawyer

“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is about boyhood mischief, not church. Yet, some of its most memorable boyhood mischief happens at church. I can relate.

Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens) published the book 150 years ago in 1876. Before then, he had some interesting Utah moments.

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Twain’s older brother Orion Clemens as secretary to the Nevada territorial governor. Twain traveled out West with Orion.

The two men stopped in Salt Lake City and stayed at a Main Street hotel above the Pony Express Station (near the old Salt Lake Tribune building). Twain wrote about the adventures in his 1872 book, “Roughing It.”

Twain asserts that Brigham Young ignored him when the two brothers visited the Latter-day Saint leader. As the meeting ended, Young patted the young Twain on the head and said to Orion, “Ah — your child, I presume? Boy or girl?”

Twain got a bit of journalistic revenge for the alleged slight when he famously (and fictionally) described Young’s “7-foot-long, 96-foot-wide bed” built for him and all his wives. A few years later, Twain encountered Utah once again.

In 1875, he filed a copyright infringement lawsuit involving his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.” Although not one of Twain’s more famous works, the novel’s title provided an enduring nickname to the American era of about 1870 to 1900.

The lawsuit erupted when a Nevada actor contracted with the Salt Lake Theatre (launched by Brigham Young) for an unauthorized performance of “The Gilded Age.” Twain hired Salt Lake City lawyers who later helped prosecute John D. Lee for the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre and represented Young’s heirs in a challenge to the prophet’s will after he died.

Twain instructed his counsel, “No compromise with thieves on any terms, not even for the entire proceeds.” He won an injunction and a year later showed his own version of the play at the same Utah theater.

A century later, I discovered Twain in northern Utah, when I was the same age as Tom Sawyer. In a drama production at St. Joseph grade school in Ogden, I played the man Tom witnessed murdered in a graveyard.

Fresh off that forgettable theatrical performance, I read the rest of the book. I loved Twain’s tales about Tom tricking others to whitewash his fence, showing off for girls and running wild through town.

Tom’s church antics

As a Catholic school altar boy who was friends with monks, however, the “Tom Sawyer” church scenes particularly amused me.

In one chapter, Tom squirms and moans in discomfort when forced to put on his stiff and confining Sunday best clothes. That was me, too.

Even today, as a practicing lawyer, I rip off my suit and tie as soon as possible after a courtroom appearance. Tom also hated shoes. Fortunately, I don’t need them when I sometimes work from home.

In Sunday school, Tom wins a prized Bible by trading his boyhood treasures for the tickets — usually earned by memorizing Scripture verses — needed to claim the award. Although I did better than him in religion class, I’ve always admired Tom’s quick and innovative thinking on questions of theology.

After Tom claims his Bible, the Sunday school teacher asks him to name the first two disciples of Jesus. When Tom shouts, “David and Goliath,” the narrating Twain mercifully says, “Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.”

In church later the same day, Tom must sit far away from the windows so he won’t be distracted by anything outside. It was a smart move. I almost messed up altar boy duties while daydreaming about scaling the towering wooden back altar in our church sanctuary.

(Don’t tell anyone, but some of this article may have been written in my head while I stared out the window during Sunday Mass at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Cottonwood Heights.)

Despite his distance from the window, Tom finds other fine diversions in church. During a long and harsh sermon that Twain says “thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving,” Tom spends many happy moments watching a dog play with a beetle.

The best church scene occurs when the town thinks Tom, Huck Finn and Joe Harper have drowned. Twain takes us back into the church for the memorial service.

In a moving eulogy, the minister tells of “many a touching incident” in the lives of the departed boys. The people see how what they once thought were “rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide” really were “noble and beautiful” acts.

Soon the “whole company” joins together in “a chorus of anguished sobs.” Even the preacher is “crying in the pulpit.”

Twain continues: “There was a rustle in the gallery, which nobody noticed; a moment later the church door creaked; the minister raised his streaming eyes above his handkerchief, and stood transfixed! First one and then another pair of eyes followed the minister’s, and then almost with one impulse the congregation rose and stared while the three dead boys came marching up the aisle.…They had been hid in the unused gallery listening to their own funeral sermon! Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Harpers threw themselves upon their restored ones, smothered them with kisses and poured out thanksgivings.”

A heartwarming and body-warming moment

If ever I get to the pearly gates, I hope my arrival plays out in a similar fashion. For now, however, I must be content to recall my own favorite Tom-Sawyer-like church moment.

It happened in winter, at the monastery chapel in Huntsville, where we sometimes would attend evening services with the monks. The place was lovely but quite cold.

One especially frigid night my mother and sister went upstairs to pray. I lingered downstairs to check out a waist-high, flat-topped metal box, strategically positioned under the stairs.

I suspected (and prayed) it was a heating vent of some kind. I tell the rest of the story in “Monastery Mornings,” my book about growing up at the old Trappist abbey:

“I strolled over and sat on it. Nothing. I waited. Nothing. I started to give up and leave when I suddenly heard a staccato set of clicking sounds. They were strange and nonrhythmic. Click. Click, click, click, click. Click, click. I sat there, eagerly anticipating. All at once, almost miraculously, hot air began to flow out of the vent slats. I was warm, deliriously and deliciously warm. I sat there for several minutes, under the stairs, in the dark, staring at a solo candle burning on a nearby altar. My head grew heavy and my body light. My soul seemed to levitate and I experienced what may have been a deep mystical feeling. Or perhaps I just dozed off for a few minutes. Either way, it was divine.”

Tom Sawyer would be proud.

Note to readers • Michael Patrick O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City who frequently represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters. He is the author of “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks.” His new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks of Shamrock Valley,” will be published in time for Christmas. He blogs at theboymonk.com.