And All Eternity Shook

A young missionary comes home after two years in Puerto Rico only to find his mother on her deathbed.

Enraged, he wrestles with his God in passionate prayer as he pleads for her life; images and memories of his mission and his Mom jump, cut, and splice together in a cinematic crescendo, flashing furiously before his eyes as though he were the one dying and not her; all as he feels after some miracle, some impossibility, and the peace which surpasses understanding.
In this work of creative non-fiction, our first full-length message in a bottle, Ships of Hagoth seeks to shine a light on the hitherto undiscussed yet very real phenomenon of missionaries losing loved ones while serving-an experience that only those who have passed through it can fully understand, yet which this book still seeks to communicate. We hope-for "one must needs hope"-to spark other works taking seriously the idea that, if the "unspeakable gift" of the Holy Ghost manifests in "groanings beyond utterance," then we must find radical new ways to express it; that are, like Hagoth, "exceedingly curious," and so build new ships in search of unknown lands; that don't just say new things, but find new ways to say them.

Jacob L. Bender is also the author of Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), a work similarly rooted in his Puerto Rican mission service and his mother's passing. In LDS studies, he has previously written for Dialogue, Sunstone, Peculiar Pages, Ships of Hagoth, the Eugene England Foundation, and The Association of Mormon Letters.