And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy by Adrian Shirk

Author:Adrian Shirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Heavenly Mother Will Believe You

Eliza Snow

The Salt Lake City Temple Square grounds are crowded with tourists. I step into the North Visitors’ Center, where a bird’s-eye diorama of first-century Jerusalem dominates the foyer. The diorama is behind glass, and a wide-eyed blond woman surrounded by her six towheaded children gesticulates over it, describing Jesus riding into the city on a donkey.

“A donkey!” two boys squinch their noises, giggling.

“Oh, yes,” she says, and she traces the path where his followers had lain out palm fronds like a red carpet, much to the Pharisees’ chagrin.

I trail behind them into the next room, an atrium of paintings depicting Jesus’ miracles or Old Testament prophets predicting them: Jesus feeding the masses at Galilee; Isaiah prophesying the Virgin birth; Jesus healing the leper; Ezekiel’s desert vision of the Messiah’s four faces; Jesus surprising Mary Magdalene outside his tomb—there he is, with his arms out, like, Mary, “oh, ye of little faith,” you’ve been punk’d; I’m alive! It’s high divine comedy, the resurrection. When I look up, the family is gone. I scan the room for evidence of anything other than mainline Christiandom but come up short, except for the three sets of missionaries, with their laminated nametags and identical uniforms, idling in pairs at the information desk.

It isn’t until I ascend a spiral ramp to the second floor that the Mormon cosmology begins to reveal itself. A gleaming twelve-foot Byzantine Jesus stands at the landing, surrounded by a 360-degree painting of the solar system in saturated blues and purples. Visitors encircle the statue on benches, snapping photos or whispering among themselves. Here is a Christ no Calvin or Luther could have conceived of. A risen Lord who presides not only over the earth but over the universe, who calls forth a new set of questions about the nature of our existence and the scope of His domain, especially in regard to other planets.

The first place where Mormon theology departs from mainline Christianity is in its interpretation of the first line of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,” for which the original Hebrew uses the plural form of “god”: Elohim. Catholics interpret this plurality as the trinity—Father, Son, Holy Ghost—but Mormons read this as evidence of multiple gods presiding over other parts of the universe. But our Heavenly Father, to whom we owe worship, is also referred to as Elohim, and he is the literal parent of Jesus, and the literal parent of all human spirits on Earth. As Latter-Day Saints founder Joseph Smith said, even “God the Father had a Father.” Smith taught that before earthly time, God was a man on another planet, who ascended into Heaven and created the Celestial Kingdom where every single soul that would ever exist on Earth was born. So Smith professed a theology whereby married men, sealed in eternity to their families, could one day assume godhead in the afterlife. (But Mormons think about this probably as often as Presbyterians parse out the trinity when

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