J. Spencer Fluhman: Absence, History, and the Burning Bush

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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At eight years old I looked for angels in vain. I might have seen one, but my mother’s response hardly hid her skepticism. Even back then I realized that I had probably been looking too hard. Truth is, I was bitterly disappointed and worried that my failure to glimpse beyond the veil revealed something lacking in me.

My angel search took place during the 9:00 a.m. session of the Jordan River Temple dedication on November 16, 1981. It was a big deal that I was there and I knew it. I had turned eight less than a month before, the minimum age for attendance, and realized that compared to my younger sister and most of my friends, I was lucky to be so old. It is no overstatement to say that my anticipation for the event had been building for years.

One of my earliest memories came three and a half years earlier. On April 16, 1978, not yet five years old, I had been brought to a Bountiful, Utah, pulpit by our Latter-day Saint stake president and presented with a dollar. He asked what I would buy with it and I reportedly responded, “eggs.” He asked for the dollar back and announced that I had just made the stake’s first donation to the construction of the Jordan River Temple. I vaguely remember the loss of the dollar but, more, my pride at being the first to help build the sacred place. Three years later, I attended the temple’s cornerstone ceremony in late summer. Two months after that I toured the new temple at the open house preceding its dedication on my eighth birthday.

In the weeks and months before the dedication itself, my family had talked of temples and dedications and I was ushered into a sacred narrative stretching back from me to the 1830s Ohio Saints. I could not forget the angels said to have attended the temple dedication there. And I was determined to see one. The first cautions came from Mom. Appearances of angels are rare. Something so sacred doesn’t happen every day. Even with the stakes thus raised, I readied myself for visions, undeterred. When I wondered afterwards if the guy who seemed momentarily out of place at the beginning of the service had been an angel, Mom lovingly professed agnosticism. (The stories, the cautions, and the tender skepticism all came from Mom. I didn’t remember my father having been at the dedicatory session at all until I checked his journal. Always, scripture and doctrine came from Dad, narrative and charismata from Mom.)

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In a way, this was my own childhood version of the “Great Disappointment,” the shock that forerunners to the early Adventists experienced when Jesus did not return as predicted in 1844. Still, I pushed the letdown from my mind and instead remembered the experience as a treasured time with Mom that provided a profound sense of belonging—a placeholder in the space where angels might have been. I eventually brushed off later absences, too. Where was God when this terrible thing happened or when that critical question remained unanswered? If God knows sparrows and numbers hairs, where was he during holocausts or genocides? Like my fruitless childhood angel quest, I suspected for many years that the absences in experience or gaps in explanation were my fault. For a few years in adolescence, I wondered if they pointed to a more shattering lacuna—perhaps there were neither angels nor a God to encounter at all. Even after finding faith again in my late teens, the questions remained, in modified forms, but eventually I acclimated to the apparent gaps.

In other words, that childhood experience has played out time and again throughout a Latter-day Saint lifetime. God and angels have remained stubbornly absent, especially at times when I think I need them most, but skepticism, adulthood, and modernity have not fully stamped out my primal Latter-day Saint yearnings, either. I still long to keep company with angels and touch the face of God. I’m told that, as a young child, I got a neighbor friend to help me reenact the scene of Moses before God’s fiery presence from Cecil B. DeMille’s film, The Ten Commandments. Mom found us kneeling in the yard, shoeless, and I explained we were on holy ground. I think I will always crave the burning bush. More than four decades later, I find myself still magically drawn beyond the immanent, secular framing of reality even as I have acclimated to its rhythms, priorities, and habits of mind.

My story is embedded in a much more extended set of stories.The entire history of modern Christianity can be seen to pivot on the axis between notions and experiences of divine presence and absence, between the “religious” and the (secular) “modern.” I recognize that the terms “modern” and “religious” were themselves constituted in a single, complicated historical process, and acknowledge that they combine to form the water I swim in. Many scholars maintain that the “secular” and the “religious” are more like sides of the same coin than definitional opposites. From this perspective, we’re all swimming together, culturally, at least in the modern West. But understanding the complicated processes that made our modern world does not spare me from their effects in my own life or in my own thinking. So, even as “modernity” insists that the gods survive primarily as “symbols, signs, metaphors, functions, and abstractions,” they have refused to remain so safely contained. The founding narrative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems to mightily strain against that cultural stream in its insistence on rather spectacular divine interruptions into the ordinary. That fact excited my earliest imagination and fueled my yearning for the holy, and it does so still. That said, I was left with a sobering problem: those dramatic divine obtrusions seemed to elude me. It turns out that both my religion’s vibrant rejection of the world’s “disenchantment” and my thoughtful distance from its extraordinary founding convulsions are both in their own ways emblematic of the American sojourn over the past century.

That being said, I have always belonged among the Latter-day Saints. Life in a ward, time as a missionary, and my undergraduate years at Brigham Young University provided the warm, embodied, and communal contexts for my earliest religious experiences, comparatively undramatic though they were. Those environments cultivated a keen sense of at least proximity to the holy, which has long felt mostly good enough in lieu of direct heavenly presence.

Yet while I experienced foundational, formative spiritual sparks in those nurturing spaces, none of them made much sense of divine absence for me. Why didn’t divine realms make themselves more obvious to us? Nor did these spiritual beginnings meaningfully address the vast challenges we encounter in life, including paradox, complexity, irony, failure, and change. My youthful religious sensibilities primarily had been occupied with certainty, absolutes, and “eternalities.” Back then, religion was the agent that smoothed rough edges and made stories simple, linear, and triumphant. But those reassuring traits also made religion brittle for a stretch during those teenage years, when it seemed ill-equipped to handle the big existential questions (Whence evil? What is universal truth? What is enduring amid the changes of history?). As a missionary, though, those same sensibilities proved to be powerful glue for diverse people striving together in fledgling wards and deep motivation in the face of rejection or drudgery. Emerging from that missionary experience, I had grown accustomed to pretending that the absences or complexities did not exist or did not matter.

This changed, permanently, when in 1998 I arrived at the University of Wisconsin to begin a doctoral program in American history.