Rough Stone Rolling IV: educations

“The waters never parted for him, not once.”
-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

For Joseph, the waters did part, sometimes. But they crashed closed before him with some frequency as well. His frustrations, reversals, tragedies matched his outsized ambitions, and the dazzling light of revelation threw the painful shadows of God’s frequent absences and inscrutability into sharp relief.

Joseph felt all abandonment sharply. He feared the sting of betrayal and loss above all other pain, and thus had dual weaknesses. First, he frequently confronted such fear (as many do), with the charged energy of anger. He brooded over failure and loss; as Bushman notes, he spent more time in his history dragging himself again through the loss of the 116 pages than he did discussing the rest of the translation of the Book of Mormon. And the several years following the first trials in Missouri confronted him with all these fears.

But he also had weakness for its grand mitigation. He loved the spectacle of salvation, the cascading emotions of redemption and forgiveness, the divine dramatics of ordinance and priesthood applied to the healing of human relationships.

Zion’s Camp, in retrospect, seems almost ludicrous; a motley batch of some hundred to two hundred men marching in the heat of June 1834 a thousand miles across the Midwest, underarmed, untrained, to confront the Missouri militias and, in Joseph’s grandiose words, to redeem Zion. The camp failed, majestically; the governor of Missouri declined to assist the Mormons as Joseph had hoped and mediators convinced Joseph that his best and only alternative was to accept peaceful resettlement in Clay County, north of Jackson. The men of Zion’s Camp, upon arriving in Missouri, quietly turned and headed for home.

Yet Joseph had thrown himself into it. He spent the months of spring rallying troops; he took upon himself the name ‘Baurak Ale,’ the “officer of the highest rank in the army of the strength of the Lord’s hosts,” and appointed an ‘Armour Bearer’ to carry his pistols. Along the way he pointed out Nephite graves and primordial altars to his followers In his vision, the Camp was redemptive, with every step sacralizing the landscape and binding the Mormons in holy fellowship.

The disappointment, then, was all the more crushing. The harmony Joseph sought collapsed when he picked a fight with Seventy Sylvester Smith over Smith’s complaints about Joseph’s dog; a petty feud that degenerated, ultimately, into Joseph heaving a bugle at the other man. And the Camp, horrifically, was smitten with cholera just as it left Missouri; a plague Joseph read as God’s punishment for his failures. Upon returning home, frustrations remained; he feuded with his brother William, made Emma cry for leaving a church meeting early, and picked a fight with Orson Pratt.

But in weakness, Joseph found strength. He was quick to seek forgiveness and reconciliation, and at the same time willingly submitted himself to a disciplinary council, facing Sylvester Smith’s charges with equanimity. In the trial, Joseph may have seen strength, for his new faith had made a transition: the intricate system of councils and hierarchies he had begun to establish no longer depended upon his personal charisma. In 1835 his vision of organization was finally realized, and it extended across the entire globe. Authority in the world was divided into two separate spheres: Zion and the mission field. Over Zion – defined as the cities of the Saints - watched the High Councils and the stake presidencies – two, by 1835, one in Kirtland and one in Missouri. Over the world watched the Quorum of the Twelve, those who went out and sought converts and preached the gospel. Over these two equal branches sat the First Presidency. The ‘great revelation’ on priesthood, the current D&C 107, was completed at this time; Joseph had in 1831 dictated the first 58 verses, now, in 1835, he completed it, adding the final 42, which discussed the mission of the Twelve. In February of that year, Joseph directed the Three Witnesses to call twelve men, to ordain them, and to send them out. Nine of the twelve were Zion’s Camp veterans.

The dedication of the Kirtland temple on March 27, 1836 was the culmination of Joseph’s multifacted experience. He had for years been promising the Saints an ‘endowment of power.’ As the temple approached completion, he began inviting selected leaders to its unfinished rooms, where they washed and anointed each other. Late on a January night in 1836, Joseph, having received anointing, saw visions, which quickly spread to his fellows. A week later he taught the Twelve Apostles and the Seventy to pray with uplifted hands, and again felt a rush of the Spirit. The dedication of the temple was a slight disappointment after these experiences; Joseph, in love with his councils, spent much of the time on procedural affairs, but again, that night, in private, there was speaking in tongues, inspired exhortions and hymn singing that went on for two days. And finally, after the first Eucharist held in the temple a week after the dedication, the veil dropped, and Joseph and Oliver saw Christ.

Joseph’s journal (his second, but most detailed) runs from September 1835 to April 1836. This is the final entry. There is no evidence that he or Oliver shared this vision; it appears nowhere else in the sources of the time. And the torrent of Joseph’s revelations faded to a trickle after it. Bushman speculates that Joseph did not quite understand, or was afraid to share, what came next. In the vision, he received three keys. The gathering of Israel he understood. But what were the keys of Malachi? And what was the work of Abraham?

He had already pushed the Saints far. The liturgy of anointing was an exceptional thing on the American frontier. The strangeness of Malachi and Abraham, however, as Bushman says, not many could bear.