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of Einstein to re-discover what Abraham knew.” I
gobbled it up.
A few weeks later Paul kissed me, and a few
months after that he broke up with me so he
could focus on preparing for his mission, as good
Mormon boys were supposed to do. We remained
friends, but the incident made me feel as if I were a
wicked distraction from his more important priest-
hood responsibilities. Black holes were safer and less
mysterious than boys, I decided, and I threw myself
at my college textbooks.at the age of twenty-one, just before
setting off on my own mission, I finally at-
tended the Endowment session in the Jordan River
Temple. More impatient than nervous, I entered
the Endowment room, which looked like a small
theater containing enough self-folding seats for
least forty people. Women were directed to sit to
the left of the central aisle, men to the right. I sat in
the front row on a chair cushion the color of desert
sage, which matched the floor-to-ceiling curtain
at the front of the room. My mother, settling in
beside me, was dressed as I was, in a long-sleeved
white dress and white slippers. I wiggled my toes
in the slippers; they made me feel like I had satin
clouds attached to my feet.
A portly man dressed in a white suit stood calmly
but unsmilingly at a simple altar in front of the
enormous curtain. When everyone was settled, he
pressed a few buttons to start the audio recording
of the presentation. After a deep masculine voice
announced the importance of the ceremony, the
lights dimmed and a large screen at the front of
the room descended. The video presentation of
the creation story from Genesis was so beautiful I
wept. Later, I would experience the same awe as I
watched the new Cosmos series with Neil deGrasse
Tyson and BBC’s Human Planet and Planet Earth II
documentaries. They all shared sweeping land-
scapes, close-ups of flowers and animals, and music
that created visceral physical responses down my
spine and across my skin: a divine feeling, whether
sent by a divinity or not. The Earth we have, lumpy
and asymmetrical though it may be, is ours, the pale
blue dot over which we can be better stewards.
A sense of overwhelming reverence is
something both science and religion can provide.
Both proffer to their acolytes the notion of thesublime, as preached by the Romantic poets. An
eighteenth-century German philosopher and
gardening enthusiast, Christian Hirschfeld, defined
the sublime as seeing our own potential in the
grandeur of nature and its many landscapes, which
are outward symbols of our many inward human
realities. The poet William Wordsworth considered
the sublime to be the mind trying to “grasp at
something towards which it can make approaches
but which it is incapable of attaining,” a mood
where mystery’s burdens and “the heavy and the
weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is
lightened.” This is the mood I have felt in singing
praises to God, scanning poetry, snuggling with
pets and people, studying planets. In his book
Truth and Beauty, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an
Indian American astrophysicist who won the 1983
Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the physical
configuration and evolution of stars, also wrote of
the human need to search for the sublime:This “shuddering before the beautiful,” this incredible
fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the
beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica
in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to
which the human mind responds at its deepest and
most profound.The subsequent parts of the Endowment ceremony
were less awe-inspiring for me. Painful childbirth
and patriarchy (Genesis 3:16) seemed a heavy price
for Eve’s sin of eating a piece of fruit in search of
knowledge. Hand in hand, Adam and Eve were
expelled from the Garden of Eden into a lone and
dreary world with the promise that if they were
obedient, they could return to God’s presence.
The white screen ascended back into its slot in the
ceiling, and we were asked to put on special temple
attire over our clothes, each item signifying spiritual
progress toward God in some way. It was strange,
but I clung to what my grandma had said the day
she purchased my temple clothes for me: whenever
I donned the symbolic temple clothing, she said,
she wanted me to feel wrapped in God’s love and
her love. When prompted by the masculine voice,
I bowed my head and covenanted to be faithful
to my church and its teachings. If I broke those
covenants, I risked losing my place with my family
in the afterlife. We were then allowed to pass by a"SHUDDERING BEFORE THE BEAUTIFUL” | JAMIE ZVIRZDIN