Lusterware

Crafting a Genuine Spiritual Life

I have been thinking lately about an Emily Dickinson poem I first heard twenty-five years ago in an American literature class at the University of Utah. I remember feeling intrigued and somewhat troubled as the professor read the poem since he was reported to be a lapsed Mormon. “Was that how it felt to lose faith?” I thought. 

It dropped so low—in my Regard—
I heard it hit the Ground—
And go to pieces on the Stones 
At bottom of my Mind—
Yet blamed the Fate that flung it—less 
Than I denounced Myself, 
For entertaining Plated Wares 
Upon my Silver Shelf.— 

Since then, I have lost faith in many things, among them Olympia typewriters, New York Times book reviews, and texturized vegetable protein; and yes, like most Latter-day Saints, I have had to reconsider some of my deepest religious beliefs. I have always been a somewhat skeptical person. I can remember raising my arm in Beehive class in the Sugar City Ward and telling my teacher that regardless of what she said I did not think that polygamy was sent by God. That kind of behavior may have had something to do with the palm reading I received from another teacher at an MIA gypsy party. She traced the lines on my upturned hand and told me my “head” line was longer and better developed than my “heart” line. For a while I worried about that. 

As I have grown older, I have become less fearful of those “stones at the bottom of my mind.” In fact, I am convinced that a willingness to admit disbelief is often essential to spiritual growth. All of us meet challenges to our faith—persons who fail to measure up, doctrines that refuse to settle comfortably into our minds, books that contain troubling ideas or disorienting information. The temptation is strong to “blame the fate that flung it” or to ignore the crash as it hits the ground, pretending that nothing has changed. Neither technique is very useful. Though a few people seem to have been blessed with foam rubber rather than stones at the bottom of their minds (may they rest in peace), sooner or later most of us are forced to confront our shattered beliefs. 

I find Emily Dickinson’s little poem helpful. Some things fall off the shelf because they did not belong there in the first place; they were “Plated Wares” rather than genuine silver. At first I didn’t fully grasp the image. The only “Plated Wares” I knew anything about were made by Oneida or Wm. Rogers. Although less valuable than sterling, that sort of silverplate hardly falls to pieces when dropped. Then I learned about lusterware, the most popular “Plated Wares” of Emily Dickinson’s time. In the late eighteenth century, British manufacturers developed a technique for decorating ceramic ware with a gold or platinum film. In one variety, a platinum luster was applied to the entire surface of the object to produce what contemporaries called “poor man’s silver.” Shiny, inexpensive, and easy to get, it was also fragile, as breakable as any other piece of pottery or china. Only a gullible or very inexperienced person would mistake it for true silver. 

All of us have lusterware as well as silver on that shelf we keep at the top of our minds. A lusterware Joseph Smith, for instance, is unfailingly young, handsome, and spiritually radiant; unschooled but never superstitious, persecuted but never vengeful, human but never mistaken. A lusterware image fulfills our need for an ideal without demanding a great deal from us. There are lusterware missions and marriages, lusterware friendships, lusterware histories, and yes, lusterware visions of ourselves. Most of these will be tested at some point on the stones at the bottom of our minds. 

A number of years ago I read a letter from a young woman who had recently discovered some lusterware on her own shelf. “I used to think of the Church as one hundred percent true,” she wrote. “But now I realize it is probably ten percent human and only ninety percent divine.” I gasped, wanting to write back immediately, “If you find any earthly institution that is ten percent divine, embrace it with all your heart!” Actually ten percent is probably too high an estimate. Jesus spoke of grains of salt and bits of leaven, and He told His disciples that “the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field” (Matthew 13:44). Thus a small speck of divinity—the salt in the earth, the leaven in the lump of dough, the treasure hidden in the field—gives value and life to the whole. Now the question is where in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do we go to find the leaven? To the bishop? To the prophet? To the lesson manuals? Do we find it in Relief Society? In sacrament meeting? And if we fail to discover it in any of these places shall we declare the lump worthless? Jesus’ answer was clear. The leaven must be found in one’s own heart or not at all: “. . .the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). 

Many years ago a blunt bishop countered one of my earnest complaints with a statement I have never forgotten: “The Church is a good place to practice the Christian virtues of forgiveness, mercy, and love unfeigned.” That was a revelation to me. The Church was not a place that exemplified Christian virtues so much as a place that required them. I suppose I had always thought of it as a nice cushion, a source of warmth and comfort if ever things got tough (which they seldom had in my life). It hadn’t occurred to me that the Church could make things tough. 

Eliza R. Snow expressed it this way in a hymn that seems to be missing from the new book: 

Think not when you gather to Zion, 
Your troubles and trials are through, 
That nothing but comfort and pleasure 
Are waiting in Zion for you: 
No, no, ’tis designed as a furnace, 
All substance, all textures to try, 
To burn all the “wood, hay, and stubble,” 
The gold from the dross purify. 

Probably the hymn deserved to be dropped from the book. The third stanza suggests that the author, like more than one Relief Society president since, had made too many welfare visits and had listened to too many sad stories. Her charity failing, she told the complainers in her ward to shape up and solve their own problems: 

Think not when you gather to Zion, 
The Saints here have nothing to do 
But to look to your personal welfare, 
And always be comforting you. 

In the Church, as in our own families, we have the worst and the best of times. 

A young missionary on a lonely bus ride somewhere in Bolivia thinks he is equal to what lies ahead. He can endure hard work, strange food, and a confusing dialect. But nothing in the Missionary Training Center has prepared him for the filthiness of the apartment, for the cynicism of his first companion, or for the parakeet who lives, with all its droppings, under the other man’s bed. 

A young bride, ready to enter the temple, feels herself spiritually prepared. By choosing a simple white gown useable later as a temple dress she has already shown her preference for religious commitment over fantasy. She has discussed the covenants with her stake president and she feels she understands them. Yet sitting in the endowment room in ritual clothing no one had thought to show her, saying words she does not understand, she turns to her mother in dismay. “Am I supposed to enjoy this?” she says. 

An elders quorum president, pleased that his firm has won the contract for the ward remodeling project, prepares for the hard work ahead. He knows the job will be demanding. He expects some tension between his responsibilities as project manager and his commitment to the Church, but he is ready to consecrate his time and talents for the upbuilding of the Kingdom. What he doesn’t expect is the anger and the humiliation that follow his year-long encounter with the Church bureaucracy. “I wonder how far up this sort of thing goes?” he asks, and contemplates leaving the Church. 

A middle-aged woman reads deeply in the scriptures, sharing her insights with friends individually and in a small study group. She feels secure in her quest for greater light and truth until she begins to examine certain troubling episodes in Church history. The discrepancy between the official accounts and the new accounts distresses her. Has she been lied to? And if in one issue, why not many? Confiding her doubts to her friends, she feels them back away. 

“And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock” (Matthew 7:24–25). What rock can secure us against such storms? Occasionally some gentle soul, perhaps as puzzled as my Beehive teacher by my outspoken ways, will ask, “What keeps you in the Church?” “My skepticism,” I answer, only half in jest. Over the years I have noticed that Saints with doubts often outlast “true believers.” But of course the answer is inadequate. I don’t stay in the Church because of what I don’t know, but because of what I do. 

The Church I believe in is not an ascending hierarchy of the holy. It is millions of ordinary people calling one another “brother” and “sister” and trying to make it true. Not so long ago I had one of those terrible-wonderful experiences that I have been talking about. It started in an innocuous way, then built to a genuine crisis—a classic Liahona–Iron Rod conflict between me and my bishop. After a week of sleepless nights I went into his office feeling threatened and fragile. What followed was an astonishingly open and healing discussion, a small miracle. As I told a friend later, “If we hadn’t been Mormons, we would have embraced!” Our opinions didn’t change much; our attitudes toward one another did. I give him credit for having the humility to listen, and I give myself credit for trusting him enough to say what I really felt. The leaven in our lump was a common reaching for the Spirit. 

I am not always comfortable in my ward. There are weeks when I wonder if I can sit through another Relief Society lesson delivered straight from the manual or endure another meandering discussion in Gospel Doctrine class. Yet there are also moments when, surprised by my own silence, I am able to hear what a speaker only half says. Several months ago, as I was bracing myself for a Fast and Testimony meeting, a member of the bishopric approached me and asked if I would give the closing prayer. I said, “Yes,” feeling like a hypocrite, yet at the same time silently accepting some responsibility for the success of the meeting. Were the testimonies really better? When I stood to pray I was moved to the point of tears. 

For me the issue is not whether the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the One True Church Upon the Face of the Earth. That sounds to me like a particularly Zoramite brand of lusterware: 

Now the place was called by them Rameumptom, which, being interpreted, is the holy stand. Now, from this stand they did offer up, every man, the self-same prayer. . . . We thank thee, O God, for we are a chosen people unto thee, while others shall perish. (Alma 31:22, 28) 

The really crucial issue for me is that the Spirit of Christ is alive in the Church, and that it continues to touch and redeem the lives of the individual members. The young man survived his mission, returning with a stronger, more sober sense of what it meant to serve. The bride returned to the temple and enjoyed it more. The elders quorum president, though still struggling with his anger, knows it is his problem to face and to solve. The middle-aged woman grew through her loss of faith into a richer, deeper spirituality. 

As I study the scriptures very few contemporary problems seem new. I wonder how men in tune with the divine can appear to be so complacent and self-righteous in their dealings with women. Then I read Luke’s account of the visit of the angel to the women at the tomb on the first day of the week: “It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles. And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not” (Luke 24:10–11). I wonder how a church purportedly devoted to eternal values can invest so much energy in issues that strike me as unimportant. Then I read the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus and find the second greatest commandment, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” side by side with a sober command that “neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee” (Leviticus 19:18–19). Every dispensation has had its silver and its lusterware. God speaks to His children, as Moroni taught us, in our own language, and in our own narrow and culture-bound condition. 

To me that is a cause for joy rather than cynicism. I love Joseph Smith’s ecstatic recital in Doctrine and Covenants 128: 

Now, what do we hear in the gospel which we have received? A voice of gladness! a voice of mercy from heaven; and a voice of truth out of the earth…

A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county. . . .

The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna. . . .

The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness between Harmony, Susquehanna county, and Colesville, Broome county. . . .

And again, the voice of God in the chamber of old Father Whitmer, in Fayette, Seneca county, and at sundry times, and in divers places through all the travels and tribulations of this Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! (D&C 128:19–21) 

Joseph’s litany of homely place names, his insistence that the voice of God could indeed be heard on the banks of an ordinary American river or in the chamber of a common farmer, gives his message an audacity and a power that cannot be ignored. For me Joseph Smith’s witness that the divine can strike through the immediate is more important than any of the particulars enshrined in the church he established. If other people want to reduce D&C 128 to a data processing program for handling family group sheets, that’s fine. I am far more interested in that “whole and complete and perfect union, and welding together of dispensations” that Joseph wrote about. 

Two or three years ago I attended a small unofficial women’s conference in Nauvoo. The ostensible purpose was to celebrate the founding of the Relief Society, but the real agenda was to come to terms with the position of women in the contemporary Church. The participants came from many places; a few of us known to each other, many of us strangers, the only common bond being some connection with the three organizers, all of whom remained maddeningly opaque as to their motives. I cannot describe what happened to me during those three days. Let me just say that after emptying myself of any hope for peace and change in the Church I heard the voice of the Lord on the banks of the Mississippi River. It was a voice of gladness, telling me that the gospel had indeed been restored. It was a voice of truth, assuring me that my concerns were just, that much was still amiss in the Church. It was a voice of mercy, giving me the courage to continue my uneasy dialogue between doubt and faith. I am not talking here about a literal voice, but about an infusion of the Spirit—a kind of Pentecost that for a moment dissolved the boundaries between heaven and earth and between present and past. I felt as though I were reexperiencing the events the early Saints had described. 

I am not a mystical person. In ordinary decisions in my family I am far more likely to call for a vote than a prayer, and when other people proclaim their “spiritual experiences” I am generally cautious. But I would gladly sift through a great trough of meal for even a little bit of that leaven. 

The temptations of skepticism are real. Sweeping up the lusterware, we sometimes forget to polish and cherish the silver, not knowing that the power of discernment is one of the gifts of the Spirit and that the ability to discover counterfeit wares also gives us the power to recognize the genuine. 

This essay previously appeared in A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars, ed. Philip L. Barlow (Centerville, ut: Canon Press, 1986), 195–204. A shorter version first appeared as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Lusterware,” Exponent II 11, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 6.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor emerita at Harvard University, a cofounder of Exponent II, and the author of A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Art by Charlotte Condie.

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