“The conquest of the deadly flux of time”

These beloved hymn lyrics, written by Eliza R. Snow (1804-1887), are very familiar to Latter-day Saints:

1. O my Father, thou that dwellest
   In the high and glorious place,
   When shall I regain thy presence
   And again behold thy face?
   In thy holy habitation,
   Did my spirit once reside?
   In my first primeval childhood
   Was I nurtured near thy side?
2. For a wise and glorious purpose
   Thou hast placed me here on earth
   And withheld the recollection
   Of my former friends and birth;
   Yet ofttimes a secret something
   Whispered, “You’re a stranger here,”
   And I felt that I had wandered
   From a more exalted sphere.

Sister Snow’s intuition on this topic was informed by the teaching of the Prophet Joseph Smith.  “This earth is not our home,” says Elder Bruce C. Hafen, summarizing a relevant portion of that teaching.  “We are away at school, trying to master the lessons of “the great plan of happiness” so we can return home and know what it means to be there.”

But many others have independently sensed the same thing.  Among them was the Russian existentialist religious and political philosopher Nikolai or Nicolas Berdyaev (1874-1948), whose autobiography I’ve lately been reading:

I cannot remember my first cry on encountering the world, but I know for certain that from the very beginning I was aware of having fallen into an alien realm.  I felt this as much on my first day of conscious life as I do at the present time.  I have always been a pilgrim.  Christians ought to feel that they have no abiding city on earth, and they should be seekers of the city to come. . . .  The consciousness of being rooted in the earth was alien to me, and I was strongly attracted by the Orphic myth concerning the origin of the human soul, which speaks of a falling away of man’s spirit from a higher world into a lower.

The music of heaven she heard at her birth

Still drowned the sad songs of the earth.

Nicolas Berdyaev, Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, translated by Katharine Lampert (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 15.  The two lines of verse cited by Berdyaev come from the 1831 poem “The Angel,” by Mikhail Lermontov, and were translated by Patrick Thompson.

The conquest of the deadly flux of time has always been the chief concern of my life.  (Berdyaev, Dream and Reality, viii)