Mother in Heaven
Each [person] is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny.
The Family: A Proclamation to the World
The winter of 1831 found Eliza Roxcy Snow seated quietly in her family’s parlor, her brown eyes fixed on the visitor warming himself by the fire. Word had spread that this young man, Joseph Smith, had seen God and angels and had translated a new book of scripture, comparable to the Bible. Eliza was twenty-seven, scarcely a year older than Joseph. Like him, she had grown up cherishing the New Testament, yearning for the voice of a modern prophet. Yet the preachers of her day insisted that prophets were no longer needed. Highly intelligent and curious, she studied Joseph’s face without drawing his notice, searching for the slightest flicker of deceit. Trained as a poet, she weighed every word he spoke. What she found was a man without guile.
For several years after that visit, Eliza studied the restored gospel methodically before committing to baptism on April 5, 1835. That night, as she reflected on her covenant, an undeniable spiritual confirmation came.
I felt a tangible sensation… commencing at my head and enveloping my person and passing off at my feet, producing inexpressible happiness. She also heard a distinct voice promising that the lamp of intelligence shall be lighted over your path1.
Shortly after, Eliza moved to Kirtland to live with the Smiths. There, within the rhythm of daily life, she became fully acquainted with the walk and conversation of a prophet. She witnessed not just the miracles and transcendent revelations that came through Joseph, but also the humility that underpinned them. The more I made his acquaintance, she would later write, the more cause I found to appreciate him in his divine calling1.
Eliza’s discipleship was also shaped by profound suffering, including the brutal persecution she endured in Missouri in 1838. Accounts preserved by Alice Merrill Horne in her 1947 autobiography suggest that Eliza may have been a victim of sexual assault during the Missouri War2. These details, fragmentary and based on second-hand recollections, cannot be fully verified. According to Horne, however, they may help explain both Eliza’s decision to enter into plural marriage with Joseph Smith and her inability to bear children, perhaps as a result of lasting physical or emotional trauma. In the years that followed, the deaths of Joseph Smith (1844) and her father (1845) left Eliza further bereft. She found solace in her pen, composing dozens of poems and hymns.
Upon migrating to Utah, and now as a plural wife of Brigham Young, Eliza was called to serve as general president of the Relief Society in 1866. In Nauvoo, Emma Smith had filled that role since the organization’s founding in 1842. With Eliza as her secretary, Emma guided the Relief Society’s early charitable and spiritual efforts and, at times, used the organization as a platform to speak against polygamy and to advocate for virtue during a period of growing tension. When the Saints migrated west, however, Emma chose to remain in Nauvoo. Her decision reflected a desire to care for her aging mother-in-law, Lucy Mack Smith, and to safeguard her family’s property. At the same time, she sought distance from Brigham Young, with whom she had deep and enduring disagreements over plural marriage and other matters.
In Utah, that mantle of nurturing the women of Zion passed on to Eliza. For the next twenty-one years, she poured extraordinary energy into the work—traveling tirelessly across the territory, delivering more than a thousand sermons, and championing education, self-reliance, and professional training for women. Through her inspired leadership, the Relief Society blossomed into a dynamic statewide network of faith, service, and empowerment—a legacy that continues to bless the lives of women around the world today.
Among the many poems Eliza wrote, one stands unique: Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother—later retitled O My Father. This inspired work gave voice to the hope of eternal relationships and destiny, and in one of its most profound lines, offered the first written acknowledgment of a Heavenly Mother.
That doctrine was first expressed in Nauvoo, in the final years of Joseph’s life, when Eliza sat at the feet of her husband and absorbed the expansive and revolutionary theology he unfolded:
In the heavens are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare;
Truth is reason, truth eternal,
Tells me I’ve a mother there.
That stanza changed everything. It marked a radical departure from traditional Christianity. Not only was God revealed to have a perfect, glorified body of flesh and bone like man; not only were men and women taught that they could become like Him; but the revelations reframed Elohim, the Creator of our spirits, as the divine image of male and female—Father and Mother—united in glory and purpose.
Years later, Wilford Woodruff would describe the hymn as sacred, the work of a woman who had the spirit of revelation3. And so it is fitting that this critical doctrine—one that elevated and profoundly ennobled womanhood—was not first recorded in a sermon or canonized in scripture, but immortalized in the inspired words of one of God’s chosen daughters, whose life reflected the very love of the Mother she testified of.
1Eliza R. Snow, Sketch of My Life, 10; Salt Lake City 20th Ward, 29.
2Andrea Radke-Moss, The Juvenile Instructor, March 7, 2016.
3Wilford Woodruff, “Discourse,” Millennial Star 56 no. 15, April 9, 1894, 229.
Note: Using advanced deep-learning techniques, Marsena Cannon’s 1852 photograph of Eliza R. Snow was digitally restored and age-regressed to approximate her appearance in her early twenties, when she first heard of the new religion. The process parallels modern forensic facial reconstruction methodologies that map and preserve the individual’s unique craniofacial landmarks—eye spacing, jawline structure, nasal profile—while algorithmically reversing age-related changes in skin texture, volume, and soft-tissue contours.