Rushing to the hospital in April 1947, Jenalyn Wing Woffinden fell unconscious from premature labor pains. The receiving physician doubted she would survive. But after waking she related the following:
I found myself in the Celestial Room of the Salt Lake Temple. As I walked across the back of the room . . . a man dressed in white robes . . . came up to me and introduced himself as Peter, a disciple of Jesus Christ. He told me I would have great difficulty rearing this child. . . .
Peter then introduced me to the child’s spiritual mother who was dressed in white. . . . She told me of the difficulty she had had raising the child in the spiritual world and [said] the only way I would be able to successfully raise [him] would be with unbounded love.1
Peter foretold many hardships for the boy and repeated his charge to love him unceasingly. As of 1965—when Brigham Young University student Russell Bice collected this story from Sister Woffinden’s daughter for folklore professor Tom Cheney—the boy’s sickly and rebellious nature was validating his mother’s vision.
Though dramatic, this story is not doctrinally foundational like Joseph Smith’s First Vision. Sister Woffinden is an ordinary Mormon. Her vision, though doubtless important to her family, remains largely unknown to other Mormons. What is remarkable about this story—besides the specific instruction encouraging unrestrained love in an era of ostensible emotional distance—is that it is not unique. Thousands of Mormon parents today tell similar stories.
While Sister Woffinden had a sleeping NDE (near death experience) and while research by Craig Lundahl and Harold Widdison suggests people often experience prebirth visions and visitations along with an NDE, most LDS preborn-children narratives describe a wakeful encounter. In 2010, a young Arizona married couple began hearing noises in their house and sensed a watcher on their roof.
Joe was outside bringing in the groceries and our bishop drove by. He said to Joe, “I have a strange question to ask you.” Joe responded, “I have a strange answer!” Our bishop proceeded to ask if we have ever seen a little girl at our home. Joe just got chills. The bishop explained how the young neighbor girl had been seeing “Angel girls” on our roof and outside of our home. The Bishop believed these spirits were our own children in spirit waiting to come to our home.2
In another instance, a couple agreed to stop talking about having more children, since this caused too much marital tension. Almost immediately, a blue-eyed little girl with blond pigtails began to visit the wife repeatedly, asking to be born. Wearied and deprived of sleep, the wife warily told her reluctant husband about these encounters. He replied, “So, she’s been bothering you too has she?”3
Folklorists call personal narratives of supernatural encounters memorates. Memorates featuring spirit children not yet born are called prebirth experiences (PBEs). Relatively few people have had a PBE, but most Mormons know someone who has. Parents pass them on as etiological narratives of how their children came to be. They are often the most cherished spiritual experience in one’s life. Notably, official Church publications rarely mention, and neither discourage nor encourage, PBEs. Yet this vibrant folk tradition is deeply enmeshed with official LDS doctrines such as people’s prebirth spiritual life, spirits’ human shape, entitlement to personal revelation, and parenting’s centrality to our purpose on Earth. These are not abstract notions only for those few interested in theological esoterica. They are living concepts dramatically emergent in the lives of Latter-day Saints through PBEs.https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/spir ... -folklore/
