They told us missionaries 20 years ago (ye gods, 20 years ago!!) that the island of Puerto Rico was on the verge of getting a Temple; we were even told in the Santo Domingo MTC that the Lord clearly wants a Temple in Puerto Rico, cause He kept sending his best and brightest there. I mean, they also told us growing up that we were Saturday’s Warrior, the noble and great ones saved for these latter-days, the very elect who would live to see the Second Coming of Christ in the flesh—which was ironic, cause I never actually liked being told I was living through the last days (despite the idea being literally codified into the full name of the Church), mainly cause it just felt so morbid, but also cause it seemed to ignore that whole “know not the day nor the hour” thing. But I digress.

Nevertheless, at least in Puerto Rico, the rhetoric of an imminent Temple did take sincere hold of our imaginations–in no small part because it felt backed up by actual numbers! Every area we served in, we were informed by local leadership that, per Salt Lake, we were only a few short baptisms and re-activations away from turning those branches into wards, those districts into stakes. There was open speculation that the unusually large plot of land the Caguas stake center sat on was obviously being reserved for a future Temple-site. Gordon B. Hinckley had recently launched his whole mini-Temple campaign, and the island felt like a perfect candidate for one.

For that matter, the Church as a whole during the turn-of-the-millennium was saturated with this Hinckley-esque optimism and self-assurance; we were drunk with all these then-recent statistical modelings (provided by non-members, no less!) that predicted Mormonism would continue to grow exponentially until it became the next great world religion by 2050 or 2080 or whatever. Truly, we thought, we were the stone uncut from the mountain as prophesied by Daniel, rolling forth to fill the world–and Puerto Rico was part of the world! All that, coupled with the recent catastrophes of 9/11 and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, gave credence to the idea that maybe these really were the Latter-Days after all–and thus the Lord was hastening His work!

Hence, despite the overwhelming indifference of the islands’ Catholics and the active hostility of its Evangelicals, we continued to grind away at the work; because with each hard-won baptism, we felt like we were finally reaching that elusive Gladwellian tipping point on the island, of which a Puerto Rican Temple would be its symbol and its crown jewel, the defense and justification for all our labors.

So each General Conference afterwards, we recent RMs waited with baited breath for the latest round of Temple announcements, sure that Puerto Rico would be next on the list. And when the Puerto Rico San Juan mission was split in 2007–effectively doubling the number of missionaries on the island–it definitely felt like God Himself wanted a Temple on that island!

But then the Prophet would inevitably announce just another round of Temples in Utah or Idaho or Wyoming–or for a Latin country that already had one, like Guatemala or Brazil–and we would feel a twinge of annoyance (or at least I would). Yet still we held out faith that PR’s was just around the corner.

The expectation of a Puerto Rican Temple became especially fraught for me personally, since my mission was punctuated by the passing of my mother only two days after I got home (as you may have heard me detail in a book I keep shamelessly plugging); suddenly, a Temple for me wasn’t just a justification for my mission, but for my entire faith and hope of ever seeing my mother again. In this, I wasn’t out of line. Everything about the LDS Temple, you’ll note, is imbricated in denying the final reality of death: from our vicarious baptisms for the dead (itself a symbolic burial and resurrection), to our marriages not “till death do you part” but for “time and all eternity,” to the white burial robes we don as we receive instructions on how to pass through the veil and re-enter the presence of God, the totality of our Temple ordinances are centered on overcoming death itself. So it was with my mother. I had not lost my faith after an event that seemed custom-designed to destroy it, largely because my entire faith was rooted in the conviction that death was not the end—not for my mother, not for me, not for anyone.

Nevertheless, as the years wore on, my breath got just a little bit less baited with each passing General Conference. It did indeed begin to feel like a real-life Waiting for Godot, as we perpetually waited for nothing to happen. And when the two Puerto Rico missions were promptly recombined in 2010, it was hard to shake the feeling that the Church was no longer invested in the place.

And then of course all those exponential growth rates plateaued. And then Church leaders started telling the Gen Zers that they were Saturday’s Warrior and the Noble and Great Ones now–just as they’d told the Gen Xers before us, and the Boomers before them, and so on and so forth. And I started to read books like Rough Stone Rolling and Gregory Prince’s David O. McKay bio and back issues of Dialogue and such; and the whole POX fiasco and general tone-deafness on womens’ and YSA and LGBTQ issues caused me to seriously consider for the first time that Church leaders were not any better or worse at following the promptings of the Spirit than I was; and the book I was writing on my Mom’s passing gradually shifted from having a faith-affirming ending to a more ambiguous one.

And when Puerto Rico itself began hemorrhaging population throughout the 2010s because they never fully recovered from the 2008 stock crash, the writing felt like it was on the wall. And then when the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017 (which triggered an even larger exodus to the U.S. mainland), I officially gave up whatever last lingering hope I had for a Temple in Puerto Rico. It clearly wasn’t going to happen. Maybe during the Millennium. If there ever was a Millennium.

Hence the great rejoicing amongst my aging cohort when President Nelson casually announced a Temple in Puerto Rico at the end of October Conference 2018; RMs who had (rightfully) not used Facebook in years flooded the platform to express their profound gratitude. No matter that it also soon became clear that Nelson was announcing Temples everywhere the Church had only a marginal presence, such that Puerto Rico finally getting one felt a little like your favorite NBA or MLB team only making the post-season due to an expanded playoff format, like they only snuck in on a technicality. And the fact that they tagged ninth-most-senior apostle D. Todd Christofferson to do the dedication (instead of, ya know, the full First Presidency A-team treatment that the Rome Temple got) also betrayed where it fell on the pecking order. I tried not to think about it too hard.

In any case, I still stubbornly penciled in that I would for sure attend the San Juan Puerto Rico Temple dedication January of 2023. My wife is a flight attendant, so I had gotten quite adept at flying standby (as I once detailed in an early essay for this very site); I also now lived in New Jersey, so I especially had no excuse to not make the direct flight from John F. Kennedy to Luis Muñoz Marín.

Or so I thought. Because when flying standby works, it works great–but when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t. And the polar vortexes and Southwest Airlines meltdowns of Christmas 2022 had knockdown effects that kept all domestic flights oversold well into mid-January. For that and other reasons I won’t get into right now, I didn’t make the dedication. I was bitterly disappointed, not least because a woman I baptized sang in the San Juan stake choir for the occasion–but that wasn’t the main reason why.

For when my wife offered to “make it up to” me by insisting I fly down to San Juan over this past Presidents Day weekend—to at least do a session in the newly dedicated Temple—I wasn’t entirely sure I even wanted to go anymore. Cause maybe it was good I’d been prevented from going! Visiting one’s old mission (even a tropical paradise like Puerto Rico) can inevitably feel like visiting one’s old High School long after you graduate. You can maybe get away with that nonsense when you’re still young and in college, but not when you’re pushing middle-age. You’re hoping for a nostalgia trip but all you find instead is a feeling of lost time and lost potential.

And honestly, it was the feeling that I feared the most–or more precisely, the lack thereof. People only join the Church based on a feeling, you know; for that matter, people only stay in this Church based on that same feeling–the groanings beyond utterance, the still small voice, the peace of God which surpasses understanding. Per D&C 50:17-18, that’s even the only valid reason to stay: “Verily I say unto you, he that is ordained of me and sent forth to preach the word of truth by the Comforter, in the Spirit of truth, doth he preach it by the Spirit of truth or some other way? And if it be by some other way it is not of God.” Any other manner of conversion, no matter how well-intentioned–whether through logical chains of facts, emotional manipulation, salesmanship, cheer-leading, acculturation, or appeals to tradition and authority–are not of the Spirit, and therefore not of God.

At least, that’s what I’d said for the longest time.

Cause here was the very real question I was trying really hard not to entertain as I finally boarded the plane to San Juan: What if I couldn’t feel it anymore–or worse, had never really felt it to begin with? What if all I had ever professed and believed was only confirmation bias and wishful thinking, that my expectations were foolish and my faith vain?

Not helping my mood was how rushed this trip became: since it was all last-minute, I overpaid for a car-rental, and then cheaped out on a hostel (which is what I really should’ve spent the money on). In contrast to the elaborate trips I’d taken to the island in my college years with various and sundry family members and ex-companions and budding girlfriends, I no longer had that vast network of local members and converts to crash with. Between inactivations and deaths and those aforementioned droves of people moving to Florida and New York due to Maria and COVID and recession and a Greek-level debt crisis, as well as simply losing touch with everyone after all these years, the island suddenly felt terribly impersonal to me. I no longer belonged. Cashiers in PR would switch to English when they saw me, even when I addressed them in Spanish–but then, my accent was no longer as sure as it once was. I was sprouting gray hairs and sporting a dad-bod, like the other mid-life-crisisers at the hostel. My mission was now officially too long ago. I began to fear that revisiting it had been a grave mistake.

I will spare you further melodramatics: suffice to say, I felt it. My first night back on the island in 8 years, I drove straight to Trujillo Alto to see the Temple all lit up at night, and I felt it. From a narrative-perspective, that is a very anti-climactic ending to this essay, but it meant the world to me. To be clear: I felt nothing specific, I had no great inspirations or revelations or visions that pierced the veil; just the groanings beyond utterance, the peace with surpasses understanding, “Not as the world gives it; let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” The Puerto Rican flag fluttered in the warm breeze, and the coquís sang in the dark, and it was enough, it was enough…

The next morning I went and explored Old San Juan, like I had on many a P-Day in PR. El Mooro stood as stolid as it had for 400 years. I did a noon session at the Temple, and found it really is a mini-Temple. The endowment room only had two rows of benches. After the session, I almost accidentally exited through the celestial room instead of the front door, cause that’s how close they were to each other. But already that didn’t matter to me anymore–the size of the building or of the local membership or even of the global membership had lost all relevancy for me, as it never should’ve mattered to me in the first place–no, all that mattered to me was that I still felt it, that it was so there, that the feeling was real.

And the parking lot was full, by the way.

Afterwords, I drove to a distant beach and bathed myself in that warm Atlantic sea water. I drove past the very spot where I was once hit by a car while biking as a missionary, and so I head-banged to Bomb the Music Industry more passionately than I had in years. I listened to Vagabundo like I was 21 again.

Then in the evening I caught up with a couple converts I somehow had managed to stay in touch with after all these long years. The sheer number of people I’d either lost track of or heard had gone inactive in the intervening two decades should’ve depressed me more; but then I reflected that, ironically, less-actives are only depressing if you don’t actually believe the Gospel is true. For if I really do take the redemptive work of the Temple seriously–and the Spirit that surrounds it–then logically, I must also take seriously the idea that God Almighty has a grand Universalist plan to reclaim all his children in the distant eternities. Including me. And thus there was nothing to mourn.

I flew home the next morning, because I still had work this week and children to feed. It was by far the shortest trip I’d ever taken to Puerto Rico. The visit was small: like the island, like the Temple, like the Church membership, like the still small voice, like mortal life itself (always shorter, far shorter than we realize). Our life is as grass, even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth. But even the shortest moment is still a subdivision of infinity, and therefore lasts forever—and that is why, at least this time, it was enough, it was enough, that moment was still enough…