A bolt of lightning didn't strike Thomas Wirthlin McConkie.
Fire didn't rain down from heaven or a swarm of locusts block out the sky.
But the effect was just as cataclysmic as McConkie meditated in absolute stillness.
"I felt simple—like I had returned to some kind of primordial innocence. And I knew and I recognized that kind of innocence and stillness—that's really something," McConkie says in the video "The Spiritual Journey - A Conversation with Thomas McConkie and Terryl Givens."
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McConkie shared with Latter-day Saint scholar Terryl Givens that he didn't know at the time that this simple yet profound feeling would bring him back to a church he had left more than a decade ago.
It's no surprise that McConkie, the descendant of two former Latter-day Saint apostles—Elder Bruce R. McConkie and Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin—was born and raised a Latter-day Saint.
In fact, McConkie shares in the video that one of the most transformative moments in his life was when he was miraculously healed from a high-grade fever.
"My granddad Wirthlin lived just down the street in Salt Lake City where I grew up, and he came in on a really snowy, cold, wet winter's evening and he laid his hands upon my head and I felt the power of God just bake my body clean of any illness," McConkie shares. "It was just an, in the moment, completely immersed-in-the-Spirit experience."
McConkie shares that moment did more to convince him of a God than any book or scripture he could've read. He says that through this experience, he became convinced there were "worlds beyond worlds not visible by the eye of flesh."
However, going to church every Sunday became uncomfortable as he transitioned into his teenage years. McConkie knew what he had experienced during the healing blessing from his grandfather was real, but it became cast in a light of "hocus pocus" and "pageantry." During this challenging time, McConkie stayed close to God the only way he knew how—through stillness.
"Stillness was radical to me," he says. "No one had taught me growing up that—to just be still and to do nothing and to think nothing and to ask nothing in prayer but to just completely empty out my vessel would be a fruitful practice."
Though the thought of doing nothing seemed counterintuitive in progressing in his spiritual journey, McConkie says that the first time he truly emptied out his mind, something incredible happened.
"I had kind of an initiation into the fullness of all creation," McConkie says. "I knew that what I was touching into was somehow related to the vastness of God's creation."
Though McConkie left the Church when he was 19, he took those experiences with him. And when he adopted Buddhism in his 20s, McConkie remained devoted to meditation.
In fact, it was through meditation that he experienced an unexpected moment of stillness—a moment McConkie would need as he transitioned back into the Church he had left more than a decade ago.
Watch the video below to see more of McConkie's story and his insights about returning to the Church.
