Spiritual Experiences
This is one of a series social media posts that I wrote in 2021 during the height of my Faith Transition. Because I was publicly deconstructing in front of an entirely faithful network of friends and followers, I received a lot reactions, questions, and backlash from people I loved regarding my journey. Many of them were dismissive or hostile towards me because they had been trained to me as a “defector.”
Since an overly long response in a comment or personal message would have been seen as aggressive, I took quotes from these reactions to write these public posts in response. I never attributed the person who asked the question since I didn’t want anyone to feel specifically blamed or called out for having the response. The questions are also not unique. They are part of the scripted response we were taught to have as members of the “in-group.” Still, each post begins with a quotation because it is a question I personally received during my Transition.
Q: “You’re right, this stuff is troubling but I have had spiritual experiences that I cannot deny and they confirm to me that the Church, the Priesthood, the Book of Mormon is TRUE.”
Me too, friend.
Me too.
🌱And, I still cherish the Spiritual experiences I had in the Church. Well…actually, the Joseph Smith related ones kind of gross me out now, but for the context I was in at the time, they were still great.
From listening to others’ experiences, I gather that I had an unusual number and variety of Spiritual experiences. I had visions, fulfilled prophecies, met ancestors, heard voices, burned in my bosom, found lost keys, spoken in tongues (meaning: a picked up languages fast, not that I babbled in gibberish at the pulpit like Brigham)–I’ve had it all.
That’s cool to me. I’m grateful that I was born into a paradigm that validated and honored spiritual gifts and discernment and inner knowing.
As I’ve mentioned previously, spiritual experiences have played a huge part in our separation from the Church, too. They are what prompted our investigation, what guided us forward, and what grounded us along the way.
🙏Here’s the thing, though…
…while I absolutely believe Spiritual experiences are real and are telling us something important,
I also don’t believe the the Church has the answer key for what these experiences mean.
🤔Why do I say that?🤔
🍄Firstly, because so many other people of every religious stripe have had exactly the same types of experiences “confirming” their belief systems (see video for examples).
And if that many people are being “confirmed” in their mutually exclusive belief systems— that means that those “confirmations” aren’t actually confirming the belief system. Maybe the experiences were valid or useful for different reasons, but clearly it is not reliable for evaluating whether an ideology is true.
🍄Secondly, because similar spiritual experiences have been happening all over the world for centuries during music, plays, movies, dance, or other moments of artistic engagement, yet they have not led people to the uniform conclusions that align with LDS Mormonism.
🍄Thirdly, because the answer key for Spiritual experiences given to us by the Church is almost absurdly one-dimensional and self-serving.
🔄 How convenient, that a country being open to missionary work OR closed to missionary work…means the Church is True.
🔄 How convenient, that someone getting better after a Priesthood blessing of healing OR getting sicker and passing away, both…mean the Church is True.
🔄 How convenient, that someone kneeling to pray for truth after reading the Book of Mormon and receiving an answer OR receiving no answer, both …mean the Church is True.
🔄 How convenient, that a movie catharsis or kindness from a neighbor or enjoying the act of singing in a group…all mean the Church is True.
🔄 How convenient, that feeling love for your newborn baby or wanting a healthy, loving marriage to last, or grieving for a lost loved one…all mean the Church is True.
🔄 How convenient, that whether the Church is growing OR shrinking…that means the Church is True.
In the Church, all roads lead to the Church being true. Always.
♾ A good faith interpretation of this is that it is an outgrowth from the idea that the LDS Church is founded on Truth, on the side of Truth, and would accept Truth wherever it is found. It’s easy to be inspired when we talk about that–our souls care deeply about where Truth is and how to access it.
A more skeptical view might also be valid though: that the Church is just a standard mind-control system that tries to keep people in by shutting off all possibility of falsification.
👏 In my opinion though, the fact that the LDS Church encourages personal pursuit of spiritual gifts and spiritual understanding is the best thing it has going.
👉 But, that doesn’t mean that the Church is true.
👉 That doesn’t mean that the Book of Mormon is historical.
👉 That doesn’t mean that Joseph Smith or anyone after him was a Prophet.
👉 That doesn’t mean God required polygamy.
👉 That doesn’t mean that the Church has the answer key to explaining all spiritual experiences.
✨Having a spiritual experience about any of these things doesn’t mean that those things are true, it means…that you had spiritual experience with those things. And, like a lump of clay in a potter’s hands, you get to decide what to make of that. ✨
There are many diverse subjective conclusions that one could draw from those experiences, but none of those conclusions should involve the history or identity of real people you don’t know and know little about, the historical reality of someone else’s experiences, or the cosmic authenticity of an organization.
Those are all separate questions.
Questions of history will need historical research and often other types of research.
Questions of science will require scientific research.
Questions of identity, will require social and anthropological research.
Our experiences, feelings, spiritual sources of inspiration are important, but they are not sources for determining objective realities.
Personally, I believe spirituality is fascinating. It’s a beautiful and mysterious part of our human experience. I’m open to the idea that there could be a God behind them, or ancestors, or even some large Universal Consciousness.
🌟The fact that we can observe biological reactions consistently within the body and brain around these experiences, does not itself explain why we have them or where they come from.
⭐️ Why do we have this ability within our brains to comprehend ourselves, the cosmos, and the people around us, as more than material creatures?
⭐️ Where does that come from?
⭐️ Why do people who describe spiritual experience and transcendence describe what they “see” or “hear” in such similar terms?
⭐️ Why is there often the sensation of interacting with a personal being?
⭐️ Why does they so often come back to Love?
These questions are worth asking and worth pursuing.
It just turns out that it is very difficult to pursue them without getting stuck in rigid dogmas attempting to answer them.
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