How Do We Know? Let’s Talk about Spiritual Experiences

Stephen Fleming

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“How can I tell if something I feel or goes through my mind is the Spirit telling me something, or my own thoughts?” is a question I’ve heard posed a number of times in church (often in elders quorum).

So as I often think about posts in terms of series, I’m thinking about a series on Mormonism and the Spirit. As we all know, the Spirit is really important in our religion with our leaders stressing this as much now as ever. God will give us guidance through the Spirit, we should listen to that guidance, and live our lives in a way to cultivate the Spirit.

But the common question remains, and what I want to discuss in this and upcoming posts are the challenges that can come with trying to listen to and follow the Spirit.

I’d like to cover such issues as faith, disillusionment, church authority, the wonders of cognition and brain science, and even mental illness. We all know that experiences can vary considerably among the membership.

As much as the Spirit is a big part of our religion, we’re also given lots of caution. There’s some church rules around such things and plenty of stories of people feeling like loved ones or other relations are doing something nutty claiming to be led by the Spirit. How do we make it all work? When is God talking to you and when is it your own thoughts? What rules does God need to follow when if he chooses to communicate with you?

I’ll just tell one story that I think relates to a number of issues I want to cover. In the fall of 1997, I was in the office of a therapist I’d seen before my mission (on my battles with depression pre-mission, see this post. An ongoing thing.)

I’d been devastated when a prior girlfriend got married to someone else right after my mission, made worse by the fact that about 6 months prior I felt a very strong spiritual experience that she and I would get married (probably not an unusual Mormon trope for people at that age).

So I was having some faith issues and had felt lied to by that experience. If that experience wasn’t real, then what spiritual experiences were?

My Mormon therapist said to me some useful words that I found VERY uncomforting at that time. “Steve, when you get to be my age, you’re going to have a handful of these experiences that you’ll look back on that you’re having a hard time making sense of. Think of the early saints. They thought they were supposed to establish Zion in Missouri and thought they’d eventually go back after they got kicked out.”

Like I said, not comforting. How was that the answer? Confusion? Why didn’t the system work better? I’d never heard any lessons in church or talks in conference that presented spiritual experience in this ambiguous way like my therapist did in that statement. The fact that other Mormons had felt misled by the Spirit didn’t feel particularly comforting.

And yet, what to do? I soon learned that there’s not much sympathy in the church for people saying they’ve had such unfulfilled spiritual experiences, so I found myself coming up with some unusual explanations for the experience and I trudged on with life, the church, and my belief in God.

Since then I’ve had an abundance of spiritual experiences and my odd interpretation of that girlfriend experience has worked for me. Now I’m probably a bit older than my therapist was at that time and I can attest that I have MORE than a handful of confusing experiences that I took to be spiritual to look back on. I find that therapist’s insight more salient than I did when I first heard it. I trudge on.

So lots of related topics to post about and I would love to hear others’ thoughts.

Comments

5 responses to “How Do We Know? Let’s Talk about Spiritual Experiences”

  1. Davek

    Unlike the TV show “Let’s Make a Deal”, we don’t get to see what was behind the doors we didn’t choose. We trudge on with our choices, never knowing what better or worse prize we left on the floor. I think that’s why we feel justified following the spirit to make decisions in life when we don’t have all the facts: The truth is that there are very few choices we can make that will permanently alter the course of our lives. Whatever choices we make are generally fine. Nothing bad happens, and therefore we receive no feedback that we chose wrongly. The result is that we go about our lives believing that we follow the spirit, and that works reliably 99% of the time.

    The truth is that we trudge on like every other schmuck on the planet, doing our best to figure it out. If we choose the goat behind Door #1, our brains are really good and convincing us that there was a cockroach behind Door #2 and rusty tin cans behind Door #3, despite having no way to know that there wasn’t an appliance set or sports car back there in real life scenarios.

    “I’ve always been curious about using a goat for weed control in my back yard” we will tell ourselves, “and now I finally can.”

    Tender mercies.

  2. Old Man

    As I watched callings being extended by a Stake Presidency and several Bishoprics, one thing I absolutely know is that a great deal of what goes on is confirmation bias or is revelation reinforced with confirmation bias (or perhaps the other way around). Leaders call people they like or connect with in some way. So callings in the Church are somewhat limited by who you know and the friends you make.

    Other revelatory or spiritual experiences are personal and clumsy on the human end of the equation. While I believe that God speaks to people in ways they can understand, humans sometimes knowingly misconstrue the message.

  3. DaveW

    I think our church does a very poor job of engaging with uncertainty. I think we all understand the draw of a reassuring message that “things always work out in the end” and “this is all according to God’s plan”. I don’t like uncertainty, and yet, there it is slapping me in the face most days. But rather than acknowledging that part of life, too often we teach lessons or give talks that always wrap up with a nice resolution at the end, even though we all know that things don’t always work out like that. Rarely will a conference talk tell the story of a couple who fasted and prayed and then remained unemployed for a long time, lost their house and declared bankruptcy.

  4. Jack

    Like Nephi I think we can be certain that God loves his children even though we “do not know the meaning of all things.”

  5. Stephen Fleming

    Yes, figuring all that out is tough, Davek. I do know some people report of avoiding very immediate danger, and thus see the alternative as quite concrete. Some then argue that God providing such assistance is problematic considering all the people who do get hit by cars etc. Claims of God’s providence can get tricky too.

    Old Man, yes, it’s a tricky process and I feel quite strongly that God doesn’t micromanage the affairs of the church, at either the top or ward levels, in the ways we often claim. Nothing wrong with a local leader picking a person he thinks would be good. Nothing wrong with praying about it too.

    I do worry about overstating the claims to God’s micromanaging at both the top and ward levels. I don’t believe that every choice our leaders put in is directly commanded by God and I think it gets problematic when the leaders claim that too much.

    DaveW, I may talk more about that in my next post. Lots of us humans do want to hear certain answers and happy endings.

    Jack, sure, but our church makes many more faith claims beyond the love of God (Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, living prophets). And the difficulties of life can leave people questioning God’s love (or even existence). I don’t think that makes such questioners bad.

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