“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.