My relationship with the spirit.
 

As a missionary, and 'person of faith,' I used to share a particular spiritual experience with investigators and members when I would talk about feeling and recognizing the promptings of the spirit.

When I was eight, my grandmother died. I remember my mom getting a call in the morning, and leaving in a panic. She came back two days later. It looked like someone had beat her up. She walked into the house. She gave each of her children and uncomfortably long hug. Then my father led her to their bedroom. After some time, my dad came out and shared the news -- our grandmother had died. That night, I lay in bed, my stomach tied in knots. I could not shake a terrible sense of guilt. The last time I had seen my grandmother, I could not recall if I had told her how much I loved her, and now I realized that I would never be able to do that again. The weight of that feeling, believing that my grandmother had died without understanding my love for her, was crushing me. I sobbed for what seemed like hours. Finally, I rolled out of bed, and began to pray.

"Father in heaven. I have a message for my Grandmother. Please give it to her. Tell her that I love her very much, and I wish I would have told her that more when she was alive."

That was the essence of my prayer. I took that simple message and repeated it twenty different ways. Then something happened. A wave of calm washed over me. The tension in my clutched hands, my quivering chin, and puffy eyes, all gave way to a powerful release. I stretched out in my bed, and had the distinct feeling that God had heard my prayer, and had delivered my message to my grandmother. Whether it was God's love or the love of my dead grandmother, I felt the presence of the divine, and it rocked me to sleep.

When people that knew me as a person of faith remind me of this experience, I share with them a different spiritual experience from the same time of my life.

I believed in Santa Claus. Each Christmas, during the time I believed in Santa, I would put out a plate of cookies and a glass of milk. On Christmas morning, I would run down the stairs to see if Santa had taken my gift for him. Sure enough, each year I would find a plate of crumbs, and empty glass, and a hand-written note from Santa. It would usually say something like this, "R, thank you for the cookies and milk. I have a lot of children I need to visit tonight, and your cookies helped to give me the strength I needed to cary out my important mission.' The feeling I would get when I would read that letter! It was powerful! Now I am not going to try to pretend, in retrospect that the spiritual experience that came from helping Santa serve all of the children of the world was anything like the experience with my grandmother. But I BELIEVED in santa, and my belief turned the experience into something real.

To this day, I have no doubt, that my Santa experience was a REAL spiritual experience. And why not? My heart was full of genuine compassion. In my mind, I believed that I was performing a real act of service. It was a labor of love. I don't believe that God would deny a child access to real spiritual experience, simply because of the false teachings of his parents. Cookies were baked, Milk was poured. A letter was written. Hearts were touched. Little Robin learned a powerful lesson about service, kindness, and universal generosity.

I share the Santa experience because it is an example of the spirit working in my life, even though I was totally off base from the truth. I think that there are probably some false assumptions about the nature of life-after-death, upon whch the experience with my grandmother was based. When I die, I hope to learn more about all of those things. But God heard my prayer, and whether my grandmother literally heard my voice and knew my love, the outpouring of the spirt was real all the same.

One might think that experiences like these would make me a more religious person. To this day, they continue to make me a more spiritual person. But the lesson I take from these experiences today is this -- The spirit may be a powerful comforter, an incredible motivator to spark in our hearts the desire to be good, but I am not sure that it is an accurate measure of TRUTH.

My own loss of a testimony was not the noisy rejection of a church I felt was evil. My loss of testimony was simply the letting go of the belief that the spirit is an accurate measure of universal truth. I gave up trying to divine the secrets of the universe, one burning bossom at a time, and found sollace in ambiguity and unsureness.

I can fully understand the desire to learn the truths of the universe, and I hope to learn them some day, when my vantage is right. Until that time, until that life, it is enough to know that an all-loving God visits the children of Islam just as He visited me on Christmas morning. It is enough to know that when a Hindu child prays for comfort at the passing of her grandmother, and finds peace in the Grandmother's return as a new kitten, that the spiritual rest she will receive is just as real as the spiritual rest I felt at the passing of my own grandmother. It is enough to embrace the love of God, to let it fill me with the desire to be good and to serve and to love, and to have patience for the day when I might actually be in a place, and have the tools, to know something with the absolute sureness that I never expect to have in this lifetime.

R.

So If I am understanding correctly IYO the only use for the spirit is comforting?

Re: My relationship with the spirit.
 

I wonder if you appreciate the irony of that particular comment. If I read it in isolation I would think that someone was describing how they came to have faith.

Nope. The spirit can certainly be a comfort, but in my own experience, it also serves to motivate me to have 'righteous' desires.

I rarely feel inspired in specifics. If I lose my keys, the still small voice doesn't whisper 'check beneath the couch.' When my heart is full of love, and I am serving others, or when my heart is full of the desire to do so, I am often visted by a spiritual sense of being on the right track. But it is a very GENERAL sense, and I tend to think that it is a universal gift from the heavens for all people who desire righteousness.

What bothers me is when people try to project specific meaning onto this general spiritual experience. It is a form of manipulation I learned in the MTC, and mastered in the mission. As a missionary I would teach people about the church. I would talk about all kinds of blessings. Because of my sincere desire to serve the investigators, and because of the investigators' sincere desire to serve their families and others, the spirit was often present during these experiences. I have no doubt that the spirit would have been present in the same way even if I had been sincerley teaching God's word through a different religion. In other words, in spite of what may or may not have been false teachings, the God was blessing us for our desires to pursue righteousness. But the church taught me to take things one step farther, and this is the part I resent. Upon feeling the spirit, I would help the investigator recognize the feeling, and then I would personally suggest meaning for those feelings. "This is God telling you, through the power of the Holy Ghost, that you and your family can enjoy the blessings that we have shared with you tonight by accepting Jesus Christ and by being baptized by one having authority into His church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." Did the spirit specifically say that? Of course not. The spirit is strong, but not so articulate. But like a poorly trained therapist, weaving meaning into dreams and vague memories, these suggestions often took root. They became REAL, like the real sense that I had done well to make Santa cookies, because I believed.

Belief is what transforms the vague into the specific. Not universal or absolute truth. If we were supposed to understand universal and absolute truth, I suspect God would have blessed us with the tools to do so. But with the tools we have, people are experiencing all manner of spiritual experiences, because a loving God is not denying any of His children access to the spirit, and a wide variety of churches sit ready to project their specific meaning onto these experiences.

Re: My relationship with the spirit.
 

That is exactly what it is. I consider leaving the LDS religion to be a step in the development of my spiritual life.

When I first saw this, my thought was "too late."

actually the Spirit does remind me of little stuff like that once in a while.

Of course, I need reminding of lots of little stuff as the big stuff doesn't stay with me.

OK. So you are making a case (predictably, I might add) that the church is deceptive and manipulative for interpreting the meaning of the spirit in missionary discussions. And yet, in the same discussion you provide your own interpretation of the spirit in that setting:

"In other words, in spite of what may or may not have been false teachings, the God was blessing us for our desires to pursue righteousness."

I suppose you may be correct, but why is YOUR interpretation any more valid? Yours is not a general assessment, it is rather specific. You are confident enough in your analysis to state that God grants this endowment even in the presence of "false teachings". Talk about "weaving meaning".

I have my share of doubts and concerns about the church. But one of the things that keeps bringing me back is a personal history of overwhelming spiritual experiences. Perhaps they aren't entirely unique to the LDS experience (something that we don't claim, by the way). Or perhaps they are chemically-based. Regardless, these experiences are mine and mine alone. At the end of the day, each of us has to make a personal decision in how to respond to such impressions.

Of course, I could go into more detail. But my better judgement tells me not to, given your admission that you view us as little more than "bonobos in a cage".

You make some great points. In this setting, considering who visits CG, I am more inclined to describe my experience in 'testimonial' terms. At the most basic level, spiritual experience happens for me as clarity in the mind and peace in the heart. If I tried to explain this to a bunch of scientists, I might use Pavlovian terms -- when I try to do good, regardless of the truth factor (ie. the Santa clause), this clarity and peace visit me. I want to have these experiences all the time, so I 'trigger' the spiritual experience by modifying my behavior accordingly. There you go. Same idea, lacking all 'interpretation.'

I know what brings about spiritual experience for me. I assume it works in a similar way for others. It is really impossible to know, but I have talked with enough people about these matters and there appear to be some common threads.

You share that spiritual experience is what brings you back to the church. I had a lot of spiritual experience in the church too. As I have stated in before, it was in the LDS church that I first learned to recognize and value spiritual experience. For that, I will always be grateful. Leaving the church was not an abandonment of that experience. It was a reclamation. By stripping away the meaning that the church had projected onto a life of spiritual experience, I felt that I had come that much closer to God. Spiritual experience continues in my life, and it is extremely important for me.

As for the Bonobos, Archaea is the only monkey that I was talking about. There is a perverse entertainment value in watching him fling poo. You, homeboy, whether you like it or not, are one of the people whose opinion I value.

Robin:

Just out of curiosity, how does your Pavlovian spiritual response feel when you are flinging ad hominems at Archaea?

ALso, and I will prbably regret doing this, you seem to reduce spiritual manifestations to some form of narcissistic personality masturbation. If indeed this is pavlovian, you have reduced the entire realm of spiritual experience to a learned response, a physical gratification, as oppsoed to a manifestation from a third party source. Bell rings, dog drools. RObin does what he thinks is good, he feels good. Very self-reinforcing, very self-centered and very meaningless. Since you seem to promote the idea of a scientific approach to your experiences, what evidecne can you muster, under your own criteria, that your manifestations come from God, as opposed to from some sort of self-created (or imagined) feeling of gratification. Indeed, you seem to present the ultimate in relative ethics: It feels good when I believe/do it, even if it is in fact a lie (e.g. Santa) and thus I should pursue anyting that feels good, becaseu that is a spiritual experience that a loving God would not deny me even, apparently, if it is a lie, and becasue this is entirely subjective, only I can ever decide what gives me that feeling. Not a bad racket. You should take it to TV, this might garner more than a few donations.