As much as people outside religion like to deride it, religion does give you deep experience with the spiritual. I'd say spirituality and the insight it offers is one of those things you have to experience yourself to understand.
For example, the Mormon religion includes a practice known as “patriarchal blessings”. These blessings are performed in an intimate setting with only the closest friends and family. An authority figure within the community will place their hands on your head as you sit in a chair in front of them. They then speak through the power of revelation as God’s mouthpiece to pronounce His specific word to you. You can think of it as a personal prophecy.
The blessing is a once in a lifetime experience and typically contains promises to be fulfilled as you remain righteous and warnings for failure to do so. Mine spoke of guardian angels assigned specifically to me, angels I believed in and relied on to keep me safe and guide me as I navigated through life. In the years that followed my patriarchal blessing, I moved through the world with a sense of peace even in challenging or dangerous situations.
I knew God could give me the strength to do hard things, as long as they were the right things. At eighteen, I left home fearlessly to preach the Mormon interpretation of Christ’s gospel in Italy, even though I knew I’d be talking to perfect strangers in a foreign language about a religion most had no interest in. While there I wandered the back streets and alleyways of poor, run-down areas in Naples and Rome at night with no fear. I passed prostitutes, thieves, and drug addicts visibly out of their senses.
On occasion I would get an uncanny feeling in the back of my mind that a particular person or situation was off, and course correct for no apparent reason. We called that the Spirit. The Spirit was one of the tools God had given to protect and guide us. But for the most part I saw no danger in the people I passed. Only lost souls in need of salvation.
Later on in college I pursued mechanical engineering, one of the most technically difficult degrees available. Many times I found myself scribbling out my homework well into the night, alone in a library or basement laboratory, longing for the respite of some simpler subject matter. I poured over convoluted formulas in an attempt to extract the equations needed to solve complex problems. Hours of work would regularly fill pages upon pages with math, only for those pages to be scrapped because of a minor mistake made early on but discovered late. It was intellectually taxing work, often even painful. I persisted anyway because I knew by voice of God’s Spirit that it was the right path for me, and I had faith that God’s strength could carry me through.
Because of the way I was raised I had a lot of experience looking for, understanding, and acting on what I believed to be God’s will for me. God was a sustaining, driving force in my life. I relied on him, I trusted him, I needed him. And then He died. My faith in God was killed by a dead Egyptologist named Robert K. Ritner.
Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin, a coin that Mormonism has taken to filling royal coffers with. The deeper into obscure doctrine a faithful Mormon gets, the more doubts he will begin to collect. In a twist of irony, his faith must become progressively stronger in order to counteract the building number of inconsistencies and peculiarities. A similar experience comes as you discover more about the origins of the church itself, as well as current organizational structures and policies. Doubt grows, and faith grows to support it.
The journey is a bit of a dance. As it stirs around in your mind, doubt becomes a motivating force to study more deeply and reinforce your faith. Some questions get answered, but many of those answers simply leave you questioning more. The longer this dance continues, the stronger one’s faith and reliance on God becomes. There’s no other way to stay on the path without cognitive dissonance taking over and taking you out.
How is this not complete insanity? To those who have no familiarity with a faith tradition, this dance appears to be madness, which, logically, it is. But those who lean into their faith discover that life becomes easier, strangely enough. They find a reservoir of peaceful reassurance they can pull from in challenging times. Faith becomes a powerful resource, enough to defy logic and continue on.
Building faith in what appear to be fables is hard to do, so several tools are provided to help the faithful remain on the prescribed path. Daily practices include reading and meditating on scripture, mindful prayer, and constantly looking to feel and act on the voice of the Spirit. The Spirit is the primary medium through which the faithful connect with the insight God has to offer to them. Intuiting this insight is known as personal revelation.
The Spirit has many names, most of them descriptive terms. “The whisperings of the Spirit”, “the still small voice”, “the comforter”. The terminology is used to describe the deep sense of knowing something through feeling it. Have you ever wondered why men are always complaining about women being too emotional? I suspect this feeling is the culprit.
As illogical as it is, the idea of an intangible spiritual influence exists in most faith traditions. Eastern religions refer to vibrations of the universe, or energy. Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike look to the Holy Spirit. To the secular observer, these terms feel imprecise, perhaps even childish. But even the deeply atheist philosopher will acknowledge some untouchable sense of intuition that blurs the lines of logic. Most of us have accepted that some things are right simply because they feel right. We don’t know how to explain it. We just know.
That deep sense of knowing carried me through my childhood, my time in Italy, my marriage, college, and into the start of my career. Then it stopped.
The stopping wasn’t immediate or abrupt. It was gradual. I had been told the Spirit would always and unequivocally align my life with the teachings of the church. The formula was simple. If the feeling came and the action or thoughts that it nudged into my mind were in line with the teachings of Christ, follow it. If the feeling wasn’t in line with those teachings, question it.
A growing sense that I needed to revisit the truth claims of the church itself sat deep in my stomach for years. But, as I had been taught to do, I questioned the source of that feeling. I tried to push it down. I didn’t want to sit with the discomfort that it evoked. Challenging my worldview on such a fundamental level was too much of an inconvenience to my life.
During this time of avoidance, a good friend of mine left the religion. When official representatives of the church speak of those who leave, the phrasing is often compassionate, but stern and dismissive. They’ll speak of lost souls having been led astray and deceived by Satan. But my friend didn’t feel like someone who had been led astray. He was gay. In Mormonism you’re allowed to feel gay, but you aren’t allowed to be gay. What was wrong with my friend simply following himself?
His story was tragic. He was married to a woman with whom he had a newborn child. Selena and I knew and were friends with them both. He’d tried to remain faithful, to the extent of going through conversion therapy - a usually ineffective and often traumatic process of attempting to remove feelings of homosexuality. Eventually my friend told his wife he couldn’t believe the teachings of the church and stopped going. After conversion therapy, sex was too difficult. Their marriage died.