Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: May 10, 2017 04:50PM
I was a bleeding heart on my mission. I met people who just never experienced the Spirit like I told them they could. I spent a lot of on-again-off-again contemplation trying to figure out those people who would say they prayed and prayed and felt nothing. My own experience was powerful and the memory of it drove my testimony when nothing else did.
But, I was not content to put my rational mind to death and in time it chipped away at my confidence that these ineffable spiritual experiences proved anything. I was never able to replicate the experience on my mission or afterwards. I chalked it up to my unworthiness at the time.
I met a woman with a taste for hippie woo woo on the side of her belief in the church who was 'antied' by a cousin in an email. She was undone. She prayed and prayed for a confirmation of the church. Eventually she just prayed to know if God was even there. She told me all this when we went out to go meet her. She described an experience of being on her knees and crying and then getting a feeling in her heart that felt like being hugged. She got a burning in the bosom and everything felt alright. BUT, the thing is... she interpreted it in a hippi deist way. Only God exists, he loves you, and everything else is an illusion and someday we will 'wake up' and become one with God again.
To my mind, if you got the 'answer' while asking if the church was true, then it was unimpeachably implied that God had confirmed your prayer. But after meeting this woman and contemplating how she could completely miss that God was telling her the church was true...
The experience doesn't happen unless you're contemplating something.
The feeling is just a feeling, not a message. To interpret it as a message, you have to infer things based on the context of what you were thinking/praying when you induced this feeling.
This feeling is not unique to Mormonism. Many religions are able to induce this feeling, or feelings very much like it, through prayer, meditation, music, or dance. And those members of other faiths interpret their spiritual experiences within the religious context that they know. Never, ever, has knowledge of Jesus Christ ever penetrated a new region through someone's meditation or prayer. They always have to hear the gospel from another human.
I believe that human beings do experience many of the religious things they claim to experience, especially when it is as simple as a feeling and not a grandiose vision or visitation from an otherworldly being. But not everyone experiences something 'spiritual', because this is not a Holy Spirit communicating a unified message to everyone. It's just feelings inherent in human neurochemistry, in the brain, which is why people reporting similar feelings can get widely different messages from the Divine.
If you think about it this way... people have to contemplate/meditate/pray over the gospel to the point where they become desperate to believe it before they get an 'answer.' Some people don't get anything they can call an answer, but are so desperate to have one, they won't let the lack of an answer stand in their way. They conclude that they knew all along and become content with that. Think about that. To get 'an answer' you have to inculcate yourself to the point where you already believe it anyway.
If it's not 'the Spirit,' and just biology and neurochemistry, then the fact that some people don't experience 'an answer' is just a manifestation of the simple fact that we are all different. Some people are full-blown schizophrenic. Some people hear voices. Some people have warm fuzzies or feel a glowing sensation in their heart. And some people are made so that they are less susceptible to any of these things. But anyone can experience great joy or inspiration from contemplating an idea profound to themselves.
If you felt nothing, so what? It's not a failure or a flaw in your part. There is no divine being that has overlooked you or that is displeased with you. It's just that some people are more susceptible to various aspects of the religious experience than others. And it's important to realize just how wide and diverse the 'religious' experience is. Not everyone means the same thing when they say 'the Spirit.' If you ask a Mormon how to recognize the spirit, he or she may tell you that you need to find out how gr spirit speaks to you personally. In other words, find some semi-consistent thing in your psyche that seems like an answer, anything, and settle for that, because that's supposedly the ultimate proof that the church is true.
It's all very loosely defined and hard to pin down, and that's kind of the point I think. 'Spiritual' has got to be the most fluid word in the English language, or any language for that matter. There are a thousand reasons why you may have never got an answer, and none of them have anything to do with a personal or moral or 'spiritual' defect. You are you. Maybe you are too skeptical. Maybe your brain is wired differently. Maybe you are full of too much self-doubt or criticism. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe nothing is wrong at all.