2016-11-17: An Experiment

This post should be considered a continuation of my last post (2016-11-17: Golden Threads). At the start of that post, I wrote: “I think I’m getting pretty close to wrapping up what I set out to write starting with my first post on September 13…, but I just want to include here and in maybe one more post, some things that I shared in 2007 with a friend and in 2015 with an acquaintance from a Facebook group…..”. My last post included an excerpt from an April 2007 email to my friend. What I shared with my Facebook acquaintance last Summer somewhat parallels and elaborates on what I wrote in 2007 to my friend. Here’s a portion of an email written on July 26, 2015:

…I wanted to send you some thoughts that I’ve had since learning about your latest feelings about the church. I only read very little, but I felt right away that I wanted to send you a message at some point. That might have been a couple of weeks ago. I set my thoughts about it aside and then was reminded again about it today.

…Two connected thoughts to start with – when I… learned of your decision…, it reminded me so much of a close friend of mine. Your experience, at first glance, just seems so much like his. My friend and I were in the same ward… and we were both graduate students at the University of Washington. Around 2007 I think was when we first started really talking… I was always impressed with his candidness. He wasn’t afraid to let people know he had doubts. In fact, he got up in sacrament meeting on a fast Sunday. He bore his testimony of what he felt like he truly had received a witness of (e.g. that God exists), but then expressed that he had his doubts about other things (e.g. the divinity of Christ). I respected him a lot for his integrity. Ultimately he asked to be released from his calling because he didn’t feel like he could do it with complete integrity.

That was the spark that really gave rise to our friendship. I emailed him privately the same day or soon after he bore his testimony and told him I appreciated his honesty. I said that we should talk sometime. Starting a couple of years earlier in 2005, I had been set on a path that, while strengthening my faith in the Lord as a personal God, got me wondering about things in the church. I think it was August 2005 that President Hinckley gave his Book of Mormon challenge and I did the challenge. I think what grew out of that experience was a personal witness of the prophecies concerning the Lord’s end-time work, including the fulfillment of the Lord’s promises to his ancient covenant people. I felt very deeply that I, as a Gentile, hadn’t received the Book of Mormon so that I could assume the lofty position of the chosen – but that I had the Book of Mormon because the Gentiles were to assume a servant role to help the Lord in bringing a portion of his ancient covenant people to a knowledge of the fulness of the Gospel.

The Book of Mormon came to have such a deeply more profound meaning and significance than we seemed to ascribe to it and talk about in our general conference talks. That was probably the first time I felt a disconnect between what the Book of Mormon was telling us and what our general conferences and lessons, etc were telling us about the book. Thus was born my growing discontent about what we were being taught in the church. So with that context, then, coming back to my friend, I told him that I had some of my own issues and that we should chat sometime.

A few paragraphs back, I said that I had two connected thoughts that I wanted to start with. This, about my friend, is just one of them. I want to weave in the other thing now, because it’s related. I was a ward missionary around 2005 and 2006. We used to go out on exchanges with the missionaries each week. I really enjoyed doing this, because we would typically drop by the homes of ‘less-active’ members. One evening, we dropped by the house of a single guy who we learned, on this occasion, was gay. He explained that he had gone on a mission and then had come home to BYU. He said, though, that BYU didn’t want people like him. He explained that he was gay. He didn’t seem angry, but he seemed resigned to the idea that he didn’t belong in the church.

I had only feelings of hurt and compassion for him. As he started to close the door, I said to hold on – I just wanted to ask him one question. I said to him, all feelings about the church aside, do you at least believe that God exists and that he loves you and cares about you. He paused and was pensive for a moment before he said, simply “I don’t know”. Then he closed the door. In that moment, I didn’t care what he believed about the church. My hope was that he at least still believed in God and believed that God hadn’t rejected him even if the church had rejected him.

Coming back to my friend, one of his frustrations was the question of when we could trust the words of the ‘prophets’ and ‘apostles’ to be from God and when they were just opinions of imperfect men. He saw the contradictions in the teachings of the leaders going back to Joseph Smith. One time I suggested an experiment for him, or for us. What if we were to clear away all the extras of the church, the teachings of the brethren, tithing, callings, all the cultural aspects and traditions? What if we cleared all of that away and said, I’m just going to start at the bare minimum. I included in that ‘bare minimum’ a tentative assumption (i.e. a hypothesis) that God was real, that we could communicate with God by prayer and that the Gospel taught in the standard works was true. What if we took that as a minimal hypothesis and left all the messiness of the church culture and history aside, at least temporarily?

In a sense, this is what I was getting at when I asked this inactive member if he at least still believed in a loving God. But there I was suggesting something even more minimal. What if we just assumed that there was a God and we devoted our effort to trying to pray to him and learn if he was there and if he was a personal God (in the sense that he would hear and respond to prayers)? What if we turned ourselves inward to our thoughts and impressions? What if we allowed God himself to inform us about his reality and his nature, rather than relying on leaders of the church or even the scriptures? What if the power was inside of us?

…Here are two personal things that figured into this whole idea of an experiment to discover God and have a relationship with him. One is Alma 32. I don’t think I’ve ever had a Moroni-10:3-5-style experience with the Book of Mormon as we sometimes tend to interpret it. I never had a Vincenzo Di Francesca or Parley Pratt reading-through-the-night experience with the Book of Mormon. But I do feel that I’ve had an Alma 32 experience with the Book of Mormon and the gospel in general. Moroni just says that God will show us by the power of the Holy Ghost that these things are true. It could be a gradual process similar to what’s described in Alma 32. Our conviction of spiritual things comes in degrees through a gradual process that better resembles the slow growth of a tree than the rapid sprouting up of bamboo.

The other personal thing that fits into this is the experience I had as a graduate student when I started writing in notebooks on a daily basis. I would write impressions I had about science-related stuff, but this also started to be coupled with impressions about spiritual things. I started to have this experience that Joseph Smith described: “A person may profit by noticing the first intimation of the spirit of revelation; for instance, when you feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes of ideas, so that by noticing it, you may find it fulfilled the same day or soon; (i.e.) those things that were presented unto your minds by the Spirit of God, will come to pass; and thus by learning the Spirit of God and understanding it, you may grow into the principle of revelation, until you become perfect in Christ Jesus.”

…My graduate program at the UW was in bioengineering. I had devoted a lot of time and energy to get into that program and I thought I was finally where I wanted to be….

I started to write a lot in my research notebooks. I’d record thoughts that would lead to other thoughts. The nature of these writings were initially strictly related to science, but increasingly I began to record spiritual impressions. In April 2005, I had an experience where I felt distinctly that the Lord was using this as a means to convey things to me that he hadn’t been able to do by other means. This was a second experience (after the experience of my mission much earlier in 1995-97) where the Lord reached me in a way that had a dramatic impact on me. I had, until this time, lamented something that I felt like I had lost from my mission. There were periods of great struggle on my mission that, when I thought back on, were filled with light, or feelings of light. And I longed to have that back.

Why am I sharing all of this? … What is it that connects it all together? During my graduate program, I grew increasingly distrusting of established ideas. This included established ideas in science. I came out of my graduate program with a much diminished trust in science. When it came down to the core question of how do we come to a knowledge of the truth, my experiences through graduate school reinforced one thing in particular for me. The best source is the living light inside of us.

…Much of my experience as a member of the church has been uncomfortable. But the Book of Mormon has been light to me. The year 2005 was light for me and was a period of renewal of desires, longing and light that I had 10 years earlier on my mission. And there were still struggles to come…. But some profoundly peaceful feeling kept me tethered to God or to the Lord.

I don’t know if any of this will be of much value to you. You’re probably on a good path anyway… My graduate school friend that I talked about is probably just fine on his path… It may very well be that God is in the details of my friend’s decision to leave the church and Mormonism behind. The common thread through these disparate experiences and paths we’ve all had should be that we’re hearkening to the inner voice. Perhaps this is the Holy Spirit which leadeth to do good. We may just call it by different names or describe it differently. That inner light or voice is living water.

And just because I want to put a big asterisk on the following (which is from the same email as the excerpt above), I want to separate the following into its own  block quote. This is absolutely central to my faith:

What if we could temporarily set aside the things that don’t make sense to us and focus on just that next portion that we’re ready to receive from the Lord? What if we give place sufficiently for an experiment in faith where we simply record in our journals or notebooks the things that have been on our mind? What if we ask our questions in there? What if the act of writing actually provides a means by which impressions can come by the Holy Spirit? And if pieces don’t yet fit together on some things, or nothing comes at all on other things, what if we start to notice certain threads of common themes and impressions in other things we’ve recorded over several weeks, months and years? By this means, then, the Lord can navigate us through a personalized path that imparts just the portions of light that we need and are ready for. But light cleaves to light and builds upon itself. And in time that light grows brighter and brighter until the perfect day, when darkness and confusion have gradually been pushed back and dispelled. And what we have is understanding and also a personal relationship with God.

Is the exercise worth it? I know I would grow exhausted in my mind, or I would have grown exhausted many times in the past, if it weren’t for moments where I felt enveloped in peaceful reassurance and calmness. That also has to be part of the experience. That’s how the Lord binds our hearts to him.