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I don’t want to F the Ineffable.

Posted by John on July 6th, 2008 at 9:59 pm · 12 Comments

I did some bad things during my stint as a Mormon missionary in Japan.  I’d like to repent of one of them right now.

Some of my Japanese friends confided deep, personal spiritual experiences with me.  In several cases I coopted their experiences for my own ends, and using my words, contorted them so that they fit perfectly into the LDS worldview.

Looking back, it seems almost a violent act.

I shouldn’t be too hard on myself.  After all, I was only trying to understand their experiences using my dominant perspective at the time.  It’s only after getting beat up when my experiences didn’t fit my LDS leaders’ and teachers’ paradigms do I fully understand my own complicity.

There is power in naming something.  And when someone came to me as an expert in spiritual matters after experiencing deep sense of connectedness to the universe/humanity/etc. and asked for some help in understanding this strange and frightening moment,  I called that event the Spirit, and then said that that Spirit was God the Father’s communication to them that they needed to read the translation of some old golden plates, believe in Joseph Smith and Ezra Taft Benson as having the Red Phone to The Big White House in the Sky, and put on white clothes and get dunked while I say some mumbo jumbo over them so that they can join an organization and get married in Masonic-inspired cermonies, and now I’m thinking, WTF!?

Was I really that unthinkingly manipulative? Did I bludgeon their sweet experiences with my well-trained, well-intentioned I believes and I testifies and I knows?

Which is why I struggle sometimes with atheist discourse.  I don’t want atheists (or believers) to write off my cravings and reverence for the oceanic, the mystical, the “spiritual.”  I don’t always want to know what chemical reactions or evolutionary mechanisms or social indoctrination triggered my desire to appeal to something outside of myself.  I don’t want to label it projection or insecurity or ritual impulse.  Sometimes this is too dismissive.  I just want to be.  I want the wordless to remain so.  I don’t want to F the ineffable.

Which is why I think I’m comfortable in the Quaker mode.  There are some words to describe experience, but they are gentle, intended to convey that the experience in minimal terms: the light, that of God, seeking within, etc., but there are no real attempts made to explain or to force those experiences into Christian or Buddhist or Skeptical language.  Also, when personal experience is conveyed to others, such as when someone in meeting for worship breaks the silence with words, they talk of their own personal experience.

It’s ironic that I have to convey my frustration with the limits of words through words.  I guess you can only say so much via blogging.

So I’ll slip into…silence.

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Tags: Atheism · Belief · Getting over Religion · Gods · Humanism · Mormonism · Musings · Mysticism · Personal · Reason · Spirituality

12 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Elise // Jul 7, 2008 at 7:00 am

    That’s a very good way of putting it….from my own spiritual perspective, I think I have experienced the exact same desire to let the wordless remain so.

  • 2 catBonny // Jul 7, 2008 at 8:00 am

    This reminds me of the one time that my mom’s boyfriend went to the doctor and they thought they found a mass in his eye. I prayed for him and when he went back to the doctor it wasn’t there. I thought he was healed and that would help him to find Christ. I still don’t really know what I think happened. I think he was just lucky he didn’t have a mass in his eye after all.

    I think that I am right there with you on the ‘I just want to be’ thing, but I think it makes some people uncomfortable to not put things into words. I guess when these people try to check up on me spiritually I just want to say that I am good and that’s all, but I usually wind up trying to describe it a lot more, which just frustrates me because I don’t have words for it, and I don’t need to have words for it, but somehow I feel like I do for them.

    Thanks for sharing this John.

  • 3 Jonathan // Jul 7, 2008 at 8:23 am

    Ahh…
    Sounds post-modern! Some things are mysterious, and very little can be done more to analyze them. Instead, just experience it… This is tough for me being “modern” but I’m trying to be more this way too.

  • 4 John // Jul 7, 2008 at 8:38 am

    Catbonny, I think you’re right that not being able to describe something can be fear-inducing. I think its why people have to take the worst events (from natural to personal disasters) and find ways to work it into their religious narrative (that wasn’t random, that was god’s punishment! etc.)

    Jonathan, I’m not writing off all attempts to capture and explain mystical experience. In many senses, I’m probably as modern as you are–I’m not a positivist, but I believe in an objective reality and that the scientific method is the best tool that we have for capturing and explaining it.

    I think that my post has more to do with how we communicate spiritual experience in our interpersonal interactions. I want to be able to enjoy some of my experiences without the burden of explaining and analyzing and describing each one. And I want to give others the space to do the same. Does that make sense?

  • 5 Jonathan // Jul 7, 2008 at 9:10 am

    I think that’s a good approach for communicating our spiritual experiences, and responding to other people’s experiences too. Some things are hard to understand, and sometimes our explanations of our experiences don’t make a lot of sense when we try to explain them – probably because we don’t really understand them ourselves. A case and point is our discussion (1year ago?) about the rocky transition from being a christian to an atheist, as described in Sarah M’s song “Dear God”.

    An attitude of humility seems best. Spiritual experiences are hard to describe and understand. While we “moderns” might want to quickly analyze it and write it off, we have to keep an open mind, both with ourselves and with others.

    That’s why I come here – I’m trying to keep my mind open. God help me if it becomes closed.

  • 6 Lessie // Jul 7, 2008 at 2:30 pm

    I appreciate this post. An atheist friend of mine gets very frustrated when people mention their “spirit”. I guess it doesn’t bother me because it’s still the word I use to describe the deepest part of me– the part that we haven’t found a scientific definition for yet. And I also don’t really care what chemical reactions are causing my euphoria, my sadness, etc. I’m still experiencing them. Anyway, our UU minister sometimes has readings that mention “God” or some of the songs in their hymnal do as well. But I just glance at it, sing it, and revel in the knowledge that I don’t have to believe it to be accepted there.

  • 7 wren // Jul 7, 2008 at 3:42 pm

    For many years I reframed my own experiences within the confines of religion, specifically Christian religion. I did the same thing with others’ experiences. I used to say that if someone else got a “no” answer to their prayer about the BoM, it was probably because they weren’t ready for it. It wasn’t the right time and God knew that. Pretty audacious, huh.

    When my faith bubble burst, I had to rethink my spiritual experiences. I had to think about why I had an experience that I thought was testifying to the truthfulness of the BoM. I had to think about experiences at the temple. When I thought about those things, I realized I also had similar sensations when getting spooked by a movie.

    I had to think further about something that always troubled me – that being how do different people get different answers and messages from God. I ended up chalking all these things up to what we want them to be.

    I don’t know that they mean anything more than that. I doubt that they do, but I don’t know that they don’t.

    Being LDS took me in the direction of knowing I had a lot of autonomy in my life. I appreciate that after growing up thinking my sole purpose was to praise and worship God and that He controlled everything. I have taken the next steps in claiming more autonomy for myself. For me, a big part of that has been accepting that there are not answers for everything and to just be.

  • 8 Jonathan // Jul 8, 2008 at 3:04 am

    For those C.S. Lewis fans – he talks specifically about emotions and spiritual experience, especially dealing with the issue of our feelings being the same whether it is a religious experience or some other mundane experience. The spiritual is a richer medium that must be translated into our emotion set – a lower medium. It’s like distilling English into binary code. Whether its a mundane message or a beautiful one, it comes out as either 1s or 0s. He called it Transposition (Weight of Glory, p.16).

    He also remarked in Mere Christianity the same thing – the gut “feeling” we get from intense sadness and intense joy is surprisingly the same.

  • 9 Perpetually Amazed // Jul 9, 2008 at 7:00 am

    John, you sparked in me a realization that has been swimming around in my peripheral vision for quite some time now: that I habitually sit and work in silence–silence is my chosen state–for precisely the reasons you outline here. My main fear is that people around me suspect that I’m a snob because of it. Or that I’m shallow. I hope I’m neither….but I don’t know how not to be silent a lot of the time. Thanks for sharing…

  • 10 Jeff // Jul 9, 2008 at 7:14 pm

    Wren,

    I’ve been going through a rethinking of spirituality lately. When friends and family members get me talking about past spiritual experiences that I’d had, they’re amazed that I could have experienced them and still not believe.

    I like what you said that these feelings are what we want them to be. I feel the same feelings while hiking in the wilderness, playing with my daughter, and anticipating the birth of a child. While all of those could be attributed to god, I now feel that they are more about things that we love and are excited about. When I was excited about the BOM, I felt the same thing when I read it. Now, it just gives me a headache.

  • 11 xJane // Jul 10, 2008 at 12:26 pm

    I’ve been holding off on this one, but it’s nice to see my thoughts repeated by the community here. It still sometimes feels unsafe to talk about spirituality in atheist circles or lack of god in religious circles. Thanks again, John, for creating a space where we can do both.

    I’ve definitely had experiences I cannot explain, but that doesn’t really make me want to turn to belief. Currently, part of my father’s death-practice (which it is helping me to think of this as, since that is something I can relate to, on a Buddhist level) is getting the founder of KofC canonized. So suddenly, I’m part of a community sharing stories of miracles and hopes for miracles. One family friend actually said that she believes that God is holding off on curing my father so that when he does, it will be unmistakably a miracle. Now, I’ve grown up and become accustomed to a poker face when confronted by religious stupidity (I purposely read things like the New Oxford Review while hanging out with my parents), so I think I managed not to give away my incredulity. But what arrogance! Firstly, to think to know what reasons god, even if you do believe in the Divine, has for doing (or not doing) anything; but also to think that this was helpful?! In the face of death, I find that acceptance is healthier than denial. But who am I to dictate the paths another has to walk?

    And I think this is the heart of John’s post & the community here: I, too, could use a reminder that I don’t have a “Red Phone” to Batman the Divine.

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