Those few of you who have seen me online know that I have many “available” messages including “Heretic”, “Portable Pagan” (my other computer had me as simply “Pagan”), “Sacralicious”, “2nd person of the Divine Trinity”, and the above, among others less incendiary. I had this particular one up and a friend of mine, who is [...]

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I’ve had two major life-changing spiritual experiences. The first, at seventeen, helped propel me into the LDS Church. The second, some seventeen years later, eased me back out. The former was dominated by a sense of beauty, connection and purpose; because I was investigating the LDS Church at the time, I understood the sublime experience [...]

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In which an struggling believer stumbles into spiritual darkness. The most profound spiritual experiences tend to be described in positive, glowing terms. People talk of being saved, of “seeing the light,” of feeling love, or of feeling a deep sense of connection to God, the universe, to humanity. I don’t want to speak about any [...]

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One of my missionary companions told me that whenever he read the Book of Mormon, he experienced “a dark feeling” inside. As I’ve read about the spiritual experiences of mystics like St. John of the Cross (who gave us the concept of the “dark night of the soul”) and Simone Weil and atheists/agnostics like John [...]

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So: here’s a question. More than one of my sisters (all very conservative, very Catholic), goes to a chiropractor/nutritionist who I refer to as the Witch Doctor. She has diagnosed many allergies in many of my nieces and nephews and…neph-dogs? She energy tests what she prescribes to make sure it’s what the body needs and [...]

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Driving down I-40 just outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I decided to not (pleasantly) numb my brain with the radio-slash-iPod but to listen to my heart’s core instead. I came up with the mandate to increase a sense of the following for the next little while: Generosity: I have a tendency to be sensitive [...]

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I did a spiritual self-assessment and realized that in spite of distancing myself from the Church for the past few months, I’m spiritually more on task than I’ve been in a long time. I’ve restarted the quest for the experience of God that I aborted about a year ago, and I’ve moved from atheist-critic to [...]

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My God is a god of suffering. Here’s my rationale: God is perfectly compassionate. The deeper the compassion, the greater the empathy. One cannot have compassion for others in a world full of suffering without sharing that pain. There is perfect joy as well, but I think that people tend to overlook the sorrowful aspect [...]

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Here are a few more incredible insights from a woman who essentially starved herself to death at the age of 34. The following are from Waiting for God. Replace Catholicism with “Mormonism” or “organized religion” and this expresses many of my concerns beautifully: [From the introduction:] It was with Father Perrin that Simone Weil argued [...]

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I try to open each day by reading from and then meditating on the writings of Christian mystics. Right now I’m supping from the pages of Simone Weil‘s Waiting for God: If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one’s own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved, I [...]

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