Deciphering Spiritual Feelings Is Devilishly Difficult

 

The book I described a few posts ago, Jonathan Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge, is an exploration of the quest for truth. He demonstrates how difficult it is to arrive at truth and contends that this quest is always a communal endeavor. He has given me a lot to think about. In the LDS Church, we tend to come at the question from a different angle, claiming that we can know the truth of various ideas, documents, and events through a confirmation of the Spirit. But my own experience and the experiences of others suggest that this may be an overly simplistic belief. Let me illustrate with seven stories, some personal, that illustrate how difficult it can be to interpret spiritual feelings. At the end, I’ll offer a few observations.

 

I.

In February 1976, I attended a memorable zone conference in a suburb of Hamburg Germany. One of the mission president’s assistants had received authorization to make what in hindsight seems like a totally unwarranted promise. But he stood there in front of the zone and in the name of Jesus Christ promised us missionaries that if we would commit to work fifty-five hours every week in March, then someone we were teaching would surely be baptized. Now, I know that promises like this one run against the very principle of free will and have been specifically condemned by LDS General Authorities, but when the president’s assistant spoke those words, the Holy Ghost hit me right in the solar plexus, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was speaking the truth. Apparently almost everyone else felt the same witness I did, because when the assistant asked us to raise our right hands to the square and promise to work those fifty-five-hour weeks, everyone in the zone quickly raised his or her hand. Everyone, that is, except my senior companion.

I couldn’t believe it. The wind went out of my sails as quickly as if I had floated into the Doldrums. How could he? I thought. I hadn’t seen a baptism yet on my mission, but here was a guarantee. All we had to do was work fifty-five hours. Heavens, we were already doing that. There wasn’t even any sacrifice involved. But my companion wouldn’t promise. I was so angry he could have strangled Bruder Carlson (not his real name).

Later I learned that my companion was afraid he might get sick or break his leg or that something out of his control would prevent him from keeping his promise. He didn’t want to make a promise he couldn’t keep. Eventually, after a long talk with one of the zone leaders, who had earlier been a senior companion to Bruder Carlson, he made the promise. And Bruder Carlson didn’t get sick or break his leg. And we worked our fifty-five hours each week. But none of our investigators got baptized. Of course, I realize that the promise never specified when the investigator would get baptized, but for years I kept in touch with some of the members of that ward, and my inquiries have uncovered no evidence that any of the small handful of investigators we taught have yet been baptized. When I was working at Church Magazines, I could request information from the good people down in Membership, as long as I had a good reason. This would have made a great story for the magazines, so I checked with Membership on all the investigators we had at the time. Zip. And anyway, the understanding we all had at that zone conference was that the baptism would occur soon. To this day, I still don’t understand what that strong spiritual confirmation meant, if anything. All I know is that it was a very powerful spiritual feeling.

 

II.

A few years later, as a new elders quorum president in a BYU student ward, I was searching at the beginning of the school year for a counselor among elders I had never met. After visiting all the men’s apartments in the ward, the person I had the strongest spiritual feeling about informed me privately after our visit that he had been excommunicated and was working toward rebaptism. There was a reason I had such a strong impression of him, but it wasn’t because he was to be my counselor. Before the year was over, he had been rebaptized and had his priesthood and temple ordinances restored. But if he had said nothing, I would probably have followed that spiritual feeling and called him as my counselor, a calling he would have probably been embarrassed to turn down. Only his forthright admission saved us both from what would have been an awkward situation.

 

III.

Elder Gerald N. Lund tells the story of a bishop who had a strong spiritual feeling when giving a blessing to young mother in his ward who was experiencing a serious health crisis. Following his feeling, he blessed her that she would be healed. But she died within a few hours. Elder Lund suggests that this bishop had a real spiritual experience, but he misinterpreted it. Perhaps the meaning of the spiritual feeling was just an assurance that the Lord was in charge of the situation. (From pages 8–9 in Hearing the Voice of the Lord)

 

IV.

Years ago, my wife was called to be Primary president, a calling the bishopric undoubtedly had prayed about. She accepted, but afterward she felt great turmoil about the calling, not because she wasn’t capable and not because she wasn’t willing. Something else was wrong. After talking it over with me, she called the bishop. He prayed about it again and then called her back and said, “Sister Terry, this calling is not for you right now.” A couple of months later, we experienced a problem pregnancy that resulted in our third child being born three months premature. For the next year or more, we were in over our heads with his medical needs. Sheri would have had no time or mental and emotional bandwidth to be Primary president. A few years later, however, the same calling was extended, and she accepted the call without any inner turmoil. The bishop obviously missed something in his initial prayers, but he was humble and willing to be questioned by my wife and corrected in subsequent prayers.

 

V.

In recent years, I have observed friends and fellow ward members who have been stricken with cancer. One in particular was cured in a miraculous way. But a few have prayed and felt very strongly that God was telling them they would be healed. These were very righteous people, one even serving in a stake presidency. I don’t doubt that they exercised great faith and believed God was telling them they would conquer the dreaded disease. After intense suffering, though, they died. I think this illustrates that it is very difficult, especially when we are in our extremity, to tell the difference between the spiritual message we desperately want God to give us and our own impassioned feelings.

This difficulty apparently also extends even to Apostles. Many years ago now, my boss told me about his sister-in-law. She was serving in a foreign land with her husband, who was the mission president there. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she returned to the United States for surgery and treatment. She also received a special priesthood blessing from an Apostle. In this blessing, he promised her that she would be healed. After a short battle with the disease, however, she passed away. I have often wondered what the Apostle was basing his promise on. Was it just a warm feeling about this woman and her future? Or was it more specific than that? Regardless, it is both distressing and comforting to know that deciphering spiritual feelings is something all of us struggle with, even Apostles.

 

VI.

Several years ago, I published in Dialogue an essay titled “Frau Rüster and the Cure for Cognitive Dissonance.” It details an overwhelming spiritual manifestation that I shared with two other people—my missionary companion and Frau Rüster, one of our investigators. At the time of the experience and in that essay, I interpreted the manifestation to be a confirmation of “everything” about the Church. But in the ensuing years, I learned a great deal more about what “everything” entails and how complicated the Church and its history are. A decade later, I included an updated version of this essay as a chapter in a mission memoir published by BCC Press. In the memoir, I had to scale back my interpretation of what the manifestation meant. Significantly, I added a question mark to the title. Part of my reason for reconsidering my interpretation is that Frau Rüster, who shared that spiritual outpouring, understood it far differently than I did. All the Spirit told her was that she needed to repent. And despite this wonderful spiritual outpouring, she never did join the Church.

 

VII.

The final story may provide a good summary of my point in this post. Frau Tiedemann (not her real name) had a dream one night in which she was surrounded by fire. Her children were screaming, but she couldn’t get to them. She woke up and sat up in bed. A power came over her that prevented her from moving. A voice then spoke to her. It gave a cryptic message, “Chadwick [my companion] is right. Watch over your family.” The voice repeated these words four or five times. She was frantic. She was sure her family was in grave physical danger. She called us the next morning, hysterical, so we rushed over to her house. Elder Chadwick assured her that it was probably a message about spiritual danger and her children’s eternal welfare. This was “obvious” to us, but certainly not to her.

This experience illustrates that it’s not just spiritual feelings that are difficult to decipher. Sometimes the Spirit speaks in actual words and sentences, but even these can be vague, and we are left on our own to interpret them.

 

Our Craving for Certainty

In the Church, we crave certainty. But often the Spirit is both subtle and ambiguous. Perhaps we place too much emphasis on testimony and not enough on faith. After all, our first article of faith says nothing about sure knowledge. The first principle of the gospel is not certainty; it is faith.

If God wanted to give us certainty, he wouldn’t have had Moroni take back the gold plates. He would appear not just to Joseph Smith but to each of us and tell us in no uncertain terms what is true and what is not. And he definitely wouldn’t have given us scriptures that are both incomplete and internally inconsistent in many ways. But that is apparently not what God wants. Maybe he just wants to see how we will behave in the face of uncertainty. Maybe that’s what faith is all about.

I don’t pretend to know how the interface between the Spirit and our minds and emotions works. All I know is that the interface is a bit spotty at times, perhaps all the time. And for us to declare our certainty may be more than we can really justify.

On the other hand, there have been times when I’ve had strong spiritual impressions, and I’ve followed them, and I have apparently understood them correctly. At least things turned out the way I felt I had been told they would. But in my life, it has been about a 50-50 proposition. At least half the time, I’ve been wrong.

I guess all I’m saying here is that we probably ought to be a lot more cautious in our declarations and interpretations and admit that we may very well be wrong about a lot of things. My 25 years as a full-time editor in the field of Mormon studies has taught me that we know a lot less than we sometimes think we do.