An aspect of Mormon life that has fascinated me for a long time is spiritual experience. Yet this is a difficult area to write about. Here I feel strengthened to write because of a moment in my field, anthropology, called the ontological moment. Most importantly, this moment does not grant priority to propositions that say the standard world is the only one, i.e. that there is not a singular reality out there per se.
Why this is important to me as I write will become clear, I hope, from the following vignette.
In 1988, while in South America I was troubled by strong feelings that I should call my parents in the US. There was a phone strike in Peru so this was impossible. The feelings were so strong and bothersome that I suddenly broke my plans and went to Bolivia where I could call.
My mother said “Nice to talk with you, but everything is fine here.” I was disappointed, because I had expected those feelings with that kind of strength to mean something, kind of like the many stories I had heard while young of Mormons following such “promptings” and important things resulting from them.
I just went and visited my friends in Bolivia planning on returning to my activities in Peru. The next day, however, the feelings returned with even greater strength. This time, the content was not “call home”, it was “go home”
Yikes. It was so expensive to come to South America and if I went home I knew that I would not be back that summer, so I demurred. The feelings just got stronger. They would not leave me alone.
Finally, I decided to see if I could make my way home. A lot of unusual things happened along the way making it possible to get to the US quickly. When I arrived in Miami I called my Mom again. She said “Thank goodness you are back in the US, son. People have been calling all day from Washington University in St. Louis looking for you. At least you will be here tomorrow morning to talk with them.”
To make the story very short, when I spoke with them they asked to see my cv and shortly afterward offered me my first academic job. For me it seemed I obtained the job because I followed inspiration.
One day a group of students asked me how I had come to Wash U, as they called it, after each of them telling their stories. I shared mine. Afterwards a student said “Oh sure. next you are going to tell us you believe in magic.”
Ouch. That stung.
At the time, I was bothered by the comparison with magic, something he thought was just trickery and foolishness in the face of a mechanical, material world. My spiritual experiences felt like none of that, but something that was a gift for those who listened, an awareness of things that were happening, or about to happen, as well as “whisperings” from the Holy Ghost. They were real and had proved themselves over and over in my life. The experience of getting the job in Washington University was only the latest of a lifetime of such experiences.
They also were not a belief.To me they were as real as the ground under my feet or the students sitting around me unbelievingly.
I realized I inhabited a different world that did those students and that, to a large extent, my world, as rational and coherent as it was to me and to people like me, was incoherent to them. Yet we inhabit the same country and walk the same streets. I taught them many things, although this I learned to keep to my self.
While not all Latter-day Saints experience this kind of spirituality, nevertheless it is figured in Church discourse and in stories such as those I learned in seminary and Church about heroes whose life was saved or someone else’s life was saved because they followed the “promptings of the spirit”.
It was not only there I was taught. My parents also taught me to pray and to feel the spirit.
For those who feel it, all this refers to a very real world and one in which they spend lots of time, measuring and analyzing this internal life of whisperings, burnings in the bosom, and promptings, or just simply feelings--a sensorium as Douglas Davies would call it. They not only measure it internally, they learn to compare it with the external world, to learn what means what.
The main point of this essay is to point a finger to this as a primary place of Latter-day Saint individual and community life. While there are many ways to talk about it, outsider language tends to take away its reality and make it reducible to something else, explainable, while for Latter-day Saints it is primary and, if it is explicable, the explanation has to do with worthiness and gifts.
I would love to see an ethnography of Mormon life that recognizes this domain and gives it the primacy it has for those of us who are natives. It is neither culture, belief, nor some other secondary thing. It just is and is powerful.
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