Wanting to believe

First, I thiink you are have a strong foundation in that the church and gospel makes sense to you — and you love it for its own merits. Not so with some people. So, pocket that as a huge advantage.

As far as a spiritual witness goes…I was in your shoes as a non-member. As a teenager, with no knowledge of Mormonism, I had a very powerful spiritual witness that God lived. I was praying and felt like my whole body was full of light and almost like a spiritual sedative had come over me. This is as I prayed to connect with God and receive comfort — when I had experienced a strong rejection from my friends — something very traumatic to a tennager. It was very powerful and convinced me that God lived. Not Christ, not any church, just that God lived and that sometimes, there could be a spiritual presence when one prayed.

Then comes my friend who was a Mormon, the First Vision explanation, missionary lessons, the book of Mormon, a year of attendance at church, fasting, a three-day fast once, regular prayer, reading the Book of Mormon regularly, and nothing. I expected the same spiritual manifestation i had as a teenager and got nothing.

I went away from the summer and stopped going to church after the summer, but “The Mormon Question” as I called it kept bothering me. Then, one night, after all that previous superhuman effort to get an “answer” and then abandoning the church, I asked again and the same thing happened to me when I was a teenager. It was not as powerful as the manifestation I had as a teenager, but it resolved the tension and was enough that I felt I could believe and become a member of the Church.

My point in telling you this is that God has his own timetable for revealing truth and knowledge. I don’t really understand why he would hold out for so long when he had a willing, clean living person standing at the door knocking like I was, ready to go. And why, I after I chose not to join and abandoned the whole thing, the “answer” came apparently easily on a near whim of a prayer.

My advice would be to enjoy the church on its own merits for the time being. Keep attending and be glad that you have found a church that works for you you in so many ways. Do good for others in it, and keep praying for a testimony and living a good life. What you describe in your relationship with the church is actually quite wonderful. Many wish they felt the same way, I think. Keep nurturing that. Also, curb unusually high expectations about what testimony means, but seek something personally meaningful to you. I think part of the reason it took me so long was that nothing short of a huge manifestation like the one i had as a teenager was good enough for me; I was not open to other forms of revelation that might have come, had I opened my mind to them.

I believe the time will come that you will feel what you can call a testimony. Read about different ways people have been touched with a testimony, and leave yourself open to accept any of them as they come your way.

I think culturally we over-sell the grand and dramatic spiritual confirmation. Most people just aren’t going to have a Sacred Grove experience. Even the prophet Elijah, one of the greatest in the Old Testament, didn’t hear The Lord in the fire or the lightning or the wind storm crashing rocks … but like a whisper of a gentle breeze (or in KJ version, the still small voice).

Perhaps you could tell people, in a diplomatic or gentle way, that you don’t get those dramatic confirmations. Follow that up by sharing how much you enjoy and find value in being a member of the church. You never know, you just might find out you are not alone. You know, a lot of others around you might all be “faking it” it too

(and I don’t mean that people are dishonest, just there is often for more people just like this than we often imagine)

I’m doing an in-depth analysis right now of the LDS truth heuristic — the mechanism whereby most members make a conclusion of truth about the church, and I am coming to believe that the summary conclusion that ‘the church is true’ based upon an emotional evidence we might term ‘spiritual experience’ is a short-cut that has great danger to it. The proposition ‘the church is true’ is not testable, because it is a complex proposition involving many subordinate propositions, the entire corpus of which must be true in order to make the broader truth claim. Since a single spiritual experience does not validate all other truth claims, there is a risk that a false proposition is asserted as true along with the general truth claim. So, for example, the ‘church is true’ can mean that ‘everything the prophets ever did and said must also be true’. When we find out that there are unfulfilled prophecies, inconsistent or false doctrines, and in some cases, bad or dangerous practices preached by the prophet as ‘truth’, then the general proposition fails with everything else. “the church is true” cannot be a binary either-or, because there is too much that the either-or fails to recognize.

Wayfarer,

I’m interested in learning more about your views on the truth heuristic. The spiritual/emotional experience related to gospel questions is key to how we approach understanding and define truth.

I agree that we need to ask simple questions that can lead to simple answers, especially when we first begin the process. If I ask “Is the church true” and get a positive response, what does that mean exactly? That’s too complicated a topic to ask the Spirit when we’re first beginning to learn how to discern the Spirit. I like to start people off with “Did the Book of Mormon come from God?” The question and the answer are pretty simple.

Another trap we fall into is having one spiritual experience and extrapolating everything else from that experience. We create a testimony chain of Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, restoration, church, succession of prophets, current prophet, etc. A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link. This type of testimony can be vulnerable to something like “Brigham Young said some crazy things.” After we have an initial positive spiritual experience about one aspect of the church we can continue to do the same process with other aspects of the church.

“Did the Book of Mormon come from God?”

“Was Joseph Smith a prophet?”

Is the church he founded Christ’s church?

“Is Thomas Monson the current prophet?”

Once someone encouraged me to ask about each chapter of the Book of Mormon as I read through. That was a really neat experience because a single chapter is usually pretty simple. Unless we’re talking about Nephite coinage…

This way we can build up a house of faith brick by brick. Knocking a few bricks out of a wall won’t necessarrily knock over the whole wall.