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Minyan Man wrote:
After my FC, my spiritual life changed a lot. For example:– God seems to be farther away than what I experienced before the FC.
– I don’t pray as much. I know how to say a prayer, the feeling isn’t the same. I’m not sure how to get it back. Maybe I won’t.
– The church doesn’t seem to live up to the historical claims. Too many questions.
– I do have personal spiritual experiences. It usually comes in a conversation with someone or a close friend.
– I do have personal spiritual experiences reading scriptures. Usually the parables.
– I have found that there are personal parables that serve as lessons or spiritual insights.
– I do have personal spiritual experiences doing or teaching Family History.
For me, going from the certainty that “God was in His Heaven and All Was [Mostly] Right with the World” to “I am hopeful that God exists [but not betting the farm on it anymore]” with dramatic shifts in personal authority (pretty much “I’m the one with the most at stake with my choices”, moral authority parameters (which voices do I pay attention to and why?), and power structures (primarily how the church is structured in very business-like ways, how and what the church has imposed on families as “family structure and related parameters” concerns).
– I found that going to personal or marital counseling was better for my relationship with my husband then church teachings had been.
NOTE: This was a statement I never expected to make. The church had “eternal truths” and “should have all the major answers”. The “church family structure” I picked up from 1990’s church culture was a disaster. The focus on “roles by gender” and “Purity” made “adaptation” less desirable and took “LovingKindness” to be a 2nd class value. My husband is not interested in presiding (I preside almost by accident in my sleep), I usually bring home and order the bacon (tongue in cheek commentary on “providing”), and my husband is more emotive than I am. The “adaptation due to disability” clause has been used so much to “excuse” our family structure that our family structure bears minimal resemblance to the structure taught at church.
– I mostly go around as Adam and Eve supposedly did Post-Garden, Pre-Angelic Visitation, “waiting for the messengers God promised to send” AND while I am waiting, I am tilling the ground I am in.
Minyan Man wrote:
The church teaches a lot about eternal progression. The inference is that our spiritual journey is a straight line up.The reality for me is: with the bumps in the road, the journey is rarely in a straight line and rarely is it up.
Our bodies & minds go through changes as we progress through life.
Why should we be surprised when we change spiritually along the same path? (Up, down & sideways.)
I think that spiritual journeys are cyclical and you end up in similar points in time thinking through similar things/issues to the last loop around.
I think the “may there be a path” with it’s additional unspoken “and may you easily identify it and walk it with courage, strength, and ease” is one of best wishes I have received. I think that going beyond that to define the path for someone else is wishful thinking, patronizing the faith of others, and blowing intellectual smoke (Kacey Musgraves did an amazing song on “Blowing Smoke” that is loosely in the country genre).
Joseph was a radical. He rejected the established pathways of his day for accessing God and blazed his own trail into the “First Vision.” The religious authorities saw this as blasphemy. Joseph is difficult to pin down. It feels like he was continually changing and reinventing. The church that he built had strong central authority but also dispersed authority broadly and freely.
Joseph wanted to bring the saints into their own “First Vision” experience. He talked about this as an “endowment of power,” “the second comforter,” having your calling and election made sure,” etc. It was to see God and Jesus and have your sins forgiven you with the assurance that you made it.
This experience was predicted at the completion of the Kirtland Temple and many reported such “day of Pentecost” experiences at the dedication (tongues of fire above the building or specific individuals, speaking in tongues, etc.).
Later in the Nauvoo period Joseph began to develop the endowment. The ordinance of sealing husband to wife (heavily tied to polygamous sealings in the beginning) seems to also be a similar attempt to take a revelatory, “seeing the face of God moment,” and creating an initiation/initiatory process that could be repeated again and again for individual members. Literally, initiating them into an inner group with hidden knowledge. The 2nd anointing is another example of trying to replicate such a moment.
Today, the temple ordinances are the descendants of these attempts. The temple itself is like Mount Horeb that we can summit and experience the burning bush. The initiatory, endowment, and temple sealing are all attempts to bring these experiences to the saints. Joseph had his “First Vision” and then spent the rest of his life trying to bring his followers with him to have their own “First Vision” experiences. The temple is an attempt to standardize and McDonaldize (I don’t mean that in a derogatory way) a theophany.
It’s going to be impossible for me to articulate my thoughts on this. Perhaps my thoughts cannot be communicated by one person to another in words or symbols, but must be experienced directly, firsthand. 
I’ve toyed with making a thread about this but my mind gets too tangled when I try to broach the subject. I’ll give it a try here. If I successfully communicate the concept, phew. If not… well, I tried. The “we” I refer to in this post is the general membership of the church. It’s not limited to people here.
I’ll start with the restoration of the church in 1830. What did the restoration achieve? I think it cracked the glass ceiling humans placed between god and man, at least for a small group of people. I imagine a people whose faith was constrained by their beliefs on what was and wasn’t considered an authoritative source for spiritual matters.
For example, “No, I don’t believe that. It’s not in the Bible.” People always looking backwards, always operating within the limits of a spiritual prison. Maybe that last bit is too dramatic, hopefully you get the point I wanted to make.
Well along comes a guy with a foundational narrative that gives people an outlet to embrace new ideas. Set aside whether the foundational narratives are actually true or not, that’s not the role the foundational narratives played. The foundational narratives were only a catalyst, a catalyst to get people to have enough faith to start to believe that god is poised to give them something new. They got sprung from that spiritual prison, they began to look forward for answers to spiritual questions.
That was 1830. This is 2024. A thick shell has grown on top of the gift that the foundational narrative provided. Now we’re right back in that same mindset we were in before the restoration in 1830. Spiritually we’ve hemmed ourselves in on all sides. We look to the past and to leaders and make sure we’re not coloring outside the lines. Someone comes up with a new idea and it’s, “No, I don’t believe that. It’s not in the Bible, D&C, or said during general conference.” We’ve placed that glass ceiling back between us and god.
When talking church with acquaintances I’ll sometimes jest that we need another 14 year old to come along and do another restoration. We’re stuck in a rut, waiting for someone or something to serve as a new catalyst that will create enough faith to do new things.
But that’s just the LDS church, impacting a very small number of people. It’s a pattern that’s repeated for a very, very long time with faith traditions.
I think we’ve even put Jesus inside a similar spiritual cage. We took his initiation into spirituality and reduced him down into being the Son of God. Perhaps I could make that the subject of an equally incoherent post.
I wear many hats. Gnosticism is one of them. It’s the one with the propeller on top.
The young have more energy, a fresh perspective, and less resources invested in specific outcomes/obligations (and usually some supports) – which make it easier for them to inspire and create change/innovation. I also think that the older cohorts “rebel” internally – they don’t necessarily “make waves” as they go about changing how they do things (so it flies under the radar). I think that Joseph Smith was “one of many” at the time who were taking spirituality in different conversational directions. For a variety of reasons, he is the catalyst/ancestor of the chain of thought that was passed down to us in terms of religion and spirituality.
I guess I think that JS was “the spark” that brought a lot of people together in a cause to “create Zion” that transcended oceans. I think that leaders after JS were responsible for converting “the rebellion” into “the establishment” (for lack of better terminology).
Roy wrote:
DoubtingTom wrote:
Where is that today?
There was an article that compared new religion to volcano eruptions.
http://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4213&p=56759&hilit=lava+flow#p56759 Quote:The beginnings of the great religions were like the eruptions of a volcano. There was fire, there was heat, there was light: the light of mystical insight freshly spelled out in a new teaching; the best of hearts aglow with commitment to a sharing community; and celebration, as fiery as new wine. The light of doctrine, the glow of ethical commitment, and the fire of ritual celebration were expressions that gushed forth red hot from the depths of mystical consciousness. But, as that stream of lava flowed down the sides of the mountain, it began to cool off. The farther it got from its origins, the less it looked like fire; it turned into rock. Dogmatism, moralism, ritualism: all are layers of ash deposits and volcanic rock that separate us from the fiery magma deep down below.
But there are fissures and clefts in the igneous rock of the old lava flows; there are hot springs, fumaroles, and geysers; there are even occasional earthquakes and minor eruptions. These represent the great men and women who reformed and renewed religious tradition from within. In one way or another, this is our task, too. Every religion has a mystical core. The challenge is to find access to it and to live in its power. In this sense, every generation of believers is challenged anew to make its religion truly religious.….
Our religion started as an eruption and has become a monolith. The good news is that I would MUCH rather be a member of this stable and steady modern church than the unpredictable and sometimes very destructive nascent church of JS and BY.
I pretty much agree that we all need to have our own spiritual “Joseph Smith First Vision” experience. Not that we all need to have a vision, but I think we all need to have some sort of epiphany regarding our own faith, spiritual course, and relationship with God. I think the problem is that our individual initiations into spirituality don’t necessarily always fit the church narrative about what it should be (and that’s probably true outside of Mormonism as well). DarkJedi wrote:
I pretty much agree that we all need to have our own spiritual “Joseph Smith First Vision” experience. Not that we all need to have a vision, but I think we all need to have some sort of epiphany regarding our own faith, spiritual course, and relationship with God.
I agree. I also think that it’s not a “just-once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity:)
DarkJedi wrote:
I think the problem is that our individual initiations into spirituality don’t necessarily always fit the church narrative about what it should be (and that’s probably true outside of Mormonism as well).
I think part of the problem by “generating the narrative” is assigning a specific meaning to a series of actions.
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