Spirited
One of the questions my believing family asks me, gently, is some version of this: Don’t you miss the Spirit?
It’s a fair question. In the church we’re taught that we must stay worthy of the Spirit or we’ll drive it away. So if someone stops believing, it seems to follow that the Spirit must have left them.
As improbable as it may seem, I still feel the constant companionship of what I’ve always known as the Holy Ghost. I remain a deeply spiritual person, even without an anthropomorphic god.
In this essay I want to describe what that looks like. The short version is this: my spiritual experiences no longer have to fit a story. I call that spiritual experience without a narrative, and I’ve found it more honest, and more peaceful, than what I had before.
Every experience gets a story
Inside the church, almost every spiritual moment comes with an explanation already attached. A quiet thought becomes a prompting. A lucky break becomes a tender mercy. A swell of feeling during a talk becomes a witness that the church is true. The experience and its meaning arrive together, and the meaning is always the same.
To be fair, sometimes the narrative is part of what makes an experience spiritual. Sometimes patterns emerge and we don’t know why. Sometimes we look back on our lives and see what appears to be a carefully designed path that led us to where we are now. Those moments can be spiritual, and we should accept them as spiritual.
But the narrative comes at a price. When every experience has to point to the same doctrine, we can’t enjoy an experience on its own terms. And if we ever come to doubt the doctrine, it seems as though we have to give up the experiences too.
I don’t think that follows. So what is left when you take the story away?
Just meaning
It doesn’t have to fit a narrative. It can just be a spiritual experience.
We can sit under the trees. We can sit at the beach. We can look into the eyes of the one we love. Sometimes we find strength beyond what we thought we were capable of. Sometimes we have thoughts that seem beyond our ability to have imagined.
Here’s a small one. People can be terrible to each other, and yet on a crowded road, cars still pull over for an ambulance. It’s the law, of course. But if you slow down to experience it, there’s something mystical about a whole street of strangers making way for someone they’ll never meet.
Miracles do happen, and we can embrace them without having to explain them, interpret them, or assign meaning to them within the context of a narrative. There is just meaning.
There seems to be a spark of divinity in us, though not from the Mormon God. There’s the shared, instinctual inheritance Jung called the collective unconscious. There are the old stories of death and rebirth that so many cultures tell (more on that in Archetypes). And there’s the plain awe of looking up at the night sky and trying to take in the sheer size of the universe (In The Beginning).
There’s mystery in all of that, and I’m comfortable leaving it as mystery.
What practice looks like now
Prayer was always a sacred part of my life. Over time I came to understand it as a way of aligning my heart with the will of God rather than aligning God’s heart with my will.
I still see value in regularly aligning our hearts with the ultimate good, or with something we choose. For me, that practice now looks more like meditation. I’ll be honest: I find meditation more fulfilling than prayer.
I also find healing in ordinary things. Reading. Writing. Genuine conversation. Recreation. Good food, good sleep and taking care of my body. None of those come with a doctrine attached, and none of them need one.
If I had to list what feels spiritual to me now, it would be short: transcendence, connection, awe, and the archetypes that show up in our oldest stories. None of them requires me to settle a doctrinal question first.
What it isn’t
I want to be careful here, because I know how this can sound to a believer.
I’m not claiming these experiences prove anything. I don’t believe my strong emotions establish truth, whether that truth is the church’s or my own. (I make that case in The Things We Feel.) I’m also not claiming that my way is better for everyone. The church gives many people a rich spiritual life, and I’m glad it does.
And I’m not hiding from the possibility of God. I absolutely leave open the possibility that there is a supreme being. I just know of no evidence for one, and I’ve stopped needing my spiritual life to wait on an answer.
So who is that companion?
Which brings me back to the question my family asks. If I still feel what I always called the Holy Ghost, what is it?
Honestly, I don’t know. It may be the same warm, open feeling everyone has when they witness something good. It may be something we don’t understand yet. What I do know is that it didn’t leave when the story did. I guess I haven’t offended him enough for him to leave me yet!
In all seriousness, that’s the most reassuring thing I can tell a believer who worries about someone they love. Stepping away from the doctrine didn’t empty my life of the sacred. If anything, I notice it more.
If you want to know how I think about spirituality and religion side by side, read Beyond Dogma. And for the fuller picture of where I stand, see my letter to my Mormon family and friends.