This week on ‘The Sanctuary’: a guest post from Andy.
One way of characterising my spiritual journey over the last four years would be to say I’ve gone from functioning within an inherited culture, towards a more critical outlook and need for rationality in assembling belief. This has been, in a large part, facilitated by my university training, and the liberal humanism that informs the teaching in such institutions. For sure, I’m really grateful for that process, as my life needed the balance tipping towards more active analysis of my assumptions and accepted worldviews. I’m glad that one of the assumptions that took a beating was the idea that life’s great principles and forces are usually organised into exclusive binary pairs. Having lost that ‘black and white’ way of thinking, now I find that for all that rational scepticism, I still maintain a capacity and respect for the things that ‘worked’ from previous versions of my belief system. Whatever I may consider it to be today, I know I’ve felt something that I called ‘the spirit’, that made me feel peace, and occasionally, bliss.
Evidently I haven’t been totally handed over to the devil for my coffee-drinking, because I still regularly feel those feelings in (some of) the situations that I used to. One of the most intense of these situations, then and now, is when I listen to music that would be best described as ‘worship’. The words ‘Alleluia’ and ‘Hosanna’ have always appealed to me as beautiful expressions. They are the sublime: cutting past the specifics and dogmas of theology, we may approach this state of language and thought. Words change into a different kind of symbolisation, and people sing together, praising the Absolute: That which exists beyond and outside of our language.
Please watch the video below, and see if you can feel these same reachings towards transcendence. There will probably be elements of the song or presentation that will get your scepticism-radar beeping… but if you can, just for a minute, try to turn the volume down on that and experience this expression of the sublime.
This video seems to me to depict something close to the end of ‘The Testaments of One Fold and One Shepherd’ (skip to 5:10 on the link if you want the relevant bit!), an LDS film made in 2000, which shows Christ appearing to the ancient American people. Both sets of Christians raise their hands up, as close as they can to touch God, and cry the tears they’ve waited, perhaps their whole lives, to release. Finally they can ‘let go’, and feel Eternity.
It works for me. I can identify some of the messages from Evangelical Christian ‘worship’ music that appeal to me for their beauty and poetry. They tend to be the messages that are paradoxical: for example, the bold assertions that the Hillsong United song makes:
‘I see the King of Glory/Coming on the clouds with fire/The whole earth shakes…’
Now, to be clear, I don’t believe that Christ is going to appear anytime soon, never mind about the sinister connotations of ‘fire’. But something inside me is attracted to the paradox because it throws off the dominance of rationality: that’s the only way this impossible glory can exist. As I type this, I can almost feel the possibility that I could sing those words as a response to all the skepticism in my heart… that I could use this kind of ‘faith’ to expand the vision of my limited eyes – to see beauty above a broken world.
I love the move from ‘the people sing/ the people sing’ into the chorus’s pure expression of worship. It’s almost a version of the revolutionaries’ song: the idealism of the end of history and utopia are recruited here. I feel significant things within me pulling towards this, wanting to be part of that world.
‘Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the Highest!’
* * * * *
And yet, as I write, I’m bothered by the feeling that this process of sublimation actually covers up ‘a multitude of sins’: and by that, I mean to say that it brushes thoughtlessly past the dogma and pain that oppress the world. It’s like taking an anaesthetic: it eases the pain for now, but does nothing to fix the cause of the discomfort we feel from the ‘real world’. I guess that’s what the verses of these songs are trying to accomplish: but I fundamentally disagree with the methods they sing to promote.
Could ‘Hosanna’ be, after all, the manifestation of a lack of faith? If we transcend this world into a sublimated experience, then we leave everything that’s wrong with the world behind. We’re jumping ship. Perhaps we’ll come back to help those left on board – or perhaps we’ll fall in love with the siren song, and never return. Maybe the truest demonstration of faith would be to reject the transcendent sublime, and insist upon being here – amongst the pain and suffering and discord – where we can do what we can to help. Because I don’t believe Christ is going to come and ‘make right’ all that’s wrong with the world, I believe that it’s something that people like you or I are going to have to do. There’s a degree of that self-sufficiency within Mormonism: but probably not enough for me.
‘The Testaments’ shows the ancient Americans holding their hands up like Evangelical Christians. You’d never see this in an LDS Sacrament meeting: or even – in the same way – in the supposed Celestial intimacy of the Temple ceremony. Because Mormons believe God is always incarnate, we cannot hold our hands out to him until he either appears to us personally, or at the Second Coming. The Holy Ghost seems to be treated as a lesser god: proximity to the Spirit is apparently something much less powerful than the awaited appearance by Christ would be.
I’m left wanting to hold my hands out: to open myself to the Absolute, and simultaneously, not wanting to leave the world I love behind. If I could learn to look the horror of human suffering in the face, and then sing: ‘Hosanna’… that would be the most moral experience of God. To experience true immanence: to find the Holy in the darkest places.
The Highest in the depths. ‘All heights and depths’.
I think I know what you mean about he exultant. I recall having those moments-living for them, really-in my former, more faithful life. Yet I was surprised to find that I have them even after turning from faith in Jesus. I have these moments when I read about the vast and incomprehensible beauty of nature … when I walk through it and breath it, and when I can only imagine it. I have these moments when I participate in humanities. I have them when I see my children moving through the world. What’s different is that these moments are no longer evoked by a cult of personality. I’m not raising my hand to a man-god or to his servants. Now, when I see this, I can only cringe.
That’s my truth.
Matt, I have these feelings around nature, too. And all kinds of music… but I can’t deny that there’s something about the paradox of pure worship that strikes me as beautiful.
I think that many readers of this post will feel the same way as you about the song linked above. I’d be interested to hear more about the quality of your ‘cringe’. :) I remember as a faithful LDS member, finding Evangelical music much more cringeworthy than I do today. I think there’s a ‘down-to-earth-ness’ in Mormon people that HATES this kind of thing. That’s one of the things I’d like to dig into in this article.
Mormonism says that Christ is a man-God: I’m not so sure that Evangelical Christians experience Christ that way. I’ve heard the accusation made in LDS meetings that other Christians have an ephemeral conception of God, akin to the Star Wars idea of ‘The Force’. Like that’s a bad thing. :)
But perhaps that approaches the beauty in nature and the world you describe – ?
It’s an interesting point about the distinctions between LDS and Evangelical views on the being they worship. I guess I was not aware that, when they speak of Jesus, praise him, sing about him, that they perceive less personality than Mormons do? And it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be my own Mormon upbringing coming into emotional play, but that does seem very likely … though I’m not sure how that’s working. I don’t recall having as strong a cringe response when I was more faithfully LDS. More a sense of disassociation and superiority … like, look, that was wrong for young Joseph Smith then it’s wrong for me (images from the Manti Pageant dancing in my head).
The cringe I experience now I feel is more associated with seeing a large group of minds completely given, not to mere meditative trance, but to a more boogie-woogie trance-state that evokes images of minds layed-open to being hacked and re-programmed. I think I cringe because it scares me to see the natural human affinity for this kind of experience being manipulated by an organized, dogma-driven, social institution in an ulterior motive-sponsored kind of fashion.
I could get into a drum group around a fire with a group of kids on the beach and enter this state as well – it’d be weird for me but also a natural release of the “rational world” and return to a more primitive state, as you suggested. I feel less threatened, less prone to cringe, by this idea in general than by the specific case presented in the video.
In short, there’s definitely a pagan longing in me, but those who would play on those pagan longings while simultaneously calling all other forms of such expression ‘black magic’ and ‘being under the influence of darkness’ and ‘wickedness’ and ‘idolatry’ because it does not align with the one true expression, because it is not focused on the person of Christ – I cringe at that.
Then again, my Mormon upbringing spawns images of idol worship and I realize that my mind was effectively hacked by these kinds of states to the point that I see any worship of a foreign idol as cringe-inducing. So now I cringe at both my former idols and at the idols of others and wonder … what is my current idol and how is it jealous of these competing idols?
I’d love to hear from someone who has been a non-LDS Christian, and especially an Evangelical Christian, to find out what their feelings are on the experience of a anthropomorphic/non-anthropomorphic deity. My observation from the outside seems to suggest that they have a dualistic experience, where they speak of ‘Jesus’ a lot in a very personal sense that we’re unlikely to find in LDS environments – but also ‘God’ (which is and isn’t the same thing, as in the Trinity) which is non-anthropomorphic. Now obviously the relationship is much more complicated that in LDS theology, because to mainstream Christians, Jesus is in heaven at the moment – but will return in a human form again, as he was when he was on the earth before.
My feeling is that the God that Evangelicals worship in these settings that invoke the sublime is necessarily a non-anthropomorphic God. He needs to be, to be God: to stand outside of our limited world. I wonder whether an LDS suspicion of worship like this, that reaches outside of comprehensible forms, is related to our theology.
So difficult to get my mind around. They refer to a person: “Jesus” or “the Lord God”. Reach-out as if to touch. I think this is what we humans need to even begin to grasp the notion of god to a degree sufficient to even care. Some folks may not see god as so literally a man as Mormons do, but they certainly see god as a personality. Don’t you think?
Yeah, whew!… non-anthropomorphic, but personal. I think so. I’d like to see more of a focus in LDS teaching about ‘The Light of Christ’, which I think comes quite close to this idea of God. It’s not human, but it does interact personally with us. Yet – in my understanding – it doesn’t refer to a consciousness, which the Christian God perhaps does.
These conceptions of God and his communications with men are so poorly taught or defined in current LDS manuals: it’s really a shame. I really like this idea: that there’s a sense of God throughout the immensity of space, to which any matter or being can ‘tune in’: the stuff of life, vitality, true knowledge, understanding and joy.
On your other point, I agree – as I hope I expressed in the post – that I’m disturbed by the messages of the ‘verse’ in the song I linked to in the post, and any dogma that ‘piggybacks’ on the sublime.
Yet, surely the potential for reprogramming is equal to the potential of any effective use of sublimation in our culture. A live gig by our favourite bands, for example? If people are being ‘hacked’, then that’s obviously abhorrent: but my feeling is that many of the young people who are part of the Evangelical movement have made a very active choice to be part of that – I’d suggest, perhaps overall a more active choice than LDS youth. Thus, they use these sublimating experiences as a way to get a feeling that they want.
But the implications of this, again, as my post concludes, are worrying, I think.
Yes, I did pick up on your concern. The process of choice in these things seem very much chicken-or-egg to me. My earliest memories include sublime experiences in context of the LDS faith. An association of parent-child love and caring with a larger, religious dogma. I could say that I chose my faith as much as anyone, but would also have to admit that I don’t clearly recollect the process that led to my choice. That process is the hack I’m talking about here and once I’ve been hacked, I know exactly where I must go to maintain the hack. As a Mormon: any number of faith-promoting activities. As an Evangelical: the same, including a Christian rock concert.
Interesting stuff on ‘the hack’. I don’t think I made a distinct choice about my LDS faith, at any point until my process of disaffection, though. I approached the conditions for that choice, and then backed away. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, so I did it less as I got older. A true choice: where both options are available and possible – is fairly rare, I think. Which supports what you’re saying about maintaining the ‘hack’.
What about when someone, as an older teenager or young adult, decides to join a Christian group, even though he’s been brought up agnostic? I had a friend who went through that just as I was moving the other way. I respected his active choice – and recognised it as a very conscious decision. Both options were open, and he decided on which path to take. Of course, once that path is taken, I agree that divergence from that becomes increasingly difficult, and I object to that.
I attended a UCC congregation with my husband before we were married, and although it wasn’t truly evangelical, it had a lot of similar elements. And I’d say that the feel I had was of a God that was hard to access or talk about. Definitely not anthropomorphic, but also very hard to focus on because of that. But maybe that was just the style of the Reverend.
As for Jesus music, we went to a Christmas Eve mass at a Cathedral of the Rockies (United Methodist) and I was surprised at how evangelical the songs were, but also how accessible they made Christ feel. So I would say it felt like there was *more* personality, but maybe that’s not the right word for it. I also had a lot of Evangelical friends in high school and always thought they had a more personal experience and relationship to Jesus than any of my Mormon friends, and certainly more than me, which was something I envied, but never figured out how to change within my own worship experiences. Probably because of over-emphasis on prophets and men at church?
Thanks for sharing your experiences, Corktree. My Dad has given lots of talks where he shares an idea he read in a book he loves (I think it might be one by Lloyd C. Douglas: perhaps ‘Magnificent Obsession’ – ?), where one of the characters explains that the only way he can pray is to picture God there in the room with him, and to speak to him like a person present. I’ve often been touched by that idea, and found it attractive – but never been able to do it myself. I think you’re right that the emphasis on prophets and leadership in the church makes even a strictly anthropomorphic God inaccessible.
Evangelical Christians speak about ‘Jesus’ a lot. I like your term ‘Jesus music’ :) – I think it captures an important distinction. Just as our leaders in the church are men who stand in authority over us, to be addressed as ‘President’, ‘Bishop’, etc (not ‘Dave’, ‘Roy’, etc), to LDS members Christ is a title, an office. In this system it seems disrespectful to call the Messiah by his first name. Or at least, it did to me.
I think there’s room for a change here: but it will be difficult. You can’t start calling Christ ‘Jesus’ without making ‘President so-and-so’ sound pompous. And so begins to disintegrate an authoritarian system. We’re a long way from doing that, I think.
At one of the lowest ebbs in my faith, when I was verging on very secret atheism, I was still going through the motions at church and home and I was asked to sing a solo. The lyrics of the song were lovely, not quite as challenging to my beliefs as in the clip above, but still a world away from my heart at the time. I practiced them without feeling anything. But, when I sang, I became really emotional — even teared up at one point, which really seemed to move some people in the congregation. I felt confused about the experience. Was God trying to speak to me through the song? Was I going down the wrong path? As I pondered the experience, I couldn’t shake my doubts *or* the reality that I had felt something during the song. I think we all have experiences, moments of transcendence or pure religion, but we rush into explain them and put them into the frameworks we’ve learned. I’ve learned that I don’t have to explain them, that I can find great peace in accepting mystery and uncertainty.
Heidi, your experience is one I can relate to. Thanks for sharing it here. Actually, as I watched the clip to ‘The Testaments’ that I link to in the post, I felt myself welling up slightly. It’s crazy to me that I do: so much of me would resist that… but still, it happens!
I really value the concept Keats called ‘negative capability’, that you suggest at the end of your comment – and I’m working towards a dual response in these kinds of situations – the first part of which is to enjoy the totality and mystery of the sublime – and the second part (or phase, perhaps) is to – where appropriate (according to access to information, desire, etc) – seek understanding. I think it’s important for me to separate the two, though. To try to unweave the rainbow rather than enjoy it is a waste. It’s also a waste to miss the opportunity to understand the physics of the rainbow. They’re two different experiences, and I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.
I can totally relate to your experience, Heidi. I am learning to not be so questioning when it happens, but just to enjoy it. It’s an amazing feeling, regardless of the attributions you make or fail to make about it.
Heidi and Heather (and anyone else): I’d like to ask a question following on from these shared experiences.
How do you rate these emotional experiences, in comparison with other experiences/feelings in your life? Is it possible to say whether these are ‘transcendent’, ie: would you say that they are the most potent and moving experiences you’ve had, in terms of confirming/questioning/provoking/motivating beliefs and actions?
I think these experiences certainly should be enjoyed and accepted… so, of course, feel free to ignore my over-actively rational-minded questioning! :)
I can only say that I was moved and that it seemed to come from somewhere outside of me — maybe from the energy, the connection between me and the congregation, maybe because I was making myself vulnerable, maybe because singing taps into a more expressive, less controlled part of me. I think our beliefs our fluid. At an earlier time in my life, I would have taken my emotion as a confirmation of beliefs I already held. At the time, the experience simply was — I felt the spirit. This experience, and others, did convince me that I am not cut out for strictly rational atheism. I have an overwhelming sense of something bigger than me in the world and I tend to think of that as God.
What Heidi said. ;)
For me, those feelings arise in the following situations:
a) at church if I’m teaching a primary song to the kids that I really love–particularly if it talks about loving others (I know, so cliche, but it’s true)
b) hearing or reading stories of a wrong being righted, or an unjust situation being fixed
c) hearing stories of people in really dire circumstances, really striving, really reaching out to help others and help themselves
d) whenever I hear “Do you hear the people sing?” from Les Mis ;)
I can’t say whether they are the most potent, but I do feel like they are outside of my control. It makes me feel like my soul is temporarily enlarged, like I’m part of something bigger than just me. ??
I like the sense that you mention (and Heidi), of something outside of ourselves: something bigger.
I think one of the interesting things about these feelings is that, even though we’ve identified places that they may happen, this feeling always seems to retain the ability to take us by surprise. So I never feel like it’s something I could manipulate or control.
My Dad takes this point as an evidence of his testimony of revelation: that these feelings come from God.
Wow Andy. What a gem this post is.
Last sunday was the first time I attended an Evangelical church. It had the rock band and everything. I thought the lyrics were so lame and superficial but was actually touched more deeply than I have been with LDS hymns because of the desire for connection that the song evoked. It wasn’t the content of the song but the devotion that was directed into it that was so inspiring. It seemed for them the modern approach to music was a tool to “get real” with God, to break with the stiff traditions. They are trying to approach God with a language that they know.
I felt this in their prayers which were spoken like you would speak passionately to a friend (” We just love the heck out of you God! You’re doing such awesome things in the world and we’re SO grateful!! We think you’re like THE BEST! You totally get us and you’re so cool! You’re like the coolest! There is none other that matches your niceness!). I really like it but it’s so different than the sacred stillness and whispering that marked many of my most impacting experiences with prayer. I didn’t speak to God as a friend, I spoke to him like a king with a kind heart. My words would have been chosen carefully and with utmost respect. I’m fascinated when I come upon different valid approaches to cultivating reverence for God.
I love what you said about words like Hallelujah and Hosanna. My favorite hymns were always any hymn that said Hallelujah. The song “All creatures of our God and King” sends electric shocks down my spine when it is slowed down and sung with true feeling (not in boring churchy unison). One of my favorite songs is Hallelujah (written origianally by Leonard Cohen)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2NEU6Xf7lM
I love how these words seem to represent deep devotion and reverence for every aspect of human experience. Hallelujah says it all. It is a deep soulful communication without words. It is surrender, acceptance, profound gratitude, beauty, tenderness. It is the christian/Mormon expression of Charity. The awareness of experience and the wonderment and reverence toward an inaccessible mystery that we simplifyy into the term God.
That song and this post was very touching. It was a surprising jolt of life in an otherwise pretty lame day. Thanks Andy!
Thanks so much, Chris! Glad to have your thoughts from a recent experience of this that you’ve had. I love your characterisation of Evangelical expression:
We just love the heck out of you God! You’re doing such awesome things in the world and we’re SO grateful!! We think you’re like THE BEST! You totally get us and you’re so cool! You’re like the coolest! There is none other that matches your niceness!
This captures perfectly the dual response I have to these expressions – it’s cheesy – but it’s honest, and full of meaning for the person saying it. That inspires me. “Get real” with God, as you say. I love that.
I really enjoyed the version of the Leonard Cohen song you linked, too. It made the hairs stand up on my arms… deep and sincere expressions of love are the stuff of life.
Incredible Leonard Cohen. I just love him. Leonard Cohen is back with a great new album, Old Values – plus much more sense of humor and also wisdom. Old Ideas is definitely awesome. Did you know he was born in Montreal in 1934 ? He was actually a poet before becoming a composer and performing. You can find Old Ideas from Amazon … http://goo.gl/oZH6N