These matters cannot objectively prove the existence of a God (whether personal or impersonal), but, as I hope to demonstrate, they do constitute the core of religious experience for believers. They provide the ground of experience on which reasoned and feeling assessments of the validity and worth of faith are based. They encompass the ways in which spirituality is manifest in history and symbol. They are the wine — and doctrine the wine-bottles.

To argue and contend about doctrine is to emphasize the wine skin over the wine. In Alma’s terms, it is to emphasize what you think you “know” over what ultimately gives “cause to believe” (Alma 32:18).

Encountering Order and Creativity in the Physical World

Joseph Smith’s 1832 journal contains a reminiscence of his awakening wonder at the order and creativity in the physical world. While specific Mormon interpretations of the creation can and should vary, this is enough to place a sacred appreciation of nature and the cosmos firmly in the Mormon tradition. This earliest version of the youthful Joseph’s first vision suggests that his awakened wonder was at least partially responsible for carrying him towards the Sacred Grove. Despite the awkwardness of the phrasing, the intensity of his experience comes through. (Spellings follow the original.)

Common Symbols and Rituals in Religion

In trying to orient ourselves when confronted by the bewildering variety of religions, we can take some comfort in the surprising discovery that all religion gathers around common symbols and rituals. Emphasizing the mythic side of things, Joseph Campbell has been very effective in popularizing the notion that humankind shares “one mythology.” The same themes, “creation, death and resurrection, ascension to heaven, virgin births,” are retold everywhere with “inflection to culture.” [3]

On the ritual side, the Myth and Ritual school at Cambridge pointed to the Year Rite as the center and climax of ancient religious activity everywhere:

But besides ritual and psychological aspects of myth, there may also be historical associations. The performance of a rite is a historical event and the archaic insistence on imitating archetypes leads to a ritually conditioned history, as is especially evidenced in kingship. [6] Hugh Nibley argues for the primacy of the temple since that is where the historical, the mythic, the ritual, the social, and the symbolic meet and fuse. [7] In Mormonism, “all things which have been given of God from the beginning of the world, unto man, are the typifying of [Christ]” (2 Nephi 11:4).

The phenomenon of a single underlying mythology in human history is arresting, whatever the ultimate explanation. Natural curiosity makes it reasonable to ask, how well does any particular religious tradition integrate and interpret these common patterns and symbols? Hugh Nibley suggests the extent to which Mormonism integrates the essential symbols and patterns.

Some people may despise the symbolic and inner aspects of religion, but they are really no less significant than the literal and historic aspects. As the writer of the Gospel of Phillip says, “We enter by means of despised symbols.” [9] The symbols guide us through the transitions and passages in our own lives and provide a means to point beyond literal meanings to truths that cannot be expressed or apprehended in any other way.

The myths of faith are not lies, but are metaphors — models that point beyond themselves, paradigms that define a community. The archetypal unity of world mythology invites humankind into a single community. I believe that ultimately, all myth points to Christ.  

Key Historical Events

Every community celebrates and re-enacts particular historical events which are crucial to its corporate identity and its vision of reality. [10]

Just as some people may dispute the historical and literal aspects of religion, yet these too are no less significant than the symbolic and inner aspects. Think of the communities defined by celebrations of the Jewish Passover and Exodus, the Buddha’s enlightenment, Mohammad’s call, and the Passion of Christ. For Mormons, historical events such as the first vision, the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon, the Martyrdom of the Prophet, and the Mormon Exodus, all contribute to a sacred history that defines and binds the community. This kind of “key event” also may include direct experience that becomes crucial to personal identity and a personal vision of reality. Some people may see particular historical events as having mythic or symbolic significance, and subsequently record them in mythologized terms. This means that some events may be both historical and mythically significant. [11]

Nevertheless, “What distinguished Mormonism,” writes Richard Bushman, “was not so much the Gospel Mormons taught, which in many respects resembled other Christians’ teachings, but what they believed had happened — to Joseph Smith, to Book of Mormon characters, and to Moses and Enoch [and later to the pioneers, during their archetypal Exodus to the west]… The core of Mormon belief was a conviction about actual events… Mormonism was history, not philosophy.” [12]

Moral Obligation

When does a sense of moral obligation become a truly religious experience? The essential “Do unto others as you would have them do to you” [13] makes good sense in any society that expects to thrive. Certainly one could feel far more secure in such an environment than in pecking orders that adopt Korihor’s “Every man prospers according to his strength” and “whatsoever a man did was no crime.” [14]

Social conditioning does influence the experience of conscience and moral obligation. However social influence cannot completely explain such feelings since people at times feel obligated to speak out against their own society, even at the risk of their lives, or even more, at risk of their soul.  Indeed, it’s difficult get much more heroic than Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, when he decides, against his social and religious training, to help Jim. “All right, then I’ll go to hell.” [15]   Many students of religion have been powerfully impressed on encountering a sense of moral obligation that seems to transcend social conditioning and survival instincts. Consider the following from the Book of Mormon:

Responses like this show moral obligation springing from feelings that are experienced as sacred illumination. Any moral act that springs from conscience in this way transforms morality from secular courtesy to sacred encounter with the holy. [16]

One final example of moral obligation deserves mention here because of its unusual complexity and intensity, as well as its vivid presence in the Book of Mormon. Sociologist Terrence Des Pres made a study of the experiences of individuals who have survived extreme horrors created by fellow humans. [17] A striking type of survival behavior that emerged from Nazi and Soviet death camps came as certain persons developed a will to “survive as witness” and to create a specific genre of survival literature. These Survivor-Witnesses can be described as follows: [18]

1.       The will to remember and record anchors the survivor in the moral purpose of bearing witness, thus maintaining his own integrity in conscious contradiction of the savagery around him (Mormon 3:11-16; Moroni 9:6-25).

2.       Witnessing of his experience is viewed as a duty, even a sacred task (Mormon 4:16; 8:14; 9:31).

3.       It is instinctively felt, an involuntary outburst of feeling, born out of the horror that no one will be left (Mormon 6:17-22; 8:1-3).

4.       The task is often carried out despite great risks; often in secret or by depositing the record in a secret archive (Mormon 6:6; 8:14).

5.       Survivors do not witness to inflict guilt or to rationalize their own survival. Their mission transcends guilt and their irrepressible urge to witness arises before any thought of guilt surfaces and at the initial stages of adjustment to extremity (Mormon 9:30-31; Moroni 9:3-6).

6.       They speak simply to tell, to describe out of a common care for life and for the future, realizing that we all live in a realm of mutual sacrifice (Mormon 4:17-22; 8:37-40; Moroni 7:45-48).

7.       Survival in this sense is a collective act; the survivor has pledged to see that the story is told (Mormon 4:16).

8.       The survivors speak to the whole world, as a firsthand eyewitness, one whose words cannot be ignored (Mormon 4:16-22; 9:30).

9.       The view themselves as a necessary connection between the past and the future (Mormon 4:17-22; 5:12; 7:1-10; 9:30).

10.   They perceive that “out of horror... the truth will emerge and be made secure,” That “good and evil are only clear in retrospect,” for wisdom only comes at a terrible price. Thus their mission is to display the “objective conditions of evil” (Mormon 5:8-9; 9:31; Moroni 9-10).

Reorientation and Reconciliation

Discussing reconciliation, Barbour writes, “The redemptive power of love is known in human life. Grace and redemption are not theological abstractions but experienced realities in which divisions within man and between man and his neighbor are healed.” [19]

Barbour’s here focuses on the experience of grace, when “people unable to accept themselves are somehow enabled to do so.  Such reorientation may need to a new freedom from anxiety, an openness to new possibilities in one’s life, a greater sensitivity to other persons.” [20]    Notice that Reorientation is a Thinking process, turning the mind, and Reconciliation is a Feeling process, turning the heart.

I’ve chosen two examples to illustrate the Mormon experience. One shows the reorientation and reconciliation as neat and sudden, and the other as the more typical experience, which includes periodic stumbles. The first comes from the Book of Mormon, from the center of Alma 36.52:

The next example comes from a writing often called Nephi’s Psalm. I’m fond of this one because it shows reorientation and reconciliation as an ongoing process. Again, I’ve arranged the text to highlight poetic characteristics. [22]

In a more recent treatment of these “core” religious experiences, Barbour adds remarks on the burden that religion carries towards providing believers with the courage and understanding to face “suffering, death, transciency,” [23] as well as the existence of natural and human evil. It strikes me that humankind also hungers for “reconciliation and reorientation” on these matters as well.

Like Enos, after finding ourselves reconciled and reoriented before God, we may find our souls enlarging with concern for our neighbors, and then our adversaries. How do we orient ourselves towards the human condition?

In the course of this essay, I have mentioned the well-known strengths of Mormonism in dealing with the problem of evil. [24] Elsewhere I have written on the strengths of the Latter-day Saint teachings regarding the afterlife. [25] Here, let me recognize the significance of the letters from Liberty Jail, D&C 121 and 122, and 2 Nephi 2 in defining the Mormon paradigm for reorienting believers towards, and reconciling them to, tragedy and death.