This post is part of my series about spiritual experiences and mental illness. The experiences I’m going to share are ones that I thought of as too sacred and personal to share. They are still deeply meaningful to me. But I have a point to make and these experiences help to illustrate my point.
God’s Love
About 15 years ago, I had the purest experience with God’s love that I’ve ever felt. My life was at a difficult point (understatement). I was a single mother with three small children and their father had checked out (he later checked back in). I was also deep in a mental health crisis that I would recognize only in hindsight. I didn’t have health insurance, so I couldn’t have gotten help even if I’d known what was going on.
The problem that I identified was that I didn’t love my children enough. I was emotionally exhausted and overwhelmed and I saw my children as obstacles — obstacles to rest, obstacles to peace, obstacles to having time to grieve. I yelled a lot, cried a lot; I needed a break and couldn’t get one; I even got physical – like yanking them around, or smacking them on the leg.
My solution was to pray for charity for my children. I needed to feel God’s love for them to make up for the lack of love that I felt. Of course, I could never admit to anyone else that I was such a terrible mother that I had to pray to love my own children, but it’s been enough years and I have a different perspective now, so I can admit what I did. I prayed for help to love my little children.
God answered. With two of my children, the answer was what I expected. I felt an overflowing love for them, their cute little faces and bitty bodies. It helped a lot to dissolve the resentment that I was building up towards motherhood.
With the other child, the answer was … more. This was my most challenging child at the time because he needed me the most. He had to be in the same room with me at all times. He wouldn’t go to Primary without me, which ruined the only time I got to spend with adults every week. He was the most fractious, the most demanding, the most difficult one. I honestly just wanted him to leave me alone.
I took him to his preschool swim lesson one day; a perfectly ordinary activity we’d done many times. Parents had to stay in the pool area during lessons, but at least he got more than ten feet away from me. As he was walking away from me, towards the pool, I was suddenly overwhelmed with joy and anticipation, like a little kid on Christmas morning. That little boy — he was going to grow up! And I would get to watch him! He was going to discover who he was and it was going to be the most exciting thing that ever happened on the entire planet! He would make mistakes; he would accomplish his goals; he would overcome difficult times; he would fall in love; he would cry; he would be happy; he would be himself! And I would be part of it! I felt like I was floating with excitement.
Then he got into the swimming pool. You know how little kids love the water? He was in the swimming pool, the most exciting location of his young life! And you know what he did!? He turned around and waved and I saw his mouth form the words, “Hi, Mom!” I nearly cried with joy. He loves the water so much and there, right there in his happiest place, he thought to turn around and wave at me! He was so happy and he thought of me! What an incredible thing for him to do! I’m his mom! Yes! That’s my son right there! The one who just turned around and waved! Did you see him? He’s mine! I’m his! We belong to each other! I am so incredibly happy that he’s my son!
And God dropped the thought into my head, “This is how I feel about you.” I was stunned. These years were so difficult that, while I knew God loved me, I rather thought it was an obligation for him. I was tiresome and needy, but he had all that longsuffering charity and so he loved me. That was the moment I found out that God didn’t love me out of duty. He loved me with all the excitement that I felt for my son in that moment. He was so excited for me to grow into myself, and to walk with me through good times and bad times. God loved me AND he was happy about it!
It would be months before I would realize that I was so excited to watch my son grow into himself that I had not a single thought about my own expectations for him; head empty, no motherly goals for him at all; no assurance that he would make me proud or do what I wanted him to do; none. That lack of prophecy has been fulfilled. This son has grown up to be perfectly, exquisitely, ordinary.
God’s Anger
In this same time period, I was working through some terrible things in my past. I was using the Church’s Twelve-Step program for the wives of porn addicts as ad hoc group therapy. It’s fine; lots of us were working through a lot of trauma and issues while everyone else’s husbands (my husband refused to attend) were in the next room working the Twelve Steps to overcome their porn addictions.
The Twelve Steps for wives hoped to rebuild marital relationships damaged by porn use. I was using the Twelve Steps to heal from childhood abuse instead. I firmly believed that I could rebuild the relationship with my father even though he wasn’t going to repent or apologize to me, or even acknowledge what he’d done. One of the prayer exercises in our workbook was to pray every day for two weeks to see our husbands as God sees them. The purpose was to feel charity for our sinful husbands. But I would pray to have charity for my father. I still believed that if I just forgave my father enough, I could fix things between us and have a good relationship. This prayer exercise would change me so that I could be in the same room with him without … without whatever kept me from being in the same room with him. (I was barely getting reacquainted with my emotions and didn’t know how to describe my feelings.)
I prayed for charity for my father. I was used to a constant feeling of connection with God and I knew what it felt like to pray and get an answer. But nothing happened. My prayers bounced off the ceiling. I redoubled my efforts. I scoured my heart for any iota of a grudge or unforgiveness and tried to pray it away. I needed charity for my father; I needed it. After all, look what happened when I prayed to have charity for my children!
After about a week of daily prayers, I could tell praying for charity wasn’t going to work. I thought up some alternative wording. I would pray and ask God to help me see my father as he (God) sees him. God loves all sinners; after all, he loved me unconditionally. I just needed to access that feeling for my father. So that’s the prayer I prayed: let me see my father as God sees him.
Readers, it was horrifying. The wrath of God is nothing like you can imagine [fn 1]. I don’t remember anything about it; just the aftermath. It disturbed me so much that I didn’t pray for the next three days. When I knelt down again, my question was why my father had all those big callings and profound spiritual experiences if God was so angry with him. I wasn’t expecting a real answer; I was expecting one of those “just trust me” and “it will make sense in the afterlife” sort of answers. But instead I felt like I should open my scriptures and I opened right to D&C 76:31-37. I’ve never done that before — I’ve never prayed to have the scriptures fall open to the verse that would answer my question. God told me to open the scriptures and he showed me the verses about my father. Here they are:
31 Thus saith the Lord concerning all those who know my power, and have been made partakers thereof, and suffered themselves through the power of the devil to be overcome, and to deny the truth and defy my power—
32 They are they who are the sons of perdition, of whom I say that it had been better for them never to have been born;
33 For they are vessels of wrath, doomed to suffer the wrath of God, with the devil and his angels in eternity;
34 Concerning whom I have said there is no forgiveness in this world nor in the world to come—
35 Having denied the Holy Spirit after having received it, and having denied the Only Begotten Son of the Father, having crucified him unto themselves and put him to an open shame.
36 These are they who shall go away into the lake of fire and brimstone, with the devil and his angels—
37 And the only ones on whom the second death shall have any power;
Then I was given an understanding about the sons of perdition. I had always thought a son of perdition denied the Holy Spirit and Christ’s Atonement in a grand, public declaration of disbelief. But it isn’t. If the Holy Ghost whispers to a man that he has sinned against his daughter and must repent, and he silently refuses to do so, he has denied the Holy Ghost and denied his own need for the Atonement. Even while my father was holding a high and responsible Church calling, he had become a son of perdition.
Shocked, awed, scared, and deeply troubled, I never prayed to love my father again.
The Postscript
As the years passed without any contact with my father, I began to heal. It was a slow process with some backsliding and despair, but also achievements and good days. One day, probably six or seven years after God told me my father was a son of perdition, I was reading a memoir and the author talked about his experience with positive affirmations. Yeah, it was probably something inspired by The Secret, but my mind snagged on it. It was a prompting. I needed to start positive affirmations.
Sadly, I couldn’t think of any. Mind totally blank. I prayed and asked Heavenly Father what affirmation I should recite to make a positive difference in my life. The sentence appeared in my mind (I don’t hear voices) and I wrote it down in my journal: “I, Janey, will receive a sincere apology from a male authority figure.”
The next line in my journal is “I don’t know if I even dare say that out loud.” That idea was simply unthinkable. It definitely didn’t come from my subconscious. I’d had a bad experience at Church a few months prior to this and thought maybe the bishop would apologize to me. As I kept saying that sentence out loud, my confidence increased. I deserved a sincere apology! I was worth an apology! No man had ever apologized to me in my entire life and I should get an apology!
Three days later, my father showed up at my office. Unexpected, unwanted, and unannounced, he’d tracked me down — we hadn’t spoken in years so he had to do some sleuthing to find me. (Why idiots in other offices suggested more locations for him to check boggles my mind. If a man shows up and doesn’t know where his daughter works … maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe you shouldn’t help him find his daughter? Just a thought.) The front office called. I took a minute to gather my thoughts and repeat those affirmations to myself. Wow. This was why I got that prompting. The Spirit was preparing me for this visit.
He did not apologize. BUT. Here’s the important part: I told him he owed me an apology. For the first time in my life, I stood up to my father in person and told him he owed me an apology. I’d hinted at it before in a text message and once in an email. My father has a very strong personality and my spine dissolves when I’m in his presence. Because of those three days of affirmations, I had enough confidence to hold the line in that awkward meeting.
When he said he did not owe me an apology, I told him I never wanted to see him again and I walked away without looking back. I have never seen him again. I was SO PROUD of myself! You have no idea! I was in my mid-40s and I had FINALLY stood up to my father.
The next morning, the affirmations sounded useless and I never said them again. I’d obeyed the prompting and they’d served their purpose.
Revelation
These are some of the (many) experiences that I can’t explain away as products of my own subconscious. These revelations completely changed my attitude about something I thought I knew. They were constructive. I stopped wasting emotional energy on believing that I had to fix the relationship with my father. I started believing I was worth an apology. I started to believe that God actually liked me, he didn’t just love me out of duty. This gave me more confidence in friendships. It also changed my perspective on my children — I gradually gave up my motherly goals for them and just relaxed into letting them be who they are.
While I stopped praying to love my father, I still had to pray to forgive him. I’ve already posted about that experience in my previous posts What Really Goes On In Hell and The Purpose of Hell.
[fn 1] D&C 76:44-47 says: 44 Wherefore, he saves all except them—they shall go away into everlasting punishment, which is endless punishment, which is eternal punishment, to reign with the devil and his angels in eternity, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched, which is their torment— 45 And the end thereof, neither the place thereof, nor their torment, no man knows; 46 Neither was it revealed, neither is, neither will be revealed unto man, except to them who are made partakers thereof; 47 Nevertheless, I, the Lord, show it by vision unto many, but straightway shut it up again;
My experience matched verse 47.
Questions
- If I told either of these experiences over the pulpit at fast and testimony meeting, would you be impressed? Would it make a difference if the person telling the story was the Stake President instead of a divorced and eccentric woman?
- You know when people say they’ve had experiences that are too special and private to share? Yeah, this. Should I just keep these things to myself? Should other people? What do we lose or gain by saying too much about deeply personal experiences?
- Have you ever had a spiritual experience completely change your mind about something?
Janey, I, for one, am very grateful that you’ve shared these experiences. I can’t say that I personally have experienced very much that’s anything like this. But reading about your experiences has buoyed me up today.
I will say, I don’t like the idea of an angry God. I am not sure what to make of your vision/experience. I believe you. But I don’t know if I want much to do with a God capable of those depths of rage. That may be a limit of my own moral imagination and experience. From what you’ve shared before about your father, perhaps something in the universe needs to feel that level of wrath and revulsion. Maybe this is why we’re counseled against trying to make gods in our own image.
This was such beautiful, fantastic writing. Thank you too for writing about the wretchedness of raising small humans. We don’t talk about this, and we should. I loved my littles. I had a supportive partner. The experience repeatedly broke me all the same. Not all the time. And the highs matched the lows. But wow.
And to answer some of your questions, if you or my stake president or anybody shared these kinds of experiences in fast and testimony meeting, and I didn’t know about them what I know about you (that I respect you, on many levels), I’d definitely be skeptical. That’s a Margie problem, I think.
Thank you so much for this. ❤
Janey – I stand in awe. They say that life is not “fair”, and of course it is not, even in a general way. But – some things should not be permitted. And some people should not be forced to accept a particular road. And some people’s souls are Beautiful, when we are allowed a glimpse of some aspect. Thank you for this glimpse.
I have to respond in three very different ways:
First, about the writing and the writer, thank you! This writing makes me a better person, makes me feel connected, makes me love the writer. That’s happened to me a handful of times before. It’s a holy moment.
Second, about childhood abuse, I was forty years old before I learned about childhood abuse as anything more than a line item on a list of bad things that happen. On the one hand, learning that late, continuing in naivety for that long, can be a kind of blessing. On the other hand, when I learned it came as an almost deadly blow. I’m so sorry. Not in contrast but in solidarity with your reading of D&C 76, I have long thought the stumble and the millstone of Matthew 18:6 are to the same effect.
W
Third, about my own never to be told experiences, I have tried a few times with some of the experiences, but I’m reluctant to give them up and in my case, at least, I find it difficult to impossible to make sense for a Mormon audience. You’ve done a remarkable job of making your experiences understandable. I don’t feel like I could do the same. I will say that God’s love as I have experienced is so radically, so profoundly, bigger and deeper than I can express that it really needs a new word.
1. I think so.
2. It depends.
3. Yes.
I think we, speaking generally, over-fixate on the institution and we fail to see how God works with individuals. Thanks for sharing your story.
Janey, I have also prayed about my abusive father. I may not be as brave as you are, because I am not sure how much I am willing to share. Yup, too sacred to share.
One aspect I am willing to share is that I know that God is pretty angry at my dad too. But God has also told me that he still loves him. Words of, “I love him too and I will take care of it.”
Maybe I will share a bit more later, let me think on it.
But part of the answer came when I was reading in the NT. It was a modern translation, where they had gone back to the original Aramaic . So, I was at the part where it says that Judas is a son of perdition. In the King James Version, Jesus says, “I have lost none of them that thou gravest me, except the son of perdition.” But this translation said, “I have lost none of them that thou gravest me except he who chose to be lost.” Sons of perdition are not cast into outer darkness, but they made a choice to be lost. They knew and they made a choice.
Thank you for sharing this. I know that some experiences can be quite personal to people, which is often why they don’t share them. But I often feel like the “too sacred to share” mentality has completely overrun almost everything and now nothing is ever shared to the point where it seems like spirituality in the church is just reduced to vague impressions. Or, they are only valid if they come from someone with “keys” and a title. So again, thank you for going out on a limb. We would not have a church or a history packed with interesting meaning if spiritual experiences had been “too sacred to share” from the beginning. And if I understand the history correctly, the effort to tamp down on all the lay members sharing their experiences came from the top to better exert control on the narrative.
Your spiritual experiences are striking to me. They are packed with meaning that even I can feel in your retelling of them. I think they reveal a lot about God and his interactions with you. And I have to admit, I find myself feeling a little sense of jealousy that God has mostly not ever communicated with me in such a way even after seeking after such things for a while. I had a powerful experience in the MTC where I felt a deep and healing sense of divine love that allowed me to continue serving my mission, yet heaven remains mostly silent for me. And the silence for me speaks volumes about the kind of relationship God wants to have with me, which I feel is really nothing.
I’ve always wondered how much more we could learn about God if we could stop being so concerned about the gender and title of the person speaking revelation. What you learned about sons of perdition is so interesting and feels like a huge and important realignment–more actual revelation than we’ve had in decades. I could only imagine the impact this could have on the behavior of men if they were told that becoming a son of perdition was so much “easier” than we have been led to believe. Separately, I’ve felt for a long time that we will not receive much more if anything until men share all the “keys” with women and give up hoarding them. We certainly will not receive any knowledge or revelation on heavenly mother from a man.
Lastly, it just pains me to hear about the immense amount of pain caused by your father. Same with Anna. I’m sorry you had to experience that.
@chrisdrobison
I’m convinced that sensitivity to that kind of thing is mostly generic, so I wouldn’t take it too personally. It’s like how my parents and siblings and I all have occasional inexplicable knowledge of the future even though that doesn’t seem to be something that happens to other people. It’s not like we did anything special to deserve it.
@janey, @anna
It’s interesting that I don’t really harbor any resentment for the people that abused me, and I haven’t since I was a teenager. I hope they’ve gotten the help they needed and are living lives with healthy relationships. It’s not love, exactly, but it’s love-adjacent. The fact that I’ll never cross paths with them again probably makes a huge difference there.
Mercifully I don’t remember most of what happened to me, but one day a year and a half or so ago I suddenly remembered the name of the one who hurt me the worst, the one who made me genuinely afraid for my life once. I thought about looking him up to see what he ended up doing with the rest of his life. I decided not to. I think I made the right choice.
I was in a therapy session once, I don’t remember what we were talking about, but my therapist interrupted me to say something like, “you’re doing it again. You’re getting close to feeling something and instead of letting yourself feel it, you’re intellectualizing your emotions to get some distance.” Yeah, that’s exactly what I was doing. I learned to slow down and feel everything. But then it helps me process to write it down and get some distance from it. Hence, this post. I completely respect others’ decision to not share things like this. It took me almost 15 years to be able to share this. And I’m leading up to a point with all these posts about mental illness and spiritual experiences.
Margie – thank you. Little kids are so hard. I absolutely love the teenage years. I’ll take teenagers over toddlers any day. About God’s anger — it allowed me to completely release everything about my father. I’d hung onto my pain as … sort of evidence of what he’d done … like I thought if I let go of it entirely, people would shrug off his need to repent. But realizing God was angrier than I could ever be allowed me to let go and forgive him entirely. I still don’t want anything to do with him, but this experience increased my trust in God. God is not part of the good ol’ boys club that just brushes stuff aside. I needed that. I understand your POV too, and thanks for sharing. And thanks for your honesty about what you might think if this was shared by someone you didn’t already know. I’ve been a W&T blogger for about four years now and there’s a reason I waited four years to share these things. I know this community and I trust this community. Perhaps “too sacred to share” also means “wait until you know someone well enough to share.” I know I’ve felt awkward when someone I didn’t know very well started telling me personal and sensitive things. Oversharing can harm a relationship.
raymondwinn – thank you!
christiankimball – thank you! I’m glad you brought up Matthew 18. Christ’s teachings about hanging a millstone around the neck of those who hurt children were also deeply meaningful to me. I spent a lot of time pondering verses 8-9 too. Those are the verses about cutting off an offending foot, and “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee”. The JST for Matthew 18:9 clarifies, “a man’s eye are they of his own household.” It helped me make peace with my decision to estrange myself from my father. For any verse someone can quote about Jesus affirming families, I can reply with a verse about Jesus cautioning people about families. I should do a post on that.
And about the impact of childhood abuse — it took me a long time to recognize the impact too. As a child, you’re forming your sense of self and how you fit into the world. Abuse causes that whole process to get skewed, causing lifelong pain and dysfunction. It takes effort and more pain to straighten that out. I don’t get those years back. I have a good life now, but I don’t get those years back, or those relationships.
christiankimball – I wanted to respond to your final paragraph too, but hit the comment button by accident. Learning how much bigger God’s love is than what I had been taught was one of the best experiences of my life. It really does need its own word and I’m so happy to hear you’ve felt it too.
ji – yes exactly! I’m working my way towards teaching that God should be personal. Once you try to institutionalize sacred experiences into a Church with defined doctrine, you lose a lot. I don’t believe in a God who wants organized religion. Humans love to form communities, so we’ll create churches because that’s just what we do. But I don’t believe the God who gave me these experiences would ever prioritize an institution over an individual.
Anna – I completely respect the decision not to share. Have you ever read “And He Did Deliver Me From Bondage” by Colleen G. Harrison? She had the same struggles with her father and I read her words about that over and over. Her book was pivotal in my healing experience. Some people need to share, but most people don’t. It’s simply not necessary for the healing process for most. I love your insight about the son of perdition — it’s a choice. You can’t accidentally sin on that level, and it’s not just a mistake or poor judgment. It’s a choice.
chrisdrobison — It’s a conundrum about sharing spiritual experiences, isn’t it? We need to share the experiences, but it risks ridicule and disbelief. Like the way I roll my eyes at the story of Zelph the White Lamanite. Joseph Smith’s revelation about the sons of perdition was very profound for me, but Zelph is weird. How to share enough without sharing too much? It’s a fine line to walk. I understand why people don’t want to say too much, especially on the Internet. Believe me, if I thought a W&T post would ever go crazy-viral, I would be a lot more circumspect about what I posted. As it is, we’re a pretty small community. Besides, I’m toying with the idea of writing a memoir, so sharing some of these ideas is auditioning that possibility. Can I share these things and be fine with the reaction? So far, so good.
About your sense of jealousy — As I got older, I got jealous of people who didn’t need as much spiritual guidance as I did. Once I was in my 30s and 40s, I was exhausted by the spiritual guidance. As I mentioned in an earlier post, these spiritual experiences came packaged with terrible, painful experiences. They’re an emotional roller coaster. The reason I got so much guidance was because my own judgment and sense of self was so badly damaged. I wanted to be able to trust my own judgment. I wanted God to trust my judgment. These were amazing experiences, and I can recognize that, but eventually I just wanted to be ordinary. The fact that I haven’t had a spiritual experience in years now is a huge relief to me (that’s an upcoming post). At the same time, I fully understand how you would want to feel that connection. I’m glad for that experience you had in the MTC. For me, I think I got these experiences because I had so few human relationships. That was another revelation I got — I prayed and asked why my family relationships were so awful and got a prompting to the effect of, “If you had better relationships, you wouldn’t need me so much.” That was hard to hear. True, but really really sucky.
I agree that God does not care about gender or title in giving revelations. My journals are much scripture as any other scripture. They’re a record of my interactions with God. They aren’t canonized, but canonizing scripture is just a bunch of humans voting on it. My revelation about how to become a son of perdition is as valid as Joseph Smith’s original revelation. I just have a much smaller audience. The Church misses out on a lot of wisdom by shutting out women.
ChrisRobinson, yes, do not feel bad about any lack of this kind of experience. Look at it this way, is God going to come along and pull someone out of a deep well, who is standing on solid ground above the well? Of course not. That person doesn’t need rescuing. Dose the good shepherd go after sheep who are not lost? No, he leaves his safe 99 to go after the one who is out where the wolves are going to get it. He rescues the lost and saves those in great danger. And it isn’t those in danger of leaving “the one true church” it is those who are unable to believe he loves them. He shows love to those who have been taught they are unlovable. If someone is doing alright, just muddling through life, he just kind of checks and leaves them alone because they are basically OK.
I think that is why all my deep spiritual experiences kind of quit. I hit a point where I am doing great and just do not need that kind of thing. Whatever god there is loves me and I am worth loving and I just do not need to keep abusive people in my life. It is odd timing, but I got fed up with trying to fit into a church that was so sexist it reminded me of my abuse and feeling worthless because of being female. My father had died about a year before, so he was out of my life. My mother was living with us because her medical condition meant she couldn’t live alone and I was the only responsible adult in my whole %$#$&&#@ family of origin. So, of course I was the one to sacrifice and take care of her. She was the same incompetent ???? Whatever you call a mother who KNOWS something is terribly wrong and ignores the problem because she might have to be an adult and make hard choices, and so allows abuse to continue right under her nose. Anyway, my mother died and my bishop conducted her funeral because I trusted him but we held it in the ward in her home town. And I never went back to church. I honestly think my bishop understood exactly why I dropped out of church because he didn’t bug me even though we were close friends. Awwwww, relief all the abusers are gone from my life. All the abusers of course included the church. And I have been great ever since. Oh, I miss my mother, she was a great person even if she never learned to make hard adult choices. But I have never been happier and you know, I should have cut both parents and the church out of my life 40 years earlier. Don’t purposely keep exposing yourself to someone who is abusive, or so ineffectual they fail to protect you from abusers they know are abusers.
See my next comment for the rest of the story. If Janey can share, why not me?
I had it written up and somehow it didn’t post.
Maybe later I will try to rewrite.
And really it isn’t “sacred” that is the reason not to share, but is it safe. And I have already shared so much here, makes me kind of hope nobody in my real life figures it out.
In sharing revelatory experiences, in addition to considerations of sacredness and safety, there’s also whether it will make sense or be relevant to whoever you share with. On occasions I have written down what felt like directly revealed flows of ideas. Powerful revelations. Earth-shaking notions. While still in a state of relative fervor, I’ve sometimes shared them with friends, or with my children or my spouse. And often but not always the reaction is “eh, that’s nice” or “cool” and then proceeding to tell me about whatever is on their mind. Sure, maybe the ideas weren’t as powerful as I thought, but even if they are, sometimes especially if they are, they won’t inherently make sense to others. They may be just for me. They may be universal, but in some way obscure to others. We each get to discover the mysteries and beauties of the universe for ourselves. If I were to truly learn the secret of life, and walk up to you and share it with you as I received it, it would be like radio static, or gibberish, or maybe like a nice poem or song or work of art. This is in part a divine grace so we don’t thieve each other’s joy.
Art is a good comparison. I’ve had songs that have cracked me open like the way the roots of a thousand blossoms break open an earthy tomb, songs that have reconstructed and remodeled my past, songs that narrate a multitude of my existence. I’ll share one of these songs with a loved one, and often but not always, their reaction is “meh, too ______”. Our revelations are divine strokes of metaphysical art, co-created.
That’s not to say they are never shareable. Sometimes I share that song with a friend, and they really dig it. Every once in a while they sit in stunned silence and we listen to each other’s beating hearts.
Given eternity, I look forward to truly tuning in to each loved one’s songs. In the meantime, I’m happy for you to try and share them with me, and I probably won’t really get it, but for sure when I find my song it’s gonna have a few measures of that one I heard at your house that one time.
bhbardo, you make an excellent point. One of my most profound religious experiences was praying in a panic about some big school assignment that I wasn’t able to complete on time and hearing a voice in my mind subtly different from my own reply “It’s not your fault.” I immediately realized the reason I wasn’t able to complete it on time was completely out of my control and that the professor would understand.
That story is utterly banal to everyone else. How could I have not realized that myself? And yet I’m confident that I didn’t and wouldn’t have and that it wasn’t me that did realize it. So it’s not a story I’ve ever told anyone before.
Janey, thank you so much for sharing.
FN Sunbeam – somehow I missed your comment yesterday! I am happy to hear you are at peace. I think you’re right on with this comment: “The fact that I’ll never cross paths with them again probably makes a huge difference there.” There were two family members who were sexual assault survivors who basically told me to use the atonement and get over it, because they had. I didn’t have the courage to argue with them, but here’s what I wish I’d said: “You were assaulted by someone close to your own age, you were free to hate him, everyone who heard what happened to you hated him, and you never had to see him again. I was assaulted by my father, the man who formed my self-image, and then I had to go to Church and sing about being loved by parents kind and dear. People told me what a great dad I had and a big part of the reason my brothers hated me was because that was easier for them than hating their father. You got to never see your assailant again. But I was expected to spend every holiday with him, send him Father’s Day cards, and let him be an important part of my children’s lives. So I’m glad you healed. But my environment is completely different than yours.”
All abuse is terrible. You can’t heal from abuse if you have to live with your abuser. Being victimized by a family member makes for a really complicated healing experience.
Anna – no pressure. If you’re not comfortable, don’t rush into sharing. I’ve had these posts outlined for months before I decided to go ahead and post them.
bhbardo – that’s a really good point. I’ve had that exact experience — where I share something and the response is a puzzled look. I learned to keep quiet, especially through the most intense times. I journaled obsessively, instead. It makes for a nice contemporaneous record of every revelation I ever had, and every thought that crossed my mind. LOL.
Janey, when I was really little, my mother told me it was wrong to make children sing that because not everyone has parents that are kind and dear to them, and that we should always be thinking about people in situations like that and how we might not even know who they were. I’ve never forgotten that. My mother was very wise. I’m sorry you had to live through that. That must have been very painful.
As I was reading your post, my heart just about burst when you wrote about standing up to your father. The phrase that came to mind was, “I am so proud of you.” And, knowing that can be read many different ways, I want to provide some context. My parents never said they were proud of me. I think it may be due in part to church teachings at the time to avoid pride. In communicating with my younger sister, we make sure to say, “Good job,” or “I’m proud of you,” whenever one of us does something challenging.
I’m also a little jealous as I never got the chance to stand up to my father. By the time I was ready to have that sort of conversation he was suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s and didn’t even remember who I was, though he knew he should.
Those are some incredibly powerful spiritual experiences. If I heard you share them in testimony meeting I would be amazed and appreciate you sharing. I think. It’s hard to say because for many, many years before leaving I had struggled with “open mic Sundays.” I tried to not hold that against the people sharing, but it was a tough day for me.
Thank you for sharing. These posts have given me much to ponder and learn. I love that the affirmation wound up giving you the strength you needed to advocate for yourself at the most needful time – though I wish that you would have gotten the apology too. But you did your part.
1) I don’t think the “status” of the person would make the difference (SP vs you) – it would be whether I know the person themselves, and thus hopefully their motivation (at least in part) for sharing. I could easily see myself distrusting an SP getting up and out of the blue talking about such things.
2) I think you’ve already sussed out, both in the comments and in your own comment/observation, about how some people choosing to share can make all the difference on at least one other person (that book you read of someone else dealing with abuse). That can be so powerful in helping someone else, but absolutely at great personal cost (if no other cost than the emotional energy you spent/spend in the telling and confronting of it).
3) I wish I have, to dovetail with others’ comments about feeling a paucity of such spiritual experiences. I sometimes like to believe that I’m a decent enough human that my day-to-day efforts to be good to other people are actually spiritual promptings, but then I struggle to accept that because these are just basic principles of being good humans. Like so many others, at times of decision in my life I have felt kind of alone.