By Moe Graviet
An essay for the BYU “Literature and Spirituality” course, taught by Matthew Wickman.
Spiritual experiences, for me, have always been the most bittersweet of life. When they occur, I am always grateful and am often filled with a sense of awe. I feel a distinct impression that there is a larger presence, and purpose, beyond me, and I usually experience the feeling of being reconnected with a bedrock of surety and peace that has always been there. I know all of the things I thought I knew, and my vision becomes clear. However, each wonderful experience is accompanied by a slight feeling of panic on my part. Because when I feel such joy and peace, I know that a gap usually follows—whether one of silence, trouble, or challenge. As the peaceful feeling gives way to “real life” once more, and I feel as though my vision is once again becoming blurry, I often find myself pleading with God, “please, let me have this feeling a little longer.”
The contrast between the truths I feel in moments of spiritual quietude and “reality” is painful. Consequently, I often find that I paradoxically almost dread the advent of spiritual experiences as much as I deeply desire and wholeheartedly seek after them—because after I have them, I know that I cannot sustain them forever and the condition of mortality feels more crushing, discouraging, and isolating in comparison than it previously was.
In this way, spiritual experiences almost seem to wound us as much as they heal and empower us. They remind of us what we’re missing—the heavenly home and state of being that we are no longer fully a part of, and in many ways, the Father and Mother whose love and parenting we enjoyed. They remove the very real bliss that comes with ignorance. At the same time, they offer deeper joy, though it comes with deeper sorrow; and greater light, peace, and power. But the gaps are real—silences in between connections, gaps where despite our reaching and seeking, we are left in a quiet night without a trace of the divine.
Denise Levertov’s religious poetry offers rich insights into the nature of God and our relationship with Him, often teaching important spiritual lessons. One of my favorite poems is “The Tide;” a poem about ocean life and movement that does not carry overt religious insight, but seemed packed with spiritual meaning as we read it this semester in class. As I read the first stanza,
While we sleep
mudflats will gleam
in moonwane, and mirror
earliest wan daybreak
in pockets and musselshell hillocks, before
a stuttering, through dreams, of
lobsterboats going out, a half-
awakening…
I was reminded of the world that exists when we’re sleeping, about how we rarely see the earth for a third of the time we spend on it. We don’t see the mudflats gleaming, though they are, or the stars moving, or the boats going out to sea. We only see the small evidences in the morning that hint at the entire world that occurred during the night. This made me think about the world of God acting that I don’t see—how I don’t see Him moving behind the scenes, the conversations He has about His children, the preparations He takes to heal and help us—I only see the traces in the morning of things that have moved, or have shifted, evidence of His planning and working in ways outside my view. To me, these silent gaps of nighttime appear as evidence of the absence of God. However, according to Levertov’s poetry, the silent gaps of nighttime are when the most work takes place in the beyond, when the world moves in harmonic beauty and rhythm to fill its patterns. Perhaps these silences are when God also moves for me, or towards me.
The last lines, about the tide turning, are equally provocative—”Last eager wave over- / taken and pulled back / by first wave of the ebb.” In these three lines lies a beautiful, though somewhat painful, description of how spiritual experiences work—there are moments of great intensity, and inevitable moments of great emptiness that follow, like the tide of the sea. But there is always a promise of return.
Occasionally, though, I feel like I have more faith that waves will return than that certain registers of spiritual feeling will. This poem caused me to ponder more on why we so often resist believing that we have had spiritual experiences, or hesitate to trust them after they occur. If you believe in your experiences, that means that you recognize that you live in want of them, that you are actually mortal; you have to confront the fact that you don’t have them all the time, that you can’t force them, and that you are dependent on God for them to occur. Believing in spiritual experiences, to an extent, means becoming extraordinarily dependent upon and vulnerable to God—or maybe just recognizing that you always were.
It seems to me that seeking and believing in spiritual experiences takes a measure of courage. You have to open yourself up to woundedness. You have to give up a degree of control over your life and self and submit yourself to a will and timing that is not your own. And you have to accept the inevitable gaps. Perhaps the greatest gap, thought, was that moment when the Savior pleaded with the Father and the Father was not with Him at the end. To me, in my own studies, this has always been the moment when Christ really transcended and became something other. After all of the things He had gone through and done, this was a culminating moment in which He somehow rose even above where He had been and managed to become the Christ alone—someone who could understand the breathtaking pain of divine absence in the human experience. In some ways, it seems to me this gap was the vehicle of godliness, or a place where Christ became.
When we sit in our gaps and seek and choose to believe in spiritual experiences, even though they increase our mortal sensitivity, we pursue the path of godliness and choose to become. In some ways, as I sit in these silent spaces now, it seems to me that I am sometimes closer to Christ than I’ve ever been.