Fifteen Years as a "Mormon" Mystic

It’s been about five years since I posted anything here, and those five years have been anything but uneventful. The love of my life–a Swedish convert who I met online and who immigrated to America for me–married me in the Mount Timpanogos Temple on the cusp of the first pandemic lockdown. They only let us bring three guests, and it closed the next day. But the air was thick with spirits. We both saw the sealer’s cerulean aura. She and I have lived together. We’ve grown into each other. We’ve built a world together, and most importantly, we made new life together.

Long before I met her, though, fifteen years ago today, in 2009, I published my first post here. The blogosphere was still a thing. Smartphones were new, and the Great Recession was still very much in swing. I was in high school. A teacher had just introduced me to mysticism. He had me open the Doctrine and Covenants to Section 130, and he had me read this verse:

This earth, in its sanctified and immortal state, will be made like unto crystal and will be a Urim and Thummim to the inhabitants who dwell thereon, whereby all things pertaining to an inferior kingdom, or all kingdoms of a lower order, will be manifest to those who dwell on it; and this earth will be Christ’s.

The world, he said, is like glass. Polish it enough, look closely enough, and you can see through it to a hidden glow. This way of looking at the world became mine. It still is. Even after he left the Church and became a strident atheist, the magic he initiated me into still runs through my veins. I’m still in the Church. I teach as an adjunct professor at BYU. I’ve taught the Conference of the Birds to fluorescent-lit rooms full of wide-eyed undergraduates there. Fifteen years later, what I used to call “Mormonism” still animates my soul.

Not that I’m good at it, of course. I’m as likely to quote Swedenborg as Joseph Smith. I still talk about auras and chakras, about hidden realms and higher worlds. I’m peculiar. I’m weird. But my faith isn’t in institutions but in Mystery. That faith is why I continue to revere the Book of Mormon, a miracle which refuses to fit into any tidy narrative.  It’s there in priesthood blessings, where the words I hear thrum with a heavenly cadence. And it’s there in those moments in the temple that feel like you’ve stepped out of yourself and into another world.

As such, I don’t want answers. I don’t want certainty. I don’t want to know more. I want to know less. I don’t want the world I’ve been taught about. I reject it. Give me the world the way it was when I first opened my eyes, the primal Garden shimmering at the edge of my earliest memories. Give me toy red trump trucks and shimmering lakeshores, dust motes in a sunbeam. Give me what Wordsworth called a world “apparelled in celestial light.”  I want a world without words, colors fresh as the first day I saw them, a world undimmed by concepts or associations. This is what Zen masters call “beginner’s mind.” It’s what G. K. Chesterton meant when he said “we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” And so I worship God with a nostalgia for childhood, for infancy, for what Swedenborg would call “divine innocence.” For the light you can see in a newborn’s eyes.

I’ve seen them. I’ve seen eyes that saw mine first. It was last February, and when I saw the doctors pull that purple foot from that gash in my wife’s belly, when I heard my daughter’s first wail, when I touched her skin, when she looked at me, I got it. I understood. I understand. God goes backwards and forwards from the beginning to the end of time and beyond. I am a part of a tree of human bodies born and reborn whose roots stretch down to eternity. The Doctrine and Covenants calls it the Tree of Lives. I am a part of it. So is she. And we are part of each other.

My reverence for God is reverence for her. She is my world even as her little fingers point beyond it. My reverence for God is for the warmth that seeped from her skin to mine when I first held her to my bare chest. That warmth was heaven’s warmth, and it connected me to the little pilgrim in my arms who’d just left it. I felt close to God, then. I know God loves me, now, because I’ve loved my daughter with His love. I don’t doubt that when I see her, God is peeking out from behind my eyes. And even in the dark and colorless moments I know will come, I also know that He will always be–as the Qur’an masterfully says–closer to me than my jugular vein.

I believe in God. I do, and that faith is both stronger and stranger than it was in 2009. It’s not that I can prove He exists. It’s not that I have more evidence. It’s that I cannot imagine a world without Him. My belief in God shapes my life, and my life is richer for it. For me, it sparks an insatiable wonder: the world is richer, after all, when there’s something shining behind it. I don’t know. I have no certainty. But I’m grateful for that. If I stood on solid ground, there’d be no need to try to walk on water.

So, for me, the unknown trumps the known. I long to lose myself in it. I don’t want to be rich in knowledge or anything else. I want to pass through the eye of a needle. I want to become nothing. And I have learned that God appears in nooks and crannies that seem like nothing to us. It no longer bewilders me to think that God chose a backwoods hill in upstate New York to hide his buried treasure. I sometimes wonder if all hills are Cumorahs for those who know where to look.

And so if the last fifteen years have  taught me anything, it’s taught me this: don’t believe them when they say that magic isn’t real. The world isn’t just stranger than we suppose: it’s stranger than we can suppose. The earth, says the hymn, will appear like the Garden of Eden. It does to those with eyes to see. It sings to those with ears to hear.

And even though Blogger has become irrelevant and obsolete, I’ll keep looking and listening with my writing here. You can expect more posts in the (hopefully near) future. My life, after all, is written here. It made me me.  I’ve met lifelong friends and gotten jobs with this blog. My wife matched with me on Mutual because of it. And so that first post–fifteen years ago–was the most important thing I’ve ever done. I’m not exaggerating. I owe it to this corner of the Internet–with its labyrinths of experimental and sometimes self-indulgent posts–to keep that flame alive. It’s lit up my world. I hope it’s shone at least a little for you too.