By Jana on Mar 17, 2007
When I was a younger the phrase “burning in the bosom” always made me giggle. I mean, it was hard to say the word ‘bosom’ without thinking of large-breasted great aunts with names like “Deloris.” As I got older and realized the difficulty of using language to describe my own spiritual experiences into words, I could see why Joseph Smith used this somewhat-stilted phrase. But it still felt, for me, like the description of heartburn more than of the rapture and ebullience that I associate with spiritual manifestations.
Language seems wholly inadequate for relating the feelings that stem from the Spirit. The attempt to do so generally ends up sounding as awkward as the ‘bosom’ phrase or like something from a teen romance novel. Yet I continually attempt to describe such experiences because I want to express the sublime, to record these special moments so I can remember how they felt—to buoy me weeks, months, or even years later. But I feel a tension in attempting such expression, as it seems that the very nature of such moments are their elusivity, ephemerality, and utter indescribability. As if the whole point is that the Spirit only moves in ways that we feel and not in ways that we cannot express with words.
For me, in grappling with how to express my spiritual experiences, I write of the physical sensations overlapping with an internal dialog, as an effort to describe the fusion of mind, heart, and body. I feel, though, that my attempts to do so are often inadequate. It seems that art can sometimes be a better medium for conveying spiritual transcendence than language. For example, music is often a better conduit of Spirit than the spoken word. But art is so subjective—I may be moved to tears by a particular hymn, yet the same hymn may sound over-sentimental or maudlin to another’s ears. I find that poetry often expresses the transcendent for me, but when I share such poems with others, they often shrug their shoulders as if to say, “That’s nice, but it just doesn’t do the same thing for me.”
Do you ever grapple with this desire to express your spiritual experiences? Do you ever find yourself yearning for a universal language of the Spirit?
How do you describe the feelings of the Spirit? What accounts of spiritual manifestations have you found where the author is able to translate their experiences effectively into language? Do you have favorite passages in the scriptures or other holy texts that do this particularly well?
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You touch on an area that is often on my mind. A few comments:
1. Language is incapable of describing any experience to with any real ‘objectivity,’ with spiritual experiences probably being among the most difficult. And memory itself is now known to be not quite the ‘tape recorder’ of experiences that we often innocently believe, and can evolve over time, and be influenced by other experiences.
2. Language itself, along with cultural and limitations of personal background, can actually influence how we ourselves see our own experiences, so there are problems not only in transmitting our experience to others, but also in accurately understanding them ourselves.
3. These factors are among the many reasons why any ‘literal’ or even a ’semi-literal’ interpretation of the scriptures is inherently and fundamentally flawed. The writers are human writings, and heir to the same limitations of language, regardless of what personal experiences led to their creation.
4. And what the heck is wrong with people who number their sentences???
Comment # 1 by Questions... | Mar 18, 2007 | Reply
Poetry really does it for me, too, Jana. This one gives me a huge “burning in the bosom”:
The Chambered Nautilus
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sail the unshadowed main,-
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,-
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn;
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:-
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
(The nautilus is a small dibranchiate cephalopod, the female of which is protected by a very thin, single-chambered, detached shell, and has webbed dorsal arms” - “purpled wings” formerly believed to be used to catch the wind and drive the nautilus along. The shell itself (like so many shelled creatures one might find along the seashore) is smooth and casts off a pearly iridescence, a purple hue. The nautilus outgrows its chamber and builds another a little larger and directly on top of its existing chamber and moves in to new chamber upon completion. The chamber left behind is sealed off, adding, in the process, to its buoyancy. A series of chambers are thus built, in succession, over time, in a spiral fashion using its existing structure for support; the living creature only ever being present in the last and largest chamber.)
I can’t even describe to you how much this poem affects me! Just cutting and pasting it onto this page has stirred me so much that I won’t be the same all day.
Comment # 2 by Bored in Vernal | Mar 18, 2007 | Reply
My favorite course in college was a dialogue between a poet and a priest with this title:
Ineffable: The Experience of Pain and the Experience of God
Comment # 3 by Deborah | Mar 18, 2007 | Reply
I think Kaimi referred to this as POACHING! :)http://www.mormonmentality.org/2007/03/03/translating-the-spirit.htm
I guess it bears repeating.
Comment # 4 by annegb | Mar 18, 2007 | Reply
Annegb:
I’m totally surprised (pleasantly so, though) that PDOE and I are grappling with similar issues. I promise I hadn’t read her post beforehand.
If it’s any consolation, I’d actually planned a post with quite a different focus but at the last minute I had to scrap my original idea and this was written rather spur-of-the-moment. So it definitely wasn’t premeditated poaching, if it was indeed poaching at all.
Comment # 5 by Jana | Mar 18, 2007 | Reply
Comment # 6 by annegb | Mar 19, 2007 | Reply
As a great aunt named Deloris, I am used to being characterized as “bespectacled” and “blue-haired” and “matronly,” even “shrewish,” but your sexualized characterization of us Great Aunt Deloris’s as “large-breasted” realy takes the cake.
Thank you for finally noticing and highlighting what I’ve always considered to be my most striking feature.
Now, sit up straight, stop fiddling with your hair, and get back to work.
Comment # 7 by Deloris | Mar 19, 2007 | Reply
We often see in the scriptures the influence of the spirit described in allegorical terms. I believe the manifestation of the Holy Ghost that accompanied Christ’s baptism was described as being “like a dove” because those who observed had no other way of expressing it.
Several Book of Mormon prophets also express how their words cannot convey the things they “saw and heard”, such as the brother of Jared (Ether chapter 3). Joseph Smith in his vision in D&C 76 was not able to write all the things he saw, as “Neither is man capable to make them known, for they are only to be seen and understood by the power of the Holy Spirit” (v 116).
Some spiritual experiences are more easily expressed than others. I remember Elder Nelson’s talk discussing the heart surgery he performed where he saw dotted lines in his vision that showed him where to make incisions and put sutures.
But describing the actions of the spirit as it moves me is not easily expressed, and I’m not sure for me that the Burning in the Bosom is the best way of describing it. Most of the time it is a sense of calm and peace. I would have to agree that words are a poor medium for such expressions.
Comment # 8 by kevinf | Mar 20, 2007 | Reply
Back in 1973, after an intitute director (Robert J. Woodford) pointed out a couple of non-D&C 9 descriptions of how the spirit operates, I started collecting references. I’ve currently got about 30 distinct ways, all of which can be desginated as speaking to either the heart or the mind. The overall ballance suggests both are equally important. FWIW, I wrote a paper that includes the references, and which is currently available here:
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/articles/060215model.html
Enjoy,
Kevin Christensen
Pittsburgh, PA
Comment # 10 by Kevin Christensen | Mar 27, 2007 | Reply