XIV. god-tier

on road trips, mormons, and divine peace

Last week I went on a road trip with my best friends. This particular quad has a fair amount of road trip experience; the sketch comedy group we were in together went on annual retreats, and somewhere in junior year we started abandoning campus for Maine during exam weeks. Though we are two years out of school, we have faithfully stuck with the group name that was drunkenly decided in September of 2016. On the night that we all got “tapped” for the sketch group, I was in Philadelphia for my mom’s graduation ceremony. I found out the next morning that I was the only girl in my tap class and, left to their own devices, the three boys chose Accelerated Foreplay as our name. Our group chat often kicks off with “foreplay assemble” and the name of our road trip playlist was Foreplay World Tour. Individually, we all have strong ties with each other, but there is a special alchemy as a four-person unit. Being with them is like being at rest.

A4P takes Lake Huron

There is a school of religious thought called apophatic theology which attempts to define God by negative statements—what God isn’t instead of what God is. The opposite being cataphatic theology, defining God by affirmation. We naturally toggle between these two frameworks when defining anything intangible. Friendship is x, friendship is not y. To me, negative reasoning is useful insofar as it’s logical—a chair is not a table—but it is annoying because you still feel like you’re at square one, you still don’t know what a chair is. That being said, in daily life, I am most able to consider myself apophatically. I can tell when I don’t feel like myself and then work the problem backwards to isolate what is making me feel off, concluding that those qualities must be what I’m not. Conversely, I find affirmative knowledge comes only through experience, which makes it less logical or even communicable, but more complete. For example: for five days, traipsing through Canada, eating my body weight in artisanal sausages and stone-fruits, laughing so much that it became the neutral state, I recognized my self. It was an embodied knowledge, not a reasoned one, and it was glorious.

aforementioned stone-fruit

Divinity appears in my life in much the same way—profound, true, and inexpressible other than me yelling “this is it!!” I am not part of an organized religion and though I am moved by religious scholarship, there has yet to be an argument that makes me go all in for one tradition. Despite that, I consider myself to be strangely and increasingly religious. God and what follows are not always at the forefront of my mind, but when I leave the thoughts unattended too long, religion appears in my life like a weed—I look out the window and see it’s taken over the whole garden. If my religious preoccupation is adequately primed, I also find that I am susceptible to some sort of beatific experience. However, the clarity I might have in a divine moment is almost not worth the anguish I feel afterward because I don’t know what to do with it. Even in a religion like Mormonism (which I am currently obsessed with), where direct and personal experience of the divine is foundational, the experience doesn’t seem to be an end in itself:

“…the Revelation, they believe, can confirm the truth of the gospel of Christ and the words of the prophets. All the basic beliefs, including the existence of God, his willingness to answer prayers, the atonement of Christ, the prophetic calling of Joseph Smith, the veracity of the scriptures, and the continuance of revelation down to the present are the components of standard Mormon testimony. The truth of it, can all be known, they believe, by inspiration taught through prayer.”

- A Very Short Introduction to Mormonism

In a religious tradition, a divine moment can ratify an established set of beliefs. My experiences of divinity are ends in themselves, like the experience of knowing myself—in both cases I’m unable to communicate the knowledge, but I feel it and that’s the conclusion. One issue may be that I’ve rooted my entire relationship with religion in William James’ conception of what makes a mystical experience. James says that a mystical experience must be ineffable, noetic, transient, and passive. The first of these qualifications has always been my favorite and I have accidentally based my spiritual life around it:

The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defied expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.

- The Varieties of Religious Experience

Words always fail, but writing about divinity feels particularly futile. Comparison sometimes helps. So, I’ll say there are god-tier moments and there are divine moments. God-tier moments are heavenly: the transition from Cuff It to Energy on the new Beyoncé album; eating a chopped cheese drunk at 4:45am while giggling on the phone with your mom; an August sunset at Broadway Junction. God-tier moments are good, they are earthly perfection, they make me happy. Divine moments can be big or small, but for me they are necessarily peaceful in that some measure of my inner human chaos is momentarily suspended. They are like swimming under a big wave: you’re already in the water but then you’re submerged, a force washes through, cold pulsing and soothing, untethered but safe. They do not make me feel happy so much as they make me feel whole.