If Jesus were to open an ice cream parlor, I think it would be one of those shops with a hundred and one flavors. In my sacred imagination, He would do this partly because it would make the little children happy, but also because as the Creator, He loves variety. The more kinds and kindreds and species, the greater the glory of His work.
I have this flashbulb memory of going to an ice cream spot with my Aunt Catherine when I was around 4—it was a shop with a lot of flavors. The decadent cacophony of the colors in their buckets was absolutely exhilarating for my young eyes, and I asked for something fluorescent and variegated in a rush of joy. Twenty years later, I’m less fond of the “flood them with rainbows” marketing strategy, since now the host of unchosen options weighs upon me in my gray deliberations on utility. Regardless of its profitability or utility, however, I think Jesus as business owner would keep that diverse palate both for stimulation and frustration.
I believe He would do this first because He is a being who revels in superfluity. There doesn’t need to be 350,000 species of beetles, yet there is, with taxonomists naming more every year. If that’s not convincing, we could start tallying types of amoebae, mushrooms, or tropical fish. Another compelling piece of evidence for this proposition: the richness of our senses always exceeds the range of tasks to which we actually apply them—scientists estimate 330,000 distinguishable frequencies the ears can hear, one million shades of color the eye can differentiate, and one trillion scents unique to our nostrils. Do we need that many visitors knocking at the doors of our perception? They throng in a teeming swarm of combinations out there in the world, waiting to be discovered, and I think God delights in the adventure of that. Robinson Jeffers captures this ecstatic surfeit in his poem, “The Excesses of God”:
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.
There’s a secondary reason behind God’s character which explains why He’s so over-the-top celebratory, and it’s that He works on an infinite timeline of operation. Like a child, existential indecision isn’t a factor for God, though the explanations for this shared power differ between them. While a child’s capacity for unhaltered pleasure in simple things flows from their tremendous vitality, I think God’s ability flows from His immortality. The child’s joy over ice cream is maximal regardless of the flavor, but God has the time to appreciate every flavor in its fullness without the fear of missing out on any other—from triple tornado to orange sherbet to pralines and cream, on and on et cetera. He has the time to try it all, so why not a billion flavors of ice cream for the shops of heaven’s summer streets? Why not a billion more species of beetles?
My sense is that a life of such longevity actually requires an infinite proliferation of complexity if it’s to remain interesting. The looming shadow behind the promise of everlasting life is that inexorable ennui, the process of songs getting old and jokes getting stale. Solving this problem is one of the most fascinating tasks in theology: how could it actually be a good thing to live forever? This question deserves the most serious consideration insofar as the resurrection is something we expect to happen.
G.K. Chesterton noted that perhaps God, like the child, is in fact “strong enough to exult in monotony.” The theologian proposed that God possesses the boredom-resilient innocence of youth: “It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” I don’t discount this possibility, but it’s perhaps one of two solutions to the forever-problem, the other being an emergent universe capable of generating a number of new experiences equal to the number of moments God has before Him.
The point of all this musing is to challenge my instinct to yoke godliness—a state of relationship between manifold beings—with purity—a state of collapsed singularness. I argue that purity is a bad conceptual metaphor to use for the godly, or at least a confusing one, since the word purity itself is an equivocal term. On one hand, the pure is safe for use or consumption; pure water won’t give you cholera, for example. On the other hand, purity is homogeneity, a nothing-but limit case of the elemental absolute; this is what we mean in the case of pure gold. These two meanings are interrelated and are thus easily conflated, a quick move that equates sheer uniformity with being perfect, complete, and void of defects. This is obviously problematic, since the semantic conjoinment leads us to place what is right, real, and sacred within only one flavor of ice cream, so to speak, a sterile sameness that is antithetical to life and to the kind of universe that any life would want to stay inside of. Lest we forget, “he is not a God of the dead, but of the living; for all are alive unto Him.” (Mark 12:27)
I hope this is a convincing case for the varieties of ice cream in my hypothetical, divinely managed ice cream shop. If there was only one bucket to repeatedly dole out from to all who came and saw, Jesus would be stultified in His creativity and maybe even bored to death. The divine restlessness ascertained in this figure (and the ensuant explosion of ingenious heterogeneity) is helpful as a way to gauge God’s outlook on many things. I now want to use this parable to make a case for the untold variations in religious experience specifically.
In the case of ultimate reality, what we are tasting—the Sufi saint, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, used this term for his mystical apprehension—is not mundane cream and sugar, but the divine essence itself. Like the blind men in Rumi’s parable of the elephant, many people encounter God, yet all come back with different accounts of what the ultimate really is. According to the logic of godly complexity, however, this shouldn’t disturb us as much as it often does; I think God wants it to be this way, where the teeming differences in theophanic retellings reflect His own inexhaustible depth. My basic argument, then, is that there are many fruits of the Spirit which ripen dispersed across the hallowed baskets of the religious traditions, and that’s the way it should be. I call this stance omnitheism, a helpful marker for the religious attitude which emerges from these ways of thinking. Omnitheism sees truth in all places, but never successfully integrates all the truths into one place. It involves the charge to go out and explore the many flavors of sacredness, after the manner and image of an undyingly creative deity.
Here is omnitheism in action: I want to descriptively reflect on two distinct fruits of the Spirit within my personal experience, and then talk about how it was that I came to appreciate them on their own terms without ever neatly integrating them. The first fruit I call the tremendous mystery and fascination of God, after its invention by the religious scholar, Rudolf Otto. This is a sublime shudder that comes from the awareness I am in the presence of a cosmic power. Contrast this with the second, more usual experience (for me) of profound love and recognition. This comes more naturally within my own tradition of Mormonism, a tradition that emphasizes the kindred sympathies shared between me and my God. I submit that these are not antagonistic, but complementary opposites, for each holy aspect is felt more profoundly the deeper one wades into its other. Intimacy becomes all the more forceful within the understanding of magnificence, and magnificence takes its true mantle in the context of intimacy. In this way, I was uniquely prepared to be surprised by the devotional power of tremendous mystery, which I focus on mainly in the following story.
In the fall of 2019, I decided to major in Middle Eastern studies. I didn’t sense that God was in the decision for me. Rather, I felt that God was elsewhere, and had a hunch He might be hiding. In a process more akin to external attraction, I sensed God’s voice calling from somewhere in the field of holy cities and prophetic texts. It wasn’t something that I could clearly explain to people, beyond being drawn after a reality I didn’t yet know. Those who expected a clear conclusion from me on the matter weren’t usually impressed with my evasive responses. All I could express to them were the edges of an instinct that lived deeper in me than my words.
Amidst my studies, I started to pray for more lucid suggestions from God than those I had received so far, in hopes that a purpose would materialize from this. Those prayers seemed to eventually echolocate God's response within a book: the melismatic, mesmerizing Quran, a holy spell which pulled at my spirit like a sandstorm. Soon after starting to read, I came across Abraham’s invocation at Mecca: “Our Lord! Make us both fully submit to You and from our descendants a nation that will submit to you. Show us our rituals, and turn to us in grace. You are truly the Acceptor of Repentance, Most Merciful.” (Sura 2:128) These words were pure water on my spirit.
My earlier intuitions had been confirmed by this revelation, yet they weren’t completely realized until a year later, when my Arabic class took a field trip to a mosque in West Valley. After we arrived and made our greetings, Imam Yusuf led the men in Salah. I placed my face and palms on the soft carpet and I whispered in earnest, “Allah-hu Akbar.” God is greatest, grandest, strongest. God is above all. I immediately sensed a numinous presence in my chest and tongue.
Prostration was unusual for a boy who had mainly folded his arms for Heavenly Father, a being who met him at the bedside and the dinner table. Yet the act of bowing to this new, Unspeakable Creator was also familiar—I had learned ritualized motions of supplication in another holy place. There, I called to my Father before an altar, but here was the first time I actually fell down before His majesty. A teacher of mine once said this vulnerable position was an affront to my dignity—I am a free agent, after all, not a slave. The moment, however, was only an awakening of my reverence. “And as Moses was left unto himself, he fell unto the earth . . . and he said unto himself: now for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.” (Moses 1:9) I was Moses, and here was overwhelming transcendence, enclosing all things. As I drove home to Provo, I knew that Allah had divulged a piece of Himself that had hitherto been hidden from me. He later confirmed this clearly through a sacred Hadith I read in Morocco: “I was a hidden treasure; I loved to be known. Hence I created mankind so I would be known” Facing the East, I heard you, God.
Present day
In all my interactions with other religions, those with me and across from me have made the assurance that we all worship the same God. Yet, from my epiphany on the prayer rug, I knew within my own soul that Allah and Heavenly Father were actually not the same. They lived in separate places of my mind, standing in relation to each other, much like neighbors, but they were not twins. Before this internal doubling, I spoke with Muslims with an assumption that their God was a discount version of my God, and that it was becoming of me to extend grace to a well-intentioned delusion. In my mind their understanding was a pit stop before the final destination of my own, embodied deity, and some friendly exposure may just get them the rest of the way. The same sentiments went to Trinitarian Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Hindus. But now I had met Allah on His throne, and I found Him every bit as demanding upon my spirit as the Man of Holiness, sitting in everlasting burnings. What could it all mean for my orientation in the world? What was my religious identity?
An initial thought I had was to convert to Islam, but ultimately I could not do this at the expense of those existing convictions which the Holy Spirit had knit into my cells from childhood. Likewise, I couldn’t disregard this discovery and move forward unchanged. There was a dissonance within my intellect that had to be justifiably accepted, or otherwise cleverly integrated into a new synthesis. This schism within was what drove me to eventually investigate a teeming variety of religious experiences, which up to that point I had thought were of a singular kind.
I consulted William James, who was a pragmatic detective of events like my encounter at the West Valley Mosque. He would call my story a “religious experience,” and he made it his mission to study other occurrences like mine. His objective in doing so was not to reveal the doctrine or rituals of any church, but to collect accounts of “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men (and women) in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” In relation to the presence of God was meant here to refer to proximity—how close or far we understand ourselves to be to the source of transcendence—but I took it at the level of identity. My feelings as a creation in relationship with Creator-Allah were qualitatively distinct from my feelings as a Son of the Divine Father. The former quenched my thirst for the sublime, that desire to be proven small on the precipice of awe, while the latter ennobled me with an eternal origin, empowering my body with celestial warmth. In this sense, the experiences were incommensurable with each other, such that I could not rationally say which was more delicious (or holy), any more than I could say whether peaking a mountain is better than a hot bath. Both are wonderful, in my mind, but they cannot be reduced to a single denominating currency of value.
When I came to this realization, I understood that like most Christians, Latter-day Saints are value monists. We’re not as explicit as hedonists or Epicureans, per se, where pleasure is openly avowed to be the only worthy experience of consideration. In contrast, our hyper-value is transparent to us in that we see through it, rather than look at it. Through our stories and rituals, Latter-day Saints elevate familial love to a status of sacral potency which surpasses all other goods, and we do this without a direct awareness of what we’re up to. I find that to be beautiful. Rather than articulating it in our words, the primacy of love is reflected by our intuitive metaphysics, where the family is the ultimate reality without beginning or end. Truman Madsen, an avid student of William James himself, expressed the necessity of our view with his lyrical wisdom: “There is in all of us an apparently infinite, and certainly ultimate, need for a rich, abiding, undergirding, trustworthy love… even in the world of religion, this craving finds extremely rare fulfillment, though it is talked of ceaselessly.” Madsen proved the divinity within Joseph Smith’s message, as it exclusively fulfills this craving. There is no doubt, the prioritization of social affection in our religion is profoundly satisfying.
Unfortunately, he also used the message’s unique power to dismiss the fruits of other religious experience, such as the silence surrounding God’s ineffable transcendence. He warns us of confusing “mystification” with “deification,” citing a series of afflicting paradoxes within the mainstream of classical theology. Madsen knew, as I came to know, that the God beyond all things cannot be the God of our tender hearts. Allah is not Heavenly Father, after all. For him, this incongruity necessitated a choice of one God over and against the other, and as a Mormon, personality prevailed over power.
Against the edge of logic, I can only speak from my own experience: the radical mysteriousness I contacted at the West Valley Mosque felt real. In that instance, Allah was bigger than my reason, bigger than Reason with a capital R, even—He circumscribed it, pervaded it, and stood beyond it. To Brother Madsen, I would say I agree that our appetite for love must be fed. However, in addition to love I would place an inextinguishable need for awe in my human spirit, a kind of food that I was starved of before that night at the masjid.
Perhaps this is an idiosyncrasy of my own psyche, and is in no way universal to the rest of humanity. In Hinduism, the rishis would call my predilection adhikari-bheda, functionally translating into something like ‘the difference of persons.’ It is an explanation to the question of why, if there is only one, undifferentiated reality, there are at the same time so many gods worshiped by humans. In the Indian Puranas, there are more than 330 million gods. Why? Adhikari-bheda: these divine hosts are pursued by distinct personalities, different emotional temperaments, and social histories.
The relativism of the sentiment may be accused of flying naively detached from the universalizing heft of a legitimate religious claim. To say God is a loving personage is not the same as saying He is the source of being, prime consciousness, or the final judgment, but we cannot easily say He is all of them at once, either. If He is all of them, one ultimate value proposition, and by consequence one principle of being, must integrate and nest the others within a unified framework. These are the demands of order, logos, and reason. All of this, yet experience reveals irreconcilable flavors of sacredness. “You say honey is sweet, and so do I,” said the prophet. “I can taste the spirit of eternal life. I know it is good.” If Mormonism was honey to me, then Islam was intoxicating wine. Upon reflection, they were equally true to the cross-dimensions of my being. What else can I say? Ironically, it was my exposure to the religion of tawheed (the one-ing of things) which resulted in my acceptance of the Many over the One. My journey has also led to a preference of experience over reason, a prioritization of sacredness over the Sacred.
I would offer two more thoughts about the Mormon tradition, in conclusion. The first is that I am thankful to understand and appreciate my own story as a member of it. Mormonism affirms many Gods over one; it has dissolved the problem of ‘monotono-theism,’ as Nietzsche would call it. Mormonism apprehends a chaotic and complex reality, one irreducible to unified field theories, one that demands tragic choices between equal and competing goods. It is more empirical than rational in its individual-affirming path to knowledge. Mormonism is generously universalist, encompassing all truth by seeing it in all peoples.
My second thought is a qualifier bracketed inside the praise. In our love for love, perhaps we Mormons do not see the awesome strains of religious experience as anything other than a series of ossified artifacts from the apostasy. For me, though, their expressions have become invaluable as a manifestation of lived religion. I’ve come to adore the perspectives of Maimonides and Dionysus the Areopagite, who could only hope to say what God was not, knowing no metaphor could do justice to His otherness. Bonaventure rejoiced in the contradiction: “God is most perfect and immense: within all things, but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased.” These thinkers used reason to exhaust itself, and God was more glorious for remaining unknown after all the exercise. The attitude of the theologians converges in this regard with the awe of the scientists, whenever they bump up against the edges of their immanent framework. “If the scientist has not experienced this cold shudder down his spine,” writes Erwin Chargraff, “this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist.”
For the practically minded, this cloud of unknowing becomes mere obfuscation at best, idolatry at worst. Mormons, in our earthy temperament and epistemological optimism, do not like to dance around the secrets hiding at the center of things. We view the limitations of rational inquiry as a dam and a distraction, rather than a springboard to the essence of divinity. In this sense, our infatuation with devotional immediacy may result in a lack of contemplative depth.
At bottom, this is a story of yearning for and tasting different elements of the truth. Like a blind man in Rumi’s parable of the elephant, I may be grasping the ear and the tail of something that ultimately includes and surpasses them both in its wholeness. For the moment, however, I have learned to come to peace with my disparate sympathies. I have felt God’s personal love, as well as His vertiginous ultimacy, and I’m refusing to let go of either.
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