Illusion, disillusionment and revelation

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This is a guest post by Lucinda Hancock, who describes herself as a Mormon wife and mother of eight wonderful children.

We are all familiar with illusion as a form of false knowledge. When we discover the false nature of a previously believed illusion, we call it disillusionment. But disillusionment, with its false hope that we can arrive at honest truth by simply not believing, cannot be our final destination. Merely losing an illusion does not constitute finding truth.

I recently watched a sort of interview between two men, Peter and Ray. They debated whether or not God existed. Peter asserted that God does not exist. The final part of their conversation follows.

Ray said:“Peter, could you be wrong about God’s existence?”

“Yes, and could you be wrong about God’s existence?” replied Peter.

“No.” Ray said, unexpectedly.

“Then, I think you’re rather closed-minded.” was Peter’s flustered reply.

I didn’t see how Ray could get past this road-block. But then Ray made this comparison that I will never forget,

“If I said to you, ‘Could you be wrong about your wife’s existence?’ You’d say… ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I know her and love her.’” He continued, “I know the Lord and love the Lord, and He transformed my life.”

This was a powerful example to me of the principle of revealed truth. Ray knew God. He could not be disillusioned because his knowledge was based on experiences with God that He could not deny.

There is a critical time when we are confronted with things that seem to contradict what we’ve known to be true. We need discernment to sort out how losing an illusion affects our understanding of other truths. For instance, when a person is young and healthy, death might as well not exist. It seems so far away and often they live life as if they will never die. This is an illusion of immortality. When such an individual’s life is touched by death and its inevitability, it often comes as quite a depressing shock.

As believers, we hold to the truth of immortality. So what is the difference between an illusion of immortality, and the reality of immortality? As it turns out, death is a part of immortality and a vitally important step in the progression of life. But we cannot receive this knowledge by merely juxtaposing our youthful illusion of immortality with the fact that death happens. We have to seek knowledge of unseen things that are in fact real. Life, in this perspective, is just another thing that we give up in order to increase it. It is an amazing truth that our Savior loved us enough to give His own life. But it was not lost, instead it was increased and abundantly shared.

This concept of love powerful enough to demand our all leads me to another sometimes painful disillusionment. In “For the Beauty of the Earth”, we sing in gratitude “for the joy of human love”. But what is love? I think we all can see that the world has been mixing and substituting false ideas into what we think of as love. And this has exposed us to disillusionment on a massive scale. I know for me, sorting out all the messages can be disheartening. I’ve sometimes bought into illusions about the perfect marriage, the perfect family, the perfect life, which has often led to disillusionment. But I think it’s a mistake to allow disillusionment to embitter us and focus us away from the real beauty. It is the adversary who would have us so focused on marital and family hardships… real, heart-breaking hardships… that we forget to seek out the “joy of human love.”

Here I quote Parley P Pratt “It was Joseph Smith who taught me how to prize the endearing relationships of father and mother, husband and wife; of brother and sister, son and daughter. It was from him that I learned that the wife of my bosom might be secured to me for time and all eternity; and that the refined sympathies and affections which endeared us to each other emanated from the fountain of divine eternal love. It was from him that I learned that we might cultivate these affections, and grow and increase … to all eternity; … I had loved before, but I knew not why. But now I loved—with a pureness—an intensity of elevated, exalted feeling, which would lift my soul from the transitory things of this grovelling sphere and expand it as the ocean. … In short, I could now love with the spirit and with the understanding also.”

Notice that phrase, “this grovelling sphere”. Elder Pratt certainly knew the pains and disillusionments this world has to offer, but he sought after the higher truths. He uses the words, “prize”, “cultivate”, “refined”, “pureness”. These can give us a sense of how to accomplish true love.

This leads easily into another illusion I often struggle against: That if God really loved me, He would make life easy for me, and then I could truly be happy. The disillusionment comes when things aren’t easy. The danger with this disillusionment is that I could turn away from God, and decide He must not love me, or want me to be happy.

What a gift the scriptures and the accounts of the prophets are. I read that God chastens those He loves. I read that unto whom much is given, much is required. I can view the sufferings of Christ and count it an honor to share in His portion. I can learn real sorrow for my sins.

This leads me to one of the foundational Christian disillusionments. As I’ve gone through life, it has gotten harder and harder to retain the illusion that I am good the way I am. Sometimes I turn to self-improvement. I think “surely self-knowledge will enable me to fix myself and become good, really good, through my own determination.” However, it doesn’t take many repetitions of failure to realize that I simply am not capable of redeeming myself. Then there is the temptation to just give into the disillusionment, and say “I just am the way I am and I can’t change that”. While it is technically true that I cannot do it on my own, the glorious good news is that Jesus Christ has the power and desire to redeem us from sins. He is the rock of our salvation.

So let’s have courage, that when the rains come down and the floods come up, to seek the truth that can only come from God. To borrow some phrasing from Elder Bednar’s talk “Things as they really are”, Lucifer will attempt to substitute the monotony of [illusions and disillusionments] for the infinite variety and beauty of God’s truth.

18 thoughts on “Illusion, disillusionment and revelation”

  1. Lovely post –

    This is why I get frustrated when someone who has experienced God and had a spiritual confirmation then decides that some historical “fact” is sufficient to justify scuttling it all.

  2. I like the little reminder of childhood when illusions are often in their prime ‘when the rains come down and the floods come up’. May your house stand. ; )

  3. Oops, I was still signed in with my alternate identity when I made the previous comment. 1 Corinthians 13:11 states it well “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.” The faith of small children is good, but it will inevitably fail as events bring about disillusionment. Mature faith is based on pain and struggle.

  5. I tend to strike up conversations with people of all religions and do impromptu interviews. Some are very passionate and bear there testimony to me. I have been told dozens of times “Our meeting was not by chance, the Lord has his hand in us coming together”. After hearing so much from so many religions I believe the only way to separate illusion from truth is historical and doctrinal inspection. inconsistencies are very telling. Prayer is subjective, as are the answers one gets. Sincerity does not produce consistent results. Try bringing a difficult doctrinal issue to Sunday school and ask all to pray about it this week and without looking up the answer in a book, bring their answers to prayer. The right questions will bring widely different answers. some illusion, some truth. You may even get some real revelation. You will be left with the problem of discerning which is which. Then you will probably resort to historical and doctrinal inspection.

  6. I think much disillusionment comes because we have unrealistic expectations. We believe prophets must be infallible, and when we suddenly find they are human, we are disillusioned. Or our bishop/leader did something we do not agree with, hence another disillusionment. Or history shows that things are not quite as someone taught.
    That spiritual things can be as difficult to unravel as scientific discoveries, and requires us to either discover it for ourselves or trust someone, is not surprising. It is not hard to lose faith in one or the other, because we see flaws. But when we do see something that gives us solid physical or spiritual evidence, I would hope we would not quickly abandon it without very good reason.
    There is strong evidence for evolution, the Big Bang, and many other scientific discoveries, None of them require us to give up God, whom we discover in a different, but equally valuable, method.

  7. I think there is currently serious doubt about the Big Bang theory. We obtain universal agreement only by government fiat, which is the sure death of honest inquiry. Reality is highly subjective and most ‘facts’ beyond simple measurement are necessarily the product of consensus. As an example, what I regarded as an unusually warm spring, my daughter in Florida regarded as a chilly streak but the temperatures were the same. Sceptics like to think they dismiss anything that cannot be measured and subjected to verification by others, but personal preferences, experience, imitation of elites and countless other factors influence how we perceive the world. Ontology continues to be a lively field even after thousands of years.
    I am convinced that the evidence of my heart and mind are valid. Just as, as an artist, I have learned to see colors and patterns missed by others, as a believer I have learned to know things that sceptics will never perceive as long as they refuse to look.
    .

  8. “There is a critical time when we are confronted with things that seem to contradict what we’ve known to be true.”

    Exactly.

    Even though Ray answered “No” to Peter’s question (and his reply was correct), Peter had the humility to answer “Yes” to Ray’s initial question. Peter admitted that he could be wrong. At least in this confession, he was open to receiving truth.

    Of course Peter was wrong to assume that Ray was “close-minded” for answering “No” to his question, but newly revealed truth will challenge both the Rays and the Peters of the world. Even the Rays of the world will have to rise to a greater understanding of things as they really are.

    Whether as Rays or as Peters, when we are confronted with truths that seem to contradict that which we already hold to be true, hopefully we can all rise to the greater truth, and to a greater knowledge and love of God.

  9. Shortly after I met my stepfather I decided to engage him in a spiritual discussion about truth. I Introduced him to the Gospel as a active Mormon. He kept bringing me back to. “That’ your truth. Everyone must seek there truth”. I thought he was playing a game with me at first to placate my push at ultimate truth, “The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ”.
    How can there be more than one truth if they contradict each other, I asked him..
    The more I got to know him, the more I saw the wisdom in what he said. “Spiritual truth is not mathematics It is based on your spiritual plane and your spiritual needs”.
    There is always someone or some institution that is willing to fill the vacuum of need. Thank the goodness of mankind for that. And yes, It is truth mingled with the doctrine of men (and women). It is mixed and stirred and baked or half baked. And the recipe is changed when people get tired of it or say it’s a bad recipe. Perhaps the truth is that “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players. They have their exits and their entrances. And one man in his time plays many parts”.
    What a beautiful play it is. Everyone gets an important role if only for a short time. Everyone plays parts that change them forever.

  10. Lucinda Hancock
    Just want you to know, I liked your post. especially your take on self improvement. There is no downside to self improvement. That is one of the things that attracted me to LDS doctrine. Good Job.

  11. One of the foundational aspects of my religious understanding since my teenage years has been Alma Chapter 32 and its explanation of how we come to know the truth of the gospel. I was always interested in science, and here in a scriptural book discussing how we obtain knowledge of God I found an invitation to conduct an “experiment”! Alma invites us to begin with the smallest seed of the word of God and, if we can simply “desire to believe”, plant it in our hearts and then see the goodness and truth of it as we nourish it and it grows into fruitful certainty, receiving the hoped for reward for our faith in the seed.

    Now let us step back and look at the Latter-day Saints in a wide-angle persective. As we approach the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Book of Mormon and the formal organization of the Church, social science finds the Latter-day Saints to be enjoying the fruits of the Gospel of Christ by every objective measure. The University of Pennsylvania has studied patterns of generosity among many religious groups, but the Mormons are the leaders in both the personal time and material means they donate to charitable causes, not only within the Church itself (as a major denomination with no paid ministry at the local or regional level), but also in their communities and the world at large.

    Another national study of religion among teenagers and young adults found that Mormon youth are the most dedicated and affirming of the faith of their parents, to such a remarable degree that one oif the authors oif the study, in her book about the negative picture it saw for Christian youth generally, titled her book about the LDS population “Mormon Envy”.

    The book “American Grace” surveyed the broad sectrum of studies on religious groups and found that the Mormons have the warmest attitudes towards the people of other religious faiths, in spite of the negative attitudes of those same people toward Mormons.

    We all know the evidence of the better health of Mormons. In many ways, the fruit of the LDS faith is apparent on an objective scale, at a macro level. It is the fruits of millions of personal trees of life affirming the truth of the Restored Gospel.

  12. I didn’t really care for the comparison of the mans knowledge of his wife’s existence with how he knows God exists. The specific distinctions omitted in his experience with his wife and God really make the whole argument seem cheap and intellectually straining. We can split hairs over whether God is “with us”, but we can safely say that even if he is, we don’t interact with him as tangibly as every other person in our lives. To put a finer point on it, a person can be in their car with their wife, and they can claim that God can be in that car too…but your wife can wear a seatbelt while God seemingly doesn’t.

  13. Ray does not say that he knows God in the same way he knows his wife, but that he wouldn’t discount Peter’s personal knowledge of Peter’s wife simply because he (Ray) did not have the same personal knowledge of Peter’s wife who Ray had probably never even met.
    Certainly there are men who have lied about the existence or non-existence of their wives, just as there are those who have lied about the existence or non-existence of God in their lives.
    I find the power of the comparison Ray makes is in exposing the fact that while Peter’s saying he could be wrong about God’s existence could be a a matter of fact, for Ray to say the same would be a matter of betrayal.

  14. I see the clarification you are making Lucinda. Then the issue comes down to the common arguments of induction, that just because Peter hasn’t experienced God it doesn’t mean Ray hasn’t. This is true, and probably why Peter was honest in his willingness to admit that he “could be wrong about God’s existence”. However, even though Peter’s non-experience isn’t a guarantee, Ray’s loosely defined relationship with God is no more compelling. The point I was making about the wife comparison is that while Peter could be lying about his wife’s existence, the validation of that claim would come by Peter introducing Ray to his wife, but there isn’t a direct corollary for validating God. We could abuse words and say that Ray could “introduce Peter to God”, but we all know from experience (yes, induction again) that whether one believes in God or not, the experience of speaking to God, feeling God, or “seeing God” is not the same as sitting down with Peter’s wife, shaking her hand, seeing her with your eyes, and engaging her in conversation. We may choose to carry some of the same language over while trying to describe both experiences, but we at least acknowledge that those experiences are different. So if Ray is afraid of betrayal, perhaps he could be at least a little more precise on exactly what the nature of his experiences have been, and what sensory data he is relying on to build his certainty of God’s existence.

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