The Tyranny of a Burning Bosom

Adapted from Revelation, by Janiece Johnson, from the Maxwell Institute's Themes In the Doctrine and Covenants series

I grew up in California, in the Bay Area, from a family made up of stalwart pioneers on one side and fresh converts on the other. Once winning a ski trip for perfect early morning seminary attendance, I was a model young woman in a ward that loved and nurtured me, and I loved them.

But no one knew I didn’t really fit.

I’d never felt something I would describe as a burning in my bosom. And wasn’t that how we were supposed to feel the Spirit? Did perfect attendance matter, if I couldn’t feel things the right way? How could I really fit without that?

As I grew up, I felt like 98.6 percent of the talks I heard on personal revelation used a single model of personal revelation that drew on what we know as section 9 of the Doctrine and Covenants. I understood this as the model of revelation. Firstly, “study it out in your mind,” and then “ask me if it be right,” in which case “your bosom” would “burn within you” (9:8). My teenage mind went something like this: Isn’t burning uncomfortable? Nope, not me. I didn’t know what to do with that. Moreover, the only other option for a revelatory response I saw in this model was a stupor of thought—an absence of an answer. There were times when I thought I might have felt a direct “no” from the Lord. There were other times when I felt a “yes!” or a nudge, nudge, “this way” or a “wait, be patient.” In other words, my experience didn’t match up with what I understood to be the pattern of personal revelation from scripture.

However, despite the tyranny of one model, the Doctrine and Covenants suggests that there is never a single model. In fact, one of the characteristics of God, one of the facets of God’s omnipotence and God’s continued desire to communicate, is an ability to ever tailor the message to the audience, which is us. “Behold, I am God and have spoken it; these commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding” (1:24). God understands the weakness of us, “his servants,” and of all humanity. God created us and placed us in mortality. And God wants to communicate with us in a manner that we will understand, despite our human limitations. This is foundational.

Today, I think that the pattern outlined in section 9 can be useful—maybe you’re like Rory Gilmore and pro and con lists are your favorite way to “study it out in your mind” when you’re trying to receive revelation and make a decision. I have had times when I planned to do something, but it consistently disappeared from my mind and my to-do-list until the opportunity passed. Perhaps that was a “stupor of thought.” Maybe the lack of an answer was the response. The steps in section 9 can be a pattern, but they should never be considered the only pattern. There is never just one blueprint through which God speaks to us. The context of the oft-quoted section 9 was Oliver’s attempt at translating the Book of Mormon, and while that does not nullify its application to broader contexts, it might temper it.

In those quiet moments when I seriously considered my own experience, I knew I had received communication from God. It just came differently for me. A “burning in the bosom” isn’t my manner of language. When my experience didn’t line up with a scripture I understood as a singular pattern, I had to wrestle to understand how God communicated with me.

We see in the Lord’s Preface that the Lord speaks to me in my “weakness” after my “manner . . . of language” so that I “might come to understanding” (1:24). While we may instantly think of our laundry list of weaknesses that we want to fix, this is “weakness” singular. Not plural. We’re all weak; it’s our mortal condition. Some people’s weaknesses are readily apparent; for others, they are hidden deep below, away from the world. But for all of us, weakness is our mortal state. And God still wants to communicate with us “in our weakness.” We can all learn to hear and feel his seeking after us. God will speak to us “after our manner of language.”

Our “manner of . . . language” might be our native tongue. God will not communicate to us in Japanese if our native tongue is Dagaare, nor in Quichean if we speak Danish. By extension, the Lord won’t speak to us in a way that is unnatural or foreign to us. In our premortal life we could communicate with God freely, but that is covered to our minds in the present. Passing through a veil of forgetfulness obfuscates our prior relationship with God and we need a lifetime to learn through our experience how God communicates with us individually.

If the Lord speaks to us in a manner that is tailored to us—“after our manner of language”—it opens up the possibilities for adaptation as well as recognizes commonalities that we can share. Maybe “a burning in the bosom” works for many people, just not me. I personally feel the Spirit in a variety of ways: sometimes the Spirit makes me confident, sometimes it makes me feel hyper and ready to act, other times it provides an overwhelming peace. I’m a big fan of Joseph’s description of “pure intelligence flowing” unto me. But when it comes to big questions in my life, they tend to follow a pattern I have learned over years. As I teach and talk with my students about revelation, I ask them to think about how they receive revelation. Over several years, I kept track of students’ responses, which I’ve formed here into a word cloud. Of course, we see a number of commonalities, general principles that work for various people, like peace or an absence of anxiety. But there are many other unique responses such as feeling “like warm pjs just out of the dryer” or “feeling a kick in the shins” or a “cleverly candid” response. These might be different descriptions of similar feelings, but each individual offers a distinct semantic explanation. How does one “feel that it is right”?

Perhaps had I focused on the latter clause, "feel[ing] that it is right” (9:8), I could have earlier expanded my own sense of revelatory abundance. I might have recognized that talks I had heard, scriptures generally, and the Doctrine and Covenants specifically don’t ever just offer a single model of revelation. Moreover, all individuals are not the same. Intuitively, we know that we are all born as different people, even before we are shaped by life’s experiences. Yet, at times, we act as though everyone is built the same way and that the voice of God will speak in exactly the same way to all people. The tyranny of a single model can limit the condition of the revelatory possibility for each of us. A singular focus on one model to the exclusion of all others limits the possibility of learning how God speaks to each of us individually and negates the valuable experiences of others. Understanding how God speaks to us is not something that anyone else can do for us. We must learn by experience.

As we continue to gain this skill, we learn which patterns the Lord uses to communicate with us collectively, and which might work with our experience and how we “feel that it is right” individually. No one else can perfectly tell me how this works—just like no one can perfectly tell you how this works. We each have to work to develop that skill through our own experience.

Janiece Johnson is a California native who loves history, design, art, good food, and travel. She has master's degrees in American History and Theology from Brigham Young University and Vanderbilt’s Divinity School, and a PhD from the University of Leicester in England.

Art by Leslie Graff.

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