Episode 241 (Transcript): Demystifying Mysticism | A Conversation with Kathryn Knight Sonntag
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Summer Kartchner for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
KS: Mystical experiences don’t translate perfectly towards a rational thought, but we are obligated to try anyway. The alternative is to have a familial and civic life that isn’t informed by our mysticism at all. And I think we have seen that is a very bad idea because anything that lives purely on a surface material level, will not survive. It will not be eternally present.
SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.
CW: And I’m Cynthia Winward.
SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things and the title of today’s episode is Demystifying Mysticism: A Conversation with Kathryn Knight Sonntag. Hello, Kathryn.
KS: Hello. So happy to be here with you both.
CW: Yay.
SH: We’re so happy. Yeah it’s great. I do have to tell you right up front, I was thinking this morning the first episode that we recorded with you, I think was the most nervous I’ve ever been to record a podcast. So...
CW: Really?
KS: Oh, no!
SH: I really was. I don’t know. I just, that’s so funny. I look up to you in very real ways.So thank you for coming back.
KS: I’m thrilled to be back and I hope you feel less nervous this time.
SH: I do feel less nervous, but then I also feel really privileged to get to call you a friend at this point.,
KS: Likewise, Susan. Likewise.
SH: Thank you. Our listeners might recognize your name and remember that we have had you on some previous episodes.
The first was episode 30, The Mother Tree, and then we also had you on episode 113 and 119 talking about revisiting The Mother Tree. Then on 119, which I think was a bonus where we asked you to say more about something that you had said, because Patriarchy As Sin. Hello, one of my favorite titles ever for a podcast episode!
So good. But I will link to all of those previous episodes so listeners can find them. Though we’ve had you before, I would love it if you would just take a minute and give listeners a little introduction of yourself, whatever you want them to know about you, and maybe something to give context to this conversation.
KS: Sure. I feel like I’ve introduced myself quite a bit to your audience, but I am from Salt Lake City, Utah. I’ve been here my whole life. I have been really lucky to study the things that I love, studying poetry and writing and the natural environment. So being able to sort of see the confluence of those loves through my career choice as a landscape architect.
I also continue writing poetry. So those are kind of the things I love the most. And then raising my two boys here has been an incredible joy. They’re nine and six, just really fun ages. Playing well together and fighting well together. They just ignite my imagination and really
bring the divine into my home in a way that is so magical. And so that’s a little bit about me. I’m just doing the same things, just still interested in writing and the natural world. I’m just happy to be able to talk about mysticism in a way that I hope is useful, and demystifying a way that people can feel maybe like it’s a more approachable subject.
KS:I’m really happy to be here.
SH: Beautiful. Thank you. That’s perfect. Cynthia, why don’t you explain how this conversation came about and why we want to have it?
CW: Well, the way it came about was at one of our book events in Salt Lake, Kathryn came to that event. Thank you, Kathryn. And we were just talking on the side visiting, and I asked you, Kathryn, if you considered yourself a mystic. And almost without missing a beat you said. Yes, I do. And that ever since your childhood, you love to, was it like lay in the grass and look at the sky? Or was it, you know, read poetry? It was things like that, right?
KS: Yes.
CW: And you resonated with that. And so I was like, would you come on the podcast and talk about that? Because for someone like me, I am prone to productivity. I am prone to being busy. I am very task oriented. As I have gotten older, I have found myself much more interested in this topic of mysticism.
CW: I’m tired of being busy, task oriented, and productive.I want to have more of a communal nature. And so that’s why we wanted you to come on. I wanted to read two quotes to kind of kick us off in talking about this topic. And one of them is from Mirabai Starr, and she has actually been a pretty influential writer for me in learning more about mysticism and everyday mysticism.
In fact, her latest book is called Ordinary Mysticism, your Life as Sacred Ground. And she said [00:05:00] this, “A mystic is someone who skips over the intermediaries, ordained clergy, prescribed prayers, rigid belief systems, and goes straight to God. Mysticism is not about concepts, it is about communion with ultimate reality.
And ultimate reality is not some far away prize we claim when we have proved ourselves worthy to perceive it. Ultimate reality blooms at the heart of regular life.”
Wow, that is calling to me right now. I want it to bloom in my regular, messy, ordinary, boring, you know, regular life. And then I don’t think I’m that far off in wanting to talk about this more because Diana Butler Bass in her book that’s about a decade old now called Christianity After Religion, the End of Church, and the Birth of a new Spiritual Awakening said this about how Americans are kind of heading towards mysticism anyway. She said, “Half of the American population now claims to have had a mystical experience, a statistic that suggests that we are in the process of returning to the idea of faith as an encounter with God, as religion in the modern sense fails. We appear to be busily re-stitching the ancient fabric of belief.”
CW: And I love that idea of re-stitching something back together, maybe re-stitching who we always have been. We just wanna hear all about those ways, Kathryn, that you have stitched your life around. Like Mirabai said about your ultimate reality, about your regular life.
KS: Well, yes, and I love these quotes so much.
I feel like they truly identify and describe a mystic and that experience that a mystic yearns for so beautifully. I will just briefly share a bit more about what I shared with you, Cynthia, when we saw each other. From a young age I was really interested in observing the world, so listening to adults, talking at the dinner table or sort of waiting to weigh in conversations before responding.
So kind of having a natural, like introversion, but also, feeling that the world was a lot like sense wise, I was very taken in by the world and sensitive to the world and felt like there was a lot that perhaps people didn’t take in because they were too busy or because thought instead of feeling was their primary response.
And so I think it taught me from a young age to not trust things done en masse, necessarily, that I had to find a sensibility inside of myself, like a resonance with my heart and my mind and my spirit. From which I could move forward in the world. And that was really the only thing I could trust.
And so, whether it was like in junior high or my LDS ward, I just noticed that culture was somewhat born out of this collective mind for better or worse. And that there wasn’t necessarily a prizing of a unique or self cultivated individual or thought. Also, in my family dynamics, there was some tension with my own parents, and while they loved me the best that they could and did their best and are good people, I couldn’t rely on their analysis or perception of the world to be my own. And I think that’s an experience many people have as they grow and mature in their own nuclear families, that they realize that adults can lead children away from their true selves. KS: They can do a lot of nurturing, they can do a lot of good, but there’s sort of that realization and we don’t really have sort of the initiation paths that many cultures have had or continue to have in sort of a western modern world. But I felt like I had to spend the time with myself, like I mentioned, whether out in the field watching clouds. Or in my room listening to music and painting and writing and watching Mount Olympus change with the weather and with the seasons - to really do that work of reconciliation with what the reality of my life was. What my heart really yearned for.
And I don’t think I quite understood I was doing that work as a child, but I did know that creative work was the vehicle. So entering into my imagination, entering into the space of visioning, what could be real was the way in which I could remake myself over and over again. So in that sense, I really love these quotes because they really point to direct experience. Your own direct experience in your life. And that’s not just on the material plane. I think we’ve had sort of decades, maybe centuries of this relying on the material world or the rational world as [00:10:00] the point from which we understand reality. But I think our own religious tradition as well as sort of the truth that remains with us. That really holds onto us as a people. Both, as a citizen of the world, but also in Christianity, are those that mend the unraveling or the rift between the eternal and the finite, the material and the spiritual and those places where we can come together and help create a map on earth that reflects a map of heaven. So there’s a way that we’re bringing this world into harmony with the world beyond and really believing through our actions, through every moment of our life that they are actually one, that the division is artificial.
KS:: So that, brings us to this point in that quote you read about coming into ultimate reality, and I think that’s ultimately what any mystic desires. And so in that sense, I see mysticism as sort of not only like the true fabric in the true sort substance of a spiritual journey, but also the final point of arrival, perhaps. And I’ll talk about this more as we get into a bit of temple mysticism, but that there’s a way in which the mystic really prizes understanding what is truly real, what is ultimately real.
SH: Right. I’m having aha moment after aha moment already, as you’re talking about some personal ones, but also I’m thinking that, you know, what you’re describing really is the individual’s work to do. And until that happens, I think we have no hope of realizing the kind of map that you’re describing on a collective level. We can’t manifest that in the world until as individuals we have allowed ourselves to connect in that way. And I feel like my personal religious upbringing did not teach me, it didn’t teach me how to do it, and it didn’t teach me the importance or the value of it or as, or how it could serve as a bridge actually to the kind of Zion that I feel is held up as the ideal.
But I’m not sure Latter Day Saints have any way to get there or have any knowledge of how to get there. How to get from A to B. And I feel like the way that our world is fragmenting right now. Not, you know, not just as Latter Day Saints and not just as the United States, but really we’re seeing it in all kinds of places in the world.
This fragmentation in societies. And I feel like that really the only solution to that has gotta be the individual journey.
KS: I feel that very keenly Susan. And I also feel great sorrow in that lack of a collective map.That it sort of points to me to a loss of hope.
That we perhaps have lost a vision. And for me, this ties directly into our tradition of the mother being in the Holy of Holies, and that being the place of vision, that being the place of the reweaving of creation together over and over again with the Day of Atonement. With a very real sort of understanding of the mysteries of why we’re here, who we are, what the vision is that the Gods have. That removal of the mother, removal of this divine wisdom is part of the unraveling of creation in our day.
And that’s something that I, every moment of my path, every moment growing up as a child, every moment mourning the state of the created world has led me to this point of understanding that without the feminine and all that it represents and adds to our healing and to our collective longing for the divine.
And to actually encounter the divine. Like there’s no moving forward. There’s no vision without her. And so in, in many ways, seeing her as this missing sort of, I think spirit, the inspiration, the literal breath that would make life renewed. She, it’s missing. She’s missing.
KS: I think that second quote you read perhaps points to that individual desire to bring her back, whether or not it’s a conscious desire of this specific goddess at a specific time in a temple millennia go, doesn’t really matter, but it’s the feminine desire for interconnection and wholeness and healing and unity that was manifest in the holy of holy space in the temple, which is just the symbol [00:15:00] of unity.
It’s a symbol of things as they really are. That everything is connected, we are all connected to each other.
Poetry really did the work of the mystic for me as a child. I had no conception of mysticism or what a mystic was, but I was a poet and will always be a poet. It’s just part of who I am and how I came.
As I mentioned before, like sort of the sensitivity to the world to what I could see and hear and taste, sort of the concrete experience of the world lent itself to the unseen. It was the vehicle through which I could speak around or perhaps circle the ineffable and understand that this beautiful world was the vision of the gods, was sort of the ineffable manifest.
And so there becomes a point at which. They’re so intertwined and so interwoven that it no longer makes sense to try to separate them. I read Rilke over and over again in high school. He was my guru and I didn’t know. It was just like the poet that I kept going to. And it wasn’t till years later that I realized, oh, he was a mystic.
This is why I love Rilke. He is a mystic. But I’ll read this short poem and I think it really exemplifies how the gods are sort of here with us watching. And then we are also reflecting a vision of the gods. Like we are the vision of the Gods manifest as well as being in that space of creative energy where there is something beyond. And yet it’s always all right here.
It’s called a walk. My eyes already touch the sunny hill, going far ahead of the road. I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp. It has its inner light even from a distance and changes us, even if we do not reach it into something else, which hardly sensing it.
We already are a gesture, waves us on answering our own wave, but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
KS: Somehow that became sort of the vision of my own spiritual path, and I think it has that universal appeal because we are all sort of moving towards something that we can’t quite fully grasp yet. But yet that we completely already are.
And it’s that realization over and over again in unique moments and circumstances that I think is the mystic experience. I don’t think it’s, I mean, on a very basic level that’s really all it is.
The ability to enter, as I mentioned, the imaginal realm has been a huge part of generating hope for me and generating a sense of healing and creation. An imaginal realm isn’t quite, maybe what people think it is or what it sounds like. It’s not like a realm of, you know, where things are just made up.
CW: It’s not a fantasy world.
KS: It’s not a fantasy world, but it’s basically this realm that exists between the physical world and the spiritual world, and allows the two to interact and to relate. And to experience things through emotion and intuition rather than just physical senses.
I love this definition that was coined by Henry Corbin, who was a scholar. He said, it is not imaginary, but an objectively real domain where ideas, archetypes, and visions manifest, which can be accessed through states like dreaming, meditation, or other contemplative practices. This realm is associated with prophecy, creativity, and a higher vision of humor of human purpose.
KS: When I encountered the Tree of Life, it was sort of this gateway into the imaginal realm for me. It became an image of not just like a cosmic structure, which is sort of, its functional use. But it became an image of connection between realms and connection between what I embody here on the earth and what is sort of, what the ripple effects are, perhaps in another realm or in a spiritual, on a spiritual plane.
And then there’s this beautiful metaphor that’s a Sufi metaphor about the imaginal realm being where these two realms meet, so where the physical and the spiritual meet. They say essentially that it is where the two seas meet.I love that sort of fluidity.
It conveys the essence of what actually happens in that space.The imaginal realm is a meeting ground, a place of active exchange between two bandwidths of reality. And it’s how its cosmic purpose is fulfilled.
SH: When [00:20:00] I saw that in your notes that image of where the two seas meet I was thinking about oh, my parents have had the experience a couple of times of sailing around the Cape where the two oceans meet.
They have described that experience to me as being a pretty singular experience. Like one of those things, you know, it’s happening when it’s happening, right? It is an extremely active experience even on a giant cruise ship. You’re still really experiencing the, experiencing something in your body.
And so as soon as I thought of that and then to read more of your description here in your notes of that, it seems to me that this would be a peculiarly active space where the two Cs meet.
KS: I love that description. Psychically active, you know? I love that description. That’s really lovely - it’s very charged. It’s very active.
SH: So I think sometimes people think contemplative zen, whatever, you know, like you’re somehow maybe disconnecting from reality, but actually moving deeper into reality becomes very active, sort of. I don’t know. I gotta think more about that.
CW: Mirabai by called it ultimate reality,
SH: Reality dialed up to 11.
KS: And I think that requires, what’s the right way to say this? A real commitment to feeling things. And very deeply. I will employ our own language here in terms of lineup upon line.
This can be a scary territory to go into. Whether it’s like the contemplative meditation path, like Buddhist tradition or if it, you know, whatever it is that sort of invites you into what many describe as the groundless ground, the space where the endlessness, I would say of the divine and the endlessness of reality can be quite terrifying.
CW: Yeah.
KS: And so I think there’s such grace and beauty in the traveler, or the wayfair being the one who chooses. Jodi was saying in one of your previous episodes - chooses when to step forward into the unknown, chooses the pacing of that journey, chooses sort of how and when and what it feels like and looks like.
But I think the trick or the key is consistency in many ways. And is trusting the groundless ground, trusting that the darkness or the chaos or the unknown place actually is deeply full of knowing and love and purpose. And that it’s ultimately the path into apotheosis. It’s ultimately where we begin that journey of becoming divine, if that makes sense.
CW: I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that can be a terrifying place, especially. Let’s just bring it back to Cynthia in my life here. But you know, just as someone who thrived on rules and who thrived on bottom and top. For someone to have introduced bottomless to me, like you were just talking about a minute ago, like - II wasn’t in a place where I could comprehend even what that meant.
What had to happen for me was everything that I thought I knew had to fall away. This is just my personality. And I found myself saying - Susan and I like to talk about two word prayers, three word prayers, and there’s this two word prayer from Rob Bell. He says, “Now what?” And so for me, everything had to fall away for me to be open to something that was bottomless or like you were describing before the imaginal realm.
Like I, I had to get to the point where I said, now what? And then seeing all these beautiful concepts you’re talking about, really made me say, oh, okay, let’s try that. Let’s just tiptoe in what that could possibly mean. And then to find out that this is actually our heritage in Christianity. To have contemplatives like Theresa of Avila and Kathryn of Sienna, Julian of Norwich, you know, like all these amazing contemplatives, and to realize, oh, we’ve just forgotten who we are.
KS: Yeah, completely. And let’s just go back to Joseph. I feel like there’s some understanding in our community that he was a mystic. I think the tension there [00:25:00] is in the idea of, oh, he was the prophet, capital P of course, he had these experiences, he had to have these encounters with the divine in order to be a prophet and to lead a people to have a vision of where we’re going and what we need to do and who we need to become creating Zion, et cetera.
But we don’t focus on how Joseph was asking all of us right, to follow his path. Right. Just as Moses said, Hey, please everyone follow me up the mountain. Come up to the mountain and see the face of God with me. Joseph was inviting the people to do that same thing,
CW: Right.
KS: And it was sort of a resounding no. Both times.
SH: Yeah. And, but I understand why if you’re gonna build a church around Joseph Smith’s experiences, why you’re gonna spend the rest of your time trying to put manners on those experiences, right? You’re gonna try to quantify it, you’re gonna try to draw lines around it and uhhuh shove it down in boxes, right?
So that you can hand it to everyone else. Because the whole point of ineffability is that it’s not something that you can hand to everyone else. And so I feel like a lot of the mysticism of Joseph Smith has been removed. From all of it. I think some people would maybe even argue with you about it - if Joseph Smith was a mystic? ‘Cause I feel like Mystic is one of those woo words that kind of gets a bad rap.
KS: Sure. And if it’s simply defined as just someone who desires communion with God. And technically that’s what our religion teaches us. That we all can commune with God.
SH: Yeah. But that’s not safe, Kathryn.
KS: It’s not safe. And I think this is the fault of religion. Because an institution, by virtue of what an institution is, is completely fragile and brittle and not dynamic and is not living. And so to have people who represent a body of Christ who, you know, has parts and movement and motion and change and transformation - the two are in conflict.
I think, like what you said, Susan, is there’s parts of the plan or parts of the full gospel that have been stymied because the church wants to encapsulate. The full experience of spiritual growth and it cannot. It cannot. So I think that’s part of the dilemma is that had Joseph been able to fully realize his vision of a Zion people, there wouldn’t be a church.
We would be in a Zion community and we probably wouldn’t be here. We probably wouldn’t be on this earth. So there’s definitely a degree to which the readiness of the people. Well, there’s a degree to which the lack of readiness collectively of people has sort of kept us in a specific developmental state within the institution.
While individuals can still continue to grow beyond the basic tenets or the basic sort of teachings. It is essentially the destiny of the church, the destiny. And I don’t mean the church of Jesus, Christ of Latter-day Saints. I mean the Church of Christ. The larger church.
To manifest as individuals. As you opened so beautifully with Susan, the calling and the purpose and the beingness of each specific and unique identity. And so the more that we do that, especially in this really fraught and difficult time of unraveling, the more we each commit to understanding what our unique call is on this earth.
What it is we, I believe, promised to do in life before.
What it was that drew us into each unique moment, each unique circumstance in which we entered, the more we can be awake. To why we chose those moments. Because I believe we did. I believe we chose when and why. The more we will empower all of creation to renew itself and can empower through that work others to see the fabric of the eternal that is here always, that is woven through everything.
CW: So everything that you’re saying, I’m thinking, okay, all of us are in the structure of the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter Day Saints, which is a system. And so to systematize something that is so personable, personal, something that Susan said a few minutes ago, this is individual work. Like I can see where there’s this real tension [00:30:00] with the church and how they poo poo I things like this because you can’t systematize it.
Actually, have you ever looked up mysticism on the church website? I was just Googling it. What does it say? Well, mysticism, see false doctrine, sorcery. See, this is what I’m saying. Superstitions and traditions of men.
CW: Now I wanna give the church grace here.
Maybe we’re not using the same definitions of what I think the three of us are talking about today versus what they’re talking about, except when I do think of it in terms of a system, like how do you systematize the ineffable?
SH: This is how the desert, mothers and fathers became the desert, mothers and fathers, because this is very old. Disconnect within Christianity, I guess where it was the systematizing of religion that caused them to go out into the desert because they were showing up for the individual experience. And that is hard to really privilege within a system. So it’s hardly that our church is the first. This has been going on from the very beginning of the larger church. So, I’m not sure. We’re not working from the same definition. I’m not willing to give quite that amount of grace. I’m afraid we are. But that’s why I said, you know, some people might argue with you about Joseph Smith being a mystic because I feel like that word really has been kicked out of the church.
KS: I think we could just look at agreed upon definitions versus the church’s definition. Right? Because that’s not what everyone’s going to see or be familiar with.
The word mystic comes from the ancient Greek, and it means one who has been initiated into secret religious rights.
So that does have some of that air of, you know, I don’t know, perhaps paganism. And then that was also derived from the Greek verb, which means to close the eyes or lips and refers to the secrecy or silence associated with religious mysteries or the initiation itself.
And then the term entered English via the Latin and old French retaining its association with hidden knowledge and direct spiritual insight into the divine.
I think that my study of ancient temple mysticism makes this less and less strange. Or less and less inaccessible and really points to the foundation of Mormonism, as rights and rituals and covenants and ordinances in a temple space. Which is part of those secret hidden and mysterious rights that we go through and we participate in that literally bind us to the unseen world.
So in that sense, mysticism is the most Mormon thing ever.
SH: Yes. I mean, the definition you just read just screams temple to me. It’s also the definition of the temple. As I’ve understood it anyway in Mormonism, that’s what it’s meant to be. I’m not gonna say that the temple, my experience at the temple as Latter Day Saint has in any way connected me right to the divine personally.
But I think that probably my experience has not been the ideal. It hasn’t worked that way for me, but I really do think at its most basic level that is probably how it’s supposed to function. When you hear church leaders talk about how the temple is supposed to be the ultimate of your spiritual experience - I think they’re hearkening back to those roots that you are describing there.
But as your average member, it hasn’t gotten me there. It hasn’t been the right vehicle for me.
KS: I think there’s a lot of grief around the ways in which ordinances now have become disembodied. That has been a layer of this, that’s been a struggle for me.
And also I think we get sort of just plopped into these very old, I don’t wanna say archaic in a negative way, but liturgy is not something we’re taught.
We’re not taught about archetypes. We’re not taught about symbolism on this very deep level. And so things that don’t need to be secret are kept secret. And then things that really should be explored go unexplored, because we don’t know how to begin to access them. That journey, at least collectively, at least through correlated gospel means.
So it does become, you know, to really experience the temple in a way that is [00:35:00] archetypal, that is profound. That is spiritually transformative. It is required that the individual step away from the known and ask questions and really begin to commit one’s heart and mind to uncovering what is secret and hidden and beyond words.
37.42
And that, for me, is also known as the feminine. It’s also known as the mother I knew coming. I was super lucky to present with my husband at Restore this year, and we talked about the weaving of ritual and wisdom and how the mother is the source of wisdom in the temple.
I’ll do a little bit of reading, if that’s okay, just to get the ideas down. And stop me at any time, because I’d love to unpack this. There’s a lot, but it has given me a lot of hope. I guess that is what I’ll say, that the power that was in the ancient temple fully embodied and presenced by the mother can return, that we can seek her and find her, and that she wants to be found in this space particularly. So the temple in ancient times was understood as a microcosm, a condensation of all time and the whole landscape of human experience. Its descending series of enclosures represented creation in all its stages, emanating from the presence of God in eternity itself and the presence of God were symbolized by the holy of holies. With its covenant, arc, and glowing tree of life, the world of fire lay beyond the veil of material creation. The veil being made from the same four color woven material that the high priest wore when representing Yahweh among the people. The enduring presence of the temple and its liturgy among the people, made this bold claim.
The days of creation described in Genesis weren’t just a story about the past. Each day of creation was ever present and ongoing. And with our active participation, unity was at the heart of ancient temple teaching. The Holy of Holies represented this unity, which was the origin of all creation, the dwelling place of the mother of the Lord.
The bonds of the great covenant held the creation together, and those bonds were sealed by the name of God. So we go on to describe in our presentation that there is this insistence that we see in Proverbs that wisdom and divine femininity are tied together. And we have the record of Isaiah trying to teach a people who had rejected wisdom.
And the way he described it is that they would not see with their eyes, hear, with their ears, understand with their hearts and be healed. So there was sort of - I would say a rejection of that mystical way of knowing, which is a full body, full heart, full intelligence mind, like a full integration of all the ways of knowing that can fully express itself in how we are in the world and how we choose to act and to relate and to be.
And in this sort of embodiment of wisdom, you have those archetypally feminine traits of compassion, relationality, receptivity, bodily knowing intuition and how to weave those different ways of knowing together. I think for me it becomes concrete when we choose to orient from this place of wisdom.
We are led to work that is naturally integrative and unifying. And that is a very tangible way that we can experience the divine feminine in our heavenly mother. It’s a way to know, not necessarily like more things or more of your intellect but to know deeper with all of you, to have a conviction that goes beyond words perhaps.
And in this way, wisdom, lady wisdom gathers from far and wide and reaches to the highest heaven and to the lowest underworld and becomes the structure of meaning. And we can think of the tree of life too as that structure. The cosmic structure that I mentioned in my last time here, having the heavens as the branches, the trunk as the mortal sphere, and the roots as the underworld. Wisdom as the tree of life, as a divine woman. These are all like layers of symbolism that are so rich and worth exploring.
CW: So I have a question as you’re describing the ancient temple, the Holy of Holies and how much that was the dwelling place of the mother of the Lord. I’m also thinking, but women were not allowed in the temple then.
Am I getting that wrong? Because I mean, I’ve seen all the diagrams and here’s the outer court, here’s the women’s court. And then as you go further in, the women are [00:40:00] forbidden. And so everything that you’re saying, I’m just sitting here basking in it, it feels like a warm bath. It’s just so beautiful.
But at the same time, and I know this isn’t a whole episode about the temple necessarily, but how was it that women were folded so heavily into the ancient temple and yet we were forbidden from being in there?
But as a woman today, in 2025, who has a really hard time with our current temple ceremonies I think, where did I ever fit in any of this?
KS: That’s a wonderful question, and I’m so glad you brought it up. I have maybe two separate responses and I hope that they can reframe a little bit of what the temple was and give a little bit of hope or comfort around that, or whatever it is.
But we began our presentation at Restore with a story, and it was the story of Mary and how she was a little girl and known as a child of Promise. And so, I really believe that there’s a lot of lost lore or information or prophecy around Mary. That’s my personal feeling.
We know that she was born to an elderly couple, Joki and Anna.I hope I pronounced his name correct. I don’t remember how it’s pronounced, but they were very old and they loved her, but they knew because of their age that their time with her would be short. And so to ensure her continued care, they agreed that when she was three, they would offer her to the care and service of the temple.
When that time came, her father worried that her heart would turn back to them and that she would refuse to leave them. So he asked the maidens, and again, who are these maidens? I don’t really know, but this is the story. All the maidens to light lanterns and walk before Mary into the temple so that, so we have maidens and Mary walking into the temple so that her heart and desires could be bound to that place instead of to her former home.
They did as the lantern bears led her into the temple, the high priest embraced her, set her on the steps of the altar and allowed her to have free entry into the Holy of Holies. Where she lived through her childhood.
And the child Mary danced on her feet and all the people loved her. And then our sort of concluding thought is the arc of the covenant and the tree of life had returned to the Holy of Holies.
So, these are all symbols by which the people would have known the divine mother. And to have Mary return into the temple, into the Holy of Holies, for many Christian faiths, they believe she was the incarnation of the divine mother. And so there’s this overlay of imagery between Mary and Astra or the divine mother from the first temple, the tree of life, the chariot throne, the weaver. And so in that sense, when you think of the most crucial aspects of the holy of Holies, the throne, which held the high priest and essentially was like the seat, the mercy, like the place where symbolically and literally the high priest went through the process of apotheosis, right?
She was the vehicle of apotheosis. She was the one who held the king, who really was known as God manifest. So there’s all of this, all of these ways in which her power and authority and presence in the Holy of Holies was the life, the literal life of the temple, and without her love that the powers of creation ceased.
CW: Thank you for that.
KS: I think there’s this direct connection in the sense that wisdom is concerned not only with what is apparent, but with what is hidden. So what is secret and subtle?
And not just objects, but the relationships between things. Transformations across time, and so hidden things, esoteric things are archetypally feminine, and I think that’s the part of our cultural life that isn’t spoken of.
That’s like the work that your podcast is also doing is bringing the feminine realm into words, into language, into reality. [00:45:00] Weaving it back into the dimensions and the realness of how the world functions. So, conversely, the ancient Israelites knew that losing wisdom meant the unraveling of creation and human society and individual lives.
It was the breaking of the covenant of peace. And I feel like we’re living in that right now. We’re living in a time where, right, where we don’t have commitments to each other, we don’t have commitments to the land, we don’t have commitments to the natural systems that make human life possible.
And we don’t have any honor for the feminine. We mock it and we ignore it, and we denigrate it outright. And so I think many people outside of even Christianity are really on this path of seeking the divine feminine because they’re seeking wholeness and healing and restoration and recreation - like having a new vision of what we can do on this earth because what we have done is not working
KS: Being driven by profit and technology and whatever, is not serving us. It’s literally destroying us. So I guess I think of mysticism as something quite practical, that the only way we can understand what is real is from the divine. Like there’s no way we’re gonna get it right on our own.
So we need to sort of arrange our lives so that our mystical experiences are brought down into practical reality at an individual and communal level. Mystical experiences don’t translate perfectly towards a rational thought, but we are obligated to try anyway. The alternative is to have a familial and civic life that isn’t an informed system at all.
And I think we have seen that is a very bad idea because anything that lives purely on a surface material level will not survive. It will not be eternally present.
CW: Can I ask you then, Kathryn, about what you were just talking about? Like how does that show up in your own life or practices or like, you talk about these mystical experiences being brought down into practical reality. What does practical reality look like for you?
KS: Yeah, it really is every moment, like it’s something that we’re taught not to do, but it’s living with tenderness in every moment. Living every moment as if it is the only moment because it is. Like this moment right now is all we have, right? And so numbing ourselves, choosing not to be responsive in some way now is only going to become a series of moments where we’ve chosen to be asleep or we’ve chosen not to feel, or we’ve chosen not to fully engage.
CW: Just as you’re talking about escape, I have written right here on a sticky note on my computer, “Encounter Over Escape.”
That’s something I’m really trying to focus on, which is why I have it written down. Because it, I mean, we all can get an A plus on how to escape nowadays. Like we have these little devices in our pocket that we can escape anytime we want. But I want what you’re talking about, Kathryn, I want more encounters, less escape.
KS: Yeah. And I’m realizing that I am not good at doing both. I am not good at being, I’ll just get very personal. I’m not good at being on social media and being able to feel like I’m a fully dimensioned, sensitive, caring, present person. I can’t do it, because I feel the ways in which social media thins down my reality and replaces real things with delusional things. And it’s so subtle and it’s so manipulative and it’s so curated to make me feel like I need more, that I end up feeling like I’m not enough. I don’t have enough, the world isn’t enough, my relationships aren’t enough. Rather than fully embracing the abundance that is every moment that I have on this earth and like stops me from feeling the deep gratitude that should be the point of orientation for everything that we do.
And so practically what I do every morning, this is new for me because I lived the life of praying every morning, every night, reading scriptures every day. I was very diligent in those things. I had my faith transformation, my awakening to patriarchy, to feminism, and it broke my heart. I couldn’t look at the Book of Mormon. I couldn’t look at a lot of things for a long time.
KS :I looked elsewhere. I looked at different spiritual traditions. I looked into other scriptures, other texts, and I did a lot of study. It wasn’t like I just stopped working, and those were incredibly fruitful and [00:50:00] healing.
But I’ve returned to the Book of Mormon and I just read a chapter every morning. It’s not a lot, but I’m honestly so astonished by the amount of love and a feeling of like deep intimacy that I’m being seen as I’m reading this book. That there’s something, there’s a spirit that is “the book” that sees me and that feels more familiar than any other text.
And it is helping me to let go of the delusions. And the false ideas and the false conceptions that have sort of been with me through social media. Through attention to other things that are not everlasting, and that are actually just pulling me away from the path, which is, I think, so simple.
It really is so simple. So that’s one thing. Writing poetry is a way that I do that work as well. Engaging with what is real around me in order to sense into this imaginal realm, sense into the spirit that is infused in all things and makes eternity now here present with me. Now, I hope that I can better inform the way that I am with people and the sort of grace and patience that I offer others.
And that understanding, the deep self within understanding who we truly are as individuals - I feel like has the power to remake creation. That is part of the work of this world ultimately being renewed. Like it’s on us. It’s within our capacity, it’s within our destiny.
CW: I really liked that you were talking for a moment there about how you had to put the Book of Mormon aside. Then for you, maybe not for everyone, but for you, it was right to go back to it. And so I love how you’re talking about how you’re seeing things in a new light. Can you talk for a minute about meaningful ritual, and especially for so many women in this space who once they deconstruct patriarchy, it’s really painful to participate in the rituals that maybe used to bring them a lot of peace, and now no longer. Anything you want to say to women about meaningful ritual?
KS: Yeah. For me, it has been as simple as intention.
So there are ways in which the church has chosen to move forward - let’s talk specifically about the temple. Ways in which the church has chosen to change things and to present things, and those little changes may not affect some people. Some people might not be necessarily discouraged by them or hurt by them - it’s just part of ongoing revelation. It’s part of how we adjust to things like a pandemic. And then there are changes that sort of make you question, like you’ve both talked about so poignantly before, like if any of it mattered, right?
Like if the wording ever mattered and if certain orders of whatever ever mattered. So there are those rituals that you do communally that are sort of prescribed by the church, and I’ll speak to that a little bit, and then maybe to like individual rituals that you create on your own. But I just wanted to share a little bit about an experience I had, if it’s helpful at all. It was during sort of the first rounds of temple changes. It was back when I was sort of first married, so I wanna say it’s like 10 years ago now. And I went and did a session with my husband and I had this energy inside of me of like, expectation, like, I’m going to be feeling something - this is gonna be intense. I don’t quite know what it is yet. But just sort of a charged energy in my body, like waiting for my whole soul, I guess, to experience the changes and process, what they were to me, and if they mattered. At a certain point in my journey I was reciting words and I had the very clear words in my mind spoken that, whatever the church does, doesn’t affect you and your posterity like that.
There was this clear division made between earthly changes to things and power beyond. And it was [00:55:00] a real powerful witness to me that our hearts are what dictate where we are in this world. And the next. What we desire, the goodness we desire, the closeness we desire with God, the rightness we desire in terms of peace, right?
Having internal peace and knowing that we’re oriented correctly - meaning in harmony with creation. That’s all that matters. And if we have that desire and we are doing our best to manifest it in the world, we are upheld and we are supported. So in that sense, we can work with what we’ve got. On another side of things, I would say that anything that you do in your life is ritual. If you bring intention and purpose and wisdom to it.
If you’re bringing your whole self to it and you are breathing through moments and feeling them in your body and allowing your intuition and your heart to be master rather than outside opinion or social pressure or whatever it is. That any moment that we are fully present and fully committed to weaving with the mother, with lady wisdom, is a moment that changes the fabric of creation and it has ripple effects into future generations and ripple effects for our ancestors.
I feel like there’s healing that they participate in because of our choice to be wise now and our choice to embody that in how we live.
CW: I think that’s something Susan and I have tried to talk about, especially over the last couple of years of the podcast, is that anything done with intention can be ritual, can be meaning making.
It’s all right here at our fingertips, not systematized. Not part of an organization. It’s what speaks to each of us in that moment.
SH: So can I ask you a really specific question, Kathryn? I’m still thinking about the beautiful experiences that you were expressing around the Book of Mormon, and I’m wondering when you returned to the Book of Mormon, had your intention changed?
KS: That’s a great question
SH: Because you talked about having read it and read it previously, but now you’ve got, it sounded to me as you described it anyway, like you’ve gotten to the thing behind the thing. This time, like you are engaging with it differently. You’re having a different experience with it, and I’m wondering if your approach maybe has helped inform that?
KS: I think there’s a few answers. One is that I’ve been away from it for so long that reading it now I am like lit up. Like talk about illuminated manuscripts. I hear the words and, it’s like a rush of light into my body and I don’t know if that’s partially because I’ve been away from it for so long and partially I think it is because I’ve
found sustenance elsewhere. That has supplemented how I feel and experience it, and I understand archetypes in a way I never understood them. I understand this feminine landscape of the divine that is infused in the first chapters of the Book of Mormon with the Tree of Life vision. I feel a feminine spirit in the Book of Mormon that was never there before.
It’s also just the classic, like homecoming. It’s like a book that I read on my mission when I was really struggling and I believe the promise of President Hinkley that if I read it daily, I would be healed. And I was, after getting through that book on my mission, the problems I had, the mental struggles, the emotional struggles were gone.
I felt a desire to return to that sort of commitment to read, and to center my day from that position.We’re told in D&C that we’re under condemnation in the church for not properly valuing the Book of Mormon. And I don’t know if that’s been lifted. So I kept feeling this desire, like, you’ve gotta go back to this book, you’ve gotta re-encounter, you’ve got to see what it is for you now, almost a decade later.
And so there’s a way in which, when I encounter verses in that book, I’m having a mystical experience. Because I am, I’m feeling the power and spirit of words that literally transform my spiritual makeup. And that is a mystical experience. That is something beyond my comprehension and my ability to explain.[01:00:00]
SH: I asked that question, it felt important to me because, myself included, we have so many listeners who have stepped away from some of the spiritual practices associated with their lives as Latter Day Saints. Maybe they’ve stepped away from the church, maybe they haven’t, but some of those things were no longer serving them, and so they’ve discontinued them.
When I hear you talk about that it caused me to pause and to maybe reconsider my own relationship with some things that I have taken a break from. And some of them, you know, for many years now. It just sounded hopeful to me that some of the practices that I have abandoned I could potentially consider picking up again at some point and seeing them with different eyes - and having a different experience with them as a result of all of the things that I’ve gathered and the ways that I’ve changed in the time since I let them go. So it just felt kind of hopeful to me. In the specific space that I feel like a lot of our listeners are living right now.
KS: I’m glad. Possibility for sure.
SH: I hear possibilities there.
CW: Intention, right Susan? It sounds like what you’re describing would be a different intention.
KS: What I feel you pointing to Susan is many of us have been through really intense seasons of pain and grief. Very specific gospel things. And the Book of Mormon can be one of those pain points. For many reasons.
And I completely understand that. I relate to that. And I think this part of maturing, what we’re asked to do on a developmental journey is to see beyond what could be the frailties of people, you know, the truth claims.
None of that interests me. What interests me is what happens to my heart when I read something. Am I willing to look beyond perhaps things that are uncomfortable or don’t quite fit my worldview or my paradigm that could potentially make me stumble. Am I willing to let pain be pain and be there, and to feel what’s potentially underneath it or alongside it, or, because there is no perfect book. There’s no perfect language, there’s no perfect culture, there’s no perfect society, there’s no perfect institution, there’s no perfect church.
But I have felt a real spirit of reconciliation and atonement in the Book of Mormon that is very much the same spirit I feel in my encounters with the divine. That it’s very hard for me to sort of separate those. And so this sort of ability to embrace it all, I think is part of this path towards maturing and letting go of pain,, letting go of hurt, not continuing to marinate in it. I think that’s a very human tendency to just have it become our full field of vision. And so everyone has their own timing, has their own path and their own way. For me, the Book of Mormon is very much tied to my personal experiences as a child with the divine and what I feel like I need to reintegrate at this point in time.
And it’s not going to look like what it did. Like Cynthia mentioned, you know, it’s different, but I can’t throw it out. It’s something that is part of my transformation.
CW: Well, and as you’re speaking Kathryn, I’m just thinking, aha, this is what it could mean to read the Book of Mormon scripture, or,, specifically our LDS Scripture through a mystical lens, set the truth claims aside, set a lot of things aside, a lot of the problematic things.And that mystical lens could be everything.
KS: I mean, the first chapters of the Book of Mormon are inviting you to partake of the Tree of Life. Who Nephi knew was Asra in the temple. That was like, if we believe historically that he was a contemporary of Josiah, that would’ve been a very clear symbol to him of the mother of the love of God being the mother.
And so whether or not you believe that, there’s still the underlying truth that Nephi and Lehi were being led to a tree that represented the love of God and that everyone had a chance to access the love of God. That is my theology. Like we are all invited to partake of the love of God. There’s [01:05:00] multiple verses saying ask and you’ll receive.
That is a mystical statement. You ask of God, you’ll receive. No intermediaries, and do we believe that? You know, do we really believe that? And so, the Book of Mormon in many ways, is inviting into a more mature, a more direct encounter with the divine and isn’t just saying it’s for profits or holy people, or just for men. It’s available to every soul who seeks.
CW: Kathryn, this has been an amazing conversation. Can we close by asking our favorite question that we love to ask women? Which is, what do you know? What do you know right now, today?
KS: This is the hardest part of the whole thing.
CW: Sorry about that.
KS: I know things that I don’t know how to talk about. I know that we’re all loved and we all have purpose and that everything will be made right.
SH: Gorgeous. Thank you so much for bringing so much unexpected to this conversation. Which I feel like a conversation about mysticism should necessarily take me to unexpected places. I feel like you’ve gotten right at the heart of what I was hoping for from this discussion today. So thank you, Kathryn.
KS: I’m glad. Thank you both so much for engaging this topic.
Voicemail 1: Hi Susan and Cynthia. This is Amelia. I really resonated with Jen Dili’s experience with the temple. I also used to really love going to the temple, and when the pandemic hit and I wasn’t going anymore, I missed it so much, and then I deconstructed and I didn’t really miss it anymore. And I still don’t.
And I’ve been trying to identify exactly why that makes me feel sad, but also nothing at the same time. And I’ve realized recently, I think that it feels very much like when a friendship falls apart or dissolves where there wasn’t necessarily an explosive breakup or falling apart of any kind, but you just sort of fade away from each other and your views maybe no longer align - or you stop spending time with each other as much and you don’t grow together.
And so you just don’t care as much as you used to. And one day that relationship just doesn’t mean to you what it used to mean. And that’s just how I feel with the Temple and many other parts of the church. Like certainly there are parts of the temple that I am frustrated by, but overall, like I still love it.
It meant a lot to me. And also I am fairly apathetic towards it. And just like a friend that I used to love, I would be willing to get to know it again and to spend time with it again. And also there’s some anger and resentment and apathy, and overall it just feels kind of sad.
Voicemail 2: I was just listening to the episode about invisible labor. From my experience,
a lot of Mormon men’s mental load stress levels, etc., to date is, it’s not better than ours. We’re all kinda stressed out. And because my husband works a lot more hours than me, and his job is a lot more stressful, I’ve accepted that I need to do, not because I’m a woman, but because I’m the spouse who has a more supplemental type job and I do work full time, but I’m the one who needs to step in to do some of these things.
I’ve accepted that, and I don’t necessarily experience it as something I resent anymore. I’m more interested in talking about things like spiritual authority in the home. I find that’s the crux for me, what I do. For example, when our teenagers are not enjoying church, and my husband and I disagree - and because of the way we’ve been conditioned, the default is for him to kind of correct me or decide what the family needs to do to solve this problem. It’s really complicated. You know, the children are more attached to me ‘cause I’ve been their primary caregiver. These are the kinds of questions that bother me.
I am over the division of labor stuff for the most part. I wish that episode had a better reflection of the diversity of situations.
SH: And the title of today’s episode is, we don’t have a title.
CW: No, we didn’t.
CW: Like we have a blank line. Dash. Dash, dash. And [01:10:00] we still didn’t fill it in. What do you think, Kathryn, should we call it? Just like, let’s talk about mysticism or what is a mystic? Can we be a mystic?
CW: do that again, Susan. Edit edit. Let’s just start again.
SH: Here we go. Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.
Don’t forget our website. Go to atlastshesaidit.org, to find all our substack content. While there, you can contact our team. Leave us a voicemail. Register for events, subscribe or make a tax deductible donation. Paid subscribers get extra stuff including ongoing community chats and live chats with us.
Remember, your support keeps the podcast ad free. Thanks for listening.