This fellow would also fit in with many EFY speakers. While we eschew this obviously performative style (I use the term in its common meaning, not its technical meaning in folkloristics) in our Sunday worship services (and would not follow a “special musical number” with applause), why is that? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this way of addressing religious topics, but for a Sunday meeting many members would find it æsthetically wrong (for the same reasons many EFY speakers would weird us out in sacrament meeting). Why is that? What do we get out of our understated Sunday æsthetic that we don’t get from this, and why would this be perfectly fine for us in other settings?

(FWIW, I quite like this performance. I think it is an effective way of inviting the Spirit and moving the audience.)

I’m not sure if this gets at what you want Glenn, but those are my first thoughts.

Yet, the meaning that Phipps derives from the purported slave origins of the song probably plays a big role in his ability to interpret it so movingly and in the audience’s ability in turn to be so moved by his performance. If the story that helps make his point — all Christians, black or white, enslaved or free, are connected by God’s grace — is not “true,” does that mean that his point isn’t true either? Or does that not matter at all? And, of course, we can ask the same question of “Mormon folklore” or “faith promoting rumors”: does it have to be “true” to be true?

(Javascript is okay, Java is not, for me.)

I’m not sure if this gets at what you want Glenn, but those are my first thoughts.

Fen, I don’t know that there is anything in particular that I am looking for, but here are two additional thoughts from me:

1) It came to my attention several months ago that certain members in my home ward had a real problem with any”Negro-spiritual” type music being played in the primary presentation during sacrament meeting (the theme was children around the world). So one of my questions is: why? I know it is a different aesthetic, but why would that be so offensive to some people to have that in our chapel as part of Sunday worship?

2) In any kind of religious performance where expectations are so clearly at play (i.e. the performer’s intention and desire to “invite the Spirit and move the audience,” or the audience members’ expectations and desires to be moved), how “real” is the spiritual experience? Is it something that comes from outside of us and sweeps over us because it has been invited in? Or is it something that we create and experience inside ourselves?

And as to your other question, I don’t think something has to be factually accurate to be “true” in the sense that it moves us and reinforces our beliefs. In fact, I think it is a shame that we too often mix up these two ideas. Because if/when we find out that something we believed to be true is not factually accurate, then we may stop believing all together and throw out the baby with the bathwater. If, however, we recognize that beliefs are choices that are based on our desires (and if we recognize that most things we think of as “factually accurate” have several possible alternative explanations/perceptions anyway), then we can continue to justify to our beliefs and “truisms” regardless of the factual accuracy. And whether or not we actually recognize our desire to believe as the foundation of our beliefs, I think that justifcation happens all the time.

Bookslinger, here is the direct link to youtube.

…certain members in my home ward had a real problem with any”Negro-spiritual” type music being played in the primary presentation…

Hmm. I really don’t see why they’s have a problem with it, unless it wasn’t sedate enough for them. I have noticed that many members bear testimony at times about the demeanor of General Authorities and “quiet dignity” as markers of the truthfulness of the gospel (they don’t know about Mormons’ nineteenth-century reputation as firebrand preachers I guess). So maybe the enthusiasm of spirituals runs counter to the attitude some think should prevail (think how many lessons we have had about being quiet and “reverent” in sacrament).

how “real” is the spiritual experience?

That is a good question. As one example, I cannot stand a whole lot of what gets sung for special musical numbers in Church, feeling that the numbers are highly manipulative in telling me exactly how I should feel (canned spirit), rather than inviting me to contemplate and come to my own conclusions. When they are performed, I am actually highly ambivalent about it because I don’t want to feel what they tell me to feel (I just happen to prefer my spirit sin queso, por favor) and then I feel guilty when others around me are so visibly moved and I wonder what’s “wrong” with me that I don’t like it.

It reminds me of a time on my mission when we were allowed to go see The Lion King in Hungarian. During the opening “circle of life” sequence my companion turned to me and said, “is it just me, or is the Spirit here?” I don’t know. I certainly felt something like what we associate with the Spirit, but I have no idea what it was bearing witness to: the truthfulness of Disney?

This projection can be done under the influence and/or power of the Holy Ghost as he magnifies them, or gives them power to project an attribute or idea.

However many people, both the good, the bad, and a lot of in-betweens, have a powerful enough spirit (ie, their eternal spirit, the part that keeps on living after we die, the “hand” in the glove) that they can project spiritual influence/radiation without any assistance from unseen powers.

Elder Bruce McConkie said some unflattering things about people who create or project such spiritual influence and incorrectly label it as the Holy Ghost. GA’s have regularly said over the years that presence of emotion is not necessarily a guarantee of the presence of the Holy Ghost; that the Holy Ghost often brings strong emotions, but strong emotions in themselves, even good ones, are not always indicative of the presence or approval of the Holy Ghost.

Of course, when the Holy Ghost really is the one empowering someone to project/radiate some kind of spiritual influence, and one recognizes that third member of the Godhead as the engine or power source, one can rest assured that what’s going on is a “good thing.”

But I’ve occasionally felt the same kind of discomfort you have, even in church settings, wherein I perceive that I’m on the receiving end of some spiritual influence/manipulation that is not originating with the Holy Ghost.

I’m going to respond to this from the skeptical part of me. He has bound and gagged the believer (who I hear faintly kicking away in a distant closet. I’ll go let him out in a few minutes).

when the Holy Ghost really is the one empowering someone to project/radiate some kind of spiritual influence, and one recognizes that third member of the Godhead as the engine or power source, one can rest assured that what’s going on is a “good thing.”

At what point are you able to determine that it “really is” the Holy Ghost? And don’t say “if it is good” because then you are only chasing your tail around in circles.

What evidence do you have for this “strength of your own personal spirit” idea. It doesn’t mean a lot to me outside of it being a certain traditional LDS ideology. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure there were clearly measurable powerful human factors that were doing the empowering here. What we have here is a masterful performer who takes a willing congregation through a series of ups and downs to tenderize their sensibilities and get those good spiritual feelings flowing. Let me point some of them out:

• Phipps is introduced and gets the mainly white audience in his corner almost immediately with the joyous “how many of you like negro spirituals?” Whoop, yes! (High.)

• Phipps starts to talk about the “old black lady down south” but then, almost immediately, has senses something from the crowd (Silence? Ambivalence? Guilt?), (this is an initial lull)

• so he interjects with “some blacks down south have more sense by accident than most of us have on purpose” – when he gets only a moderate response, he affably challenges the audience, “you didn’t hear what I said.” (moderate response, building higher)

• Then he gives the proverb “if the mountain wasn’t smooth you couldn’t climb it.” (another moderate response, still building higher)

• He introduces the 5-black-keys of the piano (moderate response, maybe a little white-guilt-fueled-tension, but he has their attention, and you can hear them growing more invested in his performance)

• Phipps plays the song amazing grace (people involved, singing a song they love – a clear high),

• but then says it was written by a man who was captain of a slave ship (low — and you can here it in his voice and the reaction from the crowd),

• then he lifts them back up by telling them that he wrote the words amazing grace to a slave melody (high, applause) and that God wanted it this way to show we are all connected (bigger high, more applause and hallelujahs).

• Then he brings them down by telling them that the tune in the library of congress is attributed to “unknown” (low, you can hear the gasps in the congregations)

• Then he makes the joke about meeting that slave “unknown” when he gets to heaven (high, laughter, applause but before it swells, he cuts it of in solemn tones)

At this point, Phipps, in a serene and beautiful voice filled with reverence, says he is going to sing the song as he imagines John Newton first heard it from the slaves coming up from the belly of the ship (a powerful image to build on). Before he hums a single note, the etherial organ music start as a still sound and slowly swells towards eventual emotional overload (were there ethereal organs in the bellies of those ships). Phipps passionately emotes suffering and anguish into the microphone with every slave-like sorrow-chant gasp. He does a beautiful job with it. And the congregation is fully invested, well-prepared to receive the feelings and let them do their work.

For a group of people who are there because they want to feel these feelings anyway, Phipps gives them all the right traditional cues to flip that feelings switch into gear and get that sweet overpowering feeling flowing.

That’s my cynical response. I see more power through man-made traditions and performance conventions than any evidence that people’s eternal spirits are reaching out from their bodies and touching others. Of course I could be wrong – that is just how the skeptical part of me sees it.

A few years ago I attended a lecture by William Benzon, who talked about the fact that, uniquely among higher vertebrates, humans are able to synchronize their physical states and through that outward enactment of synchornicity, bring their inner mental states in congruency.

Perhaps his most memorable line in describing the difference between humans and other animals was to say that humans have a difficult time in not marching to a beat, but if you’ve ever seen a horse marching to a band what you’ve really seen is a band playing to a marching horse.

I don’t think this point is trivial or strange. What you see Phipps doing in bringing the audience up and down is synchronizing their behavior and in so doing opening their minds to his message and creating a dramatic sense of community between the audience members. He’s very effective at it too. I’d be willing to bet that if you could monitor the heart and respiratory rates of the audience, you would find that they were both slowing down slighlty but that breaths were deeper. This increases oxygen flow to the brain and activates the limbic system. It’s a powerful mechanism, and I think that if we could measure someone’s reaction to the Spirit, it would be physically manifest in a similar way.

As a sode note, do you think that most people in the church hate it when we break things apart like this? I mean, to break apart a nice person’s nice performance and analyze the detailed reactions and each vocal inflections is bad enough, but getting into the mechanics of symbiotic breathing patterns and limbic systems — who is still around to hear about that?

My experience is that most people shut me off way before I get to that point. I think it’s because they prefer a supernatural explanation over a natural explanation — that the mystery of supernatural keeps belief well out of range of the apostatic sniper — as if anything earth-bound or natural could be an enemy to God (that it will sabotage your testimony if you’re not careful).

I’m fascinated with the how. That’s part of why I’m a folklorist: I don’t want to stop at saying performance is “nice,” I want to find out how it is nice. Finding out the how of something (like feeling the Spirit) is very interesting to me, much more so than saying “It’s the Spirit, don’t ask questions.” I think we, in general as Mormons, have too readily adopted the dualism of traditional Christianity that says there is the Spirit and there is the flesh, and they are in separate domains. Yet our scriptures and core beliefs should tell us otherwise. At the heart of our belief is the notion that without a body the spirit is crippled in some fundamental way we don’t understand. That tells me that I should take the body pretty seriously in the context of spiritual beliefs, and that understanding things like the limbic system and physiological responses to the holy ghost is pretty important. It also tells me that I need to be wary of any assumptions I bring in that embrace a platonic dualist distinction between things of the body and things of the flesh… It therefore seems to me as well that understanding how the Spirit affects the body is pretty important and something we should not be afraid of: it doesn’t make it any less real: if anything the opposite is true for me.
In contrast we are told to avoid being sensual and carnally minded. I have never really thought that passage was a reference to sexual sin in particular, but rather a warning that we shouldn’t be total materialists either, because that is reductive and leaves us simply as bodies.
The more I read in modern cognitive science, the more I am struck by the fact that our intelligence as humans could not exist as it is except in an embodied state. If we were brains in jars, we wouldn’t work. Similarly, Stephen Pinker (whom I don’t really care for that much in general) has pointed out that we have a dominant metaphor in Western intellectual heritage of the “ghost in the machine.” That is, we often thing of our bodies as devices that execute the instructions of the spirit, which is abstractable from the matrix of the flesh without damage. He argues that science has rendered this position untenable.
If I take a view of Truth compatible with what Brigham Young expressed (even if he didn’t always live up to it), then these scientific results, which I find highly convincing, are part of my understanding of the gospel and tell me that a lot of things aren’t the way we generally take them to be. Ergo, I no longer “know” what a spirit is. However, I know that the gospel’s absolute assurance that the body is part of the plan is spot on and that without it my progression would be stopped.
And now I’m really getting into speculation, if the things above are true, I suspect that our notion of the pre-earth life as a bunch of happy proto-Mormons floating around waiting to come to earth is simply wrong. The veil of forgetfulness is probably not something God imposed on us as part of a test, but rather a natural result of the fact that in our embodied state we can no longer even conceive of what was before. We therefore “forget” it because we cannot understand or even imagine it. (Now I’m sounding like a mystic with a materialist explanation.) Therefore we have a metaphor in the War in Heaven and so forth for something very different than the literal concepts, but those metaphors hold great truth and importance for us.

These ramblings are perhaps a bit incoherent since I just happen to be awake at 1:20 AM, but I hope they are useful in explaining why trying to find physical correlates to the spirit and so forth isn’t, in my opinion, contrary to the gospel at all…

just happened upon this thread while looking for sheet music for the kids for sacrament meeting performance (isn’t google great)
Pof GP says mater has substance our ability to see matter is based on our spiritual refinement i.e. we had substance in the preexistance.

Just a thought Very interesting site I will have to visit again
love the religious based science Oh yea I am 45 lifer and still sit there looking around trying to figure out the difference between emotion and the spirit

…although I thought the limbic system was a lower level than our regular thinking, but maybe I’m wrong.

No, you’re right. The limbic system is below the level of conscious thought, but it is heavily involved in emotion and memory formation (and their connection to physical sensation) and motivation to action. So when your limbic system is active and receptive to stimulation, you are in a uniquely motivatable and teachable state and you tend to experience pleasurable sensations (hey, wait a minute, doesn’t that sound a lot like something we know about from other contexts?).