Go visit the Carthage Jail visitor’s center in Illinois, and you will be treated to brief video on the life of Joseph Smith. It opens with the following quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1838 Harvard Divinity Address: “It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake,” as a way of contextualizing Joseph Smith’s larger Restoration project.

Indeed, the LDS Church has long had a subterranean crush on Ralph Waldo Emerson, often reading him and the American Transcendentalists (well, excluding Henry David Thoreau, of course) as spiritual contemporaries of the Prophet, intuitively tapping into the larger zeitgeist of the Restoration. (There is a reason why so many LDS English academics become 19th-century Americanists). The fact that Emerson’s most famous essay, “Self Reliance,” seems to conform comfortably with modern Utah’s own pronounced libertarianism and frontiersman DIY ethics, was just the cherry on top.

Save that “Self Reliance” is not actually about “self reliance” in the political or economic sense, at least not entirely. Ever the inveterate preacher, Emerson was writing much more about a spiritual self-reliance than sort of physical one–one that is, ironically, much more illuminating of LDS doctrine than any sort of imagined political alignment.

Fairly early in the essay, Emerson write: “I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.” Emerson is of course making twin-allusion in this passage to both Luke 14:26 (“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple”), and to Deuteronomy 6:4-9, also known as the Shema Yisrael, or the Jewish confession of faith:

⁴ Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord:

⁵ And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

⁶ And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:

⁷ And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

⁸ And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.

⁹ And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.

However, it is worth emphasizing that Emerson–despite being a Christian Divinity School graduate himself–is not citing Christ or the Gospel or God Himself as that which he will “shun father and mother and wife and brother” for, nor that he will carve into his posts, but Whim. It is his whim that Emerson, intriguingly, worships–or more specifically, it is his whims that he will obey and follow to the exclusion of all else.

Is this because Emerson is a hedonist, or an atheist? God forbid. No, it is because Emerson is keenly aware that some of his thoughts and impressions are direct inspirations from God, while others really are just random whims that happen to pop into his head. How can he tell one from the other?

For Emerson, there is no other way to find out which thoughts are inspired and which are not than by trying them all. His is a sifting process: the whims that work out, were the inspired ones; the ones that don’t, clearly weren’t.

This is not how we’re used to thinking of thoughts and impressions in the LDS faith, wherein we place a premium on following “the promptings of the Spirit,” as we term it. Emerson’s method might strike us as more the haphazard approach of one bereft of the calming influence of the Gift of the Holy Ghost.

Yet I’m reminded of that Conference talk that Jefferey R. Holland delivered a few years ago, wherein he told of getting lost in the canyon lands, arriving at a fork in the road, so he and his son had a prayer on which way they should go. They felt to go right, only to almost immediately hit a dead end, you might recall. The lesson they gleaned from that experience is that sometimes God gives you the wrong answer, so that you might then figure out the right answer.

This is a conclusion that I deeply suspect Emerson would have approved of.

I bring this up because I think we’ve all had the experience of feeling an impression that didn’t turn out–to tract a certain street as missionaries but not meet any one; to ask out someone who shoots you down; to marry someone you end up divorcing; to apply for a job you don’t get; and etc. And I’m not talking about the times when going down the wrong path ends up taking down the right one–how you ended up serving someone in need on the street, say, or you then asked out your crush’s roommate and thereby met your eternal companion, or a different job offer came through that same application, or other faith-promoting stories, no, I’m talking about when you genuinely have no idea what the point of that impression of, and still don’t. These can be legitimately faith-shaking crises, that can cause you to not only doubt whether you even know how to feel the Holy Spirit, but if there is even a Holy Spirit to begin with, or if all is mere wishful-thinking and vanity. We’ve all been there.

Hence why I suspect the Emersonian approach is the healthier one, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually: when you begin with the assumption that not all whims that pop into your head are genuine spiritual promptings, it will save you a world of consternation when a lot of them inevitably don’t pan out. Moreover, such an approach will keep you much more humble–especially those of you who end up in leadership callings, wherein the temptation is strong to assume that every thought that pops into your head is divine inspiration guiding you along. Sometimes they’re not! Sometimes you can’t tell which is inspiration and which is just a passing fancy! And that’s fine! Again, it takes some real humility to take that approach, but then, aren’t we supposed to be humble in the first place?

And to those who might say, that’s all well and good, but isn’t it a little frivolous to live one’s life in such a way? Well, as Emerson himself also warns us, “If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.”