All of Us Strangers Film Poster
All of Us Strangers Film Poster
Picture of Candice Wendt
Candice Wendt
Candice Wendt is an American-Canadian writer and interfaith worker. She is a staff member at McGill University’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and a contributing editor at Wayfare Magazine. She holds a master's degree in comparative humanities studies from BYU. She is married to the psychology scholar Dennis Wendt and they are raising two French-speaking teens together in Montreal. She recently accepted the challenge to try to form and coordinate a choir in what must be one of the most transient and multi-cultural wards in the world.

On Imagination as Revelation

In the 2023 film All of Us Strangers, main character Adam (Andrew Scott) initiates a healing journey for himself. Adam’s parents passed unexpectedly when he was eleven years old. Since then, he has struggled with intense feelings of being alone. Adam imagines and writes about what could happen if he could visit his parents in his childhood home as they were the year of their death, 1987. What would it be like if parents and son could reunite 36 years later, now that Adam is a professional writer in his late 40’s?

The audience witnesses a series of Adam’s imagined encounters with his parents. We see his parents’ joy in seeing their child all grown up with a career they are proud of. Adam comes out to his parents as gay, something they didn’t live long enough to learn. His parents come to grips with this important part of his life. Adam also has the opportunity to connect with his parents over his experiences being bullied and suffering from anxiety and loneliness as a child. 

They relive and expand on various points and parts of their lives, now with Adam as an adult. In one encounter, Adam comes home for Christmas. The parents grow to fully embrace adult Adam. They encourage him in a potential relationship with a neighbor he is interested in. They want him to be happy, loved, and fulfilled. We watch Adam and his parents embrace one another and weep together in unrestrained joy, grief, and love.

In addition to Adam not having the opportunity to come out to his parents while they were alive, they also weren’t there to support him through the struggles of teen years and young adulthood, or the anxiety he felt during the AIDS epidemic. While he is comfortable with his own sexuality, he has never fallen in love. All this has left gaps in Adam’s life that he seeks to fill through his creative spiritual work. His visualizations help him come to terms with parental loss and get in touch with his desires to live a more relationship-focused life.

I highly recommend this beautiful film. There is a lot more to it, including Adam’s relationship with his neighbor Harry. The themes about queer love, mental health, and what it means to live a fulfilling life make this a compelling, educational, DEI-relevant film for adults (it’s R rated).

What Adam experiences can be understood as a series of visions. They are not visions in conventional terms. They remind me of the kind that Gnostic thinker Meggan Watterson describes: “[A] Shaman taught me how to have a vision. Or, she taught me how to become aware of the fact that the majority of us have them all throughout the day, whether we’re aware of it or not. She taught me how to begin to see with a different form of perception by going deeply inward…It seems like a strange concept. But it’s actually not strange at all. It’s the most natural thing we humans do. We vision. We use our imaginations. What we don’t realize, or what we don’t really get sometimes, is that what we imagine can actually affect and change us. What we envision with our imagination isn’t just our “imagination” (Mary Magdalene Revealed 64). Our imaginations are conduits to our souls’ wisdom, inspiration from God, and more. Vehicles to inspiration, healing, and revelation.

I grew up thinking that revelation happened to you as a passive recipient. I assumed people were like empty containers waiting to be filled with God’s responses, and that a “vision” was grand and obvious. Certainly, such things seem to happen sometimes. Yet now I recognize that we have capacities to co-create sacred experiences. We collaborate with God as active agents in our moments of inspiration, healing, and meaning-making. As we face life, we respond with imaginative vision-making with divine help in response to our own questions, longings, and needs as active agents.

LDS scriptures back up this idea that we can and should be active, creative agents and collaborators in spiritual things, for example:

D&C 58:26-28: “For behold, it is not meet that I should command in all things; for he that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant; wherefore he receiveth no reward. Verily I say, men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness; For the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves.”

D&C 9:8: “But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.”

and D&C 88:118: “seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

We’re not meant to be passive, helpless recipients when it comes to our spiritual learning, revelation, and spiritual discernment, but co-creators with God, who offer Their own contributions and guidance as we go about this to help us.

So much potential for sacred meaning-making can be uncovered within each of us, and this is the case whether we are working in a faith context or not. Adam’s imaginative visions, for example, do not have any religious pretext (that the audience knows of), but are nonetheless full of poignant meanings that can be understood as sacred for many reasons, including that they help him feel deeply connected to and seen and loved by himself and his deceased parents. Adam does his sacred work in the same way that so many people across the Mormon spectrum do theirs: through writing about his inner life, family, needs, longings, pain, and personal mysteries.

The minds’ imaginative activities are not always helpful. They can lead us down rabbit holes of catastrophizing, for example. But it can be valuable and empowering to recognize that our imaginations also have the potential to help us get in touch with our subconscious wisdom, spiritual desires, and purpose, as well as feelings of love, peace, and belonging.

We can notice and cultivate imaginative visions by bringing greater attention and intention to them. Strengthening  trust in our inner selves and our personal intuitions can be an important aspect of this. From Watterson’s experience, she explains, “Once I stopped questioning everything that happened [in my imaginative visions], once I trusted that what I heard and felt and experienced was real in the sense it was really the wisdom I needed, then it all came effortlessly to me. My greatest obstacle was believing it could all be this simple; ask for what I need, and receive it from within. Which is also to say, my greatest obstacle was believing that I could ever be that powerful” (Mary Magdalene Revealed pg. 65). 

Both the character Adam’s creative activities and Megan Watterson’s perspective invite me to see my imaginative experiences in new ways. Recently, I was hiking when a visualization came to my mind. I had been thinking about a challenging Mormon feminist writing project I felt inspired to work on that brought me great fear and overwhelm at moments. In my mind, I visualized my grandfather, a high school history teacher who loved writing, there with me on the mountain. I imagined the compassion he felt for issues I was grappling with in life. I imagined my grandfather telling me he could see that the project I dreamed of completing was a good thing, and something he would be there to support me through. He said I wouldn’t be alone, that others who came before me would also see and understand what I learned, and they would rejoice in my efforts to reach out to others and be a compassionate voice. As I descended from my time on the mountain, I wept tears of joy. It felt remarkable that I could feel so close to my grandfather 19 years after he passed. This “vision” actually offered was a level of closeness beyond what we had during his life.  

I have had these kinds of imaginative experiences for many years, but never framed them as spiritual visions. I let them pass by without recording them or giving them much weight. Now they show up as powerful and pertinent.

What our imaginative visions may interact with and reveal to us is open. Meggan Waterson emphasizes the subconscious and hidden inner wisdom of the self. Depending on our personal spirituality, spiritual imagination can show up as revelation, encouragement and guidance from God, messages from those in the spirit world, or prophecy.

Pondering the role of imagination in the process of revelation helps me feel greater understanding toward religious leaders’ missteps. A friend who also read Mary Magdalene Revealed told me that she thinks some of Joseph Smith’s instances of inspiration and revelation were of this type (imaginative visualizations). This helped her feel more compassion for him; it’s nothing she looks down on. Receiving inspiration as a leader for others seems more difficult and perilous kind of work than we acknowledge in the LDS Church. We talk about leaders’ revelation as a kind of pure art, as if they receive and hear the Savior’s voice with clarity. In reality, we always bring pieces of ourselves, own subjective desires, and blind spots/limited knowledge. While seeking imaginative visions to guide us in our personal lives requires a deep trust in ourselves, trying to receive revelation for others requires caution, checks from others, humility, and moral interrogation. This need for check and balances is part of why women, not just men, should be revelators in the Church.

A visionary path is hazardous. Sometimes God’s voice might be muffled or silent. Messages we tune into may turn out biased or incomplete, even if they are partly divinely inspired. Religious leaders might not have the right imaginative makeup, personal context, or receptivity to receive the wide spectrum of insights God has to offer on a topic. In some instances, we might think we’re getting a revelation, but really we’re having some kind of experience of desire, ego-inflation, confirmation bias, anxious impulses to fix something, or self-gratification. This often becomes evident with time, and we can speed up the process by questioning if our “revelation” is guided by and conducive to love, compassion, and good works.

Despite the risks, moving forward, I want to pay more attention to my imaginative spiritual visions and how they might interact with God’s love and inspiration, and I want to be more engaged in healing imaginative writing of the kind Adam exemplifies on in All of Us Strangers.

Candice Wendt is an American-Canadian writer and interfaith worker. She is a staff member at McGill University’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and a contributing editor at Wayfare Magazine. She holds a master's degree in comparative humanities studies from BYU. She is married to the psychology scholar Dennis Wendt and they are raising two French-speaking teens together in Montreal. She recently accepted the challenge to try to form and coordinate a choir in what must be one of the most transient and multi-cultural wards in the world.

2 Responses

  1. I like your idea of imaginative visions, I also recommend the “All of Us Strangers” film. It contains wonderful portrayals of family love and acceptance.

    My wife and I teach 10-year-olds in Primary. A few days ago, I prayed for inspiration on how to approach the lesson I was preparing. The next morning, I knew what I needed to do. I am learning to ask and receive.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Our Comment Policy

  • No ads or plugs.
  • No four-letter words that wouldn’t be allowed on television.
  • No mudslinging: Stating disagreement is fine — even strong disagreement, but no personal attacks or name calling. No personal insults.
  • Try to stick with your personal experiences, ideas, and interpretations. This is not the place to question another’s personal righteousness, to call people to repentance, or to disrespectfully refute people’s personal religious beliefs.
  • No sockpuppetry. You may not post a variety of comments under different monikers.

Note: Comments that include hyperlinks will be held in the moderation queue for approval (to filter out obvious spam). Comments with email addresses may also be held in the moderation queue.

Write for Us

We want to hear your perspective! Write for Exponent II Blog by submitting a post here.

Support Mormon Feminism

Our blog content is always free, but our hosting fees are not. Please support us.

related Blog posts

In a split second before answering the question, my brain was processing “Am I still LDS? Am I dishonoring my pioneer ancestry by not claiming my heritage? Am I going to be affected by bias (intended or unconscious) if I say no? Does saying no wipe away the last 36 years of my life living as a Mormon?”

Never miss A blog post

Sign up and be the first to be alerted when new blog posts go live!

Loading

* We will never sell your email address, and you can unsubscribe at any time (not that you’ll want to).​