The Book of Mormon Girl (18 page)

•   •   •

Soon there was a manuscript, then an agent, then a New York City editor on the phone. “You’re a terrific writer,” she said, as I pressed my ear to the receiver. “There are so many interfaith families hungry to read this kind of book. There’s just one thing . . .”

Her voice broke off. She paused.

“It’s just too
Mormon.
I’m afraid people will find it a little
weird
. It wouldn’t be a problem if you were, like, Presbyterian or something.”

And so, ornery soul that I am, I went back to my writing desk, and every night after the girls’ bedtime, I began to write down all the Mormon stories, ancestral tales handed down by my grandmother, lessons patiently taught by my
parents at the kitchen table, memories from my own Mormon youth.

As I wrote my stories, I repopulated my world with all of the people who made me: Sister Pierce with her strawberry pie, Natasha and all the girls I danced with in the Rose Bowl, all the Girls Camp leaders, all the suit-wearing men sitting in swivel chairs behind formica-top desks, my Brigham Young University professors, and my Mormon feminist heroes too. All of them. Together. In my stories. As I wrote, I brought myself back from my own exile, the silent excommunication I subjected myself to when I was convinced Mormonism was not safe for women like me. I started to look up old friends, ones I’d lost during my exile years. I started to reconnect with the liberal Mormon kids with whom I’d shared college. “Where have you been?” they asked. “We missed you. Welcome back.”

•   •   •

Just as Sister Simmons once strung together burnt umber and brassy yellow acrylic yarn as an offering of herself to the community, I strung together words. In those nouns and verbs and adjectives, I knit back together the parts of me that were never supposed to fit: Faithful. Unorthodox. Feminist. Mormon. It was from all the Mormon stories I heard growing up that I learned that salvation meant belonging. In writing my story, I found that salvation happens not only when
our people claim us, but when we muster up the courage and the capacity to claim our own people—including the ones who have been pushed or left out.

As I wrote, I started to put small bits of prose out on the internet: some personal stories, and some essays probing important and conflicted parts of Mormon experience. The mail came quickly, some of it like rocks against the side of the house. Stinging words from strangers calling me a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” an “anti-Mormon,” an “apostate,” a “liar.” They told me I would be excommunicated for voicing such unorthodox sentiments. They accused me of not knowing the faith, of perverting the faith, of seeking to harm other Mormons by writing candidly about the tender places in Mormon life, the sparkling differences and human failings of our people.

Late one night, with the girls asleep, I read through an especially harsh batch of email from strangers. I left the house to run a late-night errand and found myself numb behind the steering wheel, my heart pounding, adrenaline running across my chest and down my arms. I remembered the shame I felt that February day decades ago at Brigham Young University when strangers in a passing car had called me an “anti-Christ” for pinning my peace-sign button to my book bag. What to do with these feelings? What to do with what felt like meanness from my own people? I scrutinized myself intensely: What if they were right? What if people like me were unworthy to tell our version of the Mormon story?
What if our voices did not deserve a place in the community? I felt a baffling sadness begin to seep back in. I parked my car under a streetlamp in the Target parking lot. Sitting behind the steering wheel, I did what my Mormon teachers had taught me to do whenever I was hurt or in danger. I did what I had done during the most difficult moments of the exile years: I prayed. I prayed to a God who stood beyond the human struggles and squabbles of day-to-day Mormonism. I prayed to the God my visiting teacher Sister Bryson told me would help me no matter what because I was searching for truth. I squeezed my eyes shut, and I opened my chest to God.
What should I do with the castigation and the shame? Are these voices speaking the words you want me to hear?
That’s when I realized that through all the years of searching, from the time I was a small girl kneeling at the bedside on her orange prayer rug, I had learned what the voice of God sounded like. I knew what the voice of God felt like, and it did not feel like rocks against the side of the house. It did not leave a sting of shame burning across my temples and in the pit of my stomach. The voice of the God I knew was gentle, kind, and deliberate. And that voice was not forbidding me to write or speak, as long as I did so honestly and without malice. Even if I made mistakes from time to time, as a writer or as a Mormon, that voice would not condemn me. It would guide me firmly and gently through.

•   •   •

In time, another kind of mail began to reach my in-box, from other Mormons:

“Thank you for saying things I want to say but don’t know how.”

“I feel so relieved to think I can be myself at church.”

“I am a believing Mormon woman, and I’m worried that the church seems to be losing so many women.”

“I’ve always questioned, and I’ve always felt so alone. I don’t feel alone any more.”

“I can have doubts without being forced to leave my faith behind. I don’t know who I am if I am not Mormon.”

“I am gay, but I never stopped believing in the values I learned at church. Thank you for giving some voice to what I have felt.”

“I have always felt the way you described but never had the words to articulate it.”

I am not special. I am just someone who happens to have the words. And this is how I would like to use them.

As I wrote, I met dozens of young women, some with pierced noses and spiky haircuts, pregnant, their shoulders
curled, young husbands in tow, everyone crying, saying thank you, and me crying and saying thank you too. I met women with long, just-washed hair, no makeup, and babies on their hips who said, “The Spirit spoke to me today, and I felt impressed to drive across town and tell you to keep going.” Older Mormon feminists reached out to put a steadying hand on my back or a soothing hand on my forehead. A thousand new Mormon friends materialized from out of thin air, each one nodding, strapping on his or her boots, picking up their piece of the handcart, saying, “Yes, let’s walk together.”

As I wrote, agnostic Catholics, reform Jews, gay Christian girls, even stone-cold atheists, gave me a hard look, then nodded, and said: “Yes, I recognize something familiar in the story you are telling.”

As I wrote, the sun came up in the east and moved across the sky until it stood over my house among the remnant orange trees in San Diego. As I wrote, I found myself sitting more comfortably in the Sunday pew. As I wrote, my prayers changed from “God, please help me,” to “God, thank you, and let me be useful.”

And the more I learned to tell my own unorthodox story in public, the more I have learned how to tell the unorthodox story of my Mormon faith. Without shame, without hiding, without apologizing for it or myself, I have written about the misunderstandings that follow this young American faith,
its human history, its awkwardness, its inventiveness, and its growing pains—all of them on record and plainly visible in the light of modern times.

These days, it’s still acceptable to make fun of Mormons in public, to ridicule our history on television, to mock rituals we hold sacred, and to talk about us as though we are not in the room. Mormons have lived with such talk for centuries now, and over the years we have acquired an entire set of habits to cope. In the nineteenth century, faced with outsider hostility and ridicule, we gathered into our own settlements, created Zion communities in a string of midwestern towns, left behind our dearly bought temples each time we removed farther westward, and soon enough left behind the United States altogether to settle in Utah territory. When the federal government sent armies to war against Utah Mormons in the 1850s and 1860s, or spies to pursue and punish polygamists in the 1880s and 1890s, we learned to keep our stories to ourselves. We grew guarded against outsiders, and sometimes we punished Mormons in our midst who asked questions or told an unapproved version of the Mormon story, as if they might betray and weaken us. Those habits have stayed with us all these years. For the most part, we are still an insular people, protective of our differences, guarded and anxious, and ready to walk away.

There is no way forward, I believe, but to tell our whole story. Not the made-for-television version, but the entire very imperfect story, the one that reveals the human flaws of the
ones who came before us. The one that presents Mormons as a people who are earnest and industrious
and
satisfied sometimes with easy contradictions, sweetly tender
and
capable of ignorance and arrogance. A people of sparkling differences and human failings. A people chosen because we have chosen to be ourselves. A people who are not afraid to tell an unorthodox story full of angels, sacred groves, ancestor pioneers, sacrifice, and longing, because an unorthodox story is what history has given us to tell.

An unorthodox story is nothing to be ashamed of. It is something that deserves to be shared.

•   •   •

There are much worse things than telling an unorthodox story, much worse things than explaining oneself to strangers. I always hoped that I would never have to explain myself. From the time I was a teenager standing in the parking lot of the Rose Bowl dance festival counting buses, I thrilled to be in crowds of Mormons and dreamed of finding a Mormon husband with whom I could wordlessly share my faith, everything already understood.

But my story went another way. When an orthodox Mormon world seemed too difficult and dangerous a place for me, I traveled into the world outside and found myself Mormon still. So Mormon, in fact, that whenever I introduced myself, I found that the subject came up within just a few minutes. I’d sit back and register the reaction: the speechless pause,
the look of surprise, mild shock, or even delight, from non-Mormon strangers and acquaintances. In my mind, I’d run through the host of associations the word
Mormon
immediately conjured up for them—polygamy, racism, archconservatism, secretiveness—then I’d see just how many of these preconceptions I could casually disappoint. At times I have encountered silliness and misunderstanding and even a spot of meanness. Nothing to compare to the kind of meanness I experienced from born-again Christians when I was a teenager, or to what I’d experienced from other Mormons who suspected my unorthodox kind. No, what I found most of all was either polite reticence or a humane curiosity, and in the gracious space it afforded, a safe haven where I could tell my stories for the first time. Sharing humanized us all, both the Mormons in the stories and the non-Mormons who had feared, judged, or misunderstood us.

It was to this sweet space of talking, listening, and learning that I committed myself for life when I married David, a man whose religious practice entails a combination of Judaism, Buddhism, and ESPN. For fifteen years now, we have tried to understand each other, motivated by a sense of curiosity, rooted in respect and humor, and, going even deeper than that, a bedrock of loyalty. We will walk this life together. It has never been entirely easy but neither has it been impossibly difficult. There have been awkward and tearful moments. Our families have worried out loud and in private. Religious leaders have wrinkled their brows. The
interfaith family guidebooks have counseled David and me to choose one tradition in which to raise the children, lest we confuse them, or water down both traditions so that we give them nothing at all—nothing but a watered-down and vaguely God-scented gruel.

But being the cantankerous souls that we are, David and I have smiled and largely ignored them. He is Jewish and I am Mormon, and to put away either one of our stories, our families, our peoples, to hold back these huge parts of ourselves from our children seems more damaging than the confusion that well-meaning people grimly prognosticate. Every family story has a great question at its center, and we certainly have ours: What becomes of our children if they are not our spiritual apprentices, if we do not expect them to turn out exactly like us? What will happen if we educate them in both traditions, teach them to be responsible to both traditions, and then expect them to make their own adult faith choices, as all grown-up children must someday do?

So here we are, a Jewish father and a Mormon mother, with Mormon-Jewish children, living a great experiment, aware that we may be failures—and yet each of us, busily, joyfully, trying to explain as much as we can to each other, competing for oxygen every night around the kitchen table. Each of us knows how to pray in at least two languages. We have worked to master the customs of each other’s day-to-day religious lives. David struggles with the homely everyday tasks of Mormon congregations, trying to remember how
exactly to collapse the metal folding chairs ubiquitous to our ward houses. He politely smiles as well-meaning LDS people pepper him with detailed questions about Old Testament rituals, as if he himself—a kid raised Reform in Southern California—knew exactly what the Levites in the temples did with the burnt offerings. He stifles his sneezing and itching whenever the subject of Jesus arises, because he, like most Jewish people, has inherited something of a Jesus allergy, developed collectively over the last two thousand years.

For my part, I have learned to cook
latkes
,
kugel
, brisket, and
matzah brei
. I have taught myself all the holidays and their stories and learned to make dairy lunches for summer school at the conservative synagogue. I have sobbed my way through Kol Nidre, trying to take refuge behind big dark sunglasses, a Mormon feminist, who felt in so many ways a failure in her own faith, finding in the Yom Kippur prayer for release from broken promises the most reasonable words to describe my situation. I have largely given up Christmas—there is no tree in our house, no stockings at the hearth, and Santa Claus has never visited—out of a desire to make our home right for my Jewish husband and children. I have taught myself the
shema
, and then I taught it to my children: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Even if we reach for that God in two different languages, a mother and a father tongue.