The Book of Mormon Girl (19 page)

Our daughters, Rosa and Ella, hear the great stories every
day: Eve tasting that world-shifting fruit of knowledge, Lehi leading his family toward the tree of life, Moses kneeling barefoot before the burning bush, Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees with a heart full of questions. Esther standing regal and unafraid and claiming her own story. Slaves leaving Egypt, and pioneers crossing the plains. Confused though they may be, at least they’ll have great material to work from.

When things get strained, we have learned to shrug our shoulders, laugh, and wait a little. Faith, after all, means knowing that the answers will come, in time. And some Sunday afternoons, when the work of our various institutional indoctrinations is done, we take the kids and the dog (who is sort of a pagan Episcopalian—that’s another story) and walk the beach together.

As Rosa and Ella write their names in the sand and outrun the waves, David moves his hands and talks anxiously about professional basketball.

And I’ll confess whether or not it has been one of those weeks when I’ve worried vaguely about my own excommunication. I don’t know a progressive Mormon woman who doesn’t worry about that from time to time, given the excommunications we witnessed in the 1990s.

“I’ve been running the tapes of my church court again,” I tell David, half-joking, half-serious. It feels better to say it out loud than to hold it inside, the fear, whether founded
or unfounded. I meditate on what it would mean to have my name scrubbed from the records of the church, removed from the files stored in the granite canyons east of Salt Lake City, severed from the names of my grandmother, my great-grandmothers, my ancestors. I remember the stories I have heard from other women who have been excommunicated: the anger and sadness that kept them crying for days and days. I wonder why any religion would care to do this to its own people.

As we walk, I review in my mind everything I have written for the last seven days, searching for the hazy spots where probity bleeds into conceit or meanness. That, I tell myself, is where the real danger lies.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I don’t think it will happen this week.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asks. He smiles, reassuringly.

The people I attend church with every Sunday, the people who teach my children their Book of Mormon stories—these people have never said an unkind word, never made me or my children feel ashamed. Still, I know that in times past, high-ranking Church leaders have asked local leaders to investigate women like me. I believe the Church is slowly outgrowing old habits of punishing the unorthodox. I believe, but this I do not know for sure. All I can do is place my trust in a faith stronger than fear. All I can do is tell my story and hope that it fosters mercy.

David knows. He has heard this all before, and he will patiently outwait it.

Sometimes he has stronger faith than I do.

Good thing I married him.

•   •   •

There’s a pioneer hymn I first learned while sitting in the wooden pews at church: I still sing it at church, and I have on my iPod a grinding, plaintive rock-and-roll version sung by the Saber Rattlers, a band led by a bearded Mormon kid in New York City:

Now, let us rejoice in the day of salvation

No longer as strangers on earth need we roam.

Good tidings are sounding to us and each nation

And shortly the hour of redemption will come.

We’ll love one another and never dissemble

But cease to do evil and ever be one

And when the ungodly are fearing and tremble

We’ll watch for the day when redemption will come.

I used to dream that Zion was a place full of people just like me. It was a place where we all knew and followed the same rules, nodding along to the tunes of hymns we had long ago memorized. And I dreamed that I would arrive there
with a station wagon full of perfectly pressed and groomed kids, a custom Marie Osmond haircut, a suit-wearing husband, and the names of my ancestors neatly organized in blue binders.

My vision is a bit less tidy now. There are all kinds of people passing through, from the farm-boy Mormon missionaries we have over for dinner now and then, to Buddhist monks in saffron robes I meet in front of the dairy case at the grocery store, from gay Navajo Mormons I encounter on the internet to the moms at the Jewish preschool.
No longer as strangers on earth need we roam.
Zion is not so much a place on the map as a longing for a place where all who really hunger for truth and goodness—and I mean
everyone
—can gather and finally rest. I feel that longing; oh, do I feel it. I feel it all the time.

On Sundays, when I was growing up, we were not allowed to watch television, except for the epic four-hour Cecil B. DeMille film
The Ten Commandments
. We’d sit in front of the television in our Sunday clothes, my sisters and brother and I, and we’d watch it all unfurl across the television screen, from baby Moses set on the river through the plagues and the exodus to the golden calf and the Promised Land. No scene was more thrilling to me than the moment when all the tribes of Israel gathered on the promenade of sphinxes that stood before Pharoah’s city, and a strapping stonecutter Joshua (played by the unforgettable John Derek) and all of his fellow heralds sounded their
shofar
s and proclaimed
the
shema
, and Moses (played by the incomparable Charlton Heston) raised his staff and the great movement from slavery to freedom commenced. How my heart thrilled when the exodus rolled across our television screen—the young, whip-scarred Hebrew families, and the Ethiopian bondsmen, and the old women clinging to the back of mules, and even some god-fearing Egyptians, and the children who got lost in the confusion of the crowd were swept up and onto the shoulders of strong men wearing Levite robes.
Yes
, I knew, we would all get there someday. Every last one of us.

Now, every spring, my daughters and I break out our DVD copy of
The Ten Commandments
for the Easter-Passover season. I sit on the couch with freckle-faced Ella and curly-haired Rosa, snuggled up under a quilt Mormon friends tied for me decades ago, just before I went away to Brigham Young University. We have snuggled together when I read them stories from the Book of Mormon, and we have snuggled together when I taught them the
shema
. Somehow, this feels just as significant.

“You see that? That big messy spiral of people, moving, trying to find God?” I ask them, as the exodus unfolds once again on screen.

“That right there is Zion. Get there however you can.”

the book of mormon girl

W
hat do we do with ourselves when we find we have failed to become the adults we dreamed of as pious children?

What do we do when the church of our childhoods no longer treasures our names?

How do we react when we discover at the core of faith a knot of contradictions?

Do we throw it all out? Throw out all the strange and beautiful stories of angels at the bedside, holy books buried in the American hillsides, and seagulls swooping down from the Utah skies to eat up plagues of crickets?

Do we sue to get our tithes and offerings back, all the dollars we faithfully mailed to Salt Lake City, to build temples we would never see?

Do we blame our parents? Do we resent the worry in their
eyes? Do we feel our failures eat up the oxygen in the room like lost and hungry ancestors?

Do we blame the orthodox, so beautiful in their temple clothes, always doing as they are told, but so alone with their own forms of failure and sorrow?

Do we blame ourselves, for our treasonous prayers, for the fact that we took it all too seriously: all the talk of love, compassion, equality, mercy, and justice?

I don’t want to blame anyone. I want to do what my ancestors did: look west and dream up a new country for my children. I just want to tell my story. Because the tradition is young, and the next chapter is yet to be written. And ours may yet be a faith that is big enough for all of our stories.

I want a faith as expansive as the skies above the Eastern Sierras at eleven thousand feet. I want to rest my back against lodgepole pines with you and puzzle out the mysteries. I want a faith as handmade as pioneer-carved wooden pews under an arching tabernacle sky dome. I want a faith as welcoming as a Pioneer Day dinner table set with a thousand cream-of-chicken-soup casseroles and wedding-present Crock-Pots, a table with room enough for everyone: male and female, black and white, gay and straight, perfect and imperfect, orthodox or unorthodox, Mormon, Jew, or gentile.

I want room at the table for all the gay and lesbian Mormons who feel they can’t go home for dinner, and room for all the Mormon parents who don’t know how to let them in the door.

Room for my Jewish husband, and all the non-Mormon people who patiently watch Mormon loved ones wrestle with our angels.

A place for my father, who taught me to read the Book of Mormon, and gently led me by the hand into the baptismal font.

And a place for my brother, who in his own way is teaching his sons to read the Book of Mormon, and gently leads them into the baptismal font.

Room for all the Idaho farm boys on their missions, lonely for video games.

All the men in their Sunday socks walking colicky babies across cold kitchen floors.

All the Mormon men who never dreamed of being prophets, never dreamed of taking plural wives, and even for those who did, at this table, there is room for you.

I want room for all the Mormon girls.

For all the Mormon pioneer girls, asafetida bags around their necks and rolling hoops between the Utah cottonwoods.

For all the Mormon girls living in Arizona suburbs with their minivans and mommy blogs and closets full of potato pearls sealed up against the end-times.

For all the Mormon girls keeping faith in the concrete canyons of New York City.

For Marie Osmond in all of her glorious variations: chubby thirteen-year-old Marie, perfect skinny college
sophomore Marie, postpartum depression Marie, grown Marie
and
her grown lesbian daughter.

For Janice Allred, Margaret Toscano, Gail Houston, Cecilia Konchar Farr, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and all the other Mormon feminists, and for all the Mormon feminists who came before us, even Sonia Johnson, wherever she may be.

For Millie Watts, white-haired Mormon mother of a gay son, holding a candle in protest on a November evening.

For my mother, the genealogist who has rescued from oblivion the names of all our dead.

For my great-great-grandmother Martha Clayton who threatened to cut off her husband’s ears if he took a plural wife, and for my great-great-great-grandmother Lucy Evalina Waterbury Wight who was a plural wife.

For the eighty-three-year-old Mormon woman patiently typing out her life story on a quiet springtime afternoon in a red-rock southern Utah town.

For the forty-year-old Mormon single mother hoping her car will start on a cold Wyoming morning.

For all the Mormon women with puffy hands and wide hips who have taught me how to camp under the stars, or filled my refrigerator with casseroles when I had my babies.

For all the Mormon girls shivering in basement apartments in Provo cutting oil paints with dull blades.

For all the tall skinny blond Mormon girls playing
basketball in reservation border towns, and for all the Navajo Mormon girl point guards hungry to defeat them.

For all the Tongan Mormon girls, Guatemalan Mormon girls, Korean Mormon girls—the future belongs to you.

And for all the redheaded polygamous girls who boldly face the television cameras and say, “Don’t feel sorry for us.”

For my beautiful brown-haired sister who lives on the very face of the Wasatch Mountains, dreams of surfing, and bumps hip-hop from her minivan up and down the granite-walled canyons.

For my beautiful blond sister talking fast in the corporate boardroom and wearing her faith quietly against her skin.

For my Mormon-Jewish daughters, their faces a galaxy of freckles, standing in the sunlight in their soccer cleats.

For my beloved grandmothers standing right above them, dressed in white.

They all belong in my unorthodox Mormon story.

As do you: Catholic girl, Jewish girl, gay Christian, Baptist boy many miles away from home, grown man on a journey, grown woman not afraid.

May this story keep you company as you travel.

May it help nurture your own.

N
o one ever asks to have a writer in the family, or the ward. To all the people who find themselves in these pages, especially my parents, thank you for giving life its richness. Mom and Dad—I love you. Thank you for teaching me to love this faith and for your grace and patience.

The first draft of this manuscript was completed during a residency at Hedgebrook Women Writers in Residence on Whidbey Island, Washington. To learn more about how Hedgebrook supports Women Authoring Change, please visit hedgebrook.org.

I thank all of the communities of faith that have sheltered me—Congregation Dor Hadash of San Diego; the Friends Meeting of Austin, Texas; St. Paul’s Cathedral of San Diego—and to thousands upon thousands of Mormons who have inspired me, taught me, frustrated me, challenged me, and delighted me in the many stakes of Zion.

I learned to write from Darrell Spencer, Louise Plummer, Leslie Norris, and Susan Howe at Brigham Young University
and from David Wong Louie, Stephen Yenser, and Paula Gunn Allen at UCLA. Blessed encouragement has come from Lisa Moore, Jim Lee, Garnette Cadogan, Holly Welker, Carol Lynn Pearson, John Dehlin, Anne Peffer, Ann Davis, Tresa Edmunds, Cathy Castillo, Susan Scott, Sara Burlingame, Lisa Butterworth, Kristine Haglund, Steve Gibson, Susan Reed, Jana Riess, Claire Tichi Grezmekovsky, Trent Ricks, Phil Barlow, Mary Valle, Karen Maezen Miller, Sarah Posner, Lisa Webster, Evan Derkacz, the women with whom I shared the Hedgebrook farmhouse table, and many, many others.