plan of salvation
On Monday nights, my father and mother gathered their four children around the kitchen table in our tract house on the edge of the orange groves and taught us how the universe worked.
Sometimes they used a stack of cotton work gloves to demonstrate the thin illusoriness of this life. “Your spirit is like this hand,” my father would say, wiggling his fingers. “Your spirit has always existed. When you were born, your spirit went into your body and a veil of forgetfulness was drawn across your mind.” He slipped his hand into the glove. “When you die your spirit will leave your body and join the spirits of your ancestors on the other side of the veil,” he said, withdrawing his hand from the glove, and leaving it an inert heap on the Formica tabletop. Death was made as small and familiar to me as changing clothes, and this life a moment of forgetfulness on a long, long thread of being.
Sometimes too my parents taught us about the farm-boy prophet Joseph Smith, who long ago in upstate New York had gone into a grove of trees, gotten down on his knees, and put his questions directly to God, who, with His son Jesus, appeared directly to Joseph Smith and then sent angels to reveal new books of scripture and new ways of being. Every night when I knelt on the little crocheted orange prayer rug at the side of my bed, I prayed to a God that heard and answered. Sometimes too I had dreams and God spoke kindly to me in my dreams, and I woke with wet eyes, so disappointed to be back on the forgetful side of the veil that separated this world from the next.
When we children were asleep, my auburn-haired mother stayed up late, late, late, pulling the names of our ancestors out of thickets of old records, to reorder them all for eternity’s sake in a baby-blue Book of Remembrance with the outlines of Mormon temple spires embossed on the cover in gold. Sometimes, in the morning, standing in the kitchen, she would tell us how dark forces had surrounded her late at night to encumber her work, but our ancestors stepped through time, straight through the walls of our tract house in the orange groves, identifying themselves by name and declaring that they would protect her.
I grew up in kitchens where bushels of backyard-grown green beans were canned and put up for the winter, habits of pioneer preparedness, steam on the kitchen windows against the perfect California sunshine outside. On the refrigerator hung a calendar from the local Mormon mortuary, each month a picture of a different Mormon temple around the globe: in Arizona, London, Switzerland, or Los Angeles. I grew up riding in fleets of blue-paneled family vans, bench seats loaded with children, all going to church in our play-clothes on a Wednesday afternoon, everything perfectly understood among us, all the lyrics memorized, nothing to be explained.
Early on Sunday mornings, the fourteen-year-old boys from church knocked on our front door to gather in the tithes and offerings. Later, my parents, brother, sisters, and I sat together in wooden pews, sang pioneer hymns, and took a white-bread-and-tap-water sacrament passed on plastic trays. On Sunday afternoons, my father, who worked all week as an engineer but gave his weekends to service as the bishop of our congregation, stayed behind to hear all the confessions and woes of the people: all their secrets he tucked away in the breast pocket of his polyester Sunday suit. And most Sunday evenings, seventy-something-year-old Sister Pierce would appear on our doorstep, a homemade strawberry pie in her hands, an offering to my father, the bishop, who one midnight in a cold hospital room had anointed her head with consecrated olive oil and given her a healing blessing.
This is how I came into this world, into this world of believing: an ancient spirit striving to remember the shape of eternity at the kitchen table, in a house where ancestors knew our names and stepped through the walls, my dreams filled with light, my head consecrated with oil, every Sunday morning white bread and tap water for sacrament, every Sunday evening the taste of a ripe glazed strawberry saying “grateful” on my tongue.
• • •
When I turned seven years old, my father asked me if I could read the whole Book of Mormon before I was to be baptized at age eight. And I said I could. So every night my father settled in beside me in my little twin bed on the second story of the tract home at the edge of the orange groves, and we held the Book of Mormon on our laps.
Together, we read of a small family of Israelites, Lehi and Sariah, their children Laman, Lemuel, Nephi, and Sam, warned by God to leave the land of their ancestors and travel far across the oceans to the Americas, where they would become (as we believed) the ancestors of the American Indians.
We read of a powerful dream given by God to Lehi. Lehi dreamed that he traveled for hours in dark mists of uncertainty, begging for mercy from God, until he reached a beautiful field, with a river and a tree of life bearing delicious fruit. A narrow path with an iron handrail led to the tree of life, past great and spacious buildings of people in fancy clothes who mocked the searching humility of Lehi, his family, and the numberless masses of people who pressed forward along the path, hungry for the delicious fruit. How many strayed from the path and were lost in the mists, or joined the proud crowds in the great and spacious building! How few finally held to the iron handrail and made it to the tree of life!
And as I felt the warmth of my father in bed beside me, I also felt the terrible danger of the world around us, peril rushing in currents beneath us, threatening to separate us one from another, and the threat of that separation was to my mind unbearable. My father understood the terrible danger too, and he hungered for some way to get me safely through the mists crowding in around us. Mormonism was the name of the iron handrail that would lead us through these mists to that beautiful tree, the end of all our hungers.
For I had been born of goodly parents who, in the wilderness of the late twentieth century, saw the wreckage of empires, markets, and civilizations, but did not know how to disentangle effects from causes, nor had the vocabulary to name the strands of these knotted histories, nor their place in them, nor the mundane and disastrous traumas of their own common American upbringings, nor the mundane and disastrous traumas lived by a millennium’s worth of their poor and common ancestors, and who heard all around them mocking crowds like faceless laugh tracks of sitcom television threatening oblivion.
Every night in my second-story room in the tract house in Orange County the year before I was baptized, my father and I read the Book of Mormon, the stories of ancient Israelite peoples led by God to the Americas, and their wars, visions, and wanderings. No one else in the world believed in the Book of Mormon but Mormons like us. So we huddled together, my nursing father and me, safe in tender longing, as the currents and the garbage and the television laugh tracks ran down the streets and fell into the storm drains and rushed along the concreted river channels, alongside the freeways, past abandoned orange groves, out to the black and trackless sea.
• • •
In those days we Mormons, most of us, were not a wealthy people. We were people one or two generations from the alfalfa farm, or the homestead. We were high school teachers, bookkeepers, nurses, engineers, and mechanics, people who fed eight children on bread homemade from wheat stored in great tins in the garage and milk reconstituted from powder. And in addition to the 10 percent of our incomes we dutifully tithed to build temples around the world, the offerings we paid the first Sunday of every month when we skipped two meals to provide for the poor among us, and the pennies we collected for the Mormon children’s hospital in Salt Lake City, we raised money to construct our own church buildings.
I had heard the stories of long ago that when Mormons built their first sacred temple at Kirtland, Ohio, from timber and local sandstone, Mormon women smashed their dishes and glasses to press into the plaster so that it would sparkle in the sun. In the 1970s, when Mormons were building meetinghouses across North America, our grown-ups came up with all sorts of homely schemes to pay into the building fund. Our mothers baked dozens of pumpkin pies for a church Thanksgiving supper and then bought them back one slice at a time for us to eat on paper plates at the ward-house supper. Our fathers volunteered to drive Hertz rental cars from one airport to another, collecting ten dollars an hour to help the agencies sort out their inventories. And every year my father, being bishop, organized a holiday bazaar where we could sell our homemade crafts to one another: gingerbread houses, jars of peach preserves, handmade pioneer bonnets.
Sister Simmons was in her eighties, a widow, Utah-born, one of the numberless Mormons who moved down to California during the Depression, or the War, seeking work. She told my father she wanted to do her part for the building fund.
“What are your talents?” my father asked from his seat behind the desk in the bishop’s office.
“I can crochet,” Sister Simmons said. “Though it takes me a while.”
“Well, that’s fine,” my father said. “Why don’t you make a real nice afghan, Sister Simmons, and we’ll make it the centerpiece of the night. We’ll put it up for a silent auction.”
What materialized at the bazaar was the ugliest afghan my father had ever seen: alternating chevrons of burnt umber and brassy yellow, with a brassy yellow fringe.
But who would dare say a word to Sister Simmons? So proud of her dedicated labors: her eighty-year-old hands curling around their crochet hooks as she sat in the soft chair in front of the television in her little house on the edge of a concrete river on the alluvial plains of Southern California, her devotion galvanizing into purpose, while her children are all grown, her husband is gone and waiting to call her name and bring her across the veil into heaven, while leggy blondes in short shorts and espadrilles bounce across the screen of the little television, and the laugh track issues forth in random little bursts, faceless and sort of menacing.
So my father put the afghan on display and set out the bid sheet.
Late in the evening he saw that no one had bid. Not one single bid.
He looked at my mother across the room, as she supervised us four children, pushing Jell-O salads across our paper plates with plastic forks. And then he wrote a number down on the bid sheet: $100. A lot of money in those days.
But how Sister Simmons smiled when she stopped by the table where her afghan was displayed and spied the $100 figure on her bid sheet. And how proud she felt that by the labors of her hands she had transformed burnt umber and brassy yellow acrylic yarn into a sacred offering, a handsome sum for the building fund.
You will say these are treacly widow’s mite stories, and I will say, yes, they are. But this is how I first came to understand what a story is, and how to define salvation: salvation is the eye that sees in secret and rewards the labors of homely hands. Salvation is the steady work of elderly women who remember the long avenues in Utah lined with cottonwood trees, and their fathers working their hands rough on the local ward house, or the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. What was there to compare to this feeling of belonging to one another, belonging to the only people who believed as we believed, as our mothers and fathers, and pioneer grandmothers and grandfathers believed, safe from the mocking and fashionable faceless crowds, safe where no one would say your books of scripture are all made up, or the sacred undergarments you promised to wear every day are funny, or your afghan is too ugly, or, old woman, there is nothing in you the world loves anymore.
• • •
This is the world I willingly joined when at eight years old I put on a white dress with a Peter Pan collar sewn with special intention and purpose by my Utah-born grandmother and stepped to the edge of a font of turquoise-blue water, where my father, dressed in an all-white suit, stood waist deep in the water and beckoned me to come. He placed one of his arms around my narrow shoulders and prayed, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” I squeezed my eyes tight as he lowered me entirely into the water, as special witnesses watched from beside the font to make sure that the immersion was total. Not a thread of my white dress or a filament of my dark brown hair floated to the top in this perfect enactment of my own death, my own passage through the veil.
This is the world I joined when I stepped from the font into the towel held by my mother, who, with my grandmother, fussed over my wet hair and helped me change into dry clothes in the church bathroom so that I could once again go out into the embrace of friends and family, take my seat, and have the hands of my father come down upon my head and with his words command the Holy Ghost as my companion, to walk beside me, an invisible guide and guardian. This is the great sweet weight I felt being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon not just by birth but also by choice and baptism, making and keeping sacred promises, a member of a people chosen because we had chosen to be ourselves.
I grew up in a world where all the stories I heard arrived at the same conclusions: the wayfarer restored, the sick healed, the lost keys found, a singular truth confirmed. And an orthodox Mormon story is the only kind of story I ever wanted to be able to tell.
But these are not the kinds of stories life has given me.
Every Mormon carries with them a bundle of stories like a suitcase of family secrets. Polygamous ancestors we have learned to be ashamed of. Histories that reveal the human flaws of the ones who came before us. Doctrines we dare not mention in public for fear of ridicule. Sacrifices we refuse to believe God would ask of us. Stories of loss that do not end neatly with restoration and stories of leaving that do not conclude with the return home.
In the world I grew up in, it was not okay to tell unorthodox stories. We did not hear them in church. We did not read them in scripture. But sooner or later they break through to the surface in every Mormon life, in every human life, in every life of faith. I am not afraid of them. Because this is the story life has given me to tell.