the book of mormon girl
What 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.