Beyond Belief (32 page)
Authors: Cami Ostman
O
N A SUNNY AFTERNOON
just before my last semester of senior year, I made my way through an ostentatious conference center built by the CEO of a successful multilevel marketing company.
Here I go again,
I thought. In my haste, my stiletto heels clacked hard against the high-polished marble in the foyer, sending ghostly echoes dancing through the open space. I shuffled past a small bistro where two youngish businessmen chatted over lunch. Across the hall stood a wide bank of elevators that would carry me upstairs for an audience with the CEO, who moonlighted as my area’s bishop.
I stepped into the spacious lift and pushed the
FOUR
button. When the elevator glided to a halt, the doors parted to reveal a small reception desk. I gave my name to the man seated behind the counter and had barely sat down myself when the CEO swung open his door, revealing a cavernous maw of an office.
“Thank you for meeting me here. Erin, right?” he said as we
shook hands and bellied up to a sprawling conference table in a room affording a view of snowcapped mountains.
“No problem, Bishop. I appreciate your flexibility on such short notice.”
I hadn’t been under this bishop’s watch for long, so he opened with a smattering of vague and easy questions, just as my first confessor had. Nervous and wanting to get to the point, I spat out details about my hometown in Illinois, how I was the only Mormon in the family, and yes, that is hard sometimes. Halfway into explaining what my major was, I paused. I was going to have a panic attack if I didn’t come out with it.
“Actually, Bishop, I wanted to talk to you because I’ve done something I want to repent of.” He wore a grave expression now and waited for me to elaborate. “So I’ve been dating this new guy for a few months now. Spencer. And we really care about each other. I actually think he might be the one. And after my divorce I never expected I’d meet someone as good or kind or exciting as he is. We’ve been getting much closer lately, and, well . . . ”
“You went too far?” The bishop was kind but severe. I nodded, my shame washing over me. He pressed for further details. Just how far was too far? Were we talking about intercourse or something else? Did I realize that oral sex and intercourse were equally severe in God’s eyes? Did I remember what the Book of Mormon says about premarital sex?
Of course I had read many times what the Book of Mormon says. That dog-eared page in my scriptures was scarred with underlining. The message stood indelible on the flimsy page: Sexual sin is second only to murder. This meant that, despite my exhusband’s abuse over the years—all the quiet manipulation culminating with the physical danger that led up to our divorce—because
it hadn’t killed me, under Mormon ideology he was far more righteous than Spencer was, though Spencer only committed the sin of covering my body in an arrangement of sweet and well-intentioned kisses. As a devout Mormon, I was asked to take this doctrine seriously, and I did. But for one brief instant, it occurred to me how shortsighted it was to regard those tender and beautiful moments with Spencer as pure lust, comparable to murder, a grievous sin to be constantly lamented. It was illogical—and
wrong
.
Suddenly I didn’t want to confess. Instead, I wanted to explain that this had happened because I was twenty-one and for the first time felt deeply in love with a beautiful person, that this was
normal,
but that I cared enough about God that I was going to try to make it right.
Penitent for the second time in my life, I sat before another old man I’d just met and mustered all the faith I had to pour forth my intimate secrets in an attempt to reconcile my secular joy with the laws of heaven. Once again, I was told not to worry, that although the sin was severe, it could be erased. When Christ was through with the situation, it would be like it never happened.
“Of course,” he said after a moment’s arrest, “I don’t think you should ever see that boy again.”
I shuddered. No, that couldn’t be right.
Spencer himself was the bridge between my growing doubts about faith and my desire to pour myself back into the gospel. On the night we met I had been ready to give up my religion for good, to drop out of college, quit my first real job, and head back East a failure. Religion wasn’t worth it if solitude, divorce, and decimated self-worth were the fruits of trying so hard to do the right thing. But Spencer had looked deep into my spirit and beckoned my most valuable qualities to surface. It was like he had crashed through the
ceiling of my rickety life, an emissary from my better self. Without meaning to, he drew me back from the edge and convinced me to take a second shot at being something more than a wreck. And he did it all without being anyone other than the one-and-only Spencer.
How could Spencer, of all people, not be worthy of my future? Without him I’d surely meet other guys and wind up with great friends, a satisfying career—a beautiful life. But you meet only one Spencer. I abandoned submission with the shake of my head. Not see Spencer? The person whom I was sure God had sent to help me?
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” I spat back. The bishop shifted in his seat, uneasy, as if I’d shot him hard in the face with a rubber band. “We broke the rules, and I accept that. But this was only a sin because we aren’t married, not because the act itself was ugly or wrong.”
He admitted I had a point, and he met me halfway by suggesting I stay away from Spencer until it had been decided that I’d fully repented.
With forced restraint, I ignored the pounding in my temples and the protest stuck in my throat. God was surely worth at least some compromise, so I agreed. The bishop and God took a few months to decide that Spencer and I could be together again. It felt like forever.
A
FEW YEARS LATER
Spencer and I sat before one more bishop for our premarital consultation. I’d obtained my legal divorce years before, but because I had been married in the temple, I had to get special permission to remarry. I could be married again outside the Mormon temple, but if I wanted my marriage to be eternal, I would need a temple divorce—a sort of
get
for Mormons.
“We’ll need to get your ex-husband’s approval, of course, and I will need you to write down any sexual indiscretion that happened since you two separated.” My new, white-haired bishop had taken the day off from his job as a financial analyst to help us with a mountain of premarital paperwork.
“Well, there was something—but I took care of that with my bishop a long time ago.”
“The brethren in Salt Lake still need to know, even if you’ve repented.”
I sighed, my patience beginning to unravel. Would I have to go through the whole story again? Was it really necessary to defend myself before a stranger and repeat the weighty business of admitting fault and reliving guilt? “But doesn’t repentance erase the sin?” I tried. “Didn’t the Savior suffer so that my sins would be forgiven? Why do I have to keep dragging them out in meetings and writing them down for strange men to read any time I want something from the church?” I watched as the bishop searched for just the right way to soothe me into compliance.
“They just need all the facts so they can make the right choice about letting you be sealed to someone else.”
All that repentance, all those nights spent in tear-streaked supplication, and the Mormon Church still wanted a book somewhere with all my sexual sins scribbled in indelible ink. Why was sleeping with someone I loved a sin worthy of a lifetime of red tape? God forgave me, but one old man after another lined up to punish me for believing that sex wasn’t the worst way to spit in the face of religion. I didn’t believe God lost too much sleep over whom I coupled with, but his Church couldn’t get my erotic life off its mind.
The brethren wanted to keep me chaste, demure, and teachable. Women were to be passive nurturers while men became
patriarchs and eventual gods. I wasn’t a disciple of Christ if I was free-loving, outspoken, and logical. The fate of my eternal life was directly tied to my gender and to my willingness to fill my role and obey these older men. But I could no longer do this without betraying myself.
Sex was complicated and beautiful, an enormous weight and the greatest joy. It was time to turn my back on guilt and embrace a life of joy. My mother’s romance novels had long ago showed me the secret joys of living, but religion forced me to separate myself from that joy in favor of submission. I wouldn’t do it.
As long as you believe . . .
My mother’s advice rang from someplace within me as I walked away from the bishop’s office, my hand entwined with Spencer’s, and the sun shone over a brand-new God and a guiltless future. The wedding was set for late March, without the temple, and without another fruitless moment devoted to the past. I was free, with nothing before me but faith, love, and eternal possibility.
T
here were only three kinds of books in our house: Bibles, cookbooks, and diet books. None of them offered the kind of nourishment I craved. “The wisdom of this world is foolishness to God” was a common refrain at home, but like Eve, seduced by the tree of knowledge, I knew there were apples in the neighborhood and I was hungry.
I loved school and managed to maintain top grades without any encouragement or even interest from my parents. My parents had no academic sights set for me; we were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, as such, higher education was deemed “unwholesome.” Throughout my elementary and junior high school years my family moved often. It wasn’t that my stepfather was in the military or diplomatic service. Quite the contrary: He didn’t get along with anyone, especially customers. He could not keep a job.
By the time I entered high school we’d settled in a Long Island town with high educational standards and a great library. I made friends with classmates who took part in Vietnam War protests, boycotted grapes in solidarity with César Chávez, and debated the superiority of Stones vs. Beatles. At home, my stepfather, who’d only dipped his toes into the tributary of “the Truth” early on at my mother’s prodding, now refused to participate, preferring to call himself a “lapsed Catholic.” He took umbrage at being abandoned by his family when we went to five weekly meetings at the Kingdom Hall or out in service, knocking on doors, on the weekend. He fumed, he slammed doors, he issued ultimatums. My mother, like all Jehovah’s Witnesses, saw “persecution” as proof that we were special and beloved by “the One True Master.” She stuck to her scriptural guns and soon every dinnertime turned into World War III.
I was forbidden to date boys from school. Instead, I was expected to accept invitations from young men in the congregation or those I’d meet at regional conventions with themes like “Fruitage of the Spirit” or “God’s Blessings Near at Hand.” The boys that set my heart aflutter, however—in other words, those condemned to perish imminently in the global annihilation that would be Armageddon, a.k.a. God’s Judgment Day—were smart, funny, artistic, and slightly aloof. Two were particularly magnetic.
Peter, with amber cat eyes and chestnut hair falling over his collar, was a musician. He collected rare recordings by blues singers from the Mississippi Delta. He sometimes walked the school halls with me between classes, teasing me, the missionary in training, by leaning in close, rasping lyrics from a current favorite, like Robert Johnson’s “Kind-Hearted Woman Blues.”
“I’m gonna get deep down in this connection, keep on tanglin’ with these wires / And when I mash down on your little starter, then your spark plug will give me fire.”
Blushing tomato red, the furthest thing from my mind was parsing scripture.
Peter took my breath away when he was close by, but it was George who kept me tossing and turning at night, plotting how I might spend more time with him without incurring Jehovah’s wrath. George was an effortless honor student. I was amazed by his intricate knowledge not only of Shakespeare and Cervantes but also of television and movie trivia. He developed the latter skill in order to keep his alcoholic single mother happy. When her regular three-day benders gave way to seesaw periods of self-flagellation and self-pity, George distracted her by providing a running commentary on reruns of
Petticoat Junction
and
The Beverly Hillbillies
. On the afternoons I wrangled permission for us to study together, slightly fudging the optional/required status of the activity for my mother’s benefit, we’d sit in his kitchen, chatting and sipping Constant Comment tea, which felt at the time like the epitome of sophistication. More than once I had to leave in a rush, pursued by George’s mother wildly batting at me with a broom, screeching, “You’d better get the hell out of here, girl! I’m gonna kick your ass back to Texas!” As she was from Tennessee and we were in New York, I chose to see her boozy threats as surrealistic
happenings
rather than acts of malice, and returned as often as possible.
