“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (11 page)

We did our best to humble ourselves. Humility, after all, is
a trait worth cultivating and wearing with pride.

Besides, there was work to do.

Jesus was coming to dinner.

Young Earth Creationists the world over speculated that 2000
AD (or, for those who are more with it, 2000 Common Era, aka CE) would mark the
year Jesus showed up to destroy the wicked and rule personally on earth for a
thousand years. They believe the world is 6,000 years old: 4,000 from the
Creation to the birth of Jesus, followed by 2,000 from then until now. As for
various scientific methods of measuring the earth’s age that converge on four
and half or so billion years, well, science is a tool of the devil.

Reporters visiting Manti asked Harmston if the Second Coming
was going to take place on January 1, 2000. Now, that was just plain silly. It
would have been pretty lame for Jesus to come on a day as easy to guess as New
Year’s Day, 2000. Besides, as the Parable of the Ten Virgins makes clear, part
of the reason God doesn’t tell the world when Jesus is coming is to encourage
everyone to be good all of the time, just in case.

Which only proves that Harmston was a true prophet. No
charlatan would have come up with a date as unlikely as March 25, 2000.

If you’re wondering how come it was OK for us to know what
day Jesus was coming when no one else was allowed to know, well, don’t forget
that we’d all had our calling and election sealed upon us. We were already
guaranteed our place on the right hand of God. There was no longer any point in
having the Second Coming take us by surprise.

Here is the order in which we were told events would unfold
on March 25:

STEP ONE: Everyone in The True and Living Church of Jesus
Christ of Saints of the Last Days would meet together and pray until the
heavenly trump sounded.

STEP TWO: The heavens would open, and Jesus would descend into
the Mormon Temple in Manti, accompanied by oodles of heavenly beings, including
all of the righteous dead from the other side of the veil. How they were all
going to fit inside that tiny temple would not be a problem, but a miracle.

If you wonder why Jesus would come to a Mormon temple when
according to our beliefs the Mormon Church was an apostate organization, see
Step Three.

STEP THREE: Manti would instantly transform into the
promised Shekinah. At that instant, all the wicked within its borders would
drop dead.
This included all the Mormons,
including those who happened to be in the Manti Temple at the time.
Jesus
would then hand the temple over to us, its rightful owners. Harmston repeatedly
emphasized that TLC members were not to do any of the wicked-slaying
themselves. Bodies dropping right and left were to be the natural, wondrous
by-product of having Jesus descend in his glory. Good thing. Most of us weren’t
nutty enough to go around slaying in the name of the Lord, but there were a few
who might have tried, had Harmston not been clear on that point. I shudder to
think.

We couldn’t have putrefying bodies spoiling our appetites at
the feast that was to follow. Something would have to be done with all those
bodies. Surely you will agree that it was no coincidence that a recent convert
to our cult happened to own a couple of backhoes. You have to hand it to God.
He thinks of everything. The fellow was told to be ready to do some digging and
burying in the name of the Lord.

The need for backhoes struck me as curious. At his coming,
Jesus was going to bestow upon the righteous men of the TLC the power to move
mountains with a wave of the hand. You’d think placing and covering bodies in
graves with the wave of a hand would be a cinch by comparison.

STEP FOUR: We would sit down to dinner with Jesus. This was
to be the Feast of the Bridegroom. Jesus, of course, was the Bridegroom. We,
The True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days, were the
bride. Nothing beats a couple of worn-out metaphors when it comes to putting a
finishing touch on an end-of-the-world dinner party surrounded by recently
fallen corpses.

If you think planning dinner for the extended family at
Thanksgiving is work, try planning one for a congregation of several hundred
people plus Jesus plus innumerable heavenly beings. The seating chart alone
could run hundreds of pages, not to mention cause squabbles over who got to sit
at the head table. Would we need name tags? (
HELLO—My name is Gabriel
the Archangel
.)

It fell to Harmston’s First Wife Elaine to take charge of
procuring the food. We were going to need a lot of it. There was no telling how
much of an appetite angels might work up with all of that trumpet playing and
wicked slaying. Elaine rented a 26-foot refrigerated box truck and, accompanied
by a few sister-wives, drove 86 miles north to the Costco in Orem, Utah. There
the women filled the truck with beef roasts, pork roasts, hams, turkeys,
lobster, crab, a variety of fruits and vegetables, flower bouquets, and
desserts. Returning to Manti, they parked the truck in our driveway. The roar
of the refrigeration unit, running nonstop, kept me awake at night.

I don’t recall who was assigned to bring drinks. Maybe the
heavenly host agreed to bring a few hundred liters of caffeine-free cola.

As the artist with the interior design degree, I was placed
in charge of decorating the temple. I couldn’t decorate the temple itself until
Jesus came and handed it over to us, so I set up tables in our home and loaded
them with decorating items. I picked up 20 forest green tablecloths from JC
Penney, which landed me on their catalog mailing list for years. To go with the
tablecloths, we procured dinnerware with an elegant green ivy pattern. Women
brought over their special bowls, candle holders, crystal, and candy jars.

I have a passion for cookies. Just in case Jesus shared that
passion—after all, what kind of perfect being wouldn’t?—I baked
hundreds.

The few folding tables our cult owned wouldn’t do for a
feast of this size. No problem. The local Mormon churches had a good supply.
Not that we expected them to lend us their tables. We would simply walk in and
take them the moment Jesus struck the Mormons dead at his coming. Harmston
assigned a group of men with pickup trucks to be at the ready.

Sometimes I shudder when I picture what we so eagerly
anticipated. Imagine the scene. There would be dead everywhere. Joyfully
carrying Jell-O salads, roasts, casseroles, and cookies, we were going to step
over the bodies on our way up the hill to the Manti Mormon Temple. Shouting
“hosanna,” we were going to walk past the dead within the walls of the temple
and make our way to the Celestial Room. There, pushing aside any corpses that
happened to be in our way, we were going to set up our tables and sit down to
feast with Jesus and sing praises to his name.

For some reason, my artist’s mind didn’t paint a graphic
mental picture for me—at the time. The whole thing remained more of a
concept than a picture. But some of our number pictured it clearly, and
rejoiced in it. It’s a creepy, scary thought.

Proper attire for dinner with Jesus would consist of the
ceremonial temple clothing I described earlier. Since that was how we decked
ourselves out for our most sacred meetings, and since we held so darned many
most sacred meanings, just about everyone’s ceremonial outfits had begun to
show wear. That just wouldn’t do for sitting at the table with the Lord.
Besides preparing meals and decorations, the women were put to work furiously
sewing and embroidering replacement veils, aprons, robes, and other attire.

It was my great honor to be called to be the official white
slipper sewer. If you’ve never sewn slippers for the Lord, you may not
appreciate just how exacting such work is. For just one example, you must
stitch exactly 12 pleats over the toe section of each slipper to properly
symbolize the Twelve Tribes of Israel. I was stuck in the sewing room for weeks
making new slippers. I resented it. Call me sentimental, but before our family
changed into immortal beings in the twinkling of an eye at the coming of the
Lord, I thought it might be nice to enjoy the last few days of mortality with
my children.

People outside the cult knew something was up. When I
stopped into a store in the nearby town of Ephraim, a clerk said, “A lot of you
people have come here and bought white clothes. What’s going on?” When Jeff
asked for a few days off from the chiropractic clinic he had begun commuting to
in Salt Lake City, his associates said they’d heard rumors of “some big meeting
planned for Manti.”

The good citizens of Manti, the vast majority of whom
weren’t members of our cult, were curious as well, possibly a little nervous.
Our clan had never caused a ruckus or trouble of any sort, but you never know
about crazy polygamists. The county sheriff, already accustomed to checking in
with Harmston on a regular basis, stepped up his visits.

To all inquirers, we answered, “Nothing special is going on.
We’re just having a meeting.” We were lying, but lying for the Lord is OK. The
Bible says so. Abraham told Abimelech, king of Gerar, that his wife Sarah was
his sister. The sons of Jacob told Shechem he could marry their sister if all
the men in his city agreed to be circumcised. Three days later, while the poor
Shechemites were still raw and sore, the sons of Jacob killed them all. Just
plain mean, if you ask me. And then there was God’s cruel, rotten fib to
Abraham. After telling him to kill Isaac, God stopped him at the last minute
and said, “Just kidding.” Our lie was trifling by comparison.

It was also necessary. Jesus could hardly come blazing in
“like a thief in the night” and take the wicked by surprise if we went around
telling everyone what day to expect him.

Behold, the great day of the Lord is at hand; and who
can abide the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appeareth?

—Doctrine and Covenants 128:24

The Lord who shall suddenly come to his temple; the Lord
who shall come down upon the world with a curse to judgment; yea, upon all the
nations that forget God, and upon all the ungodly among you.

—Doctrine and Covenants 133:2

I won’t keep you in suspense. Jesus came. It happened as
planned on March 25, 2000. Really.

Lower that raised eyebrow. There’s a reason you don’t
remember it, much less remember that you instantly dropped dead at his coming.

Permit me to fill you in.

By the night of Friday, March 24, 2000, all preparations
were complete. I couldn’t sleep. The refrigerated truck humming outside my
bedroom window didn’t help, but I won’t kid you. Truck or no truck, there was
no way I could have slept that night. You try sleeping when you know that the
next day Jesus is going to come, broil the wicked, hand over a temple to you,
and sample the cookies you baked. Not that I had a chance of surprising him
with how good they were. The guy was omniscient, after all. Eternities before I
was born, he knew how my cookies were going to taste. But maybe he’d act
pleasantly surprised and rub his tummy after the first bite, just to make this
handmaid feel good.

The next day, Saturday, March 25, was The Day. Early in the
evening, about a hundred members of The True and Living Church of Jesus Christ
of Saints of the Last Days gathered, bedecked in ceremonial
clothing—including new white slippers—to welcome Jesus to earth and
to Manti in particular. We sang hymns. We took turns standing and testifying to
one another of the truthfulness of the work in which we were engaged. We kept
it up until the glorious moment when Harmston announced that it was time.

We rose, formed a vast circle, and joined hands. Harmston
prayed aloud in the style of “the True Order of Prayer.” The True Order of
Prayer is pretty much a normal, Mormon-style prayer, except it’s a lot louder
and has more tremolo.

After suitable multiplication of a string of prophet-like
sounding catchwords and phrases, Harmston called out in the name of the Lord,
telling the Holy Order—the valiant ones on The Other Side—to part
the veil and join us.

All earlier doubts fled. I watched for the ceiling to
dissolve away and reveal a blinding white light as throngs of heavenly beings
rushed down to embrace us.

I
wanted
to see
it.

I
longed
for it to
happen.

I
tried
to see it.

I tried
hard
to
see it.

Really,
really
hard.

Nothing.

Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that you can’t expect to
usher in the end of a whole world with just a few hours of singing, testifying,
and praying. This sort of thing takes faith and works. So we started in again.
More songs. More testifying. More praying. We carried on for another three
hours.

Now it was midnight. The morning of Sunday, March 26, had
officially dawned. Without Jesus.

We were confused and exhausted. Harmston told everyone to go
home and get some sleep. We would reconvene in the afternoon for another try.

Sunday afternoon, March 26, we dragged back in, ceremonial
robes, slippers, and all. We sang hymns, testified of the work to one another,
and prayed. The testifying part was arduous. To give Jesus plenty of
time—maybe his chariot of fire had stalled and he was waiting for an
angel to come by in another chariot with jumper cables—Harmston allowed
every member of the cult to prattle on for as long as he or she felt moved by
the Spirit. As the chair under my butt grew harder, one woman treated us to 30
minutes of mindless, irrelevant blather. Despite the holiness of the occasion,
I longed for someone to stuff her mouth with one of the slippers I’d sewn.