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 My Mormon Life - Part 2
by Luke
 My mother has often told me that when I was very young I was the sweetest most loving child in the world. I would run around the house proclaiming my love to anyone and anything I could find. People, furniture, walls. I loved it all, and I would say so, right before planting a kiss on whatever noun I had chosen. What my mother doesn't know, is that I remember this.
At the age of five I am running in a circuit on the first floor of our duplex. I'm about to hug the couch and tell it that I love it. The air around me is filled with a sort of light transparent miasma. It fills all the space around me, and flows through me and everything around me. It feels like love.
Shortly after my father left the church, my mother kicked him out of the house. My father told me as he left "Luke you're the man of the house now. You have to take care of your mother and your sister."
My mother told me that the Adversary was in my father, and that's why they yelled all the time when he was near. I knew about the Adversary. They talked about him in church.
At this point, I was old enough that I no longer had to spend my sundays in the nursery. I was five, and now it was time to join the Sunbeams. Sunday school was like a miniature version of the adult chapel. All the children from age five to eleven would sit together in one room and learn about Nephi, the Golden Plates, the angel Moroni, and Joseph Smith. Afterwards, perhaps after one or two songs, we split into groups based on age.
In the Sunbeams we mostly drew pictures of Jesus. Sometimes we would pray and other times we would sing. One song in particular stuck with me for years, and it still comes unbidden to mind from time to time. It goes like this:
I am a child of God
And he has sent me here.
Has given me an earthly home,
with parents kind and dear.
Lead me. Guide me. Walk beside me.
Help me find the way.
Teach me all that I must do
to live with him someday.
Very early, the indoctrination began. My parents, were not my real parents. Heavenly Father and Mother were. My earthly parents were siblings of mine. We had all been together in the pre-existence and had chosen to be a family on earth. Someday, when the Millenium begins, after all the evil people have been burned away and our earthly bodies have died, we will receive our heavenly bodies, and live together forever as a family.
But if we weren't careful, the Adversary could get us. He'd tempt us into wrongdoing and when the Millennium came, we would be banished into Outer Darkness with him. And there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. They showed us a picture.
I was young and so my mother tried to simplify it for me. God (or Heavenly Father) she told me, was love. I was suddenly very happy. I knew God. God was all around me, it was that presence, that cloud that surrounded me and flowed through me into everything. My mother put a name to something I had known for a long time.
* * *
I remember that my mother was an angel. She was beautiful and kind. She loved me, and was only ever angry when my father was around. He had been gone for weeks.
My sister and I are running laps around the house. Barefoot, pounding our little feet over the carpet in the living room, down the hallway, onto the tile of the kitchen floor, back onto carpet in the dining room and over and over again. We laugh as we run, and every lap we pass my mother at the kitchen sink.
She's washing plates. I don't recognize the emotion on her face; I've only ever seen her happy when we're alone. As we enter the kitchen again she smashes a plate down onto the counter. It shatters and as the shards fly she turns towards us, her mouth opening in a wordless scream. There is something behind her eyes that I've never seen. I am scared, and I don't know what is happening, but I know that I have to stand in front of my sister.
She turns back to the sink, her hands on the counter, and she is seething.
My sister and I retreat to the living room. I know what to do because they taught me in sunday school. It's my job, I'm the man of the house. I kneel down in front of the couch. I clasp my hands in front of my face and pray in the formula that I've been taught.
"Dear Heavenly Father. Please help mommy to calm down and not be angry anymore. And I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen."
I walk into the hallway and see my mother standing in the kitchen looking at the shards of broken plate. The look on her face is new to me. Over the years, I will come to understand it as disgust.
"Mommy, I prayed that you wouldn't be angry anymore."
I am very proud of myself. The Adversary got to my mother, and I prayed like I was supposed to.
Her voice is low, and she struggles not to scream.
"That's good Lukey. That's what you're supposed to do."
One night, as my mother is putting us to sleep ( my bed is a foam mattress at the foot of hers) I am standing next to her as she changes my sister's diaper on the bed. Christmas is coming, and I've been trying to think of what I want from Santa. We recently saw The Empire Strikes Back, and I'd fallen in love with the AT-AT Imperial Walkers from the Hoth battle.
"Mommy? I want an AT-AT"
She turns so quickly, her eyes meet mine and I can see that she hates me. I see her hand moving but don't understand. She strikes me across the face. I am spinning and falling onto my bed. I'm holding my face, cowering, looking up at her through one tear filled eye. She's gone back to changing my sister's diaper. she's silent and doesn't look at me.
* * *
The Mormons and my mother continued to teach me about God. I learned that the Adversary had a name, Lucifer. I learned about Adam and Eve, how they were expelled from the Garden of Eden (in Missouri) for being naked. I learned about their children Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel because Abel was good. Cain was like Lucifer who was the snake in the Garden. Lucifer was punished,he couldn't have a body. That's why he hated us so much, because we were allowed to have bodies.
I started Kindergarten that fall. I had been practicing walking to school by crossing the street, and then crossing back. I liked kindergarten. There was a sandbox. We had graham crackers and milk. The only thing I didn't like was pretending to be asleep during nap time. There was one kid, Brian, who had skin like I had never seen before. I asked my mother about him when I got home.
She got very serious.
"He's black Lukey. that means he's descended from Cain. When Cain was punished he was given a mark on his forehead, and that mark was black skin. That's why black people have had to suffer for so long. God was punishing them for what Cain did."
I didn't question her. My mother told me all sorts of things, so did the Mormons. I knew it was true because they told me so.
After that, whenever I would see Brian approaching, I'd announce to whatever group I was in "Here comes that black kid again."
I didn't do so to be mean, or judgmental. I was simply pointing out an anomaly in our social group. One day, I announced his arrival while playing house with two of the girls. He was close enough to hear, and he stopped. He turned to me, and said in a hurt voice before walking away "I'm not black. I'm brown."
I was dumbstruck. He was right. Suddenly I realized that he was a person just like me. It didn't make any sense that God would punish him, he wasn't bad. The next day he wasn't in school. He didn't come back. I asked my mother what happened to him, and she told me that he moved to a school where it was only black kids. She said he'd be happier there. I still couldn't shake the feeling that I'd hurt him. I couldn't tell my mother, because somehow I knew she wouldn't understand.
That experience stayed with me. I was having difficulty resolving the fact that something my mother and the Mormons had told me wasn't correct. I sat in sunday school hoping for something that would explain it away. I needed it to make sense again.
That day, we learned about Joseph Smith and how he first learned about the Golden Plates and the Book of Mormon. In olden days (roughly the 1880's) Joseph Smith was a young man in western New York, out by Palmira. There were many fake religions, and Joseph Smith was having a hard time deciding which one was the right one. He was so upset that he ran out to the woods to pray. He tried to pray, but the Adversary found him there, and wouldn't let him say the words. He kept trying, and suddenly everything was still. As he looked up, God was standing before him (They showed us another picture. God is a handsome arian fellow with white robes, and a faint white aura.) and soon after he was joined by Jesus. Joseph Smith was amazed to meet them, and asked "Which of these religions is the true one?" to which God and Jesus responded
"None of them!"
The story goes on to describe how Joseph Smith discovers the Golden Plates, and goes about reforming the one true religion that God told him about. The story speaks to one of the core Mormon principles, and is in fact one of their key recruiting techniques.
Potential converts are given free copies of the Book of Mormon. They are then "challenged" to read a certain amount of it before the next missionary visit. After passing a few of these challenges, the missionaries pray with potential converts and challenge them to do one more thing. The final task is to pray to God and ask if these scriptures are true. They are told to listen for the "still, small voice" which is the voice God uses to talk to people. Mormons love this bit. On Fast and Testimony Sunday, anyone in attendance can hear countless variations on this same experience. There is no greater pride than that felt by a Mormon talking about the time that God told them the Book of Mormon is true.
Hearing this story, I began to calm down. Now there was an easy way. Maybe I could finally resolve this nagging disparity between doctrine and experience. After the story, we all knelt down to pray. Our teacher instructed us to pray to God and ask if the Book of Mormon was true. I knelt with relief.
I clasped my hands in front of my face, closed my eyes and prayed silently. I asked the question with joyous expectation, anticipating a final resolution. For a time there was silence. But then, in the back of my mind, there was the still small voice. It gave me the response that would change my life.
"No."
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